Murder in the Wind (7 page)

“We’ll have to close it at Inglis on the south and Otter Creek on the north. Wait a minute. There’s a wooden bridge or something in the area. A detour used quite a few years back. It might still be passable. Hold it while I ask.”

Boltay waited. “Here it is. A dirt road that turns off a mile south of you. It turns west. There’s two other cars on the way. You check that detour and then call in and let us know if it’s passable.”

Boltay swung around and ignored the people who shouted questions at him and headed south. He found the turn-off. The road was narrow but the drainage seemed to be pretty good. It was soft, but not too soft. Both wooden bridges were one lane, but they felt solid. Solid enough for passenger cars. He followed the detour until he came out on the highway again.

He called in. “It’s passable. Not for trucks, though.”

“Okay. We’ll set up truck detour signs at Otter Creek and Inglis. You start routing your pile-up over the detour. We’ll have signs down to you in another twenty minutes. When Stark gets there, put him on the other end.”

Within fifteen minutes the tangle was straightened out. Trucks that had gotten by Inglis and Otter Creek before the signs went up were routed back. The two highway patrol cars, parked crosswise of the road, dome lights flashing, routed passenger traffic over the old detour. An ambulance picked up the body to take it over to Gainesville. The first technicians had arrived. They walked around the trailer and looked at the job and made obscene comments about the job and the rain. They sent for heavier equipment and more torches. They told the highway patrol that if they had the bridge clear by eight o’clock at night, they would be lucky. They planned the job: Cut the ends free. Use two big wreckers to swivel it. Bring in another truck and off-load the cargo. Then, if the wheels were too badly damaged, drag it off the bridge. If not, rig lines and tip it up on its wheels. All this in heavy rain and a wind that was slowly, steadily increasing.

And so passenger traffic rolled cautiously over the old detour, over the two wooden bridges, by the grim old house between them, back out onto the highway. They felt their way through the half world of gray driving rain. They inched across the old timbers of the bridges.

The Stamms found motel accommodations a little north of Chiefland. They had changed to dry clothing, had phoned both the Sheridans and the State Highway Patrol.

Dudley Stamm stood at the window looking out at the rain. Myra sat across the room, talking, talking. “Honestly, I thought you’d gone clean out of your mind. Dashing out of the car like that when you know you’re not supposed to do anything like that. I just didn’t know what to think. And then to come after you in all that rain and see you standing down there up to your middle in the water—why it was just about the worst shock I ever had in my life. I don’t know what in the world you had in mind. You certainly couldn’t do anything for that poor driver. I know it was his fault but I can’t help feeling sorry for him. Even though it was terrible at the time. I can’t help thinking how
strange
you looked down there, how strange and queer standing there in that river. Do you see what I mean, dear?”

“Yes dear,” Dudley Stamm said wearily.

[By now the great anonymity of the highway has ended in other places. Fallen trees block the road from Shamrock to Horseshoe Point. A clot of cars has gathered and there are frightened conferences, many plans of action.

Near Lecanto the wind takes control of a car from the unskilled hands of a young girl. She is lucky in that she is not injured. She is less lucky in her rescuers. The car is too deep in the ditch to be hauled out. They take the girl along. They are on their way from Lecanto to Holder, three of them, half drunk, excited by the storm, excited by the clinging wet clothes of the girl. Had the heavy rain not drowned the motor of the truck, she would have come to no harm. But they sat in the rain with her and finished the bottle and opened another one and forced her to drink a great deal of it and later they raped her.

The six vehicles move steadily north, toward inadvertent rendezvous. Cadillac, station wagon, Mercedes, Dodge convertible, Plymouth, panel delivery—toward a road block and wooden bridges and high water and an ancient cypress house.]

Billy Torris was awakened by the sound of the rain on the metal roof of the stolen panel delivery truck. While still in half sleep he thought he was home again, sleeping in the room off the kitchen with two of his brothers and Mom was up early and standing at the sink and pumping water into the tin dishpan. But the dishpan didn’t get full and the spattery noise didn’t change and a few minutes later he woke up and it took him several minutes to figure out where he was. He lay on burlap sacks on the metal bed of the panel delivery and it was really raining. Really coming down.

The rain made him feel safer. There was a gray anonymity in the rain. In the sunshine you felt people were looking at you. They had time to look and you stood out clearly. In the rain they were busy keeping dry and they didn’t look at you so directly.

He remembered that Frank had driven all the way through to Tampa. The girl, Hope, had slept here in the back while they were on the road, and he had sat up in the front with Frank. They had stopped about midnight at a crummy looking bunch of cabins near Tampa and now the truck was parked beside one of the cabins, turned around so you couldn’t see the plates from the road.

He sat up and felt the stiffness in his muscles. The metal bed had been hard through the burlap. He ran his fingers through his long black hair, combing it back over the temples, fingering the duck tail into shape. You couldn’t do it right without a comb. But it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference if it wasn’t done right. No matter what you did you couldn’t look very sharp in jeans so dirty they felt stiff, and a T-shirt with the rip on the left shoulder.

Frank and Hope were in the cabin. He wondered if they were getting up. He wondered what time it was. You couldn’t tell the time on this kind of a morning. He knelt and tucked his T-shirt into his jeans and climbed cautiously over into the front seat. The place might be surrounded and they might be ready to move in. He could see two other cabins but that was all. He could hear traffic on the highway, but he couldn’t see the highway.

He didn’t want to go out into the rain. He opened the side door and turned sideways on the seat and relieved himself. He wished Frank and Hope would come out and they’d get going. He didn’t feel right about anything when he was alone. But when he was with Frank Stratter everything was okay. You felt better when you were with Frank. You felt like everything would work out the way Frank said it would. But when you were alone you kept thinking it was an awful mess and it was going to get a hell of a lot worse, and never get better.

Billy Torris was eighteen, thin, wiry, with a weak troubled face—the fading honey color that was all that was left of the deep tan he had acquired on the road job, working stripped to the waist under the watchful shotguns of the guards.

He thought about the dishpan sound and wished he was home. But he couldn’t go home. He’d be picked up. Even if the old man would let him get near the place, he couldn’t go home, back to the farm near Alturas.

The old man couldn’t get it through his head that they’d just been horsing around. Just out banging around on a Saturday night in Fowler’s old heap. He’d driven the tractor all week long and Saturday night was the time you relaxed. Dukie got hold of two bottles of raw corn and they were drinking that. He and Fowler and Dukie. Then they got tossed out of the dance and they just rode around, like always. Like he told the court, it was Fowler who decided they could have some fun with Marv. Marv had just gotten the job as night man at the gas station. For years they’d always kicked around with Marv, he was so sort of dumb and serious. They didn’t have a buck between them, but Fowler pulled right up to the pump and told Marv to fill it up. Marv wanted to see the money but Fowler pretended to get sore and he started yelling and pretty soon Marv filled it up. It was funny thinking of how Marv was going to have to explain where the gas went. Then Marv checked the oil and then he asked for the money and Fowler made a real comedy about going through all his pockets and then telling Marv that by God somebody must have stolen his money. They all started laughing at the expression on Marv’s face, and then Fowler tried to start it up but it wouldn’t start.

Marv sort of backed toward the station with a hand behind him and he said, “You got to give me the money or I’ll call the cops.”

Fowler jumped out and looked under the hood and turned to him and Dukie and said, “The son of a bitch took the distributor cap.”

They all got out then and started walking toward Marv and Marv kept backing toward the station. Marv should have known enough to give up that distributor cap. He should have known enough not to get funny with Fowler. Billy remembered how indignant he had felt. It was just a joke and now Marv was trying to make trouble.

They backed Marv right into the station and he wouldn’t give it up. Then Marv jumped toward the wall phone. Fowler grabbed him and they started wrestling around and that was when they broke the glass case. Fowler got the distributor cap away from him and Marv grabbed a socket wrench and came at Fowler, half crying the way he always did when he was sore. He hit Fowler on the arm and then it was Dukie that swung right from the floor and busted one of the bones in his hand when he hit Marv right flush on the button. Marv went down and slapped his head on the concrete floor and that was when he got the concussion. It scared Billy and Dukie looked scared too, but Fowler started picking up the cigarettes that had fallen out of the broken case and he said, “Let’s get out of here.”

They all put packs of cigarettes in their pockets and it was Fowler, looking kind of funny and wild, who went over and pushed the no sale button on the cash register. The bell rang and the drawer slid open and Dukie said, “Don’t touch the money.”

But Fowler grabbed all the bills. They were heading for the car, running, when the county cops pulled into the station. Two of them in the county car. There wasn’t time to put the distributor cap in, and they started running down the highway and the county car came after them. They took off across the fields and Billy ran as hard as he could. They started shooting and he tripped and fell and he was too scared to get up. He heard them coming and he didn’t dare look back. He tried to crawl and then the steps were close and somebody hit him on the head.

Later, after he came to when they were driving him and Fowler in, he found out that they had shot Dukie right through the head. It made a big stink because Dukie’s people owned a lot of land in the county, but it was too late then, and it made it necessary to convict the two that were left so that shooting Dukie wouldn’t look like such a bad mistake.

He was two days past eighteen when it happened and he got three years and Fowler got five. The old man wouldn’t come and see him and he wouldn’t give out any money to any lawyer. He’d never gotten along very good with the old man, and this was the end of it as far as the old man was concerned. Mom came to see him and did a lot of crying and told him how the old man was acting.

He tried to explain how they were just horsing around, how they hadn’t meant anything and about the corn they’d been drinking. But there were hard facts. Hard, like stones. Facts like Marv being unconscious for thirty-six hours. And the money in Fowler’s pockets. And the cigarettes the cops took off him and Fowler, and out of Dukie’s pockets.

After the trial they shipped him and Fowler from the county jail to Raiford Prison, and then from Raiford they were sent with some others down to a road camp near Conway. Fowler seemed to go kind of crazy in the road camp, getting locked in those sleeping trucks every night and they finally couldn’t handle him and sent him back to Raiford.

It had been damn lonesome after they sent Fowler back. He was scared by the way some of the men acted. The work wasn’t too hard. You had to keep going, but you could take it a little slow, slower than when you were working for the old man.

It was on the road camp that he got friendly with Frank Stratter. It made him feel good to be Frank’s friend, because Frank wasn’t the kind to be friendly with just anybody. Frank was about twenty-three. He was tall and blond and had one of those builds like a cowboy—big wide shoulders and real little hips. He was in for car theft and Frank told him in confidence that the reason he was in for car theft was because they couldn’t make the other stuff stick. He had pale eyebrows and pale lashes and the eyebrows were white against the deep road-camp tan. It gave his face a sort of funny naked look. He never changed expression much. He moved easy and lightly and he always somehow looked cleaner and neater than the others, even after one of the real stinking hot days.

Nobody pushed Frank Stratter around, not even Big Satch, the guard that was nine tenths belly. Billy heard that before he’d arrived Big Satch had beat up on Frank, trying to get him to hit back. But Frank wouldn’t hit back and he wouldn’t yell and he wouldn’t beg. The other guards didn’t like it, but they were as scared of Big Satch as the prisoners were. He busted Frank up three times and couldn’t get a rise out of him. After that he left Frank alone and went back to concentrating on the Negroes.

Billy remembered how it was the day they took off. It was right after the Fourth of July. They were cutting brush along the sides of State Route 15, keeping a lookout for snakes. For this job there were eighteen in the group and three guards—Big Satch, one they called Stud and a new one. Along about eleven in the morning the new guard all of a sudden fell flat on his face in the road, fell right on his gun. Big Satch cut the work and herded them all into a group and kept his eyes on them while Stud took a look at the guard who’d passed out.

“The heat got him, I think,” Stud said. “We better take him in.”

“Put him in the truck and take him on in and come on back.”

“Maybe we should ought to all go in.”

“The hell with that. I can handle this bunch. You take him on in and come back.”

It was funny how things changed as soon as the big truck had gone. Big Satch had them back working again, but it was different. All the men were watching Big Satch out of the corners of their eyes. You could see it getting to him. He began to get a little jumpy, looking around too fast when he heard a noise or thought he heard a noise. Little by little it began to get out of control, and you could feel it getting out of control. It made you sort of excited. It was like the noise kids make when they imitate a bomb. A little thin whistle between your teeth, starting low and going higher and louder and louder and then boom at the end.

The boom came when a man named Buck something spun quick and threw the brush hook at Big Satch as hard as he could. Big Satch sidestepped it easily and blew the belly out of Buck with the shotgun. It seemed to happen in a half a second. Then three brush hooks all came flying at once and one missed, one hit blade first and sliced his shoulder open, and one hit his head handle first and knocked him down. A friend of Buck’s came rushing in as Big Satch was trying to get up and he took a swing like you swing a scythe. It hit the throat as clean as could be and went on through so easy the man who swung it spun half around looking shocked and surprised. Big Satch’s hat had come off when he fell. Now his head came off as easily as the hat. A great black gout of blood came out of his thick neck and he settled down into the road, and the head rolled over slowly twice, so you could see the face each time, and then rolled down into the ditch and ended up face down in the few inches of drainage water in the bottom.

A car came along then, an out-of-state car, and it wasn’t going very fast, but it certainly picked up speed and got on out of there. Everybody stood around for a few moments and Billy realized that the object hadn’t been to get away. It had been to kill Big Satch and that had been done.

Frank Stratter picked up the bloody shotgun and yelled, “Okay. Let’s go. Split up.” He came toward Billy and said, “Come on, kid.”

Frank said it was wet land east of there, full of lakes and marshes, so they headed south and west, skirted the west bank of East Tohopekaliga Lake and about six in the evening came out on Route 192 near the lake. Frank had kept up a hell of a pace. Billy was exhausted, his mouth like cotton, a great pain blanketing his left side from armpit to belt line. They were brush burned, bitten by a thousand bugs, and muddy to the knees.

“What do we do now, Frankie?” Billy panted.

“Shut up. We got to get a car somehow. And then we got to think about clothes.”

The car was almost too damn easy. It was in a narrow lane off the highway. A man and a woman and their little girl were having a sort of picnic. The back of the car was full of luggage. It was just out of sight of traffic on the highway. Frank made the man and the woman and the little girl lie flat on their faces, the little girl between them. The little girl was crying, but there was no one to hear her. They were from South Carolina. The man had thirty-eight dollars, and travelers’ checks that Frank didn’t touch. The woman had eleven dollars in her purse. Frank guarded them while Billy dug around in the suitcases and found the man’s clothing and put on slacks that were long enough but too big around the middle and a sport shirt that wasn’t much too big. Then Billy watched them, holding the gun, while Frank changed. The slacks were too short for him and just about right around the waist, but the shirt looked as though it would split if he bunched his shoulders.

Frank told the people to wait right there until dark before going out to the highway. He said they might come back and check. Frank had taken complete charge. They got in the car and they drove to Haines City and then over to Lakeland. It was dark when they got to Lakeland. They abandoned the car there after wiping the wheel and door handles clean. Frank brought along one of the suitcases, with more clothes and toilet articles. They ate in a bean wagon near the bus station after washing up in the men’s room in the bus station. They had left the shotgun in the car.

After they ate they took a bus over to Tampa and found a cheap hotel and took a double room. They rented a radio and they sat in the room and, on the eleven o’clock broadcast, they heard the latest news of the escape.