“I need a Coke,” he said, “come on.”
They went in, and Bob took a plastic bottle of the soft drink from the glass case, got one for Russ, then went up to the counter, where a black woman watched them sullenly. He threw something at her that caused Russ to bumble into a movie-scale double take. A smile! A beaming, radiant, howdy-there smile.
She smiled back.
“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “I got some friends supposed to come through from Little Rock to look at some hunting camp property. Damn, I may be lost. You seen any groups of strangers, city-looking boys, very careful types? Truth is, we’re all Little Rock cops. You know that cop look: way the eyes is always traveling, way one guy is sort of hanging back, taking it all in, the way they don’t talk loud and keep to themselves. You see my friends in here in, say, the last few days?”
“Mister, in hunting season you see boys like that all the time. I ain’t seen a soul in months I don’t know his mama and his papa and his brothers.”
“No four-wheel-drive vehicles? Sunglasses, expensive boots, clothes look real new?”
“You ain’t looking for no cops.”
“No, I ain’t, truth is. I am worried about these damn boys and would be grateful if you’d think about it a second.”
“No sir, I ain’t seen nothing like that.”
“Okay, good work. Thanks.” He left a five on the counter.
They walked back to the truck.
“Man, you are careful,” said Russ.
“I am alive,” Bob said, “and I goddamn well intend to stay that way.”
They drove back along 271 to the dirt road, turned down it and began to pick their way along. Periodically, Bob would stop, get out and examine the dirt road for tracks. There were no fresh ones. They passed a lake far off to the right, flat pewter water against the green bulk of a mountain.
They drove and drove. The forest swallowed them, the canopy trees interlocking to block out the sun and the blue sky, as if they plunged through a green tunnel toward blackness. Every mile or so, Bob would pull over, get out, let the dust settle, check the road for tracks, listen intently. His persistence and his patience Russ found really deeply annoying.
They crept past deserted farms, timbered or burned-out patches of field, the occasional meadow, but soon enough the forest grew denser, black oak and hickory and winged elm, a curtain of hardwood shot through with an undergrowth of bristly saw brier and yucca.
Finally, they came to a ragged track off to the right.
“That’s it,” said Russ. “If the cabin is here, it’s back there.”
But Bob continued on for at least a mile, then pulled off the road, sliding the car as deep in the woods as he could. “It would be easier to walk down the road,” Russ said.
“It ain’t about being easier. It’s about being safer.”
He got out, waited again for the dust to settle.
“Bob, I—”
“Shhh,” Bob cautioned. “Use your ears. Shut your eyes and listen.”
Russ heard nothing. Bob concentrated for a good five minutes, waiting to discover if the far-off hum of a following car would announce itself. But nothing came. The world was quiet except for the occasional squawk of a bird and the quiet hiss of the wind in the trees.
“Okay,” Bob said, looking at the crude map Russ had drawn from the land plat. “You’re sure this is accurate?”
“It’s almost a tracing,” Russ said.
“Looks to me like the road trends back to the southeast. That would put the cabin a mile and a half in. We ought to be overland from it about a mile.”
Bob shot an azimuth on a small compass he pulled out of his jeans, grabbed a pair of binoculars, and they set off into the woods. The forest absorbed them. It was dense and green, the light overhead filtering through the canopy, more like a jungle than Russ’s idea of a forest.
Every so often Bob would shoot another compass angle, then veer crazily in an odd direction. It was soon enough gibberish to Russ; they seemed just to be wandering through the heavy woods in the heat, the bugs biting, the birds singing. He was hopelessly lost.
“You know where we’re going?”
“Yep.”
“You can get us out of here?”
“Yep.”
“We must have come miles.”
“We’ve walked about three, yeah. By beeline, we’ve come less than one, however. In the jungle you don’t go nowheres in a straight line, ’less you want to be taken down.”
Russ thought: he’s been here before. He’s taken men down before.
Look at him, he thought. A force of nature. Bob slid so easily and silently through the trees, his boots never slipped, he never stumbled or grunted, just maneuvered with the easy grace of the man who’d done it before. His face was blank, his eyes working the edges of the horizon, the demeanor utterly calm and concentrated. Leatherstocking. Natty Bumpo. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett. Damned John Wayne, like his father, whom everybody always said looked like John Wayne. Soon the sweat showed on his blue denim shirt but Bob paid it no mind; he just kept on trucking, the grip of that .45 sticking out of his jeans above the kidney.
In time, they came to a creek, cool and dark, and swiftly flowing. Russ scrambled over the rocks and got a mouthful of the water, which tasted faintly metallic.
“You make too much noise that way,” Bob said. “Cup it up to your lips and sip it. You never was a marine, right?”
“Not hardly,” said Russ.
“Okay, let’s go. It ain’t far.”
They cut across a path which ran between two low hills and appeared to lead to a clearing in the dim, overgrown trees ahead, but Bob never did things the easy way. Instead, halfway through that little draw, Bob took them off the path, through some heavy growth, and then broke onto the barer high ground under a maze of pines. Ahead, Russ could see the light of vista and openness. But Bob dropped to a low crawl and slithered ahead, coming at last to the edge and setting himself up behind a tree. Russ, feeling utterly like an imposter, did the same.
Two hundred yards below in a hollow by the stream sat the cabin. It was built of logs, low and primitive, with a woodpile, an outhouse, a feed trough for the pigs who scurried in a pen. A beat-up Chevy stood near it, rusted out, one fender gone to primer. Yet it had nothing of rustic Dogpatch, your quaint rural hamlet to it: instead it looked mean and squalid and impoverished.
“No phone lines,” Bob said. “No goddamned TV aerial. No electric wires.”
“Question,” said Russ. “If he’s just out of prison, how come the place looks so lived in?”
“He had a brother named Lum,” said Bob. “The brother had a son, who also lives here. It’s the son’s work you’re seeing, not old Jed’s.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “So let’s go see if he’ll talk to us.”
“No way,” said Bob. “You stay here. You eyeball the place. You got another hour. Then the sun’s too low to the west and it’ll reflect off the lenses. You got a watch?”
“Yes.”
“It’s two forty-five. You eyeball it till three forty-five. What are you looking for?”
“Uh, anything that’s out of the ordinary.”
“How do you look?”
“Uh—” Completely new question. Russ flubbed around.
“Hard,” he finally said.
“No, dummy. Divide it into quadrants. Thirty seconds a quadrant. Blink to black between, then move on. Follow the same pattern for ten minutes, then reverse it or change it around. Take frequent breaks and study the woods around. Use lens discipline. Never let them rise above the midpoint, you might throw a reflection. You’re not
