He had to hold it in both hands to lick it and then as soon as his tongue touched the paper his head seemed to catch from the contact the same faint uncontrollable jerking and he sat for an instant, looking at what he had accomplished—the splayed raddled tube already half empty of tobacco and almost too damp to take fire.
It took both hands to hold the match to it too, it not smoke but a single thin lance of heat, of actual fire, which shot into his throat. Nevertheless, the cigarette in his right hand and his left hand gripping his right wrist, he took two more draws before the coal ran too far up the dry side of the paper to draw again and dropped it, about to set his foot on it before he remembered, noticed, that he was still barefoot, and so letting it burn while he sat looking at the coffee mug with a kind of despair, who had shown none before this and perhaps had not even begun to feel it yet, then taking up the mug, holding it as he had held the cigarette, wrist in hand, and brought it to his mouth, concentrated not on the coffee but on the drinking of it so that he perhaps forgot to remember that the coffee was too hot to drink, making contact between the cup-rim and his steadily and faintly jerking head, gulping at the still wellnigh scalding liquid, driven back each time by the heat, blinking, gulping again, blinking, a spoonful of the coffee sloshing out of the cup and onto the floor, splashing over his feet and ankles like a handful of dropped needles or maybe ice particles, realising that he had begun to blink again too and setting the mug carefully—it took both hands to make contact with the stool too—on the stool again and sitting over it again, hunched a little and blinking steadily at that granulation behind his lids, hearing the two pair of feet on the stairs this time though he did not even look toward the door until he heard it open then clash again then looking around and up, at the double-breasted coat (it was of gray palm beach now), the face above it freshly shaved but which had not slept either, thinking (Wilbourne), He had so much more to do.
I just had to wait. He had to get out at a minute’s notice and find someone to stay with the children. Rittenmeyer carried the suitcase—that one which had come out from under the cot in the intern’s quarters a year ago and had traveled to Chicago and Wisconsin and Chicago and Utah and San Antonio and New Orleans again and now to jail—and he came and set it beside the cot. But even then the hand at the end of the smooth gray sleeve was not done, the hand going now inside the coat.
“There are your clothes,” he said. “I have made your bond. They will let you out this morning.” The hand emerged and dropped onto the cot a sheaf of banknotes folded neatly twice. “It’s the same three hundred dollars. You carried it long enough to have gained adverse possession. It should get you a long way. Far enough, anyhow. I’d say Mexico, but then you can probably stay hidden anywhere if you’re careful. But there wont be any more. Understand that. This is all.”
“Jump it?” Wilbourne said. “Jump the bail?”
“Yes!” Rittenmeyer said violently. “Get to hell away from here. I’ll buy you a railroad ticket and send it to you—”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbourne said.
“—New Orleans; you could even ship out on a boat—”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbourne said. Rittenmeyer ceased. He was not looking at Wilbourne; he was not looking at anything. After a moment he said quietly:
“Think of her.”
“I wish I could stop. I wish I could. No I dont. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the reason—” Maybe that was; that was the first time when he almost touched it. But not yet: and that was all right too; it would return; he would find it, hold it, when the time was ready.
“Then think about me,” Rittenmeyer said.
“I wish I could stop that too. I feel—”
“Not me!” the other said, with that sudden violence again; “dont you feel sorry for me. See? See?” And there was something else but he didn’t say it, couldn’t or wouldn’t. He began to shake too, in the neat dark sober beautiful suit, murmuring, “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.”
“Maybe I’m sorry because you cant do anything. And I know why you cant. Anybody else would know why you cant. But that doesn’t help any. And I could do it and that would help some, not much maybe but some. Only I cant either. And I know why I cant too. I think I do. Only I just havent—.” He ceased too. He said quietly: “I’m sorry.” The other ceased to tremble; he spoke as quietly as Wilbourne:
“So you wont go.”
“Maybe if you could tell me why,” Wilbourne said. But the other didn’t answer. He took an immaculate handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his face carefully with it and Wilbourne noticed too that the morning breeze from the sea had dropped, gone on, as if the bright still cumulus-stippled bowl of sky and earth were an empty globe, a vacuum, and what wind there was was not enough to fill it but merely ran back and forth inside it with no schedule, obeying no laws, unpredictable and coming from and going nowhere, like a drove of bridleless horses in an empty plain. Rittenmeyer went to the door and rattled it, not looking back. The jailer appeared and unlocked the door. He was not going to look back. “You’ve forgotten the money,” Wilbourne said. The other turned and came back and took up the neat fold of notes. After a moment he looked at Wilbourne.
“So you wont do it,” he said. “You wont.”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbourne said. Only if he had just told me why, Wilbourne thought. Maybe I would have. Only he knew he would not have. Yet he continued to think it from time to time while the last days of that June accomplished and became July—the dawns while he listened to the heavy beat of the shrimper engines standing down the river toward the Sound, the brief cool hour of morning while the sun was still at his back, the long glare of brazen afternoons while the salt-impinged sun slanted full and fierce into his window, printing his face and upper body with the bars to which he held—and he had even learned to sleep again, finding sometimes that he had slept between two shiftings of his hands upon the sweating bars. Then he stopped thinking it. He didn’t know when; he did not even remember that Rittenmeyer’s visit had gone completely out of his mind.
One day—it was toward sunset, how he had failed to see it before he did not know, it had been there twenty years—he saw, beyond the flat one-storey border of the river, across the river and toward the sea, the concrete hull of one of the emergency ships built in 1918 and never finished, the hull, the hulk; it had never moved, the ways rotted out from under it years ago, leaving it sitting on a mudflat beside the bright glitter of the river’s mouth with a thin line of drying garments across the after well deck.
The sun was setting behind it now and he could not distinguish much, but the next morning he discovered the projecting slant of stove pipe with smoke coming out of it and he could distinguish the color of the garments flapping in the morning seawind and watched later a tiny figure which he knew to be a woman taking the garments from the line, believing he could distinguish the gesture with which she put the clothes pins one by one into her mouth, and he thought, If we had known it we could probably have lived there for the four days and saved ten dollars, thinking, Four days.
It could not possibly have been just four days. It could not; and watching, one evening saw the dory come alongside and the man mount the ladder with a long skein of net cascading downward from his climbing shoulder, fragile and fairy-like, and watched the man mend the net under a morning’s sun, sitting on the poop, the net across his knees, the sun on the mazy blond webbing tawnily silver.
And a moon began and waxed nightly while he stood there, and he stood there in the dying light while night by night it waned; and one afternoon he saw the flags, set one above another, rigid and streaming from the slender mast above the Government station at the river mouth, against a flat steel-colored scudding sky and all that night a buoy outside the river moaned and bellowed and the palm beyond the window threshed and clashed and just before dawn, in a driving squall, the tail of the hurricane struck.
Not the hurricane; it was galloping off somewhere in the Gulf, just the tail of it, a flick of the mane in passing, driving up the shore ten feet of roiled and yellow tide which did not fall for twenty hours and driving fiercely through the wild frenzied palm which still sounded dry and across the roof of the cell, so that all that second night he could hear the boom of seas against the breakwater
