The Swamp Searchers

Chapter I

After a week, Charlie still had found no trace of Bobo Hensley and the twenty thousand dollars. The strain was putting a twitch in Charlie’s narrow eyes. Being buried alive up here in the Smoky Mountains was doing unpleasant things to Leah, too. She was just about nuts from having the crickets, frogs, and whippoorwills talk to her at night.

Leah was something to make the local yodelers come out of the hills just for a look. She was tall, had black hair and green eyes, and she knew how to dress her engineering job and walk it around. Charlie was her second husband. Sometimes, when she was sore, Leah compared Charlie unfavorably with her first husband, who had committed suicide.

Being away from city lights was making her short with Charlie. She railed at him and cried in anger, and last night Charlie had slapped her.

With Barney, it was different. He fished every day. The twenty grand wasn’t his. Not Barney Loy’s. That was Charlie’s worry. It was a sort of accident that Barney was here with Charlie and Leah.

Barney sat on the screen porch of the small cottage. The cottage was on a hill overlooking the little village, and the village was on a hill overlooking a neck of Lake Sanloosa. On hills in the distance could be seen the wooded sweep of cool wilderness, with here and there a checkerboard patch that meant a hillbilly farm with com and tobacco struggling to stay upright in its growth on the hillside.

Barney was cool, contented, as he snelled bass hooks. Behind the cottage a mountain stream gurgled. In one of the two small bedrooms Leah was prowling sullenly. Charlie was off somewhere trying to ingratiate himself with these stolid, wary hill people. Trying to get a lead on Bobo Hensley, without anybody knowing that was what he was trying to do. A smart guy, Charlie. Yeah. Only something about these people saw through the smartness.

Leah came out on the porch. She was wearing a print dress. It clung to her like tattoos on her skin. She passed her hand through her mane of black hair, sighed, lighted a cigarette, and sat down in a cane-bottomed chair to watch Barney prepare his fishhooks.

“You’re really serious about this fishing, aren’t you, Barney?”

“Sure.” He was a male, and therefore inevitably aware of Leah’s nearby warmth. But he was plenty sore at her, and Charlie, too. A pair of tramps. And he was sore at himself for not recognizing that fact sooner. Maybe he’d recognized it and just closed his eyes. You had to have a good manager to get ahead in the fight racket, and Charlie was even a little better than good. Or so Barney had believed until recently.

“How can you do it, Barney?” Leah asked between drags on her fag. “Stay out on that lake like you do?”

“Oh, I dunno. I just like it.” He didn’t try to explain. Leah wasn’t the kind to understand. Ever since he’d been a kid he’d wanted to find himself a place like this. A street comer slugger in an East Side slum, he’d wondered what the world was like out where the trees were green and plentiful and the sun shone on something besides concrete and massed bodies.

There had been the training camp in Jersey. But that still wasn’t the dream coming true. Too many reporters and city yeggs flocked in to watch him spar and punch the big bag. To look at his two hundred and four pound mass of muscles like he was a prize boar in a hog show.

Leah put her cigarette out and came over to stand beside Barney’s chair. She touched his shoulder and her fingers were like small flames. “Barney... it looks like we’re going to be stuck here a long time. These people aren’t Charlie’s type. You got a way with them that he hasn’t. Like you got a way with old ladies and kids — and certain young women.”

He lifted a broad placid face that wasn’t too badly marked by seventy-three fights. Her lazy eyes and moist lips made the proposition even plainer than her words had. “You find that twenty grand and Bobo Hensley so we can get out of this place, and you won’t be sorry, Barney.”

“The price, Leah, is a little high.”

She stepped back. She looked as if she wanted to slap him. “What do you intend to do?” she said sullenly. “Just rot away here?”

“Hell, no. I plan to go fishing.”

He gathered up his tackle and walked off toward the lake, leaving her standing there with her hands opening and closing and her face stamped with rage.

I’m through with Charlie and Leah, Barney thought. Charlie wouldn’t be able to talk him out of it, either. Charlie had that quick way of moving and speaking that made Barney always feel like a clunk, even if Barney knew he wasn’t a real lunk-head. But Charlie could bark his lungs hoarse this time without it doing him any good.

Let Charlie find himself a new boy, a fresh sucker to whom he could give a big build-up and then bet against to clean up.

The Kid Delaney fight still rankled. I might have taken that guy if Charlie hadn’t talked me into training with the wrong tactics, even when I felt I was right. Charlie must have kept Delaney tipped off during every moment of training, too. When he’d waltzed into the ring that night, Barney hadn’t a prayer, like an army whose general has passed every communication to the enemy before an attack.

So Charlie had made his twenty grand. So what to do about a guy like that? You got anything to go to the commission with? And you go to the boxing commission and Charlie outtalks you. Maybe he gets it in the neck, but you will never fight again, either. Charlie knows that, is banking on it. And banking on that certain little thread of feeling inside of you that makes it tough for you ever to turn against a guy you’ve once called a friend. Now you cap Charlie’s assurance you’ll keep your mouth shut with Leah’s proposition.

What do they take me for, anyway?

The dock was a floating island of planks lashed to oil drums. In the center of the dock stood a shed where soft drinks and candy were sold. Boats, flat bottoms and classy v-bottoms, were moored around the dock. The dock was hooked to the land by a thirty-foot-long gangplank which floated on more drums and was moored to the bank by ropes.

A wiry old ex-seaman ran the dock. He passed the time of day as Barney bought bait and paid rent on a boat and kicker.

Barney spun the kicker to life and started out over the lake.

He guided the boat in and out of the straits, in and out of the coves, until he was about four miles down the lake. He waited with a minnow and sat back to await the passing of a hungry bass. He’d had good luck here yesterday. Caught two and missed one strike.

With the cool evening air like a caress, he sighed back in the boat and thought of how hot and humid it was in New York at this moment. He wanted only to relax, but his thoughts kept running back to Leah. And Charlie. And Bobo Hensley.

Barney felt himself sweating the sweat of rage all over again. He’d found out about that bet and Charlie had said, “Oh, for cripes sakes, you’d have got your cut!”

As if that squared everything!

That lousy heel. That punk with the fishbelly-white face of a corpse, that consumptive cough, and the skinny body that threatened to rattle its bones together when Charlie put it in motion.

Barney had always felt a little sorry for Charlie because of Charlie’s unhealthy appearance. The sympathy of a man with health and strength roaring through every fiber.

But not now. No more of this soft, sentimental sympathy. Good enough for Charlie because he’d been scared to collect his illegal bet on the Delaney go. Charlie had been sure the plainclothes boys had sniffed a stink and were watch-mg him. Charlie had figured the gambler holding the dough would shag out of town with those cops nosing around. This had distressed Charlie greatly. So Charlie had sent Bobo Hensley to get the dough before it got away for good. Bobo had picked up the money as it had been arranged by phone — only he had kept right on traveling.

Charlie’d been fit for a strait jacket then. He’d wept, real tears. He would cut Bobo up and feed him to stray dogs. But he had to find him first.

They’d gone to Bobo’s apartment, Barney himself so mad he could bust, now that Charlie had spilled his brains in hopes that Barney might have some idea of where Bobo had gone and be of some help.

In the apartment, they’d found that timetable, slid down behind the dresser where it had fallen accidentally. Bobo had made little checks beside the schedule to Bryson City, North Carolina.

Charlie’s lips and eyes had looked as if oil had been poured over them. “The dumb hillbilly punk, he’s gone home with the dough. He was always talking about those mountains above Bryson City, the lake where he used to fish, those hills where he hunted.”

All that before Bobo, big, strong, easygoing Bobo, had got his brains scrambled after having fought his way nearly to the top in the big city. The Mauling Mountaineer they’d called Bobo, but he’d been good only to stay in another man’s corner when Barney had met him.

“What will he do with twenty grand in that wilderness?” Leah had wondered.

“Maybe he’ll buy some pigs,” Barney had said, “to enjoy a higher grade of company.”

The bass failed to show interest in the minnow. Barney weighed anchor and cruised on down the lake. He finally got Charlie, Leah, and Bobo off his mind when he had a strike in the rock-bound inlet he’d learned to call Little Sanloosa Cove.

He worked at the fishing another hour without luck. He noticed that night was creeping like dark oil poured over the jagged eastern peaks.

It was time to get back. After darkness, in this maze of coves, he wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for his chances of finding the boat dock. The kicker popped to life and Barney swung the boat out in the channel. It was later than he’d thought. Those shadows were reaching long toward the eastern shore. He opened the throttle wide and the roar of the kicker banged against the hills, throaty with anger. The boat began to crawl out of the water and plane, the prop churning water like a giant eggbeater. A little spray struck Barney’s face. This was living. Cripes, a little more practice, and he would be a first-class sailor.

He didn’t see the log. It was so sodden with water it must have been prowling just inches under the surface. The boat struck the log with a dull crunch. Up and over the boat started, like a fighter plane peeling off. It was as if Barney had been sitting on a giant spring, and the spring snapped suddenly. Up and out Barney went. End over end, arms and legs flying. The water was hard as a brick wall when he struck. The water gave him a stinging slap on the face that threatened to tear his head off his shoulders.

Bubbling, throwing spray, roiling about him, the water claimed Barney. He rolled down and down until his lungs ached, and then he burst back to the surface, blowing water out of his nose.

When the ringing left his ears, he heard the roar of the kicker fading in the distance. After throwing him like an angry bronco, the boat had righted itself, and Barney watched it charge down the channel, pitching and skipping crazily. It vanished from sight around a far off point of land. The sound of the kicker became a whisper in the majestic silence of the mountains and then faded out altogether. The boat had probably beached itself.

Barney began dog-paddling toward shore. He swam with all the grace of a mastodon. He’d never learned any of the fine points of swimming, but as a kid he’d been able to dog-paddle around East River docks for hours on end.

He pulled himself erect when the water was waist deep and waded to the slippery, chocolate mud shore. Under a tree just above the shoreline, he sat down to snort the remainder of the lake out of his nose and catch his breath.

He was pondering a night spent under the trees. He didn’t relish the thought. He was sopping; the nights up in these mountains sometimes got more than delightfully cool, under such circumstances.

Perhaps he could find a house nearby. He stood, turned toward the hillside, and saw the girl.

She startled him. He stood looking at her for a moment without speaking. She was small and slender and her hair was a mass of gold tumbling to her shoulders. She looked like a very charming mountain sprite in the half light of dusk.

Her voice was warm, husky, serious: “Are you hurt?”

Barney jarred to life. “No. At least I don’t think so.”

She walked toward him, graceful as a wood nymph. Barney, you’re staring, Barney thought. She saw his stare and the drop of his jaw and smiled.

“I’m Josie Calhoun,” she said. “I live in the cabin overlooking the point. When I heard the roar of the motor and the crunch I knew somebody had hit a log. Thought I’d better come down and see. You can dry out at the house if you want.”

“That’s very nice of you,” Barney said in his best manner. “My name is—”

“Barney Loy,” she finished for him. She had turned and started along a path which would have missed Barney’s eyes if he had been here without a guide. He caught up with her.

Walking beside her, he was conscious of his bigness and the homely cast of his face. She was like... like cotton candy at Coney when he was a kid. He said, “How’d you know my name?”

“Oh, most folks around here know you. That Charlie Collins fellow with you, he hasn’t found Bobo Hensley yet, has he?”

“Folks around here seem to know everything,” he said, mimicking her liquid mountain drawl. “You must have mighty fine Western Union service in these parts.”

Her laugh tinkled. “I didn’t mean to make you sore. Strangers always attract attention and folks usually fathom what brings them here. Then word just somehow seeps around, like it’s borne on the wings of birds or filters through the very air itself.”

Her words caused Barney to feel alien in the mountain quiet. The dusk took on a tinge of evil. The harrumpping of frogs on the lake was strangely lonely, disturbing. He thought, hundreds of eyes watching, like chips of blue flint. Word filtering from tight mouths, making its way over the mountainsides, into the hidden coves. Charlie Collins had better watch himself; the tricks that go in New York might not look so smooth here.