He had an idea, but he would have to wait for George to get back.
THEIR captor returned in excellent spirits, with four good-sized redfish in a plastic shopping bag. He turned the fish over to Martha to gut while he washed the bag out with seawater. “You get ’em with a bat?” Ham asked when he returned. “I figured you’d make a gig.”
“Didn’t have to.” George grinned, taking a handful of tinder from his pack. “There’s fish everywhere trapped in these little ponds. All you have to do is kick up the bottom. When it’s good and muddy they come up to see. Then you whack ’em, just like we whacked you when you wandered out onto the beach.” He cleared a space on the highway and stacked up old ferns, cattail heads, and dropped pine needles. On top of the tinder he placed twigs, followed by larger bits of deadfall and driftwood the storm had thrown up. “Don’t be sore, though. I’ll give you a taste of breakfast this morning. Do your hearts good.”
“George,” Martha said.
“‘Muzzle not the ox that treads out the corn,’” George intoned. “They got to be able to walk, don’t they? At least for today.” He bent over his fire and flicked the silver cigarette lighter. The tinder flinched and smoked, reluctant to catch. Either water had gotten at it during the storm, or the ever-present Gulf Coast humidity had kept it moist. Finally a fan of pine needles went up, and little buds of white fire broke open on some of the smaller twigs.
George dug a battered tin skillet out of his pack. He waved at the long sky, the morning sun glinting on the salt-grass marsh, the gentle roar of the rollers breaking offshore. “A day like this makes you glad to be alive, don’t it?”
“You’ll excuse us if me and Ham don’t spit up any hallelujahs,” Josh said. They still lay tied back to back on the pavement.
George stopped and looked around, eyes merry. “What did you say your big friend’s name was? Ham? My Lord, I might have to eat you boys after all! Ham! That’s what I call a Sign.”
“The little one, he’s kind of stringy,” Martha said, grinning.
George considered. “Not much of a roast, I’ll admit, but I’d say he’s halfway to jerky already. Six hours in a smokehouse, I reckon I could slip him into my back pocket with space left over for a tin of chaw.” Martha laughed in spite of herself, and George chuckled until he had to wipe the tears of laughter from his eyes and tend to the fire, which was threatening to go out. “You get busy with those fish now, Martha. I always loved to fish, even before the Flood. You boys are too young to remember the world back then, I suppose. Even Martha here can’t recall it, not really.”
“We had a color TV and watched cartoons on Saturday morning,” Martha said. “I had to go to a funeral after the neighbors ate my brother. I had red shoes.”
“Nobody ate your brother,” George said sharply. “Anyway he died after the Flood. You got it all mixed up. She don’t even know how old she is. What year is it, honey?” Martha didn’t answer. “See? Might as well ask a rattlesnake.” George stuck out the skillet. Martha put in two redfish fillets.
George squatted in the road, holding his pan over the smoky fire. “Now I was a grown man. I remember. We had it easy then, that’s the gospel truth. And sure, it was nice to watch a game on TV and drink a beer. But that’s a life for a steer, not a man.” He gestured at the wide world with his skillet. “Out here, today, it’s survival of the fittest. It’s tough. It’s harsh. Are you the hunter or the hunted? But it makes you strong. In the old days, the government took away half of what you earned, gave it to the weak and the lazy blacks and drug addicts and gangs. White punks, too, it wasn’t only blacks,” he added, with a glance at Martha. “Nowadays you get a truer picture of what a man is really worth.”
“Fuck you, you piece of shit,” Ham said. Josh didn’t point out he’d heard Ham say pretty much the same thing. “You cunt-sucking sister-fucker.”
George jiggled his skillet over the fire and grinned. “Well, ain’t nothing good about a fox, to hear the chickens tell it.”
Martha turned her head away from the fish she was gutting and coughed, another dry hack.
“How long have you had that?” Josh said.
“Had what?”
“That cough.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Couple of weeks, maybe. It ain’t nothing.”
“Couple of weeks!” George said. “Try two months. Keeps me up all night and makes her wiggle when we do the nasty. It’s a flu.”
“It’s a flu,” Martha said.
Josh said, “Ever get night sweats, Martha?”
She cut the head off a second redfish with an angry chop. “Why don’t you mind—”
“She does, too.” George looked sharply at Josh. “I noticed it myself.”
Josh wanted to cheer. He had George hooked now. “Hm,” he said. The smell of frying redfish reached his nostrils, and his appetite rushed back for the first time in three days. His salivary glands clenched, though he’d drunk so little water that only a trickle of spit wet his mouth.
“You think she’s got something,” George said.
Josh shrugged.
“It’s the flu,” Martha snapped. She stared Josh down. Her wrist bones stood out clearly as she pulled the guts out of the fish and threw them in the roadside ditch. In full daylight her face looked even more gaunt, her scarred cheeks hollow and the bones of her forehead clearly visible under her skin.
“Martha, you might as well let the man ask some questions. If you’re sick we need to get you some help,” George said soothingly.
“You don’t want to be weak,” Ham said sarcastically. “It’s a tough world out here. Dog-eat-dog. Survival of the fittest.”
Bless you, Josh thought. You couldn’t have said anything better if I’d rehearsed you for an hour. “Do you ever get fevers in the afternoon?” Josh asked. “Say mid-afternoon to sunset?”
“No,” Martha said.
“Have you been losing weight over the last few months?”
“No.”
Josh glanced at George. George looked down at his skillet.
“Swelling in your joints? Not all over—maybe just one or two?” Josh saw George’s eyes dart to the bulging knuckle on the ring finger of Martha’s left hand.
“I got rheumatics in the family,” Martha said.
Josh fell quiet.
“Well?” George said.
Josh blinked. “What? Oh, probably it’s the flu. There’s no way I could make a sure diagnosis anyway, not without a TB test.”
“TB?” George said. “Tuberculosis?”
“He’s making this shit up,” Martha said angrily.
“I just wondered, because of the cough,” Josh said. Ham twisted his head around to try to see Joshua’s face. Josh shrugged. “It’s probably the flu.”
Martha put down her fish and stood up. She walked over to where Josh was lying on the road and kicked him in the stomach so savagely he doubled up against Ham’s back, retching. “I ain’t weak,” she said. She stared at George. “Don’t you believe any of this bullshit.”
“I ain’t worried,” he said, looking into the skillet. But his previous ebullience was gone, and when the fish was cooked Josh and Ham didn’t get any of it after all.
Josh had hoped that after the breakfast stop they would make camp for the day, but George pushed on. “I want to get home tonight,” he explained. “The rate you boys are going, that could take a while.” Josh couldn’t talk him into giving them any food, but he grudgingly agreed to let them have water. Martha took a long pull off the canteen, then gave each of them a swig. “One hell of a storm that was,” George said, looking out to sea as he took the water from Martha. Josh noticed that he wiped off the mouth of the canteen with his shirt before taking a drink. He thought Martha noticed it, too.
George untied Josh from Ham and they set off, each still hobbled at the ankles and elbows. George pushed them into a waddling jog, shoving and yelling at them constantly. As the sun climbed and the day got hotter they slowed down even more. “I’m about
out of patience,” George said, tight-lipped. Some time later, he caught sight of another live-oak limb that the storm had thrown up on the beach. Jogging down off the highway he used the aluminum baseball bat to snap off a long switch. “This oughta help,” he said, jabbing the splintered end of the stick hard into Ham’s back. Ham grunted in pain.
He drove them harder, whipping their calves or jabbing them in the shoulders or back when they slowed down. It was a hellish journey. The brief respite from summer that had followed the storm had evaporated. The day was hot, as hot as it had been before the hurricane. The air was unbearably muggy, and as the day wore on it stank worse and worse of hot mud and rot and the decomposing bodies of stranded fish and livestock killed by the storm. Josh’s eyes stung with constant sweat. He worried about dehydration. He fell again and again, only to have George jerk him back to his feet. Ham wasn’t so lucky; when he fell, George just beat him with the switch until he got up on his own. Josh wondered if George was actually showing him a kind of favoritism, as if he had plans for him later and not Ham. Or perhaps George was just smart enough not to get too close to the big man. Even bound, Ham towered over the rest of them, and huge as he was, he might be able to do a lot of damage with a shoulder rush or a head butt.
Then there were the mosquitoes, clouds and clouds of them. By mid-morning George called a halt. “Little bastards are going to eat us alive. Martha, git on into the grass there and get some mud. I’ll keep an eye on the boys. You watch out for gators.”
She nodded and headed down into the marsh. Josh noticed she took the knife with her. George turned. “You. Sit.” he said, jabbing Ham behind one knee with his switch.
Ham collapsed to his knees. His huge shoulders heaved as he gasped for air. “So help me Jesus, if I ever get my hands on you—”
“You won’t, beef, so save your breath.” George took Josh by the arm and turned him so they were facing out to sea, with their backs to Martha in the marsh. “Now, Josh,” he said quietly, “I think you and me could come to an understanding. A big body, that’s always useful for a while. But a doctor…I can’t make any promises, not without talking to Martha, but I don’t think there’s any call to waste that education by making you a field hand. In fact, I think I could go so far as to say you might not have to wear hobbles. Just a little nick in the hamstring, you know, to make sure you stick around. With that and my brand on you, I doubt you’d get rustled. You and me, we could have a very profitable relationship.”
Josh forced himself to remain cool and concentrate, ignoring the pain in his wrist and the clouds of mosquitoes that had already covered his bare chest with bites. “How about Ham?”
“Well…I tell you,” George said after a moment, “a big body like that, he’d be pretty useful to have around. Couldn’t let him roam without a hobble, of course. But with me getting on and all, we could use a strong back around the spread.”
Josh took this to mean the big man was obviously dangerous and would get his throat cut the minute he had conveniently walked himself to George’s smokehouse. “I’m relieved to hear that.” he said.
George sidled closer. “Now, remind me a little bit about TB. How contagious is that, exactly?”
“Not really bad. You probably had some of the vaccines and boosters when you were in school.”
George passed a hand over his stubbled head. “Hm. What about poor Martha, hey? What’s her chances?”
“It’s probably the flu.”
George grimaced and lowered his voice still further. “I ain’t so sure. Let’s just say I have reason to believe she may have fibbed on a couple of those questions you asked her.”
“Oh,” Josh said. “If that’s true, I’m afraid TB is a real possibility.” A certainty, in fact; Martha had the most dead obvious case of the disease he had seen in years. “If it is tuberculosis, her outlook isn’t very good. Six months, maybe. A year at the most.”
George glanced behind them. Martha was up to her calves in the marsh, plastering handfuls of mud over herself to keep off the mosquitoes. She had covered up the bare skin of her face, wrists, feet and ankles, and was now beginning to coat her clothing as well. George turned back to face the sea. “That’s hard. We been together a lot of years now. I took her in and looked out for her from when she was just thirteen years old. Lot of time. We had us three kids.”
“The kids are at home?”
“Not really,” George said. He shook his head. “We made a pretty good team, Martha and me. It comes to all men, though, right? Nature red in tooth and claw—my daddy used to say that. Live well today, you might die tomorrow. That’s my motto.”
The two men stood together, watching the waves break tirelessly on the shore.
George stirred. “Just out of curiosity,” he said. “If some…if a gator, say, or an old coyote was to find the body of somebody who died like that, would they get TB from eating off of it?”
“From eating the corpse?”
“Out of curiosity.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Josh said in his coolest, considering, professional voice. “Certainly not if you didn’t eat the swollen joints or the lungs. And of course cooking would eliminate the problem.”
“I see,” George said. “Coyotes don’t cook, mind you.”
“I guess not,” Josh said.
Martha splashed through the ditch at the side of the road and hiked back up to the highway. “Not a word,” George murmured. “Let’s not get the poor girl rattled.” He turned to Martha with a big smile. “Your turn to guard the henhouse, my dear.” Josh noticed he took the baseball bat with him.
Josh looked for Martha and found her staring at him. Quietly he said, “George was just asking—”
“One more word out of you,” Martha said, “and I’ll cut off your dick.”
Then she coughed.
THE day got hotter and there was no more talking. The mud on George and Martha caked and hardened. Josh and Ham moved in a cloud of mosquitoes. From time to time Ham would suddenly roar and shake his head like an angry bear and drop to his knees, rolling over and over in the road as if somehow he could crush the tormenting insects under him. The first time it happened, Josh expected George to beat Ham mercilessly, but there must have been some spark of fellow feeling, a hatred of the mosquitoes that unified them all. After a moment Ham staggered to his feet, fighting his balance and the ropes binding him, and then lumbered forward again. George said nothing about it.
Just after noon Ham dropped in his tracks. “If you’re going to kill me, kill me. I’m done.”
“What if I kill your friend?”
“Fuck him,” Ham said. “If I can’t keep running to save my own ass, I sure won’t do it for his.”
George laughed. “Everybody’s always looking out for number one, that’s my motto.”
Josh sank to his knees. Gasping, he sucked in a mosquito, choked, and tried to cough it out. The temperature must be back in the nineties. The Gulf breeze still had not returned.
“Anyone for a drink?” George said, putting down his switch and his aluminum bat and slipping the pack from his shoulders.
Martha coughed. “I’ll take one,” she said, walking over. The pace and the hot day were telling on her, Josh thought. Not to mention lack of sleep and the effects of the TB that was wasting her away. Ham had spilled onto his front and lay gasping on the weed-choked asphalt. Only George seemed unfazed by the bugs and the stink and the pounding heat. His yellow teeth and eyes flashed in a smile from the midst of his mud-covered face. Right now, under the merciless Texas sun, he seemed like a different being from the rest of them, the sinewy invincible predator he pictured himself to be.
“Two hours’ rest to get your wind, boys,” George said. “A good push should get us home by—” He paused to think, tilting his neck up as he lifted the canteen strap over his head.
His arm was passing in front of his eyes as Martha reached up with a sudden slash and jerked her hunting knife across his throat. Blood spurted from his nec
k. George’s eyes widened. He reached down to grab for his bat. The blood came harder, gobbets of it spurting with every heartbeat. It splashed over Josh’s face, hot and salty and tasting of meat. Martha dodged back. George tried to yell; a weird bubbling hiss came out of his severed throat. He staggered after Martha, blood spraying from his neck. She backed easily out of range. He fell to his knees. Blood pumped from his throat. There was so much of it, so much more blood than you’d expect, spattering the road like red rain. George lost consciousness and slid forward onto his face.
Martha watched him leak blood onto the road for a long time. “Git them before they git you,” she said sourly. “That’s my motto.”
Ham was staring at her in complete bewilderment.
She wiped the blade of the knife on her leg. “Can you fix this TB thing?”
“It’s probably the flu,” Josh said.
“I know it ain’t the goddamn flu,” Martha said. “Can you fix it?”
“Yes,” Josh lied.
“I think you just saying that to keep me from sticking you.”
“I think you don’t have a choice,” Josh said. “You’re a dead woman in six months if someone doesn’t get you well. You have a flagrant case of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and I’m your only hope of living.”
Martha considered. “All right,” she said. She stepped forward and pulled the baseball bat out of George’s hand. “End of the line for you, beef. I can’t watch bof’ of you all the way back to the smokehouse.”
Ham struggled to rise to his knees. “Just try it, baby.”
“Wait!” Josh shouted. “I want him alive.”
“Fuck that,” Martha said. She stuffed the knife in her belt and gripped the aluminum bat in both hands.
“You want me happy,” Joshua said quickly. “If I’m happy, I make you well. If I’m not happy, you have no way of knowing if I’m giving you medicine or poison.”
Martha stood quivering in the road. “Goddamn it,” she said. Suddenly she swung down hard. Ham flinched, but it was George’s head she hit. The aluminum bat crunched into his skull, partly caving it in. George’s body jerked and then stiffened. “You didn’t have to listen,” Martha yelled. She coughed, another dry hacking cough. A couple of tears crawled down her muddy cheeks. She kicked George in the side, and then again. He didn’t seem to mind.