Chapter 16

Jerry called Gainey Furniture on Friday one week after the attack. Lisa had already informed her Uncle Fred that it would take a few weeks before Jerry could go back to work. Jerry thought it important to check in with Mister Parsons with an update on his recovery. Jerry could walk short distances and he could drive, although shifting gears with the column shifter made him wince. What he couldn’t do was spend hours on his feet operating industrial wood working equipment.

Jerry rested up over the weekend but on Monday morning he drove down to Charleston to see his new friend Billy Bob Jenkins at Sarge’s Surplus Bunker. Billy Bob was pleased to see Jerry although he was taken aback at how stiffly the young man moved. Even though Ida had wound his bandages extra tight this morning the drive down left him sore and gimpy.

“What happened to you?” Jenkins asked.

Jerry gave him an abbreviated version of his run in with the bikers. The two men lamented about the overabundance of assholes in the world. Once they solved all of the world’s problems over good coffee that Billy Bob served in a canteen cup, Jerry turned the conversation in a different direction.

“Say, Billy Bob, do you know of a pawn shop around here that sells rifles? I want to go hunting with my grandfather in the fall, so I’ll need a good rifle for deer season.” Jerry explained.

Billy Bob gave Jerry a look but shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Yeah, I know a guy from the American Legion with a shop not far from here. He was in the Navy, but I don’t hold that against him ... much. Hang on let me call him.”

Billy Bob picked up the phone sitting on a shelf behind the counter and found the number he was looking for on a sheet of paper taped to the wall. Jenkins dialed the number and after a few seconds asked for someone named George. After a two-minute conversation, Billy Bob hung up the phone and gave Jerry the verdict.

“Old George has a bunch of hunting rifles he says he’ll let go cheap. He says after the end of deer season, a bunch of city boys discover hunting isn’t that much fun and sell or pawn almost new guns.”

Jerry hung around with Jenkins another hour. Before he left, he bought a couple of loam and light green camouflage make up sticks, a couple of squeeze bottles of military issue insect repellent and a set of jungle fatigues He also bought a nice set of M17 binoculars with case and fifty feet of parachute cord.

“The deer will never know I’m there,” Jerry quipped.

“Good hunting,” Jenkins said dryly.

Jenkins gave Jerry directions to George’s pawn shop. Jerry drove the three blocks until he came to a building similar to Sarge’s Surplus Bunker, this one painted white with heavy bars over the two small front windows. A large sign perched on top of the build identified the shop as ‘Capital City Pawn’ and below the stores name it read ‘We Buy Gold and Silver’.

Jerry pushed through the door, walked to the youngish man behind the counter, and asked for George. At the other end of the counter a large man with long hair and a substantial beard held up his hand.

“Be with you in a minute, Bub,” says George.

He was taking in an electric guitar for pawn. The young guy pawning the guitar made a face but eventually took the twenty dollars George offered. George wrote out the pawn ticket and ambled down the long counter to where Jerry stood. Besides his long hair and unkempt beard, George had a tattoo of an anchor on his right forearm, just like Popeye.

“What can I do for you bud?” George asked.

“Sir, my name is Jerry Donavan, Mister Jenkins says you have some hunting rifles. I need one for deer season,” Jerry replied.

“Yeah, Billy Bob told me. Deer season is a few months off so now is a good time to buy. I can give you a good deal.”

Jerry ended up with a Remington 700 in 30.06 caliber, with a Leupold scope and a leather sling. Jerry liked the feel of the rifle, the bolt action was smooth as silk, and the 12x40 scope was excellent. It was a nicer rig than the one he carried in Vietnam.

“That’s a good choice Donavan, some rich fool ordered that for hunting long horn sheep in Wyoming. He had it bore scoped by a gunsmith, spent a week with a guide, and fired it twice. His wife traded it to me for a ruby ring,” George said.

Jerry dropped two hundred and ten dollars on the rifle, scope, one hundred rounds of 30.06 ammo and a cleaning kit. He figured it was money well spent.

When he made it back to Coker County, he stopped at his camp site under the Mulberry Creek Bridge. He spent ten rounds zeroing the rifle for four hundred yards. Next he cleaned the rifle, wrapped it in a poncho liner, and cached it and the ammo in the moonshiner box under his truck bed. It was too late in the day for any more practice with the rifle, so he rode back to Ida’s house.

The next morning Jerry was up bright and early. He drove up to his family home and rounded up his grandfather. Jericho Hatchett was also up early hoeing weeds out of his garden plot.

“Come on, Papa,” Jerry said, “I’m buying breakfast.”

They found a vacant booth at the truck stop’s diner and slid in opposite of each other. Hatchett doffed his hat and took the menus from the waitress. Brandy wasn’t working today but the forty something waitress serving them efficiently pouring them a cup of coffee and dropping off their silverware. The two men decided their breakfast choices and gave their orders to the waitress who was all smiles for Papa Hatchett.

“That waitress looks like girlfriend material Papa, and she was giving you the eye,” Jerry quipped after she walked away.

Hatchett shot back with, “She will have to get in line because I’m already seeing a widow woman in town. We have a very special relationship.”

Jerry grunted and held up his hand to cut his grandfather off.

“I don’t need to hear anymore Papa,” he said.

Hatchett grinned, “You started it.”

Sipping coffee and waiting for their meals, Jerry started talking.

“I’ve been thinking about what we talked about at the hospital. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the Sons of Satan had something to do with what happened to Mama and my sisters. And I think Sheriff Thompson is covering up what they did. I also believe that the bikers have done much more than is public knowledge,” he said.

Hatchett bobbed his head in agreement. “My lady friend said several families with teen daughters moved out of town with no notice. She also said she believes there are more girls and women that have been assaulted but they are too scared to come forward,” he said.

“That’s about what Ida told me, so I am going to find a place where I can watch them and see exactly what they are up to. How do you feel about helping me?” Jerry asked.

“You don’t have to ask Jericho, what’s the plan?” Hatchett asked.

Jerry out lined his plan, and his grandfather nodded his understanding and agreement.

Jerry took it easy for the next three days and basked in Ida’s tender nursing. On Friday Ida ramped things back towards the relationship they had before he joined the Army. She did that by kneeling in front of his chair as he sat on her screened in back porch reading the news. She was wearing a sheer lavender chemise even thought it was three in the afternoon.

“I think my baby needs some attention,” she husked as she reached for his zipper.

When she was finished with him, he was slumped back in his chair grinning blissfully. It was the first sex he hadn’t paid for or took care of himself in seven years. Ida giggled, zipped him up and rose to her feet.

“Tonight, it’ll be your turn,” she said as she disappeared through the door.

Jerry thought maybe Ida was onto a way to speed his recovery because he jumped up and chased her into the house. She squealed as he pushed her down on the couch, then moaned as he dove between her legs.

Saturday morning Jerry woke up feeling almost normal. His sides were tender but as long as he kept from hitting them or turning too quickly, he thought he would be okay. Jerry gently unwound himself from a sleeping Ida and took care of his morning routine. He dressed and kissed Ida on the cheek. She sleepily grumbled about him leaving but didn’t wake up completely.

Jerry visited his grandfather again, but instead of going to the diner they had coffee on the porch of the family home. The two men drank a second cup of coffee and at eight they jumped into Jerry’s truck and went up the road to see Hoke Purnell. Jerry asked Purnell if he and his grandfather could borrow Hoke’s M1951 Jeep. He explained they wanted to go hog hunting up on Pitchfork Mountain. Hoke agreed and rolled up the middle door of his three-bay garage. He unlocked the chain around the Jeeps steering wheel.

“I spect you can drive this baby, right Jerry?”

“Sure, Mister Purnell,” Jerry replied, “I drove one just like it in Vietnam.”

Hatchett loaded two of his handmade laminated bows and two quivers of store-bought hunting arrows, while Jerry tossed in his half-filled rucksack into the back of the Jeep and drove off. Hatchett made his own bows by laminating Black Locust sandwiched between two slivers of Hickory. The grip of the bow was bound by pieces of cow horn wrapped tightly with leather. The bows were incredibly strong and evenly balanced. It took considerable practice to learn to draw the bowstring back. The reason Hatchett was such an elusive poacher was because he hunted silently with a bow, and he moved through the woods like a whisp of fog.

Twenty-five minutes later Jerry parked the Jeep off the side of the rutted but surprisingly passable logging road near where the mountain had settled when coal room seven collapsed. The area above the cave-in formed a bowl-shaped depression. There were still dead fall trees rotting on the ground, but new trees had sprung up in the ten years since the cave in. Jerry and his grandfather crept through the under growth until they reach a ridge that looked down on the mine five hundred yards below them.

The mine looked much as it had when he worked there. All the original buildings were still in place, the manager’s office, the miner’s locker room/bathroom, the tipple house and the power room where his father had worked were still standing and appeared to be in use. The railroad tracks that ran up to the tipple house and the spur line where extra coal cars were parked had been pulled up. The coal chute that filled the cars was also gone. The tipple house looked as if had been refurbished as a set of roll up doors graced the front of the building near the entry door.

The site was surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence with three strands of barbed wire on top. Two chain link gates closed off the compound from the road. The fence was installed when the mine was abandoned to keep people off the property. The gate was standing open.