When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  Ray swung down hard with the revolver one good time, the sharp hilt of the handle catching two inches behind the man’s right ear. That was all she wrote. The man’s body was limp, and the only sounds were Tommy Two-Ton sniffing at the base of the bedroom door, his owner in the kitchen gasping for breath.

  * * *

  • • •

  The photo album was open exactly how the man had left it. Ray was sitting on the other end of the table tapping his fingernail against the edge of the butcher knife. He’d gotten zip-ties out of the junk drawer in the kitchen to secure the man’s wrists and ankles, then run out to the truck for rope to tie him down. There were seven or eight wraps around the man’s torso and Ray’d woven the line through the spindles of the chairback. The revolver rested on its side with the barrel drawing a line across the tabletop into the man’s chest. His head was down. His eyes were closed.

  Ricky was seventeen years old at the time the picture was taken. He’d graduated from Smoky Mountain in 1993. It was one of those hazy blue background Olan Mills jobs and the boy was shrug-shouldered in a black-and-white tux. His dark hair was greased back and his eyes were barely open. Acne made red splotches of his forehead and chin. Every tooth in his mouth was visible, a smile like he was chewing penny nails, and though Ray hadn’t thought it at the time, looking back, he figured the boy was probably stoned out of his gourd.

  Ray glanced at the clock on the stove. The man had been unconscious for almost fifteen minutes. Usually when the lights cut out, the curtain didn’t stay down more than thirty or forty seconds. Five minutes was the longest Ray’d ever seen anyone out, and that was some cocky flatlander with a glass jaw who bit off more than he could chew at a place called Burrell’s. He’d always wondered if that boy hadn’t played dead just to keep from catching it worse.

  Tommy Two-Ton clawed at the front door and Ray went into the den to let the dog inside. When he slammed the door, the man let out a long, low sigh. His head rocked from side to side and his eyes blinked sluggishly. He held his lips like he was about to whistle and drew two long breaths into his mouth. Ray came back to the table and took the revolver in his right hand. He raised the gun and closed one eye. Focusing on the front sight, he could see the man watching him through the haze.

  Ray opened both eyes and studied the man’s face. He had a wide nose and a thick mustache that didn’t connect in the middle. He was dark skinned and his hair was parted straight in the center so that his bangs made a heart shape on his forehead, the back of his hair grown long. He had his chin to his chest and his eyes tilted up watching Ray limp-jawed like he might’ve been nothing more than a figment of his mind.

  “You ever watch wrestling?”

  “Huh?”

  “I said you ever watch wrestling.”

  “I don’t know,” the man stuttered. “I guess. Maybe. When I was a kid.”

  “You look just like Eddie Guerrero, but skinnier.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind,” Ray said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The man looked down at the rope that was holding him tight to the chair, but he didn’t fight. Instead, he stretched his eyes as if trying to wake up from a dream. Rolling his head in a slow circle, he winced in pain when his neck was tilted back. “What in the world did you hit me with?”

  “I checked your pockets for a wallet, but couldn’t find anything.”

  “What?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Denny,” the man said.

  “Like the restaurant?”

  “Like the restaurant.”

  “Denny what?”

  “Rattler.”

  “Rattler.” Ray racked his brain. “I don’t think I ever met any Rattlers. Don’t think I ever met any Dennys for that matter.” He tapped the end of the barrel against the tabletop. “So what exactly were you doing in my house, Denny Rattler?”

  Denny didn’t say a word. He sniffled and dropped his head. His eyes were locked on the photo album and the picture.

  “That is my son,” Ray said.

  “What?”

  “In that picture. That’s my son in that picture you’re looking at. Ain’t that what you asked?”

  Denny nodded.

  “So now that I’ve answered your question, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing in my house?”

  “Your son’s named Ricky?”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. His mind worked to unravel how this fellow might’ve known him. The obvious reason was written up and down the man’s arms. Ray’d seen the track marks when he tied him up. But that still didn’t make sense. If he’d come to break in on some tip Ricky’d given him, he’d have known whose house it was when he came through the front door. And if he wasn’t here on some tip, then how the hell did he wind up happening upon a house in the middle of nowhere? None of it added up unless that Freeman fellow sent him. “How’d you know my son?”

  “I didn’t,” Denny said. “Not really.”

  “Why are you in my house, Denny Rattler?”

  “I was with your son when he died,” Denny said. He gazed empty-eyed at the photograph. “I was in the room with him. I saw him put the needle in and I watched him conk out. He just dropped to the floor like his legs come out from under him. I watched it happen. I watched it happen and I tried to save him.”

  Raymond remembered Leah telling him about the naloxone injector they’d found at the scene, how that’s the way they knew someone else had been in the room, that someone had tried to save Ricky’s life.

  “You the one made that call from the gas station then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A weird emotion came over Ray right then. He couldn’t put a name to it. He was angry and confused but thankful, a tangled emotional dissonance that made it hard for him to piece together words. What the man had just said might’ve been the farthest thing from where he’d imagined the conversation going, and he didn’t know what to make of it, or where to go from here. There was still the same question, though. “What are you doing in my house?”

  “Do you believe in God, Mr. Mathis?”

  The question struck Raymond like a stone. “What?”

  Denny looked up glassy-eyed. “I asked if you believe in God.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “Of course I do.”

  “I don’t go to church.” The dog wandered into the kitchen and Denny turned his head to see. “I mean I grew up going. My uncle even made me and my sister sing gospel when we were little. I used to pick guitar sometimes for the choir on Sundays. But I don’t know that I ever believed. I mean I never really believed any of it.”

  Ray let the gun down to the table. It was like every bone in his body melted. He was transfixed by the way the situation had suddenly turned and what was being said. There was no sense to be made of it, and maybe that was the beauty of a moment like that, the dumbfounding nature of it all. Wonderment arose from an inability to sort out what the senses were taking in, and that’s exactly what it felt like right then. Like absolute wonderment. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” Ray said. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because that’s the only answer I can come up with.”

  “For what?”

  “For why I’m here. Why I’m here in your house. If there’s not a God, the two of us don’t wind up sitting across from one another at this table.” There were tears wetting the man’s cheeks but he wasn’t sobbing or hysterical. He had his wits about him. He was calm and collected as he spoke. “The way these mountains have been burning, I knew there was some kind of end coming. I knew it. I just couldn’t see it. I came here to kill you, Mr. Mathis.” Denny locked eyes with Raymond and there was an uneasy feeling that settled into Ray’s throat. “Somebody sent me here to kill you.”

  Ray didn’t speak.

  “I come inside your house and I sit down at this ta
ble and this book’s opened to a picture of you and your son,” Denny said. “I turn the page and see the very face that I can’t quit seeing. What are the odds of something like that? You think that’s coincidence? You think things like that just up and happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Raymond said. The words dribbled out of his mouth.

  “If that’s not God, Mr. Mathis, then He never existed.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Why didn’t I what?”

  “Kill me.”

  “Because of that picture there. Because of your son. Who you are. I ain’t been able to sleep from thinking about him, the way he looked on that floor. The way he fell. I ain’t been able to get his face out of my head. I haven’t been able to quit thinking he was some sort of sign or something.”

  There’d been a question eating Ray alive ever since he’d stood there in that tiny cabin trying to imagine what Ricky must’ve looked like lying across that grubby tile. Until right then he hadn’t had the courage to say it or even linger on the thought for more than a moment because it was just too painful. It hurt too much to think that he might’ve been the reason it happened.

  “Do you think my son did what he did on purpose?”

  Denny stared at the old man confused for a moment, trying to piece together the question. “No, I don’t think that,” he said. “Not the way it happened. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you decide standing in a room full of strangers.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Same thing that could happen to me. I think he thought he knew what his body could take and he thought he knew what was in that bag, wound up cooking down more than he figured. A man never really knows.” Denny’s brow lowered and he shook his head. “People always think addicts are hell-bent on dying, but I don’t think that’s it at all. At least I know it’s not for me. I don’t want to die, Mr. Mathis. I don’t want to die any more than you do.”

  “I don’t think you can know what a man like me wants.”

  “I guess you’re right. You’re right about that.” Denny paused. “But there’s something brought us here, and it’s something bigger than me or you or anybody else could fathom.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Ray said. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  Ray stood from the table and walked over to the cabinet. He took a glass jelly jar and filled it with ice, then poured whiskey till it was almost spilling over. Draining half the glass in one long slug, he wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and sat back down in the chair. Tommy Two-Ton pawed at his leg and Ray stared for a long time into the grayish haze clouding the dog’s eyes. His mind whirled with questions that carried no easy answers. All he knew for certain was that the straight way was long since lost.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  By the time Leah Green finished her shift and reached Ray’s house, Raymond had drained half the bottle. He was a giant of a man and had never shown much sign of being drunk until right before he blacked out. There were no slurred words or stumbling to provide any warning. He was a long way from falling over, but the whiskey had washed the weight out of his head.

  Ray’s legs were stretched straight and the heels of his boots were anchored into the ground so that the rocking chair was leaned onto the tails of its runners. His hands hung from the fronts of the chair arms and the stub of his cigar glowed at the corner of his mouth. He was motionless, head tilted back, watching her from the bottoms of his eyes as she came across the yard.

  “You look about dead sitting there.”

  Ray rocked forward and stood. He picked what was left of the Backwoods between his fingers and stomped it out in the dirt. He didn’t respond and she looked puzzled by his silence, but she followed as he turned and headed into the house.

  Denny Rattler was just how Ray’d left him. Leah Green’s face twisted in confusion. Denny watched her and she watched him. Over the next few minutes, Ray told Leah what happened and Denny filled in the details where Ray could not. When they finished, her face was pale and she said she needed to sit down. Ray brought her some water and she pressed her wrists against the cool glass, but didn’t drink.

  “So are you going to help us?”

  “I’m closer to putting the both of you in handcuffs.”

  “I don’t know what in the world you’d charge us with.” Ray fished his pocketknife out of his overalls and pinched open the blade. He took a step across the kitchen floor and sliced the rope clean at the back of the chair, the coils falling limp into Denny Rattler’s lap like a pile of snakes. Denny’s wrists and ankles were still bound by zip-ties, but in a split second he was free. “I’d say you need the two of us telling the same story we just told to come up with any charges, me telling on him for conspiracy and him telling on me for kidnapping, and I don’t think that’s the story I’m going to tell. What about you, Denny Rattler? That the story you want to tell?” Ray rested his hand on Denny’s shoulder.

  “No, sir. I don’t think it is.”

  “Then what exactly is the story the two of you want to tell?”

  “Way I remember, Denny come over here and knocked on my front door and told me somebody wanted to pay him to kill me. He didn’t have any more desire to do that than you do, girlie, so we called the law.”

  “What you’re missing is the why.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The why, Raymond. Why would he have been asked to kill you? Some fellow just flipped open a phone book with his eyes closed and ran his finger down the page? I don’t think anybody’s going to buy that. They’re going to figure out pretty quick that if Walter Freeman sent this man over here to kill you, then odds are you’re the one who set him in front of the sheriff’s office the other night, and what happens then?”

  “I don’t have a clue why this Walter Freeman fellow would send somebody over here to kill me. Far as I know, I’ve never met him in my life. I guess it had something to do with my son. Maybe Ricky owed him some money or something and this was some sort of payback. That’s the only thing I can figure. Is that what it was, Denny?”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “And what if all of that falls apart?”

  “Then I’ll swallow my pride and take the consequences. But until that happens, girlie, the story I’m telling you is the story I’m sticking with.”

  “I need to go outside.” Leah stood from the table and left the room. After a few minutes, she came back. She’d taken off the top of her uniform and had on a white undershirt that fit her loosely. Her hair was down and Ray could tell she was just shy of cracking apart. “I’ll make a phone call to a detective.”

  “Is it someone we can trust?”

  “Yeah, you make one wrong call and this is all over,” Denny said. “You might as well be signing my death certificate.”

  Leah stood there for a second thinking and then reached into her back pocket like she was going to pull out a billfold. There was a business card in her hand. “There’s an agent came into the office yesterday morning from Atlanta. He said if we had any information on Freeman or what happened to give him a call. But before I do, the two of you need to know that once I make that phone call this can only go the one way, and once it starts there’s no off switch. You ride it all the way to the end, whatever that means.”

  “Somebody’s got to keep an eye on my sister,” Denny said. “That’s the only way I’m good with this. Anything happens and they catch wind, they’ll kill her within the hour. And I don’t mean this the wrong way, but I’m not leaving her life in the hands of some white man I ain’t ever met.”

  “Then what exactly do you propose, Denny, because you and I both know I can’t call anyone with the tribe?”

  Denny sat there for a second or two twisting his right hand around his left wrist where the zip-ties had cut into his skin
. His brow lowered as an idea seemed to come to him. “There’s one person we can call.”

  “All right,” Leah said. “Then I’ll make the call.”

  She headed for the door and Ray followed her outside. He could feel the revolver weighing heavy in his pocket, the situation weighing heavy on her mind. “I want you to know I’m sorry about this. I never meant to put any of it on your back.”

  “But that’s where it lay. Ain’t that right, Uncle Raymond?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “And if you’d just been patient and let us do our job in the first place none of this would’ve happened. Instead, you take things into your own hands and this is where it gets us. There’s the right way and the wrong and you were too stubborn to think that anybody might know better than you.”

  “This is me trying to do right.”

  “Is that what this is?” Leah smirked. “Because you sure as shit fooled me.”

  “If I’d done it my way, I’d have dug two holes.”

  “Well, you better get to digging, Uncle Raymond, because pretty soon we’re going to need a grave big enough for every last one of us.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Raymond Mathis lay belly-down on the kitchen floor with his neck slit from ear to ear. His head was turned sideways and a puddle of blood arced and widened from his throat in the shape of a trout. His eyes were open, pale blue all the brighter against the red around him. The stingy brimmed hat he wore was kicked off to the side and the thin streak of hair that ran the top of his head wafted about like a feather.

  They’d put stage blood around the room to make it look like there’d been a struggle. There was no way a man like Denny Rattler got his hands on someone as big as Ray and walked away cleanly. The house was filled with people and all of that movement and noise had Denny about to come out of his skin. He cut his eyes around the room to count them. There were four agents, one deputy, a sheriff, and Cordell Crowe. Denny was reaching that point in the coming down where panic outweighed everything else.