AMayhar - The Conjure

by The Conjure (v1. 0) [lit]

  It was time he looked at what was going on, but first he needed to talk to Lena again. A full-fledged plan had come to him in a dream the night before, and he needed to borrow her rifle to make it workable. He headed out toward her place, now able to make short-cuts across marshy areas that had formerly been too wet to risk.

  He got there quickly, because he hustled his old bones, and when he looked over the ridge he could see Lena sitting on her front steps, Lone beside her, staring up at him. She was too far away for him to read her expression, but the alertness of her position told him she had some idea what might be going on.

  By the time he was halfway down the hill, she was coming to meet him, which was not her usual custom. He hurried forward and they went back together toward the porch, where Lone sat regally regarding them.

  "Something's about to pop, Possum,” she said. “Boze and someone else came to my gate yesterday, but I didn't let ‘em come in. Now I'm sorry I didn't. There's disturbance out in the bottomlands, and I have a feeling it has to do with what brought ‘em out here."

  "Prob'ly,” Choa said. He dropped to sit in the shackledy chair and fanned himself with his hand. “Gettin’ too old to hurry like that,” he said. “But you're right. There's a chopper searchin’ the swamp country, and I'd bet my life it's Farmer, hunting for his ice chest."

  She began to grin. “Think it's time I had me another Vision,” she said.

  He leaned forward. “Wait a bit. I got somethin’ to tell you that you kin use. Back when I was young, I went into the Army, you recall?"

  She frowned, and he could see her hunting back through her long memory. Then she nodded. “True, but you wasn't gone but a few months. Then you come back and nobody knew why."

  "They decided I wasn't military material,” he said, in a good imitation of the starchy tone of the psychiatrist who examined him after he refused to obey stupid or dangerous commands. “Said if I got crazy orders I was as like to shoot my officer as I was the enemy, which was just about right. But I did learn some stuff that may be useful.

  "Did you know that if a chopper's blades stop, it's goin’ to fall? And if the blades can't whirl around the other way to slow its fall, it'll come down like a rock?"

  She shook her head slowly, her eyes narrowing as she considered the notion. “So if a sticky spell should sort of accidentally freeze up the blades, that sucker would come right down wherever it was.” Her grin grew broad. “And whoever is in it would come down, too."

  "No, you don't even need to go down there and get yourself all wore out doin’ a sticky spell,” he told her. “A high-powered rifle can do just as good, if you know what to shoot at, and I do. But my old gun has seen its best days. Seems like I recall you got yourself a real nice rifle back when you got that reward money. Might be I could borrow it?” He felt a bit shy about asking such a thing, for a gun was a mighty personal item and most didn't like to loan them out.

  Lena cocked her head and slanted her black eyes at him, reminding him of a wren on a branch. She nodded slowly, as if considering everything. When she finished, she jerked her chin toward the tumbledown house. “You come right in and let me get the gun. I'll send extra cartridges, too. You get to be our age, you don't always hit what you aim at, the first pop out of the box."

  Though he lacked at least a decade of equaling Lena's age, Choa followed her peacefully, wondering if he would need more than one shot—or if he'd have the chance to get off more than one, after shooting. A chopper could scat out of range mighty fast, he recalled.

  The ancient hardwood floors creaked under his feet as he moved across the kitchen to the rack Lena had put up over her window. She stretched up to reach it and brought down a gem of a gun, although not by any means a new one.

  Choa sighed. “A 1903 Springfield,” he sighed. “Prime shape, too. That gun, Miz Lena, might've been used in the First World War, you know that? Sends a slug that should bring down that machine, if I hit a blade just right."

  She stared up at him, her eyes bright as jet in the dim light. “You've got somethin’ else in mind besides just bringing it down. I can see it in your eye, Possum Choa. I've got a funny feeling about this. You be careful, you hear me?"

  He glanced away, feeling as if she could see clear to the back of his skull. She was a scary old lady, and that was no joke. He said nothing, just nodded.

  It took him a while to practice with the gun and make sure he knew how its sight was set. Way out there at Lena's, there was nothing to hit but trees, and he hauled up a target by the rope that raised Lena's signal in the big pine tree.

  She sat on the porch, reassuring her tomcat, while he got the feel of the gun and hit the strip of plywood five times out of six. He only missed the first shot. After that he aimed a bit lower than seemed right and hit every one solidly after that.

  "Good,” Lena called to him. “You take a pocket full of ammunition, now, and keep your own head down. There's few enough of us old-timers left down here. Can't afford to lose any of us."

  Choa wrapped the rifle in a gunny-sack and dropped the finger-sized cartridges into his pockets, where they made his pants feel as if they were about to fall off. Clinking together, they made his walk homeward noisier than he liked.

  By the time he reached the big creek leading into the swamp, he could hear the irritable whirr of the chopper and that reassured him. They were still a good distance from the sinky-hole. It would be Sunday before they could get that far.

  A good night's sleep didn't hurt Choa's feelings a bit. His bones ached, now that the nights were cooling down and the black-gums were beginning to show bright scarlet leaves amid their dark green crests. It was a good long step to the sinkhole from his cabin, too, and he appreciated the chance to think about his direction when he approached his goal.

  He fell asleep thinking, in fact, and woke only when a mockingbird tuned up outside. He grunted to his feet and stepped onto the rickety porch to look up at the stars. There was no sign of dawn, but it wasn't more than an hour off. Time to move, he decided.

  He slung the rifle, now protected by his own ancient leather gun-case, over his shoulder by the sling, stuck a couple of cold potatoes left over from supper into his pocket, and headed for his dock. There was a short-cut, this time of year, by way of a tangle of deep creeks that were now filling with the early fall rains. He could paddle his way toward his goal for several miles before taking to the trails.

  He hated to think about what he intended to do. His people had never shrunk from killing, but they had seldom gone out of their way to do it, either. Why didn't white men tend to their own business in their own places and leave the wild spots alone? He'd never figured that out.

  Soon as they found a wonderful place, full of growing things and fish to catch and game to trap, they had to build roads to it and ramps for power boats and camp houses to keep the weather off. Then they weren't satisfied with it because they'd ruined everything they came there to find. There was just no figuring them.

  An hour after sunrise he began to hear the whup-whup of the chopper again. By the time he pulled his boat into a clump of cat-tails and hid it, the thing had settled into a regular pattern again, and he could just about time its arrival at the sinky-hole. If they had sensitive detection devices, they'd surely spot that whatever-it-might-be in the ice chest, but he knew he'd be there first.

  CHAPTER XXIII. The Watchers in the Woods

  Wash wasn't surprised to find Wim waiting out on the road, when he bumped up the iron-hard ruts and stopped. Early Sunday morning or not, the boy looked bright-eyed, and his face had been scrubbed almost raw. Obviously, his mother wanted him presentable, no matter what sort of expedition he was to make with the police chief.

  Grinning, Wash leaned to open the passenger-side door. “Hop in, Wim. How far can we go in the car before we have to walk? And can we get there before the chopper does?"

  Before the boy could reply, Wash pushed a box of doughnuts toward him. “Better get something inside you. We've got a har
d day ahead, if I'm any judge,” he said.

  With a doughnut in each hand, Wim munched for a moment. Then he said, “Go back up the road a quarter mile and take that wagon track that leads off toward the northeast. It'll take us as near as we can get, without walkin'.” The chocolate-filled doughnut had already decorated his cheeks with brown dots.

  If the washboard road to Wim's house was bad, the track was much worse. Used mainly by wagons pulled by mules or tractors, it wandered around stumps, through clumps of sassafrass sprouts, and finally into the big woods itself, twisting to miss huge magnolias and oaks and ash trees.

  On either side the growth was thick, for the lane let in sunlight to sustain bushes and other plants. Beyond the screen of hawthorn, holly, myrtle, yaupon, and sawvines, Wash caught occasional glimpses of huge tree trunks rising from ages-deep leaf-mould that was too shaded to support low-growing plants.

  "It's like a church in there, I always thought,” he murmured.

  The boy nodded vigorously. “I think so, too. Ma likes to go to meetin', but I think if I was God I'd come right out here and set in the shade and think about things. All the noise and singin’ and hollerin’ they do in church seems to me like more a bother than anything else."

  Wash chuckled, for he felt exactly the same. However, he was not out here to talk religion but to catch a criminal, whether or not it was his business or in his jurisdiction. He didn't want the sheriff or the feds or anybody else messing around in his own part of the county and bothering people they thought they could bully.

  "You think there's any way to get that ice chest out of the sinky-hole without using really fancy gear?” Wim asked. “Seemed to me that nobody would ever in the world be able to find it, much less raise it up again."

  Wash sighed. “If they've got a helicopter, then they've probably got equipment that will find what they want. If the thing's radioactive, that might be pretty easy to do. The Navy's got stuff that can let you pick up almost anything off the bottom of the sea, if you pin-point it first."

  They jounced along in silence for a long time, winding deeper and deeper into the bird-song and katydid-buzz of the low country. When the track ended at a turn-around circling a magnolia tree at least eight feet in diameter, Wash killed the engine. Together the two listened hard.

  The chopper was a dim disturbance in the distance. After a while, it became more distant until they couldn't hear it at all.

  "You s'pose they give it up?” Wim asked.

  "No. I'd bet they have to go back for more fuel, now and again,” Wash said. “Let's get out and hot-foot it to the sinkhole while there's time. I'd like to be there on the spot, the first time they fly close to it. That'll tell us if they have some of that fancy gear you talked about."

  Wash pulled his back-pack from the rear seat and shrugged his arms through the straps. Wim looked at him questioningly, and he said, “We'll need water, something to eat, maybe even a snakebite kit or something of the sort. We don't know how long we're going to be here, now do we?"

  Enlightenment broke over the boy's face. Wash knew the prospect of food that wasn't black-eyed peas and cornbread filled him with pleasure, and he was glad he'd had Jewel pack a really solid lunch. Roast beef sandwiches, stuffed eggs, bananas and nuts and juice probably didn't come Wim's way often, if ever.

  There was a dim track leading off toward the east, but Wim didn't take it. Instead, he ducked beneath a thicket of yaupon bushes that seemed to form a solid wall, and Wash had to bend double to follow him. That close to the ground, he could see a path made by small animals as they went about their business in the forest.

  A raccoon track dotted the dust with prints shaped like a baby's hand; a possum track crossed that, narrower and less human-looking; the pad of a bobcat blotted out a stretch of the smaller prints, and all was laced together with three-toed prints of many sizes of birds. Watching the path was like taking a census of the creatures living down here in the bottomland.

  In a minute or two, he could straighten his back again and found that now they were in the clean-floored wood beneath the great trees. There were a few pines, monsters that would have driven loggers mad with greed, but as Wash followed Wim deeper between the trees they became fewer. The ground here was too wet for them.

  Wim was as silent as an Indian. Even Possum Choa wouldn't have heard him coming, Wash felt certain. Wash was no slouch in the woods—he'd been a boy down here, himself. He knew his way around, but he had lost the knack of absolute silence, he found, while stomping around town in boots.

  It seemed a long time that they moved through the trees, following first one path, then another, none of them made by human feet. The sun now began to cast shafts of light through chinks in the overhead canopy, and birds had tuned up even louder.

  Squirrels scampered among the oaks and the occasional hickories, gathering their winter store of nuts. So far was this wood from the usual haunts of people that they weren't afraid; they sat on branches, fluffy tails flicking nervously, while scolding the intruders as they passed.

  "You ever squirrel hunt down here?” Wash asked.

  "Got no gun. Even if I did, though, I wouldn't hunt squirrels. Not enough meat on ‘em. I'd ruther trap rabbits and possums and coons. Ma can make a stew out of ‘em that makes your mouth water. Sometimes she cooks armadillo, too, when our dog catches one. Cooks them with dumplin's, when she's got wheat flour. Mighty tasty eatin'."

  Then the boy paused and listened again. The chopper had been back for some time, but now it sounded much closer than before.

  "How long?” Wash asked. “We going to be in time?"

  Wim gauged the angle of a sunbeam and nodded. “Just about. This way, now, and be careful. There's snakes to spare around the sinky-hole. You got on boots, which is good, but some of them big moccasins can strike higher than that. Step mighty careful!"

  Wash looked down at the boy's tough bare feet. “Wim, what about you? It's dangerous to go in snaky places without anything on your feet."

  The boy laughed. “Lord, Chief Shipp, snakes pay no heed to me. I kin slip up on a moccasin and grab it behind the head, if I want. Somehow they don't seem to see me."

  He'd heard of such things, Wash recalled from his boyhood. There were people who could handle snakes, catch wild birds with their hands, call animals to them. If Wim was one such, he was truly blessed, but it still made him nervous to think about those bare feet.

  Before they had gone far, the ground became soft underfoot, then squishy. A long gray-brown shape slithered off into the brush ahead of Wash, making his skin crawl. Yet Wim's brown feet stepped unhesitatingly over turtles and around snakes until they stopped in a tangle of rattan vines and hawthorn bushes.

  Overhead, a bamboo vine formed a roof dense enough to hide them even from a low-flying chopper. “Right here's where I aimed for. Gives us a look at the sinky-hole without getting out where anybody might see us,” Wim said, raising his voice to be heard above the increasing noise of the helicopter.

  Wash crouched beside the boy, after checking the vicinity for moccasins and copperheads. He unstrapped his backpack and took out a pair of binoculars. With the thick growth, there was little chance of the lenses reflecting sunlight to warn the searchers that they were being watched.

  From time to time he scanned slowly from right to left, and as the chopper followed its search pattern it came into his field of vision at last. It was still painted with camouflage and was obviously Army surplus, but its engine sounded steady and businesslike. The pilot was clearly well trained, for it skimmed the forest's canopy closely, following the contours of the treetops and yet remaining clear of obstructions.

  The sinky-hole was an anonymous gray-green spot that looked almost like a muddy clearing. The skim of water over its top grew an irregular layer of algae, which Wash knew would look like grass from the air. Would the pilot know that this was a likely place to investigate?

  He could hear Wim's heart thumping fast, and as he glanced down he saw the boy leaning f
orward, his gaze fixed on the approaching aircraft. Wash felt his own heart begin to pick up its pace as the mottled shape came closer and closer. When it turned from its regular pattern to hover over the sinky-hole, they both let out the breath they had been holding unconsciously.

  "The game is going to take the bait,” Wash muttered.

  Wim shook his head. “I never count on that till I got my hands on the critter,” he said.

  The chopper came down lower, its blades stirring up a commotion among the surrounding branches and pushing the algae aside to show the murky water beneath it. A dark object appeared, hanging from a cable and stabilized by two smaller lines, one on either side.

  As the chopper hung there, Wash found himself wondering what sort of detector that might be. Was the hidden object in that ice chest radioactive? Would the device be sensitive enough to locate it under all the gunk that filled the sinky-hole?

  He was holding his breath again. Deliberately, he inhaled and exhaled and found to his amusement that Wim was doing the same.