"You see the error of your ways?"
"I do, boss. Surely I do. I will come clean, yes sir, and we can git this all straightened out. I can't take no more of this shit. I won't last another night."
"You punkin' out after all? And you'd be such a hero! You'd be such a tough boy!"
"Ain't no kind of tough, boss. Ain't no kind of hero. Ain't nothing but a man."
"You git back down in that hole!"
"Boss, I―"
"You git back down in that goddamn hole, boy, like I say, or I'll please myself to give you another thumping. I may tell Bigboy, I may not. I's looking forward to tonight. What I hear, Moon got some real plans for you. Moon gonna have fun tonight. Maybe we'll just let him and take you in tomorrow."
"Oh, boss, please don't do that."
"Git in that hole, boy, while I think this over."
Earl got back in the line, where his conversation with Section Boss had been noted.
"You finally goin' over to the man, buckra?"
"He done slept wif niggers enuff. Yes suh, the white boy goin' on back."
"Moon still gonna hunt his ass down and do it up fine. If I know Moon, that's what's goin' to happen right swell."
So Earl had another morning in the hole, and at 10:00, when Fish showed up, he worked Earl over plenty hard, as he did all the time, mainly along male rape lines and the power of Moon and his boys against the weakness of the lone white man. He worked him over so hard Earl wondered if it were a dream or not, the whole fantasy of escape. Maybe it was something his crazed brain had heated up for him as a way of retreating from the reality of the place.
But though Fish mocked him blasphemously, to the amusement of both his white and his black audience, as Earl reached for the cup, the old man grabbed his hand to check for the pin with a quick probe of his fingers, found it, and threw a wink at Earl. That gave Earl some sustenance.
It was finally about four o'clock. The sun had pulled down in the sky and swelled up red, like some big fruit corpulent with its own close-to-rotted ripeness. It threw a golden glow across the land, and the wind had stilled. They saw it coming, all of them.
It was the new black Hudson Hornet that had carted out Bigboy in the first place. This was so unusual that all work stopped, and even the guards reined in their horses to watch the approach of the vehicle.
It was here under the guise of the distraction that a powerful presence pressed against Earl; he looked to see a large man whom he had noted but who never spoke. Up close, the man's face revealed its mutilation, a crust of scar tissue lighter against his jet blackness, though all was touched golden by the sun. The man's eye, in that sea of frozen pain that was his ruined flesh, was askew and wandered its own dumb, blind way. This had to be Tangle Eye.
He nodded briskly to Earl, who made as if he'd slipped, went briefly to his knees and pulled the wrist chain taut across a trunk.
The blow was swift and perfect, and in the same second that it was delivered, Tangle Eye pulled away and headed back to his detail.
Earl saw that he'd not hit the link closest to the ring on the cuff, but the ring itself, the one point where the ancient steel was thinnest.
Earl hadn't even felt the shudder or the sting of vibration, so perfectly placed was the blow and so completely sheared was the ring.
Earl grabbed the now freed chain with his free hand and pulled it close.
He was no longer tethered.
The car pulled up, and someone dashed out to open the rear door. His royal hugeness, Bigboy, sunglasses and drill instructor hat in place, perfect tie putting a point to his immensity, stepped daintily out, sniffed at the brackish air, then looked about until his eyes rested at last upon Earl.
"You, Bogart. You, up out of the hole."
"Yes, sir," cried Earl, "I am coming."
He got halfway and he turned.
"Ain't going to be with you no ' trash no more, you bet!" he screamed.
"I'm goin' back to the white world, thank you, Jesus."
The men regarded him furiously, as he climbed the rest of the way out, reached the levee, and with a shuffle and a shit-eating grin minced toward the big man.
"Take me from these low men, sir, for they are beasts of the field, and I am white."
Someone grabbed him roughly and brought him stumbling to Big boy.
"So you want to talk, eh, Bogart. Finally seen the light, have you?
You have been a stubborn cuss."
"My ', sir, but being among the colored is enough to set any white man straight."
The guards let him stand free.
"And one more thing, Mr. Guard Sergeant. You're a tub of white trash monkey shit."
Bigboy's mouth fell open in astonishment, and Earl stepped back as his two companions moved in on him. They grabbed; he ducked and slipped, then banged the first one hard with a double jab to the jaw, feeling that bone shatter on the second hard blow.
The other man round housed him, and Earl dropped under the arc of the clumsy punch and nailed this one right in the heart. It took the fight out of him, and he went low fast, his face whiter than terror, his eyes big as fried eggs.
"No guns," Bigboy screamed, for guns were coming out all along the line.
"You, Bigboy, let's see how much tough you got in you," Earl yelled, drawing near.
"You're about to find out, partner. I have this dance saved up special for you," said the man, who had not a lick of fear anywhere in him and suddenly welcomed the assault as an amusement of great potential.
Somewhere the dogs started growling, their throats filling with sound as the excitement of battle violence filled their dog veins and brains.
Bigboy tossed aside his hat, pulled his big Colt handgun and tossed it.
East to come off were his sunglasses, which he neatly folded before tossing to another guard.
"I can rack him, boss," screamed Section Boss, who'd heaved near atop his mighty horse and unlimbered the Thompson gun from his saddle horn "No, sir," said Bigboy, his fists circling with a pugilist's grace as he moved with surprising agility left, then right, dancing like a well schooled heavy. "This here boy's been aching for a boxing lesson, and I'm going to give him one. You think us albinos are weak and red eyed.
Ho, boy, you goin' learn the truth."
Earl shot a left, which Bigboy flicked away, but in the next instant Earl drove a hard right into the big man's gut and met nothing but an impenetrable wall of muscle, skinning up his knuckles but doing the big fellow no apparent harm.
"My old man hit harder than that," he said, smiling.
Mine didn't, Earl thought, a little surprised at what a cool athlete this big monster was turning out to be.
Bigboy fired off a right that hit Earl above the eye. It was a fast, hard punch, an expert's punch, the punch of a man who'd worked both light and heavy bags for years. The big fellow had fast hands, too, but Earl shook it off, trying to show no pain, even if half-a-second's worth of bright lights skyrocketed off behind his eyes.
Earl circled on his toes, and so did the big man. Two jabs were thrown by each, and caught by each high on the arm, for bruises that would emerge in two days but not now. Then Earl fired a good shot off that struck the big man in the nose, crunching it. Blood gushed, but Bigboy merely dropped back a step, spat disdainfully into the ground, a goober of red-shot mucus, then set himself again and moved into the attack.
He was a body puncher. He was so slathered in muscle and so anesthetized by fury no blows could stop him. He absorbed pain on his arms, kept his head hunched behind his big fists, then worked in close, unleashed a flurry of sharp jabs that flew to Earl's ribs and lit off hell. Earl fell back, his backward motion somewhat defusing the punches, then slipped the one blow thrown from the outside (meant to crescendo the flurry) and countered with a good hammer to the jaw. It would have KO'd a lesser man and rocked a greater man, but like the nose-buster, it merely made the Bigboy blink and spit, take a step back, then set himself and move in.
He would
take pain to give pain. That was his strategy. It was crude but based on conviction: he knew he could dish out more than any man could give. He would emerge from his fights bruised and bloodied, but always the winner, on that principle alone.
Earl had a sudden fear: he would lose. The guy was a polished professional-level fighter, who could take a punch, who expected pain, who had the stamina of a platoon, and whose will to conquest was unquenchable. Plus he had good health and nourishment, six inches in height and six in reach, forty or fifty pounds in weight, and lots of gym workouts going for him. And pleasure. This was fun for him. He was loving this, loving the drama, the power, the savagery of it, as he must have hated the delicacy of the Earl problem and now could deal with it without frustration.
Earl took a couple of shots to the arm, ducked and moved in to pummel the gut, and took a glancing blow to the temple, which nevertheless opened a gash that soon issued copious amounts of red blood.
"No cut men in this ring, Bogart," sang the happy warrior. "No corner men, no bell, son, just you, me, until you drop, and son, that's coming up real soon now." He smiled and closed, threw two hard rights, the last of which glanced off Earl's blocking arm and reached his ribs for a stinging shot that brought tears to Earl's eyes.
"Oh, felt that one, did you? More coming, convict."
He threw a punch that Earl countered, but Earl's return blow was somewhat blurred by the fatigue that now corrupted his body, and didn't land square enough to do any damage.
The big man dropped back, reached up and undid his tie and tossed it away, while he sucked oxygen.
Earl, in this moment of respite, realized that the drama was so intense that both audiences, black and white, had formed an auditorium around it. No one spoke, but they watched in utterly raptu red fascination.
The big man ripped off his shirt, revealing an undershirt sopped in sweat that constrained muscles of unusual density and precision. He had a statue like quality to him, marble wrapped in wet cotton. He wasn't fat at all, just big and solid as Wall Street.
The big man went back to his toes and came at Earl.
"We're going to finish it right soon, nigger," he said. Earl went into his crouch, bobbed and weaved, dashed this way and that, as the big one sought to close. Earl now saw what he must do. Tire the man, wait for a guard to drop out of fatigue, then hit him hard and fast and dash back out of range. This was no ring, so there was plenty of room to move.
But in that same instant, Bigboy backed up, dropped his arms and yelled to his boys, "Get those dogs behind him. He's running too much. This ain't about running, it's about hitting."
Earl sensed that ordered activity un spooling behind him and knew his backing days were done. If he couldn't dance, he couldn't win, he knew, for the big man would corner him and pummel his arms. His arms would die, and then his body and then his head.
He heard the dogs screaming on their leashes as they were brought near.
They smelled the blood and sweat in the air and knew that killing time was near. He felt them scuffling frantically behind him, and a sudden snapping yap sunk into his heel as one of them got a brief hold on him.
He pulled his leg back and saw there were no options.
"Time is running out, boy. No place to run," Bigboy snarled, after lunging out another red goober and shaking the sweat off his brow.
He threw a fast punch that snapped off the crown of Earl's skull, opening another cut. Earl felt the blood spurt and blinked it out of his eyes, though some reached his lips and tasted of salt.
"Ooo, you didn't know how much speed I had on me, did you, convict?
You think you're tough, you're the champ. Hey boy, you have met the champ."
He threw another rocket Earl's way, and Earl slipped it, hammered him quick twice over the ribs, bobbed out of reach and had some space to evade. But still Bigboy came on, no sign of weakness. His eyes were red, the irises open like headlights, and the sweat poured off him, but he was on his toes and his guard was well held, steady. Onward, inward he rushed, crouching, taking blows to deliver blows.
Earl saw he would lose. It was the law of boxing: good big man beats good small man. The physics decreed the outcome. He hadn't the weight, the strength, the endurance to stay with Bigboy, and if he was faster, it was only by a little.
He never saw the next one. He was too busy thinking, and not busy enough fighting. It clocked him above the jaw, flush to the side of the face, and the world jacked out of focus while someone banged kettledrums loudly in his ears. His eyes saw only white and he backed off, feeling grogginess spread through his lungs up his neck and ooze warmly through his brain. He almost went, and felt his consciousness slipping away, like bubbly water down a drain.
Bigboy came in to finish.
Earl hadn't been faking it.
It wasn't a trick.
He hadn't thought it out.
But Bigboy's vanity spelled his disaster, for he rode in on a cloud of arrogant confidence, sure that Earl was rocked. And Earl was rocked.
But Earl came back faster than even a near pro like Bigboy could imagine, and when Earl cleared up, he saw just the flick of a sloppy opening revealed by a dropped left. Earl drove up through it, and landed his uppercut square on the underside of the astonished big man's jaw, a punch so hard it lifted all of Bigboy off the earth. When he returned to the planet, Bigboy's arms, getting no signal from the disconnected brain, briefly became cogitated and unknowing, and as they drifted, Earl somehow found the grit to close yet again and launch a left-right combination to the face that put Bigboy down.
He fell like an ox, hard and lifeless to the levee, and when he fell, a puff of dust was unleashed from the earth at his circumference, like rose petals of celebration, and he went so limp and flat he was dead gone from this world.
Earl now heard the cheers. Bless their goddamned black hearts, all the Negroes now cheered, defying their masters, and their joy was as powerful a pleasure as Earl had or would ever feel on this earth, even if it lasted but a second.
In the next instant, Section Boss hosed out a burst of.45s from his tommy gun that whistled overhead, driving the convicts down and shutting them up. But Earl didn't notice that at all. For in that same second, the guard force was on him, six, eight of them, pounding him wherever they could get at him with clubs and saps and boots.
They beat him pretty badly.
"Not the head," someone was shouting, "Goddammit, not the head!"
Earl, in the blur of all his many injuries, saw that it was Bigboy shouting, for he had returned to the land of the living and the thinking, and he wanted Earl conscious.
Earl soon knew why.
Six men held him down, and it was Bigboy who kicked him hard in the ribs until they started to crack, screaming all the time, "You motherfucker, you motherfucker, you motherfucker!" they drove through the night. Earl was in a swamp of pain, too much of it to specify location. His body was ripped, particularly from the stomping at the end, and in his head a gong pounded over and over.
"Sergeant Bigboy," he heard someone say, "you sure about this?" "Goddamn sure," said Bigboy, his stone heart set on the course he had determined.
"But―"
"But nothing, goddammit. I am tired of this special boy screwing up my system. You see the niggers. He gives ' hope. They get hope and we have problems."
Then his rage flared again and he stomped Earl's jaw.
"You goddamn boy, you! You lucky goddamn sonofabitch, no man ever knocked me down "I'll you got in a lucky goddamn punch, Goddamn you!"
Earl was on the floor of the Hudson's rear seat, chained again, and many heavy boots pressed him still, the heaviest of all Bigboy's.
"Sir, all I am saying is―"
"That's enough, Caleb, damn your soul. He tried to escape. He drownded.
Happens all the time at Thebes, and that's all anybody's got to know."
"Yes, sir."
Bigboy leaned down close.
"Breathe deep, Bogart. It's soon to be you
r last."
The big car at last stopped, and the men poured out. Earl was dragged forward. He smelled river in the air, and saw it, just through the tropically ragged line of trees, a broad band of sparkle, flat and calm and multifaceted. A moon had risen, but not much; it was blood swollen, plump and fat just over the horizon, its powerful cold blaze dancing atop the surface of the river.
But he had no time for sightseeing; in the next seconds he was dragged and shoved down a path through the jungly woods that took him to a ramshackle shack and a dock. An old scow sat moored to the dock, drifting this way and that in the currents.
They unlocked the shack door and shoved him in, roughly.
"Welcome to the Drowning House, Bogart."
He was thrown to the floor, and the work that followed was swift. It was a place of murder. He saw wooden forms, a manual cement mixer, sacks of cement as yet unmixed, various metal fixtures and chains, and a wall where old locks hung.
A grunting and a groaning sounded, as two of the heavier fellows bent and lifted a square cement block with an iron ring sunk deep into it aboard an old wheelbarrow, which one of the boys then wheeled toward him.
"I'll do it myself, goddammit," said Bigboy.
He kneeled and put a knee on Earl's bruised stomach and roughly took his chained legs and clamped them in irons. These in turn were looped with a length of chain, and it was held fast by a lock. Earl had an anxiety explosion and almost couldn't bear to check, but then forced himself to, and when he saw it squarely he knew it to be the lock he'd practiced on, which by some of Fish's magic had been replaced to its rightful spot on the wall where the locks hung in their neat order.
"Coin' have to get some new locks soon," somebody said.
But Bigboy leaned close, his face still screwed up in dementia.
"You see what fighting the Man gets you, Bogart? Do you see? You do not have the power to go against the Man! The Man rules. I am the Man, and if you go against me, you go against everything, and this is what it gets you. You think on that, Bogart, as the black water fills your lungs while you sink down to river bottom."
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