Of course his ideal location wouldn’t be up here on one of these godforsaken mountaintops but down along the river somewhere, and he’d found plenty of abandoned houses where the old road stopped at the river. For most of his life, until he’d more or less quit it in order to give all his time to the search for Robin, Leo had earned his living as a guide on the Buffalo River, taking rich sportsmen from Little Rock or as far away as St. Louis, KC and Chicago, out in johnboats to float the Buffalo and fish for linesides and goggle-eyes. He knew ever inch of that river and couldn’t nobody direct the sportsmen to the best fishing spots better than he could. His customers always gave him a nice tip over and beyond the fee. Leo was constantly hoping that he’d find Robin safely living in some cabin at a dead-end along the river. If she was, and according to his daydreams after he’d shot and killed or taken prisoner that guy who’d stolen her, Mr. Bald Tires, why, he intended to return Robin straight to her mother, and then collect the reward and get his pitcher in the papers. And then he supposed he could just spend the rest of Robin’s growing-up years giving her presents and being a nice grandpappy to her and admiring her.
The abandoned houses of the Ozarks was spread out all over northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri, and Leo had already found quite a few of them in Missouri and intended to find quite a few more now that he had a four-by-four pickup. He was keeping track and whenever he found one of the places he had one of these here yeller high-lighters that he smeared around the little white empty square on the map that meant the dwelling was no longer dwelt-in (if it was black, it meant that it was occupied, but Leo had discovered a number of black ones that was empty too, so his maps was mostly out of date). There was just about the same number of empty houses up on the ridges and mountaintops as there was down along the river or off in some flat plateau somewheres.
It was the ones up high that made him need the four-by-four, and sure enough, as soon as he got the truck and headed south from Harrison (he could never forget that was the direction Mr. Bald Tires had headed), he found himself climbing a rough trail that led up a mountain near Gum Springs, south of Jasper in Newton County, a trail he couldn’t possibly have climbed in his old pickup, the way it turned every whichaway and was full of washouts and mud holes and his pickup had a real work-out getting there. And when he got to the end of the road and stopped at the house, he saw at once the house wasn’t really abandoned. There was chickens and pigs all about, and a garden patch. A man with a shotgun came out of the house, somebody Leo hadn’t never seen before, and the man just pointed the gun at him and said, “Well?”
“Looks like a dead end, don’t it?” Leo said.
“It’s the end but it aint dead,” the man said.
“You live here all by yourself?” Leo asked.
“Just me and the old woman,” the man said.
“How old is the woman?” Leo wanted to know but that question was answered directly when the woman herself came out. She was old, all right.
“What does he want?” the woman asked her man.
“He wants to know if he can back up and turn around and get the hell out of here,” the man said to her, and then he said to Leo, “Yes, I believe you can.”
That was the second time he’d found people still living in a supposed abandoned house. The other time there’d been three women living together who’d pointed their rifle at him and driven him off. He figured most people who’d want to live at the end of the road wouldn’t care for company.
But the third time he found people still on the premises of a deserted house, he wasn’t turned away. It was in rough hill country over in Madison County, way up on the highest peak for miles around, and after climbing in low-lock for a mile over some terrible boulders, he came out into a field, and there was a young lady with her titties hanging out, why, she didn’t have hardly nothing on but a too-tight pair of cut-off blue jeans, and a string of beads around her neck. He didn’t know whether to wave or just pretend he never seen her. “Howdy,” he managed to say as he drove up beside her. Her hair come pretty near to her waist. “Does this here road go anywheres?” he asked, conversation-like, without staring at her bosoms.
“You don’t look like a narc,” she said. “Boss. The house is right down there, Daddy.”
He drove on, and the next thing he saw was another girl who didn’t have nothing on. Not a stitch except some beads around her neck and a big floppy hat on her head. He decided not to speak to her. A little beyond her, he come to the house, which might’ve been abandoned not too long ago but now looked like people were sure enough living in it, and out in the yard of the house was a whole bunch of young folks, most of ’em naked as jaybirds, in mixed company besides, boys as well as girls.
When he stopped the pickup, one young feller with his pecker hanging halfway to his knees came over to him and said, “You’re not the landowner, are you?”
“Who, me?” Leo asked. “Naw, I don’t own this land.” He could smell the smoke of mary jane in the air.
“Too much, man. Were you looking for someone?”
“Yeah, just a little girl.”
“Your daughter? What does she look like?”
“Just my step-granddaughter, and she’s seven going on eight, long blonde hair.”
The young feller laughed. “Freaking, man. Nobody that young around here, man.”
One of the stark naked girls came up beside the young man and wrapped her arm around him and said to Leo, “Daddy, I thought for a minute you were my father. But you’re not. Cool.” She was looking him over so much that he didn’t think she’d mind him staring at her titties. And her bush. “What’s your thing?” she asked.
“Thing?” he said. The only thing he knew about was what he’d once told Robin was his mousy, and it was a-starting to stir in a way he hadn’t known for quite a spell.
“Are you just some farmer?” she asked.
“Naw, I’m sort of a fisherman,” he said, if she was talking about job occupation.
“Solid,” she said. “But there’s not any fish around here.” She giggled.
The young feller said, “Turn off your motor, man, and blow some good shit with us.”
Leo wasn’t sure just what that invitation involved, but he turned off the motor and got out of the pickup and soon he was in the midst of all those young people and somebody handed him a rolled joint of mary jane. He used to use the stuff regularly in the Navy, but lately the only times he did was when one of his sportsmen customers was lighting up along the Buffalo and passed the joint to Leo just to be polite, and he didn’t smoke too much because he had to steer the johnboat.
But he smoked a lot that day. He smoked so much of it that he stopped feeling self-conscious on account of he was the only one with his clothes on and also the only one over thirty years of age. The smoking made him forget eventually that he wasn’t under thirty, but nearly twice that, and before long he had also stopped being the only one who still had clothes on.
They invited him to crash, and he hoped they weren’t talking about having him start up the truck and ram it into a tree or nothing. Some girl told him he was a gas, and he wondered if he had accidentally broke wind. Several people urged him to hang loose, and he was a little nervous about what they might be planning to do with him. “You’re making the scene, Daddy,” another girl said to him, and he wondered what he was supposed to do. They fed him some dish of rice and vegetables that was okay, nothing special, with home brew to wash it down. And after supper some of them got out their guitars and played rock and roll music, and he was invited to dance with some of the naked girls. Later one of the gals, a little on the hefty side, rubbed up against him and said, “You’re mellow, man. Want to be my old man tonight and ball me?” He didn’t like being reminded of his age, but whatever she had in mind he was ready for. Her name was Misti Dawn, and she showed him some real fancy fucking which must’ve been the fruit of lots of experience.
He stayed three or four days there with those young folks. He h
ated to leave, and they didn’t want him to leave, but he had to remind himself that he had a mission, and he’d been neglecting it to enjoy himself. By the time he left he had even learnt what some of their language meant, “spaced” and “trip” and “way out” and “downer” and “happening” and all such as that. He had had plenty of mary jane as well as home brew and even something called acid which made him see things and scared him for a few hours. He was afraid if he stayed any longer he wouldn’t want to leave. So he left.
But they traded him his ordinary clothes for some striped blue jeans with the first bell-bottoms he’d had since the Navy, and a fancy embroidered shirt, and they put what little hair he had in back into a pony tail with a ribbon around it, and that’s what he was looking like the next time Louisa seen him.
“Where on earth have you been, and what on earth have you been doing?” she wanted to know.
“Outa sight,” he said. And he stayed just long enough to see if the square world was still going round. The only development in the law’s handling of Robin’s case was that a couple who’d been in the parking lot of the roller rink that night, maybe fucking in the back seat of their car, had seen a suspicious man and had described him so well that a new police composite sketch had been made, replacing the one that Leo had done and not looking anything like that feller. The new suspect was actually identified as a known child molester recently released from Cummins prison, and there was a APB on him, with the state police and FBI concentrating on known places he had lived. That there FBI man who’d been so chummy with Robin’s mother was spending all his free time with her, and the last thing Louisa said to Leo before he took off again was, “You might just get an FBI agent for your new son-in-law, so you’ll have to watch your step, you old reprobate.”
Leo looked over his maps and decided to see if he couldn’t reach those places that he’d had to turn back from when his truck was just a two-wheel drive. One of them was up a mountain beyond the town of Snowball in Searcy County. The old Jeep trail climbed for a good two miles beyond the place where it left a good dirt road, and when Leo came in sight of the house he had a hunch or something that made him stop the truck and proceed on foot with the revolver tucked into the waistband of his bell-bottom blue jeans, with his embroidered shirt covering up the handle.
That way, he was able to catch ’em by surprise, and sure enough there was a old boy living there with a young girl, only she wasn’t Robin, and she wasn’t seven or eight but maybe thirteen. “How’d you find us?” the feller asked, and Leo knew that they was fugitives, and they was living here with a garden patch and a flock of chickens, and a spare room loaded up with food and supplies.
“I’ve just been looking everywhere for you,” Leo said, which was practically the truth.
“Are you her father?” the man asked.
“Naw, I’m just her uncle, aint that right, sweetheart?” he said to the girl, and she nodded her head, playing along with his game.
“Trina, tell him I aint done nothing to you,” the man requested of the girl.
“You know that’s not true, Wayne,” she said.
She held Leo’s gun on Wayne while Leo tied Wayne up real good with some rope and put him in the back end of the pickup, and the girl rode up front with him. He figured he’d just take ’em both to the county seat at Marshall and hand ’em over to the sheriff. Making conversation, he asked, “How long has he been a-keeping you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I lost track. Maybe five or six years.” She smiled real big, and said, “I’m so glad you found me. I thought nobody ever would. You’re my hero. Could I give you a blow job?”
Leo slammed on the brakes and felt his old mousy unbending just at the thought. “That’s real kind of ye,” he said to her, driving on. “But I reckon I’d better take a raincheck on it.”
As it turned out, when he’d delivered them to the sheriff at Marshall, the girl had been kidnapped five years previously, and the search for her had eventually been abandoned. Her kidnapper, Wayne Curtis, had a long rap sheet of child molesting and sex offenses.
Leo got his pitcher in the papers, with a story about how he’d actually been working on the famous Robin Kerr case when he accidentally stumbled upon the other one. But the reward offer had expired, so he didn’t get nothing out of it except that raincheck, which he never got a chance to cash in.
The good deed gave him a right smart of pride and courage, though, and when he resumed his search for Robin he was filled with pep and renewed determination. As September rolled around, he was all set to give another try to a trail in Newton County that had turned him back in July. The country sure was pretty, what with the trees commencing to turn color, and all that red and orange warmed him up since the weather was getting cold and he had to wear his winter jacket. According to his map, there was this impassable Jeep trail that wandered all around the north end of a place called Madewell Mountain. He’d been able to climb less than a mile of it in his two-wheel-drive pickup before hitting a stretch that he couldn’t negotiate. There was at least another mile or so of it to go to reach the white square that meant a uninhabited dwelling.
That was his destination now, and the hunch he’d played in finding that Trina girl was now hunching him over the steering wheel with shivers running up his hunched back. Something told him this was the big day.
But the damn trail just played out completely, far short of the goal. After getting stuck in one hole so rough and deep he had to get out and jack up the rear end and put rocks under the tires to go on a little ways more, he got into a gully that was really terrible and he couldn’t go backward or forward, and spent two hours trying to jack the pickup up and get it out of there, without any luck. Since he couldn’t go back the way he came, he figured he might as well just walk on, until he reached that house.
The trouble was, there just wasn’t no trace whatsoever left of the trail. And the bluffs was steep and risky and the woods was deep and spooky, and it was beginning to get dark. He had a flashlight, and his revolver, and that was all he had to find his way to wherever he was trying to go.
Chapter twenty-two
She was so heartsick she couldn’t eat. So she simply stopped eating. She didn’t even bother to build a fire in the kitchen stove each morning, because Sugrue wasn’t eating anything anyway. She built a fire in the living room stove just to keep warm. She made sure that Robert was fed, giving him his bottle with Pet Milk three times a day, and then tried gradually to wean him from his bottle by getting him interested in some of the canned goods: there were potted meats like deviled ham that he would eat. But there was nothing that she would eat. Not as long as Hreapha was gone.
She wondered if perhaps Hreapha had been eaten by a bear. Although the Ouija Board had once declared that Hreapha would live to be nineteen, which was really old, old age for a dog, there was a possibility that the Ouija Board was mistaken, just as a lot of things that require belief and faith are false: for instance, Robin had a hunch that there was no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, or, if there was, the Tooth Fairy had ignored the last two teeth she had left under her pillow. She had a third tooth almost ready to leave there, but had decided not to, out of fear it would prove beyond doubt that there is no such thing as a Tooth Fairy. And if the Ouija Board was wrong about Hreapha living to be nineteen, then it was also wrong that Sugrue was going to die. Some mornings he was able to get up and go out, hobbling on his homemade crutches, and although he couldn’t do any work, and wasn’t any good at talking, he was at least sobered up enough to listen to her.
When she told him she feared that a bear had eaten Hreapha, he simply said something that sounded like “Pigeon eat.” More than once he said those words whenever she brought up the subject of Hreapha’s disappearance. Was he trying to say that a pigeon had eaten Hreapha? Or perhaps that Hreapha had eaten a diseased pigeon which had caused her to get sick and die?
Although she accepted the possibility that the Ouija Board was wrong and that the T
ooth Fairy did not exist, she refused to cease believing in spirits or whatever was unseen but clearly felt or known. She knew that there was some kind of invisible spirit who lived in the cooper’s shed or spent most of its time there, and she had heard its voice clearly, that time she’d cured the pork. She was going to hear it again while doing the only work she would do during her time of sorrow over Hreapha: the smoking of the pork. One of the garbled things that Sugrue had said, whenever he said “Pigeon eat,” was “Mokawg,” and when several repetitions of mokawg failed to make any sense to her, he got his crutches and summoned her to follow him to the cooper’s shed, where, on the dirt floor of the shed, he piled up an assortment of wood chips from the chopping stump and some of the accumulation of corncobs that they’d saved from their own corn on the cob and the chicken’s winter supply of shelled corn. He built a fire and soon the interior of the shed was filled with smoke. He poked holes through the chunks of the razorback she had cured, and ran white oak splits through the holes and hung the meat from the joists of the cooper’s shed.
He held up two fingers and then three fingers, “Toodaze. Freedaze,” he said, and hobbled on back to the house, leaving her to figure out that she was expected to keep the fire going by adding more of the wood chips and more of the corncobs. But was she supposed to stay awake and watch it for two or three days?
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