dressed in shorts and a halter top. She, too, was smoking a cigarette. The last of the three was a scrawny, rusty- headed boy, maybe twelve years old, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and jeans and holding a Daisy pellet gun. None of them seemed to realize it was a mid-March day with a windchill in the teens.
“Watch out, kids, it’s the game warden come to take you good-for-nothings to jail,” said Mrs. Barter unhelpfully.
The henhouse was a rectangle of dry dirt as large as a boxcar, with a chicken-wire fence about four feet high around it. In the back, an outhouse had been repurposed to provide the hens some shelter. Inside the pen, there were two dozen or so Rhode Island Reds. They all seemed to be engaged in the act of pecking one another’s rear ends. The sour, grainy smell of chicken shit hung in the frozen air.
“I’m looking for your husband, Mrs. Barter.”
“You’re new around here, ain’t you? What happened to that bumfuck Devoe?”
“Warden Devoe was transferred to Washington County.”
“Good riddance.” She took the cigarette from her lips, squashed it against the fence post, and tossed the butt into the pen, where it was quickly snapped up by one of the chickens. “Will you look at those goddamned birdbrains? It’s like they got nothing better to do than peck each other in the ass.”
“Can you tell me where your husband is, Mrs. Barter?”
“Oh, he’s inside, sleeping it off. Give me a minute to finish with these chickens, and I’ll get him.”
“I shot a fox,” said the red-haired boy. He pointed to the nearest tree line. “It came out of them woods. I bet it had rabies.”
“Hold on, kids. Let me tell the story,” said his mother.
I glanced at my watch. “If you could just get your husband, Mrs. Barter.”
“This fox thing is pretty fucking funny, though.”
Her son, Travis, she said, was out with his pellet gun, breaking beer bottles, when the fox walked right past him. That’s how they guessed it was rabid.
“A person can get rabies,” remarked the teenage girl with the baby. “You start foaming at the mouth. They give you this big-ass shot in the stomach for it.”
“Now, the fox wandered right up to the henhouse as if no one else was around,” continued the mother.
“That’s when I shot it,” said Travis, puffing up his chest.
“Well, that fox took off like its tail was on fire,” said Wanda Barter with a broken smile. “Then we look inside the pen, and damn it if my rooster t’weren’t lying there dead! Davy Crockett, Jr., there killed Foghorn Leghorn!”
“It must have ricocheted off the fox,” said the boy.
“Mrs. Barter,” I said impatiently. “If you’ve got a rabid fox around here, you’d better keep your kids inside, at least for the time being.”
“You ever try to keep a child indoors in the middle of springtime?”
Springtime? My nose was getting frostbitten. “Can you go inside and get your husband for me?”
She turned to her teenage daughter, the one with the baby. “Let me have one of your smokes first.”
That was when I heard an ATV engine growl on the far side of the house. Before I could take two steps, it was already racing away, the sound receding into the distance as it rocketed up one of the fire roads that stretched all the way from the farm to Hank Varnum’s property.
One of the children must have sneaked away to alert him.
“I guess Calvin woke up,” said Wanda Barter, blowing cigarette smoke through the gap in her teeth. “Too bad you missed him. If you want to leave a card, he’ll call you back.”
There was no other word for it: I’d just been outfoxed.
6
In the Gospels, Jesus says, “The poor will always be with you.”
I didn’t realize He was speaking about me personally.
Until my mother divorced my father and spirited me away to suburbia like a stolen child out of Irish folklore, I lived in a series of leaky backwoods shacks and rusted mobile homes that were anything but mobile. All my clothes were hand-me-downs from strangers, and they were always too long or too short. At the time, I thought everyone ate day-old bread from bakery thrift outlets and shopped at stores that illegally traded food stamps for cigarettes, beer, and lottery tickets.
So what I’d found at Calvin Barter’s house was like a bad trip down memory lane.
The Drisko residence was a rat of a different color. A father and son duo who were so close in age and appearance that they seemed more like twins, Dave and Donnie Drisko were ardent four-wheeling enthusiasts, frequent guests of the Knox County Jail, and self-taught martial artists. Nor were they above scavenging a dead deer from the side of a road. My gut told me that if Barter wasn’t the ATV villain harassing Hank Varnum, then it was probably the Drisko boys.
Their trailer was located at the dead end of a dirt road no sane person would dare travel. The property was walled with a makeshift fence, topped with barbed wire. The boards bore all the usual warnings about vicious dogs and the probability of trespassers being shot-although the Driskos were actually too cheap to buy real signs. Instead, they’d just spray-painted their fuck-off sentiments on the fence itself. The warning about the dog was legitimate. They owned a brindle pit bull that lived its entire existence on a rope spiked to the ground. As I drove up, it surged so fiercely against its collar that I thought its head would pop off.
I chose discretion over valor and laid on my horn. I rested my elbow against the wheel until one of the Driskos-father, son, who knew?-finally opened the door. He was, of course, shirtless.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell do you want?”
I rolled down the window. “Can you restrain your dog, Mr. Drisko? I’d like to have a word with you.”
“You got a warrant?”
“I’m not here to arrest you.” Technically, this was true. Of course, if I found evidence of a crime, that might change. “I just want to ask you a question.”
“All right! All right! Lemme bring Vicky around back.”
Drisko-I’d begun thinking it must be Dave, the father-seemed in a surprisingly obliging mood. He dragged the dog forcibly around the trailer to some spot beyond my ability to see. I waited a moment, just to be safe, before getting out of the truck.
A flatbed pickup was parked inside the fence, right beside a beat-up Chevy Monte Carlo and two mud- splattered ATVs. I took the occasion of Drisko’s absence to inspect the bed of the truck. The wood bore recent bloodstains-the cold weather had preserved the redness of the hemoglobin-and frozen hunks of deer hair. Bingo, I thought. This gave me cause to search the curtilage.
Dave Drisko reappeared a moment later. He was scrawny as hell, with a black mustache and heavy bangs that fell so far down his forehead that he was constantly pushing his hair away to see out from under them. He looked like a runt, but at the Harpoon Bar in Seal Cove, the Driskos were known as the meanest drunks and dirtiest fighters in town.
“Your dog’s name is Vicky?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know. She’s named after that football guy, Michael Vick.”
“Do you ever let her inside?”
“Hell no. She’d eat us!” He wrapped his wiry arms around himself. “Yeesh, it’s a cold one, ain’t it?”
“Pretty cold.”
“You want a cup of Sanka or something?”
I’d never been invited into the Drisko lair before, so the invitation raised my guard. Maybe I should have called in my location to Dispatch beforehand, but Drisko was being uncharacteristically amenable, and I didn’t want to spook him. And so, I proceeded into the heart of darkness.
Imagine a bonfire fueled entirely by tobacco, smoldering cigarettes stacked twelve feet high. That was the equivalent amount of smoke I encountered within the Driskos’ mobile home. Five minutes cooped up inside and I would have come down with life-threatening emphysema. The home itself was not the worst I’d visited-the carpet
