Too Far Gone

22

The black warden woman had pissed herself in the cabin, but she did what Leland said to do and even grabbed one of the fat warden’s ankles to help Leland move the heavy bastard through the brush over to the boat they’d come to his camp in. The man he’d brought to the camp ought to be dead, but he wasn’t. His head was smashed in where Leland had taken the pipe to him, but he was still breathing, taking in water, and making rattle sounds and gurgling to beat the band.

“You give your promise you’ll wait here without running off while I load this bastard in y’all’s boat?” Leland asked her.

“I won’t run off. I promise.”

Leland knelt, grabbed the warden’s wrists, and lifted him up over his shoulder like a burlap bag filled with grain. Standing, Leland steadied himself under the dead weight.

“Are you going to…kill me?” the woman asked, her voice breaking, tears running down her cheeks.

“Of course,” Leland told her. He sure wasn’t going to let her go and tell people how easy it was to sneak into his camp house. Telling lies to people wasn’t something he did if he could help it.

She started blubbering and shaking. “P-please, p-please. Noooo.”

“It’s all right. My daddy used to say that dying is just the tail end of living. You do what I tell you and you won’t suffer none. I’m good at making it so it don’t hurt.”

Leland stepped onto the boat, causing it to rock, and dropped the dead warden’s sorry ass onto the floor. When he turned around, he saw the warden woman had run off. Leland hated liars worse than gar. He shook his head, grabbed his pipe out from inside his belt, and trotted off to catch her.

“I don’t want to die!” she hollered into the swamp.

“If you don’t want people to kill you,” he hollered as he ran after her, “stay outta their personal places!”