A Portion for Foxes

by Daniel Mitchell

  "Come on. It's feeding time."

  "What are we feeding?" I asked as he walked into the shop.

  "Easier to show you than explain."

  I followed him through the maze of tools and tables to a door on the far side with a massive combination lock hanging from the hasp. I'd noticed the door before, of course, but just assumed it was a storeroom. I started to follow him into the dimly lit room and stopped midstep when he flicked on the overheads.

  "Close the door behind you," Joseph said. "Always got a few escape artists."

  The floor was bare concrete except for a large rug under a recliner, side table, and lamp placed exactly in the center of the room. The walls were covered with heavy shelves from floor to ceiling, and the shelves were stacked with aquariums. Some had their own lights. Some were dark or lit only with black lights. Each had its own little ecosystem inside. I remembered those dioramas we made in elementary school for the class frog or turtle. I stared around in awe.

  After walking around the room, peering under and over shelves with a Maglite he took from a shelf, Joseph said, "Coast is clear, kid. Nobody dangerous on the loose today. Have a look. Just don't open anything."

  I moved slowly down one wall to the next and the next. A few cases were empty. The rest were occupied by a wide variety of creatures. On the near wall were giant walking sticks and crickets, scorpions and spiders, but most of the aquariums and terrariums were devoted to reptiles. I saw several varieties of turtles, from the long-nosed soft shells to painter turtles and one young loggerhead snapper. The next wall was devoted to horny toads and skinks, mountain boomers and fence lizards, salamanders and a few frogs. The wall directly in front of the recliner held nothing but snakes: garter snakes, copperheads, moccasins, and a few rattlers. I didn't get too close to those. Two vent fans were running flat out, and I noticed a portable air conditioner, but the smell was just short of nauseating. Reptiles in general were smelly, but big snakes, especially the poisonous ones, gave off a rotten musk that was hard to ignore.

  In a sort of closet nearby were two large cages of rats and mice, which seemed out of place until Joseph walked over and tossed a few of each into a plastic cat carrier. I watched with a mix of horror and fascination as he consulted a chart on the wall then dropped the rodents, one each, into various terrariums through little trapdoors on their wire lids. At first, nothing happened, and I moved closer as one particularly evil-eyed moccasin glided toward the mouse frantically jumping toward the wire ceiling above. The snake coiled up halfway across the enclosure and tasted the air repeatedly with his tongue. Just as the mouse finally jumped high enough to grasp the wire top, the snake struck in a blur of black scales but dropped the mouse just as quickly and sat motionless.

  "The venomous ones do that," Joseph said from across the room, where he was dropping crickets and lettuce into the turtle and lizard cases. "Don't have any teeth except for their fangs, and those break easy. Once the mouse dies and they feel safe, they'll swallow him headfirst, hair and all."

  On TV, it was cool. In person, hearing the mouse squeal and thrash as the venom burned through him—not so much.

  I straightened up to see Joseph had finished his chores and was watching me with a peaceful look in his eyes. He was almost smiling as he stood behind the recliner, the fingers of one hand tracing the seam across the top.

  "I catch most of them around here. Don't keep them long ’less they're injured. Just like to watch them sometimes."

  "Awesome," I said without much conviction and started for the door. I suddenly had to find a bush to water.

  Joseph flicked out the light and relocked the door behind me.

  I zipped up after peeing off the cliff behind the barn and turned toward the shade of the porch. Joseph was walking across the yard ahead of me.

  Over his shoulder, he called, “You want to go to town?” When I didn’t answer, he looked back and saw me frozen there.

  “Relax, kid. No one in Dougherty is likely to recognize you. We’re just making a beer run and picking up some of Jan’s brown sugar brisket. You up to barbecue for supper?”

  I swallowed hard and nodded. Despite my queasiness at the mouse's death, my mouth had started to water at the word brisket.

  He laughed and said, “That look on your face says I’d better buy some ribs too. Meet me at the Jeep around front. I’ll just be a sec.”

  #########

  “Haven’t seen you in a while, dirt bag,” the cashier said as Joseph and I walked into a store on the edge of town. She was a fireplug, somewhere in her sixties, with stringy brown hair, faded jeans, hiking boots, and a Tim McGraw T-shirt.

  Jan’s little store sat on the edge of Dougherty, where aging clapboard houses and trailers were scattered around two churches, a lone café, and one four-way stop. It was a town in the same way three ducks were a flock.

  “I missed you too, sexy.” Joseph smiled. “Sam, this doe-eyed goddess is Jan, owner and proprietor of my favorite pit stop.”

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” I said.

  Jan nodded, gave me a disapproving once-over, and turned back to Joseph. “Did you run out of beer again or just couldn’t resist the chance to insult a lady today?”

  “You know my life revolves around those broad hips and sweet lips,” he said. “You got some brisket and ribs for me?”

  “Brisket?” she said. “I thought you lived on fermented barley and bullshit.”

  “Now, Miss Jan, is that any way for a lady to talk? Besides, you got virgin ears in the place.”

  Jan snorted. “If he’s with you, I doubt anything about him is virginal. He got a name?” she asked.

  “Jeremy. My cousin’s boy. He’s helping me around the place and hanging out for the summer. His old man’s working on a rig up north for a while.”

  She eyed me as if I were a prize calf then grunted and began cutting up our supper. Jeremy? At least he hadn't told her my real name.

  I caught half of their conversation out of the side of my ear as I wandered the aisles of the little store, staring at all the things I’d been missing: pork and beans and powdered donuts, Fiddle Faddle and canned corn. Every cheap can of off-brand anything looked amazing. I would have given a testicle for half that stuff a month before.

  Joseph and Jan traded small talk and insults for another ten minutes or so while I stood looking at an old pay phone in the back. It didn’t even have buttons. It was one of those rotary things you were supposed to pull around with your finger. Even if I’d had thirty-five cents, I wasn’t sure it still worked. Despite the danger, I was nearly trembling with an urge to hear my mother’s voice or my brother’s—anyone from home.

  When I finally turned back toward the front, my eyes were wet. Jan was looking at me a little too hard, so I headed for the Jeep. Joseph seemed to like her, but for all I knew, she knew the Stanglers somehow. My skin got all tight just thinking about it.

  "You sure you can trust her?" I asked when Joseph got in.

  "With my life. Just didn't think she needed to hear your real name yet."

  "I hope you're right. She sure was looking at me like she knew something." If the Stanglers were still looking, nowhere was really safe. Joseph just grunted and stared at the road the rest of the way home.

  After supper, I followed him to the porch, and we settled into his creaky rocking chairs. He took a bottle of Coors from the ice chest between us and handed me one.

  “Thinking about calling somebody?” he asked.

  I nodded but didn’t say anything. I just swallowed a mouthful of beer and stared at the sun dropping over the cliffs. “I don’t have a landline anymore,” he said, “and I don’t think my cell phone number showing up on the caller ID at your folks’ is a great idea. You decide you want to call them, though, we’ll drive up to Davis and find a pay phone. No sense in letting them know where you are unless you’re ready to get home.”

  “I can’t go home.”

  “Kid,” he said, “this ain’t no movie. You can alw
ays go home. Might not appreciate what you find, but it’s there just the same. These Stanglers might still be looking for you. Might not. If what you’ve told me is gospel, they could all be dead or playing Drop the Soap in prison by now. Even if they ain’t, doubt you’re still high on their list these days.”

  “If I blew up your house and killed a cop in your front yard, would I still be on your list?”

  “Might have a point there.”

  “Can’t I just stay here? I can work around the place: help you with your furniture, clean up, whatever you say.”

  “You’re welcome till you get your strength back, but then we need to figure something out. You were right about one thing. Jan didn’t buy that cousin story for a second. She won’t ask questions, but she ain’t stupid. Sooner or later, we need to get you straightened out.”

  Out over the canyon, a crow appeared, floating on the thermals. He soared and swooped, spun and turned with never a flap of his wings. He just rode where the air pushed him and didn't seem to have any destination in mind. Maybe he just didn't have anywhere else to go.

  “There isn’t any way to straighten this out while those assholes are still around,” I said.

  He drained the last of his beer, set the empty on the porch, and got us each another bottle from the ice.

  “Maybe we can do something about that,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  Joseph didn’t respond or even acknowledge I’d spoken. He just drank his beer and stared across the yard with eyes gone strangely still.

  The next morning, I woke up early and found him already at work in the shop. He was chiseling a shallow rectangular trench around the edges of the table he’d started the day before. I watched until he seemed satisfied, then he showed me what the pieces of mahogany and cherry I’d cut were for. We fit them into the trench, alternating colors, dark and light, sanding and shaving each piece to perfection before gluing them into place.

  When we finished and he pointed at the broom, I asked, “Why didn’t you use the router to make that trench instead of the chisel? Wouldn’t it be a lot faster?”

  “Faster. Not better.”

  We spent the next hour smoothing the table by hand until I couldn’t feel even the slightest edge between inlay and oak.

  After lunch, he set me to sanding the table legs, said he had some errands to run, and headed off in the pickup. I worked at that until I was too tired to ignore my rising blisters and went back to the house for a nap.

  My days fell into a rhythm of painstaking work in the shop, gut-busting meals, and evenings on the riverbank or rocking on the porch with an ice chest full of cold beer. For a seventeen-year-old who’d spent the past winter trying not to starve in a cave, life didn’t get much better—except for the nagging certainty the Stanglers were going to find me eventually, which I refused to voice out loud. I wasn't really superstitious but didn’t see any point in jinxing myself, just in case.

  My strength was coming back, but I still got hot for no reason and wore down easily. I took short walks through the woods along the cliff, worked hard at whatever Joseph set me to do in the shop, and kept everything spotless since that seemed to please him. We mostly talked about wood grains, fishing, hunting, and engines. He taught me how to carve a bit, but my hands were clumsy where his were graceful. My fingers fumbled where his were sure. He praised my work and said I was improving. We both knew better. I could do the grunt work just fine, but the creative, careful stuff left me in the weeds.

  To cheer me up about my failure, he let me complete the inlay design on a patch of unfinished floor in the far corner of the living room. I stuck with his basic design but made the pieces smaller and the design more elaborate. Instead of one burled oak circle inside a square of polished yellow pine, I added another circle with the cherry and mahogany scraps left over from the table. I sanded it for two days before deciding it was ready for sealing. All of it was set in white oak and stained natural to show off the grains. Afterward, we stood admiring it in the morning light flooding through the picture window.

  “Maybe you ain’t Michelangelo with the chisels, but you do damn fine flat work,” he said and put an arm around my shoulder.

  What I intended to be a one-armed hug turned into the real deal—just for a second. Then I stepped back. I couldn’t really say why it was so important to me to please him, but it was. Maybe it was because he saved my life. Maybe it was because he was the one person who knew everything I’d done, that I was a murderer, and he didn’t care.

  He said nothing more about me leaving and let me do most of the inlays from then on. He kept an eye on my work and helped me with the details but left most of it to me. We even started making some small pieces—boxes, end tables, and the like—just for fun.

  One day, he took them all to town with him and handed me four hundred bucks when he came back. He said the guy down at Furr’s couldn’t stop complimenting the inlay work and ordered ten jewelry boxes and five sets of matching coffee and end tables. Joseph left the designs up to me. As soon as I knew what I needed, he looked at my plans, ordered the wood, and said we might have to think about raising our prices. If Mr. Big Shot Furr didn’t like it, we’d take our work elsewhere. Ardmore had a population of at least eighty thousand and sat on the interstate halfway between Oklahoma City and Dallas. Plenty of other stores would buy custom work. Maybe he was right. I kept thinking about how he’d called it our work, not his.

  Every few days, Joseph left on “errands.” Some days, he took some of the tables and boxes with him and brought me more cash, which I stashed in my room, since I had no real use for it. Sometimes, he brought home a couple of cases of beer and more groceries. The other trips he said nothing about, and I didn’t ask. On those days, he didn’t speak much and had a distant but intent look, as if he was already gone. When he left like that, he came home empty-handed and rarely spoke until his third or fourth beer. Those days reminded me that I didn’t really know him or why he’d taken me in. He treated me like a son, but with some fathers, that didn’t mean much, so I kept my mouth shut and just watched TV, but when he moved, I stayed out of his way.

  Chapter 8

  As my strength returned and my need for naps let up, I took to hiking down to the tracks below Joseph’s house when he left me alone. I went a little farther each day until I felt pretty strong, having gone all the way down across the trestle bridge and back. One lonely Thursday, I set out for Moron’s Rest with a sandwich and some bottled water in my backpack. It was a mild summer day for Oklahoma, only eighty degrees or so, but I still took my time, enjoying the puffy clouds and sunshine. A light breeze blew down the canyon, ruffling my shoulder-length hair. I reminded myself to ask Joseph if he had any clippers later.

  Patches of wildflowers grew along the track. Daisies and paintbrushes were scattered in with bluebells and some tiny white flowers I’d never heard a name for. Even the ragweed and dandelions had on their Sunday best. Two buzzards circled overhead. I lifted an imaginary rifle and mimed the jolt of firing a shell into each. Sorry, boys. You done missed your chance.

  When I reached the old trestle, I put my hand on it and listened carefully. It would flat out suck to get halfway across then see a train hurtling around the corner. I couldn’t hear or feel anything coming down the track, so I hurried across, only slowing on the far side to walk down a set of metal steps to the old railroad shack underneath and rest a bit in the shade. The water slid away below me, curling and gurgling around the pilings. I wondered if my brother had been there noodling recently. The rains had come just right, and the fish should have been thick in the holes. I’d stayed close to Joseph’s cabin most of the past month and hadn’t seen hide nor hair of anyone on the river the few times we’d gone down with our poles. I hoped that Will was all right and that my parents were missing me as much as I missed them. All those months away were making me cherish the home I used to be ashamed of. I wondered how much worry and trouble my disappearing act had cost my mother and what story
Dad had come up with for my absence. Before my worries could turn darker and I started asking the really scary questions, I decided to get moving. Ever since that first terrible night at the lake, I’d had a tough time controlling my emotions the way a man was supposed to. A stray thought about any of it could inspire terror or tears. I didn’t want Joseph seeing either—not again.

  I climbed back up the stairs and stepped onto the crossties and gravel. That area by the bridge had no bank because the cliff was way too steep, so I followed the tracks away from the river past the first line of hills. I slipped through a six-strand barbed wire fence onto the Lazy S and walked through the fields and stands of brush and hardwoods. The farther I walked, the more the woods became a maze of game trails and briars. I began to wonder if I’d taken a wrong turn. I’d been sure I could find my way blindfolded, but weeks of summer growth were hiding most of my landmarks.

  After half an hour or so, I took another break on a fallen log. I hadn’t spent much time in the woods since Joseph took me from the cave and was surprised how much I missed it. Rotten leaves and the sharp smell of cedar trees mixed with new leaves and sunshine. Birds sang all around while I munched my bologna-and-cheese sandwich, and an armadillo roamed past, rooting among the leaves. Their eyesight wasn’t very good at the best of times, and if I sat still, they sometimes wandered right up to my feet. I stood up when he was about five feet away, and he rushed off in a peculiar bounding sprint.

  I decided to follow him since he seemed to be going in the right general direction. Within twenty yards, he led me right to one of my old snares. I carefully removed the wire to keep any unlucky animals from getting tangled in it, and just like that, I knew exactly where I was and followed the trail to the clearing behind the grave ridge, gathering up two more snares along the way. One held the rotting carcass of a skunk, and I took the time to dig a shallow grave and apologize for my carelessness. I had no problem with killing to eat, but a pointless death wasn’t right, even for a skunk.