The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (29 page)

“You know about my—” but the man who was once Ashley Torrington, waved me away.

After breakfast the four of us—Krista, Smokey, Gina, and I—took a tour of the 300-acre community.  I swallowed another pill and was spared the labor of walking when Smokey rolled up to the front door with an electric golf cart.  Gina sat in front with the driver while Krista and I sat in back, holding on to the side rails. 

Torrington has an average of a dozen residents.  Except for the younger Torringtons, all are ex-military men or women and their spouses, who live in the two large outbuildings I had seen on the way in.  Miniature versions of the house I had been brought to, they had undergone various kinds of repairs and improvements over time—all mod cons, for instance, new roofs, fluted replacement pillars for the porches.  We passed close to three or four fields, each planted with a different crop.  I saw cabbage, watermelon, and one I couldn’t identify.  “So this is how Clarence gets his produce so fresh,” I said to Krista as we whisked along.

“Some of it,” she replied.  “Some of the community even makes, I guess you’d call them crafts, that he sells for us.”

“What kind of crafts?”

“Have you ever seen the eye-pillows he sells?  Those come from here.  Quilts, too, and quilt potholders.  Even junk from the old attics.  Sometimes Smokey and I will get our backpacks and take a load in to Clarence.  I guess you saw us once, huh?”

“So that’s what you were doing out there,” I said.  “And Clarence
did
see you and got you to help carry me out of the woods.”

“I carried the snake,” she said.  “Ugh.”

“The army medals,” I remembered.  “They come from here too, don’t they?”

“The people who live here try to forget they were in the army,” she said.  “They’ll let go of everything but their guns.”

“I’ve heard them shooting ever since I moved back to Pine Oak,” I said.  “At first I thought they were hunters, but I can tell the sound of a glock from a pea-shooter.”

“They’re always out shootin stuff.  Trees, deer, whatever,” said Krista.  “They’re okay, I guess.  I couple of them make pretty good deejays, but they’re really strange.  They never go into town and don’t want anybody to even know they’re alive.”

“That’s why Sam and Jason ran when you snuck up on them that morning,” Smokey added.

I was genuinely puzzled.  “Sam and Jason?” I asked.

“That first morning,” Krista explained.  “They had found a load of 1930s magazines in one of the old rooms and schlepped them through the woods to Clarence’s.  The dumpster was their drop-off point.  They didn’t know anything about the goat or they probably would have waited a day or two.”

Gina, who had been listening to Krista’s and my conversation, spoke up.  “Ah’d been wonderin who it was you heard that morning.

I didn’t reply.  It was the last piece of the puzzle—one so small I had all but forgotten about it, but without that, there could have been no puzzle at all, no story, I would have had to use all these words for some other purpose.

The golf cart’s tires crunched over the trails we were driving on.  “Y’all don’t sound like you grew up around here,” Gina remarked to Smokey.

“Naw.  We’re from Arizona.  Born and raised.  We came down to help Grampa with his radio station.  We’ve both worked in a college radio station in Phoenix, but nobody knows music like Grampa.”

“How have you kept the FCC from shutting you down?” I asked.  “It’s not like you’re broadcasting from a ship somewhere like some pirate stations and can move from place to place.”

Krista giggled the laugh I had come to associate with Gamma.  “It’s a jape,” she said.

“What’s a jape?” asked Gina.

“A joke!” Krista cried.  “We’re not really a pirate station—we just
say
we are.”

“We’re a fully licensed, dues-paid radio station,” Smokey added. “But we can get away with a lot because nobody thinks we are.  I mean, what real station doesn’t advertise and doesn’t have pledge drives?  We play exactly what we want; Krista can spout her poetry—”

“And I can make up recipes,” she giggled,  “and hope I don’t poison anybody.”

“It’s your poetry that might poison people,” I quipped.  “Really,
Poultrygeist
?”

Krista giggled again.

We had passed by the stables and I saw Trigger and several other horses—chestnut, black, and bay—grazing in a nearby pasture.  I was so intent on the horses that I almost didn’t see the row of boards just to the outside of the encroaching forest.  “Hold it!”  I shouted.  “Stop for a minute.”  I jumped out even before the cart stopped and walked—not ran, Dr. Morris—toward the structure.  I bent down and felt the roughness of he old boards—part of the old plank road I had seen just outside the fence the day Alikki had run away.

The others had gotten out of the cart as well.  “There’s more of it further down,” Smokey said.  “Grampa said to leave it alone, but I don’t know what the big deal is.”

“This is the ruins of the oldest plank road in the world,” I said.  “That’s why the original town’s name was changed from Torrington to Planktown.”

“Didn’t ya know?” Gina asked.

“We learned that from a Jasper County history book,” I told them.  “But the author said that its location was unknown. I guess that’s the line I’m going to have to take when I write my history of the Plank Festival.”

“What’s that?” Smokey asked.

“Just an old Pine Oak tradition,” I said.  ‘Like a small town Fourth of July.”

I walked back to the cart.  “I’ve gotta get back home and feed my horses.  Then I need to pay a visit to my doctor.  Gina, do you know how to drive us out of here?”

“There’s a dirt road that comes in from the opposite sahd of those fields.  Krista told me that it’s mostly used for trucking out produce.”

“Or trailering out her horse to go to wild west shows,” I added.

“She’s on restriction for that,” said Smokey.

“Let me know when you get off,” I told her.  “Maybe you can teach me to ride as good as you do.”

“Tell Mark I’ll call him sometime,” she told me.

“Who’s Mark,” Smokey asked suspiciously.

I winked at her.

Chapter 19

I’m getting pretty near the end of this story, and I’ve just realized that I haven’t finished telling you about Crookneck Smith.  So I’ll do it now.

From the day I bought my first bow until the day he gave me my last lesson, Crookneck Smith became my confessor as well as my coach.  He knew about my classes, marveled as my accent began to change from the Pine Oak drawl to the anonymity of the news anchor I once thought I wanted to be.  He learned about my boyfriends, parents, and news assignments and never offered a harsh criticism unless maybe I plucked the bowstring or took my eye off the target when I was shooting.

And over the years I learned something about him, too, both in his own words and from his daughter Beth, who worked in the shop sometimes.  Archery had been his life—too much his life—and his constant traveling had ruined his marriage.  This and the waning of his ability as an archer caused him to drink more heavily, and his problems snowballed.  I found out that “Crookneck’s Archery and Hunting Supplies” was just a front for the taxidermy business next door, and although it paid him a living wage, he spent most of it on high-tech archery supplies and Kentucky bourbon.  He told me once that he planned to enter the world championship for senior compound bow shooters, but he never did.  Another thing he never did was drink in my presence.

Whenever I dropped in, he set up regulation FITA targets on his old cotton bale and had me practice until my fingers were nearly raw and my arms shook like the tail of a rattlesnake.  Crookneck not only became my unofficial coach—he refused to take any money for his advice—but also my unofficial father.  While Mike had never really paid much attention to me—being too concerned with his own shortcomings—Crookneck Smith went out of his way to further my archery education.  He provided me with books and videos, researched and signed me up for various shooting matches: indoor, outdoor, and 3-D, whatever he could find within driving distance.

And after he had convinced me to change to the more sophisticated target recurves with their shiny protruding paraphernalia, he accompanied me to regional, then national meets.  This continued even after I accepted a job 150 miles away in Richmond, Virginia.  He was a spectator when I won the National Championship in 1999.  My mother was in the audience, too—she knew what it meant to compete in a minor sport—but Crookneck preferred to sit by himself, away from the crowd—small as it was—wearing a baseball cap that said “Crookneck’s Archery.”

When I had loosed my last arrow, which cemented my win in the finals, my mother was cheering mightily, even whistling with exuberant happiness.  But she was not the first person I searched out in the stands, to whom I raised my bow in triumph.  It was Crookneck, who sat alone in the far corner of one of the bleachers.  But he was not so far away that I couldn’t see the redness around his eyes or the tears streaming from his face. 

That was the last match that Crookneck attended.  He still drank heavily, still suffered from his wife’s defection and his increasing feebleness, and months later, when the Olympic trials rolled around, I heard from his daughter that he had a liver ailment and was confined to his bed.  Maybe because of his absence, I didn’t shoot as well as I was capable and finished fourth.  Because it was a three-woman team, I was named first alternate.

At this time I was dating a lawyer a dozen years older than me and was enwhirled in a hectic life and when I returned to Richmond from the trials, I became swept up in that life again and couldn’t drive up to see Crookneck for several weeks.  When I finally drove out, I was surprised to find him at his workbench, thinner and weaker, but still smiling.

“There she is!” he said as I walked in.  I grabbed a push broom and began a sweeping operation that had not varied since I had purchased it several years before.  I swept for a while in silence, before he continued, “Ye know, fourth is not that bad.”

“Nobody wants to be fourth at anything,” I told him.  “I missed you in the stands.”

“Yeah, waal, ye know, I was planning to go, but my guts started acting up and Beth had to take me to the hospital.  Next time ye get a coach, don’t get someone who’s at death’s door.”

“I won’t get another coach at all,” I told him.  “And you’re not at death’s door.”  But his face was more emaciated than I had seen it, his hands twitched as he tried to work his Bitzenburger fletching jig.  For an hour or so I helped him fletch a couple dozen shafts and we traded shooting stories.  I told him that when I was practicing for the Olympics I had to shoot around the outside line of the center circle because when I would aim at the exact center I would end up hitting my previous arrows and breaking them.  He told me about the time he had lost a contest because his opponent had nicked his previous arrow—which was in the 7 point range—and deflected it into the center.  I hugged him as I left.  It was the first time I had ever done that, and it was the last time I ever saw him.  

The day before I left for Sydney, I got a call from Beth.  Crookneck’s heart had stopped in the night.  One of the last things he said was that he hoped someone on my team would break her arm so that I’d get a chance to beat the best in the world.

But of course that didn’t happen.  I spent a lot of time walking around the fabulous city, shopping with my teammates, oogling the more famous athletes like the Williams sisters, Lance Armstrong, and Lisa Leslie.  I wanted badly to get Robert Dover’s autograph for my mother, but I was too shy.  I loved the sunshine and the Olympic village and all the people, but, oddly, I didn’t think about the possibility of Karen or Denise or Janet breaking an arm.  And in my practice sessions, I shot splendidly, better than ever in my life, but I knew that my competitiveness was dying down; I knew without ever having thought about it that I wouldn’t attempt to compete in 2004.

The truth is, I was getting deeper into my real profession with
The Richmond Times-Dispatch
.  My boyfriend Jack put on a good front, but he was just not that interested in my archery.  But most of all, with Crookneck Smith not around to ruffle me with his calm drawl and his boisterous conversation, I no longer felt the draw of competitive archery.  The scores in the finals of the 2000 Olympics were staggering, and would get higher still in subsequent Olympics.  I remembered my Martin Mamba with pleasure and, a few months after I got back from Sydney, I sold my Olympic tackle and bought another recurve—the Black Widow takedown I still have.

And I never had another coach.

~  ~  ~

The cemetery in Pine Oak is called Shady Rest for a reason.  Nestled into a dozen acres alongside one of the many pine forests in the area, it is dotted not only with pines, which carpet the gravesites with their soft brown needles, but a few live oaks and two large magnolias as well.

Pauley Hughes’ funeral took place the day after Gina drove me home from Torrington.  I hadn’t had to stay in the hospital, but Will Morris was furious with me, telling me how upset he would be if the first patient he ever had died because she refused to take her medicine in a timely manner.  No walking in the woods, no archery, no soccer.

It was a drizzly day, but the rain kept it from being swelteringly hot.  Most of us carried umbrellas and shared with those few that did not.  I had missed the funerals of the two people who meant the most to me, and as I walked from my car through patches of wet grass, years of memories of Cindy McKeown and Crookneck Smith cantered through my mind.

Pauley was buried next to his mother, which would have pleased him had he known.  Paul Sr. was dazed throughout the entire service, possibly a drug-induced daze.  I’d have drugged myself silly, too, if, in the course of a couple of years I had lost both wife and only child.  Cal was standing next to him at the gravesite, but Paul didn’t respond to anything said to him.  Betty Dickson was there, dressed more somberly than usual, and surprisingly, she was weeping.  I liked her better then, and still do.  In the group around Paul were his two other golf buddies, Ray Colley and Joe Rooney.  Ray had come with his wife and Becky, although they were standing somewhat apart.  I noticed that Becky stared directly forward throughout the entire service with a kind of fierceness that was hard to interpret.

Some of Pauley’s other schoolmates were there, but looked ill at ease, as if they would have rather been in class.  There were a few people who I had not expected to see.  Donny, for one, with Linda C and her son Adam.  Adam was dressed in a black suit and had his hair cut and combed.  Adam, too, was crying, although trying not to show it.  I wondered which direction he would go; the next few weeks would probably be a big test for him and for Becky Colley.

Gina, who I had expected to see standing next to Cal, was unaccountably absent and I worried that she might be sick.

About halfway through the service, I spotted Krista and Smokey Torrington, standing motionless without umbrellas under a tall magnolia tree some hundred yards away.  They were standing so close to each other that their shoulders were touching, twins except for the color of their hair.  They looked like figures painted in a gothic landscape.

I was walking back to my truck after the service when I heard footsteps behind me, then a female voice.  “Sue-Ann,” I stopped, looked around, and waited for her to catch me up.  “Sue-Ann,” she repeated.

“Linda C,” I responded.  Linda was dressed in a long, lightweight dress with a dark flower pattern.  She wore her white waitress shoes and I could only assume that she had been preoccupied when she left the house.  Her dishwater blonde hair was done up nicely, though, and pinned.  Her face held a few lines, but maybe not as many as mine.  I had no idea what she wanted; I simply hoped she wouldn’t make the morning any more unpleasant than it already was.

“I know we don’t know each other very well,” she began, “but I wanted to thank you.”

“Me?  For what?  Here, get under my umbrella.”

“I think you saved my son’s life.”

“That’s news to me,” I told her.  “I’ve never spoken a word to the kid.”

“You gave Donny that head’s up on my ex.  I knew he was into weird stuff—that’s one of the reasons we divorced—but I never thought he was dangerous—all  those occult books . . .”

“I don’t think many books are dangerous, Linda C,” I told her.

“You don’t understand.  When you called Donny and told him to keep an eye on Adam, Donny hauled the wrecked car he was towing all the way to Jerry’s.  When he opened the door and went in, Pauley was there.  He wanted to take Adam somewhere and Adam was rarin to go.  Donny said he didn’t think that was a good idea.  Jerry got riled—said Adam was his son and he could hang out with whoever he wanted.”  Linda C stopped and looked at me kind of shyly.  “You probly know that Donny don’t lahk to argue.”

I did know.  His inferiority complex usually caused him to lose arguments, even when he was right.  I nodded.

“So Donny just punched him out.”

“No he didn’t!”

“Sure he did!” she smiled.  “And then Adam started screeching somethin nasty, so Donny slapped shit out of him.”

“I can’t believe it!” I told her.  In my heart I was saying, you go, boy.

“And that’s not all.  Donny ast Pauley if he wanted some too, but Pauley just ran out swearin and cursin.  Ah don’t lahk to speak ill of the dead, but Pauley could be a real nasty little boy.”  Linda C stopped and rummaged in her black handbag for a pack of cigarettes.  She lit one and offered the pack my way; I shook my head.

“What ah’m tryin to say, Sue-Ann, is that if you hadn’t told Donny to watch out for Adam, it might have been Adam that got kicked by that horse.”  Linda C took a long puff on her cigarette.  “And you know what?  Adam knows that when Donny smacked him he mighta saved his life.  It’s a start, Sue-Ann.”

“Thanks, Linda.  That makes me feel better.  Adam sounds like a smart kid, but I feel like I should have been able to save Pauley, too.”

“If there’s . . . if there’s ever anything ah can do for you, ah hope you’ll call.”

“I will, Linda.  Now go home and dry off before you catch pneumonia and I have to go to another funeral.”

I wanted to thank Krista for feeding my horses when I had been so weak, but when I looked toward the magnolia tree where she and Smokey had been standing, they were gone.  It was as if they had gradually blended into the mist.