El Diablo's Blues

Jeff Knight

1.
The Hendrix River has some iron in its stride now, cocksure. Time was it shuffled unsteady as an old saint in his cups, or a toddler in footed pajamas. Step back thirty-some generations and it's just a big creek, nearly dry some years by late summer. Then it rains, more each year, and in the blink of a century's eye it's worth throwing some settlements around. The fishing is good. The current will haul some freight. Things grow. The water knows where it wants to go, and I envy it that. My great-great-grandfather spent decades digging and damming and diverting a wide stretch of feeder stream-you know it as Hobgood Creek now-to make an OK-sized pond on our land. His last wife watched stars shine back from the surface, and gave the modest pond a grand and celestial name. I sit here at dawn sometimes and watch the big dark blob of night give way to the particularity of squirrels and cypress stumps, jays and mist and pine trees, and my brown dog Edgar Allan snuffling and roaming the edge of the treeline. It was damn decent of that man to work his whole life so I would have a cool place to smoke cigarettes and think. And, of course, right over there is where my uncle shot El Diablo all those years ago, on Laurice's prom night. Laurice told me years later that the incident had kept her virginity intact for about a week and a half longer than she had deemed necessary, which, at the time, had seemed like a big deal to her and her boyfriend both. Time's funny that way.
Kelly could see bright speckles at the surface as she looked up, trapped. It was dawning on her that this was really bad.
2.
Kelly could see bright speckles at the surface as she looked up, trapped. It was dawning on her that this was really bad. Just a moment ago she had been gliding along the soft bottom of Orion Pond, and the smart money would have had her unlikely to die this afternoon. Suddenly, wretchedly, those things had changed. Pushing off from the silt, her foot had been snared between some kind of buried stones, maybe, or very solid, thick roots. She was getting hungrier and hungrier for oxygen. Kelly was an unusually level- headed ten-year-old, though, and she didn't thrash. She fought the panic. She felt invincible, as a matter of fact (though a breath would be nice). She felt cool. She felt like Tank Girl. She was in a bad jam, but she was up to it. It was too dark, and the roots or whatever were too buried to see what had caught her, but she could feel along the crevice which had encased her foot. It was fairly slick. She took handfuls of mud-- her chest ached-- and smeared them around her ankle, tugging, twisting. Nothing. Her pulse was starting to race. She willed herself not to stare at the surface, to keep concentrating on the part of the problem she could reach. Determined. Tank Girl. She'd been down a long time. David might come looking pretty soon. He'd have seen where she dove down, and the pond wasn't all that big. He was fourteen, and really strong. The ache in her chest was sharpening. Her cheeks were puffed, were becoming sore with strain. Her lips felt stretched thin. She let out some air. Let him see some bubbles. Smear. Twist. Tug. Oh, no. She could feel pressure in her ears, and it was starting to seem real to her that maybe she was going to be dead pretty soon, and what she wanted was to see her mother. She crouched tight against the bottom and pushed off again, and then again, with all her strength, and then she heard a small crack (!) and felt a searing pain flare up her leg all the way to the hip and she was free and struggling to the surface--oh, her chest was going to explode--and she broke into the air, gasping, and sobbing, and screaming for help, and then her brother had her and they were on the little pier, and she swore an internal vow that she would never again fail to appreciate the wonderment of air.

Her struggle had actually fractured her ankle, it turned out later. Small price to pay. She was fine. The next day David and his stupid friend Gartrell had swum along the bottom of the pond, feeling and digging in the mud all morning before they came across it, and could figure just what had happened. Kelly had gotten her foot caught between the ribs of an alligator skeleton, the remnants of a notorious killer, a local legend, in fact. What a find! Straining and dragging the mossy bones into the light, the boys could not have been happier had they just discovered a treasure chest and left Injun Joe trapped in a cave. They had the 13-foot-long skeleton of El Diablo, twenty-eight years since his murder spree had ended. And El Diablo, it was not lost on Kelly, had nearly claimed one last victim. The rest of that summer had been magic: they wrestled the gator bones; their pictures were in the paper; and people began dusting off their favorite El Diablo stories, recalling a reign of terror that had lasted nearly two years.
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