A whistle shrilled. She moaned faintly, unable to make enough noise to catch anyone’s attention. The dog, however, knew what must be done. He gave a last sloppy lick at her hair, and she heard his paws padding away up the ridge.
“My God!” That was a voice she knew. Dennis Wheeler ran a dairy near the river someplace, she knew. It must be nearby.
She felt hands touch her hesitantly. She had to look like death warmed over, she thought, as he turned her carefully on her side. Her eyes seemed bleared, but she made out the ruddy face, now creased with concern.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked. Then with a quick indrawing of breath he recognized her. “Doris? Doris Rogers?”
She grunted softly. Having gone all the way through pain and out the other side, now she was numb, unable to move anything. But her will was still there, if nothing else. “Sher’f,” she moaned.
“I’ll get him soon as we take you in to the house. Don’t worry!”
“No!” That came out clearly, sharp on the dawn air. “He...put... me...river.”
Wheeler stared down, trying to understand. Then his eyes widened. “He done this to you? The Sheriff? My God!” He turned to the dog. “You go fetch Mama, Harold. Fetch Mama, you hear?”
The German shepherd looked up at his master, wagged his tail, and took off again up the ridge. Wheeler went down the bank carefully, wet his handkerchief, and came back to dab at Doris’s mud and blood-smeared face. She could see how terrible she must look reflected in his expression, but it was all she could do to keep breathing. Reassuring her rescuer was beyond her.
Someone came at last, but by then she was all but out of it. When they lifted her onto a stretcher and moved her, she passed out, but she came to as they slipped her into an ambulance. “Not to Amberson Hospital. Go to Laf....” she coughed harshly, feeling water still sloshing in her lungs. “Go to Lafferty General. Call husband.” She felt her eyes closing, but she managed to gasp, “718-6767.”
The moves after that were dim intervals of agony interspersed with long patches of unconsciousness. When she woke fully, after a long time, she was lying on her back, her legs pulled up onto a framework and secured there. Her arms wouldn’t move at first, though at last she managed to wiggle the fingers of her right hand.
Her skin burned and stung. Her legs ached violently, and her head felt as if some demonic imp was using it as an anvil. Every time her heart beat, surges of red and orange lit the insides of her eyelids. That wouldn’t do—she opened her eyes.
Ken was there in the recliner beside the bed. As she focused on him, he realized that she was awake. His familiar face bent close, though he understood, evidently, that nothing must touch her for a very long time.
“Hey, kid,” he said, his voice gruff. “You had me worried there for a while.”
She licked her lips, and he got a glass from the tray and held it for her to sip water. That helped, and she managed to ask, “’M I unner arrest?”
His face went grim. “They tried, goddamn ’em. No sooner did the Amberson bunch find out where you are than they sent a deputy with a warrant. But I got your stuff out of the hollow stump in our woods and took it to the DA over here in Lafferty County yesterday morning—you’ve been out for two days, by the way.
“He got the interim judge of the Second District Court to issue an injunction protecting you from harassment by anyone, official or not, until he can get the attorney general’s office to look into this.”
He grinned down at her, and for a moment she felt nothing but triumph. “You got ’em, baby. Cold as dead catfish. Once they listened to those tapes you made over the last months, they got on the stick. They’ve been waiting like vultures circling a dying cow for years to catch those jokers, but nobody has ever had the goods on them before.”
Doris sighed and closed her eyes. Then she opened them again. “It was Sheriff Allen who came into the cell and knocked me out. I’m not certain he was the one who broke my legs and threw me in the river.”
Her husband looked more dangerous than she had ever seen him in all their years together. “He ran over you with his own car. Twice. His treads are marked on your thighs as plain as paint, and they’ve been photographed. You were just lucky that he missed your upper body and your head.
“Whoever put you in the water did it under his orders, it’s certain. He’s going to the wall with his cronies, Dodo. You won’t have to testify at all, unless you want to.”
She sneezed suddenly, and every nerve stood up and screamed. Once she eased a bit, her old anger came back, sending warmth through her.
“Oh, I’ll testify, Ken. You’d better bet I’ll testify. Can you see me, all black and blue and wrapped in bandages like a mummy, being wheeled up to the witness box and telling what happened to me? With all that stuff as evidence?” She sniffed and tried to smile. “I want to see them suffer.”
He reached out gently to touch her forehead with one finger. “We’ll see to that,” he said.
* * * * * * *
The day she wheeled herself into the courtroom, bandages still necessary for the worst of the cuts, and bruises still washes of pale yellow and green on her arms and face, she could, if she insisted, have walked with two canes. Yet Doris wanted to show to the fullest effect the thing that man had done.
She saw understanding in the eyes of the ex-sheriff, and when the jury returned its verdict they, too, had gotten the message. With her documentation and her own story, they put him away for a long time, even in these days of ineffective sentences.
KING OF THE SLOUGH
I have always thought of this part of the country as a sort of cultural Black Hole. There are strange survivals from the past—habits and rituals and almost Neanderthal attitudes. We have our share of really crazy people, too—more than it is comfortable to think about.
The gill net grew like magic. The shuttle flipped in and out, back and forth in the gnarled fingers, and King Deport never looked down to see what they were doing. He had made so many over the years that those fingers needed no supervision from the rest of King. Which was fine with me—that left time and attention for storytelling.
Make no mistake, King’s stories were the best of their kind. I’d thought it when I was a bug-eyed boy of eleven, and when I went back as a grown man, I found them even better than I remembered, a funny reversal of the usual order of things. I might not have gone back to the woodsy East Texas country where I grew up, if it hadn’t been for King and his tales. My folks were gone, moved to Houston, and I hadn’t much to return to but the woods and the river and King.
He was the one who started me collecting tall tales and strange stories, first for fun and then for profit. Once I had my degrees, it was a part-time profession, then full-time. The first book-length collection hit the market just as people were ripe for nostalgia mixed with humor. As it was the result of years of research, it also hit the academics favorably. That first book made a hefty profit for the publisher, and they wanted more.
I had some fine years of travel to Europe, Africa, the Orient, even Lapland and Alaska, seeking out oldsters with tales to tell. And the books did well enough to free me from teaching and the apple-polishing that goes along with it. That suited me fine.
Once I had enough squirreled away to take care of myself and my wife for the rest of our lives, I just sat back and asked myself what it was that I wanted to do. At forty I wasn’t ready to quit work, certainly. The children were young, but they were also independent and busy. Callie, my wife, had her anthropological research to do, and didn’t want to worry about my being at loose ends.
That’s when I decided to go back to the root and source of my interests, back to Skillet Bend and the river, the big woods that even the loggers hadn’t been able to clear out—and King Deport. He was still active and alert, though he was at least eighty. He had seemed old when I was eleven, which meant he was probably forty then. You can hardly produce wrinkles as deep as his in less time than that.
I p
acked up my kit, kissed Callie goodbye, waved to the boys, who were headed out on an expedition of their own, and took off for Skillet Bend, Texas, population 225. My Dad’s old friend, the postmaster, had volunteered to put me up, when I wrote to ask about King, so I had a headquarters right down close to the river and the river bottom for which I was headed.
I was shocked when I saw the way the woods had been devastated, as I drove through the cut-over remnants toward the town. The primal forest of my boyhood was reduced to scrub and stands of pole pine that the timber companies planted where old forests of mixed hickory and gum and oak and pine and ash had stood. I didn’t like it, and I wondered about the wildlife. I figured King could tell me. He watched the wild with care, and he always had a sensible view of anything going on.
Not being eleven any more, I minded my manners and went to dinner with some old friends of my folks. Then I went fishing over the weekend with Ben. So it was three days before I could take off on my own and scout out the woodsy world that had been the joy of my boyhood. Once I got right deep into the wild country, it wasn’t so bad—there were still places so remote and swampy that it was too hard to get in with loaders and skidders and trucks.
Down on the river was state land. They had built a big lake twenty years ago and bought up all the access land upstream from the place where the Nichayac ran into the catchment. There was still some huge timber there, far back in where timber thieves couldn’t handily go. I hoped the cutting on the banks had been done by thieves. I still had the illusion that the state had more sense than to cut off ground-cover along the waterside.
At the mud ramp, where fishermen launched their boats, I backed my borrowed pickup truck and off-loaded the light aluminum boat I had also borrowed. To get in to find King, you had to know how to do it. I hoped I remembered.
Once I was sliding down the current between the overhanging willows lining the bank, I felt suddenly as if the decades had evaporated. I was still a boy on the way to see my friend and hero. I almost checked out my old trotline spots, out of habit, as I moved along, but the dead trees I’d used as markers were long gone, and the willows there were the great-grandchildren of those to which I had tied my lines.
So I eased along, using the paddle now and again to maneuver around a sand bar or a snag. Before I knew it, I was at the mouth of the creek where I had to leave the boat. There was a good stout post there, where King’s infrequent visitors could tie up securely. His own boat was hidden someplace so secure that not even I had ever been able to find it.
Once afoot, I went along the worn path, smelling the mellow woods-scent of home. There wasn’t another to match it. Africa smelled strong and alien. Europe had a distant effluvium of too many people in the same place for too long. The Orient mostly stunk. East Texas woods smelled like rain on new grass, leaves quietly mulching for generations, and strong old trees waiting out the years wrapped in clean and peeling bark.
I was grinning like a fool by the time I rounded the last bend in the path and saw King’s shanty leaning against the tremendous pine he’d chosen as its prop and stay. I paused and pursed up my lips. The tooo-whee! whistle that had been our signal cut through the rustling quiet.
There was no reply for maybe a minute and a half. Then a tremulous reply came to my ears. I ran to the door and pushed. It hung low on its leather hinges and scraped the floor, but I automatically lifted, and there was King, sitting by a smudge of fire, though it was already getting hot so late in the spring. His lap was full of gillnet, as usual, though two hoop-nets leaned against the far wall, one already fitted with all its netting, the other halfway done.
He looked up but didn’t try to rise. That told me a lot about what time had done to him. In the old days, he would have met me before I got to the door.
“Bam,” he murmured. “Alabama Vincent Tremaine! Never thought to see you agin, boy. Come set by me and tell me how it’s gone, all these years since your folks moved off. By gum, boy, I never would of dreamed you’d come back. They tell me you teach in a college, or did. And write books!” His tone was full of awe, and I suddenly recalled that he never went to school in his life. He couldn’t read a book, much less write one.
I sat beside him on the short-legged stool that had always been my place, and told him about my life and travels. His questions and comments amazed me with their insight into the ways people related with each other, no matter where they were. When I said something about it, he laughed.
“Folks is folks, Bam, wherever they live. All of ’em pretty well act the same when you poke ’em with a stick. “
Which I suspect may be perfectly true.
Then I questioned him about the woods and the beasts he knew so well. I also asked about the depredations of the loggers, and that was when his face went grim, his fingers slowed on the shuttle.
“Stupid bastards! Log the riverbanks so the land just slides off down into the Gulf of Mexico. Cut the woods and leave the critters to move or die. They’d be right down here with their damn chainsaws and mechanical monsters, if....” His voice dwindled to silence.
“If what?” I asked. There had been something in his tone that sent a chill up my back.
He looked at me through the light, which was partly sunlight filtered through that granddaddy pine tree, partly red light from the coals on his hearth. His eyes, black as swamp water, were thoughtful, sizing me up as a man, the way they’d done when I was a boy. He nodded, a mere dip of the chin.
“I reckon I can tell you, Bam. Nobody else knows, but you I can trust. Could from Day One. Only been two boys I ever knowed that was trusty, and t’other was my son. He’s been gone...but that’s of no account. You I can trust, same as I could him. But never let a hint slip, not till I’m dead and gone.”
“Hope to die,” I said, with the old fervor.
He sighed. His hands moved faster, as the gillnet grew. “Well, you know I heired all this land from my folks. My great-great-great-granddaddy had it on a grant from the King of Spain. That’s why all the oldest sons was named King, kind of in appreciation, you see?” I nodded, for I’d heard that before. “I never let no logger set foot here and never will as long as I hold breath. They know that. Many’s the lawyer’s come all the way, duded up in shiny boots and fancy khakis, to see can they hornswoggle me into signing some of their papers.”
He cocked his head to look me in the eye. “Happen you remember I can’t read. Don’t sign nothing I can’t read, so I don’t sign nothing at all. I send ’em all back to town to Mr. Jenkins. He taken care of my Dad, and he’s took care of me. But I guess some of them bastards figured I was getting too old to look to my affairs. You know better, boy, and others do too, but loggers ain’t what you’d call real bright, or they’d be doing something else in the world besides messing up the woods.”
“They tried to steal your timber?” I asked. The idea shocked me, though I knew timber theft was common.
“You recall Rupe Hendricks?” he asked.
The name rang a dim bell in my memory. A shape formed around the name: a tough, square boy with just enough brains not to be an idiot, but not any over and to spare. He had, if I recalled, enough meanness to make up for any amount of dumbness. “I remember,” I said.
“Thought you might. You beaten the tar out of him once, when he made trouble for your little brother. Well, he come down here onto my land, marking my trees. They figured that if they knowed just what they wanted to take out, then they could sneak in, cut ’em, and float ’em downriver, catching ’em at the bend above Bobcat Creek. I dunno how they thought to get the things to water, but they might have intended to bring mules across my property line to drag ’em. Anyway, they sent Rupe in to mark.”
He bent and lifted a snuff can from the hearth and spat a stream of tobacco juice into it, put the lid on neatly, and set it back. “That boy knowed timber, if nothing else. He marked the big walnut by the creek, first off. All the biggest pines. Must’ve hurt his soul to pass by mine here, but he didn’t dare come
close to the house. There’s a big stand of ash he intended to take—every bit of it, but I dunno what for.
“All the big hickories was marked, probably for railroad ties. He didn’t miss a trick. But of course I caught on the first time I cast around the woods. You can’t mark a tree so I don’t see it. I didn’t know who, right then, but I for certain knowed what.” He leaned back in his hickory splint chair to ease his back and stretched his fingers, cracking the knotted joints. Then he picked up the shuttle.
“You recall the big slough over at the edge of my land, where Grampa Catfish lives?”
Having tried for half my young life to catch Grampa, I would never forget that muddy stretch that was so much deeper than it looked.
“That’s where I caught up with him. Waited for days before he come, but I knowed he would. That stand of pine has been what most of the lawyers wanted, and I knowed no timber-marker could pass it up. Soon’s as I seen it was Rupe, I knowed I was in trouble. You know how mean he was, and I was pretty old and stove up, even then. In my prime, I’d have tied him into a bow-knot and hung him in a tree, but that’s a good many years back, and was then too.
“Anyway, he looked up from his mark and seen me watching. Never paused nor howdied, just come at me like a catamount. Now you know, Bam, I never go no place without my stick. Even when I was young, I taken it along for snakes. You can’t carry a stick for sixty years without getting to know how to handle it. So I knocked him in the head, hard as I could. Didn’t faze him.” He chuckled.
“Onliest thing that boy ever used his head for was to hold up his hat. Solid bone, it was. I tripped him, next pass he made at me, and set on his back while I got my wind. Had to keep whacking his head to keep him from bucking me off, but it worked.”
I felt a cold knot in my stomach. If what I was thinking had happened….
“Then I got mad. Here was this peckerwood cruising my land, ready to steal my trees, and trying to beat me up for catching him at it. Purely unreasonable, I thought it to be. I seldom lose my temper, Bam. One reason I live so far from folks is because I know I’ve got one, so I keep it where it can’t do no harm. But he come to me. And I was hot. Hot as a firecracker.”
Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills Page 7
