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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781892950475 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Overlook Connection Press, The |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2002 |
| Pages: | 204 |
| Sales rank: | 509,758 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.94(w) x 9.74(h) x 0.81(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Red
By Jack Ketchum
Dorchester Publishing
Copyright © 2002
Jack Ketchum
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8439-5040-4
Chapter One
The old man looked at the dog looking at him, watching his
hands as they threaded the hook through the brown plastic worm
to its bright orange tail, the old dog lying on the riverbank
in a patch of late afternoon sunlight filtering through the
trees. After all this time the dog was still curious about him
and especially curious about his hands. It was as though, to
the dog, the hands and what the hands could do were what made
them different from one creature to another and that was all.
He heard the boys long before he saw them and so did the dog,
knew that someone was approaching and that there were more
than one of them cutting down through the woods along the
narrow dirt and gravel path from the clearing where the old
man had left his pickup, the same way he and the dog had come.
He could hear their feet scuffling the earth and gravel and
the crack of branches over the songs of birds and the sounds
of the slow-moving river.
The dog's ears rolled forward and up and he turned his big
brown scruffy head in the direction of the sounds and then
looked back to the old man. The old man said nothing so the
dog just sighed and settled in.
The river hand been productive for the old man ever since
ice-out but now in late June it was almost too easy-he'd been
standing on the bank only thirtyor forty minutes, no more.
And already he had two out of his three-fish legal limit lying
headless and gutted in his cooler, both of them four-pounders.
The river flowed wide and deep here. The old man had only to
pick a rock or a stump or a fallen tree as he did now-anything
the smallmouth could use for cover-and then cast his worm and
let it drop. He would retrieve the line in a series of jerks
so that down in the brown cloudy water the worm would surge
forward and upward and then settle back to the bottom again.
Today three or four jerks was all it took and he could feel
the tap on the line that told him the fish was interested. He
would point the rod at the fish so that the line went slack
and the fish could begin to feed on the plastic worm the old
man had scented with his spit. Then he would slowly reel the
slack back in and when that was finished and he judged the
line was tight enough he'd set the hook, pulling the rod up
hard over his head, freeing the hook from its swindle of a
worm and piercing the fish's mouth.
The bass would want to fight like a demon but the old man
wouldn't let him fight, not any more than he had to anyway in
order to reel him in.
This was about a fish on his plate and two in the freezer and
that was all it was about. His taste for blood sports had fled
somewhere between his daughter Alice's wedding and Mary's
death. It had never returned.
But he did love the good firm white meat of the fish and so
did the dog. Though the dog would eat just about anything,
Mary'd said. And over the years since her death he'd found
that in this, as in most things his wife chose to speak on,
she was right.
He saw the dog raise his head again, his scarred black nose
scenting the air.
The old man smelled it too, before the dog in fact. The dog
was not what he used to be. When the old man looked at him he
could still see the pup inside him the same way he could still
see the boy inside himself. But the dog moved much more slowly
now, which was probably the onset of arthritis and his eyes
were starting to cloud over.
Though there was enough left in him for him to go off chasing
Emma Siddon's black mongrel bitch whenever she was in season.
He'd caught him at that again just a week ago in the field
behind his house. The old man smiling, the dog leaping through
the goldenrod stirring up the bees like he was still young and
strong.
Still the old man smelled it first.
Gun oil.
Faint, upwind of him, coming off the trial.
The scent of an amateur, the old man thought. Any good hunter
would have known to swab it down a whole lot better than this
one had. Game would be moving away from them for miles around.
Even if they hadn't been coming down the trail as noisy as a
herd of goats.
He brought the rod up quickly to just past the vertical and
then down hard to the near-horizontal and felt the line whip
hissing toward him and then out past him, shooting away across
the river to the same half-sunk tree where he'd pulled the
first one, the bigger of the two bass, only to the far side of
the tree this time where he knew the water was deeper. He let
it drift to the bottom and then gave the line a tug.
The dog's head was up again and the old man saw them out of
the corner of his eye and turned to glance at them as they
stumbled down the hill and then he turned his attention back
to the line and tugged once again.
Kids. Seventeen, eighteen maybe.
One shotgun between them, carried by the tallest of the three,
slung over his shoulder like it was a stick or a bat, not a
firearm.
"Gettin' any?"
The old man turned to see who was talking to him. It was the
one with the shotgun, tall and good-looking and probably aware
of that, his hair cut short the way they used to cut the old
man's hair back in the service, jeans and a t-shirt that read
STOLEN FROM MABEL'S WHOREHOUSE, with a drawing of a
big-breasted woman in a cowboy hat standing outside some
Western-style bar.
The boy looked lean, hard, not like the other two. The other
wore jeans and t-shirts as well, one red and one a faded
yellow, the kind with pockets cut for cigarettes, but their
hair was medium length and brown, not blond and short like the
other boy's. The kid in the red shirt had a belly on him.
"Two in the cooler," he said. "Have a look if you want."
The boy in the yellow shirt whose body was just a skinny young
boy's body, not a man's yet like the one with the gun, leaned
down and flipped the lid of the cooler. He studied the fish a
moment, hands dug into the pockets of his jeans so that his
shoulders hunched and then stood up again.
"Not bad," he said. "Good size."
The old man grinned. "You can pull 'em five pounds or more out
of here now and then." He tugged the line. "These'll do,
though."
The heavy-set boy in red was scuffling rocks and gravel with
his sneakers. Idle, something sloppy about him that always
seemed to go with a boy too heavyset for his own good. A fish
yards away underwater could hear what was happening on the
land and the old man wished he'd cut it out.
"This your dog?" said the one with the shotgun.
The old man looked over at the dog and saw that the dog was
looking at the boy the way he did sometimes. The dog was
getting cranky in his old age and you could tell when he'd
taken it into his head to dislike somebody because he got this
kind of fixed look in his eyes like he wasn't going to blink
or take his eyes off that person for a goddamn second until
that person proved he or she could be trusted to the dog's
complete satisfaction.
The problem with the dog was that you could buy his trust with
a dog biscuit.
He thought about that and thinking about how easy the dog was
made him smile.
"He's mine all right. No need to bother yourself about him,
though. He won't bite."
Some people were funny about dogs, he thought. Always figured
a dog would want to bite. Whereas damn few dogs in his
experience had ever bitten anybody unless there was major
provocation to push the dog and rarely even then. What dogs
wanted from people was just the opposite. A dog wanted not to
bite. To never have reason to bite because they were fed and
warm at night with nobody tormenting them and plenty of time
to sleep in the sun and run and chase and plenty of room to do
the chasing.
"Pretty old, isn't he?" said the boy in red.
He nodded. "We go back a ways."
The old man tugged the line. Nothing was biting now. Maybe it
was the talk spooking the fish or maybe it was the heavyset
boy still kicking up the gravel.
"How old's a dog like that?"
The old man had to think. Mary had given him the dog for his
fifty-third birthday when the dog was six or seven weeks old.
That was the year before she died. She'd died in '83.
"Thirteen, fourteen."
"Raggedy old fella."
The old man had nothing to say to that. He didn't much like
the boy's tone, though. He gathered that the boy didn't have
much use for animals.
He began reeling in his line.
"What kind of bait you using?" The skinny boy in yellow was
looking in his tackle box.
"Worm."
"Live worm?"
"Plastic. Giving it a try. So far, so good."
"I like the buzz bait. Ever try that?"
"I never used one. Jitterbug sometimes, hula popper. Generally
I like a worm though."
"Jesus. Cut the crap, Harold," said the boy with the shotgun.
"Old man, set down your goddamn rig."
The old man looked at the boys as the boy took two steps
forward along the gravel.
The shotgun was leveled at him, pointed at his belt. Now what
the hell was this about?
The boy flicked off the safety.
The dog was growling, moving to get up.
"Easy," he said to the dog. "Take it easy."
He held out his hand. The dog could be counted on to heed what
the hand had to say even if all his instincts told him not to.
He sat back on his haunches again. Growling so low you might
have missed it if you didn't know to listen. Right now the dog
wanted more than anything to stand up fighting, old and
arthritic or not.
"He better take it easy," said the boy. "Now set down your
goddamn rig."
Talk sense to him, the old man thought. Keep him rational even
if what he was doing wasn't rational at all.
"I set it down I could lose it," he said. "Suppose I get a
strike out there? They've been biting good today."
The boy looked at him like he was crazy, then smiled and shook
his head.
"Yeah. Shit. All right, reel her in. Then set her down."
The old man did as he was told. He could see the boy enjoyed
holding the shotgun on him a lot more than he ought to. He
didn't want to provoke him.
"Gimme your wallet," said the boy.
The old man shook his head.
"Wallet's in my pickup. In the glove compartment. You passed
it coming down here. Green Chevy pickup, sitting in the
clearing."
"Bullshit," said the heavyset boy in red.
"It's true. I don't take it with me. I never do. There's not
much use for cash down here and if I have to go in after a
snagged line or go in to haul out the bass most likely my
wallet'll get wet. Or else I have to remember to toss it in
the tackle box. Half the time you forget. So I keep it locked
up in the glove compartment. There's twenty, thirty dollars in
there and I won't say you're welcome to it but I'm not going
to argue with a shotgun either. Take it."
He reached slowly into his pocket.
"You'll want my keys," he said.
"What's his rig worth?" the boy with the shotgun said to the
youngest, the one he called Harold.
"Ah, it's pretty old stuff. A couple nice flies. But nothing ...
I mean, nothing really worth bothering with."
It wasn't an honest appraisal if the boy knew anything about
fishing and the old man sensed that he did. The flies were all
hand-tied, a good collection. They could have fetched a tidy
sum. If he boy saw that, he wasn't saying.
He wondered why.
"Any credit cards in that wallet, old man?"
"I don't use any."
The boy laughed and shook his head and took a step closer and
the old man could see that the shotgun was a Browning Auto-5
12 Gauge, brand new and expensive and he could smell the oil
strong as a new-car smell as he dug out his keys and held them
out to him. The boy kept laughing but there was no humor in
it, only a kind of growing meanness.
As though the laughter was leading the boy on to something.
The old man saw that his face was deeply lined for a boy his
age and that the belt he wore was made of very good leather
and his jeans were some kind of designer jeans, not Levis, and
that the other boys were wearing them too.
They didn't need money. They just wanted it.
Well, they could have it.
He hoped to hell that was all they wanted.
"Here," he said, holding out the keys. "Smallest one opens the
dash. Wallet's inside."
Take them and get, he thought.
The boy was still grinning at him, shaking his head.
"You got a beat-up old pickup and a wallet with twenty bucks
in it and a rig that's not worth jackshit. You got a couple of
fish and goddamn dog. What the hell you got, mister?"
The old man didn't answer. There wasn't any answer. The boy
didn't want one.
"You don't have shit."
There was always the chance that the boy wouldn't fire if he
moved on him and tried to take the gun away but he doubted it
was a good chance because there was a coldness in his voice he
hadn't liked right from the very beginning but now it had gone
from cold to cold as ice. He glanced at the heavyset boy and
saw no help in the bland silly smirk the boy was wearing and
then at the youngest one in yellow and saw that this one was
scared silent now. And that was no help to him either.
Though the boy's being scared might explain the lie about his
rig.
He heard the water behind him and the wind in the trees.
He held out the keys.
He waited. Nobody moved.
The boy was building up to something. Calling it off or not,
he couldn't tell.
You could die right here, he thought. You ready for that?
He had no answer for that one either.
"What's his name?" said the boy.
"Whose name?"
"The dog. What's his name?"
To the old man the dog was mostly just the dog. He came at a
whistle and obeyed the old man's hands, a clap or a wave or a
snap of his fingers and probably he hadn't had reason to use
the dog's true name in months. Btu he and Mary had named him
as a pup, something simple for his color.
"Red," he said.
The boy stared at him unsmiling, nodding as though taking this
in and for a moment the cold meanness in his eyes jittered in
the light reflecting off the river.
"That's good," he said. "That's real good. Red."
The boy took a deep breath and blew it out and seemed calmer
and the old man thought it was possible that the storm in the
boy was passing though he didn't understand why that should be
with just the knowing of a name and then the boy whirled and
the dog was getting up out of his crouch, so much slower than
he would have just a year ago when he was only that much
younger, sensing something beyond the old man's staying hand
or his power over events and the boy took one step toward him
and the shotgun tore deep through the peace of the river and
forest and sunny June day and the peace that had been the life
of the old man up to then. And there wasn't even a yelp or a
cry because the top of the dog's head wasn't there anymore nor
the quick brown eyes nor the cat-scarred nose, all of them
blasted into the brush behind the dog like a sudden rain of
familiar flesh, the very look of the dog a sudden memory.
The old man stood there, stunned.
Why? he thought. Dear god, why?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Red
by Jack Ketchum
Copyright © 2002 by Jack Ketchum.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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