Sanctuary

“All right,” Goodwin said. “Tommy’ll show you the way to the truck.” He went away, on into the house.

Benbow looked at the woman. Her hands were still wrapped into her dress. “Thank you for the supper,” he said. “Some day, maybe.…” He looked at her; she was watching him, her face not sullen so much, as cold, still. “Maybe I can do something for you in Jefferson. Send you something you need.……”

She removed her hands from the fold of the dress in a turning, flicking motion; jerked them hidden again. “With all this dishwater and washing.……You might send me an orange stick,” she said.

Walking in single file, Tommy and Benbow descended the hill from the house, following the abandoned road. Benbow looked back. The gaunt ruin of the house rose against the sky, above the massed and matted cedars, lightless, desolate, and profound. The road was an eroded scar too deep to be a road and too straight to be a ditch, gutted by winter freshets and choken with fern and rotted leaves and branches. Following Tommy, Benbow walked in a faint path where feet had worn the rotting vegetation down to the clay. Overhead an arching hedgerow of trees thinned against the sky.

The descent increased, curving. “It was about here that we saw the owl,” Benbow said.

Ahead of him Tommy guffawed. “It skeered him too, I’ll be bound,” he said.

“Yes,” Benbow said. He followed Tommy’s vague shape, trying to walk carefully, to talk carefully, with that tedious concern of drunkenness.

“I be dog if he aint the skeeriest durn white man I ever see,” Tommy said. “Here he was comin up the path to the porch and that ere dog come out from under the house and went up and sniffed his heels, like ere a dog will, and I be dog if he didn’t flinch off like it was a moccasin and him barefoot, and whupped out that little artermatic pistol and shot it dead as a door-nail. I be durn if he didn’t.”

“Whose dog was it?” Horace said.

“Hit was mine,” Tommy said. He chortled. “A old dog that wouldn’t hurt a flea if hit could.”

The road descended and flattened; Benbow’s feet whispered into sand, walking carefully. Against the pale sand he could now see Tommy, moving at a shuffling shamble like a mule walks in sand, without seeming effort, his bare feet hissing, flicking the sand back in faint spouting gusts from each inward flick of his toes.

The bulky shadow of the felled tree blobbed across the road. Tommy climbed over it and Benbow followed, still carefully, gingerly, hauling himself through a mass of foliage not yet withered, smelling still green. “Some more of ——” Tommy said. He turned. “Can you make it?”

“I’m all right,” Horace said. He got his balance again. Tommy went on.

“Some more of Popeye’s doins,” Tommy said. “ ’Twarn’t no use, blockin this road like that. Just fixed it so we’d have to walk a mile to the trucks. I told him folks been comin out here to buy from Lee for four years now, and aint nobody bothered Lee yet. Besides gettin that car of hisn outen here again, big as it is. But ’twarn’t no stoppin him. I be dog if he aint skeered of his own shadow.”

“I’d be scared of it too,” Benbow said. “If his shadow was mine.”

Tommy guffawed, in undertone. The road was now a black tunnel floored with the impalpable defunctive glare of the sand. “It was about here that the path turned off to the spring,” Benbow thought, trying to discern where the path notched into the jungle wall. They went on.

“Who drives the truck?” Benbow said. “Some more Memphis fellows?”

“Sho,” Tommy said. “Hit’s Popeye’s truck.”

“Why cant those Memphis folks stay in Memphis and let you all make your liquor in peace?”

“That’s where the money is,” Tommy said. “Aint no money in these here piddlin little quarts and half-a-gallons. Lee just does that for a-commodation, to pick up a extry dollar or two. It’s in makin a run and gettin shut of it quick, where the money is.”

“Oh,” Benbow said. “Well, I think I’d rather starve than have that man around me.”

Tommy guffawed. “Popeye’s all right. He’s just a little curious.” He walked on, shapeless against the hushed glare of the road, the sandy road. “I be dog if he aint a case, now. Aint he?”

“Yes,” Benbow said. “He’s all of that.”

The truck was waiting where the road, clay again, began to mount toward the gravel highway. Two men sat on the fender, smoking cigarettes; overhead the trees thinned against the stars of more than midnight.

“You took your time,” one of the men said. “Didn’t you? I aimed to be halfway to town by now. I got a woman waiting for me.”

“Sure,” the other man said. “Waiting on her back.” The first man cursed him.

“We come as fast as we could,” Tommy said. “Whyn’t you fellows hang out a lantern? If me and him had a been the Law, we’d a had you, sho.”

“Ah, go climb a tree, you mat-faced bastard,” the first man said. They snapped their cigarettes away and got into the truck. Tommy guffawed, in undertone. Benbow turned and extended his hand.

“Goodbye,” he said. “And much obliged, Mister——”

“My name’s Tawmmy,” the other said. His limp, calloused hand fumbled into Benbow’s and pumped it solemnly once and fumbled away. He stood there, a squat, shapeless figure against the faint glare of the road, while Benbow lifted his foot for the step. He stumbled, catching himself.

“Watch yourself, Doc,” a voice from the cab of the truck said. Benbow got in. The second man was laying a shotgun along the back of the seat. The truck got into motion and ground terrifically up the gutted slope and into the gravelled highroad and turned toward Jefferson and Memphis.