Cry Wilderness

by Frank Capra

  Selah! Now for the plot… Selah? What does that mean? “So there”? “Take it or lump it”? I looked it up. And I learned that psalms are the poetical lyrics of songs that were sung; and that “Selah!” was a “music up!” musical direction to punctuate a particularly pithy statement in the psalm—a modern cymbal crash or a choral “hallelujah!” Okay, my “Selah!” goes double. For my plot is not only pithy, it’s… Oh, I just heard the end of the legend; the folktale of two nameless characters who “went native” up here. I say nameless because even at their fantastic trial at the Bridgeport Courthouse they refused to reveal their names. And I say legend because I’ve pieced together the story from the romantic vaporings of old-timers, and you know how old codgers can blow up a minor miracle into a Genesis.

  Anyway, with me it all started one evening about ten years ago, as I was coming out of the June Lake General Store with some groceries. Right behind me was Deputy Sheriff “Lefty” Wakefield, a big, tough, ox of a man, but as friendly as a Labrador retriever. He was carrying a roll of cheesecloth and some nylon rope, which he threw in the back seat of his sheriff’s car.

  “Hi, Frank,” he greeted me.

  “Hi, Lefty. What’s with the rope?”

  “You very busy tonight?” he asked cryptically.

  “No. Not if you’ve got a better offer.”

  “I have.” Then, lowering his voice, “Can you keep your trap shut?”

  “When I’m alone, maybe.”

  “Okay. Get in.”

  I hurriedly got into the car, secretly thrilling at the thought of aiding a sheriff with red lights and siren and all. He was just about to close his door when he got out again.

  “Oh, I forgot,” he whispered, “you’ll need a knife, too.”

  He dashed back into the store. A knife? I thought. Are we going to scalp somebody?

  I was about to take flight when back he came, handing me a long hunter’s knife in a leather sheath. Then, as he started the car:

  “You can do a better job with that than I can. I’ve seen you.”

  With the amber light flashing, we cruised through June Lake’s crowded, crooked main street, and out past June Lake’s “balanced boulder,” which looms fearfully over the road—a ninety-ton, egg-shaped hunk of glacier-deposited granite that balances magically on the small end of its egg, and on a smaller rock, yet. I looked at the knife in my hands and began to worry…and sweat.

  “Look, Lefty,” I began nervously, “I…I ain’t much for…I mean, what’s the caper, as we say in crime movies?”

  “You promised to keep your big Hollywood mouth shut, remember?”

  “I promised nothing,” I retorted hopefully. “You don’t trust me? Fine. Let me out.”

  “Just kidding, Frank, just kidding. But on the level. Keep this to yourself, will you?… As a favor?”

  “Okay…but where’re we going?”

  “I got two deer in the back of the car.”

  “Oh.” I brightened. “It’s the game warden I shouldn’t talk to, huh?”

  “Naw…Wes knows all about it. You see, deer knocked off by cars on the highway, we’re supposed to take to the county prisoners or the hospital.” Then, jabbing a banana-sized finger into my arm, he growled, “But not these two, you hear?… These are for Bear Bait and Dry Rot, and I don’t really give a damn who you tell about it.”

  I looked at Lefty with great affection as he gruffly swung the car north on Highway 395. Big bullet head, big hairy hands, big three-hundred-pound body that seemed to fill the whole car—and, for me, a heart big enough to fill Mono County. You see, Lefty was not only a dear friend. He was my hero.

  Bear Bait and Dry Rot? They were two disreputable nuts that had been holed up in the woods for years and years. Bear Bait I had seen several times, but Dry Rot only once, years ago. Following an old logging road into Jeffrey Pine Forest in my station wagon, I had stopped to cut up “slashings” (the limbs left by lumbermen) for firewood. I was alone. But as I looked up from sawing wood, I saw I wasn’t alone. In the gloom of the thick pines, a ghost was moving. I froze in fright.

  But as I watched, I saw it was a man walking…a tall, very thin man…with long silver hair falling down his shoulders, and a long beard, white, down to his waist. His tattered clothes hung on him like white robes. Then I realized he was covered all over with white volcanic dust, giving him the appearance of a wraith.

  He stopped to look at me. Although he was fifty yards away, I thought I saw him smile. With his right hand he made the sign of the cross in my direction…and I thought I heard the words “Pax vobiscum.” I say “I thought” because as I stood there in open-mouthed amazement, I wasn’t sure of anything.

  Then the wraith stepped behind a tree and disappeared. Moments later, I thawed. “What the hell was that?” I asked myself. I rushed out to where I had seen the apparition and looked around. Nothing. I looked for footprints. But the ground was covered with pine needles. I ran back to my station wagon, jumped in, and tore out of that forest as if there were no trees in it.

  Back at June Lake, I made for The Tiger Bar for a quick drink. I was still shaking. Red, the bartender, looked at me funny-like as he poured a bourbon.

  “Frank…you’re pale. What’d ya see, a ghost?”

  “Yeah…” And I told him what I saw. Red laughed.

  “That was Dry Rot you saw.”

  “Who?”

  “Dry Rot…a harmless nut…been in the woods for years.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Oh, out there someplace. Nobody’s ever found his hideout.”

  “Well…” I stuttered, “Dry Rot?… Is that his name?”

  “Naw… Never would tell his real name. Us merchants around here hung Dry Rot on ’em… You ever fish with grubs?”

  “Those big white grubs?… Sure.”

  “Well he digs grubs out of the dry rot of fallen logs…puts ’em in cans we leave him, and hides ’em in a hollow log by the highway. Then us store guys pick up the grubs and sell ’em to you fishing Joes. That’s why we call him Dry Rot.”

  “Well, for Pete’s sake… Hmm…and you leave him money?”

  “No. He won’t touch money. Never has. No, he just leaves little notes… ‘Some socks, please’… He’ s always so polite… ‘Some shoes’…‘some tools’… Lately, Ed Krouse, the hardware guy, told me he’s been askin’ for heavy gloves and cement.”

  “Cement?”

  “Yeah… Bugs me what in Christ’s world he’d do with cement… First few years all he asked for was whiskey. That’s how I got hep to the hollow log. Then all of a sudden he’s off liquor. Not a drop since. Funny guy.”

  “Whatta you know… How about food? Doesn’t he ever…”

  “Never. But you know old Piute Joe from Mono? He was in here years ago putting the bite on me for a drink…said he’d tell some good gossip for a bourbon. So I said, ‘Give with the gossip first.’ So he told me Dry Rot had been down to Mono Lake pesterin’ old Indian biddies about what they ate as kids. Cost Dry Rot a little whiskey, but they opened up… Pinon nuts, they told him, and Mono Lake ‘shrimp’—you know, those fly eggs Indians eat like caviar…”

  “You mean the fly larvae that wash up on shore…”

  “Yeah, fly something… Ain’t eatin’ none, tell you that… Another drink? Okay…and they told him about the big Jeffrey pine caterpillars you smoke down out of trees…and about wild onions, taboose, berries, squaw rice, and all the rest of the junk the Indians ate…and that’s what Dry Rot’s eatin’ I guess. Funny guy.”

  “Well, whatta you know. I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Save your breath… He sees you, he disappears…wants no truck with nobody. Wish I had guts enough to get the hell out of this bar and do what he does.”

  “Yeah,” I mu
sed. “Wonder why he went native?”… And I was still wondering when deputy Lefty slowed up and eased the car off the highway, down a bank and onto no road at all, just an opening in some thick Jeffrey pines. He weaved in and out between the spooky red-barked, diamond-quilted trunks for about a hundred yards, then stopped in a secluded draw. Our headlights eerily illumined a ghostly pine with a low horizontal branch. A hanging tree, of course. Cold fingers brushed my spine.

  “What foul deed is afoot here?” I secretly parodied in Shakespearian conceit.

  “Okay, Frank,” said Lefty. “Let’s hang ’em up here.” He turned out the car lights and lit a pocket flashlight.

  From under a canvas cover on the floor of the back seat we dragged out two deer, a doe, and a young spike buck. We tied two nooses around their necks, threw the ropes over the tree limb, hoisted up the deer until their hind feet were off the ground, and tied the ropes to the tree trunk. Then we unsheathed our knives. But I couldn’t figure out why all the secrecy.

  “Look, Lefty. I don’t mind helping you with the cleaning and skinning. But why act like two guys that just robbed a bank?”

  “Because,” he snapped angrily as he slit the belly, “the rich, fat, real estate bastards, the big new-money city guys investing ’round here…they’re needling county officials to run Bear Bait and Dry Rot the hell out of here. ‘Bad for business,’ they say… ‘Lots of children in the woods now… These two nuts could be dangerous for them…Think of the publicity… Blah, blah, blah! The dirty moneygrubbing, sons of… Neither one of these two loners would hurt a fly.”

  We started cutting out the entrails, careful-like because of the weak flashlight.

  “So,” continued Lefty, waxing madder by the minute, “the word sifted down to us officers, the storekeepers and the forestry guys, not official mind you, just hints… Give the two hermits the bum’s rush. So all doors are closed to Bear Bait, now…and Dry Rot…his grubs are rotting in the old hollow log. The bastards.” He paused, then continued.

  “Know what the chief said to me this morning? ‘Lefty,’ he says, ‘pick up those two bums on a vag charge and bring ’em in… We’ll roust ’em around a little… Maybe they’ll leave the County.’

  “‘Chief!’ I told him. ‘That’s not fair and you know it. I know the heat’s on you from the new big shots, but if Bear Bait and Dry Rot are vags, I’m Al Capone. Not me, Chief, I won’t pick ’em up, not even if it means my badge. And if you send somebody else to pick ’em up, send big guys…’cause I’ll be there to be picked up with ’em.’ And he said, ‘Keep your temper, Lefty…or it will mean your badge.’ So I walked out…and I picked up these deer cars knocked off near Fern Creek…and I’m gonna skin ’em and clean ’em and take ’em to those two hermits! Chief or no chief.”

  Then he turned to me, shaking his bloody knife.

  “Frank… Don’t ever tell this to nobody…but two years ago, there was this head-on crash at night this side of Deadman’s Summit. I got to the accident first. Bodies all over the highway. One of the bodies, young he was, waves me over to him…

  “‘Officer, officer…there was somebody here…big long beard…all in white like a ghost…kneeled down by those people over there…Then he heard your siren and disappeared.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘probably was an angel…means you’re gonna be all right’… And the young man says, ‘Oh, my God,’ and starts reciting the Lord’s Prayer… Dry Rot, of course… Dangerous? Those bastards.”

  By this time we were wiping out the insides of the deer with cheesecloth. I had a zillion questions to ask. But before I could frame one, Lefty was off again.

  “And Bear Bait…dirty old whiskey-souse Bear Bait. I was passing Silver Lake Lodge when Bill Johnson flags me down. A fisherman from Rush Creek was on the floor inside with a chicken bone in his throat. The phones were out, and could I rush the man to the Bridgeport Hospital? Sure. They carry him out and lay him on my back seat. He’s gasping and making awful noises trying to breathe. It’s gonna take thirty-five minutes to Bridgeport flat out, and I’m scared the man won’t make it.

  “I turn on the red light and the siren and lead-foot through the Loop toward three ninety-five. Then I think of Bear Bait. I’ve always had a hunch about him… Just a hunch, mind you…that he was some kind of doctor… So I take the chance. I turn off the highway and bust through the woods to his shack…about a mile from here. He’s in…and soused as usual. I opened the back door of my car and pointed inside. ‘Bear Bait, I’ve got a man here with a chicken bone in his throat. He’s dying. What’ll I do?’ Before I could finish he was in the back seat feeling the man’s throat. The man was blue and out.

  “‘Quick,’ he orders, ‘your knife.’ ‘Me?’ I ask, scared to death. ‘Your knife…hurry.’ I took out my pocket knife and opened it. ‘Now stab…right between my thumbs.’ ‘Bear Bait, I’m a cop, not a…’ ‘Stab, you stupid idiot…quick…right between my thumbs…’

  “I stabbed where he told me. Air came in and out of the hole making the blood burble. ‘Now,’ he tells me, ‘hold the wound open till I come back.’ I held the cut open with my clumsy thumbs. Color comes back into the man’s face, but me, I got no blood left.

  “Then Bear Bait came out…with a dirty old pipe stem from a corn cob. He stuck the pipe stem halfway in the cut. Air whistled in and out of it. ‘Now get this man to the hospital. Quick!’

  “Well, when I got to Bridgeport the man walked into the hospital… Bear Bait… Dangerous? The bastards!”

  “Lefty… How’d you get the hunch… I mean, about him being some kind of a doctor?”

  “Oh, that… Still not sure. First year he’d holed up in his shack, it was. I used to nose around and check on him ’bout once a week…and maybe take him something the wife had cooked to try to make him talk. Two pecan pies this time I had in the back seat. Oh, not because I was Santa Claus, no sir…just a cop makin’ sure he was clean…you know…

  “Well, as I rolled up, there was his fire outside the shack with a pot on it. I toot my horn to let him know it was me…and out busts a tall guy…looked like a scarecrow, hobbling on one foot and going Billy-be-damned through the trees, with Bear Bait after ’im.

  “Well, I jump out of the car, shoot a couple of shots in the air and yell, ‘Hold it, Hold it!’ But Bear Bait had tackled the guy and waved to me for help. Only his name wasn’t Bear Bait then. I called him Mister No Name. And he was Mister No Drink then, too. He took to the flit later.

  “‘Who is he?’ I ask No Name as I got to ’im.

  “‘Sick man, Mister Lefty. Please don’t let him run away,’ he tells me. ‘I’ll get a blanket…’

  “I grab the man as he keels over. All rags and bones he was. And whiskey breath? Liked to knock me over. ‘Sick, hell… He’s drunk, No Name.’

  “‘No, no,’ as No Name spreads a blanket near the fire. ‘Bring him here, please.’

  “I pick up the scarecrow. He’s hot as a firecracker and about as light. ‘No Name, he’s running a fever. I’ll take ’im to the hospital!’

  “The fuss that No Name put up. ‘No, NO. They ask questions. Just a leg infected, that’s all. A thorn… Lay him down here.’

  “I lay the man down on the blanket next to the fire. On his shinbone I see an ugly red-and-blue swelling big as my fist. No Name’s passing the blade of a bone-handled knife through the flames. I’m worried.

  “‘No Name…suppose he dies?’

  “‘He won’t die if we hurry. Oh, Mister Left…needle and thread…we need a needle and thread.’

  “‘I’ll look in my kit.’ I find threaded needles in my first aid box…but I also find my senses as a cop. Picking up my radio mike, I yell at Bear Bait:

  “‘Hold it, No Name… Don’t touch him! I’ll radio for an ambulance…’

  “‘I’m finished. Bring the thread.’

  “‘Finished?’ I walk back to ’em. Bear Bait had slit open the big
lump down to the bone and was squeezing out big gobs of yellow stuff. Between squeezings he washes the wound out with whiskey. The man starts to moan and tries to sit up.

  “‘Sit on him, Mr. Lefty…and here,’ hands me the whiskey pint, ‘pour some of this into him.’”

  “Ordered you around like a nurse, huh?” I chimed in, still wiping out the inside of the deer with cheesecloth.

  “Frank, I was so flabbergasted I obeyed the orders, too… Me! A tough cop who don’t mind knocking heads together. But while I dribbled whiskey into the sick guy’s mouth, I remembered something.

  “‘Hey, No Name,’ I threw at him, ‘you lied to me. You said you didn’t drink.’

  “‘I don’t,’ he answered, ‘he had it on him. Thread, please.’

  “I hand him the threaded needle. He puts the needle in the fire first, then straddles the man, sits on his knees to keep the legs still, and over his shoulder I see his hand come up and down as he’s sewing the guy up. Fine deputy sheriff, I thought to myself. How do I report this?

  “‘What’s the guy’s name?’ I ask No Name.

  “‘Don’t know, sir,’ he answers, in between stitches.

  “‘Ever see him before?’

  “‘No. Just limped in a few moments before you came, and collapsed. When he heard your horn, he up and ran.’

  “‘Oh…saw me and ran, huh?’ I was the cop again, and about time. ‘Ten to one he broke jail someplace. I better frisk him.’

  “Well, I go through his pockets…and nothing! Not a penny, no wallet, no cards, no nothin’! Only in one pocket I find a few pine nuts and a crazy string of beads. So I’m writing in my book, pine nuts and beads, when Beat Bait gets up and says: ‘Thank you, Mister Lefty. He’s okay now.’

  “I look down at the man’s leg. A piece of bark is over the stitches, tied on with strips of his shirt. Bark, plain bark.

  “‘Take that junk off, No Name, I got bandages and tape in the kit.’

  “‘No bandages, please,’ as he follows me to the car, ‘I don’t know about bandages… He’ll be fine—everything’s clean here in the woods…’