Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills

by Ardath Mayhar

  The light grew dimmer, and he shook his head to clear his vision. Then he realized that the sun was getting low beyond the thick stands of pine and hickory and oak. Straight up, the sky was still bright, but in the forest it was already twilight.

  The path ended in a swamp. Button willows leaned over green pools, and cypresses that seemed too fat to be healthy thrust their trunks and knees up from the ooze. He’d been following a logging track! But where was the back road where the car was waiting?

  He began to sweat—or was it blood soaking through the packing and trickling down his skin? He turned and hurried along the path to find the fork. It was even darker, as he took a turn onto what he hoped was the right track. In two hundred yards, he emerged onto a dirt road, barely one vehicle’s width, whose ruts were almost grown over with weeds.

  God! He had been afraid he would miss it! But where was the car? There was no parallel track among the overgrowth—it had to be farther down the road. Right? Left?

  He went right for some distance, with no result. Then he retraced his steps and went the other way. Nothing. Where was the damned car?

  Now it was really getting dark. He was also becoming weak and dizzy. He had to find someplace to hole up for the night. Stumbling around blindly would never get him to the car. He staggered along, brushing through the bushes that were trying to lean across the track. But up ahead he saw a break in the row of trees and brush. Though the sun was down, streaks of pink and orange still hung in the west, and he could just see the glint of rosy light off a tin roof. The break was a driveway, though weeds and vines had grown over it.

  An empty house. Just what he needed!

  He stepped into the brambles, trying not to leave too plain a trail. He had no doubt that deputies and what-not would be searching the countryside in the next few days. Probably they’d have choppers and dogs. He had seen it before, though never from the wrong end of things.

  It was too bad he hadn’t found the car. He could be out of the state before the law got its act together. That was why he and Seldane had picked a town so near the Louisiana line for this operation.

  He found that things were going hazy. He was suddenly on hands and knees in the stickery mass that was the drive. As it seemed too much trouble to walk, he crawled, though it was murder on his hands. Things kept going into and out of focus, as he struggled toward the house. In one of his lucid moments, he realized that he was in trouble, but the thought wouldn’t stay with him. He sighed and forced his way forward, stopping only when he butted into the sagging sill of the porch. When he opened his eyes it was darker, but he was staring into the total blackness beneath the house. A stone block held up the corner of the porch, and he used it to pull himself up, after heaving the briefcase onto the flimsy planking.

  The boards sagged. Dead leaves and grit rustled beneath him, as he moved toward the gaping doorway. A sawvine had sent a runner over the porch and into the open door, and he had to push aside the stickery tangle before he could get inside.

  It was like going into a cave. The last of the light from the sky was gone, and before he knew that furniture still cluttered the room, he bumped himself sharply. “Got to have light,” he muttered, holding onto his wits with difficulty. “See...what’s...what.”

  The room was a mess. His lighter was all but out of fluid, and the space was only a dim cave. Cobwebs criss-crossed it, and chairs were tumbled this way and that as if there had been a free-for-all there before it was abandoned. Something scuttered in a corner, invisible in the blackness.

  “Not a good place for a sick man,” he said. “Feels like a tomb. A blasted tomb.” The words echoed through the invisible rooms.

  He hauled himself upright, holding onto the heavy armchair he had bumped last. The room was full of bulky shapes. Why hadn’t people taken what they wanted from this house?

  He stumbled forward, found a mantel. It was thick with dust, but his seeking hands found a candlestick, with a length of candle left in it. Dusty strands dripped from the wick, but he flicked his lighter and lit it. It sputtered and smoked, trails of sparks running down the threads of web, but it caught well at last. The tiny light seemed very bright, after the unsteady flicker of the lighter.

  Harper set his briefcase of money on the sofa sagging beside the fireplace. He looked around, finding that a table at the back of the room still held dishes, set as if for a meal. If people had left in such a hurry, he realized, they might have left canned goods in the kitchen.

  He lifted the candle and moved toward the door at the back of the room. A strip of something was draped across the table holding the dishes—a streamer with printing on it:

  KEEP OUT

  POLICE CRIME INVESTIGATION IN PROGRESS

  He shivered. Something really nasty had happened here. There had been a body. He had seen strips like that out in the woods, when corpses had been found and the law had searched.

  But solid country folks didn’t have such things happen. Surely someone had found this strip and brought it home as a curiosity.

  He stumbled into the other room, a kitchen with an old-fashioned tin sink. A dish cupboard stood to one side, and inside the wire-covered upper shelves were more dishes and glasses. Another door opened to the side...a pantry, he hoped.

  There were empty bags on the floor, covered with dust and issuing a moldy smell that told him potatoes and onions had rotted away there. There were also shelves along the walls, and on them were jars. One entire wall was filled with full ones, though the contents of some were covered with mold.

  He picked through them, peering closely in the light of the candle. Pickles. Still green—all that vinegar should have kept them in good shape. Another jar held something dark red, without mold. Beets. More vinegar—safe too. Peaches, warmly golden under the dusty glass. Fig preserves, dark but always good.

  He felt his knees wobble. This was no balanced meal, but it would have to do. He had lost too much blood, and he needed some kind of food to keep him going. After tomorrow, he would have forty thousand reasons to eat well and sleep in comfort.

  He opened the jars in the kitchen. Peaches first—the juice was sweet, and he could feel the juice building energy. Figs. A pickle or two. He found himself swaying dizzily before he was done.

  But he explored a bit more, though he found himself inexplicably unwilling to cross the dog-run into the other half of the house. Even if there were beds there, he didn’t want to sleep in one. Now that he had something inside him, he found that he had a chilly feeling when he wondered what had happened here.

  He looked about at the walls, whose plain boards were covered with tatters of newspaper. The sink was corroded, filthy with dust and mouse-dirt. There were smears of something dark on the floor, under the litter. Something brown and thick had spilled there, long ago.

  He pushed aside the bits of newspaper and accumulated trash and stared down. There was a big blotch, and beside it was a chalk-mark, shaped like a body lying on its side, arms extended, legs drawn up. He found himself shaking again. The candle fluttered as he turned to leave the kitchen. He would burn furniture in the front room, make a fire in the fireplace. He wanted lots of light!

  He found himself weaker than he thought, and it was with some difficulty that he broke up a couple of chairs and set them alight, using newspaper stripped from the walls. But he was done at last, and when the fire was going merrily, heating the room entirely too much, he settled onto the couch in front and ran his fingers through his money.

  Something chittered overhead—he jerked nervously before he told himself that it was a bat in the attic. There were mice all over, according to the droppings, and who knew what else, here in the woods. He must not let himself become nervous. He had to keep from getting weak, though his head kept trying to float away into another dimension.

  He fell asleep on the sofa, as the fire burned itself out. Night filled the rooms, as it had done without interruption for a decade. The house endured everything, even this new encroachment that h
ad come to haunt it with problems other than its own. When Harper woke, he was covered with cold sweat. He felt as if a cold mist surrounded him, touching his fevered skin, weighing on his chest. He stared into the darkness, straining to see, but the candle had burnt out and the fire was dead.

  Some sense he hadn’t known he possessed was hearing noises from the kitchen. A crashing, followed by a shriek, mouse-thin but audible to his interior ear. A struggle, moving through the house, across the dog-run into the bedrooms, back into the parlor where he lay, stiff with terror. Blows were struck by nothing, hitting nothing, yet they could be heard by anyone there to listen.

  Harper tried to roll off the couch, as the terrible conflict came near. But he had been bleeding for hours, and he was too weak to move. He could do nothing, as the sounds filled his mind. He clenched his fists, closing his eyes and moaning. This was delirium. It had to be. He was seriously hurt—or it might be something in the canned stuff he had eaten. He was hallucinating, and daylight had to see the end of it.

  Something touched his cheek, moth-soft. Chilly. There was another blow, crashing into his mind as devastatingly as the slug had crashed into his body, and he knew nothing more.

  * * * * * * *

  The sun rose calmly, sending streaks of light through chinks and splits, making dust-motes dance in the room, as they had done for years. The house was still, as usual, resisting with all the strength of heart-pine the encroachments of termites and ants and dry-rot.

  Inside, the ants, with their excellent intelligence work, had found the body and were marching solemnly into and out of the wounds, checking out the ears and the nostrils, making a long safari up the tongue. A beetle was sitting on a glazed eyeball, taking some sort of esoteric delight in its position.

  The dust was settling over the chalk-marked kitchen floor, covering up old bloodstains and new man-tracks. The vines in the drive had already sprung up to hide any trace of someone’s passing.

  The searchers’ cars passed and repassed the old driveway, as the lawmen cast about for traces of their prey, but nobody looked into that long-empty house.

  Not even a bank-robber would be foolish enough to go there, they knew.

  DOWN IN THE BOTTOMLANDS

  Bird Hunting is a popular sport around here. I grew up in a hunting family, and one of the setter pups was my “brother” for years. I have run the fields with the dogs and when about three, walking in the woods with my mother, my dad, and the setter bitch, I came down in a point. The dog backed me, and my dad went forward and kicked up a covey of quail. I may have missed my calling—might have been a champion bird dog. However, sometimes a dedicated hunter might go to real extremes to get in an afternoon of hunting....

  I’d been warned that it would be rough going, but being young and hard-headed, I put on my brand-new hunting boots, took my brand-new shotgun out of its case, and loaded my brand-new English setter into the car. We started off in high spirits, for I’d been told that partridge were thick as fleas in the Nichayac River Bottoms.

  That was where I wanted to hunt. The codgers who had warned me about the brush and the sawvines were short on wind and heavy on their feet. I could go where they couldn’t, I knew. I was young and strong and eager, and they were just old poops.

  I found my way fairly easily, but I ran out of road several miles before I got to the bottoms themselves. That didn’t surprise me—in East Texas you can run out of roads and a lot of other things, when you get down into the boondocks. I’ve met old nesters, out on my rounds selling cattle feed, who still use kerosene lamps for light, and a well and privy for conveniences.

  A good few of those look as if they never have come out to see what the twentieth century looks like. But a lot of the old ones have died in the past few years. Now their gray board-and-batten houses sit in the woods and the abandoned fields, melting back into the red dirt among rampant berry vines.

  I stopped my car at the end of the road, beside just such a house. Beyond was a cow-trail leading off into brush. Old Rock, my setter, bounced out of the car as soon as I opened the door and began sniffing around the jungle that used to be a yard.

  I loaded the gun and put on my hunting vest and jacket, feeling to make sure my extra ammunition and my lunch were in the proper pockets. Then we set off along a path Rock found, which soon led us into a cornfield that was a perfect hell of broken-over stalks tied together with bindweed and more berry vines. I began to understand what the old fellows meant by rough going.

  Beyond the field, we found cut-over woods. It was an obstacle course of discarded treetops and sawvines and young huckleberry and hawthorn. Rock was nosing around, his tail quivering the way it did when he smelled birds, but he didn’t find a covey. It was perfect territory for quail, but we worked our way through it without raising anything but a big hawk.

  By then I was sweating. It was a damp, cloudy December day, chilly at the beginning but warming up later. I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist. I could feel sweat around the band of my cap, and the walking didn’t get any easier at all. The new boots were chewing up my feet by then too.

  Then Rock hit a pretty fair path, a nice foot-wide trail leading right through the tangled mess. A crow called overhead, and I looked up, trying to see him. By that time I was in a stand of young pine and couldn’t, but I paused and listened. There wasn’t another sound, after the caw died away. Not a chickadee or a cardinal ate seeds in the brush. No woods-noise could be heard, even the ones so regular and natural that you don’t realize you’re hearing them.

  It was spooky. I whistled to Rock, and he crashed through the brush to my side. I was glad of the noise—all that quiet was really lonesome.

  The deeper we went, the quieter that patch of woods got. If I hadn’t hated the thought of going back through that cornfield, I might have turned around and gone home. But by then my feet were like hamburger. They tried to tell me about wearing new boots for an all-day hunt, but I was too bull-headed to listen. Now I had to find a place to sit down and take them off, come what might.

  So we went on, following the path. Rock pattered ahead of me, not even trying to sniff the undergrowth. I could see by the way his ears twitched that the silence was getting to him too.

  It was almost noon by then. I was ready to stop and eat lunch and get those boots off, but you never in your life saw a place as likely to hold copperheads as that woods. There wasn’t even a stump or a rock to perch on. By the time I was ready to plump down in the middle of the path, we came around a clump of huckleberries and found ourselves looking at a house. You might not have called it that—shed, maybe. I’ve seen smokehouses that were solider.

  The yard was scraped clean down to the sand, which told me that an old-timer lived there. Pock-marked slop jars sat along the porch, holding frost-killed plants. Whitewashed tires held what had been ferns, and big bunches of herbs hung from the porch roof. Everything was neat as a pin, though almost ready to fall down. I stopped at the fence and called, for out here that’s the safe and polite thing to do.

  Something was cooking. Well, maybe that isn’t the right term for it. I smelled something, which didn’t make the mouth water but definitely was steaming. I felt certain my peanut butter sandwiches would be much better, and I hoped the owner of the shack wouldn’t ask me to lunch.

  A step inside made the porch roof wobble. The doorway was filled completely with a huge man. He stepped out onto the porch and looked down from the three-foot elevation. Some six and a half feet of his own put his head over a yard above my own. I felt like a pigmy.

  “Howdy,” he said. He waited for me to take up the conversation.

  I stepped into the yard and said, “Hello. My name’s Wilson Clevenger, and I’ve been bird hunting. Back there.” I waved back toward the woods. “Would you mind if I sat on your steps to eat my lunch? It looked too snaky to risk it, back in the trees.”

  He moved onto the rickety steps. They sagged alarmingly beneath what must have been nearly three hundred pounds. �
�Full of copperheads,” he agreed. “Not safe to sit. Mighty nigh not safe to walk either. Not without good new boots like yours. Sit. Water?”

  “Thank you.” I had a thermos of coffee, but to refuse hospitality with these woodsy people wasn’t polite.

  I ate my sandwiches and drank clear, cold water from his well, which tasted faintly of the cedar bucket holding it. I threw in a comment, now and again, and he gravely tossed back a monosyllable of reply. As I finished, he sighed. “Been a long time since I been able to hunt. Gun’s wore out. Dog died. I’m too heavy to get around. Used to love to hunt.” He stared at me, his head tilted as if sizing me up.

  “It’s a young man’s sport,” I said. “My Dad used to go every year, but once his legs went out on him he couldn’t do anything but give me advice.”

  He rose from his perch on the edge of the porch. “You got to have some of my brew,” he said. “Been wanting company, and sure enough, the minute I get it finished, here you come. It don’t taste near as good when you drink it by yourself.”

  I didn’t want anything he had cooked up, particularly if it was moonshine, and most particularly if it was the stuff I could still smell. But it isn’t polite (or safe) to refuse such an offer. Not from someone who would make two and a half of you. I smiled and reached for the cup he brought from the shack. The taste surprised me. Not bad at all, it was even a bit alcoholic. It tasted sort of greenish, too, but spicy. Its heat made me sweat, and the breeze cooled me down considerably.

  “Not bad,” I said, handing the cup back.

  He grinned like a jack-o’-lantern. “Just the ticket to put you in shape for hunting. There’s a covey down toward the river. Been keepin’ an eye on them all fall. You just sit back while I put on my beat-up old boots, and I’ll show you where to go.”

  The way my luck had been running, I couldn’t turn down his offer. I called Rock and sat back, leaning against a porch post. My eyes seemed very heavy, and I yawned. I relaxed....

  * * * * * * *