The Listener

by Robert R. McCammon

  The door came open and the double barrels of a shotgun were put in his face.

  “Get on outta here, you!” hollered the old man holding the gun. He was a bony Negro, bald-headed and with a white beard, wearing a gray nightshirt. Curtis saw behind the man’s right shoulder an equally-aged and frail Negro woman, white-haired and with a face like a roadmap on dried parchment, lifting an oil lamp to give off a meager light.

  “Please, sir!” Curtis said. “There’s a man—”

  “Get on outta here, I said! I don’t want no damn trouble!” The shotgun was trembling and the old man’s eyes were wild. He looked fearfully from side to side and then thrust the double barrels against Curtis’s chest. “I’ll shoot you down, you don’t move off!”

  Curtis thought that if he spoke one more word the fear-crazed old man might blow a hole through him, and what good would that do for Ludenmere, Nilla and Little Jack? He had no choice but to say, “I’m movin’, sir, I’m movin’.” He backed off the steps and away from the door, the door slammed shut and the bolt was thrown, and Curtis turned and ran back to Sawmill Road. He began to run along the center of the road in the direction of Kenner again, and in a couple of minutes the breath was rasping in his lungs. He saw another cabin but its roof had collapsed. He kept going, as the thunder boomed distantly to the southeast and the lightning was a brief flash of illumination over New Orleans. The rain had become a drizzle. Mist was rising from the wet woods on either side of the road. Still Curtis ran on, and then he saw his shadow thrown before him on the cracked pavement.

  He turned around. Headlights were coming. Coming fast.

  He stood in the road’s center and waved his arms up and down.

  Whoever it was, they weren’t touching their brakes.

  “Hey! Hey!” Curtis shouted, and jumped up and down in the glare of the lights for emphasis. The car wasn’t slowing; it was going to run him right over.

  When Curtis realized he was about to be struck, he leaped aside and the car—no, it was a beat-up pickup truck wet with rain and somebody riding in the truckbed—swept past him doing what Curtis figured was maybe fifty miles an hour. The vehicle went on another hundred feet and then its driver must’ve stood on the brakes because the single working tail light flared, the pickup started skidding and it looked for an instant like it was going to swerve and crash over on its side.

  After that the truck just sat there, its rough engine idling.

  Curtis was about to get himself in gear again and run to the truck when the vehicle suddenly was put into reverse with a grinding of gears. It came at speed toward him, but its driver couldn’t keep a straight line and the vehicle ran off the road on the right side before the steering was corrected.

  Then the pickup truck was there beside him, at a crooked angle.

  The driver had rolled down his window. A flashlight was clicked on and shone into Curtis’s eyes.

  “What’re you doin’ out here, boy?” the driver asked.

  Curtis couldn’t make out the face. The voice sounded like it belonged to a young man, but it was hard and a little slurred. He was aware that the person in the truckbed had gotten down and with a staggering gait had come around to stand on his right, uncomfortably close.

  “There’s a man needs help,” Curtis said. “He’s been—”

  “I think that’s him,” someone else said—another young, hard voice. It belonged to the pickup’s passenger. “Prob’ly is.”

  “There’s a man’s been shot,” Curtis went on. “I need to get him—”

  “You shoot somebody, nigger?” asked the young man on Curtis’s right. His voice was also slurred, and Curtis realized these three young whites had likely been out drinking their fill to overflowing of rot-gut moonshine.

  “No, not me. He’s—”

  “No, sir,” said the one standing up. “You say sir to me, boy.”

  “You think that’s him, Monty?”

  “Prob’ly is. Charlene said he was skinny.”

  “Please,” Curtis said. “Listen. There’s a man’s been shot and he needs help.”

  Monty, the passenger, went on as if Curtis had not spoken. “She said she never saw him before yest’a’day. Buck prowlin’ around up here lookin’ for a white girl to rape.”

  “Yep.” The driver took a swig from a clay jug that had either been in his lap or in Monty’s possession, and Curtis could smell the strong liquor of a backwoods still. “Out here up to no fuckin’ good,” the driver said.

  “Man’s been shot!” Curtis said, near exasperation. “Can’t you hear what I’m sayin’?”

  “We don’t care if a damn nigger’s been shot,” said the one standing up. “Do we, Whipper?”

  “No,” said the driver. “We don’t.” He opened his door and slid out with the jug in hand, and Curtis thought that anybody called ‘Whipper’ was someone he wanted to be very far away from.

  But it was way too late for that.

  “If you won’t help me,” Curtis said, “I’m movin’ on.”

  “Movin’ on, he says,” said Monty.

  The passenger got out of the truck. The light was still in Curtis’s eyes, and all he could make out about Whipper was that he was short and stocky and had meanness in his voice. The flashlight beam by itself was used like a weapon to blind him. Curtis looked to left and right on the road, but there was nobody else coming.

  He felt the violence building. These three were eager for it, and the moonshine had only primed them further. It was only a matter of seconds now before one of them made the first move.

  Curtis turned away from the truck and ran.

  “Get him, Fido!” Whipper shouted, and Monty let out a happy whoop.

  The third one—Fido—must’ve been faster than the others, because he was on Curtis like a mad dog before Curtis had made ten yards toward the woods. An arm locked around Curtis’s neck, and Fido’s considerable weight threw him so hard to the ground the muddy earth might’ve been concrete. The breath burst from Curtis’s lungs, and as he rolled to get away Fido fell on him with a knee to his throat.

  Something crunched. Curtis felt a pain rip from his throat up the back of his skull and for a terrible instant he feared his head would explode. Fido pinned him to the ground, that knee pressing down with paralyzing force.

  “He ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Fido said. He slapped Curtis’s hands away, and then he laughed like he’d done this kind of thing many times before and enjoyed it way too much. After the laugh, he drove a fist into his victim’s face that burst the nose into a bloody mass and knocked Curtis senseless.

  Curtis came to with the realization that he was being dragged across the pavement. He tried to get his feet under him but one of the toughs gave him a punch in the center of the chest and again knocked the breath out of him. Someone else smacked him with an open hand across the right temple, and that person said, “Ow, shit! This nigger’s got a head like iron!”

  “We’ll fix that for him. Get ’im up in there!”

  “He don’t weigh nothin’.”

  “Ain’t been eatin’ his pig’s feet and shitbread. Watch the bag, Monty.”

  Curtis was thrown over the side into the truck’s bed. His right hand hit something that felt like rough burlap. There was a movement in it and then he heard not one rattlings but many.

  He lay in the truckbed on his side with the bag next to him. The rattlings subsided. One of the young men—Monty?—climbed into the truckbed and shoved Curtis’s legs over with a booted foot to give himself more room. The pickup’s engine gave a rattle not unlike the sound from the bag, it boomed a blast of exhaust, and then Curtis felt the truck start moving, gaining speed fast.

  His face was a heavy burden of pain. He could feel his eyes swelling up. His throat also seemed to be swollen tight because he could swallow only with an effort, and that effort was the most searing agony he’
d ever felt in his life. He passed out and came back again, in time to hear Monty give a yell to the misty night that sounded like the battlecry of a vicious tribe that fought a war upon every Negro skin just for the pleasure of the fighting.

  And the killing too, Curtis thought in his nightmare haze. He knew these men might kill him this early morning, might beat him to death and leave him hanging by the neck from a tree limb. And then…what would become of Mr. Ludenmere, and of Nilla and Little Jack? He tried to lift his head but it weighed at least two hundred pounds. Could he speak to Monty? At least say the word Please as somebody might try to calm a wild animal? When he tried that, the pain that ripped through his throat was almost unbearable, and his voice was not even loud enough to be a ragged moan, but was the whisper of one.

  He realized, tasting the blood in his mouth, that whatever bad injury had been done to his throat by that crushing knee…he had lost the power of speech.

  In his twilight Curtis heard Whipper and Fido laugh like they were going to a fine party. Then the wind of their speed tore the laughter to shreds, and the truck growled on.

  ****

  “They’re still comin’.”

  Nilla paused in her forward motion to look back over her shoulder. Her brother was right. She could see the two lights, searching for them through the trees. Had they gotten any closer since the last time she’d looked, maybe ten minutes ago? She couldn’t tell.

  “They’re not gonna stop,” Little Jack said. It had been spoken as a dry and inescapable fact, in the same way Nilla had heard her father put things many times. In the glow of the lantern that Nilla held before her by the wire handle around her wrists, Little Jack was a creature of the forest hardly recognizable as an eight-year-old boy: hollow-eyed, bloody and muddy.

  “You look like some kind of monster,” she said, as if teasing her brother at this awful moment could remove them from the moment itself.

  “Ha ha,” he replied, but tonelessly. “And you’ve got alligator dookey in your hair.”

  They both realized at the same time that this kind of talk was not going to help anything.

  “There aren’t any alligators around here,” Nilla said, at the same time moving the light from side to side with her heart in her mouth. The way ahead was as the way behind had been, a morass of muddy earth that sucked at their feet, low thorny brush, thickets of prickly palmettos and thin pines that had been warped into grotesque shapes by the wind off the lake. The lake itself was maybe twenty or thirty yards off to the right, through the scrubs. Across its expanse night reigned supreme, not a single dot of light anywhere.

  But the two lights behind them were coming, and Nilla knew her brother was right; likely the man and woman had killed Mr. Hartley, and they were not going to stop.

  “We gotta keep goin’,” Little Jack said. “Can’t you put that light out? If you do, they can’t follow us.”

  “I’m not walkin’ in here in the full dark. Either of us break a leg and…I don’t want to think about it.” She had considered that already, weighed the possibilities as much as she could—including the possibility of coming upon alligators, a nest of snakes or the wild boars that her daddy had once told her roamed around near the lake—and decided the light had to stay. One thing they could do, she figured, was to turn to the left away from the lake and head in that direction, which would be sort of south or maybe southwest. That would give them a better chance of finding a road. But was there even a road up in here within miles? She had no idea.

  What had gotten on her mind and stayed there the last ten minutes or so was not the man and woman following them but what had happened to her father and Curtis.

  “Let’s go!” Little Jack urged.

  Nilla nodded, but she took a moment to try to calm her mind, to steady herself, and then she called to her listener. :Curtis?:

  There was no reply. She didn’t feel connected to him, in that usual way of feeling the energy between them like hearing the faint crackling of the records her mama played. She didn’t know if she was getting through or not…or the terrible thought, that Curtis—and her father too—were either badly hurt or dead. She tried again, and a third time. :Curtis, please,: she said. :Answer me.:

  But still there was no reply from her friend, and she stood hearing only the sound of the night insects after the rain, their declarations of chirrupings and clickings returning to full volume.

  She looked back over her shoulder again. Now she could tell for sure that the lights were closer. She figured that the muddy earth would be just as sticky on the shoes of the man and woman behind them as it was on their own shoeless feet—maybe worse—but it was time to move.

  “All right,” she told her brother, and they went on.

  ****

  “Okay, haul him out.”

  “What the fuck are we doin’ here?”

  “Got an idea, Monty. You and Fido just get him on the ground.”

  Fresh pain wracked Curtis as he was pushed and pulled over the truck’s side. He landed in a crumpled heap on gravelled earth. The flashlight was shone into his eyes again; he could see only through the left, as the right was almost swollen shut.

  “You done a job on that face,” said a voice that Curtis thought was Whipper’s. “Hey, boy!” A boot’s toe nudged Curtis roughly in the ribs. “What you been up to tonight?”

  Curtis shook his two-ton head, unable to communicate any more than that. He thought he heard something through the pain; it was a faint and garbled :Curtazzzzz. Pliss. Ser Me.:

  “He ain’t gonna talk.” Was that Fido? Curtis reckoned Fido likely had no idea what damage he’d done. “Must’ve been up to no good or he would’a been home. What are we gonna do with him?”

  “Rusty Upton and Tater Britt fixed that one they caught last week over in St. Charles.”

  Monty was speaking, with a measure of pride to relate a job well-done. “Kicked his teeth in and sent him runnin’ through them woods naked as a blackbird.”

  “Tater was in on that?” Fido asked. “Shit, I talked to him couple’a days ago, he didn’t say nothin’ about it.”

  “Yeah, he was in on it. Hell, you talk to Tater…he knows some fellas swung a nigger up in St. Tammany.”

  “Naw! Really?”

  “Really. Gimme a drink ’fore you finish the jug off, you sot.”

  “Whipper, we gonna fix this one? I can kick his teeth in from right here.”

  “We’ll fix him, all right. You and Monty pick him up.”

  Curtis was pulled to his feet. The light seared his good eye. His heart was pumping hard and he felt the crawl of blood over his lips and chin from the broken lump of his nose.

  “Nigger,” Whipper said close to his face, “we don’t like to get rough, but your kind just asks for it. Just begs to be knocked back in your place, ’cause you don’t know what’s good for you. Out here in the night, causin’ shit. No, we don’t like to get rough.”

  “Fuck it! We are rough!” said Fido, with a crazed cackle.

  “Gimme the jug,” Whipper said. Curtis could hear him chug down the ’shine. “Okay, take it,” he told one of the others as he handed it back.

  Then Whipper hit him in the mouth with a hard-knuckled fist.

  Curtis’s lower lip was split open and two front teeth on the bottom row were knocked into his mouth. Red comets streaked through his head. His legs sagged and he would’ve fallen if the other two weren’t holding him up.

  “Nice one, Whipper,” Fido said. “Couldn’t’a done better myself.”

  “Best is yet to be,” Whipper said.

  There was a stretch of silence, and then Curtis heard Monty quietly say, “We could swing him, if we had a mind to.”

  No one else spoke.

  Curtis’s legs were still rubbery. As if on its own accord his right hand came up to grasp at the front of Whipper’s shirt, but Whipper quickly
slapped it away and said, “Don’t put your dirty fingers on me, boy!”

  Monty said, “I think he is the one looked at Charlene. Skinny and all. ’Bout the same age, I figure. Yep, he’s likely the one. Runnin’ loose up in here at night and all…it ain’t right. We could swing him, if we could get us some rope.”

  “Got a better idea. Gimme another swig.” When Whipper had downed it, Curtis braced himself for another blow but it did not come…at least, not yet. “Strip him naked,” Whipper said.

  At that, Curtis tried to fight. He started thrashing for all he was worth, but he realized within a few seconds that he wasn’t worth a plugged nickel.

  Whipper hit him on the left cheekbone with a brutal strength born of either practice or pure animal ferocity, and probably some of both. The blow rocked Curtis’s head to the side and put out the last of his fading light. He was aware of falling, aware of sharp edges of gravel pressing into his cheek, and then he knew no more until he heard one of their voices fade in, saying, “…some kind of uniform?”

  “Ain’t no soldier, that’s for sure.”

  “Could be he’s run away from prison? Maybe a chain gang?”

  “Naw.” That was Fido’s drawl. “He’d be wearin’ stripes.”

  “Well what the hell kind of uniform is it, then?” Monty asked.

  “Hell if I know,” said Whipper. “Movie house usher, maybe.”

  “Movie house usher? Niggers ain’t got their own movie houses! Do they?” No one could supply an answer, so Monty went on. “And how come he’s out here at night wearin’ a movie house usher uniform?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Whipper told him. “All I know is, they’s ways to swing him other than a rope and a tree limb. Get everythin’ off, his drawers and socks too.”

  “I ain’t touchin’ his drawers.”

  “Well step aside then, I’ll do it. You reach over there and get the bag.”

  “The bag? What for?”

  “’Cause I said to. Go on, get it done!”