Gone South (42 page)

Burt turned them into a bayou that wound off to the left from the main channel. They’d gone maybe fifty yards when Arden saw a piece of board with a skull and crossbones crudely painted on it in white nailed to a treetrunk. She got Burt’s attention and motioned to the sign, but he only nodded. A second skull-and-crossbones sign was nailed to a tree farther up the bayou, this one in red.

“Little Train don’t care much for people!” Burt told Dan over the motor’s snarl. “It’s okay, though! He trusts me, we get along all right!”

The bayou’s green walls closed in. Thirty feet overhead the tree branches merged, breaking the light into yellow shards. Burt reduced their speed by half and steered the curve of another bend where the mossy tree trunks were as big around as tractor tires. And there, ahead of them in a still and silent cove, was Little Train’s house.

Technically it was a house
boat,
but from the looks of the vines and moss that had grown over its dark green sides, like fingers enfolding it into the wilderness, it hadn’t been moved for many years. It had a screened-in porch that jutted out over the water, and up top was the hooded lid of a stovepipe chimney. Next to the houseboat was a short tin-roofed pier on which stood a half-dozen rusty oil drums, an old bathtub, a clothes wringer, and various other bits and pieces of unidentifiable machinery. On the other side of the pier was an enclosed floating structure fifty feet in length and fifteen feet high, also green-painted and its sides and roof overgrown with vines. Dan could see the crack between a pair of doors at the end of the structure and he figured another boat must be stored within.

“I’ll drift up against the pier, if you’ll jump out and tie us,” Burt said as he switched the motor off, and Dan nodded. When they were close enough, Dan stood up, found his balance, and stepped to the pier. Burt threw him a rope secured to the skiffs stern and Dan tied it up to one of the wooden posts that supported the roof. When he grasped Arden’s wrist in helping her out, Dan could feel her pulse racing. Her eyes had taken on that fervent shine again, and her birthmark had become almost blood-red.

“Hey, Little Train!” Burt shouted at the houseboat. “You got some visitors!”

There was no response. Up in the trees, birds were chirping and a fish suddenly jumped from the cove’s water — a flash of silver — and splashed back again.

“Hey, Train!” Burt tried again. He stood on the pier, not daring to set foot without invitation on the Astroturfed walkway that connected it to Little Train’s home. “It’s Burt Dunbro! Come to talk to you!”

“Who you are I be seein’
, fou,”
rumbled a surly, heavily accented voice from a screened window. “Who
they
are?”

“Tell him,” Burt urged quietly.

“My name’s Dan Lambert.” Dan could see a figure beyond the screen — the blur of a face — but nothing more. “This is Arden Halliday.”

Silence. Dan had the feeling the man was studying Arden’s birthmark.

Arden shared the same sensation. Her right hand had squeezed tightly around the drawstring bag, her heart slamming. “I need your help,” she said.

“He’p,” the man repeated. “What kinda he’p?”

“I’m … tryin’ to find someone.” Her mouth was so dry she could hardly speak. “A woman called the Bright Girl.”

There was another stretch of silence for Dan and Burt, but Arden was almost deafened by her heartbeat.

Burt cleared his throat. “Ol’ gal at the cafe told her this Bright Girl used to live in a church on Goat Island. Said she’s in a grave out there. I said I been huntin’ on Goat Island, and far as I know nobody ever lived on it.”

Little Train did not speak.

“What do you say?” Burt asked. “Anybody ever lived on Goat Island?”

“Non,”
came the answer.

Arden winced.

“I told her that. Told her you’d know if anybody would. Hey, listen: I need to put in an order for a hundred pounds of cat and fifty pounds of turtle. What can you deliver by next Tuesday?”

“The Bright Girl,” the man said, and hearing him say it sent a chill up Arden’s spine. “For her you’re lookin’, ay?”

“That’s right. I’m tryin’ to find her, because   —”

“My own two eyeballs broke, they ain’t. Come from where?”

“Huh?”

“He wants to know where you’re from,” Burt interpreted.

“Texas. Fort Worth, I’m from,” she said in unconscious emulation of Little Train’s Cajun patois.

“Huuuuwheee!” he said. “That distance, you gotta believe mighty hard. Ay?”

“I do believe.”

“This what you believin’,” he said, “is wrong.”

Arden flinched again. Her hand was white-knuckled around the bag.

“Bright Girl on Goat Island,
non,”
Little Train continued. “Was a church out there, never. Who you think she may be, she ain’t.”

“Wait,” Dan said. “Are you sayin’ … there really
is
a Bright Girl?”

“Sayin’
oui.
Sayin’
non,
too. Not who this girl come from Tex-ay-ass to find.”

“Where is she?” Arden’s throat clutched. “Please. Can you take me to her?”

There was no answer. Both she and Dan realized the blurred face was gone from the window.

A door on the screened porch skreeked open, and Little Train stood before them.

H
IS GRAVELLY VOICE THROUGH
the window screen had made him sound as if he might be a seven-foot-tall Goliath. Instead, Little Train stood barely five-six, only four inches taller than Arden. But maybe he had the strength of a giant, because Dan figured he carried at least a hundred and sixty pounds on his stocky, muscular frame. Little Train wore a faded khaki T-shirt over a barrel chest, and brown trousers whose cuffs had been scissored off above a well-worn pair of dark-blue laceless sneakers. His forearms appeared solid enough to pound nails. The bayou sun had burned Little Train’s skin to the color of old brick, and it looked as rough. His jaw and cheeks were silvered with a three-day growth of beard, his hair a pale sandpaper dust across the brown skull. Beneath his deeply creased forehead his clear gray eyes were aimed at Arden with a power that almost knocked her back a step.

“Ya’ll come on in,” he offered.

Dan crossed the Astroturfed plank first, then Arden and Burt. Little Train went ahead into the houseboat, and they followed him across the porch into a room with oak-planked walls and oak beams that ran the length of the ceiling. On the floor was a threadbare red rug that instantly charged Dan’s memory: it had a motif of fighting elephants and tigers, and it looked like one of a thousand the street-corner businessmen had hawked from rolling racks in Saigon. The furnishings also had an Oriental —  Vietnamese? Dan wondered — influence: two intricately carved ashwood chairs; a bamboo table with a black metal tray atop it; an oil lamp with a rice-paper shade; and a woven tatami neatly rolled up in a corner. A shortwave radio and microphone stood on a second bamboo table next to a shelf of hardback and paperback books. Through another doorway was a small galley, pots and pans hanging from overhead hooks.

“My place,” Little Train said. “Welcome to it.”

Dan was struck by the cleanliness and order. There was the ever-present smell of the swamp, yes, but no moldy stench. In the black metal tray on the first bamboo table were three smooth white stones, some pieces of dried reeds, and a few fragile-looking bones that might have been fish, fowl, or reptile. Mounted on one wall was a variety of other objects: a huge round hornet’s nest, wind-sculpted pieces of bleached driftwood, an amber-colored snakeskin, and the complete skeleton of a bird with its wings outspread. Then he knew for sure what he’d suspected, because he saw a group of framed photographs on the wall above the shortwave set. He walked across the Saigon-special rug for a closer inspection. They were snapshots of a boat’s crew, bare-chested young men wearing steel helmets and grinning or firing upraised middle fingers from their stations behind .50-caliber machine guns and what looked to be an 81-millimeter mortar. There were pictures of a muddy brown river, of the garish nightlights of Saigon, of a cute Vietnamese girl who might have been sixteen or seventeen smiling and displaying the two-fingered V of a peace sign to the camera.

Dan said, “I was a leatherneck. Third Marine. Where’d you catch it?”

“Brown water Navy,” Little Train replied without hesitation. “Radarman first class, Swift PCF.”

“These pictures of your boat?” The Swift PCF patrol craft crews, Dan knew, had taken hell along the constricted waterways of ’Nam and Cambodia.

“The verra one.”

“Your crew make it out?”

“Jus’ me and the fella sittin’ at the mortar. Night of May sixteen, 1970, we run into a chain stretched ’cross the river. Them black pajamas waitin’ on the bank, ay? Hit us with rockets. I went swimmin’, back fulla shrap.”

“You never told me you were over there in Vet’nam, Little Train!” Burt said.

He burned his gaze at the other man. “Never you ask. And
bon ami,
I tell you plenty time: call me
Train.”

“Oh. Okay. Sure. Train it is.” Burt shrugged and cast a nervous grin at Arden.

“Please,” Arden said anxiously. “The Bright Girl. Do you know where she is?”

He nodded. “I do.”

“Don’t tell me you know where her grave is. Please tell me she’s alive.”

“For you, then:
oui,
alive she is.”

“Oh, God.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, God. You don’t know how … you don’t know how much I wanted to hear that.”

“Who’re you talkin’ about, Train?” Burt frowned. “I never heard of any Bright Girl.”

“Never you needed her,” Train said.

“Can you take me to her?” Arden asked. “I’ve come such a long way. I don’t have any money, but … I’ll sign an IOU. I’ll get the money. However much you want to take me, I swear I’ll pay you. All right?”

“Your money, I don’t want. Got ever’ting I need, I’m a rich man.”

“You mean … you won’t —”

“Won’t take no money,
non.
Who tell you ’bout the Bright Girl way up there in Fort Worth Tex-ay-ass?”

“A friend who was born in LaPierre. He saw her when he was a little boy, and he told me all about her.”

“Oh, them stories. That she’s a young beautimous girl and she don’t never get old or die. That she can touch you and heal any sickness, or cancer … or scar. Your friend tell you all that?”

“Yes.”

“So you believe mighty hard, and you come all the way down here to ask her touch. ’Cause that mark, it hurt you inside?”

“Yes.”

Train reached toward her face. Arden’s first impulse was to pull away, but his gaze was powerful enough to hold her. His rough brown fingers gently grazed the birthmark and then drew back. “You strong-hearted?” he asked.

“I … think I am.”

“Either am or not.”

“I am,” she said.

Train nodded. “Then I take you, no sweat.”

Dan couldn’t remain silent any longer. “Don’t lie to her! There’s no such person! There
can’t
be! I don’t care if she’s supposed to be some great miracle worker, no woman can live a hundred years and still look like a young girl!”

“I say I take her to see the Bright Girl.” Train’s voice was calm. “I say, too, the Bright Girl ain’t who she come to find.”

“What?” Arden shook her head. “I’m not followin’ you.”

“When we get there, you see tings clear. Then we find out how strong you heart.”

Dan didn’t know what to say, or what kind of tricks this man was trying to pull. None of it made any sense to him. What had started to gnaw at him again was the fate of Murtaugh and Eisley. He couldn’t stand the thought that his pulling the trigger in Shreveport had resulted in the death of Harmon DeCayne and now, most likely, the two bounty hunters. There would be four murders on his head, and how could he live with that and not go insane? He remembered what Burt had said about Train, back in the cafe:
He gets all ’round the swamp. If anybody would know, it’d be him.

Dan had to ask. “There were two other men with us. We were at St. Nasty. Around five o’clock, four men with guns broke in our cabin and took ’em away. The one in charge was called Doc. Do you know —”

“Oh, shit!” Burt pressed his hands to his ears. “I don’t wanna hear this! I don’t wanna know nothin’ about it!”

“Hush up!” Train’s voice rattled the screens. “Let ’im talk!”

“I’m not stayin’ around for this! No way! Ya’ll have fun, I’m gettin’ back up the bayou!” Burt started out but paused at the door. “Train, don’t do nothin’ stupid! Hear me? I’ll be expectin’ the cat and turtle by Tuesday. Hear?”

“Go home,
bon ami,”
Train said. “And to you safe passage.”

“Good luck,” Burt told Dan, and he went out and crossed the gangplank. Train walked past Arden to a window and watched Burt untie his boat, climb in, and start the engine. “He’s okay,” Train said as Burt steered the motor skiff back up the narrow bayou the way they’d come. “Hard-workin’ fella.”

“He knows who Doc is, doesn’t he?”

“Oh,
out.
And so do I.” He turned away from the window; his face seemed to have drawn tighter across the bones, his eyes cold. “Tell me the tale, ay?”

Dan told him, omitting the fact that he was wanted for murder and that Murtaugh and Eisley were bounty hunters. He omitted, as well, the fact of Murtaugh’s freak-show background. “Doc said he was takin’ ’em somewhere by boat. He had some kinda score to settle with ’em, but I’m not sure what it was.”

Train leveled that hard, penetrating stare at Dan. “Friends of you, they is?”

“Not friends, exactly.”

“Then who they is to you?”

“More like … fellow travelers.”

“Where was they travelin’ to?”

Dan looked at the elephants and tigers in the rug. He could feel Train watching him, and he knew there was no use in lying. Train was no fool. He sighed heavily; the only path to take was the straight one. “Flint Murtaugh and Pelvis Eisley are their names. They’re bounty hunters. They tracked me down here. I met Arden in a truck stop north of Lafayette and brought her with me.”

“I came because I wanted to,” Arden said. “He didn’t force me.”

“Bounty hunters,” Train repeated. “What crime you did?”