River Girl by Charles Williams

sensation of fear in my belly that I always had whenever I thought of the two of them up here alone and of what he might do if he knew, I turned and ran along the trail toward the timber. Maybe—she was out there toward the lake. And then I saw her. She had just come out of the timber and was carrying something shiny in her hand.
    She saw me and started running. “Jack! Jack!” she cried out, and then I saw what it was she had. It was the gun, that Colt .45 held out in front of her away from her body as if it were a dead snake, her fingertips grasping it by the end of the grip so it tilted slanting toward the ground. As we met, there in the open, sun-drenched clearing, she stooped and placed it carefully on the ground beside the trail, lowering it very gently as if it might explode, and then straightened, looking at me with eyes wild with relief and ecstasy and half crying and trying to smile at the same time. “Oh, Jack!” she said, her voice muffled against my shirt. “What are you carrying that gun for?” I asked. “What is it?”
    “I was looking for another place to hide it. Are we going away today, Jack? Now? Isn’t that what you came for?” She looked up at me pleadingly.
    “Yes. Right now. I’m going to take you out of here as soon as you can get ready.”
    “Oh, thank God!”
    “But tell me about that gun.”
    “I’ve had it hidden out in the woods. For days now. One night he was drunk and I was out of the house, and when I came back way after midnight he was passed out, and the gun, which had been in that drawer ever since we came up here, was lying on the table just beyond where his hand was. I didn’t know what he had intended to do with it. But I was so scared I took it and ran out in the woods and hid it. Then, yesterday, he was out there a long time and I began to have the horrible thought that he had managed to find it and was just letting me go on thinking he hadn’t. So I thought about it all night and decided to throw it in the lake. And then this morning after he was gone I changed my mind and thought maybe I was just being silly, and that I’d hide it somewhere else.”
    Holding her and feeling the shaking of her body, I knew she wasn’t telling me all of it. She was afraid of him and had been bringing it back to hide it in the house where she could get it if she had to. I thought of the way she had been carrying it and felt a little sick, knowing just how much good it would have been to her if she’d had to use it. She wouldn’t even know how to shoot it.
    I picked it up and we walked back to the house. I put it on the dresser, thinking we would take it with us and drop it in the lake, and then I turned and looked at her standing there with her face flushed and her eyes shining with the thought of leaving and wanted to take hold of her again and knew there wasn’t time. There was never any stopping when we started that, and we could both feel the minutes slipping past, hurried and driven by the remorseless ticking of the clock.
    “No,” she said. “I want to go, Jack. We’ve got to go.”
    “I know,” I said. “Where are your other clothes, and your shoes and stockings?”
    She went to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer. They were all wrapped in newspapers, the white, high-heeled shoes, the one pair of nylons, and the under-things. The little summer dress had been ironed and then folded inside a newspaper clipped together around the edges with pins. She carried them over and put them on the bed.
    She looked down. “I’ll have to wash my feet before I can put on the stockings.”
    “Wait.” I went out in the kitchen and brought a basin of water from the bucket and found a bar of soap. She sat down in one of the rawhide chairs and washed her feet. I watched her, smoking a cigarette and listening to the hot dead silence of the room being chopped off in sections by the clock. I’ll buy her stockings, I thought, and bathrooms with tile floors, and clothes,