Poachers (3 page)

I cock my head. “I’m sorry?”

“You heard me. This is private property. You’re trespassing on our hunting club.” He swings his gun barrel toward the woods on the right, as if pointing to his buddies lurking in the shadows, their faces green and black, twigs in their hair, expensive rifles aimed at my head.

I spit through my teeth. I don’t tell him that this used to be my family’s land, that I’ve dragged deer over this very track, spent hours on this goddamn trestle. Instead I say, “The railroad’s not private property.”

“The hell it’s not,” he says. And raises the rifle, aims at me.

We stand facing one another. It will be dark soon, and from the left side of the track comes the distant snarl of a logger’s power saw. I try to see myself through the hunter’s eyes: my ragged jeans, my leather jacket and hiking boots. To him I probably look like a hippie, like the last thing you’d expect to find out here.

Meanwhile, the hunter is edgy, glancing behind him in the woods. “I’m not gonna tell you again,” he says.

The saw rattles to a stop, then revs up again.

“You hear that?” I ask. “That’ll ruin your hunting more than I will.”

I know I should leave, but instead I sit on the cold rail and look away from the hunter, at the woods. I recall a story my father told me. He was turkey hunting down here early on a Sunday morning. Creeping along, he heard a wavering voice, and it spooked him. He followed it through the trees until, in the distance, he saw an old black preacher standing on a stump, practicing his sermon. He had a giant white Bible in one hand and a red handkerchief for face-mopping in the other. Despite the forty-degree weather, his shirtsleeves were rolled up. Dad stopped and listened to the man’s tremulous voice, knowing that every turkey for miles was gone, that his hunting was spoiled. He might as well have gone home. When I asked him if he was angry he said no, just spooked.

I turn and look at the hunter’s camouflaged face. “You ever hunt turkeys?”

“Go to hell,” he says, and walks away. He doesn’t look back, just heads into the woods. When he’s gone I stand up and close my coat. Take a last long look at the Blowout, then make my way carefully down the side of the tracks. I duck under the darkening magnolia branches on the other side and start back toward the logging road.

I know, as I walk, that I’m not the fancy-rifled lawyer in face paint and new camouflage, yet neither am I the dedicated native hunter I pretended to be all those years. Now when I return here, to Dickinson, it’s as a kind of stranger—after all, I’ve left, gotten educated, lost some of my drawl. I even married a Yankee. And

coming back like this to hunt for details for my stories feels a bit like poaching on land that used to be mine. But I’ve never lost the need to tell of my Alabama, to reveal it, lush and green and full of death. So I return, knowing what I’ve learned. I come back, where life is slow dying, and I poach for stories. I poach because I want to recover the paths while there’s still time, before the last logging trucks rumble through and the old, dark ways are at last forever hewn.

grit

Chugging and clanging
among the dark pine trees north of Mobile, Alabama, the Black Beauty Minerals plant was a rickety green hull of storage tanks, chutes and conveyor belts. Glen, the manager, felt like the captain of a ragtag spaceship that had crash-landed, a prison barge full of poachers and thieves, smugglers and assassins.

The owners, Ernie and Dwight, lived far away, in Detroit, and when the Black Beauty lost its biggest client—Ingalls Shipbuilding—to government budget cuts, they ordered Glen to lay off his two-man night shift. One of the workers was a long-haired turd Glen enjoyed letting go, a punk who would’ve likely failed his next drug test. But the other man, Roy Jones, did some book-making on the side, and Glen had been in a betting slump lately. So when Roy, who’d had a great year as a bookie, crunched over the gritty black yard to the office, Glen owed him over four thousand dollars.

Roy, a fat black man, strode in without knocking and wedged himself into the chair across from Glen’s desk, probably expecting more stalling of the debt.

Glen cleared his throat. “I’ve got some bad news, Roy—”

“Chill, baby,” Roy said. He removed his hard hat, which left its imprint in his hair. “I know I’m fixing to get laid off, and I got a counteroffer for you.” He slid a cigar from his hat lining and smelled it.

Glen was surprised. The Ingalls announcement hadn’t come until a few hours ago. Ernie and Dwight had just released him from their third conference call of the afternoon, the kind where they both yelled at him at the same time.

“How’d you find that out, Roy?” he asked.

Roy lit his cigar. “One thing you ain’t learned yet is how to get the system doggie-style. Two of my associates work over at Ingalls, and one of ’em been fucking the bigwig’s secretary.”

“Well—”

“Hang on, Glen. I expect E and D done called you and told you to lay my big fat ass off. But that’s cool, baby.” He tipped his ashes into his hard hat. “’Cause I got other irons in the fire.”

He said he had an “independent buyer” for some Black Beauty sandblasting grit. Said he had, in fact, a few lined up. What he wanted was to run an off-the-books night shift for a few hours a night, three nights a week. He said he had an associate who’d deliver the stuff. The day-shifters could be bought off. Glen could doctor the paperwork so the little production wouldn’t be noticed by Ernie and Dwight.

“But don’t answer now,” Roy said, replacing his hard hat. “Sleep on it tonight, baby. Mull it over.”

Glen—a forty-two-year-old
, ulcer-ridden, insomniac, half-alcoholic chronic gambler—mulled Roy’s idea over in his tiny apartment that evening by drinking three six-packs of Bud Light. He picked up the phone and placed a large bet with Roy on the upcoming Braves-Giants game, taking San Francisco because Barry Bonds was on fire. Then he dialed the number of the Pizza

Hut managed by his most recent ex-wife’s new boyfriend, placed an order for five extra-large thick-crust pies with pineapple and double anchovies, and had it delivered to another of his ex-wives’ houses for her and her boyfriend. Glen had four ex-wives in all, and he was still in love with each of them. Every night as he got drunk it felt like somebody had shot him in the chest with buckshot and left four big airy holes in his heart, holes that grew with each beer, as if—there was no other way he could think of it—his heart were being sandblasted.

The Braves rallied in the
eighth and Bonds’s sixteen-game hitting streak was snapped, so when Roy came by the next day, Glen owed him another eight hundred dollars and change.

Roy sat down. “You made up your mind yet?”

“Impossible,” Glen said. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go along. Ernie and Dwight’d pop in out of nowhere and we’d all be up the creek.”

Today Roy wore tan slacks and a brown silk shirt. Shiny brown shoes and, when he crossed his legs, thin argyle socks. A brown fedora in his lap. The first time Glen had seen him in anything but work clothes.

Roy shook a cigar from its box and lit it. “Glen, you the most gullible motherfucker ever wore a hard hat. Don’t you reckon I know when them tight-asses is coming down here?”

“How? Got somebody fucking their wives?”

Roy hesitated. “My cousin’s daughter work in the Detroit airport.”

Glen’s mind flashed a quick slideshow of Ernie and Dwight’s past disastrous visits. “You might’ve mentioned that four years ago.”

“Baby,” Roy said, “I’ll cut you in for ten percent of every load we sell.”

“There’s a recession, Roy. I can’t unload this grit to save my life, and if I can’t, you sure as hell can’t.”

Roy chuckled. “Got-damn, boy.” He pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. “This is what I done presold. I got friends all up and down the coast. They got some rusty-ass shit needs sandblasting. You ain’t no salesman, Glen. You couldn’t sell a whore on a battleship.”

“Roy, it’s illegal.”

“Go look out yonder.” Roy pointed to the window overlooking the black-grit parking lot.

Glen obeyed. A big white guy with a little head was leaning against Roy’s cream-colored El Dorado, carving at his fingernails with a long knife.

“That’s my associate, Snakebite,” Roy said. “He’ll be delivering the stuff. He also collect for me, if you know what I mean.”

Glen knew.

“Up till now,” Roy said, “you been getting off easy ’cause you was the boss. Now that that’s changed…”

Glen looked at him. “You threatening me, Roy?”

“Naw, baby. I’m a businessman.” Roy took out his pocket ledger. “As of now, I’m forgetting every got-damn cent you owe me.” Glen watched Roy write
paid
by the frighteningly high red figure he would’ve been having nightmares about, had he been able to sleep.

Roy started running his phantom
night shift Monday through Wednesday nights. To keep the four day-shifters quiet, he gave them a slight payoff—a “taste”—each week. So they clocked in

in the mornings and pretended the machinery wasn’t hot, that the plant hadn’t run all night. And Glen, hungover, took his clipboard and measuring tape out and stared at the dwindling stockpiles of raw grit where Roy had taken material. Then he went back across the yard into his office, locked the door, rubbed his eyes, doctored his paperwork and—some days—threw up.

Staring out the window, he worried that the day shift would rat to Ernie and Dwight. He’d never been close to the work-ers—in his first week as manager, four years before, he’d confiscated the radio they kept in the control room. Instead of spending afternoons in his office making sales calls the way the previous manager had, Glen had stayed out in the heat with the men, cracking the whip, having the plant operator retake grit samples, watching the millwright repair leaks, making sure the payloader’s fittings were well-greased. He timed the guys’ breaks, stomped into the break room if they stayed a minute past their half hour. If someone got a personal phone call, Glen would go to another extension and pick up and say, “Excuse me,” in an icy tone and wait for them to hang up.

In the plant, they were supposed to wear hard hats, safety glasses, steel-toe boots, leather gloves, earplugs and, depending on where they worked, a dust mask or respirator. Glen struck here, too, because his predecessor had let the guys grow lax. In those first months, Glen had stepped on their toes to check for steel and yelled in their ears to check for plugs. He’d written them up for the tiniest safety violation and put it in their permanent files.

So they hated him. They took orders sullenly and drew a finger across their throats as a warning signal when he approached. They never invited him to participate in their betting pools or asked him to get a beer after work.

Now Glen swore to give up gambling. He locked himself in the office during the day and made halfhearted sales calls: “The unique thing about our sandblasting grit,” he’d say wearily, “is that no piece, no matter how small, has a round edge.” At night, he stayed home and watched sitcoms and nature shows instead of baseball. When cabin fever struck, he went to the movies instead of the dog track or the casino boats in Biloxi. He even managed to curb his drinking on weeknights.

Until early July. There was an Independence Day weekend series between Atlanta and the Cards in St. Louis and the plant had a four-day weekend. A drunk Glen, who when lonely sometimes called 1-900 handicapping lines, got a great tip from Lucky Dave Rizetti—“A sure by-God thing,” Lucky Dave promised. “Take the Bravos, take ’em for big money.” And Glen took them, betting almost two grand over the four games. But the series was filled with freaky incidents, relief pitchers hitting home runs, Golden-Glovers making stupid two-base throwing errors, etc.

So on Tuesday, the holiday over, Glen was back in debt. Then add the fact that the lawyers of exes two and three had been sending letters threatening lawsuits if Glen didn’t pay his alimony. The lawyers said they’d get a court order and garnish his wages. Christ, if Ernie and Dwight got wind of that, they’d fly down and can him for sure.

They came twice a year or so, the old bastards, for spot inspections, speaking in their Yankee accents and wearing polished hard hats on their prim gray crew cuts. They would fly in from Detroit, first class, and rent a Caddy and get suites at the top of the Riverview downtown. They’d bring rolled-up plans to the plant and walk around frowning and making notes. Glen always felt ill when they were on-site—they constantly grumbled about lack of production or low sales figures or how an elevator wasn’t up to spec. They’d peer into his red eyes and sniff his breath. He

would follow them around the plant’s perimeter, his chin nicked from shaving, and he’d nod and hold his stomach.

On Tuesday, after Independence Day
, Glen sat in his office staring at the electric bill—he would have to account for the extra power the phantom night shift was using—when Roy stuck his head in the door. He smiled, smoking a cigar, and sat down across from Glen’s desk.

“Just come by to tell you we fixing to start running four nights a week,” Roy said.

Glen started to object, but there was a shrill noise.

“Hang on.” Roy brought a slim cellular phone out of his pocket.