Shiloh Season Read online

I give a little whistle.

  “You have any idea who might’a done this to my truck?”

  Judd Travers is uglier than a snake. Not face-ugly, exactly, but mean-ugly. He ever try being anything but mean, he might not look too bad. Eyes are all bloodshot, though, and his breath—whew! You put your nose down inside a beer bottle, that’s his smell.

  I shake my head.

  He looks at me hard. “You think of any boys who could’ve done it?”

  “Nobody I know.”

  “Well, you listen around, and if you find out who scratched my truck, you tell me, hear?”

  “I’ll listen,” I say, but I don’t promise nothing.

  Judd gets in his pickup and drives off, and it’s not till he’s out of sight that Shiloh comes on down. Don’t take a lot to prove that Judd Travers isn’t the most popular person in Tyler County.

  That man can scare you so bad that even if you haven’t done something, you almost wonder if you might. The kind of man you keep imagining all sorts of horrible things happening to, and then you feel guilty you enjoyed it. I’m asking myself if it’s such a good idea for David and me to go sneaking around Judd’s tonight.

  I walk on down to Doc’s. He’s got an office there in his house, but he don’t see patients on Saturdays unless it’s an emergency. His wife died ten years ago, and he tries to keep up the grass and flowers, just for her.

  Doc figures I owe him about ninety-nine dollars for fixing up Shiloh after he was tore up by the German shepherd. I get three dollars an hour and work three hours every Saturday. Worked two Saturdays so far, so I got nine more to go.

  “How’s the patient doing?” Doc says, stepping out on the porch when he sees me coming. He’s a heavy man, and he grunts some when he reaches down to pet my dog, check where he sewed him up. One of Doc’s friends is a veterinarian down in St. Marys, and Doc checked with him after Shiloh was hurt, made sure he was doing right.

  “Looks good, Shiloh,” he says. “You keep out of trouble, now.”

  Today Doc wants some bushes transplanted from one side of his yard to another where they’ll get more sun. He digs awhile, then I dig. Shiloh just lies on the grass in the shade, smiling at us, mouth open, and we laugh at the way he’s watching us work.

  “That dog sure has an easy life,” Doc Murphy says, stopping to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

  I’m wondering what kind of life he would have had if I’d turned him back over to Judd—if Shiloh would even be alive at all, the way Judd used to kick him and starve him every time he run off. Can’t help thinking of the three dogs Judd’s got left, all chained up, yelping and snarling at one another.

  Doc begins digging again, and I hold on to the bush so’s it doesn’t fall over while he works at getting the tip of the shovel down under the roots.

  “You suppose the rest of Judd’s dogs are ruined for good?” I ask. “I mean, once you chain a dog and he turns mean, is he going to be mean forever?”

  “That I don’t know, Marty,” Doc says. “Sometimes I figure there’s not all that much difference between a man and an animal. One has two legs, the other four—maybe that’s the sum of it. I suppose some dogs and some people are born with meanness in them—something in their bloodline, maybe. . . . ” He gives a final grunt, and the dirt ball lifts up. “ . . . But a lot fewer than folks believe, I suspect. My own guess is that a little kindness will fix almost anything wrong with man or beast, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  I lift the last forsythia bush up out of the ground and carry it over to the hole we dug for it on the other side of Doc’s driveway. We work together to set that bush straight. Doc is going to a symphony concert in Wheeling this evening, so I finish the bushes myself, packing in loose dirt in each of the holes, making sure the bush is standing up straight.

  Feel like an old man when I’m through, my back so sore. I head home at four, and Ma says I stink. Got to take a bath before David gets here, so I’m smelling sweet as a rose when David’s mom drives up to our house. Shiloh never barks at the Howards’ car—he’s always glad to see David.

  “You just have a bath or something?” David says, seeing my hair all slicked down.

  “Sweet as a rose,” I say, drawing out the “o,” and I stick my armpit in his face. “Smell.”

  He laughs and pushes me away.

  Ma comes out to talk with Mrs. Howard a few minutes, while David and I take turns on the bag swing we got hanging from our beech tree.

  David climbs up the maple close by and sits out on a limb. Then I take the gunnysack hanging by a rope from the beech tree and toss it up to him, high as I can throw. David catches the rope, wraps his legs around the sack stuffed with straw, then slides right off the branch, hanging onto that rope for dear life. Swing swoops down toward the ground and way up in the air on the other side.

  “Wheee!” yells David.

  I should be having a good time, but I keep thinkin’ about what David and me are going to do later.

  He don’t have any sisters or brothers, so he thinks Dara Lynn and Becky are cute. And they put on such a show of cuteness it almost makes your stomach sick.

  Becky’s got to sing the ABC song for him, only she always forgets what comes after the “L-M-N-O-P,” so she starts all over again. Then Dara Lynn’s got to get in the act, and after she shows David Howard all her scabs and bruises, she asks him jokes:

  “How do you keep a bull from charging?” she says, grinning.

  “I don’t know,” says David.

  “Take away his credit card!” Dara Lynn shrieks.

  She don’t even know what a credit card is.

  At supper, Ma’s got apple dumplings for dessert, and we pour milk over them while they’re still warm. David runs his finger around the bottom of his dish when he’s done to get every last bit.

  “What are you two boys planning to do this evening?” Ma asks as she clears the table.

  “Fool around outside,” I tell her.

  I don’t have to ask David Howard what he wants to do. David’s got it all worked out in his head like a detective story, I can tell. And soon as we close the screen, he turns to me and asks, “How long will it take to get to Judd Travers’s?”

  Five

  I figure when David Howard grows up, he’ll be an explorer, a detective, or a spy.

  Whenever there’s a game where you have to crawl under a bush or slide on your belly or hide in a tree, that’s what David wants to play. And because we have a lot more places to hide on our land than he does on his, that’s why David Howard likes to come to our house.

  Dad’s reading Becky a story and Dara Lynn’s helping Ma with the dishes. Only reason I got excused was I got a guest, and you can be sure Dara Lynn’ll see to it that I have to do ’em two nights in a row.

  “Takes about twenty, twenty-five minutes to walk to Judd’s from here,” I tell David.

  “Okay. We’ll need a canteen, a map, and a pair of binoculars,” says David, his voice low.

  “A map?” I say. “David, all we’re doing is crossing the bridge and walking along the road till we get to Judd’s.”

  “Not the way we’re going!” says David. “How are you going to spy on someone if they see you come walking right up the road?”

  So to please David Howard, I take the back of a used envelope and make a map of the bridge, the old Shiloh schoolhouse, and the road where Judd lives, plus the small private cemetery back in the trees behind someone’s house.

  David’s brought his own canteen and his ma’s field glasses, and I tell him if we don’t set off right soon, Dara Lynn’ll have all the dishes wiped and be begging to go with us.

  We don’t have to worry about Shiloh, though. Shiloh trots along beside us as we go down the driveway, but when we turn right instead of left, he pauses, not too sure, then lags ten feet behind us all the way to the bridge.

  We stop to look at the pothole in the road. Been there since last spring. Must be seven inches deep, and three feet around.

  “
Wow!” says David Howard. “Looks like a sinkhole, Marty! I’ll bet there’s a cave under there, and the roof’s falling in.”

  So of course we have to crawl down the bank and poke around in the weeds and bushes to see if there’s a hidden entrance to an unexplored cave that nobody knows about. Every so often you read of someone discovering a new cave. Maybe his foot drops down in it when he’s out hiking through a meadow, or his dog falls in and folks hear it whining. If we found a cave here under the road, with passages and waterfalls and stuff, we decide we’d name it the Howard-Preston Caverns.

  We waste a good half hour of daylight lookin’ for a cave that isn’t there, and then climb back up to cross the bridge. Shiloh won’t go, though. Makes this pitiful-sounding whine in his throat. He tucks his tail between his legs and slinks off toward our driveway again. It hurts me to see how scared he still is of Judd Travers. He won’t set foot on that bridge for all the rabbits in Tyler County.

  “I’ll be back, boy,” I tell him. If I could just make him understand.

  We set off down the road toward Judd’s. David stops and takes a drink of water from his canteen, but I can tell he’s not even thirsty. Just pretending he is, like we’re working so hard and all.

  We creep along through the bushes between the road and the creek, darting from tree to tree and waiting till the coast is clear before making a run for the next one. The coast is clear all up and down the road, of course—not a soul outside except an old woman sitting on her porch, and she don’t have her glasses on. Don’t even see us.

  It’s fun, though—all the spy talk.

  “Agent XRX, Agent XRX. Come in, XRX,” says David, holding one fist up to his mouth like a microphone.

  “Read you, QZT,” I say.

  “How close are we now?” asks David.

  “ ’Bout five houses more, I think. It’s a brown-and-white trailer.”

  Problem is the houses are all so far apart up here you can’t see Judd’s trailer even when it’s next one in line. Same as our house.

  “Let’s cut to the cemetery,” says David.

  We cross the road, go round behind a house, and creep through a lady’s backyard, backs bent while we run like soldiers dodging enemy fire, hills looming up on our left. We pass this little cemetery plot with a low iron fence around it. I mean, it’s only two feet high; you can step right over it. There’s a whole generation buried there, I guess, and all the names are Donaldson except one.

  “Wait!” says David Howard, grabbing my arm.

  I stop.

  “Which way is the wind blowing?” he says.

  “I don’t know.”

  David licks his finger and holds it up in the air. He’s still not sure, so he throws a handful of grass up and waits to see how it falls.

  “We’re going downwind!” he says, his eyes big, like we’re on a ship that’s sinking or something.

  I try to look worried, too. “What do we do now?” I ask. “The dogs might smell us coming.” There’s no quick way to go around and get to Judd’s from the other end, because we got hills on one side, Middle Island Creek on the other.

  “We’ll just have to be dead quiet,” says David. “You want to risk it, XRX?”

  “Roger,” I tell him.

  We get about fifty yards from Judd’s trailer and we’re down on our bellies, inching along through weeds two-feet high in the field right next to his yard. I’ll probably have to explain the grass stains on my T-shirt to Ma, and I sure shouldn’t have taken a bath, but it’s worth it.

  When we get close enough to Judd’s trailer we wriggle around toward the road till we can see Judd’s front door, and there he is, big as life, sitting out on the steps with a shotgun resting on his knees.

  David and I just grab at each other and swallow.

  Lucky for us, I guess, that Judd’s dogs are chained on the other side, can’t see us. They’re quiet tonight. I guess when you’re a dog, no matter how small your brain is or how full of meanness, you got sense enough to know that when a man’s sitting out on his steps with a shotgun across his knees, you don’t cause him any trouble.

  “You think he’s going hunting?” David whispers to me.

  “Don’t think so,” I whisper back.

  The scary thing is, Judd don’t look like he’s going anywhere. Not cleaning his gun either. Just sitting. And once in a while he spits. What’s he waiting for? The person who scratched his truck, maybe? Just watching for someone to come along and try it again?

  David Howard inches forward again, and I wish he wouldn’t. I make my way up beside him and pull him back.

  Then we realize Judd’s talkin’ to himself. Can’t make out a single word, just a low kind of mutter. Every so often he slaps a knee or shakes his head, then he’s quiet before he starts all over again. Not too hard to see he’s been drinking.

  It’s right about then he suddenly jerks to attention and raises his gun, and I know for a fact I shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be anywhere near this place. But Judd’s got his gun aimed at a tree in his front yard. At first I figure this shows just how drunk he is, mistaking a tree for a deer or something, but I raise my head in time to see two squirrels chasing each other around and around that tree trunk.

  Judd lifts his gun and aims.

  Bang!

  One squirrel goes skittering on up the tree half crazy, and the other falls straight down and goes floppin’ about the yard.

  I can’t watch. Put my head down on my arms and pray for that squirrel to die quick. But now all Judd’s dogs are going nuts, yelping and barking, and above it all comes Judd’s laugh.

  “Gotcha!” he yells, and I can hear the slap of his hand on his knee again. He don’t even stand up to go get the squirrel, or shoot it to put it out of its misery. I look up quick to see the squirrel still squirming, but then it lays still, only its tail twitching.

  How can he do that way? I’m asking myself. To watch a living thing die slow like that, shot for no good reason at all? Wasn’t as though Judd needed it for food—squirrel stew or something—because he don’t even get off the step. Just spits again out the side of his mouth.

  The other squirrel’s comin’ back now, probably to see what’s happened to his pal, and just as Judd raises his gun again, I yell, “No, don’t!” Can’t help myself.

  David pushes my head down. Judd jerks around.

  “Who’zat?” he yells, but his words sound slurred. “Who said that?”

  We hear him get up off the steps, and I think my heart’s going to pound right through the skin on my chest. I’m about as frightened as I ever been in my life, because David and me weren’t just walking down a country road where we’ve every right to be. We’re lyin’ belly down on Judd’s property, and Judd could put some lead in us quicker than he could spit—say we were trespassing and he thought we’d come to rob him or something.

  “Sound like Marty Preston to me,” says Judd, and from where I’m lying, my chin on the ground, eyes turned up about as high as I can get ’em, I see Judd looking every which way, trying to figure out where that voice came from. “What you doing over here?” he yells again. “Your dad won’t let me hunt on your land, so what you doing on mine?”

  I press the side of my head to the ground, my whole body as flat as it can get. All I can think of is Ma hearing that David and me were found with buckshot in our brains. This has got to be one of the stupidest things I ever did. I can hear Judd’s big old boots comin’ down the boards stretched across his yard.

  Should I say something? I wonder. Call out and tell him we were just go in’ by? And then I think how it will look, us just going by Judd’s place flat on our bellies. I swallow.

  The footsteps stop, don’t come any closer. I tip my head so I can look up with one eye, and I see that Judd’s so unsteady he’s only gone as far as the end of the trailer. Got one hand against it, holding himself up, the other one’s got the gun.

  “I catch you foolin’ around my truck, Marty Preston, I’ll blast you to kingdom
come!” he yells.

  Finally, after the longest two minutes in the world, Judd goes back to the steps of the trailer again and then he goes inside.

  David and I lie in the grass not saying a word—not breathing, hardly. Then slowly we inch backward out of those weeds the same way we came in, wondering all the while if Judd’s got his shotgun aimed out a window, just watching for the weeds to wiggle.

  When we’re out of sight at last behind a lilac bush, we make a run for the little cemetery with all the Donaldsons in it, and from there, we cut on back out to the road.

  We’re breathing too hard to talk, almost.

  “ . . . could of been us. . . . ”

  “Close as spit. . . . ”

  “ . . . squirrel hadn’t done anything. . . . ”

  “Shouldn’t have come. . . . ”

  “ . . . He knows it was you, Marty. . . . ”

  Both David and me feel sick inside. But there’s one big thought taking up the whole of my mind, now that I seen Judd shoot the squirrel: squirrel season don’t start till next month, so Judd’s a little early; duck season starts in October; deer season starts in November. . . . But dogs? Not a thing on the charts about dog season. With Judd drinking every evening like he does, I tell myself, and now suspecting me of scratching his truck, he’ll make his own rules. There could be a Shiloh season, and it could be any time at all.

  Six

  I don’t sleep so good that night and neither does David Howard. When David comes over to spend the night, Ma opens up our couch to make a double bed, but it’s got this bar down the middle inside the mattress, and every so often you hit it with your knee.

  Shiloh, though, he sure likes to sleep down at the bottom of that bed. When you wake up in the night but your foot’s still sleeping, you know you got a dog on it, that’s why.

  Both David and me wake early, and lie there talking while the house is still.

  “You think we should tell?” David asks me.

  “About the squirrel?” I say. He thinks that’s bad, he should know what I know about Judd Travers.

  He nods.