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CHICKAMAUGA, GEORGIA, SIX WEEKS EARLIER
Pete Buford was enraged, and he was afraid, and he’d spent too much of the last few years feeling helpless. When he left the battlefield he’d had a wet trail in his pants and the hot sting of terrified humiliation to lash him onward. It couldn’t be like that. It couldn’t be over so easily; he hadn’t had a good idea in his entire life, and the one time he had a project—a real honest-to-God goal—it had been thwarted before it even got under way good.
There had to be an answer to it. There had to be a way aroun
d this obstacle.
He fumed and growled all the way to the car, then all the way to the trunk, where he dug out some rags. He scowled at the urine stains as they began to dry on his jeans. Pete grumbled at the gasoline can in the backseat and swore as he ripped the cap off.
He grimaced when he dumped it down his crotch. He wrinkled his nose at the pungent odor wafting up to his nostrils. It made his eyes water, or maybe he was so mad he was almost crying. He wouldn’t have admitted to either possibility.
The drive home was spent shaking, cursing, and stabbing his fingers at the half-broken radio that only wanted to pick up one or two stations.
He’d tell Uncle Rudy he’d run out of gas. He’d tell him he’d stopped with the can and spilled it. That would account for the smell. The rest would come out in the wash. The rest he could lie about if he had to.
He hated himself for running.
He’d run like a little girl, screaming away from the boogeyman.
But once he’d calmed down some, about halfway home, he decided to be honest with himself: It had been pretty fucking scary. He vibrated with anxiety, rubbing his foot against the gas pedal and making the old beater drive funnier than it usually did.
What the hell was that? he wondered. I mean really, what the hell was that?
It wasn’t just that he’d never seen anything like it; he’d never even heard of anything like it. He’d never read about anything like that in a story, even.
On second thought, that wasn’t true. Like everybody else in the valley, he’d heard stories about Old Green Eyes. But they weren’t the sort of stories you believed—not if you were smart. Not if you were stupid, even. Not if you were the most gullible son of a bitch in the world—you didn’t believe the Old Green Eyes stories.
Not for real.
You believed there was a ghost, maybe. You believed that there was spookiness out there on the battlefield. Thirty-five thousand people died there, isn’t that what the park people had said? Thirty-five thousand people don’t die violently anyplace and not leave a stain of some kind.
Pete believed in stains. He believed in marks.
He believed in places that gave you uncomfortable feelings because bad things had happened; and he believed in ghosts, if it came down to it. Why not? Lots of people claimed they’d seen them, all over the world. Pete had never personally seen a lot of things, but he was pretty sure they existed somewhere.
He’d never seen a kiwi bird, for example.
He’d read about kiwi birds in sixth grade, in Mr. Viar’s biology class. Class had been held in a trailer classroom—one of the “temporary” buildings that stood for thirty years without air-conditioning, and never did much to educate students at all. There’d been a chapter on birds, though, and about what makes a bird a bird. The teacher had said it wasn’t flying, like Pete had thought it might be. Turned out, it was feathers that made a bird a bird. Even birds that can’t fly are still birds, not just rats with beaks. Inside the biology textbook there had been a drawing of a brown bird that looked like a guinea pig on stilts, with a long pointed nose. The caption underneath had said it was a kiwi bird, and it didn’t live anyplace in America. And even though it’d only been a drawing, not even a photograph, Pete had believed that the kiwi bird existed.
But this was different.
He’d heard stories about Green Eyes, and even though he’d never seen him personally, he’d believed them. But seeing the thing in person had been like meeting his first kiwi and finding out it was as big as a moose. Green Eyes was the most horrible thing Pete had ever heard of. He felt cheated by folklore’s understatement. “Green Eyes” sounded like something ephemeral and floating—spooky glowing orbs that hover and flutter and float, not anything like a monster.
What he’d seen, Pete reflected as he drove back up Sand Mountain, was something capable of doing real harm. This was a being that could grab, and choke, and pummel. It was something stronger than a man, and bigger than any man Pete had ever seen.
And it had chased him away.
One of Pete’s more personal failings had always been an inability to leave well enough alone. The thought that he’d been chased away did worse to his ego than the soiled pants he’d disguised with the gasoline stink. Pete was not the sort of man to be chased away from a prize, much less one that was owed him or his family.
And the fact that he’d been chased at all suggested there might be something really good to be found. No one gets chased away from nothing.
Maybe Green Eyes knew about the treasure, and was guarding it for himself. In all the old stories, all the best treasures were guarded by fearsome creatures. But then he remembered that the gold itself almost certainly wasn’t buried on the field, and this theory pretty much tanked.
Whether or not the beast was guarding anything was beside the point, anyway. Green Eyes was there. He was intimidating and possibly violent. Homicidal, even. And while Green Eyes was present on the battlefield, it seemed unlikely that Pete was going to get anywhere near the relics of his dead ancestor.
The trick was how to get rid of him.
When he realized this was all he needed to do, Pete brightened up some.
