Gone South (38 page)

“Comin’ right up!”

“Mr. Murtaugh?” Pelvis smiled broadly. “I think they like me.”

“You were all right. If you care for that kind of music. Here, wipe your face.” He pulled a handful of paper napkins out of a dispenser and gave it to him. “You’re not gonna pass out on me again, are you?”

“Nosir. I’m just a bit winded.” Pelvis took the bottle of water Burt gave him and guzzled it, then he poured some in his hand and let Mama lap it up. “Did’ja hear the way they were hollerin’?”

“Uh-huh. Well, step down off your pedestal and listen: we can’t get out of here till tomorrow afternoon. We have to wait for a supply boat from Grand Isle. How the hell we’re supposed to get back to the car I don’t know, but that’s how things are.”

“At least we got him, didn’t we?” Pelvis nodded toward Dan, who’d gone back to eating his gumbo.

We, my ass,
Flint was about to say, but Burt stuck his bearded face over the bar again. “You play better’n you look, if you don’t mind me sayin’.”

“Sir?”

“You know. The Elvis thing, with the judo moves and all. That’s what I expected.”

“Well, all them songs I sang were ones Elvis done,” Pelvis explained. “And I do them moves in my show, but I couldn’t ’cause I was sittin’ at the piana. Like I said, I usually play the git-tar.”

“You want my advice? I’m gonna give it to you anyway. Don’t hide behind Elvis. You don’t need it, a fella can pound them keys and sing like you do. Hell, you oughta go to Nashville and show ’em what you can do.”

“I been there. They told me I didn’t sound enough like Elvis. Told me I couldn’t play git-tar as good as him, neither.”

“Well, hell! Don’t
try
to sound like him! Don’t try to look like him, or talk like him, or nothin’! Seems to me there was just one Elvis, and he’s dead. Can’t be another one. If I was you, I wouldn’t touch a guitar again so long as I lived. I wouldn’t wear my hair like that, either, and you oughta lose fifty or sixty pounds. Get yourself lean and mean, then go see them Nashville cats. You play for them like you did here, you’re gonna be makin’ yourself some money! Hey, do me a favor!” Burt reached for a napkin and pulled a pen out from beside the cash register. “Here. Sign me an autograph, just so I can say I spotted you first. Sign it To My Friend Burt Dunbro.”

“You … want
my
autograph?” Pelvis asked, his cheeks reddening with embarrassment.

“Yep. Right there. To My Friend Burt Dunbro.”

He put the pen to napkin and wrote what the man asked. Then he started
Pelv
—

He stopped.

“What’s wrong? Pen jammed up?”

There was just one Elvis,
he was thinking,
and he’s dead. Can’t be another one.

Maybe there shouldn’t be.

It had been fifteen years since he’d played piano in front of an audience. And that was before he’d dressed himself up as the King, studied the records and movies and hip thrusts, bought the wig, the blue suede shoes, the regalia. It was before he’d let himself get fat on the Twinkies and peanut butter cookies and cornbread sopped in buttermilk. It was before he’d decided that who he was wasn’t good enough, and that he needed something much larger to cling to and hide inside.

But what if … what if …

What if he’d given up on his own talent too early? What if he’d let it go in favor of the Elvis disguise because he wasn’t sure he was worth a damn? What if … what if … ?

Oh, Lord, it would be so hard to give it up now and try to go back. It would be impossible to strike out on his own, without the King to help him. Wouldn’t it?

But Elvis was dead. There couldn’t be another one.

“Hold on, I’ll find a pen that writes,” Burt offered.

“No,” Pelvis said. “This one’s fine.”

He was terrified.

But he got the pen moving, and with a hammering heart and a dry throat he scratched out
Pelv
and beneath it wrote
Cecil Eisley.

It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done in his life, but when he was finished he felt something inside him start to unlock, just the slightest bit. Maybe in an hour he would regret signing his own name. Maybe tomorrow he would deny that he had. But right now — this strange and wonderful moment — he felt ten feet tall.

“Griff, come over here!” Burt called. The mean-faced man who didn’t care for the classics came to the bar. Burt gave him twenty dollars and quietly told him what he wanted done. “Ya’ll go on with Griff, he’ll take care of you,” Burt said to Flint, and to Arden he added, “Six o’clock. I’ll see you here.”

“Let’s go, Lambert.” Flint pushed the gun into Dan’s side again. “Take it nice and easy.”

The two cabins Griff led them to were about a hundred yards from the other structures of St. Nasty, up on a platform facing a cove of smooth black water. Griff produced a large penknife and pulled up its thin blade to slide into the first cabin’s door lock. It took four seconds to open the door. “I better check for snakes,” he said before he disappeared into the darkness within. Two minutes later a generator rumbled to life around back and then electric lights flickered on. “No snakes,” he announced when he returned to the door. “Just a skin.” He held the long gossamer thing up to show them. “Who’s sleepin’ in this one?”

When neither of the bounty hunters responded, Arden screwed up her courage and said, “I guess I am.” She crossed the threshold. The pine-paneled interior was hot, humid, and smelled of mold. There was a broken-down plaid sofa, a couple of standing lamps that appeared to have been purchased from a garage sale sometime in 1967, and a kitchen area with a rusty stove and sink. A hallway went back to what must be the sleeping area and — hopefully — an indoor bathroom. It would do for a few hours, until six o’clock.

“Shower and toilet’s between the cabins,” Griff said. “Pipes are hooked to a cistern, but I wouldn’t drink the water. And you’d best keep the front and back doors locked. Lots of fellas ’round here can’t be trusted.”

Arden closed the door and locked it, then she pulled the sofa over in front of it. She found a switch that operated a ceiling fan, and turning it on helped cool the room some.

When the lights were on in the second cabin, Griff came out grinning. “Looky here!” He raised his right arm to show Dan, Flint, and Pelvis the thick brown snake his hand had seized, the head squeezed between his fingers and the coils twined around his wrist. “Big ol’ sumbitch moccasin. Found him sleepin’ under a cot. Ya’ll step aside.” He reared his arm back and flung the reptile past them into the water. It made a heavy splash. “Okay, you can go on in.”

Flint guided Dan through the door first. The place was basically the same as the first cabin, a moldy-smelling assemblage of cheap furniture, pine-paneled walls, and a floor of rough planks. Pelvis entered last, his eyes peeled for creepy-crawlies. “Thing ’bout moccasins,” Griff said, “is that for every one you see, there’re three or four you don’t. They’ll keep to themselves if you don’t step on ’em, but I wouldn’t let that dog go nosin’ ’round, hear?”

“I hear,” Pelvis answered.

“Tough luck for that girl, huh? I mean, the way her face is. Awful hard to look at, but hard
not
to look at, too.”

“Thanks for lettin’ us in,” Flint told him. “Good night.”

“Allrighty. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. Nor nothin’ else.” Griff chuckled a little to himself, slid his hands into the pockets of his blue jeans, and started walking back in the direction they’d come.

Flint closed the door and latched it. “Here, keep this on him.” He gave Pelvis the derringer, then he took the cuffs and their key from his pocket and unlocked them. “Hands behind you.”

“I’m gonna have to go pee in a minute,” Dan said.

“Hands in front of you,” Flint corrected him. “Grip ’em together.”

“I gave you my word I wasn’t gonna run. You don’t have to —”

“Your word’s not worth fifteen thousand dollars, so shut up.” Flint snapped the cuffs around Dan’s wrists and put the key inside his suit jacket. Dan saw a peculiar thing happen: the front of the man’s shirt suddenly twitched, as if Murtaugh had just hiccupped. He recalled that he’d seen the same thing when Murtaugh was on the ground in Basile Park, just before the Elvis clone had started hollering. He had the bizarre sensation that there was more to Murtaugh than met the eye.

“Watch him for a minute,” Flint told Pelvis, and he walked back through the hallway to find out what the rest of the cabin held.

“Don’t try nothin’, now,” Pelvis said nervously, holding a sleepy Mama and aiming the derringer at Dan’s belly. “I’ll shoot if I have to.”

“Just take it easy.” Dan could tell that the man was uncomfortable holding the gun, and though it looked like a peashooter, it could still do a lot of damage at such close range. He decided silence would only increase the man’s tension before Murtaugh returned. “What’s your name?”

“Ce—” No, maybe he’d be ready to let go of it someday, but not yet. “Pelvis Eisley.”

“Pelvis, huh?” Dan nodded; it figured. “Excuse me for sayin’ this, but you and Murtaugh don’t fit. You been partners long?”

“Two days. He’s teachin’ me the ropes.”

An amateur, Dan thought. “This is your first bounty-huntin’ job?”

“That’s right. My very first.”

“Seems to me you’d do better playin’ piano in Nashville than doin’ this kind of work.”

“Eisley, don’t talk to him.” Flint came back in. What he’d found had been two grim rooms, each with two iron-framed, bare-mattressed cots. He hadn’t failed to notice that the legs of the cots were standing in water-filled coffee cans to keep insects from climbing up them. If this was the executive quarters, he would have hated to see the work crew’s barracks; then again, the cabin didn’t look like anyone had been there in quite some time. But all he wanted was a few hours of sleep, and he didn’t need a Hilton hotel pillow. Flint took the derringer back from Eisley. “Come on, Lambert. You want to do your business, let’s get it done.” Through a rear window he’d seen a tin-roofed shed that he figured must be where the shower and toilet were. The generator was sending juice to an electric bulb burning over the shed’s door, but stepping in was going to be an act of either raw courage or sheer desperation.

Arden had already forced herself — out of desperation — to walk into the shed. Fortunately, there was a light bulb inside as well as outside, but Arden approached the toilet with trepidation. There were no water moccasins coiled up inside, as she’d feared, but it wasn’t the cleanest in the world. She did what she had to do, used a roll of tissue that could have scraped paint off metal, and got out as fast as she could.

In the room in which she’d chosen to sleep, she had put the pink drawstring bag atop a battered old pine chest of drawers. Now, under the single dirty light bulb that burned at the ceiling, she opened the bag and removed what was held within.

One after the other, she lined up five little horses side by side.

They had been bought at a dime store in Fort Worth. They weren’t much, but they were everything. Five horses: two brown, one black, one gray. The paint was chipping off them, revealing the red plastic they were molded from. She knew their secret names, and they watched over her. They reminded her of a time when she’d been happy, when she could believe the future was wide-open spaces, even through the Texas dust and grit and the hard work that had to be done. They reminded her that once upon a time she had been needed.

She sat on the edge of a cot and stared at the small plastic figures, her eyes glazed and tired. She was wrecked, and she knew it. But her thoughts were still circling that flame, circling, circling. The Bright Girl. A touch from the Bright Girl, and she would be healed. Jupiter said so. Jupiter wouldn’t have lied to her. No. A touch from the Bright Girl, and the mark — the ugly bad-luck mark that had tormented her all her life and caused her father to walk out the door and never come back and her mother to fall under the weight of the bottle — would be taken away. The Bright Girl wasn’t dead. The Bright Girl was forever young and pretty, and she carried the lamp of God. Jupiter hadn’t lied. He hadn’t.

But what about Dan? He couldn’t go any farther. If he was the man God had provided to take her to the Bright Girl, then why was he being wrenched away from her? She’d thought about trying somehow to get him away from the bounty hunters, but what could she do? And she’d seen it in his face, there in the cafe: he was sick and weary of running, and he could not go on.
You His hands,
she remembered Jupiter saying.

But what if Jupiter had been wrong?

Six o’clock, she thought. Six o’clock. She had to press that number into her mind so she could sleep for three or four hours and then get up in time. She had to forget about Dan, had to let him go. As much as she wanted, she couldn’t help him. Now she had to help herself, and it seemed to her that the morning would be her last chance. Where she would go and what she would do if she found the Bright Girl’s grave, she didn’t know. She couldn’t think about it, because that way led to black despair.

She lay down and stared at the ceiling. The five horses, her talisman, would watch over her during the night. She might dream of waking up, and hearing them pawing and snorting for her in the barn, saying
hurry come to us hurry we will never hurt you we will never hurt.

At last, mercifully, her eyes closed. She listened to the rumble of the generator, the grump of frogs, and the chitterings of insects and night birds, the heavy thudding heartbeat of the oil-pumping machinery in the distance. She was afraid of what daylight might bring; she was equally afraid of knowing and of not knowing. A single tear trickled down the cheek on the deep-violet-birth-marked side of her face. Sleep came for her, and took her away.

Pelvis had gone outside to let Mama answer nature’s call. While he was out there, he unzipped and added some water to the cove. After Mama was finished, he picked her up and started back inside, and that was when he saw a match flare on the plank walkway that led back over the swamp grass and rushes to the center of St. Nasty. He saw the orange-daubed face of a man as the match touched the tip of a cigarette, and then the match was flicked out into the water like a little comet.