'What, Earl?'
'It's the last place. It's why there's a Thebes on earth. It's what it's all about. The Screaming House.'
A. rocking chair was found, and the old man sat in the middle of the street, enjoying the fireworks. Beyond the town, beyond the trees, the whole sky was lit in a glare so powerful it extinguished the stars.
That acrid tang of burned wood hung crisp in the air, driving out even the moisture. It was Fourth of July and All Hallow's Night and New Year's Eve combined, the light crackling off the vault of the sky. The old man sat and rocked.
'Sir?'
'Yes?'
'Ain't just got white lightning. Got some fine old Kentucky drinking whiskey, too. Had it many a year, so many a year I don't remember when I first owned it. Be a pleasure, sir, to serve you a drink of it.'
'Sir, my drinking days have been many a year past. But tonight I will make an exception. That is on one condition. The condition is that you and your colleague there join me, and that we raise a sip in salute to the burning of Thebes.'
'I will take that charge, sir.'
'So will I,' said the other, and in a few minutes, the three old men enjoyed a fine sip of Kentucky bourbon, fiery in its own way as the blazing sky.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Thebes came from their hovels and dogtrot cabins to see the wonders of the night. They stared and murmured, particularly as by this time the fires had grown so intense that they cast a glow on the river itself at the base of the street, and it now rippled with the orange textures of oxidation. It was quite beautiful, if not so terrifying.
A woman came to Mr. Ed.
'Sir, what is happening?'
'Why, madam, we have burned the prison farm. To the ground, even now.
There have been battles, and I am certain that most of the guards have perished and the rest have vanished. The sheriff and his fellows, they, too, have gone on. There ain't nobody here no more but you folk.'
'Sir, what do we do?'
'You may stay or you may go. It is your choice. Though there won't be no employment, for those of you who drew a living off that place. That place, it just ain't no more.'
'Sir, we can't leave. We owes money. All us.'
'No, ma'am. Not no more. Whatever debts was owed was paid up in full tonight. Look up, folks, and see the ash in the wind. That's your debts.
The place you called the Store. All gone. Nothing left.'
'What we goin' do? How can we leave? We can't leave no way. It take a boat to leave and we?'
The woman stopped.
'Noah built his own, I recall,' said Mr. Ed. 'I am no carpenter, but I see a barge just offshore, and if my old eyes still work at all in this light, I see the inscription trugood waterproof casket company.
And I see a powerful pile of boxes meant for the dead. Now, seems to me?'
'You can use them boxes, yes sir! You can run board between them with only a little hammering, and in no time, goddamn, you gots a raft. You gots a lot of raft.' 'Why,' said the old man, 'it's almost as if it were planned that way!'
The people got themselves into action, and if they were slow and clumsy at first, it was minutes before convicts began arriving in torrents down the dark road. They too saw the genius of it all, and with their muscle and skill, with nails reclaimed from dogtrot cabins and mallets and boots and whatever used as hammers, with board age from cabins quickly disassembled, it was not at all long before a fleet of rafts, each supported squarely by a squadron of pontoons that had been coffins, came into being.
'Sir, we going. They be enough for all of us. You come with us, sir.
Ain't nothing left.'
But the old man was dozing in the excitement, and even when three more white cowboys, a wounded man on a stretcher, and his granddaughter arrived to look on the scene with encouragement, no one could muster the nerve to wake the old fellow up, for certainly, all agreed, he had earned his rest this night.
Big Boy saw him a fair ways off. The flames leaping at the horizon helped, for they threw a wash of light that otherwise would have kept the man invisible. But no, there he was, two hundred yards out, moving swiftly, bent in purpose. Bigboy's heart leapt a little, but he calmed it to quiet by the imposition of his will, and concentrated on the practicalities of the problem ahead.
He was in the gully just behind the toolshed where the axes and shovels were locked each night. He knew it was Bogart by the walk, the manful stride. He could see the cow man's hat low over the eyes and a rifle in his hands, and he guessed there'd be handguns under that big canvas coat. Bigboy knew Earl was dead set on going to Thebes's one last secret place.
With a pop and a hiss, Bigboy let the whip uncoil and snake through the dirt. It had to be loose and ready for an instant's use. He looked left and right to make certain no branches hung low to capture the tail and tie it up, and of course there weren't any. He was free and clear.
His whip hand was strong and his whip had free rein to snap and bite where he directed it.
He tried to dull himself out, reach a kind of no-place feeling, so that he could move swiftly when the time came, use the whip to take the man down, get on him, and disarm him, then shoot him with his own gun or beat him to death. No, not beat him. Bogart was too swift and tough to be beaten, and no one punch would do the trick; it would have to take two or three in a row, and good as he was, Bigboy remembered that the smaller man was equally good and would have a chance at the lucky punch as he had managed before. But shooting him had no pleasure in it anywhere, for it didn't reflect Bigboy's own purity of will and natural propensity for triumph. Bigboy had to kill him with his own hands, that he knew; but he also knew those hands would have a whip in them. earl hustled along. He was on the levee road, that ridge of land that bisected the fields and led to the trees that marked the river. Along here somewhere would be the turnoff that led through those trees to the Screaming House, with its polite doctor and his assistants, where the convicts went to die in pain.
He knew also that Bigboy could be out here. It was too easy to believe that the guard sergeant had perished in the fires at the Whipping House or the barracks. The man was too swift, too smart. Had he then fled?
That didn't seem like Bigboy either, for if there was a thing he wasn't, it was a coward, and even if he escaped the general slaughter, it wouldn't be his inclination to flee, but to hang around.
But Earl also knew that he hadn't time to smoke the man out, not without dogs and other trackers. Bigboy knew the land; he didn't. Big boy could make time, he couldn't. You caught Bigboy flat in the surprise or you didn't. He hadn't. Bigboy would survive and come dog him in his real life, he had no doubt. Bigboy wasn't the type to let a thing like this slip; Bigboy would work just as hard to find out who Bogart was as Earl had worked to get back here with gunmen. That was Bigboy's nature.
So when the whip flicked out and smashed against his ear, ripping it in a flash of heat pain so intense it almost took Earl's memory, it was not quite a surprise. The surprise was that as Earl wheeled to bring the rifle up Bigboy got there so fast, for he had never seen the albino run and had no idea what animal speed the man possessed.
Bigboy hit him with the crown of his head under the left eye, and even brighter fires than the ones he'd seen that night lit instantly in Earl's brain, and Bigboy's force carried him onward, crushing him in the rush, until he had the smaller man down.
He cracked him crown to face, crown to face, crown to face three more times, each splitting skin, each knocking Earl's sentience toward chaos and sloth.
Then Earl felt Bigboy's hands on him, ripping at the guns. Earl wasn't fast enough to catch the first one, but he got a grip on the big man's wrist at the second, and so Bigboy crown-butted him again. His grip slipped. In an instant, both handguns had been ripped from the holsters.
But Bigboy did not shoot him as well he could have. Instead, he threw the last one away, following the other, pulled off the pouch that contained the firebombs, tossed it too, then stepped back, leaned to retrieve a thing from the ground, stepped back three more paces.
Earl got himself up slowly.
He heard the flick and whisper of the whip.
