effort, and down it went with just the gentlest thump as it arrived on the floor of the hull; the boat trembled only momentarily as the wheelbarrow was steered and manipulated toward its stern. The rest of the men jumped aboard, the engine was fired up, the lines cast off, and the boat began to nudge its way into the current.
A breeze blew. The moon had risen enough so that it was no longer red but now that pale, radiant bone- white, and it flickered off the stillness of the water. Its radiance did not quite blur the crazy quilt of stars and fancy patterns that filled the sky. It would have been a night of magic if it hadn't been a night of murder.
'This is usually where they start to cry,' somebody said. 'Boo hoo, it ain't fair, they got chilluns, they got a mammy and a op lady. Show some mercy, Mr. Boss, cut me a break, suh, yassuh, I be a good of' nigger boy from now on, I be. You goin' cry, Bogart?' Earl said nothing.
Someone kicked him.
'He thinks he's tough. He thinks he a hero. He ain't gonna give us the satisfaction, ain't that right, boy?' Earl said nothing.
Now he had this last thing to do. The pin had been inserted horizontally into the callus along his left palm, so that he could still form a fist to fight with, and in forming a fist he was protecting it. But in the disorientation of battle, strangeness is mandatory, and no plan survives its first contact with the enemy. This means things fall apart all the time, and you adjust to them or die. So Earl now snaked a finger into his left palm, with a moment's prayer of a small request to God that the pin still be there, that it not have slithered out and be resting in the dust of the levee somewhere, and with it all his hopes and possibilities.
It was there.
'Sometimes they just beg hard,' one of the guards said. 'Other times they angry. Got to smack ' down hard, and they fight 'I'll the end.
You like that, Bogart? You goin' fight and spit and curse as you go down? You goin' to face the Maker with blasphemy on the tongue, white boy?'
'He won't cry,' came the strong words of Bigboy, who even in the dark had his sunglasses on and his hat flat over his eyes to mute the swellings and discolorings where Earl's fists had imprinted them. 'He won't curse or scream. He will face it straight on. He is a hero.
Bogart, you are a hero. That's why you are so dangerous. You are a formidable foe, I give you that. That is why you must die. These other folks here, they are soft. They don't recognize what must be done to persevere. But I have the strength to face reality. I do. So I take the mantle of responsibility, and I see that what needs to be done is what gets done. Do you understand?' Earl said nothing. The guy was stone crazy, that was all, and now as he executed Earl, he seemed to be demanding some kind of sentimentalized gesture of respect, of acknowledgment, warrior to warrior.
Earl finally said, 'Pigman, you are a rank, stinking piece of pork, without no guts nor brains, who only got his way in the world by lucking into a place that needed pure-D crazy evil as its highest value. You will pay, I pledge you. Someone goin' to come out of this water?'
He was kicked hard in the kidneys.
'This is far enough,' said Bigboy. 'Dump him.'
Earl was pushed to the rear of the boat. There two of the minions unlocked the old lock, ran the chain through the steel ring into the block on the barrow, then resecured the lock. It snapped closed with an oily click. The fellow doing this?Caleb, Earl saw?rose, and without a thought tossed the key into the river. Nobody said a thing, and there was no ceremony to it at all. They cut away his clothes until he was nude. Then someone lifted the wheelbarrow on its forward axis, and at a certain point, the cement block slid off with a mild splash, and in an instant had pulled its chain taut and Earl didn't bother to fight it, for what was the point? He jumped before the chain could pull him.
Off he went, following the block, down into the dark river. down, down, down.
Don't panic, he ordered himself, as he slipped through radiance and bubbles, the weight of the cement chained to his ankles immobile and unforgiving.
Down, down, down.
Then it stopped. The block settled into the river bottom thirty feet beneath the surface. Above, he could see the black hull riding the water, and watched as its screws began to churn up a wake, and it described a lazy U and headed to shore.
Don't panic, he told himself.
You've done this a hundred times.
He felt no oxygen starvation yet. Calmly, holding himself together, he cupped his hands, and his fingers felt for the pin. His fingers had inflated in the cold water and were stiff and numb and clumsy. His hands ached and bled still from the beating they had administered. But still there was some mobility left, and he felt the pin and worked at the tiny segment that was not buried, had it pinched tight between thumb and forefinger and began to work it out steadily, smoothly ever so But as his eyes adjusted to the underwater murk, something stunned him. It was a tree twisted strangely in the form of a man, like a submerged, crucified Christ, the moon glow having penetrated far enough to illuminate its ghastly pallor.
It was a man.
It was a man, still buoyant, still erect, still reaching for a surface he'd never make, the chain that held him still tight. Earl turned his head, and saw not another man but what had once been a man, before age and rot and water had taken all that was human about him and left only skull and shards of meat and tatters of clothes, linked fragilely by threads of ligaments. He, too, reached upward for a surface his fingers would never break.
Earl was in a glade of corpses. They floated and bobbed in the subtle drift of current, in every state of decomposition, some hard bone, others molted flesh, some dressed, some naked. Oozy weeds twisted about them, and fish flashed in schools in the deepwater moonlight, negotiating the alleyways of a metropolis of corpses.
Get it back, he ordered himself, as his lungs at last began to sing for air, and he bent to his ankles to insert the pin in the lock, and jimmy it free, and rise, but his fingers remained clumsy and puffed.
Be calm, he commanded, which was fine, until the pin slipped away, and he watched in horror as his grasping fingers could not catch up to it, and it disappeared.
Sam tried to obey the law as he always did, but he could not this time.
Especially beyond town, with just two-lane Route 8 and no twists or turns or traffic cops between himself and Board Camp, where the Swagger farm was, he punched the pedal and his Pontiac roared its merry way along, pulling up dust, scattering chickens, scaring children and birds, earning the curses of mommies who observed his thoughtless speed.
His heart was thumping, but it was pain he felt.
This would be it: news from farther south that Earl Swagger was gone.
There could be no other news.
He tried to steel himself for the scene, as he'd seen it enough when a hero dies: the weeping wife, her face a ruin of mucus and tears, the numb child who cannot begin to imagine how his life has changed, and how he has just inherited a vision of the universe as a forever imperfect engine, a place with a hole in it that sucks out the good and permits the reigns of chaos and violence.
It seemed to take forever, but that, of course, is merely the lengthening of time by the release of blood chemicals under stress. In reality, less than fifteen minutes had passed.
The place looked the same, and he wished he'd been much better for Junie. In truth, so ashamed was he and so confused by the situation, that after passing along the money from Davis Trugood, he'd stayed away, for he could not bear to face the woman nor see the child.
There were no other cars, so she had not yet called the state police.
Sam swore that at last he'd tell what he knew, what he had found out, and would get it going, whatever it would be, some form of war on Thebes.
He parked, dashed up the driveway, and didn't bother to knock.
He entered the house of mourning and saw Junie sitting on a sofa, a dazed look on her face.
'Junie, what is it? What did you hear about Earl?' She looked up and smiled through her tears, and Sam thought he saw the delusions of madness on her face, as people act peculiarly in the arrival of a life's worth of black grief.
'Oh, Sam,' she said.
'Earl? Please. What happened to Earl?' He thought he'd have a heart attack.
