“I was born in Mobile, but I lived in New Orleans.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three. How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
“My little piece of live bait, with blue eyes and curly gold hair, that I pulled out of the river. Roger, when I get a little bitty shrimp, I like to hold him in my hand, just to feel him wiggle. Suppose I get to wondering how you’d feel wiggling?”
“Then you’re coming?”
“I’m a coon up a tree. What else can I do?”
She moved over to the stern, and leaned back on both hands while I pulled across the river, and kept looking at me, her eyes big and black in the starlight, and just a little bit it seemed they were laughing at me. At the landing I stood up to help her out, but she kept sitting there, and then: “Roger, could I borrow your boat?”
“...What for?”
“Something I got to do.”
“Well, can’t I do it for you?”
“It’s kind of private.”
I stood there figuring, and all of a sudden it hit me that if she could handle a boat and pull up the next landing, that would kind of take care of everything she had to worry about, specially as it was on the Yolo side and there would be no Sacramento officers to be looking for her. I must have sounded pretty sulky: “Take it, then. Will you drop me a note where you leave it? So I can come get it? It handles nice and I kind of like it. Roger Duval, care general delivery, Sacramento, Calif.”
“I bet you wiggle nice.”
“And watch the oarlocks. They’re loose.”
“Aren’t you taking my trunk out?... You’re the cutest thing I ever saw in my life, and I’m not leaving you. But I got a use for this boat.”
Then I saw, or thought I saw, that it had something to do with the ladies’ promenade, and wanted to tell her I was pretty well fixed in that line back of the shack, but you can’t say a thing like that, so I just stooped down to pick up her trunk. She put her hand over my lips. “Wiggle your mouth.”
I kissed the inside of her fingers, and then she kissed me all over the face and I stepped out with the trunk. She moved over to the seat and picked up the oars, and as soon as she pushed off from the landing I saw she had handled plenty of boats. I ran up to the shack and got some clothes on at last and lit a fire in the front room and some charcoal in the kitchen. But even before that I went in the bedroom, ripped the blankets off the bed, and made it up again with sheets. I had some, as well as some pillow cases, my aunt had packed when I left. A fellow in a shack, he don’t bother with them, but I was glad I had them, and that they were clean. Then I went on back and began skinning the rabbit I had bought that morning, and cleaning it, and cutting it up for the fire.
I was peeling the potatoes before it came to me she’d been gone one hell of a time. I went out front and looked, and all you could see was the lights of the water front, and all you could hear was the banjos in the bars, and the splash of somebody diving in the river. It was the dismalest sound you ever heard, first the tinkle of the music with the whooping in between, then every few minutes this splash. I walked up and down, afraid she’d got stuck on a bar, then I went down to the next fellow’s landing, thinking maybe she’d come to the wrong place. But his boat was there and mine wasn’t. Then coming back I started to run, because something was moving on the river. And then sure enough there she was, just coming in to my landing. “Did you think I was never coming?”
“I was afraid something had happened to you.”
“I’ve been doing something crazy.”
“Go on up where it’s warm. We’re ready to eat.”
“I could eat a whole possum.”
She ran up the path, and I paddled the boat out to the stake. I made the stern fast, but when I started for the bow something rolled under my feet. It was a little white knob, with a neck on it and three or four feet of string. I picked it up and saw it was the missing knob from that bedpost, the one that had the screw sticking out that raked my leg. And then it came to me in a flash, what until then hadn’t even entered my mind. She took the pocket-book. It was her diving for it into the river. And this thing was the marker she had to have, when she threw it overboard, that would float up a few feet when that gold sank in the mud, and show where it was if she ever had the chance to go down and get it.
She was kneeling in front of the fireplace when I came back, the trunk open beside her, combing her hair over her face to dry it. “Guess what I did.”
“...Fell overboard?”
“I took me a bath.”
“Where?”
“In the river.”
“I’ve got a tank and sprinkler.”
“I wish I’d known. But I’m so dirty from traveling that I just felt awful. I knew my little shrimp was all washed up, and I couldn’t come in here unless I was as clean as he was.”
I was behind her, and she gave my leg a pat, and I was just opening my mouth to say she wasn’t coming in here or anywhere until she handed over that money and we figured a way to send it back. But just then she lifted her head and began combing in the opposite direction, and a big swatch of her hair hit me in the face, soft and warm and heavy, then went slipping down over my hands to the floor, and a clutch came in my throat so nothing would come out of it. “Did you say we’re going to eat?”
“...Yes, I’ll get busy.”
I had taken the rabbit off the fire when I went out looking for her, but I had left the potatoes half on, and they were boiling now, so I put the rabbit back, and set a pot of beans up there to heat, and she came out to keep me company, braiding her hair in one thick snaky coil that she kept throwing around my head like a lasso while I was digging into the beans with a spoon to keep them from burning. “Got a skillet?”
“There’s one under the coffee pot.”
“I’ll cook those beans.”
She took up the beans with the spoon, patted them into little cakes, and fried out a little bacon grease. Then she put in the bean cakes and fried them up brown. By then the rabbit and potatoes were ready, and I got to say those beans were pretty good. Come to find out, she didn’t learn that trick in New Orleans at all, but in Caracas, where she lived the last couple of years before she came west. “What did you do there?”
“Oh, this and that.”
“What you doing here, Morina?”
“Oh, these and those.”
“Of course, it’s not really my business.”
“I’m doing you, that’s my business.”
She was leaning close, over the little kitchen table I had back there, biting at a leg of rabbit with her big white teeth, and getting her cheek a little greasy down near the chin, and I thought of a way to get back to the money again, by saying “the business you got before any other business is to let me send back that money or do it yourself.” But instead I said: “There’s a jug of wine in that bin there, but all we got to drink it out of is tin cups.”
“Oh you’ve got something else, haven’t you?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“How much you want to bet?”
“...A night’s bed and board.”
“Bring on the wine.”
I got out the jug, a gallon jug with a big cork in it. She threw it over one shoulder, pulled the cork out with her teeth, then rocked it a couple of times to listen how much was in it. It was about half full. Then all of a sudden she fell on one knee and give it a jerk, and the wine poured in her mouth like a hose was doing it. Her throat throbbed like a canary bird’s does, and the wine gurgled down it for three or four seconds. Then she snapped the jug up again, swallowed three or four times, gasped, and said: “Did I spill any?”
“Not a drop.”
“Don’t I win?”
“I owe you a night’s bed and board.”