After the sanitation inspector delivered the warning and ran out the door, Pollard locked up and went to the back room to check on the man he’d had chained to the floor next to his cot for the past four days. He’d pried his nose off with a bottle opener an hour ago; and he sat down on the bed and told him it wouldn’t be much longer, that he was going to finish him off with an axe tonight. He went on talking, though he wasn’t sure the man was capable of listening anymore. “You make number seven,” Pollard said. “A lot of people consider that a lucky number, but I bet they’d change their minds if they saw you right now, wouldn’t they?” He lingered awhile longer, eating a can of bully beef while he looked over his work. Then he went back out front, served a few drinks to some winder boys getting primed to start the second shift over at the paper mill.
As far as the man in the back room went, he’d been beyond caring after the second day in the chains. His name was Johansson, and he was a carpenter from Indiana who specialized in fine joinery and loved to square dance, but after tonight, he would just be a pile of dumb pieces. Around three or four in the morning, Pollard would bag up everything he wasn’t keeping and carry it over to Paint Creek. Standing on the bank shaking out the bloody burlap sacks and watching the slop float away in the dark water, he would picture some of it making it via the Ohio all the way to Cairo, Illinois, and from there down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the soft parts eventually passing through a hundred fish guts, the bones scattered perhaps as far as the cold, deep Atlantic. And for just a few minutes, with the stars ticking in his ears like bombs and the air rubbing against his skin like sandpaper, he would find himself slowly building to an ecstatic orgasm, as if some beautiful angel was reaching down out of the heavens and touching him with a knowing hand in all the right places.
29
THE POSSE FROM Russell, their horses wrung out and the last of their liquor gone and the storekeeper getting on their nerves with his countless retelling of his brazen confrontation with the outlaws, returned to town two days later, half drunk and empty-handed. No sooner had the bleary and disappointed clerk walked into his house than his wife showed him a new poster issued just that morning stating that Kentucky was upping the reward for the Jewett Gang an additional five hundred dollars. “God Almighty,” he said, “I better go get the boys rounded back up.”
“Now wait a minute, Wilbur,” she said. “Why let any of those fools have a share of it? There’s only the three of them, and you done winged the one, right?” She grabbed his hands and looked pleadingly into his eyes. “Just think about it, the new life all that money could buy.” He stood for a long moment looking past her out the window at his brood of rickety brats playing listlessly around the front stoop. One of them, his namesake no less, was eating dirt again, and he was the healthiest one of the bunch. How would he ever pay Mr. Haskins for his rifle when he couldn’t even keep his own family fed? He remembered again what the sonofabitch had said as he strutted out the door: “That’s between you and this Mister feller you keep going on about.” His wife was right. To share an opportunity like this when he was in such wretched straits would be downright madness. Townsfolk would talk about him for years, about how he went back out on his own to hunt the bandits down that very same afternoon, barely taking the time to swallow some cold hash and trade in his old plug for a fresh one at Jim Flannery’s livery, talking gibberish about having an important appointment at some crossroads somewhere.
—
IT WASN’T LONG before the Jewetts were on the move again. Hardly believing his luck that he’d found them, the storekeeper had managed to get within a hundred feet of the house before Chimney spied him over the rim of his coffee cup through the porch vines. Now he lay sprawled in the mass of rosebushes around the well, his spectacles still cocked crooked on his face, a .303 bullet from the Lee-Enfield having split his brave but foolish heart into two nearly equal pieces of pulpy muscle. He had toppled into the briars just as a light rain began to fall. Cane and Chimney then circled the perimeter of the property searching for other members of the posse, but all they found was a lone horse covered with sores tied to a tree fifty yards into the woods. The animal had been on its way to the glue factory when the clerk rushed into Flannery’s yelling that he needed a new mount. “Not worth keeping,” Chimney said, looking the spindly nag over. He pulled off the saddle and bridle and cut it loose. Then they headed back to where the dead man lay. Inside one of his pockets, along with a handful of shells and two dirty hoecakes, they found the updated wanted poster.
Cane kept glancing up to scan the tree line as he read the latest offer. They were now accused of three times as many murders as they had actually committed, and robbing twice as many banks. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the torching of an old folks’ home in Gainesville, Florida, and the vicious defilement of two virgin sisters with a wooden crucifix outside of Waynesboro, Virginia, had also been added to their list of crimes. He folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. The rain picked up a little more. “I’d say we better get out of here tonight,” he said. “If some damn store clerk can find us, it’s hard to tell what’s comin’ next.” Passing Chimney one of the corn cakes, he started to bite into the other one before he realized what he was doing. He slung it to the ground and stepped on it; and for a brief second he was recalling the time that Pearl stomped Chimney’s biscuit on the floor, not long before he passed.