This’n here’s the biggest room, Warn said. Then I got me a secret room on back with a rock in front of it so you cain’t see it. Then they’s a tunnel goes back, but I ain’t never been to the end of it. Ain’t no tellin where-all it goes.
Boog came up dragging a load of dead limbs and presently they had a fire going in the center of the big room. This here is the way the cave-men used to do, Boog said.
They used to be cave-men hereabouts, said Warn. Pre-storic animals too. They’s a tush over on the other side of the mountain stickin out of some rock what’s long as your leg. Ain’t no way to get to it lessen you had ropes or somethin.
Johnny Romines took out a packet of tobacco and rolled a cigarette. Boog borrowed it and rolled one too and they sat smoking in long steady pulls. Which’d you rather be, Boog asked John Wesley, white or Indian?
I don’t know, the boy said. White I reckon. They always whipped the Indians.
Boog tipped the ash from his cigarette with his little finger. That’s so, he said. That’s a point I hadn’t studied.
I got Indian in me, Johnny Romines said.
Boog’s half nigger, said Warn.
I ain’t done it, Boog said.
You said niggers was good as whites.
I never. What I said was some niggers is good as some whites is what I said.
That what you said?
Yeah.
I had a uncle was a White-Cap, Johnny Romines said. You ought to hear him on niggers. He claims they’re kin to monkeys.
John Wesley didn’t say anything. He’d never met any niggers.
Tell John Wesley here about the time we dynamited the birds, Warn said. This is last Christmas, he explained. His daddy give him a electric train one time and they got it out for his little brother.
Johnny Romines told it, slowly, smiling from time to time. They had wired the transformer of the train to a dynamite cap stolen from the quarry shack and buried the cap in the snow.
We had us a long piece of lightwire, he said, and we set in the garage with the transformer all hooked up. Warn here claimed it wouldn’t work. Well, we’d sprinkled breadcrumbs all round over where the cap was buried out in the yard and directly you couldn’t see for the birds. I told Warn to thow the switch.
Goddamn but it come a awful blast, said Warn. I eased the switch on over and then BALOOM! They’s a big hoop of snow jumped up in the yard like when you thow a flat rock in the pond and birds goin ever which way mostly straight up. I remember we run out and you could see pieces of em strung all out in the yard and hangin off the trees. And feathers. God, I never seen the like of feathers. They was stit fallin next mornin.
Lord, whispered Boog, I’d of liked to of seen that.
John Wesley had begun to cough. Ain’t it gettin kindly smoky in here to you? he asked. Above their heads smoke roiled and lowered and they noticed they could no longer see the walls of the cave.
Believe it is some, Warn said. He stood up and was closed from sight by the smoke. Hell’s bells, he said, let’s get out of here.
This is the way the cave-men done it, Boog said.
Cave-men be damned, we’re fixin to get barbycued.
They crawled and stumbled to the mouth of the cave — a shifting patch of murky light weaving beyond the smoke combers, came red-eyed and weeping from their crypt, their jacket fronts encrusted with slick red mud. When they had dried their eyes and could see again they were in some volcanic and infernal under-region, the whole of the quarry woods wrapped in haze and smoke boiling up out of the rocky ground from every cleft and fissure.
Mr Eller stood at the counter and watched them come in, the clothes steaming on the backs of the men as they stomped off the slush from their shoes and stood about the stove making cigarettes with chilled fingers, the stove popping and whistling with the snow-wetted coal, the women excited with the cold, making their purchases with deliberation, some towing small children about in the folds of their skirts, leaving again, young boys with shotguns and rifles buying shells not by the box but by fours and sixes and lending to the bustle a purposeful and even militant air. He rang the money up in the cash register or marked it in his credit books.
Odor of smoke and cold, wet clothing and meat cooking. The snow was falling again and they watched it. Lord, Mr Eller said, reckon it’s ever goin to quit.
Boog and Johnny Romines came in with a rabbit and they each got a dope.
Whereabouts you get him, Johnny? Mr Eller asked.
Over on the creek.
Warn Pulliam caught a skunk in a hole, Boog said. That right? How’s he smell? He don’t smell too purty.
The men laughed. He’s a fat’n, one said, nodding toward the rabbit. How’s them pups run? Purty good?
Purty good little old rabbit dogs, Johnny said. They jumped two more but I never got a clear shot.
Them’s beagles, said Boog.
The old man came out on the pike road at the gap where the Green Fly Inn had stood. There was no trace of the inn now but the black and limbless pine trunk that stood in the hollow. Snow had started again, dropping like a veil over the valley or riding the wind through the gap, stinging his face a little. He walked down until he came to the Twin Fork road and took it into the Hopper and homeward. From a lightwire overhead, dangling head downward and hollowed to the weight of ashened feathers and fluted bones, a small owl hung in an attitude of forlorn exhortation, its wizened talons locked about the single strand of wire. It stared down from dark and empty sockets, penduluming softly in the bitter wind.
At the head of the hollow there was a springhouse and they stopped to drink, the water green and pulsing up from the rocks where a scalloped fringe of ice jutted just above the waterline.
I figured to set here, Warn said, but they’s too many people come by and you’d get your traps stole. Come on I’ll show you where I got my culvert-set. He dipped up another mouthful of the numbing water, took the rifle and trap and handed the skunk to the younger boy. He don’t smell so bad out in the air, he said. The old lady’ll pitch a hissy when she gets a whiff of me though.
They came out on the road and crossed to the other side where the creek ran. Warn got down on one knee and peered back through the culvert under the road where the spring run trickled through.
It don’t never freeze in here, he said. I done caught me one muskrat here but what I’m lookin for is a mink. See? I got the trap jest back inside where nobody won’t notice it.
The boy peered into the dark tunnel, the water loping slowly down the corrugated metal and flaring where it passed over the trap.
I seen mink sign here back in the fall and some lately, Warn said. They’s mink on Stock Creek too. Used to be some on Red Branch but they ain’t any more is how come I don’t trap it no more. You ready to go?
See, they ain’t been no cars in here yet, Warn said. Ain’t but jest a few people live over here in the holler and mostly they ain’t got cars. You see that house up yander?
He looked where Warn pointed. Set back off the road was a squat saddle-roofed structure with a thin wisp of smoke swirling and circling about the top of the chimney.
That’s where Garland Hobie lives, he told him. You mess around there you get your ass shot off.
How come?
On account of he makes whiskey, Warn said. Him and his old lady. Here. I’ll show you somethin directly.