Forests of the Night

by James W. Hall

  Two doors down the corridor, a light shone from a cracked-open door. Lucy wiped the sweat from her shooting hand, then reset her grip.

  Moving forward, she walked a line on the edge of the hallway to keep from creaking the boards. And she made it to the door itself before the floor planks crackled underfoot.

  She didn’t wait for a reaction, but shouldered through and came in the room pointing the pistol left, then right, then left again.

  Old man Tribue was tucked beneath the white sheets, propped by pillows so he could watch the cowboy movie playing on his TV across the room. John Wayne in Technicolor riding a white stallion across a prairie.

  Congressman Otis Tribue stared at Lucy, his eyes frantic.

  Hanging from a freestanding metal pole was a plastic bag, an IV drip. The tubing ran to his right arm, a vein near the joint of his elbow. Lucy had heard the gossip around town of Otis Tribue’s wife, Roberta, sustained by endless bags of morphine through her final days.

  Lucy moved closer to the bed and checked the side table for weapons.

  Nothing.

  She kept the pistol aimed at him while she stripped back the white sheet.

  The congressman was wearing only undershorts. He was lashed to the bed by ropes and duct tape. His ankles knotted to the bedposts, from his waist to his sternum a crisscrossing of silver tape kept him motionless.

  The old man closed his eyes slowly and kept them closed like he was taking a moment to commune with his Maker.

  On the TV, John Wayne was riding at full gallop, firing back at a war party of Apaches, a six-gun in each hand, while the Indians were blown backward, one by one, from their ponies onto the rocky ground.

  “What’s going on here?”

  The old man’s voice was hoarse and weak, as if he’d been shouting at the empty room for hours.

  “My son,” he said. “He’s killing me.”

  “Killing you?”

  Otis Tribue nodded at the IV bag.

  “Pull out the needle,” he said. “It’s bleach or gasoline. I don’t know what.”

  Lucy Panther stood close to the footboard and looked down at the man. Even in his old age, he was handsome. His face had the weathered vigor of the men on the walls of his room. Black-and-white photographs and tintypes of other Tribues with their side whiskers and full beards, the stern pioneers who had preceded him in this bedroom, and on this land. Frontiersmen, they called themselves, tamers of the wilderness. As if wilderness ever needed taming.

  Otis Tribue and people like him had homesteaded Cherokee land since long before the Civil War, and they founded the stores and banks and blasted corridors through solid rock for roads and dams and they clear-cut the forests, and their modern versions built the hundreds of money-grubbing businesses that completed the conquest their predecessors began centuries before—the soldiers with their muskets and diseases and baubles.

  It was all lost now. No going back. No fixing it.

  When this white warlord died, he would be replaced by one as bad or worse. Nothing Lucy Panther could do would change the landslide. Casino money was just the latest fraud, promising paradise and giving them shit.

  “You know who I am?” Lucy asked him.

  He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “I’m the daughter of Standingdog Matthews, mother of Jacob Panther.”

  The old man moved his head in sad acknowledgment of her words.

  “Pull out the needle,” he said. “I’m dying.”

  “Why did Farris do this to you?”

  “To punish me,” he said. “Now pull it out, goddamn you.”

  His eyes were as deep and murky as the caves of ancient bears.

  “No,” she said. “Not until I have some answers.”

  “Have mercy, woman.”

  “I don’t have a nickel’s worth of pity for you, old man. What you did there’s no forgiveness for. Nothing but brimstone’s in your future.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “The story. The whole story, back to the beginning of time if that’s when it got started. Tell me and I’ll shut this poison off.”

  “Shut it now, or I’ll be dead and there’ll be no telling anything.”

  Lucy considered it for a moment, then moved to the IV bottle and twisted the clamp. She sniffed the air around the plastic bag, and, yes, she could detect the sharp reek of a flammable liquid.

  “Water,” the old man said. “Water.”

  Lucy looked back at John Wayne. He was behind a boulder now, blasting away with his endless bullets. More Apaches flew backward in their last immortal seconds.

  She went to the tiny bathroom and poured him a cup and held it to his lips and watched him gulp it down.

  “Now tell me,” she said. “Or I turn on the drip again.”

  “I need a doctor. I need medical attention now. A transfusion.”

  “You’ll tell the story first.”

  “Goddamn you, woman.”

  “Oh, he has already, yes, you bet your ass he has. Now tell me.”

  He closed his eyes, summoning his strength, and a moment or two later, in his croaky voice, he began the tale. From one fall afternoon two centuries ago until that very evening they shared. He compressed it, left out most of the names and particulars. Those things she could find out on her own, he assured her.

  In his story, dozens of her people were murdered. More than she’d imagined. More than any of the tribal scandalmongers had reckoned. Last of all, he told her where to find the remains of many of those Cherokees his ancestors had killed. A stone’s throw from his very bed.

  In the last twenty-four hours she had watched her son die, seen her lover Parker again, and then received this dreadful tale, and now there was more weight on Lucy Panther’s heart than her heart had ever carried.

  When Otis was finished, he looked at her for a long minute. She was not about to give the old man her forgiveness, and he was clearly asking for none.

  “I’m dying,” he said. “Call an ambulance.”

  But even if she’d wanted to, it was too late for that. The first convulsion came and went only a few seconds later, followed by another and another.

  Lucy Panther stood unmoved and unmoving as she watched the seizures cease and the old man dwindle, and slowly lose his place on earth, watched him slap the air a final time, twist once more in his sheets and fall still.

  When he was gone, she prowled the room, opening drawers and pawing through a woman’s carefully folded undergarments and sweaters and white aprons. In the bottom drawer of the dresser she found what she was searching for. Otis Tribue had mentioned it prominently in his story. And here it was, an antiquated, small-caliber revolver. A tangible memento from Otis Tribue’s wicked past. She tucked the pistol in the waistband of her jeans. Legal evidence, in case she survived the evening.

  So now it was one Tribue down and one left to go.

  Lucy drew up a chair close to the TV, and she watched what was left of the John Wayne movie. She’d seen this one a couple of times before. It didn’t end well for the redskins.

  It never did.

  Forty

  Farris radioed for a deputy to bring him a fresh cruiser and gave the dispatcher directions to the campground, but told her nothing further about his situation.

  “Somebody smashed you up pretty good,” the Cherokee deputy said when he got a look at Farris’s car.

  “Stay here and watch the car, son. I’ll send back a tow truck.”

  Before the deputy could object, Farris climbed into the cruiser and left.

  He drove straight away to Stillwell Branch Road, parked beside the familiar field, and took the bridge and path into the dusty basin where Margie Hornbuckle’s double-wide trailer was planted.

  It was the boy’s nap time, so Farris tapped lightly on her door. Her domicile was tidy and smelled of lemon air-freshener, and she welcomed him without complaint or question.

  “He’s sleeping,” she said. “And I been after him with that anti
septic like you said. But he fights me on it. Burns him something fierce, he says.”

  He went into Shelley’s bedroom and looked down at the snoring boy. The light from the living room threw a slash across his face. His stubbled cheeks needed tending, but beyond that the boy seemed in decent shape.

  Farris took a look back at the living room and saw Margie slouched in her recliner before the television with a can of iced tea in her hand.

  In silence, Farris stooped forward and brought his face to the boy’s and hovered there only an inch away, tasting the heat and scent of his son’s spent breath. Those molecules, which had journeyed into the boy’s lungs and out again, were charged with an intoxicating fragrance.

  Such intimacy with his son aroused in Farris a sense of overwhelming injustice. Although his own blood circled in the boy’s veins, and Shelley would pass into a distant future that Farris would never know, the boy would never reproduce, never send the Tribue bloodline forward into the years. In his crucial life’s work, Farris had utterly failed. He had passed on nothing to this angelic child but an empty life and a world of fruitless dreams.

  Farris brought his mouth to the boy’s scalp and pressed his lips against the rough bristles, lingering there for a moment until Shelley stirred and grunted and Farris drew away.

  He remained in the bedroom a moment more, recovering from the act. He listened to the ceaseless babble of the television, the nameless tune of a bird outside. He tasted again the scent of his son, which lingered like the burn of sour mash at the back of his throat. Inside his chest he felt the immensity, a blank, cold universe, starless and moonless, which stretched to the borders of his being and throbbed beyond endurance. An unspeakable yearning.

  If that sensation pulsing in Farris’s breast was not what mankind defined as love, then Farris was truly damned to never know its name.

  With a final look at his boy, Farris walked back into the living room and stood next to Margie’s chair.

  “I’ve spoken to John Gathers at the bank,” Farris said.

  A stricken look passed across Margie’s face. Fear of eviction, no doubt, an end to her life of ease.

  “From this point on, you’ll receive a monthly retainer directly from the bank,” Farris said. “It should be sufficient to provide for the boy and yourself. Upon your death, the bank will select a new caretaker for my son and that person will live here where you have lived. I have asked Mr. Gathers to appoint a watchdog to make regular visits to check on my son’s health and well-being. As well as your own.”

  “You going away somewhere?”

  He looked at the television, then back at the room where his son slept.

  “Buy the boy a drawing pad,” Farris said. “And a box of colored pencils. And those chigger bites, take care of them.”

  Margie looked up at Farris and was about to reply when he turned from her and without a backward glance left the trailer.

  Lucy heard his car. She heard his step. She didn’t move. By now he had seen the broken glass and knew his house had been invaded.

  The TV was telling other movie lies. A John Wayne anthology—this time he was a U.S. Marine, leading his men into the teeth of machine-gun fire, taking a Pacific beach. All about him his loyal men were chewed to bits by a hail of lead, but soldiering on for John Wayne’s sake. Heroes, heroes, everywhere.

  Lucy lost Farris’s tread somewhere in the house. He was moving down corridors she didn’t know. He was circling, hunting her, coming closer by slow degrees. A board creaked, hinges squealed. He was headed her way.

  She didn’t take cover. Tired of all that. The hiding.

  She kept her seat in the comfortable leather chair across from the dead congressman and watched John Wayne rally his grubby troops, hacking through jungle vines, his valiant Americans picked off one by one by a ruthless, invisible sniper high in the treetops.

  The door swung open, but Farris was not there.

  She waited, her aim fixed on the empty space.

  The gray halo of the television gave her sufficient light. Since the first shot she’d ever fired, Lucy Panther had been known as a sharpshooter, better than any boy in the tribe. She propped her pistol hand on her knee to keep from tiring the muscles. Aiming for the middle of the door.

  “You’re dead,” Farris called out.

  “That makes two of us,” she replied.

  That set him thinking for a moment. While he was distracted, she could hazard a guess about where he was standing, attempt a shot through the wall, but then again she didn’t want to waste the shells. More than that, she wanted the satisfaction of seeing him the second he went down. So she waited.

  “Father!” Farris called out in a full and untroubled voice. “Father!”

  “You’ll have to wait a while to talk to him. Till you join him in hell.”

  The boards creaked again. Farris reacting. She couldn’t imagine how. Surely he wasn’t weeping for that old devil. Was he crouching for a dive and roll? It didn’t matter to Lucy. However it unfolded from here was fine. Glad it was almost over.

  Farris had slunk away, for she could hear the creaks of his departure. Off concocting a scheme, or calling reinforcements.

  For the moment she relaxed. Rocked her neck from side to side, took a peek at the marines. Airplanes flying low and strafing. Explosions, fire, the jungle burning. His men cowered, but John Wayne stood sure and tall.

  God, she missed her Jacob. Her brave boy. How smart he was, how strong and loving. Only hours ago she’d watched him die, but it seemed like forever. Seemed like he’d never lived, never held her in his strong arms, comforted her. None of those years together ever happened. All of it was nothing but a movie played out to its finish and dissolved into darkness.

  In a while Lucy Panther heard Farris coming back. She heard him stop outside the door, and she waited in her chair.

  Seconds passed, then there was the snap and flare of a match and an odor that took her a second to give it a name.

  Gasoline.

  Lucy stood up and aimed at the empty doorway. The pungent smell grew stronger.

  Another moment passed, then the ceramic jug rolled through the door, the rag in its mouth on fire. A gallon of explosive sloshing in its belly. The same strategy they claimed her boy had used against the banks.

  Or perhaps the jug was simply filled with water, a trick to drive her from the room.

  Motionless, she watched the jug roll across the floor, watched the blue flame eat up the length of cloth. Would a man like Farris destroy his own ancestral home, his father’s remains, and all he owned to kill a simple woman? From the madness she’d heard detailed tonight, she had no doubt that such a thing was possible within this family.

  An inch of fabric was left as she made her hasty calculations. Death here and now in a burst of flame, or take her chances at the doorway or beyond?

  The prospect of watching Farris die won her over.

  Lucy Panther sprinted for the door and headed down the empty hallway toward the head of the stairs.

  She made it a dozen feet before Farris heaved himself from a nook and threw his weight into her and slammed her body against the wall. A pistol fired. But she felt no pain, and then he bashed her chin and everything went soft and simple.

  Forty-One

  They were on the outskirts of Asheville, and by Charlotte’s map reading, not more than ten minutes from the college. Gracey was in the backseat of the new Pontiac rental, staring out her window at the crystal afternoon, the faultless blue sky.

  At Charlotte’s insistence, it was to be a quick stop to ask a few questions of Professor Milford, then on to their four P.M. flight back to Miami. Parker wanted to know what possible value such a side trip would have and Charlotte said, “Just ten minutes, that’s all I want.”

  Before leaving the motel she’d called her old partner, Jesus Romero, and he’d agreed to take charge of Gracey for a few days while Charlotte and Parker returned to Carolina to unravel the last few knots.

  “Th
ere’s a list,” Gracey said quietly. “A murder list. We’re all on it. Grandmother was, too.”

  These were the girl’s first words since she’d awoken from her nap, grouchy and uncommunicative.

  Charlotte swung around and rested her left arm on the seat back.

  “A murder list?”

  “Lucy said so. A list. And our names are on it.”

  Gracey crossed her arms over her chest, sunk into her seat, and began to mumble as if she were about to drift away again into another fit of gloom.

  Charlotte looked over at Parker. He was watching Gracey in the rearview mirror.

  “Later,” he said to Charlotte. “Don’t press.”

  She shook her head. It was a now-or-never moment. Worth the risk of pushing the girl deeper inside herself. She turned back to Gracey.

  “Do you remember anything else Lucy said?”

  “You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m making it up.”

  “Not at all,” said Charlotte. “Your dad and I would like to hear anything else you remember from the time you were with Lucy.”

  “You know, Mom, I can tell what’s real from what’s not real.” She hugged herself tighter and kept her eyes on the rugged landscape. “I can tell when people are faking and when they’re telling the truth. Even you, Mother, even you.”

  “It runs in the family,” Parker said.

  “Well, if you don’t want to talk about it, Gracey, that’s fine. But later on, if you remember anything, sweetheart, we’re here, you can always tell us.”

  She was about to turn back around when Gracey said, “Jacob went to the police to tell them what was going on, but everybody laughed at him.”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “We heard something about that. Yes.”

  “And Jacob and Lucy thought Dad had clout. That he could fix everything, and that’s why he came to Miami, to warn us we were in danger, but Mom called the FBI on him before he could do it. And he had to run.”

  Parker gave Charlotte a quick look, but said nothing.