The birdsong artist frowned, trying to discern a memory. “I drowsed off around four in the morning. Something popped my eyes open just afore six. I’m purty sure it was a car, but I was sorta drifty. It seemed like it was going west toward east, like driving away.”
Cherry looked at me and shook her head. Not the car. It didn’t fit the timeline, the sun rising by six. It was the midnight ride that carried Tandee Powers to her death.
We stood and bid our farewells, Miz Bascomb seeming loathe to see me go, offering more tea and cookies, or dinner. I again complimented her work as we withdrew toward the door. I paused, turned, a sudden thought lighting my head.
“One more thing, Miz Bascomb,” I said. “The sound the earlier vehicle made. Do you think you could draw it for me?”
A smile crossed her face, as though the challenge was amusing.
“Why not? Lemme git my workings.”
Leona Bascomb walked to a cabinet, withdrew a sheet of paper and a box of bright pastel crayons.
“I got a daughter lives up in Louisville sends me my colors from an art store,” she said, sitting in the rocker and placing the sheet on the TV tray. She thought for a full minute and I saw her lips move as the sounds replayed in her head. Her ancient fingers whisked over the colors, selected.
The gnarled hands began drawing.
Two minutes later she handed me the paper. I saw a vibrating line that ran a few inches in yellow, turned green, jumped into blue and stayed the same until running off the edge of the page. I peeked out the window and confirmed the bridge that had slowed Cherry’s vehicle three hundred feet away. After crossing the bridge the vehicle would have accelerated to the speed the potholed road could bear, twenty-five or thirty miles per hour. The colors in Miz Bascomb’s drawing shifted abruptly, as the sounds must have changed.
“A standard transmission,” I said. “I see it shifting.”
Cherry stared at me.
Cherry dropped me at my cabin. We climbed out, stood on separate sides of the car. “Well, Ryder, it looks like this is it,” Cherry said over the hood, her smile strained. “I’m sorry your vacation turned into work. And for the record, I truly wasn’t the person who called you.”
“I believe you,” I said.
“Thanks for all your help. And your company. I just wish that we’d had the time to—”
I turned to the cabin. Something was missing. Mix-up was nowhere to be seen.
“You all right, Ryder?”
“Mix-up. Where is he? Mix-up!” I yelled into the trees. “Yo … Mr Mix-up. Come here, boy!”
Nothing. I turned to Cherry. “This is strange. He never goes far.”
She clapped her hands, yelled, “Here Mix-up!” I joined in and we walked up and down the drive, calling. I told Cherry I was heading into the woods and I’d let her know when he came back. I whistled, clapped, banged a wooden spoon on his metal food bowl, playing his favorite music. I hiked a mile up the creek, a mile down, yelling and banging until my hand hurt and my voice was a painful rasp.
No rustling in the underbrush. No happy bay as he raced to my side. Nothing.
I drove the nearby roads, stopping to speak to everyone I saw outside. Giving them my cell number in case they saw him.
“What’s your dog look like, mister?”
“Like nothing you’ve ever seen. And a lot of it.”
I saw a barrel-bodied guy wearing overalls and a ZZ Top beard sitting on his porch and cleaning a shotgun. I stopped, told him my story and passed him my number. “You know there are b’ars in the woods, don’t you?” he said, spitting tobacco juice over the porch rail.
I nodded. “But bears are few and far between, right?”
He thought for a moment. “E’yup. It almost ain’t never b’ars that get lost dogs …”
Thank God, my mind said.
“They usually get tore apart by coyotes,” the guy finished.
I added the aspect of heart-pounding frenzy to my search and continued another hour, passing out my number like a religious zealot jamming tracts into people’s hands. My breath stopped at a mound of fur at the side of the road, started again when I saw it was a deer carcass. Several times I wondered if passers-by thought me a crazy man, parked beside the road, yelling into the woods while beating a bowl with a wooden spoon. I didn’t care.
After two hours of nothing, I returned to the cabin, passing Jeremy’s home. Though I figured I’d said my goodbyes, I had to check.
“You’re still here?” he said when he answered the door, seeming to stifle a yawn.
“My dog’s gone. You haven’t seen him, have you?”
He wrinkled up his nose. “Not in two days. The smelly cur was on my porch. I was going to set out poison, but figured that would set you off.”
I stared at him.
“You’re still leaving, right?” he asked, looking like I was keeping him from a task.
“My dog’s here, Jeremy. He’s lost.”
“A dog’s going to keep you from leaving?”
“I have to find him.”
My brother looked perplexed, as if I was talking Gaelic. “But didn’t you say the thing cost you something like ten dollars?”
Mix-up had been a deal. The shelter folks were so happy to have him saved from Death Row they dropped the adoption fee. My sole cost was an annual license.
“Five,” I corrected.
He looked thoughtful. “Five bucks for a hundred-plus pounds of dog? Maybe I should start shopping at the pound. How do the things taste, Carson?”
I jammed my hands in my pocket to keep from punching out my brother’s teeth and walked away.
Mix-up hadn’t returned to the cabin. All I heard when listening into the woods were bands of rabid coyotes. Like most Americans under the age of forty, the prospect of traveling without connectivity was too daunting to consider, and I’d packed my laptop. In common with most pet owners, I had more shots of my dog than I could count – his first bath, his first swim in the Gulf, his first steak dinner. It took fifteen minutes to lash together a DOG MISSING poster complete with photos, basic description, and my phone number. I also added a reward, a hundred bucks at first, but the coyotes started howling in my head again and I upgraded to five hundred.
I climbed into the truck and rushed to the local library to print canine wanted posters, dropping them off at any venue with human traffic, gas stations, restaurants. I taped them to phone poles, bulletin boards at trailheads, the message boards used by rock climbers.
My travels took me past the Woslee County Police Department. I gritted my teeth and turned back, telling the person at the desk I wanted to speak with whoever was in charge, hoping for Caudill, but knew by the way my luck had been running it would be Beale.
“The Sherf’s on the phone,” the young woman at the desk said, pausing in the filing of her nails. “He says for you to hold your water ’til he gits done.”
I turned to the photo wall ubiquitous at cop shops, the parade of past leaders. There were five: a mustachioed fellow who had been sheriff until 1947, a hollow-eyed and cadaverous-looking fellow who had the position until 1967, and square-jawed man who’d started in 1967 and held the position until six years ago. The