“Are you all right?”
Sobs.
She seemed not to hear him.
“Jeezis!”
He sprinted for the brink of the drawbridge and dived out over the deep channel.
How far… down… down…. Icy water stung his body with sharp whips, then opened to embrace him.
He fought to the surface and swam toward the dark shadow of the boat.
The sobbing had subsided.
He grasped the prow and hauled himself dripping from the channel.
She was lying curled in the bottom of the boat.
“Kid… you all right, kid?”
“Sorry… I’m such a baby,” she gasped, and dragged herself back to the stern. Paul found a paddle, but no oars.
He cast off and began digging water toward the other side, but the tide tugged them relentlessly away from the bridge.
He gave it up and paddled toward the distant shore.
“You know anything about Galveston?” he called—mostly to reassure himself that she was not approaching him in the darkness with the death-gray hands.
“I used to come here for the summer, I know a little about it.”
Paul urged her to talk while he plowed toward the island.
Her name was Willie, and she insisted that it was for Willow, not for Wilhelmina.
She came from Dallas, and claimed she was a salesman’s daughter who was done in by a traveling farmer.
The farmer, she explained, was just a wandering dermie who had caught her napping by the roadside. He had stroked her arms until she awoke, then had run away, howling with glee.
“That was three weeks ago,” she said. “If I’d had a gun, I’d have dropped him.
Of course, I know better now.”
Paul shuddered and paddled on.
“Why did you head south?”
“I was coming here.”
“Here?
To Galveston?”
“Uh-huh.
I heard someone say that a lot of nuns were coming to the island.
I thought maybe they’d take me in.”
The moon was high over the lightless city, and the tide had swept the small boat far east from the bridge by the time Paul’s paddle dug into the mud beneath the shallow water.
He bounded out and dragged the boat through thin marsh grass onto the shore.
Fifty yards away, a ramshackle fishing cottage lay sleeping in the moonlight.
“Stay here, Willie,” he grunted.
“I’ll find a couple of boards or something for crutches.”
He rummaged about through a shed behind the cottage and brought back a wheelbarrow.
Moaning and laughing at once, she struggled into it, and he wheeled her to the house, humming a verse of Rickshaw Boy.
“You’re a funny guy, Paul.
I’m sorry… “ She jiggled her tousled head in the moonlight, as if she disapproved of her own words.
Paul tried the cottage door, kicked it open, then walked the wheelbarrow up three steps and into a musty room.
He struck a match, found an oil lamp with a little kerosene, and lit it.
Willie caught her breath. He looked around.
“Company,” he grunted.
The company sat in a fragile rocker with a shawl about her shoulders and a shotgun between her knees.
She had been dead at least a month.
The charge of buckshot had sieved the ceiling and spattered it with bits of gray hair and brown blood.
“Stay here,” he told the girl tonelessly. “I’ll try to get a dermie somewhere—one who knows how to sew a tendon.
Got any ideas?”
She was staring with a sick face at the old woman.
“Here?