by Jimmy Fox
The road was quiet. No other vehicle in sight. Big John jogged the hundred and fifty feet to the heap of mangled fur. No sense letting the poor thing suffer.
He slowed about six feet from the animal, holding the shotgun at hip level, ready to end the misery or to protect himself if it suddenly attacked him in its dying pain. He could see that it was still breathing. Blood had started to fill a pothole.
Now his own breath left him. It looked like a cougar—but the strangest one he’d ever seen. The skin and fur seemed to have come off the body. Had the impact literally skinned the beast?
And then it moaned. A human moan!
Big John knelt down and warily, gingerly pulled the cougar’s head away, and then the rest of the skin. It was a costume, a damn hokey costume, at that!
Below was a sweat-drenched, bloodied young man, with black hair and the complexion of an Indian. Although the man’s mouth was a red mess, Big John could see that he wore braces. Probably late teens or early twenties. He didn’t recognize the victim as Katogoula, who in general were indistinguishable from whites.
He made a quick inventory of the obvious injuries: facial and oral damage, both legs broken, an arm, too. Then he ran through the scary possibilities: concussion, broken hip, broken back, organ injuries. Most of the visible bleeding came from the left leg, where the tibia had punctured the skin. That, at least, he could do something about.
Running back to his car, Big John traded the shotgun for a comprehensive first-aid kit and some flares. The victim was feeling what had happened to him by the time the sheriff returned and set two flares out; his moaning was low and constant, pitiful. Big John worked skillfully to stop the bleeding. The splint he made for the leg satisfied him. Shock was a danger now. He called to Ray Doyle for blankets.
And then he noticed, in the back pocket of the boy’s jeans, a crumpled, leaking can of lighter fluid. Big John removed it and set it aside.
The boy kept looking at the forest edge, stark fear on his dazed face. As if something horrible were pursuing him, he tried to crawl away.
“It’s okay, now, son.” Big John held him down effortlessly and spoke in a calming tone. “Ambulance is coming. Everything’s gonna be fine, you hear? What’s your name? Can you tell me your name, son.”
The boy kept repeating Chief Claude’s name. “You ain’t Chief Claude, son. . . . Is he the one you want me to call? Is that it?”
“Chief. Yes. Oh! Oh! Hurts . . .”
“Yeah, I expect it does. You took a bad thumping, there. What’s your name, son? Can you tell me?”
“Stu—” he coughed, spluttering blood, crying now from the pain. “Stu George. I saw it. The real one! Eating a man! The real one!”
Lt. Sprague put a blanket under the boy’s head and another over his torso.
When Big John had done what he could to quieten Stu George, he stood up and forced his mind into detective mode through the fading adrenaline rush. Biting his lower lip, tasting his sweat, he critically took in the scene.
His eyes traced the probable path of the victim. Was this just a young idiot drawn to mischief by the press reports, or had he been running from someone else, there, where the grassy shoulder of the highway met the dense tree line?
The real one. The tribe had been upset by reported sightings of the mythical cougar. Maybe it wasn’t a myth, after all. What was it that had forced Stu George to run heedlessly in front of a moving car? The boy was terrified, even now.
Lt. Sprague, standing next to him, said: “This costume, Sheriff. Got me thinking. The twins, only eyewitnesses we got to anything, say a cougar attacked them. Cougar that acted mighty funny. Walked upright. We found cougar signs where Carl was killed. And that lighter fluid the boy had. The museum fire. You think maybe we done run down our killer?”
“I think we just stopped another murder. You get some men in there,” Big John said, pointing to Tchekalaya Forest. “And be quick about it. There’s more to this than a boy in a cougar suit.”
Big John, cradling his old Ithaca 12-guage pump, moved with watchful speed through the pines and light underbrush. He hadn’t waited for more men to find out what Stu George had been fleeing. The killer was close. He could feel it.
This was state forest, a beautiful testament to intelligent natural resource management. Big John marveled at the tall longleafs, just as he did every time he hunted in these woods. The trees had spaced themselves in a natural orderly pattern older than civilization, older than human beings, who had turned the clock back for the longleafs through science and public policy.
Forests still covered half of Louisiana, and trees were the state’s number one crop. Tchekalaya Forest was famous for its restored longleaf stands, though in some less intensively managed areas loblolly and slash pines predominated. With prescribed burns in the spring, Nooj and his fellow agents and foresters cleared out faster growing bushes and trees that could fuel major, devastating fires.
Even deliberately set, strictly controlled fires were something else, Big John remembered. Surreal, hellish. The fire starters would walk down roads with diesel or kerosene and gasoline in fuel cans called drip-torches, drizzling fire that soon clawed through the tangled understory. Turpentine-sharp smoke billowed up, dimming the sun to a peculiar orange color and causing a noticeable drop in the temperature.
How they kept those fires from raging out of control was beyond him. Had something to do with backfires, firebreaks, plowed borders, and the longleaf ’s resistance to natural, lightning-kindled fires.
Yep, this forest was another world, Big John reflected, walking beneath a squirrel chattering maniacally; here, the laws of man must yield to a more ancient way. We may think we have it all hemmed in and prettified, but we’re just kidding ourselves. There was something here, something violent and unpredictable and elemental, that laughed at laws, roads, and prescribed burns. He’d seen it in people, too, for instance when some formerly peaceable dude snapped and shot everybody in his family, including the dog and the refrigerator on the porch full of Budweiser. You just never know when it’s going to happen. We’re all at its mercy.
Different language here, too, the language of silence, that really wasn’t silence. What’s it saying? Made the hairs stand up on your arms.
But at first glance, if you didn’t think too hard, the forest was beautiful, benign on the surface. Hard to believe that this thriving ecosystem had not always been here, that this area at the turn of the twentieth century had looked like the site of an asteroid impact, clear-cut of every tree. Now there was a delicate but healthy truce that benefited the whole community: loggers could harvest trees, hunters could pursue their traditional pastime, and environmentalists could savor victory on behalf of dozens of saved species.
What would happen to this truce when the Katogoula started reclaiming their rights, set up their reservation, which would surely take in some forestland they presently owned and leased to the state? Would they allow public hunting? What about logging and tourism? He’d heard stories of tribes suing for hundreds of thousands of ancestral acres wrongfully taken, and winning goodly portions.
Big John wondered ruefully if central Louisiana was about to become a battlefield over the complex issues born of Katogoula recognition. The Civil War had never ended around here. All he needed was another one. National interest groups seemingly of every stripe had put this area on their radar screens. He could see it now, disaster waiting to happen: demonstrations, spiked trees, human blockades, bloodshed, network news crews intoning judgment . . . he desperately needed to solve these damn murders, get back to doing positive things, nip that kind of trouble in the bud. He was justly regarded across the parish as a superb referee and negotiator of problems before they required the solutions of the courts, or of the gun.
The forest floor had begun to rise slightly, and the composition of the woods subtly changed; fewer pines, more hardwoods. He was probably on Tadbull land, now.
The sheriff knew something was wrong as soon as he ste
pped from the dense woods into the clearing. A flock of crows vied noisily around one of the old burial mounds. He saw more cautious turkey vultures circling overhead on the thermals. The opportunistic crows wheeled and darted and cawed in a frenzied competition for something that even from this distance the sheriff could smell. Something large and dead.
The full sun was hot, and he felt every year and every pound as he strode rapidly across the grassy meadow, scanning for any suspicious movement. The Shawe twins had been attacked near here.
He stopped as soon as he saw the charred designs in the dry grass. They were letters! One row about three feet tall, the shorter one below it twice that:
CASI
NO
Touching a finger to the black grass, sniffing, he concluded the letters had been burned very recently. Was that lighter fluid he smelled? He glanced at the patient vultures circling in the hazy blue sky. You could probably see this from ten-thousand feet up. Somehow, word would have gotten around about this strange telegram to the tribe at this remote but sacred place. A turboprop puddle-jumper on the way to Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta, an A-10 from Barksdale Air Force Base, a forestry plane, or a crop duster would have spotted it soon enough.
Big John concentrated now on the mounds. The crows watched him but kept on tearing at the carcass. He fired off a shell into the ground a few feet ahead, pumped a new one into the chamber, fired, pumped again. The black birds scattered, suddenly quiet, yielding to the superior predator. After the sound of the shots ceased reverberating around the meadow, nothing seemed to move.
He stepped around the letters to approach the mound.
The clothed body of a large man, an atlatl spear through his chest, was pinned to the trunk of a gnarled oak; sneakers just touched the ground. This spear looked longer than the one that got Carl Shawe.
Big John had a sickening feeling he recognized the build, in spite of the decomposition, bloating, and damage done by the birds. This was no recent death, but the crucifying—if you could call it that—seemed a recent act. The body seemed to have been buried; the clothes and hair and skin were caked with dirt.
He climbed the mound. Travis Corbett. Had to be. The bark of the old oak tree was scarred and scraped on either side of the body, as if by some sharp-clawed animal. No question about it: the killer of Carl Shawe had struck again. All in all, about the strangest thing he’d ever seen.
He gagged, struggling to hold down lunch. “My Lord! What did you get yourself into, Travis?”
Big John called in on his radio. He gave rapid-fire instructions, starting the well-oiled machinery for processing a murder scene.
CHAPTER 30
“Did you hear gunshots?” Nick stopped on the Golden Trace.
“This isn’t New Orleans,” Holly chided. “Don’t be so jumpy on such a gorgeous day. Hunting season, remember? It’s perfectly legal to blast all those cute little squirrels and rabbits and doves. . . . Exercise! Fresh air! Sunlight! Move it, buster!” she commanded over her shoulder.
With drill sergeants who looked like her, the armed services would be shooing recruits away.
Plaid flannel shirt tied around her waist, skimpy sleeveless T-shirt hanging untucked, flapping up now and then to show the muscular slopes of her lower back, cutoff jeans like a second skin.
She noticed he was staring and smiled. Was there a note of sadness and regret in that brief glance?
Get over yourself, Herald, as Shelvin would say. She loves Wooty. End of story.
They followed the old Katogoula hunting and trading trail winding through the towering pines, a comfortable six feet at its usual width. In the thirties, the Civilian Conservation Corps had made the path accessible to city slickers like him. Dusty red earth, pine needles, deciduous leaves. An easy hike, if you kept an eye out for the rock-hard pine roots, huge rusty fingers of a subterranean beast groping across the path to twist an ankle of the unwary. Railroad ties formed steps where the forest floor occasionally rose or fell precipitously; concrete-and-boulder bridges marked “CCC-1938” traversed small bayous. The Louisiana Office of Forestry was doing a creditable job of keeping the place up. Nick was tempted to revise his low opinion of bureaucrats.
“Tcheyak means ‘pine,’ and falaia means ‘long or tall.’” Holly had been trying to teach him the elements of Mobilian Jargon. “Tchekalaya, ‘tall pine forest.’ In sentences, word order expressed grammatical function. Object-subject-verb was the usual form. So, you’d say, ‘Forest tall we go.’ Simple, really.”
“If you ask me, the Katogoula were better at war than language. They whipped every enemy around but surrendered their native tongue without a fight.”
“How disgustingly chauvinistic and unicultural. Just what I’d expect from a politically incorrect boor like you.” She stopped and squirted water from a plastic bottle into her mouth. “A broader-minded person would say they showed commendable adaptation to changing circumstances.”
“Let’s get to the cemetery,” Nick said, passing her, “so I can listen to my favorite rabid talk show on the radio I brought.”
She squirted him. “You didn’t bring a radio. I’m the pack mule of the expedition, so I ought to know. Here, give me your sling, if you’re not using it. You’re going to strangle yourself.”
He slipped it off and she stowed it in her backpack. Then she offered the bottle to him; he squeezed his mouth full of cool water several times. Holly, the consummate organizer, had a backpack with a cold pouch.
His ribs and face ached from the beating two days before at the Crescent Luck, but, oddly, his arm and shoulder felt almost normal. Holly was right: the exercise was doing him good, spreading warmth throughout him, soothing even the more recent pain. His body was repairing itself, obeying a recuperative power beyond his comprehension or control that was built into the very structure of things, like the renewing forces keeping the forest alive.
Evil, too, was built into the structure of things, according to the ancient Katogoula beliefs. And when evil was loosed on the tribe, only someone granted special power from the spirit world could restore the balance.
Did he have that power? He wasn’t sure. If he did, it would manifest itself in the same process he followed in his genealogical work: examine sources, identify evidence, prove hypotheses as facts—and sometimes, wing it.
Nick had asked Nooj for the promised tour of the old Katogoula cemetery in the forest, but the wildlife agent said he had other duties. Hunting season was almost in full swing; licenses needed to be checked, kills counted, violators ticketed, usage fees collected. Sounded reasonable, but Nick couldn’t shake the idea that Nooj was avoiding him until he gave up and returned to New Orleans for good.
The cemetery wasn’t indicated as a feature on public maps, because the tribe discouraged tourism there. That morning at Three Sisters Pantry, Miss Luevie, too, had snubbed him. She’d refused even to leave the kitchen to see Nick and Holly as they ate breakfast; Royce Silsby gave them the map, apologizing quietly for his wife’s stubborn temper. Tommy Shawe was tied up with a guiding job that day, a couple of rich men from Texas who’d bow-hunted deer regularly with Carl, his late brother.
Nick’s last legitimate genealogical excuse for remaining here was this visit to the old Katogoula cemetery; he’d gathered all the information from local sources he would need to complete his tribal history and the stories of the six core families. This considerable mass of work, he felt sure, the tribe would compensate him for, if only out of a sense of fair play; and certainly once they saw the impressive show Hawty would produce using the professional-grade presentation programs she kept adding to the fairly new but already outdated office computer. And then, unless Tommy became chief again, the Katogoula would be through with him. He would have no choice but to follow Hawty’s advice: leave the detective work to Sheriff Higbee.
Any genealogist worth his salt bravely confronts the unknown every day. He is obsessed by it, even in his dreams; with an emotional masochism he returns to the arena to face it, o
ver and over, only certain that he can never prevail, and at best fight it to a draw. Until he knows exactly who did what, when and where, beyond the shadow of doubt, he’ll carry each impossible gap, in an individual life or a family’s story, with him as if it were his wounded comrade.
Nick couldn’t give up or stop theorizing about suspects and motives, even though it wasn’t in his best interests, even though snooping around had already proved nearly fatal.
“We’re almost to the branching of the trace.” Holly was studying the single copied sheet they’d picked up from Three Sisters Pantry. “Too bad Nooj didn’t come. I wanted to see your famous interrogation methods at work.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Nick said, eyeing the faint and, to him, indecipherable map. “You sure you know where we’re going?”
“Of course I do,” Holly replied indignantly. “Only about two kilometers now . . . or is that miles?” The map went back in her jeans pocket. She was off again.
A few minutes later she shouted back to him, “There it is!” She plunged down one of three indistinct paths that meandered into the thick shady woods, shot through with shifting spears of afternoon sunlight. “I think,” Nick heard her add as the trees swallowed her.
“Not the easiest place to find,” she said.
“Maybe that’s the point.”
For the next few minutes they stood without speaking. It was a serene place, alive with secrets. Nick had visited other holy sites, natural or man-made: Delphi, Jerusalem, Rome, Tikal, Stonehenge, Giza . . . where he’d also felt this indefinable wonderment, the invisible tug of transcendence, like a subtle physical force you don’t notice until you isolate it from the background buzz of sensation.
A woodpecker’s staccato laugh rattled from somewhere deep in the sighing shadows of the scaly pines. Sunlight flooded down from the opening in the trees above the enclosure of grassy graves; a black iron fence surrounded the enclosure; around the roughly rectangular area was the ubiquitous pine straw; and then trees forming a ragged, encroaching circle about two hundred feet in diameter