Crum

Chapter 14

124 Chapter 14 Miss Thatcher was gone, we read our Bible every day in class, we learned that no man is without sin, his days are short, and the whole thing was pain in the ass. It was either cold, or wet, or cold and wet and the winter slapped Crum into the ground and brought what life there was to a standstill . Now and then what we called a storm would bang into the valley and the wind would slam down a couple of trees somewhere on the hillsides. But we were too protected by the hills to lose anything more than a tree or two, except for the gust that took the huge wooden sign off the front of Tyler Wilson’s General Store. The sign sailed off like a misshapen kite, spinning and bouncing along the road and leaping smack into the middle of Homer Wiley’s chicken coop. The classes at school dragged with a monotony that made thoughts of spring ring and glow in my mind until my ears could hear the imaginary rustle of tree leaves. I longed for something, anything , to break the endless string of days, dark days, cold days, wet days, and gray days that had no reason to be. The day Constable Clyde Prince’s outhouse exploded was the answer to my prayers, or so I thought. The old outhouse flew to pieces about three o’clock on a frigid Saturday afternoon and by four o’clock Clyde was on the lookout for Mule and me. And Clyde could chase. He had a gun and he was the constable and he was built like a buggy whip bent double. He was tall and rangy and his brown eyes were so dark that you couldn’t see into them. Clyde was lean and hard and he was damned good looking. I guess that’s the way he got his beautiful wife, Genna. He sure as hell didn’t have much else going for him. 125 TherewassomethinggoingonherethatMuleandIcouldn’tfigure out—Clyde got onto us too quickly; he came looking for us too fast. He must have had help. I bet Ethan, that sonofabitch, turned us in. Actually, he was wrong. It was Wade who bombed the outhouse, and he did a really wonderful job of it. When Wade was little he lived with some people who worked in the mines and Wade knew all about dynamite and stuff like that. Wade rigged a charge and lowered it by the wires right down through one of the holes—Clyde’s outhouse was a two-holer—and then backed off to the end of the wires and touched it off with a car battery. The depth of the hole had kept the contents from freezing, and when the dynamite went off the whole stinking mess made a sticky, dark cloud that dappled the countryside—including Clyde’s house—with splotches of brown, bits of wood, and soggy, colored scraps of old catalog pages. Every single splotch froze solid upon contact. As I said, it was a beautiful job. Wade was a real artist. Mule and I had been down at the river shooting at floating cans and bottles and bits of ice. We were huddled against the bank, trying to keep from shaking long enough to aim when Nip found us. He had been in Tyler Wilson’s store when Clyde came in and as soon as he left, Nip came straight to the river bank. We really didn’t want Clyde to find us. He was a simple, mean sonofabitch who liked to wear his gun and his little badge and give people a hard time. Clyde didn’t fuck around with the men in Crum too much, though. He had to live there and the men didn’t take too kindly to being messed with. But we didn’t count. So we sat there in the gray cold and held a war council. There wasn’t much chance of calling the whole thing an accident. I mean, shithouses just didn’t explode by themselves and, like I said, we didn’t know who had done it. We figured that by the time we found out who it was, Clyde would 126 have us locked up in the jail upriver in Kermit, and it wouldn’t do us any good to worry about it then. We’d probably never get out. At...