Earl just loosed a gob of spit. It wasn’t a nice thing to do, but it hit the man in the face, to the effect of minor irritation. Another followed, and the man awakened.
“Shhhhhh!” Earl commanded. “Mr. Sam, you keep it down.”
Sam blinked, unbelieving. He looked around, dumbfounded.
“Earl, is that—”
“Shhhh!”
Sam was silent, and at last looked up. He saw the gap in the rotted wood and an eye behind it that could only be Earl’s.
Quickly he rose, to close the distance between them. He stood on the cot, craning upward, until his mouth was but a foot or so from Earl.
“Good God, how did you find me?”
“It don’t matter. What is happening?”
“Oh, Lord. These boys have me buffaloed on some fool charge of murder that wouldn’t stand up for one second in a real court of law or even a grand jury room. What they’re planning, I do not know, Earl, I want you to contact our congressman and then work through the—”
“Shhhh!” commanded Earl again.
“No, I have thought this out, and I know exactly how to proceed. Listen to me carefully.”
“Mr. Sam, you listen to me carefully. I have eyeballed this setup, and you are in shit up to your nose.”
“Earl, you must contact Congressman Etheridge, Governor Decker, Governor Bilbo of Mississippi, and then—”
“I will do no such thing. That would get you killed right fast. What I have to do is get you out.”
“Earl, no! If I escape, I break the law. Then I am no better than—”
“And if you don’t escape you are dead. Then you are no better than the worms that are eating at you and having a fine picnic at it, I might add. Mr. Sam, look hard at the cards you have been dealt: these boys will kill you. They have to. They’re working up a plan even now: accident, drowning in the river, fall, quicksand, I don’t know. It’ll be crude but legal and you will be long gone to the next world. I guarantee you that.”
“Earl, there are laws and—”
“Not out here there ain’t. Now you listen. I can get you out. But you have to be ready, you understand? I have to set dog traps and figure us a course and cache goods along the way. I need something from you, your undershirt with a lot of stink on it.”
“That I have.”
“Good. You drop it out the window. Two nights from now, at two A.M. I will come git you. You will be awakened by distractions, which I ain’t yet figured. Fires, explosions, something like that. Then I will kill that big blue boss hound and the hound master and I will come git you.”
“Earl, you cannot kill anything. Not a dog, not a man.”
“Either would kill you in a second.”
“Earl, I have done nothing. If you kill, we’ve moved beyond a limit. There’s no getting back. I could not forgive myself for pushing you to that situation. You of all men should not be made an outlaw. I would rather be sunk in the river than be the ruination of you.”
“You are a stubborn old piece of buffalo meat.”
“Earl, swear to me. No killing. No matter what these boys have done. They cannot be killed, for that makes us them sure enough.”
Earl shook his head. Sam was set in his ways.
“Throw that shirt out, Mr. Sam. I will see you two nights off, at two. And then you and I will go on a little walk in the piney woods and go home and fall off the wagon with a big laugh.”
EARL got back into the deep trees just before dawn broke and stole a few hours of sleep. Some internal alarm awoke him, and maybe the sleep was pointless, for he never quite relaxed enough to let it take a good grip of him.
But he awoke, washed again in the cold water, fighting a shiver that came through the dense heat of the place, and then set to thinking. He thought about direction, and looked through his effects until he found that goddamned 1938 WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, God bless them commies or whoever done the work, they done a good job. Besides the big map, he found on page eighty-three a nice map marked “Transportation.” Squinting hard, he found what he needed, a rail line running north–south more or less, as it wended from Pascagoula to Hattiesburg, a spur of the Alabama and Great Southern. That’s where they’d head, and hope to snag a train as it came by.
Earl knew it would be a close-run thing. The dogs would be on them almost immediately, and he had to throw the dogs off the track as many times as he could. The straighter the dogs tracked them, the worse off they’d be. They might never make the railway, or they might get there but no trains would come. Fortunately the land was too foresty for horsemen; the deputies would have to pursue on foot, and as horsemen they’d be slow and reluctant on their own two legs. They’d tire long before the dogs, but the dogs would drive them on, and that nameless hound master and of course that Sheriff Leon, who’d have all his pride on the line. He wondered if they’d have time to involve the prison security people. In a way, he hoped so, for that would take more time in the organizing, and time was precious for him.
He maneuvered his way through the trees until he picked his positions: where he’d enter the compound, how he’d move, how he’d get Sam out, which way they’d move, what their landmarks would be as they moved into the woods. He used his compass to orient himself, and when he reached a stream, he cached his pack, his rifle and his pistol, to be picked up on the outward trek. That rifle might be the smartest thing he’d brought, for with it he could kill the dogs that the boys sent after him.
Night came, and he penetrated the prison compound again. He went first to the stable and worked his way among the shifting, seething, beautiful animals. In a tack room, he found what he needed most of all: rope. Good, strong four-ply rope, which anyone who administered horses would pack.
Next he worked around back to the shed that housed the generator. The boys shut it down at night. He slipped in and found several twenty-five-gallon cans for the gasoline. He looked about until he found the gallon cans by which the tank would be filled and took three of them, loading them to the brim and screwing the caps down tight. Three gallons of gasoline. Fella could do a lot with that.
That done, he again slipped out before the dawn, to get some sleep. He had another hard day tomorrow. And after that, the days got harder still.
THE sheriff came by at 3:00 P.M.
“Well, sir,” he said, “at last I’ve got some news for you.”
“Well, that’s wonderful,” Sam replied. “And I have some news for you. Not only will I file formal complaints, Sheriff, with the state police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I will sue you and your men in a civil court of law. It’ll be a great pleasure not merely to send you behind bars for a very long time, but to leave you destitute and without hope for gainful employment for the rest of your life. Possibly you can replace some of the Negro washerwomen at the prison farm when you get out.”
“Sir, you have got a vicious tongue. I do believe I ain’t never met a man with a golden voice and a poison tongue combined like you. You surely wouldn’t fit in down here in Mississippi.”
“When I am done with you, Sheriff, you will rue the day not that I set foot in this state, but that you did, goddammit all to hell.”
“We shall see about that one. As for tomorry, you’ll be moved downriver and sent to a small town called Lucedale. That’s where we’ll present our findings to the judge of the Third Circuit, and he will determine whether or not we have the evidence to try you on a charge of murder.”
“You know I could not have committed that crime. There is no physical evidence, there was no blood anywhere on my person, I left no fingerprints. A coroner would have concluded that the woman’s death was well in advance of my arrival.”
“Well, maybe so, maybe not. Fact is, Vincent, you was found in a dead woman’s house by my deputies and no one else was. Maybe you couldn’t stand visiting a Niggertown without cashing in on some cheap cooze and thought that old gal be accommodatin’. But she wouldn’t lie with you, and so you done poleaxed her head in. S
een it before. Now, if you’s a local, we might just say, Old Vincent, he got to thinking with his little head ’stead of his big one, and let it go at that. Them kind of things will happen. But you’s a big outside agitator so the rules are much different this time.”
“This is ridiculous. Any prosecutor would scoff at that. Did you interview other witnesses, did you develop a timeline, did you quarantine the crime scene, did you investigate her standing in the community, her kinship relations, those who might hate and fear her? No, you just arrested—”
But Sam quit. He suddenly knew what this was all about.
It was as Earl had said. Tomorrow, on the boat, he’d be drowned. The river would eat him, as it had eaten the Negro family. This story, it was all to get him quieted.
“You’ll have your day in court,” said Sheriff Leon, with a smile. “You’ll git your chance to call an attorney. We’ll git all this straightened out, once and for all. It’s all gonna be all right, and justice will be paid out, as it always is in Thebes County.”
10
NO moon, not much breeze. The dogs were quiet, and in Thebes, Mississippi, it seemed to be just another night in a long summer of nights, each the same.
But Earl crouched inside the wire at the sheriff’s compound, checking his watch. He was not dressed seasonably, but rather for war: heavy dark hunting pants, boots, a dark navy sweater, a watch cap, his face muted by mud. The K-bar knife was sheathed at his hip. His Hamilton was upside down on his wrist so that the radium dial would not show.
By his reckoning, in exactly one minute a Molotov cocktail of gasoline and powdered soap would detonate when its cigarette fuse burned into the soaked rag in its nozzle in an outbuilding in Thebes less than a half mile away. That fire would spread through the abandoned building and lead to powder fuses, which in turn would track to firecrackers Earl had constructed from the powder of .45 shells. For a few brief seconds it would sound like a gunfight had broken out in all its fury in Thebes. The building would burn; a few more shots would ring out through the night as the flames ate the wood.
He expected the boys would be up in seconds. Whatever else they were, they were well-drilled troops, and that sheriff expected them to react fast. They’d be saddled up and out to fight the invaders in a matter of minutes. That’s when Earl would kick his way into the lock-up and conk whomsoever there he found, and liberate Sam. They’d be off. But the time of freedom to move was short and chancy, and he knew he had to get as good a lead on the dogs as possible.
He checked his watch again, thinking briefly how many other times over the years he had checked his watch in dark places, waiting for a certain time to arrive, a certain signal to be given, and somebody’s idea of what was necessary to begin. But this time, at least, it was his own idea of necessary, and he would save the man whom he loved most in this world or life itself would not be worth continuing. That is how his mind worked, and that is the only way it worked. It felt no deviation, no consideration of other possibilities, no reluctance, no doubt, no temptation to a softer course, and if there was fear it was buried under a willed aggression that was his one gift in the world.
He had committed to Sam. In a youth he cared not to remember, it was Sam who offered the only tenderness in an unpleasant world, far more than Earl’s own father, a sheriff who enforced the will of God and the righteous Baptist Bible with a razor strop many times a week to Earl, his brother and his mother. But Sam was a good man who’d even once upbraided the father for his readiness to punish.
The years passed, Earl’s in the Marine Corps, and then he came back from the war and got himself in another one, in Hot Springs, and again almost got himself killed. Sam came to him a second time and said, “Now, Earl, I do have a job open. I need an investigator in Polk. Don’t pay much, but you’ll be in the public safety sector and I will be making calls on your behalf. I want you working for me, young man. I don’t want nothing bad happening to you.”
So they worked together for a number of years, and Earl finally began to understand that in some way—no book would ever say this, but he felt it and knew it to be so, whatever the books might say—Sam was the father he’d always wanted. He couldn’t put this in words, of course, for words were tricky things and never meant exactly what they said, or worse, never said exactly what they said, or worse, never said exactly what was meant. But Sam was steady and fair and honest and as hard a worker as Earl had ever seen, and it was Sam who got Earl a bank loan so that he could fix up his father’s old place, and it was Sam who treated Earl’s boy more like a grandson than an employee’s son, and it was Sam who loved that boy, Bob Lee, and made the boy feel connected to family.
So now: we do it, goddammit, without looking back, we do this thing.
He looked again at his watch. Yes, any minute now and—
From far off the blast erupted. It wasn’t a blast so much as evidence of a huge force being released. A glow rose up through the trees, and seconds later the crackers popped—Earl had set up twenty-five of them from thirty cartridges, the bullets painfully pried out of shells, then resealed with mud. They went off, powder and primer detonating simultaneously, and it sounded like the Dalton gang had decided to rob two banks in a town that had none.
Earl watched as the big log house stirred, and lamps were lit all around it. Someone fired up the generator, and then a man, then another, then three or four clambered out to see the ruckus. Someone started clanging on a big gong, and for a little bit it looked almost humorous—the term Chinese fire drill came to Earl’s mind—as the boys, then the sheriff, tried to figure out what was going on.
A night patroller came thundering up the road and roared into the compound, gathered his sweated horse to a halt, and started screaming.
“Sutter’s Store is burning and men is shooting the place up. Don’t know what it is, maybe the niggers are getting a revolt going.”
“Y’all git a-goin’,” screamed the sheriff. “You got to stop these goddamn things early else they git wild and big on you. G’wan, git out there, you bastards!”
The horsemen saddled and mounted, and played with guns for a bit—revolvers loaded, shells inserted into shotgun tubes, levers thrown, hammers drawn back—and then, without much chatter, the unit roared out the gate, pulling up a screen of dust from the road.
Earl had placed himself at an angle to the house such that the fewest of the windows opened onto him. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t slouch or scurry. Now he arose and walked purposefully forward, presuming that in the general melee no one would be focused enough to notice, or that no one would notice that as he walked, he had Sam’s old undershirt knotted around the ankle of one leg. He made it.
He slid around the back of the house as another group of outriders, this time led by the sheriff himself, hurried off. Possibly the place was deserted by now; possibly it wasn’t.
Quickly, he found the shed that contained the generator, which was plugging away and coughing up smoke as its gasoline engine drove its gears. He crouched to it and unscrewed the cap to the tank. He untied the bunched undershirt from his leg, rolled it thin and fed one end of the tube of cloth down into the gas. He wedged the shirt into the nozzle of the tank, knowing full well that the gasoline would diffuse upward until it had saturated the shirt. Except that he took out a Lucky Strike cut in half already, lit it, took a deep puff, and wedged it into the bunched cotton. It would burn down as the fuel spread up; in two minutes (he’d timed it with the other half of the cigarette), when they met, the tank would be lit off and the boys would then have two fires to think about, one that was burning up their own goods.
He left the shed, slipped along the house and into the lock-up. He tried to ease his way in, but an old guard was standing up, looking in the direction of the fire, fingering a large double-barreled sawed-off. The man smoked a cigar, shifted weight from one foot to the other uneasily, wiped his dry lips, scanned the horizon, and generated unease in all the ways a man can generate unease.
Earl rem
oved his K-bar, feeling its familiar heft and weight, the worn smoothness of the leather grip. He knew exactly the length of the blade and what it was capable of.
Swiftly he walked to the old man, gripping the knife handle.
Earl struck, and he went down.
Earl hit him with the metal cap at the end of the grip, right where the jaw meets the skull, an inch below and an inch on the diagonal from the ear. It was the haymaker. It conked the old boy so solid his lights went out before he hit the ground, and the shotgun clattered away into the dust. He’d be gone cold for a good five minutes.
Earl stepped in, grabbed the keys off the desk, and went back and unlocked Sam, who had dressed silently, even to the point of tightening his tie. His eyes bulged with anticipation or fear, and he was already breathing hard and shallow.
“Let’s go,” Earl hissed, and the two of them scurried out the door.
But before Sam could lurch himself off into the night, Earl had him under control.
“We goin’ run out the front, trying to step in the tracks cut up by the horses. Step in horseshit if you see any. You got me?”
“How can I see? I can’t see the—”
Whoomph!
It wasn’t a blast so much as an unleashing; a blade of light ruptured up the shank of the dark sky, spreading illumination as it rose. When it rose high enough, it fragmented, sending flowers of devouring flame off in a thousand directions. Enough landed upon the house to catch its roof ablaze, and in this comforting glow, Earl and Sam found the cut and shit-caked tracks of the angry horses, and dashed out the front gate.
“Off here,” he yelled.
They left the road and headed to the trees. It was a maze of interlocking pines, a complete bafflement in the dark. But Earl found an incline just where he knew it to be, and climbed a small hill, and at the top, oriented toward the east, found a brief interruption of meadow, and then another wall of trees. Where he thought it should be, he stopped, then snapped on, ever so briefly, his flashlight, until the beam disclosed a loop of rope around the trunk of a pine. He went to it, and with his K-bar cut it free and stuffed it into his belt.