Disappearances (9 page)

Some minutes later we crossed the height of land, and came down into a sugar bush. My father shut off the engine and headlights. Coasting along under the gigantic trees the battered Cadillac groaned and squeaked on its broken springs. Uncle Henry, I thought with apprehension, was going to have considerably more to be unhappy about than his soiled carpet.

Down through the tall maples I saw a dark cluster of buildings: house, barn, sheds. There was a dim light in one of the back windows. “They ain't expecting nobody from this side,” my father said.

“Who is they?”

He stopped the car several hundred yards above the buildings. “You'll see, Wild Bill. You'll see directly. We'll leave Rat here to talk with the archangels and you and me will go down there and have us a look.”

I got out and shut the door gently. We started down the lane between the trees. As we approached the buildings I made out a car behind the milk house. From the front of the house it would have been invisible. We moved noiselessly over last fall's leaves. My heart was thumping the way it had the day before when Warden had confronted my father at the falls.

We crossed the dooryard, grown up to burdocks and bull thistles. Close to the back of the house was a very old and gnarled apple tree, unmistakable even in the dark. My father stood behind the tree and looked around into the window. I hung back in the weeds on the pretext of pulling dead burdocks off my legs; actually I was terrified of what I might see inside the house. It was still quite warm but I was shivering all over. The spring frogs were singing from a marsh someplace below the house.

As frightened as I was, I was even more curious about whoever was inside that house. I tiptoed up behind the tree and looked over my father's head into a small rear bedchamber. Five men were sitting around a table playing cards and drinking by lantern light. Each of them was dressed in blue. Each had long white hair, and the man facing the window wore a full black beard.

My father pulled my head down close to his and whispered a single word. He didn't need to, though. I knew already, as he had undoubtedly known back in Magog, that the man with the beard was the hijacker Carcajou, the wolverine who had attacked and tried to drown the monks on the lake and who was now drinking their Benedictine; who with his gang blew people to bits with dynamite, cut them down with machine guns, sliced their throats, scalped them, blasted them to Kingdom Come with cannons; who like the fabled children of Israel had survived an inferno and who had now set this trap for the two men who had hired Uncle Henry to do what they prudently did not dare do themselves.

“Them two Frenchmen with the Buick would be the last two LaChance boys,” my father said fifteen minutes later back by the Cadillac. “It all fits, Bill, right down to the Seagram's.”

As he explained the situation, he opened Rat's door and began haggling at the reeking lambskin carpet with his hunting knife. “This is good tough material,” he said, lifting Rat's feet up and peeling off the entire front floor covering. “There. I doubt Henry will even notice.

“But them LaChance boys. Carcajou must have let it out on purpose to them somehow where the whiskey would be. And they suspicioned that they was being set up. And so they was. But they couldn't know for sure, and they couldn't pass up the opportunity to steal the fella's whiskey that come close to exterminating their family.”

“So they set Uncle Henry up to steal the whiskey for them.”

“Right, Bill. And that's what lets us off the hook.”

“You mean we aren't going to steal the whiskey after all?”

“Certainly we're going to steal it. We just ain't going to deliver it to them LaChance fellas. This run is going to be clear profit, Wild Bill. Come dawn them boys down below there will figure nobody's coming and go to sleep. At the rate they're going tonight they won't wake up till noon or later. By then we'll be back on the other side of the lake with eight thousand dollars' worth of whiskey.”

“Eight thousand? I thought it was four before.”

“That was before. This is after.”

I was so sleepy I didn't really care whether it was eight thousand dollars or eight dollars. All the excitement of the last twenty-four hours had suddenly caught up with me. What I wanted was to go to sleep. I didn't think I could keep my eyes open another sixty seconds if Carcajou and his gang came up through the sugar bush that instant with their entire arsenal of machine guns and cannons and scalping knives.

“What time is it, Dad?”

“A quarter or twenty after one,” my father said. “You get in back and lay down, Bill. I'm going to slide on down below and check the lay of the land again. I want to see if there's a guard. I want to see just where the whiskey be, and watch them fellas play cards a while longer. You can tell quite a bit about a man by the way he handles his cards. They seemed to be playing poker. I believe the old man was winning. You're a good whiskey runner, son. I'm most proud of you. I'll wake you up before dawn.”

“Be careful, Dad.”

“I ain't never nothing else,” my father said, heading back down through the trees.

I got in back and stretched out on the beautifully contoured seat. Rat was snoring like a sump pump in low water, but by that time nothing could have kept me awake. I closed my eyes and was asleep.

 

At dawn we lay on a damp cushion of dead leaves under the maples and waited. When the man appeared I was surprised to see him coming down from the top of the ridge instead of up from the buildings. Although it was still too dark to make out his features, I could see that he was big. Instantly I thought of Carcajou. Maybe he had circled around behind us somehow. But as the big man approached the Cadillac, moving neither fast nor slow and without stealth, I saw that he was unarmed and knew that it was Uncle Henry.

“How did you know he was coming?” I asked my father as we walked down the knoll we had run up five minutes earlier.

“I could hear him huffing and blowing while he was still on his way up the back side of the ridge. Good morning, Henry. I can't tell you how glad I am that you decided to join us. We've got some good news for you. Very good news.”

Uncle Henry did not look at us as we came out of the maples into the lane. He was staring at his car. His slightly protuberant eyes traveled slowly over the deep striations along the door and on to the crumpled fenders and the once proud figurine, now twisted and recumbent on the excoriated hood; they took in the hunched and constipated aspect of the body, squatting ignominiously on its broken springs.

Then he looked at my father. His eyes were expressionless, only perhaps bulging a little more than usual. “Whose vehicle would this be?” he said mildly.

“Why, it's yours, Hen,” my father replied. “I reckon it got jammed a little. We was breaking it in for you.”

As incredible as that remark was, it was not entirely disingenuous. In some ways my father actually admired machines. He enjoyed contemplating their shiny parts and deep inner workings. Without the most rudimentary understanding of basic mechanical principles he enjoyed getting his hands on gears, buttons, levers, switches. He liked to make machines go fast. Best of all he liked to smash them to smithereens, especially when they were careening along at their maximum rate of speed or slightly faster.

Uncle Henry looked blankly at my father, who was beaming over his handiwork. He looked at Rat, now getting back into what was left of the car to go to sleep again. He looked at me. “Is that my vehicle, Billy?”

“Uncle Henry,” I said, “look at it this way. You broke Dad's jaw and he broke White Lightning. So you're even.”

Uncle Henry gazed at my father's long jaw, which sagged off to the right slightly. “Did I do that, Bill?”

My father nodded proudly and turned his head to give us a profile view. Uncle Henry nodded once and got in behind the wheel.

We got in back and my father put both his hands affectionately on my uncle's shoulders. Every time Uncle Henry leaned forward to get a closer view of the bare metal floor where his carpet had been my father pulled him back in the seat and talked louder, enunciating all his syllables carefully.

“So they're all sound asleep,” my father continued, “and the whiskey is waiting in the cow stable. We could steam down there and pick it up in a locomotive and they wouldn't hear us.”

“Don't they have a guard?” Uncle Henry said. “Wouldn't there be a guard down below between the house and the road?”

“I checked, and there isn't. That's not all, Henry. That black Packard automobile down there is unlocked. We're going to load that too. We're going to split seven or eight thousand dollars' worth of whiskey, Hen, and you're going to get a backup car for White Lightning.”

“Of course I am,” Uncle Henry said. By that time I couldn't tell whether he was being sarcastic or ironical or neither, and I doubt that he could either. His eyes were very prominent. I was afraid they might pop right out.

He looked at Rat, slumped into the corner between the seat and the door, wheezing like an asthmatic mule. “What about Brother Kinneson?”

“Brother Kinneson is still choiring with the cherry bins and serry fins. I'm going to wake him from his slumber in a minute. He's got to start the Packard for us.”

Uncle Henry sighed. “Bill Bonhomme, this gets worse and worse. Walking up here from Magog I had time to get it all straight. Plenty of time, in fact. This is a setup and you know it. You knowed it last night and I strongly suspected it. Them boys that put us onto this, their name is LaChance. You knowed that last night too. No guards you tell me. I don't like no guards. That ain't right. Why ain't there no guards? Maybe that whiskey is booby-trapped. We don't even have a gun in case something goes wrong. I know that won't stop you, Bill. I know nothing won't stop you. I reckon I can't whup you, neither. Maybe nobody can. But I want you to remember again that I'm against this. I was in three major battles over across. I was shot at and run at with bayonets and finally I was gassed. But I never heard of nothing nowhere to equal this before. I ain't scart. I doubt you was ever scart in your life. If Billy's scart he ain't showing it and not showing it is the better part of any brave man. If Rat was awake he'd be scart and he'd be right to be. I don't know why you're set on doing this. It ain't the money now, I'm certain of that. I don't guess that I want to know what it is. Whatever it is, it ain't worth it. I'll do it because you're going to do it anyway and I couldn't face Vangie if I warn't there to do what I could to help you get out of it. But I don't like it. No guards is the worst part. No guards is very bad.”

It was the longest speech I had ever heard Uncle Henry make.

“You're a good man, Henry Coville,” cried my father. “I and Bill was saying just last night how generous it was of you to lend out your car this way. I don't intend to let you down, neither. There's still the element of surprise. I haven't told you about that yet. Now let off your brake and coast on down behind that Packard. I'll tell you what to do next when we're there.”

So just as the sun came up, exactly twenty-four hours after launching the canoe in the cedar swamp behind our hill, we started down through the sugar bush to make our pickup, swaying and bouncing like an old buckboard, unarmed, and trusting to our luck and ingenuity and the element of surprise, which was to be as much of an amazement to Uncle Henry and me as it was to Carcajou. My heart was beating fast again. I was scared all right. I had never been so scared in my life.

The grade was steep enough for us to roll all the way to the barnyard. In daylight the farm looked like any one of hundreds of other abandoned places on both sides of the border. The house sagged, the barn heaved, the fields were growing up to brush. Except for the Packard there was no sign that anyone had been near the place in years.

“Wake up, Rat,” my father said. “Rat, wake up. Can you start up a car without no keys and do it quick and not make too much noise?”

“Have you bought another car, Quebec Bill?”

“Yes, Rat. There she is. Here, wake up. There's a bottle for you in this job.”

“Say,” Rat said, opening his eyes wide, “this don't look like our dooryard.”

“The car's right there. Now do this quietly. When I give the word, start her up. Then come back and get in White Lightning with Hen and Wild Bill. We're going to load the Packard right to the gills; there won't be room in it for nobody but me.”

As we got out I had a strange and powerful urge to run over to the back bedroom window and look inside. It was not so much that I wanted to assure myself that Carcajou and his albiners were asleep. As frightful as they were to behold, I would rather have seen them doing almost anything than imagine them doing nothing.

Now, though, there was no time for anything but getting the whiskey. We loaded the Packard first while Rat worked on the wires. My father brought the wooden cases out of the milk house three at a time. I carried them singly from the milk house to the Packard, a two-door model with a rumble seat. Uncle Henry stacked the whiskey inside the rumble seat and on the passenger's side of the front seat and the floor in front. In all he managed to pack in thirty cases.

I glanced constantly toward the back of the house. Once I tripped over a discarded harrow tooth and nearly dropped a case. The bottles inside clanked together loudly. I was sure we would be machine-gunned down within seconds. But inside the house nothing stirred.

“Pay attention to what you're doing,” Uncle Henry whispered.

Rat seemed to be having trouble with the Packard. Despite all our warnings he grumbled loudly. Uncle Henry began loading the Cadillac. He packed the back from floor to roof. By then White Lightning was right down on her frame, but the springs were already gone so we secured another twelve cases on the wide rear luggage carrier with special straps, which Uncle Henry had ordered with reinforced steel braces for just this purpose. That was as much as she could hold.