by George Wier
We took to the woods.
The brush was thick. I got slashed lightly across the forehead with some kind of thorny vine. I felt my forehead, then examined my fingers in the dim light. I didn’t seem to be bleeding.
There was a racket in the dense leaves nearby. We both started for an instant, but then the racket moved off quickly. Probably an armadillo or a raccoon.
The headlights out on the roadway grew closer.
We stopped and hunkered down. It was pitch black, but for the bluish headlights coming on.
After an interminable half a minute, the vehicle passed.
Neither one of us moved.
For some reason there was complete silence. Not a rustle anywhere.
Lief exhaled loudly. I realized I had been holding my breath. Also, my heart was thumping in my ears.
“This reminds me of stealing watermelons as a kid,” Lief said.
“And how’s that checking account?”
“What checking account?”
I laughed. Lief joined in. The nervous laughter of a couple of trespassers who hadn’t been caught. Yet.
*****
Humans are not nocturnal creatures. Going out into the woods at night is little different from diving to the bottom of the sea and strolling through the foliage there. The creatures either shy away or become curious and close in. We saw the occasional close-set pair of eyes reflecting back at us in the powerful beam of Lief’s flashlight. We kept going and the eyes disappeared as quickly as they had come.
Two hundred plus acres makes for a good deal of woods. The Pfeffer property was no exception. The brush was thick, opening only occasionally onto a narrow glade with a billion twinkling stars for a roof. I hadn’t been camping since about age fifteen, but our trek through the woods brought back those memories. Good ones. That morning I had been looking down from a hundred feet onto congested downtown traffic, and the same night I was nearly a hundred miles away tromping through the East Texas woods.
After half an hour of moving through the brush, climbing down into narrow creeks and up the other side and generally attempting to keep to a straight path, Lief suddenly clicked off his flashlight.
“Shh,” he said.
I stopped.
“Through the trees there,” he whispered. “Tell me if you see it?”
“What am I looking for?” I whispered back, but then I saw it. An orange flicker, as if from flame. “Yeah, I see it.”
Without another word Lief began to move carefully forward. The moon was coming up into the sky behind us, and we moved from one patch of pale-lit ground to another.
There was a fire ahead of us, not forty feet away. A small campfire.
Another ten feet along and we were inching our way forward.
We both heard it at the same time. Someone clearing their throat and spitting.
Another five yards and a gravelly voice suddenly froze my blood in my veins:
“No use sneakin’. I can hear and see you well enough. Come on in, boys.”
“Shit,” Lief said.
The voice didn’t sound dangerous, but instead sounded diffident, tired, and mildly amused, all at the same time.
“Alright,” I called out. “We’re comin’.”
CHAPTER FOUR
When I was twelve years old I took a neighbor kid up on his invitation to a Boy Scout camp out. I was no Boy Scout, nor have I ever been one, but I did go with him that weekend to Camp Strake, a State Park located in the piney woods of the Sam Houston National Forest in East Texas, about sixty miles north of Houston.
The second night there I attended what is called a Tap Out, which is sort of a ritual of entrance into a Boy Scout secret society called The Order of The Arrow. Or maybe it wasn’t so secret. After all, I was there.
The initiation entailed taking the line of boys who had been accepted and making them strip down to their underwear. Each was stopped in turn by an older boy dressed Native American fashion, headdress and all. Within spitting distance of a huge bonfire each kid was then “tapped” rather soundly on the shoulder in welcome to the Order and sworn to secrecy of what was about to follow. I recall that a flaming arrow was shot into the lake, symbolizing something or other, and then the ceremony was done.
On the way back to camp I was informed that the boys, one of whom was the kid that had invited me, would, over the next twenty-four hours, have to go through some rigorous trials and not be able to speak for the entire day.
The pitch black woods close around us that night at Camp Strake were eerie and sinister, as if I had stepped out of the twentieth century and into another time altogether.
Pfeffer’s woods were like that. There were no ancient and gargantuan pine trees, no pine needles crunching like soft powder beneath my feet, and no one dressed Indian fashion, authentic or not. There was, however, the over-powering and nearly complete blackness of night, the smell of wood smoke, and not a little trepidation. There was also that same feeling inside of me as Lief and I approached the growing firelight: the sensation of other-worldness. A misplaced feeling, as if we had somehow managed to travel through time.
I suppose if a fellow lived long enough, he’d eventually see everything. And some things maybe twice.
At the campfire was something I had never seen before.
*****
It was the silhouette of a man, sitting with his back to the fire in meditative pose. He was naked. Also, he was very old.
“What the chilblain hell are you doing, old-timer?” Lief asked.
“Lief! Be nice,” I said. I spoke to the old man: “We’re sorry for invading your meditation, but we weren’t expecting to find you here.”
I smelled something then, just a light scent in the breeze. A familiar smell, but I couldn’t place it right off, it was so foreign to the dark woods around us.
“Of course you weren’t,” he said calmly. “Give me a minute.” He stood up with some effort, took a few steps around the fire to a small pup tent and pulled a robe from a tree branch hanging above it and donned it.
“I don’t get many visitors,” he said to the dark.
“I reckon not,” Lief said.
“Bit of a shock, huh?” the gravelly voice asked.
“You could say that,” I said.
“I’d ask you to sit, but there’s nothing here but the ground,” the old man said.
“How do you not get eaten up by fire-ants and mosquitoes?” Lief asked.
“The garlic keeps them away. And the diatoms.”
I sniffed. That was the smell. Garlic.
“I’m Bill. Bill Travis,” I told the man.
“Bill, your friend says ‘shit’ a lot, doesn’t he?” the old man asked.
Lief turned to me. He had sort of a sardonic grin on his face.
“Yeah,” I said.
I noticed it then. My eyes had adjusted to the light from the fire, and almost to the extent of the firelight the ground and even some of the foliage around us was dusted with a fine white powder. Diatomaceous earth. There are companies that scoop it up by the metric ton from dry seabeds ― the microscopic exoskeletons of dead marine life. Some gardeners used it on their plants to keep the ants and aphids away. I wasn’t sure how effective it was, but the old man in front of us wasn’t pocked with sores. His face was smooth and seamed with age but for a gray scraggle of beard. And with every breath I breathed in more garlic. He must have mixed the two in some way and come up with an effective insect repellent.
“This is Lief Prescott. He’s building a highway through this neck of the woods,” I told him.
“I’ve been expecting you fellows. But not so late in the evening, or else I would have dressed for company.”
“What’s your name?” Lief asked. “And how long have you been squatting here?”
“Squatting,”
the old man said. “That’s the word. I had forgotten it. Ty. Ty Hennessey is my name.”
I held out my hand. “It’s good to meet you, Ty,” I said.
We shook. Ty Hennessey had a solid handshake for an old-timer.
“Shake his hand, Lief,” I said. “We need all the good will we can find right now.”
“Lief Prescott,” he gave his name and shook Hennessey’s hand.
“It’s good to meet you Mr. Prescott.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Hennessey,” I chimed in, “how long have you been living in these woods?”
“Oh...” He scratched his head. “About twenty-four years, give or take.”
Lief whistled.
“How long do you have to go?” I asked. I’d heard of squatters before ― people who come to own a piece of property by sitting on it for the statutory length of time. In Texas, last time I heard, the required length of time was twenty-five years.
“August 15 of this year. That’s my last day.”
“Shoot,” Lief said. “That’s just two more months. By that time I’ll have cut a fifty yard swath right down the middle of it, dividing it in half.”
“I know,” Hennessey said.
“I don’t understand ―” Lief began, but I cut him off.
“Some things you can’t stop, so you don’t worry about them. Am I right?”
The old man’s face scrunched up a little at that. He flicked his eyes upward toward where the smoke from the fire dispersed among the treetops and into the night sky, raising his balding head. Maybe he was considering something.
“Some things...” he said.
“Bill,” Lief said, “we need to move on.”
“I know. Mr. Hennessey, I expect you know the shortest way to the barn that’s on this property.”
“That I do.”
“I also suspect that you know what we’ll find there.”
His eyes dropped back down from the sky to meet mine. I couldn’t see them so well, but I felt his intent.
“Some things,” he began, “you bury and leave buried. But they come up again anyway, no matter what you do. When I was a little fellow they told me there was a time for everything... A time to plant and a time to reap.”
“And a time to roll away stones,” I said.
Lief was looking at me with a furrowed brow. “Are you two crazy?” he asked.
Ty Hennessey looked at him. “Crazier than most,” he said. “Not as crazy as some. Bill,” he said, turning back to me, “there’s also a time for truth.”
“That’s all I want,” I told him.
“Give me a minute to get properly dressed,” he said.
Lief and I looked at each other. He rolled his eyes.
“I reckon we’ve got time,” Lief said.
We waited as the old man disappeared inside the tent and came out with a neat stack of clothing. He draped the clothes over the same low-hanging branch where he’d gotten the robe, disrobed again and began getting dressed. Once he had on a pair of old blue jeans and a checkered shirt he sat down on the ground and carefully put on a pair of socks and pair of brogan boots and laced them up carefully.
He stood.
“You fellows ready?” Ty Hennessey asked.
I nodded.
Hennessey picked up a jug from beside a tree and emptied it on the fire. A gout of steam rose up and we were once more plunged into the blackness of night.
“It’s time then,” he said. “Come on,” he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Robertson County, Texas, has a population of less than ten thousand and is smack dab in the middle of nowhere. During the Prohibition Era it was nicknamed Booger County, in large part because moonshining was so prevalent. When the Revenuers came, as they invariably did, if they weren’t careful out in the woods they might not make it back. The IRS Chief up in Waco or Dallas might ask: “What happened to Agent Lowe?” The answer: “Booger must have got him.” Whatever happened to the missing men, no one seemed willing to hand over a clue, and so the unfriendly woods became even more sinister to outsiders. And so the nickname stuck: Booger County.
The county is hemmed in on the east by the Navasota River, little more than an oversized creek, and on the west by the lazily meandering Brazos River, once called The Mississippi of the West. To the south the county line tracks Texas’ most ancient of roads: the El Camino Real, or King’s Highway, which dates back to Spain’s possession of Mexico, and consequently, Texas. The forests in the county are largely uncut, the earth not being so conducive to farming but for the long, narrow strip of cotton fields along the Brazos River bottom to the west. The seven-hundred odd square miles of woods and brush are crisscrossed by a network of unpaved county roads that lead to mostly nowhere. The county is by no means, however, a backward place. It is very old as settlements in Texas go, and the people have no love for authority, much less patience for new schemes. Consequently, Lief’s highway was not exactly what one would term popular.
I had heard about some of Lief’s problems over the previous months: run-ins with ranchers, sabotage of some of the equipment. The expenses had mounted until the road crews took to locking up the equipment when it was not in use and posting guards at night. I didn’t envy Lief his job by a long shot.
But for the occasional steady strobe from a high-flying airplane, there was little evidence that we weren’t traversing a landscape from the distant past. The night was quiet and still with only the occasional soft breeze and the sound of us interlopers. Possibly I had heard too many tall tales about Booger County while I was being raised in neighboring Brazos County.
We came up from a shallow gully onto an expansive pasture with a bulging hill.
We all heard it at the same time: voices.
On up the hill near the crest we hunkered down in the dark. A hundred yards away was the barn, bathed in headlights. There were the twin, close-set beams of a jeep spearing the tin barn with electric illumination.
“I’ll be damned,” Lief said.
We couldn’t see each other’s faces in the dark. The old man was silent.
“Tell me if you see anybody?” I asked. “I hope you can hoot like an owl or something. I want to get closer.”
“What?” he said, as if I’d asked to date his sister. “No. I can’t hoot like no damned owl. Let’s stay put for a minute.”
I thought about it. Maybe he was right.
“Well, what time was Jockovitch flying in to Easterwood Airport?” I asked.
“About twenty minutes ago.”
“Alright.”
Easterwood Airport was about thirty miles to the south. You can’t drive that distance in less than thirty minutes. There are too many red lights to go through in College Station and Bryan. Still, I had the sinking feeling we’d be seeing this Jockovitch fellow soon enough.
No sooner had the thought gone through my head than we heard the distant thumping sound, at first little more than a whisper, then growing louder.
“Chopper,” Lief said.
My first thought was a dim sort of hope. Life-flight helicopters can be seen at any given time of the day or night flitting over East Texas between Houston and Dallas and any given far-flung hamlet. Also there were intermittent oil field and corporate helicopters, going about their work. It was my faint hope, at first, that what we were hearing was any one of those, but the certainty that this was not the case rapidly settled down into my stomach to become a knot of growing fear.
At the barn there was a piercing glare of light. Someone had set off a roadside flare. We could see the figure plainly. A broad-shouldered man wearing a slick brown jacket and Sam Browne belt with a prominent side arm. He waved the flare back and forth as the thumping of the helicopter grew in intensity.
Then we saw it, two hundred feet above the distant tre
etops and coming in fast.
The pilot must have spotted the flare because the whine of turbines cut out slowly and the chopper banked suddenly and circled. A fierce cone of light sprang from the craft and stabbed downward onto the foliage on the other side of the barn from us.
He was going to circle and land, and the brilliant circle of light he was proscribing into the night terrain was making its way toward us in a lazy circle as he banked around.
“Shit,” Lief said.
“See?” Ty Hennessey said. “I told you he says it a lot.”
I looked around quickly. The way back to the creek and the protection of the brush and trees that grew there was too far. To our left around the hill was a dark, tall shape against the stars. I had purple splotches across my vision from all the brightness I had seen in the last few moments, but I instantly calculated our chances of making it to cover: they weren’t good.
“Follow me,” I barked out.
With the roar in our ears of helicopter blades slicing the air, the three of us hoofed it around the hill.
My breath came in gulps and I felt a stitch in my side, the same one I used to get in my college track and field days. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder to know we weren’t going to make it. The chopper was lower now and bearing down on us.
On instinct I threw myself to the ground and rolled over to see Lief and Ty Hennessey do the same, dark shadows landing not so softly in the thick weeds.
I felt a burning sensation along my left arm. A berry vine.
The broad circle of light came on, inevitable, like a freight train.
At the last instant I flung myself in a roll further down the hill. I felt a light bump as I rolled over Lief and landed between him and Hennessey.
The light was there in an instant, the edge of it passing over where I had been before moving on to illuminate the oak tree we had been headed toward in a light brighter than daylight.
The torrent of wind came next, twirling weeds and vines up around us. Something was in my right eye. I squeezed both eyes shut for a moment until the pain went away.