Hot Spot (22 page)

And then I felt the limb against my leg. It was there. I swung off the road and started pushing my way through the trees in a frenzy to get it done, to be able to see again, and to get out of here before it was too late. And then it happened. My shoulder brushed hard against a tree trunk and it threw me off balance. The battery slipped out of my grasp and fell somewhere into the darkness ahead of me as I crashed to the ground. I heard it slam into a tree.

This was the end. It had just been teasing me all the time, and now I was really done. The battery was broken. I couldn’t even find it. I lay on my stomach in the water and wet pine needles and swept my arms around, trying to locate it and still afraid of what I’d find. My fingertips brushed it and I slid forward and got my hands on it. It was lying on its side. I rolled it upright and ran my hands around it to find out if the case was broken. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed to be all right. There was a hole broken in the top of the middle cell, but both of the terminals felt solid. Maybe it was still all right.

I picked it up and located the car. I set it on the fender, and lifted the other battery out. It wasn’t until then that I remembered I had to get the polarity right. There wasn’t any way I could tell which was the positive and which the negative terminal. I ran my fingers across the tops of them, trying to feel the plus and minus markings, but I couldn’t tell because they were corroded over. There wasn’t any way on earth—. Wait, I thought. Sure there was. The positive terminal was always larger, and the connectors would be the same. I felt both, and I could tell which was which. I set it in and drove the connectors down on the terminals with the pliers, and ran around to turn on the lights. They came up bright and strong. I looked at the watch. It was twenty minutes after four.

I threw the other battery in, and backed out on to the road. It was only a miracle I stayed on it at the pace I went down the hill into the clearing. I put the battery in his car and connected it up, working fast now with the headlights for illumination, and as I got back in the car and turned around the lights swept once across the bleak and lonely cabin sitting there in the rain. I thought of him inside, alone in the dark with his face on the table, and then I gunned the car out of the yard, fast, and started up the hill. I went down the other side and across the river bottom like a man running away from hell, while the rain washed out my tracks behind me. When I got out on the highway there was no traffic and I rode the throttle down to the floorboards all the way to town.

Swinging left at the cotton gin, I circled around the way I had before. It was still dark, but this was the dangerous part of it now. I came up the side street and just before I swung on to the lot I cut the headlights. I came up alongside the last car in line and stopped and sat there for a minute before I got out. Main Street was empty in the rain.

The inside of the car was a mess from the water that had run out of my clothes, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. I’d have to get off the lot and over to the garage the first thing when we opened, before Gulick had a chance to see it. I grabbed the purse and the shoes and got out, slipping down the street in the shadows. When I got in the alley behind the rooming house I eased through the gate and into the yard without a sound except the pounding of my heart. I hadn’t seen anyone at all.

I stopped on the little porch outside my door and took off my trousers and sports shirt and wrung the water out of them, and then squeezed all I could out of the purse. Then I carried everything inside and without turning on a light felt around in the closet for my flannel robe and rolled all of it up in that. I took off the shorts and threw them in the laundry bag, and dried myself off with a towel. Using the same towel and feeling around on the floor in the dark, I mopped up what water I’d brought in with me. Then I put on some dry shorts, got a package of cigarettes out of the dresser drawer, and lay down on the bed. I looked at my watch as I lighted the cigarette. It was nearly six. It would be growing light in a few minutes. I had made it.

A little after seven I got up and shaved and dressed. It was still raining, so I got a raincoat out of the closet, picked up the bundle of stuff in the flannel robe, and carried it out to the car. I drove down and parked on the lot, and took the bundle out of the rear seat and locked it in the trunk.

As I started up the street to the restaurant I looked back under the line of cars. That was something which had been worrying me. But it was all right. The water had run, and it was just as wet under the ones that’d been there all night as under the one I’d been using.

I went on over to the restaurant. There were several people there already and they were all talking about it. It was all over town.

Harshaw was dead. He’d died a little after three that morning of another heart attack.

I
COULDN’T TAKE HOLD
of it at first. Why three o’clock in the morning? I ordered some breakfast and couldn’t eat it. It was a rotten shame. And then I wondered why I felt so sorry about it. After all it hadn’t been six hours since I’d killed a man; why should the natural death of another one bother me? I walked back to the office and just sat there looking out at the dark, miserable day. When Gulick showed up I told him he could go home. We’d close the lot and the loan office for the day, and also the day of the funeral.

Gloria came along a few minutes later. Robinson dropped her off on this side of the street and she hurried into the office. She had on a blue plastic raincoat with a hood, which made her look very pretty and young, but her face was pale and she was tired. She had already heard about Harshaw.

“Don’t you think we ought to close up, Harry?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve already told Gulick.”

She was in the doorway, and she turned a little away from me and looked out into the street. “It’s so terrible,” she said quietly. She had thought the world of Harshaw.

And then I wondered if she meant Harshaw. I wanted to tell her I had her purse and shoes in the car, that there was nothing to worry about, and I couldn’t. I ran right into a wall. I couldn’t say a thing.

I locked the office and we went out and got in the car. I drove down the highway very slowly and we were both silent, just watching the rain. When we got to the long bridge I parked the car near the end of it and we sat there looking at the water. It was brown, and we could see the river was rising a little. They might not find him for days, I thought. If there was much more rain the road through the bottom would be impassable. Once, when there were no cars in sight in either direction, I kissed her. She drew back a little.

“It just doesn’t seem right, I guess.” She turned and looked out of the window.

We stayed there a half hour or longer, and I could feel the wall of silence growing up between us. I knew now why I hadn’t been able to say anything back there at the office. If she couldn’t talk about it, how could I? And then I suddenly realized she wasn’t thinking about the shoes and purse at all, because she didn’t know yet that I’d killed him. And when she did find out he was dead she would know I hadn’t left them there to incriminate her. I wanted to cry out and tell her it was all right, that I knew why she’d done it and it didn’t mean a thing, but how could I? I thought of the shame and the loathing she must feel, and how having to talk about it right out in the open—even to me—would crucify her, and I couldn’t open my mouth. Maybe she could stand it if we didn’t mention it, if we pretended it hadn’t happened.

And then I thought of something else. What would it be like when they found him? Could we ever talk about it? Everything would tell her that I’d done it, but in her heart there’d always be that hope, that slim chance I hadn’t as long as we didn’t insist on dragging it out into the open. The whole thing was an ugly mess, and maybe the only way we’d ever be able to live with it was by ignoring it.

After a while I drove back to town. The stuff in the back of the car was still weighing on my mind, but I knew I’d have to wait until after dark to get rid of it.

“Don’t you think we ought to see Mrs. Harshaw, Harry?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “We’d better go now.”

I stopped in the driveway by the side porch, and the Negro girl let us in. She said yes, Mrs. Harshaw was in and she’d see us. We went in, and she was in the living room, pale and red-eyed and dressed in a housecoat and slippers. I thought she was over-doing it a little with the weeping until I noticed she had a bad head cold. That helped her to look like the grief-stricken widow.

They had already taken him to the mortuary, and the funeral was to be on Wednesday. We expressed our sympathy and said what a fine man he’d been, and between sessions of sniffles she told us how it had happened. Apparently he had got up for something, because she had heard him out in the hall and just as she was about to call out to him and ask if anything was wrong she heard him fall. He rolled all the way down the stairs in the living room.

“Oh, it was horrible,” she said pitifully, and I’d have felt sorry for her if I hadn’t known better. “Going down the steps in the dark, trying to get to him, I fell myself before I got to the bottom.” She slipped the housecoat down a little and showed us the bruise on her shoulder. “Somehow I got to the phone and called the doctor, but when he got here it was too late.” She started crying again. She made me sick.

Well, she finally outlasted him, I thought. The whole works is hers now—probably a hundred thousand or more. I wondered if she’d sell out and leave. Probably, I thought. She could keep a whole stable of boy friends now, like, a riding academy or a stud farm, and it’d work out better in a city.

Her sniffling got Gloria started. We left in a little while and I drove her home. I went back to the rooming house and tried to sleep in the afternoon, but it wasn’t any good. I kept having a nightmare about trying to run uphill out of a river bottom with a dead man shackled to my leg. I’d wake up covered with sweat and shaking.

When would they find him? That was beginning to get me now. I hadn’t thought about that part until now that I was getting a taste of it.
What about the waiting?
I thought everything was all right, and that they’d go for it, but how did I
know?
What if I’d forgotten something? I wouldn’t know until they found him and held the inquest. Every time I thought of that cold-eyed Sheriff I’d get scared. It was going to be great. I could see that. And if it went on very long I’d be crazy.

After it was dark I drove downtown and tried to eat. My mouth was dry and everything tasted like straw. I got in the car and drove out to the abandoned sawmill, stopping on the road for a while to be sure I wasn’t followed. The rain had stopped during the afternoon and now the stars were out. I parked beside the sawdust pile and got the bundle of clothes out of the trunk, went over all of it with the flashlight looking for laundry marks and cutting them out, and then carried the stuff down to the bottom of the ravine. Scooping out a hole in the bottom of the sawdust slide, I shoved them in, clothes, purse, shoes, everything, and covered them up. Then I went up a little way and started another slide. They were well buried, and as time went by more and more would fall down on them. Maybe, I thought if she stayed around here, she’d keep it sliding down. The place made me think of her, and remembering that night made me uncomfortable. Hating her didn’t make any difference. Maybe that was what she’d meant by saying I’d always come back. It was so easy to remember the last time.

The funeral was Wednesday afternoon, and they still hadn’t found Sutton. I couldn’t seem to sleep at all now. I’d doze off for a few minutes and then wake up sweating and scared. I wondered how much longer I could take it.

Gloria and Gulick and I ordered a big floral piece for the funeral, and we all went, of course. Everybody in the county seemed to be there. Gloria cried along at the end of it, and I had to blow my nose several times myself. He was a good man, a better man than I was, even if I’d been a long time in finding it out. Gloria and I drove around afterwards, not going anywhere, and that awkward silence was still there between us. When I took her home we sat in the car a few minutes in front of the house.

“What do you suppose she’ll do with the business?” she asked. “Do you think she’ll sell out?”

I got what she meant, and it was the first time I’d thought of it. There’d been so much I’d overlooked that possibility of grief. If she did sell there’d be an audit of the books, and it’d probably happen before we could get all that deficit cleaned up, even though I still had the five hundred dollars that was in Sutton’s wallet. God, I thought, how messed up can you get?

“I don’t know,” I said. “She hasn’t said a thing, and I didn’t want to bother her with business. But I’ll see what I can find out.”

But I didn’t find out anything. She didn’t call up or come around the place, and I didn’t call her because I was reaching the point I couldn’t think about anything except Sutton, and when they’d find him, and what the inquest would turn up when they did. It went on all day and all night because I never slept more than a few minutes at a time now. In another day or two I even quit seeing Gloria. I didn’t even call her up. I was so savage and on edge I didn’t know what I’d do or say next. By the Saturday after the funeral I wondered if I wasn’t reaching the breaking point. I began to have an idea they’d found him and weren’t saying anything, just waiting for me to crack under the strain. Maybe they were just playing with me, and any minute one of them would tap me on the shoulder. And then I’d get hold of myself and I’d know this wasn’t true. They just hadn’t found him yet. Nobody ever went out there. I’d just have to wait. Wait! God, how much longer could I stand it?

It broke on Sunday morning. Two farm boys hunting rabbits found him and came to town to report it to Tate. Everybody was talking about it around the drugstore and the restaurant. The Sheriff himself came over and they went out to the oil well and were gone for a little over two hours. When they returned, early in the afternoon, they brought the body out and went on back to the county seat. Nobody knew anything except what the boys had said. He was sitting at a table, kind of bent over it, and looked like he had been dead a long time, and they were afraid of him. They didn’t go inside the cabin.