“You a officer?” he said.
“You damn right I am,” the deputy said. “Just let me get this damn gun—”
“All right,” the other said. “Yonder’s your boat, and here’s the woman. But I never did find that bastard on the cottonhouse.”
The Wild Palms
This time the doctor and the man called Harry walked out of the door together, onto the dark porch, into the dark wind still filled with the clashing of invisible palms. The doctor carried the whiskey—the pint bottle half full; perhaps he did not even know it was in his hand, perhaps it was only the hand and not the bottle which he shook in the invisible face of the man standing above him. His voice was cold, precise, and convinced—the puritan who some would have said was about to do what he had to do because he was a puritan, who perhaps believed himself he was about to do it to protect the ethics and sanctity of his chosen profession, but who was actually about to do it because though not old yet he believed he was too old for this, too old to be wakened at midnight and dragged, haled, unwarned and still dull with sleep, into this, this bright wild passion which had somehow passed him up when he had been young enough, worthy enough, and to whose loss he believed he had not only become reconciled but had been both fortunate and right in having been elected to lose.
“You have murdered her,” he said.
“Yes,” the other said, almost impatiently; this the doctor noticed now, this alone. “The hospital. Will you telephone, or—”
“Yes, murdered her! Who did this?”
“I did. Dont stand here talking. Will you tel—”
“Who did this, I say? Who performed it? I demand to know.”
“I did, I tell you. Myself. In God’s name, man!” He took the doctor’s arm, he gripped it, the doctor felt it, felt the hand, he (the doctor) heard his own voice too:
“What?” he said. “You? You did it? Yourself? But I thought you were the.…” I thought you were the lover was what he meant. I thought you were the one who because what he was thinking was This is too much! There are rules! Limits! To fornication, adultery, to abortion, crime and what he meant was To that of love and passion and tragedy which is allowed to anyone lest he become as God Who has suffered likewise all that Satan can have known. He even said some of it at last, flinging the other’s hand violently off, not exactly as if it had been a spider or a reptile or even a piece of filth, but rather as if he had found clinging to his sleeve a piece of atheistic or Communist propaganda—something not violating so much as affronting that profound and now deathless desiccated spirit which had contrived to retire into pure morality. “This is too much!” he cried. “Stay here! Dont try to escape! You cannot hide where you will not be found!”
“Escape?” the other said. “Escape? Will you telephone for the ambulance, in God’s dear name?”
“I’ll telephone, never you fear!” the doctor cried. He was on the earth below the porch now, in the hard black wind, already moving away, beginning to run suddenly and heavily on his thick sedentary legs. “Dont you dare to try!” he cried back. “Dont you dare to try!” He still had the flashlight; Wilbourne watched the beam of it jouncing on toward the oleander hedge as though it too, the little futile moth-light beam, struggled too against the constant weight of the black pitiless wind. He didn’t forget that Wilbourne thought, watching it. But then he probably never forgot anything in his life except that he was alive once, must have been born alive at least. Then at that word he became aware of his heart, as though all profound terror had merely waited until he should prompt himself. He could feel the hard black wind too as he blinked after the floundering light until it passed through the hedge and vanished; he blinked steadily in the black wind, he could not stop it. My lachrymae are not functioning he thought, hearing his roaring and laboring heart. As though it were pumping sand not blood, not liquid he thought. Trying to pump it. It’s just this wind I think I cant breathe in, it’s not that I really cant breathe, find something somewhere to breathe because apparently the heart can stand anything anything anything.
He turned and crossed the porch. This time as before he and the black steady wind were like two creatures trying to use the same single entrance. Only it dont really want to come in he thought. Dont need to. Dont have to. It’s just interfering for the fun, the hell of it. He could feel it on the door when he touched the knob, then, close, he could hear it too, a sibilance, a whisper. It was risible, it was almost a chuckling, leaning its weight on the door along with his weight, making the door easy, too easy, surreptitious, making its weight really felt only when he came to close the door and this time too just easy because so steady, just risible and chuckling; it did not really want to come in. He closed the door, watching the faint light which fell into the hall from the lamp inside the bedroom suck shift and recover steadily as what of the wind might have remained in the house if it had wanted to, might have been trapped inside the house by the closing door, licked quietly out through the ultimate closing crack, risible and constant, not at all departing, and turned listening, his head slanted a little toward the bedroom door with listening. But no sound came from beyond it, no sound in the hall but the wind murmuring against the door of the barren rented hall where he stood, quiet with listening, thinking quietly, I guessed wrong. It’s incredible, not that I should have had to guess but that I should have guessed so wrong not meaning the doctor, not thinking about the doctor now (With a part of his mind he was not using now he could see it: the other neat, tight, brown-stained wind-proof tongue-and-groove hall, the flashlight still burning on the table beside the hurried bag, the thick bulging varicose planted calves as he had first seen them beneath the nightshirt, planted outraged and convinced and unassuageable by anything else but this; he could even hear the voice not raised but risen, a little shrill, unappeasable too, into the telephone: “And a policeman. A policeman. Two if necessary. Do you hear?” He’ll wake her too he thought, seeing this too: the upper room, the gorgon-headed woman in the gray high-necked gown risen onto her elbow in the stale gray bed, her head cocked to listen and without surprise, who would be hearing only what she had been expecting for four days to hear. She will come back with him—if he himself comes back he thought. If he dont just sit outside with the pistol to guard the exits. And maybe she will even be there too.). Because this didn’t matter, it was just like putting a letter into the mail; it didn’t matter what box, only that he should have waited so late to mail the letter, he, after the four years and then the twenty months, the almost two years more and then done, complete. I have made a bust even of that part of my life which I threw away he thought, motionless in the risible murmur of the waiting and unhurried wind, his head turned slightly toward the bedroom door with listening, thinking with that trivial layer of his mind which he did not need to use, So it’s not just the wind I cant breathe in so maybe forever after I have gained, earned, some little of suffocation beginning to breathe not faster but deeper, he could not stop it, each breath shallower and shallower and harder and harder and nearer and nearer the top of his lungs until in a moment it would escape the lungs altogether and there would indeed be no breath left anywhere forever, blinking steadily and painfully at the sudden granulation of his lids as though the black sand dammed forever of any moisture at which his strong heart scooped and surged were about to burst out of him through all his ducts and pores as they say the sweat of agony does, thinking Steady now. Careful now. When she comes back this time she will have to begin to hold on.
He crossed the hall to the bedroom door. There was still no sound save the wind (there was a window, the sash did not fit; the black wind whispered and murmured at it but did not enter, it did not want to, did not need to). She lay on her back, her eyes closed, the nightgown (that garment which she had never owned, never worn before) twisted about her just under the arms, the body not sprawled, not abandoned, but on the contrary even a little tense. The whisper of the black wind filled the room but coming from nothing, so that presently it began to seem to
him that the sound was rather the murmur of the lamp itself sitting on an up-ended packing case beside the bed, the rustle and murmur of faint dingy light itself on her flesh—the waist ever narrower than he had believed, anticipated, the thighs merely broad since they were flat too, the swell and neat nip of belly between the navel’s flattened crease and the neat close cupping of female hair, and nothing else, no croaching shadow of ineradicable blackness, no shape of death cuckolding him; nothing to see, yet it was there, he not permitted to watch his own cuckolding but only to look down upon the invisible pregnancy of his horning. And then he could not breathe and he began to back away from the door but it was too late because she was lying on the bed looking at him.
He didn’t move. He couldn’t help his breathing but he didn’t move, one hand on the door frame and his foot already lifted for the first step back, the eyes open full upon him though still profoundly empty of sentience. Then he saw it begin: the I. It was like watching a fish rise in water—a dot, a minnow, and still increasing; in a second there would be no more pool but all sentience. He crossed to the bed in three strides, fast but quiet; he put his hand flat on her chest, his voice quiet, steady, insistent: “No, Charlotte. Not yet. You can hear me. Go back. Go back, now. It’s all right now”, quiet and urgent and contained out of his need, as though departure only followed farewell, and goodbye was not something to precede the going away—provided there was time for it. “That’s right,” he said. “Go back. It’s not time yet. I will tell you when the time comes.” And she heard him from somewhere because at once the fish became the minnow again and then the dot; in another second the eyes would be empty again and blank. Only he lost her. He watched it: the dot growing too fast this time, no serene minnow but a vortex of cognizant pupil in the yellow stare spinning to blackness while he watched, the black shadow not on the belly but in the eyes. Her teeth caught her lower lip, she rolled her head and tried to rise, struggling against the flat of his hand on her breast.
“I’m hurting. Jesus, where is he? Where’s he gone? Tell him to give me something. Quick.”
“No,” he said. “He cant. You’ve got to hurt. That’s what you’ve got to hold on to.” Now it must have been laughing; it couldn’t have been anything else. She lay back and began to thresh from hip to hip, still threshing as he untwisted the gown and drew it down and covered her.
“I thought you said you would do the holding.”
“I am. But you’ve got to hold on too. You’ve got to do most of it for a while. Just a little while. The ambulance will be here soon, but you must stay here and hurt now. Do you hear? You cant go back now.”
“Then take the knife and cut it out of me. All of it. Deep. So there wont be anything left but just a shell to hold the cold air, the cold—” Her teeth, glinting in the lamplight, caught her lower lip again; a thread of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth. He took a soiled handkerchief from his hip and leaned to her but she rolled her head away from his hand. “All right,” she said. “I’m holding on. You say the ambulance is coming?”
“Yes. In a minute we will hear it. Let me—” She rolled her head again away from the handkerchief.
“All right. Now get to hell out. You promised.”
“No. If I leave, you wont hold on. And you’ve got to hold on.”
“I am holding on. I’m holding on so you can go, get out of here before they come. You promised me you would. I want to see you go. I want to watch you.”
“All right. But dont you want to say goodbye first?”
“All right. But Jesus God, dont touch me. It’s like fire, Harry. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just like fire. Just dont touch me.” So he knelt beside the bed; she stopped her head now; her lips lay still under his for a moment, hot and dry to the taste, with the thin sweetish taste of the blood. Then she pushed his face away with her hand, it hot and dry too, he hearing her heart still, even now, a little too fast, a little too strong. “Jesus, we had fun, didn’t we? bitching, and making things. In the cold, the snow. That’s what I’m thinking about. That’s what I’m holding on to now: the snow, the cold, the cold. But it doesn’t hurt; it’s just like fire; it’s just—Now go. Get to hell out. Quick.” She began to roll her head again. He rose from his knees.
“All right. I’m going. But you must hold on. You will have to hold on a long time. Can you do it?”
“Yes. But go. Go quick. We’ve got enough money for you to get to Mobile. You can lose yourself quick there; they cant find you there. But go. Get to hell away from here quick for God’s sake.” This time when the teeth caught the bright thin blood spurted all the way to her chin. He didn’t move at once. He was trying to remember something out of a book, years ago, of Owen Wister’s, the whore in the pink ball dress who drank the laudanum and the cowboys taking turns walking her up and down the floor, keeping her on her feet, keeping her alive, remembering and forgetting it in the same instant since it would not help him. He began to move toward the door.
“All right,” he said. “I’m going now. But remember, you will have to hold on by yourself then. Do you hear? Charlotte?” The yellow eyes were full on him, she released the bitten lip and as he sprang back toward the bed he heard over the chuckling murmur of the wind the two voices at the front door, the porch—the plump-calved doctor’s high, almost shrill, almost breaking, that of the gray gorgon wife cold and level, at a baritone pitch a good deal more masculine than the man’s voice, the two of them unorientable because of the wind like the voices of two ghosts quarrelling about nothing, he (Wilbourne) hearing them and losing them too in the same instant as he bent over the wide yellow stare in the head which had ceased to roll, above the relaxed bleeding lip. “Charlotte!” he said. “You cant go back now. You’re hurting. You’re hurting. It wont let you go back. You can hear me.” He slapped her, fast, with two motions of the same hand. “You’re hurting, Charlotte.”
“Yes,” she said. “You and your best doctors in New Orleans. When anybody with one mail-order stethoscope could give me something. Come on, Rat. Where are they?”
“They’re coming. But you’ve got to hurt now. You’re hurting now.”
“All right. I’m holding on. But you mustn’t hold him. That was all I asked. It wasn’t him. Listen, Francis—See, I called you Francis. If I were lying to you do you think I would call you Francis instead of Rat?—Listen, Francis. It was the other one. Not that Wilbourne bastard. Do you think I would let that bloody bungling bastard that never even finished hospital poke around in me with a knife——” The voice stopped; there was nothing in the eyes at all now though they were still open—no minnow, no dot even—nothing. But the heart he thought. The heart. He laid his ear to her chest, hunting the wrist pulse with one hand; he could hear it before his ear touched her, slow, strong enough still but each beat making a curious hollow reverberation as though the heart itself had retreated, seeing at the same moment (his face was toward the door) the doctor enter, still carrying the scuffed bag in one hand and in the other a cheap-looking nickel-plated revolver such as you could find in almost any pawnshop and which, as far as serviceability was concerned, should still have been there, and followed by the gray-faced Medusa-headed woman in a shawl. Wilbourne rose, already moving toward the doctor, his hand already extended for the bag. “It will last this time,” he said, “but the heart’s—Here. Give me the bag. What do you carry? Strychnine?” He watched the bag as it fled, snatched, behind the thick leg, the other hand he did not even look at as it came up but only in the next instant, at the cheap pistol pointed at nothing and being shaken in his face as the whiskey bottle had been.