Then one of the local rags revealed that a female inmate named Myrna Chitty had been assaulted while serving a six-month sentence for purse snatching, and an investigation had commenced. And damn if Myrna Chitty hadn’t told the investigators about Landron’s occasional visits to her cell and how Landron had forced her over her bunk and how she had heard the sound of his belt unbuckling and then the pain, oh, Jesus, the pain. The next day Landron was off the payroll and the following week he was pink-slipped, but it wasn’t going to stop there. There was a hearing of the Corrections and Penology Committee scheduled for September 3 and there was talk of rape charges being pressed against Landron and a couple of other guards who might have let their enthusiasm get the better of them. It was a major embarrassment all around and Mobley knew that if they had their way, he was going to be hung out to dry.

One thing was for certain: Myrna Chitty wouldn’t be testifying at no rape trial. He knew what happened to prison guards who ended up doing hard time, knew that what he had visited on the women in his charge would be returned one hundredfold upon him, and Landron Mobley didn’t plan on pulling no train or sifting through his food for glass fragments. Myrna Chitty’s testimony, if it was heard in court, would be the passing of a virtual death sentence on Landron Mobley, one that would eventually be carried out with a shank or a broom handle. She was scheduled for release on September 5, her sentence reduced in return for her cooperation with the investigation, and Landron would be waiting for her when she got her white-trash tail back to her shitty little house. Then Landron and Myrna were going to have a little talk, and maybe he would have to remind her of what she was missing now that she didn’t have old Landron to drop by her cell or take her down to the showers to search her for contraband. No, Myrna Chitty wouldn’t be putting her hand on no Bible and calling Landron Mobley a rapist. Myrna Chitty would learn to keep her mouth shut unless Landron told her otherwise, or else Myrna Chitty would be dead.

He took another long drink and kicked at the dirt with the toe of his boot. Landron Mobley didn’t have too many friends. He was a mean drunk, although, to his credit, he was mean sober, so no one could claim that he’d misled them into a false sense of security. That had always been the way with him. He was an outsider, despised for his lack of education, for his taste for violence, and for the miasma of debased sexuality that hung around him like a polluted fog. Yet his capacities had drawn others to him, recognizing in Mobley a creature that might enable them to dabble in depravity without losing themselves to it totally, using Mobley’s absolute corruption as a means of indulging their own appetites without consequence.

But there were always consequences, for Mobley was like a pitcher plant, attracting victims with the promise of sweet juices, then thriving as they slowly drowned in an abundance of that which they had sought. Mobley’s corruption could be passed on in a word, a gesture, a promise, exploiting weakness as water exploits a crack in concrete, widening it, extending itself deeper and deeper, until the structures were ruined beyond salvation.

He had a wife once. Her name was Lynnette. She wasn’t beautiful, not even smart, but she was a wife nonetheless, and he’d worn her down as he’d worn down so many others over the years. One day, he came back from the prison and she was gone. She didn’t take much, apart from a suitcase of mangy old clothes and some cash that Landron kept in a cracked coffeepot for emergencies, but Landron could still recall the surge of anger that he’d felt, the sense of abandonment and betrayal as his voice echoed emptily around their tidy home.

He’d found her, though. He’d warned her about what would happen if she ever tried to leave him, and Landron was a man of his word, when it counted. He’d tracked her down to a dingy motel room on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, and then she and Landron, they’d had themselves a time. Least of all, Landron had had himself a time. He couldn’t speak for Lynnette. When he’d finished with her she couldn’t speak for herself either, and it would be a long time before a man looked at Lynnette Mobley and didn’t want to puke at the sight of her face.

For a time, Landron descended into his own private fantasy world: a world in which the Lynnettes knew their place and didn’t go running off when a man’s back was turned; a world in which he still wore his uniform and could still pick the weakest ones to take for his amusement; a world in which Myrna Chitty was trying to run from him and he was gaining, gaining, until at last he caught her and turned her to him, those brown eyes full of fear as she was forced down, down…

Around him, the Congaree Swamp seemed to recede, blurring at the edges, becoming a haze of gray and black and green, with only the dripping of water and the calling of birds to distract him. Soon, even that was lost to Landron as he moved to his own, private rhythm in his own red world.

But Landron Mobley had not left the Congaree.

Landron Mobley would never leave the Congaree.

The Congaree Swamp is old, very old. It was old when the prehistoric foragers hunted its reaches, old when Hernando de Soto passed through in 1540, old when the Congaree Indians were annihilated by smallpox in 1698. The English settlers used the inland waterways as part of their ferry system in the 1740s, but it wasn’t until 1786 that Isaac Huger began construction of a formal ferry system to cross the Congaree. At its northwestern and southwestern boundaries, the bodies of workers are buried beneath the mud and silt, left where they died during the construction of dikes by James Adams and others in the 1800s.

At the end of that century, logging began on land owned by Francis Beidler’s Santee River Cypress Lumber Company, ceasing in 1915, only to recommence half a century later. In 1969, logging interest was renewed and clearcutting commenced in 1974, leading to the growth of a movement among local people to save the land, some of which had never been logged and represented the last significant old growth of river-bottom hardwood forest in this part of the country. There were now close to twenty-two thousand acres designated as a national monument, half of them old-growth hardwood forest, stretching from the junction of Myers Creek and the Old Bluff Road to the northwest, down to the borders of Richland and Calhoun Counties to the southeast, close by the railroad line. Only one small section of land, measuring about two miles by half of a mile, remained in private hands. It was close to this tract that Landron Mobley now sat, lost in dreams of women’s tears. The Congaree was his place. The things he had done here in the past, among the trees and in the mud, never troubled him. Instead, he luxuriated in them, the memory of them enriching the poverty of his current existence. Here, time became meaningless and he lived once again in remembered pleasures. Landron Mobley was never closer to himself than he was in the Congaree.

Mobley’s eyes flicked open suddenly, but he remained very still. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he turned his head to his left and his gaze alighted on the soft brown eyes of a white-tailed deer. It was reddish brown and about five feet in height, with white rings at its nose, eyes, and throat. Its tail flicked back and forth in mild agitation, displaying its white underside. Mobley had guessed that there were deer around. He had come across their split heart tracks a mile or so back toward the river and had followed the trail of their pellets, of the raggedly browsed vegetation and the worn tree trunks where the males had rubbed the bark off with their antlers, but had eventually lost it in the thick undergrowth. He had almost given up hope of killing a deer on this trip; now here was a fine doe staring at him from beneath a loblolly pine. Keeping his eyes on the deer, Mobley reached out with his right hand for his rifle.