They Ain’t No Injuns

by MarQuese Liddle

“They ain’t no injuns!” cried Clem for what he hoped to be the final time, but his baby brother Willy wouldn’t let up.

“By God, I swears it was a injun, Clem! I ain’t never seen no nigger that color afore. One seconds I was lett’n a piss, the next this red blur whizzes past as fast as…as fast as…fast as a red river rock we find sometimes in the clay by the crick.”

“Then it definitely ain’t no regular nigger neither, ’cause red or not, you skip rocks so slow they don’t go but plop in the water!”

“I’m tell’n you, Clem!”

“An’ I ain’t listen’n to no fib. You jest ’magined it is all.”

“Na, ah!”

“Then take me to ’em.”

“But I told you, Clem; he was gone right quick. He must o’ run through the crick a-ways some after I saw ’em, ’cause I ain’t find no prints when I come after—”

“’Cause they ain’t no injuns, Will! Pa said they all been dead now what a hundred-hundred years. They was dead afore guns an’ gas stations!”

“But I saw one!”

“Then show me! Or else I’ll tell pa who let that darn coon loose out the trap.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Try me, Willy.”

“But he was so cute! Pa was gonna skin ’em.”

“He’s gonna skin you if you ain’t show me your red nigger afore dinnertime.”

The two backwater brothers looked for but couldn’t spy the sun dipped below the hilly woodland. They glanced at one another, then to home—Pa’s old cabin that his pa’s pa’s built back in the before-times like what they watched in movies when Pa went off hunting or fell asleep drunk. They didn’t dare look toward the trees, not until they heard the howl of coyotes far in the distance.

“Well hurry up, then, Clem, afore it gets dark,” said Willy to save face, like it was his brother who’d been stalling. “or else Pa will skin us both like coons.”

They moved fast as jackrabbits from the back of the cabin and down the hill toward the creek. That was the easy part, ’cause by the water, poison oak and ivy choked their path thicker than most other places, which made it slow going without their waders. Pa would kill them if they ruined their boots too fast. So there was no way getting around walking along the bank.

Willy didn’t know which way his injun ran, so the brothers scanned the land either side the whole length from where the creek bent behind the cabin till it ended at falls. They didn’t discover any tracks, which they should have in the clay-rich mud. That could mean only one thing according to Clem, that Willy was a big fat fibber. But his baby brother doubled down in response, said the injun must have run through the creek itself. When questioned as to why Willy didn’t hear him splashing, he altered his story, said that his injun must have run barefoot across the mossy rocks that pop up out of the brown water every so often.

Clem wasn’t having it. They’d reached the Orange Water Falls by then, so named by the brothers for the stained rocks piled either side of a natural cave entrance hidden behind the wall of water. The didn’t have a name for that place itself, just called it The Cave and stayed far away from line of sight of the opening.

“He must o’ gone in there,” said Willy, pointing down from where the creek dropped a dozen feet into a shallow stream below.

“Don’t know why you’d think it when there ain’t been no tracks. No prints, no injun.”

“But it’s the only place, Clem!”

“The only place you know we ain’t gonna check! All that’s in there is fibs.”

Willy glared fiercely at Clem, then at the clay stained rocks piled aside The Cave entrance. “I ain’t fibb’n,” he murmured to himself, then he had a thought. “Who put them rocks there?”

“What’re you go’n on about now?”

“Them rocks what are stacked up. Who stacked ’em like that?”

Clem crossed his arms. “I don’t know. Pa never said it was nobody in particular. Maybe some people before the war.”

“Maybe it was injuns.”

Clem swore, and Willy gasped, but the older brother wasn’t worried. Pa wasn’t anywhere near to hear, and his baby brother wasn’t about to go tattle on him after spinning this stretcher. “Injuns, injuns, injuns!” Clem gasped, exasperated. “Is that all you can think ’bout anymore? What’s it gonna be next? Pirates? Mexicans?”

“Well, then, who was it, Clem?”

“I don’t know, maybe runaway slave niggers did it way back when.”

“Or maybe way-back-when injuns,” Willy grinned, triumphant. “An’ what if them injuns never left, but been hid’n in this cave that whole time, an’ I just so happened to see ’em?”

Clem looked to the sky; daylight was dwindling. “Maybe it was injuns, Willy, from the before times, maybe. But if it was, they ain’t no injuns now. Pa would o’ shot ’em, or Pa’s pa, or his pa before ’em. We can ask him if he’s awake when we get back to the cabin.”

“But Clem!”

The older brother points to the sky. “It’s gett’n dark, Will. Let’s go afore the coyotes come out.”

“But what if he’s in there, Clem? What if it’s like the settlers, and he’ll give us a Thanksgiving turkey for supper if we’re nice?”

“You really are a baby. That was just in a movie, Will. Pa says real injuns cut people’s hearts out an’ eat ’em an’ stick their heads on sticks. Ask ’em yourself if you don’t believe me, but we gotta get back afore—”

A howl sounded loud from the surrounding woodland darkness, then, several more yowled in response. Coyotes. Neither Clem nor Willy could tell whether their howls come from ahead or behind. What was certain is that they sounded uncomfortably nearby.

Both brothers looked to one another, big eyes afraid, then they booked it back the way they came but didn’t make it the length of a skipping rock before a fallen branch’s crack! sounded from around the creek’s bend and stopped them. Something was coming. Something was following them.

“It’s the red nigger!” cried Willy, frozen.

Clem grabbed hold of his baby brother and dragged him backward toward Orange Water Falls. “No it ain’t! It ain’t no injun! It’s gotta be a coyote or a bear or someth’n. Don’t matter none. Come on!”

“Where are we go’n?”

Clem didn’t answer. He just held tight to his brother’s hand and ran them down a slope through poison ivy or oak or some other itchy plant. That didn’t matter either. In his panic, Clem had but one thought, one plan.

Willy protested as he was haled into the shallow stream. “Wait! We’re go’n in there?”

“Yep. Ain’t that where you wanted to get?”

Willy had—when his stubborn brother was telling him he couldn’t. But now, every ounce of defiant courage had abandoned him as quickly as the red blur had fled from him earlier. Willy shook his head.

“Well too bad!” said Clem, scanning left and right. “Ain’t nowhere else to hide. Come on, now. Maybe we’ll find your injun after all an’ get that Thanksgiving dinner from ’em.”

Willy knew his brother didn’t mean it, that he didn’t believe his story at all. So when Clem dragged them both through the waterfall and into The Cave, it was no relief to hear him say they’d be safe from the animals till next sunup. “Cause they can’t smell through water none, so they won’t find us afore Pa does. Or else we’ll make it back home come dawn.”

Willy didn’t ask about what if something smelled them from inside the falls, from the utter blackness that swallowed all but the mouth of the cavern. That’s where they stood for the first while, watching for animals, listening for howls.

Within minutes, night fell, and where there was enough light to see outlines quickly became too dark for the boys to see even their own hands in front of their faces. It grew cold, then. The spray from the falls and the chill flowing in from the water drove them farther and farther into the rocky abyss. And the deeper they delved, the higher the temperature ascended, the ground and walls felt softer with sediment deposits from floods and groundwater. Soon, it became so humid that their hands began to sweat, but still they didn’t let go. Both boys were terrified of losing one another—though that was unlikely; there was only one apparent path in the narrow passage.

Then the cavern opened suddenly to a room lit with the faintest ruddy glow.

The brothers’ eyes adjusted slowly. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

“Pa?” asked Willy, gaping at the naked silhouette of a man caked in irradiated clay.

“That ain’t Pa,” answered Clem, his voice trembling.

The clay-caked figure swayed in the darkness, its eyes effulgent yellow like beams from old flashlights in the blue-ray horror movies. Its teeth, they glowed as well—what few were left—as did its winding dying-grass-green nails. And from its head sprouted a fleshy mass like a mohawk of tumors.

“Is that—” Willy started.

Clem cut him off with a hiss, all the while backpedaling as quietly as is wet boots could sneak. “It ain’t no injun Will.” He points his baby’s brother’s hand at the pile of bones about the glowing creature’s feet. In the feint light, they can just make out the remnants of polyester clothes clinging to corpses decomposed long-ago. Plastic and glass bottles and stainless steel canteens gleam in the monster’s green light stained brown shining through the red pigments of the clay.

Maybe it was an injun underneath. That didn’t matter to Clem, not any more than the bear or the coyotes or Pa skinning them both over the racoon. He had to get them out of there and back home before that thing noticed they were—

The sound of a splash echoed from The Cave entrance, and the effulgent eye-beams caught the two boys between itself and whatever wild beast had followed them. The brothers’ hearts beat so fast, they felt close to bursting. They couldn’t quiet their breathing; then they couldn’t breathe.

The injun reached up and grabbed something jutting from the ceiling: a tree root, a stalactite, the brothers couldn’t see. They squinted night-blind in the eye-lights, paralyzed as the creature crawl-climbed along the ceiling like a skittering daddy longlegs. No prints. Its locomotion was spiderlike as it was simian. Intelligent, it shut its eyelids at the last moment, nearly vanishing as it swung for them camouflaged in clay.

A voice, broken by the narrow, twisting cave, echoed into the chamber.

“Clem! Will!” it said.

Their father’s voice shattered the boys’ fear-binding spell. They turned and ran as fast as they could—faster than the creature crawled after dropping audibly to the floor. Cold stone scuffed the brothers as they bolted, groping the walls until the scratching of nails close behind was drown in the hushing of the waterfall.

Pa did not hush. “Will! Clem! I swear to God, I’m gonna skin you two like that coon I caught when—”

“Pa! Run!” the brothers yelled at once as they crashed through the Falls and onto the shallow stream. Outside, the moon shone bright, and the brisk air never tasted so sweet to the two heaving boys. So what if they were about to receive a whooping? They escaped, and here came Pa out from under the waterfall, shotgun tucked under his hunting coat, his face looking angry as it did concerned.

“What in Hell are you two do’n runn’n around so far from the cabin! I done told you there’s coyotes and worse things out here.”

“We know! Ain’t you seen it? That injun!” asked Clem.

And just as he’d replied when Willy had told him, Pa rolled his eyes and cried, “Don’t talk like a nigger, now boy! There ain’t no more injuns!”

A week went by after their encounter inside The Cave at Orange Water Falls—what the brothers now call The Injun’s Mound. They didn’t go near it anymore. They wouldn’t even spend an evening in the woods by the creek gibbeting frogs for breakfast. They didn’t want to end up the injun’s Thanksgiving supper instead. But despite their precautions, they started to fear they would anyway.

Because Pa got sick soon after that. His hair started shedding worse than a hound’s. He suffered inexplicable bouts of dizziness anytime his feet touched the ground. His eyes became jaundiced, and his skin thin and pale till, at night, it almost seemed to glow but for the mud he covered it with—he said it helped keep his fever down. He didn’t have an explanation for his finger and toenails. He just let them grow and grow until they curled round and round and turned dying-grass green and filled the cabin with their clattering.

“Clem?” started Willy the day he and his brother left off along the creek the opposite way of The Injun’s Mound. “You know, you was right, Clem.”

The older brother stopped and regarded the younger. His boots sunk to the heel in soft, red clay, like somebody had just added an extra weight on top of the ruck sack slug from his shoulders. He gulped. “Right about what, Will?”

Willy took a deep breath and showed his brother a clump of hair fallen from Clem’s scalp. “Them things ain’t no injuns.”