by Gil Brewer
I turned to Rona. “You’ll have to take him back. Can you do it? The oars for his boat are there.”
“I can’t leave you here.”
“I’m going to try and find them.”
“You’ll never find them, Sullivan. You’ll just get lost.”
“I’ve got to.”
She stared at me. “You want me to take him back to Hagar’s Point?”
“Yes.”
She was looking past my shoulder at Ed. I’d been watching her. Her voice was gentle.
“He’s dead, Sullivan. He just died.”
He lay there with his eyes not quite closed, the slits showing clothlike white, and his mouth open, choked for air he’d never get, the head arched back.
A jay screamed once from not far away. The water slapped against the sides of the boat, and I wanted to get my hands on her, find her, hear all this from her lips. If the Law reached me, they’d never believe it when I told them what she’d done. Meanwhile she and Kaylor would escape.
“You’ll have to take his body back, Rona.”
We knelt there, facing each other, her black hair streaming down one shoulder and that screwy look in her eyes, with the whole cockeyed mess between us now.
“It’s got to be this way.”
“We bury our people in the swamp.” She said it simply, as if we were in church or something, and there was a load of the backwoods pouring out of her right then.
“Not this time,” I said. “That body is evidence. I’ve got to get it back, Rona. I’d like nothing better than to leave it here. I can’t—don’t you see? Will you help me?”
“We can still go—we don’t have to—”
“Don’t make it worse than it is!”
“Did you believe him?”
“About what?”
“What he said about Evis and me? About me being crazy. I’m not like Evis. Did you believe him?”
I sighed. “No, I didn’t believe him.”
“All right. I reckon I will take him back, then.” She turned away and stood up. She stepped into the other boat. A flash of sunlight gleamed on the golden locket chain, and I sat there, lost already. “I’ll be a while,” she said. “It would be best if you wait right here for me. I’ll come back.”
“Be better if you didn’t.”
She didn’t speak for a moment. “You don’t really mean that.”
“All right. I don’t mean it.”
“The swamp will take you, Sullivan. It has no respect, sometimes. You must know its ways.”
I suddenly wanted to curse her. Her with her damned levelheaded thinking. Levelheaded thinking was the wine in the gravy. Talking soft, bury them in the swamp … and I heard her speak again.
She was looking down at the body. Then she looked at me. “It’s just—I guess I don’t want to lose you, Sullivan.”
“That’s one hell of a laugh,” I said. “Lose me? Me? It would be the best thing that ever happened to you never to see me again.”
Her face didn’t change expression. “If you get lost and can’t find any sign of them,” she said, “start a small fire—a smudge. I’ll see it and come….”
“And so will DeGreef, and God knows who else.”
“No. Just do that and stay hidden. Some place away from the fire.”
“Yeah. All right.”
She stood there a moment, looking at me. Then she smiled and pouted her lips in a kiss.
I turned away. She was really screwy. When I looked back, she was smiling. She picked up the oars from the seats of the other boat, fastened them in the locks. “They had a motor on this boat,” she said. “It was Berk’s big Johnson—a beauty. Thirty horses. It went like the wind.”
“You know a lot about Kaylor.”
“He was a friend of the family.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m not lying, Sullivan. I’m not like Evis.” She paused. “Anyway, there’s the motor. They sank it, so he’d have no chance. Maybe they thought he was dead.”
She pointed over the side toward the darker waters of the channel I saw the small propeller blades of the kicker. The rest of the motor was sunk in the muck. It wouldn’t do any good to try and save it now.
“They have Berk’s air boat,” she said. “If they went east, you’ll be able to pick up their trail. Watch for fresh breaks in the grass. Watch the weeds. Watch for islands, and how the birds fly—if they seem startled. You can tell. If there’s any sign of them, for goodness’ sake, cut the motor and pole. You shouldn’t even be using a motor. I’d advise you to cut a pole, anyway, so you’ll have it, just in case.”
She drew the sheathed knife from the slash pocket of her fawn skirt, and tossed it to me. It was a big knife, a sort of small machete. The blade was thick German steel.
• • •
After she was gone I was alone in the world. Now I let the anger seep into me and slowly expand. When she was with me it was different. Now there was a strong bitter vengeance inside me, working me like a sickness. My nerves were raw and jumping at the slightest sound that seemed out of the ordinary.
I started the motor, idled it slowly, as I probed along the winding, canyonlike channel, deeper into the swamp. I knew Rona would make her way safely and quickly back to Hagar’s Point. Then I began wishing I hadn’t forced her to go. But I had to get Fowler’s body back there. It was more than just the fact that I wanted it for evidence. Fowler had been a human being, and there was something wrong about just leaving him out here for the alligators to munch, or the buzzards to search out.
Rona said they buried their dead in the swamps. I’d heard that before. Maybe somebody would bury me in this crazy country.
If I didn’t find Evis, nobody would. Ever. She and Kaylor would hide in here until everything was clear, until all the disturbance was over with and the Law had relaxed. Then they would leave.
I fed the kicker another notch of gas.
Mangroves grew thickly on either side of the channel. The clotted hammocks were a darkly shadowed green, roots knotting into the water, with an occasional Caribbean pine spiking toward the sun, struggling through a matted network of jungle vines. Cabbage palms, shorn and twisted with strangler fig, showed on a grass-thick rounding of ground in the middle of the channel.
If they’d left Fowler and headed east, they had to take the same route I was on, for the time being.
In the distance I detected the clean pale light of day and sensed open expanse. Trying to reach it was something else again.
The channel never got there. I couldn’t find the break. Yet when I looked back, there was only the choking jungle green. It pressed toward me, growing on all sides, and the channel narrowed till it was little more than a narrow trough among rotting and newly born trees.
It narrowed until bird lime scraped from mangroves and sifted onto my shoulders and into the boat. Then it ceased altogether. The prow of the boat nudged a great dead cypress.
I reached to shove off, the kicker ticking softly, nearly laid my hand on a snake that became suddenly brilliant. It was a blue indigo water snake, half in the water, half on the gray-white root of cypress. It slid swiftly over the root, dripped into the water and flipped silently away, head up, eyes pinpoints of gleaming light.
Turning abruptly, I tripped the gas lever. The boat slowed and turned in a roaring circle, cut directly at a wall of vine and burst through.
I was in the middle of a calm lake surrounded by water lilies to the sheath of mangroves that circled it. I plowed straight across the lake, saw another channel, then checked the position of the sun.
I was headed west now. Then I wasn’t so sure. Panic lightly touched me, like the feathered black wings of a great bird. I talked to myself, chasing it away, and kept going.
In another few moments, I sliced through what looked like a vast plain, directly under the sun, the daylight world a fresh blinding. The narrow path of a boat separated the grass, air bubbles clinging along the rigid blades.
I followed this,
touched with anxiousness.
In ten minutes, I was again in jungle. Something seemed recognizable. I slowed the motor, looked around.
A flash of metal beneath the crystal water caught my eye and I sat there in a kind of stupor, sweating, staring at the propellor blades of Berk Kaylor’s kicker that Rona had noticed when we were here a short time before.
Something plopped with a splash into the water. It was a fat cottonmouth moccasin. It swam steadily toward me with a fearless eagerness that brought me to my feet. The boat drifted along the channel, motor slowly turning. The snake kept coming, gaining. I grabbed the rifle from the bottom of the boat. It was a .30-.30 Winchester carbine. I worked the lever rapidly in rising desperation, pumping slugs at the snake until the firing pin pinked on an empty chamber.
Chapter 13
THE COTTONMOUTH writhed about in the water. A deep silence closed down. I checked the carbine. There were no more shells. I’d acted like a damned fool.
I was only a short distance into the swamplands, yet it had me on edge. A threatening place. I knew I could easily get lost within spitting distance of civilization. I couldn’t let it bother me.
With the kicker going, I turned back. It was then I realized I’d lost the knife Rona had left with me.
I had to take it easy—relax.
I couldn’t throw off the tense excitement.
Out of the channel into bright daylight, I took bearings and headed around the blunt-tipped isle of jungle growth, deciding to nose across the thick saw grass.
It was early noon. I kept the motor idled and watched carefully, bearing east.
I refused to think about that snake, or the fact that I’d traveled in a circle without once knowing. I turned my thoughts back to Evis, and the hate came into me stronger than ever.
I was running on hate. Maybe that was wrong. But the tank was full of hate and I was freewheeling.
• • •
A half-hour later I saw the trail—a broad trail, wider than the beam of a canoe. Fresh urgency came into me. It could have been an air boat. Slicing through the tall grass, it led straight off across an endless plain. There was no end in sight. It went on and on.
I started along the trail of the air boat, then slowed the kicker, shut it off. When I checked the gas tank, it showed close to empty.
I sat there sweating and cursing, staring out across the misting distance where Evis and Kaylor must have traveled not long before. What chance did I have of finding them, stopping them?
Winding up the kicker, I turned back in the direction of Hagar’s Point. It took me through jungled territory again, winding channels.
From some distance I heard a speeding car.
It was a minor shock, out here, far from automobiles and highways. Yet, until you were deep into the swamp, there was the chance you could be very near a road without sensing it.
Patiently working the boat toward where the sound had been, I wondered if it were Hagar’s Point. Then, coming abruptly out of a channel, I nearly rammed an old wooded pier, clustered around with boats and skiffs, set against a steep black bank with pine stairs leading to the level of ground above.
I shut off the kicker, tied up, and walked carefully to the top of the steps.
I was certain that the police were out after me, now. They could have already converged down here, away from the main highways, but I couldn’t be sure of.
I wondered what Sheriff DeGreef was doing? I knew I was taking a chance, landing anywhere. And I realized I was thinking like a criminal: I’m as smart as they are. The bastards will have to catch me, if they find me. They’ll have a fight on their hands.
And the hate was for them, too.
It was a small landing. A sign above the pier read Tom’s Landing—Bait & Beer. A gas pump was here apparently for the use of fishermen. It stood under an oak grayly against the forest line. A general store hulked near an intersection of dirt roads. Several houses leaned squarely in the sun, and a bare-boarded bar advertised beer and wine.
Every wasted minute gave Evis and Kaylor a real start toward hiding in the swamps. It had me plenty worried.
Two fishermen, seated on a felled cabbage palm off the road, spoke together in low tones. I moved on down the road past a ramshackle house to the gas pump under the shading water oak. A grizzled, brown-faced old man with dirty gray hair sat on an upturned wooden box reading a newspaper. He wore overalls and heavy box shoes. He looked up as I came along. By his feet, a gleaming new leather battery radio softly played pop music. It sounded strange amidst the dirt of the back country.
“Like to buy some gas for my kicker. The boat’s down by the pier.”
His eyes were sharp as he wiped his nose with the back of a rough, meaty hand.
“How much you need?”
“Ten gallons. I’ll need a can, too.”
“Don’t know if I got a can.”
“Could you check and see?”
He grunted, stood up, and I eyed the newspaper in his hand. He started to put it down. I wanted badly to read it, see what was happening concerning me. He rolled it up, glanced at me again, jammed it into a deep pocket and went inside an old shed. I heard him rattling around in there. He returned carrying a battered, rusty ten-gallon can.
“What kind of motor you got?”
I told him, listening to the radio now, hoping for a news broadcast. They never came when you wanted them.
The old man headed for the pump.
I waited, looking around Tom’s Landing, as it roasted under the noonday sun. The houses appeared unlived in, vines fingering their sides….
“… pause for station identification. In a moment we’ll bring you the latest news release on the St. Petersburg robbery. You folks down there in …”
It was right then that I became aware of the white sedan. I nearly ran.
I’d been staring at it for maybe five or ten seconds, but it hadn’t registered—perhaps because the whole car was clothed in a thick film of dirt. It was parked beside one of the old houses, half in the shade. It was DeGreef’s car, without a doubt, but there was no sign of the sheriff.
I had to get out of here as fast as possible. I hurried over to the man with the gas. He’d just left the oil rack and was pumping gas into the can now.
I tried to listen to the radio. They were working on a new soap detergent that smelled like strawberries. They sang a song about strawberries and breakfast dishes to the tune of I’ll Be Down To Get You In a Taxi, Honey. The man kept watching me, pumping the gas. Finally he had the can filled, and capped it.
“There you go.”
It cost me everything I had. My hands trembled as I picked up the can, trying to take it slow. There was no damned handle.
“You got a guide?” the man said, rattling the change.
“No. No guide.”
I started walking away.
“Be glad to fix you up with a guide.”
“Thanks. I’ll be all right.”
“Shouldn’t go traipsing around in there without you have no guide.” He started after me. I looked back. He spat, shuffling rapidly. “How’d you ever find this place without no guide?”
“Just—fishing.”
I kept going. He stopped, scratched his head, spat again, hauled out his newspaper and started back toward his oak tree. The paper was probably a week old anyway.
I kept an eye out for DeGreef, but he was nowhere in sight. Maybe over in the bar.
I walked quickly toward the boat, carrying the gas can in both hands, the pungent smell thick around me. It was heavy as hell and I wanted to run.
I came down the pier, reached the boat, set the can down and looked at Hugo DeGreef, standing in the stern.
“Hello, Sullivan.”
• • •
I turned, with no place to go. Then I looked at him again. He just stood there with that self-satisfied expression on his red face. He was still wearing the dark gray suit, but he looked a little tired. His tie was loose. He stepped forward in
the rocking boat, picked up the can of gas on the pier. He grunted a little, but he picked it up lightly and placed it in the stern, then sat down by the kicker and looked at me. His hair gleamed like bright sand.
“Get in the boat,” he said.
There was absolutely nothing I could do and he knew it.
“Saw you when I was down the road, about a half-mile,” he said. “You were out there about six hundred yards, coming along a channel. Didn’t know it, did you?”
I wiped sweat off my face.
“Been waiting. Come on, get in.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get in the boat. We’re going out there together.”
I didn’t move.
“That’s right,” he said. “We’ll look around in there together—just the two of us, Sullivan.”
I thought again of trying to run and then remembered the gun he carried, and the way his eyes looked. He was mad clear through, holding it down, trapped inside him.
He spoke almost gently. “Get in the boat.”
I climbed off the pier into the boat and sat down in the next seat from the bow, watching him. The bastard had to make only one wrong move. He nodded, took the cap off the gas tank, uncapped the can and looked around for a way to pour out the gas.
He checked under the stern seat with an exasperated expression, then grinned and came up with an aluminum funnel. He had an eye on me all the time he filled the tank. Then he sat down, holding the steering rod of the motor.
“No point you trying something like you did at the hotel, Sullivan. Let’s put it this way. I’m a good shot. I didn’t try to hit you before.” He showed me his teeth. “That’s all under the bridge. Now I will try. I won’t kill you—I’ll just put one in your knee.”
It would be great out there with him.
“You see?” he said. “I’ve got you. It always happens this way. Now I’m going to get her—wherever she is. This thing’s a mess, but I’m catching up with it now. Why don’t you tell me where she’s supposed to meet you?”
I was silent.
He shrugged, turned and got the kicker started and told me to loose the line from the pier. After that, he headed the boat away from Tom’s Landing, directly across the same swamp area I’d come from.