Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “It’s hard times,” she said.

  “What you mean, Granny?”

  “The baby’s sick.” She looked down into its eyes. “Did you bring any food? Did you bring money for food?”

  His cheeks grew hot. He’d spent the two dollars Tooch had given him on Annie.

  “I ain’t got any money,” he admitted.

  “You have a good time with that whore?”

  He looked up, surprised. Ashamed. Then he looked off at the familiar trees—which ones hadn’t he climbed? The dog nosed his thigh and he petted her head absently, unable to look up at the old woman. He felt he didn’t know anything, that in the world he’d killed himself into there were no certainties, nothing you could count on. He was a thoughtless rotten thing.

  She jiggled the baby. Its arm rose from the blanket and poked at her nose.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said, gazing into the dog’s eyes, his reflection looking back out at him, upside down and as tiny as the face on a coin.

  “Macky Burke,” she said, “it’s past this baby’s feeding time. I’ve got to tend to him.”

  “This is important.”

  “So is feeding a baby.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You go on back to the store. If you ever come back you bring something.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He turned to go, his eyes burning, his throat tight like he was being choked from the inside. As he walked, the dog trotting alongside him, he felt certain the widow would call for him to stop, that he would turn and hurry back and they’d look in each other’s eyes and her face would warm to a forgiving smile.

  The weather had turned, the week’s worth of rain finally blown south, and the temperature had dropped slowly and steadily all day, settling now before dusk in the midthirties. Along the high ridges to the west a line of dead live oaks stood bare and black like splintered bones against the sunset, the bottom of the sky streaked with dark, red-edged clouds.

  Last up the incline behind Lev and William, Mack noticed a fox squirrel on a high limb, how it rippled its tail and scratched itself with a hind leg, doglike, then, seeing them, vanished. He paused with his shotgun cradled in the crook of his left arm and blew into his cupped hands and rubbed some heat back into them. Swallowed more air into his dry throat and blinked at the old landscape made new, snugged his hat brim lower over his eyes and followed the others, cresting the ridge. Except for wind feathering through the higher branches this was a silent earth, the leaves underfoot slick and plastered to his shoes. He scraped the sole of one against a flat rock and then the other, his breath smoking in the blueing dark that seemed to edge down from the clouds and up from the ground, trapping a bleak red line of horizon in the middle, the eye of the world shutting.

  He caught up with William and Lev where they’d stopped at the bottom of the next hollow, beside a pool of floating leaves. William knelt, resting his gun butt on the ground, and touched a track the shape of a flower.

  “Y’all Burkes can shoot bobcats tomorrow,” Lev growled. He fished around in the pockets of his loose-fitting knit pants and came out empty-handed. “Got some chew?”

  William reached his fingers inside his jacket and found a plug of tobacco. He handed it over.

  Lev produced the knife he’d taken from Joe Anderson and cut himself a large mouthful and stuffed it into his cheek. He worked his tongue slowly, folding the knife blade away, settling his gaze on Mack.

  William got the tobacco back from Lev and bit himself a chunk and tossed Mack the rest. He took what was left, balled it up, and pushed it into his jaw with his thumb. It unfurled against the wall of his teeth and burned pleasantly.

  “Remember what to do, boy?” Lev asked.

  Mack nodded, not looking at him.

  “Dammit. Tell me.”

  His breath misting, Mack repeated his part of the raid again, how he was to go silently upwind, around the McCorquodale house, hide, cover the back door, and give the signal when ready. Once the shooting began in the front, he was to drop any man who came out. He was not to shoot a white woman or child.

  “When I hear y’all’s call,” he concluded, “I’m to hightail it to the creek behind Tooch’s.”

  “You mess up, boy,” Lev said, “and I’m the one you’ll be answering to. Not God nor your big brother nor even Tooch’ll be able to keep me off you. Understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  William leaned and spat into the pool. “He’ll be fine, Lev. This knucklehead’s a born killer.”

  Lev exhaled and unhooked a cloth bag from his belt. He loosened the drawstrings and dipped two fingers in and started to smear ashes on his cheeks. Mack and William took some, too, dabbing at themselves, faces, throats, backs of hands. Normally William wore a hood, and Mack had been curious to try his out, too, but Lev said when he captained a raid those in his command did as he did.

  When they’d finished, Lev closed the bag and they surveyed one another, pointing at a speck of white on a nose, an ear. William turned Mack so his neck under his hairline could be touched up. Lev grunted in approval and spat, then shrugged and with his sleeve rubbed dry the double barrels of his Remington. He snapped it open for the third time in half an hour and fingered the red-colored loads, his knuckles black against the metal, then closed the shotgun quietly and rested it in the bend of his arm. He pulled the long Colt pistol from where he wore it concealed behind his back and ejected the cylinder one-handed and spun it with his thumb. The quick, minute clicking seemed loud and wrong in this fog-shrouded hollow. He had six bullets chambered, no slot left empty for safety. Satisfied, he replaced the revolver and watched William break open his new Parker twelve-gauge and Mack their dead father’s sixteen.

  Then they went on.

  Single file, down another ridge and up the other side, the terrain softening to shadow as darkness leached what variations of gray remained, tree, ridge, and sky joined by tether of night, the two silent silhouettes in front of Mack swaying and bobbing like some movable, detached element of the landscape, a primitive force jarred into motion by aeons of erosion, or gravity, or the rising waters of a flood, yet a deliberate thing, too, a part of the earth but apart as well, as if a river, or falling rock, could form malice.

  The creek at West Bend was swollen from all the rain, its old clay banks gone and loose new ones formed, as though the trees had taken a step back, giving these woods a quality Mack didn’t trust. Lev went up and down along the water’s edge, stomping his feet and muttering. At places the old creek had been easy to cross, get a good running start and leap. Now it was either wade through the fast chest-high water or find another crossing point. Lev, who wasn’t fond of water since a childhood near-drowning incident, headed upstream, William trailing him and Mack trailing William.

  On and on like that for too long. The water fast-moving and full of nasty-looking bubbles and dead leaves, turning in the current, sticks going past, the creek black in the near dusk, its bottom hidden.

  Soon, as Mack followed the two men around a bend, a horizontal tree unmurked in the dusk, smoothly cut and perfectly felled over the water by some industrious creek-crosser, a good-size green loblolly pine, bowed a tad but no stobs to mar your passage, the rough bark good for traction, just a dozen quick steps over to the far side.

  Lev paused, stroked his chin with his blackened fingers.

  William stopped beside him. “I hereby declare this the Lev James Natural Bridge,” he said, tapping it with the barrel of his gun.

  The big man cocked his head and studied the tree. “Naw,” he said. “We’ll keep on alooking. One of us tumps over and falls in our disguises’ll get rurned.”

  “We should of wore hoods,” William said.

  “Hell with your hood,” Lev said. “Let’s go on find some other way over.”

  “There ain’t no time, Lev,” William said. He leaned his shotgun against his shoulder like a soldier. “We got to get on, got to cross. We gone be late as it is.”

&n
bsp; “Goddamn weather,” Lev mumbled, glaring at the ever-darker sky through the triangles and trapezoids the limbs made.

  With no idea why he did it, Mack ambled past William and stepped gamely onto the tree. Arms out for balance, he tightroped across and soon regarded the blackened versions of his brother and Lev James from the north bank of the creek. Then, with a flourish, William was halfway over the tree, tottering a little, regaining his balance, taking the black hand Mack offered, and gaining land.

  Now both faced Lev, in the deepening night already harder to see, tilting his broad head and eyeing the log like a man might a cottonmouth.

  “Come on, Lev,” William called, pointing west with his gun. “We got to skedaddle.”

  “No way in devil’s hell,” Lev growled, looking upstream and down, even glancing into the air overhead as if he might scale a tree and swing across on a vine. He took off his hat and the white bald spot shone pale as the moon.

  “Old McCorquodale ain’t gone wait,” William called. “Maybe me and Macky ought to go on do the job and meet you back here.”

  “The hell,” Lev said. He replaced his hat. Took a deep breath, as if he meant to duck underwater, and felt for the log with his foot like a blind man. Then pulled the foot back and seemed to be reconsidering. Mack’s mind flashed other instances of airborne Lev James, sailing out of a skiff, off a bluff, headfirst from a hayloft. What bone other than his neck hadn’t he broke?

  William elbowed Mack in the ribs, as if to say, You know he’s gone fall, and I know he’s gone fall, and he knows he’s gone fall. It’s just a matter of not laughing when he does.

  Mack glanced downstream, and when he looked back Lev was testing the log. He glowered over as if he might shoot them both, then came forward in an apelike crouch, clutching his shotgun. Mack remembered the peddler Lev had killed, the man facedown in his grave, dirt over his neck, hands, torso. Lev took a step. Good so far. Another. He still hadn’t breathed.

  Then it happened. His left foot came down askew and skidded a little, and when he fell he fell quickly, a mirror image of every other fall he’d taken in a lifetime of cruel gravity, a serene surrender, perhaps the only grace allowed him, to plunge without fighting his own awry existence, his arms and legs unflailing, body relaxed, his lips pinched shut in an angry line and his white narrow eyes watching for the laughter Mack and William didn’t dare show.

  He went under and immediately came up, holding his hat in place, standing in water to his chest. The shotgun was dry, and, impressed, Mack realized it had never gone under. Lev began to struggle against the current, and the brothers reached to pull him out. Mack nearly laughed when, at last ashore, Lev shook like a dog, his blackened makeup running down his throat and onto his blue shirt collar. He unholstered his Colt and water leaked from its sides.

  “Slipped,” he muttered.

  Straight-faced, William handed him a cloth. Lev snatched it and thrust his shotgun at Mack, cursing, wiping the ash from his eyes, leaving white smudges down his cheeks. From the kerchief he fashioned a bandit’s mask and tied it behind his head. Took his gun back and lurched off, and soon the three were making good time through the slick gray beards of Spanish moss.

  William glanced back once, eyes shaded by his hat, his face barely perceptible but reassuring, then looked forward again, moving smoothly, the rounded shape of his shoulders and neck and his slightly pigeon-toed walk familiar as he climbed the hill, careful not to pull a vine or brush a limb for fear of setting off the water each tree held. In his brother’s movements Mack saw shadows of himself, recalling the afternoon in a Coffeeville dry goods store when he’d seen his profile revealed by the reflection of one mirror in another, the two hung at a precise angle on different walls. This disconcerted him, not only seeing his vaguely unfamiliar half-face for the first time, but the idea of the arranged reflections: that a person might be so consumed with appearance as to need not one mirror but two. In the widow’s cabin, half a mirror stood propped on a narrow shelf over the wash pail. Growing up, Mack had seldom viewed himself. What need was there? What could a boy see in his own eyes that would surprise him?

  He spat and wiped the back of his hand over his dry lips. They’d left the woods behind now, were crossing a field of tall wet dead cornstalks, walking bent, staying out of sight of the distant road or the edge of the woods, Mack holding his shotgun low, keeping the round eye of its barrel dry. And then downhill, cover of woods again. Level ground soon enough and their backs straight. Fewer trees in this better acreage, their own community behind. The sky darker still, stars for the first time in days. A barbed-wire fence that Lev held apart for the brothers, then squeezed through as William spread it for him. Lev gave them a look—“Come on, you sons-a-bitches,” he said from under the mask—before they crossed a muddy logging trail, William stepping in Lev’s tracks and Mack in William’s—into an orchard of loblolly pines. Soft brown needles underfoot. Nailed near the bases of the trees were wooden boxes for collection of resin, one of McCorquodale’s side businesses. The pines, their bark gashed, bled sap slowly. On Mondays he sent a couple of Negroes to empty them.

  Not Monday next: Lev stopped at the first box. He looked up the length of the tree as if to take revenge on its cousin that had bucked him into the creek. Seeing the box nearly full, he circled the loblolly and raised his foot, kicked the box to pieces and watched the thick resin ooze into the brown wet straw, nothing left but two nails curling out of the tree. He veered to the next pine and did the same, then the next and down the line, missing now and again and nearly falling twice and falling flat out once but back on his feet right away and kicking, his boot gumming up, bark and wood chips and nails sticking to the sole and the boot growing larger and Lev beginning to limp, dragging nearly a clubfoot to the next tree, sweating white lines in his forehead, as if he intended to smash every box. Mack looked at his brother, concerned about the noise, but William seemed blessed with a calm most people would never own. Still, there was a job to do and finally even he had had enough. He went up to Lev and grabbed his shoulder.

  “Let’s get on,” William said, peering into Lev’s eyes. Then he turned and walked in the direction of McCorquodale’s.

  After a moment Mack followed, giving Lev a wide berth as he scraped at his boot with a stick.

  By the time Mack was out of the orchard Lev had passed him, muttering. He overtook William in time for the three to huddle together, the stink of resin enough to gag over. Lev’s forehead was striped, like war paint. His reddening eyes fixed on Mack, voice muffled.

  “Okay, boy,” he said. “Remember. Aim for the gut. Don’t try to be no marksman with a head shot.” He poked him in the belly. “The gut, god damn it.”

  “Gut,” Mack said in a breathless voice, and William gave him a nod and squeezed his shoulder. Then Mack was off through the trees at a trot, quiet as dusk.

  It took nearly half an hour to work into position behind the house, going quietly and downwind to keep from alerting McCorquodale’s dog, and by the time he’d settled in behind the soft wet tendrils of a weeping willow fifty feet from the back door it was dark. He could outline the shape of the two-story house by its well-lit downstairs windows and the ceiling, a shade darker than the sky. Kneeling, he propped the shotgun across his knees and pulled back its hammer, heard the tiny, delicate spring of metal as it caught. The smell of smoke passed on the air, some kind of cooking meat, too. He’d never been inside this house, never would, probably. They said it had indoor plumbing. Lead-lined water tanks in the attic and a rain catcher on the roof. In the parlor a piano. Mack imagined the piano playing its rolling notes, a sound he’d heard only twice in his life, both times when they’d gone to the church in town. He cocked his head. A figure passed in one of the windows, a girl’s shape, hair tied in a bun. She passed again, carrying something. McCorquodale had four daughters and a son, Carlos, who’d never spoken to him. Fancy children with no use for country folk.

  He looked up at the sky through the trees and the sm
oky haze of the chimney. Suddenly he knew it had been too long. Shit. He cupped his hands and did his owl, but the call was too shrill. If any man in the house was of a careful or suspicious mind he would have paused halfway to his mouth, other hand reaching for a pistol.

  Mack waited, listening.

  Nothing.

  After a moment, from the woods beyond the house, William’s owl hooted back.

  Mack waited, heart slamming in his chest. Leaned and let tobacco spit drop from his bottom lip without taking his eyes from the window. Shifted positions, putting one knee to the wet ground and using the other as a prop for his elbow, aiming the shotgun at the back door. Blackened as he was and covered in the willow, he tried to calm himself by imagining that he blended into the night, relaxing into his invisibility, at the wood end of a gun and invincible, sprayer of lead-fire, messenger of death. When the girl’s shape appeared again to turn up the lamp’s flame, he settled on her with the squat bead at the end of the sixteen-gauge’s barrel. His finger touched the trigger, testing its exquisite resistance. I am the angel. His left eye closed.

  Lesser angel, the one sent to guard the back.

  From the front of the house the dog began to yap. McCorquodale’s fabled watchhound. Mack remembered her from his few trips to Coffeeville, how she’d stand when they approached the store, her hackles up, and growl. People said she went each day with McCorquodale to his store, trotting alongside his horse, obedient, trained. Waiting outside all day under shade of the porch, chin on her paws, then going back home with him after dark.

  Now there came a man’s voice: “Who the hell is that?”

  Now a woman’s.

  When the shotgun blast answered it felt too close and Mack nearly pulled his own trigger. He closed his left eye and bit his bottom lip and aimed at the door. Clamped his teeth together to quiet them. Don’t nobody come out now. Nobody better not come out here.

  No one did. No one did.

  The dog was barking. A woman was screaming, girls screaming, too.

  A door slammed.