No Blood, No Foul

                                                                  

Couple things: Chuck was there for me when I needed someone to shoot my dog. I guess that’s just one thing, but at the time I really needed his help. A census worker was walking up my driveway one Thursday afternoon and my German Shepard took a nip at her leg. It was more of a bite, really. I stepped out in time to call the dog back, but the worker turned and ran frantically back to her car. I raised my arm in a kind of pathetic wave keeping my hand in the air as if the woman should stay but she put her Kia in reverse and sped back out of the driveway. 

It really bummed me out. Anybody can just die out of the blue and they don’t know they're gonna die. Like Connie. I’d fed her that morning. Played fetch. Scratched behind her ears. Sure, Connie would growl sometimes when there were strangers around or you got too close when she was eating, but she never bit. Until that day. I’d always thought to myself that there was nothing more worthless than a mean dog. So when Connie bit that census worker, I knew she had to go. 

On Sunday afternoons Chuck and I had often been over to the gravel pit shooting his 44 Magnum, or, as he liked to say, “The most powerful handgun in the world.” I’m not sure that’s true anymore but I don’t really know much about guns. When I told him I needed his help and to bring his gun he didn’t ask any questions. Just drove right over. 

Connie was tied to a maple tree in the backyard. I made sure my wife was gone and then I explained to Chuck what needed to be done. The sense of purpose on his face and somber apprehension of this responsibility moved me. 

I always felt I owed him for that, so when he and his wife hit a rough patch, I wanted to be there for him. I pulled into his driveway swerving around a small red bicycle and then a plastic basketball hoop and pulled up to a little red wagon filled with toy construction equipment. It was unseasonably cool in a way that disappoints when you’ve been planning a canoe paddle for the last week. I waited and gave the horn a quick tap. 

Chuck was a cement guy--laid block and poured basement walls. He worked hard and I knew he was looking forward to this trip. I even helped him with a few garage floors some Saturdays for extra cash.

As I looked around the yard I heard muffled calls and then saw Chuck back out of the house gripping his backpack and scowling.

“Let’s go.” He said as he threw his pack into the backseat and slammed the door. 

“Everything alright?”

“No.”

I backed out slow and careful as a grandma and then headed for the landing up near the headwaters of the Mississippi. The tie down straps holding the canoe on the roof hummed noisily in the wind. 

It took about seventy-five miles before Chuck spoke. 

“Sometimes I just wish I could change everything--make it different so we can do things different.” He mumbled vaguely.

“You and Jess having trouble?” I’d been the best man at their wedding and we all graduated highschool together. “You know how she is sometimes.” I said trying to mollify him.

“I thought I did. I feel things changing--like it is out of my control or something.” He looked helpless all of a sudden. He sat there in his cut off shorts, camo t-shirt and flip flops.

“She just won’t listen.” He paused. “Hell, I don’t even know what to say half the time. I probably wouldn’t listen either.”

“She says it’s her life, too, that she has no choice.” That was the last thing she said when I left. Just like that. “Chuck, I love you, but I have no choice.”

I could imagine Jess saying that. She always loved Chuck, since we were kids, but who knows love when you're thirteen years old. I figured she was claiming her life now having never had one of her own. 

“So, what does she want to do?”

“I don’t know; I left. I said we’d talk tomorrow when I get back.”

The canoe was loaded and Chuck navigated from the back. We paddled for five hours and the top of my thighs and back of my hands were bright red and I cursed myself for not bringing sunscreen. Chuck pointed to the bend up ahead and said for the fourth time, “That looks like the spot, right there.” 

He’d stayed at a campsite along this route seven years before and had planned for us to spend the night there. It was an old Civilian Conservation Corp work site but was now just an open field with some campfire rings and a shelter and the only access was from the river. He said the landing was halfway between where we put in and the landing where our wives would pick us up Sunday morning.

The four beers each we’d brought were now empties rolling around in the bottom of the canoe and I could smell the stale beer smell. There was no wind and we were going with the current smooth and still, but after the initial thrill of anticipating what was around each corner wore off, it became kind of a slog. The river was still shallow here and long fluorescent green fronds of grass bent in the current alongside our canoe. 

We could have moved faster but about an hour into our paddle, Chuck had us drift to a stop for a 1.5 of rum for the 2 liter of diet Coke he had packed in his bag. It was a mom and pop resort at the edge of a small lake that flowed into the river. They sold ice cream treats, frozen pizzas, candy, soda, beer and liquor. 

We dragged the canoe up onto the gravel landing. There was a woman in the parking lot taking down a big vendor sign hung on the post near the road. Enter for a drawing to win a 20 gauge shotgun, a $75 dollar gas card or a deluxe inflatable Budweiser party barge (women in bikinis not included). When she saw us coming, she left it half hanging there and sold us the rum.

I guided the bow onto a muddy bank covered in gray and white wispy cottonwood down and duck prints. It had the translucent green look that gave a smell when you stepped into it.

We hauled out our packs and the cooler we brought along and lugged it up the pathless bank, a good one hundred feet. It took us about 45 minutes to make two trips each up from the canoe, locate the best spot for the tent, pitch it and started to unwind.

“There’s a chickadee up there.” I pointed to the top of the tree overhanging the shelter.

“She don’t give a shit, anyway--as long as she gets to go out on benders with her buddies.”

He’d been struggling since we arrived and now stared out through the ash limbs and across the river. “Wish we had some Coke for this shit.” Chuck’s 2 liter had leaked inside his back back and saturated everything.

“Hey, Chuck! Look where we are.” I said as I turned around with my arms in the air Mary Tyler Moore style. “We’re roughin’ it here.” He walked back and sat on the edge of the picnic shelter. 

“Yeah, I know. Jesus, isn’t this nice?” He too took the entire area in. “Fuckin’ nature, huh?”

While I’d already been through a midlife adjustment, I recognized the approach of Chuck’s. “How did you know this place was here? Seems kind of isolated. Is this river access the only way in?  

“Yeah, just from the river.” He took a long drink and we both turned towards a noise from brush.

A woman grunted and scrambled from the tangled brush at the top of the precipitous bank which dropped behind her the one hundred feet to the surface of the river. Incredulous, I looked at Chuck as if a goddamn alien from outer space had just appeared before our eyes, rather than a sloppy, fat female that now faced us in a loose fitting sundress hung over bovine shoulders on straining spaghetti straps with her left nipple poking around the hem.

“Hi!” She stepped towards the picnic table, tripped up slightly and continued on. 

“You guys camping here?”

“Uh, yeah.” Chuck looked over her shoulder to see if there were more.

“You tubing down the river?” I asked obviously, attempting to move her mentally and physically on before she established herself here at the top of the bluff. I could hear muffled conversation still down at the river bottom.

She looked around, unfocused, “You mind if we camp here?”

“There’s another shelter right over there.” I pointed across the clearing to a second fire ring and shelter near the edge of the woods, but her eyes roved over the contents of our picnic table.

“You guys have some food--a hotdog or something? I’m so hungry.”

Chuck offered her what was left of a bag of ruffles potato chips and I offered her some peanuts in the shell, which, after snatching the chip bag, she swerved towards me and began cracking shells and devouring peanuts with a ravenousness generally reserved for starving people.

“Our party barge is leaking air. I don’t know what happened. Fuckhead down there snagged us on some trees or something.” As she spoke she moved her lips awkwardly around four spindly front teeth in an otherwise empty cartoon mouth. “You sure you don’t have a hot dog or something?”

“Hey Man!” An emaciated creature clawed his way over the lip of the bank. He did not have a shirt on and his pants were a smooth, shiny and thin material, studded with zippers and little metal doodads here and there that were soaking wet and clung to his hips and legs. His feet were bleeding and impacted with dirt and mud all around his toe nails.

 “Hey…!” At that point he recognized that we were up there too. “Hi guys.” He softened his tone and changed his focus. “Sorry to interrupt, you two together...camping out. Listen, sorry to interrupt. Our raft is fucked.” His narrow little head and bewhiskered face worked as awkwardly as his female companions. “Hey guys, sorry to intrude on your shit here. What’s your name?” He extended his arm for a fist bump.

“Jim. What’s yours?” Tapping his fist.

“Jim?” He hesitated, tilting his head philosophically, “Where you from, Jim?” 

As he spoke he walked around the picnic table and took a seat on the edge of the shelter next to me. “You guys got anything to eat; we’re starved. Been on this river for like two hours and our raft is goin’ flat.” He scanned the contents of our site. “You guys camping here?” His sunken chest was pale and punctuated by two pale pink nipples that stuck out like a couple of studs.

“Yeah, we’re here for one night.”

“Sweeeet.” He drew the word out. “What’s your name?” He asked, again attended by the unanswered fist bump.

“Jim.” I answered his bump.

“Cool. I’m Fifi--I’m on facebook. You on facebook?” His eyes swerved in and out of my gaze.

I looked to Chuck who was watching the woman as she finished the bag of chips and was currently rubbing the salt from the bottom with her fingers and then licking it off--her hair hung in wet, limp clumps over her face and some strands stuck to her tongue as she licked at her greasy fingers.

“Freedom’s the lead singer in our band. Right, hon?”

“Aw, fuck you Feef. Hey, you guys got a hotdog or something--I’m starving?” Freedom then sat down hard on the edge of the picnic table and the other end lifted from the ground, tipping over some of our stuff. 

“Woah, baby, take it easy there. You’re fuckin’ with these dudes’ shit, now.” Fifi put his fist out. “So you guys camping here?” His short term memory seemed to have shorted out. 

“Yeah. Where are you headed?” Again, trying to move the party along. 

“County Road 8.” Feef clutched a handful of peanuts and worked one with his fingers. “Gonna call our buddy there.” As he said it, he looked off into the trees at the top of the bank. Chuck looked at me and then to the ground at Feef’s foot. 

“You’re bleeding a little there.” I pointed. 

“Ah, just a little blood, that never hurt no one, right hon? No blood, no foul.”  Freedom was still licking between her fingers and through the gaps in her teeth.

“Whatever, Feef.”

“Hey! Guys!” A third individual struggled up over the edge and while wet and his legs were muddy, he had kind of an honor student look about him that didn’t match up with his companions.

He stood at the edge of the bank rubbing mud from the front of his legs. He wore a small backpack that dripped water along with his clothing which consisted of a striped short sleeved shirt, denim shorts and slip on shoes with a checkerboard pattern on them.

“The raft is good. Let’s go.” He looked at us. “Sorry about my friends. They can be real jerks.”

“Tanner...we shouldna taken that thing out right away.” Feef spoke with some seriousness.

“You won it only because I was the reason we were at the liquor store in the first place.” Freedom waited a second. “I was the one.” She had moved to the center of the picnic table now and was snuffling through a tough peanut shell. “Shoulda known it would be shit.” She continued to poke through the bag of peanuts with her index finger, seeming to search for something specific. “You guys got anything else to eat?”

I was losing patience with this shitshow and turned to Chuck to see if he was ready to move them along. 

Feef wasn’t about to, though, when Freedom, in a voice wholly tempered from a minute ago, asked, “Tanner, you got your heater?” Chuck looked at me and I turned to Tanner, who looked like he’d been caught with his hand in a dish of fudge. “Ah, Freedom, you just shut the fuck up about that.” 

This was not the honor student I knew and, right then, Chuck knew it too.

“So, why don’t you all just head on back to your raft and keep going down the river.” The neutral tone he attempted to strike avoided the appearance of conflict but I knew Chuck and he was now on a mission.

“Tanner?” Freedom’s voice rose an octave as if mocking her boon companion. “Tanner? Are you going to let this guy push us out of our campsite?”

Then Feef broke in reasonably, “Boys, my woman here don’t have no patience, plus she’s pissed about our raft and we lost our weed in the water somewhere. As he spoke a red translucent husk from the inside of a peanut shell hung in the wispy strands of mustache at the corner of his mouth before breaking free and drifting down onto the picnic table top.

“We’re camped here. It’s been nice meeting you but I think it’s time you moved along.”

I tried to sound accommodating and firm at the same time. 

Chuck looked at me, “I’m going to get the fire starter out of my bag so we can make a fire later.” He flipped the flap of his pack over and dug into it for the fire starter.

Peter had a backpack of his own that he dropped off his back and swung around to his front. He looked at Freedom and then at Chuck and smiled. He pulled his arm from the pack and had a small silver pistol in his hand. “Alright fellas. It’s a shame we had to bump into you like this but as long as we’re here, why don’t you give us your wallets and packs. Then we’ll be on our way.

“I knew it!” Freedom shouted with joy. “Tanner, you’re the brains. That’s what Feef always tells me. Tanner is the brains here, Freedom.” She said this in a serious tone. 

“Wait a minute everybody. Chuck and I are just on a little camping trip. We don’t have any money.” I tried to keep calm but Chuck still had his arm in his bag searching for the firestarter.”

“You can just give that bag to me. Set it over there on the picnic table.”

Chuck looked at me and seemed to be trying to make up his mind when he stood up with his arm still in the bag and suddenly the front exploded and I could smell the rum dripping from it and the odor of gunpowder in the air. 

I looked over at Peter Brady. His blue and white striped shirt now had a growing patch of red in the center of it. Peter’s face seemed stunned for a second and I wasn’t sure why his shirt was red. Then he raised his arm with the pistol in it and before it became level, there was another giant Boom!. 

“Get the hell away from him!” Chuck yelled angrily and I complied. This time Peter’s shoulder was a mass of red tissue and he fell to the ground dropping the pistol as he did.

“What did you do!” Freedom was screaming now. “What the faack!” Feef had come to his senses and turned and ran towards the bank they had all just climbed. Chuck ran after him just as he dove headfirst into the brush over the edge. Freedom grabbed the hunting knife I’d used to cut the hotdog buns and covered the ground between her and I in a second.

“I’m going to kill you you goddamn bastard!” She held the knife up over her head and without thinking I rammed my shoulder into her chest and felt her large soft breasts bounce wildly into my stomach. I knocked her off balance and she fell to the side and hit her head on the rusty edge of the fire ring. At that moment I heard one more gunshot and then another. Freedom lay on her stomach with half of her swimsuit bottom lodged into the crack of her ass. The knife was caked with dirt next to an old bottle cap and some broken glass. I kicked it away and used my foot to push her in the side and get her to come to.

“Can you give me a hand over here!” I couldn’t see Chuck but he sounded close.

I walked around to the other side of Freedom and got down and looked at her face. The bone of her skull was visible just at the edge of her scalp and her eyes were wide open. Jesus. I thought. I heard twigs crack and muffled grunts.

“Over here! He’s too heavy!” I walked to the edge of the bank and saw Chuck bent over Feef trying to pull him up the hill by his wrists. The skinny arms looked like they might pull from their sockets and there were strands of weeds snagged in the zippers and doodads of his pants.

“Ah, Christ! What the fuck?”

I wasn’t about to let Chuck fall apart.

“Chuck, you had no choice. That guy was gonna shoot us sure as shit, but damn. I didn’t even know you had your .44 in there.”

“I thought we might have a chance to shoot like we do at the gravel pits.”

I looked at my watch and then at the sun, which was settled in the west. 

“He was going to shoot us. He looked crazy. Did you see that look on his face. He was going to shoot us.” I tried to keep my own emotions from slipping. “You had no choice.”

Chuck looked over to our camp and saw Freedom sprawled in the dirt by the fire ring. “What happened to her?”

“She came at me. I pushed her and she hit her head. She had a knife. She was out of her mind. It was self-defense.”

“It was self defense, mostly.” Chuck knew that Feef ran for his life and he took it. “I had no choice.”

Tanner was slumped over on his knees near Freedom with his arms hanging limply and his head turned sideways on the ground. His eyes were open. I knelt down and vomited. 

“You okay?”

“Yeah. It just came. What are we going to do now?” Chuck had that look on his face, like when he came over to shoot Connie.

“The last time I was here, there was an old building in the woods, a bunch of them actually, just off the edge of the clearing here. One of them had collapsed mostly but there was a basement, dirt floor, but I remember a hole in there, I think it was a cistern or something.” 

He scanned the woods behind us. “We could drop them in there. Cover them up with rocks from down by the river. Nobody would find them.”

It took until after dark to haul rocks up the bank from out in the river and drop them down the well over the top of the bodies. We didn’t sleep. In the morning we scanned the campsite one last time, loaded our canoe and the deflated party barge. We cut it up into pieces and stuffed it into our packs and anyplace we could.

The river moved steady and cold in the morning and was a shock to our legs as we pushed the canoe out into the current. We passed silently under county road 8 about 45 minutes in and then paddled hard the rest of the way. Jess and my wife were waiting at the landing when we arrived.

“Hey Bear.” Jess’s pet name for Chuck. She seemed sad but loving to him and I wondered what happened behind close doors, if it really was like Chuck said.

“Hey Babe.” 

I looked to my wife while she was scrolling through her phone in the passenger seat before looking up. 

“How was it?” she asked. “You cut your forehead.” 

I raised my hand to my head until I felt the cut. 

“Huh.” 

 I looked at Chuck and then back out into the current. She turned back to her phone.

“Will you give me a hand loading the canoe, Chuck?”

“You got it, buddy.”