All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

by John Farris

  Sheriff Gaines came in as Jackson was reapplying bandages with pads of gauze soaked in a solution of boric acid. Arabella, released from the worst of her pain, was peaceful now, half-asleep. She muttered unintelligibly when spoken to. The other women were anxious to get her dressed and on her way to the nearest large hospital, John Gaston in Memphis. Jackson and Nhora left the room with the sheriff.

  "Where is the other body?" Jackson asked.

  "Out back."

  "Have you killed the—are there many—"

  Gaines looked at him with a hint of amusement. "No snakes. Scared 'em all away."

  Jackson, his pulse racing, forced himself to go outside. The back screen door, on a line with and twenty feet from the front door, was also wrecked. They walked down railed wooden steps and across the yard, past a grape arbor and a vegetable garden. Someone had hung a lantern at the corner of a tool shed. Two Negro men in bathrobes were talking to deputies near the hen house. A dead hound, apparently killed by a thrust of the sharp-pointed pole that protruded from its throat, lay in the dirt.

  A deputy with wire cutters was hacking Old Lamb loose from the fence. Nhora took one look at the blood and chicken feathers and returned to the car to wait.

  "What happened to the dog?" Jackson asked.

  "Caleb—he's the nigger inside the house—saw a man runnin' through here after the dynamite, or whatever it was, went off. Caleb let his dog off the chain. Man killed the dog."

  'What did the man look like?"

  "Too dark. He ran with a kind of a limp, Caleb says. Skipped along kind of stiff-legged. But he was fast anyhow. Caleb had a couple cracks at him with his rifle. Didn't hit him. He disappeared into the bayou."

  Sweating deputies lowered the body of Old Lamb to the ground. They spread a tarp and shone a light on the body. Insects were swarming. Glossy red chickens strutted around aimlessly.

  "Well, what the hell?"

  "Looks like his pecker was blowed off, Lydell."

  "Looks like it," Gaines said glumly. He applied a match to a fat cigar.

  "Must have shoved that stick of dynamite hard up his ass," another deputy said.

  "Dynamite, hell," Gaines said. "Cover it up till they come with a box for him." He stared at Jackson through a blue billow of cigar smoke. "Unless there's something else you need to see."

  "Sheriff, I'm puzzled."

  "Know exactly what you mean."

  Jackson turned and looked at the house, which stood thirty feet ft way. He reckoned the distance from the front porch to the chicken-wire enclosure as more than fifty feet.

  Gaines said, "My daddy was an old powder man. Now I know dynamite just don't act like that. Old Lamb been standin' that close to a good-size blast, you could pack what's left in a fruit jar. It would've blowed the front of that house to smithereens. Bust windows up and down the street. Fumes hang in the air, specially on a still night like this one. What was it then? You know where he stood and you see where he is now, stuck like a wad of chewing gum to the chicken wire. He must have shot through that house like a goddam human cannonball in a circus. Hit his own wife hard enough to break near every bone in her body. Jesus Christ. Maybe it was a lightning bolt. A tornado. I don't know what else has that much power."

  "I don't either," Jackson said.

  "Some kids was fooling around the federal transmission line last spring. Storm blew up. One of them was on the pylon, maybe fifteen feet off the ground. He caught a big surge; there was a flash and it flung him a ways. Broke his back, but he was probably electrocuted already. There's only one little AC line connects up with this house, and it's nowhere near the front porch."

  "I noticed that."

  Gaines stuck out his hand. "Thanks for comin'. How's Champ?"

  "Holding his own."

  "That's good. You get a notion about this, come around to see me. Lewis, swing your light over here. Doctor's goin' back to his car now, and he don't want to be steppin' on a dead cottonmouth."

  More Negroes, relatives of Old Lamb, had arrived. A woman wailed as Arabella was half-carried to a waiting car. Nhora was sitting sideways in the seat of the Chevrolet coupé, head heavy in her hands. She looked up at Jackson's approach.

  "Sorry. I couldn't take any more."

  "We can go now. I've done everything I can."

  "Wait," Nhora said, getting out of the car. "Old Lamb's granddaughter was in the house, or near the house, when it happened. A neighbor is taking care of her—she's afraid something's wrong with the child, that she's hurt but won't say anything."

  Jackson yawned. "Okay." They walked together down the road to a house with a picket fence, lamplit windows. A teenage boy let them.

  It was a clean house, the furniture dilapidated, lace curtains turned crumbly as brown sugar at the windows. A woman wearing an orange bandanna sat holding the girl in her lap. The girl was wearing an oversize nightgown and appeared to be asleep, but she was convulsively sucking her thumb. The woman in the bandanna crooned to her.

  "What's the little girl's name?" Nhora whispered to the boy.

  "Loretta."

  The woman cradled the back of Loretta's head with a big hand as Jackson came near.

  "Is she cut or bruised?"

  "No, doctor. Jus' scared out of her wits. They found her 'longside the cistern, half-drowned. But she won't say a word."

  Jackson hunkered down and studied Loretta's pretty, glazed face. Her eyes were open, blank and empty as a couple of walnut shells. He smiled at Loretta, then replaced the woman's protective hand with his own. Loretta didn't resist. Her skin was cold, her heartbeat and pulse too fast. Snakebite? He gently removed the nightgown and looked everywhere for puncture wounds. No. He then felt for lumps or broken bones, watching her unresponsive eyes. He found nothing suspicious and dressed her again in the nightgown.

  "I think she'll be all right. She's in shock. Stay with her, held her, talk to her. I'll leave a mild sedative to help her sleep."

  "Yes, doctor."

  As Jackson rose the child's eyes moved with him, and focused for the first time. She was looking at something behind him.

  Suddenly she moved, scrambling from the woman's lap, nearly knocking Jackson over in her haste to get away. He reached for her, but missed. The boy also attempted to get a hand on her. Loretta changed direction effortlessly, raced for the front door. Nhora blocked her way. Loretta flung up both hands, spun from Nhora's grasp and crashed into a curtained window next to the door, breaking the glass with her elbow.

  At the sound of shattered glass, Loretta's eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted, falling weightless as an autumn leaf to the carpet. Nhora picked her up.

  "My God, what happened?"

  "Lay her on the sofa," Jackson said.

  Loretta was unconscious, but her breast heaved. Then saliva bulged at one corner of her mouth, ran down her chin. There were blood drops above one wrist, from a shallow cut or scratch. Her heartbeat was arrhythmic, respiration forced and shallow. Jackson was preparing an injection of scopolamine when she had her first convulsion. The second one tossed and doubled her and she died rigidly in his hands.

  During the next fifteen minutes Jackson tried every life-saving device at his disposal: digitalis in the heart muscle, artificial respiration. He was exhausted and shaking, his suit soaked with perspiration, when he went outside. A hearse from the Negro funeral home had come for the bodies of Old Lamb and his wife. Jackson told the undertakers about the dead girl, then went in search of Sheriff Gaines.

  "Heart give out?" Gaines asked. He was down to the stub of his cigar. In the yard a cock crowed. The sky had drained to silver in the east.

  "Very unlikely. I've heard of cases of extreme fright where the vagus nerve becomes paralyzed. Then the victim can't breathe, the heart stops. More common in animals than it is in humans. The convulsions were symptomatic of strychnine poisoning, but she had nothing to eat or drink while I was there—I just don't know what happened."

  "I reckon you did all you could."

>   "That bloody doesn't bring the child back, now does it?"

  Gaines took a step out of the way, as if he didn't want to be contaminated by Jackson's anguish..

  "Can't go blamin' yourself. Get some rest, doctor."

  "Good advice," Jackson said, still red-faced from his outburst. He turned and walked back to the house where Loretta had died.

  The living room was filled with neighbors, a great brown bulwark. Psalms were spoken, coffee was brewing. Nhora had her arms around the woman in the orange bandanna, who sobbed quietly. Nhora was staring at the blanketed corpse on the sofa. Jackson walked toward her. Hands touched him kindly. A pint bottle of whiskey was slipped into his coat pocket; he didn't know who the benefactor was. He smiled numbly and stopped in front of Nhora.

  She shifted her gaze.

  "We might as well—" He held out a hand. She came with him, eyes puffed and red, hair in a wild tangle.

  Outside they met Tyrone as he was coming through the gate. He was wearing a dark suit and had a Bible under his arm. Two other men, perhaps deacons of his church, trailed behind him. Nhora and Tyrone stopped and looked at each other. He seemed touched by her powerlessness in grief. He nodded gravely to Jackson, and went on past them to the house.

  In the car Nhora asked, "What time is it?"

  "Twenty past four."

  "I don't want to go back to Dasharoons just yet. Unless you're worried about Champ."

  "'No."

  "Let's drive, then."

  He put the car in gear and they left the settlement. Nhora pointed east, where the bayou tree line was clear and stark against the dawning sky, a few lingering bright stars.

  "I think I'd like to go to the river. It's peaceful there. I've always loved Dasharoons, but lately I have to get out of the house, I feel I'll go crazy sitting around."

  They took a paved road to the levee, then a dirt road down through slash land cut by backwater channels livid in the brinking light, channels numerous as the lines in the palm of an ancient hand. A larger channel which the river had made for itself years ago was silting up, loaded with swept-down trees that composed a naked, broken, dangerous-looking thicket 200 yards deep. Between this thicket and the body of the river lay a gentle brushy sandbar. Nhora showed him where to leave the car. Then she led the way, picking her path with certainty 300 feet to the edge of the river.

  From the top of the levee, the river, then a quarter-mile away, had looked dark and as quiet as a vein in the throat. This close he experienced its rude, togging power. The air was milder, even cool at water level. The river lapped at a partly submerged log. It was the mightiest river on the continent, longer than but not as wide as the K'buru—river of the mind, his own, vital life stream.

  Jackson felt the jolt of his rage leaving him; he was given over to interior currents, deep forces, a bewildering sense of having traveled endlessly to arrive at a point more than twenty years in the past. The same root terrors, the same questions waiting to be answered. He felt slow, witless, demoralized by grief. Low bluffs on the other side, roof lines, the galumphing bark of dogs, the sky a transparency unmarred by cloud or star fleck, prepared for red thunder, the upcoming sun, stupefying radiance and heat, another torpid day in the tropics.

  "Jackson?"

  He looked around at Nhora, who was standing a few feet downriver, holding her dress bunched at her thighs. She had taken off her shoes to cool her feet in an eddy. There were frozen points of light in the full pupils of her eyes, her smile was strained.

  "You were making—sounds. You scared me."

  Jackson exhaled slowly, but there was still a binding pressure on his chest. "Some boyhood passion come to mind. We lived totally at the mercy of a river like this one." He looked at the looming boneyard behind him. "Lived with the forest at our backs, and often at our throats. Or so it seemed." His throat was parched now. He remembered the gift of whiskey and took the bottle from his coat pocket. But he just held it, feeling awkward about needing a drink so badly.

  "Oh? Where was this?"

  "A missionary station and logging town called Tuleborné. On the K'buru River in French—"

  "My God, you don't mean it! I lived in Equatorial Africa, in Zenkitu."

  "When?"

  From 1921 until about 1926. My father was a civil servant, not a very happy man. He died young. His health went very quickly in that climate. Of course part of his decline was due to me, the strain of not knowing if I was dead or alive." She moved closer to Jackson, shyly lowering her dress. "Is that whiskey? Could I have a taste?"

  Jackson uncorked the bottle and handed it to her. She tilted it back with relish, drinking like a man, eyes closed in contemplation, her face faint ivory against the lightening sky. She handed the bottle back, lips pursed and rueful, a hint of tears.

  "Probably homemade," she said, her voice coarsened by the fiery stuff. "But it isn't—half bad."

  Jackson didn't care about quality. The whiskey bit away tension and settled down to a slow, pleasant burn in his stomach. "Dead or alive?" he inquired.

  "Oh—when I was three years old I was kidnapped from a carriage of the Ocean-Zenkitu train. It had stopped just before that famous tunnel, the one where so many thousands of Negroes died—"

  "From trapped gases in the mountain they were trying to dig through. I know the place. Dense forest all around. Who kidnapped you?"

  "I barely remember what happened; my mother was so terrified by the experience she had to be institutionalized. Many years later it was still an ordeal for her to tell me the story. It seemed that the train was raided by a band of men from a decimated tribe called the Ajimba. They wore—"

  "Crocodile 'headpieces. And S-s-s—" He turned, shaking, toward the river

  "Jackson!"

  "Snakeskins. It's all right, I'm not going to have another of my bloody seizures." He drank a little more of the whiskey for safety's sake, held out the bottle. Nhora declined with a shake of her head. She put a hand on his elbow; then, after a reflective few moments, slipped her arm loosely around him.

  Jackson stared at the flowing rivet, and continued: "I've had—experience with the Ajimba myself. They were a warrior sect, a secret society going back many centuries before the white man set foot in Africa. I believe at one time they were heavily involved in the slave trade. Their rituals incorporated human sacrifice. Throughout the nineteenth century the Ajimba were at their most powerful, ranging ferociously from the K'buru highlands to the sea. According to one legend, a demented Frenchwoman of unbelievable longevity ruled them for more than a hundred and sixty years. Her name was Gen Loussaint. Have you heard of her?"

  "No."

  "How many others were taken from the train?"

  "I don't know. Half a dozen. I was the only European."

  "And how long were you a captive?"

  "Nearly three years."

  "What? Didn't the government make an attempt to ransom you?"

  "They tried everything, but they never heard from the Ajimba. Mother told me it was assumed I had been murdered, something to do with their bloodthirsty ceremonies. The truth is not very interesting. After I was kidnapped, the Ajimba seemed to lose interest in me. They had their hands full just staying alive—it seemed as if we were always on the move, dodging soldiers, the gard indigène. I never saw the men wear crocodile masks again. They hunted for their food. Kept wild dogs trained to kill. They were a rather sad, pathetic people. No one was ever cruel to me. I was part of a family—I had several 'brothers and sisters.' I remember that one of my brothers was playing too near the dog pens, he was snatched inside and torn apart. I still have vivid nightmares about that. And—there was a lot of sickness, we were always in mourning. I don't know how I survived, but when I was finally returned to civilization I was in perfect health. Not a blemish or a missing tooth. I had to relearn English and French, though."

  She nudged Jackson for the bottle as he was having another swallow. He passed it to her.

  "How were you returned?"

  "I
was given to an Arab trader in exchange for a bolt of cloth or a goat or something. I suppose they just got tired of me. The Arab made a very shrewd deal. He collected a reward of two thousand dollars."

  Nhora drank until the bottle was half-empty. She had tightened her arm around him.

  "Gets me weak in the knees," she said. "I think this is what has me so weak all of a sudden." She tucked the bottle into his jacket pocket and laughed, quite loudly. The sound echoed across the river. Nhora seemed as stunned as if she'd farted; she buried her face against his arm. "Where did that come from? Everything is dreadful—dying, dying. But I don't know what to feel. Jackson—how long do you think you'll be staying? There, I finally said it."

  "I just take one day at a time. Always."

  "Is that a good answer? It was a sincere question. From the heart. Jackson, remember when you were petrified in Old Lamb's yard, and I told you I understood how terribly you were suffering? Because I'm afraid so much of the time myself."

  "Of Early Boy Hodges?"

  "Nothing that easy to explain. You saw the dog by the chicken coop, his eyes glaring and dead, his bloody mouth locked open, the jaws and teeth around the pole he swallowed—what a nightmare. I just walked away, I couldn't take any more. All my life something like that has been coming after me. I dream of wild dogs, catching, throwing me down and pulling at me with their sharp teeth until I—I don't have hands or feet or arms, all torn off, my breasts too; all I can do is wriggle and crawl to try to get away. But they sniff me out and pounce and then the only protection I have is to coil like a sn—God, I'm so sorry! How you jumped."

  "Never mind. That's certainly one of the most compelling dreams I've heard. A psychoanalyst's delight."

  "Do you know the meaning?" she asked timidly.

  I've hid only minimal exposure to psychiatry. How often does the dream recur?"

  Nhora sighed. "Too many nights, lately." She studied him. "Are you thinking something you don't want to tell me?"

  Jackson smiled, demurring.

  "Well—Henry Talmadge said I was afraid of being a woman. It's the sort of thing he would say." She thought this over and regretted the churlishness. "I doubt if he knew much about psychiatry either. Henry thought there might be a physical reason for my restlessness and bad dreams, so he did a complete examination. Very complete. He took strands of my hair and even nail clippings for analysis, can you imagine? And two samples of blood—he came back for more, saying he'd mislaid the first vial. By then Henry looked awful, he wasn't sleeping himself, and he was at the end of his tether with Nancy. I never found out what he learned about me; it was only two days later that he hanged himself. And I'm still having those nightmares."