The Backwoods

by Edward Lee

  His lips attached to an already swollen nipple and sucked. “Harder,” was the only word she uttered. She was cringing, like someone in a prickly heat desperate for relief . . . but the prickly heat here wasn’t rash; it was an agonized desire, the crudest horniness that blocked out all thoughts from her mind and simply demanded to be tended. Her groan was barely even feminine when her earlier whimsy came true: after sucking each nipple to a beating soreness, he licked up and down her throat, sucked lines in between her breasts, tonguing off the oyster juice she’d dribbled.

  She moaned more, deeper in her throat. Then she grabbed his strong hand and coaxed it down the front of her shorts, beneath the panties, pushed some more and made him feel her there. Without hesitation, her own hand roved his crotch, her fingers testing the already throbbing rigidity. . . .

  Then she prepared to haul his pants down and drag him to the ground, make him take her right there in the blazing sun.

  She didn’t know what she was doing.

  She was out of her mind. . . .

  If this sudden departure from her traditional monogamous values could be thought of as a thing, that thing fell apart a second later, just as she was getting his pants open.

  Her hand froze; then her eyes vaulted wide and her mouth shot open in a silent scream of self-outrage.

  Oh, my God, oh, my God! What am I doing?

  She quickly backed away from him, almost tripping over a tree root.

  Ernie glared at her. “What the hell?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” she blurted. “I-I-I . . . can’t!”

  He stood there appalled, his pants open. “You’re shittin’ me! What the hell’s wrong with you, pullin’ such shit!”

  Patricia’s shoulders slumped. Her face was beet red in shame. She fumbled to button her blouse. “I’m sorry,” she peeped.

  “Damn it!” He refastened his jeans, clearly outraged. “Patricia, you cain’t be comin’ on to guys like that ‘n’ then changin’ yer mind!”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” she said yet again.

  His glare sharpened. “What, thought you’d git your kicks by gettin’ the big dumb country boy all worked up ‘n’ then pullin’ the plug?”

  She shook her head desperately, fighting tears. “No, no, I’d never do something like that, not to you or anyone.”

  “What then? What the hell’s your problem?”

  “I’m . . . I’m married—”

  “Married? Yeah, I know you’re married! And you were married a minute ago when you grabbed my hand ‘n’ put it down your pants! You were grabbin’ me by the hair to shove my face in yer boobs! Don’t sound to me like you were all that worried ‘bout cheatin’ on your husband!”

  More embarrassment flushed over her. She struggled for something logical to say, but what could be logical about this? She was mystified at herself. I was about to have sex with him right here in broad daylight. I had every intention of doing that. . . . “Ernie, I don’t know what to say. Something just . . . came over me.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ve just been . . . weird lately, for some reason. Since the day I got back. I haven’t been myself, and I can’t understand it for the life of me. For those last couple of minutes, I wasn’t even thinking. It’s like I was out of my mind.”

  “Well, you are out of your mind for playin’ around with a fella like that,” he grumbled. But at least his frustration appeared to be abating. He sat down at the base of the tree and just shook his head.

  Patricia stood in frustration of her own. Her breasts, nipples, and sex seemed to throb in objection, as though her mind had betrayed her body. All that desire building up, building up, about to be relieved, and now this guillotine of last-second morality. “I’m really sorry, Emie,” she kept apologizing.

  His own frustration urged a laugh as the moment cooled down. “Well, at least we know now.”

  “Know what?”

  “That it is true what they say about oysters and fried cicadas.”

  She shook her head, smiling. “Come on; let’s go back. I promise not to accost you.”

  But Ernie had already stood back up; he didn’t seem to hear her. “I wonder what that’s all about. . . .” He was staring across the hill.

  “Huh?”

  “Look.”

  Her eyes followed his finger.

  The town police car was parked at the Stanherd house, its red and blue lights flashing.

  “Never seen nothin’ like it,” Sergeant Trey was telling them in the foyer of the old Stanherd house. It had been so long since Patricia had been inside the dilapidated plantation house that seeing it now refreshed no memories. Nothing had been replaced, just repaired, however expertly, such that she could’ve just walked through a time warp, back to the 1850s.

  “And I guarantee there ain’t never been nothin’ like it, ever, in Squatterville before, and not in Agan’s Point either,” Trey finished. “Except for Dwayne last week, we ain’t never had a murder in these parts. And like that?”

  It was too much information too fast. She and Ernie had jogged up to the house upon seeing the cruiser’s flashing lights, when Sergeant Trey had told them that two of the clan’s elders, Wilfrud and Ethel Hild, had been murdered. Patricia thought she remembered the name, but simply couldn’t place faces that far back.

  “Craziest thing I ever heard,” Ernie murmured.

  The old house smelled of incense, potpourri, and handmade candles. It stood in dead silence, like something watching them in disapproval. Wide, bare-wood stairs led up into darkness at one end of the foyer, but Trey showed them through a sitting room full of throw rugs, faded, intricately patterned wallpaper, and sunlight filtering through dusty bay windows.

  “Is the house empty?” Patricia asked.

  “Only one here’s Marthe,” Trey said.

  Everd’s wife, Patricia remembered. “So the Hilds lived in the house too?”

  “Yeah, along with some of the older couples. All the men are out on the crabbing boats. That’s why Everd ain’t here. And the women are all out gatherin’ for the picnic comin’ up. Ain’t gonna be much of a picnic now. Shit.”

  He took them deeper into the house’s first floor, and more sun-edged darkness. No pictures hung on the walls, which seemed strange, but instead all kinds of inexplicable handmade decorations: corn-husk flowers, oyster-shell mosaics, and crosses, of course, some that appeared to be made of small-animal bones. In frames, she also noticed more of those squiggly designs, their mystical good-luck sign.

  In the room farthest in back, Chief Sutter was grimly taking pictures with a Polaroid, and making notes. From his face he looked like a man experiencing stomach pains.

  “You tell ’em?” he asked Trey.

  His deputy nodded.

  “Damnedest thing. Murders. In Squatterville, of all places.”

  Patricia frowned her confusion. “Chief, I don’t understand. The Hilds were murdered? Where are the bodies?”

  “No, no, they weren’t murdered here. Couple miles away, on the Point’s where their bodies were found. Old Man Halm came across ’em doin’ his morning walk. So me ‘n’ Trey checked it out.” He put his notebook down next to the camera, then sat down on a big poster bed that must have been fifty years old. A purplish stone hung above the bed from a piece of red yarn, and on the nightstand sat a jar of what appeared to be pickled eggs.

  “What’s that in the jar?” she asked. “Eggs?”

  “They call ‘em creek eggs,” Ernie said. “Just regular hen’s eggs that they bury in a creek bed for a coupla months, turns ’em black. Supposed to ward off sickness, more clan superstition.”

  “Rotten eggs,” Sutter muttered. “What a bunch of loonies.”

  “Stinks something fierce if ya open that jar.”

  Gross, Patricia thought.

  The rest of the room stood as sparse as the house: a cane chair and small walnut table for a desk. A closet full of clothes. A claw-foot dresser and some candles in metal holders. Above the bed hung a cross made of acor
ns glued together, and below it, yet another of the good-luck designs.

  Guess it didn’t bring them much in the way of luck.

  “Shit, poor Marthe’s sittin’ in the other room practically in shock.” Sutter rubbed his big face. “Couldn’t get nothin’ out of her when I was questionin’ her. Trey, go in and see if she’s all right.”

  Trey nodded again and left the room.

  “You were taking pictures,” Patricia pointed out.

  “Yeah, evidence. We’re just a small-town department, Patricia, so whenever something happens here that qualifies as a major crime, we write up the report and collect whatever evidence there is, then turn it over to the county sheriff’s. They’ll be doin’ the investigation. Right now, the county coroner’s office is out on the Point, pickin’ up the bodies.”

  “But if the Hilds were murdered several miles away . . . why are you treating this bedroom like the crime scene?”

  “‘Cos it is, now that I looked around.” His hand tiredly gestured the closet and some open dresser drawers. “The Hilds were murdered like a city drug execution. Are ya squeamish?”

  “Try me,” Patricia said.

  “Ethel was stripped naked and chopped in half at the waist with an ax. Wilfrud was tied to a tree and knifed. And he had a couple bags a’ crystal meth in his pocket.” He pointed again to the closet and dresser. “Then look what I find in there.”

  Under some linens in the dresser drawer, she noticed dozens of little plastic bags containing either yellowish granules or yellowish chunks of something that looked like pieces of rock salt.

  “Crystal meth,” Sutter said. “Redneck crack. In the city where you live, crack is the big drug, but out here in the boondocks? That stuff’s the ticket. They snort it, smoke it, shoot it up—one of them little bags costs a couple bucks to produce; then they sell it for twenty. It’s superspeed, keeps ya high for eight hours. And it’s just as addictive as crack.”

  Patricia looked at the bags, astonished. “The Hilds were using this stuff?”

  “Not using, selling, it looks like. See all that other stuff in the closet?”

  A large plastic bag sat on the closet floor. When Patricia opened it, she couldn’t have been more bewildered.

  “Matches?” Ernie said when he looked in too.

  There must’ve been a hundred of them in the bag: matchbooks. Just plain old everyday books of matches. “What does this have to do with—”

  “It’s part of the process. Meth-heads soak the matches in some kind of solvent to get some chemical out of it—not the matches themselves, but the strike pads on each book. Then, up there on top, that’s the main ingredient.”

  On the closet shelf sat about a dozen bottles of store-brand allergy and sinus medication that could be purchased over the counter in any drugstore.

  “They soak the cold medicine in alcohol, then boil it and filter it,” Sutter informed her. “That becomes the base for the crystal meth. Then they mix it with the stuff from the strike pad and add some kind of iodine compound, and cook it all down and distill it. I don’t know the whole process—it’s pretty complicated. But any cop in the world’ll tell you that’s what Wilfrud and Ethel Hild were into.”

  “Cain’t believe it,” Ernie said. “I known Wilfrud ‘n’ Ethel all my life. They were weird, sure. But drug dealers?”

  “More than dealers,” Sutter reminded him. “Producers. It takes all kinds, Ernie, and sometimes—a lot of the time, actually—people ain’t what they seem.”

  Patricia supposed he was right about that. Sometimes people changed, became corrupted, and not much else could corrupt a person’s values more effectively than poverty. But this was utterly shocking. With all her education, and all her experience living in a large modern city, Patricia was inclined to think that she knew a lot about human nature and the world in general. But now she felt oblivious, even ignorant.

  This was a different world from hers.

  Chief Sutter rose, walked his girth to the open window, and what he said next provided an eerie accompaniment to what Patricia had just been thinking. “There’s a secret world out there that folks like us either don’t see or just forget about’cos it don’t affect us.” He was looking out at the fringes of Squatterville, the ragtag tract of Judy’s land covered with tin shacks and old trailers. “And the world of crystal meth is right out there somewhere, right under our noses. The shit’s been poppin’ up more and more in our country over the past few years. Shit, just the other day me ‘n’ Trey caught a couple of punks from out of town tryin’ to sell this selfsame shit down here. Crystal fuckin’ meth.” Then he pointed out the window. “And all that out there is why they call it redneck crack. Any one of them little shacks or trailers could be a meth lab.”

  Patricia knew she couldn’t not believe it; that would be naive. And what’s Judy’s reaction going to be when she learns that some of her Squatters are selling hard drugs?

  “So you say Wilfrud and Ethel were murdered by other drug dealers?” Ernie asked.

  “Had to have been,” Sutter answered. “That’s how these people do it—real psycho. The Hilds’ operation must’ve been cutting in on someone else’s territory.”

  “The same thing happens in the city with the crack gangs.” Patricia at least knew that much. Just a month ago in the Post she’d read about how drug dealers would kidnap and dismember the girlfriends of rival dealers. “In the corporate world you buy out the competition, but in the drug world you kill the competition.”

  “Sure.” Sutter knew as well. “Old as history. The Hilds were probably movin’ in on someone else’s turf, and now they got themselves killed for it.”

  Car doors could be heard thunking from outside.

  “Now the fun starts,” Sutter muttered. “You two better git on back to Judy’s. County sheriff’s just pulled up, and when they see all that shit in the closet, they’ll be callin’ the state narcotics squad.”

  “Do you think they’ll get warrants to search all the

  Squatters’ homes?” Patricia asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure. Let’s just hope this is isolated. If there was a whole lot of other Squatters workin’ with the Hilds, we’re all in for a big headache.”

  Patricia and Ernie walked back out to the foyer with Sutter. The door stood open in another room; inside, Sergeant Trey could be seen quietly questioning a very shaken Marthe Stanherd. The thin, elderly woman looked like a bowed scarecrow as she murmured answers to Trey’s queries.

  Trouble in paradise, Patricia thought. Serious trouble . . .

  She and Ernie slipped out, leaving Chief Sutter to brief the incoming county officers. As they walked back across the rising hill—the sun beating down, and the cicadas out en masse—Patricia took another glance back at the humble sheds and shacks of Squatterville, and wondered if last night’s brutal murders were a fluke, or a new beginning for Agan’s Point.

  The fringes of Squatterville were marked with small, uneven vegetable patches that the clan’s children would tend, mostly spring onions, soy beans, radishes. Patricia thought of Marthe Stanherd once more when she spied a genuine scarecrow mounted at the field’s edge: old straw-stuffed clothes and a grimacing potato-sack face beneath a corroded hat. The crucified thing seemed to reach out to them with skeletal hands fashioned from twigs.

  Around its neck hung, not a cross, but a small wooden board acrawl with elaborate squiggles. . . .

  “Patricia! Goodness!” Judy called to her the instant she stepped into the kitchen. Despite last night’s overindulgence with liquor, and the mental aftermath of her husband’s funeral, Judy looked peppy, vibrant, her grayish-red hair flowing in a mane around her face. “Byron called and he’s worried sick about you! Shame on you for not calling him!”

  The exclamation caught Patricia totally off guard. “Byron called the house?”

  “Yes,” Judy sternly replied. “A little while ago. He said he’s been leaving messages on your cell phone since yesterday.”

  Oh, God . .
.

  Judy wagged a scolding finger. “Don’t you dare neglect that wonderful husband of yours—”

  Ernie stepped up, interrupting. “Uh, Judy, lemme talk to ya a minute. The police are at the Stanherd house right now. There was some bad trouble last night. . . .”

  Patricia edged away, leaving Ernie to make the grim report of the Hilds’ murders to her sister. She was back in her room in a few seconds, then retrieved her cell phone and called Byron.

  “Oh, God, I was so worried, honey,” he expressed. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, Byron, I’m fine—”

  “I left messages and you never called back, so I thought—”

  “Everything’s fine, honey,” she said, feeling like a complete lout. What could she say? “Things were just so busy here with the funeral service and the reception, and all the people. There’re so many people here who remember me—I didn’t really expect that.”

  “But that was all yesterday, right?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “So why didn’t you call me this morning?”

  Patricia stalled. She looked, horrified, to the clock: it was almost noon. “I’m so sorry. I slept late—I was so exhausted. Then I went for a walk to get the gears turning. But I was going to call you when I got back, and I just got back a minute ago.” She frowned at herself. Now she was simply lying. How could she tell her own husband that she’d completely forgotten about him? That she’d been out “for a walk,” all right, with a man she’d been having sexual fantasies about and . . . and . . . And whom I practically just screwed in the woods? she finished for herself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m overreacting. I know how that place distresses you. Plus, I just . . .” There was a pause on the phone. “I guess I’m just a big, whiny, insecure pud, but I had a horrible dream last night that you were having sex with another man.”

  Someone should’ve given Patricia an Oscar for the skill and immediacy with which she next tossed her head back and laughed and said, “Oh, Byron, you’re so ridiculous sometimes. There’s not one solitary man in Agan’s Point who isn’t a redneck hayseed with a busted-up pickup truck. At least have enough respect for me to dream that I’m getting it on with Tom Cruise or Johnny Depp, someone like that.” But even through her recital, she was thinking, Holy, holy, holy shit!