They take Amos Hicks’s car. Amos drives, and the tall man sits shotgun. Buddy sits in the middle of the backseat, between his father and Gabe. The windows are down, but the breeze is about as refreshing as an electric dryer vent. Trees and fields flash by them in the darkness as they speed down an empty highway, all of them silent aside from Buddy, who starts to speak, but is hushed by a swat from his father.
After some time, the car slows down. Amos Hicks lowers his head to squint through the windshield, then turns onto a dirt road so bumpy that Gabe has to hold the door handle to keep himself in place. They lurch along through low scrub trees into wetland, the air dank with the scent of peat; Gabe breathes it in deeply, as if it were quenching a pulmonary thirst.
After a couple of miles, they reach a clearing at the edge of a large lake. Gabe can’t see the water as much as he can sense the openness, the vast, dark expanse beyond the clearing. The car stops, and the familiar marshy smell is replaced by a sickening odor, sweetly rancid, overwhelming. Like death. Gabe pulls his shirt up over his nose and peers through the windshield, trying to figure out just where they are.
In the beam of the headlights, he can see a makeshift lean-to built against the trunk of a cypress tree, its limbs swathed in gray cascading curls of Spanish moss. Nearby, stumps have been arranged in a circle around an unlit fire pit, where empty beer bottles lie strewn in the dirt. A mirror hangs on the trunk of a second tree, and it is beneath this tree that Gabe locates the source of the smell.
It is hard, at first, for him to know what he is looking at; it looks like a table covered by some sort of cloth. But the cloth is red, meaty, dripping, not cloth at all, he understands, but the flesh of a carcass. A human, he thinks, and he thinks of black men hanging from trees, of Moses Beauparlant and Frix Mobley, who went missing last year when the FBI came into town and turned up dead a few weeks later. The tall man whistles. “One big fucking gator, he got,” he says. Gabe blinks; a gator, of course.
“There’s Pope,” Amos says, gesturing out through the windshield as Pope Crowley emerges from the shadows on the other side of the lean-to. He is unshaven, shirtless beneath his suspenders. He dries his hands on his pants, then salutes into the beam of headlights, squinting as he ambles toward the car.
“Smell’s gonna make me puke,” Buddy mutters. His father jabs him quiet.
Pope leans into Amos’s open window. “Thought y’all might of forgot where my camp was at,” he says. His lower lip is fat with dip.
“Nah,” Amos says. “Road’s the worse for wear, though.”
“The way I like it.” Pope spits into the dirt, a brown river.
“Fine gator you got,” the tall man says, leaning over in his seat toward the driver’s side window.
Pope looks over his shoulder at what remains of the alligator. “Yeah. Got me that this afternoon. Just done skinning it.”
“Reckon you should salt it?” the tall man asks. “Time you get back here may be too late.”
“Pfff.” Pope sticks his head back through the window, looks at the tall man dismissively. “I waited a day before between skinning and salting. And wouldn’t miss this nigger fry for all the gator skins on God’s green earth.” He shifts his dip. “Can’t imagine you would, neither.”
“I’d have preferred to have killed him myself,” the tall man responds, his words slow, fluid. Pope regards him, nods. Then his eyes travel to the backseat. “What all’re they doing here?” he asks, of the boys. His gaze comes to rest on Gabe. “We got a problem with ol’ Polly agin?”
“Apple falls far, turns out,” Mr. Cunningham says. “Boy wanted to come ’long and see the show. Ol’ man wouldn’t take him.”
“That right,” Pope says. He stands up, spits again, then opens the car’s back door, where Gabe is sitting. “Move it,” he says, and Gabe slides across the seat as close to Buddy as he can.
Pope lowers himself into the car, and Gabe smells the punky blend of tobacco, beer, and body. Clammy nausea washes over him.
Amos Hicks turns the car around, and they bump back down the rutted lane to the state road. Once there, they drive straight and fast into the shaft of the headlights. Pope Crowley is humming, his bare skin slick against Gabe’s arm. Gabe can feel his foot falling asleep, but he doesn’t dare move it from the foot well, where it is wedged next to Pope’s. He just stares out the windshield, trying not to think.
“Well look-y, look-y, look-y here!” Mr. Cunningham’s voice is loud in the men’s long silence. “Slow on down, Amos,” Mr. Cunningham says, reaching forward to touch Amos on the shoulder.
Amos slows; a mule and wagon, pulled over on the edge of the road, gradually appear in the headlights. An old man sits on the lowered wagon bed, squinting into the lights. He stands, and raises his hand.
“Pull on over,” Mr. Cunningham instructs.
“Let’s just keep on,” the tall man growls in the front. “Ain’t got no time for this.”
“Pull on over, Amos,” Mr. Cunningham says again. “Let’s see what’s all up here.”
Amos pulls off the road and stops the car a few yards behind the wagon. Mr. Cunningham opens his door, puts one foot on the ground before turning back inside. “You with me, Pope?” he asks.
Pope nods, and the two men climb out of the car.