RATTLEMAN: Praise for 18 Seconds 'Excellent! Stephen King Page 4

  “Serpiente de cascabel,” the laborer whispered, pulling the boy behind him.

  The man with the ponytail looked at the bags, then back at the stranger. “Rattlers?” he said incredulously.

  “You buy?” Rolfe shook the sack in front of him.

  “Uh’m, no.” The man shook his head. “See, we’re not like a real trading post or anything. We don’t actually buy stuff from the public.”

  Rolfe stared at him undeterred, held the sack higher and shifted his weight between his feet.

  The blond man’s eyes moved to the laborer, then back at the stranger. “You live around here, friend?” He tried to hold the smile.

  Rolfe extended the sack toward him and shook his head. “You buy?” he repeated.

  The blond man looked down at his shoes and sighed. He had met some real characters since moving to Tennessee. Most of them were harmless and only needlessly underfoot. Every week someone was telling him how to build a cabin or drill a water-well or run a business. Or they wanted jobs he didn’t have or brought him crafts he didn’t want to peddle. A group of Indians had even asked him to set up display tents on his lawn.

  But aside from the woodcutter he met at Home Depot while attempting to repair his chainsaw – he had broken the blade trying to saw his very first tree and his wife threatened him with divorce if he didn’t hire the man on the spot – he always turned away the locals and did the finish work himself. Yes, he knew he was failing to ingratiate himself with the community and yes, he knew that sooner or later he was going to have to bite the bullet and say yes to someone.

  He looked undecided for another moment, then put his hands up and said, “Okay.” He pointed to the whiskey barrel on the porch. “Put the snakes in there and let’s have a look at your ginseng.”

  Rolfe walked up to the porch and loosened the top of the bag, spilling the snakes into the barrel with an angry thud. Then he took the ginseng roots from his knapsack and spread them across the porch.

  He collected forty dollars, rifle cartridges and three foils of chewing tobacco before he walked back up the hillside and disappeared in the trees.

  Long after he was gone, the blond man stood in the doorway, staring at the spot where he had last seen the stranger.

  “Creepy.” A woman came up from behind and put her arms around his waist.

  “Yeah, creepy,” he said softly.

  “What in the hell are you going to do with rattlesnakes?”

  He laughed. “You saw the brochure on Pageant Gourmets: Rattlesnakes at forty bucks a pound. Who knows what kind of profits there are in ginseng?”

  She smiled. “You remember the dumbest things, Jason.”

  “Naysayer,” he mocked.

  She pinched him on the side. “Yeah, well I’m not touching one of those things, dead or alive.”

  He reached behind and patted her butt. “I’ll roll the barrel out in the morning and dump them in the woods.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Then I’ll let you hang onto the ginseng.”

  He stooped and craned his neck to look through the trees. “Did you see that necklace around his neck?”

  She put her chin on his shoulder. “He bothered you, didn’t he?”

  “Nah, just trying to fit in.” He shook his head. “Gotta be nice to the natives.”

  “He wasn’t a native,” she said, “he was a bum.”

  “Then we’ll call it our good deed for the day.”

  “You’re lucky you’re so cute.” She kissed the back of his neck.

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’d move back to Greenwich and marry my old psychology professor.” She released him and retreated into the cabin.

  “Dirty old man stalker, you mean,” he hollered back, but she was already out of earshot.

  He stared at the trees a moment longer, then up at the sky. There had been planes in the air most of the morning. Now they seemed to have gone away. Maybe there was some news on the missing Girl Scout and Park Ranger, though he would be the last to know. He glowered up at the empty pole where the temporary power line was supposed to have been connected, but that was two weeks ago now and only God himself knew when the utility company would actually arrive.

  The woodcutter was finished sawing the last of the trees he had marked for removal. Now he was stripping the trunks to be used for fence posts to enclose the clearing for a small parking lot behind the cabin. He would miss the Salvadorian, he thought. The man was never idle and worked dawn to dusk without complaint. He’d have kept him on to finish the job, but he was leaving tonight and relocating his family to Pennsylvania where a cousin had found him full time work. He had said his wife and son were excited about starting over. Tomorrow when they arrived at their new home they would celebrate the boy’s sixth birthday. His cousin had already bought them a cake.

  He looked at his watch and thought – what the hell. “Call it quits, Juan,” he yelled. “Top off the gas can in town and I’ll throw in a tank for your trip as a going away present. Credit card’s under the visor in the station wagon. You can drop it off on your way out of town.”

  The shirtless man smiled from ear to ear, nodding profusely as he raked the fire together.

  Well up the hillside and behind the heavy trees, Rolfe put a stem of a Jimson Weed between his teeth. He shouldn’t stay any longer. There was a town just a few miles away. But the sun was already setting and the skies had cleared. It would be quiet until morning and by then he would be halfway to the Great Smoky Mountains. He knew they would be extending the search in every direction, but beyond the dense Smokies lay the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Cherokee National Forest. Two weeks from now he would be nearing the Kentucky-Virginia border, halfway to West Virginia and the million-acre wilderness surrounding his home.

  An engine turned over and tail lights burned through the trees. A moment later the gray truck began to move down the lane. He looked toward the cabin, thinking about the clothesline, imagining the woman standing behind the door. He swallowed the noxious juice of the Jimson Weed and felt it numbing the back of his throat. He knew it was time to sit. As the weed began to hold, he slumped to the ground and put his head against the trunk of a tree. Waiting for the dreams that would follow.

  He hadn’t always taken such chances. The girl on Blood Mountain had been a mistake. He had known that the moment he took her. She was with a group and he knew they would come looking, though he could never have imagined how aggressively. It wasn’t at all like the three-day search for that camper who went missing in February. This time they saturated the mountain with horses and airplanes and helicopters, hundreds of people on foot and more arriving each day in processions of busses that streamed south on Route 11. He’d had to wait a full week before a lull allowed him to check out the activity around the Walasi-Yi, a makeshift command center on the summit that distributed food and radios. And even in that short period of an hour, one of the Park Ranger’s had separated from the others and found his cave and the women’s bodies.

  He heard the distant growl of an engine and looked up to see a solitary plane. There were times this morning when he was certain he would be caught. The helicopters had all but surrounded him. But then suddenly one by one they peeled away and drifted out of sight. The focus of the search had changed.

  When he felt safe once more he caught rattlers and made his descent into Tellico Plains. His plan had been to look for one of the Indians who made local crafts for tourist shops in the Smoky Mountains. Rattlesnakes were profitable not only for their meat, but as skins for leather belts. If he couldn’t sell the snakes he would release them, and scavenge summer homes on his way north to the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was always some give and take when you lived on the fringe of society. Like the balance he maintained between avoiding people – even hikers and hunters – and approaching back alley pawnshops where a man might turn a blind eye to purchase an endangered species or a root harvested out of season, or even a suspicious piece of jewelry or gold.

  Betw
een these two extremes he liked to watch people from a distance: from the shadows around their sleeping bags to the wooded yards outside their trailers and homes.

  Tonight, as it turned out, the smoke had led him to this cabin with the woman behind the door and the trader who bought his snakes. And in spite of the heavy concentration of policemen in the mountains he wasn’t done taking risks. Tonight he would not be watching from the shadows. Tonight he was going to make a visit.

  The effects of the Jimson Weed took his thoughts to a church he had attended as a child. Coats and men’s sweaty hats – the women always wore bonnets – piled high on a wooden table. Men’s muddy work boots stacked across the concrete floor. Cold metal folding chairs and a night squeezed between his mother and sister. Shivering, clamping his elbows close to his skinny ribs and looking down, for it was Wednesday and he didn’t want to see it. Because always on Wednesdays the preacher brought the pine box.

  He remembered how his small legs trembled, shoes dangling nervously above the concrete floor, ears prickled from the cold and eyes streaming from the fumes of a kerosene heater. He couldn’t take his eyes off the wooden box, placed in front of the pastor. He knew what was inside its well-worn, chipped exterior with its broken leather harness straps. A woman seated in front of him was mumbling in a strange tongue, soapy scum of dandruff peppering the shoulders of a dark jacket. There was a mongoloid boy who reeked of body odor, and the Naggy sisters who conspired under Shaker’s bonnets like a pair of black crows. They could disappear a baby, his pa once said, and his mother had been furious with him for saying it.

  He looked up at his mother now, her eyes fixed upon the preacher, lips moving rapidly as she recited one of the psalms. She had told him she was going to give him one of the snakes that night, because he needed to learn faith so he didn’t end up like his father. If he were good the snakes wouldn’t bite him, she had said. If he were not he would suffer the consequence. Rolfe didn’t know how good you had to be, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t good enough.

  The windows of the church were frosted over and candles danced in the drafts, wax rolling down their sides in creamy saw-toothed streams. The heavy woman in front of him rose to her feet, swaying side to side, babbling in tongue. He watched her labored gait as she made her way forward, reaching out with both hands. “Eckeneckenrayensaw-latimlayoxbi-cayse-nameen!”

  He had squirmed in his seat as she reached into the pine box to pick up a snake, wrestling his eyes from her as he felt a new warmth in his lap and looked down to see his sister’s tiny hand. Her fingers encircled his own and she squeezed it three times like their pa had taught:

  I … love … you.

  He squeezed back four times: I … love … you … too …

  He heard an engine and was startled from his reverie.

  A door slammed.

  He stood up, then walked unsteadily through the trees until he could see the light of the open cabin door. The truck. It was the truck. It had returned and the woman met the driver at the edge of the porch. They spoke for a moment and the truck left again.

  She stood there in the light with her long hair cascading upon her shoulders. She wore shorts and a T-shirt. She took a pail down the steps and crossed the clearing where she disappeared into the trees.

  A few minutes later she returned, slopping water. He watched her climb the steps as the raccoon followed her to the door, waiting on its hind legs until she returned with a treat.

  Then the door closed.

  He returned to his tree and slumped back to the ground and let himself drift off to sleep, his mind wandering through the archives of his memories to another cabin in another forest in another time …

  The door was open and light from within formed a perfect cone across a blanket of fresh fallen snow. The earth sparkled faultlessly but for an erratic path of footprints that led to where he stood. Blood dripped from his hands turning the snow beneath him pink. An owl hooted thrice and the wind rattled leaves on dead winter trees. He imagined the legions of devils flying toward him. Ears bent back, eyes burning yellow, teeth bared in their rush to the feast.

  Fear gripped him and he trembled. Kneeling down, he began to dig with his bare hands, unable to expel the stench from his nose or the horrible screams from his ears. Hand over hand he dug like an animal, colder than he had ever known; cold to the bone, cold to the soul that was no longer his own.

  The owl hooted again, only now it was of this world.

  It was after midnight he knew, or even early morning. The air had cooled and the stars sparkled brightly. He stood once more and walked through the trees, leaving his belongings behind as he started down the hill. The cabin’s chimney was spitting sparks into the night. A single lustrous cloud floated above a gibbous moon.

  Nothing moved below the tree line but the coon’s yellow eyes. He heard the sound of its chain dragging across the porch as he passed silently between the tree stumps and the sweet smelling embers of the woodcutter’s fire. The chainsaw still rested by a stack of stripped posts.

  Beyond it a pool of pale light from a side window was cast upon the ground.

  He approached it until he was standing next to the green station wagon. Light flickered from a window, sheer white curtains parted several inches. The couple was naked, the man standing at the edge of the bed, the woman in front of him on all fours. She was rocking back and forth on the mattress, long hair switching across the sheets. Her head was turned toward the window and facing him, but her eyes were closed tightly and her jaw set in a grimace.

  Sweat began to rise on the back of his neck. He tore his eyes away and staggered to the stack of stripped posts, lifting one to gauge its weight. Then he strained to put it on his shoulder, biceps swelling as he dragged it toward the porch and dropped its end noisily against the door.

  He heard a sound from within, then voices talking anxiously.

  He quickly raised the other end of the post and wedged it against the roof.

  “Who’s there?” he heard the man yell. “Who’s out there? Is that you, Juan?”

  The latch rattled, then a shoulder slammed against the door.

  “Who’s there, you son of bitch, open this goddamned door.”

  Rolfe picked up the gasoline can and began emptying it under the door. Then he took up the axe and brought it down on the coon’s long chain.

  The man called out again, then a shotgun fired, sending splinters flying from the door. “Open the goddamned door!”

  Rolfe put a foot to the whiskey barrel and tipped it over, spilling the rattlesnakes onto the yard. He watched as their dark skins slithered away in the moonlight. Then he scratched a match and dropped it on the floor.

  There was a deep, low whump as flames shot up the walls, black smoke curling beneath the rafters.

  The man inside threw himself against the door again and then fired the shotgun at the lock.

  But the door stood firm as the smoke began to obliterate the flames, heavy billows gathering around the roof, blotting out the stars. Rolfe carried the axe to the side of the cabin and waited by the window.

  First the woman’s head appeared, then her hands gripped the window frame. Rolfe grabbed her wrists and pulled her violently through, letting her drop to the ground where she writhed in a ball. When the man’s head came through he picked up the axe and buried it in his scalp, letting the handle slip from his hands as the body slunk back into darkness.

  The woman screamed and he turned to take her arm. She fought him with fists flailing, trying to cover her nakedness with her elbows. But he grabbed her wrist and dragged her into the shadows.

  The fire burned and the porch roof collapsed sending sparks into the sky. Blue flames erupted as hot gasses shot out of the chimney. Glass exploded, then ammunition, launching fiery projectiles into the night.

  The woman drew her knees into her chest, eyes following orange embers that floated high above the trees. She thought about her husband and choked back a wail. He had sensed something about the dr
ifter, she knew. He’d been uncomfortable or he would never have agreed to buy those snakes.

  She didn’t want to die like this. She didn’t want to die right now.

  “Elizabeth,” she said huskily, using her tongue to moisten her dry lips. “My name’s Elizabeth.” She looked up at him. His skin was wet with perspiration and reflected the jagged light of the fire. She could distinguish nothing in his expression, nothing from his eyes. “You don’t have to hurt me. I don’t know who you are –”

  She her let gaze drop to the necklace of snake rattles.

  “What’s yours?” she whispered.

  In a psychology course she’d taken it was taught that rape victims should attempt to communicate with their attacker, both to delay and possibly diffuse.

  “Your name?” she asked again, but he just stared back at her.

  She looked down at the soiled clothing, the torn boots, the deformed hand that was missing a thumb. She took a breath and slowly lowered her arms. Perhaps she could try to bring things under control until she saw an opportunity to escape.

  A muscle twitched in his cheek and she froze, not knowing what he was going to do.

  She was about to speak again when he reached out and cupped her breast.

  Ashes floated through the air, sticking to the sweat on his forehead. His hand moved from her breast to her stomach and he ran his fingers across it and down to her abdomen. He didn’t look agitated or insane or even dangerous. If anything he seemed divided as if only part of him was here.

  At that moment he reached for her arm and pulled her onto her side, using his other hand to push up on her rump, manipulating her body until she was on hands and knees. The way he had seen her in the cabin.

  “Please,” she whispered as he pushed her knees apart. “Please, no.”