Джо Горес - Dead Man

Her parents. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She wanted to smash things, throw things, grieve — but she couldn’t. How could you grieve when your parents were dead because of you?

Some animal sense made her suddenly raise her head to look up the bayou. She stood up abruptly. Far, far up the narrow waterway, just coming into sight around the last turn, was a pirogue. Even at this distance she could see that the man was poling one-armed and had the other arm in a gaudy yellow sling.

Vangie drew in her breath. Dain! Here! He had set up Zimmer for the kill; she didn’t see how he could have, but maybe he’d had some hand in getting her parents killed, also. And now he was here to set her up for them. The Judas goat. Maxton and the other killers would not be far behind.

Goddam him! Weapon or no weapon, she’d see about that.

She started walking rapidly back toward the cabin.

Dain poled his erratic way toward the distant camp. The wetness soaking through his bandage was no longer red, but pus-yellow. It took all of his willpower to stay focused on that cabin. Follow the bayou. He had made it! He was here!

Where? Why?

No. Hang on. Just a few more shoves with the pole...

The prow of the pirogue sliced into muddy earth, stopped. He poled three more times before realizing he was grounded. He let go of the pole and fell sideways out of the pirogue into the muck and shallow water with a loud splash.

It felt wonderful there. Cool and soothing. Mud bath. Mummy would be mad, his Sunday clothes...

Don’t lose it. He was here. He got to his knees. Crawled ashore, dragged himself erect. Stood swaying on the muddy bank, getting his first look at the fishing camp.

The two rooms formed a stubby ell of unpainted, hand-split cypress boards around a framework of young cypress trees. Stilts held the floor off the ground, even though the cabin stood on a ridge that was itself above flood stage. The roof was peaked, shingled by two tiers of overlapped cypress boards. A two-section stovepipe stuck out of the wall beside it at a crazy angle. The foot-square glassless windows at either end of the cabin were netted against mosquitoes, their exterior wooden shutters laid back against the walls.

The handmade door also stood open, almost invitingly. Very invitingly, in fact. Even as he thought it, the cabin began to distort, to stretch and contract as if made of rubber or Silly Putty. Dain kept his eyes fixed on it as he moved; by the time he had reached the bottom of the three mile-high steps it was yawing mildly as if at sea in the middle of a storm. There was nobody in sight. Who was he expecting?

“He...” He lost it, tried again. “Hello?”

There was no response. Dain went up the steps with agonizing slowness. He paused on the stoop, swaying with the rhythm of his own ragged breathing.

But he had remembered why he was here.

“Vangie?”

He called her name and she came around the door frame from inside the cabin, yelling formlessly, high on rage, already swinging a heavy wooden paddle. It caught him in the stomach, doubling him over, driving out all his breath. She swung again, this time against his useless shoulder, knocking him off the side of the porch like a sack of flour.

White-hot pain shot from his shoulder through his entire body. Even his teeth, his toes hurt. He landed on the grass with a thud that drove his wind out and consciousness away, thinking he was saying aloud, Christ, Doc, that hurts! I don’t know how many more times I can take you cutting me...

She stood looking down at him, face flushed as much from emotion as from exertion.

“Goddam you, you got my parents killed! You got Jimmy killed! Now you come here...”

He was staring up at her, his eyes open, obviously conscious, but with a strange passivity.

“I know why you came here! To lead Maxton to me, you fucking Judas!”

Still no response. It was as if he were defenseless, defeated by her mere words. But she knew he was hearing her, was conscious, was seeing her. A new fear struck her.

“You fucker!” she screamed. “Don’t you dare fucking die on me before I can kill you!”

Then she threw the paddle aside and leaped down off the porch after him.

One of the two rooms was for living, the other for storage of gear. Rough wooden shelves nailed to the walls held canned goods. At one end of the room was a hand pump over a half fifty-gallon oil drum, cut longways with a blowtorch and braced with sawhorses to serve as a sink. Also a potbelly iron stove and a wooden table with four chairs. In the other end were two bunks with sheets, blankets, pillows.

Vangie backed in through the open doorway, dragging the unconscious and filthy Dain, who outweighed her a hundred pounds, by his armpits. She dumped him on the floor beside one of the bunks. Grunting and heaving, she got first his torso up on the bunk, then swung his legs up, leaving him lying twisted and half on his side.

From the table she got a huge glittering Bowie knife, tested the blade on the ball of her thumb as she crossed the narrow room to the recumbent man. Razor-sharp.

In the sixteen years of her life spent in the swamp before she had fled to the bright lights and the big cities, she had killed hundreds of animals, thousands of fish. Gutted them, skun them, filleted them. She was no stranger to death. It didn’t bother her to kill. So easy here. What difference it was a man, not an animal? One slash across the throat, like bleeding a hung deer... Or a single thrust up through the solar plexus under the sternum to the heart...

Dain was already almost dead. A falling-out with the others? Something in the swamp that had gotten him? To know what had happened, she would have to get a look at the wound.

And whatever had happened, Dain alive was an asset. If they were coming after her, maybe he could be a hostage.

Dead, he was just something to bury.

She knelt beside him, slashed the sling, then tore his shirtdown. She stared at the wound with the scrap of yellow pus-caked cloth stuffed through it. She bent over it, sniffed, jerked erect.

“Jesus,” she said aloud, “is that ripe!”

The swamp had not done this to him. It was surely a bullet wound, heavy caliber to have ripped through with such power. Steel-jacketed because a hollow-point or lead-nose bullet would have taken his whole shoulder off. If for some reason Maxton wanted to kill him as much as she did, he might be useful to delay them until she could get away.

She left him there unconscious, his wound uncovered, went back into the kitchen area, pumped a pail of water, set it on top of the stove, and lit the already laid fire. Without a backward glance, she went out through the open doorway. He was going to die anyway. If something came in and got him while she was gone, it would save her a lot of trouble.

Then she thought, I might do it myself when I come back.

But not right this minute. She recovered the paddle she had whacked him with, went down to his pirogue, shoved out into the bayou. She paddled easily and expertly back upstream, in the direction from which he had come.

Fifteen minutes later she swung the pirogue in toward a dead buffalo fish she had remembered was on the bank. As the prow drove into the mud three feet from the dead carp, a swarm of big green-bellied flies rose up, buzzing angrily. The side of the fish was moving in a slow steady seethe, almost as if it were still alive. Vangie crouched beside it, big Bowie knife in hand.

It was dusk when she returned to the cabin. Dain was breathing noisily. She thumped a tin can down on the table. Pumped up the kerosene lamp. A match flared, the mantles flamed, then steadied to pour out white light. She lowered the glass shield of the lantern, left it on the table.