By now Tommy had joined Kershaw, but he stood apart from him, making just one of the spectators who had gathered around as quickly as if warned in advance of some coming excitement. This was not urban America, where people gave violence involving someone else a wide berth and a studied indifference. In towns like Elmore, men still gathered to see a fight, not worried that it would reach out and kill others at random.
They also gave it a chance to play itself out before intervening. There were always the peacemakers, but never in the beginning. Even the peacemakers wanted to see a little action.
'Where is she?' Kershaw asked.
Swann looked puzzled, shaking his head.
Kershaw kicked him on the hip. The crowd gasped, neither approvingly nor disapprovingly. They were withholding judgment until they better understood the conflict.
Too much punishment of a downed opponent would have to be stopped eventually, but an exploratory kick seemed tolerable.
'Ain't going to help you to act stupid,' Kershaw said.
'I'll pound on you till you tell me where she is.'
'Who?' Swann asked.
'You know who.'
Kershaw drew his foot back again and Swann covered his face with his hands even though his attacker clearly was not aiming there. The boot caught Swann in the side and he cried out.
The crowd murmured again, this time as much in disapproval as sympathy.
'I don't know who you mean,' Swann said as soon as he could talk. He rolled his eyes to the crowd, looking for help.
'Aural,' Kershaw said. 'Where is she, you little peckerwood?'
Kershaw stepped on Swann's shin, holding his foot down until Swann jerked into a sitting position, holding out his arm.
'Least let him get up,' said a voice from the back of the crowd of men.
'I ain't keeping him from getting up,' Kershaw said, looking angrily around him to locate the protester. 'Peckerwood stole my woman.'
A collective 'ah' escaped from the men as understanding came to them all. Woman stealing, a vague but threatening concept, shifted the sympathy back towards Kershaw.
'I don't know her,' Swann said. 'I didn't steal her, I didn't steal anybody.'
'Shit,' said Kershaw in contempt for Swann's story.
'You better tell me, 'cause I ain't afraid to kick you to death if I have to.'
'You've got the wrong man,' Swann said, sounding as pathetic as he could manage. He rolled his eyes towards the crowd again. He knew that eventually some of them would intervene, and he was grateful that Kershaw had not encountered him someplace secluded. Swann knew he would have to wait out the torture-he had done it before more than once-and the only question was whether he would be able to walk when it was over.
'I got no use for your woman,' Swann said, playing the only card he had.
The crowd sucked in their collective breath at the seeming insult.
Without warning Kershaw stooped and smashed his fist into Swann's face.
Stern murmurings rose from the men. Hitting a man when he was down had its limits and Kershaw was fast approaching them.
'That's about enough,' another voice offered, but no one moved forward yet. Moral persuasion would be tried first.
Swann spit out some of the blood that dripped into his mouth, then ran his hand under his nose, which was bleeding profusely. He thumbed a tooth as if it were loose although the blow had not hit his mouth. He made no attempt to rise. He would lie there and take it like a punching bag if he had to, but offering resistance or even giving the appearance of being a fair opponent would be disaster.
'I meant I got no use for women at all,' Swann said, trying to finish the ploy that Kershaw had thwarted by hitting him so fast. 'I'm queer.'
That split the crowd about evenly between those who thought he had proven his case and those who thought he deserved the beating on general principles, but the real victory was over Kershaw. It was one thing to stand over a fallen man and kick shit out of him because he stole a woman, quite another to administer punishment to a victim who was so fundamentally weak that he even admitted to the ultimate perversion.
Kershaw hit Swann in the eye, then again for good measure, but the second blow had the halfhearted enthusiasm of a man who knows he has already lost.
The crowd helped Swann to his feet as Harold Kershaw walked away. Tommy Walker deliberately walked in the other direction. After a few minutes Swann managed to convince everyone that he didn't want a doctor, and he was in his car, heading out of Elmore. He watched in his rearview mirror for several miles to be sure he wasn't followed.
When he was sure he was safe at last, Swann pulled over to the side of the road. Now that the adrenaline was leaving his system, he began to feel dizzy from the last two blows to the eye. Vision out of that eye was poor, and when he looked at his reflection in the mirror he saw that it was nearly swollen shut. He had been beaten worse in his time, Cooper had nearly killed him in the first few weeks of breaking him in to his role as compliant concubine. This time no bones were broken; he could move; he could travel. He didn't look very good, but no one was going to see him for a while other than Aural McKesson, and it didn't really matter if he was presentable to her or not, did it?
The only thing that worried him was the dizziness that wouldn't go away.
He laid his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. The car seemed to swim about him and he snapped his eyes open again, looking for something to focus on to stop the spinning. The tree he looked at moved and then he was moving, swinging wildly back and forth and the light flickered and went out.
Swann awoke, aware that he had passed out, and. panic swept over him. It was not his health that concerned him most, but his security. He had managed to survive all this time, both in prison and before, by being constantly on the alert. He sometimes thought of himself as a mammal in the age of dinosaurs, a small and poorly armed animal that evaded its enemies by its cunning and superior intelligence. Living in the cracks of a world dominated by the huge and stupid, the mammal had persisted, laughing silently at the giants all around as it slipped stealthily between their legs. In time it came into its own destiny, outlasting the monsters, lifted to the top of the heap by its natural superiority.
Swann liked the analogy; it pleased and comforted him to think of himself as surviving on guile and craft while the slow-witted ones stumbled about, hunting for him in vain.
The price for such elusiveness was constant awareness, and if he lost that, he was lost. He needed a place to hide now, he needed someone to care for him. A doctor, a hospital, was out of the question. He could not afford to be restrained; his safety depended on a mobility — that equated to anonymity. If he was never in the same place twice, he left no impression, there was no one to remember him, no way to connect him to anything, or anyone.
He could not understand how that cracker halfwit had recognized him in the first place. What kind of incalculably bad luck was it to have been shopping in the same place at the same time? The town was twenty miles from the campsite where he had found the girl. What was the man doing there, and how could he have identified Swann? The man could not have gotten more than a glimpse of a shape in the car. It was night, Swann hadn't even been facing the man. Had he? Could he have had that good a look at him? Or was it even bad luck? Had Swann been careless, was his vigilance slipping?
Frightened in a way he had not been since his first few days in prison, frightened for his life, Swann knew he had to find someone to help him until he recovered. There was only one person who could do it and be trusted implicitly.
He forced himself to drive on, struggling for his equilibrium.
Aural had never known a darkness like this, not on the blackest night of her life, not with her eyes closed, never.
Even the blind see more light than this, she thought. This was the darkness of the grave, total and unchanging. It was not a question of her eyes getting used to a lower level of light; there was no light at all, nothing to get used to, no gearing down or gearing up, no widening of the lens would make any difference.
