with. Would certainly appreciate it if you could help.'
The colonel loved Earl, as did most who knew him, the others being those who only feared him. He knew that if Earl had a situation, Earl would need the time to deal with it. Earl didn't request things lightly; he was the kind of fool for duty that commanding officers have relied upon for thousands of war-filled years.
'Earl, I'll notify personnel. We'll see to it the county is covered.'
'Yes, sir. Much obliged.'
'Earl, you've earned it, you know you have.'
It was true. Earl's record was embarrassingly without blemish. His problem: he worked too hard, he cared too much, he was too fair and too meticulous in his planning and deportment. It was as if the goddamned medal he had won demanded of him that he be perfect the day long, and by God, perfect the day long he would be, and he would die before letting it down, though of course he never, ever, to any man or woman, talked of it.
As for Earl, the next part was the difficulty, with Junie. Yet it turned out easier than he expected. He told her he'd be going off for a bit, and he watched as her face fell.
'You're going to that war,' she said. 'You are a fool for war. You cannot stay out of it.'
'No, ma'am,' he said, 'I am not. They do not care for me; I'm too used-up for them these days.' Then he told her he was only going to Mississippi, and only for a few days, and only to look after Sam, who might be in some trouble.
'Sam? In trouble? Why Earl, Sam could talk the devil himself out of hell.'
'I know. But maybe Sam run up against something meaner than the devil.
Don't you worry none.'
He knew he had won; her deeper terror was the anguish he felt about being over here while the Marines were over there, in Korea. She knew he had been writing letters to congressmen and the com mandant, and she worried that sooner or later one would be fool enough to let him back in, despite the wounds he'd picked up in the big war. So in a way she was relieved that it was only Mississippi.
That done, a few travel arrangements needed to be made, and finally he had one last call, though he made it from a pay phone. He called a colleague named Wilbur Forebush, by rank a lieutenant in the Arkansas State Police and by authority director of undercover work, which was becoming necessary, as the crime tendencies grew more sophisticated. He and Wilbur had shared a pleasant few Saturdays in a duck blind over flooded rice fields these past several years.
He explained what he wanted but not why.
But Wilbur trusted him.
'All right, but Earl, if you git in a jam now, you call me. I will come quick for you.'
'I appreciate it. I just don't want no tracks back to my family, when I don't know what's cooking.'
'So I understand. I'll have it couriered down to you. Tomorrow morning okay?'
'That's fine.'
What arrived was a pouch containing a driver's license, seemingly authentic, in the name of, as it turned out, one Jack Bogash, of Little Rock. Other authenticating documents included a social security card, a heavy equipment operator's license, and others. There was no Bo gash, of course. The documents were high-grade fakes, meant for undercover officers in tough circumstances, and would pass scrutiny in every crime lab except the FBI's.
Earl then took the bus to Pascagoula, his belongings, including a45 from the old days, in a pack under a sleeping roll, and a Winchester '95 carbine in a scabbard. He dressed in hunter's rough clothes and high boots, and wore a fedora. No one thought the rifle odd at all, for rifles rode in pickups and saddle scabbards everywhere in the South. On the ride down he studied what maps were available, the best a big color thing that was included in the WPA's 1938 Guide to the Magnolia State.
He scanned it carefully, looking to learn the land and the foliage, committing it carefully to memory.
He did not stop in Pascagoula, but went farther up the river still by bus until he was the only white person left aboard, to an old, nearly dead lumber town called Benndale close to Greene County. There he picked up some supplies at the general store, then went looking for a hunting guide. Of course it wasn't hunting season. Hell, he knew that, he was scouting for some rich fellows and wanted to find a place where he could take a deer lease, bring these boys in the fall, git them all fat bucks, pass some green around, and, dammit, everybody'd be better off. He was directed, eventually, to a hard scrabble op boy named Mctye, who volunteered to canoe him up the Pascagoula, then up the Leaf. Earl said that sounded fine.
The trip through the bayou was without incident, but then Earl changed plans on the old fella. Instead of heading up the Leaf, he decided to have the boy put him off there, at the juncture of the three rivers, Leaf, Yaxahatchee and Pascagoula. He'd work up the Leaf on foot, looking for a sign, scaling out the terrain. The oldster would come pick him up a week hence.
'Mister, this here's dangerous territory,' said the scrunched-up old man, Mctye. 'There's bogs and hollows, and hellholes, where the land has fallen and the trees are so thick you maybe get in, but you ain't getting out. Tricky currents in the water. No one's quite clear on who's hereabouts. Might still be some Indians, might be blue- gum niggers whose bite'll kill you. We got us a dog problem, too. Feral dogs, big as wolves, they travel in packs and can chew a man to bone meal right fast.
They got a prison farm thirty to forty miles away, and they didn't plan to build it there ' the territory was easy traveling.'
'Well, sir, I am in no hurry to git close to a prison one way or the other. But I am an experienced woods fellow and believe I can hold my own. I ain't doing my job if I'm just looking at the ground from a canoe. Want to find and map the hellholes, see where I'd put up stands, where the deer paths are, where I might expect some heavy bucks, if this state done growed '.
'She does, I'll tell you, eight-points and more, big '. So I can see I'll not be telling you what's for. I can see you're a hardhead.
Okay, son, the funeral they be holding be for you, not me. You want to leave me word for your next of kin?' 'Yes sir, Mr. Mctye,' said Earl, and wrote out an address for Jack Bogash in Little Rock. 'I will leave this here with you. You come back in a week. If I am here, so much the better. If I am not, then possibly I've left in another direction. Don't you worry none either way, until maybe some weeks hence, if my widow calls the state po- lice.
Then you tell ' where I started in, and if they can find the body, so much the better.'
'Sir, I hope you know your stuff.'
'Mister, I do too. But this is what a feller has to do these days to earn a living, and if this pays out, I'll be a happy dog.'
The old man spat into the river, left Earl off on the shore of the Leaf, turned around, and in smooth strokes propelled his way back until a bend at last obscured him.
Alone now in the dark cathedral of the swamp, Earl wasted no time. He unlimbered the rifle, fed four.30-'06 150-gram cartridges into the magazine which, by the peculiarity of the gun, was not a tube under the barrel but a complicated internal spring-loaded well that took some care in the proper fitting of the shells, and jacked the lever to feed a cartridge to the chamber. That done, he lowered the hammer.
Next, compass: he shot an azimuth due east, meaning to carry him across the promontory between the upper-Y configuration of Leaf and Yaxahatchee and in seven or eight hours good traveling, locate up on the Yax yet still twenty or so miles downriver from Thebes.
This he did, the pack on his back, a canteen on his belt, the.45 still secured. Though not in combat shape, Earl lived a vigorous life and his body was entirely comfortable in the state of extra effort. He didn't feel now as if he were in Japanese territory, so he moved quickly, without a mind toward invisibility, on as straight a line as he could manage. The woods, once the waters had receded, were firm and piney, and it didn't take long for the heat to soak his shirt and the brim of his fedora. He kept his pace up steady for a good five hours, avoiding hellholes, always returning to his original due east heading.
He finally took a quick break for tuna from a can (buried afterward) and a few swigs of water. Then onward. He reached the Yax by dusk, just where it began to widen and straighten for its last twenty-mile plunge through the piney wilderness to Thebes. He spent two hours with his good knife hewing pine boughs, then stripping them, working until well after dark, assembling a raft.
He slept without a fire, sitting up in his bag, the rifle across his knees, his eyes watching, never asleep
