Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  Waylon leaned toward me and yelled, “That red’un sure is game, ain’t he? I b’lieve that’s his tenth win this year.”

  Upset by the animal carnage and the human brutality, I yelled sarcastically, “Yeah, too bad I didn’t get a chance to bet on him.”

  Waylon either didn’t notice the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. “If we’da got here a minute sooner, you coulda. I had me a hunnerd on him. Tried to lay five, but didn’t get no takers. Easy way to make a hunnerd, though.”

  “Tell that to the dead one,” I said.

  He swiveled and studied me, then nodded. “I reckon it does kindly depend on where you’re at in the peckin’ order, don’t it?”

  “So this was the financial business you needed to do—putting a bet on a cockfight?” He nodded.

  “This ain’t for me, Doc, and it ain’t just for fun. I got a cousin in a bind. Quickest way I know to raise some money for him.”

  “Does Orbin Kitchings know there’s a cockfighting pit a stone’s throw from his house?”

  Waylon spat in the sawdust on the floor, which absorbed blood and spittle with equal efficiency. “Know it? Hell, he’s a damn regular. Gets a percentage of the take. Bets big, too. If he wins, he’s real quick to collect. If he loses, you can figure on hell freezing over ’fore he’ll pay up. Folks try not to bet with him on account of that, ’cept he pressures ’em, if you know what I mean.” I was starting to get the picture, and it was a deeply disturbing portrait of Cooke County’s chief deputy. “Listen, Doc, I got to speak to this fella over yonder. Won’t take but just a minute.” He reached into a pocket and extricated a small, round container, the size and shape of a tunafish can. “Here, have a little dip while you wait.” He popped off the lid and I caught the moist, pungent aroma of tobacco. I looked down, amazed: in all my years in East Tennessee, I had never before been offered a chew; now, suddenly, I was face to face with a wad of tobacco while standing ringside at an illegal cockfight. What next, I wondered—moonshine? hookers? animal-sex acts? Waylon saw the uncertainty in my eyes. “You ain’t never dipped before?” He sounded incredulous. I shook my head. He held the container closer and smiled encouragingly, a stray strand of depleted tobacco wedged between his upper incisors.

  A man leaned down from the bleachers above my head, evidently taking an interest in our exchange. “Go on, buddy, give ’er a try.”

  Waylon looked up. “Oh, hey, Rooster.”

  Rooster nodded to Waylon, then resumed meddling. “Go on, it’ll perk you right up. You look like you could use some perkin’ up.”

  What the hell, I thought, and reached in with my thumb and forefinger. I snagged a pinch of the soft, shredded leaf and brought it slowly toward my mouth. Waylon laughed. “Shit far, Doc, that ain’t near enough. Git you some more.” I reached in and doubled the size of my pinch. “Aw, hell, that ain’t gonna do nothin’. Go on, grab you a hunk.” Embarrassed, I reached in a third time, scooping with my middle finger, too. This time my hand emerged clutching a ragged wad of Copenhagen the size of a cotton ball. Waylon winked in approval, then tugged open his lower lip—mercifully empty at the moment—and pointed, showing me the spot to cram it. When I did, carefully tamping in the loose ends, he beamed. “Doc, we’ll make a good ol’ boy out of you yet,” he said. “Don’t you go nowheres; I’ll be right back.” I nodded, afraid of the harelip sounds and the slobbery mess that might emerge from my swollen lower lip if I spoke. Waylon gave me a final appraisal and felt moved to offer a final word of advice. “Just blend in.”

  With that, he threaded his way through the crowd, moving with surprising grace. On the opposite side of the ring, he bent to confer with a wizened bantam rooster of a man whose creased face resembled distressed leather. The man reached into a pocket and pulled out a thick roll of bills; he peeled off one and handed it to Waylon. Waylon leaned down and spoke urgently, but the man shook his head stoically.

  Just then another pair of handlers stepped into the pit, accompanied by a new referee. The handlers had numbers on their backs, I noticed; these two were numbered 29 and 57. If the entrants’ numbers started with one and ran sequentially, this cockfight was blood sport on a scale worthy of ancient Rome. And if the betting that was cranking up again for this match was typical—dozens of bets of twenty dollars, a handful more at forty and fifty and a hundred, even one at a thousand—some serious money was changing hands here. Was it possible that the sheriff himself didn’t know this was going on? Or—and this seemed more plausible—were Tom Kitchings and his deputies all being paid to look the other way?

  In the pit, the new pair of handlers was beginning the warm-up dance. Anxious to avoid witnessing another death match, I turned away and edged toward the side wall. My mouth was filling with saliva; I didn’t have anything to spit into, so I swallowed, and nearly gagged. My head was beginning to hum just a bit, which surprised me, as I hadn’t had the tobacco in my mouth more than a minute.

  A handful of men parted as I drew closer to the wall, and I saw what they were gathered around. Inside a smaller, square pit, a battered and blood-smeared white bird—one eye gone and a wing dragging in the dirt—crawled in circles, trying to escape a rooster that remained largely undamaged, with the exception of a mangled left leg. The upright bird hopped gamely after his adversary, but he hadn’t quite figured out how to leap, strike, and recover with just the one good leg, so he was reduced to pecking at his foe’s remaining eye and tugging at the tatters of comb. Each time he got a beakful of comb, he would yank himself off-balance, falling onto the downed rooster. This spectacle, though less bloody than the knife fight I had witnessed in the main pit, seemed worse, somehow, for the prolonged suffering. I was appalled, but I found myself hypnotized, unable to turn away. I watched the handlers part the birds three times, stroking and breathing them back to life each time, restoring them from a glassy-eyed stupor to a brief resurgence of life and rage. Finally, on the fourth try, the hopping cock got it right: the long, curved spike on his good leg sank deep into the belly of the white bird, which squawked feebly and then flopped lifeless. “She-it,” spat his handler, reaching down to hoist the dead bird by the splayed wing and then tossing him into a trash barrel beside me. The other handler leaned down, too, seized the victor by the head, and gave his bird a brisk, neck-snapping spin before heaving it, too, into the trash barrel. It caught the rim, hung there briefly, then plopped onto the cock it had killed only moments before.

  Suddenly the shed began to spin in a blur of nicotine and nausea, blood and feathers and feed caps. Something in the Copenhagen or the carnage was conspiring with my Ménière’s disease to bring on the mother of all vertigo attacks. Staggering back against the metal wall, I grabbed for the closest support I could find: the rim of the trash barrel, half-filled with dead roosters. Bracing myself on my forearms, I leaned down, my face inches above the barrel’s rim. Just as I felt myself spinning down into darkness, I began to vomit. Half-conscious, I kept on vomiting long after my stomach was empty, long past the point where the violent heaves produced only trickles of tears from my eyes and commingled strings of bile and snot and tobacco juice from my nose and mouth. “Just blend in,” I reminded myself absurdly, and with that parting thought, I felt my brain fade to black as my body tipped forward, headfirst, toward the mound of lifeless roosters.

  CHAPTER 19

  I FOUND MYSELF RIDING IN Waylon’s truck. I had been vaguely aware of the big man carrying me through the cockfight shed, parting the crowd like Moses at the Red Sea. Cap-topped faces, gap-toothed and disgusted, had loomed into my field of view, then swiftly disappeared into a fog of nausea and semiconsciousness. Some indeterminate time later, I felt the rumble of pavement beneath wheels. Occasionally I would rouse myself enough to retch; at those moments, a plastic dog bowl materialized beneath my chin, attached to a mammoth paw that I realized must be Waylon’s hand. “Sorry,” I would murmur. “Thank you. I’m sorry.” Then I would slump back into oblivion in my posh captain’s chair.

  Eventually t
he fog began to lift. I sat up, looked out the window, and saw that we were now parked at the Pilot station at the interstate exit, right beside my truck. For the first time in what must have been hours, I felt hopeful about the prospects for a return to civilization and good health. Moving slowly and carefully, I opened the door to clamber out of the cab, then turned to ask a question that had been gnawing at me ever since my head started spinning back at the cockfight. “What’s in that stuff, Waylon? I thought Copenhagen was just tobacco, but something in there hit me like a freight train.”

  Waylon held up a finger to pause the conversation, then got out of the truck and came around to my side. Reaching up with his tree-trunk arms, he lifted me down like a child, and began walking me around the parking lot. “Dip is just tobacco, Doc, but they pump up the nicotine somehow; I don’t know how. You don’t hear much about it, but nicotine packs a pretty good wallop, you get enough of it. A lipful of dip is worth ten unfiltered Camels. It’ll knock you on your ass if you ain’t used to it. Hell, I knowed that; I shoulda thought about it before waving that tin under your nose.”

  I shook my head. “I’m a big boy, Waylon. Didn’t have to take it.” The walking was helping, but I still felt woozy. “When I was a kid, my granddaddy used to smoke a pipe. Prince Albert. Never liked cigarette smoke, but I loved the smell of Granddaddy’s pipe. Whenever he came to visit, I would beg for a puff on his pipe. He’d always say, ‘No, it’ll make you sick,’ but I’d plead and whine and wear him down. Sure enough, I’d get sick every time. But nothing like this, man. I’m amazed this stuff is legal.”

  “Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. People get hooked on it, they’ll get ahold of it anyhow. Just like moonshine or weed or chicken fights. Scary thing is, I see kids ten or twelve year old already doing a can a day. Gonna be losing their lips and tongues time they’s forty.” He scratched his chin. “I got me a late start, and I’m what you might call moderate. Figure my mouth won’t fall off till about sixty-five.”

  The image almost pushed me over the edge again. I concentrated hard on another question that had been nagging at me. “Waylon, that first day you took me up to meet Jim—how come Leon Williams, the sheriff’s deputy, helped you shanghai me?”

  Waylon rubbed his chin, and I heard a sound like coarse sandpaper rubbing on rocks. “You want the short answer or the long ’un?”

  “Give me the long ’un, if you don’t care to.”

  “First I’ll give you the short ’un: bullshit walks, money talks. Deputy sheriffs in Cooke County don’t make too much. Leon’s probably pulling down about twenty thou a year, which ain’t what it used to be. So he’s open to a little extry income, if the deal ain’t gonna get him thowed in jail hisself.”

  “So how much extra income did he get for handing me over to you the other day?”

  “Hell, you was pretty cheap, Doc. Couple hunnerd, I think.”

  “That is cheap. Should I be insulted?”

  “Naw, that weren’t about what you was worth; that was about how bush-league Leon is. If Orbin had-a been carrying you ’stead of Leon, he woulda charged ten times that much.”

  I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or worse. “What’s the rest of the answer?”

  “Well, they’s some history between Leon’s people, the sheriff’s people, and Big Jim. Some of it goes way back—some bad blood about fifty, sixty years ago between the Williamses and the Kitchingses.”

  “I might’ve heard something about that. Leon’s grandfather dying in a shootout or a fire at the jail. Is that the thing?”

  “Right. He’d been arrested by Tom’s granddaddy, who was the sheriff way back then.” Williams hadn’t told me that piece of the story. “So if Leon gets a chance to thumb his nose at a Kitchings behind his back, he’s probably gonna do it. Nothing big; he’s just disrespectin’ Tom to feel better about his own self and his people.”

  “And where does Big Jim fit into all that?”

  “Well, he’s got a little history with the Kitchingses, too. He ain’t never quite forgive ’em for standing between him and that girl. And they ain’t never quite forgive him, either, for I don’t know what—maybe just for bein’ a better man than what they are. Sometimes a real good person just rubs you the wrong way, you know?” I nodded; I did know. “Well, Jim—I think he’s that person for the Kitchingses.”

  By now my head had cleared, and my stomach and I seemed to have reached an uneasy truce. I checked my watch; I had been unconscious or asleep for three hours in the truck as the big man kept vigil over me. The afternoon was waning, and my trip to the cave would have to wait. I thanked Waylon for watching out for me, said good-bye, and pulled onto I-40, heading into a blood-red sunset that kept me in mind of fighting cocks and feuding clans all the way back to Knoxville.

  When I got home, I showered and fell into bed. Before drifting off, though, I made up my mind, and dialed the phone number I’d pulled from my Rolodex the day Tom Kitchings pulled a gun on me.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE JOHN J. DUNCAN FEDERAL Building is a cube of pink granite and black glass in downtown Knoxville, occupying a unique nexus in the city’s geometry of history, power, and knowledge. On one side it faces the old Tennessee Supreme Court building; on another side it flanks the new Tennessee Supreme Court building (which, for its part, now occupies the old post office…). One corner of the cube backs up to the main public library; the opposite corner has been rounded off to form an entrance, at the corner where the two Supreme Court buildings approach one another. Inside its gleaming granite and glass, the Duncan Building houses three federal agencies that strike fear into the heart of East Tennessee’s assassins, mobsters, and deadbeats: the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Internal Revenue Service.

  Steve Morgan, an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, met me at the building’s entrance and gave me a crushing handshake. Steve was one of my former students. He had majored in criminal justice, but he took enough anthropology to acquire a solid grasp of the human skeleton and the basic techniques of forensic anthropology. He landed a job with the TBI straight out of undergraduate school. “Thanks for helping,” I said as he held the door for me. “Sorry to call you at home on a Sunday night.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Glad you did.” As he led me toward the security checkpoint just inside the main lobby, I noticed a pair of handcuffs on the back of his waist, and I couldn’t help smiling at a memory from Steve’s student days. One of my favorite teaching techniques in Osteology 480—my upper-level bone course—was to place a few bones inside a “black box.” The box was designed to allow students to reach in and touch the bones, but not to see them. The idea was that it’s important to know the bones not just by sight, but quite literally by feel. I still remember the class one April morning—April 1, 1994—when Steve somehow managed to rig a pair of handcuffs inside my black box. The first student to reach inside—an attractive coed to whom Steve had handed the box with mock gallantry—was instantly manacled. To get her out, we had to unscrew the corners of the wooden box. As he was unlocking the cuffs, Steve asked her out on a date; two years later, they got married. I catch up on them—they have three stair-step kids by now—every year or so, whenever I run into Steve in a courtroom or at a crime scene. I have a sneaking suspicion that my Osteology class wasn’t the only time handcuffs have figured in their relationship, but I’m afraid to ask. I’m afraid he might actually tell me.

  I had brought along my TBI consultant’s badge—I’d had one for years, ever since the agency’s director issued it to me in exchange for free scientific work—and I asked Steve if I should show it to the guard at the checkpoint. “Only if it makes you feel good,” he said. I noticed that Steve wasn’t wearing his shield clipped to his belt, as he normally did; instead, clipped to his shirt, he wore a laminated plastic tag with his photo and name. “The feds aren’t impressed by TBI credentials—in fact, I think the security guard actually laughed the one time I showed him mine.” After unloading my pockets
and making it through the metal detector, I handed the guard my driver’s license, which he scrutinized for a long time, checking me closely against my photo. Then, once he was satisfied that I was indeed the person that both the TBI agent and I claimed I was, he waved me on. Steve led me to an elevator.

  “So why are we meeting in the federal building?” I asked once the doors had closed on the two of us. “Last time I checked, the TBI office was over on the north side of town.”

  “It is. But we’re not the only ones interested in this.” He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate, so I didn’t press him.

  The elevator doors opened on the sixth floor, opposite a big FBI logo. Steve led me to a receptionist sitting behind bulletproof glass, like a convenience store clerk in a bad neighborhood. She slid a form through a small slot at the bottom of the glass, and once I’d signed in, she buzzed us into a mazelike warren of offices that claimed the entire floor. After several turns in either direction, we entered a conference room occupied by half a dozen or so state and federal law enforcement types—I could tell by the dark suits, serious ties, and conservative haircuts. They were seated around an oak table worthy of King Arthur. Steve introduced them quickly; I’d met one of the FBI agents, Cole Billings, on a forensic case a few years before, but I didn’t know the other Bureau man and woman, nor the DEA guy, nor the second TBI agent, as best I could recall, though that one—Brian Rankin—looked vaguely familiar. Clearly I’d been invited to a breakfast of champions. The League of Justice.