Riding Shotgun (11 page)

Cig spoke to the field. “Fattail ditched us again. Same time, same station.”

“I can’t believe that he barked in your face.” Harleyetta, like the others, was astounded.

“What do you think he was saying?” Bill laughed.

“Fuck you,” Binky offered.

“And then some.” Cig laughed.

Carol, on her way to gather hounds still in the woods, just shook her head.

Cig called out to her, “If I live to be one hundred years old I swear I will find out
how
he does this.”

“Better turn into a fox then,” Carol called back.

“I bet other foxes don’t even know,” Florence Moeser added, her voice cracking a bit.

Cig, grateful that Florence had survived the chase, exhaled. She knew, too, that someday Florence would die hunting—and that’s exactly how the eighty-four-year-old wanted it.

“Folks, let’s hold up here for a minute.”

A hound squealed back in the woods. It sounded like Streisand, hurt or scared.

Cig waited a moment but the yowling continued. Carol had ridden to the other side of the woods to gather hounds so she wouldn’t be able to hear this one. Wanting to speed things along Cig noticed that Roger was checking on the other side of the sheep. Fat chance.

“Harleyetta, come with me. Grace, take the field—just in case.” Cig singled out Harleyetta to make her feel good and because the woman had to have known she was often the butt of many jokes, both because of her intermittent drinking
and the fact that she couldn’t hold her horse. She was a loyal member of the club, though, and Cig liked her.

They rode into the thickly scented woods. The mist, heavier than before and odd for this time of the morning, nine thirty now, continued to roll up from the river. They spied Jane Fogleman, on foot, trying to overturn the huge old fallen tree trunk that Streisand refused to leave. Cig was glad Jane had found Streisand. The bitch put her head back and howled at the top of her considerable lungs.

“Jane, what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. She won’t leave here and she’s just—well, look at her.” Jane was at a loss to explain the hound’s distress. “Bet Fattail ran through the trunk or stopped and left a little marker, you know.” Jane, with a major effort, rolled the trunk a bit more. A bony hand, what was left of it, protruded through a rotted hole in the trunk. “Good God!” Jane involuntarily took a step back.

Cig dismounted, handing her reins to Harleyetta, whose eyes bugged out of her head. Without saying a word Cig knelt down and began tearing at the hole in the trunk. A skeleton was wedged in the fallen tree trunk. They stared.

“This huge old chestnut has been here for three hundred years at least. Look at the size of it.” Jane kept blinking. “The body was in the trunk. Now who would do something like that? And why?”

“Why is obvious,” Cig answered her. “To hide it.”

Harleyetta handed the reins to Jane and carefully examined the bones, which had fallen apart over the decades. “He’s been here for a long, long time. There’s not a scrap of flesh, a bit of hair, nothing.” She plucked out the skull; the big square teeth were still intact.

Jane patted Streisand to calm her down.

Cig took the skull from Harleyetta. A strange flash of recognition made her nearly drop it. There was something unnervingly familiar about that dead smile.

“Maybe he’s a leftover from the War Between the States.” Cig stared at the whitened bones, a faint shiver running over her body as she replaced the skull.

“Could be,” Jane said. “But the Yankee gunboats didn’t
get this far upriver and there was nothing to come up here for anyway.”

“Meanness. Never forget that.” Harleyetta stood back up.

“Well, let’s call the sheriff, and he can give this fellow, or what’s left of him, a resting place with a stone on it.” Cig held Gypsy while Harleyetta, with difficulty, remounted. A rustle behind some dogwoods diverted her attention for a moment. She thought she caught a glimpse of Fattail.

Then Cig, thanks to her height, easily swung into the saddle. “My God, what a day this has been—and it’s not over yet.” She half-laughed.

“Best run all season. Maybe ever.” Jane took off her cap. She glanced again at the bones in the trunk, then mounted up. “I’m going back farther into the woods. We’re still missing two hounds.”

Streisand followed Cig and Harleyetta as they walked away.

“Guess you get used to seeing stuff like that, being a nurse.”

Harleyetta shook her head. “Not quite like that. It’s worse when you know them.” Her lips clamped down as though she were fighting the words that threatened to tumble out of her own mouth.

“Speaking of knowing them, I don’t know if I ever told you how much I appreciate all you did for Blackie when he came into the E.R. I know he was beyond help, but you tried everything to revive him. I’ll always be in your debt, Harley. You’ve taken care of many of us since you’ve been down at the hospital.”

“Oh, Cig, don’t mention it. He died fast and happy. Even if I’d been at Grace’s house I don’t think I could have saved him, but you’ve got to try. That’s—well—” She shook her head.

“Happy?”

“Uh—” Harleyetta stalled.

“What do you know that I don’t?”

“Nothing.” Her voice hit high C.

Cig, without knowing it, opened Pandora’s box by her
nonchalance. “Knowing Blackie, he’d probably just got laid and—”

Harley breathed a sigh of relief. “Here I’ve been carrying this around for a year and you knew all the time! I’ve got to hand it to you, Cig. You’re something special. Most women couldn’t have taken it.”

Cig shrugged. Her breath caught in her throat. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know whatever it was Harleyetta thought she knew. “Can’t do anything about it when they’re gone.”

“Can’t do anything about it when they’re alive. Men.”

Cig kept her voice as firm as she could. “How’d you know?”

“I put him on the gurney after we tried every procedure to resuscitate him. Helped undress him. His jockey shorts told the tale. I mean, I knew anyway. We all did. We didn’t know if you knew what had been going on so everybody just clammed up. We talked to each other, of course. Can’t stop that.” She inhaled. “Well, he died in the saddle. Must have been hell for her to get his clothes on.”

“Grace is a remarkable woman,” Cig whispered.

“Oh, here, I’ve made you think about all this again, and you and Grace have made your peace. Blackie was just like that, you know. In his own way, he loved you.”

“That’s what he always said.” Cig smiled reflexively. The mist felt clammy on her skin. A wound opened up in her stomach. The edge of the woods was ahead.

The field stood waiting.

“They’ll never believe this. None of us will ever believe this day,” Harleyetta said, voice filled with excitement.

Streisand bounded forward to join the pack.

Cig stared at her sister and wondered if she could keep from killing her.

Another yowl from the woods and a call from Jane drew Cig’s attention away from Grace.

“Found it,” was what her words sounded like, but then her voice faded away.

“Grace,” Cig, relieved to have an excuse to be alone for a few moments to collect herself, called out, “I’m going back for a minute.”

“Okay.” Grace answered, unaware of what had transpired.

The hound’s voice pierced the air. Cig turned Full Throttle back into the woods. “Harley, tell them what Jane found. I’ll catch up to you if you move off.”

She had to get through this hunt, get the horses back home and then think of how to kill Grace. Swiftly or a slow, wretched death?

She rode back to the trunk. The bony hand seemed to reach out for her. She shuddered now, uncontrollably. Within seconds she was enveloped in mist. She had no desire to be in the fog with an oddly familiar skeleton no matter how old it was.

“Poor bastard,” she thought and then as quickly thought the phrase applied to herself as well.

She rode toward the cry of the hound, which suddenly stopped. She heard the sound of huge paws racing toward her. An enormous black and tan thundered past her. She’d never seen that hound before. Few people hunted black and tans in America. Some Irish hunts used them. She reined in Full Throttle, listened a moment as the footfall faded away. She started to turn then looked down past her left foot. Fattail looked right back up at her.

“You little shit.”

He seemed to smile. Why not? There wasn’t a thing she could do to him. With elegant insolence he walked in front of her.

The mist thickened but Cig could see Fattail leading the way. She couldn’t see much else. She thought she was heading toward the James River and in an easterly direction. When Fattail pranced out onto the old canal road she knew her sense of direction hadn’t failed her. However, the silver fog made her think twice about cutting back up into the woods to try and rejoin her field. Common sense told her to stop and sit tight but she couldn’t resist following the fox, who strolled along as though her pet.

She’d known Fattail for four years, as well as his mother and father and littermates. Born in a big den on George Lawrence’s property, he had possessed a noticeable tail even as a cub.

Solon Deyhle and G-Mom taught her to learn the ways of the fox. If winter proved harsh she threw out dead chickens and rabbits for them. She’d put on her snowshoes or crosscountry skis and visit each den in turn. When foxes bred, then taught their cubs to hunt, she was sure to keep her hounds far away from them.

During cubbing season, so-called because the fox cubs
need to learn to hunt just as the hound puppies do, she noted who remained with the dens, who was missing and who moved on to form new dens.

As the fox preyed on rabbits and small game, so the larger predators preyed on him. Fattail survived his cubhood and quickly displayed that quirky intelligence for which foxes are famous, but he had something else, a kind of genius really.

She’d seen him once at the kennels by moonlight, on a muggy July night. He appeared to be studying the hounds. After hunting season she often glimpsed him over by George’s cornfields where the pickings were rich.

Cig, like most American foxhunters, never wanted to kill the fox, most especially reds since they ran true. Grays ran in circles. The death of a red fox, a cause for lamentation, could only mean that the quarry had grown old or was sick.

She had witnessed amazing things in the wild. Only last year she came across two foxes, a male and a female, on the high field behind her own house. The male ran away, hoping to draw the pack after him. The vixen crouched in the pasture, hounds all around her, and not one hound found her. Her mate saved her and lost the hounds after a ten-minute chase.

Another time, she ran a red for forty minutes. She knew the fox, a vixen with forelegs that were white up to her elbows, a distinctive looking animal. The vixen ran to her den, which Cig expected since she was tiring, but instead of ducking in, the vixen lay down right on the lip of the den. She lowered her head and asked to die. The hounds killed her in seconds. When Roger called them off and examined the vixen, he discovered that she had shingles, an extremely painful disease, fatal for foxes. The vixen chose a swift death. There was a nobility in the animal’s final moments on earth, a nobility denied fatally I’ll humans who were carted away to hospitals, sterile, clear tubes jammed in every orifice, drugs coursing down those tubes.

Cig hoped she could go down like the vixen when her time came. Blackie, the son-of-a-bitch, had had a good death. Roger, Wilco, over and out. A surge of fury welled up
in her. She unconsciously squeezed Full Throttle, who broke into a trot. She relaxed. Fattail shot a look back over his shoulder.

Cig would have given anything to be a fly on the wall when Blackie died. Was he in the act with Grace? It was almost funny. She could just picture Grace, horrified, rolling the six-foot-four carcass off of her or hopping off if Blackie had decided to take his ease and lie back. Or perhaps she’d given him a blow job. Probably not. Not that Blackie didn’t enjoy them but he was a grappler, he liked to get up close and personal, as ABC sportscasters used to say.