A LOCAL FREIGHT clattered into Greenville, Mississippi, and the conductor came in with the bills of lading. Morris Hightower began to invoice everything on the train while sacks of feed, crated Victrolas, bedsteads, harness and kegs were unloaded onto the freight dock. A local fellow, toothless and skinny, an assistant bartender out of work since the Volstead Act was passed, was coming up the street headed in the direction of the hardware store. He veered into the station and stood at the barred window, calling out to Morris Hightower to give him change for a twenty. “Them hardware clerks don’t like breaking a big bill for a quarter’s worth of box nails.”
“I’m low on change myself,” the agent said, running a handkerchief over his ponderous neck.
The skinny man blinked and seemed to think about this. “Look, I ain’t askin’ for no loan. Just break this bill into two fives, nine ones, and some quarters and dimes.”
The agent moved one bill of lading over to a tall stack. “Lot of people buyin’ tickets this morning. I need what change I got.”
The man at the window cocked his head. “Damn your hide. Hightower, you ain’t never lifted a finger in your whole damn life to hep somebody out.”
“Them that deserves help sometimes gets it.”
He began waving the twenty in the window as though it were on fire. “Come over here you rock-hearted old bastard and give me my change.”
Hightower turned only halfway around. The bulb hanging from the ceiling imparted a white-hot luminescence to his bald head. After a moment of concentrating on the wall above his typewriter, he said, “If I have to come to that window, I’ll hit you so hard you’ll piss nickels. Then you’ll have all the change you want.” When he heard footsteps trailing off toward the door, he turned back to his work. After a while he thought about the girl that had been found. His brother in New Orleans had mentioned that he’d seen her playing on Sam’s porch, singing like a bird.
SAM LEFT the pawnshop wearing a new soft brown cap, a set of high leather boots, and a big Colt automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat. He left Memphis at sundown aboard the Kate Adams, bound downriver for Helena. In the tiny stateroom he washed up, then went out to join five old men sitting near the open windows in the forward part of the cabin. They were discussing which stocks to buy on the New York exchange. One of them was a silver-haired farmer who declared he’d as soon bury his money in the privy as trust it to a New York broker. This engendered a half hour of carping that Sam patiently waited out. When the conversation changed to river traffic, Sam got in and told them what he did, which they all considered exotic and some sign of the new age to come.
“I hear some of them young gals shimmy to that jazz music till their drawers fall off,” the farmer said.
“I wouldn’t know. I’m too busy playing.”
They laughed at that, and one of them asked if he were a Levert from south Louisiana and he said no, that he lived in New Orleans, and then everybody told what they thought of New Orleans, and within an hour he had them explaining to him where to rent an automobile in Helena. He asked how the road was down to Ratio, but none of them could remember if there was any kind of a road.
THE KATE ADAMS stopped all night at plantations and dirt landings, scratching for pennies in freight. Right after sunrise it ran out its stage plank and dropped him and a large, well-made wooden crate on the wharfboat’s freight platform. He caught a ride into Helena and found the man who rented cars, giving him the names of the gentlemen who’d recommended him on the Kate Adams, and the man handed him the key of a two-year-old black Ford roadster and didn’t ask for a signature.
He got directions to Ratio, and two miles south of town the road dwindled into bumper-high grass running along the levee. He gave the car some gas and spun his way up to the top of the embankment and followed a wagon track, steering around lakes of rainwater and swales of mud, making about five miles an hour. After a time, he passed a large cotton plantation and could see dozens of workers in the fields, many mules hitched up to cultivators and spray wagons, but not a single internal-combustion machine. The trail ran down the levee at this point, and he stood on the brakes and let the Ford slide down it to flat land. The car sputtered along to a company store, a tall and broad wooden building, its shutters hanging off like oversized ears. Past this, the trail went into the woods and he drove at a crawl, the wheels tumbling over roots and stumps. This was virgin forest, and the trail wound back in time, away from civilization toward some druidlike occupancy back in the hardwood-haunted dimness.
For two hours the little car shook like a dog shedding water, and then he rolled up to the edge of a flat, fallow field that had been plowed the year before but left in unplanted rows. He got the wheels to match two furrows and proceeded until he was funneled by a fence line into the backyard of a large, paintless house where a white man sat on the back porch cradling a crock jug in his lap. He placidly watched Sam stop in the yard, scattering chickens, as though this happened every five minutes. His arm came up and briskly motioned around the side of the house, and Sam set the car forward and saw a lane under wild magnolia branches, and soon he was at a gate in front, which he opened and closed, now facing a pasture full of rickety brown cattle. This he drove across for two miles, dodging manure cakes and listing, bony animals, coming to another gate that led to a levee ramp. On top, he expected to see the Mississippi, but it had meandered off many years before and there was only willow-haunted flatland that seemed to go east for miles. He guessed that this had been a landing a hundred years before, for remnants of a cypress dock remained, pilings marching out to nowhere, to history. He tried to picture the grand steamers that stopped here fifty years before with their mural-covered paddle boxes and stained-glass clearstories, millionaire planters gesturing from the upper decks toward the worlds they owned, a time that seemed as inconsequential as smoke in light of the nothing that remained. It was only money, he thought, and that never lasts.
A trail plunged east into the willow brake, but it wasn’t mentioned in the uninspiring directions he’d been given in Helena, so he again turned south on the levee, passing a cotton gin with a shake roof and a rust-perforated smokestack coming up through the middle of it. Across a field he saw a respectable-looking redbrick house, a painted wooden porch across its front. He cut the Ford’s wheels and stood on the brakes, the tires locking and plowing sod down the steep slope. He drove along a cow path to a paintless barn and then through a gate into a fenced area of sawdust and dried manure, spooking three mules and five horses that ran from the machine and bunched against the mossy pickets. Leaving the Ford to steam among the animals, he climbed over the corral fence and advanced on the house.
The front door opened as he stepped up. Framed in the doorway was a barefoot man wearing a white shirt and vest, pearl-colored pants, and black cloth suspenders. Pinned to the right strap was a shield badge worn to brass. His hair was iron gray, carefully cut, and he was clean-shaven as well. There was something slightly off about his posture. “Sir,” he began, “is there some way I can help you?”
His civility was disarming. Sam regarded him carefully, as though there was something he didn’t understand but should. “Are you Constable Soner?”
“Indeed I am.”
“My name’s Sam Simoneaux. A man I know, a telegrapher for the railroad, told me you might be able to help me find a family back in these parts.”
“Is it Sam Kivens?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, of course. It’s old Bob McFadden.”
“I’m sorry, no.”
“What railroad?”
“Y &MV.”
Soner narrowed his eyes. “Doug Friar? Mac Divitts? Hazel Tugovich? Barry Ofel?”
“His name’s Morris Hightower.”
Soner seemed surprised. “I don’t know him, son. But I imagine that he knows one of the others I named and obtained my location from them.” He looked Sam over carefully for hints of who he was, and then turned stiffly, like a man with back trouble. “Come on in and have a seat.”
As soon as he closed the door, the front room went dark as a tunnel, and when his eyes adjusted he could see that all the windows were boarded across except for the top foot or so, where the upper sash was pulled down for air. Soner gestured to an armchair in front of an oak desk and then walked rigidly around it and sat in a wheeled office chair that needed oiling badly. In the gloom Sam saw that the wall behind the lawman was hung with guns, more of them materializing in an umber collage as his pupils relaxed. The rear wall was covered with Winchester lever actions, brass-framed carbines and rifles turning green under dust, Model 1873s, impossibly large Model 1876 big-game guns, sleeker ’86s, modern-looking ’95s, and semiautomatics in bear-killing.401 caliber. The walls were ten feet high, and on the one to his left were dusty military rifles, while to his right a hundred pistols hung on nails, hog legs from the Mexican War, break-action Smiths come in off the western prairie, single-action Colts by the dozen, their finish burned off according to how much misery they’d dispensed. He was afraid to turn around.
“This is some collection, all right. Where’d you get ’em all?”
Soner’s expression didn’t change. “There’s many of them to be had in this world.”
“You’re well protected, that’s for sure.”
“They’re all loaded.” Here he smiled. “Back here in the woods, I need options.”
“Yes, sir. I won’t take much of your time.” He made an effort to see if in Soner’s eyes there were any traces of madness.
“Take all the time you wish. Can I get you a glass of water? It’s pure, though warm.”
“That’d be nice.”
When Soner returned from the back room, walking stiffly with the glass held out, he stopped behind him and held the tall glass to the left. When Sam reached out with his left hand, Soner’s right hand ghosted from behind and plucked the.45 from its shoulder holster. He held the big pistol high in the air with two fingers as he returned to his seat. “Just a precaution. I don’t know your character.”
Sam gulped the water. “Well…all right, then.”
“I’ve been the law back in here ever since I was a boy, more or less. You’d think it was just writing permits and solving little neighborly fights. Serving papers. Things like that.”
“I hadn’t thought about it much.”
“Even back in here there are what you might call earth-shaking matters.”
Sam looked at the top of the window to his right. The light was fading, and he wondered if he could stay around long enough to sleep in the barn. He might even get up in the morning and drive back to Helena. “You know everybody around here, then.”
“I know their animals, too.”
“I’m looking for a family named Cloat.”
The constable’s expression froze. In the dim room his eyes, deep set and dark, glimmered like two stars reflected in a narrow well. “I have the feeling you’ve got a story to tell me.”
“That’s right.” He took several swallows of water, which had no taste at all, and said what there was to say. He ended by explaining that each year he thought more about the missing pieces of his life, and that talking to the Cloats, maybe just seeing them, might help him fill in the blank areas. When he finished his story, the space in the window was lavender sky.
“You think that by looking at them you’ll figure them out?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you look at a mountain, can you tell what’s inside all that rock?”
“Sir?”
“I’m sorry.” Soner made a dismissive motion with his hand. “You going back there to kill some of them?”
“I hope not.”
“Why else would anyone look up a Cloat?”
“To find out things.”
Soner nodded. “Yes, of course. You’re on a quest for knowledge only. That makes you lucky.”
Sam blinked. “How’s that?”
“The Cloats go through life incurious about anything at all, whether history or music or the well-being of their own blood.”
“Maybe they’re the lucky ones.”
Soner shook his head. “No. They’re like animals, interested only in what’s in front of them at the moment. But there’s one thing that makes them different from animals.”
“And what’s that?”
“Revenge.” The constable was quiet for a long time. Then he reached out and lit a Rayo lamp with a match. “Come on,” he said, hoisting the lamp. “Let’s fix supper.”
They went into a long rear kitchen and lit more lamps. Sam got the kerosene stove hot and found a skillet while Soner brought in eggs and a smoked ham and snap beans from his garden. There was a pitcher of buttermilk under a cheesecloth and some hard bread. The little stove cooked slow, but within an hour they sat down to eat, and Soner said a blessing. He asked Sam to tell him about his work on the Ambassador and listened to the long story about why he hired out on the boat in the first place.
After the dishes were put away, the constable poured them some old sour mash in glasses of the good water and they went out and sat on the porch in rush-bottom rockers. The dark was so total the mosquitoes couldn’t find them.
“Mr. Simoneaux, you can spend the night in the upstairs bedroom. It should be cool enough for sleep in about an hour. But do not for any reason come down before daylight. There’s a chamber pot under the bed. Do you understand?”
Sam nodded. “What’s your bedside firearm?”
He heard Soner take a long draw from his glass and then a knocking sound as he set it on the floor. “An eight-gauge Greener double-barrel. I loaded the shells myself.”
“Good Lord. What’s in them, buckshot?”
Soner chuckled. “My father was a watchmaker in Memphis. He died when I was young, and I was left for years with boxes of used watch parts, little steel gears, balance wheels, winding stems, case-hardened screws. I loaded a whole box of eight-gauge shells with the stuff, jammed it in tight.”
“Damn. You ever fire one off?”
“No. I call it my time machine. You know, when somebody dies their soul travels one of two ways-back where they came from or forward toward what they deserve, and whoever comes against my Greener will make the journey.”
“Is it something everybody around here knows about?”
“Oh, yes. Even the clan of Cloats you want to find.”
“I’d like to drive out and meet some of them.”
A little laugh came out of the darkness as Soner reached down for his drink. “I think ‘meet’ is too nice a word, son.”
“I figured they’d be a bad bunch.”
“The family has fallen off considerably in the past twenty years. When your family experienced their unfortunate meeting they were in their heyday. Usually, a meeting with a Cloat entailed a straight razor across the throat or a.45 slug in the back of one’s cranium. If you were a man. Women dealt with other initial penetrations. The Cloats aren’t your ordinary bad-seed murderers. Even on a cold day they stink like whoresex. They violate their animals. If they kill someone in their camp, they’ll feed his carcass to their hogs. But nowadays, well, I hear less and less about them as the years go on. But still there’s not a lawman in a hundred miles who would go in to find them. They came into this part of the world in the 1830s, run out of Georgia, I believe, along about the time Island Sixty-five began to form in the big river. They worked up and down the Natchez Trace cutting throats before crossing the river over to this side. Some settled back in the inland swamps for a time, but by the war they’d all moved out on the island.”
“Have you had any run-ins with them?”
“Yes.” The word came after a long pause, freighted with meaning.
Sam took a long drink. “Not as bad as my family’s, I hope.”
There was another pause. “In 1901, Aubrey Bledsoe bought a quart of whiskey off the Cloats on Saturday morning and was dead by four o’clock. The Bledsoe men, good people who used to live south of here, rode up and asked me if I could locate the still. I was a good tracker in those days, and if I could find it, I could do the busting up. I saddled a horse for Island Sixty-five, which is connected on this side of the river, and located it in two days along with three fly-ridden Cloats around it, killed by their own whiskey. They’d galvanized that cooker with a hundred pounds of lead solder, and added xylene to the batch to jack it up. They must’ve gone stark raving mad before they died because they were naked and had painted designs on their backs and stomachs and all over. With mercurochrome, for I found the empty bottles.”
“Designs?”
“Like caveman pictures, but nasty. I don’t want to tell you about it. I had a fire ax in my saddle holster and gave the still a good chopping, then turned it over and put a hundred blows into the bottom of it. The next day I told the Bledsoes the story, and good people that they were, they were satisfied that somehow justice had been done.”
“Was that the end of it?” He imagined the sorrow of the Cloats at losing three of their own.
Soner squirmed in his rocker, and Sam guessed he was crossing his legs. “The next morning I woke up and every hog, chicken, and cow I owned had its throat cut. My wife was bawling, and my son, who was six then, just stood in the yard and stared. They left me one horse, so I saddled up and rode over to the Bledsoes. All their animals were down, even the beeves in the big field, one man dead in the yard and the women howling like a hurricane. Mrs. Bledsoe, the grandmother, asked me who I left with my missus, and like a flash I understood how stupid I was, how much I could still underestimate inborn cruelty.” Here Soner stopped, and they listened to the deep throbbing of a steamboat whistle ten miles away.
“Were they safe?” Sam prayed they had been.
“Son, I’ll not inflict more of this story on you than you need to know. But you require a certain amount of preparation for your meeting tomorrow. Let’s just say that two Cloats, Batch and Slug, were standing in my backyard wearing muddy dusters when I rode up, flies in their beards around their toothless smiles. They made my wife and boy watch as they tied me to a pecan tree, arms and legs, me sitting on the ground hugging that trunk. They owned a big stinking dog, a rottweiler with a diseased face, and they turned him loose on me.” Soner stopped here and cleared his throat. “That devil tore at my neck and ate the flesh off my back until the bones came to the surface, and right before I died they pulled him off me and rode away. I imagine they figured it was better vengeance to leave me alive than to put me out of my suffering. It was my boy who cut me free and helped me crawl into the house. My wife had lost her mind. Absolutely. This is the short version, let me tell you. The very shortest.”
But even this abbreviated telling seemed to last a full hour, and after hearing it Sam felt sure he would leave for Helena in the morning.
But Soner had more to tell. “A year later, when I could get around, she left me. She couldn’t hardly step into the yard without every nerve in her body winding up like a clock spring. The boy stayed two years more, then left to join her. He writes me every month, and he’s married now with kids of his own and lives west of Chicago.”
“You wouldn’t go with her?”
“I would’ve in a heartbeat, but she said she couldn’t have me. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She said every time she looked at me she saw those men and that dog.”
“You didn’t go after them? Or tell the county sheriff?”
“Ha. I’ve got a lot of guns, but I’ll admit I’m afraid. Not a match for them. All these years, I figured to leave bad enough alone. I didn’t have the evil imagination to do to them what they’d have done to me.” He took another swallow from his glass. “If I’d called the sheriff, he wouldn’t have gone against them. If they’d heard I’d brought other law in, I’d have paid for it again. Call me chickenhearted, but I still enjoy watching the sun come up every morning. I still draw my pay, help the locals. The only thing that hurts is that I’m incomplete. My family’s gone, but still out there.”
Sam saw a firefly combust in the yard. Only one. “I think I would’ve done something. They’re only men.” In the dark, he thought he could feel the anger Soner must have felt.
The constable drained his glass and began to move in the rocker. “Come here, son, I want you to know something.”
“What?”
“The work of men.”
Sam stepped over to where he guessed by a shadowy motion that Soner was taking off his shirt.
When he finished, he rolled his shoulders forward and put down his head. “Run your hands over my back.”
“I don’t think-”
“Don’t be scared. You’ll learn something.”
“I can’t see a thing.”
“You don’t need to.”
Sam reached out with both hands the way he would search for something in a dark house at night. Placing them on Soner’s right shoulder, he let his palms ride carefully over to his backbone. “Aw, God almighty,” Sam gasped. He moved his hands over to the far shoulder, whispering something in French. Down toward the middle back, his fingers found a skinned-over wreckage of bone, and lower, wide pulsing hollows not to be imagined. He drew back his hands but hovered there a moment, frozen by his inability to change the horror he’d touched.
Soner’s voice came dry and small. “That should be a good lesson to you. But I’ve lived long enough to know it won’t be. Not good enough to keep you away from them. Nobody understands what a snake is until he’s been bitten.” Soner stood up and pulled open the screen door. “I’ll see you right after dawn.”
“Yes, sir.”
THAT NIGHT Sam rubbed his fingertips against the sheets again and again, as if to cleanse off memory itself. He woke at false dawn and lay on his back, watching the room develop around him in its gray plainness. Dew hung in the window screen like cloudy rhinestones, and he knew it would be a sunny day.
At breakfast, he noticed that Soner turned his whole body when reaching for something at his side. “Thanks for all your hospitality.”
“I don’t get many civil visitors. I hope to see you again sometime.” He stopped buttering his bread and looked up. “I hope anyone sees you again.”
He was still thinking about riding on and forgetting. “How many of them are back in there?”
Soner looked off to his left and squinted. “At one time there were twenty Cloats, plus their Indian women. They liked Indian women. There were children from time to time, but most didn’t last.”
“Didn’t last?”
“Sometimes the women would run off with them. Or, when they got to be nine or ten, sometimes the kids would take off by themselves. Girl child or no, the Cloats would rut on them all.”
Sam stopped eating. “What’s wrong with those people?”
Soner’s eyes were clear and bright. “Why, nothing. They’re exactly like you and I. They’ve just fallen a few more rungs down the moral ladder than most. It’s because they live in their chosen isolation so that nothing good can touch them. And they insist on seeing themselves as normal, abetting each other’s notions. The worst thing that ever happened to them is each other.”
“The men who did that to you, are they back in there?”
“Batch and Slug? They’re somewhere else. They acquired some hashish, I hear, and smoked it and smoked it until they decided to play tandem double Russian roulette with their pistols. Instead of one bullet, they installed five in each revolver and both crossed over on the first try.”
“How many men are left?”
“The big one named Grill dropped dead of who knows what. He was pretty old for a Cloat, maybe forty-eight. Box and Babe are still alive, so far as I know. Percy died a couple of years ago.”
“Percy?”
“They say he was covered head to toe with syphilitic chancres and took five howling months to die. His woman came up from the island later and told me about it before she left for Memphis. She seemed very sick herself. That was five years ago.” He looked at the ceiling. “Maybe six.”
“I see.”
“You’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Throw away that shoulder holster. Wear the pistol in the hollow of your back between your drawers and your trousers.”
Sam swallowed the last of his buttermilk. “Can you tell me how to get in there?”
Soner chewed his toast and thought. “Well, you’ll have to take my horse.”