“Mr. Aldridge,” the old man said in his morning-soft voice, “you takin’ up your brother’s ways?”
Randolph nodded toward the skiff as it swung for the main channel. “He’s not too interested in the details, is he?”
The marshal shrugged. “Maybe he figures Buzetti will get at you anyway. A man as smart as you must’ve figured that out, yeah.”
“If Buzetti had been in my shoes last night, even he would have killed his cousin.”
Merville squinted at him through the smoke. “But he didn’t. You did.”
The locomotive wobbled into the back of the yard, and the men watched it couple to a car of sawn lumber. “I would’ve given anything not to. You should’ve seen the way my wife looked at me when I told her what happened. I felt like a stranger in my own kitchen.”
“You not the same as you was yesterday, that’s for true.”
The mill manager put up his hands and let them drop. “What’ll I do?”
“You got coffee on?”
They walked to his house, where the housekeeper dripped a fresh pot of dark roast. Walter toddled up to the old policeman and put a soft finger on the handle of his gun.
“Come here, Walt,” Randolph said.
Merville watched as the boy climbed with much help onto the mill manager’s lap. “Buzetti will go after money or blood.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You cost him a relative. He’ll cost you something. Tell my boy to keep a eye out in the boiler room. Tell Mr. Jules to have a man check the logs coming into the saw shed.”
“You think he’ll do something to my brother?” He looked over his shoulder and saw that May had left the room. “Or our wives?”
Merville shook his head and took a long swallow of hot coffee. “The sheriff couldn’t look the other way if you or your brother got hurt. You got money, and Byron got his little badge.”
“What about the women?”
“We got a few White Camelias down west of Tiger Island. They’d come out the swamp and use a rope on Buzetti for that.”
“His soldiers couldn’t stop it?”
Merville reached over and grabbed the child’s hand, studying the palm and then turning it over, looking at the back. “Buzetti ain’t God. He’s just a mean crook from a family of crooks.”
“What are you looking for?”
He dropped the boy’s hand. “Nothing,” he said, turning to glance at the housekeeper, who had returned and was stirring a roux in a black iron pot. She stared away, out the door toward the mildewed cabin where her father had died.
The weather turned unseasonably warm and Randolph began to have trouble sleeping. The nights steamed like a cow’s breath, and he would wake up with the sheets sticking to his legs like wet paper. Sometimes in his dreams Vincente would slink out of the saloon door, stagger into the mill yard, and throw cards one at a time up in the air, where they turned into birds. Once, Randolph woke up crying, his wife cradling his head against her breasts and telling him it was all right what he had done, that she could forgive him.
“How else could I have handled it?” He twisted his face up to her in the dark.
She petted his slick cheeks and told him, “Let the other men die, I guess,” which they both knew was no answer at all.
One morning the agent at Poachum called him on the new line that stretched out to the house. “Mr. Aldridge, your agent in Tiger Island just sent me a telegram.”
“What did he say?”
“A man wearing a eye patch just stepped off the westbound there.”
Randolph closed his eyes. “How was he dressed?”
“It’s him all right.”
“Well.”
“You didn’t hear it from me.” There was the sound of a screaming locomotive whistle in the receiver, and then a click as the agent hung up.
He immediately walked over to Byron’s, where he found his brother writing a report on the shooting for the parish sheriff, forming block letters like a schoolboy. On the Victrola Lester McFarland was singing “Go and Leave Me If You Want To.” Randolph told him what the agent had said, but he didn’t stop writing.
“I’m still filling out forms about it. New ones came yesterday.” His brother’s smile was wide and mean. “You didn’t know all that stuff was in a head, did you?”
“What?”
“You maybe thought it was a big noodle in there? But it’s not. It’s a lot of dark pudding, some of it gray.” His hand made a low arc. “A pistol bullet paints the floor with his memories.” The record stopped and the Victrola clicked off. Over at the mill, Minos pulled the cable for the noon whistle, and the deep note fell against the window glass, which sang like tissue paper on a comb.
“How can you think up things like that?”
Byron looked down at his paper. “Sorry.”
“I wish it hadn’t happened.”
“It should happen to Buzetti.” He picked up his pencil and resumed the childlike lettering. “It would be easy.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’d go to jail forever.”
“Still, it would solve things. Kill the queen and get rid of the hive.”
“It’s not the way things are done.” When Randolph heard the pencil snap in two, he looked down at his brother. “It’s wrong, By. It’s a sin.”
Byron’s eyebrows went up. “If someone had shot the Kaiser, would there have been a war? Think about it, Rando. There’d be millions of fat and sane fellows working away in this old world right now.” He clapped a broad hand to his forehead. “You know, I recall a story Father once told about Annie Oakley when she was touring Europe, maybe forty years ago. The Wild West Show?”
Randolph looked around and pulled up a chair. “What did he say?”
“She was shooting glass target balls that some chump was throwing up for her.” He moved his hands, mimicking the toss. “That’s all she did. She’d shoot nine hundred a day sometimes, without a miss. Used a .22 rifle so her shoulder wouldn’t wear out.” Byron’s eyes rounded as he talked. “It was nothing to her, like swatting flies. Well, the way Father tells it, one day she was in Germany, doing some fancy shooting, knocking grapes off a bar at fifty feet while firing backward, sighting through a mirror. Then this odd man steps out of the crowd. Anyone could see that he was odd. Even the cloth on him was arrogant and his mustache was like a piece of tin. He was dressed in one of those grand European uniforms with gold braid and big epaulets. He told her that she had to shoot a cigar out of his mouth at thirty paces. He demanded it. She replied politely that she didn’t do such things, and he insulted her. Called her a weak American farmwoman. Somebody in her company leaned in and let her know that the man was very important and it would be a good thing if she would go along.” Byron stopped and suddenly looked down at a white scar on his forearm, putting a forefinger to it for a moment.
“I don’t remember this story.” Randolph turned out a brogan and mashed a roach coming in off the porch, then felt sorry about the mess.
“She told the man to stand off seventy-five feet and then chose a Winchester 73 to do the honors. He put a blunt in his mouth and showed his profile. Annie took aim none too slowly and cut the thing in half with a 44-40 slug, one inch from his lips.” Byron thrust his face next to his brother’s. “You know who the young man was?”
Randolph shook his head, pulling back.
“That damned crippled woodchopper himself.”
“The Kaiser?”
“If she had missed the cigar by two or three inches, my best friend Walter Liddy would be writing me letters about his children, and you and I would be squabbling about hardwood production in the dry woods of western Pennsylvania.” Byron stood and raised his arms to the ceiling. “Millions of good and bad fellows would just be going about their own business.” He seemed suddenly exhausted and fell back into his desk chair.
“But what would’ve have happened to Annie Oakley?”
“She would have gone down as a sad joke, brother, one of t
he world’s great idiots.” Byron raised a finger into the air. “But in all truth she would’ve done more for mankind than Queen Elizabeth, Walter Reed, and Thomas Jefferson rolled into one.”
Randolph uncrossed his legs, leaned forward. “A killing started the whole thing, you know. The archduke.”
“He was the wrong man to die.”
A shadow filled the screen door, cast by a thundercloud of a man, the one called Judgment, who was holding by the jacket collar a small, writhing figure. Minos stepped from behind them and came inside, carrying a cypress slab.
“We got us some trouble, yeah.”
“What’s this?” The mill manager stood up and walked out onto the porch to look at the olive-skinned fellow writhing in Judgment’s hand.
Minos held up the slab. “A fireman saw him walk in from Poachum on the railroad. He pulled this out of a sack and threw it in the pile we use to start up the boilers on Mondays.”
The mill manager looked at the wood. “What about it?”
“A scalder,” Byron said.
Minos turned one end of the slab toward Randolph to show an augured hole holding a stick of dynamite. “I peeled a gob of mud off the end and saw this.”
The little man blurted, “Hey, I didn’t know nothin’ about that.” Judgment twisted his collar, and he stood still.
Byron drew close to the man and looked down on him. “Who paid you.”
“Hey. I was walkin’ in to ask about a job. The sack was lyin’ on the track so I picked it up.”
“You know who paid him,” Randolph said.
“I want to hear it.”
“Nobody paid me nothin’.”
Byron shook the dynamite out of the slab into his hand. “A third of a stick.” He held the charge up. “With a blasting cap.” He pulled out a pocketknife and stepped into his house.
His brother peered through the screen after him. “What?”
After a minute Byron returned, holding two lengths of harness rope and the piece of dynamite, a line of green fuse the length of a rat’s tail hanging out of it. “Hold him by the arms, Judgment. Stand behind that porch post while you do it. Mind you don’t fall into the yard.”
“I gotcha, Mr. Byron.”
He knelt and lashed the prisoner’s legs tightly above the knees with several turns, and then pushed the stub of dynamite between the man’s bound legs so it nested under his testicles, the fuse curling up. Byron pulled out a match and held it against the box. “Now, who sent you?”
The man laughed, once. “You crazy,” he said, trying to move his thighs.
“Wrong answer.” Byron struck the match and lit the fuse.
Randolph began to flap his arms. “Lord, God,” he cried, scurrying to the corner of the house.
Minos took off his cap, bent to look at the sputtering fuse, and stepped slowly off the porch.
The man looked down between his legs. “Come on, pluck that damn fuse.”
“Who hired you?”
“Ain’t nobody hired me, I told you. Damn.”
Randolph called out from around the corner, “By, he’s not worth it.”
An inch of fuse had burned away, and Byron looked the man in the eye. “Give it up.”
“I got nothin’ to give up,” he said, his voice rising.
Another inch of the fuse had burned away when Ella stepped through the screen door, a glass of milk in her hand. “What the deuce is going on. I—” She saw the fuse, and the glass made a frothy starburst on the porch boards. The men could hear her running back through the house, slamming doors as she went, bedroom, kitchen, back stoop. Only an inch of fuse was left when Judgment cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Byron, I got to wear these clothes the rest of my shift.”
At that the man began to urinate and call out Buzetti-BuzettiBuzetti as though in a contest to see how fast he could say the name. Byron reached into the man’s crotch and plucked away the fuse.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it, you lardy bastard? Now, Rando, did you hear him say who hired him to blow our boilers?”
A voice wavered from around the corner. “Yes.”
Minos tilted his head into the open. “Did you put him out?”
Byron dusted his fingertips and looked at the dark stain running down the man’s pants. “I think he put himself out.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The mill manager’s wife was fanning herself in her new sit-ting room, seated on a divan with her husband’s head in her lap while horseflies banged the screens, mad to get in at them.
“So, it was an explosion he was after?”
“Yes,” Randolph moaned as he soaked up the feel of her palm on his forehead. “Trying to put us out of business—as punishment, I guess.”
His wife had grown up among the mechanical chatter of three brothers and had absorbed a feel for the physical nature of things. Something about the sabotage bothered her like a gnat crawling on an earlobe. She bit into her cheek with an eyetooth. “Rand, was that little bit of dynamite enough to burst the boilers?”
He rolled the back of his head against her thighs. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“Why not a half-stick charge?” she asked. “To make sure the damage was severe and wouldn’t just blow out the fire.”
Her husband turned on his side, and she began to scratch his head. “I’m sure Buzetti knew what he was doing. Those people are crafty.”
“Is dynamite terribly expensive?”
“Not at all,” he said dreamily. “We’ve got a shedful of it around here somewhere.”
“Well, why not a whole stick, then? Surely he wasn’t worried about life and limb if he planned to blow up a boiler.”
“Oh, what do you know about machinery?” He reached up and patted her hand.
She stopped scratching him. “I saw what happened when the New Castle boiler ruptured. I was there with Wallace and Todd and they explained to me about reserve heat in the boiler’s water which flashes into power when the shell splits open.”
“You saw the mess at New Castle?” He bent his head around to look at her. “They say it looked like a battleship had landed a salvo in the mill.”
“So why, if Buzetti was trying to blow up one of the boilers, did he use such a small charge?” She folded her arms above his head and waited. Her husband, however, seemed not to want to answer. She grew peeved at him, and looking out her new windows toward the boiler shed, she pondered this little mystery.
The phone rang as Randolph was writing order summaries, and it was Sheriff LaBat calling from his office in Moreau.
“Got some bad news for you.”
“What now, Sheriff?”
“That old boy your brother sent down here on the train? Last night somebody knocked the deputy in the head, broke in the jail, and sprung him.”
“Are you looking?”
“Hell, yeah, we lookin’. If we find him we’ll give you a call.”
“He’s a dangerous man, not just some drunk we wanted off the property. He was going to dynamite the boilers.”
The sheriff sniffed. “Well, we’ll look for him, like I said.”
“You had him in the parish jail?”
There was a pause on the line. “Yeah.”
“That’s a big place. How in the world—”
“It was two, three o’clock this morning. We only keep one man on then.”
“Was it Buzetti that got him out?”
“What do I look like, a mind reader? All I know is I got a call about sunup, and when I came down here old Boudreaux’s sittin’ on the floor with a goose egg on the back of his head.”
After Randolph hung up, he finished the orders, then slogged over to Byron’s house, where he found him sitting in a spindle-back chair on the porch, holding a drink. “Kind of early for that?”
Byron stared blankly at the mill buildings, as though seeing them for the first time. “I like it to wash down those pills the doc gives me,” he said, his eyes wide as an owl’s.
His brother rested
his back against the porch wall. He remembered that Byron had seldom taken a drink when he was living his other life before the war. He was too busy learning the mills, courting women. “Sheriff LaBat called. Somebody broke your dynamiter out of jail, and they can’t find him.”
Byron spat off the porch. “That so?”
“He also told me he hadn’t gotten a statement from him.”
Byron took a drink and let it sit in his mouth a moment before he swallowed. “You think the sheriff’s fond of tomato sauce?”
Randolph took off his hat and banged it against his leg. “You know, Lillian claims Buzetti wasn’t trying to destroy the mill. She says Europeans are more complicated than that. More emotional, maybe.”
“What’s she think? He wants to make us cry or something?” He took another drink, the glass wobbling on the way to his mouth. “The world is waiting for the sunrise,” he said, “just waiting for maybe some two-legged piece of shit to show up carrying a fine German pistol.” He made a gun with his right hand, aimed it at Randolph’s house, and dropped the thumb like a hammer.
By the first week in March, Randolph was playing solitaire the entire night. He began to watch his fingers and the backs of his hands, noting how different they were from Vincente’s, which had been long and flexible and darting. Randolph prayed for the dealer’s soul, felt stupid about doing so, then prayed briefly again.
He decided not to return to the saloon, and when the fights, which were becoming less frequent anyway, would break out, he’d let Byron handle the noise and the blood. During the day, at any spare moment, he would check with Minos, to see if he was monitoring the fuel, with old Mackey, the watchman, to make sure he kept an eye on the railroad to Poachum, with the captain of the rafting steamer, who’d put a deckhand in the wheelhouse at night to shine a spotlight down the canal to check for darkling skiffs. Byron came over after supper every day to play a few moments with Walter, as if the child were a poultice he had to apply to an aching wound. The boy was always in the house since Lillian had found it more convenient for her housekeeper to stay in the little back bedroom. Byron was beside himself the first time Walter caught a cypress block he’d tossed toward him.
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