“Christ’s sake, man,” Garrison said. “Put them jugheads out of their misery.”
“Shut up, Red,” the Harlins guard said. He was already cocking his carbine and taking aim. He shot one of the mules in the head and the animal went into a greater frenzy of lunging and shrieking.
“Shit,” Harlins said.
If the guards back at the riverbend heard the gunfire they wouldn’t have thought anything of it—the gun bosses were always shooting snakes or crows or at turtles in the river or hawks flying overhead.
Harlins levered another round and shot the mule again and it jerked and bellowed and both of the animals were even more panicked now and thrashing with their broken legs like they were insane.
“Christ’s sake,” Garrison muttered with heavy disgust.
Then Ogg shot the mule and it fell still.
“About time,” Garrison said.
“I told you shut your damn mouth,” Harlins said. He shot the other mule and didn’t kill it either. The veins stood out on his forehead. Then he and Ogg fired at the same time and the mule slumped dead and the following silence was a relief.
“I guess we know whose bullet did the job,” Garrison said.
Harlins jabbed him in the face with the carbine butt and Garrison went backpedaling off the end of the wagon.
“Hey, man!” Yates said, and took a step toward Harlins.
Harlins chambered a round and leveled the carbine at him from the hip. Yates half-raised his hands and the rest of us hustled to the other side of the wagon.
“All right, Connie—all right now,” Ogg said to Harlins the way you’d talk to a growling dog. “You shut up that redhead good. Let’s see to the teamster now, all right?”
Harlins eased down the hammer of the carbine and said, “Asses off,” and we all got down from the wagon. Garrison was back on his feet and trying to stem the blood running from his broken nose. He glared at Harlins, who didn’t even look at him.
We scrabbled down the levee and checked Musial. He was still alive and still unconscious. But the wagon was lying at an angle that wouldn’t allow for using the mules and ropes to drag it off him from up on the road without crushing him under it. And even if we could get the mules down to the bank without either one breaking a leg, we weren’t sure they could make it back up the muddy slope again. There was nothing to do but unhitch the dead animals and try heaving together. But the wagon was so heavy and so fast in the mud that we could barely budge it, never mind lift it enough for Wakefield to pull Musial out from under.
“We could use you up here,” Garrison said to Wakefield. His voice had gone deeply nasal and his eyes were bloodshot and already showing dark rings. He licked at the blood still oozing from his swollen nose.
“Do it,” Ogg told Wakefield. “I’ll grab onto Musial.”
Wakefield set himself with the rest of us along the wagonside and Ogg handed his carbine to Harlins and squatted down and took hold of Musial under the arms.
“All right,” Garrison said. “Heave!”
This time we raised the thing a little but still not enough for Ogg to pull him out. Musial groaned without opening his eyes.
“One more man here and we might can do it,” Dupree said, giving Harlins a look.
“Come on, Connie,” Ogg said. “Lend a hand.”
“This is bullshit,” Harlins said. “We need more guys, what we need.” But he propped the two carbines against a large piece of driftwood a few yards away and joined us at the wagon.
He was setting himself and trying to find a proper handhold when Garrison bolted for the weapons.
Harlins started after him but Witliff tripped him down on all fours. Ogg jumped up and Yates tried to grab him but he jerked away and backstepped into me and I punched him hard in the kidney and he grunted and went to his knees.
There was a gunshot and a yowl and I spun around and saw Harlins curled on his side, crying and gripping his thigh with both hands, blood running between his fingers.
Garrison chambered another bullet and stepped over to him. Holding the carbine like a pistol, he put the muzzle up close to Harlins’ temple and said, “Shut me up now, cocksucker.” And shot him. A bright thin cord of blood arced from his head and fell away and that was that.
“Oh Jesus,” Ogg said. He was sitting back on his heels and holding his side, starting horrified at Harlins.
Garrison racked the lever and an empty shell flipped out. He smiled at Ogg and said, “You wanna see Jesus, convict? Off you go.”
The carbine cracked and Ogg flopped over backward with his legs in an awkward twist.
“Whooo!” Witliff said. He’d grabbed up the other carbine and was grinning like he’d hit a jackpot. Yates was all teeth too. But Wakefield looked scared and Dupree looked angry. Chano the Mex was off to the side, cutting his eyes from Garrison to Witliff. It was almost dark now and the rest of the camp would be coming back this way very soon.
“Well boys,” Garrison said, “it’s nothing but the noose for me now. But if a nigger could run this levee I can too. You all do what you want but I’m gone.”
He turned and started off at a trot and Witliff and Yates hastened after him.
Dupree looked from Wakefield to Chano to me. “No sir,” he said. “I seen many a one try it, me, and seen they all look like after. No, thank you.” He sat down crosslegged and stared off at the river.
I hustled past him, hearing Wakefield and Chano right behind me.
We got a great turn of luck before we’d been on the run an hour—a storm swept in, the kind you don’t usually see till later in the year, full of blasting thunder and snake-tongue lightning and a cold wind that shook the trees and slung the rain sideways to sting our faces and chill us to the balls, and it was in no rush to be done with. Not man nor dog could track us in that weather. We figured they wouldn’t even start the dogs till the rain quit coming down so hard, and we picked up our pace, trying for the biggest lead we could get before they set out after us.
We bore due south, away from the levee, skirting ponds and leaping ditches and vaulting over cattle fences, tearing through cane fields, slogging through swamp muck and splashing through water to our thighs, going by dead reckoning toward a point where the river curved back around to form the prison’s lower border. We ran in single file, Garrison in the lead, Witliff and Yates behind him, then me and Chano, with Wakefield bringing up the rear. Nobody spoke as we went—we couldn’t spare the breath. The only sounds were our ragged panting and our feet sucking through the mud. Every once in a while I’d look back and see Wakefield’s shadowy form falling farther behind.
Then it got so dark we couldn’t see each other anymore except in the intermittent flashes of lightning. When the lightning finally played out and the thunder faded, the only way I could follow Yates was by the sound of him. Wakefield had fallen so far back I couldn’t hear him.
Now and then Garrison brought us to a halt to listen for the dogs and check our bearings by feeling the bark of the trees for the moss on the north side. Each time we stoppd, Wakefield would almost catch up to us, but then we’d be off and running again, and again he’d drop behind.
Sometimes Garrison or Whitliff would slip in the mud or trip on a root, and those of us coming behind would run up on him, everybody stumbling and cursing and pushing off each other and then running again, straining through the blackness like blind men, trying to sense the hole underfoot before we stepped into it, the tree branch hanging low before we hit it with our head. Yates was wheezing hard now and had slowed down so much I kept running into him, so I finally just went around him. Chano stayed right behind me.
The rain kept falling and the wind stayed in our favor, strong and at our backs. I ran in a kind of trance, unaware of anything much beyond the feel of the ground under me and a steady burning in my throat. We came onto the levee so unexpectedly I couldn’t believe we were there. We sprawled on the slope on our backs and let the rain run down our faces into our mouths. Garrison reckoned we�
��d been on the run at least eight hours. Witliff said it felt like all his life.
Wakefield was no longer with us. When we’d stopped to check our heading a couple of hours earlier, he hadn’t caught up, but we’d heard him splashing in the muck way behind us. Then the last time we’d stopped we hadn’t heard him at all.
The rain had slackened to hardly more than a drizzle and the clouds had thinned out and showed the vague gray hue of the coming dawn. The air was thick and smelled of mud. Judging by the lay of the levee, we reckoned we’d come a lot more to southwestward than due south. It was a wonder we hadn’t missed the levee altogether and ended up in the heart of the swamp. On the other hand, we figured we were already a good four or five miles below Angola’s southern perimeter.
“I tell you, fellers,” Garrison said, “I never did believe God loved me, but I guess that blessed storm was His way of letting me know I was wrong. By sunup tomorrow we’ll be in Red Stick City and trying to make up our minds which whorehouse to visit first.”
I couldn’t help chuckling with the others. Then Chano touched my sleeve and I looked at him and he put a finger to his ear.
For a moment I didn’t know what he meant. And then I heard it. We all did.
Dogs.
Baying in the distance and heading our way.
We ran and ran along the snaking levee, dark river on our left and black swamp to our right. The dogs were louder but still a good ways behind. You could hear that it was more than one pack. Other camps had likely joined in the hunt. About an hour after we first heard the dogs, there were three or four quick gunshots, and after a moment, a last one. I figured that was it for Wakefield.
The eastern sky was looking like smeared copper when Chano made a high sound to get my attention and I looked back and saw that Yates was down. The way he was spread-eagled facedown in the mud it was obvious he was finished. We ran on. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the hounds’ cries went higher and I knew they had him.
We ran and we ran. The sun was above the treetops now and the river was shining the color of rum. We’d gained some distance on the pack when it stopped to deal with Yates, but then the dogs had started coming again and now they sounded no more than a mile behind us.
We went around a long bend in the levee and then Garrison stopped running and leaned over with his carbine across his thighs, huffing like a bellows. Witliff squatted beside him and braced himself on his carbine like he’d run out of sap too.
“Can’t keep up,” Garrison gasped, and motioned for me and Chano to go on. So we did. A minute later Chano looked back and his face went tight and I turned and saw Garrison and Witliff running off the levee and into the swamp.
I snapped to the trick right off—they meant to use us for dog bait. I’d heard about it from Buck. If a man running from the dogs suddenly cut in a different direction, the pack would usually run past the spot where he turned—sometimes fifty yards or more—before they realized they’d lost the trail and turned back around to find it again. The trick was to start running with some other guys and then cut away from them, let them be the bait to keep leading the dogs on. But there were counters to every trick, Buck said, and he’d taught me one in case anybody ever tried to make me the dog bait.
The pack was louder now but still hadn’t come in view around the bend. I beckoned Chano and we ran down the slope and into the trees. It was no trouble to follow their trail over that soft ground, our feet growing large and heavy with mud as we wove through the shadowy pines and cypress, cutting our hands and face on scrub brush and branches, ripping our skunk suits. We hadn’t gone fifty yards when we stumbled onto a blackwater creek, and we dropped on our bellies and lapped at it like dogs. There were no footprints on the other bank, which meant that Garrison and Witliff were running in the creek.
We hustled after them, keeping to the bank to leave an easy trail. But my trick wouldn’t be worth a damn if they didn’t get out of the water pretty soon and start laying down a track of their own. Twenty yards farther on, they did. Where the creek turned off into the deeper swamp, their new tracks angled out and held on a bearing parallel to the levee. We kept after them, right on top of those footprints.
The pack was now so loud I expected to feel teeth in my ass any second. Then I realized the yelping was coming from my left—they had already overshot the spot where we came down the levee. And then the dogs realized it too and their timbre changed and fell away as they started backtracking. Their cries rose again when they recovered the scent, and they came yowling down the slope.
By then we’d caught sight of Garrison and Witliff. They were thirty yards ahead, slapping aside the brush with the barrels of their carbines as they went. They hadn’t seen us, and we slowed down and moved deeper into the shadows in case they looked back. Garrison kept glancing in the direction of the levee. He must’ve been puzzled by the changing direction of the yapping of the dogs. He had expected to hear them catch us on the levee. That would’ve been the end of any scent for the hounds to follow up there. The hunting party might’ve searched around a little more after that, but they likely would’ve reckoned that the two cons still on the loose had headed into the swamp and would die there and good riddance. Once the party turned back, Garrison and Witliff could’ve cut back up to the levee and pushed on for Baton Rouge.
A neat plan, but I had a neater one—if it worked. The dogs sounded like they were no more than fifty yards behind us. I pointed to a spot up ahead where the ground to our left gave way into the shallow water of a cypress stand. Chano nodded, his eyes enormous. We jumped off the trail and into the shallows and went highstepping and scrabbling into the thick tangles of roots and then hunkered down in the water to our chins. My heart was lunging up into my throat.
They went by not fifteen yards from us—a dark crazed pack of howling beasts. A minute later their cries went even higher and there was a carbine report and then another and a dog was shrieking in pain and then the men’s agonized screams were mingling with the dogs’ wild snarlings. Then the hunting party went hustling by, a dozen men or more with longarms, huffing and cursing and laughing, saying they had the sumbitches, by God.
As soon as they were past us we were up and splashing through the trees and stumbling over roots and the only screaming we heard now was of the wounded dog. There came several gunshots and then only the high baying of the pack and the whooping of the hunters.
When we reached the edge of the swamp and caught sight of the levee we got down on our bellies in the shadowy muckwater to rest and wait for darkness. We stank so high it was a wonder the dogs didn’t smell us from wherever they were—a wonder the men couldn’t smell us. It was the first clear day in nearly two weeks and a pretty one, sunlight showing gently through the dense branches overhead, the sky beyond the trees cloudless and pale blue. I told myself to stay alert, be sharp, it wasn’t over yet, and then fell asleep, though I didn’t know it until I woke to the faint barking of dogs.
Less than a hundred yards north of us the hunting party was back on the levee. The sun was past its meridian. Chano was sleeping on his folded arms, his chin in the water, and I shook him awake and pointed. The dogs were on leashes now, milling and yapping, and the dogboys were loading them onto the wagons. The manhunters carried their rifles slung on their shoulders and were passing bottles around and smoking and their distant laughter rose and fell and then rose again. A pair of convicts in stripes emerged from the trees and started up the slope, carrying a body between them, and then two more cons came behind them with the other one. The bodies looked like they might be naked but I couldn’t be sure from that distance, and I couldn’t tell which was Garrison and which Witliff. I likely would’ve had a hard time telling them apart up close.
Even after they all left we stayed put. We took turns sleeping and keeping watch, listening hard for any searchers that might still be prowling the area. We drank from the water we lay in, waiting for dusk. And when at last the sun was down we got moving.
We kept a
fast pace, sometimes jogging, mostly fast-walking. The weather helped to keep us stepping lively—the night was cold enough to show our breath, and our ragged skunk suits weren’t much help against the chill. But at least there wasn’t any wind. Now and then we went down the levee to drink from the river. I’d heard it said that drinking from the Mississippi was like drinking a mix of piss and mud but I didn’t see how the river could be any worse than the swampwater we’d been drinking. I was anyway too tired to care. Every time I lay down to drink, it took a greater effort to get back on my feet. Every muscle ached and my joints felt like they’d rusted. The last couple of times we drank, Chano had to help me back up the levee. I had height and weight on the little bastard but not toughness.
The sky was crammed with stars. The moon rose late and cast the landscape in an eerie sepia glow and deep black shadows. Shortly before dawn the swamp began to give way to pastureland and rail fences and we spied a light about a quarter-mile off the levee and decided to see if we could find something to eat there. We went down the slope and into the pines and soon came to a clearing marked by a narrow road that passed through a scattering of ramshackle houses, some of them no more than tarpaper shacks. Several of them were now showing lamplight at their windows and it wouldn’t be long before the whole hamlet was awake.
A dog started barking somewhere down the road, and then two others, a little closer by. We stood fast in the darkness under a tree, waiting to see if they’d come for us or if somebody would step outside to see what was nettling them. I wondered if Chano was thinking what I was—if he was remembering the talk at Camp M about how people who lived near the levee prayed every day for the chance to shoot a runaway convict and collect the state reward. But the dogs must’ve been penned or not very brave and we didn’t see anybody come out for a look.
The nearest house looked to be one of the better ones, with a front porch and a tin roof, its side window dimly glowing in the shadow of a live oak, its chimney churning bright white smoke in the moonlight. We caught the aroma of something cooking and I went light in the head. Chano nudged me and I nodded and we snuck up to the window in a crouch and stood to one side of it with our backs to the wall. The windowsill was shoulder-high, the sash raised a few inches and letting out that wonderful smell. I sidled over and looked inside.
A World of Thieves Page 7
