The violet air was thick with insects as I drove down the yellow road toward the levee and the marsh. The road crossed the Southern Pacific tracks, then followed alongside a green levee that was covered with buttercups. On the other side of the levee were a canal, a chain of willow islands and sandbars, and a bay full of dead cypress. Three hundred yards from the track crossing was a fishing shack, a small box of a place with a collapsed gallery, an outhouse, an overflowing garbage barrel in back. Both a pirogue and a boat with an outboard engine were tied to wood stobs driven into the mudflat. A chopped-down Harley was parked on the far side of the gallery, its chrome glinting with the sun’s last red light. The sky was black with birds.
I parked the truck down the levee, took my World War II Japanese field glasses from my locked toolbox, which the kids from the Iberville project hadn’t gotten into, and waited. It was going to be a hot night. The air was perfectly still, heated from the long afternoon, stale with the smell of dead water beetles and alligator gars that fishermen had thrown up on the bank. I studied the shack through the field glasses. The garbage barrel boiled with flies, an orange cat was eating a fïshhead in a bowl on the shack step, a man walked past a window.
Then he was gone before I could focus on his face.
Finally it was dark, and the man inside the shack lit an oil lamp, opened a tin can at a table, and ate from it with a fork, hunched over with his back toward me. Then he urinated off the back steps with a bottle of beer in one hand, and I saw his big granite head in the light from the door, and the muscles that swelled in his shoulders like lumps of garden hose.
When he was back inside I got out of the truck with my .45 in hand, crossed the levee, and moved through the darkness toward the shack. The willows were motionless, etched against a yellow moon, and I saw a moccasin as thick as my wrist uncoil off a log, drop into the water, and swim in a silvery V toward a dead neutria that had been hit by a boat propeller. The man moved in silhouette across the window, and I slid back the receiver on the .45, eased a hollow-point into the chamber, and walked quickly up the mud-bank to the back steps. I heard train cars jolt together, then a locomotive backing along the tracks on the far side of the levee.
Now, I thought, and I cleared the three steps in one jump, burst into the shack, into a reek of stale sweat that was as close and gray as a damp cotton glove. His head looked up from the comic book that was spread on his knees. I aimed the .45 straight into the face of Eddy Raintree.
“Hands behind your neck, down on the floor! Do it, do it, do it!” I shouted.
The skin around his right eye was puckered with white sores. I shoved him off the chair amid a litter of newspapers, beer cans, and fast-food containers. His weight bowed the floor planks. I put the .45 behind his ear.
“All the way down on your face, Eddy,” I said, and began to pull the handcuffs from the back of my belt.
That should have been the end of it. But I got careless. Maybe my alcoholic dreams and sleeplessness of the previous night were to blame, or the eye-watering body odor that filled the room, or the sudden slamming of freight cars out in the darkness. But in the time it took the handcuffs to drop from my fingers, my vision to slip off the back of his head, he spun around like an animal turning in a box, grabbed the .45 with both hands, and locked his teeth on the knuckle of my right thumb.
His eyes were close-set like a pig’s in the lamplight, his jaws knotted with cartilage, trembling with exertion. Blood spurted across the back of my hand; I could feel his teeth biting into the bone. I clubbed desperately at the back of his thick neck. His coarse, oily skin felt like rubber under my knuckles.
I was almost ready to drop the gun when he rammed his shoulder into my chest and dove headlong through the front window curtain.
My right hand quivered uncontrollably. I picked up the .45 with my left and went out the front door after him. He was running along the levee next to a stopped freight that must have been a mile long. The locomotive was haloed with white light and wisps of vapor, and in front of it gandy walkers were repairing track in the red glare of burning flares.
Eddy Raintree must have received his dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps before a DI could teach him to stay off the crests of hills and embankments and never run in a straight line when someone is making a study of you through iron sights.
It felt strange to fire the .45 with my left hand. It leaped upward in my grasp as though it had a life of its own. Both rounds whanged and sparked off the sides of a gondola, and Eddy Raintree kept running, his head
hunched into his shoulders. I knelt in the weeds, sighted low to allow for the recoil, let out my breath slowly, and squeezed off another round. His right leg went out from under him as though it had been struck with a baseball bat, and he toppled down the far side of the levee to the railroad bed.
When I slid down the embankment and got to him he had his palm pressed tightly against his thigh and was trying to pull himself erect on a metal rung at the end of a boxcar. His hand was shining and wet, and his face had already gone white with shock. A sweet, fetid odor came from the car, and then I saw that it was actually built of slats and contained cages.
“Sit down, Eddy,” I said.
He breathed hard through his mouth. His eyes were bright and mean, the whites flecked with blood.
“It’s over, partner. Don’t have any wrong thoughts about that. Now sit down and give me your wrist,” I said.
He tried not to grimace as he eased himself down on the gravel. I cuffed one wrist, looped the chain through the iron rung on the car, and cuffed the other wrist. Then I patted him down.
“What the fuck’s this train carrying?” he said.
I split open his pants leg with my Puma knife. The entry hole in the skin was black and no bigger than the ball of my index finger. But it took my wadded handkerchief to cover the exit wound. I slipped my belt around his thigh and tightened it with a stick.
“What the fuck is in that car?” he said. His long hair hung from his head like string on a pumpkin.
“I’m going to give you the lay of the land, Eddy. You’re leaking pretty bad. I’m going to run up ahead and ask those train guys to radio for an ambulance. But if we can’t get one out here right away, I think we should dump you into my truck and head into Baton Rouge.”
The side of his face twitched.
“What’s the game?” he said.
“No game. You’ve got a big hole in you. You’re going to need some blood.”
“That’s it? I’m suppose to get scared now? I had a nigger gunbull sweat me with a cattle prod till he ran out of batteries. Go fuck yourself.”
“Read it like you want. I’m going to the head of the train, then I’ll be back and we’ll load you in my truck.”