by Taylor Brown
“Yeah,” said Rory. “Me, too. Too bad they don’t stay this way longer.”
“It wouldn’t seem so special if they did. Scarce time is worth more. Pure economics, boy.”
“I reckon that’s true.”
“I know it is. Had a boy went overseas.” She blinked, gently touching her eyelash. “Every day I had with him was a treasure.”
“I’m sorry for your—”
She held up a huge hand, stopping him. The palm was pale, as if bleached, the lines red as cuts. She brought the hand down, slowly, and touched his arm.
“Shhh,” she whispered.
Rory felt his eyes burn, silvering, as if she’d transmitted something to him with that touch. With that silence.
CHAPTER 7
Granny sat in her old rocking chair, a black hank of yarn in her lap. The sun was an hour over the eastern ranges, and she was beginning to worry. Her grandson still wasn’t home. She tried not to think about it, about all the things that could go wrong. It wasn’t much different from the timber crews, she knew. All those tree-cutters with crushed limbs or broken backs, missing fingers or toes or eyes. Or the mills either, the fires that tore through the baled cotton of the blowing rooms like devil-spirits, the linty air that left men hacking up their own dead lungs. Death presided over these lands like an entity itself, a thousand shreds of the same dread spirit just looking for an opening, a wound or weakness of character. Once in, it was tough to get out.
She put down her needles and lit her pipe, the smoke curling warmly into her chest. Eustace was long gone, vanished back into the night out of which he came. He’d given his best, like always. She couldn’t say he didn’t try. Red-faced, sweating. Gnashing his teeth. So much effort. But there was one thing she’d learned in her years: some had the talent for it, and some simply didn’t. His prodigious belly didn’t help. It made it so hard to get the angles right. Things had only gotten worse as he grew older, rounder.
She knew if anyone did. The two of them had been at it for years now, ever since Rory was born. Eustace had returned from France without a scratch, none you could see, unlike Anson—her husband—who came home in a box. She always hated Eustace a little for that. In the years after the war, he quickly gained his reputation as a whiskeyman, a hard man. He’d broken loose jaws with those sledgelike fists of his, been chased all through the hills by revenuers and never caught. He’d built his army of stillers. But he never got too rough with her, even drunk. He made sure there was wood ricked along the house, whiskey in the jug. He kept her grandboy under his protection, and employed, with money no other cripple could make. And an old woman had needs. No, it wasn’t Eustace’s fault he was lucky. She just wished he was blessed with a bit more of certain things. Talent, for one, and at least one other thing besides.
Now that nephew of his: Eli. She wondered about that. Not an ounce of fat on him—all angles and tendons. Not much muscle, but what he had showed. She saw him looking sometimes, after he got into the jar. Sure, it was wicked. That never stopped her before.
She heard the Ford before she saw it. The big motor came growling up the mountain like some new breed of hellhound devised for the very terror of old women on their porches. When it rounded the bottom of the drive and came bumping over the ruts, she made a noise in her throat, squinting up at the sun.
Half past eleven now, if she wasn’t mistaken.
She rarely was.
Rory parked under the chestnut tree, killing the engine, and got out. She eyed him as he hobbled up onto the porch, his coat hooked two-fingered over one shoulder. She sucked her teeth.
“Hogs is hungry.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Chickens is, too.”
“It couldn’t be helped.”
She turned her head and spat on the planks.
“You ain’t a haint, are ye?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Ain’t knifed or shot?”
“No.”
“Ain’t in love?”
He hesitated. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Some mill town slut? What’s her name?”
“It wasn’t that,” he said. “It was some car trouble is all.”
She sniffed. “Out chasing split-tail, more likely.”
“I was at church, I’ll have you know. Someplace you wouldn’t know a thing about.”
“Shit,” she said. “The hell kind of church in them clothes?”
He didn’t say.
“I done told you about them preacher’s daughters—”
“Got-dammit!” He stomped toward the door. “Can’t a man get some peace?”
“Rory.”
He stopped, one hand on the door. She cocked her chin at him. He took a deep breath and blew it loud from his nose, then bent down and kissed her cheek. “You had a good night here, though?”
“I had better.”
“With Eustace?”
“With a corncob.”
He bolted upright, jaw open, eyes huge.
“Jesus Christ, woman!”
Granny shrugged and held up her yellow cob pipe—just an innocent old woman in a rocking chair. “What?”
“I ain’t believing it,” he said, pushing through the door. Then again, louder, from inside the house: “I ain’t even!”
Granny tapped her pipe against the heel of her hand, chuckling to herself.
* * *
Dusk he rose from the snarled mess of his bed, maneuvering himself to the edge. He pulled his trousers over his naked white legs, looping the suspenders over his shoulders one after the other. He lifted the booted limb from the floor, hefting the specious flesh in his arms. The little Colt automatic fit perfectly into its hollow, an organ newly implanted into his makeup. He slid his stump into the hollow socket that encased his knee and tightened the leather straps and buckles that secured him flesh to flesh and stood into the dimness of the room. The smears and scrapes of the windowglass glowed against the failing light. The edges of his mother’s paintings were curling slightly, as if the birds might lift from the wall, rise into the dark.
The whole house seemed to tremble beneath him as he walked, as if he had gained a hundred pounds in his time abroad. The china plates rattled on the walls; the framed photographs of his mother and grandfather chattered on the mantel. He stuck his head into the kitchen and told Granny he was going down to Eli’s. His stump was still sore. He was halfway to the car when he decided to walk. Spite, perhaps, or punishment.
The sky, domed violet, held the first bats, flitting sharp-winged through the ultimate light on their little sorties, and he walked the purpling meadow beneath them, watching them dart and hunt, their trajectories writ crooked and fleeting against the sky. He took the old trails of his youth, maintained in his absence by gray bands of deer, a nearly liquid quickening of power through the woods, and the ambling black bears and the lone remaining she-cat said to live upon the mountain, which would every couple of years climb upon the roof of a cabin and howl like a woman outraged. The trees engulfed him now, clutched against the remnant light, the dying leaves murmuring in their old tongue.
As a boy, seven or eight, he’d come down these trails to get Eli to take him hunting. He had his single-shot squirrel gun yoked over his shoulders, a gift from Eustace for his birthday, but Granny said he could never go hunting alone. He came out of the woods above Eli’s daddy’s garage, the windowpanes flashing blue and white. Knowing no better, he stood watching through the glass as Eli’s father taught his son to weld. The man would point here or there, one hand on the boy’s shoulder, and then the two of them would pull down their welding masks in unison, like knights before a joust. Rory watched the small suns birthed staccato at the points of their welding guns.
Soon he knew his mistake. Scars of light glowed in his vision, light-wounds that wormed and pulsed with pain when he closed his eyes. Soon his eyes began to burn, as if some bully had rubbed sand into them, and he could hardly blink for the grit against his eyelids. “Arc-eye,” sai
d the doctor. His lenses were flash-burned. For two weeks he had to wear eye patches, lifting them only enough to see his feet as he shuffled about the house. For two weeks he was afraid he would never see clearly again, the squirrels of the mountain forever safe. His vision lost, like his mother’s voice.
Rory came out of the woods above the garage like he had all those years before, the windows burning gold in the fallen dark. It was really just an old barn weathered gray, though Eli had had a concrete slab poured flat as a level over the tilted ground. The heavy oak doors hung on iron rollers, above them the hand-painted sign: HOWL MOTORS. Eli was on his creeper, elbow-deep in the underbelly of a ’51 Mercury painted the color of butter. Only his boots stuck out. Rory kicked one.
“Who’s that?”
“Like you ain’t heard me coming.”
Eli rolled out from under the car, his hands and face blacked like a man coughed up out of the mines. He wiped his face with a rag that looked even filthier than the rest of him.
“Reach me those cigarettes, would you?”
Rory gave him the pack of Lucky Strikes sitting on a nearby stool, helping himself to one before he handed them over.
“You’re welcome,” said Eli. He lit his without getting up from the creeper. He pressed his head back and blew smoke. “Heard you run into some trouble last night.”
“You’re worse for gossip than Granny is.”
Eli flicked a little ash from his beard. The dry tangles and snarls looked ripe for a brushfire.
“It’s a lot of cars coming in and out of here, each with a flopping mouth aboard. So, you think it was those Muldoons behind it?”
Rory pulled the stool close, the castors squeaking and wobbling across the floor. He ashed his cigarette between his knees with a flick of the thumb.
“I don’t suspect they’ll be overanxious to admit it.”
“Not after how it panned out,” said Eli. “Maybe that Cooley boy hired them for it.”
“He seems like a real piece of work.”
“Not the sharpest,” said Eli. “But the little son-bitch makes up for it in meanness, is what I hear. They say he got bit by a copperhead when he was eight. Swelled up like a weather balloon. Ain’t been right since. Killed a boy over in Linville last year sold him a lame-dick coondog he wanted for breeding. Got off on a self-defense but I don’t know. Went and throwed the dog off a bridge is what I’m told.” Eli nodded, still flat on his back, watching his smoke curl up toward the ceiling. “There’s got to be something bad-wrong with somebody like that, like from birth.”
“I knew a few over there. Mean-made.”
Eli rolled up on one elbow, looking at him. “In Korea?”
Rory nodded.
“What was it like?” asked Eli.
Rory looked down at the cigarette between his fingers, burning short. He chewed his lip.
“Most I could say is, it was a place where you wanted all those mean-made sons of bitches on your own side, standing behind you. The meanest ones. The sickest. Over there, bad was good.”
“Damn,” said Eli. “That’s heavy.”
“Yeah.”
“You were scared?”
“All the time.”
Eli nodded.
“Well, this Cooley boy, he ain’t one to turn your back on. Runs that Hudson in the modified class down at the speedway. Trips it two, three times a week, too. Those Muldoons been in tight with the Sheriff since you were gone.”
“What about this new revenue man from Washington?”
Eli’s cigarette stuck upright from his mouth, smoking like a tiny chimney.
“Kingman’s his name. They say he done a heavy job drying out a couple counties up in Virginia. Ain’t too fussy about who gets hurt. Ex-army, some say. Special services and that.” Eli shook his head. “Seems you come home at one hell of a time.”
Rory dropped his cigarette on the floor, toed it out with his good foot.
“Least I am home,” he said. “Mostly.”
CHAPTER 8
He ascended the mountain in darkness, no lamplight, a world black and silver and blue. The moon lay scattered through the woods in blades, glowing palely, the wind rising now and again to moan through the trees. The trail scrawled ever upward, toward the looming darkness of the mountain’s peak. Above it all the sea of night, the strange ornamentation of stars.
He found Granny on the porch, asleep. Her needles crossed in the little depression between her knees, the ball of yarn partly unspooled between her big man-boots. The pipe lay on the table beside her, a smatter of ash spilled from the fire-bowl. Her chin sat on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. He gathered her up in his arms, light as a girl, and carried her inside to her room. He covered her in her old handed-down quilt. The outer layers were burnished to a luster over decades of sleeping flesh, the inner batting composed of older blankets still. He tucked it under her feet, her elbows and shoulders, and went out into the den and opened the door of the woodstove. A mouth of red coals. He added two lengths of the seasoned white oak they kept stacked on the porch, hot-burning wood for cold nights, and stoked it to a fury before stepping outside.
There was a storm rolling in out of the west. He could hear it on the far side of the mountain, crashing like the ghost of an ocean against the brutal faces of granite. He stepped off the porch and looked up toward the summit. The sky flared silver-white, a momentary brilliance against which the mountain stood jagged and black, a sentinel against the snows and rains borne out of the corduroyed ridges and valleys to the west. The wind came skirling down the mountain, cutting cold across the meadow, and he could not help but remember Korea. The Chosin Reservoir, the fall of 1950. The most brutal landscape you could imagine, just snow and rocks and scorched trees among the frozen ranges, the sharp thrusts of the Toktong and Funchilin passes. A country seemingly made for men to die in.
They did.
A cold front descended from Siberia, thirty-five below, and 67,000 Chinese infantry night-marched from Manchuria. The 1st Marine Division wasn’t ready for either. Rory was there for all seventeen days of it. All seventeen nights. When the illumination rounds lit up the sky, you could see the Chinese coming down the hillsides, rising out of the gullies and trenches, swarming like hornets from a ground-nest. Then darkness, flashes, screams. In the morning, the ridges would be weltered black, the blood hard as stone. The Marines built parapets out of the frozen bodies and waited for the coming night. When the cold jammed their weapons, they fought with knives and shovels and rocks. The Chinese infantry were young, and they didn’t wear helmets.
Rory’s first kill was the one he remembered most, the one that still came to him in his sleep. He and Sato and four others were bunched behind a rocky outcrop at the edge of a small ravine. The companies were blasted to pieces across the hillsides, huddled wherever they could form a defense. It was after midnight and most of their rifles were useless, the gun oil frozen in the bolts, the firing pins stuck. They heard the whistles of the Chinese officers and watched the enemy infantry rise from cover to charge. They came flooding down the far slope, their burp-guns making star-shaped flashes in the night, their ranks bristling with knives and staves and stones. The orange tracer rounds of the heavy machine guns chewed into them, their bodies splitting and bursting in pink clouds and screams. Some of them who tried to retreat back up the slope were gunned down by their own officers, the rest climbing over the dead gathered all strange-struck in the creek bottom, a tangled nest of corpses, then crawling their way up toward the dug-in Marines.
Rory had his entrenching tool ready. He’d spent the day sharpening it against a rock. He rolled onto his back, against the outcrop, with the tool clutched close against his chest. He looked up at Sato, who would give them the sign to attack. All day, sharpening their tools, they’d discussed the vacation they would take after the war. Neither had ever been to the beach. They would go to Daytona, Florida, to watch the stock car races on the Beach and Road Course, where cars thundered down two miles o
f Highway A1A before sliding sideways onto the beach, blasting back up the sands. They would book a room at the mint-green Streamline Hotel and drink cocktails at the rooftop Ebony Club. The sun would turn them golden; it would warm the marrow of their bones. They would hardly remember what it was like to be cold. They talked and talked, shivering, scraping their shovels into spears.
Sato raised his head over the ledge to check the advance. His forehead split open, his helmet leaping away with a ring. Rory turned and raised up on his knees, the shovel above his head, and looked down. There was a Chinese infantryman on his belly below him, looking up open-mouthed, wide-eyed. A boy, really. Surprised at what he’d done. Rory jammed the pointed shovel into the very top of the boy’s skull. He was surprised at how easily it punched through that bony crown, darkening the fur hat with goo. He didn’t think it would be that easy. He pulled the boy’s burp-gun from underneath him and sprayed it into the others streaming up the slope, praying it wouldn’t jam. When the drum magazine was empty, he went back to the shovel.
There were others after that, men or boys killed up close, but he couldn’t remember them. Not well. They all looked the same in his mind. He thought of that as a great blessing. He didn’t think he could have held them all inside him without busting. He could only remember Sato, his head riven like stone. There was hardly any blood; it froze inside his skull. They wanted to bury him, but the ground was too hard.
Three days later, at dawn, a lone stick grenade came flying over the line, wood-handled like a pepper grinder. It bounced once on the frozen earth, hovering over its own shadow, and Rory hurled himself behind a snowbank. The world shattered, its white-hot fragments screaming through his softest parts. He did not know there was such pain in the world. He thought his leg was gone.
Not yet.
He lay in ringing silence, screaming, and a corpsman appeared white-faced above him, a morphine syrette between his teeth. The corpsmen were storing them under their tongues to prevent them from freezing. The man bobbed over Rory’s leg, shaking his head. Rory made the mistake of lifting his head, of looking at the bloodied wreck of meat and leather that used to be his foot. He turned his head, sick at what he’d become.