“All right. Give the keys to Vergil. When we finish our business at Belle Ame, we’ll either take my car if it’s still there, or we’ll drop on down to Pantherburn in the pirogue. I have to get back here by two. You can drive me up.”
“After you finish your business.” She’s calmed down, is breathing easier. “And what do I do if you don’t show up or I don’t hear from you?”
“If we don’t show up by midnight, call the cops.”
“Call the cops,” she repeats. “Why do you need Hugh?”
“He knows the river.”
“He knows the river.”
“See you later.”
“Sure,” she says absently.
3. THERE’S A DIRT TRACK atop the levee beyond the chain link fence. You can’t see the river through the willows of the batture. There’s another fence in the willows. The morning sun is already warm. A south wind from the gulf is already pushing up a dark, flat-headed cloud. It is like late summer. My nose has stopped running. Walking the levee in flatlands has the pleasant feel of traveling a level track between earth and sky.
There is no horse patrol in sight, only guard towers on the prison farm, but I’d as soon get off the levee and into the willows. The batture here has been cleared down to the fence. I quicken my stride. The smudge ahead under the cloud must be the loess hills. And here’s the crossing fence, crossing the levee and squaring off the two fences running on each side. Beyond the fence a shell road angles up one side of the levee and down the other. The fence is maybe eight feet high, but it is not a good idea to climb it. I’m still in clear view of the near tower. Elmo mentioned the downriver corner. I see why. There’s a washout just upriver from the corner, grown up in weeds, but a washout nonetheless, a space gullied under the fence. It is not hard to see. It can only mean that the fence is symbolic and the detainees have no reason to escape, or that the guards, both mounted and in the towers, keep them in sight. Or both.
I make my turn, look back toward Angola, see no one, widen the turn to carry over the brow of the levee to its shoulder, moseying along, hands in pockets like the bored ex-President of Guatemala, down and out of sight of the guard tower. The grass is ankle high, but the footing is good and it is easy to angle down the levee. On the steeper shoulder of the levee at the washout I roll down and under the fence the way you roll down the levee when you’re a boy, elbows held in tight, hands over your face.
The willows of the batture are thick. It is good to be in the willows and out of sight. I figure to hit the shell road, which angles away from me, by keeping parallel to the river. The going is heavy, but after a hundred yards or so I hit not shells but a dirt track, hardly wider than a path. This must be Elmo’s jeep trail. The soft dirt has three tire tracks, which puzzle me until I remember that deer hunters hereabouts use three-wheelers more than jeeps.
The trail angles toward the river. The batture is dropping away. The dirt is quiet underfoot, but presently there is a roaring. The top of a poplar moves fitfully as if it were being jerked by a human hand. It must be the river, high now and ripping through the batture.
I break out into a junkyard of rusty steel hawsers with caches of trapped driftwood cemented by dried whitened mud, chunks of Styrofoam, tires, Clorox bottles. A rusting hulk of a barge fitted with a crane conveyor is toppled and half sunk. This must have been a transfer facility, no doubt a soybean depot.
The river is on the boom. It’s been dry here. They must have had late summer rains in the Dakotas or the Midwest. This stretch is the Raccourci Chute, which goes ripping past Angola even at low water. But now it’s up in the willows and a mile wide, roaring and sucking and jerking the willows and blowing a cool, foul breath. A felon might imagine that if he could get over the levee and into the willows he could make it, but no. He’d get caught in the sucks and boils. There’s nothing out there but roiled, racing, sulphur-colored water flecked by dirty foam from Dakota farms, Illinois toilets, and ten million boxes of Tide. Angola could just as well be Alcatraz. Looking across toward Raccourci Island, I could swear the river swells, curved up like a watchglass by the boil of a giant spring.
Old Tunica Landing is nothing but a rotten piece of wharf. The raised walk of creosoted planks is solid enough and high enough to clear the rising water in the batture. There’s nobody here and the gravel road from Tunica is grown up in weeds. I pick out a dry piling I can sit against and from which I can see up the road without being seen. The landing was used first by the Tunica Indians and then to service the indigo plantations. I came here once to see the Tunica Treasure, a graveyard which somebody dug up and then found, not gold, but glass beads which the English, my ancestors, had given them for their land two hundred years ago. It is nine-thirty.
A little upriver and a ways out is Fancy Point Towhead, an island of willows almost submerged but long enough and angled out enough to deflect the main current and make a backwater. Foam drifts under me upstream. There’s another noise above the racket of the current in the batture downstream. It’s a towboat pushing fifteen or twenty rafted-up barges upstream. There’s not enough room inside the island for him to use the dead water. He has to buck straight up the Chute and he’s having a time of it. The current is maybe eight knots, and with his diesels flat out he’s maybe making twelve. He sounds like five freight engines going upgrade, drive wheels spinning.
I watch him. There is so much noise that I don’t hear Vergil Bon until the plank moves under me. He’s carrying a pirogue by its gunwale in one hand, two paddles in the other. The uncle is right behind him, face narrow and dark under his hunting cap. He’s carrying his old double-barrel 12-gauge Purdy in the crook of his arm and ambling along in his sprung splayed walk as if he were on his way to a duck blind. They both seem serious but not displeased.
“How you doing, Vergil, Uncle Hugh Bob?” The towboat is noisy.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
We shake hands. They gaze around, not at me, equably. They are Louisianians, at ease out-of-doors. The uncle nods and pops his fingers. We could be meeting here every day.
“Did you bust out of there?” asks the uncle companionably, flanking me.
“I have permission. Don’t worry about it.”
We watch the towboat make the bend, creep past the concrete of the Hog Point revetment, which looks like a gray quilt dropped on the far levee.
“Uncle Hugh Bob, what are you doing with that shotgun?”
“You asked him about that little Woodsman.” He nods toward Vergil as if he didn’t know him well. “We brought it. But I didn’t know what kind of trouble you’re in.” He’s jealous because I asked Vergil.
“We’re not going to have any trouble — beyond maybe a mean dog or a snake.”
“I’m not going to shoot no dog with a.22. This won’t kill him.” He pats the shotgun. “What we going to do?”
“We’re going to drop down to Belle Ame and pick up Claude. After that you and Claude can take the pirogue on down to Pantherburn. My car is at Belle Ame. I’ll bring Vergil back up here to get the truck. We’ll see.”
That seems to satisfy him. “I brought along my spinning tackle, right here.” He pats his game pocket. “Claude can go fishing with me.” Then he thinks of something. “What you doing at Angola?” He screws up a milky eye at me.
“It was a misunderstanding. Some federal officers thought I was a parole violator. I have to be back up here at two to straighten it out. Nothing to worry about.”
“They not looking for you?”
“No. It’s like having a pass.”
He nods, not listening. But Vergil is watching me closely. He says nothing.