go pretty good shoving that pimple-faced kid around, but they should have got me when I was younger if they wanted to have any fun.
You can see they’re used to handling chicken thieves and guys they pick up in crap games, way they got me in here, with one arm handcuffed to this horse-faced pimplehead and the other one loose. It’s a good thing that old sheriff wasn’t around when we loaded up to start. He’s smart old stud and he knows his business and he’d have chewed their tails out.
Maybe, though, if you look at it another way, it ain’t such a good thing for ‘em, at that. If he’d been there to tell ‘em how to transport a prisoner, maybe this time tomorrow night they’d be back there shaking down the hustlers around the beer joints and picking their teeth front of the courthouse, and I’d be starting a life sentence in a place I couldn’t get out of. You both better take a good look at her, boys, because there’s three of us that likely ain’t ever going to see none of it again.
Four
Beyond the country store the highway swung west again and dropped toward the river bottom in a long grade. Sewell Neely knew this stretch of road very well and he could picture all of it for the next ten miles his mind as the car gathered speed through the rain. Six years ago he had worked in a sawmill a few miles beyond and had fished a lot in the river on Sundays and days when the mill was idle. When you came this way from the east, there were two small bridges, over sloughs, then the big concrete and steel bridge over the main channel of the river itself. Between the last two bridges, the road ran straight across the bottom on a high fill that was twenty feet above the swamp in some places, and at the base of the fill, on both sides, there was rank growth of young willows and cane that had sprung up since the road was built.
He turned his head and looked out the back window. There were no headlights behind them, and up ahead their own lights bored into the empty night with the rain curving and slanting into them in long silver streaks rushing out of the darkness.
They came down off the grade and over the first bridge going very fast. He sat relaxed in the corner with the manacled hand lying on the seat, seeing the glow of Harve’s cigarette, and waiting. George was driving too fast, he knew, but if you were going to do it this was the best place. It was a good, friendly place because he loved river country and there was something a little like being at home about it, especially at night like this in the rain, with nobody around. It would be a good clean, sudden, and violent thing anyway, and better than a lifetime of slow rot with everything leaking out of you a little at a time instead of all at once, the way it should be.
He had always heard that at a time like this you thought of your home, if you had any, and your family and childhood and things like that, but for some reason the only thoughts that came to him were of the river, this one coming toward them at sixty-live miles an hour, the river on Sunday afternoons in late summer, very slow then, and clear, with white perch biting if you were lucky enough to have shiners for bait. And suddenly, for the first time in years, he remembered the girl who had been fishing there alone one drowsy afternoon toward he end of summer, the way she had run from him, squealing with what he thought was terror until she had stopped and he saw she was laughing, and afterward the primitive violence of the two of them desecrating and destroying the somnolent hush among the big trees of the bottom, the heat, and the sweat, and the one bunded arm outflung along the ground, turning, and the hand clutching agonizingly at the grass.
That’s a hell of a thing to be remembering now, he thought, and rose out of the seat and came forward over George, reaching for the wheel with his left hand. Harve screamed and the rear end of the car skidded sickeningly as it went down off the road and started to roll, going over sideways once and then end-for-end slantwise down the steep embankment and through the young willows like some mortally wounded big insensate mechanical animal in the extremes of its death agony.
* * *
He was at home again, lying in his bed close under the sheet-metal roof and listening to the rain coming down at night. There was a vast silence broken only !by the peaceful drumming on the roof above him and he wanted to turn over and go back to sleep again, listening to it, but Mitch had fastened their arms together and then had fallen out of bed and was pulling his right arm out of its socket. It was a crazy thing for Mitch to do, he thought. Get back in bed, Mitch, and listen to the rain. You can’t work in the cotton today. Quit worrying about it and stop pulling on my arm and just listen to the rain.
Then Mitch was gone and it was Harve who was pulling on his arm. Harve was somewhere in the darkness in the rear of the car and he was in the front, lying with his shoulders on the seat and his legs across George’s neck. The car had come to rest almost upright, sitting on its wheels but tipped downward in front and canting over to the left, apparently leaning against a tree. The lights were out and the motor had stopped running and the only sounds were those of the rain and the ticking of the motor as it cooled. Then he could hear Harve beginning to moan softly somewhere in the back. He moved, wondering what was broken, and could feel nothing but the terrible pulling on his arm.
He swung his legs up off George and pulled himself up on the back of the seat to get the weight off his arm and then came suddenly up against the top of the car. It was crushed inward until there was barely clearance enough between it and the top of the seat back for hm to slide over, but he made it and fell onto the floor, feeling Harve under him. Both rear doors were sprung open and he could feel rain coming in on the back of his head.
Harve was moaning under him and he tried to find out which way he was lying, running his free hand along his body and feeling for something he would recognize. He found Harve’s tie and followed it up to his throat and then went back along the torso looking for the gun belt. He found it, feeling the leather loops with the cartridges in them, and moved his hand on around. For a second it reminded him of running his hand along a girl’s body and he laughed, thinking of the grotesque idea of Harve’s slapping him, and wondered if he had been knocked crazy by the shock.
The gun was jammed in the holster between Harve’s leg and the floor and it took him a long time to work it free. Harve was regaining consciousness now.
“Get off me, you sonofabitch,” the deputy said thickly.
Sewell had the gun free now and he cocked it, doing it awkwardly with his left hand. Harve recognized the sharp metallic click as the hammer came back and caught and then he screamed.
“Jesus Christ, Neely, don’t! For God’s sake!”
Sewell could see nothing at all in the absolute blackness, but he brought the gun up in his left hand guided by the open and screaming mouth so near his face. Harve’s right arm must be pinned under him, he thought, or he would have grabbed my hand by this time. The gun was inches in front of his own face and he remembered to close his eyes against powder burn.
“Oh, God!” Harve cried out, and then he shot, feeling the gun jump in his hand.
When he felt Harve’s body strain upward and then go suddenly limp and relaxed under him, like some grotesque travesty on coitus and its climax, he felt slightly ill for a moment and wanted to get away. He had killed two men in his life but never one in this way before. One of them had been in a fight with another hoodlum and he had felt nothing at all afterward except relief that he hadn’t been killed himself, and the other was a man he had shot in a holdup, but the man had not died until two days later and he had not seen him die. He had only read about it in the papers.
But now he wanted to get away from Harve as soon as possible and he backed out the opened door, dragging the deputy’s body after him by the handcuff, and let it fall into the mud beside the car. With his left hand he began going quickly through the pockets in search of the handcuff keys, and then he suddenly thought of George. He stood up, sliding the body of Harve along through the mud so he could reach in the front window. The car was only a darker mass than the night, blurred and indistinct, but he could make out that it was tilted quite far over toward him and resting against the bole of a tree just in front of the door, the fender and hood pushed in by the tree and the whole weight of the car supported by it. He felt for the door handle, but it had been broken off and the door had been jammed when the top was crushed down. He leaned his head and shoulders and left arm in through the shattered and constricted window, being careful of the slivers of glass remaining. George was slumped forward with
