“Well,” Captain said, as he rooted loose a piece of meat stuck between his teeth with a finger, “the way I see it, if’n you want them to squirm around a bit and not just lay there like some ol’ cold housewife, then ye’d best keep ’em alive until after you’ve had your fill.”
As Chimney listened to several others voice their opinions about the pros and cons of live fucks versus dead ones, he settled a bead on Captain’s head with the Enfield. He wondered how much cornholing they’d be up for if he blew the old boy’s gummy brains all over their hot vittles. His heart started beating faster, and he felt his finger slowly begin to squeeze the trigger, but then he recalled Cane saying, “Whatever you do, don’t start nothing. The shape Cob’s in, we’d never be able to outrun ’em.” Letting out a sigh, he turned away and sneaked back to his horse. It had taken him half the night to find them in the dark.
“So that’s the Ohio?” Chimney asked.
“Far as I can figure, it is,” Cane said.
“Jesus, I never thought it’d be that big.”
“Looks like the bridge is the only way across.”
“Well, let’s get to it then,” Chimney said. “If they didn’t get too drunk last night, those bastards probably ain’t more than an hour or so behind us.”
Cane shook his head. “No, we’ll have to wait till the sun goes down. We get caught in the middle of that thing in the daylight it’d be a goddamn turkey shoot.” He looked around at the thin trees and patchy grass growing out of the rocky soil. “At least here we got the high ground.”
“But there’s nowhere to run if they find us,” Chimney argued. “Unless we do what Bloody Bill did, and I’ll say right now I’d just as soon shoot it out.”
Looking over the edge of the steep bluff, at least two hundred feet above the river, Cane thought about how Bill Bucket, with a small army closing in on him from three sides, had chosen to leap to his death with his horse off a high cliff in some windblown New Mexico desert. “A modern-day Icarus” was the way Charles Winthrop III described him in that last flowery paragraph, “harried and hemmed in on all sides by a cruel and unjust world, making a final glorious attempt to break free of all his earthly bonds.” Though they didn’t have any notion as to who this Icarus feller was, they had speculated he was probably some robber who had come to a bad end in some bygone time. Cane rubbed the back of his neck, glanced over at Cob. “What do ye think, brother? Can ye go a little farther?”
Cob was slumped over in his saddle, a thin string of drool hanging from his bottom lip. His skin was pale and greasy with sweat. When he heard Cane speaking to him, he straightened up a little and opened his dull eyes. “Remember them peaches the old man had hid?” he said.
“What about them?”
“I got one a-growin’ inside me. I can feel it.”
“No, buddy, you just got a fever,” Cane said.
“I wish I’d never ate them damn things. They was rotten and now I’m a-rotten, too.”
“Maybe you got one of them worms in ye like mama had,” Chimney joked.
“Jesus Christ, shut up,” Cane said. “He don’t need to hear that shit.”
“And why does he keep followin’ me?” Cob said. He turned his head as if he were looking at something behind them.
“Who?”
“Tardweller. No matter what I give him, he won’t go away.”
“Well, that settles it,” Cane said. “We stay here for now.”
They laid Cob on his blanket under a gnarled crabapple tree, hobbled the horses in the grassiest spots they could find. Then Chimney climbed with the Enfield twenty feet or so into a tall spruce at the southern edge of the promontory and propped himself between two thick branches. He reached in his back pocket for a strand of licorice and leaned back against the sticky trunk to keep an eye out for the band of sodomites that were on their heels.