The Wanderer

Bagong hung grinned, but then his face grew grave and he said softly and intently: “Pagi dan ayer surut!”

Morning and the low tide! Truly, he could hardly bear to contemplate the waiting for them. He had long ago decided what wreck he would try for then: the near-legendary Spanish treasure ship Lobo de Oro. The Tiger of the Mud would try conclusions with the Wolf of Gold!

Barbara Katz’s first reaction to the double-barreled shotgun muzzle poked through the driver’s window near Benjy’s hunched shoulders was that here was just one more weary bit of the weird flotsam and scour they’d been driving and skidding over, past, through, and around for the first three hours of daylight. Sandy soil — lots of that; leaves and fronds and matted sedge; uprooted bushes and small trees; ruined cars and farm machinery; dead animals and — Don’t stop! — people; wire — that could be devilish, especially the barbed stuff; they’d had to lay boards across one dragged and leveled fence to get the Rolls over without puncturing the tires; sodden flowers plastered here and there, including a remarkable number of scarlet poinsettias; houses and barns, both fragmentary and almost intact — they’d had to find a looping sideroad to get around one monstrous cluster of those. Everything steaming in the heat, as if a swiftly dissipating fog were coming out of the ground. Of course there had been live people, too, though not so very many of those, and they either acting stunned and helpless or else going very much about their business, such as shoring up houses on high ground, hoisting planks into big trees, or going places in cars or on horses. Once a small airplane had passed overhead, its motor sounding loud and self-important.

Barbara’s second reaction to the shotgun muzzle was that here was the nasty emergency she’d been expecting all along, and thank God she had the short-barreled .38 revolver in her right hand under her thigh next to old KKK, and if she had to, she hoped she could whip it up and start shooting through the window — though if that just got Benjy and Hester blown to bits in the front seat it wasn’t going to do any good, even though the motor of the Rolls was idling softly. If they just had a few seconds’ start -

Her third reaction to the shotgun muzzle was to see the fresh rust on it and wonder if its cartridges were wet, in which case she might hold the balance of power and needn’t actually fire, only threaten — but that was guessing.

The voice from behind the shotgun had a buzz in it that was lazy yet menacing, rather like the horsefly going back and forth against the inside of the sedan’s rear window.

“This is an inspection point We’re collecting toll. What were you doing—”

“We were only changing a tire,” Barbara answered sharply.

“—back in Trilby?” the buzzing voice finished.

So that, she thought, was the name of the miserable smashed village through whose crookedly choked main street they’d zigzagged twenty minutes ago. They should have called it Svengali!

Aloud she said hurriedly, “We were just coming through from Palm Beach. We can pay the toll,” but as she fumbled with her left hand at the black bag on her lap, two thick-corded sun-reddened arms came through the window and took the bag and one horny hand shifted to her chin and tilted her face up, and for a second she glared into a thin, unshaven, fish-eyed face and fought down the impulse to put a bullet in it or bite the hand, and then the arms went away with the bag, and the voice behind them said: “Hey, the old geezer must be one of them Palm Beach millionaires. Lots of paper money here.”

Barbara said, “He’s very sick. He’s in a coma. We’re trying to get him to—”

“One of them Yankee millionaires,” the buzzing voice cut her off, “who come down here and lord it and pay nigras white man’s wages and then run like chickens when the Lord tests us. We’ll take the money for the Jubilee Fund and we’ll take the two nigra gals — they’ll make the hill a little more comfortable. Get out, you two, quick! — or I’ll blow a hole in your high-yellow chauffeur.”

And he rested the muzzle of his gun against Benjy’s side.

This is it, Barbara thought, but as she started to bring up the revolver she felt old KKK’s clawlike fingers grip her hand on the gun with startling strength, holding it down. He cleared his throat hawkingly and next he was speaking in a voice louder than she’d ever heard from him, a voice that rasped imperiously.

“Did I hear some goddam turkey-necked cracker questioning the color of my son Benjy? I thought by your words you were Southrons out there, not mud-eating gophers!”

There was a murmuring outside, angry but uncertain. The gun pulled away from Benjy. Then old KKK, his features creasing like an old vulture’s as he stared at the men in overalls, intoned portentously, “When will the Black Night end?”

Slowly, almost as though it were drawn out of him against his will, the one with the buzzing voice replied, “With the dawn of the White Jubilee.”