A-Sides

by Victor Allen

Death on the Tombigbee

  By

  Victor Allen

  Copyright © 2014

  All Rights Reserved

  Hard times had come to Golgotha. To the unknowing eye it seemed like any other cracker-barrel town in Alabama; spa-grade heat and humidity, a main street with a light that turned into a blinker after sundown, a couple of stores, and dozens of farm ponds. Piney wilderness and Oak trees sporting crepe ornaments of Spanish moss stood cold-eyed sentinel on the ancient banks of the Tombigbee river, judging the works of man and God with equal disinterest.

  There was no industrial base left in Golgotha. The mills and factories had shut down years ago and the luminous flower that Golgotha had once been had dried out to a colorless, dying weed. The train that came through once a day mainly carried chemicals for more prosperous enterprises further down the line. It never stopped in Golgotha.

  Some folks were doing okay, mainly the big agricultural concerns and a few merchants. Bob and Louise Coleman raised cows and sheep on their 2400 acres. Leonard Pitts owned the foul-smelling chicken houses that lent an earthy aroma that settled into every knothole and crumbling mortar seam in the town. Lonnie Maness operated a grain mill that provided scratch to the chicken houses, and an unappetizing concoction of corn, barley, wheat, oats and molasses with all the oil and germ pressed out of it -the infamous “cake” to which Marie Antoinette had referred- to the cattle farmers. These folks, the movers and shakers, made hay even when the economic sun had set on everyone else.

  Things were worse for most, like John Key. With five kids -Irish quintuplets with barely a year between them- and a part-time job at a convenience store owned by Bob Coleman that paid him minimum wage plus all John could steal, times had cracked hard and inched into desperate.

  His two eldest boys, Jeshua -Jesse for short- and Hunter, were the only siblings with more than eleven months between them, Jesse at eight and Hunter at ten. The three younger children, all girls ranging from five to seven, had been dropped off at a county sponsored crèche where they could at least get sandwiches and milk. Jesse and Hunter, too old to qualify for the program, had been left, as they had been many times before, to their own good judgment.

  By nine o’clock on that June morning the mercury had rocketed into the eighties and would only burn higher from there. Mom was at work, washing out dirty drawers for some of the more well-to-do citizens of the town, Dad at the store. Once convinced that mom and dad were really gone and not likely to come back and check on them, the two brothers set out to explore the countryside.

  Jesse needed adventure. He had recently been diagnosed with late onset Krabbe disease, a very rare disorder affecting only 1 in 100,000. Calling the prognosis poor was more than putting lipstick on a pig. The only treatments were bone marrow transplants or cord blood transfusions, neither of which were very effective, and neither of which his family could afford. Jesse had somewhere between two and seven years to live. He might not even see ten, the same age as Hunter. Hunter didn’t know how much Jesse knew about the disease that was slowly wasting him away. He didn’t know if Jesse knew that he would soon suffer blindness, deafness, muscle atrophy, respiratory failure and death. He already showed some of the first outward signs with episodic weakness in his legs. But as long as he could still move around like a normal kid, Hunter was not going to treat him like glass. His mom and dad, with all their worries, had already begun to consider the two eldest boys an afterthought, but Hunter wouldn’t do that to Jesse. Jesse was a kid, he was his brother, and he needed to live.

  The boys had outfitted themselves with canteens and pocket knives for this expedition. Their tired blue jeans and dirty t-shirts were the ideal gear for tramping through the woods and scaling barbed wire fences. Hunter had overheard his mother wistfully remarking that she had heard of abandoned gem and precious metal mines on the prodigious holdings of the Coleman family. Just another way, she had sniffed, that the man kept the poor down. With that new intelligence in mind, Hunter had decided to take Jesse on a treasure hunt. The one ounce, Silver Eagle coin his dad had given him on his eighth birthday, before things had gotten so bad, weighed heavy in his pocket. It was Hunter’s good luck piece and, to his dad’s credit, he had never asked for it back, no matter how hard times got. Maybe the two kids could return the favor and ferret out some gold or diamonds to help out the family. No ten year old kid in America should have to worry about eating, but this is where they found themselves. Jesse idolized his older brother and had followed him without question.

  They walked down the dirt road mirroring the endless barbed wire fence rimming the vast Coleman property. Arid dust clouds kicked up from their cut-rate tennis shoes and sweat popped from their pores like bullets as the hammering sun beat down. Heavy Black Angus cows watched with their limpid brown eyes as the two brothers hunted for a place to clamber over the barbed wire.

  Once a football field past the last knot of calmly grazing cows, the two kids carefully scaled the springy barbed wire fence and landed on the Coleman property. To Hunter, stepping foot on the forbidden land was like being the first man on the moon. Keeping one eye on the cows that might rumble over to investigate, and the other out for sploshy green land mines, they crossed the verdant grazing land towards the endless, unknown woods.

  They crunched into the forest, predominantly pine. The rotary drill buzzing of mosquitoes and gnats which had been their constant company as they crossed the pasture changed to the chirping and scurrying of the woods insects: millipedes and ants and beetles. Hillocks of fallen leaves and dead-falls gave safe harbor to venomous copperheads and rattlesnakes. The boys inched their way into the thick undergrowth, Hunter carefully probing the ground ahead of him with a broken branch. They once in a while heard the crackling of leaves as an unseen serpent slithered away at their approach.

  Signs of human interaction began to fade the further they moved in. At first they saw a lot of abandoned, rusted out appliances and threadbare tires, then, further in, lighter items like bags of trash and paperback books. Past that were a few used condoms, lying on the ground like shed snake skins. Interspersed amongst all this were cans and bottles like a modern trail of breadcrumbs. Some five hundred yards into the forest, they stopped by a pile of discarded wine and beer bottles, heaped up in a mound.

  “Hey, what’s this,” Jesse asked.

  He picked up a dark, heavy-bottomed bottle barnacled with a thin layer of dried mud. The kosher ghosts of fermented grapes breathed from the neck of the vessel in a quiet sigh. He scraped the dried mud from the label and presented the bottle to his brother.

  “Maybe there’s a genie inside,” Jesse speculated wisely.

  Hunter inspected the bottle. “That’s a Manischewitz bottle,” he cautioned, speaking knowingly from the recently plumbed depths of his social studies class. “That means it would be a Jewish genie. You don’t want that.”

  Jesse tossed the bottle back on the pile where it landed with a clink.

  They explored further, the pile of bottles seemingly the last trace of civilization. This was unexplored territory. They could now smell -even though they couldn’t see it- the dark water of the Tombigbee river. The sporadic eruptions of wild animals crashing through the woods -a deer bounding away, rabbits scurrying into their burrows, maybe a concealed wild boar or shivery bear- were all reasons to hesitate and peer about with mistrustful, Neanderthal eyes. The benevolent sunlight had been wrestled into submission this deep into the wilderness and it was a little scary.

  From somewhere ahead of them, they heard the soft lowing of a cow, not close, but not distant, either. They looked at each other curiously. The cows were behind them. Maybe one of them had got loose, or they were coming to the opposite edge of the woods. But that couldn’t be right. The river was ahead of them and it cut directly through the thickest part of the forest. Curious, Hunter crept ahead with Jesse close behind. They heard other sounds now: the bleating of a sheep and the unmistakable cackling of hens.

  “What the
heck,” Hunter murmured. Who would have a farm in the middle of the woods?

  “What is it,” Jesse asked. He wasn’t afraid. Not yet. Hunter was here to take care of him.

  “I don’t know,” Hunter answered. “Something ain’t right.”

  Hunter didn’t quite know what to make of it, but he was almost certain he smelled smoke. He peered deeper into the woods but the towering trees pressing around him masked his view of any smoke that might be rising over their leafy peaks. The primal forest had grown hungry eyes that stalked him like a hunting cat. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. He turned to Jesse.

  “Come on. We need to get out of here.”

  No sooner had he turned to backtrack when he saw the flash of movement somewhere deep in the woods. His heart jumped in his chest. He wasn’t sure what he had seen. This deep in the woods it was almost like twilight. It may have been something as harmless as a deer or a wandering heifer, but he couldn’t be sure. He forced himself to walk slowly, not showing fear to his little brother.

  He saw movement again off to his left from his peripheral vision. He was now certain they were being hunted. He quickened his pace, briefly forgetting Jesse tagging along behind him on his weakened legs.

  “Hunter,” Jesse cried. “Wait up!”

  Hunter turned around to wait for Jesse’s stubby little legs to catch up to him. He stared all around, seeing things creeping and darting through the woods. It might have been his imagination, but he thought not.

  “Come on, Jesse,” Hunter admonished. He took Jesse by the hand and they crashed through the woods, Hunter burdened by his brother’s awkwardness. They tripped and flailed in the unfamiliar forest and within thirty seconds Hunter had gotten so turned around he had no idea which way he was going. Jesse was crying, frightened, but Hunter held it together. He looked desperately ahead, sure he saw what seemed to be a clearing opening up. He made a run for it, knowing that anything had to be better than being in the smothering maw of the woods.

  He pounded ahead, sensing something closing in on him, but not daring to look back. There was a sudden drag on his trailing arm and he heard Jesse cry out. His burden suddenly lessened and he realized Jesse was no longer holding his hand. He started to turn to see what had happened, but before he could get his head around, he saw it.

  The giant head of a goat towered at the treetops. Its spiky horns jutted like spears into the blue sky. Smoke billowed from its nostrils and its eyes were the raging red of cooking fires. Hunter jolted to a stop, his mouth open, his heart pounding like an engine seizing from overheating. The noises in the woods rose to a frenzied flurry and the world swirled into total oblivion.