“I’ve no interest in working the dogs, sir.”
“Shut your mouth.”
He pounds on the metal door before unlocking his side. Another guard unlocks the outside gate and waves me through with his shotgun.
“Take him to Taylor. And keep that gun on his back.” Beau’s been gunning for me since I arrived. “Think you’re better than all of us in here?” he asked me a couple months in. “All tidy mannered and educated. From what I’m told, you didn’t even get your hands dirty when you killed that boy. Probably sitting in your well-lit house eating some fancy meal with your wife. That looks a hell of a lot like cowardice to me.”
The guard on the other side of the gate settles the double barrels between my shoulder blades. “Walk.”
There are nerves in me as we approach the pens. Deputy Taylor is at the closest run, a dog himself, snouted and whiskered and thick in the neck. His jowls shake as he yells at my escort, “What you doing pointing that gun on him?”
I hear the guard shifting behind me. “Was told to watch this one, sir. Was told he might run.”
“You think I’d invite a runner out here? Jesus, boy, don’t know that you’re quick enough to be working this side of the wall.”
The guard comes level with me, his gun hanging down next to his legs. “Just following Beau’s orders, Deputy.”
Taylor laughs and pitches his head toward the gate. “Get on back to your post, and stop taking orders from Beau. Man’s a guard, same as you.”
“Yes, sir.”
When he’s a ways off, Taylor yells, “And you best not bring any boys out here at gunpoint again, you hear?”
“Yes, sir!”
I take comfort in seeing a guard reprimanded.
“All right, Martin, let’s see what these dogs think of you.”
Taylor tugs gently on a dog’s ears, then lets go and shouts, “Back!” His voice is hard and whiplike, and the dogs drop their paws off the top rails of their pens to the ground, expectant.
Two other men are farther in, mucking out the dogs’ waste and filling their water buckets and food bowls. The smell here is worse than at the dairy, everything ripe and foul, and I want Taylor to see that I don’t fit, that it’s a mistake to assign me to these beasts.
“First thing we’ll do is get you handling them. They’ll learn you as a master when you’re here and as a scent when they’re chasing you. Dog boys is the practice, see. Got to get a belt on you and get you hooked up to one, see how they do at the end of that line.
“Jones!” he shouts to one of the other men. “Get me a belt and a lead.”
“Yes, sir.”
I watch Jones head toward a close-by barn. “Now, the belts we use are of my own making.” Everything about Taylor is large — his belly, his voice, his hands. “Made ’em so that you boys could hook yourself up to nine dogs if you wanted to.”
I do not want to.
He goes on about the leather leads, and in the middle of this talk the sirens start blaring, their whirl and pitch like some great bird descending from the sky. Every time I hear them, I think of Marie’s knowledge of birdcalls, naming all those feathered bodies by their noise alone.
“Redtail,” she might say of the siren. “Thick feathered and dusty. It’s protecting its territory, warning off other birds.”
The dogs have brought their paws to the top rails of their pens again, their voices joining the sirens.
“Jones!” Taylor is shouting. “Jackson! Get those dogs belted up!”
Jones runs from the barn, strapping a belt round his waist. He drops another at my feet.
“Put it on, boy,” Taylor says. “Trial by fire on this one.” To Jones, he says, “Bring out Ruthie. She don’t care who she’s belted to so long as she has a scent to track.”
The belt is about two inches wide and thicker than any other I’ve ever worn. Two rings are on either side of the buckle, the base of them sewn over with extra patches. These must be what I could hook nine dogs to.
The guard who held his gun to my back comes running, a scrap of cloth in his hand.
I work to fasten the belt over my pants and shirt.
“Pick up that lead,” Taylor says to me. He turns to the guard. “Solid scent?”
“Straight off his back.”
I have the lead in my hand, and Jones is hauling a whining dog from the pen. “Strap one end to her collar, and the other to one of those rings on your belt.”
“What’s going on?”
“Taylor loves to throw new boys right in,” Jones says. “Just follow the dog. She knows what she’s doing.”
“The man’s still in sight,” Taylor shouts at us. “Right in the close cotton. Get your dogs over here.”
My dog pulls me to the piece of shirt in Taylor’s hand. She buries her snout in the fabric, huffing and snorting, then lifts her head to the air and lets out a great howling siren of her own. “Follow along, Martin,” Taylor says to me. The other two men are at the scrap now, too, their dogs digging into the smell, but I am going, my feet tripping me forward, this great beast hooked to my hips, tugging with a force I’ve not met before. She is a plow, an ox, an engine, cranking and turning and driving us on. I want reins attached to her muzzle, something to whoa her back.
The dog doesn’t slow as she puts her nose to the ground, all her movements connected. I hear the others behind me, and the pounding of horse hooves, and then Taylor draws up, high on the saddle of a tall bay. It looks like Marie’s horse once looked, back when they were both young. When I left for Kilby, that horse was nibbling the grasses around the farmhouse like a big, lazy dog, her back swaying deep between her withers and haunches, a great slump that could no longer support the weight of a person. I don’t know if she’s still alive.
The dog leads me into the cotton field, and we slow down. Cotton is a rough crop to move through. The plants let go of their moisture come harvest and turn their stems to twigs, hard and sharp. Taylor slips ahead. He has his Winchester across his lap. I still hear the yells of the other boys and dogs behind us.
“There!” Taylor shouts, and I see the escaping man, the great tear in his prison shirt that yielded the scrap for the dogs, such a fatal error in the running trade. He’s still in the cotton, his back bright against the plants.
A field guard is after him, then Taylor and his horse, then this dog and me and the others.
“Boy!” I hear Taylor shout. “You stop!”
The man doesn’t slow. He’ll reach the woods in a moment, and I don’t know what that means for me, whether I’ll be forced to follow. If this great machine of a dog continues at her same speed, my body will collapse, a tethered anchor dragged through the undergrowth, my skin and clothes tearing against the ground and the brush.
Taylor draws his horse up short in front of us and slides down from the saddle. “Stop that dog!” he shouts to me.
I dig my heels in and hunker back, lowering myself into the cotton, down to the ground. The dog’s head whips, and she lets loose the most mournful cry.
“Stop!” Taylor shouts to the escaping man.
The other men and dogs arrive on either side of me. Each holds a hand out to help me up.
“Sit,” Jones says to the dogs. “Wait.” All three of the beasts drop down, their snouts still turned toward Taylor.
Before us, Taylor aims his gun toward the sky. He pulls the trigger, and it fires a cannon’s worth of shot. “The warning shot’s enough to stop most runners,” Jones whispers. “Nine out of ten, I’d say.”