"Not that crude. Not professional, either, but carefully done.
In prison there were guys who'd do tattoos for cigarette money. They used the end of a guitar string and indelible ink, took their time. Some of them got damned good at it. That's what this reminded me of, that level of skill."
"Nathan have any idea what these people are doing up there?"
"None."
"But now you're going to have to find out."
"Guess I am."
"I'll come along," J. T. said.
Half an hour later we were scraping cicadas off the Chariot's windshield as Val pulled out on her way to work. J. T. went in to get the thermos of coffee we'd forgotten and came back out saying the beeper had gone off while she was inside.
"On the table," she said.
Of course it was.
And of course it was the bugs. Raising hell everywhere, June told me, getting in houses that left their windows open, in water troughs and switch boxes and attics, reminded her of that movie Gremlins. She'd already logged over a dozen calls. Though what anyone thought we could do about any of it was beyond her. Was I on my way in?
Sure, I said.
New plan was (I told J. T.) we'd go in for an hour, two at the most, and sand down the rough spots.
It took Lonnie, J. T., and me well into the afternoon to get everyone calmed down and the town more or less back on track. House calls included the local retirement home, where one of the cicadas had somehow got down a resident's mouth and choked her to death; a little girl terrified that the bugs were going to eat her newborn kittens; and a Mr. Murphy living alone in an old house I'd thought long abandoned. Neighbors having heard screams, J. T. and I arrived to find that Mr. Murphy had intimate knowledge of insects: when we lifted him from his wheelchair, maggots writhed in ulcers the size of saucers on his buttocks, some of them dropping to the floor, and more could be seen at work in the cushions and open framework of the chair. "Don't much mind the littluns," he said, looking from J. T.'s face to mine. "Them big ones is a different story altogether."
So the new new plan was to get a late lunch, then head up into the hills. And since chances were good we might not be out of there by nightfall, I'd look up Nathan first. No way I was going to be in those hills after dark without someone who knew them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
We parked by the derelict cotton gin and came up the line of humps and hollows that form the mountain's side, an easier but much longer ascent. By the time we reached the cabin, it was going on four o'clock. The owner didn't take too much to yard work. Every couple of years he'd clear a space around the cabin. The rest of the time pine trees, shrubs, and bushes, along with a variety of grasses and wildflowers, had their way. We were well along into the rest of the time.
Nathan stepped out from behind an oak, twelve-gauge in the crook of an elbow. His dog came out from beneath the cabin growling, then, at Nathan's almost silent whistle, went back under.
"Defending the realm?" I asked.
"Been out."
"Hunting?"
"After a fashion."
Meeting J. T.'s eye, he said, "Miss." I introduced them. "Found the camp," he went on, "maybe three miles in, 'bout forty degrees off north-northeast. Ain't much to it, mostly the hind end of a cabin they done put some lean-tos up against."
"How many are there?"
"If you mean lean-tos, there's three. If you're asking after people, which I expect you are, then my guess'd be close on to a dozen. Youngsters was all I saw. You headin' up that way?"
I nodded. "Talk you into coming along?"
"Figured to."
Instinctively tilting the shotgun barrel maybe ten degrees to clear a low branch, Nathan stepped back into the trees.
It took us almost two hours to get there. By the time we did, the sun had put in its papers and was marking time. The lean-tos were saplings lashed together with heavy twine, a spool of which I later saw inside what was left of the original cabin. The cabin hadn't been much to start with. Now it came down to half a room, five-sixths of a chimney, and a smatter of roof. A smatter of people sat on a bench out front-more saplings, these set into notches in two sections of log.
One of the homesteaders, a woman like all of them in her early to late twenties, sat beside a pile of sassafras root, cleaning with a damp cloth what was to be a new addition to the pile. Another was picking through field greens. They watched us silently as we approached. A man emerging from one of the lean-tos paused, then straightened and stepped towards us. Another, that I'd not seen and damn well should have, swung down off the low branch of a maple at the edge of the clearing. Scraps of plank from the cabin were nailed to the trunk at intervals to make a ladder.
Boards had also been nailed up over the cabin's gaping front, three of them, bridging the void. Crude block letters in white paint: "All the Whys Are Here."
"Tell me you're not the trouble you look to be," the man from the lean-to said, holding out his hand, which I shook. Older than the rest, pushing thirty from the far side, dark eyes, beetle brow, bad skin.
"Deputy sheriff," I said, "but not trouble. Not the kind you're thinking, at any rate."
"Always good to hear. Isaiah Stillman." Nodding towards Nathan, who stood apart at clearing's edge, he said, "Your friend's welcome, too."
"My friend's not much for company."
"Um-hmm. He the one lives down the mountain?"
"The same."
"So what can we do for you, Deputy? If we're-" He stopped, eyes meeting mine. "Our understanding is that this is free land."
"Close as it gets these days, anyhow."
I described the young man who'd died by the lake last night, told Stillman how it happened.
"I'm truly sorry to hear that."
"You knew him, then?"
"Of course. Kevin. We wondered where he'd got off to this time. Never could stay in place too long. He'd go off, be gone a day or two, a week. But he'd always come back."
The woman cleaning sassafras had put rag and roots down and walked up behind Stillman, touching him on the shoulder. When he turned, her mouth moved, but no sound came. Taking her hand and placing it against his throat, he said: "It's Kevin, Martha. Kevin's dead." Her mouth opened and went round in a silent no. After a moment she returned to the bench and her work. The other woman there put a hand briefly to her cheek.
"We'll be having our dinner soon," Stillman said. "Will you join us?"
We did, settling into a meal of lukewarm sassafras tea, greens, rice cooked with black-eyed peas- "Our take on hopping John," Stillman said.
"Interesting."
"Flavored with roots instead of salt pork or bacon, since we're vegetarians."
– and something that must have been hoecake, which, like hopping John, I'd read and heard about but never seen.
"Delicious."
J. T. cocked eyebrows at me at that. Nathan, having got over his standoffishness, was busy sopping up juice from the greens with crumbly bits of hoecake.
"We plan to grind our own cornmeal eventually," Stillman said.
Of course they did.
"I should notify your friend's family," I said. Helped myself to another spoonful of the hopping John. Stuff kind of grew on you.
"We are his family, Mr. Turner."
"No direct relatives?"
"His father threw him out of the house when he was fourteen. The old man was an engineer,' Kevin always said. ' He knew how things were supposed to work.' For a year or two he stayed around town. His mother would meet him, give him money.
When she died, Kevin left for good."
"What about the rest of you?"
"Have family, you mean."
"Yes."
"Some of us do, some don't. For us, family is-"
Leaning over the makeshift table, the young woman I assumed to be deaf and dumb moved her hands in dismissive, sweep-it-away gestures.