Cooter could barely ride himself, so Billy held Clever steady in the saddle while steering us through the storm away from the cottage and toward Blackstone. Having hid in jungles for months upon months, my man knows better than any of us what we got to do to keep the Brandish Boys off our scent, so soon as he knew we were high and dry, he rode back down the trail to cover up any evidence of us being there.
Snug in the cave, when I’m done sortin’ out some of the clothes Billy and Cooter grabbed out of the drawers in the cottage, I pull Clever’s soaking-wet shirt off over her head and shimmy on a dry one. My goodness. Her cups do runneth over.
Experiencing what appears to be tremendous pain, Clever is not in what you would call a jovial mood right this minute, but I’m gonna try to rectify that. I’ve been saving this tidbit for a moment just like this. “Knock knock,” I say, rubbing her hair dry.
She cannot answer ’cause she’s biting on her hand, so I reply for her in a different voice, deeper, “Who’s there?”
I go back up the scale again. “Is Sneaky Tim Ray’s pecker home?”
“Sorry,” I bluster, “Sneaky Tim Ray’s pecker ain’t home. Ain’t ya heard? Gibby McGraw shot it off.”
These birthing pains must hurt something fierce because what Clever’s doing would only be considered grinning if you look at her upside down.
“That true?” Cooter asks, buzzing around us… not sure where to land. “Ya shot that boy’s pecker? Off?”
“I believe so.”
After the pains have ebbed, Clever shoves me on the shoulder and starts laughing her lungs out. “Ya always did have skills with a gun, Butch. Ya’d have to be good to get a bead on something that small.”
“Clever!”
“What? I seen it a few weeks ago over at the Tap. Holloway was airin’ it out, tryin’ to interest Janice.”
(Please forgive her. Being lawless and godless like she is, Clever can be not appropriate at all. Even when she’s trying. Which she isn’t.)
But now that she’s brought up her mama, this is when I probably should tell Clever about how I found Janice in the drunk tank down at the sheriff’s station. But I’m not gonna. Cooter knows what I’m thinking and I can tell he agrees. That’s just plain good manners, not reminding your sidekick that her mama has a better relationship with Mr. Jim Beam than she does her own girl.
“Speakin’ of airin’ out, guess what? I got the treasure map!” I say, trying to keep her good spirits on the rise. “So y’all are gonna be okay now.”
Clever says, “Dang, you are, too. In all this upset, I forgot to tell ya. While you were gone breakin’ out Cooter, Miss Jessie called up to the cottage all the way from Texas. She told me to tell ya that Grampa is doin’ just fine.”
“What do ya mean?”
“The heart attack?”
“I recall that, but I don’t know where and why Miss Jessie is with him and I’m not.”
“ ’Member? They took Grampa to Texas in Big Bill Brown’s airplane and they’re gonna give his heart an operation.”
“No, that’s not right,” I say, befuddled.
“Is, too,” Clever says, gettin’ short. She despises her word to be questioned. “When I called down to the hospital lookin’ for you when you didn’t come right back, I made that varmint Darlene Abernathy tell me. She said the operation’s supposed to make his heart steady and that-”
“Shhh… ya hear that?” Cooter whispers, haunches hackling.
Hard to hear much of anything with the thunder giving off its best licks, so I check to see if Keeper’s gone into point, which he would if something wicked was coming our way. He’s not paying a bit of mind, too busy giving himself a lick bath. Straining to hear what Cooter heard comin’ up the trail, I finally catch it on my love radar. “Oh, that’s only Billy.”
Not a minute later he rides back into the cave, slides outta the saddle and says, “I covered our tracks best I could and didn’t see… them.” Can’t blame him for not wanting to say their names out loud. That’d be akin to evoking the devil. But ya know, I don’t think that’s fair. We need to tell Cooter and Clever, let ’em know that what we’re up against is more’n just the sheriff and his dumb deputy. Like Grampa says, “You can’t win a fight ’lessin’ ya know who your enemy is.”
So I clear my throat and announce, “When Billy says he didn’t see them, what he really means is, he didn’t see… the Brandish Boys.”
“The Boys?” Clever says, giving a willies tremble. “Who they huntin’?”
I jut my chin toward Cooter. “Sorry to be the bear of bad news… but there’s a reward on him, Kid.”
(Ya know how I mentioned earlier that she ain’t afraid of anything? I forgot about the Brandish Boys.) Clever is letting loose with one of her ear-piercing wails and Cooter looks a whole lot less colored, that’s how bad he’s waning when he finds out the bounty the Boys are comin’ for is none other than himself.
“No sense gettin’ all worked up. We’re safe for the time bein’,” Billy says, jabbing Cooter in the ribs, none too gently, maybe still mad about him holding that gun on him in the woods the other night. “Why don’t ya tell us why everybody wants this treasure map so bad?”
Cooter, trying to recover from the shock that it’s you know who that’s coming after him, says, “Ya ain’t gonna believe me if I do.”
“Try us,” Billy insists. He sure does smell good. Safe, and a little muddy.
Cooter stabs at the map that Billy lays out on the ground in front of us. “Ya see those red lines? That’s the treasure up at the Malloy place.”
“We already figured out where it is,” I say. “What Billy’s askin’ you is… what the hell IS the treasure?” I am picturing us draped in pearls and ivory and sequins and silver. “It’s gold, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s gold,” Cooter admits.
“Bless Patsy! That just about solves all our problems, right?” I shout, reaching for Clever, who looks so relieved.
Cooter adds, “Wish it was, but it ain’t the kind of gold y’all are thinkin’ it is.”
What I’m thinking is, to the best of my knowledge, there IS only one kind of Gold: A valuable yellow metal.
Clever asks, “What kind of gold is it then?”
“Hemp,” Cooter says.
Me and Clever and Billy-the three of us look a lot like we just heard the world is flat after all.
“I’m sorry, I believe I misunderstood you. Did you say hemp… h-e-m-p?” I ask him.
Cooter nods. “It’s a special kind of gold-colored weed that comes from Colombia.”
“That’s in South Carolina,” I tell Clever, since she’s not so good in geography.
“Not that Columbia. There’s another one,” Cooter says. “In South America.”
Right where we’re headed?
“This kinda hemp is real strong,” Cooter continues. “Willard says he can sell it Up North for a lot of money to folks who wanna get high.”
“That’s nuthin’ but dumb Yankee talk,” I tell him, already beyond losing my patience. “Everyone knows ya can buy a hemp rope at Ready’s Hardware if you need to climb high.”
Cooter says, “I’m not meanin’ the climbin’ kind of high. I’m meanin’ the kind of high ya get from smokin’ weed.”
Billy says knowingly to me, “Smokin’ hemp can make ya feel real relaxed. High is just another word folks use to describe that feelin’.”
I already knew that relaxing part from observing my next-door neighbor. Willard’s the poster child for relaxation. “So you’re tellin’ us there’s no emeralds or diamonds or candelabras buried up at the Malloy place? That the treasure we’ve been COUNTIN’ on for Rosie is just some… some dumb old weed that gets ya high?”
“Tha’s right,” Cooter says. “Willard and Bishop planted the seeds in the spring.”
This sounds so completely off. “How did Bishop Malloy happen to meet up with somebody like Willard?” I ask.
Cooter says, “Don’t know ’bout that. All’s I know is that come next month they’s gonna harvest the hemp, dry it in the old barn, and take it back up to New York to sell in a place called the Village.”
I’m not sure how everybody else is taking this news, but I feel like I got drug into a wet hole and left. Even if we all went up there to the Malloy farm, and stole the hemp out from under them, Clever can’t very well go draggin’ off to New York to sell it to villagers. Mothers, good mothers, the kind Clever’s gonna be, not like her mother, they don’t do those kinds of things. They paint watercolors and at night they stroke you with so much tender that you fall asleep in their arms breathing in their lily-of-the-valley scent.
“The sheriff’s in on it, too,” Cooter adds.
Surely, Cooter is mixed-up. “Well, if the sheriff is in on it and Willard was the one planted it, then they know right where that hemp is, so what the hell they need the map so bad for?”
“They don’t need it to find the hemp. They wanna get the map back to make sure nobody else finds out about what they’re doin’.”
Clever, just getting her breath back from a pain, asks Cooter, “How did ya get messed up in all this anyways? With Sneaky Tim Ray?”
He says, not ashamed at all, “Holloway got wind of what Willard and Bishop were up to and came to me suggestin’ we figure out some way to cut ourselves in. I told him gettin’ ahold a the map’d be the first step. Not sure how Holloway found out y’all had stolen the map from Willard, but that’s why we was trackin’ ya down that night.” He shrugs. “I needed money. Gramma’s gettin’ elderly.”
“Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute. First things first,” I say, trying to mask my disappointment behind an enthusiasm that I DO NOT feel. No treasure? I’d been thinking once we dug it up, we could keep a tiara for Rosie and maybe a couple other geegaws and sell the rest of it to Miss Montgomery at her downtown shop called Precious, which, amongst other things, has got a lot of fancy bracelets and broaches in the glass case right up front. We coulda used the cash she’d give us to buy boat tickets to Bolivia. Since that’s not happenin’ now, we gotta come up with another plan. My friends are not trained investigators or as perceptive as I am. It’s my professional duty to take charge. So after thinking on it a spell, focusing to make this picture clear as can be, I announce, “I know what we have to do. We gotta… number one on our very important things to do list… we gotta get Cooter clear on these charges. Prove that he didn’t murder Mr. Buster Malloy. We should forget about the treasure for the time bein’ ’cause what good will it do us if the Boys catch up with him, right?”
Our breathing sounds like a treed barbershop quartet.
“But how we gonna do that? Prove that Cooter didn’t murder Buster.” Billy’s got a funny look to himself when he says that. I don’t know what I’d call it exactly. Maybe Duplicitous: Feeling one way, but acting another.
I musta forgot to tell him. “Show ’em, Cooter.”
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the photos of dead Mr. Buster Malloy on Browntown Beach. After he passes them over to Billy and Clever to take a gander, their faces light up like the Fourth.
Billy says, “We gotta get these pictures to somebody fast ’fore-” He stops. Too late. We all know what he was about to say. They’ll shoot first, ask questions later.
Relentless: The Brandish Boys.