Woody pushed a chunk of biscuit around his plate with the end of his fork, sopping up as much gravy as possible.
The waitress came by with a fresh plate for him.
"What's this make you?" I said. "Your third?"
"Fourth."
"Have you no respect for your arteries?"
"None." To Pete, Woody said, "Has Isaac been getting threats?"
"He never said anything to me if he was."
"What about people calling you guys out, saying things?" I said.
"What kind of things?"
I blew out a huge sigh. "Must we go there?"
"Yes, we must."
I leaned in across the table and dropped my voice. "Anything homophobic," I said. "Anything derogatory."
Pete sipped his coffee. "Are you asking if someone called him or me a queer, a faggot, a fairy, an ass bandit, cock knockers, shit stabbers, rump rangers, ass munchers, pillow biters, cock gobblers, fudge packers, size queens, a rear admiral—" He took a breath. "I can keep this up all day."
“Please don’t. It makes me despair for the species too much.”
"People put forth a lot of work to be hateful," Woody said.
"People find what they're good at and work towards a goal," Pete said. "And no one's said anything to Isaac or I that either one don't already hear. It's the same shit any two men would get anywhere, especially in West Virginia, but we let things slide and focus on what's important."
"Why weren't you going to tell me the truth to start off?" I said.
"Because back when you were on patrol, you said a lot of the same garbage others guys said, calling people 'fags,' making jokes and acting like it wasn't nothing. You said shit to guys in uniform I knew were so far back in the closet they could see Narnia."
"Like who?"
"Frank Waters. Younger than me," Pete said. "Gray hair, mustache. Detective."
An image of Frank's face hit me. "He was gay?"
"Been partnered with the same guy 22 years. I went to their anniversary party last month."
"I used to play basketball with him. We were on an intramural league." A beat. "We used to shower together after games."
"That sounds way more intimate than I expected," Woody said
"Yeah," Pete said. "He said good things about you."
"Was he checking out my dick?"
"No, you homophobic asshole, he wasn't. He said you had a strong outside shot. But do you see how you responded? Reactions like yours are why telling the truth is difficult." He looked at Woody. "I need help from someone who isn’t an idiot. What do we do now?"
Woody finished the last bite of biscuit and gravy and waved toward the waitress. She brought him another full plate. He considered it for a moment, took a bite.
"We go to the McCoy family and meet with the paterfamilias."
12
Maggie called as we walked out of Tudor's. I told Pete and Woody I'd catch up, and I waited until I had some distance between us before I answered.
I’d been dodging her. Not fair, or mature, but I'd never been accused of being either, least of all by her.
I sucked in some air and said, "Hey."
"You should try answering phone calls sometime," she said. "I left voice mails. You never call me back."
"I've been getting people trying to sell me aluminum siding. You're not going to try to sell me siding, are you?"
"No, Henry." Her tone was as flat as 50 miles of Kansas highway.
There was a cacophony of voices in the background, blurring and blending together with keyboard clattering. Someone yelled about finishing a rewrite. Someone else said the city planner was on line four.
I'd struggled to not take Maggie's move to Philadelphia as a personal affront, placing even more miles between us. I suppose the metaphorical emotional distance between us was the larger of those gaps. That said, I wasn't one big on metaphor. None of that made this hurt any less.
"You're at work," I said.
"Ever the observant soul. I'm waiting on the governor's office to call."
"I'm glad you could find time to squeeze me in."
"I call you when it's convenient for me, not the other way around. If you want to talk, try calling me when it's good for you, instead of me calling when I'm neck deep on deadline."
"It's a new world, Mags; don't you operate on a 24-hour news cycle now?"
"I do, but I'm out of town for a few days. I won't be able to talk until I'm back."
"Where you headed?"
"Somewhere."
"Somewhere's nice this time of year. The skiing is good. Are you going Somewhere with anyone in particular?"
"Yes."
That one word, it carried the weight of a trainload of elephants.
I wanted to ask. I knew the answer already—not a name, only that he wasn't me—but I wanted her to say it. But I didn't, either, because there was no going back from there.
"Henry," she said.
Even over the din of noise swirling around her, I heard my breathing, the sound of air cycling through the phone's microphone and back into my ear. The sound was strained and harsh. I couldn't even register the sound emanated from me. It was just another noise, another distraction.
"Henry," she said again.
I swallowed hard. "I'm here."
"I need you to sign the papers, honey." The even, emotionless tone was gone. Her voice was soft, the way she would sound when we would wake up, sometimes hung over, sometimes not, and she'd roll over and look at me with a smile framed by masses of dark hair thrown around her face. Her voice was smooth and gentle those mornings, and she would reach over and place her hands across my face, the brush of her soft skin against my stubbled cheeks, and her smile would grow even brighter, her blue eyes shining in the morning light and the scent of her lotion lingering on her hands.
It all hit me, in a second, in a word.
Honey.
"I know," I said.
"Is there a reason you're not signing them?"
"I think Izzy ate them."
"Izzy is the dog, right?"
Maggie had never met Izzy. Had never seen the trailer where I lived now. Had seen nothing of whatever kind of life I was making for myself. It was just as well. I wouldn't want her to be envious of my rock star existence.
"Should the lawyer send new copies?" she said.
"Yeah. Have him do that," I said.
"I will. First thing tomorrow. Certified mail."
"I'll be waiting with bated breath."
"Try gum. Or mouth rinse. Gotta go. The governor's office is calling."
I didn't want the conversation to end. Keep talking, Maggie, just a little while longer. I didn't care what she said, as long as her voice stayed on the line. More than the smell of her perfume, almost more the feel of her body or the touch of her hair, I missed her voice. There was comfort and promise and hope in her voice, and I needed to hold on to the sound, the possibility of her, a while longer.
"Have a good rest of the day," I said.
"You too," she said, as the line went dead.
I shoved the phone in my back pocket and headed toward Woody's truck. He leaned against the driver's side door, smoking.
"You've looked happier," he said.
"Where's Pete?"
"Ran back inside to the little boys' room, to drain the main vein. Was that Maggie?"
Before I could answer, Pete came through Tudor's exit about the same moment, wiping his hands on his pants.
"Too much goddamn coffee," he said, laughing. "Whew."
Woody took a drag of his cigarette. "You need a minute?"
I shook my head. "I'm solid.."
Woody put out his cigarette. "Then let's rock 'n' roll, rock 'n' rollers."
13
I'd gone out west with Maggie years prior, to Oregon to visit her family, and I remembered staring at those mountains—real mountains that stretched until they threatened to pierce the blue of the sky. We climbed Mount Hood while we visited, brought a sleeping bag with us, made
love amid the wildness, and she told me how Mount Hood was an active volcano, though unlikely to erupt. No matter; you still had a city of more than a half-million living in the shadow of a volcano.
"It's something to keep your karma level," she said, snuggling closer.
West Virginia mountains are less than that, yet somehow more. They're tree-encrusted nubs of rock rolling throughout the state, screwing up the topography in every direction. There's so little flat land in West Virginia, you ponder if it was perseverance, stupidity, or both that led people to stay here. But we cling with pride to those mountains. We call ourselves Mountaineers, and we say so in the state motto, how Mountaineers are always free.
A few years ago, the boss of an out-of-state coal company that's one of the state's de facto absentee landlords, he said if we let him do mountaintop removal for his mining operations, he'd give West Virginia all the flat land we could ever want. That had cracked up the audience, a bunch of expensive suits and politicians who may as well as had their hats in hand, asking for spare change. It was where I felt Mountaineers maybe weren’t so much free as just open to the best offer.
Woody drove his cherry red 1965 Ford pickup up the winding lane-and-a-half of rutted blacktop that made up Muddy Creek Road. On the left, a narrow stream the color of coffee with cream gushed by us. Kids playing in the water, splashing, pulling up rocks and examining underneath them with fierce interest, as if they would discover the secrets to the universe.
This was the classic definition of a "holler," which should never be confused with a "hollow'; that sounds too proper and possibly New England-ish, and is therefore surely gay. No, a holler is some sliver of space between two mountains with just enough open air to let someone convince themselves that slapping down a road and building homes here is a good idea.
A holler is where the cycle spins endlessly. Families are born and raised and start afresh each generation, never leaving one another's watchful eyes. Instead, you find someone to breed that next generation with, buy yourself a doublewide within spitting distance of the people who share your last name, and rest secure in the knowledge that whatever was good enough for them is still good enough for you.
We kept driving, and the road thinned until the edges of the truck tires almost hung over the sides, and trailers grew more raggedy, sadder and sparer, older and more weathered, until they seemed unfit for human use. Children rode bicycles in circles around front yards that were nothing but weeds and patches of dirt. A roar came from the hillsides, the sounds of four-wheelers whipping through the terrain. We passed a trailer with an old-school satellite dish on the hillside behind it, a monstrosity fit for monitoring for alien communication.
We drove in silence. Pete sat on the passenger side, his arm half-hanging out of the window. I was squeezed between them, my knees straddling the gear shift. Woody kept the truck in second, the transmission whining like a whipped puppy. We made new turns, and the blacktop ended, and we cranked up a gravel road to McCoy Holler. We knocked around inside the truck cab like marbles in a 55-gallon drum for a half-mile before we approached a metal gate blocking the road. The gate was chained and locked, and on either side, barbed wire fencing ran out into the distance.
Woody braked the truck to a stop and shut the engine off. "This is where we walk," he said.
Pete looked at him like he was crazy. I recognized the face because I gave Woody the same expression more often than there are sunsets. "Are you kidding me?" he said.
“I am not,” Woody said.
Pete climbed out of the truck cab. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand, surveying the dirt road. "What the fuck am I getting into?"
Woody got out on the driver's side. "There's the same question we should all ask when we fall in love."
We climbed underneath the gate and started walking. Woody packed a nine millimeter, and Pete and I both had forty-fives. We kept them shoved in the back of our jeans and our shirt tails pulled out over top. It wasn't like we could hide them, and anyone with a brain would notice if they looked, but we had decided going out to see the McCoys unarmed was an invitation to a shallow grave.
We walked for what seemed forever. To someone without an artificial knee, it may have been so bad, but for me, on uneven road, with the sun beating down on me, the whole thing felt like a death march. A murder of crows circled overhead, dancing through the air. I wondered what possessed the person who determined how things got named to make "murder" the collective noun for crows. Did that say something about the person who made those kinds of decisions, or something about crows themselves?
I bet you've thought weird shit, too, when you were walking and bored and hot. Don't judge me.
The only sound was our footsteps crunching against gravel as the road curved and flattened out, and a small house appeared in the opening expanse about a quarter-mile ahead, and further in the distance rested a large weathered barn.
My knee ached, the throbbing coursing through my thigh and stretching into my hips. I wiped sweat off my brow and heaved a breath that doubled as a sigh of relief. I wasn't happy to arrive to the McCoys' property as much as I didn't want to walk anymore.
"How long do you think it'll be before they notice us coming?" I said.
A rifle shot rang out. Dust spat up from the road three feet in front of us.
"I'd say about now," Woody said.
Pete reached back for his gun.
"Don't," Woody said. "If they'd wanted to hit us, we'd be sucking air through holes in our necks. That was a warning shot, to let us know they know we're here."
"I'd call it effective," I said.
"No one's accusing them of subtlety."
A four-wheeler growled to life and sped out toward us. The driver was youngish, teens, no helmet, ruddy faced with scraggly patches of hair growing without caution or planning across his face. A gimme John Deere cap was shoved backwards on his head. He was wiry, wearing a filthy T-shirt and camo cargo pants and work boots.
The kid hit the brakes on the four-wheeler hard and hit a fancy little spin that threw dirt and rocks on us. Dust gathered in my mouth, and I shut my eyes as gravel bounced off me. Once I figured the air was clear, I opened my eyes and saw the little prick staring at us with a shit-eating grin full of satisfaction. He had a pistol in a holster, and a .30-06 strapped across his back. He shifted his expression to disdain, like we were coming to fornicate with the livestock, and he'd had to look up what "fornicate" meant. He spit on the ground.
"The fuck you want?" he said.
I raised my hands into clear view and took a small step forward. He shifted a hand from the handlebars to the .45.
"We're trying to find Isaac McCoy," I said.
The kid's eyes moved from one side to the other.
"You cocksuckers cops?"
"We are not," I said. "But Isaac's missing, and we hoped he's spoken to his family."
The kid pulled his hat off and a bushel of wiry brown hair sprang to life. He scratched at his scalp and pushed the mop of hair back underneath the cap and reached into a cargo pants pocket for a walkie-talkie.
"Hey, Greg," he said into the device.
The walkie-talkie crackled, and a voice said, "Yeah, Jed."
"Those fuck-nuggets you popped a shot at? They're looking for Isaac."
"Do tell." Laughter erupted from the device. "They faggots too?"
The kid snorted a laugh. "They look like it. Let Grandpa know."
More laughter from the walkie-talkie. "Hold up." The walkie-talkie went dead. The kid set the device down on the four-wheeler's gas tank and put his hand back on the pistol in the holster. He slit his eyes narrow and said, "You suck dick like Isaac?"
"Only your mother's," I said.
The kid didn't smile. Behind me, Woody groaned.
The voice came from the walkie-talkie again. "Grandpa said to bring 'em on up to the house."
"Can do," the kid. To us, he said, "You sack-suckers think you can make the walk to the house without stopping to ass-
fuck each other?"
"You think your parents ever have days where they’d wished your mother had just wiped you off her chin instead?" I said.
He cranked up the four-wheeler and spun it again, covering us in another layer of dirt and rocks before he yelled, "Follow me!" and hauled ass back up the road.
I turned to Woody. "I bet they don't offer us lunch."
14
"Pissing them off won't help this situation," Woody said as we got closer to the house.
"Are you saying my approach lacks tact?" I said.
"I'm saying you've got the dial cranked up well past the 'asshole'' setting you operate at on a good day."
The main McCoy property was a small farmhouse that looked like dried dogshit. Rust encrusted the tin roof, the paint peeled off in strips, and the lawn was deader than a trust in politics. A Dagwood sandwich mutt laid in a wide dusty spot, its white face flat against the ground. An eye flickered open, and he evaluated us as a threat or not, decided we weren't, and went back to dreaming the dreams of old dogs.
A screen door banged open and a man somewhere in his 70s stepped out. He was as small and compact as a dwarf star. He had probably been in decent shape 10 or 12 presidential administrations ago, constructed like a welterweight, but time took care of that, turning muscle slack and leaving skin to hang without care from his body. He wore a white tank top, Wranglers cinched by a belt with a buckle large enough to be a hubcap, silver-tipped cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat with a raven feather sticking out from the band, glistening in the sun. He had on mirrored sunglasses and rings on each finger.
The kid who'd been on the four-wheeler came out of the house behind the old man. Now he had the shotgun in his hands, and an angry expression that said we were indeed not going to be invited to lunch. He kept two respectful steps behind.
The old man said, "Which one of you is Pete?"
Pete nodded. "That'd be me."
The old man stepped over to Pete and extended his hand. "My son, he talks real highly of you."
Pete folded his own hand into the old man's. A smile broke out on the old man's face. It activated every wrinkle, crinkle and age line he had, and years piled on him like they had been poured from a cement mixer.
Complicated Shadows Page 5