my wife and boy watch as they tied me to a pecan tree, arms and legs, me sitting on the ground hugging that trunk. They owned a big stinking dog, a rottweiler with a diseased face, and they turned him loose on me.” Soner stopped here and cleared his throat. “That devil tore at my neck and ate the flesh off my back until the bones came to the surface, and right before I died they pulled him off me and rode away. I imagine they figured it was better vengeance to leave me alive than to put me out of my suffering. It was my boy who cut me free and helped me crawl into the house. My wife had lost her mind. Absolutely. This is the short version, let me tell you. The very shortest.”
But even this abbreviated telling seemed to last a full hour, and after hearing it Sam felt sure he would leave for Helena in the morning.
But Soner had more to tell. “A year later, when I could get around, she left me. She couldn’t hardly step into the yard without every nerve in her body winding up like a clock spring. The boy stayed two years more, then left to join her. He writes me every month, and he’s married now with kids of his own and lives west of Chicago.”
“You wouldn’t go with her?”
“I would’ve in a heartbeat, but she said she couldn’t have me. Not wouldn’t.
“You didn’t go after them? Or tell the county sheriff?”
“Ha. I’ve got a lot of guns, but I’ll admit I’m afraid. Not a match for them. All these years, I figured to leave bad enough alone. I didn’t have the evil imagination to do to them what they’d have done to me.” He took another swallow from his glass. “If I’d called the sheriff, he wouldn’t have gone against them. If they’d heard I’d brought other law in, I’d have paid for it again. Call me chickenhearted, but I still enjoy watching the sun come up every morning. I still draw my pay, help the locals. The only thing that hurts is that I’m incomplete. My family’s gone, but still out there.”
Sam saw a firefly combust in the yard. Only one. “I think I would’ve done something. They’re only men.” In the dark, he thought he could feel the anger Soner must have felt.
The constable drained his glass and began to move in the rocker. “Come here, son, I want you to know something.”
“What?”
“The work of men.”
Sam stepped over to where he guessed by a shadowy motion that Soner was taking off his shirt.
When he finished, he rolled his shoulders forward and put down his head. “Run your hands over my back.”
“I don’t think-”
“Don’t be scared. You’ll learn something.”
“I can’t see a thing.”
“You don’t need to.”
Sam reached out with both hands the way he would search for something in a dark house at night. Placing them on Soner’s right shoulder, he let his palms ride carefully over to his backbone. “Aw, God almighty,” Sam gasped. He moved his hands over to the far shoulder, whispering something in French. Down toward the middle back, his fingers found a skinned-over wreckage of bone, and lower, wide pulsing hollows not to be imagined. He drew back his hands but hovered there a moment, frozen by his inability to change the horror he’d touched.
Soner’s voice came dry and small. “That should be a good lesson to you. But I’ve lived long enough to know it won’t be. Not good enough to keep you away from them. Nobody understands what a snake is until he’s been bitten.” Soner stood up and pulled open the screen door. “I’ll see you right after dawn.”
“Yes, sir.”
THAT NIGHT Sam rubbed his fingertips against the sheets again and again, as if to cleanse off memory itself. He woke at false dawn and lay on his back, watching the room develop around him in its gray plainness. Dew hung in the window screen like cloudy rhinestones, and he knew it would be a sunny day.
At breakfast, he noticed that Soner turned his whole body when reaching for something at his side. “Thanks for all your hospitality.”
“I don’t get many civil visitors. I hope to see you again sometime.” He stopped buttering his bread and looked up. “I hope anyone sees you again.”
He was still thinking about riding on and forgetting. “How many of them are back in there?”
Soner looked off to his left and squinted. “At one time there were twenty Cloats, plus their Indian women. They liked Indian women. There were children from time to time, but most didn’t last.”
“Didn’t last?”
“Sometimes the women would run off with them. Or, when they got to be nine or ten, sometimes the kids would take off by themselves. Girl child or no, the Cloats would rut on them all.”
Sam stopped eating. “What’s wrong with those people?”
Soner’s eyes were clear and bright. “Why, nothing. They’re exactly like you and I. They’ve just fallen a few more rungs down the moral ladder than most. It’s because they live in their chosen isolation so that nothing good can touch them. And they insist on seeing themselves as normal, abetting each other’s notions. The worst thing that ever happened to them is each other.”
“The men who did that to you, are they back in there?”
“Batch and Slug? They’re somewhere else. They acquired some hashish, I hear, and smoked it and smoked it until they decided to play tandem double Russian roulette with their pistols. Instead of one bullet, they installed five in each revolver and both crossed over on the first try.”
“How many men are left?”
“The big one named Grill dropped dead of who knows what. He was pretty old for a Cloat, maybe forty-eight. Box and Babe are still alive, so far as I know. Percy died a couple of years ago.”
“Percy?”
“They say he was covered head to toe with syphilitic chancres and took five howling months to die. His woman came up from the island later and told me about it before she left for Memphis. She seemed very sick herself. That was five years ago.” He looked at the ceiling. “Maybe six.”
“I see.”
“You’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Throw away that shoulder holster. Wear the pistol in the hollow of your back between your drawers and your trousers.”
Sam swallowed the last of his buttermilk. “Can you tell me how to get in there?”
Soner chewed his toast and thought. “Well, you’ll have to take my horse.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
BY SEVEN O’CLOCK he was on the constable’s mare riding back to where he had seen the relics of a cypress dock. He took the trail leading east onto the island, and within an hour, he was lost. The terrain was lumps of river sand sprouting trash forest. He rode in and out of old scours filled with dead water and up hogbacks topped by patches of poison oak running up the willows. After four hours of wandering, he smelled wood smoke. Turning back, he rode south and crossed a ghost of a trail he’d missed before and rode down it for a mile before dismounting and tying the horse off on a long lead. After a little while on foot he smelled privy, and not much farther along spied a clearing in which six houses lay scattered as though landed there by a flood. They were swaybacked, each made out of secondhand lumber, some weatherboard, some shiplap, some plain plank, some beaded, just boards fished out of the river and nailed up as they came by, mossy and waterlogged. In front of the nearest house, a three-room box propped with saplings against collapse, a balding man wearing a crazed expression sat in a straight-back kitchen chair on a patch of bare dirt. Sam considered him for a while and decided
