Call the Devil by His Oldest Name

by Sallie Bissell

  “What’s going on?” Ruperta leaned forward from the backseat.

  Paz fought the tightness in his chest he always felt whenever he saw American cops; he sank down lower in his seat. “Sit down, Ruperta,” he told her in Spanish. “And be quiet.”

  Gordo touched the bill of his cap at the cops who leaned against their patrol cars, then turned into the campground, pulling up beside one of the long-haired men.

  “You here for the rally?” The young man leaned against the van. Paz gripped the handle, ready to bolt. This Indian didn’t sound like any he’d ever seen in the movies. Maybe Ruperta had been right. Maybe Señora and Gordo had brought them to some kind of camp where the cops rounded up all the ilegalidads before they sent them back. Señora would do such a thing for money; Gordo would help her just for a laugh.

  “Yep,” said Gordo.

  “There’s a twenty-dollar fee per carload. You with any tribe?”

  “Croatan,” Gordo replied. When the young man stared at him blankly, he added, “Lumbees, to you young’uns.”

  The guard checked his clipboard. “Okay. We’ve got a few of you guys here. Go to the top of the hill and take a right. The Lumbees are down on the far side of the creek.”

  Paz watched Gordo pull his wallet from his pocket and hand the guard a twenty-dollar bill. “Thanks.” The young man took the money and waved them through. Paz’s grip on the door handle loosened as Gordo drove forward and the troopers grew smaller in the van’s side mirror. Maybe Gordo wasn’t taking them to some kind of internment center, after all. Maybe they had indeed come to a Gypsy camp. It didn’t matter to him. For now, he had enough to do keeping an eye on the cops and watching for a singularly tall man with a death-head bracelet tattooed on his wrist.

  Two hundred miles to the west, at the old white farmhouse where Paz and Ruperta had begun their journey, Edwina Templeton lay dozing on the only truly comfortable sofa she owned. Located in a mudroom off the kitchen, the sofa sat beneath the west-facing windows of the room where she’d shoved it just for rare moments like this, when she was the only soul in the big house and the afternoon sun made the worn leather upholstery feel like butter on her skin.

  “Doc, no!” Edwina cried aloud, her eyes fluttering open, awakened by an edge-of-sleep dream that blurred the lines between reality and somnolent fantasy. She sat up, her ears sharp, wondering if Duncan had prematurely returned. Quickly she rose from the sofa, brushing the wrinkles from the long white lab coat she wore. Never had she been able to stand the thought of anyone watching her sleep.

  She walked to the kitchen and looked out the back door. The van was nowhere in sight. The only noise she heard was the comfortable tock of her Philadelphia tall case clock in the hall. She started to relax again. She was still alone.

  She put a kettle of water on to boil. As she reached in the cabinet for the Lady Grey tea she saved for special occasions, she caught sight of the day’s mail resting on the counter, a thick, cream-colored vellum envelope addressed to her in an elegant, sloping hand.

  Her heart began to beat fast all over again. Today, just after Duncan’s departure, the mailman had delivered an item sought by many but extended to few—an invitation to put her house on the Christmas Tour of Homes.

  She stared at the thick envelope, lost in thought. The missive from the society matrons of Williamson County signified, for her, the end of a long journey. She’d had the misfortune to grow up poor in a county of great wealth. Her parents lived in a trailer park just down the road from this very property. Though her mother had real talent as a seamstress and had worked hard to make sure she looked nice, she’d walked to school when others rode, eschewed after-school skating parties to earn money baby-sitting, and prayed to God that none of her classmates would ever drive by to see her father in his undershirt, passed out drunk on their front steps. She’d started the first grade as “Edwina”; she’d finished high school as “Whinny,” a name the boys gave her because they said she looked like she should be pulling a plow.

  However equine she might have looked, she had brains enough to make herself useful to their general practitioner neighbor, Dr. Skinner. She baby-sat, with admirable patience, his one re­tarded son and then, when the boy died, she took over the housekeeping as Mrs. Skinner methodically anesthetized herself into oblivion with Seconal and Myers’s rum. Edwina was surprised one night when the doctor caressed her thigh as she served him dinner; she took pleasure a few nights later when he squeezed her breasts as she washed the dishes. When he called her into his examination room and pulled her skirt up and her pants down, she realized that she might have lucked into something. What exactly, she wasn’t certain, but it sure looked like a way out of the trailer park and into the plusher ranks of the smug people she’d gone to school with.

  She’d quickly learned how to please the doctor in ways he’d never imagined: in exchange, she extracted his promise to send her to nursing school. By the time she graduated, Mrs. Skinner had died, and she came back to work for Dr. Skinner as lover, nurse, then co-conspirator, when one of Nashville’s wealthiest debs made a secret visit to this house late one night and bled out on the table. The furor over that didn’t end until eighteen months later, when Doc walked out to the barn and mainlined enough Thorazine to kill a horse. Edwina wound up with this house, which she’d lived in and turned, over the past forty years, into the mostly legal operation it was today.

  The acceptance, however, that she’d sought since high school eluded her. She tried to live like the women she envied: shopping at the right stores, lunching at the right restaurants, generously supporting horse shows and golf tournaments for various charities. She’d been commended for her efforts, too—been given plaques by Planned Parenthood and the Tennessee Adoption League. Yet, for all her good work, as she walked to her car from the eleven o’clock service at St. Phillip’s, she sometimes saw the women she’d known as girls giggling among themselves, the name “Whinny” reaching her ears like a long-ago taunt borne on an endless breeze.

  “Maybe not anymore, though,” she said aloud, taking the now-shrieking kettle off the burner. Maybe that moron Duncan would bring back some kind of baby she could make some money on. Maybe she would be able to buy that antique bed she’d been salivating over in the New Orleans auction catalog. If she could get it shipped here and set up in the downstairs bedroom in time, it would knock the knickers off those Christmas tour bitches. They would be sick with envy. They would finally see her for what she truly was. And they would never dream of calling her “Whinny” again.

  Ten

  LOGAN PARKED EDWINA’S van between an Airstream trailer with Florida plates and an old VW van that was covered in bumper stickers. A couple of elderly Floridians puttered around the Airstream, seemingly having blundered into the rally by mistake. On the other side, a tattooed man lifted his hand once in greeting, then disap­peared with his girlfriend into the van. Shortly thereafter it began rocking, its worn shocks an­nouncing each pelvic thrust with a loud metal­lic squeak. Ruperta pointed out the window and giggled, murmuring the word tórtolos.

  Logan walked over to a fiery red maple tree, unwrapped a Hershey bar, and considered the pair he’d brought with him. He’d always sus­pected Paz was ducking the cops; now he was certain. Innocent men do not sink down in their seats when they pass state troopers, sweat dotting their foreheads. The migrant workers he’d dealt with in Pisgah County knew the border dance so well that getting busted provoked nothing more than resigned irritation, yet Paz had looked at those troopers like a rabbit cornered by dogs. The INS didn’t instill that kind of terror in any­body. The little bastard must be in very deep shit down Mexico way.

  He took a bite of chocolate, hoping it would calm the manic thrum inside him. Ruperta, on the other hand, had surprised him. Though she’d seemed upset when he’d likened the Indians to Gypsies, she had not shown the wide-eyed, Hail Mary kind of fear he’d expected. Even now she was chattering t
o Paz, slyly praising three strapping male Indians who wore nothing but deerskin breechclouts between their legs and a smear of rusty paint across their faces. He sighed. He would have to keep an eye on these two. Paz for one reason, Ruperta for quite another.

  He finished his candy bar and walked over toward Paz, letting his old sheriff’s gaze impart his meaning. I’ve got you by the short hairs, amigo. And you’re gonna jump when I say so.

  “Come on, you two,” he said as Paz pulled Ruperta closer. “Let’s go for a little walk.”

  He followed behind the Mexican couple as they strolled through rows of campers, all parked beneath various tribal totems nailed to the trees. It was happy hour in Native America. Senecas from New York were drinking Genessee beer while Alabama Choctaws nipped from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Two Rappahannock women de­canted a plastic jug of homemade scuppernong wine while their husbands argued about the Redskins football team.

  Logan watched the two ahead of him. Ruperta was clutching Paz’s hand, whispering in his ear every time she spotted someone in native costume. Paz took scant interest in the feathers and war paint; he scanned the crowd nervously, as if looking for someone he knew.

  They crested the hill of trailers to find a small cove. A stage had been set up at the far end, where hundreds of Indians crowded around a rock band. To Logan it looked like any other rock concert, but when the breeze turned in their direction, he caught the smell of fry-bread and smoky sage. The mix of aromas sent a sudden wave of nausea through him, and he hurried Paz and Ruperta on up the hill. Puking at strange odors was another little gift from Ms. Crow, one he’d prefer not to exhibit in the middle of a crowd.

  As they walked, he noticed other demonstrators were joining the rally. Green-shirted Appalachian ecologists passed out leaflets about the dangerously high ozone levels in the Smoky Mountains, while a group called the Saviors of the Southern Forests tried to torch a dummy made up to look like the congressman from western North Carolina, reputed to be nothing more than a pawn of the timber lobby. As the causes and the numbers of protesters grew, Logan realized that the rally had grown too big for them to just happen upon one woman and a baby. He would have to find another way to locate Walkingstick’s wife. He stopped for a moment to let Paz and Ruperta listen to the music, then stepped over to a long-haired man wearing one of the red SOB staff shirts. He hated to leave even a wisp of a trail for the cops to follow, but he had no choice.

  “Say, buddy, do you know where I might find some Cherokees named Walkingstick?”

  “Let me check.” The young man, who had a turquoise stud stuck in one nostril, peered at the clipboard he was carrying. “Cherokees are over by the volleyball court.” He pointed to the other side of the cove. “But Ruth Walkingstick’s be­hind the stage. Next to Gabe Benge, according to this.”

  “Thanks.” Logan smiled. He waited until the young man moved farther down the hill, then he eased back over to Paz and Ruperta.

  “Come on,” he told them. “We need to go this way.’’

  Again he walked behind them, trying to disguise his limp as best he could. If Walkingstick hadn’t fallen for his boar-hunt scam, he would recognize his lopsided gait in a heartbeat. Should that happen, the game would be over. Walkingstick would turn him in to the cops for sure—if he didn’t just kill him outright.

  They picked their way around the crowd, dodging golf carts carrying official SOB staff. They passed a tent with Army cots and a big red cross stitched on the top, then another, smaller tent labeled “Media Information.” As they neared the stage, Logan noticed a circle of women gossiping about something, laughing nosily. He recognized the thick Appalachian accents immediately. Cherokees. Though they all looked vaguely familiar, the woman he’d watched remove her blouse at Little Jump Off did not stand among them.

  The Walkingsticks must be at their camp, he decided, walking a little faster. Mommy and baby, for sure. If his luck held, Daddy would not be accompanying them.

  He directed them onto a path that led off the main road. It meandered through the trees for fifty yards, then bottomed out along a creek. Suddenly he saw it. A secluded campsite with two vehicles parked side-by-side. One was a camper van with an orange University of Tennessee flag dangling from its aerial. The other was a clunky, modified Chevy pickup with North Carolina tags.

  He turned to Paz and Ruperta. Paz was eyeing everything—the trees, the creek, even the honeysuckle bushes. Still looking for something, Logan thought. Or for someone.

  “Follow me,” he whispered to the pair. “Quietly.”

  This time, he led the way. They followed him without question, crossing the creek on large, flat rocks and slipping into the trees along the other side of the bank. When they reached a rhododendron thicket directly behind Walkingstick’s trailer, they stopped. Ruperta started to say something, then hushed: a baby began crying.

  “Come on, come on,” Logan urged as he peered through the thick green leaves. “Show me who’s there.”

  Then it happened. Almost as if on command, the screen door of the trailer squeaked open and the woman from Little Jump Off stepped out. Walkingstick did not follow; instead, another woman came to the camper door, the baby yowling in her arms.

  “All I have to do is announce Benjamin Goodeagle,” Walkingstick’s wife was telling the other woman. ”Then I’ll come back and you can go to the party.”

  “How can I get her to quit crying?” asked her young friend, awkwardly jiggling the child.

  “Play the Mozart CD,” Walkingstick’s wife called over her shoulder. “Or the Hopi flute music. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  “Don’t lose track of the time,” the other woman called. “My party starts at six.”

  The younger woman watched as Walking­stick’s wife headed up the path toward the stage, then she and the wailing baby disappeared into the camper. Logan felt a surge of satisfaction. No Walkingstick. No man. Not any kind of security at all. Just two women, and one of them would rather be partying than baby-sitting that child. Everything was going according to plan.

  “You’re gonna get your wish, Miss Babysitter,” he murmured as strains of soothing classical music began to float from the camper. “This time tomorrow, you can dance the night away. Quieting Lily Walkingstick won’t be a problem at all.”

  At that same moment, another man had Lily Walkingstick on his mind: Jonathan Walkingstick sat on the hood of his truck, watching the sun slide behind the pine trees above him. The dying sky blazed brilliant pink—just the color of the little cap and shawl Aunt Little Tom had knitted for little Lily. What an asshole he’d been, coming down here. He should have just sucked it up and gone with his wife. Even if Ruth had become hard to get along with, at least he could have kept his child safe from the hundred different hands that would beg to hold her, away from the various noxious breaths that would blow their germs in her face.

  “Idiot,” he chastised himself. “You don’t deserve a child like Lily.”

  After Ruth left, he’d kept the store open until noon, then driven three hours on roads that went from paved to graveled to mud, finally winding up here, at the bottom of a mountain on the banks of Dick’s Creek. For two more hours he’d sat, growing cold and impatient, listening to the distant shrill of screech owl and the gurgle of the creek beside him.

  Motionless, he gazed into the darkening woods, watching as a fat, hunched-back raccoon crept out of the underbrush toward the creek. The diurnal animals were bedding down for the night, leaving the world to their nocturnal colleagues. Soon owls would begin swooping down on voles and field mice; skunks would leave their burrows to claw grubs from rotten logs. He had done nothing to improve his fam­ily’s lot this day. In fact, he’d spent this entire afternoon sitting on his butt, waiting for this son-of-a-bitch to show up.

  “Clootie Duncan,” he read aloud, pulling the gum wrapper from his pocket for the third time. “Dick’s Creek Trail Head, 4:00,
Fri. aft.”

  This was the place, and he’d been here since three o’clock. He’d thought it odd from the get go, driving this deep into the forest this late in the day, but the guy had promised him five hundred dollars for a two-day hunt. Hell, for that much money, he’d have taken him out for snipes at midnight.

  “Five more minutes,” he muttered, watching the coon dip its paw into the creek, then rub water all over its masked snout. Five more minutes, then Clootie Duncan could hunt frigging boar all by himself. He was going to scramble back up that road and get over to Tremont, Ten­nessee. If he drove hard, he could make it by midnight. Then Ruth could save all the bones she wanted, Clarinda could get laid, and he could keep his Lily safe again.

  Cheered by that thought, he scooted off the hood of the truck humming “Brown-Eyed Girl,” the tune that bubbled through his subcon­scious like a subterranean spring. As the last rays of sunlight disappeared behind the mountains, the cool air grew cold, and he began to feel the damp of the creek deep in his bones. He reached inside the truck and retrieved his jacket, won­dering what Lily was doing right now. Probably eating supper, he decided. They will have found their campsite, set up the little pop-up camper. Ruth will have met with that Benge character while Clarinda will be out meeting God knows who. He frowned. He didn’t like the idea of Clarinda even touching Lily. Every time she took the child in her arms, he fought the urge to rush Lily upstairs and give her a bath.

  He looked up into the sky again. Venus had risen, a dim gold twinkle of light that grew brighter as the minutes passed. It was getting late. “Your five minutes are up, Duncan. I’m call­ing the game.” Shaking his head, he chuckled. For the first time in his hunting guide career, he’d been stood up.