The Clearing (25 page)

The mill manager’s boots broke ice in the mud holes on his way to the office the next morning. Before he passed in front of the commissary, he heard a noise in the canal, an inboard motor popping along as a bateau arrowed up to the mill’s flotilla of skiffs. In it were three men wearing dark fedoras and overcoats. He went out to meet them and helped a stoop-shouldered lawman wearing an enormous mustache get out of the boat. On his left breast under his coat was a small gold star inlaid with what seemed to be diamonds and rubies. The man’s face was soft, his features rounded like those of a statue left for centuries out in the rain. Behind him was a cross-eyed deputy, and last, behind the engine, sat Merville, who looked sleepy and sick, one eye stuck shut from the windy ride. When everyone was standing on the bank and stretching out their legs, Sheriff LaBat poked his hat back with a finger and looked at the mill manager. “Did you kill that dago?”

Suddenly out of breath, Randolph looked around at the mill, his kingdom, as though someone had come to take it from him. “Yes,” he answered.

The sheriff caught his eye and held it. “Why’d you do it?”

Again there was a flash of panic in his chest, and he began to imagine a trial, a long line of lawyers, the expense and worry. Finally, he said, “He was firing a pistol at a roomful of my workers.”

The sheriff spat next to his own foot. “That damned Luger with the snail-drum clip?”

“Yes.”

“How many’d he hit before you nailed him?”

“Three.”

At that point, the sheriff looked past the mill manager, over to the schoolhouse. He sucked in his lower lip and bit it. “Would you mind if I put a little five-by-five stand over behind that building? You know, kind of a polling booth for elections? Something to keep the ballot box in?” He put a hand on Randolph’s shoulder and clamped it tight. The smell of tobacco and gasoline flooded around them.

The mill manager looked behind him and then at the lawman’s expensive badge. “Well, you could do that.”

The sheriff nodded. “Your constable, maybe he could register everybody eligible to vote if I sent him the forms? You got maybe a little spare lumber around here to build it? Some number three shingles, maybe?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And carpenters?” the sheriff asked, closing his little hand more tightly on Randolph’s shoulder and bumping against him with his pot belly.

“I’ve got carpenters,” he said hoarsely.

The sheriff turned him loose and clapped him on the back. “You look like this is the first one you put in the ground.” He stepped back into the boat, and the cross-eyed deputy started the engine. “You ought to have my job.” The mill manager saw that the deputy wore a shield badge, but it was pinned on upside down. The boat backed out from the knife cut it had made in the mud bank, away into the leaf-stained canal, leaving Merville on the bank making a hand-rolled cigarette and shaking his head.

“Mr. Aldridge,” the old man said in his morning-soft voice, “you takin’ up your brother’s ways?”

Randolph nodded toward the skiff as it swung for the main channel. “He’s not too interested in the details, is he?”

The marshal shrugged. “Maybe he figures Buzetti will get at you anyway. A man as smart as you must’ve figured that out, yeah.”

“If Buzetti had been in my shoes last night, even he would have killed his cousin.”

Merville squinted at him through the smoke. “But he didn’t. You did.”

The locomotive wobbled into the back of the yard, and the men watched it couple to a car of sawn lumber. “I would’ve given anything not to. You should’ve seen the way my wife looked at me when I told her what happened. I felt like a stranger in my own kitchen.”

“You not the same as you was yesterday, that’s for true.”

The mill manager put up his hands and let them drop. “What’ll I do?”

“You got coffee on?”

They walked to his house, where the housekeeper dripped a fresh pot of dark roast. Walter toddled up to the old policeman and put a soft finger on the handle of his gun.

“Come here, Walt,” Randolph said.

Merville watched as the boy climbed with much help onto the mill manager’s lap. “Buzetti will go after money or blood.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You cost him a relative. He’ll cost you something. Tell my boy to keep a eye out in the boiler room. Tell Mr. Jules to have a man check the logs coming into the saw shed.”

“You think he’ll do something to my brother?” He looked over his shoulder and saw that May had left the room. “Or our wives?”

Merville shook his head and took a long swallow of hot coffee. “The sheriff couldn’t look the other way if you or your brother got hurt. You got money, and Byron got his little badge.”

“What about the women?”

“We got a few White Camelias down west of Tiger Island. They’d come out the swamp and use a rope on Buzetti for that.”

“His soldiers couldn’t stop it?”

Merville reached over and grabbed the child’s hand, studying the palm and then turning it over, looking at the back. “Buzetti ain’t God. He’s just a mean crook from a family of crooks.”

“What are you looking for?”

He dropped the boy’s hand. “Nothing,” he said, turning to glance at the housekeeper, who had returned and was stirring a roux in a black iron pot. She stared away, out the door toward the mildewed cabin where her father had died.

The weather turned unseasonably warm and Randolph began to have trouble sleeping. The nights steamed like a cow’s breath, and he would wake up with the sheets sticking to his legs like wet paper. Sometimes in his dreams Vincente would slink out of the saloon door, stagger into the mill yard, and throw cards one at a time up in the air, where they turned into birds. Once, Randolph woke up crying, his wife cradling his head against her breasts and telling him it was all right what he had done, that she could forgive him.

“How else could I have handled it?” He twisted his face up to her in the dark.

She petted his slick cheeks and told him, “Let the other men die, I guess,” which they both knew was no answer at all.

One morning the agent at Poachum called him on the new line that stretched out to the house. “Mr. Aldridge, your agent in Tiger Island just sent me a telegram.”

“What did he say?”

“A man wearing a eye patch just stepped off the westbound there.”

Randolph closed his eyes. “How was he dressed?”

“It’s him all right.”

“Well.”

“You didn’t hear it from me.” There was the sound of a screaming locomotive whistle in the receiver, and then a click as the agent hung up.

He immediately walked over to Byron’s, where he found his brother writing a report on the shooting for the parish sheriff, forming block letters like a schoolboy. On the Victrola Lester McFarland was singing “Go and Leave Me If You Want To.” Randolph told him what the agent had said, but he didn’t stop writing.

“I’m still filling out forms about it. New ones came yesterday.” His brother’s smile was wide and mean. “You didn’t know all that stuff was in a head, did you?”

“What?”

“You maybe thought it was a big noodle in there? But it’s not. It’s a lot of dark pudding, some of it gray.” His hand made a low arc. “A pistol bullet paints the floor with his memories.” The record stopped and the Victrola clicked off. Over at the mill, Minos pulled the cable for the noon whistle, and the deep note fell against the window glass, which sang like tissue paper on a comb.

“How can you think up things like that?”

Byron looked down at his paper. “Sorry.”

“I wish it hadn’t happened.”

“It should happen to Buzetti.” He picked up his pencil and resumed the childlike lettering. “It would be easy.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’d go to jail forever.”

“Still, it would solve things. Kill the queen and get rid of the hive.”

“It’s not the way things are done.” When Randolph heard the pencil snap in two, he looked down at his brother. “It’s wrong, By. It’s a sin.”

Byron’s eyebrows went up. “If someone had shot the Kaiser, would there have been a war? Think about it, Rando. There’d be millions of fat and sane fellows working away in this old world right now.” He clapped a broad hand to his forehead. “You know, I recall a story Father once told about Annie Oakley when she was touring Europe, maybe forty years ago. The Wild West Show?”

Randolph looked around and pulled up a chair. “What did he say?”

“She was shooting glass target balls that some chump was throwing up for her.” He moved his hands, mimicking the toss. “That’s all she did. She’d shoot nine hundred a day sometimes, without a miss. Used a .22 rifle so her shoulder wouldn’t wear out.” Byron’s eyes rounded as he talked. “It was nothing to her, like swatting flies. Well, the way Father tells it, one day she was in Germany, doing some fancy shooting, knocking grapes off a bar at fifty feet while firing backward, sighting through a mirror. Then this odd man steps out of the crowd. Anyone could see that he was odd. Even the cloth on him was arrogant and his mustache was like a piece of tin. He was dressed in one of those grand European uniforms with gold braid and big epaulets. He told her that she had to shoot a cigar out of his mouth at thirty paces. He demanded it. She replied politely that she didn’t do such things, and he insulted her. Called her a weak American farmwoman. Somebody in her company leaned in and let her know that the man was very important and it would be a good thing if she would go along.” Byron stopped and suddenly looked down at a white scar on his forearm, putting a forefinger to it for a moment.

“I don’t remember this story.” Randolph turned out a brogan and mashed a roach coming in off the porch, then felt sorry about the mess.

“She told the man to stand off seventy-five feet and then chose a Winchester 73 to do the honors. He put a blunt in his mouth and showed his profile. Annie took aim none too slowly and cut the thing in half with a 44-40 slug, one inch from his lips.” Byron thrust his face next to his brother’s. “You know who the young man was?”

Randolph shook his head, pulling back.

“That damned crippled woodchopper himself.”

“The Kaiser?”

“If she had missed the cigar by two or three inches, my best friend Walter Liddy would be writing me letters about his children, and you and I would be squabbling about hardwood production in the dry woods of western Pennsylvania.” Byron stood and raised his arms to the ceiling. “Millions of good and bad fellows would just be going about their own business.” He seemed suddenly exhausted and fell back into his desk chair.

“But what would’ve have happened to Annie Oakley?”

“She would have gone down as a sad joke, brother, one of the world’s great idiots.” Byron raised a finger into the air. “But in all truth she would’ve done more for mankind than Queen Elizabeth, Walter Reed, and Thomas Jefferson rolled into one.”

Randolph uncrossed his legs, leaned forward. “A killing started the whole thing, you know. The archduke.”

“He was the wrong man to die.”

A shadow filled the screen door, cast by a thundercloud of a man, the one called Judgment, who was holding by the jacket collar a small, writhing figure. Minos stepped from behind them and came inside, carrying a cypress slab.

“We got us some trouble, yeah.”

“What’s this?” The mill manager stood up and walked out onto the porch to look at the olive-skinned fellow writhing in Judgment’s hand.

Minos held up the slab. “A fireman saw him walk in from Poachum on the railroad. He pulled this out of a sack and threw it in the pile we use to start up the boilers on Mondays.”

The mill manager looked at the wood. “What about it?”

“A scalder,” Byron said.

Minos turned one end of the slab toward Randolph to show an augured hole holding a stick of dynamite. “I peeled a gob of mud off the end and saw this.”

The little man blurted, “Hey, I didn’t know nothin’ about that.” Judgment twisted his collar, and he stood still.

Byron drew close to the man and looked down on him. “Who paid you.”

“Hey. I was walkin’ in to ask about a job. The sack was lyin’ on the track so I picked it up.”

“You know who paid him,” Randolph said.

“I want to hear it.”

“Nobody paid me nothin’.”

Byron shook the dynamite out of the slab into his hand. “A third of a stick.” He held the charge up. “With a blasting cap.” He pulled out a pocketknife and stepped into his house.

His brother peered through the screen after him. “What?”

After a minute Byron returned, holding two lengths of harness rope and the piece of dynamite, a line of green fuse the length of a rat’s tail hanging out of it. “Hold him by the arms, Judgment. Stand behind that porch post while you do it. Mind you don’t fall into the yard.”

“I gotcha, Mr. Byron.”

He knelt and lashed the prisoner’s legs tightly above the knees with several turns, and then pushed the stub of dynamite between the man’s bound legs so it nested under his testicles, the fuse curling up. Byron pulled out a match and held it against the box. “Now, who sent you?”