Poachers (21 page)

thought it was now. Then the barking stopped, suddenly, as if the dog had run smack into a tree.

Neil 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 Dan. Kent had never wanted to go to Grove Hill—their father had warned them of the police, of jail. In town your truck needed to have a tag and taillights that worked.

Neil picked up one of the catfish from the night before. It was cold and 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 weeds along the bank.

The telephone rig was under the seat. He lifted the chain 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 Neil and his brothers that if a game warden caught you telephoning, all you needed to do was dump your box overboard. But, Kirxy warned, Frank David would handcuff you and jump overboard and swim around the bottom of the river until he found your rig.

Neil spat a stream of tobacco juice into the water. Minnows appeared and began to investigate, nibbling at the dark yolk of spit as it elongated and dissolved. With the rifle’s safety off, he lowered the chain into the water, then the wire, a good distance apart. He checked the connections, then lifted the phone and began to crank. “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 appear behind him when something landed with a clatter in the boat. He glanced over.

A bundle of dynamite, sparks hissing 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, pollywogs, catfish—some only stunned but others dead, in pieces, pink fruitlike 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 comes over the phone. The first call had been Esther, telling him of Kent’s death, Dan’s arrest, Neil’s disappearance. This time Kirxy heard Goodloe’s voice tell him that somebody—or maybe a couple of somebodies—had been blown up out on the trestle.

“Neil,” 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 Ziploc 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, judging from that boat over yonder, it’s either Kent or Neil Gates.”

“It’s Neil,” Kirxy said.

“How you know that?”

Kirxy told him that Kent was dead.

Goodloe studied the storekeeper. “I ain’t seen the body. Have you?”

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. The deputy behind him gagged and turned away.

“Tag it,” Goodloe said, writing something down. “And keep looking. Puke on your own time.”

Kirxy poked Goodloe in the shoulder with his cane. “You really think Neil’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.”

“You half-wit son of a bitch. 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 Gates 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.

Before he and Kirxy got out, Goodloe reloaded.

The hounds kept to the edge of the woods, watching, while 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, already out of breath, stopping to cough once. 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, dumb-ass, 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 his ass up. Maybe shoot these goddern dogs.”

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

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

Kirxy swung at him with his cane and nearly lost his balance. 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 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 snakebit, you said so yourself. That other one blowing his own self 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 damn 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.

Kirxy jumped, looked down at his chest to see the blood, but the sheriff was aiming past him, and when Kirxy followed his eyes he saw the three-legged dog that had been creeping in. It lay slumped in the mud, a hind leg kicking, blood coloring the water around it.

Goodloe backed a step 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 novel. 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 Peach Tree 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 a cigarette and tried to think.

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

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 who’d grown bitter and angry. 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 unwritten game warden code. His job was to protect the wild things the law had deemed worthy. Deer and turkeys. Alligators. 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 exactly the same as them?

Kirxy drove to the highway
. The big thirty-aught-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 whisky 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 whisky 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 twelve-year-old Dan who’d found him. That truck still had window glass then, and half the back windshield

had been sprayed red with blood. Flies had gathered at the top of the truck around what Dan discovered to be a bullet hole, the pistol still clenched in his father’s hand. The rim of Boo’s hat still on his head, the top blown out. Kirxy frowned, thinking of it. 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 god-damn 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 tree line dimming, beginning to disappear.

Soon it was full dark. He unscrewed the interior lightbulb from the ceiling, rolled down the window, 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.