The real question was not what I expected of myself but what my enemy expected of me. The man in the center of the line was probably the leader. I heard him give a muffled command, then the two men on either side of him began moving out farther and farther from him. My guess was they had already concluded I would either run or try to swim upstream or downstream, and they had come to this conclusion because that was what they would have done.
What was it they did not expect me to do? When we say someone will run like a rabbit, we are usually speaking derogatorily and not examining the content of our rhetoric. A cottontail rabbit does not run without a destination; he runs in a circle that leads him back to his starting place. Then he hides, leaving his pursuers to chase a scent that serves only to confound them.
I doubted if the cleaners expected me to go back to the coulee, the place where I had dropped out of sight and entered the river basin. But that was exactly what I did, running through the shallows, splashing up onto the mudflat to a high place among the trees where I could look out on the slope that led into the watershed. I lay on my stomach, rain dripping from the overhang on my back and head, and watched the leader of the five men come down the dip in the land that would give him access to cover and a chance to reconnoiter the area.
He paused, evidently confident that I was not in immediate proximity to him. He looked to the left and to the right, scanning the trees, checking to see where his men had stationed themselves. I propped my elbows in the dirt and aimed the .45 at his rib cage with both hands, allowing for the climbing effect of the recoil, and tightened my finger inside the trigger guard. Surprise time, motherfucker.
“Iberia Parish sheriff’s detective! Throw away your weapon and place your hands on your head,” I said.
He jerked around just as a pool of yellow electricity flared inside a cloud. His expression was like that of a cowled monk in a Reformationist painting caught in an iniquitous act. In that instant I also saw his eyes, and I knew he had entered the brief interior monologue with himself that I call “the moment.” Inside the moment, which is usually not longer in duration than two or three seconds, you choose either to give it up or roll the dice. His face looked grainy and full of lumps, as though insects had fed on it. His eyes were lustrous and black, his mouth slightly parted, as though he were oxygenating his blood. Rain slid down his brow and over his eyes, but he never blinked.
“You’re having impure thoughts, podna,” I said. “They’re about to get you wasted. Don’t let that happen.”
Almost as though he wished to bring a touch of class to his moment on the edge of the abyss, his mouth softened with a lackadaisical grin. He swung the muzzle of a cut-down pistol-grip pump shotgun toward me. I fired twice, my muzzle flash spearing into the dark, the two ejected shell casings tinkling somewhere off to my right. I didn’t think the second round had found a target, but the first one did. The hooded man took it under the armpit, and I suspected the hollow-point round had flattened on bone and torn up through the lungs and perhaps exited through the far shoulder. Regardless, his knees buckled, and blood spewed from his mouth, and his jaw jacked loose when his knees struck the ground. When I pulled his shotgun out from under him, I realized he was both a taller and heavier man than I had thought.
I crawled back into the trees, dragging the shotgun with me, and opened my mouth to clear my ears. I couldn’t see the other four men, but I knew I had to turn the situation around on them and get out of the defensive position I was in. They were inside the tree line now, on either side of me, and I had a swollen river at my back and an empty field with little cover in front of me. I sat up on the slope and slipped the pump on the shotgun far enough back so I could be sure there was a shell in the chamber. It was a Remington, and if the sportsman’s plug was removed, there were probably five shells in the gun, each probably loaded with double-aught buckshot.
One bad guy down and four to go, I thought. The odds weren’t the best. But what had been the odds for the man I had just shot and killed? Before he died, he must have believed his day’s work was almost at an end and soon he would be enjoying a steak and fried potatoes and a mug of beer, or filling his mouth with a woman’s breasts, or snarfing up a few lines in a French Quarter apartment above a lichen-stained courtyard whose flowers told him the season was unending, as was his life and the pleasures it brought him.
I got to my feet and, like our heavy-browed, thick-armed, shoulder-slumped ancestor, headed along the water’s edge toward the southern horizon, the .45 stuck down in my belt, my dead enemy’s weapon in my hands, my throat tight with a thirst of such intensity it seemed to belong to someone else.
CHAPTER
17
THE TWO MEN to my south had sought cover when they heard me fire. I was sure they could distinguish the difference between the report of a pistol and a shotgun, and by now they had concluded their leader had made a serious mistake in judgment and had taken himself off the board. I hoped the loss of their leader would cause them to cut and run, but I knew better. They were obviously professionals, probably with military or mercenary backgrounds, and if the crop duster I had seen was actually part of their operation, they had radio communication with people who had far more authority and power than the man I had just killed.
Don’t try to figure it out, I told myself. Just get through this afternoon. The storm will pass, the sun will break out of the clouds, and these men will go back under their rocks. At least that is what I told myself.
I strained my eyes against the darkness. The undergrowth was shiny with rainwater, the canopy dripping. I could see no movement among the trees. Nor could I hear any sounds that didn’t belong in a drenched woods. Which meant that perhaps, with good luck, the two men to my north had gone to ground and had not decided on a plan. I stood up behind a water oak and studied the underbrush and the riverbank and the slash pines and the gum trees and the willows and the direction the wind was blowing and the patterns it created in the leaves and pine branches. I remembered how the wind had been my friend years ago when it swept through the elephant grass in a tropical country and how it redefined the shapes of the trees on a rubber plantation; I remembered it swelling inside the canopy of a rain forest where the birds had gone silent and where the shadows that did not move abruptly came into focus and caused your breath to seize in your chest.
But I saw nothing except the foliage of a riparian environment that for me had become a black-green tiger cage.
I looked to the south again and saw something that instilled in me more fear than even the two men who were probably crouched in the undergrowth. At the mouth of the river, where it widened into a fan and met a saltwater bay, I saw the same double-decker I had seen on Bayou Teche. I saw its twin scrolled stacks, its scrubbed finish, its rows of passenger cabins, its pilothouse, and the water cascading off the paddles of its great steam-powered wheel, all of it caught inside a column of translucence that looked more like ether than light. I knew that what I was watching was not a delusion, and I knew what the paddle wheeler represented and who the crew and passengers were and why all of them were here, beckoning at me, their lips moving without sound, saying, It’s time.
I ducked back behind the trunk of the tree, my chest quivering, my clothes all at once cold, as though my body were no longer capable of generating enough heat to warm the soaked fabric. I peered around the tree and in the distance saw only the blackness of the sky. The paddle wheeler was not in sight, but I heard a bush shake and raindrops scatter on the ground and I knew my adversaries were still with me. I pressed my spine against the tree trunk, holding the pump shotgun straight up in front of me like a human exclamation mark, a rock in my left hand.
“You two guys try to follow my logic,” I said. “Your leader was probably the smartest guy among you, but he got himself smoked because he assumed other people think the same way he did. So where does that leave you? Before it’s over, you’ll probably cool me out. But I’m going to get at least two of y’all before I go down, or m
aybe three, or maybe all of you. You wonder why that is? It’s because I’m old and I dread the thought of dying in a bed, and I get off splattering the grits of guys like you.”
I flung the rock in a high arc so that it fell through the canopy and landed on a solid spot outside the tree line, indicating that perhaps I had bolted from behind the water oak and was coming up hard on their flank, on the high ground, the sawed-off twelve-gauge pump about to spray buckshot all over their position.
If that was their conclusion, they were only half wrong. I ran through the trees like a broken-field quarterback, crashing over the undergrowth, weaving through the tree trunks directly at them. One man rose from a pool of water where he was crouched and began firing with a semiautomatic rifle on a wire stock. But the electricity in the clouds had died, and the stand of trees was almost totally dark; I doubted if he had a clear idea where I was. I heard a round blow bark out of a gum tree, and I felt wood splinters sting the side of my face, but I was already raising the shotgun in front of me and not thinking about anything other than killing the man whose gun had jammed and who was trying to knock a shell casing loose from his rifle bolt with his hand.
He twisted his body away from me when I squeezed the trigger, holding out his palm in a pushing position, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. I saw his fingers fly loose from his hand as though they had been snipped off with shears. I ejected the spent shell and jacked another one into the chamber, then realized that my adrenaline-fed confidence had been an illusion.
The second man had positioned himself behind the root-ball of a downed tree by the water’s edge, perhaps even sacrificing his friend so he could get me in his sights. I tried to swing the twelve-gauge toward him and lay down a masking shot before he let off the AR-15 he had raised to his shoulder. But I tripped on a log and tumbled down an embankment into a cluster of palmettos, the shotgun skittering down with me. The man with the AR-15 let off four rounds, but they were all high, clattering away in the trees like the sound of wood blocks falling down a staircase. I picked up the shotgun with both hands and, without aiming, fired at the shooter. But the barrel had become clotted with mud or clay. It exploded in a red-and-yellow balloon, the muzzle swelling into the deformed shape of a split sausage. I dropped the shotgun to the ground and reached into my belt for my .45, except I knew that this time my appointment in Samarra had come round at last.
I heard the sound of a car horn blowing and tires spinning on grass and mud. The shooter continued to hold the stock of his rifle against his shoulder, but he dissolved back into the darkness so quickly I had to blink to make sure my vision hadn’t failed me. I got to one knee with the .45 and scanned the trees and the undergrowth but could see no sign of him.
“Dave, are you in there?” I heard Clete shout.
I got up and started running up the embankment through the trees. I burst through the undergrowth and ran between two thick slash pines that whipped back into my face, then saw Clete behind the wheel of his Caddy, his window down, rain blowing inside, his porkpie hat clamped down on his brow. He looked like a giant albino ape hunched between the seat and the wheel. “What the hell is going on in there?” he said.
I pulled open the passenger door and piled inside. “I killed one guy and blew the hand off another. Four guys, including the wounded one, are still in there. Where’s your cell phone?”
“In the glove box. Who are these guys?”
“I don’t know. Cleaners, maybe. Vidor Perkins is dead. Get moving.”
He started to accelerate, but he was still looking at me. “You capped Perkins?”
“No, they did. They were shooting at me. Come on, Clete. Step on it. We’ll try to box them in.”
“You mean cleaners like government guys?”
“I didn’t say that. Will you get us out of here?”
“They’re already boxed. Let’s call the locals and pot them as they come out of the bush.”
“You don’t listen. You never listen. Your head is wrapped with iron plate,” I said.
I rolled down my window and opened up on the tree line, hoping to drive back anyone who was trying to set up on us.
“You don’t have to be so emotional about it,” Clete said. He mashed down on the accelerator, fishtailing two swampy tire tracks past the Acadian cottage.
I looked through the back window at the tree line but couldn’t see anyone emerging from it. I had the cell phone in my hand and dialed 911. There was no service. “What have you got on you?” I asked.
“Just my piece.”
“We’re going to be okay,” I said. “They’ve got the river at their back, and we’re between them and their vehicles. We can pin them down until somebody sees us and calls in a 911.”
“That van and the white car are theirs?”
“Yeah, Perkins’s body is inside the van.”
“You’re sure you killed somebody down there on the river?”
I looked at him and didn’t answer.
“You saw him close up?” he said.
“He took it through the lungs. He went down like a sack of horseshoes. You think I’m making this up?”
Something caught his attention. I looked through the windshield but didn’t see anything.
“At nine o’clock. They cut their lights,” he said.
To the left, angling off the paved road into the field, the grass flattening under their bumpers, were two black SUVs. They were neither official vehicles nor the vehicles of choice for people in this area, most of whom were poor. The SUVs divided in the field, creating a pincer movement, trying to seal us off from the road. In the dash light, the raindrops on Clete’s face looked like beads of water on a pumpkin.
“I don’t get this,” he said. “We were dealing with a bunch of local shitheads. Now we’ve got an army coming down on us. What do you want to do?”
He waited. I didn’t want to say what I had to say. “Cut your lights.”
“They’ve already seen us. That doesn’t solve the problem. Tell me what you want to do.”
“They’re behind and in front of us. Head south on the road. We’ll use the phone at the crossroads and then come back. Do it, Cletus. We’re running out of options.”
He stared hard at me, sweat and raindrops running out of his hair. “They’re gonna skate,” he said.
“I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“Forget sorry. We’re sending a real bad message to these guys, like they can spit in our mouths any time they want.”
“We’ll nail them later.”
“I’ve got a truck flare under the seat. We can set fire to the van. You said Perkins is in there?”
“It’s what they want, Clete. We’ll never get out of the field. Nobody will know what happened to us, and these guys will be around to piss on our graves.”
He gazed at me for a long time, fighting with conclusions he didn’t want to accept, steering with one hand. Then he angled toward the south, exhaling, depressing the accelerator. In the silence I could hear the grass raking under the Caddy’s frame. “How’d you know where I was?” I asked.
“I went to that filling station at the crossroads. The clerk in there said he’d talked to you.” The Caddy thumped onto the asphalt. Clete floored the accelerator, glancing in the rearview mirror at the same time. “Try the cell again.”
“No service.”
The flooded fields on either side of the road were flying past us. “We’re gonna get these guys, we’re gonna get these guys, we’re gonna get these guys,” he said.
I was used up and too tired to offer any support for his fantasies about revenge. My adrenaline-fed high had gone the way all dry drunks come and go, like a brief revisit to the psychological and moral insanity that had constituted my life when the cathedral I entered every afternoon was an empty New Orleans saloon with a long mahogany bar at the end of which a solitary corked bottle of charcoal-filter whiskey and a shot glass and a longneck Jax waited for me. Inside the amber radiance filtering through the oak trees o
utside, I was a faithful acolyte and was always respectful of the spirits that lived in the corked bottle and the power and the light I could acquire by simply tilting a small glass to my lips.
For me, unslaked bloodlust was no easier to deal with than unslaked sexual desire or a thirst for whiskey that at one time was so great I would swallow a razor blade to satisfy it. My skin was hot, my palms as stiff and dry as cardboard. I wanted to return to the field with as much ordnance as I could get my hands on and blow our hooded adversaries into a bloody mist. But I knew how things were going to play out. The men who had killed Vidor Perkins and who had tried to kill me had sanction. Perhaps it didn’t come from local or state officials, but a group as well organized and trained and financed as this one was not born in a vacuum. The question was whom did they serve.
We pulled into the filling station at the crossroads and called the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department. My report on the gun battle up the road and the death of Vidor Perkins obviously seemed surreal and was probably more than the dispatcher could assimilate. I had to keep repeating who and where I was. In the background I could hear a half-dozen dispatchers trying to talk over one another. There were obviously power outages and downed electrical wires in people’s yards and automobile accidents all over the parish. A large-scale shots-fired called in by a police officer from another parish who said he’d just killed a man and wanted backup at the scene he had fled probably sounded like the ravings of a lunatic.