The Brass Bed
- Автор: Флора Флетчер
- Год: 1956
- Язык: английский
- Год: Lion Books
- Жанр: Романы для взрослых
Электронная книга - «The Brass Bed». Краткое содержание книги:
...and the root of it all lay hidden in the secret of THE BRASS BED.
They moved on around the bend and out of sight, and I was afraid. I thought at first that I would go after them along the bank, but then I decided that I wouldn’t, and I went instead up the bank and back to where Fran and Harvey were still sitting on the ground near the old cabin. Harvey had a bright smear of lipstick on his mouth and was looking quite pleased about the way things had been going.
“Where are Jolly and Kirby?” he said.
“As you know,” I said, “they have gone to run the trot line.”
“Well, it seems to me that they have had more than enough time to do that. It only takes a little while to run the trot line.”
“The truth is, they have gone on around the bend of the river.”
“Really?” Fran looked suddenly interested. “Why do you suppose they’ve done that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they wanted to take a boat ride. Or maybe Kirby is a guy who always wants to look around the next bend. Some people have an insatiable curiosity about such things.”
“Frankly, I consider both possibilities extremely unlikely,” Fran said. “I consider it much more likely that Kirby has decided to push his current program of compatibility a step beyond the pal stage.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said, “and it is none of my business.”
I got another can of beer and sat down. Fran looked at me with a frown, and then went back to her smooching.
Everything seemed very quiet and desolate. I felt as if I were sitting in the midst of a vast ruin, and what I kept thinking was that the water of the river was very deep around the bend, and the current very strong. I sat there thinking this for a long, long time, and I couldn’t quit thinking it, although I wanted to, and after a while my head began to ache, and I put it in my hands and held it. I didn’t look up again or take my head out of my hands until I heard someone coming up from the river, and I knew even before I looked that it was Jolly and that she was alone. Her jersey and shorts were wet and adherent in the way of wet clothes, and although there was practically nothing to them when dry, there now seemed to be even less.
“What happened to you?” Fran said. “Did your clothes fall into the water?”
Jolly said breathlessly, “Kirby fell out of the boat, and I jumped in to try to save him, but it was no use. I’m very much afraid that he has drowned.”
“Fell out of the boat!” I said harshly. “Out of a flat-bottomed boat? What the hell were you doing, wrestling?”
She looked at me directly with the deep and dark and quiet eyes in which I could see no grief or shock or any emotion whatever, and I thought her lips moved briefly in the slightest smile, but I couldn’t be sure, and at that moment Sid walked out of the trees and across the clearing.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
No one answered immediately. Harvey got up off the ground and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and wiped the lipstick off his mouth without really being conscious of what he was doing. He returned the handkerchief to his pocket and reached down and gave Fran a hand and helped her to her feet also.
“It seems that Kirby has fallen into the river and drowned,” he said.
Jolly said, a little harshly, “I tried to save him, but he was too heavy for me, and besides he was very frightened and kept fighting me, and he got away from me in the current and was gone.”
“Well, God-damn it,” Harvey shouted, “shouldn’t we be doing something?”
“I guess we should,” I said, “but I don’t know what.”
“Listen to me,” Sid said suddenly.
We all looked at him and waited for him to continue, and there was about him the same strange and rather pathetic dignity that he had displayed the time Kirby had abused him in the quarrel over Jolly’s black eye. That’s what I felt at first, anyhow, but after a minute I could see that it was more than that with him this time. It was a kind of cockiness, an odd assurance bordering arrogance, as if he had tapped in the last few minutes a source of strength no one had suspected.
“It is imperative to notify someone,” he said, “and I am sure that the county sheriff is the one to notify. I will go in Kirby’s car to do it, and in the meantime Felix and Harvey can go have a look to see if maybe Kirby managed to get out onto the bank farther downstream.”
“He is drowned,” Jolly said. “He was very heavy, and he kept fighting, and he got away in the current and was drowned.”
“That is almost certainly so,” Sid said, “but it will be expected of us to have made sure. I’ll go for the sheriff now and will be back as quickly as possible.”
He went over to the Caddy and got in and started it and turned it and drove away down the narrow road. Fran went over to Jolly and put an arm around her and began to cry. She was not crying in grief for Kirby, but in a kind of shock. I had never seen her cry before for any reason at all, and it did something strange and disturbing to her ugly face. I didn’t look directly at Jolly again. It was impossible for me to do it. I crossed the clearing and walked into the trees along the river and could hear Harvey coming steadily behind me.
9
We followed the river to the bend and around the bend and on for quite a way until we finally found the boat where it had drifted in close to the bank and got caught in some submerged brush under the drooping branches of a willow, but we didn’t see anything at all of Kirby or what was left of him. I waded out and pulled the boat in to the bank so that it wouldn’t get loose and drift on with the current, and then I sat down and lit a cigarette and sat there smoking and looking at the river. Harvey sat down also and began picking up small stones and sticks and throwing them out into the water. He did it slowly and methodically, with just so much time between each stick and stone, as if he were measuring the time carefully in his mind.
“I guess there’s no use walking any farther,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“It surely looks like he’s gone, all right.”
“Yes, it does. That’s the way it looks.”
“I just can’t understand how he happened to fall out of a flat-bottomed boat that way.”
“Maybe he tried to stand up and lost his balance.”
“It must have been something like that. Just the same, however, it would be pretty hard to fall out of a flat-bottomed boat.”
“He’d had quite a lot of beer. You remember that he took two or three cans down to the gravel bar with him.”
“That’s right. It could have been the beer, of course.”
“We shouldn’t have let them go. I had a feeling about it at the time.”
“Oh, nonsense. Let’s not start blaming ourselves, old boy. That won’t get us anywhere.”
“No. It was just an accident. No one’s to blame.”
“Even allowing that he fell out of the boat because he stood up under the influence of beer, I still can’t understand why he wanted to stand up. A small boat is a very unlikely thing to want to stand up in, you’ll have to admit that.”
“Maybe he stood up to hit Jolly in the eye.”
“Really? You actually think so?”
“No, I don’t. I was just joking.”
“Oh? It’s rather a hell of a time to be joking, don’t you think, old boy?”
“Yes, it is. It’s a hell of a time.”
He kept on throwing the sticks and stones into the river, and I finished the cigarette.
“Why didn’t he just swim out?” he said. “It’s not a very wide river. Do you suppose he hit his head on the boat or something?”