The Huntsman: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Whitney Terrell was born and raised in Kansas City. His debut novel was a New York Times Notable Book. He is the New Letters writer in residence at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

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The Huntsman, Chapter One

FOR TWO GENERATIONS in the city's life there had not been much comment about its river. The populace moved southward from its banks into rolling hills and finally board-flat prairie, easily corralled, paved, and developed into suburban plots. Iron-gray and sinuous, banks heaped with deadfall and bright flecks of plastic trash, fish poisoned, docks crumbling, stinking of loam and rot, the river seemed an uncomfortable reminder of a gothic past when life had not been so clean. Bums lived along the river within sight of the mayor's office, a paper mill and several chemical companies rimmed the levee, and on the east side, the river flowed past housing projects for the poor. Most Kansas Citians never saw these things. Once every three years or so, some young reporter at the Star would get spring fever and spend the day riding upriver on an empty grain barge. In the morning, citizens at their breakfast tables held up bright color photos of the river's wide expanse and read a breathless article invoking Twain and explaining, to everyone's amazement, that barge traffic still existed. In fact, barges (this year's article read) transport one and a half million tons of cargo annually and are cheaper than trucks or rail.

"Now there's some decent reporting!" Mercury Chapman exclaimed, tapping the article with his fork. "Tells you how things work, instead of just writing up the next moronic car wreck. It's not that I don't have sympathy for any poor bastard has to die like that, but what good's the sympathy of a stranger? When I die...Lilly, what's the plan around here for when I die?" he shouted, suddenly rearing from his seat.

"The plan is, you do it after three o'clock." Lilly Washington glided through the porch door and retrieved the pitcher of milk so it wouldn't spoil. She had cooked for Mercury for thirty years, the last ten since his wife's death, and in the mornings she had business to administer. "At three o'clock the roof man's coming about that leak, and you've got to be here to show him around. Wednesdays are when I get my hair done."

"Ha!" Mercury said, sitting down.

"You've got shaving cream in your ear." Lilly's crisp lemon pantsuit darted, finchlike, into the kitchen's gloom.

"Ha!" Mercury said, rearing again for effect. The small comedy pleased him. He had talked to himself for most of his adult life, preferring to communicate by way of competing monologues rather than formal conversation, wielding the non sequitur and selective deafness like a surgeon's blade. His wife had been a formidable competitor in this running gag-in talk he found most men lugubrious-and it had been the boon of his widowerhood to discover Lilly's abilities in the field. Chattering to himself in an empty house, he would've taken his life by his own hand. "Decent reporting!" he repeated. "How much gloom is in the paper, and how much wonder all around? What about phones? You can call China by a machine on the wall, have been able to for thirty years, but who knows how it works? Or where clean water comes from, or how the TV signal goes out? How does beef get to market? Who built the Broadway Bridge? All Henry puts in here is sports, death, and politics: nothing for the common man. That's what I'm going to tell him, and watch the look on his fat Texas face...." Henry Latham was the president of the Kansas City Star, and Mercury often invited him bass fishing on weekends. He shook the paper and gazed past his Wolferman's English muffin at a photograph of the river's broad and muddy flow, a scalloped line of cottonwoods in the background.

"I like to hear that river's got a use still yet," he said, raising his voice so Lilly could hear him in the kitchen. "Booker and I went goose hunting once right along her banks, down near old Pete Martin's place. We laid out in a muddy field."

A snort of disapproval disturbed the pantry. The words "That's one way to camouflage a boy that black" reached Mercury's ears.

"Maybe he built a raft and went downriver," Mercury answered sadly, as if he had not heard a thing. "Floated clean away."

That same morning, sixty miles east of Mercury's cool, porch-flanked house on the 500 block of Highland Drive, Stan Granger headed out to check his lines. Dredging, dikes, and levees had transformed the Missouri River from a wandering, swampy titan a mile or two in width to little more than a drainage ditch (nostalgics said), at best a half mile from bank to bank. People believed that the Mighty Mo would never flood again, her mythic connection with great rivers from Abraham's time forward removed, like a stinger, by the Corps of Engineers. Still, outside Kansas City, the river flowed somnolent and muscular, centuryless, churning on without the permission of man's belief. At thirty-three, Stan Granger had acquired the habits of a much older man, a loner who fished more by habit than for useful trade. He had lost the necessity of words. Days passed in bundles when he did not speak, and as he hauled his trot line outside Waterloo, the town where he lived, his mind brooded with the same glinting, continuous flow as the river, its steady and unbroken stream of action unappended to so flimsy a vehicle as speech. So when he saw the trot line bellied far too deeply between the oak trunk and the anchor buoy a hundred yards offshore, he did not think it. He quartered his skiff against the current, set the line over his oarlock, and slid along it patiently, lifting and rebaiting the hooks that hung from steel-tipped leaders. He had caught a drum and two small catfish, and he broke their backs along the gunwales and dropped them on the skiff's floor. The closer he got to the trot line's middle, the harder the work became: the line hitched and popped jerkily along the galvanized oarlock, the weight pulled his gunwale down, and the river entered in a thin, gruel-like stream. Stan shifted his body away, grunting, to keep the gunwale up. He still did not think it but merely followed from one action to the next, each determining perfectly its successor, and when the weight and current grew too strong, he freed the line from the oarlock and played it by hand. The river darkened the flannel arms of his shirt. At the height of this ballet, his elbows bent and he thrust his chin beyond the gunwale, appearing from a distance to be ready to spring a handstand in the long, bright scarf of river, and then he set his back and tumbled a dead woman's body into his boat. Leaders trailed after it like roots, and Stan cut them one by one with his knife, just past the steel.

The corpse's head rested against the skiff's middle seat, her legs jumbled stiffly in the bow. A windbreaker had shifted rudely off her shoulders, pulling back her arms, and her breasts pressed dark aureoles against a golf shirt emblazoned with a country club's burgundy crest. She wore a khaki skirt, a needlepoint belt, and a two-toned, spiked golf shoe on her right foot, a tee stuck through the lacing flap; her left foot was bare. Her sable hair fanned the skiff's bench between Stan's knees, and her pupils, in death, had rolled backward in her head so she stared white-eyed at a cloud of starlings angling in unison against a glowing field of blue. He bent over the dead young woman without repulsion and reached beneath her shirt for a charm, which he silently unclasped. One of his hooks had caught her by the neck, and he removed it with a deft twist, leaving a glossy and bloodless wound.

Stan finished running his line. He had difficulty untangling his bait pot from the dead woman's legs, but he managed. He pulled in two carp and one more catfish and, reaching his anchored buoy, judged that if the river rose two feet more, the buoy would be submerged. None of this he put into words, but firing the skiff's outboard and heading back toward town, the dead woman's bare, finely arched foot jutting into his line of sight,...