“Now all you’ll have to do is pull me out if somethin’ happens,” I said.
“I still wouldn’t jump in that water,” Glenn replied.
“Me neither,” Snake agreed.
I sat down and pulled off my boots and socks. I started to empty my pockets, then got the idea that I would just pull my pants off. I didn’t want to be weighed down by anything.
“Them fish are liable to eat you alive,” Glenn said, not believing I was about to jump in without my pants on. “Hell, they’ve gotta be hungry. What is there to eat in a cave? They might jump all over a big chunk of meat like your legs, thinkin’ they’re giant worms.”
I had never heard of any fish indigenous to Alabama ever eating anybody, even in a cave, so I ignored Glenn’s warning and walked over to the edge of the pool. I’ll admit I was nervous and didn’t know what to expect, other than knowing I was about to get wet. I thought about sticking my foot in and testing the water, but instead just took a step, put my hand on the edge of the rock and vaulted over it, like springing over a picket fence.
The water did feel cold, but not as bad as I expected. I swam underneath the waterfall in the direction of the unknown object. All I could see once I was in the water were the rock walls and the waters surface. Snake kept trying to shine his light at different angles to help me, but it made no difference. I was just going to have to feel my way around. The fish were apparently ignoring me because I couldn’t feel them nibbling at my toes like the little fish that were in the quarry pond would sometimes do. Snake and Glenn were telling me which direction to go as I dog paddled through the black water.
“You’re nearly there,” Snake yelled. “Just a little bit to your left.”
I followed his direction and suddenly felt my foot touch something soft. I reached out with my left hand while treading water with my right. I found the unknown object and ran my hand over it, trying to identify it by feeling of it. It felt like cloth of some kind though it was hard to tell being saturated with water. Then I felt something more firm. I moved around to the rock ledge and rested one hand on it and pulled with the other. Whatever it was, it was hung up on the rocks and I was going to have to work to free it. If I had done all this for a burlap sack of useless junk, I wasn’t going to be happy,. But that is exactly what it felt like. Maybe a bundle of old clothes somebody had thrown away. But why would they throw them in a cave?
I thought about cutting it loose with my pocketknife, then remembered I had pulled my pants off. What a damn fool thing to have done, I thought. Finally, after pulling and tugging with all the strength I could muster with one arm, the object broke free. I rested for a minute holding on to the rock ledge, then started swimming with one hand, pulling whatever I had with the other.
When I got maybe five feet from where Glenn and Snake were standing, shining their lights on me, Snake let out a horrible scream and threw his flashlight against the rocks behind the waterfall. It shattered into tiny pieces. I instinctively let go of whatever it was I was dragging through the water and swam to the edge where Glenn was. I climbed over the edge of the pool in a flash, wondering what kind of hideous creature I had pulled from the rocks.
Glenn was still shining the light on whatever it was that had caused Snake to go berserk. He was speechless and white as a sheet and his hand was shaking, causing the beam from the flashlight to dance on the water. I grabbed the light from him and held it steady on the body of what looked like a girl, judging from the long hair that was waving back-and-forth in the water. I looked from the body back to Glenn, waiting for a response.
Glenn sat down on the edge of the pool, still shaking visibly. “Are we ever gonna quit findin’ bodies?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We very reluctantly pulled the body out of the water and found that it was indeed a girl that looked to be not much older than we were. Apparently, the constant, cool temperature of the cave and being in the water had preserved her body well. Of course we had no idea how long she’d been dead. The tracks we saw at the cave entrance and the skid marks looked fresh. She could have been dead only a short time for all we knew. Maybe less than a day. Maybe only a few hours. Her body was stiff, but other than that she just looked like a girl who was asleep.
Snake couldn’t stop crying. We didn’t blame him given all he’d been through in the last two months. He was feeling sorry for the girl but even more so for the family she was leaving behind that had to grieve for her. Through his sobs he managed to get out a few words, “That’s Glooooria,” he cried, unintelligibly.
“What did he say?” Glenn asked me, as if I could decipher Snake’s words better than he could.
“I…it’s Gl..oooria.”
“Did you say Gloria, Snake?” I asked him, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him.
“Yeah, Gl…Gloria Reeves. She…she was in Frank’s cl…class in school.” Snake was now snubbing like a young child who had been on a long crying jag.
“I know her,” Glenn said. “You do too. She was a cheerleader the same time Prissy was, only she was a year older. She came home with Prissy once.”
I remembered then who Glenn was talking about. She was a very pretty girl from Collinwood who we got the hots for as soon as we were old enough to fantasize about girls. Collinwood school went from the first through the twelfth grades and was all on one campus. I remembered seeing her in her cheerleader uniform at the football games and pep rallies we had at school. She looked a lot different now. I believed she had graduated year before last because Glenn’s sister, Prissy, had just graduated the past year.
“What do you reckon happened to her?” Snake had calmed down and was kneeling beside Gloria, running his fingers through her long, chestnut colored hair.
“I ain’t got a clue,” Glenn said. “She might’ve just fell in the water and drowned. Surely she wasn’t by herself, though.”
“She wasn’t by herself. Didn’t you see all those scuff marks over there?” I said, nodding toward the cave entrance. “I believe somebody drug her in here. She was either already dead or she was fightin’ whoever had her, but you can tell by those marks she was drug.”
We all stood up and walked over toward the entrance. Snake was about to say something when I held my finger up to my lips and put my hand up. I thought I could hear voices outside somewhere. We tiptoed quietly to the entrance and stopped, listening. There were definitely voices and they were getting closer. I motioned for Glenn and Snake to follow me and led them over to one of the deep crevices on the side of the cave opposite the waterfall. It was awfully narrow, but I had squeezed into it before. I pushed Snake in first and Glenn followed, squeezing poor old Snake in like packing dirt in a post hole. We squeezed back into the rock as far as we could and turned off our flashlights. Glenn extinguished the flame from the lantern.
From where we were we couldn’t hear them climbing down the rope, but we heard one of them as soon as they entered the cave.
“I thought you said she was dead when you threw her in the water,” one of the voices yelled.
I peeped around the corner of the rock to see. One man was inside and the other had just let go of the rope and was looking at Gloria’s body.
“Oh, shit,” the other man said. “How in the hell did she git out?”
“Well, was she dead or not?”
“Hell yeah, she was dead. I’m positive of it. I held her head under the water for a long time just to make sure. Somebody had to have found her and pulled her out. Unless it was some kind of animal. Do you reckon it could have been…..”
“Shit fire, no. It wasn’t no damn animal. It was prob’ly one of them boys from Long Holler like that Burt boy or George Patrick’s boy. They’re always out huntin’ or walkin’ these ridges. Whoever it was has prob’ly already called Andrew by now, or will shortly. I didn’t tell him what you did, so he won’t know not to send out a bunch of damned deputies and state troopers, ’specially with all the damn bodies poppin’ up everywhere lately.”
&nbs
p; I’d heard enough to know that the voices belonged to Jake Bullard and his oldest son, James. I knew the Bullards were capable of most anything, but didn’t expect it to be Jake and James. They didn’t seem like they were as mean as Jake’s younger boys, Bruce and Freddy. I’d heard Jake and James made illegal liquor and probably did some other shady stuff, but they didn’t seem as dangerous as the younger boys. I was trying to think beyond the fear I was feeling. What had Jake said about the sheriff? What did he mean he hadn’t told him what James had done? It didn’t make any sense to me.
I was hoping that Snake could remain quiet until they were gone. I knew Glenn could, but I wasn’t too sure about Snake. He’d never been quiet for more than a couple of minutes in his life. Just as I was having that thought Snake made some kind of noise. I couldn’t tell if it was from the crying binge he’d been on or if it was a cough, but it was loud enough that James Bullard heard it. I saw him look at his daddy and motion for him to stay quiet. Then he reached in the waistband of his pants and pulled out a pistol. Jake followed suit and pulled out a little snub nose .38 from the bib of his overalls. I held my breath as I watched the two men shining their flashlights around trying to find the source of the noise James had heard, or at least thought he had.
“What did you hear?” Jake asked him.
“I don’t know. It sounded like somebody cryin’ or somethin’.”
“Hell, boy. You’re just a-hearin’ thangs ’cause your nervous.”
James walked back over to the cave entrance. He bent over, looking, and then started following our footprints until the shallow mud turned into solid rock.
“Somebody’s been here and it ain’t been long,” he said to Jake. “Those footprints are headin’ this way and they are real fresh.”
“We’re in a damned cave, boy. There ain’t nothing to rub footprints away or wash ’em off. How do you know they’re fresh?”
“I just know,” James said, still walking and shining his light in our direction.
“Dammit, let’s get this girl outa here ‘fore some of them damned lawmen git wind. There ain’t nobody here and we ain’t got time for you to go cave explorin’ and a-huntin’ after somethin’ you thought you heard. It was prob’ly a bat. Bat’s den in caves and they roost in the daytime.”
James didn’t answer for a minute, but kept shining his light all around the cave walls. He walked within a foot of the edge of the crevice. From where I had been standing before I crept back to where Glenn and Snake were, I could have reached out and touched him. He shined his light behind a few of the rocks that were close to us but not into the narrow crevice where we were. We had made ourselves as small as we possibly could. I know we were about to mash Snake’s guts out since he was on the inside. James turned and the beam from his flashlight illuminated the wall above our heads, but he didn’t bother to look into the crevice. Maybe he thought it was too small for anybody to be hiding in. Maybe it was just God watching out for us like He always did. Whatever the reason, he gave up and walked back over to where Jake was.
“Maybe it was a bat, but I know I heard something,” he said to Jake, not about to admit he was wrong.
“Well if we don’t git this girl outta here, we’re gonna hear plenty before long and we ain‘t gonna like what we hear.,” Jake said, opening up the large duffel bag he’d brought.
The men put Gloria’s body in the bag and cinched the top up securely with the thick drawstrings. Then they drug it to the opening and tied a rope to the drawstrings. Both men climbed out of the cave and pulled the bag up out of the cave and were gone.
We were afraid to move or say a word for several minutes. When we were reasonably sure they were long gone, we quietly worked our way out of the crevice and crept over to the opening. I climbed up first and when I got to the top of the hole, I slowly stuck my head up past the rocks, like a ground squirrel peeping out of his den to make sure there were no predators lurking about. When I saw it was safe, I motioned for the other two to climb up, which they did in a big hurry. We still hadn’t spoken a word and were not about to until we were a safe distance away. I motioned toward the top of the ridge, indicating that we needed to take the long way out and not even consider going back the way we came in. I met no resistance whatsoever from the other two.
We hiked up and over the ridge and came out in Henry Wade’s pasture. We followed his fence all the way up to Long Hollow Road where we were about a mile and a half south of our dairy farm. We were going to have a two mile longer trip going home but none of us cared. I wouldn’t have cared if we’d had to crawl home. We were alive and that was a miracle. I had no doubt the Bullards would have killed us had they seen us. They would have had no choice.
Glenn finally spoke, “Well, you kicked old Bruce in the nuts and now Jake said he suspected it might be us that was foolin’ with that girl’s body. What are we gonna do now?”
“I really don’t know what to do,” I said. “Did you hear what old Jake said about not tellin’ the sheriff what James had done to that girl? Daddy always said the sheriff knows about their still and lets them operate it, anyway. But what else does he know about? Does he let them get by with killin’ people? If we can’t tell the sheriff, who are we gonna tell?”
“I guess we can tell your daddy. He’ll know what to do. Mine would if it wasn’t Saturday and he wasn’t full of beer. Your daddy always believes you, and if you tell him we can’t call the sheriff, he won’t. He’ll know who he can call, though. I hope he does, anyway, or our lives ain’t gonna be worth a plug nickel.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Gloria Reeves had the misfortune of catching Freddy Bullard’s eye one night at the National Guard Armory dance that was held twice a month in Collinwood. Freddy was a pretty good looking guy, in a rugged sort of way, and a lot of girls were attracted to him. With most of the wiser and experienced girls, that attraction usually lost most of its luster once he opened his mouth. But to younger girls like Gloria who hadn’t been around the block many times, his boasting about all the cars and other toys that he had was exciting. Gloria’s family wasn’t poor, but they were by no means well off, either. Freddy turned on the charm and told Gloria about all the things he could buy her and the places he could take her. He did keep a few of his promises and bought her some nice jewelry and other gifts that would turn a young girls head. He also took her, along with some other friends, to Panama City Beach once. Gloria was not used to being showered with such extravagant gifts and being pampered and made to feel so special.
But like all of Freddy’s conquests, he soon grew tired of Gloria when another young girl caught his wandering eye. She caught him one night with the girl at the Dairy Dip, the favorite nightly hangout spot in Collinwood. She saw him make the circle around the café with the girl sitting right up under him, her head laying on his shoulder. Gloria immediately burst into tears and was already a half mile up the road before one of her friends caught up with her in her car. The next day when she confronted him, big tears in her eyes, he just laughed at her and told her she needed to move on.
“You were fun for a while, baby,” he said with a cocky look on his face, “but I ain’t never gonna be tied down to one girl. We had some fun together, now it’s time to move on. The pastures always greener on the other side. Haven’t you heard that?”
Her heart and self esteem were shattered. To make matters worse, much worse, about two weeks later she discovered her monthly visitor was about three weeks late. She saw Freddy a couple of nights later at the Dairy Dip and told him about it.
“We need to go to the doctor,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks, “I think I’m pregnant.”
Freddy just looked at her, lit a cigarette, and turned up his long neck bottle of Budweiser. “What do you mean we?” he said. “Hell, I’m not pregnant, you are. And how would I know if it was mine, anyway?”
Gloria started sobbing, “I can’t believe you would say something like that to me. You’re the only person I’ve ever been wit
h.”
Freddy let out a loud and condescending chuckle. “A little fox as hot as you are? You expect me to believe that shit?”
“You know I was a virgin, Freddy. Remember how it hurt the first time?”
“Yeah, maybe then you were. But once you saw how good it was I know you had to have let somebody else in them tight-ass jeans of yours. Do you think I’m an idiot? Now git outta here and leave me alone. You’re just tryin’ to git more money outta me you little slut.”
Gloria was devastated. She’d never hurt like this before in her life. She spent several days in her room refusing to talk to anyone. She didn’t eat. She only slept a few hours a night. Her mother tried to get her to go to the doctor, thinking she might have some serious illness. Mr. Barnes at the drug store said he would not be able to hold her job much longer, even though she was an excellent employee and he thought the world of her.
But after about ten days of thinking her life was over and agonizing depression that caused her to lose ten pounds, her feelings turned from pain to hatred, and then to revenge. She’d heard Freddy bragging one night when he was so drunk he could barely walk, that his daddy was a drug king-pin who was worth millions. Nobody ever messed with him either, because he had ties to the mafia and if anybody ever crossed him they would wind up in the bottom of the river or a lake somewhere with their feet cemented inside a big wash tub. She also heard him say that he had the sheriff and all the judges in his pocket and he couldn’t be touched. Bruce kept telling him to shut up, but he just kept on telling how much marijuana his daddy handled and how dangerous he was.
Long Holler Road - A Dark Southern Thriller Page 14
