In the hurricane season of late summer, the heat and humidity were something to fear. Even at midday, mosquitoes hung outside the screens on a miasmal air so moist and sweet that it might have come on a south wind out of the tropics.
That summer we had a young Mikasuki squaw who’d been thrown out by her band for consorting with the moonshiner Ed Brewer. She was not exclusively for his own use, it seems, because he snuck in to the Bend one day, tried to rent her to our coloreds. Sip Linsey was a pious darkie of the old-time religion and Frank Reese was still pining for Jane Straughter, so those two boys had little use for a beat-up aboriginal with advanced alcohol and hygienic problems.
When Hannah got wind of what was going on, she grabbed Brewer by one arm and swung him off the dock into the current. “Flung that sumbitch clean off the Bend!” Green boasted. “Cut his boat loose, too, while she was at it. Never so much as ast if he could swim!” And Hannah said, “Well, that is correct, I never give enough thought to his future. If that croc got to him, he might not of had one.” But Green had seen him grab hold of his skiff, and probably he’d dragged himself ashore farther downriver.
Hannah gave that wild girl a good wash and named her Susie. She taught her a few chores to pay her feed, along with as much Baptist instruction as a redskin knowing nothing of our tongue might get a handle on. But seeing her slip into the outhouse must have set Cox thinking about certain details of what was taking place behind that door because he was awaiting her when she came out. The way he told it at the table-he thought it was pretty comical-he grasped her wrists in one hand and with the other yanked up her old rag of a shift. Held her squirming up against him until the mosquitoes swarming her bare bottom made her weep, and pretty soon she gave up and lay down for him. “Couldn’t resist me,” Leslie said. Hannah said, “She ain’t nothin but a child and you ain’t nothin but a raper. Hang your head in shame.”
That afternoon Earl Harden showed up in his new launch. Never hailed the house, just dropped someone off quick without tying up. By the time I reached the porch, he was back out in mid-river idling his motor, greedy to see what might take place when E. J. Watson realized who that stranger was. Ever since he went to Key West to accuse me in that Tucker business, Earl would only look me in the eye when he could not avoid it, then smile so hard that when he turned, the smile got left behind. I honestly believe that if that feller hadn’t been so scared of me, he would have waylaid me and shot me in the back.
Earl was jolly as could be with white men, he worked hard at it, but teasing him about his bad attitude toward Henry Short was putting raw salt on a leech. I liked to tease him: he had niggers on the brain. I used that word, too, of course, used it casually like most men, Henry Short included. But men who hated blacks like Earl twisted a sneer into it, a stink, the way a cat twists out its crap, leaving that nasty little point at the back end.
Awaiting me, the figure on the dock stood still, arms folded on his chest. His silhouette was black against the river shine but I knew him at once. Those big gun butts jutted upward from his hips like horns.
Waller came to the door behind me, napkin tucked into his collar. “Jesus,” he whispered. Hannah, huffing up behind, stared from one face to another for a clue. In the kitchen, Frank rose from his beans and went out the back door and came around to the corner of the house, then stepped back quick, out of the line of fire. Still watching the front, the figure on the dock raised one hand toward the black man in a kind of greeting.
I knew much better than to draw my gun. I worked it up out of its shoulder holster, let it slide down into my coat sleeve, having practiced that trick often enough to know how to do it undetected.
“Drop it,” he said. This pistolero had drawn on me so quick that I had no choice. At the dangerous clatter of a loaded weapon on the pinewood porch, everyone jumped.
Dutchy was grinning and I grinned right back, lest he imagine I was paralyzed by those big guns of his. And there and then, out of bone craziness or love of life, he flipped both six-guns and sprang into the air in a backwards somersault, landing in time to catch his weapons neatly on the spin, all set to shoot. One barrel was pointed at my heart, the other covered the dropped revolver on the porch in case it had occurred to me to grab it up, which it had not.
Laughing, he dropped his guns loosely in their holsters and came forward. The others backed and filled like cattle in the doorway. Retrieving my weapon, he dumped the cartridges into his pocket, tossed it back to me. “Damn if it don’t feel dandy to be back. Home is where the heart is, that right, Frank?”
Reese had been grinning right along, Green Waller, too. These fools were tickled to death to see this swarthy little criminal who had cost us so much wasted work and a year’s pay, and they caught their fool Boss, who had sworn to take his life, kind of smiling, too.
“Glad to see me, Mister Ed? Aim to invite me in?”
“There’s no free food for gunslingers around here,” I barked. “You aim to stay, you better change those fancy duds, start working off that thousand gallons of good syrup you still owe us.”
“Same ol’ Mister Ed! Talkin rough to a sensitive young feller that might take a mind to spoil another thousand.” Still grinning, he ambled over to the bunkhouse, hunted up his old coveralls. He put them on over his holster belt and reappeared, delighted.
Dutchy gave me all that time to get the drop on him. I didn’t do it, and a good thing, too. He’d put away one of his guns, but the other, although hidden, was rigged butt forward on his left side, ready to be drawn by his right hand, as I knew from the fact that his left gallus hung loose and the left flap of his coveralls, too. This boy knew I knew and grinned. “Same ol’ Mister Ed!” said Dutchy Melville.
“There’s a law against concealed weapons in this country,” I reminded him. “Might have to make a citizen’s arrest.”
“Well, I know that, Mister Ed, bless your kind heart!” He glanced around the place, wary of ambush. “Who’s that in the house?”
“That’s the foreman, finishing his dinner.” Hannah Smith was awed by his keen hearing.
Lifting his hat, Dutchy greeted Hannah with a dandy bow-the first she had ever received without a doubt. Next, he saluted her hog reiver-“How do, Mr. Waller!” Green waved and smiled, nudging his woman, proud to be singled out by name. “And Frank, too!” That hard man raised both hands high and shook them in a single fist like that black champion Jack Johnson, who had whipped America’s “Great White Hope” back in July.
Standing there on his bandy legs in the hot sun of September, young Dutchy was set for anything that came his way. “Ol’ place lookin kind of run down, Mister Ed. But I reckon it’s as close to a good home as a poor outlaw boy could hope for so I sure am grateful for your hospitality.”
“You abused my hospitality. Don’t forget that because I won’t.” I had sworn a solemn oath this boy would die the next time he crossed my path, yet it seemed a great waste in a time of labor shortage to kill a man so full of ginger.
“Mister Ed, I won’t forget it and I don’t regret it cause you had it comin,” he answered cheerfully. “So I’ll just take my old job back as the foreman.”
I was dumbfounded. To feel so confident he would be welcomed! And in a way, of course, he was quite right; he had slipped past my guard. Maybe he knew that too much time had passed, that I had no real heart for revenge.
All this while, my foreman kept on with his eating, to demonstrate indifference to the visitor. When we came in, he looked up, sullen, interrupted in his chewing, and from the start, disdaining the other, he spoke only to me. Threatened by Melville’s dangerous glee, he instinctively disliked and feared him, while Melville understood in that same instant why the foreman had stayed inside. Each shifted his gaze slightly to one side, as dogs do, to avoid a tangle before everything was ready-before, that is, one had the other dead to rights.
Both dogs ignored my introduction, as if their acquaintance would be too short-lived to waste breath on civilities. In fact, Leslie belched when told the other’s name. “Ain’t this the little piece of shit that messed up all that syrup?” And Dutchy said, “Ain’t this the back-shootin sonofabitch whose sloppy mouth got you and Frank in so much trouble in north Florida?”
With everything spelled out so quick, they nodded together in acceptance of the duty to put the other one to death as soon as possible.
Dutchy helped himself to a hearty repast and went out into the field. Knowing his job from the year before, he pointedly ignored the foreman’s orders and got his work done any way he pleased, whistling away all afternoon. That whistling was brassy and aggressive, and it got on the foreman’s nerves just as intended. From the very start, Dutchy wanted Les to blow up and attack him, giving him his excuse to cut him down.
The tension gathered like rolled-up barbed wire. The next day was much the same. I was very glad Kate and the children were safe in Chokoloskee and relieved Lucius was gone, although I missed him: I guess he was the only son I ever missed.
I warned Les Cox that Dutchy Melville drew a gun a lot faster than most. “Faster’n Desperader Watson, from the sound of it,” Leslie sneered. He had sniffed out my wariness around Melville. “Hard to take that feller by surprise,” I said.
“I noticed.” Leslie yawned and stretched, not anxious exactly, just flexing his nerves. “But I ain’t noticed any eyes in the back of that boy’s head.” He took my silence for approval.
From the first, their enmity flickered like two snakes’ tongues, silently and without cease. Not wanting war before the crop was in, I forbade them to carry guns. “I need him for the harvest,” I told Dutchy. “Can’t have you using him for target practice.”
Dutchy said, “Mister Ed, I want my job back and he’s in the way.” The damned fool had forgotten all about that ruined syrup. Handing over his shooting irons, he held my eye by way of saying, I trust you, Mister Ed. And that trust ate at me, I won’t deny it.
Over the years, I have run across outlaws in the Territories and a lot more in Arkansas State Prison who would not hesitate to kill when that seemed necessary, but unless they were young or kind of loco, they never made too much of it-neither claimed it nor excused it. Belle’s son Eddie Reed was one of these, a hellion, arsonist, and robber but no killer until someone tampered with his tight-wound spring. Dutchy Melville was another. In a robbery, Dutchy had murdered a fine lawman, Clarence Till, so I can’t honestly say he was good-hearted, but he had fun in him and folks liked him.
Cox was different. One way or another, he had come by a sick taste for taking life. By this I mean, a need came over him. Major Will Coulter at Edgefield was this same cold breed: Sometimes it gets so us ol’ boys might feel like killin us a nigger. Though Coulter had been speaking about blacks, he could probably have made do with any color. Needed to take life from time to time as other men might need a woman, assuring himself that the man sprawled bloody had it coming; if he was not guilty, then “inferior” would have to do.
I never saw Les easy around anyone outside his clan. Never curious about others, let alone sympathetic. Never listened and had nothing to tell except on the subject of himself. His concern with people all came down to how much deference they paid him even if he had to scare and bully them to get it, yet he felt left out and did not know how to find his way back in-a very bad feeling, as I remembered from Clouds Creek. Perhaps he dreaded his own isolation, not understanding it, and perhaps it was his loneliness that made him dangerous. Perhaps he had to strike something to feel in touch with life, to make sure that he himself was really there.
After the first or second killing, there is nothing much to stop a man from the third and fourth and fifth. Because it is too late to go back-too late for redemption-one may as well go forward, though the path of one’s lost life grows dim like the passage of an unknown animal through the high reeds. Swamp water fills the disappearing track and scent disintegrates in the tall growth and in a little, the faint smudge of disturbance in the morning dew is gone.
Sometimes I wonder what Will’s boy might have become if circumstances had been different, if something like that random mule hoof had not splayed a nerve, laid bare that streak in him. He might have gone off to the Major Leagues and found the notoriety he needed, reserving his bean-balls for those days when he indulged his deep urge to do harm.
For men of criminal persuasion, notoriety is crucial; ill fame is sought as a dark honor. When we were in Duval County jail, a newspaper reference to “the handsome young murder suspect Leslie Cox” was the only detail that boy gave a damn about. He would snatch away that paper just to see his name in print, read it over and over. In his utter lack of knowledge of himself, he had lost restraint in everything he did, like a rabid dog that has left behind the known traits of its species to become some mad lone creature.
In Arkansas Prison, I knew a backwoods murderer-scraggy feller with gat teeth and a long nose bursting with black hair. This man opined that a first killing was a first taste of manhood, along with that first naked rassle with mother or sister. Had ’em both, he’d cackle in that rooster voice, so I guess he knew what he was talking about.