“If all he wanted to do was kill crackers,” says Gamble, “he could have stayed in Tampa.”
The river is not so wide here, but swift-moving from the months of rain. They keep it on their right and march till they come to a sandy beach piled with driftwood in the crook of an elbow bend. There is none of the usual comment when Junior orders them to fall out.
The men have taken to carrying fruit or boiled eggs they’ve bargained for in Las Ciegas as well as their rations, and Sims gets a little driftwood fire going to cook coffee.
“How they do it,” says Coop, “is they just keeps movin. Them little shitholes we run through this morning? Full up with googoos five minutes after we leave, havin them a party.”
“They aint gonna win no war that way.”
“Long as they not where we are, they doin fine. Most alla them U.S. volunteers gone home by now, right? And how many ignant niggers like us you think they can fool into coming here?”
“Speak for yourself,” says Junior.
“I’m doin that. I been vaccinated twice already, bit by every kind of bug that crawls or flies, had googoos shoot at my head and knock a cocoanut off a tree and the sun done cook me to a whole new shade of dark, and yet I aint put nary a one of these little monkeys in the ground. They just playin with us, is all, cause they don’t want to fight no more.”
“They’ve switched to guerilla tactics,” says Junior. “Like the Boers in South Africa.”
“They’ve switched to hidin out and laughin at us poor donkeys runnin around in the heat,” says Coop. “Aint no tactics to it.”
Royal eats to get it over with, staring dully out at the river and the long wall of jagged mountains beyond it. Junior has been drilling him about the importance of a positive state of mind, and every new day he tries to will himself into one, but it never lasts much past Kid Mabley blowing Assembly. Mingo Sanders from B Company and some of the others from the Indian wars say get used to it, this is what regular soldiering is, living out your routines, working your details, keeping yourself razor-sharp so that when the redskins do attack you’re more than a match for them, ambushed or not. The fights, if they come, are flash floods in a life of drought.
“Two of you will post up and down the river,” says Junior suddenly, standing up from the sand, “while the rest of us bathe.”
“I’m staying out of there,” says Hardaway. “Might be snakes.”
“Man got snakes on the brain.”
“All right, Hardaway and Gamble set up as pickets—”
“Why me?”
Junior gives Gamble a long look.
“Because those are your orders. When someone comes out they can relieve you and you can come in.”
Coop is up and unhitching his ammunition belt. “I’m getting in that water before you niggers start takin them boots off.”
“River look cold.”
“Cold sound fine to me.”
Every other day the woman, Nilda, walks a mile from Las Ciegas with their clothes and scours them with pumice rock and lye soap in what is more a puddle than a spring, white cattle egrets stepping into the wet grass to search for snails and crayfish as she works. Royal sat to watch her there once, and helped her carry the water-heavy clothes basket back until just before the first outpost. She washes their clothes, but the men themselves stay dirty, dust and dried sweat staying on their skin for weeks. You don’t miss a chance to wash yourself.
The water is cold but the current isn’t much on this side of the bend, weak enough so you can even swim out a few strokes without worrying. The men shout and splash and duck each other under, most of them fully naked. Junior has his yellow soap and works his way upstream for a little privacy, his desperation to be clean an open joke within the company.
“Junior think if he scrub it hard enough,” Too Tall will say, “it might just come off.”
“He right too. That boy was born black as me, an lookit him now.”
The bottom is silted and easy to walk on. Royal steps out up to his armpits and can feel it change there, the backwater eddy giving way to the full current. He reaches over the surface and dips his fingers into the water as it rushes by. It will just take you.
He stands there, at the edge, for a long time and then turns back to see who’s got the soap.
There is still coffee hot when he comes out, skin tingling, and he drinks some from his cup and takes his time dressing, being sure to brush all the sand from between his toes before he pulls his socks on, to stretch the wrinkles out of his pants before he puts them on. The others dress beside him, calling out insults as Hardaway comes back and decides to go in alone.
“See why the man afraid of snakes. Think one is gonna catch a look at what he got hangin there and fall in love.”
“Don’t let them big ole catfish in there catch holt of it, now!”
Hardaway pays them no mind, bending to duck his head under the water and blowing loud bubbles.
“Where I come up,” says Willie Mills, “the catfish gets long as a tall man’s leg, and they hole up in the roots under the river bank. We used to go down there, reach in—”
He mimes the action, closing his eyes and probing with an arm—
“—and when you feel one you just stick your hand down his gullet, halfway up the elbow, and yank him out of there.”
“Big cat like that will bite on you.”
“Oh, you see some blood, but them big ones fry up nice, feed the whole family.”
“Dans le bayou,” says Achille, “we hunt the snapper turtle with our bare foot. Walk in the mud of the bank till you feel a shell, then reach in and pull him up.”
“Good way to lose some fingers.”
“On the snapper shell he has a ridge,” he explains. “You feel those ridge with your toe, you know which end is beak and which end is tail.”
“Feel em with what toes you got left.”
You had to go a ways up the river from Wilmington before the turpentine and creosote smell was gone, and Royal and Jubal would fish for bass using crickets they had caught, Jubal making up wild stories about what the Cape Fears and the Waccamaws were up to when they owned the river. Jubal never told the same story twice.
Hardaway screams and they turn to make jokes about snakes in the water but he is naked, scrambling out of the water and behind him there is another thing, light-skinned, floating slowly face-down in a rosy cloud.
It is a lazy kind of floating, peaceful, and it takes a moment to know what has happened.
The others are up with their rifles then and shouting, staying low as they spread and move up the bank, none of them fully dressed. Royal watches it float, turning a half-circle as it drifts away, then hurries out in all his clothes to grab an ankle before the current can take it. He turns and hauls it back through the running water, drags it onto the sand without looking. It is Junior, he knows. Junior is the only one of them that light. Royal is wet and shaking with the cold, still squatting by the body without looking at it when the others come back around, having found nothing upriver but the chunk of yellow soap placed carefully on a rock.
“Must have only been a few of them or we’d all be cooked.”
“Aw, damn, lookit what they done—”
“We got to carry him back. Here, spread his clothes out—”
“Got to wrap him careful or his arm’s gonna come off.”
“They be waiting out there to ambush.”
“We don’t go back the same way we come, stay in the open. Hell, let em show their damn faces—”
“That bolo cut right through a man, don’t it?”