frantically behind him, and a sudden snapping yap sunk into his heel as one of them got a brief hold on him.
He pulled his leg back and saw there were no options.
'Time is running out, boy. No place to run,' Bigboy snarled, after lunging out another red goober and shaking the sweat off his brow.
He threw a fast punch that snapped off the crown of Earl's skull, opening another cut. Earl felt the blood spurt and blinked it out of his eyes, though some reached his lips and tasted of salt.
'Ooo, you didn't know how much speed I had on me, did you, convict?
You think you're tough, you're the champ. Hey boy, you have met the champ.'
He threw another rocket Earl's way, and Earl slipped it, hammered him quick twice over the ribs, bobbed out of reach and had some space to evade. But still Bigboy came on, no sign of weakness. His eyes were red, the irises open like headlights, and the sweat poured off him, but he was on his toes and his guard was well held, steady. Onward, inward he rushed, crouching, taking blows to deliver blows.
Earl saw he would lose. It was the law of boxing: good big man beats good small man. The physics decreed the outcome. He hadn't the weight, the strength, the endurance to stay with Bigboy, and if he was faster, it was only by a little.
He never saw the next one. He was too busy thinking, and not busy enough fighting. It clocked him above the jaw, flush to the side of the face, and the world jacked out of focus while someone banged kettledrums loudly in his ears. His eyes saw only white and he backed off, feeling grogginess spread through his lungs up his neck and ooze warmly through his brain. He almost went, and felt his consciousness slipping away, like bubbly water down a drain.
Bigboy came in to finish.
Earl hadn't been faking it.
It wasn't a trick.
He hadn't thought it out.
But Bigboy's vanity spelled his disaster, for he rode in on a cloud of arrogant confidence, sure that Earl was rocked. And Earl was rocked.
But Earl came back faster than even a near pro like Bigboy could imagine, and when Earl cleared up, he saw just the flick of a sloppy opening revealed by a dropped left. Earl drove up through it, and landed his uppercut square on the underside of the astonished big man's jaw, a punch so hard it lifted all of Bigboy off the earth. When he returned to the planet, Bigboy's arms, getting no signal from the disconnected brain, briefly became cogitated and unknowing, and as they drifted, Earl somehow found the grit to close yet again and launch a left-right combination to the face that put Bigboy down.
He fell like an ox, hard and lifeless to the levee, and when he fell, a puff of dust was unleashed from the earth at his circumference, like rose petals of celebration, and he went so limp and flat he was dead gone from this world.
Earl now heard the cheers. Bless their goddamned black hearts, all the Negroes now cheered, defying their masters, and their joy was as powerful a pleasure as Earl had or would ever feel on this earth, even if it lasted but a second.
In the next instant, Section Boss hosed out a burst of.45s from his tommy gun that whistled overhead, driving the convicts down and shutting them up. But Earl didn't notice that at all. For in that same second, the guard force was on him, six, eight of them, pounding him wherever they could get at him with clubs and saps and boots.
They beat him pretty badly.
'Not the head,' someone was shouting, 'Goddammit, not the head!'
Earl, in the blur of all his many injuries, saw that it was Bigboy shouting, for he had returned to the land of the living and the thinking, and he wanted Earl conscious.
Earl soon knew why.
Six men held him down, and it was Bigboy who kicked him hard in the ribs until they started to crack, screaming all the time, 'You motherfucker, you motherfucker, you motherfucker!' they drove through the night. Earl was in a swamp of pain, too much of it to specify location. His body was ripped, particularly from the stomping at the end, and in his head a gong pounded over and over.
'Sergeant Bigboy,' he heard someone say, 'you sure about this?' 'Goddamn sure,' said Bigboy, his stone heart set on the course he had determined.
'But?'
'But nothing, goddammit. I am tired of this special boy screwing up my system. You see the niggers. He gives ' hope. They get hope and we have problems.'
Then his rage flared again and he stomped Earl's jaw.
'You goddamn boy, you! You lucky goddamn sonofabitch, no man ever knocked me down 'I'll you got in a lucky goddamn punch, Goddamn you!'
Earl was on the floor of the Hudson's rear seat, chained again, and many heavy boots pressed him still, the heaviest of all Bigboy's.
'Sir, all I am saying is?'
'That's enough, Caleb, damn your soul. He tried to escape. He drownded.
Happens all the time at Thebes, and that's all anybody's got to know.'
'Yes, sir.'
Bigboy leaned down close.
'Breathe deep, Bogart. It's soon to be your last.'
The big car at last stopped, and the men poured out. Earl was dragged forward. He smelled river in the air, and saw it, just through the tropically ragged line of trees, a broad band of sparkle, flat and calm and multifaceted. A moon had risen, but not much; it was blood swollen, plump and fat just over the horizon, its powerful cold blaze dancing atop the surface of the river.
But he had no time for sightseeing; in the next seconds he was dragged and shoved down a path through the jungly woods that took him to a ramshackle shack and a dock. An old scow sat moored to the dock, drifting this way and that in the currents.
They unlocked the shack door and shoved him in, roughly.
'Welcome to the Drowning House, Bogart.'
He was thrown to the floor, and the work that followed was swift. It was a place of murder. He saw wooden forms, a manual cement mixer, sacks of cement as yet unmixed, various metal fixtures and chains, and a wall where old locks hung.
A grunting and a groaning sounded, as two of the heavier fellows bent and lifted a square cement block with an iron ring sunk deep into it aboard an old wheelbarrow, which one of the boys then wheeled toward him.
'I'll do it myself, goddammit,' said Bigboy.
He kneeled and put a knee on Earl's bruised stomach and roughly took his chained legs and clamped them in irons. These in turn were looped with a length of chain, and it was held fast by a lock. Earl had an anxiety explosion and almost couldn't bear to check, but then forced himself to, and when he saw it squarely he knew it to be the lock he'd practiced on, which by some of Fish's magic had been replaced to its rightful spot on the wall where the locks hung in their neat order.
'Coin' have to get some new locks soon,' somebody said.
But Bigboy leaned close, his face still screwed up in dementia.
'You see what fighting the Man gets you, Bogart? Do you see? You do not have the power to go against the Man! The Man rules. I am the Man, and if you go against me, you go against everything, and this is what it gets you. You think on that, Bogart, as the black water fills your lungs while you sink down to river bottom.'
He rose, spent, and said, 'Get him in the boat.'
'You okay, boss?'
'I am fine. Get his goddamned ass in the boat.'
Three of the staff controlled Earl as he was led to the boat, the chains around his wrists held tightly, while the wheelbarrow bearing its hundredweight followed behind.
They lowered him roughly into the scow, and it turned out they even had a system for getting the heavy weight aboard; it was not lifted off the barrow at all, but a plank had been set on an angle that matched up fine to a plank sited in the boat's hull, so that the thing could be wheeled down as if on a track. It took but some practiced
