“I can pay.”
“Not the boatmen around here you can’t, no sir, and that’s a fact. Nobody goes up to Thebes.”
“Goddammit, nobody in this fool town will do what they are told to do. What is your stubbornness? Is it congenital or learned? Why such simplicity everywhere in Mississippi?”
“Sir, I would not take our state’s name in anger.”
Sam—well, he near exploded, but the old coot just looked at him, set in ancient ways, and Sam saw that screaming at a toothless geezer had no point to it, not even the simple satisfaction of making a fool uncomfortable.
Instead, he turned, went back to the car.
“No luck, sir?”
“Not a bit of it. These Mississippians are a different breed.”
“They are. Must be all the swamp water they drink, and that corn liquor. Makes them stubborn and dull.”
“Just drive, Eddie. Drive along the bayou here. Maybe I’ll notice something.”
The shiny LaSalle prowled among riverside shacks and cruised past the hulks of rotted boats tied up and banging against weathered docks. Overhead, the gulls pirouetted and wheeled and the hot sun beat down fiercely. Sam soon forgot he was in America. It was some strange country, particularly when the color of the people turned black, and little ragamuffin kids in tattered underwear and worn shorts raced barefoot alongside the big, slow-moving car, begging for pennies. Sam knew if he gave one a penny, he’d have to give them all a penny, so he gave none of them pennies.
Then even the Negroes ran out, and they were alone; the road’s cracked pavement yielded to dirt, the river disappeared behind a bank of reeds, and the whole thing seemed pointless.
But it was Eddie who saw the road.
“Bet there’s a house there,” he said. “Bet there is.”
“Go on down, then. Maybe there’ll be a boatman.”
At the end of the way, he did in fact see a shack, cobbled together out of abandoned or salvaged materials, with a tar paper roof, and tires everywhere lying about. The boxy skeleton of an early ’30s Nash sedan rusted away on blocks. Clam or oyster shells in the hundreds of thousands lay about like gravel. The place was rude and slatternly, but behind it a boat lay at anchor a few feet out in the wide brown river.
“Hello!” Sam called.
In time, an old lady leaned out, ran an eye over the man in the tan suit sitting in the backseat of the black LaSalle, then heaved up a gelatinous gob from her lungs, expelled it through a toothless mouth and grotesquely flexible lips so it flew like one of Sam’s well-aimed 105s and plunked up an impact crater among the clam shells and dirt.
“What you want?” she demanded. The accent was French, more or less, or rather the Cajun corruption of the French accent.
“To talk to a boatman.”
“You come wrong place, Mister. Who told you come here?”
“Madam, nobody told me to come here, I assure you. I see a boat. Therefore there is a boatman. May I speak with him, if you please.”
“You from revenooers?”
“Of course not.”
“Po-lices? You the po-lices?”
“No, madam. Nor FBI nor the state in any of its manifestations.”
“You wait there.”
The door slammed.
“Well,” Sam said to Eddie, “it’s a start. Not much of one, but who can say?”
A few minutes passed. Some ruckus arose from the interior of the shack, and finally an old fellow popped out. He was nut-brown, wore dungarees and a torn, loose old undershirt and a pair of shoes that might have, years ago, been designed for tennis but were now a laceless ruin. His toes flopped out from the gap between last and sole in one of them. A few crude tattoos inked his biceps. His hair was a gray nest of tendrils, this way and that, and most, but not all, of his teeth remained. His face was a crush of fissures and arroyos from years in the sun, and from his own squinting.
“You want?” he said, scowling.
“The boatman. Are you the boatman?”
“Nah, not no boatman. You go on, git out of here now. No boatman here.”
“You look like a boatman to me.”
“Agh. What you want?”
“Lazear,” cried the old lady from inside, “you talk to the guy now, you hear. He gots money.”
The old man squinted at him up and down.
“I want to go upriver. Through the bayou, up the Pascagoula, to the Yaxahatchee. Into the piney woods. Up to the town they call Thebes.”
“Ah! Sir, nobody go to Thebes. Nothing there but nigs and dogs. Oooo-ee, nigs don’t git you, dogs do. Dogs chew you real good. Whichever git you first, the other clean up after.”
“I understand there is a Negro town there and a prison farm. I have business. I wish to hire a boat.”
“You been everwhere. No one take you. So you finally come old Lazear?”
“Where I’ve been is of no account. I need passage up, I need you to wait an hour or a day, and I need passage back, that is all. I am prepared to pay the prevailing rate plus a little extra.”
“Million dollars. You got million dollars for Lazear?”
“Of course not. What do you usually get by day? I’ll double it.”
“Sir,” Eddie whispered, “I’d offer him a sum first and let him negotiate from that position.”
But Lazear quickly said, “I gits a hundred dollars a day guiding in the swamp.”
“I doubt he’s seen a hundred dollars in his life,” muttered Eddie.
“Two hundred then. Two hundred there and back.”
“Four hundred. Two up, two back. Is tricky. Lost in the bayou, eaten by ’gators, you know. No fun, no sir. Four.”
“A hundred is a month’s wages. Take two hundred or I’ll find another boat.”
“Two then. Two. You pay now, you come back tomorrow night.”
“I pay fifty now, I don’t go anywhere, we leave now. We leave immediately.”
“No, sir. Long trip. Day’s trip, maybe day anna half. Lazear got to load up the boat.”
“I am not leaving,” said Sam, “now that I am here. And that is final, sir.”
“Oh, crazy man from the North. Crazy Northern man. You from New York or Boston, sir?”
These people, thought Sam, they are so ignorant.
4
THE bayou soon swallowed them. If there was one river here, it was lost to Sam. There seemed to be dozens of them, tracks through marshy constructions of thorns or brambles, islets of gnarled green trees, thickets of vines, barricades of bristles. Though it was still light, the sense of day soon vanished.
Lazear’s boat crawled through this wet maze, chugging along uncertainly, its engine fighting to breathe, terrifying Sam each time it seemed to miss a beat or pause to take a gulp.
“You know the way?” he heard himself say.
“Well as my own hand, Mister,” responded the old man, who quickly sweated through his clothes as he navigated under a faded blue ball cap that may have borne an allegiance to a big league team, though the insignia had long since disappeared.
“I thought this was a river. It’s a swamp.”
“Oh, she straightens out up ahead, you’ll see. Best relax, sir. Nothing good comes of hurry in the swamp. You hurry, you be a dead fellow, sure. But it be fine; probably no snake be biting you, or no ’gator eat your hand off, but I cannot say for sure.”
Then his crumpled old face lit with glee and Sam realized it was a joke, that humor was a part of the man’s madness.
“Hope them Choctaws ain’t in no drinking mood,” said old Lazear over the sound of the motor. “If they be, sometimes it make them hungry and they eat a white fellow. Leave me be, I’m too tough, like an old chicken been eating bugs and grubs its whole life. But you, Mister, figure you’d taste right good to them red savages.”
“There isn’t enough salt in Mississippi to tenderize me,” Sam said. “They could chew me, but they could never swallow me. They’d choke on me.”
It wasn’t only the weather
. It was also the darkness, not of the day but of the overhanging, interlinked canopy. The leaves and vines knotted up, twisted among themselves, invented new forms. Strange vegetation grew on other strange vegetation, a riot of life forms, insensate, unknowable.
The seal of the canopy had the effect of a greenhouse on the two men trapped beneath it; the heat rose even beyond the heat of Mississippi, and in no time at all Sam had sweated through his shirt and coat. Off came the coat, up went the sleeves, rolled tightly. He left his hat on, however, for its brim trapped the sweat that grew in his hairline and kept it from cascading down into his eyes. And of course he left his tie tight to his neck. There were certain concessions to the jungle one simply could not make.
He settled into the rear of the boat, uncomfortable, nestled against a gunwale on a pile of ropes. Luxury was out of the question, and an inch or two of water perfumed with gasoline sloshed around the bottom of the boat as it chugged onward, radiating nauseating fumes and a slight sense of mirage. Or maybe it was his splitting headache.
“Cheer up,” cried old Lazear. “We got another five hours or so before true dark, then we lay up in a bay I know. You can sleep on dry ground, Lazear he sleep on the boat.”
“I’ll stay with the boat, thanks,” said Sam. He imagined himself alone in this place. Alone: dead. It followed.
The old man now and then took a tot on a bottle of something, and once or twice handed it to Sam, who politely turned it down, until at last curiosity got the better of him.
Argh! It was some hellish French stuff, absinthe or something, with the heat of fire and the tang of salt; it burned all the way down, and he suddenly shivered.
“Ha! She got bite, no?” exclaimed Lazear.
In time, the light dwindled further, until it seemed impossible to go onward. Lazear found a little cut in the land, a miniature cove, surrounded by high grass and a copse of gnarled trees of no identifiable features, and there put in.
“I rustle up some grub. You eat.”
Sam was in fact ravenous. The scrofulous old man disappeared into the disreputable hatchway that led to the boat’s forward interior and threw pots and pans around. He came up a few minutes later with white chunks of bread, a lump of butter at some indeterminate stage between liquid and solid, a warped segment of cheese, greasy, waxy rind still affixed, and a knife and fork.
“Fancy food for a fancy guy, no?”
“I’ve eaten worse,” said Sam, who remembered K rations in the snow during the Bulge, when it was so cold he thought he’d die of it, and the Germans were said to be everywhere, and all he wanted to do was head back to Arkansas and practice law. Instead, he’d gathered his six 105s into a tight formation atop a low hill, dug them in, and waited for targets. A German panzer unit obliged, grinding through the gray snow and the gray fog a mile out, and Sam and his men stayed cool and blew it off the face of the earth in three minutes of concentrated fire. Only burning hulks were left.
He slept in his clothes, feeling the drift of the boat against the slop of the river and the dampness of his feet where the water had at last overwhelmed the leather of his brogues, penetrating them. But it was good, dreamless sleep, for the temperature at last dropped and the air seemed cooled of the corruption that so embalmed it during the day.
HE awoke to the ritual of the coffee. Lazear had woken early, gone ashore, made a small fire. Now, as Sam watched, he boiled a pot of water, then moved it off the flame. With an old soup spoon he scooped coffee from an A & P bag, and spread it on the water. Next he produced a Clabber Girl baking powder tin, popped the lid and scooped out roasted and ground chicory root and again spread the material on the surface of the water until it seemed right. Then he swirled the black mix and let the grounds settle and teep. The smell of coffee and wood smoke made Sam’s stomach rumble.
The old man sloshed through the water and handed Sam up a tin cup of the stuff; it cut to the bone, hot, raw and powerful. The French and their coffee; they were good at it beyond arrogance.
As Sam tried to focus, he found the fog was not in his mind but in the swamp. Tendrils of cottony moisture lay low on the water, curled through the trees, licked at the leaves.
“How much longer?”
“We hit the big river soon enough. Then we bear right where she splits, and that part takes on the name Yaxahatchee. That one’s wider open so it’ll go smoother. Don’t you be falling in. That water deep and the current can be strong. Suck a man down, spit him back with his soul missing, his nose blue, his fingers shriveled and his false teeth out and floated off somewheres.”
“Sir, I have no false teeth.”
“Whatever you got, if you go in, the river, she take it. She’s a black bitch of a river, you see. You don’t be messin’ ’round with her, or she fuck you good.”
“My trust in you is absolute,” Sam said.
He settled back, got through a few shaky moments when the old man seemed to have trouble interesting the engine in life again, until at last it sputtered, coughed, shivered, then began to pull the boat back out from the shore.
They coursed through the blackness, passing in the morning fog a ghost town, its rickety houses moss-grown and semifallen.
“What happened there?”
“Oh, dey got through Indians and plague and flood okay, but then some dogs, wild dogs, tore up some kids there. Kilt three. Little girls, I think, caught ’em in the open, kilt ’em fast, bled ’em out. The people just gave it up after that. The swamp, she be a cruel bad place.”
Sam looked away, trying to banish the horror of the idea of it from his mind. The girls, the dogs, the screams, the smell of blood. He shook his head.
“Yah! Ha! Ain’t no picnic out here, no siree. You ain’t where you from, not by no long shot.”
At last the swamp seemed to diminish its grip on the earth. The gnarled trees, the jungly vines and dinosaur vegetation gave way to longleaf pines arrayed over ridges of land, saw grass and other green clutter, all leading to bleak shores. The river widened, deepened, turned ever blacker, grew swifter.
Then it split. It broke into two forks, one headed east, the other west. Neither looked promising: highways of dark river, the texture no longer smooth as oil or glass but now ever so slightly giving evidence of disturbance, as if strong currents lurked beneath, hungry to pull a man to his death.
“You hang on now, Mister, she can be rough,” the old man cried, as he steered the weathered craft to the rightward of the two torrents, and took them dead up the center.
They progressed steadily against a current that suggested they try elsewhere. The piney woods sealed them off from any evidence of life except the pines themselves, low, heavy with gum and tar of some sort. They were turpentine trees, bled in the fall for the chemical that oozed out of them. The weather remained malignant, even as the sun burned the last of the fog away, and if pines had ever reminded Sam of Northern glades as in Wisconsin or Minnesota, these were not such pines. They seemed to form two walls and a long, winding corridor, a madman’s dream of nothingness, while above the sun scalded them and no wind dared stir.
Sam glanced at his watch, feeling the itch of sweat and bites all over his skin. He even thought about loosening his tie, but he’d fought the Battle of the Bulge in a tie, so that was really only the last thing one did before accepting death.
It was by now nearly 11:00 A.M.
“How much further?”
“Be patient, Mister. You cannot rush the river. The current’s agin’ us, she don’t want us going there. Be glad you gots planks beneath to keep your bottom from what’s under, yes sir.”
And so it went, seemingly endless, until at last, un-bidden, as if out of a dream, Thebes revealed itself on a far shore.
He wondered: Am I in Africa?
For what he beheld was something out of a dream of a lost place, a place so benighted and run-down it seemed to have no right to exist in the country he knew to be America. Not even the meanest Negro shantytowns of Arkansas seemed so raw and sad. It was
a collection of slatternly dogtrot cabins, tar-paper roofs scorching in the hot sun, low, rotting warehouses off to a side by docks, mud streets that were too congealed to sustain wheels of any sort, much less automobiles. The ruins of what must have been a sawmill stood isolated a bit farther down the river, most walls gone, nothing but decaying frame and un-turning wheel left.
It seemed somehow to have devolved, to have gone backward in time.
“She ain’t much. Why you want to come all this way for this place, I don’t know. Merde. Do you know? Merde, shit you say in English. It’s shit. A town of shit. Who could live in such a place?”
As the old man’s boat maneuvered toward dockage, Sam thought the place was as abandoned as the last town, where the wild dogs had killed the little girls. But at the same time, he felt the presence of eyes.
A boat was so rare, he assumed, it would be remarkable to such a place. Every eye would be upon him, and indeed he felt every eye upon him, but again he saw no evidence of life.
Lazear got in close, set the course, and stilled the engine.
“You get up front,” he commanded, and Sam did what he was told. There, on the bobbing prow, he found a coil of rope. When the boat glanced off the dock, he leaped, pulling on the rope, tightening boat to dock, then looping it to a post set aslant in the water. He glanced back, saw that the old man had gone aft to secure the stern by similar method.
He walked back.
“I don’t know how long this will take. You stay here. You stay out of bars or whorehouses or whatever temptations they have here. I have business; if it seems to run long, I’ll notify you somehow. You do not leave without me. Do you understand?”
“Oh, yah, I stay forever. I got nothing to do but stay till the lawyer man gits his money.”
“Get me my briefcase.”
Lazear found it, the one pristine object aboard, and handed it over. Sam straightened and tightened his tie, pulled his coat to cure it of wrinkles, made sure his hat was set straight, and went to work.