Must’ve been caught on a snag or something, cause when the pole hooked her, up she come, slow and easy, just like she gone down. And I throwed up in the water until my insides like to of come out my mouth. Then I had to go and git rocks and rope and sink her good, so’s I couldn’t never see what they’d done to her, never no more.
I guess I must’ve went off my head, like. I come to wanderin’ round in the woods, all black and blue from bumpin’ into things. I went back to the house, but it stared at me outen its windows till I couldn’t even go nigh it. Then I went up to Pa’s. Course I didn’t tell him nothin’ about what had happened, but I could see him wonderin’. He loaned me a clean pair of khakis and five dollars, and I come on into town. Seems like I had to see people, be away from the woods.
First thing you know, Will Pollard come up and winked. “Got a jug hid out in the back of the hardware store,” he says.
So I went with him. Guess he didn’t get much of that jug. I must’ve drunk most of it. Next thing I remember, Will was lookin’ at me with his eyes bugged out and his face fish-belly white.
And now you’ve got me locked up in here, and they’re all down there right now, fixin’ to drag her out. And you’re lookin’ at me like I was the one that was crazy and sinful. And they’re goin’ to see what I seen when she come up.
Damn them crawfish!
THE WALLOW
Even criminals aren’t safe in the Big Thicket. It’s an unforgiving place, complete with many kinds of painful death.
It had been raining in the swamp for a week. The hurricane out in the Gulf had come ashore down on the Coast and worn out its worst strength on the low-lying country there. It had sent rain in buckets and bathtubs-full up country, along with a few random tornadoes.
Even in dry weather, the swamp was a hard place to find any dry land. Now there didn’t seem to be a spot to put a foot on anyplace.
Golly-Gene dipped his paddle and sent his square-nosed boat between two big hickories. In normal times, they stood on a small knoll of dry land. Now they were standing in water almost up to their lowest branches. Two water moccasins lay along those limbs, dipping their wicked little heads down to see what he was doing.
He frowned up at them and spat a stream of tobacco-juice over the side of the boat. He’d been bit by moccasins time and again, till he was mighty nigh immune to their poison, but he still hated them. The look of them, the stink of them like rotten watermelon. He hated to have to duck his head and go under those branches, feeling the small cold eyes focused on the back of his head. The idea of having a moccasin down his back didn’t make him a bit happy.
To avoid them, he would have had to go away out of his way to avoid the tangle of huckleberry bushes and sawvines on either hand. He didn’t have the time for that.
While there never was what you’d call a crowd of people messing around in the swamp at any time, and a lot fewer than usual under the present circumstances, he knew that as sure as he needed privacy, he was sure and certain to find people looking over his shoulder. Always had been that way.
That seemed to be a rule of nature. With a dead body in the back of the boat, it was just best all around to avoid anyplace where people might be. He glanced back to make sure that Cal hadn’t moved, that he was truly and surely dead. The boat bumped the tree trunk on his right, and the slack body shifted slightly.
Golly-Gene shivered. It had looked natural, but he knew it wasn’t. He’d put a crease behind Cal’s left ear that trenched right into his skull. There was no way that bastard could still be alive.
He put his hand over his shirt pocket, felt the button to make sure it was in place. That was purely too much money to let pass you by, given the chance to lay your hands on it.
He pushed the boat away from the hickory with his hand and eased it between the big boles. Beyond the trees and the submerged knoll was the wide pool of clear water that would lead him a long distance without much debris to contend with. Beyond it, where he could see a line of cypresses through the rain, was the maze of runnels and low ridges he wanted to reach. Anything dumped there would never come to light again, for there was a gator wallow somewhere inside that tangle.
Many a night he had run his trotlines and nets and heard the big bulls bellowing their challenges to each other and to the world. Once he put Cal out in there, nobody would ever know what happened to him.
There were no appreciable currents among the many channels criss-crossing the swamp, so nothing ever floated out of it. And those gators were always hungry. He’d seen them snap up moccasins swimming across their pools the way a kid would eat a licorice whip. They’d think Cal was a treat, sent especially for them by the storm.
He looked up at the gray pall of cloud hanging low over the swamp. There wasn’t any lighter place to tell him where the sun was, but he felt sure it was past mid-afternoon. Still raining, though the downpour had slacked to a slow, sad drizzle.
He laid his paddle aside and picked up the Maxwell House Coffee can. He bailed out a couple of dozen canfuls before he decided it was safe to go on. A waterlogged boat in a flooded swamp wasn’t anything to trifle with. He had no intention of adding his own body for dessert, after the gators finished with Cal.
He dumped the last can overboard and wiped his face on his dirty bandana. His hands were white as grub worms from being wet so long. His face felt clammy with sweat and damp. There was no denying that it was getting darker, even out in the open. He knew it would be dismal under the trees beyond the pool.
Dammit, he ought to’ve waited for morning. But how can you ever be sure some good old drinking buddy isn’t going to come staggering up to the shack and blunder into the shed where he hid Cal’s body at first? His drinking buddies were famous for staggering into places where they shouldn’t go and doing things they sure as hell shouldn’t have done.
He supposed some might have said the same about him, but until today he’d never done anything worse than raping a nigger wench or pilfering goods from the grocery store and the hardware department of the discount stores. He’d lived a pretty fair life, though he knew there were some as would say Golly-Gene Tucker was a low-life and a thief.
He grinned. After today, he was going to make tracks out of the swampy country for good. Go to Houston or Baton Rouge. Set up in business maybe, though he hadn’t any notion what business he might try. Five thousand dollars was more money than most of the folks he knew would see in a year’s hard work.
The boat bumped hard into a floating log. Cal’s body finished shifting and now lay along the bottom of the boat in an impossible position. Golly-Gene looked back again.
“Too bad, old Cal. But you’d have drunk it all up, you know that well as I do. Your old man would still be gone, and so would all that insurance money. Too bad your damn sisters took so much of it—I could go into business in a big way with the whole wad. But I can’t fault you for that. You couldn’t help having a slew of sisters, no more than I could help having a slut for a ma and a miserable bum for a pa.
“I’d say you done me a mighty good turn. Too bad I can’t give you a real bang-up burying, but if you could still think, you’d know I can’t risk that.”
He drove hard with the paddle, pushing the awkward boat across the slough as fast as he could. The dark line of trees came near, and he picked a clearish channel and went into the dark mass of half-drowned timber. The cypress knees stuck up like teeth, almost invisible against the black water. He had to watch carefully, for they could rip through even a metal boat, if you came at them too fast and from the wrong angle.
It was raining harder again. He peered down at the water in front of the boat and found himself looking into a pair of knobby eyes. Nothing else was visible, but he knew the alligator was there, lying beneath the water, watching what was going on in his territory. He spat another brown stream at the eyes, and they sank instantly from view.
It was misty under the cypresses, a low fog rising from the surface of the water and mingling with the
misting rain until you could hardly tell where one left off and the other began. Golly-Gene stood up in the boat, being very careful, and looked ahead.
There it was. The huge water-oak stood on the slight ridge above the wallow, its foliage standing out from that of the cypresses, even in the dimness. Not long now, Cal, he thought, as he sat and began paddling again.
The ridge was out of sight beneath the flood water, but the tree gave him a good bearing. As he came under it, two more moccasins slid along low branches and let their necks droop long to see what he was doing. He hated that cottony maw, like some sort of wicked flower blooming where it had no business being.
The bottom of the boat gave a tearing groan, and water flowed up to his boot-tops before he realized what had happened. He’d ripped the damn boat!
Golly-Gene kicked off those boots before they could take him down. The boat went out from under him, and Cal’s body bobbed gently on the surface of the foggy water. He trod water, staring around for someplace to go. Someplace above the water that was, he knew, the wallow of a whole family of gators. There wasn’t a dry spot within miles.
Something hit Cal’s body, pulling it under in a mighty swashing of waves and blood. Golly-Gene struck out for the oak as fast as he could swim. Every stroke he made he felt that one of the big beasts was coming up behind, ready to take that first and fatal bite.
His skin was crawling. His teeth chattered, and his hands shook as he caught the trunk of the oak and began climbing it, digging toes and fingers into the wet, rough bark.
He touched something that slithered from beneath his hand. He gasped a curse. Damn tree was full of snakes!
He reached the first branching and went out on a limb. It sagged beneath his weight, and he looked down into a pair of bubble-eyes that stared up at him through the mist.
“My God!” said Golly-Gene Tucker.
Not even an echo came back through the flooded swamp.
STIFF SENTENCE
...And you’d better be careful what you steal, too!
It was a bad job, right from the first. Kenny had cased that little bank way out in the boonies—he had a relative that lived in the little bitty town not too far from there, and he never could keep his mind off business, even when visiting his kin. Always had an eye out for the main chance, did Kenny.
Sibley was a place you’d miss if you winked going through it. If you sneezed too, you’d miss everything from the cemetery at one end of town to the school on the other. But Kenny never missed anything. He stopped at the café and listened to the old codgers gossiping.
He learned a lot, like the fact that the bank was one that people for miles around seemed to use, because it was still a country bank that hadn’t computerized itself right out of the human race. Your character, for instance, made the difference in making a loan.
The place even sounded good to me, and I intended to help rob it. Of course, Kenny wasn’t sentimental about things like that. He got Robert to come in for the inside work, and he located me to tend to the transportation. I’ve always been good at that: I can hotwire a car faster than most people can crank it with a key.
I usually can figure out and fix what’s wrong when one stops running too. Nine times out of ten that’s true; it would turn out that the Sibley job would be the tenth time.
Sibley was a bedroom community for a middle-sized industrial town about fifteen or twenty miles up the road. It also had a batch of senior citizens who lived on Social Security and pensions of one kind or another. Around the first of the month, they kept a lot of cash on hand, for the old nesters out in the East Texas woods don’t like to pay by check, mostly. They want cash in their hot little hands.... I expect that if they could get ahold of gold, they’d hold out for that.
It made it perfect for our needs. Big banks in cities keep lots of cash on hand, but they also have a lot of trigger-happy security. Little banks may not have more than a hundred thou’ in cash, but their security is enough to make a cat laugh.
We planned the hit for the second day of the month, a Monday. All the commuters would be off at work. The oldsters would be heading toward the bank with their checks ready to cash. If we hit early, not long after opening, we felt that we would get the whole pot.
We made the run in a black Chevy I lifted from a used car lot in Houston. It was the sort of car that can run straight over you, and you couldn’t describe it if you lived. We had a Buick hid out on a woods road about five miles out on a county oil-top, and it could put us over the Louisiana line in about an hour flat, if things went right.
Naturally, things didn’t.
Kenny and Robert came boiling out of the bank’s side door with a couple of bags full of cash. I had the engine running, of course, and Kenny yelled, “Hit it, Ray!” before he got the door shut. We took off like scalded cats.
I hooked a left, and we were behind the big trees, out of sight. Then I slowed and doubled back through a field, along a wagon road, and that got us almost to our second car, which was waiting in the woods. We ran the Chevy away back into the thickest part of the timber and shoved it down into a ravine. We pulled brush over all the tracks. Nobody was ever going to find that sucker.
The ski masks and the jackets the two inside men wore went down with it, and we pulled on the coats to our business suits, put the money into leather briefcases, lit up big expensive cigars, and pulled out onto the oil-top. We caught a through highway in five minutes, and from there it should have been smooth sailing.
About a mile outside of Croft (population 7,200), the engine began to overheat. Badly.
I nursed her along, scared to stop, because I felt in my bones that when that engine died even Jesus Christ wasn’t going to bring her back to life again. We got to Croft and pulled into the parking lot around a smallish shopping mall. It was just filling up with cars, and that made it a good place to dump a car without its being noticed, maybe for days.
“Ray, you go and lift us some wheels,” Kenny said. “We’ll go into the mall and mingle. Won’t do to stand out here in the open and get noticed.”
I could see a couple of service stations from where the car sat. The parking lot was too busy to risk hotwiring anything there, but I thought there might be something that had been washed and serviced and parked out behind one of those stations. Anything to get us out of town would suit me fine.
I locked the briefcases in the Buick. Then I took off my jacket and stuffed my tie in my pocket. Little places like Croft, in hot weather, are not where you find men in suits unless they are from out of town.
The first station was busy, but nothing promising showed up on its parking ramp. Ambling down the street, I kept an eye on the next, which was a big Exxon on a corner. As I watched, a hearse slid up to the pumps and the driver got out and went into the office. I could read his motions—he wanted the thing filled up, oil checked, and parked while he went down the street to the little café for his breakfast.
The boy came out and filled the tank, checked everything, and drove it around to the back of the station, so nobody would run into it. I had it out of the parking ramp before the boy had got himself set down in the office again.
I parked it behind an empty house in an overgrown driveway and walked to the mall after Kenny and Robert and the money. Five minutes later, we were on our way again. Time had been lost, but we still felt we were in good shape.
This time, of course, we became bereaved relatives, instead of hotshot businessmen. We were on our way to the mortuary to pick up Uncle Albert’s corpse. We’d gone twenty miles before Kenny said, “Say, did you look into the back of this thing?”
What with one thing and another, I hadn’t. We stopped in a dirt track and opened the doors.
We had lifted a stiff! He must’ve been picked up at a hospital and was on his way to be embalmed—he was still in that skimpy hospital gown. Looked awful too. What was worse, I recognized him—that was the body of Judge Walker Johns, who’d sent me up four times for felony over the past ten year
s. I thought Kenny would bust a gut—he’d sent him up a few times too.
Robert was almost crying. “This guy’s from a big rich family over to Rogersville!” he moaned. “They’ve got money and own politicians and run things like lords. They’ll have everybody in the state looking for him. The feds too—what’s the penalty for kidnapping a judge?”
“My God, Robert,” I said, “you can’t kidnap a stiff. And I dunno as I ever heard of any law against stealing one. You, Ken?”
He shrugged. “No, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. We’ve got to dump this bird. Someplace where nobody will ever find him or this meat wagon. Then we’ve got to lift another set of wheels. You idiot, Ray: I’d of thought you would look in the back!”
That made me a little hot. “It was sitting there full of gas, with the driver gone for a good half hour, if not more. You’d have done the same,” I protested. But he looked skeptical.
It was a very hot day. Of course, we all knew the man in the back hadn’t been dead for more than a few hours. Probably died in the night. But we all kept wrinkling up our noses and I could swear I could begin to smell him. It almost drove us out of our gourds.
We crept through little towns at the speed limit or below, keeping our eyes peeled for a promising set of wheels. Nothing showed; junkers seemed to be all that anybody out in the woods country could afford.
When we got to Dobson, I said, “Let me out here. Go on across the state line and hide the wagon in that big stand of pines four miles past the marker. Wait for me there, back in the woods, while I find something and catch up to you.”
I should have known better. When a job goes sour, it goes all the way. They caught me red-handed hotwiring another Buick. Big silver job that looked fast too.
Oh, you can go ahead and look for Kenny and Robert, if you want, but it’s already been a long time since they left me. They’re not dopes. They’ve found some way to go on, and if you find ’em in that stand of pines, holding hands with that stiff, they’re stupider than I took them for.
Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills Page 16