Dead Man

by Joe Gores

  “Good. Gives us twelve hours to take inventory, plan, pick the killing ground…”

  “You’re so damned… casual about it…”

  “Live with death long enough, you get casual about it.”

  “Especially someone else’s,” she said in a neutral voice.

  As she spoke, the cottonmouth’s arrow-shaped head shot forward between the roots to bury its fangs deep in the rabbit’s shoulder, just for an instant. It drew back, re-coiling, waiting. The rabbit writhed, stiffened, jerked, died.

  Why did he kill it, Mommy?

  I’m afraid that’s what he does for a living, Albie.

  Could he kill me?

  There’s nobody around big enough to kill you, Tiger.

  If the rattler in the desert three years ago had struck Dain when he danced with it, Vangie’s parents wouldn’t be dead. Jimmy Zimmer wouldn’t be dead. Minus wouldn’t be dead. But Albie and Marie still would be. To avenge their deaths he had trained, planned, shut down every other aspect of his life. Until last night with Vangie.

  Vangie was watching, mesmerized, as the snake glided forward, unhinging its jaws to open them amazingly wide. The inside of the snake’s mouth was an absolute, dead white, which had given it the name cottonmouth. It was swallowing the dead rabbit whole, walking its distended jaws up around the body as if the rabbit were entering a tunnel.

  For those moments there was nothing else in the world for her. No love last night with him; no dead lover, no dead parents, no men bent on their destruction a few scant hours away across the marsh.

  Suddenly it seemed to Dain that for five years he had been willfully evoking certain emotions—pain, the feeling of loss, the need for revenge—mainly for the pleasure of satisfying them. And telling himself he was being true, being steadfast to holy memories. To the icon he had made of Marie.

  Would she have wanted that? Did he want that? Last night he had more or less returned to life, in Vangie’s bed and in her body; against that reality, deliberately continuing the motif of the past was something like viewing a snuff film again and again. The pornography of violence.

  He realized almost with wonder that if he could walk away from this right now, and never look back, he would. But he couldn’t. Vangie couldn’t. The past was vengeance. The present was survival. The future was…

  Vangie said in an almost dreamy voice, “He’ll probably lie up there for three or four days, digesting. Sluggish as an old hog in a wallow.”

  Dain returned to the snake, that now looked like just another tree root. The rabbit was gone, a slight bulge in the long curved sinuous body.

  “How long would a man live if he was struck by that thing?”

  “Depends on the size of the snake and where he gets you. Bigger they are, the more venom they pump. Get hit in a hand or a foot, you’d probably survive—’specially if there was a doctor only a couple of hours away. But one like this hit you close to the heart, you’d only have a few minutes.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, started away up the path. The future was their present now.

  “No guns,” said Dain. “One knife that’s worth a damn, that Bowie knife of yours. So we have to—”

  “You never quit, do you?” asked Vangie.

  “You know how to survive in the bayou, I don’t. When you start picking up signs they’re coming, maybe even when you just feel they’re coming—tell me. I’ll need to know how much time we’ll have. We have to pick the killing grounds, attack them when they think they’re attacking us.”

  Vangie said, hesitantly, “How… do you know if you can kill someone or not?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dain. “I’ve never done it.”

  “But I thought you were…” She stopped. Her face hardened. “They murdered my parents.”

  And my wife and son, thought Dain. But suddenly it wasn’t enough. Carry it far enough, you just became them. Better to stick with simple survival, them or you

  “Look out!”

  Vangie grabbed his arm and jerked him to one side. Head down, watching the trail, he had been just about to walk into a line strung across the road between two trees, eight feet above the ground. At three-foot intervals were loops eighteen inches long, made by gathering and tying off the primary line. Heavy fishhooks had been threaded through the bottom of each loop. Hanging from one of these hooks was a decomposing sparrow hawk.

  “Tight line,” explained Vangie. “Left over from fishing.”

  “Eight feet up in the air?” demanded Dain.

  “You have to remember that during flood stage, the tight line was just about six inches off the water, so the hooks, with bait on them, were about a foot below the surface. Now, of course, with the water back down almost to normal—”

  “And the hawk?”

  “He didn’t have anyone to grab his arm.”

  Dain nodded, a thoughtful look on his face. His body was still full of unexpected jolts and betrayals, sudden weaknesses, but since the fever had broken his mind was clear.

  “Let’s get back and start planning our assault,” he said briskly. “We’re going to need those old muskrat traps from the storeroom… and I’m glad you didn’t jettison that gasoline can along with the outboard motor…”

  They moved off through now sun-shot woods starting to steam in the muggy heat of morning.

  All four of them were sweating with the humidity by the time they had broken camp, striking the tents and packing up all of their gear. Nicky and Trask were starting to lug it all down to the boats, but Inverness stopped them with a wave of his hand.

  “Leave all the gear and equipment here, we’ll all go in one boat. It’ll make us less of a target and we’ll move faster.”

  Maxton said, with a show of bravado, “Frontal assault, right? Before they can run?”

  “And get picked off in the boat, Maxton? Not likely. No frontal assaults, get that through your heads, all of you. We sneak up on ‘em after dark, and if we’re damned lucky—”

  “What the fuck, Inverness, first waiting for the goddamned storm to end, and now this! They could be long gone by the time we get there.” Maxton was building up a nice anger at the more cautious hunter. “The girl ran with nothing but the bonds—and you told me yourself that Dain wasn’t armed.”

  “You want to take the chance there were no firearms at the shack?” He shook his head. “They’re not going to run from us.”

  “What the hell is it with you and Dain, anyway?”

  “He wants me dead,” said Inverness. He was suddenly hard as strap steel. He moved in on Maxton, hulked over him. “When I got word he was in New Orleans, I thought he was after me and let you know he was there. Now I’m leading you to the girl so you can get your fucking bonds and your fucking nasty little revenge. In return you’re going to help me get Dain for good. I’ve already killed him twice but he didn’t stay dead, so—”

  “You’re scared of him!”

  “You’re goddam right I’m scared of him, the same way I’m scared of a cottonmouth coiled under a rock. Five years ago I killed his wife and kid, and he knows it.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill him in New Orleans?” asked Maxton. “A mugging. A hit-and-run…”

  “Better out here in the swamp where nobody’ll wonder where he’s gone. What are you bitching about? Because of me you’ll get your fucking bonds and the girl.”

  “We keep fucking around, she’ll be gone by the time we get there.” He shook his head in disgust. “From what you tell me, you killed Dain again the other night. So I say we—”

  “He’s alive and that fishing camp is his goddam rock. He’s going to be coiled and waiting for us. That’s why we go in after dark when he’s cold and sluggish.”

  “You’re as fucking crazy as he is,” said Maxton; but he stamped off down to the boat without further argument.

  The mist had burned off, the steaming had stopped when the leaves and foliage had dried. On the open cleared knoll, a dozen muskrat and nutria traps were laid out in the bri
ght sunlight. Vangie was on her knees greasing them, making sure the traps didn’t slam shut on her hand as she tested them one by one.

  Dain came down off the little verandah of the cabin. Awkwardly, because he had trouble keeping the gunnysacks open, he began stuffing them with the traps she had greased.

  “I’ve cut the two-by-fours for the cleats to go up on either side of the door, but you’ll have to nail them up. I can’t do it with only one arm.”

  Vangie suddenly stopped working to look up at him, shading her eyes with one hand. “I can’t believe this! We’re actually trying to plan ways to kill four men!”

  “No, four men are planning to kill us. We’re trying to survive. There’s a difference.”

  “Easy enough for you, with nothing in this world that you care about.”

  Dain started to speak, to tell her about his insight that morning: that only simple survival, not revenge, would have a chance of getting them through this. But instead he surprised himself by saying, “I care about you, Vangie. A lot.”

  She tried to reply, stopped; she couldn’t handle that one. She didn’t know what it meant, didn’t know what she wanted it to mean, didn’t know if she felt a similar sentiment in return, whatever the hell sentiment it was in the first place. She settled for ignoring it completely.

  “You found Inverness easily enough after five years—”

  “He found me.”

  Surprised, Vangie said, “How?”

  “That’s one of the many things I want to ask him when we get together again.”

  “Think he’ll answer?”

  “If he doesn’t kill me first. I didn’t even recognize him as one of the hitmen. No premonitions, no sudden flashes of evil—I liked the guy. Thought he was just a cop doing his job. If he hadn’t kept pushing himself at me, I never would have known who he was.”

  “He wanted you to recognize him? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not wanted—needed. If I recognized him, then he would be justified in killing me. I think that does make sense.”

  “For a hitman?”

  “He’s a complicated guy,” said Dain, “and he’s missed me twice. It’s spooking him.” He shoved the last trap into the gunnysack, said roughly, “But even so he’s not going to make any easy mistakes this time. C’mon, let’s get these into the woods and get them set.”

  Vangie nodded, grabbing the second sack, then said abruptly, “Listen, Dain, last night was just…”

  “Just last night,” said Dain quickly, “I know. But…”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But.”

  They both looked around, as if fixing this place and this moment in their minds. Then they started down the road dragging the gunnysacks behind them.

  It was still daylight when they shoved off into the channel toward the lake, all four men in the one boat, all of their gear except their weapons far behind them in the camp. They had motored this far, then had lain up here until late afternoon. Inverness did not start the outboard right away.

  “We can use the motor getting across the main body of open water, but we’ll have to row the last three miles. Surprise and darkness are our best weapons.”

  “Jesus, Inverness, you keep acting like this is going to be some sort of war,” said Maxton. “The boys and I think Dain is dead and the girl is unarmed—”

  He had to break off because Inverness had started the motor to head for open water, and couldn’t hear him anyway. Maxton settled for cursing Inverness under his breath.

  Vangie had just finished nailing up cleats of staggered lengths of two-by-four to the wall on either side of the door. She had used spikes so they couldn’t be torn out of the wall by anything smaller than, say, a fire-crazed stallion. Dain dropped a five-foot length of two-by-six horizontally into the cleats. This made it a bar across the door which would prevent it from being swung open from the inside.

  “Perfect!” he exclaimed.

  He hugged Vangie momentarily with his good arm, removed the two-by-six and carried it off the porch to stash it under a bush where it couldn’t be seen but would be readily accessible.

  “Okay. Now, where’s that vat of tar your dad used for treating the fishing nets?” .

  Vangie pointed. “Around that way—at the edge of the woods. But what good will a vat of tar do us?”

  They started walking off across the open area toward the woods on the far side of the knoll.

  “I don’t know—yet,” said Dain. “Maybe none. But…”

  The venerable cast-iron vat, over six feet in diameter and three feet deep, was set under a sycamore tree below a lip of the knoll. It looked full of water.

  “There’s a couple of feet of tar under all that water from yesterday’s storm.”

  The huge old relic had a hollowed-out place beneath it where a fire could be laid to bring the tar to a boil. Dain was delighted by it.

  “We’ll bail it out and fire it up. If we could—”

  “Listen!”

  Both were instantly still. Only then to Dain’s ears came the very faintest of mosquito whines from out in the marsh. It stopped even as he heard it.

  “Outboard?”

  “Yes. Your friend Inverness misjudged how far the sound of a motor carries over water.”

  “How far away are they?”

  “Three miles, probably. They’ll plan to row the rest of the way in well after dark.”

  “So we’ll have enough time to get everything ready—if we’re lucky.”

  “And if we’re not,” said Vangie unexpectedly, deepening her voice to quote, “’By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death.’ Shakespeare,” she added, then burst out laughing.

  He laughed himself. “Did I… when I was delirious…”

  “Yes.”

  “And you remembered it.”

  “I liked it. That part about owing a death—”

  “Yeah, well, Maxton and company owe some deaths, too,” said Dain, suddenly darkening and hardening.

  Vangie started bailing water with an old coffee can, Dain started gathering kindling for the fire beneath the vat. She suddenly stopped, watching him drag up a large oak branch.

  “Dain. I don’t want to die.”

  “Neither do I.” He gestured out at the swamp. “Neither do they.”

  “Then—”

  “Then we have to want to not die harder than they do.”

  29

  Dusk had come again, and the sky was ruddy with sunset-washed cumulus. The boat grounded behind a very low ridge rising from the marsh, its blunt prow sliding up over the mud without sound. The four men got out, bent over so they could not be seen above the reeds and rushes. Trask had been stuck with the rowing for the last mile. He flexed his hands gingerly.

  “Jesus, what blisters!”

  “Man jerks off as much as you oughta have calluses half an inch thick,” guffawed Nicky, who’d had gloves.

  Maxton followed Inverness as he crawled to the top of the rise. They parted the rushes and peered through. On a spit of land a hundred yards away was the rough-built cabin. Vangie was just walking toward it, alone, careless, unhurried.

  “We could wing her from here if we had a rifle,” muttered Maxton regretfully.

  “You’re forgetting about Dain.”

  “Fuck Dain. He’s lying dead in the swamp somewhere.”

  Inverness looked over at him, shook his head. “You’re a fool, Maxton. He’s over there. Waiting.”

  “And you’re a fucking paranoid.” Maxton swung around so his back rested on the sloping earth as if were the back of a chair. He took out a cigarette, but Inverness shook his head.

  “They might smell the smoke.”

  Maxton shrugged, put it away again, his face mean.

  “They? You sure are scared of a dead man, Inverness. Why’d you blow away his family in the first place?”

  “I was hired. Even now a certain number of big-city cops hire out as hitmen on the weekends. You do one, two a year—good money
, easy work…” He gave an easy chuckle. “Usually.”

  “You’re a cold-blooded fucker, aren’t you?”

  Inverness just stared at him. Maxton looked away first.

  Dain was crouched on the floor about three feet from the back wall, working on the end of a floorboard with a small pry bar, when Vangie finally entered the cabin. She left the door open; the windows were both already open. The big red gasoline tank from the flatboat was on the table.

  “I can feel them,” said Vangie, “the way I could feel you before you even got to New Orleans. Stay away from the windows in case they have binoculars.”

  Dain straightened up, still on his knees. “How long?”

  “There’ll be a moon tonight, so the first cloud that covers it after full dark will bring them in.”

  “Then let’s finish up here.”

  He returned to his floorboard, Vangie began pulling the bedding off the bunks, laying it out like gunpowder trails. With the harsh squawking protest of nails being drawn from wood, Dain raised one end of the plank. Vangie began gutting the mattresses, strewing the dried moss around. He fed the end of one of the blankets down through the slot he had opened.

  Vangie suddenly gasped.

  “My God, the pirogue! If they see that they’ll know—”

  “I moved it up beyond that big cypress and covered it with branches.” He chuckled. “I put the attaché case in it, too.”

  Vangie started to whirl toward the place she had hidden it, behind some sacks in the storeroom, then froze, her head coming up, her nostrils flaring like those of a spooked mare.

  She said, “It’s time.”

  “Okay. You shut the windows and then get into position. Let me know when you’re ready.”

  After Vangie had gone around shutting the windows, he stood up and, on an unspoken common urge, they embraced.

  Vangie said in a small voice, “Good luck, Dain.”

  “Good hunting, Vangie.”

  Somehow the phrases seemed inadequate, especially if they turned out to be the only epitaphs either would get; but what else was there to say? He watched her go out the door and around to the back of the cabin in the darkness, and ached to call her back. But it was too late for that.