The Clearing (10 page)

Someone was talking to him through his eyelids, and with his whole heart he did not want to be alive, but his blood still moved through him like a moon-drawn tide, and he had no choice but to sit up on the bench. A boy with baby eyes was looking at him from under an agent’s visor. “The westbound’s blowing for the trestle,” he said.

“Quoi?”
The storm in his head began to subside, and he touched the boy’s shoulder.

“The westbound,” the boy said.
“Ecoute ça.”

Merville stood and blinked himself alive, stretching one arm and then the other. He was still in this world and gave the boy a marshal’s glance before walking unevenly out into the sun. He picked up a cypress slab from the platform and flung it across the tracks into a trapper’s yard. His right arm still worked, though his left spasmed with electricity. Looking east for engine smoke, he heard the hoarse whistle softened by the thousand-year woods and saw the train’s headlight swim around a curve, turning the rails to silver arrows pointing toward his boots. With his sound right arm he drew his pocket watch, and at once an understanding flooded through him of how Byron Aldridge could bear to open his eyes each morning despite his sorrows. It was time that did it, time that allowed a man to put to use what he’d learned from his suffering. Merville’s numb left hand struggled to grip the watch, and he wound it tight.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Anthony Buzetti liked the fact that his office had no windows. His older brother had been shot dead through one in Chicago, and his mother had jumped out of another when she heard the news. He pulled the chain on his desk lamp and began dealing solitaire with a new deck, waiting for Crouch to arrive. The first board he turned up showed three fives and two queens, and he cursed the cards, raking them and dealing again. Five minutes into the next game he saw he couldn’t make solitaire, so he tore a fistful of cards in half and swept them with the rest into a wastebasket. For good measure, he leaned over and spat on them, his oiled hair sliding over his forehead.

The door rattled, and his cousin, Crouch, pushed it open just wide enough to slide his tall frame sideways into the room. “Hey, Buzetti,” he said, and stopped.

His eye patch seemed like a hole in his face.

“Hey, youself.” Buzetti got up and embraced him in a clinch, then pushed off.

“Okay, so I’m here.”

“That’s good. I want you to stick around on salary for a while, know what I’m saying?” He banged his cousin on the shoulder then sat back down at his desk. “I heard about you.”

“I bet.”

“You some bad stuff. What’s it been?”

“Five years.” The man slumped down onto an armchair.

“Crouch. Yeah. I never understood how you got a name like that.”

“It’s my poppa’s, in the old country. What can I say, he’s a Crouch.”

“He’s no
paisan,
I tell you that.”

“So what you saying, I’m a half-breed or something? A mixed dog, maybe?” Crouch’s face was unreadable and still. “I hear you got some hun in you from your momma’s side.”

Buzetti took a cigar from his coat pocket and lit it. “Crouch,” he said, drawing the word out. “Sounds like something you do before you take a shit.”

Crouch’s eye narrowed. “It’s my name.”

Buzetti laughed out a spray of smoke and came around the desk to his cousin, grabbing his neck and jerking it back and forth. “It’s all right, you know?”

Crouch waited for him to back off, then threw his leg up over the arm of the chair. “You got a job?”

“I always got a job. Right now there’s some trouble. I got three nice little cunts working for me. They turn the money, you know, but they think they’re high class. Think they can shit flowers. Sometimes they keep back too much fee. I told them, I get half.” Buzetti leaned his head to the left. “But I’m not getting half.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Crouch said.

“Don’t mess them up. It ain’t good for the business.”

His cousin nodded. “But you didn’t bring me in from New Orleans to fizz up some split-tails.”

Buzetti slid down in his chair. “I got a great little business down at this toilet-hole saloon, some place called Nimbus. No competition. One of these country Tonys owns the building, Galleri, but the only thing we let him have is the beer money. This place is so far back in the woods you’d have to ask directions from a fuckin’ owl. I got it all to myself.”

Crouch shrugged. “What?”

“It could do better. A lot better. But the constable down there beats up my dealers, puts my girls on the train when they do too good. Now he’s trying to shut me down Sundays.”

Crouch’s face did not move. “A constable. What, a sixty-dollar-a-month man? Just drop some bills on him.”

Buzetti pulled on his nose. “Nah, not this constable. He’s sharp and crazy both. I think money don’t mean nothin’ to him.”

“So I press his suit, with him in it?”

“Hey, this ain’t some joke. He was in the army.”

Crouch raised his chin. “You was in the army. I was in the army.” He touched his eye patch.

“We kill a lot of people.” Buzetti raised an imaginary glass in a toast.

“Salut.”

Buzetti frowned and looked down at his desk. “This guy killed more. The bastard was in longer. A lot longer, know what I mean? Before we got there. Years before. He sat in like a folding chair and watched the Frenchies die like ants on a woodstove. Somebody paid him to watch.”

Crouch extended the fingers on both hands and touched the tips lightly together. “So, he’s one of them with the spiders in his head.”

“He’ll need some special handling. That’s why I brought you in.”

“To send a message to the guy who don’t listen.”

“Something like that.”

Crouch’s face became even more unreadable, as blank as a shadow.

Buzetti slapped his chest, then got up again, walked back around the desk. “He got to know who to listen to.”

“What kind of people runs the mill?” Crouch asked.

“Pittsburgh money, know what I mean? Whitebread from smoketown.”

“No mixed breeds.”

Buzetti looked away. “You really do to that banker what they said?”

“What. What lies you heard?”

“The snake thing, which I didn’t believe. I can’t touch no fuckin’ snake.”

Crouch dropped his gaze and looked at his shoes. “Oh, that.”

“You want a drink?” Buzetti finally asked.

Crouch waved the offer away with the back of a hand.

“A cigar?” he asked nervously, then added, when Crouch looked at him, “Ah, of course, you don’t want that. The smoke gets in your eye.”

The tall man stood up and put a hand on Buzetti’s shoulder. “Cousin,” he said, in a voice terrible to hear, “don’t try to make me laugh.”

The saloon had been closed on Sunday for two weeks straight. The next Monday morning, the mill manager saddled the horse and splashed to the office through a foot of tea-colored tidal backwash blown up out of the swamp by a south wind. The horse stepped into a shallow ditch, stopped, rotated its ears toward the planer whining behind the office, got its bearings, and walked according to the sound. Randolph could handle the horse easily during the day, when all the machinery was steaming along and telling it where things were, but at night the animal would balk in the baffling silence. Galleri had said that the horse was blind because it had been poisoned. A mill hand who had been fired by the previous manager had fed it seed treated with mercury. Sometimes the mill manager envied the horse because it was never spooked by sudden motion and couldn’t worry about things it could no longer see, its life simplified by tragedy.

Randolph reined up at the office door, noticing a piece of paper on the step held down by a firebrick. The typed note read, “Open up the saloon. If you not going to do this, you pay.” At once he suspected the hard-drinking chief engineer, a comical, red-faced German who wore a little plug hat and roamed the plant studying steam lines for leaks, and who kept a typewriter in his closet of an office. The mill manager balled the note up and tossed it toward a wire basket inside the door. The German would have to think of some other way to get his whiskey.

A week later he was making his daily round through the roaring mill instructing Jules, who listened and nodded while working a half plug of tobacco around his mouth. In the boiler shed they stopped to watch the men throw slabs into the furnaces, and Jules called the German over, slipping a finger under one of the man’s suspenders. “Why you got the water level so high in the boilers?”

The engineer pulled off his canvas gauntlets. “
Die
Schwartzen
forget sometimes to run the pump. You want I should let the water go under the firetubes so they melt?”

Jules looked again at the water gauge and then jerked at the suspenders, pulling the engineer toward him. “Listen up, Hans, I don’t need to be lied to by no rummy. You’re carrying water high so you don’t have to watch and can sneak off for some schnapps.”

“It is no problem with the boilers,” the German said. “I watch them
viel genug
.” He backed away from Jules’s hand. “And I am not drinking on your time.”

“It’s all my time, Hans. You got to stay sharp.”

“I got to be happy. Here is not a happy place. I sweat and my clothes stay wet all day. The waterways stink and look like dark beer.” He straightened his suspenders and turned his back on them.

Leaving the boiler room, the mill manager and Jules climbed into the howling saw shed, where the atmosphere was not air but an excited mist of wood particles. The log carriage flew back and forth, running a trunk against a toothy loop of lightning, a band saw powered by a Corliss steam engine straining below the floor. Overhead, line shafts roared in their cast-iron hangers while a shirtless boy crawled on a timber above the noise, continually filling the oilers and placing his fingers next to bearings to feel for overheating. This boy had replaced another twelve-year-old who had gone up among the pulleys wearing a floppy triple-stitched shirt and was grabbed by a foot-wide belt and dashed against the saw shed roof; the mill manager could not bear to look at the freshly whitewashed section of cypress above him.

The lumber flew out of the saw blade, all the men talking in hand signals since no voice was equal to the thunder of the room. They drew pictures in the air and mouthed simple words through the sawdust snow. Randolph had heard that when sawyers went to the silent movie in Tiger Island, they could read the actors’ lips.

The head sawyer examined an invoice that must have called for a special order, for he held up a forefinger and pinky, a call for 2½-inch cuts. The man riding the carriage adjusted his grab dogs and began slicing a pink slab of cypress three feet wide. The mill manager’s skull vibrated like a bell, and he started up the stairs to his office when the band saw suddenly exploded into a clattering mass of shrapnel, its teeth whistling around the shed like scythes. Someone pulled a cable to stop the main engine.

Randolph turned to Jules, who suddenly was not there but lying facedown on the floor in a spray of blood. When he knelt and rolled him over, he saw a red blossom spreading across his white shirt.

Jules spat out a cud of tobacco and gasped, “What? What?”

“Let me look you over.” The mill manager brushed sawdust off him and searched for bleeding. “You’ve got one bad penetration and a few small places. Is anything hurting on your backside?”

“Naw. Just my chest.”

Randolph looked around at the crew. “Anybody else hurt?” The carriage operator, a short man wearing a bandanna, held up a streaming hand. “I lost the top of a knuckle is all. But I sure nuff ought to be dead.”

Someone down the carriage track hollered that he’d taken a saw tooth through an ear. “What kin I do about it,” he squalled, holding a handkerchief against his cheek.

“Aw, get yourself a earring,” the carriage man told him as he slung blood off his fingers.

Workers began to stand up and to crawl from under the walkways, and the mill manager saw that things could have been much worse. Two dozen shafts of light fell from the tin roof where pieces of band saw had knifed through. When he bent down and ripped open the front of Jules’s shirt, he saw several shallow cuts, and nested in the middle of them was a blue hole over an inch long. Spreading the wound with his fingers, he could make out the pebbled butt of a shard of blade steel.

He and two edgers carried him to the commissary and laid him on a counter between the cheese cutter and the accounts ledger. Randolph scissored off the bloody shirt and poured whisky into the hole.

“Son of a bitch,” Jules hollered.

“Yell all you want to.” Randall called for a light and the commissary clerk brought over a gooseneck desk lamp. “I think it’s just in the meat of you. Now, we can do this here, or you can go into Tiger Island in the next baggage car that goes by.”

Jules draped a forearm over his eyes. “Aw, God,” he said. “There’s more goes in to that place than comes back out.” He dropped his arm and looked at the manager. “You like this doctor stuff, don’t you?”

“Maybe I’m in the wrong business.” He wiped the chest down with medicinal alcohol the clerk had found for him. “But my father wanted a lumberman.”