GRAY DAWN. Mrs. Benton signaled for a tug to come out from the Baton Rouge levee. Sam could see commas of steam spring up against the bank, and a boat came out toward midriver with a coal flat on its hip. He climbed down and jumped aboard the tug, which cast off from its barge and chuffed back in. Crossing the levee, he came up behind the great redbrick expanse of the Y &MV station. An agent sold him a ticket on number 36 for Gashouse, where he could change for the mixed train into Woodgulch, putting him at the end of the line at 2:45.
He made the first connection with no idea of what he would do in Woodgulch, knowing only that it was ten miles from Zeneau, where he could begin tracking the boy. The one passenger car rocked at the end of a string of boxcars and three stinking chemical tankers. On a curve he saw the small locomotive, filthy with soot and forty years old, its mailbox whistle shrieking at a dirt road crossing. He sat next to a white-haired gentleman and asked him how he might get from Woodgulch to Zeneau.
He regarded Sam a long time before spitting over the window ledge. “Who are you, son?”
“Sam Simoneaux. I live in New Orleans.”
“New Orleans,” the man repeated, inching higher in his seat as if his seatmate were from New Delhi or some other foreign place replete with contagion and unspeakable ways. “What are you after in Zeneau?”
As Sam explained, an acne-scarred man in the seat ahead turned around. “This young’un you after, where’s he a-headed?”
“South along the river.”
The man snorted. “Ain’t nothing in there. Is he after black bear or something?”
“He’s kind of a runaway.”
The white-haired man also snorted. “His old man take a stick to him?”
“His daddy’s dead. I just want to catch him for his momma before he gets into trouble.”
“You say he’s fifteen year old?”
“That’s a fact.”
“You wouldn’t believe some of the crazy stuff I did when I was fifteen. One time on a dare I rode a bull and that devil carried me through a bob-war fence and a quarter-mile into town, where he and me went through a hardware-store window and took out a hundred dollars’ worth of sash work. I landed next to a Coats and Clark thread dispenser and the doc sewed me up with navy-blue number three right out the display box.”
The acne-scarred man pulled out a handkerchief and blew hard, three times. “Look here,” he began, “when I was fifteen I got up too late to milk and my old man told me to stay in our little feedstore and keep the stove hot all day. ‘Just keep the stove hot,’ he said. I sulked around and stoked that son till it was cherry red and the pipe was glowin’ all the way to the ceilin’. The damper melted and fell down into the firepot and I found some cokin’ coal in the back and dumped ten pounds of that in the door. That stove turnt white and run me out the door, and not long after that the attic caught fire. When my old man got back from Woodgulch, all that was left was a square lot of white ash and the stove sittin’ more or less upright in the middle of it. He looked at me and said, ‘Well now, I’ll grant you that son of a bitch is hot all right!’”
“What did he do then?” the white-haired gentleman asked.
“Not a thing.”
“That was the punishment.”
“Say what?”
“You’d of turned out worse if he’d a tooken a strap to you.”
The acne-scarred man gave him a startled look. “I reckon that might be true. I know I felt low as a dachshund’s nuts for a long time after that store burnt down.”
Sam leaned in between them. “I’ve got to get to this boy.”
“I don’t know about no boy,” the old man said, “but if you want a ride to Zeneau, a truck should be waitin’ for freight at the station. Ask the driver for a ride.”
A FAT MAN wearing red suspenders that disappeared under his belly was waiting at the station in a tan Model T truck. The white-haired man got off the train and shambled over, grabbed a gallus strap in a fist and pointed toward Sam, who walked up and introduced himself.
“Cost you a dollar,” the fat man said.
“All right.”
“I’m just joshin’ you. Help me get them boxes out the last car and we’ll get on down the road.”
There were only six boxes of stove parts and ten feed sacks and a crated Victrola, and soon the fat man was at the crank starting the Ford. He got in with a whistle and asked, “Can I sing on the way?”
“Sure.”
“Funny. I never could sing before.” He laughed until his face was crimson, then set the truck off across the ruts of the station yard.
They rolled through the six blocks of Woodgulch out into a countryside of washboard hills stippled with gum trees strangled by poison sumac and catbriers. He could see no houses, and after a while the road grew sloppy and plunged into an old-growth cypress forest, the trees fifteen feet through the base skirt, blocky trunks rising like factory smokestacks into a spongy canopy. He looked into these waterlogged woods and hoped the boy hadn’t stumbled far into such a terrible place.
The fat man fought the wheel over the bad road and couldn’t talk much, except once when a sack of feed fell over the tailgate and they were forced to stop. Sam got out and looked around. “That’s some timber. Damn, that’s some timber for sure.”
“Yeah, it’s been bought and paid for. A Natchez mill is finally gonna cut it all out next year.”
“How much of it?”
“All of it, I hear. Thirteen thousand acres, out on the river south of here down to the prison and beyond.”
“Down by where the Skadlocks live?”
He loaded the sack and left his hand on it. “How you know about the Skadlocks?”
“I’ve run into them.”
“You ain’t no kin, are you? I’ll leave you here in the road if you are.”
“No. What’d they do to you?”
“None of your business.”
“Fair enough. You know how to get to their place from Zeneau?”
“Boat.”
“Is there a place to rent one?”
“No.”
Sam sighed and shook his head. “Horse?”
The man walked around to the front of the truck and leaned against the steaming radiator. “If you go overland, it’s about seven, eight miles due south, and you’d have to rent you a gorilla to tote you up and down them gullies. I hunted back in there when I cared about it, and I’m tellin’ you it’s a miracle I’m standin’ here.” He turned the crank, climbed in the cab, and let off the brake.
Sam got in. “How you know about them at all?”
“I deliver for the sheriff. The west deputy has a office in Zeneau. I seen that biggest Skadlock come in there and talk to him. Him and his dog.” The fat man looked over at him, and there was a sudden longing in his eyes. “I used to have me a little black-and-white rat terrier rode in the truck. Sat right where you’re at. He was smart. Like a little fuzzy person, he was. I was down deliverin’ a chair and box of supplies to that one-room deputy office when I seen Skadlock’s horse and his dog next to it. I went into the office and didn’t think a thing about it, but from inside I heard a squeak. When I went out my dog was dead under the truck and that German police was pissin’ on my front tire. I told Skadlock off when he come out, but he just dug in his pocket and give me a dollar. Then he got on his horse and rode off. I was mad as hell, but later I thought, you know, somebody like that can’t do no better.”
“You get yourself a new dog?”
He shook his head and geared down for the next hill. “Naw. That was the one dog.”
“Can’t replace him?”
The driver turned slowly. “Can you replace your mom?”
Sam rolled his head away and looked down the awful road. “Doesn’t seem like the same thing, exactly.”
The fat man shifted gears. “Bud, the older I get, I think ever livin’ thing is one of a kind.”
ZENEAU WAS A STORE, a deputy’s office the size of a big privy, five wood houses, and a mud landing. The driver let him off in front of the unpainted office, and he looked at it doubtfully before deciding to move on through the mosquitoes to the store, breaking sunbaked, puckered mud as he walked. It was after three o’clock, the day’s heat at its zenith. Inside the dim store three graybeards were sitting around an unlit stove, their feet propped on the fenders. The clerk was busy on the back landing, taking delivery off the truck.
“Hey, bo,” one of the old men said, a fellow wearing patched overalls and a long hound’s face.
“Hi. I’m looking for a big kid, fifteen years old. Anybody seen him?”
“Where you from?”
“New Orleans.”
“You don’t talk like New Orleans.”
“I was born in west Louisiana.”
“A Frenchieman,” the hound’s face called out. “Hey, talk some of that palaver to us.”
“Comment ça va? Brassez mon tchou, têtes de merde.”
A red-faced man dropped a foot off the stove skirt. “Ha, ha, listen to that! Sounds like a monkey with a mouthful of olives.”
“Have you seen him?”
“What you wantin’ him for?”
“His mamma sent me after him. He’s run away.”
“Oh!” the hound’s face exclaimed. “Whyn’t you say so? You know, I run away when I was a kid.”
The red-faced man slapped him on the knee. “But you never went back.”
“You know, you’re right.”
The conversation stalled at that point. Sam looked at the first man and said loudly, “The boy?”
“Oh. Yeah, he come in here yesterday, said he wanted to hunt turkey. Bought a huntin’ vest and some eats.”
Sam looked at him. “He doesn’t own a gun.”
“He didn’t when he come up on the porch. Talk to the clerk about it.”
After a while, the bald clerk came back inside, sweaty and sour-smelling. “Hep you?”
“I’m looking for a boy.”
“Who you, then?”
“Aw, he’s all right!” yelled the red-faced man.
“Well, sold him some cheese and potted meat and crackers and a toy compass. And a used shotgun.”
“Aw, hell. I was afraid of that. What kind?”
“A old double-barrel wore-out Parker. Ten-gauge with rabbit ears.”
“What kind of shells did you sell him?”
“Feller that traded it to me give me the shells, and I passed ’em on with the gun. About a dozen.”
“What size shot?”
“Hell, I don’t know. They was old goose loads. Maybe number-two shot with black powder under ’em.”
“Good lord.”
“It was none of my business, but I knew he wasn’t no hunter, least not much of one. Kind of a city-lookin’ kid.”
“Well, when did he leave?”
“I let him sleep on the porch out on the cotton. He left about a half hour after I opened up at six. Give him some syrup and bread for breakfast. I saw him start off due south into the woods.”
“Is there a trail?”
Everybody laughed, and the third man’s feet fell off the stove’s fenders. “Not much of one. We all pretty much stay out of the south woods. Louisiana’s got a state prison a few miles in there against the river and there ain’t no tellin’ who you could meet up with, if you know what I mean.”
One of the men said, “You goin’ after him?”
“I guess so.”
“You own a compass?”
Sam reached into his khakis and pulled it out. “I’ve been back in there before.”
“You got my sympathy,” said the hound’s face.
“I was on a horse.”
“Well, well,” the red-faced man said and spat into a box of sawdust next to the stove. “You got him now?”
“I’m on foot.”
The man stood up. “You need to see my brother, then.”
Sam looked at the clerk, who shrugged. “What for?”
The man lay a spotted hand on his arm. “Come on, he’s down the street.”
Sam followed him half a mile to a dog-trot house, and the fellow who came out had the same sun-botched face as his escort.
“Buzz. Who you got there?”
“Fellow needs a animal.”
“I got a pig he can have.”
“Does it come with a saddle?”
The brothers smacked hands and chucked shoulders and then stood side by side looking down off the unpainted porch to where Sam stood in the chicken-bald yard.
“I don’t have a lot of money,” he began. He explained what he wanted to do and the horse trader gave his brother a doubtful look.
“I should of knowed you wasn’t bringin’ around somebody with cash in his jeans.”
His brother shrugged.
“I can only sell you a animal. I don’t rent, there ain’t no sense in it. But when and if you get out of that terrible country”-he nodded his shaggy head to the south-“I’ll buy it back less what you skint off him in there.”
Sam tried to remember how much was in his wallet, how much a pair of train tickets would cost to get him and the boy down to New Orleans. “What can you sell one for?”
“I got an Appaloosa that’s tough and is good on short hills and mud. He’s thirty-five dollars.”
“God, I can’t afford that.”
The horse trader blinked. “Somehow I thought not. Well, I got a old mare, then, slow, but she won’t spook. You can’t make no time through those woods nohow. She’s twenty dollars cash money.”
“Maybe. What else?”
“I got a couple trained mustangs, but if you ain’t a real good horseman, they’ll kill you dead, ’cause they’ll do what you tell ’em even if you spur ’em into quicksand or off a drop. Now, I got a retired dray horse with heart trouble you can have for fourteen dollars, but once you get in the woods he won’t fit between trees.”
“Let me see him.”
The trader looked at his brother and shook his head. “Let’s us go around back, then.”
On the way to the barn, an animal in the pasture caught Sam’s eye, an oversized mule a hand and a half taller than most and gray as fog. “What’s the story on that one?”
The horse trader looked everywhere except at the mule. “What one?”
Sam pointed.
“Oh. That’s a hinny. Biggest I ever saw. I got him in a trade last year and done sold him and took him back three times. That one’s too smart to ride.”
“How’s that?”
“Aw, he just knows better than anybody that gets on him. If you could just figure out how he thinks, he’d be a good animal. But you can’t make him do a damn thing he don’t want to.”
“He’s sort of white.”
“Yeah. Folks around here think that means bad luck.”
“Can I try him out?”
The man turned and looked at him. “Why would you want to?”
Sam looked out into the field and the mule looked back, rolling his ears forward. “I rode a mule like him to school.”
The horse trader spat out the side of his mouth. “This one’ll take you to school, all right.”
They got a rain-hard saddle out of the barn, and Sam asked for a thick blanket when he saw it. He cinched it on, leaning against the animal while he worked, rubbing the mule over before clipping a cloth saddlebag on the back. The roller-mouthpiece bridle he passed slowly over the ears, which stayed relaxed, though the mule looked at him carefully. Sam talked to the animal and patted him. “You got a crupper for this saddle?”
“Naw. I got a old double rig in there somewheres if you’re scared of that one.” He motioned to his brokeback barn.
“Let me see something.” He walked to the fence and got a length of mildewed plowline hanging there and tied one end to the saddle horn and walked around behind the mule to the other side, pulling the rope and rolling it up the animal’s legs and quarters. The mule watched him but barely moved a hoof. Then he took the line off and put it back on the fence. He mounted up and started the mule off in a straight line, turned him, backed him, and made him trot a bit. Getting off, he left the reins on the ground and walked away. The mule looked at the gate and back at Sam, but didn’t move.
Sam climbed on the fence. “What’s wrong with him, then?”
“A man can’t get in that animal’s head. Some you can beat, some you can treat, but that one don’t respond to neither. To be fair, he’s done good for me, but everybody else tells me he’ll stop sometime and might as well be a stump. Worse, he’ll keep going even if you pull his head off. Just won’t stop for nothing.”
“Does he have good wind?”
“Oh, hell, yes. He’ll climb a tree and yodel at the top, but that might not be what you told him to do.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars.” He spat. “Eleven if you bring him back.”
“How about the tack?”
“Now that’s worth money. That stuff’ll listen to you. I want it all back, and you leave me a ten-dollar deposit.”
“What’s his name?”
“Gasser. That’s what was wrote on the bill of sale I got. Came from over the river in Pointe Coupee Parish.”
They shook on it, and Sam rode the animal back to the store for a sack of food, a canteen, matches, oil of citronella, and a straw hat with a curled brim. He also bought a box of Quaker Oats. Starting out toward the south, he noticed Gasser’s gait was rough when he hurried him along. He slowed him to a walk, and the mule grew soft footed. Then he bumped him up with his heels, and the hard gait returned. “Damned if you don’t trot like you’re runnin’ on crutches.” In ten minutes they entered the trees at a fast walk.
The country south of the Skadlocks’ was a mix of dry and submerged cypress swamp, but this higher northern route showed hardwoods mixed with longleaf pine, the terrain choppy and bent as a run-over washboard. He was two miles south of Zeneau when the forest closed in completely, and the mule stalled against a wall of tallow trees and briars, refusing to budge. He turned the animal around and found a hogback ridge which he followed for a quarter-mile until it came to a point at a gulch full of fallen timber. He sat the animal and looked down into the tangle. Turning the mule again, he backtracked and crossed to the next ridge and rode along it until it also petered out, so he reversed tracks again, sidling west until he found a ridge that sloped down gradually into a mudbottom gorge. He tapped Gasser’s flanks to go down, but he just stood there looking from side to side. “Git up.” After half a minute the animal sidestepped to the bottom and walked south in a narrow ditch full of mudballs washed out of the ridges. Sam dodged vines as big as a man’s arm, and after a mile of riding in what felt like a long grave, he tried to urge the mule up a slope onto high land, but he just stopped and drank the opaque water.
“Aw, get up!” The mule continued to drink. He popped him with the reins and found himself carried along the ravine, still in its bottom. Reining to the side made the mule jam to a stop, sideways, his nose in the moss on one side, his rump imbedded in dirt on the other. He cursed the animal for a full minute and then straightened him out and waited in the slow moving current. He kicked his ribs and called out every command he knew, every curse and animal insult, finally resorting to the French of his childhood, calling him a maudit fils de putain, at which the mule rolled his ears back all the way, though he didn’t budge. Sam noticed the ears and thought a moment, sucking a tooth. “En avant!” he yelled, and the mule picked up his head and walked forward. Sam raised his hands and let them drop. “Eh bien, un mulet qui parle français!” The animal picked up speed, as if what he’d heard made him comfortable with the work at hand. Sam decided to give the mule his head and let him figure the woods out for himself. The light began to fade and he played with the name “Gasser,” trying to understand where that might have come from. Finally, he called out “Garde ça!” and the animal gave a jump and picked up his step, bobbing his head. “Garde ça!” Sam said again, remembering that every village had a garde ça, an old rascal who sat in front of a store begging tobacco and telling dirty jokes. “Regardez ça!” the women would exclaim, shaking their heads. “Look at that.”
GARDE ÇA dug up a slope and got on top of a wooded promontory, where he stopped. Neither French nor English would get him going, so finally Sam dismounted and pulled on the bridle. The animal refused to take a step and bent to taste a weed. It was then he saw it, a wink of tin next to his brogan, and he looked out at the woods, knowing what it was before he picked it up: the can with the image of the red devil on its side. He called the boy’s name, his voice broken by the matrix of vines and trees. Putting his head down, he listened but heard only the mule’s rotary crunching.
He mounted and rode through a clattering brake of wild magnolias, then into a cloud of honeysuckle, and after a mile the mule again stopped dead for a long time, where the ridge started to descend. A good rein-whipping had no effect. He looked over the animal’s ears trying to imagine what he saw in the mat of pigweed woven with generations of wisteria and poison oak. He began to suspect a snake and got down to study the woods floor, then looked up to scan the trees for signs of a wildcat. He hoped they weren’t near a bear’s den, and the thought of a flying comb of claws made him tug on the mule’s bridle. “Allons!”
The mule closed his eyes and grew as still as a statue. Sam stepped back to give the bridle a jerk-to tear it off the sticker-matted head, if need be-and then he put his foot on something that was not solid ground. He looked behind him and jounced a bit, as if testing a gangplank for soundness, and the whole surface for fifty feet around moved up and down like a taut waxed tarpaulin. He dropped the reins, took another step, and his leg went through into nothing. Scrambling back to the mule’s hooves, he understood that a section of the ridge had washed out, leaving the forest floor of vines and leaves suspended over a chasm underneath. Both of them could have been killed had they tried to cross. Turning Garde Ça around, he opened a burlap pack and took out a round box of oats, feeding half of them to the mule in tribute.
Backtracking, he turned south down a trail of sorts. Near dark, Garde Ça stopped and looked off to his left. Sam listened to a hot breeze stir the tops of a line of sycamores, and in the distance saw a watchman crow give three caws and flit off a pine top like ink slung from a pen. Under him, the mule seemed to be holding his breath. Then he heard two metallic clicks and turned his head, knowing that hammers had been drawn back and fingers were tightening on the triggers. A dart of orange fire blasted out of the brush and the mule stood on his hind legs, braying. Sam slid behind the saddle and hung on until the forelegs slammed back down, then Garde Ça bucked and he arced over the long ears, impacting the trail like a mortar round. He lay there, his lungs flattened, his mouth open as if to ask why all the air had been sucked out of the world.
August stepped out of the brush while reloading a mottled double-barrel shotgun. “I want you to catch your animal and get back out of here.”
He tried to say something for a long time. His shoulder felt knocked out of its socket, and pinwheels of white fire spun through his vision. He wanted to say “Bastard!” but knew that wasn’t right, and that “Son of a bitch!” was even less true, so when he got a bit of wind he said, “I’m tryin’ to help, you fool.”
August stood over him, expressionless. “You can’t even help yourself.”
“Put up that gun. I didn’t come out here to hurt you.”
“I wasn’t sure who you were, exactly.” He brushed his hair out of his mosquito-stung face.
“Come on and pull this arm. It’s just out of its socket a little.”
August propped the shotgun against a sapling and grabbed Sam’s left hand. “You want me to yank on it?”
“Just turn it right when I tell you.” He took one breath, then another.
“Now?”
He nodded and cried out when the shoulder popped back in. “Damn it to hell!”
The boy took up his gun and stood in the trail. “Now you can ride.” He pointed down the trail to the mule, who stood sideways to the track, eating bright-green leaves of marsh alder.
“What you expect to do, boy?”
August’s face was still a child’s, but his eyes were fixed like a hawk’s. “I’m going to kill Mr. Ralph Skadlock, at the very least.”
Sam sawed his left arm gingerly, looking up at the boy, trying to figure how to reason with him. “I think you’ve heard this before, yeah, but if you do that, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
“I’ve got plenty to regret already, don’t you think?” He helped Sam to his feet.
“I’m not going anywhere. You mother told me to get you back safe.”
“Nobody’s stopping me.”
“One of the Skadlocks will put the brakes on you.”
August turned his back and walked off into the brush, and Sam tried to remember what he’d felt like at fifteen, when he’d already made up his mind to leave his uncle’s farm. Nothing would have changed his mind from the one thing it had focused on. He suspected such single-mindedness was both the best and the worst thing about youth.
Sam retrieved the mule and followed the boy to where he’d been building a campfire.