I still want to know how you got my description, though. I didn’t even go into that tacky little bank, and not a soul even so much as glanced at the Chevy while I waited.
Damn! You don’t mean it! An old lady with a telescope? You’ve got to be kidding. Well, I can sort of see that a little bitty place like that doesn’t have much excitement....
How many? Six divorces? My God, I didn’t know little towns had so much action going on. She ratted on ’em all, did she? And on me too.
Oh, well. I guess the public defender will do me as well as anybody. My own lawyer gave up on me after the last conviction. He didn’t do me any good anyhow.
Too bad—this looked like such an easy job. And with my luck, Kenny and Robert will make it away clean as a whistle, while I’m stuck with the rap again.
It’s almost enough to make a man go straight.
DIGGING UP ARTHUR
Psychosis takes oddball forms in the big woods—and this story is based on a series of actual newspaper stories that aren’t that far in the past.
Even after ten years, I still kill him again every night. There’s no satisfaction in it, of course, because I know I’m dreaming. You’d think, having gotten away with it as slick as a whistle, that I’d let the thing drop, let him be, let him lie there in the cemetery in the woods and rest in peace.
I can’t seem to do that. He died too fast. It wasn’t slow and painful enough to fulfill the need that made me kill him to begin with. I wish I hadn’t taken the gun with me at all. My bare hands would have had the pleasure of wringing his miserable life out of him, cutting off his breath, feeling him struggle and heave, watching him go black in the face.... I get excited when I think about that. Have to go out and walk around the block very quickly, while I cool down again.
I never had the urge to kill anyone else. Not ever. But after he married Linda—my Linda—I never wanted anything so much in my life as to kill Arthur, slowly, painfully, lingeringly...there! My blood pressure is going up again. Have to watch that.
I go about my business just about the way anyone else does; take my wife and children to church and to picnics and ballgames. I’m no monster. I don’t let that fixation get in the way of earning a living and helping out my neighbors. I even ran for the City Council last year, though I was pretty relieved when I was beaten in the runoff.
It’s just about this time of year, late summer, with the grass drying in the fields and pears getting ripe on the trees, the heat wavering in a haze over everything, that I think of that last day of Arthur’s life. It all came to a head that day, though he didn’t have the foggiest notion that I had ever been upset with him at all, anymore than anyone else had.
I walked up to him in the back woods behind his farmhouse. He thought I’d been out hunting rabbits, I suppose, because he didn’t more than glance at the shotgun I carried.
I blew him away before he could finish saying hello.
Everyone, including the deputies and the sheriff, thought somebody had been hunting in the woods, and had killed him by accident and been afraid to own up to it. There was a big funeral, and I took Carrie and the baby and we all looked mighty sad.
I thought I had done with him.
The dreams started a while later. I’d wake up out of a sound sleep, covered with sweat, seeing him dying. Not by the shotgun blast, but in a lot of different ways, all of them slow. Carrie began to believe I was coming down with something and kept giving me vitamins. There would be months and months when everything went along fine as silk. Then I’d get to thinking about Arthur. I’d go out there to Rosebud Cemetery, whenever Carrie took the kids to see her mother for a few days, and do nothing but drink, lying there on Arthur’s grave, cursing him better and better the drunker I got.
The cemetery is so far out in the woods that nobody goes there except for a funeral or, from time to time, to put a plot in order. There’s plenty of warning—you can hear a car rattling over the washboard road for a mile or more before it gets there, so I never got caught. But after a while it got so that that wasn’t enough.
I went all over the area, when I could steal the time from my job, and tore down his advertising stickers for his real estate business that he ran along with his farm. Got every one in the county and most of those in the adjoining counties. That helped for a good long time, because it wasn’t a thing you can get done in a year or even in two.
I quit having the dreams as long as that lasted, but there came a time when I couldn’t find a sign or a sticker or even a business card left anyplace. That’s when the dreams started again.
I knew something had to be done when I woke up in the middle of the night choking Carrie. She was grunting and struggling and flopping, and that must be what woke me. Good thing. I’d have killed her if I’d gone on sleeping.
That really put the fat into the fire. Nothing would do but I had to go to Dallas and see a psychiatrist. She harped on that day and night until I wished I’d finished the job—or at least broken her voice box. I had good reason not to take off from work, but finally she got at Ralph, my boss, and the two of the fixed it up so I had to go.
That was one screwed-up dude I talked to. When I told him I was having bad dreams, he got started on why I hated my folks and when I’d been toilet trained. Soon as I saw what he wanted, I gave him just that, and he sent me home with a clean bill of health. Well, not quite that, but he said I was as normal as anybody. Which, looking around me, doesn’t say a lot at that.
This thing had been rocking along for a decade by now, and I’d handled it as well as I could all the way. The cemetery quit being used for new burials, so I could visit there without having to fear anything but a visit from Arthur’s old mother, who had a habit of going out there and weeding or planting flowers at the damndest times.
I don’t know if it was choking Carrie or the talk with the psychiatrist that got things off their even keel. I started having worse dreams than ever. I made so much noise at night that Carrie moved into the guest room, just to be able to sleep.
I’d wake up in a cold sweat, with my hands remembering the throbbing of Arthur’s throat or feeling the sticky heat of his blood, and I’d lie there shaking for a long time. I soon knew that something had to be done. I hadn’t done it right in the beginning, that was the problem. What I had to do now was to do it all over again, and this time do a bang-up job. It would take time. Uninterrupted time. In the daylight. I wasn’t about to try something like that in the dark.
My chance came when Carrie’s Ma got sick. It was late summer again, with the kids out of school, so they all went to stay for a couple of weeks and get the old lady back on her feet. If she’d known what a favor she was doing me, she’d have got well right off, instead of going around so puny for so long. But she didn’t know, and that’s what counts.
I watched Arthur’s Ma for a few days, to make sure she’d already done her stint of graveyard tending for the week. Sure enough, she got done on a Tuesday. I went home from work Wednesday with a virus, I told Ralph. Wouldn’t be in the next day at all. Maybe by Friday....
He was all sympathy.
* * * * * * *
Bright and early Thursday morning I took off for Rosebud Cemetery in the old pickup that belonged to my Dad. I keep it out in the back shed, and it only gets cranked once a month. It had enough tools in the back to dig up the whole graveyard.
They’d put in a fancy kind of grave marker. Out at Rosebud, the graves are all so old, most of them, that they just go anywhichaways. The plots lie at angles to each other, and there’s no telling, except by the individual markers, which way any grave is headed. I checked out Arthur’s pretty carefully, but I have to admit that I’d brought a bottle to keep me company.
I decided which end was which, and that wasn’t easy, and started in digging. I didn’t intend to uncover the whole coffin, you see, but just a hole big enough to let me get down and choke him again through the hole I’d chop in the lid. Saved a heck of a lot of work.
Well
, I worked and sweated, and the sun got hotter and hotter above the big pines that shaded the place, and I kept drinking to help cool off. But it was near noon by the time I hit something that went thunk! It was the coffin, and no mistake.
I climbed out of the hole and got my hatchet, which I’d brought just for that purpose. Once back down there, I began hacking away at the coffin-lid. They don’t make those things with chopping in mind. They’re slick and hard, and that had been an expensive box.
Finally I broke through, and that gave me the energy to get busy and make that hole big enough so I could see his ugly face while I did the job right and choked him.
By damn, when I looked through with my flashlight, there was nothing there but a pair of skinny ankles in black silk socks! I’d gone and dug up the wrong end!
I tried choking the ankles, but it just isn’t the same thing. Besides, there was a smell. I could have stood it, if I’d been really caught up in what I was doing, but it just wasn’t going to work. I could see that pretty soon.
There was no way I could take the time to dig up the other end and chop through more of that confounded coffin. I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the energy, and I was hot as a six-shooter anyway. Having a stroke or heart attack out there at Rosebud wasn’t going to help things a bit.
That’s why I came back home without doing what I’d set out to do. That’s not my way, not as a general rule, but things just turned out so.
I’m lying here in my E-Z-Rest with a cold beer in my hand and the TV on. I’ll get all good and rested. Tomorrow morning, I’ll call in and tell Ralph I’m still sick.
Then, by God, I’ll go back out there and dig up the right end of Arthur!
NIGHT OF THE COUGAR
There are wild tales about cougars still floating about in the woods of East Texas. But the very wildest ones are probably true....
She watched Jody as long as she could see the glint of his red shirt through the leaves along the brushy trail. The dim thuds of old Sam’s shoes came to her ears for a little while longer. Then they were both gone, and the birdcalls in the woods around the cabin didn’t seem to interrupt the silence at all.
Julie sighed as she turned toward her garden plot. With Little Jody and the baby both napping, her house was quiet too. She had always liked the woodsy spot they’d picked to homestead. East Texas was much like her southern Mississippi birthplace, but when Jody went off in work with the loggers it got mighty lonesome.
Her sunbonnet was hot against her neck, and its curving brim cut off her view of anything around her when she stooped over the rows, her hands busy among the tender sprouts of cabbage and turnip greens and onions. She didn’t really like sunbonnets...never had. It had taken the full weight of her father’s authority to make her toe the line and wear one to keep the sun from browning her fair skin.
“’Tain’t ladylike!” had been his most devastating indictment of any female. But she had never liked the girls he pointed out as ideals of feminine behavior. It was just as well that Jody had come along and carried her away from Laurel and its cadre of ladylike prototypes.
There was motion—she turned her head to watch a coachwhip snake go slipping along the fence line by the woodshed. No danger there, she knew.
But she kept a wary eye on any serpent about the house. Little Jody was at an age when anything new got chased and usually caught. She had no intention of letting him get bit by a copperhead or a moccasin.
The late spring sun was warm on her back. Sweat began sliding down her beneath her wool serge clothing. It was time to get out the summer-weight stuff, to cut Jody out of his winter underwear. She’d shed her own three weeks ago, amid her husband’s dire warnings about late cold snaps and pneumonia.
Then the sweat all but all but congealed on her skin. A long wail cut across the morning woods-noises. A cougar, hunting late maybe. She hated the sound of them, the long lonesome cry like a woman in pain. And once she’d been warned about the beast, she had hated it even more. A creature that craved human babies was something downright evil.
There were tales among the old women she saw occasionally at camp meetings of the church in the summertime; they could tell you tales that would curl your hair and kink your bones. One of those women had lost her own babe some forty years gone, when a cougar had come right into the yard and taken it out of the basket where it was sleeping while she washed. Julie shivered, remembering.
Though she knew better, she put away her hoe and went into the house to check on the children. Little Jody slept in total relaxation, boneless, his small month open, his eyes partway open too. Lissa was beginning to squirm in her hickory-splint basket, the way she always did when she was getting ready to wake up. It was just as well she’d quit in the garden. The baby would be ready to nurse any minute now. And Jody would wake up hungry. He always did.
The infant whimpered. Julie bent over the crib, felt the dampish head. Lissa hadn’t been feeling too pert for some time now. Likely some spring ailment. She’d make up some herb tea and spoon it down the child. Everybody needed a tonic in the spring, seemed like.
She lifted the plump baby and sat in the small rocker she’d brought from Mississippi in the wagon with the rest of their few bits of furniture and Jody’s plow-tools. Unbuttoning her bodice let in a grateful bit of cool air as the baby suckled. Before they were done, Jody began to grunt and thrash, the way he did sometimes. Seemed as if a body needed to be twins, when you had so much to do.
She didn’t put the children in the little pen their daddy had built in the front yard, when both were fed. She’d heard that cougar, and she was no fool. She kept them in sight all afternoon, though it meant taking off her ladylike sunbonnet and putting on her husband’s old straw hat while she finished up in the garden.
Jody was fine, just playing with pine cones and marking in the dust with sticks and watching Coaly, the fiery black horse, pace ’round and ’round the lot where he was penned. But Lissa wasn’t herself. She whimpered a lot, gave little bubbling cries from time to time. Julie began to feel uneasy about her. Something was amiss, and Jody had always been so healthy that she hadn’t learned much about baby sickness in dealing with him.
There was a quiver of uneasiness inside her at the thought. With her husband gone and the nearest neighbor twelve miles east, through woods so thick you couldn’t see ten feet in any direction, it was scary to contemplate what she’d do if one of the children got really badly sick. She had tackled a lot of hard things since leaving home and her mother. She shook herself, took a deep breath.
Nobody had ever promised her it’d be easy, Jody least of all. In fact, he’d stressed everything he could think of that might have made her change her mind. He’d wanted her to marry him, no doubt of that, but he’d had no intention of taking her off to something that wasn’t what she thought it’d be. She couldn’t fault him for the fact that there’d been things that neither of them had been able to guess at.
Like the lack of doctors. There wasn’t one nearer than Nicholson, twenty-five miles to the west. It was pure luck that had put them as near as they were to Gramma Dooley, though twelve miles was a long way and took a half day to cover, with the road nothing more than a rough track through the woods. On horseback it was quicker, but if she were forced to make it there on her own she’d have to take the buckboard. You just couldn’t manage a baby and a three-year-old on horseback. Particularly when the horse was Coaly.
She finished in the garden and took the children inside. It was mid-afternoon, already hot and steamy, though it was only April. She took the cotton clothing out of the long chest and shook it out, then hung it on the clothesline to air. The heavier woolens they’d worn all winter had already been washed or aired and gone into storage. By the time she finished it was twilight.
When she was fixing Jody’s supper, nibbling along as she did it, as she usually did for her own meals, she heard a sound from the sleeping room where she’d put Lissa back into her basket. A choking sound.
Her heart thumping in her throat, Julie ran across the dog-run hall and caught up the baby. The child’s fare was scarlet, and she was struggling for breath. As she lifted her, Lissa began coughing harshly, wheezing for breath between spasms. A dose of honey and vinegar didn’t relieve the baby’s coughing. The struggles to breathe made the baby try to cry, and that made everything even worse. The herb tea didn’t seem to help at all, nor did goose grease rubbed onto her chest. By full dark, Julie knew that she needed help.
She hitched Coaly by lantern light. Crickets were chittering all around in the grass. Frogs of all sizes were chorusing down at the creek. A screech owl’s shivering cry punctuated the rest, making her shiver. But she didn’t hear the cougar. That was something she was thankful for.
She put blankets in the wagon bed for Little Jody. He was almost asleep when she laid him on them, and by the time she came back with Lissa in her basket he was sound asleep. The baby was still making those strange barking sounds. She seemed to have a fever too, though Julie was so hot with haste and work that it was hard to tell.
She hung the lantern on the hook let into the pole at the front of the wagon, led Coaly out into the track that went roughly upward past their front porch, and climbed into the buckboard.
“Hup! Coaly, giddap!” she said, and the horse snorted, tried to dance sideways between the shafts, then reluctantly moved forward. The night air was so much cooler than the afternoon had been that it felt almost cold to her hands. She tugged the spare quilt she’d brought for Jody about her shoulders and smacked the hors’s rump with the end of a rein.
The forest was in darkness, deeper than the moonless sky. Leaves shone fitfully as the lantern passed, but the feeble gleam couldn’t penetrate far into the dense wood on either side of the track. And the track itself took much of her attention. Coaly’s neat hooves could pass easily over ruts and roots that jounced the wagon so hard it endangered its wheels.
Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills Page 17
