Fifteen or twenty minutes later I turned right again, leaving Highway 41 and taking to the country road that wound through the area to the south of the lake. The sun was gone now and warm summer dusk was thickening out through the timber. When my headlights sprayed against the three rural mailboxes and the old sign on my right I slowed and turned in through a cattle guard to a pair of dusty ruts going north across an old field long since abandoned to weeds and nettles. It hadn’t rained for a long time and the growth beside the road was powdered with dust. In a few minutes the road began to lead downward through increasingly heavy timber where fireflies winked in the darkness.
I passed some cleared land on my left and an old farmhouse sitting back off the road. A dog barked with bristling outrage and came hurtling out of the darkness to chase the car. A boy’s voice yelled, “Come back heah, you crazy Trix!” The faint light of a kerosene lamp glowed at a window. The R.E.A. hadn’t penetrated here; it was too thinly settled to warrant the lines. There was one more farmhouse beyond it about a half mile and then the road was lost in the immensity of timber. I crossed the stream that was the outlet of the lake on a rattling wooden bridge. Low places in the road had been filled with gravel to make it passable in wet weather. My headlights swung in huge arcs, splashing against the trunks of trees, as I followed its windings. The vastness and solitude of it made me feel good; I had always liked wild places. A little less than a mile beyond the bridge the road forked, one pair of ruts leading off to the left. The sign had fallen down, but I remembered it had pointed to the right. In a few minutes I came into the clearing. When I stopped and cut the motor I could hear the frog chorus along the shore of the lake.
There were four buildings, three small ones huddled darkly together at the edge of the inlet on my left and a larger one just ahead and to my right. Hot light streamed from an open doorway. I saw only one car, the station wagon Mrs. Nunn had driven this morning. I cut the headlights and got out.
“Who is it?” a man’s voice called. It came from outside the doorway. He was standing to one side of it, away from the light.
“Godwin,” I said. “From Wardlow.”
“Oh,” he said. He stepped before the door then and opened the screen. “Come on in.”
I followed him. The illumination inside the crudely finished room came from a hissing gasoline lantern suspended from a rafter with a length of wire. Insects whirled about it in a frenzied dance, butting their heads against the shield. On the left was a short counter with three stools before it and beyond the end of the counter was a glass-topped showcase containing items of fishing tackle. There was a small screened window at the other end of the room and an open doorway at the left behind the pass-through between the ends of the counter and showcase. This presumably led to their living quarters in the rear of the building. Behind the counter was a small icebox and a bottled gas stove which had two burners and a hamburger grill. On the shelves above the stove and icebox were some cartons of cigarettes, cans of soup, condensed milk, small cereal boxes, and some doughnuts in cellophane bags. Some shelves along the right-hand wall held a small stock of staple groceries, a few cheap magazines, and a large stack of comic books. I glanced at the latter, faintly puzzled. Well, maybe he read them himself. I didn’t particularly like him.
He’d been at various times a town constable and deputy sheriff until some political shake-up had pushed him away from the trough for good, and it was said he was crooked. It wasn’t this latter, however, that had rubbed me the wrong way the two times we’d met; moral indignation was a little out of my line. It was just that he seemed too impressed with his own toughness, as if he could still feel that holstered gun banging against his thigh.
He went behind the counter, hung a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match on his thumbnail. Maybe he picked it up from reading private eyes; it was stock gesture 93-B, Hard Case Lighting a Cigarette. He was about my height, but rail-thin, with a bleak and angular face that seemed to have been stretched too tightly over the bone structure behind it. There was no warmth in the sherry-colored eyes. He dropped the match on the floor, still watching me through the smoke with no expression at all. They must nave an interesting home life, I thought—the two of them staring at each other and dribbling a fall-out of dead matches around the place.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I’d like one of your cabins,” I said. “And a boat, for a couple days’ fishing. How’s it been?”
“So-so.” He shrugged indifferently. “You never been out here before, have you?”
“Once or twice,” I said. “Duck hunting. It was before you bought the place.”
“So you decided to try the fishing, huh?”
“That’s right,” I said. He didn’t appear to be the gushing type that fell all over a new customer, but I wasn’t paying much attention to him. I was trying to figure out where they kept their cash and made change. There was no register in sight.
“Anything else you want?” he asked.
I turned back to him. The harsh angularity of his face was broken into planes of highlights and shadow by the overhead light. From the waist up he wore nothing but a sweaty undershirt, and his arms and shoulders looked like a muscle chart from an anatomy textbook. There wasn’t enough subcutaneous fat to smooth the contours; he was as functional and uncluttered as an axe blade. The stare said nothing at all.
”How’s that?” I asked.
“Motor? Bait? Guide? You need anything besides a boat?”
“No,” I said. Maybe if I didn’t ask for too much he’d let me stay.
“Take the cabin on this end,” he said. “It’s not locked.”
I still had to get a look inside their cash-box, wherever it was. I hadn’t driven this far just to sleep. “How about a sandwich and a cup of coffee?” I asked.
“It’s pretty late.”
“I know it is,” I said. “But I haven’t had any dinner. I drove out here right after work.”
“You must have been in a hurry. Really like to fish, huh?”
“Yes,” I said. I was beginning to like him even less.
Without turning his head toward the door behind him, he called out, “Jewel!”
There was no answer. The room was silent except for the hiss of the lantern and the faint spatting sounds of the insects bumping against it. He started to turn, as if to call out again. She came through the doorway, dressed in a man’s blue shirt and a pair of dungarees. She gave an almost imperceptible start when she saw me, but then the surprise or whatever it had been was gone and her face closed up like a drawn Venetian blind.
“Fix Mister Godwin a hamburger,” he said curtly, without turning his head.
“At this time of night?”
“Never mind what time it is; I got a watch. He come off without his supper.”
She stared silently at the back of his head for an instant, and then walked over in front of the icebox. I sat down on one of the stools. She lighted the burner under the grill and slapped down the meat patty she had taken from the icebox. He watched her flatly for a moment and then turned away. A bug banged into the lantern overhead and fell to the counter where he lay on his back, buzzing his wings. The meat began to sizzle after a minute or two and she turned it with the spatula, leaning forward slightly with the tawny mane of hair swinging downward across her cheek. A cockroach came up from somewhere and walked along the edge of the counter. It looked shiny in the white, hot light. She stared at it, and then pushed the hair back from her face with her hand.