The Clearing (26 page)

The man laughed, once. “You crazy,” he said, trying to move his thighs.

“Wrong answer.” Byron struck the match and lit the fuse.

Randolph began to flap his arms. “Lord, God,” he cried, scurrying to the corner of the house.

Minos took off his cap, bent to look at the sputtering fuse, and stepped slowly off the porch.

The man looked down between his legs. “Come on, pluck that damn fuse.”

“Who hired you?”

“Ain’t nobody hired me, I told you. Damn.”

Randolph called out from around the corner, “By, he’s not worth it.”

An inch of fuse had burned away, and Byron looked the man in the eye. “Give it up.”

“I got nothin’ to give up,” he said, his voice rising.

Another inch of the fuse had burned away when Ella stepped through the screen door, a glass of milk in her hand. “What the deuce is going on. I—” She saw the fuse, and the glass made a frothy starburst on the porch boards. The men could hear her running back through the house, slamming doors as she went, bedroom, kitchen, back stoop. Only an inch of fuse was left when Judgment cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Byron, I got to wear these clothes the rest of my shift.”

At that the man began to urinate and call out
Buzetti-
BuzettiBuzetti as though in a contest to see how fast he could say the name. Byron reached into the man’s crotch and plucked away the fuse.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it, you lardy bastard? Now, Rando, did you hear him say who hired him to blow our boilers?”

A voice wavered from around the corner. “Yes.”

Minos tilted his head into the open. “Did you put him out?”

Byron dusted his fingertips and looked at the dark stain running down the man’s pants. “I think he put himself out.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The mill manager’s wife was fanning herself in her new sit-ting room, seated on a divan with her husband’s head in her lap while horseflies banged the screens, mad to get in at them.

“So, it was an explosion he was after?”

“Yes,” Randolph moaned as he soaked up the feel of her palm on his forehead. “Trying to put us out of business—as punishment, I guess.”

His wife had grown up among the mechanical chatter of three brothers and had absorbed a feel for the physical nature of things. Something about the sabotage bothered her like a gnat crawling on an earlobe. She bit into her cheek with an eyetooth. “Rand, was that little bit of dynamite enough to burst the boilers?”

He rolled the back of his head against her thighs. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“Why not a half-stick charge?” she asked. “To make sure the damage was severe and wouldn’t just blow out the fire.”

Her husband turned on his side, and she began to scratch his head. “I’m sure Buzetti knew what he was doing. Those people are crafty.”

“Is dynamite terribly expensive?”

“Not at all,” he said dreamily. “We’ve got a shedful of it around here somewhere.”

“Well, why not a whole stick, then? Surely he wasn’t worried about life and limb if he planned to blow up a boiler.”

“Oh, what do you know about machinery?” He reached up and patted her hand.

She stopped scratching him. “I saw what happened when the New Castle boiler ruptured. I was there with Wallace and Todd and they explained to me about reserve heat in the boiler’s water which flashes into power when the shell splits open.”

“You saw the mess at New Castle?” He bent his head around to look at her. “They say it looked like a battleship had landed a salvo in the mill.”

“So why, if Buzetti was trying to blow up one of the boilers, did he use such a small charge?” She folded her arms above his head and waited. Her husband, however, seemed not to want to answer. She grew peeved at him, and looking out her new windows toward the boiler shed, she pondered this little mystery.

The phone rang as Randolph was writing order summaries, and it was Sheriff LaBat calling from his office in Moreau.

“Got some bad news for you.”

“What now, Sheriff?”

“That old boy your brother sent down here on the train? Last night somebody knocked the deputy in the head, broke in the jail, and sprung him.”

“Are you looking?”

“Hell, yeah, we lookin’. If we find him we’ll give you a call.”

“He’s a dangerous man, not just some drunk we wanted off the property. He was going to dynamite the boilers.”

The sheriff sniffed. “Well, we’ll look for him, like I said.”

“You had him in the parish jail?”

There was a pause on the line. “Yeah.”

“That’s a big place. How in the world—”

“It was two, three o’clock this morning. We only keep one man on then.”

“Was it Buzetti that got him out?”

“What do I look like, a mind reader? All I know is I got a call about sunup, and when I came down here old Boudreaux’s sittin’ on the floor with a goose egg on the back of his head.”

After Randolph hung up, he finished the orders, then slogged over to Byron’s house, where he found him sitting in a spindle-back chair on the porch, holding a drink. “Kind of early for that?”

Byron stared blankly at the mill buildings, as though seeing them for the first time. “I like it to wash down those pills the doc gives me,” he said, his eyes wide as an owl’s.

His brother rested his back against the porch wall. He remembered that Byron had seldom taken a drink when he was living his other life before the war. He was too busy learning the mills, courting women. “Sheriff LaBat called. Somebody broke your dynamiter out of jail, and they can’t find him.”

Byron spat off the porch. “That so?”

“He also told me he hadn’t gotten a statement from him.”

Byron took a drink and let it sit in his mouth a moment before he swallowed. “You think the sheriff’s fond of tomato sauce?”

Randolph took off his hat and banged it against his leg. “You know, Lillian claims Buzetti wasn’t trying to destroy the mill. She says Europeans are more complicated than that. More emotional, maybe.”

“What’s she think? He wants to make us cry or something?” He took another drink, the glass wobbling on the way to his mouth. “The world is waiting for the sunrise,” he said, “just waiting for maybe some two-legged piece of shit to show up carrying a fine German pistol.” He made a gun with his right hand, aimed it at Randolph’s house, and dropped the thumb like a hammer.

By the first week in March, Randolph was playing solitaire the entire night. He began to watch his fingers and the backs of his hands, noting how different they were from Vincente’s, which had been long and flexible and darting. Randolph prayed for the dealer’s soul, felt stupid about doing so, then prayed briefly again.

He decided not to return to the saloon, and when the fights, which were becoming less frequent anyway, would break out, he’d let Byron handle the noise and the blood. During the day, at any spare moment, he would check with Minos, to see if he was monitoring the fuel, with old Mackey, the watchman, to make sure he kept an eye on the railroad to Poachum, with the captain of the rafting steamer, who’d put a deckhand in the wheelhouse at night to shine a spotlight down the canal to check for darkling skiffs. Byron came over after supper every day to play a few moments with Walter, as if the child were a poultice he had to apply to an aching wound. The boy was always in the house since Lillian had found it more convenient for her housekeeper to stay in the little back bedroom. Byron was beside himself the first time Walter caught a cypress block he’d tossed toward him.

“Look at that,” he’d yelled, so loudly that the baby sat down with a spank.

Randolph received in the mail a manila envelope bearing a newspaper page with an account of Vincente’s funeral bordered in pencil. The article gave a tally of flowers, Masses said, hymns sung. He’d been embalmed and sent up to Chicago in an Illinois Central baggage car. Randolph felt a connection with the man as he read the list of relatives and noted the isolated, euphemistic comment that he had worked in the entertainment industry. Again, he felt the pistol leap in his hand, saw the spray of thoughts on the wall. Merville had told him that Vincente was a thug’s thug, a man who recruited whores and then beat them up, who won a worker’s paycheck in a crooked game and loaned it back to him at daily interest, who sold lead-laced moonshine more likely to blind than intoxicate. Randolph wanted to believe that he’d done the world a favor, but his conscience would have none of it. His only solace was to consider what would have happened had he not pulled the trigger, and to hope that the living men would come to justify his decision. After dark, he thought too much and sometimes drank, and one quiet evening when he heard from across the yard Byron wake howling out of another dreamed bloodletting, he saw that his one killing did not stack up against the ranks of German
Kinder
his brother had packed off to darkness. While this thought didn’t comfort him, it gave him perspective on the deep well of foreboding into which his brother sank each time he opened his eyes on a sunrise.

The second week of March came in like a waterfall. Many snakes coiled on the house steps, and Lillian kept a Winchester .22 rifle loaded with shorts behind the kitchen door. Looming over the reptiles, she’d rivet them to the wood with precise head shots. May picked them up with a stick and threw them over the back fence. Before long, the steps both front and back were tattooed with bullet holes. One afternoon Lillian killed a cottonmouth in the middle of the backyard, and May came with a broom handle without asking what had drawn fire. Lillian pumped the empty shell out and set the hammer in the safety notch.

“I don’t know why I bother. There’s no end to them.”

“Women just don’t like ’em,” May told her, slipping the handle under the coiling, four-foot body. “They give me the chills.”

“That one’s dangerous.”

May smiled and raised the handle. “Aw, Missus, there’s snakes that cause more trouble than this one.” She gave the reptile a heave and it propellered over the fence.

“What do you mean?” Lillian asked. When she saw the smirk on May’s face, she blushed. Later, when the housekeeper came into the kitchen to wipe off the broom, Lillian watched her carefully, the way she moved, the way the light played on her face when she looked out of the window toward where the men worked.

“Something I can do for you, Missus?”

Lillian handed her a pot off the stove. “I heard that you lost your husband.”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s right.”

“Have you ever thought of marrying again? There’s no lack of men around.”

May lowered the pot into a pan of suds. “I don’t think about it, but it might happen. I’d like to move up North and start over with Walter.”

Lillian raised her chin. “I see. When the timber’s cut out?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She reached out for the cornbread skillet and their hands overlapped on the handle. Lillian looked at May’s fingers a moment, then pulled her own away.

“I think that might work out for you very well,” she said, picking up the kettle.

Each step off the clamshell-covered lanes was a boot-sucking ordeal. One day a steady wind came up out of the south and blew for twelve hours until there was a foot of water everywhere and the camp became a broad, muddy pool where the houses were boxy boats and marooned children stood on the porches watching the tide shift under their filthy toes. That flooded night, when Galleri turned off the lamps in the saloon and shoved the last reeling, tapped-out mill hand off the porch into the end-of-the-world blackness that was the mill yard, it wasn’t thirty seconds before he heard the man shrieking like someone in flames. Galleri lit a buggy lantern and jumped off the porch with it, splashing through the sulfurous water. He stopped when he saw the man floating on his back, his arms flailing, the lamplight showing twin ridges breaking the water’s surface and the gold dollars of an alligator’s eyeballs. The man’s screams drowned as the animal towed him under and backed toward the canal. Galleri moved toward his porch but remembered he didn’t have a gun in the saloon. Changing direction, he ran toward Byron’s place, his feet detonating on the water until he stepped into a rut and fell facedown. His lamp out, he ran on anyway, arriving breathless at the porch, slopping up the steps to bang on the door.

Byron’s face appeared behind the screen like an angry smoke. “What?” the face said.

“Sloan got took off by a ’gator,” he gasped.

“Where?”

“They’re headin’ to the canal,
now.
” He screamed a falsetto
now
.

Byron reached behind the door for a rifle and stepped into a loose pair of rubber boots, coming out onto the porch in his long underwear and carrying two nickel-plated flashlights, handing one to Galleri. They moved as fast as they could through the water, past the saloon, stumbling through a patch of floating blocks bobbing on the tide like headless fowl. The beams from their flashlights cut across the glossy flow that slid and stank like crude oil. Byron told Galleri to be still, and they listened, but all they could hear was the wind pushing at the cypress trees behind the saloon, and then the sound of a horse splashing through the water, Randolph coming up behind them on the bare back of the blind horse. “What’s going on? I heard someone yelling.”