Five Miles to Paradise

43

Over the years, Clancy had made improvements to his swamp shack. He had often escaped here for a cool down period after weeks of midnight escapades terrorizing the coloreds and poor whites in neighboring counties.

Like a dog who does not defecate where he eats, Clancy was careful to keep his clandestine terror campaigns out of LafayettahCounty. Cooperation between local law enforcement officials in the surrounding counties was nil.

This had enabled Clancy to wage his bigoted operations of fear and intimidation for decades without getting caught. Clancy was deceitful and cold, but he was smart enough to know that proper planning went along way to ensuring he served no time at Parchman Farm, Mississippi's state penitentiary.

Clancy always knew the shortcuts, backwoods trails, and roads that afforded him the fastest exits after a long night's ride into hell. That's what he gleefully nicknamed the vigilante Klan crusades for mean justice.

While traitorous factions were working to wheedle down the membership with charges of corruption and reformation, Clancy Threckenstall refused to believe his beloved organization was anything other than one acting under the will of God. So, he held the reins of power and control that he had over his few followers in tightly fisted hands. 

He also knew that you had to be watchful and ready.

That is why, over the years, Clancy had worked to fortify his little postage stamp of paradise in the swamp. There were numerous pits dug in strategic locations near the shack. Clancy had filled them with as many different booby traps that his evil mind could imagine.

Sharp stakes poked up from some of them. Coated with human excrement, toxic resins from plants or poisonous secretions from swamp frogs, the stakes provided a perfect breeding ground for infection to swiftly move into the blood and poison any creature whose foot or leg was penetrated.

In some pits, a bear trap lived.

Over the years, one or two held a gator or was filled with venomous swamp moccasins.

Any man unlucky enough to fall into one of these was met with hungry, starving reptiles who welcomed human flesh like manna falling from heaven.

All around the perimeter of the cabin were any number of trip wire traps, many hooked to bow traps that could skewer you through with sharpened, fire-hardened sticks, as deadly as any arrow.

On each of his window sills, Clancy had smeared a sticky natural resin he obtained from the swamp. Before the sticky ooze dried and hardened, he sprinkled bits of broken glass.

Anyone trying to enter through the shack through one of the small windows would immediately feel the pain of glass shards ripping their palms and fingers.

He had tied mazes of fishing line with rusty hooks throughout the woods near his cabin, too.

Clancy wanted to make sure no one snuck up on him uninvited.

Now, it was time to make sure his booby traps were still in working order. He'd marked areas with a piece of rag or a whittled out sign on a tree trunk. The woods about the shack were filled with Clancy's coded messages to himself, telling him where the beginning of one trap started and another ended.

Heck had seen some of the signs before the sun faded. He knew that getting to Leah was not going to be easy. In fact, he wondered if it wouldn't be impossible. But, he had to try.

He inched closer, using Birdie's push pole to tap the soggy ground and the shallow waters around him. It was extremely slow going. He stayed crouched low to the ground, trying to stay as small as possible.

If he somehow avoided Clancy's traps, he did not want to make himself a large target for a bullet or a load of buckshot. All the while, he kept a sharp lookout for the old codger slinking about in the shadows of the swamp. 

Heck was also mindful of alligators. They were as mean and as murderous as a million Clancies.

His vigilance was rewarded as night fell. Heck caught a glimpse of Clancy zigzagging his way back into the tiny shack. At least, he now knew his enemy was inside the tiny cabin. But, how to get inside without getting his head blown off was his next problem.

The push pole hit upon a piece of ground that gave way in front of Heck's feet. The swamp grass covering fell into a hole. Two old boards filled with nails turned in the dirt, grabbing the pole with the hoard of rusty nails that spiked their surfaces. Heck was impressed. Those barbs would have left nasty wounds in his foot or his calf if he'd had the misfortune to step in the hole.

"Okay, Clancy. My hunch was right. You've set your traps, now let's see if I can outsmart you," Heck muttered to himself.

Meticulously and cautiously, Heck inched toward the shack.

Darkness fell, but Heck was in luck.

He had counted on the moon for light, and that assumption had proven correct. It was also a clear night. Not a cloud floated in the sky.

What he hadn't counted on was the fact that even though the swamp was a fertile area of overgrown vegetation, a blanket of vines and moss and trees in some cases, the bit of land that Clancy's shack rested on stood in the middle of a small clearing.

It was almost as if the plant life refused to thrive among such evil.

Heck didn't know the reasons, but he thanked his lucky stars that this was so.

The moonlight shown down like a spotlight from the heavens, casting its silvery rays on the dismal hut.

Heck made his way slowly toward the cabin. What in the world was he going to do next, he wondered?

Knowing Clancy, there were probably surprises awaiting anyone who attempted to breach his place by going through one of the small windows at each side. Besides, Heck was too large to have a ghost of a chance of fitting through one of them, even if he managed to break the grimy glass.

His best chance, he decided, was to go straight through the front door.

But again, Clancy was sure to have rigged some kind of nasty surprise.

Probably a shotgun blast on entry, Heck thought. If only . . . if only, he thought, this works.

* * *

Clancy had entered the tiny shack to get a bite to eat. His digestive tract warned him that if he did not get some food inside his scrawny belly soon, he would pass out.

He grabbed a stale biscuit from his nap sack that he always carried, just for such emergencies.

"You get old, ya ain't worth shit," he growled toward Leah, biscuit crumbs on his chin. 

Clancy always carried a flask of moonshine in his back pocket. He washed the stale bread down with that.

I watched silently.

"But, heh, heh, I don't guess ya got nuthin' ta' worry 'bout far as that. I don't 'spect you'll have too many more days ta' mark off your calendah! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

He thought his little joke about my short life was hilarious, choking and laughing simultaneously.

"I kill mahsef sumtimes. I shore do."

Still, I said nothing.

"Ain't mech for conversating, 'air ya, niggah? Don' mattah. You jest set 'air quietlike. I need ta' listen anyways. Ain't no tellin' whut yer white rooster got planned for ole Clancy? Naw suh."

Clancy took the only other chair and placed it in the far corner of the small room. He sat down, aiming his shotgun squarely at the door.

"Now, all we gotta do is jest bide out time, my liddle colored gal. Jest bide our time 'n wait."