But he delayed the departure, looking at his money. He had lots of plans to make, a way had to be found to get the money out of the swamp, out of the county, out of the state if necessary. He'd go to Jacksonville and take up with some young slick-looking girl-hell, he'd take up with three or four of them. He could afford it. He wouldn't have to play around with Iris Culver ever again.
The great gator wasn't dead. The. 303 slug had ploughed a hole in one of his horny starboard scuts, passing on to gouge a deep gash in the softer section of his flank. When the bullet first struck, he didn't know what had happened and reared out of the water on reaction alone. Then the burning began. He had sounded hurriedly, trying to evade the thing in his side. Twisting, S-shaping himself in the muck on the bottom, he'd finally fled down the waterway in a paroxysm of fear and pain.
A pair of playful otters met him at the mushy base of a reed bed and went for him in a mood of frivolity. They made quick fleeting nips at his paws and eyes, keeping clear of the dangerously thrashing tail. The scut-shot gator drove after them in a snapping fury, though it was a hopeless chase.
Mad, tail-whipping, the gator rammed himself into an oozy thicket of water grass and settled. The pain didn't go away. He surfaced and bellowed his anger at the swamp. Then he thrashed ashore and waddle-legged himself down to the gator nest. There he went amok, demolishing cones, snatching up two-three young gators in a scoop, crushing them to baggy pulp.
Then the she-gator charged him with thunderous bellows of rage. But it was a mistake. The bull opened his mouth, emitting a sharp hiss, and went for her with a short, fast lunge. They tangled – paws, mouths and tails – over the smashed nests and little mashed corpses of the pups. The bull's tail swung heavily through the air and landed solidly against the she's flank, spinning her into the cane. He went at her again with hissing mouth, snapping at her throat.
In the end the she-gator lumbered for the water in a blind panic, two of the scuts on her back flapping loose and showing red blood underneath. The bull felt better after the fray. He grunted and snorted and ploughed himself through the thickets until he found a boghole. There he rolled his wound in the plastering swamp mud, and finally settled down to rest, too exhausted to fret.
3
Sutt's Landing was a bend in a country road, by land, and the union of a crippled creek with a minor lake, by waters. It was on high land, built on the fringe of the scrub oaks. A nowhere place, lonely, yet it was a corner of the world that drew a measure of enchantment from its own solitude.
It was dark when Shad rowed across the lake and tied up at the landing. Up at Sutt's Store, and in some of the little village shanties in the grove beyond, the lighted windows stood out like square sheets of flame.
Shad left the jetty and started up the path. Somewhere near at hand an owl- self-appointed sentry of the landing- hooted the inevitable challenge, and further out in the open pine woods a dog cut across on a deer and loosed his deep night-running bay. For a long tremulous minute after that the night was full of music.
Shad chuckled with warm delight as he neared Sutt's porch. He could have himself a rare time right about now, could waltz into the store and say, casual-like, "If they be any of you fellas thinking on going at that old Money Plane next week, I wouldn't go to git myself in an ailfired stew overn it, if'n I was you." And they would look at him all big-eyed and mouths unslung, and Jort Camp would gulp and say, "How's that, Shaddy? How's that agin?" And then, and not a word more from Shad, he'd spread his ten bills out on the bar.
It was tempting, but he knew he wouldn't do it.
I'm goan keep my big mouth shut fer once. And when I clear out, I'll be the richest son-o-bitch that ever did clear out'n here.
It bothered him though that he would have to break one of his bills; but he wanted a drink-needed one. And he was going to buy some taior-mades, a full carton for the first time in his life! He'd be eternally damned if he ever again had to roll a Duke.
Oh, Sally Brown's a bright mulatto,
Way, hay, roll and go!
She drinks rum and chews tobacco,
Spend my money on Sally Brown!
Oh, Sally Brown's a Creole lady,
Way, hay, roll and go!
She's the mother of a yellow baby,
Spend my money on Sally Brown!
It was Joe Tarn, the guitar-banging man, leaning back on a cracker chest, singing. Shad grinned coming in the door. He always liked to hear of the perversities of Sally Brown. When he was twelve (when he first heard Joe sing the song) the imagery of _Sally Brown_ would plague his tossing summer nights. He'd lie on his Spanish moss tick, naked and sweltering, and stare up at the dark cobwebby rafters, not seeing them, seeing Sally Brown. He pictured her a high yaller, the colour of new corn, with long black hair and black wicked eyes. She would start each evening sitting on the edge of a sati bed, herself in a red silk dress-very skimpy. Her right leg cocked on the bedstand, her left on the bed. frame, and she wore shiny red highheels. And because her legs were spread that way, and her skirt high in her lap, he could see her red silk panties. On each leg she wore a blue garter.
That's how he and she started the evening. Later, as the night dragged on, it grew worse. Trouble was he never knew what to do about it. It wasn't until he was fourteen and ran into Lily-Mae Duffy that he forgot about Sally Brown. He superannuated her to a dusty corner along with his other childhood toys.
Frequently Shad wondered just how many times he'd been in and out of Sutt's Store in his life. Nothing ever seemed to change, not even the customers. He could picture it looking just as it did now clear back to the day it had first been raised, and that had been during the Civil War. The long dusty rows of canned goods with their fading labels, the cracker chests and flour barrels, the always halfunrolled bolts of cloth, the scummy glass breadbox, and in the front right corner the hardware, shotguns, axes, spades, and the enamel ware.
High up along the south wall was the aging display of heads-a decoration of the birds and beasts of the swamp. Stilled, stiff wings tacked on boards, and the glass eyes of the bears, bucks, and bobcats staring straight ahead at the north wall year after year through a film of dust. The crusty lips and dull teeth showing in the stark open mouths had a dusky unwholesomeness about them, and all of the trophies were dog-eared and moth-riddled. Somehow they always bothered Shad, as though man, in stuffing and hanging them, had made a mockery of death. Shad had seen their descendants in the flesh, and the contrast was too incongruous.
Man stuffs and hangs what he catches from the swamp, he thought absently. Maybe the swamp ort to stuff and hang what it catches: Ben Smiley, George Tusca, the two men in the Money Plane, Holly- The air in the store was still, hot. Joel Sutt's nightly regulars, some with shot glasses of corn-of-the-hifis in their hands, looked up as Shad entered. They knew he'd been out searching for his brother again, and they waited for him to speak, though it was plain to them that he hadn't found Holly's body.
Shad grinned, nodded, and called, "Joe-don't stop Sally Brown on my account. She's an old lady friend a mine."
They laughed, and Shad stepped up to the counter.
"Joel," he ordered, "see kin you git me some of that what you pass off on crazy folk fer corn. Got me a thirst drier'n an owl's nest."
Seven long years I courted Sally,