All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (33 page)

The dog lifted his head in a nervous way, a tremor running through the gaunt and frowzy body.

Early Boy glanced reluctantly over one shoulder. Clouds were on the run across the dark bayou, blinding the moon.

"It's nothing," he said. "The moon. But it's gone under now." Yet he felt a prickle of unholy excitement at the nape of his neck. The dog gasped and whined. The tops of the big trees in the bayou, at the edge of the settlement, had begun to roll toward them like ocean combers.

Old Lamb started up from the chair, then fell back in frail defeat, his face wrinkled and as solemnly glazed as a newborn child's.

"Tell me!" Early Boy said harshly.

The word was faint, and frustrating. "
Baka
."

"What the hell does that mean?"

Old Lamb's heavy-lidded eye opened like a sunrise. His mouth was open too; his breath rushed in and out.

"Protection. Strong magic. Ai-da Wédo must respect—the power of your sacrifice."

Grit stung Early Boy's cheek; he threw up his hands. A few feet away, in the dirt dooryard, a dust devil had appeared. As it moved closer, soundlessly, the air was filled with the rush of flowers lifted from the porch steps, whirled, then flung with such velocity they had the impact, on bare skin, of tiny mad fists. Carmine petals clung to Old Lamb's starved face, they flocked to the screen door and stuck there. The dog had disappeared from the porch. There was a sweetness in the air, garish, like the cheapest kind of nigger perfume.

Early Boy got to his feet, stiff with alarm. Old Lamb gripped the rocker arms and rocked for dear life, but his feet weren't touching the floor. His head jerked up and down with the violence of the rocking. In the botanically sweetened air of chaos, the porch roof shook and rattled and revealed sharp edges in an upsucking wind.

"The Ai-da Wédo!" he screamed. "She scald yore skin, she poison you. Get away, Beau, get away!"

Behind the screen door a child had appeared in her nightgown, a girl about ten years old, her head shapely as a kidney bean, clipped to a summery quarter-inch of fuzz. Her eyes, a glowing, liquid bronze-green in the changing light, were open, but she looked fast asleep. Her hands jittered, pawed nervously at the flower-matted screen; air pressure kept it closed against her. She opened her gap-toothed mouth as if to howl or cry. Instead Early Boy heard from her the bony, chilling sizzle of a calabash, or a canebrake rattlesnake.

Enlarging on this dreamwork, other women of the house slowly appeared behind her. They looked dumbstruck, mute but charged with apprehension, like the chorus of an antique passion play. As the women gathered, the little girl pressed more urgently at the screen, throwing her slim body against it. The rattling sounds from her throat grew louder.

Flowers flew at Early Boy's head and brought tears to his eyes. The fragrant air had a bitter aftertaste and burned his throat like quicklime. His skin had begun to smart and sting as the night turned sickly from fluorescence. His jaw sagged under pressure and he felt spiked, through his gut, to the pillar of the porch, unable to free himself. His eardrums ached until he clamped his jaw shut; there was no sound of wind, just windless pressure upward and outward. He felt squeezed and contorted as the roof sheared and flew away. The house groaned from strain, and big trees leaned frighteningly near, attracted to the vortex. It seemed they must come unrooted, and smash the house to kindling.

As he fought to breathe, to think, Early Boy heard feminine laughter. Old Lamb had stopped rocking. He had pulled off his nightshirt and was sitting slack, emaciated but unexpectedly prominent in the groin, sticking up almost afoot. What looked like a limb of a tree had come loose and smacked against the front of the house. When it fell to the porch Early Boy saw that it wasn't part of a tree at all, but a big blacksnake. The snake lay stunned, or dead. While he struggled to free himself, another snake came hurtling and wrapped itself around his upraised arm. He flung it away in revulsion. More laughter. Then the perfumed air was filled with twisted snakes and puffs of rioting flowers.

Early Boy had lived a hazardous life and survived pain as bad as a man can know; nothing in his life had ever made him scream. But he screamed now, helpless and tormented.

Suddenly the pressure slackened, the whirling air was momentarily still. The screen door opened and the little girl ran out. With a squall of delight she mounted her grandfather, pulling up her nightgown, exposing her immature pubes. She tried earnestly to impale herself on his erection.

Early Boy, his eyes streaming, reached her in a bound and snatched her away. He knew there was a deep cistern on a slab at the rear corner of the house. He stumbled toward it, half-blinded, the girl clamped under one arm. Now dark was light and light was dark, like a photographic negative. He was scalding to death, as Old Lamb had promised. The air was unbreathable, thin sweet fire in the lungs. But he couldn't resist a backward look, prompted by the taunting laughter of the Ai-da Wédo, temptress and eternal serpent.

He looked quickly, and away, an image of the eyes of the basilisk burned forever on his brain. He fell against the cistern, reached up, pushed the cover off and dropped the Negro girl into the rainwater. As Old Lamb shrieked, Early Boy followed her, plunging headfirst into the cistern. Early Boy was aware of an intense flash of green light. He lay low in dark, clean water with the struggling girl, a hand over her nose and mouth. He half expected a concussion that would rock the cistern on its foundation, split the tarred boards and spill them, along with a cubic yard of water, to the ground.

It didn't happen. When the girl became frantic in her efforts to breathe, he let her pop to the surface. She gasped for air and began to cry, clinging with both hands to the lip of the cistern.

Early Boy was surprised to see that Old Lamb's house was still standing. The little girl's racking sobs were answered by whimpers of terror from inside the house. A woman groaned. "Oh, Lordy, my eyes on fire! Help me, please!"

The night was comfortably dark again, starry, windless and humid, the air fit to breathe. Not a trace of viridescence, or the cloying perfume. Chickens, awakened by the flash of artificial dawn, squawked and fretted. Every dog in the neighborhood was yowling, announcing death. A snake, possibly a cottonmouth, stirred on the littered ground and slithered away. Early Boy's blood ran cold, but there was no sign of the Ai-da Wédo.

He heaved himself from the cistern, pulled the girl out and stood quaking with an arm around her, for the moment unable to take a step. He looked around at the scattered, withered flowers, the twisted sheets of metal from the porch roof. It had been a pocket-size tornado, silent but devastating. The broad leaves of the oaks facing the house looked bedraggled and dead, as if hit by a killing frost. So did the tomato plants staked along the south wall of the house.

Old Lamb had disappeared from the porch, but the rocker moved almost surreptitiously. Up and down the street, lights had appeared in other houses. Men were coming, possibly with guns, and he was in danger. He released the girl, who sank trembling to the ground and refused to budge when he urged her to go into the house with the women. His skin still smarted, but bearably, as if he were suffering from a mild sunburn. He turned, dripping wet, and stumbled away, trying to run.

Near the hen house he came across the body of Old Lamb.

At first, because he still couldn't see very well, he didn't know what it was. Grotesquely elongated and flattened by stress, it was spread against and deeply embedded in a framed section of sagging chicken wire. It looked like an effigy made of wet black mud and bits of mica and shiny, splintered sticks. But the sticks were bone and the wetness was blood dripping down into the chicken yard. In a beam of light from an adjacent back porch he saw the distorted face of Old Lamb, and the shocking hole in the body where the genitals had been joined.

A dog was loosed and it came after him, making little whuffing sounds of effort. It was one of the lean, savage killers of the neighborhood and not to be fooled with. He wrenched a narrow fence pole from the ground, turned and met the charging dog with the pointed end. The impact, as the point drove deep into the animal's throat, jarred him against the body on the chicken wire. He left the skewered and kicking dog on the ground and ran, a manic hop-skip-jump because of one stiff leg. A shot was fired, then another. Unworried, Early Boy changed direction, leapt a ditch, entered the bayou, grinning boldly in the dark, leaving pandemonium behind him.

I
t was five minutes after three in the morning when Nhora awakened Jackson. She was wearing a peignoir. She seemed dazed with sleep herself; there was a blue, taut, inconsolable look about her.

"Excuse me for coming in; your light was on and the door was open."

Jackson got up quickly. "What's wrong? Is it Champ?"

Nhora shook her head. "No, I just looked at him on the way down. He's sleeping. But there's been a tragedy, a fire or something down on Little Fox Bayou. They need a doctor there badly. Would you go?"

Jackson pulled on his shoes. "How far is it?"

"Three miles. I'll drive you. Give me a minute to change."

She turned and almost ran from the room, agile for such a tall woman. There was something blissfully erotic in her flight, creating a field of energy in which he was momentarily trapped, feeling both charmed and cheated. The lively fullness of her breasts in silk, a shadow cleft or two, explicit inner curves—the peignoir covered her from neck to ankles, but it was not a modest garment. He popped a shoestring under tension and swore to himself, then made the repair with shaking hands.

They rode in the coupé, which still smelled of the perfume which Early Boy Hodges had dumped inside. As if to mask the odor, Nhora smoked cheap, strong cigarettes, Spuds, one of the wartime brands. Jackson thought about the saber that he'd placed in the trunk, wondering if it was still there. Perhaps she'd finally rid herself, and the unlucky family, of this weapon. But he didn't ask. Her eyes were narrow, rimmed in mourning blue, her lips bloodless; the anxiety with which she had awakened seemed not to have left her.

In Little Fox Bayou two of the county's cars had been parked so that the angled headlight beams partially lit up a small house near the south end of the single street. Nhora drove cautiously past groups of Negroes along the road. Everyone was outside but keeping their distance.

"My God," Nhora said. "Old Lamb lives there."

Sheriff Lydell G. Gaines and several middle-aged deputies were checking, with flashlights, the ground outside the house. They were all armed with rifles or revolvers.

Gaines came over as soon as Nhora stopped. He was a small, old, crew-cut man with a wiry salt-and-pepper mustache and eyes that bulged coldly behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He wore khakis and a soiled gray Stetson, a revolver under his left arm instead of on his hip. He was not a man who fussed with words. He used as few as possible.

"Mornin', Miz Bradwin." To Jackson he said, "Gaines. You're?"

"Jackson Holley. What's happened here?"

Gaines tugged at his Stetson, looked up and down the street. Next door a rope creaked as a small boy, nearly invisible in the dark, rode a swinging iron hoop suspended from a tree limb. Jackson heard sounds of
women
weeping, then the crack of a pistol that no one seemed to take much notice of; but Nhora flinched as she came up beside him.

"Dynamite," Gaines said. "Maybe. Big flash. Porch roof blew off. Screen door off the hinges. Front and back. Blew him in one door, out the other."

"Old Lamb?" Nhora said unbelievingly. "
Why?
"

Gaines shrugged. "Klan." He looked at Jackson. "Doctor? Two, three hurt bad inside."

Jackson started toward the house with his medical bag. In the glare of headlights he saw withered grass, blighted shrubs and dead leaves on an oak tree. The porch roof was gone, all right, and the screen door was caved in, but a rocking chair had survived intact and untouched. Dried or dead flowers and leaves littered the porch.

A gun flashed in the dark off to his left and he froze, Nhora bumping into him.

"Snakes," the sheriff called to then. "Big'uns. Place is crawling. Watch your step."

Nhora sucked in a breath and went more slowly, but the dooryard was nearly bare, no hiding places for reptiles. "I can't believe the Klan would murder Old Lamb, he never made any trouble—" She turned, realizing he wasn't with her. "Jackson? Jackson!" She came back, staring uneasily at him.

"Sorry," he said between clenched teeth. He had closed his eyes. His heart loped but the rest of his body was go-big numb. A pall had spread across his rational mind.

'What
is
it?"

"Phobia."

"Oh, God, really? Snakes? How bad?"

"Very bad. I—lock up. Sometimes I—I can't help myself, I start screaming until I black out."

"Fight it," Nhora urged quietly, taking hold of his arm.

"I'm trying." But he was cold and his tongue had thickened as he imagined what might be crawling across the ground toward them.

"Walk with me. To the house. You'll be safe inside. You believe that, don't you? Think about something else,
anything
. People are hurt, maybe dying. You're needed."