SOME TIME IN MARCH, Ralph Skadlock had been hired by a Louisiana state legislator to steal a specially engraved and gold-inlaid Parker shotgun from the home of a plantation owner in Braithwaite. The day after he stole it, he pulled the double out of its gun bag and looked it over while sitting in his mildewed front parlor. The sidelocks showed bird dogs jumping a covey of quail, and he ran a sooty fingertip over the razor-sharp checkering on the swirling walnut stocks. He noted how it snapped shut, as though barrels and receiver suddenly became one piece of metal through the cold welding of expert craftsmanship. Still, to him, the piece was ridiculous. A gun was a wrench or a hammer. It did a job.
The next day he rode horseback to the depot and took the southbound to the Baton Rouge station, where he handed a smudged cardboard box to a corpulent, florid man dressed in a tailored suit.
“I think you’ll be happy with this here item,” Ralph told him.
The legislator gave him a look, paid him, and turned away without a word. Ralph held on to the envelope and watched him walk out into the sunlight, knowing for a fact that this fool couldn’t hit a quail exploding out of a dewberry bush to save his soul and probably not even a dove sitting on a branch outside his bedroom window. But he could show off the gun to men gathered in his parlor for drinks, the weapon suggesting how much better he was than they.
Skadlock went home and brooded about their meeting, how the man’s little sharp eyes looked at him, how he’d refused to give him a single word. He remembered the envelope coming over with a nasty flick of the wrist. Men had gotten killed for such manners.
A week later he crossed a long, apple-green lawn and climbed through the window of a many-columned house northeast of Baton Rouge. He stood under a high ceiling and smelled the furniture oil, the floor wax, the fresh paint of the place. The gun was conspicuously displayed in a leaded-glass case, and he took it, fading back out into the night, knowing that when the theft was discovered, the legislator wouldn’t report it, wouldn’t send any lawman against Ralph Skadlock, who might tell who had paid him to take the gun in the first place, along with a few other items he’d been hired to steal in the past. He walked two miles to a highway and crossed it into a stand of sycamores where his horse was tied. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this double thieving before. On the long ride back, he made a mental list of all the haughty, weak men he could revisit, taking back animals, clocks, jewelry. It was then that Acy White came to mind.
HE AND BILLSY were looking the gun over the next day in the big kitchen house, debating where they could sell it, when they heard a spatula hit the floor. Their mother, cooking breakfast, had slumped down on the floor planks with a wheeze, and they went and stood over her, nudging her arms with their brogans and then kneeling down and trying to talk her upright. Ninga would have none of it. One eye rolled toward the window and the other toward the door, signals that everything in her had suddenly quit, muscles turned loose, breaths escaped, thought gone out like a wick. After ten minutes of staring and cajoling, the men understood that she was dead, but could not imagine what might happen now. A vast emptiness grew up around them, and Billsy stood to turn off the aromatic stove, not sure which way to twist the valve handle.
They laid her out straight on the floor, so she would cool in a decent posture, and stood around outside the kitchen eating slices of white bread, wondering what to do next. Neither of them had been to a family funeral, and they couldn’t remember what had been done to their father after his still had exploded when they were four and five years old. They weren’t sure where any relatives lived over in Arkansas, as the clan tended to move around.
There was a magnolia-haunted graveyard a hundred yards to the rear of the mansion bearing several humpbacked markers and a stone cross crenellated with lichen. The men scratched out a vacant space at the rear of the highborn dead and dug her hole. Wrapping her in her own quilts, they set her in the ground and covered her up, then stood looking down at the soppy mound. Ralph felt a thickness in his throat he thought might be some words coming up, but he didn’t say anything. No one in the family had ever read a Bible or stepped foot in a church one time, and both men were too primitively formed to deal even in the clichés of Christianity, having no more notion of a hereafter or its price of admission than lizards stunned asleep in the noon sun.
Billsy looked around at the other weed-wracked headstones bearing inscriptions in French. “She needs her a marker.”
Ralph looked up. “Like what?”
“Just a second.” He turned back to the kitchen house. Ralph walked the dirt down around the edge of the grave until his brother returned holding a stamped skillet with a long handle. “This here’s the ticket.”
Ralph took it from him, turned it front and back several times as if he were inspecting it for purchase, then stuck the handle in the earth at the head of the grave. “That there about says it, all right.”
THEY ATE potted meat and sardines, then rode several miles toward a ferry landing upriver. Turning onto a road leading to the water, they rode against automobiles coming off the boat. Near the bank they reached a roughboard roadhouse fronting three mildewed tourist cabins strung out along a raw red ditch. Upstairs, the dark, low-ceilinged bar served skin-peeling moonshine in jelly glasses, and after an hour of it they both were ready for whores.
Ralph leaned over the counter and put a hand on the ample arm of the barmaid. “Is Suzy servin’ tonight?”
She fixed a lead ball eye on him. “Ruttin’ season, is it?”
“Is she still three dollars?”
“Ralph, a good-lookin’ man like you, I’m surprised you ain’t married.”
“Costs more than three dollars. Is she seein’ fellers?”
The barmaid put a finger in an ear and scratched. “In cabin two, at the back.” She slid her gaze past Ralph’s dark bulk to round-shouldered Billsy, who’d been here dozens of times but was still shy about it. “You want a good pokin’?”
“I reckon so.”
“Who you want?”
Billsy thought for a moment. “This time I want a gal with teeth.”
THE DOOR to cabin two swung open to reveal Suzy Kathell, long-waisted and long-faced, fifty years old with orange hair. Swaying in a lime green negligee, she held a drink and a cigarette in one hand and tugged him into the light with the other. “Hello, opportunity,” she said, and laughed like a horse. “How the hell you doin’?”
Ralph stared at her bodice. “All right.”
“How’s your bashful brother?”
“He’s all right, I reckon.”
“Is your mother still kickin’?”
“Naw. She died.”
“She did? When was that?”
“This morning.”
She turned her head at an angle. “Well, damn it to hell, you need some cheerin’ up,” she said, shucking her negligee.
Ralph was near senseless from the moonshine, and it took a while for the woman to get finished with him. After it was over, he said, “Would you come live with me on salary?”
She gave his face a playful slap. “Hell, that almost sounds like a proposal. Or will I have to do Billsy too?” She guffawed at this, blowing smoke in his face.
“Do us or not, we need a woman out at the place.”
Suzy Kathell took a sizzling drag on her Picayune. “Lambchops, I don’t think you can afford help like me. Plus I done tried domestic bliss before and it didn’t work out. I like my fancy drawers and my automobile I can drive anywhere I want. You got a automobile out at your place?”
Ralph admitted that he didn’t even have a road.
She gave his stubbly cheek an enormous pinch. “Sweetie, you straight in the back, you got all your teeth, and you got that scary look that drives dumb women off their nut. You look around good and you’ll have that old cookstove hot in no time. Now if you’ll put your clothes on and excuse me, I got to call my next case.”
THE BROTHERS SAT in the bar and drank from the same jar of shine. “I think my eyeballs is switched sockets,” Billsy said.
Ralph reached over and jerked a button off his brother’s shirt pocket and threw it at him. “Wake up and listen.”
Billsy looked stricken. “Who’s gonna sew that son of a bitch back on?”
“How much is that racehorse worth you took over in Carencro?”
“I got no idea. I think they said a thousand dollars.”
“That LeGrange man paid you to take it?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you grab it back?”
“Hell no, that black devil bit me six times. It was like dancing with a wolverine evertime I fooled with him.”
“But you could just steal it back, and he wouldn’t say nothin’ because it’s stole by him in the first place.”
“Then what, sell it?”
“Yeah. Back to him.”
“That’s crazy. Who’d buy something that was his in the first place?”
“That’s the beauty of it. It never was his.”
Billsy took a sip, hoping the drink would clear his head. “Why not just blackmail the son of a bitch?”
“There’s something about havin’ that physical thing in your own hands. Something you want that somebody else could wind up with. That’s what drives ’em up a wall.”
“Well, I ain’t going after that horse. I couldn’t sleep for a month after that job. Thought I had rabies.”
“Come on.” Ralph batted him on the shoulder, knocking off his fedora.
Billsy bent down to pick it up. “You want to resteal something, you ought to think about that kid.”
The chair under Ralph cracked its knuckles. “I done thought about it. Just don’t know how to make that deal work.”
“That job was good money.”
Ralph bent over the table and took another drink. He spread his arms out onto its surface as though it were a giant wheel he was trying to stop from turning. “That job cost me my dog.”
Billsy straightened up and composed himself, as if he knew he had to be careful. “That was some dog.”
“I took a step, that dog took a step. We’d sit out in the woods, he’d come up and bite the flies out the air if they was buzzin’ too close to my head. He’d eat bees before they got a chance to sting me.”
“He was the only pureblood in the family.”
“Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and look around the bed. If the moon was in the window I’d see old Satan’s big eyes in the room lookin’ my way, kind of the color of pine sap, keeping watch on me.”
“I remember him killin’ that pit bull that come at you.”
“That Cincinnati son of a bitch,” Ralph mumbled into the table. “How many policemen you reckon they got in Cincinnati?”
Billsy squinted over at the barmaid, who was wiping glasses with her shirttail. “I’d bet a thousand. They got paved streets and automobiles. Telephones on ever street corner.”
“Damn telephones. If it wasn’t for them, a man could get away with most anything.”
The barmaid called over. “If he’s about to puke, haul his ass outside.”
Billsy looked around for the voice. “He ain’t sick. He’s my brother.”
She didn’t laugh. “Billsy, you drunker’n a rat ridin’ a ceilin’ fan. If he pops off, you got to clean it up.”
“Aw, he’s all right. Give us another drink.” He felt his shirt pockets. “And we out of cigarettes.”
“Don’t sell ’em.”
“Aw, sweet thing, you don’t want us to smoke in here? Scared it’ll make you smell worse than you do?”
The barmaid spat in a glass and rubbed it hard. “You’ll smoke enough after you’re dead,” she told him.
THE NEXT MORNING they woke up and stumbled around in the sunshine outside the big house trying to detoxify, hungry as refugees, smelly and stunned with headache. Ralph fired a big heater in the house and warmed up water for a bath in the galvanized tub. After, he found some tins of sardines in the cupboard and a block of moldy cheese, and at table his head began to clear.
“Tell you what,” he said to Billsy, who was seated across from him in the kitchen with his shirt off, little horns of hair rising from his shoulders. “You stay here and tend the still and keep an eye on things. I’ll go up the country and check out that kid.”
“Leave me money for some eats.”
“All right. That bundle of shingles we fished out the river you could nail up on the roof. It leaks pretty bad.”
“You never complained before. Said it sounded like a waterfall in your sleep.”
“Well, we never found them shingles before, did we? Everything’s getting slimy with mold and the floor’s warped up.”
“I’ll take a look at it.” Billsy pinched up a sardine out of the tin and ate it, sucking his fingers.
“I’ll pack my glad rags. Them light wool pants we got from that laundry in Scotlandville. White shirts and a string tie.”
“Scrape the horse shit off your shoes.”
“I’ll use them new brown boots we got out that house in McComb.”
“Whoa. Nobody’ll know you.”
THEY RODE to the little station in Fault, and Billsy took both horses back. In two days, Ralph was walking the neighborhoods of Graysoner, Kentucky, his thumbs under his suspenders as if he owned the place. It was after nine a.m., when most men were at work, most women busy getting the day’s shopping done before the heat set in. He’d spent an hour down at the farrier’s, getting the information he needed from the old-timers hanging around the forge who told about the trails of ten or fifteen years before, when the automobile had been a thing unknown. He listened to what they said about the hatchet-back ridge south of town and the passes that threaded over it. The next day he walked down the alley behind Acy White’s house and saw what looked like a hired girl in poor clothes and the child rolling a ball in the short grass. When he passed the fence, he tipped his hat and smiled as best he could. The woman, robust-looking with a narrow back straight as a kitchen chair, smiled back at him, and he moved down the street. “Well, now,” he said to himself. “Gray eyes.”
Skadlock went down to a hotel where steamboat men stayed and washed up in the restroom at the end of the hall. He slicked his hair back with oil and put on a fresh shirt. He got a haircut in the shop in the lobby and passed small talk, gradually sliding the conversation around to the woman who worked in the middle of the block on Bonner Alley. He didn’t want to use Acy White’s name. Ralph understood that local barbers knew everything in a small town since chitchat was their stock-in-trade, more so than bartenders and whores. The barber snipped his scissors three times in the air and looked into the middle distance. “That gal lives somewhere down the hill in Ditch Street. I’ve seen her walking that way after seven when she’s finished up at Mr. White’s house. Damned if that ain’t a place for the rats. The tannery leaves its slops out in the canal, and they’re all over in there, up and down.”
“She’s married to that foreman at the tannery, ain’t she?” Skadlock held up his boot and pretended to look at it.
“If she is, I don’t know it. Mr. White says she lives alone in one of those red tarpaper shacks this side of the boiler house.”
Realizing that his hair was being cut by the only barber in town, he changed the subject. “You know, I ate in a café the other day that put sugar in its cornbread.”
The barber quickened to the comment. “I know it. I guess somebody in New York thought it was a good idea. Me, I like the old pie-shaped cornbread with bits of crackling in it, salty as sweat.”
“Yessir. How about dodgers?”
The barber spoke solemnly for five minutes about his grandmother’s corn dodgers and blackberry jelly while Skadlock figured the schedule for the rest of the day.
FROM WHERE HE STOOD between two willow saplings half a block to the north, he saw her leave the backyard gate and enter the alley. He slipped out onto the sidewalk and affected a lazy saunter down the hill in the direction of Ditch Street and soon heard her come up behind him. He imagined she’d want to hurry home and put her feet up after working for the rich folks all day. When she came alongside, he pretended to be startled. “Hey,” he said. “I saw you somewheres today, didn’t I?” Her face was fairly narrow, her chin small, but a tough smartness hid deep in those pale eyes.
She gave him a quick glance, the kind of look she’d normally give a big strange dog, but she slowed down. “I was out behind the house where I work, and you was traipsin’ up the alley.”
“That’s right. You was playin’ ball with a kid had too much clothes on for this heat.”
She began to match his gait. “Ain’t that the truth. Missus ain’t happy less she’s got a week’s salary on that kid’s back mornin’, noon, and night.”
“You her nursemaid or something?”
Vessy raised her chin a bit. “I’m rightly the cook. But I watch the girl some.”
Skadlock stopped walking. “Cook, you say. You cook everday?”
“Yeah. I believe that’s what a cook does. It’s what I’m cut out for, anyway.” They started out again down the hill, walking slower. “You in town lookin’ for work? I heard some old boys say they heard the tannery’s hiring.”
He shook his head. “Naw. I just come to buy somethin’ for one price and sell it for another.” He practiced a smile on her.
What she saw was on the border of frightening, but she ignored his expression. “Like a horse trader.”
“Somethin’ like.”
“Well, my brother, when he was alive, he traded in mules and always went barefoot.” She gave him a longer look, noted his boots.
“I usually trade to advantage,” he told her.
He walked with her to the start of Ditch Street, a narrow lane of greasy dirt shooting off from the cobbles of the respectable street they’d come down. “So long, miss. It is ‘miss,’ ain’t it?”
“Yep,” she said ruefully. “Miss. Or maybe ‘missed.’”
HE LAY ON his single bed that night and looked at the ceiling, sipping from a pint of his own white-hot stock and thinking where he might run into her again. He was hungry and tired of the food he’d brought from home, bread he could drive tacks with and cheese that smelled like feet. Longing suddenly for his mother’s skillet-fried marsh hen with garlic, he was stunned by the thought that she would never cook for him and Billsy again. “Well, damn,” he said to the ceiling. Ralph never felt sentimental about one thing in his life, but at the present moment he felt heart pangs when he remembered the old woman pushing around a cut-up bird in a smoking skillet. He wondered long why she did it.
The next afternoon he met Vessy at the head of Ditch Street and spoke with her for another ten minutes. He noticed powder stuck to the sweat on her face and thought he detected the smell of violets or Sen-Sen. Later that night he showed up at her place, where they sat on her teetering porch in dry-rotted wicker chairs. They talked for an hour or so before he offered her a pour out of his flask. She sniffed at the inch of liquid in her cloudy water glass, then took it all down in a slug. “All fire and no ash,” she said approvingly. “Sure ain’t no singlings.”
“I figured a east Kentucky gal would know a good sip.”
She looked at him. “What exactly you do for a livin’ there, Ralph?”
“Oh, people hire me out to do things. Find things. Make things.”
“I bet some of them things flow in a bottle.”
“Could be.” He poured her another sip, and with this, she took her time, staring at him over the glass.
THE THIRD DAY was Saturday. That night he took her to a café and they each ate a plate of chops and vegetables. Walking back to her place, he asked about the child and she told him what she knew. They drank a pint between them sitting at the rough wood table next to her bed, and he leaned over and gave her a lasting kiss that she took as though it were a long-awaited letter from the mailman. Then she said, “Well, Mr. Ralph, that’s all right, but just to get things straight, you can kiss on me all you want, but I ain’t spreadin’ my legs for no man. I seen too many left with a big belly watchin’ a feller’s back walkin’ away.”
He lit a cigarette and looked past her at the bed, then he kissed her again as if he liked the taste of it. He straightened up in his chair and gave her his cigarette and watched her take a drag. “All right. You tell me how you think they got that little girl.”
“It’s somebody else’s, I know that much. Probably hired somebody to steal her away from her parents.” Her eyes narrowed. “You a detective or something?”
“No,” he said. “I’m the man got paid a thousand bucks to steal her.”
Vessy gave him back the cigarette and reached for the bottle. “Well, ain’t you a jack-in-the-box.” Her mouth formed a straight line. “What you want now?”
“I aim to steal her back.”
She stopped before taking a drink. “Excuse me, but that don’t seem too bright. The sheriff’s in Acy’s poker club.”
He pointed a finger up the hill to Lilac Street. “They can’t report me, not without admittin’ to a crime themselves. And I’ll sell that kid right back to them again, but this time for a cool two thousand.” He got up and put the cigarette in the trash burner, then turned to look at her. “Could you use five hundred of it?”
She glanced rapidly around her shack, every surface jaundiced in the kerosene light, as if she might never see it again. “What I got to do?”
“Can you ride a horse?”
She made a face. “What you think? I was raised ridin’ a mule to school, all five grades, then I come home to plow till dark.”
“I need you to help with the girl down to my place in Louisiana.”
She stuck a tongue in her jaw and thought about this. “And then what?”
He was not used to smiling, but smiled now and straightened his back the way a gambler with the winning hand does before he lays down his cards. “Sweetness, then you can do whatever the hell you want.”
HE STAYED at her place talking with her long after the streets were empty. The next day he laid low at the hotel. The following night, he walked over to Ditch Street, ignoring the aromatic fog rising from the steaming runnels flowing downhill from the tannery. She let him in and told him at once that Tuesday Acy would be away from the house early for sure, and that Mrs. White was leaving on the morning boat headed upriver to Louisville to shop. Neither would get home until five-thirty at the earliest.
He wedged back in the spindle chair and its joints popped like caps in a toy pistol. “You got pants you can wear under a dress?”
She nodded, sitting across from him at her table. “You got horses?”
“I got two set up to buy.”
“Neither one of ’em bite?”
“The ones I’m lookin’ at might not have teeth.”
She grinned, and a trace of a blush formed above her cheekbones.
He smiled back, his expression mysterious, the way some mean men smile at people, with the suggestion that he might bring her as far as he needed her, then leave her in the woods somewhere with a knot on her head. If Vessy read these notions on his face, she gave no hint of it. Taking his flask, she poured herself a small drink, hoping the taste would burn the tannery stench out of her nostrils. She smiled delicately into the glass.