Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (13 page)

Someone passed it and he drank. They hunched about the stove, more conscious of their comfort than they would have been with ducted heat and deep carpets, though none of them, probably, had ever experienced either of those things.
They were of that place; a wet norther and a shack and a stove went together, and they had grown up in houses a little tighter and more rectangular than that one, but not much. The hills are not rich country, not since the old ones cottoned out the flat places and grazed out the slopes, and the topsoil went on down the Brazos, and the cedar moved in thick and sullen, letting nothing grow beneath it. That happened so long ago that a whole, spare, organic way of life has had time to grow up around the cedar itself, and even in the thirties only a few ancients recollected scraps of the brief richer time.

So that the shack represented more or less standard shelter, though outside the small circle of the stove’s radiation its temperature was in the thirties and all of them were dressed in denim. They were cozy.

But coziness is not a lasting satisfaction to persons of that age and breed.…

“I wisht they was somethin’ to God damn do,” Jim Lemmon said.

“Could go maybe see old Rosie,” said a third one hopefully, a thin sort named Ike Atterbury.

“He’s
home.”

“Oh.”

“Could gang up and stomp old Bert,” Dave Birdsong said.

Bert grinned broad-faced into the stove’s glow, bull-necked, stump-bodied. “Could,” he said.

“I reckon not,” Dave said. They had recently tried it.…

They had a coal-oil lantern. He took it and rolled up its wick a little and went roaming with it through the corners of the shack. It had stood empty for three years now; the last family who had lived there, not owning it or paying rent, had taken off in a Chalmers touring car for California to go
orange-picking and had not been heard of since. Their calendars moralized on the walls; their detritus cluttered the floor. Dave’s foot rolled on a mustard jar; he slapped the wall to keep from falling, and cut his palm on a nail.…

“You come acrost any sixty-eight-carat gold thunder mug, you holler right loud,” Jim Lemmon said.

Davis picked up a pair of overalls. Except for having no knees and only one strap, and having suffered the gnawings of mice, and being rotten, they were pretty good overalls.

He said: “Could make us a dummy.”

Ike Atterbury said: “Tootie Anson got hisself shot, a-foolin’ with dummies.”

“Stood too closet,” Davis said. “Looky here, they’s a flarr sack.”

“Nothin’ to stuff the sommidge with,” Jim Lemmon said.

“Straw,” Dave told him, jerking his head toward a rear door. “Lean room’s full of it. Seen it.”

“Who you gonna dummy?” Ike Atterbury said, doubtful.

“We,” Bert said. “Who
we
gonna dummy, you mean.”

“What I said.”

“Sam Sowell,” Davis said. “Ain’t walkin’ no futher’n that, no night like this.”

“That gold he’s got hid,” Jim Lemmon said, musing. “Five thousand dollars, somebody said.”

“ ’Pression’s done growed it,” Dave said. “Thousand, used to be.”

It was a whingding dummy, he told me long years later. They finished the first Mason jar of whisky while they were making it, and started on another, and in the end they took Ike Atterbury’s hat, knocking him down when he objected, and pinned it with baling wire to the dummy’s head. Its flour-sack face glared white; they tied a dog rope to the
overalls’ one shoulder strap and jiggled it from a rafter. It looked fine. Single file then, sodden under the thin horizontal rain that should by rights, Dave said, have been sleet, cold as the air was, they threaded through the thick shinnery brush of the shack’s valley and up a nose into the cedar. For secrecy they had left the lantern at the shack with the dogs, but none of them missed it. (You go hound-hunting with those people on a dark night and you’re lucky to get home with two eyes; they feel out the slapping, scratching branches with another sense, like bats, and lift casual forearms to shield their faces, but you don’t.)

A quarter-hour later they were standing before Sam Sowell’s storm-cellar house. Smoke from its stovepipe bit warm into their noses; a thin line of yellow light showed at the edge of the trap door.

“Hod damn, I’m cold,” Ike Atterbury said. “Whine we just go in, say hi?”

“Shut up,” Jim Lemmon told him. “Drank some whusky.”

“Thang looks like Bert,” said Davis, who had been stringing the dummy to a live-oak branch, its feet just touching the ground, twenty feet from Sam Sowell’s door. Bert snorted, and followed Davis and Jim Lemmon a few yards down the hill and to one side. Ike Atterbury remained standing by the live oak, thoughtful.

“Hello!” Davis yelled. “Hello, the house!”

“Naw!” said Ike Atterbury.

“You standin’ about where he’d shoot,” Davis said.
“Hello!”

That was when Ike left them, at a run. They let him go, slapping one another’s damp shoulders and doubling over with quiet, violent laughter as they heard him hit the heavy cedar below with crackles and swishes and a curse or two.
Then there was nothing more above the wind’s big sighing.

“Is
cold, a little,” Davis said matter-of-factly.

“Sha,” Jim Lemmon said. “Where’s that old sommidge at? HELLO!”

The door’s yellow line widened. Abruptly they all squatted beside a cedar, watching while it grew parallelogrammatically and old Sam Sowell’s head projected dark from its center, swinging about, blinking against sudden blackness. In a minute, after his pupils had opened out and the night had erased lingering lamp light from his retinas, Sam’s head stopped swinging and remained fixed toward the dummy a few feet before him.

“Who ooh?” he said.

(“Didn’t have no front teeth on top,” Davis told me. “Worth your money, see him side-gnawin’ a old tough piece of fried squirrel. Couldn’t talk good.”)

The dummy didn’t answer.

Sam Sowell said: “Honnam ooh, who be ooh?”

Jim Lemmon had fallen over onto his side and was wheezing silently on the wet stones beneath the cedar. Bert was making a hl-hl sound around his gums which was as near as he ever came to laughter.… Davis watched: to this day he seldom even smiles, but only crinkles the corners of his eyes when great mirth seizes him.

Sam Sowell stared for a time at the dummy without speaking, then swiftly stuck out an old arm, picked up a rock, and hurled it. It missed; the dummy stirred a little under a gust of wind.

“Hunnamitch!” screamed Sam Sowell, and disappeared. Jim Lemmon whoo-whooed softly in the exhaustion of suppressed mirth, Davis watching still while the old head came out again behind a shotgun’s barrel, laid itself down along
the stock, and jerked as flame shot out in a loud five-foot-long streak at the dummy’s midriff.

“Air, by Gog!” Sam Sowell cried, and came tearing up out of his hole like an infantryman riding the wake of a barrage. But the enemy no longer existed; he stopped where the upper half of the overalls still hung from the live-oak limb, and stared down at the blasted-away lower half on the ground. Bending over, he came up with a handful of straw, stood frozen for a second under the wind, and then began again to swing his old narrow head in search.

“Look out,” Davis said, and laid a hand on Jim’s shoulder.

But Jim had choked on a chuckle, and sputtered, and then the three of them were rolling, scrambling backward and downhill as the shotgun swiveled toward the sound. Davis said he started running while he was still on his knees and had just about worked himself erect, still moving fast, when he ran astraddle a small cedar. He clambered straight up and through it, treading branches, and had ridden it down on the other side when the second barrel of Sam Sowell’s shotgun spoke. A pellet tugged at Davis’s hat, and Jim Lemmon yelled. Then, like Ike Atterbury, they crashed into the heavy cedar of the lower hillside and tore on through it, their bat’s radar awry. Davis lost his hat and could never afterward find it, to prove it had been hit.…

Finally they stopped, scratched and soaked and run out, in a little slit clearing near the bottom of the hill. (“Just spent a time a by God breathin’,” Davis said to me. “Bein’ a-scairt it uses up air.…”) Sam Sowell, needing reloads, had not pursued. The wind blew. The rain spattered down.

“Three,” Jim Lemmon said, having been groping at the calf of his left leg.

“Missed me,” Bert said.

“Popped my hat,” Davis said.

“Old bastard,” Jim said.

“What we spected,” Davis told him mildly. “What you’d do, too. Hit were a good dummyin’.”

“Would of kilt us.”

“Didn’t.”

“Could of,” Jim Lemmon said. “Lost that whusky, too. I’ll fix him.”

“How?”

“Watch,” Jim said, and headed back up the hill.

(“ ’Bout half mean when he got mad,” Davis said. “Worrit me.”)

In the beginning Jim had Bert stand on the door, but then he brought some big flat rocks and laid them across it and Bert moved, so that by the time Sam Sowell got around to shooting up through it, he did no harm.… Jim got a leg from the dummy’s overalls and wadded it into the top of the dugout’s stovepipe. Dave stood discreetly aside and watched while the door’s yellow crack and the hole that Sam had blown with his gun grew darker, smoke muffling the lamp light inside. Listened as the coughing began …

He said factually: “Gonna assaficate him.”

“Sure,” Jim Lemmon said, and did a jig step. “Hey!” he yelled at the dugout’s door. “Hey, how’s it smell, old ringtail?”

Sam Sowell coughed, and fired again. The shot lifted one of the boulders an inch or two, but it fell back into place. Jim Lemmon stepped back a yard.

“Thousand bucks, let you out!” he shouted. “By God, shoot old Jim, you’ll see!”

“Tell him,” Bert said with satisfaction.

(“A-scairt of ’em,” Davis told me without shame. “Old Bert he never said nothin’ but he always run with Jim. Hopin’ they’d quit by theyself, knowed it’d be a fight.”)

It was.… He waited the four or five minutes that it took for the coughing to stop, then resignedly moved to the door and began to lift the big stones away from it. It was dark, and he had the last one off before Bert dived at him, the big belly hitting him in the shoulder, the oaken arms hugging. They rolled.… Davis got a rock in his hand and somehow found room under that hug to start pounding Bert on the back of the head with it. Bert abruptly relaxed. Davis came free, and scrambled back to open the door, and had a good grip on the armpits of unconscious Sam Sowell lying just below it when Jim jumped him, kicking and pulling.

“I helt on,” he told me. “When Jim pult me away, old Sam he come out of there just like a rotten tooth out of your jaw.”

“What happened then?”

“Old Jim he stomped me,” Davis said. “Bert too when he waked up. Cracked me a rib. I had the old booger out, though, and they didn’t stick him back in. Thought they might.”

Sam Sowell caught pneumonia when he came to, and spent three weeks in bed at Davis’s mother’s house while she slept on a pallet on the floor. When he was well, he left one morning before anybody was up, without thanks or comment, and went back to his dugout. Not long after that, somebody took a shot at Jim Lemmon out of the cedar, and he quit hunting in that part of the county. He died later at Anzio; I never knew either him or Bert, who left for an
automobile assembly plant or somewhere, the way people leave that country.

And didn’t miss knowing them …

T
HERE WAS
, too, a little fellow in the Northwestern cattle country whom a friend of mine told me about one time. The story could be researched, I guess, but I’ll tell it the way I heard it. He was pathologically solitary like Sam Sowell and was considered to be a bit demented, though in the world of the Rocky Mountain slopes, where he lived in a one-room cabin, he could cope better than well. For cash sometimes he hired out to pack outfitters nursing dudes up into the game country he knew so well, a closed face with shifting eyes outside the circle of firelight where the big men from the cities joked and drank to build up in themselves an un-confident illusion that they were feeling that other pulse.… Probably he didn’t even listen; most of their words would have been Urdu to him.

On his own, he hunted year in and out without regard for the game laws. Meat was wild meat; when you needed it you killed it and ate it, and, not needing it, you didn’t kill it: that morality must have seemed higher to him than the one that applied to the licensed dudes. People knew about his hunting, but the West, maybe because for so long it was the big empty land where the loners went, has a tolerance most of the time for that kind of queerness, and he wasn’t bothered.

Until one day the sheriff and the game warden of that county got to drinking together and decided it would be fun to go out and scare old John. It was not a very happy idea, any way you look at it.… They drove out over the rough
trail, and went to his door, and when he opened it the sheriff said: “John, they tell me you got some elk meat up here.”

Puzzled—they had joked at him from time to time in town, but he had never had trouble—John looked from one to the other of the plump, muscular townsmen, and finally said: “Why?”

“Why?” the sheriff mimicked, winking at his friend. “Why? We find any meat, you go to the jailhouse, John.”

The countryman’s eyes went back and forth faster, slitted down now, scared. “Don’t want to go to no jail,” he said.

“Ha!” said the warden. “Guess they’s been others felt that-a-way, too.”

As they grinned, he slammed the door suddenly in their faces and whipped the latchstring back through its hole. They started laughing, and after a moment he poked the muzzle of a Winchester out the window and shot the sheriff through the heart, and as the game warden turned to run, blew his head nearly off.… Then he hit for the hills with his rifle and a bag of cartridges, and for three weeks terrorized the region, not wanting to, just fighting back when they sought him. A battalion of the National Guard holed him up, they thought, on a rocky mountainside and sprayed it with eighty-millimeter mortar fire, but in the night, like an Indian, he slipped over a ridge nobody had thought anybody could slip over. He shot the hounds sent to trail him. Needing money for some unlikely scheme of escape his desperation had dreamed up, he hitchhiked into town once and held up the bank for precisely $500 (asking for that sum), killed a teller who made a jumpy gesture, and walked out through the streets to the mountains again. Having, like Sam Sowell, wanted only to be left alone, he had all the
boosters in that country wearing nickel-plated pistols, and killed five or six men before they finally got him.…