The Elephant Mountains (14 page)

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To look out the window,” she said.

“Put some shoes on. Watch out for broken glass.”

She did as he asked and went to the window. He heard the crunch of broken glass under her shoes.

“The stars are out,” she said. “Come and look.”

When he looked up at the sky, he saw it was clear. Then they heard laughter from the other end of the boat.

“I don't think they'll bother us,” he said.

“Just keep that shotgun close.”

They got back in the bed, neither of them bothering to put on clothes. He lay on his back, his hand on one of her breasts. It was too hot for any more contact than that. He waited to feel the sort of breathing from her that would mean she was asleep. But it never came.

“Can't you sleep?” he asked.

“Will you stand watch?” she asked.

He looked at his watch and saw there were three or four hours before sunrise.

“Sure,” he said. “You go on to sleep.”

“If they come, don't argue with them,” she said. “Just kill them.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes, before they do it to us.”

He almost made a joke about that being an un-Christian thing to do but decided against it. He did not like having to contemplate harming Richard and Drexel. They had plucked them out of their sinking boat. Prison or their belief in God or some force, perhaps unknown even to them, had transformed them into good men. He did not care how many banks Drexel had robbed or that Richard's wife was dead by his hand. That was in the past.

Richard, if he were telling the truth, had probably not meant to kill his wife. Stephen recalled how Richard had observed it did not seem real that she was dead. He remembered his father and his killers lying on the sand, how that did not seem real.

Then he got up and put on his clothes. Taking the shotgun, he sat in a chair placed in a position that allowed him to have a view of both the window and the door. He supposed if they tried to force the door he would kill them. It would be a simple thing to do. Yet he hoped he would not have to do that.

Angela's breathing had fallen into the slow, heavy rhythm of sleep. To pass the time he began to count all the dead people he had seen floating in the water. Not a single one of them would receive a burial or even have the briefest word said over them. When he reached thirty, the count slowed down. But as he sat there, the images of the floating dead, some grotesque and some peaceful, kept forming in his mind. And he felt a vague sense of panic there would be no end to the count, that it would go on and on until he was exhausted. He would break his promise to Angela and sleep. The prisoners, whose characters he might have misread, would slip into the room, and he and Angela would join the floating dead.

TWELVE

S
tephen opened his eyes. The room was full of light. He noticed the bed was level. It was clear to him that the water had risen, leveling the boat. Angela was still soundly sleeping. He wished they could take a bath together in the big Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom and then go down to the dining room for breakfast. In the evening they might go to the casino and gamble. Then they would return to the room and make love.

He slung the Saiga over his shoulder and moved the couch away from the door. He left Angela sleeping to go find the prisoners. He carefully opened door after door, but the rooms were all empty.

Out on deck he found them sleeping on mattresses they had dragged out there. They each had thrown a sheet over themselves to keep off the mosquitoes. He prodded Richard's leg with his foot. He knew it was Richard because his body made a larger mound under the sheet. Richard groaned and rolled over. An empty whiskey bottle was by his side. He wondered if they were still drunk.

“Get up,” Stephen said.

Richard poked his head out from under the sheet. He rubbed his eyes and then took a look at the sun, which was just rising over a line of cypresses.

“Boy, it's mighty early to be getting a man up,” he said.

“Water's rising,” Stephen said. “You lay around in bed a little longer and we'll be floating down the river.”

Now Drexel was stirring.

“Get up,” Richard said. “You heard what this boy said.”

Drexel emerged from beneath the sheet.

“I heard,” he said. “How could I help not hear?”

“Can't hold his liquor,” Richard said.

“Just as well as you,” Drexel said.

He sat up and looked around.

“Where's the girl?” Drexel asked.

“Don't you be worrying about that girl,” Richard said. “She's this boy's girl.”

“No, that's not so,” Stephen said.

But he hoped the opposite might be true. She had made love to him, but he realized she had probably done that with plenty of boys, every one of them a boy who believed in Jesus. They were not pretending as he had.

“I think she likes me,” Drexel said.

Richard laughed.

“A college girl like that ain't gonna have nothing to do with you,” he said.

“How do you know she's a college girl?” Drexel said.

“She told me,” Richard said.

“Boy, is that true?” Drexel asked.

“That's what she says,” Stephen said.

“Drexel, just put your mind off her,” Richard said. “What we have got to do is find somebody to surrender to and show 'em we saved these children. Then maybe we'll see that pardon from the governor.”

Stephen went back to wake Angela. Soon they were lowering themselves down the rope and into the bridge boat. Richard started the engines and took the helm. Drexel took a position in the bow to watch for snags. The pump jet kicked up a cloud of black mud.

“Look at that good black mud,” Drexel said. “After the water goes down somebody's gonna grow themselves a million dollars' worth of beans in this field.”

“We don't get that pardon, we gonna be growing beans and cotton for free for the state of Louisiana for the rest of our natural lives,” Richard said.

Richard steered the boat through the field as Drexel pointed out the places where there were snags.

They crossed a creek and then floated over the top of what Richard said was a private levee and into another enormous field with cypresses scattered here and there at one end. Richard began to wonder if it was mostly an oxbow lake instead of a field.

As the field or lake curved to the northeast, Richard followed the curve along the edge of the flooded timber. Then up ahead Stephen saw a boat anchored in their path. He looked through the field glasses and identified it as a towboat.

“Lost his barges,” Richard said. “Maybe he's out of diesel.”

Stephen scanned the deck of the towboat and saw there were figures on deck looking at them with field glasses.

“We'll have a look,” Richard said. “Boy, you keep that shotgun close.”

Stephen chambered a shell and took a position behind Richard. Drexel was looking at the towboat through the field glasses as they drew closer.

“Women!” he shouted. “Ain't nothing but women!”

Angela took the glasses from him and turned them on the towboat.

“He's right,” she said.

Drexel snatched the glasses from her. They were now rapidly closing the distance between the two boats.

“Fine-looking women,” Drexel said.

“You just remember we're looking for that pardon,” Richard said. “You insult those women and we'll be back to chopping cotton.”

“I'm not gonna insult nobody,” Drexel said. “It's probably been a long time since they've seen a handsome man like me.”

Now they were drawing close. Three women stood on the deck. One had a bullhorn in her hands.

“You prisoners stand off,” a metallic voice came over the water.

“We standing off!” Richard shouted. He turned to Stephen and Angela. “Put down that shotgun and get up here where they can see you good.”

Stephen and Angela climbed up beside Richard and Drexel.

“We rescued these children,” Richard shouted. “We looking to give this boat back to the Corps.”

“All right,” the voice said. “Come alongside so we can have a look at you.”

Stephen saw that one of the women had brought a machine gun out on deck. She was resting the barrel on the rail and covering them with the gun. Another woman was supporting the belt of cartridges.

Richard maneuvered the boat until it was alongside the towboat. The woman put down the bullhorn.

“I'm Captain Sullivan,” she said. “This is the towboat
Sally James
. Keep your hands where Chandra can see them. I know you don't want to make her nervous. Now you come on aboard. Leave any weapons in your boat. Let the children come first.”

“We ain't gonna do nothing to make Chandra nervous,” Drexel said.

He gave her a big smile, but Chandra, a thin black woman, gave him no encouragement. She looked like she was ready to sweep the deck of the bridge boat with automatic fire at any moment.

Stephen and Angela boarded the boat.

“Are those prisoners telling the truth?” Captain Sullivan asked.

She was a black woman. She wore khaki pants and a shirt with her name stitched on it with red thread. On her belt was a big pistol in a holster.

“Yes, ma'am,” Stephen said.

“They saved us,” Angela said.

It turned out that the
Sally James
belonged to Captain Sullivan and her husband. They were both retired army officers. Her husband was somewhere between this point and New Orleans, looking for a string of runaway barges. He knew her position and would return as soon as he found them.

“Just because a few hurricanes show up don't mean it's the end of the world,” she said. “Those barges are carrying soybeans worth a lot of money.”

The women manning the machine gun were the deckhands Chandra and Mary Jane. It was all the crew she could put together on short notice. The towboat had what Captain Sullivan thought was a bent propeller shaft as a result of an encounter with a piece of debris in the river. She had managed to get the boat out of the river and over the submerged bank and levee and into the lake. When her husband Henry returned, he would tow them back upriver to Natchez.

“Hey, Captain,” Drexel yelled. “Can we come aboard?”

Captain Sullivan looked them over one last time.

“What were you in Angola for?” she asked.

“Killed my wife,” Richard said. “By mistake.”

“Banks,” Drexel said.

Then he grinned as if he were proud of that accomplishment.

Chandra and Mary Jane giggled.

“Get that boat tied up right,” Captain Sullivan said. “Those convicts won't know how.”

The deckhands put up the machine gun and caught the lines thrown to them by Drexel.

“We just want to surrender,” said Richard.

“And get our pardon from the governor for saving these children,” Drexel said.

“Come aboard,” Captain Sullivan said. She tapped the butt of the pistol. “But I won't tolerate any foolishness.”

“We believe you,” Richard said.

They all climbed aboard.

Chandra made coffee. Then she stood off to one side with the machine gun. As they sat around a table, Captain Sullivan had Stephen and Angela tell the story of how they came to be on the bridge boat with the prisoners.

“Where'd you get that machine gun?” Richard asked.

“Belonged to the National Guard,” Chandra said.

Mary Jane explained how they had come across a wrecked bridge boat with what looked like a hole made by a rocket launcher in the cockpit. The crew was dead.

“Strange nobody took this machine gun,” Mary Jane said. “It was right there on the deck.”

“Maybe they killed each other and the other boat just floated away,” Richard said.

“We'll never know,” Captain Sullivan said.

Stephen thought of the attack on the barge. He was wondering if Angela was thinking of that too. In that case too the dead had vanished.

“That's when I realized the rising river and tornadoes and hurricanes weren't what we should worry the most about,” Captain Sullivan said. “It's people who're dangerous.”

Captain Sullivan had talked with her husband on the radio the day before. He was going to look for the barges one more day and then return upriver. She had told him the bent propeller shaft had left her in a vulnerable position. The bridge boat with the dead soldiers had convinced her she should not stay in this isolated place too long. She wanted him to find those barges loaded with beans and hurry back.

There was power on the towboat and plenty of food in the galley. They all took showers and washed their clothes. Drexel and Richard were much too big to wear any of the women's clothes. But Stephen and Angela now wore some of Captain Sullivan's khakis. Both of them cut off the pants to make shorts.

Stephen noticed that Drexel was lavishing attention on Chandra and Mary Jane. Captain Sullivan had noticed it too, but she did not seem to mind.

“Look at that fool,” Richard whispered to Stephen. “Thinks he's a ladies' man.”

“You could show him how,” Angela said.

“Those girls are too young for me,” Richard said. “I've been in prison a long time. I'd need to go slow. Start with the right sort of woman.”

Stephen wondered what that meant. When he had a chance, he asked Angela.

“Do you think he means prostitutes?” Stephen asked.

“I don't know,” Angela said. “Maybe it's men he's used to.”

Stephen wondered how it was for a man when, after all those years in prison, the opportunity to sleep with women presented itself.

They had a good evening meal. Chandra did the cooking. Drexel had three slices of her apple pie and praised every bite. Both Richard and Captain Sullivan were looking on him with amusement. After they ate, he helped her with the dishes.