A goddamned girl!
For some reason this infuriated him even more profoundly. A girl! A girl had been among the raiders, and had brought all this hell upon the place.
A girl!
He squiggled and wiggled gently, oriented the big gun this way and that, until he’d put the big sight blade square on her and had it centered in the peephole of the Lyman sight.
Gun braced tight, he began to squeeze the trigger.
He was a hero!
72
THE birds sensed it coming somehow, and the dark night was full of them, seething and cawing, wheeling and darting. Amazing how many birds a piney woods could contain, and how mysteriously they could read the future and know it to be tragic. They launched, like carrier planes, before the water arrived.
Earl wondered how it would come as he labored at the prison launch, trying to find fuel to add to the tank, mixing some oil in, studying the primitive controls so that he could understand it well enough to run it, and finally cracking off the control panel at the keyhole (he had no time to look for a key) and trying to hot-wire the tangles to spark, and get out of there.
He tried to concentrate, but he could not. The world was about to end, this world at any rate, and by his hand. He somehow had to see it, know it, watch it finish and drown.
Birds in the air. Animals scurrying through the brush. A sense of disturbance in the universe, as the animals understood flood as well as fire, and made to flee.
When it came, it came stealthily. He thought of Japanese naval infantry moving through the fog, knowing how to use the land, geniuses of concealment and silent movement. The black water was not there and then in the next second it was, though at first only the oddest sense of shimmer or vibration where there should be none gave away its presence, and then it was everywhere, unstoppable, remorseless, powerful in its quiet, insistent way. It didn’t rush or gurgle or throw up sprays of white; it boasted no waves or tides; it just rose in the trees and spread with devilish speed until in seconds there was no ground visible but the trees stood sunk halfway in black water. Its current was strong, for boughs and chunks and pieces hurled along its surface, and here and there the corpse of a dead animal.
Earl knew it was time.
Come on, goddamn you, he said, jerking two splayed wires together. At last a spark, just a tiny twitch of light in the dark chaos of what had been a control panel, and the old craft heaved, shuddered, coughed up a throatful of blue, dense smoke, and then began to roar.
Earl steered straight into the channel, hoping there were no secret impediments or secret passageways concealed by the still calm water that he didn’t know (he hadn’t been paying much attention the last time he’d gone for a ride in this particular boat) or that he wouldn’t encounter some kind of supercurrent set off by the broken levee that would suck him in and down.
The old scow lurched into the dark water under a spray of stars, and Earl held her steady, aiming for an opposite shore, where there should be as much safety as possible.
He looked back and saw that the Drowning House had now been taken, its foundations eaten away by the flood; it fought its destiny but then gave up, tumbling into collapse as the water claimed it.
The sun was coming up. Its brightness oozed out of the east, and soon enough the water began to sparkle. The disk itself was shortly visible, and the sky began its run from black to gray to pewter to blue.
In the increasing light, Earl watched the clouds of birds circling the opposite shore, although shore wasn’t quite the right word. Remnants of the levee stood all along it, though here and there, by natural forces difficult to comprehend, it had been breached, and yet more water poured into the lowlands of Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored).
Earl navigated a course south, toward the town or what would remain of it. This took him along the whole course of the prison installation at which he looked for signs of destruction. They were ample. Of the four machine-gun towers only one still stood, the others having given way to the water; and that one looked ready to go at any second, twisted crookedly as its supports washed away. The air was full of the sense of water unleashed, and yet still whiffs of the night’s fires remained. Above it all the birds rotated in the sky, trying to figure out a new destination.
When Earl passed what should have been the Big House, the Store and the Whipping House, he could see nothing. But of course he hadn’t looked for them from the river before, and so he didn’t know if this signified their ruin or not. But he heard the rush of water, and that was enough to suggest they were inundated.
The last mile was calm, and he could tell from the columns of smoke of fires still burning that the town was gone, too, somehow. But at last he saw what he had come to see: a raft, poling its way up the river on this far bank, holding three cantankerous white fellows, cursing at each other loudly, a man on a stretcher, and a girl, who stood apart from them.
She took off her cowboy hat and waved, and her survival, honestly more important than any of the others’, filled him with sudden joy.
“Say there,” he hailed.
“Damn, Earl, where’d you get that damn boat?”
“Picked it up somewhere in the night. Here, let me get y’all aboard.”
“Be careful now. There’s a fifth.”
Earl wondered what Elmer meant, but then he saw a coffin on the raft that wasn’t being used as a pontoon.
“Oh, hell,” he said.
He maneuvered close enough, and throttled the engine back, afraid to turn it off. Elmer and Bill seized his gunwale and mated the two craft in the center of the current. Then Charlie and Sally helped Jack across, and though the man had difficulty with his pinned arm, in other respects he seemed spry enough. He was a tough old bastard. Then Elmer and Bill got the coffin up and slid it over the gunwale, with Charlie and Sally pitching in on their side, until it rested on the deck of his own boat. Then the two men threw rifles across, and came themselves.
They released the raft, and Earl steered hard astarboard to reorient upstream, and the current was much stronger running against than running with, but the old scow plunged ahead in the increasing light and heat, back in the direction he had come.
“Glad to see you, Earl,” said Elmer. “We’s getting tired of that poling and goddamned Charlie wasn’t pulling his own weight on his pole. And Jack wasn’t worth a damn.”
“Hell I wasn’t, old man. These two old coots let me do all the work.”
“What happened to Mr. Ed. He catch one?”
“No, sir, not by a damn sight. He faced his fellas and done that job up right good. He told all them colored men how to put a raft together, and they all been gone for hours now. They downriver a far piece. Then old Ed just passed, with a smile on his face, in a rocking chair. He went gentle into the good night, I’ll say.”
“I’m sorry, Sally. I never meant—”
“You never mind, Earl. Now what on God’s earth happened to you? Looks like you put your face in a meat grinder.”
“Had a ruckus with a fellow.”
“Someone else can drive this boat. Earl, you come here and I will stitch that ear on or it will fall clean off and you will look like a circus freak.”
“I—”
“Earl, you do what I say.”
Earl did. Charlie took over the steering, and Earl sat still as Sally ran a needle and thread through his ear and scalp, and it hurt like hell, but not nearly as bad as when she doused the stuff in some kind of disinfectant that made it burn like pure hell.
“Goddamn,” he said.
“You can get through it, cowboy, big man like yourself.”
“Oh, Christ, that hurts.”
The others laughed.
“Some damn hero. Earl, maybe you ought to give that medal back.”
They plowed up the Yaxahatchee, once again passing the flooded prison farm, which was now to the left. The fourth tower had fallen, and more of the levee was gone. It was all reverting to savage swamp. Everything would be buried unde
r the water, and in months the silt would build up and all traces of a fight would be gone, unless Navy divers decided to make a million-dollar salvage project out of it, which seemed unlikely.
“Don’t hardly seem like nothing was there now,” said Elmer.
“Nope. It’s all gone to hell. We wiped ’em off the face of the earth.” This was Charlie.
“Hey, I see the kid,” shouted Bill.
And, yes, there he was, Audie paddling furiously in a yellow Navy raft. When the sound of the engines reached him, he turned and saw Bill waving wildly from the prow of the craft, and waved back. He steered out to the stream, and Earl guided the launch toward him.
“Hey, you fellows.”
“Look at him, out for a Sunday boat ride.”
Again, Earl came close and went to idle, and Audie transferred. He left combat knife slashes in the raft before he made his move, ensuring that it would deflate and sink in time.
“Where’s the old fellow?” Audie asked.
“Didn’t make it through the night,” Elmer said.
“Oh, Christ,” said Audie. “Sally, I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Audie. I will be fine.”
Upstream they went, for another half an hour, until they were lost in trackless piney woods and silence, as if no other humans existed on earth. Earl retook the wheel and navigated to the pickup site, and checked his watch. He saw they had some time.
“We’ll just lay up here,” he said. “I think we’re home free.”
“Home free,” said Charlie. “Goddamn, how I like them words.”
73
IT all danced before Section Boss: how he and he alone had tracked the Northern communist night riders who came South with fire and brimstone. How he slew them in the river. How justice was served. How he became a hero in the white South, the king of N’Awleens and all them pretty gals, how he was elected to the state legislature and then the governor’s mansion and then who knew what.
How he killed a damn girl who humiliated the great white South!
And all he had to do was squeeze a trigger and hold it down for a few seconds, as he had done so many a time.
He felt the trigger yield to his steady pressure and…
And then he heard a crash as something or some fleet of things blasted from the piney woods upon him.
The dogs. The dogs came out of the brush like rifle shots, all snarl and teeth and blood hunger. Somewhere in the swamp, they had picked up the scent of the man who beat them all those months, and hunted him hard.
They hit him with a frenzy, and he screamed as the fangs drove into him, though in his pain he could not hear it and neither could anyone else, over the arrival of another sound, the roaring of engines, loud and low and close.
74
THE call came at half past noon. Sam picked it up quickly.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Sam?”
“Earl! Jesus Christ, man, what happened?”
“It’s done. It’s finished. We hit ’em hard and got out pretty clean. Ain’t no more Thebes prison farm. It’s destroyed twice, by fire and flood. Destroyed three times, really, the first by gunmen.”
“You’re all right?”
“Have some stitches in me.”
“The others?”
“One man died of a heart attack. Three others were hit but should recover. We’re all beat to hell. And I’m sorry to report that Mr. Davis Trugood didn’t make it. I found him dead in the upstairs bedroom of the old house when I went looking for the warden. He found the warden first, but what happened between them or why, I have no idea.”
“Earl, I have found out much about him you should know.”
“Later. I’m too tired to remember. You can move your family back to Blue Eye. It’s all over. It’s finished.”
“Earl, you…I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say a thing. We all agreed. After today, the words Thebes penal are never going to be said. I’m going to rest a spell, then go back on duty. No more gunfighting. That’s all over, unless the gunfight comes to me, and I don’t think it will. At least I hope it never does.”
“Earl—”
“Mr. Sam, you keep this under your hat. I’ll see you in a few days. I have to set my adventuring right by Junie, and I’d prefer to do that face-to-face than on a phone.”
“Of course.”
Sam hung up and looked about himself, to a little messy Little Rock office-bedroom. He meant to call his wife first.
But he couldn’t.
Some things never change.
He called Connie.
BILL Jennings and Jack O’Brian didn’t leave the helicopter at the farm; instead, they were flown on to Pensacola, under the advice of Sally, who urged that Jack needed to get plasma into him as quickly as possible. The word came that night from Bill that Jack would be all right, the doctors in Pensacola said, and would be three weeks in the hospital. Jack’s wife, Sarah, was headed down. Earl knew how much was left in the fund from Davis Trugood and knew that there’d be enough. He told Bill to tell Jack and wondered if Jack had a last message. Bill said that Jack sent his best to all the boys and hoped to see them again, maybe sometime in the 1970s or ’80s. The boys got a laugh out of that, especially since they knew they’d see him at next year’s NRA convention and could josh him merrily.
Meanwhile, Charlie and Elmer, with their lesser wounds, saw no need to rush. Charlie had a rat’s amazing ability to recover. He would be bruised for a month, but his cracked ribs would heal, and the two flesh wounds sealed themselves up and didn’t infect. Elmer had a whopper headache, so bad that for the first time in years he let his correspondence languish. He just sat on the porch, drinking whiskey and swallowing aspirins. But he wasn’t grumpy a bit. He actually seemed to enjoy it all.
At night, much drinking was done, though not by Earl, and much retelling around the campfire. It seemed Charlie had killed hundreds and he would have recreated each of them if he weren’t hooted down by the others. But the cowboys were happy, to a man. Audie said he hadn’t been so happy since V-E day, and he’d spent that in the hospital with a chunk of his hip shot away. This time, he got to celebrate it up right! They almost seemed in the end as if they couldn’t quite let go of it. But already they missed Bill and Jack, though they knew the two weren’t coming back. There was a sense, somehow, that this was it: a last roundup, and they’d never be together again, at least not like this, in the lassitude of survival, thankfulness and drunkenness.
The next day Sally made the arrangements for her grandfather, and a hearse from a mortuary in Pensacola came by to pick up the body. The mortician had the death certificate, and nobody seemed particularly bothered by the legality of it. Old men died, it happened all the time, and this fellow was in his eighties without a mark on his body. The mortician—he seemed somehow to be a deputy sheriff, too—assured Sally there’d be no problems at all, especially when Earl paid out a nice lump of change for him.
The next day, it was Earl who drove Sally to Pensacola for the long trip to Montana by train, and for burial for Mr. Ed.
Earl parked in front of the station, which was all jammed up with Navy personnel in their whites and their girls and folks and kids. A lot of hubbub floated in the air, and Earl could see the big steam train hissing and puffing at the head of its cars.
“You are a special one,” he told her.
“So are you, Earl.”
“Where will you go? Have you a place?”
“My aunt. Grandpap’s other daughter. She’s been after me for years. It’ll be fine. I’ll be all right, Earl, don’t you worry. Don’t I seem like the type who makes out just fine?”
“You do. But let me tell you this: Young men are going to come courting hard now. You pick the best. You deserve the best. If you wind up with some no-good, old Uncle Earl will visit you and kick his butt and give you what-for, do you understand?”
“Well, Earl, as I have not done a single thing you ever told me, why should I do that??
??
“I’m hoping you’ll change your wild ways. Lord, I wish I was twenty years a younger man. I’d give them young bucks a run for their damn money.”
“Well, guess what happens now? You have to kiss me. It’s how the story ends. Don’t you see? Prince Charming kisses Snow White and releases her from her spell and so she doesn’t have to live in the woods with the Seven Dwarfs anymore.”
“I ain’t no prince and I certainly ain’t charming. Though I would admit them other fellows was mostly dwarfs. And you’re not a princess. You’re a queen, you just don’t know it yet. So I shouldn’t be kissing so far above myself.”
“Well, as I sewed your ear back on and did a nice damn job on it, I will determine what happens, and for now you will kiss me. And that will be that. The queen has spoken.”
“You were the toughest and the bravest. Do you know that?”
“I just tried to live up to grandpap’s standards, and then to old Uncle Earl’s.”
“You done that, and how.”
He kissed her, hard, just to see what it would feel like, and of course it felt exactly as he knew it would, and an electricity of regret flashed through him and then it was over and no more. She smiled and laughed, and got out of the car.
“Do you need help?”
“Earl, if I don’t get away, I’ll never leave. You go on, I can handle this little suitcase.”
She grabbed it and took off, without looking back.
He watched her go, and damn, as had happened so rarely in his life but happened this time, some kind of grit came sailing through the window and clouded up his eyes, and the thin young woman walked away and back to whatever her life would be, disappearing in a squall of sailors.
When Earl got back, Audie and Charlie had left. Audie had made a phone call, and he yelled out a big whoop-de-do when he hung up. He had gotten that big part in that Civil War picture. He’d play a hero. He had to leave right away, as he had to get back for what Elmer reported was called “wardrobe” by the end of the week, and since he was going west, he’d drive Charlie back to Texas.