Poachers (23 page)

The phone rang later. It was Goodloe, asking about the boy and telling what had happened.

Kirxy nearly smiled. “You been lost all this time, Sugar-baby?”

“Reckon I have,” Goodloe admitted, “and we still ain’t found Deputy Dave yet.”

For a week they stayed
in the store together. At times Kirxy could barely walk, and other times the pain in his side was worse than ever. He gave the boy a stocking cap to cover his skinned head and put him to work, sweeping, dusting and scrubbing the shelves. He had Dan pull a table next to his chair, and Kirxy did something he hadn’t done in years: took inventory. With the boy’s help, he counted and ledgered each item, marking it in his long green book. The back shelf contained canned soups, vegetables, sardines and tins of meat. Many of the cans were so old that the labels flaked off in Kirxy’s hand, and so they were unmarked when Dan replaced them in the rings they’d made not only in the dust but on the wood itself. In the back of that last shelf, Dan discovered four tins of Underwood Deviled Ham, and as their labels fell away at Kirxy’s touch, he remembered a time when he’d purposely unwrapped the paper from these cans because each label showed several red dancing devils, and some of his colored customers had refused to buy them.

Kirxy now understood that his store was dead, that it no longer provided a service. His colored customers had stopped coming years before. The same with Esther. For the past few years, except for an occasional hunter or logger, he’d been in business for the Gates boys alone. He looked across the room at Dan, spraying a window with Windex and wiping at it absently, gazing outside.

The boy wore the last of the new denim overalls Kirxy had in stock, and they were too short by an inch or two. Once, when the store had thrived, he’d had many sizes, but for the longest time now the only ones he’d stocked were the boys’.

That night, beneath his standing lamp, Kirxy began again to read his wife’s copy of
Tarzan of the Apes
to Dan. He sipped his whisky and spoke clearly, to be heard over the rain. When he paused to turn a page, he saw that the boy lay asleep across the row of chairs they’d arranged in the shape of a bed. Looking down through his bifocals, Kirxy flipped to the front of the book and saw his wife’s name written in her neat script. He moved his thumb over it and read it to himself. Then he turned to the back of the book to the list of other Tarzan novels—twenty-four in all—and he decided to order them through the mail so he and Dan would know the complete adventures of Tarzan of the Apes.

In the morning, Goodloe called and said that Frank David had officially arrived—the sheriff himself had witnessed the swearing-in—and he was now this district’s game warden.

“Pretty nice old fellow,” Goodloe said. “Kinda quiet. Polite. Asked me how the fishing was.”

Then it’s over, Kirxy thought.

A week later, Kirxy told
Dan he had business in Grove Hill. He’d spent the night before trying to decide whether to take the boy with him but had decided not to, that he couldn’t watch him forever. Besides, town wasn’t the place for a Gates. Before he left he gave Dan his thirty-aught-six and told him to stay put, not to leave for anything. For himself, Kirxy took an old twenty-two

bolt action and placed it in the back window rack of his truck. He waved to Dan and drove off.

He thought that if the boy wanted to run away, it was his own choice. Kirxy owed him the chance, at least.

At the doctor’s office the tired-looking young surgeon frowned and removed his glasses when he told Kirxy that the cancer was advancing, that he’d need to check into the hospital in Mobile immediately. It was way past time. “Just look at your color,” the surgeon said. Kirxy stood, thanked the man, put on his hat and limped outside. He went by the post office and placed his order for the Tarzan books. He shopped for supplies in the Dollar Store, using the buggy for support, and then the Piggly Wiggly, had the checkout boys put the boxes in the front seat beside him. Coming out of the drugstore, he remembered that it was Saturday, that there’d be chicken fights today. And possible news about Frank David.

At Heflin’s, Kirxy paid his five-dollar admission and let Heflin help him to a seat in the bottom of the stands. He poured some whisky into his coffee and sat studying the crowd. Nobody had mentioned Frank David, but a few old-timers had offered their sympathies on the deaths of Kent and Neil.

Down in the pit the Cajuns were back, and during the eighth match—one of the Louisiana whites versus a local red, the tall bald Cajun stooping and circling the tangled birds and licking his lips as his rooster swarmed the other and hooked it, the barn smoky and dark, rain splattering the tin roof—the door swung open.

Instantly the crowd was hushed. Feathers settled to the ground.

Even the Cajuns knew who he was. He stood at the door, unarmed, his hands on his hips. A wiry man. He lifted his chin and people tried to hide their drinks. His giant ears. That hooked nose. The eyes. Bird handlers reached over their shoulders, clawing at the numbered pieces of masking tape on their backs. The two handlers and the referee in the ring sidled out, leaving the roosters.

For a full minute Frank David stood staring. People stepped out the back door. Climbed out windows. Half-naked boys in the rafters were frozen like monkeys hypnotized by a snake.

Frank David’s gaze didn’t stop on Kirxy but settled instead on the roosters, the white one pecking at the red’s eyes. Outside, trucks roared to life, backfiring like gunshots. Kirxy placed his hands on his knees. He rose, turned up his coat collar and flung his coffee out. Frank David still hadn’t looked at him. Kirxy planted his cane and made his way painfully out the back door and through the mud.

Not a person in sight, just clattering tailgates vanishing into the woods.

From inside his truck, Kirxy watched Frank David walk away from the barn and head toward the trees. Watched him step around a mud puddle. Now he was just a blurry bowlegged man with white hair. Kirxy felt behind him for the twenty-two rifle with one hand while rolling down the window with the other. He had a little trouble aiming the gun with his shaky arms. He pulled back the bolt. He flicked the safety off. The sight of the rifle wavered between Frank David’s shoulders as the game warden walked. As if an old storekeeper were nothing to fear.

Closing one eye, Kirxy pulled the trigger. He didn’t hear the shot, though later he would notice his ears ringing.

Frank David’s coat bloomed out to the side and he missed a step. He stopped and put his hand to his lower right side and

looked over his shoulder at Kirxy, who was fumbling with the rifle’s bolt action. Then Frank David was gone, just wasn’t there, there were only the trees, bent in the rain, and shreds of fog in the air. For a moment Kirxy wondered if he’d seen a man at all, or if he’d shot at something out of his own imagination, if the cancer that had started in his pancreas had spread up along his spine into his brain and was deceiving him, forming men out of the air and walking them across fields, giving them hands and eyes and the power to disappear.

From inside the barn, a rooster crowed. Kirxy remembered Dan. He hung the rifle in its rack and started his truck, gunned the engine. He banged over the field, flattening saplings and a fence, and though he couldn’t feel his feet, he drove very fast.

Not until two days later
, in the VA hospital in Mobile, would Kirxy finally begin to piece it all together. Parts of that afternoon were patchy and hard to remember: shooting at Frank David, going to the store and finding it empty, no sign of a struggle, the thirty-aught-six gone, as if Dan had walked out on his own and taken the gun. Kirxy could remember getting back into his truck. He’d planned to drive to Grove Hill—the courthouse, the game warden’s office—and find Frank David and finish the job, but somewhere along the way he blacked out behind the wheel and veered off the road into a ditch. He barely remembered the rescue workers and the lights and sirens. Goodloe himself pulling Kirxy out.

Later that night two coon hunters had stumbled across Dan, wandering along the riverbank, his face and shirt covered in blood, the thirty-aught-six nowhere to be found.

When Goodloe told the semiconscious Kirxy what happened, the storekeeper turned silently to the window, where he saw only the reflected face of an old, dying, failed man.

And later still, in the warm haze of morphine, Kirxy lowered his eyelids and let his imagination unravel and retwine the mystery of Frank David: it was as if Frank David himself appeared in the chair where Goodloe had sat, as if the game warden broke the seal on a bottle of Jim Beam and leaned forward on his elbows and touched the bottle to Kirxy’s cracked lips and whispered to him a story about boots going over land and then a gunshot and rain washing the blood trail away even as the boots passed. About a tired old game warden taking his hand out of his coat and seeing the blood there, feeling it trickle along his side and down the back of his leg. About the boy in the game warden’s truck, handcuffed, gagged, blindfolded. About driving carefully through deep ruts in the road. Stopping behind Esther’s empty house and carrying the kicking wet boy inside on his shoulder.

When the blindfold is removed, Dan has trouble focusing but knows where he is because of her smell. Bacon and soap. Cigarettes, dust. Frank David holds what looks like a pillowcase. He comes across the room and puts the pillowcase down. He rubs his eyes and sits on the bed beside Dan. He puts on a pair of reading glasses and opens a book of matches and lights a cigarette. Holds the filtered end to Dan’s lips, but the boy doesn’t inhale. Frank David puts the cigarette in his own lips, the embers glow. Then he drops it on the floor, crushes it out with his boot. Picks up the butt and slips it into his shirt pocket. He puts his hand over the boy’s watery eyes, the skin of his palm dry and hard. Cool. Faint smell of blood. He moves his fingers over Dan’s nose, lips, chin. Stops at his throat and holds the boy tightly but not painfully. In a strange way Dan can’t understand, he finds it

reassuring. His thudding heart slows. Something is struggling beside his shoulder and Frank David takes the thing from the bag. Now the smell in the room changes. Dan begins to thrash and whip his head from side to side.

“Goddamn, son,” Frank David whispers. “I hate to civilize you.”

Goodloe began going to the
veterans’ hospital in Mobile once a week. He brought Kirxy cigarettes from his store. There weren’t any private rooms available in the hospital, and the beds around the storekeeper were filled with dying ex-soldiers who never talked, but Kirxy was beside a window and Goodloe would raise the glass and prop it open with a novel. They smoked together and drank whisky from paper cups, listening for nurses.

It was the tall mean one.

“One more time, goddamn it,” she said, coming out of nowhere and plucking the cigarettes from their lips so quickly they were still puckered.

Sometimes Goodloe would push Kirxy down the hall when they could get a wheelchair, the IV rack attached by a stainless steel contraption with a black handle the shape of a flower. They would go to the elevator and ride down three floors to a covered area where people smoked and talked about the weather. There were nurses and black cafeteria workers in white uniforms and hair nets and people visiting other people and a few patients. Occasionally in the halls they’d see some mean old fart Kirxy knew and they’d talk about hospital food or chicken fighting. Or the fact that Frank David had surprised everyone by deciding to retire after only a month of quiet duty, that the new game warden was from Texas. And a nigger to boot.

Then Goodloe would wheel Kirxy back along a long window, out of which they could see the tops of oak trees.

On one visit, Goodloe told Kirxy they’d taken Dan out of intensive care. Three weeks later he said the boy’d been discharged.

“I give him a ride to the store,” Goodloe said. This was in late May and Kirxy was a yellow skeleton with hands that shook.

“I’ll stop by and check on him every evening,” Goodloe went on. “He’ll be okay, the doctor says. Just needs to keep them bandages changed. I can do that, I reckon.”

They were quiet then, for a time, just the coughs of the dying men and the soft swishing of nurses’ thighs and the hum of IV machines.

“Goodloe,” Kirxy whispered, “I’d like you to help me with something.”

The sheriff leaned in to hear, an unlit cigarette behind his ear like a pencil.

Kirxy’s tongue was white and cracked, his breath awful. “I’d like to change my will,” he said, “make the boy beneficiary.”

“All right,” Goodloe said.

“I’m obliged,” whispered Kirxy. He closed his eyes.

Near the end he was delirious. He said he saw a tiny black creature at the foot of his bed. Said it had him by the toe. In surprising fits of strength, he would throw his water pitcher at it, or his box of tissues, or the
Reader’s Digest
. Restraints were called for. His coma was a relief to everyone, and he died quietly in the night.

In Kirxy’s chair in the
store, Dan didn’t seem to hear Goodloe’s questions. The sheriff had done some looking in the Grove Hill Public Library—“research” was the modern word—and discovered that one species of cobra spat venom at its victim’s eyes, but there weren’t such snakes in southern Alabama. Anyway, the hospital lab had confirmed that it was the poison of a cottonmouth that had blinded Dan. The question, of course, was who had put the venom in his eyes. Goodloe shuddered to think of it, how they’d found Dan staggering about, howling in pain, bleeding from his tear ducts, the skin around his eye sockets dissolving, exposing the white ridges of his skull.