When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  Ray lifted his hat by the pinch-front crown and resituated it just so. Leah was already to her cruiser when he spoke. “You be safe, girlie,” he said, taking a long drag from his cigar. She nodded and climbed behind the wheel. He knew she’d be back in a couple of days.

  NINE

  That first week of November there were days when the mountains were invisible behind the smoke and the sun rolled across the sky like a pale marble. Ricky had no insurance so the hospital took a couple X-rays, stitched up a cut or two, and discharged him after a day and a half. By the second morning home, Ray was convinced the boy was dying. Physical pain seemed overcome by something greater, something that appeared to be drawing the boy into himself so that lying beneath the thin cotton sheets of his childhood bed he looked to be little more than a skeleton.

  There was a thought that settled onto Ray while he stood in the doorway watching the boy, how when an animal has gone lame it is with mercy that the farmer ends the suffering. That thought left a hollow feeling inside him because this was not some horse that had broken a leg in a groundhog hole or a chick pecked nearly to death by the clutch. Being the father of an addict, there was always this ambivalence because you’d watched the same thing over and over for years and years, and you knew deep down that there wasn’t a thing you could do to stop it. But at the end of the day, that boy curled up in that bed was still your son, and that was always the part that won out. Around lunchtime, Ray phoned Herschel Stillwell because he couldn’t bear the thought of doing nothing at all.

  Herschel was a retired family physician who’d served Jackson County for decades. Being the man that he was, he still answered house calls for locals who never had been much on doctors and didn’t trust anyone but him to do the job. The bedroom was dark aside from the soft glow from a milk glass lamp that stood on a dresser at the foot of the bed. Herschel knelt beside a five-gallon bucket Ray’d brought the boy for getting sick. The doctor wore a dark plaid shirt with black suspenders fastened to pleated wool pants. His hair was silver and he’d lost most all of it except a low curve that started behind each ear and made a smile around the back of his head.

  His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and he closed his eyes while he pressed the diaphragm of his stethoscope against Ricky’s chest to listen to his heartbeat and breath. Herschel moved the instrument a few inches, then again, each time closing his eyes while he listened, a strained look on his face as if he was trying to remember the name of a song. When he was finished, he removed the tips from his ears and let the stethoscope hang from his neck.

  “Can you sit up for me?” Herschel asked. The boy didn’t budge. “I need you to sit up a little bit so you can take this pill. I don’t want you to get choked.”

  Ricky groaned and pried himself onto one elbow. He opened his mouth and the doctor gave him a large white pill, then held a cup to Ricky’s lips to drink. Water ran down the boy’s chin and wet a spot on the sheets beneath him. He choked for a second or two before he found his breath, then resumed the same position he’d been in all night.

  “How those ribs feeling?” The doctor pulled the sheet back and eyed the bruise spread across Ricky’s side. “Hurt when you breathe?”

  Ricky grunted, but nothing discernible.

  “You sit up straight or lay flat and it’ll keep the pressure off those ribs some, make it a little easier for you to breathe,” the doctor said as he stood. He patted the bottom of Ricky’s leg. “You hang in there,” he said, but the boy did not move.

  When Herschel and Raymond were in the kitchen, the doctor took a seat at the table, a white oak slab stained dark as walnut. Raymond offered him something to drink and the doctor asked for a cup of coffee. There was a pot already brewed and Ray didn’t bother to make fresh. He plucked an enamel tin mug from a small brass hook beneath the suspended cabinet and filled the mug to the brim. He slid the coffee in front of the doctor and took a handkerchief from his back pocket to blow his nose.

  “Allergies been bad this fall,” Herschel said. “I think it’s likely on account of this smoke as much as the leaves.”

  “Might be.” Ray shoved the rag back into his overalls.

  “I drove to Franklin a few days ago and it was so smoky I couldn’t see twenty feet up the road. Damn sky was yellow with it. Looked about like an eclipse.”

  “I believe it,” Ray said. “Probably blowing in from Tellico.”

  “Probably so,” Herschel said, holding the mug in front of his face with both hands like he was trying to warm his palms.

  The book Ray’d been reading lay on the table and the doctor turned the spine with his thumb so as to get a good look at the cover. The face of a coyote was screen-printed onto a light gray background.

  “Them things have been absolute hell on my chickens,” Herschel said. “Now the guineas, they don’t seem to be able to catch them guineas. Maybe on account of them roosting in the trees, or maybe the coyotes just don’t like the taste. I don’t know.”

  “There was a pile of them back in behind the house the other night,” Ray said.

  “Guineas?”

  “Coyotes.”

  “Eerie sounding.” Herschel shook his head. “You remember that time they got after that Brinkley girl, Frank and Gertie’s little girl, over there in Tuckasegee?”

  “I do.”

  “Ruined that man seeing his little girl get eat up like that. Think her name was Pearl, if I remember right. That’s been a long time. I just couldn’t imagine seeing something like that.” Herschel took a sip of coffee and slid the mug onto the table. “I got to looking not long after that happened and couldn’t find but one other instance of anything like it anywhere in the country, coyotes getting after a child like that.”

  “Maybe just circumstances.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe so.” The doctor reached into his pocket and set a small orange pill bottle onto the table. “I want you to give Ricky one of these in the morning and one in the evening for four days. After that, you break the rest of these pills in half and you give him half in the morning, half in the afternoon, and half of an evening. You do that for four days. Then the last four, I want you to cut it back to half in the morning and half at night. There’s eighteen pills in here.” He rattled the bottle. “You think you can remember that?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “If not you just call me. And I mean that, Ray. I know how you are. So any questions at all I want you to call me. You’re not bothering me a bit.”

  “I appreciate that,” Raymond said. He was leaned back in his chair with his hands slid inside the bib of his overalls, his thumbs hooked on the outside. “What exactly was that you gave him?”

  “Hydrocodone,” Herschel said. “It’s a pretty mild opiate. I know those doctors at the hospital didn’t want to give him anything at all, but the way I see it, we’re treating two different things. There’s the pain from that beating he took and there’s the withdrawal. That’s what’s got him so sick in there. From the looks of it, the pain ain’t bothering him near as much as the other, but this ought to help with both. How many days has it been? You know?”

  “Been like that three days.”

  “You think he was high when you found him?”

  “I imagine he was.”

  “That sounds about right,” Herschel said. “Day two, day three, that’s one foot in the grave when you’re coming down. That’s when it’s at its worst. You have any idea how much he was using? How much a day?”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  Herschel made an expression that indicated it wasn’t all that important. “Well, this isn’t enough of anything that it’s going to keep that high going, but it’ll stave off those withdrawals. Sort of fighting fire with fire, but I’m thinking it’ll work faster. Hard to heal when you can’t even get food in him. We get him over one hurdle and maybe we can get him healed up.”

 
“And what then?”

  “Way I figure, we’ve got two options. If you’ve got the money I know some fine facilities down south, a couple top-notch places folks swear by down in Florida. We get him down there, get him away from what’s familiar, we might be able to dry him out.”

  “What’s something like that run?”

  “I don’t know off the top of my head, but it’s not cheap.”

  “I don’t got enough money left to pay these hospital bills.”

  “So the other option is this,” Herschel said. He picked up the bottle of pills and turned it in his hands. “We wean him down with these as best we can and we get him into the clinic over in Waynesville. They get him on a program and we hope it sticks.”

  “What sort of program?”

  “Methadone. Buprenorphine. Suboxone. They meet with him and they decide what they think will work best,” Herschel said. “Now they’ll keep a close eye on him and he’ll have to—”

  “He’s already tried that.” Ray shook his head and pulled a couple long strokes of his beard through his fist. “He done that and it didn’t take.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A year or so back he was staying over in Haywood County, Hazelwood, Frog Level, somewheres, and the law put him in one of those programs to keep him from going to jail. He wound up failing a drug test or using too much of what they was giving him, hell, I don’t know. All I know is they tried to keep him from going to jail and he wound up going just the same.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Ray.”

  “What kind of answer is that?” Raymond watched Herschel’s face go blank as if those words had slapped him across the mouth. Being as big as he was, Ray knew he intimidated most people. He’d watched their faces flush all his life when even the slightest bit of anger showed, so he was accustomed to trying to ease that tension so folks knew he didn’t mean things how they sounded. “What I’m trying to say, Hersch, is what do I do? What do I do to get him clean?”

  “Here’s the thing, Raymond, and this isn’t easy to say, but I’m not sure there’s anything you can do.” Herschel opened his eyes wide and stared into his coffee as if he were trying to read the future in the grounds at the bottom of the tin cup. “If that boy hasn’t hit rock bottom yet, he might not know one. And if that’s the case, there ain’t a thing in this world me or you can do to save him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that kind of change is something a man has to want for himself. If he don’t want that, we can talk till we’re blue in the face and he’s not going to listen. In one ear and out the other. The Good Lord might’ve walked on water but He couldn’t change that, Raymond. I’ve been at this fifty years and if there’s one thing I know it’s that people only change when they want to.”

  * * *

  • • •

  By that evening, the pills Herschel gave the boy had eased the sickness enough that he could finish a glass of water. When Raymond came into the room, Ricky was lying flat on his back staring dreamy-eyed at the ceiling like he was watching for shooting stars. Ray pried a thumbtack from the wall and let the sheet that was stretched across the window fall to one side. When the column of light reached the bed, the boy squinted his right eye, the other swelled shut and purple as cedar heart.

  “Think if I bring you something to eat you can sit up?”

  “I think so,” Ricky grumbled, those being the first words he’d spoken to his father since the night in the truck.

  “You need help?”

  “I think I can get it.” The boy scrunched his face in pain as he eased himself up a little at a time, his back gradually righting itself against the headboard.

  In the kitchen Ray pulled the lid off a tall steel stockpot, then stirred the bone broth and let it settle, circles of oil glistening on the surface like spider’s eyes. He spooned a taste to his lips, the stock deep brown and so flavorful he had to pour a cup of water from a mason jar to cut the richness.

  He’d started the broth the afternoon before with a bag full of chicken bones he’d saved in the freezer. Ray covered the bones with water and added dried sprigs of rosemary and thyme. He brought the pot to a lid-rattling boil, then dialed the stove eye back to low and let it simmer till morning. The bones came out clean and he replaced them with whole onions and carrots, a full stalk of celery, and eight cloves of garlic, allowing the vegetables to cook down most the day. He strained them at the last minute, reduced the stock by half, then hit the broth with salt to taste and a douse of apple cider vinegar so the fat wouldn’t hang on the tongue.

  That was how Ray’s mother made stock. All his life she’d cook batches when someone in the house or a family up the creek was sick. “The life’s in root and bone,” she’d said, and Ray believed that just the same as she did. He’d finish the pot with diced carrots, onions, and celery, a handful of pulled chicken, a shot of red pepper flake, and maybe a cup of rice to hearty it up. But for the boy, he just filled an old Pyrex bowl with broth the color of caramel and carried it to the bedroom like he’d done a hundred times over the course of Ricky’s life.

  The sheets were bunched around the boy’s waist. He was sitting up straight. Side light from the window made slats of his ribs so that Raymond could count them from across the room. The shadows continued up his chest, a pair of praying hands tattooed over his left breast depressed and blue as if just another bruise on his body. Ray thought about how easy he’d been to carry that night. Probably only weighed a buck thirty when he should’ve been somewhere close to two. There was little left of him. The dope had starved Ricky down to his framework and even that seemed just shy of folding.

  Ray handed his son the bowl and Ricky held the offering cupped in front of his face like a beggar. A small ladder-back chair was catty-cornered by the window and Ray eased himself into the checkerboard weave of its seat, trying not to put all his weight down. There was no other place to sit.

  Raymond wanted to say something, but he didn’t yet have the words and was unsure of where to start. He ran his beard through his fist and looked through the windowpane where a cardinal had lit on the branch of a dogwood at the side of the house.

  “Whereabouts you been staying?” Ray didn’t turn from the window, as if he might’ve been asking the question of the bird.

  “Around,” Ricky said.

  “Any place in particular?”

  “A couple different spots.”

  Ray pressed the tips of his fingers into his left temple and closed his eyes. That fast and the bullshit was already giving him a headache. “I thought you was living over there in Haywood. That was the last I’d heard. Didn’t know you’d come back over Balsam till I got a call they’d found you up there by Rose’s a few weeks ago.”

  The boy didn’t speak.

  “How about you tell me this,” Ray said. “How about you tell me how a man shoots ten thousand dollars through a needle?” He turned and looked at his son then, but there was nothing really there, no sort of thread between them, just a void with plenty of legroom for lies.

  “I didn’t shoot ten thousand dollars,” Ricky snapped as if almost proud of himself. “Nowhere close to it. That was money I lost on a truck.”

  “A truck?”

  “Yeah, I lost that on a truck. I was supposed to drive this dually down to Georgia for this fellow and I didn’t quite make it.”

  “You were buying it?”

  “No, I wasn’t buying it. I was driving it. I was the driver. I was supposed to take this truck down to Georgia for this fellow and he was supposed to pay me.”

  “So what happened to the truck?”

  “That’s the thing,” Ricky said. “I get down there around Clayton and the law’s sitting there. Backed up in this old kudzu patch. I come around the curve and there they was. Wasn’t nothing I could do but step on it. They hit the lights and dropped in behind me
and I knew that thing was stole or full of dope or something, so I mashed the gas. Lost it about a half mile down the road in a curve. Dog was in the road and I swerved to get around him and that was that. After that it was ground, sky, ground, sky.”

  “And they caught you?”

  “No, they ain’t catch me. I climbed out the window and took off. I made it a little ways and got tripped up coming off this hill. Must’ve hit my head on a rock or something and knocked myself out. Woke up and it was dark and there wasn’t a soul around.”

  “That don’t make a bit of sense.” Raymond shook his head, knowing the boy was lying the same as always.

  “I know it don’t make sense. I didn’t say it made sense. You asked, so I’m telling you what happened,” Ricky said. “Only way I can figure, they must’ve walked all over me and just not seen me laying there. The woods was real thick and I was down in them weeds. I don’t know. All I know is I come to and it was dark outside and there wasn’t a soul around but me and that dog. That dog was standing there, him a-licking me in the face. That’s how I woke up. That dog a-licking me.”

  Ricky raised his right hand in the air as if he was offering a formal testimony. Raymond wanted to tell that boy he was full of shit, but he knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere. Then again, maybe for once Ricky was telling the truth. Maybe it really had happened just like he said, and if it had it wouldn’t make much difference. The end result was the same whether he shot it into his arm or lost it just how he’d said.

  “That still don’t answer how you come to owe ten thousand dollars.”

  “I guess that’s what he figured he lost on account of me wrecking that truck.” Ricky paused. “Well, that on top of what I owed.”