Gather Her Round

by Alex Bledsoe

  “So it’s a wild hog?” Alvin Darwin asked. He stood against the wall, his hat in his hand, watching the wildlife man with some skepticism. Jack suspected that Darwin was like other highway cops he’d encountered: he considered game wardens to be little more than parking enforcement officers who worked in the woods, meter maids with manure on their shoes.

  “I’d say,” Jack agreed. “With a whole herd along for the scraps.” That was unusual, too; the big ones were usually solitary.

  “How many?”

  Jack gestured at the photo. “That’s hard to tell. Ten pigs can root up the ground as bad as fifty if they’re at it long enough.”

  “That ain’t too specific.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed at the trooper’s tone. “If you’ve got a crystal ball, you’re welcome to look into it and be more definite.”

  Darwin didn’t respond to the sarcasm. “So what do you think we should do about it?”

  “I don’t think we have any choice but to go out and hunt it down. It’s like a bear that’s hurt someone; once it’s lost its fear of man, it’s too dangerous to ignore.”

  “Do you think you can find it?” Bliss asked.

  “I think I can lower the odds,” Jack said. “I have some trained experts on call. I alerted them last night, and they can be here later today.”

  “Thanks,” Bliss said.

  “And what about you?” he said to Darwin.

  “What, you want me to arrest a pig?”

  “Well, it’s a death. I assume some forms need to be filled out, at least.”

  “The paperwork will all been taken care of,” Bliss said, stepping between the two men. “There’s just the matter of this animal to deal with, and then the case can be closed.”

  Jack frowned. “This just happened yesterday. How can you say that?”

  “Because it’s true,” Darwin said. “I’ve talked to everyone involved. A long investigation won’t change things. Unless you think the pig was framed?”

  Jack really didn’t like this guy. He had long-standing issues with traditional law enforcement treating their position as a license to brutalize and intimidate, and Darwin seemed no different from his predecessor, the notorious Bob Pafford.

  Darwin was also clearly a Tufa, and he knew they were experts at misdirection, which might mean Darwin was deliberately trying to make him angry, to keep his attention focused anywhere other than the community where the girl had died. “I think,” Jack said carefully, “that some people may ask questions if this is swept under the rug.”

  “You think there’s a cover-up? A Hog-gate?”

  “Guys,” Bliss said, and snapped off her blue vinyl gloves. “I don’t think it’s the right time for this sort of pissing contest. We have a dead girl and a dangerous wild animal. Those are what we should be focusing on.”

  Darwin nodded. “Agreed. Sorry for getting off track.”

  Still seething, Jack also nodded. “All right. I’ll get my people together, and the first thing we’ll do is set up a bait trap at the incident site. We might get lucky and catch our boy right off the bat.”

  “If he’s as big as you say, do you think a trap would hold him?” Darwin asked.

  “Alvin,” Bliss said quietly. “This is Jack’s area. Let’s let him plow the field with his own mule.”

  Darwin put on his hat, then touched the brim in salute. “Fair enough. I’ll leave you to it, then, unless you call me.”

  Jack waited until Darwin had sauntered out of the station before saying, “That guy flat gets on my nerves. I imagine I’ll be getting lots of tickets now that I’ve pissed him off.”

  “He’s not like that,” Bliss said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Now—what sort of trap have you got in mind?”

  Jack forced his mind back to work. “What we usually do is put up an automatic corn feeder first, then let them get used to it for a few days. Then we put a pen around it and a drop gate. We let ’em get used to that before we drop the gate. That way we hope to catch the whole herd.”

  “How do you know when they’re in the trap?”

  “Use a trail cam with a live feed.” He paused. “Did you know the girl?”

  “I did. Known her since she was little. Used to play with her at our local roadhouse. She played the pennywhistle.”

  “What do you play?”

  “I play the guitar, mostly. You?”

  “I’ve been known to annoy a piano.”

  She smiled, and Jack suddenly realized how pretty she was. He’d met her on several occasions before, always in her capacity as an EMT, with her long black hair braided and piled up on her head. But here she wore it loose, and it framed her high cheekbones and bright, intelligent eyes. He’d heard some odd stories about Tufa women and girls, and not just from Georgina; but he couldn’t imagine Bliss Overbay as the source of anything so extreme and, ultimately, ridiculous.

  “I’ll admit I share your concern that perhaps her death was more suspicious than Alvin thinks,” she said. “Would a hog really kill someone?”

  “One that’s big enough and feels threatened, yeah. It’s rare, but it has happened. That’s why we’re trying to wipe them out.”

  “If you catch it, will you be able to tell if it was the killer?”

  “If we catch it soon enough, I can tell what it’s eaten based on its stomach contents. But no, I can’t tell how that meal died.”

  Bliss got herself a paper cup and some water. After she drank, she said, “This is one of the most awful conversations I’ve ever had, do you know that?”

  “It’s right up there for me, too. Or down there, I should say.”

  “Come on,” Bliss said as she opened the door. “You can follow me out to the scene of the crime.”

  And he did follow her, admiring her feminine silhouette.

  * * *

  First the tune penetrated his consciousness, then the words.

  I found the trail of the mountain mist,

  the mountain mist, the mountain mist

  I found the trail of the mountain mist,

  But ne’er a trace of baby.…

  Duncan snapped awake to find his mother, Bobbie, singing softly as she looked down at him. He jumped.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  He sat up, then immediately regretted it. His head thundered, and his stomach churned. At first he thought he was back in his old bedroom, but then he realized he was, in fact, in his apartment. How had she gotten in?

  “What are you doing here, Mom?” he croaked. She’d even opened the blinds, flooding his aching eyeballs with bright morning sun.

  “You didn’t answer your phone, and after what happened yesterday, I was worried.”

  “Me, too,” a new voice said. He turned toward it, glad the hangover hid the rush of emotions that flew through him.

  Adam Procure.

  “I heard you were down at the old ’shine cave, and got pretty wasted,” Adam continued. He was freshly scrubbed, his black hair still damp from a recent shower, and wore a faded Skrillex T-shirt over his enviably muscular torso. Duncan was filled with jealousy, resentment, and rage.

  However, he was also filled with the dregs of whatever he’d drunk last night, and that took priority. So he said, “Y’all might want to back up,” and gave out a warning burp.

  “Come on,” Adam said, grabbed him by the arm, and heaved him upright. He carried him the few feet across the bedroom to the bathroom just in time.

  Duncan threw up, long and agonizingly deep, the physical pain made worse by the knowledge that both his mother and the man his dead girlfriend had been cheating with watched him. His body wrenched tight, then relaxed, then seized up again, and his fingers scraped against the porcelain as they sought a steady grip.

  “Oh, son,” he heard his mother say. “I didn’t raise you to be the kind of man who drinks that stuff.”

  “That stuff” was the moonshine they brewed right there in the cave, made in ways s
o unsafe, almost everyone involved in its manufacture had burn scars—or worse. Cloud County paint thinner, indeed.

  At last, his throat on fire and his stomach still in knots, Duncan rolled onto his back and looked up at the water-stained ceiling. “I think I’m done,” he choked out.

  “Can you stand?” Adam asked.

  “Turn off the turntable I’m on, and maybe.”

  Bobbie said, “I’ll get some coffee brewing. Adam, can you help him into the shower?”

  “I don’t need help,” Duncan muttered, and rolled over. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, then used the toilet for support as he got to his feet. The room spun, as he expected, and he stumbled back into the wall. He braced his legs and grabbed the edge of the sink. “Do not,” he said with great care, “try to undress me, Adam.”

  “Man, if I had a nickel for every time I’d heard that,” he chuckled. “Always been from girls before, though.”

  Not here, Duncan told himself. Not now. But his anger and hatred burned even worse than his esophagus.

  The shower did help clear his head and settle his stomach, and when he finished, his mother had a fresh cup of coffee for him. He sat down at his little bistro table opposite Bobbie and sipped the hot liquid. His throat and stomach protested, but the caffeine did its job. Adam stood beside him, radiating sympathy.

  “There’s no real news about anything,” Bobbie said. “I reckon the wildlife people are going to try to kill the hog that did it.”

  “That’s good,” Duncan muttered.

  “I wish I could go get after it,” Adam said. “It’d be better if a Tufa got it, and sang its little ham hock soul to hell in the process.”

  A little bell went off in Duncan’s head, the germ of an idea, but he was far too fuzzy-brained to pursue it. He said, “I need to get back out there and see Brenda and Sam. They must be feeling terrible.”

  “I’m not sure you’re up to going anywhere,” Bobbie said.

  “I’ll be fine once I get something greasy in me,” he said, and got to his feet. “I’ve got some sausage in the fridge, and—”

  “And nothing,” Bobbie said. “You sit down, I’ll cook you something. Adam, you hungry?”

  “I can always eat, Mrs. Gowen,” Adam said genially, and took the seat that Bobbie vacated. “And sausage feels appropriate.”

  A joke, Duncan thought. The smug SOB is making a joke about this.

  As Bobbie puttered in the kitchen, Adam leaned close and said, “How are you, man? Really?”

  “I’m pretty fucking shitty,” Duncan said honestly.

  “Yeah. I know you can’t talk with your mom here, but … what did you get into last night?”

  He had a vague memory of encountering Flint, then talking with Junior, and of sitting on a bench in a corner, moping and drinking moonshine. At some point, he must have been screaming, because he also recalled being shaken awake, a circle of concerned faces around him. Things got blurry again after that.

  “I just drove around,” he said. “I know, drinking and driving, blah blah blah. But,” he added snidely, “it was a special occasion.”

  “Well, you can hang out with me today. I got my banjo in the car. We’ll play a little when your hands stop shaking. Get back to normal.”

  What normal? he thought. The normal where I have a girlfriend who loves me, or the normal where she’s cheating with you behind my back?

  Suddenly he sat up straight. Adam said worriedly, “What?”

  The phone. Duncan looked around, terrified that he’d left Kera’s phone out in the open. But it wasn’t on the table, or on the nightstand. Where the hell was it? Had he left it in his truck?

  “Nothing,” Duncan said. More images from the prior night came to him. He had, at some point, screamed at Flint, demanding to see Junior again. Why had he wanted to do that? He recalled Flint’s ethereal voice singing … something. Then nothing else until he woke up.

  Before Adam could press him, Bobbie brought two plates of scrambled eggs and sausage to the table, and he began to eat. With each bite, his stomach settled, and that little germ of an idea began to grow.

  He managed a tired smile at Adam. His ostensible friend smiled innocently back. Yeah, just keep grinning, asshole, he thought. Just keep grinning.

  * * *

  Jack let the pocket tape measure snap back into its little case. Bliss’s photograph had not exaggerated things. The print was truly gigantic, and all the implications that it carried filled Jack with a kind of dread he’d never felt before. He’d hunted most animals in these mountains, including bear, but even a bear print didn’t scare him like this did. The ramifications of its size, and the certainty of its ferocity, set a cold knot in his belly.

  Bliss stood back beyond the yellow crime scene tape and let him do his work, measuring and photographing, while she kept watch with a rifle in her hands. The woods were solemn, with even the birdsong muted, as if in respect. Or terror.

  He stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, “I don’t know if this hog did kill that girl, but I know he damn well could have.” He looked up the hill, where the woods closed in and provided the kind of dark shadowy spaces that might very well hide monsters. “I reckon this one weighs around eight hundred pounds, based on the size and depth of those tracks.”

  “Eight hundred pounds?” Bliss repeated. “How is that even possible?”

  “Unlimited feed,” Jack said. “This hog didn’t grow that big in the wild. He got loose from somewhere.”

  “Where? I mean, everybody around here pretty much has a few pigs, but I haven’t heard of anyone raising one that big.”

  “Would you? Hear about it, I mean.”

  “It’s a small town. I think I would.”

  “That’s something I’ll be looking into, then. This beauty would be about seven feet long. Probably have tusks about like this,” he said as he held his hands about nine inches apart.

  “Even if it was raised on a farm?”

  “Depends on how long ago it got loose. Pigs go feral within six months. They grow hair, tusks, the works. That’s how thin their domestication is.”

  “Jesus.” She peered into the forest shadows, searching for any sign of movement. Normally wild hogs wouldn’t come near a human scent, but anything this big was decidedly not normal.

  “I don’t want to waste any time,” Jack said, and took out his phone. “My team will be in here this afternoon to set up the trap. Pigs are creatures of habit: they like to use the same trails, so it’s pretty likely they’ll be back around here tonight.”

  “I hope it’s that easy.”

  He began to text his photographs to the members of WHOMP. “You and me both.”

  7

  Janet skipped her after-lunch study hall and cornered Mr. Pirtle, the English teacher and de facto sponsor for the student paper, alone in the faculty lounge. He wasn’t a Tufa, but he understood them after teaching there for twenty years, and knew more about them than even they suspected. He had curly brown hair, a mostly gray mustache, and absolutely no patience with teenage nonsense. Janet adored him.

  “I’ve got a line on a big story, Mr. Pirtle,” she said as she sat down opposite him.

  “Janet. Please, sit down. The sign on the door says ‘Absolutely No Students,’ but I’m delighted that you’ve realized that couldn’t possibly apply to you.”

  She waved her hand as if his sarcasm buzzed around her face. “I’m serious. This story is the best thing ever.”

  “I assume you don’t mean ‘A Rose for Emily’?”

  “There’s been a murder.”

  “Oh, so you did read the Faulkner?”

  “Stop that,” Janet said impatiently. “Kera Rogers was killed yesterday.”

  “I heard about that. I believe it was an accident, and will no doubt be thoroughly covered by—”

  “How are you accidentally eaten by a pig? ‘Whoops, I tripped and fell into that pig’s stomach. How embarrassing.’”

  Pirtle took off his
glasses and smiled despite himself. “You definitely have the attitude of a real old-school reporter, Janet, I’ll give you that. Lois Lane and Carl Kolchak are no doubt smiling down on us at this very moment. But that story, while certainly sensational and tragic, has nothing to do with the school. And therefore the Caw has no interest in it.”

  “Kera is an alumni. She has a lot of relatives who still go here.”

  “Janet, everyone in this county has a lot of relatives who go here. And I’m sure they’ll hear all about it from their families. And one female person is an ‘alumna,’ with an a.”

  “Really? I never heard that word before.”

  “Then I’ve taught you something despite yourself.”

  She leaned forward in her chair “Come on, Mr. Pirtle. This is huge. We have to write something about it. Hell, it should be on the front page.” When Pirtle’s eyebrows rose at her profanity, Janet quickly added, “I mean, ‘Heck, it should be on the front page.’”

  Pirtle sighed. The only thing worse than an apathetic student was a crusading one, and he’d expected this ever since Janet was named editor. Everyone warned him that all that mattered to her was music, and that journalism would not hold her interest for long; it was Pirtle’s bad luck that the Rogers girl had decided to get eaten so close to the beginning of the school year.

  And then he felt terrible for that thought. He’d taught Kera Rogers, had watched her go from a lanky freshman to a beautiful senior, had heard her play her pennywhistle in the school’s jam band so sweetly, it once brought tears to his jaded old eyes. He remembered the way she helped the younger kids find the more complex chords on their guitars, delighting in their progress just as any teacher would. Just as he should with Janet.

  “All right, see what you can find out,” Pirtle said seriously. “But it goes through me. With a crime like this, there are some details that just won’t fly in a student paper.”

  Now Janet’s eyebrows rose. “Are you censoring me? Is this prior restraint, because I’m pretty sure we learned in civics class that that doesn’t fly.”