The Clearing of Travis Coble Read online

  “Where am I?” Myers croaked.

  Someone hooked him under the armpits and hauled him to a sitting position. Though he was blinded by the midday sun, Myers realized his hands and feet were bound. He struggled to free himself, but the rope only bit his flesh harder. He stopped and stared at his wrists. They’d ripped his shirt in half and used the pieces to bind him. He twisted and writhed but his bonds wouldn’t loosen. Panicked now, he bucked against the unyielding fabric and cursed himself for buying the stupid shirt.

  Out of breath, he paused and stared out at the forest. He was in the center of a wide ring of trees. The searing heat had bleached everything in sight. The overhanging boughs were silvered with glare, the cracked clay of the forest gleaming like the bloated white bellies of decomposing deer. Here and there, slender steel rods poked out from the scorched earth and sparkled in the sunlight.

  Myers asked, “What are you doing to me?”

  “Giving you your exclusive interview,” Coble said, and as he spoke he peered over Myers’s left shoulder. Snapping his head around, Dick saw a large man and a giant watching him.

  “Professor Richard Myers, meet B.J. and Ike Coble.”

  They regarded him without pity. The whanging in his head pinched shut his eyes, which was a mercy. The glancing boom in the base of his skull was better than the sight of the staring goblins he’d been certain were dead.

  There was a snicking sound followed by a dull mechanical whir. He opened his eyes and watched Travis speaking into the Dictaphone.

  “Daddy’s death was an accident,” Travis began in his hillbilly voice. “Mama an’ Daddy loved bein’ ’round one another. They were always wantin’ to be alone, and I expect there’s worse ways two people can be. They’d gone up climbing, and there’d been a rockslide. None of us saw it happen, but Ike happened to be playin’ nearby when the mountain came loose. Apparently, Daddy’s neck twisted around like an owl as he tumbled and Mama would have been dead too eventually if Ike hadn’t found her first.”

  Myers turned and looked at Ike. The man, who would now be thirty-one, was at least six and a half feet tall and had to weigh over three hundred pounds. He stood there immense and godlike, his skin impossibly white in the fierce sun. His cratered face was slack and beaded with perspiration, but beneath the mild expression Myers sensed something predatory, something eager.

  His mouth quivering, Myers peeled his eyes off of Ike, hoping he’d spot some sign that there was still hope. But what he saw only deepened the turbid dread churning in his belly. B.J., the one who looked uncannily like a larger Travis Coble, was stalking back and forth now like a battle-scarred and very hungry Bengal tiger. Myers shut his eyes to escape the man’s avid gaze. He swallowed but winced when his throat only made a dry, painful click. He took a breath, but regretted it when his nostrils clogged with the smell of human excrement.

  “We never quite got the story ’bout what went on when Ike found Mama,” Travis said. “But I imagine it took a toll on him.”

  Eyes squeezed shut, Myers imagined the mentally retarded giant finding his mother and father amidst the rocks and the dirt, his father already dead, his mother overcome by pain and grief.

  Travis said, “Me and B.J., we were huntin’ for squirrel. Ike was gone all day, so when it got close to sundown, we started to worry about him. Daddy wasn’t around much, but when he was, he always told me an’ B.J. to watch out for Ike. We didn’t want to make Daddy mad, so we set off to find him. Around dusk, we did.”

  Dick’s hands were turning blue. He attempted to pull them apart, but the rayon only dug deeper into his flesh. He peered up at the tape recorder in Travis’s grasp, and somehow this was worse than not being able to feel his hands, Coble stealing his Dictaphone. Travis held it close to his lips and stared down at it so that his black eyes were slightly crossed.

  “When B.J. an’ me found the three of ’em, Ike had already eaten Daddy’s liver. Mama had a broken back, and what she’d seen her boy do had ruined what was left of her mind. She’d gone crazier than a shithouse rat.” Travis looked up and smiled. “Isn’t that how you’d say it, Doc? Or would you call her an ignorant wretch?”

  Myers flinched away to escape Coble’s jack-o-lantern grin. But what he saw made his stomach sink.

  Ike was unbuckling his belt.

  Myers turned back to Travis. “Please take me back to town.”

  “Naw, it’s easier to do it here,” Travis said. “Don’t have to worry so much about clean-up.”

  Behind him, Myers heard a thump. It was Ike’s belt, which had fallen on the damp soil. A salacious leer spreading on his moonlike face, the giant began unzipping his jeans. Myers felt his scrotum tighten in terror. He opened his mouth in a voiceless plea, but Travis didn’t seem to notice.

  “Well, we couldn’t have momma screaming like that, no matter how far away from town we were. It just wasn’t Christian. So B.J. here bust her head with a rock.”

  Pleased to be included in the tale, B.J. gave Myers a conspiratorial wink.

  “’Course we buried what was left of Mama and Daddy out here in the woods. Ground’s soft, so it was easy enough to dig a hole big enough for ’em both. And the truck.”

  Dick glanced back at the steel rods poking out of the ground and realized they were radio antennas. At the far end of the clearing he distinguished a fresh mound of dirt and beyond it a backhoe.

  Myers’s voice was scarcely audible. “You had the hole dug before I got here.”

  “Pretty good, Doc. Maybe you shoulda been a detective after all.”

  “Let me go and I won’t tell a soul about you three,” Myers said, trying and failing to keep the despair out of his voice.

  “Can’t chance that, Doc. But you gotta admit, we got a nice setup out here. B.J. and Ike, they live over here at Carl’s house. I bring home good money from Beatty’s so we never go hungry. When we do get the cravin’ we take a weekend to find us some real food. Then we bury what’s left over.”

  Against his will Dick found himself gazing about the clearing. He’d counted fifteen antennas before his face crumpled and the tears started to flow.

  “I promise I won’t tell on you guys,” he moaned. “Please let me go back.”

  “No, I figure you ought to hear the rest of it since you were nice enough to come all the way up here. They’ll look for you at my place, and I’ll tell ’em you never made it. Unless you were smart enough to give them the directions I gave you.”

  Myers could only rock back and forth and weep.

  Coble smiled. “That’s what I figured.”

  Myers felt his lips quiver as he said, “They’ll search for me.”

  “Who will? Your wife? Your kids? You think your college friends will give a shit about you goin’ missing? Hell, that’s just one less person to compete with. Anyways,” he said and gazed up at the trees, “this place is miles from my house. You’d given someone else the directions I gave you, I’d be worried. But like I said, you never told nobody where I told you to meet me. You only said you were going to Travis Coble’s. And that’s where they’ll look.”

  “I came here to help you,” Myers whispered. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Help me?” Travis said and uttered a grim, clipped laugh. “You came here to help yourself, Doc. Who the hell you think you’re foolin’?”

  “Help you…” Myers said, his voice a hoarse croak. “…came to help you.”

  Ignoring him, Travis cast a sidelong glance at his brothers. He smiled fondly at Ike. “This is a special day for us. We usually gotta go quite a ways to satisfy our cravings. We fire up my Ford and put the topper on her. Ike and B.J., they’re snug back there, but they don’t complain much. Mostly we go for families. Weird as it sounds, a missing family means less suspicion for a single guy like me. Only time I got questioned was when we hunted too close to here and fried up that hippie that was hikin’ by himself. Police figured, single guy, single killer. Plus, it was Sanger County so they came callin’ on me.”


  Travis nodded sagely to Myers. “That’s the last time we killed in our own stompin’ grounds. ’Til now, of course.”

  Myers felt a hopeful smile twist his lips. “So don’t do it! You’ve got the perfect situation here, Travis, don’t ruin it. People know I was coming here. Even if they don’t know my precise location, they’ll know I came to this mountain. They’ll find me eventually.”

  Travis gave an apologetic little shrug. “Sorry, Doc. Already promised Ike here he’d get himself a piece.”

  Myers cast a frantic glance at Ike and tried to squirm away. B.J. ambled over, raised one gigantic boot, and stomped on the small of his back. Myers grunted in agony. His kidneys felt like they’d been harpooned.

  Travis resumed his tale. “After the trial, we got fed up with Carl always saying things about us in town, so one night me and B.J. called him and told him to come search our place himself if he didn’t believe us. Sure enough, Carl was even dumber than that D.A. When he showed up and didn’t see Ike, he asked where the idiot was. That was the word he used, ‘idiot.’ Probably the same word you’d use if you weren’t so scared of gettin’ that scrawny white ass of yours pounded.”

  “I wouldn’t call him—”

  “We said Ike was down at the river with a trout line, but what he really had was a hard-on for Carl’s wife, Aunt Elva. As soon as Carl left his place to come to our house, Ike cut their power and went inside.”

  Travis regarded his brother fondly. “I didn’t know how well Ike would get along at Carl’s house while we were gone. He was burly even then, but like you said, Doc, he was only eleven. And there were four of them. Elva and her three children, I mean.”

  Ike’s jeans dropped to the soil, and the smell of shit filled the clearing. Ike’s alabaster legs were great hairless pillars. Staring at them, Myers began to sob.

  “With the two of us there it wasn’t no trouble taking care of Carl. I cracked his face with a meat mallet.” Travis chuckled. “Shoulda seen his nose cave in, Doc. More blood than I ever seen, and that’s the God’s honest truth. B.J. wanted to go ahead and butcher him on the spot, but I knew we’d have to get back to Ike and Aunt Elva.

  “But by the time we got there, three of ’em were dead. Aunt Elva, her boy Lucius, and her youngest daughter Kate.” Travis grinned at the recollection. “Aunt Elva’s arm was chopped off at the elbow and jammed bloody end first up her female parts.”

  “Please don’t do this,” Myers said, tears streaming over his face.

  “Sadie,” Travis whispered into the Dictaphone, “the older of the two girls, was still alive though she was bleeding pretty good. Me and B.J. were glad of that. We got to have our fun too while Ike ate Aunt Elva’s tongue.”

  As the giant slid off his grungy underwear, the stench became unspeakable, like being submerged in the pit of an outhouse.

  Drooling, Ike plodded toward him.

  “Keep him away from me,” Myers begged.

  “Ike likes to play with his food first,” Travis explained. “You ain’t as pretty as some of the others, but you’ll have to do.”

  The drooling giant stood over Myers, one great paw slowly stroking his huge phallus.

  “Oh God no,” Myers whimpered.

  Travis leaned down, his face inches from Myers’s.

  “How does it feel, Doc? How does it feel to be innocent yet condemned?” Travis’s grin became horrible. He shoved the Dictaphone into his back pocket.

  “Don’t do this, Travis,” Myers pleaded.

  As they rolled him over onto his stomach, he could hear Ike panting.

  “Please!” Myers howled.

  A great, sweaty hand tugged at the seat of his trousers. Myers wailed.

  Travis chuckled. “You know how it is, Doc. A man’s got to provide for his family somehow.”