“Or you could take him into the swamp and find some quicksand,” Avery said. “It’s not much different than dying from pneumonia. His lungs would fill up with sand instead of water.”
“You’re pushing it. I ain’t taking much more.”
“You ain’t going to do nothing,” LeBlanc said.
“Keep running off at the mouth and see.”
“I knowed people like you in the army. You won’t drop your britches to take a crap till you get an order. We’re five to one against you. Lean on one of us and you’ll have to use that pistol. Then there will be an inquiry and the warden will bust you out of a job to save hisself.”
“It’s your ass when Evans gets back.”
The warden’s car came back down the line and went past the men. It was splattered with mud. The tires spun in the mire, and the warden steered around the place where he had stuck before. The sheriff sat in the front seat and the two deputies were in back. The end of a rifle barrel showed behind the glass in the back seat. An enclosed truck followed them, the back covered with canvas like an army truck. The guards sat inside, crowded towards the front because the sheet of canvas that closed the rear had been torn loose from its fastenings by the wind and flapped over the top. The captain’s pickup came through the ruts in second gear and hit the soft place where the warden had become stuck. His wheels whined in the mud and he shifted into reverse and fed it gas and shifted into second again, rocking it, until he got traction and spun out of the soft spot to harder ground. Evans sat next to him. They stopped the truck and got out and went around to the back. Their rifles were propped against the seat by the gear-shift stick.
“Bring them over here,” Evans said.
Rainack snuffed out his cigarette and buttoned his slicker. He got down in the rain.
“You heard him. Start moving,” he said.
Avery and the others walked unsteadily across the clearing to the pickup. His legs felt loose and uncoordinated from having stood in one position too long. His feet hurt from the cold when he walked. Daddy Claxton wavered from side to side. He coughed and spit up phlegm. There was a tarpaulin laid across the bed of the pickup. Pools of water collected in it and ran down through the folds and creases. There was a dark smear on top of it. Evans had his hand on one end of the canvas to raise it up.
“I want you to know what happens to guys that think they can bust out of here,” he said. “Look at them and tell everybody back at camp what you saw.”
He lifted the tarpaulin and exposed the two bodies. They lay on their backs and their faces looked up blank and empty and the rain fell in their eyes. Billy Jo had been shot twice through the chest and a third bullet had cut through the left eye and come out at the temple. Pieces of cloth were embedded in the chest wounds. The blood had congealed and his shirt stuck stiffly to him. He was barefooted and his pants were torn at the knees and stained with mud and grass. His remaining eye was rolled back in his head. The wound where the bullet had emerged from the temple was very large and fragments of bone protruded from the matted skin and hair. Jeffry wore only one shoe. The ankle of his bare foot was broken. It swelled out in a big, discolored lump like a fist and the foot was twisted sideways. His shirt was torn in strips like rags. He had been hit with a shotgun at a close distance and the pellets covered his trunk and part of one thigh. An artery had been severed in his neck and there was a large area of red around the top of his chest like a child’s bib.
“Where were they?” Rainack said.
“They fell in a clay pit. They was just climbing out when we saw them. Billy Jo started running for the trees, and me and Jess let go. We missed Jeffry but Abshire got him with the shotgun. It blew him right through a thicket.”
“Who got Billy Jo in the head?” Rainack said.
“It’s hard to tell. We was shooting at the same time. Part of him is still sticking to a tree out there.”
“Cover them up and let’s go back,” the captain said.
Evans replaced the tarpaulin. The water ran down from the creases in the canvas onto his boots.
“You goddamn swine,” LeBlanc said. His skin was white and the burn on his forehead turned dark as blood.
“Shut that man up,” the captain said.
“I been having trouble with him ever since you left,” Rainack said. “I started to bust him a couple of times.”
“Can’t you keep control of your men, Evans?” the captain said.
“I’d like to take him off in the woods and not come back with him,” Evans said.
“Sonsofbitches.”
“Do you want to keep shut, or you want something across the mouth?” Evans said.
Spittle drooled over LeBlanc’s chin. He sprang on Evans and grabbed him by the throat. The guard fell backwards in the mud with LeBlanc on top of him. Evans’ mouth opened in a dry gasp and his eyes protruded from his head. LeBlanc’s hands tightened into the soft pink skin. Evans fumbled weakly at his holster for his pistol.
Rainack and the captain hit at LeBlanc’s head with their revolvers, and amid the hard bone-splitting knocks he shouted into Evans’ face, the saliva running from his mouth: “You wouldn’t let me wait I had it planned and you wouldn’t give me time goddamn you to hell if you’d only waited I could have done it right—” and then Rainack whipped his pistol barrel across LeBlanc’s temple, and he fell sideways into a pool of water.
J.P. Winfield
The show had returned to town two months after it began its tour of the southern portion of the state. It was night, and a large flatbed truck, painted firecracker-red, followed a black sedan over a railroad crossing down a dirt road into the Negro section of town. At first there were board shacks with dirt yards and outbuildings on each side of the road, then farther on, the road became a blacktop lined with taverns, pool halls, shoeshine parlors, and open-air markets which stank of refuse and dead fish and rotted vegetables. The doors to the taverns and pool halls were opened, and the night was filled with the noise of loud jukeboxes and drunken laughter. Negroes loitered along the sidewalk under the neon bar signs and called back and forth to each other across the street. A hillbilly band stood on the open bed of the truck with their instruments. A boxlike piano was bolted to the bed with its back against the cab. Several wood casks were stacked along the side of the piano. The firecracker-red truck was painted with political slogans in big white letters:
LET A HUNGRY MAN KILL A RABBIT
BRING HONEST GOVERNMENT BACK TO LOUISIANA
LET THE GOOD CHURCH PEOPLE HAVE THEIR BINGO GAMES
VOTE FOR JIM LATHROP, A SLAVE TO NO MAN AND A SERVANT TO ALL
THE COMMON MAN IS KING
The sedan and the truck stopped by the taverns. The Negroes on the sidewalk looked at them cautiously. More Negroes appeared in the doorways, and small children ran down the road from the shacks to follow the truck.
“What you want down here?” a Negro said from the sidewalk.
Jim Lathrop got out of the sedan. He was dressed in a light tan suit with a blue sports shirt buttoned at the throat without a tie. He looked at the Negro.
“This is campaign night. Don’t you know this is election time?” he said.
“You ain’t going to get no votes down here,” a woman said.
“How do you know that, sister?” Lathrop said. “How you know you don’t want to vote for me if you haven’t heard what I got to say? How do you know I’m not the only man running for office that can do something for you? Tell me that, sister, and I’ll go on home. Of course you can’t tell me, because you haven’t listened to what I got to say. And that’s why I’m here tonight. You folks don’t have one friend in Baton Rouge and you don’t have many friends in Washington, and I’m down here to tell you how you can get one; I’m here to tell you that there’s one man in this state who is a slave to nobody and a servant to all, and I mean all, no matter if he’s colored or white.”