“I’m not listenin’.” Little Jack sounded nearly worn-out.
Nilla was holding herself together only with the thought that they would have reached a road or found another cabin with someone in it by now. There were no other lights anywhere and even the stars seemed dim through the last fragments of the clouds.
“Nowhere to go!” the woman called. “Get you somethin’ to eat, you’ll feel better!”
“Aren’t they nice,” Nilla said bitterly. “We’ve got to go into that, Jack. Are you ready?”
“Ready,” he said.
She started off, with Little Jack behind her and about two feet to the right. She had taken six steps into the muck when she sank to her hips in water. The water splashed into her face and she held her arms up to keep the lantern from being doused. With a yelp, Little Jack sank down to the middle of his chest. “Keep going, keep going,” she told him, as they waded onward through what appeared to be a grassy plain but deceived the eye. The bottom was sticky mud that caught at their feet. Suddenly Little Jack gave another cry and fell into the water; it swallowed him up, and Nilla could do nothing to help him with her hands bound and guarding the light. He came up spitting and trying to get his feet under himself but without the use of his hands and arms for balance it was a hard task; Nilla realized her brother could drown right there, as she watched helplessly.
With an effort he got himself righted and steady and said urgently, “I stepped on somethin’ that jumped! I hurt my leg, Nilla…my ankle’s hurtin’!”
“It was probably a turtle,” she said, trying to make the best of it. “That’s all it was.”
“I don’t know…maybe…my ankle’s hurt…got twisted.”
She looked back again at the lights. The man and woman would have to come through his swampy area too, but they were taller and their legs were longer.
“Maybe we ought to give up,” Little Jack said, with pain in his voice. “I mean…I don’t think I can go on much longer…and…I mean…maybe it’s better with those two than with what else is out here.”
“No,” she told him. “It’s not better with those two.”
“They’re gonna catch us anyway. We can’t get away from ’em!”
Nilla shook her head. She didn’t want to hear that, but she was afraid that it was true. In her despair she closed her eyes against the reality of the moment. As she waded onward she focused her mind upon Curtis and called out to him. :Curtis? Are you there?:
She didn’t expect an answer. She suspected that something bad had happened to him and to her father. Maybe even they were both—
:Nilla.:
It came so weakly she could almost think it was herself, speaking to her own mind because she wished an answer so badly.
:Curtis?: she tried again.
:Here,: came the reply, still very weak, but now Nilla was sure it wasn’t the echo of her own wishful thinking. :Where…you?:
She nearly screamed out what would’ve been heard by him as a confused tangle and surely not able to be understood, so she made herself take a few deep breaths and speak slowly. :After us,: she said, and corrected herself. :They’re after us. The two of them. Donnie’sdeadandMisterHartleygothurtwe’re—: She stopped herself again, to begin anew. :The two of them are after us. We’re in a swamp at the lake. Where are you?:
:Near,: Curtis sent back. :Been havin’…trouble. Kinda…:
:I can hardly hear you. Curtis, where’s our daddy?:
There was no reply. Nilla opened her eyes to see the way ahead, which was the same swamp. Something that sounded heavy splashed over on the left. She couldn’t allow her connection with Curtis to be broken, not just yet. :Our daddy,: she sent. :Is he dead?:
He didn’t answer at once, but then came :Shot. Not dead…goin’ for help…got in…mess.:
That jolted her, but she hung on. :Where are you?:
:On…ground. Boxcar.: Something came over that was unintelligible, as if the sending had sped up in her head and gone by too fast to catch.
:Did they shoot you too?: she asked.
:…find you. Somehow. Have to…up.:
:I can’t understand what you’re saying.:
:Get up,: he said. :Have to get up.:
:They want us to stop,: she said. :They’re right behind us.:
:No. Don’t…get you. Don’t let ’em. Hear?:
:I hear,: she replied, lifted up by his presence; though the sending was so terribly weak, the resolve behind it was still strong.
:Gonna find…somehow. Find you. Don’t let…:
:We’ll keep going, Curtis,: she said to his fading connection. :We will.:
He didn’t come back after that. Nilla thought he sounded badly hurt…and that about her father being shot…she couldn’t let her mind go to something as bad as that, or tell her brother either. All they could do was to continue to stay ahead of the two lights that were steadily gaining on them.
They came out of the water onto a weedy hummock that went on for maybe twenty feet.
Nilla saw how Little Jack was limping on his twisted ankle but there was nothing to be done for him. Then they went down again into a mass of rushes and once more the water took her in up to her waist and Little Jack up to his chest.
“No use in this, kids!” That was Mister Parr, her daddy’s so-called friend, shouting at them.
His voice became softer, like he was a teacher mildly scolding them for not doing their homework. “Come on, now! If you think we’re mad about Donnie…we’re not. He asked for it, didn’t he? Shouldn’t have been in that room. You think we’re mad at you, Nilla?”
She didn’t want to waste her breath with a reply, which is what she figured he wanted her to do.
“Little Jack!” the man called. “Hey, you must be awful tired and hungry by now, huh?”
Nilla heard her brother make a small sound of pain as he waded forward, but he didn’t answer either.
“Awful tired,” the man said, almost crooning it. “And awful, awful hungry.”
“Don’t listen to that,” said Nilla.
“I got water in both ears,” he told her.
She could have hugged him, if she’d been able.
They went on, side-by-side now through the water while the lantern showed nothing ahead but more of the grassy swamp and dozens of flying insects zipping back and forth through the light. Nilla was tired and hungry too, as she knew Little Jack must be, but she was determined to keep going all night if she had to…though it seemed her brother was starting to really hurt because he’d slowed down and she could not forge ahead and leave him, no matter what.
Find you, Curtis had said.
She didn’t think so. He was hurt, maybe shot. She felt herself wanting to cry for her father and for Curtis and the tears were close but she had no time for that; she was her brother’s protector now, a thing she would never have dreamed possible three days ago. And, as she’d learned, a whole lot could change in three days, and in three days a little girl used to dolls and tea parties and soft pillows to sleep on could get plenty damn tough—as her daddy might have said—if she had to.
She had to…and she reasoned that she was going to have to get a whole lot damn tougher before it was all said and done, and Lord help her father and Curtis, but she and Little Jack were on their own.
Twenty-Four.
Curtis thought he must’ve swallowed his teeth when they were knocked out. His throat hurt like they’d given him a bite on the way down. He couldn’t breathe through his nose, his right eye was nearly closed and the left swollen up too, his ribs ached, the joints of his shoulders were on fire, his knees were scraped and bloody where he’d landed on the gravel in that railyard, he was unable to speak…and what else?
Oh, yes…he was walking—staggering, mostly—along the side of Sawmill Road stark naked.
He was heading towar
d the town of Kenner, which shouldn’t be too far. He’d already passed a closed-up gas station, and there stood a cemetery just past it on the left. He felt ready for the grave. He kept looking back and forth along the road, ready to head for the bushes if anyone came along but the police…and even if the police came by, what was a naked Negro in a small town going to say to a white policeman after two o’clock in the morning? Even if the naked Negro could speak, which this one could not. He’d tried, and it had come out as the croak of a half-dead toadfrog.
It was a bad injury. He kept spitting up blood. He had no illusions that he didn’t need a hospital, and probably the emergency room, but at least he had avoided being swung. And…Nilla and Little Jack were still out there, and they needed him. How on God’s green earth could he help them? It had gratified him that he’d been able to hear her and speak back to her, as hurt and messed-up as he was, but what good did that do if he didn’t know exactly where they were? A swamp at the lake, she’d said, but he’d lost some of what she was sending because he’d been hearing her only in fragments.
It was a big lake and likely a big swamp, he thought as he kept walking. His hands were pressed against his ribs because it felt like one or more of them was jabbing his insides like a sharp blade. He remembered speaking to Nilla when all this had started and thinking according to her impressions that the cabin the kidnappers had taken the children to was likely past town, on the lake side. For sure they’d been on the lake side, but on the other side of town? The swamp must be past the town, so that made sense…but how far it was, he had no idea.
He needed clothes and shoes. He had stepped on half-a-dozen beer bottle caps and a dead possum. At least he was not dead himself and as long as that was true he held hope he could get Nilla and Little Jack away from the kidnappers.
But…in the real world again and not the fantasy world of faithful knights in shining armor, which Curtis thought might be getting mixed up in his head due to the beating he’d taken…how?
He reached the two-block town. It was completely silent until a dog started barking at him, and then a second one joined in. He ignored them and leaned against a wall for support; he wanted to slide down to the ground and rest awhile, just a few minutes to ease his legs and clear from his head the haze that came and went, but he realized that time was his enemy. What was he going to do, from this point? What could he do?
He made out a sign on a storefront: Evie’s ‘Everything’ Shoppe.
Everything? Clothes, maybe? Shoes?
He pushed himself away from the wall and approached the store. The two dogs were still barking furiously at him, but they had come no closer. He peered through the store’s front window.
Without lights, he couldn’t make out what was in there except right in the window was a mannequin dressed in dungarees and a straw hat, and there were three pairs of women’s shoes and a couple of pocket watches on a display shelf.
Miss Evie wasn’t going to like what he needed to do, but it had to be done. He looked around for something to use. Just beyond the Everything Shoppe was a structure being built, and somebody had left a wheelbarrow full of bricks sitting in the rain. He walked to the wheelbarrow, picked up two bricks, walked back to the Everything Shoppe’s front window, and without further hesitation threw one brick into the glass. It made a crash that silenced the dogs. Curtis threw the second brick into part of the window that had not completely shattered, and as the dogs started their barking again he pulled jagged shards of glass out of the windowframe and crawled in over the fallen mannequin and the shelf of shoes.
Once inside, he had to pause to get a few small pieces of glass out of his feet. He had a moment where his head swam and he felt near passing out again, but he steadied himself and then took stock of where he was, as he left bloody footprints on the gray linoleum tiles.
In the gloom he could tell the Everything Shoppe was probably a place where people either brought their castoffs to be sold or where the belongings of dead folks wound up. For sale with yellow price tags were rickety-looking old chairs and tables, some bigger pieces of furniture, a roller lawnmower, a display of pots and pans, dishes and glasses, a shelf of towels and bedsheets and…there, over by the wall and deeper into the store…a shelf of what looked to be folded-up blue jeans and some other articles of clothing.
He went through the jeans and found they were all big enough to put three Curtis Mayhews into, but there were two pairs of khaki trousers and the one with green plaid patches on the knees looked like it might fit. He got into that and found the waist snug but the length was way short of his ankles. No matter; it covered him up. A rack of men’s and women’s shoes stood just past the jeans shelf. A pair of worn brown workboots went on his feet; they were tight, even open without laces, but he could not be a choosy beggar. There were some colorful shirts on hangers but he found a pack of three white cotton t-shirts bound up with a rubber band. He took one of the t-shirts and shrugged painfully into it, and though it flagged around him he was satisfied with it.
A child’s battered red wagon caught his eye. Next to it was a good-sized dollhouse that somebody had spent a lot of time building. And beside a round table that sagged on one broken leg was a white bicycle. It was a girl’s bicycle, smaller than what Curtis was used to, but on closer inspection he found it had air in the tires and the chain looked all right. Attached to the handlebars was a woven-reed basket decorated with painted-on red and blue flowers.
The dogs had given up their barking and moved on, and it was time for Curtis to get out.
He wheeled the bicycle toward the broken window in his new used clothes and his torture chamber boots. Before he reached the window he caught sight of a water fountain off to the side. Above it on the wall was a handwritten sign This Fountain Is For Whites Only. He approached it, stepped on the pedal that operated the flow, put his face in the water that arced up and drank what he wanted. When he was done he went to work getting himself and the bicycle out of the window onto the sidewalk.
Should he risk knocking at the doors of any of the houses around here? He was torn on that; he needed the police, but he didn’t want to be either shotgunned or beaten. Not being able to speak, he wouldn’t have a chance to explain himself unless he could get to a pencil and paper, and how long would that take?
He decided he would ride out past Kenner and go along every road that led to the lake, in hopes of finding a cabin where Ludenmere’s car was parked. He didn’t know the car’s make but he figured it would be obvious it belonged to a rich man. That would at least give him a starting point. What he would do from there, he didn’t know, and maybe it wasn’t much of a plan but it was all he had. He got up on the bicycle and found he was almost hitting himself in the chin with his knees, though it was going to be faster than walking. He spat onto the sidewalk the blood that kept rising into his mouth, and then he started pedalling west.
Ironheaded, he remembered his mama saying. Just like your daddy.
And proud of it, he thought.
His long legs worked the pedals, and like a tarnished knight on a white charger he moved on in his quest.
****
Nilla and Little Jack waded out of the grassy swamp onto a muddy beach. The lantern showed to the left a field of knee-high brush dappled with clumps of palmettos and twisted pines, and to the right was the unbroken surface of the lake. Nilla looked back at the two oncoming lights. She had the thought that they ought to head across the field; that would be more to the south, and they might find a road in that direction. “This way,” she told her brother, who was starting to limp badly on his injured ankle. Again, with her hands still bound she could do nothing to help him.
They had just started toward the field, which looked to be rougher and more uneven ground than it had first appeared, when a gunshot rang out. Nilla heard the bullet sing past her, dangerously close, and she froze in her tracks.
“Nope!” the woman called ou
t. “Not goin’ that way, darlin’! Just stand right where you are!”
“Can you run?” Nilla asked Little Jack.
“I can try.”
“We’ll stay on the beach,” she said. “Easier going on your leg, but we’ve got to run and I’m going to throw the lantern away so they can’t follow us by the light anymore. All right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She said, “Let’s go!” and she tossed the lantern’s wire handle from her wrists into the air to her left. Then she began to run through the mud as Little Jack hobbled behind her, trying his best to keep up.
“Damn!” Ginger said through gritted teeth as she watched the lantern fly up and then crash down into the brush. Smoke was still curling from the barrel of the .45 revolver in her right hand. “I thought that would do the trick. Well, at least they’re stayin’ along the lake. Let’s keep at ’em.” She started wading through the last of the swampgrass toward the shore.
Pearly followed her. “Kinda risky shootin’ at our insurance policies,” he said.
“I want to keep ’em right out here ’til they wear out. They think they’re bein’ smart, but without that light they’re not goin’ much further and they won’t try to go inland. Mark it, they’ll be givin’ up soon.”
“Didn’t you say that half-an-hour ago?”
“Maybe.” She looked up at the wide expanse of stars. “Still got more’n three hours before first light. We’ll run ’em to ground and be on the road in another hour.”
“Unless we miss ’em in the dark,” he said. “We could go right past ’em and not know it.”
“City kids,” she answered as they reached the shore. “Without that lantern, they’ll stay near the lake where the goin’s easier. Trust me, Pearly. They’re gonna give out and we’ll find ’em sittin’ on the ground waitin’ for us real soon.”
He was starting to doubt that, but he said nothing. He thought that when they got the kids he was going to beat the blood out of them for this, and in his mind he saw their faces struck with terror and plastered with the handfuls of lake mud he was going to shove into their mouths. Time was being wasted when he and Ginger should be on their way to Mexico with all that money, but she was right…they needed the brats to keep from ending up shot to pieces at a highway roadblock, because if the kids were left to go free it wouldn’t be long before they found their way out of here and flagged down help, and soon after that every cop in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas would be on the alert, and it was a long way from New Orleans to Brownsville. Pearly figured it could be that if Ludenmere and the nigger driver weren’t dead they had already gotten to the law, which made it even more imperative to get hold of those kids. Without the brats, it could be a Bonnie and Clyde massacre all over again.
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