“She checked out,” I said.
“Damn...Do you believe her story?”
“There’s an arrow sticking out of her. She was either telling the truth or Robin Hood missed a shot at a deer.”
That’s when we heard a noise, someone coming, being loud, purposely. My guess was they wanted her to hear them coming and cause fear.
Two men began to call out.
“Come on out, whore. We have a few points to make with you.”
“Yeah,” said another voice. “You might as well give it up, cause these points really hurt.”
The voices were coming from out in the deeper woods.
“Come on,” Leonard said. “She’s gone, and she said they had weapons.”
We rushed up the hill, and no sooner had we laid flat amongst the brush and were spying downward, two men came into the clearing beneath us. The two women she had mentioned did not appear.
The men were dressed in camo, carrying modern bows and quivers of arrows strapped to their backs. One of them had arrows fastened to his bow in such a way he could pop them loose and load them up quickly. They had machetes strapped to their sides in scabbards. They had canteens of water on their belts. One of them was wearing a backpack with his quiver of arrows strapped to that. Both wore high–top, waterproof boots. One of them was stocky, but solid, and had on a green baseball cap. The other an Aussie style hat with one side pinned up.
Making their way down the hill they came to the body and stared at it.
“The arrow is ruined,” I heard the one in the cap say.
“Yeah,” said the other. He was taller. He took off his Aussie hat and ran his hand through his hair and put it back on. “Shafts bent, but it made a hell of a hole. Forget the arrow. It was a good shot, one of your best.”
“Bitch,” said the stocky man wearing the baseball cap. He laid his bow on the ground carefully, pulled his machete out of its scabbard and went to chopping on the woman with it, hacking at her legs and privates and chest. She was still fresh enough to bleed, and she bled a lot.
Leonard started to rise up, but I grabbed him. He looked at me. I shook my head and spoke to him by forming words but not saying them. “Not yet.”
Leonard tried to relax and lay still. He managed, but just barely. Leonard is the kind of guy that will attack a rhino barehanded and expect to come home with its horn. Sometimes you have to remind him he’s just a man.
Baseball Cap hacked on the poor woman some more. It was all I could do not to stand up and scream at him and run down the hill with my hunting knife. But the other guy was holding his bow, and from the way they carried themselves I knew they were trained woodsmen and hunters. There was a good chance me or Leonard would look like a porcupine by the time we got down there. A good bowman can thread several arrows and fire far more quickly than you can imagine.
When Baseball Cap grew tired of hacking, he wiped his face with his forearm, took a deep breath, and then hacked one more time, cutting off the woman’s head. I heard Leonard let his breath out, or so I thought, and then I realized it was me. Still, I hadn’t been too loud. We were still safe and hidden.
There were strands of flesh still attached to the neck and the head. The man chopped again until the head was free. Aussie Hat brought out a bag, and Baseball Cap put the head in the bag, leaned down and rubbed the machete across her shirt to clean the blade, and then he put it away. Aussie Hat fastened the bag to the back of his pack, which for a moment he had removed, and then re–slung it.
“I forgot the camp shovel,” said Baseball Cap. “Shit. We can push her off in the water, I guess. Gators, fish, and the heat will take care of her in a few days.”
“Hell with that,” said Aussie Hat. “Who the hell comes all the way back in here? There are thousands of acres. She’ll rot quick, and then there’s the ants and animals, all this fresh blood. No guarantee a gator will find her, but something will. ”
“That’s right,” said Baseball Cap.
“Sure it is,” said the other.
They started walking back the way they had come, and when they disappeared into the trees, I said, “We got to call some law. Bring them back here.”
“By the time we get to the car and find a phone, they’ll be long gone,” Leonard said. “There won’t be any justice for that poor woman. Those guys might never be found. They hunted her like a deer. And you can bet they’ve done it before, and will do it again. We got to track after them. Keep them in sight.”
“You mean more than that, don’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve seen enough killing in my time,” I said.
“Listen. You go back, drive and find a phone. I’ll stay after them.”
“She said there were four, remember? Where are the other two? Hell. I’ll come with you. I can’t let you go up against four. You might hurt them.”
“There you go,” Leonard said.
We sent down to her body for a look. It was sickening.
“Can you believe that shit?” Leonard said. “Chopping off her head.”
“Have to,” I said. “Saw it.”
“We ain’t got time for a burial, Hap. I know that’s what you were thinking.”
That was exactly what I was thinking.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. And we got nothing to dig a hole.”
We went after them.
· · ·
The rain had blown out, but with the heat of the day rising there were ribbons of fog in the low land, and it wrapped around us like damp serpents. The trees seemed to come out of the fog and then go back into it. It didn’t take long before we lost them.
We paused to examine the ground and find tracks, but the fog was too thick and too close to the earth for us to see well. We stopped beneath a tree as it warmed up, waiting for the fog to lift, hoping we could follow their tracks as we were once able to do, back when we were younger and had grown up near nature.
We drank water from our canteens and split a granola bar. Until then we hadn’t had anything for breakfast or lunch but bad coffee and some sips of water. The sun melted the fog like cotton candy. Now we could see their tracks, and the limbs they had bent while moving through the brush. They might as well have left us a map.
Looking where they had gone, we saw that there were a lot of ancient cedar stumps in the middle of a long patch of brackish water. It went on for some distance. There were only a few grown trees; most of the others were scrubs. It was patched like that for a long distance, and in the distance we could see those two moving along at no particular pace, seeming to take their time about it, not worried in the least. I figured, why worry when you thought no one had any idea what you had done and where you were.
And then I thought: Well, you son–of–a–bitches, we know, and if you knew us, you’d start worrying.
They got well ahead of us, and we let them. We tried to stay near the larger stumps and the clumps of greenery as we went. There were long leaves that grew out of the water, looked like blades, and they were sharp too. We hid behind those when we thought we ought to, and when we had to truck across large expanses of water, we made our way so as not to make the water splash too loudly, in case our prey might look back and see us. We were too far from them to do anything, but with their arrows, they weren’t too far from us.
They had planned all this well, let the woman off in the thick of the swamp and hunted her down. Now they had time to walk out and be a great distance away from her body. The question was, where were they going now, and why were they carrying her head in a bag?
Snakes swam all around us, and once we saw an alligator hustle along between two stumps in our direction, but it turned, went out where the marsh was deep, and with a flick of its tail it was gone. Let me tell you that took my breath away.
In time the woods swelled up again and the swamp water thinned. Before long we were in tall grass, and then the grass gave way to even more woods, a lot of thin trees growing close together. The sun had begun to cr
awl up high. A bit of water had seeped into my so–called weatherproof boots.
Far away we saw a split in the woods and we could see water beyond the split, not brown, but blue. We were coming out of the low–level muck, and to the bank of the larger and cleaner–looking Lake Caddo, the only natural lake in Texas.
I added that because I learned it in school. I wouldn’t want you to think I wasted my education.
There was a line of willow and cypress trees along the water, and we could see the men walk out of the green growth, and keep walking onto the water, which for a moment gave me pause until we came up a little higher on the rise, ducked down behind some swamp grass, and saw they had stepped onto a large barge. It was like a great, high–setting raft and there was an enormous cabin in the center of it with a band of large windows that went around as far as we could see. Inside the cabin was where the wheelhouse and living quarters would be. The part of the wheelhouse we couldn’t see would have to be glass as well, and it would give a good view of the water ahead.
As they stepped onto the barge, two women came out of the cabin and each grabbed a man in turn and they hugged, and then the man with the head in the bag took it out and showed it to them.
You would have thought it was Christmas and their birthdays all rolled into one. The women giggled with glee. They were long, sun–browned women, one with her dark hair tied back, the other with short blonde hair cropped close to her head. They looked good in tight tee–shirts and shorts and flip–flops, and it was obvious both were braless and could make that work. They didn’t look like monsters.
Leonard turned and looked at me, his forehead scrunched.
I shrugged. I didn’t get it either.
The man with the woman’s head, which he was holding by the hair, put the head in the bag, and the women went inside the barge.
We eased back behind the rise.
“What kind of people are these?” Leonard said.
“They’re not people,” I said.
Easing through the weeds, crawling on our bellies, we made our way down to the trees along the bank near the barge. I took up behind a cypress, and Leonard eased into a clutch of small willows.
Aussie Hat picked up a pole lying in a groove on the barge and pushed at the bank with it. Baseball Cap had already unhooked a line tied to a large root sticking out from the shoreline. He picked up a pole and helped Aussie Hat push off. The motor began to hum, and then the barge began to move. One of the women was motoring them away.
“Damn,” Leonard said.
“Wait,” I said.
They glided along on the water, not going far from shore. We watched as the barge chugged around a bend in the lake.
“They seem to be staying close to land,” I said. “Maybe they’re not going far.”
“All we can do is follow around the edge of the lake and hope,” Leonard said.
We got up and trucked along the way they were going. It was hard work. The trees were thick and there were a lot of mosquitoes now and they moved in little black swarms like living clouds. The sun was dipping and the sky was already dark from clouds filled with rain.
It was a slow slog, and finally it began to rain. It was a soft but steady rain. We stayed close to the curve of the lake and only went away from the shoreline for any distance when we had no choice, when the bushes and trees and vines grew thick enough to make a fence. We went wide then, but we always made it back close to shore. We could see the barge had lights on inside the cabin. It was still close to the bank. Finally it came to a place far up from us and drifted over for a moment, then chugged back out into the lake.
“What was that about?” Leonard said.
“Maybe they thought they’d camp there, decided not to.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Leonard said.
We took a breath and drank some water and split another granola bar, which was good. I was so hungry my stomach was starting to gnaw at my insides.
After a few minutes we got our wind back and started onward. A surprised nesting of birds startled by our presence flew up in a burst, causing me to nearly pass a turd.
Before long the barge pulled over again and stopped and the man in the baseball cap came out and secured a line to shore. He went back inside. It was growing darker, and the lights in the barge looked warm and inviting, even if the people inside were as cold–blooded as a snake. Rain had begun to come down like bullets.
I pulled the hood on my slicker close around my face and we eased closer to shore. We could see through the windows, and we could see people in the light. There was hard rock music coming from the barge and Baseball Cap was dancing with the women. The dark–haired woman was holding up the decapitated woman’s head as she danced. I glanced at Leonard.
Leonard pulled his knife from its scabbard. “I say we surprise them and kill their asses.”
“The women too?”
“I don’t see any difference,” Leonard said. “You and your chivalry are going to get you killed some day. I don’t make one whit of difference in them.”
“We could still go for help.”
“They’d be gone by the time we come back, and they’ll never get what they deserve.”
“I’m kind of worried we might get what we don’t deserve,” I said.
· · ·
“Here’s what I will do,” I said. “We make a citizen’s arrest.”
“What?” Leonard said.
“I’m not going to kill these people, go back to the cabin and go fishing. When I said I’d had enough of death, I meant it.”
“I thought we’d kill them, go back to the cabin, get the car and go home. We might stop somewhere for a burger.”
“No.”
“So, we going to go in and say ‘Citizen’s Arrest’, hang out with them and a decapitated head hoping some cops show up?”
“I thought we’d surprise them, tie them up, use the barge itself to make our way back to where our cabin is. We can put them inside the cabin, one of us can watch them, and the other can drive out and get the law and bring them back.”
“How about this?” Leonard said. “We make a citizen’s arrest unless we have to kill them?”
“You’re opening a door I don’t want to open,” I said.
“And they might just kick that door open in our faces, brother. Say we do our best not to hurt anyone, outside of kicking their ass a little and tying them up? But if things get a little wonky, I’m going Attila The Hun on them and I expect you to bring the horses.”
I thought about that. Leonard was right. They’d motor away and escape. It might not even be their barge. It could be stolen. They could do this again. And they would.
“All right,” I said. “We go for the compromise.”
“Good,” Leonard said.
Behind us we heard a slight crack of someone or something stepping on a branch. We whirled about. A light came on. The light was a little thing fastened to the top of a pistol, and there was a man behind it, and in that instant I realized something obvious. We had only seen one man in the cabin with the women. I guess we logically thought the other was in the shitter or pausing in a back room to consider the nature of the universe, but now I knew we were a couple of dumb asses and our logic had been full of holes.
“Howdy boys,” said a voice. That would be Aussie Hat.
I knew then that when the barge pulled over it was because they knew we were after them; had spotted us. Aussie Hat got off at that stop to sneak up on us. And he had done it well. Until that stick cracked, he could have come up behind me, combed my hair and wiped my ass, and I wouldn’t have known he was there. He was that good.
· · ·
Aussie Hat and his pistol pointed us forward and he trailed behind. He led us to the barge and said for us to step on board. Then he called out, “Open up.”
Shadows tumbled through the windows and moved along the wooden deck, and the music went away. Baseball Cap opened the door and the light came with him. He and the women stepped ou
t on the barge deck. We all stood in the rain.
“Well, well,” said Baseball Cap. “What have we here? Heckle and Jeckle?”
“Told you I saw someone,” Aussie Hat said.
“Hey, we’re just fishing,” I said. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“Where’s your fishing gear?” said Aussie Hat.
It was back on the hill where we had left it when we started following them, but I said, “We ditched it after we got lost. We been trying to find our way out.”
“Have you now?” said Aussie Hat.
“Yeah,” I said. “We don’t mean you guys any harm.”
“You know,” said Aussie Hat. “I doubt that.”
The short–haired blonde said, “Fresh meat.”
“Get their knives and canteens, the belt packs,” Aussie Hat said.
Baseball Cap took them away from us and gave them to the blonde woman who took them inside somewhere.
Aussie Hat beckoned us into the cabin. It was tight in there. There was a fold–down table attached to the wall and there was a gap in the wall where it folded up. There were snack foods on it. Beneath the windows were benches. There were a couple of folding chairs on hooks on the wall. There was a door off the little cabin. It was closed. I assumed it would be the bedroom and off of that would be the wheelhouse. The woman’s head was on a silver platter on the table next to a bowl of pretzels.
Baseball Cap removed the platter and head, placed it on the bench, then he put the food away inside the other room, came back and folded the table into the wall, fastened it there with clamps.
“You boys sit down on the other side,” he said.
We sat on the bench there. I couldn’t take my eyes off of that poor woman’s head.
Aussie Hat nodded toward the head and the platter. “If you didn’t know what we were all about and are just lost fishermen, well, now you know something about us.”
“Is that real?” I said.
“Oh come on,” said Aussie Hat. “That was lame.”
“You guys shooting a movie.” I was still working it.
“It may end up starring you guys,” Baseball Cap said.