Buried Alive

by J. A. Kerley

  “Didn’t give a sh-shit. I figured they’d send me somewhere elst soon enough, like always.”

  “So you went to the Solid Word school.”

  “Words and turds, turds and words,” Hawkes said, disgust on his half-face. “Dog turds, dogs everywhere. Barkin’ and growlin’ all the time. Everything stunk of dog turd. Never cleaned it up, just waited for the rain to wash it away.”

  “Tell us about the school.”

  “Started off nice. GOOD EAT! Lived in little house things. NO RAIN NO PAIN.”

  “Did you have school lessons?” Cherry asked.

  “We learned this …” Hawkes jumped up and started throwing air punches. He spun to kick something only he could see. The man’s kicks and punches were tight, hard, and controlled. He knew what he was doing.

  “Sit, Jimmie,” the guard cautioned. Hawkes sneered, but sat.

  “You ended up fighting?” I asked.

  “PIN A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK!” he bellowed into our faces, his breath treacherous. “BUST THEIR ASSES AND GET SOME EAT IN THE BELLY!”

  “You fought and you ate?”

  He backhanded away spit dripping from the keyhole mouth. “Food without maggots. Real EAT! EAT AND EAT MORE. DOPE AND WHISKEY AND GETTIN’ ALL FRISKY! WIN AND FILL THE MOUTH-HOLE!”

  “What happened when you lost?”

  Hawkes stopped moving as if a spring mechanism had spent its energy. His mouth drooped and his one eye turned inward. He became absolutely still.

  “Coach’d come in and have his party,” he said, turning away.

  “The coach?”

  Hawkes leaned back his head and screamed, “HERE COMES THE SNACK TRUCK!”

  I turned to Cherry. The blood had drained from her face. “Is that what Coach said, Jimmie?” I asked.

  Hawkes jumped up, planted his feet wide, made the motion of grabbing a head while being fellated. He knifed his hips forward and back. Grunted, “Here … comes … the … snack … truck … uhn, uhnnn, uh-HUUUGRG!”

  “Did anyone ever try and get away, Jimmie?” I asked, holding up my hand at the guard, Don’t interfere.

  “Yesssssss,” he hissed.

  “Did they make it?”

  Hawkes’s single eye burned into mine. He made a throttling motion with his hands. “HE did this to a dog. Then HE hung Mister DOG from a TREE.”

  My mind’s eye presented a limp canine swinging from a limb, the symbol of the failed escape. “It was to tell you what happened to the boy, right?”

  Hawkes gestured me close with his forefinger. “Read the dog, mister,” he whispered. “The dog knows the future.”

  “Who killed the dog, Jimmie?” Cherry asked. “The coach? The preacher?”

  “The Colonel,” he said.

  “Colonel, Jimmie?”

  Hawkes cupped his hand over his crotch. “PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND COVER YOUR PUPS,” he barked, as if giving an order. “STICK A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK, BOYS! MAKE THE COLONEL SMILE!”

  I said, “The Colonel was part of the camp?”

  “YES-FUCKING-SIR, MISTER COLONEL! Colonel was always there.” Hawkes did the money-whisk with both hands. “BIG FUCKING SUGAR! NO MAGGOT FOR THE COLONEL!”

  “Maggots?”

  “PREACHER-MAN WAS FOOD MAN. MAGGOTS AND SLOP AND PUKE ’TIL YOU DROP. WIN AND GET THE GOOD EAT!”

  I glanced at Cherry, shook my head, turned back to Hawkes.

  “What did the Colonel look like, Jimmie?”

  Hawkes craned his head toward the door, as if readying an escape. He didn’t want to talk about the Colonel.

  “Time for me to GO!”

  “Just a couple more questions,” I said, whipping out the photo in my jacket pocket, Bobby Lee Crayline.

  “This guy,” I said to Hawkes. “Ever see him? Was he ever with you in school? He would have been about your age.”

  Hawkes scowled at the photo. Turned away. “GUARD,” he yelled into the air. “I WANT THE YARD!”

  “Jimmie,” I pleaded, “just a couple more minutes.”

  “I WANT OUT!”

  The guard shrugged at us and opened the door.

  “Jimmie,” Cherry called to Jimmie Hawkes’s retreating back. “One question, Jimmie. Please? Just for me?”

  Hawkes jittered and twitched. He paused in the doorframe.

  48

  We stood in the sun of the parking lot, five sheets of paper spread across the dark hood of Cherry’s cruiser. Heat rose from the metal as Cherry shifted the sheets like puzzle pieces. She’d asked Hawkes to draw us a map to the “camp”.

  “Think this is worth anything?” Cherry squinted at lines and images Hawkes had scribbled.

  “You’re expecting accuracy in a map drawn by a man with two-thirds of a brain? Aiming us at a place almost two decades gone?”

  Cherry leaned over the hood, shuffled the pages yet again. “I might be able to dope out landmarks he was talking about. Here …” she pointed to a lollipop shape Hawkes had scrawled beside a line representing a road. “He called it the cow tree.”

  I did dubious. “And?”

  “There’s a pasture by the county line with a huge beech, the tree near the road. There’s a spring-fed creek by the tree and the farmer keeps salt blocks there as well.”

  “Shade, water, salt. Cows?”

  “Usually a couple dozen at least, all ringing the tree. And here’s what Hawkes called Beer Stop. If this is the tree I’m thinking about, there’s a little grocery a mile down the road that sells beer and wine. It’s been there since I was a kid.”

  Cherry pulled a sheet from the bottom of the arrangement, set it on top. Joined the lines Hawkes called roads. She tapped on the center page. “This so-called map, Ryder? It might actually make sense if I can figure out Hawkes’s other landmarks.”

  “This wavy line,” I said, pointing to a wavering doodle. “He said that was a creek, didn’t he?”

  “Yep. And this triangle over here was - what did he call it? - the big boat rock? It could be a big pointy boulder that looks like a battleship pushing out of the mountain. There’s one like that a mile or so from the grocery.”

  I tapped a dark smear of ink. “He called this big muddy field.”

  “It fits the landscape,” she said. “I’m thinking we tape these pages together and go a-hunting.”

  It took two hours of driving, circling, doubling back. We ended up at a chained gate blocking a dirt lane overgrown with weeds. The chain was crusted with rust, the lock a red block of oxidation.

  Cherry said, “This is where Hawkes’s map leads, as far as I can figure.”

  “No one’s been through this gate in a long time,” I said. “We’re on foot from here.”

  We crawled warily over the barbed-wire fencing running from the gate in both directions and followed the lane for several hundred feet before encountering a second and taller perimeter of barbed-wire strung with rusted cans, a cheap alarm system. We found a tumbled section and pushed through, following the lanes to a two-story house of logs tucked in a tight hollow surrounded by hundred-foot cliffs, too sheer to climb without bolts planted for climbers.

  There were a half-dozen windowless outbuildings on the hillside sloping to the cliffs, little larger than outhouses. Rhododendron had grown up over the years, the shacks almost hidden in the green. Behind the row of houses was a half-acre motley of hurricane-fence enclosures and tumbledown doghouses. The topography put the canine area a few feet above the outbuildings. Hawkes had been right about dog excrement, it would have washed down the hill directly beneath the little boxes.

  “Dog turds, dogs everywhere … Everything stunk of dog turd.”

  Neither Cherry nor I uttered a word as we angled toward the house. The place was empty, save for the bats. No furniture, no fixtures, not so much as a scrap of newspaper on the floor. Chinking had fallen from between the logs and birds had nested in the empty spaces.

  We went to inspect the row of outbuildings: sheds, reeking of animal urine from years of possums, rats, birds and ra
ccoons. Each shed had the remains of a mattress on the floor, now no more than rotted fabric filled with insects. Cherry swung a creaky door on heavy iron hinges, studied a latch.

  “The doors lock from the outside, Ryder,” she said. “And this was supposed to be a school?”

  “The one-room schoolhouse from hell,” I said.

  At the furthest end of the hollow was an old barn, large, the wood weathered almost black. We circled it, spying a huge cage on its side in the bushes.

  “That cage is big enough to hold a doggone horse,” Cherry noted.

  “Or a couple of humans,” I added.

  We came around to the front again, no other openings in the building. The sliding door was frozen with rust so we pulled it back enough to slip inside, turned on our flashlights. On both sides of the structure were four-tier bleachers, twenty feet long. I estimated the place might hold a hundred-fifty screaming onlookers.

  In the corner was a tabletop set-up, behind were shelves screwed into the beams. The bar area, I figured. The only liquor allowed at events had to be purchased there at ten bucks a pop. Another profit center. Plus oiled-up gamblers wagered more money. The bar also explained the shards of busted glass glittering from the floor: bottles dropped, or banged on the bleachers in bloodlust frenzy. I kicked loose glass that had been stuck in the dirt for years.

  The floor between the bleachers resembled a perverse three-ring circus. On one end was a square pit about twelve by twelve, a yard or so deep. On the other end was a slightly smaller and less-deep pit, circular. Dogs and chickens, respectively.

  In the center of the floor was a rectangular hole about twelve feet by five, four feet deep. Cherry’s beam touched the pit, pulled away as if repulsed, returned to light the damp and scuffed bottom.

  “Remember what came out of Crayline’s memory?” she said. “The kids fought in a long pit nicknamed the grave. You think that happened here, too?”

  “The other kids Crayline fought had to come from somewhere.”

  “But Crayline was kept in the Alabama mountains. He was never in Kentucky that we know of.”

  “Because he got trucked in and out in the dead of night,” I said, my beam climbing the rafters, finding a row of broken light bulbs cupped by gray, sheet-metal shades. They looked like lamps from Auschwitz.

  We retreated down the lane, escapees from Sodom. Cherry turned for a final look. I saw her shudder. “It’s like a Ray Bradbury nightmare, Ryder. A carnival of horror.”

  “A horror that was filled by Powers,” I said, the blanks in the puzzle beginning to take shape. “She found isolated, troubled kids from hideously dysfunctional homes. Told parents about her special school where kids would get fed, receive a righteous education, whatever. She just needed permission, a few papers filled out. She’d been a … what did you call her?”

  “A classified teacher. It’s an assistant’s position that doesn’t need a teaching certificate. But anyone needing to check Powers out would see teaching in her background. Plus she knew the jargon when submitting the home-school forms, not to set off any alarms.”

  “And, of course, she had the church-lady talk.”

  “Miz Powers had everything covered,” Cherry said. “The parents simply gave the kids away.”

  “Happy to get them gone, I expect. Putting Billy or Bobby’s leash in the hands of folks spouting chapter and verse made it easy.”

  “Tanner was the head spouter, I imagine,” Cherry said. “The Pious Teacher and the Man of Faith. Maybe Tanner believed it at first. Then the money started and he got hooked. I’ll bet he still deluded himself, telling himself he’d use the gambling proceeds to build the grand religious edifice in his mind.”

  We climbed the barbed-wire again. Cherry said, “Eighteen years back would have been about the time Zeke got sick with all the old-timey religion, the save-yourself-from-Satan spiels.”

  “A pure man of God couldn’t be throwing himself into rampant sex and gambling and cruelty to children. It must have been Satan acting through him. By attacking Satan, he could still claim the high ground of an alliance with God. It’s aligning symbol and metaphor to absolve yourself of baser instinct. When you’re not at fault, every low and self-serving wish can be freely granted.”

  Cherry shook her head, holding down a strand of wire to help me over. “I swear religion like that is a form of madness. How about Burton?”

  “Burton didn’t need to re-arrange private symbolism to suit his needs. He was simply amoral, taking what he needed with no bothersome conscience.”

  “He was also a boxer, Ryder,” Cherry reminded me.

  I nodded, recalling the air punches and kicks Hawkes had demonstrated. The moves had been drilled into him so deeply they were fluid and powerful years later.

  “The boys needed a coach, right?” I said. “Can’t make money unless you win, can’t win unless you know what you’re doing.”

  “There’s one more person in this hell broth, Ryder. The Colonel. I got the impression from Hawkes that the Colonel was the top dog, so to speak.”

  We reached the gate and turned for a final look, seeing only the rustic tranquility of trees and meadow and birds flitting tree to tree. Butterflies tumbled round red spikes of sumac. Insects rasped in the warm air.

  “This whole dirty scheme needed a leader,” I said, chipping rust from a barbed-wire point with my thumbnail. “And someone to bankroll the start-up. Buying this place and building the houses. Double-stringing the area with barbed-wire. Building bleachers and fight pits.”

  Cherry wrinkled up her nose. “Let’s get gone from here. The reek of dogshit is making me sick.”

  We were a half-mile from buildings where dogs hadn’t been kept for years. There was no smell left; Cherry’s mind was supplying the odor.

  I began to smell it, too.

  Followed by the feeling of eyes on the back of my neck. A tingling, like an ice target painted across my spine. I picked up my pace, shooting glances at the ridge-line above. Though I saw nothing, I continued to feel the cold eyes even as we drove away.

  49

  “I’m gonna get the state property evaluator’s office on finding out the owner of that property,” Cherry said, driving with one hand, dialing with the other. “It’s part of tax records. The last thing the state’s gonna misplace are tax records. It may be a day or two, but we’ll get something.”

  While Cherry wound her way through the bureaucracy and backtracked toward civilization, I studied the map scrawled by Jimmie Hawkes, one more relic of this bizarre case. Jimmie Hawkes had lived amidst the stinking boxes, fought the bouts, ate the maggoty food. His mind was a stream-of-consciousness retelling of the horror.

  I didn’t know if he’d entered the camp a damaged child, or been damaged while there and during the crime-ridden post-camp years of his life. Given that his pre-camp life was spent shunted from relative to relative and living most of that time outside like a farm dog, I figured - from a fair amount of experience - that Jimmie Hawkes was pretty much broken from the git-go.

  I stared at Hawkes’s childlike symbols: a wavy line for a creek, cross hatches for the plowed dirt of a field, lollipop shapes designating trees. Simple signs.

  I put his map in my lap and replayed our prison experience in my mind, the half-faced man bouncing from toe to toe and firing tight, hard punches and whipping kicks at head height.

  Saw Hawkes cup his hand over his crotch. “PIN A NUMBER ON YOUR DICKS, BOYS! PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND COVER YOUR PUPS!”

  Athletic cups. The only fight protection the boys wore, according to Mickey Prince. A cushioned plastic and fabric semi-oval covering penis and testicles, held in place by slender straps around the hips. I thought of skinny boys wearing the protector, recalled Crayline wearing a cup and nothing else when he’d been spotted by the surveyor. I picked up a pencil and made a few loose sketches. Felt my heart skip a beat.

  I turned to Cherry. “You have to call LaGrange and check on their video capabilities. I need to show Jimmie Hawk
es something.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too strange. I have to run it by Hawkes.”

  Fifteen minutes later we pulled into her office. Her computer set-up had a camera for video conferences and I sat and played with the controls while Cherry confirmed a similar set-up at LaGrange.

  “Do they have the technology?” I asked.

  She clapped her hand over the phone. “There’s a secure room with video capability, used for depositions and the like. Hawkes is headed there now.”

  I pulled a black marker from my pocket, slipped a sheet of paper from the copier tray and drew a simple picture. Cherry ran in, tapping her watch.

  “One minute to show time.”

  We sat in front of the monitor and camera. Jimmie Hawkes appeared on our screen. The cheap lens flattened his face to create the impression of a bizarre mask, half a face of an intense-looking man with pronounced features, the other something clipped from a lunar landscape. The shadows on his face moved when he moved, creating the impression the landscape was pulsing.

  There was an institutional-yellow wall behind Hawkes and I saw the arm of a guard behind and to the side of the man. Hawkes gave us his splayed grin and leaned close to his camera, face ballooning to fill the screen.

  “Yo! Anyone in there?”

  “We’re here, Jimmie. Detective Cherry and me, Detective Ryder. Look at the computer screen.”

  Hawkes’s face turned to the monitor at his end, giving us a full shot of the ruination of the eyeless left side of his face. “I wish they’d have put the camera on the other side,” Cherry muttered.

  “Ssssh,” I cautioned, knowing the mics could be surprisingly sensitive.

  “I thought this was the side you liked, Miz Cherry,” Hawkes giggled. He flicked his tongue in and out and moved his damaged face to the lens until the screen went dark with shadow. He jolted back. I saw the guard’s large black hand on Hawkes’s shoulder, returning him to the chair.

  Thanks, buddy, I thought to the guard. Maybe his presence would calm some of Hawkes’s wilder antics.

  “I take it you hear us fine, Jimmie,” I said.