The Murderer Vine

by Shepard Rifkin

  “Nope. Nossuh!”

  I took out a five and laid it on the coffin. He was impassive. I took out another. His eyebrows lifted a little. People in Southern towns didn’t go around spreading money this easily. One more. His tongue came out and touched his lips and then went back in again. One more. That was almost a week’s pay on the local wage scale. That was a lot of money for a little effort and not too much risk. He began to warm up. He looked quickly over his shoulder.

  And one more.

  His hand scooped them up decisively.

  “I’s gonna get a screwdriver,” he whispered. “Now anyone come you say you was gonna kill me effen I din’t do what you say.”

  “Okay.”

  He disappeared and came back with a long screwdriver with an amber plastic handle. The screws were in tight. It took both hands and a lot of little grunts and shoulder muscle before he could start one. It began to turn with a little squeal. “Phewie,” he whispered, “they puts ’em in with one of them ’lectric things. Zoom!”

  I held the screws as he took them out.

  I wondered what the hell I was doing there. The old man was dead. What was the difference how he had died? Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Word might reach the sheriff I was fooling around with things which were not exactly what a Canadian speech expert should be doing. And if the sheriff heard, so would A.B.C.

  I was guilty of doing something which no professional should ever do. I was becoming personally involved; I was breaking a very good rule. I had kept to it damn carefully as far as Kirby was concerned.

  It would be smart for me to stay away from Old Man Mose now that he was dead. But I was beginning to hate these people; I wanted to know exactly what they had done to him. I would take a good look and put the data away in the J. Dunne filing cabinet, next to the drawer labeled “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

  You can call it childish.

  I wouldn’t have done it the first few days down in Okalusa. But there was something about that Southern way of handling dissenters I was beginning to get angry about. And it didn’t matter too much now what I did; I was getting real close to earning my money. I could go ahead and take the chance. Even if A.B.C. heard about it later and whistled up his bloodhounds, I was sure I could lead them up a shallow riverbed or two and then split across a rocky surface and be long-gone Joe by the time they caught on.

  He took out the last screw. He put down the screwdriver and lifted the faceplate.

  I squeezed the handful of screws.

  Mose had been badly beaten.

  Mea maxima culpa.

  “Put it back.”

  He picked up the screwdriver. “Mistuh, you never saw nothin’.”

  “Right.”

  To whom do I apologize?

  “What I mean is, you might git talkin’ someday, an’ if you ever talks about this, I am cooked. I am daid. You gonna bite yo’ lips fo’ me?”

  My palm was wet. I turned it over and looked at it. I had forced a couple of the threads into the skin. I wiped it with a handkerchief and promised to bite my lips.

  “I ’preciate that.” He walked to the door and held the clapper of the little bell. When I walked out, not a sound came from it.

  The counterman had his head pillowed in his arms. No one was in the streets. A slight chill had come in the air and even the bugs that had been bumping into the globes of the streetlights had gone. It was a slow night in Okalusa.

  I opened the door of the car and a voice said behind my ear, “Good morning, Mr. Wilson.”

  Not many people say good morning before they slug you. Although I felt like leaping up and switching ends like a bronco, that thought deterred me. I said very calmly, “Good morning to you,” before I turned around to see who the pussy-footing bastard was.

  Naturally it was Mr. Funeral Parlor.

  Any funeral parlor director, I was beginning to feel, could give points to an Apache when it came to approaching nervous people. Or people who might feel guilty about something. Like me.

  “There’s something about Mose that attracts you enormously,” he said.

  “The relationship of Southern Negro vowels to the Herefordshire dialect,” I said.

  “Yes. You taped him. You visited his house this afternoon. You came here later. You found him so interesting you came again.”

  “Looking for souvenirs.”

  “Looking for souvenirs, as you say. I hear you found a couple.”

  “I was hoping that some of his juju might have survived the fire.”

  “You’d like a pocketful of conjure things?”

  “I’d like a souvenir of Old Man Mose. I admired him.”

  “I hear you found a couple.”

  “They were all burned, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Glass doesn’t burn.”

  I was leaning back against the car and he surprised me with that one.

  “I kicked around a couple chunks, yes.”

  “Shards.”

  “Congratulations on your vocabulary.”

  “Shards is a good word. And now you’re here for the second time.”

  “I insist on paying my last respects.”

  “No doubt. But somehow that’s not the kind of behavior I associate with a Ph.D. candidate.”

  “We vary in our personal qualities.”

  “Did you see anything interesting when you took off the faceplate?”

  “What faceplate?”

  He looked at me.

  “I only came in once, during the afternoon. I stood with head bowed, in respect for a very old man who had told me some old stories in order to help me for my doctoral dissertation, and then I left, period.”

  “Period. So if the issue should ever arise, say, in conversation with law-enforcement officers, or even in a court somewhere, will it still be period?”

  I was getting annoyed.

  “Look here, Morgan. I came about four this afternoon. I stood by the unopened coffin a minute or so with my hat in my hand. Then I left.”

  “Name, rank, and serial number.”

  “It’ll have to hold you.”

  “And you never talked to my night custodian.”

  “Oh, come off it.”

  “You feel contemptuous. How would you like some cracker to come racing by at four A.M. with a half inch steel ball bearing in a rubber slingshot and let go at your twelve-by-eight plate-glass window with gold-leaf lettering? I can’t get window insurance. Or walk out and find all your hearse tires slashed? Or be handled the way they handled Mose?”

  “I suppose I’d hate it. And now, if you’ll excuse me — ”

  He backed off enough for me to get in. He took the door handle and closed the door by pushing it gently shut and then releasing the door handle. If I had been ten feet away, I don’t think I would have heard it.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, under my breath.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he repeated. “You try running a good business where the law, the tax structure, the newspapers and most of the rural whites and a great deal of the city ones are lined up solidly against you. You just try it. Try it just a week. And then let’s talk about it.”

  I should have gone to his house, sat over a couple drinks for a few hours, and entered deeply into the question of black-white relationships. He was all primed for it and it would have been very interesting and I would have learned a lot. We might have hammered out some constructive solutions and we would have parted with a lot of mutual respect.

  But I wasn’t down in Okalusa to develop my sociological imagination. Or whatever they were calling it these days.

  I was very sleepy and I had to figure out how to get some incriminating statements from several people who had casually added arson to their list of achievements.

  An immature choice, perhaps. But I was stuck with it.

  37

  Kirby stopped the car at the river. I had everything ready in the trunk. She never had known about the machine gun. I had taken it out of the spare tire the night befo
re and assembled it without her seeing me. Coming out, I had stripped in the car down to swim trunks and a pair of sneakers. I pulled my things out of the trunk, closed the trunk lid quietly, waved goodbye, and slid down the bank with my props for the evening performance.

  Anyone in the bait shack might have heard the car stop. But since it started again in ten seconds, it was nothing to get excited about. Even if you lived in a small Southern town.

  I unrolled an air mattress I had bought on my trip to New York. I could have bought it in Okalusa and saved carrying it down on the flight, but it might have attracted some attention.

  The mattress was made of strong rubberized nylon. It wouldn’t tear on a snag of a sunken cypress stump or even on a sharp, broken branch we might drift over.

  Twenty deep, long breaths filled the mattress. My chest ached. I wasn’t in such good condition as I thought.

  I couldn’t see the river. The moon was behind a heavy, cloudy sky. If I looked down, I could see a black mass moving slowly to my right. I guessed it was shifting at about half the speed of a normal walking pace, about a mile and a half an hour.

  About thirty yards away was another black mass — the trees of the opposite shore.

  I set the recorder in the dead center of the mattress. It sank a bit in the middle but still rode high.

  I picked up the machine gun. I had wrapped it in a small piece of canvas so that Kirby would have no idea what it was. I unwrapped it and screwed on the big black silencer. It was about the size of a quart bottle of beer. I clipped on a full drum of cartridges. I took out a rubber contraceptive from the little pocket of my swim trunks and covered the muzzle with it in case it would be dumped into the water. It was an old trick I had picked up in Korea.

  I put a thick, absorbent towel on top of the gun. I was ready. I waded into the river up to my knees. The bottom felt soft and muddy. I went above my ankles in the mud and I felt it oozing into my sneakers. The water was cool. I pulled the mattress from the bank into the water. As soon as it was free of the shore, the current began to tug at it like a dog pulling at a bone. I pushed it out into the river till the water reached my shoulders. Then I kicked off from the bottom. It was a pleasure to kick free from the bottom mud.

  The mattress began to float downstream. The night was hot. It pressed down like a thick wool blanket. From the swamp on each side came the deep bellow of bullfrogs and the gloink-gloink of the smaller frogs. The same kind that I had hung up for my personal juju. I smiled when I thought of old Ryerson’s face when he came upon it. The croaking of the bullfrogs sounded as if someone were plunking at a giant cello.

  Somewhere downstream a fish jumped and splashed back into the water. Fish don’t jump for the sheer joy of living, the way colts will race around a pasture. They jump because bigger fish are after them. The alligator is not a fish, but it eats fish. It eats moccasin eggs too, which made me feel a slight affection for it, but the thought made my feet feel very vulnerable. I suppressed a strong wish to hurl myself on the mattress. But if I did, there wouldn’t be any assurance that the recorder would remain dry. And if the recorder didn’t work perfectly tonight, I might as well pack up and go home.

  Mosquitoes whined out of the swamp and settled on my sweating face and neck. I settled down to two hours of drifting, punctuated with irritated mutters and slaps.

  Something slid off the bank to my left and went into the black water with a loud splash. I didn’t want to hang around and find out what caused it. I gave several strong scissor kicks and the mattress picked up speed. Whatever it was, if it was used to the water, it could swim rings around me if it really wanted to, I took the chance that it might not be too interested in me. At least, not enough to follow me.

  A minute later I felt a smooth, round object slide along my thigh and grab at my trunks. I thrashed wildly to one side and kicked as hard as I could. The result was a stubbed toe and a ripped pair of trunks.

  I had gone over a submerged cypress knee with a broken stub sticking out of one side. My sneakers saved my big toe from a bad bruise when I kicked out. I felt my heart throbbing away like an engine racing out of control.

  We city boys panic easily in the country. It would have been simpler if Kirby had driven me close to the Catfish Club. But we might have been spotted by some member driving to the club. Or she might have been recognized on her way back to the main road. Too risky.

  I kicked for another five minutes. That wasn’t smart. I gained a little time. But the later I got there, the better. More of them would be there and they’d be more liquored up. What I was trying to do was understandable but stupid: to get out of that black water as quickly as possible.

  As soon as I realized what I was doing, I stopped kicking. I was ashamed of myself. That kind of panic activity was the way you lost. Panic action was what got you dead in Korea, and it could do the same down in Mississippi. I had always had pretty good control of myself, but this was the first time I was after five people, any one of whom would have shot me without a second’s hesitation if he knew what I was up to. It was true that the North Koreans and the Chinese would have done that too, but then I had a lot of friends around me who would have helped, and a war is where the more people you kill, the easier it is to get a medal hung on you.

  My mind was getting stupid.

  What did I mean by thinking, “if he knew what I was up to”? A tape recorder and a machine gun and drifting down on their Catfish Club? What would he think I was up to — looking for bait?

  The thing to do was to play it cool, just drift. Detach the mind and send that adrift. Another forty-five minutes and I would be at the club, ready for a night of fun and games. Just don’t think about the swamp, Dunne. Think about dozing off under a coconut tree somewhere on the Honduras coast. And some girl in a loose white blouse is bending over you with a tall glass filled with cracked ice and gold rum and lime juice.

  But the image wouldn’t stick. It kept dissolving and all I saw was masses of thick-bodied moccasins coiled up all along the river’s edge. I tried to remember whether moccasins were night-hunters. It was either rattlers or moccasins who hunted at night. And this was a hell of a time to forget who did what. I hoped to God it was rattlers. That would leave the day to the moccasins, if that were the case, and I wished them Godspeed with their sunlit pursuit of frogs.

  I carefully placed the idea of alligators somewhere in a back room of my mind. I thought I had succeeded, but the door suddenly opened and I could just see the way the water curled around the eye ridge. I could hear Brady idly chatting as we stood on the patio holding drinks and sipping before Kirby correctly decided that he and I should become public enemies.

  He said, “Now next time you get to a zoo, take a good look at an alligator. They’re as well adapted for livin’ in the water as these Southern politicians are for survivin’ in Democratic Party primaries.

  “You might say both species have it made.

  “The alligator has a heavy eyelid. Look and you’ll see a ridge around it. This ridge makes the water curl off around his eyes so he can really get up speed when he’s on the surface, and it works so good that he can make time and not blind himself. Now look at that inner lid. That’s for underwater precision work. That inner lid slides sidewards. He can see through it, because it corrects for underwater refraction of light so he can strike accurately underwater. Any civil rights worker coming into a little Southern town is like a swimmer decidin’ to take a healthy invigoratin’ little swim in a swamp filled with hungry alligators. Neither one of them is goin’ to have much of a chance.”

  “Brady, you son of a bitch,” I muttered. I hated his vivid phrases. I got some sort of shame-faced satisfaction from knocking out his teeth.

  Then I got thinking how much it would cost the poor guy for three artificial teeth and bridgework. I once had two teeth knocked from my upper right jaw by a gun barrel in some nighttime discussion. It cost five hundred seventy-five bucks. Probably front teeth were more of a problem. Maybe eight hundre
d? I would send Brady that and a brief note of apology.

  This kind of rambling kept my mind off the river. I decided to go on with it. How could I send Brady the money? It had better be postmarked Toronto.

  But how could I send a letter from Toronto if I were going in exactly the opposite direction? I could enclose eight one-hundred-dollar bills in an envelope and a note, wrapping it well so that the bastard couldn’t hold it up to the light and see what was in it, the bastard being my friend Moran up in Toronto, with a request that he mail the letter to Okalusa.

  But he would probably steam it open to see what he could learn that might be useful or profitable. Goodbye, eight hundred smackers.

  No. Moran was out.

  It would be better to send the envelope to the postmaster at Toronto with an International Reply Coupon and a note saying that I collected postmarks, and that I would be grateful if he would cash in the IRC for a pretty Canadian stamp and mail it to me.

  “Me” would be Brady, of course.

  Yes. That would work out fine. I would — a slimy tendril from a water-edge plant wrapped itself around my leg. I almost whipped myself onto the mattress to escape. And to hell with the recorder.

  I had just about enough of these encounters. I had seen men break down and cry in Korea when they had had too much. One or two more little encounters like that lousy little weed and I would drop the whole thing.

  Except that for half a million bucks I would plunge my naked arm into a bushel full of moccasins. With reasonable assurance that I would survive, of course.

  These little mental exercises to take my mind off night-hunters and inner eyelids for underwater precision work were not working too well. And it wasn’t doing much good to think of tall glasses packed with crushed ice fed to me by an amiable mestiza while I swung back and forth in a hammock. The hammock would be made of nylon and not out of sisal. Sisal scratches. There would be a double jigger of rum in the glass and a teaspoon of sugar. The juice of a lime would have been squeezed by the strong hands of the lady, and she would hold the glass up to the sky and let me watch the pale green lime juice trickling every which way through the fissures of the cracked ice.