by Otto Penzler
In the quiet, Kirxy heard Goodloe’s truck. He glanced at Kent, who’d probably been hearing it for a while. Outside, Goodloe slammed his door. He hurried up the steps and tapped on the window. Kirxy exaggerated his limp and took his time letting him in.
“Evening,” Goodloe said, shaking the water from his hands. He took off his hat and hung it on the nail by the door, then hung up his yellow slicker.
“Evening, Sugarbaby,” Kirxy said.
“It’s a wet one out there tonight,” Goodloe said.
“Yep.” Kirxy went behind the counter and refilled his glass. “You just caught the tail end of happy hour. That is, if you’re off the wagon again. Can I sell you a tonic? Warm you up?”
“You know we’re a dry county, Kirxy.”
“Would that be a no?”
“It’s a watch your ass.” Goodloe looked at the brothers. “Just wanted to ask these boys some questions.”
“Have at it, Sugarbaby.”
Goodloe walked to the Lance rack and detached a package of Nip-Cheese crackers. He opened it, offered the pack to each of the boys. Only Wayne took one. Smiling, Goodloe bit a cracker in half and turned a chair around and sat with his elbows across its back. He looked over toward Kent, half-hidden by shadow. He chewed slowly. “Come on out here so I can see you, boy. I ain’t gonna bite nothing but these stale-ass cheese crackers.”
Kent moved a step closer.
Goodloe took out a notepad and addressed Kent. “Where was y’all between the hours of four and eight A.M. two days ago?”
Kent looked at Scott. “Asleep.”
“Asleep,” Scott said.
Goodloe snorted. “Now come on, boys. The whole dern county knows y’all ain’t slept a night in your life. Y’all was out on the river, wasn’t you? Making a few telephone calls?”
“You saying he’s a liar?” Kirxy asked.
“I’m posing the questions here.” Goodloe chewed another cracker. “Hell, everybody knows the other game wardens has been letting y’all get away with all kinds of shit. I reckon this new fellow had something to prove.”
“Sounds like he oughta used a life jacket,” Kirxy said, wiping the counter.
“It appears”—Goodloe studied Kent—“that he might’ve been strangled. You got a alibi, boy?”
Kent looked down.
Goodloe sighed. “I mean—Christ—is there anybody can back up what you’re saying?”
The windows flickered.
“Yeah,” Kirxy said. “I can.”
Goodloe turned and faced the storekeeper. “You.”
“That’s right. They were here with me. Here in the store.”
Goodloe looked amused. “They was, was they. OK, Mr. Kirxy. How come you didn’t mention that to me this morning? Saved us all a little time?”
Kirxy sought Kent’s eyes but saw nothing there, no understanding, no appreciation. No fear. He went back to wiping the counter. “Well, I guess because they was passed out drunk, and I didn’t want to say anything, being as I was, you know, giving alcohol to young’uns.”
“But now that it’s come down to murder, you figured you’d better just own up.”
“Something like that.”
Goodloe stared at Kirxy for a long time, neither would look away. Then the sheriff turned to the boys. “Y’all ever heard of Frank David?”
Wayne nodded.
“Well,” Goodloe said. “Looks like he’s aiming to be this district’s game warden. I figure he pulled some strings, what he did.”
Kirxy came from behind the counter. “That all your questions? It’s past closing and these young’uns need to go home and get some sleep.” He went to the door and opened it, stood waiting.
“All righty then,” the sheriff said, standing. “I expect I oughta be getting back to the office anyhow.” He winked at Kirxy. “See you or these boys don’t leave the county for a few days. This ain’t over yet.” He put the crackers in his coat. “I expect y’all might be hearing from Frank David, too,” he said, watching the boys’ faces. But there was nothing to see.
Alone later, Kirxy put out the light and bolted the door. He went to adjust the stove and found himself staring out the window, looking into the dark where he knew the river was rising and swirling, tires and plastic garbage can lids and deadwood from upriver floating past. He struck a match and lit a cigarette, the glow of his ash reflected in the window, and he saw himself years ago, telling the boys those stories.
How Frank David would sit so still in the woods waiting for poachers that dragonflies would perch on his nose, gnats would walk over his eyeballs. Nobody knew where he came from, but Kirxy had heard that he’d been orphaned as a baby in a fire and found half-starved in the swamp by a Cajun woman. She’d raised him on the slick red clay banks of the Tombigbee River, among lean black poachers and white-trash moonshiners. He didn’t even know how old he was, people said. And they said he was the best poacher ever, the craftiest, the meanest. That he cut a drunk logger’s throat in a juke joint knife-fight one night. That he fled south and, underage, joined the Marines in Mobile and wound up in Korea, the infantry, where because of his shooting ability and his stealth they made him a sniper. Before he left that country, he’d registered over a hundred kills, communists half a world away who never saw him coming.
Back home in Alabama, he disappeared for a few years, then showed up at the state game warden’s office, demanding a job. Some people heard that in the intervening time he’d gotten religion.
“What makes you think I ought to hire you?” the head warden asked.
“Because I spent ten years of my life poaching right under your goddamn nose,” Frank David said.
The Gates boys’ pickup was the same old Ford their father had shot himself in several years earlier. The bullet hole in the roof had rusted out but was now covered with a strip of duct tape from Kirxy’s store. Spots of the truck’s floor were rusted away, too, so things in the road often flew up into their laps: rocks, cans, a king snake they were trying to run over. The truck was older than any of them, only one thin prong left of the steering wheel and the holes of missing knobs in the dash. It was a three-speed, a column shifter, the gear-stick covered with a buck’s dried ball sack. The windows and windshield, busted or shot out years before, hadn’t been replaced because most of their driving took them along back roads after dark or in fields, and the things they came upon were easier shots without glass.
Though he’d never had a license, Kent drove, he’d been doing this since he was eight. Scott rode shotgun. Tonight both were drinking, and in the back Wayne stood holding his rifle and trying to keep his balance. Below the soles of his boots the floor was soft, a tarry black from the blood of all the animals they’d killed. You could see spike antlers, forelegs, and hooves of deer. Teeth, feathers, and fur. The brittle beaks and beards of turkeys and the delicate, hinged leg bone of something molded in the sludge like a fossil.
Just beyond a NO TRESPASSING sign, Kent swerved off the road and they bounced and slid through a field in the rain, shooting at rabbits. Then they split up, the younger boys checking traps—one on each side of the river—and Kent in the boat rebaiting their trotlines the way his father had shown him.
They met at the truck just before midnight, untied the dogs, and tromped down a steep logging path, Wayne on one end of four leashes and the lunging hounds on the other. When they got to the bottomland, he unclipped the leashes and loosed the dogs and the brothers followed the baying ahead in the dark, aiming their flashlights into the black mesh of trees where the eyes of coons and possums gleamed like rubies. The hounds bayed and frothed, clawed the trunks of trees and leaped into the air and landed and leaped again, their sides pumping, ribs showing, hounds that, given the chance, would never stop eating.
When the Gateses came to the river two hours later, the dogs were lapping water and panting. Wayne bent and rubbed their ears and let them lick his cheeks. His brothers rested and drank, belching at the sky. After a time, they leashed the ho
unds and staggered downstream to the live oak where their boat was tied. They loaded the dogs and shoved off into the fog and trolled over the still water.
In the middle, Scott lowered the twin chains beside the boat and began dialing the old telephone. Wayne netted the stunned catfish—you couldn’t touch them with your hand or they’d come to—and threw them into the cooler, where in a few seconds the waking fish would begin to thrash. In the rear, Kent fingered his rifle and watched the bank in case a coyote wandered down, hunting bullfrogs.
They climbed up out of the woods into a dirt road in the misty dawn, plying through the muddy yards and pissing by someone’s front porch in plain sight of the black face inside. A few houses down, Morrisette didn’t come to his door, and when Kent tried the handle it was locked. He looked at Scott, then put his elbow through the glass and reached in and unlocked it.
While his brothers searched for the liquor, Wayne ate the biscuits he found wrapped in tin foil on the stove. He found a box of Corn Flakes in a cabinet and ate most of them, too. He ate a plate of cold fried chicken liver. Scott was in a bedroom looking under the bed. In the closet. He was going through drawers, his dirty fingers among the white cloth. In the back of the house Kent found a door, locked from the inside. He jimmied it open with his knife, and when he came into the kitchen, he had a gallon jar of whiskey under his arm and Euphrates’ stepdaughter by the wrist.
Wayne stopped chewing, crumbs falling from his mouth. He approached the girl and put his hand out to touch her, but Kent pushed him hard, into the wall. Wayne stayed there, a clock ticking beside his head, a string of spit linking his two opened lips, watching as his brother ran his rough hands up and down the girl’s trembling body, over the nipples that showed through the thin cloth. Her eyes were closed, lips moving in prayer. Looking down, Kent saw the puddle spreading around her bare feet.
“Shit,” he said, a hand cupping her breast. “Pissed herself.”
He let her go and she shrank back against the wall, behind the door. She was still there, along with a bag of catfish on the table, when her stepfather came back half an hour later, ten gallons of whiskey under the tarp in his truck.
On that same Saturday Kirxy drove to the chicken fights, held in Heflin Bradford’s bulging barn, deep in woods cloudy with mosquitoes. He passed the hand-painted sign that’d been there forever, as long as he could remember, nailed to a tree. It said JESUS IS NOT COMING.
Kirxy climbed out of his truck and buttoned his collar, his ears full of cotton. Heflin’s wife worked beneath a rented awning, grilling chicken and sausages, selling Cokes and beer. Gospel music played from a portable tape player by her head. Heflin’s grandson Nolan took the price of admission at the barn door and stamped the backs of white hands and the cracked pink palms of black ones. Men in overalls and baseball caps that said CAT DIESEL POWER or STP stood at the tailgates of their pickups, smoking cigarettes, stooping to peer into the dark cages where roosters paced. The air was filled with windy rain spits and the crowing of roosters, the ground littered with limp, dead birds.
A group of men discussed Frank David, and Kirxy paused to listen.
“He’s the one caught that bunch over in Warshington County,” one man said. “Them alligator poachers.”
“Sugarbaby said two of ’em wound up in the intensive care,” another claimed. “Said they pulled a gun and old Frank David went crazy with an ax handle.”
Kirxy moved on and paid the five-dollar admission. In the barn, there were bleachers along the walls and a big circular wooden fence in the center, a dome of chicken wire over the top. Kirxy found a seat at the bottom next to the back door, near a group of mean old farts he’d known for forty years. People around them called out bets and bets were accepted. Cans of beer lifted. Kirxy produced a thermos of coffee and a dented tin cup. He poured the coffee, then added whiskey from a bottle that went back into his coat pocket. The tin cup warmed his fingers as he squinted through his bifocals to see which bird to bet on.
In separate corners of the barn, two bird handlers doused their roosters’ heads and asses with rubbing alcohol to make them fight harder. They tightened the long steel curved spurs. When the referee in the center of the ring indicated it was time, the handlers entered the pen, each cradling his bird in his arms. They flashed the roosters at one another until their feathers had ruffled with bloodlust and rage, the roosters pedaling the air, stretching their necks toward each other. The handlers kept them a breath apart for a second, then withdrew them to their corners, whispering in their ears. When the referee tapped the ground three times with his stick, the birds were unleashed on each other. They charged and rose in the center of the ring, gouging with spur and beak, the handlers circling the fight like crabs, blood on their forearms and faces, ready to seize their roosters at the referee’s cry of “Handle!”
A clan of Louisiana Cajuns watched. They’d emerged red-eyed from a van in a marijuana cloud: skinny, shirtless men with oily ponytails and goatees and tattoos of symbols of black magic. Under their arms, they carried thick white hooded roosters to pit against the reds and blacks of the locals. Their women had stumbled out of the van behind them, high yellow like Gypsies, big-lipped, big-chested girls in halter-tops tied at their bellies and miniskirts and red heels.
In the ring the Cajuns kissed their birds on the beaks, and one tall, completely bald Cajun wearing gold earrings in both ears put his bird’s whole head in his mouth. His girl, too, came barefoot into the ring, tattoo of a snake on her shoulder, and took the bird’s head into her mouth.
“Bet on them white ones,” a friend whispered to Kirxy. “These ones around here ain’t ever seen a white rooster. They don’t know what they’re fighting.”
That evening, checking traps in the woods north of the river, Wayne kept hearing things. Little noises. Leaves. Twigs.
Afraid, he forced himself to go on so his brothers wouldn’t laugh at him. Near dark, in a wooden trap next to an old fencerow, he was surprised to find the tiny white fox they’d once seen cross the road in front of their truck. He squatted before the trap and poked a stick through the wire at the thin snout, his hand steady despite the way the fox snapped at the stick and bit off the end. Would the witch woman want this alive? At the thought of her he looked around. It felt like she was watching him, as if she were hiding in a tree in the form of some animal, a possum, a swamp rat. He stood and dragged the trap through the mud and over the land while the fox jumped in circles, growling.
A mile upstream, Scott had lost a boot to the mud and was hopping back one-footed to retrieve it. It stood alone, buried to the ankle. He wrenched it free, then sat with his back against a sweet gum to scrape off the mud. He’d begun to lace the boot when he saw a hollow tree stump, something moving inside. With his rifle barrel, he rolled the thing out—it was most of the body of a dead catfish, the movement from the maggots devouring it. When he kicked it, they spilled from the fish like rice pellets and lay throbbing in the mud.
Downstream, as night came and the rain fell harder, Kent trolled their boat across the river, flashlight in his mouth, using a stick to pull up a trotline length by length and removing the fish or turtles and rebaiting the hooks and dropping them back into the water. Near the bank, approaching the last hook, he heard something. He looked up with the flashlight in his teeth to see the thing untwirling in the air. It wrapped around his neck like a rope, and for an instant he thought he was being hanged. He grabbed the thing. It flexed and tightened, then his neck burned and went numb and he felt dizzy, his fingertips buzzing, legs weak, a tree on the bank distorting, doubling, tripling into a whole line of fuzzy shapes, turning sideways, floating.
Kent blinked. Felt his eyes bulging, his tongue swelling. His head about to explode. Then a bright light.
His brothers found the boat at dawn, four miles downstream, lodged on the far side in a fallen tree. They exchanged a glance, then looked back across the river. A heavy gray fog hooded the water and the boat appeared and dissolved in the ghostly
limbs around it. Scott sat on a log and took off his boots and left them standing by the log. He removed his coat and laid it over the boots. He handed his brother his rifle without looking at him, left him watching as he climbed down the bank and, hands and elbows in the air like a believer, waded into the water.
Wayne propped the second rifle against a tree and stood on the bank holding his own gun, casting his frightened eyes up and down the river. From far away a woodpecker drummed. Crows began to collect in a pecan tree downstream. After a while Wayne squatted, thinking of their dogs, tied to the bumper of their truck. They’d be under the tailgate, probably, trying to keep dry.
Soon Scott had trolled the boat back across. Together they pulled it out of the water and stood looking at their brother who lay across the floor among the fish and turtles he’d caught. One greenish terrapin, still alive, a hook in its neck, stared back. They both knew what they were supposed to think—the blood and the sets of twin fang marks, the black bruises and shriveled skin, the neck swollen like mumps, the purple bulb of tongue between his lips. They were supposed to think cottonmouth. Kent’s hands were squeezed into fists and they’d hardened that way, the skin wrinkled. His eyes half open. His rifle lay unfired in the boat, as if indeed a snake had done this.
But it wasn’t the tracks of a snake they found when they went to get the white fox. The fox was gone, though, the trap empty, its catch sprung. Scott knelt and ran his knuckles along the rim of a boot print in the mud—not a very wide track, not very far from the next one. He put his finger in the black water that’d already begun to fill the track: not too deep. He looked up at Wayne. The print of an average-sized man. In no hurry. Scott rose and they began.
Above them, the sky cracked and flickered.
Silently, quickly—no time to get the dogs—they followed the trail back through the woods, losing it once, twice, backtracking, working against the rain that fell and fell harder, that puddled blackly and crept up their legs, until they stood in water to their calves, rain beading on the brims of their caps. They gazed at the ground, the sky, at the rain streaming down each other’s muddy face.
