also By Stephen Hunter

hot springs

time to hunt

black light

dirty white boys
point of impact
violent screen: a critic's 13 years on the front lines
of movie mayhem

TARGET

THE DAY BEFORE MIDNIGHT

THE SPANISH GAMBIT

THE SECOND SALADIN

THE MASTER SNIPER

TAPESTRY OF SPIES

NOVEL

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Copyright 2001 by Stephen Hunter All rights reserved, including the
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At last, for Jean

in mid-1947, Jefferson Barnes, the prosecuting attorney of Polk County,
Arkansas, finally died. Upon that tragedy the old man fell out of one of
those new golf cart things on vacation in Hot Springs, rolled down a
gully screaming damnation and hellfire all the way, and broke his neck
on a culvert Sam Vincent, his loyal Number 2, moved up to the big job.

Then in '48, Sam was anointed by the Democratic party (there was no
other in western Arkansas), which ran him on the same ticket with Harry
S. Truman and Fred C. Becker. As did those worthies, he won handily. For
Sam, it was the goal toward which he had been aiming for many years. He
had always wanted to be a servant of the law, and now, much better, he
was the law.

Sam was six foot one, forty-four, with a bushy head of hair and a
brusque demeanor that would not be called "lovable" for many years. He
stared immoderately and did not suffer fools, idiots, Yankees,
carpetbaggers, the small of spirit or the breakers of the law gladly.

He wore baggy suits flecked with pipe ash, heavy glasses, and walked in
a bounding swoop. He hunted in the fall, followed the St. Louis Browns
during the summer, when he had time, which he hardly ever did, and tied
flies, though he fished rarely enough. Otherwise, he just worked like
hell. His was classic American career insanity, putting the professional
so far above the personal there almost was no personal, in the process
alienating wife and children with his indifference, burning out
secretaries with his demands, annoying the sheriff's detectives with his
directions. In what little time remained, he served on the draft board
(he had won the Bronze Star during the Battle of the Bulge), traveled
five states to interview promising high school seniors who had applied
to his beloved Princeton, played a weekly round of golf with the county
powers at the country club, and drank too much eight-year-old bourbon.

He knew everybody; he was respected by everybody. He was a great man, a
great American. He had the highest conviction rate of any county
prosecutor in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, or Tennessee for that
matter.

He was not reelected. In fact, he lost in a landslide to a no' count
lawyer named Febus Bookins, a genial hack who smelled of gin all the
time and meant only to rob the county blind during his term of office.

He called himself a reformer, and his goal was to reform his bank
account into something more respectable.

Sam had made one mistake, but it was a mistake which few in his home
state, and in fact not many elsewhere, could ignore. In 1949, he
prosecuted a man named Willis Beaudine for raping a young woman named
Nadine Johnson. It was an unremarkable case, save for the fact that
Willis was a white person and Nadine a Negro girl. It is true she was
quite light, what some would call a "high yeller," and that she had
comely ways, and was, perhaps, not normally so innocent as she looked
when she appeared in court. But facts were facts, law was law. Certain
evidence had been developed by Sam's former investigator, Earl Swagger,
who was now a state police sergeant and was famous for the big medal he
had won during the war. Earl, however, risked nothing by testifying
against Willis, for Earl was known to be a prideful, bull-headed man who
could not be controlled by anyone and was feared by some. Sam, on the
other hand, risked everything, and lost everything, although Willis was
convicted and spent six months at the Tucker Farm. As for Nadine, she
moved from town because even in her own community she was considered
what Negro women called a " '," and moved to St. Louis, where her
appetites soon got her murdered in a case of no interest to anyone.

Sam had taken his defeat bitterly. If his family thought he would see
them more often, they were mistaken. Instead, he rented a small office
on the town square of Blue Eye, the county seat, and commenced to spend
most of his days and many of his nights there. He worked such small
cases as came his way, but mainly he plotted out ways to return to
office. He still hunted with Earl. His other friend was Connie Longacre,
the smart Eastern woman whom the county's richest, most worthless son
had brought back from his education at Annapolis in '30 and his failed
naval career thereafter. Connie had soon learned how appetite-driven a
man her Ranee was, and while trying to raise her own hellion son,
Stephen, fell to friendship with Sam, who alone in that part of Arkansas
had been to a Broadway play, had met a gal under the clock at the
Biltmore, and who didn't think Henry Wallace was a pawn of the Red
Kremlin.

Sam was never stupid, not on a single day in his life. He understood
that one thing he had to do was to regain the trust of the white people.

Therefore he utterly refused to take any cases involving Negroes, even
if they only revolved around one dark person suing another. There was a
Negro lawyer in town, a Mr. Theopolis Simmons, who could handle such
things; meanwhile, Sam worked hard, politicked aggressively, kept tabs,
sucked up to the gentry who had deposed him so gently, and tried to stay
focused.

Then, one day in June of 1951, an unusual event occurred, though nothing
in that day or the day or week before had suggested it would.

Sam, alone in his office, worked through probate papers for a farmer
named Lewis who had died intestate and whose estate was now being sued
for back taxes by the state, which would drive his widow and four
children off the property to well, to nothing. Sam would not let this
happen, if only he could figure out a way to He heard the door open. In
the county's employ he had always had a secretary; now, on his own, he
didn't. He stood, pushed his way through the fog of dense pipe smoke,
and opened the door to peer into his anteroom. An elegant gentleman had
seated himself on the sofa and was paging absently through an old copy
of Look magazine.

"Sir, do you have an appointment?" Sam asked.

The man looked up at him.

He was tanned softly, as if from an expensive vacation at the beach,
balding, and looked well tended, of an age that could have been anywhere
between thirty and fifty. He was certainly prosperous, in a
smooth-fitting blue pinstripe suit, a creamy white shirt and the black
tie of a serious man. A homburg, gray pearl, lay on the seat beside him;
his shined shoes were cap-toed black bluchers, possibly bespoke, and
little clocks or flowers marked his socks. The shoes were shined, Sam
noticed, all the way down to the sole, which was an indication that
sentence. Yes, do go on, Mr. Trugood. You have my attention, without
distraction."

"Thank you, sir. I am charged with executing a will for a certain rather
well-off late Chicagoan. He had for many years in his employ a Negro
named Lincoln Tilson."

Sam wrote: "Negro Lincoln Tilson" on his big yellow pad.

"Lincoln was a loyal custodian of my client's properties, a handyman, a
bodyguard, a gardener, a chauffeur, a man whose brightness of
temperament always cheered my client, who was negotiating a business
career of both great success and some notoriety."

"I follow, sir," said Sam.

"Five years ago, Lincoln at last slowed down. My employer settled a sum
on him, a considerable sum, and bid him farewell. He even drove him to
the Illinois Central terminal to catch the City of New Orleans and
reverse the steps by which he arrived up North so many years ago, for
Lincoln's pleasure was to return to the simpler life from which he had
sprung in the South. Lincoln returned to his birthplace, a town called
Thebes, in Thebes County, Mississippi."

Sam wrote it down, while saying, "That is the deepest part of the
deepest South, I would imagine."

"It is, sir."

Thebes, as a word, rang ever so slightly in Sam's imagination. He
recalled that the original was a Greek town, city even, much fought over
in antiquity. For some reason the number seven occurred in concert with
it.

"I see puzzlement, sir," said Trugood. "You are well educated and no
doubt think of Seven Against Thebes, by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus.

I assure you, no army led by seven heroes is necessary in this case.

Mississippi's Thebes is a far distance from Aeschylus's tragic town of
war. It is a backwater Negro town far up the Yaxahatchee River, which
itself is a branch of the Pascagoula River. It is the site of a famous,
or possibly infamous, penal farm for colored called Thebes Farm."
"That's it," said Sam. "It is legendary among the Negro criminal class,
with whom I had many dealings as a young prosecutor. "You don't wants to
go to Thebes, they say, don't nobody never nohow come back from Thebes."

Or words to that effect."

"It seems they have it mixed up with Hades in their simplicity. Yes,
Thebes is not a pleasant place. Nobody wants to go to Thebes."

"Yet you want me to go to Thebes. That is why the fee would be so high?"

"There is difficulty of travel, for one thing. You must hire a boat in
Pascagoula, and the trip upriver is unpleasant. The river, I understand,
is dark and deep; the swamp that lines it inhospitable.

There was only one road into Thebes, through that same forbidding swamp;
it was washed out some years back, and Thebes County, not exactly a
county of wealth, has yet to dispatch repair."

"I see."

"Accommodations would be primitive."

"I slept in many a barn in the late fracas in Europe, Mr. Trugood. I can
sleep in a barn again; it won't hurt me."

"Excellent. Now here is the gist of the task. My client's estate--as I
say, considerable--is hung up in probate because Mr. Lincoln Tilson
seems no longer to exist. I have attempted to communicate with Thebes
County authorities, to little avail. I can reach no one but simpletons
on the telephone, when the telephone is working, which is only
intermittently. No letter has yet been answered. The fate of Lincoln is
unknown, and a large amount of money is therefore frozen, a great
disappointment to my client's greedy, worthless heirs."

"I see. My task would be to locate either Lincoln or evidence of his
fate. A document, that sort of thing?"

"Yes. From close-mouthed Southern types. I, of course, need someone who
speaks the language, or rather, the accent. They would hear the Chicago
in my voice, and their faces would ossify. Their eyes would deaden.

Their hearing would disintegrate. They would evolve backward
instantaneously to the neolithic."

"That may be so, but Southerners are also fair and honest folk, and if
you don't trumpet your Northern superiority in their face and instead
take the time to listen and master the slower cadences, they will
usually reward you with friendship. Is there another issue here?"

"There is indeed." He waved at his handsome suit, his handsome shoes,
his English tie. His cufflinks were gold with a discreet sapphire,
probably worth more than Sam had made in the last six months. "I am a
different sort of man, and in some parts of the South--Thebes, say-that
difference would not go unnoticed."

"You have showy ways, but they are the ways of a man of the world."

"I fear that is exactly what would offend them. And, frankly, I'm not a
brave man. I'm a man of desks. The actual confrontation, the quickness
of argument, the thrust of will on will: not really my cup of tea, I'm
afraid. A sound man understands his limits. I was the sort of boy who
never got into fights and didn't like tests of strength."

"I see."

"That is why I am buying your courage as well as your mind."

"You overestimate me. I am quite a common man."

"A decorated hero in the late war."

"Nearly everybody in the war was a hero. I saw some true courage; mine
was ordinary, if even that."

"I think I have made a very good choice."

"All right, sir."

"Thank you, Mr. Vincent. This is the fee I had in mind."

He wrote a figure on the back of his card, and pushed it over. It took
Sam's breath away.

"You are sending me to be your champion in hell, it sounds like," said
Sam. "But you are paying me well for the fight."

"You will earn every penny, I assure you."

IT took Sam but a few days to bank the retainer, rearrange his schedule,
book a ticket on the City of New Orleans, and spend an afternoon in the
Fort Smith municipal library reading up on Thebes and its penal farm.

What he learned appalled him.

On the night before he was to leave, he finally faced the unsettled
quality of his feelings. At last, he climbed into his car and drove the
twelve miles east along Arkansas Route 8 toward the small town of Board
Camp; turning left off the highway, he traveled a half mile of bumpy
road to a surprisingly large white house on a hill that commanded the
property. The house was freshly painted as was the barn behind, and
someone had worked the gardens well and dutifully; it was June, and the
place was ablaze with the flora chosen to flourish in the hot West
Arkansas sun. A few cows grazed in the far meadows, but much of the
property was still in trees, where Sam and the owner shot deer in the
fall, if they didn't wander farther afield.

Sam pulled up close to the house, aware that he was under observation.

This was Earl's young son, Bob Lee, almost five. Bob Lee was a grave boy
who had the gift of stillness when he so desired. He was a watcher, that
boy. He already had made some hunting trips with them, and had a talent
for blood sport, the ability to understand the messages of the land, to
decipher the play of light and shadow in the woods, to smell the weather
on the wind, though he was some years yet from shooting. Still, he was a
steady presence on the hunt, not a wild kid. It was Sam's sworn duty as
godfather to the boy to draw him into the professional world; Earl was
adamant that his son would do better than he and not be a roaming
Marine, a battlefield scurrier, a man killer, as Earl had been. Earl
wanted something more settled for his only son, a career in the law or
medicine. It was important to Earl, and when things were important to
Earl, it was Earl's force of will that usually made them happen.

"Howdy there, Bob Lee," called Sam.

"Mr. Sam, Mr. Sam," the boy responded, from the porch where he had been
sitting and looking out over the land in the twilight.

"Your daddy's still on duty, I see. Is he expected back?"

"Don't know, sir. Daddy comes and goes, you know."

"I do know. How you got such a worker as a daddy I'll never figure, when
he has such a lazy son who just sits there like a frog on a log."

"I was memorizing."

"It doesn't surprise me at all. Memorizing the land? The birds. The sky,
the clouds."

"Something like that, sir."

"Oh, you are a smart one. You have received all the brains in the
family, I can see that. You'll end up a rich one. Is your mama here?"

"Yes, sir. I'll fetch her."

The boy scooted off as Sam waited. He could have walked in himself, for
he was that familiar with the Swaggers. But something in his mood kept
him still and worrisome.

Junie Swagger emerged. Lord, a beauty still! But Junie was, well, who
knew? The childbirth had been a terrible ordeal, it was said, and Earl
not around to help, at least not till the end, and so the poor girl
fought her way through fifteen hours of labor on her own. She had not,
it was also said, quite ever come back from that. She was somewhat
dreamy, as if she didn't hear all that was said to her. Her great
pleasure was those damned flowers, and she could spend hours in the
hottest weather cultivating or weeding or fertilizing. It was also said
that she would have no more children.

Now, a little wan, she stood before him.

"Why, hello, Mr. Sam. Come on in."

"Well, Junie, thank you much, but I don't want you making no fuss. I
have to have a chat with Earl is all. You needn't even consider this a
visit, and there's no need to unlimber any hospitality."

"Oh, you are so silly. You sit down, I'll git you a nice glass of
lemonade. You'll stay for supper, I insist."

"No, ma'am. Can't. I'm in the middle of getting ready for a business
trip to New Orleans. I'm driving over to Memphis tomorrow to catch the
train."

"You know, Mr. Sam, Earl sometimes gets so caught up he doesn't get here
' late."

"I do know. It seems a shame after all he's been through that he can't
have a quieter life." Junie said nothing for a second, but her face
focused with a surprising intensity, as if some spark had been struck.

Then she said, "I fear he has other things on his mind. I know this
Korea business has him all het up. I'm scared he'll get it in his head
he has to go fight another war. He's done enough. But I can read his
melancholy. It's his nature to go where there's shooting, under the
impression he can help, but maybe out of some darker purpose."

"Earl is a man bred for war, I agree, Junie. But I do think that he'll
sit this one out on the porch. He's still in pain from wounds, and he
knows what a wonderful home you've made for him and the boy."

"Oh, Mr. Sam, you can be such a charmer sometimes. I don't believe a
word you say, never have, never will." She laughed and her face lit up.

"Now you sit here, Earl will be along shortly or not, as he sees fit. I
will bring you that lemonade and that will be that."

So Sam sat and watched the twilight grow across the land. He could have
sat all night, but on this night Earl had decided to come home as
quickly as possible, and within a few minutes Sam saw the Arkansas
Highway Patrol black-and-white scuttling down the road, pulling up a
screen of dust behind it. Earl had meant to asphalt that road for four
years now, or at least lay some gravel, but could never quite afford to
have it done. Sam had volunteered to front him the money, but Earl of
course was stubborn and wanted no debts haunting him, none left for his
heirs to owe if his melancholy about the true nature of the world ever
proved out and he turned up shot to death in some squalid field.

Earl got out of the car with a smile, for he had seen Sam from a long
way off. He loved three things in the world: his family, the United
States Marine Corps and Sam.

"Well, Mr. Sam, why didn't you tell me you were coming? Junie, get this
mart a drink of something stronger than lemonade and set an extra
place."

Earl lumbered up to the porch from his car. He was a big man, over six
feet, and still so darkened from the Pacific sun after all these years
some thought he was an Indian. He had a rumbly, slow voice famous in the
county, and his close bristly hair--he'd removed the Stetson by now--was
just beginning to gray. He was near forty years old, and his body was a
latticework of scar tissue and jerry-built field-expedient repairs. He'd
been stitched up so many times he was almost more surgical thread than
human being, testimony to the fact that a war or two will write its
record in a man's flesh. His hands were big, his muscles knotty from
farm work on weekends and plenty of it, but his face still had the same
odd calmness to it that inspired men in combat or terrified men in
crime. He looked as if he could handle things. He could.

"He says he won't stay," Junie cried from inside, "though Lord knows I
tried. You tie him to a chair and we'll be all set."

"Bob Lee's going to be disappointed if old Sam don't read him a story
tonight," Earl said.

"I will stay to read the story, yes, Earl." In his stentorian, courtroom
voice, Sam could make a story come more alive than the radio.

"And I wish this were a pure pleasure call. But I do have a matter to
discuss."

"Lord. Am I in some kind of trouble?"

"No, sir. Maybe I am, however." It was such a reversal. In some ways,
unsaid, Sam had become Earl's version of a father, his own proving to be
a disappointment and his need for someone to believe in so crucial to
his way of thinking. So he had informally adopted Sam in this role,
worked for him for two years as an investigator before Colonel Jenks had
managed at last to get Earl on the patrol. The bonds between the two men
had grown strong, and Sam alone had heard Earl, who normally never
discussed himself, on such topics as the war in the Pacific or the war
in Hot Springs.

The two sat; Junie brought her husband a glass of lemonade, and he in
turn gave her the Sam Browne belt with the Colt .357, the handcuffs, the
cartridge reloaders and such, which she took into the house to secure.

Earl loosened his tie, set his Stetson down on an unused chair. His
cowboy boots were dusty, but under the dust shined all the way down to
the soles.

"All right," he said. "I am all ears." Sam told him quickly about his
commission to go to Thebes, Mississippi, and the tanned, smooth-talking
colleague who had put it together for him, and the large retainer.

"Sounds straightforward to me," said Earl.

"But you have heard of the prison at Thebes."

"Never from a white person. White folks prefer to believe such places
don't exist. But from the Negroes, yes, occasionally."

"It has an evil reputation."

"It does. I once arrested a courier running too fast up 71 toward Kansas
City. He had a trunkful of that juju grass them jazz boys sometimes
smoke. He was terrified I's going to send him to Thebes. I thought he'd
die of a heart attack he's so scared. Never saw nothing like it. It took
an hour to get him settled down, and then of course another hour to make
him understand this was Arkansas, not Mississippi, and I couldn't send
him to Thebes, even if I wanted to. I sent him to Tucker, instead, where
I'm sure he had no picnic. But at the trial, he seemed almost happy.

Tucker was no Thebes, at least not in the Negro way of looking at
things."

"They live in a different universe, somehow," Sam said. "It doesn't make
sense to us. It is haunted by ghosts and more attuned to the natural and
more connected to the earth. Their minds work differently.

You can't understand, sometimes, why they do the things they do. They
are us a million years ago." "Maybe that's it," said Earl. "Though the
ones I saw on Tarawa, they died and bled the same as white folks."

"Here's why I'm somewhat apprehensive," Sam confessed. "I went up to
Fort Smith the other day, and found out what I could find out about this
place. Something's going on down there that's gotten me spooked a bit."

"What could spook Sam Vincent?"

"Well, sir, five years ago, according to the Standard and Poor's rating
guide to the United States, in Thebes, Mississippi, there was a sawmill,
a dry cleaner, a grocery and general store, a picture show, two
restaurants, two bar-and-grills, a doctor, a dentist, a mayor, a
sheriff, a feed store and a veterinarian."

"Yes?"

"Now there's nothing. All those businesses and all those professional
men, they've up and gone."

"All over the South, the Negroes are on the move. Mississippi is cot
ton, and cotton isn't king no more. They're riding the Illinois Central
up North to big jobs and happier lives."

"I know, and thought the same at first. So I picked at random five towns
scattered across Mississippi. And while some have had some social
structure reduction and considerable population loss, they remain
vibrant. So this does seem strange." Earl said nothing.

Sam continued.

"Then there's this business of the road. There was a highway into Thebes
for many years and it too supported businesses and life. Gas stations,
diners, barbecue places, that sort of thing. But some time ago, the road
washed out, effectively sealing the town and that part of the swamp and
the woods off from civilization, well, such civilization as they have in
Mississippi. You'd think a civic structure would get busy opening that
road up, for the road is the river of opportunity, especially in the
poor, rural South. Yet now, all these years later, it remains washed
out, and as far as I can learn, no one has made an attempt to open it.

The only approach to what remains of Thebes is a long slow trip by boat
up that dark river. That's not a regular business either. The prison
launches make the journey for supplies on a weekly basis, and to pick up
prisoners, but the place is sealed off.

You don't get there easily, you don't get back easily, and everybody
seems to want it that way. Now doesn't that seem strange?" "Well, sir,"
said Earl, "maybe it's a case of no road, no town, and that's why it's
all drying up down there."

"It would seem so. But the decline of Thebes had already begun three
years earlier. It was as if the road was the final ribbon on the
package, not what was inside the package." "Hmmm," said Earl. "If you
are that worried, possibly you shouldn't go."

"Well, sir, I can't not go. I have accepted a retainer and I have a
professional obligation I cannot and would not evade."

"Would you like me to come along, in case there's nasty surprises down
there?"

"No, no, Earl, of course not. I just want you to know what is going on.

I have here an envelope containing my file on the case, all my findings,
my plan of travel and so forth. I leave tomorrow on the ten forty five
out of Memphis, and should reach New Orleans by five. I'll spend the
night there, and have hired a car the next morning to take me to
Pascagoula. Presumably I'll find a boatman, and I'll reach town late the
day after tomorrow. If I can find a telephone, I'll call you or my wife
and leave messages on a daily basis. If I can't find a telephone, well
then, I shall just complete my business and come on home."

"Well, let's pick a date, and if you ain't home by that time, then I'll
make it my business to figure out what's happening."

"Thank you, Earl. Thank you so much. You saw where I was headed."

"Mr. Sam, you can count on me."

"Earl, if you say something, I know it's done."

"I'd bring a firearm. Not one of your hunting rifles, but a handgun.

You still have an Army forty-five, I believe."

"No, Earl. I am a man of reason, not guns. I'm a lawyer. The gun cannot
be my way. Logic, fairness, humanity, the rule of the law above all
else, those are my guidelines."

"Mr. Sam, where you're going, maybe such things don't cut no ice.

I'll tell you this, if I have to come, I'll be bringing a gun."

"You have to do it your way, and I have to do it mine. So be it. Now
let's read a story to Bob Lee."

"I think he'd like that. He likes the scary ones the best."

"You still have that book of Grimm's?"

"His favorite."

"I know there's a dark tale or two in there."

"A dark tale it will be, then."

Sam loved New Orleans, he was moderate and professional the night he
stayed there, avoiding its temptations. He took a room in a tourist
home, ate at a diner, went to sleep early after meticulously recording
all his expenditures for his client. The next morning, he rendezvoused
with his car and driver, and commenced the drive along the gulf coast
down U.S. 90, passing quickly from Louisiana into Mississippi.

It was, at first at least, a pleasant drive, with a driver named Eddie,
who knew how to keep his mouth shut, and his big, comfortable Lasalle.

"It's a 1940," Eddie said, "the last and the best." And that was the
only thing Eddie said.

Sam had removed and folded his coat, rolled up his sleeves, put his
straw Panama on the seat next to him, and let the cooling air stream in
through the open windows of the big black car. Of course he did not
loosen his tie; after all, one did not do such things. There were
limits. But he got out his pipe and lit up a bowlful, and simply watched
the sights. On his right, the gulf's blue tide lapped against the white
sands, and small towns fled by, each quaint and cute enough for a
tourist trade that was beginning to catch hold. The small cities along
the way were white, sunny places, Gulfport and Biloxi, further given
over to tourists. He could see young couples on the beach, some of them
beautiful some not so beautiful. Beach umbrellas furled against the gulf
breezes and homes had rooms to let, many of them with free television as
the signs proudly proclaimed.

But beyond Biloxi, it changed. No one came here for the sun or the sand,
and no beaches had been cleared. It was just mangoes and ferns and scrub
pine and vegetation whose only distinguishing feature was its generic
green viney quality, down to a strip of soil before the water which, Sam
fancied (maybe it was his imagination) had changed in tone from carefree
blue to a dirty brown. The sediment this far down floated unsettled in
the water, giving it the look of an immense sewer.

It smelled, also, some pungent chemical odor.

Pascagoula, it turned out, was a city of industry. Paper plants
dominated, and shipbuilding came second, and it was a city that had once
strained mightily to produce. Now, hard times had hit it. The paper
industry was down, and shipbuilding had stopped with the end of the war.

It was a sad place; the boom of the war years had dried to bust, but
everyone had a taste for the big, easy money of before.

Again, maybe he was imagining too much, but he thought he saw despair
and lassitude everywhere. The streets felt empty; signs were not freshly
painted, and commerce was not active. It all baked under a hot sun, the
stench from the paper mills enough to give a man a crushing headache.

"Sir, do you have a particular destination? Do you want to go to a
hotel?"

Sam looked at his watch. It was only 11:00 a. m." and, yes, he did want
to go to a hotel, have a nice lunch, lie down in a room with a strong
fan or maybe some air-conditioning, take a nap. But it was not in him to
do so. He was rigid about everything, but most of all about duty and
obligation.

"No, Eddie, I've got to push on. Uh, do you know the town?"

"Not hardly, sir. I'm a N'Awleens boy. Don't like to come out to these
here hot little no' count places."

"Well, then, I suppose we'd best start at the town hall or the police
station. I'd like to confer with officials before I venture further."

"Yes, sir. B'lieve I c'n hep you there."

Eddie located the single municipal building quickly enough, a town hall
on one street, a police station, complete to fleets of motorcycles and
squad cars parked outside, on the other.

Sam chose the administrative before the enforcement. He suited up again,
tightening all that could be tightened, straightening all that could be
straightened, and implanting the Panama squarely up top as befit his
position and dignity. Eddie left him in front of grand stairs that led
to not much of a door; he climbed them and ducked between statues of
Confederate heroes facing the gulf.

He entered to a foyer, consulted with a clerk at a desk, got directions,
entered a set of hallways to look for the city prosecutor's office. It
was not at all hard to find, and he went through the opaque-glassed
doors to find a waiting room with leather chairs and magazines under the
rubric white only. Through a doorway that bore the sign colored only he
could see another room, ruder and filled with more rickety furniture,
all jammed up with pitiful Negroes. He turned to the white secretary
behind a desk, whose hair was tidy but who ruled by right of a harsh
face and too much makeup.

He presented his card.

"And, sir?"

"And I wonder, ma'am, if I could have a word with Mr ..." he struggled
to remember the name painted on the door, then did. "Car rut hers

"What is this in reference to?" she said, with a Southern smile that
meant nothing whatsoever.

"Ma'am, I am a prosecutor myself, only recently retired on the basis of
electoral whimsy. I wish to speak with my colleague."

"You from here in Mississip?"

"No, ma'am. Up a bit. Arkansas, Polk County, in the west. It's on the
card."

"Well, I'll see."

It wasn't Carruthers who came to get him but a Mr. Redfield, an
assistant city attorney, who made a show of ignoring the unfortunate
Negroes in the back room and shook his hand heartily, escorting him back
to a clean little office. As they walked, Sam searched his memory, and
at last realized why Redfield admitted him: they'd met at some
convention in Atlantic City in 1941, with a group of other prosecutors,
all having a last fling before the war did with them what it did.

"Glad to see you made it back, Mr. Redfield," Sam said.

"Never got the chance to leave, alas," said the man, as they walked into
the door of a clean little cubicle. "Four-F. Stayed here prosecuting
draft dodgers while you boys had all the fun. Where'd you end up?

Europe, wasn't it?"

"Finally. Ended up in the artillery."

"Win anything big?"

"No, just did the job. Glad to be back in one piece."

Redfield broke out the bourbon and poured himself and Sam a tot.

Tasted fine, too. They settled into chairs, chatted somewhat aimlessly
on the subject of the others in attendance of that long ago convention,
who was dead, who divorced, who quit, who rich, who poor. Redfield then
segued neatly into local politics and gossip, his chances for getting
the big job in the next election or maybe it would be better to wait
until '56, local conditions, which weren't good, except for, he laughed
heartily, the coming of some Northern fool's waterproof coffin company
to the South, which would put the ship carpenters to some good use until
it failed, ha ha ha, or the gub'mint lost so many destroyers off Korea
it needed to build some new ones. Sam didn't really care, but down South
here, it was the way business was done, until finally, when a ten-second
pause and a second drink announced it to be the time, he launched into
particulars.

He explained, concluding with his unease about the upcoming trip.

"Well," said Redfield, "truth be told, I don't know much about Thebes.

That's two counties up the river, and not much between but bayou and
wild niggers and Choctaws living on ' and catfish, then finally your
piney woods, thick as hell. Too thick for white people."

"Ah, I see."

"Don't know why any feller'd go up there he didn't have to."

"Well, Redfield, I really don't want to. But I've accepted the job. I
was hoping you'd write me a letter of introduction or give me a name of
a colleague to whose good offices I could appeal."

"Most counties, that'd work just fine, that'd be the way to do it. But
Thebes now, Thebes is different. It's the prison farm, and that's about
all. You'd have to git into our state corrections bureaucracy, and I do
know those boys run their territory very tight and private-like. Don't
like strangers, especially strangers from up North--"

"Arkansas? Up North?"

"Now, mind you, I ain't saying I'd be in agreement with that sentiment,
but that would be how their minds work. I'm only clarifying here.

They're a clannish bunch. They've got a system full of colored men, some
of whom may be het up on juju, some on booze, some on Northern communist
agitation, all that plus your natural Negro tendency toward chaos,
irrationality and of' Willie thumping Willie on Saturday night just for
something to do. So them boys got a whole lot on their minds, hear? I
wouldn't just go poking about now." "I see," said Sam.

"What I'd do, you'll pardon me for presuming, I'd just turn around, head
back up North. Yes, sir. Then write that fellow in Chicago, tell him
everything's fine, he don't got to worry, the death certificate be on
its way. I mean, it's only probate now, isn't it? Then I'd forget all
about it. Come time, he'll write some angry letters, but hell, he's a
Yankee, that's all they know how to do is act all indignant."

"Well, see here, Redfield, I can't do that. I took the money, I must do
the work."

"Oh, come on now, Vincent. Wouldn't be the first time someone took a
retainer, wrote a letter, and forgot all about it. I just wouldn't be
messing about in Thebes. They got their own ways of doing things up
there, they don't want nobody getting in their bid ness no sir. I'd
write you a letter, but to who?"

"Whom," corrected Sam.

"Who, whom, it don't matter. Thebes up there, up that dark river, ain't
nobody up there to write to, ain't nobody up there to sit down nice and
polite, sit under a fan, have a sip of rye whiskey, and palaver. They're
sitting on a goddamned powder keg, what they're doing. A nigger powder
keg. They got to keep it from blowing, and, way I see it, that's a
hero's job."

"Redfield, I have been in a variety of prisons, white and Negro both.

The men who run them are many things, but heroic is about the last word
I'd employ. Necessary is about as far as I'd be pleased to go."

"Well, it's all clear and dandy to y'all up North, with all your
answers. Down here, where it never snows and things change slow except
when they change fast and ugly, it's a lot less stamped out. It can be
downright messy. That's why there has to be a Thebes. The niggers have
to know there's a Thebes, and by God if they get uppity, Thebes is where
they'll be sent. So in its way, Thebes is more important than Jackson or
Biloxi or Oxford or Pascagoula. Without Thebes, wouldn't be no Jackson
or Biloxi or Oxford or Pascagoula. Without Thebes, Mississippi is the
Congo and America is Africa. Thebes is what keeps the lid on. I'd hate
to see you get your nose all a-twitch because you saw one guard knock a
nigger down and you make a big thing over it. It just won't do. I say as
one white man to another, you best stay far from Thebes. Nothing going
on in Thebes you got to see or know about, you hear?"

"Well, Redfield, I am sorry you see it that way. I can tell you're a man
set in your ways, but I am equally set in mine. I have a job to do,
that's all. I am an attorney, I took on a client, and goddammit, that is
what I will do, so help me God, Thebes or no Thebes."

He stood and walked out, without looking back.

they drove for a while, and Eddie read Sam's gloomy mood.

"Sir, any directions? I'll take you anywheres." Sam said, "I suppose
we're looking for a waterfront, or a marine district or some such. I
have to hire a boat and just get this done on my own."

"Yes, sir. I'll try and find it for you, I surely will."

It turned out Pascagoula itself had only a marine industry focused on
the deep waters of the gulf; what they needed was a smaller satellite
city called Moss Point, up the river a few miles, where boats ventured
out into the bayous that lay to the north.

Eventually, after more starting and stopping, they found a place, an old
boatyard administered from a peely shed near the water. The boats were
moored along docks, and they floated and bobbed on the vagaries of tide
and current, bumping into one another, none of them particularly
impressive craft. Sam had traveled to England on the Queen Elizabeth and
across the Channel on an LST on D-Day. Even when the latter came under
fire as it neared the spot to deposit him, his men and his six 105-mm
howitzers on the dangerous shore, he'd felt more comfort than he did
confronting this wooden fleet rotting in the sun.

The boats were all some form of fishing craft, their engines inboard,
their cabins low to the prow, their comforts all but absent.

fishing, the sign said.

And the place smelled of that commerce, with lines looped everywhere,
and nets hung to dry, the sand shifty under the foot, crab husks and
fish spines abandoned everywhere, the gulls flap pity-flapping overhead
for a bite of flesh or cake, but otherwise still as buzzards on the
wharf.

Sam ducked inside to find an old boatyard salt, with bleached eyes and a
face gone straight to the quality of the dried plum called a prune.

"Howdy," said Sam, to no answer, but only a sullen stare. "I'd like to
hire a boat."

"You ain't dressed to fish."

"No", not for fishing."

"You just want to piddle around? See the sights?"

"No, sir. Trying to get upriver to a town called Thebes."

"Thebes. Don't nobody go there, except the prison supply boat once a
week."

"Could I hitch or hire a ride aboard it?"

"Ain't likely. Them boys are coolish toward strangers. They run tight
and private-like. What would be your business in Thebes?"

"It's a confidential matter."

"Ain't talking, huh?"

"Look, I don't have to answer anybody's questions, all right? Let's just
find me a boat that'll go upriver. That's your job, isn't it? You run
this place? I'm not one for Mississippi lolly gagging in the hot sun
when there's work to be done."

"Say, you're a cuss now, ain't you? A stranger, too, from the way you
talk. Well, sir, I can git you a boat and a man to take you deep into
the bayou after big catfish or brown bass or whatever; I knows men
who'll take you far into the gulf where the big bluefish play, and maybe
you'd hook one of them and be proud to put it on your wall. Maybe you
just want to be in the sun and feel it turn your pasty face a nice shade
while sipping on an iced Dixie. But nobody here is going up the bayou to
the Yaxahatchee and then to Thebes. Nothing up there but blue-gum
niggers who'd as soon eat your liver with the spleen still attached as
smile and call you sir. And if one of them blue gums takes a bite out of
you, sure as winter, you goin' die before the sun sets."

"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."

"Polices You the polices?"

"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 lace less 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 ever where 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
', 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.

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 steep. 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' ' 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 I ghost
town, its rickety houses moss-grown and semi fallen

"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 ' in the open, kilt ' fast, bled ' 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 right ward 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, unbidden, 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 shanty towns
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.

was it only a town of children? Little Negro scamps tracked him from
behind the first line of buildings. He could not see them, but he heard
them scurrying in the mud, and several times, drawn by flashes of
movement, glanced over, but his look drove them back. And if he advanced
on them, they scattered.

Otherwise the town was seemingly deserted. There was no commerce, nor
any sidewalk. A few storefronts were abandoned. Mostly the places were
cabins, many to his eye as abandoned as the storefronts. Yet still he
had a queasy feeling, a sense again of being looked at, inspected. It
brought a shiver of discomfort.

As he climbed the slope from the river, he at last came upon an adult
woman. Her eyes were big, her face a ruin. She was swaddled in a dress
of many layers and colors, all pulled into one tapestry; her hair was
bandannaed tightly to her skull, and she had no teeth at all. She was a
Negro mama, a formidable figure in the Negro community, Sam knew.

And she didn't seem insane, but regarded him with only sullen dull
hatred.

"Madam, excuse me, I am looking for a county seat, a municipal building,
the sheriff's department? You could possibly direct me?"

She responded in a gibberish alien to his ears. Was she still African?

Had she not been Americanized?

"Madam, I do not understand. Could you speak more slowly?"

He picked out a word or two of English in her mewl, but she grew
frustrated with the stupidity on his face, and shooed him away with a
dismissive, abrupt gesture, then gathered herself with dignity, pulled
her shawl tight about her, and strutted away.

But she stopped and turned, then pointed down an alley.

She said something that he deciphered to mean: down that way.

He walked down it, the mud sucking at his shoes. Here and there a door
slammed shut, a window closed, people not seen clearly hastened away.

He felt as if he were the plague, Mr. Death himself, with a scythe, be
hooded a pale slice of darkness, and all human things fled his presence.

Then he came to it, or what had been it.

Fire had claimed it. A blackened stone wall still stood, but the timbers
were all scorched and collapsed, and rogue bricks lay about in the weeds
of what had once been a public square. No pane of glass remained in the
ruin, once upon a time some kind of courthouse building after the proud
fashion of the South, with offices and departments and lockups and a
garage or stable out back. Scavengers had picked it clean, and moss or
other forms of vegetation had begun to claim it for their own.

So this was why there was no "official" Thebes County, why no letters
were answered. It had burned, and perhaps with that the will that claims
civilization out of nothingness was somehow finally and permanently
broken.

Now what? he wondered.

It's all gone? It burned, most everybody left town, and only a few
hopeless cases remain. Those that do must eke out a living somehow from
the prison farm yet another mile or so upriver.

He walked on, not out of purpose but more in the hopes of encountering
an inspiration. Then, progressing a bit farther, he noticed a low, rude
shack whose door was open, and from whose chimney pipe issued a trail of
smoke, thin and white.

Batting at a fly that suddenly buzzed close to his face, he leaned in to
discover something of a public house, though a rude caricature of it. It
was empty but for an old man at the bar and an old man behind the bar.

No array of liquor stood behind the bartender, only a motley collection
of dusty glasses. Beer signs from the twenties dustily festooned the dim
room, and dead neon curled on the wall, which could be decoded, with
effort, into the names of the commercial brews of many decades past.

"Say there," said Sam, "I need some help. Can you direct me?"

"Ain't nowheres be directin', suh," said the bartender.

"Well, I'll be the judge of that. Can you guide me to what succeeded the
town hall? Surely there's still some authority around. Possibly the
registrar's office, the tax collector. Or a police or sheriff's station.

This is the county seat, isn't it?"

"Used to be. Not much here no more. Can't help none. You g'wan, git back
to that boat. Ain't nuffin here you want to know about."

"Surely there are sheriff's deputies." "Dey fine you iffn dey want,"
said the other. "Best pray they don't want you."

"Well, isn't this the limit?" said Sam to nobody.

"It all burned down ' fo' years back, Mister. Everybody done left."

"I saw it. So now there's nothing?"

"Only the Farm."

"The Prison Farm, yes. I suppose I shall have to go there."

"Don't nobody go there but gots to go there, suh. In chains. Thems only
ones. You don't want to go there. You best be on ' your business."

"Then let me ask you this," he said, and went on about Lincoln Tilson,
the retired Negro whose fate he had come down to locate. But as he
spoke, he began to sense that his two coconversationalists were growing
extremely unhappy. They squirmed as if in minor but persistent pain, and
their eyes popped about nervously, as if scanning for interlopers.

"Don't know nuffin' ' dat," said the one.

"Not a damn thing," chimed in the other.

"So the name means nothing to you?"

"No suh."

"All right. Wish I could thank you for your help, but you've not been
any at all. Don't you respect white people down here?"

"Suh, jus' tryin' to git by."

"Yes, I see."

He turned and left, and began the long trek back to the boat. He knew
now he had to go to the prison, where surely what records remained were
kept, if they were kept at all. It seemed out of another century: the
possibility that a man like Lincoln Tilson, a man of accomplishment and
property, even by these standards some prosperity, could just disappear
off the face of the earth, leaving no trace of paper, no police report,
no death certificate, no witnesses, no anything. That was not how you
did it.

Sam's mind was clearly arranged. He appreciated order above all things,
for order was the beginning of all things. Without elemental order there
was nothing; it wasn't a civilization unless undergirded by a system of
laws and records, of taxes and tabulations. This down here: it was not
right. He felt some fundamental law was being flouted before his very
eyes.

He rounded the corner and began to head down the slope to the river.

That's when he saw the dock, yet several hundred yards before him, and
realized that Lazear was gone.

Goddamn the man!

But of course: this whole journey was a fiasco from the start, and how
could he have trusted an old coot like Lazear? You'd as soon trust a
snake in the grass.

He walked down, hoping that perhaps Lazear had taken the craft out into
the deep water for some technical reason or other. But no: the boat, the
old man, both were gone. Nothing stirred, nothing moved, behind him the
ghost town in the mud, before him the empty river, and nothing around
for hundreds of square miles but wilderness and swamp.

Sam was not the panicky sort. He simply grew grumpier and more obdurate
in the face of adversity. He turned, convinced that he should find the
first adult he saw and demand explanations. But to his surprise, almost
as if awaiting him, the old mama lady stood nearby.

How had she approached without his hearing? Was she magical?

Don't be a ridiculous fool, he thought. This isn't mumbo jumbo voodoo
hoodoo, it was the blasted, backwater South, up some sewer of a river,
where folks had degraded out of loss of contact with an outside world.

He was in no danger. Negroes did not attack white people, so he would be
all right.

"Madam, I have in my pocket a crisp ten-dollar bill. Would that be
sufficient for a night's lodging and a simple meal? Unless there's a
hotel, and I suspect there's not a hotel within a thousand square
miles."

He held the bill out; she snatched it.

He followed her.

the house was no different from any other, only a bit farther into the
woods. It was another dogtrot cabin, low, dusty, decrepit and tar paper
roofed like the others. A few scrawny pigs grunted and shat in a pen in
the front yard, and a mangy dog lay on the porch, or what passed for
porch, but was just floorboards under some overhanging warped roof.

The dog growled.

She kicked it.

"Goddamn dog!"

Off it ran, squealing. It clearly wasn't her dog, only a dog she allowed
to share space with her, and when feeling generous rewarded it for its
companionship with a bone or something.

"Ou' back. You go where de chickens be."

"Why, thank you," he said, wasting a smile on her, a pointless exercise
because she had no empathy in her for him, and was only interested in
minimally earning that ten spot.

He walked ' back, and there was a low coop, wired off from the rest of
the yard, and a few chickens bobbed back and forth as they walked
onward.

"Home, sweet home," he said to nobody except his own ironic sense of
humor, then ducked into the place. All the rooms were occupied, and the
innkeeper, an orange rooster, raised a ruckus, but Sam, sensing himself
to be the superior creature, stamped his foot hard, and gobble-gobbled
as he did for his youngest children at Thanksgiving and the bull bird
flustered noisily off in a cloud of indignant feathers and squawks.

Sam took the best bedroom, that being a corner where the straw looked
cleanest and driest, and sat himself down.

Dark was falling.

He wanted, before the light was gone, to write out an account of his day
for his employer. He filled his Schaeffer from a little Scripp bottle in
his briefcase. Then he set to work on his trusty yellow legal pad, soon
losing contact with the real world.

He didn't hear her when she entered.

Ilk, "Here," she finally said. "Sompin' eat."

"What? Oh, yes, of course."

It was a foil pie plate, her finest china, filled with steaming white
beans in some sort of gravy, and a chunk of pan bread. She had a cup of
hot coffee with it and utensils that turned out to be clean and shiny.

"Thank you, madam," he said. "You keep a fine homestead." "Ain't my
home," she said. "Used to be. Ain't no more."

"It isn't your home?"

"It be the Store's."

"The Store?"

"The Farm Store. Onliest store dese parts. Da store own everything."

"Oh, you must be mistaken. If the Store is part of the state government,
it can't loan funds against property, calculate interest, and foreclose,
not without court hearings and court-appointed attorneys. There are laws
to prevent such things."

"Da Store be the law here. Dat's all. You eat up them beans. Tomorrow
you go about your bid ness I could git in trouble wif dem. Dey don't
like no outsiders. You won't say I told you nuffin?"

"Of course not."

After that, she had nothing left to say, and he scraped the last of the
beans off the plate. She took it, and left silently. He saw her heading
back to her cabin, stooped and hunched, broken with woe.

Lord, I cannot wait to put this place behind me.

He made his plans. He'd clean up tomorrow as best he could given the
circumstances, then go to the Store or the office of the Farm, where all
power seemed concentrated. He would get to the bottom of this or know
why.

Once he'd taken off his shoes and his hat and at last his tie, and
folded his jacket into a little package that would do for a pillow, it
didn't take long for him to fall asleep. For all its scratchiness, the
straw was warm and dry. His roommates cooed quietly on their nests, and
even the rooster seemed at last to accept him; it realized he was no
threat when it came to fertilizing the hens.

He slept easily; he was, after all, near exhaustion. The dreams he had
were dead literal, without that kind of logic-free surrealism that fills
most sleepers' minds. In Sam's dreams, the world made the same sense it
made in reality; the same laws, from gravity to probate, still obtained;
reason trumped emotion and the steady, inexorable fairness of the system
proved out in the end, as it always did. Sometimes he wished he had a
livelier subconscious, but there was nothing that could be done with
such a defect.

He was not dreaming when they woke him. He was in dark, black
nothingness; the light in his eyes had the quality of pain and
confusion. He sat up, bolt awake, aware of shapes, the smell of horses,
the sense of movement all ' him.

Three flashlights had him nailed.

"Say, what on earth is--" he began to bluster, but before he could get
it out, somebody hit him with a wooden billy club across the shoulder.

The pain was fearsome, and he bent double, his spirit initially
shattered by it. His hand flew to the welt.

"Jesus!" he screamed.

"Git him, boys."

"Goddamn, don't let him squirm away."

"Luther, if he fights, whop him agin!"

"You want another goddamn taste, Mister? By God, I will skull you next
goddamn time."

They were on him. He felt himself pinned, turned, then cuffed.

"That's it. Bring him out now."

He was dragged out. There were three deputies, husky boys, used to using
muscle against flesh, who shoved him along, their lights beaming in his
face, blinding him. The cuffs enraged him. He had never been handcuffed
in his life.

"What in God's name do you think you're doing! I am an attorney at-law,
for God's sake, you have no right at all to--"

Another blow lit up his other arm and he stumbled to the earth in the
agony of it.

"That ought to shut him up," said the man on horseback, who was in
command. "Load him in the meat wagon and let's go."

ilk.

It smelled of pines. The odor actually was not unpleasant; it was brisk,
somehow clean, and pine needles, like tufts of feathers, light brown and
fluffy, lay everywhere.

But it was still a prison.

Sam's arms were both swollen, and when he clumsily peeled away the
clothes he wore, he saw two purplish-yellow bruises inscribed diagonally
across each biceps, as if laid there by an expert. One was not harder
than the other. In fact, they were mirror images. No bones were broken,
no skin cut, just the rotted oblong tracing exactly the impact of the
billy club upon his upper arms, each delivered with the same force, at
the same angle, to the same debilitating effect. Sam's arms were numb,
and his hands too unfeeling to grab a thing. He could make but the
crudest of movements. When he had to pee in the bucket in the corner,
undoing his trouser buttons was a nightmare, but he would not let these
men do it for him, if they would, which was questionable.

He knew he had been beaten by an expert. Someone who had beaten men
before, had thought critically about it, had done much thorough
research, and knew where to hit, how to hit, how hard to hit, and what
marks the blows would leave, which, after a week or so, would be nothing
at all. Without photographic evidence, it would only be his word against
a deputy's in some benighted Mississippi court room, in front of some
hick judge who thought Arkansas was next to New York, New York, the home
of communism.

His head ached. His temper surged, fighting through the pain.

It was some kind of cell in the woods, and he had a sensation of the
piney woods outside, for he could hear the whisper of needles rustling
against each other in the dull breeze.

He said again to the bars and whoever lurked down the corridor, "I
DEMAND to see the sheriff. You have no right or legal authority to hold
me. You should be horsewhipped for your violations of the law."

But no one bothered to answer, except that once a loutish deputy had
slipped a tray with more beans, some slices of dry, salty ham, and a
piece of buttered bread on the plate, as well as a cup of coffee.

Was he in the prison?

Was this Thebes, where uppity niggers were sent to rot?

He didn't think so. There was instead a sense of desolation about this
place, the stillness of the woods, the occasional chirping of birds.

The window was too high to see out of, and he could see nothing down the
hall. His arms hurt, his head hurt, his dignity hurt, but what hurt even
more was his sense of the system corrupted. It cut to the core of the
way his mind worked. People were not treated like this, especially
people like him, which is to say white people of means and education.

The system made no sense if it didn't protect him, and it needed to be
adjusted.

"Goddammit, you boys will pay!" he screamed, to nobody in particular,
and to no sign that anybody heard him.

At last--it had to be midafternoon, fourteen or fifteen full hours after
his capture--two guards came for him.

"You put your hands behind yourself so's we can cuff you down now," said
the one.

"And goddammit, be fast about it, Sheriff ain't got all day, goddammit."

"Who do you think--"

"I think you gimme lip, I'll lay another swat on you, Dad, and you won't
like it a dad gum bit."

So this was the fellow who had hit him: maybe twenty-five, blunt of nose
and hair close-cropped, eyes dull as are most bullies', a lot of beef
behind him, his size the source of his confidence.

"G'wan, hurry, Mister, I ain't here to wait on your dad gum mood."

At last Sam obliged, turning so that they could cuff him, a security
measure that was, in a civilized state like Arkansas, reserved for the
most violent and unpredictable of men in the penal system, known
murderers and thugs who could go off on a rampage at no provocation at
all. It was for dealing with berserkers.

Once they had him secured, they unlocked the cell and took control of
him, one on each arm, and walked him down the wood corridor, then into a
small interrogation room.

They sat him down, and, as per too many crime movies and more police
stations than Sam cared to count, a bright light came into his eyes.

The door opened.

A large man entered, behind the light so that Sam could not see details,
but he made out a dark uniform, black or brown, head to toe, with a
beige tie tight against his bulgy neck, and a blazing silver star badge
on his left breast. He wore a Sam Browne belt, shined up, and carried a
heavy revolver in a flapped holster, his trousers pressed and lean, down
to cowboy boots also shiny and pointed.

"Samuel M. Vincent," he said, reading from what Sam saw was his own
wallet. "Attorney-at-law, Blue Eye, Polk County, Arkansas. And what is
your business in Thebes, Mr. Vincent?"

"Sheriff, I am a former prosecuting attorney, well versed in the law and
the rightful usage of force against suspects. In my state, what your men
have done is clearly criminal. I would indict them on counts of assault
and battery under flag of authority, sir, and I would send them away for
five years, and we would see how they swagger after that.

Now I "

"Mr. Vincent, what is your business, sir? You are not in your state, you
are in mine, and I run mine a peculiar way, according to such conditions
as I must deal with. I am Sheriff Leon Gattis, and this is my county. I
run it, I protect it, I make it work. Down here, sir, it is polite of an
attorney to inform the po-lice he be makin' inquiries.

For some reason, sir, you have seen fit not to do so, and so you have
suffered some minor inconveniences of no particular import to no
Mississippi judge."

"I did not do so, Sheriff Gattis, because there were no deputies around.

I spent most of yesterday looking for them. They prefer to work after
midnight! I insist "

"You hold on there, sir. You are getting on my wrong side right quick.

Any nigger could have told you where we are, and if they didn't it's '
they thought you's up to no good. God bless ', they have the instinct
for such judgments. So, Mr. Vincent, you're going to have to cooperate,
and the sooner you do, the better. What are you doing in Thebes County?

What is your business, sir?"

"Good Lord. You set up a system than cannot be obeyed, then punish when
one does not obey. It is--"

Whap!

The sheriff had not hit him, but he'd smacked his hand hard on the
wooden table between them, the room echoing with reverberation from the
force of the blow.

"I ain't here to talk no philosophy with you. Goddamn you, sir, answer
my questions or your time here will be hard. That is the way we do
things here."

Sam shook his head.

Finally he explained: he was after a disposition or certificate in re
the death of a Negro named Lincoln Tilson named in a will being probated
in Cook County--that is, Chicago--Illinois.

"Thought you had a Chicago look to you."

"Sir, if it's your business, and it's not, I have never been in the
state of Illinois and know nothing at all of it."

"What I hear, up there, the Negro is king. Ride ' in fancy Cadillac
cars, have white girls left and right, eat in the restaurants, a kind of
jigaboo heaven, if you know what I mean."

"Sir, I feel certain you exaggerate. I have been to New York, and that
town, progressive though it may be, is nothing as you describe."

"Maybe I do exaggerate. But, by God, that ain't goin' happen in Thebes.

Down here, we got a natural order as God commands, and that's how it's
goin' to be."

"Sir, I feel that change will come, because change is inevit--"

"So you are one of them?"

"Uh--"

"One of them."

"I'm not clear--"

"One of them. You talk like one of us, but you be one of them.

Northern agitators. Communists, Jews, God knows who, what or why, but up
to nothing good. Is that you, Mr. Vincent? Are you a communist or a
Jew?"

"I am a Democrat and a Scotch Presbyterian. You have no right to--"

But the sheriff was off.

"Oh, we done heard. We done been warned. We onto y'all. Y'all come down
here and stir our niggers all up. You think you doin' them a favor. Yes
sir, you helping them. But what you be doin' is filling their fool heads
full of things that can't never be, and so you be making them more
unhappy rather than less unhappy, while you be gittin' it ready to tear
down what we done built down here, on nothing but sweat and blood and
guts and our own dying. Oh, I know your sort, Mister. You are the pure-D
devil his self only you think you doin' good."

"I am a firm believer in the rules, and I--"

"The rules! Mister, I got a county full of piney-woods niggers who all
they want to do is fuck or fight, don't matter much to them."

"Sir, I didn't say--"

"Now I'll tell you what. I will make inquiries. I will git you your
certificate, and my deputies will get you out of our county. Don't you
never come back, you hear? That's the goddamnedest best you're gonna git
down here, and I am cutting you an exclusive deal because you are white,
even if I believe you be deluded close to mental instability.

Thebes ain't for outsiders. You want Mississippi hospitality, you go to
Biloxi, you square on that, partner?" "I see the point," said Sam.

"Yes, sir, I bet you do. Boys, move Mr. Vincent to holding, where he'll
be more comfortable. He's ' to leave us."

sam was no longer locked up, nor did he remain handcuffed. He was free
to move about the general area, but had, under orders and strict
observation, to stay close to the station, as it was called, and not to
go near to or rile any Negro people.

They let him take a nice shower indoors, where they themselves kept
clean, and he got himself back into some kind of civilized order. He was
fed, and the food was better than anything he had eaten since leaving
Pascagoula, beans and ham, fried potatoes, heavy chicory coffee, fresh
bread. These boys here, they lived pretty good, in what was a kind of
barracks in the woods, a good mile out of town, which, he now saw, was
protected against attack by a stout barbed-wire fence.

There was a stable here, for the deputy force seemed more like some kind
of light cavalry than any law enforcement unit. The men lounged about
like soldiers, keeping their uniforms sharp, riding off on patrol now
and then in twos. There was a duty room with assignments and rotation, a
roster board; in all, it seemed far more military than police.

Finally, a rider came, and after conferring with some of the deputies,
he came and got Sam, who was put back into the wagon, though this time
not bound or beaten. He sat up front with the driver, who drove the team
through the piney woods--Lord, they were dense, seeming to stretch out
forever into the looming darkness--and then through the town, dead now
as it was then.

They approached the river, the big wagon and the thundering horses
driving back what Negroes remained in the street. As they passed the
public house, Sam felt the eyes of the two old men he'd spoken to
watching him glumly.

Down at the dock, a happy sight greeted Sam. It was Lazear, back from
wherever, standing by his boat, whose old motor churned a steady tune.

The sheriff stood there also.

Sam climbed down from the wagon, on unsure legs, then caught himself.

"All right, Mr. Arkansas Traveler, here is your official document.

You'll see that it's right and proper."

It appeared to be. Under the seal of the state of Mississippi and the
state motto it was an official certificate of death for one lincoln
tilson, Negro, age unknown but elderly, of Thebes, Thebes County,
Mississippi, October 10th, 1950, by drowning, namely in the river
Yaxahatchee. It was signed by a coroner in an illegible scrawl.

"There, sir. The end of that poor man. The river can be treacherous.

It takes you down and it does things to you, and out you come three days
later. Poor Negro Tilson was such a victim. It's a miracle that after
that time in the water, he was still identifiable."

"Sheriff, who identified him?"

"Now, Mr. Arkansas Traveler, we don't keep records on every dead Negro
in the county. I don't recollect, nor do I recollect the exact
circumstances. Nor, sir, do I fancy a chat with you on the subject,
while you interrogate me and try to prove your Northern cleverness over
my simplicity."

"I see."

"You have been given fair warning. Now you get out of our town, and
don't you come back nohow. There is nothing here for you and you have
done your task."

Sam looked at the document; there was nothing to it to convince him that
it couldn't have been fabricated in the last hour or so.

But here it was: the out. The end. The finish. He had earned his
retainer, and would file a complete report to his client, and what would
happen next would be up to the client.

"Well, Sheriff, this is not the way I do things, but I see things down
here are slow to change, and it is not my charge to do that. I fear when
change comes, it will be a terror for you."

"It ain't never coming, not this far south. We have the guns and the
will to make that prediction stick, I guarantee you. Now, sir, every
second you stand there is a second you try my hospitality to an even
more severe degree."

Sam stepped down into Lazear's boat and didn't look back as it pulled
from the shore and headed out to the center of the dark river.

Sam sat in the prow of the boat, too angry to talk to Lazear,
uninterested in the feeble excuses the man had thrown his way on the
whys and wherefores of his seeming abandonment.

He felt two powerful, conflicting emotions. The first was relief.

Thebes was enchanted, somehow, by evil. Who knew what secrets lurked
there, what horrors had been perpetuated under its name, who was buried
where and how they had perished? It was frightening, and escaping its
pressures brought a sense of complete liberation.

So a part of Sam was happy. He was done, and now it was a mere
progression of travel and he could return to his life, chastened, as it
were, by exposure to the lurid and the raw, aware that the world in
general was uninterested in his experiences and it would best be
forgotten or filed away for distant future usage.

But there was also a powerful, seething anger. His mind was orderly yet
not overly rigid. He understood that order was a value and from order
all good, great things stemmed. Yet order was only a value when it
guaranteed and sustained those good, great things. When it actively
opposed them, where it destroyed them, where its rigidness was so
powerful and its administration so violent that it was only concerned
with its own ideas, something evil happened, and it filled Sam with
rage.

He felt the thwack when the deputy's two expert blows had smashed his
arms, and the fear when under the influence of pain all will to resist
had fled him. He remembered the helplessness of being bound and forced
into the wagon, the wait for the sheriff as that man took his own sweet
time, the fear on the faces of the Negroes whom he ruled so absolutely,
the brazenness of the phony document that had guaranteed the end of his
days in Thebes.

And Sam finally wondered this one last thing: Did he have the strength,
the guts, the steel, to stand up to it, to oppose the ways of Thebes?

He knew the answer.

The answer was, No.

It wasn't in him. It wasn't in anybody. You just got out and didn't look
back and you went back to a better life, and soon enough the memories
eroded and you won your election and you fathered your children and you
won the approval of powerful men and you had a career, a set of
memories, a fine tombstone, the respect of those who stayed behind when
you had passed. That was enough.

He sat back, having at last faced and come to terms with his own
weakness. On either side of the river, the piney woods fled by,
diminished by the steady chugging of Lazear's old motor, the day a bit
cooler than before. Before him the river wove and bobbed, dark, calm and
smooth. It was growing toward late afternoon; he assumed that in a few
hours or so, when they had penetrated the great bayou, they would lay up
as before, then continue in the morning.

He began to calculate. They'd be in Pascagoula then by late afternoon;
he'd call his wife and alert her that everything was fine. He could
spend a night in a fine hotel--if there was such in Pascagoula ... wait,
then, no, a better idea. He could hire a car and zip down the coast a
bit, possibly to lush Biloxi, and take a room there, where surely
there'd be fine hotels. Maybe he'd take a day or so; the stipend he'd
earned would certainly cover it, and possibly he could even expense it,
as the recovery time from his ordeal was a fair charge, was it not? He
saw himself having an elegant meal under a slowly rotating fan, amid
ferns and palms; outside there'd be a sparkling beach. The meal would
commence with oysters fresh from Mother Gulf, move on to fresh sea bass
or trout grilled or poached in butter, all served by an elegant black
gentleman in a white cotton jacket. The room would be full of beautiful
people, happy people, the best kind of people that our great country
could produce.

What a riposte. What a recovery. Then, the next morning, on to New
Orleans, refreshed and restored; from there by rail up to Memphis, the
drive over to Blue Eye and home, home, home, home.

Home, he thought.

Home, home, home. Then he saw the body.

He happened to be looking down, in the black water, and the shock was
such that perhaps it was an apparition, something that his momentarily
deranged mind had conjured. But he knew in the next second that no, this
was reality, no haunt, no ghost, nothing from the subconscious. It was a
Negro boy, a few inches under the surface, bled white by immersion, his
features puffy, his body in the cruciform as if inflated, his fingers
abulge, his eyes wide and empty, his mouth open black and empty, his
clothes in tatters, gliding by. Then he was gone.

Sam blinked, stunned.

He saw something just ahead, floating, its low silhouette just breaking
the surface, and as Lazear's old craft fled by, he made this victim out
to be a girl child, also Negro, but facedown to spare him those open
eyes staring into nothingness.

He looked: on the surface of the water appeared to be the remnants of a
massacre by drowning; bodies floated everywhere, as if a vessel had
capsized and all perished. There had to be at least ten, drifting,
riding the currents, bobbing this way and that.

"Stop the boat! Goddamn you, stop the boat!" he screamed, over the
beating of the engine.

Lazear looked up, surprised, yanked from whatever crude reverie had
occupied him.

"Stop the boat, you idiot!"" Sam cried, and rushed back. Lazear didn't
stop it, but reined in the throttle so that the boat merely idled,
drifting.

"What you say?"

"There're people in the water! Look, look around, people. A Negro
family, all gone, all lost, stop the boat."

Lazear just shook his head.

"Sir, I done top you. In de river, de currents is ugly and mean. Suck
people down all de time. Send ' back bloated and dead. Nothing we can do
but press on. Can't do them no good. Make a report when you gets back to
civilization if it makes you feel good. I can't be wastin' no time on
this."

And with that he bent forward and readjusted the throttle to a steady
roar and the boat lurched back into But Sam took him in two strong
hands, shook him once malevolently, then almost quite literally threw
him into the rear of the boat.

The old man raised a hand in fear as Sam advanced upon him.

"Don't hit me, sir! I didn't do nothing to them people, I swear.

They's fleeing the Store, they got in trouble, and the river done et '
up, is all."

Sam declared, in the full stentorian powers of his voice, "You slimy
little maggot, you turn this boat around and we will recover those that
we can. Then we will head back to Thebes and we will get that good
for-nothing sheriff off his fat ass and all his deputies and we will
come back here with full lights running. There may be a child out here,
clinging to a branch or ashore in the weeds. We will save that child, or
by God, we will die trying, and that is the way it'll be."

Now he bent, and with one hand pulled Lazear up, and propelled him
toward the boat's cockpit, and the old man hit it, and sank to the deck.

"Get your ass up, and get going, sir, or I will make you wish you had
never ever been born."

"Yes sir, yes sir," said Lazear, pale with terror.

As it turned out, Sam quickly realized there was no point in recovering
any bodies. It would take too much time, and it was a job for
professionals with the right equipment. He realized those bodies
therefore might never be recovered.

Thus, as newly proclaimed captain of Lazear's vessel by right of mutiny,
he determined that the correct course of action was to return to the
Thebes dock as swiftly as possible. He gave these directions to Lazear.

"And if de motor burn out, what then?"

"Then I will whip your scrawny ass until it bleeds. You just get us
there faster than you got us here, you wretched old fool."

"Yes, sir."

"What did you mean when you said ' the Store." What was the meaning of
that comment?"

"Sir, I don't recollect saying nothing ' dat."

"Listen here, you brainless idiot, you said it flat out in plain English
just minutes ago. Now explain it, or once again I will shake you

"I'll your teeth, all three of them, rattle like dice in a cup."

Glumly Lazear looked ahead. A bitterness settled over him. He acted as
though God had selected him alone to bear this monstrous cross. He
sighed.

Sam kicked his scrawny ass.

"Does that help? Clear the memory, does it?"

"You din't hear nothing from me. Dey kills me dey know I talkin' their
business. Okay? Kill me dead. Kill you dead as well."

"Talk, damn your soul."

"The Store own everything the nigs got. Nigs take credit from the Store,
fall behind, they don't get this interest thing, the Store forecloses,
and then they owned by the Store. Heard the nigs talking ' it once."

"Yes. And so?"

"And so, dey gots to work it off. Dey works for de man. Never can leave,
never can go nowhere, tell nobody, no nothing. Stay and work for food is
all.

"Every once a while, nigs git fed up and sneak off at night. Some make
it, some don't. Dat family, dey no got no luck. The river et '.

Maybe dey's better off, though." "Good Lord," said Sam, disgusted.

How did they know?

But they did. Somehow, in Thebes, they always knew.

The old boat maneuvered its way in and Lazear lined it up just fine and
laid it up next to the dock. There, Sheriff Leon Gattis and no less than
four deputies, all uniformed and heavily armed, awaited. Their horses,
lathered and nervous, milled behind them. Together, men and horses, they
looked like some apocalyptic drawing out of Dore, along the
four-horsemen-of-death motif.

But Sam did not care.

"Sheriff," he cried, as he climbed up, "you'd best get your boys onto
the river. A Negro boat has overturned some miles down, and there yet
may be survivors. You'll need powerful flashlights, for I fear the light
will be gone by the time--"

"Didn't you and me reach a agreement, sir? You's to leave town, and not
never come back on no account. And on that bargain, you would not be
prosecuted for resisting arrest or generally stirring up the
population."

"Sir, I am not here to quibble. People's lives may be at stake. For
God's sake, time's wasting. Get those boys of yours on to the goddamn
water and get them going. This is a river town, surely you have boats.

This is not some paltry charge, this is a public safety emergency."

"Goddammit, Mister, you must be thick of the skull or water brained or
some such. Didn't know they growed such knot heads in Arkansas. Heard it
was an all right place, though I can see now it produces too many of the
daft persuasion."

"Sheriff, I insist that--"

"Mister, I am not sending boys out on that dark river to look for
fleeing Negroes. The currents are tricky, the fog comes in and twists
things around, and before you know it, you have white men in trouble as
much as black ones."

"My God, we are talking about human beings!"

"If they go out there after dark, they know damned well the chance they
take."

"Sheriff," a merry deputy called, "bet it's Jimmy and Glory and them
all." "That Jimmy, never was no good," said another. "That one always be
in trouble. Lord, he done got Glory and the chilluns drowned, too."

"We'll ride over and check in the morning."

"Sheriff," Sam implored, "am I to understand you'll do nothing?

Nothing at all. Possibly a child--"

"Ain't no children out there, sir. The children are all dead. These
people flee their responsibilities and they make plumb fool decisions
and take terrible chances, and they pay the price, most of them do.

Jimmy owed money, he should have stayed like a man and worked off his
debt, ' of running off to welch on it."

"Sir, I have to tell you: If I don't see evidence of public safety
activity on your part, I will myself make a report to the governor of
Mississippi and--"

"Haw!" laughed one of the deputies, "ain't that a good one. He's gonna
go to Jackson and tell old Bilbo ' a drownded nigger!"

The others hooted.

"Sir," the sheriff said, "tell who you wish whatever you want. In
Jackson they consider that we do our job well down here. We handle the
uppity niggers, or rather the prison does. We make the state run, and we
do our part to keep order, and I'm a proud man because of it. Now I
warned you to leave this town."

"Mr. Leon," Lazear suddenly proclaimed, "don't make us leave now. I
don't know de river in de dark; we end up dead as them nigs."

About three different conversations seemed to explode simultaneously:
the deputies continued to enjoy the humorous idea of Sam's audience at
the state capital; Lazear enjoined the sheriff to let them stay the
night so that he did not have to face the river in the dark; and Sam
continued to demand action on the missing family.

The sheriff finally reached to his holster, pulled out a big revolver,
and fired a single shot to quiet them all. Its boom clapped and whanged,
rolled and reverberated. Total silence followed as all looked at the
large man with the revolver in hand.

"Y'all, you git back on patrol," he told his deputies. "Old man, you
stay here, moored to that dock. At first light, you be gone, or by God,
I'll make you wish you had. And you, Mr. Lawyer, you git back on that
boat, and don't you come off to step on the dirt of my county ever agin.

If you do, I will personally have a knot beaten into your head that will
last forever, and you can tell all your fancy Arkansas people, I got
this knot in Thebes, Mississip, on account of some drownded niggers. And
I don't care to speak again on this subject, no more, never."

"Sheriff, you are making a big mistake."

"Jed, you stay down here, make sure these two don't roam. And make sure
they put off with the light. They give you any trouble, you can whip up
on them any old way you want. Now I'm going home to get my supper."

Jed detached himself from his chums and swaggered down. He was a big op
boy, with three guns, and cords and leathers and belts everywhere.

He looked just dumb enough to take all this seriously, and wouldn't be
con vincible else wise He'd as soon hit you with the club he carried as
listen.

He spat a wad into the water, where it popped wetly as it hit.

"Don't you worry, Sheriff," he said. "I'll take care of these boys, you
can bet on it."

sam awakened in the dark.

He had reached his conclusion at last.

He'd been building toward it for a long piece, fighting its
implications, aware that he was troubling with the very stuff of his
life, his destiny, his fate.

But now he knew he could not spend his time in Blue Eye, Arkansas,
pretending to represent law and order, while three hundred miles away
this chancre perpetuated itself, unseen, unmolested, uncontested.

He knew: Thebes must fall.

Somehow, some way, it must fall. In his mind, he sketched out a plan. It
was orderly and well founded, almost certain to succeed. He would have
to form a committee of well regarded, unassailably moral Southern
prosecutors--he knew many of them--and very carefully review and
accumulate the evidence. An unassailable report had to be created.

Then, carefully, copies of this document must be given to selected
press, which would reveal the findings on the day that his committee
presented the report to the governor of the state of Mississippi, the
speaker of the house in the Mississippi state assembly, Mississippi's
two senators and five congressmen, hell, maybe even, for the publicity
value alone, Harry S. Damn Truman himself, or, since all this was some
years off, whomsoever big wigged war general was in the White House.

It had to be done square and legal, one step at a time, with an eye
toward reality, so that the final product had a Tightness to it that
transcended the seething angers of the South. He wanted the white
Southern mill worker and small-patch farmer, the sharecropper, the
feed-store clerks, the small-town politicos, the damn women (if they
could control their goddamn crying!), the Mac Whatevers and the Joneses
and the Whites and the O'Whomevers; a new Confederacy, if you would, of
the same of' boys who marched up Peahawk Ridge or across the wide-open
ground at Gettysburg behind the fool Pickett or thrashed and perished in
the cornfields of bloody Antietam. They could do it, for they had it
within them, if they were ably led; they and they alone could bring
Thebes down and make the world a better place.

But he knew this too: he had to start with a document.

It was all so much palaver without a piece of evidence, a piece of
paper, that made it clear as a bell's last dying ding dong this is evil.

This is wrong. This must be stopped.

He had to have something. He knew it, and that there was no way around
it.

He thought: I have to get into that store.

And then he thought: that is insane. It is in a prison, it is carefully
guarded, it will not give up its secrets easy, it is a mile away down a
dark and windy forest road that I have never traveled and, top it all, I
am no man for breaking and entering. I would get caught, and if caught I
would be in deep trouble.

He thought again: I need someone to help me. I need someone to take the
risk, to get me a document.

Then he remembered the old lady whose chicken coop he'd rented. She
spoke a gibberish at first, but as he listened more carefully and got
used to the rhythms and strangenesses in her words, he had begun to
understand her. It was she who told him about the Store. She must
understand the legal underpinnings of Thebes County, the original crime
that indebted its citizens to work for little or nothing for the benefit
of boss men who kept his expenses in that way to a minimum while raking
off the top, whose iron system of rule by violence lined his own
pockets.

She must have a piece of paper. He remembered now, the weathered old
face, the fierce eyes, the watchfulness; why, that old mama was the only
one in the town whose spirit remained secretly intact, and Sam knew this
to be in accordance with Negro ways, where authority frequently devolved
on the sagacity of an old woman, who was smart and just and
well-tempered by experience.

Sam squinted in the dark, and saw that it was near 4:00 a.m. If he could
get by that behemoth on the dock, he could get to her house by 4:30 and
back again by 5:00, and then he'd have it, something upon which to
build. It was how a lawyer worked: go for the paper. Get the paper. Get
the evidence. If there was any evidence.

He rose from his length of blanket on the prow of the boat, and
carefully put on his shoes. Though it was warmish, he took his coat,
which had been his pillow, and threw it on, to blot out the whiteness of
his shirt. Rising craftily, he crept down the length of the boat, and
stopped for just a second to listen to the easy sawing of old Lazear's
aged lungs as he snoozed away in the cockpit, in some impossible
position that no civilized being could find rest in. But Lazear snored
as if lung-shot and producing death rattles, each a mighty shudder
through bubbles of phlegm, but otherwise unwakeable.

Sam made the climb to the dock and discovered that the guardian deputy,
of course, had grown bored with the passing of the nighttime hours and
had departed for whatever recreation he wanted, probably a willing
colored gal in a crib somewhere, for all the deputies had the look of
men who're whup-ass on colored in the daylight and cuddle with it in the
night.

Sam climbed the slope from the riverside area to what amounted to the
town's main drag, not really much of either main or drag, just shuttered
storefronts behind which, on either side, lay the dogtrot cabins that
made up the domiciles of the place before yielding to the all
encompassing piney woods. He tried to remember. This way or that?

It's not that Thebes was a complex metropolitan zone, with byways and
alleys that could lure a man to ruin, or at least get him lost. Still,
in the dark, it seemed all different, and the vistas down the few
streets were closed off to his eyes. But then he saw the public house
where the two bitter old men had been and remembered ... no, he didn't
get to the woman's house until after he'd been there. Why hadn't he paid
attention? It hadn't seemed important then, but it surely did now.

At last he thought he had it, as he projected a three-dimensional map of
Thebes in his mind. He passed the public house, turned down an alley,
walked amid silent cabins. Dogs scuffled and scurried, and occasionally
barked, and he heard the slithery, feathery rattlings of chickens
twitching in their coops. A pig or two was up, for whatever reason,
maybe to shit in the mud or whatever. But of people the place fwas
forlorn and empty. It was a balmy Southern night. Above, towers of stars
spangled in i" the pure black sky and a zephyr whispered through the
pines, bringing relief from the day's brutal heat. The smell of the
pines was every\ where, bracing and pure, almost medicinal. With the
squalor and the despair blocked out by the darkness, Sam could almost
convince him self he was in some healthy place, some non blasphemed
ground. ' And then, yes, there it was. That was hers. It was different
from the" , rest, being set farther back, almost in the woods
themselves. But he recognized it by its shape and location, and as his
eyes adjusted, and he moved just a bit, he made out that coop out back
where he'd had the (, corner suite with the chickens and the disgruntled
rooster. / Sam approached stealth fully He didn't want it noted that the
white i lawyer from the North had visited old granny in the night. It
would do ' old granny no good at all in Thebes County, Mississippi.

Of course the door was not locked. He slipped in and stood motionless
for a bit, waiting for his eyes to adjust yet again, this time to the
closer dark of the interior space.

When at last he could pick out impediments and chart a passage in the
dark--say, the doorway into the bedroom to be aimed for, the stove in
the middle of the room to be avoided, the rickety furniture not to be
knocked asunder--he moved quietly, and slipped into her bedchamber. He
was a prince come a-calling.

No, he was a soldier of the Lord, come to bring righteous vengeance and
God's wrath to Sodom.

No, he was a scared white man in way too deep and playing with forces he
could not even begin to understand.

He approached the bed, wondering how to waken her without making her
scream and alerting the locals and the gendarmerie.

"Madam," he whispered, in a low voice.

There was no response.

"Grandma? Grandma, wake up, please, it's me, Mr. Sam, come for a talk."

That was louder still, but there was no response.

He bent to the bed where she lay swaddled and touched her arm, gently as
he could, and rocked ever so slowly, crooning, "Mama, Mama, please
awaken, Mama."

But Mama remained mute.

He became aware of an odor, and then, through the bedclothes, his
fingers sensed damp.

He recoiled, but had to go forward.

He turned to the candle next to the bed and found a few stick matches
next to it. He struck one on the bedpost, cupping the sudden flare, and
brought it to the wick, where it clung, then held fast. Again, he kept
his hand cupped around it, to cut down on the light, and brought it to
her, and pulled back the bedclothes.

She had been smashed all to hell and gone. Her skull had the shocking
aspect of deflation, for its integrity was breached mightily. Whatever
oozed from it oozed black onto the bedclothes. Her eyes were distorted
by the trauma done to her skull, and one had a bad eight-ball hemorrhage
to it. It was too cool for the flies, but by midmorning they'd be here
in waves.

He had been to murder scenes too many times before, so he did not panic,
but a breath of air passed with a hiss from his lips.

Jesus Christ, he thought. Who could The flashlights from the window came
on, several of them. Then, from the other side too. Men moved swiftly
toward him, and he heard the creaking of leather boots and belts.

"Mister, you in plumb bad deep dark trouble now," said Sheriff Leon
Gams. "Boys, git this Yankee cuffed. We done caught us a murderer."

EARL called the town up through blur by focusing his binoculars, and
watched as it swarmed into clarity. What he saw was of no surprise in
the piney woods, a slatternly place in the mud, with its ruined
waterfront, its closed sawmill ruin off to one side, and the residential
zone, its warren of jumbled cabins, and the listless people who
populated it.

He saw also the men on horses, six, seven, then eight of them on the big
steeds, in the dark uniforms, lords and masters, rulers of all. He
watched them thunder through the town when it so moved them, and could
read terror in those they stopped to talk to. There were no easy
encounters in Thebes; all confrontations were charged and difficult.

Earl therefore set out to do what he knew he absolutely must. He set out
to draw a map. He was across the river, possibly one hundred yards from
the town, and he lay there, hour by hour, his binoculars focused, his
handwriting steady and clear, the lines growing in his notebook. He
noted also the times of the mounted patrols, the officers involved, the
routes they took. He noticed the officers themselves, the fat ones, the
quick ones, the mean ones. He wrote it all down.

He watched early in the morning as the Negro ladies all left. These,
Earl guessed, were the prison cooks and seamstresses and whatnot, who
picked up after the white men who ran the prison and, Earl also knew,
provided comforts as they were needed. He knew at night men on horses
would stop at certain houses in the town, enter, then leave an hour or
so later. He didn't care to speculate on the drama of favor and fury
that took place inside the cabins; down here, it was an ancient pattern,
and maybe that's why so many of the children who roamed the wild streets
during the day had a yellowish cast to them.

Earl's approach had been different than Sam's. Earl was no lawyer like
Sam; he presumed, as Sam had not, the existence of no set rules of order
and regulation, no rational system that would entertain inquiry with
fairness and due deliberation and cough up, ultimately, a response,
rational and complete. Earl was a policeman, but not really; he was
still a Marine in his mind, and any territory was enemy territory until
he knew otherwise. He acted deliberately and decisively.

For example, on the day that he and Sam agreed upon as the last day by
which Sam could be expected back, Earl called Sam's wife and made his
inquiry.

"No, Earl, I haven't heard a thing. I've begun to worry. Should I
contact the authorities?" Earl thought not, for who knew by what compass
the authorities in swamp-water Mississippi steered?

"Did he tell you so?" "He said no such thing about it."

"Then, Mary, I'd wait. You know how Sam hates a fuss."

"Earl, it's been long enough. What he had to do oughtn't to have taken
this long."

"Well, Ma'am, these little towns, you just can't tell how they operate.

As I understand, it's swamp country and communication might be tricky."

He then called Sam's other closest friend, Connie Longacre. Earl knew
the two had a private relationship, though its nature was neither clear
to him nor curious to him.

"Miss. Connie?"

"Earl, have you heard from Sam? I've begun to worry." "No, Ma'am. I
thought possibly you had. You know how that man enjoys a good talk."

"Not a word, Earl, strange on its face for Sam. Earl, what should--"

"I will do something."

"Earl, I--"

"Miss. Connie, I will."

Then Earl made another phone call. It was to Colonel Jenks, the
commandant of the Arkansas Highway Patrol and his mentor beyond Sam.

"Earl, yes?"

"Colonel, sir, I've some leave time due. It's been on five years
straight. Got a private situation I need to deal with. Would certainly
appreciate it if you could help."

The colonel loved Earl, as did most who knew him, the others being those
who only feared him. He knew that if Earl had a situation, Earl would
need the time to deal with it. Earl didn't request things lightly; he
was the kind of fool for duty that commanding officers have relied upon
for thousands of war-filled years.

"Earl, I'll notify personnel. We'll see to it the county is covered."

"Yes, sir. Much obliged."

"Earl, you've earned it, you know you have."

It was true. Earl's record was embarrassingly without blemish. His
problem: he worked too hard, he cared too much, he was too fair and too
meticulous in his planning and deportment. It was as if the goddamned
medal he had won demanded of him that he be perfect the day long, and by
God, perfect the day long he would be, and he would die before letting
it down, though of course he never, ever, to any man or woman, talked of
it.

As for Earl, the next part was the difficulty, with Junie. Yet it turned
out easier than he expected. He told her he'd be going off for a bit,
and he watched as her face fell.

"You're going to that war," she said. "You are a fool for war. You
cannot stay out of it."

"No, ma'am," he said, "I am not. They do not care for me; I'm too
used-up for them these days." Then he told her he was only going to
Mississippi, and only for a few days, and only to look after Sam, who
might be in some trouble.

"Sam? In trouble? Why Earl, Sam could talk the devil himself out of
hell."

"I know. But maybe Sam run up against something meaner than the devil.

Don't you worry none."

He knew he had won; her deeper terror was the anguish he felt about
being over here while the Marines were over there, in Korea. She knew he
had been writing letters to congressmen and the com mandant, and she
worried that sooner or later one would be fool enough to let him back
in, despite the wounds he'd picked up in the big war. So in a way she
was relieved that it was only Mississippi.

That done, a few travel arrangements needed to be made, and finally he
had one last call, though he made it from a pay phone. He called a
colleague named Wilbur Forebush, by rank a lieutenant in the Arkansas
State Police and by authority director of undercover work, which was
becoming necessary, as the crime tendencies grew more sophisticated. He
and Wilbur had shared a pleasant few Saturdays in a duck blind over
flooded rice fields these past several years.

He explained what he wanted but not why.

But Wilbur trusted him.

"All right, but Earl, if you git in a jam now, you call me. I will come
quick for you."

"I appreciate it. I just don't want no tracks back to my family, when I
don't know what's cooking."

"So I understand. I'll have it couriered down to you. Tomorrow morning
okay?"

"That's fine."

What arrived was a pouch containing a driver's license, seemingly
authentic, in the name of, as it turned out, one Jack Bogash, of Little
Rock. Other authenticating documents included a social security card, a
heavy equipment operator's license, and others. There was no Bo gash, of
course. The documents were high-grade fakes, meant for undercover
officers in tough circumstances, and would pass scrutiny in every crime
lab except the FBI's.

Earl then took the bus to Pascagoula, his belongings, including a45 from
the old days, in a pack under a sleeping roll, and a Winchester '95
carbine in a scabbard. He dressed in hunter's rough clothes and high
boots, and wore a fedora. No one thought the rifle odd at all, for
rifles rode in pickups and saddle scabbards everywhere in the South. On
the ride down he studied what maps were available, the best a big color
thing that was included in the WPA's 1938 Guide to the Magnolia State.

He scanned it carefully, looking to learn the land and the foliage,
committing it carefully to memory.

He did not stop in Pascagoula, but went farther up the river still by
bus until he was the only white person left aboard, to an old, nearly
dead lumber town called Benndale close to Greene County. There he picked
up some supplies at the general store, then went looking for a hunting
guide. Of course it wasn't hunting season. Hell, he knew that, he was
scouting for some rich fellows and wanted to find a place where he could
take a deer lease, bring these boys in the fall, git them all fat bucks,
pass some green around, and, dammit, everybody'd be better off. He was
directed, eventually, to a hard scrabble op boy named Mctye, who
volunteered to canoe him up the Pascagoula, then up the Leaf. Earl said
that sounded fine.

The trip through the bayou was without incident, but then Earl changed
plans on the old fella. Instead of heading up the Leaf, he decided to
have the boy put him off there, at the juncture of the three rivers,
Leaf, Yaxahatchee and Pascagoula. He'd work up the Leaf on foot, looking
for a sign, scaling out the terrain. The oldster would come pick him up
a week hence.

"Mister, this here's dangerous territory," said the scrunched-up old
man, Mctye. "There's bogs and hollows, and hellholes, where the land has
fallen and the trees are so thick you maybe get in, but you ain't
getting out. Tricky currents in the water. No one's quite clear on who's
hereabouts. Might still be some Indians, might be blue-gum niggers whose
bite'll kill you. We got us a dog problem, too. Feral dogs, big as
wolves, they travel in packs and can chew a man to bone meal right fast.

They got a prison farm thirty to forty miles away, and they didn't plan
to build it there ' the territory was easy traveling."

"Well, sir, I am in no hurry to git close to a prison one way or the
other. But I am an experienced woods fellow and believe I can hold my
own. I ain't doing my job if I'm just looking at the ground from a
canoe. Want to find and map the hellholes, see where I'd put up stands,
where the deer paths are, where I might expect some heavy bucks, if this
state done growed '.

"She does, I'll tell you, eight-points and more, big '. So I can see
I'll not be telling you what's for. I can see you're a hardhead.

Okay, son, the funeral they be holding be for you, not me. You want to
leave me word for your next of kin?" "Yes sir, Mr. Mctye," said Earl,
and wrote out an address for Jack Bogash in Little Rock. "I will leave
this here with you. You come back in a week. If I am here, so much the
better. If I am not, then possibly I've left in another direction. Don't
you worry none either way, until maybe some weeks hence, if my widow
calls the state po-lice.

Then you tell ' where I started in, and if they can find the body, so
much the better."

"Sir, I hope you know your stuff."

"Mister, I do too. But this is what a feller has to do these days to
earn a living, and if this pays out, I'll be a happy dog."

The old man spat into the river, left Earl off on the shore of the Leaf,
turned around, and in smooth strokes propelled his way back until a bend
at last obscured him.

Alone now in the dark cathedral of the swamp, Earl wasted no time. He
unlimbered the rifle, fed four .30-'06 150-gram cartridges into the
magazine which, by the peculiarity of the gun, was not a tube under the
barrel but a complicated internal spring-loaded well that took some care
in the proper fitting of the shells, and jacked the lever to feed a
cartridge to the chamber. That done, he lowered the hammer.

Next, compass: he shot an azimuth due east, meaning to carry him across
the promontory between the upper-Y configuration of Leaf and Yaxahatchee
and in seven or eight hours good traveling, locate up on the Yax yet
still twenty or so miles downriver from Thebes.

This he did, the pack on his back, a canteen on his belt, the .45 still
secured. Though not in combat shape, Earl lived a vigorous life and his
body was entirely comfortable in the state of extra effort. He didn't
feel now as if he were in Japanese territory, so he moved quickly,
without a mind toward invisibility, on as straight a line as he could
manage. The woods, once the waters had receded, were firm and piney, and
it didn't take long for the heat to soak his shirt and the brim of his
fedora. He kept his pace up steady for a good five hours, avoiding
hellholes, always returning to his original due east heading.

He finally took a quick break for tuna from a can (buried afterward) and
a few swigs of water. Then onward. He reached the Yax by dusk, just
where it began to widen and straighten for its last twenty-mile plunge
through the piney wilderness to Thebes. He spent two hours with his good
knife hewing pine boughs, then stripping them, working until well after
dark, assembling a raft.

He slept without a fire, sitting up in his bag, the rifle across his
knees, his eyes watching, never asleep enough to be unconscious but
nevertheless nourishing his energy.

Breakfast, before dawn, was another can of tuna fish, followed by a can
of cold tomato soup, the cans again buried. By the duck hunter's hour,
he was on his fragile craft, poling his way along the shore, never
venturing to the center, ready to dip into shore at the first sign of
disturbance.

He reached what he felt must be Thebes well before dark, having pulled
off the river only once, when the powerful churning of engines far off
indicated a heavy craft; it was the weekly Mississippi Bureau of Prisons
boat, a steam-driven thirty-five-footer, with its supplies and its cargo
of human woe, a few more unfortunates destined for the penal farm. He
studied the craft through his binoculars, noting nothing peculiar about
it except a large white box with an odd insignia of red triangles
arranged around a red dot, where a red cross would be if the box
contained medical supplies. He'd never seen such a thing; he recorded it
in his notebook, and having done so, promptly consigned it to his
subconscious, forgetting it totally at his functional brain level.

Earl laid up across from the town, watching and waiting.

It became clear soon enough that there had to be some sort of station on
that side of the river, near enough to the town for the officers to run
their patrols, and they were aggressive enough and changed horses enough
to suggest that they were close by.

And Earl could guess where it would be. To the northwest, equidistant
between the town and the still unseen Thebes Penal Farm for Colored.

Earl knew it was there; he could tell by the barking of the dogs.

THE dogs.

At least they weren't free-roaming. Instead, they were kenneled at the
back of the wire compound, and the deputies were so complacent that they
didn't patrol the perimeter with them or any such thing, or keep a night
watch, or any true security measures. That's how atop the world they
felt. The deputies were like kings of everything, these boys, atop their
horses, with their chained dogs, easy, confident masters of the universe
of piney woods and bayou and cowed Negroes.

Earl studied the kennels: there he saw blue-tick hounds, low, slobbery,
sinewy barking and sniffing machines. There were twenty or so of them,
and they gamboled and played in their pen, but if they were put on his
trail, he knew they'd be remorseless. It was the dog way.

Earl feared dogs. On Tarawa, the Twenty-eighth Marine War-Dog teams had
sent their animals into blown-out bunkers in search of live Japs.

The dogs' noses were so much finer than humans', they could pick out the
smell of the living from the dead, and when they found a wounded man,
they'd tear him up bad, usually to death. They'd drag them out of the
bunkers or pillboxes, swarming and yapping and biting, and you could see
the Jap, bled out, sometimes concussed, the poor man fighting against
them on some kind of general principle of survival but without much
energy. As much as Earl hated the Japanese, he hadn't enjoyed seeing
that; the packs of dogs ripping at the wounded man, usually by this time
awash in blood that made the dogs even more insane. Meanwhile, their
handlers, by nature brutal, urged s the animals on, laughing at the
spectacle. The dogs snapped and , chewed, or they hung on and shook and
twisted and pulled. No man J not even a Jap soldier, should die like
that, torn to pieces by dogs as iji sport. Earl bet that after the war,
those dogs had been destroyed. You couldn't have a dog like that in a
civilian world, a dog encouraged to the furthest extremes of its
savagery. Yes, they were our dogs, but still: he shuddered. Some things
were too much.

These dogs looked the same. They were beautiful and sleek, but they'd
been corrupted by men and nourished toward specialized forms of
violence. In a way, they represented all the evil that men could wreak
on the world, impressed upon the innocence of a dumb, brute animal. He
saw that in the kennel where it was the rule of the pack, a
rough-and-tumble world of tooth and fang. A big blue seemed to run the
place, and he kept the young dogs away with the strength of glare and
intensity. Just like in the human world. That's why Earl never wanted
any part of a pack. Meanwhile, an old man who worked the dogs looked
more dog than human; he was more an ambassador to the dog world from the
human race than a full human himself. The other deputies kept apart from
him. He'd be the master of hounds; he'd be the one tracking Earl if it
came to that.

Earl found the compound at dawn by simply following the horse tracks.

It was a rude building, made of logs, more cavalry outpost than
anything. For these boys practiced their trade from horseback, and held
their whole operation together from a horse, with a dog or two on )
chains.

So: a kennel, a stable, and a main house, all log, all secure behind a
high barbed-wire fence in the piney woods. And of course, no Negroes
allowed near. Maybe the dogs had been trained to smell Negroes. The main
house had the lock-up attached; that's where Sam had to be, or else he
was up the road in the penal farm itself, and if he was there, there'd
be no getting him out without a division of Marines. Earl watched from
deep in the trees, saw well-fed, confident men locked in routine.

Patrols, lots of organized activity. Boss man was a big fellow he heard
someone call Sheriff Leon, to whom all others deferred.

He was sure Sam was here, because Sheriff Leon checked in to the lockup,
and it seemed to be the point of a lot of energy.

Earl knew he had to get in. He studied on the place, trying to figure
out a way.

It had to do with the wind, he knew. The wind might carry his scent.

If the dogs picked it up, they'd throw up a fit; that might agitate the
deputies, and once agitated, they might begin to nose around. They'd let
the dogs out to hunt him, and the dogs would find him, and that would be
that. He'd be taken and he'd be in with Sam. What good would that do?

Earl patiently charted the breezes on the first night. He learned it was
most still between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00, just before the dawn. He knew he
had to come in on the other side of the compound from the dogs, and that
he had to move slowly. If he sweated, the dogs would smell it; their
noses were so much better, and they were creatures of pattern, used to
things being just so and prone to acting up when they weren't.

At the same time as he exhibited a hunter's patience, Earl was himself
becoming increasingly disturbed. It's one thing when deputies live with
families, and go on duty and off, and when off go back to a civilian
world, be with their kids and wives, go to church or the movies. But
these boys weren't like that. Instead, they were kept living out here in
the woods, isolated, in uniforms that sparked fear and mystery, behind
wire and protected by dogs. They were more like a conquering army in an
occupied territory than police officers.

And they were young, too. Somehow, they were paid enough to put up with
the dormitory-style living far off in the woods, and the constant
discipline of the military. So there was some money behind this,
certainly more than could be justified by the paltry ruin that was
Thebes County, a town locked in mud living off a penal installation
upriver still a mile or so.

Earl didn't like it. The dogs, the horses, the guns, the fear of the
townspeople, Sam locked up way out here. He didn't like it one bit.

earl scrubbed himself in a cold-water stream until he shivered, then put
on the last of his clean underwear. He would sweat some, though it was
cold, but still he'd leave less man smell that way.

He slithered to the wire at 4:30, and watched. In the lock-up, a candle
burned, meaning someone had night duty, but Earl bet he was asleep. The
big log house was before him, between him and the dogs.

Earl had patted dark mud against his face, as he'd done in the Marines
with burnt cork, and stripped to his dungarees and a dark shirt.

Getting through the fence was tough, and the barbs cut him in a dozen
places, shallowly, but enough to sting like hell and leave a tiny blood
track. Easier to simply cut the wire; but if he cut it they'd notice it
the next day.

Earl lay inside the wire, waiting. He was unarmed, except for a K-bar
knife, black-bladed and leather-gripped, which he might use in a pinch
on a dog. But no dogs howled or barked, no one called. He lay still for
the longest time. Then he stood, and walked.

He walked nonchalantly. He didn't sneak or dash or evade. If anyone
should see him from the house, he looked like he belonged. He walked
across the yard to the house, waiting every second for a challenge, but
it never came. These boys felt secure in their place.

He skittered around the house to the lock-up, and peeked in; he could
see a deputy asleep at the desk, the fire in the stove having burned
low, and beyond three cells in the back, two open, one locked. That's
where Sam would be. But Earl didn't enter. Instead, he crawled around,
past the door to the back, then found purchase at a window and gutter
and swung his way up, as silently as he could. Again, no challenge came.

He eased to his haunches, then to his feet, and staying at the edges
eased around until he thought he was over the locked cell.

Going prone again, he pulled the knife, and quickly set at cutting
through the roof. He figured--rightly--that the roof would be the
weakest part, unreachable as it was to the prisoners. It was old, rotted
wood, the shingles soft, the tar holding them down softer, and digging
assiduously, he quickly opened a seam in the roof, chopped through the
wood, and at last got a bit of an opening. He could see down at Sam,
sleeping restlessly on his cot.

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 fore sty 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 He with you, and
so you done pole axed her head in. Seen it before. Now, if you's a
local, we might just say, Old Vincent, he got to thinking with his
little head ' 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."

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 lockup 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.

"Sutler'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 removed 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 horse shit 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.

"This way, you stay with me, goddammit. We got some hard travel ahead.

We got twenty miles to go in about ten hours. You up to it? "Cause if
you ain't, I can't carry you, Mr. Sam."

"I will run till I die, Earl. You are a great man. You are a great
American."

"That I doubt. But I do mean to get you clear of here, goddammit, so
let's go."

And off they went into the woods, stopping every one hundred yards or so
for Earl to find and cut a rope necklace from a pine trunk.

they got the fire out by dawn, but already the dogs had found the scent.

"He won't git far," Pepper told Sheriff Leon. "My pups got him lined up
right fine. They'll be nipping at him by noon, Sheriff, and by four you
can put him back in the cuffs and I can kick his ass for the knot he
done give me." Pepper was the conked one. The left side of his head was
swollen like a softball. He had a headache, and he'd swallowed a plug of
Brown's Mule when he'd been hit. That was the worst, for he'd puked
brown slop for an hour and it had emptied him of hunger for the '; so he
had two grudges going, one for the knot on the skull, the other for the
wasted plug.

"Yes sir, the pups be on his Arkansas behind."

But the sheriff was not so convinced.

He knew there had to be a second man and that the second man had to be
mighty smart. Already the sheriff found himself behind the eight ball.

The fire in town proved to be nothing but an old building burning and
some kind of firecracker put together from some .45 shells. It was
clever. This feller'd thought hard to come up with that one.

Meanwhile, as all the sheriff's deputies are hiding behind trees and
looking for targets at what's nothing but burning lumber, whoever he is
is back in the compound, jury-rigging a bomb out of the generator and
freeing up that goddamned Arkansas lawyer.

He should have killed the dogs, though, the sheriff thought. He should
have slipped in there and cut twenty dog throats. Why didn't he kill the
dogs?

"Okay," he said. "Y'all got your sleeping packs? This may be a long
'un."

His deputies by now had switched to hiking boots, for there were no
horse trails in the deep woods, and they all carried packs. It was the
drill. They'd hunted men before. They also all had rifles.

"Sheriff, you want I should go on up to the Farm and tell Warden and
Bigboy we gots a runner. They's got them good hounds, too."

"Hell, they hounds ain't no better ' my hounds," Pepper put in. "My pups
out track them mangy Farm mutts any day of the week, including Sunday
and Armistice Day. Yes sir, my hounds the best hounds."

Pepper's hound pride meant little to the sheriff, and he considered
telling Warden and Bigboy and getting the guards in on the hunt. Some of
them were essentially professional man hunters as they'd run many a
nigger to ground their own self over the years. But again: that meant
notification and coordination, it meant trying to rendezvous in deep,
twisting piney roads and nobody had radios or anything, and it could
just mess it up bad. Sometimes too many on a manhunt got in their own
way and ended up chasing each the other.

"Naw, it's only one man, maybe two. Running through woods they don't
know, toward what they ain't sure. We knows our land, and them dogs old
Pepper has are good enough. You boys, let's git her going. And, let me
say this again, man fleeing justice who done lit up a municipal building
is a desperate man. No limit likely on what he's willing to do to taste
some free cooze and a jar of lightning down the road. So if you git him
in your sights, you jack. Okay? Understood? You shoot him dead. This
boy's had the smell of mischief on him from the git-go, and his wagon
should be fixed. Let's move it out."

With Pepper's six best hounds straining against their chains, driven
almost insane by the thickness of the Sam-smell clinging to the earth,
they set out, the dogs snuffling furiously at what they believed to be
Sara's path out of the compound, around the back of the house and
crosswise to the wire, where he'd obviously slid underneath.

The sheriff commanded the wire cut, for now that he'd started he didn't
feel like backtracking to the gate, then circling around again to this
spot. One by one his men slipped through, and then he followed.

"Cut the dogs free, Sheriff?"

"Cut ', Pepper. Let ' hunt."

So Pepper clicked to his animals in some strange dog tongue he knew, and
the old blue, the master of the pack, fought through his instincts and
settled. Soon the others followed.

Pepper passed among them, freeing each, and though each had instincts
that commanded onward, they had had their obedience beaten into them by
Pepper's brutality, and so they knew they risked a thumping if they
disobeyed, no matter how their loins ached to.

Finally Pepper said, "Go/" and the six took off like nags from a gate,
yelping their excitement as they gobbled up the Samness of the track,
and plunged, muscles working, jowls slobbering, toward the woods.

"Oh, they got it rich," Pepper said. "Watch them pups hunt. They are
hunters and they got locked in on that of" boy. Going to bring in the
meat."

The dogs plunged ahead, almost in formation, so strong was the
Sam-smell, and for just a second the sheriff allowed himself a whisper
of pleasure.

They had it so strong. They were so sure. It was going to be easy.

But then the pack seemed to explode. Each dog picked a different
direction. One raced into brambles, another circled back around, two
more began barking at a tree, and the last two simply stood stock-still
and began to whimper. They'd stopped before they'd even got going.

"What's happening? They lose it?" "Goddamn," said old Pepper. "Goddamn
him, that goddamned tricky bastard."

"What happened?"

"He done laid a false scent. He brings the dogs here where he's smeared
up ever-thing with Arkansas scent. He must have had some clothes or
something, and he riled up a big scent trap here, and my pups is all
messed up in their heads. It ain't that there's no scent, it's that
there's too goddamned many scents."

The sheriff felt the frustration rising in him like a column of steam,
pressure increasing, heat rising, pain swelling.

"Goddamn him! Goddamn him all to hell." "That goddamn lawyer is smart,"
said Opic Brown, one of the younger fellows.

"Lawyer nothing. Some other bird's in on this one, don't you see. He
been watching us and thinking this thing through a while. Who else set
that fire last night, God himself?"

"No, sir."

"Pepper, what we do?"

"Well, sir, got to start over. Got to run a perimeter until my pups can
find the true scent, then we be off."

The sheriff knew this would take hours: he and his party and the dogs
inscribing a large, slow circle around the compound until one of the
dogs came up with a Sam-smell unaffiliated with this riot of Sam smell
here.

Then the hunt would begin in earnest.

"We'll get him, Sheriff," Opic cried. "Goddamn, I know we will!"

they ran out of loops of rope too early.

"Goddammit," said Earl.

"What?"

"We're ahead of schedule."

It was still dark in the woods. Around them loomed the shapes of trees
rearing up, which men with undisciplined imaginations might have seen as
monsters assaulting them, or foreshadowings of impending doom. But Sam
didn't have enough imagination to let run wild, and Earl was too locked
into the absolutely necessary. Though a flicker of dawn showed behind
them, the sun was still more than half an hour away.

"That's good, isn't it?" said Sam, breathing hard.

"Nah, it's bad. Means we just sit here till it's light enough to take a
compass reading, goddammit."

"You can't--"

"No, sir. Can't see far enough to set a compass reading, shoot an
azimuth. Got to sit here till I can make out a landmark half a mile
ahead."

"We're hours ahead of them, and they can't bring any horses in here."

"You'd be surprised how hard men can move when they're motivated. And
that sheriff's got plenty of motivation. He's been humiliated in his own
little world, and he don't want that getting out, ' everything he has is
based on the idea that he is the toughest, smartest, meanest sumbitch in
the territory. Seen it in my father, same goddamn mule-pride craziness.

He will come after us both barrels, and now we're stuck just sitting
here for a half an hour. How you holding up?"

"Ah. Okay. I've got a blister on my foot."

"Got bandages and some aspirin at my goods cache, but that's still a few
miles ahead. That'll be some help."

"Good. I didn't wear the right shoes for a hike."

They both looked at Sam's leather brogues from Brooks Brothers in St.
Louis, a smooth, beautiful shoe in rich mahogany, a successful man's
shoe, and so out of place in the woods it was almost laughable.

"You just keep on pumping," Earl said. "You do that, I'll have you home
to your kids in two days."

"The hell with my kids. I just want to see Connie Longacre."

"She is some gal "

"Earl, an experience like this, gets a man to thinking, and I "

"Save it, Mr. Sam. Not for now. Save your breath. You'll need every
little bitty piece of it before this here thing is run out."

In twenty minutes Earl found just enough light to shoot his azimuth to a
terrain feature, and they were off again, and an hour after that found
Earl's goods cached out of sight behind a log, in some high, dry grass.

Earl unscrewed his canteen and Sam took a good long draft. Earl got
clean, dry socks out of his pack, and a bandage, and Sam took off his
shoes, threw away the socks, bandaged his foot and pulled on the dry
socks, which, being thicker, fit not quite so well in the tight, sodden
shoes.

"That's okay," said Earl, "they'll loosen, you'll be fine."

Then he reached further into his pack and pulled out a .45 automatic,
which had been worked on a few years back: it had a larger than usual
rear sight welded to the receiver and some kind of shelf on the safety.

"Here. This is for you."

"Earl, I can't accept that. I cannot kill to get away. That invalidates
anything I have ever stood for, which is the law." "Mr. Sam," said Earl,
as he reached further into the dry grass to pull out his Winchester '95
carbine, "do you see much in the way of law out here? We are on our own,
and no law's going to help us."

"Earl, I know you to be a moral man, a decent man, a good man. They say
you are the best policeman in the state, and I know in the war you done
fine work for our side. But I must say it amazes me how quickly and well
you convert to the other side. It's as if your great gifts for action,
well-conceived thought, for capability beyond all men, could go either
way. I hope your boy grows up to be the straight and narrow you, and if
you have another son, I hope he doesn't grow up to walk the crooked,
violent road."

"Are you ready?" Earl said, returning the un taken pistol to his pack.

"Earl, you cannot kill with that rifle. Kill a man and you have crossed
over."

"I will not kill except to save you, Mr. Sam. Except a dog. I may have
to kill a goddamned dog or two. That I will not enjoy, but if it has to
happen, it will."

And that was when they heard, far off and scratchy, the sound of the
hounds.

"My, my," said Earl. "I do believe they are still in the hunt."

The dogs had something.

"The pups got '. Yes sir, got one of ' treed."

The pitch of their barking changed. It was not the unfocused yipping of
the tracking animals who made noise to keep themselves amused and
because it was their way. It was focused, ferocious, and " intense.

As they came into a clearing, they all saw them gathered.

"Yes sir, by God, got a one of ' treed, you can see, ha, goin' to git
that ".umbitch, yes, sir, oh, them wunnerful doggies!" cried Pepper, his
throat phlegmy with glee.

The hounds circled a large pine, three on point, the other two trying to
leap up the trunk, snarling fiercely. Only the big blue was apart, as if
not sanctioning this development.

"Okay, fellows," yelled the sheriff, "now you git around ' and be
care--"

One shot sent a Winchester bullet blowing through the clusters of pine
needles, and then they all opened up, shot after shot after shot laying
into the tree, puffing it with green haze as the bullets ripped through.

Dust and pulverized bark rose from the tree, a limb hit precisely
tumbled off under its own weight.

"Cease fire, goddammit!" yelled Sheriff Leon, and one by one the men
stopped firing.

"Take cover, and keep the tree covered, goddammit. Just wait and see
what you bagged."

The men scurried to cover, and the dogs, who had scattered at the first
reports, reassembled under the tree and recommenced trying to leap and
nip at it. The sheriff waited another three minutes, then slowly drew
his Smith .38/44 Heavy-Duty.

"Y'all cover me."

"Yes, sir."

"Opic, you don't be shootin' me, you hear?"

"Yes, sir," replied Opic.

The sheriff slid on the angle toward the tree, and as a veteran of
several gun battles--he'd worked on the New Orleans police force before
being cashiered for corruption back in 1932, at which time he'd started
his new career as a prison guard at Thebes, which led ultimately to this
position--he knew what he was doing. Keeping the gun out before him
aggressively, his finger caressing the trigger, he at last ducked under
the skirt of boughs and pointed upward to see what he could see.

"Well," he finally said, when he emerged, "why'n't you boys come see
what you have killed."

The deputies raced to the tree.

About ten feet up, hanging on a sheared-off limb and surrounded by the
pock and puncture marks of too many rifle bullets, they could see two
black socks hanging limply.

"You killed that lawyer's socks," said the sheriff. "Pity he ain't in
them."

"THEY are truly a disciplined bunch," said Sam, when a mile or so behind
them the firing eventually stopped. "You were right. They attacked my
socks. They were fancy socks, too. I don't suppose I'll ever get them
back." "You never know," said Earl. "These backwoods fellows, they don't
like to waste a thing. Probably someone named Billy or Ray Ed or
something is trying ' on right now. You could come down in ten years or
so when everybody's forgot all about this, and probably find them on his
feet on Sunday at the meeting."

The pines showed no particular tendency toward abatement, though now and
then they'd come to a logged out area, which upset Earl; he would not
let them pass through the open land, because a rifleman who got there
before they cleared its bare spaces might get a good, clean shot off,
and one was all it took.

"On the other hand," Sam had argued, "we can make better time, because
the ground is less cluttered with these goddamned vines and weeds and
things. We can advance our lead and--"

"But they can make better time too. They're following our smell. We go
', they go '. That's it. Either that, or you figure out a way to stop
smelling. When you get that one done, you let me know."

"Should have known I couldn't outthink Earl Swagger on some tactics
issue," said Sam.

"I got a bagful of tricks," said Earl. "Only goddamned thing I know at
all in this world."

But he hadn't sprung his best trick yet. He'd been looking for just such
an opportunity, which demanded the congruence of stout trees, not pines,
but the occasional oaks that sprung up helter-skelter in the woods. He
needed a dead one, with a nice spike of splintered trunk atop it.

And at last, on the far side of a gentle hill, he found it.

"Okay," he said. "You take a rest." "Earl," said Sam, his face a shine
with sweat, "you know those boys can't be that far behind."

"I got a little something here. This one's real pretty."

Earl knelt and reached into his pack. He came out with a big coil of
rope. He diddled with it, until at last he'd fashioned a cowboy's lariat
with its expandable loop just perfect for bringing down running steers
from close-by horseback.

"We used to see them Western-type movies in the Pacific when we wasn't
kinin' Japs. You know, with that feller John Wayne, you seen any of
them?"

"Yes, Earl, of course I've seen Westerns. But what on earth--"

"Oh, you just watch me now."

Earl swung the looped rope overhead, building up a nice rhythm and
swoop, then let the thing fly and it soared the thirty feet or so to the
spike and missed.

"Goddamn," he barked.

"I'll go--"

"No. You stay where you are."

Instead of retrieval, Earl snapped the rope back slowly so that it
wouldn't catch on anything. Then he began again, flinging the rope
across and This time he got it right, and the loop settled over the
spiked trunk and slipped down.

"There we go."

With that he went to another oak, this one alive, pulled himself up a
bit, got to the second branch, pulled the rope tight but not too tight,
so that it had some spring to it, and secured it by a peculiar knot to
the trunk.

He scurried down.

"Now you come on."

"What are you up to, Earl, this is the craziest--"

"You just come with me." They forged ahead another hundred yards.

"That's fine. That's right good. Now come on."

They backtracked to the tree.

"Now sir, you git up that tree and you hand-over-hand across to the
other tree."

"Earl, I don't see--"

"It's the scent. It's low to the ground. Them dogs can only smell what's
on the goddamned ground. That's why they got to keep their noses in the
mud. So we going across, we ain't touching no ground, and when we get
across, we head off from over there. They go right on by and a hundred
yards up so where we stopped, they run out of trail.

It'll take ' an hour of scouting to find us again."

Sam looked at Earl.

"Sir," he finally said, "if you weren't on the side of the law, you
would make a very cunning criminal. You have it in your bones, no doubt
about it."

"goddammit!" screamed the sheriff.

"Damn," said Pepper. "Ain't seen a thing like it never. Trail just
stops. Did they fly out by spaceship?"

"Maybe it was one of them heliochopters," a deputy said. "Seen it in the
newsreel. Them things can land straight down."

"Don't be no fool, Skeeter," said the sheriff.

"Ain't no helicopters in Thebes County. They backtracked and someplace
back they managed to jump trail. Don't know how they done it, but this
fellow running this thing, he's as smart as they come."

"Sheriff, ain't nobody got this far before."

The sheriff knew that to be the case. It clouded his brow with darkness.

Usually the runners headed the other direction, because for them the
river meant freedom; there was something in the Negro head, something
ancient and unperturbable, that connected crossing a river with freedom.

The sheriff didn't understand it, but he knew that the colored went
east, to the bayou, and because they thought the dogs couldn't track
through water, but the dogs were really good and didn't lose a scent
easy, and the runners left enough about on weeds and vines and wet logs
and leaves for the dogs to stay with, and the swamp slowed them down and
sometimes killed them, sparing the sheriff and his boys the trouble.

Nothing personal: it was just that a running nigger was a guilty nigger,
whatever the infraction might be, and a bullet was as easy a solution to
the case as time in the Farm, and it meant a good deal less paperwork
for everybody.

But this goddamn white boy had been smart. He'd gone out through the
piney woods, which meant he had a compass and was good in the wild, and
he'd thought hard about beating the dogs. He'd worked it out real solid.

No, nobody had gotten that far before.

"So, we got to circle until we pick up that scent again, is that right?"
he demanded.

"Yes, sir," said Pepper.

"Tell you what," said the sheriff, thinking into the problem. "You put
them dogs back on chains. I want two teams of three dogs each. You run
one team, Opic'll run the other. Instead of one big circle, we'll each
take a half. Whichever team picks up the scent first, whether it's one
or tother, you fire a shot. Then you mark it. You see. You mark it with
a handkerchief or something, Opic, you can figure out to do it, right?"

"Yes sir, b'lieve I can," said Opic.

"Yes. And the first team goes on after them boys, and the second team
cuts cross the circle, finds the mark, and it commences after the first
team. That seems like it could save us a mess of time, don't it?"

"Yes, it do," said Pepper. "Sheriff, you one right smart man."

"Okay, let's get her done. I figured out where they're headed, by the
way."

"Where, Sheriff?"

"Track. The Alabama and Great Southern track cuts across the woods
another six, seven miles out. So they goin' to catch a train ride, they
think. You boys best catch ', you hear? We don't want nobody gitting out
to tell fantastical stories about Thebes County now, do we?"

"How much further, Earl?" said Sam. The ordeal was wearing on the older
man. He'd twisted his ankle back there a ways, and now hobbled painfully
onward.

The going wasn't easy, for vines and sawtooth clotted the passageways
between the trees and palmettos with sharp leaves that cut at them like
cutlasses. Worse, every now and then they'd come upon a trail, and the
easy passage, beckoning them onward, tempted their spirits away from
Earl's compass plot sorely and broke their hearts when they had to find
the discipline to say no to its comely ways.

"We're getting close," said Earl, lying. He knew they weren't "close,"
only "closer." But no longer did they hear the barking of the dogs, and
now it was just the two of them alone in the dark woods.

"I am running low on steam."

"I am, too, Mr. Sam. Neither of us banked on this. But by now them boys
is goddamned good and mad, so we'd best keep going. If they catch up to
us, there be all kinds of hell to pay."

"I'm only thinking we've done beat them. That trick of yours buffaloed
them good. We could take a rest, maybe."

"Mr. Sam, that earned us an hour. But the deputies is younger and
stronger and well motivated. They will not be stopping, no sir. They
will keep on coming, I guarantee it. Best thing is, don't think about
other stuff. Keep your mind hard."

"I suppose you are right on that one. I--oh, shit."

"Goddammit," said Earl.

Far back, they heard a shot.

It was the bitch Lucy who picked it up, and the sheriff's team, with
Opic on the dogs, who got it.

Lucy began to shiver and whine; she leaped up, her wet tongue licking at
Opic.

"Goddamn mutt," he said, pushing her back.

"No, she's got it," said the sheriff. "She wants her reward. Opic, give
her a kiss."

"Ain't kissing no dog."

"Yes you is, Opic. Seen goddamn old Pepper do it. Get to it."

As Opic bent and faked love to the squirming, prideful hound, the
sheriff turned and drew his Heavy-Duty and fired a shot.

"Okay, boys," he said. "Let me tell you how we goin' do this thang.

That track can't be more that three miles ahead. So now it's a goddamned
race, and I am too much a old man. I will slow you down.

Opic, you and Skeeter take off them packs. We will leave the packs here.

I just want you with your rifles running after them dogs. The dogs will
show the way. They hunt good. They'll hunt ' down, you hear? I will wait
here for them other fellas. When they arrive, we'll run them dogs too,
and they will follow along right quick, I do believe. But you our best
chance. You get to them boys and you shoot ' dead. I don't want no
confusion here now, you understand. Your job is to bring ' back dead and
not alive, so that no one ask no questions, not now, not never. Got it,
fellas?"

Both men were hunters; both men appreciated the opportunity that had
been presented them; both men looked upon it as the greatest of fun.

"Now you go, dammit. I will wait for tot hers Opic set the hounds free,
and they bounded off. Packless, but carrying their Winchesters with the
glee of men about to have some fun, the young deputies took up the
chase.

"Docs," said Sam. "Oh, Christ, dogs." "Ain't as many of them," said
Earl. "He done split up his team, and only a few marked us."

"Can we make it?"

"We got to pick up the pace. We can't tarry. Sorry, Mr. Sam, but it's
going to be a running thing now." "Then," said Sam, "I will give it my
best effort."

They accelerated their movements, bucking ahead with more abandon now.

Sam did something unprecedented as testament to the seriousness of his
situation: he actually loosened his tie.

"Hope no supreme court justices see you with that tie all reckless like
that," said Earl. "You could git in trouble with your career if that
happens."

"Don't you tell a soul now, Earl. This one's between you and me, and as
soon as we catch that train, the tie comes up again. You never can tell
who you may run into hoboing on a freight."

Earl appreciated that Sam could still joke a bit. When a man's sense of
humor went, it meant he was near going under. In the war, he'd always
looked for a chance to make his boys smile at some fool thing or other.

It made ' that much looser and gave ', however tiny, just that much more
chance.

The land began an incline, howsoever gentle, and the height worked
against them as well. Soon both were bent double, puffing hard, feeling
the sweat leak off them, lost in the intensity of the ordeal.

Earl had plotted onto a lone pine a half mile ahead. They increased
their pace, achieving almost a jog, just the steady, easy lope of men at
urgent extension, pushing themselves ever onward, trying to ignore the
multitude of discomforts that built toward pain as they rushed along,
their minds tunneling through everything toward the possibility of
escape.

Earl had pieces of metal scattered through his body, most of it Japanese
shrapnel. Now and then a piece worked loose and nudged a nerve or
something and sent a searing pain up to his brain. He'd been shot in the
war a whole bunch of times, treated roughly by combat as combat will do
to a man. He thought he was beyond the rough stuff, and he wasn't.

Still, he clung desperately to the rifle. It was an old gun bought
secondhand from a retiring trooper, what you call a trunk gun. It rode
in the cruiser, wrapped in a blanket, picking up nicks and scratches
over the years. But if a trooper ever needed something heavy to plow
through the bones of a wounded animal or a barricaded robber, the heavy
old Government .30 Model of '06 bullet would do the trick, and Earl knew
he had but a hammer snick to accomplish before he fired the first of
five packed in there.

He hoped he didn't have to shoot. But he knew if he did, he would. It
was his way.

They reached the crest of the hill.

"Lookie, goddamn," cried Opic. "Seen '. They just ahead."

His eyes were good. They'd picked up on a flash of movement a quarter
mile down the slope from them, nothing demonstrably human but
nevertheless clearly the flash of something moving urgently.

"Them dogs be on ' soon," Skeeter declared. "Tear ' up real damn good.

Then we pop '. Like bear hunting'. Hunt bears with dogs.

Dogs drive ' back, tire ' out, bleed ', y'all git close and you can pot
yourself a bearskin rug for the winter."

"You ain't never hunted no bears, Opic."

"Well, that's right, goddammit. My people wasn't bear-hunting people.

But that's how it be done, by Christ, that I know. You ain't never
hunted no bears neither."

"There, goddammit," Skeeter yelled. "Seen ' too. Let's git them old
boys. Whooooie, goin' to be fun a-coming!"

"Fun a-coming!" yelled Opic.

The two lanky youths gathered themselves heroically, and once again
started loping through the pines toward the last view they'd had of the
fleeing men. The track was easy. The running dogs chewed up the soft
pine needles where they galloped, and three of them left a big enough
sign for an idiot. On the balls of their feet, Opic and Skeeter danced
forward. The prospect of action, of success, of getting home after all
this shit lightened their steps and their spirits. Their natural
hunter's exuberance amplified the chemicals in their blood, and they
soared ahead.

sam stumbled and fell, caught himself, and kneeled, chest heaving, face
wet with sweat.

"Earl, I'm about finished. I think I'm going to have a goddamn heart
attack! You go on. You git. You leave me here. You done your best.

I just wasn't up to this goddamn thing."

"Mr. Sam--"

"No, Earl. I formally relieve you of any obligation to me. It's the '<!

right thing. You go on back to Arkansas and raise that boy and--"

"Mr. Sam, give me your coat."

"Your coat. Goddamn, we haven't much time at all. And that hat too, give
me that goddamn thing."

"Earl, I--"

"Goddammit, Sam, do what I say!"

Sam was stunned that Earl, who understood the elaborate system of
deference that underlay Southern society as well as any man, would
actually raise his voice at him. It seemed so out of character. One
yelled at Negroes or, occasionally, workingmen, women and male children,
particularly of the teenaged years, but one never Earl lost all patience
with the shocked man and picked him up by the lapels, spinning him,
stripping him of his coat. Then he plucked the straw hat.

"Now your shirt."

"My shirt?"

"Your goddamned shirt!"

Quickly, Sam shucked the damp garment. Earl quickly shed his hunting
coat and extended it to the bare-chested man.

"Here's what we do. I will lead them away. It's your scent them dogs has
homed on. I will peel off to the right. You keep going straight to the
track. Them boys will be on me. I will try to shuck them a few miles
from here, and I will get to the train."

"Earl, you don't even know there's a train, you have no idea when on
earth the train--"

"It's due in Hattiesville by six-thirty, which means it ought to be
through this part of Greene around four, which gives you fifteen
minutes. You think I'd do this goddamn stunt without a train schedule in
my pocket? The whole goddamn thing is set up around that freight.

Usually six cars, it slows down as it hits grade, and you ought to git
aboard easy enough. I once rode from Little Rock all the way to Dago on
the bum. Now, goddammit, you have rested enough. Get going."

"Earl, I--"

"Just go, Mr. Sam. I will see you in Arkansas."

"Yes, I--"

"And one last thing. If I don't make it, you will want to start your
program. The governor, the congressman, the police chief, the newspaper
joe, all that stuff. Well, I am giving you an order: don't you do it. If
they nab me, one thing'll keep me alive, and that's them wondering who
the hell I am. If big shots start asking questions, they will shoot me
in the head and bury me out here in the piney woods. Do you hear? Do you
understand?"

"Earl, give me a time frame? How long do I wait?"

But a train whistle sounded far-off, and Earl, rubbing Sam's sweaty
clothes on bushes and against trees, began his maneuver to the right.

Sam picked himself up, pulling Earl's coat tight about himself, and was
off.

it was better now. Earl, alone, spread the Sam scent broadly as he
worked his way back. He preferred to be alone. Alone, he could
concentrate fully on what he had to do; he didn't have to pay attention
to Sam. Regretfully he tossed his pack and pistol into a hollow log; he
couldn't afford the weight.

The dogs were loud now. He knew they'd take the bait. That was the way
their minds worked. But he had a moment where he wondered if he hadn't
been wiser to have just set up and shot the dogs as they came upon them.

But who knew when they'd be here and maybe he'd not have time after
shooting them to get to the train himself. No, of the choices, all of
them bad, this was the best.

He worked his way along but just below the crest of what appeared to be
a low hill. On the other side of the crest, the land would drop away to
the tracks, possibly half a mile ahead. That would be fine. Sam should
have plenty of time. He checked his watch and knew that he had enough
time now to get himself to the train. He would just dump Sam's clothes
and dip over the crest.

He wadded them into a union of pine trunk and bough and laughed at the
ruckus the dogs would set up when they reached this spot. Then he ducked
over the ridge, ready for his own descent. It occurred to him suddenly:
They were going to make it. It wa sat the crest, he made a terrifying
discovery.

The trees had been timbered all the way down the slope. There was no
cover at all. And he could see Sam, alone, amid a forest of stumps,
picking his painful way down to the tracks, now plainly visible.

He knew what that meant.

A rifleman on the crest would have a clear shot at Sam all the way down.

If he was any good at all, he'd have Sam dead three hundred yards before
he got to the track.

Earl squatted to gather his breath for a second. It wasn't even a
dilemma. Even though he was close enough to the limit of the timbering,
and had at this moment technically escaped, and had only a last downhill
plunge before intercepting the train, it never occurred to him to go.

Instead, he dropped back on the other side of the crest, and headed
toward his pursuers.

Now he was hunting them.

sam felt naked. He knew this wasn't good, but the nearest timber was a
half mile in either direction, and if he raced for it he'd miss the
train. He hoped and prayed the boys behind wouldn't get a good shot at
him, and he stumbled ahead, feeling so helpless. He had no shirt, but
only Earl's hunting coat, a waxy canvas thing, and his shoes were
sodden, and his ankle still throbbed from the twist, and the breath came
in hard, dry spurts, as if he hadn't enough room in his throat to get
the proper right amount of air into his lungs.

He could see the track before him, glinting in the sun like a piece of
ribbon on the floor, but at the same time bobbing in his perspective
because of the spastic quality of his breathing and his downward
lurching. The sun was hot. He seemed to be floating through thickets of
moths or butterflies. Now and then a pine stump jabbed or poked at his
already torn and battered legs, but the slope helped him immensely, as
did his momentum, as did the prospect of gravity.

Suddenly he heard a shot.

the first dog bounded into view. It was a hound, sleek and young, a
beautiful animal, gobbling up Sam's scent as it plunged ahead.

It saw Earl, and it didn't pause a second, and went from tracking dog to
attacking dog, flying at Earl with a fury no man could muster, its fangs
bared, a guttural growl of pure insanity screaming from its throat. The
eyes were red and narrowed as it leaped, and Earl took it from the hip,
one shot, the bullet piercing its throat, blowing its brains out at an
upward angle as it passed through the not-so-thick skull, and the dog,
so beautiful, was also so dead. It collapsed in a heap.

A bullet kicked up a gout of dirt near him, a geyser of highpowered
energy. One of the deputies had fired.

Earl threw his lever, jacked a shell out, and took up a kneeling
position halfway behind a tree. The stupid boy ran ahead to see if he
had bagged something and Earl put the sight blade in the center of his
chest, and almost squeezed the trigger, but instead let it drop and
fired a round at the running boy's feet, throwing up his own geyser. The
boy dropped, both himself and his rifle, and if the other were aiming,
he took a dive when he saw the closeness of the round.

But Earl saw none of this.

Instead another dog leaped and before he could get a new round levered
into his rifle it was upon him so even in the motion of cocking, he
wheeled and clubbed it with the butt of the rifle, feeling it shudder
with the blow and sigh. But the dog after that was on him, and he felt
its tearing snout burrowing through his shirt as it tried to rip his
throat with its canines. There's something terrifying about the totality
of the way an animal fights; it has no doubts or qualms and its fear
releases a pure blast of chemicals into its blood, so that its muscles
triple in their strength and its savagery quadruples. But the animal
could not get purchase on the soft flesh of Earl's throat because he
protected it with his chin, then ripped out his K-bar and got the blade
into her.

She squealed in the sharp pain, and knew herself to be mortally hurt,
but in a second she was back at him.

By this time he had gotten the rifle up and fired. He belly shot her,
and down she went, and he could not stand the idea of so brave an animal
suffering, and so he levered the rifle again and shot her in the side of
the head.

The beaten dog came at him and got its jaws locked on his left wrist so
he could not shoot. The pain flared through his arm. He transferred the
rifle to his right hand, flipped it, then used it to brain the dog.

The dog relaxed. He swung it overhead and brought the full weight of the
accelerating rifle down upon its skull, and something broke. The dog lay
still.

He sat back, leaking blood from a dozen ugly wounds. He could feel it in
his eyes, running down the side of his face, darkening his shirt,
running down his arms to his hands, making them so slippery they could
hardly hold the rifle. He tried not to look at the ruined bodies of the
animals. It seemed to cast a bad spell on this business. Killing
something so beautiful that was only doing what it had been trained to
do, well, it was nothing to be proud of.

As he sat back momentarily, he made another terrifying discovery. The
force of thumping the last dog was so intense that the lever had popped,
opening the action, and the remaining two .30-06 cartridges had spilled
out to somewhere on the floor of the forest. He was unarmed.

"Opic ! Goddamn, there he be."

"Wal, git him. Then we git tother. And the sheriff be here with more
dogs. Git that one down there. It's that goddamned law fellow, I know
for sure."

Indeed they could recognize Sam as he worked his way toward the tracks,
not going as fast as he should, a civilized man in rough territory
without a clue. He was nakedly open to them in the distance, a tiny
figure against the rawness of the timbered plot.

Both deputies dropped to prone and eased the hammers back on the
Winchesters.

"You got to shoot high. You shoot over him, drop that bullet into him."

"You watch where I hit, and yell corrections."

"You ain't so dumb for a dumb hick."

"Only thang dumber than a dumb hick is a smart city boy."

Opic was the designated shooter. He was young, his eyes sharp, he had
shot a lot and hunted his whole life. He could see his target hobbling
along at what appeared to be a range of about six hundred yards, a far
carry for a .30-30, but not impossible. Hell, he didn't even really have
to hit him. He just had to scare him into dropping--and missing that
coming train. If he done that, he done right good. The sheriff and the
dogs and the other fellers could round him up.

He found the old man perched at the tip of his sight, and squeezed the
worn, smooth trigger of Mr. Oliver Winchester's best gun.

The target was lost in the jump of the rifle.

He levered the gun quickly, tossing the empty, bringing a new one into
the chamber.

"You's off seventy-five yards at least," yelled Skeeter. "You got to
shoot high."

"I know that, dadgummit. Just gittin' a feel for it."

He held again on the man, then raised the rifle a good five man lengths
over his head and squeezed.

"Goddamn, that's close. Still a mite short."

"That's five men high. I am five men high. I'm going to six."

He levered, found the position, and fired.

The shot plunked up a spray of dirt not ten feet from the fleeing
target.

"Thattharbeit."

"Six men high gits it done."

He fired again, and Skeeter saw the dust puff surprisingly near Sam, who
dropped immediately, scurried a few feet in the low crawl, and took
refuge in a gully.

"Whoooeee," said Opic. "Now you shoot, Skeet. Six men high, that's it."

sam lay in the gulch, heaving for oxygen. It was quiet, and then, with a
lazy puff, the earth just behind him erupted in a scuffle of dirt and
broken stone. Something stung him in the neck, some fragment.

Oh Lord, he thought.

Then, a full second later, the pop of the report lazily reached his
ears, as the sound took its sweet time following on the bullet.

Oh Lord, Lord, he thought.

He could hear the train. It was getting closer and he was but a hundred
yards from the track. But he knew he had to stay until the very last
second, calculate it just perfect, and get up and run helter skelter
like some sort of Crazylegs Hirsch to catch the train, climb aboard, and
drop out of sight from the bullets. He knew he had a chance, at least a
small one, but he didn't like that run, over the rough ground, trying to
read the speed of the train and match his own speed, worried about
stumps and potholes and stones, with those boys up there whacking away
at him, just desperate to get close to him and pancake him with their
sticks again.

Whop!

This one lit up about an inch from his face and filled his eyes with
dust.

It enraged him.

Caught. Trapped. Stuck.

It occurred to him: I will die here and nobody will ever pay, and Earl
will die, and for what, justice denied the heirs of a rich Chicago man
who happened to leave money to a Negro who had worked for him.

It seemed so unfair, but then he counseled himself that life wasn't fair
and that things happened as they happened, and you never knew what you
were getting into.

He got ready to make his run.

earl came upon them from the side, and they were so intent on shooting
they did not hear him, as they had forgotten their own dogs in the
excitement. He had lost blood and was no longer quick, but he was
determined.

As he rushed at the deputy, the boy heard him and spun, but too late,
and Earl knocked into him as he rose, pulling the rifle from his hands.

As he got it, he rose and hurled it at the other boy, who was now
bringing his rifle to bear. But the thrown weapon crashed into the boy,
knocking him backward.

Earl rushed to him as he rose. The boy absurdly raised his fists in
classic fighting style, as if a boxing match were about to commence.

There wasn't a lick of fear on his face, just pure meanness. He looked
about nineteen.

Earl hammered him hard in the jaw and he went down, but then the other
boy was on him, trying to drive him to earth with one arm and both legs,
while pummeling him in the kidneys with the other. Earl twisted and
shucked and got the boy off him, slipped and rose as the boy fired a
good punch with his left fist that tattooed Earl in the jaw.

"Haw!" shouted the boy with glee, then spit a brown goober of ' off into
the woods and closed in, fists rotating crazily as he tried to line up a
good shot, squinting as he hunted the angle.

Earl took two ineffectual blows on the shoulder, ducked a roundhouse,
then dropped the boy with a right to the point of the jaw that would
have him sipping meals through a straw for a month.

Both boys were down.

Earl gathered up the two rifles, quickly cranked the levers to empty
each one, and threw each empty gun as far as he could.

He stood and waved. It was too far to yell, but Sam saw him, rose and
returned the wave. Earl made a get-going gesture, as if flinging an
imaginary football that far distance, meaning to communicate the idea
that the train was almost there, the train, the train, and Sam turned.

The huge thing pulled into view as it emerged from the trees, pumping
smoke, pulling four boxcars and two flatcars loaded with farm machinery.

Earl turned to the boys. One was awake, nursing a busted jaw.

"Sorry about the dogs, but they didn't give me no choice. Now you stay
put or I will beat on you some more."

The boy had no interest in further fighting, and so Earl turned just in
time to see Sam clamber aboard the train.

He knew he'd never make it, but he had to try.

He began to dash down the slope, and the train slowed, because it had to
climb a bit here, and he thought he just might be all right, and then he
heard the barking.

sam rode for an hour, unmoving. He lay among chained pieces of
equipment, the vibration of the track rattling upward, making his head
buzz. No one came for him, no one inspected the train, there was no
train detective; it was just him, alone, on the bed of the flatcar,
between a thresher and what might have been a combine, each a brand
spanking new example of Mccormick's finest machines and speaking of
hopes for the bright future.

Sam felt nothing. There was no joy available for him. He had not seen
Earl. He did not know what had happened to Earl. Had Earl made the
train? He doubted it. The last time he had seen Earl, Earl had been up
the slope, waving him onward, and he'd turned and pulled himself toward
the track.

The train thundered along. It was immense. You never appreciated from
afar how big they were. Worse, it was terrifying, a contraption that
vibrated the very planet as it crossed its surface, vast and deadly, and
as Sam pulled near to it, he became aware of the hugeness of its wheels
as they glistened and sliced along the track. Helpfully, a little ladder
hung off the rear of the flatcar, and he hoisted himself up it, banging
a knee on something hard, experiencing a moment of horror when it felt
that he was slipping off. But then he had it, he was up, and he
clambered desperately for cover and fell between the chained machines
and lay there, terrified.

When it occurred to him to look for Earl, he picked himself up and
peered through the spokes of the machine. But it was too late. The train
had passed beyond the timbered-out zone and was now in close, dense
trees. He could see nothing but piney woods a few feet back from the
tracks, and whatever secrets they concealed they would not surrender.

His mind was in a fog. He had not expected an ordeal so piercing this
late in life, after having survived the craziness of the war and having
at last found his place in the world. It was as if he couldn't wrap his
mind about what had just happened to him, unhelped by the terrifying
reality that nothing yet was settled. Earl was still out there,
somewhere, somehow. That ate a large hole in Sam's digestive tract and
would not stop hurting, like an ulcer gnawing away on him.

He tried to reason it out. Earl probably got away. Earl, in the woods on
his own, was a match for any ten men. Earl survived, for nothing could
kill an Earl Swagger, state police sergeant, Marine war hero and all
around the most capable of all men on the planet.

But that presumed ... the rational universe. A place that made sense,
where order prevailed, where justice was paid out. Wherever they had
been, it was not a rational universe but some haunted zone of Manichaean
savagery, as if out of some ancient tale, where survival was not for the
just but for the lucky, and one's antagonists were unbound by civil
logic or the stays of the human heart.

I put Earl in that, he thought, and his heart broke again, as the tide
of guilt, like a kind of phlegm in the soul, molasses-thick and greasy,
pure sludge, oozed over him. He thought of what he had done to Earl,
where he had put Earl, and for what?

His self-loathing exploded, and he worked himself over pretty hard,
wondering if the right thing to do hadn't been to jump off the train and
head on back to help Earl. But even as he conceived that idea, he knew
it was impossible. He could not have done so. He could not leap off a
moving train (leaping on had been hard enough) and gone back to face
Sheriff Leon Gattis and his deputies and their educated billy clubs and
their dogs. He already had seen the battered skull of that poor black
mama. Who could have killed her but them? He had seen the fear among the
Negroes at their powerful and confident ways, their occupier's
arrogance, their complete self-assurance in their mandate to rule by
force. He could not face that again, not without a shirt, with a twisted
ankle, exhausted beyond any exhaustion that had afflicted him in the
war, when he was so much younger and stronger and had believed so much
more firmly.

So it was not until 8:30, when the train pulled into a freight yard at
Hattiesburg that the last reality suddenly occurred to him: he was a
wanted man. The police would be hunting him. Bulletins had gone out,
possibly by radio or radio telephone or telegraph. There would be a
manhunt. And there he was with no money, no local connections, nothing
to sustain him.

It was at this point that his hand closed on something hard and round
and crisp in the left pocket of Earl's canvas hunting coat, and he
pulled whatever it was out to discover a roll of bills. He quickly
slipped the rubber band off and discovered over four hundred dollars,
mainly tens and twenties. With that he could buy lodging, a shirt, some
new shoes, but he knew he had to be careful, and that the cops would
have all forms of transportation covered. He formulated a plan: Connie
Longacre could drive down here and pick him up. He could hide in the
trunk of her car and hopefully get through the roadblocks that way.

Connie would do it. Connie always liked a big adventure, as if being
married to the worthless but wealthy Ranee Longacre wasn't adventure
enough, or was perhaps too much adventure.

It wasn't much of a plan. Earl would no doubt come up with a much better
plan, as Earl was a natural man of action, whereas he, Sam, had a tight
legal mind focused on the stratagems of the law, but at the same time
somewhat indifferent to the physics of the natural world.

But he knew one thing: he had to get away from this rail yard. That
would be the first thing to be reported, the first thing the police
would think of. In fact, he realized with a start, they were probably
combing the place now.

He looked around. It was dark. He saw nothing. He gathered the coat up
around him and slipped off the flatcar, dropping a few feet and again
feeling a twitch of amazement at the hugeness of the thing. Of course he
was unobserved by anybody, except for the three police officers who
happened to be strolling along the way at precisely that moment.

"Well," said the first one, "ain't you a bit old to be bumming the
rails, Dad?"

"Ah! Well--"

Sam's mind, normally so filled with words, so glib, swift, logical,
eloquent, powerful, emptied. It purged. He felt his mouth gibbering
soundlessly, his lungs inflating with air, his lips drying in the
breeze.

He was caught.

"I, uh, er "

"Cat got your tongue, buster?"

"It's, ah, er, you see " "Bet he don't got no ID neither," said the last
officer. "Bet he don't know nothing about nothing. They never do."

But the cops didn't seem menacing. None of them put their hands on their
revolver butts, which is, Sam knew from experience, the first thing an
officer does if he's not feeling right about a situation.

Nobody unlimbered a billy or a kosh or a sap, no knuckles went white,
nobody started breathing hard or squinting or hunching and coiling at
the prospect of violence; there were no signs of aggression whatsoever.

"Well, let's go, bud, or I guess we'll run you down to the drunk tank to
sleep it off all night long."

"Sir," Sam finally found the voice to say, "I am not inebriated."

"Well, he's got a voice and he knows some big words, by God!"

Sam was amazed at how quickly he had recovered, and at how quickly he
was analyzing this: do they know? Have I been reported an escaped
prisoner? If so, wouldn't they be quick to the gun and the club, in full
cop manhunt posture and tension, which he'd seen in his time, too.

No, these boys were pretty relaxed and seemed to think he was a funny
old goat.

"Bet there's a helluva story on how he lost his shirt," said one.

"Something involving a farmer's daughter, a farmer, a shotgun, and some
city feller knows too many big words for his own good."

Sam realized: they don't know. They can't. They wouldn't be acting like
this.

So he reached back ever so slowly and removed his wallet.

One cop took it; he put his flashlight on it.

"He's an Arkansas lawyer. Mr. Sam Vincent, Esquire, of Blue Eye,
Arkansas. Hell, don't that beat all."

"Mr. Vincent, sir, you are a long way from your stomping grounds.

Ain't Blue Eye way to the west in Arkansas, if I recollect correctly?"

"You do, sir."

"Well, sir, I'm afraid we got to ask you how come you're riding the
rails into our little city? Without a shirt and looking like the devil
his self just got done throwing a party for you."

Sam never knew where the inspiration came from, or why, or how, but
there it was, and in a second or so he even had himself convinced.

"Officer, I was on a business trip to New Orleans. You know that town.

I'm afraid I gave in to certain low temptations, after denying for years
I felt them at all. In a certain house I met a certain young woman. She
was a Negress. A yellow Negress."

"A high yeller. Them's the worst. They can make a man act like a dog
faster'n hell."

"Yes, sir. I would confess also that alcohol played a part. In any
event, the next day I believed myself to be in love and went back to the
house to rescue her from it, and take her home with me. I admit I hadn't
yet figured out how I'd explain her presence to my wife of seventeen
years and my five children. In any event, it was made clear to me that I
wasn't wanted, but I learned she was from Pascagoula, her name was
Vonetta Louise, and thence she had returned. I imagined it was because
she was so profoundly moved by my love for her and hers for me that she
had struck out a new path in life."

"Haw! Heard that one before! Knowed plenty of white boys thought they
could rescue a nigger gal from being a nigger."

"It don't never work. God won't let it work."

"Anyhow, before I knew it, I had hired a car and traveled to Pascagoula,
and began to make inquiries. I found her. I also found her boyfriend and
his gang of brutish young Negro fellows, her daddy, her granddaddy, and
most fearsome of all, her grand mama They were not moved by my
declaration of love, nor the whiskey on my breath. I seem to recall a
scuffle, some rough thrashing and rolling, and the next thing, I was
fleeing. I found myself without a shirt in a rail yard being hunted by
large men of a dark persuasion interested in administering what I
believe they referred to as a ' of' ass whuppin." That didn't sound like
much fun to me, and suddenly my love for sweet Vonetta Louise acquired a
somewhat tarnished patina. I managed to sneak aboard a flatcar and lay
still for the longest time.

Then white men came and the Negroes left, but there was too much
agitation for me to escape and I had no desire to explain my presence to
them, either. Soon enough the train pulled out, and here I am."

"Shee-it, don't he tell a purty story!" one of the boys guffawed. All
three had enjoyed it immensely. It connected with experiences they had
either had or heard of, and it amused them no end to see a fancy talker,
a man of education like Sam, brought low by the twin furies of drinking
whiskey and high-yeller tail, which had been the ingredients in many a
poor man's destruction in the houses of New Orleans.

"The niggers will teach you a lesson if they catch you alone and there
ain't no other whites '. Way it is don't mean jack to them in that
sityation. Way up where you live, y'all don't see that part of '. You
just see " and '," but let me tell you, sir, they's got it in for us,
always will."

"I fear I have learned that lesson the hard way. You know, I am not
without means. I have some money. I require only a night's
lodging-preferably not in the drunk tank, as I can afford a hotel
room--a shirt and some clean underwear, and I'll be on my way by bus
tomorrow."

they took Sam to their prowl car, and then to Hattiesburg's best hotel,
where a brief intervention got Sam a fine room, though of course he had
to pay cash up front.

"Want you to see Mississippi hospitality at its finest, sir. Don't want
you to think all's we do down here is fight the niggers for control.

It's a wonderful place to live and raise up your kids. You'd best call
your wife with some story or other, ' I'll bet that old gal is all
upset."

This was the youngest, nicest and smoothest of them.

"I certainly will, Officer."

"Dave, Mr. Sam. I'm Dave."

Dave appeared to have conceived of some major affection for Sam, along
lines that Sam would never understand. Perhaps it was that, being
discovered at a total disadvantage, Sam never got into his more usual
powerful personality, where he was the best of all men, the smartest,
the most capable, the boss prosecutor. Or perhaps it was as a residue of
his experiences that he no longer quite believed so fiercely in those
attributes as his birthrights, having seen how quickly and totally the
world will dispense with them, and allow mean young deputies the
privilege of beating a tattoo against your skull with a nightstick. In
any event, whatever it was, the young officer responded to it.

Sam called home; he spoke to his oldest son, who seemed not to have
noticed that he had been gone three weeks instead of one and then his
wife, who had made the observation, but just barely. He then called
Connie Longacre, got drunken Ranee instead, but left a number, and she
called back and they had a wondrous conversation, as they always did.

Sam loved her; he knew he'd never quite have the nerve to blow up his
life and then hers in order to make a change, and this thing between
them, this fondness, was all that he would ever have.

The hotel sent a room service meal to his room; he slept, dreaming I of
Earl, convincing himself that Earl would make out just fine, Earl ' was
all right, not to worry about Earl.

At eight someone knocked on the door, and he had a brief seizure of
horror imagining that the news he was in some sense a wanted man had
caught up to him, but opened it to find merely a portly gentleman from
the Longbow Men's Apparel Shop with a selection of coats, shirts, and
ties, from which Sam selected a new outfit and paid for it in cash.

After a nice breakfast in the hotel dining room, Dave the cop came on by
and drove him to the bus station. Dave had done some checking and
discovered that the 10:00 a.m. bus to Meridian would get Sam to the
airport in time for a 3:00 p.m. flight by DC-3 to Memphis, where his car
was parked. After the cross-state drive, he'd be home in time for a late
supper.

Dave drove him through Hattiesburg, talking amiably of his life, his
children, his hopes for the future he hoped to go to night law school
and asked Sam some keen professional questions, and Sam gave him
forthright but encouraging answers.

Finally, in a lull, Sam tried a bit of a probe.

"Say, Dave, you ever hear of a place called Thebes Prison for Colored.

Seemed like them black people down in Pascagoula was talking about it.

Got my curiosity up."

"Well, sir, best bet is, don't get curious about Thebes. They got a big
set of work farms over at Parchman in the Delta, but they send the truly
lost niggers down there to Thebes. You don't want to know what goes on
down there. It ain't a purty place, no sir."

"Ah, I see. You'd think if conditions were so rough, they'd worry about
escapes."

"Sir, ain't nobody never escaped from Thebes. Never. It's so hellish a
place, it breaks a man's spirit to be there, and he don't got the spunk
for no escape. Plus, it's in the worst jungle on earth, and I hear they
got the best hounds in the state, and a crew of guards that can run dogs
and track like dogs themselves, all big boys who git ex try pay to work
that camp. The state likes it that way: a place for sartain bad niggers,
you know, so that the niggers always have a fear of it, when they hear
the word, and that fear keeps ' fine. It's better that way. Better for
us, but better for them, too, in some ways. They don't git their hopes
up so high, and therefore live in constant disappointment and
bitterness. They always know there's a Thebes somewhere."

Sam nodded sagely, and said, "Yes, very interesting sentiments," by way
of seeming to agree but not really having committed to a position.

The rest of the trip went pretty smoothly, and indeed he slept that
night in his own room next to the indifferent form of his own wife, just
down the hall from the indifference of his children. He'd thought he'd
never make it back to such comforts, and yet he had.

And tomorrow he'd see Connie for lunch and have a fine old time.

But that was not the main condition of his mind. The main, the
inescapable condition of his mind had to do with Earl. Over and over
again, he confronted Earl's dictate: do not tell anybody, raise a
ruckus, start a thing to come get me. That will get me killed soonest.

He parsed those words, as imperfectly as he remembered them, for a
provisional escape clause, an intellectually justifiable principle of
dispensation or modification, and concluded in the end that the contract
was fairly drawn and that he must obey it. He did feel he had to make a
report to his client, which he would do in the morning, and send off by
special delivery, and he resolved to discover options within the
framework of Earl's command that would enable him to engage the issue.

That was all he could do.

Earl, he thought, and it would not leave his mind: What of Earl?

The dogs took Earl down hard. It was their nature, but it also may have
had to do with the blood that they smelled on him, his own and their
cousins' and brothers'. They hit him simultaneously, strong young hounds
in full power, growling savagely as they flew upon him like blurs, and
in the next tenth of a second he gave up on any idea of catching the
freight and concentrated only upon covering his vitals.

He went into a fetal ball, his knees locked to his forehead, his arms
swaddling his head and throat, his face buried. This drove the dogs more
insane. They knew how to kill him and their frustration was immense. But
there was no way they could get their muzzles and teeth into a
vulnerable, soft area, so they attacked his arms and legs, knowing that
if they hurt him bad enough by reflex he'd unsnap from his protected
position and they could get him where he would bleed out. So for a few
moments, that's all it was, the dogs biting to get him to spasm while he
fought the pain and the anger of them to stay locked up in himself.

But then the dogs were pulled off by men, and a general kicking
commenced. At first it was just two men, and then three more, and they
kicked and stomped at him, and cursed and spat and threatened. This went
on for a few minutes until, finally, a last fellow arrived and imposed
some order.

"Goddammit, boys, let him be, let us see what we got," and the blows
stopped whacking into him.

"Mister, you best get up or I will finish you as you lay there."

Earl rolled over and uncoiled, looked up to see six men, that is, four
deputies, the hound master and the sheriff, all of them sweated up and
crazy-eyed from their ordeal.

"Don't hit me no more, please," he said. "I didn't do nothing."

Whack!

It was a kick in the ribs, delivered with visible pleasure by the dog
man.

"Kilt three fine dogs, you did, goddamn your black soul. I'll see you
a-swing before this damn day is done."

Two bent to him swiftly and rolled him over. He felt his arms being
pinned behind his back and the cuffs coming on.

"Git me them leg irons, too. This fella's a kicker, you can double bet
on that!"

The leg irons were yanked tight around Earl's ankles.

"There, he ain't goin' nowheres now, no sir."

The young deputies sat back from their work, then rolled Earl over.

"Who are you, Mister?" the sheriff asked.

"I, uh--"

Earl could not recall the name on his phony driver's license.

"Hah? Who are you, goddammit, when I speak to you, you damn well better
answer me right smart, you whelp."

"His name's Jack Bogash," yelled a deputy, who'd evidently found Earl's
wallet off to the side, "and he's another goddamned Arkansas fella."

"Ain't that something? You Arkansas fellas seem to stick together, don't
you? Ain't you just the fanciest things, y'all? You come down to rescue
that old--"

"Sir, sir!" screamed Earl, "I don't know what y'all are talking about.

Please don't hit me no more. I'm bleeding plenty bad. I need a doctor.

Please, sir, oh God, I will bleed to death I don't get a doctor."

"You will be okay. You may lose some blood, but if you can't lose no
blood, you oughtn't to be playing rough. And that is not nothing to do
with your problem. You have a much worse problem, and that problem is
me."

This was the sheriff, screaming in his face.

"Sir, my name is Jack Bogash. I am an unemployed truck driver trying to
get a hunting camp going. I came down here ' I heard there was un leased
land about, with lots of whitetail. I meant to lease the rights, build a
cottage, and see to bringing some Hot Springs or Little Rock high
rollers down here for the season. That's all there is to it."

"Son, we done chased you twenty miles. You burned down a coupla
buildings, co shed a guard, kilt three dogs, beat the Jesus out of two
strong young men and run us a merry old time."

"Wasn't me, sir. I swear to you. Was them other fellas."

"Other fellas?"

"Yes, sir. I's set up camp about two mile off. Looking for deer sign.

Hoping to learn the land, figure on where to build my stands. These two
fellas come running out of the piney woods with some story about
blackies chasing them for some hellfire reason. They offered me cash
money to help ' git to the tracks. I admit now it don't make much sense,
but they offered me money. The old boy talked a blue streak, he did, and
before I knowed it, he'd talked me into helping. Don't recollect now why
I done it, but he was a persuasive son-of-a-bitch, I will say. He done
twisted up his ankle, so I helped him move along, sort of a human
crutch. Don't know what happened to that other fella.

When I got the old man to the track, I was headed out when them dogs
done hit me. That's every true word." "He's lying," said Opic. "I seen
him shoot the dog. I seen him take a shot at me. He jumped Opic and me,
and he out-boxed us both and put us both out without busting sweat, like
some sort of champion. He's a lying bastard, and he's dangerous as hell.

He's playing scared now, but he's just figuring on how to kill us all,
you can bet. He's a goddamn gangster."

"I think he's a red. I think he's a red sent down here to rile up the
niggers."

"I think he's one of them FBI boys, sniffing around. Looking for
trouble."

"Sheriff, best thing is, you just string him up."

"Please, please, fellas. I didn't do nothing. Young man, I swear to you
wasn't me hurt your dogs and took a shot at you. That was that other
feller, the one still loose. I don't hardly know how to shoot a gun at
all. I done some boxing once, that's the only thing, and if I hit you it
was because you had a gun and was fixing to shoot at me, that's all.

What choice did I have?"

"You say you are leasing hunting properties. That would make you a
hunter, and unless I miss my bet, them are hunting boots you're wearing.

But you don't know how to shoot a gun? Yet someone shot three dogs
moving fast. That would be this other missing fella, who left no tracks
or scent for the dogs to track. Then at your age, you outbox two strong
strapping young fellows, but you are just an Arkansas truck driver
without a job. Mister, your story got more holes than a piece of angel
food cake."

"He's a goddamned plenty dangerous man."

"I've had enough. Sir, you are too much for us to handle. Boys, take him
to the tree, that's all. I will be done with these Arkansas people for
good and all."

It took an hour, but they knew exactly where they were headed; Earl
realized they had been there before. It was a hanging tree. He guessed
if they caught a runaway out here, that's where he went. Or if someone
talked against them in the town, that's where he went. These boys didn't
like the shooting close up, they couldn't stand the look of a man's
skull all bashed in by a .45 and blown out on the other side.

The hanging tree killed easy and bloodless.

"Sheriff, I'm telling you--"

"You shut up now, Mister. I don't want your words confusing these boys.

You keep your mouth shut or I'll have Pepper do some work with his knife
on your tongue, and that'll shut you up right and proper.

You'll have to meet your maker without no tongue."

"I'll do that right now, Sheriff, you want. That's what we do to a dog
killer down here in Mississippi. You kill a dog, you got to pay. Dogs is
valuable, and them three was like my brothers."

The convoy marched on through the pines, and Earl tried to lag, but
rifle muzzles prodding him urgently kept a spring in his step, and the
blood oozing from the many dog bites wouldn't let him relax.

Eventually, the group found a path, which speeded matters up
considerably, and then they encountered a hill. Up there, at last, was
one of the rogue oaks that this piney woods somehow allowed to grow, a
stout tree with a limb heavy enough to support a man's full weight, a
task for which no pine could be counted on.

It was barren and windswept, as such places inevitably are, and no pine
would grow close to the old oak, which was barkless and crooked like a
broken bone, climbing twisted into the blue sky.

"Okay, boys. You know what to do."

"You should make him dig his grave," said Opic, "so's we don't have to."

"Yes, let's put a goddamn three-foot shovel in the hands of a man that
capable, and see which of us he kills with it and if he can git all of
us before we get him. I swear, boy, you don't think a lick before you
speak your mind."

"Sheriff, this ain't right," Earl said. "I ain't done nothing. I just
helped two boys say they was running from a mob of colored."

"That's another thing. You ever hear of white boys running from niggers?

If you actually heard that story, which I doubt, and you were so stupid
to believe it, then you are getting your neck stretched for being a dumb
bunny, too blame ugly stupid to live. But more likely you think we're
the dumb bunnies who'd believe such a crock of sawdust.

Now, I think you're some kind of hero type, down here to rescue that old
goat. Hired by his family, maybe, for cash money. I hope you spent it
already. You paid the goddamned price for it, and see what being a hero
does for a fella in Mississippi?"

The rope went over the limb, and was then looped by one of the young
fellas he had outfought around his neck, and pulled tight. Of course
there was no horse for them to drive out from under him, and nothing for
him to fall from; he'd die, not by the merciful snap of a neck giving
way to gravity, but slowly, pulled aloft by strong stupid boys, to
asphyxiate slowly, twitching, twisting, shitting, pissing, gagging.

Yet Earl was not particularly frightened now, at the last. He and death
were old friends, and as a professional man killer for the Marine Corps
he had sent that old gentleman many a customer in his time. He had known
it would come for him, sooner or later, and now he faced it, as before,
the way a predator does--without much fear, with much coolness, with the
bull-goose drive to do this last thing well and give these boys, squalid
as they may seem, something to remember him by: the one who was a man
and died a man.

The rope pulled taut, lifting him onto his toes.

"Usually they be beggin' about now," someone said.

"Cold day in hell afore I beg to white trash like you Mississippi
peckers."

"Ain't he a hard one?"

"Give him credit, he ain't got no cards to play but he is playing them
out just as they lay on the table." "You got anything to say?" said the
sheriff.

He swallowed and could find nothing at all of interest.

"You got any regrets, sir? This'd be the time to make ', and face the
Lord at peace." That inspired him. "Yes," he said, feeling the tautness
loosen just shred, so that his voice could find words. "Here's my
regret. I regret that I tried to get this one done without killing no
human man.

I told somebody that's how I'd do it. And that was a mistake. If I'd
done what I knew was the right thing, and shot you boys dead, beginning
with them two lunkhead baby shits, and then you, dog man, and you two
yassuhing deputies, and finally you, Sheriff--"

"Big words for a man standing under the tree whar he'd a-going to
swing," said Pepper, spitting a gob out on the dirt.

"And finally," said Earl, "I regret for them living dogs, ' I know when
you boys finish with me, you're going to liquor up, and sooner or later
you going to git on them poor animals like they's women and--"

The rope came up, closing up his larynx, and he was off the ground, the
world gone to black nothingness, his vision gone, his hearing gone, his
feet kicking the breeze. He fought for air but there was none, and the
full muscles of his arms and legs kicked and jacked, but only to the
effect of opening yet more wounds in his flesh where the unyielding
steel bit it. He thought at least he had a son, and by all indications a
good one, and he loved his wife and wished he'd been better to her, and
he thanked God he'd done his duty in the Marine Corps all them years,
and as far as he knew he'd only killed men who were armed and wanting
his death, and he'd never raped no one or fought a man who couldn't
defend himself, and he thought of blue Pacific seas and the smudges that
became islands when the smoke cleared, and how it felt afterward when
you had made it and you had just a little bit of time to feel the joy of
surviving a bad one once again, and he realized that was as happy as he
had been, and it was a kind of happiness few men had felt.

He fell to earth.

He sucked the air.

He heard shouts.

He opened his eyes, saw new men had arrived, six or seven of them, and
saw a fellow in command screaming at the sheriff. This one was huge: he
had shock-white hair and a pinkish skin, and he wore sunglasses and the
uniform of a some kind of sergeant.

"Warden wants this boy, Leon, goddammit, and you back off, because you
know what the warden wants, I make sure he gets."

"Yes sir, Bigboy, I do know that," the sheriff was yammering as he
backpedaled. "But you watch him, ' he's a tricky bastard, yes, he is."

"Oh, I don't think he'll be any trouble," said Bigboy, and he turned and
smiled at Earl, who had collapsed to the earth, retching and breathing
raggedly. "You won't be any trouble now, will you, sir?" he asked, and
then hit him hard and flush in the side of the jaw, putting him dead-out
cold.

Earl's brain saw water: he was underwater. Above him, the green surface
undulated; he gasped for air and there was none and then he remembered
where he was. Tarawa, off Green Beach 1, and the Higgins Boat had tied
up on a reef a quarter mile offshore and he was walking the platoon in
while the Jap tracers, blue-white, flicked across the surface, and their
howitzers and mortars tossed big boomers down and their cut puffs into
the water. The world was liquid and fire, chaos and fear, nothing but,
and he tried to hold it together, keep the boys moving, get in toward
cover, because there was nothing here for anyone.

A moment came when he slipped and went under, with all that equipment,
the pack, the Thompson, and the weight just pulled him down in green
silence, and he almost quit. He was underwater. Above him, the green
surface undulated; he gasped for air but there was none. But he didn't
quit. That wasn't in him for some reason, and so when he really awoke,
he realized he wasn't in the warm salty Pacific off Green Beach 1, but
in some other hellhole. Then he remembered.

The pain was general all over his body, from the rips in his flesh where
the dogs had chewed him to the aches in his ribs where the deputies had
kicked him. His own blood tasted salty in his mouth and his muscles were
throbbing in discomfort; worse still, where his wrists and ankles had
cut against the cuffs, he'd opened wounds too, and those flickered hot
as fire. But it was his head that hurt the most.

As he swam to consciousness, he was aware that something was wrong; it
was as if the left side of his head had doubled in size. He opened his
eyes and in the left one, the vision was blurred toward blindness. He
moved to touch his wound there, but was bound by the chains. Instead, he
lowered his head and touched it against his shoulder; it erupted in
pain, and he realized the oddness he felt was a swelling. The left side
of his head was swollen like some kind of fruit, and his eye was crushed
shut. He remembered a fight on the deck of the old U.S. S.

Philippine Sea in Shanghai Harbor in 1938, against a Seaman Second named
Kowalachik, where each man had battered the hell out of the other for
fifteen rounds. He remembered it, but he didn't recollect if he'd won it
or not, and then realized you don't win a fight that hard, you merely
survive.

Details began to accumulate, and through the buzz and the glare and the
pain, he pieced together where he was. That rough jostling: that meant
he was in a wagon, being jounced along a country road. The green
overhead: the road ran through forest, no, really more like jungle, for
it had a Guadalcanal aspect to it of overhanging canopy, and there was
tropic vegetation, moisture and heat in the atmosphere. The jinglings
and janglings: those were the chains that bound him, hand and foot. He
couldn't move a step, one way or the other.

They were in jungle. No pine trees anywhere; that meant they were close
to that dark river. He rolled over, nobody paying him any mind at all,
and saw two guards ahead of him, up top the wagon, driving the team of
six horses as they juggled along.

On either side, the jungle climbed and vaulted; it was like some
cathedral of green, dense and hot and steamy.

He rolled over just a bit, and using his elbow lifted himself until he
could see over the rough wood of the wagon. On either side rode three
guards on horseback, each with a drill instructor's flat-brimmed hat low
over the eyes, each with a big revolver on his belt, each with a
Winchester '07.351 self-loader in his scabbard. The guards rode well,
men at ease on horseback.

He turned and craned to see what was ahead.

Whack!

Someone smacked him hard in the arm and he leaped back in pain, knowing
that two weeks' worth of bruise had just been laid on him. He looked at
a guard who'd leaned down to supply a little discretionary discipline
with a billy club. Earl sat back, well away from the wagon's timbers. As
if he'd had a chance to escape anyhow, with all these chains entwining
him, and also, he saw now, running through iron rings pounded into the
wood, so that he was moored to the wagon no matter what came.

"You see it soon enough, boy," said the guard. "And come time, you'll
wish you ain't never seen it and that them fellows had hung you straight
up."

And see it now he did: red brick walls, crumbly and ancient, in
disrepair, wearing a brass plate kept shiny amid the ruin, where the
letters gleamed:

THEBES STATE PENAL FARM (COLORED)

"Welcome home, nigger," said the guard.

The wagon passed through the brick gates, and Earl saw something else.

It had been added recently, crudely welded together, an ironwork arc
curving overhead, in the clumsy penmanship of the unlettered, presumably
under the direction of a firmer hand exactly certain of the message.

"work will set you free," it said, and it had a weird familiarity to
Earl, but he could not place it in time or locale.

Then the ironwork arch was gone and they had progressed into the belly
of the beast itself, into Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored).

He saw a ghastly old plantation house, its columns still soaring and
fluted, speaking of a grand old age, but speaking as well of rot and
decay, for what had once been jet white was now mottled with brown
stain, the taint of algae and corruption, or possibly only moss. It had
the look of a ruin, though a curtain flapping in an upstairs window next
to the portico suggested some form of provisional habitation, perhaps a
more engaged owner would have seen it repainted and restored to a
glistening white. Who would leave it so decadent? And why?

Next to it was a newer structure that had the look of wartime
improvisation, a barracks-style military building of one story, low and
busy. It looked like some kind of store, for it, not the old house, was
the center of activity, and a line of free Negroes waited patiently for
admittance. Earl wondered what could be in there so important to these
people, lined up in complete obedience, as if the key to their
provenance lay therein. And perhaps it did, for a Negro woman stepped
out, and someone admitted her replacement; she had sacks suggesting
goods or merchandise, and Earl recollected that he had seen no store
alive in Thebes from the far trees, his observation point. This must be
the only store around.

Other decayed brick outbuildings stood, some in ruins, some in better
repair, all somehow moist in the closeness of the jungle and the
overhang of the thick canopy. Beyond that the compound proper, that is,
where the convicts must live. He saw a gate and a barbed-wire fence more
efficient by far than the crumbled old brick plantation wall. In the
distance he could make out barracks, again military-style, presumably
the homes of the convicts when they returned from their day's toil in
the farm's fields. But he saw something else, which struck him as queer:
that is, four towers, each a story tall, each with a shed atop and gaps
in the shed walls, where men looked out with binoculars. Hard to tell
from here, but he was sure from one of the gaps he saw something he knew
well: the water-cooling jacket of a Browning .30 caliber machine gun.

Four towers? Four Brownings? That would bring considerable firepower to
bear on whoever challenged authority here at Thebes Penal Farm, and it
did surprise him, for such guns might have been common in big Northern
pens like Alcatraz or Sing-Sing, but down here in the backwater South?

They didn't even have any of those at the big penitentiary in Arkansas.

The wagon headed to one of the outbuildings and pulled up short.

Goddamn, he thought, we are here, wherever in God's name here is.

The guards dismounted and unlimbered the wagon. His chains were freed
from the rings that pinned them, and, roughly, he was dragged off toward
the door of a two-story brick building, dating from at least a century
before, shabby but clean, as if well-maintained by men who feared
lickings if they didn't clean it well. He was pulled indoors.

"Okay, chief," someone said, "you cooperate or them bruises you got will
seem like Sunday school so far. You catch my drift?" Earl said nothing
as he was pulled into a room, and a man with a knife appeared, and
without any ceremony at all, began to slice away at his clothes.

"Jesus," said Earl, as his nakedness was finally revealed.

"Shut your mouth, boy," said one of the huskies, and there were no less
than five of them for this task.

"See, he got a tattoo," another added.

Someone bent close at the blue ink faded into Earl's biceps.

"He's a Marine. "Semper Fi," all that good shit. You a war hero, boy?"

Earl didn't answer; you can't talk to some people.

Then the hose hit him, hard, a jet of screaming water that knocked him
backward. Hygiene wasn't its real purpose, though possibly it did some
work to that effect. It beat him badly, pinning him against the floor,
and purifying him in a rough way. Finally, it stopped, and he began to
shiver in the sudden cold, feeling wilted. No clothes were offered.

Naked, he was dragged to his next destination.

"My name," the man said, "is of no importance. I want you to know,
however, that I have one. I have a real name, but you'll never know it."

Earl now sat on a wood chair. They wanted him naked, in chains, feeling
powerless before this guard sergeant, who was, not to put too fine a
word on it, something to see.

"In case you're wondering where you are," said the sergeant, "let me
tell you. You are in what is called the Whipping House. This is where I
do the business of this institution. It's ugly work, but it's necessary.

I am very good at it. The convicts know one thing. Well, two things. One
is to stay out of the Whipping House. The other is to avoid the anger of
Bigboy."

It was the man who had rescued him from the hangman's noose, then
knocked him cold with a blow that blew up the left side of his face.

Earl looked at him, though he suspected it would be better to keep one's
eyes averted in the presence of this fellow.

The sergeant went 240 to 260 pounds, but it was not fat; it was muscle.

He had to have spent hours hauling dead weights up and down to get
bulges like that. He had his sunglasses off, and Earl could look into
his little red eyes, bloodshot and weak, clearly his one vulnerability.

His skin was pale and would burn in tropical sun as if set aflame, so he
wore the hat with the big brim, gloves, and kept his olive green shirt
buttoned up to the top. His hair wasn't blond in the yellow sense, but a
new snow's fresh white.

"Bigboy. You will become quite familiar with that name," he said to
Earl, "so I would mark it well. Bigboy. It's a nickname. The men I
command call me that. Some of the trustees call me that, our doctor, the
colored help who run the jobs in this place, the cooks, what have you.

The convicts call me that, but not to my face, for they know the penalty
for disrespect. Now, do you know where I got that name?"

Earl didn't think the question required an answer, but in the next
second, whap, a cosh from another guard in the shadows, slapped hard
against his wrist, curling his wrist in pain, almost, but not quite,
breaking bone.

"No, "Earl finally said.

"No what?"

Whap! Another blow.

"No sir!" Earl responded instantly, shivering with the intensity of the
hurt.

"Much better. Anyhow, you might think I got that name because I am big.

But that's not true. For many years I had another name. In those days I
wasn't big. I was weak. I was food. I was free lunch. I was everybody's
favorite target. Are you listening?" Insane, Earl thought. The man is
clearly out of his head.

"I was a fat weak boy, with red eyes and white hair, a disorder
specifically called oculocutaneous albinism. I had a cute little
upturned nose. I grunted when I ate, and sometimes I farted. My hygiene
was questionable. So I was called Pigboy. It fits, doesn't it? Pigboy.

My papa called me that, so did my mama and my three brothers. Until I
was fifteen years old. So do you think I was happy?"

"No, sir."

"No, sir. Pigboy was not happy. "Pigboy, git your goddamn ass in here,
you goddamned worthless piece of pig shit!" So Pigboy one day in his
fifteenth year got himself an ax and he cut Mama and Papa and three
brothers up into tiny pieces. The happiest day in Pigboy's life. This
was in another state, far far away, under a different name, but
nevertheless, it happened, I can assure you. I escaped. I fled. I remade
myself many times and had many adventures and learned to trust myself,
and at a certain point, I decided I would never again be weak or
frightened. I got myself a job on a railroad, laying track. Five years I
laid track, getting bigger and stronger. I discovered the gym.

I lifted a million pounds of iron and discovered I had a certain kind of
muscle tissue that responded spectacularly to lifting. I worked. I
learned. I started fighting. It turned out I was good at it, because I
have all that hatred stored up in me, and I like to hurt people and see
them bleed. I like to make them cry and teach them they have no chance
in the world. So where would such a fellow go? Why, there's only one
place:

I joined the Mississippi Bureau of Corrections, where my talents were
not only appreciated, but encouraged. Now I am a sergeant and I run this
whole goddamned mighty engine of retribution and justice. And my friends
call me Bigboy, and every time I hear that, I think of how Pigboy became
Bigboy, what it took, how it hurt, what strength and determination it
demanded. I tell you that, convict, so you will understand that you are
not dealing with a normal man. You are dealing with a creation of pure
will who will do what is necessary to get the job done. You have no
rights. You have no recourse. You have no hopes. There is nothing for
you anywhere in the universe except that you accept the power of my
will, the totality of my domination, the hopelessness of all resistance.

I am superior to you physically, morally, mentally and spiritually. If
you resist me, I will destroy you and never think of it again. Do you
understand?"

"Sir, I am no convict. I am--"

Whap!

The beatings started. They didn't even ask him any questions, not at
first. They just beat him.

earl lost contact with the very concept of time. It was neither day nor
night, it just was.

"Name?" "I told your, sir."

"Tell me again."

"Jack. Jack Bogash. Of Little Rock. Unemployed truck driver.

Looking for hunting leases, that's all. Seemed like a start on something
new. Some fellows come out of the woods, screaming of being hunted by
wild darkies, or maybe Indians, I don't know. Needed my help. I done
helped the old one, for money, and the other fellow, he circled around
and--"

Whap!

Bigboy himself never struck Earl. Somehow it was beneath him. Another
guard or two, shadowy figures that Earl never saw, administered the
blows. They used short cudgels and were expert, with flexible wrists and
fast hands, and could hit him a blow that hurt exquisitely and forever,
yet broke no bones. They were quite practiced in this. They were
professional.

"There was no other man," Bigboy said, "and it angers me that you think
I am stupid. Convict, I am not stupid. No tracks of him, no scent of him
that the dogs picked up, nothing. You penetrated the Thebes lock-up, you
set up diversionary devices which you had to have improvised, you conked
a guard in just such a way that he was knocked cold but not killed, you
rescued a man, you led him out over miles and miles of rough territory,
you set up several clever traps to confuse the dogs, you circled back
and killed three dogs in about two seconds with incredible shooting and
knife skills, you closed on two powerful young deputies and outfought
them in a matter of seconds. If the second pack of dogs hadn't arrived,
you'd have made it scot-free. This is very impressive work. It's the
work of a trained man, a professional Who are you?"

"My name is Jack--" Whap!

"Are you an FBI agent? Are you a communist spy? Are you still a Marine?

Are you some sort of super Marine? Are you investigating us' What are
you up to? Why are you here? Where did you learn your craft?"

"Sir. My name is Jack--" Whap!

They threw him in a cell, and just when he drifted off, they pulled him
out for more.

Hoses.

Head in a bucket, gagging for air underwater.

Exhaustion, bright lights, hideous noise.

The smacking of the expertly administered cudgels, which produced such
excruciating pain.

Sometimes it was Bigboy, sometimes it was others. They passed him, shift
to shift to shift.

He got through it all on the strength of the one idea that permitted him
survival. It was that he could make it only if he kept his identity
quiet. They could not kill him until they broke him, and as long as he
defied them he hurt them. His stubbornness was a weapon of ferocious
power.

"We checked. Ain't no Jack Bogash. That address. A phony Who are you,
boy? What you doing here?"

"My name is Jack Bo--"

Whap!

This is how he figured: they had to know who was investigating them. It
would be crucial to their survival. They were smart, they were cunning,
they had connections, but they knew they had enemies and they had to
root them out and destroy them. A man like Sam was no enemy, not really;
he was a normal fellow, indignant but not heroic. Besides, he knew
nothing of the prison, only of a corrupt rural Mississippi county,
which, really, was no more corrupt than any other rural Mississippi
county. Earl, though, tantalized them. They somehow instinctively
believed that he represented a powerful threat, and it both terrified
and infuriated them.

"Jack!"

"Huh? What?"

"Jack, I called you by name twice, you didn't even look around. You
forgot your name was Jack. If I called your real name, you'd have looked
around fast."

"Sir, my head is all achy and fuzzed up. Don't know nothing no more, not
even my own name."

"Which is?"

"Jack, sir. Jack Bo--"

Whap!

"Jack, you are a stubborn piece of shit, I'll say that for sure. Damn,
you are a piece of stubborn shit."

"I ain't stubborn at all, sir. I am just telling you the truth."

Earl clung to it passionately, even as he forgot the rest of his life,
for to think of that would be to weaken. He could not weaken. If he
weakened, he was dead. If he let an image of his wife or son into his
mind, he was poisoned.

"Jack, who you work for?"

If they knew he worked for nobody, if they knew he was just a man sworn
to help a friend, then they'd put a bullet in his brain and bury him
deep and forget where. Because a nobody was no threat to them. But if he
was somebody--an agent of some sort, an investigator--then he
represented an enemy institution and that institution had to be
identified.

"Who you work for, Jack?"

"Sir, I don't work for no one. I am a poor man trying--"

Whap!

and sometimes it wasn't even him they beat. One night--or maybe it was
day, he could never tell--he was stirred from the blurry sanctuary of
light, sporadic sleep by screams from somewhere else in the Whipping
House He wasn't sure how this building was set up, but he believed he
was on the first floor in a little warren off a corridor, but up above
was bigger, more expansive. It was from that direction the sounds fell
through the floorboards. He heard the screams of a black man.

"Suhl Suhl I swear, suh, wasn't me took them things. Suh, I knows the
rules. Suh, please, I--"

He heard the sounds of physical struggle, and somehow moans, low sounds
that seemed involuntary, as if they seeped out of a living man from some
other orifice than his throat, as if some secret fear ducts had been
opened.

"You know the rules, Willie."

It was Bigboy, his almost accentless voice, his surprising command of
the language, his lack of excitement or fear, his insistence on defining
his pleasure as some kind of duty for the betterment of humanity. "Oh,
God, no, suh, please, I--"

When they hit Earl they used hand cudgels, short billy clubs, and got
their power from a lot of practice and a flexible wrist. The theory
behind it was to not build up too much speed, to inflict a short, sharp,
incredibly painful blow to the outer muscles and the nerves, but to
break no bones and rarely cut the skin.

The whip was different. The whip, wielded by an expert as it now seemed
Bigboy truly was, gained incredible velocity as the snapping of a
powerful wrist amplified itself as it traveled down the nine-foot
leather braid to the tip, which ultimately reached supersonic speed, and
when it struck it tore, brutally, gaps in the flesh, penetrated, and by
the roughness of the leather pulled through the already explosive pain
of the wound increased that pain even more.

Earl could tell by the sound that something obscene was happening, for
the whip thrummed almost musically as it accelerated, and when it struck
the snap was like a gunshot, yet there was a curiously muted quality to
it, for the flesh of Willie was absorbing the complete energy of the
blow.

Willie screamed and screamed and screamed. No transliteration can quite
capture the agony of those utterances, for they were beyond the power of
an alphabet or a writing system to record. It was just an agony,
untethered by restraint and encouraged by fear, that burst alive and
pulsating from his lungs.

A good whip man can keep you at maximum pain for the longest time. With
control and an awareness of the human nervous system he can hit you
where a previous blow's nerves aren't already sending out signals; he
can make each blow, that is, a new blow.

Willie struggled to provide drama for the lesson, as Bigboy, proving a
very good whip man, crooned to him, but he was not with it, and couldn't
keep up his part. Earl heard what he knew was a death rattle, for he had
heard it in the islands so many times, a kind of low gurgle as some
valve or other lets go while life passes from the body.

"Sarge, he's out," Earl heard one of the assistants say.

"He's not out," said Bigboy, who knew of such things, "he's dead. He's
gone."

"He didn't last long, did he?"

"It's hard to tell," said Bigboy. "Sometimes the scrawniest ones, they
last for hours and hours. And the big fellas, they just go fast, because
something in their brain tells ' it's too much and it clicks off."

"You know more about niggers than any man alive, sir," said the
assistant.

"No, it's the warden who knows niggers. I learned all this from him,"
said Bigboy.

later that day--or maybe later that month or year--he was alone with
Bigboy. The guard lit a Camel from a fresh pack, passed it over. Earl
took it, though he couldn't look Bigboy in the eyes, for Bigboy had
begun to preside over his mind, to loom, to move through his dreams. He
felt fear, because he had no power.

"Go on, boy. Smoke that cigarette."

Earl smoked hard. The first glimmer of pleasure in what seemed like
years, though really it had only been days.

"Look here," said Bigboy, "you've done well, even I have to admit it."

"Sir, I haven't done nothing. Just tellin' the truth, that's all."

"So here's what we'll do. You tell us who you are. Okay? We'll have to
check it. For a few days, we'll let you alone, move you to a nicer
place. Food. No discipline. Plenty of smokes. You like the girls?

We'll git you a nice dark field gal for a night of fun. We have a part
of the setup here we call '-town. You know what that means, don't you?

Let me tell you, Jack, she'll make you forget all your bruises.

If we can make some sort of deal with your agency, a kind of
you-scratch-my back-we-scratch-yours arrangement, then we'll let you go.

You can look back on all this as a character-building exercise. Hell, we
didn't break any bones. You lost some sleep, that was all."

"My name is Jack Bogash. I am " And so it continued.

They took him to the hose room and hosed him down, blowing the filth and
excrescence off of him. His chains, finally, were unlocked. He was given
a prison uniform, newly laundered, a rough, striped garment, and a pair
of old boots to wear. When he was done, he was chained again, but more
lightly: not festooned with chains so much, but merely handcuffed and
ankle-cuffed, the two bonds joined by a single strand of chain.

He was led out of the Whipping House, his home for however many days it
had been. He blinked. The sun was hot. It was daylight, when there is no
night or day in the Whipping House. Bigboy ran the convoy, with two
guards on either side and another behind him with a riot gun, in case
Earl had breakaway designs.

They walked from the Whipping House past what Earl had identified as the
Store, and Earl felt as if he were some kind of freak show all his own,
the man with two heads or six arms or three noses, visiting town.

All the Negro women in line to get into the Store stared at him, for
they had never seen a white man in chains before and were committing the
image to memory, to tell their grandchildren about, that day at Thebes
where a white man was treated like a Negro.

They came to the once grand house whose Doric columns seemed romantic
proclamations of a time past. That house rose above them all, something
out of one of those movies full of belles in fancy dresses and young
Confederate cavalry officers heading off to fight the blue bellies and
defend a way of life. But there were no liveried Negroes in service at
the doors to hold them open, and up close the old house showed how
rotted it was, how forlorn, how its paint peeled; some of its windows
were boarded over, its shrubbery and bushes were not tended at all, were
overgrown and weedy. If a hundred years ago this house had commanded a
plantation, today that memory was a ghost.

Up the three steps they went, and into a foyer, where the furniture lay
under sheets. In rooms and corridors beyond, Earl glimpsed other rooms
and corridors, also shrouded and dusty. But Bigboy led them to the
right, through a single door, into the one room that was functional. It
was the warden's office, where the man himself sat behind a desk.

He looked up, so mild, at Earl. He was baby-fat plump, bald with a spray
of white hair on his temples, maybe sixty or so, eyes distorted behind
glasses. He wore a battered linen suit, a white shirt gone to gray, and
a black string tie, like a hero of the Confederacy in his declining
days.

"Here he is, Warden," said Bigboy.

Earl stood before the man, who looked him up and down.

"My, my, my," he said, "you are a strong one, aren't you?"

Earl had no words for this man. He said nothing.

He was prodded.

"Convict, when Warden says something you reply right quick."

"I ain't no convict," said Earl. "This here's all a big
misunderstanding."

Something jacked him hard in the ribs.

"And you call him sir, convict."

"Sir." "My, my, my," said the warden. "Well now, convict, you seem to
have raised a right smart ruckus in our little pea patch. Yes, sir, you
do have a talent for chaos."

"Sir, my name is Jack Bogash of Little Rock, Arkansas. I come down to
your state in quest of deer-hunting leases in unhunted areas, with the
idea of starting up a hunting business. I don't know what these fellas
have told you, but some men come out of the woods in a powerful sweat
and offered me money to help them, and the one was very convincing and I
did need money, so I got involved. I had no idea no law-breaking was
involved. This is all just one big misunderstanding."

"I see, I see," said the warden. "And what happened in our county, a
detained man being broke out, a chase through the woods, some tricks
played on some dogs, all that I have had reported to me, all that didn't
happen then, that's what you're sayin', is it?"

"Sir, there was "

"Another man. Yes. Well, convict, I just don't know what to do here.

You say one thing, the reports say another. Now what am I supposed to
do?"

"Sir, I don't know nothing about no report. I only know what happened."

"Now, convict," said the warden, "if that is so, can you ' tell me one
damn thing?"

"If I can, sir. My brain ain't working too well with all the pounding
it's been getting."

"It seems to me that if you were who you say you are and were not who we
say you are, you would be screamin' bloody murder for a lawyer. That is
what all innocent men accused unjustly demand, for they understand that
the lawyer is their emissary before justice. They demand phone calls,
they demand to call their wives and see their children, they demand to
return to the world they claim they have been unjustly removed from. The
world means something to them, it means a lot. They cannot in any way
quickly make an adjustment to their new surroundings. That has been my
experience."

"Sir, I just tried to cooperate with the deputies and then the guards,
sir. That's all I "

"Now, a natural criminal mind, or some kind of trained man, on the other
hand, he doesn't waste time in mourning. No sir. He understands right
fast he's in a new world with new rules, a new system, with new lords
and masters, new traditions, new possibilities. And he sets about as
fast as a skinned cat to master what he's got before him. He's used to
quick thinking, quick adaptation. Hell, that even may be why he got in
the business he got in, ' he's so dad gummed quick at it. Your
undercover man and here I could mean on whichever side of the law, for
it is my theory that detectives and criminals bear a marked similarity
in personality is above all a realist. They tell me you are a realist,
convict. That you play weak and scared and stupid, but underneath it
all, you're calculating your next move, trying to figure out what's
going on, aiming at your best chance of survival. You ain't done one
thing, not one thing, the man you say you are would have done."

"Sir, I don't know what you're talking about. I am Jack--"

"Now, see, there you go. Bigboy, did you see that? He's playing stupid
again.

But if you watched his eyes as I spoke, as I did, as I know you did,
what did you see?"

"Warden, what you see all the time," said Bigboy.

"His pupils narrowed and darkened, his head got real still, and he put
it down a bit as if it could help him hear better. His eyes didn't move,
he was concentrating so hard. And when we brought him over here and in
here, you should have seen him looking and memorizing."

"How many Negro women were out front at the Store waiting admittance,
Bigboy?"

"Warden, I don't know."

"I'll bet he does. Convict, how many?"

"Don't know, sir."

"Five or six?" Actually it was seven. "Don't know, sir."

"I watched his eyes again, Bigboy. He didn't involuntarily respond to
either five or six, because he knows it was seven."

"Sir, y'all are way beyond me."

"Well, you have presented me with a problem here, boy. Now I want you to
work it through that achy brain of yours what I should do. Okay?

You with me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay. What I see before me can't be Jack Bogash of Little Rock.

There's no Jack Bogash in Little Rock. Documents phony, but very fine
phonys. Skills highly developed. Marine background. Tough smart violent.

No, you'd be Mr. X. Mr. X is an agent. Maybe he was hired by someone in
Arkansas, or maybe in Washington. He's a white man, he's very smart,
he's been around. He's what you might call a professional operator. Yes,
sir. Now, we can't do anything with him until we figure out who he is,
why he's here, what his goal is. Unless we know that, we don't know a
thing, but if we know that, then suddenly there are possibilities.

Without that, we're just stuck with another convict. And being a convict
here, sir, is no picnic, for we believe that convicts should suffer for
their crimes against society."

"My name is Jack Bogash--"

"Damn! I thought I explained it to you. There is no Jack Bogash.

Jack Bogash doesn't help a thing. Jack Bogash isn't here. Jack Bogash
doesn't exist. Jack Bogash is a fantasy, or a professional identity,
well camouflaged, well thought out. I don't want to hear that again from
you, convict. You understand. You are pulling a stunt, and you know how
we deal with stunts."

" Sir, I am Jack Bo--"

"Okay, Secret Agent X. You have made your choice. Sergeant Big boy, take
Secret Agent X to the coffin."

sam sent his letter of report to his client, Davis Trugood, in Chicago
and waited anxiously for a reply. He thought a telegram might be the
fastest way, or a long distance call, which would come on the third day,
but on that day there was no response. Then came the fourth, with
nothing either.

In the meantime, he fretted wretchedly, and was unpleasant to everybody.

But he was hardest on himself, and for the intense relief he felt at
being out of Thebes County, even if Earl was still there. He wished he
didn't feel such pure joy in simple survival, in small things like his
wife's grits on the table in the morning and his children's sullenness.

He had punishing horrors to be got through still, the worst of which was
a terrible session with Junie and little Bobbie Lee, in which he assured
them that Earl was fine, he was on confidential business regarding a
legal matter for Sam and in no danger. He would report in soon, if he
didn't reach Junie first.

Junie had become somewhat passive by this time in her life. She knew
Earl's ways and his nature, and if she didn't accept it or understand
it, she had made peace with the fact that her life would in some way be
shaped by his needs.

"It's some war thing, isn't it, Mr. Sam? Earl is a man who somehow needs
a war. He saw too much war and now he has no other way to feel fully
alive. His wife and child just don't supply what he needs.

He tried to get to Korea, you know."

"Yes, Junie, I know."

"But they refused. They did not want a man with his record getting shot
up on some terrible ridge in a little country nobody ever heard of."

"I suppose no, they did not."

"So Earl has gone looking for another ridge upon which to die, and this
time, I'm sure, for even less. For nothing at all, in fact. Mr. Sam, no
man that I have ever heard tell of is like that. Why is Earl like that?"

"Junie, I assure you, he is not in desperate, warlike circumstances."

"Oh, Mr. Sam, you are such a bad liar for a man so good with words. Or
maybe it's that you yourself see the truth of what I am saying regarding
Earl, and so you can't lie with the usual polish. But we both know Earl
is in some terrible mess and may well die. I hope if he dies we know
about it, and so can go on with our lives. I cannot have him simply
disappear. That would be too cruel. Death would be hard enough, and for
this boy to have no father, that would be so tragic.

But for him just to be gone; no, I could not get through that."

"He will return. I promise."

"You cannot promise, Mr. Sam. You know Earl as well as I do, and you
know no promise can cover his behavior. He makes his own choices on his
own needs, for reasons about which I know nothing. No one does, no one
ever will. That is the way he is."

On that displeasing note, the conversation concluded, and Sam went out
to his car. The boy, Bob Lee, was sitting on the running board.

"Whar my daddy?" the child asked sternly.

"Son, he is off someplace doing something important. He will return as
soon as possible, but your father is a particular man of duty, and will
do what must be done or bust. That is why he is such a good policeman."

"What's'duty'?"

"I can't explain it. It's doing the right thing, no matter what it
costs. If it's easy, it's not your duty, it's your job. Most people do
their jobs, but only a few, like your daddy, do their duties."

"I want my daddy."

"Son, if it is possible, he will return, I swear to you."

The boy fixed Sam with unblinking eyes and stared almost through him.

For a second, Sam thought he was confronted by the father himself, and
then he concluded that little Bob Lee probably had it in him to be just
such a man as Earl, as would any of Earl's sons, if he had more.

When Sam got back to his office on the town square, he discovered yet
another surprise: what he recognized, outside, as the limousine owned by
or rented by Mr. Trugood. That gentleman himself awaited indoors, in
Sam's office.

"Mr. Trugood, sir."

"Mr. Vincent, I came as soon as possible. This is very disturbing news."

"Sir, I am as upset about it as you are."

"You have to admit, please: I did not authorize the involvement of
another man. This was your doing? I am not here to evade consequences,
but I do have to have that acknowledged at the start."

"Mr. Trugood, are you seeking to avoid a lawsuit?"

"No, I am not. I am more concerned with my own conscience. I would not
have put another man in such jeopardy on so trivial a matter.

That's my concern, and only that."

"Then you may rest. Earl did what he did for me, not for you. He doesn't
know of you. But he is a man of great loyalty who may feel toward me
what could be similar to a son's feelings, even though we are close in
age. It was his decision to risk all on my behalf."

"I do not mean to separate myself from him, but only to support him on
my own moral compass. Is that fair? I seek to be fair. I know a good
deal about unfairness."

"Yes, sir. That would be fair. Fair as fair could be."

"Good. I thought so. Then I am here to support him in any way possible.
What can we do about it?"

"As yet, I don't know. I don't know if he was taken by the prison or the
county authorities or by anyone at all. I have had no communication from
him. But they are capable of anything. That is an evil place down there.

I never knew such a place could exist in this country in this century
after we fought a war to liberate men from these kinds of things all
over the world."

"Should you call the police? Surely a Mississippi state police agency
would intercede in local matters."

"Sir, in that part of the South, I'm not so sure. It's different. It's
cut off, isolated, they have their own rough way of doing things, and I
sususpect certain folks in Jackson like it that way. But Earl did grab
me hard, as I said, and made me promise not to instigate an
investigation or raise a complaint. He thought that could put him in
more, rather than less, danger."

"Do you share that assessment?"

"I don't know. Earl is a good judge of matters of force and violence, as
I have indicated. He knows better than most how such men operate, and he
can operate with the best of them. This is what he wanted. He was afraid
that if outside pressures were brought to bear, they would result in his
death rather than his release, assuming he's even been taken."

"I find it hard to stand by and do nothing."

"I do, too."

"We should set a time. Say, one month from now. If we haven't heard from
him by then, then I would urge you to begin to apply every pressure you
know how. Is that fair?"

"Yes, it is."

"I would advise this, too: If we are to in any way move to change events
in Thebes County, then we will have to know all about Thebes County.

Would it not make sense to begin some kind of research project, so that
we could know all about how Thebes County became Thebes County, who is
responsible, what local conditions ensue? Would that not be a wise
course?"

"I've already begun, sir. Earl is my friend, and I am torn as to what to
do, and I feel guilty as sin for being here, among my children and
friends, comfortable and at ease, while he is in extremes. I say that
even though I know him to be a man of superior capability, and that if
he can in some way escape and survive, he will do it."

"Here is a check, Mr. Vincent, drawn on my bank in Chicago." "Sir, I
have not asked for money. Earl is my friend."

"Then he is my friend, too, and what he has done on your behalf he has
done on my behalf, and on my client's behalf and on Lincoln Tilson's
behalf. All of us in a row are beholden to him, and I cannot live with
myself if I sit back and do nothing. So I want this check going into a
sort of working fund. Any expense that is necessary for the rescue or
release of Earl should come from this; I leave it to you to put some
portion of it with his wife and child, for theirs can't be an easy lot
while they wait. But use the money wisely, Mr. Vincent, and keep me
informed. You have the number."

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. Vincent, I will say I am very pleased about your escape and
impressed with the dedication you Arkansans have to one another. We
could use some of that kind of loyalty up in Chicago. I know some
families where loyalty like that isn't much applied."

"Thank you, sir. I will begin to find a way to crack this nut right
away. I only hope we have not in our way declared a war, without even
realizing it. Wars can be hard to control and too many of the innocent
can die."

"Though if you must wage them, I take it Earl Swagger is just the man
for such an enterprise."

"Yes. That is his genius. And also his tragedy."

In the coffin it is not the heat, even though that is considerable. It
is not your own filth, which soaks you, and the odor of your corruption,
which assails you. It is not the darkness, though that is a special hell
of its own. It's not the solitude, at least not for Earl, a man
accustomed to solitude and able to endure it more lightly than most.

It's not the rats, or whatever they may be, that skitter over your feet
or may be felt examining your particulars, or the occasional insect
bite. All of that is miserable in its own pure right, but it may be
borne by a strong man who believes in what he is doing.

What it is, really, is the space. Or the lack of it. The sense of being
crushed, of being utterly helpless. That is why they call it the coffin,
and that is why it is so terrible.

The box is six feet long and about twelve inches deep. It is framed in
concrete out on the harsh and pitiless yard behind the Whipping House,
near some trees, but sited to catch the sun's full blast. Its floor is
concrete and it has no comforts at all, just the rawness of the concrete
beneath and the overwhelming encasement of the steel, which draws and
magnifies the heat and whose closeness permits no air circulation, so
breathing itself becomes labored and sometimes a cause for panic.

Supine and stiff, with no room to flex any joint, Earl found only a
universe of corrugated steel. Above, it was but two inches from his
face. He could not move. The sense of claustrophobia grew in geometrical
degrees, and came in a very short time to weigh immensely upon him. In
any case, he was not a man for stillness, and this stillness, enforced
by a wall an inch beyond his nose, an inch beyond each hand, an inch
from the top of his head and the bottom of his feet, this sense of being
pinioned, of being trapped, locked, broken: this was difficult.

Earl tried not to scream. But panic was his constant enemy. If he didn't
work at relaxation, the panic, liberated by the pain and the misery and
the darkness and the closeness, flew out of control. He yearned so
desperately to sit up. Sitting up seemed a paradise worth dying to
attain. Rolling over was too greedy a goal and stretching seemed
positively indecent.

Here the time passed slowly. It drained by, as he could feel the tickle
of the sweat as it departed his hairline, drawing a tickly track of
irritation down his face. That was the only measure of time, except that
by the excess, brutal heat, he could tell it was day and by the endless
shivering of the dark, he could tell it was night.

No one came for him. No one fed him or watered him. He pissed and shat
where he lay and starved or gulped dryly in thirst over time. He was
alone in the world, literally buried alive. In there, thoughts of death
came naturally to him, and he began to pray for the arrival of that old
friend.

Then he rallied, at least a little. He tried to find a place where he
could go to relax, where memories could overcome the present. He
examined his life for oases of respite, where the sensations of
well-being were so overwhelming they could even overcome this
grotesqueness.

It didn't work, not even a little.

Each wonderful memory in a life soon produced a moment of pain, which
jerked him down to the steel an inch away.

He thought of surviving the islands, and that only got him melancholy
for those who hadn't.

He thought of the day his son was born, but he was so exhausted he
somehow missed truly feeling that, and there was a look so soon in
Junie's eyes that expressed some kind of disappointment.

He thought of a boxing match he'd won in a different world, before there
had been a Second World War, and everything was different, and the joy
had been so thorough: it was the first time he'd really ever won a
goddamn thing, and he had been so proud. But then he knew his daddy
would say "You was just lucky, boy," even if his daddy was a world away
across the huge Pacific, but still that harsh truth sucked the joy from
that pleasure and opened his eyes, and there was his steel wall in the
blackness, an inch off, and the suffocating smell of his own filth, and
the touch of some other form of life finding him fascinating, and horror
that this would be his forever and ever, that all the things he had
tried to do would come only to this, the coffin.

you can get through this, he told himself, to quell the panic that again
flashed through his brain and made him ache for release, for freedom,
for some other chance, even if he doubted he could get through this.

He was a physical man, used to the freedom of movement and the
expression of his strength. Physical enemies he could vanquish, and he
was used to them and to that process. He knew better than most how to
fight, how to win a fight, where to look for weakness, how to exploit
it, when to show mercy and when to close for the kill.

But here there was no enemy except his own immobility and the immensity
of the steel and concrete crushing him. He tried to focus on Bigboy or
the sheriff or the warden, or on old Pepper, the dog man, who'd kicked
him so savagely when he was down.

He could not hold these images in his mind. They slipped away, as if he
hadn't the energy to hate them now, he was too weak.

He was scared. So many thought he was so brave, but he knew bravery to
be a kind of fraud. He was alone and terrified that now, at the end, he
would disgrace himself. Even with the noose around his neck he had not
been particularly scared, for he'd been anesthetized from fear by rage.

He had just wanted to kill those crackers who were lynching him.

But now, again, his strength was meaningless and without an enemy to
focus on, his rage deserted him and he felt defeated. It hardly seemed
worth it.

He hated that, and possibly it was the warden's shrewdness that saw how
this would plague him. In fact, he saw that that was the point of the
coffin: it was for strong, active men, that is, violent Negro felons,
who were so full of hatred they felt no fear. It was superbly designed
to crush them so totally--both in the exact meaning of that phrase but
also in the larger, more philosophical kind of way--that their minds
gave up, and they were broken. It was an expression of the ultimate
power of what the Negroes call "the Man," meaning the white boss, who
was so all-powerful he could not allow a single threat, even in the form
of a petty theft, to his rule. But even knowing that did not stop it
from working so well.

He yearned to straighten up. He tried not to think of it, or of water,
or of the pleasures of a good stretch, or of the simple dog's freedom to
roll over and scratch your own butt, and these things, now denied,
seemed more valuable than gold or diamonds or, possibly, even love.

Pain was everywhere, in places he hadn't known he had. His lower back
itself ached tragically, for the tightness of the coffin held it at a
wrong angle, against the concrete, and muscles unused to that tension
soon rebelled. His elbows were rubbed raw, and so were his heels. His
ass itched because of the foulness there, and that seemingly minor
irritation tunneled deep into his brain and was possibly the worst
thing, for it made him ashamed of being alive, and made him hate himself
for his filth.

He tried not to give in to self-pity, but there was nobody to hide it
from. He tried not to give in to rage at, of all people, Sam, for his
stupidity, good-hearted though it might have been, in swearing him to a
vow of not killing, and thereby dooming him, at the expense of Sam's own
sense of morality. Sam got to feel moral; Earl got to die alone,
paralyzed, in the suffocating heat, with ants and spiders eating him,
and his wild and crazed yearning for the simple freedom of moving his
head or turning his neck.

It grew and grew and grew, this big thing, this weight. He felt an urge
to scream.

Tell them, he thought.

Tell them you're nobody; you're an Arkansas cop who came looking after
his buddy, a man he owed much to, your boy's godfather. You meant no
harm. They could just let you go and it would all be over.

Yes, and then they'll kill you and bury you and that's all there is.

You'll never be heard from again. You'll be nothingness, and that's what
got Earl through it: he refused to be nothing. On that issue alone he
could fight them.

I will not be nothing.

I will fight you, even from the coffin.

He closed his eyes, but he could not sleep. He itched, he ached, he
shat, he stank, he was lunch for something and dinner for something else
and he could not move his face or his head or his shoulder and he didn't
know how he'd get through it.

Sam recalled what he had learned of Thebes before his trip, remembering
the decline in the town and the unrepaired road that cut the place off
from casual visitors and dried up economic prospects. At the Fort Smith
Public Library, he looked up the WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, and
there refreshed himself on the subject of Thebes State Penal Farm
(Colored) and Thebes County. It was listed on Tour 15, which drew
travelers, however few of them there may have been, down into the
southeastern corner from Waynesboro to Moss Point. It was the shortest
tour in the whole damn book over a "remote backwoods section about which
little has been written [where] economic and social development have
been slower, perhaps, than in any part of the State."

He looked up the Mississippi state guidebook and went to "penal system"

in the index. There was a whole batch of numbers behind the subheading
"Parchman Farms," the big complex in the Delta, but for Thebes there was
only one page number, on which it was stated merely that the prison was
founded in 1927 on the old Bonverite Plantation as a satellite of the
Parchman Farms, as a place to segregate particularly violent Negro
convicts. No visiting hours or amenities were cited.

That at least gave Sam two clues to work with, the old Bonverite
Plantation and the year 1927. For this work, he decided he had to go to
Jackson, Mississippi's capital, loath though he was to reinsert him self
into that state's unwelcoming climate. But after once again checking the
circulars in the Blue Eye police department (where he was still highly
regarded and where everyone assumed he'd be prosecuting attorney again
after the next election), he learned that no "wanted"

bulletins had been sent out with his name on them, and so he went ahead,
with his wife's sullenness, his children's indifference and Connie Long
acre's blessings.

The trip there, by train and bus, was uneventful, though made livelier
by far by what had been missing from the first part of his last trip,
which is Mississippi hospitality. Everywhere he went it seemed he met
people willing to help him with his business, to make calls and
arrangements for him, to do what had to be done. His first appointment
was with a Mrs. James Beaufueillet ("That would be '-fwewyay," son")
Ridgeway III, who turned out to be the state's youngest living
Confederate widow, in that her late husband, whom she had married when
he was sixty and she twenty, had run at the Yankee position with Pickett
and his fellows, and carried a ball in his lungs ever since that day,
Lord only knows how he survived it in the first place. Mrs. Ridgeway
III, formidable in her own way as the German panzers Sam had blown to
hell and gone that snowy day in Belgium, was custodian of the memories,
as a fellow prosecutor in Jackson told him. That is, she knew the social
history of the old Mississippi, and it would be she who would verse him
on the Bonverite Plantation.

Now in her seventies, she still had a belle's beauty amplified by
theatrical makeup applied with a professional's precision, an elegant
and completely perfect coiffure, and a manicure of uncommon beauty. She
was a production still. She had those high, fine, sparrow bones of good
breeding; she still wore dark, as if in mourning, though of course James
Beaufueillet had died back in 1923 and she had married twice again
afterward, each time acquiring a yet more sizable estate. She had
therefore buried three husbands, given birth to eleven children, buried
a few of them, been through the wars of'98, '17-'18, '41-'45 and now
this Korea thing. She served him lemonade; they sat on the screened
porch of her house in North Jackson, in the center of the antebellum
district, where old porticoed mansions spoke of days past but not dead,
while outside, amid the cars, surreys and two-wheeled dump carts driven
by white-haired Negroes were seen on the streets.

There was only one problem: she could not be hurried.

She would take her own sweet goddamned slow-as-molasses time.

"Now they were a family," she began, her eyes locked firmly on that
past, as if it were still within touch of her beautiful old hands, so
slim, so elegant. "Timber family. The first Bonverite man was George,
and he arrived in the eighteen forties, from Louisiana, I'd guess, the
French in him, and he was an empire builder. Yes, sir, Mr. Vincent,
where others saw gold beneath the trees where it never was, it was
George Bonverite who saw the gold in the trees, where in fact it hid.

But to timber you must have a mill, so George decreed a mill out of
nothingness onto the Yaxahatchee, built with Negro slave labor and
strictly applied discipline, and after building began to cut and ship
the wood. Where the capital came from originally I don't care to know,
and perhaps you would be wise to avoid investigating. If he was from
Louisiana, gambling had to be involved, and duelin' and women, for the
Bonverites, as it turned out, always had a taste for the women, their
own and anybody else's with a comely set of ankles, dimpled knees and
buttocks like buttered apples."

Sam took a deep breath.

She laughed.

"What a pleasure it is in this day and age," she said, "to discover a
man I can still shock. These young men, they've been through the war and
everything, so they've not had the time for a moral education. You have,
sir, and I do approve, though as an old gal who's outlived them all, I
may now and then give you two fingers of truth."

"Ma'am, I shall try and get through it without calling for my vapors."

Hurry on with it, old Circe!

"Oh, sir, you are a fine rascal, I can tell. Anyway, back to George
Bonverite ..."

And so the story crawled through the generations begat by begat, scandal
and duel by scandal and duel as George and his heirs timbered in ever
wider circles to feed the growing appetite of the state and the
shipbuilders of Pascagoula, and for which they built themselves a grand
house, called Thebes, after the storied Greek town of yore, presumably
because old George the patriarch had a classical education somewhere in
his abandoned background.

The Bonverites flourished, their great house Thebes flourished, and the
town that grew to service it and the timbering flourished. Pascagoula
ships sailed the world on Thebes lumber. But hard times, perhaps in
payment for all the virgins deflowered and all the angered husbands
slain by single .41-caliber pistol balls in duels, came in the twenties,
when the region was all but lumbered out and the boom of the Great War
had subsided. Though America was on the go then, the collapse of timber
hit Thebes County hard.

"So old Joe," recalled Mrs. Ridgeway, "who was the patriarch then, old
Joe had to contemplate giving up. The town was on the collapse, nothing
was growing, there was no work. He would lose it all. It must have
destroyed him, for down here we hold our land dear, as I'm sure y'all do
up North in Arkansas."

"We do, ma'am."

Get on with it, you old singer of songs!

"Down here, a man'll do just about anything to hang on to his land.

Without his land, he's nothing, he's got nothing, his family is nothing.

So he had to come up with something. I don't know if it was his idea or
if it was the boy's."

"The boy's?"

"The last Bonverite. Cleon, I b'lieve. Cleon Bonverite. Wonder what ever
became of him? Anyway, either he or his daddy cooked up a way to save
the house and the town. They had heard that over at Parchman, the nigras
was escaping now and then, not a lot of it, but enough to get folks
riled. Nobody got killed or anything, but you can't have that now, can
you, that is, felonious Negroes on the loose? It just won't do, will it,
Mr. Vincent?"

She batted her belle's eyelashes at him.

"No, ma'am. I can see how it would get people upset."

"So Joe reasoned, along with his boy, that Thebes had one thing left to
sell, one last product. Its isolation. It was Joe who went to the state
legislature, spread some money around, called in chits, did what had to
be done, and offered up the idea of a prison for the very bad Negroes,
which the Bonverites of course would operate themselves at a generous
stipend. So the state " the land, though not really.

The land never changed hands; it just meant a generous stipend was paid
out each month to the Bonverites, and that for the minimum investment of
a few barracks being built, old Joe no longer had to pay his field
hands, he now got them for free from the state. The taxes went away as
if they were a bad dream. Joe and the Bonverites were now sellin'
retribution against the angriest of the darks, and it was a product many
people in this state were ever so eager for. It was a grand system, for
it gave the white people a new and more terrible club to wield over the
poor nigras, and the Bonverites had their place and their property
assured, and new sources of revenue, and for a time the town once again
flourished."

"This was 1927?"

"If you say so, Mr. Vincent."

"And then?"

"My, my, my, you are so inquisitive, aren't you," the old beauty
responded. "Do pour me some more of that lemonade, won't you, Mr.
Vincent."

"I will, madam."

She was flirting, damned by vanity still!

He did, filling his own glass too, more to assuage her than to drink,
for the stuff was foully sweet, almost a paste of sugar that had yet to
dissolve and flakes of lemon rind and melted little round blobs of ice
cubes.

The old lady took a greedy drink, needing another blast of sugar to stir
her dry old bones and, fortified, went onward.

"Joe died. Don't know why, or how, or by what hand. It was said he died
in violence so terrible it could not be reported and that the nigras did
it, though no man was accused, and in that part of the state an
accusation was a guilty finding, and a trip to the nearest tree was a
way to get your dried dead fingers sold as souvenirs. Yes, sir, even in
the thirties such terrible things occurred."

"Yes, ma'am. And the boy Cleon? Are you imputing he killed his own
father?"

"I would never say such a vulgar thing."

"But he vanished."

"He vanished. He inherited nothing, though by whose decision I know not.

There were rumors."

"Rumors?"

"Of another."

"Another? Another what, ma'am?"

"Why, sir, such things can't be talked about. Not among decent white
people. But since you are such a charming man, I will perhaps intimate
that which should never be intimated. That is, there does seem to be
something in the white man's brain, some ancient thing, perhaps
curiosity, perhaps fear, perhaps bravado, who knows, that makes him wish
to lie with the gals of color. Are you familiar with this phenomenon,
sir?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Sam, "not that I've ever--"

"Of course not, Mr. Vincent, as any old fool could see so plainly.

But not all are as strong and sensible as you, much less a lust-engulfed
creature like a bull-stud Bonverite man. So that, perhaps, is the origin
of the other, if there was another. For whatever reason--it was all
hushed up, you can understand, with only the faintest reek of
scandal-the boy Cleon disappeared. Or went away.

The plantation with its great house Thebes, it was lost to the
Bonverites. The state took it over, expanded it, put people in charge
who care nothing about anything except whipping the nigra and cashing
their checks. Why, I believe the new warden was named Jones, can you
believe such a thing? And the people that run it to this day are
uninteresting. They have no family, to speak of."

"And the Bonverites are all gone?"

"It would seem so."

"I see."

"Do you, Mr. Vincent? Why, it's our Southern tale, exactly the one that
Mr. Faulkner up in Oxford has had such sport with, of generations of
strong men with but the weakness of wanting to lie with the fetching
high yeller, and of that weakness's inevitable result, which comes in
the form of nigras with strange ideas of importance, and intelligence
much inflated, and devious minds, natural antagonists to what must be
and must be defended. Yet now it is hard to defend, for when bloodlines
are confused, moral certainty disappears, which equals moral downfall,
sir. The Bonverites were a great family; they ruled an empire from a
great house and dined on china imported from London. They helled and
rode hard and made things happen with their deep schemes and their
courage, and they lost it all in scandal, a man dead, his son fled in
shame, the haunting suggestions of a shadow brother also vanished.

Chaos, loss, pain. New inheritors named prosaically enough Jones come
and know or care nothing about what came before. But that is the tragic
story of what happened in Thebes, and that is why to this day no decent
folk will visit it, for it is blasphemed ground. Would you care for more
lemonade, sir?"

"Ma'am, no, I wouldn't."

"I have so enjoyed this. I do not get audiences as once I did when I was
young and fair. It was so nice to have a gentleman caller."

"I had a very stimulating experience," you old monster.

sam returned with a treasure. It was a name, the name Jones. How many
Joneses could there be in Mississippi? And it turned out there were
hundreds. He set about his task with a great deal of discipline, even
though he was sure people would think him cracked if they knew what a
thing he was up to.

He called the directory assistance or the switchboard of every single
town listed in the gazetteer, and asked for the number of every person
named Jones. It turned out there were over 450 of such people, and he
called each and every one of them, acquiring a phone bill that set a
record.

At each answer, he began the same way.

"Hello, I am Sam Vincent, Esquire, a lawyer from Arkansas. In regards to
a law case, I am seeking a man named Jones who may have been for a time
the warden of a penal farm in Thebes County, Mississippi. Is there any
chance, sir for ma'am, depending], I have the right Mr. Jones or at
least a relative of that Mr. Jones?"

The answers he got ranged from the idiotic to the unprintable, but most
were polite enough, though disappointing.

"No suh," the Negro Joneses would say, "don't know nothing about that
Jones. Our people never had nothing to do with no jail."

"Thank you, sir for ma'am]," Sam would reply, "I am very sorry to have
bothered you," and another name was scratched off the list.

The white Joneses were more helpful; their sin was perhaps that they
were too helpful. It turned out that most were obsessed with their own
families, and kept him on the phone for what felt like hours as they
took him through their family trees, and they were so flattered to have
a listener interested in their lives, they spilled beans quite readily
that hadn't ought to have been spilled to anyone, much less an unknown
caller.

"Well, sir, we never had a Jones who worked in a prison, but I'm sorry
to say, we had a Jones who served time in a prison. He was a lawyer like
yourself, sir, my aunt's husband, and as luck would have it, his name
was Jones too, like our family's name, Willard Jones, and it turned out
he was over billing an estate to which he had been appointed executor,
and he had to resign the bar after he got out of the prison.

He's now in Memphis, I think, and I believe he has passed the Tennessee
bar, though of course there are no standards whatever in a primitive
state like Tennessee," and so forth and so on.

Sam wearied quickly of his ordeal by Jones, but there was no quit in him
at all, so he kept at it, though he could feel his energy and interest
lagging, and his voice growing dull and charm less Of course he was at
his worst when he finally connected.

"Well, what would this be in regard to?" the Jones on the other end
asked, the first time he'd encountered an upward tweak of voice,
signifying a nibble.

Sam looked quickly at his list to figure out where the hell in the maze
of Joneses he was, and discovered that this Jones was the third Jones of
Mccomb, Mississippi.

"Sir," said Sam, "I am in the business of trying to authenticate the
death of a Negro man at that prison much later, and I am trying to
locate someone who could provide information about conditions there."

"Under my father, conditions was as good as they could be. He was a fair
man with a hard job to do, and he done it like he done everything, which
is true-blue steppin' to duty and our Christian god."

The edge of hostility gave Sam something to work with.

"That is what I had heard. I had heard that this Warden Jones was a fair
and a good man. If I can establish that, if I can enshrine his memory
and make the court see what a good man he was, then possibly I can
demonstrate that what happened after he left--let's see that was-- "

"It was forty-three. The gubmint took it over in forty-three."

"I see. So he was there--"

"Thirty-six to forty-three. He wanted so bad to run his own prison, and
he'd been at Parchman quite a while, and when he got Thebes after, you
know, old man Bonverite got roasted up like a weenie, and it wasn't
much, but he worked it hard. He worked it so hard it damn nigh kilt
him."

"He sounds like a great man."

"Nobody escaped under Wilson W. Jones and nobody died, neither. I'm not
saying it was a nice place, now; it couldn't be." "Of course not," Sam
said. "After all, its mission was the incorrigibles."

"And I'm not saying no Negro wasn't now and then mussed up a bit by the
guard staff, but they had a hard job, and a great responsibility. They
didn't beat nobody so bad they died, and my pa was proud as hell of
that. When they beat ', they beat ' fair and square, lookin' ' in the
eye, I seen it my own self many a time. And b'lieve it or not, the
Negro, he likes it that way, too. He likes knowing the rules and what's
spec ted of him. You can't give no Negro too much freedom, ' it makes
his head spin and there's all sorts of hell to pay."

"And the government came in, forty-three you say, what was his--"

"He was upset when the gubmint came in--"

"It was the state government?"

"No, no, the U.S. gubmint. The Army. They took it over in forty three.

What they needed with it, I do not know. I do know that my daddy never
got another prison, and he was a bitter man. He took the worst job in
the system and made a go of it, and had a perfect record, and he went on
to be assistant warden at several places, but never got to be top man
again. He died of a broken heart, I would say."

"Oh, I am sorry to hear that," Sam said, anxious now to get off the
phone and pursue this new direction.

"I am sorry, too."

"So he is not alive and I could not get a deposition from him?"

"No sir, not unless you got a telephone number from heaven."

"Well, then, I am so sorry to have wasted your time. But may I thank you
for your father's service. He sounds as if he were a good man."

"Thank you, sir. That's more'n he ever got from the state of
Mississippi."

The government took it over in forty-three. What on earth could that
mean?

Sam puzzled this one over for a bit, and recalled that nothing he had
read anywhere spoke of such a thing. Perhaps it wasn't worth reporting,
simply some temporary wartime measure like a supply depot or a reporting
station of an ancillary training facility for some arcane specialty,
like ball-turret gunning, that needed some isolation to practice in. Or
jungle survival; that made sense. Maybe they brought in young naval
aviators and gave them a crash course in jungle survival, for certainly
parts of that bayou were as wild as anything in the Pacific.

He tried to think of who he could call, and then came up with the name
Mel Brasher, who was a staffer in Congressman Harry Ethe ridge's office
but had been a county chairman down here in Polk for a number of years
before Harry had tapped his talents for the big D.C. job. Once Mel's
wife, Sherry, had been picked up for drunk driving after an election
night, and Sam had seen to it that the case never came to trial and that
nothing had happened to Sherry's license.

So Mel owed Sam; now Sam meant to collect.

He got Mel, not right away, but soon enough, and after a de rigueur
session of political gossip and a run-through of each fellow's family
and prospects, Sam got to the point.

"Mel, I'm stuck on a case here and I wonder if--"

"You just tell me, Sam. You know you can count on me."

"Thanks. You want the long story or the short story?"

"Sam, it's D. C." so I have to have the short. I've got fifty phone
calls after this one to return, and I've got to make sure Boss Harry
gets to the Silver Spring VFW post tonight."

"Mel, I'm looking to find out what U.S. government installation was
established at a Mississippi state prison in nineteen forty-three. For
some reason, the Army came in and took the place over. Why'd they do
that, when did they give it back and under what circumstances. "

"A state prison?"

"Actually, a penal farm. For colored. In the bayous of Thebes County,
way up the Yaxahatchee River. No country for white men."

"I'll say," said Mel. "I'll have a kid in our office get back to you,
Sam. You need this by--?"

Yesterday! Sam's brain screamed.

"Well, sooner'd be better than later."

"I'll get this kid right on it."

The kid, a pip-squeak voice that wore a name that didn't register,
wasn't a fast worker, but he was at least thorough, and it was two days
before he called back, two days, needless to say, of anguish for Sam.

After introductory preliminaries, the boy--Harold, that was the
name!--got to the point.

"Yes, sir, I checked with the Department of the Army, and you're right,
an army unit did move in down there."

Sam was all ears.

"It was actually Army Medical Corps. So I went over to Walter Reed and
used the congressman's name and met a guy in records, and it turned out
it was something called the 2809th Tropical Disease Research Unit. They
were looking at the jungle diseases and cures for them, so they had to
go somewhere where there was jungle, I guess." "I see," said Sam,
writing it down. "Yes, that's very good. Is there more?"

"Well, I couldn't see the file. I just got this fellow to look at it."

"Ah," said Sam.

"Yeah. But I did learn something. This unit, the 2809th, it was
commanded by a Major David Stone. That would be Major Stone, M. D."

Sam wrote it down.

"But if you think you need a line on Stone, Mr. Vincent, you can forget
all about it. I ran that through the Department of the Army, and I found
out that this Stone died in nineteen forty-five. So it's a dead end."

"Died of what?"

"Sir, I don't know. It didn't say and nobody knew. You'd have to get the
records themselves."

A. crack appeared in the darkness, and then spread to a blast of light,
as someone pried the coffin lid open. Earl was too gone to notice or
care.

"Whoa. Do he stank or what? No human man stank like that, no sir."

"Give it to him."

The next thing Earl knew, cold water hit him under great pressure,
pushing him sideways as it smashed him. He withered under its force,
which was in its own way a beating, for the power of the pressure tilted
him sideways and mashed him against the rough concrete box. He felt the
water going up and down him, then settling in his ass where he was
filthiest, where it beat a steady hurting into him there, tearing at him
where he was sorest and most delicate.

And the water was so cold it sent tremors raging through his body. He
could make no sense of it for a second, of what was happening. It was
like going for a sleepwalk and waking up from a dream when you stepped
off that top step and started your long and horrifying tumble down the
steps.

The water stopped. Rough hands got a grip on him and pulled him out,
where they dumped him in the dust. He uncranked limbs that had been
immobile for who knew how long, and felt those pains added, as muscles
bent in shape were stretched for the first time. Yet he was so confused
he could take no pleasure in it.

"Ain't he a sorry sight though?"

"He is. Ain't no white man let his self git like that. He can't be
white."

"He ain't white. He's another nigger, that's all."

"Hit ' agin with that water, boys. Git his ass good, git that shit out
of there so them flies don't go crazy. Bigboy wants him clean and right
proper for the doctor. This boy goin' git his shots."

The water blasted Earl along the ground, but soon the men pinned him
flat on his belly and the hose man really squirted him out. Then they
pulled him to his feet, and he could not stand, and went to one knee, at
which time he was yanked up again.

"Boy, no one here goin' carry you, that's for sure. You can move as we
direct, or I can shoot you behind the ear right here and we'll let the
hogs eat you."

Earl couldn't focus or speak. His lips were cracked, his muscles
a-tremble. That he was naked before these uniformed men didn't even
occur to him, and he felt no shame, for he was not human enough for
shame. He just felt some strange sensation that had to be something like
the recognition that he was alive. But it was not pleasing nor elating;
it simply was. They shoved him along, and his feet dragged in the dust
as they led him into the Whipping House.

There, in Bigboy's office, he was wrapped in a blanket.

He waited.

Then Bigboy arrived, with some others, bent to him, and lifted his chin
in his big hands. Lights flashed in Earl's eyes; he blinked and jerked,
but Bigboy had him in control and yanked his head back.

Something cold and round pressed against his chest, and Earl fought
through jangled memories for a name, and came up with the concept of
stethoscope, which was attached to the concept of doctor, which led
onward to medical examination.

"Well, his heartbeat's remarkably strong. His pupils are all dilated,
and they'll stay that way for a day or so. He needs nourishment, bed
rest, gradual exercise, penicillin for all of those bites, in case he's
infected. But he'll be all right in a bit. Nothing a few shots won't
cure easily."

"Well," said Bigboy, "we don't got a bit. We only have right now."

But the doctor, if that's what he was, stared at Earl in some kind of
rapt curiosity. Earl tried not to stare back, for such a breach of rules
would get him a rap in the back of the head and his eyes weren't working
very well. Some flashing seemed to cut through the room each time he
blinked. But he eventually made out a man of surprising civility, neat,
modest, hair perfect, eyes lit with probing curiosity, as he looked Earl
up and down.

"He's strong," the doctor said. "You're strong, aren't you, friend?"

Earl was glum.

"He has fight in him still. You don't see many Negro boys that strong.

They tend to give it up and hand it over. This one has some spirit."

"Can we do this, sir, and move on?"

"Of course. Secure him."

Strong hands moored Earl to the table he sat on, and there was in them a
threat of violence.

The doctor opened his case. Earl caught just a glimpse into it and made
out tubes, many tubes. But then a tube came out, a paper sheathing was
pulled away, and Earl saw a large hypodermic needle.

"Like shots, friend?" Earl said nothing as the doctor drew some fluid
into his syringe from a tiny bottle, then came around to him. He felt
his arms slapped, felt the sting of powerful disinfectant, and then the
steely prick of the needle. It felt about an inch wide as it slid in,
and a numbness spread as its fluids were injected into his system.

Then came another needle in the other arm. Then he was bent forward, and
took two shots in the ass.

"You'll be sore for a while. Now you've got penicillin, a common
booster, a blood coagulant, and some vitamins that should get you
around."

"Are you done, sir?" said Bigboy.

"lam. He'll survive."

He looked at Earl.

"Friend, I don't know what you got yourself into, but I wouldn't want to
be in your shoes."

He rose, closed his case, and left.

Earl was alone with Bigboy. His mind was full of strange sounds, and he
was having some trouble making much sense of all this. He felt pain from
the needles and could already see the bruising beginning.

But he felt Bigboy looking hard at him, as if trying to figure him out.

Finally Bigboy said, "You know how long you were in there?"

Earl shook his head.

"Seven days," said Bigboy. "Seven goddamn days. No one has lasted there
more than four. You know, it backfired. You're playing to be somebody
named Jack Bogash, unemployed truck driver, but I'll tell you what,
nobody believes just any Arkansas Joe Truckdriver could get through what
you got through. Only man who could get through that is some kind of
hero, some police officer or Marine raider or agent or some other. You
think you're helping yourself, you're only guaranteeing more rough
treatment. So I'm now going to ask you again: Who are you? You tell me."

"Bogash," was all Earl could think to say after he finally found his
tongue.

"Yeah, and my name's Jesus Christ."

He sat back, got out a cigar and lit it up, sucked in a big cloud of
tobacco, let it sift from his mouth through a tiny channel in his lips.

"I told the warden this," he said. "See, I know how these boys think.

This one thinks he's a hero. You beat him or drown him or make him think
you're going to kill him, that just makes him stronger. You know what
the heart of a hero is?" "No sir," said Earl.

"You're lying again. Even as stretched thin as you are now, you're
lying, playing dumb-and-stupid cracker who doesn't know a thing. You
think no matter what, we won't kill you, not "I'll we've figured out who
you are, so that's what's keeping you alive. Yeah, I see that, nobody
else does."

It didn't seem to require an answer.

"So, I'll tell you what the heart of a hero is, even though you know it.

I just want you to know how far ahead of you I am. The heart of a hero
isn't love or sacrifice or courage or anything fancy like that.

That's for the funny papers. No, I've seen through that in my
adventures. Here's what it is: it's arrogance. Vanity. Love of self.

You think you're so special. Yes you do. And when we treat you special,
when we do all this to you, it may hurt like hell but pain doesn't mean
a lot to a tough cracker like you, been blown up in the war, and shot a
few times to boot. You can get through the pain. No sir. Now I'll tell
you what you can't get through. Are you listening?"

Earl didn't say a thing. He was concentrating on not passing out.

"Yes sir. What you can't get through is this: to be nobody. Take away
what's special, make you nobody. Make you just another convict and you
have the rest of your life down here among the lowest and crudest and
most violent of the Negroes. This is just it, this place. No hope of
escape or recognition, nothing at all special that's going to happen to
you. You'll be anonymous, a face in the crowd, a nobody for ever and
ever. Now how do you like that?" Earl said nothing.

"You think about this. We're going to give you a nice day or so in a
private lock-up with some food and a toilet; you get a shower twice a
day. You can play the radio. We get you some newspapers. I won't even
pretend to hide from you what I'm doing, because you'll see through it.

All that's to make you think of the good stuff of life.

Then it's over, convict. Then you go to the Ape House."

It makes a long, o time man, o feel bad It makes a long, o time man, o
feel bad It makes a long, o time man, o feel bad O my Lord, Lordy, when
he can't get a letter-a from home. O Captain George, he was a hard a
driving man O Captain George, he was a hard, a driving man, O my Lord,
Lordy, out on the Gulf and Shelf Island Road It wasn't music, not
really. It was a chant, deep and from the heart, pounding with rhythm as
hoes flashed and bit into the earth in unison.

Earl could see them far away. They were in the broad fields, chopping
weeds from gullies, and they seemed to be engulfed in mist, as if
legendary; but it was dust that rose and the men just fought through it,
their hoes rising and falling to the sound of their song, as guards rode
around them on horseback with guns.

"You don't look over there, convict," said Earl's escort. "You ain't
going over there. Over there, them's got it easy. Where you're going, it
be hard."

Earl walked along the dusty road, his wrists ensnared in chains, and his
ankles too, so that the only steps he could take were mincing and
pitiful. His arms still ached from the shots. Two men flanked his
shuffle, and one was up front and one behind. The sun beat down, a
Mississippi sun that seemed to have been put into the sky for one
purpose alone and that was to fry the hell out of all men unfortunate to
experience its blast full out.

He felt somewhat better now, at least in a physical sense. He'd had food
and shots and was clean. His clothes were clean, if simple, cotton,
striped as were all the convicts', and boots that fit.

But in other ways, he didn't feel better at all. Bigboy was right. Big
boy was smart. Bigboy had him figured out pretty good.

The two days of relative respite did more to hurt Earl than all the
abuse that had been heaped upon him by Bigboy and the prison itself. He
listened to the radio, he ate grits with butter in the morning, a ham
sandwich in the afternoon and fried chicken in the evening, buttery
biscuits and gravy. He saw now that his life didn't have to be
circumscribed and brutal. They had moved him, as expertly as they had
beaten tattoos on him with their clubs, beyond simple survival toward
contemplation. Thus his true enemy became his own thoughts: he
remembered his son, that wary, observant boy who had a strange gift for
stillness, and could just sit and watch for hours without saying a word,
and then, when quizzed, spit back all and everything that had passed
before his eyes, no matter how insignificant.

He thought of his wife, the most beautiful gal he'd ever seen in his
life, and how he'd fallen crazy in love with her that first time he'd
seen her at the USO in Cape Girardeau in 1944, after coming back from
Saipan and going on that bond tour in his fancy uniform, a designated
hero of America meant to inspire people.

That's what came back the most to haunt him, and that's when he hurt the
most. It was easy to be a hero when you had nothing to look forward to,
and the only thing you had to believe in was the United States Marine
Corps. But then, in love, he had to go back to another terrible battle,
and he remembered the leaden sorrow he had felt, because for the first
time in his life, the world had seemed so full of possibility.

But he went back. He had to. It's what he did, it's who he was.

Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin', man, I feelin' bad.

Wah--babe, I was feelin' bad, I was thinkin' ' the good times, Lord, I
once have had.

They were singing to beat the devil down, or to beat the hopelessness
from their own spirits as they chopped and chopped. They are singing for
me, Earl thought.

The camp was surprisingly elaborate, like a government installation, a
series of barracks behind a barbed-wire fence, and, inside it, another
square of barbed wire, and inside that, a single barracks.

At each corner of the inner square, a two-story tower stood, and Earl
could see the machine guns mounted in them. He saw how flexible they
were: they commanded the entire compound, and with30-caliber
water-cooleds capable of sustained fire, and with the barracks beneath
them simple jerry-built structures of wood, no place was safe from their
wrath, given the physics of the ballistics. If it were necessary, the
guns could hose down the compound in a matter of seconds, minutes at the
most, and all inside the barracks would be dead. There was no cover from
the guns; they controlled all.

They entered the first compound, and it was almost a community. Not all
the men were at work, but some hung back, cleaning barracks, scrubbing
floors, hanging laundry, doing all the administrative work that would
keep such an institution going. In a separate shed, he could see women
cooking at big vats, preparing food for the men, all of it under the
eyes of guards, who patrolled under the drill instructor hats, watching
intently for too much fraternization. Just beyond the wire there seemed
something like a free community, or a trustee community, where in
relative freedom a few older men lounged and chatted laughingly with
each other. That had to be the famous '-town. Yet they all stopped to
stare as this strange little convoy approached them: a white man in the
stripes of a convict. Surely they'd heard rumors or knew of the white
boy locked in the coffin, but hadn't really believed it. Here he was at
last, in the flesh, a white boy, chained and being led by the tough boys
in the hats.

Then they reached the inner compound. Earl could see Bigboy in there,
surrounded by his ass-lickers, watching him approach with something not
quite glee but certainly smugness.

The gates were opened after an elaborate ritual with the locks, so that
no gate was opened completely. They stepped in, it was locked behind
them, then the last gate was opened.

"Welcome to the Ape House," said Bigboy. "Jack, you're going to like it
here."

Earl just saw another barracks building, with barred windows and a row
of crude shifters outside, the wood all dilapidated and every which way,
as if some invisible burden of woe had bent the place down over the
years. Its roof was wood and it was painted the pale green of
institutions everywhere.

"Let me tell you, Jack, who your new roomies are going to be. They are
the worst of the worst. They aren't just killers, they're the crazy,
wild Negroes, the angriest, the most violent. You have multiple
murderers in there, you have all the riffraff in the state that
everybody wanted to hang but couldn't quite, because maybe they only
killed another Negro and not a white man. But in there, Jack Bogash, in
there there isn't any hope and there is no future."

Some laughter came from the guards around Bigboy.

"You won't last a night in there. You're going into a hell so deep no
white man can come out alive, or maybe would even want to."

Bigboy brought his dark-glassed eyes so close to Earl's, Earl could see
his own scraggly self reflected in them, big as life.

"You are the answer to their hopes and dreams, Jack Bogash, you are.

There's a blue-gum nigger in there named Moon, and he's the meanest
black bastard who ever walked the face of the earth, and they say he's
endowed like a horse. Tonight is the best night in Moon's life. Moon is
going to shine tonight, Jack. So Jack, what's it going to be? Are you
coming clean, Jack, you telling us your real name? Or you going into the
Ape House?"

"My name is Jack Bogash," Earl said.

SAM knew people; people knew Sam. That was one of his gifts; he had made
friends wherever he'd been.

So now, feeling he'd pretty much used up his congressman's assistant's
assistant's good will and energy, he turned to the colonel of the
artillery battalion he'd served in during the war, the same man who had
pinned the Bronze Star on Sam for blowing up the German armored column.

But Russell K. Parsons was a brigadier general now, and he worked in
that strange new building that was so singular it inspired awe, a
skyscraper on the ground, broken down into five units, called by its
geometric shape the Pentagon.

A phone call got through easily enough; the general headed something
called the Army Logistics Command, designed to hustle toothpaste and tin
cups and condoms and Lucky Strikes and packs and Garand rifles over to
Korea or wherever.

"Well, Sam," said the general, "I'll be damned, how are you." "Sir, I am
fine," said Sam, realizing again that the colonel, now the general, was
three years younger than he was.

The two chatted; Sam had been a damned good artillery officer and the
general had been happy to have him in his command. It was citizen
soldiers like Sam, the then colonel often said, who won the war, not the
few West Pointers such as himself salted through the ranks.

But of course the general knew this was not a social call, and got
quickly enough to the point.

"Don't suppose you're calling me to set up a get-together for the
families, are you, Sam?"

"No, sir. I probably couldn't stand your kids and I know you couldn't
stand mine."

"Well then, designate your target, set your coordinates and open fire."

"Sir--"

"Sam, you really should call me Russell. Frankly, as an elected official
you probably outrank me now." Sam said nothing about being turned out at
the polls last time; he just played the role.

"Sir, I could never call you by your first name. You were God to us, and
I'm comfortable that way."

"Well, then ask God for a favor and possibly God will look with pleasure
upon it. It's nothing to do with manna from heaven."

"Only information from the Pentagon."

"Why, that's more valuable than manna from heaven, and probably harder
to come by."

"Even for a general?"

"Sam, in this place, they send brigadiers for sandwiches. I'm lucky to
have a job."

So Sam finally got to it.

"The 2809th," said General Parsons, "a medical research unit."

"Yes, sir."

"Major David Stone?"

"Major Stone, M. D." Sam left out the detail that the man was dead. It
wouldn't do to suggest that he already knew quite a bit.

"All right, Sam. I will have a sergeant look into it, and if that
doesn't get it done, I'll send a captain. If that fails, some poor
colonel is going to be working for you and not even know why." It took a
few days--anguished, of course, but Sam couldn't call to press, for he
knew that would be a mistake--but finally the general got back to him.

"Now, explain to me why you need this information again?" There was an
edge to his voice that Sam picked up on right away, even as he launched
into his new cover story about a lawsuit against the state of
Mississippi regarding the wrongful death of a man in the vicinity of

"I see."

"Yes." I! "Sir, is it known of what cause?"

"No."

"No, it's not known, or no, you don't know." "It's not known," said the
general, a certain distance coming into his voice.

"Is something wrong, sir?"

"Sam, this thing isn't well documented. In fact, it's unusually poorly
documented."

"I see, sir."

"Well, possibly you don't. In fact, I did have to send a sergeant, a
captain and finally a colonel on this errand, and even that didn't work.

So finally I went to Records myself, and of course it turned out I was
at the Point with the OIC. We'd played football there together in the
early thirties."

"Yes, sir."

"So he looked. He himself, a full bird colonel, he looked. Sam, we got
David Stone's personnel file out of the storage room."

"Is it classified?"

"Sam, it's more than classified. It's nonexistent."

"I don't--"

"The jacket is there, but inside there's nothing. The contents of the
file have been physically removed. That's highly irregular."

"There was no reference, no note, no explanation or anything?"

"Not a thing."

"Could such a thing simply be lost?"

They led Earl in, and in the jamb of the door, the guards unlocked his
chains.

As the men bent with the ancient keys and he felt the locks yield and
the sudden weightlessness as the chains that had been his companions for
so long disappeared, Bigboy leaned in close.

"You're on the levee tomorrow," said Bigboy. "And the day after that.

And all the days after that "I'll you either come clean or you kill
yourself or your new pals in here kill you. You know what? It doesn't
really make a shit's worth of difference to me. It does to the warden,
who gets paid to worry about such things, but it doesn't to me."

He stepped back, and the door was opened, and the two men propelled Earl
inward with a shove.

He entered a different world.

He knew it immediately from the smell. It was the smell of ancient sweat
and blood, hammered into the wood. He knew from the darkness, because no
details swam into his vision, but only indistinct impressions, mainly of
rows of bunks, most full of men, and an open space at one end, near to
him, where some men played cards.

But he knew mostly from the eyes.

At least thirty sets drilled into him. He could feel their weight. In
the Marines, he'd felt such a thing when he moved to a new outfit, and
the men he would be responsible for watched him out of fear or curiosity
or in defiance or to test him. That was all right; that was human.

That was recognizable.

What he felt now was fury. The eyes spoke eloquently. They were narrowed
but intent, close to warriors' concentration, tracking his every
movement, the details, committing them to memory, and most of all
expressing hate. He could feel the mass will of obliteration upon him,
unleashed, unbroken, unmitigated. These weren't the Negro eyes as white
people experienced them, obedient, ready to please, hoping for a
compliment or a tip. Earl had never seen eyes like these.

But as he looked he saw some eyes past caring. It became clear that sick
men were in here too, or mentals or the feeble-headed, for a certain
segment of the population was apart and it was men in strange states.

One stood, arms clasped about himself, jabbering madly.

Another rocked back and forth, shaking his head, a spume of drool
running down his chin. Still another was lashed crudely to his bed, and
thrashed, though with the diminished energy of the exhausted, against
his bonds. One was stark naked, standing frozen in the corner.

Earl looked away; it would not do to stare.

It was fine for them to stare, and stare they did, as all the cards
being played were set down, and the Negroes just looked at him. There
was no greeting, no acknowledgment, no anything, only the sullen looks
of an anger so pure and deep and old it was beyond reckoning.

Tentatively, he walked the rows of bunks, until he found one that was
empty.

He unrolled the mattress, which had no sheets and only a thin stretch of
blanket and a rough pillow, and sat.

"Dat my place," a voice came out of the darkness.

Without speaking or looking Earl rose and found another bunk like the
one he'd tried, and he sat there.

"Dat be mine," came a voice.

He rose again, this time to laughter. Three more times he tried and each
time a voice warned him off, until it became clear that none of the
bunks were for him.

So he walked to the wall, and slid down it, and commenced to sit,
staring at nothing, unmoving, willing himself so quiet and still it
seemed he approached animal death.

But he was not ignored.

He heard the talking, the laughing, the joy of their voices. They were
happy. This was damned interesting to them. They'd never seen a goddamn
thing like this, a white boy among them. Put here without protection or
explanation.

He waited. He knew they would come sooner or later, and he knew there
would be more than one.

Finally, two young men rose from the card table, and sauntered over.

They stood over him, but he did not look up at them.

"Hey," one finally said, "you. White boy."

Earl at last looked up. They were splendid young men, muscular and lean
with an athlete's grace and light dancing in their eyes. They wore the
striped prison pants, but just undershirts, and their complex arrays of
muscles gleamed off shoulders and arms.

"Dat's my spot," said one. "You can't be there."

Earl got up, moved a few feet, then sat down again.

"Hey, now he gots my place. Damn! He don't git nothing."

"Must be dumb. Hey, boy, you dumb? You be in Marcus's spot."

Earl didn't say a thing. He just sat there, giving no signal of
response, as if he were made of stone.

They walked over again.

"See, boy, you done be in Marcus's spot. So you gots to move. You
understand."

Earl stood up.

He looked them square in the eyes.

"Moved twice now. Figure I'll stay here a spell, fellows, if it's okay
with you. If it ain't, well then, it ain't." He smiled a little dry
smile.

"Hey," said the one, "who you think you be talkin' to? Huh? You think
this here be funny? You think you come in an' take a man's spot and it
be funny? So you smile a bit? Huh, white boy?"

Earl just looked into nothingness.

"See," said Marcus, "we gots to make you understand how it be in here.

It be different. You ain't no boss, you see that?"

Earl looked at nothing.

"I don't think this here fellow done be too smart," said the one. "He
don't seem to be listening wif both ears."

"He don't look so smart to me. Hey, you got cigarettes?" Earl said
nothing.

"You. I'm talking to you. You got cigarettes?" "Not for you," said Earl.

"See, here's what it is. What it is, you be paying us cigarettes.

Every day. You git us a pack of cigs, and then we be your friends.

Then we look after you, you got it? See, that's the way it is in here,
okay. So you be handin' over some cigarettes." "I said," Earl repeated
mildly, "I don't have no cigarettes." "Whoa," said Marcus. "Then we got
us a problem. You know, a situation. He can't pay, what we goin' do?"

A hand flicked out, and snapped Earl hard in the shoulders. He could
feel the strength in the sting.

"That git his attention," said Marcus.

Two hands flashed out with good speed and propelled Earl hard against
the wall, rattling his teeth. The two young black men stepped in close
to him. Their eyes had drained of any mischief and were now dull and
swollen, the pupils dilated large as saucers in anticipation of what was
coming next. They were fixing to beat him hard, Earl knew.

"What you staring at?" one asked.

"Don't think the man like us," said the other.

"You got some problem, boy? Huh, you don't understand what we sayin'?"

"Boy, I think I'm going to have to teach you some manners, yes suh, so
you know how it be in this here place. What you think about--"

"All right!"

It was a rumbling voice. A figure stepped from the shadows. He was an
immense man, jet black, with huge biceps that loomed immensely on his
large frame. He had almost no neck at all, and his eyes burned
furiously. Earl could see a crescent scar running down one side of his
face, like a quarter moon, and knew instinctively that this was Moon
himself.

"Don't y'all be hassling this here poor boy," said Moon, smiling. His
immense strength had the effect of pushing them back and away.

He turned to Earl.

"If he be in here, he be our brother. He be one of us, yes sir. I can
tell a good man when I sees one, and I know this here be one of ours,
yessir. Son, what's your name?"

"Jack," said Earl.

"Jack? Jack, well, y'all meet Jack, our new brother, new to our world,
and welcome to it. Jack, I am called Moon. Brother, I offer you my
hand--"

He stretched out a big hand, as if pushed forward by the smile that lit
his face in welcome.

Earl hit him in the throat. He hit him so hard even a man of his size
was stunned, and gave up a pace, and then Earl drove the same fist hard
into the center of the body, and heard the gasp as in reflex the air was
pushed from Moon's lungs, and then he turned.

Earl lunged and before Marcus could get his fists up he hit him a
three-punch combination, two to the head with a shot to the solar plexus
between, which set the young man to his butt, retching.

That left the third who moved in on boxer's feet, bobbing behind his
fists as if he knew what he was doing. He didn't. Earl fired a punch
through his guard that broke his nose, slipped a weak comeback punch,
drove inside for a body tattoo of five or six speed jabs, and when he
dropped his hands to cover up there, Earl teed off on the side of the
head.

In ten seconds, everybody was down. In that same ten seconds, everybody
else was up, staring, some tensed for action but unsure, some falling
back to avoid the riot, some protecting their poker winnings, but most
waiting for the first man to make a move so they'd know what to do.

"Y'all listen now," Earl addressed them. "This here big fella, he wasn't
no friend of mine. I know how these places work, so don't you be trying
no shit like that on me. Y'all ain't my friends, not a one of you. You
move softly behind me, and I will be on you hard. You move fast around
me, you be behind me, I know you fixin' to kill me, that simple. So I
get you first and fastest. You think you can take me in a group? Tell
you what, you're probably right. But I will kill one man in the group
before I go. Maybe it'll be you. Anything you pay me I will pay back
with interest. That is the goddamn rule I live by, so don't you be
getting' bold on me. If you mess with me, I will hurt you so bad you'll
be beggin' for Bigboy to save you."

Then he walked to the nearest bunk, flipped somebody's effects off the
mattress.

"This here's my bunk. Nobody conics near it without making noise. I
sleep real light, so don't think you can git me while I'm out. I won't
never be out, not so's you know it. You want to git through this, you
leave me be. You want to die young in this shithole, you come against
me. I will finish you and not think twice about it."

So even Connie could help.

Connie Longacre was forty-four and Sam's secret confederate in the
adventure of his life. She was married to Polk County's richest man,
Ranee Longacre, whom she'd wed in 1930 when he was a glamorous naval
aviator in Pensacola, headed for the fleet, and looked so dashing in his
white uniform, so heroic. But Ranee, as it turned out (this was Connie's
bitterest lesson) wasn't particularly heroic; he was always the lesser
of the men he was around except for the natural lubrication of the
immense ranch and beef cattle empire he had inherited and which would
produce more income than anyone could spend into perpetuity. For
example, he didn't have a particularly distinguished war, serving on an
admiral's staff far from the battle zone, where most of the county men
had come back with medals if they came back at all, Sam with a Bronze
Star and Earl, of course, with the Medal of Honor. The one thing Ranee
was really good at was staying buzzed twenty-four hours a day. He slept
drunk, he awoke drunk, and there wasn't a second during the day when his
Scotch glass wasn't within easy reach.

Connie tried other avenues, but her one son, Stephen, was more like his
father than his mother, handsome and reckless and ready for trouble
wherever and whenever he could find it. He was currently spending his
father's money at a heartbreaking rate in New Orleans while attempting
to stay married, through his many infidelities and other in discretions,
to one of Louisiana's most beautiful and socially connected young
ladies, equally as wild as he, equally, it seemed, as hellbent on her
own destruction.

So Connie, bent in her own unexpressed agony over the tragedy of a
husband who would never accomplish anything and a son who would die too
young, turned to the one civilized man she could find, a strong, fair,
just man, who worked like a dog and said true things no matter the cost.

Connie would have gone out of her mind if she'd never discovered Sam,
who under his bushy eyebrows and his appearance of brusque annoyance,
seemed to understand the deeper mechanisms of the universe in a way
Ranee couldn't and Stephen wouldn't. Sam had been to Princeton and Yale
law, he had stood under the clock at the Biltmore and seen shows on
Broadway, and secretly read novels behind everybody's back. He had a
dutiful Arkansas wife who produced babies and biscuits and looked great
at political functions, but felt numb around Sam, as Sam did around her,
and so this whatever it was between Sam and Connie magically just
happened.

It wasn't quite an affair. No one ever touched, and Connie, who was
still quite beautiful, with perfectly formed features, a delicate mouth,
and a shock of blond hair, always seemed too perfect to kiss, much less
do anything more primal to or with. One didn't fuck a Connie Long acre;
one simply enjoyed the privilege of her company, which was good enough
for Sam.

So what they had was more a comfort, a sense that each would trust the
other and that they really were betraying no one in the technical sense,
if in the philosophic sense they were madly, endlessly in love and would
remain so until they died.

Thus it was only to Connie that Sam could confess his anguish, which by
this time was considerable.

"Here I sit," he said, "going to my office, and only God knows what is
going on with Earl. Oh, Jesus, I keep lying to Junie and to my wife and
to the state police and it is just eating me up."

"Sam, did Earl give you a date?"

"No, that's the damn thing. He was unconditional. Do not, he said, do
not on any account contact the authorities."

"Well, he is a very capable man."

"Yes, but when he said that, he had no idea what he was up against. He
thought it was a corrupt tinhorn sheriff in a dead old country town. I
see now that it's something much bigger, much better protected, much
more connected. Maybe even Earl is overmatched."

"Sam, the entire Japanese naval infantry didn't overmatch Earl."

"No, you're right. But--"

"Sam, Earl has natural gifts. He has a genius for action and force.

It's beyond what normal people have, as we both know it. God decided to
give him a great talent, and he has always used it in duty in dangerous
places. His instincts would be much better than yours or mine in this
situation."

"I know. But I just can't do nothing. I've done all the goddamned
secondary research I can around here. I either have to go to Jackson and
raise hell with the governor or I have to face the fact that I am no
damned good."

"Sam, I won't hear you talk that way. You are a great man and you will
lead this county to the justice and the peace its people, all its
people, deserve. But you have to yield to Earl's instincts on this one.

If he wants it to go a certain way--"

"It's just been so long that--"

"Sam, maybe it's this. Earl knew if he got captured and he knew people
would think about coming to his aid, that hope, that belief, would
poison him. It would destroy him. He had to be free of that delusion.

He had to know nobody was coming, because only then would he have the
freedom to do the necessary as he saw fit. So you should honor his
requirements. He knew what he was doing."

This had never occurred to Sam, but as he turned it over in his mind, he
saw that once again Connie had had an insight into men's minds that
would have evaded him no matter how hard he studied it.

"Earl can't rely on anything," Connie said. "It is death to him to have
to rely. He learned to take care of himself the hard way, in that
terrible family, with that terrible father, so he prefers to pass
through life unaided, trusting only himself for serious matters. That is
why heroes are always so tragic, in the end. They are alone."

"You may be on to something."

"That is his nobility and also his doom. But possibly not this time."

"Still," said Sam, "I just can't sit here."

"Then you must do something productive. You must use this time. You must
figure out what Earl would have you do if he were here and in full
control of his faculties. In that way, you obey his wishes but you also
honor his traditions."

Again, the woman had something. Sam stole a sideways glance at her--they
were sitting on a park bench in Fort Smith, where they met every Tuesday
at 4:00 p. m." for a picnic supper, far from prying eyes and able to
enjoy each other, without the pretense of being mated to others.

Sam now and then had a terrible dream: that she would leave Ranee and he
would leave Mary, leave it all behind, Arkansas, the families, the
expectations, the ambitions, the traditions: just go. Go to Paris or
something. Connie dreamed of being a novelist; she could work on a book.

He could--well, what? Well, nothing. That was why it would never happen.

That was the problem: the only thing he had ever wanted to do was put
criminals behind bars and run a county and be a force in the Democratic
party.

"I don't know what," Sam finally said. "The government has the files."

"The files?"

"This doctor. He died at the prison in 1945, and it's classified. That
may have something to do with all this, but I don't know. It's a dead
end."

"Hmmm," she said. "You don't know where he's from?"

"Who?"

"The doctor."

Sam tried to recall.

"No."

"Well, you have his name. He's a doctor. Presumably a researcher, right?

His files may be classified, but he had a life, Sam. A wife, children, a
home. He left memories, clues, things of that nature."

"How on earth would I--"

But then he remembered Neal Greenberg.

"I knew a fellow at Princeton," he said, "named Neal Greenberg. Very
decent guy, very smart. He went on to medical school and he's now on the
staff of the American Medical Association."

"And so?"

"And so, I could call him. I'm guessing there'd be records and that he
could find them."

"Yes."

"Yes, and then I could go investigate him. See his widow if he has a
widow, his survivors if he has them. And ..."

He trailed off.

"It's not much, is it?" he said.

"No," she said, with a wise Connie-smile, "but it's something."

let me ' how it works," the section boss said. "You work hard or I beat
you with a stick

"I'll you bleed. You unnerstan' that?"

Earl didn't say a thing.

The man was on a horse, above him, as they stood on the levee at 7:00 in
the morning, after a long tramp out. On the one side of them the land
had been cleared, and a channel ran through it, irrigating it. On the
other, jungle.

"Now, you think you tough? You beat up some colored boys last night?

Well, whoop-tee-do on all that shit. You give me lip and I will beat you
with a stick until you dead. You unnerstan' that?"

Again, Earl had no remarks for the man, who wore a Stetson and
sunglasses, and had a Thompson submachine gun with a drum draped across
the front of his saddle, his right hand cupped on the grip. Around that
same wrist, on a leather tether, he wore a supple polished stick, maybe
eighteen inches long, just long enough to build up some real speed for
inflicting painful bruises or breaking bones.

"You do not want to give me no lip, or I will make it hard on you.

Harder than you can imagine."

His flat gray eyes ate Earl up. He was just loving this, Earl could
tell, as Bigboy had loved it, too.

"You want to run? Ha! That's my most favoritist thing. I love it when
they run. If I see you, I give you to Mabel Louise. Mabel Louise take
you for her own, boy. You understand?"

He patted Mabel Louise: Mabel Louise was his pet name for the big
submachine gun. Earl could see the man had a fondness for the weapon and
loved to strike heroic poses with it. He bet when he shit the gun Mabel
Louise was not far away.

"And if you git away before I can let Mabel Louise loose on you, guess
who gits you then? You see them hounds?"

He gestured over his shoulder. A pack of twelve hounds bayed and yapped
on chains held by a struggling dog master.

"Them hounds ain't like no hounds you ever saw. Them is blue-tick
hounds. They be smart and mean. You know what? Ever damned night, I goes
to the kennel and beats ' bad with rawhide soaked in nigger sweat. Yes
sir, so they know the smell of a nigger, yes they do, and what they want
more than anything is to get them tee ths into a black boy and pay him
back fo' all the agony his smell done caused them. So they goddamn hates
niggers. And to them anybody working in the hole is a nigger. So you
think you gon' make a break, I'll let them blue-ticks loose on you. They
tear you apart. They like to tear niggers apart, and you just another
nigger, you got that?"

Earl didn't even look up. The newly drained swamp section beneath the
levee spread for a dozen acres or so. A channel had been dredged through
it--by hand, no doubt, and Earl didn't doubt whose hands-so that the
water had drained and pumped out and been channeled back to the
Yaxahatchee. The land revealed by the water's fall was muddy still,
treacherous and slippery; but worse, it was full of stumps and vines and
rocks and the refuse of the swamp, all that had laid under the surface
of the black water since time immemorial. It was the special province of
the convicts of the Ape House to clear this land.

"So you git down there," the section boss said, "and I will be watching
you. You git down there and you put your back into it, or goddammit, you
will feel my stick upon your flesh."

They were not chained together. The footing in the newly drained section
was too treacherous for that, and one man falling could bring down a
whole line. But they were not free, either. Their legs were loosely
chained, with enough play to let them walk in short steps but never
enough to let them run, and the chains were forever becoming entangled
in the vegetation or the rocks on which they worked.

Similarly, their wrists were tethered by a good twelve inches of chain,
which gave them the freedom to work, but not much else.

Meanwhile, five men on horseback patrolled from the sanctity of the
levee, each with a Winchester pump gun. At any given moment,
considerable firepower could be rained upon the men in the drained
section, so rebellion was unthinkable.

"Men down," came a cry, and that was the order to commence.

But the section boss leaned low to him, and muttered something just for
him.

"You know what Bigboy say. You want to be treated like a white man, you
come clean. You tell ' what they wants to know. Otherwise, you just
another nigger and I own your bony ass and this is what you got till the
world comes to a end."

Earl slid en masse with the other convicts down the slick side to the
levee, and immediately the mud gripped him. Just walking through it was
exhausting.

Earl saw also that the sick ones, the crazed ones, they were here too.

Men on horses nudged them, some chattering madly to themselves, others
gripping themselves against a phantom cold, still others so full of
anger they could hardly see down into the muddy flat. Earl could hardly
stand to watch. Because many of them didn't know their names, they'd
been painted with big numbers, easy for a guard to read from afar.

"You, white boy," the section boss sung out, "you git with them other
fellows on that there trunk. You lean into it now, or by God I'll whup
the whole goddamn group of you."

Earl trudged toward the clot of men who circled a half fallen Cyprus
tree. They were digging at its roots, chopping at it, hacking away at it
with shovels, trying to free it from the mud that insisted so feverishly
that it stay put.

Earl found a spot in the circle, and began to beat at the mud
surrounding the tree. His shovel blade didn't bite deep without a
maximum driving effort, and the load it freed, saturated in the water,
was achingly heavy. Though he was strong, it took only minutes for his
lower back to begin to knot up in pain.

The sun rose, until it pressed against them with the insistence of a
liquid, fierce and miserable. Mosquitoes buzzed around, and he could
hear them in his ears as they drew close to feast on him. His sweat ran
in torrents down his face. The exhaustion rose up through him and
blurred his efforts, making him slow and stupid.

Someone poked him.

"Git wif da rhythm, white boy. You be messin' us all up."

Then he felt it. It was something deep and unknowable by the ways in
which his mind worked, but somehow nevertheless nurturing. The men had
fallen into a syncopation, not planned but brilliantly improvised,
finding a way of coming up and coming down in concert that enabled each
man to deposit his pam in the will of the collective and thereby,
strangely, alleviate it just enough to survive it.

Whang-chop, whang-chop, whang-chop.

The shovel rode up like an ax, found equipoise in the air, then
descended with a bomb's inevitability, exploding into the mud, sending
spatters everywhere, but you were so immersed in the rhapsody of it you
didn't feel it, and you didn't feel it when with one foot you just drove
the blade in that much deeper, and then there was a pause, perfectly
timed, and the mud was lifted out, not with the small of the back but
from the thrust of the thighs, and a glob of earth came free and was
tossed.

Whang-chop, whang-chop.

At a certain moment, and without a leader so directing, a thinner man
ceased his shoveling and began to slither his way up the bent trunk, his
weight adding on. He bounced up and down.

"Damn, she goin'," came a cry, and exactly as that cry called out, the
little man's weight was enough to send the tree toppling forward, its
roots now pulled naked and grasping from their bed of swamp bottom.

The men didn't pause to watch what happened next. A squad of specialists
with axes would now alight on the fallen tree and hack it to pieces, and
then another would pull the wood over to the levee and haul it up, piece
by piece, "I'll a wagon would come by and it could be loaded on that and
carted away for burning.

But there was no time to consider the process. In their own rhythm and
by internal communications to which Earl was not alert, they moved to
another giant obstruction, this time a stump of an oak rather than a
tree itself, and began to struggle again. There was a sense of
prehistoric hunting to it, and it made Earl think of some picture he'd
seen in a book somewhere in a past that was the other side of the Marine
Corps and the war in the Pacific and so hardly real at all: but the
picture, in some kind of child's book, showed men clustered around the
flanks of some great hairy elephant beast caught in a pit, and they were
stabbing at it with spears made of sticks and chipped stones. So it was
with the men of the Ape House and this great oak stump; they circled it
and tried to kill it and it defied them by not dying, and the more they
struck it and dug at its roots, the more it resisted them. The battle
was well fought, for the purchase on the ground was hard, and each man
fell in his ordeal a dozen times and slammed knees into the knobs of
root or cut themselves against its rough skin, or, as in Earl's case
especially, felt their hands pucker with blisters against the raw
hardness of the shovel.

On and on it went, without reference to time or temperature, though one
passed slowly and the other rose fiercely. Nothing, really, had been as
bad as this, not the coffin, not Iwo, not Tarawa in the water, not
Guadalcanal the two nights of the great human wave attacks, not the
screaming fury of his father as he beat him. For those things at least
constituted in themselves, by their very structure, the possibility of
ending. He would die or survive, he would grow old and leave, whatever.

Not with this: this was just it forever, the torment of the crushing
physical labor without help under the watch of the men with sunglasses
and guns and no pity at all.

"Now you know what a nigger feel, white boy," somebody muttered at him.

"You gots to be crazy to do this shit you got a choice. Us, we am' got
no choice." "You shut up," someone else said. "Moon catch you talkin' to
the white boy, he skin you."

And now and then Earl's prickly sensitivities for such things picked up
the heaviness of eyes upon him. He looked up, then, risking the
syncopation of the shovel rhythm, and thought once he caught a glimpse
of the great Moon staring at him from among the ax-wielders, but then he
lost him, as he had to get back on the rhythm.

A thousand years passed, or possibly a million. But at a point in time
when Earl thought he'd die from it, he heard some new phenomenon of
sound--jingling, shuffling, bells and animals linked together--and
looked up to the levee where his supervisors watched, and there
discovered a man arriving in a wagon pulled by two homely, wretched old
mules.

The man was scrawny, with one of those ageless black faces that had seen
so much woe and survived so much it could have watched life on earth for
anywhere between forty and seventy years.

"Fish here, boys," the man sang from his wagon, "old goddamn Fish come
to you."

No signal was needed. The arrival of Fish meant some sort of lunch
break, and the men turned from their labor and sloughed through the
sludge to the levee and began the hard, slick climb upward, each helping
the men around him, though no one helped Earl, and he didn't get up till
nearly everyone else did, which put him last in the line that formed at
the end of the wagon.

As they filed by, each man took a swig of water from a tin cup chained
to a water can, then dropped it and reached as Fish handed each what
appeared to be a piece of biscuit dipped in gravy or grease of some
kind, which they took over to the edge of the levee and consumed in
repose, if only for a few minutes. That was lunch, but it struck Earl as
something of a feast.

But when he got there, Fish looked at him coldly.

"This here the line for colored," he said.

The guards, who'd dismounted and were eating better fare, laughed. Some
of the convicts laughed.

"You go find the white line, boy," said Fish.

"Come on, old man," said Earl. "I am hungry."

Earl grabbed the cup and brought it to the spigot, but Fish tilted the
water can, and it fell to the ground with a thump, its fluid spilling
out in the dust.

"Ain't fo' no white man," said Fish. "You gots to go to a special white
place."

"Where would that be?"

"I don't know. The white peoples didn't tell me!"

Everybody laughed.

Earl looked at the empty water can in its puddle of sodden dust. It
seemed the saddest thing he'd ever seen. His throat felt cracked and
dry, his lips wooden. He moved on to the bin with the biscuits but when
he reached for one, old Fish handed him a special one. It was smeared
with some kind of animal shit.

"This here be fo' you, suh. This here be special. Go on, you eat that,
boy, you tell me how you be likin' it."

"Just give me a biscuit."

"Oh, you be de boss now. Suh," he yelled back at the section boss, "is
this here a new boss?"

"No, it ain't, Fish. It's just another nigger. You don't owe him
nothing, not the time of day or nothing."

With a clatter, Fish kicked the tin of biscuits to the ground, where
they bounced down the slope of the levee and settled in the thick,
brackish ooze at its foot.

"There yo' dinner, boy. Seconds, even, ' you be special, you hear? Ain't
no one else got seconds."

Earl felt like snapping the little man's neck. He could have done it,
too, in less than a second, for he still had some strength left. But
what was the point?

Earl pulled away, hungry and thirsty, but he would not beg, out of a
mule-headedness that was not heroic in the least but only crazy. He went
stoically to where the convict crew lay along the levee, all gobbling
their biscuits, some lounging extravagantly, yammering among themselves.

There was no place for him, nor did he expect one, but simply crouched
at the edge, eyes fixed on nothing.

Whack!

A jolt of pain struck him in the small of the back, and he jackknifed
up, his feet slid out from under him, and he tumbled down in a cloud of
dust into the mud at the bottom of the levee.

"Whoo-eee, y'all see that white boy jump! Didn't know them boys could
jump like that!"

It was old Fish, scrawny and demonic, his face knitted up in a glee that
only half hid his anger. It was the toe of his sharp boot, delivered
with a great deal of springy force, that had just nailed Earl.

Earl almost cursed and called him the ugliest word for a black man that
he knew and headed up the hill to beat on him for a while, but then
caught himself. That's what you'd do in the world if a man kicked you in
the back. He wasn't in the world; he was in Thebes. He looked and saw a
bunch of convicts staring at him.

"You go git him, white boy! Yassuh, go git him, see what it gits you."

Suddenly the section boss was next to Fish, on his horse, his tommy gun
pointing at Earl.

"What's going on, Fish?" "This here man said you be a old bastard,
boss," lied Fish with a grin that showed only a few teeth behind his
cracked old lips. "So I done fixed his ass good."

He stared at Earl with malevolent yellowed eyes.

"That true, convict?" asked the section boss.

Earl shook his head.

Suddenly, the boss man fired his tommy gun. It was a ten-round burst,
and it kicked into the mud next to Earl, a neat stitch of lead that
popped ten geysers in a single second. The roar of the gun raced through
the air, rebounded off the far trees where the river lay, and came back
in rolling echo. All the Negro boys lounging on the levee flinched and
cowered at the noise. The shots were meant to make Earl shiver and
collapse in terror. But Earl had been shot at before, and so he simply
winced at the noise, wiped the mud spatters off his face, and said, "You
want me to show you how to run that gun, let me know.

Otherwise, you might hurt somebody."

The boss's eyes flared with rage; clearly he had a petty vanity about
his Thompson skills, and it was evidently part of his legend among the
men, and a source of his power. He expected respect, admiration and fear
from the men he commanded.

He reined his horse around, drew it steady, and, one-handed, fired
another deafening burst, this time spattering up geysers on Earl's other
side.

But Earl stood still.

Then he said, "I don't believe Bigboy wants me dead yet, so if you put
one into me, he will whip on your ass for a month of Tuesdays. So as far
as I am concerned, you are just wasting ammunition to no good point."

"You must want a taste of the stick, boy!"

"You want to come down here and give it to me, you come ahead."

"Your evil tongue will win you no favors here, boy. I swear on that."

He reined his horse over a bit, and turned to the men.

"Since y'all find this so amusing, I'm going to cancel the water break
at three, goddammit, and you c'n work straight through till dark. You
got any problems, you tell it to the white boy. Now, go on, back to
work!"

"Men down," came the cry, and the men groaned as they rose and headed
back down into the mud.

Earl headed back to the stump, and around him the black convicts sloshed
and pushed along as well. At one point, someone bumped into him, and he
went down briefly, but he rose, thinking it was going to be a fight or
something. Instead, something was pressed into his hand by an unseen
body, and he looked down and saw that it was a half-eaten biscuit. He
stuffed it into his mouth, ground it with his teeth, and felt the
pleasure of solid food.

Then it was back on the stump and back on the shovel.

Be my woman, gal, I be your man, By my woman, gal, I be your man, Every
day is Sunday's dollar in your hand, In your hand, Lordy, in your hand,
Every day is Sunday's dollar, in your hand.

That was Rosie. Rosie was their dream, their love, their inspiration.

Rosie got them through the long afternoon hours, otherwise unmarked by
time or incident.

A man killed a snake.

A guard hit a loafer with a stick, or maybe he wasn't a loafer, maybe he
was just sick.

The boss cursed out a lazy nigger.

The men just worked, that was all, without rest, without speeding up or
slowing down, just abiding by the harsh rules imposed and finding
instinctive ways beyond it, with the help of Rosie.

When she walks, she reels and rocks behind, When she walks, she reels
and rocks behind, Ain't that enough to worry a convict's mind, Ain't
that enough to worry a convict's mind.

And they loved her for worrying their minds, for when they worried about
Rosie, they didn't think about the boss with his stick and gun, they
didn't think about the blue ticks hungering for their flesh, they didn't
worry about the strutting clown prince Fish, who sucked up to the guards
and wore his petty gift of stature like a crown, and they didn't think
about the heat, the mud, the sun, the mosquitoes, they didn't think
about a tomorrow and a tomorrow and a tomorrow of that same hard thing
without end.

Earl slipped twice in the mud, and once hit his knee on a rock hard
enough to bruise. He felt his hands pulping up in pain, swelling, and
glanced at his palms, which were seared raw with his own blood.

"You, white boy, you keep on a-shoveling, you don't need to be looking
at them purty hands, ' they ain't so purty now," the section boss
called.

"You keep working, white boy," a voice crooned to him, "or they beat you
silly and then they beat us just fo' the fun of it."

Earl took the advice to heart, and gave himself to the shovel, and never
again that whole afternoon did he take a break or look away; he just
gave himself to the rhythm of the labor, and like the men around him,
tried to close it out.

Only one oddness struck him; he looked up late in the afternoon for the
glinting of light on a lens far off. Sometimes early in the war the Japs
gave away their positions that way, and the brief flash would be
answered with a long belt of .30-caliber machine gun fire or a mortar
barrage. So he knew: someone was watching from far away, with
binoculars, steadily and professionally.

Section Boss worked them hard that day, as he would all days, and after
dark they shuffled back to the Ape House. There were no showers or
mercies or softnesses waiting for them there, either. They stripped and
ran naked through hoses held by white guards, that was the shower, and
then pulled the same foul clothes on. The food was cold grits, coffee, a
biscuit, some beans ladled out in the cook house on tin plates, gobbled
quickly under the watch of men with guns. They ate with their hands,
squatting in the yard, then went back to soak the tin plates in a
cauldron of boiling water.

Then they went back to the Ape House, and the card players took up the
game and the talkers started up reveries about '-towns they'd visited,
and the crazies and the sick ones retreated to their corner of hell to
gibber irrationally, and Earl pulled his bunk against the corner and
slept lightly.

The next morning at 4:00 it started all over again, the same thing,
exactly, and on and on it went, the hot mornings, the jabbering torture
of the monkey Fish, the baleful stares of Moon, the visits in song of
Rosie and the escape she brought. On and on. Over and over. There was
nothing else, except now and then he'd catch the flash of light off
lenses. Whoever was watching from afar was making a consistent,
scientific job of it. Meanwhile, he lost track of the time. A week, a
month, a year? It felt the same.

And then one day as they were climbing from the pit, a weariness on
their bones so powerful they could hardly speak of it, somebody brought
himself close to Earl. It was a man who'd never acknowledged him, one of
the card players, but he whispered something fierce, and then slid away,
and nobody had seen him do it.

He whispered, "They gon' cut you tonight, white boy. Moon and his
fellas. Cut you to death."

sam stared at the photo. The man was extraordinarily handsome, and if
one had the inclination to imbue beauty with more substantive virtues,
he was possibly noble.

The late David Stone, M. D." Ph. D." Maj." United States Army Medical
Corps stared back at Sam from his formal studio setting, tinted vaguely
sepia after the fashion of 1943, when the shot had been taken. He wore
his uniform proudly, with the entwined staff and serpent of the medical
corps glinting on his lapels next to a block of ribbons that testified
to a career that mattered. He wore a pencil-thin moustache, and had
pearly teeth, his hair pomaded back neatly. He looked like a philosopher
prince of some sort.

"He was a very good man," said the widow Stone, sitting across from him
in her apartment, which overlooked a rolling splurge of meadow, pond and
tree called Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, eight stories below.

She was a lovely woman, too. There was something aquiline in her facial
features, and her eyes were darkness embodied, but lively, merry, so
intelligent. They were eyes made for laughter, but not raucous yuks;
rather, for the laughter of wit, of erudition, of the bon mot.

He could see them as a married couple, how they fit together, how well
they set each other off, what a center to a set they'd be, with his
dashing nobility, her brilliance and beauty. It seemed so Eastern some
how, something Sam had glimpsed in his time in New Jersey and New Haven,
a brilliant world, but one sealed off; you couldn't get into it without
fabulous talent or fabulous success or fabulous family. Lacking all
three, and moreover aware that he lacked something more--a capacity to
dazzle seemed to be it--he knew he'd never move in such a society. He
wanted to prosecute rapists and bank robbers in a little county in
western Arkansas. No Eastern woman could understand such a thing, and he
was hopeless when it came to articulating it. Only a Connie Longacre,
stuck there in her tragic marriage, could understand, after much hard
study.

"Harvard, as I understand it?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, second generation. David's father was a doctor before him on
New York's Park Avenue. Society, that sort of thing, and with it all the
expectations that David lived up to without even breaking a sweat.

He had a moral investment in life, if I may say. So David did his
undergraduate school at New Haven, then Harvard for medical school, just
like his father. Then, after a few years of residency and a fellowship,
he came here, to Baltimore, and got his advanced degree in public health
at Johns Hopkins."

"You'll have to forgive me, ma'am, I'm just a humble country lawyer.

It would seem he could have gone anywhere in the world with those
credentials and had a very nice life. An opulent life. Even while doing
good practicing medicine. Yet he went into public health, which, if I'm
not mistaken, is not the most remunerative of fields. And if I'm not
mistaken, he spent the early thirties in Africa and Asia."

"That is correct, Mr. Vincent. David wasn't interested in money. As I
say, he was a moral man. He was in some way obsessed with goodness, with
progress, with doing well for the world. The money was nothing.

He'd grown up with it, he had a private income, a small one, so possibly
he took it for granted, and simply earning money for the sake of earning
money held no magic for him. I had some money, too, from my family. We
wanted interesting and useful lives, not big houses. This apartment was
fine for us. We never wanted a spread in the valley."

It was a four- or five-bedroom apartment in what had to be the city's
best building, a castle overlooking a deer park. What Sam experienced
was some sort of tabernacle to a life of the intellect, of stimulation
of imagination and eye and mind: it was a book-lined warren, with
eclectic furniture and a medical library as large as some small
college's, Sam guessed. But there was also literature and poetry on the
shelves, and modern art on the walls, and crazed sculptures here and
there, and a great many African and Asian artifacts and pieces, as well
as a riot of textures and colors from various forms of textile art. The
view of the park, Sam had noted, was magnificent.

"You must have been so happy," Sam said.

"Yes. But it was hard. David was a man of work, of duty. He wanted to
bring mercy into the world. He wanted to cure the great tropical
diseases, yellow fever, malaria, rickets, all the terrible ulcerations
and cataracts of the eye, the lack of nutrition and sanitation. He
wanted to make all those faraway dark places light and clean and full of
healthy babies and smiling mothers. I can't say I was as idealistic as
he was, and it cost us. It cost us a child, a family. After we lost the
first one, I couldn't have any more. Not that you asked, and not that I
give up such information to any person that comes along. But you have to
know how hard it can be to live with a saint."

"I'm very sorry for your hardships, ma'am. I truly am."

"Now, you wanted to talk about the war? That was your original line of
questioning?"

"Yes, ma'am. I represent a client who is suing the State of Mississippi
over the death of a Negro at a prison farm called Thebes in 1948. But
Thebes was the site of the research station which the late Dr. Stone
directed when he was a major in the--" he made a show of checking notes,
though he knew it by heart--"the medical corps, in that unit, the 2809th
Tropical Disease Research Unit."

"Yes, that is what it was."

"And as you might expect, the state of Mississippi isn't being
particularly helpful. It's not much interested in being sued. So I'm
hoping to uncover testimony that shows that the situation in Thebes
under Army control was quite benign and it turned somewhat ugly when the
prison reverted to state control, under a civilian warden, and such
things could occur too often."

"I would very much like to help. I'm a great believer, along with dear
Mrs. Roosevelt, in the plight of the American Negro. It is a shame on
the bosom of our country."

"I agree, ma'am, and possibly the work I'm involved in"--Sam half-hated
himself for the nobility he was pretending to, particularly in the
presence of the widow of a man who was genuinely noble--"will help
advance that cause."

"You are a man of stern belief, Mr. Vincent."

"No, ma'am. Your husband was a man of stern belief. I'm just a country
lawyer, taking a deposition. May I ask, how did he die, if it's not too
indelicate a subject?"

"It was a disease. He wanted to destroy it; it destroyed him."

"I'm so sorry."

"No need to apologize. It was a mighty enemy, and he lost a noble
battle. I think of Hector and Achilles. He was Hector. Heroic, but sadly
human, at war with one of God's most favored killing machines.

He'd never been dipped in immortality. It ravaged him and he died,
that's all. Some bug stung him, some dying patient breathed on him, some
germ crept into his water or food. It's very tragic. He could have done
so much more than he got to do. He wanted to help so much."

"I take it the Department of the Army was very aggressive in setting up
this project."

"As you might imagine, tropical diseases weren't of much interest in
this country until the war came along. Then our boys started suffering
from them in the Pacific. So of course it all changed, and David was
suddenly very popular. He was commissioned directly, given a budget and
an agenda. I'm not sure why Mississippi was chosen as opposed to
Florida, the Everglades or something, which at least would have been
close to a sophisticated city, Miami. But for some reason, he had to go
to God's Little Acre, Mississippi. I gather its impenetrability was part
of its allure. The conditions were primitive in that part of the state.

It was much like being in an African jungle. And you couldn't fly there
or drive there; just getting in was arduous enough. But he loved the
work, and he was very optimistic about his research."

"I'm sorry, but wasn't there a road? I mean, couldn't you have flown to
New Orleans, traveled to Pascagoula, then driven up the road parallel to
the river?"

"Well, there was, until the Army Engineers destroyed it."

"They destroyed it?"

"They cut it off. I suppose it had to do with security. Possibly they
were worried about German or Japanese spies, or inquiring newspaper men,
or whatever. But they went to a great deal of trouble to isolate it."

This was new. The people in the area believed the road had just been
destroyed naturally. But now the government was destroying it, to
protect whatever Dr. Stone was working on.

Sam wrote down this development.

"Do you know, exactly, what it was he was studying?"

"You know, I haven't a head for medicine. I believe it was malarial
virus work of some sort. He may have explained it to me at one point or
other, but if I understood it then, I honestly can't say I do today."

"Did he ever specify the exact nature of the work? I mean, was he
treating patients? Was he examining blood? Was he looking for cures and
running a medicine test of some sort?"

"As I understand it, they had volunteers who agreed to be infected with
various strains so that their progress could be monitored and cures
tried. The whole point was to do it quickly, to arrive at some kind of
cure or medical protocol years in advance of the normal techniques. It
was very accelerated, that I know."

"Would they have used prisoners?"

"I'm sure they were volunteers, Mr. Vincent. It would be very dangerous
work, and you couldn't possibly force a man to risk his health, his
body, his life like that, now could you?"

"No, ma'am. Well, then, would he have sent back photographs of any sort?

I'm looking for a way to document the changes at Thebes Penal Farm."

"No, Mr. Vincent. David was not a photographer, I'm afraid. He was
caught up entirely in his work."

"I see." "Now," she said, "there were letters. Lots of letters."

Sam swallowed and hoped he didn't give away both his surprise and his
idiocy for not having come up with this possibility on his own. He
finally said, "I suppose you've got them?"

"Of course, Mr. Vincent."

"Would it be all right if--"

"Of course, "she said.

IN the dark, men breathed heavily as they snored through sleep painfully
earned. Some farted away the pressures of a bean-rich diet, some moaned
in pain or dread, and occasionally someone cried out from the
unconscious but far more pleasant other world for a Rosie or a Mama or
an Alberta.

But even in this darkness there were gradients in the shadings, as there
always were in any darkness. That deeper patch over there, was it the
shape of a man, prowling, hunting? Or was it a discoloration on the
wall, the play of obscure shadow? That small ticking sound: the ancient
timbers settling yet again, another tiny degree? Or a man opening a
secret pocketknife to do some powerful cutting?

He watched, waiting for movement, waiting for some indication of
assault, trying to control his breathing.

Earl had slipped from his bed an hour after lights out, and oozed with a
sniper's patience slowly along the floor an inch or so at a time, until
he crouched a few feet from the mattress where he'd been sleeping these
past nights. He was in his underwear but had his heavy work boots on. He
tried to be soundless as he cocked his legs for a spring and readied
himself for a fight.

He even had a weapon, for he could not fight in the dark without one.

It was a knot of branch, secreted into his pants late in the day, heavy
for clubbing, pointed and broken for stabbing.

But what if they didn't come tonight?

If they didn't, he'd lose the sleep and he'd never gain it back; the
work in the hole was grinding him down inexorably, and he could feel his
strength ebbing. And with his strength, his will was going.

He'd been thinking about one thing: escape.

But it seemed impossible.

The problem wasn't the fences or the guns or even the swamp; he could
slide under the fence, he could evade the guns, he could navigate the
swamp. He'd already figured two ways to escape the barracks at night.

No, the problem was those goddamn dogs, who'd hunt him down long before
he could reach the only fair chance at escape, which was the river.

Before, he'd been able to plan, to build traps and switchbacks to throw
the hounds off. No chance of that here: he'd be blind in the swamp, and
the dogs would be on him in no time.

Yet that wasn't the worst. He knew the worst: it was that each day he
was here, he lost a little strength, a little spirit, a little hope. He
had to move soon or he'd never move. It was too much. It was horrible.

In the war, at least you had responsibilities and comrades to get you
through, to share the ordeal and lend you their strength.

Here he had nothing: no Negro would have a thing to do with him, and
Bigboy and his bullies wanted him dead, and this braying monster Section
Boss wanted him dead slowly. Only the warden was keeping him alive, and
for how long? Eventually the warden would conclude that enough time had
passed, and that if Earl were indeed the agent he believed him to be,
his agency would come looking for him to make a big stink. Absent that
proof of Earl's importance, the warden would conclude he was just what
he said he was: a nobody. And being a potential embarrassment, he'd be
easy enough to dispose of. Who would say a thing?

He tried to keep his mind sharp. He couldn't. He kept sliding off into
blurry reverie. He remembered so many nights like this in the war,
particularly early on, on jungle-rich Guadal, where the Japs crept in
through the shadowy trees and left a man or two with his throat slit
every night. Earl had caught one once about to finish him after he'd
finished another man in the gun pit, and Earl had kicked him in the
balls, then beat him to death with an entrenching tool. It was not a
pleasant memory, and as it stole over him now, waiting, he felt a sense
of shame. He remembered the glee with which he'd whacked and whacked at
the small, squirming yellow man, and the strange notes that came from
his enemy's constricted throat, and the exultation when it was over, and
he was blood-smeared, exhausted but alive for one more tropical sunrise
and one more shot at survival.

He tried not to move his head, or let the pain stinging in his tensed
legs get to him. He scanned without motion; his eyes simply rotated left
and right, scoping the abstractions for a sense of movement, listening
for a sound.

But nothing came. It was going to be at hey were fast and quiet. They
were as good as the Japs. They rose soundlessly from nowhere and only
passed through a tiny smear of light from a dim moon beyond the window
to alert him, and they were on his bunk in split seconds; they made no
noise at all, like expert jungle killers, men well experienced in mortal
confrontations and well studied in the leverage of force against flesh.

He watched their arms blur as they struck again and again into the hump
of knotted clothing that was a laundry bag he'd stolen in the dark.

In the next second, they realized they were stabbing at somebody's
sweaty underwear, not a man, and in the next second after that, he was
on them.

Earl was without mercy. He was not in a universe where mercy was
allowable. Mercy equaled death. Yet even as far gone as he was toward
savagery, he was not comfortable with what happened next, though he was
its sole author. As he lunged, he swung the limb with the force of an
ax, wishing for more weight up top. But it didn't matter, for his timing
was exquisite and he struck one of his antagonists-too dark to tell
which one--full in the face with it and felt the satisfying shudder up
the shaft of the club and the length of his arms to signify a solid
wallop. That man, stunned, loosened and slipped, gasping, his two hands
flying to his injured face, which now must have worn a broken nose, a
shattered cheek and a mouthful of broken teeth. He was out of the fight.

Earl was quick on the rebound, knowing he'd never get a full swing off
again; instead, from the full extension of the first blow, he came
driving back this time with the sharp point of his weapon, driving it
hard into something soft and moist, a neck he presumed, that belonged to
the second man. He drove this shaft like a piston, back and forth in
cruel, savage strokes, at the same time shoving his body with all its
strength against his antagonist's, and yet also keeping that now
screaming man between himself and the other who was charging around to
cut him.

Earl separated from the second bleeder to meet the rush of the knife
man. He countered the blade with the stick, catching the last man's
lunge, and spared himself a deep stab. But he knew also that he had not
hurt the second man enough to put him out of the fight, and if the two
of them got to him, and the fight went to the floor, as most fights do,
they'd crush him beneath them, grapple him still, and gut him.

The other blade probed again, this time glancing off Earl's parry and
slicing a bad wound across his forearm. The blood spurted, but there
wasn't any pain, for his system was too aboil with blood chemicals to
register hurt. He got a short stroke of the haft into the face of the
other fighter, driving him back, and then the second man recovered
enough to get him in a driving bear hug and slam him into a bunk,
spilling two screaming sleepers from it.

Lanterns were lit somewhere, and in the pitching darkness, Earl saw that
it was big Moon himself who had him crushed, while another man retrieved
the knife to close on Earl. So Earl squirmed and improvised.

With his boot he crushed Moon's instep, and when the giant screamed and
loosened his grip, Earl, head-butted him backward in the nose, breaking
it. Then he spun, saw an opening, and nailed him with a hard jab to the
lower side of the head, and felt the jaw he'd smashed snap and twitch;
he'd broken it clean. He grabbed the injured heavyweight and pushed him
in the direction of the knife fighter, deflecting him.

But not for long. The knife boy knew his stuff. He evaded Moon deftly,
stayed balanced and without panic, went to a trapping backhand grip on
his cutter, and his eyes were empty of emotion but full of skill. He was
fast as he danced at Earl, and the knife then came at Earl's face so
fast even a man as fast as Earl couldn't completely avoid it, and it
sliced along the line of his skull, opening a squirting gash. But the
point missed his eyes, which had been the idea behind the thrust, and
Earl didn't panic when he was hurt as so many do. He closed faster than
the man withdrew, knowing the closer he was the more he cut the power of
the slabber. And before that one could get the knife back into play,
Earl tattooed him with a left-right-left-right combo to the center of
the body, knowing the satisfaction of punches well delivered. The other
buckled and stepped back, and with hazy eyes flailed at Earl with the
knife, which Earl evaded easily enough, and when the blade had passed,
hit him a haymaker over the jaw, taking the consciousness away from him.

He twisted down in a heap.

The lanterns were fully on now. Moon was alone, his jaw disfigured, a
great foam of redness spread across the heaving blackness of his chest
from the many gougings Earl had applied with the back end of his club.

"Come on, big man. Let's finish it," Earl shouted in full rage, blood
and sweat streaming off him. He had surrendered fully to the warrior's
madness. He wanted to kill and crush his antagonist, but Moon, rather
than stepping forward, stepped back, raising a hand. He slinked away,
trying to stem the blood from his wound. He was done for that night.

Earl staggered slightly, as the pains his adrenaline had kept him from
feeling now announced their presence. His hands hurt the most and his
knuckles were garlanded in red. He opened and closed his fists, feeling
the pain as fire, hot and raw. But no bones were broken. When he turned
he saw horror on the faces of the lantern-lit Negroes who stared at him
as if he were some kind of rough beast, newly born among them. Then he
realized he was bathed in blood.

He touched his head where the long slice had been opened up, and his
fingers came away red. He looked at his left arm, where the other cut
was. Both oozed. He went to his own laundry cache and pulled out a clean
undershirt, broke the seams with his teeth and quickly improvised cotton
bandages around them to stanch the blood flow. He knew he had not been
hurt mortally but that the less blood he lost the faster he'd recover.

Too bad there wasn't fishing line about; he'd sew himself up.

Then he heard the commotion.

"Mama! Mama! I ain't goin' to de Screamin' House! Mama, don't let dem
take me to de Screamin' House! Lord, Lord, ain't goin' to de Screamin'
House."

He saw that it was the knife fighter, now conscious, now aware he was
dying. Knocked out by Earl's blow, he had managed to twist on his blade.

He had buried it in his thigh, and the blood ran so swiftly and puddled
so hugely that it seemed clear he would bleed out. Around him stood men
watching, seemingly frozen in the drama of his exsanguination.

"Oh, God!" he screamed, waving his hands futilely, "don't let me die
like this. Please God, don't let them take me to de Screamin' House."

No one seemed able to help. Memories danced through Earl's mind from the
war: young men, blood, the shock of loss, the disbelief that oneself
could be so badly hurt so quickly, the numbness of the survivors, their
tentativeness. It was all too familiar.

Earl pulled himself up off the floor and went to and kneeled by the man.

"You deep cut, son," he said.

"Don't let dem take me, boss. Please to the Lord, no."

"You hold on tight now. The less you scream and move, the less blood you
lose."

Earl bent closer. It was a butcher knife with an old, worn haft.

"I'm going to pull it out, son. Coin' to hurt like Jesus."

"Help me, boss."

Earl called, "Some you other fellows, you come here. Give this man
something to hold on to. Someone else, you go get a cool cloth from the
pump and wet his face. He has to be calm or he is a goner."

The men shambled to do what he wanted.

When they had him secured, Earl leaned his strength against the meaty
thigh with the wooden grip buried in a well of bubbly red, winked at the
man--a boy, he now saw, just as so many of them had been in the war--and
drew it out. The boy shuddered in the pain, though he didn't scream.

Immediately the blood flow increased.

"Ya'll git me a cord or a rope or something. We have to tie off that
artery."

Someone went to improvise one, but the blood came so fast, Earl was
afraid it was too late. Gently, he pried the wound open.

"Git a light down here so I can see!"

The lantern was lowered and Earl could make out the pulsing, severed
artery. He had no clamp at all, so he reached in and plucked the little
spurting tube between his two fingers and closed it.

"He's got to stay still like this till medical help comes."

"Won't be nothing till the morning."

"Well, if we can hold him still and keep him calm, now that I got this
hose shut down, he may make it."

"Fo' what?" somebody asked. "Come back here?"

"You got a point, man. But still, I say keep this young man alive for
better times. Whyn't ya'll do some of that singing you're so damn good
at. Maybe that'll keep him with us an extra minute or two till the doc
comes."

The men began to sing.

Well, sweetheart, it isn't pretty and it's primitive, but after Africa
and Asia, it's certainly comforting to be in one's own country, although
Mississippi has a long way to go before it joins the rest of the U.S. A.

Sam sat in a leather chair in a study. He had before him a cup of coffee
and a pile of letters on the thin paper that marked the V-mail of the
war, a large sheet folded many ways to make it a small and efficient
package for delivery. victory it said at the top of every fold.

This was the earliest one, marked January 9, 1943.

"It's so odd," the doctor went on, you expect Mississippi to be hot and
swampy and to see men in chain gangs working in dust and heat. You
expect to run into Walker Evans images everywhere. Now Let Us Praise
Famous Men. Well, it's not at all like that. It is squalid, of course,
and underdeveloped, but it's both cold and wet and of course dreary as
well. Everything is muddy and the forest or jungle or whatever it is is
impenetrable. I certainly can see why they put this prison here on this
old plantation site; the question is, why did they put the plantation
here in the first place?

Sam was a thorough, disciplined man. He read each letter completely,
occasionally taking notes on his yellow pad. He skipped nothing, he
tried to prejudge nothing, and he willed himself to pay no attention to
the emotional content of the letters, which was none of his business.

Yet that of course, particularly in the early going, was the only thing
he could notice. As a couple, Dr. and Mrs. Stone seemed so ... well,
damned perfect. He had censored his own men's letters during the same
time period, as he moved his artillery unit across up Italy, then over
to England, then to invade France and roll toward Germany. He therefore
had a reference point, but quickly found it of no use. For while the
average soldier's letters were full of sentences like, "You tell Luke he
still owes me that $300, and I am not forgetting it when we finally win
this thing" and "Who is this Bob you keep writing about.

Shirley I am sleeping in cold dogshit every night and these German
fellows are trying to blow me up and I DO NOT appreciate hearing about
Bob taking you to the church supper." But the Stones were like a couple
in a movie: "Miss. you darling, dearest, and am so proud of the work you
are doing at the U.S. O."

"Thanks, sweetness, for that last wonderful letter, and it doesn't
surprise me that flower club politics are so rough. All politics are
rough, from the Medical Corps to the flower club. You will become
treasurer in the next election, I am sure of it."

Unable to help himself, Sam wrote the words "emotional authenticity
lacking" on his yellow pad, unsure himself quite what he meant.

Occasionally, he'd look up when the sentiments grew too cloying and
Hollywoodesque, pinch the bridge of his nose, take another sip of
coffee, and glance around the study, with its wall of photographs taken
in obscure foreign places where the great humanitarian had gone in his
quest for a disease-free universe. The photos were the same and seemed
in bright color, even though they were black and white: the great man,
in a white coat or a pith helmet, standing among a coterie of little
people of differently hued skin and differently configured wardrobes,
enjoying their adoration and his own sense of centrality. His wife was
in some of the photos as well, always a beautiful woman of classical
posture and self-possession, the of a dozen or more native cultures.

The little people were brown, black, yellow, in a variety of fabulously
interesting garb: feathers, loincloths, ceremonial gowns, animal skins,
black pajamas, sometimes in just the pale dowdy uniform of colonialist
lackeys in some empire's far-flung bureaucracy.

Among the pictures, of course, were the testimonials, some even in
English. They spoke of the same thing: the doctor's commitment, the
doctor's love of people, especially children, the doctor's courage. It
was a fabulous cavalcade, and it made Sam himself feel a little banal
and worthless. He'd blown up some German tanks and put some bad fellows
in a little county in nowhere, U.S. A." in prison or in the electric
chair. What was that in comparison to a life lived so grandly, so
heroically?

"Would you care for more coffee, Mr. Vincent?"

"Yes, ma'am. I was just looking at the photos and tributes on the wall.

I wish I'd known the doctor during his lifetime. It would have been an
honor and a privilege."

A dreamy look of assent flew across the woman's face, which itself was
her reply, and off she fled to get more coffee.

"The engineers have at last finished the levee," the doctor wrote, "and
we can therefore count on uninterrupted work. No more floods, no more
lost documents and protocols, no more horror stories terrifying the
'natives' around here."

Hmmm. Army engineers had built a levee to protect the doctor's project
from flood damage? This in the middle of the war July 6, 1943, Sam was
in Sicily then when engineers were in high demand in the world's combat
theaters. That suggested how important official Washington considered
his project or how much private influence a mere major could wield even
in the military, if he were charming, famous, charismatic, well
connected. Sam remembered the crumbly bridges his guns had traveled as
they crossed that rocky island, and how he'd lost one, and two men, both
maimed for life, when in some nameless village the truss bridge built by
the Romans had given way, and collapse had ensued. They could have used
more engineers in the Sicily of 1943.

"My spirits are high, darling, and we are making progress. I must say
even the " are taking this in good cheer. They want to do their part
too! Everybody wants to win the war, so they can go back to their loved
ones proud of what they've done to put Herr Hitler and Tojo-san out of
business!"

Sam wondered about those innocent quote marks around "volunteers"; to a
sophisticated man such as Dr. Stone, punctuation could express a whole
range of subtle irony and camouflaged meaning; was it some reflection of
ambivalence on his part, a whisper of cynicism, a subconscious
projection of contempt?

It all began to change by the spring of 1944. Evidently the early days
of great progress had run into a wall and, medically, whatever it was
the doctor was working on now resisted his efforts.

Darling, I'm afraid I won't see you next weekend as I had promised.

There's so much to do here and so little time. Now that the invasion is
imminent, I'm losing personnel to go to Europe. It seems I've slipped a
little in the priority department. It's as if they expect miracles, and
when I can't produce them overnight, they lose confidence in me and the
project. It's so damned unfair, but then, I keep reminding myself, that
is the way the military works. It's very much like it was at the Hopkins
with batches of us competing for attention, and first this project and
then that looks the most rewarding and gets the lion's share of the
funding. But I soldier on, darling, and will see you as soon as
possible. Love and kisses, your ever-loyal David.

David canceled his next leave, too; that was August of 1944, and in
December, he was even sharper.

Darling, I love you truly, but I cannot in good conscience have you
coming even to New Orleans. There has been a shift in the direction our
program is taking us, and I feel I must be here constantly to supervise
our reconfiguration. Moreover, in these momentous times, darling, we
must discipline ourselves and give all to the immense task at hand,
especially when the end is so near and we are so close to victory and to
a return to our way of life. To have you taking up valuable railroad
space to see someone as insignificant as me is simply wrong; best give
that seat to the war widow, the kid on last pass before hitting some
godforsaken Pacific atoll, the fellow on compassionate leave over a sick
and dying mother. Meanwhile, in my way, I struggle on, fighting for what
I believe and doing my damndest to eradicate the ancient enemy.

Sam thought he was getting a little florid and over melodramatic the
woman's passage to New Orleans by December of 1944 certainly wouldn't
have counted a bean's worth against the war effort. Again it felt
emotionally inauthentic, as if something were wrong.

In the next letter, Sam realized what was wrong: the guy had a screw
loose. He was nuts.

Yes, we are making good progress in our new direction, but it's hard, in
a way. He was our ancient enemy, who has stalked us for years. He's been
a wary adversary. Now we try to make him work for us, and yet he's still
the enemy. It's like collaborating suddenly with a Nazi, very depressing
but I'm sure very necessary. So I still wrestle him, though now I try to
wrestle him to our side. Am I tarnished for my vanity, for my belief I
can master him? Perhaps. But then I realize, / don't matter, the only
thing that matters is continuing the struggle, and what others might
think of me, well, that too is meaningless against the larger, more
insistent drama of the crusade. Darling, when I think of your sweet
pureness in this world that is so filled with filth, perversion,
decadence, weakness, cowardice, it sickens me. It is not right. Darling,
you are too good for this world.

What was going on with the doctor? Was he delirious? Was he losing
control? Nowhere in all the previous correspondence had such an insane
note been struck; it was as if the doctor were no longer himself and no
longer writing these letters. Some other had taken over, some Being.

And what was this mysterious "change in direction" in the project?

Whatever, that certainly seemed to be upsetting the doctor. Was it
driving him insane, as he tried to reconcile his "goodness" with
whatever the new aims were?

There was a long lapse in the letters, at least six month's worth. By
June of 1945, the doctor's mind was really scrambled:

Am I God? I think not. I never wanted to be God! But science makes us
God, or at least gods: what are we to do? I sought to learn the truth,
to help, and that humble mission was enough for me. Yet they sought me
out, and let me have my way. They made me a god! They gave me the power!

What is life and death to a god? I smote what was evil, wherever I could
find it. I found it in my own heart and there I smote it most
grievously, but in doing that, I smote myself. In dying, I learned I was
not god, I was but a man. I am so sorry we lost the baby all those years
ago. I'm so sorry I wasn't there when it happened. I am so sorry what
was going on through the microscope was more real to me than what was
going on in my own house. I am so sorry about all I did before you.

Darling, forgive me. I never meant to be god.

There were but two other letters. The penultimate was from the War
Department.

Mrs. David Stone, 12 Druid Hill Park Drive, Apartment 854, Baltimore,
Maryland.

Dear Mrs. Stone, the War Department regrets to inform you that your
husband, David M. Stone, MAJ." U.S. Army Medical Corps, died of
complications after a short illness June 23, 1945, at his post at the
medical research facility at Thebes, Miss. Major Stone did a great deal
to assist his country in the pursuit of final victory and we are
saddened that he did not make it through the conflict.

Yours Very Warmly, George C. Marshall Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
United States Army Washington, D.C.

But the last V-letter arrived after the death notice; presumably Dr.
Stone had written it as he faced death full in the face on his last
night.

It only said: "The darkness." "Such a shame," she said.

He was not sure when the woman had entered. She stood across from him
now, pale and beautiful as death, as he put down the last letter.

"Ma'am, I'm very sorry."

"Was this of any help?"

"Well, uh, I'm not certain. It contains certain leads I may be able to
follow up on. Time will tell."

"He tried so hard. He fought so valiantly. He was such a hero."

"Ma'am, toward the end, he seemed to be ... well, not quite himself.

Do you have any idea what was going on? And there was some thing about a
' in direction' in the research. Do you know what that could be?"

"I presume the disease was working on his mind. I wrote him letter after
letter begging him to slow down, to relax, to go on leave. I wrote the
War Department, the Medical Corps, everyone I could think of, or knew. I
could feel him getting dangerously mixed up. As for the change he
mentioned, I honestly couldn't say. He didn't share things like that
with me.

"

"The darkness." What could that have been?"

"I don't know."

"What was done with the body?"

"It was shipped back in a closed coffin. He was buried here in a small,
somber ceremony."

"Here?"

"Here in Baltimore."

"He's in Baltimore?"

"Yes, Mr. Vincent. At Green Mount Cemetery. But what would this have to
do with your case? After all, you represent a man suing the State of
Mississippi for a wrongful death well after the end of the war."

Sam didn't even have an answer: he was thinking, I have to get that body
autopsied.

Earl thought he'd make it. The cut wasn't deep, but arterial, and he'd
spent the last two hours with his fingers in the boy's thigh, pinching
off the blood flow, while the boy moaned for his mama over and over
again. The other men had gotten him calmed with their strength and their
music.

But he died, anyway.

As for Moon, the same hidden convict grapevine conveyed the news that
his jaw was broken and he'd been wired up as best as possible, but he
had to be shipped via the prison launch to Pascagoula, where a surgeon
would repair his jaw and he'd be in a maximum security ward while his
jaw healed. He'd be back in a few weeks or so.

It was another day on the levee. Earl worked hard, though at a strange
angle, because he didn't want to stress his own wound, which had not
been stitched closed as it should be but instead bound up with linens.

He knew a sudden twist or jump and the blood would start spurting again.

It wasn't arterial, so he wouldn't bleed out fast. He'd just get weaker
and weaker.

The sun was a monster's eye that day. It was a huge, angry thing, and it
poured out its fiery radiance, and it sucked the energy and the will off
them all. The flies, the skeeters. The heavy work, the poor food, the
never-enough water. Section Boss sneering at Earl up top his horse, but
now, since he'd kept himself alive much longer than anybody had
expected, keeping a wary distance. They were afraid of Earl now, the
guards. Earl liked that. Somewhere deep inside himself, he liked that a
lot.

The rain came at 3:00. It slashed down from heaven with such vengeance
that even Section Boss, now in a hunter's poncho, understood that it was
pointless to work, a rare concession to the elements. He commanded the
convicts out of the soupy hole and up to the levee, where they could at
least sit this one out.

Earl sat, as usual, alone. But he had a strange sense that men were
closer to him than before.

"You, white boy. You box? You musta boxed, boy. You gots fast hands."

The voice came from directly behind him, but nobody was looking at him.

"Did some fighting in the service," Earl said, in response to the first
question anyone had asked other than Moon or one of his young thugs.

"I worked corners and cuts for a coupla years. You gots fast hands and
can slip a punch. Nice jab combo."

"You pick things up," was all Earl allowed himself to say.

"You so smart, buckra, how come you done made a big mistake? You be dumb
as any nigger, ask me."

"What mistake is that?"

"You shoulda kilt Moon. He down, he out of the fight. You should have
pulled that blade out of that no' count Junior and come over and gutted
Moon." "He'd said he was through."

"You is dumb, buckra. You is dumb. That boy gonna come back with one
thing on he mind. He goin' kill you. You done messed up his old haid
twicet, he gots to kill you. You best kill him first night he gits back,
else he kills you deader ' a motherfucker."

It was solid advice, Earl knew. Moon wasn't the sort of man who'd learn
a lesson. He'd get through his pain and fury in the prison ward in
Pascagoula, wired up without anesthetic, and he'd lay in silent pain for
a week or two or three, in the darkness, and all that time he'd nurture
his hatred for Earl, he'd think on it and polish it and lick it shiny,
until there was no other thing in his mind, no other thing at all. That
was the way a fellow like Moon worked.

So: Earl had to kill him.

Or: Earl had to prepare to die.

Or: Earl had to escape.

None of the possibilities were inspirational to him. Instead, he just
tried to fight the despair by snatching a quiet moment in the warm, hard
rain, feeling slightly cleansed for the moment. He looked around: fronds
of palmetto pulsed out of the green undergrowth, and before him, down
the levee slope and in the hole, though the ground had turned even
muddier and more desperate, the vegetation was green and glisteny. It
was like a Guadalcanal in Mississippi, where the beauty of the wild
place stood in contrast to the squalor of the savagery. That was the
now. That was the present. That he could enjoy.

"Hey," he said to the man who had spoken to him, "tell me something.

The Screaming House Junior was yelling about. What would that be?"

"You don't want to go there, white boy. Take my word on that."

"It's the end of the line?"

"You see them bedbug-crazy boys down ' of the barracks? Look, they
standing over there."

Earl glanced quickly through the rain, to a small knot of gibbering
crazies who were shunned and stood apart from the others. He recognized
a few: the fellow who talked to himself, the fellow who gripped his own
arms so tightly you thought he'd squeeze himself to death, the gentleman
with the fused spine who looked as though an iron bolt had been sunk
through the center of his spindly old body. Each had a bright red number
painted on his shirt so that he could be recognized.

"Them boys should be in a hospital someplace."

"Ain't no hospitals here. Only the Screaming House. You ain't been here
long enough, but when one gits so bad he can't work, they comes git him
in the night. They takes him off to the Screaming House. We calls it
that. No man never seen it. It's off to the west a bit. Fish claims it's
cool there, and clean. But off goes a crazy boy and you can hear him in
the night, the wind is right, the weather calm. You can hear him
screaming. He scream and scream and scream. These country niggers let a
place like that grow on their minds, think it's some kind of torture
place. Think these guards got a special torture place."

"What happens?"

"The screaming stops. That boy don't never come back. Nobody never comes
back from the Screaming House." "I will avoid that place if I can," said
Earl. "What they sick from?"

"Don't know, white boy. Some say it's bad blood. Some say it's the
fevers of the river. Some say it's the shots they give us when the
doctor look us over every three-fo' months."

"What kind of doctor would let men like that fry in the sun?" "The white
kind," said the man, simply, and that seemed to end the conversation.

Earl noticed the rain had stopped just as suddenly as it had started,
and now shed of his poncho, his tommy gun named Mabel Louise gleaming
from frequent cleanings, Section Boss rode the levee road commanding the
convicts back into the hole.

"Git ' goin', you lazy niggers. Work to be done. You too, white boy, you
git on down there and don't you think you be slackin' none. I catch you
leaning, I'm going to beat your hide with my stick, boy."

Earl rose, feeling the endless pains cut at him. His respite was over.

The hole beckoned, with its sucking mud and stubborn, iron-hard Cyprus
stumps and its endless tangles of bramble and thorn, its mosquitoes, its
snakes.

"You do what Section Boss says, or I be on you ass, white boy, and
maybe, hell hell, I be in yo' ass!"

It was Fish, who'd jingled up on his mule-drawn cart unnoticed during
the rain.

"You tell him, Fish!" came the cry from the guards.

"Yassuh, boss. Talked to of' Moon afore he done left. Moon, before he
guts you, he goin' fuck you! Yassuh, he be goin' do dat. Up the ass!

Make you his sweet bitch. So you die a bitch! Ha, lawdy, lawdy, don't
that beat it all! Make you wear lipstick! You be a fancy lady!"

The homosexual content of the jibes annoyed the hell out of Earl.

Things like that weren't right. Shouldn't be said out loud. He'd once
caught two Marines doing something sexual out near the shitters on one
island rest camp and immediately transferred them out of the unit, to
different regiments. His fear on this one went deep, for some reason.

"Hoo, don't think the white person like to know he goin' be Miss.
Katharine Hepburn for old Moon when he gets back! Hey, white boy, iffn'
you can take out the garbage and wear nylons, maybe Moon marry yo' pale
bootie!"

Earl lost himself in his work, trying not to feel humiliated and debased
by this new tack of Fish, who clearly had a way of getting under the
skin.

As Earl used his hoe to chop at the root of an old tree, Fish was making
Lana Turner smooching sounds, full of the suggestion of tongue and spit,
to raucous laughter from the guards, particularly Section Boss.

Earl tried to erase the contaminated image from his brain, but couldn't.

Himself being held down and stripped buck naked while Moon, behind him,
had his way. It was a shame he couldn't live with. It would kill him,
that's all. He feared it, for some reason, deep in his brain, beyond all
logic and clarity.

That would kill me, he knew.

I'd rather be gut shot and die slow than live with that in my mind.

He chopped and dug and dug and chopped. The heat and the sun came back.

He was in a dream of fear, trying to see only what was before him. It
had one salutary effect, and that was that the afternoon seemed to pass
more quickly than ever before, and soon enough the twilight was on them,
and the cry came down the line, "Convicts, out of the hole and form up."

As Earl came out, he saw something new. It was a car.

It was the first car he'd seen at the prison.

It was a black Hudson sedan, gleamy and creamy in the twilight. And
standing next to it, like a general attended by his staff, was Earl's
main antagonist, Bigboy himself, examining the world through his
Macarthur sunglasses. Two minions hung by him; Section Boss, even
farther down the line of hierarchy, had dismounted and assumed a
submissive position.

Earl felt Bigboy's eyes on him through the dark lenses. But he didn't
dwell on it. He simply clambered up the slippery slope, took his hoe to
the toolshed where a trustee stacked it, and looked for his exile's
place at the end of the formation.

But suddenly two men were beside him and a third behind him. In the next
second, they collided upon him, his chains were drawn tight, two more
added to secure his arms to his body with no clearance whatsoever, and
he was dragged in his mincing, humiliating walk before the great man.

"You still alive, Jack Bogart? You know what?" said Bigboy, "you made me
some money. These section guards swore you wouldn't last a night. You've
lasted twelve. You've killed a man, even if it was only a lowly Negro.

You've made friends and influenced people. I had money riding on you,
and I've come out to collect."

Whap!

Someone hit him hard upside the head.

"You look at Mr. Bigboy when he be talkin' to you, son. That's how we do
it here."

"You are a sight, I will allow, Brother Jack," Bigboy went on. "Cut and
beaten, you still fight on. From what I hear, it only gets worse.

Everybody is saying old Moon has special plans for you. Why do I think
you aren't going to enjoy what Moon intends? Seems to me a hero like you
can't lose his dignity, or he's nothing. That true, Jack Bogart?"

Whap!

Another openhanded strike to the back of the skull.

"Cat got your tongue, boy? Answer the guard sergeant." "My name is Jack
Bogash," Earl said. "It ain't no Jack Bogart, like that movie fellow. I
am a truck driver from--"

Whap!

The boys commenced to beat on him, for their amusement, for a few
minutes. Even Section Boss, emboldened by Earl's chains and pain, came
over and got a few licks in. One of the blows opened the cut across
Earl's body, and he felt the blood begin to seep out of his shirt.

"Enough," said Bigboy. "Get him up and in the back of the car. Jack
Bogart, you're going for a ride."

Strangled by his chains and pinned by the beef of guards on either side,
and with a sawed-off Winchester pump rammed in his ribs for good
measure, Earl rode through the penal farm. Once he even glimpsed the
river beyond, pale and flat and broad, like some highway out of town.

But soon the vegetation thickened and darkened again, and the tropics
took over; they came to a gate.

"Yes, sir," said Bigboy in the front seat as the driver ran out to
unlock the gate and pivot it open, "you listen hard to what the man is
going to say to you. You won't get another shot at redemption. We don't
sell redemption here. We're not in the salvation trade. We're punishers.

We make the evil pay for their sins, that's our specialty, but on
account of my deep and abiding affection for heroic types, I have
arranged something special for you, along temptation lines. We shall see
how tough you are. Pain doesn't frighten you, Mr. Hero, nor does the
fear of death or degradation. We'll offer you what the devil offered
Jesus Christ himself, which is the whole world."

He chuckled softly in the fading light.

The car purred along a narrow jungle path and soon encountered a
strangely tidy building nestled among the lob lollies and the palmettos,
white and trim, well built along strict government guidelines. It had a
very 1943 feel to it; it reminded Earl of the jungle headquarters the
Seabees would throw up so efficiently on back islands away from the
battle zone, where staff and intelligence matters were considered in
comfort.

Earl was dragged out, further confused by a mechanical hum arising from
somewhere. It was the sound of generators, well insulated, churning
away, another cue familiar from the Pacific in wartime.

In he went, to an utter astonishment: coolness.

The place was air-conditioned.

The temperature must have been seventy-two degrees. He blinked in low
darkness, and the two hulking guards took him down a shiny corridor.

Doors off it opened to what appeared to be ward rooms, and one was
opened just enough so that he saw a black man in an oxygen tent, clearly
close to death. They reached the end of the corridor and an office
which, entered, proved to be clean and modern along military lines, with
a medicine cabinet, a sink, a shelf of jars, a pile of clean towels,
many sterilized packets of either pills or small instruments and an
examining table.

Two men in white coats over otherwise nondescript clothes awaited him.

"You keep still, Bogart," the senior guard said. "You let these fellows
work on you or I will do some serious thumping on your haid that you
will not enjoy one damned bit."

Earl was placed on the table. Quickly, the technicians snipped off his
foul clothes and washed him with the smoothness of medical orderlies,
which he now saw they must be. They were impersonal, efficient,
uninterested. They disinfected his wounds, and quickly sewed them up.

He winced each time the needle perforated his torn skin, but the two
orderlies were not at all put off by his pain.

Then the hypodermic needle came out. Earl flinched involuntarily as the
technician drew some fluid into the shaft of the thing, then walked
around, prepped his arm, and slid it in with a sting. Something about
the needle was more hurtful than all the beatings he'd gotten.

"Waste of that fine medicine on this sorry specimen, you ask me," one of
the guards said.

"No one is asking you, Rufus," said the orderly snootily, claiming his
hierarchical superiority over the fellow, whom Earl knew to be called
Clete.

"Okay, now get lost," said the other orderly to the guards. "We'll take
him from here."

The guards obeyed, angry to be shown up by the two lesser but somehow
higher ranking men.

"Here now, this'll relax you," said the technician, and quickly gave
Earl another shot.

"Just a little tranquilizer, sweetie. Keep you calm and collected.

Now you just sit here a bit."

Earl waited. Whatever it was hit him hard; it softened him, and the
world seemed to fall ever so slightly out of focus. He blinked, almost
passed out, and felt a great calmness, almost a sleepiness, pour through
him.

"There you are, sunshine," said the technician, coming back. "My, aren't
we relaxed now. Okay, you come with us now."

Though still chained, Earl was wrapped in a cotton bathrobe, and the two
men led him through another door. He was trying to track details, but
they wouldn't stay tracked as his mind seemed to slip in and out.

Was this a hospital? There was a hospital smell somehow, but at the same
time he felt no sense of bustle or movement or urgency. That was
certainly missing from the hospital sense of the place. He couldn't
figure it out.

The last door led to a room oddly lit. He sat on a chair and the two
orderlies stood by.

"Doctor will see you shortly, stud boy. You just sit tight now."

Earl couldn't sit any other way. He felt himself on the edge of
consciousness.

Earl sat there.

The door opened and a man slid in, and even through the strange
condition of his mind, Earl right away recognized the doctor who had
given him the shots after his time in the coffin.

"Do you want a cigarette, friend?"

Earl nodded.

A cigarette was placed in his chained hands, and he put it to his lips.

Quickly it was lit, and that first drag was like paradise, biting
through his drugged blur.

"You know, it doesn't have to be like this," the man said.

Earl said nothing.

"You're a remarkable man. You're strong, tough, resilient, heroic.

Nobody denies that. But you're fighting the jungle, and the jungle
always wins. Surely you've figured that out."

Earl knew this to be a fact, but he didn't acknowledge it. He didn't say
a word.

"Who are you? You can't be who you say you are. You're too motivated,
too clever, too experienced, too well trained. Are you some kind of
federal agent? FBI, perhaps? Are you military intelligence? Are you
something military? What is your interest? Whom do you represent? Why
are you here?"

Earl was silent. He took a puff on the cigarette.

"You keep fighting. It's really amazing. You should be studied. I've
seen heroes before, believe me, and most are ordinary men compelled by
circumstances to the incredible. You are heroic every single day.

Every single one. Amazing."

Earl paid him back in silence.

"All right," said the man. "I'm going to give you an out. I'm going to
give you hope. You don't even have to tell us who you are, at least not
until you want to, and you will want to, eventually. It's simple.

You come over." Earl said, "Come over?"

"Yes. You join us. We need good people. I can have you here in a second.

You'll be fed, you'll sleep in clean sheets, you'll have a pleasant duty
day. It'll seem all strange at first, even frightening.

But you'll see that what we are doing is very necessary. It's work of
the utmost importance, and it ennobles everyone associated with it.

These poor Negro convicts, these ignorant white trash guards, the
brutality, the death, the seeming wanton cruelty of Thebes, the shots
they get: it's all justified. It's all for a higher good for our country
and our way of life. You won't see that at first. But eventually you
will. There'll come a i time when you'll believe. Then we can let you go
back to wherever you came from. And you won't be bitter; you'll be proud
you've served your country."

Earl drew a last breath on the cigarette, then stubbed it out on the
desk.

"No," said Earl. "Not a chance. Not a goddamned chance. I may die here,
but I won't be a part of whatever terrible thing you're up to."

"A shame," said the doctor.

Sam could not lie. Sam was against lying. All kinds of mischief sprang
from lying. It wasn't merely that it was wrong, but that it felt wrong.

A tide of liar's phlegm overwhelmed your esophagus, your heart popped,
your knees trembled. Sam hated lying and liars.

Sam lied.

He lied, he lied, he lied.

He hated himself for it and swore to God if he ever got out of this
horrid sewer into which Davis Trugood and the Thebes State Penal Farm
(Colored) had dragged him, he would never tell a lie again, not even a
social one, like

"Honey, you sure look pretty today."

But what bothered him more than even that was how well he had lied, how
he had learned to lie over the course of this ordeal.

"Ma'am, I'm afraid I have some very good news and some very bad news,"
he had said to the widow Stone. "Your husband, David Stone, M. D." is
heir to a not inconsiderable fortune. Ma'am, I'm not yet prepared to
divulge financial details, but I would estimate that it is in the
seven-figure range."

Even Stone's beautiful widow, smooth and polished and cosmopolitan as
she was, gulped slightly at this information.

"Yes, ma'am. It seems his father had a brother, a rogue in the family
you might say, who went off on his own. This man, Daniel Stone, had a
rambunctious, tumultuous life, he did indeed. Possibly your husband
never mentioned him nor did his father, because I believe some time in
the penitentiary was involved."

The widow had gasped again.

"But he died intestate and wealthy, through certain interests in the
West involving industries not exactly on the up-and-up. After probate
taxes, the estate is, as I say, considerable. Your husband was his last
living relative. As heir to his estate, you are therefore the
beneficiary." "I see," said the widow. "But as you can see, I'm quite
well off from my own family's estate. I see no reason whatsoever to
enter into a protracted legal engagement to acquire money I don't have
any need for."

Ach! Sam hated this! Character! A woman who could not be motivated by
greed! Now there was a tough one.

"But madam," he said quickly, "think of the money not for you but to in
some way commemorate your husband. Think of the David Stone Scholarship
for Negroes at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Think of the young
doctors that would come out into the world, and how well they would
reflect the best of the American Negro, the good they would do, the
mercy they would bring to the world and their own people. Now would that
not be a testament to the greatness of your husband?"

It was so amazing. This beautiful woman from the highest circles, with
her knowledge of art and beauty, her social connections, her dead
husband's brilliant reputation to sustain her, her many (he assumed)
fractious suitors, was biting. Not for some free dough but for the
narcissism of Doing Good and Feeling Good: put that before her and she
was any tart in a bar looking for a sugar daddy.

He hated himself for manipulating her. He hated her for being so
malleable. He hated it all.

"Ma'am, what I need to do is disinter your husband's body, don't you
see? I need to ascertain beyond doubt that that is indeed him in Green
Mount Cemetery, and that you are his legal widow, and with that we can
swiftly accomplish the transfer of the funds. Think of the future."

And so it was that Sam now stood in the mortuary room of the Smallwood
Brothers Funeral Home in downtown Baltimore, where a casket, still caked
with dirt, had just arrived. He had the proper authorization, the proper
paperwork, everything in its place, every i dotted and t crossed.

In her apartment the widow awaited his call.

He was used to death, of course, but not its ceremonies. For him it was
a wartime thing, squalid and tragic; or an issue of small-beer west
Arkansas murder, where a husband choked his wife blue and bulge eyed out
of rage at an infidelity she had not really committed, or a businessman
neatly perforated the liver of his embezzling partner with a
nickel-plated .32, or two wild country crackers cut each other dead in a
ditch in a drunken waltz of anger and stupidity.

This was a dark, subdued place, without joy. It felt as if a heavy
coating of oil had lubricated every surface, so that friction was
impossible. Things moved slowly, with greasy decorum; it was more like a
graduation than a mortal inquiry.

The funeral director supervised; the undertaker executed. It didn't take
long.

"Mr. Vincent?"

"Yes."

"Sir, we have removed the decedent from his inner casket."

"Yes. And--"

"Sir, there appears to be a mixup."

"Of what nature?"

"There's a discrepancy between the death certificate and the remains.

Would you like to see? It's only over here."

"Frankly, sir, no. I will take on trust a report of your findings."
"Yes, sir," said the funeral director, one of the Smallwoods.

He was a man used to mortal circumstances, well schooled to represent
dignity in the face of crushing grief. His solemnity was unbridgeable,
but Sam knew something was up when he saw that dry tongue lick nervously
across those dry lips.

"Sir, according to the death certificate, this is a forty-three year-old
white male. But the remains are those of a thirty-year-old Negro male. I
don't know what to say." "I don't either," Sam said.

"Worse, he appears to have perished of some grotesque disease. I can't
say I've ever seen anything like it. Chancres, tumors, limbs eaten away.

It is a true horror, sir. I would like to burn it--him--in the next
minute or so. The fires are ready." "Oh, Christ," said Sam.

The sun blasted down as it usually did, and Fish showed up, as he
usually did, with the water wagon drawn by the two old mules in the
jingly tack. Earl hardly noticed. He was in a depression so deep and
dark he could hardly breathe. He hacked at a stump with his hoe until he
heard the call, "Men, out!"

He was slow clambering out of the hole for his place at the end of the
line and a guard gave him a whack with a stick to speed him up.

"You slower than the niggers now, boy!" he said with a whoop, as he laid
the flat of the club hard against Earl's kidneys, driving him in a spasm
of pain to the ground.

"He used to be white," sang out Fish. "Haw, boss, now he all nigger.

He mo' nigger than any nigger you got!"

Earl humbly made it to the rear of the line, wishing he could rub the
new bruise with his hand but unable to reach it because of the chain.

At a point his eyes lost focus and he went to a knee.

Whap!

Another blow. Since he had turned down the mystery fellow in the mystery
house, the word had gotten out among the guards. He was fair game. The
process would intensify, then intensify some more. They would break him
or kill him, and it seemed now not to matter. Maybe Moon would be his
killer. Earl was the dead.

"You stand straight in line, nigger, or you don't git nothing," the
guard sang. Section Boss, on his horse with Mabel Louise the Thompson
gun dangling over the horn on a sling, patrolled back and forth, not far
at all from Earl. He was a good horseman, and in a second, if he wished,
he could use the power of the beast to crush Earl to nothingness. His
closeness was ominous and full of anger. But he said nothing, and Earl
didn't look up at him, for that would merely earn another whack.

The jungle always wins, the man had said.

It was true. The jungle does.

Earl tried not to give up hope. But, really, with the dogs, with his own
declining strength, with the fury of the black men at his whiteness, he
had nothing to hope for. Maybe Sam was No he tried not to think of that.

If he thought of that, it was the sign that he'd given up, that he was
relying on the offices of others, and he couldn't have that in his mind
if he were to survive. He had to do it on his own.

At last he got up to the water spigot, following even the sick and
crazed inmates. He reached for the cup, feeling Fish's harsh eyes upon
him, when a peculiar thing happened. He didn't reach the cup, but in the
quickness of a blink, Fish intercepted his hand and probed his palm with
a horny finger. Then it was over, as if it had never happened, and Earl
looked up at Fish, who'd looked away and was smiling up at Section Boss
now.

"Can I whack him one, Boss?" asked Fish, smiling broadly in that
ass-kissing, shit-licking way of his.

Suddenly he drew back his hand as if to issue a mighty clout, and Earl
flinched, drawing back. But Fish just laughed.

Earl grabbed the cup, greedily sucked down the half cup of water, and
turned, and suddenly Fish was on him.

The old man had surprising strength. He'd leapt from the wagon and
actually landed on Earl's back. His strong, wiry arms lashed across
Earl's chest, drawing him in, and his legs locked around Earl's thighs.

Earl struggled but could not get at the little man and spun away, and
then felt the thrust of a sexual pelvis grind against his rear end.

"I's Moon!" Fish was screaming, "I's fucking the white boy!

Whooooo-eeee, look-a-me!"

The laughter rose raucously, the black man mounted on the larger, slower
white, grinding into him in scabrous imitation of the sexual spasm, the
white man, all tangled up in his chains, lurching, spinning, unable to
get leverage to separate himself from the smaller tormentor.

"Go git him, Fish!" the guards yelled.

"You hump that Nancy!" they cried.

"You ride that boy just the way Moon goin' ride him."

It had to be funny in its pathetic way, for the inmates themselves
started to laugh, and they generally wouldn't acknowledge the shameless
way Fish played to the guards.

"Goin' fuck you, boy, yas I am, goin' fuck you hard, boy, have my way
with you," Fish crooned amid the laughter, and Earl spun desperately,
trying to shake the man off, trying to elbow him, but the chains would
not permit his arms the freedom. He spun, dizzily, a clown being fucked
by a monkey, raising dust from the dry levee until it floated like a fog
while the men moved aside to let the comic spectacle go on.

"I say he lasts a minute."

"Hell, he gon' break that bronc. He gon' make him his, you bet!"

"You go, Fish, you go. Ride that horsie. Ride and fuck that horsie."

Earl spun to the edge of the levee, but then his foot stepped off it,
and down the two tumbled, a bone-jarring spill that brought them
crashing down the incline into the mud until they'd rammed hard against
a stump.

And Fish was off him in a flash, dancing back up the incline. He stood
up there, doing a little jig of triumph as Earl, muddy and humiliated,
dragged himself from the soupy mixture of the drained swamp, breathing
hard.

"Look at him," Fish crowed. "So high and mighty and look at him now."
"White boy Bogart," said Section Boss, "you is one whipped pussy, you
is. You a disgrace to the white race. You is no longer a white man, no
sir. I hear by drum you out of the white race. You nigger through and
through."

Earl sank to his knees.

"Men, down," came the call, and the convicts rose as one, much amused by
the show, and headed down to join him. At the same time, a very merry
Fish jumped aboard his wagon, gave a theatrical flourish to his
audience, and turned to the mules to go on about his rounds.

But what nobody except Earl knew was what Fish had whispered in his ear
as they lay in the mud down below, entangled for just a second.

"I can git you out of here. I knows the way."

Sam wished he could take the cab straight to Friendship Airport, plunk
down some more of Davis Trugood's money, and fly to Little Rock aboard
that big United DC-4. He wanted that desperately. It would be so much
easier.

But the duty part of him, that nagging little monster inside that would
not ever leave him in peace, would not permit such indulgence. Which is
why he found himself, feeling like a condemned murderer, hunting for the
courage to knock upon the widow Stone's door in the beautiful old
apartment building outside Druid Hill Park.

He tried twice, three times, and then a fourth, knew he'd manage it on
the fifth, but before he could find out if that were true or not, the
door opened.

Dressed for a summer outing, purse in hand, she was stunned.

"Why, Mr. Vincent! What on earth are you doing here?"

"Ah, ma'am, I had--" he stammered.

"Oh dear. The news is bad?"

"I don't know what the news is. I really don't know what it is."

"You had better come in, then."

He followed her back to the living room and sat in the same chair he had
sat in a day or so ago.

"So, Mr. Vincent?"

"Well, ma'am, straight out, you see, that isn't your husband in that
casket."

At first it seemed she didn't understand. She blinked, twice, and
swallowed, once, and then said, "I'm afraid I don't quite--"

"Ma'am, it's not him. It's a Negro male, much younger."

"Are you telling me my husband is alive?"

"No, ma'am. I am only telling you that he is not in his casket; someone
else is. What that means, I don't know. Possibly it's a terrible mistake
made by somebody at an Army mortuary back in nineteen forty-five.

Possibly, it's--well, I can't even begin to imagine what it is."

"Good heavens."

"Ma'am, is there any--well, ma'am, I am by profession a prosecutor and I
proceed by blunt methods. So if I may be blunt, is there anything in
your husband's life or character that would suggest his capacity to
become mixed up in something not quite aboveboard?"

"Excuse me?"

"Well, I'm just groping for explanations here, Mrs. Stone, and I--"

"Are you imputing that David Stone, the medical researcher and heroic
savior to the world's beleaguered and benighted, that he is involved in
some criminal activity?"

"No, ma'am, I'm--"

"Mr. Vincent, I may have to ask you to leave. This is very upsetting to
me."

"Yes, ma'am. I'm just trying to get a fix on all this. I'm just trying
to--" "You're not here for the reasons you said, are you?"

"No, ma'am."

"That whole business about the fortune. That was all a lie, wasn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Sir, you are despicable."

"I do not deny that."

"Really, you have to leave. Immediately."

"Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry. This is so unfortunate."

"It's more than unfortunate, Mr. Vincent, if even that is your name, it
may be criminal." "Yes ma'am," he said.

"So tell me, finally, after it's all over: Why are you here?"

"In truth, I began working for another attorney in Chicago, and I was
investigating the death or disappearance of a Negro man at what was your
husband's medical station. Not during his tenure, but somewhat later.

That is, recently. I journeyed down there, and barely escaped with my
life. It's something of an American disgrace. And even as I speak to
you, a good man who rescued me may be dead for his assistance. I have a
private compact now with my conscience to find out what is going on in
Thebes, Mississippi. I'm sorry I lied. I'm not in this for money or
financial gain or anything. But I am very concerned about my friend, and
until I find out about him, I am making it my business to learn
everything about Thebes that I can. Your husband's name came into it
from a governmental source in Washington, but all the files have
disappeared. So I was working from this end."

"You think my husband was involved in the murder of a man?"

"No, ma'am, I don't. But I thought his involvement might lead me to
someone who might lead me to someone who ... well, that's the way we
investigate."

"I see. This is very upsetting."

"Ma'am, if you wish, if you'd feel more comfortable, possibly you'd care
to call your attorney. Possibly if you will let me continue this
conversation, you'd feel more comfortable in his office instead of your
home. I'm very sorry I misrepresented myself. It was unethical. But I'm
under great pressure to get a fix on that place, in order to help my
friend."

"My attorney won't be necessary, Mr. Vincent. I'm simply going to
reassert that you must leave. My husband was a saint, a hero, a martyr.

He died giving his life for his country. Were you in the war?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, that's something."

"I was an artillery officer."

"So you shot cannons at Germans or Japanese. Well, my husband was in
battle too, only he shot microscopic cannons at germs and parasites and
worms. I will not let you defame him. Please, leave, or I shall have to
call the police."

"Yes, ma'am."

Sam got up, wooden-faced, and walked to the door. He had certainly blown
this one and would be fortunate to get out of Baltimore without getting
arrested. But he had to try one last thing.

"Ma'am, you'll forgive me, but one question I have is that in one of the
letters, your husband expressed sorrow over ' baby'--"

"Mr. Vincent! How dare you! How dare you? I was taught that people from
the South are gracious, and yet you ask me the most personal questions
imaginable. I will call the police if you don't please leave at once."

"I'm very sorry, ma'am."

"You should be very sorry. My husband was a great man and that was part
of his greatness, his capacity to forgive. He had a terrible
disappointment. I cannot have children. It is nobody's fault, so you may
not believe anything ill of him. Do you understand? You cannot believe
anything ill of my husband."

"Yes ma'am. I'm going to leave now."

But he didn't, and his crudeness produced a crude treasure. It was an
old prosecutor's trick; he hated himself for using it. But it worked: to
ask someone highborn a lowborn question, one notable for its lack of
taste and sensitivity. It frequently shocked such people into tears, and
before they realized they had lost control of their emotions, they
blurted something out that no amount of torture could otherwise have
produced.

"I cannot have children," she said, "because I contacted a virulent
venereal disease in my early twenties; I was a month pregnant at the
time. My husband worked feverishly to help me and save the child, but it
couldn't be done. He blamed himself for my misfortune."

"Ma'am, I'm very sorry. It's none of my--Ma'am, I can't believe that you
contracted something so--"

"I was raped, Mr. Vincent. One night, late. In Asia. It was very
violent."

"I'm very sorry."

"The disease killed my baby, it killed all the babies I would have. It
was the cruelty of the world, and a perfect example of the sort of
tragedy that my husband gave up his life to prevent. Now please leave."

"Yes, ma'am."

Earl watched and waited, but there was no approach. He thought: maybe
it's a trick. Maybe it was part of Fish's psychological war against him,
just to whet his appetite and get his hopes up, then to let him down.

And he cursed himself for letting the little bastard get to him. He
tried hard to pretend he didn't feel crushing disappointment when
lights-off and lockdown hit at ten and the place settled into wheezing
darkness. He waited in the dark, and the more he waited, the angrier he
became, and he realized the fury was a form of medication against the
despair he was beginning to feel.

you got yourself into a goddamn fix, partner, was what he couldn't admit
feeling. But he knew he felt it just the same. For the first time in his
life, he was very close to feeling beaten down and broken.

Sleep came roughly after too much time and too many pictures in his mind
of other places and other lives he had lived and would never live again.

But it came, and if he dreamed he didn't know it or remember it, because
the next thing he felt, something bit him.

Goddamn!

It jerked him awake, some little insect or mouse where it shouldn't be,
on the side that was down on the mattress. Now how the hell Another bolt
of discomfort came, and his mind settled down enough to put two and two
together properly: he realized it wasn't a bite so much as a poke, up
against him from the other side of the mattress.

He leaned over his bunk and saw some kind of rod extended up from the
floorboards, where it had poked him awake. There was somebody down
there.

He slipped off the bunk and put his mouth to the crack in the
floorboard.

"Yeah?"

"You crawl to the third window, eastern side."

And that was all.

Earl low-crawled, listening to the snores and the groans and the farts.

He made it without a problem and wondered what was in store for him
there. And then he felt the floor drop out, as one board was removed
from beneath. He waited until another came out, and he had enough room
to snake through.

"You come on," Fish whispered.

Fish rose and took him around back, so that he was invisible to the men
in the closest tower with the searchlight that commandeered the Ape
House, yet too far in the dark to be spotted by any of the other towers.

"We be okay here," said the old man. "The patrol don't come back this
way fo' half a hour." "You said you could get me out."

"Didn't say that. Said I knows the way out. Maybe you man enough to make
it, maybe you ain't. Took five fellas out. Four be dead. One got out.

That too much a risk fo' you? One in five. It ain't easy.

Fact, it's the hardest goddamn thing you ever done, and I'm bettin' you
been in the war something fierce. Harder than that even. You want me to
go on? Or you want me to disappear and you can go back to waiting for
Moon to slit your belly or Bigboy take you to the Whipping House."

"Why?

"said Earl.

"Why what?"

"Why you get me out? You hate me. I'm the white boy. Everybody in this
place hates me."

"You got that right. I was sent up here by white boys just like
everybody else in here. And we do hate you. You done us so wrong and you
ain't even got no idea. You took us over here in chains and we in chains
still. You fuck our women and make ' whores, and when we gets angry you
be actin' all su-prised. You keep us poor and weak and set it up to
crush the life out of us, and you pretend it be fo' our own good, ' we
too stupid to be otherwise. So onliest thing fo' us be: yes suh; no suhl
Yassuh, with a big coon-ass smile and bright white teeth. Y'all like our
white teeth." "Sorry I asked."

"I pick you ' of two things. I heard first off you kep' your fingers on
Junior's artery, keep him from bleeding out. He was my sister's boy. So
I owe you."

"You don't owe me nothing. I'd do that for any man."

"Way my haid work, I owe you. Second is, as I say, to do this thing it
takes a bucket of guts. Not many have it. Even brave men, strong men,
hard men, they don't have it. It's a motherfucker. It's a big old
royal-ass motherfucker."

"I don't have that kind of stuff, old man."

"Oh, I'd bet you does. You just got to make me two promises, that's
all."

"So what are they?"

"Tell you later. I get you out, I tell you."

"I ain't promising no promises I don't know about."

"You'll make these promises. All them other fellas done it, and one them
out now, living high on the hog."

"Just tell me where this is going."

"It's simple. All you got to do is open this."

The old man handed him a brass lock, an almost antique thing that
weighed nearly a pound. It was tighter than hell. Earl pulled and felt
no give at all in the connection between the hasp and the lock body. He
tried to examine it in the darkness, and felt for buttons or screws but
touched only rivets. He tried to put his finger into the keyhole
underneath it, and of course made no progress at all.

"I can't do it. Nobody could do it." "Gimme," said Fish.

Earl handed it over, saw it disappear in the old man's hands. There
seemed to be some fiddling, maybe a massaging, and in two seconds, the
lock came sprung with a barely audible metallic snap.

"Jesus," said Earl. "You do that barehanded?" "You pick it," the old man
said, displaying a pin about two inches long.

"It take practice, but when you learn it, you can git her open in about
two seconds."

"Yeah, fine, except where do I get the pick?"

"See, that's it. That's why I touched your hand. You got enough callus
to carry it now. You couldn't done it till now."

Earl watched as the old man made the pin disappear into the ridge of
callus that decorated his horny old palm. He turned and looked at his
own hands and saw that yes, now they were ridged with a hard pad of
deadened, accumulated skin, where healing skin had covered broken
blisters but come out tough as leather gum. It was a dead zone, one of
God's few kindnesses to those who worked hard with their hands.

"Gimme that paw, boy."

Earl put out his left hand and felt not pain but pressure. The pin
punctured his hand and rode across the palm. There it was, tightly held.

"You got to practice. I give you the lock. You practice every night.

You got to get the pin out, get it into the lock. You make a "H." You
feel the softness of the tumblers. You get the two on the left, cross
over, git the two on the right. Do it blindfolded. Do it at night.

When the time comes, you won't be able to see what's going on."

"I'll be in a darkened cell?"

"No. You be at the bottom of the river. You be drowning. You make a
mistake, white boy, and the hundred pounds of cement that lock chain to
you keep you down there and you be drownded dead in thirty seconds."

earl worked the lock every night in the dark. Out with the pin, a swift
movement to the keyhole, no wasted motion, the insertion, then the
delicacy of it all: feeling the tension in the tired spring-driven
tumblers, trying to duplicate the pressure of a key against them,
finding the right progression until at last the thing would pop.

The first night he never got it open.

You goddamn worthless scum, he called himself mercilessly the next day.

The second night he finally felt it move a bit and got close to getting
it open.

The third night it came open by the second hour.

The fourth night by twenty minutes.

Only got to get another nineteen minutes and fifty-eight seconds off
that time.

He worked and worked until at last a poke came in the night.

He slithered to the floorboards and out.

"You do it?"

"I got it down to thirty seconds now. We best do this thing soon, else
these guards are going to beat me to death. Or Moon will be back."

"Moon be back day after tomorrow. He cut you first thing, white boy.

Firstest thing. Ain't no not her possibility ' it. He cut you bad and
deep, and fuck you bleeding. He want to be fucking you as you pass."

"Christ."

"You up to killing him first?"

"It ain't my style a bit."

"You pussy, boy."

"Done my share of killing. You don't know the killing I done. You got no
idea. Nobody here does. But if I fight this guy, and even if I whip him,
he's going to hurt me bad, and I can't do this thing, right?"

"That's right. So it's got to be tomorrow. Now I tell you the rest of
it."

Earl braced himself.

"You tell Section Boss tomorrow first thing: You talk to Bigboy. You
broken. You tell ' what they want. Yeah, they gos, gits Bigboy. He drive
up in his shiny new Hudson car."

"If I tell ' who I am, they kill me."

"I knows. So here's what it be. When Bigboy drive up, you'll feel Tangle
Eye gittin' close to you."

"Who's Tangle Eye?"

"Big yeller convict. One eye go strange. Tangle Eye. A ax man. Best ax
man in Mississippi."

"Yeah?"

"You slip down. Tangle Eye, he give yo' wrist chain a whack right where
it clip to the bracelet, right hand. Yo' hands free. But you hold that
chain tight so nobody don't see it."

"Yeah."

"Now come the fun part. You be called up out de hole. You g'wan over to
Bigboy, and when he smile at you you pop him hard. You pop him so bad
you break out his teeth and his nose. You hit him bad."

"That is the fun part. Only problem: it gets me killed."

"No, it don't. It do git you beat. Gits you so beat you wish you dead.

But they don't kill you. They don't even make you unconscious.

They won't whack yo' haid. They bang yo' ribs, yo' gut, yo' kidneys, yo'
legs. Have a good of' time with them sticks."

"This don't sound like no fun at all."

"You want out?"

"Ain't there no other way?"

"This be the only way you beat them dogs. No other way. The dogs run you
down if you try to bust out through the bayou or the piney woods.

Dogs rip you up right good. So you listen here to the hard part."

"Goon."

"You got to humiliate Bigboy. Make him so mad he forget his self So he
kill you just fo' his own pleasure. This is how they kill at Thebes.

They take you to what they call the Drowning House."

"Lots of houses at Thebes."

"It's a city of houses, you got that right. At the Drowning House, they
chain you to a cement block. It's locked with that lock you done been
working with. Nightfall, they take you out on de river. They likes to
hear ' beg and cry and plead. Makes ' feel powerful and strong. They
gots a special boat. Boat got a door in the side. Git out there, the
cement block goes over. You go with it." Earl thought about this. He
remembered the long walk in on Tarawa, with the Jap tracers skating over
the surface of the water and the pack on his back dragging him down. He
shuddered involuntarily at the horror of the memory.

"You in the water. You got yo' thirty seconds. You get that lock off.

Oh, one thing. I forgot to ask. You can swim, can't you? White boys swim
good, I hears. I can swim good, ' I raised on the Mississip.

Hey, why you think they call me Fish?"

"I can swim okay. Ain't no Johnny Weissmuller."

"Who?"

"You know, that Tar--. Never mind. Yeah, I can swim."

"You can't come to de surface fast, and break it and suck in the air.

You gots to swim away underwater, come to the surface slow, be gentle
when you gits to it. Otherwise they hear you, ' they havin' too much fun
to notice usually. You swim in, real slow and quiet. Follow them to
their shore, ' otherwise you be real mixed up. You swim to the wrong
shore, I can't help you none. Got it?"

"Where do I go?"

"Swim upriver maybe quarter mile. Look for a flash. That'll be me with a
old carbide lamp. You come ashore there. You rest up couple of days,
I'll set you free with a compass. It's a straight run to the tracks
twenty-five miles out, you hops a freight and back you go. I got some
money fo' you. No dogs trackin' you, no mens with guns and trigger
fingers all twitchy-like, nothin'. They think you daid. They seen you go
into the dark river. They don't know nothing. You home free. They never
come after you. You got that life of yours back and you do wif it
whatever you want."

Earl could think of nothing to say.

"But even if we get that far, then you gots them two promises. You make
them, or I swim you back out there and chain you to that rock again."

Sam got back in a mood of near suicidal grief. So much for that
adventure. His peregrinations in Baltimore had destroyed the serenity of
a good woman and he had learned almost nothing of use. Dutifully, he
typed out a report and sent it off to Davis Trugood, along with a
careful, thorough accounting of all expenses.

He called Connie, was bucked up by her to a small degree; he went to one
of his son's baseball practices where the boy did well, and that buoyed
him even more. But it all went away late in the afternoon, and not even
a powerful bourbon could destroy the sense of a life wasted, a friend
betrayed, all control slipping away from him.

He finally made his decision. At 10:00 a.m. the next day, he would call
Colonel Jenks, the commandant of the Arkansas State Highway Patrol, and
tell him everything. It was time at last to get official convening
authorities involved in the situation, and if there were anything that
could be done, it would be done. Then he would call Junie Swagger, whom
he now avoided like a disease. He would tell her, own up to his idiotic
responsibility for all this, and tell her that he was trying to obey
Earl's mandates, but now too long had passed, and it was time to get
this thing settled.

He awoke with a sense of mission, showered, shaved, put on his suit and
tie, had breakfast with his wife and two of the boys and two of the
girls, and went downtown to his little office. He climbed the steps and
sat at the phone. He could not make himself call at 10:00 a. m." but by
10:15 he had screwed up the ambition. He reached for the phone, set it
before him, an dit rang.

He let it ring a bit, then picked it up.

"Sam Vincent."

"Sam, it's Melvin Jeffries."

Mel was the pharmacist in town. Sam had once declined to prosecute one
of his children on a fool shoplifting charge, for which Mel had been
eternally grateful. That boy, if Sam recalled correctly, was now up at
Fayetteville, doing well.

"Mel, what can I do for you?" "Well, Sam, nothing at all. I just thought
you should know a couple of fellows were here." Sam paused.

From Mississippi?

His breath dried to a little spurt.

"Which fellows?"

"G-men." "G-men?" Sam said.

"Yes, sir. They had all sorts of questions ' you."

"FBI agents?"

"I think so, Sam. At least that was the impression I had, even if they
didn't say. Men in suits, with badges, carrying guns."

"What did they want to know?"

He waited: all about your adventures in Mississippi? How you were an
escaped prisoner from Thebes County. How they think you killed a woman.

How your friend, Earl, came down there and you got him killed.

How you violated the law and' Well Sam, mainly it was your politics."

"What? My politics?"

"Yes."

"Why, I'm a Democrat like everybody else here in Arkansas. Why would
they have to know my politics? I ran for the Democratic party. I hope to
run for the Democratic party again in a year or so. I've been a Democrat
my whole life. What business is my party affiliation to the federal
government?"

"Not them kind of politics, Sam. More like, were you " or anything. You
have any strange " ideas about politics?

Were you sympathetic of unions? Did you listen to the Negro jazz music
or classical music? What magazines you buy? What books you read? What
was your sentiments about the Soviet Union? Did you ever speak favorably
about Mr. Stalin? Were you upset we went to the aid of the Koreans? Did
you speak agin' the atom bomb. Did you think it was a shame we didn't
share that secret with our Russian allies? What was your opinion of
communists in the pictures or on the radio? Seemed like they thought you
were a red, is what I gathered."

Sam realized: they were investigators from the House Un-American
Activities Committee.

"Well, what did you tell them?"

" You's a true blue American war hero and went after criminals hard as
hell and kept the order and represented the state and that you had good
judgment and character, but also a heart and a sense of discretion. You
know how highly we think of you in this house, Sam, after what you did
for Harrison."

"It's not right that they're asking these questions," Sam said.

"No, Sam, it ain't. But they're all over town this morning. I thought
you should know."

"I see. Thank you so much, Mel. How's Harrison doing, by the way?"

"He's fine, Sam. He just pledged SAE."

"Well, that's terrific."

"You have a good day, Mr. Sam." "I will," said Sam. He put down the
phone, shaken. HUAC? Now how the hell? What the hell? Was it that
somebody in Mississippi had complained?

Or was it that The phone rang again.

This time it was Mary Fine, who ran Fine's Dry Cleaning. The same story:
two government men, questions about politics, insinuations about a
radical unreliability, stern, judgmental demeanors, disappointment.

Something like that could ruin a fellow with public ambitions in a
hurry.

Then it was the barber, the newspaper editor, and finally Harley Bean,
the county Democratic chairman, who was also the mayor and the
undertaker to most of Polk County.

"Sam, what the hell is goin' on? You must be the least red fella I ever
heard tell of. Unless you consider sending Willis Beaudine up to Tucker
for diddling that nigger gal." "Some would say that's pretty red," said
Sam.

"Well, Sam, I can't tell you your business, but if you're red I'm going
to suggest we surrender to the commies, as they've already gotten too
far."

"Well, Harley, you know I'm not red."

"Well, what is this all about?"

"They haven't reached me yet. Sure as hell, that's what they're here
for."

"Well, Sam, you know I'd go to bat for you in any ball game in America.

But when the FBI--"

"Did they say they was FBI?"

"Hmmm, Sam, now as I recollect I am not certain. I did have that
impression, however. They just flashed badges and government IDs and on
they went."

"I don't think they're FBI. I think they're House investigators. That
means they're not bonded police agents, and if they're carrying
concealed weapons they are doing so in violation of the laws of
Arkansas."

"Well, Sam, nobody pays much attention to that law, anyhow. They
certainly act like FBI. I'd get to the bottom of this, I was you. You
know we have big plans to get you back in the prosecutor's office."

"Thank you, Harley."

Sam knew this was because he was a good prosecutor and a good Democrat,
though the meaning of the second was in contravention to the meaning of
the first; good Democrat meant he'd just naturally look in other
directions when certain county contracts were let. That was the system.

Sam accepted it because he knew he couldn't change it, and his
willingness not to change it meant the party would elect him
wholeheartedly, to make up for the nastiness of his loss to reformer
Febus Bookins, who mainly used the office to reform his own bank
account. Sam would never have done anything so crude; everybody knew he
didn't care about money, but only about something called the law and
something else called justice.

The worst was that night. One of his children, Tommy, eleven, came home
in tears. He had been called out of class by two mean Yankees in suits,
who'd questioned him about his father. They had scared him seriously, as
they'd meant to, and the boy was shaken over it.

"There, there, Tommy," he said to the child, cradling him tenderly,
"it's all a misunderstanding. Those men didn't mean any harm, and
they'll be going away soon. I promise." That made the boy feel better,
but not Sam, who went to bed in a purple rage and awoke the next day in
a black rage. He hit his law books for two hours, made several calls,
then sat back.

They finally arrived at the office at around eleven.

He was polite. He let them in.

"Sir, we're federal investigators, examining a case of national
security."

They showed him credentials, which he did not examine carefully. They
had badges and bulges under their coats, where shoulder holsters
concealed revolvers.

They wore suits, hats and one wore glasses. They were big men,
presumably ex-cops of some sort, from some Northern city. They were used
to having their way, their badge frightening people into compliance.

Detectives worked that way, good and bad.

"Now, what is this about, fellows?" Sam asked, being a good sport about
it all.

"Well, now, sir, we're pleased you're cooperating with us. You'd be
surprised how much hostility we run into. We've just got a few little
matters to clear up, then we'll be back on our way to Washington. These
are troubling times, you know. You'd be surprised where your enemies
turn up, and how they wheedle their ways into high places."

"I do believe you, gents. You can count on me for cooperation, yes,
sir."

"Mr. Vincent, let's see, you were--" and he summed up Sam's life pretty
succinctly.

They wanted to impress on him how much they knew about him already, what
tiny corners and cracks of his life they'd already shined their light
upon.

"Yes, sir," he said. "You've certainly been looking into me right
thoroughly, I can tell. If the FBI thinks it's that important, I'm
surely going to help out. Is this serious?"

"Well, Mr. Vincent, your name has come up in certain inquiries.

Certain possibilities have been raised, may I say. We just want to
discount them."

"Certainly. How can I assist you?"

"Well, sir, it seems you've been in Washington lately, and you've raised
questions about a top secret project in the nineteen forties in
Mississippi. It's not the sort of thing--"

"You folks from the FBI don't miss much, do you?"

"No, sir, we don't," said the other.

"Now, could you tell us why you have an interest in a highly secret
government circumstance? I mean, it's a little out of the way for an
Arkansas prosecutor." "Yes, sir," said Sam, "I will be happy to answer
that question. I don't want there to be any misunderstanding or any
doubt about my loyalty. No, sir, I'd have thought winning a Bronze Star
in the war would pretty much be it as far as proof of loyalty goes, but
I guess you boys don't care much about that."

"Sir, your military record is not at issue. We have a national security
mandate to--"

Sam lifted the newspaper off his desk.

There was a tape recorder, and it was recording.

"Would you speak a little louder, sir. I want to make sure I get this
for the trial."

Little pause.

The two men looked at each other.

"It would be better for you if you cooperate, Mr. Vincent."

"See, that's what I's just about to say to you, sir. Isn't that a laugh?

You thought you were investigating me. Here it turns out I'm
investigating you\"

"Mr. Vincent, where the hell do you think you are--"

"Impersonating a federal officer. That's two to five. First offense, the
judge'd probably let you off with a warning, except I know all the
judges, and I can guarantee you they won't."

"Look, here, Vincent, this--"

"I got you on tape acknowledging you're an FBI agent. But you aren't.

You've been calling yourself federal investigators. You aren't even
that. You're staff assistants at HUAC in D.C. You have no police powers,
no right or authority to represent yourself as such, and no right to
carry concealed firearms in this state. That's another two to five.

Again, if you have friends, it could go away. But in Polk County, see,
here's the funny thing, I'm the one with the friends."

The two looked at each other "This is not helping your case," said one.

"This is not helping your case," said Sam.

"You wouldn't dare--"

"I would dare, gents. See, I don't like you. I don't like nosy men who
come by and bully the uninformed and take advantage of the uneducated."

"We have subpoena powers, sir. We could call you as a--"

"You do not have subpoena powers. You can request a subpoena through a
congressional liaison and, if authorized, a subpoena may be issued at
the discretion of the Congress. You think it's automatic? Well, it's
not. It's a question of who's got the juice to get it done. You say you
can get me subpoenaed. I say I can get you fired and set it up so you
won't ever work again in that town, or any other."

He looked at them. They looked at him.

He smiled. "Suppose I call my good friend Harry Etheridge, of the Sixth
Congressional District? You do know Boss Harry, don't you?

Believe you do; he's chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee,
which makes him quite a big fellow in your town. Well, guess what?

He's from our town, originally, before he moved up to Fort Smith. He
even has a summer place a few miles west of here. Now suppose I call
Boss Harry and tell him two monkeys from Congressman Dies's committee
are down here stirring up trouble, alleging that Boss Harry has
communists in his own hometown. Think how embarrassing that would be for
a patriot like Boss Harry, and how he would have to set that right.

And what do you think Boss Harry would do if it turned out those same
two boys were pretending to be FBI agents and frightening honest folks
and picking on little boys in school?"

At last. A swallow. The one on the left licked his lips nervously, and
then he swallowed too.

"I'm sure if we explained--" "And I'm sure if I explained. Tell you
what, let's find out, okay?

Let's call Washington right now and see what Boss Harry says."

He picked the phone up off the hook, tapped the receiver a few times,
until Mildred came on.

"Mildred, honey, it's Sam Vincent. Can you put me through to Washington,
D. C." Boss Harry's number. No, no, not his office number, his home
number. I don't want to have to go through Claude, I'd rather go through
Betty. She'll get him on the phone in ten seconds. Yes, Davis 3080,
that's right."

The two men looked at each other.

They both knew that an adversary like Harry Etheridge could make life
difficult for them, and that their own guy, Martin Dies, didn't have
enough juice to stand.

It was simple calculation on their part. Was Sam bluffing or could he
get Boss Harry?

Clearly, the answer was not worth finding out.

"Now, see here, Mr. Vincent, there's no need to get upset. Why don't you
put that phone down and we can have a little chat. I feel we've gotten
off on the wrong foot."

Sam put the phone down.

"I'm listening," he said.

"We're not here to make any trouble. It's just been suggested to us
confidentially by someone in authority that some inquiries you made
weren't appreciated."

"What authority?"

"That is confidential."

"You tell me, goddammit, or you will spend five years in an Arkansas
state penitentiary."

"It was from a security operative at an installation called Fort
Dietrich, in Maryland."

"What?"

"Sir, I don't know what you've been into that got those people up there
so alarmed. But you have been messing where you should not have been
messing, and we were sent down here to make sure you stopped the
messing. Now we've communicated that. Sorry if we did it too roughly.

Why don't we just get on out of here, and let you go on about your
business. We've delivered the message. That's all we're here for."
"Hmmm," said Sam. "I do believe even the questions have done me some
harm."

"Well, sir, I suppose on our way out of town we could stop off at a
couple of places and explain the whole thing is a big misunderstanding.

Would that set it straight by you?"

"I suppose it might."

"Well, sir, then why don't we shake on it?"

He stood and offered his big hand.

"No, sir," said Sam. "Down here we take our etiquette seriously, and we
only pay it out to those we respect. Y'all came into this town with
blackness in your hearts, and now I'm chasing you out. You stop off on
the way and clear my name as you say, and I won't have you arrested or
have Boss Harry make a phone call to the chairman. That's all you get
from me. Now please leave. I have business."

He sat down as they passed from his office and his life.

He thought: Fort Dietrich, in Maryland. What the hell is that one all
about?

The phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Sam, why'd you hang up on me?"

"Well, uh--" It was Mildred, the operator.

"Well, anyhow, you gave me the wrong number. There ain't even a Davis
exchange in Washington, D.C. If you want Boss Harry's number, I got that
for you, Sam. You need to talk to Betty?"

"No, Mildred, I don't. Sorry."

"All right, Sam. Good-b--oh, wait, your light is flashing. Put the phone
down."

He hung it up and it rang in seconds, as Mildred made the connection.

It was Junie Swagger.

"Sam, come quick," she said. "It's about Earl."

In the gray dawn the prisoners jogged out to the levee between the
horsemen who ran them like cattle.

"You boy, you keep up, goddammit."

"Jethro, yee-haw, watch that nigger on the left!"

"Ya'll keep together, goddammit."

The snap of whips flicking supersonic ally through the air stood out
like rifle reports amid the general thunder of hooves, running men and
yelling men. Now and then came the whap of a solid shot against flesh
when some low man displeased some high one, and the sticks were used.

They reached the levee and formed up the line to get the tools out of
the old toolshed, where a trustee with a key went to open the old lock
and pay out the implements while another trustee ran the count.

"Fifty-six out, boss," came a cry.

"Fifty-six," Section Boss cried in reply, "you mark it good. Fifty five
black niggers and one white nigger!"

Earl stood in the line and Section Boss rode up to him, his horse
veering ever so close to make Earl draw back. But Earl knew the horseman
wasn't going to come too close; he was scared of Earl.

Then Earl looked up.

"Section Boss, got to talk to you."

"Well, damn, boy, don't that beat it all."

"Please, Section Boss."

Section Boss backed up, steadied his horse, and climbed off.

Immediately a couple of other riders came up to cover him, their sticks
and whips at the ready, their freshly greased Winchester .351s close by
in their saddle scabbards.

Earl approached humbly.

"Speak, boy."

"Sir, I can't take it no more. When Moon gets back, he going to do sum
ping awful to me, and it preys heavy on my mind. All these other men
gonna laugh about it. Then he going kill me. I can't die in no prison
for colored. Please, sir, you tell Guard Sergeant Bigboy I am a broken
man at last."

"You see the error of your ways?"

"I do, boss. Surely I do. I will come clean, yes sir, and we can git
this all straightened out. I can't take no more of this shit. I won't
last another night."

"You punkin' out after all? And you'd be such a hero! You'd be such a
tough boy!"

"Ain't no kind of tough, boss. Ain't no kind of hero. Ain't nothing but
a man."

"You git back down in that hole!"

"Boss, I--"

"You git back down in that goddamn hole, boy, like I say, or I'll please
myself to give you another thumping. I may tell Bigboy, I may not. I's
looking forward to tonight. What I hear, Moon got some real plans for
you. Moon gonna have fun tonight. Maybe we'll just let him and take you
in tomorrow."

"Oh, boss, please don't do that."

"Git in that hole, boy, while I think this over."

Earl got back in the line, where his conversation with Section Boss had
been noted.

"You finally goin' over to the man, buckra?"

"He done slept wif niggers enuff. Yes suh, the white boy goin' on back."

"Moon still gonna hunt his ass down and do it up fine. If I know Moon,
that's what's goin' to happen right swell."

So Earl had another morning in the hole, and at 10:00, when Fish showed
up, he worked Earl over plenty hard, as he did all the time, mainly
along male rape lines and the power of Moon and his boys against the
weakness of the lone white man. He worked him over so hard Earl wondered
if it were a dream or not, the whole fantasy of escape. Maybe it was
something his crazed brain had heated up for him as a way of retreating
from the reality of the place.

But though Fish mocked him blasphemously, to the amusement of both his
white and his black audience, as Earl reached for the cup, the old man
grabbed his hand to check for the pin with a quick probe of his fingers,
found it, and threw a wink at Earl. That gave Earl some sustenance.

It was finally about four o'clock. The sun had pulled down in the sky
and swelled up red, like some big fruit corpulent with its own
close-to-rotted ripeness. It threw a golden glow across the land, and
the wind had stilled. They saw it coming, all of them.

It was the new black Hudson Hornet that had carted out Bigboy in the
first place. This was so unusual that all work stopped, and even the
guards reined in their horses to watch the approach of the vehicle.

It was here under the guise of the distraction that a powerful presence
pressed against Earl; he looked to see a large man whom he had noted but
who never spoke. Up close, the man's face revealed its mutilation, a
crust of scar tissue lighter against his jet blackness, though all was
touched golden by the sun. The man's eye, in that sea of frozen pain
that was his ruined flesh, was askew and wandered its own dumb, blind
way. This had to be Tangle Eye.

He nodded briskly to Earl, who made as if he'd slipped, went briefly to
his knees and pulled the wrist chain taut across a trunk.

The blow was swift and perfect, and in the same second that it was
delivered, Tangle Eye pulled away and headed back to his detail.

Earl saw that he'd not hit the link closest to the ring on the cuff, but
the ring itself, the one point where the ancient steel was thinnest.

Earl hadn't even felt the shudder or the sting of vibration, so
perfectly placed was the blow and so completely sheared was the ring.

Earl grabbed the now freed chain with his free hand and pulled it close.

He was no longer tethered.

The car pulled up, and someone dashed out to open the rear door. His
royal hugeness, Bigboy, sunglasses and drill instructor hat in place,
perfect tie putting a point to his immensity, stepped daintily out,
sniffed at the brackish air, then looked about until his eyes rested at
last upon Earl.

"You, Bogart. You, up out of the hole."

"Yes, sir," cried Earl, "I am coming."

He got halfway and he turned.

"Ain't going to be with you no ' trash no more, you bet!" he screamed.

"I'm goin' back to the white world, thank you, Jesus."

The men regarded him furiously, as he climbed the rest of the way out,
reached the levee, and with a shuffle and a shit-eating grin minced
toward the big man.

"Take me from these low men, sir, for they are beasts of the field, and
I am white."

Someone grabbed him roughly and brought him stumbling to Big boy.

"So you want to talk, eh, Bogart. Finally seen the light, have you?

You have been a stubborn cuss."

"My ', sir, but being among the colored is enough to set any white man
straight."

The guards let him stand free.

"And one more thing, Mr. Guard Sergeant. You're a tub of white trash
monkey shit."

Bigboy's mouth fell open in astonishment, and Earl stepped back as his
two companions moved in on him. They grabbed; he ducked and slipped,
then banged the first one hard with a double jab to the jaw, feeling
that bone shatter on the second hard blow.

The other man round housed him, and Earl dropped under the arc of the
clumsy punch and nailed this one right in the heart. It took the fight
out of him, and he went low fast, his face whiter than terror, his eyes
big as fried eggs.

"No guns," Bigboy screamed, for guns were coming out all along the line.

"You, Bigboy, let's see how much tough you got in you," Earl yelled,
drawing near.

"You're about to find out, partner. I have this dance saved up special
for you," said the man, who had not a lick of fear anywhere in him and
suddenly welcomed the assault as an amusement of great potential.

Somewhere the dogs started growling, their throats filling with sound as
the excitement of battle violence filled their dog veins and brains.

Bigboy tossed aside his hat, pulled his big Colt handgun and tossed it.

East to come off were his sunglasses, which he neatly folded before
tossing to another guard.

"I can rack him, boss," screamed Section Boss, who'd heaved near atop
his mighty horse and unlimbered the Thompson gun from his saddle horn

"No, sir," said Bigboy, his fists circling with a pugilist's grace as he
moved with surprising agility left, then right, dancing like a well
schooled heavy. "This here boy's been aching for a boxing lesson, and
I'm going to give him one. You think us albinos are weak and red eyed.

Ho, boy, you goin' learn the truth."

Earl shot a left, which Bigboy flicked away, but in the next instant
Earl drove a hard right into the big man's gut and met nothing but an
impenetrable wall of muscle, skinning up his knuckles but doing the big
fellow no apparent harm.

"My old man hit harder than that," he said, smiling.

Mine didn't, Earl thought, a little surprised at what a cool athlete
this big monster was turning out to be.

Bigboy fired off a right that hit Earl above the eye. It was a fast,
hard punch, an expert's punch, the punch of a man who'd worked both
light and heavy bags for years. The big fellow had fast hands, too, but
Earl shook it off, trying to show no pain, even if half-a-second's worth
of bright lights skyrocketed off behind his eyes.

Earl circled on his toes, and so did the big man. Two jabs were thrown
by each, and caught by each high on the arm, for bruises that would
emerge in two days but not now. Then Earl fired a good shot off that
struck the big man in the nose, crunching it. Blood gushed, but Bigboy
merely dropped back a step, spat disdainfully into the ground, a goober
of red-shot mucus, then set himself again and moved into the attack.

He was a body puncher. He was so slathered in muscle and so anesthetized
by fury no blows could stop him. He absorbed pain on his arms, kept his
head hunched behind his big fists, then worked in close, unleashed a
flurry of sharp jabs that flew to Earl's ribs and lit off hell. Earl
fell back, his backward motion somewhat defusing the punches, then
slipped the one blow thrown from the outside (meant to crescendo the
flurry) and countered with a good hammer to the jaw. It would have KO'd
a lesser man and rocked a greater man, but like the nose-buster, it
merely made the Bigboy blink and spit, take a step back, then set
himself and move in.

He would take pain to give pain. That was his strategy. It was crude but
based on conviction: he knew he could dish out more than any man could
give. He would emerge from his fights bruised and bloodied, but always
the winner, on that principle alone.

Earl had a sudden fear: he would lose. The guy was a polished
professional-level fighter, who could take a punch, who expected pain,
who had the stamina of a platoon, and whose will to conquest was
unquenchable. Plus he had good health and nourishment, six inches in
height and six in reach, forty or fifty pounds in weight, and lots of
gym workouts going for him. And pleasure. This was fun for him. He was
loving this, loving the drama, the power, the savagery of it, as he must
have hated the delicacy of the Earl problem and now could deal with it
without frustration.

Earl took a couple of shots to the arm, ducked and moved in to pummel
the gut, and took a glancing blow to the temple, which nevertheless
opened a gash that soon issued copious amounts of red blood.

"No cut men in this ring, Bogart," sang the happy warrior. "No corner
men, no bell, son, just you, me, until you drop, and son, that's coming
up real soon now." He smiled and closed, threw two hard rights, the last
of which glanced off Earl's blocking arm and reached his ribs for a
stinging shot that brought tears to Earl's eyes.

"Oh, felt that one, did you? More coming, convict."

He threw a punch that Earl countered, but Earl's return blow was
somewhat blurred by the fatigue that now corrupted his body, and didn't
land square enough to do any damage.

The big man dropped back, reached up and undid his tie and tossed it
away, while he sucked oxygen.

Earl, in this moment of respite, realized that the drama was so intense
that both audiences, black and white, had formed an auditorium around
it. No one spoke, but they watched in utterly raptu red fascination.

The big man ripped off his shirt, revealing an undershirt sopped in
sweat that constrained muscles of unusual density and precision. He had
a statue like quality to him, marble wrapped in wet cotton. He wasn't
fat at all, just big and solid as Wall Street.

The big man went back to his toes and came at Earl.

"We're going to finish it right soon, nigger," he said. Earl went into
his crouch, bobbed and weaved, dashed this way and that, as the big one
sought to close. Earl now saw what he must do. Tire the man, wait for a
guard to drop out of fatigue, then hit him hard and fast and dash back
out of range. This was no ring, so there was plenty of room to move.

But in that same instant, Bigboy backed up, dropped his arms and yelled
to his boys, "Get those dogs behind him. He's running too much. This
ain't about running, it's about hitting."

Earl sensed that ordered activity un spooling 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
tommy gun 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 ' 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

"I'll 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.