by John Farris
Jackson was properly astonished. "What do you mean, again?"
"She was there the night before, sometime after midnight."
"How do you know that?"
"Some Bradwins twice removed live up Kezar way. They spotted her drivin' through, in that little Chevrolet car of hers."
"They must be mistaken."
"If you see her once, you remember her. She's that kind of woman."
"What would she have been doing in Kezar County?"
"Lookin' for Nancy."
"Well, then, if she found Nancy, surely she would have said something—"
"Found her dead, maybe."
"And drove all the way back to Dasharoons, in the dead of night, without having notified the authorities? That doesn't make sense."
"Some folks regard her as bein' a little strange," Wilkes said deliberately. "Have all along."
"Oh, I see. Well, why don't you just ask Nhora if she was in Kezar County. No sense in prolonging the mystery, if there is one."
"She might have good reasons for denyin' to me she ever went there."
Jackson felt his face stiffening from outrage. "Is that an accusation?"
"I'm purely speculating." He lifted his big head back, closing his eyes, letting the beer gush down his throat.
"This is something that does want clearing up," Jackson admitted, after taking time to think. "If you consider the eyewitnesses dependable."
"I do. Another reason why I wanted to chat with you this mornin'. You appear to have her confidence. And I surely don't. Lose your appetite?"
"I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm worried about what Nhora may have to say on her behalf."
Wilkes hit his dead leg with a fist, feeling nothing except, perhaps, the repetitious shock of psychic pain. "If she and that nigger are in cahoots, anything could happen. Murder."
"Preposterous. You may despise Nhora, but you can't seriously believe—"
"She wouldn't be the first white woman to lose her dignity, and her common sense, because of a handsome buck. Who knows what kind of hold he has on her?" Wilkes tested his logic silently; then, with a twist of his mouth as if he were about to spit, rejected it. "No. She's probably not capable of murder. But he is." He gestured at his crutches. "I'm a cripple and there's no damn earthly reason for it! Unless somebody fixed me up on purpose. I've run into the nigger a few times since this happened. He's polite, he smiles, but it's the smile of a man who knows more than he chooses to tell. Like he could do worse to me, if he really wanted to.
"Let me explain what I was up to the night I lost the use of my leg. I always have liked my liquor, although I been on it heavier than I should this past year. Anyway, I was drivin' home late at night from Judge Walker T. Murry's stag party at his fishin' camp. And I was okay to drive long as I had the road to myself but not feelin' any pain, you understand. I missed the turn at my gate in the dark—I'll do that cold sober sometimes—and the car slipped a little catty-corner into the drainage ditch. No way to get it out without the tractor, and I didn't feel like walkin' the three hundred yards to the house. I figured I'd have a nap there in the car, then go on up to my own bed. It was a warm night, so I laid down across the seat and corked right off.
"Don't know what it was woke me up. A dog, a train whistle. A hoot owl. Still dark. But the door on the driver's side of my Caddy was open, and I was hangin' half out of the car. I heard footsteps, like somebody runnin' away down the road but tryin' to be quiet about it. I sat up. Tears in my eyes. Head goin' round and I around. Puke comin' up. I might've seen a man, just a split-second's worth, runnin' where there was a trace of sky light between the dark pine trees. I leaned out and puked, then fell back down on the seat and passed out. Next thing I knew, it was past dawn. I got out of the car to piss and my left leg wouldn't hold me. No feeling. It was already a goner."
Wilkes wiped beer foam from his lips and said, with beseeching clarity, as if he were asking mercy of a hanging judge, "You have any notion of what a man could do to take away a leg like that?"
"Yes, I'm afraid I do. The sciatic nerve sheath could be dissolved by chemical means. An injection of paraldehyde in the right place would accomplish it. But one must know just where to insert the syringe."
"How could Tyrone find out about that?"
"A doctor or trained nurse would have to show him how to do it."
Wilkes looked out the window. "They're buryin' Old Lamb today. I never trusted that old bastard. Too much education. I don't know what kind of a doctor he was, but sometimes he got the idea he was a nigger lawyer too."
He paused, flinching as the windshield of an auto making a turn in the street caught the sun and hurled dazzling white light at his face, unexpected and as nerve-racking as a scream of fear. Wilkes ducked and looked oddly chastened, cleansed of his anger.
He said slowly, sounding depressed, "Sheriff doesn't know how Old Lamb died. Some scare talk this mornin'. The supernatural. Niggers love ghost stories, don't they? I hear you were out there. Any ideas?"
"He was as badly mangled as if he'd stood in front of a train. His genitals were—ripped away. Missing."
"Like some kind of animal got to him? Pack of wild dogs, maybe. There's a few wildcats left in the swamps." He dismissed his own explanations with an irritable grimace and wrapped his hand around the remaining bottle of beer. Three quick ones had slowed him a little; his drawl had become charmingly difficult to comprehend. "I was they-uh when Boss got hacked to day-eth. Clipper with that sword. A madman. Chapel fallin' to pieces. No rhyme or reason to it. I don't know, maybe we're up against more than the two of us can handle. Champ's just about helpless right now. If you're a man of integrity, and I think I can still rely on my good judgment in such matters, then I know you'll take good cay-uh him. When you want me to get in touch with the army?"
"Tomorrow; let Champ rest another day. I'll discuss the case with the surgeon-general if possible, have him speedily removed to a good hospital."
"Where Nhora and the nigger can't get their hands on him. They had time alone with Champ so far?"
"Nhora was with him for a while last night. But I'm still unconvinced that you have anything to worry about where Nhora is concerned." He was impatient to be gone, on his feet abruptly before he finished speaking.
"Just be careful," the lawyer said broodingly. "Between now and tomorrow noon I think I ought to visit with Champ. My observations might come in handy later on, in a court of law."
Jackson saw the wisdom in that. "Why don't you come to the house in the morning, about nine?"
"The Good Lord willin' and the creeks don't rise."
Wilkes wouldn't let Jackson pay for his largely uneaten breakfast. He was off to the bathroom on his crutches when Jackson left the café.
Ten-forty in the morning. War Time. The sun not high yet, but the temperature, according to the car radio, was heading for a fierce one hundred. Negroes worked in bonnets and straw hats, chopping cotton in the mammoth level fields along the straight road through Dashiroons. Dun fields, row upon row cracked and bleeding, dense white bleed of bolls. Osage orange trees and shade rushing over him, blips of dark too quick for comfort, and out again into the vivid blue, car racing but not fast enough to out-distance the horsemen of the nerves. Heat had him by the throat; his damaged chin and head were throbbing, his shirt stuck to his ribs and back.
The house, in contrast to the wide-open road, was cool as well as bright in every corner. Hackaliah was coming down the stairs as Jackson crossed the foyer.
"Where is Nhora?"
"She gone out riding, half hour ago."
Jackson paused in his dash up the stairs. "She's all right, then."
"Yasuh. Champ, he ask to be moved from the playroom."
"Moved where?" Jackson was amazed that he was even conscious; he had loaded Champ with phenobarbital.
"To Boss's room." Hackaliah studied Jackson from two steps down, eyes expressionless; but a blood vessel throbbed nervously near the top of his bal
d head. "I didn't know if it be right or wrong to move him. Sometimes, when they was children, and bad afraid of the dark, Boss let the boys come into his bed. It was a comfort, I know. So Bull Pete and me, we carried him downstairs."
"What did Nhora say about that?"
"She was gone already," Hackaliah said, a shade indifferently.
"Show me where he is, please."
Boss Bradwin's room, at the opposite end of the hall from his own room and next to Nhora's, was a tastefully furnished museum dominated by a four-masted bed with enough unsinkable oak to sail it across an ocean. There were works of art from every continent; rare books under lock and key; glass cases filled with medals, scrolls and other awards; photographs of Boss with all the presidents from a dour, paunchy Teddy Roosevelt to FDR in his prime. The room was elegant, rich and explained too much about Boss at a glance. Perhaps everything. His ego was deafening after two years in the grave. But Champ, easily overlooked in the bed, was as deeply asleep as Jackson had seen him. He took Champ's pulse, thinking of Nhora in this same bed, tumbling with the rugged, doting old man; he felt sick with longing and apprehension. Aunt Clary Gene, hollow-eyed, kept her vigil, and Bull Pete was parked in a chair just the other side of the door.
Serenity, for now.
But there was trouble, too, in this room, Jackson didn't know just what. Champ had struggled back to his beginnings; what comfort was there to be found in the cold flash of medals, the cant of sabers and big-bore guns? He lay burnt-out, frail, of unsound mind, forever dominated by the tragedy of a murdered man, easy prey for the bumptious spirit still shadowing the outer edge of his domain . . . It was a haunting truth, too close to the flashpoint of Jackson's own existence, the unthinkable crisis of his narrowed-down life; he had to breathe and be free a little while longer. Desperation drove Jackson from the house and to the stables, in search of Nhora's green and willing eyes.
He inquired at the stables; the Negro stableboy was not sure where she had gone. He gestured in a southwesterly direction. Jackson took off his coat and loosened his tie and got back into the scorching car. He pulled the brim of his Baku straw hat lower, tilting it against the sun-bounce off the car's hood, the brilliance of the sky.
All the roads were dirt, for the most part straight and pale through the knee-high cotton, through dusty green soybean fields. Trees appeared in oasislike clumps, their shade closely packed with somnolent cattle. He stopped at a cotton gin, but no one there had seen her. At a railroad siding he passed the private car in which he and Champ had completed their journey from Kansas City. Seeing it revived sensations rather than memories. The way behind him was laden with dust, impenetrable.
He drove fast and mindlessly, quartering the huge plantation, thinking only of the horse and rider, feeling the relentless pull of Nhora, erect and galloping, somewhere just beyond his reach. The car, needing only a robot's touch on brake or gas pedal, going slowly out of his control, an instrument of the destructiveness of time. Chutes and sloughs, low glitter of an oblong pond, willow trees, a spillway. The heat over all, shimmering. Then fallow ground, brush arbors, and, nearer the river, rise and fall of wooded ridges, limestone outcrops. Noon. Birds and shadowless pine trees, fencewire, the road dwindling to a muddy impasse. A gate. A sign.
DASHAROONS
PRIVATE HUNTING PRESERVE
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
Silence, as he left the car. Galaxies of insects, spinning nowhere, lifespan of a single day. He saw the roof lines of some low rustic buildings through a stand of oak and tulip poplar, and walked that way, stepping into a clearing dominated by massive stone barbecue pits, a taint of old feasting. The riderless stallion, suddenly aware of him, threw up its head in alarm and snorted. Lofty trees here, interlaced branches, a hothouse stillness, the sun falling in glimmers across the moss-covered, swaggy ground. Green, damp scent of humus rising with every step he took. The horse's saddle had been removed and thrown over the railing of a long porch. There were shutters over every window.
As he was about to call, Nhora came around the corner of the main lodge, limping a little as if she'd picked up a stone bruise in the thin leather riding boots she wore. Strands of hair were loose across her face. She was drinking from a tin cup as she walked.
She looked at him and stopped, clearly anxious, as if he wasn't recognizable at a distance of a hundred feet or more. Jackson humbly removed his hat. Leaves stirred, there was a change of light-play around her head simultaneous with the glow of recognition in her eyes, but Nhora hesitated a few moments longer, teeth on her lower lip as if she were nibbling at some minor traces of restraint.
Then she ran all the way to him and pitched thankfully into his arms.
Midafternoon.
Sun stealth on the glazed oak floor, the fabulous Persian carpets of the Boss-room, sun a hot tickle on the toes of Aunt Clary Gene as she sat softly drowsing, curled in a high-backed chair.
In the bed he stirred; from the first, wakeful change in his breathing he had Aunt Clary Gene's full attention. After several hearty yawns he moved to his right and noticed her.
"What are you doin' here, Aunt Clary Gene?"
He had caught her by surprise after all. She sat up straighter, one hand slowly rising to her heart as if she feared at long last its beat had been lost. She couldn't reply.
"What's the matter with you?" he said crossly. "Swallow your teeth? And what the hell time has it got to be?" He raised himself on one elbow, alert to the angle of the sun through the windows. "Godalmighty!" he yowled. "The whole day shot." He looked disgustedly at the mute old woman. "That's all right, don't bother to be civil to me in my own house. I sure do know how to spoil my niggers, don't I?" She started to rise from the chair, reacting automatically, eyes still full of wonder and fixed on his face. He made a stay-put gesture and said with a big, needling smile, "No, no, don't go to any trouble on my account; I'll just get up from here and pour my own coffee."
He sought to get out of bed then, but the shock of weakness drove him down, left him sprawled momentarily breathless and wide-eyed with apprehension. Then he began to laugh, a whiskey rumble.
"Looks like I had a little too much to drink last night. What was the occasion? I don't seem to remember a damn thing."
The door to the bedroom opened and Bull Pete, unnoticed by either of them, looked in.
"Just get me coffee; coffee, is that asking too much? I don't need a nursemaid, I'm just hung over. Maybe a little worse than normal." He closed his eyes and breathed heavily. Bull Pete shut the bedroom door. Aunt Clary Gene heard it click into place and swung her head quickly around. When she looked back he was scratching his scalp and yawning again.
"Aunt Clary Gene, after you've fetched the coffee, get the boys up here, will you?"
Her lips trembled. "They all gone now. Every last one. Gone."
That quieted him, and time went by. His eyes were open, looking straight up. The tone of the sun changed, the light of the room was inflamed. Aunt Clary Gene began to fret, as if she felt imperiled by, his blankness, by the unfilled space of his remorse.
The bedroom door opened again. Hackaliah came hesitantly in, frowning. Behind him, Bull Pete, breathless, trying not to look scared.
"Asked for the boys," Aunt Clary Gene said to Hackaliah, who stood with his hands clenched behind his back. Bull Pete, no good for this kind of thing, rattled the stem of his corncob pipe against his teeth. Hackaliah gave him a stern look, then shifted his attention back to the thin, ravaged young man on the bed. There was no movement, no sign that they had been observed.
"Boss?" Hackaliah said, bending forward, peering intently at his face.
He was answered by a long and agonizing sob.
There was room after dim room in the hunting lodge and sportsman's club, nothing fancy, just rough plank floors and bunk beds and exposed rafters. There was an odor of cold ashes, mustiness of trophy heads, tiny skittish noises of mice in the walls and kitchen stovepipes. The windows apparently had never been washed. T
he hard, thin blankets they had pulled from cedar-lined closets to nest in were clean, but smelled vaguely of the iron-filled water in which they had been washed. A torn sheet had saved their skins during prolonged lovemaking, one tumultuous orgasm after another. And still they couldn't bear to let each other go.
Sunlight fell in sharp squares on the floor near their feet, vanished, fell bright again, like the pictureless throw of a balky movie projector while, outside, clouds marched across the sun and they heard the sullen trumps of thunder.
Nhora's long body was a match for his as they lay head to head and neatly intertwined, her fingers in his hair; she gazed with curiosity and a trace of regret at the sluglike scars which she'd exposed, then smoothly, tenderly covered them over, a child planting a dead rabbit in clover. Jackson wished there was something he could do about the bruises on her neck. He had an arm around her, the other hand astride a softly cambered buttock. His wearied penis was still half-erect and snugged in tribute against her belly. The heat and balm of repeated couplings had ripened her, and although she'd been far from drab or unvital before, the act of love seemed to have brought Nhora awesomely to life. By contrast he felt overpowered, his resting heartbeat too faint and too cold. Not an uncommon complaint for someone his age, he thought wryly. Yet even as he loved her obsessively he wished for more profit, a shared potency, some of her tremulous, blazoned joy in the aftermath. Anything but this weakness, and nerves, and a low-pitched thrum of dismay.
Thunder again; she stirred, muscling uneasily against him as if preparing to pull away. Jackson smiled, reluctant to give an inch.
"Not yet."
"If there's lightning, Rowdy Boy will be frightened. I need to take him back. And besides—you know." She made a face of necessity. "My kidneys are about to float."
Nhora untangled them with lingering gentleness, stepped out of the bunk bed and crossed to the bathroom gingerly, on her toes, wary of picking up splinters from the floor.
Jackson rose and began to pull on his clothes, feeling the spell of the sensuous afternoon sadly broken. His fingers were stiff and rather cold, his heart pounded lugubriously.
