Hog Wild

by Cathy Pickens

  The guy climbing on the center pole lagged six or eight feet behind the other two when they made it to the top of their poles. Having Sarge directly below the center pole screaming up at him didn’t either calm him or encourage him. I wouldn’t want Sarge staring up at my fanny, screaming. Remind me not to sign up for summer camp here.

  The kid lost some ground thanks to the yelling, but he finally attained the pinnacle.

  I expected the three to rappel down. Instead they clung to the top, intent on some task. Sarge barked more orders, unintelligible from my vantage. They appeared to be fixing the thick rope that linked them to the top of each pole.

  The guy clinging to the pole on the right yelled across at his companions, what sounded like a count to three. Then what I’d taken to be a thick rope unfurled. It whipped loudly as it rolled open, turning into a black banner at least two stories high. A plain black banner. No message, just an impressively large black canvas swaying slightly at the edges.

  I didn’t hear Sarge congratulate them. Maybe his praise fell like the gentle rain of mercy.

  Before the kids could rappel down behind the banner, I picked my way through the scrub brush and down the embankment to the car. I waited until I had driven a few yards down the road before I closed my oversize car door, not wanting the sound to attract attention.

  Corporations paid for a lot of strange things in hopes of gaining a competitive edge. I could only wish Mitch and Tim and Sarge Whosit all the best.

  21

  Wednesday Night/Thursday Morning

  I’d piddled around the cabin, picking up fallen tree limbs in the winter-weedy yard, and sweeping and dusting inside. The cabin was solitary, and darkness closed in solid, first among the pine trees and hard-woods edging the clearing, and eventually tight around the cabin itself. The few security lights dotted around the other lake cabins muted the stars. There would be no moon.

  I settled in, as was my occasional ritual, with peanut butter, Mom’s blackberry jelly, loaf bread I kept in the freezer, and some ultrapasteurized milk from the cupboard.

  I ate sitting sideways in my favorite stuffed chair, my legs hooked over the arm, my plate under my chin, and one of my grandfather’s battered leather journals propped open on my knees. I felt in need of a visit with him.

  I thumbed back to a spot where I’d left off a couple of days earlier. Over the ridge behind the cabin, my grandfather’s land nestled against the national park. The ire in his words surprised me, as he ranted about the government landgrab, buying mountain property for pennies on the dollar to piece together the national forest.

  Even though I knew the Southerner’s distrust of government ran deep in him, he’d always been a reverent respecter of nature. He’d even tipped into his journal a now-yellowed news photo of a man standing in front of a poplar tree trunk, a photo likely taken before he was born, before these forests had been logged almost to extinction by men who had to feed families off tough land. Trees are, after all, endlessly renewable, they thought. No need to worry—until erosion carried off the topsoil and the need for timber and pulpwood outpaced long-term tree growth. Four grown men standing together would have barely blocked the trunk from view. No more trees that size, certainly no poplars.

  One of the loggers who helped scalp this land was also the one who encouraged the government to buy what became the wilderness area in western North Carolina, one of the few virgin stands of timber left. So-called forestry experts say trees need to be cut to keep the system healthy, to open up for new growth. Amazing that the forests here did so well before we started “managing” them. Ought to be left alone now.

  Never any mention of the men who lost their family homesteads or their livelihoods. Bet they’d rather not be managed, down the hill in some textile mill, any more than the trees needed to be managed.

  I thought of the road cut in to Golden Cove and all those towering trees and the tiny delicate plants and birds’ nests and squirrels. As stewards, we don’t manage well.

  I read awhile, and eventually nodded to sleep in the chair.

  Despite stumbling to bed after midnight, I woke early, freshened up, and gently guided my grandfather’s vintage Mustang convertible over the rutted dirt road from the cabin. I viewed the thick woods around Luna Lake with a new eye, the perspective from my grandfather’s almost one-hundred-year span, a perspective of unresolved conflict over what to protect and how.

  At Pop’s Place, I had just finished topping off my gas tank when Noah arrived. Miraculously, his cumbersome vehicle didn’t turn over as he whipped into the store’s parking lot. The car came to rest in a faint cloud of dust near the gas pump, sun glinting off the big silver canoe.

  “Hi!” He yelled and waved as he climbed out. “Do you think it’ll be okay if I leave my car here? Or should I follow you?”

  “We can ask.” Thank the good Lord he wasn’t planning on me riding with him. Or using that ridiculous canoe on the river.

  He held Pop’s wooden screen door open for me, and music greeted us. All eyes inside turned to study us as we came in. No one missed a beat, literally. No emotion. No greeting. Just stares.

  Here in Pop’s Place, the regulars assembled on a rump-worn sofa and assorted chairs to pick or strum an instrument or tap a foot in time to the music. It didn’t take them but an eyeblink to recognize us as nothing more than paying customers, thereby worth not another look.

  Noah stood frozen, staring and listening, a tentative smile on his face as if he’d landed among an alien race with whom he hoped to make friends. I watched Noah and could see Pop’s Place afresh, through his eyes. The wood shelves and creaky uneven plank floor sanded by decades of shuffling feet. The neatly stacked but dusty merchandise. No fast-food franchises or day-bright fluorescents in this roadside store. Worn, comfortable, slightly oily smelling. And loud with live music.

  This morning’s gathering was small, only four players and a couple of full-time listeners. Plenty enough to fill the low-raftered building with banjo, guitar, and mandolin music. On the weekend, the crowd would spill out the door, weather permitting. Some singers might come to join in, a couple of clog dancers on the fringe of the crowd perhaps. Between now and then, the players would ebb and flow, depending on who got off work or whose wife would let him out of the house. Most times, though, Pop’s had music. Authentic mountain folk music or bluegrass or twangy old Nashville country or tub-thumping gospel.

  I’d watched for Noah’s reaction because, only a few months earlier, I myself had been surprised by my own reaction. When I’d first walked back in here, after being away practicing law in Columbia and Charleston, I’d been surprised. Not surprised to find music here, but surprised to realize I had never found it anywhere else but home.

  This wasn’t the only place around Dacus where folks gathered to play music. Far from it. Friday or Saturday night square dances at the state park or over in Dillard, Georgia. Wednesday night or Sunday afternoon gospel singings at churches. Family gatherings around the piano. Heck, even school bus trips where most of the kids knew the words to “The Old Rugged Cross” or “That Good Ol’ Mountain Dew,” a silly ode to moonshine, not a soft drink jingle. The surprise had been realizing I’d never found casual communal music anywhere else but home.

  The circled players studied the dusty threadless rug at their feet, focused on the changing leads in “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” a Doc Watson favorite.

  The grin spread on Noah’s face, and he looked like he planned to join them. I took his elbow and steered him toward the door. It might look impromptu, but there were rules. Damn cinch Noah didn’t know what they were and didn’t know any better than to sing or get in the way of somebody’s fret arm.

  “That was great! Who are they? What was that song?” Noah practically danced toward my car. “I should do an article.”

  I didn’t break it to him that National Geographic had already done one, back when he was in grammar school.

  When I’d asked if we could leave his ve
hicle, the guy at the register had just nodded. Wait’ll he got a load of Noah’s dual-habitat amphibimobile parked beside his store.

  “Is it some kind of club?” Noah asked.

  “Whoever shows up plays. Pretty much anytime.”

  “Wow.” Noah slumped into the Mustang’s low seat and stared back at the store as I pulled away. “They’re good enough to go professional.”

  “A couple of them are professional, I guess you could say.” Good enough, sure. Them and dozens more around here who’d grown up listening to, then playing with their grandfathers or aunts.

  “Lots of folks around here save their music for pleasure and work jobs to pay the bills.” I didn’t try explaining that to some around here—probably most of those guys’ wives—making music, like painting or writing or reading, was a waste of time, unless it was in church. Just living required too much effort for such frivolity. Granddad always said it was the schizophrenia of being both Scots and Irish, dour and fun-loving.

  As I turned left toward the fish hatchery, I asked, “Any part of the Chattooga in particular?”

  I took the first curve fast. Noah reached for his seatbelt—a lap belt that hadn’t been factory issue when this car rolled off the line in the midsixties.

  “Something I would’ve seen in the movie. You know, Deliverance.”

  “Sorry. You’d have to be on the river to see that, farther down on Sections III and IV.” I knew the scenery he was talking about. Roads didn’t reach most of the famous views. Thank goodness, else they’d already be ruined by stampeding tourists.

  A glance in his direction confirmed that he was disappointed. And maybe a little nervous about how fast I was driving.

  “How about I take you to one of my favorite places. You can see the river up close.” No way I wanted to fuel the male fantasy that James Dickey—durn his hide—had fed with his alcohol-fired imagination four decades back.

  Fifteen minutes later—about the time Noah realized I knew this road well enough that he could relax his stranglehold on the door handle—I turned off at the brown U.S. Forest Service sign to the hatchery.

  I was forced to slow down as the shoestring road doubled sharply back on itself and we climbed down past thick laurel hells, dropping steeply into a deep-cut valley that registered the state’s lowest temperature nearly every morning. Even twenty miles an hour is fast if the curve is sharp enough.

  We pulled into the heavily shaded, damp green parking area buried deep, as if we’d descended into a hidden land.

  We climbed out and could feel how much the temperature had dropped. “You need a hat or anything?” I asked as I put on my earmuffs. I don’t care if they look goofy; I hate cold ears.

  “Uh, no. I’m fine.” He had on a flannel shirt and a sleeveless down vest. He looked cold to me, so I handed him an extra knit hat—what we always called a toboggan—from the jumble of stuff in my backseat.

  “The fish hatchery’s to the right. We can see the trout they’re raising to stock the river. Or we can go see the river first.”

  Noah stared around him, his thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets. He looked surprised—or awed. Whether by the cold or the massive trees or the dripping quiet, I couldn’t tell.

  “The river,” he said.

  Even in March, the undergrowth was dense and green, so the path’s opening from the parking lot wasn’t easy to spot, even though a signboard stood beside it, complete with a map and rules for campers. I didn’t stop to read it.

  As we strolled along the path, Noah craned his neck and studied treetops that almost disappeared from view.

  “Do you have trees like this in Vail?” I asked. “I’ve never been.”

  “We’ve got ski slopes and fake Swiss chalets and local people who can’t live there anymore because the taxes are too damned high.” The anger in his voice was old and only a bit worn. “Nothing like this.” His voice trailed off, and he kept studying the treetops, the loamy dark soil, the evergreen undergrowth.

  Scattered at intervals along the trail, wooded bowers hid lichen-crusted picnic tables. As we turned the last bend, I prepared to dramatically present his first glimpse of the river.

  “Dang.” I stopped dead. Where was the bridge? Only concrete pyramid-shaped pillars stood in the water, showing where the footbridge across the river once stood. ‘The hurricane. I forgot all about. . . I thought they’d rebuilt it.”

  “Hurricane? This far inland?”

  “Gulf storms often don’t blow themselves out until they hit the Appalachian chain.” Flash flood warnings meant something in a land of steep hillsides, fast water, and few escape routes.

  “Gosh, Noah, I’m sorry. I—This is the only way I know to the trail that follows the river.” I felt like an idiot. Some local expert I was.

  ‘This is the Chattooga?” He sounded hesitant, not wanting to ridicule and, at the same time, not wanting to fall for some kind of prank.

  “It’s the East Fork. One of the quieter parts.” This sure wasn’t what he had expected. This section wasn’t one of the rocky tumbling torrents that could bend a metal Grumman canoe around a boulder. This was trout-fishing territory. Below us, the trees bowed over the river, framing it; the water flowed noisily over rocks; the sound and smell of air and earth and water surrounded us completely.

  “We can double back. There must be another trail around to Ellicott’s Rock.” The water sounds were so loud I had to lean in close to be heard. And this was the gentle section.

  He shook his head absently, absorbed in his surroundings, taking it in.

  “No-o, that’s okay. This is good. We can sit here a minute.” He looked at his watch. “I didn’t realize how long a drive it was. I’ll need to head back to town before long. I forgot to tell you about that, didn’t I? I got sidetracked back at the store. There’s a press conference I should attend at the nuclear power plant. Can we just sit here a minute?”

  Odd change of plans, but okay with me. We both perched on the blunted concrete pyramid on the river-bank and stared down into the water glistening over the rods.

  “So, how does this compare to home?” I asked.

  He sat quiet a moment, thinking. “It’s greener. Of course, we have fast-moving water, and rocks. But not quite this sound. Or the dank smell. I can’t—It’s hard to describe. It’s . . . claustrophobic.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Not the awed, poetic tribute to my homeland I’d expected.

  “There’s so much. . . stuff. It closes in. You can’t see the open sky.”

  Now that he’d put it in words, I realized what had seemed skewed when I’d first visited the Rocky Mountains. I thought a recent and terrible windstorm had felled all the trees that lay like Pixy Stix on the ground, but people just stared when I asked about it. I finally realized what was missing: They had no thick green undergrowth to gracefully shroud the downed trees, to allow them to rot away unseen.

  “Guess it is odd, compared to home. These squatty old mountains must seem puny, compared to the Rockies,” I said.

  “No, just different.” He kept studying everything intently. “Darker. Like something could sneak up on you.” He fell silent.

  Talking about home didn’t seem to interest him, so I foraged around for another topic. “Any more news about what killed Lionel Shoal or Suse Knight?” That was a topic that had probably occupied his attention as much as it had mine over the last few days.

  “No. Autopsy reports won’t be complete for a few weeks. Toxicology can take a while.”

  “Things certainly move faster on television.”

  He snorted, probably thinking, And everywhere else outside this godforsaken state.

  “Any more ideas about a link between Shoal and Ruffin?” I asked.

  “Nope. Neither one of them had a lot of friends, I can tell you that. And when it comes to Len Ruffin, nobody has trouble speaking ill of the dead. Except his wife, who is too mousy to say much of anything.”

  “How about Shoal?”

  He shrugged. �
��A developer one step ahead of irate investors in several states. Oh, and one step ahead of a wife he’d robbed and left holding the bag while he shacked up with a silicone-enhanced replacement who’s angry because she miscalculated his net worth. What more can I say?”

  So Noah had found the real Mrs. Shoal. I hated to think of Alex being exposed or embarrassed any further. I knew I couldn’t protect her, and after what she’d been through, could it really get any worse?

  “And Suse Knight?”

  He broke his focus on the river to face me. “You could fill me in on that one,” he said. “I understand you’re representing her husband.”

  I didn’t bother wondering how Noah had found out about Carl Newland Knight’s visit to my office. Dacus was, after all, a small town. I looked up, studying one of the towering hardwoods, not wanting my expression to inadvertently give away anything that might hurt Mr. Knight. One of my very few clients. I wondered what his friends called him.

  “No comment, counselor?” He was still watching me.

  “No comment.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes, you’re representing him.”

  I graced him with what Melvin calls my go-to-hell smile.

  “You sure ask a lot of questions, counselor, but you don’t supply many answers.”

  “I’m the one who told you how Lionel Shoal died. That’s a pretty important connection, plenty for you to work on.”

  “Work on, yeah.” He snorted. “Not much to print.”

  What had started as just idle conversation about Dacus’s murder mysteries had gotten a little heated. I wasn’t sure if it was me or something else eating at him, but Noah tripped into irate mode easily. Might as well lob him a question I was really curious about.

  “You ever gonna tell me why you came to Dacus?”

  He bent over, plucked a piece of straw grass, and began twirling it between his fingers.