999 (65 page)

“It’s gettin’ dark,” Tom said.

“I know.”

“I don’t think Toby’s in all that much pain now.”

“He does seem better,” I said. “But that don’t mean his back ain’t broke.”

“Daddy wanted us to shoot him to put him out of his misery. He don’t look so miserable to me. It ain’t right to shoot him he ain’t miserable, is it?”

I looked at Toby. There was mostly just a lump to see, lying there in the wheelbarrow covered by the dark. While I was looking he raised his head and his tail beat on the wooden bottom of the wheelbarrow a couple of times.

“Don’t reckon I can do it,” I said. “I think we ought to take him back to Daddy, show how he’s improved. He may have a broke back, but he ain’t in pain like he was. He can move his head and even his tail now, so his whole body ain’t dead. He don’t need killin’.”

“Daddy may not see it that way, though.”

“Reckon not, but I can’t just shoot him without trying to give him a chance. Heck, he treed six dadbum squirrels. Mama’ll be glad to see them squirrels. We’ll just take him back.”

We got up to go. It was then that it settled on us. We were lost. We had been so busy chasing those squirrels, following Toby’s lead, we had gotten down deep in the woods and we didn’t recognize anything. We weren’t scared, of course, least not right away. We roamed these woods all the time, but it had grown dark, and this immediate place wasn’t familiar.

The moon was up some more, and I used that for my bearings. “We need to go that way,” I said. “Eventually that’ll lead back to the house or the road.”

We set out, pushing the wheelbarrow, stumbling over roots and ruts and fallen limbs, banging up against trees with the wheelbarrow and ourselves. Near us we could hear wildlife moving around, and I thought about what Mr. Chambers had said about panthers, and I thought about wild hogs and wondered if we might come up on one rootin’ for acoms, and I remembered that Mr. Chambers had also said this was a bad year for the hydrophobia, and lots of animals were coming down with it, and the thought of all that made me nervous enough to feel around in my pocket for shotgun shells. I had three left.

As we went along, there was more movement around us, and after a while I began to think whatever it was was keeping stride with us. When we slowed, it slowed. We sped up, it sped up. And not the way an animal will do, or even the way a coach whip snake will sometimes follow and run you. This was something bigger than a snake. It was stalking us, like a panther. Or a man.

Toby was growling as we went along, his head lifted, the hair on the back of his neck raised.

I looked over at Tom, and the moon was just able to split through the trees and show me her face and how scared she was. I knew she had come to the same conclusion I had.

I wanted to say something, shout out at whatever it was in the bushes, but I was afraid that might be like some kind of bugle call that set it off, causing it to come down on us.

I had broken open the shotgun earlier for safety sake, laid it in the wheelbarrow and was pushing it, Toby, the shovel, and the squirrels along. Now I stopped, got the shotgun out, made sure a shell was in it, snapped it shut and put my thumb on the hammer.

Toby had really started to make noise, had gone from growling to barking.

I looked at Tom, and she took hold of the wheelbarrow and started pushing. I could tell she was having trouble with it, working it over the soft ground, but I didn’t have any choice but to hold on to the gun, and we couldn’t leave Toby behind, not after what he’d been through.

Whatever was in those bushes paced us for a while, then went silent. We picked up speed, and didn’t hear it anymore. And we didn’t feel its presence no more neither. Earlier it was like we was walking along with the devil beside us.

I finally got brave enough to break open the shotgun and lay it in the wheelbarrow and take over the pushing again.

“What was that?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It sounded big.”

“Yeah.”

“The Goat Man?”

“Daddy says there ain’t any Goat Man.”

“Yeah, but he’s sometimes wrong, ain’t he?”

“Hardly ever,” I said.

We went along some more, and found a narrow place in the river, and crossed, struggling with the wheelbarrow. We shouldn’t have crossed, but there was a spot, and someone or something following us had spooked me, and I had just wanted to put some space between us and it.

We walked along a longer time, and eventually came up against a wad of brambles that twisted in amongst the trees and scrubs and vines and made a wall of thorns. It was a wall of wild rosebushes. Some of the vines on them were thick as well ropes, the thorns like nails, and the flowers smelled strong and sweet in the night wind, almost sweet as sorghum syrup cooking.

The bramble patch ran some distance in either direction, and encased us on all sides. We had wandered into a maze of thorns too wide and thick to go around, and too high and sharp to climb over, and besides they had wound together with low hanging limbs, and it was like a ceiling above. I thought of Brer Rabbit and the briar patch, but unlike Brer Rabbit, I had not been bom and raised in a briar patch, and unlike Brer Rabbit, it wasn’t what I wanted.

I dug in my pocket and got a match I had left over from when me and Tom tried to smoke some corn silk cigarettes and grapevines, and I struck the match with my thumb and waved it around, saw there was a wide space in the brambles, and it didn’t take a lot of know-how to see the path had been cut in them. I bent down and poked the match forward, and I could see the brambles were a kind of tunnel, about six feet high and six feet wide. I couldn’t tell how far it went, but it was a goodly distance.

I shook the match out before it burned my hand, said to Tom, “We can go back, or we can take this tunnel.”

Tom looked to our left, saw the brambles were thick and solid, and in front of us was a wall of them too. “I don’t want to go back because of that thing, whatever it is. And I don’t want to go down that tunnel neither. We’d be like rats in a pipe. Maybe whatever it is knew it’d get us boxed in like this, and it’s just waitin’ at the other end of that bramble trap for us, like that thing Daddy read to us about. The thing that was part man, part cow.”

“Part bull, part man,” I said. “The Minotaur.”

“Yeah. A minutetar. It could be waitin’ on us, Harry.”

I had, of course, thought about that. “I think we ought to take the tunnel. It can’t come from any side on us that way. It has to come from front or rear.”

“Can’t there be other tunnels in there?”

I hadn’t thought of that. There could be openings cut like this anywhere.

“I got the gun,” I said. “If you can push the wheelbarrow, Toby can sort of watch for us, let us know something’s coming. Anything jumps out at us, I’ll cut it in two.”

“I don’t like any of them choices.”

I picked up the gun and made it ready. Tom took hold of the wheelbarrow handles. I went on in and Tom came after me.

The smell of roses was thick and overwhelming. It made me sick. The thorns sometimes stuck out on vines you couldn’t see in the dark. They snagged my old shirt and cut my arms and face. I could hear Tom back there behind me, cussing softly under her breath as she got scratched. I was glad for the fact that Toby was silent. It gave me some kind of relief.

The bramble tunnel went on for a good ways, then I heard a rushing sound, and the bramble tunnel widened and we came out on the bank of the roaring Sabine. There were splits in the trees above, and the moonlight come through strong and fell over everything and looked yellow and thick like milk that had turned sour. Whatever had been pacing us seemed to be good and gone.

I studied the moon a moment, then thought about the river. I said, “We’ve gone some out of the way. But I can see how we ought to go. We can follow the river a ways, which ain’t the right direction, but I think it’s not far from here to the swinging bridge. We cross that, we can hit the main road, walk to the house.”

“The swinging bridge?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Think Momma and Daddy are worried,” Tom asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Reckon they are. I hope they’ll be glad to see these squirrels as I think they’ll be.”

“What about Toby?”

“We just got to wait and see.”

The bank sloped down, and near the water there was a little trail ran along the edge of the river.

“Reckon we got to carry Toby down, then bring the wheelbarrow. You can push it forward, and I’ll get in front and boost it down.”

I carefully picked up Toby, who whimpered softly, and Tom, getting ahead of herself, pushed the wheelbarrow. It, the squirrels, shotgun and shovel went over the edge, tipped over near the creek.

“Damn it, Tom,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It got away from me. I’m gonna tell Mama you cussed.”

“You do and I’ll whup the tar out of you. ‘Sides, I heard you cussin’ plenty.”

I gave Toby to Tom to hold till I could go down a ways, get a footing and have him passed to me.

I slid down the bank, came up against a huge oak growing near the water. The brambles had grown down the bank and were wrapped around the tree. I went around it, put my hand out to steady myself, and jerked it back quick. What I had touched hadn’t been tree trunk, or even a thorn, but something soft.

When I looked I saw a gray mess hung up in brambles, and the moonlight was shining across the water and falling on a face, or what had been a face, but was more like a jack-o’-lantern now, swollen and round with dark sockets for eyes. There was a wad of hair on the head like a chunk of dark lamb’s wool, and the body was swollen up and twisted and without clothes. A woman.

I had seen a couple of cards with naked women on them that Jake Sterning had shown me. He was always coming up with stuff like that ‘cause his daddy was a traveling salesman and sold not only Garrett Snuff but what was called novelties on the side.

But this wasn’t like that. Those pictures had stirred me in a way I didn’t understand but found somehow sweet and satisfying. This was stirring me in a way I understood immediately. Horror. Fear.

Her breasts were split like rotted melons cracked in the sun. The brambles were tightly wrapped around her swollen flesh and her skin was gray as cigar ash. Her feet weren’t touching the ground. She was held against the tree by the brambles. In the moonlight she looked like a fat witch bound to a massive post by barbed wire, ready to be burned.

“Jesus,” I said.

“You’re cussin’ again,” Tom said.

I climbed up the bank a bit, took Toby from Tom, laid him on the soft ground by the riverbank, stared some more at the body. Tom slid down, saw what I saw.

“Is it the Goat Man?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s a dead woman.”

“She ain’t got no clothes on.”

“No, she ain’t. Don’t look at her, Tom.”

“I can’t help it.”

“We got to get home, tell Daddy.”

“Light a match, Harry. Let’s get a good look.”

I considered on that, finally dug in my pocket. “I just got one left.”

“Use it.”

I struck the match with my thumb and held it out. The match wavered as my hand shook. I got up as close as I could stand to get. It was even more horrible by match light.

“I think it’s a colored woman,” I said.

The match went out. I righted the wheelbarrow, shook mud out of the end of the shotgun, put it and the squirrels and Toby back in the wheelbarrow. I couldn’t find the shovel, figured it had slid on down into the river and was gone. That was going to cost me.

“We got to get on,” I said.

Tom was standing on the bank, staring at the body. She couldn’t take her eyes off of it.

“Come on!”

Tom tore herself away. We went along the bank, me pushing that wheelbarrow for all I was worth, it bogging in the soft dirt until I couldn’t push it anymore. I bound the squirrels’ legs together with some string Tom had, and tied them around my waist.

“You carry the shotgun, Tom, and I’ll carry Toby.”

Tom took the gun, I picked Toby up, and we started toward the swinging bridge, which was where the Goat Man was supposed to live.

Me and my friends normally stayed away from the swinging bridge, all except Jake. Jake wasn’t scared of anything. Then again, Jake wasn’t smart enough to be scared of much. Story on him and his old man was you cut off their head they wouldn’t be any dumber.

Jake said all the stories you heard about the swinging bridge were made up by our parents to keep us off of it ‘cause it was dangerous. And maybe that was true.

The bridge was some cables strung across the Sabine from high spots on the banks. Some long board slats were fastened to the cables by rusty metal clamps and rotting ropes. I didn’t know who had built it, and maybe it had been a pretty good bridge once, but now a lot of the slats were missing and others were rotten and cracked and the cables were fastened to the high bank on either side by rusty metal bars buried deep in the ground. In places, where the water had washed the bank, you could see part of the bars showing through the dirt. Enough time and water, the whole bridge would fall into the river.

When the wind blew, the bridge swung, and in a high wind it was something. I had crossed it only once before, during the day, the wind dead calm, and that had been scary enough. Every time you stepped, it moved, threatened to dump you. The boards creaked and ached as if in pain. Sometimes little bits of rotten wood came loose and fell into the river below. I might add that below was a deep spot and the water ran fast there, crashed up against some rocks, fell over a little falls, and into wide, deep water.

Now, here we were at night, looking down the length of the bridge, thinking about the Goat Man, the body we’d found, Toby, and it being late, and our parents worried.

“We gotta cross, Harry?” Tom asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Reckon so. I’m gonna lead, and you watch where I step. The boards hold me, they’re liable to hold you.”

The bridge creaked above the roar of the river, swaying ever so slightly on its cables, like a snake sliding through tall grass.

It had been bad enough trying to cross when I could put both hands on the cables, but carrying Toby, and it being night, and Tom with me, and her trying to carry the shotgun … Well, it didn’t look promising.