Bone Valley (24 page)

The building was dark, but I could make out an outline of black against black, and could tell the man was coming for me again.

Then he grabbed me and hauled me up to a sitting position.

When I opened my mouth to begin negotiating my freedom, or screaming—I wasn’t sure which yet—Maniac Man began to smash raw hamburger all over me.

Here, I officially lost it.

And I screamed some more, for all the good it was doing me. I mean, under the best of circumstances, and these were not remotely in the running for even tolerable circumstances, let alone best, raw dead cow scares me, but having a strong and apparently totally demented man smearing wet, raw meat all over me while I was muddy and bound up in ropes plain scared me out of my wits.

Despite the lack of any obvious benefit, I gave screaming another round or two. While I aired my terror through my vocal cords, my mad assailant pushed clumps of raw hamburger into my hair and smashed small handfuls into my clothes, even smushing some inside the pockets of my shirt. I imagined small, evil armies of E. coli bacteria crawling all over me and killing me slowly.

Maniac Man eventually seemed satisfied that he’d smushed enough raw meat into me and he stopped. I stopped screaming. He picked me up, threw me over his shoulders like I was no more than a bedroll and we were on a
Texas Chainsaw
campout, and he carried me out of the small building over rough and wet ground as the rain pelted both of us. The next thing I knew, the man threw me on the ground, which was pretty much a mud lagoon, and while I sank and sloshed, Maniac Man pulled out a gun and shot something. The noise of the firearm set me off shrieking again, plus it injured my eardrums.

Over my demented wailing, I thought I heard him say, “Gun’ll take a padlock any day.”

Despite the kick to my ears and the mud and rain in my eyes, I made myself pay attention. I heard the sound of metal on metal, muffled as the sound was by my ringing ears and the pouring rain. Before I could calculate what this sound might mean, my vile kidnapper picked me up from behind and rudely shoved me into something that had a floor with straw on it. Without ever a clear look at the madman’s face, I rolled away from him until in the dark I hit a wall.

There was the sound of metal on metal again, then a clanking noise. And I smelled cat.

Not house cat.

Big cat.

My lunatic captor said in his fake stage whisper, “In this rain, nobody’ll come out here for a while. You’ll be supper. Then they’ll have to shoot the panther because it’s a man killer.”

Judging from the noise, my perverse kidnapper rammed a stick through the bars of the cage, taunting the big cat, which growled and thrashed.

It began to dawn on me that I was in more trouble than E. coli germs in my hair, more trouble than possibly I’d ever been in before.

“Bye-bye,” the man whispered.

But in the dark, I couldn’t see his face.

I heard the sounds of Maniac Man leaving, including the grinding sound his SUV made as it plowed through the mud on its path away from me.

With my eyes pried open by my own fear and my breathing more of a rasp than a breath, I sat still.

In the next flash of lightning, I could see the dark outline of the cat.

A big cat.

A big cat that was coming toward me.

Now that it
seemed it was about to end, I had the wholly uninvited notion I might have wasted my life.

I mean, I hadn’t saved the whales or even any starving children, I didn’t have a child or a husband, I hadn’t written
To Kill a Mockingbird,
and, frankly, I wasn’t always truthful.

Not savoring the idea of the reckoning that might be coming toward me decades sooner than I’d calculated, I closed my eyes and started whispering the Lord’s Prayer.

The Florida panther’s growling closed in toward me. A new and profound panic gripped me. I forgot everything after “thy kingdom come.” It’s amazing how many degrees of fear there are; just when I thought I couldn’t be any more scared, I was.

Frantically I tried to remember all the tips on wildlife survival I’d either read or been told in my short lifetime. “Grandmom,” I whispered, but for the moment my grandmother was oddly silent. I guess being locked in a cage with a Florida panther was outside her range of experiences. But, come on, I mean, Grandmom was a ghost. Don’t ghosts know everything?

So as the panther crept toward me, I had nothing to rely on except what few tips of wilderness survival I could recall without ancestral, spectral coaching. I remembered that you’re never supposed to run, as that makes you seem like game and encourages the wild animal to chase you. Prey that draws attention to itself is often the first to be eaten. And as a practical matter, even if you’re an Olympic sprinter, you can never outrun a gator, a bear, or a wild cat anyway. Besides, being in a cage muted that point. There was nowhere for me to run. I remembered the tip about raising your arms to look big, but I couldn’t do that because I was still tied up. I inhaled, and gathered my inner resources. And cried for my grandmother.

Still, the cat hadn’t attacked me, though I could hear it sniffing at me. Freeing my arms suddenly seemed like a good idea. I worked my hand into my pants pocket, and, not without great difficulty, I pulled out the knife and started sawing at the rope while praying the cat wasn’t hungry, or easily irritated.

In an eerily elongated flash of lightning I got a better look at the panther, which was now standing about three feet away from me. Either I imagined it, or the panther had only one eye. In that flash of lightning, it looked like where one of the panther’s eyes should have been was a narrow, closed slash. In the next burst of light, I thought one of the cat’s ears was missing too.

Oh frigging great, I was in a cage with a one-eyed, one-eared panther. Assuming I lived through this, who in the whole world would ever believe me?

Then I got to thinking, a one-eyed, one-eared panther suggested veterinarian care, and that suggested the cat was used to people. Also, I remembered that wild cats, in fact, most animals, don’t like to eat people because we don’t taste good to them. One of the human being’s baser survival gifts—a nasty flavor to other carnivores.

Not counting on tasting bad alone, I sawed and sawed at the ropes that bound me. I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to finally break through the rope, but I did. And during all that time, as much as I could tell in the irregular illumination provided by the lightning, the cat had simply crouched there and was staring at me.

Once my hands were freed, I held the knife out in front of me, defensively. But as I stood there, fighting another round of panic, I realized the knife wouldn’t do me any good against a panther. Come on, a kitchen knife against a Florida panther? I’d have to be Tarzan with a good scriptwriter for that to work.

Then I remembered what Josey had told me about training cats. “Look them in the eye and tell them what you want.” I decided that making friends with the cat wouldn’t hurt either, and how do you befriend an animal best?

With food, I thought. That’s what Josey had said, feed them a treat.

A treat, of course, other than me. “I taste nasty,” I whispered to the cat, which ignored me.

Moving as slowly and as fluidly as I could, I put the knife into my shirt pocket beside the carrot and then made myself stand up. That movement, unlike my unsolicited culinary comment, caused the panther to slink slowly toward me again.

“I’m not supper,” I said, in as soft and soothing a voice as I could make myself use. “Bad taste.” The cat paused, but then continued toward me after a second. I hoped the cat was more curious than anything else, and I created a new mantra, “Easy, easy, easy.”

When the panther was within the reach of my hands, there was another flash of lightning and I could see that definitely the cat had only one eye and one ear. The roar of the thunder apparently spooked One-Eye as well as me. Over the sound of the storm and the rain, I could hear a low growl begin. Uh-oh, definitely not good. But over the sound of the growl, I heard my grandmother’s voice. “Feed it. Now,” she said.

Slowly, moving like I was in some Hitchcockian ballet, I raised my hand to my shirt and scraped off some raw hamburger. I offered my hand to the cat with the meat cupped in my palm. I held my breath. The cat licked the meat off my hand, and I came as close to peeing in my pants as I’d come since being fully potty trained. But slowly, I scraped some more meat out of my hair, and offered it to the cat, all the while talking softly. “Easy, easy, easy, easy.”

I kept hand-feeding the one-eyed panther hamburger until the meat was gone. The panther moved so close to me that even in the dark I could see its face, and I tensed for an attack. But then the cat licked me, either cleaning me, or licking off the last of the hamburger. Its tongue was unbelievably large, and unbelievably rough.

When the cat finished licking me, it backed off a bit. Weak with fear, I sat down slowly. The cat sat down too. It made a guttural noise, which I hoped was the sound of a satisfied cat after a happy meal.

I listened to the cat and focused on not moving. I prayed. And doused as I was, despite the panther’s licking, with residual raw hamburger juice, I worried about bacteria. But mostly I worried about my house burning down. Rasputin was not the right kind of bird to rise from the ashes.

Time passed. I couldn’t tell you how much, except that I began to cramp from sitting still, so I slumped down a little and shifted my weight. Then off somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard the sound of a vehicle.

Oh, Lord, I prayed, don’t let it be Maniac Man coming back.

Let it be, I prayed, a band of law-enforcement people with a lion tamer.

I bunched my
muscles for flight, pulled out my kitchen knife, and waited to learn if my would-be killer had come back to check on the panther’s progress in eating me.

But it wasn’t just one SUV, it was the sound of many vehicles.

Lights came driving into the area and vehicles and people were everywhere. Hallelujah, I was saved, I thought, figuring there weren’t that many people who’d join my kidnapper in feeding me to a panther, so this crowd had to have a different mission in mind.

I opened my mouth to start screaming “Help, help, help,” but feared hysterical yelling might upset the cat, possibly into attacking me. So I shut my mouth and stood up. Flashlights bobbed around and I heard the sound of slamming vehicle doors and excited voices. I wondered how they knew I was here. And then to my horror, I saw that they were moving away from me, dashing in different directions.

Shouting out a tentative “Hey,” I watched for the cat’s reaction. In the glow from the headlights, I could see that the cat had cocked its head, as if curious. However my “hey” had been so soft that no one heard me.

Eyeing the big panther in the trippy, strobe-light effect of bobbing flashlights and headlights, I shouted “Help” in a slightly louder tone. This time the panther omitted a low sort of growl.

Well, this was an interesting new catch-22, wasn’t it?

Someone moved in my direction, or maybe a group of someones, and then clearly, like the voice of a guardian angel, a woman said, “Check on the panther.”

Next thing I knew someone beamed a flashlight in the cage, first on the cat, and then at me. As soon as the man with the flashlight saw me, he shouted, “What the hell?” The cat was definitely growling now, though she was advancing on the man with the flashlight rather than on me. But the man with the flashlight was protected by cage bars. I wasn’t. I didn’t know how fickle an irritated cat could be, and did not want to learn. In more of a hiss than a voice, I said, “She doesn’t like the flashlight.”

Immediately the flashlight went dead. The man said to someone near him, “Get Adam. And that sheriff lady, tell them there’s a woman in the cage.”

The next sound I heard was Josey’s voice, saying softly, “Stay still. I’ll get some meat from the fridge to distract her.”

“Wait. I’ve got to tranquilize her anyway, to move her into the trailer,” a man said.

I heard the sound of running, a heavy thud, then more running, and people milling about, and, of course, the pounding rain. I heard the sound of my own heart beating. And over all of that noise, I could still hear the low, insistent growling of my companion in the cage, the one-eyed panther.

Then I heard clanking, and a man’s voice telling me to get to the end of the cage, as far away from the cat as I could get—oh, like I needed encouragement on that angle—then pop, and thud. The man had raised what looked like a real gun and had apparently shot the panther with a tranquilizer dart.

Fleetingly, I wondered how they knew the drugs would waylay the cat rather than piss her off enough to eat me, but the cat growled, shook, staggered, and then collapsed.

Then Josey yanked open the cage door, grabbed me, and dragged me out. I stumbled onto the ground. And immediately started babbling.

But over the sound of my incoherent and panicked words, Josey asked, “Do you need to go to a hospital? Are you all right?”

Under the circumstances I had to agree that I was physically okay. But I sobbed out, “Shower. Bathroom. Cell phone. Police. Burning house.”

As if I had merely amicably asked how she was doing, Josey looked at me and smiled. “Thank goodness, you’re all right,” she said. “Who put you in there?”

“Some big man who wanted a videotape. I’ve got to call my house, I think it burned down, see, there was this skillet of oil on the stove, and this man kidnapped me and left it on the stove, and I’ve got to see if my house burned down. Please, please, give me a cell phone.”

“If it burned down, no one will answer,” Josey said. “And if it didn’t burn down, then it’s okay. Now, if you’re all right, you’ve got to help us. The Manatee River is rising, fast. The county dam personnel just put out the word to the sheriff ’s office and all emergency-rescue people about a half an hour ago that the lock on the dam is stuck and they can’t open the gate to divert the water. It’s going to flood, and flood bad. All spare officers are on evacuation duty right now, me, I’m volunteering. We’ve got to get these animals out of here before the road is too flooded to pass. This place will be underwater in a few more hours. If not sooner.”

“Toilet. Shower. Phone. Police,” I shouted at her again.

“You aren’t hurt. You said so yourself,” Josey said. “And you don’t need a shower, you’re standing in a downpour. Now get a grip.”

“Bathroom. I need to pee.”

“Go inside,” Josey said. “And then get back out here and help us.”

I scampered inside, skidding around in the hallway to the bathroom, and slammed the door shut. Frankly, I wanted to stay in the bathroom of Lenora’s little cracker house. I wanted to keep washing my hands and my face. Although the sink was small and the water smelled like sulfur, I figured with a little luck I could stick my head in there and wash my hair, getting out the residual hamburger germs.

But then I thought about all of Lenora’s little creatures, and all she had suffered to take care of them to this point.

“Go and be useful,” my grandmother ordered me. It was her signature line. I left the shelter of the little house and went back outside. In the circle of car lights and bobbing flashlights, I saw frantic wildlife-rescue people, some in uniforms, some in slickers, some in the clothes they were wearing when they were called out. They were working at a frenzied pace to load an assortment of birds, squirrels, and other small game, plus some equipment. They must have organized quickly once the word went out about the failed lock on the dam. No one was paying the least attention to me.

“The cat’s going to be a problem,” a skinny man said.

“She’s tranquilized, we can carry her into the smaller cage on the trailer. Then it’s just a matter of hooking the trailer up to a truck and pulling it out,” said another man in a hooded poncho. When I turned and studied him, I recognized Adam, the Fish and Wildlife man.

“You see that road? It’s already underwater in spots. You think you can get that trailer out?” said the skinny man in an oddly hostile tone.

“I can get it out,” Josey said. “I got four-wheel drive on my truck and it’ll—”

“Then go last, after we’ve all driven out, so if you get stuck, you don’t block all of us,” the skinny man said.

“I’ll go last,” Josey said. “And I’ll make sure everybody, including the cat, gets out.”

“I won’t leave the panther,” Adam said. “You can hook her up to my SUV.”

“No offense, Adam,” Josey said, “but my truck is stronger than that little SUV.”

While people scurried hither and yon, Josey and Adam engaged in a macho war of words, wheel bases, and horse-powers, and I lost interest. One of them would win, and one of them wouldn’t.

As the rescue people moved about in earnest and in speed, I looked around me in dazed wonderment. The rain pelted me, pelted us all, as a small army of Lenora’s people jostled in the wind and the lightning to save little wild things and unwanted domestic animals. Lenora must be pretty sick, I realized, not to be here herself.

But then Josey trumped Adam in the great cat-hauling vehicular contest, and turned to me. “Can you help the others? While Adam and I take care of the cat.”

“Tell me what to do to help.”

“Pick up those small cages and load them into the back of any truck that isn’t already full.”

Slip-sliding in mud, I joined the others in lifting cages and loading trucks with wet wildlife. Suddenly I wondered about Bob, the little squirrel Lenora had cuddled in her arms the first time I met her. After dumping a caged but playful raccoon into the back of a pickup, I dashed back into the cracker house to make sure no little squirrel named Bob, or any juvenile jays, had been left behind. No little Bob in the big room. When I peeked into the kitchen, I saw Olivia frantically throwing what looked like medicines into a cooler. I ran up to her and pulled her into a bear hug. Though she hugged me back, when she pulled her head away she looked at me with puzzlement. “Lilly, how’d you get here?”

How in the world had she missed all the excitement of my rescue?

Okay, yeah, she was single-minded, even to the point of rudeness, but, still, how had she not heard about the woman in the cage?

On a mission to remedy that oversight on Olivia’s part, I started to babble forth my tale of horror, when instead, so relieved at seeing a good friend, I hugged her again. At the tail end of this hug, I smelled something that made me gasp. The spicy scent of sandalwood. I could smell it over Olivia’s own smell of hard work, the rain, the mud, and the odor of my own fear.

Sandalwood?

Miguel and Olivia?

But before I could say anything about how interesting it was that Miguel and Olivia appeared to be using the same scented toiletries, a man stuck his head in the kitchen and shouted, “If it’s not alive, leave it, come on. We gotta go. That road’s bad, and getting worse.”

Olivia, my more mysterious-than-before friend, grabbed one end of the cooler as I grabbed the other and we carried it out and slung it, none too gracefully, onto the back of the first pickup we came to.

“Everybody loaded?” Adam asked, yelling over the sounds of the rain.

Shouts of yes were muffled by weather, but then people started getting in their vehicles and turning the engines on and driving their trucks and SUVs out in a slow, muddy parade.

Olivia held on to my arm as if I needed guidance as we stood in the pouring rain, watching the strange procession, the two of us oddly companionable in the storm around us.

“Didn’t you ride in with Lester?” Josey asked.

Olivia jumped a tad, and then said, “Yes. He picked me up ’cause he’s got a truck.”

“Well, his truck is about the second vehicle heading out. You can ride with me. You too, Lilly.”

Olivia and I nodded.

“We’ll go last, right behind Adam’s SUV,” Josey added. Then we followed her as she checked the trailer with the still-sleeping panther. “That man who put you in the cage, he shot off the padlock on the big cage, and I don’t have another one. Don’t suppose either of y’all got a lock on you?”

I still had a carrot and a knife, but I couldn’t see how either could be fashioned into a lock, and I shook my head, sending an extra spray of water at Olivia.

“Might be a lock back in the house,” Olivia said.

“Haven’t got time to look,” Josey said, definitely in officer-in-charge mode. She pulled off her thin cloth belt, threaded it through the hook where a padlock should go, twisted it into a knot, and pulled it tight.

Olivia, ever the den mother, glanced at the knot and said, “That’s just a loose granny knot, you need something more secure. Let me—”

“We gotta go. It’ll do for now. Come on, y’all get in the truck.”

I lifted my face up to the rain in a celebration of the fact that I was still alive. Muddy, filthy, but alive. Fervently, I hoped it was still so for Rasputin.

But before I could wax sentimental, Josey poked me. “Get a move on,” she said. Eyeing her truck, which was, I should note, truly a monster truck, I cast a last look at the panther. Good kitty, I thought as walked around the trailer to the passenger side of the Big Truck and I scrambled up into the cab. Olivia slid in next to me, muttering something about a loose knot while Josey jumped in behind the steering wheel.

Once Josey began the treacherous task of skidding out through the mud, under driving conditions considerably worsened by the passage of other vehicles churning up the muck pond that used to be a kind of road, stress and confusion made me need to talk. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask Olivia about Miguel. Especially not in front of Josey, who, after all, was Official Law Enforcement. Rather, I started to talk out all that had happened to me, as well as my anxious request to summon diverse law-enforcement agencies to the scene to begin the search for the madman who had kidnapped me.

“Be quiet, please. I need to concentrate on driving,” Josey said, not rudely, but firmly.

Olivia put her hand on my knee and squished it slightly, as if to cheer me up. Or maybe shut me up.

With a grimly determined Josey driving, we sloshed and slid our way out of the compound, grinding down and sticking a few times, and once spinning a half circle out of control and coming to rest against the slim trunk of a pine sapling. The cat trailer did a jackknife type of move, and then blammed into still another tree, but the trailer hitch held.

With four-wheel drive, a skilled driver, and perhaps an army of guardian angles corralled, no doubt, by Grandmom, we kept going. We finally arrived on a paved road, still in parade single file behind Adam’s vehicle. Olivia had not said a single word the whole time.

Once relief at being on pavement began to seep into me, physical pain from my attack did also. I felt my swollen right eye tenderly with my fingers and wondered if the moment was right to demand anew a troop of police to track my assailant. But when I glanced at Josey, I saw such a look of forlorn focus on her face, I decided to follow Olivia’s example and keep quiet.

When we finally got on Highway 64, in east Manatee County, Adam’s baby SUV pulled off to the side and stopped. Josey pulled her truck in behind it, and jumped out. Olivia did too. Not wanting to miss a second of the story, I slid out after her. We watched as Josey and Adam checked on the panther.

“She looks okay, despite all the heavy bumping the trailer took,” Adam said.

Josey only nodded.

Adam offered his hand, and Josey took it. “I just got a radio call from up north on the Little Manatee. Sorry to leave you. Take your friends home, or take them to the sheriff ’s office, get the cat high and dry, best you can. Don’t worry,” he said.

Josey nodded again, Adam patted my arm and said I’d “done good,” and then drove off, leaving the three of us standing in the rain on the side of the road for a moment, with a one-eyed panther tethered to the back of the Big Truck.