A boat was so rare, he assumed, it would be remarkable to such a place.
Every eye would be upon him, and indeed he felt every eye upon him, but again he saw no evidence of life.
Lazear got in close, set the course, and stilled the engine.
'You get up front,' he commanded, and Sam did what he was told. There, on the bobbing prow, he found a coil of rope. When the boat glanced off the dock, he leaped, pulling on the rope, tightening boat to dock, then looping it to a post set aslant in the water. He glanced back, saw that the old man had gone aft to secure the stern by similar method.
He walked back.
'I don't know how long this will take. You stay here. You stay out of bars or whorehouses or whatever temptations they have here. I have business; if it seems to run long, I'll notify you somehow. You do not leave without me. Do you understand?'
'Oh, yah, I stay forever. I got nothing to do but stay till the lawyer man gits his money.'
'Get me my briefcase.'
Lazear found it, the one pristine object aboard, and handed it over.
Sam straightened and tightened his tie, pulled his coat to cure it of wrinkles, made sure his hat was set straight, and went to work. was it only a town of children? Little Negro scamps tracked him from behind the first line of buildings. He could not see them, but he heard them scurrying in the mud, and several times, drawn by flashes of movement, glanced over, but his look drove them back. And if he advanced on them, they scattered.
Otherwise the town was seemingly deserted. There was no commerce, nor any sidewalk. A few storefronts were abandoned. Mostly the places were cabins, many to his eye as abandoned as the storefronts. Yet still he had a queasy feeling, a sense again of being looked at, inspected. It brought a shiver of discomfort.
As he climbed the slope from the river, he at last came upon an adult woman. Her eyes were big, her face a ruin. She was swaddled in a dress of many layers and colors, all pulled into one tapestry; her hair was bandannaed tightly to her skull, and she had no teeth at all. She was a Negro mama, a formidable figure in the Negro community, Sam knew.
And she didn't seem insane, but regarded him with only sullen dull hatred.
'Madam, excuse me, I am looking for a county seat, a municipal building, the sheriff's department? You could possibly direct me?'
She responded in a gibberish alien to his ears. Was she still African?
Had she not been Americanized?
'Madam, I do not understand. Could you speak more slowly?'
He picked out a word or two of English in her mewl, but she grew frustrated with the stupidity on his face, and shooed him away with a dismissive, abrupt gesture, then gathered herself with dignity, pulled her shawl tight about her, and strutted away.
But she stopped and turned, then pointed down an alley.
She said something that he deciphered to mean: down that way.
He walked down it, the mud sucking at his shoes. Here and there a door slammed shut, a window closed, people not seen clearly hastened away.
He felt as if he were the plague, Mr. Death himself, with a scythe, be hooded a pale slice of darkness, and all human things fled his presence.
Then he came to it, or what had been it.
Fire had claimed it. A blackened stone wall still stood, but the timbers were all scorched and collapsed, and rogue bricks lay about in the weeds of what had once been a public square. No pane of glass remained in the ruin, once upon a time some kind of courthouse building after the proud fashion of the South, with offices and departments and lockups and a garage or stable out back. Scavengers had picked it clean, and moss or other forms of vegetation had begun to claim it for their own.
So this was why there was no 'official' Thebes County, why no letters were answered. It had burned, and perhaps with that the will that claims civilization out of nothingness was somehow finally and permanently broken.
Now what? he wondered.
It's all gone? It burned, most everybody left town, and only a few hopeless cases remain. Those that do must eke out a living somehow from the prison farm yet another mile or so upriver.
He walked on, not out of purpose but more in the hopes of encountering an inspiration. Then, progressing a bit farther, he noticed a low, rude shack whose door was open, and from whose chimney pipe issued a trail of smoke, thin and white.
Batting at a fly that suddenly buzzed close to his face, he leaned in to discover something of a public house, though a rude caricature of it. It was empty but for an old man at the bar and an old man behind the bar.
No array of liquor stood behind the bartender, only a motley collection of dusty glasses. Beer signs from the twenties dustily festooned the dim room, and dead neon curled on the wall, which could be decoded, with effort, into the names of the commercial brews of many decades past.
'Say there,' said Sam, 'I need some help. Can you direct me?'
'Ain't nowheres be directin', suh,' said the bartender.
'Well, I'll be the judge of that. Can you guide me to what succeeded the town hall? Surely there's still some authority around. Possibly the registrar's office, the tax collector. Or a police or sheriff's station.
This is the county seat, isn't it?'
'Used to be. Not much here no more. Can't help none. You g'wan, git back to that boat. Ain't nuffin here you want to know about.'
'Surely there are sheriff's deputies.' 'Dey fine you iffn dey want,' said the other. 'Best pray they don't want you.'
'Well, isn't this the limit?' said Sam to nobody.
'It all burned down ' fo' years back, Mister. Everybody done left.'
'I saw it. So now there's nothing?'
'Only the Farm.'
'The Prison Farm, yes. I suppose I shall have to go there.'
'Don't nobody go there but gots to go there, suh. In chains. Thems only ones. You don't want to go there. You best be on ' your business.'
'Then let me ask you this,' he said, and went on about Lincoln Tilson, the retired Negro whose fate he had come down to locate. But as he spoke, he began to sense that his two coconversationalists were growing extremely unhappy. They squirmed as if in minor but persistent pain, and their eyes popped about nervously, as if scanning for interlopers.
'Don't know nuffin' ' dat,' said the one.
'Not a damn thing,' chimed in the other.
'So the name means nothing to you?'
'No suh.'
'All right. Wish I could thank you for your help, but you've not been any at all. Don't you respect white people down here?'
'Suh, jus' tryin' to git by.'
'Yes, I see.'
He turned and left, and began the long trek back to the boat. He knew now he had to go to the prison, where surely what records remained were kept, if they were kept at all. It seemed out of another century: the possibility that a man like Lincoln Tilson, a man of accomplishment and property, even by these standards some prosperity, could just disappear off the face of the earth, leaving no trace of paper, no police report, no death certificate, no witnesses, no anything. That was not how you did it.
Sam's mind was clearly arranged. He appreciated order above all things, for order was the beginning of all things. Without elemental order there was nothing; it wasn't a civilization unless undergirded by a system of laws and records, of taxes and tabulations. This down here: it was not right. He felt some fundamental law was being flouted before his very eyes.
He rounded the corner and began to head down the slope to the river.
