The Spirit

The Indian hissed into his face, black eyes distilling fire, threads of saliva collecting in the deep clefts on the sides of his mouth. “He’s a spirit! He is! I know what he is. And you’re the devil, you bastard—” Moon babbled on, words spilling out of his mouth, juiced with a venomous hatred so potent they seemed to cling to the walls. He drenched Jason in obscenities, some common, some so bizarre they made absolutely no sense.

But he did not pull the trigger. Some uncertainty stilled his finger. Jason knew that if the right lever in Moon’s psyche were touched, his own life would pour out, and he had not touched that lever. It was fear that really fueled the Indian’s rage. Fear of Jason, fear sparked from some mysterious emotional terminals in his brain.

The Indian ran out of insults. He released his grip on Jason and stepped backward, his bony face a whitened mask of trapped anger.

“You were in the war, weren’t you, Moon?”

Moon breathed harshly, the breath whistling through his nostrils. His forehead glistened.

“I’m very sorry,” said Jason, straightening his coat.

He opened the door. Wind shrieked in, bearing twigs from the woods. There were no snowflakes yet, but there soon would be. The sun would darken and the sky grow fat with iron clouds that pressed tightly over the horizon. “I want my gun back, Moon. If you’re not planning to shoot me, that is.”

Moon threw the gun at him. It bounced off Jason’s jacket to the floor. Had it been cocked, one of them would not be walking out of the room.

“Thank you,” said Jason. He tucked it into his belt and bulled out into the wind.

Touching that toe had been a kind of addiction. He had to get back into the medicine bundle. Regardless of what the Indian did, Raymond Jason was determined to stick as close to John Moon as Moon had stuck to his spirit.

The late cousin Murphy used to say that Lester Cole was never on time anywhere. When relatives called Cole’s trailer to find out how he could miss Murphy’s funeral, an operator came on to say that the phone was out of order. He was not working at the lodge, where the phones were also down, so they became mildly alarmed and contacted the police.

A motorcycle cop braved the winds and drove up Hulcher Road to where Lester’s trailer was parked deep in overhanging woods. Lester’s truck was overturned, and the entire trailer was off its cinder-­block mountings. The ground was littered with broken glass, furniture, and beer cans, thrown out the smashed doors and windows.

The cop took out his gun and shouldered his way inside. A rock lay on the floor. Blood was everywhere. A trail of thin blood led into the kitchen, to a great dried puddle of it soaking newspapers around the kitchen table. Lester had apparently been poaching deer. Every­thing else in the trailer was smashed.

The cop called headquarters, which in turn called the Forest Service. When Drake and his men arrived, the cop was poking through the woods, looking for Lester’s body.

“Let’s not fly off the handle yet,” said Drake over the map spread out on the truck hood. He indicated a fanlike section of Colby’s face with Lester’s trailer as the base. Checking it out meant trudging uphill through tangled timbers and maintaining your balance by gripping bushes. “There isn’t any reason for them to come all the way around the mountain. Oharaville’s on the north side.”

They climbed for an hour, searching the ground. After a hundred yards the blood gave out. Taylor was leaning against a tree, feet securely planted in the ground, cupping a match against the wind to light a cigarette, when he saw the shoe wedged in the exposed tree roots. It was a cheap loafer, the sole worn to paper-­thinness. The heel was caught in the root.

Drake examined the shoe. Blood had dried on the instep. “It was upside down, so that means he was either walking backwards or he was dragged up and the heel caught in the roots. Let’s look for clothing or something.” They spread out, searching the underbrush and branch tips. Jones was standing next to Wallace when the wind shifted. “Listen!”

Wallace listened and heard nothing. “What?”

“It’s gone now. Did you ever blow over the top of an open bottle and make this whooo noise? For just a minute there. . .”

Again the wind shifted and this time Wallace heard a lowing sound, like that of a distant cow, coming from a rock ledge above them. He and Jones scrambled up to it.

Brush was pushed tightly against the wall of rock. It did not quiver as the wind crossed it. Jones grabbed a handful and pulled. The entire bush popped out like a cork from a small horizontal cave some four feet high and seven feet wide. The bush flew away in an ungainly ball from Jones’s hand, hit a tree, and disintegrated.

They waited on the ledge for Taylor to puff back up the slope bearing a rope and lights. Drake tied the rope around his waist and flashed a light inside the cave. “Somebody make a note that Forest Rangers be equipped with gas masks next time.”