"I said run, boy."
"Yow, boss," Woodrow said.
He ran to the shed and lifted a wood case of Royal Crown Cola bottles by the handles and closed the door behind him with his foot, the bottles clinking between his hands. Then, as though a choice lay before him that would forever define who he was and the place he would inhabit in the world, he hesitated. On the perimeters of his vision he could see the Lejeune home high up on the slope, built to resemble a steamboat, surrounded by live oaks and palm trees; he could see a bulldozer and scooped out hole between the camp and the house where a damaged gas storage tank had just been removed; he could see the soot and brown smoke blowing out of the fields, the buzzards circling in the sky, the barbed wire that surrounded the camp, the tin roofs of the cabins already expanding against the joists with the heat of the day, the hard-packed clay smoothness of the yard, the gun bulls and trusty guards already mounted on their horses, most of them armed with double-barrel, cut-down shotguns whose steel was the color of a worn five-cent piece, and in the midst of it all, Woodrow's best friend, Junior Crudup, drunk on julep made from yeast, raisins, and cracked corn boiled in a syrup can, about to be destroyed by his own pride.
Drop the bottle case on the ground, he told himself. Let them ship you back to "Gola. Do cain't-see to cain't-see on the Red Hat Gang,
take the sweatbox treatment on Camp A, but don't hep them to hurt Junior. Please, Lawd, make me be strong when I am weak, he prayed.
"Goddamn it, boy, move your ass!" Jackson Posey shouted.
"I'm coming, boss!" Woodrow said, running, the empty pop bottles rattling inside their wooden slots.
Junior sat down on the ground, pulled off his shoes and socks, and mounted the pop bottles, extending his arms out sideways for balance. The other men marched out the front gate, their-eyes straight ahead, and began climbing into the trucks that waited for them. When the trucks drove away in the dust, Woodrow looked through the slats in the tailgate and saw his friend quivering like Jell-O atop the rows of R.C. Cola bottles, his pain sealed inside his closed eyelids.
Junior was still there when the trucks returned in the evening. Except he didn't look like Junior anymore. There were skinned places on his face and knots on his head; one eye was swollen shut and his denims were dark with his own urine.
At sunset Junior was allowed to come off the box and sit in one corner of the yard. As the other men passed on their way to the mess shack, they saw the bottoms of Junior's feet and had to look away. But Junior's trial by ordeal was not over. Jackson Posey stood over him, thinking private thoughts, touching at the corner of his mouth with one finger. Posey looked up the slope toward the gouged hole in the landscape where a gas storage tank had been pried out of the ground.
"Get your shoes on, Junior. Woodrow, bring a spade from the shed and get my lunch bucket and a chair from my office," Posey said.
The three of them walked together up the slope in the twilight, Junior limping like he had glass in his shoes, while purple martins darted through the haze of smoke in the air. A fat, thumb-buster .45 revolver creaked in a holster on Boss Posey's hip. Woodrow set down the chair for Boss Posey to sit in and speared the spade into a huge mound of wet clay by the hole, then set down Posey's lunch bucket on the ground by the chair. For just a moment he thought he smelled rain inside the wind.
"You don't need me no more, huh, boss?" he said.
"Hunker down on the dirt pile and keep me company," Posey replied, opening his lunch bucket and removing a pint of whiskey.
He wants you to attack him, Junior. Then he's gonna kill you. He brung me to be a witness and cover his ass, Woodrow said to himself. Look at me, Junior. Can you hear the words I'm t'inking?
"Dozer man run out of gas today, Junior. So you got to fill up that hole for me. Better get on it," Posey said.
"Stood all day on the bottles, boss. Ain't got nothing left," Junior said.
"You done this to yourself, boy." Posey unscrewed the cap on his whiskey bottle and took a sip, rolling it in the corners of his mouth before h
e swallowed. Then he seemed to think a long time before he spoke again. "You believe you're better than me, don't you?"
"No, suh," Junior replied.
"Smarter, been more places, slept with better-looking white women than I have. Been wrote up in northern magazines. A man like me don't get his name in the paper lessen it's in the obituary."
Junior pulled the spade out of the clay mound and began shoveling into the hole, keeping his bruised feet stationary, swiveling his back to throw each spadeful. Boss Posey drank from the bottle again, then removed a piece of wax paper-wrapped chocolate cake and a slapjack from his lunch bucket. The slapjack was perhaps eight inches long, thin, mounted on a spring, lead-weighted and swollen at the tip, like the head on a snake. He rested it on his thigh and ate part of the cake, then put both the slapjack and the remnant of the cake back in the lunch bucket.
The sun dipped over the rim of the earth and the fields went dark and night birds began calling to one another in the woods across the bayou. At first Woodrow tried to close his eyes and sleep on his feet. Then, without asking permission, he sat down on the back side of the pile Junior was spading into the hole. But Boss Posey didn't seem to mind. He was drinking steadily from the bottle now, bent slightly forward in the chair, the cancer on his arms like small poisoned roses buried in his skin.
Off in the distance Woodrow heard the dry rumble of thunder and saw a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. Junior's movements with the shovel became slower and slower, then it slipped out of his hands and clattered down into the darkness.
"I had it, boss. You gonna shoot me, go 'head on and do it," he said. He stood erect, his face slick with sweat, his body glowing with stink, one eye swollen into a knot with a slit in it.
"I'm about to lose my job 'cause of you. My pension goes out the window with it. That's what you done, you black sonofabitch. Now, you fill that goddamn hole."
"Know what the problem is, boss?" Junior asked. "It ain't Miss Andrea. It ain't Mr. Lejeune, either. It's 'cause you ain't no different from us. You eat the same food, stack the same time, kiss the same pink ass the niggers do. Maybe it's time you wise up."
The first blow with the slapjack caught Junior across the temple, splitting the skin to the bone. Then Jackson Posey whipped him to the ground, just as though he were chopping on a piece of wood.
But Woodrow believed it was the first blow that killed Junior and that the others were visited upon the body of a dead man, because Junior made no sound as the slapjack whistled down on his head and neck and back, thudding to the ground on his knees, his eyes already rolled upward in his head.
And while his friend died Woodrow stood by impotently, his fists balled in front of him, a cry coming from his throat that sounded like a child's and not his own.