Devil on My Heels Read online

  We run most of the way. We run like Gator always runs, like the devil is on our heels. We make it to the edge of the swamp while it is still dark. I’m covered with sandspurs again. But I am so scared, I hardly feel their sting.

  “You don’t want to go in there,” Gator says. “Just tell me how to find this place.”

  I shake my head. “I only know by going. I’ll recognize things along the way, but I can’t remember them to just tell somebody.”

  We set off, pushing through the brush. The ground grows soft. Soon I will be up to my knees in swamp water. I take off my sneakers, tie the laces together, and drape them over my shoulders. If I let myself think about the mosquitoes, I will scream. Their buzzing swells in my ears. It’s pointless to swat them. There are thousands swarming around us.

  I don’t bother to tell Gator that those other times I came to the shack, I had a small, flat-bottomed boat I found leaning up against a tree near the edge of the water. Every time I came here, that boat was always there. And since nobody seemed to live anywhere nearby, I borrowed it—lots of times.

  But tonight I don’t see the boat. I look for it until Gator wants to know what I am doing. “Getting my bearings,” I tell him. And then we head off on foot. Gator follows me. It seems like hours, slogging through the water, trying not to get my feet caught in cypress roots and losing my balance, but it has only been a few minutes.

  The swamp is so still. There is only the sound of us moving through the water, making little waves. Even the Spanish moss hangs limp and motionless from the cypress branches. The leaves and moss form a canopy. You can’t see the stars in this place. No moonlight can get through. Everywhere is the smell of decaying wood.

  We are up to our knees in swamp water now. And moving slow.

  I don’t realize what’s happening until Gator swoops me up in his arms. He stands there holding me, staring down at the water. “Cottonmouth,” he says. I can feel his heart beating double time.

  He doesn’t move.

  “How much farther?” he asks.

  “Not far, a few hundred yards maybe.”

  “I’ll carry you. Just point where we’re going.” Gator’s arms are large and powerful. I don’t doubt for a minute he can carry me without much effort. But it wouldn’t be right. Me up here, safe against his chest, and him the one who could get bit.

  “That’ll slow us down,” I tell him, sliding out of his arms. “The only way we’re going to make it is if we both use our own two feet. Anyway, I’m not afraid of a little old snake.” Although the truth is, I am. I’m scared to death of alligators too. But I try not to think about that now.

  “If it bites your ankle, it’ll swell up with poison,” Gator says.

  “Well, I know that,” I call back to him. I am moving through this water as fast as I can. I am practically running.

  It isn’t until we are almost to the shack—which, thank goodness, seems to still be in one piece, rusted tin roof and all—that I think about Gator lifting me up like he did. A colored man could get himself hanged for touching a white girl. They would never give Gator time to explain he was just trying to save my life. And even if they did, they more than likely wouldn’t give it any consideration.

  It is almost dawn when we climb up on the rotting dock. The water is deep here. It forms a large pond. We had to swim the last hundred yards. The space overhead is more open now. I can see a patch of sky turning from gray to pale orange.

  Inside the one-room shack is an old rope bed with a stained, lumpy mattress, a wooden table, a couple of chairs made out of tree branches, and an old potbellied stove. Cobwebs hang from every corner. Dust, thick as a piece of cardboard, has settled over everything.

  “It’s not much to look at,” I tell Gator.

  He laughs at that. Like maybe I thought he was expecting first-class accommodations.

  “You’d better rest up before you head back,” he says. “I’ll keep watch.”

  Head back? Until now, I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to do next. Gator probably thinks I will just go home. But I can’t do that. So far all I’ve managed to do is hop from one place to the next. And somehow, so far, there has been someplace to hop to. I can’t help but wonder if I’ve finally run out of places.

  I lie down on the lumpy mattress, thinking I will never sleep again, and just like that, I’m out cold. When I wake up, the sun is hovering above the treetops. Best I can tell, it’s early evening. I step out on the narrow porch. Gator is kneeling at the end of the dock. His back is to me and he has his red T-shirt off, washing it in the water. He splashes water on his face and over his head, on his chest and arms. With the sunlight spilling through the tree branches onto his strong back, his skin glows a warm maple-syrup brown.

  I know I shouldn’t be watching him, but I can’t seem to help it. He sits back, wrings out the shirt, and turns sideways to spread it on the dock to dry. That’s when I see what Rosemary has seen all along, that Gator is good-looking, real good-looking. I never noticed before. He has always been . . . well . . . just Gator.

  I step back inside the shack, embarrassed about thinking of him like that.

  For a while I sit on the musty mattress, watching a spider weaving a web in the corner of the window. It stops weaving long enough to tend to a fly that’s just got itself tangled up in the web. The spider’s setting up house and doing its grocery shopping at the same time. Very efficient. You can only watch something like that for so long, and then sooner or later you are going to have to visit what is going on inside your head, including the things you would rather not think about. Things like where your next meal is going to come from.

  Two days ago I had three balanced meals a day. I had a bedroom with curtains and a matching bedspread. I had a father who loved me and took care of me and made sure I got my allowance every week. I had Delia, who has been the only mother I have ever really known. I had friends. And I had Chase. Right now I can’t be sure what I have or don’t have. All because I couldn’t let things be. All because I couldn’t accept the way things are in Benevolence. Is this what Emily Dickinson meant about remorse being “the Adequate of Hell”?

  When Gator comes inside a short time later, he says, “You’d better get on back. Your daddy’s going to wonder where you got to. They’ve probably been out looking for you since yesterday morning.”

  I don’t say anything.

  Gator’s shirt is still damp. He has a handful of white chunks—swamp cabbage. He drops a few of them in my lap and puts the rest on the dusty table. I eat them raw, even though the taste is a little bitter. I am so hungry I could eat the bark off a tree.

  “How’d you get this?” I ask him. Swamp cabbage is the center of a young palm tree. You have to chop the palm down with an ax, then cut away the stalk to get to the heart. You don’t just tear it apart with your bare hands.

  Gator steps outside and with a rusty ax. “Found this out back by the woodpile.” He sets the ax over by the potbellied stove.

  “There’s probably brim in that pond. I’ll try to rig up something to catch a few. Cottonmouths make pretty good eating too. Maybe I’ll catch us one.” He grins over at me. He picks up a chunk of swamp cabbage, wipes the dust off on his shirt, and bites into it.

  “Why’s the Klan after you?” I ask.

  Gator pulls one of the chairs away from the table and sits in it backward, the way Chase did that day in the cafeteria. It seems like years ago, me and Chase talking about the pickers while he kept snitching bites of my meat loaf. But it’s only been about a week and a half.

  “Travis, he’s mad as hell because I’m trying to help the pickers get what’s fair. He’s been cheating them long enough. I thought it was time we did something about that.”

  “Travis killed Gus Washburn,” I say.

  Gator runs his thumb along his upper lip a few times, like he’s thinking about something. “Yeah. I heard about that.”

  “How? I only told Delia about it yesterday morning.”

 
; “Bad news travels fast around here. When the pickers heard about Gus, not a single one of them would get on Travis’s truck yesterday. Probably didn’t this morning either. Don’t know that for a fact, since I wasn’t there. Travis, he’s blaming me, saying I put them up to it.”

  “Did you?”

  “What, getting them to not show up after they heard about Gus?” He shakes his head. “They did that on their own.” A grin eases across Gator’s face. “But I got them to agree to a slowdown, not working as fast as they should, not picking as much fruit. Some of the pickers took turns not showing up. It was starting to hit Travis where it hurts the most. In his wallet.

  “At first everybody was scared Travis would just pick out a new crew. But all that’s left over in Winter Hill are a few lazy stoop laborers. They don’t know the first thing about picking citrus. Travis, he’d lose even more time training them.

  “We had to get everybody in the camp to agree to the slowdown, otherwise it wouldn’t work. Travis made it harder by threatening to turn in some of the illegals who don’t have work visas. But he knows he can get in trouble for bringing them over the border in the first place.”

  Finally it’s beginning to make sense, what Rosemary meant when she said Travis probably thought Eli was part of the slowdown.

  “By yesterday afternoon word was all over Benevolence that Travis killed Gus Washburn,” Gator says. “But white folks, they don’t care. They think Travis is going to keep the lid on us troublemakers. Travis and the rest of the Klan have all the white folks scared half to death thinking the pickers are going to burn their houses down over their heads. Every little Girl Scout campfire that gets out of hand, we’re getting blamed for it.” Gator laughs just thinking about that. “Travis, he’s making sure everybody thinks it was one of the pickers who set the fires, any fire at all, doesn’t matter which fire. And the white folks, they believe him. Doesn’t matter what he did in the past—killed a black man, cheated his crew, made slaves out of the immigrants he brought in—none of that matters, because Travis, he’s gonna keep law and order in this town. That’s how they see it.”

  I’ve never seen Gator this angry before. Right now the air in this tiny room is practically crackling with his rage, the way wood crackles when it’s on fire. It scares me a little, seeing him this way. But I don’t let on.

  It looks to me like Travis is trying to make an example of Gator. He’s probably thinking if he does, the other pickers will back off. He thinks they’ll be too afraid to pull any more slowdowns or not show up for work. I don’t blame Gator one bit for being mad. And I’m starting to worry about Travis figuring out who told Delia about his killing Gus in the first place, and about what he’ll do if he ever gets his hands on that person.

  Gator gets up and looks out the door. “Sun’s behind the trees, better get going.”

  “I can’t go home,” I tell him. “And I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

  His back is still to me when he says, “Your daddy probably has half the state of Florida out looking for you. If they find you here, you know what they’ll do.”

  “They won’t find us,” I say.

  “They’ll use the hounds.”

  “We came here through swamp water. It’s like I said before, the dogs can’t track that.”

  “They’ll follow the scent to the place we went into the water. They’ll know we’re in the swamp somewhere. Your daddy’ll have them cutting down trees. He won’t stop looking for you until there’s not a cypress left standing.”

  I know he’s right, but I don’t move from the bed.

  Gator looks over at me. We don’t say anything more about it after that. For a while, we don’t talk at all. Gator wanders around the shack, inspecting every seam, every crack. He opens the potbellied stove, sifts around in the ashes, and pulls out a piece of burnt wood.

  He goes outside and a few minutes later comes back with some leafy branches, which he uses to sweep the dust from the table. This whole time I am trying to gag down the last of the swamp cabbage.

  Gator sits down at the table and begins working that piece of burnt wood. Every so often he looks over at me. That’s how I know he’s drawing my picture. So I stay put. In my head I recite lines from poems. I don’t remember whole poems, but I remember some of my favorite stanzas. It keeps my mind occupied.

  After a while Gator slides his chair back and studies the picture he drew of me on the top of the table. Right about then the door to the shack flies open with a bang.

  24

  Chase Tully’s body blocks the light coming through the doorway. And the first thing that pops into my head is that he is bone dry. However he got himself here, it wasn’t by wading through the water or swimming through the pond. The second thing is, I suddenly remember bringing him to this place once before, years ago, when I was maybe nine or ten. How could I have forgotten that?

  Chase’s face is in shadow. I can’t read his expression.

  I am having those Keatsian fears of ceasing to be—again. My heart is thudding in my ears. If Chase is here, so is the Klan. Or they are going to be real soon.

  He looks from me to Gator and back to me again. He’s wearing his leather jacket, singed sleeves, scorch marks, and all. I stand up so fast, I almost lose my balance. “So help me, if you’ve brought the Klan here”—I point to the ax by the potbellied stove—“I’ll hack you into little pieces and throw them to the alligators.”

  Chase steps inside the door where I can see him a little better. He gives me his lazy grin.

  I look over at Gator. I’m waiting for him to do something, wrestle Chase to the floor so we can tie him up. Maybe bash his brains in. But Gator just goes back to his drawing. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I tell him.

  Chase slips his hands into his jacket pockets, walks over to the table, and studies the drawing Gator is working on. He looks over at me, then back at the picture. “Good likeness,” he says. “You really captured her ornery side.”

  “Gator!” I shout.

  “Dove’s right,” Chase says. “They’re not far behind me. We gotta go.”

  We? Like comets roaring through space, a hundred questions zip through my mind. But there’s no time to ask. Chase and Gator are out the door and heading down to the end of the dock. I’m right behind them. Tied to the post is the flat-bottomed boat I couldn’t find earlier. More questions. Still no time. We climb into the boat. Gator takes the pole.

  Chase shows Gator which way to go. I have no idea where he is taking us. Best I can tell from the little daylight left is that we are heading northwest. I have never gone farther than the shack before. For all I know, the Klan will be waiting for us when we get to wherever we’re going. So why isn’t Gator saying anything?

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” I say to Chase’s back. It’s the middle of May and a regular steam bath out here, but he hasn’t taken off that jacket.

  “Me what?” he says over his shoulder.

  “You’re the one who warned Gator what was going on, so he’d go into hiding. And you told him about the Klan going over to Eli’s place last night. Didn’t you?”

  He doesn’t say anything. Neither does Gator. They don’t have to. I know I’m right.

  It makes sense now, Chase not helping Gator the day Willy and Earl beat him up. Not flat out calling Willy a liar when he spread those rumors about our barn. Going with his dad to the Klan meeting. It all adds up. He couldn’t let on to his dad and Willy and the others. If they got suspicious—if they figured it out—Chase wouldn’t have been able to help Gator and the others because he’d probably be in a full body cast by now—or worse.

  “Where’d you find this boat?” I ask.

  “Where I hid it.”

  “Hid it? Why?”

  He swats at a mosquito on his neck. “A couple years back I figured if I didn’t hide it, somebody might come along and take it.” He angles his body so he can look at my face. “After you showed me this place, I used to come out here sometimes, do a li
ttle fishing.”

  “How’d you know to look for me here?”

  Chase just smiles and shakes his head, like he expects I should know the answer to that. He turns his back to me again.

  After a while we come to a small inlet. The bank slopes up to woods. Chase tells Gator to steer the boat into the inlet. Between the two of them, they carry it up to the woods and hide it behind some bushes. We follow Chase along a narrow, overgrown path. He takes off his jacket and ties the sleeves around his waist.

  After a short time we come to an open field. The sun has gone down, and the sky is a dusty pink. Across the meadow are orange trees. I know this place. We are at the far end of the Tully property.

  “Are you crazy?” I say.

  “This is the last place they’ll look for you,” Chase says. “We’ll wait until it’s dark. Then we’ll head back toward the main house.” He looks over at Gator. “There’s a smokehouse nobody’s used for years. You can stay in there until I figure out how to get you out of the county. Right now they’ve got roadblocks up all over the place. They think you kidnapped Dove. At least that’s what Travis Waite’s got ’em thinking.”

  “Does my dad think that too?” I ask.

  “I haven’t seen your dad since Friday night,” Chase says.

  “If they’ve got the hounds out looking for Gator,” I say, “they’ll track him here to the smokehouse.”

  “The hounds only took them as far as the edge of the swamp,” Chase says. “They lost the scent.”

  “You were with them?”

  “It was the best way for me to find out if they were on your trail, so I could warn you. As soon as I saw them go into the swamp, I knew where you were.”

  We wait until the sky turns violet gray. Chase leads us along the edge of the woods to the groves nearest the Tully house. We stay among the orange trees until we aren’t far from the barn. “That’s it over there,” Chase says to Gator. He points to a wooden building with a smokestack on top. “The door’s not locked.”