“You’ve seen me often enough, It’s just nature.”
“I’ve seen you too often, especially here lately, and maybe it’s nature, but that’s not saying it’s right.”
“You mean, on account of my being your mother?”
“What do you think I mean? And why don’t you mean it?”
“There might be a reason, Dave.”
That’s the way she always talked about it. She always slid past the point, never hitting it on the nose, so it didn’t occur to me she might mean something actual. I told her: “Goddamn it, pull that thing together!”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Did you hear what I said?”
She pulled it together at last. Then, as though it was just a funny idea that had popped in her head, she said: “You look so comfortable there in that bed, I wouldn’t ask much to crawl myself in right there with you.”
“I wouldn’t ask anything to kick you the hell out. Here, take this glass and git.”
I drained it and handed it over. She took it and said: “You aren’t very nice to me, Dave.”
“You’re too damned nice to me.”
“Little Davey Howell, listen—”
“I said git. So git.”
At last she got or git or whatever you’d call it, and after I’d snapped off the light, I lay in the dark asking myself, what about it? There was no doubt what she meant. The question was, what did I mean? I was 22, with normal impulses, a little too normal these last two months, since a girl I’d been going with left me flat, turned around and married a guy for no reason at all I could see except that he had a Cadillac. It had rocked me pretty hard, especially at night, which was when that girl and I got together for some great lovemaking. With Mom, I thought my answer was no, but I wasn’t sure that it was. I lay awake and was bothered plenty. But I must have gone to sleep, because I woke up all of a sudden with the light shining in from the living room, and Mom by the bed, shaking me. At first I thought it was more of the same.
“Dave,” she whispered, “there’s somebody down on the island. They’re hollering.”
The “island” was a little hummocksy hill in the river that had stuck out from the east bank where we lived and then had been cut off by the river a couple of years before. It was in sight of the ranchhouse where we kept a light burning to make it look like someone was there. It wasn’t in sight of this house, though, unless you went upstairs to look.
“Mom, you’re imagining things. No one could be on the island. There’s no way on this earth they could get there. It’s probably some drunk on the road, wanting help with his car. Now go back to bed. Leave me alone; let me sleep.”
“Maybe no way on this earth. There could be other ways.”
“Other ways? What are you talking about?”
“What do you think?”
Then suddenly I remembered the newscasts, the flashes they kept coming up with while we were watching TV about the plane a guy had hijacked by holding a gun to a girl as his hostage, a stewardess on the plane, and making it fly all around in a crazy way, from Chicago to Pittsburgh and back and around, while $100,000 and a parachute were brought and handed over — with 28 people on board and a storm coming up. Mom stood there in the half-dark, staring down at me, and whispered: “He’s hollering and she is too, that girl — she must be the one he was holding the gun on — it’s got to be that.”
I jumped up and ran back to the kitchen and listened. Sure enough, I could hear a man yelling, and then in between a girl.
“OK,” I said. “We have to go down. Get the flashlights while I put something on.”
2
She was already dressed, waiting for me out back. I put on my pants and shoes but no socks and a sheepskin coat, without a shirt. In the kitchen I picked up the rifle that always stood there. It was an Enfield from World War I my father had got at a surplus sale in Marietta. I threw the bolt and rammed a round into the chamber. With both of us holding flashlights, we went down the path. As we got near the water’s edge, the guy stopped hollering and all of a sudden said: “Hey!”
“Hey,” I answered. “Who are you?”
“Never mind who I am. You got a boat?”
“Johnboat, yeah.”
“You got a car?”
“Yes.”
“Get the boat. Show me the car. Hand me the keys.”
“Oh please,” the girl cut in in a trembling voice, “do what he says or he’ll kill me.”
“OK, OK.”
“You heard me, kid. Do it now!”
“And you heard me, I hope,” I said. “OK, but there’s a couple of things we have to get straight first. Lady, who are you?”
“I was the stewardess on that plane, the one he hijacked last night. He kept holding a gun to my head. Then when they finally opened the door, he was too scared to jump, and I pushed him. He grabbed me, and we both went. He kept hitting me to make me let go, but I wouldn’t, and then we came down in the water. Oh, please, he could kill me now. He—”
“Oh no he won’t.”
“What makes you think I won’t?”
“If she gets it, you do too.”
No answer to that, so I told him: “You can’t get off that island without me ferrying you over. God help you in that water if you try to swim. It’s flood tide. They’ll fish you out dead nine miles down when you go over the dam. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Yes sir.”
“OK. Now I have to get oars from the house—”
“What house?”
“Over that hill.”
“I don’t see no hill.”
“I’ll have a light put in.”
I said, “I’ll be back with the boat” and started for the house, whispering to Mom: “Whatever I do, keep talking.” By now she had turned off the spotlight. I went on up to the house and into the kitchen to look at the clock. It said five after five. Daybreak was only a few minutes away, so I had to move fast. I went outside again, picked up the oars from the back porch, and went down the other path to the boat which was tied up to our little landing. Fortunately, a week or ten days before, I had put it up on a trestle.
It takes a few days for a boat to swell after being out of water that long, and of course it leaked, but not much. The second time I had bailed it out there wasn’t much to bail, which meant it was tight and ready. So, after stripping off the tarp I had put on, I was ready to go. A johnboat is a square-ended thing the size of a soap dish, with a seat in the bow, one in the stern, and one across the middle. I got in and tilted one oar and the rifle on the seat in the bow, using the other oar as a paddle. Then I shifted the shot bag from cuddy under the front seat, to balance my weight, and cast off. The shot bag was a sixty-pound canvas bag full of buckshot to trim the boat with when I went out alone. Then I sat down on the seat in the middle, holding onto the landing. With the river being so high, the boat was less than a foot out of water, which, of course, made it handy. Then I waited, watching the sky in the east. Down below I could hear voices, yelling — Mom’s, the guy’s, the girl’s — the girl’s loudest of all. I had no idea what she was yelling about, but if she was yelling, she wasn’t dead. So far, so good.