“Hey, Jack,” I say. “Hey, Jesper.” To Taylor I say, “Where’s the scent start?”
“Corn. Northwest corner. You boys start with the dogs. I’m getting my horse.”
We set off. Taylor catches up just before we reach the first rows of corn. He whips his mount forward, and we chase after them — man and horse — until we get to the field guard. He holds the man’s bushel bag, and those dogs settle their noses into the burlap, huffing their lips, flushing the scent, those big ears trapping it in their faces. My two lift their heads first and point toward the woods.
The dogs are faster than me, and they buck against my weight. Their voices pitch. They pause to recharge the scent. Here, in this bunch of grasses. There, on that twig. Here, in this fresh footfall in the muddy mess of ground near Cobbs Creek. The dogs try to break from each other, and from me, moving up and down the small bank, but then Jesper splashes into the shallow water, and we follow. The scent is right there, another footprint, and then just ghosting smells. My calves burn. My lungs heave. My emaciated shoulder and arm whine. All of this is too familiar.
We pass the possum oak, and a part of me wants to be chased again, to climb back into its branches, though I know I couldn’t do it now, that I will never again climb a tree.
Stevens and his dogs are still with me.
Taylor’s horse splashes through the water. “I’m following you two,” Taylor shouts. “Michaels’s dogs are heading a different way. Feels like we’re close on this one.”
The dogs don’t tell me that, though. They change when they’re close, their muscles tighter, something steep and tense in their steps. We have a ways to go, their bodies tell me now. Taylor is loud behind us, and suddenly that young Marie falls in at my right. She darts along quickly, her breath calm and even.
The dogs pause for new tastes, then run some more. The leather belt round my waist cuts into my back. The damp I feel could be sweat or blood, warm and cold.
Stevens falls back a bit, but Taylor’s horse is in my ears, the soft felt of the thing’s muzzle drenched in froth flying from its lips, drawn back against the bit and the breath it heaves. “Hup,” Taylor shouts. “Hup, hup!” That breath goes sour, grasses rotting in its guts.
I hear a whisper to watch out. Marie?
“Hup!” Taylor shouts once more, before a great stumble of limbs crashes down, branches breaking under that fortress, sticks crumbling. The horse’s chest hits the ground, then its neck, jaw, lips, nose. The body plows up the dirt, mulch and rubble hitting me. I pull the dogs to a stop, watching as Taylor picks himself up. A gash in his arm drains blood. Another guard comes up behind him, and I’m surprised to see that it’s Beau. He’s gotten here so quickly.
“Go,” Taylor shouts at both of us. “I’m behind you. Go.”
The dogs start pulling. They are disappointed to have stopped at all.
Beau runs next to me, and Marie is next to him, silent and intent. I can feel the nervousness in her, and I hope that Beau’s desire to catch this man who’s run trumps his desire to do me further harm.
Then we are there. We are here. It’s nothing more than a shack, this structure, a forgotten still house, tired boards holding a rusty roof. The dogs are keen on the door. They’re sure. I see it in them, that deep-pressured force.
There’s snuffling behind us, and then Stevens appears behind his dogs.
“You!” Beau points to Stevens. “Give your dogs to Martin and go pound on that door.”
Fear pales Stevens’s face, but he unhooks his dogs’ leads from his belt and helps fasten them to mine. I’m up to five beasts now, and it’s too many. They’ll kill me in their pursuit, I know.
“Get up there, boy,” Beau hisses, slinking back toward the cover of the woods, his gun poised.
Stevens walks up to the shack and raises his fist, pounding it hard against the doorframe, the door too weak to sustain such a blow. Around me, the woods shake. We’ve made our way from the oaks into this thicket of pine, tall and red-barked.
“Boy!” Beau barks. “You best come on out without a stir.” He is all but invisible in the undergrowth.
A scrambling comes from inside, a whine of metal, a scrape. Stevens is turning his head over his shoulder in Beau’s direction when the door pulls back. A man named Hughes stands in the doorway. He’s a regular in the library, like Dean, and he likes books about machines — the cotton gin, the engine, the letterpress. He’s tall, thick in the shoulder and waist, with eyes too big for his face — fearful eyes that put a man to apology or confession, eyes fit for a leader, not a runner. He has a shotgun in his hands, held low at his hip. Before there’s time enough to note its gauge, Stevens is on the ground, a great chunk gone from his right side.
The sound from him comes from everywhere at once: the suck and yaw of his body, the moan of skin and bone, of hidden guts meeting air, of a body draining. The sound from his mouth is a quiet whisper, barely more than breath.
Hughes looks down. “Shit. Didn’t mean that for you, brother.”
Stevens keeps at his noise, and Hughes looks up at me. I’m waiting for Beau’s gun to fire.
“I’m not looking to shoot you, Books.”
“I’m not looking to get shot.”
The dogs are quiet, their eyes fixed on the barrel. Metal is a convincing master.
There’s no movement, no sound from Beau’s position.
“Where’s the guard that’s with you?” Hughes asks.
“Ran off,” I say, buying Beau more time.
Hughes smiles. “They’re all mice at heart.” He looks down at Stevens. “What’s he saying?”
I push through my dogs and crouch by Stevens’s head, my ear close to his mouth. His side is so different from Jennings’s, and I see clearly that he is dying. I know it by the sound and color. He won’t make nightfall. He won’t leave this spot of ground. He won’t pass Taylor’s horse a few miles back.
“ ‘Lord.’ He’s just saying, ‘Lord,’ over and over.”
I’m more scared of my proximity to it than of the death itself.
Stevens is pale, the ground around him dark.
Where the hell is Beau?
My dogs don’t know what to do. They’re not so used to the smell of blood.
“I can’t go back.” Hughes steps over the mess of Stevens.
I move myself a few feet away from him, opening up a clean line for Beau to fire. He has to do it now.
Don’t, I hear in a voice like Marie’s — she’s here again, among the trees.
Hughes’s gun is back in its spot at his hip. “You best stay right there.”
“They’re going to catch you.”
“That may be, but for now, I’m going. That all right with you, Books?”
I nod.
“You hold those dogs back.”
“All right.”
He runs then, sprinting his long legs in the opposite direction of Beau’s hiding spot. The branches make a ruckus for a bit, snaps and shouts. He won’t make it far.
“Beau!” I shout, but no sound answers me.
Don’t you want him to escape? Marie asks, appearing now at my side.
“No,” I tell her, realizing as I say it that it’s true. Though I know him and have never wished him ill, I want Hughes caught. I want to see him fail in his flight. This is the closest I can come to freedom within the world of my confinement — seeing another man’s freedom captured.
This isn’t a great loss, Marie is saying of Stevens.
“I know.” What does it say that I want Hughes apprehended and don’t so much mind Stevens’s harm? Have I finally and completely cast my lot with the prison, rather than the prisoners? Have I stitched my prison coat to my skin, the fibers fusing to my body, the two things blended so thoroughly they’ll never come free of each other?