Hot Spot (9 page)

Fighting the impatience, I waited a few minutes to be sure. Nuts, I thought; there’s nobody within miles. I got out, opened the trunk, and carried the bag inside the barn before I switched on the flashlight. My hands were beginning to tremble a little and I was conscious of a wild excitement. I went inside the corn crib and closed the door. I didn’t notice the heat now, or the sweat on my face. I upended the bag and let the bundles and loose bills cascade on to the floor. It was wonderful.

I didn’t try to count all of it. Most of the bundles were fifties, twenties, and tens. Without any of the loose bills or the ones it came to $12,300. I whistled softly. A wild impatience began to get hold of me. I wanted to get going, to put it back in the car and run.

Run where? I thought.

The world wouldn’t hold me, and I knew it. It wouldn’t take them an hour to figure it out if I disappeared now. They could add too. I couldn’t leave. The only way I could beat them was the one I’d known from the first, and that was to keep my head down and wait it out. After a month or so, when the heat began to die down … I gathered the bag up and went out the door of the crib.

Picking a spot near the rear wall of the crib, inside one of the stalls, I scraped the old manure out of the way with a piece of shingle, and started to dig. The ground was sand, and easy to gouge up with the shingle. I was careful to place all the loose dirt in one pile. When I was down about eighteen inches, I rolled the bag of money into as tight a ball as I could make it, and shoved it into the hole. Then, just before I started scooping the dirt back in, I thought of something. I lifted it out and began looking over the undershirt. There was a laundry mark on it, all right. Taking out my knife, I sawed out the piece of cloth and stuck a match to it, then ground the ashes into the bottom of the hole. If anybody did happen to stumble on to it I’d lose the money, but they’d never tie it to me.

I put it back in the hole and began filling it, tamping the dirt down with my fist until it was as firm as the rest of the ground. The little which was left over I spread evenly around, then raked the dried manure and old straw back over the whole area.

Snapping off the light, I went back to the door. The old house was just a faintly darker shadow in the night, off there to the left, and as I looked towards it I thought for the hundredth time of that other day and what Sutton had said to her and the way she detested and feared him. There was something insane about it. You could keep trying for years to add it up and you’d never come out with an answer that made sense. She wouldn’t even
know
Sutton. The hell she didn’t—!

I shook them off angrily. What business was it of mine? But, as always, when I gathered her up and threw her out of my mind there was a little of her left over, the way there is in a room a girl has just walked through.

I went out and got in the car, but instead of heading right back to town I drove on down to the river and went swimming by the bridge. When I did go back I stopped in at the restaurant to get a cup of coffee. The waitress looked at my head and smiled.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I forget to put on my hair?”

She grinned. “No. But it looks like you left it out in the rain.”

“I been swimming,” I said. “They caught the bank robbers yet?”

“No. But they got enough cops around here to catch Dillinger.”

“You don’t even remember Dillinger,” I said. “You were just a kid in a three-cornered Bikini.”

She laughed, tickled about it. I went back to the rooming house, took another drink, and lay down on the bed, feeling the tension go out of me. I was in. The money was buried, and I hadn’t left a track behind me.

The next day was Saturday, but there wasn’t much business transacted. They might as well have closed the whole town except that there wouldn’t have been any places for people to congregate and rehash the robbery. The place was full of cops. The white-haired Sheriff from the county seat was in town with two of his deputies besides the one who lived here, and there were some more with plainclothes cop written all over them, probably from the detective agency or insurance company. Everybody was wild to get at the remains of the fire and start pawing through it for evidence, but a lot of it was still smouldering and too hot. Special deputies had been sworn in to keep people away from the place. I had a hunch the Sheriff and the detectives had already junked the out-of-town gang idea and were playing it cagey, going through the motions of looking for the getaway car while they waited for somebody to stick his head up or make a slip. That much money would be burning somebody’s pockets and he’d have to start throwing it around. All right, I thought; go ahead. I know about that one too.

All I had to do was keep playing it down the middle. I stuck around the lot and talked robbery with anybody who drifted in. And then Harshaw pulled a funny one on me. Around noon he called me into the office. He was chewing a cold cigar and oiling a big salt-water reel on his desk.

“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

I perched on the side of a desk, wondering what was coming. “What’s up?” I asked, as casually as I could.

“I want you to take charge here for a while. My wife and I are going to Galveston for a week.”

“What’s the matter with Gulick?” I asked.

“There’s nothing the matter with Gulick,” he said impatiently. “Except that he’s a little slow and he won’t take responsibility. You can use your own judgment about trades. Do you want it, or don’t you?”

“O.K. with me,” I said. For once I couldn’t start an argument.

“You can run an ad if you want to,” he said. “The paper comes out early in the week.”

“What’ll I use for money? My own?”

He sighed and shook his head. “You’re a tough nut to get along with, Madox. Why in hell would I ask you to pay for the ad out of your pocket? They can send the bill to Miss Harper. Or tell her to give it to you out of petty cash.”

“O.K.,” I said. At least he was taking that over-ripe bundle of sex with him this time.

He finished cleaning the reel and put it in a flannel bag with a drawstring. “Well, if you can’t think of anything else to bitch about, I’ll leave it with you,” he said, starting out the door.

“What are you going after?” I asked. “Tarpon?”

“No. Hammerhead sharks. They got some big ones around the jetties down there.”

After I came back from lunch I went out on the lot and picked out about a half-dozen cars that would make good leaders in an ad, made some notes, and started writing it up. At first I was just doing it to kill time, but the thing began to grow on me as I went along and after the second or third draft I had some pretty good stuff whipped into shape, slicing the down payments as low as they would go and playing up all the accessories. I took it up the street to the newspaper office, paid for it and got a receipt, intending to go by the loan office and collect from Gloria Harper.

I had started back to the office before I remembered it was Saturday and they closed at noon. Well, I could collect on Monday; it didn’t matter. But I was conscious of a vague disappointment, and knew the money was only part of it; what I’d really wanted was an excuse to go in and talk to her.

I was angling across the street towards the lot when I happened to glance around towards the loan office and saw her through the window. She was sitting at a desk behind a pile of paper work. I turned abruptly and started back, and just as I did I noticed that Gulick had company on the lot. Two of the deputy sheriffs were talking to him.

Well, it wasn’t anything. They were talking to everybody in town. There was nothing unusual about it. But still I wished I hadn’t turned right there in the middle of the street; it might look as if I had turned back to avoid them. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. If I kept switching back and forth in the middle of the street I would
attract
attention.

The door was open and there was a big electric fan blowing across the office. She nodded as I came in, but the smile itself was a little forced and there was something very tired about her face. I wondered why she was working overtime. She got up and came over to the counter with tall unhurried grace.

“It was terrible about the bank, wasn’t it?” she said. “And the fire.”

“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t even thinking about the bank. And then I remembered what I had come in for. “Harshaw said to take it out of petty cash,” I said, shoving the receipt across the counter and explaining what it was for.

She wrote out a slip and got the money out of the safe. “Thanks,” I said, putting it into my wallet. “Why don’t you knock off? You look tired.”

“I will pretty soon.”

I didn’t want to go. We stood there facing each other across the counter. “What are you going to do tomorrow?” I asked.

“Nothing special. Go to church in the morning, I expect. And in the afternoon I thought I might go out and try to sketch the Buchanan bridge.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s in the river bottom, below the one where—” She paused, confused, and I knew what she was thinking. “Below the one we crossed going out to the oil well.”

“Could I go, too?” I asked.

She nodded. “Why, yes. We could make it a picnic.”

“That’s fine. I’ll get the restaurant to make us a lunch to take along.”

“No. Let me do that,” she said. “It’s no trouble.”

“What time can I pick you up?”

“About twelve would be all right.”

“Great,” I said. “I’ll be looking forward to it.”

I started out and then paused, when I reached the doorway, to look back at her. She was still watching me, and had just started to turn back to the desk.

It was awkward, somehow. Both of us were a little confused. “Was—I mean, is there anything else?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said. “No. I guess not.” I turned and went on out into the street.

When I got over to the lot the two deputies were gone and Gulick didn’t say anything about them.

I
DROVE OVER AROUND NOON
. It was a blazing, still day of white sunlight, and the shadows under the trees were like pools of ink. She was sitting on the front porch waiting for me, dressed in white shorts and a blue T-shirt, and surrounded by painting equipment and the box of lunch. I got out and loaded it all into the back seat. The cocker spaniel was running eagerly up and down the walk.

“Can we take Spunky?” she asked. “He likes to run rabbits.”

I looked at Spunky’s short legs and big paddle feet. “Did he ever catch one?”

She smiled. “No. But he’s still hopeful.”

“Sure,” I said. I lifted him in through the rear window and held the door open for her. As we went down Main Street a few people were clustered in front of the drugstore and the restaurant.

“They’re still talking about the bank robbery,” she said. “Do you think it was somebody around here?”

I didn’t want to talk about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “It could have been.”

When we were on the highway going south I cranked the wing windows open and swung them around front to scoop in a little breeze. She sat back in the corner of the seat, facing towards me with one leg doubled under her, and the big violet eyes were happier than I had ever seen them before.

The road was a mile or so beyond the one which went over to Sutton’s oil well. It wasn’t much more than a pair of ruts struggling through the sand and stunted postoak in a generally westerly direction towards the river bottom, and looked as if it hadn’t been used in months.

“Where’s it go?” I asked.

“Nowhere, any more. The bridge isn’t safe and it’s all washed out beyond, on the other side of the bottom. We can get as far as the bridge, though.”

When we got down among the big oaks in the bottom there was more shade and it was a little cooler. The road wound erratically, skirting the dried-up sloughs. Once we almost ran over an old boar which came charging out of some bushes into the road ahead of us.

“That looked like a wild pig,” I said.

“Some of them are,” she said. “They get lost down here and after a while they sort of go native.”

“You’d better warn Spunky they’re not rabbits. They could slice him up like salami.”

When we finally got to the river it was worth it, and I could see why she had wanted to come here. It was beautiful and remote and there was a feeling of peace about it as if they’d forgotten to wind the clock and it had run down fifty years ago. There was no concrete or steel about the bridge; it was a sagging ruin of oak timbers and loose planking weathered to the bleached-out whiteness of old bones against the dark wall of timber beyond it, and tilted a little as if it would go out with the next high water. There was a jam of whitened logs on the upper side and the water ran dark, almost like black tea, out from under the jam, boiling up a little and swinging around in a big hole on the downriver side. The road approached from below the bridge and where I pulled the car off and stopped in the shade of a huge pin oak there was a clean sandy bank sloping down to the sandbar below the pool.

She looked across the river and then at me. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“It’s perfect,” I said.

We got out. Spunky ran down to the sandbar to get a drink and then took off to investigate the surrounding country. I took the water jar down to the river’s edge and filled it for her, and when I came back she was looking around for a place to sit down in the shade.

“Wait,” I said, “I’ve got—” And then I chopped it off suddenly, feeling cold chills down my back. I’d almost said blanket. It had been a near thing, and thinking about it scared me.

She looked at me questioningly. “What is it?”

I got hold of myself. “Nothing,” I said. “False alarm. I started to say I had a Sunday paper in the car that you could sit on, but I just remember I didn’t bring it.”

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t need anything. This is nice sand, just like a beach.”

She sat down with the block of paper on her legs and took up one of the charcoal sticks, looking meditatively at the bridge. Then she glanced around at me where I’d stretched out on the sand, just smoking a cigarette and watching her.