The Clearing (30 page)

The big man stepped back. “What you want?”

“You know what I want. Where is he?”

The man’s bovine jaw clenched. “The door on the right.”

The bouncer walked him over and opened a six-panel door, stuck his head in for a moment, said something in Italian, then motioned for the lawman to move into the room.

When Buzetti saw who it was, he seemed annoyed, leaned back in his chair, and spat in the trash can. “I’m busy. What you want?”

Merville drew his pistol, cocked it and pointed it at Buzetti’s head, then held out his trembly left hand. “Let me have your knife.”

Buzetti became very still. “I got a pistol in my coat.”

“I don’t give a shit about a pistol.”

Slowly, Buzetti drew a long thin jackknife from the region of his right ankle and handed it over. “What?”

“I’ll tell you what in a minute.” He sprung the blade and held it up under the lamp on the desk. The knife was clean. The old man put it to his nose and sniffed. Grabbing it by the blade, he banged it on the desk and put his finger on a spray of water beading against the wood. “You washed it.”

Buzetti spread his arms. “What’s all this bullshit about?”

“Ada Bergeron.” He watched Buzetti’s face.

“What about her?”

“Somebody just cut her throat.”

Buzetti cocked his head. “I’m sorry. Hey, it’s a bad business, look what she does for a living. When you got a different boyfriend every night, you run the risk, you know?”

“I ought to do it right now.” The Colt was shaking, but it was still close to the slick face.

Buzetti’s smile slid back over a rack of yellow teeth. “You ain’t got no evidence, and you ain’t got no balls. And you know that if you shoot me your own sheriff will put you in the can.” He stood up, crossed his arms, and bounced, once, on the balls of his feet. “But the real reason is you just a dumb fuck coonass.”

Merville winced, uncocked the revolver, and, after two tries, put it in its holster under the slicker. He moved his face close to Buzetti’s. “Who shaved you after the zoo let you out the cage?”

“What? Ey, what’s that mean?” Buzetti took a step back.

Merville looked at him, his eyes the gray of old bullets. “What’s the matter, Ada didn’t like your cousin? Maybe she wouldn’t mate out of her own kind?” He turned for the door.

Buzetti bowed his back and gestured wildly. “Hey, hey. You live past your time, eh? What, you don’t care no more? Listen to me, I can teach you to care about something.”

Merville put his hand on the doorknob. “You can’t teach a cat to kiss his own ass.”

Buzetti brought down his eyebrows. “What can keep you safe?” he asked, in a low, seething voice.

The old man leaned back and mocked him with a wide smile, his upper plate clacking down.

The marshal picked his way across the railroad tracks and through the cloudy puddles of River Street where the wind blew like bad breath over oyster shells piled in the ruts. At his office he retrieved the bag of weapons and began to walk home under crepe myrtles careening in the squalling wind, pattering their stored rain onto the rotten slicker. At his wooden house he walked into the bedroom, upended the bag on the floor, and pitched the weapons one by one behind the high armoire jammed across a corner. He looked briefly at a straight razor before he pitched it, thinking of the inches of man-meat that would go uncut by it, the rolling in the mud and the squalling out in the moonlight for Jesus and Momma that would not issue from the blade. He hefted a set of spiked brass knuckles, then tossed it up and over, listening to it crash down onto years of other weapons. This disposal was what he enjoyed most. It took away from all evil that he had done and felt.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In the late afternoon Randolph was on his front porch watch-ing the child as he pointed at the locomotive, which was coupling up cars of kiln-dried one-by-twelves. Walter’s wet mouth formed an O and out of it came the train’s whistle.

The mill manager leaned over him from the rocker. “How does the engine go, Walt?”

The boy bobbed his head. “Choo-choo-choo, den na whistle.”

“That’s right.” Together they watched the locomotive slam the cars around, coughing cinders and geysers of steam. Walter sat down and played with his own wooden train, a present Byron had brought from town. Randolph saw his wife come out of the school building across the way, shade her eyes and look over at them, then turn back inside. The knock-off whistle had just sounded and the workers were streaming to their streets, or the barracks, or the gaunt saloon. He watched a black man come out of the road that led from the Negro quarters; the worker took his hat off and stopped a foreman, who listened for a moment, then pointed toward the mill manager’s house. He replaced his hat, and when he got close enough, Randolph could see it was Clarence Williams, his scar draining sweat like a switchback road.

“How you?” he asked the child, who looked up at him and was silent.

“Are you doing all right?” the mill manager asked.

He came right up to the porch and stood in a puddle down below the rail. “Mr. Aldridge, they’s some talk down in the quarters.”

“What kind of talk?”

“That nigger what live by me went with that ho woman back the saloon.” Here the man turned away and pretended to study the school building. “He heard she say the debt ain’t paid.”

“What debt?”

“She say, Mr. Buzetti say one housemaid ain’t worth no Sicilian gennelmen. Mr. Aldridge, I wish I knew more what she say.”

Randolph put both hands on the rail and looked left toward a stand of cypress, and then above the trees where a mockingbird was chasing a crow. He did not look at Clarence Williams. “Was she drunk?”

“Ho’s always drunk,” he said. “Ain’t nobody drink more and cry more than a ho. Last time I went with one she like to bit my nose in two. I got the blood poison and laid in bed with a fever, breathing through my mouth for two weeks.” He looked at the baby, then away. “Most times a ho tell the truth. They just too bad to lie.”

“That’s all you heard?”

“I wish I ain’t heard what I did.”

The mill manager looked at the sweat-loaded hat wilting down around Clarence’s face and smelled the day’s labor on him. “You get any more information, you let me know.”

“I hear that,” he said, sidestepping back into the lane and starting toward the dark side of the mill.

Before daylight, Lillian heard the chirp of the three-inch Buckeye whistle mounted over the boiler house, the signal for the firemen to roll out of bed and come raise a roaring head of steam before breakfast. She got out of bed and lit a lamp in the kitchen and then fired the stove, heating a kettle for coffee. The yard began to take on the color of a tarnished nickel, and she walked to the screen door to check for a hint of what the weather might be, reaching for the latch, mildly surprised when she found it already undone. She stepped onto the back landing and looked suspiciously at a cottony striation of mist lying like a doily over the wet yard. Turning around, her sharp eye noted that the screen had been carefully cut alongside the latch and then pushed back into shape. Only a bright scratch where the blade had pushed through had caught her attention. She stood in the kitchen and narrowed her eyes, thinking and looking.

Randolph was dreaming that he was playing piano, a ragtime number on the ornate upright at home. He was running arpeggios and trills with no trouble, bouncing the left hand off the right, playing for his own amazement, exhilarated and about to open his mouth to sing when suddenly he felt hands on his shoulders shaking him out of rhythm, the notes falling apart under his fingers, replaced by his wife’s muted, splintered voice. He woke and turned his head off the edge of the bed; she was standing back, her hands clapped to her temples, her eyes alight with fear.

“What?” He blinked like a swimmer coming back up into harsh sunlight.

“Walter.” The word trembled into the air.

He rolled out and lumbered toward the rear of the house and into the boy’s room, looked into the baby bed, and found nothing out of the ordinary, though he was still blurry-eyed and tangled up in his dream. The child was asleep on his back among three wooden blocks, a dark cloth wiener dog Ella had sewn for him, and his green blanket. Randolph started to rub his face, and when he raised his hand something dull moved in the bed, and at that instant he saw the fractured amber of the slotted eye and stepped back. All his senses were shocked awake, and he could hear Lillian breathing in the door frame behind him. “Do you want my pistol?” she whispered.

The spade head was over Walter’s foot, its fiery vein of tongue tasting the air. Randolph shook his head slowly. The vast inventory of employees began to reel through his mind and he hoped somewhere would be a name he could summon to reach into the crib and pluck the snake, which was pooling now under his eyes, responding to the boy’s motion as he drew the back of a hand across his nose. He recalled grown men puffed out with poison and knocked down for weeks by the venom, the one little bucker who died last year, at least three loggers who had gone out of their heads. Randolph opened his hand and guessed how to grab the snake, and when he extended his arm slowly he heard his wife walk to the front of the house and open the door. Her bare feet slapped the ground as she ran off toward Byron’s, he guessed. Walter formed a half syllable, yawned widely; the snake picked up its head and cocked its neck like a question mark. Randolph guessed his thumb and forefinger should noose the head and clasp the jaws shut. It was all a matter of math, of quickness, of figuring what to do, how to master the logic of it, and as his hand pulsed with blood and quickness, he knew he could do it—but in that instant of knowing, the baby kicked, there was a flash of white mouth, and Randolph was electrified by the sight of the reptile pinned to the small foot and by the cry that came at once. His hand shot down on the scaly muscle and it opened to bite him, but he pulled it by the tail high above the bed. Not a large snake, two feet long at most, it was an angry one, and he slung it to the floor where it writhed after his bare feet as he danced backwards into the kitchen. It was then that Byron charged into the room and with the heel of his boot made a red smear of the snake’s head.

Randolph seized his arm, stepping over the sidewinding body. “Walt’s been bitten.” His brother picked up the squalling child and looked at the marks on his heel, putting him down at once and pulling his old pocketknife, opening the little blade, the one he kept like a razor. Randolph remembered the knife, how it had cut twine for their kites when they were children. His brother bolted into the kitchen, cut the cord from the blinds, flipped open a stove lid with the key, and held the blade in a yellow flame. Running to the crib, he tied off Walter’s leg below the knee and then bore down with the knife. The child shrieked as Byron incised two X’s across each fang hole and then sucked the wound, spitting onto the floor, sucking again as if to drain the leg dry, the child looking up at him, the nightmare, the loving man giving pain, and Byron closed his eyes to shut out that look.

Finally, he asked for whiskey, and to his brother’s surprise he didn’t pour it on the wound but took a big mouthful and bolted for the back door, where he spat it on the planks like an atomizer.

The doctor, hatless and wearing unlaced brogans splattering water, burst into the room and bent over to peer at Walter’s foot, which was already swelling and turning inward. “It been sucked?”

“Yes.”

“Your brother did it?” When Randolph nodded, the doctor went through the kitchen to the back porch, where he found Byron gargling and spitting. “You swallow any? You have any sores in your mouth?”

“No more than a match head went down.”

“You drain that whole bottle and then stick your finger down your throat,” the doctor told him. “You’ve got to throw breakfast.”

The old man came back inside and told Lillian to hold Walter in her lap and keep the foot low. He knelt down, applied salve to the wounds and then squeezed on two red rubber suction cups, wincing at the boy’s screams. “We’ve got to get after that damn poison for thirty minutes, at least. Sometimes that stuff stays up in you like glue.” He loosened the tourniquet for a moment, then twisted it tight. Taking the foot and turning it toward the hanging light, he watched a deepening lavender rise from the marks. No one said anything as the rhythm of the baby’s crying changed, propelled by shallow breaths. “Ah, Lordy,” the doctor said.

“What is it?” Randolph leaned over his shoulder.

“Nothing.” He looked down at the snake, its head pasted to a floorboard. “A damned cottonmouth.”

From out in the yard came the sound of Byron’s retching. By noon the baby was pale, one leg twice the size of the other. Byron, weak and nauseated, was sprawled on a sofa in Lillian’s sitting room at the front of the house. When Jules came by for instructions, Randolph pushed him out onto the front porch, his hand clamping his arm. “I don’t care how the six-by-sixes get shipped today, do you understand me? You can shoot them out of a canon. Just ship them, but first I want you to find out if a stranger’s been in camp before daybreak.”

Jules looked away. “You think that snake was put where it was?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s a sorry business, but I heard it’s been done before.” He looked at the mill manager carefully. “You better have Lillian make you some coffee.”