John Hawkes: The Beetle Leg

He undressed in front of the open door and by the smudged light of the hurricane lamp. Off came the vest with a careful crick of the arms, picking the buttons, dropping another bit of white cloth to the floor, and there was no curiosity for the place upon whose husks and hides they had slept so long switching their faces. With an old maid agility he skipped into the nightshirt. He left the light smoking for his sons. He tested the bed. And, with low white neckline and tremulous drawstrings, thin loose cuffs and deckled folds, fluttering like a small moth, Cap kicked off his slippers, lay flat, drew the blanket to his chin. Arms straight at his side he slept, waiting, eyes boring through the roof.

My place.

“Shall we let him go,” shouting above the engine, “or take him to the hollow?”

“Put me down!” And Camper watched the crusty truck jog from sight. Alone, dun flies dropping from his collar, he began to run toward the dormitory where his wife — wet trouser legs ran faster— had met the fiends.

“I told you to keep that shade drawn. I told you.” Even now they might be circling for another look, the amphibiotic eyes. She sat by the child’s cot side, feet tightly together, hands folded in her lap. She shook her head. The boy lay on his sheet of white canvas, without fever or chill, the short body draped from top to foot in the translucent gauze of a mosquito net. It clove to the pointed face and thinly hid the open lips. The snake’s breath hung about the body.

Camper went to the other cot, stood over it, reached beneath the pillow for the revolver. “Pearl handle,” he thought turning it over, still seeing the child’s face cut from stone outlined under the white stocking mask, “it ought to have a pearl handle.” Fumbling, for useless protection, he stuffed the pistol butt-down in his pocket.

And at last the woman got up, crossed the room, and pressed herself against the open window. For Lou the road to the hills was cut with barbed barricades and red lanterns, or through hundreds of miles of shrub and sand, was stopgapped at little towns. There, become the possession of local officers, it slowed cars to a standstill and subjected travelers to the arm of a wry sheriff. And the gritting voice, sharp jowls and eyes picked over the bodies of those who fled. The driver was taken from his car, the deputy posted with his wife.

“Why, you ain’t from around here! You’ve brought that woman just a piece too far, mister.”

The deputy kept a yellow stained hand on the door. “Lady, if he ain’t really your husband, it’s too late now. And if you ain’t always been as pretty as you say, God help you.”

Stocks greasy from unshaved cheeks, rubber padded rifle butts and hair triggers met any couple fool enough to show their faces in that hell’s place twice. “Mister, if you ever made any money off her, you better give it here.”

The deputy was the tallest and craned to the window: “Well, then, what about you, lady?”

When again she looked it was as if her face was on the other side of the screen, solemnly her nails scratched a waiting tattoo on the wire mesh. She whispered and for a moment he could not move. A soft, unfamiliar, lucid condemnation: “Take me out of here.”

The gasoline burner sidled down the shale. Brake bands smoked, springs lightly bent, probing. Only the sound of changing gears and an airy pumping of the engine, the flapping of a pulmotor, followed it through the darkness. The mechanical mule felt hoof by hoof for the running scent, balking downward through the young everglade.

“Where are they?”

“Fu’ther.”

Bohn himself sat at the wheel. “If I don’t get a shot, Sheriff,” stamping the pedals with big boots, “I’ll be coming in to Clare.” The truck dropped around cover of a boulder, descended into the bog. Three men peered through the isinglass with itching fingers.

“Kill most anything tonight.” And after a silence he muttered, “Bound to. In Saggitarius.”

“Keep going, Bohn,” said Luke.

In the back of the hunting truck, lolling against the cab, Wade cradled the weapons across his lap, and into each, gazing up at the black heat or turning to look through splintered slats, attracted by some flipping tail under the wheels, he carelessly inserted two twelve gauge bulging shells, the lumps of explosive wadding. “I ain’t going to blow my head off,” he thought and waved away with fat hands the longest barrels. The shells had golden, corroded crowns, rusty paper shanks. “Is this one here fixed, or isn’t it?” His long hide shoelaces danced on the wood, he clapped a hand on the ammunition box.

The driver, now full of the smells of duck congealed canvas, allowed himself a mouthful of the tar-layered plug for the better taste of game. Gasoline, tobacco, death, he felt the satisfied warning in his groin.

And Luke: “Bohn, bite me off a piece.”

Down they came with switching sensitive ears and a mania for scouring the crabbed hiding lands below the dam, rucksacks ready for the first bag. The loose disconnected eyes of the truck turned one way then the other, goaded over the fresh foot holes.

“I didn’t bring no carbines. Buckshot’ll do.”

Haunch up, falling haunch, they nuzzled the beating bush, silent again as the suckless engine geegawed cautiously into the hollow: that intense silence of set jaw and frown, waiting to pick up the scratching of a bird’s ear. Strain, and they perspired, three abreast on the front seat, lips tasting the far-off fur. Sand splattered over the lead wrapped wire through a hole in the floor boards. Wade carried peaceably his load of metal cordwood. He did not like noise.

The gray truck chugged to a stop before Eve’s slimy pool, an unshielded dip of water in the waves of earth that, as far as they could see, appeared to be covered with palm leaves, broad, clay-veined shadows. Bohn climbed down, filled the canteen, tasted the water. The back of his head filled the window, one foot cocked on the mended running board. “Oil,” speaking over his shoulder, spitting, “they come this way all right.”

“We’ll set here and wait for them,” said Luke.

But once again they prowled forward, scattered abandoned nests and crossed small bodies of quicksand. Bohn pushed the truck further into the squeaking rushes.

Rum breath, saddle pants, and rank signs through the forest of needles; they did their hunting at night, dragged through roadless quagmires, and trundled under the dusky bluffs of Mistletoe. The black face hunters hooked rosined fingers in their belts, stared about bitterly for the undiscovered lairs. Suddenly, through the briars, they heard the coughing of another engine.

“There,” Bohn pulled the brake, “that’s them!”

“Switch on the lights.” And through the whorls of milky undergrowth they saw the troop of Red Devils on little horned motorcycles.

“You shoot,” cried Wade, “I ain’t going to shoot!”

“Load them guns.”

They fell from the cab and with ragged trouser bottoms, sealed grins, clamored over the sidings and dropped by Wade. Shells spilled under their feet.

“Hit them now,” Bohn pillowed the butt into his shoulder, drew down his head, “or never.”

They fired. From the parapet of the truck a tinkling cloud of shot landed among the vandal herd, rock salt into the buttocks of cornered apple thieves. In the headlights and streaming of the muskets, one motorcycle, as its rider fled, turned to flame under the little seat, reared, contorted into a snake embrace, and fell writhing in fire. A honking set up from the handless horn as the rubber bulb shrank in the heat.

Flat shells, smoke, recoil filled the truck, one side ablaze with the spitting triple battery. Bohn’s cheek was blue and red, a great wattle under the punishment of the gun, his eye steely down the barrel. In his corner, taking aim, Luke trained upon the dancing throng and with pinched mouth, bile rising from his stomach, held his fire.