Nursery Tale (6 page)

"I
know
that," Sam Wentis said. "What're you sayin'? You sayin' I think turtles are fish or somethin'? I know a lot about turtles."

Timmy Meade raised his head and rolled his eyes. He wondered if he would ever figure Sam Wentis out. "No, Sam, I'm not sayin' that. I know you know about turtles. Everyone knows about turtles."

"Sure as hell!" said Sam Wentis, and he smirked a little, proud of his curse.

"Damn it to hell!" said Timmy Meade, and he turned away so his friend wouldn't see his broad smile and know the truth—that he was trying to best him in cursing.

"Shit damn it all to hell and back!" exclaimed Sam Wentis, and both of them burst into loud, nervous, adolescent laughter. The laughter lasted nearly five minutes, then, like a spinning top, slowly subsided and finally stopped. Timmy Meade said, "Hey, let's get outa here. It smells like shit damn rotten eggs." And, after some thought, Sam Wentis agreed that the swamp really did smell like "shit damn rotten eggs, now that you mention it." So, Timmy checked his new watch—an eleventh birthday gift—decided, after consultation with Sam, that they had a good hour left before dinner, and, side by side, they headed north, into a particularly dark, thick, and very intriguing area of the woods.

Sam Wentis and Timmy Meade had become inseparable in the ten weeks they'd lived in Granada. As much as any two boys can be they were an amazing study in contrasts. Sam was tall, dark-haired, olive-skinned. His adoptive mother was fond of saying he had a "decidedly Mediterranean look about him," and her friends invariably commented that "the girls are going to be falling all over him," and, "he's going to be a real lady's man," which, for reasons she couldn't understand, made Trudy Wentis very uncomfortable. And Sam was also "impetuous," which, his parents realized, might have been a euphemism for "bullheaded" and "slow," although the second word was never used in the Wentis household, because it was agreed that perhaps Sam wasn't really "slow" so much as "contemplative," in his own unique way.

Timmy Meade, on the other hand, was short, fair-skinned, and fair-haired, with the kind of "thoughtful good looks" which, later in his life (his father maintained) only a few, especially sensitive women would find appealing. And he was extremely bright. His mother often wished that IQ testing hadn't fallen into general disuse. She was sure that her son's score would really be something to brag about. She was that kind of woman.

"'R
ound the end of September, sometime," Sam Wentis said.

Timmy Meade didn't understand. "What's around the end of September, Sam?"

Sam Wentis put his open hand against the trunk of a tree. "That's when fall starts. I just remembered." He noticed the long thorns spaced randomly on the tree. "Hey, Timmy, looka this!" He took his hand away and fingered one of the thorns, fascinated. "Jees—you could really get speared by one of these things." He pushed his finger deliberately into the tip of the thorn and watched, still fascinated, as a small bead of blood formed. "Jees, these things could kill ya."

"That was a dumb thing to do," Timmy Meade said. "How do you know it's not poisonous? You could be rolling around on the ground there in a couple minutes." He nodded meaningfully at the ground. "Then you could be
dead
! Shit damn! That was dumb! Dumbest thing I've seen you do all week! Why do you do things like that?"

Sam Wentis said nothing. He brought his finger slowly to his mouth and licked the blood off. Then, abruptly, he turned and started walking north. Timmy Meade lowered his head;
Jees, not again!?
He looked up. "Sam," he called, "I didn't mean nothin'. Really." But Sam Wentis kept walking; he quickened his pace a little. Timmy Meade stayed where he was; he had decided, at that moment, that his friend's temper wasn't going to get the best of him
this
time. It seemed like every day he had to apologize to him for saying one thing or another. Yesterday, it had been the thing with the garbage cans ("Sam, why would you wanta go pokin' around in someone else's garbage? You could catch a disease." . . . "I'm sorry, Sam. I didn't mean nothin'."). And the day before that it had been the thing with the puppy ("Sam, don't do that, can't you see yer hurtin' him?" . . . "I'm sorry, Sam."), because Sam couldn't seem to understand that some of the things he did made no sense at all. Or that they were stupid and cruel things.

"I'm not going to apologize this time, Sam," Timmy Meade called. "I don't think I need to, 'cuz if you just think about it a little, Sam, you'll know you did a dumb thing!" He paused. And realized, on the instant, that Sam had vanished. A nervous smile played along his lips. "Sam?" He looked quickly to his right, his left. Then at the spot where Sam had last been. "Sam, you hidin' behind a tree?" He paused very briefly. "You behind a tree or somethin', Sam?" From far to his left to the west—he heard the crack of a rifle. He turned his head toward the sound; the phrase hunting season passed through his mind and made him grimace. He turned his head back, focused on the spot where Sam had been. And saw him standing, facing him, smiling an odd, crooked kind of smile. "Shit damn!" Sam Wentis said, and he looked very pleased, as if he had just won some great victory. "Shit damn!" he repeated.

Clyde Watkins and Manny Kent. Townies

C
lyde Watkins called, "What'd you shoot at, Manny?"

Manny Kent ("Manny" was short for "Manfred," which he despised) looked up from the deer spoor. "Damn buck," he called back. "Didn'tcha see it? Great big damned buck, Clyde. Mighta got him, too, weren't the sun in my eyes."

Clyde walked over to him, very careful of how he carried his rifle (the year before, Clyde's Uncle Winston had accidentally shot himself in the chin. Miraculously, he had survived but, Clyde thought now, he'd never again be much to look at). "I didn't see a thing, Manny. You got X-ray vision or somethin'?"

"Naw, I ain't got X-ray vision. Yer just blind, Clyde." He laughed. "Blind's a bat in a snowstorm, Clyde."

Clyde nodded to indicate the deer spoor. "That ain't no deer spoor, Manny." It lay on a slight rise in the land. To the east, the land sloped downward at a gentle angle for several hundred yards, where a newly installed, six-foot-high chain-link fence bisected it. Just beyond the fence, the land gave way to heavy thickets and small stands of evergreens. Granada lay three-quarters of a mile east of the fence.

"Sure that's a deer spoor, Clyde. You gonna tell me I shot at some damn cow?"

'That ain't a deer spoor at all Manny." He paused, suppressed a giggle. "That's a Steg-oh-saurus spoor. And it's a very rare thing, Manny."

Manny eyed him suspiciously. "That's a what, Clyde?"

"A Steg-oh-saurus spoor." He felt the laughter building in his stomach, like a whirlpool; he fought it back. "You ain't hearda the
Steg
-oh-saurus?"

"You jokin' with me, Clyde?"

"I ain't jokin' with you, Manny. That's an actual Steg-oh-saurus spoor, there. It
looks
like a deer spoor, but it ain't." He paused, grinned. "Woulda fooled me, too, if I didn't know the difference. It's a real subtle difference, Manny."

"Yer fulla shit, Clyde, 'cuz I
know
what a Stegoh-lasoris is! It's some kinda fuckin' dinosaur, some kinda fuckin' damn big dinosaur, and yer tryin' to make
me
look like a damn fool! Admit it, Clyde. Go on, admit it." There was no animosity in Manny's tone; he'd grown accustomed to his brother-in-law's off-key sense of humor, and it made him feel good when one of Clyde's jokes fell flat. "Go on, Clyde, admit it."

"Yeah, you're right," Clyde said, as if in apology. "But it ain't no dinosaur, Manny." Again he suppressed a giggle. "It's actually a kind of wild pig!" And then the whirlpool of laughter burst from his mouth, he dropped his rifle, fell to his knees and, the laughter frothing out of him, enjoyed himself immensely,

Minutes later, when he could open his eyes again, when, at last, the laughter had died, he saw that Manny was holding something in front of his—Clyde's—eyes; a small, rectangular piece of tarnished metal; a badly rusted chain hung from it. "What's that, Manny?"

Manny held it up to his own eyes, and studied it critically. "I think it's somebody's bracelet, Clyde. And I think it's made of pure silver."

Clyde stood and picked his rifle up; he examined the bracelet closely, while Manny clung possessively to it, then he announced, "Sure looks like pure silver, Manny." He tried to take it from him; Manny yanked it away. "Finders are keepers, Clyde." He nodded at what appeared to be a broad, flat, dull white rock, half buried in the bare earth, about a yard away. "I found it. Over there, under that rock. I saw the chain stickin' out."

"Well let me tell you this, Manny. If it is silver, you just remember that it was
my
pickup that brought you out here, and
my
thirty-ought-thirty yer huntin' with, and
my
damned boots yer wearing—"

"There's a name on it, Clyde."

"You listenin' to me, Manny?"

"Ever hearda someone named Mark Collins, Clyde?—'Cuz that's the name here: 'Mark Collins.'"

Clyde thought for just a moment, then, "Give it here, Manny."

"I sure as hell will not!"

"It's evidence, Manny."

"Evidence? What kind of evidence?" He sounded on the verge of a pout.

"You're thick, Manny! You got no brains, nor memory! Mark Collins was that colored man who disappeared around here six or seven years ago. You remember? It was in the papers, and I know you can read."

Something close to recognition settled into Manny's eyes; "Oh yeah," he said.

"So give me the damned bracelet, Manny, 'cuz it ain't yours, anyway, 'cuz first of all it's evidence, and second of all—" He stopped, annoyed. Manny had stepped away from him and was prodding the dull white rock with the toe of his boot. "Clyde . . ." he said tentatively.

Clyde stepped over to him, hesitated a moment, then leaned over and pushed him away. For a long while he studied and fingered what they had supposed was a rock, then he looked up at his brother-in-law. "Give me the bracelet, Manny!"

Manny obeyed instantly. Clyde's tone had become severe, even threatening.

"Manny, this here ain't no rock. It's a pelvic bone." He wiped the bracelet clean with his handkerchief.

"It's a
what
, Clyde?"

"A pelvic bone. From somebody's pelvis, from
Mark Collins's
pelvis." He tucked the bracelet under the bone, back where Manny had found it.

"Clyde, what would you know about bones?"

"I'm the volunteer fire chief, right, Manny?! And as a consequence of that I seen lotsa bones. I seen skull bones and I seen wrist bones and backbones, and I seen pelvic bones, too. And this here is a pelvic bone. And I'll tell you somethin' else, Manny, somethin' I hope makes you real sick, 'cuz I don't wanta know about this man here, or what's left of him, and I don't wanta know we found him, and I'm real upset that
you
found him, so I want you to be sick when I tell you that someone's been gnawin' on this pelvic bone here! I don't know what's been
gnawin'
on it—a coyote or a bobcat, maybe. Maybe not. But somethin'. And I'm gonna tell you one more thing, Manny"—he started for the car at a fast walk. Manny followed—"I'm gonna tell you," Clyde shouted over his shoulder, "that if you ever so much as mention one word to
anyone
about this, about what we found out here, even if you mention it to that skinny little wife of yers—"

"Clyde, she's
yer
sister!"

"Even to her, Manny, then your ass is grass and
I'm
the mower. I'm tellin' you that right now, and I'll tell you again tomorrow, and the next day, 'cuz I don't want
no
part of somebody's fuckin' murder, you hear that, Manny, no part, no way, and you better remember—"

T
immy Meade asked, "Think you'd ever come out here at night, Sam?"

Sam Wentis considered the question a moment. "Sure," he said, with conviction. "Ain't nothin' here at night that's not here in the day. My father told me that and I guess it's true."

Timmy Meade smiled to himself. Sam Wentis so rarely talked about his adoptive parents. "Is that what your father said? Sounds real good to me."

"But I knew it all along, anyway."

"I know you did, Sam."

"'Course, there's things out here in the day you got to be real careful of."

"Yeah, I know, Sam. I heard there's timber rattlers, and maybe some brown bears . . ."

In unison, they stopped walking. They had reached the edge of the forest—above them, the full and overhanging branches of two beech trees side by side formed a perfect, natural archway. From here, they had a grand, panoramic view of Granada, a half mile off, bathed in the dull, orange glow of sunset.

"My dad told me we'll probably all get stuck out here this winter," Timmy Meade said. "Because the road's too narrow and they'd better widen it. But, heck, I hope they don't widen it. Just think of all the days we'll have off from school, Sam." He waited for some response but got none. "Sam?"

And, after a moment, Sam Wentis whispered, "Shit damn!" He repeated it once, louder. Then again, even louder. And then he took off at a loping and impossibly graceful run toward Granada. He had always been a very graceful and quick child.