Half of Paradise (7 page)

LeBlanc stood up in the outboard and shouted at the police boat.

“Sit down!” Gerard said. “I got to get us out of here.” He threw the motor into gear and shot forward through the willows. The police boat’s searchlight went on, and the trees were flooded with a hard electric brilliance. “Bastards,” LeBlanc shouted. He stood up again and took aim with the pistol. The glass broke with the first shot, but the lamp still burned. He fired twice more, and the searchlight went out.

Avery and Tereau ran for the wagon. They climbed into the seat, and Tereau slashed the reins down on the mules. The mules jumped against their harness, and the wagon banged over the ruts, pitching back and forth, so that Avery had to hold on to the brake to keep from being thrown from the seat. He looked behind him and saw LeBlanc’s pistol flash three times in the dark. Tereau whipped the mules to a faster pace until the boat was out of sight. They could still hear LeBlanc cursing.

“He’s done it,” Tereau said. “We never had no shooting, but we’re going to have it now.”

“Where we going?”

“To the still. I’m going to move out everything I can. The swamp will be full of police before morning.”

The wagon swayed against a tree and careened back on the road. “My God,” Avery said.

“Got no time to waste.” Tereau whipped the mules harder.

“You think he hit anybody?” Avery said.

“It ain’t our doing.”

“We were with them.”

“When they got in the boat they were on their own,” Tereau said.

“Look out!”

The left front wheel of the wagon struck a large oak root that grew across the road. The rim of the wheel cracked in two, and the spokes shattered like matchsticks as the wagon went down on its axle, skidding across the road to the edge of the gully; it turned on its side and balanced for a second, then toppled over the brink, pulling the mules down with it. Avery was thrown free and landed on his stomach in the middle of the road. The breath went out of him in one lung-aching, air-sucking rush, and the earth shifted sideways and rolled beneath him, and a pattern of color drifted before his eyes; then he could see pieces of dirt and blades of grass close to his face, and his chest and stomach stopped contracting, and slowly he felt the pressure go out of his lungs as he pulled the air down inside him. He turned over on his back and sat up. He looked for the wagon. There was a scar of plowed dirt where the axle had skidded across the road. He stood up and walked to the brink of the gully.

“Get down here and pull it off me,” Tereau said.

Avery could see the top portion of the Negro’s body lying among the splintered boards. The wagon had come to rest upside down, pinning Tereau’s legs under it. The mules lay at the front, twitching and jerking in the fouled harness. The kegs had broken open and there was a strong smell of whiskey in the air. The broken slats (their insides burned to charcoal for aging the whiskey) and the copper hoops were scattered on the ground. Avery slid down the bank and tried to lift the wagon with his hands. It came a couple of inches off the ground and he had to release it. He moved to the front of the wagon and tried to raise it by the axle. It wouldn’t move. He stooped and got his shoulder under the axle and tried again. He pushed upwards with all his strength until he went weak with strain.

“Find something for a wedge,” Tereau said.

Avery hunted along the gully for a stout fallen limb. He found several thick branches, but they were rotted from the weather. He searched in the grass and saw a railroad tie that had been discarded by one of the pipeline companies that worked in the marsh. The tie was embedded in the dirt. Avery pried it up with his fingers and saw the worms and slugs in the soft mold beneath. He carried it back to the wagon.

“I’ll slip it under close to your legs,” he said. “When I lift up you pull out.”

“I’m waiting on you,” Tereau said.

Avery fitted the wedge under the side wall of the wagon and lifted.

“Hurry up and get out. I can’t hold it up long.”

“I don’t feel nothing in my legs. The blood’s cut off.”

“I got to drop it.”

Tereau reached under the wagon and grabbed his legs under the knees and pulled.

“I’m out. Let it go,” he said.

Avery released the tie and let the wagon drop.

“Is anything broken?” he said.

“I don’t know. Hep me up.”

He put Tereau’s arm over his shoulder and lifted him to his feet.

“They ain’t broke, but I can’t go nowheres.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“We ain’t getting out of the marsh this way.”

“I’ll help you. Can you walk if I help you?”

“I ain’t going far.”

“Let’s get away from the wagon. They can probably smell the whiskey out on the river.”

“There’s something you got to do first.”

“What?”

“Them mules is suffering,” Tereau said. He took the long double-edged knife from his boot. The blade shone like blue ice in the moonlight. “Put it under the neck. They won’t feel no pain that way.” He handed the knife to Avery.

Tereau leaned against a tree while Avery went over to the mules. The knife cut deeply and quick. He cleaned the blade on the grass and came back.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

Farther down the gully there was a rainwash that had eroded a depression in the bank. It was dry now and overgrown with vines and small bushes. Avery was able to get Tereau up the wash to the road. They crossed to the other side and entered the thicket and headed towards the opposite end of the marsh where the still was. Tereau could take only a few steps at a time. For the next hour they worked their way through the undergrowth. Tereau was breathing hard and had to rest often. The vines scratched their faces and necks. In some areas the mosquitoes were very bad and swarmed around them and got inside their clothes. It took all Avery’s strength to keep the Negro on his feet. Tereau took his arm from Avery’s shoulder and sat on the ground.

“Go on and let me be,” he said.

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Go on. You don’t belong down here nohow.”

“You’re not helping anything. You’re making things harder,” Avery said.

“My legs are gone. You’d have to carry me.”

“All right. I’ll try it.”

“You ain’t talking good sense.”

“I’ll get somebody to help. Will you be all right if I hide you here?”

“I’ll get along.”

Avery put him in the bushes and cut some branches from the trees to cover him.

“Leave me the knife,” Tereau said. “What for?”

“I need it.”

“No.”

“Give me my knife and get away from here.”

“I’m not going to give it to you. Stay put till I get back.” He put the knife in his belt.

“I’m too old a man to go to prison.”

“Stop talking like that.”

“Ain’t you got any sense at all? You won’t be back in time, and I ain’t going to no jailhouse.”

“Don’t talk so loud.”

“I don’t know why I ever took a young boy with me in the first place.”

“I’m going to Jean Landry’s houseboat. We’ll come back in his pirogue.”

Avery left him in the thicket and splashed into the knee-deep water of the swamp. It would take him a half hour to get to Landry’s, and about half that time to come back in the pirogue. The bottom of the swamp was mud and sand. His feet sank in to his ankles. He thought he heard the police in the distance. The branches of the trees overhead grew into one another, and there was almost no light in the swamp. He had trouble finding the direction to the houseboat. He believed that old man Landry would help them, since he disliked any type of authority and had moved out in the swamp years ago to avoid paying taxes and obeying the law. Unconsciously Avery felt at his side for the knife. It was gone. He thought he would have heard it splash if it had fallen in the water. It must have slipped out of his belt before he left Tereau. He headed back towards the shore, breaking through the overhanging vines with his forearms. A water moccasin slithered across the water in front of him. Avery’s foot caught on a tree root and he went under. He struggled to free himself and plunged through the reeds onto the bank.

The cut branches were still in place over the bushes where Tereau was hidden. Avery ripped the branches away. The Negro was sitting upright, just as he had left him, with the knife on the ground by his side.

“You ain’t forgot nothing, have you?” Tereau said.

“You and that goddamn knife.”

“Take off. You ain’t got much time. I heard the police on the road a few minutes ago.”

“Let’s get moving, then.”

“It ain’t no use. There’s a big tree out in the water I can hide in. Leave me there and Landry’ll find me in the morning when he picks up his nets. You can go through the grass flats to the other levee and get back to town. There ain’t nobody
going
to follow you through there.”

“I have to take the knife with me.”

“You’ll probably cut yourself with it.”

Avery picked up the knife and threw it through the air into the water. They heard it splash in the dark.

“Ain’t that a foolish thing to do.”

“Let’s go,” Avery said. He helped Tereau to his feet and picked him up over his shoulder in a cross-carry. He moved out of the thicket and waded into the water. Away from the bank there was a great cypress tree with one side split open and blackened and hollowed out where it had been struck by lightning. He slid the Negro off his back into the hollow. Tereau adjusted his position with his hands so that he could sit upright fairly comfortably, and pulled his feet out of the water inside the tree. He took off his boots and wrung out his socks.

“I reckon you’ll let me alone now,” he said.

“I reckon.”

Tereau took the pint bottle of whiskey from his pocket and pulled the cork out.

“Would the young gentleman care for a drink?” he said.

“You crazy old man.”

Avery and Tereau each took a swallow from the bottle. Avery waded back to shore and made his way through the thicket, walked down the gully and across the road and over the side of the levee, and began circling behind the police. He hoped the police would be searching the road so he could get to the big expanse of alligator grass without being seen and cross to the opposite end of the marsh. He could hear voices ahead. He crawled up the side of the embankment and looked down the road. Several flashlights shone through the trees opposite the gully. Two officers with Springfield rifles stood with a third man between them. The man’s hands were handcuffed behind him. He turned his face in the beam of one of the flashlights. His clothes were wet, he had lost his hat, and his black hair fell over his ears. His skin looked white in the flashlight beam. A captain and another state policeman climbed out of the gully onto the road.

“Why don’t you tell us where they headed for, and we can all go home,” the captain said.

LeBlanc glared at him in silence.

“We’re going to get the others whether you help us or not,” the captain said. “Your friend probably drowned trying to swim the river, and the ones in the wagon aren’t going far after the crackup they had. It’ll make it easier if you cooperate.”

“You go to hell,” LeBlanc said.

The captain motioned for the other men to continue down the road. Avery crawled back down the levee into the brush and started towards the grass flats. The glow of the flashlights shone above the levee He entered the wide field of alligator grass where there were bogs of silt and quicksand. The quicksand wasn’t deep enough to be dangerous, but usually a man was helpless in it if he didn’t have somebody to pull him out. The bogs looked like solid ground because they were covered with dead leaves and grass. He traveled slowly as he went deeper into the field, his head held down, watching the ground carefully. The sharp-edged grass cut his face. He saw a bog ahead and went around the side of it. The sand was wet and cold and came over his shoes. There was a dead nutria, half submerged, out in the middle of the bog. The buzzards would have gotten it if it had died anyplace else, but they couldn’t stand on the sand to feed. Avery looked up at the hard ivory brightness of the waning moon. It would be morning in a few hours, and old man Landry would get Tereau out of the tree. Avery went on for another mile and came out on the far end of the marsh. He walked through the sand and water and reeds onto the bank. He sat down exhausted. Someone on top of the levee shone a flashlight down at him. Avery whirled and started to his feet. It was a state policeman. He could see the campaign hat and the leather holster and the dust-brown uniform. The policeman had a revolver in his hand, the moonlight blue on the barrel.

“Stay still. You got nowhere to go,” he said.

J.P. WINFIELD

He appeared on the Louisiana Jubilee every Saturday night for the next five months. The show was broadcast throughout four states, and J.P.’s name became well known to those people who sit by their large wooden radios with the peeling finish and tiny yellow dial on Saturday night to listen to their requests and hope that their letters will be read between the advertisements of cure-all drugs and health tonics. J.P. came to be one of their favorite entertainers. They bought his records and wrote him letters, and he replied by sending them an autographed picture of himself and the band. He also received an increase in salary and replaced Seth as the main figure of the show. When the band appeared onstage J.P. acted as the spokesman and did most of the solos. He never used any accompaniment except his own guitar when he sang, his third record sold two hundred thousand copies, and Hunnicut had his name featured on the placards that were nailed to the fronts of the dance halls and roadhouses where they played.

During the week the show toured the small towns and played one-night performances in any dance hall that was willing to pay three hundred dollars to have a band from the Louisiana Jubilee. Each weekday night J.P. sang his songs in the juke joints and highway clubs, and the days were spent traveling across the country in a state of complete fatigue. The band didn’t quit until early in the morning, and there was little time for sleep except while riding in the bus. When they returned at the end of the week for the Saturday night performance on the Jubilee, J.P. was physically spent. It was at this time that April introduced him to a doctor who pushed narcotics. She had begun to pay attention to J.P. since he had moved to the front of the band, and on Sunday afternoon she called him into her hotel room to meet a man whom he would not forget for a long time.