Читать книгу Close to the Edge Down By the River - R.L. Sterup - Страница 10

The men arrived on site early the next morning in a lather of anticipation, having first bolted down a cup of joe and cut of sirloin and scrambled eggs and bacon and hot biscuits brimming with gravy, then another cup of joe. Like experimental scientists rushing to the lab to see if the experiment worked. Hopeful in the extreme, but prepared for disappointment as well. Arriving in their trucks one after another as dawn stole over the land.

Stealthily the men made their way to the brush-thick loam in which the trap cleverly had been set the previous afternoon. As the platoon steadily advanced the unmistakable hints of intelligence at work plainly emerged.

Something had been trapped.

Because the trap had been intentionally well concealed in a thicket of shrub they heard the thrashing critter before they saw it. Heard distinctly the unmistakable commotion of a caged beast, that is, as the company drew within, say, thirty yards of the covert locale.

Many an ear pricked. Many a pulse quickened.

Could it be? Yes it could. Something’s coming, something good.

Frank and Jay as self-appointed forepersons of the endeavor stole crouching through the scrub, rifles in hand, by way of a reconnoitering initial foray. Moving cautiously to the point a sundial easily could have timed their advance. Though eager in the extreme, neither man wanted to be the first to discover the trapped animal yet boasted one free paw full of claws.

As more closely they approached, the scrabbling, shaking, atavistic hubbub emanating from the trap took on an unexpected tenor. A frankly bewildering tone, to be frank. Not the conventional rise and fall of feline yowling they expected, suffice to say.

The men stopped. Intently they listened. Again slowly forward they crawled.

Again the unexpected sounds faintly could be heard.

“God damn it god damn it” --- or words to that effect -- somewhat vaguely could be made out.

Frank stopped in his tracks. He hushed his crawling companion with a finger to the lips.

“You hear that?” he whispered.

Jay nodded.

“Sure did,” he mouthed back.

“Mebbe its Buster and Bob,” Frank suggested.

“They was behind us,” Jay responded.

The men watched and waited silently for a time.

More thrashing and mad crashing and shaking of steel. The sounds of a caged animal, assuredly.

Then another cry, one heard even more clearly than the first.

“Somebody. Anybody. Get me the hell out!”

With a sigh Frank stood, as did Jay, and the others of the company who too had heard the disappointing intelligence. They pushed through the brush to the side of the trap, rifles at their sides, looking like a boy scout troop that has just discovered the raccoon it diligently has tracked is, in fact, the scout master’s poodle.

“Hold on hold on hold on,” Frank said with something like disgust.

He turned back to the equally disgusted company.

“Who knows how to open this damn thing?”

Nobody did, particularly, which is why it took the better part of a half hour to get Lester Grimes freed of its steel and chicken wire confines. Lester at length climbed spitting and sputtering from the smallish -- for a full grown man -- bunk in which he had unexpectedly spent a coolish spring night. Brimming with equal parts indignation and explanation, though the former fell on deaf ears, and the latter was not especially necessary.

That particular branch of the Grimes clan inhabited a hovel just the other side of Blue Creek where the creek empties into the Platte, as every man on hand well knew. None among the regiment needed a diagram to immediately understand exactly how the trap intended for a cougar had, instead, bagged a mere Grimes. One look at the poultry decorating the interior of the intentionally well-concealed trap and Lester did what his nature demanded of him, no questions asked. With chicken fetching a market price of eight-six cents a pound, a real steal. Literally. Little suspecting the trap into which he stumbled. Though on reflection some might have wondered why Lester did not stop to question exactly why and how freshly sectioned poultry parts happened -- just happened -- to be lying about for anyone with an appetite to grab, before they remembered he was a Grimes.

Lester once freed drove himself to town later that very day to swear out a complaint with the Sheriff against the half dozen or so men whose names he remembered from among the capturing party, for kidnapping, and false imprisonment, and trapping a man out of season. Sheriff Hampton nodded and smiled and allowed as how he would get right on it. He placed the hastily scrawled and dutifully X-ed complaint in the file drawer reserved for those things promptly to be forgotten, then promptly forgot about it.

Not because he, the Sheriff, lacked temerity to tackle the occasional thorny assignment. Whether Lester had a legal beef for having been lured into a trap intent on stealing chickens, for example, or, conversely, whether Lester faced jeopardy for compromising the trap intended for something with four feet -- and so was more properly considered the un-aggrieved party in the whole mess -- represented a jurisprudential hum-dinger, no mistake. No, the matter failed to capture the fancy of local law on strictly jurisdictional grounds.

For going on a generation the land inhabited by the brethren or coven or posse -- or whatever the followers of Henry and Parrish were calling themselves these days -- had been beyond the reach of mere government, immunized or inoculated or shielded by unspoken consensus, not lawless so much as a law unto its own. Say a roughly ten-mile by ten-mile roughly hexagonal slice of black dirt and pine- dotted hills bordered on the north by the river and on the other three sides by fanaticism. Or, more accurately, followers of an itinerate tent preacher named Hoskins, of whom Henry himself had been a follower, and thereafter Parrish. Walled off not by iron curtain so much as wholesale, unquestioning, unswerving adherence to received dogma and conviction. A Kingdom into whose confines outsiders only sporadically strayed -- for purposes of birthdays and barn raisings and threshing bees and horseshoe pitching of a summer’s afternoon -- but which remained intellectually impermeable withal, and thus beyond penetration or contamination, or even facially benign infiltration, by any and all outsiders and their crazy ideas. Any federal revenuer intent on collecting a pound of taxing flesh was sure to be met by a wall of buckshot. Or a Methodist missionary. When Sheriff Hampton’s predecessor the first Sheriff Hampton foolishly attempted to serve a subpoena or warrant of distraint or restraining order on a sullen camp follower of a hot summer afternoon some years earlier the matter did not end well. The Sheriff summarily jailed a half dozen men and walked with a limp for three weeks. Eventually the whole thing was dropped. No treaties were actually inked. Instead, by mute consensus and unspoken agreement the law and other trifling social mores to which the rest of us dutifully bend and scrape agreed to look the other way so far as the roughly hexagonal principality of rural dystopia was concerned. Provided, of course, the doom-and-gloomers did not bust out from their hostile and unforgiving plain to bodily assault us. They didn’t much bother us, and we didn’t much bother them. We could hunt there, and fish, and take short cuts to other places, but at our own risk.

As Lester found out the hard way, too.

Not to mention the fish and game boys sent packing a week or so earlier.

Hanratty, of course, could scarcely contain his glee.

“They managed to bag a knuckle-dragging neighbor, the boobs,” he told an unamused Arch. “How fitting. Build more prisons and all you get are more prisoners. Well, duh.”

The Agency Man took opportunity to roll -- yes literally roll -- on the floor, hands clutching his heaving sides.

Arch made no response, merely stewed and pouted. Eventually he limped from his attic hideaway down the stairs and out the kitchen door to the farmyard where the dozen or so pick-up trucks and two dozen or so men grimly waited, swatting flies and drinking iced tea in the shade of the tall cottonwoods.

The men swatting flies, not the trucks.

A regiment in need of direction, if ever there was one.

From across the adjacent pasture the sound of A. Jacks dutifully loading wood on a wagon dimly could be heard.

“Ain’t no sign of ‘im nowhere,” one of the men complained rather loudly as Arch drew near then sank to the ground in the manner of a General seeking inspiration.

“We done scoured very square inch, Arch,” added another. “Nary a trace.”

“Me and the boys been trackin’ many a beast for many a year, and we ain’t never seen the like,” glumly noted one failed search-and-rescuer. “A man can follow them there cat tracks perfectly clear. Then, of a sudden, she goes off all different ways.”

“I seen that too.”

Much murmured concurrence.

“It ain’t natural.”

“I’m half beginning to believe there ain’t no cat a’tall.”

So complained the posse in turn.

Arch shook his head.

“Faith saw it,” Arch said.

The congregation mulled the intelligence uncertainly.

By and by Joe or Jim or Jesse seized the podium of rural debate. One of the Tkomasjevitgch brothers, anyway.

“I don’t know quite how to say it, Arch,” he began haltingly. “But I feel touched by the spirit to speak.”

He drew a deep breath.

“I’m commencin’ to think we may be facin’ some kind of higher power here.”

Much vigorous nodding of assent from the assembled men.

Hanratty cackled raucously.

A cat doesn’t come when called. A cat intent on evading detection will not by merely mortal man be found. The men knew this, and knew too a feline successfully can hide from prying eyes for days and months and years, even while stealthily stealing tuna from the kitchen table or slop from the pig’s trough, because some among them had witnessed just such behaviors in the domesticated miniatures haunting many a dusty farmyard, or rather not witnessed them, and beyond that, even, the primitive brain stem remembered the threat from a time before pants. Hopelessly, then, the men of the roughly hexagonal fiefdom or prelate or sanctuary resumed their collective inspection of the fields and meadows and hills and dales, but without any real hope. By and by they knocked off for the day and headed to their respective homes or hovels for a shower and a shave and a snort of home-brewed swill.

A kidnapper on the loose, every man hastened to man battle stations, intent on defending against the tawny killing machine, bolting and locking and barricading and sandbagging every available orifice, so to speak. Sealing with keen vigilance the family perimeter against the ravaging cat that, if given half a chance, would steal from the family bosom the very crown jewel of hereditary genetic lineage. Or, in this case, a son. Whether the cat had been carried by the very winds into the way of Arch and Faith and Thomas and Peter remained a matter of conjecture, though most frankly doubted it. Death will spring from whatsoever place it elects, be it brooding black cloud or sleek feline predator.

As Faith knew better than anyone.

The body they never found, oddly. The “they” whose job it is to find such things, that is. Found, the body was not. Caught in a snare of submerged logs, as attested by the tennis shoes and watch and other telltale gee-gaws later discovered in the interstices of or between or among the twining branches, the man himself somehow managed to escape. Unexpectedly the body was not found, by Faith or the “they” who are charged with recovering drowned husbands or brothers or sons.

True, the river itself was running higher and wider and deeper than usual that spring day. Deep enough, anyway, to conceal the cottonwood trunk and associated limbs and thin branches carried by current into a freakish hollow or eddy where jumbled haphazardly together the limbs conspired to catch and hold temporarily the man only seconds before from a canoe flung. Though both water and atmosphere are comprised of roughly sixty-seven percent hydrogen – as is the human body, parenthetically – and thus more similar than dissimilar in constituent make-up, the manner in which that hydrogen arranges itself with the other ingredients makes all the difference, or so it seems. Not found, the body.

Faith remembered standing on the riverbank, twin sons at her side, dripping wet all three of them, anxiously scanning the raging river for any sign of a living, breathing survivor. No such luck. As if the man had succumbed to, or perhaps more accurately surrendered at, or perhaps even better been vacuumed from the planet by, a wormhole or portal or dimension-bridging bridge across which merely mortal man strays but once. To the other side. Poof, just like that, vanished without a trace, the oxygen-bereft body somehow escaping the river’s iron grip, not unlike, say, the human soul fleeing its fleshy confines at the hour of death.

Her brother Arch arrived three days later to take Faith and the boys back to the family farm north of Plowman. It seemed the right thing. Faith too numbed and stunned and otherwise emotionally torpedoed to resist. Bodily carried off, or should one say kidnapped, by fate, events, time, caprice. She set up shop in the house the family had called home since its unceremonious eviction from the Home Place two generations earlier, she and the twins, intending to bide her time until her presumably dead husband turned up alive again, waterlogged perhaps but otherwise hale and hearty, discovered somewhat unbelievably by a passing junk on the uninhabited Pacific island to which the river undoubtedly had carried him.

River currents can be tricky.

Speaking of whom, Faith and A. Jacks at that hour sweated rather heavily over the busted toilet in the basement of the two-story farmhouse still brimming with mourners.

The farmhouse brimming with mourners, not the toilet.

The damn thing had geysered inopportunely just as the women sat down to afternoon tea. A. Jacks came running as summoned to staunch the flow. Or rather laconically strolling as summoned, by Faith, monkey wrench in hand. Once on the job the bushy-haired man sank to a knee to attend to the necessary repairs, Faith watching anxiously over his shoulder.

A thing badly in need of fixing, as a quick look confirmed. Unchanged from installation decades earlier, apparently. The design lacked cohesive continuity, for one thing. More like a system cobbled together on the fly. Suctioning stuff up from the basement not exactly what nature had in mind. Rivers generally don’t flow in an upward heading, or other material things flee from down to up. Whose damn idea was that?

With much vigorous plungering of plunger A. Jacks succeeded in clearing the clogged pipe, albeit not without effort. The way having been made somewhat clear, he next unscrewed the valves and replaced the torn gasket. Fortunately Faith had a replacement handle on hand. The gearshift needed a new flywheel into the bargain. A. Jacks could not readily put his fingers on a wrench of appropriate dimension, so Faith helpfully dug through the tool box while slapping the man lightly about the head and shoulders as penalty for his disorganization.

Men cannot be counted on to put things away routinely. Away to things routinely put.

Which left only the corroded pipes themselves. Nothing for it but to grease the leaky joists. A. Jacks screwed, Faith too screwed. A two-person job, most assuredly. Sweating and swearing some while jammed cheek to jowl in the smallish space under the eaves where the builders most inconveniently had housed the apparatus, apparatuses, but making steady progress withal. But a few short minutes -- or hours -- of feverish fiddling from untroubled flushing, again.

Still, how good it felt to lube the old pipes. To exercise the unlikely implements. Just the two of them, grunting and puffing in unison, a good team, seemingly familiar with one another’s each kink and nuance, slipping this Tab A into that Slot B delightfully, effortlessly, seamlessly, cathartically.

Once the job was done Faith rose from the endeavor and slipped into the shower for a cleansing rinse before carrying her temporarily sated bones up the steps to feed Thomas. A. Jacks disappeared to his barn stall for another night, soon slumbering peacefully, pleasantly spent.