The Second Ardath Mayhar Read online

  The voice that answered was gruff, as if it came through a throat that had hosted too may drinks and too much tobacco smoke. Not recognizable as one I had heard recently, that was certain. Then I concentrated on the conversation.

  “This is Sheriff Hogue. Wanted to tell you we settled that little problem you had. You won’t have to be concerned about it ever again.”

  There came a cackle of laughter from the phone. “You folks do good work, Terry. I’ll have to make a donation to your re-election campaign. A big one. That wasn’t what you could call a major concern of mine, but I’m gettin’ old, and it was somethin’ I wanted to put behind me while I still can. You’ll be hearin’ from me.”

  I felt myself pulled away from the sheriff. That phony drawl—I knew it. Hadn’t heard it for decades, but it was one that had been familiar long ago. Lawrence Thibodeau had faked it, trying to sound like the other redneck boys, but his Cajun accent crept through anyway. The girls had seemed to like him, but the boys thought he was a creep or queer or, worse than anything, FRENCH!

  If my girl Lizzie had made eyes at him, I might have felt the same, but we were a real item, as we proved by getting married and staying married until she died twenty years ago. And that comic-strip light bulb came on over my nonexistent head. Larry had made a lot of moves toward Lizzie, now that I came to think about it. Neither of us had thought much about that, because we were so taken up with each other at the time. But he’d cut a swath through the other senior girls, and if shower-room talk that Lizzie passed on to me was anything near true, he’d scored with about half of them. Could he have been so set on getting Lizzie that he’d held it against m all these years?

  But then I remembered that night when we all were barred from playing football. He’d been one of the players who had lost his chance to shine. Another memory unfolded. He’d tried to scam the county with a “bargain” deal on asphalt. The group I headed had investigated that, and we discovered that other counties had used the stuff, and it floated away at the first rain. That had probably cost him a lot of money, and it wasn’t the only thing we’d found, either. We scotched a half-dozen crooked deals he had been pushing. Though it was nothing personal with me, the idiot must have thought I was out to get him. The one thing I knew for sure about him was that he thought the universe revolved around him.

  I knew where he lived, too. Without even knowing how it worked, I found myself hanging in the air above his recliner, looking down at his bald head with its fringe of white hair. He was sipping coffee from a mug, a newspaper open on his lap. He scanned through it rather hastily, and I followed, reading over his shoulder. He had to be looking for any mention of that illegal arrest and sudden death, I knew, but I could see no mention of it, even in the short bits at the back of the paper.

  So now I knew. Old Larry, for some twisted reason of his own, had set me up either to serve time or die. I wondered if poor Lizzie, dead now these twenty years, knew what we’d set in motion, back there in our teens. Then I wondered how you’d go about haunting somebody. I’d already proved that I couldn’t touch anything. I’d have choked the life out of Larry at that point, if that could be done, but he didn’t even seem to feel a chill while I tried. I couldn’t even whomp up a good scary moan.

  I wanted to hurt that bastard worse than I’d ever wanted anything, and I was totally helpless to do anything at all that he’d notice. Talk about frustration! Being a mind in a mist is not a satisfying state of being. I drifted back up to the ceiling and hung there, trying to figure out some way of punishing the man.

  Time passed mighty slowly, I can testify to that. Thibodeau came and went, pestered his wife about silly things, made phone calls to people I knew to be influential and some I thought must be the scum of the earth. If he was setting up some other old acquaintance he thought had done him harm, I couldn’t recognize it from what was said.

  I seemed to be caught in some kind of limbo, couldn’t even go somewhere else, though I tried. There must be some kind of connection between a dead man and the one who had him killed, because I seemed to be tethered there in his study like a colt to a stake. If I’d still had a body I’d probably have gone crazy, but I was sort of frozen in the situation like a fly in amber. It was plenty of Hell for me, though I couldn’t really think of anything I’d done in my life that was bad enough to earn me that kind of punishment.

  I’d never thought of cheating on the income tax as anything but good clean fun, and I couldn’t see God feeling much different about it.

  I kept watching the dates on his newspapers and reading over his shoulder, and never a word was printed about my death. I wondered if my uncles and cousins even knew I was gone. We’d sort of lost touch after I got old and sickly, and they were all busy folks, so I didn’t hold it against them. I wondered how my second wife was getting along, but I knew she was one tough lady and she’d do fine. No, I was the one in trouble. Where was that bright light and that tunnel folks talked about? How in hell was I supposed to find my way wherever it was I should go, if I was stuck here with this fat, bald bastard.

  Then somebody gave him a dog, a yappy little beast named Tab that seemed to see me. First time he came into the study he stopped short, sat down, and stared up at me where I lurked in a corner of the ceiling. He didn’t bark, but he lifted his lip and snarled up at me. About that time Larry came in and dropped into his recliner. The dog went over and sniffed his legs, licked his hand, and lay down. From time to time he’d look up at me and snarl, and finally old Larry realized that the critter was actually seeing something he couldn’t see.

  He got up, grumbling, and looked around the room, followed every step of the way by that dog. That gave me an idea. I started moving around, keeping as much on the opposite side of the study as I could. The dog tried to keep an eye on both of us, but he finally gave up on Larry and kept staring at me. That really puzzled his new master. He kept coming to stand on the spot Tab was staring at, but by that time I’d be somewhere else and Tab would be staring there. I could see that was driving him crazy, and it suited me fine.

  Tab and I played that game almost every evening for a week. Then Larry locked up the study and never came inside. After that I could make it to whatever room he occupied, so I followed him around, just like the dog did, and he got more and more frantic. We drove him crazy, old Tab and I, and once his wife had him committed to the funny farm, I found I could turn loose and go just about anywhere.

  I checked on my wife and my uncles and what cousins I could locate. Then I began paying attention to things that weren’t really obvious, and I found that Lizzie had been trying to get my attention since day one. She really chewed me out, once I realized that the presence I felt was really Lizzie.

  I don’t really know where we go from here, but she does, and that is good enough for me.

  THE SWAMP RUNNER

  I take wicked delight in devising oddball ways to punish evildoers. Living as I do in an area not unlike that in the story, I know how to do it, too, but I am too old to manage alligators!

  It seems to be getting plumb crowded down here in the river bottom country. I’ve been running trotlines and traplines and hunting wild hogs and possums and coons since I could walk, and I almost never come across anybody but hunters and once a game warden, but he was dead already. Now it seems as if there’s folks behind most every tree and bush. Mostly law folks, now that bank robbers and such have found out what a great hiding place this can be. Too bad they don’t know enough about staying alive down here to make it, but if they had good sense they wouldn’t be in trouble with the law in the first place.

  Course, you could say that I’m in trouble, too, but that’s only with the school folks, who think I ought to be cooped up in four walls and made to listen to teachers who can’t tell a king snake from a copperhead. I have to admit, though, that they have too much sense to come out here looking for me. The thing that bothers me is that I can read better than m
ost of them and have read stuff they never even heard of. Mama gets books from the library at the college where she works. She is a janitor, but she’s good friends with all the librarians and they let her check out what she wants. She has good judgment about what to bring me.

  Down here there are always illegal gillnetters and folks hunting deer, either to feed their families, which I never mind, or to sell, which I resent. Mostly I just observe them and let them be, unless they begin cutting trees or messing up the water and the woods. Once in a while a bunch of moonshiners will begin sampling their own stuff and get really troublesome. That’s when I drop a hint to my Mama, and she sends a tip to the feds or the state game control people. Usually they clear up the mess pretty quick. I think they’ve come to rely on those tips, though if they knew it came from a boy under fifteen they probably would ignore them.

  Don’t make a mistake. Mama sent me to school until I was about ten or eleven, could read anything I wanted and a lot of things the teachers never dreamed I could or would want to, and had enough math to do for the kind of life I intended to lead. Once I knew those things, I had an idea how to find out anything I needed, and the computer Mama bought and set up in our cabin helped me learn more.

  Funny thing. She got an on-line degree in history and another in English, but she went right on working as a janitor. She said the kind of in-fighting she saw between the professors and the departments made her sick. “If I wanted to go into politics I’d run for office,” she told me. “The idea of spending every day of my life playing politics with a bunch of academics who couldn’t find their way out of a bramble thicket is disgusting. I’d rather scrub toilets. Once you do that you have something to show for it, but in the university nobody has anything to show for all their finagling and back-stabbing.”

  I always thought she might be exaggerating things a little, but she’s a smart woman and sees things a lot of people miss. Which is why I chose a life in which politics has only a very remote place. When the time came I guessed I’d register and vote, but the rest of the time I intended to spend with critters I could trust either to try to kill me or let me alone. That can’t be said for politicians.

  Things went along mighty well for a long time. Mama retired from janitor work, but she missed the university, so she passed the ACE test and enrolled for a Master’s Degree in English, which surprised the heck out of her friends there. This meant she could still bring me books from the library, and she figured I could test out for a bachelor’s degree in history, probably in literature and English, and maybe even more, but I figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. I didn’t intend to look for any job in the “real world,” that was certain.

  So how did I think I’d earn money? You’ve got to be kidding! The bottomlands are full of valuable plants and critters. I caught snakes for the labs that make antidotes for their poison. I gathered rattan and grapevine and willow and cattail for people who did craft work. There were all kinds of medicinal plants that I harvested for the few old black ladies who still practiced herbal medicine and a growing number of white folks who have caught on to how effective it can be. Mama delivered my gleanings to my customers, though she promised she’d buy me a motor scooter when I got to be sixteen, so I could do my own deliveries. She never got used to those big sacks of mixed moccasins, copperheads, and rattlesnakes. I had to double-bag them and put those into a thick box or she wouldn’t handle them at all.

  When the Catletts built a fishing shack down close to Peshtigo Creek, I didn’t think much about it. People were always doing that sort of thing, coming down from time to time to camp and fish, then getting tired of it and letting the shack fall down. It wasn’t as if they owned the land—most of this belonged to the state. Mama and I owned our hundred acres because it had come down from her great-great-great-granddaddy, who got it in a grant from Mexico. The state tried to take it a couple of times, but Mama proved to be a lot smarter than they were. We still had the place and the old cabin, which we’d kept repaired (to the point of almost rebuilding it), and now we had it protected under the historical homestead program.

  That was why I never bothered about the Catletts’ shack or their weekends spent there—not until the wind shifted one day when I was running my trotlines along the creek, and a whiff of a nasty smell just about knocked me onto my heels. I’d read about meth labs, of course, because I kept up with newspapers and magazines, but that stink matched the descriptions I’d read. I slid up the creek, past the gator hole where a big old bull gator was sunning himself on a mud-bank, and several more were lurking under the water, only their eyeballs betraying their presence.

  They paid no attention to me; I was something they were used to. Besides that, I sometimes brought them dead critters I found in the woods or run over on one of the dirt tracks where kids drove their four-wheel drive pickups down to the mud-wallows they used. Once in a while a couple of the young gators would follow me for a while, as the path ran alongside the creek, seeming to hope that I had some treat for them.

  As I got closer to the shack, they gave up and slid deeper into the creek, and I went low and silent, for the Catletts were there in their lab, and the stink was terrible. Worse than that, they had been tearing up the woods around it. They’d cut down a big dogwood and two grancy-graybeard trees that I’d watched bloom in the spring since I was about eight. A trail of slimy stuff ran off toward the branch of the creek beside their shanty. Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be good for either fish or alligators.

  I found myself getting angry. People stupid enough to buy their muck were free to do it or not, but the critters and the fish and the gators had no choice. Whatever that gunk running down the slope might be, I knew it was nasty. Make no mistake—I killed game to feed my Mama and me, when things were tight, but every time I did that I thanked the dead animal for helping us survive. Sort of like the Indians used to, I guess. These folks were as nasty as their sewage or whatever that was polluting the creek. I figured I needed to do something to discourage them.

  I went home that evening and told Mama what I’d found. She had her nose in a book, as usual, but she came out of it in a hurry when she learned what the Catletts were doing. “We could turn ’em in,” she said. “But they’re a mean bunch, from what I hear, and they might burn us out...or worse.”

  I’d seen some things happen in the swamp country that made me sick to think of. There was that game warden who’d arrested a bunch of illegal gillnetters. They went to jail but got bailed out, and before you could get your breath, the warden’s house burned down with him and his wife in it. Then there was that girl who turned in the site of a still she stumbled across while on a fishing trip. What they did to her I try never to think about.

  I spent a lot of that night thinking instead of sleeping. Just before I finally drifted off I heard a distant bellow from the swamp—a big bull gator sounding off, I knew. And then it came to me, clear and clean and—appropriate. Smiling, I let myself sleep at last.

  That was on a Tuesday. I had most of the week to prepare, before the rest of that crew came down for their weekend in the country. I scoured the dirt roads and even went out to the highway and picked up every run-over critter I could find. I got those gators so spoiled they’d follow me along the path, and I baited them closer and closer to that shack. They got as near to being pets as I suppose a gator can come, though I never got too close or turned my back on them. By Friday night I had them ready, if things worked out like I hoped.

  Mama didn’t like for me to roam the swamp country at night, but in this case she didn’t argue when I laid out my plan to her. She knew town-people—no one better—and they were terrified of most of the critters in the woods. Which made me wonder why they risked their precious hides down here in the habitat of so many. Anyway, I was loaded with road-kill when I made my way down to the creek where my gators waited.

  And they were hungry! I dropped a squashed possum here and a stiff armadillo the
re, until I had the entire bunch trailing along the path behind me, the sound of their padding paws creepy amid the chirps and squawks and twitters of the night birds and tree frogs. They were well on their way, and I hoped everyone was asleep in that shanty, for I had to dump the rest of my bait inside its door.

  They must’ve felt mighty secure, so far out in the woods, for they didn’t even have anyone watching. I heard only sputters and snores as I eased the door open, after picking its lock (Mama didn’t know I had learned how to do that from one of the books she brought me). I felt the gators too close behind me for comfort, so I dumped the bait and jumped aside as far as I could as the reptiles shoved into the building with a grating of horny hides and began chomping into their treat.

  Hidden in a huckleberry thicket, I listened, as it was too dark to see anything much. First there were some grunts and groggy questions, then a match scritched and a streak of light came shooting through the cracks in the walls. Then there was a royal shindy. Screams and crackles and crashes were punctuated by the sounds of irritated gators, who evidently didn’t appreciate having their midnight snack interrupted.

  Then four shapes crashed through different parts of the walls, heading in four different directions. I almost laughed out loud, for I had watched them over the weeks, and none of them could find his way through the woods unless there was a clear-cut path to follow, preferably with hatchet marks on the trees along the way. They’d spend the night lost as graveyard ghosts, with whippoorwills and screech owls making the night tuneful with their weird calls. Before dawn every one of them would think he was in Hell.

  I heard a strange noise, sort of a smushing sound, and a flicker near the shack told me that the kerosene lamp must have been upset. Now those flimsy walls were unable to stand with man-sized holes in them, and they were falling in. The whole shebang was going to collapse and burn without my lifting a hand to make it happen.