One Good Eye

by Tammy Huffman

He only had one good eye, but he had twenty-twenty vision in that good eye and Ross saw it. Something — no, somebody — running down the hill. It was a man all right, not a deer or a bobcat or a coyote. It was a man running like he was running for his life.

Ross had just started out with a load of corn from his father's field on his way to the grain elevators in Lock Springs to sell it. The wide flat field lay at the bottom of a steep bluff. The bluff was owned by a neighbor boy.

On spying the man sprinting down the hill, Ross braked the big truck to a stop and rolled down the dirt-speckled window for a better view. The autumn breeze smelled of sodden leaves, cattails, willows, and even a hint of chimney smoke from somewhere far off.

"Picking 'em up and putting 'em down," Ross observed casually of the running man.

He waited. His father roared by in a combine in the cornfield they were only about halfway done harvesting. The huge machine was lost in swirls of pulverized husk and dust. Ross saluted the Old Commandant — and in such a way that his father could see him do it. Ross was a rebel and a bit of a torero; he could not resist teasing and taunting the fates. His brother, the good little soldier, followed behind the combine on a tractor and chisel plow. The chisel churned up dirt so fresh and black it looked wet. They went on by.

The running man ran in long strides through goldenrod and milkweed and coral brush. He had a ways to go yet before he reached the bottom of the hill.

While he waited, Ross's eyes roved the spider web of logging trails, deer paths, and three-wheeler ruts to the top of the hill from where the man had to have come. There was a farmstead up there known as the Old Hawkins Farm. It was a remote and lonely place that had only recently sold. The members of the Hawkins family were all dead now and buried in various sites on the property where the graves yawned wider with every passing year as though they were rooting around down there for comfort and legroom. There was a big falling-down house, an even bigger hay barn, and a few sheds. It was the sort of place liked by bats and rodents and meth-makers and the occasional squatter. Around Halloween, the place conjured up vampires, monsters, werewolves, creatures from outer space, witches and shapeshifters — if a mind leaned toward myth and mystery, which the mind of Ross did.

Who was this fella running? He was still too far off for Ross to make anything of. Now he was sidewinding through a herd of cattle.

The Hawkins hill was rocky and no good for field crops, but it had a fine stand of pine and walnut and a vast pasture where a herd of cattle now grazed, unfazed by the crazy guy bounding through them. They were black Angus, those cattle, fed lush fescue grass to marbled fatness, tail-swishing, cud-chewing, prized sovereigns, symbols of wealth and prosperity, leaders of housewarmings and passages into the afterlife.

Ross sighed. He'd liked to have owned such cattle.

The guy that did own them was his nemesis and arch enemy -- Monty McVey.

Monty had recently bought the Old Hawkins Place — the abandoned farmstead, the tree stand, and that big herd of cattle that Ross eyed curiously — not enviously, mind you —just wondering.

Ross didn't understand it. Monty was a kid Ross had grown up with and looked askew at and wholly despised ever since first grade when Monty caught him copying his straight lines.

"You can't draw a straight line to save you," Monty accused him.

"That's all right, your momma can't walk a straight line to save her, " Ross shot back.

And that was mean, but true. Because his father told him and his brother that the McVeys were drunkards and wastrels and inbreds and not to play with them or hang around with them because they were dirty with head lice and scabies and diseases even doctors couldn't pronounce.

Ross couldn't understand it. They had only been out of high school a year now, but Monty was already buying up land and cattle and making money hand over fist. Ross worked his fingers to the bone and still could barely scrape together enough money for a used Harley.

His brother gave him sass about it; told him he ought to go to work for in Monty, the financial wizard. Even his father liked to lecture him about 'thinkers and plodders.' Ross knew he was the plodder in those nasty old stories.

Well. There was the right kind of craft and cunning and there was the wrong kind. The right kind belonged to the American Eagle and Batman and Luke Skywalker. The wrong kind belonged to things that crawled on their belly and called holes home. Ross knew that much.

Ross leaned over and pushed open the passenger door and the running man jumped right in. He was out of breath, shaking, and his face was scratched and bloody.

Seeing him close up, Ross recognized him as one of Monty's latest hired hands. Monty had a different hired man working for him every time he turned around so they were hard to keep track of. This last time he'd hired two.

"What's the matter with you?" Ross asked him. "You get in a fight with a bull? You come between a mama cow and her baby? What's the all-fire hurry? There ain't no grizzly behind you."

He waited. "Not talking." Ross rummaged around under the seat and found a flask of Jack Daniels. The man grabbed it and gulped down a couple of swallows. Ross got the truck rolling again.

The man had sticktights all up and down his thin raggedy pants and cocklebur gauze in his shoe strings. One shoe had a loose sole and he even had cockleburs on the toe of his muddy sock that was sticking out. He looked like a homeless person and probably was. Monty found vagrants and drifters at the bus stations and train terminals in Lock Springs near the stockyards and the ag plants. He hired them off the street. They were so happy for a job they worked for room and board and a few dollars in spending cash. At least for a while. Monty couldn't keep help. All of them eventually took off again.

"Where's your partner?" Ross asked him. "Weren't there two of you this time?" The man glanced back. "Not anymore," he said.

Ross let the man collect himself. He looked like he had been truly terrified by something and not too long ago.

Driving through the bottom lands in silence, past the slashed corn stalks and the scalped soybeans, Ross let his mind wander into daydreams. He was the hero in all of his fantasies and like all true heroes he fought against evil supervillains and for a just cause: a name or reputation to defend; a battle for flag and country against invaders and crime; and, of course, he was always righter of wrongs against the abused, neglected, ostracized and dispossessed. By the time they'd driven through the bottoms and reached the MaGill bridge, many legendary deeds of strength, brains and valor had been fought inside Ross's head, and his passenger had calmed down considerably.

He eyed Ross. "You look like somebody," he said.

Ross tensed. He knew what was coming, what with his one eye, his wavy hair, the beige duster, and his penchant for cigars. It made people think of Columbo, the detective on T.V. The teasing caused Ross no small amount of grief.

"Yeah, I know," Ross said. "Columbo."

"Who?"

"You know. From the Mystery Movie on T.V. The reruns."

"No, man. Clint Eastwood. The actor. Rowdy Yates on Rawhide. Dirty Harry in those movies."

"Hell, no."

"Yeah." His company smiled with bad tobacco-stained teeth, pleased that he'd made Ross look in the mirror.

Ross reached in his pocket for cigars to celebrate making a new friend. The booze loosened his new friend's tongue and the man commenced talking. His name was Hank. It turned out he'd been married and had a job on the line at a car manufacturing plant in Lock Springs. He made good money and things were going fine. But he had one little chink in his mettle. He liked to gamble. He'd gamble with and on anything...cards and dice, dogs and horses, lotteries, all kinds of sports, and once he'd gambled on an inchworm race. After he'd gambled away his savings and the house and car, his wife took their little daughter and left. Hank fell hard into the hole he'd dug. It was a fall that knocked out everything with it, his job, family, home, church, wind, and spit and vinegar. Hank hit the road and the bottle with equal determination to be lost. He said he was down a lot more than money and was heartsick and didn't understand why God would do such a thing to him. It sounded to Ross like most of the fault lay with Hank and not God, but he didn't say it. Folks needed to be fooled by illusions and tricked by delusions in order to keep from seeing themselves too clearly. Ross might be half-blind and broke, but he knew a thing or two about human nature.

Ross drove on to the Lock Springs grain elevators and unloaded the corn. He let Hank out at the bus station with a ten dollar bill. That was all he had in his billfold. On his way back, it occurred to him that Hank never did tell why he was running like a jackrabbit down the hill of the Old Hawkins Farm.

It was later the same day and Ross was half asleep in the truck, bored, drifting on daydreams, waiting on the combine to bring him another hopper of grain. His good eye picked up something in the woods of the Old Hawkins Farm. Ross got out and walked through the little pine trees to the walnut trees. It was a pickup parked near the old farmhouse at the top of the hill. There was something on the ground by the pickup. Ross walked a little farther up the hill. The thing on the ground was wrapped in an old tan tarp. He got a little closer. Something wet and pinkish had seeped through and stained the tarp. He moved a few feet closer.

Murder. He understood it in a flash. No wonder Hank had gone bounding like a fox with its tail a-fire through the brush that morning. The other hired man had been murdered. And Monty's image blurred inside Ross's vision with all the great known evils — Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates and Darth Vader and Hitler and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Later, Ross would have to admit to himself that his first instinct was not to help or even to call for help. It was to run.

Ross ran like hell through the big trees, and then through the Christmas trees and out into the field. He ran in great loping strides through the stubbled field in much the same way he'd seen Hank running that morning. He flagged down his father on the combine. His brother pulled up and got off the tractor to hear what Ross had to say.

By the time the sheriff got there, Ross knew he'd find no body, no blood, no nothing. He knew, when he saw the pickup was gone, that they were too late to find anything. The hired man rolled up in the tarp had been loaded up and hauled off.

The sheriff wore a big white cowboy hat and had a big pistol in a holster on his hip. He had an oversized star pinned to his fringed leather vest and even had jingling spurs on his cowboy boots. He tried to look big and tough to deceive first himself and then the voting public. In reality the sheriff was as far from the gritty, hard-fisted, hard-drinking cowboy legend as east is from west. The sheriff was afraid of most things that provoked danger, and that included reptiles and rats and bats and spiders in the old abandoned farmhouse and surrounding woods. His deputies did all the work.

The sheriff moseyed over to where Ross was sitting on the bricks of a dried-up well and asked him questions, none of which Ross could answer. Did he know the make or model of the pickup? Did he get a look at the license plate?

"The truck was green," Ross said. "I saw a dead man and after that not much else." "Well, for a famous detective, you didn't detect much," the sheriff said.

That got snickers from the deputies standing around.

Ross's father was leaning against the sheriff’s vehicle with his arms crossed over his chest. He didn't laugh. He had his chin butted down and his jaw bones were working. He cleared his throat. "Sorry to drag you out here," he said to the sheriff. "The boy has an active imagination and he has imagined things."

"I reckon so," the sheriff said, getting in the jeep. "He's a little old to be pretending he's something he ain't."

"He's seeing things," one of the deputies said. "Maybe he's sick in the head."

"Maybe he's drunk," the other one said.

"Let's hope it's from his mama's side," the sheriff said.

Ross wished they'd just go on. He knew his father hated being made fun of, even by proxy.

The sheriff and the deputies drove off. His father gave his brother a curt nod to send him back to the field.

Standing there in the clearing by themselves, Ross's father said something about how he knew Ross's wild imagination would cost him one day. Ross told him he didn't believe it had cost him anything but what it would cost to clean his boots of the sheriffs bullshit, which must have cost him plenty because his father never did much like being smarted off to. "You don't never learn," his father said, while he crossed the ground between them in two quick steps. Ross couldn't read the look on his face until it was too late to do much about it. It was something sweeping and broad and heavy that startled and stung him and even made him suck in his breath.

Hunched against the door of the truck, Ross considered many things. His father took a belt to him only once in his life. That was for throwing a paper cup at his brother. When he saw that belt coming, Ross had argued hard and fast that it was only a paper cup he'd thrown; harmless. His father told him that because he had thrown it in a fit of senseless anger, it had just as well been a knife. Ross got that. Another time his father told him to never strike another living thing in the face. It would make both people and animals shy and ruin their trust.

It was good advice on both counts. His father had taken none of it into account when he came at him in hot anger with that broad hand and got him right in the face. Was it a slap or a cuff? Was it a clubbing? Didn't matter; Ross was no kid anymore and he was altogether taken aback by it, humiliated by the injustice, the inhumanity... and fuming, steaming mad.

Ross sat bunched up against the door, plotting. Plotting was the only thing that calmed him enough to start thinking clearly again. Plotting revenge. And vindication.

That's how the stakeout began. It went on for a day, two days, three, a week. He watched from the hood of the track by day. Of a night, he hid his motorcycle in the trees and crept up near the old farmhouse and watched and waited.

He heard and saw nothing. He was starting to believe he had imagined it all. Until one night. He saw headlights. He stood stock-still. Monty and another newly hired field hand pulled up in a pickup Ross had never seen before except that one time, when a dead man lay in a tarp beside it. This time it backed up to one of the sheds where a gooseneck trailer was stored. They hitched the trailer to the pickup.

Ross cut his motorcycle lights and followed as the pickup pulled away. They drove slow and steady until the pickup turned onto a lonely stretch of gravel road. Ross knew this neighbor. He'd helped him put up hay just that summer.

Between those big round hay bales that provided cover, Ross watched Monty use a pair of long-nosed pliers and cut the wire fence. Fence panels and gates were laid out by the hired man to make a corral. Feed was used to lure the witless beasts into the gooseneck trailer.

Then it was a wild chase under milky white stars. Monty thundered ahead, the pickup and trailer dark and horrid with its load of kidnapped bawling cattle. Ross stayed with him on his glowing flying hog, a whirlwind pursuit of dust and bugs, across the sky and into the underworld.

He made it back to the Old Hawkins Farm in time to see the cattle let out in Monty's pasture. It was that easy, that simple, that quick.

Over the next few days, Ross watched Monty and the hired man switch ear tags and re-brand the cattle.

Some financial genius, Ross thought. He spat between the handlebars of his bike. Monty tweren't nothing but a cattle rustler and a two bit thief. And worse. Those hired hands had no idea what they'd signed up for. Strangers to the area, with no roots and no paper trail, they were the perfect patsies. Murder. No witnesses. If they complained or said they wanted out of Monty's little racket — Murder. Nobody came looking for them. Nobody even knew they were missing.

Ross did not come to all these conclusions at once. It was later, when he took a flying leap and tackled Monty that all those things lined up like crowned checkers inside his head.

He'd been hiding in the trees waiting for the sheriff to show up when he saw the hired man come out of the abandoned house with Monty right behind him with a shotgun nudging his back. A lucky escape from that same shotgun at his spine was what had sent Hank running for his life that day. The other hired man hadn't been near so lucky.

Ross tackled Monty at a dead run and sent the shotgun flying. Then it was all arm locks and head locks and rolling around on the ground in the leaves. Until Ross took a head butt that made him see a blaze of yellow. His vision cleared just in time to see the newly hired hired man crack Monty over the head with a rock.

"They was bums, Ross," Monty told him when he came to. He rubbed the back of his head. "They was poor and dirty and smelly and nobody wanted 'em around. Nobody would of missed 'em cause nobody cares whether our kind live or die."

Ross heard it -- "our kind"— and that twenty-twenty vision of his honed in hot and wilted most of the self-righteousness and pride he was feeling at being the hero in this particular situation.

The sheriff, or at least his deputies since the sheriff was scared of copperheads and rattlers, found four bodies in all. They found them all on the Old Hawkins Farm, in the barns, out in the woods, down the well. The highway patrol and other county sheriff’s departments and even the army reserves were called in to help with the search. They brought bloodhounds and backhoes but the backhoes weren't really necessary. All of the bodies were found in shallow graves, like all the dead Hawkins had been hogging them out.

Ross watched from the trees with the homeless guy. This one's name was Rex. A television crew showed up with a big satellite dish on top of a van and lights and a sound system. The reporters told stories of the murder victims. They all had mothers, some had wives and children. They had lost jobs and missed rent payments or spiraled off into pills and booze, or were never quite right in the head to start with. The telling was sad and made folks who generally told themselves in their own hearts that they cared, actually care for a bit.

"You should go down there," Rex prodded Ross. "Get interviewed. You're famous. You're a hero, buddy."

"Nah," Ross said. "I know damned good and well who I am and I ain't no hero."

Ross lit his cigar with a kitchen match. His father's head turned toward the flare of light.

Who do you think you are? Ross wondered ~ not bitter, mind you — just wondering.

He got on his motorbike and stomped the pedal. It was too cold now to still be riding. The November air made his bad eye water something fierce. He tore off.

And his duster, caught by the wind, swirled behind him bravely, even tauntingly, like a cape.

The End

Tammy Huffman has had two poems published in Time of Singing (Damn This Wood) and Jonah Magazine (I Found Him There); and eight short stories published in: Alpha (Carol); Front Porch Review (Yonsiders); Adelaide (The Feeding); Aphelion (The Picture); Mystery Weekly   (Angels Stirring); Life and Legends (Duane and the Cougar); Literary Heist (Jack's Gamble); and Addanomadd this fall (The Ark); and one flash story in the West Trade Review and one in WINK. She has had numerous feature/human interest stories published in multiple newspapers.