Instead, he turned, went back to the car.
'No luck, sir?'
'Not a bit of it. These Mississippians are a different breed.'
'They are. Must be all the swamp water they drink, and that corn liquor.
Makes them stubborn and dull.'
'Just drive, Eddie. Drive along the bayou here. Maybe I'll notice something.'
The shiny Lasalle prowled among riverside shacks and cruised past the hulks of rotted boats tied up and banging against weathered docks.
Overhead, the gulls pirouetted and wheeled and the hot sun beat down fiercely. Sam soon forgot he was in America. It was some strange country, particularly when the color of the people turned black, and little ragamuffin kids in tattered underwear and worn shorts raced barefoot alongside the big, slow-moving car, begging for pennies. Sam knew if he gave one a penny, he'd have to give them all a penny, so he gave none of them pennies.
Then even the Negroes ran out, and they were alone; the road's cracked pavement yielded to dirt, the river disappeared behind a bank of reeds, and the whole thing seemed pointless.
But it was Eddie who saw the road.
'Bet there's a house there,' he said. 'Bet there is.'
'Go on down, then. Maybe there'll be a boatman.'
At the end of the way, he did in fact see a shack, cobbled together out of abandoned or salvaged materials, with a tar paper roof, and tires everywhere lying about. The boxy skeleton of an early '30s Nash sedan rusted away on blocks. Clam or oyster shells in the hundreds of thousands lay about like gravel. The place was rude and slatternly, but behind it a boat lay at anchor a few feet out in the wide brown river.
'Hello! 'Sam called.
In time, an old lady leaned out, ran an eye over the man in the tan suit sitting in the backseat of the black Lasalle, then heaved up a gelatinous gob from her lungs, expelled it through a toothless mouth and grotesquely flexible lips so it flew like one of Sam's well-aimed 105s and plunked up an impact crater among the clam shells and dirt.
'What you want?' she demanded. The accent was French, more or less, or rather the Cajun corruption of the French accent.
'To talk to a boatman.' 'You come wrong place, Mister. Who told you come here?' 'Madam, nobody told me to come here, I assure you. I see a boat.
Therefore there is a boatman. May I speak with him, if you please.'
'You from revenooers?'
'Of course not.'
'Polices You the polices?'
'No, madam. Nor FBI nor the state in any of its manifestations.'
'You wait there.'
The door slammed.
'Well,' Sam said to Eddie, 'it's a start. Not much of one, but who can say?'
A few minutes passed. Some ruckus arose from the interior of the shack, and finally an old fellow popped out. He was nut-brown, wore dungarees and a torn, loose old undershirt and a pair of shoes that might have, years ago, been designed for tennis but were now a lace less ruin. His toes flopped out from the gap between last and sole in one of them. A few crude tattoos inked his biceps. His hair was a gray nest of tendrils, this way and that, and most, but not all, of his teeth remained. His face was a crush of fissures and arroyos from years in the sun, and from his own squinting.
'You want?' he said, scowling.
'The boatman. Are you the boatman?'
'Nah, not no boatman. You go on, git out of here now. No boatman here.'
'You look like a boatman to me.'
'Agh. What you want?'
'Lazear,' cried the old lady from inside, 'you talk to the guy now, you hear. He gots money.'
The old man squinted at him up and down.
'I want to go upriver. Through the bayou, up the Pascagoula, to the Yaxahatchee. Into the piney woods. Up to the town they call Thebes.'
'Ah! Sir, nobody go to Thebes. Nothing there but nigs and dogs.
Oooo-ee, nigs don't git you, dogs do. Dogs chew you real good.
Whichever git you first, the other clean up after.'
'I understand there is a Negro town there and a prison farm. I have business. I wish to hire a boat.'
'You been ever where No one take you. So you finally come old Lazear?'
'Where I've been is of no account. I need passage up, I need you to wait an hour or a day, and I need passage back, that is all. I am prepared to pay the prevailing rate plus a little extra.'
'Million dollars. You got million dollars for Lazear?'
'Of course not. What do you usually get by day? I'll double it.'
'Sir,' Eddie whispered, 'I'd offer him a sum first and let him negotiate from that position.'
But Lazear quickly said, 'I gits a hundred dollars a day guiding in the swamp.'
'I doubt he's seen a hundred dollars in his life,' muttered Eddie.
'Two hundred then. Two hundred there and back.'
'Four hundred. Two up, two back. Is tricky. Lost in the bayou, eaten by ', you know. No fun, no sir. Four.'
'A hundred is a month's wages. Take two hundred or I'll find another boat.'
'Two then. Two. You pay now, you come back tomorrow night.'
'I pay fifty now, I don't go anywhere, we leave now. We leave immediately.'
'No, sir. Long trip. Day's trip, maybe day anna half. Lazear got to load up the boat.'
'I am not leaving,' said Sam, 'now that I am here. And that is final, sir.'
'Oh, crazy man from the North. Crazy Northern man. You from New York or Boston, sir?' These people, thought Sam, they are so ignorant.
The bayou soon swallowed them. If there was one river here, it was lost to Sam. There seemed to be dozens of them, tracks through marshy constructions of thorns or brambles, islets of gnarled green trees, thickets of vines, barricades of bristles. Though it was still light, the sense of day soon vanished.
Lazear's boat crawled through this wet maze, chugging along uncertainly, its engine fighting to breathe, terrifying Sam each time it seemed to miss a beat or pause to take a gulp.
'You know the way?' he heard himself say.
'Well as my own hand, Mister,' responded the old man, who quickly sweated through his clothes as he navigated under a faded blue ball cap that may have borne an allegiance to a big league team, though the insignia had long since disappeared.
'I thought this was a river. It's a swamp.'
'Oh, she straightens out up ahead, you'll see. Best relax, sir.
Nothing good comes of hurry in the swamp. You hurry, you be a dead fellow, sure. But it be fine; probably no snake be biting you, or no 'gator eat your hand off, but I cannot say for sure.'
Then his crumpled old face lit with glee and Sam realized it was a joke, that humor was a part of the man's madness.
'Hope them Choctaws ain't in no drinking mood,' said old Lazear over the sound of the motor. 'If they be, sometimes it make them hungry and they eat a white fellow. Leave me be, I'm too tough, like an old chicken been eating bugs and grubs its whole life. But you, Mister, figure you'd taste right good to them red savages.'
'There isn't enough salt in Mississippi to tenderize me,' Sam said.
'They could chew me, but they could never swallow me. They'd choke on me.'
It wasn't only the weather. It was also the darkness, not of the day but of the overhanging, interlinked canopy. The leaves and vines knotted up, twisted among themselves, invented new forms. Strange vegetation grew on other strange vegetation, a riot of life forms, insensate, unknowable.
The seal of the canopy had the effect of a greenhouse on the two men trapped beneath it; the heat rose even beyond the heat of Mississippi, and in no time at all Sam had sweated through his shirt and coat. Off came the coat,
