Poisoned Soil: A Supernatural Thriller (14 page)

“Nope. Don’t know jack shit about ’em.”

Somehow hearing that put Blake at ease. Maybe he had overreacted. He’d probably find Jesse and Shane just fine the next day, but if he didn’t, he was relieved that Terry didn’t know their families or where they lived any more than Blake did.

“Them boys better hunker down tonight,” Terry said as they drove north on 441 through Dillard. “There’s panthers in them hills.”

Blake chuckled. “There ain’t no mountain lions or panthers around here no more,” Blake said, his mountain accent coming on stronger every minute he talked to Terry.

“Well...ain’t no mountain lions no more I reckon,” Terry conceded, “but there sure is heck is panthers. We got pictures of them with our deer cam on the Sky Valley side of Rabun Bald. DNR tells folks they ain’t no panthers cause if they admit it folks’ll want to hunt and kill ’em. Then there won’t be none.”

Blake listened to pass the time, wondering as he drove the winding road up to Sky Valley what really did lurk in the woods on that mountainside...what came out at night. He had hunted the hills a fair amount growing up in Rabun County and felt pretty comfortable in the woods. Comfortable enough to know one thing for sure. He wouldn’t want to be in those woods alone at night.

Chapter 11

Smoke wafted through the air and carried with it a symphony of odors. Yeast, burnt corn, fire: smells commingled with sounds, the crackling of a nearby fire, and the sizzling sound that accompanied another smell, bacon.

Ozzie’s eyes twitched open and quickly blinked shut, not ready to accept the harsh, late morning sunlight. He opened them again, squinting, feeling as if he were in a dream. He was lying on the ground and everything appeared sideways to him. Rolling his neck to the right, he was able to take in more of his surroundings. Above was a wooden structure, the underside of a porch. A cabin. Ozzie tilted his head back to see an open door that went into the cabin. A hard, wooden floor lay beneath him as he turned his attention to what lay across him. It had been a long time since Ozzie had felt anything as soft as the blanket that someone had draped over him. Slowly he regained consciousness, not yet thinking of how he came to be there. Rather, just painting a relaxed picture of his environment. Like someone on a morphine drip, conscious to the world, but absent of reason. He let his neck roll to his left. A few feet from him a fire ring encircled a well-tended fire, above which a flat, metal surface rested. Smoke rose from the surface, as did the sound of meat sizzling.

“Howdy,” a voice said from the other side of the fire. Ozzie’s focus shifted from the fire to the man the way an auto-focus camera resets its focus on a distant object. The feeling of sedation began to wear off as Ozzie saw the man. He labored with great difficulty to remember what happened, how he got here, but was able to string together only memory fragments. Hunting mushrooms with mom, running through the woods, getting shot! Coyotes! The fragments stopped there, not remembering Eduardo, Felipe, who this man was, or how he got here.

“The name’s Hal,” the man said. “Hal Skinner.”

Hal leaned forward and stoked the fire, and then sat silently for a second, not sure what else to say. He had not spoken to another human being in almost five years. In all that time he had spoken to himself countless times, concluding ultimately that that was all thinking really was; someone talking to himself. He had tested his new theory once a few years back trying to see if he could think without a voice in his head speaking. He wasn’t able to.

It surprised him a little that he was able to speak so easily to Ozzie. He thought of movies he had seen years before, in which people were stranded or isolated for years and almost forgot how to speak. Then again, Hal had never really stopped talking. He simply ranted to animals now. Of course, he hadn’t forgotten his own name, but hearing himself say the name “Hal Skinner” almost startled him, as if he had come to believe his identity had been erased along with his physical being in the civilized world.

Ozzie stared at Hal, not feeling afraid and unable to act on his fear if he had. The frazzled hood of a wool jacket loosely covered greasy, scraggly hair that draped over the man’s weathered blue eyes, the bangs shielding the dirt-encrusted crow’s feet around his left eye. His unkempt beard, a scruffy mixture of rust, gray, black, and dirt rose to meet his hair, giving his face the look of a soiled egg. His cheeks were well worn, stained with dirt, age, and tears. Indeed, he had his reasons to cry, to live here alone in the woods and to leave the rest of society behind.

“You probably smelled that batch of moonshine I got brewing over there,” Hal said. Ozzie said nothing and kept staring as Hal struggled to compose his next sentence. Ozzie understood none of Hal’s words, but did understand his tone. He wasn’t like any of the other men. He seemed kind, more like his mother.

“Got some bacon frying too,” Hal paused, thinking of something to add. “Not pork bacon, mind you. Venison bacon. I don’t—” Hal fought for words, not used to having to say anything. “I don’t care for pork too much, you understand. Hell, can’t get it much around here anyway. Isn’t like there’s a Piggly Wiggly in these woods.”

Ozzie stared at Hal.

Hal looked at Ozzie then back at the fire, poking it some. “Hell, I figure you probably can’t understand a word I’m saying,” he said. “You ain’t exactly answering back, but what the hell do I know? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Ozzie stared at Hal and farted. Hal laughed for the first time in over five years, since before his wife’s funeral. “Good idea,” Hal said, and matched Ozzie one. Ozzie blinked, but said nothing. He rolled his head again to look at the door, staring at the top of the entrance. A strange inscription caught his eye and Ozzie tried to turn to make it out.

“TEOTWAWKI” were the letters that had been carved and burnt into the cabin wall.

Hal caught Ozzie looking up.

“Tee Ought Walk E,” Hal said. “That’s how you say that, you know. It means The End Of The World As We Know It. Tee Ought Walk E. That’s why I came out here after,” Hal blurted, his blood boiling as the memory of his wife rose to the surface. He paused, realizing that no one had forced him to bring it up. He had almost volunteered to bring it up.
Don’t go there Hal, please don’t relive that
, he counseled himself, too late as the cork was set to pop and spill his bottled emotions. Hal’s grip on the poking stick tightened as he jabbed the fire and went back in time, unable to differentiate if he was merely thinking or talking aloud, as they had become one and the same to him by now.

“There was just nothing left to me, for me, after she died. Still isn’t. It’s like I’m trapped in a different world. Landscapes are in black and white, food has no taste, flowers have no smell. I see it all but everything is void of virtue,” Hal blurted, without knowing it. He was in some place else now, that other place he went to so often, where he kept himself right after she died, the time and place where suffering and isolation was the greatest.

“I imprisoned myself the minute the funeral was over. Didn’t take calls, allowed no one to see me, wouldn’t even talk to her parents. Just shut down, shut the world out,” Hal continued, spewing his stream of recollection as if on the sofa at a shrink’s office.

Ozzie stared into the fire. The realization that Ozzie couldn’t understand a word he was saying encouraged Hal to continue. “I took a month to get everything in order. You know, accounts, property, bills and all that bullshit. I decided I’d go into the woods and disappear. Don’t really know why. Figured I could suffer and die here, I guess I wanted that most of all. Didn’t have it in me to commit suicide. Just didn’t feel that was my right. But I wanted it to all be over. The hate, the suffering, the anger, the loss.”

Ozzie tried to reposition himself, but his pain was getting worse. He grunted and grimaced as he tried to move. Hal snapped out of his diatribe and realized Ozzie was in pain. “Careful there Ozzie, you’ve had a rough go,” he said.

Ozzie stared at him, unsure of what to think.

“Oh yeah,” Hal said, “I know your name. Right there hanging on that tag they stuck on you, like military dog tags or a prison tag. OZZIE, it says. Can’t imagine where you came from though. Don’t care none, neither.”

Hal leaned over, grabbed his jug of corn whiskey and walked to Ozzie. His approach frightened Ozzie and he tried to get up, but a sharp pain from his rear made it impossible. He grimaced again. “Easy there,” Hal said. “Like I said, you’ve had a rough go. Them coyotes clean broke your leg and bit right through it and your shoulder. I’ve been wanting to blast them suckers to smithereens for some time now. They was hooting and hollering up the ridge there not a hundred yards from here so I walked up with my shotgun and there they were beating you like you was Rodney King. Didn’t look like a fair fight to me so I took two of them down. The other two scattered off and I brought you back here. That was...let’s see...don’t really know what day today is, but that was three or four days ago, I reckon. I’ve been keeping you fed on this moonshine to take the edge of that pain off.”

Hal stopped talking for a moment to look at Ozzie’s wounds.

“I had to leave these wounds open, son, to let them drain. Made you a bandage out of some sphagnum moss I took from a mountain bog not too far from here. They used to use this stuff in the Civil War, you know, when they ran out of sterile dressings. Healed wounds faster than the cotton did! That’s cause this stuff doesn’t let bacteria grow.”

Hal let the moss bandage do its work and held the back of Ozzie’s head to pour a little shine into his mouth. Ozzie drank it, vaguely remembering it. Hal gently placed his head back down and stroked it before returning to the fire.

“That right there’s the whole problem with this world,” Hal said, on the verge of a rant. “The answer to most things is right there in nature. But you can’t put a patent on that moss so there ain’t no money in it. Instead we just whip up some concoctions made of who knows what, put it in a pill, give it a stupid name so a pharmaceutical company can sell it. Only, if you listen to the fast-talking snake oil salesman on the commercial, it creates all kinds of side effects that need another pill. So people buy that pill! Ain’t no need for none of it!” Hal concluded out of breath, his face becoming flustered. He thought for a moment as he checked the bacon.

“Bacon’s done,” he said. “I’ll just put it over here. You can try some later if you’d like.”

Hal sat back down, looked at Ozzie, and shook his head at all he had said in the last few minutes. He didn’t want to talk, had become used to not talking, but the words just bubbled out as if someone had shaken the soda bottle violently before opening it. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” Hal said, his words still bubbling out. “I just didn’t want to live without her. Didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, hear them say shit like “oh we’re so sorry” and “she was such an amazing woman” and whatever. Hell, I know how amazing she was. We did everything together, and I mean everything. Worked together, slept together, played together. No other friends, just her. And I was her one and only friend. And then...one of us is gone, leaving the other all alone.”

Hal looked at Ozzie and realized that he too must be alone.

“Well, like I said, I just wanted to die, to be gone. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t jump off the bridge, if you catch my meaning. So I just hightailed it to the woods figuring if I had to be alone without her I’d just as soon be alone without anyone. Besides, the world’s going to hell in a hand basket anyway. So I grabbed the things I needed to live out here and came and found my spot. To tell you the truth I figured for sure I’d be dead by now. Hoped I would, anyway, but death hasn’t taken me.”

Hal stopped, realizing that he had been talking nonstop, and wanting to extend an opportunity to Ozzie if he had something to say. Ozzie’s eyes were sealed as the moonshine had coaxed his pain away and his body to sleep.

Hal continued ranting, half drunk now.

“Hey...I’m a quarter Cherokee, you know. Yep, Skinner, you can look the name up on the Dawes Roll of 1906, it’s right there. My ancestors were run off this land, did you know that?”

Drool oozed from Ozzie’s mouth as he lay on the porch.

“Back in 1838,” Hal continued. “Made to march on foot about a thousand frigging miles, you believe that? White men like the other three quarters of me imprisoned them and took their land. A frigging crime!” Hal took a stick and stirred the fire as he continued his rant. “Then again, the Cherokee ended up keeping some slaves of their own, so I guess we’re all either captor or captive depending on what day it is. Can’t just let every creature live freely I reckon.” Hal exhaled as he concluded his rant and stopped talking, realizing that he had put his first audience in five years to sleep.

Hal walked over to Ozzie and checked on his blanket. He had been badly hurt and would need time to heal, but for the first time in a very long time, Hal felt a twinge of purpose. For so long his life had no meaning and he wanted only for his body and soul to fade into the forest soil, becoming lost amidst the winter leaf litter. To just end it all already. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that.

In Hal’s barren field of despair a lone seed of hope now germinated, and its name was Ozzie. He had nurtured it for days, nursing it to its next phase of recovery, and he would continue nursing it. Hoping for it the happiness that eluded him and perhaps tasting a bit of happiness for himself once more.