After getting out of the Hyundai, Manon and Arlette thanked the elderly couple for the ride. Jason couldn’t stop thinking about Retired and Gone Fishin’ sitting in Uncle Sky’s yard. He saw Cudjo walk past with some men carrying rifles, and Jason trotted alongside, his telescope bouncing on his hip. A wind stirred the tops of the pine trees.
“Sir?” he said. “Mr. Cudjo?”
The hermit turned to him, yellow eyes gleaming in the growing night. “Boy, I want you stay with you mama.”
“Could we use another boat right now? As we drove here, I saw the boat we came in sitting on a trailer. We could go back and get it.”
“Put this truck ’cross this road, you,” Cudjo said to the driver of a pickup. “You—” Patting the shoulder of one of his riflemen. “You, la has, down in them trees, you. Stay quiet, you. Lord High Sheriff come, you flank him, yes? The rest of you, you stay here, behind truck, yes? You no shoot, you, you don’t know who come. Could be Nick and them who come, yes?”
Then Cudjo turned to Jason. “You tell me ’bout this boat, you.”
“It’s a bass boat,” Jason said. “We came down on it from Missouri. There’s a fifty-horse Johnson on it, and we had fuel left. If we put it in the water, we could travel to Vicksburg, send for help.” Cudjo frowned at him. A gust of wind tugged at his long beard. “Where you see this boat, you.”
“Uncle Sky’s Metal Building Whatever,” Jason said. “The boat was right in the yard. It wasn’t even behind the fence, it was like somebody just dropped it there. The place was closed, nobody around. We could hitch the trailer to a truck and drive it off, no problem.”
Cudjo’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Skyler King, he a Kluxer, that man. But he an old man, that Sky, he live in Hardee with his daughter, that Rachel. Ain’t nobody at his business now, no.”
“That Sky place isn’t five minutes from here,” Jason said. “We can make a quick trip.”
“Jason—” Arlette came up the line of vehicles, took Jason’s hand. “Mama says—” Jason squeezed her hand. “We’ll go get the boat,” he told Cudjo, “if we can have someone to drive us out there.”
Jason and Arlette held hands on the bench seat as they were driven to Uncle Sky’s. Their van was alone on the old road—it was a plush vehicle, carpeted and with soft seats, a Chevy that still smelled new. The driver in front of them was a young light-skinned man named Samuel who scanned the road nervously as he pushed the vehicle to high speed in between slowing down for partially repaired tears and crevasses. Every so often Samuel would drop a hand to finger the pistol at his hip.
“Here it is,” Jason called. Jason leaned into Arlette’s shoulder as Samuel swung the van abruptly into Uncle Sky’s gravel drive. The headlights tracked across a yard over which was scattered building materials, agricultural equipment, then the battered bass boat on its trailer, parked on the grass to one side of the gate.
Samuel backed the van to the trailer. Jason left his telescope on the seat, and he and Arlette went out the van’s sliding side door. Jason felt the night wind ruffle his hair. They went to the trailer, and Jason looked down to see that a padlock had secured the ball on the trailer, making it impossible to hitch the trailer and tow it away.
“Damn,” Samuel said. “Wait here.” He opened the hatch at the back of the van and began searching through his large toolbox for something to cut the padlock.
Jason hoisted himself onto the bass boat’s foredeck. Rainwater sloshed in the boat’s bottom. Jason hopped over the cockpit to the aft deck, then bent to inspect the outboard motor. From what he could see in the dark, the outboard was as he left it, but when he felt with his hand in the well near the motor he couldn’t locate any of the jerricans of fuel they’d brought with them from Rails Bluff. Jason straightened. “There’s no gas,” he said. “They probably took the cans inside. I’ll go look.” The fence was two feet away, chain link twined with Virginia creeper. Jason launched himself at the fence, clung with fingers, dug his toes into the gaps between the chain link. He scrambled to the top, put both feet on the pipe that ran along the top of the fence, adjusted his footing, and raised himself to a precarious standing position, arms flung out for balance. The gusty wind tried to pluck him off. He grinned. “Wish I had my skates,” he said. “I could travel on this.”
“Be careful,” Arlette said. Jason knelt, reached a hand down to Arlette. “Want to come up?” he asked.
“You better hope there’s not a big dog in there,” Arlette said.
“Woof woof,” Jason said. He dropped his butt onto the pipe, then twisted around and lowered himself to the soft ground inside Uncle Sky’s compound.
Samuel found a hacksaw and began working on the lock that secured the trailer. Jason walked through the cluttered yard to the unpainted clapboard building. He stepped onto the porch that ran the length of the front. Planks sagged under his feet. He looked into the window, peering through a frame of his two hands pressed against the glass. He saw the glint of a glass counter, dark objects that were probably lawnmowers or lawn tractors. He walked to the front door and tried to turn the knob—
—Then jumped three feet as an alarm bell began to ring out. His heart hammered. The door had been wired. Jason gave a helpless look back toward the gate, saw Samuel and Arlette staring at him, Samuel with the tail lights of his van outlining his exasperated expression.
“Sorry!” Jason shouted over the clatter.
Then he walked to the end of the porch and peered around the side of the building. Another boat loomed there in the shadow of the building, a big eighteen-foot powerboat with a canvas top. Jason wondered about stealing it. It would certainly furnish more deluxe transport than Retired and Gone Fishin’. The ringing bell was on this side of the building, right over Jason’s head. The clamor rang in his skull. He clenched his teeth and walked around the boat, put a foot on the fender of the trailer in preparation to boost himself into the cockpit, and he saw that the tire on the trailer was flat. So much for driving off with it.
Jason boosted himself into the cockpit. A hulking outboard was tilted up over the stern. Jason groped in the recesses of the stern and found a pair of plastic jerricans—not, judging by the weight, the ones he had brought on the bass boat, but larger and holding more gasoline. “Bingo!” he shouted over the clamor of the bell, but he doubted that anyone could hear him.
One container was connected by rubber hoses to the engine, and the other was free. Jason took the free container and heaved it onto the gunwale, then lowered it to balance it precariously on the trailer fender. He jumped off the boat and managed to catch the jerrican just as it started to topple over. He took it in both hands and waddled across the yard with his knees banging into the container at every step. He was happy to be distancing himself from the clatter of the alarm.
While Jason had been exploring, Samuel had finished cutting the padlock free, and he and Arlette had hooked the trailer to the van. “Here’s some gas,” Jason said as he brought the gas to the gate. He tried to squeeze it between the gate and the upright to which it was chained, but failed.
“It’s too heavy to boost over the fence,” he said. “Can you cut a hole in it?”
“I’ve got some wire cutters,” Samuel said.
“There’s another gas can where I found this one. I’ll go get it.” Jason trotted back to the powerboat. While the alarm bell blared through his nerves, he disconnected the gas can from the outboard by feel, lowered it out of the boat, and began to carry it across the equipment-filled yard. Samuel had cut a modest hole in the wire of the gate, and he was bent over, dragging the jerrican through the gap. He was brightly lit by the headlights of his van. Arlette stood by, watching him. The clamor of the alarm filled the night.