The Clearing (36 page)

He ran over to his brother, who was sitting up in the clamshells looking at his shattered left elbow, crying out “Aw, no” while trying to move his left hand. Randolph saw the lower arm dangle and pour, that the elbow was simply missing. Byron’s rifle was at his feet, unfired.

“Hold on, By. Just be still,” he said, going to his knees beside him. Clovis Hutchins came over and held the arm together, but just then Byron slumped over, unconscious. Randolph looked up and saw the fireman’s boots in the gangway of the locomotive, and at that moment the entire clearing began spinning around him. At the end of the train a man lay facedown with his neck across a rail. None of the whiskey loaders was moving, and Buzetti was doubled up like an infant, his arms folded around himself, his lips moving. Randolph got to his feet and walked over to where Buzetti lay staring sightlessly and muttering in Italian, blood seeping from a ragged hole in his coat. The mill manager got down on one knee, in an attitude of apology or prayer. “If you live long enough,” he said at last, “I’ll get you a priest.”

Buzetti stopped speaking, and his head turned, trembling, toward the voice. “You,” he said, and the live gloss of his eyes clouded like cooling lead.

Clarence Williams walked up, shaking, holding his empty rifle by the barrel. “Mr. Aldridge, this went bad. I didn’t know it was gone be like this. Somebody shure to come after me for killin’ a white man.”

Randolph looked over to where Big Norbert was sitting on the ground, a red hole in his overalls strap. “No one’s coming after anybody.”

“You sure?”

“Look around,” he said, motioning right and left to the twisted bodies. “Who’s left?”

Clarence shook his head and began to reload. “The one-eye gone.”

The mill manager stood quickly, all guilt and sorrow panicked out of him. Quickly he got over to Norbert and saw that the bullet had gone cleanly through him under the shoulder bone. “Where’s Minos?”

“He’s all right.” Norbert glanced up. “You better see to yourself.”

Randolph examined his own blood-sopped shoulder and felt his sodden ear, then walked over to where Minos, unhurt, was sitting in the weeds next to his father’s body, staring at the hissing train. “We killed the engine crew,” he said.

Randolph’s ear began to throb, and he pulled his handkerchief and pinched it against the wound. “Did you see the one-eyed man?”

Minos shook his head. “Been busy on my end.”

The mill manager stood drunkenly in the high grass, tying the handkerchief around his ear. Clarence Williams came up and they walked down past the end of the train, searching the tugboat and barge and scouring the trashwoods around the ruins of the shingle mill for signs, but Crouch was gone, whether along the alluvial shelf of the bayou, through the swamp, or flown off on leather wings, the mill manager couldn’t tell.

He sent Clarence hiking out to the main line to tell Rafe to shove the crew car down into the woods, then he moved over to his brother, who’d come to and was sprawled on his back over the sharp-edged shells.

“I’m going to lose this arm,” he cried.

“Easy,” Randolph told him, feeling for the first time how big a part dumb luck plays in a man’s life. He looked around and felt good in spite of everything.

“I was shot at by a half-million soldiers,” Byron was saying, “with the most accurate rifles in the world, and not one of them could do what a puke-brain engine-jockey did with a fifteen-dollar pistol.” He closed his eyes and tears rolled down into his ears. “I was hoping I was through with the war,” he sobbed, “but this whole damned world’s turned into one.”

The mill manager shifted his gaze toward the woods and flicked off the rifle’s safety. Only when he heard the crash of drawbars as the mill locomotive backed down into the clearing did he turn around. Fifty yards away, Minos and Clovis Hutchins carried the old marshal out of the brush and one of the black workers who knew Merville walked over to them, staring down at the still figure on the stretcher, then waving his arms above his head and crying out, his voice keening with surprise and fright.

The living loaded onto the train, which pulled out for Poachum. When they arrived, the operator came out onto the platform yelling about the jimmied switch lock, but Rafe ignored him and watched for the rails to be aligned so he could take his train into the weeds toward Nimbus.

When they rattled out of the woods into the mill yard, Randolph stepped off the train and had to sit down on a spike keg to wait for his head to clear. Along with Byron and Big Norbert, he was brought to Dr. Rosen, who tended Byron first, giving him an injection to make him sleep. After studying the wound for a long time, he finally bound it to stop the hemorrhage and sat against the wall on his examining stool, his forearms on his thighs, wagging his white head at the floor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jules was at his desk sharpening the third pencil of the morning when Minos opened the door, came in, and sat down at the mill manager’s desk.

“Don’t tell me,” Jules said, laying his pencil on an open ledger. “I don’t even want to know.”

“We wound up killing every damn one of them.” The assistant manager held his hands up like a man with a gun at his back and walked out of the room. Minos listened to his boots clopping down the stairs to the saw parlor, then picked up the earpiece from the phone. He looked out the window and politely asked for the connections to the sheriff’s office. After two transfers, he reached the big deputy stationed outside the sheriff’s door.

“This is Minos, Merville’s boy. I want to talk to LaBat.”

“You can talk to me.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Then you ain’t talkin’ to nobody.”

Minos took a breath. “When LaBat finds out you didn’t put me through, he’ll shove that pointy badge of his sixteen feet up your ass, jewels and all.”

There was a pause and the sound of a receiver being thrown down, and the next voice was LaBat’s. “What?” Over the phone came the sound of paper being grabbed and manhandled into a stack. Minos winced at the thought of a man having to work for a living by moving little squares of paper.

“Merville and some old boys he deputized went down to Cypress Bend to arrest Buzetti and his bunch. Buzetti’s man shot first and blew Mr. Byron’s arm off, so the deputies opened up and killed everybody what was shootin’ back.” He stopped, figuring he’d said enough.

“Son of a bitch,” LaBat screamed. “What you mean, everybody?”

Minos ran down the list.

“You killed the fucking locomotive crew?”

“Robinson shot the mill constable down with a pistol. Him and that fireman was in on the deal.”

LaBat yelled something incoherent and vile, then the line went quiet. “What about that man with the patch, Crouch?” the sheriff finally asked.

“That one got loose.”

“Got loose? What you mean, got loose? He was the only one worth killing.”

“He probably swimmin’ to Cuba after he saw what the others got.”

“Bullshit. That one-eyed bastard is Buzetti’s first cousin. I’m telling you right now, you better start wearing eyeglasses on your asshole.”

“They can’t watch for him no harder than what they been doing.”

There was another pause on the line, and the sound of papers being batted around, as if the sheriff was scattering them with a stick. “Can we get into Cypress Bend with a car?”

“Hell, no. Call the railroad and tell them what happened. Maybe they can hold the westbound and get your deputies in there on the Beewick switch engine.”

“You left them all in there?”

“Except for my daddy. He dropped dead when all the shootin’ started.” The mill engineer imagined the sheriff forming a question on his face.

“Why’d you take just him?”

Minos looked out the window at the sooty crew car that still held his father. “He was the only one I cared to pick up, yeah.”

A mist of new-hatched mosquitoes rolled out of the swamps and stippled Randolph’s neck as he helped lift his brother’s stretcher to the baggage car of the eastbound, which would take him to New Orleans. The camp doctor climbed in beside him wearing his tan suit. Ella boarded the day coach ahead, fanning at the mosquitoes with a soggy handkerchief. After the train pulled out, its whistle howling at an ox standing down the main line, Randolph sat on the station bench and waited patiently for the sheriff.

LaBat and his driver came along in a mud-spattered patrol car at five o’clock and parked next to the station. He got out slowly, then brushed at dried mud on his pants legs and knocked clods off his boots on the edge of the platform. He sat next to the mill manager, and they waved away mosquitoes as they talked, Randolph listening with his unbandaged ear.

“I’ll have to talk to your men.”

“Come and speak to them.”

The sheriff looked at him sharply. “You got together with everybody already, I bet.”

The mill manager looked over at the driver, who was scraping his boot on the bumper of the patrol car. “How much of a stink will this raise?”

The sheriff hunched his shoulders. “People gonna ask why
I
wasn’t down here after Buzetti.” He shook his head. “I never seen so much liquor in my life. Bonded stuff. Canadian, some of it.”

“Oh, but you
were
down there.”

“No I wasn’t. What you mean?”

“Your authorized agent, Merville Thibodeaux, and his deputies,
your
deputies, pulled the raid. You stopped the biggest shipment ever seen in these bayous.”

The sheriff froze for a moment, narrowed his eyes. “No. I don’t want to be hooked up with this deal. Not with the worst of the lot still loose.”

“He’s just one man.”

“So’s the devil. That half-blind bastard ain’t crazy. He’s ruined, is what he is.”

“Ruined.” Randolph said the word slowly.

“Buzetti himself told me the guy was captured by the Austrians, and some fancy officer put a gun to his head and made him shoot Italian wounded. I heard he fell down and started pukin’ after he’d killed twenty, maybe twenty-five.” The sheriff turned a palm up, and shook his head once, uncomprehending. “Now, don’t look at me like that. I know this is bad stuff. An officer gave him a pistol, told him he could get out of shooting the rest if he would kill himself. And you know, he put that gun in his mouth and when it went off, it fried the inside of his throat. The Austrians all started laughing because it was just a blank cartridge.”

Randolph put up a hand and closed his eyes. “I’ve heard enough.”

LaBat glared at him. “You got to know who you dealing with. Them Austrians give him a little lecture about bein’ Italian, then they got some bread, soaked it in the blood of one of the men he just killed, put it on the bayonet of a Carcano rifle, and made him put it in the mouths of the wounded. They’d bring him one man at a time, you see, and while each one of them was eating they made him—”

The mill manager jumped up. “How was his eye put out?” he asked, his voice breaking.

LaBat ran his smart, mean eyes over the mill manager. “I kind of like you, Mr. Aldridge, so I don’t think I’ll tell about that. It’s worse than the other.”

“Why do you like me? What do you mean?” Another question, he figured, would stop the storytelling altogether.

LaBat raised a hand and gestured toward the woods. “You come out here and buy this shit swamp for fifty cents an acre and you make money off of it. Hire a few folks so they don’t starve for a while. Without people like you all this would just be woods.” He looked around. “Woods ain’t good for nothing unless you a woodpecker.”

Randolph swallowed and looked down the tracks to the east. “What will you tell the New Orleans papers?”

“If they hear about it, I’ll just say everything was done legal.”

“How can they not hear about it?”

The sheriff shook his head. “Look where it happened. Nobody saw. No phone line for a man to call out and tell about something right when it happens.” He stood up. “I’ll send Buzetti and his three to New Orleans for a quick autopsy and then storage in potter’s field, the wet part where the maggots are busy. Those three other slugs from Tiger Island, their families won’t want it to get out, maybe, what those guys been doing. I can make the local paper say they drowned.”

As he listened, Randolph felt that he was indeed living at the end of a thousand-mile road in the jungle where everyone is anonymous and unrecorded. “What about those men on the tugboat?”

LaBat shrugged. “Out of towners. Florida men. We’ll get ’em embalmed and mailed home and let their local papers say what they want. Now, the railroad men, I don’t know. Maybe the Southern Pacific won’t raise hell, considering what that crew was doing on company time.”

“Impossible. There are too many ways for information to get out.”

The sheriff looked up at the single wire running down the poles toward Nimbus. “Not that many, not yet.” Then he looked at his driver, who was leaning against the radiator. “Hey, Percy. Bring us a drink of that new whiskey.”

Randolph’s head jerked toward the automobile, a cold nausea rising in his neck.

“Oh, hell,” LaBat said, “I’m just kidding.”

The next day the mill manager turned a saw team into watchmen for his house and the plant, issuing them pistols and new flashlights. He set about working the backlog of sales orders, and every time he hung up the phone he expected it to ring, but it didn’t—until two o’clock. It was a judge in New Orleans, inquiring about the authority of the marshal who led the raid, and Randolph spoke carefully, every fact in his voice a decision. At four, a reporter called from Baton Rouge, and the mill manager said he could not release any information about the incident. That he should call Sheriff LaBat. The reporter said that he had been trying all day. The next morning, the station agent at Poachum rang up and told him that two newspapermen were on the platform and wanted to know when the log train was coming in. The mill manager told him no train would come that day, nor maybe the next, and he sent Jules to tell Rafe not to run, to let the lumber stack up on the flatcars. For the rest of the week, each day was punctuated by phone calls and careful answers. One man, wearing a tan suit and cursing the cloud of mosquitoes circling his head, came out on foot down the spur from Poachum to where Judgment was stationed at trackside a mile from the mill. He was sitting on a stump under a chinaball tree when the reporter tried to walk by. “Can’t nobody get past me,” Judgment told him, staying seated.