“You mean — there’s more?”
“Little bit, Bill,” said Sandy. “She’ll tell you.”
“Cresap et Gregg,” she said.
“Gregg and Cresap,” he corrected.
“Cresap et Gregg!” she repeated, jumping up and stamping her foot. “Who tames one river may perhaps tame another, and we know who this tamer was!”
“Then — Cresap and Gregg, all right!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked them.
“The twenty-five thousand bocks,” she said.
“Bill,” he told me very solemnly, “you don’t have to go home if you don’t want to. I didn’t bring this up, and in fact knew nothing about it, except that crack I heard that Mignon made one time — but it didn’t really connect. And she didn’t bring it up, until after the knot was tied in City Hall just now. But then she did bring it up — and that’s what brought us here. One of the things.”
“Marie,” I said, “now I am going to cry.”
So, in the mornings I read the papers, for the U.S. marshal’s auction sales of stuff we’re going to need, and sometimes go out to bid, having the gear delivered to a waterfront shed we rented over on the Algiers side. In the afternoons I write, on a stack of foolscap I got, of the hours I spent with her, to explain how everything was, so I’ll have it to read later on, and so perhaps it’ll ease the pain. Because at night is when my life gets bad. I turn out the light, I go to bed, I make myself sleep somehow. Then I open my eyes and she comes — through the walls, floating in, her hair wet, her cheek cold, her hands pressing mine, telling me how she escaped; how she swam ashore at Biossat’s, at the bridge, at the Catholic church below town, and was hidden by kind friends, so the Navy couldn’t find her; and how, if I’ll give her a little time, we’ll be together soon when the war is over at last. Then I moan and try to tell her I would have dived in to save her, but I was forcibly stopped. Then I get more and more worked up, and then she goes — through the wall, waving as she did from the monitor’s deck.
So, the hoodoo passed me by at Red River but didn’t forget me, at all. He sleeps in the other bed.