SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Twenty-Four

142 Twenty-Four The light of a fat moon drifted down through the pines and I was lost in the sweating effort of pushing the motorcycle along a road that seemed to become softer as I went, and I was at the edge of the pathetic collection of plank shacks and rough cabins before I knew they were there. It was some sort of tiny village, a shantytown, abandoned and rotting there in the damp lowlands. The cabins were scattered along both sides of a wide, flat lane, a sort of common front yard carpeted with pine needles and twigs. But even through the carpet I could see old tire tracks, the marks of wide, heavy cars that had pulled up between the houses. Off to one side at the edge of one of the buildings a round, metal table and some chairs, all rusted into a uniform stage of decay, leaned at odd angles and cast soft shadows in the warm light of the moon. The shacks sat like fat sleeping storks, crazily balanced on pilings that kept their floors up off the damp earth. Some of the pilings were stone, some were heavy pieces of wood, and some were wired-together collections of things I didn’t recognize, junk gathered together to support the small, leaning hovels with their sagging porches and gapped walls. The dog came out of nowhere. Honest to God, I never saw him. He was suddenly there, on the other side of the Triumph, his angry barking splitting the night and the moonlight. I shoved the bike over toward him and he yelped, jumping backwards. I dived under the nearest shack. The earth under the floor was soft and ran up toward the far corner of the shack. There were some old planks and pieces of wood under there and I grabbed one, dragging it with me as I crawled, 143 finally squeezing myself into a back corner. I twisted around and held the plank in front of me. But the dog didn’t follow me under the floor, at least not very far. He was growling now, his bulk in silhouette just under the edge of the shack. He had me trapped. He was in no hurry. It didn’t matter. If he could wait, I could wait. It was cool and quiet under there and, in spite of one rat that I saw clearly, I fell asleep. The singing awakened me. I crawled from underneath the house and out into the dim light and the fog and looked for the dog, who apparently had gone on to other chases. The singing came from the house next door, a slightly larger building than the others squatting in the gray dawn. The building was a church, clapboard, unpainted, pale in the early light, with no panes in some of the windows. A rickety wooden cross was nailed and wired, leaning, at the front of the roof. Lord, a truly joyous building. And the incredible singing—the rocking, ecstatic singing— seemed to raise the dust from the sagging front porch and its broken railing. I sneaked across the porch to get a look inside. I was hypnotized , my mind locked blindly to the sound of a hundred swaying black people singing praises to the Lord, dancing words of faith and happiness. The sound of that singing is still in my mind, and it may have been the most beautiful music I have ever heard. I was very quiet, careful not to make the boards creak. “I think you be out of gas, boy.” I turned and leaped off the porch, but it was too late. The largest man I had ever seen, of any color, was holding up my bike. He held it out in front of him, straight out and off the ground, his thick arms not even quivering. He was wearing bib overalls and no shirt and 144 his arms jutted out from under the suspenders like thick pipes, just came down and joined the backs of his hands in a knot of muscle that didn’t seem capable of bending. His skin was the color of milk chocolate melted under the warm light of a southern sun in winter. He had a round face and a bald head and his jaw seemed to meld into his shoulders with no discernable thing that could be called a neck. His trunk from...