When the dust settled, I saw with some surprise that the car was one of the county’s deputy sheriff cruisers, white with no lights on top. It had a chrome spotlight mounted above the driver’s-side mirror and a faded gold star on the door. The door creaked open, and out clambered a stocky, dark-skinned man with a uniform shirt tucked into his jeans. He wore a pistol in a hip holster and tugged down on a pale Stetson as he straightened up.
Richard motioned him to join them on the porch. Jesse left the Lab and walked inside. He returned almost immediately and tossed the deputy what appeared to be a small stack of cash.
The deputy turned and walked down the steps. He fingered the bills, looked toward the sky, and smiled, and I finally got a clear view of his face. It was Eades. My decision made, I turned my scope back to the propane tank beside the house. I took a deep breath then let it halfway back out and held it, rifle tight to my shoulder, just as Dad had taught me from age five, and slowly squeezed the trigger.
There was no explosion, nothing but a puff of dust beside the tank. I quickly pulled back the bolt action on the rifle, ejecting the spent shell casing, and rammed another home. Again, I took careful aim and fired. This time, I got the results I was looking for. Unfortunately, the sound of my first shot had already reached the porch, and both Stanglers were diving for cover. Maybe they'd been shot at before. Eades wasn’t so lucky.
The tank split wide open, blowing dust and grass in an invisible wind toward the porch and grill. When it fell over, the grill ignited the gas cloud from the tank, and hell came to Earth. The fireball that engulfed Eades and half the house had no mercy. It flung him over the hood of his cruiser like a discarded doll. He bounced when he hit the packed dirt of the driveway, and debris from the house rained down around him. I couldn’t see Richard or Jesse but hoped they were on fire. For Eades, I had only the rage I’d felt on seeing his face turned up to the sun.
More calmly than I would have believed myself capable of, I crawled out from under the cedar and started back to my truck. Then panic set in, and I ran. I made it a quarter of a mile before realizing I was going the wrong way. I eventually reached the truck on shaky legs, threw the rifle behind the seat, and headed for home, careful to obey the speed limit precisely. As I drove through Dickson, one of their notoriously ticket-happy cops pulled out from a store behind me and stayed on my bumper until just past the city limits. The logical part of my mind knew they couldn’t have been onto me, but that part was hanging on by ragged fingernails. The rest was screaming.
When I got home, my folks still hadn’t returned from church. I tossed my filthy clothes in the laundry and took a long shower, trying not to close my eyes for more than a quick blink. Every time I did, I saw Eades flying across the yard and his legs twisting under him when he hit. I couldn't stop seeing it.
I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling when my parents got home. I managed to convince Mom I’d been throwing up since they left. I had gotten a bad case of the dry heaves in the shower and was shaking, so it wasn't that hard to fake. She even gave in and let me stay home from school the next day, which gave me a handy excuse to not eat much at dinner. I didn't want to eat ever again.
An hour or so later, I was sitting on my bed in the dark, hoping I was actually going to be able to sleep without thinking too much, when Dad walked in and closed the door behind himself.
"What did you do?"
"I just laid around all day. I'm sorry. I'll go back to school tomorrow," I replied.
"I'm not talking about today. Yesterday. When your mother and I were at church and you were supposedly here sick. What did you do, Sam?"
"Nothing, Dad. I swear." But my voice was shaky.
"It's all over the news," he said. "The explosion out on Grant Road at the home of Richard Stangler. And a deputy has gone missing, the deputy we talked to that night. Know anything about that?"
"Dad, I—" My throat locked up, and I could only wave at my rifle on the desk, surrounded by the scattered pieces of my cleaning kit.
When he turned back to me, his eyes had gone empty and still. He stared at me for a full minute without blinking.
"He's not just missing, is he?"
I tried to talk, to explain. But I couldn't get enough air. Finally, I just shook my head. Dad turned to look out the window and, after a long silence, took a deep, shuddering breath.
"When I get home tomorrow, you won't be here. You can take the truck, and I'll leave you some money. You will not speak to your mother. I'll figure out what to tell her. You just get gone." He rose and started for the door.
"Dad, please," I said as I jumped up after him and tried to grab his arm.
He spun around, knocked my hand loose, and for the first time in my life, he hit me. His hand was open. It wasn't a punch but more of a backhand slap. Just the same, my knees stopped working, and I sprawled on the floor by my bed.
He stood looking down at me, both hands loose at his sides. "You killed that man. Or you did something to get him killed. Worthless or not, crooked or not, you killed him. You endangered me, your mother and brother, and your immortal soul, and for what? Mike is just as dead, and the Stanglers are still alive. You will leave, and you will stay gone. I will always love you, but you don't live here anymore."
#########
I pretended to be asleep when Mom looked in the next morning and stayed in bed until I heard her car pull out. I got dressed, grabbed my guns, and loaded everything I could scavenge into my old truck. Twenty minutes later, I was parked far down a dirt road in Lake Murray State Park, trying to figure out what to do next. Dad had left six twenties on my front seat. I had another five hundred in a savings account in Ardmore, but even if I emptied that account, the cash would take me only so far. If Dad could figure me out so easily, it made sense the Stanglers and cops might too. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but for all I knew, they were looking for my truck already. I had to disappear, and quickly. I remembered a joking conversation I'd once had with Will about where we would go if something crazy happened and we had to turn outlaw, but I’d never thought I would really find myself needing to leave my whole life behind and hide.
Far back in the Arbuckle Mountains north of Ardmore was an old gravel quarry on the river where we sometimes fished or noodled in the summer. An old man had shown Will where the place was and taught him how to catch catfish with his hands. There were lots of empty buildings there, and Will said the old man swore a little cave lay beyond the river, and he used to camp in it as a kid. Finding that cave wasn't much of a plan, but it would have to do.
At a convenience store in Dickson, I filled up the truck and bought a couple gallons of water, a megapack of beef jerky, two bags of chips, and some extra flashlight batteries. Forty minutes later, while driving down a mostly forgotten dirt road deep in the Arbuckle Mountains, I reached the gates of the old Big Canyon Plant and unlocked one of the massive railroad locks with one of two funny hollow keys Will had made in the shop at work. I locked it behind me and drove as quietly as possible toward the river, crossed the railroad track, and drove the Dodge into the thick brush under towering oaks.
The quarry had closed decades before. No one ever went there but us and the rare fisherman who hiked in from the road. Since the best fishing spots were downstream, chances of the Dodge being spotted were slim at best. After covering the truck in a layer of limbs, vines, and old driftwood out of sight of the railroad, I made a cold camp and watched the light fade. There in the river canyon between steep hills, the night came down like a hammer.
Will once said a caretaker lived somewhere on the property. I’d never seen him, but I didn’t want to take the chance he would see my fire and come to investigate before I crossed the river. I lay there in the darkness, feeling more alone than ever, and cried till I choked on my own snot. I tried to pray for help but had a hard time believing God had much use for me just then. I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again, but hours later, exhaustion finally claimed me.
By first light, I
’d already made a small raft and started ferrying my things across the river above the rapids. The water was thick with red clay, and seeing the massive rocks and deep holes under the surface was impossible. If I got swept down among them, it was a safe bet I would end up with broken bones, if not a broken skull, and drowned. This particular stretch of water resembled Colorado more than Oklahoma as the current sliced between jutting granite cliffs easily two hundred feet tall. On the far bank stretched a three-thousand-acre ranch, the Lazy S, where I planned to lose myself. After two trips back across for the last of my things, I began to do just that.
Chapter 3
In some places, the river had no bank at all, and the water just rushed along the foot of the bare cliff rising sheer above. In others, long tree-lined shelves of scrub and sand lay between river and rock. The brush was thick near the water but thinned out close to the cliff, where the sun couldn’t reach.
I made my first camp under a stone overhang, piling my guns and the weird mix of supplies I’d grabbed against the back wall. I dug a deep firepit and surrounded its edges with flat rocks to reflect light back into the hole.
I opened a large plastic tub I’d grabbed from the barn and did a quick inventory. It held my sleeping bag and an air mattress, an eight-piece camp cooking kit, a few spices, some tinfoil, several packets of hot chocolate mix, a machete, two cigarette lighters, some wooden matches, and three rolls of toilet paper. My first rule of camping was to always bring plenty of toilet paper. Wiping with leaves was no one’s idea of fun.
I’d also managed to bring along two old trotlines, my tackle box, and my favorite fishing pole. I baited up the better of the two trotlines with some earthworms, beetles, and grubs I scrounged from under a rotten log, tied a rock to the end for a weight, and tossed it into a likely-looking spot. I tied it off to a green tree limb so it would give a bit without breaking if I hooked a big one.
The yearly spring floods always left piles of driftwood around a bend just upstream in great heaps of dry, seasoned limbs and logs ten to twenty feet deep. In an hour, I’d broken and stacked quite a pile of firewood back at camp, and I was filthy and itchy, so I decided to scout out my new home. I knew that stretch of woods pretty well. My brother and I had noodled for big catfish there the last three years, and we’d spent a fair amount of time exploring, but things had a way of changing drastically near a river from one year to the next.
The area was wild but hardly wilderness. Those same spring floods that supplied so much firewood left a vast array of everything from old ice chests and plastic containers to metal cans. I scavenged some netting, rope, and plastic containers for water or whatever else I might need. I even spotted an old toilet sitting upright under an elm tree, completely intact. I eyeballed that particular find longingly, knowing I was quickly going to get tired of squatting over a hole. Without anything in the way of plumbing, though, it was worse than useless. God seemed to be mocking me.
I’d learned a lot about self-reliance in the woods from Dad, but I also had an addiction to survival shows. They all taught the basics: water, shelter, fire, and food, in that order. The human body was sixty to eighty percent water, depending on how fat you were. A person could go weeks without food but only a few days without water—less in really hot or dry places. A year-round river flowed practically across my doorstep, but those same humans upstream who provided all that useful trash also provided a lot of bacteria and disease from garbage and sewage that often spilled directly into the river. Boiling and filtering could make it drinkable, so I wouldn’t get the squirts and crap myself to death, but it wouldn’t be tasty. I’d read somewhere that more men had died from dysentery in the Civil War than from bullets.
Shelter was also a must. Without enough heat, I would end up with hypothermia or pneumonia, even in a relatively mild Oklahoma winter. Not many predators lived in the Arbuckles, but sleeping would be easier with something between me and whatever wanted to eat my supplies. I piled rocks at each end of my little overhang in the cliff, which would also help reflect the warmth from the fire back onto my bed, but it was a temporary home at best. We hadn’t had any snow in a couple of years, but I expected at least one serious cold snap and probably an ice storm or two before spring. I had to find that cave or build something better soon. I knew living in the woods wouldn't work forever, but at the time, I couldn't think of where else to go.
If I’d told Will my plan, he would’ve just tried to talk me out of it. Worse, he might want to confront the Stanglers head-on. Mom did have family in Kansas, but I hadn't seen them in years, and I couldn't imagine what I'd say to explain my appearance on their doorstep. Besides, they would call Mom eventually. Other than some of Dad's cousins in southwest Texas, I had no other family. I figured if I could just get by for a while, maybe come spring, I could hop on a train at the bridge downriver and head west. Will had spent one summer on a road crew in the Rockies. He swore they were always looking for young guys to hire as summer hands and paid so well a guy could party all winter. Given my options, that seemed to be the best plan.
I had bagged up several cans of vegetables, a loaf of bread, some Chef Boyardee Ravioli and SpaghettiOs, and even six or seven cans of Campbell’s soup before leaving the house, so I was covered for a little while, but I needed to find a steady source of meat and edible plants if I was going to make it very long. I had my two favorite bows and three dozen aluminum arrows with some mismatched target and hunting heads. I also had my Mauser and the shotgun but didn’t plan to shoot them any more than absolutely necessary. I doubted the foreman or hands from the Lazy S spent much time out here, but one phone call from the caretaker across the river would send game wardens or an angry landowner out looking for me.
The main thing I’d learned from all those survival shows was how to scavenge and keep my eyes open for anything and everything that might be of some use. Cordage or rope of any kind was good. Bugs were even an option as a good source of protein. Dad had made me try ants, grasshoppers, and grubs as a kid, but they tasted like crap.
I found some stainless-steel wire wrapped around a board, which would make fine snares for rabbits and other small game. Dad had insisted I learn about snares and traps early. He grew up poor in New Mexico and knew just how desperate the hunt for meat, any meat at all, could be. He had often shown me different ways to make traps and snares of my own and tortured me with practice on occasion. It used to drive me crazy. Now, I blessed every obsessive minute. I still thought I might puke, but I was ravenous too.
I spotted a few small-game trails near camp and set up some wire snares tied to spring poles, which was just a fancy name for a nearby bush or young tree bent over and loosely tied to a forked stick I’d driven into the ground near the trail. If I set it just right, the slightest touch would make it pop loose and pull the animal into the air for a quick death while keeping it away from scavengers in the process.
I was hoping for rabbit or squirrel. Both were tasty. I’d heard of people not liking the taste of “wild” meat, but those people were idiots. That just left more deer, squirrels, and rabbits for me. My brother often took such things to extremes, whipping up batches of armadillo chili or fried rattlesnake when Mom wasn't home to gripe about him stinking up her kitchen. They were decent but didn’t compare to deer cutlets with Mom’s thick flour gravy or even plain, pan-fried rabbit or squirrel.
Having covered all four basics of survival, at least for the time being, I set off upstream to look for a spring or some other source of fresh water. I took my bow in case I stumbled across any dumber-than-usual deer in the brush, but other than a lot of tracks, I found nothing. I spotted a couple of likely trees that could work as high seats and turned back before full dark.
On the way back to camp, I checked my snares and found two tripped but empty. Apparently, my skills were a bit rusty. The fifth snare, the one closest to the camp, held a squealing cottontail, and I decided God must not hate me after all. After clumsily breaking its neck with a stick, I stuck my knife t
hrough the loose skin on its back, wiped off the blade on my jeans, and rammed my fingers into the hole. I grabbed the skin and pulled it right off. I had to cut off its head, feet, and tail, but in a couple of minutes, it was completely gutted, skinned, and ready for supper. I dumped the guts and skin into the river and went back to camp.
At the lean-to, I cut some forked green branches, drove them into the ground on each side of the fire, and impaled the rabbit on another green branch laid across the first two, turning the spit from time to time to cook it evenly. An hour later, I wolfed it down, feeling good about my ability to provide for myself but really wishing I’d thought to get some soap and paper towels at the store. I ended up wiping the grease off my fingers on some dead grass, which left me with only slightly less greasy fingers covered in bits of dead grass. Feeling less cocky, I went down to the river to scrub my hands and face with wet sand and rinse the whole mess off with river water. I had to drip dry since towels were another thing I'd forgotten.
I’d stored plenty of firewood and spent the next few hours thinking about how Mike had made a fire that night at the lake. He was a fan of the teepee method, leaning twigs together in a cone shape over some wadded-up newspaper before lighting it. I preferred the log cabin style, and we'd had a heated argument about which way was best. I wished I’d agreed with him, just that once.
With effort, I shook off the memory and added more wood to the fire. “Early to bed and early to rise” might have worked for the actual pioneers, but I was used to staying up until eleven or twelve, playing Halo on my Xbox or just zoning out in front of the small flat-screen I’d bought with money made hauling hay the summer before. I used to look around my tiny upstairs bedroom in our old farmhouse and think about how bad I had it. Just then, I would’ve given anything to be back there on my lumpy bed, bored out of my mind, safe, and clean.
A Portion for Foxes Page 3