Earl sensed that ordered activity unspooling behind him and knew his backing days were done. If he couldn’t dance, he couldn’t win, he knew, for the big man would corner him and pummel his arms. His arms would die, and then his body and then his head.
He heard the dogs screaming on their leashes as they were brought near. They smelled the blood and sweat in the air and knew that killing time was near. He felt them scuffling frantically behind him, and a sudden snapping yap sunk into his heel as one of them got a brief hold on him. He pulled his leg back and saw there were no options.
“Time is running out, boy. No place to run,” Bigboy snarled, after lunging out another red goober and shaking the sweat off his brow.
He threw a fast punch that snapped off the crown of Earl’s skull, opening another cut. Earl felt the blood spurt and blinked it out of his eyes, though some reached his lips and tasted of salt.
“Ooo, you didn’t know how much speed I had on me, did you, convict? You think you’re tough, you’re the champ. Hey boy, you have met the champ.”
He threw another rocket Earl’s way, and Earl slipped it, hammered him quick twice over the ribs, bobbed out of reach and had some space to evade. But still Bigboy came on, no sign of weakness. His eyes were red, the irises open like headlights, and the sweat poured off him, but he was on his toes and his guard was well held, steady. Onward, inward he rushed, crouching, taking blows to deliver blows.
Earl saw he would lose. It was the law of boxing: good big man beats good small man. The physics decreed the outcome. He hadn’t the weight, the strength, the endurance to stay with Bigboy, and if he was faster, it was only by a little.
He never saw the next one. He was too busy thinking, and not busy enough fighting. It clocked him above the jaw, flush to the side of the face, and the world jacked out of focus while someone banged kettledrums loudly in his ears. His eyes saw only white and he backed off, feeling grogginess spread through his lungs up his neck and ooze warmly through his brain. He almost went, and felt his consciousness slipping away, like bubbly water down a drain.
Bigboy came in to finish.
Earl hadn’t been faking it.
It wasn’t a trick.
He hadn’t thought it out.
But Bigboy’s vanity spelled his disaster, for he rode in on a cloud of arrogant confidence, sure that Earl was rocked. And Earl was rocked. But Earl came back faster than even a near pro like Bigboy could imagine, and when Earl cleared up, he saw just the flick of a sloppy opening revealed by a dropped left. Earl drove up through it, and landed his uppercut square on the underside of the astonished big man’s jaw, a punch so hard it lifted all of Bigboy off the earth. When he returned to the planet, Bigboy’s arms, getting no signal from the disconnected brain, briefly became cogitated and unknowing, and as they drifted, Earl somehow found the grit to close yet again and launch a left-right combination to the face that put Bigboy down.
He fell like an ox, hard and lifeless to the levee, and when he fell, a puff of dust was unleashed from the earth at his circumference, like rose petals of celebration, and he went so limp and flat he was dead gone from this world.
Earl now heard the cheers. Bless their goddamned black hearts, all the Negroes now cheered, defying their masters, and their joy was as powerful a pleasure as Earl had or would ever feel on this earth, even if it lasted but a second.
In the next instant, Section Boss hosed out a burst of .45s from his tommygun that whistled overhead, driving the convicts down and shutting them up. But Earl didn’t notice that at all. For in that same second, the guard force was on him, six, eight of them, pounding him wherever they could get at him with clubs and saps and boots.
They beat him pretty badly.
“Not the head,” someone was shouting, “goddammit, not the head!”
Earl, in the blur of all his many injuries, saw that it was Bigboy shouting, for he had returned to the land of the living and the thinking, and he wanted Earl conscious.
Earl soon knew why.
Six men held him down, and it was Bigboy who kicked him hard in the ribs until they started to crack, screaming all the time, “You motherfucker, you motherfucker, you motherfucker!”
THEY drove through the night. Earl was in a swamp of pain, too much of it to specify location. His body was ripped, particularly from the stomping at the end, and in his head a gong pounded over and over.
“Sergeant Bigboy,” he heard someone say, “you sure about this?”
“Goddamn sure,” said Bigboy, his stone heart set on the course he had determined.
“But—”
“But nothing, goddammit. I am tired of this special boy screwing up my system. You see the niggers. He gives ’em hope. They get hope and we have problems.”
Then his rage flared again and he stomped Earl’s jaw.
“You goddamn boy, you! You lucky goddamn sonofabitch, no man ever knocked me down ’til you got in a lucky goddamn punch, Goddamn you!”
Earl was on the floor of the Hudson’s rear seat, chained again, and many heavy boots pressed him still, the heaviest of all Bigboy’s.
“Sir, all I am saying is—”
“That’s enough, Caleb, damn your soul. He tried to escape. He drownded. Happens all the time at Thebes, and that’s all anybody’s got to know.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bigboy leaned down close.
“Breathe deep, Bogart. It’s soon to be your last.”
The big car at last stopped, and the men poured out. Earl was dragged forward. He smelled river in the air, and saw it, just through the tropically ragged line of trees, a broad band of sparkle, flat and calm and multifaceted. A moon had risen, but not much; it was blood swollen, plump and fat just over the horizon, its powerful cold blaze dancing atop the surface of the river.
But he had no time for sightseeing; in the next seconds he was dragged and shoved down a path through the jungly woods that took him to a ramshackle shack and a dock. An old scow sat moored to the dock, drifting this way and that in the currents.
They unlocked the shack door and shoved him in, roughly.
“Welcome to the Drowning House, Bogart.”
He was thrown to the floor, and the work that followed was swift. It was a place of murder. He saw wooden forms, a manual cement mixer, sacks of cement as yet unmixed, various metal fixtures and chains, and a wall where old locks hung.
A grunting and a groaning sounded, as two of the heavier fellows bent and lifted a square cement block with an iron ring sunk deep into it aboard an old wheelbarrow, which one of the boys then wheeled toward him.
“I’ll do it myself, goddammit,” said Bigboy.
He kneeled and put a knee on Earl’s bruised stomach and roughly took his chained legs and clamped them in irons. These in turn were looped with a length of chain, and it was held fast by a lock. Earl had an anxiety explosion and almost couldn’t bear to check, but then forced himself to, and when he saw it squarely he knew it to be the lock he’d practiced on, which by some of Fish’s magic had been replaced to its rightful spot on the wall where the locks hung in their neat order.
“Goin’ have to get some new locks soon,” somebody said.
But Bigboy leaned close, his face still screwed up in dementia.
“You see what fighting the Man gets you, Bogart? Do you see? You do not have the power to go against the Man! The Man rules. I am the Man, and if you go against me, you go against everything, and this is what it gets you. You think on that, Bogart, as the black water fills your lungs while you sink down to river bottom.”
He rose, spent, and said, “Get him in the boat.”
“You okay, boss?”
“I am fine. Get his goddamned ass in the boat.”
Three of the staff controlled Earl as he was led to the boat, the chains around his wrists held tightly, while the wheelbarrow bearing its hundredweight followed behind.
They lowered him roughly into the scow, and it turned out they even had a system for getting the heavy
weight aboard; it was not lifted off the barrow at all, but a plank had been set on an angle that matched up fine to a plank sited in the boat’s hull, so that the thing could be wheeled down as if on a track. It took but some practiced effort, and down it went with just the gentlest thump as it arrived on the floor of the hull; the boat trembled only momentarily as the wheelbarrow was steered and manipulated toward its stern. The rest of the men jumped aboard, the engine was fired up, the lines cast off, and the boat began to nudge its way into the current.
A breeze blew. The moon had risen enough so that it was no longer red but now that pale, radiant bone-white, and it flickered off the stillness of the water. Its radiance did not quite blur the crazy quilt of stars and fancy patterns that filled the sky. It would have been a night of magic if it hadn’t been a night of murder.
“This is usually where they start to cry,” somebody said. “Boo hoo, it ain’t fair, they got chilluns, they got a mammy and a ol’ lady. Show some mercy, Mr. Boss, cut me a break, suh, yassuh, I be a good ol’ nigger boy from now on, I be. You goin’ cry, Bogart?”
Earl said nothing.
Someone kicked him.
“He thinks he’s tough. He thinks he a hero. He ain’t gonna give us the satisfaction, ain’t that right, boy?”
Earl said nothing.
Now he had this last thing to do. The pin had been inserted horizontally into the callus along his left palm, so that he could still form a fist to fight with, and in forming a fist he was protecting it. But in the disorientation of battle, strangeness is mandatory, and no plan survives its first contact with the enemy. This means things fall apart all the time, and you adjust to them or die. So Earl now snaked a finger into his left palm, with a moment’s prayer of a small request to God that the pin still be there, that it not have slithered out and be resting in the dust of the levee somewhere, and with it all his hopes and possibilities.
It was there.
“Sometimes they just beg hard,” one of the guards said. “Other times they angry. Got to smack ’em down hard, and they fight ’til the end. You like that, Bogart? You goin’ fight and spit and curse as you go down? You goin’ to face the Maker with blasphemy on the tongue, white boy?”
“He won’t cry,” came the strong words of Bigboy, who even in the dark had his sunglasses on and his hat flat over his eyes to mute the swellings and discolorings where Earl’s fists had imprinted them. “He won’t curse or scream. He will face it straight on. He is a hero. Bogart, you are a hero. That’s why you are so dangerous. You are a formidable foe, I give you that. That is why you must die. These other folks here, they are soft. They don’t recognize what must be done to persevere. But I have the strength to face reality. I do. So I take the mantle of responsibility, and I see that what needs to be done is what gets done. Do you understand?”
Earl said nothing. The guy was stone crazy, that was all, and now as he executed Earl, he seemed to be demanding some kind of sentimentalized gesture of respect, of acknowledgment, warrior to warrior.
Earl finally said, “Pigman, you are a rank, stinking piece of pork, without no guts nor brains, who only got his way in the world by lucking into a place that needed pure-D crazy evil as its highest value. You will pay, I pledge you. Someone goin’ to come out of this water—”
He was kicked hard in the kidneys.
“This is far enough,” said Bigboy. “Dump him.”
Earl was pushed to the rear of the boat. There two of the minions unlocked the old lock, ran the chain through the steel ring into the block on the barrow, then resecured the lock. It snapped closed with an oily click. The fellow doing this—Caleb, Earl saw—rose, and without a thought tossed the key into the river. Nobody said a thing, and there was no ceremony to it at all. They cut away his clothes until he was nude. Then someone lifted the wheelbarrow on its forward axis, and at a certain point, the cement block slid off with a mild splash, and in an instant had pulled its chain taut and Earl didn’t bother to fight it, for what was the point? He jumped before the chain could pull him.
Off he went, following the block, down into the dark river.
DOWN, down, down.
Don’t panic, he ordered himself, as he slipped through radiance and bubbles, the weight of the cement chained to his ankles immobile and unforgiving.
Down, down, down.
Then it stopped. The block settled into the river bottom thirty feet beneath the surface. Above, he could see the black hull riding the water, and watched as its screws began to churn up a wake, and it described a lazy U and headed to shore.
Don’t panic, he told himself.
You’ve done this a hundred times.
He felt no oxygen starvation yet. Calmly, holding himself together, he cupped his hands, and his fingers felt for the pin. His fingers had inflated in the cold water and were stiff and numb and clumsy. His hands ached and bled still from the beating they had administered. But still there was some mobility left, and he felt the pin and worked at the tiny segment that was not buried, had it pinched tight between thumb and forefinger and began to work it out steadily, smoothly ever so—
But as his eyes adjusted to the underwater murk, something stunned him. It was a tree twisted strangely in the form of a man, like a submerged, crucified Christ, the moon glow having penetrated far enough to illuminate its ghastly pallor.
It was a man.
It was a man, still buoyant, still erect, still reaching for a surface he’d never make, the chain that held him still tight. Earl turned his head, and saw not another man but what had once been a man, before age and rot and water had taken all that was human about him and left only skull and shards of meat and tatters of clothes, linked fragilely by threads of ligaments. He, too, reached upward for a surface his fingers would never break.
Earl was in a glade of corpses. They floated and bobbed in the subtle drift of current, in every state of decomposition, some hard bone, others molted flesh, some dressed, some naked. Oozy weeds twisted about them, and fish flashed in schools in the deepwater moonlight, negotiating the alleyways of a metropolis of corpses.
Get it back, he ordered himself, as his lungs at last began to sing for air, and he bent to his ankles to insert the pin in the lock, and jimmy it free, and rise, but his fingers remained clumsy and puffed.
Be calm, he commanded, which was fine, until the pin slipped away, and he watched in horror as his grasping fingers could not catch up to it, and it disappeared.
33
SAM tried to obey the law as he always did, but he could not this time. Especially beyond town, with just two-lane Route 8 and no twists or turns or traffic cops between himself and Board Camp, where the Swagger farm was, he punched the pedal and his Pontiac roared its merry way along, pulling up dust, scattering chickens, scaring children and birds, earning the curses of mommies who observed his thoughtless speed.
His heart was thumping, but it was pain he felt.
This would be it: news from farther south that Earl Swagger was gone. There could be no other news.
He tried to steel himself for the scene, as he’d seen it enough when a hero dies: the weeping wife, her face a ruin of mucus and tears, the numb child who cannot begin to imagine how his life has changed, and how he has just inherited a vision of the universe as a forever imperfect engine, a place with a hole in it that sucks out the good and permits the reigns of chaos and violence.
It seemed to take forever, but that, of course, is merely the lengthening of time by the release of blood chemicals under stress. In reality, less than fifteen minutes had passed.
The place looked the same, and he wished he’d been much better for Junie. In truth, so ashamed was he and so confused by the situation, that after passing along the money from Davis Trugood, he’d stayed away, for he could not bear to face the woman nor see the child.
There were no other cars, so she had not yet called the state police. Sam swore that at last he’d tell what he knew, what he had found out, and would get it going, whatever it would b
e, some form of war on Thebes.
He parked, dashed up the driveway, and didn’t bother to knock.
He entered the house of mourning and saw Junie sitting on a sofa, a dazed look on her face.
“Junie, what is it? What did you hear about Earl?”
She looked up and smiled through her tears, and Sam thought he saw the delusions of madness on her face, as people act peculiarly in the arrival of a life’s worth of black grief.
“Oh, Sam,” she said.
“Earl? Please. What happened to Earl?”
He thought he’d have a heart attack.
Someone said, “Sam, why don’t you set a spell and have some of Junie’s nice lemonade,” and Sam turned to see that it was Earl, even browner than before, brown as a man who’d spent two months laboring in the sun, and he held his son in his arms and was smiling.
34
AS consciousness ebbed and the bubbles took over, a wraith or an eel or a large, slippery fish flashed before Earl’s dulling, darkening eyes. He was aware of some kind of movement, and in the next second felt the full glory and pleasure of release.
Upward and reborn he coursed, seeing what all those down there had seen in their last seconds but could never reach and died dreaming of, and that was the surface.
He broke, feeling the rushing intake of cold sweet air, dipped beneath the current, surfaced again for more of the stuff. Even now he was not insane. He didn’t gasp or gulp or shout, for somewhere was the boat, though those aboard would likely not be paying attention.
At that moment the old man broke the surface next to him.
“Can you swim with them chains?”
Earl nodded; there was enough play in the bonds to allow him to propel himself and his victory over death had filled him with energy and exuberance.
“We go slow. You stick with me. If you lose sight of me, you orient on that low star there and swim to it. We less than fifty yards out. You reach walking depth in less than twenty-five yards.”