Burial Ground

by Shuman, Malcolm

  Maybe, I thought, I should steer out further into the river, try to get around this current, but I discarded the idea almost as soon as I had it: If the engine quit then, we’d be at the mercy of forces we could never control. Pepper was still pointing, yelling something back at me, and I realized she was indicating something on the top of the bluff. I looked up and blinked.

  Something metallic flashed in my eyes.

  Ben saw it now, twisting around.

  The flash gave way to an outline, a man silhouetted against the sky. He had something long and sticklike in his hand, and he was pointing it in our direction.

  Ben sat up suddenly and I realized why he’d been so quiet: He’d been slipping out of his bonds and now he raised a hand, as if to shield himself, but it was too late.

  The bullet hit him in the midsection and I heard him grunt at the same time I heard the explosion. He rocked back, his hands flying up, and I jerked the tiller left, to get us onto the shore.

  It was too late: Ben was standing now, rocking the boat from side to side, and the next bullet hit him in the shoulder, spinning him around and causing his body to fall left, against the side of the boat.

  The little craft went over, and I gulped a mouthful of muddy water. Wetness surrounded me and something under the surface struck my leg. I grabbed for the side of the hull and felt my hand grip the edge. Ben was gone now, swept away by the current, but I saw Pepper a few feet away, arms flailing in the air. I reached out, caught her hand with my free one, and pulled.

  For a terrifying second our eyes met and then her hand let go and the waters took her away.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When I opened my eyes I was staring into the sun. The bottom half of my body floated, rising and falling on unseen currents. A fly buzzed near my ear, and I turned my head. There was tall grass on my left and above it, trees.

  I rolled onto my side and started to cough. Water trickled out of my mouth and with it the remains of my noon meal. When I finished retching I hoisted myself onto my hands and knees and looked around.

  My legs were in the water and my hands were invisible in a sea of mud. I tugged my arms loose and dragged myself forward, into the grass and out of the water.

  I had no idea where I was. Someone had shot at us, that much I vaguely remembered, and then I remembered the sucking waters and the terrible feeling as Pepper’s hand jerked away from my own.

  Gone. She and Ben were both gone and only I was left.

  I don’t think it sunk in.

  The sun was still hot but it was already low in the sky. Another hour or two and dusk would fall.

  I hauled myself to my feet and stood swaying on the river’s edge, trying to orient myself. What bank was I on? The current was flowing from my right to my left. So I’d beached on the same side we’d been on when the sniper had struck.

  But how far downstream was I?

  I craned my head, trying to look out over the water, but I was in a slight, convex bend, so that each end was blinded by vegetation. I could be a few feet from where we’d cap-sized, or a mile. I turned and took a step forward, my brain telling me I had to find a way out, and then my legs gave way and I toppled forward, into the brush.

  For a long time I looked down at the baked mud, my eyes following the cracks. I was alive, but what did it matter? I fought an overwhelming urge to close my eyes and slump forward.

  Then I heard branches breaking.

  Something was in the brush above.

  The trouble was I didn’t have the energy to fight it.

  Probably the man with the rifle. He’d find me here and then it would be over.

  “Come on,” I croaked. “Get it done.”

  The movement stopped, and then I heard a rushing of steps.

  I raised my eyes to the forest and saw movement.

  The vines parted and Pepper lurched out.

  She looked like a mudhead kachina, slathered over with gray gumbo, her straw hat replaced by a nest of dried mud and leaves.

  “Alan!” she cried out, and I thought she’d never looked better.

  I scrambled back to my feet and lurched toward her.

  “My God, I thought you were dead,” I blurted.

  “Same here,” she said and grabbed my hands with both of hers. For a brief second we embraced and then drew away, mutually, as if we’d shocked each other.

  She sat down then and I saw deep scratches on her arms and streaks on her face.

  “I’ve been wandering along the bank,” she mumbled. “I kept telling myself there was a chance that you might have made it …”

  “And you were right.”

  “I wonder if there’s a chance for Ben,” she said.

  I shook my head. “He took one bullet in the midsection and then another one in the arm or leg. If they didn’t kill him he must have drowned.”

  “But who?”

  I shook my head. “Somebody who feels threatened by our being out here.”

  I thought of the silhouette atop the bluff. I couldn’t see the face or even get a good notion of the body size; all I knew was it was a man—or someone in a man’s clothes.

  “There’s only one person that’s got any stake in this,” she said. “Your friend Willie Dupont.”

  “Isn’t there another?” I asked.

  The sound of the motor cut off her reply.

  It was an outboard, coming upstream, on our side of the river. The noise grew louder and as we waited it emerged from the trees on the left, skimming against the current, thirty feet from shore. A lone figure hunched over the tiller, baseball cap shading the face.

  Pepper raised an arm to wave and then, before I could say anything, dropped it. We were thinking the same thing, of course: What if it was the killer?

  We watched the motorboat round the bend. Five minutes later the sound of the engine had died away.

  “Well,” she said. “What do we do now?”

  “You don’t have a plan?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  I managed a smile. “That man in the boat was going somewhere. We could toss a coin but I say let’s go up-stream.”

  “And if he was the killer?”

  “Then we’ll have to watch ourselves, won’t we?”

  “Alan, listen, about all the trouble I’ve given you …”

  “That way,” I said, pointing.

  We started along the beach, trying to keep on the dried mud strip between the thick grass and the plastic goo at water’s edge. Logs barred our way, and every time I climbed over one I felt more strength drain away. We came to the end of the bend and I stopped. Ahead was a bluff, jutting out over the water. Even from this angle it was unmistakable: It was the cliff on which our attacker had stood. The river had swept us only a couple of hundred yards downstream.

  I stood motionless, waiting for a figure to appear against the sky, but there was none.

  “Maybe he’s gone,” Pepper whispered.

  “And if he isn’t?” I looked around for a path and she pointed to a breach in the forest. There was a narrow game trail and we followed it, ducking into the protective darkness of the woods.

  We had to climb to the top of the bluff, because if someone had been there, that meant there might be a road, and a road meant a way out. Unless he was still there, waiting.

  Fifty steps into the woods I saw a rise to our left and motioned to her. We trudged upward, trying to ignore the thorns and vines. The bluff was a relict ridge, poking out into the floodplain from the hills at its back, with the river eating away its base. Eventually the river would claim it all, but not quite yet.

  I paused, panting, and wiped the sweat off my face with an arm. What if we were wrong and there was no road above, no trail of any kind? What if our attacker had just moored a boat there and climbed up to pick us off as we passed?

  I took a deep breath and flailed away at the briars, managing to edge upward another two feet. Pieces of shirt and skin came off together and then I was free. I looked back for Pepper. She
was taking a slightly different route, but I could tell it was no easier. I turned back to see what was in front of me.

  High grass.

  I blundered into it and ten feet on halted.

  There was a clear space ahead, with no trees. I forced myself the rest of the way, and thirty seconds later I stood in a clearing. To my relief, I saw a faint vehicle track leading from the direction of the hills, on the right.

  It was a way out.

  I waited until Pepper was beside me.

  “Let’s check it out,” I said. “You wait in the woods and I’ll see if the coast is clear.”

  She shook her head. “No way. I’ve come this far.”

  Too tired to argue, I began to edge along the clearing, heading toward the river. Whoever had shot at us was probably gone now, but maybe we could find some shell casings as evidence.

  The clearing was eerily still and the only noise was the muted wash of the river below. Even the birds were quiet, and as I scanned the yellow grass that stuck up in clumps, I had the sense of visiting a dead place.

  The ground rose ahead of me, to the dropoff over the river, but there were some ruts before I got there, as if someone had spun his wheels in the earth. But there were too many ruts to have been made by a vehicle. And as I neared the spot, I saw that the scars weren’t ruts at all.

  “Alan,” Pepper breathed from beside me and I turned involuntarily to look at her. She was trembling, like she was caught in a sudden blast of air, and when I reached out to reassure her I saw that my own hand was trembling, too.

  The places where the earth had been turned up were more than ruts and even from where we stood, ten yards away, I could see something orange.

  I fought the sickness churning my belly and made myself go closer. The orange was from Ben Picote’s jumpsuit. He was lying beside a shallow grave, facedown.

  I looked at the graves closer to the bluff: There were two that looked fresh, a matter of a few days at most, and I thought I knew who they belonged to.

  Pepper pointed: “Are those the—?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The two convicts.”

  “My God.”

  We walked past the fresh mounds to what appeared to be older interments. At one of them, a wild animal had been at work and a jaw gaped from the dirt. I stopped and picked up a shell necklace that had evidently been in the grave with the bones.

  Pepper stared, transfixed. “This is the place,” she said. “Alan, this is the place.”

  I nodded, unsure whether to exult or run. As I walked I saw that there were bones all around, poking from the earth at odd angles—skulls, jawbones, femurs, ribs, even a pelvis. I tried to count but I lost track at forty. They were too jumbled to clearly distinguish. But one thing was sure: The graves themselves were strewn with the burial artifacts of the Tunica nation. A combination of erosion, wild animals, and someone with a spade had uprooted them from their earthen chambers, and now they lay white and bleached in the gold evening.

  Pepper crossed her arms over her chest, as if to still the shivering, and I saw her shaking her head in amazement.

  “I can’t believe it,” she mumbled. Then, suddenly, she stooped by the first skull and raised it with one hand.

  “Alan, this can’t be.”

  “What?”

  She pointed to one of the teeth. “This skull has a filling. Alan, these can’t be Indians at all.”

  I stared down at the tooth, trying to make sense of it.

  And Chloe Messner’s words came back at me:

  The tooth is yellowed, completely different wear pattern than Joseph Dupont’s premolars. I think it’s been lying around somewhere for a long time.

  I looked over at the two fresher graves and started to gag. I thought I understood now.

  “You’re right,” I said finally. “It isn’t an Indian.”

  A cloud passed over the sun and for a second I thought I was dizzy.

  Too late, I realized it wasn’t a cloud, but a large human figure, standing at the edge of the bluff. A man in a baseball cap, with a rifle. And the rifle was pointed at us.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “So you didn’t drown after all?” rasped a voice I recognized. “Too bad.”

  Marcus Briney walked slowly down the bluff toward us. “Now I’ll have to dig a place for you like I did him.”

  Pepper’s mouth moved silently and I thought for an instant she was going to scream, but instead she finally articulated a single word: “Why?”

  Briney shrugged. “Because you know where this place is now. You’ve been here and you’ve seen. Just like the old nigger. Bastard was a danger to me, always poking around. I finally had to get rid of him.”

  “But why?” she asked again. “For the treasure?”

  Briney spat on the ground. “Treasure? This junk? I seen what happened to that other poor son-of-a-bitch found a treasure, how they took it away from him. Naw, this crap don’t mean nothing to me. It ain’t nothin’ but Indian beads.”

  I turned slowly to Pepper.

  “It’s the graveyard that he’s trying to protect,” I said and turned back to the other man: “My God, Briney, how many of them were there?”

  Briney smiled a crooked smile and shrugged again. “Dunno. Lost count a long time ago. Not so many, though. Twenty-five, tops.” He walked over to some of the older graves. “And the last one was while I was still at the prison. That’s been five years.” He looked down at a bleached fragment of scapula. “Otis, you wise-ass little bastard, you shouldn’t of never tried me like you did. Now look at you, all in little bitty pieces when you coulda left prison a free man after only ten years.” He squinted up at us again. “And you know he was a white man, too?” He shook his head. “I always gave the niggers more leeway, because they didn’t know no better. But a white man? Wasn’t no reason in the world for a white man to act the way some of ’em did. I always tried to help, too. I was fair. Everybody said that. Man did his work, didn’t make trouble, I was his best friend. I’ve had cons call me after they got out, thank me for what I did. There’s men out there with new lives because they used their time to learn something.” He sighed. “But there was others just too damn ornery to learn anything at all. Those were the ones I brought here.”

  The setting sun sent little red fires dancing in his eyes.

  “I told ’em I was gonna help ’em ex-cape.” He chuckled. “And they did: I put ’em in my car and brought ’em here.”

  “Nobody ever missed them?” Pepper asked.

  “Some of ’em I wrote up as escapes, and the rest just died in prison. Back in them days, when I started, there wasn’t the kind of recordkeeping they have now. A man really could disappear in Angola and never come out. Well, who the hell cared? We’re not talking about people, for God’s sake: We’re talking about scum. Look, my father was killed in the breakout of ’33. Those animals shot him down like a dog. And the parish wouldn’t even pay for the trials. Do you think they deserve any mercy?”

  “And the two convicts,” I said. “You got them, too.”

  “Sure. It was sort of an accident. I come up here a lot to talk to my boys. Otis, Big Red, Largo, and the others. I tell ’em I’m sorry I had to do this but I explain how it had to be and they understand. I was up here when I seen them two. Well, it was an easy shot. And I figure I did the state a favor.”

  “A favor like killing T-Joe Dupont?” I asked.

  “That crazy old nigger give him a tooth and T-Joe come asking me about it, said there wasn’t no Indian with fillings and he was going to the law. I tried to stop him but he took off in his truck, so I nailed him through the back window.”

  “I figured as much,” I said. “But why did Carter Wascom alibi you? What do you have on him?”

  “Carter?” Briney cackled. “He’s got a thing. He likes young girls. When Eulalia grew up he started after other ones. Got into some trouble in Natchez, when he was home visiting his folks, right before Eulalia got sick. They bought him out of it but they shut him ou
t after that.”

  “And you found out about it.”

  “Well, being assistant warden gets you certain law enforcement connections. I picked it up from a sheriff’s deputy up there I knew.”

  “So you blackmailed him into selling you your place at half what it was worth.”

  “What was he gonna do with the land? Hell, it was a bargain: He didn’t want Eulalia to know, and when he stirred up all this crap after she died, he didn’t want anybody to know. Wouldn’t help his case any, would it?”

  “You killed the dog.”

  “Sort of a reminder to Carter.”

  “And Absalom?”

  “Couldn’t let the old bastard go on, digging stuff up and passing it out to who knows who. So I followed him up here.” He shrugged. “I was going to bury him with the others, but he ran. I shot him and he went over the edge.”

  “And now it’s our turn,” I said, trying to keep him from hearing the fear in my voice.

  “Hey, you people was coming right at me. How was I supposed to know you hadn’t figured out this place was here? And him in his orange jail uniform. Any citizen’s got a right to shoot an escapee on sight, I say.”

  Pepper shook her head, disbelieving. “But what about the artifacts? The beads and these brass bells and …”

  “He’s a smart man,” I said. “Mr. Briney here figured that if he buried the bodies with Indian artifacts, anybody like old Absalom who dug them up would figure it was an Indian graveyard and they’d keep quiet.”

  Briney grinned again. “You’re smart, too. I wish I didn’t have to kill you, but you got to understand.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to keep him from seeing me shake.

  “Walk on to the edge of the bluff,” Briney said in a suddenly soft voice, like he was coaxing a child. “Go ahead of me and I promise you won’t feel a thing. It’ll be over quick and then I’ll come and talk to you, too.”

  “Just a minute,” I said, trying to buy a delay. “Tell me, who was the first one you killed? Do you remember? Do you remember where he was buried?”