The Convict and Other Stories

Her face colored, and she had trouble finding her hat and her car keys before she left.

The moon was bright over the marsh that night, and I decided to walk down the road to Tee Batiste’s cabin and go frog gigging with him. I was on the back porch sharpening the point of my gig with a file when I saw the flashlight wink out of the trees behind the house. I ran into the living room, my heart racing, the file still in my hand, my face evidently so alarmed that my father’s mouth opened when he saw me.

“He’s back. He’s flashing your light in the trees,” I said.

“It’s probably somebody running a trotline.”

“It’s him, Daddy.”

He pressed his lips together, then folded his newspaper and set it on the table next to him.

“Lock up the house while I’m outside,” he said. “If I don’t come back in ten minutes, call the sheriff’s office.”

He walked through the dining room toward the kitchen, peeling the wrapper off a fresh cigar.

“I want to go, too. I don’t want to stay here by myself,” I said.

“It’s better that you do.”

“He won’t do anything if two of us are there.”

He smiled and winked at me. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, then took the shotgun out of the wall rack.

We saw the flashlight again as soon as we stepped off of the back porch. We walked past the tractor shed and the barn and into the trees. The light flashed once more from the top of the levee. Then it went off, and I saw him outlined against the moon’s reflection off the bayou. Then I heard his breathing—heated, constricted, like a cornered animal’s.

“There’s a roadblock just before that railway track. You didn’t tell me about that,” he said.

“I didn’t know about it. You shouldn’t have come back here,” my father said.

“They run me four hours through a woods. I could hear them yelling to each other, like they was driving a deer.”

His prison uniform was gone. He wore a brown, short-sleeved shirt and a pair of slacks that wouldn’t button at the top. A butcher knife stuck through one of the belt loops.

“Where did you get that?” my father said.

“I taken it. What do you care? You got a bird gun there, ain’t you?”

“Who did you take the clothes from?”

“I didn’t bother no white people. Listen, I need to stay here two or three days. I’ll work for you. There ain’t no kind of work I can’t do. I can make whiskey, too.”

“Throw the knife in the bayou.”

“What ’chu talking about?”

“I said to throw it away.”

“The old man I taken it from put an inch of it in my side. I don’t throw it in no bayou. I ain’t no threat to you, nohow. I can’t go nowheres else. Why I’m going to hurt you or the boy?”

“You’re the murderer, aren’t you? The other convict is the robber. That’s right, isn’t it?”

The convict’s eyes narrowed. I could see his tongue on his teeth.

“In Angola that means I won’t steal from you,” he said.

I saw my father’s jaw work. His right hand was tight on the stock of the shotgun.

“Did you kill somebody after you left here?” he said.