I hoped it didn’t come to that. Innocent men don’t run, for one thing. I didn’t want to be wrong about Len, and it seemed a shame to muck up such a nice morning by having to haul someone to the county lockup. Aside from that, there was the fact that I wasn’t hoping to find out anything bad had been happening to that little girl. I wanted to finally be able to tell Andrea I’d sorted out the situation – that some neighbors had been at Len’s place, and the little girl belonged to them.
It crossed my mind that I was thinking about Andrea again – imagining her catching a breath and looking relieved when I told her the little girl was fine. Andrea smiled, in my mind, laughed about the big adventure up to Len’s cabin, and said she’d ruined her dress shoes for nothing. I told her if she was going to be working with Texas Parks and Wildlife, she’d better get some more practical footwear.
I shut down the conversation in my head as I pulled the boat up into the cedar overhang and waited. It wasn’t like me to have my mind on anything other than work. Normally, even with seeing the sleazy and sometimes downright stupid human behavior that went along with this job, I was happy to stay focused on the task. While I was at work, I didn’t wonder how Laurie’s boys were getting through the baseball season without Uncle Mart there to have a catch with them. I didn’t wonder if the new stepdad was arranging his day so that he could go by the ball field and help Levi learn to hit off the tee.
Maybe that was why I was thinking about Andrea now – maybe I was trying to fill the gap in my life. Another single mom, another boy who needed a man around. Maybe I was working to cap the black hole now that Aaron’s family had a new man in it.
Pulling the plug on the chatter in my brain, I sat back in the seat and watched the last of the stars fade overhead as the day crept in, light gray at first, then misty and pink. The lake yawned and stretched and came to life, little perch and bass popping the top of the water, doves calling in the trees, their wings beating the air as they flitted from branch to branch, a mockingbird imitating the calls of the doves. The dove cooed in reply, and I figured the mockingbird had a laugh over it. He’d fooled someone.
I waited, sort of drifting in and out of a doze, longer than I thought I’d have to before I heard movement in the brush. My pulse jumped. I sat up and listened, but it was just a rabbit or squirrel, maybe a little bobcat or a fox. Nothing to get excited about yet, but anytime now, Len would come tromping down the hill. In the morning quiet, and with the blanket of dead leaves underfoot, he wouldn’t be hard to hear. I’d be able to tell from the sound whether he was alone or had someone with him.
A hawk left its nest and circled overhead. I watched it gliding on the warming air currents, stretching its wings in the mist. Passing over me, it cried out a complaint, letting me know I was horning in on its territory. I thought of my grandpa, a one-quarter Chickasaw who lived in the hills of northeastern Oklahoma when I was a kid. He talked to wild things like he expected them to answer. Looking back, I guessed he was the one who’d given me a love for the woods. The summers we went to visit at his farm were some of the best I remembered. A trip to town in his old pickup was always an adventure for us boys. We’d go in the five-and-dime and pick out penny candy, or pinwheels, or kites we could fly in Granddad’s hayfield.
There was a game warden who hung around the old feed mill. I’d sit on the porch and listen to his tales while Granddad jawboned with the men inside. It was that game warden who gave me the idea that maybe I’d like to do his job one day – have all those adventures like he did, not be tied to an office or a desk. Guess, even though my daddy left when I was fourteen and I didn’t see my granddad much after that, a little of Granddad and that game warden stayed with me.
A twig snapped on the hillside while my mind was in Oklahoma. I sat up and listened. Footsteps for sure this time. Just one person coming – a long, loose, easy gait, dragging one foot a little. That’d be Len. He was pretty late getting down to the lake this morning. By the sound of things, he was carrying something fairly heavy – fishing equipment, cast nets, and jug lines wrapped in a tarp, maybe. Hopefully not some kind of trap I’d have to cite him for.
I moved to the side of my boat and slipped off into the mud where I wouldn’t make any noise, then worked my way along the shore and stopped at the edge of the cedars, waiting for Len to make it down the hill. Once he’d uncovered his boat and started wrestling it down to the water, I would let him know I was here. By then his hands would be busy. He was probably carrying a gun, and I didn’t want him to get surprised and decide to use it.
He was about twenty feet away – just on the other side of the cedar brush – when I heard him set down whatever he was carrying, then work his boat out from under a tangle of branches, turn it over, and push it toward the water. The swish of the hull over the leaves moved away, but then there was another noise. Something closer – where Len had set down whatever he was packing. A dog, maybe? I should’ve thought about the fact that he could have one of his dogs along. If that was the case, the whole picture changed. A protective pit bull goes a long way toward making the odds uneven. Surprising Len was one thing, but surprising one of those dogs was another.
If it was a dog, why hadn’t it sniffed me out yet?
Nearby, Len grunted and struggled, the boat hanging up on something. My ear strained into the brush, tried to pick up what was out there, to figure out whether it was a threat or not. My heart pumped. I settled my fingers over my gun, broke it loose in the holster.
The carpet of leaves shifted and rustled, and then there was the faintest sound. It seemed out of place at first – soft and peaceful. An exhale of breath, like a child sighing in its sleep. The leaves shifted and crinkled again, and all at once I knew. Len wasn’t alone. The little girl, whoever she might be, was right there on the other side of the cedars, not more than eight or ten feet from me.
My thoughts whirled like fish schooling up. What would Len be doing at the shore with a child first thing in the morning? Nothing good. Nothing normal. He probably hadn’t picked her up at some neighbor’s house before seven. Whoever she was, he’d had her with him overnight, and now he was . . . was . . . what? Where was he headed?
Stories from the evening news and missing persons cases pushed into my mind. Maybe I’d been wrong about Len. Maybe everyone had. Maybe his mild manner and his slow, stuttering speech was all an act. Maybe he wasn’t mentally handicapped at all. Maybe he was some kind of a long-term perp, a fox hiding right here in the chicken house. The lake and the parks were full of kids, all summer long. . . .
I shook off the idea. No point in speculation. Right now the only thing certain was that I couldn’t let Len leave here with the little girl. I should’ve arranged some other form of backup when Jake called in sick. Coming alone had been a bad choice. I’d been at this job long enough to know that a situation could seem safe enough one minute, then blow up in your face the next.
Crouched there in the cedars, I thought through the scenarios. If I went after the child, Len would perceive me as a threat immediately. If he was armed or chose to fight, I’d be weighted down, trying to protect and contain the child while Len was free to come after me in whatever way he wanted. . . .
He’d worked the boat loose and was pushing it toward the lake again now. I heard the aluminum hull grind over the rocks at the edge of the brush cover.
A better chance isn’t coming along anytime soon,
I thought, and made sure my gun was ready, but I didn’t draw it. Better to make this look casual, try not to set him off.
While the boat was scraping along, I slipped back the other direction a bit, got to the shoreline where I could see clearly, and started Len’s way, just moving at a casual pace, so as not to come up on him too quickly. Rounding the last of the cedar brush, I could see him pulling his rig through the shore muck. I checked him over as I moved in. No visible weapons, except a hunting knife on his belt. I doubted I was in too much danger from that.
He hadn’t seen me coming yet. He was turned toward the lake, pulling the boat along with a piece of frayed rope wrapped over his shoulder. He slid a hand up the line, and I could see that he had on bulky work gloves. That was a point in my favor. Gloves like that make it pretty hard to use a weapon of any kind.
“Mornin’, Len,” I said, and he jumped about three feet, dropping his draw line. His eyes flew open wide, and his gaze darted around. For about a second and a half, I got the strong feeling he was thinking about running. If he did, I’d have to stop him before he made it back to that brush. Len wasn’t a big man. He might’ve been at one time, but at this point, he was shrunken up and stooped over, old looking. The skin on his neck moved up and down like a turkey wattle as he swallowed hard, his eyes tracking from my badge to my gun and back.
I held my hands away from the holster a bit. “Don’t panic on me now. I just want to talk to you a minute. You know who I am, right?”
Of course Len knew who I was. He and I’d had too many conversations about jug lines for him not to know. The real question was why he was looking at me like he was scared to death. Usually, when I confronted Len about fishing violations, he just came across as confused by the fact that the lake and land around it had actual rules he was supposed to follow. When I explained that fact to him, he just hung his head, slurred out, “Yyyes-ir,” in his strange garbled way, and then he went on and complied with whatever I’d asked him to do. I’d cited him once for shooting a couple wild turkeys out of season, and he’d even taken that pretty calmly. Len didn’t know much, but apparently, he had some experience with paying fines for wildlife violations.
Today he looked panicked enough to bolt into the lake. Darting a glance toward the cedar brush where I’d heard the child, he took a step sideways.
I held up my hands, palms out, to calm him. “Len, I don’t want any trouble, all right. I have to ask you not to go any closer to the brush, though. I need to talk to you for a minute, and we’ll stand right here where I can see what’s around us. You understand?”
I waited for his next move. There was a pretty decent chance he had a rifle up there in the woods with the rest of his stuff. If there was a child there, the rifle and the child might be in the brush together.
The situation was getting more complicated by the minute. Some way or other, I had to hurry things along before Len’s mind could cycle around and come up with a plan. Fortunately, Len wasn’t a quick thinker.
“All right, now, listen,” I said. “First thing, I need to know what you’ve got stashed up there in the brush.”
Len swallowed hard again, his lips tightening. His tongue kneaded around his teeth as he worked up some words. “I ain’t . . . s-s-shot unn-no utt-turkeys.”
Turkeys
came out in a hail of spit I could feel from four feet away. The wind shifted then, and I could smell him, too. Len stunk worse than something that’d been dead on the side of the road for three days. Hard to say whether that shack of his had indoor plumbing or not, but it must not’ve had a bathtub.
“I didn’t say you shot any turkeys. I asked what you’ve got up in the cedar brush. There someone out here with you this morning?”
He darted a look toward the brush again, rubbing his hands over his grease-coated jeans, like he was trying to dry his palms even though he had gloves on.
“I need you to keep your hands where I can see them,” I said. The hands stayed where they were, his gloved fingers tightening over baggy folds in his clothes, pulling and tugging nervously. I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him. Most of the suspects I dealt with were scum with long legal histories of petty crime, drug violations, DUIs, and domestic incidents. I usually found them driving around in cars registered to wives, girlfriends, mamas, or grandmas, because they couldn’t keep up the payments on a vehicle themselves. But Len, even with his limitations, was trying to scratch out his own living on the little bare-dirt farm left behind by his folks. “You got somebody with you this morning?”
“Unn-nobody,” he answered, working hard to get the word out, a bead of tobacco dribbling from the corner of his mouth and hanging in the gray stubble on his chin. “Unn-nobody th-th-thar.” He glanced toward the cedar brush again, his hands worrying the tails of a denim shirt that’d probably been scooped from the trash barrel behind some gas station.
I looked him in the eye, and he ducked his head like he was hunting a hole to jump into. “Len, we’re walking up to that cedar brush now, and I don’t want you to cause any trouble. I need you to show me what you’ve got hidden there.”
I will charge thee nothing but the promise
that thee will help the next man
thee finds in trouble.
– Mennonite proverb
(Left by Mennonite fishermen with a load of blue catfish)
Andrea Henderson
My first appointment of the day was a session with a grandmother who was trying to raise three grandkids after the death of her son. Taz had been working with the eldest of the boys, Daniel, since before Daniel was removed from his mother’s care and given to his grandmother. Now Daniel had begun to realize that his grandmother couldn’t physically control him. He harbored an underlying fear that she, too, might abandon him, and that fear had begun manifesting itself in destructive ways. He’d been kicked out of the school’s summer enrichment program for showing up with a mini baseball bat and threatening another kid with it. Now Daniel had no friends and wanted to drop out before beginning the fifth grade.