The Bottoms (38 page)

I rushed after Grandma, and found it hard to keep up. The Goat Man ducked into the shadows, silent as thought.

As I ran, I began calling for Tom, and Grandma picked up on it and started doing the same, but Tom didn’t answer. I tripped and went down. When I rose to my knees I saw that I had tripped over Toby. He lay still on the ground, just inside the woods. I picked him up. His head rolled limp to one side. He whimpered softly, his back legs kicked desperately. Blood leaked from his head where he had been whacked.

After all he had been through he had had his head battered, and was probably dying. He had barked earlier, to warn me about the Goat Man, and I hadn’t listened. I had rolled over and gone to sleep, and the Goat Man had come for Tom. Now Toby was injured and dying and Tom was missing, and Mama and Daddy had gone off somewhere in the car, and the Goat Man was no longer in sight.

And for that matter, neither was Grandma.

I
didn’t want to leave him to bleed and die, but I had to help Grandma find the Goat Man and Tom. I put Toby down easy, pushed back the tears, ran blindly into the woods, down the narrow path Grandma had taken in her pursuit of the Goat Man. I fully expected at any moment to fall over Grandma’s or Tom’s body, but that didn’t happen. I finally began to catch up with Grandma. She wasn’t moving so fast now. She was limping, breathing hard. Her nightgown had been ripped by limbs, and so had her hair. She looked absolutely crazed.

“Hon, you got to follow,” she said. “I can’t go another step … I got to sit and rest … I ain’t as tough as I thought. He went through them brambles there. You got to hurry … Take the shotgun.”

“I don’t want to leave you here.”

“You got to follow him, find Tom. You got the gun. He ain’t got none, but I seen he’s got a knife. A big’n, strapped to his side. You make him tell where Tom is, hear? Oh, Jesus, I feel like I’m gonna die. My heart’s actin’ up. Go … go, Harry.”

Grandma collapsed to the ground on her butt, her chest heaving
as if pumped with bellows. As Grandma lay down, I snatched up the shotgun, darted through the brambles, broke out onto a narrow pine-straw-littered trail. The moonlight danced through the boughs overhead and lit up the path. I could see where the Goat Man had pushed back limbs, even broken a few, as if he wanted me to inspect the direction he had gone.

There was enough moon for me to see where I was going, but not enough to keep every shadow from looking like the Goat Man, coiled and ready to pounce. The wind was sighing through the trees and there were bits of rain with it, and the rain was cool. Gradually the moon was being bagged by rain clouds.

I didn’t know if I should go on, or go back and get Grandma and try and find Mama and Daddy. I felt that no matter what I did, valuable time was being lost. There was no telling what the Goat Man was doing to poor Tom. Had he tied her up and put her at the edge of the woods before coming back to taunt me at the window? Maybe he already done what he had wanted to do to Tom, and now he wanted me too.

I thought of what had been done to all those poor women, and I thought of Tom, and a sickness came over me, and I ran faster, deciding it was best to continue on course, hoping I’d come on the monster and would get a clear shot at him and be able to rescue Tom.

It was then that I saw a strange thing in the middle of the trail, prominent in the moonlight breaking through the trees. A limb had been broken off, and it was forced into the ground. It was bent to the right at the top and whittled on to make it sharp. It was like a kind of arrow pointing the way.

The Goat Man was having his fun with me. I decided I had no choice other than to go where the arrow was pointing, a little trail even more narrow than the one I was on.

I went down it, and in the middle of it was another limb,
this one more hastily prepared, just broken off and stuck in the ground, bent over at the middle and pointing to the right again.

Where it pointed wasn’t hardly even a trail, just a break here and there in the trees. I went that way, spiderwebs twisting into my hair, limbs slapping me across the face, and before I knew it my feet had gone out from under me and I was sliding over the edge of an embankment, and when I hit on the seat of my pants and looked out, I was at the road, the one the preachers traveled. The Goat Man had brought me to the road by a shortcut and had gone straight down it, because right in front of me, drawn in the dirt of the road, was an arrow. If he could cross the road or travel it, that meant he could go anywhere he wanted. There wasn’t any safe place from the Goat Man. That story about the road stopping him, about him not being able to leave the bottoms, it was all wrong.

The Goat Man could do anything he wanted to.

I picked up the shotgun I had dropped, ran down the road. I wasn’t even looking for sign anymore. I was heading for the Swinging Bridge and across from that the briar tunnels. I supposed he could have Tom under the bridge, in the cave, but in spite of what Grandma had said, I knew those tunnels were his nest, and I wanted to find him there, and I wanted to shoot and kill him. I wanted Tom to be okay. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted not to be dead. I wanted that a lot. Then I wondered if a shotgun blast could stop the Goat Man. I had thought on that before and wondered, but now, chasing him like this, him leading me on, I certainly wondered it more than ever before.

As I ran, I became more certain that the place I was being taken was the briar tunnels, and that Tom, for better or worse, was there. Those tunnels were where he had done his meanness to those women before casting them in the river. By placing that dead colored woman there, he had been taunting us all, showing us not only the place of the murder, but the probable
place of all the murders. A place where he could take his time and do what he wanted for as long as he wanted.

I felt confident of my conclusions, though I could base them on little more than intuition and childish fantasy. I wished then I had pushed my ideas on Daddy, but I hadn’t, and now I had to deal with the consequences.

When I got to the Swinging Bridge, the wind was blowing hard and the moon showed itself to the world in patches. The bridge lashed back and forth, and I could easily visualize myself being tossed through the air, a stone snapped from a sling. I decided I’d be better off to go down to Mose’s cabin and use his boat to make my way to the briar tunnel.

I remembered we had left the boat along the shore, and my heart sank momentarily, then I thought of how it had been returned before, and ran down there hoping.

When I got there, the boat was in its spot, but when I put the shotgun inside it and tried to push it out in the water, it bogged in the sand and I couldn’t move it. I struggled a full five minutes, unable to budge it, bursting into tears.

I took a deep breath. I had no choice but the bridge. Way the boat was bogged down, there was no way I was going to move it by myself, and I knew in my heart where the Goat Man had taken Tom.

As I raced past the cabin, up in the woods I saw the nose of some kind of vehicle sticking out of the brush, the rest of it tucked between trees. It occurred to me that it might be Mama and Daddy for a moment, but a quick look and I could tell it wasn’t their car. It was a truck. It really didn’t matter. It could be someone down on the river with a boat, running night lines, or hunting possum or coon.

I turned and ran behind the shack on my way back to the bridge, saw something that grabbed my attention. It was hanging from the nail on the back of the cabin. It was a hand and part of a wrist. Something bright dangled from the hand.

My knees sagged. Tom. Oh God. Tom.

I went over to it slowly, bent forward, saw with relief the hand was too large to be Tom’s, and it was mostly rotten with only a bit of flesh on it. In the shadows it had looked whole, but it was anything but. The rotting hand was in a half fist and it was holding a little chain; the chain was draped through its bony fingers, and in the partial open palm on a pad of darkening flesh I could see what it held was a bullet-dented French coin.

Taylor’s coin.

I was trying to reconcile this with the Goat Man, figure on how it had all come together, when there was a hand on my shoulder.

As I jerked my head around, I brought up the shotgun, but another hand came out quickly and took it from me.

I was looking straight into the face of the Goat Man.

The moon rolled out from behind a rain cloud, and its light fell into the Goat Man’s eyes. They shone in his red-black face like cold emeralds. They were the same color as Mose’s eyes.

The Goat Man made a soft grunting sound and patted my shoulder. I saw his horns were not horns at all, but an old darkened straw hat that had rotted, leaving a gap in the front, like something had taken a bite out of it, and the tips the gap had made had been turned up by time, wind, and rain.

It was just a straw hat. A blasted straw hat. No horns.

And those eyes. That skin. Mose’s eyes. Mose’s skin.

In that instant I knew. The Goat Man wasn’t any Goat Man at all. He was Mose’s son, the one wasn’t right in the head and was thought to be dead. He’d been living out here in the woods all this time, and Mose had been taking care of him, and the son in his turn had been trying to take care of Mose, by bringing
him gifts he found in the river, and he was still doing it, even if Mose was dead and gone. He was just a big dumb boy in a man’s body, wandering the woods wearing worn-out clothes and shoes with soles that flopped.

The Goat Man turned and pointed upriver. I knew then he hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t taken Tom. He had come to warn me, let me know Tom had been taken. Now he was pointing the way. I just knew it. I didn’t know how he had come by the hand or Taylor’s chain and coin, but I knew the Goat Man hadn’t killed anybody. He had been watching our house; maybe he thought of himself as a kid. Hadn’t aged a day in his head. The sensation I had felt earlier hadn’t been any possum watching us, it had been the Goat Man. He had been in the woods and had seen what happened with Tom, and now he was trying to help me.

I broke loose from him, ran back to the boat, tried to push it free again. The Goat Man followed me, put the shotgun in the boat, grabbed the end of it, and together we pushed it out of the sand and into the river.

I splashed into the water with the Goat Man. He grabbed me suddenly and stuck me in the boat, pushed on out until the current had it good.

I watched as he waded back toward shore and the cabin. He stood on the bank looking at me, like a friend who hated to see his playmate go away. The wind snapped at his old hat and plucked at his clothes as if to remove them.

I picked up the paddle and went to work, trying not to think too much about what was being done to Tom.

Dark clouds kept passing over the moon, but none grabbed it and held it. It peeked out every now and then, like a frightened child looking out from beneath warm blankets. The raindrops became more frequent as the wind grew hard and slightly cool with dampness.

I paddled so hard my back and shoulders began to ache, but
the current was with me, pulling me fast. I passed a whole school of water moccasins swimming in the dark. I feared they might try to climb up in the boat, as they liked to do, thinking it was a floating log and wanting a rest.

I paddled quickly through them, spreading the school. One did indeed try to climb up the side, but I brought the boat paddle down on him hard and he went back in the water, alive or dead I couldn’t say.

As I paddled around a bend in the river, where moss hung down from trees like curtains, and as I paddled through the moss, fighting it the way you might a thick swath of spiderwebs, I saw where the wild briars grew, and in that moment I had a strange sinking feeling, like carrying a bucket full of water and suddenly having the bottom drop out of it.

The feeling came not only for fear of what I might find in the briar tunnels, but fear I might find nothing at all. Perhaps I was all wrong and the Goat Man did indeed have Tom. Possibly in Mose’s cabin, hiding her there, waiting until I was out of sight. But if that was true, why had he given my gun back? Then again, he wasn’t bright. He was a creature of the woods, same as a coon or a possum. He didn’t think like regular folks.