Half of Paradise (21 page)

“I thought I was doing right and I done wrong,” Brother Samuel said.

“You didn’t do nothing wrong,” Toussaint said. “If they get shot it’s their bad luck. You didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

“I went back on my promise to the Lord and had dealings with the Black Man. I should have knowed better. Billy Jo and Jeffry is going to pay for what I done.”

He took the wood disk and its leather cord from around his neck and held it in his hand. The letters on it were cut deeply in the wood. He wound the cord tightly around the disk.

“What are you doing?” LeBlanc said.

“I’m giving up my powers.” He threw the disk across the clearing into the canal. It splashed into the water and floated along in the current. He took the snake fang and turtle foot from his pocket. He jabbed the fang into the shriveled foot and threw it against the opposite bank. It hit and rolled into the ditch.

“You mean you ain’t got no more powers now?” Daddy Claxton said.

“I done renounced,” Brother Samuel said.

“Just throwing them things away and you can’t heal no more?”

“I done it too late. Jeffry and Billy Jo is going to stand before judgment today.”

“They can take care of theirself. They ain’t old and wore down,” Claxton said.

“They’ll go before the Lord with the evil spirit clinging to their souls, and the Lord will look down at them and turn His face away. He’ll point His finger at them and lightning will strike from His hand and the spirit will drag them down to the shade.”

An hour passed. The rain lessened and then began again in a fresh downpour. The trees shook in the wind. Bits of dead leaves lay in the pools. The clearing was rutted with deep tire tracks where the trucks had passed. The warden, the parish sheriff and two deputies had driven out to the line and had become stuck. The car sunk down to its hubs and the tires spun and whined deeper. The smell of burnt rubber filled the air. The deputies got out and pushed and the mud splattered their uniforms, but the car didn’t move. Gang five was ordered to push them out. Toussaint got the jack from the trunk and jacked up the rear end. They put leaves and brush under the wheels and let the jack down. They lifted up the rear bumper, and while the warden accelerated they bounced the car out of the ruts. Then Rainack took them back over to the truck, and he got inside and they remained in the rain.

It was two o’clock and Avery’s legs felt weak under him. He had his eyes closed and his face tingled from the steady beating of the rain. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He thought of when he used to work on the exploration crew on the Gulf. It seemed long ago. He remembered the hot, clear days on the drill barge and the easy roll of the swell, the few whitecaps in the distance, the long flat blue-green of the water and the way the trout jumped in the morning, their sides silver and speckled with red in the sun, and at night when they laid the trotline out. The next day it would be heavy with catfish, and there was the good feel of rope in his hands when he moored the jug boat to the rusty bulkhead of the barge, and the pitch of the deck when the weather got rough and they had to put on life jackets because someone was always getting washed overboard when they went out to pick up the recording cable, and the cans of explosives that were screwed end to end and were run down through the drill pipe below the floor of the Gulf, and the battery and detonator that the shooter used to set off the charge and the way the iron barge would slam and jar when the explosion went off, and the acrid yellow smoke that floated back off the water and would give you a headache if you breathed it, and going back inland on the launch after the hitch was over with everybody getting drunk and talking about going to whorehouses and staying there until the next hitch began, and the island off the coast with the pavilion among the cypress where they served chilled wine and the beer came in beaded mugs.

He remembered his last year in high school when his father was alive and he had gone out with a girl named Suzanne, and they were always together and they talked about getting married. Her skin was very white and her hair hung to her shoulders like black silk, and at eighteen she looked like a mature woman. There was that Saturday they went fishing together in his boat and he rowed down the bayou with the oaks and cypress and willows on each side, and she sat forward in the bow and her eyes were dark and happy and she lifted the hair from her neck to let the breeze blow on her, and he put into the bank and got out and dragged the boat through the shallows, and he didn’t have to ask or even say anything because she already understood. And for the rest of the spring it was the same. On Saturday morning he would meet her at the levee and they would row to the same place on the green bank among the azaleas and jasmine, and later they would drink wine and fish and he would row her back in the afternoon.

They graduated from high school and he began to drink more, and there was the weekend they drove to Biloxi in the sports car her father had given her for graduation, and Avery left her in the hotel room to get a package of cigarettes and came back three hours later blind drunk, and she lay in bed with her eyes wet and her hair spread out on the pillow and she turned away from him when he tried to touch her; he left the room and bought a bottle at the bar and went down on the beach and passed out. He woke in the morning with a bad hangover and his clothes and hair were full of sand, and the sun was hot and the white façade of the hotel gleamed in the light. He went to the room, but there was nothing to say or do because when he told her he was sorry it sounded meaningless. She was very hurt and she tried not to show it, and that made him all the more angry and ashamed. So they drove back home not talking, and things were never the same after that. The summer became fall, and she went to school at the state university and he took a job on a shooting crew. She wrote him a few letters during the time she was at L.S.U., and then she went to Spain to study painting and he never heard from her again. It had ended undramatic and unpoetic and unanything, and he wondered why he should think of her now. He had been in prison only for a short time, but everything that had existed before seemed to belong to another world and she with it. The Saturdays that they had together and the things they did were no longer real, nothing was real except the wet clothes and the rain and the mud and the cold in his feet and Daddy Claxton’s coughing and Rainack sitting in the back of the truck in his uniform and slicker with the holster strapped around his waist and the .45 revolver that meant he could crack the barrel across your head if you tried to get out of the rain, and two men somewhere off in the woods running for freedom with an armed search party behind them.

“I got to take a leak,” Claxton said.

“Go ahead,” Rainack said.

“Can’t I go off in the brush?”

“I got to keep watch on all of you.”

Claxton looked embarrassed.

“I ain’t going to run off nowheres,” he said.

“Act your age. We ain’t going to look at you,” Rainack said.

“It’ll just take a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Finally he turned to the side and urinated on the ground. He buttoned his trousers and stared at the irrigation ditch, not wanting to look at anyone.

“How’s it feel to be a bastard?” LeBlanc said.

“You ain’t getting a rise out of me,” Rainack said. “Your time is coming when Evans gets back.”

“If Evans owes you any money you better get it from him while you can,” LeBlanc said.

“You’re talk, LeBlanc. Guys like you shoot off their mouth. They never do nothing.”

“Wait around a while.”

“Evans will be alive to piss on your grave,” Rainack said.

“Maybe you ought to pay up your debts too.”

“I should have killed you out in the ditch and saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

The sound of rifle shots came from the woods. They were distant and faintly audible through the rain. There was a single report followed by two more, and then someone was firing in rapid succession. A minute passed and it was quiet except for the even patter of the rain. Rainack got out of the truck with his hand on his revolver and looked at the trees. The front of his khaki clothes, where his slicker was open, was drenched through. Gang five waited and listened. There was a final
whaaap
of a rifle and almost immediately after a burst from a shotgun and then silence again. A few minutes went by and the woods remained quiet.

“That’s the end of your pals,” Rainack said. He got back in the truck and shut one door to keep out the rain. He wiped the water off his face with his handkerchief.

“Them shots was too close,” Daddy Claxton said.

“They’ve been gone three or four hours,” Avery said. “They should have been in the next parish.”

“Maybe Evans was having rifle practice on a friend,” LeBlanc said.

“I know it ain’t them. They’re young. They could make ten or twelve miles in the time they been gone,” Claxton said. “Billy Jo said they had a car waiting for them. They might be over the state line by now.”

“They’re standing before the Lord,” Brother Samuel said. “They crossed the big river, and the Lord’s sitting in judgment. Tonight their souls will be flying through the dark with the evil spirit dragging them by a chain.”

“I ain’t going to believe it. They’re young. An old man couldn’t make it, but the young ones got a chance.”

“I seen the sign this morning. I knowed it wouldn’t do no good to warn them.”

Daddy Claxton coughed violently. His breath rasped in his throat. He gagged on his shirt sleeve.

“There ain’t no reason to keep us out here now. Let the old guy get inside,” LeBlanc said.

“Talk to Evans,” Rainack said.

“You got no call to keep us in the rain,” LeBlanc said.

“It’s going to be a hell of a lot worse for you when Evans gets back.”

“Billy Jo and Jeffry is dead,” Brother Samuel said.

“I got my orders.”

“Try using your mind. You’re going to kill the old man,” Avery said.

“You keep quiet.”

“Why don’t you throw him in the irrigation ditch? You’ll be sure he catches pneumonia that way,” Avery said.

“Evans is going to hear about this.”

“There’s some deep places in there. He probably can’t swim,” he said.

“Keep it up. You’ll have your name on detention list with LeBlanc,” Rainack said.

“Or you could take him into the swamp and find some quicksand,” Avery said. “It’s not much different than dying from pneumonia. His lungs would fill up with sand instead of water.”

“You’re pushing it. I ain’t taking much more.”

“You ain’t going to do nothing,” LeBlanc said.

“Keep running off at the mouth and see.”

“I knowed people like you in the army. You won’t drop your britches to take a crap till you get an order. We’re five to one against you. Lean on one of us and you’ll have to use that pistol. Then there will be an inquiry and the warden will bust you out of a job to save hisself.”

“It’s your ass when Evans gets back.”

The warden’s car came back down the line and went past the men. It was splattered with mud. The tires spun in the mire, and the warden steered around the place where he had stuck before. The sheriff sat in the front seat and the two deputies were in back. The end of a rifle barrel showed behind the glass in the back seat. An enclosed truck followed them, the back covered with canvas like an army truck. The guards sat inside, crowded towards the front because the sheet of canvas that closed the rear had been torn loose from its fastenings by the wind and flapped over the top. The captain’s pickup came through the ruts in second gear and hit the soft place where the warden had become stuck. His wheels whined in the mud and he shifted into reverse and fed it gas and shifted into second again, rocking it, until he got traction and spun out of the soft spot to harder ground. Evans sat next to him. They stopped the truck and got out and went around to the back. Their rifles were propped against the seat by the gear-shift stick.

“Bring them over here,” Evans said.

Rainack snuffed out his cigarette and buttoned his slicker. He got down in the rain.

“You heard him. Start moving,” he said.

Avery and the others walked unsteadily across the clearing to the pickup. His legs felt loose and uncoordinated from having stood in one position too long. His feet hurt from the cold when he walked. Daddy Claxton wavered from side to side. He coughed and spit up phlegm. There was a tarpaulin laid across the bed of the pickup. Pools of water collected in it and ran down through the folds and creases. There was a dark smear on top of it. Evans had his hand on one end of the canvas to raise it up.

“I want you to know what happens to guys that think they can bust out of here,” he said. “Look at them and tell everybody back at camp what you saw.”

He lifted the tarpaulin and exposed the two bodies. They lay on their backs and their faces looked up blank and empty and the rain fell in their eyes. Billy Jo had been shot twice through the chest and a third bullet had cut through the left eye and come out at the temple. Pieces of cloth were embedded in the chest wounds. The blood had congealed and his shirt stuck stiffly to him. He was barefooted and his pants were torn at the knees and stained with mud and grass. His remaining eye was rolled back in his head. The wound where the bullet had emerged from the temple was very large and fragments of bone protruded from the matted skin and hair. Jeffry wore only one shoe. The ankle of his bare foot was broken. It swelled out in a big, discolored lump like a fist and the foot was twisted sideways. His shirt was torn in strips like rags. He had been hit with a shotgun at a close distance and the pellets covered his trunk and part of one thigh. An artery had been severed in his neck and there was a large area of red around the top of his chest like a child’s bib.

“Where were they?” Rainack said.

“They fell in a clay pit. They was just climbing out when we saw them. Billy Jo started running for the trees, and me and Jess let go. We missed Jeffry but Abshire got him with the shotgun. It blew him right through a thicket.”

“Who got Billy Jo in the head?” Rainack said.