Then she noticed they were no longer alone.
"Sam, there's a man from Mars over there."
Indeed, the Martian lumbered over to them. He was some sort of giant robot, stiffly encumbered in armor, his body a bulk of pure iron, his face an iron mask with a tiny viewing hole. He wore immense mittens of steel braid.
"Say, what part of Mars are you from?" Connie asked.
The Martian shucked off his huge mittens and removed his mask and revealed himself to be merely "Sergeant Rutledge, U. S. Army, ma'am," and in seconds everybody else was in there, including police officers, the heroic Harry Debaugh, a medical technician and two more partially disrobed bomb guys, pulling a huge metal box on wheels behind them.
"Look at all these party crashers," said Connie.
But Sam was thinking: damn, damn, damn, another second and I could have kissed her. earl looked at the telegram and wished it hadn't come. It sat, as yet unopened, on the table on the porch. It actually had arrived yesterday, and Earl could not bring himself to open it. It could only be from Sam.
Sam had promised him he'd tell him man-to-man if he'd decided against the plan. Maybe Sam couldn't come, so Sam had sent a telegram.
Earl imagined it said, At midnight, unless I hear from you, I will inform state police. Regards.
Sam, really, was not a man of war. Sam was a civilian. He thought like a civilian, he reacted like a civilian, he had a civilian's fears and doubts. Earl was a soldier. Earl killed people. That was a difference in the way the two minds worked that Earl could not bridge.
He should never have told Sam. He should never have come back.!" He should have done it on his own.
Earl sat on the porch of the farmhouse in Florida. He could see the empty barn, the rolling fields, and the long dirt road and in the distance the forest cut with palmetto plants, and above it all a blaze of sun.
There was nothing to do but wait; the boys would begin to show up tomorrow or the next day, and dark of the moon was but four days off.
To make himself useful, he was working with the.38–44 high i velocity cartridges, taking each one from its nest of fifty, and with an awl drilling a hole in the center of the semiwadcutter bullet, so that the bullet would rupture when it went through flesh, on the principle of the dumdum bullet. Illegal to do so in battle, but battle was a different phenomenon. This was a holy war, where the odds would be seven against Thebes. So it was allowed.
Earl worked steadily, trying to keep his mind clear, trying not to worry. He went over his own private operational plan, trying mentally to take it apart, to see it afresh, to figure on the unintended consequence. He knew that the confidence that he had thought of everything was the true sign of danger.
Then he saw the car.
It was a long way off. It pulled up the road, yanking a screen of dust behind it. Under the newspaper next to him on the table was a Colt357
Trooper, loaded with the dumdums. Earl could get at it fast, but hoped he didn't have to.
But soon enough it was recognizable, and Earl put aside his thoughts of the gun. It was the Cadillac limousine that Mr. Trugood seemed to travel the country in.
Earl sat back, still dumdumming cartridges, until the car arrived, and a fellow popped out obsequiously to spring the door for the august Mr.
Trugood.
Earl stood and beheld. The man was resplendent in cream linen, with a blue shirt and a yellow tie and a nice straw Panama, with a yellow band to match the tie.
"Hello, sir," said Earl, rising.
"Mr. Earl. You don't seem happy to see me."
"Come on up and get yourself out of that heat."
The man came up, following Earl into the squalid living room. He looked about with distaste.
"It's certainly not elegant, is it? Well, that's what sixty dollars a month rents these days."
"These boys won't even notice. They'll be too busy buzzing among themselves about cartridges and gun actions."
"Earl, you're still not happy that I'm here."
"Sir, I don't want no one down here to see you and identify you. If this thing goes wrong, I want to be the only man with the whole picture. I don't want it coming back at you."
"Yes, and you also don't want a rich fellow in a fancy car suddenly getting all the natives excited in this backwash, wouldn't that be equally true?"
"It would."
"Well, we traveled back roads, and after Montgomery I have not been out of the vehicle. Fair enough?"
"Yes, sir. Since you are paying, you are always welcome."
"Earl, I've come about the plan."
"Yes, sir?"
"Earl, I have to say this. I think there's a mistake."
"Since you're paying all the bills, Mr. Trugood, then if you think I there's a mistake, I'll listen hard to it and try and get it fixed."
"Excellent."
"I've been butting against it myself. I'm trying to see it fresh.
Maybe, you've seen something I ain't yet."
"It's not the plan, not really. It's the bigger picture."
Earl squinted. What was this bird up to?
"Sir?"
"You're a Marine. You make your attack, you move on. That's it, right?"
It was so true Earl simply nodded.
"Yes. Well, what about them?" said Davis Trugood.
"Them?"
"The Negroes. When you're done, you'll have two-hundred-odd convicts and thirty-five odd townspeople stuck upriver miles from civilization.
You've drowned the prison under twenty feet of black water. What happens to those folks, Earl?" Earl thought it over a bit. Finally, he said, "You have a point. But in the war if we'd thought of that stuff, then we'd never have made the first invasion. We'd still be in our boats off Guadalcanal."
"Of course. I understand that. That is how you think. That is fine.
I accept that. Only it cannot stand as is."
"What are you saying?"
"I will do that part."
Earl squinted.
"I don't think that's so good an idea, Mr. Trugood. You yourself said you're best behind a desk. Now suddenly you want to be up there where there's lead flying all over the place and things can get messy. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and I guarantee you that'll happen.
Some of these boys may catch one, and I may even catch one. I don't want you catching one. You didn't sign up for that kind of work."
"Believe me, sergeant, I am no hero. I will do nothing heroic. I have no intention of going in harm's way. I'll retreat happily to my desk and wait for a call from you telling me all's well. But I must get a craft up there, something big enough to take all who want to escape away in the morning."
"If you take a craft up there, you will tip off the boys at Thebes exactly what we've got cooking in our little pot. So there would be no point in going. So why go at all? You can't have it two ways. You go in hard and trust what comes will be better, or you don't go in. That I know."
"Seemingly immutable, isn't it?"
"It is." "So I thought it out. I thought it out, and I came up with something. You've heard of the Trojan Horse?"
It touched something in Earl from long ago. Couldn't quite get it straight, but sure enough he had it filed away for future usage back there among the point of impact of a.30–06 with a quarter value wind drift and the proper way to regulate the rate of fire on the gas pipe under a Browning Automatic Rifle barrel.
"Some old thing. Some big wooden horse, raiders was inside. The boys in the city, they thought it was a gift. Now me, I'd have burned it right there on the plain. That's how a sergeant thinks. But them boys brought it in, and that night the raiders slipped out and started slitting throats."
"That's it exactly."
"I don't think you're going to have a horse built, though."
"No, sir. Not at all."
"What will you build then?"
"I've worked this out neatly. It'll be a barge full of prefabricated housing materials. To build a church. A minister is
starting up a flock for the lost Negroes of the swamp. Now the boys won't like that, but they won't quite know what to do. What they don't know is that anyone will see that the beams and the steeples and the roofing triangles can be quickly assembled into rafts. That way, there's an escape."
Earl considered. He didn't like it. But then, he wasn't paying for it, so in a sense it didn't matter what he didn't like.
"You sound so set I can't see much point in trying to talk you out of it. I have to tell you, in the morning, my boys ain't going to be hanging around to help folks put rafts together out of church parts.
Our plan stays the same. We hit hard and burn the place and shoot any and all armed men. We free the prisoners, we blow the levee, and we're out of here at first light. My men ain't the kind to be helping old ladies get aboard rafts. You understand that?"
"Totally. It is time the Negro race learned to fend for itself. Surely Someone among them will grasp the possibility. I'll simply have the barge towed upriver, moored, and the boatman will leave. I'm simply providing an opportunity. It helps me sleep the night."
"Then if it don't have nothing to do with my people, you will do what you have to do."
"Good, Earl. You understand that."
"I do."
"So I will be off. I have to get to Pascagoula, set all this up. That is all."
Earl didn't like it a bit. Any little thing out of the norm would send the Thebes boys out scurrying. All they had to do was put more men on night patrol, erect the smallest little fortifications, set up flare patterns or wire, and the whole thing got shaky. "You go ahead then."
"Earl, I have to say one thing. I'm very proud of what we're doing.
It's the right thing. I'm so glad you found men who would fight for this cause."
"Sir, you put that out of your mind. These boys ain't fighting for no cause at all. Most of ' don't care much for the Negroes, if they thought about it a bit, which I doubt they done. They're doing it because it's their nature. They're gunmen. Some have been in it, some haven't, but they've all got to go to the dark valley one time or one more time and see what kind of fellows they are. That's all they care about. They ain't no Holy Rollers. They're bitter, tough old birds, and if you make ' into something they ain't, you will be powerfully disappointed."
"I expect all righteous armies are like that."
"Wouldn't know about that, sir. To me, armies are just men doing what they think is right and proper, for whatever reason."
"So be it."
He shook Earl's hand, and walked off. Earl went back to the porch and watched him go away. Finally, it was time.
He opened up the telegram from Sam, held it in his hand for a second before unfolding it.
Hope you're with me, Mr. Sam. Lord, I hope you're with me. It said:
UP 73. STOP. CORRECT FOR WIND 15 RIGHT. STOP. FIRE FOR EFFECT. STOP.
SAM.
Earl smiled. For whatever reason, Sam had come around. That meant but one thing: blow them off the face of the earth. Dark of the moon, Earl thought, I will do just that.
FINALLY'Moon.
Of course, Moon.
Who but Moon?
Moon was given up by Charles who was given up by Noah who was given up by Vonzell who was given up by Roosevelt who was given up by Titus who was given up by Raymond who was given up by George Washington Carver who was given up by Orpheus who was I given up by Three Finger.
"You must be prepared for Moon, Sergeant Bigboy," the warden counseled.
Yes, Moon was different than the rest, and Moon demanded special consideration, so Bigboy had gone to the world's greatest authority on the male Negro miscreant, classification, behavior, psychology and complexity: the warden, who knew everything about them.
"Moon is a monster, and he is a hero," the warden lectured. "Moon is all the nobility of the Negro race, its courage, its endurance, its cleverness, its strength, its physicality. Yet he is also all its flaws, its seething, never vanquished anger, its innocence about the complex, its inability to concentrate on one goal, its refusal to put today's small pleasures aside for next year's bigger payoff, its ready will to violence of no point, its omnivorous sexual hunger above all else, its insane refusal to consider consequences. Moon is all these things and more." "Yes, sir," said Bigboy, awed as always at the man's wisdom.
"You've seen the records," said the warden. "Moon has been a pimp, a gambler, a boxer, a confidence man. He has beaten men to death for money, and he ran a string of high yellers in Jackson. He has had money.
He has drunken wine and bubbly champagne. He has won immense amounts betting on the ponies. He has had fine clothes, an automobile, an army of gofers and factotums. He has raped, pillaged, burned, pirated, done evil by violence, cut men to death with knives. And all before he was twenty-two, at which point he shot and killed a Negro gangster named Jelly Belly Long, but the bullet traveled through Jelly Belly and struck a white child named Rufus, who had been down in the dark part of town with his holy-rolling mother, preaching the word to the fallen Negroes of Jackson's bitterest streets. Nobody cared about Jelly Belly; but the death of Rufus just barely avoided getting Moon lynched or tarred and feathered, and only because the judge was a noted radical did he allow for Moon's lack of intent toward the boy Rufus, and so put Moon away for life plus two hundred and made him, shortly, by the natural order of things, the new king of Parchman Farms. There he killed three guards, five convicts, escaped twice, once for six months, and that at last had him removed to Thebes and the Ape House."
"Yes, I had heard the stories, sir."
"So if you take Moon, you must take him hard and well. You must tell him at the start who his master is, and strip him of hope, which is the root of courage."
"Yes, sir. But if I get him before the whip, I will break him."
"I know you will, son."
So, at last, Moon.
Taking him down was hard. The guards went in during the dead of night with twice the usual detail. They beat him in his bunk while others with shotguns held his boys off. Bleeding, chained and dazed, he was dragged to the black vehicle and taken to the Whipping House.
Twice he awakened and mutinied, breaking a man's jaw, caving in three ribs of another before he was subdued by another blizzard of blows. But his rebelliousness only put off the inevitable, and the inevitable had at last arrived. He was alone with Bigboy.
Moon was chained to the post, and it was early in the morning with a gray dawn beginning to edge its way into the day. Candles had burned low.
"I expect you'll fight me pretty hard, Moon," said Bigboy, who had stripped to his skin so that his muscles, every bit as sculpted and magnificent as Moon's, gleamed.
"You can't bust me, boss," said Moon. "Ain't got no bust in me. Yo' arm goin' tire afore I sing yo' song."
"Now Moon, if I remember, it's been a time since you tasted the lash."
"Ain't never tasted no whippin', boss."
"Of course not. Then, why now? And to what point? This would be so easy.
You tell me who whispered to you the magic words ' horse; coming." Then you sit back, have a nice Pepsi-Cola, and I'll find that boy. I will have a talk with him. Then I will know what I am charged to D know and it will be all fine here at the Farm."
"Ain't tellin' you nuffin', boss man. You think you can beat it out of Moon, you go ahead. Moon done been beat before."
"But Moon, not by a whip man. I am a whip man. I can do things with a whip that will amaze you." Bigboy thought of the massive muscle-ripple expanse of Moon's ' back as his new canvas. He would need all his strength. He would be pressed to the maximum, forced to find new creativities of torture.
"Let's try this for a start," said Bigboy. "Tell me what you think."
He unfurled the whip, gave it a crack like a gunshot as its tip broke the sound barrier, then unleashed five fast snaps like darts at five nerve points on Moon's broad back.
Moon jacked hard at each bite, for at the nerves the man is most vulnerable, and pain rocketed t
o his brain.
"How was that, Moon? Help me here? Was it much?"
"My of' daddy done hit me harder than that, boss."
"Tell me, Moon, did he hit harder than this?" the Whipping House filled the air with screams that night, and the night after and the night after. It was an epic battle, if a bit one sided The whip man punished, the convict endured. On and on it went, the agonized screams floating like an unholy vapor, seeming to hang in all the air and casting upon it all a pall. Evil things were being done; everybody knew it.
At the Store, the black women of Thebes were especially surly. They could smell the blood floating in the heavy jungle air. They stood in their line with their tickets to get their pound of bacon, their five pounds of flour, their pound of coffee, and no one said a word.
Usually, this was the best part of the week, for it was release from the muddy, grueling sameness of Thebes, the despair, the fear of men in the night with dogs. But no more. The women languished, silent, untouchable.
Admitted, they did their business and left, for the long walk back through the piney woods. They never looked back; they traveled alone, and swiftly.
But perhaps the ordeal was hardest of all on Fish. Not that you would have noticed. Fish went about his ways, merrier, it seemed, than ever.
He stopped in the kitchen house for the day's supply of lunches for the field hands, filled up his water can, and then rode about the fields with his wagon and his two mules, jingling wherever he went, bringing palaver, a note of cheer, a desperate hunger to entertain.
Nobody was in a mood to be entertained. Too many had gone in the night, screamed their nights away, and never returned. The guards were testy too, for they too had known something was up, that the pale horse was said to be coming, that their empire, so stable, so beautifully constructed, so munificent, was possibly in jeopardy. This led to an outbreak of twitchy-finger-itis, a disease that primarily afflicts men with guns in charge of men without them, where every shadow is seen to be a threat, every comment a promise of violence to come. Three men were shot, one fatally, over behaviors that in other circumstances would have been dismissed with a laugh, or at most with a smack or two upside the head.
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