Charlie walked tentatively to the outer edge of the maelstrom of men and hounds. He strained for a look at the bear.
He could smell it all the way from where he was standing. Suffocating. The bear’s head lifted, the muzzle bloody, drooling sputum, crawling with insects. Eating carrion, Charlie thought, and wondered briefly whose carrion it might be. A disgusting wall of smell. He’d never encountered anything like it.
Then, amazingly, the bear dropped to the ground, into the center of the maelstrom. The pull dogs screamed and leaped at the standing black form. “Pulling fur,” they called it. But it was something much uglier than that. The dogs wanted to rip this manlike creature’s heart out, render his flesh. Charlie thought, sickened, this bear was just a stand-in for man; it was a man these dogs were ripping apart, avenging themselves for having been chained so long.
The bear charged in jackhammer assaults. Yiiiiiiii as one dog was clipped. A scream as another was held and chewed. Another scream. Then another. Charlie couldn’t believe it. With that many dogs a bear would never focus on one individual’s damage. But this one, doing it again and again—he had to be crazy. Or vengeful. Something wrong here…
The bear turned once, just an instant, and stared Charlie down. Massive, sullen, and for that brief moment Charlie could swear he saw a humanness in the eyes, but the darkness expanded in them, so that the bear was concentrated human and concentrated bear at the same time. Shadow. An idiot, or a monk. A saint or devil. Bear. So much bear that it was, simply, no longer the bear, but bear forever and eternal.
A dark, composite animal was beginning to rear, growing out of the mad dance of men, hounds, and bear: a face of lantern eyes, bloody man-hands, and dark fur. A new creature just given its life. Change into change into change as the mass of forms blurred before Charlie’s tired eyes. Blood leaping from indistinguishable flesh, trying to escape into the night air.
Suddenly Amos was leaping. “Watch his mouth, dammit! His mouth!”
Bear rips Flap ear to tail.
Jake rising, shouldering the gun. Firing once, twice. Pitching over, crying, throwing up over his red-checkered vest.
Amos firing, sobbing over his dog. “Needs to be gutted, soon as he’s shot, boys!” he cries. Leaning over. Amos painting his cheeks, chin, with blood-coated fingers, staggering a dance while the dogs yawp.
Then explosion after explosion. Jake throwing up somewhere, crying.
Reed groaned in his sleep, cried out against the roar filling his head, then leaped up at the rocking train window. Small lights dotted the ridges ahead. The Creeks? He couldn’t be sure. He suddenly wished he hadn’t come. Something was waiting for him up there in the hills, something just now whetting its teeth. Hungry for him.
He thought he saw tiny lights moving near the top of the Big Andy, but suddenly the brooding peak was dark again. He couldn’t be sure.
He closed his eyes, seeking more sleep, but it was the rocking, and the roar, that consumed him.
Charlie thought he’d finally found the campfire. They seemed to have been separated during the fight, and a long time passed. He hadn’t seen the campfire since it happened. But now it was glowing just ahead, between the trees. It seemed as if he had been wandering forever. Everything ached. He could hear some of the dogs off crying in the woods, but he’d stumbled over the carcasses of several. The warm glow was comforting, and maybe one of the others would be there, waiting. They had to get off the Big Andy soon. Things had gone just crazy up here.
He stepped right up to the glow. But something was wrong. It seemed covered…by fog, or…something.
He stepped right up to the glow. Her flaming hair. She floated by him…a beautiful thing. She wanted him to kiss her, to…be a man to her.
But he was afraid. He began to cry.
The dog was still moving. Joe Manors reached over for it, thinking maybe he could carry it back to the campsite, where it just might survive. Where was everybody? He suddenly hated Amos Nickles for bringing the dog up here, making it do all the dirty work for him, suddenly hated himself and Jake and Ben Taylor and Charlie and even that old dog Buck for getting him into this mess.
He touched the heaving sides, crawled over to examine it. Then pulled back. For a second he thought it was the body of a little girl. Her lips blue. Dead.
But just for a second. Just for a second.
Ben would have recognized his brother’s boy anywhere. “Reed?”
The boy kept running. Ben knew he was getting farther and farther away from the others, but he just couldn’t leave the boy out here.
Why was the boy here? How could he be here?
“Reed?”
Ben ran for a long time, but the boy was always way ahead. Sprinting like a young animal.
And the same age as he’d been ten years ago. He hadn’t aged a bit. Ben would have to ask him about that.
“Mr. Nickles, that you? Amos?” Jake rose up on his knees, wiping the puke off his jacket, embarrassed, afraid the others would see him that way.
“Seen it happen to a hunter, hundred damn times,” a voice behind him said. Amos! Jake twisted around.
Hector Pierce stood against the tree, naked as the day he was born. Staring straight ahead, his body rigid, emaciated muscles standing out like an animal’s hackles. It was the tree the bear had climbed. There were hounds lying all around—some of them whimpering and mewling, most of them dead.
And a red hunting jacket. A pale, withered face. Amos Nickles with his steaming gray guts looped over Flap’s flayed torso.
It was starting to rain.
‘’Bloody teeth…” Hector whispered.
Chapter 12
Reed stepped down from the train at nine-thirty in the evening. Shivering, his head cold having spread to numb the rest of his body. His legs and arms moved stiffly. Rain was splashing off the tin roofs of Simpson Creeks in thick, broad strokes. Just as he remembered it, the still picture he’d always carried in his mind of the town: shallow pools and tides of water backed up on the hard clay, deepening in ditch lines and small sink holes. Off in the distance, toward the Nole Company mines, he could make out the gob piles steaming under the hard rain, the giant hills of mine waste bleeding down into the creeks in ribbons of scarlet.
The buildings here appeared all the same color: slab shacks like wet gray limestone with rusted tin chimneys anchored to the cracked rock slab his forebears considered some kind of lifeboat. And behind these, more gray shacks leaned back in rows far up the ridge and around the bend of the tracks—most of them empty, unless the mines were doing better than the last time he had been here. Dark scratches and wet paperboard on the dead wood sides of foreground buildings indicated old signs, but Reed couldn’t read any of them.
The town really hadn’t changed much; fewer trees dotted several more tons of clay.
The station house looked less well used than it had when Reed lived here. At least then there was always some equipment being shipped in for the Nole mine, and there were always a few miners commuting from further down the mountain for the night shift. He doubted there was a night shift anymore; he was the only passenger. And he watched the freight man unload the only freight: some crates for Charlie Simpson’s store.
It really wasn’t so bad. He felt sicker than a dog, but he could see nothing frightening here.
“Charlie should have been here to help me unload,” the potbellied freight man said. “He’s usually real good about that. Can’t figure what must’ve happened to him.”
Most of the windows in the station house were boarded up. When Reed tried the door, he discovered it was locked.
“We don’t use the inside of the Creeks Station no more,” the freight man told him. “No reason to. Just use the loading platform, is all.” Reed opened his umbrella and started to step off the platform. “You live around here, boy?” the freight man drawled.
Reed turned and stared, finally saying, “I do believe I’ve lived here all my life.”
The freight man laug
hed and Reed wondered if he really knew what he was laughing about.
The building across the street from the boarded-up station house had a bare yellow lightbulb over the porch: Charlie Simpson’s General Store. There appeared to be lights on inside, silhouettes. Reed remembered that Charlie had usually kept the store open at nights, selling beer and providing a place for people to gather and talk. He slipped around in the mud in front of the slab, but finally managed to climb up onto the first wide step. He took a few deep, wet breaths. That seemed to bring his energy back with a rush; he suddenly wanted to get things done, get them over with. He gripped the doorknob tightly and pulled.
When he opened the rickety screen door, he was acutely aware that everyone had suddenly stopped talking.
A general store full of old men and younger old men, even at an hour when most country people had gone to bed. They stared, turning slowly at his entrance, not quite simultaneously but close enough that Reed felt suddenly a little wetter in his rain-drenched army surplus jacket.
Their eyes didn’t fit the rest of their faces. Strained and blanked-out, every pair of eyes in the room. Reed could see the bottom halves of the faces talking, making jokes, occasionally suffering a grim smile, but the eyes, and the lines around the eyes, remained frozen. Bleached-white eyeballs, with pupils so pale and small they seemed to have disappeared entirely. White holes in dark faces. Like the faces of soldiers in shock.
Reed was suddenly convinced that there was nothing behind those sockets but the white sky of some hidden countryside. The old surface of the eyeball had been peeled away to let this other landscape shine through. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be looking at one old man’s face, and another set of eyes would suddenly peep out of the sockets to get a better look at him. Reed expected the masks to fall away from the old men’s shoulders at any moment, revealing perhaps a bright landscape of exotic trees and colorful birds tended by a dwarf with a twisted back, or some experimental animal with too much and too little brain, all there in miniature, sitting atop their shoulders where the heads used to be. Like the glass paperweights you used to see with the miniature scenes inside and the snow that would fall when you shook them.
Craziness. The train of thought amused him. What would they think, these people he had grown up with, if they knew what was running through his mind? He shivered as the warmth of the potbellied stove struck him. He could feel damp running out of his skin. Sometimes his imagination took on a life of its own.
Then one of the men stood and staggered in front of him, examining him with a dazed expression. Reed saw the blood on his face and hands, the torn jacket, the dirt and leaves in his greasy black hair. As if the man had been wandering out in the woods a hundred years.
Reed’s fantasy suddenly changed as he looked around the room. He could see, so real it made him shudder, skeletal heads on the shoulders, faces dumb and twisted from a heritage of incest, blackened tongues and mouths twisted with pain.
“Boy!” The man gripped Reed’s arms tightly, his red-veined eyes fixed on Reed’s black hair. The man reached up a trembling hand and pulled at it. “What you been doing!”
Reed tried to struggle out of the wild man’s grip, but he was too strong. “Jake? You’re Jake Parkey, aren’t you? I used to know you!”
Then suddenly Charlie Simpson was there, pulling Jake away. “Leave the boy be, Jake. He wasn’t out there; you’re just all tired and confused right now!” Then Charlie turned back to Reed. Reed was shocked; the storekeeper looked so old. “Reed? That you, son?”
“Yessir, Mr. Simpson. I’ve…I guess I’ve come home.”
“Well…welcome home, son.” He scratched his head and looked around. “I apologize for Jake there. See…we had a hunt tonight; a man was killed. Everybody’s on edge…half-crazy some of them. Here now…come sit down with me and your uncle.”
As Charlie led him unsteadily across the room, Reed glanced down at Jake Parkey bent over a beer. The man stared up at him with sullen suspicion. Reed grew cold, acutely aware of the water running down the back of his neck.
Ben Taylor was on his feet beside the table. “Reed?”
“Yessir…”
The man reached out and pulled his nephew into his arms. “Good to see you, son,” he mumbled into Reed’s jacket. “Wait’ll Martha and the kids see you. Another Taylor back in town.” Ben stepped back and looked at him, then said, “You weren’t out on the mountain, up the top of Big Andy, earlier tonight, were you?”
Reed caught Charlie Simpson giving Ben a worried look.
“No, no, I just got in off the train.”
Ben looked at him with a puzzled expression. But then, too quickly, his uncle grinned broadly. “Course not! You can see how old I’m gettin’, Reed. Imaginin’ all sorts of things lately.”
Reed smiled. “I don’t think my Uncle Ben will ever get old. I remember a time when you helped…helped my dad at harvest time, doing twice the work of any young man there. And still had energy left over to take me on a hike through the woods.”
Ben laughed. “Now those were fine hikes, weren’t they? Think I learned as much about the land around here as you did on our hikes. I miss ‘em, Reed.”
“Then we’ll do them again, Uncle. I’ve several things to do here, so I think there’ll be time.”
Ben and Charlie glanced at each other as they all sat down. Something was up, and it was making Reed very nervous. He’d always thought nothing happened here; nothing changed. But obviously something had these men frightened. Men like these didn’t frighten easily. “You said someone was killed tonight?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so.” Charlie looked at his hands. “You may remember him, Amos Nickles? Owned the lumberyard up near the Nole Mine?”
Reed nodded. He barely remembered the man, seemed like he stayed in his house or at the lumberyard all the time, except when he was bear hunting. “How did it happen?”
“Bear got’m,” his uncle said. “Got Charlie’s dog, too.”
Reed looked at him in surprise. He felt suddenly, unaccountably anxious. He thought of the eyes from a recurring dream: dark, bestial. “There…haven’t been bears in this part of the country twenty years or more,” he said to his uncle, but suddenly could not look at him.
“Seem to be now,” Charlie said. Reed was thinking how Charlie Simpson very much resembled some kind of bean pole in an apron, pushing salt grains across the tabletop with a long, brown finger. He made a circuit of them, his finger tracing loops, spirals, and figure eights. “So…what brings you back, Reed?”
The old storekeeper said it as if Reed had only been gone a few hours, instead of ten years. Nobody ever leaves these hills, he had heard his uncle say one time, and people tended to treat you that way, as if you’d never left. Reed glanced around the room; the old men around a nearby stove seemed to be paying no attention, their shoes bunched on the rusted metal like baking potatoes. But he caught Jake Parkey’s eye; the man had been staring at him. Reed wondered why all the obvious resentment. Actually, he hardly knew Jake Parkey; the Parkeys had moved into the town only eight months or so before Reed left.
“I want to dig up around Dad’s old place…see if I can find anything left there.”
His uncle smiled and touched Reed’s hand across the table. “That’s your right, son. I always wondered why you never sold that piece of land after it was passed down to you.”
Reed thought his uncle was fishing for some kind of answer, but he didn’t feel ready to talk about it.
Charlie flattened the salt out with his palm. “Lot of mud up that holler.” Then, after an uncomfortably long pause, “But you probably take after your uncle and granddad.” He smiled at Ben. “You Taylors’ve always been big about digging, haven’t ya? Arrieheads…ain’t it? That sort of thing. Things off dead folk…”
“Yeah…that was it.”
Ben laughed. “Why, Charlie! You sound just like a sour old disapprovin’ schoolteacher!”
“No, I know you boys do
the right things by it,” Charlie said. “I guess it would just make me uncomfortable.” Then he looked up at Reed. “I’d watch myself up around there, Reed. I’ve seen that bear up around your dad’s old place and he’s mean, I swear. That bear’s a crazy one.”
“You be staying at our place, won’t you, Reed?” Ben looked up anxiously.
“I wasn’t sure where I’d be staying. I wasn’t sure if I’d be welcome after all this time.”
Ben looked embarrassed. “Oh now, Reed…”
“I know, Ben. I should never have doubted your hospitality. And I plan to take you up on that. But I would like to spend the first couple of nights at Inez Pierce’s, that is, if she’s still got her boardinghouse.”
“She does…wouldn’t be surprised if she lasted longer than the town.” Charlie chuckled.
“Good…I’d like to stay there just the first two nights. I need time to myself for just a bit…to get used to being back.”
“Well…I can understand that,” Ben said, “but do let me take your bags down, get the arrangements made with Inez. At least that much.”
“Sure.” Reed grinned. “I’d appreciate that.”
Ben stood and eased past Charlie’s chair. “I’ll pick you up in ‘bout a half hour, son.” He squeezed Reed’s shoulder with a chop-sized hand. He held it a little too long and Reed looked up. “You’re lookin’ a little poorly, nephew,” Ben said softly. “Get yourself some rest. Martha’d kill me if anything happened to you now.” Reed nodded and Ben walked away.
“That man loves you, Reed,” Charlie said after Ben Taylor had left. “He never has stopped talking about you. Like you were his son and not his brother’s. Not many men in these parts can love as well. That Ben Taylor is a fine man.”
“He is.” Reed stared after his uncle, feeling a bit guilty. He’d never even written the man in all these years. Somehow, he hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, how much his uncle cared. “I’m pretty lucky, I guess.”
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