by Blake Crouch
The late customer made his way in, Jocelyn noticing that he walked like a man who’d crossed a desert on foot, limping toward her, and even though his hat was slanted at an angle to shield his face, she knew right away he was a newcomer.
As he reached the bar, half-tumbling into it, she saw that his face was deeply sunburnt, the tips of his ears and nose blackened with frostbite.
“You could use a cowboy cocktail,” she said.
The man leaned his hammer shotgun against the bar and reached into his frockcoat, pulled out two leather pouches, then another, and another, lining them up along the pine bar.
“One a these has money in it,” he said at barely a whisper, the pretty barkeep already uncorking a whiskey bottle, setting up his first shot.
“The hell happened to you?” she asked.
The man removed his slouch hat and set it on the barstool next to him. He lifted the whiskey, drank, said, “How much for the bottle?”
The barkeep leaned forward, her big black eyes shining in the firelight.
“Yours, free a charge, you tell me what you been through.”
He hesitated, then said, “Rode out from Silverton three weeks ago. Got waylaid by an early snowstorm. I been walkin three days to get here.”
“Was you alone?”
He shook his head, poured another shot of whiskey.
“Where’s the rest a your party? Where’s the men these wallets belong to?”
“They didn’t make it.”
“But you did.”
“Maybe I should just pay you for the bottle, ‘cause this line a questioning is gettin pretty old.”
“You ain’t gotta worry. I’m on the scout myself, and this ain’t the worst town for layin low.”
“That right.”
“For a fact. So, how’d you make it when your friends didn’t.”
“I et ‘em.”
Jocelyn threw back her head and laughed as hard as she could remember since arriving in this dying town, a fugitive in her own right, the man wondering if she was laughing because she thought he’d made a joke, or because she was crazy, and on the fence as to which reason he might prefer.
He drank the whiskey, poured himself another shot, said, “Care to hoist a glass with me?”
Jocelyn set up a tumbler for herself, and they raised their glasses, the man feeling better already. Maybe it was the hunger and the thirst, exhaustion bordering on madness, but he felt a surge of something, and though he couldn’t name it outright, having never known it, he suspected it was peace, the embracing of a thing he’d had his back to going on thirty years.
He said, “To you—what’s your name?”
“Joss.”
“To you, Joss.”
And he made a quiet toast to himself also, to finding his good, red road, to Dan and to Marion, and to Nathan of a now crushed skull, having brained the man in his sleep with a still-warm stone from the fire-ring upon which they’d roasted Marion.
He wondered what Sik’is would’ve thought of this new thoroughfare he’d found for himself, then realized he no longer cared.
As he swallowed his whiskey, the glow spreading through his stomach, to the tips of his filthy fingers, dulling the pain in his shoulder, he was overcome by a joy that sheeted his cloudy irises with tears. He felt thankful for every painful second of those twenty-one days in the wilderness, for the starvation and the thirst. He regretted nothing. If he’d never met Nathan and the boys, he’d have rolled into Abandon right on schedule, that weak, miserable fuck of a man he’d been for thirty long years since he’d watched his brothers die on Malvern Hill.
“You all right?” Jocelyn asked.
Oatha reached for the whiskey bottle.
“Strange to say, but I believe I just woke up.”
An introduction to “Shining Rock”
When I was a boy, I did a lot of backpacking with my parents and younger brother, and one of our favorite places to go was Shining Rock Wilderness in the North Carolina Mountains. One summer evening as we were setting up camp in a remote area of the wilderness called Beech Spring Gap, a gentleman came over to our camp and introduced himself. He was a burly fellow in his fifties wearing blue shorts and a vest brimming with camping accessories and various patches. He also had a machete lashed to his back and mentioned in the course of small-talk that he’d fought in Vietnam. The interaction was unsettling and more than a little awkward. I was twelve at the time but found out years later from my father that he’d been terrified, so much in fact that he and my mom had whispered in their tent late that night, debating leaving because they were afraid this man was going to come back and murder all of us while we slept. Obviously, that didn’t happen. My family struck up a friendship with the man (who turned out to be a gentle soul) and we accompanied him on future backpacking trips. But the strangeness of that initial encounter and the fear my parents must have felt never left me, and the experience inspired a short story called “Shining Rock.”
shining rock
They’d been coming to the southern Appalachians for more than a decade, and always in that first week of August, eager to escape the Midwestern midsummer heat. Last year, it had been the entire family—Roger, Sue, Jennifer, and Michelle—but the twins were sophomores at a college in Iowa now, immersed in boyfriends, the prospect of grad school, summer internships, slowly drifting out of their parents’ gravitational field into orbits of their own making. So for the first time, it was just Roger and Sue and a Range Rover filled with backpacking gear, heading south through Indiana, Kentucky, the northeast wedge of Tennessee, and finally up into the highlands of North Carolina.
They spent the night in Asheville at the Grove Park Inn, had dinner at the hotel’s Sunset Terrace, watching the lights of the downtown fade up through the humid dark.
At first light, they took the Blue Ridge Parkway south into the Pisgah Ranger District, the road winding through primeval forests, green valleys, past rock faces slicked with water that shimmered in early sun. Their ears popped as the road climbed and neither spoke of how empty the car felt.
By late morning, they were pack-laden, sunscreen-slathered, and cursing as they hiked up into Shining Rock Wilderness on a bitch of a path called the Old Butt Trail. Roger let Sue lead, enjoying the view of her muscled thighs and calves already pinked with high-altitude sun, glistening with perspiration. He kept imagining footsteps behind him, glancing back every mile or so, half-expecting to see Jennifer and Michelle bringing up the rear.
They crested Chestnut Ridge in the early afternoon, saw that the sky looked cancerous in the west, a bank of tumor-black clouds rolling toward them, the air reeking of that attic mustiness that heralds the approach of rain. They broke out the raingear. The pack flies. Huddled together in a grove of rhododendron as the storm swept over them, thunder cracking so loud and close that it shook the ground beneath their boots.
They reached Shangri-La a few hours shy of dusk. Sue had named it on their first trip here, thirteen years ago, having taken the wrong trail and accidentally stumbled upon this highland paradise. The maps called it Beech Spring Gap, a stretch of grassy meadows at 5,500 feet, just below the micaceous outcroppings of Shining Rock Mountain. Even the hottest summer afternoons rarely saw temperatures exceed eighty degrees. The nights were always cool and often clear, with the lights of Asheville twinkling forty miles to the north. Best of all, Beech Spring Gap was largely untraveled. They’d spent a week here four years ago and never seen a soul.
By 8:30, they were in their sleeping bags, listening to a gentle rain pattering on the tent.
‘Night girls, Roger thought. It would be easy to fall asleep tonight. Too easy. He used to stay up listening to the twins talking and laughing. Their tent would have been twenty yards away in a glade of its own, and he’d have given anything to hear their voices in the dark.
The next two days transpired like mirrors of each other.
Warm, bright mornings. Storms in the afternoon. Cool, clear evenings.
R
oger and Sue passed the time lying in the grass, reading books, watching clouds, flying a kite off the nearby peak.
The emptiness seemed to abate, and they even laughed some.
Their fourth day in Shining Rock, as the evening cooled and the light began to wane, Roger suggested to his wife that she take a walk through the meadow with a book, find a spot to read for a half hour or so before the light went bad.
“Why do you want me out of camp all the sudden?” she asked. “You up to something?”
When Sue returned forty minutes later, a red-and-white checkered picnic blanket lay spread out in the grass a little ways from their tent. Roger was opening a bottle of wine, and upon two dinner plates rested a bed of steaming pasta. There was a baguette, a block of gruyere, even two of their crystal wineglasses from home and a pair of brass candlesticks, flames motionless in the evening calm.
“You brought all this from home?” she asked. “That’s why your pack was so heavy.”
“I’m just glad the crystal didn’t break when I fell climbing up the Old Butt.”
Roger stood, offered his arm, helped Sue down onto the picnic blanket.
“A little wine?”
“God, yes. Honey, this is amazing.”
He didn’t know if it was the elevation or the novelty of eating food that hadn’t been freeze-dried, but the noodles and tomato sauce and bread and cheese tasted better than anything Roger had eaten in years. It didn’t take long for the wine to set in behind his eyes, and he looked down at the mountains through a haze of intoxication, watching the light sour, bronzing the woods a thousand feet below. First time in a long while that things had felt right, and Sue must have sensed it, because she said, “You look peaceful, Roge.”
It was so quiet he could hear the purr of the river flowing down in the gorge.
Sue set her plate aside and scooted over on the blanket.
“Is it the girls?” she asked. “That what’s been bothering you?”
He reached his arm around her, pulled her in close.
“Let’s just think about right now,” he said. “In this moment, I’m happy and—”
“Evening folks.”
Roger unhanded his wife and rolled over on the picnic blanket to see who was there.
A stocky man with wavy, gray hair and a white-stubbled chin smiled down at them through reflective sunglasses. He wore well-scuffed hiking boots, tight blue shorts, and a frayed gray vest, bulging with an assortment of supplies. His chest hair was white, skin freckled and deeply tanned. Roger estimated him to be ten years their senior.
“Hope I’m not interrupting. I’m camped up in the rhododendron thicket and was just on a stroll through the meadow when I saw your tent. Wow, crystal wineglasses. You guys went all out.”
“We just finished eating,” Sue said, “but there are leftovers if—”
“Oh, I’ve got my dinner simmering back at camp, but maybe you two would be interested in a card game later?”
“Sounds lovely,” Sue said.
“Then I’ll come back in two hours. I’m Donald, by the way.”
“Sue.”
“I’m Roger.”
“Good to meet you both.”
Roger watched Donald march off across the meadow toward the rhododendron thicket at the base of Shining Rock Mountain, didn’t realize he was scowling until his wife said, “Oh come on, Roge, you antisocial party-poop. It’ll be fun.”
No campfires are permitted within the boundary of Shining Rock Wilderness, but the moon would be up soon. Roger and Sue relit the candles for ambience and sat on the picnic blanket, waiting on their guest, watching for the flare of meteors in the southern sky.
Roger never heard his footsteps. Donald was suddenly just standing there at the edge of the red-and-white checkered blanket, grinning.
“Lovely night,” he said.
“We were just sitting here, looking for shooting stars,” Sue said.
“May I?”
“Please.”
Donald set some items in the grass and knelt to unlace his boots, stepping at last in wooly sockfeet onto the blanket, easing down across from Roger and Sue.
“I brought playing cards, an UNO deck, whatever your pleasure, and some not too shabby scotch.”
“Now we’re talking,” Roger said as Donald handed him the bottle. “Ooh…twenty-one year Macallan?”
“Roge and I have become scotch aficionados since a trip to Scotland last year.”
Donald said, “Nothing like a good single malt in the backcountry on a quiet night.”
Roger uncorked the Macallan, offered the bottle to Sue.
“I’ll drink to that.” She brought it to her lips, let a small mouthful slide down her throat. “Oh my God. Tastes more like a fifty-year.”
“Everything tastes better on the mountain,” Donald said.
Sue passed the bottle to her husband. “So how many nights have you been up here?”
“My second.”
“You’ve been here before?”
Roger wiped his mouth. “Goddamn that’s smooth.”
“Actually, this is my first trip to Shining Rock.” Donald took the scotch from Roger and after a long, deliberate swallow, looked at the bottle a moment before passing it back to Sue. “I usually do my camping up in northern Minnesota, but figured these southern highlands would be worth the drive.”
“Where’s home?” Roger asked.
“St. Paul.”
Roger and Sue glanced at each other, smiled.
“What? No, don’t tell me the pair of you are Minnesotans.” He drew out the “o” in stereotypical Midwestern fashion, and they all laughed.
“Eden Prairie as a matter of fact,” Sue said.
“You could make a strong case for us being neighbors,” Donald said and he looked at Roger. “What are the chances?”
Midway through his second hand of UNO, Roger realized he’d gotten himself drunk—not a sick, topsy-turvy binge, but a tired, pleasant glow. He hadn’t meant to, but the scotch was so smooth. Even Sue had let it get away from her. She was laughing louder and with greater frequency, and she kept grabbing his arm and pretending to steal glances at the twenty-plus cards in his hand.
Sue finally threw down her last card and fell over laughing on the blanket.
“Two in a row,” Donald said. “Impressive.”
He pulled out the cork and took a slow pull of scotch, then offered the bottle to Roger.
“Oh Don, I think I’m done for the night.”
“Come on.”
“No, I’m good.”
“One more. Bad luck to skip a nightcap.”
Roger felt the twinge of something in his gut he thought forty-eight-year-old men were impervious to. He took the bottle and drank and passed it back to Donald.
Sue sat up. “Say, I meant to ask why you had a machete lashed to your back?”
Donald smiled. “Sometimes I like to get off-trail, do a little bushwhacking. I did a few tours in Vietnam, and let me tell you, that was the only way to travel upcountry.”
“What branch of the military?” Roger asked.
“Green berets.”
“Wow. Saw some shit, huh?”
“You could definitely say that.”
Donald suddenly tilted to one side and squelched out a noisy fart, then chuckled, “Damn mountain frogs.”
Roger thinking, Well he’s definitely a little drunk.
Donald corked the scotch, said, “You have children?”
“Twin girls,” Sue said.
“No kidding. How old?”
“They’ll turn twenty next month. They’re in college at Iowa. Michelle wants to be a writer. Jennifer, more practical of the two, is pre-law.”
“How nice.”
“Yeah, this trip has been a sea change for Roger and me. Our family’s been coming to Shining Rock, God, forever, but this is the first time it’s just the two of us.”
“Empty nesters.”
“How about you, Don? Any kids?”
Donald bit down softly on his bottom lip and looked away from Roger and Sue at the moon edging up behind the black mass of Cold Mountain.
“I didn’t pick twenty-one-year-old scotch to share with you two on a whim. This whiskey,” he swirled what liquid remained in the bottle, “was put into an oak barrel to begin aging the year my little girl was born.”
He pulled out the cork, tilted up the bottle.
Sue said, “Is she in school somewhere or—”
“No, she’s dead.”
Sue gasped, and through the gale in his head, Roger sensed something attempting to piece itself together.
“I’m so sorry,” Sue said.
“Yeah.” Donald nodding.
“What happened, if it’s not too—”
“She’ll have been gone six years this coming fall.”
“She was sixteen when…”
“Yeah.”
Roger reached for the scotch and Donald let him take it.
The bottom edge of the moon had cleared the summit ridge of Cold Mountain, and somewhere in the meadows of Beech Spring Gap, a bird chirped.
“Was it a car wreck?” Sue asked.
“Tab was a cross-country runner in high school. Captain of her team when she was only a sophomore. Very devoted, disciplined runner. It was just a thing of beauty to watch her run. She made the state championship her freshman year.”
Roger noticed Donald’s hands trembling.
His were, too.
“Morning of October third, I was on my way to work when I came to a roadblock about a mile from our house. There were police cars, a fire truck, ambulances. I’d heard the sirens while I was getting dressed but didn’t think anything of it.
“I was swearing up a storm ‘cause I was late for a meeting and getting ready to do a u-turn, find an alternate route, when one of the EMTs stepped out of the way. Even from fifty yards back, I recognized Tabitha’s blue shorts, orange running shoes, her legs.
“Next thing I remember was throwing up on the side of the road. They say I broke through the barrier, that it took two firemen and four cops to drag me away from her body. I don’t remember seeing her broken skull. Or the blood. Just her legs, orange shoes, and blue running shorts, from fifty yards back in my car.”