“You got a problem with me?” he asked. In the booths at either side of mine the conversation faded, then died. His left ear was pierced, the hole contained within an Indian ink clenched fist. His brow was high, and his blue eyes shone in his pale face.
“I thought you might have been coming on to me, way you were looking at me in the mirror,” I said. To my right, I heard a male voice snicker. The skinhead heard it too because his head jerked in that direction. The snickering ceased. He turned his attention back to me. By now, he was bouncing on the balls of his feet with suppressed aggression.
“Are you fucking with me?” he said.
“No,” I replied innocently. “Would you like me to?”
I gave him my most endearing smile. His face grew redder and he seemed about to make a move toward me when there came a low whistle from behind him. The older man materialized, his long dark hair slicked back against his head, and grasped the younger man firmly by the upper arm.
“Let it go,” he advised.
“He called me a fag,” protested the skinhead.
“He’s just trying to rile you. Walk away.”
For a moment, the skinhead tugged ineffectually at the older man’s grip, then spit noisily on the floor and stormed toward the door.
“I got to apologize for my young friend. He’s sensitive about these things.”
I nodded but gave no hint that I recalled the man before me. It was Earl Jr.’s messenger from Charleston Place, the man I had seen eating a hotdog at Roger Bowen’s rally. This man knew who I was, had followed me here. That meant that he knew where I was staying, maybe even suspected why I was here.
“We’ll be on our way,” he said.
He dipped his chin once in farewell, then turned to go.
“Be seeing you,” I said.
His back stiffened.
“Now why would you think that?” he asked, his head inclined slightly so that I could see his profile: the flattened nose, the elongated chin.
“I’m sensitive about these things,” I told him.
He scratched at his temple with the forefinger of his right hand. “You’re a funny man,” he said, giving up the pretense. “I’ll be sorry when you’re gone.”
Then he followed the skinhead from the bar.
I left twenty minutes later with a crowd of students, and stayed with them until I reached the corner of Greene and Devine. I could see no trace of the two men, but I had no doubt that they were close by. In the lobby of Claussen’s, jazz was playing over the speakers at low volume. I nodded a good night to the young guy behind the desk. He returned the gesture from over the top of a psychology textbook.
I called Louis from the room. He answered cautiously, not recognizing the number displayed.
“It’s me,” I said.
“How you doin’?”
“Not so good. I think I picked up a tail.”
“How many?”
“Two.” I told him about the scene in the bar.
“They out there now?”
“I’d guess they are.”
“You want me to come up there?”
“No, stay with Kittim and Larousse. Anything I should know?”
“Our friend Bowen came through this evening, spent some time with Earl Jr. and then a whole lot longer with Kittim. They must figure they got you where they want you. It was a trap, man, right from the start.”
No, not just a trap. There was more to it than that. Marianne Larousse, Atys, his mother and sister: what happened to them was real and terrible and unconnected to anything that had to do with Faulkner or Bowen. It was the real reason that I was down here, the reason that I had stayed. The rest was unimportant.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, then hung up.
My room was at the front of the inn, facing out onto Greene Street. I took the mattress from the bed and laid it on the floor, arranging the sheets loosely on top of it. I undressed, then lay close to the wall beneath the window. The chain was on the door, there was a chair in front of it, and my gun lay on the floor beyond my pillow.
She was moving out there, somewhere, a white blur among the trees, illuminated by bleak moonlight. Behind her, it bedecked the river with glittering stars as it flowed beneath the overhanging trees.
The White Road is everywhere. It is everything. We are on it, and we are of it.
Go to sleep. Go to sleep dreaming of shadows moving along the White Road. Go to sleep watching falling girls crush lilies beneath them as they die. Go to sleep with Cassie Blythe’s torn hand emerging from the darkness.
Go to sleep without knowing if you are among the lost or the found, the living or the dead.
24
I HAD SET my alarm for 4 A.M. and was still bleary-eyed as I made my way across the lobby to the back door of the inn. The night clerk looked at me curiously, saw that I wasn’t carrying my bags, then went back to his books.
If I was being watched, then the two men were divided between the front and back doors. The back door led to the parking lot, with exits onto both Greene and Devine, but I doubted if I could drive away without being picked up. I took a handkerchief from my pocket and unscrewed the light inside the door. I’d already taken the precaution of shattering the outside light with the sole of my shoe when I had come in the night before. I opened the door a fraction, waited, then slipped out into the darkness. I used the ranks of parked cars to hide my progress until I reached Devine, then called a cab from a pay phone outside a gas station. Five minutes later, I was on my way to the Hertz desk at Columbia International Airport; from there, I drove back in a loop toward Congaree.
The Congaree Swamp is still comparatively inaccessible by road. The main route, along Old Bluff and Caroline Sims, takes visitors to the ranger station and from there sections of the swamp can be explored on foot using a system of boardwalks. But to venture deeper into the Congaree requires a boat, so I’d arranged to hire a ten-footer with a small outboard. The old guy who hired them out was waiting for me at the Highway 601 landing when I arrived, traffic rumbling across the Bates Bridge overhead. We exchanged cash and he took my car keys as security, and then I was on the river, the early morning sun already shining on the brown waters and on the huge cypress and water oak that overshadowed the banks.
In wet weather, the Congaree swells and floods the swamp, dumping nutrients on the plain. The result was the enormous trees that lined the river, their boles monstrous and swollen, their foliage so wide that at times it created a canopy over the flow, darkening and shading the waters beneath. Hurricane Hugo might have claimed some of the largest trees as casualties when it tore through the swamp, but this was still a place to make a man catch his breath at the size and scale of the great forest through which he was passing.
The Congaree marks the borders of Richland and Calhoun counties, its meanderings determining the limits of local political power, police jurisdictions, ordinances, and a hundred other tiny factors that influence the day-to-day lives of those who live within its reach. I had traveled some twelve miles along it when I came to a huge fallen cypress that jutted about halfway into the river. This, the old boatman had told me, marked the end of the state land and the beginning of the private tract, a section of swamp just under two miles long. Somewhere in there, probably close to the river, was Tereus’s home. I only hoped that it wouldn’t be too hard to find.
I tied up the boat at the cypress then jumped for the bank. The chorus of crickets nearby grew suddenly silent, then picked up again as I began to move away. I stayed with the bank, looking for signs of a trail, but could find nothing. Tereus had kept his presence here as low-key as possible. Even if trails had once existed before he was jailed, they were long overgrown by now and he had made no effort to clear them again. I stood at the bank and tried to find landmarks that would allow me to get my bearings when I made my way back to the river, then headed into the swamp.