Unwritten Laws 01(15)

Sonny hadn’t seen the Bone Tree since 1966, but he remembered it all too well. The colossal cypress reared up out of the swamp like the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. But this was no paradise. More than a dozen men Sonny knew of had died under that tree, and Frank claimed the real number was over a hundred. He’d shown Sonny hand-forged chain links embedded in the bark that dated back to slave times. Runaway slaves had supposedly been hanged or hobbled beneath this cypress. High inside the hollow trunk, Sonny had seen carvings Frank swore were Indian sign, from before the French came. Sonny didn’t need those facts to make him wary of this place. The things he’d seen done to men beneath the Bone Tree were seared into his brain. He was half tempted to carry Jimmy Revels to Baton Rouge and put him on a northbound bus rather than make the journey out of this snake-infested swamp alone.

“Glenn don’t know how easy he’s got it,” Sonny muttered. “Compared to this, dumping Luther’s car in the Jericho Hole is nothing.”

A heavy swish in the water to his right made Sonny’s sphincter lock up. He knew that sound. Sure enough, when he squinted, he saw the armored back of an alligator swimming alongside the boat. When his heartbeat finally slowed to normal, Sonny looked forward and saw the Bone Tree towering a hundred feet above him, its base as broad as a building blocking his path. The fibrous bark looked like the leathery skin of some great creature, not dead but only sleeping, and high above, its branches joined the crowns of other trees to form a thin canopy. Killing the motor, Sonny let the johnboat glide up onto the edge of the hummock that surrounded the massive trunk. A narrow, A-shaped crack of utter darkness offered entrance to the hollow tree, and Sonny wondered what lay inside that cavelike space on this night. Soon Jimmy Revels could tell him.

Sonny stood and pointed his pistol down at Revels’s bloody form. “Get out,” he said, kicking Revels’s foot.

The nigger didn’t move.

“Come on, boy!” Sonny’s voice sounded higher and thinner than he’d intended. “I know you’re playing possum.”

Revels remained still.

“By God, I’ll shoot you where you lay.” Sonny was lying. The slug from his .357 Magnum would likely go through Revels and punch a hole in the bottom of the boat. He didn’t plan to spend the night surrounded by water moccasins and alligators. Hell, there were bears in this swamp.

“What difference does it make?” Revels moaned at last.

“Get up, damn you! Or I’ll shoot you in the pelvis. That’ll make a difference, I promise you.”

“Tell me where my sister is. Then I’ll get up.”

“I don’t know!”

“But ya’ll ain’t done nothin’ else to her?”

“No!” Sonny yelled, blocking out the memory of all they’d done to Viola Turner. He couldn’t bear to think about that. “She got away, I told you.” He squinted at his watch in the dim light. “You saw it happen. She’s probably with Dr. Cage right now, all patched up and pretty again.”

“That’s impossible, after what ya’ll did.”

“Move, boy!”

Revels struggled to his knees, then crawled out of the rocking boat and collapsed in the grass. He was lying squarely in a deer path.

Sonny picked up his flashlight, climbed out of the boat, and kicked Revels’s thigh. “Get your ass up, damn it!”

“Why for? You just gonna shoot me and roll me into the water so the gators get me. Go on and do it.”

“That’s not what I’m gonna do. I’m just leaving you out here for a couple of days, till things cool down.”

“Leave me, then.”

“Not here. Inside the tree.”

Revels rolled over and looked at the gigantic cypress. “In the tree? What you mean?”

“This tree is hollow. I want you to get inside it.”

Swollen, bloodshot eyes looked up into Sonny’s flashlight beam. “You lyin’, man.”

“I ain’t. The deer get up in there and sleep sometimes, ’cause it’s dry. See that crack there? They call this the Bone Tree, ’cause wounded deer crawl up in there to die. You’ll get up in there, too, if you want to live. This is gonna be your jail for a couple of days.”

Revels stared at the black opening for half a minute, thinking. Then he rolled over and slowly got to his feet. Sonny prodded him in the back, pushing him up the hummock, toward the crack in the fibrous wall of wood. Only eighteen inches wide, it stretched upward for ten feet, gradually narrowing to nothing.

“I ain’t going in there,” Jimmy said with boyish fear. “Ain’t no telling what’s up in there.”