The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  But then he decided he wasn’t gonna say nothing. After all, she’d delivered Bishop Washington’s mongrel pup right into his hands! He’d ought to give her a pat on the head and a dozen roses.

  Billy Ray was waiting in the shadows of a big, leafless sycamore tree, stompin’ his feet to keep them from going numb in the cold, when Isaac Washington pulled into his driveway—with his lights off. Considerate of him to be careful not to disturb the household. When the boy eased his car door shut and started toward the barn, Billy Ray appeared behind him and shoved the cold steel barrel of the shotgun into his back. The nigger liked to jumped out of his skin!

  “It was right kind of you to come all the way out here to give your drunk little buddies a ride,” Billy Ray said. “But you know what they say: no good deed goes unpunished.”

  “What do you want with—?”

  “Shut up!” Billy Ray hissed. “You want to draw in another breath after this ’un, you better not make another sound. Now, git!”

  He handed the boy a flashlight, then used the gun barrel to prod him forward, directing him across the broad lawn and into the woods. It was a bright night—a full moon and a black velvet sky freckled with stars. No clouds—that’s why it was so cold that Billy Ray wondered if he touched his tongue to the barrel of his shotgun, would it stick there like a tongue on a flagpole.

  He shoved the young man in front of him through the trees until Isaac stumbled in the forest gloom. He dropped the flashlight and went down hard on one knee, grunting in pain, puffing out a white plume of breath into the frigid air. Billy Ray grabbed him by his collar to haul him up, but it was like trying to lift an anvil, and he felt a sudden flash of rage at the size of the boy.

  “On your feet,” he snarled. “We got bidness to do, you and me.”

  Them niggers was all alike, big animals, pack animals, working in the fields was all they was good for! This one wasn’t gonna be near as big as his daddy, though, even when he filled out, 'cause he wasn’t never gonna fill out. Bishop was at least six feet, seven inches, maybe three hundred pounds.

  Bishop. The name poured hot lead into Billy Ray’s belly, seemed to pull his internal organs downward, twisting and distorting them. Bishop had looked even bigger that first time he brought groceries to the house. He wasn’t but maybe a dozen years older than Billy Ray, but scrawny as Billy Ray was, Bishop’d looked like a black giant, a monster, and Billy Ray had run and hid. His mama’d found him though, drug him out of the closet by the ear and made him stand there in his own living room and say thank you to the black ape from down the road who’d brung ’em food ’cause they didn’t have none.

  Even as a nine-year-old boy, Billy Ray’d knowed that wasn’t right. Even before the kids at school made fun of him for being so poor he had to take charity from niggers, he’d known dogs was dogs. His daddy was long gone and as the oldest of the six kids, Billy Ray ought to have had some say in things, and he would much rather have gone hungry than took that stinkin’ nigger’s leavin’s.

  His mama didn’t see it that way, though, didn’t have no pride a’tall, no dignity, was constantly whining, begging for charity from anybody and everybody. When Billy Ray was twelve, Theresa Washington’s whole Sunday School class had come to the house with clothes they’d made for all the kids. He’d burnt his! Mama was gushy grateful, kissin’ up to them nigger women like they was white folks. And Mama was all the time asking Bishop to come over to fix a broken door handle or a leak in the roof. Billy Ray shouldn’t have been surprised—but he was—when he walked in that day at age fourteen and found his momma throwing herself at Bishop. Sometimes, he thought he’d have been less angry at Bishop if’n he’d a’took what she was offerin’ him. But watching that stinkin’ nigger buck push his mother away—telling her to leave him be, that he was a married man—had planted a seed of hatred in Billy Ray’s heart that growed up big as one of them California redwood trees. He vowed that very day to kill them both.

  Six months later, his mama was dead. Pneumonia got her. She took sick, coughed ’til she lost her voice and couldn’t talk at all, run a fever and got so weak she couldn’t get out of bed. Billy Ray closed her up in the only bedroom in the house and kept the kids out—so’s they wouldn’t catch what she had. There wasn’t no heat and he refused to bring in firewood, wouldn’t let his little brothers fetch none either, told ’em Mama needed the cold to bring down her fever, and they could wrap up in blankets if they’s chilly. Then he removed the blankets from his mama’s bed, took food in to her and ate it his own self soon’s he closed the bedroom door behind him. Made her watch. She didn’t last long—sick, cold and hungry. Not long at all. After that, the neighbors divvied up the little ’uns and raised ’em, but Billy Ray didn’t take no charity from nobody, dropped out of school before he turned sixteen to make his own way in the world— growing dope. And in the end, he’d made enough money to buy and sell every last one of the folks who’d give his family charity—a hundred times over.

  He never forgot his vow, though, and for years kept his eye out for the right time and place to ambush the big nigger. But as he got older, he got wiser. He watched Bishop with Isaac in the grocery store or at the park, watched how he doted on his brat and that’s when it’d come to him. He wouldn’t kill Bishop, he’d kill the nigger’s kid, make Bishop pay ever day with the wantin’ and the grieving’ of him. One day, Billy Ray would have an opportunity, and he’d be ready. That’s why he’d stole that little vial with a stopper in it that fit inside an amulet he could wear around his neck. Snatched it out of the back of one of the campers where them carneys lived who come to town every summer with their rigged games and rickety old carnival rides. He planned to put some of the boy’s blood in that vial after he killed him so’s he could stand right up next to Bishop Washington with the blood of the big ape’s son in a vial ’round his neck.

  Soon’s he realized the Carpenter kid had give him the chance he’d been waiting for all these years, he’d gone upstairs and got the amulet. It hung now under his shirt, the glass of the little vial cold against his chest.

  Though the nigger kid kept tripping and falling as they continued through the cold night, Billy Ray never faltered. He could find his way through these woods with his eyes closed. He knew them like his own front yard because every time he went to the Butt Cheek Rocks, he walked a different route through the trees, never the same way twice so’s not to leave a trail.

  Billy Ray had happened upon his cave when he was seven years old, playing hide-and-seek with his cousins in the woods on his granddaddy’s farm that was now his. Never told a soul about it. It belonged to him and it was private. The entrance was on a rocky hillside back deep in a crevice behind two big, round stones he thought resembled butt cheeks. It didn’t look like the entrance to a cave at all, just a crack in a rock. The cave beyond the crack was only ten feet wide and about as tall for about forty feet beneath the granite capstone of the hillside, then it opened up into a single large chamber that extended out under a meadow. Like every other limestone cave in the county, it was too damp to be good for anything like hiding a fortune in dope—which had been Billy Ray’s plan in the beginning. That’s why he’d needed that big old boxcar.

  It had taken him and three of his hired help the better part of a summer to build the “bunker” under the meadow for Billy Ray’s secret stash. They hauled the boxcar in on the back of a flatbed truck under cover of night and winched it down into the hole they’d dug for it, using a backhoe to scoop out the dirt and break through the roof of the cavern below. By the time they were finished, nobody would ever have dreamed a boxcar full of dope and money lay buried under the surface of the field. It hadn’t taken but a couple of months for the wildflowers, briars and brambles to take over and cover up the scar in the meadow.

  Once it was in the ground, Billy Ray’d set to fixing it up like he wanted. He’d welded shut every hole, crack and opening from one end of the boxcar to the other, making it totally air and water tight. The cave, of c
ourse, wasn’t. Water is what had formed the cave in the first place, dissolving the layer of limestone that lay beneath the cap of granite. It was like that under a big hunk of the whole state. He remembered that much from his third-grade field trip to Mammoth Cave. Billy Ray used a car battery to power an electrical system, lights in the cave and boxcar, along with a fan in the boxcar for ventilation. He’d installed air pipes in the roof. One peeked up into the field above in a tangle of brambles so thick he’d been scratched up like he’d lost a fight with a black bear after he’d worked to put the little hat on it. The return-air wasn’t a pipe, it was a heavy gauge rubber hose like you used to drain a washing machine that he’d snaked up through the rocks on the hillside. He’d put wire mesh across the end of it and the air pipe so wouldn’t no rattler or some other varmint crawl down into the boxcar through it.

  Though the train car almost filled up the whole cavern, there was enough room on the left side between it and the cave wall to go around it to the back where the big chamber narrowed again into a cave that continued deeper into the hillside. Billy Ray had explored that cave to make sure it didn’t lead to some other opening somebody might wander in. It went on for half a mile, maybe more, then came to a dead end in a huge chamber, bigger’n a cathedral, that had them things sticking up from the floor and hanging down from the ceiling—stalagbites or something like that. There was a thirty-foot-wide crack in the floor of the chamber stretching all the way across it.

  When Billy Ray was in prison and reading library books to pass the time, he’d laughed right out loud at how the pirate Blackbeard had always buried the body of the man who dug the hole for his treasure chest along with the chest. Something like that had happened with the men who’d helped Billy Ray bury the boxcar. Each had met with an untimely end soon after the boxcar hiding place was constructed. One got drunk and burned up when his trailer house caught fire. One run headlong off the road at the bottom of Muldraugh Hill—like he didn’t have no brakes at all—and slammed into a tree. The third committed suicide, hung hisself in the barn next to his house, didn’t leave a note nor nothing for his wife and three kids.

  Billy Ray hated losing them workers, did for a fact. But life was hard, that was just the way of it, and now wasn’t a living soul knew about the bunker but him. Well, Isaac Washington was about to find out about it, but he wasn’t gonna live long enough to tell anybody.

  “You’s about to see what nary another man in all of Caverna County’s seen, the stuff of daydreams and fantasies,” Billy Ray said as they came out of the trees and stood before the Butt Cheek Rocks. “Now get yourself up on them rocks and drop down behind ’em.” The only way out of the space behind the rocks was to climb back up over them. “Don’t even think about trying to run. I’ll drop you ’fore you get five paces.”

  Isaac opened his mouth to speak, then caught the look on Billy Ray’s face, thought better of it and merely did as he was told. Billy Ray climbed to the top of the rocks and from there directed Isaac toward a slab of rock taller than a refrigerator, but only about six inches wide, rounded on one edge. He instructed Isaac to roll the rock on its round edge up a slight incline and jam a chock under it to keep it from rolling back down. It’d taken Billy Ray two days with a hammer and chisel to round off the edge of the rock so it’d roll away from the crack that opened onto the cave. Took another week to hollow out the crack into a proper cave entrance, where he affixed a recessed metal grate—the kind with wire mesh between the bars—to the rock face with six eight-inch iron spikes hammered into the rock. The grate was fastened with a padlock. Tossing Isaac the key, Billy Ray held the shotgun on the boy as he unlocked it, bent over and stepped into the cave. Then Billy Ray jumped down off the rocks and followed.

  Once inside, Billy Ray flipped a switch beside the grate and lit up the cave.

  "You can put down that flashlight now—real easy, wouldn’t want you to get the idea you could use it as a club.”

  Holding the shotgun steady on the boy, he told Isaac to remove the chock holding the rock in place so it would roll back in front of the entrance. There were grooves cut in the back side of the rock to grab so you could roll it away from the inside. When Isaac had snapped the padlock on the grate shut, Billy Ray took the key and shoved the boy down the short length of the cave to the cavern containing the boxcar. He watched the boy’s eyes widen when he saw it. Isaac stopped and stood stock still, surprised and awed.

  Billy Ray felt justifiably proud of his handiwork.

  “All them tales ’bout buried boxcars full of money—they’s just made-up stories,” he said with laughter in his voice. “Couldn’t possibly be nothin’ like that in the real world.”

  Inside the boxcar, Billy Ray told Isaac to go all the way to the end of it. “Face the wall and don’t turn around or I’ll blow a hole in you big enough to drive a forklift through.”

  Isaac obeyed, but moved slowly, taking it all in—the piles of marijuana, the grocery sacks full of moldy-smelling money—his gaze flitting from one thing to another like a startled hummingbird. But it wasn’t the dope or the money that caught his attention and held it. It was what lay on the shelves that lined one side of the boxcar. Resting square in the middle of each shelf was a bar of gold. There were six of them, shining as bright as the interior of Fort Knox.

  Billy Ray figured it was all beginning to sink in right about now, that the kid was smart enough to figure out Billy Ray wasn’t gonna let him leave here alive after he’d seen the boxcar and what was in it. When Isaac got to the far wall, he didn’t stand facing it as Billy Ray had directed, but instead turned to face Billy Ray.

  Yeah, he’d figured out the way of it, alright. Billy Ray could see him tensing to lunge at the shotgun, wanted to go out fightin’.

  Before the black ape had a chance to move, Billy Ray dropped the barrel of the shotgun from where he’d had it pointed at the boy’s chest, and pulled the trigger. The shotgun was loaded with 00 buck—which consisted of nine .33 caliber pellets, each about a third of an inch long. Isaac’s kneecap was instantly pulverized—blood and hunks of bone and flesh flew out from it in a wide spray. The lower portion of his leg hung below the gory hole, dangling by shreds of skin and sinew.

  Isaac screamed and dropped to the floor, lay there howling, writhing in a growing puddle of blood.

  Billy Ray pointed the gun at Isaac’s head and shouted above his cries.

  “Shut up! Stop that caterwauling. Do it or I’m gonna take out your other kneecap.”

  Isaac’s face was bathed in sweat, contorted in pain, his eyes almost rolled back in his head. His cries were piercing, the sound of a butchered animal, and for a moment Billy Ray was afraid the bloody kid was going to throw up all over his boots.

  “Shut up, I said,” he cried, and held the barrel of the shotgun inches from Isaac’s knee. He thumbed back the hammer of the shotgun. “I’m gonna give you to the count of three. One. Two…”

  Billy Ray had to stop Isaac’s wailing so he could talk to him, tell him what was happening and why. And if he didn’t do it quick, the kid would bleed to death right in front of him. And where was the fun in that?

  Isaac clamped his jaw shut tight. Tears ran down his cheeks. He was still screaming in his throat, making a sound that put Billy Ray in mind of dragging a rasp across a piece of wood.

  “Why?” The boy expelled the question, coughed it out. “What do you want with me, Billy Ray?” He ground the words through clenched teeth.

  Billy Ray slapped Isaac in the face with the barrel of the rifle, slicing a gash across his cheek and bloodying his nose. The blow knocked the boy backward. He’d have sprawled on his back but hit the wall instead.

  “It’s Mr. Hawkins! You got that, boy?”

  Isaac gasped, spit blood, shook his head. He was losing blood fast, wouldn’t last long at that rate.

  “Why’d you bring me here?” He didn’t say “Billy Ray,” but he didn’t say, “Mr. Hawkins,” either. “I hardly know you.”

  “But you see,
I know you, that’s the thing. More’n that, I know your daddy. Watched my mama throw herself at yore Daddy when I was way younger than you are. Would have watched the two of them go at it in the bed if’n—”

  “Are you saying my father slept with your mother?” Those words came out strong. “I don’t believe it. Is that what this is all about—my father—?”

  “Yes, it’s all about your father. I brung you here because of him, and you gonna leave here because of him…” Billy Ray leaned closer and whispered. “Piece. By. Piece.”

  Isaac’s eyes grew impossibly wide, the whites shining in his black face. It was all Billy Ray could do to keep from bursting out laughing. He walked to the far end of the boxcar to a big cardboard box on the floor. It was still there, right where he’d left it the last time he cut boards for another shelf to hold more gold bars.

  He leaned the shotgun against the wall and lifted the chain saw out of the box. He pulled hard on the starter cord. Nothing. He pulled again. Still nothing. He glanced at Isaac and saw something like stupid hope in his eyes. He pulled harder the third time and the saw leaped to life, making a mighty rumbling sound in the confined space, spewing out exhaust fumes that’d kill you quick if you worked with it too long with the door closed. But the job Billy Ray had in mind wouldn’t take long.

  When Billy Ray turned around, holding the howling chain saw out in front of him, he couldn’t help himself this time and burst out laughing at the look of shock and fear on Isaac Washington’s face. Then he crossed the length of the boxcar to the boy, who was slowly shaking his head back and forth in mute terror, holding his arm up in front of him as if for protection.

  “Beg!” Billy Ray said, standing over him.

  The nigger did. “Please! Oh, please, don’t—!”

  That’s all he had time to say before he started screaming when Billy Ray swung the saw down in a sweeping arc that separated Isaac’s arm from his body just below the elbow, splattering the whole room with blood and hunks of flesh and bone. Billy Ray laughed at the gore and swung the saw again. And again. There would certainly be enough of the nigger’s blood to fill up the vial hanging around his neck.