Chapter Four
~
Corey watched Crandall Lewis as he spoke to his father. Crandall’s father was a tall, upper-middle-aged man with white hair. He drove the tractor up to the level section of the yard where Corey waited. They were both going to show him how to change a pin, which held the bush hog to the back of the tractor. Corey was going to mow for them while they were at church, his repayment for borrowing their truck.
Crandall, or Cooter, bobbed his head forward as he spoke; each bob of his head was a punctuation mark. Corey had noticed that even though Cooter now lived in western Illinois – having moved from Kentucky at the beginning of the fall semester -- his Kentucky drawl was heavier than usual at times, depending upon the topic of discussion. He sometimes played it like a musical instrument, accentuating certain measures for effect and soft-pedaling others when he thought it necessary. Around his father, Cooter was pure hayseed.
Cooter had decided to give up his apartment near the campus and take over -- with the help of his father who had followed him from Kentucky -- the operation of the farm. He continued to teach English composition at Henderson County Community College and was even scheduled to replace a retiring instructor, in the coming spring semester, as the instructor of an introductory psychology course. Before Cooter had majored in English in graduate school, he had studied psychology as an undergraduate.
Fifteen minutes later, Corey again sat in the cab of the truck, clutching the large wheel. “We didn’t get the tractor pin loose,” he said to himself, as if the invisible movie camera were still trained on him. The pin had been sheared off so much that the father and son could not extricate it to replace it. Cooter’s father had to go to the church to sing in the choir, and he wanted Cooter to go with him. They said that he could either use the power saw to cut some wood or pick up the few remaining vegetables that had not been damaged by the early frost or roaming deer.
Corey turned the truck just enough to look back through the driver’s window at the farmhouse. He stared at the nondescript structure – examining the faded walls that Cooter needed to paint, the cellar door that opened upward, the curtained downstairs windows, and, finally, the upstairs windows.
“What?” He jumped.
“Bleeet!” His elbow struck the rim of the truck horn, causing marauding scavenger birds to scatter from the field next to the gravel road.
Something like a huge bird had fluttered its dark wings on the roof. A figure had moved and something – he would swear it was a face – looked down at him with red eyes.
He panted heavily as if he had been lifting weights. Maybe it was nothing – just an illusion created by shadows of tree limbs unfolding in the breeze. Maybe it was nothing, or maybe – he continued to pant energetically – it was something trying to communicate with him.
He turned to face forward in the truck cab and shifted gears. Somewhere along here is the dirt path that leads away from the gravel road to the pastures, he thought to himself, trying to breathe deeply and calmly. I’m trying to remember where the vegetables are.
He steered the truck from the road that dwindled down into a path; it bucked and jumped as the tires hit huge ruts. Hang on, he thought. The front bumper struck the ground, and the grill flattened down tall weeds.
In his mind, he saw an image of his therapist’s face, and he laughed to himself. C’mon, Chicken-shit! Are you running from what might not even be there? He swung the vehicle into an open path where the skeletal framework of an outbuilding stood leaning to one side, hit the brakes, slammed the gearshift into park, and turned off the ignition.
Just so he did not get stuck out here, not with the Lewis farmhouse looking over his shoulder.
He thought about looking around to determine if he still could see the rooftop of that farmhouse from here – or if it, whatever it was, could see him. He listened to his breath. “Fuck this anxiety crap,” he said aloud. If I’m going to pant, I should do some real exercises to earn it.
Corey piled the truck bed high with tan butternut squash. Deer entering the farm area had gnawed on some of the bulbous vegetables that had not yet been frozen. Why did Cooter and his dad leave these out here so long? Too busy with other things, maybe.
Adjacent the lot where he picked up the last of the squash was a cornfield. Golden-brown stalks waved against the unclouded sky. Flapping its wings for a moment before drifting on the wind that caused the corn stalks to sway, the moth-like creature gradually became a horizontal slash-mark before vanishing.
***
“Ruffcorn: Warrick Teen Remain Missing”~
From what Corey read, weeks had gone by since Patty Ruffcorn had last been seen, and he was curious to discover if the local paper, being only a weekly, had been given any new leads after all this time.
He read the first column below the three-column-wide heading: The story offered nothing new; it only reiterated what had been deduced and reported. It again mentioned the Ruffcorn family car had been found parked on the side of the road in the Warrick Bottoms. No evidence examined by the crime unit of the county sheriff’s department indicated that a crime had been committed.
Evidently it was difficult to find much news to fill a weekly in a town as small as Warrick. Word from the rumor grapevine was that the local weekly newspaper using old-school methods would fold, and news about Warrick would be contained in one section of the Henderson County Constitution published in the larger town of Clifton, about twenty miles to the east. Residents of Warrick had balked at this, but the closure was financially motivated, pure and simple. The economic base of the river town was no longer sufficient to support even a weekly.
Warrick had only one small grocery store remaining – a new store in an ugly prefab metal building. Across from the vacant theatre building, Stratmeyer’s Hardware was still open for customers, many of whom, Corey knew, were farmers who came into town to buy needed tools.
Over behind the theatre was a quick-shop and service station combination called Easy Stop. Only one other service station in town was still operating. Along Main Street, among the shells of former businesses, were Stratmeyer’s, a tavern called Elmer’s which Corey had visited only once, a barbershop, a realtor, a café called The Fish Basket and an old bank sign that squawked when it turned.
It was hard to believe that Main Street of Warrick had once had several small grocery stores, a Farmer’s Bank, a Ben Franklin, two hardware stores, a jewelry store, a butcher and locker plant, a fresh fish store, and a corner drugstore where he had sat with friends over milk shakes and fountain sodas. There had even been a car dealership, but Corey had only a dim recollection of it.
***
Selena sat on the metal steps of her mobile home, squinting into the glare of the morning sun. She looked at the jar of sun tea perched on the nearby metal tool shed. It was dark enough to take inside and put into the refrigerator, but she liked the way it looked against the gold leaves on the tree branches that reached across the shed. She probably should take it in; her husband hated tea that had turned sour.
She glanced over to see if her neighbor were watching her today from behind the frilly kitchen curtains, but she could not even see a glimpse of her shadow. She was sure that the woman wondered why she sat outside on such a cool day with a sweater draped over her shoulders, but since their neighbor had never introduced herself or even nodded their way during the year and a half that Selena and her family had lived here, Selena had little concern regarding what she thought.
The truth was that she preferred the sun shining from an unspotted blue sky during the cooler months to the harsh light shimmering through the white haze on humid summer days. Selena looked at the garbage cans waiting near the road for the morning pickup.
She had scanned the weekly Warrick Banner and, finding nothing recent regarding the disappearance of Patty Ruffcorn, considered rolling the paper up and sticking it inside one of the cans to avoid any argument that would erupt once Brent read it, but she could hardly explain why their weekly paper had not been thrown to them. Besides, Brent liked seeing his name and horseshoe-pitching scores listed on the sports page.
“I don’t want you gettin’ involved,” he had told when the story about Patty had first been appeared. “It ain’t your problem.”
Selena folded the paper under her arm and stood up. She opened the shaky metal door of the mobile home. Trailer. Mobile home. A metal shell that had to be balanced on concrete blocks and located on man-made higher ground above the Old River Road – like the other homes in the Warrick Bottoms where the mobile home court was located -- to keep it from being flooded by the Mississippi River in the spring months.
Of course, other residents also had to put insulation around the pipes to keep the water from freezing in the winter months; many others even put the black trash bags over their windows and taped them with sticky, silver duct tape to keep their monthly utility bills from exceeding two hundred dollars.
This shared misery, however, did not make her feel more secure.
Daphne pedaled her red toy motorcycle with the big yellow wheels along the edge of the road. In her bright yellow windbreaker, she resembled a trembling autumn maple leaf.
“Daphne! Get back up here.”
On this and most Saturdays, the local youths liked to gun their cars along the road as they sped out toward the flat terrain known as the Warrick Bottoms, the area where lowland farms were sometimes flooded during the years of heavy rains.
On the west side of the curving blacktop road stretched the vast open fields with far-between barns and farmhouses, and on the east side crouched wooded areas behind the town’s only real industry, the enamel factory where Brent worked.
Selena held open the door, the Banner still under her arm. Perhaps the feeling of impermanence made her insecure. She had lived in mobile home courts before, but always in large towns like Gate City. There she could at least find convenience shops and coin laundries – not that those made her feel any less like an itinerant.
Selena heard a vehicle and looked down the road. Dust rose from one of the side roads and drifted across the field. A Chevy appeared as it turned onto the Old River Road. It raced toward town, failing to slow down.
For a road like that, someone is sure— “Daphne!”
Her daughter still stood near the center of the road. The Chevy barreled toward the child as if the driver had lost control. “No-oo!” Selena lurched for Daphne. She gripped the shoulders of her garment and jerked her roughly from the tricycle, which wobbled away from them. The ground beneath Selena’s feet trembled.
In an instant before road dust threw up a blanket, she saw a flash of sandy hair and a plaid shirt at the wheel. “You son-of-a-bitch!” she screamed.
The brown leaves whirled in the air and skidded away from the center of the road. The car, caked with dried mud as if it had been driven along backcountry roads for days, slowed to make a right turn. It might have been the case of a farmer letting his under-age son take the car off their property, experiencing what they called a joy ride, were it not for the fact that a shadow of a large, air-born creature followed the vehicle.
She hugged Daphne to her as she watched the vehicle groan up the winding road to the top of the hill, that narrow blacktop road lined with small homes.
Whatever it was – the River Hawk, if she believed what local teens gossiped about – disappeared beyond the nearly naked trees.
Daphne, crying almost hysterically, clung to Selena while she carried her up the wooden steps and into the trailer. As she calmed her daughter, she glanced again toward the mobile home next door, but she saw no curtains stirring.
***