Chapter Fifty-one
Before I could explain my idea, flames and small explosions shot from holes cut in the foundation of the Exchange as even more booby traps cooked off. The deputies waited where it was safe behind their cars and watched the firemen work. Great clouds of white steam rose up against the low, heavy clouds.
The heat drove everyone back, and they moved the whole shebang back past the tracks. The two ambulance drivers tried to talk Uncle Cody into going to the hospital, but he wouldn’t leave.
“Not until I know John’s all right.”
“You’re going to the hospital right now,” Grandpa told Uncle Cody, looking at the huge white bandage on his hand that was blooming red. “You need to get your own thumb worked on. John’s gone to Miss Sweet and she’ll doctor him up just fine.”
Uncle Cody flashed us a grin that told me everything was going to be all right. “Blair called and Norma Faye is on the way. I ain’t riding in no ambulance that won’t take John. She’ll carry me to get it stitched up, and then I’m gonna sleep for a week.”
“All right, then. There she is now.”
The terrified redhead I still had trouble thinking of as Aunt Norma Fay rushed through the crowd and nearly knocked Cody over in her relief. He gave her that grin that I still practiced in the mirror and held her with his good arm while the ambulance drivers stood around looking like they didn’t know what to do.
She was crying and carrying on, and I knew that someday I’d have me a wife that wore tight shirts and made a fuss over me if I got hurt.
“Sheriff Griffin!” A television reporter finally squeezed through the crowd and got close enough to the sheriff for questions. “Why aren’t you trying to save that house?”
“It’s beyond help.”
“I see that, but do you have any comments about that house on the other side of the tracks?”
Griffin turned on his heel, and only I heard the comment the reporter could have built a career on. “I hope it burns to the ground and takes the rest of this sorry end of town with it.”
Grandpa didn’t hear it either. He was ready to go. “They don’t need us anymore.”
Mr. O.C. took one last look at the Exchange. Fire shot from every window. Tall, graceful flames leaped from the collapsed roof and almost touched the low clouds. Smoke and steam caught against those same clouds and spread overhead. In the spotlights, thick streams of water from the firemen’s hoses crisscrossed, but did little to slow the fire.
A rumble in the distance made everyone stop. I saw panicked looks on the faces of the men around us, and then the railroad lights began to flash as the crossing arms started to come down.
“God almighty!” Mr. O.C. yelled. Cars were parked both on and very close to the tracks. One ambulance sat almost on the rails.
I’ve never seen anything happen so fast in my life. Men shouted, women screamed and half a dozen people ran toward the cars and trucks on the tracks. In the distance, I saw the engine’s headlight through the falling sleet, bright and round, coming fast.
The train whistle shrieked, adding to all the noise, yells, the flashing lights on the cop cars and fire trucks, and people running every which-a-way. A truck plowed through a wooden crossing arm, knocking it spinning. A couple of men opened a car door, shifted it out of gear, and slipping and sliding on the ice, pushed it off the tracks where it rolled across the street and into the side of the house that was still burning.
The whistle shrieked again, this time sounding to me like it was scared. Grandpa grabbed me and Pepper and held us still. In seconds it was upon us, and we felt the wind from its passing.
It was a fast moving passenger train and I saw shocked faces at the windows when the cars flashed past the burning Cotton Exchange. Colored lights and the fire flickered on the shiny cars’ steel skin. Cold wind blasted against us and seconds later, they shot down the tracks and were gone.
Just then one whole corner of the building slumped, collapsing in a blaze of sparks as decades worth of trash burned uncontrollably. We felt the intense heat as Grandpa and Mr. O.C. hurried us kids into the car and finally away from the nightmare.
We slid into the back seat of Grandpa’s car and some men moved the barricades. Grandpa didn’t stop until we reached the town square. The norther had already moved on through, and the sleet tapered off, but it was still painfully cold. Melting ice from the tall buildings around us splashed onto the concrete. Paper trash washed along the gutters. I wondered if the drains were helping put out the fires back behind us, down deep underground.
I’d never seen the square so late at night. It was empty and with all the sleet on the ground, it made me think of Christmas, which was still over a month away. The car hadn’t had time to warm up good, and the side and back windows were still fogged.
Grandpa angled into a stop beside the big icicle-covered fountain in the middle of the square and shifted the car out of gear. Grandpa and Mr. O.C. needed to get cleaned up and rested, but they wanted to hear what I had to say, too. He turned around so he could see me sitting behind Mr. O.C. “All right, tell us what you know.”
I have to admit, it made me feel pretty big to have those two old men pay so much attention to me. “Well, you remember when we went fishing last summer, while it was still cool?”
“Does fishing have anything to do with all this and Kendal Bowden?”
“I reckon it might.”
“You’re so full of bull your ears stink.” Pepper rolled her eyes as I tried to explain my thoughts so’s they’d understand. She shrank back when Grandpa turned his expressionless blue eyes on her. When they were dead like that, it always scared us to death. “I meant… he’s just talking out his a…he wants attention.”
“He’s got it, Missy, now you hush a minute,” Mr. O.C. said. “Go on Top.”
“We were following that deer trail, remember, when that little old mama quail took to flying crooked like she was hurt?”
Grandpa nodded. “I remember.”
Early one summer afternoon, right after our troubles at the Rock Hole, me and Grandpa slipped off to go fishing on the river. We threw a couple of Zebco 33s into the truck bed and drove through the bottoms, past the fields until Grandpa pulled under a wide pecan tree not far from the timber leading down to the river bank.
He parked beside a cultivator and shut off the engine. It ticked quietly as the motor cooled and we got our fishing rods from the truck bed. It was pretty warm in the sun, but a lot cooler in the woods. Grandpa led the way and I followed down a game trail leading down to the river.
When we came to a small clearing in the trees, I nearly jumped out of my skin when a quail flushed from cover almost at our feet. But instead of whirring away like they do on a covey rise, the little bird fluttered and tumbled across the clearing, dragging one wing.
“That bird’s hurt.” I dropped my fishing rod and darted around Grandpa. “I bet I can catch her.”
“Bet you can’t.” He stopped and waited in the shade. He was right. Every time I got within inches of the quail, she regained her strength and flapped away on the ground, barely out of reach. I chased her across a little meadow and into the trees, always a foot or two away, but never close enough to get ahold of her. I finally gave up and walked back to Grandpa’s shade.
“Where’s the bird?”
“It got away.”
“I knew it would.”
“How’d you know? I wanted to catch it and see what’s wrong.”
“There wasn’t nothing wrong, son. That bird isn’t hurt, she’s trying to lead us away from her nest. All that commotion is to get your attention, so that you’ll see her and nothing else.”
“How do you know that?”
“’Cause I’m old. Come here and mind where you put your feet.” He led me a few yards off the game trail. “Now, stand right here for a minute.” It didn’t take more than a few seconds until he found what he was after. “Here it is.”
I joined him beside a thick clump of tall b
luestem grass hiding a neat little nest containing nearly a dozen tiny eggs.
“That’s what she was trying to lead you away from. Birds and animals know how to protect their young’uns. She acted like she was hurt to draw us away from her eggs in this here nest.”
“Will she come back?”
“Sure will. As soon as we’re gone, she’ll be right back to set. Before long there’ll be a bunch of little bitty quail running around here.”
“Let’s wait for her.”
“Nope. I’m of a mind to catch us a mess of catfish for our supper tonight. I don’t intend to waste any time waiting for no mama quail to come back to her nest.”
I filed that experience away and followed Grandpa Ned down to the river, where we caught half a dozen blue cats before a thunderstorm drove us back to the truck.
That’s how I knew what Kendal was doing, because I saw a little ol’ mama bird do the same thing.
Mr. O.C. scrunched his face up, like he was about to bust as I told him the story, but he kept listening.
“You said she wasn’t really hurt, she was leading us away from her eggs, Grandpa. You said all birds and animals did that sort of thing. Well, when Kendal got away, it felt the same way to me, but different.”
I struggled with the words. I knew what I wanted to say, but it didn’t seem to make any sense out in the open, like a nightmare that scares you to death in the dark and still seems real when you’re first waking up. Then, when you’re sitting up in bed the next morning and want to tell someone about it, the whole thing feels silly.
“It seems to me like that Kendal feller ain’t been seen one time, but when y’all got too close to his nest somewheres, he led you away…up here to the Cotton Exchange.”
Pepper couldn’t contain herself. “That’s stupid. He wouldn’t have led everybody to where he’s hiding if he wanted to lead them right back away from it.”
“Hush for a second, Pepper,” Grandpa said softly. He turned to Mr. O.C. “He’s half right. I think Kendal has been hiding in the bottoms, because that’s where his people are and that’s where Cody has been looking. But when he got too close, Kendal lit out and led us away from his nest straight to the place where his old man went crazy twenty years ago. He knew them tunnels, because he learned them after he killed his old man when he got back to town, then he led Cody into an ambush. Now Kendal thinks he’s dead and he went back to Center Springs while everyone is here in town.”
I heard Pepper take a quick breath. “Grandpa, when we were sitting with Mr. Martin while he was dying, he said he saw somebody slipping around his place one day that he didn’t recognize and the way they walked reminded him of family. He said how funny it was that our people all lived within a mile or two of one another.”
“What does that mean?” I was frustrated that Pepper was going in an entirely different direction.
“That means, stupid, that Kendal Bowden ….”
“…is in the bottoms for sure.” Grandpa said.
“Sounds right to me, Ned.” Mr. O.C. shivered and reached over to turn up the heat. “There’s folks down there that will hide kin, no matter who they are or what they do. I’ll call up to Tulsa and see what else I can find out from the hospital while you poke around and see what you can kick up.”
“Well, it ain’t gonna happen quick. They’ll lie for sure, and hide him out with somebody else until the coast is clear.”
Mr. O.C. turned back toward the clearing windshield. “Then Cody’ll have to keep an eye peeled, along with a constable fresh out of retirement.”
Chapter Fifty-two
Grandpa and I went to the store a couple of days later. The norther had done its job, bringing in fall. He called it jacket weather, because even though it warmed up during the day, the nights were cold and everybody needed more than shirt sleeves.
It was my idea to go, because I overheard Grandpa and Bill Morris talking at the post office the day before about how Center Springs was slowly dying. I was always interested in history, and the conversation had wandered from the long gone Rawhide Theater to the blacksmith shop that my great-granddad once owned. When Mr. Morris said Uncle Neal’s store was once the original courthouse for Center Springs, it brought the building into a new light.
Grandpa sat on the two-by-six that served as a combination seat and porch rail, talking to a collection of the local farmers. I went inside and slowly turned round and round, trying to get a feel for the old building when it was a courthouse.
On my last spin, I saw a little wooden tray full of loose cigarettes on the counter.
We called them onesies, and I remembered that Pepper had snitched a couple of them a few days back. Uncle Neal was running the slicer with his back to me, cutting rat cheese. On impulse, I dug a quarter out of my pocket and laid it on the cigarettes. Twenty-five cents was way too much in repayment, but it made me feel better.
I’d barely gotten my hand back down when he turned around with the cheese wrapped in white paper. “Well howdy Top. I bet you could use a cold drink.” He glanced down and picked up the quarter with a slight frown. He used a blunt forefinger to punch at a key on the cash register. He hit a larger key with the heel of his hand. The cash drawer popped open with a loud chunk and he dropped the quarter into the tray and removed a dime. “Here, get you a drink.”
That’s how he was. Everybody said Uncle Neal was tighter’n Dick’s hatband, but he always had something for us kids. I wasn’t going to turn down a free RC, even though it was my quarter. The drink box was beside the front door and I’d already dropped the dime into the slot and was sliding the RC bottle along the metal track to pull it out when I heard Pepper’s voice.
I popped the cap on the opener, and went outside. She’d apparently walked to the store and was sitting on the opposite end from Grandpa, talking to Cale Westlake, a kid I’d gotten into a fight with a few months before. I stopped outside the door and he saw me. I could tell he wanted to punch me again, but he turned his back and kept talking with Pepper.
I didn’t want any trouble, so I sat down on the wooden steps to listen, off to the side so I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way coming in and out of the store. Grandpa was standing at the far end of the porch, near the domino hall, so he could see up and down the highway and the oil road behind the store at the same time.
“I’d never seen nothing like what was in that old Exchange building.”
Mr. Ty Cobb Wilson was whittling on the pine two-by-six seat with his pocketknife as he listened to the conversation. The legs on his overalls were full of sheep burrs, because him and his twin brother Jimmy Foxx spent most of their time hunting.
“Say it was full of trash?”
Grandpa was wearing his bib overalls like the other men. The only thing different was the constable badge pinned on his blue shirt once again. “That’s what Cody said, and from what I saw when the front fell off in the fire, that place was packed as tight as if you’d jammed a ’toe sack into a coffee can. Then them crazy fellers either dug tunnels through that mess, or they made them while they was filling the place up. Damnedest thing I’d ever seen.”
“But the one y’all are chasin’ got away.”
“Sure did. Old George and his brother Alvin didn’t make it out, but George was already dead when Cody and John got to him. Kendal had cut his head off, too. They found what was left of his brother’s burned body this morning, but it wasn’t the fire that killed him. Cody was right. He was crushed to death under a pile of junk that fell on him a while back. They know, because…well, because there wasn’t any flesh left on the body. He’d already rotted away. Anyhow, Kendal got out and we’re still trying to find him.”
“Is that George’s kid?”
“Yeah. He was in the nervous house up in Oklahoma and got away. There’s a lot of folks after that nut.”
Jimmy Foxx shifted to lean his back against a support post. He stretched his legs along the rail and crossed his feet. I could see that he wasn’t wearing socks. He stuck his finger
in a hole in the leg of his overalls and scratched. It was unusual to see the brothers during the day. They usually ran the bottoms, hunting whatever would run from them.
“That feller was always odd, even when he was kid. I was never able to put my finger on it, but he just didn’t seem right.”
Ty Cobb kept on carving without taking his eyes off the knife. “Him and them running buddies of his came over a time or two to play with our cousin Carl. They seemed all right to me.”
“I reckon he wasn’t, and he ain’t,” Jimmy Foxx said. “He’s done killed all three of them same friends, plus another feller or two. That ain’t all right in my book.”
“You think Kendal might have been the Skinner and now he’s come back?” Ty Cobb was worried.
Grandpa stood. “Naw, he was locked up when all that was happenin’. I done checked, and the sad truth of the matter is, we aren’t for sure he did it. But it seems that way to me. That’s why we’re trying to find him. You boys see Kendal anywhere around, or hear tell that he’s down there in the bottoms, you let me or Cody know.”
Jimmy Foxx laughed. “I knew you wouldn’t stay retired. Now we have twice as much law around here as we once had.”
Grandpa took off his Stetson and momentarily examined the band. “Well, I don’t rightly know what I am now. Cody was the one y’all elected. I’ve been…told…that I’m an appointed constable, for what it’s worth.”
Cars passed on the highway, but Grandpa barely paid any attention to them. We heard an old truck rattling down the oil road that came up back of Uncle Neal’s store and Grandpa perked up.
Ty Cobb kept talking, but Grandpa wasn’t listening. The truck turned off and into the bottle cap parking lot between the store and the domino hall. I didn’t know who the driver was, but as he slowed, he saw something he didn’t like. He shifted into first gear, turned left on the highway, and drove off.
“Wasn’t that Donny Wayne Foster?” Mr. Ty Cobb asked.
“Sure was.” Grandpa put his hands in his pocket and watched the truck disappear to the east.
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