“I…I don’t have the damn bullets. I told you. I was bluffing.”
McCracken beat on me a while. Every blow sent pain shooting through my system until I was drunk with it; I started to laugh, to join in with the good time that was leaking in from the saloon out front.
“He’s gettin’ slaphappy,” Bucky Boy said, a frown indicating some degree of thinking ability.
McCracken was rubbing his right arm with his left hand. “I’m gettin’ wore out. You wanna pound on him some, Bucky Boy?”
“Shore!”
“Don’t kill him, now.”
“Try not!”
Bucky Boy had pipe-cleaner arms, but he found power somewhere; the wiry hillbilly had the sense to get behind me, and find new territory, slamming the rubber hose into my shoulders, even whapping it through the rungs of the chair. I wasn’t laughing anymore, but he was, filling the little storeroom with raucous, down-home glee.
When my body was one enormous sea of anguish, I did myself a favor and passed out again.
When I came to, I was alone. I was throbbing with pain, like my body was covered with boils about to burst; though they hadn’t touched my face or hit me on the head, my head was splitting.
I tried to stand. Maybe I could make it over to that door, if I could get my feet and legs to work. It took all the effort I had, but I stood. My legs were flimsy things under me, like a card table that wasn’t put up right, but I dragged myself over to that door, hunching over, carrying the chair on my back like a slave with a cotton bale, and turned my back to the door, and, with no more effort than it takes to thread a needle with your toes, tried the knob, turned the knob.
But it was locked.
Now what?
I could try to smash the chair against the wall-it was spindly enough that it might come apart-but would the racket attract somebody out there? The sounds of drunken laughter and honky-tonk piano continued; it had covered my screams-would it cover this?
The walls that weren’t lined with shelves were either blocked by beer cartons or that Yankee-gumbo tub, so the door itself, which was a solid-looking slab of wood, was the best bet. I rammed myself into it, and the chair didn’t give, though every bone and muscle in my body seemed to; but I did it again, and again, and tears were rolling down my face, mingling with sweat, when McCracken came bolting through that kitchen door and dragged me back over toward the middle of the little room and slapped me, twice, hard. My mouth was bleeding, but I was starting to go generally numb.
When he began waling on me with the rubber hose again, I hardly felt it; I was just a big dead slab of meat, barely holding onto consciousness.
“I want those fuckin’ bullets! I want those fuckin’ bullets!”
I could have told him about Vidrine, and if the pain hadn’t turned to numbness, maybe I would have; but I knew, punchy as I was by this point, that telling him about Vidrine would only get the doc killed. It wouldn’t help me. Oh, maybe McCracken would stop beating on me. But he was going to kill me, anyway. I knew that.
So did he.
Because you have to kill a man you give a beating like this to.
Or he’ll kill you.
My chin was on my chest. McCracken was standing talking with Carlos; beanpole Bucky Boy was looking on.
The washer tub had been moved out from the wall; it was filled within a few inches of its rim with a cloudy liquid. An acrid aroma flared my nostrils.
“I don’t care whether you do this thing or not,” Carlos said, “but dawn’s comin’…and Sunday’s my
McCracken sighed, shook his head and said, “Hell-he ain’t gonna talk.”
“Do whatever y’think best. I ain’t no part of it, dough.”
And Carlos went back through the kitchen. No sounds or smells came out. The saloon was quiet out there. After hours.
The lye smell was starting to crowd out the air in the little space; McCracken started to cough. Then he dug in his pants pocket and came back with a key and unlocked the door that led out back, let that door stand open to air out the room a little.
Bucky Boy stood in front of me and said, “You bet’ let me kill ’im, boss, ’fore we dump ’im in the tub. He might thrash aroun’ some, and get that mean ol’ stuff on you and me.”
That’s when I stood, chair and all, and, heaving all my weight into it, butted Bucky Boy in the pit of his stomach, and he went careening backward, head knocking against the conical lamp, sending it swinging, throwing its light wildly around the storeroom, while he went awkwardly back, windmilling his arms like Huey giving a rabble-rousing speech, instinct making him look over his shoulder to see where he was going, and splashing right into the tub of lye, getting it on his bare arms, chest, the side of his face, and more; he had lost balance, he was in the tub, splashing and kicking and screaming like he was being skinned alive, which in a sense he was.
But he didn’t get much if any of it on me, splashing around, because I was busy ramming backward into McCracken, who was clawing for the gun in his shoulder holster, only he didn’t get to it before my chair splintered against him, sending him into a wall of canned goods. The shelves collapsed and the cans rained on him, and he was on his ass down there, under the wood and the scattering of cans, dazed.
I moved through the open door and outside, shaking the remnants of the chair from behind me, free, or as free as a man with his hands bound behind him can be, and ran into the early daylight, moving toward the swamp. McCracken would soon be after me, with his gun, and hazardous as the unknown of that marshy wilderness might be, it was a place where I might find cover, where I might have an even chance.
As soon as I crossed the waist-high grass of the yard and stumbled into the trees, the ground got soft, spongy. Would it go out from under me, and put my chin at ground level? Words like
I knew I shouldn’t go too far, or I’d never come out. My only goal, for the moment, was to hide; stay away from the man with the gun who wanted to kill me. If I could find something sharp, to work the ropes around my wrist against, I could quit thinking defensively, and fight back…but right now: hiding. Survival….
The land gave way to water suddenly, a forest of cypress trees standing like impossibly tall men, but they were dead men, as gray as the Spanish moss they were so lavishly draped with; the trees of this ghost forest were no less formidable dead than alive: their out-flaring, swollen trunks separating into twin arms reaching into a sky they blotted out, their root systems above the water, gnarled, skeletal, horrible, beautiful.
One step at a time, I tested the water, to find the land beneath. I saw something sliding along the water’s surface, about ten feet away; I froze. Waited. Then, whether harmless or poisonous, the serpent had passed, and I had this hellish Eden to myself again. Another step, and another, over one ankle, one more, another, to my knees, and then I was up on the roots of the biggest cypress in Louisiana.
I knew the direction I’d come, so I got behind the tree, figuring I could peek around and watch for McCracken, and in the meantime try to work the rope on the bark of the cypress. I had already twisted my fingers around to check the knot; it was hopelessly tight. It might take a while, but eventually the rope would wear through.
As I worked the ropes against the rough bark, I heard the rustle of fronds as he moved through. I had hoped that spongy ground would swallow up my footprints, but even so, maybe he could track me by broken branches and tramped-down foliage. I hadn’t been too careful; I’d just been moving.
I peered around. He was standing at the edge where the marshy land gave way to water and the ghost cypress forest began. He wasn’t twenty feet away.
“Heller!” he called, voice echoing across the water. “Give it up. You gon’
A bird called a mocking cry by way of response.
“Look-I believe ya…you
