The cart stopped. It remained still for a moment, and then picked up pace again. The outer gate, Roy thought. The little air he could find was less acrid. He breathed in and out as slowly as he could. Controlling his organs was madness. They’d become lunatic inmates, now wardens in the asylum of his body.
The cart bumped along for fifteen minutes before stopping. The back gate fell open and slapped the ground, shaking the cart. A body slid off the top, relieving pressure. Another body slid off, and then another and another until Roy was no longer covered. He wanted to suck air like a landed fish. He wanted to tear free from the burlap, to get up and run.
No.
They’d cut him apart as he struggled within the bag. It would all be for naught. He remained still and cursed his mad heart and lungs, imagining their betrayals making waves on the burlap above him.
Two hands came to his ankles and pulled him off the cart. He hit the ground and felt rough gravel beneath his back. Through the burlap he could see tiny rays of sun. They were the same rays he’d seen all his life, but they were different now, somehow cleaner. Calmness washed over him. His mind regained some measure of control over his body. He breathed silently and evenly.
The guards working the corpses grunted and breathed heavily. More bodies came off the cart and piled up around him, blessedly not on top.
Then the shoveling began.
For hours Roy lay on the road, seeing the splintered sun move across the sky through his bag, hearing shovels chopping into dirt. Occasionally there was Paul’s voice. He commanded two helpers to dig, stop, take a break, drink some water, and dig again.
Roy touched the burlap with his tongue, gauging its thickness and strength. If he were to rip his way out, he’d need to know how long it might take.
One by one the other bodies were dragged away, each one preceded and followed by more shoveling until finally it was Roy’s turn.
“The freak,” a voice said. It was a dumb voice, low and deliberate.
“Jesus,” another voice said, equally as low, equally as dumb. “How long did he last?”
“Over a year, I think. More than anyone.”
“Probably ‘cause he’s part animal.”
“Let’s go, boys,” Paul said, “we ain’t got all day.” Paul was farther away than these other two, probably by the hole they’d been digging. “And get him out of that burlap.”
It made no sense to remove him from the bag, so why would Paul order it? Maybe Paul knew he was alive? Maybe he wanted to help? Surely their childhood friendship meant something.
Hands on the burlap, untying the knot above Roy’s head. Roy closed his eyes. He’d made no plan for what happened now. He hadn’t allowed his hope to travel so far. He could let them bury him alive and try to dig out once they were gone, but how deep was the hole? No man, no matter how strong, could claw his way free from six feet of earth. Besides, there’d be no coffin around him to supply a little air. He wouldn’t last two minutes before inhaling a lungful of dirt.
The bag came off of his head and down past his shoulders. His eyes remained closed. The insides of his eyelids turned red with the sun. New heat baked his arid skin. Another tug and the burlap slid entirely off.
Lying on the road, stiff and vulnerable, Roy felt reborn.
“Ugliest thing you ever did saw,” one dumb voice said.
“I ain’t touching it,” said the other.
“Neither am I!”
“Fellas,” Paul said.
There was a pause. Roy imagined Paul pleading with his eyes, the same way he did when they were boys. It was a look young Paul used to give his mother whenever he wanted more play time for himself and Roy, a second helping of supper, or to stay up late. Damn if it didn’t work most every time. Roy fought the muscles on his face, which were threatening to smile.
“Tie a rope around his ankles,” Paul said. “Drag him over and let’s get this done.”
Roy heard footsteps on gravel, then the sound of a rope zipping against wood as it came off the dead cart. If they bound his feet, he wouldn’t be able to stand up and fight.
So now it was stand up or die.
Paul was tired. He leaned on a shovel and pulled his hat down over his eyes. He hadn’t slept last night. His wife was passed out from the drink and his son was fast asleep when he’d arrived home. He couldn’t find a way to settle down and join them in slumber. With his nerves tingling, he sat on the stoop for hours, spinning a revolver chamber to an audience of crickets.
The revolver was his father’s. When he was called to the Civil War he bought it and took it with him. Only the pistol came back. Paul, then only eleven years old, cleaned the gun and claimed it for his own.
He sat last night, thinking about Roy and their gunfighter games. He smiled to remember that Roy taught him how to use his thumb properly. “When you pull it back,” young Roy said, taking his thumb into his hand like it was a pistol hammer, “it makes it a hair-trigger. Then all you do is graze it, and bang, bad guys are history.”
They said that Roy had killed an armless man. Story had it the two men had been performers in a traveling sideshow, and one day Roy just got the notion to smother his friend under a goose-feather pillow, all for the bit of money in the man’s wallet. As it was told, the rest of the freaks then turned against Roy, beating him nearly to death and carving up his chest.
Paul had been dismayed to find that Roy had grown up to become a murderer and a thief. He’d been disappointed to know the man in the hole was once his best good friend, but he told himself men reap what they sew, and if Roy’s harvest was imprisonment and death then he’d orchestrated his own undoing. Still, the least Paul could do was inter his old friend with a scrap of dignity, as Pops had suggested. As it were, the burlap body bag was an item of shame and hatred. If their childhood friendship was worth anything, it was worth Paul’s refusal to allow the man to be buried in it.
Paul sighed. The day was a scorcher. He wanted to close the hole, get back to Redmine, finish his shift, and get home to see his son before bed. Nothing could keep him awake tonight.
He looked up to see his twin gravediggers, John and Aaron Boyle, preparing to bring Roy’s body over. John had pulled a rope from the cart and was leaning over Roy’s scabby feet. Aaron had gloved his hands in burlap so he wouldn’t have to touch Roy’s skin as he picked up his ankles to help his brother along. Both men were giants capable of amazing feats of strength and long hours of hard labor in the sun. They were good for this kind of work—dumb and relatively harmless despite their size.
Paul yanked his shovel from the ground and stabbed it into a pile of fresh dirt, ready to cover Roy once the twins dragged him over. When Roy Pellerin’s dead body sat up and opened its eyes Paul dropped the shovel, but it stayed stuck in the earth.
5
Roy’s heart jumpstarted. The sun blinded him. Between blinks he saw the two prison guards, their heads cocked in confusion. They were twins. The left twin held a rope that looked like a shoelace in his huge hand. The right twin’s hands were wrapped in the burlap bag. He was picking up Roy’s ankles. Either one could be a strong man in McLean’s show, Roy thought. Two for the price of one. Rubes would pay to see them wrestle each other.
The twins’ confusion exploded into surprise. They backed away from Roy like they’d just stumbled upon a pit of cottonmouths.
Roy tried to leap to his feet, but his muscles barely responded and he fell to his side like a drunk. For so many hours his muscles ached to move, to be free from their prisons, but now they were worn-out toddlers after a tantrum. Along the road there was a dry field edged by a six-foot wide dirt line extending into the horizon. The ground was moist where new bodies were buried. Roy heard the click of a grasshopper’s jump, followed by the buzz of its wings as it coasted back to the earth. He struggled to his knees, spitting out the mouthful of blood and pus he’d been holding. His tongue found the gap where Jeb Crittendon’s thumper had knocked out two teeth.
“Sakes alive,” a t
win said.
Roy managed his way up from his knees, one leg and then the other. Pain shot from his ankles to his jaw. His arms and hands shivered with the wallops of his heart. The grasshopper clicked and buzzed again.
Roy turned to face the gravediggers.
The twins were standing catatonic with shock. Each wore a thumper, but no gun. The third guard was, of course, Paul. He came away from the hole he’d been digging and stopped between the twins, two feet behind them, his face pale and stricken. He was puny next to them, like a child king flanked by two monstrous eunuchs.
“Hello Paul,” Roy said.
The twins looked at Paul between them.
“Hello Roy,” Paul said.
“Thanks for the books.”
“Sure thing.”
There was a gun on Paul’s waist—a six-shot revolver with a worn wooden handle. It had a black iron ring with a rawhide lace tied through it. Roy remembered it’d been Paul’s father’s, taken with him the day he went to the war. The gun seemed to say he hadn’t come back. Roy was put in mind of the muggy afternoons when he and Paul had killed many a pretend Indian, and many a bad guy in a black hat with imaginary guns. They would cut them down while repeating the clever words the good guy’s always used in Roy’s books.
Funny; now Paul was wearing a black hat.
And his expression was blank. By now he probably had a wife and kids more important to him than a former friend accused of murder.
No. Not accused, convicted.
Paul pushed between the twins like they were saloon doors. “I’m sorry, Roy,” he said. His hand moved toward the pistol on his waist.
Roy stepped forward and shot a fist at his old friend’s face. Four-hundred-and-sixteen days of torture and pain were packed into his fingers and thumb. Each knuckle was a steel bearing, his arm a pile driver, his body an exploding furnace. Paul’s facial bones were duck feathers compared to the packed-clay walls of his former cell. Roy could pulverize it all, but he held some back. The impact was at once exhilarating and empty.
Paul had managed to loose his revolver. As he fell his hand came up and the trigger was squeezed. The gun fired near Roy’s ear, sending a bullet into the air.
High-pitched ringing was Roy’s new and only sound.
The twin giants responded. The left one seemed to forget he was holding a rope, not a thumper, as he swung at Roy. The rope flopped harmlessly on Roy’s bald head. The guard looked perplexed by the strange object in his hand.
Roy dove at the guard’s exposed leg, driving hard with his shoulder. The knee cracked against its natural way. Roy thought of Camilla, the Camel Girl from Akron, Ohio. She was born with her knees working backwards, and she walked on all fours. Otherwise she was beautiful, and Roy felt it was a shame that her beauty would be used only to garner extra coins from rubes instead of buckling the knees of lovesick boys. McLean had managed to lure her away from a competing sideshow, banner and all, by offering the girl her own wagon. She snuck away from her previous show that same night, the banner draped over her shoulders. The first thing she did was set her makeup kit down in the middle of her own vanity and declare she’d never share her space again.
Both men toppled to the ground. Roy crawled up to the guard’s chest to see a screaming mouth he couldn’t hear due to the ringing gunshot in his ears. He drove down a fist, crushed bones, reloaded, and drove down again. The screaming mouth fell closed. The man’s face was mashed. He and his twin would forever be different.
A fist impacted the back of Roy’s head. His open eyes saw black. He fell to his hands, crawled forward, rolled to his side, and came to his feet, blinking and backing away. His vision came back hazy. The second twin moved toward him, tugging the thumper from his waist. He raised it above his head. Roy dodged the downward strike and rolled. Back up to his feet, he found the guard coming again, thumper aloft. Roy slipped to the side and punched the guard below the sternum. The guard doubled over and huffed out a breath. Roy grabbed a handful of greasy hair and brought up a knee to the guard’s face once, twice. He let go. The guard toppled over.
Roy stood above the three downed men, his chest heaving as he sucked in maniac breaths. He threw back his head and laughed. This moment outside the wall, suddenly free, had been beyond his will to conceive.
But the guards were merely beaten, not dead.
Roy removed Paul’s clothes. He found them a near perfect fit—dungarees and open neck shirt with a leather lace. Paul’s boots were tight, but nevertheless they felt precious around Roy’s hardened feet. Paul’s black hat fit Roy’s head nicely. Inside he found a leather bag full of coins. Roy cinched Paul’s gun belt around his waist. The revolver’s weight felt fine. On the cart he found a long leather duster and a nearly full waterskin. He slid on the jacket. It had been made comfortable through years of wear. He crisscrossed the waterskin strap, the rope, and the burlap bag—ends tied together—over his shoulders. He imagined he looked like a dime novel gunfighter, and with the black hat, a villain.
He considered riding out on the horse, but thought it smarter to go on foot. A reptilian man galloping through your town isn’t the type of thing you wouldn’t tell someone about. He unhooked the horse and gave it a hard slap on the backside, sending it down the road in a frenzy.
The twin guards slept and bled in the searing sun with their faces broken, one with a ruined knee. Roy considered dragging them under the cart for shade, but to Hell with them. Had they gotten the better of him, they’d have beaten him to death and buried him. They could burn. He dragged a naked Paul under the cart, close to the front where the shade would remain all afternoon. Paul’s face might never be the same, either. If he had a wife she might cry. If he had children they might wonder if their father could still be called a man.
“I’m sorry, my friend,” Roy said, placing a hand on Paul. “Look at you, huh?”
Roy patted his friend’s chest and stood. A quick survey and he set out across the field, leaping over the burial line so as not to leave tracks. He raced toward a distant forest while moving away from the scene, away from the prison. When he came to the woods he stopped and looked back. The cart was a dot on the horizon, the road a thin line in the shimmering heat. Two more dots marked the twins. They had not yet begun to stir.
Roy entered the forest. If he was lucky enough to reach a town, his first purchase would be salve.
6
In Roy Pellerin’s eight-year-old mind, the most dangerous and mystical predator in Lousiana’s Bayou Rouge was the alligator. Sure, there were cottonmouths and bobcats, spiders and snapping turtles, and by combined number they were equally as dangerous as gators, but for Roy’s money there was only the gator. Armor-bodied, quick, and with a million teeth like spits for human flesh, a gator could turn wrists and ankles into stumps, or living bodies into dead ones. The animals patrolled the river in front of Roy’s childhood home like dinosaur sentinels, their eyes and snouts an inch above the water as they drifted in wait. Their exposed parts looked like harmless knobs, but Roy knew this was illusion. To the Pellerins, gators were more than deadly illusionists, but voodoo spellbinders with magic in their mouths; a gator’s clapping jaw could turn an unborn human child into a son of its own.
Roy would know; he was such a son.
Roy must have liked the warm, dark pool of his mother’s womb, because he stayed two weeks past his expected nine months. At the time Roy’s mother, Verna, looked ready to split. Her husband, Thomas, wore a mask of worry. Roy was to be their first child, and his parents fretted his reluctance to enter their bayou home. Any advice would be welcome, so Thomas and Verna decided to visit an upriver neighbor whose wife had given birth to seven children, all on time and all healthy.
They set out from their home in the early morning haze, carefully picking their way to the water’s edge. Thomas walked in front, reaching back to hold Verna’s hand.
“Maybe there’s a secret food or drink,” Verna mused, breaking the morning silence, “or a way to stretch or bend.
”
“I reckon so,” Thomas Pellerin said, eyes locked on the dangerous water.
The young couple would never reach their neighbor’s home. Verna would later say there was something in the stillness of the dawn that gave her pause. She didn’t like the shameful look of the Cypress trees, like they knew a secret but had sworn to keep it dry.
Thomas halted on their small dock, eyeing the water for rings pulling away from small shadows on the gleaming surface. He stayed in front of his wife, protecting her with knife in hand. He knelt down and scanned the still water diligently, but found nothing to cause alarm. He sheathed his knife and got on the skiff, turned back and held out his hand.
Verna came slowly to the dock’s edge, cradling her gigantic belly. She gripped her husband’s hand, stretched out a foot toward the skiff, and then stopped.
Thomas eyed her curiously.
Verna pulled back her foot just as a gator exploded from the water. Its massive jaws clacked together where her foot had just been. Thomas unsheathed his knife and slashed the gator’s nose in one fluid motion. The gator growled and reeled. It snapped its jaws again, taking a chunk of the skiff before fleeing. An oily blood slick trailed away from its wound.
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