Minos looked down at the heap. “Every week he’d throw these things behind there. When we was kids, if we tried to get at it, he’d wear us out with a belt, let me tell you.”
Father Schultz bent over and examined a bayonet. “What will happen to these things?”
Minos kicked a cotton hook back into the pile. “A long time ago, he told me what to do. I’ll get a couple men to help me put it in skiffs and we’ll throw it in the middle of the river.”
The mill manager sat on the edge of Merville’s bed. An arsenal, he was thinking—enough to equip a crazed, primal army. He watched the priest place a finger on the razory edge of a hatchet, and with a shudder Randolph began to imagine all the things that had never happened.
After ten days, the mill phone jingled only with orders for siding and not with the concerns of judges or reporters. Randolph understood the cliché that news, like fish, becomes less valuable with age.
LaBat still called every day to report on his efforts to find Crouch, the one-eyed snake carrier and killer of housekeepers. And he informed the mill manager that the railroad’s investigation into the raid was stopped dead in its tracks when a Southern Pacific accountant discovered a combined total of $52,000 in the train crew’s bank accounts. The one morning LaBat did not call, Randolph was relieved, as though beginning to believe the subject no longer worth a daily consultation. But after lunch, he stood in his kitchen and stared long at the swirling linoleum before the stove, deciding to use the new phone on Lillian’s desk to call the sheriff himself. A deputy told him the sad news, how LaBat had somehow cart-wheeled down his stairs at home and broken his neck.
“It was an accident?” the mill manager asked, his voice sailing up.
“You know, it’s a funny thing,” the deputy said. “A man goes up and down the same stairs for twenty, thirty years. One day he misses that top step, maybe. How do you suppose that happens?”
Randolph found Byron on his porch, his legs crossed, his bandaged stump propped over a knee. He received the news with no expression. Turning in his rocker, he yelled through the screen, and the nasal hillbilly voice that began to unwind on the Victrola sang of a railroad engineer’s head burning up in the firebox of his engine. Randolph thought of the image. A head in a firebox, flames for eyes.
Ella came to the screen. “This is the sixth time,” she announced, shifting her gaze to Randolph as he eased into a chair. “He cried through the first three. He’s getting used to it, I reckon.”
“I went over to see little Walter,” Byron said. “He’s recovered almost all the way. Amazing how they are at that age.” He looked at his brother for the first time. “I got him up in my good arm.”
“By, what do you think?”
“About what?”
“That last man.” Just saying the words made him tired, because he wanted to be through with it all and think only about his wife, Walter, sawing timber, and moving home. It scared him the way his brother looked when he talked about the boy.
“He’s got to do whatever’s in him.”
“What will that be?”
Byron frowned. “You’re asking me to predict him like a line in a song I’ve never heard before.” He closed his eyes and listened again to the keening record. From the woods came the call of a pull boat’s whistle, far off, pained, like a white egret caught in the jaws of an alligator.
Ten days later, August came in damp and airless, capturing the camp in heat. Machinery sweated at sunrise, beads of condensation rolling like bugs off every iron thing, and the millwrights stepped up lubrication as the air itself washed oil from the mill’s many bearings. The locomotives required more sand on the water-slick rails, the women spent more time at their wash pots as towels and bedsheets soured overnight and never seemed to dry on the beaded clotheslines. On some days, clothespinned and spiritless overalls gathered more water from the atmosphere than they gave up. Jules and the mill manager worked orders and figures in their shirtsleeves, a series of lacquered engine nuts holding down their paperwork against a battery of oscillating fans. Randolph was happily distracted, calculating profits on an unexpected order for water-tank lumber. He was engaged like a machine in his mill, a moving part of the process leading from stump to farmstead in Minnesota. His work shut out worry, became again life’s real adventure. He remained on his guard, but nothing could happen in the mill yard, which, after all, was being watched like a fortress.
One day in mid-month he walked home for lunch, ravenous, empty of care, looking forward to a conversation with his wife, and came through the rear door into the kitchen, whistling, just in time for Crouch to step from behind that same door and call out “For Buzetti,” as he fired a shot into the mill manager’s back with a .30 caliber Luger. Randolph felt a narrow spear of fire in his heart and then the floor struck him like an onrushing train, the busy and blurring design of the linoleum forming the connected shards of his great final catastrophe. He arched his back and turned his head in time to see another slug shock through his left forearm and to hear his assailant calling out a rhythmic and spiraling string of Italian punctuated by another ear-splitting pop that gouged splinters out of the baseboard, a deliberate miss, he knew, to make him suffer through a last few moments of hope. Randolph saw a soft flow of white cotton at the door leading into Walter’s room and then a red blossom as his wife’s little .32 loaded with black-powder shells banged a slug into the one-eyed man. She fired the pistol four more times, once missing her target and spearing Randolph in the back of his left hand, this bullet causing the most painful wound of all. Feeling for a moment the warmth of safety, he then heard Crouch raring in pain and scuffling with someone, cursing, flinging words like bitch and stupid fucking whore and worse, his wife screaming under blows. He tried to turn over, and after two attempts, air rushing out of his mouth with a cupful of blood, he did, only to see the one-eyed man looming above, grinning like a death’s head, the dark Luger pointed straight down at him. “Have a look where you going,” Crouch said, bending closer and with his bloody fingers raising the black leaf, revealing a tortured, waxy ball, a fat yellow worm on its surface, some infected scar caused by a flame, perhaps gunpowder poured in and lit by a man wearing absurd epaulets and a gilded sword. Randolph stared at the eye, this jaundiced pain that Crouch carried with him like a fiery coal to burn whomever it could—and he was not afraid, but simply sorry. His hand ached so much that he was distracted from his approaching death, and he opened his mouth to speak—of what, he had no idea—when a church bell tolled and the yellow eyeball revolved completely back into its skull, Buzetti’s cousin falling onto him and rolling off, as slack as jelly.
Above Randolph hovered the rocky face of the Irish housekeeper, the big woman holding an eleven-inch Griswold skillet with her two chapped hands. “Sure I’ve sent the poor fellow to blazes,” she cried, turning to Lillian, who Randolph could see was also down on her back.
The doctor, drawn yet again by gunfire, cautiously stepped in through the screen door, looked around, and touched his chin. “Well,” he said, kneeling down next to Randolph and opening his shirt, glancing the while over to the still figure next to him. “That one’s head is completely flat. What’d she do, drop a stove on him?”
The mill manager opened his mouth and tried to answer, but the air for his voice was coming out somewhere else. The doctor became more focused, thumbed his patient’s eyelids, counted his pulse, watched the blood spread out from his shoulder across the olive and red curls of the linoleum. Randolph could hear his wife’s healthy crying, then doors rattling open and the sound of boots and a despairing, angry flux of voices above him in the failing light. It occurred to him that he was listening but not seeing, that the great pain welling up inside him had nothing to do with a bullet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Many of the sawmill’s workers seemed bogged in a relentless hangover for days, as if caught up in the misery of the people who controlled their lives. Minos moped along to the commissary for cheese and bre
ad, then came out to sit on the steps next to the doctor, who was eating sardines and crackers off a blinding square of waxed paper, neither man speaking as they washed down the food with swigs out of sweating soft-drink bottles. From down at the saloon came the sirenlike howl of a drunk. The doctor rolled his sallow eyes. “Damnation.” He bit a cracker as if he meant to hurt it. “It’s a trapper in there with Big Norbert’s cousin. I saw them go in earlier.”
Minos threw his cheese under the steps and stood up. “I’m surprised the place hasn’t been fought to pieces the past week, what with no law.” They walked to the corner of the commissary and looked over at the saloon, each understanding that the low, odorous building had lost its invisible power the minute Buzetti died. Only the momentum of the camp’s hard drinkers kept the place open at all.
The doctor put his hands in his pockets. “You know, that place’s a menace to health.”
The engineer spat into a wheel rut. “Galleri done run out of bonded and beer both. He’s down to a couple oil drums of moonshine.” He looked back to his house, down the row from Byron’s. “Wait here a minute while I check on something.” In ten minutes he was back, carrying a twenty-four-inch Coe’s wrench. Another round of hollering came up from the saloon.
“You can’t do better with a shovel?”
“It’s all I could find in the house. If it don’t work I got the old man’s pistol in my britches.”
At the saloon door, they were met by a millwright, coming out, who looked at the wooden-handled wrench. “Better not, Mr. Minos.”
“Let’s just see,” he said, sliding past, followed by the doctor. The trapper was a dark Indian who was straddling Big Norbert’s cousin, sitting on his back and drawing hatch marks on his neck with a skinning knife. Several men were trying to stop the fight, but whenever one pulled on the Indian’s arm he was met with a whistle from the blade.
“All right,” the doctor hollered, his face filling with blood. “I’m tired of fixing you dumb asses.” He grabbed the wrench from Minos and raised it high, addressing the Indian. “Drop that knife or I’ll wind up digging this out of your skull.”
The Indian turned his red eyeballs toward the doctor and stood. As the wrench came down, he grabbed the handle with his left hand and threw it spinning across the room, as though it were a playing card. “You couldn’t whup me with no two wrenches,” he said, pushing the doctor backwards through the door and off the porch, where he fell to the ground onto his back. He tried to get up but felt a brogan on his shoulder, not heavy, and looked up into a face frowning under a steamboat man’s cap.
“Stay down,” Minos told him. He wheeled and hollered at the trapper, who was turning on the porch to go back after Big Norbert’s beaten-down cousin. “Ay, muskrat.”
The trapper faced around and stared, his eyes crossed as though one of them had been beaten out of line by a sledge.
“What you gonna do with that knife?” Minos asked.
“Skin me a hide.”
“No you ain’t.”
“How you gonna stop me?”
Minos pulled his father’s Colt lightning and fired a round into the trapper’s shin, right over his mud-caked boots. The man yelped and threw his arms aloft as if he were slipping down on ice, the skinning knife flying up and sticking in the underside of the porch roof.
The doctor got up and walked through the puff of gun-smoke into the black side of the saloon, where he put a hand under a saw filer’s overalls strap and dragged him out into the sun, instructing him to fetch two five-gallon cans of kerosene from the commissary.
Galleri stepped out on the porch, his hands making questions in the air. “What’s going on?”
“Clear every worthless jarhead out of that bugger hole,” the doctor told him.
“What? What you going to do?” His lardy face bounced back and forth between the two men.
“Your floors are unsanitary,” the doctor announced. “We’re going to clean them so people can say you run a healthy place.”
Minos searched the writhing trapper’s pockets and stepped down off the porch. “Coal oil. Ten gallons ought to clean things up some.”
Galleri looked into the men’s faces. “This a joke, right?” Then, after a moment he hurried inside. From the back of the saloon came the sound of breaking glass, and the doctor and Minos dragged the bleeding Indian off the porch and dumped him out in the lane next to a pile of mule droppings.
When the kerosene arrived they went inside the white section and found that Galleri had broken out the jackpot windows in the slot machines and was scooping quarters and nickels into a sombrero. The saw filer set down a can in the middle of the floor, and Minos shot a hole into it near the bottom; next, they walked over to the black side and did the same, the slug bounding through the other side of the can and shattering a mirror behind the bar.
A tipsy, barefoot whore wandered out from the back, holding a pint can of pomade, come to see what the racket was about. When she smelled the kerosene, her feet froze to the floor, and she looked at the spreading silvery pool. “What you crazy white folks doin’?”
The doctor smiled at her. “Do you have a ready-made, my darlin?”
The woman drew a soggy cigarette from her bodice and held it out as though expecting someone to light it. “You wants to fire me up?” she asked, wavering.
Minos stepped around the running fuel and dug a kitchen match from a box on the bar. “Come here, girl.” He led her around to the front door and struck the match, the doctor following and putting his hand on the knob.
The woman leaned over and inhaled noisily, then let the smoke slide from her mouth and drift up her nostrils. “You gennelmens want something?”
When Minos took a step backwards and dropped the match to the floor, a yellow lip of flame grew patiently across the boards as though following a giant wick. The woman stepped onto the porch without making a sound, an expert at leaving trouble, and the men stayed in and closed the door behind her, then walked quickly along the wall to the springloaded back door. They strolled out casually, moving toward the canal, where they sat down on a bulkhead. For a long while, nothing seemed to be happening inside the building, but then the fire began to drum and snap, gray smoke snaking out around the closed windows. Something detonated with a thud, and after this noise every crack and seam in the saloon began to spray smoke. The mill’s fire whistle started to whoop, sliding up and down the scale, and the two of them walked around to stand with the gathering crowd, feigning surprise. A stretcher crew showed up for the wounded trapper, while the whore, trying to be inconspicuous, sauntered around to her cabin in back.
Minos pointed at her. “Looks like she’s going to pack, yeah.”
“She’ll be all right,” the doctor said. “Nobody’ll bill her for a burnt-up saloon.”
A team of workers rolled down a hose cart from the boiler room and began to hook up to the one hydrant in the mill yard. Minos walked over and grabbed a man by the arm. “Take your time,” he said.
The man looked over at the building, which was now a huge blossom of seething, slate-colored smoke. “You gone Baptist on us, Mr. Minos?”
“Go on back to the mill for that big wrench hanging by my chair. You got to get that hose on tight.” He looked at the other men. “All of you go get yourselves a wrench.” They did as he asked, moving toward the mill in no particular hurry. Meanwhile, the saloon hissed and boiled, sap running like water out of the knotholes, the tin roof crinkling and banging as if someone were inside throwing billiard balls against it. All at once the fire burned through a side wall, the air got in, and every board bled red and yellow flame. The onlookers scrambled back to escape the flash of heat and the ragtime notes of bottles breaking, the building lighting up like a paper bag and disappearing in a roaring bloom. The hose crew reappeared with their wrenches and proceeded to wet down the roof of the commissary, the two whore cabins out back, and three smoking-hot privies. The porch posts burned away upright, the window sashes fell out and flamed
in the yard, and the saloon pulsed hotter, a giant tulip of crackling orange light, until its roof collapsed in a tornado of sparks. Everyone not on shift was in the yard, watching respectfully as if the blaze were a play they’d paid good money to see.
Full dark showed only a bank of red coals, and the next morning revealed a rectangle of ash littered with giant rusty flakes of tin and the partially melted hulks of eight slot machines canted in the cinders like one-armed torsos. A bucker glancing at the debris on the way to his shift remarked that it looked like the day after Hell burned out.
That afternoon several thirsty men stood around the ashes like dogs whose bowls had been taken away, and Galleri, smudged and sick, appeared at the mill office, straw hat in hand. Jules asked what he could do for him.
“I didn’t have no insurance,” he said, turning his hat in front of him.
Jules threw down his pencil. “Hell, you the only man around here with a bank account.”
“Okay, I was ready to move on, but you got to admit, the building was worth somethin’. You got to admit that.”
“Aw, go on and move to Shirmer, or Tiger Island. Build yourself a barber shop or a little grocery store.”
“Hey, you know what happened.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I can’t get no free lumber?”
The assistant manager looked up at him for a long moment. “All right. I can let you have some number two stuff, siding and some joists.”
Galleri rocked from one foot to the other. “What about tin?”
Jules squinted meanly. “Hell, no. Your place was a boil on this mill’s ass, and you’re lucky to get a four-penny nail out of me.”
Galleri put on his hat. With his hand on the doorknob, he said, “One time, Buzetti offered me a thousand dollars to kill Mr. Byron.”
The assistant manager’s face snapped up. “Why didn’t you take it?”
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