Poachers (15 page)

“She,” the old man said, joining him. “Three, three-fifty, I reckon. My boy was a strong one. Lift half of anything.”

Steadman whistled. A wolf spider had laced a web between the rhino’s horns. He flicked the spider off and pulled away the web.

“Would you sell her?” he asked.

Kilpatrick snorted. “Reckon I’m fixing to have to sell everything.” He wiped his lips with his black rag. “Well, they’s folks’ll pay a heap for that big horn by itself. Them poachers overseas say if you grind it up in a powder it’s like giving a woman a bucket of goddamn oysters.”

“What if,” Steadman said, “I could let you keep your station?”

Kilpatrick regarded him.

“I could rig something…” Steadman said. “You’ve gotta have leak detection, that’s all there is to it. If you don’t, we’ll both get caught….”

He studied the ground at his feet, dirt he knew deep down was contaminated. You couldn’t guess what might happen below the topsoil when you mixed things up. He’d worked one project where several tons of buried insecticide waste had been accidently discovered by a backhoe; the sludge had eaten through the metal barrels it had been stored in, and mixing with each other and the minerals in the soil, had formed a strange new chemical combination. The unlucky backhoe driver had died instantly from the murky green cloud that belched out of the ground.

Steadman walked into the road, hazy with heat as far as he could see. For a moment he thought a truck was coming, an eighteen-wheeler, but it was only a mirage. Shading his eyes, dizzy with heat, he barely heard the gas pump click off.

“Guess you were right the first time
,” he told Kilpatrick.

On the clean side of the station, where the tanks weren’t buried, Steadman replaced the fake pipe he’d pulled out of the ground. He used a sledgehammer to drive it deep, then tamped the dirt tight with the handle. He resumed with the auger and began digging the first of four holes around the fake ports. In the widening strip of shade, Kilpatrick watched and drank beer and smoked and crossed and uncrossed his legs.

His shirt off, Steadman augered into the night. At about six feet down, groundwater started seeping into the holes—he saw it

with his flashlight: clear, uncontaminated: the goods. He kept digging.

Kilpatrick rose once and limped toward him and handed him a beer. The old man turned and walked several feet away and took a leak while Steadman drank, then he came back for the empty bottle and returned to his chair. In the distance a coyote began to howl and Kilpatrick yelled “Shet up!” and the howling stopped.

Steadman finished digging just after nine-thirty, in the bright moonlight. A car had passed a few minutes earlier, and only now did he comprehend it. It had slowed, and a black face had peered out the open passenger window, and a black hand had waved. Had Steadman waved back?

At his truck, he slid four eight-foot-long PVC pipes from the side rack.

Kilpatrick, who’d been napping, woke and said, “What you up to now?”

“These are your monitoring wells,” Steadman grunted, twisting a pipe into the first hole. “The way they work is, when I stick ’em in the ground, they fill up with water. If the water was contaminated, like it probably is on the other side, it’d have an oily sheen on top of it. But over here, you shine your flashlight in there you’ll just see clean water. If the EPA comes to check on you, these ones’ll be clear.”

Steadman forced the last pipe in the ground until all but eight inches showed. “There,” he said, screwing on its cap. “Tomorrow I’ll come pour cement around here so nobody’ll be inclined to check your authenticity.”

Kilpatrick’s Camel glowed. A strange sound came from the darkness, a fart maybe. Or a grunt of approval.

“One more thing,” Steadman said, disassembling the auger. “Tomorrow that rhino comes with me.”

“I’ll vacuum her tonight,” Kilpatrick said. “You can borry my trailer.”

After a moment, the two men shook hands.

The next morning at the
office, Steadman FedExed the jars of soil from his yard to the lab in Savannah. The results would be back in a week. He popped his head into the secretary’s office and told her that Kilpatrick’s Sinclair station had been a bust, that the old man already had leak detection. Then he told her it was his father’s birthday; he was taking the day off. Ignoring her raised eyebrows, Steadman walked down the hall and went outside to his truck. With eight bags of quick-dry cement, he drove to Kilpatrick’s.

The old man sat smoking in his office beside the open Coke machine. The unleaded gas pump still showed the eighteen dollars Steadman had bought yesterday. Kilpatrick jerked his thumb toward the back of the station.

The rhinoceros stood on the trailer, held tight by chains and come-alongs. Kilpatrick walked out from under the shed, hands in pockets. He directed Steadman in backing the truck to the trailer. The rhino’s skin was clean, its eyes polished. Smelling of Lysol, it looked ready to stomp those feet, break loose from the puny chains and come-alongs, and charge.

“What you say,” Kilpatrick said.

Steadman paused, a bag of cement on each shoulder. “Cooler today.”

The old man squinted at the sky. “Yep. Might rain.”

“Might.”

Steadman poured cement around the wells, adding water from a leaky garden hose, while Kilpatrick hitched the trailer, a cigarette dangling from his black lips. Now and again he coughed.

When he’d finished, Steadman walked to the trailer. Kilpatrick was wiring the taillights.

“How come your son gave you the rhino?” Steadman asked.

Kilpatrick didn’t look up. “Don’t remember,” he said.

Together, they threw a tarp across the rhinoceros, then stepped back to inspect the job. It seemed illegal, transporting something so large, so threatening. But that worry was soon shrinking in Steadman’s mirror as the truck kicked up dust enough to blot Kilpatrick from sight. A hell of a lot bigger than a shoebox, Steadman thought, picturing the rhino beside azaleas, surrounded by old people at the nursing home, his father among them, touching and stroking the dangerous beast with lust in their fingertips, a birthday gift ancient, faithful, unforgettable. Birds would collect on the rhino’s back and Steadman knew his father would impress everyone by identifying them.

As he drove away from Kilpatrick’s, Steadman pretended the rhino chased him, and like a child running at night, he went faster and faster. But the rhinoceros stayed close behind, its eyes tiny and clear, nose low, horn inches away from Steadman’s gas tank.

instinct

Five years ago
, Henry was driving home from the wastewater treatment plant when something caught his eye. He turned left off County 151 and pulled to the shoulder. For several minutes he sat, staring at the backs of his hands, which seemed as they clutched the steering wheel to belong to someone else. After a moment, the right hand put the gear lever into reverse.

It was a yard sale he’d passed, colorful junk spread on card tables under pecan trees. Two ten-speed bicycles leaned against a table beside a wooden knife rack, and a trampoline in the background had a sign that said
MAKE OFFER
. The woman conducting the sale wore a long skirt and an Alabama baseball cap and sat on a faded love seat. She closed the paperback she’d been reading when Henry stepped out of his truck. He wore his uniform pants from the plant and an undershirt.

The claw-footed bathtub was behind the tables. Coming the other way, he might never have seen it.

“Hot today,” the woman said, without rising. She squinted and looked down the road and fanned herself with the book. The house behind her was red brick, two-story, dormer windows with drapes, not blinds, which Henry liked. A garden hose lay coiled next to the steps.

While she watched from the love seat, he walked to the bathtub

and, looking into it, knelt in the wet grass. The porcelain was dirty, some rusty stains. But the drain plug was still there, attached by a tiny greenish chain. He ran his fingers along the tub’s rim. He didn’t like how the claw feet were sunk half an inch into the dirt.

“It’s an antique,” the woman said. She still hadn’t gotten up. Henry thought she ought to be here with him, staring into the tub. As if remembering, he saw a woman’s leg, a woman younger than this woman, her leg raised, soaped, over the rim.

“Belonged to my grandmother,” the saleswoman went on. “She passed two years ago.”

“How much?” Henry asked, and she finally stood.

He paid without haggling.

In his truck, he took the tub to his uncle L.J.’s hunting cabin in the middle of the two hundred acres of scrubby pine woods and wrestled it down into the root cellar, dragged it beside the butcher’s block where the old man had cleaned the deer and wild pigs he’d killed. To hook up the tub, Henry could branch a T-pipe from the industrial sink in the corner, which his uncle had gotten at a hospital auction and which had pedals so you could turn the water on and off with your foot.

Uncle L.J. had died several years before, emphysema and a brain tumor the size of a golf ball. Henry’s mother kept saying they ought to sell that old falling-down place with its deer heads and the stuffed bobcat and turkey beards, ought to sell the useless dead land, too, but Henry knew that in his thirty-eight years, they’d never gotten rid of anything.

Two years later he woke
on a Sunday morning. His mother was calling him, saying he’d be late for church. He went to the door and peeped out. She stood by the hall stand, putting on

lipstick.

“I’m staying home,” he called. “Don’t feel good.”

She closed her purse. “You were out late again last night,” she said. “Drinking, I expect. It’s no wonder you’re ill. John?”

His father appeared, in a tie but no jacket. “Come on down, Henry the Great.”

“No.” Henry closed the door and locked it. He imagined the old man jingling the keys in his pocket and scratching his bald spot. His mother catching his father’s eye in the mirror.

But soon the front door closed. At the window by his bed, he parted the drapes and watched them climb gravely into the car, his mother in her yellow church hat. They sat for a moment and he realized they were praying. For him, he knew. Then the Chrysler’s brake lights blinked and the car moved down the drive.

In the attic, he rolled the soft extra mattress into a ball and tied it with a piece of nylon rope. He pushed it across the dusty floor and out the trapdoor, nearly toppling an end table with a vase of daisies on it. The mattress came down the stairs easily, and out the front door. Driving to his uncle’s cabin, which was nearly ready, he began to shiver in the heat.

A year ago a school
bus stopped at the treatment plant. Henry looked up from adjusting an aerator pump with a pipe wrench. He took off his gloves. The bus door opened and the driver stepped out; behind him the seats were empty of children and he stood before Henry and pointed across the plant yard to the water storage pond.

“What’re them balloons you got floating there?” he asked. “Scientific devices?”

Henry squinted at the pond and told the driver no, they were rubbers.

“Rubbers?”

“Condoms,” Henry said, and explained that how after people had sex the man often tied a knot in the rubber and flushed it down the toilet. In the sewer system it gets hot, Henry went on. Gases in the rubber build up and expand and when the rubbers come out of the sewer into the treatment pond they float like balloons.

“I believe that one over there’s a French tickler,” Henry said, pointing with the wrench.

“Christ,” the bus driver said. “What’ll I tell the kids? They changed our route and now the children keep asking me what them balloons are.”

“Tell ’em they’re titties,” Henry said.

“Titties,” the driver said, chuckling.

Later, in moonlight, Henry brought his pellet rifle to the plant and sat on the dock with a package of cigarettes and shot the rubbers, one by one.

This evening Henry slips out
of his parents’ house. His mother and father are snoozing beside the fireplace, the TV on. It’s about thirty-five degrees out, but getting colder. The radio says snow is possible. Driving, he finds himself humming. He goes to the Key West for a Jack and Coke. The place is dead. He and the bartender talk about snow. The bartender says he’s from Maryland and it snows there a heap. Henry says sure it does. The bartender says he used to work nights in a hospital in D.C. and, no matter how hard it snowed, you had to be at work for your shift. You couldn’t miss, you had to be prepared. He says they’re ready for

snow there. Plows all over the place. Down here, he says, you get a spoonful of snow once in five years and they shut down the fucking city.

Outside, Henry hurries to his truck. He glances at the night sky past the streetlights. When he looks back down, a woman is squatting beside his tire. He watches her, thinking she’s peeing in the street, but she picks something up, a piece of electrical wire.

“Hello,” he says.

She jumps, then, seeing his face, laughs. “You scared the shit outta me.”