The Clearing (35 page)

Clovis Hutchins and Minos loaded the marshal into the crew car on a stretcher. Byron handed out the eight semiautomatic rifles and kept his own Winchester lever action for himself. He gathered the deputies by the engine’s headlight and explained precisely what they were going to do, how it would play out so that no one would have to fire a shot. He spoke about the weapons, and the men turned them in their hands, fingering the buttons and triggers. While his brother lectured, Randolph looked across the flat-black yard and thought he saw a blurred, nightgowned figure on his porch, holding on to a post, watching. He wanted nothing more than to go to her, take off his clothes, and try once more right then to make a child. But then the engineer released the air brakes, the coach lurched backwards in a heavy, cloudlike motion, and they all began to pile aboard. Randolph pulled on the grab irons and hoisted himself into the cab as the engine began rocking over the sagging rails.

When the train arrived at Poachum, the fireman jumped down with a spike puller and broke off the lock on the switch stand. He opened the switch, and the train backed out of the spur track and onto the Southern Pacific’s high rails. As soon as the fireman swung the switch closed again, the engine began to dodder west as fast as it could go, eighteen miles per hour, its gear shafts and connecting rods winking grease in the afterglow of the headlight. Randolph hung out of the gangway remembering the invisible landscape, the moss-haunted trunks rising from a floating carpet of duckweed, the reptile-laced bog that still raised the hair on his neck if he thought about it too much. He wondered if the many-fanged geography rubbed off on people, made them primal, predatory. Had it changed him? Why else would he be out on this errand, risking gunfire? What had affected him if not the land itself that sickened and drowned his workers, land that would eat him alive, too, if given half a chance?

When the slowing train approached the big curve before Cypress Bend, the engineer killed the headlight, and let the locomotive creep along in a white noise of whispery exhausts. At a point where an engineer approaching Cypress Bend switch from the other direction would have no chance of seeing the Shay, he set the brakes, and with the jolt Randolph’s heart bumped up in rhythm. He began to worry about all the men and weapons on both sides and concluded he’d rather be playing accordion on his porch. Getting down on the fireman’s side of the engine and stepping off the roadbed, Randolph could no longer see the black locomotive and he was immediately lost. Away from Nimbus the world was a darker and wilder place, and when Clarence Williams touched his arm from behind, he turned around and saw nothing but a smudge on the night.

“What wrong with Mr. Merville back there on the floor?”

Randolph reached out to find the man, so he would know where to send his words. “He’s very sick. Unconscious, in fact.”

“Why ain’t he at the doc?”

“We can’t do this job without him.”

Byron came up and turned on his flashlight, playing it along the coach to where Minos and Big Norbert were taking the old man down the steps on the stretcher, Norbert on the ground, holding the handles high.

The mill manager watched the light ghost over his brother’s face. He hadn’t said a word. “Are you all right, By?”

“I’ve done this with a hundred thousand men,” he whispered, reaching into a shirt pocket and removing a police whistle. “One blast and we all stand up.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,
sir
.” Byron struck off west down the main line, followed by his brother, Clarence and three other Negro mill hands, then Clovis, with Minos and Norbert at the rear.

Rafe, the engineer, who’d just struck a match for his pipe, looked down at the stretcher as it passed under the cab window. “Y’all must be hard up for lawmen.”

Minos spat on a driving wheel. “Some people don’t never take a day off,” he said, then disappeared past the steaming front of the locomotive.

It was a quarter mile around the curve to Cypress Bend spur. Rafe had predicted that George Robinson would run the Tiger Island switch engine around the wye at Rick and back down the line into the spur so the boxcars would be close to the wharf. They all came to the switch stand and walked the spur away from the main line into the uncut woods, staying in the center of the track. From the left came the rum-rum of a bar pit full of bullfrogs. Grass spiders and crickets textured the dark with their noise, but after a half mile of walking, the men heard the wall of sound fall away. Byron snapped on the flashlight and lit up an open area, a broad apron of clamshells on the left, and down near the end of track, the jutting roof of a storage dock where the wisteria and poison oak squeezed the rotting roof braces in weedy fists. Fifty feet behind the clamshells and parallel with the track was a low, overgrown levee, and Byron signaled with his light for the men to spread out as he’d instructed, twenty feet apart in the tallow trees and privet, keeping behind the mound. Minos and Big Norbert lay Merville far back in the roundgrass, taking their rifles out of the stretcher. Randolph crouched in the dark and heard the men settle in, shucking shells into the chambers and clicking the safeties on and off, on and off, another insect noise.

He didn’t know the time, but when he noticed the outline of a thistle appear next to him, guessed it was five o’clock. Light glazed the treetops in the east and after a moment he could see flat, lead-colored reeds leaning against his gun barrel, and then a live oak formed out of the night sky across the tracks. He worried about standing when his brother blew the police whistle, about trying to arrest everyone in a show of force, and whether the surprise would indeed paralyze Buzetti’s men into preserving themselves.

Hearing the thump of an engine, he rose up to look toward the slate-colored bayou where after a minute the ghost of a small tugboat appeared, pushing a deck barge toward the landing. The boat drifted in at an angle like a careful drunk and landed sideways against the plank dock. Two men stepped off carrying rifles in a careless fashion, holding them parallel to the ground, one-handed. Randolph backed down into the brush as the men walked slowly up the track, looking to the north. He could hear them speaking, trying to guess the time as they sauntered up the line and then returned to the boat where two other men had thrown off a gangplank and were off-loading wooden crates.

A wren scolded, and then a crow flew low overhead. The mill manager froze as he saw movement in the dense grass to his right where the hatless head of his brother broke through the greenery. “Remember,” Byron said, panting, wide-eyed, “this is an arrest. No shooting unless one of them fires first.”

Randolph drew back, alarmed. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

“The mosquitoes are making everybody jumpy. The sooner the train gets here, the better.”

“Yes.”

“Rando.”

“What?”

“Are you all right?”

Randolph looked toward the dock. “How’d you feel before you went over the top in France?”

“There was always a moment when I wondered if I was making a mistake.”

“I was trying to make a joke.”

Byron licked his lips and peered through the weeds. “A joke. Well, we’ll see who laughs, won’t we.” Then he backed down through the path he’d made in the wet grass, and when he was ten feet away, the mill manager could see nothing of his movement.

The mosquitoes burned like droplets of acid on his arms and neck, but he didn’t slap at them. His ears were on fire with the stings when he heard a train whistle calling a long way off at the road crossing in Rick. Ten minutes later came the heavy clack of boxcars slowing out on the main line, and the woofing exhaust of the locomotive died as the fireman dropped off to throw the switch. Through the cypress stand came the sing of wheels as the train backed down the curve toward Green Bayou. The exhaust of the switch engine drummed four times, and then there was the slowly growing rattle and creak of the approach. The mill manager took off his hat and laid it on the ground. Looking above the levee he saw the first boxcar wobble into the clearing a hundred yards away, and he clicked off his Winchester’s safety and gathered his legs beneath him. Mosquitoes were lined up and drilling on his ears, but he didn’t feel them. The engineer backed the cars all the way to the end of the rails, the fireman dangling from grab irons on the last car and giving lazy hand signals. With a hiss of compressed air the train stopped, and a boxcar door slid open in a complaint of rusty rollers as Buzetti jumped out along with four others, all of them wearing pistols in holsters. Randolph looked under the cars and could see no one on the other side of the train, so he listened for his brother to blow the whistle for the deputies to stand up. He was sure Byron would call out in his big musical voice for everyone to stand under arrest, and it would all be over. Randolph could taste the relief on his tongue. His ears yearned for the signal.

Perhaps the whistle was in his brother’s mouth, but Byron must have seen what Randolph suddenly noticed on the far side of the train: a dark hat passing in the rectangle of new light between two boxcars. No whistle sounded, and there was only the rattle of another boxcar door and the grunt of a man hefting a wooden crate of whiskey from the dock and struggling with it toward the tracks. Despite the mosquitoes propellering in his ears, all the mill manager could think of was catching Buzetti’s men on this side of the train, the surprise both complete and safe. He held his breath and watched the legs moving along the far side of the last boxcar, then stopping; the man might be urinating, or maybe just dodging the work. It was a shame, Randolph thought, that several lives could depend on the fullness of one man’s bladder.

The first crate of whiskey arrived, and someone in the boxcar pulled it inside. Seven men formed a walking line between the barge and the train. Twenty-five, fifty, then a hundred wooden twelve-quart boxes arrived, and the mill manager began to rock back and forth, his legs cramping and burning. He ignored everything except the movement on the other side of a willow sapling in front of him, thinking of how he would describe this motion years from now—and at once a shiver vibrated along his shoulders at the idea that there might not be any years ahead, and he looked up to see vividly for the first time the grasses around him and the smudge of train beyond.

Someone stepped from around the back of the last boxcar, a man with a small, dark mustache and a darker eye patch, a piece of material so black it seemed to be a hole showing the lightless insides of his head, and immediately the police whistle warbled out from the brush—the same whistle, Byron had told him, that had belonged to his sergeant on the line at Chateau Thierry—and the nine of them stood and stepped over the embankment together, Byron in the lead and shouting, “You’re all under arrest, put your hands up.” For one moment, an angry churning seized Buzetti’s face, his hand moving to his side, but the sun was full up, and even the man wearing the patch could see the huge muzzle holes and box magazines of the sleek Winchesters and how they were designed to kill at once. Buzetti’s hands drifted up, shaking in the yellow light, and then the men who were loading put down their boxes and hesitantly raised their arms, as if they were only following their boss’s lead. The boatmen reached their hands the highest, and Randolph looked over this dream of the whole batch of them being rounded up without a shot fired, even the dark one with the eye patch stepping out into the light, his coat falling open to reveal an automatic pistol in his belt, but his hands on the back of his head like a military prisoner. The mill workers were rigidly aiming, every one of them scared of death and standing firm only out of loyalty to the sawmill boss or a paycheck or some connection to the pile of smokestacks and boilers and saws gnawing daylight out of the swamps. Randolph fixed his sights on Buzetti’s forehead and tested the curve of the trigger with his forefinger, but there was no resistance in the criminal’s eyes. He was giving up, as they all were, Buzetti perhaps already thinking of his lawyers, of how paying a few thousand dollars to a jury foreman was better than swapping lead with a sawmill gang so ignorant in the ways of killing people that they might be lucky enough to manage it. The event looked to be over. Byron was the first to step ahead of the line, hollering for the bootleggers to bunch up, making sure the morning’s work was finished.

But then, the wife-beating engineer, the foul, balding man with blotched, peeling skin who craved the admiration of gangsters, lifted above the ledge of the locomotive’s window a large break-action revolver, drew back the hammer, and fired, knocking Byron to the ground. The concussion ran through everyone like lightning; the men by the train dropped their hands to their guns, and all the deputies panicked, jerking their triggers as one shot, and pulling them again and again, not really comprehending automatic rifles that kept reloading themselves. The mill men seemed to lose track of how many rounds they were firing and as long as guns went off kept banging away.

The engineer’s skull cracked open like a watermelon and the heavy slugs broke planks out of the boxcars, rang the iron wheels like church bells, thundered against the locomotive’s tender as Buzetti and his men fell down firing their pistols wildly, at anything or nothing, as if it would be unthinkable to die with unspent shells. While the deputies filled the air with spinning brass, the mill manager fired at Buzetti and the recoil kicked the next shot into the top of a car, and when he felt a bullet thwack through the cartilage of his left ear, he brought the muzzle down and pulled the trigger until his last casing winked through the air and the firing pin snicked down on an empty chamber. He spun dumbly to the right, heard the roaring fade through the trees, and smelled the mockingly pleasant odor of smokeless powder filling the windless clearing. A few shocked moments passed before he saw that no more shooting was called for. Everything had changed forever, and the gunfire had lasted six seconds.