Poachers (16 page)

“You okay?” he asks.

“You a cop?”

He shakes his head.

“Then I’m Brenda,” she says. “You want a date?”

Across the street is an alley with a Dumpster in the back. This is downtown and nothing moves. A mist is in the air now, it stings his cheeks. She moves closer to him, urgently, shivering with cold. She has blond hair that needs washing and she is very thin.

“I want to show you something,” she says. “Think of it as an advertisement.” When she reaches into her purse Henry imagines she might pull out a badge and arrest him for soliciting prostitution. He has a record already, for trying to set his high school gym on fire years ago. But she brings Polaroid pictures out of her purse. He has to squint to see them but knows they’re shots of her nude. There’s one where she lies on her stomach on a bed. You can see her bottom and part of one breast, though no nipple. The next shows her pubic hair, and both breasts. Then one with her sitting astride an exercise bike. And one with her in a bathtub.

“Can I buy these?” he asks.

“Depends,” Brenda says. She stares at him for a long time, so long he doesn’t like it. “Look,” she says. “I’m in kind of a bad way. What’s your name?”

“Donald,” Henry says.

“Okay, Donny, look. Give me twenty bucks and a ride, and I’ll blow you. Deal?”

He looks at the pictures again. “Them,” he says.

She snatches them away. “Christ, Donny. It’s cold. Look how you’re shivering.”

She has long red fingernails that are chipped, and he thinks her hair might be a wig.

“Okay, thirty,” she says. “For the pictures and nothing else. You pay first.”

In the truck, she switches the heater on high. She changes the radio from country to rap. She turns it up. “Got a cigarette?”

He hands her his pack and lighter. She lights one. “So what-all drugs’ve you done?”

He says not many. The truth is none.

“Turn here,” she says, pointing a long nail. He obeys. “Tell me something, Donny-boy—” She’s going through her purse. “Why do you hate women? I’m not judging you,” she says. “All my rides do. I’m just curious. Was it your mother? Some ex-girlfriend? Who?”

He shrugs, wonders what to say, but she brings something out of her purse. She holds it against the dash lights.

“You ever seen that?” she asks.

A dirty-white crystal, the size of an aspirin.

“Crack,” Henry says.

“You guessed it, Donny. Got a knife?”

He says he doesn’t, though he does, in his pocket, a birthday present from his parents several years ago. He thinks of them now. They’ll be done with supper, his mother in the kitchen putting dishes away. Wiping the counter. His father in the den, watching the Alabama Tide on TV. They’ll be asking each other where Henry has gotten off to.

“No prob,” Brenda says. “Nobody can improvise like an addict. Turn here, Donny.”

She takes the piece of electrical wire and lights a match and holds the match to the wire. She doesn’t see that Henry passes the turn. It will be a while before she realizes. When the plastic coating on the wire begins to melt, she strips it off. She takes a pen from her purse and pulls the ink cartridge out. She forces the wire into the barrel of the pen. Then, holding the wire in place with her long nails, she breaks off a corner of the crack and pushes it into the opposite end of the pen. She taps the rock gently with a nail. Strikes another match.

She lights the pipe and inhales, using the wire for a filter. Outside, rain has begun to fall and there are pine trees. Inside, her eyes have become red and dreamy and the truck has filled with smoke.

“Do you want to die?” Henry asks.

“Spare the sermon,” she says, offering him the pipe.

He takes it, rolls down his window and without thinking throws it out.

“Hey,” Brenda says.

Tomorrow, when Henry comes back through, he will have to find the pipe. He makes note of a pine stump and a large hole in the road. Brenda is yelling now, but he barely hears. He is already living in tomorrow, already on his knees in the stiff cold grass, finding the pipe, which will be frozen and will snap easily in his fingers.

alaska

Our aim was
this: Alaska.

To abandon Mobile at dawn without telling anybody, not even our girlfriends or our boss at the plant. Bruce knew a bail jumper who got a deckhand job on a crab boat off the Alaskan coast where she made five hundred dollars a day. Bruce was divorced for the third time and I’d never been married, so we planned to sell our cars and Bruce’s house trailer and buy an olive drab Ford four-wheel-drive pickup with a camper, fill it full of those sharp green pinecones hard as hand grenades. Bruce’d heard you could sell those suckers for five bucks apiece in New England.

They’re crazy up there, he said.

Driving through Georgia and Tennessee, we’d look for tent revivals where they had faith healing. If we found a good one we’d stop and visit a service. Bruce would fake heart disease and I’d be an alcoholic—to make it convincing, he said, I’d have to belch and stumble and splash on rum like aftershave. He would grimace, moan, and clutch his left arm, until we had the whole congregation praying for us. When the ushers passed the KFC buckets for donations, we’d shrug and say we were flat broke, just poor travelers. Homeless.

Bruce had stolen his second ex-wife’s Polaroid camera, which we’d keep handy for making pictures—hawks on fenceposts, grizzly bears, church marquees that said
THE LORD IS COMING SOON
,

then right under that
BINGO 8:00 EVERY TUESDAY
. We’d have a stack of books-on-tape from the public library, too: John Grisham, Stephen King and even self-help. In the Badlands of South Dakota, when we pulled off the road to sleep in the back of the truck with our feet sticking out, we’d play an
Improve Your Vocabulary
tape, learn words like
eclectic
and
satyr
.

At night we’d stop in
dives, me in my dark glasses and Bruce in his eelskin cowboy boots. There’d be smoky harems of women interested in such eclectic guys, and they’d insist on buying us boilermakers. When I picked up a babe, I’d take the truck and leave Bruce arm-wrestling a drunk welder at the bar. Or if he got lucky and split with a startling honey, I’d amble to the jukebox and punch up John Prine and lure my dream girl away from the line-dancing bikers and cowboys. In the middle of the fight, I’d crawl bleeding out the back and sleep on a rock next to a cow skull and wait until the olive drab truck topped the hill in the morning.

We’d make pictures of the girls, too. You’d be surprised how many get off from posing in motel rooms, Bruce said. He would “let on” to some of the drunker ladies that we were advance photographers for the swimsuit issue, our names Abe Z. and Horatio. At the other end of the bar I’d be telling them that we were scientists from Texas researching barn owls. But to that adventurous woman running the pool table, the redhead wearing tight cutoff jeans, the kind of woman you know has a green iguana tattooed on her hip, to her we’d tell the truth: Alaska. Bruce said she could tag along, but he was sure she’d get homesick thousands of miles before the crab boat. Imagine the scene: some dusty Wyoming ghost town and this woman sobbing and hugging our

necks, angry that she’s such a crybaby. She would climb the steps and we’d watch her sad pretty face in the window as the bus lurched off, and when she was gone Bruce would sigh with relief and, after a few drinks, we’d get in the truck and go north.

I’d miss her terribly.

If we saw the right
brand of dog—it was a mutt we wanted, the ugliest in the lower forty-eight—we’d stop and bribe him with fast food. He could sit between us on the seat and lick our hands, and if he farted we could look at each other and yell, “Was that you?” and crank the windows down furiously. And, of course, we’d pick up chicks hitchhiking. When we got one, she could sit between us and hold the dog (we’d name him Handsome) and croon to him. We’d go days out of our way to get her home, but we wouldn’t be crass and say, “Ass, gas or grass.” All our rides would be free.

Because manners
were
important, we thought. So eating in truck stops, we’d put our napkins in our laps and remove our caps and say “Yes, ma’am” to the flirting women at nearby tables, even the Yankees, who wouldn’t be used to such gentlemen. We would smile and wink and gather our doggie bags and leave 50 percent tips. Our waitresses would long to follow us, and the pretty gas station checkout girls would lean over their cash registers to read our names off the backs of our belts—not only because of our unusual looks and ugly dog, but our cultured southern manners.

And sportsmen to the end, we’d skid off the road when we saw a private golf course. We’d step out of the trees in our loud pants and vault the fence and drive our used balls into the clouds, needing binoculars to watch the hole-in-ones three hundred yards

away. The serious golfers, in their berets, would frown at each other as we played through, carrying only one driver each, and when the stern club attendant came, we’d disappear into the woods like satyrs and reappear magically at the clubhouse bar.

Or we’d stop if we found a good secluded pond, rig our rods with Snagless Sallys and pork rinds, cast into the hard-to-reach, around cypress knees, into grasses, keeping our lines flexible as the largemouth bass tore through the murk with the rind whipping against its gills. We’d set the hooks like pros and play the fish perfectly, then grill the shining wet lunkers over a campfire that night and sip the moonshine we’d stolen from bootleggers in Virginia. Handsome would prowl the pond and court his first she-wolf, the two of them baying softly, and in the firelight Bruce would uncase his mandolin and I’d warm up my harmonica, and we’d play tender ballads, love songs, so sweet the woods would grow still and sad around us, and just before we’d begin to lament all the people and places we’d left behind, things we’d never see again, we would stop playing as if on cue and look at each other, suddenly happy, remembering Alaska, waiting for us.

poachers

At dawn on
the first day of April, the three Gates brothers banked their ten-foot aluminum boat in a narrow slough of dark water. They tied their hounds, strapped on their rifles and stepped out, ducking black magnolia branches heavy with rain and Spanish moss. The two thin younger brothers, denim overalls tucked into their boots, lugged between them a Styrofoam cooler of iced fish, coons and possums. The oldest brother—twenty, bearded, heavy-set—carried a Sunbeam Bread sack of eels in his coat pocket. Hooked over his left shoulder was the pink body of a fawn they’d shot and skinned, and, over the right, a stray dog to which they’d done the same. With the skins and heads gone and the dog’s tail chopped off, they were difficult to tell apart.

The Gateses climbed the hill, clinging to vines and saplings, slipping in the red clay, their boots coated and enormous by the time they stepped out of the woods. For a moment they stood in the road, looking at the gray sky, the clouds piling up. The two younger ones, Neil and Dan, set the cooler down. Kent, the oldest, removed his limp cap and squeezed the water from it. His brothers did the same. Then Kent nodded and they picked up the cooler. They rounded a curve and crossed a one-lane bridge, stopping to piss over the rail into creek water high from all the rain, then went on, passing houses on either side: dark warped boards with knotholes big enough to look through and cement

blocks for steps. Black men appeared in doors and windows to watch them go by—to most of these people they were something not seen often, something nocturnal and dangerous. Along this stretch of the Alabama River, everyone knew that the brothers’ father, Boo Gates, had married a girl named Anna when he was thirty and she was seventeen, and that the boys had been born in quick succession, with less than a year between them.

But few outside the family knew that a fourth child—a daughter, unnamed—had been stillborn, and that Boo had buried her in an unmarked grave in a clearing in the woods behind their house. Anna died the next day and the three boys, dirty and naked, watched their father’s stoop-shouldered descent into the earth as he dug her grave. By the time he’d finished it was dark and the moon had come up out of the trees and the boys lay asleep upon each other in the dirt like wolf pups.

The name of this community
, if it could be called that, was Lower Peach Tree, though as far as anybody knew there’d never been an Upper Peach Tree. Scattered along the leafy banks of the river were ragged houses, leaning and drafty, many empty, caving in, so close to the water they’d been built on stilts. Each April floods came and the crumbling land along the bank would disappear, and each May, when the flood waters receded, a house or two would be gone.

Upriver, near the lock and dam, stood an old store, a slanting, weathered building with a steep tin roof and a stovepipe in the back. Two rusty gas pumps on the left, beside the road. The regular pump, empty for years, had a garbage bag tied over it. Around the store the mimosa trees sagged, waterlogged. In front,