The Local Hunt

When Steven and Donnie returned with the supplies, Flynn was pacing the camp in a fever. The other boys had kept Montgomery’s promise not to talk about anything mysterious or exciting until the two had returned. It was torture, though. To burn off the impatience, they held a rope climbing contest. For the first time in his life, Flynn climbed hand over hand for more than three pulls. He actually made it to the high branch that held the rope, using hands only. Even with his new strength, though, he had been no match for the small and wiry Montgomery, who ascended the rope like he was part helium.

Flynn also participated in a contest of who could jump the farthest from the rusty roof of an ancient pickup truck. The truck was  a dome of rust, partly sunken in the earth, with a tree as thick as a boy growing crookedly from its windowless windshield. In this contest, Flynn was the clear winner by many yards.

“Here they come,” bellowed the square-faced Boyle in his pained voice.

“Gimme gimme!” said Flynn, helping himself to the brown paper bag with both hands. Inside were two sandwiches and two bottles of pop.

“I think she knew it was for him,” said Steven. “She threw in the extra sandwich free.”

“That Arlene’s all right,” said Montgomery. “Where’s the first aid?”

Flynn fumbled with the wax-paper wrapping of the first sandwich—tucked together by tight triangles of folding—and quickly had half the sandwich in his mouth. He took up one of the bottles and roared through his mouthful of food, fiercely indicating the bottle cap to his audience, who, as usual, were watching his every move.

“I’ll get it for you,” said Dooley. He took the soda bottle to the truck, worked it like a lever at some crevice or fixture, and returned it to him, vaporing a little from its open mouth. Flynn had gotten some of the sandwich down his throat by then, and he poured orange soda in after it. The carbonation burned, but he didn’t care. He was so hungry and thirsty he was almost out of his mind.

There was something about this country town, or about time traveling, that was amplifying his bodily responses. His running speed, his jumping distance, and now his hypoglycemia, all were ramped up.

He gobbled down the rest of the sandwich and chased it down with the remaining soda.

How had he thought one sandwich and one soda would suffice?

“My appetite, too,” he thought. “Twice as big as normal.”

He was instantly at the second sandwich, and Dooley was already handing him the second opened bottle.

Flynn tried to say thank you, but his mouth was crammed so full he only managed to spit bread.

“Don’t mention it,” said the droll Dooley.

The boys howled at that one.

His jaws ached from such fast chewing. For once the whole gang was silent, sprawled and leaning in various positions of comfort to watch this performance of wolflike eating.

Their faces were so rapt and unposed—they looked so frankly and truly curious—that Flynn found himself blurting out the fundamental fact about himself. He wanted to tell these friends his great secret, and it felt like this time he’d be able to get the words out.

“What?” one of them said.

“Ine fuh duh foo-shoe,” he repeated, but it was costing him too many morsels of half-chewed bread.

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” said Boyle, for once matching Dooley in dryness. The boys rolled and kicked.

Flynn shook his head, swallowing, and once again poured a half bottle of burning soda down his throat.

His jaws and lips and throat were so fatigued he wasn’t sure he would be able to form words, but he felt an urgency to finally share his secret. That urge had been scratching at him the entire time he waited for his meal. The light-headedness seemed to unlock his throat the way the mad eating had.

“I’m finally going to get it out!” he told himself. He held up a finger to let his audience know he had something to say. They were all silent and leaning forward when he finally opened his mouth to speak and—he began choking.

It was his throat’s most blatant refusal yet. “What kind of effing liar’s complex is this!” he asked himself, and then, when he had finished the choking, he could only manage to say, with tears in his eyes, “Frick it to hell, anyway!”

The boys were still waiting. He shrugged wordlessly, pointing to his throat.There was a general moan of disappointment.

“Well, can we tell him now?” asked Boyles. “If he’s going to keep faking us out?”

“Tell him what?” asked Steven.

“About the vampire,” said Dolley. “He was very interested in that.”

“You said you wouldn’t talk about—.”

“We didn’t, Donnie,” said Montgomery. “We waited for you guys to get back.”

“For real?”

“Of course.”

“I’m somewhat impressed,” said Donnie.

“Ok, tell me about this guy,” Flynn said, his voice working again.

“Why do you care so much about it?” asked Dooley.

“It sounds more interesting than your other exploits. Lost cats and things.”

“We never said anything about lost cats.”

“Whatever. I’m a big fan of vampire fiction. Lay it on me.”

The story was told in five voices, with lots of corrections and acting out, and all out of sequence, but it finally came together for him.

* * *

It had taken place several months before, in early spring. The boys were still in school then, so most of the adventure had taken place on two weekends. It started when an old maid of the town, Lucille Schoppenhorst, had started telling people how her Russel Terrier, Molly, was lately bring her with dead birds. Presenting them on her nice living room rug. It was clearly someone tormenting here in advance of even worse things, Lucille said. For a full week these complaints attracted no more attention than Lucille’s complaints and suspicions ever did. With her it was always something, quite often something she could only tell in whispers, asking each person she shared it with to keep it just between themselves and her: she just wanted someone else to know, in case she was found some morning with her throat slit, or tied to her big tree, or missing entirely, nothing left of her but Molly and her seven cats.

By the weekend, though, some people had noticed that Lucille wasn’t enjoying her forebodings of torture and kidnapping as much as usual. She was genuinely upset. That Saturday morning she marched into Frank and Anna’s Uptown Tavern while many of the local men were having their breakfast and coffee.

“There!” she cried. “I’m not imagining it, and someone has to do something about it.”

Flung back in time and physically unable to speak the truth of his origins, Flynn has gone on a rampage — in the course of which he discovers surprises physical powers. Taken in by a gang of admiring younger boys, he gets what could be his first hint of hope as the boys tell him a story of strange goings on in their isolated Midwestern town in the 1970s.

In the bucket were two dead house wrens and a male bluebird. One of the old farmers picked one up and worked it a little with his thumb and index finger. He did the same to the other two. The birds had been dead between six and ten hours, he pronounced. No one questioned him. If he hadn’t known it was true, he wouldn’t have said it. A lot of the old timers knew things like that about the woods and nature, and some of the young people did, too, though a long sight from what the boys of the old days would have known.

But there was something peculiar. The rigid little bodies weren’t completely rigid. The farmer held one in front of him and shook it up and down. The head flopped loosely.

“These birds had their necks broke,” the old farmer had pronounced. “And that’s a hell of a note.”

It sent a tremor of shock through the town. This was more than a mystery and more than mischief. It was meanness. The people of Augusta didn’t want to think they had among them a person who would do such a thing. People might shoot sparrows and starlings for being pests, or even shoot one of the nicer kinds of birds to try out a new gun or slingshot, but to kill any bird with your own hands, that was just killing to be killing.

It became the main topic of the town right away, and one of the first things decided was that the bird killings weren’t being done to give old Lucille fits. No one could have predicted that Mollie would bring them home like that. This was just bird killing for its own sake. And Mollie was a roamer. It could have been done anywhere in a five-mile radius.

The people who considered themselves the best thinkers in Augusta went to work puzzling it out—over breakfast, lunch and supper at Frank and Anna’s, over soda and ice cream at the uptown store, over sandwiches down at Arlene’s, over beers and coffee, from one driver’s-side window to the next, even at home across kitchen tables. Everybody wanted to be the one to figure it out.

The boys of the town were naturally drawn to the mystery, and believed they had the best chance of solving it. What they lacked in education and old-time knowledge of nature and so on they made up by being two-legged versions of Molly. They were boys. The would go anywhere, sniff anything, could sit for hours in the dark listening for something scary, if they had to. They often did those things anyway.

Naturally it became a contest between the two gangs. The uptown boys seemed to have the advantage, at first, because Lucille was an uptown resident, and that’s where most of the town lived. Those boys could get more suggestions and clues. The downtown boys, in most people’s minds, were the town’s riffraff. They lived in the oldest and smallest houses on the hillside and down in the bottoms. The lower town was as much woods as a municipality, and that made it hard for most people to think of the inhabitants there as town residents at all, but more as country people living awfully close to town, hanging out at the edge of civilization like coyotes or stray dogs. But not rats. It would be a rare person in August mean enough to call the lower-town people rats. And there was some brotherhood between the adults of the two parts of town. They worked together, went to church together, volunteered in the fire department and town festivals together. For the most part it was a town of friendly people. But when it came to a contest, each part of the town naturally rooted for its own.

So while the uptown boys got busy asking the grownups for clues and guesses, the downtown boys settled in to come up with clues and guesses of their own.

The first idea was to follow Molly, on the theory that if she’d found a dead bird once, she’d naturally go that place again looking for more. They tried that for half a day. When they tried to follow Molly, she would run on ahead, but only where she guessed the boys were planning to go: so it turned out they were only following themselves.

“Molly ain’t going anywhere, and we’re going with her.”

The next try was to tie a cowbell onto the terrier’s collar, sit around pretending to sleep, then when the dog wandered off for lack of interest, follow her quietly from a distance.

What they found was that once Molly got started roaming, the only way to keep up was to storm along pell mell, making so much noise the dog doubled back to see what the fun was. And then they were back to nothing.

“That dog’s no more help than a tadpole,” said Monty. “We need a better plan.”

It was the mayor’s son who came up with the answer. “I think it’s those businessmen out on the highway,” he said.

“Why would a bunch of rich businessmen go around killing birds?”

“Why would anyone?” I just think this is something we never had until lately, and so are they. It has to be them.”

No one saw that as strong detective logic, but it got them thinking about the businessmen. “They are a strange bunch,” said Boyle.

“My dad stopped and helped them with a flat once,” said Steven. “They couldn’t even change a tire.”

“I heard one of them came in Peters’ store and asked for coffee beans.”

“Coffee beans!”

It was looking bad for the businessmen already. Donnie spoke up next.

“I never told you guys this, but one time I was knocking June bugs off the screen door at the store—”

“You told me about that.”

“You told me, too.”

“I mean I never told everybody!”

“Go ahead, Donnie. What happened?”

“I’m flicking the screen, popping the June bugs off from last night, and here comes Clarence the Toad up out of that hole in the step. So I got quiet to see if toads eat June bugs.”

“Of course they do.”

“No way.”

“Well, one of those businessmen comes along on the porch outside. He doesn’t see me inside, because I’m behind the screen. Right? He stops and stands there, watching Clarence, too. All at once he snaps his fingers on both hands, like that. And his throat starts moving, like a chicken clucking, but not making any sound. I look at Clarence again, and he’s dead.”

“What do you mean, dead?”

“How do you know he was dead?”

“His eyes were half open. He was kinda flattened down. So then the businessman goes like this. Watch.”

Donnie took a slow, long inhale through his nose, holding it for about five seconds, then exhaled, sighing with pleasure.

“He did that?”

“Holy smokes.”

“Wow.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. I got out of there.”

“The back door?”

“Yes.”

“Did he see you?”

“No way, man. I stayed down behind the shelves until I got out the door. He never saw me me at all.”

“What if we asked old Peters, ‘Who was that kid looking at me through the screen?”

It was a new thought for Donnie. “Thanks a lot, Boyle. Now I’ve got that to worry about. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you guys.”

“Did you go back later and check on Clarence?”

“Of course, you idiot. When I heard the Cadillac leave, I came around around, and Clarence was gone.”

“Gone!”

“Maybe he went back in his hole.”

“How could he if he was dead?”

“We don’t know he was dead.”

“I know he was dead. Have you seen Clarence lately? In the past couple weeks?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“I bet he’s still around.”

“I bet he isn’t!”

So that story was inconclusive, but it got the boys thinking deeper about the men from the city, remembering other strange details—the brand of cigarettes they smoked, the kind of shoes they wore, their double earphones. Instead of just one earphone when they had a radio in their pocket, they had an earphone in each ear. And the wires were white, not tan. “Whoever heard of that?”

“No one except spies, probably.”

So it was agreed: the businessman were suspects. But suspects was only a formality. Every boy among them was sure they’d put their finger on the culprits. The only thing left was to prove it.

Doing that would make them heroes. It would save the birds. It might even make the town get rid of those dressed-up strangers who were always laughing to themselves and making faces about Augusta not having coffee beans.

“We’ve gotta get those guys, pure and simple,” said Monty.

It was now Saturday afternoon. They had hopes of solving the case by supper. That way they would have all day Sunday to enjoy their fame as town heroes. It meant they had to get busy fast. They hadn’t been home for lunch yet, but there was no time for it now. Off they charged on their bicycles, up the rising road to the cemetery and the highway above the town. They turned right on the high road, pedaling along what was almost the highest point in the county, with the fields first rising above it on one side, then on the other, like a topsy turvy circus ride. A quarter mile along they passed a high brick wall that ran along a great, rising lawn to their left. The wall itself was only 7 feet high, but that was high enough to hide everything beyond it but sky. The wall was broken only by a high stately gate of black iron, beyond which an expensive asphalt driveway went up a grassy hill that was always kept mowed. Just over the crest of that hill glimpsed for a second the impressive roof and top part of one slightly gold wall, the Old Stone Barn, the county’s great architectural landmark: once easily viewed by passersby rounding this curve of the road, but now kept almost completely hidden.

“Bad guys!”

“Creeps!”

“We’re gonna get you!”

Then the road plunged crazily down, white-knuckle steep and curvy, the air quickly turning cooler. At the bottom, the road made a long right-hand curve that always came like a surprise, going through a tunnel of trees, then starting upward again. At the bottom point they crossed a crash-chipped cement bridge, and right at the other end they braked their bikes hard and veered off into the weeds, and dangerously down a bank, into a jungle of low branches and brush, still slowing down. The boys knew this piece of the county almost as well as they knew the woods, creeks and cliffs inside the city limits. They didn’t have the range of a roving Russel terrier, but this place a mile from the peak of their mountain town wasn’t new to them. It was, however, almost the outside reach of their explorations in this direction.

The gang dismounted while their bikes were still rolling, and ran them on bouncing wheels to a partly bare place beside the creek where the weeds around them were very tall, with square stalks, the only place they knew of with weeds like that. They dropped their bikes and themselves and lay there gasping for air. When they could almost breathe normally again, Monty said, “Okay, men. In we go.” They rose into line behind him, ducking forward into an instantly different kind of grove, tangled and thorny. Although they heard a car pass nearby and slightly above them, they were as hidden as if they were underground. They emerged from this into an open area with a brown pool of still water, looking sick and yellow where the sun hit it. In front of them rose a cement wall with a flat top 30 feet above. It was the bridge they had crossed. As a pick-up rumbled overhead, they could see it’s roof and the very top of its passenger-wide window. A few inches taller and they wouldn’t have been invisible.

Coming out of the wall was a large round pipe, and beside it, screwed into the concrete, a black sign with white lettering.

—————————

NO

TRESPASSING

—————————

The sign was still new, put there a year before when the businessmen from the city had bought the old stone barn and its land. They’d put those signs all up and down the road and through the woods and were almost the first reason no one around Augusta liked them.

“Okay, no jackass fooling around,” said their captain. “These jokers probably got police dogs, and rifles. We’re going on private property. That means they can kill us, and we’d  be the ones that was wrong. Donnie and Steven, I’m talking to you especially.”

Both boys nodded vigorously. They knew if anyone was likely to foul up a mission, it was them. And they knew how high the stakes were.

“We’re looking for signs of a path,” Montgomery Moss continued. “It might be plain as day, it might be almost nothing. But them city clowns got a habit. Maybe every day, maybe every week—‘Come on fellas, let’s go kill some birds.’ They ain’t thinking some smart boys’ll be out here trying to catch ‘em. So I’m betting they’re careless. Going out the same way each time, leaving a trail. So we got to look for something regular, but not regular for the woods. Does everybody got that?”

There were silent nods all around. Their eyes were wide with the kind of attention fear can snap people into.

“Okay. Quiet and sharp,” said Monty, and led the way with a stick he had selected along the way. They went around the pool, scooted sideways along the footing of the bridge, and swung themselves into the big steel culvert, where a lost handhold could mean falling backward into the brown water. Then through the echoing pipe, straddling the slimy trickle down the middle, ducking to miss any clotted web that Monty had not batted down with his stick. When they re-emerged in daylight on the other side, they felt as if they’d been hunching underground for an hour. But it was not a pure relief. They were lawbreakers now—one of the worst kind they knew of. They were trespassers.

And from now on they spoke in whispers. When they conferred, they moved together in a huddle.

“We’re dong this for Lucille and for the town,” Montgomery Moss whispered to his man. “This ain’t for fun. We got to remember that.”

“I know, but let’s stop yapping and do it,” whispered Boyles.

And the boys trooped forward, up a creek that was alternately rocky and muddy, here and there a pool that hadn’t shrunk completely yet. They walked with their eyes to the ground, rarely speaking, hoping after every turn of the creek that their luck was about to change. They kept their voices low and their heads down and they thought about every step, avoiding dry leaves and sticks. In half an hour they had gone as far they could. Ahead of them was a forbidding thing, three barbed wires crossing the creek at three heights—knee, stomach and head. Ragged, awful things hung from the barbs as warnings. None of the boys went close enough to confirm their belief that under the leaves and mud applied by the last high water were the skin and bones of animals, and possibly the partial remains of human beings, most likely boys. It was the property boundary of old Dutch Dillman, the local handyman, gravedigger and warlock.

“I don’t reckon them businessmen would come up this far,” said Monty. “We must’ve missed something. We got to look again.”

“I’m starving,” said Steven.

“Forget about solving this stupid mystery,” said Donnie. “Let’s just go cash in some soda bottles for ice cream.”

“It’s not stupid just because we’re hungry,” said Boyles. “I want to catch those guys.”

“We are going to catch them,” said Monty. “Look extra sharp this time. It’ll be too dark to look a third time.”

So the boys retracted their journey. When they were halfway back to their bikes, they sat for a rest. So much careful walking and continuous tension had worn them down. Because the creek made a long, slow curve around the base of the hill, the old stone barn had always been hovering above them, up atop the steep wooded hill, visible at times behind the tall tree trunks, dark against the blue sky.

They chose a stony area to rest in, wriggling themselves a seat that was comfortable only for a minute before they had to wriggle again. They were all hungry by now. They had put in a full day of chasing, marching and scrutinizing, and none of them had even had breakfast, in their rush to save the town. Montgomery Moss could see his troops were on the verge of quitting. He realized that he, too, had been working in a half-brained way. The job they had taken on was as hard as the work most adults did, even if it might look to anyone but a kid like playing. Yes, they were somewhat having fun, but it wasn’t easy fun.

“Let’s use our heads, dangit,” said Monty in whispers. “What are we looking for?”

“Footprints.”

“A trail.”

“Anything that isn’t regular.”

“What’s that mean exactly,” Monty said. “We got to say it, so our eyes it know when they see it.”

“A newspaper.”

“Don’t be ignorant!”

“What else would a city fellow have? Or do? Or forget to do?”

“A radio.”

“Car keys.”

“A briefcase.”

“Now that’s ignorant.”

“What else? Keep going.”

“A coffee cup. Those guys are always drinking coffee.”

“A paper coffee cup. I’ve seen them throw them away before.”

“What else?”

“A map of the world.”

“What?”

“Just keep going.”

“A cigarette butt?” asked Steven.

“Sure,” said Monty. “Good one, Steven.”

Steven beamed.

“What else?”

There were more ideas, but soon they ran out. But Steven was still deep in thought.

“What else you got, Steven?”

“I took more credit than I should have,” he said, his eyes down.

“What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t exactly think of a cigarette butt. I saw one.”

“What?”

“When?”

“You idiot!”

“Where? Can you find it again?”

“Sure. I mean, I hope so.”

There ensued another half hour of hunting back and forth along one stretch of the creek, everyone following Steven as he alternately rushed ahead, then stopped and thought.

“This is worse than following Molly.”

Suddenly, with a flash of insight like Sherlock Holmes, Steven brightened. “I remember now,” he said. “It was when Dooley was calling Donnie a turkey.”

“That could be ten different places.”

“Nope,” said Steven proudly, “it was when we were by that big root that comes out of the bank.”

“So why didn’t you just say that?”

Steven shrugged. “That’s how I think.”

“If you want to call it that,” said Boyle.

Filled with new hope, the boys raced back to the spot Steven had pinpointed. While Steven hunted for the cigarette butt, Monty and Dooley conferred privately, dashed into the woods on opposite sides, then rejoined the others.

“Okay,” whispered Monty, “we hit pay dirt. This is where they cross. Dooley found where they come down from the barn. They step down on that big root, scuffing it smooth, they cross here, go up that bank, and bingo, go along the game path.”

“Let’s go,” said Boyle.

“What about the cigarette butt?”

“That cigarette butt already did its job. A quick cheer for Steven.” There were pats on the back, some quiet laughter, then the gang followed Monty out of the creek, on a good solid trail at last.