Chapter 1 by Owner

Author:Owner [Owner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-11-13T17:00:29+00:00

Chapter 16

Next morning I waited in my sleeping bag until Trudy and Howard were off to work. I didn't want to look either of them in the eye. Didn't want to see the look of disappointment she would give me, the look of pain Howard would have. He probably woke up in the middle of the night, found her gone, and thought we were out banging one another silly until the wee hours of the morning.

I think Trudy would have wanted him to think that. I wish that was what had happened. I wish I had never learned the truth about Cheep.

Someone had bought a few groceries the day before, so Leonard pan-toasted a couple slices of bread and we spread them with butter and had some bad leftover coffee the texture of syrup.

Outside the day was cold, but still clear. We drove to the bottoms and began our game plan.

What we did was simple. We drove down the main bottom road until we saw a cutoff we thought the car could handle, and we took it.

Sometimes the cutoffs circled back to the main road, or met up with another little road.

When a road dead-ended at the woods or river, or was just too muddy to drive, we got out of the car and walked awhile, hoping I'd see something familiar that would lead to a tributary or creek or some little outflow of water that might be the home of the Iron Bridge.

Mostly we walked and Leonard cussed the brush and rotten logs we stepped over. I think he did it to irritate me. I'd never known the woods to bother him before. I think he wanted to remind me he thought this whole thing was stupid and he was humoring me.

I tried to ignore him and listen to the cries of the birds and the splashing sounds coming from the river. Those sounds made me think of great fishing days and channel cats, catfish they called the trout of the Sabine. Gunmetal gray, lean and graceful with pointed heads and wide, forked tails. And there were the bigger cats that swam along the bottom of the river or laid up between the huge roots of water-based trees. Some called them bottom cats and others called them flatheads. They were big, brownish rascals, sometimes fifteen feet long, weighing up to a hundred pounds, narrow-tailed, with a wide head and a mouth big enough to suck up a child. And there were stories that they had.

Certainly there were gars in there that had bitten children and pulled swimming dogs under for their afternoon meals. They didn't call the big ones alligator gar for nothing. Six feet long, lean and vicious, they were the barracudas of fresh water, beasts with an angry racial memories of lost prehistoric seas.

And now and then, there was the real McCoy, the alligator. I had never known them to be plentiful along this stretch of the Sabine, and growing up I had seen only one in the river, and that one from a distance.

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