Nancy A. Collins, page 27
“Get the doc!” Easy bellowed, his throat sac making his voice to boom like a kettledrum.
The stagehand looked almost as stunned as the audience then ran to fetch the carny doctor.
As he struggled to keep the dying man afloat, the Gator Boy turned his lambent gaze on the gawking rubes perched on the bleachers. “What are you looking at?” he roared “Show’s over!”
000
A large, shadowy figure stood at the end of one of the docks lining Memphis’ riverfront. During Cotton Carnival it was not uncommon to find people enjoying an evening stroll or watching the muddy waters roll their way towards the Gulf of Mexico. However, the stranger’s winter-length coat and wide-brimmed felt hat were more than a bit unusual, given the time of year.
But if anyone was staring at him, the stranger did not notice. After all, being stared at was his business.
Everyone was so used to bunkum and hokum from the talkers that it never once occurred to them-not even Easy himself-that the Colonel had been giving them the straight dope the whole time. Or straight enough.
As the old showman gasped out his last few breaths in his star attraction’s arms, he had finally come clean with him. Back in 1970, when the show was pitched near Vicksburg, a local showed up with something to sell. The yokel was frightened by what he had in his possession-but not so scared he couldn’t see dollar signs.
The Colonel followed the yokel out to his truck and looked at what was tied up in the back. The Colonel, ever the sharpie, managed to convince the fisherman that all he had was a freak alligator and paid him three hundred bucks to take it of his hands. Even if the fisherman didn’t know what he was looking at, the Colonel sure as hell did. The minute he laid eyes on him, he saw easy green. Hence the origin of Easy’s name,
As to Easy’s origins, the old showman had his suspicions, which he passed along as he lay dying. As a boy he had grown up along the river, listening to folk tales handed down from the settlers, who got them from the slaves, who learned them from the Indians who first dwelt in the bayous and swamps of the delta. He remembered the stories about the catfish gals and the gator boys, and how they held cotillions on the bottom of the river during the full of the moon. Were the stories true? Who was to say? But what else could explain something like Big Easy the Gator Boy?
As the only person he had ever trusted and relied on died in his arms, Easy decided it was time to leave the world of carnies and the rubes and return to the murky world that had spawned him. The Colonel had raised him to stick to his decisions, no matter what. There was no going back …only forward motion from here on in.
Easy took off his hat and sailed it into the river. When he yanked on the lapels of his coat, it sent the buttons flying like tiddlywinks. With a flex of his powerful legs, he dove straight into the waiting Mississippi. Someone on the shore called out in alarm, mistaking him for a suicide.
The undertow caught him instantly. Had he been a human, he would have been dead within moments, instead of surfacing almost a half-mile from where he first entered the water. He spotted a small group of passersby gathered on the dock, shaking their heads in bewilderment. Easy’s jaws constricted in what passed for a smile.
The journey would not be without dangers. He had not navigated open water since he was a child. There were submerged snags that could snare and drown him, not to mention the propellers of pleasure craft and the churning blades of the giant barges that traveled the river. He glanced up at the moon, hanging three-quarters full in the muggy night sky. If the current was with him, he might even make the cotillion on time.
000
The Steelhead was a wide, squat, ugly muscle of a ship. Its job was to push cargo, in this case sealed containers of tractor parts, down river to the New Orleans docks, where they were to be lifted onto a freighter bound for Europe. No, The Steelhead wasn’t a flashy vessel, but she knew her job and performed it beautifully. It was that homely strength that attracted Sill to life on the river in the first place.
This was only his second trip as a working hand on a barge, so he did not have the indifference to his surroundings that his fellow shipmates shared. While the others spent their off-hours playing cards or watching television, he preferred to stroll the decks and keep an eye out for local fauna. Having grown up in suburbia, he still experienced a thrill of discovery whenever he glimpsed deer grazing on the levees or piles of turtles sunning themselves on driftwood.
As The Steelhead slowly made her way around a bend in the river, he lifted the binoculars to check for sandbars. He spotted one located just outside the mouth of a tributary on the opposite shore. It was too small and out-of-the way to be a hazard to the barge, but there was something about it that seemed odd. With a start, he realized he was looking at what must be a family of wild alligators sunning themselves on the wet sand.
A deep, strong, bass voice abruptly boomed forth. Bill craned his head to look at Joe, who was standing watch atop the bridge, only to find his shipmate looking down at him with an equally quizzical look on his face.
“Did you sing out?” Joe called down to him.
“No! I thought it was you!”
Joe shrugged. “The Mississippi’s strange that way. The old timers say sometimes you can hear the ghosts of old river captains, calling out the soundings.”
Bill nodded without saying anything, then glanced back in the direction of the sandbar. The gators were gone, apparently frightened by the approaching barge. As green as he was, even he knew that sailors, whether they navigate salt water or fresh, see and hear things no landlocked soul would ever dream of. So spectral riverboat pilots shouting out warnings from beyond the grave wasn’t that hard to accept. But whoever heard of a river ghost yelling “Hey Rube?”
BILLY FEARLESS
Lester McKraken was a miller who lived in the town of Monkey’s Elbow, Kentucky, which is somewhere’s near Possum Trot, which is a hundred miles north of Paducah, more or less. Now Lester had himself two sons he had to raise on his own when his wife fell to her death after the neighbor kids moved the McKraken outhouse back ten feet one moonless night. The older of the two boys was a fine young figure of a man, with a good head on his shoulders and a strong back and the gumption to make something of himself. The younger boy was-well, let’s just say he was Billy.
Now, there weren’t nothing seriously wrong with Billy upstairs. He wasn’t feeble-minded, not like the washerwoman’s young’un. It’s just that Billy, well, Billy tended to take things at face value, regardless of the face. I guess you could say he lacked imagination, more that anything else. Old Lester saw it as a case of being mule-stupid. And maybe he was right. But one of the strange side effects of Billy’s thick-headedness was that the boy was immune to fear.
From the day he learned to crawl, Billy was always getting himself into some fix or another, like the time he came home leading a dog on a leash thinking it was in need of a shave because of the foam on its jaws. It wasn’t long before his schoolmates were coming up with all kinds of outlandish tasks to try out on him, which Billy would dutifully perform. By the time he was nine years old he’d gotten the nickname of “Billy Fearless”, which most folks called him more than his rightful name of McKraken. Much to Old Man McKraken’s relief.
Billy’s father had tried his best to school the boy in common sense. When Billy was no bigger than a grasshopper he told him that there were things he should never do, for fear of his life.
“How will I know when I should be scared, daddy?”
“You’ll know you’re scared of something if it gives you a shudder.” Unfortunately, Billy didn’t know what a shudder was. He was under the impression it was something not very nice, but he wasn’t sure. He was afraid to ask his father for fear of the old man’s temper, so he never did find out.
When Billy turned sixteen he was put out of school, like most boys his age. Billy figured he’d end up working at the mill, just like his elder brother had before him. But Old Man McKraken, while he loved his son, as a father should, had pretty much worn out his worrying-bone on Billy. He figured it would be better if his younger son found himself employment somewheres beside the mill. So Billy went knocking door to door, looking for work. When no one wanted to hire him in Monkey’s Elbow, he walked the ten miles to Possum Trot and knocked on doors there.
One door he knocked on belonged to the town gravedigger, a fellow by the name of Shanks. Shanks looked Billy over and saw that he was young and strong and eager to work. But he also knew that even strong men often turned weak when it came to digging graves in a lonely cemetery late at night.
“You seem to be a right enough sort,” Shanks said. “But I have to ask you one thing before I can hire you-are you skeered of ghosts?”
Billy blinked and thought and blinked again. “Ain’t never seen a ghost, I reckon.”
“Would you be scared if you did see one?”
Billy shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Shanks wasn’t sure if Billy was putting on being brave or was out-and-out lying to him, so he decided he would test the boy to discover the truth. Later that afternoon he handed Billy a shovel, a pick and a Coleman lantern and pointed to the most remote section of the cemetery, where the grave markers were old and leaned at strange angles.
“Billy, I just got word from Reverend McPherson that there’s to be a funeral the day after tomorrow. I need you to dig me a grave six long and six deep over yonder, near the weepy willow. I have to go to town to see to some business and I might not be back til the morning. I want you to work on that grave until midnight, understand?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Shanks,” replied Billy. And without any word or complaint, the boy took up his tools and set off to do as he was told. Shanks went into town and sat at the local bar, drinking with a couple of his friends until it got dark. Then he snuck back to the cemetery, where he dressed himself in a cast-off shroud and whitened his face, hair and hands with flour. Then he snuck out to where he could see the light from Billy’s lantern.
It was very dark and the night air crisp with the coming autumn as the gravedigger darted from gravestone to gravestone. The cemetery smelled of dead leaves and lichen, with the ever-present odor of rot lurking just under the surface. Somewhere up in the weepy willow an old hoot owl cried out. Shanks had to bite back a drunken laugh as he thought of how frightened the new boy was going to be when he laid eyes on him, white and ghostly, standing on the edge of the freshly-dug grave. As he reached the plot where Billy was working, he could see that the grave was almost finished. Indeed, Billy-smeared with dirt and sweat-was in the act of boosting himself out of the hole. Shanks waited until the boy was reaching in his pocket for a bandanna to wipe the sweat from his face, then stepped out from his hiding place, moaning like a lost soul. “Ooooohhhhhh!”
Billy looked up from his labors and frowned at the white-faced stranger who stood on the opposite side of the grave he had just dug. “Who’s there?” he called out.
“Whooooo!” Shanks replied, waving his arms a little to give his performance a most ghostly effect.
“You better answer me proper or you better git,” Billy said, getting to his feet with the aid of his shovel. “You got no business here at this hour, mister.”
Shanks wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or irked. He’d been expecting the boy to turn white and wet his pants with fear or, at the very least, flee, as any sensible person might do when confronted by a ghost. Still, the boy’s bravado might not be as strong as it looked, so he decided to continue his little masquerade.
“Oooouahhh!” Shanks moaned again, shaking imaginary chains at the boy.
“What do you want here?” Billy demanded, this time starting to sound angry. “Speak if you’re a honest man, or I’ll whup you upside the head!”
Shanks was convinced that Billy’s threat was mere bluster, so he stood his ground, waving his arms and moaning and groaning to beat the band. So Billy hefted his shovel and struck him upside the head with the flat of the spade, knocking him into the grave. Billy then packed his tools and headed for the gravedigger’s shack to await his employer’s return from town so he could show him the nice new grave he’d dug and tell him about the strange fellow who’d pestered him.
The next day there was a knock on Old Man McKraken’s door. When he answered it he found Shanks standing on his front porch with a plaster on his head and two black eyes. Sitting in the back of the gravedigger’s mule cart was Billy.
“What in tarnation is going on here?” he demanded.
“I’ll have you know, McKraken, that boy of yours ain’t nothing but bad luck on two legs!” Shanks snarled, wincing as he spoke. “He whopped me on the head with a shovel and left me to lie in an open grave all night long! I’ll be lucky if I don’t get the rheumatism from the damp!”
Aghast, Old Man McKraken promptly grabbed Billy by the ear and yanked him from the back of the mule cart. “What kind of mischief are you up to boy? The devil must be in you, child, to play such unholy pranks!”
“It weren’t my fault, daddy!” explained Billy, fighting back the tears as his father gave his ear another twist. “He stood there in the night, all covered in flour, and wouldn’t talk when I asked him to. I thought he was some rascal, out to do me harm-“
Old Man McKraken might have had his doubts about his son’s mental strengths, but he knew the boy was incapable of lying. So he gave Shanks five dollars for his trouble and brought the boy back into the house. After a couple of days he called his son to him and sat him down in front of the fire.
“Billy, I’ll be blunt, son-while I love you as the flesh of my flesh, I can’t take any pride in you. Its time that you went out into the world. I’m giving you fifty dollars cash, a cart and horse, a turning lathe, and a carving bench so you can go forth and master yourself a trade. But tell no one where you come from or who your father is, for I am ashamed of you.”
Billy didn’t seem to take his father’s words badly. He simply shrugged and said; “If that’s all you want out of me, daddy, I reckon I can do that.”
So that very same day Billy, dressed in overalls and a red flannel shirt, wearing his only pair of brogans, took the fifty dollars, the cart and horse, the turning lathe, and the carving bench
his father had promised him and rode out of Monkey’s Elbow, never to be seen again.
During his sixteen years Billy had never gone any farther than Possum Trot. Although he knew there were other towns and villages outside the valley of his birth, he’d never once visited them. He’d also heard tell of other states besides Kentucky, although he had a hard time picturing them. But now, true to his father’s wishcs, he found himself heading into the world.
By dusk Billy was two valleys away from his home, passing through scenery that was both strange and familiar to him. He came to a cross roads with a huge oak tree in the middle. As he was tired and his horse weary, Billy decided this was as good a place as any to stop for the night. Billy made himself a small fire at the base of the tree and set about making himself comfortable for the night. As he ate his simple meal of cheese and bread, he heard a creaking sound coming from the branches over his head. Looking up, he saw a man hanging from his neck by a rope.
“Howdy!” Billy called up to the hanged man. The hanged man didn’t say howdy back.
“It looks to be a chilly night,” Billy observed. “Ain’t you gonna get cold up there?”
The dead man didn’t say anything, but a gust of wind blew him to and fro, making the rope creak all the more.
“Lordy! Look at how you’re shaking and shivering!” Billy said. And because he had a good heart, he shinnied up the tree and used his knife to cut the hanged man down and lower the body to the ground, so it could share his fire.
Billy had hoped he would have some company to while away the hours before he fell asleep, but the hanged man didn’t seem very appreciative-or talkative. In fact, all he did was stare at Billy with his tongue sticking out black and bloated. He also smelled a tad high and was missing an eye, which looked to have been pecked out by a bird.
“You don’t seem to have a lot to say,” Billy sighed, poking the fire with a stick.
As if in answer, the one-eyed corpse fell headlong into the fire, setting its hair ablaze.
“Watch out!” Billy cried. When the dead man made no move to pull his head out of the fire, Billy quickly leapt to his feet and yanked the body clear, stomping out the burning hair.
Billy clucked his tongue in reproof, much the same way his father used to do. “Tch! If you can’t do no better’n that, friend, I’ll put you back up in the tree.”
The hanged man just lay there and smoldered, looking the worse for wear after Billy had stomped out the fire. Disgusted, Billy went to sleep. The next morning the dead man still hadn’t moved. Billy had been thinking of offering the stranger a ride to the next town, but decided not to, seeing how unfriendly the fellow had turned out to be. So he hitched his horse back up to its cart and headed on his way.
After traveling most of the day, Billy finally came upon a little town on the edge of a big lake. In the middle of the lake was an island dominated by a huge mansion made of gray stone. It was getting on to late afternoon and Billy was hungry and thirsty and didn’t cotton to the idea of spending another night under the chilly stars, so he decided to stop at the inn near the lake.
The sign over the door said The Ghost Lake Tavern. When he entered every one turned as one to stare at him, their faces showing a mixture of curiosity and dread. When they saw it was just Billy, they let out a collective sigh and returned to their drinking and tiddlywinks.
Billy eased himself into a seat and signaled to the barkeep that he wanted a drink. In the wink of an eye a pretty young girl with hair the color of a new penny set a tankard of ale in front of him.
“You’re new to town,” she smiled.
Billy nodded, his cheeks coloring. He couldn’t help but notice how pale and fine the barmaid’s skin was and how her hair shimmered in the lamplight. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever laid eyes on in his short life.
