The Americans Are Coming (6 page)

Dryfly thought of the rifle, the flashlight and the two of them gunning down a panther. Dryfly wasn’t sure what a panther was, but he reckoned it was a throaty creature, by the sounds that came from it every night. He thought of the C chord and himself being able to play every song ever sung. He thought of the adventure and the stories that they’d tell everyone.

He thought of being Shadrack Nash’s friend; of being closer to Shad than George Hanley or Max Kaston were.

“I’ll come over after supper,” said Dryfly. “Wanna come in and have some supper with us?”

“What’re ya havin’?”

“Salmon.”

“No thanks. Never cared much for salmon.”

Shad left thinking that he wouldn’t take a million dollars for eating Shirley Ramsey’s cooking.

*

Sneaking the rifle and the flashlight out was almost too easy for any kind of interesting adventure. Bob Nash had gone fishing and Shadrack’s mother was sewing in the kitchen. The rifle stood behind a chair in the living room. Shad hid the flashlight under his belt. To get the rifle, all Shad had to do was pick it up and go with it.

Outside, Shad gave Dryfly the flashlight. They reckoned they had an hour before it would be dark enough to use it.

The trail that led to Todder Brook country was an old, neglected trucking road, originally used for hauling out pulp, logs and boxwood, but it was evident that the road hadn’t been used for years. The tire ruts were still there, but blueberry bushes and even the odd alder bush flourished in the center. Shadrack walked in one rut and Dryfly in the other. Neither boy felt like talking. Both boys were scared. Neither would admit it. Shad cocked the rifle the moment they entered the forest.

There was the odd bird singing and insect buzzing, the setting sun sat like a golden bonnet on the tops of the taller trees.

“How much further we goin’?” asked Dryfly after a while. “I don’t know. Maybe a mile. I don’t know.”

“Seems to me we’ve come a long way already. Do you think it’s that far away?”

“I don’t know.”

They continued to walk until they heard the rushing sounds of Todder Brook. Here, they noticed that the ground was
speckled with numerous hoof prints – some deer and some bigger prints they hoped were those of moose.

“I don’t smell anythin’,” commented Dryfly, staring at the hoof prints.

“What odds if ya smell anything?” asked Shad. “I doubt if a human could smell a panther, anyway, unless he had his nose right up against ’im.”

“Mom told me that the devil’s s’pose to smell like shit.”

“How’s she know that?”

“Don’t know. That’s what she told me.”

“That’s foolish,” said Shadrack, but he sniffed the air anyway.

Dryfly noticed that the sun had left the treetops and the twilight had replaced it. The anticipation of the approaching night and the inevitable darkness of the forest was not what Dryfly considered to be a good time.

“I think we should go home, Shad. I have to cross the footbridge tonight. It’s tricky in the dark.”

“You kin have the flashlight.”

Dryfly sighed.

Shadrack and Dryfly found a big pine tree and after eyeing it to make sure there were no cougars in its midst, they sat close together with their backs against its trunk. They could not be attacked from behind.

Time ticked on and darkness fell.

There in the night, every sound – the snapping of a twig, the hooting of an owl, a breeze whispering in the boughs above them – quickened their imaginative young hearts. Every shadow, every form, seemed a potential threat, and sometimes what they knew was only a tree or shrub seemed to actually move. Dryfly checked out his surroundings with the flashlight about every ten seconds. Shadrack didn’t complain.

“What’s that?”

“Where?”

“There!”

“I don’t see anything.”

“There. I heard a thump.”

“Where?”

“Listen!”

Dryfly couldn’t hear anything, except his heart beating, but he wasn’t sure. There might have been something. He might have missed something . . . he wasn’t sure. “I think we should go home,” he whispered.

“Why?”

“It’s gettin’ awful late.”

“Shh!”

“Mom’ll kill me.”

“Wait a few more minutes.”

Another deep sigh escaped from Dryfly.

A bird sang, its song piercing the silence, crisp and clear. Dryfly could not identify it – he hadn’t heard it before. “Indians,” he thought.

Palidin had read a book about cowboys and Indians in which the Indians had used the songs of birds as a form of communication. Dryfly remembered Palidin’s reference to the tale.

“I hope they’re dead Indians,” he thought.

The bird sang again and somehow sounded mournful and forsaken. “No,” thought Dryfly, “I hope they are alive.”

A Gander-bound plane rumbled far up amidst the stars, its flicker somehow reassuring as it crossed the Dipper.

A mosquito hummed by his ear. The bird sang once more.

“What bird is that?” whispered Dryfly.

“What bird?”

“That one.”

“Don’t hear it.”

A few minutes passed and Shad decided he’d had enough. “Let’s go,” he whispered. The words “let’s go” came like poetry to Dryfly’s ears.

They followed the flashlight beam out on the trail, their feet thumping the ground and swishing the bushes as they hurried along.

Dryfly counted to himself, “One less step, two less, three, four, five, six . . .”

When a rabbit has lost the chase and finds himself cornered by a hungry fox, a strange phenomenon occurs. The rabbit gives up, goes into a trance-like state, a fear-induced state of
paralysis, and sometimes even dies, robbing the fox of the thrill of the kill.

When Shadrack and Dryfly heard the honk from no more than a hundred yards off to their right, they stopped in a trance just short of death. The flashlight dropped from Dryfly’s hand to the ground and went out at his feet. Darkness reigned supreme.

Thump, thump, thump, went a heartbeat.

Dryfly wasn’t sure if it was his own heart or Shadrack’s. Shadrack wasn’t sure either.

BEEP-BARMP-BARMP! went the noise in the forest. The brief silence that followed was disrupted by a fart. Both boys knew that it had been Dryfly’s release. For a moment it was impossible to say if, or if not, they were smelling the devil.

Shadrack gripped the .303 so tight that he might have been attempting to leave finger dents in the wood.

“What do we do now?” asked Dryfly in a tiny voice that seemed not to be his own.

Shadrack didn’t know. He couldn’t think. To run seemed to be the logical move, but in his confusion he prayed instead, silently. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep . . .”

Thump, thump, thump, went a heartbeat Dryfly identified as his own. “Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou amongst women . . .”

BARMP! BARMP-BARMP, BEEP-BEEP! went the noise that sounded like a sick car horn, an elephant, perhaps the scream of an eastern cougar, or all three.

“Got the gun, Shad?” asked Dryfly, his voice still very tiny in the great dark forest.

“Right here!” said Shadrack. “Want it?”

“You know how to use it?”

“Just pull the trigger, I think.”

BARMP, TWEEP, BLEEP!

“You scared?”

“What’d you say?”

“You scared?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

BARMP-BARMP HONK! BEEP-BEEP, BARMP-BARMP! As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they were able to make out the trail before them – a navy line in a black-forested field, a mere reflection of the azure. Dew drops imprisoned the azure.

“The noise is coming from down by the brook,” whispered Shadrack.

“Fire the gun! You might scare it off, if it’s a cougar.” Dryfly whispered back, spying for the first time since he dropped it, the flashlight. He knelt and picked it up. He pushed the button. The bulb was blown.

“Won’t it work?” asked Shad, musing over Dryfly’s suggestion to shoot the gun.

“The bulb’s blowed,” said Dryfly.

“Do you think a shot would do it?”

BARMP-BARMP! BEEP-BEEP! BARMP! continued the noise in the forest.

“It can’t hurt!” said Dryfly.

Shad pointed the rifle at the sky. “I hope it’s a cougar! I hope it’s a cougar, I hope it’s a cougar . . .” he chanted to himself. “I hope it runs away when I shoot, runs when I shoot, runs when I shoot . . .” He could have been memorizing a poem. “Oh God, make it run. I’ll be good and go to church and everything,” he prayed.

BARMP-BARMP-BARMP! BAR-AR-AR-ARMP!

POW! went the rifle. Silence and the smell of gunsmoke.

*

Lindon Tucker never installed electricity in his house, but he had a battery radio. Lindon Tucker lived with his mother and an old tomcat called Cat. When Lindon called Cat in at night, he called, “Kitty, kitty, kitty.”

“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” called Lindon.

“Meow,” went Cat and zipped through the kitchen door into the dimly lit room, meowed as it scanned the dark corners for mice, then jumped onto the cot behind the kitchen range.

Lindon closed the door and went back to his rocking chair.

Everyone in Brennen Siding figured that Lindon kept his lamps turned low to save on kerosene. He may have kept the volume of his battery radio equally as low to save on batteries. Lindon Tucker wasted nothing. When he shopped at Bernie Hanley’s store, Lindon saved every inch of twine from the parcels; he also saved the brown paper. He saved the aluminum foil from the inside of tobacco packages and the remains of used wooden matches.

Lindon Tucker picked his teeth with the remains of used wooden matches.

Lindon Tucker’s mother sat with her ear not more than six inches from the radio speaker.

From the CKMR station in Newcastle, Brother Duffy was busily condemning sinners. CKMR, the community voice of the Miramichi.

Hayshaker’s Hoedown
at 7:00 p.m. News, sports and weather followed by the marine weather forecast with its Brown’s, LeHavres and Fundy Coasts, came on at 7:30. The exotic names mentioned in the marine forecast, the sound effects – ships’ bells and fog horns – were soothing, like poetry, to Lindon. At 8:30 some heathen Catholic thing came on, which Lindon always turned off. He’d turn the radio back on at 9:00, set the dial at 550 and listen to the
Saturday Night Jamboree
on CFNB.

“The jamboree was better than usual tonight,” thought Lindon. “Freddy McKenna, Freddy McKenna, that blind lad, Freddy McKenna was on it tonight. They claim he plays his giddar turned up on his lap.”

At 10:00 p.m., Lindon had to oblige his mother and shift the dial back to CKMR for a Bible-thumping half hour of Oral Roberts.

Lindon didn’t mind the preaching. At least it kept his mother from complaining for a half hour.

Clara, Lindon’s mother, was eighty years old and hadn’t been sick for forty years. The gift of health didn’t keep her from complaining, however. Lindon was subjected to her complaining day in and day out, her voice whining and whimpering even when she was talking about it being a nice day.

“Bless us and save us,” she whined. “Yes, yes, Lord. Dear Jesus!”

When Oral Roberts said “Hallelujah!” for the last time and went off the air, Clara leaned back in her chair and squinted her eyes to see Lindon. Her eyesight was good, but the lamp was turned down to a mere glow.

“My toe’s botherin’ me, Lindon. You think a person could git cancer in a toe? Some claim ya kin, some claim ya can’t. You kin git gangrene in yer toe. Old Billy Todder died of gangrene in the toe. I’ve heard of people dying of cancer of the bowels and the stomach, but I don’t know about the toe. I don’t know about gangrene of the stomach either. Do you think a corn could turn to cancer, Lindon?”

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cancer, yeah,” said Lindon, reaching for the dial.

Lindon stopped turning the dial when he heard the rich and mellow voice of Doc Williams talking about a picture Bible. “Just write ‘Picture Bible,’ WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia,” Doc was saying. “And now I’d like to do y’all a song I very much enjoy and I hope y’all at home will enjoy too.”

The guitar was strummed. It sounded deep and rich. Doc Williams was the best guitar player in the world –

Hannah! Hannah!
Hannah won’t you open the door.
Hannah, Hannah, Hannah,
Won’t you change you manna’
This is old Doc Williams,
Don’t you love me no more?

– and Lindon thought that Doc Williams was the best singer in the world, too . . . with the exception of, maybe, Lee Moore.

When Doc Williams ended his show by picking “Wildwood Flower” and had gone the way of Brother Duffy and Oral Roberts, Lindon stood, yawned and headed for the door. He needed to have a leak before going to bed.

“Where ya goin’?” asked Clara.

“To see a man about a horse,” said Lindon.

The night was moonless, the deep blue sky spangled with a million stars, the Milky Way straight up. The air was warm and scented with lilacs and grass. The songs of a million night creatures (peepers, Lindon called them) betrayed the presence of a swamp. The air buzzed and hummed with midges, black-flies and mosquitoes. A bird sang . . . like a robin . . . but not a robin; a swamp robin, perhaps.

Off in the east, back on Todder Brook, came the now familiar screams of what Lindon figured was the devil.

Then suddenly a rifle shot sounded from the same direction and the devil fell silent.

“Hmm, a shot in the dark,” muttered Lindon.

Somebody standing behind him might have thought that Lindon was directing his comment at his penis.

Nutbeam lived in a tiny camp in the forest back on Todder Brook. He’d built the camp five years ago on somebody’s land – he didn’t know that it was the lumber section of the old abandoned Graig Allen farm – and none of the locals, as of yet, had located him. A couple of hunters came close a couple of times, but that was all.

Although Nutbeam could not read or write, he was not uneducated. He knew all there was to know about living in the woods. He was an expert trapper, hunter, fisherman and axeman. He knew every shrub, weed, wildflower, fern, berry, cherry, mushroom and nut; which ones were edible and which ones were not. He was an expert in a canoe and on a pair of snowshoes. He had gathered his knowledge from experience, mostly in the last five years.