Armanti Hall and I were exploring the roads in his pickup truck when we saw a little house fifty yards or so from the road, a strip of twelve-foot-wide asphalt that wound around over the hills following the contours. It was a nice enough little clapboard house, but the reason it attracted my attention was the large garden beside it. The flora it contained was big and tall.
We parked and strolled over. We didn’t get very far before we realized that lying near the garden gate was a body.
As we walked up I could see it was a man. He had that totally collapsed look of the dead that are in the process of returning to the earth. From ten feet away, I could see the dark mottled color of his skin and the bloating of his abdominal cavity, so I guessed he had been dead at least a day, and perhaps two.
“Don’t go any closer to that gate,” a woman’s voice said.
We turned to face the house. A small old woman with iron-gray hair was sitting in a rocking chair under a roof on a flagstone patio that was just inches above ground level. Across her knees was a lever-action rifle. Her right hand rested on the stock above the trigger.
“Looks like this gent expired suddenly,” I said conversationally.
“It come on him quick,” she acknowledged. “I gave him fair warnin’ and he decided he needed my tomatoes and beans more than I did. Didn’t think I would shoot, I suspect.”
“Did you know him?”
“Not by name. Seems like I seen him across the mountain at Walmart from time to time, but only to nod to. He was one of the hollow rats, I’m thinkin’, used to sittin’ on his porch drinkin’ beer, waitin’ for the welfare check. That and huntin’ and fishin’ all year ’round. Doubt if he had a garden or much food laid by.”
“So he wanted yours.”
“So he did. He don’t need it now.”
“Where’s his ride? How did he get here?”
“The people he was with drove off after the shot like the hounds of hell were chasin’ them. I thought they’d go get the sheriff, but I ain’t seen hide nor hair of a lawman, unless you’re lawmen.”
“We aren’t. My name is Tommy Carmellini. My friend is Armanti Hall.”
“My name is Angelica Price,” she said. “I see you’re wearing pistols. Are you with the gover’ment?”
“No,” I said. “The pistols are just fashion statements in these troubled times, strictly for social purposes. I’m a peaceful man, myself.”
“We don’t see many black folks up this way. Wasn’t ever ver’ many in these mountains, and after the Civil War most of those few traipsed off for the big cities and bright lights.” She said that as if she could remember it. “Mr. Hall, you’re the first black man I’ve seen in years.”
“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad,” Armanti told her. “If I stay I’ll have to find me a white girl, I suppose.”
Angelica Price supposed so too.
The garden didn’t have a weed in it. Rich dark earth was heaped up along several rows of plants that I thought were probably potatoes. There were several rows of tall plants tied up with strips of rag loaded with green tomatoes, and row after row of beans climbing poles, with cucumbers growing among them. A fence surrounded the whole thing, which was perhaps forty yards wide and sixty or seventy yards long. Above the fence were a couple strands of wire that raised the fence too high for a deer to jump. Just to make sure, strands of wire ran across the top of the garden festooned with strips of cloth that flapped in the breeze. Over it all was fishing line strung from pole to pole to discourage birds.
Beyond the garden was a pasture. Up higher on the hill, right on top, I could see a few headstones sticking up inside a wooden fence, which apparently had been erected to keep cattle away from the stones. Three black cattle grazed on the hillside. To the right, almost behind the house, was a three-sided pole shed containing piles of loose hay inside a fence with an open gate. Chickens and a rooster or two wandered around inside and outside the fence.
“If you’d like, Mrs. Price, we’ll tuck this gent under the sod for you. Say… up there on the hill in that cemetery.”
She turned that offer over, then said, “No. I think we’ll leave him lay right there as a warnin’ to any other fool that happens by. He’s already startin’ to get ripe and I figure he’ll get riper, but I can put up with it. And I don’t want him up there on the hill with my folks and my man.”
“He is getting a little strong,” Armanti remarked, and headed back down the hill toward his truck.
I liked the old lady, who looked to be in her mid-seventies. She was spry and lean, so it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn she was ten years older. It’s a wonder some lonely man didn’t try to marry her years ago. Maybe some did and were refused.
“After he gets rotted down some, I’ll put him on the compost pile,” Angelica Price said.
It took me a moment to get my head around that. Then I asked, “So how are you getting along without electricity?”
“Just fine. Only used it for lights. Got candles and a kerosene lantern, a wood stove and an outhouse, so life is goin’ just the way it has for years, twenty-two since my man died. I got ever’thin’ I need right here, young man. I was born in this house and hope to live out the rest of my days here, on this piece of earth. This is a good place.”
I had to agree. Across the valley I could see clouds building. The breeze, smelling of the land as summer came to an end, was rippling the leaves of the distant trees, making the forest look like the surface of the sea. And it was quiet; the only sound was the whisper of the wind.
“Good luck to you, Mrs. Price,” I said, and walked down the hill to where Armanti was waiting in the pickup.
As we drove off, I told Armanti about Mrs. Price’s remark about the compost pile.
All he said was, “I saw plenty of ’em in Afghanistan and Syria that I would have enjoyed tossing on a compost pile. Killed a few of ’em myself. God bless her.”
TWENTY-FIVE
A board the flagship of the Texas Navy, George Ranta, sitting at the sonar console, removed his headset. The boat was at periscope depth amid a large area of drilling and production rigs. “It’s like listening to a mechanical orchestra warm up,” he told Loren Snyder. “Machinery noises transferred into the water, drill strings going up and down, hammering, clanking, sucking, gurgling…”
The photonics mast was out of the water and the video was on the scope. Loren rotated it slowly around the horizon, stopping every few seconds to make a note on the chart he used to back up the computer plots. Paper didn’t crash and forget things. It was a decent day up there above the ocean, with a high thin overcast and enough breeze to give the water a bit of chop.
What Loren was looking for was a destroyer or frigate, a gray warship. He wanted to torpedo it, then leave the gulf and head around Florida for the Atlantic. First, he thought, put the fear in them. No, first you must find a target. The good news was that any submarine or surface warship amid the rigs was as acoustically deaf as he was.
Always look on the bright side, Loren told himself. Be optimistic. That’s one of the rules for successful people. And we are highly successful people, looking for a place to get a little more of it.
He gave orders to Ada Fuentes on the helm. He wished he knew more about drilling rigs: he wondered if they were stabilized with underwater cables that fanned out from the surface to the seabed. Stay between them, he told himself. Don’t get near one.