Day of Independence (3 page)

The morning sun turned the swamp the color of molten iron and touched with a blush of pink the pale lilac blossoms of the hyacinths that grew in islands among the cypress trees.

Alligators floated like pine logs and made scarcely a ripple in the still water. Everywhere insects chattered and swamp birds made wild whoops among the trees, like the ghosts of the long-gone Choctaws on a war trail.

Henriette Valcour's cabin sat on a spit of land that thrust a hundred feet into the swamp. It was a small, unpainted, timber structure, narrow as a shoebox, with a tin roof, a porch and rocker in front, a privy out back.

Despite the summer heat, a trail of smoke rose from the cabin's cast-iron chimney and tied misty gray bows in the still air.

Henriette stirred a blackened pot on the stove that smelled of crawling things, and the fish crow perched on a shelf nearby studied the swamp witch with glittering amber eyes. Its sleek head darted from side to side as it followed her every move.

“Soon,
mon chéri
,” she said to the bird. “The death potion is not to be hurried.”

The crow croaked and hopped back and forth on the shelf and Henriette smiled. “You are impatient,
n'êtes-vous pas?
Well, not long now and then we will see what we see.”

The woman could have been any age, but she claimed to be ninety-eight. She was actually twenty years younger than that.

Henriette wore a white woman's cast-off cotton dress, but her hair was covered with the traditional Creole turban, the yellow
tête calendé
made from checked madras cloth.

Her skin was the color of old mahogany and deeply scarred by wrinkles, but her eyes were a match for those of the fish crow, bright, intent, the translucent golden hue of Baltic amber.

When Henriette decided the potion had simmered enough, she took a square piece of white linen the size of a woman's handkerchief and dipped it into the pot.

After a while she removed the cloth, now the color of pond scum, and stepped outside, where she draped it over the porch railing to dry.

The crow fluttered out of the cabin and perched on the back of the rocking chair, waiting.

Henriette picked up some twigs and Spanish moss from a wicker table, then sat in the rocker. The fish crow croaked a welcome, and the old woman smiled and stroked his breast feathers with the back of her forefinger.

The rippling water of the bayou was no longer blood red. The rising sun had drawn in storm clouds and to the north thunder rumbled.

A rising wind shook the garlands of moss in the dead cypress and near the cabin lime green frogs splashed into the water and redfish jumped at gnats.

On the wall behind Henriette's chair, the chained pendulum of a Bavarian cuckoo clock ticked with slow, Teutonic solemnity. The clock had not kept time in fifty years, but in the swamp time was not measured by minutes and hours but by the changing of the light.

But the little bird still popped out twenty-four times a day and proclaimed the hour, the irritated fish crow regarding it with a baleful eye.

Thunder roared closer and vivid lighting seared through a hundred miles of storm cloud in an instant. Rain kicked up startled Vs on the surface of the water and ticked from the roof.

Henriette, busily fashioning a stick man from the twigs, kept two items on the floor by her chair at all times.

On her left, a quart bottle of Dr. Dribble's Peptonic Bitters that said right on the label that not only was it a sovereign remedy for dyspepsia but also an effective cure for female urinary problems.

On the old woman's right stood a jug of moonshine.

Throughout the day, Henriette imbibed liberal doses of both.

The stick man was finished and the old woman rose and got the linen from the railing. The cloth was still damp and had gotten rained on, but she could work with it.

For a few moments Henriette stood and watched the downpour fall on the bayou and the sudden flare of lightning that for an instant transformed the cypress into columns of white marble.

She returned to the chair and her nimble brown fingers packed moss around the stick man. She paid particular attention to the doll's belly, making it big and round, for was that not how she'd seen the fat man in her dream when he'd frightened her so badly?

When the stick man was covered to her satisfaction with moss, Henrietta wrapped the linen around him and tied it in place.

From the pocket of her dress she brought out the head she'd carved from a piece of wild oak. The face was crude, the eyes shadowed with black dye, and the top of the skull was round and bald. Carefully, Henriette positioned the head in place and then nodded her satisfaction.

The voodoo doll was finished.

Urged on by the thunder, black clouds rolled across the bayou, their flanks branded by white-hot scrawls of lightning.

Across the water, Henriette watched old Jacques St. Romain paddle his canoe among the buttressed bases of the bald cypress, the fishing lines dropped fore and aft glinting in the gray light.

A man with blue-black skin and white, curly hair cropped close to his scalp, Jacques feared neither lightning nor alligators, and he always carried a .45 in his pants pocket.

But he studiously avoided looking in Henriette's direction.

A swamp witch could put a hex on a man with a single glance, and Jacques trembled all over until he paddled deeper into the cypress, out of sight.

 

 

Henriette watched the empty, rain-lashed space where the old black man had been, then turned her attention back to the doll.

She recalled her dream again and the fat man who had threatened her grandson Baptiste. Although she did not know from whence the danger to Baptiste would come, or when it would happen, she woke, cried out, and felt very afraid.

The fish crow, who possessed the soul of a man who'd blasphemed Bondye, the one true God, had been alarmed and flapped his wings and croaked in a most pitiful fashion.

Henriette had quieted the bird and then told him she would protect her grandson from all harm, especially the dangers posed by the fat white man, who must be very powerful and evil indeed to have taken over her dream the way he did.

As thunder racked the bayou, Henriette took a swig from the jug to steady her nerves, and then removed the needle pinned to the front of her dress.

She did not wish to harm the fat man too much, at least not yet.

If danger threatened her dear Baptiste, other dreams would tell her what she must do.

Henriette took her needle and barely pricked the doll's chest.

She removed the needle and smiled. There, that was enough.

For now...

A niggling chest pain troubled Abe Hacker as he sat higher in bed, waiting for Mickey Pauleen to show. He was a little short of breath but felt only a slight discomfort, so there was nothing to worry about.

His ticker was holding up quite well, and that pleased him.

All he needed was time.

The door opened and Nora stepped inside. She seemed a little disheveled.

Hacker grinned.

“Ol' Mickey nail you?” he said.

“He tried,” Nora said.

“I'll kill him for you one day,” Hacker said. “But right now I need him.”

“He's a snake. He needs killing.”

“I know. But he's fast with a gun, maybe the fastest ever. Look what he did to the town marshal.”

“An old man. He must've been eighty if he was a day.”

Hacker shrugged his fat shoulders. In the dead light of the hotel room he was fish-belly white, like an enormous slug.

“The old coot got his chance to draw. Everybody saw it.”

Nora poured her morning glass of bourbon and without looking at Hacker said, “He was a retired typesetter, for God's sake.”

“Then he should've stuck to his trade,” Hacker said. “Anyways, it doesn't matter much. Mickey doesn't like lawmen, so he would have killed him eventually. Better sooner than later.”

Three sharp raps on the door sounded like gunshots in the room.

The door flung open and Mickey Pauleen stepped inside.

His carrion-eater eyes flicked to Nora and a faint smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

He shifted his attention to Hacker. “You wanted to see me, boss?”

Pauleen was a small, narrow man, who could be as quick and sudden as the crack of a bullwhip. He affected the dress of a small-town parson, sober gray suit, collarless white shirt, and flat crowned hat.

His somber garb was modeled on that of his late foster father, a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Esau Stern who'd tried to whip the fear of God into young Mickey every single day of his life.

When he was fourteen, Mickey bashed in Esau's skull with a posthole auger. When Mrs. Stern saw her husband weltering in his blood, the gory auger in her foster child's hands, she screamed, “Murder!” and Mickey promptly did for her.

Since then Mickey Pauleen had never looked back, and his reputation as a man-killer was well established, as a dozen hard cases buried in Boot Hills across Texas could testify.

“There's no gold, Mickey,” Hacker said. “There's no gold mine.”

“You woke me up this early to tell me something I already know?” Pauleen said.

“I want to make Last Chance pay,” Hacker said.

Pauleen's smile never reached his eyes. “For what? For having no gold or for being run by a bunch of dung-smelling rubes?”

“I don't mean it that way,” Hacker said. “There's money to be made here, Mickey, and I want it.”

“You planning to be a sodbuster?”

“Something like that. The rubes are growing wheat, corn, oats, and soon, cotton. On top of that, cattle ranches are prospering up and down the river, and the cows are fat.”

Pauleen shook his head. His yellow hair was thin and lank, growing over his narrow shoulders. “I'm not catching your drift,” he said. “I ain't a damned farmer.”

“You don't have to be,” Hacker said. “I'm taking this place over, all legal and aboveboard, like. I'll get title to this land and my associates in government will call in favors and get the Katy to lay a railroad spur right to our doorstep.”

The morning brightened and sunlight angled into the room and Hacker's bald head glistened with sweat. Released by heat, the musky odor of the cologne that doused his body hung heavy in the air.

“Now do you see, Mickey?” he said. “Tell me you share in my vision.”

Pauleen smiled. “Boss, you won't get these people to work for you. They're an independent bunch.”

“I don't want them to work for me, Mickey,” Hacker said. “That's the beauty of my plan, see?”

“No, I don't see,” Pauleen said. His high, narrow shoulders and small, sharp-featured head gave him the look of a bird of prey.

“Mexicans!” Hacker said. “I'm going to make a lot of money out of this place, and I'll do it off the sweat of Mexicans.”

Pauleen said nothing, and Nora looked baffled. She poured herself another bourbon.

“I'll bring Mexicans across the river and put them to work in the fields,” Hacker said. “Hell, a Mex will work all day for a couple of pesos and a bowl of corn mush.”

He slapped a beefy fist into the palm of the other.

“Damn it, the profits will be enormous,” he said. “By Christ—”

“Don't take the Lord's name in vain, boss,” Pauleen said. “I don't like it.”

Hacker smiled. “Mickey, you don't smoke, you don't drink, and you don't cuss. But I know what you like, huh?”

Pauleen's pinched face was like stone.

“You like women, don't you?” Hacker said. He stared hard into the little gunman's eyes. “Yeah, that's it, you like women.”

He waved in Nora's direction.

“Stick with me until this thing is done, and I'll give you that as a bonus. I'll conclude my business here real quick, because Nora isn't getting any younger.” Hacker grinned at the woman. “More than a shade past your prime, ain't you, gal?”

The woman looked at Hacker with wounded eyes.

“Sometimes you say cruel things, Abe,” she said.

“Well, maybe that's my right,” Hacker said. “I pay you plenty to take what I dish out. And lay off the booze. It's turning you into a hag.” He was smiling when he turned his attention to Pauleen again. “I'm joking, Mickey. She's got a couple of good years left in her.”

“What about the Mexicans?” Pauleen said.

“You want the woman?”

“Yeah.”

“All right, here's what I want you to do. Ride into Mexico and find Sancho Perez. He's usually around Chihuahua or—”

“He'll find me,” Pauleen said. “I'll be riding a five-hundred-dollar horse.”

Hacker smiled at that.

“Tell him to round up Mexican peons, men, woman, and children, and drive them across the Rio Grande,” he said.

“How many?” Pauleen said.

“As many as Perez can get. A thousand, two thousand, more, I want them to descend on Last Chance like a plague of locusts.”

“And drive the whites out, huh?” Pauleen said.

“That's the idea. The people around here have been at peace for too long. By now they've forgotten how to fight, and they'll cut and run.”

“I reckon the ranchers haven't forgotten. They could give us trouble.”

“Well, that's where you and the other guns come in.”

“We can handle it,” Pauleen said.

Hacker smiled. “I know you can, Mickey. By Independence Day I want the Mexicans working in my fields and my own boys in the bunkhouses.”

“That's a month from now,” Pauleen said. “You're not giving us much time.”

“Tell that to Perez. Tell him I need the peons here in a hurry.”

“What do I offer him?”

“A dollar a head. Man, woman, or child. The more he brings in, the more money he gets.”

Pauleen thought for a moment, then said:

“And the locusts went up all over the land of Egypt and settled in all the territory of Egypt. Very grievous were they. Before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such.”

“Damn right,” Hacker said. “That's good Bible talk. Only this isn't Egypt, it's the Texas Big Bend country.”

“I think the result will be the same,” Nora said. “The Garden of Eden will become a wasteland.”

Hacker was suddenly angry and a vein pulsed on his forehead.

“Maybe it will,” he said. “But, by God, I'll squeeze a fortune out of it before it does.” To Pauleen he said, “There's no time to waste, Mickey. Find Sancho Perez and tell him what I want.”

The gunman nodded and stepped to the door, but Hacker's voice stopped him.

“Mickey, get a couple of boys to take care of the Texas Ranger over to the hotel.”

“He's sick in bed, boss.”

“Yeah, I know, but he could become a problem later.”

Pauleen nodded. “I'll see that he gets out of bed and into a pine box,” he said.