He headed south and east down through some country I’d never seen, roaring over several miles of macadam through the mountains and then turning off onto a dirt and gravel road that led us to a state highway and a little settlement right where the gravel and pavement met. Three or four stores and a filling station, and a cobbled Main Street that bumped me around pretty good.
“Let’s stop and get a Coke,” he said above the road of the motor, drifting into the station. “You prob’bly need to stretch anyway.”
I groaned in agreement. He grinned.
The guy running the place knew Pete, and they chewed the fat for a little bit, shop talk mostly, while I looked around the place and drank my Coke. It was another Skelly station, pretty much like Pete’s, neat enough but not quite as spotless. The location, though, was beautiful, with the walls of mountains rising up all around it. That little town looked like a set of tiny toy buildings at the bottom of a dark-green bowl.
I was checking over the Indian again, not looking for anything in particular, when Pete spoke behind me.
“Hell of a machine,” he said.
“You do a hell of a job in the driver’s seat,” I returned. “Don’t want her back, do you?”
“Naw.” He took a rag from the pocket of his work uniform – he hadn’t bothered to change – and slowly wiped the dust off the headlights. I knew him well enough by now to see that he was making his mind up about something.
“Let’s take a walk out back,” he said.
“Sure.”
Behind the station a lawn studded with engine parts and other automotive stuff went out and gradually sloped upward until it turned into woods. Several big rocks studded the side of the mountain, and we walked to one of those and leaned up against it. This seemed a good time to offer Pete one of my precious Berings. He accepted and we both lit up, smoking in silence for a minute or two. Damn, but those are good cigars!
Finally, Pete blew out a stream of whitish-blue smoke and said, “I ain’t been completely honest with you.” He gazed up at the mountains, not looking at me.
“That right?”
“‘Bout the bike,” he added. “I told you I wrecked it twice so I quit riding.”
“Yeah.”
He turned his eyes on me. “That’s true. But I didn’t tell you the second wreck killed my wife.”
Then he told me the story, just the way Pete tells things, without a lot of emotion or wasted words. It was nobody’s fault, really. A truck from the packing house didn’t see him and made a left turn just as Pete and his wife got to the intersection at the edge of Mackaville. He was banged up, but she was thrown out of the sidecar onto the road and her injuries were critical. She died a few days later. Pete had insisted on being in the bed next to her, but he was in such bad shape he didn’t even know she was gone until the doctor told him a day later. He was doped up with morphine, so it took him a while to understand what was being said, and when he’d pulled himself together enough to look, the bed next to him was empty.
They’d been married 10 months. A baby was on the way.
“So that’s how come I never got on that bike again – ‘til today,” he said. “Knew I had to get back on. Figure you understand now why I was wantin’ to drive.”
I nodded. “Yeah, Pete. I’m real sorry.”
We fell quiet again then, smoking the last of our Berings and inhaling the mountain air, birds chirping and singing in the trees around us. I understood now why Diffie had looked so funny back at the service station, when Pete had asked to drive.
Reluctantly, I dropped the end of the cigar, grinding it into the dirt with my boot. Something told me this was the time.
“Pete,” I began, “maybe you can tell me about something else.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“When I was cutting up those dimes the other day, to put in shotgun shells?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You really didn’t want me to do that.”
Holding the stub with the tip of his thumb and forefinger, he took one last big drag, letting the smoke curl slowly out of his mouth.
“You don’t have to tell me why. I know there’s some connection between Mrs. Davis and that cat I was going to shoot. I hope you don’t think I’m crazy, but she either has some control over that cat, can see through its eyes or some damn thing, or she is that old calico.” I thought about what I’d seen in the cemetery exactly a week earlier, still not entirely sure it hadn’t been some kind of apparition.
“You didn’t want me to shoot because she and you are friends,” I said.
“We’re friends, sure,” he returned, dropping the remnants of his own cigar to the ground.
“None of that is what I’m asking you – as your friend, too. I’m pretty sure Mrs. Davis was wanting to know if I was reporting to the state about people ‘passing for white.’ When I showed her I wasn’t, she said something about how the town thanked me.”
I took a breath.
“Now, I know a lot of the folks in Mackaville and outside in the hills are a little darker than what I’m used to back in Minnesota, where we have all those Scandinavians and Scots, and I’m just wondering, well – does that have anything to do with why Mrs. Davis was so interested in my reports?”
He grinned then. “Might,” he said. “C’m’on.”
We went back down the hill, I folded myself into the side car, and we were off again, this time off the highway and onto some rougher back roads that jarred my fillings.
“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” I shouted.
“TO MEET SOME RELATIVES OF MINE,” he hollered back.
We were way out in the sticks: beautiful green country, but a hard ride. Finally we turned into a neat old farm and out came these folks who, while lighter-skinned, were obviously Negro. Pete watched me while I shook hands and he was obviously pleased with the way I acted around them. Hell, John, I’m no bigot. I’ve had colored friends before. If that was Pete’s family, then that was fine with me. Pete was part-black, he and lots of other people in the town – including Mrs. Davis. I could understand their reluctance to have me report that to the cracker busybody at the state capitol who wrote me that “passing for white” crap. Until I’d talked to Mrs. Davis and Ma, they had no notion whether or not I’d tell on them or not. And if I had – well, Arkansas wasn’t the most enlightened state in the union when it came to racial relations.
Pete said as much a couple of hours later, after he took me even further up into the mountains, where we hid the bike in a hawthorn grove and climbed about a half mile to a natural tunnel that went clear through one of the big hills. On the other side was a pocket with a little flat meadow studded with pin oaks and a deep pool of cold spring water, where I had one of the best swims I ever had in my life. Stripping to our skivvies, we stayed in as long as we could stand it – which wasn’t long, even with the summer’s heat all around us. Pete then showed me a really well-hidden cave on the cliff above the pool, and I made a note to come back and explore it soon. But time was getting away from us and I didn’t want to be late for my date with Patricia.
Yeah, I knew that she was colored, or part-Negro, or whatever the hell you want to call it. She had to be because her grandma was. And sure, we’ve both made jokes about colored people and laughed at Stepin Fetchit and all that. But I’m honestly telling you it didn’t make much difference to me where Patricia was concerned.
Our lunch was kind of bass-ackwards, since Pete’s relatives had insisted we eat some big old dishes of blackberry cobbler before we left, so we’d had dessert first. Even with that, we polished off everything I’d brought before heading back out. All food’s better outdoors, but I hardly tasted anything because I was so intent on listening to Pete’s story about why so many people in Mackaville had black ancestors. It had to do, he said, with a Scotsman named MacKenzie who started up the packing plant and the town – Mackaville, makes sense – with the entire cargo of a slave ship back around the 1850s. He hand-picked merchants to come in to take
care of the workers’ needs, and over the next several years, given the relative isolation of the town and its unusual circumstances, some blacks and whites had begun intermarrying.
MacKenzie was a freethinker, and he didn’t mind. And while he kept a pretty tight lid on letting anything get out about the town and its mixed-race population, other Negroes found out about the place and its accommodating nature and several moved there and settled after the War Between the States.
“The folks in Little Rock got their suspicions ‘bout us,” Pete said. “That’s prob’bly why you heard from that fella ‘bout all that ‘passin’ for white’ nonsense. But if it ever all really come out, why, no tellin’ what’d happen. Klan’d get mixed up in it, most likely. Hell, they might even get the plant shut down, and then there wouldn’t be no Mackaville no more.”
He fired up a Spud. I passed.
“That’s why it was so damn important to Miz Davis to see if you was tellin’ on us. We got to keep things pretty quiet, see.”
“I understand, Pete. Thanks for filling me in.” I got up, brushing off my pants. “Well, better get back.”
“Big date tonight?” He grinned, and I grinned back.
“You bet.”
“Don’t mind she’s colored?”
I shook my head. “I honestly don’t,” I said.
“Could be trouble, you take her outta Mackaville.”
This time I laughed. “I’ve had one date with her, and you’ve already got me married. That’s a bridge I won’t have to cross, at least for a while.”
We climbed back down and retrieved the big Indian, and this time I drove. Pete fit in the side car a lot better than I did.
He directed me back to a route I knew from my former trips, and we headed for Mackaville. I had to get back home, change, and make it to Patricia’s by about seven, and I knew I’d be cutting it close, so I was gunning the bike pretty good when Pete hollered, “SNAKE!”
I swerved just in time to miss one of the biggest damn rattlers I’d ever seen, stretched out in the road in front of us, head up, tail whirring. Six feet if he was an inch. He actually struck at us as we zipped past.
“DAMN!” I said. Pete was twisted around in the side car, looking back.
I figured it was the sudden appearance of the snake that spooked me, but I was hit hard then with a cold certainty that something bad was about to happen.
On the next hilltop, I stopped the bike. The late afternoon air was hot, the woods silent. Pete sat up in the side car, looking at me. “Big damn snake,” he said.
“You said it.”
“Something else wrong?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling.” I’d told him a little about my “feelings,” so he knew what I meant.
“One of those, huh?”
“Yeah. Wish I knew what it meant. Something’s up, though.”
“Well, we’ve only got another five miles or so, and it’s all pret’ near down hill.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Get that shotgun out, will you? And hang on.”
As he horsed the shotgun around I let out the clutch and rolled it over the hilltop. I knew the road home, but not like Pete did.
“ANY TURNS AHEAD?” I shouted.
“NAW. GIVE HER HELL!”
So I did. And even with the extra rider and side car that old Indian began to roar. We ripped down the hill, gaining speed with each second. I looked back. A little flame was coming out of the exhaust. We looked like Flash Gordon’s rocket ship.
At the same time, my skin felt like ice-cold ants were crawling all over it. I scanned the road ahead for any sign of trouble. For a quick moment, I thought I saw another snake, this time looking at us from the hillside that sped by. Then I thought I saw another. We were going too fast for me to be sure.
We zoomed downward, ever downward, on bouncing and jittering wheels, roaring into a patch of shadow where a mountain blocked out the sun. Then, down the way, I picked up a faint undulation, a silvery line like a spiderweb’s strand, thicker, bigger –
“GET DOWN PETE! THERE’S A ROPE ACROSS THE ROAD!”
In that second, I heard Pete swear before the shotgun exploded in my right ear. We hit that cable, I ducked, and it flipped off my cap and ripped the shirt right off my back. I hugged the tank as tightly as I could, hoping that Pete was hunkered down in the car, knowing in that instant that if it had been me instead of him in the side car I’d no longer have a head.
Then, I heard him blast again with the shotgun. Thank God. Swerving and zig-zagging as much as I could, I realized my goggles were gone, too. Pete was firing with my .22 revolver. He emptied eight shots as fast as you can read this. Then we were over a rise and out of their range, whoever they were.
That’s when the pain hit me, right across the nose. Blood was blowing into my eyes. I’d been going on adrenaline, but I was shot, maybe bad. John, I sure didn’t want to die. I managed to get the bike stopped, turned to make sure Pete was all right, and passed out right there on the road.
And reliving that is enough for tonight. You know I didn’t die, that’s the main thing. I’ll tell you the rest of the bloody details tomorrow.
Robert, survivor
June 13, 1939
Tuesday afternoon
Dear John,
Sorry to leave you hanging with my last missive. Just ran out of gas. Fact is, I just started working again today, and then only did one interview. But it was a doozy. I’ll tell you about it.
First, though, some old business. When last we left Robert, bloody and damn near decapitated, he had staggered off his motorcycle and passed out on the road.
CHAPTER TWO: “HUMAN TARGETS” (Remember how we used to laugh about how every Republic serial had a chapter titled “Human Targets?” I’m here to tell you that being a real human target ain’t that damn funny.)
I woke up and thought: I’m in HELL! Unbearable lightning-bolt pain blazed through my crotch, my forehead throbbed, wind roared like a tornado past my ears, closed eyes, and drooping head. My arms were pulled back unnaturally, pinned behind me. I had to move, to get the weight off my gonads, which felt like they were being smashed by a rock. But when I tried to shift around and pull myself up, a hand pushed me down again.
“DAMMIT!” I screamed. “STOP THAT SHIT!” Maybe not the best thing to holler in Hell, but if I was there it didn’t make any difference what I said anyway.
Instead of Old Nick’s laugh, though, I heard a voice far more welcome, yelling over the roar.
“HELL’S BELLS! YOU’RE ALIVE!” It was Pete, and I felt him grab my shirt and pull me upright.
Although my eyelids seemed to be glued shut, you bet I got ‘em open. I saw I was on the motorcycle, sitting in front of him, my private parts jammed up against the gas tank as we blasted toward a setting sun. I squirmed into a little less painful position while Pete cut the engine and slowed us to a stop, jumped off, and grabbed me again. Which was a good thing, because I was about to fall on my face. He held me up and I started stamping my feet, instinctively I guess, restoring circulation, trying to relive the agony below my belt. Webbing was thick in my head, but as he held onto me I heard him say, “I thought you were a dying man, maybe dead already. All I could think about was getting you to a doctor.”
I blinked a couple of times, swallowed. “Thanks.” I could barely see the sun now. Dusk comes quickly in the mountains. Still, there was enough light for me to see blood, and plenty of it, when I looked down. It was smeared all over my chest and what was left of my shirt, and when I reached up to my cheek some of it stuck to my fingertips. Staring at the sticky red stuff dumbly, like I was in a dream, I barely heard Pete, talking faster than I’d ever heard him talk.
“I didn’t know if those sorry bastards were coming after us or what, so I just pushed you forward, got in the saddle, and took off. I knew I couldn’t fold you up enough to fit in the side car,” he said, all in one breath. And then, like he was seeing me for the first time, his eyes widened a
nd his hand went to his front pocket, pulling out a rag. He held onto my shoulder with his other hand, keeping me propped up.
“Man, that’s where all the blood’s coming from!” He jammed the rag above my eyes, looking real concerned. “You got a bullet hole in your forehead!”
I guess maybe I was in shock, because everything seemed to be going very slow, but I knew what he’d said right enough. And now that I thought about it, my head did hurt like hell. I slid my fingers up under the rag, to the source of the pain, and touched something metallic. It was slippery with blood and flesh, but I grasped it and pulled it free. The accompanying wave of agony was enough to make me pass out again, but, feeling Pete’s iron grip on my shoulder, I willed myself to stay on my feet.
Without a word, I held the little metal object out, where it caught the glow of the dying sunlight.
“Here,” Pete said, guiding my other hand to the rag. “Keep holdin’ it to your head.” He took the thing from me, examining it.
“Well, I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” he said. He looked at me and actually laughed, the bastard! Here I was bleeding to death, and he thought it was funny?
“You weren’t shot at all, you lucky stiff,” he said, still grinning. The blood-slicked piece of metal he held up before my eyes was small and square. “Know what this is? It’s the buckle for your damn goggles. That rope skinned it off and slammed it into your forehead. A little flesh wound’s all you got.”
So I wasn’t going to die. The news called for something better than a weak grin, but that’s all I could muster under the circumstances.
“Think you can ride now?” he asked.
I nodded. Still keeping the rag pressed against my wound, and with him guiding me by the elbow, I managed to fold myself into the sidecar. By this time it was dusk, and about ten minutes later, when we pulled up in front of Pete’s Skelly Gas and Tires, night had fallen over Mackaville.
Seventh Sense Page 10
