you’re going to wash this stuff off of you.”
That sounded fine so far. “And then what?”
“Smuggle you back in the house while it still sleeps.”
“I’ll be soaking wet.”
“Well, that can be explained a bit better than whatever in the world this is all about. How did that god-awful buzzard get up here?”
She stared at him “Buzzard?”
He paused a while, only his eyes moving. “A buzzard the like of which I never seen was up here with you.”
She shook her head. In a whisper, she said, “I don’t know how I got up here.”
James whistled low. “Come on, then. Help me.”
He bent and handed her the Roy Boy. The horse liniment came in a white ceramic crock, heavy as an old merchant jar, with a ringed hasp and gasket lid. When she clamped it down, a solid smack shut off the blazing vapor. She stretched an arm out, and the whiteness of the liniment intensified the paleness of her skin. “It burns like Hell.”
“Well, it’s on the front and sleeves of your nightshirt, too. Be careful.” From her stomach to the middle of her chest, the cotton of the weskit was shining and rumpled. “At least you kept it mostly on your arms and legs.” He gathered the shotgun and flashlight.
“It’s on you, too. It’s on my palms. Why? Uncle James?”
“Maybe growing pains. Take that sorry old lamp.” He nudged her toward the stairs. “Were you having a Charley horse? Do you get those?”
“All the time. Hey. Where’s this buzzard now?”
“Dead. Let’s move.” Downstairs, he stuck the flashlight at the groom’s pantry. “Get that Castile soap. Shove it in my overalls here. Both bars.” He leaned forward so she could shove two waxy blocks of Castile soap in the front pocket of his overalls.
“Would all the fireworks make it roost in here?” Hettienne asked.
“Keep your voice down,” he warned. “Never seen one like it. He was all black with a gray head. You could see right through the nostril in his nasty beak. Look, we’ve got to get you to the river and washed and smuggled back in the house. Crabby-ass Simon could lose his mind over this. Or your father or poor mother will.”
- 7 -
Near the bridge on Buffalo Road, a gravel bar spread out in the water far enough from the house for splashing not to be heard. There the water ran swift and warm and deep.
In the moonlight, she could tell she must be a jolt to behold. With her hair fallen and wearing the white, smeared weskit, she was like a faerie girl in some nightmare. She could see the streaks of the same Roy Boy on James’s front and on his face.
As the two of them approached, a nova of light arched above the riverbed, and voices carried through the trees. James pressed a hand to her back. “I don’t know who’s there, darling,” he whispered. “Let’s sneak a look. It’s going to be . . . all right.”
They crouched down in brush at the berm just before the land descended to the river bottom, and there they lay flat as partisans in ambuscade. Down in the riverbed, a loud male voice was trying to tell some story, but he kept backtracking and getting tangled and confused. Two women’s voices, one grating and whining, goaded him.
James strained his neck and peered over the berm, and Hettienne edged up beside him. Basted like a roasting fowl, she felt the humidity swarm her, and with the river so near, the air could almost be sipped. Her skin outside was broiling but inside was humming like sheets of lake ice in winter. If she had suffered a charley horse, it was long gone.
Down at the gravel bar by the flicker of a bonfire hulked two soldiers, unarmed, no helmets, no caps, but in khaki uniforms, and two floozies, everyone drinking beer from the bottle. The women had plump, bare white arms with tattoos on them. Both were smoking cigarettes.
“They’re right where I wanted us to wash,” James whispered in her ear.
Just outside the halo of light waited headlamps and the grill to an olive drab Willys-Overland. The soldier telling the story was very stout. He staggered toward the griping girls.
“All right. All right.” He raised his beer bottle above his head of black hair. “Let me finish the story.” The women quieted down. “While crossing the bridge, the man either saw or heard something.”
One of the women took her cigarette from her gleaming lips, puckered, then sputtered the loudest raspberry fart Hettienne had ever heard. Roars of laughter from all but the heavyset soldier.
Finally they all calmed down. The heavyset soldier started again. “When he reached the other side, he turned around and he goes back to investigate. He either stopped his car or the auto stalled on the bridge; no one is sure.”
“But ’cept for him who is driving it, jerk-off,” one of the women protested in a ringing Ozarks accent. “Who the story is about. He’s real sure what his crappy car did.”
“The next morning,” the heavyset soldier hushed her. Once she shut up, he leaned over as if bowing, and this made him seem even rounder. In the orange of the bonfire, his buzz-cut hair shone bluish, as if someone had stippled it onto his scalp with a mechanical pencil. “The next morning, he was found lying on his stomach. His head, severed from his body, was just a few feet away. Beside the head: a bloody hatchet!”
“And a note from General Dwight David Eisenhower that says, ‘Greetings! Private McGowan, you are a dickless moron.’” This was the other soldier.
“But that’s why it’s called Hatchet Man’s Bridge,” whined the heavyset McGowan, pointing at the one-lane bridge over Sac River.
James turned, lowered his chin to his chest, and was laughing into his forearm. Hettienne hunkered down behind the berm as well and bit her lip. “Oh, Jesus,” James whispered, holding his chest. They overheard more ridiculing and arguing, and then all four trespassers had at a song from before the war, “Hooray for Hollywood!” They sang abysmally, often in just vowels.
“They have a lot more beer,” James whispered. “They aren’t leaving.” James looked at her with his forehead smooth. He pulled at his bottom lip. “Say, we look pretty awful. What if we both stood up and walked down to the water like spooky ghosties?” When she did not react, he patted the shotgun. “And this is with us.”
Hettienne lifted the sticky weskit and examined her stomach, touched her arms where her skin transformed from its usual pale to a star-bright white. “I do look like . . .”
“Like Hell,” he whispered, his eyebrows bobbing. “A banshee.” His face was plenty white and gray, too. And in the overalls, smeared white, he was a sight.
“Just stand up straight and tall beside me in the light,” he whispered. “Trust me. They have never seen anything like the way you look right now.”
She blinked at him. Then at last she nodded. “Okay, then. But we got to make this like a drama, Uncle James,” she whispered.
He nodded at her, his eyes
