much coolness, with the bull-goose drive to do this last thing well and give these boys, squalid as they may seem, something to remember him by: the one who was a man and died a man.
The rope pulled taut, lifting him onto his toes.
'Usually they be beggin' about now,' someone said.
'Cold day in hell afore I beg to white trash like you Mississippi peckers.'
'Ain't he a hard one?'
'Give him credit, he ain't got no cards to play but he is playing them out just as they lay on the table.' 'You got anything to say?' said the sheriff.
He swallowed and could find nothing at all of interest.
'You got any regrets, sir? This'd be the time to make ', and face the Lord at peace.' That inspired him. 'Yes,' he said, feeling the tautness loosen just shred, so that his voice could find words. 'Here's my regret. I regret that I tried to get this one done without killing no human man.
I told somebody that's how I'd do it. And that was a mistake. If I'd done what I knew was the right thing, and shot you boys dead, beginning with them two lunkhead baby shits, and then you, dog man, and you two yassuhing deputies, and finally you, Sheriff?'
'Big words for a man standing under the tree whar he'd a-going to swing,' said Pepper, spitting a gob out on the dirt.
'And finally,' said Earl, 'I regret for them living dogs, ' I know when you boys finish with me, you're going to liquor up, and sooner or later you going to git on them poor animals like they's women and?'
The rope came up, closing up his larynx, and he was off the ground, the world gone to black nothingness, his vision gone, his hearing gone, his feet kicking the breeze. He fought for air but there was none, and the full muscles of his arms and legs kicked and jacked, but only to the effect of opening yet more wounds in his flesh where the unyielding steel bit it. He thought at least he had a son, and by all indications a good one, and he loved his wife and wished he'd been better to her, and he thanked God he'd done his duty in the Marine Corps all them years, and as far as he knew he'd only killed men who were armed and wanting his death, and he'd never raped no one or fought a man who couldn't defend himself, and he thought of blue Pacific seas and the smudges that became islands when the smoke cleared, and how it felt afterward when you had made it and you had just a little bit of time to feel the joy of surviving a bad one once again, and he realized that was as happy as he had been, and it was a kind of happiness few men had felt.
He fell to earth.
He sucked the air.
He heard shouts.
He opened his eyes, saw new men had arrived, six or seven of them, and saw a fellow in command screaming at the sheriff. This one was huge: he had shock-white hair and a pinkish skin, and he wore sunglasses and the uniform of a some kind of sergeant.
'Warden wants this boy, Leon, goddammit, and you back off, because you know what the warden wants, I make sure he gets.'
'Yes sir, Bigboy, I do know that,' the sheriff was yammering as he backpedaled. 'But you watch him, ' he's a tricky bastard, yes, he is.'
'Oh, I don't think he'll be any trouble,' said Bigboy, and he turned and smiled at Earl, who had collapsed to the earth, retching and breathing raggedly. 'You won't be any trouble now, will you, sir?' he asked, and then hit him hard and flush in the side of the jaw, putting him dead-out cold.
Earl's brain saw water: he was underwater. Above him, the green surface undulated; he gasped for air and there was none and then he remembered where he was. Tarawa, off Green Beach 1, and the Higgins Boat had tied up on a reef a quarter mile offshore and he was walking the platoon in while the Jap tracers, blue-white, flicked across the surface, and their howitzers and mortars tossed big boomers down and their cut puffs into the water. The world was liquid and fire, chaos and fear, nothing but, and he tried to hold it together, keep the boys moving, get in toward cover, because there was nothing here for anyone.
A moment came when he slipped and went under, with all that equipment, the pack, the Thompson, and the weight just pulled him down in green silence, and he almost quit. He was underwater. Above him, the green surface undulated; he gasped for air but there was none. But he didn't quit. That wasn't in him for some reason, and so when he really awoke, he realized he wasn't in the warm salty Pacific off Green Beach 1, but in some other hellhole. Then he remembered.
The pain was general all over his body, from the rips in his flesh where the dogs had chewed him to the aches in his ribs where the deputies had kicked him. His own blood tasted salty in his mouth and his muscles were throbbing in discomfort; worse still, where his wrists and ankles had cut against the cuffs, he'd opened wounds too, and those flickered hot as fire. But it was his head that hurt the most.
As he swam to consciousness, he was aware that something was wrong; it was as if the left side of his head had doubled in size. He opened his eyes and in the left one, the vision was blurred toward blindness. He moved to touch his wound there, but was bound by the chains. Instead, he lowered his head and touched it against his shoulder; it erupted in pain, and he realized the oddness he felt was a swelling. The left side of his head was swollen like some kind of fruit, and his eye was crushed shut. He remembered a fight on the deck of the old U. S. S.
Philippine Sea in Shanghai Harbor in 1938, against a Seaman Second named Kowalachik, where each man had battered the hell out of the other for fifteen rounds. He remembered it, but he didn't recollect if he'd won it or not, and then realized you don't win a fight that hard, you merely survive.
Details began to accumulate, and through the buzz and the glare and the pain, he pieced together where he was. That rough jostling: that meant he was in a wagon, being jounced along a country road. The green overhead: the road ran through forest, no, really more like jungle, for it had a Guadalcanal aspect to it of overhanging canopy, and there was tropic vegetation, moisture and heat in the atmosphere. The jinglings and janglings: those were the chains that bound him, hand and foot. He couldn't move a step, one way or the other.
They were in jungle. No pine trees anywhere; that meant they were close to that dark river. He rolled over, nobody paying him any mind at all, and saw two guards ahead of him, up top the wagon, driving the team of six horses as they juggled along.
On either side, the jungle climbed and vaulted; it was like some cathedral of green, dense and hot and steamy.
He rolled over just a bit, and using his elbow lifted himself until he could see over the rough wood of the wagon. On either side rode three guards on horseback, each with a drill instructor's flat-brimmed hat low over the eyes, each with a big revolver on his belt, each with a Winchester '07.351 self-loader in his scabbard. The guards rode well, men at ease on horseback.
He turned and craned to see what was ahead.
Whack!
Someone smacked him hard in the arm and he leaped back in pain, knowing that two weeks' worth of bruise had just been laid on him. He looked at a guard who'd leaned down to supply a little discretionary discipline with a billy club. Earl sat back, well away from the wagon's timbers. As if he'd had a chance to escape anyhow, with all these chains entwining him, and also, he saw now, running through iron rings pounded into the wood, so that he was moored to the wagon no matter what came.
'You see it soon enough, boy,' said the guard. 'And come time, you'll wish you ain't never seen it and that them fellows had hung you straight up.'
And see it now he did: red brick walls, crumbly and ancient, in disrepair, wearing a brass plate kept shiny amid the ruin, where the letters gleamed:
THEBES STATE PENAL FARM (COLORED)
'Welcome home, nigger,' said the guard.
The wagon passed through the brick gates, and Earl saw something else.
It had been added recently, crudely welded together, an ironwork arc curving overhead, in the clumsy penmanship of the unlettered, presumably under the direction of a firmer hand exactly certain of the message.
'work will set you free,' it said, and it had a weird familiarity to Earl, but he could not place it in time or locale.
Then the ironwork arch was gone and they had progressed into the belly of the beast itself, into Thebes State
