Hot Valley (12 page)

“Get off me! Don't touch me!” He leaped to his feet and ran three paces away. Something was badly wrong.

“Hey, calm down! What's happened? You've got to tell me.”

“I can't…” His eyes were wet, his voice trembling.

“What happened, Eddie? You'd better tell me right now. Are we in danger?”

He would not look at me. “No. Nothing…”

I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. “You tell me what's going on or I swear I will—”

There was a cracking noise nearby—slight, but enough to tell me that we were not alone. I froze. Silence. Then, again, a crack and a rustle from the trees. My ears are attuned to danger. One man, two men, possibly more. I grabbed Eddie by the throat—that pretty throat down which I had shot my load so many times—and stared into his eyes.

“You've sold me.”

“I haven't… They made me…”

I pushed him from me with such force that he sprawled on the ground, and I started to run—but suddenly there was a whoop and a crash, and four men burst into the clearing, each of them carrying a gun.

“We got him, boys!” one of them said, a tall, ugly bastard with hair like dirty string.

They moved in swiftly, two in front, two behind, like the jaws of a trap. I had just time to whip my hunting knife from its sheath and hold it to Eddie's throat. One stroke, and he would be dead. I didn't figure that it would matter much to men like that—bounty hunters, I guessed, who would get a price for my head, delivered (still attached to a working body) to the local sheriff and sold into slavery and certain death on the railroads. This kind of contraband dealing was rife in the South; I had no idea it had infected the North as well.

“Take one more step and I'll kill him,” I said, in the calmest voice I could muster. I had no desire to kill Eddie; if he'd betrayed me, I knew that it must have been under the severest duress.

“Please don't, Aaron,” Eddie whispered. “Please don't kill me.”

“I won't,” I said softly in his ear, then shouted, “I mean it! I'll slit his throat!”

The men stopped in their tracks, waiting for a clear lead. Eddie whimpered and moaned, the blood rushed in my ears, and from a nearby tree a robin trilled a carefree song. It was a ridiculous situation that could end only in someone's death, it seemed.

“Let him go,” the stringy-haired one, obviously a leader of sorts, said, “and we'll let you run.”

“Like hell,” I said. “I know your tricks.”

“So cut his throat,” he said, “and then we'll shoot your legs off and leave you to die with him. Wouldn't that be pretty?”

The men laughed.

“You promise you'll let me go?”

“What do you want? Should I swear on a Bible?” They all laughed.

There was no alternative; whatever happened next, whether they kept their promise or not, I had one chance at least of living. And if I could save Eddie's life too, it wasn't such a bad bargain. I removed the knife from his throat—a tiny bead of blood appeared, as if he'd cut himself shaving—and pushed him away from me. He picked himself up and ran outside the circle of men. They paid him no heed. Nor did they move.

“Now let me go.”

“Why would we want to do a thing like that?”

I was going to say “because you said you would,” but that sounded laughable even to me. The choice was clear—either fight (and, with four guns pointed at my head, that didn't seem wise) or submit.

I held out my hands and looked at Eddie. His head hung down.

I was quickly bound at the wrists and led on a long rope back to town, two men ahead of me, two behind me with guns. Eddie disappeared, and I cursed him as he fled. The gang didn't seem interested in him anyway, not even for what I'd been enjoying. They were even more barbarous than I thought.

In town, I was delivered to the sheriff's office, thrown into a cell, and given a piece of dry bread and a beaker of water. The men left, presumably to collect their reward. I was told nothing, but I knew enough about these situations to guess that I would be kept alive (just) in captivity until my new “owners” from the railroad company came to collect me. They would work me as hard as they could, for very little outlay in the way of food, until I died.

This I could not have, so I set about planning my escape. The cell itself was impregnable, with a solid wall at the back and bars on three sides. The cells on either side were, for the moment, empty. There was a drunk in the last cell of the four, sleeping off his liquor. The jailer was an old man with a disgusting habit of chewing tobacco and spitting a long stream of brown liquid into a large brass pot in the corner. He had obviously not washed for some time, and the combined smells of stale tobacco juice, greasy hair, and stale alcohol were making me feel sick.

However, at present this old bird represented my only chance of escape, and I was willing to try anything.

“Excuse me, sir.”

“What do you want, nigger?”

I had the immediate impression that my captor was not an abolitionist.

“I wondered if you could tell me if there's a minister in town.”

“A minister? Why? You planning on dying?” He thought this was mighty funny, cackling for a while and then putting a stop to it with another long, juicy spit.

“No. But I'd like to clear my conscience.”

“You ain't going nowhere yet awhile. You won't need a minister.”

There had to be some way of getting another, more sympathetic individual into the jail. I sat silent for a while, then tried again.

“Getting late, isn't it?”

“What you say, boy?”

“Getting late. You must be tired.”

“Darn it, don't you ever shut up?” I had spoken twice in two hours.

“Do they keep you here all night?” I have always found that an appeal to a man's selfish inclination to grumble works wonders.

“They would if they could, boy, damn their eyes, and if that damn fool Jed Brown don't get here soon I'll just lock you in and damn the consequences.” I knew this was not allowed by law; there had to be an attendant at all times, as a few too many prisoners had roasted to death in fires.

“Well, where is that Jed Brown, in God's name?” I asked, trying to sound sympathetic.

The answer came in the form of shouting and banging from outside. The doors burst open and there was Jed Brown—at least, I assumed it was him—leading two bruised and bloodied white men, both of them chained at the wrist.

“Two more outliers, Zachary!” he said. The men were detached one from the other and thrown into cells on either side of me. The doors clanged shut and Zachary, the old tobacco chewer, rattled his keys in the lock.

“You got 'em, sheriff!” he said, all sycophantic now. There was no more “damn fool Jed Brown.”

“Yep, I got 'em. Up by Monroe's farm, sleeping in a barn.”

“Deserter scum!” Zachary said, spitting again but this time missing his receptacle and making a sticky patch on the grimy wood floor.

“Get out of here, old man, and take that filthy mess with you!”

“Goodnight, Jed. Sleep tight!”

Zachary scuttled off to his lair, while Jed Brown strode around the jail taking off his gun belt, hanging his coat on a peg, checking the log book. He was a big man, way over six feet tall, broad in the shoulders and thick at the waist, his legs as strong as tree trunks. His thick, curly hair had turned the color of gunmetal, and in his fine set of whiskers there was more white than black. I guessed he was ten years my senior, maybe more.

He made a few notes in the log, scratched his head with the pen, and looked over at the cells.

“Well bless my soul, what have we here? A nigger in the woodpile, huh?” He laughed, a deep, booming laugh which somewhat mitigated the tone of his remark. I stood up, but made no reply.

“Where'd they find you, boy? With your hand in the chicken coop, stealing eggs?”

“No, sir,” I said, “I was taken prisoner in the woods.”

My educated accent took him by surprise, and he stepped up to take a closer look.

“What's your name?”

“Aaron Johnson, sir.”

“And what's the charge?”

“What's written in the book?”

“Vagrancy.”

“That's the usual charge, isn't it, when arresting a black man?”

He scratched his beard, and it made a crackling noise as he did so. “You steal something?”

“No, sir.”

“Kill anyone?”

“No, sir. I didn't get the chance.”

“Ah. So you were trying to.”

“I'd kill bounty hunters who sell free men into slavery, yes.”

He turned and went back to the desk, put his feet up, and appeared to fall asleep. I turned my attention to my fellow prisoners—poor, half-starved creatures, bloodied around their mouths, their faces bruised and grazed, who were huddling on the floor, whimpering. I could not see much; there was a single lamp on the sheriff's desk, and it cast a fitful light over the cells, enough to show their injuries but little more. From odd bits of torn, filthy material, I could guess that they were dressed in the remnants of Union uniforms.

One of them was nearer to me, lying against the bars that divided us, and I could easily reach out and touch him. He flinched at the contact, and looked up at me with hooded eyes. I gestured toward my beaker of water, and offered it to him. He looked around, saw that we were unobserved, and tried to grab it through the bars. There was not room for the whole vessel to pass through, but, if we both knelt, I could tip the brim of the beaker to his lips. He drank greedily, the water spilling down his throat. When I could feel that half the contents had gone, I pulled it away, and his lips kissed the empty air, hoping for more.

I would have repeated the performance with my other neighbor, but, as it turned out, our captor was not asleep.

“If they want a drink they only have to ask.”

His feet in their heavy boots dropped noisily to the floor. I said nothing, waiting to see how things developed. He walked over to a brass pot in the corner of the room.

“Any of you boys need to take a piss?”

We all said that we did.

“Well, wait your turn.” He arranged himself in front of the pot, his back to the cells, and I could only imagine, in the dim light, that he was hauling his cock out of his pants. The noise left little doubt as to what he was doing; it rang the metal vessel like a wet bell.

When he had finished, he shook himself off, stuffed himself away, and picked up the pot. He placed it on the floor in front of the first cell.

“Hope you ain't pee-shy,” he said to the soldier inside.

The poor bruised boy got painfully to his feet like an old man, bracing himself with his hands on his knees. His fingers were dirty and swollen, but he managed to unbutton himself and pull out a fair-sized prick. Even in the dim light, I could see that it was markedly cleaner than the rest of him. Holding it with one hand and supporting himself against the bars with the other, he maneuvered himself to a position where he might reasonably hope to reach the pot.

The first few drops hit the floor, but soon a steady stream was arcing into the pot. It didn't flow as fast as the sheriff's, but there was no lack of volume; the flow seemed to last forever. Judging by the acrid smell that tickled my nostrils, the soldier hadn't pissed in a while. The tone changed as the pot filled up, a queer ringing sound climbing the scale. I judged that, with two loads inside it, the pot was at least half full.

When the first soldier had finished pissing, the sheriff pushed the pot with his boot over to the other side of me, and the performance was repeated. My left-hand neighbor was in better shape than his comrade, and stood with less difficulty. The sheriff watched the performance like a hawk.

Turning to me, he said, “Now your turn, boy. We've saved the best till last.” His voice was low, and he licked his lips.

Unwilling to disappoint him, and needing to empty my bladder, I whipped out my dick—which was half hard—and pointed it through the bars, waiting for the pot to line up. The sheriff positioned it a good yard away.

“Think you can hit that?”

“Yeah.”

By alternately relaxing and clenching my muscles, I built up a good head of steam, so to speak, and sent the first
volley right over the pot onto the floor around the sheriff's boots.

“Whoa, boy! Steady, there.”

The stream settled, and, with a little aiming, I managed to hit the very center of the pot, to my immense satisfaction. The changing tone told me that it was nearly full.

“Looks like I got to go again myself,” the sheriff said—an obvious excuse for getting his big dick out. It was almost fully hard, and would be difficult to piss through. Nevertheless, just as my stream started to wane, he managed a couple of creditable squirts. The pot was full to the very brim. Neither of us put our dicks away.

“Now, ain't that pretty,” he said, stepping toward the bars. “I ain't never seen that before. A black one and a white one. And I do believe it's almost as big as mine.”

He stepped up to the bars, took both weapons in his hand, and measured them, tip to tail. His was larger, for the moment, but mine was catching up. The heat of his cock, the softness of the skin, and the firmness of his grasp were priming me nicely. I held on to the bars and pushed my hips forward, letting him set the pace. I still didn't know if he was friend or foe, and feared that he might wish me harm after he'd had his fun. But this was the best opportunity I'd yet found for making my escape.