Six or seven quick shots burnished the air.
It was a butterfly day out here, too.
Except all the butterflies were hiding behind boulders so they wouldn’t get hit in all the gunplay.
The first thing that came to mind was the Hatfield-McCoy feud of lie and legend, two hillbilly families that warred with each other generation unto generation. They came to mind because the trailer resembled a shack, patched as it was with cardboard, sheet metal, stucco, anything that could be adhesed, nailed, or otherwise appended to the rusted-out abode. A shotgun poked from its lone front smashed window.
Then there was the motorcycle with a sidecar. A very small man, not much bigger than a munchkin, looking an awful lot like Yosemite Sam with his long red beard and floppy battered hat, crouched behind his cycle, firing away with his shotgun at the trailer. What you have to understand here is that neither party was seriously trying to hit the other. Nobody’s aim could be that bad. The sidecar was more interesting than the gunfire. From it stuck the barrels of at least eight or nine long rifles, shotguns, and even-I kid you not, as Jack Paar likes to say-a hunting bow. As in bow and arrow.
The first thing I considered was the health and well-bbing of my ragtop. I swung back in front of the church and parked it there. Then I snuck around the side where I could be seen and heard. The folks firing the guns were under the impression-probably correct-t out here in the boonies nobody would bother them. Hell, nobody would probably hear them.
But being the good-citizen type, I raised my voice and said, “If you people don’t put your guns down I’m going to call Sykes and have him come out here.”
“Viola! Viola! Who the hell is this guy?” shouted the man with all the weapons.
“He works for Judge Whitney!” a female voice from inside the trailer shouted back.
“Judge Whitney! She’s the one threw me in the jug for lumpin’ Bonnie up that time!”
“Lumpin’” in mountain language means putting lumps on another person’s body.
“We better stop firin’, Ned!”
“Put your gun down and walk away from your motorcycle,” I said. “With your hands up.”
“You ain’t even got a gun,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“And you ain’t even much bigger’n me, either.”
“Right again, pal. But it’s me or Cliffie.”
He frowned and spat a stream of tobacco that was probably carcinogenic enough to scar the earth forever.
“Cliffie. One day me’n that sumbitch is gonna tangle, I’ll tell you that.”
“Away from the motorcycle. Hands up.
Now.” I said it just the way Robert Ryan would h.
Cliffie loved beating up people who didn’t have the education or the money to fight back legally. A man like this would give Cliffie plenty of thrills.
He moved away from the motorcycle. With his hands up.
“Now, you come out of the trailer,” I said.
“With your hands up,” Ned said. Then to me, “I gotta have my hands up, they gotta have their hands up.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
There were two of them, mother and daughter, the Muldaurs. They wore the same kind of tent-dresses they’d worn last night, the kind that hides bodies too big, shame dresses really.
“C’mon over here,” I said. “I want you folks to tell me what’s goin’ on.”
“I want my money,” Ned said.
“What money?”
“Money their mister owed me for snakin’.”
“I thought Muldaur did his own snakin’.”
“He could handle ‘em but he couldn’t find ‘em.
I took him out with me about six months ago and he couldn’t find nothin’. Not even a garter snake. Muldaur’s the only one made any money that day.”
“He paid you what he could,” Viola
Muldaur said. She had a wide, Slavic face that had likely been pleasant before hard times had taken their toll. It was too easy, what with her snakes and all, to dismiss her as an alien of some kind.
“So he paid you to find them?” I said.
He nodded. If he weighed 120, 100 of it had to be dirt, grime, slime. The ratty red beard had things crawling in it. The gums looked charred-yes, folks, charred-andthe one blue glass eye managed to appear goofy and sinister at the same time. He wore a filthy cotton vest with nothing but scrawny, hairless chest beneath, and a pair of Sears Roebuck jeans even more vile than the vest. And no shoes. His toenails had some kind of luminescent green-blue fungus growing on them. I’d be proud to have him in my family.
“He owed me for that last batch.”
“And you came here with your shotgun?” I said.
“You ever hear of sending somebody a bill?”
“That’s how we settled things in the hills.”
“He’s right, mister,” Viola said. “We wouldn’t actually hurt nobody. Just make a lot of noise. And what’re you doin’ out here, anyway?”
“Just wondered if you’d had any ideas about who might’ve poisoned your husband.”
“I sure do,” the girl said.
“You hush, Ella.”
I studied their eyes. Ella had been crying.
Viola was wiping tears from her eyes. Ella seemed unsteady, ready to erupt. Viola looked calm. Different people react differently to the death of a loved one. Still, Viola’s reaction made me curious. Ella kept touching a rashed spot just below her knee. She’d rubbed something on it.
“You tellin’ me you don’t have no money?”
“That’s what I’m tellin’ you, Ned.”
“I suppose they give you credit down at the Tv store.”
“John hisself bought that set. I don’t know nothin’ about it.”
“I bet.”
I said, “You were going to say something, Ella.
About who might have killed your father.”
“Ella wasn’t gonna say nothin’ and
Ella ain’t gonna say nothin’,” Viola said. “You understand that, girl?”
Ella, a whipped dog, nodded slowly. She suddenly seemed winded, washed out. She looked older today, maybe sixteen or seventeen.
“And as for you, mister, I want you off my property.”
“You seem to forget your husband hired me.”
“Yeah. To find out who wanted to kill him.”
She smiled with dirty teeth. “And you done a whale of a good job at finding out who, didn’t you?”
Ned’s whole body did a delighted kind of puppet-dance. “Hee-hee, she sure got you on that one, city boy.”
That was probably the first time a man from Black River Falls, Iowa, had ever been called a city boy. In a way, it was flattering.
I glanced back at his junky motorcycle, big-ass old Indian, and the sidecar with all the artillery in it. “You expecting a war any time soon?”
“I sure am, city boy. And when it comes, I’ll be ready for it.”
I’d suddenly run out of things to say to these people.
I felt sorry about leaving Ella behind- she was young enough there might still be hope for her-but there wasn’t anything I could do short of kidnapping her. And if I did that, Ned here would probably get out his bow and arrow.
