Annie stopped writing the note to her father and looked up, nude, her face laughing. "Are you kidding, country town? It's country people who really know what people are like. That's why they're all Baptists."
"Or drunks," Landers said.
"Or drunks." She finished the note, and signed it and folded it up. "I don't want to put this in a hotel envelope," she said. "It would just make daddy sad. Will you get a plain white envelope and put it in it?"
Landers took it and put it away carefully. When he looked back up, Annie still in the desk chair, still nude, had begun to laugh outrageously. "What's the matter, now?" he said.
"Nothing. Nothing. Just laughing. I was just thinking how you won't be there three days probably, before you'll be fucking my pregnant sixteen-year-old sister. Old Loucine." She began to laugh again.
Landers felt shocked. "Oh, no. No, no. I wouldn't do something like that."
"I don't see how you're going to avoid it." She stared at him, her face grinning more. "You're shocked," she said.
Landers felt irritated. "No, I'm not. Not shocked." He made himself grin. "But I don't want your daddy the sheriff to throw down on me with his shooting iron."
"My daddy would be more likely to throw down on you if you didn't," Annie laughed. "I told you he understood women, didn't I? Well, women are going to get love made to them. One way or another. And it doesn't matter what they call it. Or if they don't call it at all. Or don't mention it even, which is more likely. Well, my daddy was born knowing that, from a baby. I guess that's why women have always found him so attractive."
Landers found he had no answer.
"Come on," Annie said. "We might as well get dressed. I still have to call daddy for you."
"Listen, don't call from out there. I don't want Strange and those others-"
"Don't worry. I read your plans. You don't want Johnny Strange to know where you are, or to tell your Sergeant Winch." She smiled. "In actual fact, I was planning on taking you home with me to my place. I'll call daddy from there, and you can listen. Then I thought I'd see you off at the bus station."
"Well," Landers said, at a loss, "fine. But why are you so nice to me?" He felt perturbed. There had been whiskey available up here at the suite, and now he had drunk enough to make his courage considerably reinforced. But he was upset by the extravagance of her help. It made him want to look around for exits. "Why?" he said, and made himself grin. "Tell me why?"
Annie laughed. "I suppose it's partly because I'm not going to Barleyville with you. I feel a little guilty." She paused. "But I've had to run a couple of times in my life," she said more seriously, "and I know what it's like. Especially if you have no place really to run to."
"Let's get something straight," Landers said stiffly. "I'm not running anyplace. I'm leaving an untenable position."
"That was what I meant," Annie smiled. "Besides, you're a nice boy." She took a deep breath, and sighed. "But before you go through with this, I wish you'd think twice, Marion."
"I've thought twice," Landers said shortly. "More than twice."
While they dressed, she went on talking to him, about her sister Loucine. Now that they were moving, Landers wished that she would shut up about it all. It was as if having once got started talking about her family, she did not want to stop. Loucine had come down here to Luxor for a while to stay with her, she said, when the baby began to show, but Loucine had hated Luxor. After two months she had gone back home, to face it out. She preferred that to staying in Luxor.
"Nobody said anything to her?" Landers asked, tying his shoes.
Annie laughed. "What are they going to say? They've all seen unmarried pregnant girls. About as many as married." She was putting on her lipstick. "You know, times have changed, even since you've been away overseas. This old war has changed everything a lot."
Landers guessed that was true, but didn't care very much. He did not answer her. "Now you just let me handle Strange," he said.
But it wasn't that easy to handle Johnny Stranger. Landers pretended that he was just going off somewhere for a few days with Annie, and that he was being covered for in his outfit at O'Bruyerre, but Strange wasn't buying that.
"Listen, you crazy son of a bitch, Landers. I know exactly what you're trying to pull. And you're never going to get the fuck by with it. They'll trace you down, and they'll get you. They'll get you, and they'll do you in. So I'll goddamn follow you, if I have to." He reached and grabbed his own GI overcoat. "You crazy son of a bitch, I'll follow you and camp right outside your fucking doorstep, until you come back."
By this time it had all become a big joke to just about everybody in the suite, except Strange and Landers.
"You can't do it. You'll never get away with it," Strange half shouted. "You're ruining your fucking life. I'm not going to let you."
Several people tried to shout him down. In the end Landers had practically to tear himself out of Strange's arms, to get out of the door. It was only through the ministrations of Annie, plus some help from Frances Highsmith, that Strange was kept from following.
"I'm only taking him to my place, Johnny. I promise I'll call you from there. I swear I promise."
"Where is this place that's your place?" Strange demanded, shouting. "Nobody knows where the fuck you are. I'd never find him."
"No. And not just anybody's going to know, where my place is. Either," Annie said. "A girl's got to have some privacy. In her life. Around this stinking mess."
It was only on the strength of the promise to call that they were finally able to get outside.
And they did call him, after Annie had talked to Charlie Waterfield in Barleyville. Strange insisted on talking to Landers. Landers talked to him for five minutes, but was unable to convince him he was only taking a small AWOL vacation. He could only get off the line by promising faithfully that he would call tomorrow.
"I hate to lie to him," he said heavily, when he finally hung up.
"Come on," Annie said. "If you don't hurry, we'll miss your bus."
At the bus station he waved to her in the sea of faces until the bus turned out from the stall, and her face swung away with the others into invisibility. Then he was off on his single-handed, one-man adventure, alone. As soon as she was out of sight, it was curiously as if she had never existed. And deep down, he felt very righteous and very Christian, if a little sick.
But he couldn't help wondering what kind of a looking guy Charlie Waterfield must be.
CHAPTER 27.
IT WAS THREE in the morning, when the Greyhound pulled up for Landers in Barleyville. Landers hadn't the least idea of what to expect. And didn't much care. The windswept little town square was empty, nothing was open. The driver had some bundles of newspapers to deliver, depositing them against the closed storefront of the newsstand. Then the big door closed, and the hissing of the big bus's air brakes whispered, fading across the square.
Almost at once, a tall figure in a sheepskin coat and a semi-Western-style hat stepped leisurely out from the shelter of a storefront, into the cold wind.
"Marion Landers?"
Landers said he was. "Charlie Waterfield. Annie's dad," the other said. He was a lean man, but even in the heavy sheepskin you could see he had the paunch of a heavy drinker.
"Might as well go somewhere where there's lights and people," he said.
There was an official sheriff's car parked across the street against the courthouse square. The courthouse was a red brick and white clapboard affair. It had a Sheriff's Office sign on it, and Landers realized Waterfield could have waited for the bus there, in his own office, where it was warm. Instead of standing alone out in the cold and wind, in a darkened storefront.
Waterfield was squinting up at the courthouse, through the bare branches of the big trees, from beside the driver's door of the car. "Damn grackles. Roosting in the eaves again. Do it every winter." He got in and slammed his door.
By the time Landers was in, he had a pint bottle of whiskey out. "Want a snort?" Landers accepted gratefully. Waterfield took one, then slipped it under the driver's seat.
But then he didn't start. Instead, he sat with his ungloved hands on the wheel, staring out across the country square. Landers got the impression of an immensely inarticulate man, tongue-tied not so much by dumbness, as by the terrible complexity of saying anything at all. After a minute, without a word, he turned the ignition key and jerked at the gear lever.
Somewhere in the outskirts of the town he pulled up to what up north would have been called a roadhouse. It was dark, and looked deserted and closed. Waterfield rapped on the door, anyway. A man in an open shirt and a woman in a long gown opened it. The two led them into music, warmth, low lights, and a long bar along the lefthand wall with a dance floor behind. Vera Lynn was singing "The Umbrella Man." There had been ten or twelve cars outside in the parking lot. All the people from them were in here.
Waterfield got a chorus of affectionate greetings. Somebody said, "Say, Charlie, who's your friend?"
"Friend of Annie's come to visit. From Luxor."
The point wasn't pressed, but it was an announcement. Any friend of Charlie's had better be a friend of Landers.
In the light, he had circles under his eyes so pronounced they gave him the look of an alert, very patient hound dog. The eyes looked at you with that same look of a smart hound, alert, patient, waiting.
They fixed a table for him, in what was apparently a ritual. Off by itself, with a bottle of whiskey, glasses, ice, and a pitcher of water. The two of them sat at it and talked as they drank, mostly questions by Charlie and answers by Landers about Annie.
How was she doing down there in Luxor? Was she in good shape, healthy? Was she having a good time, was she happy? How was that job of hers holding up? Did she look good? Did she have decent friends?
Here was the only place he stumbled, over the adjective decent, which he half hesitated on, then changed to nice. So that the final question read: Did she have nice friends?
Landers answered the best he could, not knowing much about Annie. Landers did not know, for example, whether Annie had a job or not. He did not see how she could, going off for a week or a month with servicemen all the time. But he did not tell this to Charlie.
"She doesn't have to work," Charlie smiled, from below the perpetually alert hound's eyes. "I send her all the money she wants. But I guess she enjoys working." Landers thought it best not to make an answer to this at all.
There wasn't much question that Charlie was at least part owner of the joint. The lady manager in the gown came over to ask his advice on a technical question about the bar. "I don't want to talk about it now," was all he said, raising those alert, patient hound's eyes, and the lady faded. Charlie went back to his questions about Annie.
It was six-thirty and the daylight was coming up in the east, when they finally got home. Landers was both drunk and exhausted. Charlie showed no signs of either. He showed Landers to his bedroom in the huge derelict house, but he himself did not go to bed. He changed into his day uniform, and went out to do his morning inspection tour he did every day at this hour.
Changing into his day uniform meant taking off his navy blue pants, and the white shirt with shoulder straps, with its black four-in-hand tie; and putting on khaki pants and a khaki shirt with shoulder straps, and a khaki four-in-hand tie. The sheepskin coat and semi-Western-style hat he did not change. He walked out of the house, telling Landers that Loucine would be around the house when he woke up, to make him breakfast. This was the pattern life took, in the big Main Street house. It was Charlie's pattern, but day by day Landers' pattern fell more and more in line with it. He got up at noon, had breakfast, then read the papers in the dark, unused living room. Then he went for a walk in the business district, hitting all the poolrooms, and in one of them he usually found Charlie. He would have a sandwich and a Coke laced with illegal whiskey for lunch in one of them. It was amazing how much whiskey there was loose in this county seat of a dry county. Then he would go back to the tall, spindly house and sleep or read for a couple of hours. They almost always had dinner out with Loucine. Then when Loucine went home to bed, the two of them would start Charlie's late evening rounds that would last till dawn.
It was not such a terrible deal. At the very least he was safe here. The only comment Charlie Waterfield ever made on his being a deserter was to hand him a full book of blank pass forms. "There's plenty more where these come from. And you're welcome to stay here as long as you like."
But of course that didn't solve anything. The problem was somewhere else. Whenever Landers thought of Captain Mayhew and his fucking telephone, and what he had done to the 3516th, he went into a rage that was murderous, and which he carefully hid, and he swore he would never go back.
But the sworn oath was always followed by a monstrously deep, black depression, which drove him out to wherever there was whiskey. He had not been there more than a week when he knew he would not be able to stay.
When Landers woke that first morning at noon, it was to the smell of bacon frying. When he could get dressed and downstairs, he found Loucine in her winter nightgown and a not very sexy robe, cooking and eating her own breakfast. She did not seem surprised to see him. She was enormously pregnant. She was a small, slender girl, but she literally waddled around the kitchen. It was a big, comfortable kitchen, sunny at the end where the table was, on a sunny day. The plate of yellow scrambled eggs laced with red-brown strips of bacon and tan squares of toast she placed before him looked and tasted delicious, in the winter sunshine. Then she went off to get dressed.
Landers had to grin sourly two days later, when Annie's prediction about how long it would take for him to end up in bed with Loucine came true, a day ahead of schedule.
It happened suddenly. The second noon at breakfast she was not in the flannel nightie and unsexy robe, and instead wore a thin shorty nightgown and a knee-length negligee, also thin. When Landers went into the living room after he'd eaten, and sat down with the papers, she sat silent on a windowseat near him and looked out over the town, which was under a thin snow, granular and sifting like flour. The next afternoon she was suddenly in his lap, between him and the papers, crushing the Louisville Courier-Journal, although Landers never quite knew how she arrived there. Charlie seemed to make it a point of not coming home at this time of day.
So Loucine was added to Landers' daily life pattern in Barleyville. Her time was the early afternoon, or the early and late afternoon, depending. Loucine would screw him as many times each afternoon as he felt he was capable of screwing. The record was ten, in four hours of one afternoon. Landers wanted to see just how far she would go, and what her limit was, and also whether he could get her to talk, besides just saying hello and good-by. Besides, he had nothing much else to do. But he never found out. And afterward she had to make him a big raw-eggs-and-milkshake drink, to help his shaky legs, before he went out for his daily walk down the street and a half of business establishments and pool halls.
Charlie introduced him to lots of other available women, during the nights. Almost all were married, or at least engaged, to guys who were away overseas, or at least off somewhere in the Army. All of them were lonely, and hungry for a cock.
Landers had a sneaking feeling that Charlie already had made out with each of the ones he himself went off with. But Charlie never talked about it, or about women. The women never talked about it, either. Any more than Loucine did. It was as if the women all felt that if they did not talk about it, it would seem not to have happened. And they all would still be getting the release they all needed.
So there were plenty of women. But Landers began to resent being the out-of-town stud for all the juke joint ladies. Besides, he got tired. Serving as stud to a pregnant lady was not all that easy. After the first couple of times the novelty wore off. Especially if like Loucine she didn't talk. He discovered it required an enormous amount of physical energy, because you had to be careful to keep yourself up off her stomach. What it amounted to, finally, was a sort of series of unlimited push-ups, until either you came or your arms gave out, whichever happened first. But Landers felt he owed it to Loucine. He certainly owed them something for taking him in. And after his afternoons with Loucine, he was not up to other ladies. He took to spending more and more of the nights just with Charlie, getting drunk and just talking.
They talked about everything, excepting women. There was something about Charlie that seemed to insist on seeing all women as ladies. He was prepared and willing to make excuses for all of them. Most of his Southern confreres, Landers had found-indeed, most Americans-divided women into two distinctive categories: ladies and whores. With no shadings of gray in between. But not Charlie. He had only the one category.
Twice while Landers was with him in the sheriff's car he drove over across town in the late afternoon to see his wife. Charlie, it turned out, brought her every afternoon the groceries she wanted for that evening and the next day.
Landers was curious to see her, knowing what Annie had told him about her down in Luxor. She was a good-looking woman for her age, about forty-five, and she had not lost what they called bloom. She still had a figure. But for a roundish face such as she had there was a peculiarly elusive ferretlike toughness to some part of it. She had a soft, gentle, delightful Southern smile, which went all the way up to and deep into her eyes, with a kind of ropy, sexy charm of innocence. She almost never relaxed this smile in her eyes, even when her face wasn't smiling. The few times she did, the very few times Landers caught her at it, Landers thought he saw behind it the eyes of a shrewd, hard-hitting poker player. The kind he would not want to play against, in any serious game.
She took one look at Landers, and decided immediately Landers was sleeping with her second-oldest daughter. Both she and Landers knew what this conclusion she had made was. Both knew there would be no revoking it. While Charlie was unloading the car of its groceries, Landers sat with her in the parlor and talked politely.
Her first name was Blanche. She was, it came out quickly in her talk, a pillar among the local Baptists, and wanted to know if perhaps Landers would come down to the church to some of their meetings. Landers said he would be delighted to. She smiled her thanks. But she carefully did not press him for a specific time.
Apparently Annie in Luxor was the only one who knew she was the mistress of the local Nashville politician, Landers thought. But then he revised that. Charlie knew. Then he revised again: Everybody knew.
The two little girls of nine and eight were abominable. They were both spoiled totally rotten. Worse, even at eight and nine they were both already well aware of being females, knew that this carried special privileges, utilized these shamelessly, and just did not have the finesse yet to hide it. They flirted outrageously, just as if they were already women, and thrust out their little buds of breasts as though the breasts had already grown into what they would someday become.
Outside in the car, when Charlie had delivered all the groceries, Charlie stared off through the windshield again. As if he were about to say something. But he thought better of it, and threw the car violently into gear. Before he released the clutch, he took a deep breath and let out one huge sigh.
Sitting there, watching and saying nothing, not even involved, Landers had the impression he was with a man who in the course of his life had had to learn the hard way to cope with a great many disarrayed and enigmatic things, and had done it; but in the course of doing it, had found a great many other darknesses he would never be able to cope with ever. Not ever. Never.
Landers never had found out when Charlie slept, and never did. It wasn't in the morning. And it certainly wasn't in the afternoon, because he was never there. Landers finally decided he must exist by catnapping. Like a combat soldier. Sleeping a half hour at a time, in his big swivel chair at his desk, in the back room of his office at the courthouse.
When they had taken Loucine out to eat and brought her back home, Charlie brightened up. As the two of them set off on his evening rounds. And that night it was Charlie who went off somewhere with one of the lonely juke joint ladies. Leaving Landers behind for an hour or two. Landers could almost hear him sighing. Simplicity, simplicity.
It was near the end of the third week he had been there that Landers told him he couldn't stay. It would not have been true to say that his final decision was due to their two visits to Blanche and the little girls. But it was possible meeting them caused him to make the decision earlier.
He tried to explain to Charlie how there was just too much going on, too many things that had not been resolved; too much, too, he hadn't solved for himself. Charlie apparently had already anticipated this. He had a sad, rueful smile and said he suspected as much, but he must add that he thought it was a mistake.
"You know, this war's not going to last forever. May seem like it to you, but it aint. We've won it, now."
"A lot of good men are going to die before the Germans and Japs believe that," Landers said somberly.
"I know, and that's sad, but what I say's the truth, just the same. Soon's this invasion of France gets under way, sometime this spring, it's not going to be too long in Europe. And the goddam Japs're already whipped. Just going to take a little power."
Landers thought this was an awfully large and conclusive statement to swallow, without water. Especially coming from a Tennessee country sheriff. What he felt must have shown on his face.
"Believe me. Just believe me," Charlie said. "A year in Europe. Another six months for the Japs. I've got friends in Washington. They know. They're already planning.
"Anyway, I think it would be pretty silly for you to get killed in this war, now. You've already done your share.
"So you just think it over a couple days. And in the meantime, let me make you a proposition."
"What kind of a proposition?"
"You just stay here with us. Forget about going back to the Army. That's the proposition."
Landers was staring at him, and didn't answer.
"Just think about it," Charlie urged. "That's all I ask. In a month you can start putting on civilian clothes. I can even get you a job, if you want. But you don't need it.
"Nobody's going to say a word to you. Nobody'll pick you up. Not in my county."
For Landers it was a little breathtaking, that the law could be so grandly circumvented so totally, and with such confidence.
"You think about it," Charlie said.