The man was putting two more shells into the breech of the shotgun and Sylder could see them now, and the dull red of the waxed cardboard tubes that had been missing from the extracted cases. The man didn’t hesitate; he raised the gun and breeched it in one quick motion. Two more blasts ripped the silence and two holes appeared now in the lower corner. He was making a huge crude X across the face of the tank. Again he examined the bits of brass before reloading.
Sylder watched wide-eyed from his retreat in the bushes. He could hear the solid whop of the full cases lamming into the tank and the tank seemed to reel under the impact like a thing alive. There was something ghastly and horrific about it and he had the impression that this gnomic old man had brought with him an inexhaustible supply of shells and would cease his cannonading only when he became too weary to lift the gun. He backed out of his hiding place and returned to the car. Daylight was coming on fast and he began to worry lest the old man’s shooting bring investigation. He was late anyway and didn’t know but that the legal, the official, carriers might use the road at this hour even if a crazy old man wasn’t shooting holes in their responsibility with a shotgun and rung shells. There were six cases of whiskey still in the honeysuckles and he brought them out two at a time with a hobbling half-run. The firing had ceased. He got the turtledeck loaded and fastened, got in and started the motor. When he pulled out of the weeds and into the road he looked back and there was the old man standing on the hill above him at the turnaround, holding the shotgun in one hand and leaning on a cane. Sylder lowered his head and floor-boarded the gas pedal.
When he was safe around the first curve he relaxed and drove slowly to the gate so as to leave as few signs as possible. He refastened the ring-plate and chain, got back in and turned onto the pike and toward Knoxville. Just beyond the creek he passed an olivecolored truck, the driver and the other man in the cab looking serious and official, but somewhat sleepy and not in any particular hurry. Genial, unofficial, and awake, Marion Sylder drove to town.
His light played on the wet mudbanks among roots and stumps, a sheaf of brown honeysuckle hanging down and trailing in the water like hair. His boots made sucking sounds as he waded against the slight current, walked softly the silted floor of the creek. He could hear a car on top of the mountain coming down, the exhaust rattling and the tires sounding on the switchbacks. He came to the bridge and waded to the spit of loam filled in against the concrete wall. Throwing his light to the set he could see the trap with the jaws cocked and the pan, all brown-looking under the water and wrinkling in the small ebb and lap of it. He put the flashlight in his pocket and squatted on the sand among tracks of feet and tails, wiggling his numb toes, huddling down in his mackinaw and breathing slowly into his cupped hands, listening in the darkness to the water curling past his feet with small muted water-sounds, to his cough echoing hollow and blankly among the beams overhead.
The tires sounded again, closer, and then the motor revving between engagements of the clutch and the explosive sound of the shift to high gear as the car came out of the last turn at the base of the mountain. He followed with his muscles the downward thrust of the lever, locked the shift home arm and shoulder. The car was on the straight stretch approaching the creek and he could feel the vibrations of it, waiting for it to pass overhead. It did not. He heard the motor building speed and then there was a sudden explosion, a doglike yelp, followed by a suspension of all sound, a momentary eclipse of animation even to the water and his own breathing.
The trees at his left leaped, wild with light, went out again. There came an eruption of limbs cracking, splitting, of wrenched metal screaming like slate, a heavy and final concussion like a steel drum bursting. Silence again through which filtered a thin and diminishing rain of glass. By the pulsing wash of water at his feet he knew that it was in the creek and he tugged his flashlight free and poked the beam out along the bridge, the bank of the creek where broken saplings and peeled trunks stood out whitely all about like markers and finally to the sleek black flank of the car, upturned in the creek with the hood tilted into the water and the off-wheel still spinning idly. The side window-glass was laced with myriad cracks, shining in the beam like dewed spiderwebbing, and he could not see inside. The waterline angled across it, from cowl to centerpost, giving it an inverted look of anger.
By then he was already in the creek again, scrambling low under the beamed flooring of the bridge and dipping water into his boots with gentle sluicing sounds where he floundered in over the tops, squatting down too far under the canopy of sumacs broken over the bank, and the water on his backside icy as alcohol. He was thinking: I’ll have to pull up on the doorhandle. Then he was at the car, stepping and threading the brush it had pulled into the creek with it, reached for the doorhandle, crammed it upward, and jerked back on it with his full weight.