"Well, see here, Redfield, I can't do that. I took the money, I must do the work."
"Oh, come on now, Vincent. Wouldn't be the first time someone took a retainer, wrote a letter, and forgot all about it. I just wouldn't be messing about in Thebes. They got their own ways of doing things up there, they don't want nobody getting in their bid ness no sir. I'd write you a letter, but to who?"
"Whom," corrected Sam.
"Who, whom, it don't matter. Thebes up there, up that dark river, ain't nobody up there to write to, ain't nobody up there to sit down nice and polite, sit under a fan, have a sip of rye whiskey, and palaver. They're sitting on a goddamned powder keg, what they're doing. A nigger powder keg. They got to keep it from blowing, and, way I see it, that's a hero's job."
"Redfield, I have been in a variety of prisons, white and Negro both.
The men who run them are many things, but heroic is about the last word I'd employ. Necessary is about as far as I'd be pleased to go."
"Well, it's all clear and dandy to y'all up North, with all your answers. Down here, where it never snows and things change slow except when they change fast and ugly, it's a lot less stamped out. It can be downright messy. That's why there has to be a Thebes. The niggers have to know there's a Thebes, and by God if they get uppity, Thebes is where they'll be sent. So in its way, Thebes is more important than Jackson or Biloxi or Oxford or Pascagoula. Without Thebes, wouldn't be no Jackson or Biloxi or Oxford or Pascagoula. Without Thebes, Mississippi is the Congo and America is Africa. Thebes is what keeps the lid on. I'd hate to see you get your nose all a-twitch because you saw one guard knock a nigger down and you make a big thing over it. It just won't do. I say as one white man to another, you best stay far from Thebes. Nothing going on in Thebes you got to see or know about, you hear?"
"Well, Redfield, I am sorry you see it that way. I can tell you're a man set in your ways, but I am equally set in mine. I have a job to do, that's all. I am an attorney, I took on a client, and goddammit, that is what I will do, so help me God, Thebes or no Thebes."
He stood and walked out, without looking back. they drove for a while, and Eddie read Sam's gloomy mood.
"Sir, any directions? I'll take you anywheres." Sam said, "I suppose we're looking for a waterfront, or a marine district or some such. I have to hire a boat and just get this done on my own."
"Yes, sir. I'll try and find it for you, I surely will."
It turned out Pascagoula itself had only a marine industry focused on the deep waters of the gulf; what they needed was a smaller satellite city called Moss Point, up the river a few miles, where boats ventured out into the bayous that lay to the north.
Eventually, after more starting and stopping, they found a place, an old boatyard administered from a peely shed near the water. The boats were moored along docks, and they floated and bobbed on the vagaries of tide and current, bumping into one another, none of them particularly impressive craft. Sam had traveled to England on the Queen Elizabeth and across the Channel on an LST on D-Day. Even when the latter came under fire as it neared the spot to deposit him, his men and his six 105-mm howitzers on the dangerous shore, he'd felt more comfort than he did confronting this wooden fleet rotting in the sun.
The boats were all some form of fishing craft, their engines inboard, their cabins low to the prow, their comforts all but absent. fishing, the sign said.
And the place smelled of that commerce, with lines looped everywhere, and nets hung to dry, the sand shifty under the foot, crab husks and fish spines abandoned everywhere, the gulls flap pity-flapping overhead for a bite of flesh or cake, but otherwise still as buzzards on the wharf.
Sam ducked inside to find an old boatyard salt, with bleached eyes and a face gone straight to the quality of the dried plum called a prune.
"Howdy," said Sam, to no answer, but only a sullen stare. "I'd like to hire a boat."
"You ain't dressed to fish."
"No", not for fishing."
"You just want to piddle around? See the sights?"
"No, sir. Trying to get upriver to a town called Thebes."
"Thebes. Don't nobody go there, except the prison supply boat once a week."
"Could I hitch or hire a ride aboard it?"
"Ain't likely. Them boys are coolish toward strangers. They run tight and private-like. What would be your business in Thebes?"
"It's a confidential matter."
"Ain't talking, huh?"
"Look, I don't have to answer anybody's questions, all right? Let's just find me a boat that'll go upriver. That's your job, isn't it? You run this place? I'm not one for Mississippi lolly gagging in the hot sun when there's work to be done."
"Say, you're a cuss now, ain't you? A stranger, too, from the way you talk. Well, sir, I can git you a boat and a man to take you deep into the bayou after big catfish or brown bass or whatever; I knows men who'll take you far into the gulf where the big bluefish play, and maybe you'd hook one of them and be proud to put it on your wall. Maybe you just want to be in the sun and feel it turn your pasty face a nice shade while sipping on an iced Dixie. But nobody here is going up the bayou to the Yaxahatchee and then to Thebes. Nothing up there but blue-gum niggers who'd as soon eat your liver with the spleen still attached as smile and call you sir. And if one of them blue gums takes a bite out of you, sure as winter, you goin' die before the sun sets."
"I can pay."
"Not the boatmen around here you can't, no sir, and that's a fact.
Nobody goes up to Thebes."
"Goddammit, nobody in this fool town will do what they are told to do.
What is your stubbornness? Is it congenital or learned? Why such simplicity everywhere in Mississippi?"
"Sir, I would not take our state's name in anger."
Sam―well, he near exploded, but the old coot just looked at him, set in ancient ways, and Sam saw that screaming at a toothless geezer had no point to it, not even the simple satisfaction of making a fool uncomfortable.
Instead, he turned, went back to the car.
"No luck, sir?"
"Not a bit of it. These Mississippians are a different breed."
"They are. Must be all the swamp water they drink, and that corn liquor.
Makes them stubborn and dull."
"Just drive, Eddie. Drive along the bayou here. Maybe I'll notice something."
The shiny Lasalle prowled among riverside shacks and cruised past the hulks of rotted boats tied up and banging against weathered docks.
Overhead, the gulls pirouetted and wheeled and the hot sun beat down fiercely. Sam soon forgot he was in America. It was some strange country, particularly when the color of the people turned black, and little ragamuffin kids in tattered underwear and worn shorts raced barefoot alongside the big, slow-moving car, begging for pennies. Sam knew if he gave one a penny, he'd have to give them all a penny, so he gave none of them pennies.
Then even the Negroes ran out, and they were alone; the road's cracked pavement yielded to dirt, the river disappeared behind a bank of reeds, and the whole thing seemed pointless.
But it was Eddie who saw the road.
"Bet there's a house there," he said. "Bet there is."
"Go on down, then. Maybe there'll be a boatman."
At the end of the way, he did in fact see a shack, cobbled together out of abandoned or salvaged materials, with a tar paper roof, and tires everywhere lying about. The boxy skeleton of an early '30s Nash sedan rusted away on blocks. Clam or oyster shells in the hundreds of thousands lay about like gravel. The place was rude and slatternly, but behind it a boat lay at anchor a few feet out in the wide brown river.
"Hello! "Sam called.
In time, an old lady leaned out, ran an eye over the man in the tan suit sitting in the backseat of the black Lasalle, then heaved up a gelatinous gob from her lungs, expelled it through a toothless mouth and grotesquely flexible lips so it flew like one of Sam's well-aimed 105s and plunked up an impact crater among the clam shells and dir
t.
"What you want?" she demanded. The accent was French, more or less, or rather the Cajun corruption of the French accent.
"To talk to a boatman." "You come wrong place, Mister. Who told you come here?" "Madam, nobody told me to come here, I assure you. I see a boat.
Therefore there is a boatman. May I speak with him, if you please."
"You from revenooers?"
"Of course not."
"Polices You the polices?"
"No, madam. Nor FBI nor the state in any of its manifestations."
"You wait there."
The door slammed.
"Well," Sam said to Eddie, "it's a start. Not much of one, but who can say?"
A few minutes passed. Some ruckus arose from the interior of the shack, and finally an old fellow popped out. He was nut-brown, wore dungarees and a torn, loose old undershirt and a pair of shoes that might have, years ago, been designed for tennis but were now a lace less ruin. His toes flopped out from the gap between last and sole in one of them. A few crude tattoos inked his biceps. His hair was a gray nest of tendrils, this way and that, and most, but not all, of his teeth remained. His face was a crush of fissures and arroyos from years in the sun, and from his own squinting.
"You want?" he said, scowling.
"The boatman. Are you the boatman?"
"Nah, not no boatman. You go on, git out of here now. No boatman here."
"You look like a boatman to me."
"Agh. What you want?"
"Lazear," cried the old lady from inside, "you talk to the guy now, you hear. He gots money."
The old man squinted at him up and down.
"I want to go upriver. Through the bayou, up the Pascagoula, to the Yaxahatchee. Into the piney woods. Up to the town they call Thebes."
"Ah! Sir, nobody go to Thebes. Nothing there but nigs and dogs.
Oooo-ee, nigs don't git you, dogs do. Dogs chew you real good.
Whichever git you first, the other clean up after."
"I understand there is a Negro town there and a prison farm. I have business. I wish to hire a boat."
"You been ever where No one take you. So you finally come old Lazear?"
"Where I've been is of no account. I need passage up, I need you to wait an hour or a day, and I need passage back, that is all. I am prepared to pay the prevailing rate plus a little extra."
"Million dollars. You got million dollars for Lazear?"
"Of course not. What do you usually get by day? I'll double it."
"Sir," Eddie whispered, "I'd offer him a sum first and let him negotiate from that position."
But Lazear quickly said, "I gits a hundred dollars a day guiding in the swamp."
"I doubt he's seen a hundred dollars in his life," muttered Eddie.
"Two hundred then. Two hundred there and back."
"Four hundred. Two up, two back. Is tricky. Lost in the bayou, eaten by ', you know. No fun, no sir. Four."
"A hundred is a month's wages. Take two hundred or I'll find another boat."
"Two then. Two. You pay now, you come back tomorrow night."
"I pay fifty now, I don't go anywhere, we leave now. We leave immediately."
"No, sir. Long trip. Day's trip, maybe day anna half. Lazear got to load up the boat."
"I am not leaving," said Sam, "now that I am here. And that is final, sir."
"Oh, crazy man from the North. Crazy Northern man. You from New York or Boston, sir?" These people, thought Sam, they are so ignorant.
The bayou soon swallowed them. If there was one river here, it was lost to Sam. There seemed to be dozens of them, tracks through marshy constructions of thorns or brambles, islets of gnarled green trees, thickets of vines, barricades of bristles. Though it was still light, the sense of day soon vanished.
Lazear's boat crawled through this wet maze, chugging along uncertainly, its engine fighting to breathe, terrifying Sam each time it seemed to miss a beat or pause to take a gulp.
"You know the way?" he heard himself say.
"Well as my own hand, Mister," responded the old man, who quickly sweated through his clothes as he navigated under a faded blue ball cap that may have borne an allegiance to a big league team, though the insignia had long since disappeared.
"I thought this was a river. It's a swamp."
"Oh, she straightens out up ahead, you'll see. Best relax, sir.
Nothing good comes of hurry in the swamp. You hurry, you be a dead fellow, sure. But it be fine; probably no snake be biting you, or no 'gator eat your hand off, but I cannot say for sure."
Then his crumpled old face lit with glee and Sam realized it was a joke, that humor was a part of the man's madness.
"Hope them Choctaws ain't in no drinking mood," said old Lazear over the sound of the motor. "If they be, sometimes it make them hungry and they eat a white fellow. Leave me be, I'm too tough, like an old chicken been eating bugs and grubs its whole life. But you, Mister, figure you'd taste right good to them red savages."
"There isn't enough salt in Mississippi to tenderize me," Sam said.
"They could chew me, but they could never swallow me. They'd choke on me."
It wasn't only the weather. It was also the darkness, not of the day but of the overhanging, interlinked canopy. The leaves and vines knotted up, twisted among themselves, invented new forms. Strange vegetation grew on other strange vegetation, a riot of life forms, insensate, unknowable.
The seal of the canopy had the effect of a greenhouse on the two men trapped beneath it; the heat rose even beyond the heat of Mississippi, and in no time at all Sam had sweated through his shirt and coat. Off came the coat, up went the sleeves, rolled tightly. He left his hat on, however, for its brim trapped the sweat that grew in his hairline and kept it from cascading down into his eyes. And of course he left his tie tight to his neck. There were certain concessions to the jungle one simply could not make.
He settled into the rear of the boat, uncomfortable, nestled against a gunwale on a pile of ropes. Luxury was out of the question, and an inch or two of water perfumed with gasoline sloshed around the bottom of the boat as it chugged onward, radiating nauseating fumes and a slight sense of mirage. Or maybe it was his splitting headache.
"Cheer up," cried old Lazear. "We got another five hours or so before true dark, then we lay up in a bay I know. You can sleep on dry ground, Lazear he sleep on the boat."
"I'll stay with the boat, thanks," said Sam. He imagined himself alone in this place. Alone: dead. It followed.
The old man now and then took a tot on a bottle of something, and once or twice handed it to Sam, who politely turned it down, until at last curiosity got the better of him.
Argh! It was some hellish French stuff, absinthe or something, with the heat of fire and the tang of salt; it burned all the way down, and he suddenly shivered.
"Ha! She got bite, no?" exclaimed Lazear.
In time, the light dwindled further, until it seemed impossible to go onward. Lazear found a little cut in the land, a miniature cove, surrounded by high grass and a copse of gnarled trees of no identifiable features, and there put in.
"I rustle up some grub. You eat."
Sam was in fact ravenous. The scrofulous old man disappeared into the disreputable hatchway that led to the boat's forward interior and threw pots and pans around. He came up a few minutes later with white chunks of bread, a lump of butter at some indeterminate stage between liquid and solid, a warped segment of cheese, greasy, waxy rind still affixed, and a knife and fork.
"Fancy food for a fancy guy, no?" "I've eaten worse," said Sam, who remembered K rations in the snow during the Bulge, when it was so cold he thought he'd die of it, and the Germans were said to be everywhere, and all he wanted to do was head back to Arkansas and practice law.
Instead, he'd gathered his six 105s into a tight formation atop a low hill, dug them in, and waited for targets. A German panzer unit obliged, grinding through the gray snow and the gray fog a mile out, and Sam and his men stayed
cool and blew it off the face of the earth in three minutes of concentrated fire. Only burning hulks were left.
He slept in his clothes, feeling the drift of the boat against the slop of the river and the dampness of his feet where the water had at last overwhelmed the leather of his brogues, penetrating them. But it was good, dreamless sleep, for the temperature at last dropped and the air seemed cooled of the corruption that so embalmed it during the day.
He awoke to the ritual of the coffee. Lazear had woken early, gone ashore, made a small fire. Now, as Sam watched, he boiled a pot of water, then moved it off the flame. With an old soup spoon he scooped coffee from an A & P bag, and spread it on the water. Next he produced a Clabber Girl baking powder tin, popped the lid and scooped out roasted and ground chicory root and again spread the material on the surface of the water until it seemed right. Then he swirled the black mix and let the grounds settle and steep. The smell of coffee and wood smoke made Sam's stomach rumble.
The old man sloshed through the water and handed Sam up a tin cup of the stuff; it cut to the bone, hot, raw and powerful. The French and their coffee; they were good at it beyond arrogance.
As Sam tried to focus, he found the fog was not in his mind but in the swamp. Tendrils of cottony moisture lay low on the water, curled through the trees, licked at the leaves.
"How much longer?"
"We hit the big river soon enough. Then we bear right where she splits, and that part takes on the name Yaxahatchee. That one's wider open so it'll go smoother. Don't you be falling in. That water deep and the current can be strong. Suck a man down, spit him back with his soul missing, his nose blue, his fingers shriveled and his false teeth out and floated off somewheres."
"Sir, I have no false teeth."
"Whatever you got, if you go in, the river, she take it. She's a black bitch of a river, you see. You don't be messin' ' with her, or she fuck you good." "My trust in you is absolute," Sam said.
He settled back, got through a few shaky moments when the old man seemed to have trouble interesting the engine in life again, until at last it sputtered, coughed, shivered, then began to pull the boat back out from the shore.
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