Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (20 page)

I stood up. “I’ll go get my bike,” I told him. “Go on, I’ll catch up with you.”

I went back to the house, hoping Mama hadn’t seen me talking to Wendell. She didn’t like for me to have anything to do with him because she said his family was trashy. They lived down a dirt road a little way up the valley from us, in an old house that looked about ready to fall down, with a couple of old cars up on blocks in the front yard. Everybody knew his daddy was a drunk.

Mama was back in the kitchen, though—I could hear her through the window, singing along with Johnny Ray on the radio—and I got my bicycle from behind the house and rode off before she could ask me where I was going and probably tell me not to.

I caught up with Wendell about a quarter of the way across Tobe Nelson’s pasture. That wasn’t hard to do, with that rusty old thing he had to ride. When I came even with him, I slowed down and we rode the rest of the way together.

It was a long way across the field, with no shade anywhere along the road. Really it wasn’t much more than a cow path, all bumpy and rutty and dusty, and I worked up a good sweat pedaling along in the sun. On the far side of the pasture, the ground turned downhill, sloping toward the creek, and we could ease off and coast the rest of the way. Now I could see a lot of cars and trucks parked all along the creek bank where the road ended.

At the bottom of the hill I stopped and got off and put the kick-stand down and stood for a minute looking around, while Wendell leaned his bike against a tree. A good many people, men and women both, were standing around in the shade of the willows and the big sycamores, talking and looking off across the creek in the direction of Moonshine Hollow.

Moonshine Hollow was a strange place. It was a little like what they call a box canyon out west, only not as big. I guess you could call it a ravine. Anyway it ran back into the side of the ridge for maybe half a mile or so and then ended in this big round hole of a place with high rock cliffs all around, and a couple of waterfalls when it was wet season.

I’d been up in the hollow a few times, like all the kids around there. It was kind of creepy and I didn’t much like it. The trees on top of the bluffs blocked out the sun so the light was dim and gloomy even on a sunny day. The ground was steep and rocky and it was hard to walk.

It wasn’t easy even getting there, most of the year. First you had to get across the creek, which ran strong and fast through this stretch, especially in the spring. It was only about thirty or forty feet across but you’d have had to be crazy to try to swim it when the water was high.

And that was just about the only way in there, unless you wanted to take the road up over the ridge and work your way down the bluffs. A few people had done that, or said they had.

In a dry summer, like now, it was no big deal because you could just walk across without even getting your feet wet. Except that right now Deputy Pritchard was standing in the middle of the dry creek bed and not letting anyone cross.

“Sheriff’s orders,” he was saying as I moved up to where I could see. “Nobody goes in there till he comes back.”

There was a little stir as somebody came pushing through the crowd. Beside me, Wendell said softly, “Uh oh,” and a second later I saw why.

Wendell’s daddy was tall and lean, with black hair and dark skin—he beat a man up pretty bad once, I heard, for asking him if he was part Indian—and mean-looking eyes. He stopped on the edge of the creek bank and stared at Deputy Pritchard. “Sheriff’s orders, huh?” he said. “Who’s he think he is?”

Deputy Pritchard looked back at him. “Thinks he’s the sheriff, I expect,” he said. “Like he did the last couple of times he locked you up.”

Everything got quiet for a minute. Then, farther down the bank, Tobe Nelson spoke up. “What’s he doing,” he said, “asking the skeleton to vote for him?”

He was a fat bald-headed man with a high voice like a woman, always grinning and laughing and making jokes. Everybody laughed now, even Wendell’s daddy, and things felt easier. I heard Wendell let his breath out.

Somebody said, “There they are now.”

Sheriff Cowan was coming through the trees on the far side of the creek, pushing limbs and brush out of his way. There was somebody behind him and at first I couldn’t see who it was, but then I said, “Hey, it’s Mr. Donovan!”

“Well,
sure.
” Wendell said, like I’d said something dumb. “He was the one who
found
it.”

Mr. Donovan taught science at the junior high school in town. Everybody liked him even though his tests were pretty hard. He was big and husky like a football player and the girls all talked about how handsome he was. The boys looked up to him because he’d been in the Marines and won the Silver Star on Okinawa. I guess half the men around there had been in the service during the war—that was what we still called it, “the war,” even though the fighting in Korea had been going on for almost a year now—but he was the only one I knew who had a medal.

I always enjoyed his class because he made it interesting, showing us things like rocks and plants and even live animals. Sometimes he let me help when he did experiments. When he saw I liked science, he helped me pick out some books in the school library. He offered to loan me some science fiction magazines he had, but I had to tell him no because there would have been big trouble if Daddy had caught me reading them.

Sheriff Cowan climbed down the far bank of the creek and walked over to stand next to Deputy Pritchard. His face was red and sweaty and his khaki uniform was all wrinkled and dusty. He looked up and down the line of people standing on the creek bank. “I don’t know what you all heard,” he said, “and I don’t know what you thought you were going to see, but you’re not going to see anything here today.”

A couple of people started to speak and he raised his hand. “No, just listen. I’ve examined the site, and it’s obvious the remains are too old to come under my jurisdiction.” He tilted his head at Mr. Donovan, who had come up beside him. “Mr. Donovan, here, thinks the bones might be thousands of years old. Even I don’t go back that far.”

After the laughter stopped he said, “He says this could be an important discovery. So he’s going to get in touch with some people he knows at the university, and have them come take a look. Meanwhile, since the site is on county land—”

“Is not,” Wendell’s daddy said in a loud voice. “That’s our land, on that side of the creek. My family’s. Always has been.”

“No, it isn’t,” Sheriff Cowan said. “It
used
to be your family’s land, but the taxes weren’t paid and finally the county took over the property. And nobody ever wanted to buy it.”

“I guess not,” Tobe Nelson said. “Just a lot of rocks and brush, not even any decent timber.”

“I don’t care,” Wendell’s daddy said. “It was ours and they taken it. It ain’t right.”

“That’s so,” Sheriff Cowan said. “It’s not right that you managed to throw away everything your daddy worked so hard for, while your brother was off getting killed for his country. Just like it’s not right that your own family have to do without because you’d rather stay higher than a Georgia pine than do an honest day’s work. And now, Floyd Haney, you just shut up while I talk.”

Wendell’s daddy looked madder than ever but he shut up. “All right, then,” Sheriff Cowan said, “as I was saying, since it’s county property, I’m closing it to the public till further notice. Tobe, I want you to lock that gate up at the main road, and don’t let anybody cross your land to come down here without checking with me first. Or with Mr. Donovan.”

A man said, “You mean we can’t even go look?”

“Yep,” the sheriff said. “You hard of hearing?”

Mr. Donovan spoke up. “Actually there’s not much to see. Just a hand and a little bit of the wrist, sticking out from under a pile of rocks and dirt, and even that’s partly buried. We’re just assuming that there’s a whole skeleton under there somewhere.”

“Not that any of you could find that cave,” Sheriff Cowan said,

“even if I let you try. I’d have walked right past it if he hadn’t been there to show me.”

He started waving his hands, then, at the crowd, like somebody shooing a flock of chickens. “Go on, now. Everybody go home or back to the pool hall or something. Nothing to see down here.”

People started moving, heading toward their cars, talking among themselves and glancing back in the direction of Moonshine Hollow. Wendell’s daddy was walking our way and Wendell sort of scooched down behind me, but he went right past us and climbed into his old pickup truck and drove away, throwing gravel and dirt as he went up the hill. When he was gone, we went over and got our bikes, without speaking or looking at each other. There was a lot I wanted to talk about but I could tell Wendell wasn’t in the mood.

“Lot of foolishness,” Daddy said that evening over supper when I told him the story. “Going to have a bunch of damn fool scientists, now, poking around and spouting off a bunch of crap.”

Daddy didn’t like scientists because they believed in evolution. He used to ask me if Mr. Donovan was teaching evolution at the school. He said he could get him fired if he was.

He said, “I’m not surprised, though. There’s a good many caves and holes up in that hollow. That’s why they call it Moonshine Hollow, you know, the bootleggers used to hide their whiskey there during Prohibition. Could be some bootlegger’s bones,” he said, “that hid in there running from the law. Or maybe a runaway nigger back in slave times. Probably not even an Indian at all.”

“Mr. Donovan says the bones are a lot older than that,” I said, and Mama gave me a warning look. She didn’t like for me to argue with Daddy about anything. She said it wasn’t my place.

Daddy said, “Oh, that’s a crock. Damn scientists know everything, to hear them tell it. I heard one on the radio telling how far it is to the moon.” He snorted. “Guess he’d been there and measured it off.”

Mama said, “Who wants pie?”

Later on Mr. Donovan told me how he happened to find the skeleton.

He was hiking up in the hollow, looking for things he might be able to use in class next year. He was working his way along the foot of a bluff, where there were a lot of great big boulders that had fallen down from above, when he saw a snake of a kind he didn’t recognize. Before he could get a good look, it slipped in behind a boulder that rested against the rock of the bluff.

So Mr. Donovan went up to the boulder, and after walking around it and pushing aside some brush, he found a gap between it and the bluff. He got out his flashlight from his pack and shone it into the hole, still looking for the snake, and saw what looked like a dark opening in the face of the rock. Without stopping to think about it, he squeezed himself through the gap to have a closer look.

“One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done,” he told me. “You never,
never
go into a place like that alone. Don’t tell the school board, Raymond, but I’m a real idiot sometimes.”