Hungry Mountain Man

by Charlize Starr

  “In a way,” Jacob says after a long pause, like he was considering his answer carefully. He sounds a bit uncomfortable again, so I change the subject, wanting to keep him talking.

  “So, other than washing machines, what else can you fix?” I ask.

  Jacob laughs again, sounding surprised this time, but then he relaxes again and starts talking. He’s telling me about the improvements he’s made to his well when I reach my appointment. I almost hate to hang up, but I’ve had this hair appointment for days and I don’t want to inconvenience anyone by canceling at the last minute. Still, I sigh a little when we say our goodbyes, already eager to talk to him again by the time I check in at the salon.

  I find a seat in the lobby and I pick up a southern living food and beverage magazine to thumb through while I wait, thinking of my conversation with Jacob. In the middle of the magazine, there’s a two-page spread on some whiskey heir of a huge international brand called High Country Whiskey. It’s the top-shelf kind a date orders when he’s trying to impress you. The heir, a man a few years older than me, has a smug expression on his face and something in his eyes that makes me feel sure he’s not at all as charming as this spread is desperately trying to present him as.

  The spread says he’s known for throwing elaborate parties, getting into a bit of trouble, and being a real heartbreaker. I shake my head in disgust. I’m sure by heartbreaker they mean he tries to get every attractive woman he sees into bed with him that very night. The spread touches on a few of his famous exes – mostly names I recognize as models he’s apparently had messy breakups with – and I know I’m right. I’ve dated men like him: pampered rich boys who swear you’re the prettiest woman they’ve ever seen right until the moment another woman crosses their path. Apparently now he’s “back on again” with some singer girl, the vocalist for a rising country band with an electronic instrumental backing and a breakout single over the summer. The magazine promises me their relationship is much steadier than it was last time around. I feel sorry for the girl instantly, wondering just how steady a relationship with a guy like this could possibly be with his slicked-back hair and his partying and his self-satisfied smugness.

  Flipping to the ad on the next page – as if the two-page interview wasn’t enough of an advertisement already – I frown. It’s way too flashy for such an expensive product. The kind of people I’ve seen buys this whiskey aren’t people who want fast cars and scantily-clad women. There are too many bright colors and trendy elements here, not enough to signify high-class taste and a true gentleman’s drink. I sigh to myself, wishing I’d gotten the chance to design ads for a brand like this. Something glamorous and expensive. Something that really deserved my attention.

  The girl at the desk calls me back just then, and I wonder as I walk back with my stylist if I should ask if Jacob knows this whiskey playboy through business. I dismiss the thought quickly as I settle into my hair station though, since I doubt small mountain town distilleries really do much talking to the giants.

  Chapter Six - Jacob

  I know I shouldn’t even look or I’ll make myself angry, but I can never turn myself away from them – the industry publications, the lifestyle magazines, the gossip columns, everything that mentions the company and Calvin in the same breath. The two-page spread open in front of me gives me a headache just looking at it. It’s meant to be a positive piece in a southern beverage magazine, one we’ve done a lot of business with, calling him the face of the company. All through it, though, there are all the same obvious cracks in his persona as always. The “partying” reads as the heavy drinking it really is, the “mischief” and “troublemaking” less rich-boy hijinks and more the kind of run-ins with the law that our legal team has spent millions on, the “heartbreaker image” more his own self-destructive womanizing.

  It’s more frustrating than it should be, every article glorifying Calvin and calling me reclusive – if bothering to mention me at all. There is something extra maddening about this one, though, and I don’t think it’s just the way that even through the photoshopping and airbrushing on his photo I can see how bloodshot my brother’s eyes are – how off his pupils look and how drunk or high he must have been at the photoshoot. I think it’s the infuriating way it talks about Maria and that damn music festival.

  Maria is the woman who's been in my brother’s life the longest, although I don’t think Calvin is actually any more serious about her than he is about anyone or anything else in this world. The columns always refer to them as “on-again, off-again,” and it’s true enough, I suppose. She’s been swearing she hates him and then back on his arm at least a dozen times since they met. Maria is the lead singer of a pop country band, always primed to be the next big thing. During their latest – or latest that I know of, anyway – breakup, she’d been playing a late afternoon slot at a huge music festival in North Carolina, the kind with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. We’d been the official drink partner, with a huge tent and lots of merchandise being raffled off. It should have been a huge deal and really positive PR for us, but it turned into a nightmare.

  Calvin had decided it would be the perfect time to win Maria back, convinced it was romantic. He’s always loved a dramatic gesture, and he’s always been terrible at them, fucking them up in the worst possible ways. So, he’d ended up in a drunken fistfight with her current boyfriend, shoving him right into a table in our sponsorship tent, sending glass and alcohol flying everywhere. It was a disaster that, of course, turned into my disaster to clean up Monday morning somehow. It was the last straw in a string of outlandish behavior that only seemed to be getting worse and worse as of late.

  “It’s time for you to grow up,” I’d told him sternly the next afternoon when he’d gotten in from the festival. “You’re nearly thirty years old. This bullshit has got to stop.” Calvin had still been bleary-eyed from the night before but had had a drink in hand anyway.

  “What bullshit?” he’d asked, glaring at me, defiant as always.

  “You know what I mean, and I’m done with it,” I said, raising my voice at him. “I’m done cleaning up after you. The company can’t keep pouring out money to cover your tracks, and Dad can’t keep watching you do this. The man’s going to have a heart attack one of these days, and it’s going to be your fault.”

  “Fuck you,” Calvin had spat at me, voice lower and sharper than usual in these fights we’d been having more and more lately. He took a long gulp and then threw his whiskey glass at my head. It shattered just behind my ear, streaking the wall with liquid. “Honestly, go to hell, Jacob. Dad’s fine, but you want to talk about dead parents? Do you really want to go there? Then we should talk about how maybe you should have died instead of Mom.”

  He’d stormed out after that, leaving me stunned. It’s true that when she was alive, our mother had a soft spot for Calvin, had indulged him, but it was his own behavior that had driven a wedge between him and Dad. I always knew that Calvin resented how much of the company Dad had trusted me with. It had only grown when I’d revitalized our barrel-aging process, speeding up our time and allowing us to grow into a billion-dollar international player. I knew he resented that, being a few years older than him, I was set to inherit those billions of dollars and the whole company. I knew he resented not being allowed to get us deals with his partying. He used to say that I might have known how to make whiskey, but he knew how to drink it and how to speak the language of nightlife, which he thought was even more important. He always thought that should have counted more in Dad’s eyes.

  I had no idea he resented me that deeply. I thought we were still a team, if often a dysfunctional one. He is my brother, and it is a family business after all. I had no idea he hated me so much – that he was angry with me all the time instead of only the times we were fighting.

  And that was all before the attempts on my life started.

  Frustrated, I toss the magazine into my fireplace. I stand up, pacing around my cabin, wanting to do something
to alleviate the feeling. Wishing I could go somewhere or talk to someone, if only for the distraction.

  Mia. I think I want to talk to Mia.

  I don’t have an excuse to call her, no apologies or dry cleaning or chocolate concerns, but I want to talk to her. I think hearing her voice will calm me down from the way my thoughts of Calvin have my blood boiling. I don’t have a reason to call her, but I want to call her, and I decide that maybe that’s reason enough. Our talk yesterday had turned into something as mundane as how I had fixed up several things around the cabin to make them functional, so I don’t think she’ll mind hearing from me. I check the time and see she should surely be off work by now, so I decide to go for it.

  She answers on the first ring, and the sound of her voice lifts my spirits instantly.

  “Hey there. You change your mind about that chocolate?” she asks, laughing a little.

  “I’m still deciding,” I say, grinning and sitting back down like her voice has defused me.

  “We’re making some new varieties next week, flavors of the season, if you want to hold out,” Mia says.

  “Tempting. Tell me all about them?” I ask, settling in.

  Mia laughs again and then tells me each and every new combination of chocolate being made, and then about her day: getting her new house set up and a phone call she’d had from a city friend who still can’t believe she moved away. Before I know it, we’ve been on the phone for over an hour, and I just want to keep talking, to keep the conversation with Mia going.

  Even though I know I shouldn’t take the risk, I want whatever this is what's happening with Mia to continue.

  Chapter Seven - Mia

  I’ve been in town for three weeks, and every day for the last two of them, I’ve talked to Jacob. Jacob has somehow become an important part of my new life here. I don’t know how it’s happened so fast, or why one of us has found a reason to call the other every day, but I’m so thrilled it has. The conversations keep getting longer, too. Longer and more personal, and Jacob seems to be easing into them. At first, he’d been so awkward and so unsure on the phone, and while he still can be occasionally, he seems much more at ease lately. I think, or I hope, anyway, that I’m putting him at ease. I like the idea of that, of Jacob feeling like he can really open up to me.

  I think I might even be falling for him.

  I know that’s ridiculous. I’ve only seen him in person once, and that hadn’t gone well. It feels crazy, how much I like him, how much I think about him during my day, how much I want to tell him things, hear him laugh, listen to his voice. I wish I could see him in person again or that he would offer to meet up or even take me out. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be the same in person.

  I call Jacob as soon as I’m done at the shop, locking the door for the evening and heading home. “Hi,” I say into the phone, a little breathless from a cold wind that hits me as I turn down the street.

  “Are you okay?” Jacob asks. His concern makes me smile more than it probably should.

  “Just cold,” I say, “it’s windy out tonight.”

  “Not up here,” Jacob says, chuckling. “The trees block it, I suppose. Are you headed straight home?”

  “I am,” I confirm, thinking about Jacob’s cabin. I know he’s up in the mountains somewhere, but I don’t actually even know how high or how remote he is.

  “Good,” Jacob says.

  “Good?” I echo.

  “That you won’t be out in the cold,” Jacob clarifies, still a touch awkward. I’ve come to find his gruffness incredibly charming.

  “Only while I walk,” I agree. “I’ve got a furnace and a blanket waiting for me.”

  “Sounds nice,” Jacob says, then pauses. Although I can’t see him, I feel like he might be shaking his head. “How was your day?”

  “Busy but absolutely wonderful,” I say. “How was yours?”

  “Neither busy nor wonderful,” Jacob says, making me laugh just a little.

  “Oh no. What happened?” I ask.

  “Eh, just family politics,” Jacob says as another gust of wind makes me shiver. I shake my head. I can’t imagine what it would be like to work so closely with your family that way. I’m sure it would drive you a bit out of your mind at times. My mother teaches second grade, my father is a car mechanic, and my sister is a stay-at-home mom to a nephew I’ve only seen a handful of times. We’re a get-together-on-holidays-and-that’s-about-it sort of family now that my grandparents are gone. Being in business with them seems like it would be an impossible task.

  “More secret recipes?” I ask, teasing a little, hoping to make Jacob laugh. I’m delighted when he does.

  “Still just the one,” he responds.

  “Is it really lost forever? No one knows it?” I ask, shivering. I’m glad I’ll be home in a few blocks. Jacob’s right; it’s much too cold to be out.

  “Not a soul. At the time, he was the most popular man on the mountain. People would come for miles and miles around for his whiskey. They say during the Civil War, some people even hid flasks of it in their uniforms to use for cleaning wounds or to steal a sip of liquid courage before going into battle. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that or if it’s all legend. But it was his whole life after he moved here, although he never told my great-grandfather the recipe. He died before my grandfather was old enough to ask for it. Grandpa always said his greatest regret was that he never got it written down,” Jacob says.

  “That’s one really closely-guarded secret,” I say, fascinated.

  “They say he kept it on him, wrote it down, and carried it with him at all times, but no one has ever found it. If it ever even existed, he was probably buried with it,” Jacob says.

  “Not even his wife knew?” I ask, letting myself into my house and breathing a sigh of relief when the warm air washes over me.

  “If she did, she never told anyone. She never even talked about it at all, apparently,” Jacob says.

  “My grandmother liked to say she had a secret recipe, too,” I say, smiling to myself.

  “For chocolate?” Jacob asks, his voice warming me just as much as the little radiator near my couch.

  “Yes, she used to swear it was top secret, that she could never tell anyone,” I say, laughing. “I used to find the bags of grocery store chocolate chips in the garbage when I was talking the trash out at her house, so I knew she was just melting them down, but I used to wheedle her for the secret anyway. My grandfather never gave her up even after she died. Can you believe it? He’d swear up and down there really was a family secret.”

  “Well, it sounds like your grandmother and my great-great-grandfather would have gotten along quite well,” Jacob says, laughing too.

  “I’m sure they would’ve,” I agree. “They could’ve thrown the most delicious get-togethers with their recipes.”

  “It’s probably good they lived at different times, actually, or they might have gotten along so well that you and I wouldn’t be talking now,” Jacob says in a way that I can’t tell if it’s an attempt at flirtatiousness or just his general edge of awkwardness. I laugh again and flush a little anyway.

  “My grandmother was really pretty when she was young,” I say, thinking of the old pictures I’ve seen of my grandparents, barely more than teenagers the day they’d eloped.

  “I’m sure she was,” Jacob says. “You must take after her.” He pauses and coughs, clearing his throat. “I mean, I’m sure you must. In a lot of ways.”

  “I like to think so,” I say, flushed again at Jacob’s stumble. I’m almost sure that was him calling me pretty, too. “What about your great-great-grandfather? Any pictures?”

  “Only when he was older,” Jacob says. “I’ve never seen a picture of him younger than seventy, so I assume he came out of the womb with wrinkles and a full head of gray hair.”

  “I’ll bet he was handsome,” I say, thinking of Jacob’s face on a man from well over a century ago.

  Jacob laughs again, and this one sounds jus
t a little nervous. “You think so?” he asks.

  “Oh, yes,” I say, pulling a blanket over myself on the couch and grinning. “A big strong mountain man with a top-secret recipe for amazing whiskey? A man of mystery and good business sense? I’ll bet he had half the girls in town fighting over him. Wanting him to – would it have been called courting back then?”

  “In some places it still is,” Jacob says, chuckling awkwardly, “but yes, I think it would have been.”

  “Then they all wanted him to court them,” I say. “I can just see the girls lining up at his door with home-baked pies and batting eyelashes.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Jacob says, laughing again, more at ease this time.

  If he was half as handsome as you are, I’m sure I’m spot-on, I almost think about adding, but I’m not sure I’m ready to test the waters just yet. Still, there’s a lightness in Jacob’s voice I haven’t heard before for the rest of the conversation, a teasing banter between us that makes me fall asleep thinking of whiskey and courting and handsome Civil War mountain men as I do.

  Jacob would have made for a fine mountain man legend, I think to myself, smiling as I consider it. I think I would’ve wanted to be the first girl in line at his door if I had lived back then myself.

  Chapter Eight - Jacob

  The last thing I should be doing right now is pursuing a relationship. How can I? I don’t even feel safe getting groceries. I certainly can’t take Mia out the way I’d like to. I’m still looking over my shoulder all the time, waiting for the next “accident” that feels all too intentional.

  I know I’m just being paranoid, but in the weeks following that last big fight with Calvin, it had happened three times. There hadn’t been anything I could prove, and I still can’t, but it had all seemed like far too much to be a coincidence.