The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (44 page)

“The agent buys hides all the time.”

“Look, you don’t understand.
I
don’t buy them. Too much bother. Town-people don’t barter no more. The Company says I have to take federal money. Legal tender. I had a fellow wanted to give me a rarefied sidelock shotgun all the way from Italy and I couldn’t take it.”

“This goes beyond your typical deal. This is five shotguns. Cover the plow and more and you can have the rest for your troubles.”

Cartwright looked about the room. No. If McBride had some silver buried about the place, it wouldn’t be such a wreck. “Well,” Cartwright said, standing up, not even bothering to hide his disgust, “I’ll be taking my leave of you, Mr. McBride. Good luck with your yield. Got to find somebody who can actually buy this thing.”

When Cartwright went out the door, it was the serene way that McBride said, “You’ll regret it,” that called him back. The Irishman took a folded piece of newspaper from his wallet and smoothed it out on the knife-scored table. “I had to go to Jeph-thah for court day. I was on the jury that hung that Brad fellow for jiggering his little niece and I got this off the corner man.”

Cartwright read it once, and read it again. McBride said, “I know where you can get one of them, a great big one.”

“Why haven’t you got it out already?”

“Thought you said you was a farmer,” McBride said, bristling. “Anthem’s more than sixty mile. You can’t go leaving.”

“Hey now, settle down,” said Cartwright. “I ain’t casting aspersions.” He read the notice a third time, a grin swelling on his face. “We’ll split it sixty-forty,” he said. “But that’s a
solid
forty.”

No one had been to the cave much since the war, when a few dozen men harvested saltpeter for the Confederacy, and then for the Union, when they were told they lived no longer in Old Virginia. They’d shrugged, saying, Makes no difference to us, we just want to eat. And avoid conscription, they might have added. When the war ended, their profits vanished and the cave was plunged back to obscurity. A scattering of people knew the place, but none knew it like McBride’s boys: they crawled into the Sinks of Gandy to harvest flint and hide from downpours when they hunted spring turkeys.

Toting a bundle of tools, the nine-fingered boy led Cartwright on cattle paths to skirt their few neighbors, suspicious people loyal to no one but blood and that even questionable. They wandered into high meadows drowning in beaver dams and dropped into the next valley. A thin jade river fled north and drained with a sucking roar into the Sinks of Gandy, a hatchet wound grinning in the mountainside. The Sinks led to a lacework of caverns undergirding the farmlands. The river resurfaced four miles north by northwest.

Stubby stalactites drooped from the opening and a hush issued from the hole, exhaling the smell of wet rock. Cartwright held out a hand and found it too mild for hell. He glanced over his shoulder at the humpy valley land, beckoning him back. “Two miles in,” the boy said, stuffing his belongings into a wetproof satchel made of stomach. “Long miles.”

They were swallowed into the cold bowels of the mountain. Cartwright cursed, sinking his leg into a sump of cave mud as the boy lit a pine knot from his satchel. The torch spat glow on soap-stone walls that glistened wet as a dog’s mouth.

A frothy roar. Crotch-deep in the river, their flesh shriveled. All manner of beast erupted from the crevices—blind wormy salamanders, hare-eared bats whose wings were silk fans brushing their faces. They scrambled over rocks and hangs as the river dropped and narrowed, sluicing through a trough. Deeper they went. Walls closed and they squeezed through closets of stone, rooms within rooms. Cartwright felt his chest cave, his ribs compress. Each breath painful, space no more than a corncrib. His lungs burned. He cried out, casting echoes through the tunnel.

“Quit your wailing,” the boy said, holding out his hand to the mud-smeared man who
still
wore a necktie. “Breathe deep. Scoot sideways.”

Cartwright popped free into a chapel of stone. The boy pulled a fresh pine knot from his bag, touched it off, and handed the hissing lantern to the drummer. The room soared overhead, massive
wet ribbons of rock dripping in folds from the ceiling. The chemical burn of waste in his nostrils, a roof of rodents screeching above. In the old days the men said, The bats sow shit and we reap gunpowder.

They came to an opening, a single slur of light on the floor. Cartwright stuck his head inside and drank the sweet air. Covered crown to boot in coffee-colored mud, he asked, “Won’t that fire choke us in here?”

The boy ran his four fingers over the remains of abandoned saltpeter hoppers pegged to the wall, troughs of cucumber wood and oak. “Big window up top lets the fire out. Indian smoke-house. Funny thing, you walk through the field and a flock of bats just pop out the ground beneath you. You near piss yourself.”

They felt the earth settle and creak, the animals shuddering in waves overhead. A few squeaking kits fell from the ceiling, and they couldn’t help but tromp them under boot.

“What if the whole mountain falls down?”

“Been standing since Genesis,” the boy said. “Look, here we are.”

The ground was a carpet of fossilized dung. With their torches, they studied the wall scratchings of a lost people, charcoal men in positions of coupling and war. That’s when Cartwright saw the face glaring back at him. The maw of a cave bear jutted from the rock, trapped by flood long ago. The greasy pine fire burned against it with a contained fury, illuminating the hollows of its face. It was clearly no mean bruin, its skull gargantuan, with black canines dripping down the jaw. Cartwright put his hand to the wall and soft shale flaked and fell away. He took the clipping from his shirt pocket and read it aloud, taking a second go at the longer words.

“Sounds right to me,” the boy said. Could the boy have even read it? Did someone explain it to them? He took a hammer and a chisel from his bag and handed them to Cartwright. Turning his shoulder so the boy couldn’t see, Cartwright folded the newspaper clipping back into the sucker list, marrying the two documents together, and tucked them into his jacket.

Stepping forward, Cartwright ran his thumb against the sharp ring of the occipital bone and the worn points of fang, tracing the fissures of the skull that rippled like stitches under his touch. It thrilled him. He couldn’t wait to turn it over in his hands. He was amazed there were such things in the ground, waiting to be dug out like potatoes. Cupping them in his brown palm, Cartwright’s father used to show off the arrowheads he tilled out of the fields.

The boy said, “Something, ain’t it?”

A scene came drifting up from the lake bed of memory. When Cartwright was seven years old, his father had bought a gold locket for his wife’s birthday from a drummer passing through. A smile they hadn’t seen before took hold of her face, but a week later, his father stood clutching the doorframe, looking shamefully at where the false gold stained her pale skin, like gangrene. He tore it from her neck and threw it down the well. It was the one time his father cried in front of them. The frightened children fanned into the woods. That night, Cartwright’s father had to come looking for him with a lantern to fetch him back home.

Cartwright grooved the chisel’s tooth into the base of the skull, where the spine would fuse, and lifted the hammer. He let it fall. The chisel jumped in his hand and half the skull turned to silt. It cascaded down the rock wall with the faintest sigh. The boy let
out a string of oaths so profane, so unparalleled, that surely they’d been inspired by a hell so near.

Cartwright was glad to have a hammer in hand.

Once again they waded the river, water sucking at their limbs. A pinprick of light appeared ahead. Neither spoke, even when a toothy rock tore Cartwright’s jacket with a startling rip. Soon, a delicate sun and then a javelin of light struck the drummer’s chest. They came to the mouth of the Sinks of Gandy. “I see them coming,” the boy said.

Indeed, McBride and the ten-fingered boy stood there with guns in hand, laughing, each with a fox draped over his shoulder. McBride held a double-barrel sixteen-gauge loaded with pumpkin-ball slugs, a gun the drummer hadn’t seen before. They lifted their bloody foxes to the sun. They were fresh, tongues still pink with the suggestion of life. The foxes couldn’t be eaten, only sold, because like all predators they reeked of the flesh they’d consumed. One was a black-socked vixen with a sleek coat, the other a gray fox, its face and limbs streaked with red, which had obviously been living in a briar patch. It could use a currycomb and wouldn’t bring as much, Cartwright mused miserably, but still a good price.

“You all get it?” McBride asked. “Them bones don’t look like much, but they say it’s money in the bank.”

“Ask your drummer here,” the nine-fingered boy said, cocking his head.

“That skull was too old! No one told me how old it was. That was damaged goods.”

McBride colored. “Good what now?”

“It’s in a thousand pieces,” the boy said. “You couldn’t broom it out of the dirt.”

Cartwright opened his hands. “That skull wasn’t worth a damn. You misled me. You violated our contract.”

“Misled you?”

“That’s the law. It’s a contract.”

“We shook hands,” the farmer said, looking to his boys. “Drummer, you said a man can’t do without it.”

“It’s the law. The legislature wrote it. We just got to live by it.”

“What? What are we going to do about that plow?”

“Hey now,” Cartwright said, “don’t bounty those foxes. Tan the hides and sell them. You’ll turn a better profit. You get a few more dozen and I’ll come back in the fall.”

“Know how long it’ll take to cure these hides?”

Cartwright said nothing.

“That’s right. You’ll be off down the road and we won’t see you for a year. Hell, two year. You’ll come back when you feel like it. Where will we be? I’m tired of this ground working me, I’m ready to work
it
. You said it yourself.”

The nine-fingered boy said, “What’s this?”

The boy knelt and picked up a folded piece of paper. Cartwright felt the world turn on a pivot. He grew light-headed and loose-limbed, as if he’d just been bled with leeches. The boy peeled the sucker list away from the newspaper clipping. His eyes scanned the lines. Cartwright thought about running, but he didn’t know the way back to the road.

The nine-fingered boy read the words aloud, which listed the name McBride among the county’s daft, drunken, gullible, and insane.

“Says we got an eye for any piece of metal, long as it’s shiny. Drills, reapers. Pine away for it, we will.”

“No better than rooks,” his brother said.

Cartwright opened his mouth, then let it shut with a click. He felt weary from the cave, and the years on the road, and his entire body was slick with mud, pant legs heavy as dragnets. He leaned against a sycamore lording over the Sinks of Gandy. He could retch. “Look,” he cried, “I know what it’s like! I’m from here!”

With a crack, the nine-fingered boy slapped a creeping armored caterpillar off his pant leg. “Jesus Christ,” he said, looking
down. It was a brilliant green, nearly five inches long. He looked back to Cartwright.

The slug punched Cartwright’s side like a party ballot. The drummer fell against the slippery bark and the shot patch fluttered against his face, a sulfur burn in his nostrils. Once, when he was young, he’d tasted a bitter pinch of gunpowder and said it tasted like a chimney. His father laughed, clamping a loving paw on the boy’s shoulder, his palm rough as a file. Cartwright threw up a hand and the second shot took his forearm in a hail of bone and the third struck his chin, unhinging the mouth.

When Cartwright fell, he did it watching the light play through clouds on the face of the mountain.

McBride laid the shotgun on the ground and reached for a pipe of tobacco, hand shaking.

The ten-fingered boy asked, “What was that on your leg?”

“Hell if I know.”

The boys turned the dragon-like caterpillar on a stick, its orange spikes waving. They ran their thumbs across them. The spikes were hard as apple thorns. “That’s called a hickory devil,” McBride said, turning back to the drummer’s body. “Digs into the ground and turns into a big old red moth.”

“Kill it,” one said. “It’ll kill a dog if it eats it.”

Tartly, McBride said, “Don’t. That’s a myth. It won’t hurt nothing.”

It was a lonely place, and they merely covered the drummer in pine boughs, confident that no one would find him and no one would care. They should have known better, for the bears and the foxes broke him apart and scattered him a good ways. Rodents gnawed his belt and boot leather for their share of salt. Five years later, a hunter found Cartwright’s brass belt buckle in the leaves and slipped it into his pocket.

It says something of the quality of the buckle’s manufacture, as well as the hunter’s eye, for it was the fourth week of October and the leaves were a thousand shades of brown, mottled like the skin
on a copperhead’s back. Later, some lost boys from Moatstown found part of him but paid it little mind, calling him a deer because they failed to check the long lithe bones for hooves or fingers. In twenty years, a bear hunter pried the gold tooth from his jaw and threw the husk to the ground. An old woman of Palatine German stock gave his rib cage a Christian burial after a dog dragged it behind her springhouse. She chanted the verses, murmuring, “Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” But she was fading herself, near death, and troubled in her mind. Is only his torso in heaven? she wondered. Do his legs dance in hell? But she was too frail to go searching for the rest, though his pelvic bone rested near a prominent fork in the road, gathering dry leaves like a crock.