Chapter 15 #2
It went into Abe clean and quiet, the way the truest things did, and he let nothing of it cross his face.
“I’ve had people,” he said. “Tell me about the dogs. How often they run them.”
“There it is. You don’t want to talk about your people any more than I want to talk about mine, only mine’s the reason I’m in the ground and yours is just a thing you carry.”
Samson almost smiled, the ghost of the man he must have been before the hole. “Twice a day they’ve been running them lately. Morning and sundown. The morning run’s careless. They’re not awake to it yet and the scent’s gone stale overnight in the heat. It’s the sundown run that’s the dangerous one—”
He stopped dead, his hand on the lip of the hole where he’d half risen to reach it.
Abe had already caught it. Off to the west, back through the deep timber, a long way yet but not near so long as he would have liked.
A dog throwing its voice up into the dark.
And then a second answering the first. And under the two dogs, fainter, the sound of men moving through brush and not troubling to move quiet about it, men who had given up on quiet and gone over to speed.
“They’re back,” Samson said, and the small relief that had come into his ruined face drained straight back out of it and left it gray as the dusk. “Sundown. Like I was telling you. They run them again at sundown, when the day’s heat lifts and the scent lies down close to the cool ground and holds.”
He looked up at Abe out of the hole. A flat animal fear had come into him now, the fear of a thing that has been hunted a long time and knows the sound of the hunt resuming.
“You have to go. Now, this minute. They don’t have your scent, you’re not from here, you’ve not been in these woods but the once today.
You can still get clear of it if you go right now. Drop the door and go.”
“Come up out of there. We go together, the both of us.”
“No.” Samson dropped back down into the bottom of the hole and got both hands on the underside of the door and pulled at it, trying to take it back out of Abe’s grip and draw it shut over himself.
“You don’t understand it and there’s no time to make you understand it.
If they take the two of us together, then I’m a man who turned.
“You hear me? The very minute they so much as think I’ve thrown in with somebody against them, they send the word south, and they kill my brother for it.
Jeremiah. He’s the only blood I’ve got left breathing in this whole world.
I’ve sat in this grave two months in the dark to keep him breathing and I will not have it all undone in one night because a stranger with a federal paper wanted my company on the walk out. ”
Abe held the door up against the man’s pulling, easily, his arm stronger than the wasted strength left in Samson’s.
He had the words right there in his mouth.
They sat on his tongue, ready, true. That Jeremiah Jennings had been face down and turning in the brown Arkansas current with Abe’s own ball lodged in him for weeks now.
That the brother this man was burying himself alive in the dark to keep breathing had stopped breathing a long while since, and the keeping had all been for nothing, every day of it, every leaf the root by the wall had put out.
The lever was right there in his hand. He had only to speak it, and the one reason Samson Jennings had to refuse him would come apart in the air between them, and the man would climb up out of his grave and come along quiet, because there’d be nothing left to stay for.
He looked down into the hole at the ruined frightened man who had kept faith two months in the dark with a dead brother he didn’t know was dead, who had talked to him on the long nights and half believed he answered, and the dogs came on through the timber to the west, and he didn’t say it.
Not like this. Not with the dogs forty seconds out and no time for the man to so much as sit down under the weight of it.
Not as a thing taken up and used to move him, like a pry bar worked under the one rock holding him in place.
To take a man’s brother off him was a hard enough thing to do in daylight with all the time in the world to do it gentle.
To do it in the dark, fast, to make him climb easier out of a hole, was a thing Abe found he couldn’t make himself be the man who did, however much it would have served.
There would come a better moment than this one, or if not a better one then at least a less cruel one, somewhere down the road.
A man’s last reason left in the world for staying alive was not a thing you knocked out from under him in the dark to win yourself an argument and save yourself a second trip.
“Alright,” Abe said. “Keep the door shut over you, and keep dead still, and don’t make a sound whatever you hear. I’ll come back for you. You hear me? I’ll come back.”
“Don’t come back. Get clear and stay clear and forget this hole’s here.”
“I’ll come back for you,” Abe said again, and he lowered the door down slow over the man, and set the leaves and the scattered branches right across the top of it with the flat of his hand the way they’d lain before, and he was up off his haunches and moving away through the trees before the door had wholly settled into its frame.
He went east, and low, and quick, putting the trunks of trees between his own body and the oncoming dogs, not yet running, only moving, because a running man makes a running man’s noise and noise was the one thing that would kill him now.
He came to the ragged edge of the timber where the brush thinned out toward the open field, and there he stopped and stood a moment in the last gray of the light and made himself breathe slow and deep and steady. He listened with his whole body to the search coming on behind him.
The dogs were working the western side of the timber.
Quartering it, back and forth across the ground the way they’d quartered it that morning.
They didn’t have the hole. They had a stretch of dark woods and a search pattern and a hope, the same as the morning, and if the door held over Samson the way it had held that morning they’d quarter the whole of it again and come up empty a second time and go home a second time.
He didn’t believe in luck, had never believed in it, had watched it kill better men than himself who did. And he stood there in the brush at the edge of the field and held himself dead still and hoped for it anyway, hard, the way a man does when hoping is the only thing left in his hands to do.
And then he heard the dogs change.
The voice of them sharpened all at once and bunched together, the four of them coming off their separate quarters and converging onto a single thing, the loose searching note gone hard and certain, the bay of a dog that has stopped looking and started finding.
The men’s shouting found a focus and a direction it hadn’t had a moment before, calls answered and a name flung back, and Abe understood it with a cold sick drop in his belly.
The door hadn’t held.
Or worse, and likelier, he had left his own fresh scent all over the lip of that hole, his hands on the door, his weight on his haunches in the leaves beside it, an hour of him laid down fresh over ground that had been cold to them that morning, and a dog had cut that fresh scent and run it straight down to the made ground and given tongue over it.
He had come up over that hole. He had laid both his hands flat on the door of it. He had crouched in the leaves at the edge of it and talked down into it, taken his time about it, drawn the man out.
He had left himself smeared all over the one place in these woods that had to stay clean, and he had done it to be gentle, to spare the man a gun in his face, and the gentleness was what was going to dig Samson Jennings up out of the ground.
He had done that. Him. Nobody else.
He stood in the brush at the field’s edge with the rifle gripped in both his hands and he listened to the men drag Samson Jennings up out of the ground he’d hidden in two months, the scrape of it and the dogs gone wild and frenzied over the find and the men shouting back and forth across it in the two languages, and somewhere under it a single thin cry from the man himself, quickly stopped.
Abe made himself stand there in the dark and not move, not go to him, because there were six of them and four dogs and the full dark coming down now.
A tracker shot dead in the timber on a fool’s rush did Samson Jennings no good at all in this world, nor Marielle waiting, nor the dead brother owed, nor anyone.
He had found the man twice now. Twice. And he wasn’t going to lose him again—not to Flores, not to a rope, not to the dark.
Abe melted back deeper into the timber, and began, slow and silent, a step and a held breath and another step, to circle around toward the noise of them.