Unraveled (2 page)

Chapter Four

The Wraith wiped sweat from his forehead with an oily rag. It was easy for him to get away from his job for an hour or two. As long as he did his work, no one said much. But the best time was before dawn when he could come and go without
anyone
knowing. He tightened the loose nut on a pivot pin, straightened, and waved to an associate that he was finished.

***

Ike Reader hadn't completely finished his three-point turn when Phil Bates arrived from Powderly. His wrecker barely had enough room to pass Ned's car, squeezing by with only inches to spare. He stopped close to the men gathered beside the missing rail.

Ned stepped to Phil's open window. “We can't move it yet, not 'til Buck gets here. We got two dead down there.”

“I'm in no hurry. I'll wait. Who is it?”

“Frank Clay and Maggie Mayfield.”

Phil grunted. “
Mayor
Clay?”'

“Yep.”

“Jesus. How far down are they?”

“All the way.”

“I may not have enough cable.” He pointed in the direction of the highway that wound past Ned's house, knowing that once he crossed the Sanders Creek bridge, a dirt road skirted a pasture of alfalfa nor far from the creek. “Can I go around and get to it from down there?”

Ned thought for a moment. “No. They cut a road when they were working, but it warshed out with all the rain back in the fall.”

Buck Johnson was the county Justice of the Peace and it was his job to pronounce the victims dead before the bodies could be moved. He arrived twenty minutes later to join a growing crowd in the middle of the dam. “Well hell, Ned. I'm getting tired of death exams around this lake, and around here in general.”

“I don't blame you.” Ned jerked his head toward the nearly unrecognizable car. “You're not gonna like this one a'tall. There's two bodies down there and one of 'em's Frank Clay. It's a steep climb, but John'll go with you and take the cable down with y'all. You can hold onto that to help you back up.”

“Oh, hell.” Buck thought for a moment. “You been down?”

Ned unconsciously rubbed the scar on his stomach from a recently healed bullet wound. “Naw. I ain't in any shape for that.”

Big John led the way down the steep slope with two folded quilts under one arm, digging his boot heels into the soft soil to remain upright. Buck followed, using those same deep impressions as steps all the way to the bottom.

Standing with his shins against the undamaged rail, Ned saw Buck stop beside the woman's arm hanging out the window. He took her wrist to check for a pulse. He lowered it, pressed her neck, then moved around to the other side where he and John knelt and disappeared behind the battered car.

Seconds later John stood and cupped both hands around his mouth. “Have Phil bring a chain down with that spare cable he carries! That'll be enough to reach, and we can get the car off Frank!”

Phil backed the wrecker to the edge of the pavement and leaving the engine running, worked his way down with a chain and cables. Buck helped him attach the rig and he puffed his way back up the steep slope with Phil while John stayed below to make sure the chain didn't slip off once they took up the slack.

At the top, Buck caught his breath. Phil climbed into the cab and the engine idle increased.

“Is it really Frank Clay down there with that colored gal?”

“Rod, let the man blow for a minute.” Ned stepped back as the winch tightened the cable. The wrecker settled, trembled, and the cable vibrated like a guitar string before the car finally moved.

Ned took Buck's arm and moved him out of earshot. “It was Frank for sure?”

“Yep.”

More local farmers arrived. One was Ross Dyer, a man with hairy ears and the sour stink of armpit sweat. Ned never cared for him because he was eating candy every time Ned saw him at the store, but the man never took any home to his kids. Dyer pulled Rod's shirtsleeve between a thumb and forefinger. “That's the mayor down there?”

“Yep.”

“I thought he had better sense than to run around with another woman. I guess they
are
town people.”

Aggravated that Dyer was asking questions, Ned rubbed his chin. “He moved to town and the rest of that Clay bunch stayed out 'chere, farming, raising kids, and cooking a little moonshine every now and then. I catch 'em when I can and run 'em in for it.”

Frank Clay's family had lived in Center Springs for generations. They were sullen and clannish for the most part, but Frank always had more ambition than the rest. He wanted to leave Center Springs for state politics.

The questions piqued Buck's interest. “He never was as mean as them others.”

“You're right about that. Frank broke away from the rest of that sorry pack and worked hard to earn enough money for college. He came back to Chisum, did pretty good in land, and went on and made a politician. Got on the city council and then got hisself elected mayor. I hear he throwed his hat into the ring for state representative. He's been running with the bigwigs down in Austin.” Ned tilted his straw hat back. “Thissun'll make the front page of the paper.”

“It'll be on the TV, too.” Buck cut off a hunk of Days Work chewing tobacco and tucked it into his cheek.

“He almost made it, didn't he?” Despite Frank being a Clay, Ned had been following his rise and had voted for him in every election.

“Don't mean nothin'. He was just another man.” Ross Dyer spat over the rail and walked away, digging in his ear.

Buck watched him go. “It's a damned shame, that's for sure.”

“I bet the county'll want to put up a monument to him.”

Buck closed his knife and settled the chew into his cheek. “That don't usually happen to dead politicians that ain't got to going yet.”

Ned watched a sheriff's car pass the lookout and slow. “It will this one. He was different.”

Sheriff Cody Parker pulled around a long line of vehicles waiting for the accident to be cleared. On the Center Springs side of the lake, an even longer line of trucks waited. Most had driven out to see the wreck, while a few were simply trying to cross the dam.

Sheriff Cody Parker left his door open, settled the Colt 1911 on his hip, and worked his way through the gathering crowd. He stopped beside Ned and watched the car containing Maggie's draped body top the crest.

The old constable waved toward the car as Buck gently placed her bare arm under the quilt made from flour sacks. “Cody, That's Maggie Mayfield. I reckon you know her from your joint.” He almost spat the word as if it had a nasty taste. Cody still owned The Sportsman, a rough cinderblock honky-tonk in a cluster of mean clubs on the shallow Oklahoma bank of the Red River. Folks called it Juarez, referring to the joints south of the Rio Grande, in Mexico. Ned had been after him to sell what he called the gun and knife honky-tonk after Cody was elected sheriff, but he was disinclined to do it.

Cody ignored the comment and peered over the rail at John who waited with Frank's covered body “This ain't good, Ned.”

The old constable sighed. “I'm afraid this is as good as it's gonna get.”

Chapter Five

Mr. Ike let us out at the house and left to get back to the wreck before we were even on the porch. The phone was ringing and Miss Becky hurried in to join the local grapevine. I followed Pepper around to the north side of the house where we could barely see the top of the dam through a gap in the trees across the road.

She stepped up on the porch to get a better view overlooking the highway that wound around our hill like a stream around a rock. “I still can't see much. You know, we can walk to it from here. It ain't that far down to the wreck.”

“It's on the other side of what was the creek.”

The engineers had dredged and straightened Sander's Creek at the spillway, I reckon so water could get away from the dam pretty fast when the lake was high. It stayed straight for a quarter mile until reaching the woods they hadn't knocked down, and then turned back into a wiggly creek. The bridge was a mile and a half from there.

“Top, you beat all. We can walk down to the bridge and after we cross, it won't take us no time to get there.”

“They'll all be gone by then.”

“Right. That's the idea. They didn't want us there in the first place, but I want to see where the car landed.”

“It'll just be a big old gouge.” I wasn't sure about going back. I figured it would be a lot like seeing the highway after a car wreck, some scuff marks and maybe a piece of chrome or two.

“Well dammit. I'm going alone, then.”

She was always like that, coming up with ideas that usually got us in trouble.

We waited an hour before drifting off the porch and across the yard to the corner fence post behind the house where we played in a deep sand cut when we were little. The cut overlooked the highway and we got in trouble one time for throwing clods at the cars passing below. Even when we missed they hit the road and grass with an explosion of sand and dust.

Most folks never noticed because our aim was so bad, but I got hold of a good solid clod one day and led a truck just right. It hit square on the hood of an International and Mr. Floyd Cass slammed on the brakes so hard he almost threw Mrs. Cass through the windshield. He pulled right up our drive and when Miss Becky stepped out on the porch to see who it was, he told her what happened.

We got in pretty bad trouble over that, but didn't get a whippin', mostly because she didn't tell Grandpa. He found out a couple of days later up at the store, but by then it was too late. He was pretty mad, but she'd already made us cut the yard and clean out the chicken house as our punishment.

I think I'd rather have had the whippin', because it would have been over a lot quicker and chicken houses stink like butt.

Grass had spread over most of our play pile in the past couple of years and it was almost grown over. I kicked at the loose sand for a minute, thinking. When I glanced back up, Pepper'd started down the slope. “Hey. We're gonna get covered in sandburs.”

I knew that for a fact, because when we were about eight, we decided to roll all the way down that same hill. We'd only made about two turns when we both jerked up from the sharp pain of hundreds of sandburs stuck in our clothes. My dad and Uncle James laughed loud and long while we cried and they picked the stickers out one at a time.

“I guess you'll learn to think before you act,” Dad said. I recalled his voice that day, but was surprised when I realized that many of those details were already starting to fade. The sound of his voice was getting away from me since he and Mama died.

Pepper led the way. Gravity grabbed us both and we jumped a couple of times to the bottom of the hill to keep our balance. She darted across the highway without looking, but that was okay, because you could always hear cars hissing down the pavement long before they arrived. Instead of following the road like she said, she cut down a deer trail through the woods.

I saw the cuffs of her jeans were full of stickers. Mine had just as many. “Hey, this won't take us to the other side.”

“I know a way. We're gonna have to cross that big ol' foot log over Center Springs Branch, though. C'mon!”

“Watch for snakes.”

She slowed down some. Folks in Center Springs were killing snakes left and right since the lake started filling up. We'd seen more rattlers and water moccasins than usual when they started clearing the creek bottoms, but the rising water ran 'em out in numbers the old folks were talking about up at the store.

One week before, someone ran over a big old timber rattler close to the house. Uncle Cody called us down to see it. He cut its head off, then gave the tail a shake so we'd know what a rattler sounded like. It had thirteen rattles and a button, and I hoped I'd never run across one without having a hoe close by.

Pepper jogged through the trees and I had to hurry to keep up. Minutes later we came out in an open pasture. Hot as it was, we still loped through the deep grass until we came to the woods bordering the branch.

The clear spring water of Center Springs Branch ran across both sand and gravel bars. Grandpa said the Indians used to come out of the Oklahoma Territory and camp there before he was born. The sites were somewhere nearby and the Indians traded with the white settlers who started our community. We were always finding arrowheads and old rusty pieces of metal, and once I found a spear point that saved my life.

Uncle Cody and Grandpa liked to hunt quail and squirrels along the branch, too. I'd been down there often enough to know the land, and where the big old red oak tree Pepper was headed for had fallen across the branch. The last time we hunted down there, Uncle Cody and I used the foot log to cross to the other side.

That was the day we sat on that log and he told me some things about my mama that I'd never heard. She and Daddy died in a car wreck right before I came to live with Grandpa and Miss Becky, and there was a lot I didn't know.

***

Uncle Cody pointed toward the deep branch. “See that foot log there?”

The steep bank fell off to the trickle of water far below.

“It's a long way down.”

“Yep. That tree's been there before you was even thought of. I crossed it with your mama and daddy the year before you were born, on the way to catch some crappie out of the creek. I've always been a little skittish over footlogs, especially them that are so far above the water, but your daddy walked across like it was a sidewalk. I don't believe I ever saw him afraid of anything.

“That's when your mama surprised me. She was in a dress, but she took off her shoes and went barefoot across right behind him. I was shocked to see her do that and I asked her, ‘When did you learn
that
?' She whispered something to your daddy and they laughed, arms around each other on the far side. She said ‘You'd be surprised at what I can do.'”

Uncle Cody shook his head and grinned. “Until then, it hadn't occurred to me that the young girls I knew would someday grow up to be mothers, and she looked completely different to me all of a sudden.”

***

At that moment, thinking about what Uncle Cody had told me, I had something happen that I'd never experienced. I saw Mama standing there in a blue print dress, clear as day and as solid as the woods around us. She was twisting her wedding ring like she did when she was thinking or worried. She shook her head and watched over her shoulder toward the dam. Then she faded away and there was nothing left but the woods.

Every hair on my body stood up and I knew what Miss Becky called the Poisoned Gift was working again, but it had never actually brought
ghosts
in front of me. Uncle Cody saw one once, and I wished he was there beside me right then. My heart skipped a beat and I could feel my jaw moving with me trying to talk but nothing coming out but the sounds I make when I have an asthma attack.

“What are you doing?”

Pepper's voice jolted me back from wherever I'd been and I realized for only the second time in my that life I'd experienced the Gift while I was awake.

It scared the pee-waddlin' out of me.

I finally snapped back to Pepper. “I just saw Mama.”

She knew I saw things in my dreams that came true, but they were always mixed up and we couldn't figure out what was going to happen, until after the event. That near-'bout drove us crazy.

Pepper's eyes widened and she looked around as if Mama might be hiding behind a buckeye bush or something. “What was she doing?”

“Nothing. Standing there and worrying at her wedding ring.”

“Far out! Did she say anything?”

“No.” I imagine adults would spend some time talking about the vision, or what might be coming, but we shared so much over the years that we didn't need to say hardly a thing. “She's gone now.”

Pepper shrugged and led the way like she always does. “Then what are we standing here for?”

The log was solid, but scary. We were log-walkers from way back, but we still eased across like it was a thousand miles to the bottom. Even if we'd fallen, the ten-foot drop into soft mud and water wouldn't have been bad, but it'd be a mess and we might have broke an arm like Kevin McDaniel did last year. What was worse, I heard about a cousin who fell off one and broke his neck.

Pepper crossed with her arms out like a tightrope walker. I didn't want to look like that, so I tucked my own arms close and kept my eyes on the far side instead of the log. The rotting bark crunched underfoot, but the bridge held steady. My tennis shoe caught on a stob and I caught my balance just in time to skip and dance the last couple of feet with a lump of fear as big as a horse apple in my throat.

Back on solid ground we followed a game trail winding around trees and tangles of berry vines. A squirrel scolded us all the way, running from limb to limb and chattering like we'd stole his nuts. I wished I'd brought my BB gun to sting him and shut him up.

Pepper was looking around for a rock to throw at him when she stepped in a thick stand of tall grass. The world exploded around her as a big covey of quail whirred into the air, scaring her so bad she jumped and screamed. The birds scattered and sailed through the trees.

“Shit!”

I laughed and pointed a finger “Pow! Pow!”

“It ain't funny. I think I peed myself a little.”

That made me laugh even more.

“I wish
you'd
stepped in 'em, then I could laugh at
you
.”

“They're only tee-tiny birds. Come on.”

We finally broke out of the woods at the base of the dam. I stopped at a barbed-wire fence and peeked through the cedars growing thick and tall. We could see the broken rail high above at the top of the dam, and the long gouge in the dirt where they'd dragged the car back to the top.

“They're gone.” Pepper put her foot on the second strand of barbed-wire where it was stapled to a bodark post and crawled over the fence. “Shit! Look at this.” She pointed at a thick pool of blood.

We're no strangers to blood. We kill and eat our own cows and pigs, and hunt and fish, but I'd never seen so much in one big, thick puddle. It had already started to dry on the dirt and what little grass there was, and it looked like strawberry jelly to me.

It was a
person's
blood and it made me queasy.

I couldn't take my eyes off it, but Pepper stepped around the damp patch and kicked through the young Johnson grass. “Here's her makeup.” She pointed up the slope. “There's a pair of sunglasses up there.”

It looked like someone had dumped a load of trash down the slope. Tissues, pens, papers, maps, and a dozen other things were mixed with dirt clods, torn-up grass, and scattered chrome trim. I imagined the woman screaming while the spinning car tore itself apart on the long way down.

I noticed a man's shoe nearby. My head spun. “They lost their shoes. Why would they lose their shoes?”

Pepper was unfazed by it all. “There's stuff everywhere.”

“Don't touch it.”

“Why not?”

“It ain't ours. It belongs to that poor lady and Frank Clay.” I didn't know her, but I'd seen him a time or two up at the store after I came to live with Miss Becky and Grandpa Ned. He was a nice guy, the kind who always winked and grinned at a kid, whether he knew them or not. He had three kids of his own, but they were all younger than me.

Pepper was holding a lipstick that she dropped back on the ground. “I've never seen anything like this.”

A car slowed as it passed high overhead. I was sure the driver was looking at the rail, but he couldn't see us from his side.

We were trespassing where we shouldn't have been and I felt bad for the folks who'd died there. It was suddenly personal. It reminded me of Mama and Daddy's wreck, even though I hadn't seen it and all of a sudden I felt like crying. “We need to go.”

My eyes stung and I turned so Pepper couldn't see. She bit her lip and I could tell she was watching me, but she wouldn't let it go. “Do you think they suffered?”

“Probably not.” I hoped my parents hadn't suffered, either.

Quiet for once, Pepper took one more glance around us.

The lady's shiny high-heeled shoe looked so out of place in the dirt that I felt swimmy-headed. I dropped to my knees thinking that it might help. “Should we get their shoes for them?”

“No. What we do with them? They don't have any use for shoes anymore.”

“They're good shoes.”

“There's only one of each.” She drew a deep breath and headed for the fence.

I started to leave and noticed a tissue that looked like a big white Hershey Kiss. It was sitting up, with a rubber band around the top. Wanting to get my mind off the shoes, I picked it up. There was something hard inside and I started to tear it open when we heard a branch break on the other side of the spillway. Something grunted.

You couldn't tell if it was some
one
or some
thing
, but it was enough to spook us. I stuck the Kleenex in my pocket and we skinned on out of there so we wouldn't get caught.