We took the trail up to Jumping Rock, pausing at the top to look over the clear, uncorrupted lake. We both saw him at once, on the cliff across the water, prone on a flat rock, the distance obscuring his features. “Who the hell is that?”
“Gotta be the guy from two nights ago. He must’ve followed us or something.”
“What are we to him?”
I shrugged. “Let’s check the snares and tell Pops.” We hurried over the hill to the snare field. One snare was tripped and empty, the others still set. We reloaded the one and ran back to camp.
“Do you think it’s the man from the other night?” I asked Pops.
“Boys, there was no man from the other night. He probably just came up here for peace and fishing and didn’t count on noisy teenagers disturbing his quiet.”
I smirked at Buzzy but let the matter drop.
After a dinner of bass and the mountain gather, we sat around the fire, listening to the thunder of a burgeoning storm and to Pops telling stories of his time in the war.
“The Japanese were ferocious fighters. On Saipan we came upon a field hospital and captured it. We had the enemy doctors tied up to a palm tree and our corpsman was tending their wounded. One of their wounded soldiers, man with an arm and half his face blown off, grabs the medic’s pistol and shoots him, then turns it on us. Fought like a wounded cat to the end.”
“Did you ever kill a man?” Buzzy asked.
“I did. I killed men who were trying to kill me.”
“What’s it like? Killin someone. Tilroy tole Petunia it felt like he owned the universe.”
Pops smirked. “It’s a sight less attractive than that. However, when you prevail in mortal battle there is a euphoria you feel having not died. There is also inherent respect that you owe the vanquished. But what Tilroy did was just sick. Him deriving any feeling of pleasure from it makes me despair for the boy.”
We were silent for a time, watching the fire have its way with the wood. I took up my old copy of The Call of the Wild and started reading by flashlight. Pops poked at the coals with a stick, sending sparks flying like lightning bugs. A single meteor ran a line across the Milky Way. “Shooting star,” Buzzy called. “Make a wish.”
“There’ll be plenty of wishing tomorrow night. That’s when the Perseids will be at peak.”
“What are they?”
“Every summer around this time the earth passes near the tail of the Swift-Tuttle comet and it causes a meteor shower—some years are better than others. This year we’re going right through the tail, so it’s supposed to be quite a show.”
“Will we be able to see it from here? There are a lot of trees.”
Pops shook his head. “We’re gonna climb to the top of Old Blue. I watch em there most years.” He stirred the fire again.
“You never told us the story of you climbing Red Cloud.”
“Ahh… yes.” He put the smoking stick aside and scratched his growing stubble. “Both of my brothers tried to climb the face on their sixteenth birthdays, and they made it—barely, but they made it. As a result, it became a serious rite of passage among our kin; many tried, but no one else in the family could do it. On my first attempt, I got halfway up and just couldn’t get higher. It was a sheer face up the neck, then jutted out at Red Cloud’s chin. When I quit, my brothers let me have it. It was like I dishonored the family name, and it rode heavy on me, I have to admit. Second time I tried was six months later, alone at night so no one could watch me. I guess seeing Red Cloud every day reminded me of my failure. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. This time I got as far as Red Cloud’s nostril.” Pops laughed and stirred the fire again.
“When did you finally do it?” Buzzy asked.
“It was the evening before Chester, Bump, and I shipped off to the war. Those boys didn’t even attempt it; they just climbed the back way. But I guess I was determined to win some of that Red Cloud protection before going off to fight, or maybe just to show up my brothers. Regardless, this time I made it to the top. It was a feeling I will never forget—felt like I could do anything, after that.”
“So you think Red Cloud really had special powers?” Buzzy asked.
“I do.”
“Wait a second, Pops. You mean like magic power?”
He looked at me with a wry smile. “I mean the power to inspire a bookish kid to think he could accomplish anything in the world. If that ain’t magic, I don’t know what is.”
“But that’s really just you believing in yourself.”
“Maybe, but I think it was Red Cloud who gave me that belief.” He shifted on the rock and took a sip of mash. “Let me ask you both something. What did it feel like when you first made the top of Old Blue?”
“Amazing.”
“Yeah, amazin.”
“Like you were invincible?”
“Yeah, sort of. Yesterday was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. The whole day was a test. I know I can do harder things now.”
“Me too. I feel like this is jus the beginnin of what we can do.”
Pops sat back, satisfied. “I knew there was a little bit of Buck in you boys.”
“Who’s that?” Buzzy asked. “I don’t know him.”
“He’s the hero of a book I’m just finishing.” I held it up. “He goes from civilized to wild in Alaska.”
“What makes him go wild?”
“Well, he’s a dog and falls in with a pack of wolves and ends up head of the pack.”
“So he kinda goes back to what he was meant to be.”
“Uh… yeah. That’s a good way to put it. His instincts just take over and he survives. You should read it.”
“Maybe I will.”
We went silent again. After a while Pops said, “You know, Call of the Wild was Ray Mitchell Jr.’s favorite book.”
“How did he die anyway? You never told me.”
Pops topped up the mash in his tin cup. “Ray Junior wasn’t like his daddy. He was a bright boy from the start. Mayna taught him to read early and he took to it like a Lab to water. When he was about ten he used to walk into town to borrow books from me. All those books you’re reading now, Kevin. He’d take one back every Sunday to read for the week. Had to hide them from Grubby.”
“Why did he have to hide them?”
“Grubby’s expectations for Ray didn’t extend past the farm. He regarded things like reading and education as superfluous to Ray’s destiny, which was to run steer like his daddy, his daddy’s daddy and his daddy before him. And young Ray wanted nothing more than to please Grubby, but farming just wasn’t in him. He had a hunger to learn that burned in him like a coke fire. We would sit on the porch at Chisold each Sunday afternoon and talk about what he read that week.
“One day Grubby caught him reading when he was supposed to be working and whipped him raw. Came storming into my office saying I was trying to get his boy to ‘deny his place.’ ” Pops shook his head and took a sip of mash.
“He was a great student, Ray was. A born writer—used to write the most incredible short stories and poems. Couple months before high school graduation, I convinced him to apply to the University of Kentucky. They had this new writing program. Didn’t tell Grubby. Figured if he got in we’d find the money and somehow get Grubby to agree.
“Come June we heard from Kentucky; Ray was accepted into the program. That same summer he got his draft notice. I met with Grubby and Mayna about him going to college, but Grubby wouldn’t have it. And Ray wanted to please his daddy more than anything, so he turned down college and went into the army. After basic training he came back up to Medgar on a three-day pass before shipping out to Vietnam. I’ll never forget the sight of him walking up my porch steps with his head just about shaved and his starched army uniform. He looked about fifteen years old.”
Pops looked off into the night as he continued the story. “Ray said he just wanted to thank me for lending him all those books and helping him with his writing all these years. I told him wh
en he came back safe and sound from the war, I would convince Grubby to let him go to college. He just smiled and said nothing—he just knew it wasn’t going to happen.”
“How did he get killed?” Buzzy asked. “I heard it was in one a them enemy tunnels.”
“What were the tunnels?” I asked.
Pops continued, “The Vietcong were guerrilla fighters and had spent years digging tunnels throughout South Vietnam. They used to live in them by day and attack at night. Because Ray was small, almost jockey size, he was the one who had the job of rooting in the tunnels they found for any VC. One tunnel turned out to be a division command post. He surprised a whole room full of VC colonels and generals. Then the VC attacked and his platoon was driven off and Ray was captured. Rather than kill him immediately, the VC tortured him to see what he knew.”
I went cold. “What did they do to him?”
“What they did to him isn’t important.”
“Oh, come on, Pops, we gotta know what they did to him to make the story. Come on, we’re old enough to know this stuff.”
Pops declined. I kept pestering him for the next five minutes to tell us. Finally, he lost patience with my badgering.
“You really want to know what they did to Ray Mitchell?” he said with a stripe of anger. It was one of the few times Pops had been visibly irritated with me. I knew I should retreat, but I had to know how they tortured Ray.
“Okay.” He put his sour mash tin down and leaned forward, looking straight at us. “They brought him into a room in one of the tunnels. First they beat him to a pulp… broke his jaw in twelve places. Then they hammered bamboo slivers under his fingernails and pulled them off, one by one. They beat the bottom of his feet with clubs until his feet were ruined. They punctured both eardrums with sharpened chopsticks. Then they cut off his thumbs and were working on his fingers when they were overrun by the army. They strangled him and retreated. That’s what they did to young Ray Mitchell. You boys satisfied?”
Buzzy and I swallowed in unison. “I’m sorry, Pops, we didn’t mean to make you angry. We were just wondering.”
“I know you were just wondering, but sometimes wondering is better than knowing.”
We were all silent for a while. I helped Buzzy watch the campfire embers; Pops was considering the cooler air that collected off the lake. Finally he spoke. “I didn’t mean to snap at you, boys. It’s just that I hadn’t thought about Ray in a while and maybe I felt guilty about that.”
“Did he make it up the top a Red Cloud? “
“No, son. He didn’t.”
Pops stood and went off to bed and left Buzzy and me at the embers.
“Man… what do you think he was thinking when they were torturing him like that?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. I was overtaken with thoughts of young Ray Mitchell and how, the week he was held captive, the soft life in Medgar continued unabridged. Smith’s was open to brisk hot-weather business when they brought Ray to the underground room and shattered his jaw with an iron stave. Miss Janey’s was crowded that Saturday, with still-shiny mirrors and fewer clippings in the corners when they broke the bones in his feet for the first time. Biddle’s had just reopened after the expansion with new red vinyl seats and shiny chrome about the time they pried off the first of his fingernails. Jesper Jensen was the newly crowned Hivey’s pinochle champion when they burst Ray’s eardrums with a sharpened chopstick. Everyone in Medgar went about their business that week. Pops waited anxiously for his daughter to come home from her third year of college as Ray lost his right thumb. Lo was packing powder at Juliet Seven when they cut off the left one. Grubby was tending his growing stock, trying to raise a grand champion steer while his only son, tortured, then garrotted, was left naked by the retreating Vietcong.
“I bet he was thinkin he shouldn’tve tried to please his daddy so much,” Buzzy said after a while.
Chapter 29
THE HUNDRED-YEAR STORM
Pops was already at the fire frying fatback and boiling coffee water when we woke the next morning. He cooked four bass filets in the fatback grease with wild garlic and black trumpet and bear’s head tooth.
After breakfast Buzzy and I hiked off to check the snares. At the top of Jumping Rock we scanned the lakeside for the strange visitor, but he was nowhere around. Then through the trees to the snare field.
The first snare was tripped but empty. The next had caught a huge brown rabbit, which was hanging upside down, eyes closed, body still, noose around its thigh. I reached to take it down and its eyes shot open. It shook frantically, writhing in abject terror for twenty seconds, then went still, chest heaving. I grabbed the line and the rabbit shuddered and quivered again until I let go. “How are we gonna get him back to camp?”
“We’re gonna chop his head off.” He pulled Pops’ hatchet out of the large pocket in his pant leg.
“Oh man, I don’t think I want to see that.”
“Don’t look then.” He grabbed the rabbit’s hind legs and slipped off the snare. The rabbit fought ferociously, twisting and shaking in Buzzy’s grip. He slammed its head on a rock, stunning it to quiet, then laid it across a fallen tree and lopped off its head in a quick motion of the ax. He strung the rabbit up on a tree branch for blood draining. The animal’s hind legs moved rhythmically, as if it was blindly hopping around in search of its severed head.
We caught two more smaller rabbits, which Buzzy dispatched with a quick flick of the ax. The fourth snare was tripped but empty, the others intact. We reset the triggered snares and carried the headless rabbits back to camp.
“We will make quite a stew for lunch,” Pops said when he saw our haul. “Let me show you boys how to field dress a rabbit.” We followed him down to the water. He took the bowie and pressed the tip into the rabbit’s back, then peeled off its fur like he was skinning a banana. He chopped off its four feet, then slit its belly. “You want to tease out the entrails so the intestines don’t break open. Then remove the heart, liver, lungs, and other organs.” He gathered up the rabbit guts and flung them into the lake. “Always wash the game thoroughly so no bacteria remains.” He rubbed the carcass vigorously in the water, then held up the rabbit by its leg stubs. “You are going in the stew,” he said to the varmint. “You boys dress the others while I ready the pot.” He handed me the knife and walked back to camp.
I shook my head and passed it to Buzzy. “Come on,” he said, clearly perturbed. “I’m only doin one.” He cut the fur, then quickly stripped and gutted the animal, washing it in the lake. He gave me the bowie. “Your turn, Indiana.”
I hesitated.
“What? Don’t they got dead rabbits where you come from?”
“Only roadkill.”
I held the headless rabbit. Its fur was warm and downy. I made a two-inch cut in the nape of its neck and pulled the skin away from its back. It came off easily, as if I was pulling rabbit-fur gloves off a delicate hand. I cut off its feet and pulled the skin free. The rabbit was scrawny without its fir, glistening like a newborn.
“Now for the gross part.” I cut into the underside and opened its belly. I considered the entrails, unsure exactly how one is supposed to “tease out” guts.
“Reach in an pull the intestine out gentle; then the rest’ll come.”
I did and the guts spilled like colander-poured spaghetti.
“Now cut the organs out.”
I scraped out the heart, lungs, and everything else.
“I’ll do the gut chuckin for you.” Buzzy picked up the innards and cast them into the lake. “Go on an wash it good.”
I briskly rubbed the rabbit inside and out; then we walked up to camp. Pops had gathered a half bucket of hopniss and some chanterelle and shaggymane. He added water and more wild watercress and cut the rabbit carcasses into thirds and threw them into the pot, bones and all. In an hour we were eating one of the best stews I had ever tasted.
Then to our hammocks, digesting wild everything and watching the clouds morph across the splendid sky.
Around three o’clock Buzzy and I rousted from our lay-about and decided to explore the other side of the lake and try to scout the mystery camper. We hiked up Jumping Rock hill, past the snare field, and over the larger cliffs at the north end.
We watched Pops go lakeside to check the fishing rods—it was then we saw him again, the strange man dressed in black, standing on the rock cliff at the south end of the lake, watching the camp with binoculars. From a distance it was difficult to make out any features—just a dark shape on the granite.
“I swear that’s the man from the other night,” I said, a pitch of fear in my throat.
“Don’t know, but he’s takin a long look at Pops.”
We watched him watch the far shore until Pops went into the trees and the man left the cliff. We crept a half mile through the woods, quiet as Shawnee sneaking up on an enemy camp, tiptoeing around fallen twigs, leaf piles.
At the back side of the cliff we came upon the intruder’s campsite—a smoking fire, a simple sleeping bag under a blue tarp strung between trees, a small daypack against a rock. Buzzy stood.
“Where are you going?”
“Gonna see who it is. You keep lookout. Gimme a bird whistle if he comes.”
“No, I’ll just yell.”
“Don’t be yellin. He’ll know we’re here. Just give a whistle.”
“I can’t whistle.”
“What do you mean you can’t whistle?”
“I mean I can’t whistle.”
“Why not?”
“Never learned how.”
Buzzy looked at me with a pitiful gaze, as if my suburban upbringing left me severely wanting in the ways of boy.
“I’ll give you a woo-woop if I hear him coming back. I’ll make it sound like an owl or something.”
Buzzy seemed dumbfounded by my lack of whistling ability. “I guess that’ll have to do.”
He quietly stepped through the trees to the stalker’s camp. I spun which ways, looking for movement, listening for approaching steps. Buzzy poked through the pack, scouted the camp for clues. He came back and motioned me to follow. We worked quickly through the woods, around the corner of the lake to the start of the flat beach, and sat by the water on a rock.
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 27
