Butcher

60

Bayou Ridge

Meara was fucking freezing. Chaingang be damned, he had to get out of the water. Silently as he could, he worked his way around to where he could see the boat. It would be just like that fat shit to start an outboard and send another boat out into the backwater with a wired throttle and ... Paranoia was getting the better of him. If Bunkowski had wanted his ass in the grass he'd be planted. Meara looked into the boat and didn't see any new holes but—who knew? He pulled it up a bit further and staked it.

On the way back he saw his .22 in the mud. That settled it. Unless the big boy had tampered with his piece he wouldn't leave a weapon around somebody he was going to plant. Meara wiped it off, racked the thing back, and a .22 slid into the pipe. He removed the mag, ejected the live round, cleared it, peered up the spout at moonlight. Put the magazine back in and reloaded the weapon. He noticed he was shaking a little.

The house looked and felt empty. Spooky but empty. He made himself go down to the barn while he was gutted up for it. Nobody home. In the open weapons cache he spotted something shiny and picked up his paycheck. It appeared to be real enough but, again, who knew?

He went back to the house, built a roaring fire, changed into dry clothes, and sat huddled up in bed with a pile of blankets on, the .22 still in his right fist. Shit. You could probably put a round into the big boy's brain and he'd still rip your pump out. He put the piece away and went to bed, but the shakes kept him from sleeping. He couldn't get warm.

He got up and brought his blankets in and sat huddled close to the blazing wood stove. Burning up and freezing simultaneously, dead tired and too stoked to sleep. Chaingang in his fucking life from out of the black. How had he found him? Why had he come to look for him? What did it mean? Suddenly he remembered a couple of news stories about recent Bayou City killings and shuddered as he perspired profusely under the blankets. There'd be no reason for him to bother Meara again. He'd taken what he wanted.

Ray thought about being with Sharon again. He wanted to show her how much she meant to him. He wondered if she'd like the ring. On the other hand ... Jesus! Think where it might have come from. Who wanted to know? Perhaps he could sell it or trade it to a jeweler and...

He woke up drenched in sweat, still in front of the stove, inside a wet cocoon of blankets, sick inside as if he were coming down with a bad virus, gripped by a terrible headache and the notion that it was later than he thought. He cursed aloud when he looked at the clock.

Eleven o'clock. Eleven in the fucking morning? He hadn't slept past nine in years. He had a distorted memory of having dropped off to sleep around five-thirty. His neck and head felt as if Fritz von Chaingang had held him in an iron claw all night long. He felt like hammered shit. He got up, sat back down, and tried to think.

Meara got up again, with some effort, and looked out the window. Judas! It was raining. He flung clothes on, pulled hip boots on, and topped the ensemble with a poncho, hurrying outside and slogging down the road to the boat. It was a short walk, as the water had pushed further in, and he was relieved he'd pulled the boat up thirty feet into the drain ditch. It was already sitting anchored out in the backwater, and by that evening he'd have to come in through the woods and tie up in the field behind the house. Thank God his folks had built on a high knoll.

It was the richest kind of bottom land one found in the Bootheel, but it could be costly to farm there. Backwater alone could push in during wetter years, leaving in its postdiluvian wake a stinking mudhole covered in water-logged trees. Even if they didn't blow the levee, this much water already meant Meara would spend a butt-kicking month hauling logs, picking up chunks, and doing the hard manual labor that would be necessary to farm in the flood's nasty aftermath.

Ray was not one to complain or give in to illnesses. He thought most people ran to the doctor for the least little thing, and he believed a man could will himself to stay well. When he felt bad he'd toss back a straight shot, chase it with a big glass of cold orange juice, gobble a few aspirin, and drive on. This was something else. He was sick as a dog, so much so that it was overpowering his efforts to reclaim the boat, and he shook it off as best he could.

The boat was completely full of rainwater. He tried to start bailing with the milk jug but gave up. Too much water and he was in too deep to tip it, so he untied the boat and turned to pull it back out of the water but lost his footing and stepped off into the ditch, plunging down into icy water, the mud seizing his hip boot and damn near drowning him before he could get himself unencumbered. He was beyond swearing. A quiet, slow anger was starting to build inside.

He got the boots off, tried to clean out what mud he could, gave up, and jammed them back on, sitting in the middle of the road, drenched, shivering in the rain, finally emptying the water from the boat and getting in. He got it pushed off at last and started the motor, easing the boat out the drain canal past the large oak trees and into the rainy chop.

Nobody would believe what it was like here. You could have a piece of farm ground one day and a lake the next. The wind had picked up some, and the boat was going pretty good, bouncing over the whitecaps. He was going against the current, the prow standing out of the water with his weight and the weight of the big Johnson offsetting the boat's balance. Suddenly there was a noise and the engine stopped dead. Had that fat shit monkey-wrenched him?

What now? He had the sinking sensation of being out of gas but when he looked he discovered he'd sheared off a freaking motherjamming cotter pin. He had nothing. He patted pockets, scrambled around in the recesses of the boat. He'd dumped the small nails he carried for that purpose when he'd emptied the water.

Any small piece of wire or whatever would fix it temporarily. Surely he could come up with a mere fishhook or paper clip? No. Nothing. It was starting to rain harder and he was freezing again and the current was taking him back to the big oaks. And he hadn't had any coffee, much less orange juice. And it was already noon. The day was half over and he was sitting in a boat filling with water out in the middle of what used to be his beans.

It took him fifty-seven minutes to paddle across. He was exhausted from paddling against the current and shaking from the cold. By the time he had pushed through the clog of willows on the other side he didn't have any strength left in his arms, shoulders, or back. He'd only thought he had a headache and neck ache when he woke up. This was a headache. It wouldn't have surprised him to see Chaingang waiting to snuff him.

He finally made it to the bank, reached his paddle out, and felt the wood strike good old solid roadway underneath, so he stepped out of the boat. Later, much later, he'd recount the incident and speculate that what he'd done was hit the bridge rail with the paddle. When Ray stepped out he also stepped off the Southeast Mark Road Bridge, dropping down thirty-seven feet in ice-cold water.

He was instantly traumatized. He'd never completely recall how he escaped the death grip of the wet poncho, only the vague sense of swimming into willows where he was found, clinging for his life, in shock, when Wendall Chastain came along and saved his life, hauling him into his boat and taking him back to shore.

“I'll be fine, Wendall,” he kept arguing with the man. “Just let Pee Wee Kimbro know and he'll fix my motor and bring it across to me."

“Bullshit, Ray. Now get in there and get dry clothes on before you catch your death. I'm going to run back across, but I'll be right back for you in about ten minutes. Now git!” the man commanded.

Meara didn't even thank him. He turned and trudged up the road, fighting a wave of nausea. What he wanted to do was fix a few stiff drinks and sit in front of his stove for about six days. He managed to get inside, change clothes, crack the seal on a half pint, and take a couple of shots with bottled water, although his well was sunk so deep he could have probably drunk the tap water safely. He was already sicker than any tainted wellspring could make him. He forced himself to pull a leather jacket on and went back out in the rain.

Chastain had just tied up and was starting up the road to get him when Meara came out of the house. Big pieces of the day would come back to him later as deep, dark holes, and this was one. He had zero memory of crossing back with Chastain or making his way to Kimbro's. He remembered ringing their doorbell.

One of their dogs, a strange-colored semi-hound, came barking out from behind the house and bit Meara on the back of the right leg before he could kick it away. He didn't even care.

“Hi, Ray,” Betty said, opening the door, and he sneezed in her face by way of answering. “You look like you're getting a cold. Come on in."

“Howdy,” Pee Wee's mother-in-law said. “Pee Wee ain't here."

“He had to go in to the blacksmith's, Ray."

“Can I have my keys, please?"

“Uh—I think Pee Wee's got ‘em."

“Oh.” He sneezed again.

“You're gonna give us your germs,” Pee Wee's mother-in-law told him sternly.

“I'll wait outside,” he said.

“I don't know when he'll be back. You know Pee Wee."

“That's all right."

“Say, Ray, your—uh—lady called and said to give you a message.” She went over to the phone. “Come on in,” she said as an afterthought, ignoring the look from her mother.

He opened the door. “Sharon? Sharon Kamen called?"

“I got a note here someplace,” she said, rummaging through loose scraps of paper by the telephone.

“Could I use your phone while I'm here, Betty?"

“Sure. Go ahead.” He picked it up and dialed the motel.

“Thanks,” he said, as the line rang. He heard Betty Kimbro's mother mumble something about how his germs would be in the mouthpiece of the phone and they should take Lysol to it.

Meara asked for Sharon's room number and listened to the phone ring over and over. Betty came over beside him and laid a crudely printed note down beside the phone. He could make out the word package.

“She left a package for you at the motel,” Betty told him when he eventually hung up. It brought another big shiver.

Ray thanked her and went to Pee Wee's barn and got some wire, jimmied his truck door open, and hot-wired the ignition.

“Reckon he found his keys,” Betty Kimbro said to her mother, as they turned the volume back up on the soap opera they were watching. Meara's truck could be heard starting up and roaring off in the direction of town.

“Better hope he didn't give us any of his germs,” her mother said, absentmindedly.