Randolph rocked on his heels. “It might work just like the ambush I set up at Poachum station. You can hand out those cannons you bought in Shirmer to the deputies. Buzetti’s men will see the guns and back down. Then we tell them they’re under arrest.”
Byron stared at the map and pinched his bottom lip with his fingers. “Maybe.”
Randolph ran a hand over his hair. “Well, what do you think will happen?” He tried not to imagine the event itself.
“The town boys’ll probably run like hell. And Buzetti, once he figures the odds, might decide to let his lawyer do the fighting.”
Randolph placed a finger on the map. “And if not?”
“If we do it right,” Byron said, “they won’t fight a big group. They’re not crazy, and they won’t be expecting us. They’ll be there to load liquor, not to fight deputies.”
Randolph began rubbing his hands together. “The little details, you’ve got to set them up. You and the old marshal.” He wanted to think that the arrest was not in revenge for Walter, but it was difficult not to wish that the one-eyed man would be there and would draw a pistol on a sawyer standing over him with a semiautomatic rifle. “I just don’t want anybody to get hurt,” he said quickly.
Byron looked at his brother. “Did Merville say that one-eyed bastard was along on this one? What’s his name, Crouch?”
“The marshal told me everyone was called in. There’s something like a thousand cases to be loaded.”
Byron walked over to the Victrola and lifted a round tray of discarded needles out of the cabinet. “The kid station agent told me he’d testify that old one-eye walked by the station a few hours before Walter was bitten.”
“Did he see him walk the track toward the mill?”
Byron shook his head. “Nope. Saw him carrying a sack, though. Got out of a car with it, walked in front of the headlights, and the car left.”
“A sack? What kind of sack?”
“Burlap,” Byron told him, pouring a waterfall of needles into a wastebasket by the door. “And something in it was moving.”
At five o’clock they were waiting at the yellow station in Poachum. The mill manager looked beyond the steep iron roof of a trapper’s house into a soaring cypress forest, not his tract, and passed the time by estimating board feet.
Byron followed his gaze. “You want every tree that walks?”
“That’s a lot of money standing there.”
“A forest is good for more things than shutters and weatherboard.”
The mill manager regarded him blankly. “Like what?”
“Why, just to look at, maybe.”
Randolph turned back to the trees and frowned. “Look at them for what?”
But before Byron could say anything, a locomotive whistle shrieked in the west, and their heads turned down the tracks.
Merville sidestepped down from the wooden coach and shuffled across the platform to meet them, his skin dusty pale. He rolled his shoulders inside his wilted coat and glanced at the waiting room. “Let’s step away over there by your engine. I don’t want no kind of son of a bitch seein’ me here.” They walked along the platform and down the steps onto the spur track toward Nimbus. Out of his rumpled jacket he took the high sheriff’s document and one of the stars.
Byron nodded. “You’ve got the authority, sure enough.”
They had trouble getting Merville up the steps into the cab of the engine, and Randolph wished he had dragged the crew car along.
Byron looked worried. “You’re stiffening up on us.”
Merville touched his throat at his open collar. “I feel like chewed tobacco. I’ll be glad when we get through with this, yeah.”
When the mill manager released the brakes and cracked the throttle, the engine sneezed and drifted backwards toward Nimbus through a tunnel of weeds and willow saplings exploding out of the clear-cut lowland. “I hope your sheriff can hold onto them longer than that other fellow we let him have.”
Merville stepped out of the way as Byron threw a slab into the firebox. “You know, since the lines been going all over, I been using that telephone more and more. I got a direct call into New Orleans right to the office of the federal prosecutor, yeah. I didn’t know you could do that. Nowadays it’s like you think of a man, maybe somebody you ain’t seen in ten years, and you just ring him up. The wire finds him.” He looked out as the engine backed through a dark grove of cypress. Next to the roadbed, blue herons were stabbing crawfish, ignoring the progress of the locomotive. “Everything’s tied to that wire.”
Byron threw in more wood and then took off his gloves, tossing them in the boilerhead tray. “And what did this federal man say?”
“He said if we live to do it, we can bring whoever we arrest straight to New Orleans and put ’em in his custody in parish prison. When we round up those boys tomorrow we’ll take ’em out on the eastbound. LaBat can kiss my ass.” He began to cough and settled back in the fireman’s seatbox. “That telephone,” he said after a while. “I didn’t have to get on a train to go see nobody. Just crank the phone and tell the operator to find whatever fool I want.”
Randolph looked out the cab window at the single new line running along the tracks on peeled poles. The man who put in the wire had told him that in five years nearly everyone in the country would have a telephone, and he thought about what that might mean. Anyone who witnesses wrongdoing could call for a policeman or a newspaperman. People would know everything, because the phones weren’t just ears and voices but eyes as well. He looked again at the copper wire. Like a vein, it would soon run head to foot through the body of the world.
Later in the mill office, Byron decided to use no more than ten men. Jules sat on his desk and listened to the plan, his big cowboy hat cocked to one side on his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I done left Texas to get away from the shooting kind of folks. I won’t do my wife no good all crippled up with pistol slugs.” He kept his eyes low as he spoke, and it was clear to Randolph that he was an employee, not someone bound to this problem by money and blood. An employee didn’t take chances for the company after the knock-off whistle blew. The mill manager said nothing and stared at the floor, surprised for a moment, but then realizing that neither the yard foreman nor chief millwright nor saw boss would allow himself to be deputized. Those of higher rank had plenty to lose. They went into Tiger Island, and some had local family. But he had to be sure. He told Merville and Byron to come with him, and together they walked down to the railroad engineer’s house in the white section of camp. When they stepped up onto his little porch, he came out, pulling his galluses onto his shoulders. He’d finished his shift but hadn’t yet cleaned the locomotive’s oil and soot off of him. He looked around, blinking at his company.
The mill manager stepped close, shook his hand, and said, “Rafe, we need to deputize you.”
The engineer looked back at his wife, who stood behind the screen door as Randolph explained the deputizing process. “They want me to help get that dago what paid to get the log spiked,” Rafe told her.
The woman was rubbing flour off her hands with her apron. “Is there gonna be guns?”
“Yes,” the mill manager told her.
“If he gets kilt, you going to feed me and our babies for the rest of our lives? He goes to town and gets stuck, you going to sew up the hole and keep sending his pay till he mends?” Her voice was an experienced weapon, and the engineer turned toward the men on his porch to view its effect.
Randolph stepped back. “I don’t want to put any burden on you, Rafe. Just give me an answer and we’ll move on.”
The engineer motioned with his chin. “Aw, if they was coming in the mill yard up to some mischief, I’d be with you. But this liquor stuff ain’t really the mill’s business, is it?”
Randolph heard Merville and Byron step off the porch behind him. He tipped his hat to Rafe’s wife and followed them out into the rutted street.
“I’ll run y’all down there with the engine,�
� Rafe called. “But I ain’t packing no gun.”
Byron pulled off his straw hat, looked up at the sun, and replaced it. “It’s not exactly like raising an army, is it? The only people who’ll go along are the ones who owe us, and the ones with no families.”
“And the crazy ones,” Merville said. “You got any crazy ones can shoot straight?” He pointed at the Winchester automatic rifle Byron was holding. “Show them that bear-killer and they’ll think it’s a party they going to.”
A crop-eared yellow dog came up close, and Byron held out his boot for it to sniff. “You can’t just ask, for God’s sake. We’ve got to go in and tell them what they’ve got to do for us.”
“You handle the next one, then. Where’s Clovis Hutchins, the drunk that promised he’d turn preacher if I kept him on?” He pulled his watch. “He’s on the first boiler gang, so he’s off now.”
They walked over to the barracks where the single men lived, a long, two-story box punctuated at intervals with single-pane windows propped open with ax handles. Turning into the bottom hall they walked through the smells of tobacco, liniment, sweat, and unemptied chamber pots until they found Hutchins washing up in a corner of his little room.
Byron pitched a star to him and Hutchins caught it in his towel. “What you giving me a medal for?”
“It’s a badge,” he told him. “Be down at the locomotive at four in the morning. Wear that and I’ll tell you what to do.”
Hutchins looked at the shiny weapon dangling from Byron’s right hand. “That’s a .401, ain’t it?” He dried his hands and took it reverently, working the action, finding the safety and flicking it on and off. “Where you want me to pin this here badge on, Mr. Byron?”
“You can wear it on your drawers for all I care. Just be on time. We’re going to arrest some fellows, and that’s all you need to know. Don’t tell anyone about this.”
Hutchins handed back the weapon. “I’ll be there, boss. Do like you tell me.” He drew a hand across his bald chest, holding the badge by one of its points, positioning it over his right nipple.
Outside, Randolph trod on a mule dropping and stopped to wipe his foot. “So you’re right. Now there’s four of us.”
“Five,” Merville said. “Minos will do what I tell him.”
“Are you sure of that?”
The marshal gave him a look and the mill manager nodded. “Okay, then. Five,” he agreed.
In the saloon, Norbert, the young fireman for the narrow-gauge dummy engine, was getting a drink. A new man in camp, too smart for his job, Byron figured he was safe enough to ask. They pulled him out into the yard and talked to him a long time before he agreed to be deputized, and it cost the mill manager a five-dollar raise. Byron watched the big man pocket his star and walk off toward his shack, then said, “Six.”
Merville pulled a handkerchief and wiped his neck. “I got to go sit on your porch awhile. I’m done.”
“Go on into the house,” Byron told him. “Make yourself at home. Ella can fix you a drink.”
Randolph bent and looked. Merville’s eyes were staring, red-rimmed. “Rest up, Marshal, and we’ll finish this.”
Byron touched the old man’s shoulder. “Make her play a record for you.”
“My dancing days is over,” he said, giving them a handful of badges and angling away, carefully sidestepping a rut.
Byron looked after him. “Well, we’ll have to drop in on the Negroes.” They struck out across the dummy line track and walked through the mill to avoid the log ramp and its avalanche of bark and mud. The gangs of men catching lumber and sorting it glanced at them but didn’t stop working, because boards were flying through air filled with blinding, cinnamon-colored cypress dust. Threading through the rack yard, they entered the lower camp where brown ducks and fish snakes navigated standing green pools, and everything smelled of wet, burned wood, chicken dung, and Ivory soap. In the Negro barracks they found Clarence Williams’s room bare as a pauper’s coffin. The man across the hall raised up from his cot and told them he was on shift. They walked back to the rack yard and found him finger-tossing two-by-fours to a man high up on an air-dry stack, who waited for each board to stall in the air next to him and then closed his hand on it.
Byron raised a finger and both men looked at him. “Take a break,” he said to the man on the stack.
Williams was running with sweat and stepped back into the shade cast by the pile of lumber. “Mr. Byron.”
“Clarence, we need you to be a deputy for tomorrow, to help us round up some of those Tiger Island bootleggers.” Byron held up a badge and put it in Williams’s long fingers.
The stacker rolled his eyes up. “You ain’t gonna let them use me for no target practice, is you, Mr. Byron?”
“Keep your head down and listen to what I say tomorrow, you won’t get hurt. I want you on the train at four o’clock.”
Williams looked at the needle on the back of the metal. “I ain’t never been on this side of no badge before.”
Byron tossed him the Winchester. “I’ll give you one like this, loaded up. All you do is flick off the safety and pull the trigger.”
“Sure enough? You don’t got to work nothing? It just reload itself?”
Byron looked around for the other man. “Your partner, will he shoot or run?”
Williams laughed, showing a mouth full of crooked teeth. “He so cross-eyed, he shoot and the bullet be goin’ around the rabbit and back again.”
Randolph held up a hand and gave him a serious look. “Can you find us three like yourself we can deputize?”
A bead of sweat ran down Williams’s scar as he turned his head toward the barracks. “I can show you three Negro gennelmens won’t never have to back up to the pay window.”
The last one they visited was Minos. At six o’clock they found him in the boiler house disconnecting an injector from a steam line, his shirt off, thick leather gloves dribbling sweat when he reached up to turn a valve. He waved the men off, unable to talk above the roar of the fireboxes and a steam leak from a faulty valve stem. They backed out of the gangway into the slanting sunshine and waited. A few minutes later, he came out buttoning a wet denim shirt, and Byron told him what his father had planned.
Minos pulled a handkerchief and wiped his face hard. “I talked to Daddy two days ago and he was mad.”
“He says you’ll go with us.”
“Then I guess that’s what I’ll do.”
Randolph clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re the last man. We’re all set.”
“Who’s the others?”
The mill manager gave the list. A pipe banged in the boiler room, and Minos looked suspiciously toward the noise. “I don’t know if the old man can take it.”
“He’s got to go. All our authority comes from him.”
Minos shook his head and looked at his asbestos-covered boots. “Shit, he’s almost seventy-five years old.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Merville sat in a rocker on Byron’s porch and watched the mill yard suddenly fold in half like a newspaper and fall inward on itself, the smokestacks tumbling horizontal, workers and mules walking in and out of a seam in the earth. His ears whistled, his eyes went dead and then came back to life. He saw the mill come to rights, but twisted, as if everything had begun to melt. He felt noise and a little breath at his ear, and his head drifted around to a woman who was saying something kind. Was it his own wife? He opened his mouth, feeling he could never again make words, and was amazed to hear himself ask for aspirin and water.
“Surely,” Ella said. Her skirt stirred the air, and at once she was next to him again. After he washed down the pills, he saw her looking at him closely and then felt her hands on him. “You come in where it’s a little cooler.” The next thing he knew she’d sat him in Byron’s chair and turned an electric fan toward him. He shuddered as his eyesight squeezed down again, turning the room warped and jaundiced, as if he were viewing it through a film of varnish. Before him was a mahogany th
ing he did not recognize, bent and angled like a wooden tabernacle, and the woman said she would play some music for him. Merville blacked out and began to dream about the men on horseback who fired his father’s barn because he wouldn’t tell them where he’d buried his coins. He watched the deserters hang his brother by one foot from a live oak, claiming they would cut him down when the father relented. Little Etienne was not even crying; he was so thin the rope barely cut his ankles, and he swung patiently like a chicken who didn’t understand what was coming. His father told them there were no coins and a deserter drew from his muddy blouse an old single-shot pistol. His father went down on his knees and said if they wanted to hurt him, they should shoot his mule instead. So the deserters, having murdered so many men that they considered the death of a good mule a greater tragedy, did as he asked. Merville decided then that if he lived to be two hundred years old he would never be like these stinking outlaws, would never allow a kinked desire for blood to rise in him the way it did in these robbers’ eyes before their weapons bucked and his father’s fly-bled mule went down in its patched traces.
Merville’s ears vibrated with a sound like the moans of a dying man haunted by nightmare. He opened his right eye to the abrasion of a fiddle and words about lovelight and twilight and silver-haired lovebirds riding the train to dreamland and the kiss of gentle years. At this groaning music, his mind snapped open like a windowshade unblinding a sunrise, and he saw his friend the priest, waiting in the dark confessional for truth from the sweet-faced man who told of his stealing, from the woman who wanted her doctor’s hands on her, from the wife who dreamed her husband dead, and then he saw himself kneeling before Father Schultz and felt at once gilded like a morning-bright pane because he could not think of one thing to confess. The image faded as the music rose around him like the whir of a saw, the nasal moaning so cloying and false that the marshal struggled to his feet and stretched out his hands toward the dark wood to put an end to the sung lies of the glossy machine.
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