Teeth, Long and Sharp: A Collection of Tales Sharp and Pointed

by Grace Draven

  In the man’s hand was a knife, long and thin, narrowing to an acute point. Napier was five feet back in a split second, like a cat. The man laid the knife on the scarred, ink-speckled counter. “Boy, them’re some reflexes. What war was you in? Kuwait? Iraq?”

  Napier jerked a nod, shrugged. Now was not the time for sharing the dark places in his soul. Kuwait. Iraq. Kosovo. Somalia. Some places that hadn’t made the news and probably never would. Places where a knife like that, long and slender like an old French poniard, might come in handy when the need was for silence and a sharp thrust upward.

  “You won’t see this on your invoice, but like the two paddles, it’s non-negotiable.” Gone was the good ol’ boy accent, the aw-shucks that probably bilked more tourists than the double billing for paddles did. The man’s hand went beneath the counter again, and up came the blade’s leather scabbard, slung on a webbing belt.

  “I don’t need it,” Napier said. “I have plenty of protection.” And six silent ways to kill you in under thirty seconds, without a gun or a knife or a garrote, he thought. The webbing would do the job slick enough.

  “Hear me,” the old man said again, sliding the poniard into the well-oiled sheath. It made not even a whisper. “There are things on that river we ain’t meant to see. All I’m sayin’ is if you do, you might want something to help you past ‘em.”

  “What are you talking about, old man?” Napier approached the counter. His fingers itched to touch the knife, feel its balance and heft, give it an experimental jab upwards in the empty air.

  “More than peckerwoods, I’ll tell you that. Catfish big as your boat, been around longer than original sin. Gators, a course. Panthers sometimes, bears for sure. Swamp people, if you get up a channel you oughter leave alone. I don’t know what-all. But like I said—non-negotiable. You don’t put this pig-sticker in your pack, you don’t take that canoe up the Choctawhatchee.”

  Napier picked up the knife. It looked old. Felt old. Probably the blade was brittle.

  Not a blade he wanted to depend on for his life.

  With a wry twist to his mouth, he settled it in the top of his go-bag and shouldered the bag. “If we’re done here, I’d like to get upchannel before I lose too much more of the morning.”

  The old man gave him a long, considering look from his yellowed eyes. “Remember what I tole ya. Things is angry out there. Ain’t no Joan Van Ark to sweeten the deal if you stumble acrost something you shouldn’t.”

  “Right. Smothered by frogs. I’ll remember.” Napier fought the urge to roll his eyes and followed the old man out the door to a rack where the rental canoes were stored upside down, strapped in place with cargo tie-downs. The old man slapped the flank of one of the boats as if it were a horse, waited a moment, then grunted.

  “Ain’t been out a while. Sometimes the mud daubers like to build nests in the flotation chambers. You tell me if you see anything. Let’s get her down.”

  The canoe was heavier than Napier had expected, accustomed to fiberglass boats and more modern resins, but its weight was well balanced as he and the old man each seized a thwart, let the boat flip, and set it like a cupped leaf on the brackish water of Jolly Bay. The old man held the painter to snug the boat up to the dock while Napier settled his pack slightly forward of mid-canoe and laid a paddle alongside it. He left the second paddle on the weather-silvered dock while he sat on the dock’s edge to put his feet carefully on each side of the midline. Then he kept his center of gravity low and knelt in front of the stern seat, his ass just touching it, while he got the feel of the boat on the water.

  It rocked slightly, and wavelets made a soft, hollow noise as they lapped the sides of the little wooden peapod.

  “You got your own vittles and drinkin’ water? You don’t want to be scroungin’ or takin’ stuff off the locals and whatnot. It ain’t all good, you see. Water in particular. Fevers and such.”

  “I do. Enough for a couple of days.”

  “Good deal.”

  Napier brought the second paddle from the dock, nodded to him as he coiled the painter and handed the loops to Napier.

  “That river…” the old man began, and Napier looked up from where he was feathering the blade of his paddle in the water to draw the canoe away from the dock. The man’s eyes were steady, and the cheery glint was gone. “It’s haunted.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind.” Drama queen, he muttered under his breath, making it look good for the tourists. He stroked for the bay and the dark mouth of pine and scrub where he could see the channel he sought.

  Napier settled to the work of propelling the canoe up the channel against the slow current. The meandering, indecisive Choctawhatchee estuary offered plenty of choices to penetrate less accessible territory, places where the paper companies might not have harvested every old-growth tree. Internet scuttlebutt told of a boat landing a few miles upstream, where enthusiastic birders had noticed old trees recently dead, or dying, and the trademark scaling of the ivory-billed woodpecker. This largest of North American woodpeckers occupied one of the narrowest of ecological niches, and when the tall timber was taken, the beetles whose larvae the ivory-bill ate dwindled. In turn, so did the ivory-bills. By the middle of the twentieth century, the raucous, mocking call of the bird was heard no more.

  If Napier had learned nothing else in his decade of soldiering for democracy in various nightmare villages of the world, he had learned that life was tenacious. One man’s destruction was another man’s opportunity. Something always emerged from the ashes, but it was any man’s guess whether that something curled its demon tail or bloomed gracious as a rose.

  Smothered by frog bellies.

  Napier shook his head and paddled more strongly. Gallant’s Landing was a good two hours’ paddle from Jolly Bay, and he wanted to be there by noon. After he’d explored the location the internet rumors had noted, he’d decide what to do next. He was here on his own time, a few days of vacation from sampling water quality in Panhandle streams and lakes for the state, but if he were to turn up irrefutable evidence of an ivory-bill somewhere nearby—hell, even something faintly stronger than a rumor!—it could be his ticket to a more interesting career. Much as he needed the solitary peace he found tramping through the sandy Florida woods with labeled vials of water in his backpack, he needed more to be of use to a larger cause. Soldiering had been enough for many years, until he realized democracy was not a choice. It was a rape, red with blood and seeding its unholy get in places people could hardly scrape together enough to eat, let alone support the lofty political goals of other countries. Democracy came with a price tag: your oil for our paper. Your diamonds, your poppies. Your children, your blood.

  The brackish blue of the bay gave way to the darker, more tannic water of a Florida river. Cypress and magnolia mingled with the pines and ti-ti scrub, with clusters of oaks where the land was a couple of feet higher. It was both cool and hot on the Choctawhatchee, baking sun-heat above and the cool lick of the river below. The old man had been right about the canoe’s silence. It slipped through the water with almost no sound except for the dip and churn and drip of Napier’s paddle. In the brightness of the morning, the animal life along the river was quiesced except for towhees and brown thrashers rustling in the underbrush, or the occasional hawk or buzzard riding the estuary’s thermals. Turtles drowsed on logs, sometimes stacked two deep in places where the landing was favorable and easy boarding for armored vehicles. From time to time the arrow-wake of a snake disturbed the slow silk of the river’s surface ahead of Napier. Insects hovered and dipped. Thankfully the mosquitoes kept to the banks, but damselflies and horseflies were not so inhibited, perching on the bow and gunwale. The horseflies liked a little meat from time to time, so Napier kept an eye on their heavy, buzzing bodies. More than one met with a smack from his paddle and floated stunned alongside, where the soft gulp of a fish sucked down the morsel.

  Catfish big as your boat. What I wouldn’t give to see such a monster.

  Napier
encountered a lot of characters in his work for the state. Hunters out poaching trophy animals, gaunt men green with hookworm setting traps for rabbits and possums. Teens grinding together on beach towels spread on the creamy sand banks of backwoods lakes. Silent women dressed in thin cotton pegging out their gray laundry on ropes strung from truck mirrors to trees, big-eyed children hiding behind them, skin scratched and sun-brown. Fishing shacks with no one inside, and other shacks with piles of salvage strewn around the yards. Everyone had a tale to tell, if they chose. The teenagers would either run shriek-laughing for a car or stare at him in challenge until he had filled his vial and gone. But the solitaries, as Napier thought of them, were the ones with the best stories. The ones who knew the land and could vanish in the space of a breath. The ones who hungered for conversation, human contact, could perhaps tell him if the ivory-bills lingered in the dark, primitive places, or if the hopeful were confusing the pileated woodpecker with its larger, extinct cousin.

  Noon brought Gallant’s Landing, nothing more than a collection of half-a-dozen sun-bleached cypress plank picnic tables, a single truck with a boat trailer in the oyster-shell parking lot, and the pale sandy boat ramp into the Choctawhatchee. Napier drove the canoe for the bank just to the right of the landing, stepped into a couple inches of tea-colored river water, and pulled the boat onto land. A quick hitch of the bow line to a cypress knee, left dry in the low water of midsummer. He lifted his pack from the canoe and shouldered it. It would probably be safe in the canoe, but Napier knew that one didn’t leave such things behind for the locals to find and exploit. A go-bag did just that: go, no matter how heavy.

  Besides, he had to return the old fart’s pig-sticker to him day after tomorrow. It wasn’t responsible to leave weapons where just anyone might stumble across them. Napier snorted.

  He walked up the smooth sand slope of the boat ramp, looking around him. Now that he was off the river, sweat ceased to dry in the slight breeze he made working upstream. His clothes clung in his body’s sudden moisture. Before he did too much more, he should hydrate, down some calories. He chose the picnic table farthest from the parking lot, though there was no one he could see or hear. The go-bag thumped onto the plank top. Napier had to remove the old man’s knife before he could get serious about mining the sack’s depth for water and a little lunch.

  The knife’s knurled hilt fit well in his palm. Curious, he slid it free of the sheath, noting again how quiet it was. The leather was clean and smooth. The blade held its balance beautifully, surprising him. It was made along the lines of a poniard, as he’d thought when he first glimpsed it in the marina office, though it lacked a cross-guard, only nubs to keep fingers from sliding onto the blade. Napier was more used to handling Bowie knives and the occasional switchknife and thoroughly illegal butterfly, but he liked this weapon’s feel in his hand. He tried a feint or two, reversing the blade along his forearm, flipping it swiftly, finding its movement to his liking.

  Something about the blade, however…in the office, his initial impression had been that the blade was brittle, though he could not have explained why. Now, upon closer inspection, he thought perhaps the knife was not hardened steel, but a softer iron. A scowl-line of thought drew his brows together, and he wondered what the old man was playing at. Napier wished he’d taken just a few more minutes to coax tales from the man. A river might be haunted, but by men, not ghosts or smothering, irate frogs filled with malice and out for vengeance.

  Or haunted, perhaps, by the ivory-bill, sometimes referred to as the Lord God Bird by old-timey backwoods folk. That was what he’d pinned his hopes on.

  He considered the blade a little longer, then slipped it into an inside pocket of the go-bag and fished for the beef jerky, an apple, and a bottle of water. He consulted the sun, the angle of the tree shadows—little more than blobs so close to midday—and headed into the trees away from the river. He could see brown tops in amongst the green, and it was those trees he sought.

  The first dead tree Napier encountered had been dead for some time, a sparse-branched, leaning snag. He rested his hand on its bark while he looked up into the open canopy for a tree with brown needles still on its branches, and in that pause, he heard a rustle in the underbrush to his right. Without moving, he cut his gaze to the side. The rustle had sounded like leaves brushing along a large body, higher up than small animals grubbing in the leaf litter and fallen twigs. He put the tree at his back. His hand brushed past the hilt of his belt knife and returned to settle there, ready but unconcerned.

  In the greenery of the palmettos and mottled tangle of smilax vines, something moved, something pale and more vertical than horizontal. The thing paused, and Napier had a very clear impression that it had turned its head and was looking right at him, though he couldn’t see a face.

  That was no deer.

  “Hello,” he said, voice firm and clear, carrying. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.” The belt knife’s hilt was in his palm, though he didn’t recall his fingers opening the strap that snugged the weapon in its sheath. Sometimes it was best to heed the hindbrain, even though he doubted he’d startle anything dangerous so close to a public boat launch. He slipped the six-inch blade free.

  He saw the flash of the blade reflected on the shiny, plastic-looking green-gray smilax leaves, and in that instant the thing in the underbrush turned and sprinted away. Two-footed, running, crashing through the underbrush.

  Napier went after it.

  He was instantly cussing, tangled and caught by blackberry vines and the thick shrubbery of wild blueberries past their fruiting. He managed one last leap that brought his prey in view for the barest second, and caught a glimpse of bare ass cheeks, the side of a bouncing breast, and a flick of long blonde hair before the figure vanished in the undergrowth. The crashing continued, growing more distant by the second.

  He’d surprised a sunbather.

  His fingers sheathed and secured the knife, and he turned a moment, getting his bearings. To his left was a small sandy clearing, and in its center, a dead longleaf pine, brown needles still clinging to its branches. But more importantly, and somewhat startlingly, was the ragged expanse of bare trunk where something had scaled the tree’s bark, leaving it in chunks at the foot of the tree.

  Napier’s breath caught in his throat.

  This was what he’d been seeking. He’d seen the pictures on the internet and wondered, but this was amazing, this was proof. Those squared-off marks around the beetle tunnels were made by a beak like a chisel and—

  He had started across the clearing before the hindbrain triggered again and he froze. Napier always trusted the DLR, as he called it, the “doesn’t look right” part of him, that glitchy thing inside him that went off from time to time. To ignore it meant someone got hurt, someone died.

  Sometimes.

  Like any glitch, it had moments of senseless chatter when his personal radar tracked static, when there was nothing to be concerned about, yet some combination of sensory perceptions had added up to a stop sign. He took the time to listen to it now, looking around him carefully, hand on his belt knife again.

  The sand of the small clearing was too clean. Except for the clutter of bark at the base of the tree, the sand was as clean as beach sand, without even the creamy tinge of old floodwater tannin and decomposed oak leaves and pine needles. Empty and as white as if it had been bleached. The underbrush didn’t encroach closer than five feet to the base of the tree, a green ring that seemed to be holding back the crush and press of the plant life beyond it. Almost as if the sand had been inoculated with poisons to kill anything that tried to approach the tree.

  Foolish imaginings, he knew, and yet. It just didn’t look right, and until the DLR quit shouting he would take it slow.

  Napier took one step backward into the greenery, his feet completely off the ring of clear sand. Superstitious idiot, he told himself. But he didn’t know a single soldier who’d gone to war and actually seen action who didn’t talk about lucky socks or
the benefit of wearing a helmet backward or kissing a bullet before racking it into the clip.

  That river…it’s haunted, said the old fart in his head, chuckling.

  After a while, when nothing else burst out of the brush or exploded from the sand like a stepped-on claymore, the glitch quieted. Napier eased the go-bag from his shoulder and groped in it for his camera, his gaze flicking around the clearing. Like his binoculars, the pocket digital camera was as high quality as he could afford. He turned it on and let the electronic eye see what he could not. He’d have plenty of time at home to enlarge, enhance, and examine the photographs minutely. For now, he took a dozen shots of the tree trunk, including the pile of bark and wood chips at the roots, and close-ups of the larvae tunnels and the chisel marks. He photographed the sand, the strange ring-shaped clearing, and then he stepped onto the sand again.

  Nothing exploded, nothing caught fire, no one screamed.

  Napier’s mouth twisted wryly. He took a second step, and something made a high, gooselike honk, from above and not too far away. It sounded like nothing so much as a toot on a clarinet with a split reed, made by a hopeless middle school band student. Short. Repeated. Uninspired.

  His head whipped up and his eyes sought for the bird that had made the calls, looking frantically, using his ears to estimate angle and distance. All the old recordings he’d listened to on the internet—something like the squeak made by a turkey lure, nothing like the mocking whicker of Woody Woodpecker cartoons—flashed through his mind. It was the very call of the ivory-bill, he would have staked his life on it. He searched for a black blob against the dark wood of the pines, a wily bird accustomed to keeping a tree-trunk between itself and its enemy.

  He shook his head, still staring into the trees a hundred feet away. He couldn’t have been successful a scant four hours into his trip, not here, in a publicly accessed boat ramp. It didn’t seem right, somehow. The bird should have been harder to find than this, taken more effort. Hundreds of better educated men than he had searched for decades and been unsuccessful in returning with incontestable proof of the bird’s existence, here or elsewhere. Yet here were the signs. Except for the weirdness of the clearing, it seemed cut and dried, though Napier knew it was not proof.