Death's Half Acre

CHAPTER 11

The mouse traps are set.

—Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

Once he was absolutely certain that Deborah was no longer following him, Kezzie Knott left the main road and turned onto a lesser one that would eventually get him back home in a more roundabout way.

Bad luck that she’d caught him like that, he thought, but he had to make sure them diamonds was real. Who was it said “Trust, but verify”?

Now that he was sure that he was not the one being played for a fool, he could get on with his fishing.

He seldom bothered to lock the truck but the collapsible fishing rod that Dwight and Terry had given him a few years back was still there on the seat beside him. They liked to fish nearly as much as he did and they each kept rods like this in their own trucks so they could wet a line whenever they got near an unexpected body of water. He had been polite about it at the time, but a bit dubious about the need for such a thing. Still and all, it had proved handy more than once and he had wound up thanking them more sincerely a few months later when he caught a four-pound catfish out of a creek he hadn’t planned on fishing when he left home that evening. But the man he was there to meet was late coming and Kezzie had killed time by throwing his hook in the water, a hook baited with a scrap of a fried chicken wing left over from his fast-food supper.

To his way of thinking, fishing was one part luck to two parts skill. You had to know where the fish were and you had to know what bait they’d bite on. Put the right bait on your hook, he thought, and even the wiliest ol’ catfish in the creek can’t help but rise to it. Once you set the hook, it was only a matter of playing him easy, giving him enough slack to let him think it was his idea to come swimming toward you. Jerk too hard and you’d tear the hook out of his mouth or else he’d put up such a fight that he’d break the line before you could get him in your net.

And thinking about bait . . .

Kezzie swung into the dirt parking area of a small country store. The ground was hard with sixty years of metal bottle caps stomped into the dirt. Once this had been a thriving one-pump gas station. Now the only fuel sold was kerosene. The air hose still worked though and the drink box still held chunks of ice to chill the glass bottles. You could buy ice and hoop cheese, tinned meats and crackers, and you could buy live crickets and red wigglers by the cupful. You could also buy a jar of ’shine if the proprietor knew you or you were vouched for by someone utterly trustworthy.

When they had nothing else to do the ATF agents would occasionally swoop down for a bust, but so far they had never been able to find the owner’s stash of untaxed white liquor, which is how it is referred to when agents testify in court.

Even though he had not supplied this store in several years, Kezzie knew who the current supplier was and he knew where the stash was hidden.

“Hey, Mr. Kezzie,” the proprietor said. “Ain’t seen you in a coon’s age. How you been?”

“Real good, Jimmy.” He pushed his hat to the back of his head. “How ’bout you?”

“Just fair. Got a little arthuritis in my hands these days, but not nothing else to complain about.”

A couple of the men seated at the front of the store stood up to give him a chair.

“Naw, now, y’all keep your seats,” he said genially. “I ain’t staying long enough to set. Just stopped in to get a little bait. Anybody know what the perch’re biting on over in Hinton’s pond these days?”

There was a moment of silence while they digested his question. None of them would point out that he had two well-stocked ponds and a creek on his own property less than a half-hour away. If Kezzie Knott wanted to fish Millard Hinton’s pond, that was his business and none of theirs.

“Ain’t heared nobody say,” the store owner said, already reaching into the cricket cage with a small cardboard cup. “How ’bout I give you some of both?”

“That’ll work.” Kezzie pulled out his wallet, but the other waved it away.

“Now you know your money ain’t no good here, Mr. Kezzie.”

The older man shook his head and laid two dollars on the counter. “I ’preciate that, Jimmy, but you got a living to make, too, and them crickets must eat a lot of mash.”

Millard Hinton was an upright pillar of the community, a farmer who had never been known to use tobacco in any form nor to take a drink of anything alcoholic. As soon as the tobacco buyout began, he sold his poundage and began raising cotton, sweet potatoes, and soybeans.

“Ain’t nobody ever found Jesus in a cigarette,” he said. “It’s Satan that wants to get you in his fire.”

Nevertheless, he had told Kezzie Knott years earlier that he would be proud to have him fish in his pond anytime he wanted. A couple of elderly men who knew about the arrangement also knew what that old bootlegger had done to merit the lasting gratitude of such a man of God, but neither of them ever spoke about it.

The man-made pond lay about a half-mile off the road and had been scooped out of three acres of soggy bottomland that had never been much good for anything except pigs and maybe holding the world together.

When Kezzie and his truck topped the rise and headed down the lane to the water’s edge, he saw another vehicle there before him. A lone man watched him approach. He was fishing with a cane pole, and a red plastic float out on the surface of the pond showed where his hook and line were.

“Evening,” said Kezzie, stepping down from the truck and taking out his own rod.

The man gave him a friendly nod.

“It ain’t gonna bother you, is it, if I do a little fishing myself?”

“Not a bit, Mr. Knott. This place is big enough for both of us.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got the better of me,” Kezzie said, giving the man a closer look. “I don’t believe we’ve met?”

“My name’s McKinney,” the man said, stretching out his hand to shake. “Faison McKinney. I’m the preacher at the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal over near you.”