Read Online The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux - Free Book Online Page B

up, he responded gradually to the heat in her palm, opening his eyes to a lantern globe hanging like a molten noose from her fingers. Randolph saw her flimsy robe and was struck by how slim she was.
    “What?” he croaked.
    “You better get down to the saloon.”
    He came up on one elbow, sleep shedding off his eyes like sparks. “I don’t . . . why?”
    “Mr. Byron’s in there, and I hear a lot of yelling coming out.”
    He got up and dressed, walking blindly out into the street, stumbling around a broad puddle lying like a filthy mirror, the moon imbedded in it like a vandal’s rock. He fell out of step to avoid a mule dropping, and the pile moved, uncoiling toward the canal.
    The saloon was almost invisible, darkness within darkness, the green planking reflecting no light, the windows kerosene-dim. Rising shouts rang out of the Negro side and mixed with the sounds of bodies drumming the floor. The entry was blocked by white mill hands looking in. Randolph elbowed through the stinking crowd and into the heat and smoke. Razors winked in the lantern light, and four big men were squared off, beaded with sweat, bleeding, stunned with drink, their eyes showing that the mind had been turned off and something else was in charge. The mill manager looked around him and was afraid. Every Negro in the place—at least fifty of them—was arm-flapping, hollering, toe-walking, whooping drunk and ready for blood, anyone’s.
    He saw Byron standing against a side wall, staring and motionless. “Talk to them,” the mill manager shouted.
    His brother motioned with a hand to the center of the room, where fighters were circling, waiting for an opening, blinking their eyes free of sweat. “This is the result of my talk,” he called back. All four combatants were lumped and scuffed, as if they’d spent the whole night beating on one another.
    Byron pulled his pistol and fired a shot through the floor, calling out for them to stop. A tall wave of surprised cursing broke over the room, and one of the fighters swung his razor at the man across from him. The concussion of the pistol’s second shot bent every back in the saloon and the worker fell dead, a bullet hole through the bandanna on his forehead. Byron holstered the Colt automatic, walked over to where the mill hand was jerking facedown in the sawdust, and gathered a fistful of his triple-stitched shirt, dragging him to the front door like an overloaded suitcase. He looked back at a man who was folding up his razor and told him, “If it wasn’t for me you’d be holding your windpipe together right now.” A cloud of quiet settled over the building then. Even the white onlookers said nothing as he dragged the corpse out to the porch and set it on the splintery boards. “Who knows him?” he called out. No one said anything. The men seemed to be concentrating on the bottoms of the dead man’s boots.
    Then a saw-sharpener, the target of the dead man’s razor, wavered through the doorway. “He go by Griggs. His mamma work for the Palmers over in Shirmer.”
    “You owe me,” Byron said, reaching out an upturned palm. “What’s your name?”
    “They calls me Pink.” He gave up an ivory-handled weapon.
    Byron looked down at the body and then at his brother, who was standing speechless on the porch. “If you can find a sober carpenter, tell him to make a box to ship him in.” He walked off the porch toward his house, slogging through a lake of rainwater spread out like black fog alongside the commissary.
    The mill manager turned to Anthony Galleri, a small, dark man with a tarry mustache. “For God’s sake, cover him up.”
    “All I got’s a tablecloth,” he said, looking down at the body.
    “That’ll do. Please.”
    “Okay.” Galleri said, raising his shoulders. “But everybody seen him already.”
    Randolph returned to his house and sat on the bare porch steps, struggling with visions of the killing. He’d been there a full five minutes before sensing a