The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Tom Franklin Poachers from Texas Review

At dawn, on the first day of April, the three Gates brothers banked their ten-foot aluminum boat in a narrow slough of dark water. They tied their hounds, strapped on their rifles, and stepped out, ducking black magnolia branches heavy with rain and Spanish moss. The two thin younger brothers, denim overalls tucked into their boots, lugged between them a styrofoam cooler of iced fish and coons and possums. The oldest brother — bearded, heavyset, twenty years old — carried a Sunbeam Bread sack of eels in his coat pocket. Hooked over his left shoulder was the pink body of a fawn they’d shot and skinned, and, over the right, a stray dog to which they’d done the same. With the skins and heads gone and the dog’s tail chopped off, they were difficult to tell apart.

The Gateses climbed the hill, clinging to vines and saplings, slipping in the red clay, their boots coated and enormous by the time they stepped out of the woods. For a moment they stood in the road, looking at the gray sky, the clouds piling up. The two younger ones, Scott and Wayne, set the cooler down. Kent, the oldest, removed his limp cap and squeezed the water from it. He nodded and his brothers picked up the cooler. They rounded a curve and crossed a one-lane bridge, stopping to piss over the rail into creek water high from all the rain, then went on, passing houses on either side: dark warped boards with knotholes big enough to look through and cement blocks for steps. Black men appeared in doors and windows to watch them go by — to most of these people they were something not seen often, something nocturnal and dangerous. Along this stretch of the Alabama River, everyone knew that the brothers’ father, Boo Gates, had married a girl named Anna when he was thirty and she was seventeen, and that the boys had been born in quick succession, with less than a year between them.

But few outside the family knew that a fourth child — a daughter, unnamed — had been stillborn, and that Boo had buried her in an unmarked grave in a clearing in the woods behind their house. Anna died the next day and the three boys, dirty and naked, watched their father’s stoop-shouldered descent into the earth as he dug her grave. By the time he’d finished it was dark and the moon had come up out of the trees and the boys lay asleep upon each other in the dirt like wolf pups.

The name of this community, if it could be called that, was Lower Peachtree, though as far as anybody knew there’d never been an Upper Peachtree. Scattered along the leafy banks of the river were ragged houses, leaning and drafty, many empty, caving in, so close to the water they’d been built on stilts. Each April floods came and the crumbling land along the riverbank would disappear and each May, when the flood waters receded, a house or two would be gone.

Upriver, near the lock and dam, stood an old store, a slanting building with a steep, rusty tin roof and a stovepipe in the back. Behind the store the mimosa trees sagged, waterlogged. In front, beside the gas pump, long green steps led up to the door, where a red sign said “Open.” Inside to the right, like a bar, a polished maple counter covered the entire wall. Behind the counter hung a rack with wire pegs for tools, hardware, fishing tackle. The condoms, bullets, and tobacco products, the rat poison and the Old Timer knife display were beneath the counter.

The store owner, Old Kirxy, had bad knees, and this weather settled around his joints like rot. For most of his life he’d been married and lived in a nice house on the highway. Two-story. Fireplaces in every bedroom. A china cabinet. But when his wife died two years ago, cancer, he found it easier to avoid the house, to keep the bills paid and the grass mowed but the door locked, to spend nights in the store, to sleep in the back room on the army cot and to warm his meals of corned beef and beef stew on a hot plate. He didn’t mind that people had all but stopped coming to the store. As long as he served a few long-standing customers, he thought he’d stick around. He had his radio and one good station, WJDB of Thomasville, and money enough. He liked the area, knew his regulars weren’t the kind to drive an hour to the nearest town. For those few people, Kirxy would go once a week to Grove Hill to shop for goods he’d resell, marking up the price just enough for a reasonable profit. He didn’t need the money, it was just good business.

Liquor-wise, the county was dry, but that didn’t stop Kirxy from selling booze. For his regulars, he would serve plastic cups of the cheap whiskey he bought in the next county or bottles of beer he kept locked in the old refrigerator in back. For these regulars, he would break packages of cigarettes and keep them in a cigar box and sell them for a dime apiece, a nickel stale. Aspirins were seven cents each, Tylenol tablets nine. He would open boxes of shotgun shells or cartridges and sell them for amounts that varied, according to caliber, and he’d been known to find specialty items — paperback novels, explosives, and, once, a rotary telephone.

At Euphrates Morrisette’s place, the Gates brothers pounded on the back door. In his yard a cord of wood was stacked between two fenceposts and covered by a green tarp, brick halves holding the tarp down. A tire swing, turning slowly and full of rainwater, hung from a white oak. When Morrisette appeared — he was a large, bald black man — Kent held out the fawn and dog. Morrisette put on glasses and squinted at both. “Hang back,” he said, and closed the door. Kent sat on the porch edge and his brothers on the steps.

The door opened and Morrisette came out with three pint jars of homemade whiskey. Each brother took ajar and unscrewed its lid, sniffed the clear liquid. Morrisette set his steaming coffee cup on the windowsill. He fastened his suspenders, looking at the carcasses hanging over the rail. The brothers were already drinking.

“Where’s that girl?” Kent asked, his face twisted from the sour whiskey.

“My stepdaughter, you mean?” Morrisette’s Adam’s apple pumped in his throat. “She inside.” Far away a rooster crowed.

“Get her out here,” Kent said. He drank again, shuddered.

“She ain’t but fifteen.”

Kent scratched his beard. “Just gonna look at her.”

When they left, the stepdaughter was standing on the porch in her white nightgown, barefoot, afraid, and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The brothers backed away clanking with hardware and grinning at her, Morrisette’s jaw clenched.

Sipping from their jars, they took the bag of eels down the road to the half-blind conjure woman who waited on her porch. Her house, with its dark drapes and empty parrot cages dangling from the eaves, seemed to be slipping off into the gully. She snatched the eels from Kent, squinting into the bag with her good eye. Grunting, she paid them from a dusty cloth sack on her apron and muttered to herself as they went up the dirt road. Wayne, the youngest, looked back, worried that she’d put a hex on them.

They peddled the rest of the things from their cooler, then left through the dump, stumbling down the ravine in the rain, following the water’s edge to their boat. In the back, Kent wedged his jar between his thighs and ran the silent trolling motor with his foot. His brothers leaned against the walls of the boat, facing opposite banks, no sound but rain and the low hum of the motor. They drank silently, holding the burning whiskey in their mouths before gathering the will to swallow. Along the banks, fallen trees held thick strands of cottonmouth, black sparkling creatures dazed and slow from winter, barely able to move. If not for all the rain, they might still be hibernating, comatose in the banks of the river or beneath the soft yellow underbellies of rotten logs.

Rounding a bend, the brothers saw a small boat downriver, its engine clear, loud, and unfamiliar. Heading this way. The man in the boat lifted a hand in greeting. He wore a green poncho and a dark hat covered with plastic. Kent shifted his foot, turning the trolling motor, and steered them toward the bank, giving the stranger a wide berth. He felt for their outboard’s crank rope while Scott and Wayne faced forward and sat on the boat seats. The man drawing closer didn’t look much older than Kent. He cut his engine and coasted up beside them, smiling.

“Morning, fellows,” he said, showing a badge. “New district game warden.”

The brothers looked straight ahead, as if he wasn’t there. The warden’s engine was steaming, a flock of geese passed overhead. Wayne slipped his hands inside the soft leather collars of two dogs, who’d begun to growl.

“You fellows oughta know,” the warden said, pointing his long chin to the rifle in Scott’s hands, “that it’s illegal to have those guns loaded on the river. I’m gonna have to check ’em. I’ll need to see some licenses, too.”

When he stood, the dogs jumped forward, toenails scraping aluminum. Wayne pulled them back, glancing at his brothers.

Kent spat into the brown water. He met the warden’s eyes, and in an instant knew the man had seen the telephone in the floor of their boat.

“Pull to the bank!” the warden yelled, drawing a pistol. “Y’all are under arrest for poaching!”

The Gateses didn’t move. One of the dogs began to claw the hull and the others joined him. A howl arose.

“Shut those dogs up!” The warden’s face had grown blotchy and red.

The spotted hound broke free and sprang over the gunnel, slobber strung from its teeth, and the man most surprised by the game warden’s shot was the game warden himself. His face drained of color as the noise echoed off the water and died in the bent black limbs and the cattails. The bullet had passed through the front dog’s neck and smacked into the bank behind them, missing Wayne by inches. The dog collapsed, and there was an instant of silence before the others, now loose, clattered overboard into the water, red-eyed, tangled in their leashes, trying to swim.

“Pull to the goddamn bank!” the warden yelled. “Right now!”

Scowling, Kent leaned and spat. He laid his thirty-thirty aside. Using the shoulders of his brothers for balance, he made his way to the prow. Scott, flecked with dog blood, moved to the back to keep the boat level. At the front, Kent reached into the water and took the first dog by its collar, lifted the kicking form, and set it streaming and shivering behind him. His brothers turned their faces away as it shook off the water, rocking the whole boat. Kent grabbed the rope that led to the big three-legged hound and pulled it in hand over hand until he could work his fingers under its collar. He gave Wayne a sidelong look and together they hauled it in. Then Kent grabbed for the smaller bitch while Wayne got the black and tan.

The warden watched them, his hips swaying with the rise and fall of the current. Rain fell harder now, spattering against the aluminum boats. Kneeling among the dogs, Kent unsnapped the leash and tossed the spotted hound overboard. It sank, then resurfaced and floated on its side, trailing blood. Kent’s lower lip twitched. Wayne whispered to the dogs and placed his hands on two of their heads to calm them — they were retching and trembling and rolling their eyes fearfully at the trees.

Scott stood up with his hands raised, as if to surrender. When the man looked at him, Kent jumped from his crouch into the other boat, his big fingers closing around the game warden’s neck.

Later that morning, Kirxy had just unlocked the door and hung out the Open sign when he heard the familiar rattle of the Gates truck. He sipped his coffee and limped behind the counter, sat on his stool. The boys came several times a week, usually in the afternoon, before they started their evenings of hunting and fishing. Kirxy would give them the supplies they needed — bullets, fishing line, socks, a new cap to replace one lost in the river. They would fill their truck and cans with gas. Eighteen-year-old Wayne would get the car battery from the charger near the woodburning stove and replace it with the drained one from their boat’s trolling motor. Kirxy would serve them coffee or Cokes — never liquor, not to minors — and they’d eat whatever they chose from the shelves, usually candy bars or potato chips, ignoring Kirxy’s advice that they ought to eat healthier: Vienna sausages, Dinty Moore, or Chef Boyardee.

Today they came in looking a little spooked, Kirxy thought. Scott stayed near the door, peering out, the glass fogging by his face. Wayne went to the candy aisle and selected several Hershey bars. He left a trail of muddy boot prints behind him. Kirxy would mop later.

“Morning, boys,” he said. “Coffee?”

Wayne nodded. Kirxy filled a styrofoam cup, then grinned as the boy loaded it with sugar.

“You take coffee with your sweet’ner?” he said.

Kent leaned on the counter, inspecting the hardware items on their pegs, a hacksaw, a set of Allen wrenches. A gizmo with several uses, knife, measuring tape, awl. Kirxy could smell the booze on the boys.

“y’all need something?” he asked.

“That spotted one you give us?” Kent said. “Won’t bark no more.”

“She won’t?”

“Naw. Tree ’em fine, but won’t bark nary a time. Gonna have to shoot her, I expect.”

His mouth full of chocolate, Wayne looked at Kirxy. By the door, Scott unfolded his arms. He kept looking outside.

“No,” Kirxy said. “Ain’t no need to shoot her, Kent. Do what that conjure woman recommends. Go out in the woods, find you a locust shell stuck to a tree. This is the time of year for ’em, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Locust shell?” Kent asked.

“Yeah. Bring it back home and crunch it up in the dog’s scraps, and that’ll make her bark like she ought to.”

Kent nodded to Kirxy and walked to the door. He went out, his brothers following.

“See you,” Kirxy called.

Wayne waved with a Hershey bar and closed the door.

Kirxy stared after them for a time. It had been a year since they’d paid him anything, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask for money; he’d even stopped writing down what they owed.

He got his coffee and limped from behind the counter to the easy chair by the stove. He shook his head at the muddy footprints on the candy aisle. He sat slowly, tucked a blanket around his legs, took out his bottle, and added a splash to his coffee. Sipping, he picked up a novel — Louis L’Amour, Sackett’s Land — and reached in his apron pocket for his glasses.

Though she had been once, the woman named Esther wasn’t much of a regular in Kirxy’s store these days. She lived two miles upriver in a shambling white house with magnolia trees in the yard. The house had a wraparound porch, and when it flooded you could fish from the back, sitting in the tall white rocking chairs, though you weren’t likely to catch anything. A baby alligator maybe, or sometimes bullfrogs. Owls nested in the trees along her part of the river, but in this weather they seemed quiet; she missed their hollow calling.

Esther was fifty. She’d had two husbands and six children who were gone and had ill feelings toward her. She’d had her female parts removed in an operation. Now she lived alone and, most of the time, drank alone. If the Gates boys hadn’t passed out in their truck somewhere in the woods, they might stop by after a night’s work. Esther would make them strong coffee and feed them salty fried eggs and greasy link sausages, and some mornings, like today, she would get a faraway look in her eyes and take Kent’s shirt collar in her fingers and lead him upstairs and watch him close the bathroom door and listen to the sounds of his bathing.

She smiled, knowing these were the only baths he ever took.

When he emerged, his long hair stringy, his chest flat and hard, she led him down the hall past the telephone nook to her bedroom. He crawled into bed and watched her take off her gown and step out of her underwear. Bending, she looked in the mirror to fluff her hair, then climbed in beside him. He was gentle at first, curious, then rougher, the way she liked him to be. She closed her eyes, the bed frame rattling and bumping, her father’s old pocket watch slipping off the nightstand. Water gurgled in the pipework in the walls as the younger brothers took baths, too, hoping for a turn of their own, which had never happened. At least not yet.

“Slow, baby,” Esther whispered in Kent’s ear. “It’s plenty of time....”

On April third it was still raining. Kirxy put aside his crossword to answer the telephone.

“Can you come on down to the lock and dam?” Goodloe asked. “We got us a situation here.”

Kirxy disliked smart-assed Goodloe, but something in the sheriffs voice told him it was serious. On the news, he’d heard that the new game warden had been missing for two days. The authorities had dragged the river all night and had three helicopters in the air. Kirxy sat forward in his chair, waiting for his back to loosen a bit. He added a shot of whiskey to his coffee and gulped it down as he shrugged into his denim jacket, zipping it up to his neck because he stayed cold when it rained. He put cotton balls in his ears and set his cap on his bald head, took his walking cane from beside the door.

In his truck, the four-wheel-drive engaged and the defroster on high, he sank and rose in the deep ruts, gobs of mud flying past his windows, the wipers swishing across his view. The radio announcer said it was sixty degrees, more rain on the way. Conway Twitty began to sing. A mile from the lock and dam Kirxy passed the Grove Hill ambulance, axle-deep in mud. A burly black paramedic wedged a piece of two-by-four beneath one of the rear tires while the bored-looking driver sat behind the wheel, smoking and racing the engine.

Kirxy slowed and rolled down his window. “Y’all going after a live one or a dead one?”

“Dead, Mr. Kirxy,” the black man answered.

Kirxy nodded and speeded up. At the lock and dam, he could see a crowd of people and umbrellas and beyond them he saw the dead man, lying on the ground under a black raincoat. Some onlooker had begun to direct traffic. Goodloe and three deputies in yellow slickers stood near the body with their hands in their pockets.

Kirxy climbed out and people nodded somberly and parted to let him through. Goodloe, who’d been talking to his deputies, ceased as Kirxy approached and they stood looking at the raincoat.

“Morning, Sugarbaby,” Kirxy said, using the childhood nickname Goodloe hated. “Is this who I think it is?”

“Yep,” Goodloe muttered. “Rookie game warden of the year.”

With his cane, Kirxy pulled back the raincoat to reveal the white face. “Young fellow,” he said.

There was a puddle beneath the dead man. Twigs in his hair and a clove of moss in his breast pocket. With the rubber tip of his cane, Kirxy brushed a leech from the man’s forehead. He bent and looked into the warden’s left eye, which was partly open. He noticed his throat, the dark bruises there.

Goodloe unfolded a handkerchief and blew his nose, then wiped it. “Don’t go abusing the evidence, Kirxy.” He stuffed the handkerchief into his back pocket.

“Evidence? Now, Sugarbaby.”

Goodloe exhaled and looked at the sky. “Don’t shit me, Kirxy. You know good and well who done this. I expect they figure the law don’t apply up here on this part of the river, the way things is been all these years. Them other wardens scared of ’em. But I reckon that’s fixing to change.” He paused. “I had to place me a call to the capitol this morning. To let ’em know we was all outa game wardens. And you won’t believe who they patched me through to.”

Kirxy adjusted the cotton in his right ear.

“Old Frank David himself,” the sheriff said. “Ain’t nothing ticks him off more than this kind of thing.”

A dread stirred in Kirxy’s belly. “Frank David. Was he a relation of this fellow?”

“Teacher,” Goodloe said. “Said he’s been giving lessons to young game wardens over at the forestry service. He asked me a whole bunch of questions. Regular interrogation. Said this here young fellow was the cream of the crop. Best new game warden there was.”

“Wouldn’t know it from this angle,” Kirxy said.

Goodloe grunted.

A photographer from the paper was studying the corpse. He glanced at the sky as if gauging the light. When he snapped the first picture, Kirxy was in it, like a sportsman.

“What’d you want from me?” he asked Goodloe.

“You tell them boys I need to ask ’em some questions, and I ain’t fixing to traipse all over the county. I’ll drop by the store this evening.”

“If they’re there, they’re there,” Kirxy said. “I ain’t their damn father.”

Goodloe followed him to the truck. “You might think of getting ’em a lawyer,” he said through the window.

Kirxy started the engine. “Shit, Sugarbaby. Them boys don’t need a lawyer. They just need to stay in the woods, where they belong. Folks oughta know to let ’em alone by now.”

Goodloe stepped back from the truck. He smacked his lips. “I don’t reckon anybody got around to telling that to the deceased.”

Driving, Kirxy turned off the radio. He remembered the Gates brothers when they were younger, before their father shot himself. He pictured the three blond heads in the front of Boo’s boat as he motored upriver past the store, lifting a solemn hand to Kirxy where he stood with a broom on his little back porch. After Boo’s wife and newborn daughter had died, he’d taught those boys all he knew about the woods, about fishing, tracking, hunting, killing. He kept them in his boat all night as he telephoned catfish and checked his trotlines and jugs and shot things on the bank. He’d given each of his sons a specific job to do, one dialing the rotary phone, another netting the stunned catfish, the third adjusting the chains which generated electricity from a car battery into the water. Boo would tie a piece of clothes line around each of his sons’ waists and loop the other end to his own ankle in case one of the boys fell overboard. Downriver, Kent would pull in the trotlines while Wayne handed him a cricket or cockroach or catalpa worm for the hook. Scott took the bass, perch, or catfish Kent gave him and slit its soft cold belly with a fillet knife and ran two fingers up into the fish and drew out its palmful of guts and dumped them overboard. Sometimes on warm nights cottonmouths or young alligators would follow them, drawn by blood. A danger was catching a snake or snapping turtle on the trotline, and each night Boo whispered for Kent to be careful, to lift the line with a stick and see what he had there instead of using his bare hand.

During the morning they would leave the boat tied and the boys would follow their father through the trees from trap to trap, stepping when he stepped, not talking. Boo emptied the traps and rebaited them while behind him Kent put the carcass in his squirrel pouch. In the afternoons, they gutted and skinned what they’d brought home. What time was left before dark they spent sleeping in the feather bed in the cabin where their mother and sister had died.

After Boo’s suicide, Kirxy had tried to look after the boys, their ages twelve, thirteen, and fourteen — just old enough, Boo must’ve thought, to raise themselves. For a while Kirxy let them stay with him and his wife, who’d never had a child. He tried to send them to school, but they were past learning to read and write and got expelled the first day for fighting, ganging up on a black kid. They were past the kind of life Kirxy’s wife was used to living. They scared her, the way they watched her with eyes narrowed into black lines, the way they ate with their hands. The way they wouldn’t talk. What she didn’t know was that from those years of wordless nights on the river and silent days in the woods they had developed a kind of language of their own, a language of the eyes, of the fingers, of the way a shoulder moved, a nod of the head.

Because his wife’s health wasn’t good in those days, Kirxy had returned the boys to their cabin in the woods. He spent most Saturdays with them, trying to take up where Boo had left off, bringing them food and milk, clothes and new shoes, reading them books, teaching them things and telling stories. He’d worked out a deal with Esther, who took hot food to them in the evenings and washed and mended their clothes.

Slowing to let two buzzards hop away from a dead deer, Kirxy lit a cigarette and wiped his foggy windshield with the back of his hand. He thought of Frank David, Alabamaa’ss legendary game warden. There were dozens of stories about the man — Kirxy had heard and told them for years, had repeated them to the Gates boys, even made some up to scare them. Now the true ones and the fictions were confused in his mind. He remembered one: A dark, moonless night, and two poachers use a spotlight to freeze a buck in the darkness and shoot it. They take hold of its wide rack of horns and struggle to drag the big deer when suddenly they realize that now three men are pulling. The first poacher jumps and says, “Hey, it ain’t supposed to be but two of us dragging this deer!”

And Frank David says, “Ain’t supposed to be none of y’all dragging it.”

The Gates boys came in the store just before closing, smelling like the river. Nodding to Kirxy, they went to the shelves and began selecting cans of things to eat. Kirxy poured himself a generous shot of whiskey. He’d stopped by their cabin earlier and, not finding them there, left a quarter on the steps. An old signal he hadn’t used in years.

“Goodloe’s coming by tonight,” he said to Kent. “Wants to ask if y’all know anything about that dead game warden.”

Kent shot the other boys a look.

“Now I don’t know if y’all’ve ever even seen that fellow,” Kirxy said, “and I’m not asking you to tell me.” He paused, in case they wanted to. “But that’s what old Sugarbaby’s gonna want to know. If I was y’all, I just wouldn’t tell him anything. Just say I was at home, that I don’t know nothing about any dead game warden. Nothing at all.”

Kent shrugged and walked down the aisle he was on and stared out the back window, though there wasn’t anything to see except the trees, ghostly and bent, when the lightning came. His brothers took seats by the stove and began to eat. Kirxy watched them, remembering when he used to read to them, Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan. The boys had wanted to hear the books over and over — they loved the jungle, the elephants, rhinos, gorillas, the anacondas thirty feet long. They would listen intently, their eyes bright in the light of the stove, Wayne holding in his small dirty hand the Slinky Kirxy had given him as a Christmas present, his lips moving along with Kirxy’s voice, mouthing some of the words: the great apes; Numa the lion; La, Queen of Opar, the Lost City.

They had listened to his Frank David stories the same way: the game warden appearing beside a tree on a night when there wasn’t a moon, a tracker so keen he could see in the dark, could follow a man through the deepest swamp by smelling the fear in his sweat, by the way the water swirled; a bent-over shadow slipping between the beaver lairs, the cypress trees, the tangle of limb and vine, parting the long wet bangs of Spanish moss with his rifle barrel, creeping toward the glowing windows of the poacher’s cabin, the deer hides nailed to the wall. The gator pelts. The fish with their grim smiles hooked to a clothes line, turtle shells like army helmets drying on the windowsills. Any pit bull or mutt meant to guard the place lying with its throat slit behind him, Frank David slips out of the fog with fog still clinging to the brim of his hat. He circles the cabin, peers in each window, mounts the porch. Puts his shoulder through the front door. Stands with wood splinters landing on the floor at his feet. A hatted man of average height, clean-shaven: no threat until the big hands come up, curl into fists, the knuckles scarred, blue, sharp.

Kirxy finished his drink and poured another. It burned pleasantly in his belly. He looked at the boys, occupied by their bags of corn curls. A Merle Haggard song ended on the radio and Kirxy clicked it off, not wanting the boys to hear the evening news.

In the quiet, Kirxy heard Goodloe’s truck. He glanced at Kent, who’d probably been hearing it for a while. Outside, Goodloe slammed his door. He hurried up the steps and tapped on the window. Kirxy exaggerated his limp and took his time letting him in.

“Evening,” Goodloe said, shaking the water from his hands. He took off his hat and hung it on the nail by the door, then hung up his yellow slicker.

“Evening, Sugarbaby,” Kirxy said.

“It’s a wet one out there tonight,” Goodloe said.

“Yep.” Kirxy went behind the counter and refilled his glass. “You just caught the tail end of happy hour. That is, if you’re off the wagon again. Can I sell you a tonic? Warm you up?”

“You know we’re a dry county, Kirxy.”

“Would that be a no?”

“It’s a watch your ass.” Goodloe looked at the brothers. “Just wanted to ask these boys some questions.”

“Have at it, Sugarbaby.”

Goodloe walked to the Lance rack and detached a package of Nip-Cheese crackers. He opened it, offered the pack to each of the boys. Only Wayne took one. Smiling, Goodloe bit a cracker in half and turned a chair around and sat with his elbows across its back. He looked over toward Kent, half-hidden by shadow. He chewed slowly. “Come on out here so I can see you, boy. I ain’t gonna bite nothing but these stale-ass cheese crackers.”

Kent moved a step closer.

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

Kent looked at Scott. “Asleep.”

“Asleep,” Scott 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, wasn’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 the other game wardens has been letting y’all get away with all kinds of shit. I reckon this new fellow had something to prove.”

“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 looked down.

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?”

Wayne 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 that 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 white trash 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 heard that in the intervening time he’d gotten religion.

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

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

The Gates boys’ pickup was the same old Ford their father had shot himself in several years earlier. 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, cans, a kingsnake 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, he’d been doing this since he was eight. Scott rode shotgun. Tonight both were drinking, and in the back Wayne 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, Kent swerved off the road an(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 down a steep logging path, Wayne 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, hounds that, given the chance, would never stop eating.

When the Gateses came to the giver two hours later, the dogs were lapping water and panting. Wayne 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 and shoved off into the fog and trolled over the still water.

In the middle, Scott lowered the twin chains beside the boat and began dialing the old telephone. Wayne 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 fingered his rifle and watched the bank in case a coyote wandered down, hunting bullfrogs.

They climbed up 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 black 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 Scott, then put his elbow through the glass and reached in and unlocked it.

While his brothers searched for the liquor, Wayne ate the biscuits he found wrapped in tin foil on the stove. He found a box of Corn Flakes in a cabinet and ate most of them, too. He ate a plate of cold fried chicken liver. Scott was in a bedroom looking under the bed. In the closet. He was going through drawers, his dirty fingers among the white cloth. In the back of the house Kent found a 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 whiskey under his arm and Euphrates’ stepdaughter by the wrist.

Wayne 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. Wayne stayed there, a clock ticking beside his head, a string of spit linking his two opened lips, watching as his brother ran his rough hands up and down the girl’s trembling body, over the nipples that showed through the thin cloth. Her eyes were closed, lips moving in prayer. Looking down, Kent saw the puddle spreading around her bare feet.

“Shit,” he said, a hand cupping her breast. “Pissed herself.”

He let her go and she shrank back against the wall, behind the door. She was still there, along with a bag of catfish on the table, when her stepfather came back half an hour later, ten gallons of whiskey 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 tape player 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 dark 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 men discussed 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 an axe 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 whiskey 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 bloodlust 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 on each other. 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 mini-skirts and red heels.

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, checking traps in the woods north of the river, Wayne kept hearing things. Little noises. Leaves. Twigs.

Afraid, he forced himself to go on so his brothers wouldn’t laugh at him. Near dark, in a wooden trap next to an old fence row, he was surprised to find the tiny white fox they’d once seen cross the road in front of their truck. He squatted before the trap and poked a stick through the wire at the thin snout, his hand steady despite the way the fox snapped at the stick and bit off the end. Would the witch woman want this alive? At the thought of her he looked around. It felt like she was watching him, as if she were hiding in a tree in the form of some animal, a possum, a swamp rat. He stood and dragged the trap through the mud and over the land while the fox jumped in circles, growling.

A mile upstream, Scott had lost a boot to the mud and was hopping back one-footed to retrieve it. It stood alone, buried to the ankle. He wrenched it free, then sat with his back against a sweet-gum to scrape off the mud. He’d begun to lace the boot when he saw a hollow tree stump, something moving inside. With his rifle barrel, he rolled the thing out — it was most of the body of a dead catfish, the movement from the maggots devouring it. When he kicked it, they spilled from the fish like rice pellets and lay throbbing in the mud.

Downstream, as night came and the rain fell harder, Kent trolled their boat across the river, flashlight in his mouth, using a stick to pull up a trotline length by length and removing the fish or turtles and rebaiting the hooks and dropping them back into the water. Near the bank, approaching the last hook, he heard something. He looked up with the flashlight in his teeth to see the thing untwirling in the air. It wrapped around his neck like a rope, and for an instant he thought he was being hanged. He grabbed the thing. It flexed and tightened, then his neck burned and went numb and he felt dizzy, his fingertips buzzing, legs weak, a tree on the bank distorting, doubling, tripling into a whole line of fuzzy shapes, turning sideways, floating.

Kent blinked. Felt his eyes bulging, his tongue swelling. His head about to explode. Then a bright light.

His brothers found the boat at dawn, four miles downstream, lodged on the far side in a fallen tree. They exchanged a glance, then looked back across the river. A heavy gray fog hooded the water and the boat appeared and dissolved in the ghostly limbs around it. Scott sat on a log and took off his boots and left them standing by the log. He removed his coat and laid it over the boots. He handed his brother his rifle without looking at him, left him watching as he climbed down the bank and, hands and elbows in the air like a believer, waded into the water.

Wayne propped the second rifle against a tree and stood on the bank holding his own gun, casting his frightened eyes up and down the river. From far away a woodpecker drummed. Crows began to collect in a pecan tree downstream. After a while Wayne squatted, thinking of their dogs, tied to the bumper of their truck. They’d be under the tailgate, probably, trying to keep dry.

Soon Scott had trolled the boat back across. Together they pulled it out of the water and stood looking at their brother who lay across the floor among the fish and turtles he’d caught. One greenish terrapin, still alive, a hook in its neck, stared back. They both knew what they were supposed to think — the blood and the sets of twin fang marks, the black bruises and shriveled skin, the neck swollen like mumps, the purple bulb of tongue between his lips. They were supposed to think cottonmouth. Kent’s hands were squeezed into fists and they’d hardened that way, the skin wrinkled. His eyes half open. His rifle lay unfired in the boat, as if indeed a snake had done this.

But it wasn’t the tracks of a snake they found when they went to get the white fox. The fox was gone, though, the trap empty, its catch sprung. Scott knelt and ran his knuckles along the rim of a boot print in the mud — not a very wide track, not very far from the next one. He put his finger in the black water that’d already begun to fill the track: not too deep. He looked up at Wayne. The print of an average-sized man. In no hurry. Scott rose and they began.

Above them, the sky cracked and flickered.

Silently, quickly — no time to get the dogs — they followed the trail back through the woods, losing it once, twice, backtracking, working against the rain that fell and fell harder, that puddled blackly and crept up their legs, until they stood in water to their calves, rain beading on the brims of their caps. They gazed at the ground, the sky, at the rain streaming down each other’s muddy face.

At the truck, Wayne jumped in the driver’s seat and reached for the keys. Scott appeared in the window, shaking his head. When Wayne didn’t scoot over, the older boy hit him in the jaw, then slung open the door and pulled Wayne out, sent him rolling over the ground. Scott climbed in and had trouble getting the truck choked. By the time he had the hang of it, Wayne had gotten into the back and sat among the wet dogs, staring at his dead brother.

At their cabin, they carried Kent into the woods. They laid him on the ground and began digging near where their sister, mother, and father were buried in their unmarked graves. For three hours they worked, the dogs coming from under the porch and sniffing around Kent and watching the digging, finally slinking off and crawling back under the porch, out of the rain. An hour later the dogs came boiling out again and stood in a group at the edge of the yard, baying. The boys paused but saw or heard nothing. When the dogs kept making noise, Scott got his rifle and fired into the woods several times. He nodded to his brother and they went back to digging. By the time they’d finished, it was late afternoon and the hole was full of slimy water and they were black with mud. They each took off one of Kent’s boots and Scott got the things from his pockets. They stripped off his shirt and pants and lowered him into the hole. When he bobbed to the top of the water, they got stones and weighted him down. Then shoveled mud into the grave.

They showed up at Esther’s, black as tar.

“Where’s Kent?” she asked, holding her robe closed at her throat.

“We buried him,” Scott said, moving past her into the kitchen. She put a hand over her mouth, and as Scott told her what they’d found she slumped against the door, looking outside. An owl flew past in the floodlights. She thought of calling Kirxy but decided to wait until morning — the old bastard thought she was a slut and a corruption. For tonight she’d just keep them safe in her house.

Scott went to the den. He turned on the TV, the reception bad because of the weather. Wayne, a bruise on his left cheek, climbed the stairs. He went into one of the bedrooms and closed the door behind him. It was chilly in the room and he noticed pictures of people on the wall, children, and a tall man and a younger woman he took to be Esther. She’d been pretty then. He stood dripping on the floor, looking into her black and white face, searching for signs of the woman he knew now. Soon the door opened behind him and she came in. And though he still wore his filthy wet clothes, she steered him to the bed and guided him down onto it. She unbuckled his belt, removed his hunting knife, and stripped the belt off. She unbuttoned his shirt and rubbed her fingers across his chest, the hair just beginning to thicken there. She undid his pants and ran the zipper down its track. She worked them over his thighs, knees, and ankles and draped them across the back of a chair. She pulled off his boots and socks. Pried a finger beneath the elastic of his underwear, felt that he’d already come.

He looked at her face. His mouth opened. Esther touched his chin, the scratch of whiskers, his breath on her hand.

“Hush now,” she said, and watched him fall asleep.

Downstairs, the TV went off.

When Goodloe knocked, Esther answered, a cold sliver of her face in the cracked door. “The hell you want?”

“Good evening to you, too. The Gateses here?”

“No.”

Goodloe glanced behind him. “I believe that’s their truck. It’s kinda hard to mistake, especially for us trained lawmen.”

She tried to close the door but Goodloe had his foot in it. He glanced at the three deputies who stood importantly by the Blazer. They dropped their cigarettes and crushed them out. They unsnapped their holsters and strode across the yard, standing behind Goodloe with their hands on their revolvers and their legs apart like TV deputies.

“Why don’t y’all just let ’em alone?” Esther said. “Ain’t they been through enough?”

“Tell ’em I’d like to see ’em,” Goodloe said. “Tell ’em get their boots.”

“You just walk straight to hell, mister.”

Wayne appeared behind her, naked, lines from the bed linen on his face.

“Whoa, Nellie,” Goodloe said. “Boy, you look plumb terrible. Why don’t you let us carry you on down to the office for a little coffee? Little cake.” He glanced back at one of the deputies. “We got any of that cinnamon roll left, Dave?”

“You got a warrant for their arrest?” Esther asked.

“No, I ain’t got a warrant for their arrest. They ain’t under arrest. They fixing to get questioned, is all. Strictly informal.” Goodloe winked. “You reckon you could do without ’em for a couple of hours?”

“Fuck you, Sugarbaby.”

The door slammed. Goodloe nodded down the side of the house and two deputies went to make sure nobody escaped from the back. But in a minute Wayne came out dressed, his hands in his pockets, and followed Goodloe down the stairs, the deputies watching him closely, and watching the house.

“Where’s your brothers?” Goodloe asked.

He looked down.

Goodloe nodded to the house and two deputies went in, guns drawn. They came out a few minutes later, frowning.

“Must’ve heard us coming,” Goodloe said. “Well, we got this one. We’ll find them other two tomorrow.” They got into the Blazer and Goodloe looked at Wayne, sitting in the back.

“Put them cuffs on him,” Goodloe said.

Holding his rifle, Scott came out of the woods when the Blazer was gone. He returned to the house.

“They got Wayne,” Esther said. “Why didn’t you come tell him they was out there?”

“He got to learn,” Scott said. He went to the cabinet where she kept the whiskey and took the bottle. She watched him go to the sofa and sit down in front of the blank TV. Soon she joined him, bringing glasses. He filled both, and when they emptied them he filled them again.

They spent the night like that, and at dawn they were drunk. Wearing her robe, Esther began clipping her fingernails, a cigarette smoking in the ashtray beside her. She’d forgotten about calling Kirxy.

Scott was telling her about the biggest catfish they’d ever called up: a hundred pounds, he swore, a hundred fifty. “You could of put your whole head in that old cat’s mouth,” he said, sipping his whiskey. “Back fin long as your damn arm.”

He stood. Walked to the front window. There were toads in the yard — with the river swelling they were everywhere. In the evenings there were rainfrogs. The yard had turned into a pond and each night the rainfrogs sang. It was like no other sound. Esther said it kept her up at night.

“That, and some other things,” she said.

Scott heard a fingernail ring the ashtray. He rubbed his hand across his chin, felt the whiskers there. He watched the toads as they huddled in the yard, still as rocks, bloated and miserable-looking.

“That catfish was green,” Scott said, sipping. “I swear to God. Green as grass.”

“Them goddamn rainfrogs,” she said. “I just lay there at night with my hands over my ears.”

A clipping rang the ashtray.

He turned and went to her on the sofa. “They was moss growing on his nose,” he said, putting his hand on her knee.

“Go find your brother,” she said. She got up and walked unsteadily across the floor and went into the bathroom, closed the door. When she came out, he and the bottle were gone.

Without Kent, Scott felt free to do what he wanted, which was to drive very fast. He got the truck started and spun off, aiming for every mud hole he could. He shot past a house with a washing machine on the front porch, two thin black men skinning a hog hanging from a tree. One of the men waved with a knife. Drinking, Scott drove through the mountains of trash at the dump and turned the truck in circles, kicking up muddy roostertails. He swerved past the Negro church and the graveyard where a group of blacks huddled, four warbling poles over an open grave, the wind tearing the preacher’s hat out of his hands and a woman’s umbrella reversing suddenly.

When he tired of driving, he left the truck in their hiding place, and using trees for balance, stumbled down the hill to their boat. He carried Kent’s rifle, which he’d always admired. On the river, he fired up the outboard and accelerated, the boat prow lifting and leveling out, the buzz of the motor rising in the trees. The water was nearly orange from mud, the cypress knees nothing but knobs and tips because of the floods. Nearing the old train trestle, he cut the motor and coasted to a stop. He sat listening to the rain, to the distant barking of a dog, half a mile away. Chasing something, maybe a deer. As the dog charged through the woods, Scott closed his eyes and imagined the terrain, marking where he thought the dog was now, and where he thought it was now. Then the barking stopped, suddenly, as if the dog had run smack into a tree.

Scott clicked on the trolling motor and moved the boat close to the edge of the river, the rifle across his knees. He scanned the banks, and when the rain started to fall harder he accelerated toward the trestle. From beneath the cross ties, he smelled creosote and watched the rain as it stirred the river. He looked into the gray trees and thought he would drive into town later, see about getting Wayne. Kent had never wanted to go to Grove Hill — their father had warned them of the police, of jail.

Scott picked up one of the catfish from the night before. It was stiff, as if carved out of wood. He stared at it, watching the green blowflies hover above his fist, then threw it over into the cattails along the bank.

The telephone rig lay under the seat. He lifted the chains quietly, considering what giant catfish might be passing beneath the boat this very second, a thing as large as a man’s thigh with eyes the size of ripe plums and skin the color of mud. Catfish, their father had taught them, have long whiskers that make them the only fish you can “call.” Kirxy had told Scott and his brothers that if a game warden caught you telephoning, all you needed to do was dump your rig overboard. But, Kirxy warned, Frank David would handcuff you and swim around the bottom of the river until he found your rig.

Scott spat a stream of tobacco into the brown water. Minnows appeared and began to investigate, nibbling at the dark yolk of spit as it elongated and dissolved. With his rifle’s safety off, he lowered the chains into the water, a good distance apart. He checked the connections — the battery, the telephone. He lifted the phone and began to dial. “Hello?” he whispered, the thing his father had always said, grinning in the dark. The wind picked up a bit, he heard it rattling in the trees, and he dialed faster, had just seen the first silver body bob to the surface when something landed with a clatter in his boat. He glanced over.

A bundle of dynamite, sparks shooting off the end, fuse already gone. He looked above him, the trestle, but nobody was there. He moved to grab the dynamite, but his cheeks ballooned with hot red wind and his hands caught fire.

When the smoke cleared and the water stopped boiling, silver bodies began to bob to the surface — largemouth bass, bream, gar, suckers, white perch, polliwogs, catfish — some only stunned but others dead, in pieces, pink fruit-like things, the water blooming darkly with mud.

Kirxy’s telephone rang for the second time in one day, a rarity that proved what his wife had always said: bad news came over the phone. The first call had been Esther, telling him of Kent’s death, Wayne’s arrest, Scott’s disappearance. This time Kirxy heard Goodloe’s voice telling him that somebody — or maybe a couple of somebodies — had been blown up out on the trestle.

“Scott,” Kirxy said, sitting.

He arrived at the trestle, and with his cane hobbled over the uneven tracks. Goodloe’s deputies and three ambulance drivers in rubber gloves and waders were scraping pieces off the cross ties with spoons, dropping the parts in ziplock bags. The boat, two flattened shreds of aluminum, lay on the bank. In the water, minnows darted about, nibbling.

“Christ,” Kirxy said. He brought a handkerchief to his lips. Then he went to where Goodloe stood on the bank, writing in his notebook.

“What do you aim to do about this?” Kirxy demanded.

“Try to figure out who it was, first.”

“You know goddamn well who it was.”

“I expect it’s either Kent or Scott Gates.”

“It’s Scott,” Kirxy said.

“How do you know that?”

Kirxy told him that Kent was dead.

“I ain’t seen the body,” Goodloe said.

Kirxy’s blood pressure was going up. “Fuck, Sugarbaby. Are you one bit aware what’s going on here?”

“Fishing accident,” Goodloe said. “His bait exploded.”

From the bank, a deputy called that he’d found most of a boot. “Foot’s still in it,” he said, holding it up by the lace.

“Tag it,” Goodloe said, writing something down. “Keep looking.”

Kirxy poked Goodloe in the shoulder with his cane. “You really think Scott’d blow himself up?”

Goodloe looked at his shoulder, the muddy cane print, then at the storekeeper. “Not on purpose, I don’t.” He paused. “Course, suicide does run in their family.”

“What about Kent?”

“What about him?”

“Christ, Sugarbaby—”

Goodloe held up his hand. “Just show me, Kirxy.”

They left the ambulance drivers and the deputies and walked the other way without talking. When they came to Goodloe’s Blazer, they got in and drove without talking. Soon they stopped in front of the Gateses’ cabin. Instantly hounds surrounded the truck, barking viciously and jumping with muddy paws against the glass. Goodloe blew the horn until the hounds slunk away, heads low, fangs bared. The sheriff opened his window and fired several times in the air, backing the dogs up. When he and Kirxy got out, Goodloe had reloaded.

The hounds kept to the edge of the woods, watching.

His eye on them, Kirxy led Goodloe behind the decrepit cabin. Rusty screens covered some windows, rags of drape others. Beneath the house, the dogs paced them. “Back here,” Kirxy said, heading into the trees. Esther had said they’d buried Kent, and this was the logical place. He went slowly, careful not to bump a limb and cause a small downpour. Sure enough, there lay the grave. You could see where the dogs had been scratching around it.

Goodloe went over and toed the dirt. “You know the cause of death?”

“Yeah, I know the cause of death. His name’s Frank fucking David.”

“I meant how he was killed.”

“The boys said snakebite. Three times in the neck. But I’d do an autopsy.”

“You would.” Goodloe exhaled. “Okay. I’ll send Roy and Avery over here to dig him up. Maybe shoot these goddern dogs.”

“I’ll tell you what you’d better do first. You better keep Wayne locked up safe.”

“I can’t hold him much longer,” Goodloe said. “Unless he confesses.”

Kirxy pushed him from behind, and at the edge of the woods the dogs tensed. Goodloe backed away, raising his pistol, the grave between them.

“You crazy, Kirxy? You been locked in that store too long?”

“Goodloe,” Kirxy gasped. The cotton in his left ear had come out and suddenly air was roaring through his head. “Even you can’t be this stupid. You let that boy out and he’s that cold-blooded fucker’s next target—”

“Target, Kirxy? Shit. Ain’t nothing to prove anybody killed them damn boys? This one snake-bit, you said so yourself. That other one blowing himself up. Them dern Gateses has fished with dynamite their whole life. You oughta know that — you the one gets it for ’em.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re about neck deep in this thing, you know. And I don’t mean just lying to protect them boys neither. I mean selling explosives illegally, to minors, Kirxy.”

“I don’t give a shit if I am!” Kirxy yelled. “Two dead boys in two days and you’re worried about dynamite? You oughta be out there looking for Frank David.”

“He ain’t supposed to be here for another week or two,” Goodloe said. “Paperwork—”

He fired his pistol then. Kirxy jumped, but the sheriff was looking past him, and when Kirxy followed his eyes he saw the dog that had been creeping in. It lay slumped in the mud, a hind leg kicking, blood coloring the water around it.

Goodloe backed away, smoke curling from the barrel of his pistol.

Around them the other dogs circled, heads low, moving sideways, the hair on their spines sticking up.

“Let’s argue about this in the truck,” Goodloe said.

At the store Kirxy put out the Open sign. He sat in his chair with his coffee and a cigarette. He’d read the same page three times when it occurred to him to phone Montgomery and get Frank David’s office on the line. It took a few calls, but he soon got the number and dialed. The snippy young woman who answered told Kirxy that yes, Mr. David was supposed to take over the Lower Peachtree district, but that he wasn’t starting until next week, she thought.

Where was he now? Kirxy wanted to know.

“Florida?” she said. “No, Louisiana. Fishing.” No sir, he couldn’t be reached. He preferred his vacations private.

Kirxy slammed down the phone. He lit another cigarette and tried to think.

It was just a matter, he decided, of keeping Wayne alive until Frank David took over the district. There were probably other game wardens who’d testify that Frank David was over in Louisiana fishing right now. But once the son-of-a-bitch officially moved here, he’d have motive and his alibi wouldn’t be as strong. If Wayne turned up dead, Frank David would be the chief suspect.

Kirxy inhaled smoke deeply and tried to imagine how Frank David would think. How he would act. The noise he would make or not make as he went through the woods. What he would say if you happened upon him. Or he upon you. What he would do if he came into the store. Certainly he wasn’t the creature Kirxy had created to scare the boys, not some wild ghostly thing. He was just a man who’d had a hard life and grown bitter and angry. Probably an alcoholic. A man who chose to uphold the law because breaking it was no challenge. A man with no obligation to any other men or a family. Just to himself and his job. To some goddamned game warden code. His job was to protect the wild things the law had deemed worthy: dove, duck, owls, hawks, turkeys, alligators, squirrels, coons, and deer. But how did the Gates boys fall into the category of trash animal — wildcats or possums or armadillos, snapping turtles, snakes? Things you could kill any time, run over in your truck and not even look at in your mirror to see dying behind you? Christ. Why couldn’t Frank David see that he — more than a match for the boys — was of their breed?

Kirxy drove to the highway. The big thirty-ought-six he hadn’t touched in years was on the seat next to him, and as he steered he pushed cartridges into the clip, then shoved the clip into the gun’s underbelly. He pulled the lever that injected a cartridge into the chamber and took a long drink of whiskey to wash down three of the pills that helped dull the ache in his knees, and the one in his gut.

It was almost dark when he arrived at the edge of a large field. He parked facing the grass. This was a place a few hundred yards from a fairly well-traveled blacktop, a spot no sane poacher would dare use. There were already two or three deer creeping into the open from the woods across the field. They came to eat the tall grass, looking up only when a car passed, their ears swiveling, jaws frozen, sprigs of grass twitching in their lips like the legs of insects.

Kirxy sat watching. He sipped his whiskey and lit a cigarette with a trembling hand. Both truck doors were locked and he knew this was a very stupid thing he was doing. Several times he told himself to go home, let things unfold as they would. Then he saw the faces of the two dead boys. And the face of the live one.

When Boo had killed himself, the oldest two had barely been teenagers, but it was eleven-year-old Wayne who’d found him. That truck still had windows then, and the back windshield had been sprayed red with blood. Flies had gathered at the top of the truck in what Wayne discovered was a twenty-two caliber hole. Kirxy frowned, thinking of it. Boo’s hat still on his head, a small hole through the hat, too. The back of the truck was full of wood Boo’d been cutting, and the three boys had unloaded the wood and stacked it neatly beside the road. Kirxy shifted in his seat, imagining the boys pushing that truck for two miles over dirt roads, somehow finding the leverage or whatever, the goddamn strength, to get it home. To pull their father from inside and bury him. To clean out the truck. Kirxy shuddered and thought of Frank David, then made himself think of his wife instead. He rubbed his biceps and watched the shadows creep across the field, the treeline dim and begin to disappear.

Soon it was full dark. He unscrewed the interior light bulb from the ceiling, pulled the door lock up quietly. Holding his breath, he opened the door. Outside, he propped the rifle on the side mirror, flicked the safety off. He reached through the window, felt along the dash for the headlight switch, pulled it.

The field blazed with the eyes of deer — red hovering dots staring back at him. Kirxy aimed and squeezed the trigger at the first pair of eyes. Not waiting to see if he’d hit the deer, he moved the gun to another pair. He’d gotten off five shots before the eyes began to disappear. When the last echo from the gun faded, at least three deer lay dead or wounded in the glow of his headlights. One doe bleated weakly and bleated again. Kirxy coughed and took the gun back into the truck, closed the door, and reloaded in the dark. Then he waited. The doe kept bleating and things in the woods took shape, detached, and whisked toward Kirxy over the grass like spooks. And the little noises. Things like footsteps. And the stories. Frank David appearing in the bed of somebody’s moving truck and punching through the back glass, grabbing and breaking the driver’s arm. Leaping from the truck and watching while it wrecked.

“Quit it,” Kirxy croaked. “You damn schoolgirl.”

Several more times that night he summoned his nerve and flicked on the headlights, firing at any eyes he saw or firing at nothing. When he finally fell asleep just after two A.M., his body numb with painkillers and whiskey, he dreamed of his wife on the day of her first miscarriage. The way the nurses couldn’t find the vein in her arm, how they’d kept trying with the needle, the way she’d cried and held his fingers tightly, like a woman giving birth.

He started awake, terrified, as if he’d fallen asleep driving.

Caring less for silence, he stumbled from the truck and flicked on the lights and fired at the eyes, though now they were doubling up, floating in the air. He lowered the gun and for no good reason found himself thinking of a time when he’d tried fly fishing, standing in his yard with his wife watching from the porch, Tarzan of the Apes in her lap, him whipping the line in the air, showing off, and then the strange pulling you get when you catch a fish, Betty jumping to her feet, the book falling, and her yelling that he’d caught a bat, for heaven’s sake, a bat!

He climbed back into the truck. His hands shook so hard he had trouble getting the door locked. He bowed his head, missing her so much that he cried, softly and for a long time.

Dawn found him staring at a field littered with dead does, yearlings, and fawns. One of the deer, only wounded, tried to crawl toward the safety of the trees. Kirxy got out of the truck and vomited colorless water, then stood looking around at the foggy morning. He lifted his rifle and limped into the grass in the drizzle and, a quick hip shot, put the deer out of its misery.

He was sitting on the open tailgate trying to light a cigarette when Goodloe and a deputy passed in their Blazer and stopped.

The sheriff stepped out, signaling for the deputy to stay put. He sat beside Kirxy on the tailgate, the truck dipping with his weight. His stomach was growling and he patted it absently.

“You old fool,” Goodloe said, staring at Kirxy and then at the field. “You figured to make Frank David show himself?” He shook his head. “Good lord almighty, Kirxy. What’ll it take to prove to you there ain’t no damn game warden out there? Not yet, anyhow.”

Kirxy didn’t answer. Goodloe went to the Blazer and told the deputy to pick him up at Kirxy’s store. Then he helped the old man into the passenger seat and went around and got in the driver’s side. He took the rifle and unloaded it, put its clip in his pocket.

“We’ll talk about them deer later,” he said. “Now I’d better get you back.”

They’d gone a silent mile when Kirxy said, “Would you mind running me by Esther’s?”

Goodloe shrugged and turned that way. His stomach made a strangling noise. The rain and wind were picking up, rocking the truck. The sheriff took a bottle of whiskey from his pocket. “Medicinal,” he said, handing the bottle to Kirxy. “It’s just been two freak accidents, is all, Kirxy. I’ve seen some strange shit, a lot stranger than this. Them Gateses is just a unlucky bunch. Period. I ain’t one to go believing in curses, but I swear to God if they ain’t downright snake-bit.”

Soon Goodloe had parked in front of Esther’s and they sat waiting for the rain to slack. Kirxy rubbed his knees and looked out the windows where the trees were half-submerged in the rising flood-waters.

“They say old Esther has her a root cellar,” Goodloe said, taking a sip. “Shit. I expect it’s full of water this time of year. She’s probably got cottonmouths wrapped around her plumbing.” He shuddered and offered the bottle. Kirxy took it and sipped. He gave it back and Goodloe took it and drank, then drank again. “Lord if that don’t hit the spot.

“When I was in the service,” Goodloe went on, “over in Thailand? They had them little bitty snakes, them banded kraits. Poison as cobras, what they told us. Used to hide up under the commode lid. Every time you took you a shit, you had to lift up the lid, see was one there.” He drank. “Yep. It was many a time I kicked one off in the water, flushed it down.”

“Wait here,” Kirxy said. He opened the door, his pants leg darkening as the rain poured in, cold as needles. He set his knee out deliberately, planted his cane in the mud and pulled himself up, stood in water to his ankles. He limped across the yard with his hand blocking the rain. There were two chickens on the front porch, their feathers fluffed out so that they looked strange, menacing. Kirxy climbed the porch steps with the pain so strong in his knees that stars popped near his face by the time he reached the top. He leaned against the house, breathing hard. Touched himself at the throat where a tie might’ve gone. Then he rapped gently with the hook of his cane. The door opened immediately. Dark inside. She stood there, looking at him.

“How come you don’t ever stop by the store anymore?” he asked.

She folded her arms.

“Scott’s dead,” he said.

“I heard,” Esther said. “And I’m leaving. Fuck this place and every one of you.”

She closed the door and Kirxy would never see her again.

At the store, Goodloe nodded for the deputy to stay in the Blazer, then he took Kirxy by the elbow and helped him up the steps. He unlocked the door for him and held his hand as the old man sank in his chair.

“Want those boots off?” Goodloe asked, spreading a blanket over Kirxy’s lap.

He bent and unlaced the left, then the right.

“Pick up your foot.”

“Now the other one.”

He set the wet boots by the stove.

“It’s a little damp in here. I’ll light this thing.”

He found a box of kitchen matches on a shelf under the counter among the glass figurines Kirxy’s wife had collected. The little deer. The figure skater. The unicorn. Goodloe got a fire going in the stove and stood warming the backs of his legs.

“I’ll bring Wayne by a little later,” he said, but Kirxy didn’t seem to hear.

Goodloe sat in his office with his feet on the desk, rolling a cartridge between his fingers. Despite himself, he was beginning to think Kirxy might be right. Maybe Frank David was out there on the prowl. He stood, put on his pistol belt and walked to the back, pushed open the swinging door and had Roy buzz him through. So far he’d had zero luck getting anything out of Wayne. The boy just sat in his cell wrapped in a blanket, not talking to anybody. Goodloe had told him about his brother’s death, and he’d seen no emotion cross the boy’s face. Goodloe figured that it wasn’t this youngest one who’d killed that game warden, it’d probably been the others. He knew that this boy wasn’t carrying a full cylinder, the way he never talked, but he had most likely been a witness. He’d been considering calling in the state psychologist from the Searcy Mental Hospital to give the boy an evaluation.

“Come on,” Goodloe said, stopping by Wayne’s cell. “I’m fixing to put your talent to some good use.”

He kept the boy cuffed as the deputy drove them toward the trestle.

“Turn your head, Dave,” Goodloe said, handing Wayne a pint of Old Crow. The boy took it in both hands and unscrewed the lid, began to drink too fast.

“Slow down there, partner,” Goodloe said, taking back the bottle. “You need to be alert.”

Soon they stood near the trestle, gazing at the flat shapes of the boat on the bank. Wayne knelt and examined the ground. The deputy came up and started to say something, but Goodloe motioned for quiet.

“Just like a goddern bloodhound,” he whispered. “Maybe I oughta give him your job.”

“Reckon what he’s after?” the deputy asked.

Wayne scrabbled up the trestle, and the two men followed. The boy walked slowly over the rails, examining the spaces between the cross ties. He stopped, bent down, and peered at something. Picked it up.

“What you got there, boy?” Goodloe called, going and squatting beside him. He took a sip of Old Crow.

When Wayne hit him, two-handed, the bottle flew one way and Goodloe the other. Both landed in the river, Goodloe with his hand clapped to his head to keep his hat on. He came up immediately, bobbing and sputtering. On the trestle, the deputy tackled Wayne and they went down fighting on the cross ties. Below, Goodloe dredged himself out of the water. He came ashore dripping and tugged his pistol from its holster. He held it up so that a thin trickle of orange water fell. He took off his hat and looked up to see the deputy disappear belly-first into the face of the river.

Wayne ran down the track, toward the swamp. The deputy came boiling ashore. He had his own pistol drawn and was looking around vengefully.

Goodloe climbed the trestle in time to see Wayne disappear into the woods. The sheriff chased him for a while, ducking limbs and vines, but stopped, breathing hard. The deputy passed him.

Wayne circled back through the woods and went quickly over the soft ground, half-crawling up the sides of hills and sliding down the other sides. Two hollows over, he heard the deputy heading the wrong direction. Wayne slowed a little and just trotted for a long time in the rain, the cuffs rubbing his wrists raw. He stopped once and looked at what he’d been carrying in one hand: a match, limp and black now with water, nearly dissolved. He stood looking at the trees around him, the hanging Spanish moss and the cypress knees rising from the stagnant creek to his left.

The hair on the back of his neck rose. He knelt, tilting his head, closing his eyes, and listened. He heard the rain, heard it hit leaves and wood and heard the puddles lapping at their tiny banks, but beyond those sounds there were other muffled noises. A mockingbird mocking a blue jay. A squirrel barking and another answering. The deputy falling, a quarter mile away. Then another sound, this one close. A match striking. Wayne began to run before opening his eyes and crashed into a tree. He rolled and ran again, tearing through limbs and briars. He leapt small creeks and slipped and got up and kept running. At every turn he expected Frank David, and he was near tears when he finally stumbled into his family graveyard.

The first thing he saw was that Kent had been dug up. Wooden stakes surrounded the hole and fenced it in with yellow tape that had words on it. Wayne approached slowly, hugging himself. Something floated in the grave. With his heart pounding, he peered inside. A dog.

Wary of the trees behind him, he crept toward their back yard, stopping at the edge. He crouched and blew into his hands to warm his cheeks. He gazed at the dark windows of their cabin, then circled the house, keeping to the woods. He saw the pine tree with the low limb they used for stringing up larger animals to clean, the rusty chain hanging and the iron pipe they stuck through the back legs of a deer or the rare wild pig. Kent and Scott had usually done the cleaning while Wayne fed the guts to their dogs and tried to keep the dogs from fighting.

And there, past the tree, lay the rest of the dogs. Shot dead. Partially eaten. Buzzards standing in the mud, staring boldly at him with their heads bloody and their beaks open.

It was dark when Kirxy woke in his chair; he’d heard the door creak. Someone stood there, and the storekeeper was afraid until he smelled the river.

“Hey, boy,” he said.

Wayne ate two cans of potted meat with his fingers and a candy bar and a box of saltines. Kirxy gave him a Coke from the red cooler and he drank it and took another one while Kirxy got a hacksaw from the rack of tools behind the counter. He slipped the cardboard wrapping off and nodded for Wayne to sit. The storekeeper pulled up another chair and faced the boy and began sawing the handcuff chain. The match dropped out of Wayne’s hand but neither saw it. Wayne sat with his head down and his palms up, his wrists on his knees, breathing heavily, while Kirxy worked and the silver shavings accumulated in a pile between their boots. The boy didn’t lift his head the entire time, and he’d been asleep for quite a while when Kirxy finally sawed through. The old man rose, flexing his sore hands, and got a blanket from a shelf. He unfolded it, shook out the dust, and spread it over Wayne. He went to the door and turned the dead bolt.

The phone rang later. It was Goodloe, asking about the boy.

“He’s asleep,” Kirxy said. “You been lost all this time, Sugarbaby?”

“That I have,” Goodloe said, “and we still ain’t found old Dave yet.”

For a week they stayed there together. Kirxy could barely walk now, and the pain in his side was worse than ever, but he put the boy to work, sweeping, dusting, and scrubbing the shelves. He had Wayne pull a table next to his chair, and Kirxy did something he hadn’t done in years: took inventory. With the boy’s help, he counted and ledgered each item, marking them in his long green book. The back shelf contained canned soups, vegetables, sardines, and tins of meat. Many of the cans were so old that the labels flaked off in Kirxy’s hand, so they were unmarked when Wayne replaced them in the rings they’d made not only in the dust but on the wood itself. In the back of that last shelf, Wayne discovered four tins of Underwood Deviled Ham, and as their labels fell away at Kirxy’s touch, he remembered a time when he’d purposely unwrapped the paper from these cans because each label showed several red dancing devils, and some of his Negro customers had refused to buy anything that advertised the devil.

Kirxy now understood that his store was dead, that it no longer provided a service. His Negro customers had stopped coming years before. The same with Esther. For the past few years, except for the rare hunter, he’d been in business for the Gates boys alone. He looked across the room at Wayne, spraying the windows with Windex and wiping at them absently, gazing outside. The boy wore the last of the new denim overalls Kirxy had in stock. Once, when the store had thrived, he’d had many sizes, but for the longest time now the only ones he’d stocked were the boys’.

That night, beneath his standing lamp, Kirxy began again to read his wife’s copy of Tarzan of the Apes to Wayne. He sipped his whiskey and spoke clearly, to be heard over the rain. When he paused to turn a page, he saw that the boy lay asleep across the row of chairs they’d arranged in the shape of a bed. Looking down through his bifocals, Kirxy flipped to the back of the book to the list of other Tarzan novels — twenty-four in all — and he decided to order them through the mail so Wayne would hear the complete adventures of Tarzan of the Apes.

In the morning, Goodloe called and said that Frank David had officially arrived — the sheriff himself had witnessed the swearing-in — and he was now this district’s game warden.

“Pretty nice fellow,” Goodloe said. “Kinda quiet. Polite. He asked me how the fishing was.”

Then it’s over, Kirxy thought.

A week later, Kirxy told Wayne he had to run some errands in Grove Hill. He’d spent the night before trying to decide whether to take the boy with him but had decided not to, that he couldn’t watch him forever. Before he left he gave Wayne his thirty-ought-six and told him to stay put, not to leave for anything. For himself, Kirxy took an old twenty-two bolt action and placed it in the back window rack of his truck. He waved to Wayne and drove off.

He thought that if the boy wanted to run away, it was his own choice. Kirxy owed him the chance, at least.

At the doctor’s office the young surgeon frowned and removed his glasses when he told Kirxy that the cancer was advancing, that he’d need to check into the hospital in Mobile immediately. It was way past time. “Just look at your color,” the surgeon said. Kirxy stood, thanked the man, put on his hat, and limped outside. He went by the post office and placed his order for the Tarzan books. He shopped for supplies in the Dollar Store and the Piggly Wiggly, had the checkout boys put the boxes in the front seat beside him. Coming out of the drugstore, he remembered that it was Saturday, that there’d be chicken fights today. And possible news about Frank David.

At Heflin’s, Kirxy paid his five-dollar admission and let Heflin help him to a seat in the bottom of the stands. He poured some whiskey in his coffee and sat studying the crowd. Nobody had mentioned Frank David, but a few old-timers had offered their sympathies on the deaths of Kent and Scott. Down in the pit the Cajuns were back, and during the eighth match — one of the Louisiana whites versus a local red, the tall bald Cajun stooping and circling the tangled birds and licking his lips as his rooster swarmed the other and hooked it, the barn smoky and dark, rain splattering the tin roof — the door swung open.

Instantly the crowd was hushed. Feathers settled to the ground. Even the Cajuns knew who he was. He stood at the door, unarmed, his hands on his hips. A wiry man. He lifted his chin and people tried to hide their drinks. His giant ears. The hooked nose. The eyes. Bird handlers reached over their shoulders, pulling at the numbered pieces of masking tape on their backs. The two handlers and the referee in the ring sidled out, leaving the roosters.

For a full minute Frank David stood staring. People stepped out the back door. Climbed out windows. Half-naked boys in the rafters were frozen like monkeys hypnotized by a snake.

Frank David’s gaze didn’t stop on Kirxy but settled instead on the roosters, the white one pecking out the red’s eyes. Outside, trucks roared to life, backfiring like gunshots. Kirxy placed his hands on his knees. He rose, turned up his coat collar, and flung his coffee out. Frank David still hadn’t looked at him. Kirxy planted his cane and made his way out the back door and through the mud.

Not a person in sight, just tailgates vanishing into the woods.

From inside his truck, Kirxy watched Frank David walk away from the barn and head toward the trees. Now he was just a bow-legged man with white hair. Kirxy felt behind him for the twenty-two rifle with one hand while rolling down the window with the other. He had a little trouble aiming the gun with his shaky hands. He pulled back the bolt and inserted a cartridge into the chamber. Flicked the safety off. The sight of the rifle wavered between Frank David’s shoulders as he walked. As if an old man like Kirxy were nothing to fear. Kirxy ground his teeth: that was why the bastard hadn’t come to his deer massacre — an old storekeeper wasn’t worth it, wasn’t dangerous.

Closing one eye, Kirxy pulled the trigger. He didn’t hear the shot, though later he would notice his ears ringing.

Frank David’s coat bloomed out to the side and he missed a step. He stopped and put his hand to his lower right side and looked over his shoulder at Kirxy, who was fumbling with the rifle’s bolt action. Then Frank David was gone, just wasn’t there, there were only the trees, bent in the rain, and shreds of fog in the air. For a moment, Kirxy wondered if he’d even seen a man at all, if he’d shot at something out of his own imagination, if the cancer that had started in his pancreas had inched up along his spine into his brain and was deceiving him, forming men out of the air and walking them across fields, giving them hands and eyes and the power to disappear.

From inside the barn, the rooster crowed. Kirxy remembered Wayne. He hung the rifle in its rack and started his truck, gunned the engine. He banged over the field, flattening saplings and a fence, and though he couldn’t feel his toes, he drove very fast.

Not until two days later, in the VA hospital in Mobile, would Kirxy finally begin to piece it all together. Parts of that afternoon were patchy and hard to remember: shooting Frank David, going back to the store and finding it empty, no sign of a struggle, the thirty-ought-six gone, as if Wayne had walked out on his own and taken the gun. Kirxy could remember getting back into his truck. He’d planned to drive to Grove Hill — the court house, the game warden’s office — and find Frank David, but somewhere along the way he passed out behind the wheel and veered off the road into a ditch. He barely remembered the rescue workers. The sirens. Goodloe himself pulling Kirxy out.

Later that night two coon hunters had stumbled across Wayne, wandering along the river, his face and shirt covered in blood, the thirty-ought-six nowhere to be found.

When Goodloe had told the semiconscious Kirxy what happened, the storekeeper turned silently to the window, where he saw only the reflected face of an old, failed, dying man.

And later still, in the warm haze of morphine, Kirxy lowered his eyelids and let his imagination unravel and retwine the mystery of Frank David: it was as if Frank David himself appeared in the chair where Goodloe had sat, as if the game warden broke the seal on a bottle of Jim Beam and leaned forward on his elbows and touched the bottle to Kirxy’s cracked lips and whispered to him a story about boots going over land and not making a sound, about rain washing the blood trail away even as the boots passed. About a tired old game warden taking his hand out of his coat and seeing the blood from Kirxy’s bullet there, feeling it trickle down his side. About the boy in the back of his truck, handcuffed, gagged, blindfolded. About driving carefully through deep ruts in the road. Stopping behind Esther’s empty house and carrying the kicking boy inside on his shoulder.

When the blindfold is removed, Wayne has trouble focusing but knows where he is because of her smell. Bacon and soap. Cigarettes, dust. Frank David holds what looks like a pillowcase. He comes across the room and puts the pillowcase down. He rubs his eyes and sits on the bed beside Wayne. He opens a book of matches and lights a cigarette. Holds the filtered end to Wayne’s lips, but the boy doesn’t inhale. Frank David puts the cigarette in his own lips, the embers glow. Then he drops it on the floor, crushes it out with his boot. Picks up the butt and slips it into his shirt pocket. He puts his hand over the boy’s watery eyes, the skin of his palm dry and hard. Cool. Faint smell of blood. He moves his fingers over Wayne’s nose, lips, chin. Stops at his throat and holds the boy tightly but not painfully. In a strange way Wayne can’t understand, he finds it reassuring. His thudding heart slows. Something is struggling beside his shoulder and Frank David takes the thing from the bag. Now the smell in the room changes. Wayne begins to thrash and whip his head from side to side.

“Goddamn, Son,” Frank David whispers. “I hate to civilize you.”

Goodloe began going to the veterans’ hospital in Mobile once a week. He brought Kirxy cigarettes from his store. There weren’t any private rooms available, and the beds around the storekeeper were filled with dying ex-soldiers who never talked, but Kirxy was beside a window and Goodloe would raise the glass and prop it open with a novel. They smoked together and drank whiskey from paper cups, listening for nurses.

It was the tall mean one.

“One more time, goddamn it,” she said, coming out of nowhere and plucking the cigarettes from their lips so quickly they were still puckered.

Sometimes Goodloe would wheel Kirxy down the hall in his chair, the IV rack attached by a stainless steel contraption with a black handle the shape of a flower. They would go to the elevator and ride down three floors to a covered area where people smoked and talked about the weather. There were nurses and black cafeteria workers in white uniforms and hair nets and people visiting other people and a few patients. Occasionally in the halls they’d see some mean old fart Kirxy knew and they’d talk about hospital food or chicken fighting. Or the fact that Frank David had surprised everyone and decided to retire after only a month of quiet duty, that the new game warden was from Texas. And a nigger to boot.

Then Goodloe would wheel Kirxy back along a long window, out of which you could see the tops of oak trees.

On one visit, Goodloe told Kirxy they’d taken Wayne out of intensive care. Three weeks later he said the boy’d been discharged.

“I give him a ride to the store,” Goodloe said. This was in late May and Kirxy was a yellow skeleton with hands that shook.

“I’ll stop by and check on him every evening,” Goodloe went on. “He’ll be okay, the doctor says. Just needs to keep them bandages changed. I can do that, I reckon.”

They were quiet then, for a time, just the coughs of the dying men and the soft swishing of nurses’ thighs and the hum of IV machines.

“Goodloe,” Kirxy whispered, “I’d like you to help me with something.”

Goodloe leaned in to hear, an unlit cigarette behind his ear like a pencil.

Kirxy’s tongue was white and cracked, his breath awful. “I’d like to change my will,” he said, “make the boy beneficiary.”

“All right,” Goodloe said.

“I’m obliged,” whispered Kirxy. He closed his eyes.

Near the end he was delirious. He said he saw a little black creature at the foot of his bed. Said it had him by the toe. In surprising fits of strength, he would throw his water pitcher at it, or his box of tissues, or the TV Guide. Restraints were called for. His coma was a relief to everyone, and he died quietly in the night.

In Kirxy’s chair in the store, Wayne didn’t seem to hear Goodloe’s questions. The sheriff had done some looking in the Grove Hill library — “research” was the modern word — and discovered that one species of cobra spat venom at its victim’s eyes, but there weren’t such snakes in southern Alabama. Anyway, the hospital lab had confirmed that it was the venom of a cottonmouth that had blinded Wayne. The question, of course, was who had put the venom in his eyes. Goodloe shuddered to think of it, how they’d found Wayne staggering about, howling in pain, bleeding from his tear ducts, the skin around his eye sockets dissolving, exposing the white ridges of his skull.

In the investigation, several local blacks including Euphrates Morrisette stated to Goodloe that the youngest Gates boy and his two dead brothers had molested Euphrates’ stepdaughter in her own house. There was a rumor that several black men dressed in white sheets with pillowcases for hoods had caught and punished Wayne as he lurked along the river, peeping in folks’ windows and doing unwholesome things to himself. Others suggested that the conjure woman had cast a spell on the Gateses, that she’d summoned a swamp demon to chase them to hell. And still others attributed the happenings to Frank David. There were a few occurrences of violence between some of the local whites and the blacks — some fires, a broken jaw — but soon it died down and Goodloe filed the deaths of Kent and Scott Gates as accidental.

But he listed Wayne’s blinding as unsolved. The snake venom had bleached his pupils white, and the skin around his eye sockets had required grafts. The doctors had had to use skin from his buttocks, and because his buttocks were hairy, the skin around his eyes grew hair, too.

In the years to come, the loggers who clear-cut the land along the river would occasionally stop in the store, less from a need to buy something than from a curiosity to see the hermit with the milky, hairy eyes. The store smelled horrible, like the inside of a bear’s mouth, and dust lay thick and soft on the shelves. Because they’d come in, the loggers would feel obligated to buy something, but every item was moldy or stale beyond belief, except for the things in cans, which were all unlabeled so they never knew what they’d get. Nothing was marked as to price either, and the blind man wouldn’t talk. He just sat by the stove. So the loggers paid more than what they thought a can was worth, leaving the money on the counter by the telephone, which hadn’t been connected in years. When plumper, grayer Goodloe came by on the occasional evening, he’d take the bills and coins and put them in Kirxy’s cash drawer. He was no longer sheriff, having lost several elections back to one of his deputies, Roy or Dave. Now he drove a Lance truck, his routes including the hospitals in the county.

“Dern, boy,” he cracked once. “This store’s doing a better business now than it ever has. You sure you don’t want a cracker rack?”

When Goodloe left, Wayne listened to the sound of the truck as it faded. “Sugarbaby,” he whispered.

And many a night for years after, until his own death in his sleep, Wayne would rise from the chair and move across the floor, taking Kirxy’s cane from where it stood by the coat rack. He would go outside, down the stairs like a man who could see, his beard nearly to his chest, and he would walk soundlessly the length of the building, knowing the woods even better now as he crept down the rain-rutted gullyside toward the river whose smell never left the caves of his nostrils and the roof of his mouth. At the riverbank, he would stop and sit with his back against a small pine, and lifting his white eyes to the sky, he would listen to the clicks and hum and thrattle of the woods, seeking out each noise at its source and imagining it: an acorn nodding, detaching, falling, its thin ricochet and the way it settles into the leaves. A bullfrog’s bubbling throat and the things it says. The soft movement of the river over rocks and around the bases of cattails and cypress knees and through the wet hanging roots of trees. And then another sound, familiar. The soft, precise footsteps of Frank David. Downwind. Not coming closer, not going away. Circling. The striking of a match and the sizzle of ember and the fall of ash. The ascent of smoke. A strange and terrifying comfort for the rest of Wayne Gates’s life.