by Alex Taylor
“It’s not a story,” replied Hazelip. “It’s the truth.”
Loat closed the knife and laid it on the table. He watched it for a moment as if he expected it to spring off the table at his command. “I think you are an old man who has had too much to drink and whose mind isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “But if you keep talking, these facts won’t help you.”
He then raised his eyes to Hazelip, and the two locked their stares. What Clem remembered most, however, was the look of expectant joy that rode Derna’s face, her eyes bright and hungry as a girl in the throes of her first ravishing. She fumbled with the collar of her dress, revealing the milky flesh of her cleavage, and her lips were soon flushed. Though he was no greenhorn, Clem had never seen a woman actually swoon, but this seemed to be what he witnessed, as Derna’s eyes fluttered and a slow groan of ecstasy rolled up from her belly. Her knees buckled and she braced herself against the stove, her head bent so that her black curls dangled in the drafty air, and she gripped the edge of the iron stove with such force her knuckles whitened.
All of the men turned toward her. Even Loat, his mouth now gaped in slack surprise, craned his neck.
“Dollbaby,” he said. “Is the heat in here getting to you?”
Derna raised her head. Her eyes had a drowsy cast to them and her open mouth burned a bright ring of color in the center of her powdered face.
“Yes,” she said, almost gasping. “I think maybe I’d better go lay down.” She stumbled out of the room and clomped down the hall to the room where Loat kept her bedded. For a time, the men stared after her, a bit dazed by what they’d seen. But whatever it had been, true bliss or performed rapture, it had diffused the simmering violence in the room so that Boyce Hazelip raked his chips from the table into his black-banded hat.
“I’ll cash these leavings with you at a later date, Loat,” he said.
Loat gave no reply as Hazelip exited the house. The other men around the table listened to the cough and grind of his ancient Ford pickup, the engine giving grate and snarl as it descended the grade from Loat’s house to the main trace that led back to town. When the noise had diminished, Loat ordered that the game be finished. His gaze was calm and serene as he dealt the final hand.
A week later, Boyce Hazelip’s wife found him in his burley patch with his throat slit. Loat was brought in for questioning, but the sway of his influence extended into lofty pockets, and the police soon turned their inquiries elsewhere, and when the trail went cold, the matter was mostly forgotten.
For Clem, this seemed but a footnote to the larger story. What he’d seen that night was a woman throttled by the scene of two men paired against each other, the smell of their building blood hot in the close dingy room. It was the first time he looked upon Derna as something more than just another woman. Her back arced against the iron stove, the sweat dribbling from the crease of her hairline—it all gave her the appearance of a woman being inhabited by forces larger than herself, and the gruff moan as it slid from her throat made it clear the forces were welcome, that her body longed to house them.
“Go on, Clem,” she said, bringing him back from memory. “Fetch the Hoover so I can run it over the carpet here. You’ve dropped cornbread or something all through the house.” Her hand darted at invisible crumbs.
Clem retrieved the vacuum, plugged it into an outlet, then sat it before her. She laid the shotgun beside her on the couch and turned on the machine, its brash roar rattling the windows as she wheeled it over the carpet, soft plumes of dust rising about her. Her look was empty and calm, as if this were an action as somber and driven of anger as church.
Clem watched her for a spell, then went to fetch his baking soda.
V
In the morning sometimes, a white vintage Cadillac would coast into town and lurch to a stop in the gravel parking lot of Steff General Merchandise, the car rocking on its chassis as the motor sputtered and died. In the backseat rode a band of six Doberman hounds posed in various attitudes. At the wheel was Presto Geary and beside him sat Loat Duncan, his face shaded under the straw hat that marked him to folks from a distance. The men on the porch of the store would nod or hello him, but Loat rarely spoke, passing on into the cool dark of the mercantile, bent upon his own mysterious business.
The dogs waited in the car. These were not jolly hounds, but had the look of beasts borne up from some uncharted desert, their lean tapered forms resembling those of jackals, though they were much larger and coated in the black and tan pattern of their breed. When Loat and Presto emerged from the store bearing their brown-bagged groceries, the men on the porch were glad to see them go as the dogs made them nervous because they were clearly bred for hunting and the hunting they were bred for was the hunting of men.
Once the Cadillac drove away in a fog of bone-colored dust, the men on the porch would resume their talk, the appearance of Loat directing the conversation toward grim memory.
“He was around twenty or so I guess when it happened with him and Daryl.”
“He was young I remember.”
“Young, but mean already.”
“Who else was with them the night it happened?”
“Clem Sheetmire. You know that.”
“Oh. I recollect now.”
“The three of them run out to the Peabody mines. Course the mines had been shut down for a year at that time and that was the summer when if a man had any copper laying around he better sit on it if he didn’t want it stole. Folks would leave for church and come home to find the wiring tore right out the walls of their house that copper was going at such a price.”
The sun had shifted to fall slantwise beneath the porch eaves, and the men moved in tandem to the cooler shade of the concrete steps.
“It was Daryl climbed that transformer pole out at the mines. All three of them thought the power had been shut off and I guess anybody would have thought the same, seeing as the mines had pulled out a year before.”
“The power hadn’t been shut off though, had it?”
“No sir. Daryl climbed that pole with a set of bolt cutters and when he laid into the line it exploded. Blew his arms clean off at the elbow.”
A collective nodding of heads.
“Electricity cauterized him, didn’t it? That’s why he didn’t bleed to death?”
“That’s right. Only, I bet there’s been times he wished to hell he had of bled to death. It can’t be no easy life without your arms.”
“No, I suppose not. But he up and sued Peabody and raked in a hell of a settlement, didn’t he? And he was the one stealing from them.”
Heads shaking in mute disbelief.
“Another thing I heard told, and it may not be right, but that it was Loat made Clem and Daryl throw dice to see who’d climb that pole. Daryl threw low was how come it was him to climb up there instead of Clem.”
“Is that what happened?”
“What I heard. Heard Clem always carried a set of dice in his pocket he loved to gamble so much and that he rolled them with Daryl that night to see who’d go up. I also heard those dice were loaded.”
“Well, I guess that explains why Daryl never had much use for Clem after that, don’t it?”
One of the men took a thin carpenter nail from his shirt pocket and began to pick his teeth with it. When he was done, he leaned over and spat off the porch into the dust.
“Ask me, Daryl’s been laying for Clem ever since.”
“Well, he’s taking his time, ain’t he? That all happened twenty years ago or better.”
“Don’t matter. He’ll take care of Clem when the time comes. You wait and see.”
The men mumbled begrudged dismay at this, the breath swarming out of them in long gusts as they palmed the sweat from their faces. They spoke of other things for a little while, and then, after a time, became very quiet.
VI
WEDNESDAY
The dark descended over the game trails Clem had told him to follow, and the hard scarring of stars and moonl
ight slowly erased the last hints of daylight so that the shadows fell in grainy showers like soot crumbling from a chimney flue, and the night thickened gradually until there was no sound but that of his boots as they swept through the dry tinder of leaves and fallen hickory limbs.
Beam waited until full evening before clicking on the Maglite his father had given him. He knew it was unwise to travel with a light, as the glare could direct any search party or snooping stranger to him, but he was a bit fearful of the dark and of traveling through it.
Occasionally, when he grew tired and stopped to rest, he would pull the duffel from his shoulders and rifle through the clothes and bagged sandwiches as if taking inventory of what meager provender his father had given him, which was now contained within the canvas bag that had belonged to the man he’d killed aboard the ferry. Growing up, Beam had shot squirrels with his .22 rifle and clubbed catfish with a hammer, and he was surprised that taking a human life had been as simple as killing these other lowlier creatures. But people were caged in much the same frailty as any animal. It only took a measure of force to assign a man to his grave, to loose him from this world.
Before that night on the ferry, Beam hadn’t known there were things a man could do that he couldn’t take back. When he’d gotten in cursing fits with Clem, he would stomp off to sulk in the woods for a few hours, but he always came back. Sometimes he was meek and full of apologies; sometimes he clutched to his defiance through weeks of gritty silence, but he always came back, and Clem always held the door open for him. You couldn’t come back from killing a man, though.
When Beam closed his eyes, he saw the stranger tumbling from the tug cabin, his face coated with blood, the damp red bristles of his mustache twitching like the legs of some insect he’d eaten. He heard again the dead drum of the steel wrench striking the man’s head, saw forever his eyes as they walled white in the darkness, and then felt the boom as the body fell against the aluminum hull of the ferry. The entire night of blood and death beside the river returned to scream at him like an imp crouched in the glare of oncoming headlights just before it rose on the thin pale staves of its legs and ratcheted into the roadside bracken again, the brief flare of its eyes aglow in a rainy slash of wind that tore at Beam until he forced his eyes open and found himself sweaty and breathless on the trail. His narcolepsy had the potential to cause hallucinations and he reasoned the phantoms away with this explanation, but knew he couldn’t do so with the man on the ferry. He was dead and Beam had killed him and that was the stone truth of it.
In a ravine between two hills he stopped again and rested on a mossy rock. He clicked the flashlight off and listened. Trees creaked and wheezed in the breeze and the tremolo of crickets shivered all about him. There was no chill in the night and so he made no fire. He eased down from the rock and pillowed his head with the duffel so that he lay on his back staring at the deep of the sky and waiting for the sudden blow of sleep to come.
He didn’t know exactly how it happened, or what caused it. Doctors had informed him, but their jargon was bland and technical and Beam understood little of his condition. If asked, he’d simply shake his head and look at the ground and say, I just go to sleep sometimes. As if that was any kind of accounting for the way he fell out while walking along a dusty road ditch or stumbled to one knee without a moment’s warning while running the ferry. He did know that when it came, the swift ax-fall of slumber, it was heavy and absolute enough to leave his mind cleared and empty for a few brief minutes after he awoke, and that was something he hoped for now, especially with the brute ghost from the ferry shuttling out to greet him from every knurly tree and coil of briars.
Now, though, when he longed to sleep, it wouldn’t come. Pitted with his head against the duffel and his back on the ground, the trees jostling in the wind, he remained dazed and wakeful. Time seemed to bend and flex, to elongate and then contract like a spasm, until he heard movement in the leaves behind him.
In one motion, Beam sat up and turned and flicked on the Maglite. Revealed in the light was a spotted bobcat, one paw lifted in mid-step, the gray tufts of its muttonchops giving it the look of a magistrate who gazed upon Beam with scorn and contempt.
Beam remained crouched and frozen. The bobcat’s eyes gleamed in the light, and the animal sniffed the air a few times before bounding away into the trees, traceless and gone as a vapor.
For a time, Beam sat in mute shock. Bobcats were numerous in these woods, he knew, but rarely seen. Some childish fear drove him to wonder if this one had sought him out, if it had meant to glare at him with that smoldering cruelty in its eyes, but he soon shook that thought away and pulled the duffel onto his back and began walking on through the wilderness, the flashlight sprayed before him on the trail.
Eventually, the trail led him to a dirt road that seemed to amble either way toward nothingness, and he followed it until he came upon a culvert. He squirmed into the structure and spent the rest of the night in a whorl of mosquitoes so thick it seemed to fill his lungs like hot cinders.
At dawn, Beam crossed a wide mown field, the dew wetting the cuffs of his pants as the sun rose above the far poplar woods. When he reached the trees, he slid the duffel from his back and rested against a white oak log, sweat draping over him as he caught his breath. There were birds crying in the forest. For a moment, he tried to think what kind of birds they might be and he thought he might know, but he didn’t. He thought it was something he’d forgotten, or maybe never known at all, the way to name a bird by its song. He wondered if killing the man on the ferry had taken him farther and farther away from the world he once knew as he staggered lost and unbidden through a land solitary and alien.
Unzipping the duffel, he found the last bits of a ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper and ate it quietly with a motion almost involuntary, like the simple rise and fall of his own breath. Out of a mayonnaise jar, he drank some water he’d trapped from a creek. The water tasted silty and bitter, but he still finished it all, until only a milky skim remained in the bottom of the jar. He held the jar to his eye like a kaleidoscope and the world captured in the glass was blurred and smeary as though made at the behest of a God harried and suspect.
When he was done, he screwed the lid back on the jar and returned it to the duffel. He then shut the bag and scooted from the log so that he rested with it to his back. The birds still screamed in the trees, and beyond them he heard the faint cawing of crows, but Beam barely listened. A slow drowning repose came upon him and he soon slid into a dismal kind of rest.
The scrape of a screwdriver against the white oak log woke him. Beam didn’t know how long he’d slept, but when roused by the noise, he found the sun stood blank and white overhead. An old man was on his hands and knees digging at some plant beneath the log, using the screwdriver to prize the roots loose from the soil, his hands groping through the black humus, sweat darkening the blue pearl-snap shirt he wore.
Beam lay motionless and watched the old man. He worked quietly, levering the screwdriver into the hole he’d dug until the plant emerged, its pale hag-wig of roots dripping wet soil. Then he took a plastic Sunbeam bread sack from his pocket, snapped the leaves and stems from the plant, and placed the roots inside. When this was finished, he groaned into standing and wiped the dirt from his pants and breathed deeply.
“Best place I ever seen to get some rest,” he said, looking off through the trees, “was in a bed under a roof somewhere.” He drew a red spotted rag from his pants pocket and tugged it over his forehead, then balled it in his fist and winked his filmy blue eyes at Beam. “Anyway, I sure wouldn’t be one to take a nap in the woods like you’re doing. Man’s liable to wake up dead.”
Beam raised himself off the ground and sat on the oak log. He rested his palms on his knees and watched as the old man toed the dirt back into the hole he’d dug. “What is that you’re digging?” he asked.
The man glanced at the bread sack and then hoisted it up higher so that Beam could see it better. “Sang,” he announc
ed.
Beam scratched a mosquito bite on his elbow until he felt the warm blood between his fingers.
“This sang in through here is kindly puny,” said the old man. He lowered the bread sack and knocked it against his leg. “Course, I’ll take what all I can get. These days you got to look awful hard to find any sang whatsoever. Why? Cause everybody’s damn greedy, that’s why. They snatch up all the sang there is and don’t leave none to bear on the next year. It’s like they think another year ain’t even coming.”
Beam knuckled the sleep from his eyes. “Maybe it ain’t,” he said.
The old man did not remark on this. He propped a boot on the log, and stood staring off through the trees. His form was lean and cut by years of labor, Beam could see, and the hands dangling from his arms were large and crossed with blue varices, his face brown and dried as an apple core.
“I’ve dug sang most my life,” he said. “Dug it in times when it was thick as carpet under the trees. Look on a north hillside where there’s plenty of shade because sang likes shade. And digging it after August is best because it’s got the berries on then. And where you find sang you’ll find bloodroot and goldenseal, though those don’t bring a dollar the way sang does.”
Beam yawned. “Where are we?” he asked.
“You’re right about that,” answered the old man, mishearing him. “You can’t hardly raise sang from seed. Not if you want quality. It’s a tender plant that’s careful about where it takes root, but once it finds ground it likes it’ll be there forever if some damn fool don’t dig it all up. I’ve always thought folks would fare a sight better if they behaved a little more the way sang does. But they don’t. They’ll just root in one spot for a time and then be gone with scarcely a trace if they think there’s better ground somewheres else.”