Джо Горес: Cases

Hulking Blackman Brown’s shovel-strengthened fingers scrunched Hent’s right hand so the hand could reach neither collar nor holstered .44. Collinson jerked Hent’s left arm wide so his scattergun hit the dirt. Anderson’s unshackled leg whipped, Hent went down, sprawling on his belly in the dust.

He opened his mouth to shout, though the nearest guard was half a mile away at the quarry, but mild little accountant Dalton shoved a torn shirtsleeve, foul with brine, between his teeth. Clods dug his belly and chest. Dalton’s hands ripped the keys from his belt, Larkie’s the huge bowie knife from its sheath.

It went just as planned, hard, sharp, quick, physical — almost like a football game, except you couldn’t limp off this field, helmet in hand, in the middle of the game.

“Turn him over,” said Larkie to Blackman Brown; to Collinson, “hold his arms"; to Anderson, “his feet.”

Larkie jerked down the squirming captain’s pants to expose his thick white flanks. He grabbed the handful of sex between Hent’s thighs and looked into the captain’s wildly rolling eyes.

“Gotta borrow these here, Cap’n,” he said with diffidence.

The bowie knife flashed. Hent convulsed, whipping his head from side to side, trying to buck Collinson off, trying to scream. Collinson hung grimly on, sick, frightened, confused, but unable to release his frozen grip on Hent’s arms. Larkie straightened up, holding his bloody prize above his head; then he threw it far out into the swamp.

“For the turtles,” he said.

He stooped, drove the blade into Hent’s lower abdomen and ripped it upward to the sternum. Hent thrashed and tried to kick, tried to scream, and tried to tear his arms loose. But most of all he tried to die, which took way too long.

Collinson, eyes shut, kept repeating his silent litany: It’s an adventure. It’s all just another adventure. It’s an adventure. It’s all just...

The corpse, draped in their leg irons, was sunk in the swamp, the bloodstained earth spread over the embankment and covered. Brown took the shotgun, Anderson the .44, Dalton the money, Larkie the big bowie knife. Collinson took the water jug.

They got off the levee, spread out through the woods, each man going his own way to confuse the dogs that would be brought at dawn. They all knew that if they stayed together, any man caught would give up the others to avoid the noose.

Collinson moved silently through cover; he had hunted with his dad since he was a kid. Near nightfall, he waded a half mile through water to throw off the dogs, pine resin heavy in his nostrils, mosquitoes, ticks, and leaches feasting on his sweat-soaked body. But finally he worked his way into the center of a dense briar patch on the edge of town and settled down to wait.

Please don’t throw me in that briar patch, Br’er Fox.

He prayed all through the sleepless night, something he hadn’t done much of since being sent to the chain gang: Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

It being Sunday, he felt an intense desire for Mass, but not for confession because he couldn’t repent. He hadn’t committed murder, but he’d helped, and would again: he’d do almost anything not to be next on those squealing bedsprings...

Almost anything. Would he ever be able to do what Larkie had done? He hadn’t been able to release Hent’s arms — why not? Was there a part of him able to mutilate and murder? Maybe part of being on the road was finding out things like that about yourself...

At dawn he lifted a bottle of milk from among others on a back stoop, stole a shirt and trousers from a lineful of early wash flapping in the hot breeze. The gooseberry lay, his Uncle Russ had called it.

He wore only one day’s stubble on his face; after shoving his convict clothes down into a trash barrel behind the general store, he slicked his hair back with water from the town square’s drinking fountain. What if Sue Ellen was working the morning shift at the diner? What if Sheriff Swinton was having before-church breakfast? What if the end booth was in use and he had to wait, naked and exposed, until he could get to it?

No on all counts. He sat looking out the window as the fingers of his right hand delved into the rip in the red imitation leather, groped desperately... Yes!

In vast relief, “Ham and eggs and grits and toast and coffee, ma’am, thank you very much.” They’d remember tea.

He ate fast, his Social Security card and driver’s license under his real name once more in his pocket. As he paid at the cash register with one of his precious twenties, he saw his duffel bag still under the counter. He just reached down and scooped it up, nodded his thanks to the iron-haired cold-eyed woman behind the register. Imelda Joad, without a doubt.

“Ma’am, I’d purely ’predate you thankin’ Sue Ellen fer keepin’ this here fer me,” he twanged in a bogus cracker accent.

She stared hard-eyed after him as he left, but he was counting on her being all too aware of Sue Ellen’s kind heart. In the paperback rack at the bus station he found a new copy of The Damned, caught the first Greyhound out. Didn’t matter which way it went: out of town, out of Georgia, over a state line before the bloodhounds came baying down his back trail.

He had his duffel bag back, no one could trace him through that. They hadn’t even taken his fingerprints. Peter Collinson meant “son of nobody.” He could go back to his own name. The shackle scars on his ankle would heal; in time, the nightmares would stop.

Somehow he knew he would never be telling any tales about that chain gang.

He quit telling Uncle Russ stories, too.

Pierce Duncan, usually called Dunc, had coal-black hair cropped tight to his head, alive brown eyes, a good chin, and the thick neck of a man who has done a lot of weights or a lot of manual labor, or both. He was being carried west in style on the crushed ivory leather backseat of a white Cadillac convertible as long as a hearse. A pair of curved Texas longhorns graced the Caddy’s grille. Hot wind blew on his face. This was the life! He needed a little of this after Georgia.

The Caddy whispered through the desert afternoon at a hundred miles an hour. The driver was large, soft, reddish, with a red sunburned face and thinning russet hair blown by the wind. Sunglasses hid his eyes. He steered with a single finger crooked around the wheel. There were freckles on the backs of his sunburned hands. Pink hairs curled on his bare forearms.

“Nice car,” called Dunc, trying for casual even though the Caddy, at this speed, skittered as if on glare ice. His words were whipped away by the wind of their passage.

“Eats up the miles,” yelled the big man. In the rearview mirror his face wore a wide grin. His voice was surprisingly thin to come from such a large body. “I need a car can get me there fast. I need lots of fast.”

“I need to pee,” whined the blonde riding beside him. She also wore black glasses and was about thirty, but still with a good figure well displayed by a cotton sunsuit. Her narrow fox face had a sly thin-lipped mouth with half the lipstick eaten off.

“Now, Mae, there’s not much of a place to go around here,” said the driver mildly. He caught Dunc’s eye again in the rearview, winked. “Tracks we’re making, we’ll hit a town soon.”

Maybe literally, thought Dunc. The reddish man went on, as if hearing the unspoken thought.

“Thing is, I gotta go all over the West all the—”

“I’m gonna go all over the seat you don’t stop right now.”