He hunkered down behind the gun, began to check off the firing requirements. Steadily, he drew the bolt back, till it clicked. He looked at the two levers above the grip on the left-hand side, the safety (off) and full-auto (on).
He checked the sight, that fancy Lyman job, and diddled a bit with it to make certain the gun would shoot to point of aim at less than fifty yards.
He had them.
He brought the gun to bear, and at that moment beheld an amazement. A thin cowboy stepped out of the cabin of the craft, and took his hat off, and cascades of blonde hair fell out, and Section Boss saw that it was a girl!
A goddamned girl!
For some reason this infuriated him even more profoundly. A girl! A girl had been among the raiders, and had brought all this hell upon the place.
A girl!
He squiggled and wiggled gently, oriented the big gun this way and that, until he'd put the big sight blade square on her and had it centered in the peephole of the Lyman sight.
Gun braced tight, he began to squeeze the trigger.
He was a hero!
THE birds sensed it coming somehow, and the dark night was full of them, seething and cawing, wheeling and darting. Amazing how many birds a piney woods could contain, and how mysteriously they could read the future and know it to be tragic. They launched, like carrier planes, before the water arrived.
Earl wondered how it would come as he labored at the prison launch, trying to find fuel to add to the tank, mixing some oil in, studying the primitive controls so that he could understand it well enough to run it, and finally cracking off the control panel at the keyhole (he had no time to look for a key) and trying to hot-wire the tangles to spark, and get out of there.
He tried to concentrate, but he could not. The world was about to end, this world at any rate, and by his hand. He somehow had to see it, know it, watch it finish and drown.
Birds in the air. Animals scurrying through the brush. A sense of disturbance in the universe, as the animals understood flood as well as fire, and made to flee.
When it came, it came stealthily. He thought of Japanese naval infantry moving through the fog, knowing how to use the land, geniuses of concealment and silent movement. The black water was not there and then in the next second it was, though at first only the oddest sense of shimmer or vibration where there should be none gave away its presence, and then it was everywhere, unstoppable, remorseless, powerful in its quiet, insistent way. It didn't rush or gurgle or throw up sprays of white; it boasted no waves or tides; it just rose in the trees and spread with devilish speed until in seconds there was no ground visible but the trees stood sunk halfway in black water. Its current was strong, for boughs and chunks and pieces hurled along its surface, and here and there the corpse of a dead animal.
Earl knew it was time.
Come on, goddamn you, he said, jerking two splayed wires together. At last a spark, just a tiny twitch of light in the dark chaos of what had been a control panel, and the old craft heaved, shuddered, coughed up a throatful of blue, dense smoke, and then began to roar.
Earl steered straight into the channel, hoping there were no secret impediments or secret passageways concealed by the still calm water that he didn't know (he hadn't been paying much attention the last time he'd gone for a ride in this particular boat) or that he wouldn't encounter some kind of supercurrent set off by the broken levee that would suck him in and down.
The old scow lurched into the dark water under a spray of stars, and Earl held her steady, aiming for an opposite shore, where there should be as much safety as possible.
He looked back and saw that the Drowning House had now been taken, its foundations eaten away by the flood; it fought its destiny but then gave up, tumbling into collapse as the water claimed it.
The sun was coming up. Its brightness oozed out of the east, and soon enough the water began to sparkle. The disk itself was shortly visible, and the sky began its run from black to gray to pewter to blue.
In the increasing light, Earl watched the clouds of birds circling the opposite shore, although shore wasn't quite the right word. Remnants of the levee stood all along it, though here and there, by natural forces difficult to comprehend, it had been breached, and yet more water poured into the lowlands of Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored).
Earl navigated a course south, toward the town or what would remain of it. This took him along the whole course of the prison installation at which he looked for signs of destruction. They were ample. Of the four machine- gun towers only one still stood, the others having given way to the water; and that one looked ready to go at any second, twisted crookedly as its supports washed away. The air was full of the sense of water unleashed, and yet still whiffs of the night's fires remained.
Above it all the birds rotated in the sky, trying to figure out a new destination.
When Earl passed what should have been the Big House, the Store and the Whipping House, he could see nothing. But of course he hadn't looked for them from the river before, and so he didn't know if this signified their ruin or not. But he heard the rush of water, and that was enough to suggest they were inundated.
The last mile was calm, and he could tell from the columns of smoke of fires still burning that the town was gone, too, somehow. But at last he saw what he had come to see: a raft, poling its way up the river on this far bank, holding three cantankerous white fellows, cursing at each other loudly, a man on a stretcher, and a girl, who stood apart from them.
She took off her cowboy hat and waved, and her survival, honestly more important than any of the others, filled him with sudden joy.
'Say there,' he hailed.
'Damn, Earl, where'd you get that damn boat?'
'Picked it up somewhere in the night. Here, let me get y'all aboard.'
'Be careful now. There's a fifth.'
Earl wondered what Elmer meant, but then he saw a coffin on the raft that wasn't being used as a pontoon.
'Oh, hell,' he said.
He maneuvered close enough, and throttled the engine back, afraid to turn it off. Elmer and Bill seized his gunwale and mated the two craft in the center of the current. Then Charlie and Sally helped Jack across, and though the man had difficulty with his pinned arm, in other respects he seemed spry enough. He was a tough old bastard. Then Elmer and Bill got the coffin up and slid it over the gunwale, with Charlie and Sally pitching in on their side, until it rested on the deck of his own boat.
Then the two men threw rifles across, and came themselves.
They released the raft, and Earl steered hard a-starboard to reorient upstream, and the current was much stronger running against than running with, but the old scow plunged ahead in the increasing light and heat, back in the direction he had come.
'Glad to see you, Earl,' said Elmer. 'We's getting tired of that poling and goddamned Charlie wasn't pulling his own weight on his pole.
And Jack wasn't worth a damn.'
'Hell I wasn't, old man. These two old coots let me do all the work.'
'What happened to Mr. Ed. He catch one?'
'No, sir, not by a damn sight. He faced his fellas and done that job up right good. He told all them colored men how to put a raft together, and they all been gone for hours now. They downriver a far piece. Then old Ed just passed, with a smile on his face, in a rocking chair. He went gentle into the good night, I'll say.'
'I'm sorry, Sally. I never meant?'
'You never mind, Earl. Now what on God's earth happened to you? Looks like you put your face in a meat grinder.'
'Had a ruckus with a fellow.'
'Someone else can drive this boat. Earl, you come here and I will stitch that ear on or it will fall clean off and you will look like a circus freak.'
