by Moreau, Iza
Although I used my flashlight continuously, it was slow going. The trail was narrow and might simply have been a deer path, but it was large enough to follow. I’ve never found a way to comfortably carry a strung bow—especially one with a quiver and arrows attached—and several times it knocked into low branches or got caught in high weeds. I didn’t even know why I brought the bow, but it comforted me to carry it, knowing my arrows were within easy reach.
Every few minutes I could hear a car whoosh by on the highway, but these sounds grew fainter until, after a while, they faded into the quiet of the trees.
I had to walk slowly, conserving my strength and watching my footing. At the end of an hour, I doubt if I’d gone even half a mile, but the sunlight filtering through the trees allowed me to switch off the flash and transfer it to my pack. Almost immediately I came to a small clearing—an area thirty feet or so in diameter, surrounded by several tall pines and a gigantic live oak. Dead limbs and newly cut brush told me that the area had been cleared deliberately and recently. Near the center was a big white circle with other white splotches outside its perimeter. I looked more closely. Possibly letters or symbols, but partially scuffed out by heavy boots. Near the oak was a log a foot and a half high, and around this I spotted signs of civilization: cigarette butts, empty cans of Miller Lite beer and an empty box of corn starch. That must be what the circle and other lines were made with.
There was a stench and I heard the buzzing of flies. Something was dead. I looked around without seeing anything, but the sound was coming from within the corn starch circle—from a dark, sticky-looking patch of red. Blood, but from what or who? I saw more flies covering a small lump of something a few feet away and kneeled down to examine it. Phew! It wasn’t blood, but vomit, no more than a couple of days old.
I didn’t see anything else of interest, so I sat down on the oak log to rest. I rummaged in my fannypack and found a plastic bag containing a new bow string. I took the string out and replaced it with several of the cigarette butts that were lying around. There were at least two different brands, maybe three.
A few pieces of a story were starting to form in my mind. It was pretty obvious that this must be the place where the goat was killed—in the center of the circle. A sacrifice to Papa Gede, but the presence of the beer cans made it look like more of a party than a ritual. The vomit told me that one of the gang had a weak stomach.
What happened after that was anyone’s guess. Why carry a heavy, bloody goat for half an hour just to put it in a dumpster—especially after you’ve just killed it? It made no sense. And who had been crazy enough to steal a goat in the first place? I had a few ideas about where to start, but that would be the easy part. The hard part was figuring out how the pirate radio station was mixed up in this macabre business. Playing the entire Goat’s Head Soup LP was no coincidence. Nor was The Creeper’s parable about Papa Gede. It was like a warning to stay away, but a warning to who, and to stay away from what? He had used the words children and boys and girls, so it was a warning to young people. What had Benny called them? Goths, punkers. And they were being warned away from here—from these woods, probably from this very clearing. But why? Scarier still was the fact that The Creeper had been in this clearing himself, may have sat right where I was sitting, had seen the circle and the vomit. For all I knew he might have been the one who had rubbed out the symbols. The whole thing was starting to weird me out.
I wished I had someone with me that I could talk all this over with, Gina Cartwright maybe, although why Gina would flash into my mind at that time was another mystery. There’s no reason that Gina would think any differently than—
I became aware of faint sounds behind me. Voices, but not from the direction I had just traveled, but from further down the trail. The voices were a ways off yet, but coming closer. I quickly took up my bow and moved to a position behind the oak, which was broad enough to hide three of me. I crouched silently, listening. Presently I heard hurried footsteps and was able to make out a few words.
“ . . . see us!”
“No way. Sunday morning, remember?”
The first voice was feminine, the other masculine. Young, but not children. They passed along the trail, without stopping at the clearing. After a few seconds I ventured a glance around the tree. The girl had wild and fluffy hair the color of the inside of a peach, and was wearing athletic trainers and a long, flowery dress. The guy wore jeans and a t-shirt with a big red tongue silkscreened on the back. Long hair, but not shaggy. Neither appeared to be much taller than I am and both were wearing backpacks. That was all I saw before they disappeared around the path out of sight. I hadn’t seen their faces. I stood up to follow them, then had another idea. I crept back to the path and headed in the direction they had come from.
The trail I followed was distinct, but bordered by thick brush and high grass. It wound through the pines and oaks the town was named for. Occasionally it opened out into a grassy glade, but always the forest eventually closed back around me. I walked as briskly as I could for half an hour without seeing or hearing anything unusual. My heart was beating rapidly, but I was enjoying myself. I was closing in on a story that no one else believed existed, trying to solve a mystery that only I recognized.
The trail sloped slightly upward into a grove of cedars. The air was clean and fresh and the leaves were brilliant green. Great old logs and trunks were evident here and there. On one of these I spotted a pine cone, although the nearest pine tree was fifty yards distant. Someone must have put it there; maybe one of the two hikers I had seen, maybe someone else. I stopped to listen, but heard nothing but the wind and a few crows calling far in the distance. I knew I was being careless, but years of stumpshooting wouldn’t let me leave such an obvious target unmolested.
I took an arrow from the quiver, nocked it, aimed at the pine cone, and let the string flow off my fingers. It sailed high by a few inches and swicked into the ground. I pulled another arrow from the quiver and pierced the pinecone through, sending it flying several feet, still impaled by the arrow. I smiled. Not too bad for someone sick and out of shape.
I stepped over brush and limbs and retrieved the arrows, pulling the pine cone loose and tossing it away. I sat down on the log to rest for a moment before I went on. The path I was following went through the cedar grove into an unusually thick growth of ground cover. Beyond that, there was more forest, dark and brooding. What would I find there? A hunting lodge? A logging trail? Maybe a swamp or small lake. It seemed impossible to think that there could be houses, farms, or civilization of any kind way out here, yet there must be something; Clarence had hinted at it when he told me about the farmers who had once peopled these woods. I figured that as long as there was a path to follow, I would keep on.
I had been sitting quietly enough to hear the wind wafting through the tops of the cedars, but now I heard something else—the rustle of leaves. It was coming from behind a huge cedar maybe twenty feet from where I sat; too quiet a sound for a human to make but too loud for the wind. I slowly stood up and peered intently in the direction of the sound, but what I saw made my skin shiver down to my very cells. It was a rattlesnake, larger around than my forearm, slithering slowly forward. When it sensed my presence, it stopped, raised its head, and threw out its tongue like a tiny flame. Its tail rattled like maraca.
An icy fear in my belly froze me solid for a few precious seconds. But I shook it off; my time in Baghdad—where every step outside the safe zones was a step into danger—had prepared me for fear. I knew that if a snake that size struck me, I would never make it back to my truck. The cedar was an old one, with dozens of low-hanging limbs, but I could see the snake clearly through a break in the foliage. I watched it coil itself up slowly while, at the same time, I reached out for an arrow. It had only a target point and there was no time to reach into my fannypack and change it out for a broadhead. It would have to do. It occurred to me as I slowly and quietly nocked the arrow, that I had been preparing for this shot a
ll my adult life, that all my trophies and accomplishments meant nothing if I wasn’t equal to this moment. This was for the entire wheel of cheese.
Very slowly, I pulled the string to my anchor point and sighted down the arrow, hoping the snake wouldn’t sense the movement and strike. But just before the arrow rolled off my fingers the rattler’s head came up a few more inches. I released the arrow and jumped sideways with every ounce of strength I had left, trying to get the log I had been sitting on between me and the snake. Too late I realized that my foot was caught on a root or vine, making me lose both my balance and my direction. The last thing I saw was the end of the log coming toward me like a truck toward a bicycle.
Sometime later I was roused to consciousness by a sound I hadn’t heard since that morning in the Baghdad zoo—a soft whinny. The top of my head hurt like someone had buried a hatchet in my skull. I made an effort and opened my eyes but everything was blurred and red. But there, towering miles above me stood a gray horse. It was looking at me curiously, cautiously with its very large, brown eyes. The horse seemed to be asking me questions I didn’t know the answer to. I tried to raise my head, to reach out and touch the horse, but the pain made me pass out again.
The next time I woke up it was in a hospital bed. My head still ached, but not as much as before. I raised a hand and felt my head wrapped in bandages. I was more than a little groggy, and heavy with sedation. I was thirsty, though. And hungry. “Hey!” I called, but the word came out slurred and made me a little dizzy. The response came almost at once from a lanky figure who was slumped in a chair in a corner of the dim room.
“I’m here, Sue-Ann.”
“Clarence?”
The worry on Clarence’s face was obvious. “Hey, Sue-Ann,” he said. “How’re you doin?”
“I don’t know. Where am I?”
“County hospital.”
“How did I get here?”
“I drove you.”
“You?”
“I saw your car parked out back of the market. When you didn’t show up after an hour or so, I figured you’d gotten a burr in your bra about that goat and gone in the woods lookin for somethin. God’s gonads, Sue-Ann. What did you expect to find out there?”
Then memories began flooding in: the path, the couple with the backpacks, the clearing with the circle of blood, the . . . “Clarence! There was a rattlesnake, I shot at it but . . . I don’t remember any more. Ohhh,” I moaned, “What happened to my head?”
“You conked your coconut on a log and sliced the top of your scalp open. They had to shave off some of your hair to put in stitches. I found the snake, though. Somebody’d put an arrow smack through its mouth and nailed it to a tree. It was as dead as I’ve ever seen a snake.”
“I hit it?” I asked happily. The dizziness was wearing off.
“I should smile you did,” he replied. “Darned arrow was stuck so deep into the trunk that I had to screw the point off and leave it there. I’ve got your bow and stuff in the car. Got the snake, too—I’ll give you ten bucks for the skin. But don’t tell me you went out there rattlesnake huntin.”
“No. You guessed right about the burr. I was trying to find out who put that goat in your dumpster.”
“Now, Sue-Ann, we talked about that . . .”
I tried to sit up, but it made my head ache more and I settled down again into the pillow. “But Clarence,” I told him softly, trying to keep my head from pounding with excitement, “I found the place where they killed the goat. And I saw two people; one was a guy with long dark hair and the other was a strawberry blonde girl . Youngish. Wait,” I continued, trying to think rationally through the pain and whatever drugs they had given me, “If you followed me out on that trail, you must have seen them.”
Clarence looked blank. “Sorry, Sue-Ann. I didn’t see nobody.”
“But that’s not possible.” I began, thinking rapidly. “Unless . . . unless maybe they came out before you went in.”
“That’s probably it. But are you sure you saw somebody?”
“Don’t treat me like I’m blind.”
“Awright, Sue-Ann. You don’t need to get upset. But it was probably just a couple of backpackers out for a Sunday hike.”
“How did you know they were wearing backpacks, Clarence?” I asked.
“What else would backpackers wear?” he asked innocently.
It was almost like the log had knocked some sense into me, because I was thinking more clearly than I had in months. “Clarence,” I asked, “are you trying to tell me that you carried me for over an hour through the woods, and managed to bring my bow, my arrows, and a seven-foot rattlesnake at the same time?”
Clarence stiffened and I knew that something was going on. “Now, Sue-Ann,” he stammered, “you just had a hard knock on your—”
Before he could finish, a woman dressed in white came into my peripheral vision. Nurse or no nurse, I glared at Clarence, waiting for his “explanation.” The woman spoke first.
“Sue-Ann!” The voice made me forget about Clarence altogether. I made the mistake of turning my head too fast and the pain almost made me cry out.
“Gina.”
“Mah gosh, Sue-Ann,” Gina said, out of breath. She was dressed more simply that I had ever seen her: white jeans, white blouse, sandals. Her hair was straight and tied back with an elastic band. “Ah came as soon as ah heard. Are you all raht? Clarence, is she all raht? Where’s the damn doctor?” Gina took my hand and squeezed it gently.
“She’ll be fine, um, Ginette,” said Clarence, who looked totally surprised to see her. “Just busted her head open a little. The doctor had an emergency; said he’d be here in a few minutes.”
“How did you know I was here?” I asked her.
“Dilly Dollar called Cal at home,” she said. “Told him you’d been in a serious accident.”
“But how did Dilly—” I began.
“He was at the hospital when I drove up,” Clarence said. “He was writing up a report on some kind of abuse. He helped the nurses get you on the gurney.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“Just that you’d had an accident. Guess he thought I meant you’d crashed your truck.”
“You didn’t?” asked Gina.
“No. I just fell and bumped my head on a log. It’s not that serious. I’ll be—”
“It’s serious enough,” came an unfamiliar voice in the doorway. I looked over to see a young man in a blue smock with a stethoscope around his neck. He held a clipboard that he looked at as he spoke. “You had a concussion and a laceration to your scalp that took ten stitches to close. Plus various minor abrasions to your hands and face. Aside from that you’re undernourished and probably anemic.” He put down the clipboard, looked up, ran a hand through his already mussy hair, and smiled. “But I’m glad you’re awake. Are these friends of yours?”
“Yes, sure. In fact, Clarence was just about to tell me—”
“We’ll have to talk about that another time, Sue-Ann,” Clarence said. “I need to be gettin back to the market.”
“But you didn’t—” But Clarence had walked quickly from the room. I looked at Gina. “I’ve a bone to pick with that man,” I told her.
“He may have saved your life,” said the man with the clipboard, who was now feeling my pulse, now listening to my chest, now looking into my pupils. He looked at me quizzically. “You seem to be feeling a lot better than you should be,” he said.
“I’m great,” I told him. “Just a little headache.”
“You need rest,” he said.
“I’m resting,” I said.
“Without visitors,” he replied.
“Gina can stay,” I told him.
“Only a few minutes,” he said, looking at Gina, who nodded. “Call if you need anything.”
“Right. And hey,” I called after him. “Bring some more drugs when you come back.” I looked back at Gina. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Now there’s somethin ah n
ever thought ah’d hear you say,” she said.
“Me neither,” I admitted.
“Tell me what happened.”
For the next twenty minutes, I related everything I knew about what I had started to call the goat story. From the phone call on Saturday night, my talk with Clarence, my visit to the bookstore, the pirate radio station, and so on.
“But I shot at the rattlesnake just when I thought it was getting ready to strike, so I jumped out of the way. I remember tripping over something and evidently hit my head hard on a log. Seems like I came to for a few seconds and . . . and, oh Gina,” I breathed, “there was a horse! A magnificent gray horse!”
“A horse?” Gina asked. “Where?”
“Standing over me. Watching over me. I only saw it for a second and everything was bleary, but it was a horse! I think I tried to get up then, but I must have passed out again.” I looked at Gina thoughtfully. “You know, Clarence thinks I’m bonkers, or at least he pretends to think so, but he may be right. I mean, I saw a horse, but there couldn’t be a horse out there. There just couldn’t.”
“If you saw one, Sue-Ann, then there was one,” Gina said calmly.
“I’ve never seen you without makeup before,” I told her.
“I was in a hurry, darlin.”
“I like it, though. You look, I don’t know. You look pure. Were you, um, at Cal’s when Dilly called?
“Ah was, yes. Ah’m not now.”
“He asked you to come over and see if I was still breathing?”
“Course not; what do you think. He wanted to come himself, but ah told him to let me come instead. He’s workin on somethin, so he was glad enough to let me. He was concerned, though. Told me to let him know if there was anythin he could do.”