Bill Crider - Too Late to Die

Up north, they call them “ponds,” Rhodes thought as he drove up. He remembered some kids from New Jersey who had visited his family while he was growing up. He had offered to take them fishing in a local tank. “In a tank ?” they had asked, incredulous. “You can’t fish in a tank !” Turned out they thought a tank was a big iron barrel. Well, the Gin Tank was hardly that.

The sides of it were dammed around with earth, ten feet higher than the surrounding pasture. Johnson grass, berry vines, milkweed, Bermuda grass, and who knew what else grew in profusion over the pasture and the dam. Willow trees that no one had planted had grown up all over the dam, looking for the water that they needed so desperately in the heat of the summer months. On one side of the dam, the east side, there was a break that was bridged by several rotting planks. Water flowed under the planks from one tank to the other.

The old gin property was not fenced. It covered several acres of land just off the main road, within sight of the stores and homes of Thurston. The family that owned the land had long since moved to the city, but they refused to sell the property. They held out fond hopes that one day oil or gas would be discovered in the Thurston area, not a very likely possibility to Rhodes’s mind, so they kept the land and paid their taxes with regularity. In the meantime, they had no intention of putting out any money on upkeep; the land was unfenced, and anyone who wanted to fish in the tank was welcome to do so.

Rhodes drove up as near the dam as he could get and parked his cruiser, leaving behind him two lines of crushed grass and weeds. He couldn’t see anyone on the dam, but there was the old gray Chevrolet that Tomkins had driven up to Barrett’s store the other day parked not far from a big hackberry tree. Rhodes got out of the car and started up on the dam. Beggar lice stuck to his pants legs, and he was sure that chiggers were leaping from the Johnson grass by the thousands to bury their heads in his flesh. It made him itch just to think about it, but there was nothing he could do.

When he got to the top of the dam he looked around. Tomkins was on the other side of the tank, in a shady spot between two willow trees. There was a camp stool nearby, but Tomkins was standing up with a cane pole under his left arm. With his right hand he was putting a large shiner on a hook. As Rhodes watched, he tossed the shiner out into the tank. After it hit and sank, a red and white plastic cork bobbed on the surface of the water.

Rhodes was mindful of the fisherman’s etiquette that required him to remain silent to avoid scaring the fish. Rhodes wasn’t sure he believed that noise made any difference, but he walked as silently as he could around the dam to where Tomkins was. By the time he got there, Tomkins was seated on the folding stool and casting a spinner bait into the tank with a cheap black rod and Zebco 33 reel.

“How’re they biting?” Rhodes asked, hunkering down by Tomkins.

“So-so,” Tomkins wheezed in his asthmatic way. “Stringer’s over there.” He indicated a stick anchored in the mud.

Rhodes walked over to the stick and saw that a nylon line was tied to it. He pulled up the line. As it emerged from the slightly muddy brown water, he saw, and felt, the fish. There were three, the line running through their gills and mouths. Two were fairly small, but the third weighed about three pounds. The water rolled off their scales, making them shine in the rays of the sun that came through the willow branches.

“Nice mess of fish,” Rhodes said, lowering them back into the water. “I wouldn’t mind catching a few like that myself.”

Tomkins reeled in his spinner bait, but he didn’t make another cast. “I get the feelin’ you didn’t come out here just to talk about the fishin’,” he wheezed.

“That’s, right, Bill, I didn’t.” Rhodes turned to face him. At the same time his eyes caught a brief glimpse of something shiny in a grove of trees about a hundred yards away, something that he barely glimpsed over Tomkins’s head. It was easy to see the trees, because Tomkins was seated in a gap between the two willows, and their branches and leaves were quite thin. Rhodes dismissed the shine, not even sure that he had seen it.

“I hear you’ve been telling some folks that Jeanne Clinton had quite a few visitors at night while Elmer was out,”

Rhodes said. “Now, you mentioned Hod Barrett to me, and then you hushed. If there was ever anybody else, though, you’d better tell me now. I’d hate to think you were hiding evidence of a crime from me.”

Tomkins laid down his rod and reel. “Just a minute, Sheriff,” he said. “You just hold your horses. I might’ve had a good reason for not tellin’ you who else was there.”

Rhodes shook his head. “No such thing, Bill. There’s no good reason for hiding something when murder’s involved. I know you went by there, and Hod did. Now I want to know who else.”

Tomkins spit in the tank, then rubbed his hand over his face. “All right, I’ll tell you. But you’ll see why I didn’t at first. I knew you’d find out. See, one of the others that stopped by to see Jeanne was your election opponent, Ralph Claymore.” He paused to I take a deep, rough breath. “I just didn’t see how it would do you or Mr. Claymore either one any good for me to bring that up.”

“One of the others, Bill? One of them? It’s beginning to sound like Jeanne was holding open house whenever Elmer cut out for work.” Rhodes shifted his weight and leaned a little forward. “It might make a man wonder if somebody who was seeing her got just a little jealous, maybe. Maybe he could have gotten so upset that he decided to do something about it.”

Tomkins jumped up from his camp stool, angry. Rhodes thought he looked a little like Walter Brennan taking on Richard Crenna in an episode of The Real McCoys .

“You got no call to say that, Sheriff! Jeanne was just a sweet, nice girl. Let me tell you who.”

He never got to tell who because a number of things happened almost simultaneously. Rhodes, no matter how much he tried later, was never able to get the sequence exactly straight in his mind.

He saw the flash again in the grove of Ames, that was for sure. He remembered a few willow leaves and maybe part of a branch falling, and he was pretty sure that he heard the two rifle shots. What he remembered most, though, was the way that Bill Tomkins’s head just seemed to sort of come apart, and how Tomkins dropped like a rock, rolled a couple of times, and came to a stop in the water, with the red stain seeming quite brown as it widened around him.

Rhodes was up over the tank dam and running toward the grove of trees almost before his eyes had time to take in the details of Tomkins’s death. He ran through the chest-high Johnson grass without a thought of either cuts or chiggers. He didn’t break any land speed records, but when he arrived he could hear that someone else was still scrambling around in there.

Sounds in the woods can be deceptive, and Rhodes paused to listen. He wasn’t sure just which direction to take, so he plunged straight in, drawing his.38 as he did so. A twig lashed across his open eye, and tears began to flow. “Damn,” he said, stumbling a bit as his foot caught in a thorn-covered vine that grew along the ground. He put the pistol back in its holster and used his hands to help clear his way.

While the grove was not a forest in any sense of the word, it was nevertheless dense, a reminder of what all the country around Thurston must have been like at one time, before the cotton farmers moved in and cleared all the land. Or most of the land. Occasionally, someone would have more space than he needed, or someone would just happen to like a little woods. In such cases a stand of trees would remain, and even an acre or two of trees could seem like a forest when a man was trying to run through it.