advance of my arrival.'
'Well, maybe so, maybe not. Fact is, Vincent, you was found in a dead woman's house by my deputies and no one else was. Maybe you couldn't stand visiting a Niggertown without cashing in on some cheap cooze and thought that old gal be accommodatin'. But she wouldn't He with you, and so you done pole axed her head in. Seen it before. Now, if you's a local, we might just say, Old Vincent, he got to thinking with his little head ' of his big one, and let it go at that. Them kind of things will happen. But you's a big outside agitator so the rules are much different this time.'
'This is ridiculous. Any prosecutor would scoff at that. Did you interview other witnesses, did you develop a timeline, did you quarantine the crime scene, did you investigate her standing in the community, her kinship relations, those who might hate and fear her?
No, you just arrested?'
But Sam quit. He suddenly knew what this was all about.
It was as Earl had said. Tomorrow, on the boat, he'd be drowned. The river would eat him, as it had eaten the Negro family. This story, it was all to get him quieted.
'You'll have your day in court,' said Sheriff Leon, with a smile.
'You'll git your chance to call an attorney. We'll git all this straightened out, once and for all. It's all gonna be all right, and justice will be paid out, as it always is in Thebes County.'
No moon, not much breeze. The dogs were quiet, and in Thebes, Mississippi, it seemed to be just another night in a long summer of nights, each the same.
But Earl crouched inside the wire at the sheriff's compound, checking his watch. He was not dressed seasonably, but rather for war: heavy dark hunting pants, boots, a dark navy sweater, a watch cap, his face muted by mud. The K-bar knife was sheathed at his hip. His Hamilton was upside down on his wrist so that the radium dial would not show.
By his reckoning, in exactly one minute a Molotov cocktail of gasoline and powdered soap would detonate when its cigarette fuse burned into the soaked rag in its nozzle in an outbuilding in Thebes less than a half mile away. That fire would spread through the abandoned building and lead to powder fuses, which in turn would track to firecrackers Earl had constructed from the powder of.45 shells. For a few brief seconds it would sound like a gunfight had broken out in all its fury in Thebes, The building would burn; a few more shots would ring out through the night as the flames ate the wood.
He expected the boys would be up in seconds. Whatever else they were, they were well-drilled troops, and that sheriff expected them to react fast. They'd be saddled up and out to fight the invaders in a matter of minutes. That's when Earl would kick his way into the lockup and conk whomsoever there he found, and liberate Sam. They'd be off. But the time of freedom to move was short and chancy, and he knew he had to get as good a lead on the dogs as possible.
He checked his watch again, thinking briefly how many other times over the years he had checked his watch in dark places, waiting for a certain time to arrive, a certain signal to be given, and somebody's idea of what was necessary to begin. But this time, at least, it was his own idea of necessary, and he would save the man whom he loved most in this world or life itself would not be worth continuing. That is how his mind worked, and that is the only way it worked. It felt no deviation, no consideration of other possibilities, no reluctance, no doubt, no temptation to a softer course, and if there was fear it was buried under a willed aggression that was his one gift in the world.
He had committed to Sam. In a youth he cared not to remember, it was Sam who offered the only tenderness in an unpleasant world, far more than Earl's own father, a sheriff who enforced the will of God and the righteous Baptist Bible with a razor strop many times a week to Earl, his brother and his mother. But Sam was a good man who'd even once upbraided the father for his readiness to punish.
The years passed, Earl's in the Marine Corps, and then he came back from the war and got himself in another one, in Hot Springs, and again almost got himself killed. Sam came to him a second time and said, 'Now, Earl, I do have a job open. I need an investigator in Polk.
Don't pay much, but you'll be in the public safety sector and I will be making calls on your behalf. I want you working for me, young man. I don't want nothing bad happening to you.'
So they worked together for a number of years, and Earl finally began to understand that in some way?no book would ever say this, but he felt it and knew it to be so, whatever the books might say?Sam was the father he'd always wanted. He couldn't put this in words, of course, for words were tricky things and never meant exactly what they said, or worse, never said exactly what they said, or worse, never said exactly what was meant. But Sam was steady and fair and honest and as hard a worker as Earl had ever seen, and it was Sam who got Earl a bank loan so that he could fix up his father's old place, and it was Sam who treated Earl's boy more like a grandson than an employee's son, and it was Sam who loved that boy, Bob Lee, and made the boy feel connected to family.
So now: we do it, goddammit, without looking back, we do this thing.
He looked again at his watch. Yes, any minute now and From far off the blast erupted. It wasn't a blast so much as evidence of a huge force being released. A glow rose up through the trees, and seconds later the crackers popped?Earl had set up twenty-five of them from thirty cartridges, the bullets painfully pried out of shells, then resealed with mud. They went off, powder and primer detonating simultaneously, and it sounded like the Dalton gang had decided to rob two banks in a town that had none.
Earl watched as the big log house stirred, and lamps were lit all around it. Someone fired up the generator, and then a man, then another, then three or four clambered out to see the ruckus. Someone started clanging on a big gong, and for a little bit it looked almost humorous ?the term Chinese fire drill came to Earl's mind?as the boys, then the sheriff, tried to figure out what was going on.
A night patroller came thundering up the road and roared into the compound, gathered his sweated horse to a halt, and started screaming.
'Sutler's Store is burning and men is shooting the place up. Don't know what it is, maybe the niggers are getting a revolt going.'
' Y'all git a-goin',' screamed the sheriff. 'You got to stop these goddamn things early else they git wild and big on you. G'wan, git out there, you bastards!'
The horsemen saddled and mounted, and played with guns for a bit?revolvers loaded, shells inserted into shotgun tubes, levers thrown, hammers drawn back?and then, without much chatter, the unit roared out the gate, pulling up a screen of dust from the road.
Earl had placed himself at an angle to the house such that the fewest of the windows opened onto him. At the same time, he knew he couldn't slouch or scurry. Now he arose and walked purposefully forward, presuming that in the general melee no one would be focused enough to notice, or that no one would notice that as he walked, he had Sam's old undershirt knotted around the ankle of one leg. He made it.
He slid around the back of the house as another group of outriders, this time led by the sheriff himself, hurried off. Possibly the place was deserted by now; possibly it wasn't.
Quickly, he found the shed that contained the generator, which was plugging away and coughing up smoke as its gasoline engine drove its gears. He crouched to it and unscrewed the cap to the tank. He untied the bunched undershirt from his leg, rolled it thin and fed one end of the tube of cloth down into the gas. He wedged the shirt into the nozzle of the tank, knowing full well that the gasoline would diffuse upward until it had saturated the shirt. Except that he took out a Lucky Strike cut in half already, lit it, took a deep puff, and wedged it into the bunched cotton. It would burn down as the fuel spread up; in two minutes (he'd timed it with the other half of the cigarette), when they met, the tank would be lit off and the boys would then have two fires to think about, one that was burning up their own goods.
He left the shed, slipped along the house and into the lock-up. He tried to ease his way in, but an old guard was standing up, looking in the direction of the fire, fingering a large double-barreled sawed-off.
The man smoked a cigar, shifted weight from one foot to the other uneasily, wiped his dry lips, scanned the horizon, and generated unease in all the ways a man can generate unease.
Earl removed his K-bar, feeling its familiar heft and weight, the worn smoothness of the leather grip. He knew exactly the length of the blade and what it was capable of.
Swiftly he walked to the old man, gripping the knife handle.
Earl struck, and he went down.
Earl hit him with the metal cap at the end of the grip, right where the jaw meets the skull, an inch below and
