(2008) Down Where My Love Lives (18 page)

MY SCREEN DOOR SLAMMED, AND AMOS BOUNDED into the living room, where I sat in the dark listening for an echo of Maggie's voice. It was mid-November, Canadian winds had blown in an arctic front, and the temperature had slipped to twenty-three degrees. I don't understand weather patterns all that well, but arctic front or not, it was butt-cold. The weatherman said it would drop another three or four degrees before the night was out.

Next to me were a pair of old Carhart overalls, hip waders, and my headlamp. Amos didn't say a word. Just popped his head around the corner, saw me, nodded, and turned back toward the door. I grabbed my stuff and threw it into the back of his truck. While I waved my hands across the heater vent inside the truck, one thought occurred to me. Winter had come, and Maggie would like that.

I turned to Blue and held up my hand like a stop sign. He laid down on the couch, let out a deep breath, and wouldn't look at me. The silent treatment. "Not tonight," I said. "Don't want you getting hurt." He whined and dug his wet nose beneath the sofa cushion.

Willard's parking lot was full by the time we arrived, crammed tight with trucks, dog boxes, blaze-orange vests, baseball caps advertising farm equipment, hip waders, chewing tobacco, Carhart overalls, and coffee cups now used as spit cups. Mr. Willard's thermometer, hanging on the gas pump, read twenty-two degrees, but that probably accounted for a little bit of wind chill.

A few weeks ago, Amos said he bought his dad some new insulated hip waders for this year's season. Amos parked his Expedition next to his dad's old Ford. His father walked over to him, running his fingers up the elastic suspenders. "Moose, I love 'em. Best I've ever owned."

"Glad you like them."

Mr. Carter put his hand on Amos's shoulder, and the two walked ahead of me toward Mr. Willard's store. Mr. Willard saw us coming and opened the door with a smile. Then he hung the "Closed" sign over the suction hook in the middle of the window.

His coffeepot was almost empty after Amos and I filled our mugs and a beat-up green thermos that looked as if it had rolled one too many times around the back of somebody's pickup. Back outside, Mr. Carter banged on the side of an empty Maxwell House coffee can for attention, then climbed atop the dog box wedged in the bed of his truck. He zipped up his coveralls, pulled up his collar, shoved his hands in his pockets, and began.

"Howdy. Now y'all come in close. That's better." His voice was blowing smoke, it was so cold. "It's too cold to yell. And Jim, don't stand too close to my exhaust. I don't want you passing out again. I don't want to hear any excuses from you when we get in the Salk."

Mr. Carter smiled, Jim shuffled his feet, and everybody laughed.

Jim Biggins, who is just what his name implies, owns a junkyard, but come winter, he supplies most of Digger and even some of Charleston with firewood. In seven years he's never run out of wood, and neither have the folks in Digger. He sells it cheap, and Jim has kept a lot of people warm long after their gas has been cut off.

A few years back, he had just come off working a double because the Weather Channel said South Carolina would experience a hard freeze. Once he got home, he pulled on his coveralls and came coon hunting. We got inside the swamp, and Jim just couldn't hold off the sleep any longer. No amount of coffee would change that. Just about the time the dogs treed a coon, Jim slumped over and fell asleep at the base of an old cypress, curled up like a baby.

Jim is about six foot six, dresses out at three hundred pounds, and is the strongest human being I have ever known. There was no way we could tote him out of the swamp. So Mr. Carter and the rest of the boys continued hunting while Amos and I hung out in the swamp for a few hours, letting Jim nap. We made a fire and sipped coffee, and when Jim woke, he stood up, shook his head, and apologized. We walked out of the Salk about an hour before daylight. Since then, he's never let me pay for firewood, and I've never run out. Somehow every year it just shows up.

Towering over everyone from his perch in the back of the pickup, Mr. Carter addressed the crowd like the chairman of the board at the annual stockholders meeting. "I'd like to welcome everybody to the first coon hunt of this year." He eyed the full moon and cloudless sky. "Looks like we got its a good night."

Coon hunting in Digger is a religion, something passed down from father to son. Amos's dad has had the best coon dogs in the state for years. He's been winner or runner-up of the Greater Salkehatchie Coon Gathering for twelve of the last fifteen years, and he breathes coon hunting. It could be blowing forty miles an hour outside, treetops blowing right off the trees, but come first freeze of the year, Mr. Carter would load five or six of his best hounds and head to Mr. Willard's store.

Participation here is by invitation only, and Mr. Carter is selective. If you get invited, you better be able to keep up, and you better not have a problem walking ten or fifteen miles.

Mr. Carter prides himself on dogs that can hunt all night and on into the next day. His dog kennel is a real operation. Twelve kennels raised four feet off the ground. Every dog has its own box, automatic waterer, and food bowl. Once a month Mr. Carter drives to the Wal-Mart distribution center and loads up his pickup with about eight or ten seventy-five-pound bags of Alpo. Twelve dogs can eat a lot of food, and they can get rid of it too. Every morning Mr. Carter cranks up his pressure washer and hoses down the concrete into a holding area, where he shovels the muck into a five-gallon bucket and dumps it into a hole that he dug with his front-end loader. In fifteen years, he's pretty well dug up his whole pasture, but he's got the greenest grass of any farm in Digger.

In almost twenty years, he's lost only one dog to snakebite, because he trains them to stay away from snakes. In springtime he waits for the weather to warm up and catches a rattler or moccasin crossing a road or slithering along some bank somewhere. He tapes its mouth shut and then puts both the snake and the dog into a closed space and buckles a shock collar on the dog. I'm not talking about a pet-supermarket bark collar that sort of tickles the dog into thinking that it ought not to sniff the snake. His collars do what they advertise. They shock. They aren't inhumane, but they're strong enough to straighten all four legs and bring a dog off its feet. He calls it electroshock therapy. Mr. Carter used to threaten to put one on Amos and me when we were kids, if he thought it was needed. As a result, we didn't let him know about all the trouble we got into.

With the dog and the snake in the same space, he would let the dog do what it naturally did. Sniff. But every time the dog got close to or sniffed the snake, Mr. Carter lit him up with that collar. "Watch this," Mr. Carter would say. The dog would pace back and forth, looking at the snake out of the corner of its eye. The snake would coil up and silently watch the dog, wishing that its mouth weren't taped shut. The dog, not knowing that the ropy-looking thing in the corner of his kennel wanted to kill it, walked over, sniffed, and attempted to place the snake between its teeth. Just about the time the dog's teeth touched the snake's skin, Mr. Carter mashed the big red button in the middle of the 2D-cell radio control in his hand. The dog yelped, jumped three feet off the ground, straightened all four legs, and returned to the opposite corner of the kennel, whining, never to sniff a snake again. Curiosity cured.

One year a fellow in Charleston called Mr. Carter and gave him a real stubborn dog named Gus. Gus was, and still is, crosseyed as a goat and dumb as a brick. By Mr. Carter's account, the previous owner was tired of messing with him. To cure his stupidity, Mr. Carter caught a six-foot diamondback and put him in the kennel with Gus. Dumb Gus immediately went to sniffing, and Mr. Carter shocked-three times. Finally Gus got the picture. That collar just about killed him, but Gus is still alive and has never been snakebit.

Mr. Carter kicked the dog box to quiet one of his hounds and turned again to face the crowd at his feet. "Glad y'all could make it. John Stotton said he could not be here tonight 'cause Emma is feeling a little under the weather, but he promised to make it this weekend. Pastor John had a wedding over in Charleston. And"-he looked at Amos-"son, who am I forgetting?"

"Sam," Amos whispered.

"Oh yeah, Sam Revel said he's got some business in Columbia. All send their apologies. Butch Walker and his boys said a few of their milking cows got loose, but if they can join us, they'll be along shortly."

Every year we all compete to see who can come up with the best lighting apparatus. There's a science to it. You have to consider three things: weight, longevity, and candlepower. John Billingsly won last year's pat on the back with a one million candlepower Q-beam mounted to his chest, powered with a backpack full of four lithium ion batteries converted from an Apple laptop. John works in computer sales, and rumor has it that he's threatened to increase this year's output to two million candlepower. John doesn't understand overkill. He's the guy in town who trades his own computer in every three months whether he needs to or not, and the back of his toilet is full of magazines that tell you all about the latest computer technology. John even writes for some of them. A lot of school kids in Digger have benefited from his "used" models. Anyway, when he stepped out of his truck for coon hunting, he looked like a walking lighthouse.

Mr. Carter moved to the front of his dog box, eyed the crowd, and pointed to John Billingsly. "I think we can pretty well agree that John here is this year's hands-down winner in the light category. John, you outdid yourself again."

John smiled earlobe to earlobe, and four or five guys patted him on the back.

"Anybody with bad eyesight, stay close to John. But be careful; he looks like a walking runway light, so be wary of planes looking for a landing strip on the outside of the Salk."

After the laughter quieted, Mr. Carter continued. "Gentlemen, we haven't hunted the south end of the Salk in almost three years, so tonight I thought we'd drive that direction. Any objections?"

Mr. Carter's authority is never questioned. This is his show, and everybody knows it. Nobody spoke.

"Good. Now, Jimmy," he said to a man in faded green Carharts. "You still got that mangy female, Sally?"

"Yes, sir," Jimmy answered.

"Well, good. She seems to work real well with Badger, so we'll let the two of them out first. Now, y'all know that the first catch of the year is a training coon. It's not a keeper. So any of you that might be a little weak in the stomach ought to hang back once we get to the tree. Everybody agree?" Mr. Carter folded his hands and lowered his head as though checking off a mental list. "The CB's on channel seven, and if the reception is bad there, we'll go to fourteen. Everybody got a partner?"

One fellow in the back raised his hand. "No, sir."

"All right, Frank, me either. You're with me. Anybody else?" Nobody spoke. At that, Mr. Carter bounced off his dog box onto the tailgate and hit the ground at a trot. Sixteen truck engines started at one time amid a cloud of white exhaust and the pang and smack of glass-packs. Mr. Carter's old Ford slowly led the procession out of the parking lot.

That scene would make a great commercial. Represented there were about fifteen models and years of Ford and Chevy's best work trucks, all in varying degrees of worn out. All we'd need is a Bob Seger, Alan Jackson, or George Strait song, and we'd fit right in with Monday night football.

The commercial proceeded down Highway 42 until we got to McSweeney's Fork, turned right down South Salk Road, and drove four miles to Gunter's Hole, where we eased under the huge live oak limbs bordering the edge of the swamp.

Around Digger, the Salkehatchie is mythical. Everybody knows the stories. Confederate gold. Lost lovers. Indians. World War II German spies. Vietnamese foot soldiers. Eighteen-foot alligators. You name it, it's buried there. Somewhere beneath the slow-moving black water, the hundred-foot cypress trees, the hanging moss, and the swamp stench, there's a story to go along with most every idea you could have about a swamp. If you can think it, it's probably already been mythified.

Every coon hunter in the Salk is required to have two things: a radio and a partner, the idea being that if you get lost, at least you'll be able to talk to folks on the outside, and you won't be lonely. It happens about once a year. Rarely does anybody spend the night in the swamp, but several times they've walked out some ten or fifteen miles from where they walked in. The swamp itself is forty square miles of the exact same thing. Landmarks are difficult to make. Nobody "knows" the swamp, not even Mr. Carter. He's pretty good around the edges, most of us are, but we know our limits. Amos and I are as good as anyone. We've dug for a lot of Confederate gold in our days, even built a few Swiss Family Robinson forts in the cedars, but even we know where our experience stops and the swamp takes over.

And one more thing. When the sun goes down in the Salk, "dark" takes on a whole new meaning. It may be clear and starlight bright outside, but you step one foot inside that swamp, underneath the canopy, and it's a different story. No matter how familiar you might be with a particular area of the swamp, when dark comes, you turn around, try and find your way out, and things look real different. No matter how well you've marked it, orange surveyor's tape, breadcrumbs, or what, the darkness will make you doubt.

At Gunter's Hole, Mr. Carter unlatched the box doors, letting Badger and Sally catapult off the tailgate. The two bounded off into the darkness. We stood outside in the cold, engines idling, feet shuffling, listening to single barks like submarine pings as they faded a half mile, then a mile, then a little more. Talking was over. If you needed to communicate, you used hand signals, or worst case, you whispered.

Mr. Carter does not tolerate talking while he's listening to Badger. Varying tones are more difficult to pick up the farther he gets from the edge of the swamp. After a few minutes I could tell no audible difference in Badger's bark, yet a smile began to crease Mr. Carter's face. I had learned long ago that Mr. Carter's face could tell me far more than Badger's bark.