Poachers (19 page)

Kent moved a step closer, his eyes down, focused on Goodloe’s boots.

Goodloe took out a notepad. “Where was y’all between the hours of four and eight
A.M.
two days ago?”

Kent looked at Neil. “Asleep.”

“Asleep,” Neil said.

Goodloe snorted. “Now come on, boys. The whole dern county knows y’all ain’t slept a night in your life. Y’all was out on the river, weren’t you? Making a few telephone calls?”

“You saying he’s a liar?” Kirxy asked.

“I’m posing the questions here.” Goodloe chewed another cracker. “Hell, everybody knows them other game wardens has been letting y’all get away with all kinds of shit. I reckon this dead fellow had something to prove. Being new and all.”

“Sounds like he oughta used a life jacket,” Kirxy said, wiping the counter.

“It appears”—Goodloe studied Kent—“that he might’ve been strangled. You got a alibi, boy?”

Kent lowered his eyes. Took his hands out of his pockets, balled them into fists.

Goodloe sighed. “I mean—Christ—is there anybody can back up what you’re saying?”

The windows flickered.

“Yeah,” Kirxy said. “I can.”

Goodloe turned and faced the storekeeper. “You.”

“That’s right. They were here with me. Here in the store.”

Goodloe looked amused. “They was, was they? Okay, Mr.

Kirxy. How come you didn’t mention that to me this morning? Saved us all a little time?”

Kirxy sought Kent’s eyes but saw nothing there, no understanding, no appreciation. No fear. He went back to wiping the counter. “Well, I guess because they was passed out drunk, and I didn’t want to say anything, being as I was, you know, giving alcohol to young’uns.”

“But now that it’s come down to murder, you figured you’d better just own up.”

“Something like that.”

Goodloe stared at Kirxy for a long time; neither would look away. Then the sheriff turned to the boys. “Y’all ever heard of Frank David?”

Dan nodded.

“Well,” Goodloe said. “Looks like he’s aiming to be this district’s game warden. I figure he pulled some strings, what he did.”

Kirxy came from behind the counter. “That all your questions? It’s past closing and these young’uns need to go home and get some sleep.” He went to the door and opened it, stood waiting.

“All righty then,” the sheriff said, standing. “I expect I oughta be getting back to the office anyhow.” He winked at Kirxy. “See you or these boys don’t leave the county for a few days. This ain’t over yet.” He put the crackers in his coat. “I expect y’all might be hearing from Frank David, too,” he said, watching the boys’ faces. But there was nothing to see.

Alone later, Kirxy put out
the light and bolted the door. He went to adjust the stove and found himself staring out the window, looking into the dark where he knew the river was rising and swirling, tires and plastic garbage can lids and deadwood from

upriver floating past. He struck a match and lit a cigarette, the glow of his ash reflected in the window, and he saw himself years ago, telling the boys those stories.

How Frank David would sit so still in the woods waiting for poachers that dragonflies would perch on his nose, gnats would walk over his eyeballs. Nobody knew where he came from, but Kirxy had heard he’d been orphaned as a baby in a fire and found half-starved in the swamp by a Cajun woman. She’d raised him on the slick red clay banks of the Tombigbee River, among lean black poachers and moonshiners. He didn’t even know how old he was, people said. And they said he was the best poacher ever, the craftiest, the meanest. That he cut a drunk logger’s throat in a juke joint knife fight one night. That he fled south and, underage, joined the marines in Mobile and wound up in Korea, the infantry, where because of his shooting ability and his stealth they made him a sniper. Before he left that country, he’d registered over a hundred kills, communists half a world away who never saw him coming.

Back home in Alabama, he disappeared for a few years, then showed up at the state game warden’s office, demanding a job. Some people had heard that in the intervening time he’d gotten religion.

“What makes you think I ought to hire you?” the head warden asked him.

“Because I spent ten years of my life poaching right under your damn nose,” Frank David said.

The Gates boys’ pickup was
the same old Ford their father had shot himself in several years before, heartbroken over their mother’s death. The bullet hole in the roof had rusted out but was now covered with a strip of duct tape from Kirxy’s store. Spots of the truck’s floor were rusted away, too, so things in the road often flew up into their laps: rocks, Budweiser cans, a king snake they were trying to run over. The truck was older than any of them, only one thin prong left of the steering wheel and the holes of missing knobs in the dash. It was a three-speed, a column shifter, the gear stick covered with a buck’s dried ball sack. The windows and windshield, busted or shot out years before, hadn’t been replaced because most of their driving took them along back roads after dark or in fields, and the things they came upon were easier shots without glass.

Though he’d never had a license, Kent drove, had since he was eight. Neil rode shotgun. Tonight both were drinking, and in the back Dan stood holding his rifle and trying to keep his balance. Below the soles of his boots the floor was soft, a tarry black from the blood of all the animals they’d killed. You could see spike antlers, forelegs and hooves of deer. Teeth, feathers and fur. The brittle beaks and beards of turkeys and the delicate, hinged leg bone of something molded in the sludge like a fossil.

Just beyond a no-trespassing sign already gnawed up by bullets, Kent swerved off the road and they bounced and slid through a field in the rain, shooting at rabbits. Then they split up, the younger boys checking traps, one on each side of the river, and Kent in the boat rebaiting their trotlines the way his father had shown him.

They met at the truck just before midnight, untied the dogs and tromped over a steep logging path, Dan on one end of four leashes and the lunging hounds on the other. When they got to the bottomland, he unclipped the leashes and loosed the dogs and the brothers followed the baying ahead in the dark, aiming their flashlights into the black mesh of trees where the eyes of coons

and possums gleamed like rubies. The hounds bayed and frothed, clawed the trunks of trees and leaped into the air and landed and leaped again, their sides pumping, ribs showing.

When the Gateses came to the river two hours later, the dogs were lapping water and panting. Dan bent and rubbed their ears and let them lick his cheeks. His brothers rested and drank, belching at the sky. After a time, they leashed the hounds and staggered downstream to the live oak where their boat was tied. They loaded the dogs in and shoved off into the fog and trolled over the still water.

In the middle, Neil lowered the wire and the chain—stolen from a child’s swing set—behind the boat and began cranking the old telephone, which he held between his legs. Dan netted the stunned catfish (you couldn’t touch them with your hand or they’d come to) and threw them into the cooler, where in a few seconds the waking fish would begin to thrash. In the rear, Kent propped his rifle on his knees and watched the bank in case a coyote wandered down hunting bullfrogs.

They climbed out of the woods into a dirt road in the misty dawn, plying through the muddy yards and pissing by someone’s front porch in plain sight of the face inside. A few houses down, Morrisette didn’t come to his door, and when Kent tried the handle it was locked. He looked at Neil, then put his elbow through the glass and reached in and unlocked it.

While his brothers searched for the liquor, Dan ate the biscuits he found wrapped in tinfoil on the stove. He found a box of cornflakes in a cabinet and ate most of them, too. He ate a plate of cold fried liver. Neil was in a bedroom looking under the bed. In the closet. He was going through drawers, his dirty fingers smudging the white shirts. In the back of the house Kent found the bathroom door, locked from the inside. He jimmied it open

with his knife, and when he came into the kitchen, he had a gallon jar of whisky under his arm and Euphrates’s stepdaughter by the wrist.

Dan stopped chewing, crumbs falling from his mouth. He approached the girl and put his hand out to touch her, but Kent pushed him hard, into the wall. Dan stayed there, a clock ticking beside his head, a string of spit linking his opened lips, watching as his brother ran his rough hands up and down the girl’s shivering body, thumbing the nipples that showed through her shirt. Her eyes were closed, lips trembling in prayer. Looking down, Kent saw the puddle spreading around her bare feet. Dan giggled, then put his hand over his mouth.

“Shit,” Kent said, letting her go. “Pissed herself.”

She shrank back against the wall, behind the door.

And was still there, along with a bag of catfish on the table, when her stepfather came back half an hour later, ten gallons of whisky under the tarp in his truck.

On that same Saturday Kirxy
drove to the chicken fights, held in Heflin Bradford’s bulging barn, deep in woods cloudy with mosquitoes. He passed the hand-painted sign that’d been there forever, as long as he could remember, nailed to a tree. It said
JESUS IS NOT COMING
.

Kirxy climbed out of his truck and buttoned his collar, his ears full of cotton. Heflin’s wife worked beneath a rented awning, grilling chicken and sausages, selling Cokes and beer. Gospel music played from a portable radio by her head. Heflin’s grandson Nolan took the price of admission at the barn door and stamped the backs of white hands and the cracked pink palms of black ones. Men in overalls and baseball caps that said
CAT DIESEL

POWER
or
STP
stood at the tailgates of their pickups, smoking cigarettes, stooping to peer into the cages where roosters paced. The air was filled with windy rain spits and the crowing of roosters, the ground littered with limp dead birds.

A group of loggers was discussing Frank David, and Kirxy paused to listen.

“He’s the one caught that bunch over in Warshington County,” one man said. “Them alligator poachers.”

“Sugarbaby said two of ’em wound up in the intensive care,” another claimed. “Said they pulled a gun and old Frank David went crazy with a ax handle.”

Kirxy moved on and paid the five-dollar admission. In the barn, there were bleachers along the walls and a big circular wooden fence in the center, a dome of chicken wire over the top. Kirxy found a seat at the bottom next to the back door, near a group of mean old farts he’d known for forty years. People around them called out bets and bets were accepted. Cans of beer lifted. Kirxy produced a thermos of coffee and a dented tin cup. He poured the coffee, then added whisky from a bottle that went back into his coat pocket. The tin cup warmed his fingers as he squinted through his bifocals to see which bird to bet on.

In separate corners of the barn, two bird handlers doused their roosters’ heads and asses with rubbing alcohol to make them fight harder. They tightened the long steel curved spurs. When the referee in the center of the ring indicated it was time, the handlers entered the pen, each cradling his bird in his arms. They flashed the roosters at one another until their feathers had ruffled with blood lust and rage, the roosters pedaling the air, stretching their necks toward each other. The handlers kept them a breath apart for a second, then withdrew them to their corners, whispering in their ears. When the referee tapped the ground three times with

his stick, the birds were unleashed. They charged and rose in the center of the ring, gouging with spur and beak, the handlers circling the fight like crabs, blood on their forearms and faces, ready to seize their roosters at the referee’s cry of “Handle!”

A clan of Louisiana Cajuns watched. They’d emerged red-eyed from a van in a marijuana cloud: skinny, shirtless men with oily ponytails and goatees and tattoos of symbols of black magic. Under their arms, they carried thick white hooded roosters to pit against the reds and blacks of the locals. Their women had stumbled out of the van behind them, high yellow like gypsies, big-lipped, big-chested girls in halter tops tied at their bellies and miniskirts and moccasins.

In the ring the Cajuns kissed their birds on the beaks, and one tall, completely bald Cajun wearing gold earrings in both ears put his bird’s whole head in his mouth. His girl, too, came barefoot into the ring, tattoo of a snake on her shoulder, and took the bird’s head into her mouth.

“Bet on them white ones,” a friend whispered to Kirxy. “These ones around here ain’t ever seen a white rooster. They don’t know what they’re fighting.”

That evening, bending to check
a trap in the woods north of the river, Dan took hold of a sapling and yelped when a spray of water rained on him. He crouched, dripping, and waited while the drumming of his heart slowed. Forced himself to rise and move on so his brothers wouldn’t laugh at him for being afraid.