Written by Stephen F. Moloney
“Oh, hold up a second.”
For the third time since they’d started walking through the trees off to the left-hand side of the range, Ray came to a stop so that he could crouch down and pluck an old, dirt-covered range ball out from the thick undergrowth.
“Another one for the collection.” he announced, holding the ball up and examining it like it was a diamond before shoving it roughly into his pocket and looking back over his shoulder at Maggie. “Right, it’s not much further now.”
As they set off walking once again, Maggie noticed that the undergrowth and trees seemed to be getting denser and denser the further they moved.
“So I take it no one really comes through here all that often?” she asked distractedly as she primarily focused on avoiding what looked like a small clump of poison ivy.
“Naw …” answered Ray, trodding on a rotted tree branch and snapping it in half. “Apart from the occasional wild hog, this place don’t usually see much in the way of foot traffic.”
“Wild hogs, huh?” replied Maggie, stepping over the now severed branch. “Well, I guess I’d rather come across one of those than an alligator.”
“You’d be surprised, actually.” said Ray, his voice steeped with the sort of knowing tone that suggested there was a story behind it. “Gators, for the most part, are more interested in keepin’ to themselves, really – you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. But the hogs? They can be real cranky. I mean, you come across one of them and it takes a dislikin’ to you? He’ll try and run you through with his tusks, no doubt about it. Luckily, though, you can generally smell ‘em before you see ‘em, so we should be good.”
To distract herself from the nervousness she was now feeling about being suddenly accosted by a rampaging feral pig, Maggie decided to try and find out a little more about the night Ray had come through where they were currently walking in search of Mustang.
“So, when you decided to try and find Mustang after he ran in here …” she began, choosing her words carefully. “What exactly made you do that? I mean, I know you said you wanted to find out where he’d gotten the club he was using from but … well, now that we’re actually walking through here and I see how overgrown and difficult it is to navigate, I’m just wondering was there something more than that ‘intrigue’ that made you feel it necessary to go to all this trouble?”
“Uhm …” mumbled Ray eventually, after taking about five or six steps to mull over his answer. “I guess it was a mixture of things, really. The fact I’d never seen him around before. How young he looked …”
Ray trailed off for a moment as he had another think about how best to vocalise the thoughts swirling around his mind; like he was looking for more golf balls that had long since been hooked and sliced into where they were walking and promptly swallowed by the jungle.
“And I don’t know …” he continued, finally, as he grabbed a particularly long frond of grass he was passing and tore it loose. “It might sound dumb but … something just told me that I should try and find him.”
“Do you think part of that feeling might have been down to how you said he looked when you first spoke to him?” probed Maggie, eager to keep Ray exploring this train of thought. “You know, how scared you said he appeared? Like, ‘unusually’ so?”
“Maybe, yeah.” agreed Ray, tossing the piece of grass off to the side of where they were walking. “You know, you’d understand a kid that age getting a tiny bit scared when he’s caught doin’ somethin’ that he technically shouldn’t be, but … well, as scared as he looked? You’d swear I’d just caught him with a pile of hundred dollar bills at his feet after a robbin’ a bank, instead of a heap of beat up golf balls.”
“And did the fact he ran away like he did,” added Maggie, swatting away a particularly annoying fly that had been pestering her for a few steps. “Into here of all places, set off any alarm bells?”
“I wouldn’t necessarily say ‘alarm bells’, no.” replied Ray, frankly. “I felt bad that I’d made him feel like he needed to run away, but when it came to actually goin’ about tryin’ to find him? It was a blessing in disguise, really.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, because what you see here?” said Ray, gesturing loosely around at the trees. “What we’re walking through? This is pretty much it. You go half a mile that way? Bayou. That way? More bayou … except for one place.”
“And where’s that?” asked Maggie, intrigued by Ray’s leading tone that suggested he was talking about somewhere quite special.
“Well, as it happens …” answered Ray. “Right through here.”
With that Ray pulled back a long curtain of foliage that was hanging down just in front of where he was standing and suspended from some unseen branch high up in the canopy overhead. Instead of revealing yet more dense and overgrown trees for them to trek through, however, Maggie was amazed as Ray led her out of the somewhat claustrophobic corridor of greenery they’d been walking through and into a light-dappled clearing where she was brought face to face with the most amazing looking stone cabin.
It was much smaller than Ray’s cabin back out on the range, probably containing two rooms max. The roof, where it was still intact, was comprised of old-fashioned, hand cut wooden shingles; and where it had collapsed in on itself a young Sugar Maple tree, having spied the opportunity to set roots inside the cabin, was now plugging that gap as it had burst through the roof in its quest to reach the sky. The majority of the stones that formed the structure of the cabin were covered in a thick carpet of green moss, whilst the few remaining holdouts looked as though it wouldn’t be all that long before they, too, succumbed to their fate. And, unsurprisingly, given the age of the cabin, any windows and doors charged with keeping it watertight during the fall and winter rains had long since disappeared from the tiny spaces in the walls that used to house them.
“What is this place?” whispered an awe-struck Maggie, eyes dancing around the clearing in an effort to commit as much of it to memory as possible.
“This …” replied Ray, pausing alongside Maggie to take in the fairytale-like setting as well. “Is ‘The LaFleur Cabin’.”
“LaFleur?” repeated Maggie, recognising that name. “As in, Beau and Henri LaFleur?”
“Same family, yeah.” confirmed Ray, looking up towards the tops of the trees surrounding the clearing as a gust of wind suddenly whistled through them. “But the LaFleur who lived here? He was the guy who started the whole family line that led to Beau and Henri.”
“And what was his name?” asked Maggie, walking slowly further into the clearing and nearer the cabin.
“François.” answered Ray assuredly as he followed Maggie in venturing closer to the cabin. “Came over here in the late 1890’s from France with next to no money and wound up, get this, winnin’ the deed to Crescent Creek – all two-hundred acres – in a game of poker.”
“No way that’s true!” said Maggie, whipping around from where she was standing and looking back over at Ray with a disbelieving smile on her face. “Seriously?!”
“That’s how the story goes.” smiled Ray, pulling one of the golf balls he’d found earlier out of his pocket and rolling it idly around in his hand. “And there’s got to be some truth to it because the stretch of holes from fifteen to eighteen here? It’s always been known as ‘Dead Man’s Alley’.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that’s a poker reference of some kind?” said Maggie, tongue-in-cheek.
“Yes, it is a poker reference.” replied Ray, smiling and shaking his head ruefully. “It’s a nod to the hand François apparently won Crescent Creek with in that poker game, a ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ – or, to put it another way, a pair of aces and eights. All black.”
“Well, as far as origin stories go for a stretch of golf holes, that’s probably the coolest I’ve heard.” said an impressed Maggie over her shoulder as she’d wandered closer to the front of the cabin in the time Ray had been speaking. “And I take it François was the one who actually turned Crescent Creek into a golf course then?”
“Yep.” confirmed Ray, now taking a moment to clean some of the more embedded dirt out of the dimples on the golf ball he was holding. “He’d played a lot of golf back in France, and when he first came out here to actually get a look at what he’d won, he got to the place where the ninth tee box now is and straight away it reminded him of his favourite hole on the course he used to play back home – so, right there and then, he decided he was going to turn the property into a golf course. That’s also why the name of the 9th hole is ‘Maison’ …”
“Home” said Maggie, smiling at the thought of the translation.
“You speak French?” inquired Ray, shoving the golf ball back into his pocket now that he was happy it was sufficiently clean.
“Oh God, no!” corrected Maggie emphatically. “I took it in high school and can remember very little – basically, enough to know ‘oui’ is the correct answer if someone says ‘croissant’ or ‘soufflé’.”
Ray chuckled quietly as he moved across the floor of the clearing – which was mainly just hard, bare earth topped with old, fallen leaves and patches of wiry grass – before lowering himself down onto a gnarled tree stump that was sunk deep into the ground.
“So, unless I’ve radically misunderstood why you brought me here …” said Maggie, gently laying her hand on one of the stones which made up the front wall of the cabin and feeling its coolness against her skin. “I’m assuming this is where you found Mustang that night?”
“Yeah, this is the place.” replied Ray, wiping off the beads of sweats that had gathered on his forehead with the sleeve of his t-shirt. “Hasn’t changed all that much since that night either …”.
*
Ray stepped out through a screen of long, dangling ivy fronds and into the clearing of the old ‘LaFleur Cabin’. Between the jungle-like foliage and poor visibility it had taken him slightly longer than it normally would to reach the cabin from the range, but now that he was there, any and all concerns over time or how tight a grip the night had taken over proceedings quickly evaporated. He was focused on the task at hand and that meant finding the kid – he only hoped, however, that he was right to figure the cabin was where he’d actually ran off to.
Having moved far enough across the clearing that he was now facing the front of the cabin, Ray came to a stop. He couldn’t help but notice that everything had suddenly gone very quiet. On his way to the clearing, in-between the odd swear word uttered by him as the kid’s golf club got snagged on bramble after bramble, Ray had been treated to the sound of birds guiding each other back to their respective nests and frogs just starting their nightly concert in the nearby bayou. Now, however, there was nothing but silence. Even the tops of the trees surrounding the clearing were surprisingly still, with barely a rustle between the lot of them.
Suddenly, the faintly metallic sound of a bag of chips crinkling from inside the cabin shattered the silence and immediately garnered Ray’s attention. Feeling confident that bags of chips didn’t grow wild in nature, Ray took the necessary few steps to reach the door of the cabin in order to investigate. He quietly leant the kid’s golf club up against the wall and peered inside. Even though the roof was partially caved in, it was still after getting too dark for him to make out anything more than a foot in front of where he was standing. Luckily for Ray, however, he’d grabbed his cellphone from out of his locker and shoved it into the pocket of his jeans before Mr. Denby had cornered him in the workshop, so he promptly pulled it out and, after some momentary fumbling, turned on its flashlight.
A beam of white light flooded the interior of the cabin like Ray had lassoed the moon that was just starting to peek its head out for the night and pulled it down into the clearing for his own personal use. Everything looked pretty much the same inside the cabin as Ray remembered it from the last time he’d ventured out to this part of the property. The large, open fireplace on the left-hand side of what used to be the main living area was still filled with old twigs and bits of dried out grass from long since abandoned bird nests. The few pieces of furniture dotted around the room were, inexplicably, somehow still standing despite the fact they had become even more rotted. And in the adjoining bedroom – which was the only other room in the cabin – the Sugar Maple he’d seen had begun to sprout up through the fractured floorboards from the foundation below on his last visit was still looking surprisingly strong, if not thriving.
What wasn’t the same as the last time he’d laid eyes on the cabin, however, were the empty candy bar wrappers and soda cans that were now suddenly strewn around the floor. Happy that this all but confirmed the kid had, indeed, been in the cabin – and for quite a while it seemed too – Ray carefully followed the trail of trash with his flashlight to see if he could find anything that might tell him more about who the kid actually was. When he reached the corner of the cabin nearest to where he was standing, though, the only thing further illuminated was the bag of chips he had heard crinkling a few moments earlier – and something inside it was moving.
With thoughts of potentially coming face to face with one of the giant rats who called the surrounding bayou ‘home’ not being all that appealing, Ray, without taking his eyes off the bag, slowly reached his hand back outside the door and felt around for the kid’s club. After only a few missed attempts he finally felt the cool steel of the club’s shaft and made a move to yank it inside the cabin. Unfortunately, in his effort to appropriately arm himself against whatever ‘swamp demon’ lay inside the bag, Ray inadvertently knocked the head of the club against one of the stones that made up the side wall of the door.
As soon as the cringe-inducing clack of chrome hitting stone reverberated around, what was left of, the walls of the cabin, there was a panicked rustle inside the bag of chips as whatever lay concealed within realised their late-evening picnic had been rumbled – so it made a break for it. Instead of coming face-to-face with the ginormous rat he’d imagined in his mind, however, Ray was relieved to see a rust-coloured fox squirrel bound out of the bag and, with the single chip it had managed to grab, dart across the floor of the cabin before disappearing out of sight through a gap where one of the floorboards had rotted away.
Now able to relax, Ray – who was feeling rather glad no one had seen him, the former soldier, get put so on-edge by, ultimately, nothing more than a squirrel with a taste for nacho cheese – let out a sigh and loosened his grip on the kid’s club.
“Give me back my club.”
Completely caught off-guard by the sound of his voice, Ray whipped instinctively around with the same lightning quick reflexes he’d honed in Iraq until he was facing back out towards the clearing. And there, no more than twenty paces from the cabin and with what appeared to be a tire iron raised above his head, was the kid.
Though he’d, of course, seen him out on the range, between being more mesmerised by the shots he was pulling off and then how quickly he’d made a run for it as soon as he’d spoken to him, now was the first time that Ray had properly looked at the kid.
He was once again wearing the hoodie he’d taken off back out in the range, except now without the actual hood pulled up over off his head. Though his memory of what he’d seen on the range had told him the kid just had a shock of brown, wavy hair, under the moonlight that had now asserted itself in the sky directly over the clearing, Ray could see that it actually had the faintest hint of blonde running through it as well. And whilst he was still just as wiry and tall-for-his-age as Ray had first thought when he was watching him stripe ball after ball into the stratosphere, now with a little more focus on the kid himself, that ‘wiriness’ looked as though it was veering dangerously close to ‘sickly’, possibly even ‘underweight’ – though the baggy hoodie and basketball shorts may have been somewhat exacerbating those thoughts in Ray’s head.
The one thing that remained steadfastly true to the memory of their encounter out on the range, however, was the look of fear on the kid’s face. Sure, he was trying to appear intimidating to complete the ‘tough guy’ aesthetic he was going for with the tire iron, but Ray had been in the army for long enough to recognise when someone was merely using that as a front to try and hide the fact they were actually terrified.
“Ah, so we meet again.” said Ray, smiling warmly but making sure not to move.
“Give me back my club.” repeated the kid, sounding like he was having to try hard to keep his voice from shaking.
“Well, funnily enough …” began Ray, flipping the club upside down in his hand so that he was holding it by the head as opposed to the grip. “That’s exactly why I followed you in here.”
Having been idly examining the head of the club as he spoke, Ray suddenly turned his gaze onto the kid.
“So how ‘bout you go ahead and drop that tire iron you’re pretendin’ you’re actually goin’ to use.”
Given how young he looked, Ray thought deliberately adding a little steel to his voice and directly telling the kid to do something might foster a more productive interaction between the pair of them – and it worked. After trying to maintain his ‘tough facade’ for another few moments, the kid’s mask finally slipped and he let the tire iron drop loosely down to his side.
“Thank you.” said Ray. “Now, you got a name?”
The kid shifted uneasily on his bare feet and averted his gaze – clearly he didn’t want to tell Ray his name.
“Alright …” continued Ray, keen to establish some kind of dialogue. “How long you been here for?”
Again, the kid remained silent and kept his eyes firmly locked on the trees off to the side of the clearing.
“Listen, man, you gotta give me somethin’.” said Ray bluntly. “Ok, you ain’t in trouble. You’re gonna get your club back. I just wanna help you if I can.”
“I don’t need any help.” mumbled the kid. “I’m fine.”
“Oh you’re ‘fine’, huh?” replied Ray, scoffing lightly. “Well, I’ll be honest, kid, that’d be a whole lot easier to believe if you weren’t all alone out here, barefoot and, from what I can see, stayin’ in an abandoned cabin.”
Knowing he didn’t have an answer, the kid, once again, got into a staring contest with some unfortunate tree off to the side of where they were standing.
“Now, you don’t wanna tell me your name, that’s cool.” continued Ray. “But I know when someone needs help – whether they want to admit they do or not. So, kid, I’m gonna ask you – can I help you with anything?”
After taking a moment where he looked conflicted as to what he should do, the kid eventually looked over at Ray.
“Well, that depends …” he said quietly.
“On?”
“Can you fix cars?”