Johnny caught himself and scrambled back up the incline. I could see the hate afire in his eyes and I tried to get between him and McIntosh, but he brushed me aside. He put his face up close to the boss logger’s, spat out a string of cuss words, and finished up with, “I’ve had all I’m gonna take from you, you son of a bitch.” And then he swung with his right hand.
But all he hit was air. McIntosh had seen it coming; he stepped inside the punch and spat tobacco juice into Johnny’s face. The squirt and spatter threw the kid off balance and blinded him at the same time — left him wide open for McIntosh to wade in with fists and knees.
McIntosh seemed to go berserk, as if all the rage and meanness had built to an explosion point inside him and Johnny’s words had triggered it. Johnny Cline never had a chance. McIntosh beat him to the ground, kept on beating him even though me and some of the others fought to pull him off. And when he saw his chance he raised up one leg and he stomped the kid’s face with his calks — drove those sharp steel spikes down into Johnny’s face as if he was grinding a bug under his heel.
Johnny screamed once, went stiff, then lay still. Nilson and some others had come running up by then and it took six of us to drag McIntosh away before he could stomp Johnny Cline a second time. He battled us for a few seconds, like a crazy man; then, all at once, the wildness went out of him. But he was no more human when it did. He tore himself loose, and without a word, without any concern for the boy he’d stomped, he stalked off through the slash.
Johnny Cline’s face was a red ruin, pitted and torn by half a hundred steel points. I thought he was dead at first, but when I got down beside him I found a weak pulse. Four of us picked him up and carried him to our bunkhouse.
The bullcook and me cleaned the blood off him and doctored his wounds as best we could. But he was in a bad way. His right eye was gone, pierced by one of McIntosh’s calks, and he was hurt inside, too, for he kept coughing up red foam. There just wasn’t much we could do for him. The nearest doctor was thirty miles away; by the time somebody went and fetched him back, it would be too late. I reckon we all knew from the first that Johnny Cline would be dead by morning.
There was no more work for any of us that day. None of the jacks in our bunkhouse took any grub, either, nor slept much as the night wore on. We all just sat around in little groups with our lamps lit, talking low, smoking and drinking cof fee or tea. Checking on Johnny now and then. Waiting.
He never regained consciousness. An hour before dawn the bullcook went to look at him and announced, “He’s gone.” The waiting was done. Yes, and so were Saginaw Tom McIntosh and the Black Mountain camp.
Nilson and the other crew chiefs had a meeting outside, between the two bunkhouses. The rest of us kept our places. When Nilson and the two others who bunked in our building came back in, it was plain enough from their expressions what had been decided. And plainer still when the three of them shouldered their peaveys. Loggers will take so much from a boss like Saginaw Tom McIntosh — only so much and no more. What he’d done to Johnny Cline was the next to last straw; Johnny dying was the final one.
At the door Nilson said, “We’re on our way to cut down a rotted tree. Rest of you can stay or join us, as you see fit. But you’ll all keep your mouths shut either way. Clear?”
Nobody had any objections. Nilson turned and went out with the other two chiefs.
Well, none of the men in our bunkhouse stayed, nor did anybody in the other one. We were all of the same mind. I thought I knew what would happen to McIntosh, but I was wrong. The crew heads weren’t fixing to give him the same as he gave Johnny Cline. No, they had other plans. When a logging crew turns, it turns hard — and it gives no quarter.
The near-dawn dark was chill and damp, and I don’t mind saying it put a shiver on my back. We all walked quiet through it to McIntosh’s shanty — close to a hundred of us, so he heard us coming anyway. But not in time to get up a weapon. He fought with the same wildness he had earlier but he didn’t have any more chance than he gave Johnny Cline. Nilson stunned him with his peavey. Then half a dozen men stuffed him into his clothes and his blood-stained boots and took him out.
Straight across the camp we went, with four of the crew heads carrying McIntosh by the arms and legs. He came around just before they got him to the edge of the drop-off. Realized what was going to happen to him, looked like, at about the same time I did.
He was struggling fierce, bellowing curses, when Nilson and the others pitched him into the chute.
He went down slow at first, the way one of the big logs always did. Clawing at the flat-hewn sides, trying to dig his calks into the glass-smooth bottom logs. Then he commenced to pick up speed, and his yells turned to banshee screams. Two hundred feet down the screaming stopped; he was just a blur by then. His clothes started to smoke from the friction, then burst into flame. When he went sailing over the trestle he was a lump of fire that lit up the dark... then a streak of fire as he shot down into the lower section... then a fireball with a tail longer and brighter than the one on that comet a while ago, so bright the river and the woods on both banks showed plain as day for two or three seconds before he smacked the river — smacked it and went out in a splash and steamy sizzle you could see and hear all the way up at the chute head.
“And that,” Cass Buckram finished, “that, by God, was the damnedest sight I or any other man ever set eyes on — McIntosh going down McIntosh’s chute, eight hundred feet straight into hell.”
None of us argued with him. Not even Poley the button.
Trade Secret
I was sitting in one of the canvas chairs on the back deck, adjusting the drag on my Daiwa fishing reel, when I heard the car grinding uphill through the woods. My cabin is on a backcountry lake, pretty far off the beaten track, and the gate across the private road has a No Trespassing sign. The only visitors I get are occasional tradespeople from the little town a dozen miles away, by invitation only, and I wasn’t expecting anybody today.
I got up, slow — now that the cool early fall weather had set in, my arthritis was acting up — and shuffled inside for my 30.06. Then I went out front to find out who it was. The car that rolled out of the pines was a shiny new silver Lincoln I’d never seen before. Illinois plates — that told me something right there. The driver was a man and he was alone; the angle of the sun let me see that much. But I didn’t get a good look at his face until the Lincoln swung to a stop alongside my Jeep and he opened the door.
Surprise. Easy Ed Malachi.
He hadn’t changed much. A little less of the dyed black hair, a few extra wrinkles in his jowly face and another ten pounds or so bulging his waistline. Dressed same as in the old days, like an Armani ad in a magazine — silk shirt, Bronzini tie, a suit that must’ve set him back at least three grand. But the outfit was all wrong for a trip into this wilderness country. That told me something, too.
Malachi was smiling when he got out, one of those ear to ear smiles of his that had always made me think of a shark. I leaned the rifle against the wall next to the stacked firewood, moved over to meet him when he came up onto the porch.
“Hey, Griff,” he said, and grabbed my hand and pumped it a couple of times. Sunlight glinted off his gold baguette diamond ring, the platinum Philippe Patek watch on his left wrist. “Hope you don’t mind me just showing up like this, but you’re a hard man to get hold of. Long time, huh? Must be, what, six years?”
“More like seven and a half.”
“Some place you got here. Middle of nowhere, not easy to find.”
“That’s the way I like it.”
“Sure, you always were your own man. But I never figured you’d turn into a hermit.”