'You don't quite get it, Mr. Sam. I am not meaning to break some men out. I am meaning to break them all out. I am meaning to break the prison. When the morning sun rises on Thebes, there ain't going to be no Thebes. None at all. None. I'm going in and shoot to kill those who stand against me, free the convicts, burn the buildings, and blow the levee and drown the place under twenty feet of black river. Nothing is left. It is gone, razed, destroyed, like Sodom and Gomorrah in the Good Book. It is finished. I can't say what happens next, other than that it will be different. I take on trust it will be better.'
'Earl, that's insurrection you're talking. You could start a race war in the South.'
'No, sir. Because it'll happen so fast and so totally that there won't be nothing left. The evidence is under water and mud. The few witnesses don't make no ' sense. And the state don't want to shine no spotlights on Thebes. None at all. It don't want people peeking at what went on in Thebes. It will see the wisest reaction is to let Thebes stay dead in its tomb of river, and move on.' 'Jesus, Earl,' said Sam.
'I told you I didn't want you involved.'
'We have now committed the felony of conspiracy to assault,' said Sam.
'So be it,' said Earl.
Sam shook his head.
Earl said, 'Mr. Sam, when them German tanks were coming on, did you call the newspapers? Did you convene a panel? Did you file a suit?
What did you do?'
'I calculated range and wind. As I recall, it was 2950 meters off by range finder, with a wind of more than 10 miles an hour to the west, a full-value wind we called it. We were already zeroed at 2000 meters, so I had to come up 73 clicks, and then come over 15 clicks to the right for wind deflection. I fired a salvo for double-checking my calculations, then I fired high explosive for effect. We blew them off the face of the earth,' said Sam. 'There was no other thing possible.
But the state had decreed a general condition of war.'
'Well, that is where we are,' said Earl. 'We are in a general condition of war. Or, we turn tail and forget about it and go back to our lives and live happy ever after. And Thebes goes on and on, maybe for years.
You can't fix it. You can't modify it. You can't reform it. You can't make it better or gentler. You can only do two things.
You can wait for it to change, meaning you wait until the world changes, which it might do tomorrow or next year or next century or never. And all that time, that city of dead under the water gets more and more crowded, the Whipping House gets bloodier, the Screaming House gets louder. And we're the worst, because we knew about it and we didn't do a goddamn thing. Or we can blow it off the face of the earth. Those are the only two possibilities, realistically.'
'You would take a force up that river?' said Mr. Trugood. 'Or through that forest? It seems to me you'd be easily spotted and you'd have no surprise at all. Yet with only seven, you'd need surprise. I don't see?'
'I can do it. I know the way. It's a thing nobody ever thought of before.' He told them.
'When?' Trugood asked.
'It's now the dark of the moon almost. I want to go in the dark of the moon next month. I want it done fast, with good men. If I hustle and travel and palaver good, it can be set up and brought off that fast.'
Sam listened and saw the possibility of it.
'Earl, you are bent on this thing.'
'I am, Mr. Sam.'
'And if I say ' and that I have to turn you in?'
'You will do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to.'
'Can he do these things?' Mr. Trugood asked.
'Mr. Trugood, if Earl says he can, then he can,' Sam said.
'Mr. Sam, are you with us?' Sam said nothing for a bit. Finally, he realized what he had to say, and declared himself to be a man of the law. 'I cannot go against the law,' he said. 'But you say to do nothing would be to go against a bigger law.'
'That is the gist of it, sir.'
'All right. Then I can then only say this: Earl, I cannot make up my mind in a single evening. I know you must begin to make your preparations. You will do that no matter what I say. So I will ruminate, examine, penetrate the mystery, lock up with the epistemology of it.
Excuse the big word, but that is how I must proceed. If I find I cannot support you, Earl, you have to trust me to come to you and tell you. If it comes to it, I will have to go to the authorities. I may consider myself as having no choice, but I will face you square and tell you so eye to-eye.'
'Fair enough, I suppose,' said Earl.
'In the meantime, you'll forgive me if I don't practice my small arms marksmanship. I have said I will find something out about that place.
I have begun that effort, and in good faith and in obeyance of my decision, I will proceed. Again, fair enough?'
'Fair enough,' said Earl.
'I wish you could join us enthusiastically,' said Davis Trugood. 'But I respect your honesty. As for me, I know my part. It is financial. You cannot fight a war without money.'
It was cool and still in the minutes before dawn, and in that gray flush, only beginning to light some in the east, Earl sat on a shooting bench, enjoying a Lucky Strike. He was early, but he meant to be early.
Around him towered some magnificent Idaho mountains, but he could not see them yet. It was quiet, until at last he heard the sound of an automobile approaching, grinding its way uphill over the cinders of a road to this shooting range.
He watched as a humpbacked Chrysler from some year before the war pulled up next to his own rented Chevy, and a man got out. He was what some might call all hat and no cattle. He was a small man in a large hat. The glowing ember of a lit pipe illuminated his tough little face if you looked carefully, but as he made his preparations, he was all business.
He opened the trunk of his car and took out a leather shooting box, which contained at least five pistols or revolvers, as well as a large amount of ammunition and various cleaning tools and chemicals and rags; it had a door flap that could be unlocked and locked in the upward position, and a spotting scope then attached, neatly moored to check targets. You saw them at bull's-eye matches.
He lugged this thing up just a bit to another bench, and there set it down. He noticed Earl.
'Howdy,' he said.
'Howdy, sir.'
'Looks to be a right fine day, don't it?'
'It does,' said Earl.
The old man got himself set up. He opened the flap and connected the telescope. He pulled out the case's drawer to reveal the five guns which turned out, as Earl saw, to be all heavy revolvers manufactured either by Colt on the.41 frame or by Smith & Wesson on the N-frame.
Then he removed several plastic boxes, removed the tops, and Earl saw neat rows of cartridges.
Next, out came a roll of paper targets and a staple gun.
'Cease-fire?' he asked.
'Yes, sir,' said Earl.
The old man walked out on the range to a frame fifty yards gone, and quickly stapled the bull's-eyes to it. He returned to the bench and sat down behind it.
'Range hot?'
'Range hot it would be,' Earl said.
The next thing out was a notebook where, with a scholar's intensity, he turned to a page where a good deal of data was already recorded, and reviewed it, almost as if he were checking over this morning's lecture before the students arrived.
So compelling was this immersion into the physics of it that he didn't look up for quite some time, now and again writing himself a note or underlining something that was already written, occasionally dealing with his briarwood pipe, which, like Sam's pipe, went out almost as often as it went on.
