That's when he saw the dock, yet several hundred yards before him, and realized that Lazear was gone.
Goddamn the man!
But of course: this whole journey was a fiasco from the start, and how could he have trusted an old coot like Lazear? You'd as soon trust a snake in the grass.
He walked down, hoping that perhaps Lazear had taken the craft out into the deep water for some technical reason or other. But no: the boat, the old man, both were gone. Nothing stirred, nothing moved, behind him the ghost town in the mud, before him the empty river, and nothing around for hundreds of square miles but wilderness and swamp.
Sam was not the panicky sort. He simply grew grumpier and more obdurate in the face of adversity. He turned, convinced that he should find the first adult he saw and demand explanations. But to his surprise, almost as if awaiting him, the old mama lady stood nearby.
How had she approached without his hearing? Was she magical?
Don't be a ridiculous fool, he thought. This isn't mumbo jumbo voodoo hoodoo, it was the blasted, backwater South, up some sewer of a river, where folks had degraded out of loss of contact with an outside world.
He was in no danger. Negroes did not attack white people, so he would be all right.
'Madam, I have in my pocket a crisp ten-dollar bill. Would that be sufficient for a night's lodging and a simple meal? Unless there's a hotel, and I suspect there's not a hotel within a thousand square miles.'
He held the bill out; she snatched it.
He followed her. the house was no different from any other, only a bit farther into the woods. It was another dogtrot cabin, low, dusty, decrepit and tar paper roofed like the others. A few scrawny pigs grunted and shat in a pen in the front yard, and a mangy dog lay on the porch, or what passed for porch, but was just floorboards under some overhanging warped roof.
The dog growled.
She kicked it.
'Goddamn dog!'
Off it ran, squealing. It clearly wasn't her dog, only a dog she allowed to share space with her, and when feeling generous rewarded it for its companionship with a bone or something.
'Ou' back. You go where de chickens be.'
'Why, thank you,' he said, wasting a smile on her, a pointless exercise because she had no empathy in her for him, and was only interested in minimally earning that ten spot.
He walked ' back, and there was a low coop, wired off from the rest of the yard, and a few chickens bobbed back and forth as they walked onward.
'Home, sweet home,' he said to nobody except his own ironic sense of humor, then ducked into the place. All the rooms were occupied, and the innkeeper, an orange rooster, raised a ruckus, but Sam, sensing himself to be the superior creature, stamped his foot hard, and gobble-gobbled as he did for his youngest children at Thanksgiving and the bull bird flustered noisily off in a cloud of indignant feathers and squawks.
Sam took the best bedroom, that being a corner where the straw looked cleanest and driest, and sat himself down.
Dark was falling.
He wanted, before the light was gone, to write out an account of his day for his employer. He filled his Schaeffer from a little Scripp bottle in his briefcase. Then he set to work on his trusty yellow legal pad, soon losing contact with the real world.
He didn't hear her when she entered.
Ilk, 'Here,' she finally said. 'Sompin' eat.'
'What? Oh, yes, of course.'
It was a foil pie plate, her finest china, filled with steaming white beans in some sort of gravy, and a chunk of pan bread. She had a cup of hot coffee with it and utensils that turned out to be clean and shiny.
'Thank you, madam,' he said. 'You keep a fine homestead.' 'Ain't my home,' she said. 'Used to be. Ain't no more.'
'It isn't your home?'
'It be the Store's.'
'The Store?'
'The Farm Store. Onliest store dese parts. Da store own everything.'
'Oh, you must be mistaken. If the Store is part of the state government, it can't loan funds against property, calculate interest, and foreclose, not without court hearings and court-appointed attorneys. There are laws to prevent such things.'
'Da Store be the law here. Dat's all. You eat up them beans. Tomorrow you go about your bid ness I could git in trouble wif dem. Dey don't like no outsiders. You won't say I told you nuffin?'
'Of course not.'
After that, she had nothing left to say, and he scraped the last of the beans off the plate. She took it, and left silently. He saw her heading back to her cabin, stooped and hunched, broken with woe.
Lord, I cannot wait to put this place behind me.
He made his plans. He'd clean up tomorrow as best he could given the circumstances, then go to the Store or the office of the Farm, where all power seemed concentrated. He would get to the bottom of this or know why.
Once he'd taken off his shoes and his hat and at last his tie, and folded his jacket into a little package that would do for a pillow, it didn't take long for him to fall asleep. For all its scratchiness, the straw was warm and dry. His roommates cooed quietly on their nests, and even the rooster seemed at last to accept him; it realized he was no threat when it came to fertilizing the hens.
He slept easily; he was, after all, near exhaustion. The dreams he had were dead literal, without that kind of logic-free surrealism that fills most sleepers' minds. In Sam's dreams, the world made the same sense it made in reality; the same laws, from gravity to probate, still obtained; reason trumped emotion and the steady, inexorable fairness of the system proved out in the end, as it always did. Sometimes he wished he had a livelier subconscious, but there was nothing that could be done with such a defect.
He was not dreaming when they woke him. He was in dark, black nothingness; the light in his eyes had the quality of pain and confusion. He sat up, bolt awake, aware of shapes, the smell of horses, the sense of movement all ' him.
Three flashlights had him nailed.
'Say, what on earth is?' he began to bluster, but before he could get it out, somebody hit him with a wooden billy club across the shoulder.
The pain was fearsome, and he bent double, his spirit initially shattered by it. His hand flew to the welt.
'Jesus!' he screamed.
'Git him, boys.'
'Goddamn, don't let him squirm away.'
'Luther, if he fights, whop him agin!'
'You want another goddamn taste, Mister? By God, I will skull you next goddamn time.'
They were on him. He felt himself pinned, turned, then cuffed.
'That's it. Bring him out now.'
He was dragged out. There were three deputies, husky boys, used to using muscle against flesh, who shoved him along, their lights beaming in his face, blinding him. The cuffs enraged him. He had never been handcuffed in his life.
'What in God's name do you think you're doing! I am an attorney at-law, for God's sake, you have no right at all to?'
Another blow lit up his other arm and he stumbled to the earth in the agony of it.
'That ought to shut him up,' said the man on horseback, who was in command. 'Load him in the meat wagon and let's go.' ilk.
It smelled of pines. The odor actually was not unpleasant; it was brisk, somehow clean, and pine needles, like tufts of feathers, light brown and fluffy, lay everywhere.
But it was still a prison.
