“They managed to bag a knuckle-dragging neighbor, the boobs,” he told an unamused Arch. “How fitting. Build more prisons and all you get are more prisoners. Well, duh.”
The Agency Man took opportunity to roll -- yes literally roll -- on the floor, hands clutching his heaving sides.
Arch made no response, merely stewed and pouted. Eventually he limped from his attic hideaway down the stairs and out the kitchen door to the farmyard where the dozen or so pick-up trucks and two dozen or so men grimly waited, swatting flies and drinking iced tea in the shade of the tall cottonwoods.
The men swatting flies, not the trucks.
A regiment in need of direction, if ever there was one.
From across the adjacent pasture the sound of A. Jacks dutifully loading wood on a wagon dimly could be heard.
“Ain’t no sign of ‘im nowhere,” one of the men complained rather loudly as Arch drew near then sank to the ground in the manner of a General seeking inspiration.
“We done scoured very square inch, Arch,” added another. “Nary a trace.”
“Me and the boys been trackin’ many a beast for many a year, and we ain’t never seen the like,” glumly noted one failed search-and-rescuer. “A man can follow them there cat tracks perfectly clear. Then, of a sudden, she goes off all different ways.”
“I seen that too.”
Much murmured concurrence.
“It ain’t natural.”
“I’m half beginning to believe there ain’t no cat a’tall.”
So complained the posse in turn.
Arch shook his head.
“Faith saw it,” Arch said.
The congregation mulled the intelligence uncertainly.
By and by Joe or Jim or Jesse seized the podium of rural debate. One of the Tkomasjevitgch brothers, anyway.
“I don’t know quite how to say it, Arch,” he began haltingly. “But I feel touched by the spirit to speak.”
He drew a deep breath.
“I’m commencin’ to think we may be facin’ some kind of higher power here.”
Much vigorous nodding of assent from the assembled men.
Hanratty cackled raucously.
A cat doesn’t come when called. A cat intent on evading detection will not by merely mortal man be found. The men knew this, and knew too a feline successfully can hide from prying eyes for days and months and years, even while stealthily stealing tuna from the kitchen table or slop from the pig’s trough, because some among them had witnessed just such behaviors in the domesticated miniatures haunting many a dusty farmyard, or rather not witnessed them, and beyond that, even, the primitive brain stem remembered the threat from a time before pants. Hopelessly, then, the men of the roughly hexagonal fiefdom or prelate or sanctuary resumed their collective inspection of the fields and meadows and hills and dales, but without any real hope. By and by they knocked off for the day and headed to their respective homes or hovels for a shower and a shave and a snort of home-brewed swill.
A kidnapper on the loose, every man hastened to man battle stations, intent on defending against the tawny killing machine, bolting and locking and barricading and sandbagging every available orifice, so to speak. Sealing with keen vigilance the family perimeter against the ravaging cat that, if given half a chance, would steal from the family bosom the very crown jewel of hereditary genetic lineage. Or, in this case, a son. Whether the cat had been carried by the very winds into the way of Arch and Faith and Thomas and Peter remained a matter of conjecture, though most frankly doubted it. Death will spring from whatsoever place it elects, be it brooding black cloud or sleek feline predator.
As Faith knew better than anyone.
The body they never found, oddly. The “they” whose job it is to find such things, that is. Found, the body was not. Caught in a snare of submerged logs, as attested by the tennis shoes and watch and other telltale gee-gaws later discovered in the interstices of or between or among the twining branches, the man himself somehow managed to escape. Unexpectedly the body was not found, by Faith or the “they” who are charged with recovering drowned husbands or brothers or sons.
True, the river itself was running higher and wider and deeper than usual that spring day. Deep enough, anyway, to conceal the cottonwood trunk and associated limbs and thin branches carried by current into a freakish hollow or eddy where jumbled haphazardly together the limbs conspired to catch and hold temporarily the man only seconds before from a canoe flung. Though both water and atmosphere are comprised of roughly sixty-seven percent hydrogen – as is the human body, parenthetically – and thus more similar than dissimilar in constituent make-up, the manner in which that hydrogen arranges itself with the other ingredients makes all the difference, or so it seems. Not found, the body.
Faith remembered standing on the riverbank, twin sons at her side, dripping wet all three of them, anxiously scanning the raging river for any sign of a living, breathing survivor. No such luck. As if the man had succumbed to, or perhaps more accurately surrendered at, or perhaps even better been vacuumed from the planet by, a wormhole or portal or dimension-bridging bridge across which merely mortal man strays but once. To the other side. Poof, just like that, vanished without a trace, the oxygen-bereft body somehow escaping the river’s iron grip, not unlike, say, the human soul fleeing its fleshy confines at the hour of death.
Her brother Arch arrived three days later to take Faith and the boys back to the family farm north of Plowman. It seemed the right thing. Faith too numbed and stunned and otherwise emotionally torpedoed to resist. Bodily carried off, or should one say kidnapped, by fate, events, time, caprice. She set up shop in the house the family had called home since its unceremonious eviction from the Home Place two generations earlier, she and the twins, intending to bide her time until her presumably dead husband turned up alive again, waterlogged perhaps but otherwise hale and hearty, discovered somewhat unbelievably by a passing junk on the uninhabited Pacific island to which the river undoubtedly had carried him.
River currents can be tricky.
Speaking of whom, Faith and A. Jacks at that hour sweated rather heavily over the busted toilet in the basement of the two-story farmhouse still brimming with mourners.
The farmhouse brimming with mourners, not the toilet.
The damn thing had geysered inopportunely just as the women sat down to afternoon tea. A. Jacks came running as summoned to staunch the flow. Or rather laconically strolling as summoned, by Faith, monkey wrench in hand. Once on the job the bushy-haired man sank to a knee to attend to the necessary repairs, Faith watching anxiously over his shoulder.
A thing badly in need of fixing, as a quick look confirmed. Unchanged from installation decades earlier, apparently. The design lacked cohesive continuity, for one thing. More like a system cobbled together on the fly. Suctioning stuff up from the basement not exactly what nature had in mind. Rivers generally don’t flow in an upward heading, or other material things flee from down to up. Whose damn idea was that?
With much vigorous plungering of plunger A. Jacks succeeded in clearing the clogged pipe, albeit not without effort. The way having been made somewhat clear, he next unscrewed the valves and replaced the torn gasket. Fortunately Faith had a replacement handle on hand. The gearshift needed a new flywheel into the bargain. A. Jacks could not readily put his fingers on a wrench of appropriate dimension, so Faith helpfully dug through the tool box while slapping the man lightly about the head and shoulders as penalty for his disorganization.
Men cannot be counted on to put things away routinely. Away to things routinely put.
Which left only the corroded pipes themselves. Nothing for it but to grease the leaky joists. A. Jacks screwed, Faith too screwed. A two-person job, most assuredly. Sweating and swearing some while jammed cheek to jowl in the smallish