Black Mountain

by Laird Barron

  Bucks forever!—the boys lost last season in the championship on a field goal missed wide right. The kicker and his family wisely fled town. A cashier at the gas station informed me of this, as did a waitress at the diner, and the clerk at the motel when he handed me a key to room 16.

  In the span of an hour and a half, I could already detect the will to live siphoning from my veins, replaced by an icy desire to sleep forever and ever. Entropy is a hell of a drug.

  I would’ve liked to interview Morris Oestryke’s family, but none were local; nor were his teachers, except for a lady who’d slipped into dementia and now resided at the Deering Golden Era Rest Home. I settled for the scattering of grade school and high school classmates who remained in the area. Deering would be a tough place to escape. Small, eternally moribund towns possess outsized gravity wells.

  People talked willingly; regular folks usually do. A three-piece suit and granite scowl sets a certain expectation that I undermine with courtesy and a touch of humor. I call it my See, that wasn’t so bad technique. It’s the opening salvo in every Coleridge charm offensive. Oh, I thought you were going to kick my ass. You want my help with a matter of life and death? Let a homemaker or a construction laborer believe he or she might hold the key to solving a mystery and after a minute or two you can’t get them to shut up.

  There are exceptions to every rule.

  A retiree slammed the door in my face with ire generally reserved for Jehovah’s Witnesses and traveling salesmen. The proprietor of a tire shop stared wordlessly over his newspaper until I conceded defeat and exited his establishment. An aged fellow who wrangled concessions at the movie theater pretended to be deaf. Nope . . . What? . . . Nope, nope, is all I gleaned from our brief encounter.

  In a moment of weakness, I yearned for the days of kneecapping people and dangling them from windows. Somebody’s face offends you? Rearrange it. Some dope giving you the runaround? Bounce his head off a countertop.

  Nostalgia overwhelmed me.

  Other folks were eager to help, albeit useless. Morris Oestryke? My parents say he was a nice boy. Nice, real nice kid. Great kid—the best! Football star. Or baseball. I was a baby. You should talk to his old teachers, if any are still aboveground—hehe.

  A scaly-eyed duffer sorting shoes at the bowling alley bucked the trend. Yep, yep, he’d gone to school a couple of grades behind Morris Oestryke. Dare he hope I was an attorney sent to deliver a surprise inheritance windfall? No? Another day at the alley, then.

  The Big O had proved a fair-to-middling back on the football team and a decent fellow, not swellheaded, or anything, the way jocks can be in a community where they were demigods. A decent, hardworking kid who cared for his sickly mother; after school and football, he mowed yards and took shifts at Valero Technologies. He ran off to volunteer for ’Nam like a damned fool and nobody saw hide nor hair of him after that.

  I asked for directions to Valero and what, exactly, it created.

  The duffer spat tobacco into a beer can. The laboratory had been the subsidiary of a defense contractor based in California, don’t ask which one. Armed guards patrolled the grounds. Employees wore plastic picture ID cards, color-coded according to multiple levels of clearance. They signed nondisclosure contracts. Most of them were out-of-state drones. The company had hired a few locals for janitorial and labor services. Valero shut its doors in 1981. It lived again as a furniture warehouse store, northeast of town a stone’s throw from Slocum Field. The end.

  Shortly, I parked in an empty lot next to the aforementioned furniture store. Finger-width cracks split the asphalt. Opposite where the highway cut through fields of dead grass, a storm fence girded the far perimeter of the property from a marsh and copses of mossy-gray trees. Shadows of birds rose and floated and fell against the pale sky. Here lay purgatory.

  The store was a tall, shit-colored metal block; rooted in the earth, invasive as a tumor. I estimated a thousand of those wizened trees were plowed under to make room for the lot and its altar to American commerce. A Day-Glo banner strung along dirty-glass frontage proclaimed FURNITURE! Inside lay a soaring vault, wherein the atmosphere was stale and hushed as a mausoleum. Unsmiling, stooped attendants shuffled to and fro across the tacky showroom floor and between racks of off-brand furniture. Fluorescent lights twitched and spilled their ghastly bluish-greenish glow.

  I counted three clerks under thirty and a manager in her forties. Their ages and expressions of chronic disaffection advised me to save my breath. The likelihood of any of these folks being willing or able to answer questions regarding a company dead these past thirty-plus years was nonexistent. Nobody made eye contact. I ambled past the EMPLOYEES ONLY warning and into the bowels of the warehouse.

  Architecture in this section harkened to an older period and hadn’t benefited from much renovation during its existence. Here, the ceiling drastically lowered, and a series of intermittently lighted bulbs did little to dispel the gloom along a network of corridors. More concrete flooring, except with painted alternating bands of black, then crimson, and worn to a slight concavity. Doorplates designated bathrooms, offices, and storage. Muzak droning in the showroom did not persist here in the warren.

  Meandering through the store was probably a futile exercise. As I’ve stated, in the absence of solid evidence, I’ll settle for indulging my instincts. My personal theory of osmosis and the subconscious mind prodded me to sniff around, to breathe it in, if for no other purpose than to have broken the rules of a corporate slave pit. I expected to be challenged and sent away with an admonishment. Frankly, I half hoped such a confrontation would occur. The place disturbed me for reasons that defied explanation. Its claustrophobic murk and the subterranean monotony of the passages were repellant.

  Hush prevailed as I moved inward and reached a set of doors marked RECEIVING. Old, old metal doors with metal handles. The left door was painted crimson, the right black, and, to either side, brick walls pallid as a dirty eggshell. The doors had been frequently repainted; a detail that inexplicably heightened my disquiet. Whatever had transpired in this area in the ’60s and ’70s lingered as a dim, psychic taint. I tamped down the urge to growl. When a wild animal encounters something outside its natural routine, primordial instincts surface.

  Chipped almost beyond recognition, a logo emblazoned the wall to the left of the doors. Possibly a black crescent moon, its horns angled toward the bend sinister as aficionados of heraldry would describe its orientation. I snapped several cell phone pics for future reference.

  Gazing upon this faded symbol reinforced my rising unease.

  My heart rate accelerated as I seized the handles and pushed into a large area cluttered with crates and loose furniture. A hard-hat-wearing driver on a forklift and his clipboard-toting supervisor stared at me diffidently. Nothing to see, I waved to them and nonchalantly fled the scene.

  I slumped in the car and took several deep breaths while my nerves settled. You wouldn’t believe I was a big, scary dude who’d seen twenty men’s share of trouble. Adrenaline squirted through my veins as if I’d escaped certain death in a house of blood while a horror movie score swelled at my back. Gene called the effect genius loci. It’s the genesis for the mythology of haunted locales—houses, swamps, caves, bodies of water, and so on. Some places don’t react well to the presence of humans.

  Defeated, I resumed knocking on doors in town. The list wasn’t long; nonetheless, chasing false leads, cornering people, and the interminable junctures in waiting rooms, lobbies, and on doorsteps, eats daylight fast. Two nights in a row, I returned to my dingy room, crashed on the hard-as-marble single, and fell asleep to black-and-white cinema mayhem. Some guys binge porn on the road. Me, it’s cartoons, westerns, and samurai epics.

  Pounding the pavement and bashing my head against doors instigated migraines. I nabbed a bottle of aspirin at the drugstore and popped them regularly. This eased the thudding headaches, but did nothing to al
leviate my nightmares.

  On the second evening, I forestalled sleep to phone Meg while Kurosawa played. She asked me what was happening in my motel room. I explained that a matter of grave personal honor was being resolved by thousands of men stabbing one another with swords.

  Matters of grave personal honor can be resolved no other way, she said, and then she said good night.

  True love? I had a hunch it might be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Denis Swenson played varsity fullback on the Deering Bucks football team, ’67 through ’69. He’d blocked for Morris Oestryke, the first-string running back, and missed the fun in Vietnam thanks to a college deferment and bum knees. Got early retirement from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 600—and whatever—after a cherry picker malfunctioned and dumped him three stories onto asphalt. The accident shattered his spine. He now divided his golden years between his home and the Antler Taproom.

  Swenson’s name resided near the bottom of my list. The signs weren’t promising. Bald and thick. His heavy-lidded eyes narrowed in suspicion; his mouth curled in a habitual sneer. A beer-swilling troglodyte parked in a cheap folding wheelchair with a U.S. flag on an antenna. He’d doubtless resembled a moldy carving of a potbellied Scandinavian troll since junior high. Not a chance this sourpuss would give me the time of day, much less discuss a comrade from an era when golden rays of prosperity irradiated the town.

  I bought him a round, regardless, and made my pitch.

  Two p.m. and three barflies squabbled as they nursed cans of Pabst. The soundless TV monitor flickered unintelligibly. The customers paid it not a lick of heed.

  “Dick is dick, but pussy absorbs DNA,” Drunk A said to Drunks B and C. The trio wore coveralls issued by different, inevitably defunct, companies. “You fuck some sleazy broad, you fucked every dipstick she ever had in her honeytrap.”

  “Where you hear that?”

  “Good Morning America. Science segment.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It ain’t bullshit. Why you say that?”

  “It’s Good Morning America, is why. You ain’t rollin’ outta bed to watch the science segment on a morning show.”

  “Well, it’s what I heard, is all I’m sayin’.”

  Swenson hefted his drink. His eyes were pink as flayed meat.

  “A shame the fucknuts in the Capitol banned cigs. Man hangs around the bar in daylight for one reason. He wants to die. They banned cigs, they removed one of the best methods of suicide. Anymore, the whole shitaree takes twice, three times as long. Except, you gotta factor in respiratory infections on account these knob jobs go outside, rain or shine, to smoke. It’s Deering, so more rain than shine. Ain’t Miller Time, it’s Pneumonia Time.” His was a smoker’s rasp. “I suppose shitheads croaking due to pneumonia evens the score.”

  “That’s a unique perspective,” I said. “Are you committing slow suicide? Moving to a warmer clime might be a less permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I am. Beer does half, gravity handles the rest . . . You a cop? I get a feeling you’re something along those lines.”

  I explained I wasn’t a cop or a Fed, but basically a ronin on the make.

  He cracked a smile. His diminished complement of teeth was a jumble.

  “The Feds locked my pop away on a bullshit charge. Total shitshow. Won’t talk to a Fed. Might stab him in the throat. Won’t talk with him.”

  “What did your dad do?”

  “Kidnapped some asshole swindler, drove him into Wisconsin and nailed him to a sheet of plywood and left him there.”

  “Sounds as if it might’ve been a raw deal.” I didn’t specify for whom.

  “Dad kicked in Ionia, doin’ twenty-five-to-forever. Yeah, I guess you could say it was a raw deal. You don’t hold yourself the way a cop does. I like it. You’re a mean sonofabitch. Not cop mean, the real deal. Rabid-dog-tearing-into-the-balls mean.”

  “Denny, you okay over there? That asshole botherin’ you?” The pencil-neck behind the counter must’ve packed a scattergun to speak with such boldness.

  “Fuck off,” Swenson said. And to me, “The hicks have worn tinfoil bandannas since 9/11. If you ain’t lily-white, you might be an Arab.” His attention drifted to the snowy TV. The image crystallized to reveal a famous actor in uniform giving a perp the third degree. “Cop shows are such a load of garbage. Yellin’ threats and slappin’ suspects around.”

  I managed not to roll my eyes.

  “They aren’t called dramas for nothing.”

  “Investigators tend to be polite,” he said. “Especially the Feds, and especially when interviewing a subject who without a doubt executed a fellow human. There’s no percentage in playin’ rough until the hard-nosed approach is necessary. Have a smoke, have a Coke. Relax, we’re all friends here, we’re just guys shootin’ the breeze. You can tell us whatever’s on your mind. We’re here to listen. We don’t judge. We’re here for you, man. Personally, I dig why you did what you did. More of us had the balls, we’d do the same. Et cetera, like that.”

  “They ran that game on your old man?” I said.

  “Hell yeah, they did. I knew what was what when the Feds came down here four years ago, curious to learn all they could about my friend Morris Oestryke. Tried to be cagey; it became obvious they wanted Morris for something real serious. I spit in their faces and they went away mad.”

  “I’m not cagey, but I could use some help.”

  “Give me a lift home? Sidewalk doesn’t make it to my house.”

  I slapped two twenties on the table and dangled my keys.

  “Ready to ride.”

  “Okay, my new best friend.” He polished off his brew. Then he unlocked his wheels and headed toward the exit.

  “Whoa! Where you takin’ our buddy?” said Pencil-neck.

  “Where you goin’ with this guy?” Drunk A said to Swenson, Drunk A’s cronies grumbled their support.

  “Piss up a rope, boys,” Swenson said. “See ya tomorrow.”

  “Not if we see you first!” The barflies cried in unison.

  * * *

  —

  I HELPED HIM INTO THE CAR, folded his chair, and put it in the trunk. Five minutes later, in front of a seedy split-level house in an equally neglected neighborhood, we reversed the procedure. This time, I let the chair slide backward as he shifted his weight. Easy as pie; he’d begun to trust me. He toppled forward and landed on his face.

  “Fuck,” he said when he rolled over and blinked dazedly at the sky. A muzzy sunbeam through clouds caused his bloody mouth and nose to glisten. “You’re a sonofabitch, aren’t you?”

  “A clumsy sonofabitch,” I said.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  I didn’t know. Sometimes I make snap judgments about people. Sorting the marks from the hard cases is a talent.

  “Sorry, pal.”

  “Oh yeah? I’m thinking this was a mistake.” He pawed at his lips.

  “No take-backsies.” I squeezed the meat of his bicep to give him the idea he should go along to get along. There’d be a bruise in the morning. To reinforce the threat, I lifted him bodily at arm’s length into his wheelchair. My ribs had finally knitted together over the past week; lingering aches had subsided to twinges. I was, as the televangelists proclaim, healed. “Shall we?”

  I wheeled him up a makeshift ramp into the house.

  It’s against my nature to beat an animal without cause, but it’s also a morbid fact that certain creatures respond solely to force. An unsettling number of humans share this brand of masochism. He adored me now.

  “Meet my wife, Norma. Norma, this son of a b is Coleridge. He’s a detective.” He introduced a heavyset matron in a bathrobe and a bright green shower cap who’d appeared from the back of the house.

  Norma eyed us dourly. />
  “A detective. Yeah. Mister, wanna Faygo? Glass of water?” She touched her husband’s swollen, streaming nose and clucked wearily. Some variation of this scene had played out a hundred times before. I declined and she nodded and left us alone.

  Swenson’s house featured wood paneling, shag rugs, and linoleum floors. I whiffed dead flowers in the spacious living room. He’d covered the furniture in plastic. The dozen or so prints of famous vamp Anita Ekberg, in various stages of undress, almost distracted me from noticing a bolt-action hunting rifle leaned against the wall near a sliding glass door that let onto the balcony.

  “You’re preoccupied with pinups.”

  “Only have eyes for Anita.”

  “Cute rifle.” I inspected the rifle, detached the magazine, and tossed it into a newspaper basket.

  “A man is sensible to keep a longarm in easy reach. We’re in the wild. Got to take special care.” He rolled into the kitchen and returned with a towel pressed to his face.

  I carefully set the rifle down.

  He watched me with a soft light in his eyes. One predator ceding right-of-way to a larger, more dangerous animal. Anger and pride pale beside self-preservation.

  “The suburban lights aren’t foolin’ anybody who’s lived here a week, forget about their entire life. A pack of coyotes stalked me right here in town. I was twelve, so that made it autumn of 1963. My family lived on Redburn and Darkman’s. Mile, mile and a half east a here. Wild and woolly, lemme tell you. The burbs had a black problem—no offense—and not enough cops then. Real rough in our neighborhood; you wanted to be in by dark, because that’s when the gangs would come outta the woodwork. Folks used to joke that Charles Bronson should drop by our town and clean up the trash. It was only a joke. You got strapped in Deering. For all the good it’s done.