I spit on your graves (15 page)

And then he felt as though the Buick

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was speeding up because he was getting closer to the bike, but he suddenly realized that the cops were slowing up. His lips formed a peculiar smile as he slowly decreased the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal. There was now no more than fifty feet between the two vehicles, forty, thirty... Lee suddenly pressed down hard again. He saw Barrows face just beside him and jerked violently under the blow of the bullet which hit his right shoulder. He passed the motorcycle grinding his teeth together so as not to let go the wheel. Once ahead of them he was out of the soup.

The road suddenly took a sharp curve, and then straightened out again. Carter and Barrow were still hot on his heel. In spite of the car springs, he felt every little bump in his injured arms. He looked into the rear-view mirror. Nothing had come around the curve yet besides the two men on the bike, and he then saw Carter slow down and stop on the shoulder to let Barrow turn around and get back on again since they weren't going to chance passing him by.

The road came to a fork a couple of hundred feet up. Lee noticed some sort of building to the right. Without letting up on the gas, he turned into the plowed-up field bordered by the dirt road to the right. The

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Buick bounced way off the ground and almost twisted over, but righted itself again to the groaning complaint of all the car parts, and came to a halt before a barn. He got to the door. Both his arms were hurting like the devil. He felt the blood begin surging through his numb left arm again—it was still tied to his chest—and it forced moans of pain through his lips. He ran towards a wooden ladder that led up to the grain shed and he flung himself on its rungs. He almost lost his balance but regained it with a grotesquely contorted movement of his body and he took the fat, rough, wooden rungs between his teeth. He stopped halfway up, panting heavily, and a silver cut his lip. He felt how hard he was clenching his teeth together when he againjelt in his mouth the salty taste of warm blood, as warm as he'd drunk from Lou's body, between her thighs smelling of a Paris perfume that was intended for a woman much older than her. He again saw Lou's twisted mouth and the skirt of her suit smeared with blood and again there were bright flashes before this eyes.

Slowly, painfully, he struggled up several more rungs as the scream of the sirens came closer. Lou's screams mixed in with the noise of the sirens, and the whole scene flashed vividly in his brain, he began to kill Lou all

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over again, and the same sensation, the same surge of pleasure shook him again as he reached the flooring of the grain-shed. The noise had died down outside the barn. Inch by inch, he pulled himself up to the little window. He couldn't use his right arm at all now because the slightest movement brought it excruciating pain.

Before him, as far as he could see, the yellow fields stretched out monotonously. The sun was going down, and a slight breeze was waving the grass along the edge of the road. The blood ran down his right sleeve and his body. He was slowly exhausting his last bit of strength, and he began to tremble with fear again.

The cops had completely surrounded the barn by now. He heard them call to him, and he opened his mouth wide, but soundlessly. He was thirsty and he was sweaty and he wanted to shout defiance and insults at them, but his throat was too parched. He watched his blood make a little puddle near him and finally run over and soak into his knee. He trembled like a leaf in the wind, and his teeth chattered, and when he heard steps on the ladder he began to bawl, a low moan at first which grew and swelled into a mad bellow; he tried to get the revolver out of his pocket, and

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finally got it at the cost of almost unbearable pain. He flattened his body against the wall, as far away as possible from the opening in the floor the cops would climb through. He held the gun in his hand, but he couldn't shoot.

The noise had stopped completely now. He stopped bellowing and his head fell back on his chest. He heard some vague sounds. Some time passed, and then several bullets struck him in the hip.

His body relaxed and slowly flowed to the floor. A thread of saliva stretched from his mouth to the coarse boards of the barn floor. The rope with which he'd slung up his left arm had left deep glue cuts in his flesh.

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XXIV

The townspeople hanged him anyway because he was a nigger. Under his trousers, his crotch still protruded ridiculously.

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