The Weirdo (18 page)

"Don't you think you should tell the Clewts to be careful?"

"I already have. I told John a month ago, when I first heard about all this, that the quickest way to get in trouble around here is to get involved with hunting rights."

"He didn't listen?"

"It's not him, Sam. It's Chip. He's involved because of Chip. All he wants to do now is paint his birds and live in peace back there. At the same time, if Chip wanted a piece of sky, John would try to get it for him. When John stopped feeling sorry for himself and started staying sober, he dedicated the rest of his life to Chip. John owes Chip quite a lot."

"Have you talked to them today?"

"This morning. I repeated what I said a month ago."

"How do
you
feel about it?"

"Mixed. But I'll tell you one thing, Sam. I'm stayin' out of it. I sell to hunters. They'd boycott me. Might even torch me. I have to make a living here. I'm strictly neutral. I have to be. How about you?"

"I'm on Chip's side." The morning with the cubs had done it.

Dunnegan said, "Good luck. Watch out for your papa."

Sam's laugh was low. She nodded. Dunnegan had known Stu Sanders for a long time.

***

SUNDAY night Chip called Sam at the Dairy Queen. "Hi, got a minute?"

"Yeah." Things were slow at seven forty-five.

"I just keep wondering about what you think you saw near the Sand Suck. Whether or not that might have been Tom in the bundle that guy was carrying."

"I didn't think it, Chip. I saw him. I saw the bundle."

She knew Chip still didn't quite believe her. Of course, neither did anyone else. No matter what they thought, Sam was convinced she hadn't manufactured the swamp-walker in another wild dream. He was too vivid, too real, to have come out of a dream.

Chip had told her about the poacher incident on Trail Six, and she realized he was now trying, at last,
to connect that big man to the one she'd seen in the early shadows, just as she was trying to connect Mr. Howell to Tom Telford.

"I'd like to see that stump where you spent the night."

"You don't believe it's there?"

"Samantha, I do believe it's there. I just want to see it. Can you meet me tomorrow at the head of Trail Six?"

"Four o'clock?"

"Great," he said.

Monday, after the chatter-filled school bus dropped her at the Chapanoke intersection, Sam hurried home and spent no more than five minutes taking her books upstairs and going to the bathroom. She changed into hiking boots and put on her thorn-cut jacket.

The bronze sun had paled in the late afternoon, but the rays were still shining down, setting chill fire to the red and yellow leaves as she trotted west up Chapanoke.

She saw that Chip was already waiting behind the locked refuge gate formed by welded three-inch pipes. He'd already turned the Jeep around and headed it south along Six, which ran between arching boughs.

"You're five minutes early," he said, leaning against the hood, smiling at her.

"So are you," she answered, sliding under the lower gate pipe.

"I like my women to be early," he said jokingly.

"I didn't know you had that many," Sam said, moving to the right-hand side and climbing in.

She marveled how easily they could talk to each other now, but she didn't know how to explain it. Maybe because he was a year older and from a big city? That didn't make sense. If he was whole and handsome, he probably wouldn't look at her. She was just grateful they could talk.

The Jeep bolted away. An hour of light was left.

"It still sounds like too much of a coincidence. Him passing right by you at that time of the morning."

Sam shrugged. "Call it what you want."

"I wish I knew how to hypnotize you."

"I've already told you that I could only see that he had a hat on, a floppy one. And that he was big."

"If he was there at all, you saw more than that."

Sam was becoming angry at being doubted again. "I did, huh?"

Their voices jarred as the Jeep pounded along.

"Chip, you have any idea how scared I was? Do you?"

"Umh."

Another mile and he slowed down, nodding off to the right. "We're getting near it."

"How do you know?"

"We trapped and plotted all through here."

Finally Chip stopped and turned off the ignition,
the engine sound quickly folding into the stillness. "We'll walk a ways. Were you to the right or left of here?"

"To the right."

"And he came through water?"

"Yes."

He limped for about fifty yards, then said, "I think the quicksand is just over there." His head wagged that way. A hundred feet of water separated them from the next hard-ground ridge in that direction.

"I just know it's here somewhere."

"You're about to take a ride."

"A ride?"

"On my shoulders."

With that, Chip bent slightly and lifted her off the ground, dropping her over his right shoulder.

"I think this is crazy. Don't drop me."

"I might fall down, but I won't drop you."

He moved off Six, stepping down into the shallow water, heading for the opposite ridge and foot trail.

"Is this the way he was carrying whatever he was carrying...?"

"Yes."

"In a blanket or a painter's drop cloth?"

"Yes."

Sam began to understand what Chip was trying to do. She shut her eyes. The sloshing sound of his waders was the same as the one she heard that terrible morning.

"Keep your head up," he ordered. "Let me know if you see the stump."

She lifted her head. "Keep walking until you hit the high ground." She twisted her head to look south, but his body cut off vision that way. "I was going along the footpath."

A moment later, he stepped out of the water and up onto firm ground, lowering her to earth. "See, I didn't drop you."

"Thanks!" She looked around. "It was later than this that day, almost five o'clock, but I'm sure I came this way."

"Okay, let's keep going."

They walked south.

Even in the lengthening shadows, the light beginning to lose the golden cast, slowly turning to brownish gray, the surroundings looked familiar. The shallow-rooted gums were where they should be; the catbriers were there; now and then, clumps of muscadine grapes.

A few minutes later, Sam said, "I know I was here. I started to look for a place to sleep right about here, and if we go a little bit farther..."

Fewer than a hundred yards had passed when she said, "There it is. That's the one I slept in."

They moved quickly toward it.

Charred on top, the big bell-like stump was six or seven feet off the bank. "That's it, I'm sure," Sam said.

When they reached it she said, "Piggyback me over."

Chip looked off west. "I think the Sand Suck is about fifty yards that way."

"So my guess was right."

He nodded, then picked her up again.

He deposited her in the fire-hollowed stump. She sniffed it and looked down. "Same smell. Same hollow. I kept wishing my legs were shorter."

Chip was staring off toward the opposite shore, asking, "He came from there?"

She nodded.

"Okay, I'm going to walk over, get up on Six, and then start across again. Look at your second hand and tell me how long I'm taking. I'll come right by you. How far out?"

"Eight feet, about..."

"Okay, I'll pass by you and go straight to the quicksand, then come back by here and go to the trail. I'll stay at the Sand Suck three minutes, which should have been enough time for him to dump whatever he had...."

"It wasn't much more than three minutes."

"Samantha, when I come toward you, try to remember exactly how he looked, what he was wearing. Was it a mackinaw? That's important."

She watched his retreating back cross, the approximately hundred feet to Trail Six, then turned and started out again, the rhythmical
plusht-plusht-plusht
of his waders focusing her memory as he approached her.

She closed her eyes, listening to the water splash, trying to peel away the shadows and see the swamp-walker closer. See his face. See the color of his jacket. See that bundle over his left shoulder. Instead, all she could see was his huge form. No details, but her heart pounded just the same. Terror returned.

As she opened her eyes Chip passed her, the brush soon crackling underfoot as he moved on toward the quicksand patch. She looked at her watch, counting the second hand's sweep as it rotated past a minute. She'd told him the man seemed to have been gone about three minutes, but that was just a guess. It might have been two minutes or five. What difference did it make?

Chip returned as the second hand completed a fourth full sweep, asking, "Did you see what he was wearing?"

Sam shook her head. "And your idea about hypnotism wouldn't work. At least, not with me. I saw what I saw. Not much. Get me out of here!" She was standing up in the stump.

He waded out and piggybacked her to land. "Have you ever seen it? The Sand Suck?"

"No."

"Follow me."

She'd never had any great desire to pay a visit to five acres of brown jelly. That's how Grandpa Sanders had described it. But now that she was this close...

They pushed through the thickets, rousing some cottontails, who fled, bounding and streaking. There was life no matter where you went in the swamp.

Soon Chip separated tall green cane to reveal the quicksand patch with its barbed-wire fencing and red Danger signs. The area was larger than she thought it would be, the slick surface the color of old, graying potatoes.
This is the place where nothing is living,
she thought, shivering slightly. There was a tomb's silence about it.

"Let me show you something," Chip said.

He picked up a piece of wood about two feet long, then tossed it over the barbed wire. In seconds it had disappeared, the sand enclosing it without a bubble. The surface became marble-slick again.

Sam didn't need to ask Chip if he thought Tom Telford was buried down there. The stricken look on Chip's face had already answered the question. "Let's go," he murmured, and she followed him out.

She hadn't met Thomas Telford, wouldn't have known him if they'd passed on Chapanoke, but she felt an overwhelming sorrow.

That eerie time between final day and total darkness had fallen over the swamp when they arrived back at the vehicular gate, their headlights slashing the gray dusk.

Sam hadn't spoken since they left the Sand Suck.
She'd been thinking of Telford. Climbing out of the Jeep, she lingered by the side a moment, looking over at Chip. His face was barely visible in the dim glow of the dash.

"It's not legal to bring a gun back in here," she said.

"That's right."

"And the only people who do bring them in are poachers...."

"Probably."

"So why don't they find out who's been poaching?"

"Easier said than done, I think. The problem is they've still got Tom listed as missing. Just missing, Truesdale said. That's all he can prove. He can't go tracking down poachers...."

"But what about us finding the truck and the blood stains?"

"He can't prove anything, Samantha."

Sam considered this—another frustrating wall—and finally nodded. His scarred left hand was on the window ledge. She touched it without thinking and said, "See you." Then she walked away, lit by the twin headlight beams. Sliding under the iron-pipe gate she moved off toward home. She wondered if her papa knew any poachers and if he'd report them.

The headlight beams turned south.

***

Tom always worried more about the loss of habitat on the coastal plain than about bear deaths caused by poachers or farmers, cars or trucks. The wetlands weren't limited to the Powhatan. Lumbering, farming, phosphate and peat mining were eating up the pocosins, squeezing the natural feeding acres outside the swamp.

But one of the last notes he had made before disappearing said flatly, "Protection from hunting should be continued within the Powhatan National Wildlife Refuge." He wrote it two days before he vanished.

Powhatan Swamp
English I
Charles Clewt
Ohio State University

***

THE FIRST hard, cold rain of the autumn began falling midafternoon on Tuesday. It pelted the Feeder Ditch and Lake Nansemond, causing water to mushroom up in tiny oxblood eruptions. It wet down the tinder-dry Powhatan and filled the thirsty ruts on Chapanoke
Road. There was enough clay in the sand for instant, sticky mud.

Inside the big barn there was a pleasant
rat-tat-tat
as drops bounced off the gently sloping tin roof. Dozens of wise white-throated sparrows had taken shelter in the high rafters. Nearby, the dogs, including Baron von Buckner, had taken to their huts, curling up. Early winter had arrived, a season that Sam usually enjoyed with the comings and goings of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's all in less than six weeks.

Inside the house, at the heavy, old oaken kitchen table with hand-carved legs, the atmosphere was as stormy as it was outside, the animal rights argument continuing, much to Dell's displeasure. Her smooth, round face was blank, eyes dull with annoyance.

"Those Clewts don't have the foggiest notion of what they're foolin' with," the bo'sun said. "Liberal, ignorant loonies, both of them. Whenever and wherever liberals stick their noses in, things get screwed up. I hear that bear-counter from Raleigh, the college boy, is still missin'. He probably fell into the lake an' didn't know how to swim."

He was probably murdered by some hunter and thrown into quicksand,
Sam thought. She buttered her bread, deciding not to say anything that would make her papa's motor-mouth run faster.

Dell had made duck broth simmered with rice and carrots and celery. She'd baked cornbread to go with the teal that had been braised with onions and celery. The bosun's hunting skills always landed meat on the table.

"I'm gonna give you some articles to read, Sam."