Strawman's Hammock Read Free

Commission.” The warden had a revised seal embossed with the new name pinned neatly to his light tan shirt. That shirt, topped with an olive-green jacket, seemed insubstantial in the morning’s chill, but Jarold did not appear uncomfortable. He nodded at the hanging carcass.
    â€œFirst kill of the season?”
    â€œI believe so,” Barrett replied. “This club, anyway.”
    Jarold opened a pouch on his belt to pull out a knife.
    It was a Boy Scout knife. The warden went through a corkscrew and toothpick before settling on an awl.
    â€œI hate these clubs.”
    The candor took Barrett by surprise.
    â€œUsed to,” Jarold said, cleaning a cuticle meticulously, “you could buy a shotgun for fifty dollars from a Sears catalog, get yourself some shells, and go anywhere in these woods, anywhere at all, and hunt to your heart’s content.
    â€œLong as you were a good steward no one cared. Do anything you want out here, long as you respected the animals. Not a penny out of your pocket.
    â€œNow look. Linton and the paper mill and everyboy else has chopped up their land into leases. Now to even see a deer you got to buy a lease. And you cain’t get on a lease unless you get in a club. And not just anybody gets asked, Barrett. You know that.”
    Barrett knew only too well.
    â€œUsed to, a man with a box of Number Ones and some skill could feed his family off these woods. But now—now, hell, you got to be rich just to come out here.”
    Barrett watched as Linton Loyd kneeled to warm his hands in the fetid vapor that geysered from the gut bucket.
    â€œIt’s cold,” he remarked.
    â€œAs a well-digger’s ass,” Jarold agreed.
    The climate often turned bitter in northern Florida, but seldom this early in the season. It was not unheard of to have hurricanes in November, the sullen, persistent heat of Gulf waters encountering the capricious influences of la niña and a dipping jet stream. This morning, however, a stiff breeze and forty degrees felt Arctic.
    â€œWell. Guess I better be movin’,” the warden declared abruptly, pouring his coffee onto the fire in a careful stream, like a small boy pissing on hot coals.
    â€œNice seeing you, Jarold.”
    The warden only nodded in reply. Barrett followed his solitary retreat. Linton had his buck gutted by now. The bladder had been removed without a single drop of urine contaminating the carcass. The skinning would come next. Linton would assign another hunter that task, returning himself only to dismember the choicest pieces of the buck’s meat from its entaglement of bone and sinew. “Here,” he nodded to his sullen son, and strolled past the bunkhouse to wash up.
    The Loyds’ bunkhouse was no more than a pair of thirty-foot construction trailers slapped together, the interior walls ripped out to allow a woodstove, tiers of beds, an overstuffed couch, and a card table. An open shed set some distance from the trailer provided a new luxury, a cold-water shower and washstand where Linton, bloodied to the elbows, now washed his hands with soap and sink cleaner. There was no latrine. You needed to shit, you walked off to the woods and found yourself a stump unencumbered with scorpions or patient spiders. You forgot your toilet paper, you made do with moss or something similar.
    There was a kind of verandah added on to the camphouse, an unfinished porch fashioned with plywood and mounted on cement blocks looking out over the firepit to the gallows or cruciform beyond. It was only after Linton had washed that he came to the campfire and the black man drinking coffee. “Morning, Bear. Been out yet?”
    Barrett Raines might fairly be described as a bear, with a great lump of neck and shoulder squeezed into a frame a shade shorter than a coffin. But it was the habit of sweetening his coffee with honey, locals knew, that gave Barrett his sobriquet. He was at it now, squeezing honey from a Pooh