AMayhar - The Conjure Read online

  Choa felt a sort of thud in his belly. Lena knew, and she would never tell anyone what it was she knew. She was protecting her old friend, and he had a sick feeling he knew where that timber man had gone.

  "There's no way anybody could prove anything, though, is there?” he asked her. “It's been too many years, and no body ever was found. Old King, he hurts nobody, never comes out of the creek bottoms, and he helps when he can."

  "And we'll keep it that way,” she said. “Nobody knows a thing, now do they? Not even me, though I visioned something, once, when I'd drunk too much elderberry wine. Nobody pays attention to an old woman in the woods—or to an old Injun in the swamp—we both know that."

  He felt relieved. That was Gospel truth. You'd think those town boys who sometimes tramped through the swamp and bottomlands, looking for this and that, knew what they were doing, but they didn't. And they had no idea there were people who did. No, King Deport was in no danger, but he was going to be almighty pissed off at what came next.

  * * * *

  If Choa had only known it, King was already pissed off. He'd trudged, overused body protesting, along the creek banks to Irene Follett's back pasture. The four miles seemed like forty before he came in sight of her gray cypress house and its huddle of out-buildings.

  He scouted, as always, before venturing to call, and it was a very good thing he did. When he worked around through the woods-tangle of huckleberry bushes, pine trees, and sawvines north of her house he could see three state patrol cars pulled up around her half-circle driveway.

  Damn lawmen! He'd heard the news about that body early in the morning, but somehow he never thought about them going along this road to ask questions. Didn't the idiots know that you didn't have to use automobiles to do everything? And that if you walked or used a boat, a road was no use to you at all?

  He sank into a clump of bushes and watched; after a long while, six men came out onto Irene's porch, their wide-brimmed hats in their hands, and headed for their cars. If those idiots thought Irene Follett had anything to do with drugs they ought to talk to the sheriff. She'd scotched one drug dealer who'd killed a woman down by the river and then come after her. She wasn't about to have anything to do with helping them.

  Only when the last sound of an engine had died away down the road toward the river did King rise from his covert and make his way to the back stoop of the old farmhouse. “Irene!” he called softly. “You there?"

  There came a soft step along the wide central hallway, and her shadowy figure appeared behind the screen door. “King? Sure. Come on in. I've just had company, as if you didn't know."

  She pushed the screen open, and he sidled through, feeling, as usual, uncomfortable within such solid walls and beneath such an impervious tin roof.

  "Come into the kitchen,” she said. “I've got coffee on the boil. You might as well eat supper with me—I have green salad and cold pork roast and a peach pie."

  King felt saliva fill his mouth. If it wasn't for those two women, he'd never get real cooked food, he knew. Lena gave him oatmeal cookies, but Irene reallyfed him.

  In ten minutes, he was stoking his boiler with her supper. Between bites, he asked, “What did them state fellows want?"

  "It seems that a body has washed down the river, and they think it came from someplace in the bottoms below me. The head was bashed in, so of course they think it has something to do with drugs. They'd think the Second Coming had something to do with drugs, and we both know it. Maybe so, but there are other things people kill each other over."

  "This time it's drugs,” King told her. “I happen to know. A friend of ours saw the whole thing. He's the one sent the bodies downriver. The big fellow in the boat whacked two men over the head with an oar and hid ‘em under a cutbank."

  "So Possum was out and around, was he?” she asked. She poured him more coffee and sipped her own. “Nothing much goes on down there that he doesn't know about."

  "Hell, he knew when that feller come in your house the night after you found the dead woman at the river. He was ready to dive in and help when you blew the bastard away. Then he figured everything was all right, so he just crep’ back into the woods and headed home again."

  Irene nodded slowly. “That doesn't surprise me. We don't really know each other, but both of us keep track, in our own ways. There are not enough of us down here—we can't spare a single one.

  "It makes me feel better, somehow, to know he's keeping an eye on me. I'll do the same for him, as far as I can. If I hear anything that might affect him—or you—I'll get the word to Lena McCarver. She'll let you know. I can hear that shotgun of hers clear up here, when the wind's right."

  They smiled at each other, reading thoughts better than words. People who lived almost entirely alone became good at understanding unspoken signals.

  King knew they both hated the thought of lawmen poking around in the river bottoms, but even worse was the idea of drug dealers doing the same while looking for their stash of poison. The law might sometimes do unjust and unforgivable things to those they considered powerless, but dealers would kill you as quick as a wink and never think about it again. They were like alligator gar—all saw teeth and bite.

  "You take care, Irene,” King said. “Those bastards are dangerous critters—both kinds are, in fact. They got no idea there's anythin’ in the world but their own business, and folks like that do things without thinkin'. Lawmen are so set on gettin’ the bad guys that sometimes they turn into bad guys their ownselves and run all over innocent folks who get in their way."

  Irene gave a ladylike snicker. “Ransome Cole is the exception. He's too lazy to pull up his own socks, as he proved both times I called him down here. I suppose with lawmen you either get the overly enthusiastic or the sluggardly."

  King thought a minute. He'd never had much to do with the sheriff, thanks be to God, but he knew all the gossip. “Seems like he stays too busy keeping himself neat and clean and chasin’ women to do much else.

  "Might not be a bad thing, either. We might have him moochin’ around down here more than we do, which would be almighty uncomfortable. Sheriffs best stay in their offices, where they belong."

  Irene looked him in the eye and grinned. Did she suspect his secret? Surely not! Nobody had known where that timber man was going when he set out, and nobody had even thought to look around King's territory when he never came back to his employers and family.

  Still, the thought made him uncomfortable enough to cut his visit short. “I need some stuff, when you go to town, Irene,” he told her, getting out his tally stick. She took down the items as he checked off the notches on the stick, and as soon as he could manage King Deport took off for home.

  He went back a different route, wondering all the while if the state men intended to search the woods and the bottomlands. He knew they'd never tackle Possum Choa's huge swamp, but they could make themselves mighty unwelcome everywhere else.

  As he moved quietly along a ridge, watching his feet to keep from slipping in the mud, he heard a distant call and a gunshot. Someone had found something, that was sure. Sounded as if it was downstream from the swamp, and he hoped it was nothing that would bring more intruders in. Particularly, he hoped it would bring no Dealers. Those sons of bitches were pure poison.

  CHAPTER VI. The Deputy

  Choa, too, had heard the gunshot, for his keen ears followed the noisy progress of those who searched along the creeks. Anything they found would have nothing to do with either bodies or drugs, for he had covered the ground himself.

  They seemed to have located the dead gar he'd seen beside the deep hole above Croaker Bend, he thought. It sounded like just about the right distance. Did some poor sapsucker think that long and stinking shape was another body?

  True, it was just over six feet long, but surely even one of the feds or a deputy could see the loose scales, hard as arrowheads, around it. Besides, it stunk like fish, not like man-flesh. There was a powerful difference, as he had found over
the years.

  He waded out of the edge of the swamp, pulling behind him a gunny-sack filled with mussels and cat-tail roots. He had a hankering for a mess of stew like his grandma made when he was a boy, and he figured to get the makings while he monitored the progress of the lawmen.

  He already had a wire cage full of bullfrogs, which he had gigged before sunup, waiting in the shade of the pier, and he hauled that up the slope to his cabin. While his cookfire burned down to good coals, he skinned the frog-legs and cut them into chunks, peeled the cat-tail roots, and shelled out the mussels. All went into the pot over the coals, along with water from his spring and onions from hanging bunches harvested from his garden.

  Then, leaving everything to simmer along together and mix up flavors, he went out onto his porch again and cocked his hickory splint chair against the front wall. The sun was going down again behind the western trees, and the shadow of the house stretched deeper and deeper toward the murky and weed-grown water.

  A hint of cool breathed from the east, and beyond the farther line of button willows the smallest frogs began to shrill. A bull gator bellowed, and something splashed frantically along the river-ward path, which was still partially under water, heading toward Choa's clearing.

  A mud-drabbled figure came into view, his hat drooping with damp, his boots slimed with green, and his gun obviously having been dropped into the muck.

  As Choa watched, he glanced up and spotted the cabin. “Heyyyyy!” he yelled, breaking into a faster trot. “Hey, you in the cabin! I'm lost! I need help!"

  That went without saying, Choa thought, but he got up and moved stiffly down his plank steps to meet the bedraggled deputy. Not one he had seen before, he thought.

  The man panted to a halt and looked about him. His eyes widened. “You live way out here?” he asked, sounding stunned. “There's no road!"

  He was staring around wildly, looking for some access to the place by land, and Choa chuckled inwardly. Water leaves no track, and a careful man who wants no visitors and no truck with the outside world likes that route best.

  "Don't need a road. Did I have a road, I'd need a car, and did I have a car, I'd have to buy gasoline and such for it. That'd take money, which I don't have and don't want. “No, roads brings trouble, so I just live here quiet and go about my business without any hassle,” he said. “Name's Choa, by the way. Folks calls me Possum Choa."

  A muddy hand reached for his own. “I'm Larry Needham. I was helping out the feds, searching, but I got lost. You live out here all by yourself?” He was still searching the clearing and the porch and the weedy garden patch for some sign of humanity.

  "Since my wife died, I been by myself. Me'n the bullfrogs and that old dog under the house, if he's still alive. He's got so lazy he don't even wag his tail no more.

  "You come in and get a drink of water and some stew. Got a pot of mussel stew just like my Grandma used to make, about ready right now. It's near to dark, and you can't go wanderin’ around. Likely to get snakebit."

  He hid his amusement as Needham washed himself in the water at the end of the pier, tried to clean his boots a bit, and laid his gun aside. They sat together on the edge of the porch, as Choa's table had fallen flat years before and he'd never seen a need to replace it.

  The pot of stew sat on a couple of bricks between them, and they shoveled the food into chipped enamel saucepans, using half a hollow gourd for a dipper. Because he had company, Choa had put out his two tin spoons.

  The deputy seemed not to mind the crude utensils as he relished the stew and broke up cold cornpone into the gravy. As he licked the last drops from the spoon, he looked up at Choa and said, “I never tasted anything so good in all my life. What's in it? My wife would love to have the recipe."

  Choa's grin was invisible, for the sun was now long down and it was too dark for his coppery face to reveal anything. “Well,” he began, “you have to go out into the swamp and pull up about a dozen cat-tails and cut off the roots. Then you finds a good shallow spot of mud, where you can wade around and feel for mussels with yore feet, and you picks up twenty or so of them.

  "Course, you got to gig five or six really big bull frogs, too, and put their hind legs in. Onions, of course. Then you lets everything kind of gaum up together over hot coals until it smells just right, and all the meats is tender."

  "You mean—that's what I just ate?” Needham gasped. “But—but it's delicious. And you didn't buy anything that went into your supper?"

  "Well, I traded catfish for grinding my corn into cornmeal to make cornpone. I take my boat out along the creek to some farms, now and again, to get things I like but can't get or grow down here. But mainly it's just what the swamp gives me.

  "That's the best kind of eatin', I guarantee. If you've never had gator tail—but I reckon you ain't, since it's illegal to kill ‘em now. Used to be a good fry of tail was hard to beat."

  He had caught himself just in time—what nobody knew didn't hurt anybody; when a gator got uppity and dangerous, tearing up nets or robbing set hooks, he was likely to find himself furnishing Choa with a good meal or three.

  As if echoing his thought, a big bull gator off in the swamp gave a bellow, followed by a mighty splash. Fireflies were twinkling among the weeds and off over the water, and all the frogs had joined their voices in their nightly chorus.

  "Peaceful out here,” Needham said and yawned. “I don't guess you got room for me to sleep the night...?"

  "If you don't mind the floor, I got some quilts to make a pallet. The bed we used all those years finally busted, so I just roll out a quilt wherever I happen to get took sleepy,” Choa replied.

  From the snores that punctuated the night, Larry Needham had no problem with a pallet on the floor. Choa finally got up and took his out onto the porch, where the mosquitos were no worse than they were inside and it was a lot quieter.

  Before the stars wheeled into their wee hours position, he heard, very faintly, a human voice raised in a long call. Looking for his companion, he had no doubt. He smiled and turned over. Morning would do. No use to spoil the lawmen—might make ‘em think they could come and go as they pleased in his swamp.

  He woke his guest just after daylight. “You want to get out before folks worry about you?” he asked. “I ‘spect we better get us a bit of cold stew and cornpone and be on our way."

  Groaning and muttering, Needham rose and staggered down to the pier to wash. When he returned by way of the privy, he was rather pale. “You got asnake in that privy!” he said.

  Choa nodded. “Old king snake. I calls him Robby. He keeps the moccasins and copperheads out. I forgot to warn you—he's almighty big, and he looks scary, but he won't hurt you none."

  "Well if I hadn't been already sitting down over a hole, he'd have harmed my britches, I can tell you that,” the deputy replied, chewing on cornpone and taking a swig of spring water. “You know, that Spanish moss you keep in there is even better than toilet paper. I'd never have believed it."

  "Folks used that before they was such a thing,” Choa said. He nodded toward the pier and his boat. “We better get movin', now. Folks is going to be worried about you.” What he didn't say was that he wanted Needham out of his place before anybody else stumbled onto his homesite. It was pretty certain the deputy would never find his way back, for he had no idea on earth how he got there in the first place.

  The boat rode low with two in it, but Needham obeyed orders and sat still in the bow while Choa paddled from the stern, his strokes silent, his leaf shaped paddle never hitting the boat. Possum could sneak up on an alligator or a catfish, when he wanted to, for he moved as quietly through the water as either of the creatures could do.

  "What you fellows lookin’ for, anyway?” he asked, as he maneuvered the small craft around a choked bend. “I heard gunshots, in the evenin’ before you got to my place."

  "You didn't hear it on the radio?” the deputy asked.

  "Got no radio. No electric. Batteries costs money, and I got n
one of that, either."

  "A body came down the river, two days ago, now. Pretty badly decomposed, but somehow it had fallen onto a log, and the flood must have flushed it out of the woods along the river or one of the creeks that empty into it. The man was a known drug runner, so the feds figured there had to be drugs someplace. His head was all bashed in."

  Choa nodded thoughtfully. “Sometimes I hear things from the folks I trades with. They mention drugs a lot. Seems to be a big problem in the towns, now. What might drugs look like?"

  The question was quite sincere. He'd never seen anything druggier than a bottle of aspirin that King had given him, once, after he'd been snakebit.

  "Some is white powder. Some can be capsules ... different kinds and colors. Marijuana is like dried herbs, I guess you'd say. This is probably cocaine, and that is usually either a powder or hard chunks.