by Steve Vernon
Nobody should grin that way, but Olan Walker hung in the rack the way a man hangs in a summer hammock, the rest of that first long morning.
*
They cut him down at dinner.
The gun bull fetched him a plate of beans. Handed to him dainty and scared, like Olan Walker was a one man nest of cottonmouth snakes.
Olan Walker hunkered down next to the rack, like he and it were old buddies.
Nobody got too close that first day. Was like they smelled a storm coming and Olan was a tall tree. Didn’t want to stand too close for fear of a lightning strike.
Somebody had to talk to him. Let him know the laws of the camp.
So I mustered up my courage and walked on over.
“Howdy,” I said.
“Howdy hey,” he answered back.
“My name’s Aloysius. Aloysius Hutterford.”
Olan Walker liked the sound of that.
“All-your-wishes?” he said molasses slow.
He looked straight into my eyes. It was like staring down the loaded bores of a double barreled shotgun.
“You shall have all your wishes, All-Your-Wishes. I guarantee that.”
“How you know what I wish for?”
“Your feet are sore, ain’t they? And you wishing to sit down, ain’t you? Well sit you down, All-Your-Wishes Hutterford. Sit you on down.”
I sat down.
“There you go, All-Your-Wishes. Your wish has come true.”
I grinned at his prediction. It wasn’t all that much of a trick. Out here on the work farm a man’s feet are always looking for an excuse to sit down.
Then Olan Walker laughed. It was a big deep bottom of the well long way from anywhere kind of laugh. It was the kind of laugh makes you laugh right along with.
His smile widened.
It was hard to imagine a man could smile as hard as Olan Walker.
“You be careful now, laughing that way. Guards get to watching us,” I warned.
“God is watching us. Isn’t that what that peckerwood Brady said?”
I looked around quick, just in case somebody heard. Brady was watching, but not too close. His looking and listening weren’t turned on. He picked at his hand like he’d dipped it in cooties.
“The eyes of God are watching,” Olan Walker went on. “And he’s most likely grinning. Thanking what’s above him that he don’t have to work like us.”
“Ain’t no one above God.”
“Didn’t say nothing about no one,” Olan Walker replied. “Funny ain’t it? How close God and guard sound. Like walking and working. Jingle jangle, jingle jangle.”
“How’d you last on the rack like you did? I never seen a man take pain like that.”
“We all walk through pain. Ain’t no way around it. Way I figure, they don’t think it hurts me, won’t put me back on it. It kind of makes it fruitless, you understand.”
I wasn’t so sure of that.
“They don’t hurt you that way, they find another way,” I predicted. “They got boxes they stuff you in, holes they bury you in, guns and sticks and knives, and they got Black Betty.”
I didn’t like talking about Black Betty. It was bad luck even mentioning her.
So I went on talking in the other direction.
“They’ll stake you over a nest of ants. Let them clammer over you until you’re screaming for a bullet. Some of the pissier bosses like to nick you with a knife.”
“Like Boss Brady?”
I nodded.
“Like Boss Brady. Once he staked out old Chigger John. They peeled Chigger off that ant hill and he itched for three whole months. Claimed the ants laid eggs in his blood. Could feel them crawling underneath his skin. After three months, old Chigger opened his throat with a rusty train spike.”
“Help any with the itching?” Olan Walker asked with a grin.
I had to grin back.
“You just keep yourself right with the law of the camp, and you won’t have to worry about any of that.”
“What law?”
“Boss law, mostly. Handed down. See, the Governor created the Captain. And the Captain, he created the Bosses. The Bosses created the Gun bulls. Captain’s above everybody. He answers only to the Governor. Governor answers to whoever got the deepest pockets. I ain’t too sure where God fits in.”
“Maybe he gets a cut from the governor.”
I laughed at that.
“The only thing I’m sure of is they all been created to piss on us convicts.”
“And we ain’t got an umbrella in sight,” Olan Walker finished. “Are the gun bulls free men?”
“Naw. They just convicts pretending to be Bosses. The Bosses let them carry shotguns, but they all empty. Only the Bosses got the ammo. That’s the law.”
“That ain’t the law,” Olan Walker said. “That’s book law, talk law, not my kind of law. There’s a law of the land and a law of the book. The two don’t ever see eye to eyeball. Two laws be like a snake, looking at its own poop hole and seeing the biggest burrow he ever rooted in. Damn funny when it takes a bite.”
He shook his head slow, like he had all the time in the world.
“No sir. The law of the land and the law of the book ain’t ever supposed to meet. They is bound to be eternal strangers, like God and old Scratch. They ain’t never meant to be more than passing acquaintances.”
And that was Olan Walker’s thoughts on the law.
*
The second morning begun like slow thunder.
The camp bell woke us. A rail of rusty iron hung on a rusty chain. The oldest gun bull banged it every morning like he was beating the judgment bell. Like it was the last thing he’d do before God up and walked him down the road.
The sky was streaked with red, like the yolk of an egg kissed too hard by the rooster. Was a long walk through hell today. All we had to look forward to was a dinner of beans, and an afternoon nap under the snake tree.
The snake tree was the biggest cypress I’d ever seen. We called it the snake tree on account of the way the roots curled. Least that’s what I’d been told.
The guards opened the slat truck gates. We started walking, feet following feet, like a human centipede. The road stretched out ahead of us, like a forever kind of snake.
“Short steps! Short steps!” the yell went out.
Men on the chain kept slow pace. It didn’t pay to high step. One man falls, the whole chain line falls with him.
“How come they park so far away?” Olan Walker asked.
He was chained right behind me. Usually bad luck to have a new boy walking behind you, but Olan Walker fell in step like a regimental trooper.
“Any convict lights out, he got a long walk to get to wheels, way I figure it.”
“Maybe they just like to see us sweat,” Olan Walker said with a laugh.
“Maybe.”
“What you used to do, out there?”
“Worked in a bank,” I said. “I was a teller.”
“Now what brings a banker to a chain? You rob it maybe? Am I walking beside a dangerous man?”
He grinned, all wild like. Seeing Olan Walker grin was like catching a glimpse of a two handed saw flying out of the trunk of a one hundred year old walnut tree.
I shook my head.
“Boss’s daughter,” I explained. “Said she was older than I guessed she was, only she wasn’t.”
Olan Walker laughed.
“She pretty?”
“Pretty ain’t big enough a word,” I said. “Think about moonbeams and apple blossoms. She looked at me, I had to talk to her. Wasn’t nothing I could do about it.”
I stared like I could see her standing there in that field, and for a moment I thought I saw her, hovering over the snaketree..
“Dark eyes,” I said. “What the moon looks like round the other side. Kind of eyes that tug you like a low rip tide. One look, bam, you snagged.”
Olan Walker grinned.
“Trapdoor spider,” he said. “Bam, you snagg
ed.”
I nodded.
“You ever see eyes like that on a woman, Olan Walker?”
He looked to the trees like an army of strangers.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just the once.”
He shook his head, trying to lose a memory.
“A banker.”
He shook his head and laughed out loud.
“A teller,” I corrected.
He grinned like a snake in an egg house.
“Yeah, All-Your-Wishes, you be the teller, for sure.”
*
Days are long on the chain.
The morning rolled like frozen slow.
We worked the road, hacked the scrub and cursed. The gun bulls cursed at us when the going got slow. The bosses cursed the gun bulls for fear of the Captain. The air was thick with curses, like swamp water thick with wrigglers. If God was listening I hoped he wore a damn good pair of ear plugs.
We hacked through saw grass and palmetto so sharp a wrong step would lay a man’s ankle wide to the bone. You got to be careful, cutting yourself on the road. There’s fever rot and gangrene, blood boil and leprosy. You open a hole in your skin, there ain’t no telling what will crawl inside.
The gun bulls poured kerosene to heal the blisters up. There ain’t no balm on the Alabama chain line. There ain’t nothing but snake oil, sweat, and rot.
I looked up to where the preachers tell us heaven is. Just to rest my eyes. Never been much of a God believing man. Seen too much wrong to believe heaven isn’t more than a gravedigger’s joke.
Hell is here. We walk it every day. If there’s a heaven, the bosses own it. Walking skies of eternity, waving whips and chains and telling us how good it’s for us.
“What you staring at boy?” Brady hollered.
He hit me with what was left of his walking stick, in case I hadn’t heard him holler.
“Just blinking the sky out of my eyes boss,” I said. “Getting right back to work.”
I noticed, even though it was hotter than a fire in a pepper grinder, Boss Brady wore a glove on the hand Olan Walker touched.
He scratched at it most the day, but it hadn’t begun to stink.
Not yet.
*
“So what’d you do?” I asked Olan Walker.
“Talking when I should’ve been listening.”
“Tell me about it.”.
He shook his head no.
“Let’s just say I’m passing time. Just waiting for a train, is all.”
“No train out here on the road.”
“There’s an old story. A train that rolls through the heavens, picking up souls. I’m going to ride that long crazy train into the wild dark night. Ain’t ever coming back.”
“You sure about that?”
“Nobody’s sure of nothing. But one thing I know. There’s a gray lady been looking for me, and she’ll be driving that train.”
“Sounds like a trapdoor spider to me,” I said.
He grinned.
“Like you said, bam, I was snagged a hell of a long time ago.”
I laughed at that.
“Are you a conjure man?” I asked.
“What you think?”
“Whole camp says you are.”
“Didn’t ask what they thought. Asked what you thought.”
“I seen what you did to Boss Brady’s hand.”
He smiled like a kid catching a ball.
“I ain’t done doing for old Boss Brady.”
I looked to where Brady stood. He was scratching his hand like to tear it off.
“Scratch and scratch, Boss,” Olan Walker said. “Jingle jangle, jingle jangle. You ain’t done itching yet. You and all your company.”
He turned back to me.
“See them fellows over there?”
I looked where he nodded.
“The bosses?” I asked.
“Not them. Look past them. Look hard.”
I looked, and that’s when I saw them.
Old Beelzebub and his whole circle of demons holding court by the roadside, just watching us convicts work. Frogs like men, and toads that walked like big dogs, a big old star faced thing hovering just over the snake tree. And hanging out of that snake tree was the biggest snake I’d ever seen. Dangling like a whip vine from the branches of that cypress. Head hung down around the earth, tail tickled itself somewhere up near the face of the moon. Staring at me, moon and snake, eyes wider than an ocean wide pie pan. In the eye I saw a thousand more snakes wrapped like the veins of a drunkard’s morning stare. In each snake eye I saw a thousand more, down and down and down.
“They’re taking notes,” Olan Walker said. “Kind of like studying, you understand. They’re taking notes on how hell ought to be run.”
I seen one of them wink at me like he was sharing some kind of secret joke. I blinked too hard, and they were gone just like they had never been in the first place.
Only I wasn’t so certain.
Olan Walker stared into the distance, listening for a voice.
“They out there, all the time. You just got to know how to look past them.”
He spat on the ground.
“Yeah, I’m a conjure man. A houngan. A boujou man. Make medicine with the Loa. Pray to Damballah. Listen to the spirits talk and the dead rotted things mutter.”
“Voodoo? I heard tell of that up in New Orleans.”
“My people call it boujou, but it’s all the same,” Olan Walker said. “These hills, these fields, even this goddamn road. It’s all full of the boujou spirit. It’s in the bones of the land. You can’t walk it, you can’t work it, without it touching you.”
“So what else can you do?”
He stared into the distance, like he was listening for an answer.
Finally it came.
“I can make it rain snakes,” he said.
And before the end of the week he did just that.
*
The third day was when it happened.
It started like any other day.
The camp bell, the trucks, the walk.
But it ended like nothing I’d seen before.
We worked the rough part of the day. Now we rested under the snake tree.
We should’ve knowed better, lying under a tree like that. But it only made sense. It was the biggest shade tree handy. The bosses sat in the trucks, sipping on soda pop, where else we going to take our nap?
Brady stood separate from the rest. He’d been hanging back all day, like he was trying to hide.
I lay in the shade of the snake tree. When I looked up a big old tree snake dangled about my face, twisting and unwrapping like a bolt of slow lightning.
“Damn!”
I sat up quicker than Lazarus and grabbed a rake. I would have broke that snake’s skull bone, except Olan Walker was quicker than me. He slid his hand and caught the snake by its neck.
“Let me kill it,” I said.
“Snake don’t mean no harm,” Olan Walker said. “It’s bound by its own chain to this earth, just doing what it’s supposed to do. Can’t help being made the way it was.”
Bang!
The snake’s head exploded like a fourth of July thundercracker.
Me and Olan Walker whirled like Jesus called us.
There was Boss Brady, standing and grinning, smoking pistol in hand.
He walked on over, his grin getting bigger as he got closer, like a truck barreling down on a headlight struck deer.
I could see why he’d been hanging back. He looked like a half dozen lepers standing on two legs. His face ran like meat gone rancid, moldering and alive with maggots.
Olan Walker grew as still as death.
“Did I kill your pet?” Brady asked. “I seen you petting that thing. Big old fellow like you, a snake petter? Who’d have thought it?”
Brady got closer. He stunk like a battlefield, sun gone over. I felt his shadow like a cold weight upon my body. As dark as that tree was, Boss Brady’s shadow was that much darker.
; “You take that snake to the cook, conjure man. Maybe he make you a nice stew for your supper. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you old snake eater?”
He leaned back with one hand and scratched the meat of his ass. I heard the skin piling wet beneath his fingernails, it had got that quiet.
“I don’t know what you done to me conjure man, but you got to pay.”
Olan Walker’s eyes grew hard and black as the bullet heads peeking from the cylinders of Boss Brady’s pistol.
Quick as a needle pulling thread the snake healed. The snake opened its mouth and hissed at Boss Brady.
BANG!
The second bullet was louder than the first. It took the second head off that snake like a cap off a beer bottle.
“The next bullet takes off your hand, conjure man,” Boss Brady said. “You try and heal that.”
Olan Walker let his arm sink to his side. He let the snake slide head-stump down to the earth. It slid through his loosened fingers like a chain sliding through a tackle block.
Only he stopped at the tail.
He cracked the snake like a whip. The dead snake struck his right leg shackle, shattering it like a piece of glass. The sound of the crack made the bullets seem voiceless.
At that crack snakes poured from the tree. Their bodies slid about my shoulders and face like burning rain.
Boss Brady went crazy. Snakes landed on his face and back. He kept screaming they were biting him. Waved his arms and fired his gun until it refused to speak.
When the smoke and crazy cleared Olan Walker stood with the dead snake dangled in his hands. His big red hat shoved back jaunty on his skull like a rooster’s topknot. Brady stared at the dead snake, afraid it’d stand up and bite him.
Olan Walker let the dead snake slip from his fingers.
He pointed at Boss Brady.
Brady flinched like he’d been struck.
“It seems like you are carrying a little extra cargo in your drawers, Boss.”
Whether or not Brady marbled his drawers didn’t matter. Everyone laughed. Some from fear, some because they couldn’t think of anything better to do.
The gun bulls ran around trying to keep order. I seen some of them grinning too, but only when they figured Boss Brady wasn’t looking.