A Death in Eden

by Keith McCafferty

  “I do. I’m allergic to bee stings.” It was Lillian, speaking from behind the lens of her camera.

  “Then you’re finally good for something besides criticizing my shirts. Keep it handy. We won’t use it unless he shows symptoms.”

  Marcus had come back from shaking out Trueblood’s tent. He’d found no snake.

  “Why didn’t it rattle?” Sam said, more to himself than anyone else. “You’d think if a snake crawled into your tent and you moved enough to make it strike, the son of a bitch would rattle.”

  “Maybe it did and we didn’t hear it,” McCaine said. “We were all pretty out of it. I know I was.”

  Sam grunted. “It doesn’t matter. The reason you kill the snake is so they can make the positive ID at the hospital. You don’t want to give the wrong antivenin. But the prairie rattlesnake is the only game in the state, so it’s a fuckin’ gimme.”

  Sean came back from making the call. “They can put down at Cow Camp,” he said. “Fifty minutes. They gave me a bunch of instructions for first aid.”

  “The only first aid that would really come in handy is a fucking forty-horse for the raft,” Sam said.

  * * *

  —

  Harold and Marcus watched the boats pull away from camp. Sam was at the oars, Lillian Cartwright attending to Bart Trueblood, ready to administer the EpiPen at the first signs of shock. The canoe that Sean Stranahan was paddling with McCaine was already at the bend downstream, out in front to establish the line.

  “Do you think he’ll make it?” Marcus said.

  “Odds are in his favor.”

  “What about the allergy stuff?”

  “I don’t know. That was news to me. But with the water rising, they’ll make good time. Come on, we got a camp to break.”

  That was the plan. They’d pack up, put a tarp over the gear, take the valuables in their canoes, and leave the rest to be rafted out later.

  “Do you think we’ll see them again?”

  Marcus had become attached to the party, Lillian Cartwright in particular. That much was clear to Harold, never mind the feigned indifference in his voice.

  “No,” Harold said. “After they get Trueblood evacuated, they’ll haul ass on the oars. Both boats should be through to the take-out in a couple days. But you and me, we still have a job to do.”

  Packing up Bart Trueblood’s tent gave Harold his first clue about what might have occurred. In one corner was a muslin game bag of the sort that hunters carry to put elk quarters in. Harold always packed one himself, for stuffing with clothes to make a camp pillow. This bag looked to be used for the same purpose. It was empty but for a shirt, underwear, some socks, and a mess of greenish-white excrement. Harold dropped his nose to it. The bag reeked of rattlesnake. The door of the tent had been unzipped, and Harold figured that the snake, sensing the warmth from Trueblood’s body, had slipped inside and nosed its way into the game bag. At some point, it could have been hours later, the snake had slid out of the bag and struck Trueblood, probably when he rolled onto it in his sleep. Rattlesnakes don’t strike without provocation.

  Still, it was curious. Like Sam had said, why hadn’t it rattled? Why, for that matter, hadn’t Trueblood cried out when he was bitten? Rattlesnake bites throbbed like hell. Harold had had a running pal in his childhood days, a boy named Francis whose catchphrase was “Watch this.” He’d picked up a baby rattlesnake with the predictable result, a bite that made his hand swell up like a catcher’s mitt and turn black with necrosis. He’d screamed bloody murder and three fingers of his left hand had never grown longer. His friends renamed him Baby Fingers.

  “What did you say, Marcus?”

  “I said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I mean, after packing camp?”

  Harold crawled out of the tent. It was a good question. The Scarecrow God had erected his effigies on cliff faces up and down the Smith River, so far without anyone but a little girl catching so much as a glimpse of him. How could Harold expect to do better, especially if the man was on foot with no boat to give him away?

  Something was bothering him, had been for some time now, an apprehension that had built into a foreboding and had started with the loss of a girl’s magic shoe. A dread had settled over this canyon. The cliffs reflected on the surface were still beautiful, but there were forces at work that ran deeper, and he regretted not sending Marcus down the river with the rest of the party.

  He looked at the boy, who was standing on one foot and scratching at his cheek with his fingernails. My son, he thought. And saw himself as a hawk, mantling over Marcus with his cupped wings, protecting him from harm.

  “I’m thinking you go on ahead,” he said. “You’ll catch up to them in twenty minutes. Wherever they camp tonight, stay with them. Take advantage of Lillian’s offer to pick her brain.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll stake out the cabin in case anyone comes back. You stay with the party until you reach Table Rock. Wait there for me. Don’t take any chances with heavy water. If it looks dangerous, line your canoe down through it, or portage. Sean, Sam Meslik, you listen to them. If you reach a stretch they say is too risky to float, don’t. Pull over to the bank and wait for me. Worse comes to worse, we’ll sit it out until the river begins to drop.”

  “You’re thinking I can’t handle myself, I might be a liability I stay with you and somebody shows up.”

  “Maybe, but I’ve made up my mind.”

  “Just like that. I don’t have a say?”

  “No.”

  “You treat me like a child.”

  No, Harold thought. I treat you like my son.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Creature from the Black Lagoon

  He came with the first stars, when twilight’s curtain was all but drawn and the owl by the river was asking his questions.

  Harold was asking them, too. Who? Who goes there? Who are you? Who?

  The figure was treelike, the trunk stooped forward with the arms swinging loose and long. The head trailed tendrils of hair that reminded Harold of the moss called Old Man’s Beard. He focused the binoculars on the figure as it bent from the gloom of the forest into a swath of moonlight. The man—for it was far too large a figure to be female—appeared to be carrying a pack with something thin lashed to the back and sticking up over his shoulder. A rifle barrel? No, it wasn’t quite straight, had a curve at the end of it. The figure faltered, then stopped as the man bent to rest his hands on his thighs. Harold could see a knife sheath swinging from a wide belt. When the head dropped forward, tangled hair fell across the man’s face.

  As soon as Harold was certain that the man had no weapon within easy reach besides the knife, he stood up. He thumbed the hammer of his grandfather’s old Model 71 Winchester to half cock, not trying to muffle the distinct click.

  The man figure lurched upright at the sound, but the long arms stayed at his sides.

  “Who’s that? Make yourself known.”

  “I mean no harm,” Harold said. He stepped from the shadow of the tree. “Just want to talk.”

  The man swung toward him, the mosslike hair shifting in the wind that had been steadily picking up pace through the evening.

  “Then why are you holding a piece on me? That’s a goddamn act of aggression I ever seen one. Any feller hang a dagum barrel on me, he best be ready to fire it.”

  “I’ll set the rifle down,” Harold said. He set it on the ground, raised his hands, turned around. “I’m unarmed.”

  “You a gol-dang fool, you know it?”

  The accent was Deep South, bayou South, kiss-your-cousin South.

  “My name’s Harold.” Harold walked purposely up to the man, holding out his hand. After a hesitation, the man extended his. Fingers long and bone white in the moonlight wrapped around Harold’s hand, then quickly released their grip.

  “Jewe
l,” the man said. “My old man named me that ’cause I had such big gonads coming out of the womb. Least that’s what I was told.”

  “Where’s your accent from?” Harold asked

  “You ever hear of Creature from the Black Lagoon?”

  “No.”

  “They filmed that movie ’bout five mile up the road from where I growed up, twenty mile out of Tallahassee. People hear you talk this way, they think you must be simple. Call you a cracker, call you a hillbilly. But that’s north of wrong by five hundred miles. Where I come from it’s flat as a Aunt Jemima pancake.” He held out his hand level with his waist.

  “I don’t think you’re simple. I think you’re smart. Can we go somewhere out of the wind, sit and talk?”

  “What you want to talk about?”

  “Just talk.”

  “You think I’m smart, huh? I coulda been, but I got brain damage. Back when I was in school I could run you your multiplication tables but couldn’t hardly sign my name more than print a ‘X’; you asked me to draw a horse it wouldn’t look like no living animal. Then I got my ass lit up like a Christmas tree when a fuckin’ mosquito mine tripped, like to cave half my head in. I never was right after, but I could draw you a horse right down to the breed. You hurt one side the brain, the other takes over, and that’s fact. Now I’m artistic but I . . . I . . . it’s hard to pick up words. It’s like they’re on the floor but they got a slime on them or something. So I just sort of stammer around and people think I must be of weak mind. Way I talk, it’s like my head’s on low speed in a kitchen blender.”

  The right arm swung toward the homestead cabin. “I got a lantern in the dwelling. There might be a . . . a few drops a kerosene in it. I’m plum outta supplies. This far north it don’t matter so much. You can read a book ’til per near twenty-three hundred hours.”

  “You were in the military.”

  “They call it that. Bunch of crewcuts and fuckups is what it was. I was a conscientious objector, but they done took me anyway. I was a band-aid ’cause of that. Next to your second lieutenant and field radio operator there ain’t no higher rate of fatality than your special forces medic. I liked the country well enough. ’Cept for the kraits, it weren’t no different than the swamps I growed up in, just your regular boonies.”

  “Krait?”

  “They call it the cigarette snake ’cause you get bit, you got time for one smoke before you’re dead. But really you got time to smoke about half a pack. Then your diaphragm freezes up and it’s K-MAG-YO-YO. Kiss my ass, grunts, you’re on your own.”

  He laughed, a slow “hey-hey-hey,” then shrugged off his pack and tilted it against the cabin wall. Harold could see that the “stick” that poked from the top of the backpack was actually the neck and fret board of a small guitar, or maybe a ukulele.

  “You want to know why that war ended?” the man said. “I give it a real lot of thought.”

  “Yes,” Harold said, to keep him talking.

  “It’s ’cause of the GI smoking pot. By the end of my second tour, that would be in ’69, more than a third of infantrymen were toking, that’s a fact. You toke and the war quits making sense, not that it never done in the first place. ’Bout the only thing kept me sane was reefer. I’d offer you, but I’m down to stems and I need it for the medicinal effect. It slows down the swirling. Makes me an intelligent-sounding man, if you can believe it.”

  Jewel was fooling with the lantern, shaking it, fiddling with the wick, striking a match against his fingernail, and lighting it. The yellow glow revealed the craters on his cheeks and his unkempt hair that was the color of a yellow Lab, though heavily streaked with gray.

  Picking up the rain bucket and setting it aside, he sat down cross-legged on the floorboards of the cabin and indicated for Harold to do the same. Above their heads was the hole in the roof showing three dim stars.

  “People say I look like Billy Gibbons, but ’cept for the beard I don’t see it,” Jewel said.

  Harold didn’t know who Billy Gibbons was.

  “I guess you ain’t no fan of Southern rock then, one,” the man said. “You never heard of ZZ Top? He’s the front man, plays a guitar looks like a triangle. People figure ’cause he’s a long beard he’s got to be a redneck. But he ain’t no more redneck than me and I ain’t no redneck to speak of. I’d put money down that I’m the only vet in Wakulla County voted for a black man for U.S. president. You know what the significance of 2032 is?”

  Harold shook his head.

  “That’s the year the white man becomes the minority. Can’t get here soon enough, you ask me. You ought to know things like that.”

  “Thanks for informing me.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t have nothing to offer. I had some deer I jerked, but it’s all gone. All I got left is a sack of taters growing sprouts. They ain’t killed me yet. Course they could and I might not know it. This could be a dream, I s’pose. Sometimes I go a whole day like I’m a bird looking down at the world and I’ll touch a tree just to make sure it’s there and I got the connection. Like I’m still with the living, you know it?”

  He reached out and touched Harold’s arm with rough fingertips. “You feel real enough. So what is it brung you up here?”

  The man had been leaning back on the heels of his hands and a loose floorboard tilted suddenly with a creak, and Harold was looking down the bore of a revolver. The hole was very large and the blade sight above it wavered over Harold’s heart. When he heard the man speak, there was no accent and the words were very clear.

  “I’m only going to ask you the once.”

  Now it was Harold who was looking down from above and for a moment he couldn’t summon his voice.

  “I’m a state investigator,” he heard himself say. “I’ve been directed to find out who is placing scarecrows in the cliffs. If that person is defacing pictographs, it is a federal offense and I have the authority to make an arrest.”

  “You got a badge?”

  Harold placed a hand over his chest. “Can I reach inside the pocket?”

  Jewel nodded and Harold handed him his card. As the man read it, Harold looked at the gun looking at him and guessed it was a .41 or maybe a .45. Double action, so that it wouldn’t need to be cocked before firing.

  “This ain’t nothing more than a business card,” Jewel said.

  “It’s down in my boat,” Harold said. “Like I told you, I just wanted to get out of the wind and have a conversation. If you’ll set your piece down, we could have one.”

  “I don’t see what there is to talk about. I ain’t breaking no laws ’cept thems that make no sense. I don’t have a dagum boat so I don’t need a dagum permit to float the dagum river. I ain’t done nothing illegal to get here but a few steps trespassing in country that rightfully belonged to your people. I don’t gather you think that’s a crime any more than I do.”

  “I’m not worried about trespassing,” Harold said.

  “Then what do you care for? I ain’t defacing no native art. Them words on the rocks, they’ll wash away you get a strong rain. It’s just chalk paint.”

  “But you are the person who is making the scarecrows,” Harold said, stating it as a fact.

  “I might be. I might not be.”

  “It’s just between you and me,” Harold said. “I really would ask you to put the gun down.”

  “People, they need to know that someone’s watching out for their interest. These mine folks, they want to dig a tunnel under the major spawning tributary. Like that ain’t digging a grave by a different name.”

  “Did you know they call you the Scarecrow God? They’ve shut the river to all floating.”

  “The past couple days I didn’t see many boats, I wondered why. They figure I’m dangerous, huh? Do you think I’m dangerous?”

  “No, but you’ve created a dangerous situation.”

 
“I don’t see how that can be.”

  “People are going to climb up to look at them. Someone could get hurt.”

  “They fall, that’s on them. Nobody’s got a gun to their head making them do a durn thing, not one durned thing.”

  Harold took a shot in the dark. “Who are you doing this for, Jewel?”

  The question caught the man off guard. He started to say something, but the words caught and a look of bewilderment came over his face. His eyes flashed away to the walls of the cabin. A long pause, Harold looking at the sprouting of yeti hair where the top button of his shirt was undone, thinking of making a lunge for the pistol and thinking better of it, remembering how quickly the man had drawn it from under the floorboard.

  “Why would I be doing it for anyone but myself?”

  “It’s just a question,” Harold said. “I thought maybe that man in the photograph you stuck behind the glass.”

  Jewel’s eyes went to the photograph, then he looked up at the hole in the roof. There were more stars now, and he appeared lost in them, and there was the owl hooting in the canyon that emphasized the silence. He looked at Harold and slowly then, as if in a trance, he turned the revolver so that he was holding it by the barrel and held out the grips for Harold to take it. Harold took the gun and tilted out the cylinder. All six chambers had been loaded. He set the gun by his side and took a full breath for the first time in ten minutes.

  “I ain’t but seen him more than six, seven times in my life,” Jewel said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Mirror of Water

  The first time he’d met his father he was not yet of school age, and what stayed with him was the red wine smell of his body and the odd cadence of speech, in which many sentences were started but very few finished. He had known, of course, that he had a father because all kids did, didn’t they? He wasn’t sure, sex education being something one experienced rather than learned in the Panhandle swamps of his childhood. He’d even known his father’s name without knowing it was his father. His mother, who worked the fourteen acres they lived on, supplemented that little subsistence by raising hothouse orchids and boarding dogs for country club people. She was a woman moved to the verge of tears every day and for as many reasons as there were days. Jewel was used to hearing her say the name “Scott” under her breath, usually while taking the Lord’s name in vain—“Damn you, Scott MacAllen” being her most common utterance.