24

Chase Tully’s body blocks the light coming through the doorway. And the first thing that pops into my head is that he is bone dry. However he got himself here, it wasn’t by wading through the water or swimming through the pond. The second thing is, I suddenly remember bringing him to this place once before, years ago, when I was maybe nine or ten. How could I have forgotten that?

Chase’s face is in shadow. I can’t read his expression.

I am having those Keatsian fears of ceasing to be—again. My heart is thudding in my ears. If Chase is here, so is the Klan. Or they are going to be real soon.

He looks from me to Gator and back to me again. He’s wearing his leather jacket, singed sleeves, scorch marks, and all. I stand up so fast, I almost lose my balance. “So help me, if you’ve brought the Klan here”—I point to the ax by the potbellied stove—“I’ll hack you into little pieces and throw them to the alligators.”

Chase steps inside the door where I can see him a little better. He gives me his lazy grin.

I look over at Gator. I’m waiting for him to do something, wrestle Chase to the floor so we can tie him up. Maybe bash his brains in. But Gator just goes back to his drawing. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I tell him.

Chase slips his hands into his jacket pockets, walks over to the table, and studies the drawing Gator is working on. He looks over at me, then back at the picture. “Good likeness,” he says. “You really captured her ornery side.”

“Gator!” I shout.

“Dove’s right,” Chase says. “They’re not far behind me. We gotta go.”

We? Like comets roaring through space, a hundred questions zip through my mind. But there’s no time to ask. Chase and Gator are out the door and heading down to the end of the dock. I’m right behind them. Tied to the post is the flat-bottomed boat I couldn’t find earlier. More questions. Still no time. We climb into the boat. Gator takes the pole.

Chase shows Gator which way to go. I have no idea where he is taking us. Best I can tell from the little daylight left is that we are heading northwest. I have never gone farther than the shack before. For all I know, the Klan will be waiting for us when we get to wherever we’re going. So why isn’t Gator saying anything?

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I say to Chase’s back. It’s the middle of May and a regular steam bath out here, but he hasn’t taken off that jacket.

“Me what?” he says over his shoulder.

“You’re the one who warned Gator what was going on, so he’d go into hiding. And you told him about the Klan going over to Eli’s place last night. Didn’t you?”

He doesn’t say anything. Neither does Gator. They don’t have to. I know I’m right.

It makes sense now, Chase not helping Gator the day Willy and Earl beat him up. Not flat out calling Willy a liar when he spread those rumors about our barn. Going with his dad to the Klan meeting. It all adds up. He couldn’t let on to his dad and Willy and the others. If they got suspicious—if they figured it out—Chase wouldn’t have been able to help Gator and the others because he’d probably be in a full body cast by now—or worse.

“Where’d you find this boat?” I ask.

“Where I hid it.”

“Hid it? Why?”

He swats at a mosquito on his neck. “A couple years back I figured if I didn’t hide it, somebody might come along and take it.” He angles his body so he can look at my face. “After you showed me this place, I used to come out here sometimes, do a little fishing.”

“How’d you know to look for me here?”

Chase just smiles and shakes his head, like he expects I should know the answer to that. He turns his back to me again.

After a while we come to a small inlet. The bank slopes up to woods. Chase tells Gator to steer the boat into the inlet. Between the two of them, they carry it up to the woods and hide it behind some bushes. We follow Chase along a narrow, overgrown path. He takes off his jacket and ties the sleeves around his waist.

After a short time we come to an open field. The sun has gone down, and the sky is a dusty pink. Across the meadow are orange trees. I know this place. We are at the far end of the Tully property.

“Are you crazy?” I say.

“This is the last place they’ll look for you,” Chase says. “We’ll wait until it’s dark. Then we’ll head back toward the main house.” He looks over at Gator. “There’s a smokehouse nobody’s used for years. You can stay in there until I figure out how to get you out of the county. Right now they’ve got roadblocks up all over the place. They think you kidnapped Dove. At least that’s what Travis Waite’s got ’em thinking.”

“Does my dad think that too?” I ask.

“I haven’t seen your dad since Friday night,” Chase says.

“If they’ve got the hounds out looking for Gator,” I say, “they’ll track him here to the smokehouse.”

“The hounds only took them as far as the edge of the swamp,” Chase says. “They lost the scent.”

“You were with them?”

“It was the best way for me to find out if they were on your trail, so I could warn you. As soon as I saw them go into the swamp, I knew where you were.”

We wait until the sky turns violet gray. Chase leads us along the edge of the woods to the groves nearest the Tully house. We stay among the orange trees until we aren’t far from the barn. “That’s it over there,” Chase says to Gator. He points to a wooden building with a smokestack on top. “The door’s not locked.”

Gator tails after Chase. I stay close behind them both, keeping an eye out in case anybody is following us.

The smokehouse has a dirt floor. Even though it has been years since this place was used to smoke meat and fish, the pungent odor of hickory smoke still clings to the blackened walls.

“Dove and me will get you some food and water,” Chase tells Gator. “And a blanket.”

Gator looks around, then sits down on the damp dirt. “Thanks.”

“I should stay here too,” I tell Chase. “If they’ve been out looking for me, what are your mom and dad going to think, me showing up at your place?”

“Nobody’s home. My dad’s out searching for Gator with the others. Mom’s been up in Tallahassee all week visiting Aunt May.”

So nobody is more surprised than Chase when we are standing in the kitchen making peanut butter sandwiches for Gator and Jacob Tully comes barreling through the back door like an angry stallion busting out of his corral.

He looks from Chase to me, then turns back to Chase. “Where is he?” he barks.

Chase gives his father a blank stare. “Who?”

In the distance I hear the howls of the bloodhounds. They are on to the scent. Gator’s scent. The blasting horns aren’t far behind. I run out the back door in time to see Gator tearing out of the smokehouse. The men on foot, the ones with the dogs, are only about a hundred yards behind him. A parade of pickups and cars winds through the Tullys’ backyard. There don’t seem to be as many as there were over at Eli’s place. But I don’t get my hopes up. It’s possible that only some of the men have come back with Jacob. The others might still be out there, looking someplace else.

Travis, Jimmy, Moss, and Spudder are in the lead like some twisted version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They act like they’re on some sacred mission. And they are the most terrifying sight I have ever set eyes on.

They surround the smokehouse and shine their lights toward the woods, where I see two of the dogs lunge at Gator just as he gets to the first line of trees.

“Chase!” I yell. But he doesn’t come. I am scared to death for Gator. He has got to be thinking Chase led him into a trap, that he lied to us. I know that’s what’s going through Gator’s mind, because that’s what’s going through mine. I only hope he doesn’t think I was in on it.

I slam open the back door and find Jacob Tully standing over his son. Chase lies on the floor with a bleeding lip.

“You better make up your mind whose side you’re on, boy. And fast!” Jacob pounds his fist into the palm of his other hand. Pounds and pounds and keeps on pounding. I expect him to start in on Chase’s face again, but he doesn’t. When he realizes I’m there, he barks, “Your daddy is looking all over creation for you.” And bam! he’s out the door.

“They’ve got Gator,” I tell Chase.

I run cold water onto a dish towel and try to wash the blood from his mouth. But he pushes my hand away.

“I know where they’ll take him,” he says. He staggers to his feet. We get to the back porch as the last truck is pulling out of the yard. Chase heads straight for the T-bird. I climb in the passenger side.

“Stay here,” he says.

I shake my head. “No.”

“Dove, this is too dangerous. You have no idea what they’re—”

“I’m not getting out of this car.” I reach over and turn the key in the ignition. “We’re wasting time.”

“Promise me you’ll stay in the car, then, when we get there.”

I don’t say anything. I’m thinking about how I broke my last promise, after Chase made me swear not to tell anybody about Travis killing Gus.

“Promise, or I’m going to pull you right out of this car and lock you in the smokehouse.”

“Okay, okay.” I mumble. “Just let’s go.”

I don’t have to ask Chase where we’re going. I already know. To the place where the Klan holds its meetings. To Spudder Rhodes’s house.

“Why did your dad come back to the house?” I ask. “Did the hounds lead him and the others there?”

Chase shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe he got suspicious when I suddenly disappeared from the search. He knows you and I are friends.” He looks over at me. “We are, aren’t we? Still friends?”

I swallow hard. “Course we are,” I whisper. It is on the tip of my tongue to say we’re more than that. But I don’t.

“Maybe he came back for some other reason and saw my car there. Or maybe he’s suspected for a while that I wasn’t exactly Klan material and he’s been keeping an eye on me. Who knows how his mind works? I sure as hell don’t.”

“How long you been pretending to be in the Klan?”

Chase draws a deep breath and lets it out. “My dad started dragging me along last year. Not to all the meetings. Just a few—maybe three.”

“And you been helping Gator and the others all this time?”

“Look . . . Dove . . . I don’t want to spoil this Chase the Hero thing you got going on in your head at the moment, but up until picking season started last March there wasn’t any need to help Gator or anybody else. The Klan’s never been all that active around here, not since back in the twenties. Most of the men you saw at the meeting last week aren’t even members. They’re just worried about what’s been going on with the pickers—afraid there’s going to be some kind of uprising or something.”

We turn down the dirt road leading to Spudder’s house. “You remember a couple years ago, when those colored kids wanted to go to that all-white high school in Little Rock?”

“You mean when President Eisenhower had to send in the National Guard to protect them?”

Chase nods. “Some of the folks around here are worried that the government is going to try to run their lives—use the military to make them do things they don’t want to, like letting colored kids go to white schools. The Klan’s been cashing in on those worries, and not just around here.

“Then Gator started organizing the pickers, telling them about strikes and slowdowns and the like. Travis, he’s been out to get Gator for years. He’s always hated that he couldn’t control him. The slowdowns just gave Travis an excuse to go after him. He got his friends, some of them Klan members like himself, to back him up.”

We are heading across the meadow to the meeting place I found over a week ago. “It sounds to me like this is Travis’s personal vigilante group.”

“Yeah, well. He’s the one who’s been stirring ’em up, that’s for sure.”

We are driving down the narrow road that leads to where the Klan meets. Suddenly the glaring lightbulbs from the cross flash on. Chase doesn’t pull into the lot where the other pickups and cars are parked. Instead he leaves the T-bird by the side of the road, about two hundred yards from the cinder-block building and trailer where all the men have gathered. Gator isn’t anywhere in sight.

“What are they going to do to him?”

Chase presses both hands against the dashboard and stares straight ahead. “Anything they can think of,” he says.

“How come they’re not wearing their robes and hoods?”

“I’ve never seen them wear robes,” he says. “Maybe they don’t even have them. But if they do and they’re not wearing them, that’s a bad sign.”

“Why is that a bad sign?”

“If they’re just going to rough somebody up, they’d probably wear robes. That way, if the person tries to press charges, he can’t say for sure he recognized any faces.”

“He could say he recognized the voices.”

“Doesn’t hold up in court. That’s the point.” Chase has his back to me. He’s watching the men across the road.

“They wouldn’t kill Gator, would they? They wouldn’t go that far?” My heart has started to pound like a basketball someone is driving down the court at full speed. Billy Tyler’s horrible picture of the colored man hanging from the tree, eyes bulging, staring at nothing, has crept back into my head. I am trying not to panic.

Chase shrugs. “All I know is they were planning to make an example of him, send a message to the other pickers.”

I dig my fingers into his arm. “We can’t let anything happen to Gator. We’ve got to do something.”

“We aren’t doing anything,” he says. Chase unlocks my shaking hand from his arm and presses it against his cheek, then kisses my sweaty palm. “You promised to stay in the car, remember?” He opens his door and climbs out. His jacket is still around his waist. He unties it, and the way he puts it back on, it’s as if he’s getting ready for battle. He pulls the keys from the ignition and tosses them to me. They land in my lap. “If things turn ugly, get out of here. Fast!”

I don’t have a chance to ask him what qualifies as “ugly” because he is already crossing the road, heading toward the woods on the outskirts of the open field. It looks as if he is planning to circle around behind the cinder-block building.

Across the way the men have gathered outside. They seem to be waiting for something. Some have shotguns. Some are holding rifles.

A few minutes later the door flies open. Travis Waite and Spudder Rhodes step outside. They have Gator between them. They stand on the steps, looking out over all the faces. Best I can tell from this distance, Gator’s hands are tied behind his back. He has to be scared out of his wits. My whole body is shaking now. I can barely take a breath, my chest is so tight.

The men fall back, leaving a narrow opening for the three of them to walk through. Spudder and Travis shove Gator along in front of them. Some of the men stab burning cigarettes at Gator, in his face, on his head, his arms. Gator kicks at their legs, swings his broad shoulders, and throws his body at them. He knocks a few of the men off balance.

I send frantic mental messages to Chase. Hurry. Hurry. You have to stop this. I look for him, but I don’t see him.

I can’t just sit here and do nothing. I made Rosemary a promise to look out for Gator. My promise to Chase to stay put doesn’t seem real important right now. I get out of the car and make my way across the road to the field, to where the glaring cross is so bright it almost looks like daylight out, to where these men are burning Gator with their cigarettes. And I don’t doubt for a minute that this is just the beginning.