Arch tapped the black Compaq laptop on the table. “This his computer?” he asked. “Or Larry’s?”
“Its Harry’s,” she declared. “But I’m sure it’s password protected.”
Arch found the copy of The Choiring of the Trees. “The novel he was reading,” Monica said. “I haven’t read it myself. I’ve been planning to.”
“You ought to. It’s great,” Arch declared, careful to keep it open as he had found it. “This must have been the page he was reading just before he took off. Get me a blank sheet of paper.”
She got him the paper, and he wrote down on it a long passage describing a sheep pasture and an old road and a trail leading through the woods to a glen of a waterfall. Monica’s eye caught one phrase: “several sort of half-caves where it looks like Indians must have lived.” She brightened, and knew the past tense was near an end.
“Take me with you,” she requested.
“Sorry, honey,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. And besides, aren’t you supposed to be putting VV-Day into effect?”
She nods, and the past tense is past.
In the present tense, she doesn’t even tell Arch that half of that hundred thousand he’s about to win ought to be hers.
Chapter nineteen
His first big problem is to find that pasture on Ledbetter Mountain where those two upper corners converge upon a hidden entry to the woodland trail leading to the glen of the waterfall. He asks Day and Diana, when he goes to change into his hiking boots and warm outdoor clothes, if they know where Nail Chism’s upper pasture was located, but not being natives of Stay More, they do not. They want to know where he’s going. He simply tells them that in the absence of anything better to do he wants to visit the old Chism home place, as described in The Choiring of the Trees. Diana offers to go with him (Day is very busy planning the transplanting of huge trees) but he thanks her and says he’ll find it by himself.
Diana packs a picnic lunch for him, with a bottle of good Chateauneuf-du-Pape, and he takes also a spare gallon of water in plastic jugs. He wears his Big Smith bib overalls with a flannel shirt and a light jacket. He unlocks the toolbox on his Chevy Silverado 4-by-4 and gets out the German Luger and checks his supply of ammunition. His father had brought the Luger back from the Great War in 1946, a magnificent weapon. The holster has a wooden back that is designed to serve as a stock so the pistol can be converted into a rifle. He has never used it as such, but he knows how to do it. He hopes fervently not to need it. He can’t remember the last time he shot anything. He is a member in good standing of Handgun Control, Inc. and completely supports Vernon on the extirpation of all firearms. He decides not to wear the holster strapped to his overalls waist but just to leave it on the seat of the Chevy, ready to hand.
All the rest of the morning he drives the back roads and trails on and around Ledbetter Mountain, looking for any sign of a promising turn-off where perhaps tire tracks would indicate a Pierce-Arrow having turned repeatedly from the road and entered. He broods just a bit over the fact that this is VV-Day and that his presence and advice and authority might be needed. He consoles himself with the thought that if his hunch is correct, what he is doing is far, far more important than VV-Day. He also broods just a bit over being alone. He has asked himself if he ought to have someone to help him or back him up, and has realized the foolhardiness of making himself into a lone paladin. If the search is successful, does he want all the reward money to himself? No, he doesn’t need nor want the reward, nor even the glory nor even anyone knowing that it is he who has found Lydia and Harry. He considers that after he’s found them, he’ll take them back to Stay More and make them promise that they’ll never tell anyone who has found them. Two women (both natural blondes) have already offered to accompany him on his quest, and he has turned them both down. Because they are women? No, Monica could hold her own in any job requiring a man’s strength or wits. He just doesn’t want anybody else. If he is so certain of his hunch, and so certain now just where the kidnappers are hiding, as Harry has been certain before him, why doesn’t he just notify the sheriff or the state police? Let them do it. Well, why hadn’t Harry? Maybe Harry too had said to himself what Arch says now to himself, “If this doesn’t work, there’s nobody to blame but me.” The big difference between him and Harry, of course, is that Harry didn’t have any weapons.
Odd that he should be thinking about this matter of being alone when he happens to run across George Dinsmore. George is in his Explorer and they roll down their windows as the vehicles meet and stop on a high backroad. They exchange howdies. They exchange comments on the weather (partly cloudy, occasional sun, upper 40s Fahrenheit).
“Just out for a drive, maybe?” George says.
“Yeah, I’m just looking for the old Chism place that I read about in a book,” Arch says.
“Which old Chism place was that?” George wonders. “The Chisms was thick as possums all over this here mountain.”
“Where Nail Chism grew up and raised sheep,” Arch says.
“Aw, yeah,” George says. “The Seth Chism place. But I misdoubt if you could git to it, even in that four by four truck. And there aint nothin up there left to look at, nohow.”
“No old trail that still leads to it?”
George seems to need a moment a think. “Not from this side of mountain, I reckon not. If you could find the old Bourne place, you could cut back up through one of them loggin trails behind it, and maybe you’d come out in the Chism back forty.”
“Could you tell me how to find the old Bourne place?”
“I could show you. I couldn’t rightly tell you.”
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“No trouble a-tall. Just follow me.” George drives on down the road and waits while Arch finds a place wide enough to turn in and back up and turn around. Then Arch follows him as they negotiate a few forks in the road and reach the east face of Ledbetter Mountain. It is close to noon when they finally come across a long-abandoned home place, of which nothing remains except the stone chimney and the stone well with its pulley hoist collapsed. They pull into the yard and stop. Arch notices that the high weeds of the yard and the wagon path to wherever the barn was, weeds that have been killed by frost but are still thick and tousled, have been mashed down in parallel indentations as if by the tires of a car. He gets out of his truck and takes a close look and discovers that there are fresh tire tracks beneath the weeds.
“Looks like somebody else beat you to it,” George observes, and gets out of his Explorer to take a close look at the tire tracks. “Don’t look like anybody’s tracks I’ve ever seen before, except on that there Pierce-Arrer that them injuns has got.”
George and Arch look at each other for a moment, and Arch watches George’s face as it begins to take on the lineaments of comprehension. Arch has been wondering if he should reveal his actual mission to George, but has decided not to. He still wants to go alone, even if it might be a great advantage in this wilderness to have George as a guide and back-up. But George is a sharp old hillbilly, and in the same moment that Arch observes George’s face reaching awareness, George has also developed a suspicion of why Arch might be trying to find the Chism place. “Well,” is all Arch can say.
“Well hell,” George says. “You aint lookin for the Chism place just on account of some book you read. You’re maybe trying to find how Nail Chism’s upper pasture is a-hiding the way you git to that there lost holler where the waterfall is at.”
“You caught me,” Arch admits. “I’ve got a real strong suspicion that’s where Lydia is, and these tracks sort of confirm it, don’t they?”
“Now how come a nice feller like big ole Ben would want to take her off?”
“That’s what we all want to know, when we find him…and her. He was probably just following orders from his boss. And she had her own good reasons for wanting to silence Lydia.”
“I’ll be switched,” George says. He thinks just a little while more, and the
n he asks, “Are we gonna ride in your rig or mine?”
“I was planning to go alone,” Arch says.
“You want all that reward money to yourself, do ye?”
“I don’t want any of the reward money,” Arch says.
“Hell, Vernon wouldn’t pay it to me, nohow. I’m just a employee of his’n.”
“So I’ll just go on by myself, then,” Arch declares.
“You don’t think you could stop me, do ye?”
“Probably not.”
“Let’s go in your crate. Might scrape hell out of the bottom and knock off the tailpipe.”
So they go in the Chevy, George first retrieving from the Explorer his shotgun. Getting in, George notices and admires the Luger. They follow the tracks up the back of the property and across a rusty fallen barbed-wire fence and into the woods. There the tracks become clearer as the tracks leave the weeds behind and impress themselves into the dirt of the forest. It is an ancient trail, and Arch follows it, up and up the mountain, his vehicle slipping and lurching and jolting and straining. “Maybe we should have taken yours,” he admits. He has never driven a 4-by-4 onto a path as wild as this, and he cannot believe that a Pierce-Arrow would have been able to negotiate it without drives in all four wheels. “Maybe we ought to go on foot,” he suggests, but George tells him they are still a good long ways from their destination.
“Aint been up this way since I was a boy,” George declares, “but I reckon I can still find it.”
Eventually the trail levels off and breaks out into a pasture, an old pasture grown with brush and briars and weeds. Arch smiles to see that one corner of the pasture is up against a steep part of the mountain, and that in the darkness of that corner can be detected the entry as described in that passage of The Choiring of the Trees.
“That’s it, huh?” he asks, and drives to that corner and discovers there the same trail that will take them to the glen of the waterfall. “Here we are,” Arch says. “We just follow this, right?”
“If we can,” George says.
“Let’s stop for a bite first. You haven’t had lunch, have you?”
“Naw, but there aint no McDonald’s or Wendy’s hereabouts.”
Arch fetches the sack that Diana has prepared for him, and tells George who gave it to him. There are enough sandwiches in there to feed a platoon. And he discovers a bunch of paper cups. Did Diana think he’d have company? He opens the bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and pours a cup for George. Arch doesn’t want to drink enough to cloud his mind, but he does want to drink enough of it to wash down the excellent sandwiches Diana has prepared for him.
While they are eating and drinking, he spies the cigarette butt out there on the ground and he fetches it and shows it to George. “Pall Mall,” he says. “That’s Harry’s brand.”
“I sure do hope they’re still alive and kicking,” George says.
“We’ll soon find out,” Arch says, cranking the truck and driving on.
“There’s one samwich left,” George says. “You want it?”
“You can have it,” Arch says.
“Maybe we better save it for the dog,” George declares. “You know them injuns has got this pointer name of Threasher, who’ll come a-yappin at us when we git close. Maybe he’ll hush if we throw him some lunch meat.”
“There might also be Lydia’s dog,” Arch remarks. “Let’s hope the dogs like roast beef.”
The trail comes to an end when the tire tracks of the Pierce-Arrow they’ve been following abruptly turn off into a thick brake of cedars and disappear. There is but a footpath from there on.
“What’s in there?” Arch asks, pointing to the cedar trees, as he stops the car and gets out.
“I’ll cover your back,” George offers with a grin.
Arch walks into the brake and discovers a makeshift but substantial shed, one end open, constructed of scrap boards and tree branches and the same basketry interweaving as the wigwam down in the valley. It is obviously the work of Ben, intended as a garage for the Pierce-Arrow, but the car isn’t there.
He returns to his Chevy. “That’s where the Pierce-Arrow ought to be,” he tells George. “There’s a primitive sort of garage behind those cedar trees. But there’s no car in it.”
“I reckon we’ll have to go on foot from here,” George says. George carries the shotgun in one hand and the meat for the dogs in the other. Arch straps the Luger in its holster to his waist, and puts his Motorola cell phone into the bib pocket of his overalls. George too has a tiny Nokia in his jacket pocket, but neither man has mentioned calling back into the village, or to George’s boss, to let them know what they’re doing.
They haven’t gone far on the footpath when they hear the motor, and turn to look back down the trail to see the Pierce-Arrow arriving behind their vehicle. Ben is alone in it, and after he stops and gets out, he walks only a slight distance toward them, and waits. They retrace their steps toward him. He is holding a shotgun cradled in his arm put pointing toward them.
“Is that you, George?” Ben calls. “Who’s that with you?”
“Just Archie Schaffer,” George says, and Arch isn’t sure how he feels about that “just,” which sounds somehow belittling.
They walk on, until they are face to face. George and Ben have their shotguns pointed at each other, but Ben suddenly reaches out with both arms and bear-hugs George mightily and even lifts him up above the ground. “I’ve missed you!” Ben exclaims.
“Nothing was stopping you from calling me to let me know you was okay,” George says, and pats his Nokia. “You know my number.”
Ben laughs. “Oh, yeah. Sure,” he says sarcastically. “I couldn’t call my own mother to wish her a happy birthday.” And then, remembering his manners, he holds his hand out to Arch for a handshake. “Mr. Schaffer,” he says.
“Mr. Bending Bear,” Arch says, shaking his hand.
The Indian says something in his Osage language which Arch can’t understand, but Arch can tell from the tone of it that Ben is not very happy that Arch is here.
George says, “First big question, of course, is have you been taking real good care of Lydia Caple and Harry Wolfe?”
“You’ll soon see for yourselves,” Ben says, a bit petulantly, as if the question impugned his hospitality. “But first I must ask you gentlemen to put your weapons down on the ground.” And he passes the muzzle of the shotgun back and forth between them. George lays his shotgun down, and Arch removes the Luger and its holster from his waist and lays it down, and Ben picks up the two weapons and takes them to the Pierce-Arrow, where he opens the trunk and puts them in, but, before locking it, requests, “I’d also appreciate having possession of your cell phones.” They give him their Nokia and Motorola and he adds them to the guns and locks them in the trunk. “Now,” he says, “if you’ll give me a hand with the groceries, I won’t have to make two trips.” Ben opens the rear door of the Pierce-Arrow, and loads their arms with grocery sacks bearing the imprint of the one supermarket in Jasper. “Would you mind getting that sack of cat food?” Ben asks Arch, who takes up the 20-pound bag of Special Kitty®. Ben, holding his shotgun casually in the same hand with a bag of groceries, motions them back onto the trail. “It’s not quite a mile,” Ben says. “I would have preferred to have built the garage much farther in, but neither my car nor yours could negotiate the crossings of the little creek that winds through the hollow. A little exercise never hurts anyone, does it?”
“I reckon not,” George allows. They have to walk across some foot-logs to get across that creek, and that is tricky with arms full of grocery sacks. The little creek, Arch realizes, is probably the run-off of that fabled waterfall, whose cascade in the distance he seems to be able to hear already.
“Monica has her shade up,” Ben says to Arch offhandedly as if just commenting on the weather. Arch doesn’t know what he’s talking about, unless, in addition to being some kind of homosexual, Ben is also a peeping tom. When he gives Ben a quizzical look, the latter asks
, “She didn’t tell you about the shade?” Arch shakes his head. “Have you talked to Monica today?” Arch nods his head. “What did you talk about?”
“All kinds of things. The campaign. The weather. The possibility that whoever kidnapped Lydia is still somewhere not too far from Stay More.”
“Monica didn’t tell you about a message she had from Lydia?”
“No, she didn’t,” Arch says, wondering why she hadn’t.
“Then what are you fellows doing here?” Ben wants to know.
“I suppose the same that Harry was doing here: trying to find Lydia.”
“Well, you’ll soon see both of them,” Ben declares, and guides them onward into the glen of the waterfall, where suddenly two dogs come charging toward them, yapping and woofing. They sniff around Arch and George until they’re satisfied that since Ben is with them, they’re not intruders. “Threasher and Lydia’s dog Beanbag,” Arch declares, and gives them a pat. Arch looks around at the glen and the bluffs surrounding it, and the cascading waterfall, a sylvan paradise. There are ferns growing everywhere, and mosses on everything, and big old virgin trees that nearly blot out the sky even without their leaves. Arch has read about this place in several of Harington’s books, which didn’t do justice to it. The bluffs surrounding the glen are pocked with the dark mouths of caverns, and the largest of these mouths has been partially covered over with the same sort of basketry-and-board construction of which Ben had made the garage. There is a door, and Ben holds it open for them with pride that comes from having made the door. They enter the snug confines of the large shelter, one commodious cavern extending deep back under the bluff. There are four people sitting on improvised chairs at a table rigged from branches and boards beside a large open fire, its smoke vented through the top of the shelter’s front wall: there are the hostages Lydia and Harry, and their captor Juliana. And there is Ekaterina. Or is Ekaterina the captor?
“You idiots,” Harry says jovially to Arch and George, rising to meet them and shaking their hands. “What makes you think you could do something that I couldn’t do?”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 138
