As we went along, there was more movement in the thicket next to us, and after a while I realized whatever it was it was keeping stride with us. When we slowed, it slowed. We sped up, it sped up. And not the way an animal will do, or even the way a coach whip snake will sometimes follow and run you. This was something bigger than a snake. It was stalking us, like a panther. Or a man.
Toby was growling as we went along, his head lifted, the hair on the back of his neck raised.
I looked over at Tom, and the moon was just able to split through the trees and show me her face and how scared she was.
I wanted to say something, shout out at whatever it was in the bushes, but I was afraid that might be like some kind of bugle call that set it off, causing it to come down on us.
I had broken open the shotgun earlier for safety sake, laid it in the wheelbarrow and was pushing it, Toby, the shovel, and the squirrels along. Now I stopped, got the shotgun out, made sure a shell was in it, snapped it shut and put my thumb on the hammer.
Toby had really started to make noise, had gone from growling to barking.
I looked at Tom, and she took hold of the wheelbarrow and started pushing. I could tell she was having trouble with it, working it over the soft ground, but I didn’t have any choice but to hold on to the gun, and we couldn’t leave Toby behind, not after what he’d been through.
Whatever was in those bushes paced us for a while, barely cracked the leaves it stepped on, then went silent. We picked up speed, and didn’t hear it anymore. And we didn’t feel its presence either.
I finally got brave enough to break open the shotgun and lay it in the wheelbarrow and take over the pushing again.
“What was that?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It sounded big.”
“Yeah.”
“The Goat Man?”
“Daddy says there ain’t any Goat Man.”
“Yeah, but he’s sometimes wrong, ain’t he?”
“Hardly ever,” I said.
We went along some more, found a narrow place in the river, crossed, struggling with the wheelbarrow. We shouldn’t have crossed, but here was a good spot to do it, and I was spooked and wanted to put some space between us and it.
We walked along a good distance, and eventually came up against a wad of brambles that twisted in amongst the trees and scrubs and vines and made a wall of thorns. It was a wall of wild rosebushes. Some of the vines on them were thick as well ropes, the thorns like nails, and the flowers smelled strong and sweet in the night wind, almost sweet as sorghum syrup cooking.
The bramble patch ran some distance in either direction, and encased us on all sides. We had wandered into a maze of thorns too wide and thick to go around, too high and sharp to climb over; they had wound together with low-hanging limbs, making a thorny ceiling above.
I thought of Brer Rabbit and the briar patch, but unlike Brer Rabbit, I had not been born and raised in a briar patch and it wasn’t what I wanted.
I dug in my pocket, got a match I had left over from when me and Tom tried to smoke some corn silk cigarettes and grape vines, struck the match with my thumb and waved it around, saw a wide path had been cut into the brambles.
I bent down, poked the match forward. I could see the brambles were a kind of tunnel, about six feet high and six feet wide. I couldn’t tell how far it went, but it was a good distance.
I shook the match out before it burned my hand, said to Tom, “We can go back, or we can take this tunnel.”
Tom studied the brambles. “I don’t want to go back because of that thing. And I don’t want to go down that tunnel neither. We’d be like rats in a pipe. Maybe whatever it is knew it’d get us boxed in like this, and it’s just waitin’ at the other end, like that thing Daddy read to us about. The thing that was part man, part cow.”
“Part bull, part man,” I said. “The Minotaur.”
“Yeah. It could be waitin’ on us, Harry.”
I had, of course, thought about that. “I think we ought to take the tunnel. It can’t come from any side on us that way. It has to come from front or rear.”
“Can’t there be other tunnels in there?”
That I hadn’t considered. There could be openings cut anywhere. And if it grew tight in there, all a person, animal, Minotaur had to do, was reach out and grab me or Tom.
“I got the gun,” I said. “If you can push the wheelbarrow, Toby can sort of watch for us, let us know something’s coming. Anything jumps out at us, I’ll cut it in two.”
I picked up the gun and made it ready. Tom took hold of the wheelbarrow handles, wiggled it through the split in the briars, and me and her went on in.
2
The smell of roses was thick and overwhelming. It made me sick. The thorns sometimes stuck out on vines you couldn’t see in the dark. They snagged my old shirt and cut my arms and face. I could hear Tom back there behind me, cussing softly under her breath as she got scratched.
The bramble tunnel went on for a good ways, then I heard a rushing sound, and the tunnel widened and we came out on the bank of the roaring Sabine River. There were splits in the trees above and the moonlight came through strong and fell over everything like milk that had thickened, yellowed, and turned sour.
Whatever had been pacing us seemed to be good and gone.
I studied the moon, thought about the river. I said, “We’ve gone some out of the way. But I can see how we ought to go. We can follow the river a bit, which ain’t the right direction, but I think it’s not far from here to the Swinging Bridge. We cross that, we can hit the main road, walk to the house.”
“The Swinging Bridge?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Think Mama and Daddy are worried?” Tom asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Bet they are. I hope they’ll be as glad to see these squirrels as I think they’ll be.”
“What about Toby?”
“We just got to wait and see.”
The bank sloped, and there was a little trail ran along the edge of the river.
“Figure we got to carry Toby, then bring the wheelbarrow. You can push it forward, and I’ll get in front and boost it down.”
I carefully picked up Toby, who whimpered softly, and Tom, getting ahead of herself, pushed the wheelbarrow. It, the squirrels, shotgun, and shovel went over the edge, tipped over near the creek.
“Damnit, Tom,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It got away from me. I’m gonna tell Mama you cussed.”
“You do, and I’ll whup the tar out of you. ’Sides, I heard you cussin’ plenty.”
I gave Toby to Tom till I could get a footing and have him passed to me.
I slid down the bank, came up against a huge oak growing near the water. The brambles had grown down the bank and were wrapped around the tree. I put my hand against it to steady myself, jerked back quick. What I had touched hadn’t been a tree trunk, or even a thorn. It was something soft.
When I looked I saw a gray mess hung up in brambles. The moonlight was shining across the water and falling on a face, or what had been a face, but was more like a jack-o’-lantern now, swollen and round with dark sockets for eyes. There was a wad of hair on its head, like a chunk of dark lamb’s wool, and the body was swollen and twisted and without clothes. A woman.
I had seen a couple of cards with naked women on them that George Sterning had shown me. He was always coming up with stuff like that ’cause his Daddy was a traveling salesman and sold not only Garrett snuff, but what was called novelties on the side.
But this wasn’t like that. Those pictures had stirred me in a way I didn’t understand but found somehow sweet and satisfying. This was stirring me in a way I understood immediately.