Riders In The Sky Part 3

Neely didn't answer, and Vale didn't press him. The man might be a royal pain in the a.s.s, but somewhere inside those mismatched clothes and under those streaks of dirt and G.o.d only knew what else was a man who used to be a teacher, or a college professor. At least that's what the word was, and once in a while Vale heard something that made him believe it. Why he'd come to Camoret, why he was what he was now, no one knew and no one asked. His business if he wanted to drown; even Lyman Baylor, pain-in-the-b.u.t.t preacher that he was, had stopped trying to save him.

A few minutes later Dub began to squirm a little in the pa.s.senger seat, and Vale grinned. The pudgy little man didn't care for not having much but roll bars and struts between him and the blacktop; more than once he'd declared Jeeps and their cousins dangerously unnatural, quite possibly demonic. But a mile down the road he settled himself, squinting into the wind that slipped past the sun visors Vale had snapped up over the windshield's top frame.

"Funny, ain't it," Neely said, rubbing the side of his nose with a finger.

"What? Your murder?"

"No." A hand waved west, toward the unseen mainland. "You know. All that s.h.i.t going on." He sniffed, and rubbed his nose again. "We been lucky, you know? Camoret ain't had none of that sickness went around last year, had pretty much plenty of food. Only a few of them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds coming out to raise a little h.e.l.l." He squinted at the brick school-house as they sped by. "Like we was blessed or something, you know what I mean?"

Vale looked at him, surprised the dope had even noticed. Any other day, he would swear nothing ever got through the man's alcoholic haze but the price of his next drink. "Good a word as any," he agreed.

Dub nodded solemnly. "Like them kangaroo folks."

"The what?"

"You know, them people that live with the kangaroos?"

"You mean Australians?"

"Well, who'd you think I meant? The Chinese? Jeez, Sheriff, pay attention here. They got no kangaroos in China, you oughta know that."

"Right," Vale said. "Right."

"They ain't blessed is what I'm talking about. What I read, they's getting ready for a shooting war pretty soon."

Now that the sheriff already knew. Sometime around midsummer, some drunken and drugged-up Indonesian sailors had hijacked a patrol boat and shot up a small cruise ship tooling around the water near someplace called Queensland; he never heard of it but that didn't matter. When it was over, a dozen or so Australians and New Zealanders had been killed, a couple dozen more badly wounded. Words had been exchanged. Diplomats recalled. Fuss and bl.u.s.ter in the UN. Maneuvers and high-visibility training on both sides.

" *Course, it's no skin off my nose," Dub said, bracing a hand against the dashboard as Vale swerved to avoid a gull squatting insolently in the middle of the road. "You just get tired of hearing of it, you know what I mean? If it ain't the kangaroos, it's them guys over in Africa beating the c.r.a.p out of each other." He shook his head sadly, scratched through his hair, then used the end of his tie to dab some sweat off his neck.

"We had lots of killing before," Vale reminded him. "That year, remember? Seemed like half the country was going up in smoke."

Dub shook his head again. "That was killing, Sheriff. This time we're talking war."

The houses were fewer, the trees thicker, live oak and pine, willows house-tall and taller. Not long before the road began a long and slow curve to the west, they pa.s.sed a clutch of undistinguished homes flanking the blacktop, and Vale squinted over to the left, hunting for signs of Chisholm at his house. The smart thing would be to stop, knock on the door, look around the place, but Neely had gotten under his skin, and he decided to go on, he could always check the house later.

Less than a mile farther north, sidewalks and houses ended. Sand drifted across the blacktop. Reeds and weeds. Just before the road straightened again, Vale swung the Jeep hard to the right and followed a wide sandy trail through the trees, marked by a sign that told him he was heading for North Beach, No Dogs, No Bicycles, Bonfires by Permit Only.

Ten minutes later they reached the sea.

And the whales.

4.

As far as anyone knew, there had been no Indian population on Camoret when the Spanish discovered it on their way to Florida; as far as anyone knew, they stayed only long enough to build a few huts and some graves before moving on, without leaving any recorded reason why they had abandoned their find. It wasn't for lack of fresh water, good soil, protection from the elements, or proximity to the coast for trade and military purposes; Camoret had all of that, but the English didn't stay either, their records just as brief and puzzling as their predecessors'.

No one knew, then, who had given it its name.

No one knew, then, who first stood on the clean wide beach and looked back across the Atlantic toward home.

Or who first discovered the whales: Six huge boulders in three pairs worn smooth and grooved by wind and sea, white-streaked grey, so deeply set that no one had ever been able to dig beneath them to measure their actual size. The three largest resembled the great heads and humps of whales about to sound, behind each a smaller boulder, nearly flat on the back side, one of them split on top to give imagination reason enough to call them flukes, the tails up and ready to slap at the surface.

The lead whale's head was eight feet high, twelve feet long, with a nine foot tail; the others, each slightly behind and inland of the one in front, weren't quite so imposing, but all were taller than a tall man.

A family it was: Daddy the largest, Baby the smallest, Momma firmly planted in the middle, holding the group together.

By the time Camoret town was firmly, permanently established, no laws were needed to protect the site. It was a given: do your mischief elsewhere if you need to let off steam, but vandalize the whales at your peril.

They were climbed, of course, and played on and around; there were picnics and trysts, games invented that used the boulders as bases, photographs taken and a magazine layout about ten years ago, but the only damage done was by the wind, and the sea.

Wishing he were somewhere else and moving up his retirement date because he couldn't stand this c.r.a.p anymore, Vale parked off to the side of the trail's end, in a spot where countless other vehicles had tramped and hardened the sand into a makeshift parking lot. An empty trash barrel stood at each corner. A small sign on a canted post warned drivers not to go any farther.

"Where?" he asked as he pulled a pair of sungla.s.ses from his shirt pocket and put them on.

Dub moved to the front of the Jeep, a hand rubbing the small of his back, eyes narrowed against the glare off sand and water. The nearest whale, Baby, was fifty yards away; he pointed to the lead whale, another twenty farther on.

"Okay, then. Let's do it."

Although he didn't for a minute believe Neely's story, he couldn't help a slight antic.i.p.atory tightening of his stomach, couldn't help leaning to one side as if he could see through the boulders to the place where the body was supposed to be. Those men Dub had claimed had only raised a little h.e.l.l had in fact done more than that--two break-ins, a severe beating, an attempted arson.

Word was, it was Cutler's boys, not mainland strangers. Stump Teague and his brothers, who lived in separate houses at the edge of the marsh.

Another reason why retirement was looking better every day.

Neely didn't speak.

The only sound was the crunch of their shoes on the sand, the hiss of the wind across the surface of the beach. The voice of the surf didn't count-it was there all the time, and the only time it was noticed was when it grew louder.

As Neely swerved around Baby's tail, his right hand automatically, absently, reached out to stroke it. For luck. Touch wood, on stone.

Vale moved in a wide arc, keeping the boulders on his right. The beach was nearly two hundred yards wide along the full length of the eastern sh.o.r.eline, dotted with clumps of dried kelp, smashed sh.e.l.ls; a gull feather twitching where it had stuck in the sand, a pine cone quivering in the depression of a footprint. The tide was out, but he could still see plumes of spray where waves struck the ma.s.sive teeth of rock jetties that had been built out into the water. The earliest colonists had recognized the danger of erosion from storm and ordinary tides, and every spring and autumn Camoret continued what they had begun-hauling the largest rocks and boulders they could find to add to each jetty's bulk, repair the winter's damage. One every quarter mile, and so far it had worked.

"You know," Dub said, sticking close to Vale's side, "sometimes you kind of feel like Robinson Crusoe out here, you know what I mean, Sheriff?"

Vale did.

There were no buildings anywhere on the beach, no homes, no shops, all forbidden by law. Waves, then sand broken here and there by sawgra.s.s-topped dunes, then a heavy line of trees and underbrush. An unbroken sky. No ships on the horizon. Stand long enough, quietly enough, and you'd never know there were several hundreds of people back there, thousands in the right season. It was as if no one lived here, or ever had. Ever.

When they reached Daddy's head, Vale took off his hat, wiped his face with a sleeve, and said nothing.

The sand was empty.

No body, no blood, no stains.

Just to be sure, he checked the other side, checked the rest of the family, then walked along the treeline for fifty yards in either direction. When he returned, Dub had plopped himself on the ground, his back against the boulder, hands on his knees. Staring at the water.

"Dub."

"Don't say it."

Vale blinked, c.o.c.ked his head. That wasn't Neely's usual voice. No whine, no apology, no sputtering preparation for a story that would explain how the body and blood had vanished. This was Neely's other voice, stone sober, something he had heard but only three or four times a year.

"Must've been the light," the little man offered, flatly.

"Must've been," Vale agreed, no accusation in his tone.

"That guy must've been taking a nap or something. Slept on the beach all night, maybe. I think he does that a lot."

"Probably. Lots of people do, the weather's nice and all. Do it myself sometimes." He wiped his face again, replaced his hat, adjusted his sungla.s.ses. "Yep. Can see that, Dub. You're probably right."

Neely rocked to one side so he could extricate a dented hip flask from his back pocket. He held it against his chest with both hands, licked his lips several times, finally said, "Do you have any idea what it's like to be a drunk?"

Vale didn't know what to say. This was suddenly way beyond the boundaries of their relationship, such as it was.

"For one thing," Neely said, looking up at him with a squint and a half smile, "you see things that ain't ordinarily there, ordinarily."

Vale hesitated, then nodded as if he understood; what the h.e.l.l else could he do?

"For example"-and Neely nodded toward the place where he'd thought the body had been-"that giant-"

"Chisholm. Casey Chisholm. For crying out loud, Dub, the guy's a little strange but he does have a name."

"Yeah," Neely returned his gaze to the sea. "He don't have a car, you notice? He's got this old bike instead, never goes anywhere but where he lives, once in a while I see him in town. But far as I can tell, he never goes off-island, you ever notice that? Thought at first maybe he was on the run, you know? Did something bad and was using us to hide out."

"And ... now you don't think so?"

"Nope." Neely unscrewed the top, took a drink and coughed, took another, and screwed the top back on. "Another thing about a drunk is, people don't pay you no attention except to kick at you once in a while, get you the h.e.l.l out of the way. So you see things, you know? Hear things." He laughed silently. "Don't always remember what it is, but it happens."

Vale rolled his shoulders against a light chill that rode the breeze. Now this was more like it-Neely not making any sense.

"So, uh, what did you see, Dub?"

"Ain't seen nothing, not really."

"Then what did you hear?"

Top off, another drink, longer this time, and this time, no coughing.

"I'm sitting right here last night." He smacked his lips. Another drink. "Communing with the stars, you know what I mean? The meaning of life, Sheriff. The meaning of life. Kind of an existential haze sweetened by a good red wine. Anyway, that giant comes walking up the beach. Moon's big enough, but I'm sitting right here, so he don't see me. So he's walking along, got his hands in his pockets, just out for a stroll."

"So what?" Vale said impatiently. "Jeez, Dub, you eavesdrop on him or something?"

"Nope, that ain't what I heard."

"Dub, d.a.m.nit, if you don't tell me, I'm gonna smack you into the middle of next March."

"Horses."

Vale barked a laugh, "Horses? Christ, Dub, we don't have any horses on the island, you know that as well as I do."

"Don't care, Sheriff. That guy's walking along the beach and he gets a little way up there, and all of a sudden I hear horses. Kind of walking slow, but I hear them."

Wearily Vale ma.s.saged his brow with two fingers, adjusted his Stetson, rubbed his brow again. "h.e.l.l, I'm going back. You want a ride?"

"No. Thanks anyway, I think I'll just sit here a while. Commune, you know?"

"Whatever," Vale said and started back to the Jeep.

"I'll tell you something else," Neely called after him.

Vale lifted a hand over his shoulder, an I-don't-care-see-you-around gesture.

"He heard them too," Neely called. "Didn't see jack, but that Chisholm guy heard them too."

3.

1.

A.

lmost autumn; long past noon.

A light warm wind that still carries dampness from a brief storm just pa.s.sed, pushing ripples across puddles, nudging raindrops from sagging leaves; a dead branch lies in the slow lane of the interstate, and the occasional car swerves around it, lifts a wave, each time pushing it a little closer to the shoulder; the smell of mud and wet gra.s.s and oil smeared to rainbows on the north-to-south highway; a crow in the left land, tearing at the b.l.o.o.d.y body of a cat.