CHAPTER 9
They set on him sometime after dusk, while he was walking up the shoulder of US Route 27, which was called Main Street a mile back, where it passed through town. A mile or two farther on, he had been planning to turn west on 63, which would have taken him to the turnpike and the start of his long trip north. His senses had been dulled, maybe, by the two beers he had just downed, but
40 he had known something was wrong. He was just getting around to remembering the four or five heavyset townies down at the far end of the bar when they broke cover and ran at him. Nick put up the best fight he could, decking one of them and bloodying another's nose-breaking it, too, by the sound. For one or two hopeful moments he thought there was actually a chance that he might win. The fact that he fought without making any sound at all was unnerving them a little. They were soft, maybe they had done this before with no trouble, and they certainly hadn't expected a serious fight from this skinny kid with the knapsack. Then one of them caught him just over the chin, shredding his lower lip with some sort of a school ring, and the warm taste of blood gushed into his mouth. He stumbled backward and someone pinned his arms. He struggled wildly and got one hand free just as a fist looped down into his face like a runaway moon. Before it closed his right eye, he saw that ring again, glittering dully in the starlight. He saw stars and felt his consciousness start to diffuse, drifting away into parts unknown. Scared, he struggled harder. The man wearing the ring was back in front of him now and Nick, afraid of being cut again, kicked him in the belly. School Ring's breath went out of him and he doubled over, making a series of breathless whoofing sounds, like a terrier with laryngitis. The others closed in. To Nick they were only shapes now, beefy men-good old boys, they called themselves-In gray shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show their big sunfreckled biceps. They wore blocky workshoes. Tangles of oily hair fell over their brows. In the last fading light of day all of this began to seem like a malign dream. Blood ran in his open eye. The knapsack was torn from his back. Blows rained down on him and he became a boneless, jittering puppet on a fraying string. Consciousness would not quite desert him. The only sounds were their out-0f-breath gasps as they pistoned their fists into him and the liquid twitter of a nightjar in the deep stand of pine close by. School Ring had staggered to his feet. "Hold im," he said. "Hold im by the har." Hands grasped his arms. Somebody else twined both hands into Nick's springy black hair. "Why don't he yell out?" one of the others asked, agitated. "Why don't he yell out, Ray?" "I tole you not to use any names," Signet Ring said. "I don't give a fuck why he don't yell out. I'm gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. Goddam dirty-fighter, that's what he is." The fist looped down. Nick jerked his head aside and the ring furrowed his cheek. "Hold im, I tole you," Ray said. "What are y'all? Bunch of pussies?" The fist looped down again and Nick's nose became a squashed and dripping tomato. His breath clogged to a snuffle. Consciousness was down to a narrow pencil beam. His mouth dropped open and he scooped in night air. The nightjar sang again, sweet and solus. Nick heard it this time no more than he had the last. "Hold im," Ray said. "Hold im, goddammit." The fist looped down. Two of his front teeth shattered as the school ring snowplowed through them. It was an agony he couldn't scream about. His legs unhinged and he sagged, held like a grainsack now by the hands behind him. "Ray, that's enough! You wanna kill im?" "Hold im. Sucker kicked me. I'm gonna mess im up." Then lights were splashing down the road, which was bordered here by underbrush and interlaced with huge old pines. "Oh, Jesus!" "Dump im, dump im!" That was Ray's voice, but Ray was no longer in front of him. Nick was dimly grateful, but most of what little consciousness he had left was taken up with the agony in his mouth. He could taste flecks of his teeth on his tongue. Hands pushed him, propelling him out into the center of the road. Oncoming circles of light pinned him there like an actor on a stage. Brakes screamed. Nick pinwheeled his arms and tried to make his legs go but his legs wouldn't oblige; they had given him up for dead. He collapsed on the composition surface and the screaming sound of brakes and tires filled the world as he waited numbly to be run over. At least it would put an end to the pain in his mouth. Then a splatter of pebbles struck his cheek and he was looking at a tire which had come to a stop less than a foot from his face. He could see a small white rock embedded between two of the treads like a coin held between a pair of knuckles. Piece of quartz, he thought disjointedly, and passed out.
When Nick came to, he was lying on a bunk. It was a hard one, but in the last three years or so he had lain on harder. He struggled his eyes open with great effort. They seemed gummed shut and the right one, the one that had been hit by the runaway moon, would only come to halfmast. He was looking at a cracked gray cement ceiling. Pipes wrapped in insulation zigzagged beneath it. A large beetle was trundling busily along one of these pipes. Bisecting his field of vision was a
41 chain. He raised his head slightly, sending a monstrous bolt of pain through it, and saw another chain running from the outside foot of the bunk to a bolt in the wall. He turned his head to the left (another bolt of pain, this one not so killing) and saw a rough concrete wall. Cracks ran through it. It had been extensively written on. Some of the writing was new, some old, most illiterate. THIS PLACE HAS BUGS. LOUIS DRAGONSKY, 1987. I LIKE IT IN MY ASSHOLE. DTS CAN BE FUN. GEORGE RAMPLING IS A JERK-OFF. I STILL LOVE YOU SUZANNE. THIS PLACE SUX, JERRY. CLYDE D. FRED 1981. There were pictures of large dangling penises, gigantic breasts, crudely drawn vaginas. It all gave Nick a sense of place. He was in a jail cell. Carefully, he propped himself on his elbows, let his feet (clad in paper slippers) drop over the edge of the cot, and then swung up to a sitting position. The large economy-size pain rocked his head again and his backbone gave out an alarming creak. His stomach rolled alarmingly in his gut, and a fainting kind of nausea seized him, the most dismaying and unmanning kind, the kind that makes you feel like crying out to God to make it stop. Instead of crying out-he couldn't have done that-Nick leaned over his knees, one hand on each cheek, and waited for it to pass. After a while, it did. He could feel the Band-Aids that had been placed over the furrow on his cheek, and by wrinkling that side of his face a couple of times he decided that some sawbones had sunk a couple of stitches in there for good measure. He looked around. He was in a small cell shaped like a Saltine box stood on end. Beyond the end of the cot was a barred door. At the head of the cot was a lidless, ringless toilet. Behind and above him-he saw this by craning his stiff neck very, very carefully-was a small barred window. After he had sat on the edge of the cot long enough to feel sure he wasn't going to pass out, he hooked the shapeless gray pajama pants he was wearing down around his knees, squatted on the can, and urinated for what seemed at least an hour. When he was finished he stood up, holding on to the edge of the cot like an old man. He looked apprehensively into the bowl for signs of blood, but his urine had been clear. He flushed it away. He walked carefully over to the barred door and looked out into a short corridor. To his left was the drunk tank. An old man was lying on one of its five bunks, a hand like driftwood dangling on the floor. To the right the corridor ended in a door that was chocked open. In the center of the corridor was a dangling green-shaded light like the kind he had seen in pool-halls. A shadow rose, danced on the propped-open door, and then a large man in khaki suntans walked into the corridor. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt and a big pistol. He hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets and looked at Nick for almost a full minute without speaking. Then he said, "When I was a boy we caught ourselves a mountain lion up in the hills and shot it and then drug it twenty mile back to town over dirt hardpan. What was left of that creature when we got home was the sorriest-lookin sight I ever saw. You the second-sorriest, boy." Nick thought it had the feel of a prepared speech, care fully honed and treasured, saved for out- of-towners and vags that occupied the barred Saltine boxes from time to time. "You got a name, Babalugah?" Nick put a finger to his swelled and lacerated lips and shook his head. He put a hand over his mouth, then cut the air with it in a soft diagonal hashmark and shook his head again. "What? Cain't talk? What's this happy horseshit?" The words were amiable enough, but Nick couldn't follow tones or inflections. He plucked an invisible pen from the air and wrote with it. "You want a pencil?" "If you're mute, how come you don't have none of those cards?" Nick shrugged. He turned out his empty pockets. He balled his fists and shadowboxed the air, which sent another bolt of pain through his head and another wave of nausea through his stomach. He finished by tapping his own temples lightly with his fists, rolling his eyes up, and sagging on the bars. Then he pointed to his empty pockets. "You were robbed." The man in khaki turned away and went back into his office. A moment later he returned with a dull pencil and a notepad. He thrust them through the bars. Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker. Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows. "Yeah, that's me. Who are you?" "Nick Andros," he wrote. He put his hand through the bars. Baker shook his head. "I ain't gonna shake with you. You deaf, too?" "What happened to you tonight? Doc Soames and his wife almost ran you down like a woodchuck, boy." "Beat up & robbed. A mile or so from a rdhouse on Main St. Zack's Place."
42 "That hangout's no place for a kid like you, Babalugah. You surely aren't old enough to drink." Nick shook his head indignantly. "I'm twenty-two," he wrote. "I can have a couple of beers without getting beaten up & robbed for them, can't I?" Baker read this with a sourly amused look on his face. "It don't appear you can in Shoyo. What you doing here, kid?" Nick tore the first sheet off the memo pad, crumpled it in a ball, dropped it on the floor. Before he could begin to write his reply, an arm shot through the bars and a steel hand clutched his shoulder. Nick's head jerked up. "My wife neatens these cells," Baker said, "and I don't see any need for you to litter yours up. Go throw that in the john." Nick bent over, wincing at the pain in his back, and fished the ball of paper off the floor. He took it over to the toilet, tossed it in, and then looked up at Baker with his eyebrows raised. Baker nodded. Nick came back. This time he wrote longer, pencil flying over the paper. Baker reflected that teaching a deaf-mute kid to read and write was probably quite a trick, and this Nick Andros must have some pretty good equipment upstairs to have caught the hang of it. There were fellows here in Shoyo, Arkansas, who had never properly caught the hang of it, and more than a few of them hung out in Zack's. But he supposed you couldn't expect a kid who just blew into town to know that. Nick handed the pad through the bars. "I've been traveling around but I'm not a vag. Spent today working for a man named Rich Ellerton about 6 miles west of here. I cleaned his barn & put up a load of hay in his loft., Last week I was in Watts, Okla., running fence. The men who beat me up got my week's pay." "You sure it was Rich Ellerton you was working for? I can check that, you know." Baker had torn off Nick's explanation, folded it to wallet-photo size, and tucked it into his shirt pocket. "You see his dog?" "What kind was it?" Nick gestured for the pad. "Big Doberman," he wrote. "But nice. Not mean." Baker nodded, turned away, and went back into his office. Nick stood at the bars, watching anxiously. A moment later, Baker returned with a big keyring, unlocked the holding cell, and pushed it back on its track. "Come on in the office," Baker said. "You want some breakfast?" Nick shook his head, then made pouring and drinking motions. "Coffee? Got that. You take cream and sugar?" Nick shook his head. "Take it like a man, huh?" Baker laughed. "Come on." Baker started up the hallway, and although he was speaking, Nick was unable to hear what he was saying with his back turned and his lips hidden. "I don't mind the company. I got insomnia. It's got so I can't sleep more'n three or four hours most nights. M'wife wants me to go see some big- shot doctor up in Pine Bluff. If it keeps on, I just might do it. I mean, looka this-here I am, five in the morning, not even light out, and there I sit eatin' aigs and greazy home 'fries from the truck stop up the road." He turned on the last phrase and Nick caught "... truck stop up the road." He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders to indicate his puzzlement. "Don't matter," Baker said. "Not to a young kid like you, anyway." In the outer office, Baker poured him a cup of black coffee out of a huge thermos. The sheriff's half-finished breakfast plate stood on his desk blotter, and he pulled it back to himself. Nick sipped the coffee. It hurt his mouth, but it was good. He tapped Baker on the shoulder, and when he looked up, Nick pointed to the coffee, rubbed his stomach, and winked soberly. Baker smiled. "You better say it's good. My wife Jane puts it up." He tucked half a hard-fried egg into his mouth, chewed, and then pointed at Nick with his fork. "You're pretty good. Just like one of those pantomimers. Bet you don't have much trouble makin yourself understood, huh?" Nick made a seesawing gesture with his hand in midair. Comme Ci, comme Va. "I ain't gonna hold you," Baker said, mopping up grease with a slice of toasted Wonder Bread, "but I tell you what. If you stick around, maybe we can get the guys who did this to you. You game?" Nick nodded and wrote: "You think I can get my week's pay back?" "Not a chance," Baker said flatly. "I'm just a hick sheriff, boy. For somethin like that, you'd be wantin Oral Roberts." Nick nodded and shrugged. Putting his hands together, he made a bird flying away.
43 "Yeah, like that. How many were there?" Nick held up four fingers, shrugged, then held up five. "Think you could identify any of them?" Nick held up one finger and wrote: "Big & blond. Your size, maybe a little heavier. Gray shirt & pants. He was wearing a big ring. 3rdfinger right hand. Purple stone. That's what cut me." As Baker read this, a change came over his face. First concern, then anger. Nick, thinking the anger was directed against him, became frightened again. "Oh Jesus Christ," Baker said. "This here's a full commode slopping over for sure. You sure?" Nick nodded reluctantly. "Anything else? You see anything else?" Nick thought hard, then' wrote: "Small scar. On his forehead." Baker looked at the words. "That's Ray Booth," he said. "My brother-in-law. Thanks, kid. Five in the morning and my day's wrecked already:" Nick's eyes opened a little wider, and he made a cautious gesture of commiseration. "Well, all right," Baker said, more to himself than to Nick. "He's a bad actor. Janey knows it. He beat her up enough times when they was kids together. Still, they're brother 'n sister and I guess I can forget my lovin for this week." Nick looked down,,embarrassed. After a moment Baker shook his shoulder sothat Nick would see him speaking. "It probably won't do any good anyway," he said. "Ray 'n his jerk-off buddies'll just swear each other up. Your word against theirs. Did you get any licks in?" "Kicked this Ray in the guts," Nick wrote. "Got another one in the nose. Might have broken it." "Ray chums around with Vince Hogan, Billy Warner, and Mike Childress, mostly," Baker said. "I might be able to get Vince alone and break him down. He's got all the spine of a dyin jellyfish. If I could get him I could go after Mike and Billy. Ray got that ring in a fraternity at LSU. He flunked out his sophomore year." He paused, drumming his fingers against the rim of his breakfast plate. "I guess we could give it a go, kid, if you wanted to. But I'll warn you in advance, we probably won't get them. They're as vicious and cowardly as a dogpack, but they're town boys and you're just a deaf-mute drifter. And if they got off, they'd come after you." Nick thought about it. In his mind he kept coming back to the image of himself, being shoved from one of them to the next like a bleeding scarecrow, and to Ray's lips forming the words: I'm gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. To the feel of his knapsack, that old friend of the last two wandering years, being ripped from his back. On the memo pad he wrote and underlined two words: "Let's try." Baker sighed and nodded. "Okay. Vince Hogan works down to the sawmill... well, that ain't just true. What he does mostly is fucks off down to the sawmill. We'll take a ride down there about nine, if that's fine with you. Maybe we can get him scared enough to spill the beans." "How's your mouth? Doc Soames left some pills. He said it would probably be a misery to you." Nick nodded ruefully. "I'll get em. It..." He broke off, and in Nick's silent movie world, he watched the sheriff explode several sneezes into his handkerchief. "That's another thing," he went on, but he had turned away now and Nick caught only the first word. "I'm comin down with a real good cold. Jesus Christ, ain't life grand? Welcome to Arkansas, boy." He got the pills and came back to where Nick sat. After he passed them and a glass of water to Nick, Baker rubbed gently under the angle of his jaw. There was a definite painful swelling there. Swollen glands, coughing, sneezing, a low fever, felt like. Yeah, it was shaping up to be a wonderful day.