Читать книгу Good Blood - K. C. Pastore - Страница 10

“I found one!” Charlotte’s voice echoed across the field. Her arm waved like a white flag of surrender—embarrassingly swooping side-to-side.

I trudged through dewy field, making my way to see Charlotte’s treasure and holding Grandma’s Polaroid Swinger high above my head so that it wouldn’t even graze the tops of the grass. My wallet-size leather pouch, which I’d slung across my shoulder, already contained three arrowheads. I had all the luck that day.

Charlotte opened her grasp to reveal a finely-shaped triangle with little scalloped ridges on the sides.

“Yep, sure looks like one to me.” I took the treasure, cleaned it off on my shorts and handed it back to Char. “Okay, hold it out like this.” I snapped a picture and tossed the artifact into my satchel. When the camera spit out the black rectangle, I handed it to Char. “Here. You can peel it.”

Char gently pulled back on the black film. “O-o-o-h. Perfect!”

I tucked the photo in my satchel with the arrowhead itself.

Covert’s field was the best place for these types of expeditions. There used to be a lot of Indian camps down there, along the Mahoning River. Beneath that very field rested an ancient Indian burial city, so they said.

It’s always best to go searching for arrowheads there just after it rains. The water raises up from the ground all of those buried treasures.

The high sun glistened off the meandering river. The roar of a distant truck upon a gravel drive had Charlotte peering toward the echo’s epicenter.

“That’s probably the guy who lives in the log cabin we passed on the way down.” I remarked.

The man’s name was Richie Covert. His family had lived down in those wild parts since the crash. That is how the bridge there got its name, Covert’s Crossing. People didn’t frequent those parts though, only if they needed to go to Hillsville or Edinburgh or, God forbid, Youngstown. The only reason that I personally knew the area was because Dad used to take Nicky and Angelo out to those parts for hunting. That was back when Angelo hunted. Angelo and I were great pals, but I honestly couldn’t understand his indifference to nature. He avoided the woods. So Nick and Dad were the only ones who’d go out there.

They never brought me. The way I found the place was by following Nicky one morning. He was going to check his traps. Of course, my trailing Nicky lasted only for about three miles, which is actually successful given that Nicky had the ears of a hound and the sense of an Indian. He found me right at the break of the field and the forest after my foot had busted a small stick.

I think I followed Nicky down because I thought it would lead me somewhere. After that quite remarkable three-mile stalk, I considered the possibility of working for intelligence in the national government. Then of course, just before dawn broke, Nicky found me trailing him—due to the stick. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew I was trailing him all along.

At the time of that incident, Nicky was walking on the open tracks, and I followed him about three feet into the woods. We’d just made it to the part where the tree-line left of the tracks panned out into more sparse patches; meanwhile, the tree-line right of the tracks grasped onto an over-grown, cliff-like region. I was on the right side, heading for the scraggly cliff. I remember being pissed with myself for choosing to sneak along that side of the tracks. But now, in retrospect, how could I have known that I was walking into such a splendid trap?

After I cracked that stick, I slipped down onto my side and yet remained nearly upright, given the steepness of the hill. I watched Nicky stop, set down his bag, and just stand there for like five minutes. Then he slowly turned around and came straight toward me. Nick never made any fast movements. He stayed completely calm most of the time. On the other hand, Angelo must have gotten all of the energy in the family. He always flipped around like a bass out of water. Angelo always had to be doing something, anything—some kind of project or plan. Nicky wasn’t like that at all.

Nicky came right up to the bush. He reached straight through it and grabbed my arm. With one motion, he yanked me out right onto the gravely tracks. He turned back around and picked up his bag.

“Come on,” he said reluctantly, while he continued his walk.

We hiked down the tracks side by side. I balanced on one of the rails—walking on a tight-rope.

“Nicky! Don’t I look like the lady over Niagara?”

“Uh-huh,” he agreed without looking.

I wasn’t real sure if he was annoyed or indifferent—not to the Niagara thing, but to me being there, in general.

We started into the tall grass. The low clouds hung in the sky, tempted to spit. The blue morning-light breathed behind the gray Pennsylvania sky, like a secret color, a more hopeful depth.

That’s when Nicky told me that this field was exceptionally good for arrowheads. He said that a lot of Indians fought in a war here and that you could find lost arrowheads everywhere. We cut our way through the kind-of African savanna. He told me it was an Indian burial ground too. I thought I heard the rumble of an elephant stampede in the distance. Then a train zoomed past.

The birds were almost awake by the time we got to Covert’s Crossing, the actual bridge itself. We made our way up its steep incline and onto the flat one-lane surface. My eyes laid hold of an excellently dreadful path that lay before us. From that point on, I caught glimpses of Nicky every thirty seconds, when I briefly glanced up. The old one-lane bridge had no walkway. I wondered what would happen if a car came. The 1.5-inch slats of wood that lined it didn’t look very stable for a person, let alone a car. The slats spaced out, grossly uneven and often missing up to even three or four at a time. Nicky, about fifteen steps ahead of me, skated along. His feet missed every gap even though his eyes looked out over the river.

I was pretty sure that I was about to fall to my death. Meanwhile, Nicky confidently tread across the abyss leaving not even a shred of fear behind to comfort me.

Eventually, we descended from the bridge. I was just happy to be on dry land again. Nicky hadn’t looked back at me since the middle of the field.

I followed him off the road and into the woods—Nicky quiet, me quiet. Then Nicky stopped and pointed out some leaves to me. To my surprise he actually explained which ones were wild ginger and which were garlic and which grow by garlic and how to identify poison ivy and how that is different from poison oak. I was startled, as this was the first time Nicky talked with me, but unfortunately, to me the forest was pretty much one big pile of green. I tried to understand. He pointed out trees, naming their kinds and qualities. And he even pointed out flowers. He told me about a place that was a little north, an abandoned house surrounded by a field of lilies.

Nicky and I never did have much in common. Both of us were too quiet. We just never really talked. Not to mention I was just kind of scared of him, him being my big brother and everything. I think that day at Covert’s, Nicky outdid himself in words. It was the most, to this day, I’ve ever heard him talk, and to be quite honest it wasn’t really what I expected to be going on in his brain. From the look of his face, consistently pissed, I had assumed that he only thought about hoodlum stuff.

At Covert’s, it felt like maybe he didn’t mind me so much. It felt like we were family. It felt good.

Charlotte and I continued our inspecting of the field, but our efforts yielded nothing new. We got pretty close to the train tracks opposite the river.

“Char, let’s head back the other direction. I don’t think we are going to find much here,” I suggested. “I don’t think the overflow from the river reaches here, so it’s not going to bring up stuff that’s buried.” When she didn’t respond, I looked up at her.

She stood frozen. “What’s that sound?”

The train tracks were buzzing bees. Their rumbling matched their vibrating heat waves. I told her, “Trains comin’.”

With a surprised eye and knowing smile, she challenged me to a race. Charlotte took off toward the river. I grabbed hold of my satchel, and my camera and started after her. The still dewy sheaves of tall field-grass sliced my legs as I cut through them. The grass slowly engulfed us to shoulder height, which made it impossible to see the ground, especially moving at such a rapid pace. I could see Char’s head bobbing about ten feet in front of me. Then her head dropped right out of view. I attempted to slow my full speed, but it wasn’t quick enough. With arms slicing like windshield wipers through a thick patch of grass, I had both legs simultaneous knocked out from under me. Mid-air, my stomach lurched its way into my lungs while my head and shoulders still thought they were running. After about a half-a-second of total body flight, I face-planted into the ground, holding both the satchel and the camera in front of me, unharmed.

Charlotte lay laughing behind me, and the train zoomed by with an organ-like univocal tune.

“What in the world are you doing?!” I shouted, half playful, half furious.

“I tripped in a little dip or something,” Charlotte chuckled. “I was just getting back up, until crazy came barricading through!”

“Well, at least I had my hands out in front of me, before you gave me a lift, or I probably would’a smashed this damned camera.”

“Geez, sorry.”

After checking to see that the arrowheads were safe, I fumbled around in the grass, acting like I had resumed looking for more treasures. Honestly I wasn’t really looking. I was just looking like I was looking and trying to get over my embarrassment. I really hated looking stupid, because I was worried people would start thinking I was stupid all the time.

The train chi-chonk chi-chonk chi-chinked behind us, slowing its pace as the engine prepared to pull into the Joint.

“Hey,” Charlotte whisper-spoke. “I think I found something.”

“Arrowhead?”

“No.” Her voice wavered. She held her finger to her lips to shush me. “Rose, come look.”

I scuffled through the grass. Charlotte, bent-over, hands-on-knees, looked to the ground. I went around her to see what she was inspecting. She reached her hand down and moved a creamy colored stick that was encrusted with dirt. I got onto my knees and removed a clump of soil.

“Hm-m,” I picked up the stick and examined it.

Charlotte picked up another one. The train whistled in the distance, probably arriving in Mahoningtown. The little two-inch stick was most definitely a bone.

“Looks, like we found a grave,” I whispered. “I think these are finger bones.”

She nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.” Char’s face started to lose a little color.

Little finger particles were scattered at the base of a garbage-bag sized rock. I motioned for her to help me push it over.

We heaved the rock a solid six inches, enough to reveal the arm and shoulder of a full-on corpse. At first we stared, mouths agape. After a few seconds, I used my foot to kick up the humorous bone a bit. The length of the bone detached from the rounded joint on the elbow end. And maggots slithered out from the bone, leaving dark tracks of marrow over the creamy surface. A horrid stench, far beyond mold, far beyond feces, permeated the air. Terrified, but trying to remain calm, I looked up at Char’s face. “I’ll bet this is just one of the Indian graves that rose up from the flooded river.” I knew better, but I was trying to sound reassuring.

Char’s face was now the color of limestone, hard and white. Right before my eyes, all of the color retreated from her lips.

A deep, raspy, yet blood-curdling scream pierced my ears. But the scream did not come from Charlotte, or me for that matter. It came from someone somewhere in the field behind us. At the same time the scream broke out, Charlotte’s knees buckled and her forehead smashed right into the rock.

“HE-E-E-LP ME.” The voice pleaded—a man’s. “OH, GOD.”

I dropped next to Char. Her body rolled to the side, right into my arm. Her eyes opened unevenly, and rolled back inspecting her lids.

“A-G-H-H-H!” That scream again was followed by the sound of grass shuffling, met with grunts and the disoriented treading of struggling boots. Someone yelled,“STAI ZITTO GIDRUL’!” followed by an ear-splitting heavy snap. And a grown man’s whimper.

My heart pumped blood into my ears and pounded at the surface of my temples. I slowed my breathing and laid my head down on Char’s chest. Her heart pounded against my brain.

It sounded like several men were struggling their way toward us. They wrestled about twenty yards away, fifteen yards, ten yards. Grunting, they seemed to be trawling a catch through the mire. I sunk down harder into Char and lowered my hips into the mud, trying to disappear into the ground.

“What the hell?” one asked—a familiar voice.

“It’s the ground, gidrul’!” another answered. Their feet made a sloshy sound that told me they’d stepped into a mucky tributary.