"The Dead Man"

The dark boat came up the channel without a light on it, and the plan died on the dock where it was being made.

He did not go to the son's door. The son was the plan, and the plan was already a dead thing; you do not carry a corpse uphill. He went the other way, down off the boards and along the waterline into the dark where the village kept its boats drawn up, because the water was his and the dark was his and the men coming in off that channel had neither.

They came in fast and low, the way they were taught now---no lights, the bow grinding up onto the mud and the dark shapes going over the side of it into the shallows. Six. Eight. He counted them by the suck of the mud under their boots and did not bother past eight. They were all young. He could tell they were young from the way they bunched, shoulder to shoulder, wanting the comfort of another body beside them in the dark. Old soldiers spread out. These had not lived long enough to be taught it by the only thing that teaches it.

The workshop stood open to the water with its half-built boats and its smell of resin, and resin burns. There was a drum of it by the door and a tin of fuel beside the drum, and he had marked them both that afternoon without knowing he was marking them, the way his hands marked everything that could be used. He tipped the tin out along the mud between the soldiers and the dock and he tipped the drum after it, the thick stuff going slow and black down to the channel's edge and out onto the water, and he took the matches off Márànata's bench and struck one and did not throw it. He set it down at the edge of the slick. He let the fire take itself.

It went up the way resin burns on water---low and blue, then yellow, then a standing wall of it with the heat coming back against his face, and the black resin-smoke rolled off the top and lay down flat over everything. And the night came apart.

They fired into it. They fired into the smoke and the fire and the dark, because there was a thing moving in all three and a man with a rifle shoots at what he fears, and they were afraid. The tracers went high and wild, into the trees, into the water, into the wall of their own smoke. One was screaming a name---not his; God's, or an officer's---and the others took it up, the bunching gone now, every one of them alone in the smoke with the thing they had been told about since they were boys young enough to believe it entirely.

The dead man.

The one the river would not keep. They had been raised on him the way other children are raised on the saints, and now the smoke had him in it.

So he gave them what they had been promised.

He went through the smoke low and fast, and where a soldier turned and saw the shape of a big still man walking through fire that should have stopped a man, the soldier did not fire.

The soldier ran.

That was the legend doing the work Márànata had said it would do, and it did more of it than her plan ever could have, because a man can be argued with and a story cannot.

One did not run.

He came around the end of the dock with the rifle up and his teeth bared, close, too close to bring the long gun round before Osogó was inside it. Osogó took the barrel in one hand and turned it and the rifle went off into the mud, and he brought his forehead down into the bridge of the boy's nose and felt it give, and the boy folded, and he took him down by the back of the neck into the black shallows and held him there. The boy thrashed and gripped his wrist and his heels drummed the mud. The fire ran orange across the surface of the water over the boy's face. And his hand counted it, toward the number it had always gone to in the years he did not walk back into. Before the number came, he hauled the boy's head up out of the water and threw him into the reeds, gasping and retching, and left him there alive. There was no reason in it he would have answered when asked. His hand had simply stopped short of the number, the way it had been stopping short of it for fifteen years, and he did not look at why. He took the rifle. He went back into the smoke.

Behind him, on the dock the loading had begun.

⁂

The black boat was not finished.

It needed a week, Márànata had said. The second motor was not hung. The hull was not sealed above the waterline. The fuel line ran taped down a frame whose ribs still showed bare under the gunwale like the ribs of a thing that had not yet grown its skin. It sat low at the end of the dock, and it was the only boat that was theirs, and so it was the boat.

Ésa and Kàkà had the girls coming down the boards through the smoke---a knot of them, barefoot, low, moving the way Osogó had watched people move who had spent their whole lives being moved: not running, because running draws the eye, but going small and fast and close to the ground, obeying. They had been given orders all their lives. These were better orders than most.

Kàkà had her hand out, laying it on each head as it passed her into the boat, and her mouth was going under the noise, and coming up out of the smoke with the taken rifle he heard what she was doing. She was not counting one-two-three. She was counting names. She was putting them down into the boat by name, the ones she had been told and the ones she had made, and the smallest one, the one with the scar through her brow who had worn the cellar-look in the dark house, went down under Kàkà's hand and Kàkà said Sparrow, low, fitting the name over her one more time. She touched five heads and said five names and her hand came back and found the shell in her pocket and held it.

"The son," Ésa said.

"Gone." Márànata threw a coil of line into the boat and came down hard after it. There was blood up her forearm, dark, not hers. She did not say whose and he did not ask, and her face said the son's part of the night was over and had not gone the way the line in the sawdust had drawn it. "He's not ours to take now. Get in. Get in---"

He went over into the stern and put his hand on the tiller. The motor was cold. He pulled the cord and it coughed and died. He pulled it again and it coughed and caught and died again, and a round came off the bank and went through the bare ribs a hand's width behind Ésa and buried itself in the far gunwale, and the smallest girl made a sound, and Kàkà put her own body down over the girl, and he pulled the cord a third time the way you haul a drowning man up by his collar, all of it at once, and the motor caught and held and screamed.

"Down," he said. "All of you. Down in the boat."

They went down. He opened the throttle, and the unfinished boat put her nose up out of the black water and ran.

⁂

The village fell behind, and the channel took them in, and for a moment there was quiet.

It was not real quiet.

The motor was under it, and somewhere back of them the patrol boat finding the water.

But here the channel ran narrow between two walls of mangrove, and the trees took the noise and folded it down and held it off, the way they had held it off at the head of the Narrows, and in the pocket of it his ear came back to him. He heard the hull part the water. He heard the girls breathing. He heard, far off, a bird go up out of the dark from something moving under it. His hands read the water through the tiller---the depth of it, the pull of it, the way it wanted to set the boat toward the left bank where the current was cutting in under the roots---and he held the boat off it, and for three seconds, four, there was only the work and the dark and the going.

Then the channel bent, and a man was standing on the mudbank where it bent.

The man was not running. That was the first unnatural thing, the thing that turned over cold in him before the rest of it arrived. A man does not stand still on open mud while a boat full of what he hunts comes round the bend at him. He waits in cover, or he runs to cut the angle, or he comes up firing from a knee. This man stood on the bare mud with his rifle hanging down along his leg and watched the boat come the way you watch a thing you already own, that is only taking its time arriving.

The fire was behind them and the moon was out, and the light came down on him, and Osogó knew the body before he knew the face. He knew the way it stood still, the weight even on both feet, nothing in it reaching for anything. He knew the marks on it. The scars went up the arms and across the bare chest in the old patterns, the patterns the Hook had cut into its own with a hot iron and the flat of a blade in the years he had drowned and salted and walked into the river to be rid of. Seeing them was like seeing his own back in a glass. He wore the match of them under his shirt. He had carried them so long he had stopped knowing they were there.

Dákun.

Beside him Ésa went still---the whole of her at once, her eyes fixed on the man on the bank, and in the half-second he had to understand anything he understood that she had the name before he had the face. She had carried it out of whatever rooms she had sat silent in, gathering things men said over her head; she had set it down for him on the dock at Mokili with no face to hang it on. Here was the face. And her going still was the sound of the last thing she had told him locking shut and turning true. The tracker. The hills. The siege or suicide. She had not been wrong about any of it. He could see, in the set of her, that she had hoped a little to have been wrong.

The boat came down on the bend fast, and for the length of it they were close, ten feet of black water between the gunwale and the mud, and Dákun looked at him. His eyes went over Osogó the way Osogó's had gone over him---down the arms, across the chest, reading the old marks through the cloth he could not see but knew were under it, checking them the way you check whether a tool you have not held in years still keeps its edge. There was no warmth in it. There was nothing in him to make warmth out of. But there was a thing that in another man would have been warmth, and it came out of him flat and even and almost gentle, his eyes going last to Osogó's hands where they lay on the tiller.

"Still counting," he said.

His voice was smoke and gravel, barely above nothing, and it came across the water like a hand around the throat. The two words he said were words of a man remembering a thing about another man across a long time and a great deal of blood, the way you might say it at a funeral. And the worst of the night, worse than the fire and the guns and the boy in the reeds, was that it landed---that the old flat words went down into him and lit something, some ember he had held under the black water of himself for fifteen years and believed dead---and that it should not have lit, and did.

Then the rifle came up.

Nothing changed in him as it came. No tightening, no decision crossing the still face, no line between the man who had said still counting and the man bringing the gun to his shoulder---because for Dákun there was no line. Greeting a man he had done the work beside and killing him were the same kind of work, done with the same economy, the one running into the other without a seam, the way Osogó's own hands had brought a rifle up in the Narrows before his mind had been asked.

Osogó did not reach for the gun in the bilge. There was no time, and it was the wrong tool.

He had the right one in his hand.

He threw the tiller and drove the boat off the deep line and across the shallow shoulder of the bend, where the mud came up close under the surface, water no one runs a boat across, water that would have set a patrol boat on its belly---and the unfinished hull skipped across it screaming, and the shot, when it came, went flat and low through the air where the boat had been and would have been, out into the dark over the water. One shot. He did not fire twice. He had already seen the boat was past. The bend took the bank, and the man on it, out of the line of sight.

Osogó looked back once. Dákun had not moved off the mud. He was not running after them. Running is for men who want a thing badly enough to run for it, and there was nothing in him that wanted like that. He stood with the rifle lowered again along his leg and watched the place the boat had gone, and then he turned, unhurried, back toward the fire and the channel and the heavier boats, because there are other ways to come at a thing, slower ways, and he had all the time there was, and he knew the water as well as the man he hunted.

Then the channel opened, and there were the other boats.

⁂

They had found the channel behind him. Three, or four; the dark and the speed of it would not let him hold the count, and he let the number go. Their engines were heavier than his and their lights were off too now, and the black water between was closing.

He knew the bend before he came to it, because he knew this water now. He had come up it that afternoon with the village quiet around him and his hands had marked it the way they marked everything: the deep cut on the right, the mud shoulder on the left, and behind the shoulder the place where the mangrove came down to the waterline so that a person over the side would be in the trees in three steps and gone. He drove the boat up onto the shoulder and killed the motor.

The quiet came down hard.

"Out," he said. "Into the trees. Now. All of you."

They went over into the mud, the girls first, Ésa handing them down one-armed and going after them, and Márànata took the front because the ground was hers---she had been born on this coast and knew its forests the way he knew its water---and she had them up the bank and into the black under the mangrove fast and low, the pale soles of their feet going up out of the mud and vanishing one after another into the dark.

Ésa was the last but one. At the top of the bank she turned and looked back at him once---the look the two of them had instead of the words neither of them ever spent---and then she took the dark and was gone into it.

Kàkà did not go.

She stood in the shallows with the water at her knees and her hand on the gunwale and looked up at him in the stern, and the boats were coming, he could hear them taking the reaches one by one, and she did not move.

"You're taking it back out," she said.

"Yes."

"So they go after you and not into the trees."

"Yes."

"And then you find us."

"I'll find you."

"You don't know that." Her voice did not rise. It went the other way, flat and low and certain. "You don't know you'll find us. Nobody knows that. You told Snail you'd bring me back, and you don't know that either. You just say it. You say it and then you go where the guns are, and the words are supposed to stand in the place where you were."

He looked at her.

The boats were close.

He did not have the words she wanted, because the words she wanted did not exist---there was no true thing he could say that was also a promise, and she knew it, and she was not asking him to lie. She was asking him to know what he was asking of her.

So he gave her the only thing he had, which was the same thing again, and left her to do with it what he had once had to do with Ésa's, in the dark, under a different boat.

"I'll find you," he said.

And it was hers to decide now, whether that was enough. He watched her decide it. It did not take her long, and the deciding cost her something he could see shifting her face, and when it was done she lifted her hand off the gunwale.

"You'd better," she said.

His hand went to the pouch at his belt. He did not send it; it went on its own. It found the shape of the stone through the leather and his thumb came onto the cold of it, his mother's, the one thing the river had never managed to take off him---

A round came off the lead boat and took the crown off a mangrove root a foot from her head, and the splinters went into the dark, and the moment went with them.

His hand came off the pouch and back onto the tiller. The stone stayed where it was. He had not given it.

"Go," he said.

She went. She turned in the water and went up the bank after Márànata, low and fast, and at the top she stopped for half a breath against the black of the trees and looked back at him once, and then the forest took her the way it had taken the others.

He started the motor. He backed the boat off the shoulder into the deep cut and turned her nose away from the bank and the trees and the place where they had gone, out toward the open reach where the boats were coming with their guns, and he put the throttle to its stop.

The first boat saw him and swung after him, and the second, and the third behind it. That was the whole of the plan now, the entire remainder of it: to be the most worth chasing thing on the water. He took the unfinished boat down the reach the way he had taken the canoe through the Narrows---off the deep line, across the shallows, through the snags, water the heavy boats had to slow for or break on---and they slowed for it, and they came on, and their guns lit the dark behind him and put rounds into the water on both sides and astern. He did not look back at the bank. Looking back at the bank with their eyes on him was the one thing that could put their eyes there too.

The reach bent. It bent hard right around a long arm of mangrove, and he took it, and on the far side the trees stood up tall and came down close on both hands, and they took the sound.

They took it the way the trees had taken it at the head of the Narrows, the way they had taken it for three seconds in the channel before the man on the mud. The engines behind him folded down to almost nothing. The guns went far away. For a moment---not because it was over, it was not over, the boats were still there, the dark was still full of them---there was only the hull under his hands and the black water going by.

His hands worked the boat. They held the line and read the water and made the next small correction and the next, the way they had made them ten thousand times, the way they made them across the lake with the children sleeping in the bilge and up the channels in the grey before light. The same work. His hands did not know it was any different.

But it was different, and the difference was the one thing in him that was not in his hands, and it sat under the false quiet and would not be counted. Every other time his hands had done this work, the work had been to get somewhere. To a bank. A village. A far shore. A person standing on it, waiting. To arrive. There was nowhere now that he was going. There was no shore at the end of this one. The work was not to arrive. The work was to be followed, and to go on being followed, out into the dark and the open water and away from the trees, for as long as the boat would run and the fuel would burn and they would believe there was something out ahead of them in the night worth the chase.

He opened the throttle the rest of the way. Behind him, around the bend, the sound of the hunters came back up out of the trees and found him.