“No footprints?” I let him see my fear. “The man didn’t leave no footprints?”
“None we could find.” “How’d he manage that?”
Pic drove for a ways before he answered. “No human bein’ can travel without leaving prints.”
But that was where he was wrong. Once the wind blew the dust across the Delta, no trace of me would ever be found.
17 Life and Casualty
Les Standiford
DEL HAD PASSED the last chance to exit the Parkway when the fog started rolling in. He noticed the tendrils creeping down out of the sumac just as the Explorer began to chew its way around a tightly banked hairpin. In the next moment, as the heavy vehicle dropped its nose along the steep double yellow and started down, everything blanked out, just that quick. He swore softly, tapping the brakes, his fingers suddenly tight on the wheel. There’d been a time when he might have remembered what was coming next—could have handled it blind—but it had been too long since he’d driven this road. All he could do was hold on and hope. He might be left of center, poised for a head-on—or maybe he was a foot away from jumping the rail and a plunge to the center of the earth, hard to tell.
With that thought formed, the wall of white vanished as suddenly as it came. The gray asphalt rose abruptly in front of him, twisting to the right, and he leaned hard into the wheel, gassing the Explorer into the turn and up the rise. The fog was nothing but runners again on higher ground. He blinked and shook his head, realizing he’d been drifting toward sleep when he piled into that last turn. Should have taken the Cottrell exit. Ten miles longer to angle eastward toward that hamlet in the valley, then the state road back west along the river and a steady climb towards the cabin, but at least those roads were straight.
Now he was stuck on the high spine of the Blue Ridge, nothing but twists and turns and pockets of fog for forty miles. An hour in good weather, but torturous with fog. There was an overlook not far up ahead. He could turn around there, head back to the exit, do the smart thing, he told himself. And laughed. Since when?
The Labrador stirred on the seat beside him, lifting its head off its paws. Something funny was worth waking up for, evidently. Sailing off the side of a mountain, now that you could sleep through. Del smiled. He’d like to come back as a dog.
He saw the sign for the overlook then, and knew it was two relatively uneventful miles. “Pit stop coming up, Sonny. What do you think of that?” Whatever he thought, the dog wasn’t saying. Sonny yawned, then put its chin back on its paws.
Del glanced at the radio, but that was no good here. He’d lost the last FM station when he passed Boone. AM was nothing but static and lunatic preachers at this hour. He might have called Ginny but it was too late for that too. He’d lost coverage on his cell phone an hour ago. Just as well. He might get to talking and change his mind.
He noted the flare of the asphalt for the turnout ahead and slowed, easing the Explorer off the Parkway and onto the graveled lot. Had it been daylight, there would be quite a vista out ahead of him, he thought. A sheer drop-off at the edge of the parking area, and the sweeping valley stretched out for miles below, the shadow of blue hump-backed mountains running endless at the horizon. But he would have needed to leave Miami in the middle of the night to make it for any of that, though. Right now there was only a sheet of darkness in the distance and, below, a shelf of fog glowing vaguely in the light of a half moon.
He switched off the engine and got down from the Explorer, then went to open the passenger door for the dog. Sonny took his time stepping down to the mats, then made a nimble move to the gravel. The dog went snuffling off in the darkness while Del walked to the rail and unzipped, relieving himself into the pillow of mist below. “So easy for you guys,” Elizabeth had often grumbled. About the only thing she envied, he thought. That self-certainty was just one of the things he’d loved about her.
He was zipping up when he heard a commotion in the brush at the edge of the turnout: an odd bellow followed quickly by Sonny’s I-mean-business bark. Del turned in time to see a dark shape crash out of the bushes, lumbering across the turnout with Sonny hot on its tail. At first Del thought it was a bear cub, but as it sped past him, panting, nails raking the gravel, he realized it was a raccoon, a huge one, as big as he’d ever seen.
“Sonny!” he called, as the dog sped past, but it was a waste of breath. The raccoon hit the top of the rail at the edge of the overlook in full stride and launched itself out into the mist without hesitation. Sonny’s feet cleared the rail by a foot.
“Shit,” Del muttered as his dog disappeared. He held his breath, then heard the snapping of limbs and a clattering of stones from below. A pair of urgent barks came soon afterward, then more clattering and crashing, dampened now through the shroud of fog.
“Sonny!” he tried again, but it was useless. The chase would go on until the ‘coon turned and gave the dog what for, or found a tree to climb. Nothing to do now but wait.
Del stood at the rail until the sounds from below had dimmed almost entirely. His own damned fault, he found himself thinking. If he kept a Pekinese this wouldn’t have happened.
He turned away from the rail with a sigh and moved toward the truck. There was a chill in the air, he noted. No surprise for September up this high. He climbed into the Explorer and sat a moment. If Elizabeth had been here, she would have reminded him why cats were better. Too bad she wasn’t.
He reached to turn on the key. He’d run the heater for a moment and let the parking lights burn. The dog wouldn’t need a light to find his way back, but still it seemed the right thing to do.
He turned on the lights and reached to ease the seat back a notch when he noticed the music, so faint at first that it might have been drifting down the mountain outside. But it was coming from the radio, he realized, the singer’s voice thin and nasally, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar and a hiss of static that was part of the recording, not the broadcast. “Yonder come Miss Rosie, piece of paper in her hand,” intoned the singer, “She come to see the gov’ner, wants to free her man …”
No wonder he nearly mistook the source of the music, he thought as the chorus kicked in. This was no digitally enhanced version of the old classic, no enthusiastic cover by some latter day bluesman. Except for the certainty in the voice and the clarity of the tone, this could have been coming from the stoop of a porch overlooking a cotton field or the steps of a trailer house sitting crooked up a narrow ravine. “Let the Midnight Special, shine her light on me … Let the Midnight Special shine her everlovin’ light on me.”
Del hadn’t heard the song in a while, and he’d never heard it sung quite so bare bones as this. Elizabeth was more partial to pop, but she’d indulge his interest in rhythm and blues at times. The last time they’d gone to New Orleans, he’d managed to coax her out to Tipitina’s twice.
The song had concluded now, and Del noticed the thickness at the back of his throat. Just the cool air he told himself, reaching to see if he might dial the station in a bit clearer. Sonny had done him something of a favor, he supposed, stopping them at the only spot in these mountains where he might have heard such a thing. And where was the signal bouncing in from, he wondered? Up from Boone, some college station DJ who’d discovered where Eric Clapton got his ideas from, maybe; or maybe all the way over from the coast, where there were these little pockets that time had still not touched, music-wise.
He was squinting at the display, trying to make out the frequency before he went fiddling with the dial, when he heard the announcer’s voice cut clearly through the night air and his hand stopped. “… that’s just one of the five records you’ll receive from Randy’s Record Shop on the .45 Special this week, and all for only three dollars. When you call the number, tell ‘em the Hoss Man sent you.”
The voice faded away as an advertisement for Philip Morris cigarettes took over, and Del stared dumbly at the glowing display of the Explorer’s radio. There was no mistaking what he’d just heard—it just took h
im a few moments to make sense of it. He’d listened to that DJ hundreds of nights in his youth, a white man named Bill “Hoss” Allen who sounded black and spun down-home R&B on a station out of Nashville, Tennessee. It was music so raw that it made Elvis Presley seem tame—the Hoss Man and his cohorts, Gene Nobles and John R., also white, favored the rough hewn rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes” issued by Carl Perkins, for instance, and in fact rarely played Presley on their late-night shows. Del had stayed up to all hours, listening to artists whose names alone were a promise: Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins, Howling Wolf. Compared to what most of his schoolmates in his benighted rural town were listening to, Del—ever the enthusiast—felt like he had tapped into the planet Pluto.
But that was long, long ago, and the Hoss Man and John R. and Gene Nobles had all been dead for years. Del had seen a squib about the DJ’s and their offbeat station and its “cult following” in the New York Times in fact, a dozen years or so ago, when the Hoss Man, the last surviving member of the group, had passed away. WLAC, he recalled then. “The voice of Nashville Life and Casualty.” But what was the Hoss Man doing on the air a few decades after his last broadcast? One of those stations that filled up the dead air of late night with recordings of old time radio, he guessed. Like those he had heard featuring reruns of Jack Benny and The Shadow.
He was leaning closer to the display, happy to take note of a station astute enough to replay the Hoss Man and John R. and their offer of five singles for three dollars or a hundred baby chicks delivered C.O.D. to your doorstep, when a knock came at the window of the Explorer.
“What the hell?” Del blurted, whirling at the sound.
The silhouette of a figure in a hooded sweatshirt loomed outside the driver’s window, the shadowed face no more than a foot from his own. “This your dog, man?” Del heard panic in the voice and then, behind it, the low threatening rumble that was Sonny’s characteristic form of address to unfamiliar males, especially those approaching in the dead of night.
Del yanked the door open quickly, his relief at Sonny’s reappearance tempered by the need to get the dog calmed down before the guy in the sweatshirt did something stupid. “Sonny!” Del commanded, and the dog’s growling dropped a notch in volume.
“It’s all right,” he said, turning to the figure beside him. “Long as I’m out here, he won’t bother you.”
“He already got me,” Del heard. It was a young man’s voice, he realized—a bit of a tremble there, and also some resentment.
“He bit you?”
The kid pulled back the hood of his sweatshirt with one hand and held up his sleeve for Del to see. “Messed me up, man.”
Del saw a flap of fabric dancing as the kid thrust his hand forward. Sonny’s growl was suddenly menacing again. Del thought a moment. “He break the skin?” he asked.
There was a pause. “Naw, man. He could’ve though. Look at my shirt.”
Del fought the urge to tell the kid Sonny hadn’t misbehaved so badly. He’d been trained to bring back game the same way he found it. Del had never hunted Sonny, but the breeder he’d bought him from was a legend in the business. Del snapped his fingers and Sonny sat back on his haunches, quiet now.
“Where’d this happen, anyway?” Del asked.
The kid pointed vaguely over his shoulder. “Just around the bend. I was walking the shoulder and your dog just came up at me. Good thing I put my arm up. He was going for my throat.”
Del nodded as if he were agreeing. A kid is walking along a road on a dark night, he sees a big dog growling, coming his way, who could blame him for being scared?
Del reached into his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll pay you for your sweatshirt.”
“Naw, man. That’s okay.” The kid looked off to the north. “Maybe you could give me a lift, though.”
Del pursed his lips. “I’m going north,” he said.
“So am I.”
Del stared at him in the dim light. “I thought you were headed toward Cottrell.”
The kid shook his head. “I’m hitchin’ north,” he insisted. “But there ain’t been a car going that way for two hours now. I figured I’d hike on back to Cottrell and try that route.”
Del glanced at the Explorer. He had the cargo hold full, and a few boxes on the back seat as well. But Sonny could manage on the boxes for the short distance they had left. He felt he owed the kid something. And maybe the company would keep him awake.
“I’m only going about forty miles,” he told the kid.
A shrug. “Better’n walking to Cottrell,” the kid said.
“Okay,” Del said. “I’ll have to move the dog’s things out of the front.”
He motioned to Sonny who stood with a meaningful glance at the kid. “He’s all right now,” he assured the kid. “You must have scared him, that’s all.”
The kid made a sound that might have been meant as a laugh but came out more like a snort. “He scared the shit out of me, I’ll tell you that much.”
Del nodded, leading the way around the Explorer. He opened the passenger’s door and leaned in to pull Sonny’s rug off the seat. An old hooked rug that Elizabeth had brought home from a secondhand store one day. “If you’re going to let that dog ride in the front seat …” Before they’d left Miami, Del had tucked one edge in snug between the cushions and the center console so it wouldn’t slide, and sure enough the fabric caught on something as he was pulling. He might have reached to see what it was, but he didn’t feel comfortable bent over that way, his back exposed to a stranger, and so he caught the rug with both hands and jerked it free.
“Go ahead,” he turned to the kid. “Get in.”
The kid looked at him, then at the dog, and climbed up into the passenger’s seat. Del opened the rear door and surveyed his cargo. He moved a box of books onto the floorboards, and squeezed a bag of undone laundry into the crowded cargo hold. That looked like enough room for the dog, he thought. They weren’t going that far.
“Looks like you’re movin’,” he heard the kid say from the front seat.
“For a while, anyway,” Del said as he worked to tuck the rug so it wouldn’t slide.
“I didn’t think you were from these parts.”
Del glanced over his shoulder. “Why’s that?”
“Florida plates is one thing,” the kid said. “Plus you just don’t sound like it.”
“I been away a long time,” Del said. “I met my wife in Florida, and …”
He broke off when he heard a faint, familiar snapping sound and realized the kid was stepping down from the passenger’s seat. That was wrong, Del thought. But he wasn’t sure exactly why until he turned from fooling with the boxes and the rug to see the kid facing him and the glint of steel between them in the soft moonlight.
“How come you got a gun?” the kid said neutrally. He’d un-snapped the holster of the .38 Del kept tucked beneath the passenger seat—that was the thing the rug had caught on, he realized—and held it easily at stomach level. If the kid had seemed nervous earlier, he was now entirely at ease. Born to train a handgun on someone, Del thought.
Del glanced down at the pistol, then at the kid’s shadowed face. “I’m from Miami,” he said evenly. “They give them out down there.”
The kid nodded. “I bet they do.” He nodded at Sonny, who was back on his haunches now, staring at Del. “I saw how you talk to that dog,” he said. “You keep your hands still, or I’ll put one in you. Him and me’ll finish up by ourselves.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Del said. “I don’t want trouble.”
“Nobody does,” the kid said. “You not a cop, are you.”
It was a statement, not a question. “I build houses,” Del said.
The kid made the sound that approximated laughter. “People try to steal your houses from you? That why you pack?”
Del shrugged, careful to keep his hands still. “You’d be surprised what they steal when a house is under construction. Appliances. Air-conditioning
units. Sometimes the copper wire right out of the walls. You go out checking things at night, you have to be careful.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised at nothing nobody steals,” the kid said, a trace of bitterness in his voice.
Del broke the momentary silence. “You come out of Guilford by any chance?” There was a work farm outside of Asheville, about fifty miles south of where they stood. If you got away from the dogs and into the hills, you could find your way up the Appalachian Trail, just a late-season camper on a stroll.
“Doesn’t really matter where I come from, does it?” the kid said.
Del supposed that it didn’t. And cursed his luck. He’d left Miami for his old home, a quiet place where he could try and get his feet under him again with Elizabeth gone. Ginny was sweet, and it had been more than a year since his wife’s death, but if anything, the pain had only grown.
“You want the truck, just take it,” Del said, finally. “Just take it and go where you’re going.”
“I expect I will,” the kid said.
“You want my money …” Del said, shrugging.
“I told you, keep your hands still,” the kid said. “That’s all you have to worry about.”
There was a pause then, and the slightest rustling of a breeze. “You don’t want to do anything stupid,” he told the kid.
“That’s right,” the kid said. “Leave you here to tell who took your truck, that would be stupid.”
He raised his chin and lowered it, as if he’d made his decision. Del made his as well. What good was all this talk? If he was going to die, he’d do it headed in the right direction.
He saw the kid’s hand start up, felt himself lean forward . and then the night was split by an ungodly Tarzan call, a yodel out of Hollywood by way of a long-dead Nashville DJ. Del had heard it played on the station a thousand times in his youth, and never understood why Gene Nobles found it so funny.
Delta Blues Page 30