They coursed through the blackness, passing in the morning fog a I ghost town, its rickety houses moss-grown and semi fallen "What happened there?"
"Oh, dey got through Indians and plague and flood okay, but then some dogs, wild dogs, tore up some kids there. Kilt three. Little girls, I think, caught ' in the open, kilt ' fast, bled ' out. The people just gave it up after that. The swamp, she be a cruel bad place."
Sam looked away, trying to banish the horror of the idea of it from his mind. The girls, the dogs, the screams, the smell of blood. He shook his head.
"Yah! Ha! Ain't no picnic out here, no siree. You ain't where you from, not by no long shot."
At last the swamp seemed to diminish its grip on the earth. The gnarled trees, the jungly vines and dinosaur vegetation gave way to longleaf pines arrayed over ridges of land, saw grass and other green clutter, all leading to bleak shores. The river widened, deepened, turned ever blacker, grew swifter.
Then it split. It broke into two forks, one headed east, the other west.
Neither looked promising: highways of dark river, the texture no longer smooth as oil or glass but now ever so slightly giving evidence of disturbance, as if strong currents lurked beneath, hungry to pull a man to his death.
"You hang on now, Mister, she can be rough," the old man cried, as he steered the weathered craft to the right ward of the two torrents, and took them dead up the center.
They progressed steadily against a current that suggested they try elsewhere. The piney woods sealed them off from any evidence of life except the pines themselves, low, heavy with gum and tar of some sort.
They were turpentine trees, bled in the fall for the chemical that oozed out of them. The weather remained malignant, even as the sun burned the last of the fog away, and if pines had ever reminded Sam of Northern glades as in Wisconsin or Minnesota, these were not such pines. They seemed to form two walls and a long, winding corridor, a madman's dream of nothingness, while above the sun scalded them and no wind dared stir.
Sam glanced at his watch, feeling the itch of sweat and bites all over his skin. He even thought about loosening his tie, but he'd fought the Battle of the Bulge in a tie, so that was really only the last thing one did before accepting death.
It was by now nearly 11:00 a.m. "How much further?"
"Be patient, Mister. You cannot rush the river. The current's agin' us, she don't want us going there. Be glad you gots planks beneath to keep your bottom from what's under, yes sir."
And so it went, seemingly endless, until at last, unbidden, as if out of a dream, Thebes revealed itself on a far shore.
He wondered: Am I in Africa?
For what he beheld was something out of a dream of a lost place, a place so benighted and run-down it seemed to have no right to exist in the country he knew to be America. Not even the meanest Negro shanty towns of Arkansas seemed so raw and sad. It was a collection of slatternly dogtrot cabins, tar-paper roofs scorching in the hot sun, low, rotting warehouses off to a side by docks, mud streets that were too congealed to sustain wheels of any sort, much less automobiles. The ruins of what must have been a sawmill stood isolated a bit farther down the river, most walls gone, nothing but decaying frame and un turning wheel left.
It seemed somehow to have devolved, to have gone backward in time.
"She ain't much. Why you want to come all this way for this place, I don't know. Merde. Do you know? Merde, shit you say in English. It's shit. A town of shit. Who could live in such a place?"
As the old man's boat maneuvered toward dockage, Sam thought the place was as abandoned as the last town, where the wild dogs had killed the little girls. But at the same time, he felt the presence of eyes.
A boat was so rare, he assumed, it would be remarkable to such a place.
Every eye would be upon him, and indeed he felt every eye upon him, but again he saw no evidence of life.
Lazear got in close, set the course, and stilled the engine.
"You get up front," he commanded, and Sam did what he was told. There, on the bobbing prow, he found a coil of rope. When the boat glanced off the dock, he leaped, pulling on the rope, tightening boat to dock, then looping it to a post set aslant in the water. He glanced back, saw that the old man had gone aft to secure the stern by similar method.
He walked back.
"I don't know how long this will take. You stay here. You stay out of bars or whorehouses or whatever temptations they have here. I have business; if it seems to run long, I'll notify you somehow. You do not leave without me. Do you understand?"
"Oh, yah, I stay forever. I got nothing to do but stay till the lawyer man gits his money."
"Get me my briefcase."
Lazear found it, the one pristine object aboard, and handed it over.
Sam straightened and tightened his tie, pulled his coat to cure it of wrinkles, made sure his hat was set straight, and went to work. was it only a town of children? Little Negro scamps tracked him from behind the first line of buildings. He could not see them, but he heard them scurrying in the mud, and several times, drawn by flashes of movement, glanced over, but his look drove them back. And if he advanced on them, they scattered.
Otherwise the town was seemingly deserted. There was no commerce, nor any sidewalk. A few storefronts were abandoned. Mostly the places were cabins, many to his eye as abandoned as the storefronts. Yet still he had a queasy feeling, a sense again of being looked at, inspected. It brought a shiver of discomfort.
As he climbed the slope from the river, he at last came upon an adult woman. Her eyes were big, her face a ruin. She was swaddled in a dress of many layers and colors, all pulled into one tapestry; her hair was bandannaed tightly to her skull, and she had no teeth at all. She was a Negro mama, a formidable figure in the Negro community, Sam knew.
And she didn't seem insane, but regarded him with only sullen dull hatred.
"Madam, excuse me, I am looking for a county seat, a municipal building, the sheriff's department? You could possibly direct me?"
She responded in a gibberish alien to his ears. Was she still African?
Had she not been Americanized?
"Madam, I do not understand. Could you speak more slowly?"
He picked out a word or two of English in her mewl, but she grew frustrated with the stupidity on his face, and shooed him away with a dismissive, abrupt gesture, then gathered herself with dignity, pulled her shawl tight about her, and strutted away.
But she stopped and turned, then pointed down an alley.
She said something that he deciphered to mean: down that way.
He walked down it, the mud sucking at his shoes. Here and there a door slammed shut, a window closed, people not seen clearly hastened away.
He felt as if he were the plague, Mr. Death himself, with a scythe, be hooded a pale slice of darkness, and all human things fled his presence.
Then he came to it, or what had been it.
Fire had claimed it. A blackened stone wall still stood, but the timbers were all scorched and collapsed, and rogue bricks lay about in the weeds of what had once been a public square. No pane of glass remained in the ruin, once upon a time some kind of courthouse building after the proud fashion of the South, with offices and departments and lockups and a garage or stable out back. Scavengers had picked it clean, and moss or other forms of vegetation had begun to claim it for their own.
So this was why there was no "official" Thebes County, why no letters were answered. It had burned, and perhaps with that the will that claims civilization out of nothingness was somehow finally and permanently broken.
Now what? he wondered.
It's all gone? It burned, most everybody left town, and only a few hopeless cases remain. Those that do must eke out a living somehow from the prison farm yet another mile or so upriver.
He walked on, not out of purpose but more in the hopes of encountering an inspiration. Then, progressing a bit farther, he noticed a low, rude shack whose door was open, and from w
hose chimney pipe issued a trail of smoke, thin and white.
Batting at a fly that suddenly buzzed close to his face, he leaned in to discover something of a public house, though a rude caricature of it. It was empty but for an old man at the bar and an old man behind the bar.
No array of liquor stood behind the bartender, only a motley collection of dusty glasses. Beer signs from the twenties dustily festooned the dim room, and dead neon curled on the wall, which could be decoded, with effort, into the names of the commercial brews of many decades past.
"Say there," said Sam, "I need some help. Can you direct me?"
"Ain't nowheres be directin', suh," said the bartender.
"Well, I'll be the judge of that. Can you guide me to what succeeded the town hall? Surely there's still some authority around. Possibly the registrar's office, the tax collector. Or a police or sheriff's station.
This is the county seat, isn't it?"
"Used to be. Not much here no more. Can't help none. You g'wan, git back to that boat. Ain't nuffin here you want to know about."
"Surely there are sheriff's deputies." "Dey fine you iffn dey want," said the other. "Best pray they don't want you."
"Well, isn't this the limit?" said Sam to nobody.
"It all burned down ' fo' years back, Mister. Everybody done left."
"I saw it. So now there's nothing?"
"Only the Farm."
"The Prison Farm, yes. I suppose I shall have to go there."
"Don't nobody go there but gots to go there, suh. In chains. Thems only ones. You don't want to go there. You best be on ' your business."
"Then let me ask you this," he said, and went on about Lincoln Tilson, the retired Negro whose fate he had come down to locate. But as he spoke, he began to sense that his two coconversationalists were growing extremely unhappy. They squirmed as if in minor but persistent pain, and their eyes popped about nervously, as if scanning for interlopers.
"Don't know nuffin' ' dat," said the one.
"Not a damn thing," chimed in the other.
"So the name means nothing to you?"
"No suh."
"All right. Wish I could thank you for your help, but you've not been any at all. Don't you respect white people down here?"
"Suh, jus' tryin' to git by."
"Yes, I see."
He turned and left, and began the long trek back to the boat. He knew now he had to go to the prison, where surely what records remained were kept, if they were kept at all. It seemed out of another century: the possibility that a man like Lincoln Tilson, a man of accomplishment and property, even by these standards some prosperity, could just disappear off the face of the earth, leaving no trace of paper, no police report, no death certificate, no witnesses, no anything. That was not how you did it.
Sam's mind was clearly arranged. He appreciated order above all things, for order was the beginning of all things. Without elemental order there was nothing; it wasn't a civilization unless undergirded by a system of laws and records, of taxes and tabulations. This down here: it was not right. He felt some fundamental law was being flouted before his very eyes.
He rounded the corner and began to head down the slope to the river.
That's when he saw the dock, yet several hundred yards before him, and realized that Lazear was gone.
Goddamn the man!
But of course: this whole journey was a fiasco from the start, and how could he have trusted an old coot like Lazear? You'd as soon trust a snake in the grass.
He walked down, hoping that perhaps Lazear had taken the craft out into the deep water for some technical reason or other. But no: the boat, the old man, both were gone. Nothing stirred, nothing moved, behind him the ghost town in the mud, before him the empty river, and nothing around for hundreds of square miles but wilderness and swamp.
Sam was not the panicky sort. He simply grew grumpier and more obdurate in the face of adversity. He turned, convinced that he should find the first adult he saw and demand explanations. But to his surprise, almost as if awaiting him, the old mama lady stood nearby.
How had she approached without his hearing? Was she magical?
Don't be a ridiculous fool, he thought. This isn't mumbo jumbo voodoo hoodoo, it was the blasted, backwater South, up some sewer of a river, where folks had degraded out of loss of contact with an outside world.
He was in no danger. Negroes did not attack white people, so he would be all right.
"Madam, I have in my pocket a crisp ten-dollar bill. Would that be sufficient for a night's lodging and a simple meal? Unless there's a hotel, and I suspect there's not a hotel within a thousand square miles."
He held the bill out; she snatched it.
He followed her. the house was no different from any other, only a bit farther into the woods. It was another dogtrot cabin, low, dusty, decrepit and tar paper roofed like the others. A few scrawny pigs grunted and shat in a pen in the front yard, and a mangy dog lay on the porch, or what passed for porch, but was just floorboards under some overhanging warped roof.
The dog growled.
She kicked it.
"Goddamn dog!"
Off it ran, squealing. It clearly wasn't her dog, only a dog she allowed to share space with her, and when feeling generous rewarded it for its companionship with a bone or something.
"Ou' back. You go where de chickens be."
"Why, thank you," he said, wasting a smile on her, a pointless exercise because she had no empathy in her for him, and was only interested in minimally earning that ten spot.
He walked ' back, and there was a low coop, wired off from the rest of the yard, and a few chickens bobbed back and forth as they walked onward.
"Home, sweet home," he said to nobody except his own ironic sense of humor, then ducked into the place. All the rooms were occupied, and the innkeeper, an orange rooster, raised a ruckus, but Sam, sensing himself to be the superior creature, stamped his foot hard, and gobble-gobbled as he did for his youngest children at Thanksgiving and the bull bird flustered noisily off in a cloud of indignant feathers and squawks.
Sam took the best bedroom, that being a corner where the straw looked cleanest and driest, and sat himself down.
Dark was falling.
He wanted, before the light was gone, to write out an account of his day for his employer. He filled his Schaeffer from a little Scripp bottle in his briefcase. Then he set to work on his trusty yellow legal pad, soon losing contact with the real world.
He didn't hear her when she entered.
Ilk, "Here," she finally said. "Sompin' eat."
"What? Oh, yes, of course."
It was a foil pie plate, her finest china, filled with steaming white beans in some sort of gravy, and a chunk of pan bread. She had a cup of hot coffee with it and utensils that turned out to be clean and shiny.
"Thank you, madam," he said. "You keep a fine homestead." "Ain't my home," she said. "Used to be. Ain't no more."
"It isn't your home?"
"It be the Store's."
"The Store?"
"The Farm Store. Onliest store dese parts. Da store own everything."
"Oh, you must be mistaken. If the Store is part of the state government, it can't loan funds against property, calculate interest, and foreclose, not without court hearings and court-appointed attorneys. There are laws to prevent such things."
"Da Store be the law here. Dat's all. You eat up them beans. Tomorrow you go about your bid ness I could git in trouble wif dem. Dey don't like no outsiders. You won't say I told you nuffin?"
"Of course not."
After that, she had nothing left to say, and he scraped the last of the beans off the plate. She took it, and left silently. He saw her heading back to her cabin, stooped and hunched, broken with woe.
Lord, I cannot wait to put this place behind me.
He made his plans. He'd clean up tomorrow as best he could given the circumstances, then go to the Store or the office of the Farm, where all power seemed concent
rated. He would get to the bottom of this or know why.
Once he'd taken off his shoes and his hat and at last his tie, and folded his jacket into a little package that would do for a pillow, it didn't take long for him to fall asleep. For all its scratchiness, the straw was warm and dry. His roommates cooed quietly on their nests, and even the rooster seemed at last to accept him; it realized he was no threat when it came to fertilizing the hens.
He slept easily; he was, after all, near exhaustion. The dreams he had were dead literal, without that kind of logic-free surrealism that fills most sleepers' minds. In Sam's dreams, the world made the same sense it made in reality; the same laws, from gravity to probate, still obtained; reason trumped emotion and the steady, inexorable fairness of the system proved out in the end, as it always did. Sometimes he wished he had a livelier subconscious, but there was nothing that could be done with such a defect.
He was not dreaming when they woke him. He was in dark, black nothingness; the light in his eyes had the quality of pain and confusion. He sat up, bolt awake, aware of shapes, the smell of horses, the sense of movement all ' him.
Three flashlights had him nailed.
"Say, what on earth is―" he began to bluster, but before he could get it out, somebody hit him with a wooden billy club across the shoulder.
The pain was fearsome, and he bent double, his spirit initially shattered by it. His hand flew to the welt.
"Jesus!" he screamed.
"Git him, boys."
"Goddamn, don't let him squirm away."
"Luther, if he fights, whop him agin!"
"You want another goddamn taste, Mister? By God, I will skull you next goddamn time."
They were on him. He felt himself pinned, turned, then cuffed.
"That's it. Bring him out now."
He was dragged out. There were three deputies, husky boys, used to using muscle against flesh, who shoved him along, their lights beaming in his face, blinding him. The cuffs enraged him. He had never been handcuffed in his life.
"What in God's name do you think you're doing! I am an attorney at-law, for God's sake, you have no right at all to―"
Another blow lit up his other arm and he stumbled to the earth in the agony of it.
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