Excerpt from Indian Summer

Frank the Fox was naked from the waist up, daubing iodine onto the bullet hole in his shoulder when I came sliding down the slope to his cave. His red hair was slick and finger-combed back. He’d bathed in the downpour.

He wasn’t the only one who looked like he’d taken a bath. Though it had stopped raining, I’d shook several small trees on my way to the cave, causing the water in the leaves to patter down on me. My shoes was splattered with mud from “accidentally” stomping in a couple puddles, too. I knew Ma was going to be cross, but asking a nine-year-old (going on ten) to resist stomping in a big mud puddle is like asking a fat man to pass on the chocolate cake.

“Hey, kiddo,” he greeted me. “What happened to your chin?”

“I fell down,” I answered. “Whatcha doing?”

“Doctoring these bullet holes,” Fox said with a rueful smile, daubing his wounds with the iodine applicator.

Fox had a stocky build, with thick red hair sprouting up his belly and blooming across his broad, muscular chest. There were wounds in the meaty part of his side, just above the hip, and in his left shoulder and upper arm. He’d doused the puffy-looking wounds in ample amounts of the copper-colored antiseptic, but they still looked pretty nasty. “You mind painting the holes in the back with this? I can’t reach them,” he said.

“Sure!” I said eagerly. Anything to get a close up look at the bank robber’s bullet holes!

I took the applicator from his hand and he turned around. “Are these holes where the bullets came out?” I asked as I swabbed the wounds with iodine.

“Naw, they came out the front. Ouch! The holes in the back side are where they went in,” Fox answered. “Dirty coppers shot me while I was running to my car.”

“What happened?” I asked, drawing a circle around the hole in his upper hip.

He hissed at the sting, then told me how he’d got shot.

“Me and Pea Brain and my lady were driving to Pea’s ma’s house and we got ambushed,” Fox said with a scowl. “Cops caught us out on this old country road called the Switchback.”

“Who’s Pea Brain?” I asked.

“Pea Brain was one of the fellas in my gang. Me and him went way back. Good egg, real big, but not very smart. That’s why we called him Pea Brain instead of Percy, which was his Christian name.”

I laughed a little. “Pea Brain,” I said.

Fox chuckled. “Yeah. Poor guy. His pa use to beat him pretty bad, ‘til the state took him away and put him in foster care. That’s how we met. We was both in the same foster home when we was teenagers. We ran off together. Started pulling little capers here and there. Pea was the muscle. I was the brains.”

“Anyway,” Fox continued, “His ma’s been real sick with the consumption, and me and Annie was trying to get him down to see her before she passed. Pea’s mother owns a little house not far from here. He been visiting with her off and on since his pa died, even though she’s never been much of a mother to him. So that morning, Pea’s sis calls the club and tells us the old lady wasn’t going to last much longer, and we better get to Johnson County if Pea had any last words he wanted to speak to her.

“A friend of ours-- who turned out to be not such a good friend after all-- told us to take a different route than normal ‘cause the cops had set up roadblocks to look for us. He told us to take a detour out in the boonies called the Switchback. We trusted him. Never had a reason not to.

“So there we was, driving down Switchback when we came across a truck that had turned over. There was broken cages all over the road and chickens running around. We didn’t think nothing of it, just thought a delivery truck had lost control and rolled. We slowed down to see if we could give the driver a hand. He was sitting on the side of the road, mopping blood off his head with a handkerchief. He was an old codger, nodded real eager when we offered to help.

“‘I sure would appreciate it, yes, sir!’ he says.”

I finished doctoring Fox’s wounds, and he thanked me and slid back into his shirt. He sat down on the stump in the middle of his cave and continued with his story as he buttoned up.

“So anyways... All three of us gets out of the car to give this old fella a hand, me and Pea Brain and my ladyfriend Annie.”

“Annie was your girlfriend?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“You talked about her when you were delirious yesterday.”

“Did I?” Fox asked, his eyes distant. For a second, his mind was somewhere else-- maybe in his girlfriend’s silky arms. He jumped a little, returning from that far away place.

“We had to help the guy clear the road, ‘cause those chicken cages were scattered all over. We couldn’t get around, otherwise... But in truth, we would have stopped to help anyway.

“Annie...” Fox smiled, his eyes glimmering. “She was chasing after the chickens, trying to catch them so we could put them back in their cages. I started getting tickled, watching her run after them. We was going to pay our last respects to Pea’s ma and she’d gotten all gussied up for the occasion, but she’d hiked her skirt up like a schoolkid so she could chase after those cluckers, and she kept wobbling from stepping in chuckholes on account o’ she was wearing heels. I couldn’t help but laugh at her, and even Pea was grinning, though he didn’t really have much of a sense of humor.

“So there she was, halfway out in the field, stumping after some silly old chicken that was zigging and zagging back and forth, flapping its wings and squawking, and me and Pea was picking up the chicken cages, stacking ‘em beside the truck, snickering at her like we been smoking ree-- er, like we been smoking. The driver kept thanking us over and over while we did it, like he couldn’t think of anything else to say, and at first I thought he was just rattled ‘cause he’d turned over his truck, but then he dropped his handkerchief and took off running down the road. For a second, I just stared at him. I couldn’t believe how fast that skinny old codger’s legs was pedaling.

“Then it struck me what was going on, and it was like someone had doused me with a bucket of cold water. I looked at Pea, who was standing with a chicken cage in his arms, and I said, ‘Get in the car, Pea. We’s about to be in a world of hurt.’

“Pea never was very quick witted. He just stood there looking at me with a confused expression. ‘We still got more cages to pick up, Fox,’ he says.

“I didn’t have time to explain it. I told him to get in the car again, and then I jogged out in the field and started yelling for Annie come back. She heard me but she didn’t know why I was yelling after her. She turned around and put her hands on her hips and looked at me with her head cocked, a big grin on her face, and then the cops started shootin’.

“It was an ambush,” Fox said. “They paid my pal to talk us into driving down Switchback Road that day. They set up the accident, see, so we’d stop and get out of the car. The whole time we was helping that old geezer clear the road and catch those chickens, those sonsabitches were hid out in the woods, stroking their rifles and waiting.

“I heard their guns start popping. Sounded like firecrackers, hundreds of firecrackers. Annie went down first, and then Pea got hit in the hip and dropped. I ducked down and ran to get my girl. I don’t know how those bullets missed me. I could hear them whizzing all around me, but they did, and I knelt down and scooped Annie in my arms and ran for the car.

“That’s when I got shot... While my back was turned and I was holding my girlfriend in my arms. I got hit in the shoulder and the hip, and the last one got me in the leg. I didn’t hardly feel ‘em, though. I was so scared for Annie, they might as well have been bee stings.

“Luckily, Pea had managed to crawl to the car and climb in, and he took off as soon as I threw myself in the backseat with Annie, but he was shot up, too.

“We got away. Those stupid coppers didn’t count on us getting past their road block. They thought they’d gun us down in the middle of the road like we was rabid dogs, but I guess Lady Luck was with us, or they was a bunch of cross-eyes and couldn’t shoot straight. They shoulda had us dead to rights, but we managed to escape, drove right over some of those cages to do it. The chickens that were in ‘em, too. We heard them crunch under the tires. Then Annie... Well, Annie went quick.

Fox paused for a moment, looking up at the roof of the cave. When he continued, his voice was rough with emotion. “She’d got shot in the neck. Out in the field, when she went down. Just one bullet, but it did her in. I guess it hit her jugular-- that big vein in her neck, whatever it’s called. Blood was just... spraying out of her like a water fountain. It was all over me and all over the seat and the windows. Even the roof of the car. I tried to stem the blood, but... It was just too bad a wound. There was nothing I could do ‘cept kiss her over and over and tell her I loved her. She died right there in my arms, smiling up at me how she always did, so beautiful and good.

“Never hurt a soul, my Annie. Never did anything wrong in her life, except love a bad man.”

He looked down at his hands, then glanced back at me.

“Pea... He was hurt bad, too, only I didn’t know it at the time. Actually, I don’t think he knew it either. He drove like a bat out of hell, trying to get us out of there. Pea wasn’t very bright, but he could drive like the devil. We flew up one country road and cut back down another, making sure none of those coppers would pick up our trail. We expected them to chase us, but we never did see any police cars after we got away. I guess Pea lost them really fast. Who knows?

“After about a half hour or so, while I was sitting in the back seat mourning over Annie, Pea called out to me. I looked up and met his eyes in the rear view mirror, and he said, ‘Fox, I think I’m gonna die now.’ He said it just so... calm! And then his eyes rolled up in his head and the car went barreling off the road... right into these woods.”

“These woods?” I asked, turning to look at the forest that surrounded us.