Ralph went into the house and stopped inside the door, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The walls showed flowering spills of mildew and cumulus blooms of lime dissolved out of the plaster by rainwater. The next room was a great hall hung with dangling leeches of paint. Billsy sat in a velour chair with the stuffing leaking out under his legs.
“You pop the question?”
“Shut up.”
“All right, bud. Let’s talk business. We goin’ into Woodgulch with the kid?”
“I said not, but now I don’t know.”
“We could take the skiff across the river.”
Ralph looked through the clouded glass over the broad gallery toward the fungus-haunted live oaks hiding the west. “Just who in hell was watchin’ us?”
THE TWO OF THEM ate breakfast at the Woodgulch Café, a plain-wood room painted from floor to ceiling the gray of a rainy dawn. Sam counted their money together and figured they could afford something for supper but not much else until they got back to New Orleans.
August thumbed his empty plate away. “Can we trust him?”
“Well, I’m as sure as I can be.” He knew that when outlanders passed through a community like Woodgulch they touched on old biases and blood alliances going back generations, considerations that were complex and far beyond right and wrong. “He said he’d show up at train time with some deputies.”
“I hope there’s no shooting.”
“Look, there’s no telling what’ll happen. Just try to stay in the clear. Get hold of Lily and stay in the clear.”
“What exactly do you want me to do?”
He took the last bite of egg and stared at his empty plate. “When you’re playing ‘Sweet Sue’ and the trombone gives it over to you to build the song, do you stop the band and ask what they want you to do?”
“No.”
“You just rip into her with that alto sax and play between the notes until it’s right with what the band’s doing. If everybody’s jumping and the dancers are springing the floorboards, you just cut up like crazy, you step all over the clarinet and make him wait for the next turn. On the other hand, if the band is tired and just plugging along, you take your turn and sort of match. It’s like that with everything.”
“Keep my ears open and watch the room.”
“That’s the ticket.”
THEY PASSED THE DAY wandering the aisles of the hardware, walking the town’s six gravel streets, sitting on the one public bench in front of the courthouse. They arrived at the bench about two o’clock, and after an hour of watching a few Fords, mule-drawn wagons, two delivery trucks, and one buggy with a rotted top come and go on their errands, the boy shook his head. “Not much to do, is there?”
“If you lived here you’d be working at something.”
He thought about this. “I’d be working at moving away.”
A man wearing a flannel shirt buttoned up wrong rode a little quarterhorse past them. Across the street a baker came out and, with floured hands, turned the crank that lowered an awning against the westering sun; he looked at them and dusted his hands one against the other, then turned inside. Behind them, the courthouse door rattled and they turned to see the sheriff come out into the heat and start toward them.
“How are you?” Sam called out.
Tabors walked up and put a foot on the bench. “I’ve been on the telephone finding out about your story. Called down to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and everything checks out. I talked to a Muscarella at the French Quarter precinct and he read me the report.” He looked at August. “Called a lot of people. I hear you play on a big dance boat.”
“Yessir.”
“That jass music or what?”
“Yessir, we try to make people want to dance.”
The sheriff looked at both of them, as though trying to divine their characters. “If that little girl shows up tomorrow, I have to be satisfied about her identity. Do you have a photo?”
“I don’t.”
“No, sir, not on me.”
“Well, if we wind up with her, I’ll have to perform an interview before I can turn her over, you understand. I can’t just go around giving away children.” He put a hand on August’s shoulder for a moment, and Sam saw how large it was, thick in the palm. The sheriff was a big man, his size partially concealed by his suit, a mild gray pinstripe. He took off his fedora to wipe his forehead, revealing a big, straightsided head, the close-cropped blond hair free of gray. He was built of preventative muscle that would make those he dealt with think about the gravity of their actions and words, or else.
“You have things set up?” Sam asked him.
“Everything’s ready,” the sheriff said.
LATE THAT NIGHT in the hotel, they again talked across the dark, their voices boxy in the plank-walled room. One side of Sam’s bed was against a low window, and a wet breeze seeped through the screens but did little to allay the breathless heat.
“Lucky, you think we should’ve sold the shotgun? We could have traded it for a little pistol.”
Sam turned over on his side, the springs squalling under his weight. “Bud, a pistol in the pocket changes the way a man thinks. Without it, he might not take certain chances. With it, he goes where he shouldn’t or does something that’s not a good idea. He thinks it’s a free pass, but it isn’t.”
“But it’s kind of a life preserver, isn’t it? A safety device?”
“If you can’t swim, best not go near the water.”
“I can see how sometimes one might come in handy, though. Like when a robber comes at you.”
“Listen, unless you’re trained or some kind of natural-born killer, a criminal will get the best of you every time. You’re surprised, and he’s not, that’s all there is to it. He’ll shoot you through the heart before you get a finger on your pistol.”
They lay there in silence, the little town as quiet as a shadow. After a while, through the screen came the dull aeolian hum of a steamboat whistle several miles off.
“What about tomorrow?”
“It’ll get here, won’t it?”
“I mean, do you think everything will turn out all right?”
He knew August understood that in fact things were not that simple. Many things had recently not turned out all right. Sam guessed August wanted what every boy did-assurance, a good night’s sleep, someone on his side. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, turning his face to the window and looking down to where a black horse stood in the middle of the street, facing west, untethered and lost and asleep.
THE NEXT MORNING they could afford only toast and coffee for breakfast. They washed up and straightened their clothes as best they could, wiping down their shoes with the only cloth in the room. Walking to the edge of town they sold the mule for six dollars and fifty cents to a liveryman who spoke a little French and wanted him as a pet.
At two o’clock they walked through the sun to the station and waited inside on one of three varnished benches. The agent nodded as though he’d expected them. Fifteen minutes before train time the sheriff came in and sat next to the door, wearing a different suit than the day before, no badge visible. After him, a beefy man dressed like a farmer came in and sat by the other door to the platform, a pistol-shaped bulge in his overalls pocket. The sheriff nodded to him, and they both bent to stare across the street where a man sat on a doorstep looking back at them. After a while, he raised his arm, and the farmer waved back.
Sam stood up and walked out onto the platform, looked over at the dusty town, and read the train board. South of Woodgulch were three flag stops named Fault, Lacy Switch, and Stob Mill, then the main line interchange at Gashouse. The tri-weekly mixed train was the only one scheduled. He expected that the train was close and thought of the picture that still flashed in his mind, sometimes in his dreams, sometimes when he was trying to remember why he wasn’t with his wife and child in New Orleans. He wanted to fasten in his imagination the little girl’s face, and closing his eyes for a moment saw the familiar cameo and next to it the image of his new son, and then from out of nowhere the girl in France whose house he’d leveled with the errant artillery shell and next to her a dim painful image of his first child. He opened his eyes and tried to remember everything Elsie and August had told him about Lily, the pitch of her voice, the precise color of her hair, and then he heard the train whistle, hoarse and foreboding, and his heart stumbled. He walked inside, and the sheriff told him to stand in the back corner.