What do you do under those circumstances? I had eight hollow-point rounds in my.45 and a full magazine in my back pocket. The storm had effectively isolated the environment I was in. Even if someone passed on the paved road, it was unlikely he would take notice of the events down by the river. Over the years I had read of historical situations that were similar, and I had always wondered what I would do. The French Legionnaires at Dien Bien Phu, most of whom were Germans, had kept repeating over and over “Cameroon,” in memory of the famous last stand their antecedents had made in defense of Maximilian during Benito Juarez’s war for Mexico’s independence. Crocket and Bowie and Travis and 185 others went down to the last man at the Alamo, Crocket run through against the barracks wall, Bowie firing his pistols into his executioners in the infirmary just before he was tossed on top of their bayonets. Custer and his men died bravely on the hilltop overlooking the Little Big Horn River, although as many as thirty troopers may have committed suicide rather than allow themselves to be taken half alive and subjected to a fiendish death.
The real question was not what I expected of myself but what my enemy expected of me. The man in the center of the line was probably the leader. I heard him give a muffled command, then the two men on either side of him began moving out farther and farther from him. My guess was they had already concluded I would either run or try to swim upstream or downstream, and they had come to this conclusion because that was what they would have done.
What was it they did not expect me to do? When we say someone will run like a rabbit, we are usually speaking derogatorily and not examining the content of our rhetoric. A cottontail rabbit does not run without a destination; he runs in a circle that leads him back to his starting place. Then he hides, leaving his pursuers to chase a scent that serves only to confound them.
I doubted if the cleaners expected me to go back to the coulee, the place where I had dropped out of sight and entered the river basin. But that was exactly what I did, running through the shallows, splashing up onto the mudflat to a high place among the trees where I could look out on the slope that led into the watershed. I lay on my stomach, rain dripping from the overhang on my back and head, and watched the leader of the five men come down the dip in the land that would give him access to cover and a chance to reconnoiter the area.
He paused, evidently confident that I was not in immediate proximity to him. He looked to the left and to the right, scanning the trees, checking to see where his men had stationed themselves. I propped my elbows in the dirt and aimed the.45 at his rib cage with both hands, allowing for the climbing effect of the recoil, and tightened my finger inside the trigger guard. Surprise time, motherfucker.
“Iberia Parish sheriff’s detective! Throw away your weapon and place your hands on your head,” I said.
He jerked around just as a pool of yellow electricity flared inside a cloud. His expression was like that of a cowled monk in a Reformationist painting caught in an iniquitous act. In that instant I also saw his eyes, and I knew he had entered the brief interior monologue with himself that I call “the moment.” Inside the moment, which is usually not longer in duration than two or three seconds, you choose either to give it up or roll the dice. His face looked grainy and full of lumps, as though insects had fed on it. His eyes were lustrous and black, his mouth slightly parted, as though he were oxygenating his blood. Rain slid down his brow and over his eyes, but he never blinked.
“You’re having impure thoughts, podna,” I said. “They’re about to get you wasted. Don’t let that happen.”
Almost as though he wished to bring a touch of class to his moment on the edge of the abyss, his mouth softened with a lackadaisical grin. He swung the muzzle of a cut-down pistol-grip pump shotgun toward me. I fired twice, my muzzle flash spearing into the dark, the two ejected shell casings tinkling somewhere off to my right. I didn’t think the second round had found a target, but the first one did. The hooded man took it under the armpit, and I suspected the hollow-point round had flattened on bone and torn up through the lungs and perhaps exited through the far shoulder. Regardless, his knees buckled, and blood spewed from his mouth, and his jaw jacked loose when his knees struck the ground. When I pulled his shotgun out from under him, I realized he was both a taller and heavier man than I had thought.
I crawled back into the trees, dragging the shotgun with me, and opened my mouth to clear my ears. I couldn’t see the other four men, but I knew I had to turn the situation around on them and get out of the defensive position I was in. They were inside the tree line now, on either side of me, and I had a swollen river at my back and an empty field with little cover in front of me. I sat up on the slope and slipped the pump on the shotgun far enough back so I could be sure there was a shell in the chamber. It was a Remington, and if the sportsman’s plug was removed, there were probably five shells in the gun, each probably loaded with double-aught buckshot.
One bad guy down and four to go, I thought. The odds weren’t the best. But what had been the odds for the man I had just shot and killed? Before he died, he must have believed his day’s work was almost at an end and soon he would be enjoying a steak and fried potatoes and a mug of beer, or filling his mouth with a woman’s breasts, or snarfing up a few lines in a French Quarter apartment above a lichen-stained courtyard whose flowers told him the season was unending, as was his life and the pleasures it brought him.
I got to my feet and, like our heavy-browed, thick-armed, shoulder-slumped ancestor, headed along the water’s edge toward the southern horizon, the.45 stuck down in my belt, my dead enemy’s weapon in my hands, my throat tight with a thirst of such intensity it seemed to belong to someone else.
CHAPTER 17
THE TWO MEN to my south had sought cover when they heard me fire. I was sure they could distinguish the difference between the report of a pistol and a shotgun, and by now they had concluded their leader had made a serious mistake in judgment and had taken himself off the board. I hoped the loss of their leader would cause them to cut and run, but I knew better. They were obviously professionals, probably with military or mercenary backgrounds, and if the crop duster I had seen was actually part of their operation, they had radio communication with people who had far more authority and power than the man I had just killed.
Don’t try to figure it out, I told myself. Just get through this afternoon. The storm will pass, the sun will break out of the clouds, and these men will go back under their rocks. At least that is what I told myself.
I strained my eyes against the darkness. The undergrowth was shiny with rainwater, the canopy dripping. I could see no movement among the trees. Nor could I hear any sounds that didn’t belong in a drenched woods. Which meant that perhaps, with good luck, the two men to my north had gone to ground and had not decided on a plan. I stood up behind a water oak and studied the underbrush and the riverbank and the slash pines and the gum trees and the willows and the direction the wind was blowing and the patterns it created in the leaves and pine branches. I remembered how the wind had been my friend years ago when it swept through the elephant grass in a tropical country and how it redefined the shapes of the trees on a rubber plantation; I remembered it swelling inside the canopy of a rain forest where the birds had gone silent and where the shadows that did not move abruptly came into focus and caused your breath to seize in your chest.
But I saw nothing except the foliage of a riparian environment that for me had become a black-green tiger cage.
I looked to the south again and saw something that instilled in me more fear than even the two men who were probably crouched in the undergrowth. At the mouth of the river, where it widened into a fan and met a saltwater bay, I saw the same double-decker I had seen on Bayou Teche. I saw its twin scrolled stacks, its scrubbed finish, its rows of passenger cabins, its pilothouse, and the water cascading off the paddles of its great steam-powered wheel, all of it caught inside a column of translucence that looked more like ether than light. I knew that what I was watching was not a delusion, and I knew what the paddle wheeler represented and who the crew and passengers were and why all of them were here, beckoning at me, their lips moving without sound, saying,
I ducked back behind the trunk of the tree, my chest quivering, my clothes all at once cold, as though my body were no longer capable of generating enough heat to warm the soaked fabric. I peered around the tree and in the distance saw only the blackness of the sky. The paddle wheeler was not in sight, but I heard a bush shake and raindrops scatter on the ground and I knew my adversaries were still with me. I pressed my spine against the tree trunk, holding the pump shotgun straight up in front of me like a human exclamation mark, a rock in my left hand.
“You two guys try to follow my logic,” I said. “Your leader was probably the smartest guy among you, but he
