“You’re quick,” I said.
“Not like he was. He was quick like you’re quick. I hit harder than you, but he was bunny-fuck fast.”
“Why the grudge?”
“Something about the guy rubbed me the wrong way. We both had a tough background. I actually knew him a little from around LaBorde, and he was a bully. He liked to rough people up and take what little money they had. A street thug. He acted like that point win against me made him the toughest motherfucker in the badass basket.”
“You feel like you beat him? Don’t you?”
“I thought I hit him harder than he hit me, and I made him run a little. Losing on points to that asshole chapped my ass. Something about him. But he’s tough as a nickel steak, no doubt. I gave him some shots that would have made an elephant shit a stack of lawn chairs, and he kept dancing. He has a head like a block of stone. But had we been on the street, which is where I’d like to get that motherfucker, I would have beat his ass like a tom-tom. Hit hard, hit fast, go to the house, like they say in Shen Chuan. Sport is a sport. I get beat that way, normally it’s no harm, no foul, but Sheerfault, he’s got a way about him that sets my teeth on edge.”
“You’re both older now,” I said.
“I can still whip ass,” Leonard said.
“No doubt,” I said. “I meant maybe he’s matured, even if you haven’t.”
“Ha, ha.”
Buffy came over and laid her head on my leg and I scratched her behind the ears.
“Back to what’s important,” I said. “I think we need to find out what it was about Charm’s camera, about where she was taking pictures, that got the Camp Rapture cops nervous. How about tomorrow we go out to the old sawmill?”
“Yeah, and let’s bring our own camera,” Leonard said.
16
Leonard dropped me off at home. I tore up the note I had written Brett, since it was obvious neither she nor Chance had stirred. Buffy checked on Chance on the couch, sniffed her, then came over and lay at my feet. I sat at the table and wrote a new note about how I was sleeping at the agency, still avoiding flu, and then loaded Buffy in my car and drove back to the office.
Now that I was involved in this business with Charm and her mother, I damn sure didn’t want the flu to slow me down. I wanted to be at my best. I figured we had a tiger by the dick, but I wasn’t exactly sure if we could yank on it enough to cage him.
I drank a bit of cranberry juice I had in the refrigerator straight from the container. I was the only one who drank it, so I figured it didn’t matter. I folded the couch out and got the rolled-up foam mattress from the closet and put it on the couch frame and made it up with sheets and blankets, a pillow. I turned out the light and climbed into bed, Buffy at my feet. I lay there trying to figure how Charm and her camera went together and how that fit with her brother being murdered. As I drifted off, I thought too about those poor dogs and people in that sawmill pool, crusted over with ancient sawdust, congealed into sticky flakes that made the dead look rusty.
17
Early the next day I drove me and Leonard out to the sawmill on the edge of Camp Rapture. The morning was fresh with cold air, and the sun was creeping over a horizon lined with trees and houses, turning the sky red as a ripe, polished apple.
Both of us had lived in this area once, between LaBorde and Camp Rapture. Terrible things had gone down with me and Leonard at his old house, back when he owned dogs and we both worked in the rose fields, back when my former wife, Trudy, came calling and messed us up. Or, to be more precise, I messed us up because she had me under her spell and I wanted it that way. That had been a turning point in our lives. It had changed us. Set us on a different and more brutal course. I always thought of Leonard as the naturally brutal one, but the truth was, my choices had led us into all this, and here we were, at the zenith of those choices and mistakes, two middle-aged men, tough of flesh, but tired. At least on my end. Leonard wasn’t one to complain about it much. I didn’t know if he had noticed he’d aged. I had noticed I had aged. I felt it in my bones on cold days like this one, and I thought about the avenues missed when I put my head on my pillow at night. But it wasn’t all bad. There was Brett, and now Chance, and I had my brother Leonard with me. That’s the kind of thing a lot of folks want and never get. But as Leonard has said, I’m hard to make happy.
As we drove, I remembered Leonard’s old place, where Trudy had died. He no longer owned it. In fact, his old house was no longer there. It had caught fire and burned down after he moved, and a double-wide mobile home had been hauled in and blocked up in its place. There was a real lawn now and it was always mowed. The trees that had been along the edges of his property had been cut down and a series of shrubs had been planted. The shrubs were green for about a year after they first got ripe, as I liked to say, and then they became brown clutters that ran along either side of the property.
The worst part was that at one time, well behind Leonard’s house, deep in the woods, there had been a massive oak. It was the last of the great oaks and came from an older time when trees grew for a long time without fear of the saw, grew fat and tall. The oak had thick limbs you could climb up on and stretch out on and sleep without fear of rolling off. I know. Both of us had done it, just because we loved it out there. We would lie in the tree in the spring with the canopy of leaves above us, shiny and green, and in the fall we were sometimes there too, when it was cool, before the nights turned truly cold. We would lie there on separate limbs and talk. We had some great discussions.
We called the tree the Robin Hood Tree, like the humongous tree where Robin and his merry band gathered to talk and feast. I also called it the Tarzan Tree, imagined how you could build a tree house on its wide limbs and have plenty of room to live with a lithe, blond Jane and do more than call elephants and swing on vines. I guess Leonard might have dreamed of having Tarzan as his mate, though no doubt, he would have made Tarzan his bitch.
Leonard and I would meet at the oak, me having to hike through the woods from my place, which wasn’t all that far away if you came by wooded path and then broke off the path and took a deer trail and finally a winding trace through a series of tall, blackjack oaks until you arrived at Fisherman’s Creek. Across the creek the trees thinned in number but not in magnificence. There were sweet gums and hickories and, of course, pines.
The Robin Hood Tree was the granddaddy of them all. The oak rose higher and spread its limbs wider than all the others. Its bark was healthy and dark, and in the spring the leaves were green as Ireland. To stand beneath it when it rained was amazing, because the limbs were so thick and the leaves so plush that during the spring and much of the summer, if not the fall, when the leaves were crisp and brown and yellow and dropping, you would hardly get wet. When it stormed, the limbs shook like angry Spartans rattling their weapons, but the limbs didn’t break. The soil beneath the oak was thick and dark with many years of dropped and composted leaves. There were fat acorns on the ground, and sometimes when you came to the tree, squirrels were under it, rare black squirrels that made that part of the woods their home. They would be in the tree as well, chattering and fussing as you arrived.
Leonard and I met there many mornings, usually having a breakfast of boiled eggs that we brought in brown paper bags. We drank coffee from thermoses. We brought our fishing gear with us. We would sit beneath the tree and eat and talk and take our time drinking coffee. Finally we would go away from there, carrying our gear and cooler, one of us with a bucket of dirt loaded with worms. We walked through the trees and along the narrow creek bed to where the pond was. It was a big pond, and at one time there had been a house near it. Now the house was a pile of gray lumber and rusty nails and a few bricks that showed where the fireplace had been. Beyond that was a clapboard barn that still stood, the wide doors gone, probably removed for lumber for someone’s project. Trees crowded the barn, and one sweet gum had grown up and under the roof and was pushing it loose on one side.
The pond had
been dug maybe fifty years before and filled with fish, and we were fishing their descendants. There was a small boat down there, one we had tediously carried along the creek bank, and we left it there for when we wanted to fish. No one bothered it, because no one besides us came there anymore. The land was owned by someone up north who had mostly forgotten about it. The pond was always muddy, but the fish were thick. We caught them and generally threw them back, unless they were good-size enough and fat. Then they went home with us and became our supper.
We fished with cane poles, not rods and reels. It wasn’t a place for rods and reels. It was a place for fishing in an old and simple way. We put lines on the poles, sinkers, corks, hooks, and bait, usually worms. Out in the boat we would dangle lines and drift and watch the fish jump, the dragonflies dip down on the water, see the shadows of birds flying over. Now and again there was the sight of a leaping frog or a wiggling water moccasin. Turtle heads rose like periscopes, then fell beneath the water with a delicate splash and a ripple.
In the spring it was cool for a long time, and in the summer it grew hot, but with wide-brimmed hats on, we still fished, and we lazed, and sometimes we talked softly, fearing we might frighten the fish. We talked about all manner of things we believed in, same as when we were in the tree. We talked about how we differed from one another. I told Leonard about my women, and he told me about his men. We talked about brotherhood without speaking of it directly. I told bad jokes and Leonard grumbled. We were tight before those times, but that was when we bonded like glue.
When Leonard moved from the house next to the woods, and I later moved from where I lived, we lost that spot.
Some years later the people up north remembered the land. They brought in pulp crews and cut the woods down, even the great and ancient oak, which must have fought the saws valiantly with its old, hard wood. But the saws won. It tumbled down and was coated in gasoline and set on fire. They didn’t even bother to make it into lumber. They wanted the pines. The land where the great oak stood was a black spot for a long time.
Eventually they filled in the pond. A company that raised chickens for a supermarket chain bought the land, and a series of long, commercial chicken houses took the place of the original pond and the woods that had surrounded it. Now there is a wide gravel road that leads out of where the trees once grew and on to the highway. It’s odd, but looking out here now, it seems like such a short distance to where the pond once was. It seemed a long ways away when the trees were there.
As we drove by, Leonard refused to look in the direction where the chicken houses now stood. I looked, but I didn’t like what I saw. The rain still falls and the wind still blows, but the oak and the pond and the rare black squirrels are gone.
18
We arrived at our destination. My memories had placed me in a melancholy mood, and somehow that ancient abandoned mill made it more so. It stood precariously outside of Camp Rapture, on a high hill, behind a thick swath of trees that covered most of the rise. The trees grew all around it as if to spite the developers who’d mauled many of their leafy clan into lumber on that very spot. One pine, very brave and defiant, was pushing up through a gap in the roof. The evergreen needles glistened as if with sweat.
There was a good-size pond to one side of the mill, and the morning sun gave it a bronze sheen, and the heat on the cold water made it mist over. It was an ugly pond, not like the one Leonard and I had loved, back where the chicken houses now stood. That one had been muddy, but it had been fine.
We parked as near as we could to the mill, where the road ran out, walked over, and looked at the pool of water. The mist was slowly evaporating as the sun rose, and we could see the pond was dark with caked sawdust. It looked like quicksand, and it was the reason for the water’s bronze appearance.
Once upon a time a chute had projected from the sawmill and sawdust had been sent down it as the whirling blades inside milled the trees into lumber and progress ate up the East Texas forests. Rainwater had gathered in the pit beneath the chute and had made the stagnant pond. The pond gave off an acidic odor.
“So,” Leonard said, “Charm took a few photos of an old sawmill. So what? Everyone knows bodies have been found here, so no news there. What could have been so important Charm got pushed around by angry cops and had her sim card taken and her brother killed? Seems to me, they were better off just letting her be.”
“Could be it’s not what she photographed but what they thought she photographed.”
“And then she got set loose and they just gave up on her?” Leonard said. “Why?”
“They had a chance to look at the sim card. Nothing there bothered them. But what could Jamar have known that would be of any concern to them?”
“Again, he was annoying them.”
“Still, seems like a big jump from him being annoying to a bunch of cops punching and kicking him to death. Even these yo-yos in Camp Rapture couldn’t be that stupid.”
“As we have done noted many times, people who do stupid things are usually stupid. You and me come to mind.”
“You have a very good point,” I said. “Let’s look in the mill.”
We walked along a weed-coated drive. The weeds were bent down and brown, and you could see where cars had been driving over them, and recently. The gravel crunched beneath our feet like broken glass.
There was a large piece of plywood leaning against the side of the mill. I could see a strip of light between the edge of it and the building. I pushed the board aside. There was an opening into the mill where the wall had gone to rot. Inside, the morning sun dropped into the room through holes in the roof and lit up the floor and made the pine growing through the rip seem much greener. There was a large saw with a great rusty, dust-covered blade and dusty old belts attached to massive pulleys attached to a bulky engine.
When we walked, the floor beneath us felt like carpet where the sawdust had congealed. Mice darted across it and disappeared under split boards and into holes in the wall. There was a thick, wire fencing around the pine, probably about twenty feet out from the trunk. The fence made a complete circle around it. On our side there was a little open gate made of chicken wire and slats of wood and rusty hinges.
“Dogfighting,” Leonard said.
“Looks that way,” I said.
We went inside the circle of wire. The ground was covered in sawdust there as well, but it was kicked up, and you could see the dirt floor was scratched over by the struggling paws of unfortunate dogs, or so I presumed.
Maybe they thought Charm was secretly photographing the dogs fighting, and perhaps it was like Manny said, the cops were sponsoring it, a thing they called a sport, as if the dogs had volunteered. They might have thought she got photographs or video of a fight that could have been going on that night, feared that if she got images of the people who were there, and if the cops and prominent town officials were some of those people, it would blow back on them.
Leonard had brought a camera, and he took photographs of the place, and I used my phone to take more, and I mailed them to my computer at home.
We strolled outside, put the plywood back, and walked to the car. As we were about to get in, a blue sedan rolled up the drive behind our ride, blocking our exit. Two men got out and came around to stand in front of the car. One was dressed in jeans and a loose Hawaiian-style shirt. He was big and his head was shaved and the top of it was sunburned in contrast to how white his face was. His face looked as if it had been paddled by a two-by-four. The other man was shorter and stockier and ruddy-skinned, with a thick head of black hair and a bent nose and a walk like his balls were too heavy on one side. He stood with his mouth open, sucking air. I kept hoping a fly would land on his tongue.
“Well, well,” Leonard said to the man in the Hawaiian shirt. “If it isn’t Your Fault his own goddamn self.”
I got it then. This was Sheerfault, the guy Leonard had fought and lost to and didn’t like. He was a physically capable-looking guy.
“Leon
ard Pine, why, I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age,” Sheerfault said. “No offense. I want you to know that wasn’t a nigger joke…I think last time I saw you…Let me see. Didn’t I whip your black ass?”
“Points,” Leonard said.
“What losers say, but I had you dead to rights. I could have knocked you out if I had another round.”
“I doubt you could have knocked me out with a hammer,” Leonard said.
Sheerfault grinned. It was the kind of grin that made you want to feed him his teeth.
“I wanted a rematch,” he said, “but as I recall, that’s about when you retired.”
“I didn’t want to lose again on being tagged, not hit.”
“Oh, you were hit, all right.” Sheerfault’s grin spread even wider, which seemed impossible, but he managed it.
“Who’s your little friend?” Leonard asked. “He looks like he might need to be paper-trained.”
“Bobo Townsend. He isn’t what you’d call a thinker, are you, Bobo?”
“Ain’t no thinker,” Bobo said.
“He got hit by a train about five years ago, and he wasn’t exactly a mental giant before,” Sheerfault said. “Train hit his truck crossing the track, smashed the truck into a wad, and knocked some wires loose in Bobo’s head. Bobo has a simple approach to life, don’t you, Bobo?”
“I like to hit people,” Bobo said.
“That sums it up,” Sheerfault said. “He likes to hit people. Also, he hears a train whistle up close, he shits his pants.”
“Can’t help it,” Bobo said.
“You should carry toilet paper with you,” I said. “Change of underwear.”
“I could hit you,” Bobo said.
“No need for unpleasantness,” I said.
“Go ahead,” Leonard said. “Hit him. See how that works out for you, Banjo.”