One evening, he and Marci were eating pizza after a movie in Eldorado. It was at Rock-o’s, pizza by the slice, and Marci could put away the slices like nobody Gene had ever seen. He was amazed she didn’t weigh more than she did.
“I have some good news for you,” she said into her lap after her first slice of pepperoni, before finally looking him in the eye. “You’re going to be a daddy!”
Gene set down his slice and studied her face, his insides growing colder and darker as if someone was shutting down his emotional faculties section by section. Marci fidgeted in her seat and wrapped a paper straw sleeve around and around her finger.
“I am? Geez. How’d that happen, Marci?”
Marci blushed a little.
“You know how that happens, silly,” she said. “I’m pregnant. Aren’t you happy? Genie, you’re going to be a daddy!”
“Oh I am, huh?”
“Isn’t that great?”
“Sure, I guess it’s great for you, but I’m not going to be anyone’s daddy.”
“What do you mean, Genie? Don’t you want to be a daddy?”
“Nope. And you know what else, you lying little bitch?” Gene stood and rummaged through his pockets. He had the strange sensation he was delivering lines from a stupid soap opera. “It’s not mine. I guess I never told you—I can’t have kids.”
Gene went up to pay at the cashier’s window. He was pissed with himself, more than anything else, for being taken in by the childlike naiveté. On his way back through the restaurant, he saw that Marci looked like she had just started to cry. No tears had struggled down her cheeks yet, but her eyeliner and mascara were already blurred, and her eyes had begun to redden and swell. Before he left her at the restaurant, he couldn’t resist saying, “At least now you have a good excuse to eat for two.”
“Asshole,” she spat back as he left through the front door.
That night there had been two messages on his answering machine, one from Marci and one from her father. He deleted both without listening and never heard from them again.
Assholes, he thought, and pushed deeper into Shawnee National Forest, running over a two-foot black rat snake slithering across the road. He watched it thrash and writhe in his rearview, felt bad about it, and turned around. It upset him to kill something, even more to watch it suffer, especially an animal. He ran over the long cord of agony again, this time slowly, crushing its skull, which burst beneath his wheel. The more he thought about it as he headed toward Cave-in-Rock, the more he hated the whole area. The only thriving industry was crystal meth. The people smiled at you with decaying teeth while they stuck a knife in your kidneys or conceived someone else’s baby. If they weren’t smiling with deceit, they were mean and surly, put up high walls with no doorbells. The people down here didn’t care for the land, either—trash, rusting cars, refrigerators, bathtubs, and appliances cluttered front yards and backyards, gullies and ditches. He couldn’t wait to head back north, but not without some answers first. Also, right then he needed to stop, eat some jerky, drink some water, and regain his focus for the rest of the trip. Stretching his legs, which were getting tired and starting to cramp up a little, wouldn’t hurt either.
EIGHT
WHEN HE GOT OFF his bike, he pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and saw he had just missed Keith, along with a call from an unknown caller. The message began abruptly, “Yeah, I can take care of Pretty Girl. I got nothing going on. Might watch the neighbor tie up his wife tonight, but other than that, I’m pretty free.”
Gene smiled because he never could tell if Keith was joking about the tied-up wife or not. He walked down to the riverfront, sipping water and chewing deer jerky. Despite his better experience, he had cut this batch with the grain instead of against it as an experiment to make it stay intact and look better, but now he regretted it. The sweet and salty meat tasted fine but was too chewy, and his jaw already felt sore by the time he reached the river. Now that he wasn’t riding into the wind, the heat and humidity had smothered him within seconds of stepping off his bike. Sweat poured off his shaved head and into his eyebrows, down his arms and fingers, which sweat into his sweet and salty jerky.
An enormous amount of rain had fallen this spring and early summer. The corn swayed taller and earlier than usual. The river looked swollen and surly. The Ohio licked the steps leading up to the cave at Cave-in-Rock and slapped against the rocky bluffs, its savage innocence threatening to run over its banks and ruin people’s lives.
Gene had often come to Cave-in-Rock as a boy. His family visited the national forest from their home in Evansville, seventy twisting miles up river, camping at Garden of the Gods and Bell Smith Springs. Still Cave-in-Rock held a particular fascination for him, and he remembered his mother telling him that it had been a hideout for pirates. At the time, he’d imagined pirates with big feathered hats, cutlasses, and eye patches, sailing up and down the Ohio in a huge galleon. Walt Disney and the movie Davy Crockett and the River Pirates later disabused him of that fantasy. The pirates who plied the Ohio were far less picturesque. Gene looked out over the wide expanse of dull brown water. He remembered the movie in black and white, but it was probably in color.
Miller had been fascinated with caves and in college had gone spelunking in Mammoth Cave, Wyandot Cave, and others, but had also explored and mapped unknown caves in Illinois and Missouri. On their first trip, Miller had been so excited to see the cave he started running as soon as he was out of the car. But their mother put a halt to that, setting out a picnic lunch and insisting the boys had to eat before exploring. Miller nibbled his sandwich and made a pretense of eating, squirming on the wooden bench. Finally, their mother nodded and he tore down toward the cave with Gene following on shorter legs. The whole thing turned out to be a crushing disappointment. The cave was small and unimpressive with not a pirate in sight.
Gene had visited Cave-in-Rock as an adult, too. He and Marci had taken the tour several times and picnicked up on the bluffs while reading the brochures and guidebooks. The two of them would buy a bucket of Extra Crispy KFC. Marci could eat almost a whole bucket herself, plus a whole box of butter-and-jelly-smothered rolls. Gene remembered thinking her stomach had a black hole as big as the one in the side of the rocky bluff.
He walked to the visitor’s center, staffed by a suntanned older woman with long gray and white hair combed straight down her back, and grabbed a brochure called “Ohio River Pirates.” His arms and legs were tired from his ride and from his near collision, so he sat down in a section of a large tree that had been hollowed out as a chair and placed in the picnic area. Whenever he’d looked through the Cave-in-Rock brochures and the little books he’d bought from the gift store or whenever he listened to a giddy tour guide, Gene marveled at two things: how proud these people seemed to be of their violent, lawless history and how many of the outlaws had been former military men like himself.
The Shawnee had always known about the cave and used it for storage and hunting parties, and as he chewed his chewy deer jerky, Gene wondered if they stored pemmican in the cave too, and wondered how it differed from his own. According to the brochure, French explorer M. de Lery found it in 1739 and named it “Caverne dans Le Roc,” and since then it had served as the base for a colony of horse thieves, counterfeiters, pirates, cutthroats, robbers, prostitutes, rapists, and serial killers. Tucked in among the generations of degenerates was also a group of Christians who used the fifty-five-foot cave for church services. Gene figured the Christians weren’t up to much more good than the outlaws.
As he skimmed the ivory copy of a copy of a copy of the brochure, he remembered the characters and stories from the area. Philip Alston first used the cave for counterfeiting in 1790, teaching the craft to John Duff, who had been a sergeant in the Illinois regiment, not unlike himself. John Duff was also a hunter and scout who had helped George Rogers Clark capture Illinois County for the United States during the revolutionary war. After his military service he operated Philip Alston’s
Cave-in-Rock counterfeiting operation until 1799—when three Shawnee Indians, hired by the commander at Fort Massac down river and near where Metropolis is today, assassinated Duff at his house near the cave.
The whole wide stretch of the Ohio from Louisville to Fort Massac, near the mouth of the Ohio that fed the Mississippi, was a vast wilderness teeming with river pirates who raided barges, keelboats, flatboats, and rafts that drifted down to New Orleans. After watching the Disney movie and visiting the cave several times, Gene and Miller had played river pirate in the deep ditch behind their grandmother’s house. Miller usually made Gene be the victim until Gene would quit and go inside, muddy and making his grandma furious, but sometimes they would be pirates together and prey on imaginary victims.
A family of four walked past where Gene sprawled, resting, the mother swatting a young boy’s tiny butt every few steps while berating him for running off. He looked to be five or six. The slightly older daughter smirked, and the father, wearing a Cardinals cap and a McGwire jersey, said nothing.
“What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded, red-faced.
The boy expertly said nothing.
“You could have fallen off the cliff and died, boy!” she continued, swatting him on the head.
Gene considered saying “Can you blame him for wanting to run away?” but decided to mind his own business. Miller would have been the one in trouble, and Gene would have been the one smirking at Miller’s misfortune. Despite repeated disciplining from their mother, teachers, and principals—it seemed like he was always in trouble—Miller’s impulsive decisions and reckless behavior never stopped. Until yesterday.
The family disappeared down the trail, and Gene returned to his brochure and read with renewed fascination about Samuel Mason, sometimes also known as Meason, who had been a captain of the militia in Ohio County, Virginia, during the Revolutionary War. The sole survivor of an Indian ambush near Fort Henry, Mason returned to Washington County, Virginia, where he was elected Justice of the Peace and a few months later named associate judge. When citizens increasingly questioned his judicial decisions in the 1790s, Mason moved his family west to Red Banks, Kentucky, near Henderson today, right across the river from where Gene and Miller grew up in Evansville, Indiana. Captain Mason made a slight career change from judge to river pirate, and he and his family and cohorts robbed and migrated downriver to Diamond Island. By 1797 he had moved his base of operations to Cave-in-Rock, which by that time was also known as the House of Nature, a tavern and brothel, and was joined by Philip Alston’s son, Peter, who married one of Mason’s daughters.
Their tribe robbed and killed travelers for years and made passage to New Orleans impossible without an armed guard. Sometimes a group, even with an armed guard, would make the mistake of stopping for refreshments at the House of Nature and later turn up downriver at Fort Massac.
In 1801 an angry band of bounty hunters and vigilantes calling themselves the Exterminators, led by Captain Young of Mercer County, Kentucky, pushed west down the Ohio from Henderson, Kentucky, all the way to Cave-in-Rock, killing or scattering river pirates as they went. Mason and most of his crew escaped and settled further downriver in Spanish Louisiana, now Missouri, making a career change once again from river pirate to highway robber on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. The Spanish arrested him and his men in 1803 and shipped him to New Orleans for a three-day trial, at which Mason maintained he was a simple farmer maligned by his enemies until $7,000 in currency and twenty human scalps recovered from Mason’s luggage convinced the Spanish otherwise.
On the way back to Mississippi, Mason and one of his cohorts, Wiley Harpe, overpowered their guards and again escaped, though Mason reportedly suffered a shot in the head. The governor of Mississippi issued a $500 reward for Mason’s recapture, which prompted John Sutton (an alias used by Wiley Harpe) to bring in Mason’s head.
Gene chewed his jerky, more healthy than the tobacco he used to chew but without the kick, and wondered if Harpe had killed him for the reward or merely cut off Mason’s head after he died of the gunshot wound. He also wondered if Wiley Road was named after Wiley Harpe or one of his offspring and marveled at the coincidence. Maybe it was named in Wiley’s honor. As far as he knew, the Harpe brothers hadn’t made it that far north, but maybe their kin had. Not long after collecting the ransom for Mason’s head, Harpe and another man were recognized, arrested, tried in US Federal Court, and hanged as pirates in Greenville, Mississippi. Their heads were cut off and stuck on stakes on the Natchez Trace.
Wiley Harpe went by a name other than John Sutton: Little Harpe. He and his brother Big Harpe were the nation’s first serial killers, at least documented ones, responsible for more than forty murders. Micajah and Wiley Harpe, who may have been first cousins, began life as William and Joshua Harpe. They grew up and lived with a band of Creek and Cherokee Indians who committed robbery, murder, rape, and other atrocities, not only against whites but members of their own tribes. Along with the three wives they shared between them and several small children, the Harpes were driven north from Knoxville, Tennessee, after a man named Johnson was found dead at the bottom of a river, his body hacked open and weighted with stones—a signature of Harpe murders. The two indiscriminately murdered men and women, young and old, even butchering pregnant women and babies. Big Harpe once swung his own colicky baby daughter by the heels and bashed her soft skull against a tree when he grew sick of her crying. It was the only crime to which he ever confessed remorse.
In 1799 a posse tracked down the Harpes after they murdered the wife and child of Moses Stegall and burned down his cabin. John Leiper, a member of the posse, shot Big Harpe in the back. Moses Stegall, angered and sickened during Big Harpe’s long confession of murders, used Harpe’s own knife to decapitate him slowly before he’d finished, reminding Gene of an al-Qaeda execution. They nailed the outlaw’s head into the fork of a tree near Dixon, Kentucky, a region still called Harpe’s Head today. Wiley Harpe escaped and made his way south to Natchez Trace, joining his old buddy Samuel Mason.
Gene looked up from his brochure and tried to picture these murderers skulking on the bluffs, in the cave, on rafts floating down the swollen river. He wondered if something in the Southern Illinois humidity boiled men’s brains to madness, or if the soil was poisoned down here. Maybe it was nothing more than simple greed, but he couldn’t help but wonder how Miller got mixed up with Tosti’s boys, the modern-day version of those heartless murderers. He sighed and turned back to the brochure.
After the Exterminators forced the Mason crew to leave, a group of Christians began holding church services in the cave and in 1807 founded the first church in Southeast Illinois, Big Creek Baptist Church. Around this time, too, a new river pirate gained renown in the area and occasionally used the cave as a hideout: Colonel Plug, the Napoleon of the Ohio, another former military man who was notorious for performing despotic deeds in his faded blue coat and hat, faded scarlet and tarnished yellow epaulettes, and a large bright red nose, swollen from whiskey. There were many more generations of robbers, counterfeiters, and bootleggers—the Ford’s Ferry Gang, the Sturdivant Gang, who built an impregnable fort called Sturdivant’s Castle, which made Gene think of the yellow stone walls and gated drive he’d just visited. The list went on and on. Gene often wondered if the military attracted oddballs and derelicts who could do nothing else in life or if a little bit of training in arms, a few lessons in the principles of “might makes right,” and a gradual callousness to the loss of human life encouraged crime and brutality during hard economic times. Not often, but when he let himself now and then, he wondered if feeding Tosti’s bodies to hogs was much better than murdering and pirating during his own hard economic times. He hated to think of himself in the same league as the river pirates. After driving past the family plot and thinking of his ancestors, it also occurred to him for the first time that Joe Miller, though not a murdering pirate, had also been a former military man and possessed many pirate-like qualities wit
h his loan-shark beginnings. Old Joe had pirated hundreds of acres of his neighbors’ farmlands, too, and generations had profited from it, including Gene. Maybe it was inevitable that he and Miller end up tainted by the history of Southern Illinois’ bloody past.
The humid air was almost suffocating, as it must have been back then, too. Gene looked at the gaping hole of Cave-in-Rock, the hole that for 150 years had sucked into it every despot, villain, and sociopath for hundreds of miles. The hole must have tried to suck in Miller, too, forty-five snaking miles downriver, or at least sucked into it whoever or whatever group of people had killed him.
Up the other direction of the river, Gene remembered another black hole—the stripper pits. Their father had taken both Miller and Gene, separately, to the stripper pits to explain “the birds and the bees.” By fifth grade, both brothers had unwittingly hopped on their bikes with their father to ride up to the stripper pits and park them on the soft, newly displaced earth. The kickstands stabbed into it, so they slipped under it a stone or flat piece of wood. A hike up and over mounds upon mounds of toffee-colored dirt and clay revealed a massive shoe-box-shaped hole, the size of several football fields, and, inside, a huge shovel scooping up house-sized chunks of earth. The shovel alone was big enough for them to have driven in with their family station wagon, but the whole machine looked like a small toy in the gaping rectangular pit dwarfed by the mountains of earth it relocated. The floor of the pit sparkled black from the coal but also contained piles of dirt and clay and shiny black pools of water suposedly filled with piranhas from people’s aquariums after they were too hard to keep. Some said the small ponds were full of overgrown pet alligators, but nothing could have lived in those black waters.
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