The Brass Bed

9

We followed the river to the bend and around the bend and on for quite a way until we finally found the boat where it had drifted in close to the bank and got caught in some submerged brush under the drooping branches of a willow, but we didn’t see anything at all of Kirby or what was left of him. I waded out and pulled the boat in to the bank so that it wouldn’t get loose and drift on with the current, and then I sat down and lit a cigarette and sat there smoking and looking at the river. Harvey sat down also and began picking up small stones and sticks and throwing them out into the water. He did it slowly and methodically, with just so much time between each stick and stone, as if he were measuring the time carefully in his mind.

“I guess there’s no use walking any farther,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“It surely looks like he’s gone, all right.”

“Yes, it does. That’s the way it looks.”

“I just can’t understand how he happened to fall out of a flat-bottomed boat that way.”

“Maybe he tried to stand up and lost his balance.”

“It must have been something like that. Just the same, however, it would be pretty hard to fall out of a flat-bottomed boat.”

“He’d had quite a lot of beer. You remember that he took two or three cans down to the gravel bar with him.”

“That’s right. It could have been the beer, of course.”

“We shouldn’t have let them go. I had a feeling about it at the time.”

“Oh, nonsense. Let’s not start blaming ourselves, old boy. That won’t get us anywhere.”

“No. It was just an accident. No one’s to blame.”

“Even allowing that he fell out of the boat because he stood up under the influence of beer, I still can’t understand why he wanted to stand up. A small boat is a very unlikely thing to want to stand up in, you’ll have to admit that.”

“Maybe he stood up to hit Jolly in the eye.”

“Really? You actually think so?”

“No, I don’t. I was just joking.”

“Oh? It’s rather a hell of a time to be joking, don’t you think, old boy?”

“Yes, it is. It’s a hell of a time.”

He kept on throwing the sticks and stones into the river, and I finished the cigarette.

“Why didn’t he just swim out?” he said. “It’s not a very wide river. Do you suppose he hit his head on the boat or something?”

“He couldn’t swim.”

“No? Not at all?”

“Not a stroke.”

“That’s odd, isn’t it? He was such an athletic bastard and all.”

“He was afraid of water.”

“You don’t say so. How do you know all this, old boy?”

“Jolly told me. Only yesterday, it was.”

“It makes it all the worse somehow, doesn’t it? It’s bad enough to die at all, but to die of something you’re afraid of, that seems to be the worst thing that could happen.”

“I don’t know. You generally die pretty fast, I think, once you get started, and I don’t suppose it made much difference in the end.”

He picked up a small stone and turned and looked at me without throwing the stone immediately into the river, and it broke the rhythm of his picking and throwing, which seemed somehow to make an enormous and overwhelming change in the established order of things.

“That’s a very neat way to look at it, old boy,” he said, “and it is apparent to me that you’re quite a philosopher about these things. You will surely be a great comfort to Jolly.”

I turned my head to meet his eyes, but he had already tossed the stone into the river and was reaching for another, and I was pretty certain that he hadn’t meant anything in particular by what he’d said, nothing ironical or anything, and I told myself that it was surely the same with what Jolly had said and repeated, that she had not really meant anything by wishing that Kirby would die, that it had been only like a child wishing it in anger about a parent or a sibling or a friend, not really meaning it or wanting it and certainly not planning to make it come true.

“How long do you suppose it will take Sid to bring the sheriff?” Harvey asked.

“Not long if he’s in his office. It’s only a short drive to the county seat.”

“Maybe he’s already back.”

“I doubt it. He might be, however.”

“There’s a funny guy. That Sid. Did you notice how he started giving orders and everything? He sort of took over, I mean. It was rather surprising in a guy who regularly takes all that snotty talk and all from Fran. He must be in love with her.”

“He’s not in love with Fran. He’s in love with Jolly.”

“Is that so? I thought it must be Fran.”

“No, Jolly’s the one.”

“Well, I can understand that. I admit that Jolly’s much the prettier.”

“Yes, she is.”

“That Fran’s passionate, though. She’s extremely passionate.”

I didn’t answer, and we were silent again, and pretty soon he sighed and stood up.

“I suggest that we go back now, old boy. How do you feel about it?”

“We might as well.”

“What shall we do about the boat? Do you think we ought to leave it here?”

“Why should we leave it here?”

“In cases like this, aren’t you supposed to leave everything alone or something?”

“That’s in cases of crime. An accident is no crime.”

“That’s so, of course. I must say, though, it will be a hell of a job rowing it back upstream.”

“We’ll take turns.”

“That’s fair, old boy. I’ll take first turn if it’s all right with you.”

We went down and got into the boat. Harvey sat between the oars and started rowing back upstream, and I twisted around and watched the dark water split on the bow and wondered if Sid was back yet with the sheriff. The bend in the river was about half way back, and when we reached it Harvey and I changed places, and I rowed on up to the gravel bar. We got out and pulled the boat up onto the bar and went up the path to the clearing, and Jolly and Fran were sitting close to each other on the ground among the empty beer cans, and Sid was just coming down the narrow road in the Caddy with someone following him in a Ford.

“Did you find anything?” Fran said.

“Yes,” I said. “We found the boat and brought it back.”

Jolly looked at me and didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, either. Sid got out of the Caddy, and a tall, thin man with very round shoulders got out of the Ford, and they walked over to us together. The tall, thin man was wearing a beautiful cream colored hat with a wide brim. I was certain from this that he was the sheriff, because it seems to be imperative that sheriffs wear hats with wide brims.

He was the sheriff, all right, and it turned out that his name was Logan Pierce. He had an unpleasant, reedy voice, and his shoulders were so stooped that, in spite of his height, he gave the impression of looking up at everyone from under his brows in a sly way, and this was rather disconcerting after a while. When he spoke, Jolly got up off the ground and brushed off the seat of her shorts.

“Which one of you is Mrs. Craig?” he said.

“I am,” Jolly said.

“I’m sorry about Mr. Craig. I guess it must have been quite a shock.”

“Yes, it was. It was a shock.”

“Do you think you could tell me about it?”

“Of course. I can tell you exactly how it happened.”

No one said anything for a while, Logan Pierce just standing there looking at Jolly with this appearance of slyness, and then Jolly said, “Do you want me to go ahead and tell it?”

“Yes,” he said, “just in your own words the way you remember it.”

I thought afterward, thinking back on it, that this remark could have been interpreted to imply something pretty unpleasant, because Jolly could hardly have told it in any words other than her own unless she’d been coached ahead of time like a witness in a trial, and this suggested that there was something involved in Kirby’s drowning that she had to be careful about, to lie about or tell in just a certain way, but I doubt that he meant the implication at all, and it was probably just a sloppy way he had of expressing himself.

“Well,” Jolly said, “we went in the boat to run the trot line, but there weren’t any fish on it, and then Kirby wanted to go on around the bend for a ride, but I didn’t want to go. I told him I would rather come back here, but he said he was determined to have a ride around the bend after having come as far as the trot line, and so we went. When we were around the bend, he stopped rowing and stood up and for some reason started to walk down to where I was sitting, and that’s when he fell out of the boat.”

Logan Pierce lifted a big hand with the palm turned out in a gesture that meant to stop, and Jolly quit talking.

“That bothers me a little, I got to admit,” Logan Pierce said. “I been trying to figure the odds against a man’s falling out of a flat-bottomed boat, and the way I got it figured, they would be terrific.”

“He fell out,” Jolly said. “He fell right out into the water.”

“Okay. That’s established. But what made him fall? Can you explain what made him?”

“He just seemed to lose his balance, that’s all. The boat started to tip to one side, and he went over.”

I could see that she hadn’t answered the question to his satisfaction, and he stood looking at her with the slyness that was probably only an effect and not real. All at once he began to pop the knuckles of his right hand one at a time slowly.

“He had drunk quite a lot of beer,” I said.

Logan Pierce transferred his gaze from Jolly to me.

“Who are you?” he said.

I told him who I was, and how Harvey and I had come here fishing, and that I was a friend of Kirby and Jolly’s, which wasn’t precisely true in the case of Kirby but did no harm so far as I could see, and he nodded his head two or three times and started looking around at the empty beer cans.

“Seems to me you all been drinking quite a lot of beer,” he said.

“That’s true,” I said. “We’ve all been drinking quite a lot.”

He finished his survey of the cans and turned back to Jolly.

“What happened when he fell out?”

“Well,” she said, “he came up, and the boat had drifted away from the place he came, and I jumped in to help him, but he was obviously terribly frightened and unreasonable, and he fought me and was too strong to handle. He got away in the current and was gone, and I swam over to the bank and came back here after waiting long enough to make sure he didn’t come up again anywhere that I could see.”

“He didn’t come up again?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“All right. There’s something else that bothers me, though. After he fell in, why didn’t you just stay in the boat and stick out an oar for him to get hold of, or why didn’t you row the boat over so he could crawl back in? Seems to me either of those things would have been easier and maybe better than jumping in after him.”

“I don’t know. I suppose I was a little excited and merely did the first thing I thought of to do.”

“I can see that you might have been excited, and it’s nothing I can blame you for. The truth is, I’ve been admiring your self-control. You aren’t hysterical like you might expect a woman to be after she’d watched her husband drown, and as a matter of fact you don’t look to me like you’d even been crying any. Personally, I admire a woman who can keep herself in hand.”

It was another one of those comments that might have implied more than its literal meaning, or on the other hand maybe no more at all, and it was impossible to be sure about it from his looks or inflection one way or another. He was pretty good at that, to be truthful about it, saying things that left you wondering, and it made you very uncomfortable. No one said anything, and he looked around at the empty beer cans again and popped five knuckles.

“I guess I’d better go down to the river and look things over,” he said, “but I don’t suppose there’s anything much to see. I’ve got a crew coming out here soon, and we’ll start working to recover the body. That may take a long time, though, and in the meanwhile you people may as well go back to town if you want to.”

By this time he had followed the cans with his eyes until he’d come around to Jolly again, and he lifted his eyes and looked at her directly.

“I’ll get in touch when I’ve got any news,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened, but I can’t help it, and I hope I haven’t distressed you any because of the questions I had to ask.”

He turned and went across the clearing and into the trees. Fran got up slowly from the ground where she had been sitting all this time.

“No one introduced me,” she said. “Why didn’t someone introduce me to the sheriff?”

“Never mind,” Sid said. “What I think is, I had better take Jolly home.”

Jolly didn’t seem to hear. She came over to me and took one of my hands and held it against her cheek. Her own hands were cold.

“I always seem to get you into trouble,” she said.

“It’s not my trouble,” I said. “It’s yours.”

“Nevertheless, you are somewhat involved, and I’m sorry.”

“As for me, I think Sid’s idea is a good one. I think you had better let him take you home.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Yes, I do.”

She took her cheek off my hand and looked at me, and it was remarkable but true that even after jumping into a river and being badgered by a sheriff she was still incredibly lovely and somehow untouched and possessed of a kind of pathetic dignity.

“If that is how you feel,” she said, “I suppose I will have to go.”

She walked over to the Caddy, and Sid followed her. Fran turned to Harvey and shook her head regretfully.

“Under the circumstances,” she said, “I will have to go also.”

“It looks like it,” he said.

The Caddy left. I sat down on the ground, and Harvey sat down beside me, and the cabin and the clearing and the river were no longer the familiar features of a fine and comforting place to fish, but the strange and threatening remnants of an ugly, ending world.

“Do you mind my saying that I think you were pretty rough on Jolly under the circumstances, old boy?” Harvey said.

“Yes, I do. I mind.”

“Well, you are upset, and I must say it’s no wonder. I guess this place will never seem the same again, will it?”

“I guess it won’t.”

He looked off across the river and thought about something for a while. Then he stood up. “I think I’ll pick up a few of the cans,” he said.