Hamilton, Donald - Novel 01 (9 page)

     
"Why not?"

     
She glanced at him, brushing ashes from
her heavy skirt. "Because, as Georges said, our position is very bad
legally, and I do not want to give you enough information that you can go to
the police. In case I am not able to convince you...."

     
Branch said, "Listen, tell me just
this: did she, I mean Jeannette, have anything to do with what happened
to--" He gestured in the direction of the smaller girl's room.
"-her?"

     
Madame
Faubel
hesitated. "No," she said finally. "She did not."

     
"Did her husband?"

     
She shook her head. "No. Not
directly, but ..."

     
"I don't," Branch said,
"like people who pull a long and irrelevant sob story on me before asking
me to do something for them. I'm very sorry about the girl-"

     
"There are hundreds of others like
her," Madame
Faubel
said angrily.
"Thousands of others."

     
"And the way to cure them is to drag
them around the country and expose them to passes by every wolf in Navy uniform
who
comes along?" He laughed sharply and went on
before she could retort. "Anyway, I don't see the connection, if neither
of them had anything to do with it."

     
The woman's narrow white face was quite
expressionless. "We are not free agents, Mr. Branch," she said.
"We take our orders from the Central Committee. There are some to whom I
would like to attend personally, myself, but so long as I know they are being
attended to I do what I am told to do."
She made a
sharp" gesture with her cigarette.
"We are not agents of
revenge, but of justice."

     
Branch sat silent and wished that his pipe
were cool enough that he could smoke it again.

     
"You are quibbling, Lieutenant,"
the woman's voice went on. "Would it seem better to you if we were
avenging mere personal injuries?"

     
"By God, it would," Branch
admitted. "Anyway, it would seem nice and normal and natural." He
laughed uncomfortably. "Tell me..."

     
"Yes?"

     
"If you could, would you shave her
head like in the pictures?"

     
"Perhaps," Madame
Faubel
said stiffly.
"If it did not
interfere with more important business."

     
"Well...." Branch grimaced and
ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He got to his feet. "Well,
I certainly won't help you."

     
Madame
Faubel
rose to face him. "If you had-"

     
"But I didn't," he said. "I
wasn't. And I don't want any part of it. It stinks."

     
He watched her go out of the room. Agents
of Justice, he thought, Central Committee, nuts. The door closed and he heard
her footsteps diminish down the hall in the direction of the staircase. When
the sound of them had ceased he went to the bureau and, with the whisk-broom,
brushed away the lint the coverlet of his bed had deposited on his uniform. He
went out of the room and along the hall in the opposite direction from that
taken by the woman.

     
More than a minute passed between his
knock and the opening of the door.

     
"I'm sorry, he said
.
"
Did I wake you?"

     
She looked down at her rumpled dress and
brushed at it absently. "I must have fallen asleep," she said. Her
face was puffy from crying.

     
He licked his lips. "I wanted to
apologize," he said. "I'm awfully sorry."

     
She did not say anything. He could feel
her wanting to say something but it did not come and she stood there watching
him, trying to make it come, but it did not come. He thought, all she needs is
for somebody to be nice to
her,
somebody should make a
job of being nice to her.

     
"Well, I just wanted to tell
you," he said helplessly. "Goodnight."

 
IN THE MORNING it was raining. He lay in bed
and listened to the rain and thought, wouldn't you know it would rain?
as
if this place wasn't grim enough without rain. There was
nothing to do that was worth getting wet for, and he tuned over and was soon
half asleep again. Then the rain had stopped and someone was opening the door
in a tentative sort of way,
As
he sat up abruptly he
was quite sure that it was the girl, but it was only the colored woman to clean
the room. She withdrew, saying something apologetic, in the slurred, almost
incomprehensible dialect that they had down here, white as well as colored,
that had no relationship to the conventional southern drawl, but was a sort of
verbal shorthand in which only the important syllables of the important words
were spoken.

     
Branch got up and showered, shaved, and
dressed. The colored woman was just emerging from the next room when he stepped
into the hall.

     
"All clear," he said to her,
grinning, to show that he had not minded her coming in. Down here he felt the
necessity for being very polite to them to show that he did not approve of the
Jim Crow laws that existed in this state.

     
The woman did not smile back at him but
stood by the open door of the room out of which she had come, without speaking,
as he went past, and something in her attitude made him look back as he reached
the corner, and she was still standing there, looking after him. Then, seeing
him
turn
, she gathered up her broom and dustpan and
went to the door of his room. He went on, but more slowly, and halfway down the
stairs he turned and went slowly back. The door of his room was closed and the
woman was not in sight. He opened the door abruptly and walked in as if
returning for something he had forgotten. She was kneeling on the floor by the
wardrobe and Jeannette Duval's suitcase was open in front of her. Branch closed
the door gently behind him, a little angry and a little embarrassed.
"Well!" he said loudly. "Just help yourself!"

     
The woman remained kneeling by the
suitcase and did not answer.

     
"God, don't sit there," he said.
"Get up, for Christ's sake.

     
She got clumsily to her feet, a small
woman in a shapeless print cotton dress and a gray coat sweater that was
partially unraveled. She was well over middle age and her face had the prim,
pious look they sometimes had, and her lips were tightly closed.

     
"Wasn't stealing," she said
sullenly.

     
"Just looking, I suppose," he
said.

     
She spoke a long sentence that he did not
understand until he had thought about it for a moment, at last realizing that
she had told him she was honest and had never been in any trouble and the
suitcase had come open when she picked it up to dust it, and she had been
putting the things back when he came in. She was talking again by the time he
had interpreted her first speech, and a few key words told him she was
elaborating on her respectability.

     
"Shut up," he said. She was
silent, tugging angrily at her ragged sweater.

     
"Who sent you?" he demanded.
When she did not speak at once he said sharply, "What's your name?"
Her eyes, regarding his uniform, were suddenly afraid, and she launched into
another long sentence that was quite incomprehensible to him until he had
considered it for a while, she watching him warily.

     
"No," he said, "I won't
tell him you told me."

     
 
It
was like speaking to a foreigner of whose language you knew only a few basic
words. It made him feel as if he were no longer in
America
. The woman's eyes held the
same wary fierce resentment you would expect to meet in a conquered country.

     
She said she was a respectable woman and
he had no right to threaten her. She said Mr. Parks had sent her.

     
"Mr. Parks?" he demanded.

     
Yes, she said, Mr. Parks who had a farm
and a store out by Three-Mile Oak on the old
River Road
. And Mr. Parks had told her
all about it, she said.

     
"All about
what?"

     
It seemed that Mr. Parks had a friend in
the service who had heard that his wife was running around with an officer
while he was at sea. The colored woman's eyes lowered to the suitcase from
which she had pulled a very pale cream-colored satin negligee trimmed with
lace. She looked up at Branch, her mouth very tight and prim and condemning.

     
After a moment Branch asked, "How
much did he pay you?"

     
"Five dollars, sir," she said
primly.

     
Branch licked his lips. "Well,"
he said, "it's none of his goddamned business, see?" Watching the woman,
he slowly took out his wallet. "Suppose ..." he said, "suppose
you pack that stuff and just forget about it, eh?" He grinned. "Just
tell him you didn't find anything, huh?" he said, looking at her sideways
as he put two five-dollar bills on the unmade bed.

     
The woman said nothing. Branch hesitated,
turned sharply, and went out. Outside he drew a long breath and, finally,
grinned and walked quickly away down the hall, but the grin did not make him
feel any better. It was funny, all right, but he could not make himself truly
laugh at it. When he returned after breakfast the bed was neatly made and the
money was gone.

     
Later walking across the river bridge he
could look downstream and see the pier on which they had sat the previous
night, the motorboat still lying there, and everything was dark and wet with
the rain. The river had a gray look, like dull iron, under the low, thick,
unmoving clouds. It looked cold and
hosthe
and its
expansion beyond the harbor mouth seemed coldly treacherous when one recalled the
barely covered mudflats revealed by the chart. When he had climbed the rise of
the road on the south side of the river he was in the country. He began to feel
a little conspicuous striding along a country road in city shoes and clothes,
and he wondered what the passengers of the occasional cars thought about him.
Then a car stopped.

     
"Take you somewhere?" the man
asked.

     
Branch went to the door of the car.
"Well, I'm trying to find Three-Mile Oak on the old
River Road
," he said, grinning.
"A guy named Parks ..."

     
"Hop in," said the man.
"I'll take you."

     
Branch got in and the car gained speed
down the smoothly curving concrete of the highway.

     
"Liable to get wet before you get
there, walking," the man said. "Know George Parks?"

     
Branch shook his head. "Just thought
I'd walk up and have a drink and come back. They said he had a store up
there." ·

     
"He'll sell you beer," the
driver agreed. "I just got tired of sitting around the hotel watching it
rain," Branch said. Then, as the man turned the car onto a badly kept
black-top road, he said, "Look, I'm not taking you out of your way, am
I?"

     
"Only half a mile longer," the
man said.
"Joins the state highway again, oh, about two
miles beyond Park's place.
Used to be the main road till they put the
other in, back in '
?7
."

     
He drove carefully along the winding road,
on either side of which the woods, now leafless, were a tangled jungle of trees
and bushes lashed together by long ropy vines, and it was hard to remember that
New
York
was only six hours distant by bus and train. Then they emerged
among open fields dotted by warped houses and barns that needed painting.

     
"All niggers in here," the man
said.
"Niggers and dogs."

     
They rolled unevenly through another patch
of woods and past farms where the houses had more paint, and stopped in front
of a shingled two-story building in front of which stood four cars and an
orange gasoline pump.

     
"There you are, sir," the man
said.

     
"Thanks a lot," Branch said,
stepping down to the gravel.

     
The man waved his hand and sent the car
away, and Branch watched it go out of sight. Then he turned and went into the
store. Two colored men and three white men lounged around the soft-drinks dispenser
in the corner, and three small boys were buying candy from a stout woman behind
the counter to the right. At the rear of the store by the cash register a plain
straighthaired
girl was adding up, on a piece of
paper, the bill of a middle-aged man in overalls who put the items in a paper
sack as she checked them off.

     
Branch went to the corner and one of the
colored men got off the cooler and made way for him. All of them continued to
talk and it was as if he did not exist. He fished a bottle of beer from the ice
water and opened it and let the foam go into his mouth as it rose. He walked
back across the store and put a quarter in front of the stout woman who had
finished with the children. He stood looking out the window and drinking
occasionally of the beer until she returned with his change.

     
"Is George Parks around?" he
said casually.

     
"George is down to the farm,"
she said.

     
"It's not important," he said.

     
"It's just up the road a piece,"
she said.
"If you want to see him."

     
"How do I get there?"

     
"First road to the
left.
Gray house on the right-hand side, you can't miss it, sir. Name's
on the mailbox."

     
He looked at her for a moment.
"You're Mrs. Parks?"

     
"Yes, sir," she said. He felt
that she was watching him a little too closely, as if she were afraid of him.

     
"Oh, I'll go down, I guess," he
said indifferently, turning away from her to sit down on a pile of cardboard
cartons to finish his beer, aware of the short pause before the woman moved
away behind the counter.

     
He knew the house from the woman's
description before he read the name on the mailbox: George C. Parks, RFD 2,
Box
64. It was a tall, narrow gray frame house that looked
naked and lonely without houses on either side of it. Close behind it stood a
barn and a chicken-house, and behind these was an open field sloping back to a
tangled ravine that led down into the woods towards the river that could not be
seen from here. Branch stood by the mailbox and thought, why crowd it all up
against the road like that?
looking
at the small rough
patch of lawn and the concrete walk and the ragged hedges. He went up to the
porch with the feeling that most traffic went around the side of the house to
the kitchen.
When he knocked on the door a small boy stuck
out his head, glanced at him, and retreated, shouting, "Hey, Dad!
Oh, Dad, there's a man round front."

     
Presently a slightly built man of medium
height came to the door and pulled it open to look at Branch through the
screen. He wore grimy brown trousers and a worn denim shirt, and he needed a
shave. His face had a
thinlipped
, underfed look and
he studied Branch for a moment contemplatively without speaking.

     
Then he said, "I'm Parks. Was there
something you wanted?"

     
"Mind if I come in?" Branch
asked. ·

     
The man shook his head and pushed the door
open; then turning with sudden loud savagery, he shouted, *Hey, you Charley,
what did I tell you about them chickens?" and the boy standing immediately
behind him walked away without haste, stopping at the far door to look back.
"Do you want I should come after you?" George Parks shouted, making a
motion to follow, and the boy put his hands in his pockets and walked leisurely
out of sight. "Come on in," the man said quietly to Branch. Branch
stopped in the middle of the soiled rug and watched the man close the door
through which the boy had gone.

     
"That Charley," said George
Parks. "I've got five head and it's like to drive me crazy."

     
"You hired a colored woman to search
my room at the hotel," Branch said.

     
"I figured you
was
Branch," the other man said. He groped in his pocket for a cigarette which
he put into his mouth. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I did." The
cigarette bobbed between his lips as he spoke. "She
tell
you?"