Free River Girl by Charles Williams

sight without effort into water the color of tea.
    Maybe he wouldn’t come. Maybe she had been telling me the truth when she said he had no certain days for going to the store. I looked at the watch again; less than five minutes had passed. Why hadn’t I brought at least a semblance of fishing tackle with me? What would I look like if I met someone up here, a man going up the lake in a boat for no reason at all, not fishing because he had nothing to fish with? Suppose I met him, or he saw me? There was nothing in the boat except that ridiculous cardboard box of moistened earth, shoved as far back out of sight as possible under the seat in the bow. I’m crazy, I thought. I’m insane. No man in his right mind would be doing this.
    A half hour passed while I smoked cigarettes chain fashion and listened for the motor. Then I heard it, or thought I did, and held my breath to listen. Yes, there it was, still far up the lake. I waited while the sound grew in volume, and pulled farther back under the overhanging limbs into the shelter of the leaves. The boat came past the entrance of the slough, and then for a moment I could see him, less than fifty yards away, sitting up straight in the stern with the big floppy straw hat set exactly level on his head and looking neither left nor right as he went on down the channel. My boat rocked gently in his spreading wake and then he was gone, the sound of his motor dying away in the distance down the lake. I pushed out from under the trees and started up.
    It was after ten and the sun was brassy on the water when I went past the place where I had camped. As I came around the bend I wondered if I would see her swimming in the long stretch of the lake above, but there was no sign of her, the water flat, unbroken, and shining like a mirror in the sun. I throttled the motor down and turned into the entrance of the slough, feeling my heart beating and conscious of the tightness in my chest. Without even thinking of it, I went on past the boat landing, around a swing of the slough, and pulled up at the bank under the low overhang of a tree. Even before you will admit to yourself that you are a criminal, I thought, you begin to act like one without conscious thought. I tied the boat up and stepped ashore with the cardboard box cradled in my arm.
    Pushing through the timber and underbrush because the trail was below me, to my left, I came out into the clearing, seeing the brown, dry grass and the weathered ruin of the house squatting in the sun. I was out of breath and had a feeling I had run for miles. Would she be swimming? Or would she be at the house? What would she be doing?
    I went on across the clearing in the hot sun like a man walking across an endless plain in a nightmare he cannot stop. Why, it hasn’t changed at all, I thought. It looks exactly as it did before, and then the realization came that it hadn’t been years since I was here last. I had been four days.
    I stopped in front of the porch, not seeing the old hound this time, or any sign of life. A grasshopper sang in the still, bright heat, and out at the edge of the timber a crow cursed me with raucous insolence and flew away. I stepped up on the porch. “Hello,” I said. “Doris, where are you?”
    There was the soft sound of bare feet from the rear of the house and I stepped to the door. She had come into the front room, apparently starting to the door to see who it was, but when she saw me she stopped. She had on a different dress this time, of another color at least, but an identical shapeless sack of cheap cotton too large for her, and she was still barefoot.
    “Doris,” I said. “I—” The words quit on me and I stood there foolishly with the clumsy box in my arms. She said nothing at all. Still standing unmoving in the center of the room with her arms down at her sides, she stared at me with the fixed intensity of someone in a trance.
    “I brought you another vine, Doris,” I said idiotically, not knowing what