MIRANDOLA, THE DUMB bastard, was saying something again. Gendron turned his back and walked away without answering. The son of a bitch always had something to say, at least to him.
“You, American, stop there!” It was Sergeant Ducharme, the Frog, bulging with yellow fat, a vicious grin on his mottled face. Gendron could smell Ducharme when he came close.
“Having a lover’s quarrel?” the Frog asked, looking from Gendron to the Italian. “What’s the big hurry?”
Gendron, the American Frenchman, spoke French with a harsh, unmusical accent. “No hurry, sir,” he said.
Ducharme mimicked his accent. “No hurry, sir. That’s surprising for an American. No hurry, sir. What’s the matter? Don’t you like Italian boys? I think they’re beautiful.” The Frog rolled his jaundiced eyeballs. “That’s a hint, Mirandola.”
Gendron wondered how long Mirandola would go on taking it from Ducharme. Mirandola wasn’t tough because he was a murderer. Shorter, broader, perhaps stronger than the American, his murder hadn’t been committed for any of the romantic reasons. No wife caught with a man between her legs. No sister’s honor upheld by the death of her defiler. It was none of that. Coming home late and drunk, he had become embroiled in a foolish argument with a bus conductor. There was a fight. Mirandola picked up the bus conductor by the heels, swung him several times to gain momentum, then split his skull against the base of a lamp post.
“All right, don’t talk,” Ducharme snickered. “You’ll say yes one of these days. I know you will. Right now, lovers, I have a treat for you. You’re the clean-up squad.” He pointed to the guillotine where the headless body lay. The blood, still dripping, had turned from red to black, and as the sun grew stronger, so did the buzz of the flies.
Cadiz, the executioner, hummed a lively tune as he worked.
“You’ll like this,” Ducharme said, waiting to pounce if they moved without a direct order.
“Get moving, lovers,” he roared.
On the punishment island the only things that came ready-made were for the officers and the guards. When something was needed the convicts made it themselves or they did without it. Now a coffin was needed; so said the regulations. One end of the stone death house was used to store poor-grade pine boards and a few tools. Sergeant Ducharme unlocked the heavy iron door, then he unslung his short Lebel rifle and watched them while they got what they needed to make Barbe-Bleue’s coffin.
Ducharme counted the boards they brought out and wrote the figure in his notebook. “That’ll do. Boards cost money.”
“It won’t be big enough, sir,” Mirandola pointed out. Every time Mirandola said “sir” it was like biting the head off a nail.
“Then you’ll just have to run him through the guillotine one more time,” Ducharme said. “Cadiz will take off the legs at no extra charge. He’s done it before. I don’t care what you do with the child raper. Bury the son of a whore and be quick about it. But you don’t get any more lumber than what you have. Men have been known to build boats.”
In the forests of French Guiana there was enough lumber to make coffins for everyone in South America, but in all the convict camps, and especially on the islands off the coast, every piece of lumber was counted. And not only lumber but barrels, wood or metal; anything that could float. Over the years, men had put out to sea in the strangest vessels, and no matter how carefully the authorities counted the lumber, the barrels, the corks, even the empty soup cans from the guards’ mess, the prisoners kept looking for new materials, new methods of escape.
Sergeant Ducharme liked to make it hard for everyone. No, he told Mirandola, who knew something about carpentry, it was against regulations to give him a pencil, even to mark the boards for sawing. “I don’t want you writing love letters to Gendron here,” the Sergeant said, talking about Gendron but looking at Mirandola’s heavily muscled thighs. The Italian was so broad and muscular that even the baggy convict’s uniform was a tight fit.
Ducharme leered at Gendron, thinking that the American was all right in a way, but there was something hard and cold in the man that made him unattractive. Mirandola was perhaps more dangerous, certainly more emotional, and, so thought Sergeant Ducharme, there was also a softness behind the dark, glowering face; just underneath the overdeveloped muscles.
Mirandola was using the point of a nail to mark the boards. “Can you follow that with the saw?” he asked Gendron. “If you can’t, I’ll do it.”
“I can saw a board,” Gendron said.
Sergeant Ducharme played with the short rifle. “Hey, Italian, you Italian,” he said. He dug the muzzle of the rifle into Mirandola’s thigh and said in a hoarse whisper: “Hey, maybe I’ll let you have the pencil after all. I think Gendron is sweet as anisette.” Ducharme, the Frog, made smacking sounds with his wide mouth. “Sweet and juicy, what do you have to say, Italian?”
Mirandola didn’t answer.
“He’s shy,” the sergeant said to Gendron, making no effort not to be overheard by the executioner who was wiping blood from the blade of the guillotine with an oily rag. The Arab finished wiping the blade and cranked it up just far enough so that he might inspect the edge.
“I said the Italian is shy,” Sergeant Ducharme said. “What do you think, American?” When Gendron didn’t answer, the Sergeant reached out and touched him in the rectum with the muzzle of the rifle.
Gendron stood up slowly with the saw in his hand. It wasn’t a very good saw for sawing wood—the teeth were worn and the edge was more like that of a knife. A quick slash across a man’s throat and he would die as surely, if not as quickly, as under the blade of the guillotine.
Ducharme knew that. He moved back, fingers fumbling at the bolt of the rifle. But he didn’t say anything.
“Did you want me, sir?” Gendron asked. “I didn’t hear you because I was sawing a board.”
“Don’t get smart with me,” Ducharme warned him. “You Goddamned American. Get back to work, both of you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Gendron said.
Sergeant Ducharme started again a moment later, this time on Mirandola. Nature had given Ducharme sallow skin; jaundice, jungle fever and bad brandy and had turned it yellow, bright yellow, banana-yellow. His face was broader than the thickest part of his neck; that wide, flat face, the bulging eyes, the almost lipless mouth made him look like a frog. Some men are said to look like bears, bulls, pigs, but that is simply a way of speaking or writing. Mostly, men look like men or old men, and not animals or reptiles. It wasn’t that way with Sergeant Ducharme. He was a frog. Everything about him was frog, even his hands which were broad, yellow like his face, and mottled with dark spots. More than anyone else, Ducharme knew he was a two hundred and forty pound frog.
It was still before seven o’clock, but the sun was blistering hot. All the smells of the punishment island grew strong. The island didn’t smell of death but of things dying, or of things that refused to go on living. Sweat wrapped Ducharme in a sheet of wetness, and he moved back into the shade of the death house.
Making the coffin was easy. Making a coffin that looked like a long and poorly made wooden box was easy. It began to take shape and it might have been something to ship brooms or shovels in. Gendron sawed the boards and passed the pieces that were ready to the Italian. Gendron worked steadily without hurry, the way he did everything. Silence with him wasn’t restraint, the result of discipline. It wasn’t even habit; it was the way he was.
Mirandola’s restraint was what the American’s was not. The Italian, the French Italian, was neither a silent nor a melancholy man. At night, in at least some of his dreams, he was the man he always was—careless, good-natured, violent without lasting rancor. He slept well but every morning was surprised to find himself in French Guiana.
“That’s the last piece,” Gendron said.
“Hurry, lovers,” Ducharme said from the shade of the death house. “It doesn’t have to float.”
“I will kill that man,” Mirandola muttered.
“Then do it,” Gendron rasped. “Don’t tell me.” Mirandola was making the lid for the coffin. It was crude, like the rest of it: two long boards held together by three cross-pieces. Mirandola, after he tried to fit the lid, took the saw from Gendron and shaved off some wood. It was a better fit after that. “Ready, sir,” Gendron said.
“When will you be ready, Italian?” the Frog sneered. “When can we name the day?”
Ducharme took a flat brown bottle of bad Colombian brandy from inside his tunic and, after looking around, drank from it. He belched and grinned as the raw liquor burned its way through his gross body. “Box the bastard,” he said.
They turned toward the guillotine. “Wait a minute,” Ducharme said. He dug into his pants pocket and found a coin. “You’ll toss for it. Heads—Mirandola. Tails—the American.”
The executioner, enjoying the joke, stopped his work to watch.
The coin, tossed high, glittered in the sun. Ducharme caught it easily before it hit the ground. The outcome made no difference to the two men, but Sergeant Ducharme’s enormous belly shook with laughter. He stopped laughing. “You don’t even get it,” he said. “Heads—Tails? You don’t get it.”
At first, he was annoyed because they refused to laugh, even to grin. Then, after another drink, his rage was quiet once more. One of these days he would go up the tough Italian’s ass like an express in the Metro. Because he was a sergeant of Colonial Police he could have the Italian any time he wanted him, out of sight of the officers naturally, but he didn’t want the Italian that way: He wanted the Italian to say he liked it and wanted more.
The brandy convinced the human frog that there would be such a moment. He felt good about it. “Make it quick,” he said.
The Arab executioner had finished with his beloved guillotine and was trundling the portable death machine across the courtyard toward the shed with the galvanized-iron roof where it was kept between executions. The Arab made a joke about coming back for the basket in which Barbe-Bleue’s head now lay, explaining to Gendron and Mirandola while he winked at Ducharme that he would like to let them keep the basket, so that their hands didn’t have to touch the grinning head, but, really, the basket was part of his equipment, and he must have it.
Cadiz dumped out the head and it rolled a bit until Gendron stopped it with his bare foot. Mirandola looked at Gendron’s foot, then at Gendron’s face. Gendron picked up the head—the eyes were open—and placed it in the coffin. “You take the legs,” he said.
Ducharme heard it. “See, lover, he’s considerate, the American is. That’s a good sign, but make him put it in writing.”
“Come on,” Gendron said to Mirandola. “We don’t eat until this is over.”
Mirandola was looking at the Sergeant.
“To hell with you, friend,” Gendron said. Now that the blood had stopped flowing the slice made by the blade of the guillotine looked neat, clean, really not at all frightening. There were the flies but then there were always the flies in Guiana. Most of the flies were investigating the flood that had flowed from the body; not many had any interest in the body itself, not even in the great wound that had been made just below the Adam’s apple. The nerve cables showed yellow-white, cut off neatly just as a grouping of cables might be cut by an electrician or a bank robber.
Gendron was handling the corpse roughly, dragging the thing by the legs. Mirandola was still looking at Ducharme, and he shuddered but not because of the corpse. “I’ll help you,” he said.
There was no need; Gendron had the body most of the way into the coffin. Gendron let the Italian help. The corpse smelled bad even with all the other foul smells on the island. A shudder ran through the Italian’s powerful body. Gendron thought he looked like a prize bull trying to shake off some painful disease. Mirandola said something in Marseilles slang. Gendron didn’t understand the words.
“Let go,” Gendron said.
Mirandola looked surprised.
“Let go the wrists,” Gendron said.
“Oh, yes,” Mirandola agreed, looking from Gendron to the thing in the box.
Taking hold of the wrists, Gendron leaned over and settled Barbe-Bleue for the long sleep. Then he put the lid in place and began to drive in the nails. There was no regulation about the number of nails, so Gendron used four on each side, two at top and bottom.
Sergeant Ducharme heaved himself off his wide backside and waddled over to have a closer look. There was nothing he could do to the coffin except kick it. He tried to think of something funny and became angry when he could not. It was time for another drink, but he couldn’t risk it out in the open.
They hoisted the coffin and carried it to the convict cemetery, a railed-off piece of swampy ground near the sea. No commercial cemetery owner would have chosen such a place to bury the dead. On St. Joseph Island it suited its purpose quite well; slowly during the dry months, rapidly during the rainy season, the coffins containing the dead convicts sank through the black mud, making room for other coffins. For close to ninety years they had been putting thin, unpainted coffins into the piece of swampland and it looked as if they could keep on doing it forever.
Their feet squelched in the mud. Ducharme watched them from dry ground. A heavy smell rose up as their bare feet sank into the wet dark mud. No markers were used and though another convict had been buried there only two days before, there was no sign of the grave. Swamp grass and weeds grew everywhere and the marks of a grave never lasted more than a few hours. A coffin, if left on the surface, would sink under its own weight, but that was against regulations.
Digging the grave wasn’t easy. It was easy to get it started; hard when the water caused the sides of the grave to fall in. The coffin was about a foot high; the coffin had to be covered; and that was as deep as they dug. They had to move fast to get the coffin into the hole before enough water trickled in to make it float. Water came in anyway and they pressed down on the coffin and held it until the water seeped in through the cracks.
“Next time don’t make it so tight,” Ducharme called out. “I could have told you that, lovers, but you’re here to learn, aren’t you?”
They began to cover the top of the coffin with mud. When the shovels struck the lid of the coffin there was a hollow booming sound.
Ducharme corked the bottle and put it away. “Hurry, lovers, the day is just beginning.”