But if Charlie learned what was going on, he would fall over in a dead faint. Charlie was a dry, pallid, emotionless little man in his early sixties. He was a wizard with figures. He had been with the trust department of a big New York City bank until his wife died, and Charlie’s health had broken, and he had come to Florida with too small a pension. He had worked for Johnny Flagan for twelve years. Johnny didn’t pay him generously, but every once in a while he had a chance to deal Charlie in on something, and it all added up.
Johnny drove cautiously across the rickety Ringling Bridges through the heavy rain in the big, dark-blue Cadillac. He had a quick breakfast in town and picked Charlie up at his rooming house over behind the Post Office. The envelope of money made a bulge in the inside pocket of Johnny’s rayon cord suit-jacket. It was comforting to feel it there. Little Charlie Himbermark scampered out through the rain and put his suitcase over in the back seat beside Johnny’s. They got out of town at seven, and Johnny Flagan pushed the big car hard as they headed north on 301 toward the Sunshine Skyway which would put them on Route 19.
About eleven miles north of the town of Crystal River on Route 19, on Florida’s West Coast, State Route 40 crosses 19 at a village called Inglis. Forty does not continue far to the west after it crosses; just three miles, to a place called Yankeetown on Withlacoochee Bay. The Gulf of Mexico is that close to 19 at that point.
As Route 19 continues north, it swings inland through Lebanon, Lebanon Station, Gulf Hammock. When it reaches Otter Creek, six miles north of Gulf Hammock, it is twenty-two miles from the Gulf. Cedar Key, on the Gulf, is twenty-two miles due west on Route 24 from Otter Creek.
In the relatively straight six miles of Route 19 between Gulf Hammock and Otter Creek, the highway crosses the Waccasassa River. Not much of a river. Not much of a bridge across it.
Ten miles west of the bridge the Waccasassa River empties into Waccasassa Bay, an almost triangular indentation of the Gulf of Mexico into the flank of the state. The shores of this bay are dreary and uninhabited. Thick mangrove grows down to the salt flats. Behind the mangrove the land is sodden, marshy, flat. High tides overflow into the flats, obscuring the slow curling course of the Waccasassa River. In the Gulf Hammock area Route 19 is barely six feet above the level of these tidal flats.
The bridge over the Waccasassa is a relatively modern concrete highway bridge, two lanes wide, not over a hundred feet long. It was built some years ago to replace a rickety wooden lane-and-a-half structure with timbers that flapped and rumbled under the wheels of the vehicles. At the time the bridge was being replaced, through traffic was detoured around it on an obscure road, four miles long, that roughly paralleled the highway and ran to the west of it. If headed north, you had to turn west off Route 19 about a mile before you came to the bridge. It was a narrow sand road, and it angled sharply away from Route 19 for over a mile. It turned north then and crossed a narrow wooden bridge over a vagrant loop of the sleepy Waccasassa, and about three hundred yards further, crossed a second bridge over the main river. Two and a half miles further on, after bearing almost imperceptibly east, the sand road rejoined Route 19.
When the new bridge was built, construction lasted well’ into the tourist season, despite State Road Department assurances that it would be done by Christmas. As a consequence, many southbound tourists went over the detour down the narrow sand road that wound through sparse stands of pine and then cut through the heavy brush near the river. Many of the tourists had cameras and a few of them, more aware of pictorial values than most, stopped on the stretch between the two wooden bridges to take a picture of a strange old deserted house quite near the sand road. It was a ponderous and ugly old house built of cypress, decorated with the crudest of scroll saw work. It was weathered to a pale silvery gray. The shuttered windows were like blinded eyes. The house sat solidly there and you thought that once upon a time someone had taken pride in it and had ornamented it with the scroll work.
Then the bridge was opened, and there was no one to take pictures of the house; no one even to see it except for the infrequent local fishermen who knew the times when snook came up the Waccasassa from the Gulf and could be caught from the larger of the two wooden bridges.
It was almost noon on- Wednesday, the seventh of October, when the concrete highway bridge became blocked.
Dix Marshall had picked up the load in New Orleans, and it was consigned to Tampa. He knew from the way the rig handled that they had loaded it as close to the limit as they dared. The inside rubber on the two rear duals was bald and it felt to him as though the whole frame of the tractor was a little sprung. It had an uneasy sideways motion on long curves to the left. But the diesel was a good one; new and with a rough sound, but with a lot of heart. That was a break. It was six hundred and sixty-five miles from New Orleans to Tampa, and he hadn’t got a very good start out of New Orleans. He’d felt so upset after the scrap with Grace that he’d almost asked the dispatcher if he could have a helper on the run. There was the usual bunk behind the cab seat. But the company didn’t like to pay double wages for a run this short if it could be helped.
He wanted this one to be a short trip because he wanted to get back and work out some kind of a better understanding with Grace.
Dix Marshall was a small man in his early thirties with thick shoulders and husky tatooed arms. He had been driving a rig since ’46 when he got out of the army, and he had been married to Grace for the past seven years.
He drove toward the dawn thinking about Grace, feeling sick about the whole mess and wondering what a guy was supposed to do. He felt that, if he could talk to her again, he could make her understand.
She was still cute. Heavier than when he’d married her, but dark and built real good. Everything had seemed to be going along fine until this last year when she had started to work on him to get off the rigs and get a steady job. She wanted him at home more. But she couldn’t get it through her head that he had some seniority, and the pay was good, and his record was good and, anyway, he liked the work. They’d started to fight. And kept it up. If he got off the trucks, what was there? An apprentice mechanic, maybe.
Then, just lately, he’d begun to hear things he didn’t like. She was hitting the neighborhood bars while he was on the road. Some of his friends gave him the word. They were apologetic about it, but they thought he ought to know. He’d seen it before. There was always somebody around to offer to buy the drinks and sooner or later she’d take on a reckless load and bring one of them home. He’d seen it happen.
So this last fight had been rugged. She, screaming about the life she had to live. “Why shouldn’t I go where I can talk to people?” she said. “You want me to sit in the house with the kids every night of my life?” And he had yelled back at her and they had hammered and jabbed words at each other for hours. He seemed unable to make her understand.
When he thought of how he hit her once, the first time he had ever hit her, he wanted to cut his right hand off. There was a tiny nick on his middle knuckle — she had tried to cry out just as he had struck her, and her tooth had nicked him. He wanted the trip to be over. He wanted to hurry back, and this time they’d talk quietly, and he would make her understand.
He ran into the rain south of Tallahassee. It was a hard rain. He started the wipers, turned on his running lights and cursed the rain. It would slow him down. But not as much as it would slow down a less experienced driver, or one with slower reflexes. He pushed the big rig along as fast as he dared — thundering south through the rain, throwing up spume from the big duals, staring ahead through the murkiness and worrying about Grace.