Soil (31 page)

45

The rain passed and moisture fell from the trees, pelting the underbrush like a search party in the woods. Jay burrowed under an old wet stump and raked damp leaves and branches over himself for added cover. Chances were good he could wait out Shoals until morning, but if the deputy's searchlight found him tucked under here, it was over. Straight to jail, with good reason.

Life would never be the same. He'd fired at an officer of the law with the weapon of another man, a man whose disappearance the deputy had come to investigate, the same man he'd fed, just an hour ago, to an alligator upriver. Surrender was not an option, but how far would he go to ensure his escape?

He'd lost the gun somewhere, probably dropped it back at the house for fear of using it again. If he wanted to take Shoals, it would have to be by bare-handed challenge, against whatever arsenal the deputy carried on his person. A suicide mission.

If he could just get to the river, he might jump in and ride it down, all the way to the Gulf. What did he have to lose? His body was prepared for any deprivation. He felt the river close by and worked up the courage to rise and peek around. He saw a beam of light swinging to the south, the deputy off on a dead trail. This was his chance. He stood quietly and took swift rolling steps over rain-muffled leaves. The searchlight moon shone down on him in the clearing, and it was hardly a surprise when the first shot came like cannon fire over his shoulder. He sprinted ahead, feeling his way through the maze of gulleys and fallen limbs, his body exerting a foreign will and effort.

He came to the riverside, where the brush was thick and concealing, and down the bank he found the familiar cleft torn out by the river. He kicked off his boots but didn't bother removing his clothes, just slithered down into the mud, flat on his back until he was submerged. In the dark, he would be impossible to find unless Shoals climbed down and stepped on him, but by now he was so adept at maneuvering this formidable terrain he believed he could wrestle the athletic deputy to advantage if necessary.

Shoals came along not far behind and stalked around the edge of the gulley, catching his breath. “Where'd you get off to, Mize?” he cried, puffs of vapor billowing from his exhalation.

The flashlight beam played over the pit floor, down the bank, and all along the water's edge. Jay could hear him gently cursing above.

“I got those bloody drawers from your washroom, Mize,” he yelled, unaware his perp was just below, not twenty feet away. “Now you want to tell me just what in the hell is going on?”

The wallow was soft from the rain, and Jay wriggled deeper until his entire body lay buried up to his lips, just a ripple in the mud, sucking air with the quiet, patient gasps of a beached fish.

“What happened to Leavenger? I bet you know a thing or two about this Boyers fella too. Best to start talking, it'll go that much easier for you.”

Jay knew the deputy was telling the truth about the bloodstained underwear. He could admit that mistake, but it also confirmed every suspicion he'd ever had about the local law. It didn't matter what had happened in the woods or in the field, they would invent their own story. Even as he lay there lamenting the farm and that his family would worry about him in the coming days, he felt a peculiar satisfaction that he'd been right all along. He wasn't crazy or paranoid. It was the world, with all its lazy presumptions and cockeyed conclusions, that had gone insane. Was there a place in this world anymore for a reasonable man and his family?

“Come out, you little chickenshit!” the deputy hollered toward the river. “You can't get away so easy, Mize. You owe it to me to put up a fight.”

Jay guessed the deputy wouldn't come down to the wallow for fear of get
ting his jeans dirty. At some point he would lose interest and venture off, and that's when Jay would make his getaway.

“Okay, then, let me confess something to you,” the deputy called. “It's over for me, all right? They're done with me. You happy? They're shipping my ass off in the morning. This is my last chance to be a hero.”

Jay waited to learn if this might be his way out. Was Shoals suggesting a truce? A collaboration? Or was this one of his tricks?

“Hell, I'll
let
you shoot me,” Shoals said. “Just make it count. I can't go out like a chump. It's gotta be a fireball, Mize, you got me?”

Either Shoals was coming apart or he was a good actor. It was hard to tell without looking the man in his eyes.

Jay heard a scratch of leaves and a cough in the distance and thought Shoals had wandered off. He waited a few minutes and was preparing to stand up when he heard whimpering above him. It sounded like the deputy sitting in the leaves, mumbling to himself quietly.

Finally he called out to Jay, “I'm not gonna lie to you, Mize, I'm scared to die. But hell, I'm almost scared to go on living at this point. How do you like that? I guess you feel pretty superior now.”

The deputy sounded sincere, as if he might be speaking aloud to himself. “Come on, man. You already gut-shot me. Just finish the job.”

“I don't have a gun!” Jay cried out, inexplicably. The walls of the pit distorted his cry. His voice bent and echoed, and Shoals jerked his head from side to side, trying to pinpoint the source.

“Where the hell are you?”

Jay said nothing, just clinched his body, waiting for the cheap shot.

“Here! Take mine!”

The light beam tracked across the mud without finding Jay. He heard the clank and splat of the .44 Magnum as it landed an arm's length away.

“That's my daddy's gun,” Shoals said. “No one will believe I gave it freely. And if you ever get caught, you better tell them I put up a hell of a fight.”

There was a long quiet spell, several minutes before Shoals spoke again.

“Not gonna do it, huh?” He had a bit of the swagger back in his voice. “I
didn't think you had the stuff. I guess you'd rather spend the rest of your life in your grandpappy's old cell. That's fine. Well let me tell you a little story you can think about while you're jerking your chain down there on Parchman farm.”

He was up and scuffing through the leaves again and then he stopped. His voice came at Jay direct, as though he'd pinpointed his buried figure there in the slough.

“The other night I get a phone call around midnight. A pretty little thing who lives down by the ballpark, says she has a prowler in her basement. Her husband is too much of a sad sack to deal with it so she asks can I come see to it. I show up, she lets me in, takes me down to the cellar. Well, of course, there's nobody down there, and she turns to me and says, ‘How bout you investigate this, Danny,' and wouldn't you know it, she whips off her pajama pants.”

He's just trying to flush me out
, Jay kept reminding himself.
Trying to bring me to light and put a bullet between my eyes.

“It was a trap, see? The best kind of trap. The kind you don't mind falling into again and again.”

The deputy circled and waited for a sign that he was making inroads.

“I'm generally the one laying the trap, but now she's laid one for me. And, buddy, lemme tell ya, it was one hell of a lay.”

It sounded like the deputy was down there with him, his stale tequila pant and sweaty aftershave just inches away.

“I don't guess I need to give you all the fine details. We've been to the same place, done similar things. She said I was better at it, but that's neither here nor there. All to say, we're a lot alike, you and me.”

Jay slowed his breathing and tried to achieve equanimity, to purge the anger. These were only tricks.

“You ever slurp fresh oysters, Mize?” Shoals said. “You gotta work to get that shell open. Buddy, when you do, it's like wetting your tongue in the ocean after you done walked across the desert. Man, I can still taste her on my lips.”

The deputy inhaled deeply, dramatic and satisfied. “Mmm, I can smell
her too. Like a ripe muskmelon still warm from the field. You know what that's like, don't you, Mize? Well, maybe not.”

It was difficult to keep from shooting him, but Jay rationalized it. Does a man deserve to die for wanting to love a good woman? If so, then the whole world deserved its apocalypse.

“
Sweet Sandy loves the candy
. That was our little saying.”

And yet there was a spark of vulgar truth in this confession that lit Jay's fuse.

“Oh, and don't worry about Jacob. I'll take him under my wing while you're gone, teach him all the things you were too busy to teach him. Like baseball and hunting, all the things boys love to do. And when it comes time, I'll show him how to be a man.”

Jay bolted up and reached for the Magnum, his muddy fingers fumbling the hammer. Shoals gave a startled yelp and dropped his flashlight, and before Jay could get off a shot, there came a thunder and flare off the ridge. His hand lit up with hot metal, and he felt the sensation of angry yellow jackets swarming his arms and neck, the earth's sucking gasp beneath him. The ground splayed open like whiplashed skin, and he fell through the cut, sliding backward and upside down into shallow water. Mud cascaded over him, driving him into the black river, and as much as he wanted to resist it, to fight and to save himself, he knew to just let it take him, that the river and the earth would decide.

The young farmer found himself at last in the middle of the river. The water was so cold it clenched him to the bone, and when he gasped he sucked in the whole world. His senses tuned to everything around him—the sound of hurtling water, the wet taste of a wild fermented land, the white splatter of a million stars above him, and the heavens in splendid turmoil. He'd never seen it from here, spreading out in all directions, never-ending, capable of pushing him all the way to the Gulf and from there wherever after. The flood had not strangled this river but expanded it, pushed against the shores, tearing into the land to make a wider path, and now it ran with new purpose.

A dark figure came up alongside him in the water, rolling long and solid. He flinched to get away, but it already had him snagged in its limbs. A tree stripped from the bank. It still had its leaves and enough sturdy branches to pull him from the current like a paddle wheel arm.

He clung to it in slothful repose and decided he would ride it all the way to the mouth. Maybe when he arrived, he'd camp and lie low, take an odd job, save up for the train ride north and go find that little cabin on the lake, a retreat from the hell of living this civilized way. He would wait a month or two, earn back his strength and his wits, and then he would send them a postcard, an image she'd remember with a scribble on the back, some code she might recognize. She would've put the land up for sale by then and maybe made a sale, paid off the loans and still have enough left over to bring the boy north to start a new life.

It seemed reasonable that the deputy would let him go. He'd armed and shot a suspect just to prove him guilty and then sentenced him to the river.
There's no way he survived
, Shoals would swear to the boys at the station. No body, no crime.

And this is how it will end. Not without a little penance, for what in this world is worth doing that doesn't require a portion of one's body and soul? And it would still be a long meandering course back to himself and to his people and to his dream of achieving.

He began to tremble from the cold and his injured arm, which had gone numb in shock. He reached up for a top limb to pull himself higher on the log when he noticed that he was missing half his palm. Only a dead thumb dangled there and blood coated his entire forearm. He never felt a thing, just the hot blast and then the river. And he'd been dragging it through all the bacteria and microbes for the last several minutes? Hours? He had to get it bandaged, but what hospital would welcome him off the street in this condition without first calling the police? A hamburger claw and buckshot all up his arm. Where could he slip into port and score some gauze and peroxide, maybe a plastic bag to wrap it for swimming? There were no convenience stores or emergency stops along this way. His heart began to race, shunting the blood upward as a geyser. He held his hand over his head as he slipped off the branch and back into the cold river.

He reached out and grabbed one of the tree limbs and was towed for a while. The current sucked the socks off his feet and then his pants. He raised his head now and then to catch a breath and kept his injury above the waterline.
Just hold on till the current slows
, he told himself. He would find the strength to climb back on the log. He could make it. He'd made it this far, hadn't he? It was that or wash up in someone's field.

But the current didn't slow before his good arm gave out and he lost his grip. He trailed along behind the tree, mud in his shirt pockets weighing him down. He looked again at the missing hand and wiggled his missing fingers, and he felt them but they weren't there, and he threw back his head and laughed.

He scooted his feet and felt for rock bottom. He heard the laughter of fish and the whimper of a wasted dog and watched his son crawl around the wading pool like water going down the drain, bloodstains scumming the bare Jacuzzi bowl, a bowlful of cooked organs and the hungry hordes standing in his field, praising him and his farm tower with their thankful faces. And finally, at the bottom, where the mud was soft and warm, where the moon and tide held their furthest reach, he and his wife found love again, planting a new seed in their precious fledgling ground.

Floodwater swept into his smile and made a lake inside him. His eyes twitched awake to a darkness greater than sleep. The terrible meaning became clear. He thrashed and reached for the surface, and in the last blue breath his chest swelled and his mind bargained and pleaded and repented to his new God,
No, I'm not done, help me please it can't be over, I haven't done anything and my wife and son need me, I'm sorry, I'll do it right this time, let me do it again I want to do it again I want to do it all over I can make it right I can if I—
and his heart ruptured with an explosion of love for them, for all of them.

Everything vanished in that span. He became one with the disaster of his life, as if he and the memory of his family and the scraps of their mistakes and failures were mashed together in the hands of some greater power, pressed down, rolled into a ball, stacked, watered, tumbled, and spread out to grow taller and stronger, ready to flourish at last in practiced earth.