The Trembling Earth Contract, page 1
The Trembling Earth Contract
A Joe Gall Mystery
Philip Atlee
Chapter 1
Have you ever seen a duckpond get up and tiptoe away, in a near-blizzard? I have. In fact, I was one, and it’s wearing work. In howling autumnal weather, it’s harder work than being a duck.
I wasn’t the whole pond, either, just half of it. Ansel Tuttle, a professional guide, was the other half. He had led me on a wild-boar hunt in the Ozarks, one on which I had been armed only with a spear and pistol, and I got perforated before the boar did. During that hunt, one of Ansel’s best dogs, a Catahoula leopard hound, had been killed by the boar, and he would not accept any payment for its loss.
I don’t accept that kind of favor, so a few months later I had a friend in North Carolina ship me two young male Plott hounds, ready for training. This breed was originally developed in the Big Smoky country, and can be used for anything from coon up.
I tried to reach Tuttle at the Hunting Club, but it reported he was at home, on his farm below Stuttgart, Arkansas. The young Plott hounds and I got in my Rover coupe and drove down there.
As we went jouncing along the rutted road from the highway to Ansel’s house, a powdery snow began to whirl down from the northwest. Stepping out of the car before Tuttle’s unpainted shake-shingle cottage, I could hear a high and lonely honking as a flight of geese came down the Mississippi Flyway.
Tuttle lived alone; his wife had died a few years ago. After I tapped my horn button, he came around the south side of the house, wearing stained bib overalls and a beatup hat. He nodded, said, “Major Gall, nice to see you. Step inside.” No smile, though; Ansel wasn’t much of a smiler.
While he went in the front door and turned on lights, I leaned back into the car, put one of the young hounds under each arm, and followed him into the cottage.
Tuttle stared at the two puppies. Said “Set. I’ll put the coffee on,” and went back into the kitchen still wearing his hat. The house was in a state of seemly bachelor disarray: two big gun racks and gun-cleaning equipment, casting and trolling gear, trot lines, and huge statue of a fox terrier with his head on one side, in question. The statue was ten times the size of a normal terrier.
“Where the hell did you get this thing?” I called into the kitchen. And although Tuttle couldn’t see what I was looking at, he answered promptly.
“Friend of mine up in Stone County named Jimmy Driftwood give him to me. Writes songs, Jimmy does; had a big hit a few years back. ‘Battle of New Orleans.’ Remember it?”
“Yes.”
Ansel came back and offered me a mug of steaming coffee, and I had to put the dogs down to take it. They frolicked around on the immaculately scrubbed floor, and when Tuttle took his coffee over to the butt-sprung couch they followed, sniffing his muddy boots, overalls, and crotch.
“The RCA fellers give Driftwood the chalk dog on account of his song. But his wife, Cleta, got tired of dustin’ the thing and Jimmy give it to me.”
I stared at the enormous dog. His head was still cocked in question, still trying to pick up “HIS MASTER’S VOICE” on the thick gramophone records of the past … I heard a nearer music again. In lulls of the mounting wind, more honkers were passing overhead.
“Fixing to blow a little,” I said idly, thinking of my long drive home.
“That’s right,” answered Tuttle. “Be down in the twenties in a couple of hours. These are Plott hounds, ain’t they?”
“Only part of the proper description. The dog you lost on my boar-hunt was a good one, but you’re such a hard-headed bastard you wouldn’t let me pay for him. So these two are Ansel Tuttle Plott hounds. You can’t refuse, because the ownership papers are out in my car. They read ‘Ansel Tuttle.’”
Tuttle took his battered hat off and threw it at the chalk dog. He swore at some length, using both words and music, and then went sliding to his knees to face the gamboling puppies. His weathered hands went over their heads and down the dark brindle sheen of the backs, checked the fawn insides of their sturdy legs and strong chests. Their tails scythed in delight, and when he grabbed their muzzles they pulled away in splayfooted, mock-heroic savagery.
“Man,” he said, still kneeling, “these things won’t never quit a trail.” And getting up, “I’m greatly obliged to you.”
“I never worked one,” I said, “but I hear a lot of good about them. These are the short-eared type, and they don’t have the voice or cold-trail qualities of the longeared Plotts. But they’re supposed to be faster and more evasive on bear and boar. Maybe one of the two will train up to the one you lost.”
He nodded. “Might both do it. Yancy, my Catahoula, was bigger than they’ll get and had a good nose, but he couldn’t do all the things this breed can. They been fed today?”
I told him when.
“They got names?”
“No.”
The guide turned into the kitchen again, with the young hounds baying soprano at his heels, and I heard him draw a pan of water, heard them lapping, and then a heavier dish was put on the floor. In a few minutes, Tuttle came back to the front room with two small glasses and a half-gallon jar so cold it was beading. We both had a straight drink and I remarked on the smooth quality, because it was triple-run moonshine whiskey.
Tuttle said it had come from the Gulf Coast, one of the few places where they still used sprouted corn, and copper stills and worms. There was some good whiskey being made in the Ozarks, he said; around my place, for example. But most of the boys were using automobile radiators which created lead salts, and lye, and turning out poison. I knew about the good moon in my section, because the High Sheriff of the county delivered me a half-gallon of it every month.
We had three or four more drinks of the white whiskey, and needed it because the cottage was becoming chilled as the temperature dropped. Freezing rain was slatting at the shingled walls, and Tuttle kept fueling the wide fireplace with split logs. Finally I refused another drink, said I had a long way to go and would have to fight chains on my car before I could start.
“That would be foolish, Major,” said Tuttle. The lank hair was down over his forehead, and I thought he must be a big percent Cherokee. “Let’s make a deal. You seem to be a feller likes to try things the hard way. Why not stay the night with me, and if you’re game to rise and shine at four A.M., I’ll promise you two snow geese before breakfast.”
I laughed. All the nearby ponds and sloughs had been frozen over for two days, nearly three. True, his farm was at the edge of the famous flyway, which funnels down the river from Missouri to the Gulf, and all around us were the Stuttgart rice fields. However, nobody could create open water when it was frozen solid.
“I appreciate the offer,” I said. “But no guide alive could promise wild fowl on the kind of morning this next one’s going to be.”
Ansel had another shot of the moon, and his head lifted. He looked a trifle feral himself. “Don’t never cuss the banker, Mister,” he said harshly, “when you want to borrow money.”
I sat back down. “All right Ansel,” I said. “I’d like very much to stay, and drive out of here tomorrow with two geese.”
He nodded and put the jug down beside me. “What we take here are Lesser Snows. Weigh up to five pounds. I’ve got plenty of thermal underdrawers, decoys, and whatever else we’ll need. But it’ll be bitter cold, and we may be out in it awhile.”
“All right.”
“We’ll use double-barreled 12 gauges, full-choke. I don’t hold with that third shot. I’ll call the geese down, and you wait until you can kill them.”
“Fair,” I said, and he fixed us a supper of cold mallard and poke-greens salad. When I had topped that off with another shot of moon, I was ready for bed. Ansel spread an enormous featherbed for me on the lumpy couch, with a down bolster, and as I dozed off I heard him putting the young dogs to bed near the fireplace, snugging them in a worn quilt.
Several hours later, when I went back through the kitchen to piss, Tuttle was standing in the kitchen like an ancient alchemist, guarding several steaming cauldrons. The sink was littered with empty boxes which had contained blue Tintex dye, and I asked what he was doing.
“I’m boiling you up a duck pond, Major,” he said shortly, and went on stirring his big pots. I relieved myself in the back yard and went stumbling back to the warmth of the featherbed. Once I roused again, momentarily, because the young hounds were whimpering in their unaccustomed surroundings. Tuttle’s shadowy figure moved out of the lighted kitchen and knelt beside them.
Murmuring, he stroked and calmed them, and they fell asleep again. I did too, smiling, because the young Plott hounds seemed to be at home….
When Ansel touched my shoulder, I came out of the featherbed immediately. It was just past four in the morning, still dark outside, and the wind had not died down. Tuttle cooked us rashers of country ham and two soft-scrambled eggs apiece, and when we had tamped it down with scalding coffee spiked with moonshine, we were ready to go hunting.
I pulled on heavy socks, thermal underwear, my boots, pants, and shirt, and Tuttle fitted me into a white waterproof coverall with a parka hood. When he was dressed as snugly, we checked the guns and ammunition and Ansel wrapped me in yards of blue-white, transparent plastic. I wrapped more of it around him, and we waddled out the back door of the cottage, hooded, into the sleety wind. He led the way through the dim light, past rice fields with frozen stalks, to a large pond that was a sheet of ice.
Or was it? To my astonishment, I saw that most of the pond was stained bright blue, like open water. During the night, Tuttle had brought his pots of blue-dyed water down and flooded the icy surface of the pond. And spaced all over it were snow goose decoys. The dawning light was faint, but I calculated that there must be over fifty of the decoys in place.
The wind was cutting. Pantomiming, Tuttle unreeled the polyethylene plastic from me, then himself, and draped it around the edge of the blue-dyed area. We arranged the featherlight material in long arcs, pinning it down with rocks and boulders which were already in place. I realized that Tuttle must have been up all night, getting the setup ready.
“Where’s the blind?” I shouted in his ear, from a distance of a few inches.
“No blind,” he roared back. “Squat down and drape some of this stuff over your shoulders.”
I crouched, draped myself, and loaded the shotgun with freezing hands. Tuttle had retreated across the pond, and when he ducked under the plastic in his white coverall and parka, I could barely make him out. He swung one arm, to indicate our fields of fire, and I nodded.
When Ansel started using his goose-call, honking abruptly, I was startled and lifted the gun. He kept calling for a long time, and my feet began to chill through the paratrooper boots and heavy socks. The rain had changed to sleety snow, and stung the portion of my face left exposed by the parka hood.
I began to be a trifle morose. He’s grateful for the young hounds, I thought, so he went overboard and rigged up a long-shot effort over a faked-up pond.
Tuttle kept honking on his call.
After another forty minutes of waiting and creeping cold, I was beginning to ache in the joints. I wanted to walk back to the cottage for a drink; I wanted a small cigar. And I wondered why I had let even an experienced guide like Tuttle talk me into such a water-haul. Frozen water, at that.
Then my spine chilled with an older cold. From far up in the slaty sky, a flight of geese was answering. They were descending, spiraling down toward us, their wing-beats solid. Braking now, black-tipped wings planing as they plummeted in, after the long reach from Canada.
I got my two with a straight-on shot and a slight swing. They crashed to the ice, and not until then did I hear Tuttle’s shotgun blast. Two more of the lovely white birds tumbled, and the rest of the flight took off again with a tremendous thrashing of wings. We could have reloaded and taken at least two more apiece before they were out of range.
Tuttle emerged from his polyethylene shroud and moved across the ice to pick up the fallen geese. I joined him and pointed at the decoys, but he shook his head. We wound each other back into the plastic again, walked gingerly off the ice, and back to the cottage.
While he was gutting, scalding, and plucking the snow geese, I put chains on the Rover. When that was done, I went back inside, got my dressed geese, and thanked Ansel. The young Plott hounds were bloated with warm milk and mallard, and condescended to let me scratch their distended bellies. Going back to the car, I jockeyed it along the frozen ruts to the highway and turned north toward home.
Chapter 2
I almost made it. A sleety rain was rattling around my coupe as I turned off the desolate stretch of pot-holed State Highway onto the narrower dirt road which led to my mountaintop eyrie. That road was rutted and stony, but gave the tires more traction, and I was jockeying the car along carefully when somebody out in the stormy night opened fire on me.
The first two shots were broadside and starred the glass in the right door window. Ducking instinctively, I gunned the car, put it into the shallow bar ditch and out again; the Rover fishtailed along the icy ruts but was gathering speed. Another shot stung my right ear and starred anpther hole, this time into the right edge of the windshield. As I slammed the headlights off with the heel of my hand, I saw blood spraying across my extended wrist.
A fourth shot chunked into the body of the coupe somewhere, and as I fought the wheel I saw headlights move in behind me. Over the blowing sleet, I heard my ambusher roaring nearer. He was closing the gap.
I gave the Rover all the throttle I thought it would take, hunting traction on the narrow dirt road. This involved swerving from one shoulder to the other through the fading light. The ambush car, only fitfully visible through sleety rain, opened up with another fusillade; slugs smashed into the Rover and I knew they were trying for my tires.
When I gained the top of the mountain and went roaring past the soon-obscured stretch of the side road that led to my cave garage, I was traveling far too fast. I knew the road down the other side of the mountain well, but in that dying light I had no slot to keep my wheels in. And the driver of the ambush car was no new hand.
His headlights grew larger in my rear-view mirror.
I switched my own headlights back on high-beam, but kept the interior dark because now we were working down the Ozark switchbacks, and if I missed one, it could turn into a spine-snapper. I nursed the plunging Rover down, easing on the wheel, and blood kept spraying from my nicked ear. The ambush car was still pushing hard, and from the muted thunder of its engine I thought it must have more than a stock mill in it. Once the pursuing headlights tilted crazily, and I knew it was slewing in the ruts, but the beams righted and came lancing down the steep turns after me.
There wasn’t much time. After we got on the flat at the bottom of the mountain, the ambush car would overtake me. Skidding and sliding through the last few switch-backs, I visualized the stretch ahead. About a mile of flat hemmed in by encroaching second-growth pine, the shoulders widening into a small flood flat on the left. This led, on that side, to a deep branch of the Buffalo River. On the right side, the road was rimmed by a plunging valley, hundreds of feet of sheer fall, to meet the narrow river far below.
At the end of the stretch was a low-water bridge over the river. Slabbed concrete, a suspension-smasher at any speed.
I steered the Rover out of the last switchback and opened it up down the straight. As I had expected, the ambush car began closing the gap swiftly, and I knew it would either catch me before the bridge or that I would tear up my wheel assemblies when I hit it.
I began to reduce speed, slowly, calculating as I watched the pursuing headlights grow in size. My gut ached; it was roiling with acids, and I tried to belch but couldn’t. The low-water bridge ahead had no walks or side-rails, just slabs of concrete that tilted in the middle. I eased the slowing Rover to the right, holding split attention between the RPM needle and the darkened precipice.
There was a rhythm involved, and I had to find it. Exactly. I nursed the Rover down to fifty, glanced again at the enlarging lights, and did two things almost in unison—one, quarter-turn the car into a slide, and, two, tamp the brake once, firmly, to accelerate the broadside slide. But not too much. The tires of the Rover wailed as its rear end whipped around and over the dark chasm, and swung back to the road. Reversing direction in a wide sliding arc that took it across the road into the flash-flood flat, and turned it completely around.
That left me heading back the way I had come, and with enough speed left to have momentum when I floor-boarded the Rover again. The rear wheels churned out of the weed-choked flood flat and back onto the narrow dirt road.
When I smashed into the ambush car, angling into its front left fender, the Rover was still gathering speed.
In the final second before impact, a reflex jerk by the unseen driver of the ambush car turned it toward the abyss side, and that helped. There was a grinding scream of metal and the heavier car went sliding over the edge. The Rover slithered after it and came to rest with its smashed front end nosing into darkness.
The seat and shoulder straps had kept me out of the wheel, but I had tested them good. And my bleeding ear had spotted the inside of the windshield with ruddy drops. I heard the ambush car thrash through small pine growths as it catapulted downward, then tear against the boulders which lined the steep drop. It caromed sideways off the rocks, and the headlights spun crazily as it went out of sight.
I unsnapped the protective harness, and lighted a small cigar with shaking hands. The copper-salts of fear were in my mouth, and my bladder was distended. The door would open, so I opened it, got out, and an involuntary vomit removed the cigar from my mouth. It seemed to take an intolerable time to locate my zipper. Shaking like a dog, I finally managed to urinate.
