As they penetrated, the land seemed to fight them. The slope increased, to wear against their legs; no clear path yielded through the dense pines, and the saw brier slashed at their legs. The sunlight fell in slanting sheaves through the darkness but it wasn’t a cool darkness, and was instead hot and close. Sweat burned Earl’s eyes.
“Goddamn,” screamed Jed Posey, stumbling for the tenth time in the saw brier as the frustration built, “this ain’t no goddamned picnic, Earl. This ain’t white man’s work. Git some niggers if you want to fight your way through this shit.”
Even Earl had to agree. It was pointless. You could hardly see ten feet ahead. The dust rose and swirled.
“All right,” said Earl, admitting defeat. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Mr. Earl?” It was Pop.
“We’re leaving, Pop. Ain’t nothing back here.”
“Mr. Earl, Mollie’s got something.”
Earl looked. The two stupider young dogs had collapsed, their heads forward on the loam, their pink, wet tongues spread out under half-opened jaws. Their bodies heaved with effort and disappointment. But Mollie sat quietly, his head cocked, his eyes quizzical, very calm. Then he began to keen. The sound seemed to come from some other orifice than his throat: it was pure animal, a single howl throaty with texture and meaning. Then he bobbed up, pivoted, his tail wagging smartly, and pointed with his nose.
“He’s got her, Mr. Earl,” said Pop. “She’s here.”
“Goddamn,” shouted Jimmy Pye. “Shoot and goddamn, boy, turn that damned dial! Git me some noise!”
Jimmy’s hair was blond and longish, slick with Brylcreem, which glinted in the sun like a sheet of beaten gold above his beautiful, fine-boned face.
Bub’s thick fingers worked the dial, but the trace of musical energy that Jimmy claimed to have heard as Bub slid through the possibilities seemed to vanish.
“J-J-Jimmy. I cain’t f-f-f-find—”
“Spit it out, boy. Just go on, goddammit, and spit it out.”
But Bub couldn’t. The word hung up somewhere between his brain and his tongue, trapped in a molasses of frustration and pain. Goddamn, when would he learn to talk like a man?
Bub was twenty, a thickish, sluggish young man, who had worked as an assistant carpenter at Wilton’s Construction in Blue Eye until he’d been let go because he’d never quite got the hang of it. He had grown up totally in awe of his older cousin, who was the best running back Polk County had ever produced and had hit .368 his senior year at Polk High and could have gone either to the minor leagues or the University of Arkansas, if he hadn’t gone to jail instead.
But today Bub was more than in awe: he was possibly in love. For Jimmy’s golden power seemed to fill the air, radiating the magic of possibility.
“Go on, boy,” yelped Jimmy, his face alight with glee, “find me some music. None of that nigger shit. No hillbilly shit, neither. No sir, want to hear me some rock and roll, want to hear me ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ by Mr. Bill Haley and his goddamn Comets.”
Bub hunted, earnestly sliding the radio dial left and right, seeking a powerful Memphis or St. Louis station, but for some reason the gods weren’t cooperating, and exactly the kind of shit Jimmy didn’t want kept coming up loud and clear, KWIN out of Little Rock or that nigger beam KGOD from Texarkana. But Jimmy wasn’t angry. He was enjoying Bub’s struggle and gave him a little pat on the shoulder.
Jimmy was driving. Where the hell had he got a car? Well, goddamn, Bub was so overwhelmed with love when he arrived at the jailhouse in west Fort Smith, he just hadn’t bothered to ask, and Jimmy hadn’t explained. The car was a goddamned beauty too, a sleek white Fairlane with Fordomatic gearshift, a convertible no less, looking brand spanking new, as if it’d just been driven off a showroom floor. Jimmy drove it like a god. He whipped out Rogers Avenue, zooming in and out of traffic, blowing by the slower vehicles, honking merrily, waving with a movie star’s sexy confidence whenever teenage girls were glimpsed.
The girls always waved back and this was one thing that left Bub a little confused. Jimmy was married. He was married to Edie White, who was Jeff White’s widow’s daughter and a legendary beauty. Why would Jimmy want to go and wave at strange girls? It was all set up, it was perfect. Mr. Earl had gotten Jimmy a job at the sawmill in Nunley and Jimmy and Edie was going to live in a cottage outside Nunley on the late Rance Longacre’s cattle ranch; Miss Connie Longacre, Ranee’s widow, had said they could have it for free if Jimmy pitched in at driving time. Meanwhile, Jimmy would learn a trade at the sawmill. He might even become a manager. Everybody wanted it to work out.
“Lookie them gals,” said Jimmy, as the car sped by a Pontiac station wagon. Four pretty blond girls who looked like cheerleaders smiled as Jimmy shouted, “Hey there, pretty missies, y’all want to git some ice cream?”
The girls laughed, for Jimmy was so handsome and outrageous they knew he meant no harm, though it was Bub who noticed that he had crossed the centerline and that a truck was bearing down on them.
“J-J-J-J—”
“Or how about a drive-in movie, we could go to the Sky-Vue and see Jail Bait,” Jimmy hollered.
The truck was—
The truck honked.
The girls screamed.
Jimmy laughed.
“J-J-J-J—”
With just the flick of his wrist, Jimmy jiggered the wheel and stepped on the gas and with his athlete’s coordination shot into the tiny space left between the station wagon on the right and the rushing, honking, squealing truck just ahead; the car dipped and swooped ahead.
“Whooooooie!” sang Jimmy. “I’m a goddamned free man.”
He took the next left, fishtailing in a spray of gravel, and headed back downtown.
“You find me some music, Bub Pye, you old dog, you.”
Bub caught something familiar, with at least the kind of banging rhythms he had figured his cousin needed.
“That’s a nigger,” said Jimmy.
“N-n-n-n-no,” finally Bub got out. “That’s a white boy. He sounds like a nigger.”
Jimmy listened. It was a white boy. White boy with rhythm. White boy with nigger in him, full of piss and cum, hot and dangerous.
“What’s that white boy’s name?” he wanted to know.
Bub couldn’t remember it. It was something new, some name he could never remember.
“Cain’t ’member. Goddamn,” said Bub.
“Well, you ain’t no damn good, then,” said Jimmy with a big old smile, in the way of saying in code, it don’t matter a damn.
Jimmy looked at his watch. He seemed to know where he was going. Bub had only been up to Fort Smith a few times before; he had no idea.
Pretty soon, Jimmy pulled over.
“Just about noon,” he said.
They were on a busy street, Midland Boulevard, across from a big grocery store. “IGA Food Line,” it said on the sign. It was the biggest grocery store Bub had ever seen.
“Goddamn,” said Jimmy. “Lookie that, Bub? Lookie all them people in and out a place like that. All of them with their goddamned money just spent on food. Hell, boy, must be fifty, sixty thousand dollars in that place.”
Bub wondered what the hell Jimmy could be talking about. Something he didn’t quite like about it.
“J-J-J-J-J—”
But goddamn, Jimmy’s luck was good.
One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock ROCK,
five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock ROCK,
nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock ROCK,
We gonna ROCK around the clock tonight!
We gonna ROCK ROCK ROCK ’til the broad daylight!
The unleashed dogs found her. Earl heard them baying wildly, their voices a-gibber with excitement.