101 Mystery Stories

92 A Cool Swim on a Hot Day Fletcher Flora

Suddenly awake, he opened his eyes in a glare of morning sun. The glare was blinding and painful, and so he closed his eyes again quickly and lay without moving in the soft shadows behind his lids. He could hear a clock ticking in the room. He could hear a cardinal singing in the white light outside. Something seemed to be scratching at his brain. The remembrance of something.

And then he remembered. He remembered the night and the night’s shame. The focus of the night was Ellen’s face. The sound of the night was Ellen’s voice. The face was cold and scornful, remote and strange. The clear and precise articulation of the voice was more appropriate to proud defiance than to a confession. Lying and remembering, fixed in despair, he held to the slender hope that he remembered a dream.

After a few minutes, needing to know, he got up and walked across the room and into a bathroom and through the bathroom into a room beyond. Ellen was lying on her bed in a gold sheath. He had put her there himself, he remembered, after shooting her. Ankles neatly together and one hand folded upon the other below her breasts. The hands covered with a definitive gesture of modesty, as if it were something intimate or obscene, the small hole through which her life had slipped out and away between her fingers. He had removed her shoes.

So it was not a dream. He had killed her indeed in the shameful night, and there on the floor where he had dropped it was the gun he had killed her with. He looked at the gun and back at her. Oh, golden wanton. Oh, sweet and tender harlot wife. Having killed her, having laid her out neatly on a quilted satin cover, he had gone to sleep in his clothes in his own room. But this was an oversimplication and therefore a distortion. He had not merely gone to sleep. He had withdrawn, rather, into a deep and comforting darkness in which, if nothing was solved or made better, everything was at least suspended and grew no worse. He had slept soundly.

Now, of course, he was awake and faced with the necessity of doing something, and what he must do was perfectly apparent. The loaded gun was there, and he was there, and he had now, since last night, not only the negative motivation of not wanting particularly to live, but also the positive one of wanting and needing to die. But there was no urgency in it. He felt a kind of indolence in his bones, a remarkable lassitude. Walking over to the gun on the floor, he bent and picked it up and put it in a side pocket of his jacket, in which he had slept. He stood quietly, with an air of abstraction, watching Ellen on the bed. In his heart was a movement of pain which he fancied for a moment that he could hear faintly, like the dry rustle of cicada wings. Turning away, the gun in his pocket, he went out of the room and out of the house and began walking down the street in a tunnel of shade that breached the bright day.

He had no destination. He did not even have a particular purpose in leaving the house, except that he was not quite ready to die and felt compelled to do something, almost anything, until he was. He had a vague notion that he might walk into the country and kill himself there in some quiet spot, or perhaps, after a while, he might return to the house and kill himself in the room with Ellen, so that they might later be found together. This was an enormous problem, where finally to kill himself, and at the moment he felt in no way capable of coping with it. His mind was sluggish, still fixed in the gray despair to which he had wakened, and now, besides, his head was beginning to throb like a giant pulse, measuring the cadence of his heart.

It was a very hot day. A bright, white, hot day. Heat shimmered on the surface of the street in an illusion of water. The sun was approaching the meridian in the luminous sky. The shimmering heat had somehow entered his skull, and all at once he was very faint, hovering precariously on the verge of consciousness while the gaseous world shifted and wavered and threatened to fade away. He had left the tunnel of shade and was now hatless in white light, the sun beating down directly upon his head.

Still walking, he pressed a hand across his eyes, recovering in darkness, and when he removed his hand at last, looking down at his feet, he was filled with wonder to see that his feet were bare. On the tip of the big toe of the left foot was a small plastic bandage, signifying that the toe had been lately stubbed. The bare feet were making their way on a gray dirt road. The dirt was hot and dry and powdery, rising in little puffs of dust at every step and forming a kind of thin, gray scum on faded blue denim.

For a second or two he could not for the life of him remember where he was or where he was going or how he had got there, but then it all came back clearly — how he had been sitting under the big cottonwood in the side yard at home, and how he had been thinking how good a swim in the creek would feel on such a hot day, and how at last he had decided to walk out and have the swim. So here he was, on the way, and everything was familiar again after being momentarily strange. He had just crossed Chaffee’s pasture to reach the dirt road where it junctioned with another road at the northeast corner of Mosher’s old dairy, and there ahead was the stand of scrub timber along the creek in which the swimming hole was.

With an odd feeling of comfort and assurance, he said softly to himself, “I am Dewey Martin, and I’m going to have a cool swim in the creek on a hot day.”

It appeared to be only a short distance on to the creek, but it was farther than it looked, nearly half a mile, beyond a cornfield and a pasture that were part of Dugan’s farm. Dewey left the road and crawled between two strands of a barbed wire fence into the field. He walked around the edge of the field to the other side, around the standing com, and stopped there by the fence and surveyed the pasture to see where Jupiter was. Jupiter was Dugan’s bull, and he was dangerous.

There he was, sure enough, down at one end of the pasture, a safe distance away, and Dewey slipped through the fence and hurried across before old Jupiter could make up his mind whether to chase him or not. The creek was quite near now, no more than twenty yards away, but Dewey sat down in the shade of a hickory tree to rest before going on. He was curiously tired and still a little light-headed, and he was slightly disturbed by being unable to recall anything between the time of leaving home and the time of suddenly seeing his bare feet on the dusty road by Mosher’s dairy, he had a feeling of having come a long way from a strange place, but this was surely nothing but a trick of the heat, the bright white light of the summer sun. After a few minutes he quit thinking about it and went on to the creek and stripped off naked and dived into the dark green water.

It was wonderfully cool in the water, and he stayed in it for about an hour without getting out once, but then he got out and lay for quite a long time on the bank in a patch of sunlight, his bare brown body shining like an acorn. After that, when his flesh was full of clean white heat, he dived back into the water, and it was cooler than ever by contrast, the purest and most sensual pleasure that anyone could hope to have on earth. Altogether, he spent almost all the afternoon by himself at the creek, and he could tell by the position of the sun when he left that it was getting late, and that he would have to hurry on the long walk home.

It was not quite so hot going back. A light breeze came up, which helped, and he made it all the way to town without stopping to rest or feeling light in the head a single time. Cutting across several blocks to the street on which he lived, he started down this street in the direction of home, hearing as he walked the good and comforting sounds of mowers and sprinklers and the first cicadas, and smelling a supper now and then among flowers and cut grass.

Ahead of him, standing beside the walk, was a girl about his own age in a pink dress. It looked like a party dress, with a blue sash at the waist and a bit of lace at the throat. The girl had golden hair woven into two braids, and she was far and away the prettiest girl he had ever seen. As a matter of fact, he had instantly a notion that he had seen her before, although he couldn’t remember where or when. This could not be true, however, for if he had seen her, pretty as she was, he would not have forgotten.

As he came abreast of her, she smiled and spoke.

“Hello,” she said.

He stopped, watching her, and said hello.

“Do you live in this neighborhood?” she said.

“Down the street a few blocks.”

“I live here. In this house. We just moved here yesterday.”

“That’s nice. I hope you like it.”

“I don’t know anyone yet. I’m a stranger. I may like it when I get to know someone. Would you come and talk with me sometime?”

“Sure. Maybe tomorrow.”

He was painfully conscious of his dusty jeans and bare feet with the plastic bandage, somehow a survivor of swimming and walking, still stuck on the one big toe. He edged away and began to turn, lifting a hand in a brief, shy gesture of good-bye.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Dewey. Dewey Martin. What’s yours?”

“My name is Ellen,” she said.

The sound of it was like an echo in the fading afternoon as he hurried on his way, but he did not recognize it as a name that he had known in the future.