Читать книгу Fire Ants and Other Stories - Gerald Duff - Страница 9

Bad Medicine

That one yonder is the head dog then?” said B. J., looking at the black and tan hound curled up in the dust by one of the sections of oak stump supporting the front porch of the house. It was getting on toward evening, and the long shadows of the afternoon sun fell across all of the dog but his head and part of one front leg.

“Yeah,” said Uncle Putt Barlow, “he ain’t gonna lie to you on trail.”

As they watched, the sun-lit leg kept up a steady pawing motion at the red dust beneath it, maintaining a regular measured beat as though it were moving in time to some song that only the dog could hear.

“Why’s he scratching like that?” said one of the other men standing in Uncle Putt’s front yard. “Is he killing fleas?” The man was called Mr. Hall, he was up on the weekend from Beaumont for one of Putt Barlow’s cat hunts, and he was wearing brand new clothes of a camouflage design: boots, trouser, jacket, and hat. The jacket had zippers, pockets, and openings arranged in symmetrical patterns all over it. Each piece of metal on the clothing was tinted dull gray to avoid giving any kind of reflection. Mr. Hall’s boots had left perfect impressions of their tread wherever he had stepped in the skinned-off yard in front of Uncle Putt’s double-log house.

“Naw,” said Uncle Putt and leaned over to spit a big wad of Cotton Boll tobacco juice into the center of one of the boot-tracks Mr. Hall had made. “He ain’t scratching no fleas. Nor ticks neither.”

He rolled the cud of tobacco from one jaw to the other and looked over at the black and tan.

“Name’s Elvis,” he said. “I’ll show you why.”

At the sound of the words the hound flopped his tail in the dust once and looked up at Uncle Putt from under the ridges of tan markings over his eyes. He took a deep breath, expelled it with a sigh and advanced three steps away from his spot under the edge of the porch, ending up standing about eight or ten feet in front of and facing Uncle Putt. Although the dog had come to a standstill, the front half of his body continued to bob up and down at a rhythmical pace, first to the left and then the right, his forelegs flexing and working, now and then one foot or the other leaving the ground briefly to paw gently at the dusty yard.

“Why, I swear he looks like he’s dancing,” said Mr. Hall’s friend in a Gulf Coast voice.

“Can’t help but do it,” Uncle Putt said. “He’s jitterbugging. That’s why he’s named what he is. Elvis.”

The circle of cat hunters watched for a while without saying anything, until finally Elvis sat back on his haunches to scratch at an ear. Even during this operation, though, he kept up a steady movement, holding to his established rhythm and not missing a beat.

“How’d you teach him that?” asked Mr. Hall, fumbling at one of the zippers in his jacket.

“Didn’t,” said Uncle Putt. “Distemper when he was a pup left him with that movement. It’s a natural dance, that thing is. You can’t learn a dog nor a human being neither to do nothing like that. You got to be give something like that. Just like Elvis Presley had a natural gift.”

Uncle Putt spit again and then lifted a carved cow horn hung around his neck with a rawhide string to his lips and blew two notes on it. Elvis got to all four feet and increased the tempo of his beat by about a quarter, and three other spotted dogs came surging into the front yard from under the house, two yipping in high voices and one baying in a low mournful tone.

“That blue tick there,” B. J. said to Mr. Hall, pointing to the last dog out from under the porch, “him with that low voice, you know what Uncle Putt calls him?”

“No,” said Mr. Hall. “This is my first time to hunt up here with the old gentleman. Isn’t he a character?” He smiled and pulled a hand away from one zipper on his jacket and made for another. “What is that speckled one named?”

“Johnny Cash,” said B. J. “He talks so low on trail. The other one there is Johnny Ray because he sounds like he’s crying when he’s got something treed. And that one yonder, well . . .” B. J. paused and studied the fourth dog in the pack, a small blue tick with one ear gone and long scars running all the way from the tip of its nose halfway down its back. “Uncle Putt calls him a curse word which I can’t repeat. I’m a Baptist minister, you understand.”

“Why me and my wife are members of First Baptist in Port Neches,” said Mr. Hall and stuck out his hand. “Pleased to be hunting with you, Reverend.”

“Just call me B. J.,” said B. J. “I’m just one of the boys when I get out in the woods.”

“I hope you don’t mind us taking a drink now and then tonight, preacher,” said the other man, overhearing.

“No, no,” B. J. answered him, looking over at the little man who seemed to have a basketball badly hidden under the front of his red plaid shirt. “It’s not for me to judge the weakness of other folks.”

“You fellers,” called Uncle Putt from over by Mr. Hall’s pickup truck-house trailer combination, “we got to get into the woods.”

The vehicle was a Nomad Home-on-Wheels, and as Mr. Hall watched, Uncle Putt spit a load onto the rear hubcap and opened the door to the housing compartment for the dogs. The hounds swarmed the little set of steps that had flopped down as the door opened, Elvis jiving in the lead, and surged aboard in one big clot of black and tan and blue-tick spots, giving voice all the way in.

“I believe that’s the first time they ever been in a house afore,” said Uncle Putt and clicked the door shut, the pickup rocking back and forth on its springs as the pack tumbled from one side to the other of the living compartment. “I was kinda afraid Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch wouldn’t take to a place with beds and a stove in it.”

“That’s the name of the other blue-tick,” B. J. said to Mr. Hall who stood with the corners of his mouth turned down and his eyes popped, watching the dogs fighting to get their muzzles up against each window in turn in the Nomad camper.

“You ain’t got nothing in that little room to ruin their noses, have you?” Uncle Putt asked Mr. Hall.

“No, I . . .”

“’Cause if you have they ain’t gonna be able to scent no bobcat.” He paused to shift his cud of Cotton Boil and spit. “Hell, they couldn’t smell skunk piss if you got something like loose cigarettes to eat or a opened sardine can for them to get into in yonder.”

“No, I don’t think so. I hope the dogs won’t . . .” Mr. Hall paused for a minute. “Do nothing in my Nomad.”

“They ain’t gonna hurt theyselves if they ain’t nothing loose,” said Uncle Putt. “Let’s get in the woods.”

Uncle Putt directed and Mr. Hall drove, taking the Nomad down a series of logging roads, each one fainter than the one before. The last one looked as though it had not been used in a year. Pulpwooders had cut it long before, and except for occasional hunters and lost berrypickers, the last real traffic had stopped a decade ago. Pine saplings up two and three feet grew in the space between the ruts, and three or four times B. J. and the man in the red plaid shirt had to dismount and pull fallen timber out of the roadway before the pickup could go on. Each time they did, the pack of cat hounds in the living compartment broke into a storm of baying, the deep bass of Johnny Cash setting the tune and the high clamor of Johnny Ray picking out the melody.

Whenever it happened, Uncle Putt would spin around where he was sitting crammed up against Mr. Hall and hammer on the rear of the truck cab, cussing the dogs by name and spraying Cotton Boll fumes over the side of Mr. Hall’s head. Mr. Hall had broken a good sweat under his camouflage suit and was beginning to feel increasingly nervous about the cat-hunting pack swarming in among all the portable beds, canned goods and kitchen utensils in the Nomad living compartment.

“They certainly are lively,” he remarked at one point to Uncle Putt just after the old hunter had called Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch every kind of a goddamn son-of-a-bitch for causing a major collapse of several objects just behind the heads of the people riding in the pickup cab.

“Yeah,” said the old man, “they having a time. I believe they purely love being in that little house back yonder. Just listen at them tussling with one another.”

About then, the dim logging road petered out completely in a burned-out clearing covered with blackened pine stumps, waist-high huckleberry bushes and saw-briers. Mr. Hall killed the engine, and everybody unloaded and began looking around in the rapidly fading light. The tops of the long-needle pines were already disappearing into the night sky, and by the time Uncle Putt had let the dogs out of the back of the pickup there was barely enough light left to make out details in the burned-over clearing.

“So this is the forest primeval,” said Mr. Hall’s friend and lifted a pint of whiskey to his lips.

“What did he say?” asked B. J.

“He reads a whole lot,” said Mr. Hall, switching on the light in the rear of the Nomad and cautiously sticking his head inside to estimate the damage. It wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be and he came out in a minute, smiling, and reached for the whiskey bottle.

“He says things like that all the time. Gets them out of books.”

“Uh-huh,” said B. J. and checked the action of his .22 rifle. Satisfied, he set it against a stump and began watching Uncle Putt tying a rope around Johnny Ray’s neck. He had finished with the curse-word dog and Johnny Cash, and Elvis waited on his haunches near the old man, patiently bobbing and weaving in time to the music only he could hear.

“Some people question a Baptist preacher hunting,” B. J. announced to the clearing, “but the reason I like to come on cat-hunts with Uncle Putt every year about this time is to get out into nature and look around for signs of God.”

Nobody said anything. The book-reader took a measured sip of whiskey.

“You can sense His presence out in the woods like this,” B. J. went on. “He talks to us in the movement of the breeze and the motions of the animals.”

“You fellers,” said Uncle Putt, getting the last rope tied and beginning to fiddle with the carbide light attached to his hat by an elastic strap, “get your pants stuck down inside your boots. They’re crawling tonight, and I don’t want to have to call off my dogs to take one of y’all to the hospital for snake-bite.”

He let the four dogs pull him toward the thicket at the edge of the clearing and called back over his shoulder. “I’m fixing to cast these here dogs now, and when y’all hear Elvis sing out, come a running with your lights on.”

“How’ll we know it’s Elvis and not one of the other ones?” asked Mr. Hall in an anxious voice and zipped something.

“Don’t come for the other ones. They just background for Elvis. He got a pure sweet voice. Starts up high and then comes way down low.”

The pack of hounds reached the thicket, whining, and the darkness closed around Uncle Putt two steps behind them. The beam of his carbide light bobbed for a few seconds through the dense brush and was gone.

“What kind of snakes?”

“Well, up on the ridges it’s rattlers,” B. J. said to Mr. Hall. “Timber rattlers mainly, but I have seen a diamond-back now and then. And if the bobcat takes the dogs down into the river bottoms, why you can run into water-moccasins along in there.”

“I sure hope not,” said Mr. Hall and turned toward the glow of his friend’s cigarette end. “Where is that Old Granddad?”

B. J. walked away from the Nomad toward the far edge of the clearing. “I’m just going to step over here and listen to the woods. See if I can hear the Master at work.”

When he came back from taking a leak and perusing the night sky for signs of order and regularity, the two men from the Gulf Coast were squatting in front of the headlights of the pickup making sure their boots were firmly fastened. Those poor fellows are depending on the courage that comes from a bottle, B. J. said to himself, and are afraid of the natural creatures God put in these woods. And one of them a declared Baptist. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

“I tell you what scares me,” he said loudly, and the book-reader jumped. “It’s not the serpent that crawls on his belly in God’s forest.” B. J. paused, and both men straightened up in his direction, blinking in the beams from the headlights. Mr. Hall had tied the ear flaps of his cap under his chin tight enough to cut into the soft flesh of his throat, and when he turned to look at B. J., the material of the cap strained under the pressure.

“No,” said B. J., “it’s not the rattler who warns you with the sound of his tail before he strikes or the moccasin who hisses before he bites. What I fear is the serpent who stands on two feet and comes in the night with no announcement to take your goods and the lives of you and your family.

“Oh,” said Mr. Hall’s friend. “You’re talking about sin.”

“Not exactly,” answered B. J. “I’m talking about communists and hippies and doped-up colored people.” He clicked the safety on and off the .22 rifle and reached in his pants pocket for the box of hollow-point cartridges. “What you might call the physical presence of sin. That’s what I mean.”

“You get many of them up here in these woods?” asked Mr. Hall and coughed because of the tightness of the strap fastening his hat to his throat.

“Well, not yet,” B. J. admitted. “But, you see, I live in Corpus Christi. I’m just up here up to preach at the Big Caney graveyard working on Sunday. Where I’m talking about the communists and dope-fiends being is down in the cities. That’s where they do all their crimes.”

Mr. Hall switched off the pickup’s headlights and the clearing plunged into darkness again, so total this time that it was a half a minute until B. J. could make out the difference between the tree line and the night sky. He could hear Mr. Hall’s book-reading friend pull the cork from the bottle of Old Granddad in the silence and then make a swallowing sound.

“Was that a dog bark?” the man asked.

“No,” said B. J. “You’ll know when they start up.” He paused for a minute. “But speaking of dogs, you fellows ever hear of Christian Guard Dogs, Incorporated?”

“What did he say?” the book-reader asked Mr. Hall. “Christian dogs?”

Before Mr. Hall could say anything, from the direction in which Uncle Putt had plunged into the thicket came a drawn-out high pitched howl, softened by distance but definitely touched by a good measure of hysteria. It hung in the air above for a few seconds and then was joined by another sound, lower in tone and divided into a series of chopping notes.

“Goddamn,” said one of the Gulf Coast citizens. “Excuse me preacher. What’s that?”

“That first one’s Johnny Ray,” said B. J., “and the other one is the curse-word dog. They’ve hit a cat track.”

The racket started up again, and within a few seconds was joined by another voice, this one beginning with a high note, descending the scale a space, hesitating, going back up for the first note, reaching it and then a bit beyond, and suddenly sliding rapidly all the way down to an ultimate bass where it held for three seconds, chopped abruptly off into silence, and then began the whole sequence all over.

“That’s Elvis, and he’s hot,” B. J. said, fumbling with the elastic strap on his carbide light. “That’s how he talks when he’s close on to one. Uncle Putt says he sings just the same way Elvis Presley does in that old ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ song.”

B. J. got the carbide light fastened around his head on the outside of his cap, hit the switch, and the chemicals began to fizz and pop, sending a weak beam of light through the reflector which grew stronger and reached its most intense at about the time he plunged from the clearing into the thicket, his rifle held chest high.

“Hold onto what you got, and let’s go,” he yelled back at the two lights bobbing behind him. “We want to get there before they tree him.”

Heading as best they could toward the sound of Uncle Putt’s pack of hounds, the three men moved through the pine thicket, stumbling over fallen logs and underbrush, catching their rifles and pieces of clothing on saw vines and creepers, stepping into rotted-out stump holes with brackish water in the bottoms, and trusting to the pale white light of the carbide.

At one point B. J. came to a brief open space and called back over his shoulder to Mr. Hall and Norman, twenty or thirty yards behind, making thrashing sounds as they tore through a clump of saw briers and scrambled in turn over the trunk of a fallen sweetgum nearly four feet in diameter.

“Lord,” he said, “don’t you love this? I can just sense the eternal presence of God in this thicket.”

But the cat hunters from Beaumont seemed to be too busy to answer, so B. J. spoke a couple of words in his heart to the Master and turned back toward the sounds of Elvis and Johnny Cash, louder and more impatient now as they got closer to what they were after.

In another ten minutes, B. J. reached the crest of a small hill covered with a stand of virgin pine and looked back at the two lights bobbing behind him, working their way slowly up the rise against a tide of huckleberry and yaupon bushes. Mr. Hall was saying something to Norman in a ragged voice, but was having a hard time making himself understood because of his need to pause for a deep quavery breath after every word he uttered.

“Come on,” said B. J. to the carbide beams, “they’re just across this next little creek. I can see Uncle Putt’s light, and I can hear the dogs real good.”

The sound from the cat pack was now a storm of howls, bays and yips, compounded by the noises of the dogs crashing through the underbrush lining the bed of the creek as they worked the scent of the bobcat not a hundred yards ahead. Now and then came a faint yip from Uncle Putt himself as he urged the dogs on by name, calling out encouragement to Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch and Johnny Ray mainly, trusting Elvis to take care of business by himself at the head of the pack.

B. J. launched himself down the hill full-tilt, crashing through brambles and sliding on pine straw, the light from his carbide light jerking from earth to sky to water as he struggled to catch up to the action. By the time he splashed through the knee-deep creek and reached the other bank, the voices of the cat-pack reached a new tone, one deeply touched with urgency and hysteria, and the progress of the dogs slowed, sped up for a few yards and then stopped altogether.

“He’s treed,” B. J. yelled back toward the men following him, just now reaching the creek and beginning to slow down for the crossing. “Look up yonder at the light on the sweetgum.”

When B. J. arrived at Uncle Putt’s side and tilted his head back to allow the carbide beam of his lamp to shine up into the limbs of the tree which the bobcat had been forced to climb, the pack of dogs at its base was swarming around the trunk like a school of gar fish. Of the two men behind, Norman came up first, just in time to see Goddamn Son-of-a-Bitch run up the bole of a fallen sycamore leaning toward the trunk of the sweetgum with no hesitation as though he expected to be able to sink his claws into the bark and scramble up the tree after the bobcat.

At this maneuver, Johnny Cash and Johnny Ray went beyond madness to a new state, baying with every breath, and beginning alternately to dig at the ground at the foot of the sweetgum and to claw at its bark as high up as they could reach. Elvis moved away three or four steps and sat back upon his haunches, peering up into the clusters of leaves and branches where the carbide lights jerked in little starts and twitches as the four hunters looked for the red eyes of the bobcat.

Every few seconds the head dog barked in a low regular tune to keep the cat notified he was indeed treed, his dancing front legs moving in a quick measure, fairly close in rhythm to the beat of “That’s All Right, Mama.”

“Yonder he is,” said Uncle Putt as a beam of light picked up two blood-red fiery points about halfway up the sweetgum just above where a large limb intersected with the trunk. “He’s grinning at us.”

“Where? Where?” said Mr. Hall, the light from his carbide lamp wobbling from one side of the mass of leaves and branches to the other as his head shook with his heavy breathing.

“Yonder,” said Uncle Putt and held his light steady on the face of the bobcat. “See them tushes? That thing’d eat a feller up.”

“What do we do now?” asked Norman, staring up at the animal and stroking the basketball-shaped belly under the front of his plaid shirt gently with one hand.

“I’m half a mind to climb up in there and punch him out in among these here dogs.”

Elvis groaned deep in his throat at Uncle Putt’s words and increased the time of his jitterbug step close to that of “Jailhouse Rock.”

“But he’s a big un,” the old man continued, “and I’m scared he might cut one of them boosters up pretty bad.” Uncle Putt directed his light down at the pouch on the front of his bib overalls and drew out a cut of Cotton Boll tobacco. He bit off a good-sized chunk and threw his light back up into the bobcat’s eyes. “Yeah, I reckon one of y’all’s gonna have to shoot him on out of there.”

“Which one of us gets to shoot him?” asked Mr. Hall in an eager voice, spinning around to look at Uncle Putt so that the carbide beam of his lamp shone on the old man’s face.

“Y’all got to settle that for yourselves,” said Uncle Putt and held up a hand to keep the light out of his eyes. “It ain’t nothing to me. Just aim for one of them eyes.”

The bobcat in the fork of the sweetgum had just made a spitting sound at the three dogs clamoring at the base of the trunk and B. J. had cleared his throat to enter the negotiations about who was to get to shoot when the first voice came from across the creek:

“You palefaces leave that bobcat where he is.”

“Yeah,” said somebody a little further down the creek bed from the first, “don’t any of you fuckers shoot up in that tree.”

“Lord,” said B. J. and dropped his rifle into the darkness at his feet as though it had become suddenly red-hot, “who is that? Niggers?”

“I don’t know,” said Uncle Putt, aiming the beam of his lamp toward the trees and brush across the stream and beginning to lift his .22 to his shoulder. “But I’m gonna see.”

The light picked up nothing but a mass of leaves and sawvines and hardwood trunks, and the first voice spoke again. “Old man,” it said in deep tones which sounded definitely foreign to B. J., “you better lay that rifle down if you don’t want your dogs shot full of arrows.”

Clear on the opposite side of the sweetgum where the bobcat was treed somebody laughed in a high cackle which cut off abruptly in the middle.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Mr. Hall and moved up a step closer to Uncle Putt, “I knew it was a mistake to come out here in these woods. Yvonne tried to get me to stay home.”

“What?” said Norman. “What?”

Uncle Putt moved up between Johnny Cash and Johnny Ray and leaned his rifle against the hole of the sweetgum. He stepped back to where he had been, and the dogs stopped barking for a minute, sniffing at the discarded .22 and whining as though puzzled. First one, then all of the pack sat back on their haunches and looked up into the sweetgum toward the bobcat, hidden in the darkness now that the carbide beams on the men’s hats had dropped to head level.

“Don’t shoot no arrows into none of my dogs, niggers,” said Uncle Putt, directing his beam into the thicket across the creek again.

“We ain’t niggers,” a voice from a different location announced. “We are a war party of the Alabama-Coushatta, and this is your personal Little Big Horn, palefaces.”

“Right,” said the first one who had spoken. “You have done fucked with our totem, our brother the bobcat. Now you’re going to have your famous last stand.”

The high cackling laugh broke out again from behind the sweetgum and kept on for a full half minute this time.

“I wasn’t going to shoot him,” said Norman to the darkness, facing one direction and then shifting to the other. “Look, my rifle’s empty. It’s not even loaded.” He held the weapon so that the beam of light from his carbide lamp shone on it and then jerked his hands away and let it fall to the ground in front of him.

“Here,” he said, “you can have these shells.” He fumbled in his pocket for his box of cartridges, found it and threw it toward the creek. It made a splash and a tinkle. “We was going to let the preacher shoot the bobcat, me and my buddy was. I mean that sincerely.”

“Wait just a minute,” B. J. spoke up. “I’m not here to kill anything. I just come out into the woods to study nature and praise God.”

“A preacher,” said one of the war party. “That means they got to have some whiskey with them.”

“Hey,” called another voice from a new point of the compass. “We want your firewater, palefaces.”

“Here it is,” Mr. Hall volunteered, pulling out what was left of the pint of Old Granddad and taking the new unopened one from Norman. “Here’s all the whiskey we got.”

“Put it over there on that sycamore trunk,” somebody said, and Mr. Hall moved to obey, his carbide light jiggling as though he had fever. “Don’t throw it in the creek like the other dumb fuck did to the shells.”

“A bunch of damn reservation Indians,” Uncle Putt said. Elvis whined deep in his throat and barked once at the sweetgum. Two of the other dogs had flopped down to pant in the dead leaves and pine needles, and the other one, Johnny Ray, was lapping water out of the creek.

“Naw, old man,” said the first voice that had spoken, “we just come in off a buffalo hunt, and our medicine’s been bad.”

“Shit,” said Uncle Putt and spit a stream of tobacco juice.

“Hush, Uncle Putt,” said B. J. “Don’t get them mad at us.”

“That’s right. Listen to the preacher.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” said the Indian who had been doing all the laughing and then he laughed again.

Encouraged, B. J. spoke up. “Now what that young man just said shows you all have gone to Sunday school. Now, is this right? I ask you.”

“Shut up, preacher,” said somebody across the creek, making snapping noises as he moved through the brush. “We been to Sunday school and we also have seen that video, what’s it called, He Who Watches Films?”

“Deliverance,” said He Who Watches Films and sniggered.

“That’s right. It’s all about what you rednecks do to one another when you get off in the woods together.”

“Palefaces are a nasty bunch,” somebody else said.

“Disgusting,” came an answer in what sounded to B. J. like a put-on English accent.

“Brave, though.”

“You got it,” said the first voice. “Tell you soldiers what. We as the Alabama-Coushatta war party want all y’all to take off all your clothes. All them camouflage jackets and boots and them suspenders and Fruit-of-the-Loom jockey shorts and all the rest of it.

“Oh, no,” said Norman and began to sob, having seen the video and read the book, too. “What? What?”

“Don’t worry, corporal,” said the voice across the creek. “We ain’t going to cornhole you. We ain’t rednecks.”

The laugher cackled again and called out: “But our necks are red.”

“That sounds like a song. Our necks are red, but we ain’t rednecks.”

The war party began to guffaw and shake bushes, and up in the sweetgum the bobcat moved down to the next lower limb. Elvis stirred in the dead leaves and whined.

“But back to business,” called the voice from across the creek. “After you palefaces get naked, call your dogs off our brother bobcat and haul ass out of here.”

Mr. Hall and Norman were already pulling at their clothes, unzipping and unbuttoning as fast as they could in the wavery light from the carbide lamps, scattering garments as each piece came free. In a second B. J. joined them, bending over to untie his boots and almost tripping over the rifle he had dropped when he heard the first voice coming out of the thicket.

“You too, old man,” the leader said. “What are you? Some kind of a guide to these fuckers? Get your overalls off, and all of you put your stuff in a big pile. And preacher . . .” the voice paused. “You the biggest man of the bunch, looking at your light. The war party wants you to carry everybody’s stuff out of these woods. I mean all of it. We don’t want you to leave a single damn paleface thing in these woods.”

“Except for the firewater,” said somebody, and the rest of them laughed.

“What about their little headlights, chief?” said the voice behind the sweetgum.

“Y’all can wear them on out of here. You look like a bunch of one-eyed men from Mars with them things on anyway.”

By this time Uncle Putt’s pack of hounds had noticed the bobcat’s progress back down the tree and had surged forward to bay at the base of the sweetgum again, only Elvis lagging back a little.

“Shut up them dogs, old man,” said the main speaker. “We got arrows trained on them just aching for their blood.”

Uncle Putt kicked the last leg of his overalls loose from a foot and began tying lengths of cotton rope around the neck of each dog. “Come on, dogs,” he said to the cat pack. “Let him go. Let’s get the goddamn hell out of this thicket.”

“You tell them, Davy Crockett,” said one of the war party and let out a series of high-pitched yips.

Stripped to his carbide light and boots, B. J. leaned over to scoop up his and the other’s clothes and rifles, and found it difficult to get everything balanced on one arm while he loaded with the other. A jacket fell off one side as he was feeling around in the dry leaves for a shirt, and somebody’s rifle slipped loose when he began to straighten up.

“One of you men help me,” he said in the direction of a carbide beam, and the person behind it backed off.

“They said for just you to do it,” Mr. Hall warned in a shaking voice. “Uh uh. They might put an arrow through me.”

“Goddamn it,” said B. J., “come on and help me get out of these fucking woods.”

“All right, preacher,” said Mr. Hall in a shocked voice and began draping clothes over B. J.’s outstretched arm. Norman had already started off, close in the wake of Uncle Putt and the four dogs, his light veering neither to the right nor left.

B. J. and Mr. Hall caught up within fifty yards, branches and vines slashing at their bare chest and legs like switches as they ran, but they didn’t feel a thing. When they reached the top of the ridge paralleling the creek, they could hear sounds of splashing and yelling behind them as the war party waded across after the whiskey. They didn’t look back.

Lord, prayed B. J. as he stumbled after the men and dogs in front of him, his arms dead from the weight of the clothes and guns he was carrying, you got to forgive me for taking your name in vain, but there was a whole host of devils all around me. Just get me home. Out loud he called to the naked cat hunters fleeing ahead of him:

“You got to let me tell you about Christian Guard Dogs, Incorporated. It’s just this kind of thing they’re a real use for.” Nobody slowed, and nobody answered him all the way through the moonless thickets back to the burned-over clearing and the Nomad camper parked in the middle of it. The only sound was that of Elvis in the low bushes, moving in a steady jive.