He took a step back toward the street. “Come again?”
“She steals dogs. Prize hounds, bank-guard dogs, yapping nuisance dogs. Don’t know how she makes off with them or who hires her. Last year I found her driving an old Dodge Betsy with three German shepherds in the backseat asleep in sacks. Purebloods from the damned army, no less. The car stunk of chloroform. We took her in and she had bail in her purse. Never seen her since.” Melvin put his tongue in his cheek and rolled his eyes. “Then I heard she got pinched for the same thing down in Orleans Parish. Same results, too.”
Sam put a hand in his pocket and leaned against the plate glass out of the sun. “It’s worth a shot. You can go out with me and we’ll talk to her face-to-face.”
“Lucky, my authority extends about five blocks from where we’re standing. I’m just a city cop.”
“Well, a parish deputy, then.”
“Her place is two parishes away, and that sheriff tolerates the Skadlocks like they was kin. I think they give him his liquor. If you want to talk to her, you’ll have to go into Gasket Landing yourself.”
“Where the hell is this place? Maybe I can take a train up and meet the boat at Bayou Sadie. Our advance man set up a moonlight trip out of there for the townspeople.”
Melvin pulled his watch and wound it, shaking his head. “Gasket Landing isn’t really a place anymore. Long time ago there was a plantation in there, but everything’s mostly fallen apart, I hear. It’s gone back to horse country. A car can’t get back in there through the slop.”
“Can I get there by boat?”
“You gonna sneak up on somebody on an excursion steamer?” He laughed and pulled out the papers for another cigarette. “If you got some wood sense from when you was a kid, there’s still one livery in St. Frank where they’ll rent you a horse.”
“The hell you say.” Sam remembered riding to grammar school with his cousins down in Calcasieu Parish, three of them on one rough-riding plug named Slop Jar. “I haven’t been aboard a horse but once since I left the farm.”
“It’s the only way to get there, Lucky. Bring a cheap compass and ask directions from everybody you see.” He put the cigarette in his mouth and gave Sam a sideways look. “You got a gun?”
He shook his head. “Don’t want one.”
“I’d bring a Colt.45 if I was hunting up a Skadlock.”
“I don’t even own a pocketknife. I just want to find this woman and talk to her. Then I’ll know what to do, I guess.”
A truck rumbled into the intersection and stopped. Two women in a REO approached from the far side, and the driver squeezed the bulb on her horn.
Melvin blew his whistle and waved the truck on through. “I’ll tell you everything I know, bud.
“Well, then. Here goes.”
Chapter Nine
AFTER THE MOONLIGHT cruise the boat steamed all night to Bayou Sadie, little more than a mud landing and a few plank stores connected by a thread of road to the nearby towns. At seven the next morning the purser gave Sam an advance against his salary and told him to get back for the eight-thirty cruise or he’d be docked two dollars. He walked all the way into St. Frank and found the livery on the north side of the main street. The owner, a fat man wearing a cut-down pair of overalls held up by green suspenders, didn’t know him, so he took all the money he had as a deposit on the worst horse in the pen, a small, nervous-looking animal the color of a stained mattress. Then he tried to explain where Gasket Landing might be. “You have to go down this here lane and then ford the bayou, but it’s pretty shallow this time of year and it’s got a hard bottom. Then you head west into the stickers for a while and you’ll get into a big swamp that’s dry right now and pretty clear of brush. Those big trees cut back on the undergrowth. Keep the horse moving through there, don’t let him stop and look around too much. If you keep an animal busy he won’t get spooked.”
“What’s to spook him?”
The fat man looked up thoughtfully as Sam swung into the saddle. “Best not tell you. Just keep going a few miles till you hit the riverbank, then you’ll ride up to some ruint houses. That’s where the Skadlocks stay. You related?”
“No.”
“I figured that. You don’t have the look.”
Sam motioned toward the woods with his chin. “You know if Ninga Skadlock lives in there?”
“She couldn’t live nowheres else.”
“How many miles am I lookin’ at?”
“I don’t know.”
“No idea at all?”
“Somewhere between ten and fifty. It’s crazy country back in there.”
“What’s his name?”
“Who?”
“The horse.”
The livery owner scratched the yellow hair on his chest where it boiled up out of his undershirt. “Number 6.”
HE GOT the animal out into the road, and when a lumber truck went by, Number 6 whinnied, reared, and clambered down into a twelve-foot ditch. He sat the horse in water up to his stirrups, petted it, and coaxed it up the bank and back into the lane, where it commenced a pelvis-hammering trot, weaving from side to side. Sam stopped it, rode it several times in a circle to the right and then to the left, as his uncle Claude had taught him, and when he set the horse forward it seemed to remember that it was supposed to travel in a straight line, and its gait evened out. After a few miles they arrived at a place where the road sloped down into a broad bayou. The horse would have none of it. As soon as the water went over his pasterns, he kept turning upstream. Sam got off, stripped down to his drawers, and walked in ahead, tugging the reins. The water was only up to his waist, but the bottom rose in stinking clouds as he pulled across. He sat on the bank in the heat to dry off, then pulled on his khakis, debating whether he should just give up and cross back into town. He closed his eyes a moment to see if the girl child was still caught behind his lids, and her image came up glowing, but beside it was another face, that of his son losing consciousness, slipping away in a fever. He was the type of man who didn’t want the bad things that happened to him to happen to anyone else; maybe somebody told him things when he was three or four years old that landed like seeds in the furrows of his character. However he was formed, his tendencies were costly ones. He mounted up with a yodel and kicked Number 6 in the flanks, the horse barging into a hummock of blackberries, scattering dust and dead stalks, wasps flying behind its hooves like red sparks.
Number 6 labored on, now and then hanging up between saplings. In a tight spot it raised a hoof, put it through a fork in a trunk, then pulled it back and wedged around the tree, lowering its head and rooting through the trash woods like a hog. Four miles into the maze, a ropey wisteria vine caught the toe of Sam’s shoe and flipped him off like a playing card. Number 6 didn’t even look around and cantered west. Fighting the brush, Sam ran after it for a hundred yards in the smothering heat, finally leaping for the saddle horn and pulling himself up. The horse stopped then and looked back at him.
“You ugly son of a bitch,” Sam rasped. “You thirdhand hook rug pulled from a privy.” Here the horse bucked once, and Sam came down on its neck. After gaining his breath, he slid down and led the animal to a deep puddle of clear water and let it drink. “All right,” he said, pulling out his compass. “Eat some of that grass there and we’ll move on.” The horse rolled its ears away.
Soon they entered a low-water cypress swamp, the treetops closing off the sky. The red-bark trunks were the size of factory chimneys, and everywhere their roots rose from the soppy mud like stalagmites. He checked his
