Dead Man (25 page)

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.

On the stove, the water was boiling ferociously. She wrapped her Bowie knife in a towel and dropped them both into the boiling
water, dropped in two more towels as well, took the bucket off the stove. Only then did she turn to look at Dain for the first
time since returning from her foray.

His eyes were open, glittering in the lantern light, but his voice was rational.

“What am I doing here?” he asked.

“Dying,” said Vangie.

Dain was declaiming, waving his good arm around as he did.

“’By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death.’”

Vangie pumped up the lantern some more, brought it over to set it on a chair near the cot on which she had dumped him.

“That’s Shakespeare,” said Dain.

“Terrific.”

He lapsed into silence as she made her preparations. First she brought a tarp from the storeroom, managed by rolling him first
one way and then the other, to get it under him and over the bunk. When she went to work with the knife there would be a lot
of blood, water and pus to contend with.

Next she got out the first-aid kit Papa had always made sure was in the camp. Sterile gauze and adhesive tape and, thank God,
an unopened bottle of iodine. She’d need plenty of that.

She lugged, over the bucket of cooling boiled water, set it on the floor, fished out the towel with the Bowie knife in it,
holding it gingerly in the steaming towel, tossing it from hand to hand so she wouldn’t scald her fingers.

“You’re going to die sane,” she said. “You’re going to feel it coming.” Her eyes narrowed, her face got mean, she burst out,
“You son of a bitch!”

She pulled up the second of the two chairs, sat facing him. She opened the hot towel, took out the Bowie knife, poised it
above the infected wound.

“Grab onto something besides me or I’ll kill you before I want to.”

Her arm jerked. Pus squirted. Dain gave a single yell and was silent. She worked with the blade, wiping sweat from her face
with her sleeve from time to time, rinsing out the wound with the boiled water and sterile towels when she was finished.

“Fun time,” she said to the silent Dain.

And poured about half the bottle of iodine into the opened wound. He screamed again, then was silent again. She felt his pulse;
it was racing. Better than not going. She had no way to check his blood pressure, wouldn’t have known what was good and what
was bad even if she’d had the proper instrument.

Finally, it was time for the coffee can full of seething maggots from the dead carp. She sat down on the edge of the bunk
and very carefully began packing the fat squirming white creatures into Dain’s infected wound. When she had used enough, she
wrapped it with gauze and used adhesive tape to bandage it.

Miles away in the swamp, two flatboats were pulled up on the edge of a broad, lakelike waterway. In a small clearing were
the hunters’ two tents, their flaps closed. On a little natural raft of vegetation just below the low bank, a bullfrog carrunked
away, swelling its throat to drive a ball of air back and forth over its vocal cords and create its thrumming sound.

Without warning a raccoon killed it with one savage
crunching bite. The coon began backing off the raft of vegetation with the dead frog in its mouth. As it did, a bobcat on
the bank gave a sudden high scream.

Maxton’s voice yelled, “Jesus Christ, what’s that?”

The coon had dropped the dead frog to flee. A powerful flashlight began playing wildly over the inside of one of the tents.
The bobcat slunk into the underbrush with the frog.

“Your conscience, maybe?”

The tent flap opened and Inverness looked out. Maxton’s pale face appeared beside his in the narrow V-shaped opening. He was
still waving the flashlight around.

“It… it sounded like… a woman’s scream.”

“That isn’t until we get to the camp,” chuckled Trask from the other tent.

Inverness could feel the pressure building inside. He just wanted it finished. He just wanted fucking Dain dead. Maxton and
the two creeps could do what they wanted to Vangie. He let the flap drop back again.

“Go to sleep, Maxton. You’ll need it. I smell rain.”

Through the small mosquito-netted window on the east side of the fishing shack, dawn was staining the horizon with a narrow
crimson line. But neither of them was awake to see it. Vangie was crowded into the same narrow bunk as Dain, his head resting
partially on her breast and partially on her shoulder. His wound was tightly bound with fresh white gauze.

“No,” he said suddenly in a conversational voice. Vangie’s eyes opened. He began throwing his head from side to side.
“Run,
Albie!” he cried.
“Ru…
“

He subsided. She put her hand on his forehead. It was cool to the touch. The fever had broken in the night. Just some nightmare… But Dain thrashed again, almost throwing her off the bunk with the violence of his movements. She saved herself only by
putting one foot on the rough plank floor.

“Marie! Look out!” He paused for a moment. Then, a loud cry, “Vangie!” Softer voice. “They’re… coming…”

She leaped out of the bunk, ran on bare feet to the table,
pumped the dying lantern bright again. She sat down heavily and, hunched forward, regarded Dain intently, an almost frightened
look on her face.

She shivered. “Why me… in his nightmares…”

When he had begun bucking like an out-of-control stallion, her old perverse reactions took over as they had so often in the
past. She’d started to feel sorry for him. Yesterday, she’d wanted to kill him. This morning, when he had been bucking beneath
her, she’d wanted to fuck him. It was as old as mankind, deny death with an act that affirmed life, sometimes created it.
But here and now, with this particular man, her body’s reaction seemed a betrayal and made her angry.

“Goddam you,” she exclaimed, “if you’re going to die, I wish you’d do it.”

Dain made no more movements or outcries. Vangie’s head gradually slumped to her forearms, crossed in front of her on the table
beside the slowly dying lantern. She slept again.

Midmorning, rain pouring from a leaden sky. Vangie was coming from the marshland in the pirogue through the driving storm,
wearing gleaming raingear. Two cylindrical chicken-wire traps in the bottom of the boat were crawling with live crawfish.

Inside, Dain awoke to the sound of rain drumming on the roof, swung his feet to the floor and tried to sit up. On his second
try he managed to stay upright. His right arm was immobilized under its gauze wrappings; he gingerly scratched at it. His
color was better, he felt totally rational.

“Be a hero,” he said aloud to himself. “Stand up.”

He tried. Fell back on the bunk. Tried again. This time he managed to get to his feet, swaying but upright. He began a very
slow progress across the room. Rested, hanging on the back of a straight wooden chair. Panting. He looked at the inviting
bunk a continent away. Started back again. Made it.

Sat down. Rested. Stood. Started back toward the table.

Made it. Back to the bunk. Stayed upright.

Again. And again and again and…

The door was jerked open and Vangie was blown into the cabin by hurled sheets of rain. She set down her bait bucket full of
live crawfish as the door slammed behind her. Only then did she see Dain on his feet, halfway between bunk and table.