When we walked out of the bank, the cold met us immediately. We had Yancy with us. Louis had handcuffed him. Nobody talked, but Louis handled Yancy and that pistol like a man who’s decided something way inside his head, a man I wasn’t crazy about getting in that car with.
Louis drove us out of Shardale. We stayed close to the speed limit, sat for a red light. It was very quiet in the car. It reminded me of riding in the car when my daddy was around and all of us would stare off in a different direction, scared to say anything.
We left Shardale’s few houses and stores and churches, and the Delta opened up again, big and winter-wet and empty. It was getting to where I couldn’t watch out the window anymore. I was wishing to God that we had driven east into the hill country. But we were heading west, farther out into the Delta, to find this cousin of Louis’s who lived inside the Mississippi levee. Louis said the guy was a certified nut and wouldn’t care if we laid over with him a couple of days. That had sounded fine to me, mostly because I wanted to go over inside the Mississippi levee. I had never been, though I had lived my whole life not two hours from it and always heard about it from folks who hunted over there. I was curious to finally see it for myself. But I didn’t know whether we’d even get there now.
I zipped my coat up and turned my back to my door.
Louis was stone-faced. His left hand was up on the wheel, and his right hand still held his pistol flat on the seat beside him.
Somebody finally said something. It was Yancy.
“Ray,” he said. His voice was small, but calm. “Why are y’all pulling this crap?”
I set my eyes on the highway out front of us. I didn’t answer him.
“Ray.”
I never looked back there at him.
Yancy then said, “Louis?”
I watched what happened out the corner of my eye. Louis jerked the pistol up off the seat. He started glancing over in the back, and Yancy said, “Come on, man... now... wait,” and Louis kept his hold on the steering wheel and got the pistol over in the back seat and Yancy was yelling, “Don’t, come on...” when Louis looked back there again. I stared hard as I could at the windshield.
It sounded like the world fell on the car. Then a ringing silence.
It took me a second to hear Yancy laboring down in the seat.
Louis still had his arm hung over the seatback, and he started looking back there again. I put my fingers in my ears.
There were two more severe thumps.
When I took my fingers out of my ears, there was a faraway hum in the car, but no noise in the back seat. The car stunk with pistol smoke.
Louis brought his arm back over the seal and rested the gun beside him. But I saw how he kept holding it, kept his finger curled on the trigger, and it made me glance around for my gun. It was down in the floor, on my duffel bag at my feet. But Louis finally left his pistol where it was and rolled down his window.
I had gotten almost no sleep the night before and then been keyed up all morning, and now I started feeling hollow and sleepy. For a while I tried to think through what we could do with Yancy Purvis’s body but I couldn’t stay with it for remembering different things about him from school and from seeing him out nights in his uniform in Silas, and then I couldn’t think about anything but how cold I was getting again. I let my head fall back against the headrest and just sat there watching the road with Louis.
There was no mistaking the levee when it appeared. Out there in front of us was a high mound sown with the brightest green winter grass. It ran out of sight in both directions. I sat up to look at it, at how long it was and green it was, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.
The road we were on turned in front of the levee and ran alongside the foot of it for a little ways, but in the turn there was a gravel ramp that ran up on top of the levee. Louis slowed down and took the ramp, and we turned south on the gravel road that ran along the top. The dull, gray Delta shadowed us on our left. But out my window on our right was that land inside the Mississippi levee that I had never seen before. For some reason I had come to hope like hell that it was as different as they said it was, and I tell you, it didn’t let me down.
Rising up here and there out of the tall yellow grass inside the levee were trailers up on stilts, regular trailers, but held fifteen or twenty feet up in the air on bowed iron girders. Beyond them the hardwood ran so thick you couldn’t see the sky through their tops, all those black branches wild and matted like a huge nest of water moccasins. When there were breaks in the trees you could see oxbow water, wide and choppy, and birds that looked like seagulls floated and fell and gusted low over the water, and above them small dark birds rode the wind in circles like bits of ash in the thermals of a fire, and the wind came up on the levee and whipped against Louis’s car. Out in one lake we passed I saw a heavily wooded island.
When I looked over at Louis he didn’t seem to have even glanced over inside the levee, and it occurred to me that he had probably seen this before. Though I wondered if he had ever been much impressed by it, even the first time he saw it, and I thought probably not.
We rode south on the levee for a good while, but I can’t say how long because I lay my head back again finally and closed my eyes and gave my mind over to the lake wind that whistled and brushed against the car. I did not sleep, but I found myself walking a river island, with blue mud and wet roots and flood-twisted trees and loud birds and old, heavy-headed deer, and from deep under the firm earth where I stood I felt the giant slide of more dark water than I could imagine. I tried to go to that island in sleep, but could not slip away from the freeze inside the car, from thoughts of Yancy, from what remained on my left.
The next thing I remember was hearing Louis say, “Shit. Shit.” When I opened my eyes, he was watching the rearview mirror. We had sped up considerably. I looked back to see blue lights flashing up on the levee.
Louis banged the steering wheel with his fist. His eyes began searching out in front of us.
I sat up and turned in my seat to watch back, steadying myself with a hand up on the dash. I saw Yancy’s dark sleeve, but I didn’t look down in the seat. The car behind us looked like a deputy sheriff’s. I couldn’t tell whether it was gaining on us.
All I could think to say was, “We got to get off of here.”
Louis did not say anything.
There was nowhere to get off the levee. On our left lay a mud field. On our right the hardwood had come up near the levee and was flooded with still, khaki water. There were no roads or ramps or trailers in sight. We went on like this for several minutes. Louis kept surging the gas and whenever he did the car skittered side to side beneath us.
When the roadblock appeared way down the levee, my first thought was that a bunch of deer were standing in the road. But we got closer and the blue lights came on and my head went really hot and started tingling and Louis was muttering something. I picked my pistol up off the duffel bag and it felt light as air in my hand. I could barely tell I was holding it. Something about this made my gut sick. We did not slow down and we got close enough to see it was two brown patrol cars parked across the levee and behind them a red pickup with a flashing light up on the dash, and we left the levee, down the Delta side. It might have made no difference, but I would’ve tried the other side.
I felt the body of the car leave the ground completely for a heartbeat before we hit the foot of the levee and started across a soggy bean field. We didn’t go twenty-five yards before Louis’s car sank to the chassis.