by T. F. Torrey
Macy was fairly flying over the road, which was anything but smooth. The bouncing and jarring of the truck shook me so much that it was impossible to stay comfortably seated. Erica, too, looked mighty uncomfortable. On the other hand, Macy and John seemed to be enjoying the ride in the front seat, and somehow Sharon managed to stay sleeping. It crossed my mind that Macy might have noticed the Ram behind us, too, and was trying to lose it by driving fast.
If that was the case, he was dramatically unsuccessful.
Suddenly the Ram charged forward through our dust trail. I’d been riding with my arm draped over the tailgate, and the charge of the Ram surprised me. I yanked my arm back into the bed of the pickup and braced myself into the corner, anticipating the impact.
Chapter 9
But the impact didn’t happen. The Ram slowed to our speed and hovered five feet off Macy’s back bumper. I looked forward to see if Macy had noticed. He certainly had. In fact, the Ram had the undivided attention of Erica and John as well. Sharon, of course, remained sleeping.
Macy didn’t keep us waiting to find out what his reaction would be. I heard the engine howl and felt the truck lurch forward as Macy shoved the accelerator to the floor. Hurtling over the rough road sent the coolers and fishing gear bouncing and rattling wildly in the bed of the pickup. I gripped the side and the tailgate to keep from bouncing around myself.
Our pursuers were undaunted. Their own engine roared, and the Ram never dropped a foot away from us.
All at once, Macy jumped on the brakes, sending the coolers and fishing gear cascading to the front of the bed. Hanging onto the tailgate to keep from being thrown forward, I saw the front end of the Ram dip low as our pursuers slammed on their own brakes. The Ram hood ornament came right up to my face, so close I could have reached out and polished the chrome, but the truck didn’t contact us.
Macy stomped on the accelerator again, sending the coolers slamming back into my legs and tossing me against the tailgate. This move pulled us away from the truck behind us.
But not much. The truck dropped back maybe twenty yards, then its engine roared and it charged up behind us again.
This time I expected the Ram to slow down a few feet from us, but the big truck never slowed. With a metallic crunch the Ram thumped into the rear bumper of Macy’s truck.
For a second our truck pitched and bucked and slew sideways and I was sure we were going to roll over. But the engine howled as Macy floored the gas and cranked the wheel, somehow keeping us from spinning around.
Even Macy’s expert handling, however, couldn’t keep us on the road. When Macy straightened the truck, we were pointed off the road, with no time to turn. Macy jammed on the brakes and we skidded, bouncing sideways again as the front wheels caught the ditch beside the road. The rear end kicked around and snapped into the ditch, pitching me almost over the side and throwing all the coolers into my legs again. The same motion heaved Erica out of her seat, onto the now-awake and startled Sharon.
As we rolled to a stop in the ditch, the Ram’s engine roared and they raced by us in a cloud of dust and sand. The passenger flipped us the bird as they rode by.
Then they were gone over the top of a rise, the sound of their engine fading in the distance.
***
Macy’s engine had sputtered and quit when we hit the ditch, leaving us in hot dusty silence to assess our damage.
Before I even had a chance to sit up again, Macy and John had leapt out of the truck and run past the front of it, up out of the ditch as if they might pursue the Ram on foot. Erica climbed off Sharon’s legs and asked if she was all right.
“Yeah, I’m all right. I’d be better if my stupid husband knew how to drive,” Sharon said. She’d been asleep through the first part of the Ram attack.
Erica and Sharon and I clambered out onto the road to dust ourselves off. I had a good bruise on my shin from one of the coolers, but I was okay. Erica and Sharon seemed all right. With the sound of the Ram growing more and more distant, Macy and John came back to see how their girls were. From somewhere they had produced handguns.
“Can you believe that asshole?” Macy asked.
“You’re the asshole,” Sharon said.
“I was just driving and that fucker slammed into me!”
“So?” Sharon said, “I was sleeping and you woke me up.”
“Hey, man,” John said. “We should see if they did any damage to your truck.”
Macy’s face lit up expectantly and we all went to the back of the truck to look at the bumper. It was fine, except for a small dent that may not have been new anyway and some scratches by the bumper sticker. “It’s fine,” Macy said proudly.
John started laughing. “Dude,” he said. “When did you get that?” He pointed at the bright vinyl bumper sticker proudly displayed on the black bumper. The bumper sticker read: “Operation Game Thief. I Report Poachers. l-800-VANDALS”.
“Just this week,” Macy said, a touch of hurt in his voice.
“Why did you get that?” John asked, still laughing.
“Well, I figured it was kind of like a disguise, you know. We take a few deer out of here, and you know it ain’t hunting season, so I figured that if a game warden saw this sticker he might not stop us.”
“Sure, man,” John laughed. “He’ll just figure he doesn’t have to nail us because we’re going to turn ourselves in as soon as we get to a phone.”
Macy was insulted. He stalked around the truck to look at his wheels in the ditch.
I was catching my breath, still somewhat shocked. “Does this happen a lot?” I asked John.
He shook his head. “Nope. First time.”
“And Friday was the first time you got attacked by dogs and joggers?”
“Actually, Jack, you got attacked. I was fine,” John said.
“Isn’t something strange about that?” I asked.
“Yeah, Jack, you’re a trouble magnet,” he said sarcastically.
“Wait a minute,” Sharon interrupted. “Where were you guys Friday night?”
“We went skating,” John said.
“Roller skating?” she asked.
“No,” John said. “Shoot guns and run from the police. That kind of skating.”
“And you got attacked?” she asked. She took the rest of it in stride.
“No,” Erica corrected. “Jack got attacked.” She sounded almost happy about it.
“Macy said you were planning this fishing trip,” Sharon said.
“Well, we did that, too. Kind of,” John said.
“How come Erica knew and I didn’t?” demanded Sharon.
“I don’t know,” John said. Then, searching, he added, “He probably just didn’t want you to worry, because you’re pregnant.”
“No,” Sharon said. “He’s just an asshole.”
On the other side of the truck, Macy pretended he didn’t hear us, or maybe he really didn’t. He kicked the right side tires, but didn’t seem to find any problems. He opened the passenger door and rummaged through the gear on the front seat.
“I don’t think I’m a trouble magnet,” I said.
John shrugged.
Erica shot me a hurt glance, but didn’t say anything.
“So why did those guys hit us, John?” I asked.
“They were probably poachers,” he said, “and they didn’t like the bumper sticker.”
“You really think they were poachers?” I asked.
“Probably,” John said. “Did you notice the dual rifle rack in their back window?”
I shook my head.
“And the truck was pretty scratched up,” John continued. “They’ve been taking that deep into the desert.”
“Is that where the deer hide?”
“No. They’re all over. There’s just not as many people that far out. Or game wardens.”
“So the bumper sticker made them mad enough to try to kill us?”
“Well,” John said, “if they get caught, the game warden can confiscate t
heir truck, their guns, their house if they used it to keep the deer in, everything they used in connection with poaching.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s what they do to drug dealers. That’s some serious environmental protection.”
“Yeah, man,” John said. “They want to keep the deer plentiful out here.”
“They might come back to make sure we don’t nark,” Macy said, rejoining us. He had attached a holster onto his belt and stowed his handgun in it. He tossed another holster to John.
“I doubt it,” John said, threading the holster onto his belt.
Macy wasn’t convinced. “I’m going to go up here and see if I can see where they went.” He trotted up a rocky mound to the right of the truck and looked around.
“If they can lose everything,” I asked, “why do they do it?”
“Money,” John said simply.
“For the hides?”
“No, for the meat.”
“What?”
“Venison is really popular in California,” Erica explained. “The ritzy people love it because it has almost no cholesterol or fat.”
“And, it tastes good,” John continued. “If you know the right people you can sell an average size deer for about seventy-five dollars.”
“That’s not very much, really,” I mused.
“But you can get five or six in a weekend if you’re good at it.”
“That's more like it.”
“And if you go out more than just weekends,” John said, “you can make a lot of money.”
“Wow,” I said. “You could really sell that many?”
“As many as you can shoot,” John said. “Until you get caught.”
“Or somebody turns you in,” Erica said.
I was about to ask how John knew so much about it when Macy spoke up. “Hey, you guys,” he called enthusiastically. “Check this out.”
The bunch of us walked up the rocky mound to where Macy stood, about twenty feet from the truck. Macy wasn’t pointing at anything, just standing proudly with his hands on his hips, chest thrust forward, staring at something off in the distance. Following his gaze with my eyes, I saw three birds circling majestically in the breeze, high up in the brilliant blue sky toward the hills.
“Ain’t that awesome?” Macy asked.
“It sure is,” Erica said, genuinely impressed.
“Beautiful,” John said simply.
“We see those all the time,” Sharon said.
“Wow,” I said. “Are those buzzards or falcons or vultures or something?”
Everybody looked at me as if I was the ignorant, one-eyed moron I felt like. “Close,” John said. “Those are bald eagles.”
Of course. “I’ve never seen them in the wild before,” I said. Or anywhere else, I thought.
“I’m going to get something to drink,” Sharon stated, flatly unimpressed. She headed back down to the truck.
Contrary to Sharon’s attitude, the view was impressive. The mound on which we stood wasn’t very high, but it afforded us an excellent view of our surroundings.
As Sharon fumbled through the coolers, we gazed. The road ran pretty straight north in this area, partway up the western slope of a valley formed by two rows of foothills. It was over this valley that the eagles flew, riding some invisible updraft, circling higher and higher.
The vegetation grew dense as the land fell away to the east, then thinned as it rose again on the other side. Ahead of us, the road climbed over the western hills as they curved across our path. To the east, we could see the peaks of distant mountains, purple and hazy. Far behind us were the foothills at the edge of Tonto.
I could have appreciated the scenery for quite a while, and if there had been time it would have been challenging to draw. It was gentle, tranquil, quiet, and stunningly beautiful.
But Sharon had stopped rummaging through the coolers. I heard her footsteps on the rocks, moving to rejoin us, to cast this sunny scene in just a little bit of shadow.
Saguaro cacti combed every feature in sight. For the first time, I noticed something strange about them. On the tops of most of the branches, fist-sized, bright red and brown clumps had grown. “What are those?” I asked, pointing at a cactus standing just down the mound to the east of us.
“Cactus candy,” John said.
“What?”
“It’s the seed pods of the—”
Suddenly Sharon let out the most blood-curdling scream I had ever heard.
***
When Sharon screamed, my hair stood on end and chills ran down my spine. It sounded like the dying scream of a virgin pitched into a volcano.
We leapt and whirled toward her.
She stood about fifteen feet from us. She’d been coming back from the truck, and now she stood frozen in her tracks, body rigid, knuckles white around the cola can in her left hand, eyes firmly fixed on the ground in front of her. I looked where she was staring and felt an instant surge of adrenaline and fear. Coiled on the sand just two feet in front of her was a diamondback rattlesnake, fiercely shaking his rattle, head raised, poised for the strike.
Macy yanked out his revolver and John grabbed his arm.
“No, man!” John said tersely. “She’s too close. The ricochet could hit Sharon or the truck—or us.”
“We have to do something!” Macy said, not taking his eyes off the snake.
“I will,” John said.
And he did. He moved slowly, carefully across the rocks toward the snake, crouching low, his hands out in front of his body. At first I thought he was going to throw a rock or a stick or something at the snake. But then he was much too close for that, and I thought he must be out of his mind. He was going to try to grab the poisonous reptile with his bare hands.
All I could think was that if anybody got bitten it was a long way back to the city, to a hospital. It wouldn’t take that long for the snake’s poison to do its work.
“John, wait! That’s—” I began, but Macy stopped me, putting his hand on my chest as if to hold me back.
“He knows what he’s doing,” Macy said.
I looked at Erica, who stood on the other side of Macy. She glanced quickly at me, opened her mouth as if to say something, then realized that it was to no avail. All eyes locked on John as he moved to within three feet of the snake.
Suddenly the snake whipped around, facing John, reacting to his approach. John didn’t flinch. I was momentarily afraid that Sharon would turn and run and maybe cause the snake to strike John, but she stood frozen, her expression mixed with fear and fascination.
John took one more painfully slow and careful step toward the snake, crouching low to the ground and spreading his hands wide, palms forward in front of him. As the reptile moved his head slowly, menacingly side-to-side, John inched his right hand closer. John closed his right hand, angling his fingertips together. The animal seemed to focus on this. John mimicked the snake’s side-to-side movement with his right hand, at the same time drawing his left arm back by his chest as if cocking it, still holding his hand open, palm up. John raised his right hand a little. The snake raised his head to follow.
John snapped his left arm out and across in a lightning move. He caught the distracted snake right below its head and stood up quickly.
The snake was not alone in surprise. John turned around toward us and grabbed the snake’s whipping tail with his other hand as he walked back to us. Erica and I shied away, but Macy stepped forward to examine the reptile.
“That sucker’s gotta be six feet long!” Macy said excitedly.
“Yep,” John said, smiling. “Check out that rattle. There’s what? Ten or eleven rattles there? Makes this guy over a decade old.”
They continued marveling over the snake. Erica and I walked to Sharon, who still hadn’t moved or taken her eyes off the snake. Her left hand gripped the soda can so hard that she’d crushed it, squeezing the drink out the top and over her fingers onto the ground.
“Are you all right?” Erica asked.
Sharon nodded slowly, as if coming out of a trance, beginning to breathe again. “I thought for sure he was going to bite me,” she said.
“So did I,” confided Erica.
I turned back to John and Macy, just as John heaved the animal down the mound away from us. They watched as the snake landed, then they walked back to us and the truck.
“Aren’t you going to shoot it?” I asked.
“Why?” John asked.
“He almost got Sharon.”
“Ah, he didn’t mean any harm. She just startled him, that’s all.”
“What if someone else startles him?” I asked.
He shrugged. “They’ll probably get bit.”
“So why don’t you shoot him?”
“Jack, there are thousands of snakes out here. I can’t go around shooting all of them.”
“You could shoot a few. Better than none.”
“People have to understand that it’s rough out here. They have to watch out for snakes. They have to be careful, or they’re going to get bitten. And snakes aren’t the only things out here that’ll kill you. There are scorpions and flash floods, or just the sun.” He sighed. “This isn’t the park, Jack. People have to respect things out here, or they’re going to get hurt.”
I let it ride. He did have a point.
Macy tried to console his wife. “Are you okay, Sharon?” he asked, putting his arm around her.
She pushed his arm away. “Yeah, no thanks to you.”
“Sharon,” he said, “it was your idea. You wanted to come out here.”
“Well, it was your idea to stop here!”
He was flabbergasted. “Those guys ran me off the road!”
“Well, they wouldn’t have if you hadn’t picked a fight with them!”
“I didn’t—” he said, and stopped. He could see, as all of us could, that argument was futile. “The least you could do is thank John,” he said.
“Thanks, John,” Sharon said flatly.
I turned back to John myself. “Where did you learn to do that?” I asked.
“Do what?” he asked back.
“To grab rattlesnakes like that, with your bare hands.”