by Watt Key
“Did he tell the TV about me draggin’ him into a creek and takin’ his pistol from him?”
Mr. Mitchell laughed. “Naw, he didn’t say nothin’ about that. Why don’t you climb in and tell us all about it.”
“I might get sick if you don’t keep the windows down.”
“Son, these windows ain’t down, they’re gone.”
Mr. Mitchell’s truck was beat up all over. It had dents from the tailgate to the headlights. So many parts had been replaced on it that it was six different colors. It was piled full of cans and empty five-gallon oil buckets and magazines and sacks of garbage. The cab was crammed with just a little bit less of what was in the back.
Hal leaned into the truck and scooped up an armload of cans and magazines and empty chewing tobacco pouches. He backed out with his load and went to drop it in the truck bed. When he came back, he climbed in and slid to the middle, kicking more trash around with his feet.
“Slide on in here, Moon,” Mr. Mitchell said.
I got in and pulled the door shut.
As we drove towards the Mitchells’ place, some of the new trash that Hal put in the truck bed fluttered out onto the highway. At one point, I heard a clatter and turned to see a five-gallon bucket bouncing down the road behind us.
“You’re losin’ buckets back there, Hal.”
“Let ’em go,” Mr. Mitchell said.
I heard a paint can clatter off the truck. “You’re losin’ all kinds of stuff.”
Mr. Mitchell shrugged and spit out the window. “Yeah, well, this old boy don’t get out on the road much.”
Mr. Mitchell began to tell me about Sanders coming on television and talking about how dangerous I was. He said that everybody that lived around the Talladega National Forest was on the lookout for me.
“I oughta whip him good,” I said.
“You might get your chance if he finds you.”
Mr. Mitchell pulled a bottle of whiskey from under the truck seat and took a swallow. He screwed the cap back on and shoved it under. “Hal says you gonna head to Alaska pretty soon.”
“Not until I hear from Kit. I’m not gonna go up there by myself.”
“What if he’s too sick?” Hal asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
Mr. Mitchell spit again, coughed, and wiped his mouth. “I’ll tell you, Davy Sanders might be a fool, but he’s a dangerous fool. I suggest you stay holed up with us until you get you a plan made.”
“We can stay holed up and shoot bottles,” I said.
Mr. Mitchell smiled. “Damn straight we can shoot bottles.” He pulled out the whiskey and took another drink. He let down the bottle and looked at it. “I ’bout got this’n ready to set up soon as we get back.”
“I wish I had Sanders’s gun. Y’all should have seen that thing I took off him. It’d blow out your eardrums.”
“Where is it now?” Hal asked.
“Back in the forest gettin’ rusty.”
Mr. Mitchell smiled and shook his head. “Moon, I’ll do what I can, but you better hope he don’t get his hands on you. That’s all I got to say.”
31
I told Hal and his daddy what Kit and I had been doing. Mr. Mitchell drove along and smiled at my stories and drank from his whiskey bottle. After a while he pulled off the road and got out of the truck and walked around the passenger side. Hal slid over and got behind the wheel.
“Hal gonna drive us?” I asked.
“Boy can drive a bus, he can sure ’nough drive my truck for me,” Mr. Mitchell said as he climbed back in.
We crossed the Black Warrior River, and I stared down at the muddy water below. It reminded me of the cedar bluff overlooking the Noxubee River where Momma and Pap were buried.
“You make it out before it got cold on you, Hal?”
“Barely. I followed the creek like you said and come out on the road about dark. Some old fellow came along and let me ride with him. He was pretty jumpy about all those dogs crammed in his car and he was eyein’ me like he knew I was up to somethin’. I finally got him to drop me off at a place I recognized and I walked the rest of the way. I don’t think he figured out anything about who I was ’cause ain’t nobody been to Daddy’s lookin’ for me.”
We parked near a clear-water creek just outside a town called Clinton. Mr. Mitchell dug around in his toolbox until he found a can of Spam. Hal pulled a loaf of bread from behind the seat and we made lunch on the tailgate. It had been a long time since I’d had any meat with fat in it, and I was sorry there wasn’t a whole can just for me.
Mr. Mitchell’s place outside of Union was just how I pictured it would be from Hal’s description. His trailer was old and yellowed and had tires on top to keep the wind from blowing the roof off. The bloodhounds came running around the corner and jumped up and scraped at the truck.
“I don’t guess you’ll be needin’ a place to put your things, will you, Moon?”
“Nossir. I don’t have any things.”
They showed me a mattress I could sleep on in Hal’s room and said it was the best they had to give me. The little wiener dog was already lying on it, and she looked at me like she wasn’t giving up her spot.
“She gonna get mad at me?”
“Naw,” Hal said. “Just scoot her over. She’ll get under the covers with you at night. She likes gettin’ under things and crawlin’ in holes. Daddy had to dig her out of an armadillo hole last week. She was down there for two days.”
“She get it?”
“Hell yeah, she got it,” Mr. Mitchell said. “Them dogs is crazy. She got dead squirrels layin’ all over the yard like dish rags.”
“What’s her name?”
“Says Daisy on the tag.”
I lay down on the mattress beside Daisy. “Next to lyin’ on leaves and red bugs, this feels pretty good.”
Mr. Mitchell nodded at me and walked towards the room at the end of the hall. “I’ll see you boys later,” he said.
Hal told me his daddy usually took a long nap in the afternoon and we’d see him for supper and bottle-shooting later. He showed me where the bathroom was and gave me everything I needed for a shower. “How many bugs you think you got in your hair?”
“Prob’ly a bunch,” I said.
“Daddy ain’t gonna like bugs gettin’ in the mattress. He already got onto the wiener dog about fleas.”
“Well then, I reckon we oughta shave it all off after I take a shower. Spring’s about here anyway.”
I used some soap they had for cleaning grease off your hands and scrubbed the dirt off me. My fingernails and toenails had pine sap under them and we used gasoline to soften it and then scraped it out with a pocketknife. After that, Hal gave me some of his old clothes to wear in place of my Pinson uniform. I pulled on the blue jeans and a T-shirt that said “Moe Bandy” on it and looked at Hal.
“Fit pretty good,” I told him.
“Yeah. Last time I used ’em I was about your size.”
Mr. Mitchell had mashed some wooden crates into the mud and covered them with plywood for a front porch. Hal set some chairs up for us and ran an extension cord out of the trailer to plug his daddy’s electric razor into. As he shaved my head, I looked out over the clay pit and let the hair fall over my shoulders and into my lap. “I can see why he likes this place,” I said. “You can shoot guns all day long out here. Not too many places you can shoot guns all day long.”
“Daddy’ll be awake in a while and we can set up some bottles.”
I nodded. “Sounds good. You know, Sanders still has my rifle.”
“Not much way to get it now.”
“Your daddy let you take his truck by yourself?”
Hal stopped shaving me. “Yeah, but I ain’t takin’ you to get your gun from Sanders.”
“How about you takin’ me to get Pap’s gun?”
“At your old home?”
“Yeah.”
“Hell with that. We’re gonna let the law cool off a little bit. D
addy said even if you didn’t wanna come back with us, we should come warn you to stay hidden for a while.”
“Okay,” I said. “We can wait a while. But I’m glad you came and got me. I don’t wanna be out there by myself anymore. Once Kit gets better, we’ll figure somethin’ out. You know how I can talk to him?”
“He’s prob’ly too sick to talk to.”
“When he gets better, though.”
“The radio said what hospital he’s at. We can go up to the Laundromat and use the pay phone to call in a few days.”
“I thought he was gonna die out there. I’ve never felt so bad about anything in my whole life. I should have told him to bring some medicine.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Pap was wrong about a lot of things. You can’t make every kind of medicine in the forest. I can’t make everything Kit needs.”
32
After my haircut, Hal got some black garbage bags and started taping them over the side truck windows with duct tape.
“What’s all that for?”
“You just hold on, skinhead.”
When he was finished, we got in the truck and went riding down into the clay pit with the bloodhounds chasing behind. Once we were at the bottom, Hal mashed the gas pedal as far as it would go. The back tires threw mud fifty feet behind us and we fishtailed until I had to clutch the seat to keep from sliding across the cab. Finally, he straightened the truck and we sped towards the opposite side.
“What’re you doin’!” I yelled.
“Muddin’!”
There was a long strip of mud in the middle of the clay pit that we hit next, and a wall of rust-colored water shot up over us. The truck slowed and Hal gritted his teeth and floored it again. Clumps of mud clopped against the truck and covered us inch by inch until we could only see through what the windshield wipers scraped clean.
“Daddy made some heavy-duty wipers for us,” Hal yelled. I was so excited I couldn’t answer. I gripped the seat and held on. The tires slowly caught the ground, and the wall of water fell, and I saw we were still headed straight for the high clay wall of the opposite side. Just as I was about to ball up for the crash, Hal yelled, “Hold on!” and whipped the steering wheel with one hand. We slid sideways for about thirty feet until we slammed into the clay bank. I saw cans and buckets and trash bags fly into the air through the rear window. Hal grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and I saw his knuckles go white. “Hammer down!” he shouted and jabbed his right foot to the floor.
We scraped the side of the bank for a few yards and then tore away from it.
“You’re crazy!” I yelled.
“Fun, wasn’t it?”
“You’re gonna bend up your truck!”
“Daddy don’t need no Sunday car.”
“Well then, let’s go again.”
Hal’s eyes twinkled and he straightened his right leg, and we tore off for the other side. The bloodhounds had almost caught up with us and made a wide circle to give chase again. They were so covered with clay mud all you could see were their eyes, like they’d been dipped in tomato juice.
We made three runs through the clay pit before Hal said we were low on gas. We drove back up to the trailer and washed the dogs and truck down with a hose. The afternoon was growing late and my stomach hurt from laughing so hard. After Hal finished washing everything, he gathered up the hose and threw it under the porch. “What you think about that?”
“Most fun I ever had,” I said.
Hal nodded and ripped one of the garbage bags from a window. “You ain’t the only one that knows about stuff.”
“What else you got?”
“We’ll get Daddy up. He’s got a machine gun from Vietnam we can shoot those bottles with.”
“Machine gun!”
“Yeah. Real one.”
“Let’s go get him, then!”
Hal woke his daddy while I waited outside. Mr. Mitchell came out in his underwear with the machine gun Hal told me about. He had scars across his stomach and tattoos on his shoulder. His underwear was split and so thin that it was little more than yellowed cheesecloth.
Hal went around to the back of the trailer and got some empty bottles from a trash pile and stood them at the edge of the clay pit. I sat beside Mr. Mitchell on the porch and watched him load his gun. I had heard and read about machine guns, but I’d never seen one.
“Where can you get one of those?”
Mr. Mitchell rubbed his eyes like he was still tired. He scratched under his arms and took a while before he answered me. “You just kinda ask around.”
“Pretty loud?”
Mr. Mitchell nodded. “Yep. Especially for a man with a headache.”
Hal came back and stood behind us on the porch. Mr. Mitchell looked at us. “Ready?”
“Ready,” I said.
Mr. Mitchell jerked the machine gun up to his shoulders, and I slammed my hands over my ears as it shot fire from its barrel. All of the bottles seemed to blow apart at once and rain down into the clay pit as he swept the barrel once right and then once left. I was so excited my ears started to itch. I let my hands down and yelled out, “Wahooo!”
Hal ran around the back of the trailer, and I heard him picking through the trash pile for more bottles. Mr. Mitchell laid the gun across his legs and looked over at me. “Wanna try it?”
“Heck, yeah!”
After Hal set up the new bottles and returned, I took the gun from Mr. Mitchell and brought it to my shoulders. I lined up the iron sights and put my cheek against the stock. “Now?” I asked.
“Make ’em pay, Moon.”
I squeezed back on the trigger and the gun exploded. I let off the trigger and watched the one bottle I’d aimed for fall away into the clay pit. Mr. Mitchell told me to move my barrel along the line of bottles when I pulled the trigger and I could get them all. I sucked in my breath, took aim, and turned every bottle in the line to glass splinters.
“You a damn good shot, boy.”
“I told you he would be,” Hal said.
When it was his turn, Hal walked to the edge of the pit and fired the gun from his hip at the far side. Puffs of dust spit from the clay bank. Before he was done, a giant wall of dirt fell away and slid to the bottom.
It was well after dark when Hal and I stopped shooting. Mr. Mitchell had made a seat for himself on the tailgate of the truck and drank whiskey and scratched and chuckled at us. “You boys would have been hell in ’Nam,” he said. “I reckon you two gonna be icin’ them shoulders tonight.”
Hal made hamburgers for supper, and I’d never tasted anything better. I ate two before I sat on the sofa and held my stomach. Mr. Mitchell watched me. “Touch easier than killin’ your own food, ain’t it?”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Don’t hurt yourself over it. You gonna blow up, you don’t slow down a little bit.”
“He always eats too much when you give him regular food.”
Mr. Mitchell played country music on his record player and lay back in a big chair across from me. He took a pouch of tobacco from a table beside him and stuffed some in his cheek. Hal sat on the kitchen counter and pulled his shirt off. He licked his finger and began to clean his belly button.
“What’s today?” I asked.
“Saturday,” Hal replied.
“You get a lot of people comin’ by here to get dirt?”
Mr. Mitchell spit in an empty whiskey bottle beside him. “Sometimes,” he said. “Depends on what they got goin’ on construction-wise.”
“I’ll bet you can make a bunch of money sellin’ dirt. You don’t ever run out, do you?”
Mr. Mitchell seemed to think for a few seconds. “Guess you don’t.”
“We gonna go see Kit, Hal?”
“How we gonna do that? They catch me or you both, they gonna take us away.”
“We could sneak into the hospital.”
“He’s prob’ly not feelin’ better yet.”
“Well, I hope he doesn�
�t think I forgot about him. Hope he doesn’t think I’m mad at him.”
“I told you we’d call him in a few days.”
“You think he’ll still wanna go to Alaska”
“Moon, what you gonna go to Alaska for?” Mr. Mitchell asked me.
I was about to tell him what Pap had told me, but I didn’t. It didn’t seem right anymore. “I’ve just been plannin’ on goin’ there for a while. I told Kit I’d take him.”
“You’d freeze up there.”
“I don’t really care where we go. I just don’t wanna go by myself.”
“I’d rather live out there in that clay pit than Alaska,” Mr. Mitchell said.
“Clay pits don’t bother me.”
“Any place you don’t wanna live?”
“Pinson. Jail. Most anyplace where you get locked up. It makes my insides tighten up like somebody poured bad water down my throat.”
The wiener dog jumped into my lap, and Mr. Mitchell watched it. He spit into the bottle again and said, “I’ll bet you Sanders’s momma raised hell on him for losin’ that dog.”
“I’ll bet he got lost lookin’.”
“For you or for the dog?”
We lay in Hal’s room that night with the window open because the weather was pleasant. The wiener dog nosed under the blanket with me and lay throbbing against my side. I trained my ears to listen for the night sounds, but all I heard was the rustling of pecan trees.
“What else do you have around here?”
“Got a chainsaw. Bet you ain’t never used one of them.”
“Let’s go get it.”
“Not now.”
“Is it loud?”
“Yeah.”
“Loud as that machine gun?”
“No.”
“Bet you don’t have many wild animals around here with all that shootin’.”
“Daddy don’t shoot it much. Just when he’s got company.”
“You’re lucky,” I said.
“I know.”
“I could ride in clay pits and shoot machine guns and eat hamburgers for a long time before I’d get tired of it.”