Poachers (18 page)

gown and step out of her underwear. Bending, she looked in the mirror to fluff her hair, then climbed in beside him. He was gentle at first, curious, then rougher, the way she liked him to be. She closed her eyes, the bed frame rattling and bumping, her father’s old pocket watch slipping off the nightstand. Water gurgled in the pipework in the walls as Neil took a bath, too, hoping for a turn of his own, which had never happened. At least not yet.

“Slow, baby,” Esther whispered in Kent’s ear. “It’s plenty of time….”

On April third it was
still raining. Kirxy put aside his crossword to answer the telephone.

“Can you come on down to the lock and dam?” Goodloe asked. “We got us a situation developing here.”

Kirxy disliked smart-ass Goodloe, but something in the sheriff’s voice told him it was serious. On the news, he’d heard that the new game warden had been missing for two days. The authorities had dragged the river all night and had a helicopter in the air. Kirxy sat forward in his chair, waiting for his back to loosen a bit. He added a shot of whisky to his coffee and gulped it down as he shrugged into his denim jacket, zipping it up to his neck because he stayed cold when it rained. He put cotton balls in his ears and set his cap on his bald head, took his walking cane from beside the door.

In his truck, the four-wheel-drive engaged and the defroster on high, he sank and rose in the deep ruts, gobs of mud flying past his windows, the wipers swishing across his view. The radio announcer said it was sixty degrees, more rain on the way, then Loretta Lynn began to sing.

A mile from the lock and dam Kirxy passed the Grove Hill ambulance, axle-deep in mud. A burly black paramedic was wedging a piece of two-by-four beneath one of the rear tires while the bored-looking driver sat behind the wheel, smoking and racing the engine.

Kirxy slowed and rolled down his window. “Y’all going after a live one or a dead one?”

“Dead, Mr. Kirxy,” the black man answered.

Kirxy nodded and accelerated. At the lock and dam, he could see a crowd of people and umbrellas and beyond them he saw the dead man, lying on the ground under a black raincoat. Some onlooker had begun to direct traffic. Goodloe and three deputies in yellow slickers stood near the body with their hands in their pockets.

Kirxy climbed out and people nodded somberly and parted to let him through. Goodloe, who’d been talking to his deputies, ceased as Kirxy approached and they stood looking at the raincoat.

“Morning, Sugarbaby,” Kirxy said, using the nickname Goodloe hated. “Is this who I think it is?”

“Yep,” Goodloe said. “Rookie game warden of the year.”

With his cane, Kirxy pulled back the raincoat to reveal the white face. “Young fellow,” he said.

There was a puddle beneath the dead man, twigs in his hair and a clove of moss in his breast pocket. With the rubber tip of his cane, Kirxy brushed a snail from the man’s forehead. He bent and looked into the warden’s left eye, which was partly open. He noticed the throat, the dark bruises there.

Goodloe unfolded a handkerchief and blew his nose, then wiped it. “Don’t go abusing the evidence, Kirxy.” He stuffed the handkerchief into his back pocket.

“Evidence? Now, Sugarbaby.”

Goodloe exhaled and looked at the sky. “Don’t shit me, Kirxy. You know good and well who done this. I expect they figure the law don’t apply up here on this part of the river, the way things is been all these years. Them other wardens scared of ’em or feeling sorry for ’em. But I reckon that’s fixing to change.” He paused. “I had to place me a call to the capitol this morning. To let ’em know we was all outta game wardens. And you won’t believe who they patched me through to.”

Kirxy adjusted the cotton in his right ear.

“Old Frank David himself,” the sheriff said. “Ain’t nothing ticks him off more than this kind of thing.”

A dread stirred in Kirxy’s belly. “Frank David. Was he a relation of this fellow?”

“Teacher,” Goodloe said. “Said he’s been giving lessons to young game wardens over at the forestry service. He asked me a whole bunch of questions. Regular interrogation. Said this here young fellow was the cream of the crop. Best new game warden there was.”

“Wouldn’t know it from this angle,” Kirxy said.

Goodloe grunted.

A photographer from the paper was studying the corpse. He glanced at the sky as if gauging the light. When he snapped the first picture, Kirxy was in it, like a sportsman.

“What’d you want from me?” he asked Goodloe.

“You tell them boys I need to ask ’em some questions, and I ain’t fixing to traipse all over the county. I’ll drop by the store this evening.”

“If they’re there, they’re there,” Kirxy said. “I ain’t their damn father.”

Goodloe followed him to the truck. “You might think of getting ’em a lawyer,” he said through the window.

Kirxy started the engine. “Shit, Sugarbaby. Them boys don’t need a lawyer. They just need to stay in the woods, where they belong. Folks oughta know to let ’em alone by now.”

Goodloe stepped back from the truck. He smacked his lips. “I don’t reckon anybody got around to telling that to the deceased.”

Driving, Kirxy remembered the Gates
brothers when they were younger, before their father shot himself. He pictured the three blond heads in the front of Boo’s boat as he motored upriver past the store, lifting a solemn hand to Kirxy where he stood with a broom on his little back porch. After Boo’s wife and newborn daughter had died, he’d taught those boys all he knew about the woods, about fishing, tracking, hunting, killing. He kept them in his boat all night as he telephoned catfish and checked his trotlines and jugs and shot things on the bank. He’d given each of his sons a job to do, one cranking the phone, another netting the stunned catfish, the third adjusting the chain that dragged along the bottom and the wire which conducted electricity from the telephone’s magnets into the water. Boo would tie a piece of rope around his sons’ waists and loop the other end to his own ankle in case one of the boys fell overboard.

Downriver, in the moonlight, Kent would pull in the trotlines while Dan handed him a cricket or catalpa worm for the hook. Neil took the bass, perch or catfish Kent gave him and slit its soft cold belly with a knife and ran two fingers up into the fish and drew out its palmful of guts and dumped them overboard. Sometimes on warm nights grinnel or cottonmouths or young alligators

would follow them, drawn by blood. A danger, too, was catching a snake or snapping turtle on the trotline, and each night Boo whispered for Kent to be careful, to lift the line with a stick and see what he had there instead of using his bare hand.

During the morning they would leave the boat tied and the boys would follow their father’s back through the trees from trap to trap, stepping when he stepped, not talking. Boo emptied the traps and rebaited them while behind him Kent put the carcasses in his squirrel pouch. In the afternoons, they gutted and skinned what they’d brought home. What time was left before dark they spent sleeping in the featherbed in the cabin where, barely a memory, their mother and sister had died.

After Boo’s suicide, Kirxy had tried to look after the boys, their ages twelve, thirteen and fourteen—just old enough, Boo must’ve thought, to raise themselves. For a while Kirxy let them stay with him and his wife, who’d never had a child. He tried to send them to school, but they were past learning to read and write and got expelled the first day for fighting, ganging up on a black kid. They were past the kind of life Kirxy’s wife was used to living. They scared her, the way they watched her with eyes narrowed into black lines, the way they ate with their hands, the way they wouldn’t talk. What she didn’t know was that from those years of wordless nights on the river and silent days in the woods they had developed a kind of language of their own, a language of the eyes, of the fingers, of the way a shoulder twitched, a nod of the head.

Because his wife’s health wasn’t good in those days, Kirxy had returned the boys to their cabin in the woods. He spent most Saturdays with them, trying to take up where Boo had left off, bringing them food and milk, clothes and new shoes, reading

them books, teaching them things and telling stories. He’d worked out a deal with Esther, who used to take hot food to them in the evenings and wash their clothes….

Slowing to let two buzzards hop away from a dead deer, Kirxy lit a cigarette and wiped the foggy windshield with the back of his hand. He thought of Frank David, Alabama’s legendary game warden. There were dozens of stories about the man—Kirxy had heard and told them for years, had repeated them to the Gates boys, even made some up to try to scare them into obeying the law. Now the truth and the fictions were confused in his mind. He remembered one: A dark, moonless night, and two poachers use a spotlight to freeze a buck in the darkness and shoot it. They take hold of its wide rack of antlers and struggle to drag the big deer when suddenly they realize that now three men are pulling. The first poacher jumps and says, “Hey, it ain’t supposed to be but two of us dragging this deer!”

And Frank David says, “Ain’t supposed to be none of y’all dragging it.”

The Gates boys came in
the store just before closing, smelling like the river. Nodding to Kirxy, they went to the shelves and began selecting cans of things to eat. Kirxy poured himself a generous shot of whisky. He’d stopped by their cabin earlier and, not finding them there, left a quarter on the steps. A signal he hadn’t used in years.

“Sheriff Goodloe’s coming by tonight,” he said to Kent. “Wants to ask if y’all know anything about that dead game warden.”

Kent shot the other boys a look.

“Now I don’t know if y’all’ve ever even seen that fellow,” Kirxy

said, “and I’m not asking you to tell me.” He paused, in case they wanted to. “But that’s what old Sugarbaby’s gonna have on his mind. If I was y’all, I just wouldn’t tell him anything. Just say I was at home, that I don’t know nothing about any dead game warden. Nothing at all.”

Kent shrugged and walked down the aisle he was on and stared out the back window, though there wasn’t anything to see except the trees, ghostly and bent, when lightning came. His brothers took seats by the stove and began to eat. Kirxy watched, remembering when he used to read to them,
Tarzan of the Apes
and
The Return of Tarzan
. The boys had wanted to hear the books over and over—they loved the jungle, the elephants, rhinos, gorillas, the anacondas thirty feet long. They would listen intently, their eyes bright in the light of the stove, Dan holding in his small dirty fingers the Slinky Kirxy had given him as a Christmas present, his lips moving along with Kirxy’s voice, mouthing some of the words:
the great apes; Numa the lion; La, Queen of Opar, the Lost City
.

They had listened to his Frank David stories the same way: the game warden rising from the black water beside a tree on a moonless night, a tracker so keen he could see in the dark, could follow a man through the deepest swamp by smelling the fear in his sweat: a bent-over shadow stealing between the beaver lodges, the cypress trees, the tangle of limb and vine, parting the long wet bangs of Spanish moss with his rifle barrel, creeping toward the glowing windows of the poacher’s cabin, the deer hides nailed to the wall, the gator pelts, the fish with their grim smiles hooked to a clothesline, turtle shells like army helmets drying on the windowsills. Any pit bull meant to guard the place lying behind him with its throat slit, Frank David slips out of the fog with fog still clinging to the brim of his hat. He circles the cabin, peers in

each window, mounts the porch. Puts his shoulder through the front door. Stands with wood splinters landing on the floor at his feet. A man of average height, clean-shaven: no threat until the big hands come up, curl into fists, the knuckles scarred, blue, sharp.

Kirxy finished his drink and poured another. It burned pleasantly in his belly. He looked at Neil and Dan, occupied by their bags of corn curls. A Merle Haggard song ended on the radio and Kirxy clicked it off, sparing the boys the evening news.

In the quiet, Kirxy heard Goodloe’s truck. He glanced at Kent, who’d probably been hearing it for a while. Outside, Goodloe slammed his door. He hurried up the steps and tapped on the window. Kirxy exaggerated his limp and took his time letting him in.

“Good evening,” Goodloe said, shaking the water from his hands. He took off his hat and hung it on the nail by the door, then hung up his yellow slicker.

“Evening, Sugarbaby,” Kirxy said.

“If I can volunteer a little understatement here,” Goodloe said, “it’s a tad wet tonight.”

“Yep.” Kirxy went behind the counter and refilled his glass. “You just caught the tail end of happy hour. That is, if you’re off the wagon again. Can I sell you a tonic? Warm you up?”

“You know we’re a dry county, Kirxy.”

“Would that be a no?”

“It’s a watch your ass.” Goodloe looked at the brothers. “Just wanted to ask these boys some questions.”

“Have at it, Sugarbaby.”

Goodloe walked to the Lance rack and detached a package of Nip-Chee crackers. He opened it, offered the pack to each of the boys. Only Dan took one. Smiling, Goodloe bit a cracker in half

and turned a chair around and sat with his elbows across its back. He looked over toward Kent, half-hidden by shadow. He chewed slowly. “Come on out here so I can see you, boy. I ain’t gonna bite nothing but these stale-ass cheese crackers.”