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Then he was hobbling through gum trees and a soybean field, over the levee, down into the willows along the mudflat, where he waded out through the backwater and the reeds and cattails and plunged into the current, his ankles raw and bleeding and still chained together.
By all odds he should have drowned, but later a group of West Feliciana sheriff's deputies with dogs would find a beached tangle of uprooted trees downstream, with a piece of denim speared on a root, and conclude that Aaron had not only grabbed onto the floating island of river trash but had wedged himself inside its branches like a muskrat and ridden the heart of the river seven miles without being seen before the half-submerged trees bumped gently onto a sandspit on the far side and let Aaron disembark into the free people's world as though he had been delivered by a specially chartered ferry.
Then he was back into the piney woods, hard-shell fundamentalist country in which he had been raised, that he took for granted would never change, where a white man's guarantees were understood, so much so that when he entered the barn of a black fanner that night and began clattering through the row of picks and mattocks and scythes and axes and malls hung on the wall to find a tool sharp and heavy enough to cut the chain on his ankles, he never expected to be challenged, much less threatened at gunpoint.
The black man was old, barefoot, shirtless, wearing only the overalls he had pulled on when he had heard Aaron break into his barn.
"What you doin', old man?" he said, and leveled the dogleg twenty gauge at Aaron's chest.
"It's fixing to storm. I come out of it." Aaron held his right wrist, with the manacle dangling from it, behind his back.
The lightning outside shook like candle flame through the cracks in the wall.
"You got a chain on your feet," the black man said.
"Cut it for me."
"Where you got out of?"
"They had me for something I ain't did. Cut the chain. I'll come back and give you some money."
"You the one they looking for, the one that killed that NAACP man, ain't you?"
"It's a goddamn lie they ruint my life over."
"Now, I ain't wanting to harm you . . . You stand back, I said you—"
Aaron tore the shotgun from the black man's hand and clutched his throat and squeezed until the black man's knees collapsed, then he wrapped him to a post with baling wire, tore the inside of his house apart, and looted his kitchen.
Five minutes later Aaron Crown disappeared into the howling storm in the black man's pickup truck, the shotgun and a cigar box filled with pennies and a bag of groceries on the seat beside him.
"Where you think he's headed?" I said.
"He got rid of the pickup in Baton Rouge late last night. A block away a Honda was stolen out of a filling station. Guess what? Crown's lawyer, the
one who pled him guilty, has decided to go to Europe for a few weeks."
"How about the judge who sent him up?"
"The state police are guarding his house." He watched my face. "What's on your mind?"
"If I were Aaron Crown, my anger would be directed at somebody closer to home."
"I guess you picked my brain, Dave."
"I don't like the drift here, Sheriff."
"The next governor is not going to get murdered in our jurisdiction."
"Not me. No, sir."
"If you don't want to be around the LaRoses personally, that's your choice. But you're going to have to coordinate the surveillance on their house . . . Look, the election's Tuesday. Then the sonofabitch will probably be governor. That's the way we've always gotten rid of people we don't like—we elect them to public office. Go with the flow."
"Wrong man."
"Karyn LaRose doesn't think so. She called last night and asked for you specifically . . . Could you be a little more detailed on y'all's history?"
"It all seems kind of distant, for some reason."
