***
She was stringing a net between the slicked cypress uprights on the dock. It was the middle of the morning and she had not been out of my thoughts.
She glanced over her shoulder. "You still here?"
"Lily, I want to talk to you."
She went on stretching the netting. A fish struck in the river, glistening wetly silver for a moment in the sun.
"Do I look like anything you might want, Lily?"
She did not smile. She shook her head. "Pa looked through your wallet. I watched him do it."
"It doesn't matter what's in my wallet, Lily."
"It matters to me."
"Suppose I could give you some part of a hundred thousand dollars? I don't know how much yet. But if you helped me find Marve Pooser-"
The breath exhaled from her. "Marve Pooser again. You got two things on your mind, haven't you? Getting me in a bed and finding Marve Pooser." She laughed, shaking her head. "Two of the worst things that could ever happen to you."
I looked at her. "I'll take my chances. Marve Pooser has got part of a hundred grand-"
"Marve?" She had bent over the netting again. She straightened up, and I saw the scowl, the pull between her brows. "Marve Pooser? What you been drinking?"
"It's the truth. He, he robbed me. I'm going to get that money back. You help me and I'll get you out of here, with plenty of clothes to wear and money to spend-"
"In exchange for getting me in bed."
"If I can. That's up to you. That has nothing to do with Marve Pooser."
"Look. I don't believe Marve Pooser has any such money."
"Why not?"
"It stands to reason. Marve is just like me. All he ever wanted was to get out of this scrub country. If he had any part of a hundred thousand dollars, he'd never come back here."
"Maybe he had to. Maybe he had to hide for a while."
"That proves you never knew Marve Pooser. He would never come out here with money, not even to hide. He'd go somewhere he could spend it."
"Just the same he's out here. You could help me find him."
She laughed. "Even if you found him it would be a long way from spending any money that he might have. I don't believe he has it. But if he took it away from you and you're still alive, you be glad, Jake, and you stay away from him."
I looked at her. "I thought you really wanted money."
"I want it. But fooling around trying to take it away from Marve Pooser is not the way to get it."
"I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm just asking you to help me find him."
She laughed again, shaking her head. "You just going to walk up and take it away from him?"
"I don't know what I'D do. I just know I'm going to have it, whatever he's got of what he took, that's what I'm going to have."
"You go back to bed, Jake. You're sick."
***
I slept that night. It was hot and still and it was not that I got used to the noise. I was so tired that I slept through it. When I woke up the sun was blazing hot. I was lying on my sweated pillow and the room was like an oven beneath that tin roof. Old man Sistrunk was going into town. I asked if I could ride along with him. I didn't see Lily around anywhere before we left. I told myself I had been a damned fool talking about Marve's part in that robbery to anybody out here. No matter what I thought about him, he was one of these people and they were clannish. They had proved that to me.
I sat silently beside old man Sistrunk on the drive into town. We passed only a few cars, most of them people he knew. He spoke to all of them and doffed his straw hat every time he spoke. Here was a man wanted to get along with everybody, and a man like that is dangerous to trust. But it was not like that with Lily.
I thought about her and the black depths of her eyes. You couldn't see much in them; anger, defiance-and greed. She was a greedy little swamp girl on the lookout for the big chance. You could see that in her eyes, all right. I felt safe. I didn't trust Lily, but I trusted the greed I saw in her.
"Reckon to leave this part of the country?" Sistrunk said.
"No. I want to ride back to the camp with you when you're ready to go."
Sistrunk looked ill. "I can't understand any man like you. I just can't."
He parked the old pick-up truck on the square and told me he would meet me back there in two hours. I walked around looking in the windows until I found the best sporting-goods hardware store in town. I bought a roll of wire, a pocket model Smith and Wesson and a hunting knife. I was back at the car long before Sistrunk was. He stared at the package in my lap but made no comment.
***
I got out of the car when he parked at the fishing camp and went into my room. It was stifling in there, but I closed the door anyhow.
I put the wire and knife on the bed. I loaded the gun that weighed about two pounds with the magazine. I put it in my pocket and practiced getting it out. I was slow, and knew I would never get up any speed, and there was always the chance of snagging it on torn cloth or even loose threads. It was awkward pushed inside my belt. I wished I had bought a shoulder holster, but knew that took a lot of time too, getting used to wearing it, getting used to making a draw from it.
I shoved it into my jacket pocket, knowing I'd have to carry it there. I practiced drawing until I was sweated down, but I was no gunman. I stood there hating Marve Pooser and wondering if I'd be able to pull the trigger.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead, wondering what had happened to me. From an ordinary easy-going joker I had become a guy full of hate, obsessed with one idea, and now thinking about killing a man, planning how I was going to do it.
I shoved the gun in my pocket, tried to forget it was there. The sweat boiled out across my forehead again. It was not all because of the heat in the closed room, either. I admitted one more truth, the reason I had bought that gun. I was close to Marve Pooser now. The closer I got to him, the more I heard about him, the less I liked it.
For the first time in my life I knew what it was like to be scared in your guts. I wasn't about to turn back, but I wasn't fooling myself any more. It wasn't going to be easy. I had never even thought before just how bad it might be.
There was a knock at my door and I heeled around, facing it. My nerves were drawn taut.
"All right," I said. "Who is it?"
With my left hand I wiped the sweat off my face.
"You're sweating," Lily said.
"All right. So it's hot."
She looked at the wire and the hunting knife on the bed. "Planning a camping trip?"
"I don't know."
"Or are you going to run?"
"What does that mean?"
She shrugged. "You've had another day to think it over. You look smart enough to add."
I looked at her. She had been padding around in the mud again. It squeezed up between her toes, and her legs were marked up by briars. But under that cotton dress was a body that haunted you and you didn't have to sleep to dream about her. And in her eyes there was that other thing, that driving hunger that never let her alone.
"You want me to run?"
"I don't care what you do."
"Then what do you want?"
"Pa says you rode to town with him."
"Yes. I wanted to buy some things."
"Clothes line and a knife. You setting up business?"
She saw the outline of the gun in my jacket pocket. She glanced at it but didn't mention it.
"Why didn't you spend that money smart? Why didn't you buy a bus ticket home?"
"Why don't you be smart? Why don't you clear out of this place, Lily? You could go with plenty of guys. But they're not what you want. Maybe you're never going to find the guy you want. Maybe you've got to leave here with some guy and throw him over for the next one."
She spread her hands. "Maybe I will."
"Maybe you won't. Maybe you're scared. Maybe you know how tough it is away from your old man's fishing camp. Maybe it's easier just to stay on here and hate it."
Her mouth twisted. "If the man came along that had what I wanted, I'd go with him."
"Would you? Or would you decide at the last minute it might be too tough?"
"How tough are you?"
"What's that got to do with it?"
"Plenty… maybe."
I felt the accelerated beating of my heart. "Will you help me, Lily?"
"How do I know you wouldn't run out on me-even if you were able to get anything away from Marve Pooser?"
"You know." I looked at her and laughed. "It's all stacked in your favor."
She smiled. "Makes it nice for me, doesn't it?"
"Makes it nice for both of us, Lily." I moved closer to her, so close that the fragrance of her boiled against me in the breathless room. "You help me find him. You'll never be sorry."
She let her sullen gaze move slowly over me. It was not complimentary. Here was a girl who had seen Marve Pooser. "It's dangerous," she said. "I don't think you have any idea how dangerous."
"I know that son of a bitch ruined me and walked off with a fortune. Sure he had to divide it, but he's got part of it. I'll settle for that. Help me find him, Lily." I caught her arms. "That's all you have to do. Whatever I get, I'll spend it on you. You'll get out of here all right, that's for sure."
"Win or lose, I'd have to get out of here." Her voice was flat. She was still weighing it in her mind.
I pulled her closer to me. "Take a chance, Lily. God knows, I'm gambling my life. All I want from you is just to know where he is."
She nodded slowly. "I'll take you to him."
I grabbed her close, sliding my arms around her. She writhed free, shoving me back. I stared at her.
She shook her head, her mouth pulled down. "There'll be plenty of time for that… afterward."
And then she laughed, her dark eyes mocking me.
***
It was the sort of thing that happens in a nightmare. By now I should have known that nothing was going right. Maybe I should have taken Lily's advice and run out of that scrub country. But I couldn't do that. All I could think was that Marve Pooser was out there, and he had robbed me and cost me everything and I wasn't going to let him get away with it. Now I knew what these people thought of Marve, the people who had known him all their lives. Anybody less obsessed with the idea of evening an account might have given up. But by three o'clock that afternoon Lily and I were moving upriver in one of her father's boats, powered along by a Mark twenty-five Mercury, and that's when this nightmarish thing happened. We cruised around a curve and there was Nat Sklute.
We had been on the river less than an hour. We didn't talk much. There wasn't much left to say. Lily had shown me that anything between us was on a cash basis, and that I didn't stack up in her estimation against Marve Pooser.
She wore an old blue denim shirt that must have belonged to her father. It was washed until it was salty, gray-streaked and lifeless. Her collar was open deeply at her throat and I found myself staring at her, my gaze magnetized by that triangle of soft gold flesh. Her dungarees were flesh tight and as faded as the blue shirt. On her it looked like Dior.
The sun glittered whitely on the water. We passed under a few bridges and then the river curved deeper into the scrub, moving away from the back-country roads. Sweet gum and bay and elder tangled together out over the banks of the river. When we drove near, white heron stalked up from the tangled brush still walking on log-stems as they got in flight.
It had been some time since we had seen anybody. I was conscious of the automatic in my jacket pocket. I felt the weight of it and it was never far out of my consciousness because I knew I was going to need it. I could see that in Lily's set expression though she said nothing.
The back end of the boat skidded slightly on the water as Lily put it around a curve and there ahead of us, moored to an overhanging water oak, was some guy fishing. He lifted his head and it struck me that I had seen him somewhere before. And then it hit me like a fist. It was the insurance investigator.
"Ho there." He stood up in his small boat and waves rippled up from it. He waved his arm and Lily cut the motor before I could shake my head at her.
The momentum of the motor thrust pushed us up near Sklute's boat. He caught our bow and for a moment our gazes clashed.
"Having trouble?" lily asked him. It was bred in her to inquire along the river. This was god-forsaken country and a man could be stranded for two days without seeing another boat.
Sklute pulled his gaze from mine and looked at Lily. I saw his eyes widen. He had the soul of an insurance investigator but even that appreciated the resilient pressures of Lily's body against those faded clothes.
He glanced back at me, and his glance said I had good taste. My mind was busy and I saw the only way I might get him off my back. He had to know why I was down here. He must have tracked me through every tavern and used-car lot. If so, he knew Marve's name and his birthplace. Maybe he even knew a lot more than I did. He was a professional snoop. I'd been getting no answers for almost a week. If he did not know who Marve was, then it was certain that he was still riding my back like a trained monkey.
"Thanks," Sklute said to Lily. "I'm getting some fishing done. Just wondered if you could tell me how far it is downstream to the nearest camp. I went pretty far upriver this morning, drifted back this far. I don't want to get caught in this scrub after dark."