In the Season of Blood and Gold

by Taylor Brown

  Next thing I know Bear’s got him in this big hug. Big bear hug you got to be big and hairy as Bear to give. Hell, almost made me want one myself—not to be gay or nothing. How it made Doogan feel I don’t know. Before I could gauge him, a group of local girls came by. Doogan greeted some of them, but me and Bear just kept to ourselves, talking like we had shit to attend to. Important matters. You know the routine.

  Bear put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You know that big sniper rifle, the Barrett .50 cal?”

  “Fine weapon,” I said, nodding. From what I’d seen on TV, that thing is just about as tall as me. Same bullets that shot down Zeroes and Messerschmitts.

  “Damn right,” said Bear. “You know they use that honker to kill cars and airplanes and generators and such. Shell is yea long.” He spread his thumb and forefinger as far apart as they went.

  To all this I was nodding a lot.

  “Just put one right in the motor,” said Bear. “Kill it. Anyways, I was asking Doogan if he’d shot the Barrett and he said one time indeed they had him hiding out in this culvert with it. There was this field in front of him and nothing was supposed to cross it. Those were his orders. Nothing crosses. No cars, trucks, wagons, camels, nothing. Nothing that moved. You got me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Anyhow, he just sat there for near on two days and nothing. Said not a thing come to pass. Then finally there comes this big-ass truck. Said kubz or hubz or some Arabic shit on the side. Whatever, it was the Arab word for bread. Big old bread truck. White. Well, he puts one in the engine block. Stops the son of a bitch cold.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh yeah. Anyways, driver gets out thinking he’s just broke down. Goes around back and gets out a big plastic shelf of bread and starts lugging it across the field.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, what you think? His orders was nothing crosses. That includes bakers, don’t it?”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “Nah, he didn’t really say. I had to infer.”

  “Shit.”

  “What you think that does to a man?”

  “Shit,” I said again, shaking my head. I wasn’t sure what more to say. My mind seemed stuck like the engine of that bread truck. Pistons not turning over.

  “Can you imagine the nightmares?” Bear asked me.

  I couldn’t. I just looked over there at where Doogan was standing amongst those girls. They were just jabbering on every side of him, talking amongst themselves. He standing there like the new kid at school. Awkward-like. Acne making it look like he was blushing, and maybe he was. Hands in pockets and shoulders all scrunched. Like he was having to keep all his blood and heat from spilling out.

  He’d been a real good skateboarder once, I recalled. Back when he’d done Mallory. Didn’t look like much of one now. Wouldn’t look like much of anything if it weren’t for those veins swelled along his forearms. I reckoned those spoke more than anything else about him. I had the feeling he’d tried to tell me something but I missed it. I followed those veins down to where they twisted into his pockets like ropes. I tried to see the hand that had pulled the trigger on that baker and God knows what else. But I couldn’t. His hands were hid too deep.

  He looked my way and I gave him the deep nod again, trying to tell him I understood it all. What it was to be a killer of men. But I don’t think he saw me. Either that or he knew me for what I was. I can’t say I wasn’t jealous of him.

  COVERED BRIDGE

  Baker stepped rock to rock, downward, his bare toes gnarled for traction on the slick-tilted planes of river rock. He watched for gaps that could swallow a leg, angles that could break an ankle. His palms were sweaty, a loose-handled satchel gripped in one hand.

  Below him the river hissed and whorled, eddied drunkenly at elbowed corners of boulder-rock, then jetted whitely ahead, rapid-foamed, and Baker knew the real danger lay in the black-shooting hydraulics that ran beneath the surface, that could knock you from standing and hurl you crammed under a hunk of rock old as the world, leave you there amid the bone-jammed carcasses of deer and dogs and children gone missing.

  That would never be him, he told himself. His thirteen-year-old body was muscled and lean this summer, hand-made himself in the high school weightroom, looking to play tailback come sophomore year. A match for near anything short of the varsity defensive line. They still outweighed him by nearly a hundred pounds a man. But his time would come, he told himself.

  He reached a big flat-topped hunk of rock, big as a Volkswagen, perfect for sunbathing if the climb down wasn’t so tough. There were many other paths to the river, easier ones, which his scantily-clad peers used on weekends to find sun-bright planes to lie out over the water, to drink beers and frolic and tan.

  But days like today Baker preferred the shade of the covered bridge. The covered bridge had been there as long as he could remember, red-roofed, past it a ten house community of working families who’d built it. That was Moss land up there, or had been—Moss his mother’s family. All the houses up there had been of one side that family or the other, blood or marriage. But now those houses were gone, leveled, the families paid out well to move somewhere else, to the edge of Lake Lure mostly, making room for the luxury homes planned to go in their place, thirty homes where there used to be ten.

  On the high side of the land, where the earth went shallow before the rising crust of rock, was the graveyard where his mother was buried, the dirt churned black over her grave.

  Baker crossed the big flat rock and climbed down the other side, into the shadowed cool of the bridge. He sat on a chair-shaped rock, his feet dangling in the black rush of water, and opened the satchel he carried with him.

  Flowers. Day lilies mostly, red-orange as a girl’s lips, and azaleas too, these his mother’s. Dead now but not yet the seeds she’d sown. Not yet. His father wanted them cut, gone. He didn’t care how or where. Baker had scythed them down this morning with his pocketknife, pulling handfuls of them taut like you would a throat before cutting. They came loose, light as air, flowering from his hand, petals tickling his skin like fingertips.

  They’d buried his mother in a casket, full-bodied, instead of cremating her to ash, as she’d wished. He didn’t know how it all came about, probably something to do with his father’s family, Presbyterians all. They did not believe in degrading the body, as though they’d never seen the rotting carcasses of livestock mangled in barbed fencing, as though that degradation didn’t transpire in a person’s coffin.

  Baker palmed a handful of flowers from the satchel, their brightness undiminished by the shade. He examined the petals, so tender. The day lilies you could eat. His father used to make day lily fritters, batter-fried golden. Baker lowered his upturned palm toward the rush of water, the bottom stones long smoothed by hydraulic action, no edges to them, serene despite the torrents that ripped over them year on year.

  A clamor downstream stilled his hand. He looked up. Bare-backed locals were standing up on their rocks, dumping coolers of silver beer cans into the river, throwing away ziplock baggies of weed and pills. Uniformed men were descending the weekend trails, shuffle-footed, hands steadying their sidearms, black sunglasses down-tilted to watch their steps.

  The cops never bothered anyone out here, no one local, not until now. Baker heard steps above him, on the slatted pine of the bridge, then on rock.

  “You, boy, get up here.”

  Baker looked up and squinted at a black shape thinned against the overwhelming power of the sun. He nodded and started back the way he’d come.

  “Bring that bag with you. That’s the reason you’re coming up here.”

  Baker nodded and stooped down to pick up the satchel and climbed four-limbed up the rocky creekside, his dry skin making good friction against the crags, the bag draped over his shoulder.

  He stood finally before the policeman, a young man with a starched shirt and shaved head.

  “Let’s see the bag,” he said.


  Baker handed it to him, his heart beating like he’d done something wrong.

  The police officer swiped open the satchel with a rigid hand, cocked his head to see inside the black well of cloth.

  “What you got in here?”

  Baker swallowed. “Flowers, sir.”

  The man’s brow crinkled.

  “Flowers?”

  He shook the bag over a flat-topped stone, just a few of the orange and pink flowerheads falling upturned like bright propellers onto the rock. Pink and purple, some red. The lilies orange.

  “These some kind of funky flowers, edible?”

  “No, sir. Those is just day lilies, and those others azaleas, my mother’s.”

  “Your mother’s?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man squinted at him, suspicious. “What’s a boy like you doing with all them flowers?”

  Baker stiffened. “Nothing,” he said, too quick.

  The policeman nodded his head like he was beginning to understand. “Son, ain’t nothing illegal about being a—”

  “They’re just pretty is all,” said Baker.

  The man looked down at the bladed petals, like flowers from rock. He cocked his head from one side to the other. After a moment he exhaled.

  “Shit,” he said, “I reckon they are.”

  He handed the bag back to Baker and looked over his shoulder. He was young, his face round and unlined.

  “Listen,” he said. “You best just get on out of here. There’ll only be trouble down here today.” He nodded downriver, boys chest-puffed against handcuffs, their girlfriends hip-leaned toward their badged captors, flirting for freedom. “You don’t want any trouble, I’d get on.”

  Baker nodded and squatted down to gather up the loose-strewn flowers before walking back the way he’d come, walking quick and light as he could to salvage his soles against the scorch of the blacktop.

  ***

  At home he placed the satchel in the garage refrigerator, where they kept beer and soft drinks, placing it in one of the empty vegetable drawers where his father wouldn’t notice.

  “Where you been?” his father asked, looking up from his paper.

  “Down at the river.”

  “Don’t you got a gym regimen to keep up?”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “My day, there weren’t no days of rest.”

  And look where that got you, thought Baker. He looked out the bay window, the glass heat-warped, to the hills rising green-folded from their yard, steep as walls. You could not even see the tops of them from inside the house. You had to be out there, right underneath them, looking straight heavenward like a kid in the front row of a movie theater, a trick of angles keeping you from ever seeing the peak, the summit, only the last ledge of barefaced granite you couldn’t ever reach.

  “You take care of them flowers?”

  “Yes, sir. Buried them. Full-stemmed I did.”

  “What’s that matter?”

  Baker shrugged. “Reckon it don’t.”

  “Well, you best just stay away from the river. I hear they’re trying to pre-sell half them homes before the bulldozers even get cranked. They don’t want no riff-raff hanging round the river, scaring off them buyers from Charlotte, Atlanta.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  ***

  Come midnight, Baker was huddled underneath the covered bridge, his bedroom window agape some mile distant, the satchel left in the fridge, too risky to wake his father.

  Diesel hulks roared and smoked on the far hillside, angular earthmovers with square white eyes. Baker heard more of them traverse the bridge above him, tank treads squeaking like reinforcements. Long drips of oil fell through the slats overhead. Tiny spouts of steam hissed on the cold black water.

  Baker was rigid with gooseflesh, his skin alien on him, the fine mist off the running snowmelt so cooling in daytime, so frigid at night, no sun to fight the cold. He’d not expected this, had gone barefoot as always, his black wife-beater worn as camouflage.

  A wooden fence was going up around the perimeter of the community, head-high and barbed ornately with gold-tipped spires.

  His mother had owned a parcel of land up there, a half acre was all, but green and unbuilt, willed to his father at her death. A short walk through sparse trees to the Moss firepit, the banjo and mandolin and yearn-filled voices of singing kin. He’d always thought he’d live there, but it had been sold alongside all the Moss land—his father’s doing.

  Baker palmed the hard square-cut piling beside him, the wood damp-dark over the gush of water, like a tide had risen when he wasn’t here. He held his hand there, flat-palmed, and felt the fine mist against his knuckles, the wood darkened by invisible flecks of spray. The wood was unsodden by so much whitewater, just as sturdy as the days it stood living from the earth, bark-bound and leafed.

  He patted the wood and slid his hand upward, against the grain, asking for splinters. His hand disappeared into the shadowed joinery overhead.

  ***

  Senior walked down the stairs stiff-jointed, skipping the loose and rickety steps where news of his going might groan into the upper reaches of the house and wake his boy. He snuck a six-pack from the back of the garage fridge and walked out toward his shed, through the yard, weaving between the broken white flagstones, the grass crackly and cool underneath his bare feet.

  The tin corrugation of the shed held a strange luster in the darkness, like it lagged behind the rest of the world, still reflecting the last glimmer of dusk.

  For most his days he’d been a dynamiter in the rock quarries all around the state. They would send him rappelling down sheer rock walls with his rope, his gear, his explosives. All day he’d drill one-inch holes in the naked exposure of rock, striated century on century, and neatly insert his sticks of TNT, running fuses from the blasting caps to the T-handled detonator on a far ledge. At end of day he’d watch his handiwork blow dust-white towers into the blue sky, eons of granite and shale blasted heavenward, broken, raining down hotly into the carved-out bowl of earth, there to await the trucks, the grinders, the stone-cutters.

  That was until his fall, his broken back. The doctors told him he’d been lucky his spinal cord wasn’t cut, no paralysis. He walked carefully now, stiff-spined, like something might still slip, some sharp-edged bone fragment of his past cutting his legs from underneath him.

  He opened the shed and stepped into the dark. Found the cache of candlestick dynamite hidden in a cardboard box labeled X-MAS LIGHTS. He started descending the path through the woods, three sticks in hand, the six-pack under his arm.

  ***

  Senior’s johnboat floated silently in the middle of the lake, the moon an ovate silver sheen across the surface. It did not touch the quadrant of black water he’d chosen.

  He slurped the last sip from a can and set the crushed aluminum in a bucket alongside its companions. He lit a cigarette and inhaled, then touched off a TNT fuse with the ash. It crackled like a sparkler. He tossed the stick over the side, the white spark haloing through the air. It hissed when it struck the surface, sank.

  Senior leaned to watch, one forearm shielding half his face. The dynamite had come with sixty second fuses, but he’d cut them down to fifteen, timed to blow like depth charges. In his day he could eye a fuse better than anyone. He’d won many a bet over fuses crackling nakedly against the white rock-dust of the quarries, cutting them by sight alone to burn a given number of seconds.

  He waited, watching the white spark descend deeper, deeper. Nearly disappear, the seconds down to one. The white seed exploded ball-shaped from the depths, outburst like a supernova, the lake suddenly electric with power, illuminated, the depths exposed white-lit a single second, the hull hovering suddenly high and weightless, as in air, over a sunken rowboat, tiny from such height, and schools of stunned fish, limbic and unswimming, their scales silver-struck.

  Senior sat back in the boat, looked heavenward, blinded. He closed his eyes and imagined the fish rising
all around him, white-bellied, their bladders ruptured, specking the black surface in droves. He palmed his way around the bottom of the boat, found the net.

  ***

  “Trout for breakfast?” asked Baker. “We never eat nothing but fish around here. Don’t seem natural.”

  Senior waved the greasy spatula in his direction.

  “Jesus Christ was a fisherman, boy. And I never heard him getting huffy about it.”

  “Well,” said Baker, “seems like we might could stretch for something different every once in awhile, what with all that land money.”

  Senior set the thick china plate down hard before his son, the silverware rattling on the table. Flaky pink meat bleeding a yellow pool of butter. Then he set down his own plate, hard too, and took his seat at the head of the table, Baker at his right hand, an empty chair across from him.

  “Let’s say grace,” said Senior.

  “Grace,” said Baker, picking up his fork.

  ***

  By nightfall Baker had already crossed the bridge onto the old Moss land. The workers were on dinner break, or maybe changing from dayshift to night. No one was hardly around. He walked up across the construction site and up the far slope to where the headstones shouldered out of the earth in broken formation, his mother’s the whitest.

  There were no pretties to grace them, no glass vases or new-cut flowers or notes hand-scribbled for the dead to read. He knelt over his mother’s grave bare-kneed, the earth still soft and dark, and the ground here felt warmer, safer, like some remainder of warmth and running blood infused the ground. Some spirit. He spread his hands flat to the dirt, soaking what he could through his palms, and then he clenched handfuls of the black dirt in his fists, let go and clenched more, his hands burrowing of their own accord, like animals for warmth or to escape some predator.

  “Hey, boy! Get away from there!”

  Baker bolted upright, black-handed, his eyes wide. A big man in a hardhat was barreling toward him, his finger pointed in judgment. Baker looked down at himself, his hands, the torn-up earth between his bare feet. He took off running down the slope, heard the man yelling behind him.