by Wile E Young
Catfish in the Cradle
Wile E. Young
Copyright © 2019 by Wile E. Young
All Rights Reserved
03-01-20-19-02-16-20-19
www.deathsheadpress.com
Cover Art by Don Noble
For my grandfather, Roger Rice
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Jarod Barbee, Patrick C. Harrison III, and everyone else on the Death’s Head Press team.
Thanks to my family who kept me from giving up. Thanks to my mentors, friends, and peers who believed and helped make this possible: Brian Keene, Linda Addison, Stephen Kozeniewski, Mary Sangiovanni, Bob Ford, Kelli Owen, Somer Canon, Wesley Southard, Mike Lombardo, and a long list of others I admire.
Thanks to departed friend Dallas Mayr for advice and time I’ve never forgotten.
Thank you to my Mom and Dad; I can’t believe this finally happened.
And thank you to my wife, Emily, who has stayed with me through the worst and has ridden with me through the best, has labored over and beta-read everything, and who has helpfully told me when I needed a good kick in the pants.
Chapter One
It’s been about a year since my daughter went missing.
Stuff like that happens. You know it ain’t all that rare; women just up and run off with whatever smooth talking man that’s able to promise whatever makes their hearts flutter.
I had gotten the unwanted looks of sympathy, heard the hushed diner conversations… poor Grady Pope, his daughter done run off.
I pretended not to know, gave my own private misgivings to my friends and just prayed that whatever guy Sammie Jo had run off with was worth the humiliation her dear old dad had suffered.
“There you go hun, the Mr. Roger special just the way you like it.”
I was snapped out of my stupor by the pretty little waitress that I would have jumped head over heels into to bed with in my younger years.
“Thanks Vicky.”
Victoria Barnes was the talk of Uncertain, Texas. Even as she walked away, I could see the furtive glances from most of the men in the room trying to pretend they were drooling over their food.
Vicky had been good friends with Sammie Jo. Maybe that was why I was a little soft on her, with wishful thinking and alcohol attempting to form a replacement for my flesh and blood.
I dug into my pancakes and bacon with fervor; I had spent all night out on the lake looking for a particular gator that had been taking dogs and chickens near some lake houses. No kids yet thankfully, but once a gator started getting this bold it was only a matter of time before taxpayer was the only menu item.
Government work was shit, but it put the food on the table. Literally, since every animal I put down stocked my fridge for the next month. But nevertheless, it was a dirty job and I had often come home smelling to high heaven and coated in the insides of some critter or another. The pay wasn’t fantastic, and if it weren’t for the fact that the cabin had been in the family since my great-grandfather, I doubted I would have been able to afford it.
I was a simple man and content with it.
Sammie Jo had wanted more.
I sighed and rubbed my eyes, letting the warm egg yolk run down my throat as I stared around the Shady Glade Café, trying to keep my mind off my melancholy.
The restaurant had been in business off and on for ninety years; people from all walks had traded yarns at the tables and stuffed their mouths with the finest food that the diner could provide. Battered chairs and checkerboard print tablecloths made up the interior of the place, walls of fishing gear and photos going back years all with smiling locals and secret spots known to select few.
The smell of breakfast food drifted from the pick-up window as Davis “Monster” Trucker deftly handled spatulas and deep fryers like he was a Hibachi chef down in Shreveport.
Sheriff Otis Porter was telling another anecdote to the regulars, fisherman, and others.
Mose William had a group of eager young tourists, no doubt guiding them through the canoe trails cut through the bayou.
Then there was Vicky, busy refilling Gideon Whyte’s coffee, leaning over so the young fisherman could get a good look up her shirt. Best way to hook a man; appeal to his stomach and pecker simultaneously.
“Want a refill Grady?”
“Naw, I think I’m heading out.”
Vicky leaned down and gave me a quick kiss on my unshaved cheek. “You take care you hear?”
I told her I would, gave her a generous tip and picked up my cap as I headed out the door. The chime rang as I stepped out into the gravel parking lot and breathed in a deep lungful of humid April air.
The marina was down a small mossy embankment to my left, and I strode purposefully out onto the dock past the ranks of Bass Masters, Sun Trackers, and aluminum bottom River Runners. Most folks around here paid for their own slips, but I just tied up at the very end of the row, right past the last slip on the open water.
My pride and joy was a Lowe 175 that I had saved and scraped to buy. I loosed the moorings and pushed off the dock, pontoons under the wood bouncing in the water as I pulled away. The engine rumbled to life and I motored out into the channel, lily pads and Spanish moss bouncing in my wake.
I could smell the muddy water from the river and reached my hand over, letting the water gently stroke my fingers as a startled turtle jumped into the water from a nearby log.
Caddo Lake was a little over 25,000 acres of wetland and lake in deep East Texas, the Louisiana border a hot stone’s throw away. Cypress trees enshrouded the area… a place to come if you wanted to disappear from the world.
I glanced at the empty seat next to the trolling motor on the prow of my boat and the melancholy came drifting back. Just as well; this wasn’t the place to come if you wanted the high life. I made my way up river in silence hearing the occasional quack of a duck or a distant crow, lost in my own thoughts.
My home was located in a back channel dominated by small inlets and trees called Carter Lake, very far off the beaten path, which was just the way that I liked it. I rounded the corner in the bend and saw the squat dull-brown wood and faded windows of my humble cabin, a craggy slope dominated by dead driftwood and cypress trees obscuring the view.
Then I heard the sobbing.
The water down by my boathouse was shallow and muddy. I had grown used to the various blacks, greens, and dull greys of the things that grew and drifted there.
So the pale flesh huddled under one of the support beams threw me for a loop.
I gunned the motor faster and hollered over the lapping waves “Hello! You okay?”
A face peeked out at me: long blonde hair covered in mud, tear-stained eyes misted over in drops of agony, long red scrapes from where the woods had torn at the flesh.
My daughter…
Sammie Jo screamed under the dock, her massively swollen belly heaving in the throes of labor.
Chapter Two
There’s no cellphone reception out in the boonies, one of the side effects of living in the sticks. I had seen full-grown men lose their shit and throw tantrums once they were disconnected from the wider world. That was the thing about Uncertain and Caddo Lake… if you needed to get lost, you just needed to take a walk into the bayou.
The clay-like mud splattered all over my jeans and flannel shirt as I crouched in the muck with my daughter.
“Sammie!” I was practically sobbing as I scooped her up in my arms. Her eyes, which had been wrinkled in tears and pain, softened for a moment before she gritted her teeth and let loose another ear-splitting shriek.
It wasn’t like delivering puppies. I had done that plenty of times. But a real baby was outside my expertise.
I tried to pick her up
but my old bones weren’t up to the task, and I barely managed to get her out of the muck and filth and onto the dock. The wood was warm from having baked under the sun, its soft rays trying to reach down and provide a little comfort before it turned the world into an oven.
I blinked into the light and mouthed the words Please God over and over as my daughter shrieked, her belly quivering.
Her mother had given birth to her in Shreveport at Promise Hospital. It had been a surprise labor. I had been out on the river and our neighbor Cy had to drive Renee into town. The nurses had given me death glares when I had tracked mud into the ward, telling me to leave, but I had managed to muscle pass just in time to see my beautiful baby girl, born seven pounds and four ounces in the cool autumn of 1986.
I rocked Sammie Jo in my arms. “Push on through baby girl, push on through… I know it hurts.”
There weren’t any neighbors coming to help me. Cy had passed ten years ago, and no one wanted to buy a cabin nearly five miles from the nearest road with no reception. I kept praying for a miracle, that maybe Scott Carter or one of my other friends would come trundling up the driveway to check on me.
Sammie shrieked again and her nails, chipped and dirty, dug into my arms, drawing dark maroon blood that trickled down my forearm and onto her breasts and chest.
I wished for Renee. She would have known what to do… she had taken all those classes about it while I just had a very simple knowledge. But my wife had passed too, six months ago. Sammie Jo disappearing had aged her overnight.
“Baby girl, I can see the head!”
I didn’t know if it was a boy or girl, but a head of pallid black hair was showing, then another contraction, and another push… a face.
Sammie caterwauled and shouted cuss words to high heaven, her pain intense as I gripped her hand and told her what a good job she was doing. That’s what I had seen in the movies… there wasn’t much else I could do.
A final scream and a push and my grandson spilled out onto the dock, crying his lungs out. Sammie Jo fell back with a groan, and I hastily took off my jacket and scooped the boy up into my arms, trying to keep him warm.
The boy’s cries were deep, more croak than wailing, throaty… I hadn’t remembered his mother making such noise. His hands grasped at the air, brushing the strands from my beard as he experienced the world for the first time.
I smiled “Baby girl, it’s a boy…” Sammie Jo didn’t respond, and my smile disappeared and a heavy pressure grappled with my heart. I set the boy down gently in my coat and shook Sammie’s shoulders. “Baby girl…”
Her eyes were dilated and were staring sightlessly out at the bayou. I shook her shoulders harder, her head bouncing on the dock like a fish out of water.
I screamed her name over and over again, her child joining in the symphony of pain as the sun burned my bare skin, uncaring.
Her hair was spread out like ripples in water, her eyes and mouth a painting of relief.
She was dead.
I rocked back and forth, begging her to come back, the stabbing pain in my heart unending.
The boy squirming in my jacket caught my eye; the little thing could barely move as he grasped at the air… unaware that his mother was gone.
My old bones creaked when I stood; I stood over the thing that had killed my daughter. Those eyes that weren’t open yet, mouth that opened and closed repeatedly, the pale skin that still glistened with the juices of childbirth.
He was a murderer, a killer. My daughter’s corpse lay feet away, the death wound between her legs all the evidence I needed.
All I had to do was nudge him off the dock, let him sink into the brown water, his first taste of life nothing but an illusion.
It would be justice.
The temptation was there to my shame; my grandson barely into the world and already with an enemy.
I could have done it easily, I owed him no loyalty. No loyalty other than blood, thicker than the water lapping at the bank.
I picked him up cradling him gently and I walked to my truck, turning on the heater and driving into town.
****
Lincoln, that’s what I named him. Lincoln Andrew Pope, my first and only grandchild.
Marshall, Texas was about a fifteen-minute drive from Uncertain. I thundered down the highway, ignoring any speed limit signs until I had reached the Christus Good Shepherd Medical Center.
A nurse had made a small noise of alarm when I had come stumbling through the door, all sweat and dirt carrying a squalling baby. Lincoln was practically wrenched from my hands and taken into the depths of the hospital as clipboards full of forms were shoved in my hands.
My handwriting was sloppy; the little one room schoolhouse in Karnack having done little to equip me with any useful skills. I hadn’t graduated and could barely add and subtract. I had spent my childhood outdoors on the lake under my father’s guidance and stories.
The paper was a mess of scribbles, and for the first time I wondered who the father was. As she had gotten, older Sammie Jo had spent time enough trawling bars for men… I had never met any of them. That was the one bit of mercy my daughter had left me: a blessed ignorance of how she spent time away from home.
There would be tests, maybe a DNA test, to prove he was kin, an end to mystery.
Then I would know the identity of the man who had taken my little girl.
The police came walking in like they owned the place, typical East Texas swagger… this wasn’t Otis Porter and his deputies; these were city police.
I repeated the story of my daughter’s disappearancethat every mouth in Uncertain could have repeated verbatim and told them to call anyone to back me up.
They kept pushing, asking hard questions and trying to press my buttons. I was a man with a temper, but I wasn’t rising to the occasion. If I did there was no hope for Lincoln… he’d grow up without a mother or grandfather. The Popes are a stubborn clan, always have been and always will be… lasting through the tides and the seasons.
Otis was finally called. He vouched for me and I was free to leave.
Lincoln had to stay at the hospital; he needed more than I could give him, not to mention the tests to prove his blood relation to me. They at least let me see him first.
The nursery had that odd sterile smell that had always made me uncomfortable. My mother had died in a rest home, and every time I had gone to visit her towards the end that stench had left with me, lingering all the way back to the house.
Lincoln was front and center, dressed in that little blue outfit that hospitals kept on hand for baby boys. He wriggled and squirmed, and for the first time I was struck by how pallid his skin was… unhealthy, like he had never seen a sun before.
Then it was time to leave, and I was in my truck driving back to Uncertain.
My adrenaline died.
And my grief began.
Chapter Three
I pulled over on the edge of the road between Marshall and Uncertain. I had driven past this spot a million times and could have probably pointed out every rabbit hole or possum den for miles. The pasture to the left, the overhanging tree, the mud stained boulder that had seen too many rainstorms.
I pounded the steering wheel, shouting out my anguish and letting the tears fall. If you cry, always do it away from prying eyes. My father had pounded that lesson into me at the end of a fist. One too many black eyes and pain began to lose its potency.
But I had never felt pain like this.
When I had finished, I wiped my face and focused on that dead pit in my stomach, the one I went to when things were bad.
The one that made me angry.
****
Sheriff Otis Porter and his deputy Beau were waiting when I got back to the cabin. Their old cruiser had seen better days; a holdover from the eighties, it still had the swiveling lights instead of the strobe lights of more modern cars. It was parked right next to the door with a black van that belonged to my friend Scott Carter.
I turned off t
he ignition and climbed out. Otis waited for me patiently next to the house. An overweight man in his fifties, he had been a star high school quarterback in his day. He still looked capable, though, even if he was packing a bit of a spare tire.
“Grady…” We shook hands, his eyes echoing his sympathy without words. Southern upbringing all the way: never voice the problem. “Scott’s already down at the dock.”
I nodded and gruffly murmured a thanks before the three of us walked around the house and down the embankment to my boat slip. They had pulled a sheet over her body, a blessing and a mercy.
Scott walked to meet us and hugged me in a short embrace. “Grady.”
“Thanks for coming Scott.”
My friend nodded, his goatee that was just beginning to show hints of grey contrasting with the dark navy t-shirt he was wearing. “We are gonna take her into Marshall if you’ll let us, get an autopsy.”
They wanted to cut my baby girl up, tear her open with no dignity for a cause of death that I already knew…
“That’ll be fine, but I want a DNA test done on the kid, find out who the father is and if he’s going to be a problem.”
Otis and Beau nodded and promised they’d get the order put through. None of us said the word rape, but it was obvious that it was going through our minds. And if it was true…
Well, folks around here have a way of dealing with that.
My boat had drifted into a small grove of cypress trees, and Beau slipped on an extra pair of waders to retrieve it. I walked with Scott and Otis as they gathered up Sammie Jo, carrying her as gently as two middle aged men could up the hill. They gently placed her in the back of the van, sealing her in the body bag that had been brought for her.
There was my daughter, seemingly at peace. But I had seen that look of fear in her eyes before Lincoln had made his way into the world. She hadn’t been at peace then.
