The Huntsman (Mint Review Copy)

Book by Terrell Whitney

The Huntsman, Chapter One

FOR TWO GENERATIONS in the city's life there had not been much comment about its river. The populace moved southward from its banks into rolling hills and finally board-flat prairie, easily corralled, paved, and developed into suburban plots. Iron-gray and sinuous, banks heaped with deadfall and bright flecks of plastic trash, fish poisoned, docks crumbling, stinking of loam and rot, the river seemed an uncomfortable reminder of a gothic past when life had not been so clean. Bums lived along the river within sight of the mayor's office, a paper mill and several chemical companies rimmed the levee, and on the east side, the river flowed past housing projects for the poor. Most Kansas Citians never saw these things. Once every three years or so, some young reporter at the Star would get spring fever and spend the day riding upriver on an empty grain barge. In the morning, citizens at their breakfast tables held up bright color photos of the river's wide expanse and read a breathless article invoking Twain and explaining, to everyone's amazement, that barge traffic still existed. In fact, barges (this year's article read) transport one and a half million tons of cargo annually and are cheaper than trucks or rail.

"Now there's some decent reporting!" Mercury Chapman exclaimed, tapping the article with his fork. "Tells you how things work, instead of just writing up the next moronic car wreck. It's not that I don't have sympathy for any poor bastard has to die like that, but what good's the sympathy of a stranger? When I die...Lilly, what's the plan around here for when I die?" he shouted, suddenly rearing from his seat.

"The plan is, you do it after three o'clock." Lilly Washington glided through the porch door and retrieved the pitcher of milk so it wouldn't spoil. She had cooked for Mercury for thirty years, the last ten since his wife's death, and in the mornings she had business to administer. "At three o'clock the roof man's coming about that leak, and you've got to be here to show him around. Wednesdays are when I get my hair done."

"Ha!" Mercury said, sitting down.

"You've got shaving cream in your ear." Lilly's crisp lemon pantsuit darted, finchlike, into the kitchen's gloom.

"Ha!" Mercury said, rearing again for effect. The small comedy pleased him. He had talked to himself for most of his adult life, preferring to communicate by way of competing monologues rather than formal conversation, wielding the non sequitur and selective deafness like a surgeon's blade. His wife had been a formidable competitor in this running gag-in talk he found most men lugubrious-and it had been the boon of his widowerhood to discover Lilly's abilities in the field. Chattering to himself in an empty house, he would've taken his life by his own hand. "Decent reporting!" he repeated. "How much gloom is in the paper, and how much wonder all around? What about phones? You can call China by a machine on the wall, have been able to for thirty years, but who knows how it works? Or where clean water comes from, or how the TV signal goes out? How does beef get to market? Who built the Broadway Bridge? All Henry puts in here is sports, death, and politics: nothing for the common man. That's what I'm going to tell him, and watch the look on his fat Texas face...." Henry Latham was the president of the Kansas City Star, and Mercury often invited him bass fishing on weekends. He shook the paper and gazed past his Wolferman's English muffin at a photograph of the river's broad and muddy flow, a scalloped line of cottonwoods in the background.

"I like to hear that river's got a use still yet," he said, raising his voice so Lilly could hear him in the kitchen. "Booker and I went goose hunting once right along her banks, down near old Pete Martin's place. We laid out in a muddy field."

A snort of disapproval disturbed the pantry. The words "That's one way to camouflage a boy that black" reached Mercury's ears.

"Maybe he built a raft and went downriver," Mercury answered sadly, as if he had not heard a thing. "Floated clean away."

That same morning, sixty miles east of Mercury's cool, porch-flanked house on the 500 block of Highland Drive, Stan Granger headed out to check his lines. Dredging, dikes, and levees had transformed the Missouri River from a wandering, swampy titan a mile or two in width to little more than a drainage ditch (nostalgics said), at best a half mile from bank to bank. People believed that the Mighty Mo would never flood again, her mythic connection with great rivers from Abraham's time forward removed, like a stinger, by the Corps of Engineers. Still, outside Kansas City, the river flowed somnolent and muscular, centuryless, churning on without the permission of man's belief. At thirty-three, Stan Granger had acquired the habits of a much older man, a loner who fished more by habit than for useful trade. He had lost the necessity of words. Days passed in bundles when he did not speak, and as he hauled his trot line outside Waterloo, the town where he lived, his mind brooded with the same glinting, continuous flow as the river, its steady and unbroken stream of action unappended to so flimsy a vehicle as speech. So when he saw the trot line bellied far too deeply between the oak trunk and the anchor buoy a hundred yards offshore, he did not think it. He quartered his skiff against the current, set the line over his oarlock, and slid along it patiently, lifting and rebaiting the hooks that hung from steel-tipped leaders. He had caught a drum and two small catfish, and he broke their backs along the gunwales and dropped them on the skiff's floor. The closer he got to the trot line's middle, the harder the work became: the line hitched and popped jerkily along the galvanized oarlock, the weight pulled his gunwale down, and the river entered in a thin, gruel-like stream. Stan shifted his body away, grunting, to keep the gunwale up. He still did not think it but merely followed from one action to the next, each determining perfectly its successor, and when the weight and current grew too strong, he freed the line from the oarlock and played it by hand. The river darkened the flannel arms of his shirt. At the height of this ballet, his elbows bent and he thrust his chin beyond the gunwale, appearing from a distance to be ready to spring a handstand in the long, bright scarf of river, and then he set his back and tumbled a dead woman's body into his boat. Leaders trailed after it like roots, and Stan cut them one by one with his knife, just past the steel.

The corpse's head rested against the skiff's middle seat, her legs jumbled stiffly in the bow. A windbreaker had shifted rudely off her shoulders, pulling back her arms, and her breasts pressed dark aureoles against a golf shirt emblazoned with a country club's burgundy crest. She wore a khaki skirt, a needlepoint belt, and a two-toned, spiked golf shoe on her right foot, a tee stuck through the lacing flap; her left foot was bare. Her sable hair fanned the skiff's bench between Stan's knees, and her pupils, in death, had rolled backward in her head so she stared white-eyed at a cloud of starlings angling in unison against a glowing field of blue. He bent over the dead young woman without repulsion and reached beneath her shirt for a charm, which he silently unclasped. One of his hooks had caught her by the neck, and he removed it with a deft twist, leaving a glossy and bloodless wound.

Stan finished running his line. He had difficulty untangling his bait pot from the dead woman's legs, but he managed. He pulled in two carp and one more catfish and, reaching his anchored buoy, judged that if the river rose two feet more, the buoy would be submerged. None of this he put into words, but firing the skiff's outboard and heading back toward town, the dead woman's bare, finely arched foot jutting into his line of sight, he felt the need of them. He could see the small town of Waterloo banked steeply on the bluff, clapboard buildings screened by cottonwoods and willows, the railroad grade, and above everything the white spire of the church steeple. "And on a Wednesday," were the words he found. "Right on a Wednesday morning, too."

At the landing, he tossed the fish in a bucket of water and left it in the shade and walked into town wearing overalls and a dirty shirt. At the church, early choir practice had begun, and organ music drifted through the still, gnat-laden streets, and when Stan arrived at the sheriff's house-a split-level ranch along a gulley on the edge of town-the tan patrol car shimmered in the drive. The sheriff stepped out onto his balding lawn with the city paper's sports page in his hand.

"I got one," Stan said.

The sheriff glanced at him quickly and then looked back at his box score. "Dead body, you mean."

"Yeah."

"That's the first one in a year. Black fella?" Sheriff Wade Crapple was forty-five and stood a full head shorter than Stan. He had played second base both in high school and for his company team in the marines and conveyed, even while reading, a laconic preparedness for the imagined, well-struck ball. "Go on, tell me," he said. "I can do two things at once."

"She's white," Stan said. "Young. My dad used to talk about the Italians came down in the forties, but not nobody white. Not a lady."

The sheriff sniffed. "That's not what's bothering you."

"Why wouldn't it be?" Stan said. He chafed his broad hands, the necessary evasion stretching before him like a desert. "You throw a person in the river in Kansas City, and this is where they'll beach. Currents. City pitches her trash out, and it floats up at our door. I've took fifteen bodies out of that water, and that's how I looked at it-cleaning up trash-but this is the first time I've seen a face like that. Clean, young-looking. Been out golfing, I think."

"A debutante, eh?" the sheriff said. "They'll have the reporters out for that."

Stan Granger had expected a different body, if he'd expected one at all. The two were intimately connected in his memory-the dead girl, Booker Short's thin silhouette-and as the sheriff's patrol car wheeled him forward, his mind went in reverse, calling up the shadowed figure he'd seen outside old Pete Martin's cabin, two years ago last spring. Blacks of any sort were a rarity in Chapman County, and so Stan had punched his brakes, fishtailing on the gravel road, until he recognized Mercury Chapman's more familiar, whiter face, following the black one with a shovel and a rake.

He'd left them alone for a couple of days. He could not have said why, since he was caretaker of the place, except for the fleeting sense, garnered across a hundred yards of upturned soybeans, that some transaction was being conducted in which he did not care to participate. On the third day, he'd brought the water truck. The cabin stood at the end of a raised and rutted drive that split the soybean field like a dike. Beyond the cabin, a curtain of elms and pin oaks hid five hundred acres of prime duck fields bordered by a creek that, with luck, would flood them when the rains commenced. Stan had pulled the tanker in a half circle before the unshaded cabin, the screw mounts for its rain gauge blazing hot.

Seeing nobody, he'd stepped down.

"I didn't do it any," a voice said.

Wheeling, Stan had seen an empty soybean field and a washing machine colandered by target practice, and when he turned back the boy was slouched before his truck grille, head tilted, as though leaning back against a post where none in fact existed. His skin rose smooth and intensely black from the zip-collared neck of his orange shirt, though when he moved, Stan could see glimmerings of yellow in the tone and a fine, adolescent mustache on his lip. The boy glanced off toward the duck fields, sucking hard on a cigarette, and then stamped out the butt. He lifted his eyes to Stan.

"Just so's you know."

Stan's nostrils caught the distinct reek of pot, wafting in the breeze.

Then Mercury Chapman splintered through the treeline below, talking and grunting dyspeptically, as was his habit: "And so the psychiatrist tells the priest, 'I know one thing they forgot to mention in the Bible, and that's PMS.'" He labored up a short hill of thigh-deep swale, a machete dangling from his wrist. "'Hell, no, they didn't !' this preacher says. 'What about the part where Mary rides Joseph's ass clear to Bethlehem?' Hello, Stan. Why haven't you gentlemen introduced yourselves? There's goddamn enough lack of manners in the city without we start it out in the sticks. I'm of the idea we should dig this clubhouse a permanent latrine." With this he marched between them and, turning on his heel, disappeared around the cabin's corner, where Stan heard him open the door.

"Stan Granger," Stan said, holding out his hand.

The boy leaned forward from his imaginary post and gripped Stan's fingers, smiling. It was a smile of reserve, blurred in meaning, and Stan believed he'd just been invited to share amusement at the eccentricities of his employer. He closed his face.

"Booker Short is my name," the boy said when they were no longer touching. "So you work for the man?"

"I look after the club."

"Is that 'man' singular or plural?" Mercury said, rounding the cabin again. He'd exchanged the machete for the key to the water tank. "Booker is teaching me a whole nother language, Stan. All these years, and I never learned to speak jive. 'Man' means white people in general, right?"

The boy whistled. He lifted his cap and looked bleakly over the gray, long-stretching fields and the dust-streaked water truck.

"I have just heard a living person say 'jive,'" he said.

Mercury sucked the spittle off his lip. "I tell ya what, kid," he said. "Me and this old boy are gonna teach you how to fill a country water tank and work a piece-of-crap pump like Stan's got here. And you cut us some slack on vocabulary." His words were friendly, but irritation whined through his gray-tufted nose, and, as he headed for the tank, Stan saw the boy staring at him with what he judged to be (at the time, of course, before he knew Booker-though even now he did not know for sure) a look of hate.

This confusion had always troubled Stan about Booker Short-both now, as he rode in Sheriff Crapple's cruiser, and in the past. Click, like the aperture of a camera, and Booker changed from one thing to the next. His first words to Stan, "I didn't do it any," had been spoken in what Stan would have called street talk, familiar from shouting black singers on TV and pretty much how Stan expected him to speak. But later, when he said his name, the voice had been rich and melodious, each consonant savored and pronounced in the manner of black preachers or older actors, and still later, when he'd become upset over the word jive (or was it what Mercury had said about "the man," or had he even been upset at all? In retrospect, Stan still could not be sure), he'd spoken with a parodic English burr.

One person could not be so many different things before somebody decided one of them was wrong, Stan's thinking went. And furthermore, what didn't he do? Stan hadn't even known what the boy was doing out in that cabin with Mercury Chapman, a wealthy and well-connected man. Uncertainties l...