Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  Carlos’s fingers were opening and closing in the cotton wreckage like moth wings in a spiderweb. With a gust of hatred so hot it surprised even him, Ardy realized the boy was so afraid, right down to the level of instinct, that his own hands wouldn’t move to defend him, would only writhe there. He let go.

  “You about a sorry little girl, ain’t you?”

  Carlos lay gasping.

  “Carla. That’s gone be your name from now on, till you earn you a man’s name. Now you want to come with me, little girl, and settle this feud, or you want to lay here in the mud and cry?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Ardy crawled off.

  Keeping the wind in his face, he veered right. The hounds were dark lumps on the porch. He went quietly, glad Carlos wasn’t there to stir things up and wake the dogs, and arrived at the rear of the house unseen, unheard. He looked through a crack in the shutter and saw a pile of shadowy children sleeping by the fire and, through another crack, a man’s shape in a chair rocking forward and back with his head straight up, gazing it seemed right at Ardy. He continued to rock, though, and did even as Ardy eased two soundless steps back and creaked open the shutter with one hand while pushing the rifle barrel in with the other. Before Norris could move Ardy squeezed the trigger. Norris’s head snapped back and the chair tipped over, his feet flying up. Ardy stuck his head in the window, ignoring the scramble of the boys by the fire, and studied the man where he lay on his belly. He reached inside his coat and took the pistol and stuck his arm in and fired six shots into the body, which jerked with the first bullet but took the others as if resigned to it. When Ardy withdrew his arm he did it too quickly and his coat sleeve snagged on a nail, tearing the material and his shirt underneath and gigging his biceps. “Shit,” he said, hung up. He’d set his rifle aside so that with his other hand he could dislodge himself when he heard the dogs and understood they were very close. He grabbed for the rifle but it fell, then they were on him. Oh, Carla, he thought, are you in for an ass whipping when I get back to you, little girly.

  The next morning they headed back to town. Ardy’s legs had been torn up by the dogs, one of which he’d eventually shot dead, though the other had escaped. He’d ripped an extra shirt into bandages and stopped the bleeding but rode in a gloom over his shredded pants.

  Carlos was flung across his horse with a bullet hole between his eyes, one in his right shoulder and another in his belly, the horse covered in blood. They were a quiet duo now, so Ardy heard the approach of the other rider—who was singing—in plenty of time to guide the horses into the edge of the woods. He swung from his saddle and dumped Carlos and led the horses into a grove of pine trees where he hobbled them quickly. The rider’s song still rising and falling in the air, Ardy hurried back toward the road and dragged the dead boy behind a rotten log and lay down beside him. In front of them, beyond the log, he could see a low spot in the road with a trickle of water cutting it.

  “Half a dollar says his mule or horse will stop at that little crick yonder,” Ardy said, pointing with his Winchester barrel. He worked his tobacco in his jaw and spat and glanced at Carlos where he lay on his belly just inside the shadows of a pair of young pin oaks. “Well?”

  He waited, then, “I don’t bet,” he answered for the boy, in a falsetto voice.

  “You what?”

  Same girl’s voice: “We don’t believe in it.”

  He looked at Carlos. “How the hell am I supposed to mold you into a man if you act like a church lady?” He held out his hand. “Here. Shake my goddamn hand.”

  The boy lay dead.

  Ardy reached and grabbed his cold hand and squeezed hard before he let go, the fingers mashed together and yellowing.

  “There. We’ve shook on it. That mule stops in the crick, you owe me a dollar.”

  He looked off down the road. Birds crossed and recrossed, chasing one another, the air busy with their whistles. A shadow on the dirt and he looked up to see a large crow veer its course and light in the top of a leafless pin oak, watching them.

  “Your more superstitious folk might take that for a bad sign,” Ardy said. He shifted his rifle on the log and lowered his shoulder so his sights centered the crow. “Look at that,” he said. “That peckerhead knows I ain’t gone shoot, don’t he?”

  He watched the crow, its white breath borne away on the breeze.

  Then he saw the man, on a mule riding in the middle of the dirt road, passing in and out of shadows. Heard his warbling voice.

  “Quiet,” he told Carlos.

  The man sang, “She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes, when she comes, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes, when she comes, she’ll be driving six white horses she’ll be driving six white horses she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes.”

  “Look how he’s sitting on that mule,” Ardy whispered. “He’s drunker than shit. This is gone be a cakewalk, boy. Go on cock your gun.”

  “We will all have chicken and dumplings when she comes, when she comes…”

  Carlos didn’t move.

  “Cock it, dammit.”

  The boy remained frozen, so Ardy with his eyes on the faraway figure reached across and clicked the hammer of Carlos’s shotgun slowly back.

  “We will kill the old red rooster when she comes, chop chop…”

  He saw now that it was Lev James on the mule, chop-chopping with his hand as if it were an ax with the actions of the song, and Ardy’s insides seemed to fill with bright warm light. This would be three of the gang dead, their number cut almost in half. He clutched Carlos’s shoulder whispering, “Wait, wait, wait…” as James drew closer, was nearly in range, fifty yards, his mule raising its muzzle at the smell of water and swishing its tail.

  “Come on,” Ardy whispered, “come on, you jackass, lower on down in there and go to dranking.”

  The mule approached the creek and stopped. James paused in his song.

  Ardy bit his bottom lip. “Drank up.”

  The mule lowered its head and began to lap the water.

  “A dollar,” Ardy said to Carlos, “but you can pay me later. You can go on shoot whenever you ready.”

  “I can’t do it,” he whispered for the boy in a sissy’s voice. “Oh, I’m a little girl I’m so scared, Mister Ardy.”

  Lev James may have sensed them then, as buck deer are said to be able to do, or maybe he heard something unnatural to his ears, or perhaps he’d made a deal with the devil—which might have accounted for the crow’s watchfulness—for without the smug expression on his face altering and without panic or even seeming to hurry—the only change you could see was a lock of hair falling across his eyes—he dropped his jug to the sand while reaching right-handed behind his back and withdrawing from his waistband a long-barreled pistol. As it passed his right hip he cocked it with his other hand like a trickshooter Ardy had paid a dime to see once in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and then in a movement gauzy with speed he’d switched the gun to his left hand and raised his right forearm flat before his eyes for a prop and steadied the barrel over the forearm and sighted down the length of the gun.

  He seemed smaller now. He’d hunched behind the mule’s head and curled his shoulders inward. The jug had just stopped its roll in the road.

  Ardy didn’t hurry his first shot. He planted the squat bead at the end of his Winchester at James’s breastbone. James hadn’t fired, was still searching the brush for movement, when Ardy squeezed his trigger. James would have died quickly, except the mule raised its head into the bullet’s path and was suddenly vomiting blood and teeth.

  Flung back and off, James held on to his pistol as he flew and landed and lay flat in the dirt while the mule buckled to its knees squealing and panting, rolled onto its side, clambered back on its feet. Then it fell again, kicking. James scrabbled to his right to avoid the mule’s thrashing, but kept it between them. He fired once, clipping a leaf above Ardy’s head, and Ardy knew he would
be a good one on your side in a fight. Carlos of course hadn’t moved the whole time.

  James fired twice more, both shots high, and Ardy held off, not wanting to give his position away.

  “Who the hell’s shooting at me?” James bellowed.

  The mule had settled on its side and lay kicking and squealing through its ruined snout, blood soaking the dust and creeping in its pool nearer and nearer to James’s elbow. Ardy saw the outlaw’s rump rise a bit and knew he meant to move forward, use the mule for cover, which is what Ardy himself would’ve done.

  He came on all fours, but when Ardy shot, James’s right sleeve puffed and he yelled an animal sound and grabbed his shoulder. Still he came, a flurry of knees and elbows. Ardy ratcheted in another round and fired, hitting James in the left foot. The outlaw yelled again and fell behind the mule, which continued to squeal and struggle to rise.

  Until James shot it in the head and it lay still.

  “Hey!” Ardy called. “You dead yet?”

  James peeked over the mule’s flank. “I’ll be doing the killing today,” he said. Then he did a surprising thing. He stood up. His shirt and pants were entirely red, though were it mule blood or his own Ardy couldn’t tell. He walked with a limp, directly toward them with his pistol aimed. He’d reloaded and made their position. He fired once, twice. Ardy kept his head down. A bullet sprayed him with dirt. Another hit a tree. One smacked Carlos in his white face, destroying his nose and turning his head toward Ardy.

  Good shot.

  Then nothing. Ardy raised his head. James continued toward them, aiming, clicking, his gun empty. He kept walking, twenty feet from the edge of the woods, fifteen. He threw his gun at them—it landed just in front of Carlos’s frozen face—and fell to his knees.

  First Ardy thought he’d gone down at last, then saw he was digging at rocks in the road. He stood up with his right hand full and began throwing them with his left. Running. Ardy raised up on one knee over the log and aimed at the man’s gut. A rock hit him in the shoulder and it hurt but not bad and he was glad it wasn’t a bullet. He fired. James hadn’t stopped running and Ardy fired again, and then the man was crashing between them, falling over the log with the iron odor of blood. When he landed he was still.

  “That’s one tough son-of-a-whore,” Ardy declared.

  To be sure he was dead, Ardy reached the barrel of Carlos’s shotgun to the man’s hair and pushed it up under the base of his skull. He pulled the trigger and the head burst like a melon. Then he stood and listened. What a silent world. He looked up into it. He felt like the center of something. The crow had flown or he would have shot it, too.

  VI

  Waite sat thinking in his office, sun coming in through the window and igniting the crystal figurine Sue Alma had given him to use as a paperweight. He never did stack papers under it, preferred to keep things neat, filed and locked away, but he did like to heft the thing—shape of an ocean fish, a porpoise—and he liked its weight, its smoothness. When he blew on it it misted up, he liked to watch it unmist in his hand. He’d enjoyed fishing as a younger man, taking his daughters in a little rowboat he’d made himself and named the Clara Nell after his two oldest. Now he smiled. Several years back Johnny-Earl had lobbied for a boat of his own, the John Earl, and Waite had got him the lumber as a Christmas gift that year and the boy had labored for nearly a week, refusing Waite’s help, not even letting him come into the stables to view it on its sawhorses. When he’d finished, he ceremoniously led Waite, Sue Alma, and the three girls to the barn and with a flourish snatched off a bedsheet to reveal the boat. Instead of the John Earl he’d named it the Sue Alma, causing his mother to cry and Waite to flush with pride.

  He shook his head, as if to clear it. Beside the paperweight lay a shape-less lump, the heel of Lev James’s boot, with which he’d beaten poor Clarence Wilkins half to death. Waite had no doubt it had been Lev, who’d been at the auction and kept the Methodist church from getting itself a new piano. Lev had paid a couple of fellows to haul it out to Mitcham Beat by way of Coffeeville—you’d never lug a piano through that damn thicket. Now Waite knew he’d have to go out there and pick him up for the assault on Wilkins, a thing he dreaded, knowing the man wouldn’t come in peacefully. Which meant Waite was faced with riding out to Mitcham Beat and killing Lev James.

  As he thought, he picked up the heel of the boot and held it. Something in the treads. He idly scratched at whatever it was with his fingernail, hoping it wasn’t a year’s worth of compressed horse shit. He unfolded his glasses and put them on and frowned at the gunk. It was of a certain viscosity that was familiar to him and he raised it to his nose aware even as he was doing so that if anyone happened to walk in or peer through his window they’d see him sniffing the bottom of Lev James’s boot.

  Pine tar.

  He did the paperwork to arrest James for McCorquodale’s murder and sat waiting for Oscar to return so he could get a signature. In the meantime he opened a drawer in his desk and removed a list of men who’d served as deputies in the past. One had died so he scratched his name off and pondered the rest.

  Presently he heard soft footsteps down the hall, heard them stop as whoever it was looked at the four doors. He set his list aside and took his feet off the top drawer where they’d been propped, butt of a pistol within grasp. When he saw who came in his door, he closed the drawer.

  “Hello, Bit,” he said.

  His friend looked haggard beyond reason, like a man who’d been dumped by a typhoon on an island: he wore pants much too large for him and a woman’s lacy blouse with elaborate daisies stitched into the sleeves. His beard was caked in mud and the skin of his face was mottled red, covered in scratches and sores, red welts on his neck. Waite stood to see the rest of him. His pants were frayed at the bottoms, and for shoes he’d tied rags around his feet, the yellow-nailed big toe of one foot visible like the head of a turtle. By now the office had filled with the rank odor of something dead.

  “I could arrest you for your smell alone,” Waite said.

  “Billy,” Bit said. He raised a hand to his head as if he might take a hat off, but he wore nothing on his mud-flattened mat of hair and dropped his hand back along his side.

  “This one I’ve got to hear.” Waite pointed at his neck, the welts there. “What happened?”

  “Just about got hung.”

  “By who?”

  Bit was still looking out the window. “I’m fixing to tell you some things, Billy, that I ought to told you when you come see me last time. I had what they call misplaced loyalty. Well, here I stand in a ragged state, sucked back from Hades, ready to repent.”

  Waite put his handkerchief to his nose. “First let’s get you cleaned up and get you outta that woman’s smock. If any children see you, they’ll have nightmares for a year.”

  In a tub in a hotel room Waite had charged the county for, and with the things Bit’d been wearing in a sour pile on the floor, the bootlegger looked just about human again, though against cleaner, whiter skin his wounds seemed more severe, especially the infected ones covering his neck. Waite had sent for the doctor and expected the man any moment.

  “Did you sign their paper?” Waite asked.

  Bit sat up in the tub—the water just about black—and ashed his cigar into the soap dish. “I didn’t, Billy, but they was three of ’em come to my house. They said they was a organization that meant to attack the courthouse and get some new blood in there. They figured if they killed all the town fellows they could get their hands on, some good men would have to fill in.” Bit inspected his cigar. “I ain’t so sure they’re gone find ’em, Billy.”

  “You mean there ain’t enough decent town men to reconstruct the government once the good decent country fellows murder all the current folks in office?”

  Bit raised a peeling yellow foot out of the water, then submerged it again. “You reckon that fellow’d heat up this bath?”

  Waite went into the hall and looked over the balcony rail. “Jimmy,” he
called down to the clerk, “could you bring Mr. Owen some more hot water?”

  Back in the room, Waite took his seat. “Go on.”

  “They wanted me to give up my stills. Wanted me to be partners with ’em. I said what did that mean, that I’d do the work and they’d share in the takings, and they said yep, that’s about what it meant.”

  “And?”

  “And I told ’em no. Which is when they started coming after me.”

  “Were they the ones who tried to hang you?”

  He nodded.

  “I need names, Bit. And I need you to promise me you’ll testify.”

  “I’ll give you the names, Billy, but then I’m fixing to leave the county. I’m hoping you’ll help me get something to wear—’less you want me dragging around your town dressed up like a wild woman. I’ll tell you who they are, and for payment I want you to set me up. Train ticket, some pocket money.”

  “I could arrest you, Bit. Put you in jail.”

  The old man shook his head. “We both know you wouldn’t do that, Billy.”

  He was right. “Who are they?”

  He told the story of his hanging then, of three hooded fellows ambushing him at his still and opening fire on him. He shot back and got one in the leg but they had him pinned down behind his vats. They started shooting at it and whiskey began running out onto him. They called out and said they were fixing to throw a torch over in there, which would’ve ignited the whole place. So Bit surrendered. They beat him up some, then took his shoes.

  As if to demonstrate this, he raised one of his awful yellow feet from the water.

  “Go on,” Waite said.

  He related the failed hanging attempt, how he’d known he was a dead man when they’d taken off their hoods and let him see their faces. Last thing he remembered was being noosed aback his own mule and Lev James beating dust from the poor animal’s rump, trying to get it to move out from under him and leave him swinging. “It must’ve moved, finally,” he concluded. “For I don’t recall no more.”