sledgehammers, and if Bodean couldn’t detect it, he was surely as deaf as a
post.
His voice drifted to me, from my left. “Might as well give up, kid. I
know where you are.”
He sounded convincing. I almost answered him, but I realized he was just
as much in the dark as I was. I kept my mouth shut and my head low.
A few seconds later, Bodean shouted from a little farther away: “We’re
gonna find you! Oh yeah, don’t you worry, we’ll find every one of you sneakin’
bastards!”
He was moving off. I waited a couple of minutes longer, listening to the
Blaylocks calling to each other. Evidently, Davy Ray and Ben had both escaped
and Biggun was furious about it. “You’re gonna find those kids if it takes you
all goddamn night!” he roared at his sons, and they meekly answered “Yes sir.”
I figured I’d better get out while the getting was good, so I got up and crept
away like a whipped pup.
I sure didn’t know where I was going. I knew only that I needed to put as
much distance between my skin and the Blaylocks as possible. I thought about
doubling back and trying to find the other guys, but I was scared the
Blaylocks would nab me. I just kept walking into the dark. If bobcats and
rattlers were anywhere around, they couldn’t possibly be worse than the
two-legged beasts behind me. Maybe I walked for half an hour before I found a
boulder to crouch on, and under the stars I realized my predicament: my
knapsack, with all it contained, was back at the campsite, wherever that might
be from here. I had no food, no water, no flashlight, no matches, and Davy Ray
had the compass.
I had a crushing thought: Mom had been right. I should’ve waited until I
was thirteen.
8
Chile Willow
I HAVE KNOWN LONG NIGHTS BEFORE. LIKE WHEN I HAD STREP throat and couldn’t
sleep and every minute seemed a torment. Or when Rebel had been sick with
worms, and I stayed awake worrying as he coughed and whined. The night I spent
huddled on that boulder, though, was an eternity of regret, fear, and
discomfort all jammed into six hours. I knew one thing for sure: this was my
last camping trip. I jumped at every imagined sound. I peered into the dark,
seeing hulking shapes where there were only skinny pines. I would’ve tossed
every issue of National Geographic on a bonfire for two peanut-butter
sandwiches and a bottle of Green Spot. Sometime near dawn, the mosquitoes
found me. They were so big I might’ve grabbed their legs and hitched a ride to
Zephyr by air. I was miserable, from my red-blotched bites to my growling
belly.
I had plenty of time, between slapping at skeeters and listening for the
sounds of footsteps creeping up on me, to wonder what was in the box that Mr.
Moultry and Mr. Hargison had paid four hundred dollars for. Man, that was a
fortune of money! If the Blaylocks were involved, it had to be something
wicked. What were Mr. Moultry and Mr. Hargison planning to do with the
contents of that box? Something Mr. Hargison had said came back to me: They
won’t know what hit ’em until they’re tap-dancin’ in hell.
Whatever this was about, it was a bad enough business to be conducted
late at night in the middle of the woods, and I had no doubt the Blaylocks
would cut our throats—and maybe Mr. Moultry and Mr. Hargison would, too—to
keep it a secret.
At last the sun began to rise, painting the sky pink and purple. I
figured I’d better get moving again, in case the Blaylocks were somewhere
close. Yesterday we’d been following the sun, and that had been afternoon, so
I chose to head due east. I started off on aching legs, my heart hungry for
home.
I figured I might be able to get to a high point and see Zephyr, or
Saxon’s Lake, or at least a road or a railroad track. On the hilltops,
however, I could see only more woods. I did get a break, though, about two
hours after dawn: a jet plane screamed overhead, and I saw its landing gears
slide down. I changed course a few degrees, heading for what I hoped was the
Air Force base. The woods, though, seemed to be thickening up rather than
thinning. The sun was heating up, the ground rough underfoot, and soon I was
wet with sweat. The gnats returned, with all their brothers, sisters, uncles,
and cousins, and they swarmed around my head like a dark halo.
Soon I heard more jets shrieking, though I couldn’t see them through the
trees, and then I heard the dull whump! whump! whump! of explosions. I
stopped, realizing I was near the bomb testing grounds. From the next ridge I
could see dark plumes of smoke and dust rising into the sky to what I reasoned
was the northeast. Which meant I was a long, arduous way from my front door.
My belly and the sun at its zenith told me it was high noon. I was
supposed to have been home by now. My mother would start going crazy soon, and
my dad would start warming up his whipping hand. What would hurt most would be
admitting I wasn’t as grown-up today as I thought I’d been yesterday.
I continued on, skirting the area where the bombs were dropped. The last
thing I needed was to be greeted by a few hundred pounds of high explosive. I
pushed through tangles of thorns that bit my skin and tore my clothes, and I
gritted my teeth and took what was coming to me. Little panics kept flaring up
inside me, my mind seeing rattlesnakes in every shadow. If ever I wished I
could really fly, now was the time.
And then, all of a sudden, I emerged from the pine woods into a green,
leafy glade. Sunlight glittered off the rippling water of a small pond, and in
that water a girl was swimming. She must’ve not been there long because only
the ends of her long, golden hair were wet. She was as brown as a berry, the
water glistening on her arms and shoulders as she stroked back and forth. I
was about to call to her, and then she flipped over on her back and I saw she
was naked.
Instantly my heart jumped and I stepped behind a tree, more afraid to
startle her than anything else. Her legs kicked blissfully, the small buds of
her breasts visible above the surface. She wore nothing to cover the area
between her long, sleek thighs either, and I was ashamed to be looking but my
eyes were spellbound. She turned and slid underwater. When she came up again,
halfway across the pond, she swept her thick wet tresses back from her
forehead and flipped over once more, gazing up at the blue sky as she floated.
Now, this was an interesting situation, I reasoned. Here I stood, hungry
and thirsty, covered with mosquito bites and thorn welts, knowing my mother
and father were calling up the sheriff and the fire chief by now, and twenty
feet in front of me was a shimmering green pond with a naked blond girl
floating in it. I hadn’t gotten a good look at her face yet, but I could tell
she was older than me, maybe fifteen or sixteen. She was long and lean, and
she swam not with the splashy giddiness of a child but with an elegant, easy
grace. I saw her clothes lying at the base of a tree on the other side of the
pond, and a trail led off into the woods. The girl dove under, her legs
kicking, then she resurfaced and slowly swam toward her clothes. She stopped,
her feet finding the slippery bottom. Then she started wading in toward shore,
and the moment of truth was thrust upon me.
“Wait!” I called out.
She spun around. Her face turned red and her hands flew up to cover her
breasts, and then she ducked down in the water up to her throat. “Who’s there?
Who said that?”
“I did.” I came out, sheepishly, from my hiding-place. “Sorry.”
“Who are you? How long have you been standin’ there?”
“Just a couple of minutes,” I said. I followed it with a white lie. “I
didn’t see anythin’.”
The girl was staring at me with open-mouthed indignation, her wet hair
crimped around her shoulders. Her face was illuminated by a spill of sunlight
through the trees, and I looked beyond her anger at a vision of beauty. Which
surprised me, because the power of her beauty hit me so hard and suddenly.
There are many things a boy considers beautiful: the shine of a bike’s paint,
the luster of a dog’s pelt, the singing of a yo-yo as it loops the loop, the
yellow harvest moon, the green grass of a meadow, and free hours at hand. The
face of a girl, no matter how well-constructed, is usually not in that realm
of appreciation. At that moment, though, I forgot about my hungry belly and my
mosquito bites and my thorn stings. A girl with the most beautiful face I’d
ever seen was staring at me, her eyes pale cornflower blue, and I had the
feeling of waking up from a prolonged, lazy sleep into a new world I had never
realized existed.
“I’m lost,” I managed to say.
“Where’d you come from? Were you spyin’ on me?”
“No. I… came from that way.” I motioned in the direction behind me.
“You’re tellin’ a story!” she snapped. “Ain’t nobody lives up in them
hills!”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
She remained hunkered down in the water, her arms around herself. I could
tell that the anger was gradually leaving her, because the expression in her
eyes was softening. “Lost,” she repeated. “Where do you live?”
“Zephyr.”
“Oh, now I know you’re tellin’ a story! Zephyr’s all the way on the other
side of the valley!”
“I was campin’ out last night,” I told her. “Me and my friends. Somethin’
happened, and I got lost.”
“What happened?”
I shrugged. “Some men got after us.”
“Are you tellin’ me the honest truth?”
“I am, I swear it.”
“All the way from Zephyr? You must be worn out!”
“Kinda,” I said.
“Turn around,” she told me. “Don’t you dare look till I say for you to.
All right?”
“All right,” I agreed, and I turned my back to her. I heard her getting
out of the water, and in my mind I saw her naked from head to toe. Clothes
rustled. In a minute or two she said, “You can turn around now.” When I looked
at her again, she was dressed in a pink T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers.
“What’s your name?” she asked, pushing her hair back from her forehead.
“Cory Mackenson.”
“I’m Chile Willow,” she said. “Come on with me, Cory.”
Oh, she spoke my name so fine.
I followed her along the trail through the woods. She was taller than me.
She didn’t walk like a little girl. She was sixteen, I figured. Walking behind
her, I inhaled her scent like the aroma of dew on newly cut grass. I tried to
step where she stepped. If I’d had a tail, I would’ve wagged it. “I don’t live
too far,” Chile Willow said, and I answered, “That’s good.”
On a dirt road stood a tarpaper shack with a chicken coop next to it and
a rust-eaten car hulk sitting on cinderblocks in the weedy yard. The place was
even worse than the rundown house where Granddaddy Jaybird had lost his shirt
playing poker. I had already taken notice that Chile’s jeans were patched and
ragged, and there were dime-sized holes in her T-shirt. The house she lived in
made the poorest dwelling in Bruton look like a palace. She opened the screen
door on squalling hinges and said into the gloom, “Momma? I found somebody!”
I entered the house after her. The front room smelled of harsh cigarette
smoke and turnip greens. A woman was sitting in a rocking chair, knitting as
she rocked. She stared at me with the same cornflower blue eyes as her
beautiful daughter, from a face seamed with wrinkles and burned dry by hard
work in the sun. “Throw him back,” she said, and her needles never stopped.
“He’s lost,” Chile told her. “Was lost, I mean. Says he came from
Zephyr.”
“Zephyr,” the woman said. Her eyes returned to me. She wore a dark blue
shift with yellow needlework across the front, and she had on rubber
flipflops. “You’re a long way from home, boy.” Her voice was low and husky, as
if the sun had dried up her lungs, too. On a scarred little table near at hand
was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and half a cigarette still burning.
“Yes, ma’am. I sure would like to call my folks. Can I use your phone?”
“Ain’t got no phone,” she said. “This ain’t Zephyr.”
“Oh. Well… can somebody take me home?”
Chile’s mother plucked the cigarette from the ashtray, took a long pull
on it, and set it back down. When she spoke again, the smoke dribbled from her
mouth. “Bill’s took the truck off. Be back directly, I reckon.”
I wanted to ask how long “directly” might be, but that would be impolite.
“Can I have a glass of water?” I asked Chile.
“Sure thing. You ought to take off that shirt, too, it’s wringin’ wet. Go
on, take it off.” While Chile went back to the dismal little kitchen, I
unbuttoned my shirt and peeled it away from my skin. “Done got yourself in
some thorns, boy,” Chile’s mother said, her mouth leaking smoke again. “Chile,
bring the iodine in here and doctor this boy.” Chile answered, “Yes’m,” and I
folded my sweat-drenched shirt up and stood waiting for pleasure and pain.
Chile had to pump the water out of the kitchen faucet. Coming out, the
water spat and gurgled. When it got to me, it was warm and tinged with brown
and contained in a jelly glass with a picture of Fred Flintstone on it. I took
a taste and smelled something foul. Then Chile Willow’s face was near mine,
and the sweetness of her breath was like new roses. She had a swab of cotton
and a bottle of iodine. “This might hurt a little bit,” she said.
“He can take it,” her mother answered for me.
Chile went to work. I winced and drew in my breath as the stinging
started and then deepened. As the pain progressed, I watched Chile’s face. Her
hair was drying, falling in golden waves over her shoulders. Chile got down on
her knees before me, the red cotton swab leaving streaks of red across my
flesh. My heart was beating harder. Her pale blue eyes met mine, and she
smiled. “You’re doin’ just fine,” she said. I smiled back, though I was
hurting so bad I wanted to cry.
“How old are you, boy?” Chile’s mother inquired.
“Twelve.” Another white lie rolled out: “I’ll be thirteen soon.” I kept
looking at Chile’s eyes. “How old are you?” I asked her.
“Me? I’m an old lady. I’m sixteen.”
