The Clearing (22 page)

“No.”

He shrugged. “You and your brother must think I smell bad. But hey, no matter. Look, I come to ask if you can let Galleri open up on Sunday.”

Byron narrowed his eyes. “How fast does that boat of yours run?”

Buzetti’s face rippled like a shallow pool in the swamp where a dark millimeter of water rides over a cage of fangs. “I figured we could help each other out. I can use the Sunday business and Mrs. Aldridge, she could use a little protection on the 2900 block of Prytania Street.”

“The saloon stays closed,” Byron said, but there was a tentative note in his voice that seemed to catch Buzetti’s ear.

“Look, I don’t want something for nothing. I figure we maybe shoulda took it easier on some of your woodchoppers. So let’s say I pay you a fine.”

“A fine?”

Buzetti drew a small paper bag out of his coat and spread open its top. Disbelievingly, Byron looked inside, as if he were being offered a sack of candy. He saw a roll of bills bound with rubber bands, and laughed. “You’re trying to buy me?”

“Aw, naw. It’s a fine. Do what you want with it, give it to nigger orphans in New Orleans for all I care.”

Byron looked through the screen into his empty front room, then turned back to Buzetti and stared over his head at his brother’s house across the compound. “No sale.”

“C’mon. It’s a lot of money.” Buzetti held out a palm. “You could buy yourself enough records to tile your fuckin’ roof.”

Byron grabbed him by the shirt front and shoved him against a porch post. “I don’t like the smell of your money, either.”

Buzetti’s face began to show its blood. “Go ahead, you idiot,” he said, “smash my head open in front of witnesses. Then even your brother can’t keep you out of the pen.”

Byron relaxed his fingers and took a deep, slow breath. “Sunday’s out of the question.”

“Why?” He held out the bag. “You can sit in there and look all you want. With the five hundred in this bag you can hire another constable to watch Vincente’s hands. But he won’t see nothing. These chuckleheads you got out here are so dumb he don’t need to cheat.”

Byron looked at the paper bag. “You think I can do only one thing,” he said. “But I can do another.” His eyes, lifted up from the money, were two dark disks of tin, but he saw that Buzetti understood his words, and yet was not afraid.

“You can’t do shit but what I let you do. I know a million guys like you. You studied the Bible and then went off and killed, what, a hundred, two hundred schnapps-drinking kids, so your brains, they got in a wringer, right? And now your tight Pennsylvania ass is down here trying to save the fuckin’ swamp from Joe Buzetti. You want to stop some damage?” Here Buzetti put a forefinger against his own temple. “Well, the damage is already done, you dumb fuck.”

“Get off of the property.”

Buzetti took a mocking step back. He smiled a genuine smile, but it was for himself alone. “I apologize to come all the way out here and bother you. You all set up out here with Miss Ella. She don’t never come to town. Just now and then, ey? She likes this nice little life you got.” He surveyed the mill yard and his face showed what he thought of a nice little life in a place such as this. “And Mrs. Aldridge all by herself down on Prytania, she’s okay too?”

Byron stared at Buzetti’s bag. “You don’t scare me, you pimp.”

“Hey, I ain’t trying to scare
you,
Jack. Nobody can scare a crazy man what pulls a gentleman’s place of business apart with a fucking steamboat.” Buzetti scratched his forehead with the little finger of his right hand. “But your brother and the ladies, one of them could maybe wake up with a big reptile in their bed and decide mill life ain’t for them, you know? Maybe they’d move out and leave you with the mosquitoes.”

“You try that and you won’t believe what turns up in your bed.”

Buzetti pushed his fedora far back on his head. “Let’s get something straight here. This ain’t about you. I know I can’t do nothing to make you think twice about nothing. You a fucking nutzo or something, I don’t know what.”

“What’s it about, then?”

“Money. Vincente, my cousin, who wants Sunday.” He looked past Byron into the house. “With five hundred dollars you could double the size of this shack. Miss Ella, she’d like that.”

Byron reached out and took the bag, hefting it.

The sallow face watched him. “What?”

“How many Germans did you kill?”

“Austrians,” Buzetti corrected, his voice less harsh. “It was Austrians.”

Byron looked down into the bag. “Why did we do it?”

Buzetti cocked his head. “Because somebody gave the permission. That’s a great thing, permission. After the war, I learned to give it to myself, you know?”

Byron thought about this and nodded. “Tell Galleri he can open on Sunday. Just leave my brother and the women alone.”

Buzetti looked back at his men who were watching but not watching, their eyes aimed to the side of the house. He turned to Byron. “Now you thinking straight.”

He stepped inside and latched the screen, leaving Buzetti hovering on the porch like a noisome insect. “No, I’m not,” he said, backing away from the door.

Byron got off the train in Shirmer and headed to the rambling store owned by the Spencer Brothers Plantation. The commissary smelled of molasses, coffee, kerosene, and dirt, its rafters hung with harness, cane knives, and axes frosted with dust. Shelves rose to the smoked ceiling packed with everything except what Byron wanted. The clerk, a short, bald man wearing thick glasses, took a long time to walk up from the back and he addressed him in French.

“I’m the company law down in Nimbus,” Byron said. “What do you have in the way of rifles?”

The clerk put his hands flat on his counter and leaned over them. “Depends on what you need to kill. I got some .22 pumps.”

Byron shook his head. “No. I need large caliber.”

“Oh, you goin’ deer huntin’ in the bushes, yeah?”

“Something like that.”

“I got some old ’73 Winchesters upstairs in 38-40. Nobody buys that no more. I can let you have ’em right.”

“That might do.”

The clerk looked long into Byron’s face. “
Mais,
if you want something that’ll put a twelve-point down on his ass, I got the one.” He walked to a vertical glass case, opened it with a little key, and pulled out a semiautomatic carbine, a mean-looking rifle with a satin-walnut stock and a short, night-blue barrel.

Byron took the weapon and sighted it. “I’ve read about these.”

The clerk put a finger on the gun’s receiver. “Shoots fast as you pull the trigger, yeah. Six times. It fires a soft-point slug that’ll knock a black bear’s brains out in one shot.” He handed Byron a .401 caliber cartridge shaped like a little sausage.

“How many will five hundred dollars buy?”

The clerk glanced at Byron’s badge, then flattened out a paper bag on the counter and added up figures, hiding his arithmetic with a broad hand. “I can bring in eight on the train day after tomorrow, with two boxes of shells each.”

Byron worked the glassy action on the rifle, studied the fearsome cartridge. He remembered his brother’s amateurish standoff at the Poachum station, how Buzetti’s men had seen the Winchester trench brooms and had left without drawing a weapon. “Order them,” he said.

By Wednesday evening the rifles were locked in his armoire in Nimbus, loaded and rubbed down with Outer’s gun oil. His wife watched him wash his hands in the kitchen, then walked into the next room to put a record on the Victrola. As Bessie Smith’s “Downhearted Blues” began to fill the house, she came back and poured herself a tall glass of blackberry wine.

“That record you ordered is too sad,” he said, squeezing his fingers in the dish towel.

She looked at him, flat and steady. “Somebody’s sad is another somebody’s happy, I reckon.”

He looked through the kitchen window into the dark. “You ought not to drink. It’s a habit that gets worse.”

She pursed her lips and leaned against a door frame. “Is it the habit that gets worse, or what causes it?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lillian moved into the logging camp and learned to deal with the captured heat of the place, mosquitoes always floating in her vision, stinkbugs haunting her collar, love bugs flying drunk and sticking to her dress like crawling black snowflakes. She learned the necessity of keeping a shovel on the front porch, which she used to cut the heads off snakes sunning on the steps in the afternoons. The housekeeper she treated as she had always dealt with maids and kitchen women, though she was somewhat at a loss in accounting for Walter. A woman from over in the white quarters had told her the child was probably the son of a millwright who’d quit and moved to Texas back in March. Lillian noted the housekeeper’s cleanliness, intelligence, and devotion to her frail father, and made no alteration in her duties aside from teaching her how to bake and boil a few dishes instead of frying or stewing everything. At her urging Randolph hired five married men who brought their families along, displacing rough-neck drunks Byron had escorted to Poachum in handcuffs; she met each new family as they got off the crew car and urged the men, in front of their wives, to keep clear of the saloon.

The mill manager worried that his wife might last only a few days, but Lillian surprised him, and her activity gained momentum through September. On the last day of the month, when he came home riding the old horse, she met him outside with a list of figures. He was still in the saddle when she handed it up with a slender arm.

“What’s this?” he said, his eyebrows rising. “What will cost six hundred dollars?”

“A one-room schoolhouse. The parish will let us have a teacher and some old books if we supply the building. And a privy, of course. There’s a colored woman down in the quarter who can teach reading and figures to the little black ones at night.”

“You’ve been busy.” He looked down at her. “But most of these kids will wind up sawing timber like their fathers. That doesn’t require any schooling.” He dismounted and began walking the horse around back.

“How much timber will be left when these children are old enough to cut it?” She followed him to the gate of the tiny stall and crossed her arms. “Times are changing up ahead.”

He turned to her and sucked a tooth. “You’ve been reading my
Lumber World
.”

“Enough to know that most of the virgin timber will be stumps in fifteen years or so.”

He looked at the sun in her hair, the mosquito whelps on her neck. “Where do you want it?”

“Between here and Byron’s is a little less swampy.”

He looked at the heavy tree line surrounding the site. Nimbus was being cut, unlike most tracts, from the perimeter toward the center, since this would diminish lumbering costs over the life of the operation, requiring less railway maintenance, less cable and fuel for the pull boats and rafting steamer. From where he stood, the timber seemed to go on forever. Turning away from the woods, he imagined a twenty-four-by-forty-foot schoolhouse, open windows, cypress shingles, all number two stuff, of course. In his mind, the benches were lined with shoeless offspring of boiler firemen and loggers, preparing for a life after trees.

He pulled the saddle from the horse, and the animal let out a relieved breath and leaned sideways against the stall boards. “School,” he said. “Next thing, you’ll want me to build a church.”

“I’m one ahead of you,” she told him, putting an arm through his and leading him through a cloud of Dominick chickens toward the back porch. “The Methodist missionary who comes to Poachum can conduct services in the schoolhouse.”

May, who was broadcasting chicken feed out of her apron, looked up at her as they passed. “There going to be any religion for the colored?” she asked.

Lillian stopped and looked at her, surprised. “Why, May, I sometimes forget you
are
colored.” She reached out and squeezed her forearm. “If you ask around in the quarters and find enough interest, maybe Mr. Aldridge can provide materials for a chapel. Until then, if you can find a preacher, you can use the commissary porch Sunday mornings.”

“Shouldn’t you ask me first?” When his wife looked at him, Randolph pulled off his hat. “Oh, nobody’ll come. You don’t know these people. White or colored, they left their religion behind in Texas or Arkansas.”

Lillian gave out a scoffing laugh. “Every mill town has a school and church, Rand. It’s time you think about providing some civilization.”

He looked again toward where she wanted the schoolhouse built and thought of his red-eyed, headache-haunted employees. “I don’t know.”

“You’ll see,” his wife said.

By mid-October the school was finished—built of raw, ruddy cypress—and six white children showed up at its door. The teacher the parish sent was an inexperienced stick of a woman, but she knew how to read and write, and after a week, the enrollment had risen to seventeen. Randolph lost a large bet with Jules concerning the attendance at the first church service. He walked out onto his porch at eleven o’clock, sure he would be able to look through the open windows of the little building and see only three or four washed-out hillbilly women. To his amazement, he counted many heads, and as he walked up he saw that the rough benches were filled with women, and their men were standing along the walls. Outside, Negro workers and their women gathered under the windows to hear the spilled-over preaching. The minister was conventional in his sermon, but loud, the homily carrying out the open doors and above the Sunday-quiet mill. A gang of young bucks was sitting in the commissary yard on upright bolts of cypress, watching sullenly. Three white sawyers sat behind them on the commissary porch, quietly chewing and whittling, their ears turned toward the overflowing schoolhouse. The boiler gang lounged about the double doors to the steam plant, far out of earshot, but watching, nevertheless. Above the roofs of both the white and black quarters fewer stovepipes smoked, dinner already cooked and waiting for the service to be over at noon. Maybe less than a quarter of the mill’s population was at the service, yet everything turned toward it, Randolph noticed, from the derision of lounging, wild-eyed buckers to the curiosity of single men wandering the barracks yard in their long johns, commenting and scratching. He looked over at the saloon, saw something, and went inside for his field glasses, then brought into focus a man sitting on a nail keg out front—Vincente, flipping cards into his upturned hat. He swung the glasses to the boiler room door, angry that the gang wasn’t cleaning the fire and blowing down the mud rings on the boilers, but then remembered that Lillian, now seated on one of the benches, had instructed Minos to postpone that noisy task until the services had let out.