Country Dark

by Chris Offutt

  “Reckon a car would fit?”

  “Might scrape the sides,” Beanpole said, “but it’ll make it.”

  “It’s a damn good car.”

  “I don’t see no other way.”

  Tucker had drawn his body back into the chair and was sitting normally, hands resting on his thighs. It wasn’t a bad idea. He’d have a record, but that didn’t matter in the hills, especially for selling beer to drunks. Going to prison was a possibility he’d accepted on his first run, same as getting killed.

  “I don’t want nobody bothering Rhonda and the kids with me gone.”

  “It won’t be easy.”

  “Setting in a cell ain’t easy.”

  “All right,” Beanpole said. “I’ll move them. That way if anybody comes around, Rhonda and the kids won’t be there.”

  “Where to?”

  “Here,” Beanpole said. “My road ain’t on any map. Rhonda’ll be all right up here.”

  “Your wife won’t like that.”

  “I don’t mean living with us. Angela’s off with the grandkids half the time. She’s been on me about moving closer to them.”

  “I ain’t renting off you.”

  “What we do is buy each other’s house for one dollar. Put it in your wife’s family name.”

  “Might work,” Tucker said. “But twenty-five dollars a week in prison won’t cut it. I want sixty a week. Plus fifteen thousand cash when I get out.”

  Beanpole massaged his neck with his fingers, straining his arm to reach. He relaxed a little. Now that Tucker was haggling, the deal was as good as done. He’d been wondering how much Tucker would ask for. He admired him for going full on.

  “Can’t do it,” Beanpole said. “Ain’t got it.”

  “I know how much you make off me and how many runners you got. A minute ago you set right there bragging about the bootlegger money.”

  “I won’t be making no money off you.”

  “I won’t be making none setting in a cell.”

  Beanpole enjoyed negotiation, but it was always more fun with someone who liked it, too. He knew Tucker wasn’t that way.

  “Forty a week and ten thousand when you get out,” Beanpole said.

  Languidly at first and then in a quick motion, Tucker pushed himself from the chair and offered his hand.

  “Forty a week,” Tucker said. “And ten thousand.”

  Beanpole rose and stuck his own meaty hand out. They shook once, then dropped their arms. Tucker left the porch, his back to Beanpole for the first time, a shoulder twitching where he felt an imaginary bullet strike. He stopped and looked at the land, turning in a slow circle to the porch. The house was bigger than his and in better shape, and the driveway was gravel.

  “Hey,” he said to Beanpole. “You best go to the doctors about that neck fat.”

  Tucker waved and drove away. At the foot of his home hill he parked by the creek and smoked a cigarette. He couldn’t decide what to tell Rhonda first—the new house or him going away for a while. They hadn’t been getting along since he got in from his last run. He wanted a warm welcome home but she always felt overwhelmed and irritable. She was worried that the next baby would be a boy not quite right in the head. Maybe the promise of money would help. He plucked a double handful of purple birdsfoot and white crownbeard, laid them on the truck seat, and drove home.

  Chapter Eight

  A few days later, Tucker walked through the woods at dusk and climbed the hill. Lightning bugs flickered low. He’d heard the females were the ones that lit up in order to attract males, which made sense for a bug that only went out at night. Hills ran at a steep slant on either side of the creek, blocking starlight. Tucker didn’t mind. He’d walked here many times as a kid.

  He shifted the ruck across his shoulders. The load wasn’t too heavy but he’d lost the habit of wearing it, and the calluses along his collarbones had softened. Discomfort turned to nagging pain that he ignored like a chigger bite. He was glad to be born and raised on a ridge where people got more daylight. Families who lived up narrow hollers only saw solid sun three or four hours per day. They were a pale bunch. If you were going to make a home in a holler, you may as well live in town, and if you did that, why not go whole hog and move to Lexington.

  At the top of the hill Tucker found the entrance to Number Nine. The narrow gauge railway was gone, but a few rotted ties still protruded from the earth. He pulled a flashlight from his ruck and stepped into the mine. Old beer cans and cigarette butts littered the first fifteen feet. His boots were loud in the silence. The shaft narrowed at a slight turn and he measured the width to make sure his car would fit. Farther on, the shaft made a fork and the old rail line veered to the left. Tucker moved carefully along the right fork, sliding his boots a few inches at a time.

  The air ahead became darker. He scooped a handful of rock and threw it past the flashlight’s beam. When it struck the earth, he moved a few feet more, and did it again. There was no sound. He knelt and crawled, moving his fingers along the surface. Finding the edge of the drop-off sent a jolt through him as if he’d grabbed a live electrical wire. He tossed a rock into the abyss and heard nothing. The miners had inadvertently found a pit cave, a natural vertical shaft that ended in a cavern far below. Tucker underwent a strange impulse to lean forward and fall, as if the deep cavity in the earth were beckoning.

  He set the flashlight on the ground. From the ruck he withdrew a hammer, an old T-shirt, and a sharpened picket of oak. He pounded the picket into the dirt six inches from the edge of the hole. Satisfied that it was firmly in place, he draped the white T-shirt over the top. Tucker walked back out of the mine and descended the hill. The moon had risen. The woods had encroached upon the narrow road but rain kept it washed out. It was rough in places, more creek than road. The run-car would make it easily, the gears and suspension modified for traction.

  At the house he watched Big Billy sleep. Rhonda rose and went to the bathroom, nodding to him in a blur of somnolence, and he heard the bedsprings creak as she returned to sleep. She’d been upset since learning about the deal he’d made with Beanpole. Tucker had repeatedly emphasized the new house—more rooms, better insulation, warmer in winter. He impressed upon her the amount of money they’d receive in less than a year. She wanted to know why—why him, why now, why why why? He explained that serving a little prison time was part of his job.

  He slept in a chair until dawn, then moved to the bed for an hour. He rose for coffee with Rhonda on the porch. He lit a Lucky and waited for her to speak. Jo brought them yesterday’s biscuits with ham, then went back inside. Tucker heard her climbing the steps and singing to her siblings.

  “She’s a good girl,” he said.

  Rhonda nodded.

  “Helps with the little ones,” he said.

  Rhonda stared at the yard as if something existed other than fescue. Her hair hung lank and uncombed. Despite sitting in a rocking chair, she was motionless.

  “Rhonda,” he said, but didn’t know how to go on. “Rhonda … Think it’ll rain?”

  She nodded.

  “Frog strangler,” he said, “gully-warsher, or a cow pissing through a screen door?”

  “Light,” she whispered. “Dry again by evening.”

  “Did you ever want an umbrella? They got them in town. I never seen nobody use one but they might be handy.”

  “No,” she said. “Won’t help in a flood.”

  “Can’t flood a hill.”

  “It’s what it’s like.”

  “What?”

  “You gone six months. This baby coming. Like the world is drowning and me with it.”

  “I’ll be back before that baby’s walking and we’ll have ten thousand dollars cash and a bigger house.”

  “I’d rather have you.”

  “You do, Rhonda. You got me right here.”

  He didn’t understand her talk of drowning. He’d grown up with sisters and a mother, but the ways of women were a mystery. By age eight, boys in the hills
spent all their time outside while women stayed indoors unless they were gardening or killing a chicken. Maybe that’s why women lived longer. Or maybe he had it backwards and men lived shorter.

  “I had me a dream last night,” Rhonda said.

  “A dream.”

  “I was in an airplane. It didn’t have no roof on it. Just open to the sky. The driver of it was sitting behind me. Beside me was our new baby, a boy. The sky was pretty. All them clouds. I started in looking for you on the ground but couldn’t see you. Everybody else I ever knowed was there, even some that’s been dead for many a year. But not you.”

  She trailed off. Tucker had been in the middle of lighting a cigarette and stopped. He figured dreams didn’t amount to much but people always wanted their own to mean something.

  “Don’t sound like too bad a dream to me,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I liked it. Flying in a plane. I never seen one and there I was in one. It was nice.”

  “And the boy was there.”

  She nodded.

  “Did he have a name?” he said.

  “I don’t want to name him yet, in case he ain’t right.”

  “Will that make a difference? The name?”

  “If something’s wrong with him, I want to save the good name for the next baby.”

  Tucker nodded. Two red squirrels chased each other around an oak at the edge of the yard, then ran up the tree. At the first fork the small one went east. The other squirrel jumped to the opposite fork and they faced each other on a long horizontal limb. The big one jumped the other, landing easily on the bark, spinning on its rear legs. It climbed on the back of the small one, tucked its forelegs tight, and began hunching its tiny hips. In a few weeks the squirrel would give birth, same as Rhonda. The male might be shot by then, same as him.

  Tucker stood and went into the house and got his gun and returned to the porch. She glanced at the pistol he’d brought out.

  “Just old habit,” he said. “From the army.”

  “You never once told me anything about over there.”

  “Not much to say, Rhonda. Me and my brothers used to play army in the woods. It was the same. Except not so many trees and the guns were real.”

  “You mean it was fun?”

  “No.”

  “You used to have bad dreams about it,” she said.

  “That’s why I don’t put much stock in dreams. I decided I’d not remember them and they went away.”

  “I liked flying. But I didn’t know where you were at. It made me nervous.”

  “Well,” he said, “pretty soon you’ll know exactly where I’m at for six months. You’ll be way ahead of all the other women worried their men are out catting around.”

  Rhonda’s eyes squinted with a slight smile. Her shoulders rose and fell, the laughter unable to leave her body. Tucker put his hand over hers. At his touch, she began to cry. He stood and leaned over her for a hug. The chair arms got in his way and she couldn’t scoot forward because of her belly, nine months swollen. He knelt on the porch slats and laid his head against her. His strong arms circled her waist.

  They sat that way for a long time, days it seemed to Rhonda. She looked at the top of his head and knew she’d found him from the plane. He was here. He’d go away but come back. Six months was short. He’d be back before the baby was walking. She felt a sudden cramp deep in her body, an involuntary flexing. Her time was coming soon, a couple of days or so.

  Tucker spent an hour with the girls in the upstairs bedroom and two hours talking to Billy. As Rhonda foretold, the early afternoon received a light rain that turned every surface into a prism. The woods glowed in the sun. He took Jo on a walk, showing her where mistletoe grew in the bare branches of blackgum, explaining that her mother would appreciate some at Christmas.

  “I want some dryland fish,” she said. “Are they biting yet?”

  “No, Jo. They ain’t exactly fish, but a kind of mushroom.”

  “Why do they call it a fish?”

  “You take and cut one in half and it looks like a fish.”

  She laughed, the sound drifting up the holler to mingle with the early doves.

  “They’s some to call it a hickory chicken,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

  “I’m going to call them a chicken-fish.”

  “Good idea. Then nobody will know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why’s that good?” she said.

  “If you ain’t careful somebody’ll follow you and take all your fish. They grow in patches and you don’t want nobody knowing where they’re at.”

  “Will you show me?”

  “They don’t grow the same place every year. You got to wait till oak leaves are the size of a mouse ear, then go look for mayapples, before they flower. They favor the hillsides on the north. Some sun but not too much. Right about the time sarvis is blooming, look under oak and beech. You find one, you stop right there and look around in circles.”

  “They grow in circles?”

  “If you throw a rock in a mud hole, the water makes circles. That’s how you hunt dryland fish. You look for the rings from the first one you find.”

  He stopped walking and looked at her, waiting.

  “Mouse ear and oak,” she said. “Sarvis and mayapple. Mud hole circles. Which way’s north?”

  “Moss grows on the north side of trees.”

  “How does a tree have sides if it’s round-shaped?”

  “I don’t know. That’s about the smartest thing I heard anybody say.”

  He watched her preen beneath the praise. They stopped at a flat place on the hill, a mini-ridge that overlooked the holler. He sat on a damp rock protruding half a foot from the earth.

  “This is my spot, Jo. I moved this rock up here when I was about your age. You need to study on something alone, you come here to this spot. If I ain’t around, you can talk to me here.”

  “Can I sit on your rock?”

  “All you want. It’s colder than the dirt. But dries faster after rain.”

  Jo propped her elbows on his thigh and looked around, memorizing the place and the route. Time spent with her father was rare. This was the most she could ever remember him talking except late at night to Big Billy.

  “Honey,” he said. “Your mama’ll have a new baby soon. And I’ll be gone for a while. She’ll need you more than ever.”

  “Where are you going? Can I come?”

  “No, you can’t. It’s not for kids.”

  “I don’t want you to go, Daddy.”

  “I don’t either. Neither does Mommy. But it’s the way of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Comes a time,” he said and stopped. “A man …”

  He trailed away and reached involuntarily to light a Lucky, but decided against it because her face was close to his.

  “Jo. I just got to go. It’s sort of like work. Except longer. That’s about all there is to say. But I’ll be back.”

  She nodded. As long as Jo could remember, her father had come and gone at indeterminate hours for various lengths of time. He always brought back something nice, just for her. She knew kids at school who had no father, and others whose father never worked. She believed she had the best daddy of all. They walked down the hill together. Jo felt lighter now, unburdened without knowing she’d previously carried a load. In the coming months she figured she’d go up to her daddy’s spot once a week, maybe take a broom and sweep it clean for his return.

  Tucker rested for a couple of hours, a state not quite sleep, a skill he’d learned in the army. He could relax his body but come fully alert in less than a second. He rose for a meal of soup beans, cornbread, and collard greens. He cleared out the car and unscrewed the side mirrors. He circled it once, brushing his fingers over two bullet holes he’d carefully repaired. He loaded the trunk with a tractor jack, a hickory post, a blanket, a hatchet, a sledgehammer, a flashlight, and rope.

  He turned the key, enjoying the low rumble as he eased out the ri
dge to a fire trail and followed the old mine road. He was tired. Maybe prison would be a good break. The constant vigilance drained him, the steady threat of robbery or arrest. Living on coffee, potted ham, and crackers had cost his guts. He couldn’t tally the number of times he’d slept in the car holding a pistol. Tucker was lucky—he’d never been caught and he’d lost only one vehicle, abandoning it in a pond and escaping on foot. He’d bought the old Ford coupe and set about modifying it. The years of running had been fun but he was done for a while.

  At the entrance to the mine he cut the engine and stepped into the woods, listening intently for twenty minutes. Either nobody had followed him or someone was laying back a long ways. He cut six long boughs of pine, each with smaller limbs forking away, and tied the limbs to the rear bumper. The tasseled pine needles dragged the ground behind the tires, erasing tracks.

  Tucker broke the rear window with the sledgehammer and draped the blanket over the jagged edge of the opening. He turned on the headlights and drove slowly into the mine. The space ahead was illuminated for a few feet before the darkness seemed to suck the light away. The left side of the car scraped the wall. He maintained a steady pace, slow as possible to keep from stalling. The shaft tightened at a slight turn, the rock tearing a gash in the Ford’s body. He kept his boots on both the accelerator and clutch pedal, lifting and pushing each until the car was past the gouging rock. The passage forked left and he steered the opposite way and saw the white T-shirt hanging on the oak picket. He shifted into neutral, climbed into the backseat, and crawled out through the broken rear window. The shaft was silent, the air completely black. He removed his tools from the trunk.

  He squatted with his back against the bumper and pushed. His leg muscles quivered from the effort. He’d pushed it before but that had been on blacktop with less friction. Now he strained with every part of himself. The car began rolling forward and he felt the abrupt shift as the front wheels dropped over the edge. They landed hard.

  He placed the tractor jack beneath the rear of the car, then set the post horizontally on the jack. He began operating the handle. The car rose slowly, the hickory post distributing the weight. When the rear tires were clear of the earth, he pushed the car until it fell forward off the jack, moving farther into the hole. Tucker repeated this process several times until the car tipped completely over the edge. Tucker heard it hit an outcrop, then twenty seconds later a dull impact. A few pine needles lay at the lip of the abyss. He threw them into the hole along with the jack, post, and T-shirt.