pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat. He left Memphis at sundown aboard the
“I hear some of them young gals shimmy to that jazz music till their drawers fall off,” the farmer said.
“I wouldn’t know. I’m too busy playing.”
They laughed at that, and one of them asked if he were a Levert from south Louisiana and he said no, that he lived in New Orleans, and then everybody told what they thought of New Orleans, and within an hour he had them explaining to him where to rent an automobile in Helena. He asked how the road was down to Ratio, but none of them could remember if there was any kind of a road.
THE
He got directions to Ratio, and two miles south of town the road dwindled into bumper-high grass running along the levee. He gave the car some gas and spun his way up to the top of the embankment and followed a wagon track, steering around lakes of rainwater and swales of mud, making about five miles an hour. After a time, he passed a large cotton plantation and could see dozens of workers in the fields, many mules hitched up to cultivators and spray wagons, but not a single internal-combustion machine. The trail ran down the levee at this point, and he stood on the brakes and let the Ford slide down it to flat land. The car sputtered along to a company store, a tall and broad wooden building, its shutters hanging off like oversized ears. Past this, the trail went into the woods and he drove at a crawl, the wheels tumbling over roots and stumps. This was virgin forest, and the trail wound back in time, away from civilization toward some druidlike occupancy back in the hardwood-haunted dimness.
For two hours the little car shook like a dog shedding water, and then he rolled up to the edge of a flat, fallow field that had been plowed the year before but left in unplanted rows. He got the wheels to match two furrows and proceeded until he was funneled by a fence line into the backyard of a large, paintless house where a white man sat on the back porch cradling a crock jug in his lap. He placidly watched Sam stop in the yard, scattering chickens, as though this happened every five minutes. His arm came up and briskly motioned around the side of the house, and Sam set the car forward and saw a lane under wild magnolia branches, and soon he was at a gate in front, which he opened and closed, now facing a pasture full of rickety brown cattle. This he drove across for two miles, dodging manure cakes and listing, bony animals, coming to another gate that led to a levee ramp. On top, he expected to see the Mississippi, but it had meandered off many years before and there was only willow-haunted flatland that seemed to go east for miles. He guessed that this had been a landing a hundred years before, for remnants of a cypress dock remained, pilings marching out to nowhere, to history. He tried to picture the grand steamers that stopped here fifty years before with their mural-covered paddle boxes and stained-glass clearstories, millionaire planters gesturing from the upper decks toward the worlds they owned, a time that seemed as inconsequential as smoke in light of the nothing that remained. It was only money, he thought, and that never lasts.
A trail plunged east into the willow brake, but it wasn’t mentioned in the uninspiring directions he’d been given in Helena, so he again turned south on the levee, passing a cotton gin with a shake roof and a rust-perforated smokestack coming up through the middle of it. Across a field he saw a respectable-looking redbrick house, a painted wooden porch across its front. He cut the Ford’s wheels and stood on the brakes, the tires locking and plowing sod down the steep slope. He drove along a cow path to a paintless barn and then through a gate into a fenced area of sawdust and dried manure, spooking three mules and five horses that ran from the machine and bunched against the mossy pickets. Leaving the Ford to steam among the animals, he climbed over the corral fence and advanced on the house.
The front door opened as he stepped up. Framed in the doorway was a barefoot man wearing a white shirt and vest, pearl-colored pants, and black cloth suspenders. Pinned to the right strap was a shield badge worn to brass. His hair was iron gray, carefully cut, and he was clean-shaven as well. There was something slightly off about his posture. “Sir,” he began, “is there some way I can help you?”
His civility was disarming. Sam regarded him carefully, as though there was something he didn’t understand but should. “Are you Constable Soner?”
“Indeed I am.”
“My name’s Sam Simoneaux. A man I know, a telegrapher for the railroad, told me you might be able to help me find a family back in these parts.”
“Is it Sam Kivens?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, of course. It’s old Bob McFadden.”
“I’m sorry, no.”
“What railroad?”
“Y &MV.”
Soner narrowed his eyes. “Doug Friar? Mac Divitts? Hazel Tugovich? Barry Ofel?”
“His name’s Morris Hightower.”
Soner seemed surprised. “I don’t know him, son. But I imagine that he knows one of the others I named and obtained my location from them.” He looked Sam over carefully for hints of who he was, and then turned stiffly, like a man with back trouble. “Come on in and have a seat.”
As soon as he closed the door, the front room went dark as a tunnel, and when his eyes adjusted he could see that all the windows were boarded across except for the top foot or so, where the upper sash was pulled down for air. Soner gestured to an armchair in front of an oak desk and then walked rigidly around it and sat in a wheeled office chair that needed oiling badly. In the gloom Sam saw that the wall behind the lawman was hung with guns, more of them materializing in an umber collage as his pupils relaxed. The rear wall was covered with Winchester lever actions, brass-framed carbines and rifles turning green under dust, Model 1873s, impossibly large Model 1876 big-game guns, sleeker ’86s, modern-looking ’95s, and semiautomatics in bear-killing.401 caliber. The walls were ten feet high, and on the one to his left were dusty military rifles, while to his right a hundred pistols hung on nails, hog legs from the Mexican War, break-action Smiths come in off the western prairie, single-action Colts by the dozen, their finish burned off according to how much misery they’d dispensed. He was afraid to turn around.
“This is some collection, all right. Where’d you get ’em all?”
Soner’s expression didn’t change. “There’s many of them to be had in this world.”
“You’re well protected, that’s for sure.”
“They’re all loaded.” Here he smiled. “Back here in the woods, I need options.”
“Yes, sir. I won’t take much of your time.” He made an effort to see if in Soner’s eyes there were any traces of madness.
“Take all the time you wish. Can I get you a glass of water? It’s pure, though warm.”
“That’d be nice.”
When Soner returned from the back room, walking stiffly with the glass held out, he stopped behind him and held the tall glass to the left. When Sam reached out with his left hand, Soner’s right hand ghosted from behind and plucked the.45 from its shoulder holster. He held the big pistol high in the air with two fingers as he returned to his seat. “Just a precaution. I don’t know your character.”
Sam gulped the water. “Well…all right, then.”
“I’ve been the law back in here ever since I was a boy, more or less. You’d think it was just writing permits
