Stupid question. I’d been slammed by a hunk of maple wood.
“How’s your face?” she asked when I didn’t answer.
“OK. Considering.” I looked at Crowther junior. Meanwhile, Crowther senior shuffled his feet in the dirt like he wanted those feet to carry him away.
“I won’t beat about the bush, Greg.”
Nice choice of words, lady lawyer.
“The Caucus met tonight. We discussed Mr. Crowther’s assault on you. We consider it unwarranted…”
That mean he didn’t have a good enough excuse to crack my skull bone?
“It was cowardly, and we deem it a serious infringement of the rule of law in this time of national emergency.”
Well, said, Miss Bertholly. You must have been sharp as a blade in court.
“Greg.” She gave me a look that was seriously lawyer like. “The Caucus has agreed unanimously that Mr. Crowther is guilty of the crime of actual bodily harm against you. We feel very strongly, also, that he shouldn’t go unpunished.” She paused. “How do you respond to that, Greg?”
“My response would be, why do you call me Greg and the guy who tried killing me, Mr. Crowther?” I looked from Crowther junior to Crowther senior. “It seems strange to me. Or is it because I crawled in here on my hands and knees just a few months ago? While the two Mr. Crowthers here are old Sullivan blood and the local neighborhood millionaires?” I jerked my head in the direction of the burnt piece of crap that Lewis had become. “See how much you can buy for a dollar across there.”
“Greg… Mr. Valdiva. I apologize.” Her voice was polite, but the words came out with a glint of ice on them now. “This isn’t a court of law.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I was merely trying to be informal.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t blame you for being angry.”
“Me? Angry?”
“You suffered a physical assault today. It was unprovoked.”
“Assault? If you took the hard end of the wood like I did you’d call it attempted murder.”
“Mr. Valdiva. Mr. Crowther had maybe a few more drinks than he ought. He didn’t mean to-”
I couldn’t stop the snort of pure disbelief shooting out of my nostrils. “Oh, I see. You’re closing ranks. It was just a bit of fun that got out of hand. See?” I tilted my head to the light shining from the cabin so she could see the crazy paving of grazes and bruising. “That’s Crowther’s little bit of fun.”
“Hey, Valdiva.” Now it was old man Crowther’s turn. Disgust came oozing through his voice as he spoke. “Valdiva. My boy would not harm anyone without just cause. He must have been-”
“Jim.” An old man beside Crowther senior held up a hand. “Jim, the Caucus has made its decision. Your son is guilty of assault. There’s no debate about that.”
“The question is,” Miss Bertholly said crisply, “what will the punishment be?”
I shrugged. “OK. So why have you come down here to discuss that?”
There was a pause long enough to hear the cry of night birds shimmering across the water. Those men and women shifted uneasily, as if they heard the sound of ghost children calling to them from the ruins of Lewis.
“Why have the Caucus meet here outside my house? You’ll have made up your damned minds about Crowther anyway. You going to stop ten dollars from his allowance, Mr. Crowther? Are you going to ground him for a week?” This slice of crappola had become a joke. I turned to go inside.
“Mr. Valdiva,” Miss Bertholly said. “We-the Caucus, that is-have also decided that as you are the victim you must decide the punishment.”
“Get away…” I shook my head. “You want me to fix a punishment for Crowther? Why?”
“Because if we chose a punishment you’d only say…” She took a breath and selected more diplomatic words, “If you chose the punishment you would know that an adequate redress had been made.”
“OK.” I nodded. “OK. That sounds fair enough.” I reached back to the veranda rail to grab a coil of rope that hung from a nail there. Underarm, I tossed it at old man Crowther. He caught it as it slapped into his chest.
“I’ve decided the punishment,” I told them. “Hang him.”
There was a silence you could have carved with a blade. Even the call of the night birds died. All I could hear was the lap of water out there in the darkness.
“There’s a lighting rig down at the jetty. It’s a good ten feet tall. You can string him up from that.”
Jesus, their faces. They looked as if I’d thrown a hand grenade at them. Crowther junior had arrived with a look of defiance pasted across his face. Now his eyes seemed to race from one person to another, finishing with a pleading look at his father. I looked into the eyes of the others there, especially into the eyes of Miss Bertholly the lawyer.
“What did he say? Dad, what did Valdiva say?” Crowther’s voice came stammering out of his mouth. “Dad?” His eyes had morphed into big rolling white balls that locked tight onto the rope in his father’s hands. “Dad? D-der-does he want to hang me?”
Gritting my teeth, I lunged forward to snatch the rope from the old man’s hands. “Go home,” I told them, angry. “Go home; it’s late.”
With the rope in my hand I went back to the cabin, punched open the door, then crashed it shut behind me.
I stood there with the door pressed shut by my back. Jesus… my hands were trembling. Sweat poured down my face, its salt getting onto my tongue. I balled my hand and rubbed it across my mouth with the back of my fist.
“Christ. Idiots… You crazy idiots…” I looked at the rope as if it had burst into a mass of bloody tumors, then threw it from me. Because I’d read that look in their eyes. They’d have gone along with what I’d asked for. They were going to hang Crowther junior, the poor bastard.
Sweet Jesus Christ.
What was happening with these people?
Seven
“You’re kidding me, Valdiva.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Straight up?”
“Straight up.”
“You told them to hang the Crowther kid and they were actually going to do it?”
I nodded as I hooked the log before pulling it out of the lake onto the beach.
“But you say his own father was there?” Ben’s eyes were huge. He couldn’t get his head ’round this slice of news. “He was just going to stand by and watch his own son be killed?”
“He’d have put the noose ’round his own son’s neck if I’d demanded it.”
“Jesus.”
“I tell you, they looked weird. If you ask me the… what do you call it? Trauma… the trauma of what’s happened to these people over the last few months has gotten to them. They’re getting desperate.”
“Why? We’re safe enough here.”
“For the time being.”
“We’re damn lucky, Greg, The Caucus is publishing a report next week. They say we’ve got enough gasoline in those big storage tanks in the interchange to last ten years.”
“Yeah, I know, and enough juice for the power plant for twenty years if they ration the electricity supply to six hours a day.”
“And five warehouses crammed with canned foodstuff.”
“And close on a hundred thousand gallons of beer, truckloads of whiskey and about ten million cigarettes.” I hooked another hunk of wood and started hauling in. “Yeah, everything’s peachy.”
“Not peachy, Greg. But everything’s OK. What with the dairy herds and the poultry farms, fish from the lake and fruit from the orchards.” He sounded enthused now; words came tumbling out. “And the crops on the south end of the island, we’re self-sufficient. We can sit here for a decade and still not have to break sweat to feed ourselves. That’s going to be more than enough time for the country to get back to… oh, hell.”
The “oh, hell” indicated that the piece of timber I’d been hauling wasn’t a piece of timber after all. Instead of a three-foot hunk of firewood I saw a fraying head linked to a torso. The face and eyes had gone. Whether it was a man or woman I couldn’t say. All I could say for sure was that fifty pounds of human flesh had seen better days. I pushed it back out into the lake with the pole. Gas from inside the body bubbled out, making it sink slowly out of sight.