down. He pulled amid bubbles and sparkle in the water, his lungs all but exploding, his consciousness ebbing away. He could see faces just above the surface, all white, all laughing. Bigboy was there, just enjoying it so much, a nigger drowning slowly just beyond the surface. Fish saw his own dying face reflected in the darkness of Bigboy's sunglasses, where so much woe had been mirrored. The warden, too: not laughing, but intent, in that preoccupied way of his, as if relating things to things as was his tendency, always seeing the methodical connection, the link, the pattern in all things, pedantic, prosaic, a mechanic in the art and science of keeping the Negro down. He saw Section Boss with that goddamned motherfucker gun he carried everywhere, just guffawing away.
He saw Moon, too. Moon, however, was a white man, though big and just as carved up by his adventures in the Jackson underworld, and Moon was laughing at little old Fish, the fixer, the smuggler, the bringer and taker, dying under the water. And he saw the white boy, Bogart, his savior. He was laughing because he was not coming to save Fish or any of them. That was the biggest joke of all.
Fish jerked awake.
He looked around on his pallet. He saw nothing in the darkness, no movement, nothing. He slept in his own room, as a senior trustee in the trustees' quarters, where the men like him who had responsible prison jobs and good incomes from illegal activities by which they could pay off the guards lived in relative comfort, far from the squalor of the field barracks or the Ape House.
Something was different.
He looked out through a bar less window at the swamp, slightly agleam in the shimmery light of a shrinking moon. He saw water shining, the shadows of the bent trees, the snaky limbs and twisted fronds. Frogs, maybe a coyote, small mammals, ': they slithered around out there. The crickets sounded.
What was different?
Then he had it.
There was no screaming.
Moon had been broken.
The old bastards were making Earl crazy. He wanted to shoot them all.
They were like old ladies, bickering among themselves, forming allegiances, then selling each other out in a trice and forming new ones. But also holding ancient, ruinous grudges, beyond any notions of forgiveness or grace. No Marine unit could have functioned with so much inner strife, but for these old fellows bitterness was one of the great joys of life. What was the point of being old if you couldn't hate your brothers?
Elmer hated Jack. This had to do with a philosophical issue, to be sure:
Elmer was a believer in the theory of the big, slow bullet, while Jack only cared for small, fast bullets. But it was more than that, and if one had switched to the other argument, the other would counter switch just to be not on the same side. Basically, each felt entitled to the leadership of what might be called the gun world. Each was a king. Each had a magazine that published his comments and research, each had a retinue of followers (who hated each other too, even more than the two old rulers), each had connections with certain gun manufacturers (Jack with Winchester, whose products he used exclusively, Elmer with Smith &
Wesson, likewise). Each said nasty things about the other whenever it was possible. Each acted with arrogance and majesty. Each had killed over six hundred wild game animals, and while Elmer had once busted broncs and was very cowboy in his way, Jack saw himself as an aristocrat or even an intellectual of the rifle, and had no popular gifts and no interest in them. Elmer could spin a yarn, Jack could deliver a lecture.
Each held to his positions as fiercely as rival party chairmen, which of course they were.
But at least Jack and Elmer didn't fight directly. Theirs was more of an oblique thing, the soft comment made just in earshot, the stony frigidity that expressed itself in formal politeness too ostentatious to be real.
'Morning, Mr. O'Brian.'
'Mr. Kaye.'
'What's that pipe tobacco, sir?'
'Why, Briarwood. With a touch of ginger root 'Oh, say, I'll bet that's a nice flavor. Favor rougher stuff than that, I do, but as they say, each to his own.'
'Yes, Mr. Kaye. Each to his own.'
As for direct confrontations, that was a specialty of the border patrolman and ex-pistol champion Charlie Hatchison. The other five men and Earl were at least unified in one thing: their hatred of Charlie.
Charlie was addicted to aggression. He never tired of telling the others he had killed seventeen men, and if asked, he'd speak all night on the details of each victory, the weight and design of the bullet, its placement in the flesh, whether the opponent died quickly, well shot, or, alas in the case of a poor Wehrmacht sold at whom the old bastard had pretty much simply executed, slowly, crying for vasser and mama.
Charlie never tired of that one.
'You should have seen the look on that poor boy's face when my38 punctured his lung. Never seen nothing like it. It was as if he'd been pole axed. But he doesn't fall. Now here's the interesting thing. He sits down, very formally, by God, as if he's afraid he's going to dirty up his trousers and get in trouble with God or something. Ha! Never saw nothing like it. On the border, you shoot a Mex, he just goes all floppy, cry babying to his goddamned Catholic God or whatever them beaner people b'lieve in, but this German feller, he managed to kick off real slow like.'
That was Charlie is a gentle mood. In the more common pugnacious mood he'd strut around looking for a fight, and it didn't matter to him if it were verbal or physical. His special target was the other border patrolman, the gigantic, taciturn Bill Jennings, another damned writer (all these boys was writers!) for the guns and hunting books, and Charlie loved to needle Bill.
'Bill, you sure you're what you call a human being? Don't say nothing.
Don't even kill nothing. You just go around with that mug of yours, bluffing folks to surrender.' 'Maybe it's his reputation,' said Elmer.
'Hell, just ' he was on a television show drawing and shooting a Ping-Pong ball don't mean he's got no reputation, except maybe with that phony-baloney host. I mean a man-killing reputation.'
'They say he's the fastest man with a gun ever.'
'Hell, he looks like a goddamned mummy. He ain't faster than that old man over there, that is, if you can wake him.'
It was true. Ed Mcgriffin showed up with his lovely little granddaughter Sally in tow, and she made his meals individually, pre squashing everything and soaking it in milk so the old boy could get it down. And somehow, she slipped into making all the meals, and the men just let her, including Earl, who was amazed at her energy, her matter-of factness and her endurance for no guff at all. She chased that damn Charlie out of there at least three times, suspecting, rightly, that he had something unseemly up his sleeve.
Meanwhile, old Ed just sat in a rocker on the front porch, sometimes rocking, sometimes dozing, with a nice pleasant look on his old face.
He wore a tie every day and a three-piece suit, and carried with him a gigantic hat that dwarfed his almost hairless, eggshaped head.
'That old man forgot more about shooting than you'll ever learn in a dozen lifetimes, Charlie,' said Elmer.
'Maybe he does, but what the hell good it do anybody if he sleeps all the time? Earl, wasn't you being a mite over optimistic when you invited that geezer?'
'That old man invented fast, Charlie.'
'Ah! Earl, you done read too many of those True West books. You b'lieve all that hokum.'
'Charlie, Earl would know a thing or two,' Elmer said. 'He killed what you killed thirty times over. Only, he don't yammer on it all day long.
They don't give out them big medals to no ', that I know.'
'I don't doubt but that Earl had a good day or two in the war. I'm talking about a lifetime of warring. I'm talking about living by the gun with the gun, with the gun's quickness, for over thirty years.
That would be me. Y'all boys just talked on it and figured on it and wrote it up like you done it. Hell, I was there! I done it.'
At that there came a wet, slurpy sound, and it was old Ed, gobbling down whatever damp stuff his system manufactured while he dozed, but now he'd come awake.
'Charlie, if you shot as much as you talked, there wouldn't be no Mexes left, nor no desperadoes. Yet we have
