Читать книгу Close to the Edge Down By the River - R.L. Sterup - Страница 8

The menfolk wending their way through the sandy loam of the Platte bottomland, hands on knees in search of cat tracks, stopped just about then to reassess.

Unaware of Arch’s plight, just as he was unaware of them. Well and truly plighted, nonetheless.

The tracking mission so promisingly undertaken a few short hours earlier had, by then, gone sincerely awry. Just like that, the trail went cold. Leaving the men roaming, or rather crawling aimlessly, in the mud and dirt and clay and sand.

Downright comical, in a way. Men ranging in size and age from average to young to dumpy to tall to old to callow to fat falling to the ground like a guy who’s lost his contact lens. The sun rising higher and day getting warmer all the while. Plenty muggy and uncomfortable for May, made all the more so by the relative lack of even a hint of fresh breeze.

The cat tracks had done disappeared.

At length the men clotted to rest their weary limbs in the shade of a Ford heavy-duty eight-cylinder four-wheel-drive pick-up truck.

Plenty frustrated, by then.

“It ain’t right that animal should live,” one of the men grumbled as the posse collectively reclined. “Not after what it done.”

“Once she’s got a taste for human flesh, no tellin’ who she’ll go after next,” said another.

“Damn straight. Ain’t no man safe long as that creature runs loose.”

So on and so forth.

The council of war considered and rejected several options -- including not least giving up the whole damn operation and sitting back to wait for the cat to either kill again or just go away, whichever came first -- before settling on what seemed the most expedient of several possibilities. Abe and Lefty drove to town to fetch the baling wire and acetylene torches. Rick and Slim headed to Griswald to collect the chickens. Bill and Bob swung by the Gibson’s in York to freshen the company’s supply of duct tape and blasting caps.

By late afternoon the designers had cobbled the several mechanical ingredients into a rudimentary prototype. They stepped back to admire their work. With a satisfied air the men eventually completed manufacture of the gleaming steel-and-baling-wire contraption before camouflaging it generously with branches and leaves in a carefully selected location near the place where the creature’s tracks last had been clearly seen. Somewhat clearly been seen. The work once completed, over the course of say an hour or three, they piled back into their trucks and headed to Rose and Cal’s for a well-earned adult beverage.

They would have used venison but none among the company had any such meat in their freezers, and the white-tailed critters had made themselves scarce again, so none were readily on hand for gunning down and gutting purposes. No matter. A suitable substitute was into the cage hurled.

Since they could not come to the cat’s locale, wherever that locale might be, they would instead bring the killing creature to them, mountain to Mohammed style, or, more accurately, the trap they cleverly set. The clever trap they’d set. One designed with sticks drawing blueprints in the dirt, and some considerable trial and swearing error, particularly as regards the precise size of entrance required so that a cougar of unknown dimension could fit. Someone remembered a cat can slip into any opening at least as big as its head. Searching memory, the men recalled watching the domesticated cousins of the killing machine materializing through impossibly small cracks when motivated by milk or mice, so the motion unanimously carried. They figured the lion likely was hungry again some five days on from its last tragic kill, so a half dozen dismembered members of the poultry family would more than suffice. Besides, at eighty-six cents a pound, the bait was not exactly cheap.

Job completed they went to town as mentioned to cool off or get drunk, whichever came first.

Faith for her part retreated from the grievers once again to find A. Jacks. She was plenty bored, and more than a little tired of cousins and Aunts and Uncles etcetera running off at the mouth. “Making clear the way.” … “He never gives a gal more than she can handle.” … “Like a thorn from the monster’s paw pulled.” … “May not make one damn bit of sense now, but the Almighty has a plan, you’ll see.” … “Maybe young Peter did something to deserve the unexpected disappearance?” … “And, by the way, why did you survive?”

Prudent queries, perhaps, albeit hardly helpful, under the circumstances. All to be revealed in the fullness of time, Faith knew.

She found him in the clearing where the timber had catastrophied. A. Jacks was, by then, not only stacking lumber, but boldly loading selected segments of timber on a wagon hitched to an ATV.

The wagon hitched to the ATV, not A. Jacks.

An altogether ordinary wagon. Planks affixed to a metal frame. Sideboards say a foot-and-a-half high. A tailgate made of parallel wood slats. Faith didn’t remember seeing it before. Or perhaps she had. The cavernous barn hosted many a machine from the days of Henry and before him Luther and before him Arch, little remembered and long unused. A. Jacks must have found it lurking in a concealed corner of a forgotten shed, Faith vaguely surmised. Useful enough, in its way.

A. Jacks shuffled around and about the unlikely landing place of unexpectedly airborne timber, wearing levi’s and a checked shirt and muddied work boots, and of course that bristling black beard and unruly mop of black hair and muscular carriage, scouring the scattered remnants head down. He’d already loaded a healthy selection of two-by-twelves. Wordlessly Faith commenced to clutch sticks that struck her fancy and chuck them into the wagon, mimicking more or less A. Jacks who, if he had a pattern to his endeavoring, failed to reveal it.

She stopped long enough to capture the man’s attention. He looked up wordlessly.

“You’ve come to piece the bits together in some fashion,” Faith said.

Not a question so much as an observation.

The bearded man grunted.

“May as well,” he responded gruffly, not stopping from stacking lumber purposefully.

Faith shook her head. Whether from annoyance at the response or the man’s somewhat stubborn demeanor could not readily have been said. Probably both.

“You do know the wind will just take it down again.”

Faith felt obliged to point out the raw fact. One supported by many the empirical study, parenthetically. Each and every carefully constructed edifice, together with every other damn thing, condemned to surrender into the vast gumbo of a diffuse absolute-zero slurry toward which all matter daily trudges.

He raised his eyes to examine the sky, which at that early afternoon hour betrayed no hint of apocalypse. A fine day. Potentialities aplenty. He cast her a rueful glance, while wisely refraining from comment.

“Not today,” Faith interjected. “Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time. But inevitably.”

Even Faith has her doubts, occasionally.

A. Jacks fixed her in his gaze. He shrugged.

“Maybe so,” he replied.

He turned from her somewhat dismissively, maddeningly, returning to his work, apparently undeterred, statistics be damned.

Inasmuch as he was already bent over Faith slapped the man rather sharply on the ass with the two-by-four she just happened to have on hand. Or rather in her hand.

He grimaced slightly but otherwise made no response.

“That’s for being gone so long,” she said.

She chucked the lumber on the wagon.

Faith had recognized him, of course, from the moment he appeared on the narrow snaking trail, like a sort of human caboose materializing to append itself to the family train. A bit heavier than before, perhaps. Slightly bushier of beard. Still, the same guy, unmistakably. A figure from antiquity ripped, eternal messenger, courier, ever-ready sidekick and underappreciated doer of necessary deeds, a mere man, after all, and, indeed, of the type she might scarcely have noticed when but a spry lass tip-toeing her hair-tossing way through fields of admiring males. Before the two kids, and the first wrinkles, and the telltale hints of gray in her auburn locks. Unmistakably the same man, though, as betrayed primarily by his eyes, blazing black, hooded, mercurial, spectral, entirely unique eyes. As seen standing by the river bank that hot summer day some years ago now, nearly seven years, Faith awaiting the return of her husband, his resurfacing, those ghastly ghostly eyes lodged in the granite-hewn visage of the man waiting, seemingly, standing or perhaps seated, she couldn’t be sure which, directly across the river from her.

As if he was watching her.

She noticed him absently the way one notices the things one barely notices, a somethingness but vaguely cognized, as an implement tender and percussive, one apparently affixed to earth for a single meaningful purpose. Noticed without knowing she noticed, or at least not overtly, but enough to fleetingly register, at least, and thus claim a place in consciousness. A mere man indistinguishable from the ordinary everyday run of men, bushy-bearded and broad-shouldered, muscular and thick, with black hair sprouting abundantly from his broad loaf, but otherwise of no particular moment, then or ever. Except something in the manner and bearing or perhaps watchful eyes of the watching man pierced the mundane papyrus of time and space, it seemed, if but fleetingly. She took note of him without knowing why.

Thomas emerged first from the current where the canoe’s tipping had pitched them. Faith washed up on the log-choked bend where the river eddies mindlessly had cast her, or perhaps obediently chucked her, or just plain indifferently. She sputtered to the sandy bank. A moment later Thomas washed up at her side, shaken but otherwise unhurt. A half second that seemed an eternity later Peter too bobbed to the surface, gasping and splashing. The stream threatened to carry the child to points unknown, until Faith with a tenacity she did not know she possessed snatched the child from the watery embrace and flung -- yes bodily flung -- the boy to safety on the sandy banks beside or perhaps even atop the coughing Thomas.

She retreated again to the sandy bank to embrace the twins and smooth their sopping brows and mutter assurances that all would be well, everything would be okay, they were safe.

When her husband did not similarly from the turbid flow emerge even as the seconds and then minutes crawled maddeningly past Faith looked up to see the man still bushy-bearded and broad-shouldered standing slightly upriver and up a slight bluff, and still curiously watching her, watching them, or at least so it seemed.

The same man, unmistakably. Dry as the proverbial bone, from all appearances. No boat in sight. How and under what circumstances he might have traversed the distance between the upriver point A where first Faith had spied him to the point B just beyond the log-choked trap where he appeared again Faith could not have said, or much cared at the moment, occupied as she most assuredly was scanning the stream for any hint of her husband.

Then the rescuers came, and in the all the tumult she lost sight of him, or perhaps he de-materialized into thin air.

Would-be rescuers, that is.