“Told you, he taking care of his bidness.”
With that said, Dudley whipped out a knife with a big shiny blade from his boot, and Poudlum and I shrank back in fear. But he simply took it and stabbed it into a can of our beans and carved the lid off. Then he licked the blade and turned it on a can of sardines as he said, “I’m fixing to partake of some of this grub y’all brought. You boys want to join me?”
I was starving and I figured Poudlum was too, but I knew I had rather eat dirt than dine with Dudley. Poudlum confirmed my suspicion when he made a gagging sound from behind me.
“Uh, you go ahead, Dudley. We had something earlier on the boat,” I lied.
It wasn’t a pleasant sight watching Dudley gobble up our food. After he finished and let out a huge belch, I asked him, “Say, Dudley, do you think it would be all right if we step out on the porch and see what the weather is like?”
“Naw,” he said. “Silas say for me to keep y’all inside.”
“I believe we’re being held captive!” Poudlum whispered.
“You think we ought to make a dash for the door?”
“I ’spect not ’cause he might whip out that big blade if we did,” Poudlum said.
While Dudley was carving open a can of sausage I whispered to Poudlum, “Let’s just play along and something will open up for us.”
In a little while after Dudley had stuffed himself on our food we noticed he was nodding off while seated at the table.
I signaled to Poudlum and he began to creep along the wall to the right and I did the same to the left. Our plan was to circle around Dudley and dart out the front door.
We were almost there when he leapt up and darted over to block the front door quicker than a water bug.
He stood there, back to the door, knife in hand and said, “I done told y’all Silas said not to let you out the front door.”
We both froze and I knew we had to think fast if we wanted to outwit a halfwit. My eyes searched the room and lighted on a door at the back of the room. I figured it must be the back door leading out of the shack.
“How about that back door, Dudley?” I said. “Silas didn’t say we couldn’t go out it, did he?”
A bewildered look came over his face for a moment, then he said, “Naw, he never said that.”
“Then how about we go out that door over there,” I said, pointing.
“I reckon it’ll be all right,” Dudley said with a befuddled look on his poor face. “He didn’t say nothing about y’all not doing that.”
“Then we just gonna walk over there and ease out that door and you can have all that food we brought, okay, Dudley?”
“I reckon that’ll be all right,” he told me with a blank look.
“Ain’t no need for that knife, Dudley,” I told him. “Just put it away and save it to open all those cans of food we brought you.”
We were highly relieved when he slid the blade back into his boot and said, “Y’all really gonna leave all this food here?”
“That’s right, Dudley. You can have it all for yourself. We’ll just go out that back door and be on our way. And tell Silas he can have our boat to take care of his business in.”
While I was talking Poudlum and I were slowly edging along the wall towards what we thought was the back door.
“How y’all gonna get back up the river without your boat?” Dudley asked.
“We’ll walk through the woods over to Highway 84 and then just follow it to the ferry landing in Coffeeville”
I was just making something up to pacify Dudley, but when I heard what I had said it did sound like it could be a plan.
We were getting real close to that back door. A few more steps and I had my hand on the latch.
“You ready?” I mouthed to Poudlum.
When he nodded I lifted the latch and flung the door open.
What shocked me was just before we darted through it, Dudley came speeding across the room, like the darting of a snake’s head just before the bite, hit us both in the back and drove us through what turned out to be the door to a back room instead of to the outside.
We crashed to the wooden floor and got splinters in our hands when we used them to break our fall.
Before we could look around the door slammed shut and we heard the latch fall into place.
I had to agree with Poudlum when he said, “I do believe we done been outwitted by a halfwit.”
Chapter 11
Trapped
It was pitch black in that room. As I felt around with my hands I could feel the floor was put together tightly with thick pine boards, and there was no light seeping in from any other door or window.
When I recovered from the shock, I told Poudlum that I wished we had some kind of light.
“I got some wooden matches in my pocket,” he said. “I’ll strike one soon as I pick these splinters out of my hands.”
In a moment, I heard him scrape the head of his match across the floor, and it flamed to life and illuminated our prison. I had been right, there was no other way out besides the door we had been so rudely pushed through, nor were there any windows. It also appeared to be more stoutly constructed than the front room.
It was bare of any furnishings, but before the match burned down to Poudlum’s finger tips and he had to shake it out, I saw the outline of some boxes or cartons stacked against the back wall.
“You see that?” Poudlum said as he blew on his fingertips.
“Yeah, what you think it is?”
“I’ll strike another match and we’ll see,” he said.
“Wait a minute, how many matches you got left?”
“Maybe a dozen or so.”
“Too bad we don’t have something to light so we don’t have to use up our matches.”
“I know what we can do,” Poudlum said.
“What?”
“Old Dudley ain’t as smart as the bank robbers were.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He didn’t take our pocket knives. What I can do is carve out a good long splinter from the floor, light it, and it’ll burn long enough so we can see what this room looks like, and what’s in them boxes. Just hold on, I can do it by feel.”
I heard the metallic click as Poudlum opened his Barlow.
“What I’ll do is carve two good-sized notches in the edge of this board, and then I’ll put the blade of my knife into one of ’em and slide it down to the other one.”
“Be careful,” I told him. “Don’t cut yourself.”
“Only thing gonna get cut is old Dudley’s nose if he sticks his head through that door.”
In a few moments, I heard the cracking sound as Poudlum pried the splinter loose from the board.
“Here, you take it while I strike another match,” he told me.
We fumbled through the darkness and made the transfer. Then Poudlum struck another match. It flamed up and he held it to the end of the splinter. It sputtered to life like some kind of miniature torch. I held it overhead and we turned toward the far wall and the boxes.
The splinter cast an eerie light about the dark room as it flickered and sputtered.
There were about a dozen boxes, and as I held the light, Poudlum opened the top one, reached inside and pulled out a quart fruit jar. When he screwed the lid off of it, we could smell the strong odor of alcohol.
“White lightning!” Poudlum said. “Looks like we done found ourselves another bootlegger!”
“We got to figure out a way to get out of here,” I said as Poudlum was replacing the illegal whiskey.
“We’ll cut our way out,” he said.
“How in the world we gonna do that?”
“With our knives. Hold the light down close to the floor. There! See the nail heads where the board is nailed to the beam underneath it?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah, I see ’em.”
Poudlum asked me to move the light down the board a little ways. “Stop right there!” he said. “There’s the nail heads in the next beam. Let me mark the spot with my knife.”
I watched as he marked the spots between the beams by cutting a big notch at each starting point. “It’s going to take a lot of whittling to cut through that heavy board with only our pocket knives,” I surmised.
“Got any better ideas?” Poudlum asked.
“Nope. Let’s commence to whittling. I think we can do it in the dark after we get started. That way we can both work at the same time.”
Poudlum got a good v-shaped wedge started and then held our little torch while I did the same at the other end. Then I spit on the dying embers of our torch to make sure it was completely out, and we went to work in the dark with our knives.
It wasn’t long before I felt my blade cut through the board. Then I folded it back into the case and opened the middle-sized blade.
After I had about a half-inch cut in the board, I asked Poudlum how long he thought it would take us to cut it all the way through.
“How long you think we been at it?” he asked.
“It’s been a good twenty minutes, maybe thirty.”
“Judging from what I done cut and feeling across the rest of the board, I figure it’ll take us another two hours at least, and that’s if we keep steady at it.”
“Good,” I said. “That way we can sneak on out of here right after dark.”
“We might not have to cut it clean through. Maybe we’ll be able to stomp on it and break it out when we get over halfway.”
“I think my knife’s getting dull, Poudlum.”
“Here, take my whetrock and sharpen it up. While you’re at that, I’ll see if I can slice a splinter out of this board from my end to yours.”
I could hear Poudlum grunting and working the blade of his knife while I scraped the blade of my own across the little flat stone.
In a few moments I heard a slight cracking sound as he pried out the splinter from the edge of the board, and lo and behold, a little sliver of light came filtering up from underneath the house.
“Look at that!” Poudlum whispered excitedly. “That’s enough light to really see how to cut. We won’t need no more fire, which is fine with me, because it made me nervous having a flame around all that shine. One mistake and it would blow us to kingdom come.”
As we cut deeper and deeper into the board, Poudlum kept slicing splinters from it lengthwise. By the time it looked like it was beginning to get dusk dark outside, we were only about two-thirds of the way through.
We had both developed blisters on our hands and that had slowed us considerably. “My hand aches something awful, Poudlum, and I can’t hardly find a way to turn my fingers where there ain’t a blister.”
“Mine, too,” he said. “But I got an idea.”
“What is it?”
“We could just finish cutting it through on one end and it would be easy to just break the other end. I’m gonna cut a piece off the tail of my shirt to wrap my hand in. If you’ll just keep me a sharp knife ready, I’ll have this sucker cut through in another thirty minutes.”
“I would sure hate for them to come busting in here and catch us after we done gone to all this work,” I told Poudlum while I was sharpening his knife and he was using mine.
He stopped with the knife for a moment and looked at the door to the front room and asked, “Didn’t that door open into this room?”
“Yeah, I believe it did. Why?”
“They must be fifteen or twenty cases of whiskey over there. If we walked real soft-like and stacked it all against the door, they couldn’t get in here so easy.”
“Good idea! I’ll get right to it.”
“By the time you get ’em all moved over there, I should have this board just about ready to bust out.”
I walked soft as a cat, found the squeaky spots and remembered to avoid them as I made sixteen round trips across the floor. I was surprised at how heavy the cases were, but I discovered each one contained twelve quarts, which was equal to three gallons.
When I finished, I had transported forty-eight gallons of moonshine and had it snuggled up against the door, and I knew it would take a mighty shove to open it, especially if we added our weight to it.
After I returned to Poudlum’s side, I saw he only lacked about a quarter of an inch before it looked like we might be able to break the floorboard out. It was at that moment we heard the ruckus up front. We froze for a moment, then tiptoed over to the wall and placed our ears against it.
Silas had come back, and he was yelling at Dudley, “You dumb idiot! I told you not to let them boys leave—”
“But-but-but, Silas,” Dudley interrupted with a stutter. “I never did!”
“Then where in the dickens are they, you blubbering hunk of lard!”
“I got ’em shut up in the shine room.”
“Why did you put ’em in there?”
“It was the only way I could keep them from trying to leave.”
“Well, they better be in there, ’cause if they ain’t we done lost two hundred dollars, and I will have to take it out of your hide.”
Poudlum leaned over and whispered to me, “What you think he meant by saying he would lose two hundred dollars if we ain’t in here?”
“I don’t know. Listen!” I said as the conversation on the other side of the door began again.
Silas was yelling at Dudley again. “Look at this mess, empty cans everywhere. Why you done eat every morsel of food them boys brought with ’em and I was counting on that to feed ’em on the way down the river to Mobile.”
Poudlum poked me and said, “You hear what he said? I better get back to cutting that board!”
“You think we could break it out right now if we had to?”
“We might be able to.”
“Then let’s listen a little bit more.”
“How did you get ’em to go in the shine room?” Silas was asking.
“I tricked ’em,” Dudley said boastfully.
“You tricked ’em?” Silas said as he roared with laughter. “You ain’t never tricked nobody about nothing.”
“Well, I did them,” Dudley said.
“How did you do it?’
“I just made like it was the back door to the house and not to the shine room. When they opened it and poked they heads in, I give ’em a shove, slammed the door, and dropped the latch.”
“You better not have hurt either one of them. Mr. Kim don’t like damaged goods.”
“What’s Mr. Kim gonna do with ’em?” Dudley asked.
“He takes ’em to some of his friends he knows who are in charge of big freight ships fixin’ to go to China.”
“What they do with the boys on the ships?”
“They use ’em as cabin boys.”
“What do a cabin boy do?” Dudley asked.
“They do things like serve the captain his meals, shine his shoes, and I don’t know what all.”
“I kind of hate to think about them two boys getting sent all the way over to China and never seein’ they kinfolks again.”
“Don’t you go gittin’ soft on me, Dudley. That two hundred dollars is gonna set us up somewhere on a bayou down there, and we’ll be eatin’ shrimp and oysters instead of catfish all the time. I been waitin’ on a opportunity like this for quite a spell, then that storm blew ’em right into our hands.”
Poudlum grabbed me by the shirt and whispered, “They worse than the Klan! Gonna sell us into slavery to some Chinese folks. Let’s bust on out of here right now!”
I started to move away from the wall with Poudlum when we heard Silas say, “We need to feed ’em somethin’. Open the door real careful and give ’em a couple of biscuits while I hold my p
istol on ’em.”
“He’s got a gun!” Poudlum hissed.
“All the more reason to skedaddle right now! Come on!” I said.
I lingered for another moment and heard Dudley say, “Them biscuits is cold, left from this morning. Let me fix ’em somethin’ hot.”
“All right,” Silas said. “Scramble up some eggs for ’em.”
We had a reprieve, at least for a few minutes, so we tiptoed back over to the hole we were cutting. It had gotten dark outside, and once again we had to work in the dark.
“Let’s both get a real good grip and see if we can rip it on out,” Poudlum suggested.
We planted our feet on the floor, grasped the board with both hands, put our backs into it and pulled, but the tough old pine board just wouldn’t break off.
Before I could say what next, Poudlum had dropped to his knees and was frantically cutting at the board with his knife again.
“Shore would like some of them scrambled eggs,” he said as he attacked the board. “But I don’t plan on waiting around for ’em.”
“Me, neither,” I told him as I took the whetrock out and began sharpening the big blade of my knife. About every thirty seconds Poudlum would pass me a dull knife, and I would pass him a sharp one.
I was beginning to suspect we weren’t going to be able to get the board out of the floor and escape before they attempted to bring us some food, and it turned out I was correct.
Suddenly, there was a pounding on the door, and Silas yelled out, “We fixin’ to bring you boys some supper. When Dudley opens that door, y’all best stay back so you don’t get hurt.”
There was a brief silence before Dudley said, “They ain’t answering.”
“I know that. Don’t you think I can hear?” Silas scolded. “Just set they plates on the floor and open the door.”
“Here they come, Poudlum!” I said.
“The stack of shine will hold ’em for a while,” he reassured me. “We gonna make it. I think in just a little bit we can both stomp on the board, and it’ll break down easier than if we pull up on it.”
We heard a thud on the door.
“Well, open the door,” Silas yelled.
Trouble on the Tombigbee Page 9