Free Into the Web by Thomas H. Cook

and a flannel shirt, both coated with the region’s red dust. He’d tugged his hat from his head before speaking to me, and now held it with both hands, a gesture common to the people of Waylord.
    “Name’s Crenshaw,” the man said. “Nate Crenshaw. I live up the creek a ways.”
    He was not threatening in any way and yet a threat seemed to rest between us like a pistol on a gaming table.
    “You the law?” he asked.
    It struck me with some relief that in fact I was. I took out the badge. “Roy Slater.” I nodded toward where thebody had lain. “It was Clayton Spivey we found here. I guess you heard about that.”
    Crenshaw continued to watch me warily. “Yeah, I heard about it.”
    “Did you know him?”
    The old man shook his head. “Not much, no. He sure run into a patch of bad luck, didn’t he?”
    Bad luck.
    It was the same phrase my father had always used to gather into one pile a vast array of disasters. Children drowned because of bad luck. Babies died of whooping cough and meningitis for the same reason. When men went to prison or were crushed in collapsing mines, bad luck was the culprit. Women dead in childbirth, or ground down by labor. Bad luck. Once, when I’d asked my father why he’d left Waylord, he’d simply shrugged and said, “Too much bad luck up there.”
    “I seen Clayton sometimes,” Crenshaw added. “Not too often though. He wasn’t too sociable. Lived out in the woods. By hisself.”
    “How’d he make a living?”
    Crenshaw shrugged. “He swapped things. He wasn’t in good enough shape to work regular.” “Did he have any friends?”
    “He visited Lila Cutler from time to time. She let him stay in that little shack on her land. Felt sorry for him, I guess.”
    “Was that their only connection?” I asked. “That he lived on her property?”
    Crenshaw nodded. “Far as I know. Never heard Lila say there was anything else to it. ’course, Lila’s quiet.”
    But the girl I remembered sang along with the bandwhen we danced, hummed continually, called loudly to me from her seat in a darkened theater or the crowded assembly hall at school or one of the wooden bleachers that lined the football field, her arm in the air, waving energetically. Over here, Roy.
    “She was lively when I knew her,” I said. “In high school.”
    “Maybe so,” Crenshaw said. He eyed the stream briefly, turning something over in his mind. “Clayton was out hunting, I guess,” he said, nodding toward the dove’s body.
    “I suppose he was.”
    Crenshaw walked to the edge of the creek, picked up a stick, and dipped it gently into the water. “Hunting like a feller that’s hungry.”
    He drew the stick from the water, considered its wet tip, then lowered it back into the stream, moving its tip in ever-tightening circles over the surface of the water.
    “Like a feller that ain’t got time to wait for a deer or a rabbit. Because he’s hungry. Needs whatever he can get.”
    “Was Clayton Spivey that poor?” I asked.
    Crenshaw tossed the stick into the creek. “Must have been, or he wouldn’t have been shooting at no dove.” His eyes drifted up toward the shattered nest. “A dove won’t fly, you know. Just sets there till you shoot it.” He continued to peer at the nest, looking more and more puzzled as the seconds passed. Finally he shook his head slowly, as if giving in to the mystery of things. “Maybe that’s why Clayton was after it. ’Cause he was too weak to go after nothing else.”
    I looked at the dove, her bloodied feathers alive with ants. “Lila told me that he was sick. Was he dying?”
    “Heard he was, yes, sir.”
    “What of?”
    “Black lung.”
    Then I knew exactly what had happened to Clayton Spivey, the sudden seizure that had overtaken him, driving him first to his knees, then forward, pressing his face against the ground, blood rising like a geyser in his throat.
    “Ain’t no cure once you got it,” Crenshaw added.
    No cure, and nothing to do but wait