Hootie jumped at the figure.
Darkness.
Thunder boomed and I shouted for Hootie to come back.
Grandpa jumped out of the car and started toward the pasture when a deep rumble like a freight train filled the air around us. He stopped as if reaching the end of a rope and looked at the sky.
Miss Becky held the car door open. “Ned! The cyclone’s coming, and we got to get these kids under the ground. He’s a runnin’ already and we don’t have time.”
“Hootie!” I doubted he could hear me over the storm.
Pepper joined me. “Hootie, get back here!”
“All right. We don’t have time to fool with him!” Grandpa started the car. “Get in!”
Miss Becky grabbed my shirt with surprising strength and shoved me into the back seat, sparing me the decision to abandon my dog. But Hootie ran back around the smokehouse and jumped in, tracking muddy water on the dusty cloth upholstery. Pepper dived in behind me. Grandpa had the car in reverse before Miss Becky slammed her door and we hit the wet highway in a slide.
I turned to look out the back window. “Somebody was fooling around the house, Grandpa.”
“I saw him.” Lightning struck a tree across the road in a shower of flame and sparks. The tree would have burned had it not been for sheets of rain slashing out of the sky.
“My lands.” Miss Becky turned to look out the back window. “That feller was back.”
Grandpa gripped the wheel with both hands and looked through the windshield at the black clouds roiling overhead. “It don’t matter right now. The cyclone’s gonna catch us.”
“Not till it quits raining. That twister ain’t here yet.” Miss Becky didn’t look overly sure of her comment.
Thinking about a cyclone scared me, and I could see Pepper’s mouth was open with fright. I unconsciously rubbed Hootie’s wet head while we hissed down the highway in a spray of water. His hair was sticky. In another burst of lightning I saw blood on my hand. It scared me and in the next flash I saw a shallow cut seeping blood. I wiped it on my wet jeans.
“It’s gonna catch us,” Grandpa repeated.
The wipers barely kept up with the volume of water. It didn’t take long to reach Uncle Henry’s house. Grandpa turned left up the red clay and gravel drive toward the top of the hill. In the headlights I could see other cars scattered near the storm cellar, thirty yards from the house.
He shut off the engine and we jumped out into the driving rain. Lightning picked out the cellar’s wood and metal door. Rain carrying red mud in great streams washed around and over the tops of our shoes.
Pepper was scared. I could tell she wanted nothing more than to get underground. She’d never acted afraid of storms before, but all of Grandpa’s fear rubbed off on her. A nearby thunderclap made her scream. We jumped over the narrowest streams and splashed through the wide ones as we raced through the rain. The roar was even louder and the wind whipped our clothes. Hootie splashed along behind us.
Grandpa held his hat with one hand, bent over and hammered on the slanted cellar door with his fist. I saw his lips move and knew he was shouting, but the wind whipped the words away. The wooden door opened to reveal two men sitting on the plank steps leading downward to safety. A sliver of yellow light split the darkness and the odor of burning coal oil was sucked out into our faces.
The storm nearly tore the door from their hands and they strained on rope handles to keep it from flying off. Grandpa grabbed the door’s edge. “Hurry up!”
Pepper raced down the narrow steps. Miss Becky followed quickly, trying to hold her cotton dress down and keep a hold on a canvas bag. Hootie hesitated, frightened of the kerosene and damp dirt smells, but I kicked him in the rear and he went down the steps on two front legs like a circus dog.
“There it is!” someone shouted from below ground. I turned in the doorway to see the tornado heading straight for our shelter. I dove in and heard Grandpa’s shout to close the door and he jumped down the first three steps. Only a moment later a gust of wind yanked all the men off their feet.
Then the door slammed down and Grandpa threw the enormous iron bolt to lock us in with the smell of damp clay. The men exchanged glances, and everyone spoke in hushed tones. Sounding like a freight train on tracks of lightning, the cyclone roared overhead.
Dim yellow light from coal oil lamps lit the long, narrow interior barely high enough for a grown man to stand upright. Splintery oak benches lined both sides of the cellar. Rough shelves on the back wall sagged under hundreds of canned goods in glass jars.
Nearly a dozen other adults made room for us on the benches. Pepper and I were the only kids. We sat beside each other and I pulled Hootie close to keep him out of trouble. He trembled on the dirt floor beside me, his head still leaking blood. With shaking hands I reached for my puffer, shocked to find my pocket empty.
Miss Becky noticed my look and opened her bag. “I knew you’d forget.”
“It almost got us,” Pepper told Aunt Mamie as I sucked medicine into my lungs.
“The good Lord made sure it didn’t.” She held something in her lap. I looked closely and saw it was a pink baby pig. “Seems like I always have baby pigs around, Top. That ’un you brought a few months back is growing like a weed. We’ll have bacon next winter if the cyclone don’t carry him off tonight.”
The moaning wind squeezed through the cracks in the door. Uncle Henry glanced fearfully toward the vibrating cellar door. “I hope the house is still standing when we get out of here. Then I’ll worry about bacon.”
The talk of food made Pepper hungry. “I’d like some bacon right about now.”
Miss Becky reached into her bag again and unwrapped a dozen cold biscuits from a dishcloth. “I knew y’all’d be hollerin’ you were hungry, so I brought these. Maime, can the little ’uns open a jar of them preserves or some of that plum jelly we put up last year?”
“Lands yes. Right after we thank the Lord for leading us all safely down here tonight.”
“Shit,” Pepper said under her breath as everyone bowed their heads.
***
We stayed in the cellar for nearly an hour until the cloud moved on toward Chisum. The men sitting on the steps talked quietly about the dark man outside of our house.
“You think he was trying to get in, Ned?” Uncle Henry asked.
“I sure do.”
“You’ve got The Skinner after you.”
I didn’t know the man who spoke, but the words sent a shiver up my spine. Grandpa looked shocked, and then glanced back toward us to get them to shut up.
“That’s what the Chisum News called him,” the man defended.
Grandpa shook his head. “I don’t like that talk. He’s nothing more than a man. Giving him a name makes him something more than he is.”
They got quiet for a while and we waited. Someone occasionally peeked outside to let in some fresh air and watch the roiling sky until they decided it was safe.
“It’s lightened up some.” Grandpa stood up to stretch his legs. “I reckon we can go.”
We stepped out into the dim morning light like refugees emerging from a bomb shelter. The gray clouds continued to spit rain, and lightning flickered in the distance, but it wasn’t anything like what chased us into the hole in the ground.
Grandpa used his flashlight to check for damage. Uncle Henry’s house wasn’t much worse for wear except for a few shingles. The tornado jumped over the house and then touched down again to take the barn before chewing up the trees in its path. In the pasture beyond, the barn and low built pig shed were gone. The pigs rooted in the mud as if nothing had happened.
In one of the last flickers of lightning we could see the trees were a sorry sight down toward Center Spring Branch to the southeast. All in all, we were lucky.
The older folks thanked Aunt Maime and Uncle Henry for letting us stay with them again. The house looked the same when we got home, but both the barn and the chicken house were missing long pieces of sheet-ir
on roofing. Some of the iron was wrapped around the highest limbs of a chinaberry tree growing up along the fencerow.
I opened the car door and Hootie remembered the excitement of our rapid departure. He ran back to the smokehouse and made several circles trying to pick up a scent, but the heavy rain washed the ground clean. Carlo was nowhere to be found.
Miss Becky and Pepper started into the house, and then paused. “Ned, you want to go in and turn on the lights?”
He hesitated, then looked at her on the porch with her hand deep in the pocket of her house dress. I knew she was holding the butt of her pistol. “All right.” He checked the house and turned the lights on in each room while we waited on the porch.
When he was satisfied it was safe, Miss Becky and Pepper went in while Grandpa and I stayed in the yard for a few minutes.
He stared off toward the pasture for a long moment, talking quietly to himself.
I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Did you see him?”
“I saw someone.” Grandpa came back to himself and walked over to my bedroom window.
“It was a man wearing a Sunday coat and hat. I think the storm surprised him.”
“It surprised us all.” He rubbed his fingers against the wooden sill bearing the marks where someone tried to pry it open.
“What do you think he was doing hanging around here last night?”
“You don’t want to know, son.”
All of a sudden we heard a commotion in the house and Pepper started crying. Grandpa started to run, but Miss Becky called out to us. “It’s all right. Me and Pepper are just washing something out.”
Grandpa peered through the window saw Pepper standing in the hall with a bar of Dove soap in her mouth. He chuckled. “Somebody’s getting her mouth washed out.”
It tickled me. “I guess Miss Becky heard what she said before we left the house tonight.”
“She hears more than you think. Keep that in mind.”
“I will.”
I heard banging and saw Miss Becky through the window, driving nails once again into the wooden casements. They exchanged looks through the glass and she disappeared to hammer nails into another window before she let Pepper spit.
Chapter Twenty-five
Ned blew across a mug of steaming coffee. “The son of a bitch killed my dog the night of the storm.”
He and O.C. Rains were huddled in deep concentration in the back booth of Frenchie’s café. A wooden screen door on Main Street opened onto the long, narrow cave with booths along the left and a long mahogany counter running along the right. The only illumination came from a dozen large droplights suspended four feet below the high hammered tin ceiling. It smelled of grease, coffee, and fresh baked pies.
The cascade of chilly rain missing the downspout and splashing on the concrete sidewalk outside didn’t register with Ned. “Carlo chased him off just as we left for the cellar and this morning when I went to feed the cows I found what was left of him on the porch. Somebody quartered that dog and left him either for a warning or to scare us. It pretty much did both.”
O.C. stuck his index finger through the thick handle of the mug and sipped his scalding coffee, staring at the black look on his friend’s face. “The Skinner wasn’t after your dog though, was he? He wanted them kids.”
“Now you’re calling him that.” Ned shivered.
“Well, it’s as good a name as any.” O.C. studied his coffee.
“I believe you’re right about him figuring to use the storm to get them kids out of the bedroom. At any rate, he wasn’t expecting the winders to be nailed shut or for us to get up and leave, so we surprised him and he run off. I reckon James was right. Pepper don’t need to be around so he can get both kids at the same time.”
O.C.’s eyes snapped across the table. “You know how that sounds?”
“I know having them in two different places keeps at least one of them safe for the time being.” His shoulders slumped. “I’m gonna have to get a new dog. I can’t be gone from the house without a dog in the yard to bark if anyone comes up.”
“What about the little pup of Top’s?”
“Well, Hootie is half-growed, and he’s inside. I need a nose and ears outside. This is getting bigger.”
O.C. blew across the coffee’s surface. “The bodies are starting to pile up.” He took a cautious sip.
“Yeah. John Washington says the colored boy was to throw us off the track, but he’s dealing with his people now, too. They’re as scared as we are, even though he thinks this guy intends to use my family to pay me back for something. I swear. You can’t go up to the store without people wanting to know what was done to that little colored boy. They all think someone they know will be next. Men are afraid to go to the field and crops ain’t getting in, because they think someone will come to the house while they’re gone.
“You should see it. Everybody is afraid. Whenever folks come to the store, they bring the whole family now. It reminds me of Saturdays when we was kids. You remember how our daddies would wait all week and then everybody went to town for groceries and shopping?
“I get calls every night because people think someone is sneaking around their house. Folks are fighting more at home because they’re scared. Some people are even keeping their kids at home instead of sending them to school. I feel the same way. We don’t let Top or Pepper hardly get out of our sight. What kind of person goes after your family if he’s mad at you?”
“Crazy people.” O.C. took another sip. “Maybe he killed the colored kid when he couldn’t catch any of your kinfolk out and around. I asked Donald Griffin about what he found around the fence, but he didn’t say anything about a piece of newspaper.”
Ned rubbed his bald head in frustration. “Griffin probably didn’t pay attention to any evidence. It galls me to think he wanted to wrap everything up and get out of there without letting any of us know. He don’t care about colored folks.”
“Well, we’re in bad shape here. I hate to bring it up, but do you think he might have had something to do with Arnold Rob?”
“Naw. The coroner told me it was his heart.”
“But we don’t know for sure.”
“No, we don’t know for sure, but I ain’t digging my brother up right now!” Ned’s voice rose.
“All right.” O.C.’s eyes lifted from his own coffee mug and he put out a pacifying hand. “More bad news is an Oklahoma feller driving on highway 271 north of the river saw something hanging on the fence early this morning and he stopped to see. It was a young white girl, cut up like all the others and folded over the top strand of bob-wire like a dead wolf…and that colored boy. That makes three on fences.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did, and it was in Oklahoma. They’re working on it now, but nobody knows who she is yet, neither. I called in the FBI right after I heard about it. They’ll be here tomorrow.”
Ned glared at him.
“Now don’t take this wrong, Ned. I had to, because neither you nor Donald Griffin has any business dealing with these murders by yourselves, because they’re happening in two different states. This thing is getting bigger than any of us can handle, it’s growing fast, and it’s getting partly personal. The Bureau has a whole department dedicated to these kinds of murders. When I talked to them this mornin’ on the telephone the agent told me they have a name for them now. They’re called psychopath killers.”
“I’m not turning my back on what’s going on in my precinct. Psychopath killer or not.”
“I’m not asking you to turn your back on anything. You need to understand that these boys do this for a livin’. Go about your business on this side of the river, but let ’em alone and don’t you get in their way.”
Ned felt his ears getting hot. He shared the same territorial traits as O.C. felt toward visiting judges in his courtroom. “They better not go to messing with my people. I have several more folks to talk to and I’ll find out who’s doing these killings. I don’t w
ant them in my way.”
“Goddammit, Ned!” O.C. heated up just as quickly.
Frenchie looked up from her newspaper behind the counter and sighed. Ned and O.C. Rains had been arguing in her café since she first opened the doors in 1945, and it was always the same thing. They’d yell a while and then leave together to go on about their business.
“I told you these boys are professionals. They’ll get to the bottom of this pretty quick. If you’re gonna find them before the FBI boys get here, you better get busy.”
“I been busy.”
“Then get busier.”
Ned felt his face swell with frustration. “Hell, O.C. They’re federal and they won’t get to the bottom of a goddamn thing.” He pointed a finger across the table and jabbed it at the judge for emphasis. “Think about two men in suits driving up in their new cars to my people’s houses. If they don’t get run off with the business end of a shotgun, the best they’re gonna do is stand in the yard and hope the dog don’t bite ’em.”
O.C.’s voice raised in response. “They’re trained in this sort of work.”
Other customers turned to look at the two arguing lawmen.
“They’re city people. They don’t know nothin’ about the country. Some folks out there haven’t talked to anyone but kinfolk since the War. All your FBI people are gonna do is scare this psychopath killer, and the sonofabitch’ll lay low until they’re gone.”
“You ain’t making any headway!”
The accusation stung because it was true. The deaths were coming thick and fast with no suspects in sight. Ned felt he was no closer to finding the killer than when the monster first started to cut up animals. He sank inward and fiddled with the badge on his shirt. His stomach rolled, and he could see himself throwing the gold-plated star on the scarred table and walking out of the café. “My lord, O.C. We’re lost.”
“Not yet.”
He rubbed his bald head and rested his chin on his big hand. “I’ll find him somehow.”
A rumble of thunder rattled the windows, and conversation stopped as everyone in the cafe glanced out the flyspecked window.
The Rock Hole Page 21