Free River Girl by Charles Williams Page B

doesn’t. I guess it’s like pain when you have it long enough—before you reach the point you can’t stand it any longer you go crazy, or die, and it’s all changed. I’m either crazy or dead.”
    “No,” I said. “Just beautiful.”
    “You like my hair-do, don’t you?” It was a joke, but she didn’t laugh. There were just those enormous eyes, very close, watching me.
    “Yes. The first time I saw it I thought that whoever chopped it up like that should be horsewhipped. But now I like it.”
    “I guess there are some things you can’t stop,” she said quietly, more to herself than to me.
    “There’s no way we could have stopped it.”
    “It’s like it was sometimes when I was out there swimming in the lake at night. There’d be just the black top of the water with the stars reflected on it, and I’d wonder why I couldn’t swim down until I drowned, just stay under, as if the water was a black sheet over me. You can’t, though. If you can swim you can’t drown yourself. When I began to hurt I always come up.”
    I could feel the anger begin to flame up inside me. “What did he do to you? Is he mean when he’s drunk?”
    “No,” she said hesitantly. “Only once. We had a fight But I don’t like to talk about it.”
    “I’ve got to know,” I said. “Can’t you see I have to know?”
    “It was the loneliness. I was beginning to go crazy with it, I guess,”
    “It was more than that, I said.
    “No. It was mostly that. We were all right until we came up here.”
    “What did you come up here for, anyway? Neither of you belong in this swamp.”
    “We know that now, but it’s not easy to get out.”
    “But why? I mean, in the first place.”
    “Running,” she said woodenly. “It was a place to hide.”
    Somehow, I had known that. “Him?” I asked. “Or both of you?”
    “Just him. It’s something that happened before I met him.”
    “What is it?”
    “I don’t know. He never did tell me. But, as I said, it was all right before we came up here. Between us, I mean. The moving around was bad, all right, and we never had much because he was always changing jobs, but he was good to me and I guess we were still in love with each other. But this place was too much for us. I guess it was more my fault than his, but I couldn’t stand it. We got on each other’s nerves and began to fight, and then he started drinking like that. He won’t leave here because this is the first place we’ve ever found where he didn’t sooner or later see somebody who might recognize him so we had to move again. And it’s getting harder for him to get any kind of job. He looks older than he really is, and of course he can’t ever give any references or say where he worked before.”
    “But,” I said wonderingly, “why didn’t you leave?”
    She looked at me. “How?” she asked simply.
    “Good God, you mean he won’t let you?”
    “In a way.”
    “But,” I protested, “how could he keep you from it?”
    “I said in a way. He won’t take me down to the highway, or let me have any money. Where could I go?”
    “But why?” I asked. “Why does he want to keep you here if there’s nothing between you any more except fighting?”
    She was silent for a moment. “I’m not sure,” she said at last. “I think I know, but I don’t like to talk about it”
    “You have to tell me,” I said.
    “As I said, I’m not sure. But I think he suspects I’ll turn him in. I guess it must be the law he’s running from and it has preyed on his mind so long he suspects everybody. Maybe you crack up after just so much of that Anyway, I think that’s what he believes—that if he let me get away from here I’d report him to the police because we’ve fought so much. Especially after he found I was trying to run away. I quit asking him after a while because it always caused trouble between us, and I began to steal from him.”
    “Steal?” I said. “How could you steal from you husband?”
    “Stealing