The Murderer Vine (26 page)

What did I mean by thinking, “if he knew what I was up to”? A tape recorder and a machine gun and drifting down on their Catfish Club? What would he think I was up to — looking for bait?

The thing to do was to play it cool, just drift. Detach the mind and send that adrift. Another forty-five minutes and I would be at the club, ready for a night of fun and games. Just don’t think about the swamp, Dunne. Think about dozing off under a coconut tree somewhere on the Honduras coast. And some girl in a loose white blouse is bending over you with a tall glass filled with cracked ice and gold rum and lime juice.

But the image wouldn’t stick. It kept dissolving and all I saw was masses of thick-bodied moccasins coiled up all along the river’s edge. I tried to remember whether moccasins were night-hunters. It was either rattlers or moccasins who hunted at night. And this was a hell of a time to forget who did what. I hoped to God it was rattlers. That would leave the day to the moccasins, if that were the case, and I wished them Godspeed with their sunlit pursuit of frogs.

I carefully placed the idea of alligators somewhere in a back room of my mind. I thought I had succeeded, but the door suddenly opened and I could just see the way the water curled around the eye ridge. I could hear Brady idly chatting as we stood on the patio holding drinks and sipping before Kirby correctly decided that he and I should become public enemies.

He said, “Now next time you get to a zoo, take a good look at an alligator. They’re as well adapted for livin’ in the water as these Southern politicians are for survivin’ in Democratic Party primaries.

“You might say both species have it made.

“The alligator has a heavy eyelid. Look and you’ll see a ridge around it. This ridge makes the water curl off around his eyes so he can really get up speed when he’s on the surface, and it works so good that he can make time and not blind himself. Now look at that inner lid. That’s for underwater precision work. That inner lid slides sidewards. He can see through it, because it corrects for underwater refraction of light so he can strike accurately underwater. Any civil rights worker coming into a little Southern town is like a swimmer decidin’ to take a healthy invigoratin’ little swim in a swamp filled with hungry alligators. Neither one of them is goin’ to have much of a chance.”

“Brady, you son of a bitch,” I muttered. I hated his vivid phrases. I got some sort of shame-faced satisfaction from knocking out his teeth.

Then I got thinking how much it would cost the poor guy for three artificial teeth and bridgework. I once had two teeth knocked from my upper right jaw by a gun barrel in some nighttime discussion. It cost five hundred seventy-five bucks. Probably front teeth were more of a problem. Maybe eight hundred? I would send Brady that and a brief note of apology.

This kind of rambling kept my mind off the river. I decided to go on with it. How could I send Brady the money? It had better be postmarked Toronto.

But how could I send a letter from Toronto if I were going in exactly the opposite direction? I could enclose eight one-hundred-dollar bills in an envelope and a note, wrapping it well so that the bastard couldn’t hold it up to the light and see what was in it, the bastard being my friend Moran up in Toronto, with a request that he mail the letter to Okalusa.

But he would probably steam it open to see what he could learn that might be useful or profitable. Goodbye, eight hundred smackers.

No. Moran was out.

It would be better to send the envelope to the postmaster at Toronto with an International Reply Coupon and a note saying that I collected postmarks, and that I would be grateful if he would cash in the IRC for a pretty Canadian stamp and mail it to me.

“Me” would be Brady, of course.

Yes. That would work out fine. I would — a slimy tendril from a water-edge plant wrapped itself around my leg. I almost whipped myself onto the mattress to escape. And to hell with the recorder.

I had just about enough of these encounters. I had seen men break down and cry in Korea when they had had too much. One or two more little encounters like that lousy little weed and I would drop the whole thing.

Except that for half a million bucks I would plunge my naked arm into a bushel full of moccasins. With reasonable assurance that I would survive, of course.

These little mental exercises to take my mind off night-hunters and inner eyelids for underwater precision work were not working too well. And it wasn’t doing much good to think of tall glasses packed with crushed ice fed to me by an amiable mestiza while I swung back and forth in a hammock. The hammock would be made of nylon and not out of sisal. Sisal scratches. There would be a double jigger of rum in the glass and a teaspoon of sugar. The juice of a lime would have been squeezed by the strong hands of the lady, and she would hold the glass up to the sky and let me watch the pale green lime juice trickling every which way through the fissures of the cracked ice.

I had just about exhausted all of these little fantasies. I don’t think I could have produced any more of them as a defensive wall against any more nighttime surprises from the swamp. I had had it.

Then I floated around a bend and saw the lights of the Catfish Club.

A few kicks and I was under the pilings. Light poured down in narrow gold slabs through the cracks in the flooring. If anybody upstairs would take a look down he might see me, especially if I moved.

I had to rely upon habit patterns: no one ever looked down at a floor as a matter of course. And I made doubly sure by maneuvering the mattress so that it would be directly under the table, the way I remembered it.

Someone said, “Aw, not on yore filthy pants.”

Joe Sam added, “Wipe that goddam knife afore you cuts the fish. Jus’ once. Jus’ wipe it once.”

Back in Okalusa I had cut a slit in each projecting corner of the mattress. Then I had run a piece of clothesline through each slit. When I had the mattress nicely positioned under the floor, I made the lines fast to four pilings. Now the mattress held firm against the current.

The water was up to my chest. Inside the recorder it said, in four languages:

vor nasse schutzen

protégez contre l’humidité

proteger contra humedad

keep dry

If they considered keeping it dry important enough to repeat it four times, who was I to disagree? I wiped my hands very carefully. Then I lashed the mike with another length of line to a piling so that it was directly under one of the cracks. I faced it upward. It was a dynamic directional mike with low impedance. I didn’t know what it meant, but I hoped it meant good.

The Kim’s controls were like a piano keyboard. I pressed the
start
and
record
keys simultaneously. It was like spanning a small octave on a piano. It made a tiny
click!
which was drowned by the gurgling noise of the water coiling around the pilings. I reached up and turned the
on
switch in the mike. There was a faint rustle as the reels turned. It was the sound a snake makes as it moves over dry leaves.

I settled back with my back against a piling and listened.

The sounds of plates. Knives and forks. I could smell fresh hushpuppies. Then the tinkle of glass, probably the jug against a glass rim. Then a gurgling sound.

“I don’t hold with that ungodly stuff,” Joe Sam said.

“You still talkin’?” That sounded like Vince.

“That squashed-up frawg an’ that tooth a hangin’ from it. More I think ’bout it, more I think we shoulda done somethin’. Like make the sign of the cross afore we touched it.”

I suddenly noticed something shining. I looked down. I had forgotten that the voltage meter was illuminated. I threw a quick glance upward, half expecting to see a curious eye peering down, but there was no one. I pulled an end of the towel over the meter.

“You keep talkin’ ’bout it, you gonna vex me, Joe Sam.”

“Cain’t help it. I cain’t git it outta my mind. That there frawg stuck in that stick is a power!”

“Joe Sam, you shut up!”

“Vince, you know Ol’ Man Mose, he kept a pocket full o’ fish scales? When I wasn’t no bigger’n ’at frawg, he kind o’ squeaked an’ rattled them scales in his hand an’ right then I wished I was dead. I purely don’t think we shoulda gone to his house. Then he used — ”

“You talk some mo’, you gonna rile me.”

“Then he used to have a lil bitty ol’ dry-up tuttle, jus’ a mud tuttle ’bout the size o’ my thumb, the whole thing jus’ dry-up and dead. He used to take out that tuttle an’ put it in the palm of his hand an’ sot down an’ say:

‘Little bunch o’ pepper,

Little bunch o’ wool.

Two, three pammy Christy beans,

Little piece o’ rusty iron.

Mumbledy-mumbledy.’

He used to make my hair creep all ovuh the back o’ my neck when he do that. For a fact.”

“What’s that ‘mumbledy — mumbledy’?”

“How should I know? It’s African. I’m sure glad I didn’t do nothin’ to Ol’ Man Mose.”

“You scairt?”

“I ain’t scairt o’ doin’ what we done with them No’th’n niggers, an’ that white boy ’cause he ain’t no better’n a nigger, but Ol’ Man Mose, he’s diffrunt.”

Vince said, “Aw, you believe in that nigger voodoo.”

“I ain’t sayin’ yes an’ I ain’t sayin’ no. All I say is, it don’t hurt none to go up there an’ make a sign. I got me a mind to go up right now.”

“Sit down, you damn fool.”

“Ain’t goin’ to sit down. You think jus’ because you threw that stick an’ that frawg way into the piny woods the power’ll stay away? You got to fight power with power. An’ killin’ Mose ain’t the way to do that.”

The sheriff spoke. “I don’t give a damn ’bout power or voodoo or hoodoo. Don’t believe in spirits or hants. That’s for ol’ ladies an’ niggers. All I believe is when someone knows somethin’ you don’t want him to know, you make sure he don’t talk.”

“I’m sure glad I didn’t do nothin’ to Ol’ — ”

“Aw, shut up.” This was Ray.

“It fair sickened me to my stomach, the way Vince went at Ol’ Man Mose.”

“Why doncha try puttin’ your lips together an’ not movin’ ’em for a while, Joe Sam?”

“I don’t like you beat ’im with chains. All you had to do was shoot ’im.”

“Chains teaches ’em a lesson.”

“How does it teach ’em if they’re dead?”

Ray interrupted. He said, “You think mebbe we should bury ’em somewhere else?”

“Yeah,” the sheriff said. “No tellin’ if Ol’ Man Mose din’t tell somebody. We better go tonight an’ take ’em somewhere else. Joe Sam, you get that ol’ tarpaulion outta your garage. You go git it an’ meet us back of my house.”

“Why that tarpaulion? It’s a good one.”

“You want your car all smelted up with them boys? They’re ripe. Now you go git it, y’ hear?”

Well, that was enough to convict. Maybe not in front of a jury of twelve good men and true in Okalusa. But enough for the only jury I cared about. It was sitting at 28 Battery Place, high above Manhattan. I knew what he would accept as convincing evidence. And I had it on that silently circling plastic reel.

I had better begin work. I reached out for the stop key, but just then I heard a car turning off the road. Then it stopped. Doors opened and slammed. Two or three people were coming up the walk. I cursed silently.

They knocked.

“Who’s at?”

“Andy ’n’ Boone.”

“ž’Bout time. Come in.”

They walked in.

“Put it down easy, now,” said the sheriff.

Andy or Boone put it down easy. I heard glasses. Then the sound of a liquid being poured.

“How much we owe?”

“Aw, you know how much.”

“Okay. You fellas want a drink?”

Jesus. The local bootleggers making the rounds.

The chairs scraped. Damn them, I hoped they weren’t settling down for the night. They talked. From the sudden way the Catfish Club had dropped the topic under discussion, I was sure that the newcomers had nothing to do with the three boys. If they were settling down for an evening of hard drinking, I was out of luck. The next meeting wouldn’t be till Friday.

In that week, if A.B.C. was as smart as I thought he was, he might be making me, as they say in the profession. That is, he would have traced me, and found out who I was.

I couldn’t afford to wait that long.

So that created an ethical dilemma. If the night went by and those two bootleggers were still there, should I drop half a million bucks just in order to avoid killing two bystanders? Who might not have been involved in this particular killing, but who might have approved of it?

I listened to them talk about the new girls at Mike Gillen’s Motel and Truck Stop. There were four cabins in the rear, each one fitted out with a whore from Jackson or Mobile. The girls were rotated every two weeks by the local syndicate. The Catfish Club began to compare the current batch to the previous ones. It was decided that the new ones weren’t so hot. This news was very interesting but not worth half a million.

Half an hour passed. I was tired of standing in one place. My legs were becoming cramped and chilled. I didn’t dare move. I might make some noise that wouldn’t sound fishlike. I might step into a hole on the river bottom and make a man-sized splash.

They talked about the new liquor tax man down at Jackson; about the Air Force plane that had flown low over their mountaintop still a year ago, and how Boone had shot at it and put a bullet hole in a wing, and how the FBI and Air Intelligence swarmed all over the mountaintop looking for the saboteur. Only it was the wrong mountain. This was also interesting information, but Parrish wouldn’t pay five cents for a reel on Federal Liquor Tax evasion. Should I kill them?

They might deserve it for having the Catfish Club for a customer. I suddenly felt an agonizing pain stab my left calf. With my city boy reactions I almost let out a yell, but I gritted my teeth and forced myself to remain motionless. It took a second before I realized it was only a muscle cramp.