*
“Hey,” Jason said. “Hey, that’s our boat.”
He pointed out the side window of the little silver Hyundai. He saw the battered hull of Retired and Gone Fishin’ sitting on a trailer outside a chainlink fence that surrounded a tumbledown clapboard business. The outboard was tipped up over the boat’s stem. The homemade sign by the road proclaimed Uncle Sky’s A-l Metal Building Products and Agricultural Machinery Repair— No Drugs!
The place was padlocked and closed. No lights shone in the building or in the fenced yard.
“Stop!” Jason said. “That’s our boat! We can put it in the water and get out of here!”
“I can’t haul a boat and trailer,” the driver said. “Not in this car. I don’t have a trailer hitch.”
Jason, Manon, and Arlette were crammed in the backseat of the small Korean car, stuck in the middle of the long caravan of refugees following Cudjo away from the A.M.E. camp. They’d left the highway and were heading west along an ill-repaired blacktop road.
“We’ll use one of the trucks behind us,” Jason said. “One of them will have a trailer hitch.”
“I’m not stopping,” the driver said. “It’s not safe to stop.” He was elderly and peered anxiously over the steering wheel at the car in front of them. His wife clutched his arm in terror, with a grip so strong he could barely steer. She hadn’t said a word since she’d entered the vehicle.
“Hush,” Manon said to Jason. “Cudjo said he had a boat.”
“That boat won’t have a motor, I bet,” Jason said. “If we get the bass boat, we can run to Vicksburg and go for help.”
But no one was inclined to pay him any attention, so Jason tried to relax, squashed against the inside of the car, as the caravan moved west down a sagging, rutted two-lane blacktop, slowing to a crawl every so often to negotiate parts of the road ripped across by quakes. The country was mostly uninhabited cotton fields with rows of pine trees planted between them. The sun eased over the horizon, and the western sky turned to cobalt. The caravan moved south, then west again, on narrow gravel roads. Sometimes the cars splashed through areas flooded to the floorboards. Eventually the line of vehicles pulled to a straggling halt in an area filled with young pines. Jason could see car headlights glinting off flood waters to the right.
After getting out of the Hyundai, Manon and Arlette thanked the elderly couple for the ride. Jason couldn’t stop thinking about Retired and Gone Fishin’ sitting in Uncle Sky’s yard. He saw Cudjo walk past with some men carrying rifles, and Jason trotted alongside, his telescope bouncing on his hip. A wind stirred the tops of the pine trees.
“Sir?” he said. “Mr. Cudjo?”
The hermit turned to him, yellow eyes gleaming in the growing night. “Boy, I want you stay with you mama.”
“Could we use another boat right now? As we drove here, I saw the boat we came in sitting on a trailer. We could go back and get it.”
“Put this truck ’cross this road, you,” Cudjo said to the driver of a pickup. “You—” Patting the shoulder of one of his riflemen. “You, là bas, down in them trees, you. Stay quiet, you. Lord High Sheriff come, you flank him, yes? The rest of you, you stay here, behind truck, yes? You no shoot, you, you don’t know who come. Could be Nick and them who come, yes?”
Then Cudjo turned to Jason. “You tell me ’bout this boat, you.”
“It’s a bass boat,” Jason said. “We came down on it from Missouri. There’s a fifty-horse Johnson on it, and we had fuel left. If we put it in the water, we could travel to Vicksburg, send for help.”
Cudjo frowned at him. A gust of wind tugged at his long beard. “Where you see this boat, you.”
“Uncle Sky’s Metal Building Whatever,” Jason said. “The boat was right in the yard. It wasn’t even behind the fence, it was like somebody just dropped it there. The place was closed, nobody around. We could hitch the trailer to a truck and drive it off, no problem.”
Cudjo’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Skyler King, he a Kluxer, that man. But he an old man, that Sky, he live in Hardee with his daughter, that Rachel. Ain’t nobody at his business now, no.”
“That Sky place isn’t five minutes from here,” Jason said. “We can make a quick trip.”
“Jason—” Arlette came up the line of vehicles, took Jason’s hand. “Mama says—”
Jason squeezed her hand. “We’ll go get the boat,” he told Cudjo, “if we can have someone to drive us out there.”
*
Jason and Arlette held hands on the bench seat as they were driven to Uncle Sky’s. Their van was alone on the old road— it was a plush vehicle, carpeted and with soft seats, a Chevy that still smelled new. The driver in front of them was a young light-skinned man named Samuel who scanned the road nervously as he pushed the vehicle to high speed in between slowing down for partially repaired tears and crevasses. Every so often Samuel would drop a hand to finger the pistol at his hip.
“Here it is,” Jason called. Jason leaned into Arlette’s shoulder as Samuel swung the van abruptly into Uncle Sky’s gravel drive. The headlights tracked across a yard over which was scattered building materials, agricultural equipment, then the battered bass boat on its trailer, parked on the grass to one side of the gate.
Samuel backed the van to the trailer. Jason left his telescope on the seat, and he and Arlette went out the van’s sliding side door. Jason felt the night wind ruffle his hair. They went to the trailer, and Jason looked down to see that a padlock had secured the ball on the trailer, making it impossible to hitch the trailer and tow it away.
“Damn,” Samuel said. “Wait here.” He opened the hatch at the back of the van and began searching through his large toolbox for something to cut the padlock.
Jason hoisted himself onto the bass boat’s foredeck. Rainwater sloshed in the boat’s bottom. Jason hopped over the cockpit to the aft deck, then bent to inspect the outboard motor. From what he could see in the dark, the outboard was as he left it, but when he felt with his hand in the well near the motor he couldn’t locate any of the jerricans of fuel they’d brought with them from Rails Bluff.
Jason straightened. “There’s no gas,” he said. “They probably took the cans inside. I’ll go look.”
The fence was two feet away, chain link twined with Virginia creeper. Jason launched himself at the fence, clung with fingers, dug his toes into the gaps between the chain link. He scrambled to the top, put both feet on the pipe that ran along the top of the fence, adjusted his footing, and raised himself to a precarious standing position, arms flung out for balance. The gusty wind tried to pluck him off. He grinned. “Wish I had my skates,” he said. “I could travel on this.”
“Be careful,” Arlette said. Jason knelt, reached a hand down to Arlette. “Want to come up?” he asked.
“You better hope there’s not a big dog in there,” Arlette said.
“Woof woof,” Jason said. He dropped his butt onto the pipe, then twisted around and lowered himself to the soft ground inside Uncle Sky’s compound.
Samuel found a hacksaw and began working on the lock that secured the trailer.
Jason walked through the cluttered yard to the unpainted clapboard building. He stepped onto the porch that ran the length of the front. Planks sagged under his feet. He looked into the window, peering through a frame of his two hands pressed against the glass. He saw the glint of a glass counter, dark objects that were probably lawnmowers or lawn tractors. He walked to the front door and tried to turn the knob—
—Then jumped three feet as an alarm bell began to ring out. His heart hammered. The door had been wired. Jason gave a helpless look back toward the gate, saw Samuel and Arlette staring at him, Samuel with the tail lights of his van outlining his exasperated expression.
“Sorry!” Jason shouted over the clatter.
Then he walked to the end of the porch and peered around the side of the building. Another boat loomed there in the shadow of the building, a big eighteen-foot powerboat with a canvas top. Jason wondered about stealing it. It would certainly furnish more deluxe transport than Retired and Gone Fishin’.
The ringing bell was on this side of the building, right over Jason’s head. The clamor rang in his skull. He clenched his teeth and walked around the boat, put a foot on the fender of the trailer in preparation to boost himself into the cockpit, and he saw that the tire on the trailer was flat. So much for driving off with it.
Jason boosted himself into the cockpit. A hulking outboard was tilted up over the stern. Jason groped in the recesses of the stern and found a pair of plastic jerricans— not, judging by the weight, the ones he had brought on the bass boat, but larger and holding more gasoline. “Bingo!” he shouted over the clamor of the bell, but he doubted that anyone could hear him.
One container was connected by rubber hoses to the engine, and the other was free. Jason took the free container and heaved it onto the gunwale, then lowered it to balance it precariously on the trailer fender. He jumped off the boat and managed to catch the jerrican just as it started to topple over. He took it in both hands and waddled across the yard with his knees banging into the container at every step.
He was happy to be distancing himself from the clatter of the alarm.
While Jason had been exploring, Samuel had finished cutting the padlock free, and he and Arlette had hooked the trailer to the van. “Here’s some gas,” Jason said as he brought the gas to the gate. He tried to squeeze it between the gate and the upright to which it was chained, but failed.
“It’s too heavy to boost over the fence,” he said. “Can you cut a hole in it?”
“I’ve got some wire cutters,” Samuel said.
“There’s another gas can where I found this one. I’ll go get it.” Jason trotted back to the powerboat. While the alarm bell blared through his nerves, he disconnected the gas can from the outboard by feel, lowered it out of the boat, and began to carry it across the equipment-filled yard.
Samuel had cut a modest hole in the wire of the gate, and he was bent over, dragging the jerrican through the gap. He was brightly lit by the headlights of his van. Arlette stood by, watching him. The clamor of the alarm filled the night.
And then a small car— its headlights were off— lunged out of the darkness by the road. Samuel sensed the car’s approach at the last second and turned to face it just as the car drove him into the chain link. Samuel’s arms were thrown out wide as the gate bulged inward beneath the thrusting force of the car, but the chain held and Samuel’s legs were pinned against the mesh by the car grill. He pitched forward from the waist and sprawled across the car’s hood. Arlette watched in stunned surprise, her mouth open in a cry that went unheard beneath the clanging alarm.
Then the driver’s door flung open, and a crop-haired man lunged for Arlette and seized her arm. She tried to wrench free, but he brought his other hand up, with a small pistol. He shoved the barrel into Arlette’s throat, and she froze, her mouth still wide in a frozen scream.
Jason stared at the scene, the heavy plastic container still hanging from his arms. The ringing alarm filled his skull. He couldn’t seem to move. Astonishment and terror froze him to the spot.
The driver was one of the deputies, Jason saw. He remembered seeing the little man during the deputies’ attack yesterday.
The little deputy was shouting at Arlette. Jason couldn’t hear the words over the urgent alarm. But when the deputy swiped Arlette across the face with his little pistol, hot rage surged through Jason’s veins. He dropped the heavy container on the ground and ran for the gate.
The deputy backed Arlette to the side of the van, was pressing her against the driver’s door. Jason crouched behind an old Allison-Chalmers tractor parked near the fence. He saw headlights reflect off the little black gun in the man’s hand, felt helplessness jangle through his mind like the clap of the bell. He looked for a weapon, saw nothing in the darkness.
Jason saw a violent movement, the deputy punching Arlette with the pistol, and he heard Arlette scream over the clamor of the alarm. Jason’s nerves wailed. He clenched his fists. All he had to do, he thought, was get the man to let go of her for just a second.
He climbed the tractor, crossed over the seat and stood on the big rear tire next to the fence. The wind flurried at him, whipped his hair. The deputy was twenty feet away along the fence. He had Arlette pinned to the van with his left hand around her throat; the right hand brandished the pistol in her face. He was turned away from Jason. “Where are they, bitch?” The demand was barely audible above the clattering alarm. “Where are they all hiding?” Arlette cringed away from the pistol. There was blood on her face.
Jason took a giant stride into space, landed on the top rail of the fence. For a moment he balanced wildly, pigeon-toed on the rail, arms spinning like windmill blades, and then he managed to shift one foot and gained a firm purchase. Weird triumph sang through his soul.
Clicked in!
He took one step along the pipe, then another. Then a third. The deputy kept howling questions, prodding Arlette with the barrel of the gun.
Landfakie, Jason thought as he took another step. Landfakie and mule-kick the son of a bitch.
The deputy must have seen Jason out of the corner of his eye, because he turned and looked up just as Jason took his last, swift step. Jason pivoted on the rail, saw little pebble irises in the wide, astonished eyes as he hurled himself into space. Jason saw the little gun swing toward him as, spinning in the air, he lashed backward and downward with both feet. “Run!” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Run. Everybody run.
It felt like a giant hand slapping him out of the sky. Suddenly he was on the ground, amid moist grass, teeth rattling from the impact. He’d brought the deputy down, too, because the man was lying there with a half-dazed expression on his face. Arlette stood over them both, staring. “Run!” Jason screamed again. He saw the hand and the gun outflung on the grass and launched himself at the weapon, putting his weight on the deputy’s arm. He sank his teeth into the man’s wrist. The flesh had a strange, metallic taste.
The deputy gave a shout and punched Jason in the body with a fist. Agonizing pain crackled along Jason’s nerves. He tried to hang on, but he felt himself growing weaker, weaker with each clang of the alarm, with each impact as the man’s fist hammered into his side. When the arm and the gun slipped out of his grasp at last, it felt like trying to hold flowing water in his two hands.
Concussions slapped at Jason’s ears. He felt himself wince with each shot, felt tears squeezed from his eyes. He couldn’t seem to breathe. Couldn’t breathe at all.
Jason blinked tears away. To his surprise he was looking at the deputy again.
The deputy was lying on the ground. And he was dead, small blank irises staring at the sky from his white, startled eyes.