by Taylor Brown
The corpsman took the syrette from his mouth. He removed the clear plastic hood and punched through the seal with the loop pin. A bulb of liquid stood atop the needle. He opened Rory’s overcoat and pulled up the layers of sweaters and shirts to reveal a white sliver of belly. He pinched the skin and slid the needle in sideways, squeezing the soft tube that held the drug. Then he put back Rory’s clothes and buttoned his coat and pinned the emptied syrette to his collar. He went about muffling the wound in bandages and gauze, boot and all, shouting it was all he could do.
When the morphine hit, it was a dark wave out of that place. Rory was there and then he wasn’t. The pain seemed a long way off, a thing that throbbed its importance thickly, dully, in a world doing the same, filled with muted pops and screams. He could close his eyes and see the stone Buddha sitting cross-legged in the temple by the stream. The figure’s right hand was held up, palm facing out, the fingers slightly curved, as if to touch a man’s forehead. Sato’s voice in the darkness.
Abhaya mudra. The gesture of fearlessness. The Buddha used it to calm the drunken bull elephant Nalagiri, loosed by a jealous monk to kill him.
A pair of dog tags dangled from the Buddha’s neck. Rifles leaned against his shoulder. Someone had stuck a half-smoked cigarette through the fingers of his opposite hand. Rory held his gaze on the raised palm, which glowed by candlelight, the fingers flickering like small tongues of flame.
The morphine lasted him two hours, maybe three, and then the pain was back and the cold, which were one and they were everything. The corpsman had sat him against a bank with the other wounded, their collars pinned with empty syrettes. He could hear their moans and whimpers, their stiff silences. The boy next to him had been shot in the gut. It was all in his lap like a treasure he’d lost, frozen black. The boy held his arm, then his hand, until he didn’t.
It was getting dark. Rory was in better shape than many of the others. Someone came by and gave him an officer’s Colt. He used it that night, then others, the long nights of fear when the Chinese kept coming in wave on wave. He used it again and again. The boys from the line would come by at dusk to give him new magazines for the gun, scavenged from officers killed in the night. Days later reinforcements broke through from the south, and so began the retreat, the long road of ice to the port of Hungnam, the sea. A goat path, really, sunk between ridges that twinkled and popped with enemy fire. Hell Fire Valley. They strapped him to the hood of a jeep alongside men less lucky. Dead. He knew he wasn’t one of them. He hurt too much.
II. HALF-MOON, WANING
They ate lunch together each day in the little Carnegie library, flanked by pebbled spines and gold-leafed names. Connor did most of the talking. He was full of knowledge. Words seemed to beat through his blood. His passion was birds.
—Did you know the bee hummingbird weighs less than a penny? Its heart can beat over one thousand times per minute.
—Yesterday I spotted a great grey shrike, rare for this part of the country. Its scientific name means “sentinel butcher.” Know why? It impales uneaten prey on thorns!
—Did you know “nuthatch” is a corruption of “nuthack”? Because the birds wedge nuts and seeds in tree bark and hammer them open?
Bonni listened to this strange specimen of boy, feasting on his words. At school, he would lift his binoculars to his eyes, sighting songbirds or kites that came swooping down into the schoolyard. The teachers said nothing, because he could answer any question they might ask.
The loggers’ sons snickered and elbowed one another, their faces red-crusted with pimples, but they were careful how they spoke to him. A legend followed in his wake. The first day of high school, when one of the bullies cornered him, Connor’s right arm shot expertly into the boy’s nose, breaking it. A beard of blood appeared, bright as Christmas.
His father had been a Golden Gloves champion up north, they whispered. He trained the boy in their basement every morning, pushing him through endless rounds of push-ups and punches, the jump rope and speed bag.
After that, Connor wore the cloak of legend. Not even the bullies would touch him.
CHAPTER 9
He had to see her again. It was like a sickness in his blood, some kind of infection planted within him by the green of her eyes. The sun was dawning, the first frost crackling beneath his boots. The little meadow gleamed, the blades of grass iced jagged under the cold hard light. Rory was carrying a pail of chestnuts gathered from beneath the tree in the yard, limping his way to the hog-house. People said there was nothing sweeter than chestnut-fattened hogmeat, so seldom tasted since the blight. The thought seemed ash on Rory’s tongue. There could be nothing so sweet as the taste of the girl’s mouth, and he did not even know her name.
She was seared in, branded against the backs of his eyelids. He could close his eyes and see her as clearly as someone he’d known a lifetime. He could see her as clearly as he could see his own mother, whose eyes were feathered with faint lines, whose throat would catch, showing its tendons, when she felt something strong, when the words seemed almost to come. He could see her as clearly as he could see Granny, those proud cheeks and razor eyes, those crow’s-feet deep as the creeks that ran down the mountain. He could see the girl’s face as clearly as all that, clean as crabapple flesh. Her wide mouth and nude lips. The broad thumbprint beneath the slight upturn of her nose. The green eyes, so bright.
The big sow grunted happily at his arrival. She was a crossbred Duroc, rust-colored, with floppy ears and a corkscrewed tail, gentle as a two-barrel Lincoln. Her bulk quivered as he poured the flood of chestnuts into her pen.
“Eat up, sweet girl. Frost on the ground, you know what that means.”
The chestnuts disappeared beneath her snout two and three at a time, burrs and all, and the two smaller hogs rooted under and around her legs and mouth. He left them to their meal and headed to the chicken coop on the back side of the house, carrying the feeding pail from the crook of a knuckle. The big bandy-legged Java cock, Commandant, was already marching around on the icy ground, impervious to the cold, having crowed the sun’s rise. His feathers were mottled black and white, like a black chicken speckled with snowfall, and he had a cockscomb and wattles of the bloodiest red. He looked to be sizing up Rory for breakfast. Rory grinned.
“Feeling froggy, you old bastard?”
He cast some of the grain before the cock, still grinning, and soon the hens came waddling from the coop. They looked like nothing so much as fat women in overlarge skirts, clucking and gossiping as they pecked the ground. Commandant, king bigamist of the lot, stamped among them, proud-chested like the little general he was.
Rory set the empty pail aside and hobbled back up to the house. The car sat before the porch in a caul of dew-ice, like some gift from the night, and Granny was out in her rocker, smoke curling about her face. Soon a car or mule would show, perhaps someone simply walking, pilgrims come up the mountain for the potions she made. The teas and poultices, the remedies for stiff joints and aching heads, for lax members or empty wombs, for seed spilled in the wrong fields of a whiskey-bent night. How she’d come to know such arts was something of a mystery. It was not handed down simply blood to blood, for the keepers were more often heirless widows or lone hermit-folk foresworn of the outer world. Rory only knew that when he was little Granny had gone deep into the mountains on her own, and she’d come back weeks later with the trove of knowledge she now carried, as if it had been imparted into her very blood or cells. He wondered if she had anything for the forgetting of green-eyed girls, some elixir that burned them right out of you. If she did, he wondered would he willingly drink it. He wasn’t so sure he would.
He climbed up onto the porch and sat next to her. She leaned back in her rocker and a blue wisp curled from the corner of her mouth. That smoke had spunk, he knew, and sometimes sitting next to her he could feel it. Problem was, he liked it.
She looked at him.
“Want you some of this?” She held out the pipe.
&
nbsp; “You know I don’t.”
She shrugged. “Might do you some good.”
“Good for what?”
“For whatever it is happened the other night.”
“Shit.”
“I ain’t too old to lay a switch on that ass.”
Rory shook his head and rolled his eyes, looking up. The smoke was coiling itself toward the blue planks of the overhung roof. Haint blue, to keep the spirits out. They didn’t like to cross water, Granny said, and they were none too smart besides. He closed his eyes, opened them. There before him was the chestnut tree, myriad-glinted in the new sun. Another spirit-catcher, or so she said. He lit a Lucky Strike and watched it. The bottles shifted in the wind, the crown sparkled. Trees. You thought they were one shape, a tall stem snaked heavenward for sun, but you forgot what was below the surface, reaching into the dark earth. The cold earth. Reaching.
He shook his head and stood.
“That damn smoke.”
* * *
Saturday he was rolling down out of the mountains at dusk, night welling up from the slanted earth like a tide. He had a full pack of cigarettes in his pocket and a sandwich in an old poke on the passenger seat. The road scrawled its way through crooked arcades of hardwoods, jagged in some places, sweeping in others. The logging trucks were done for the day and he drove in third gear, the gravel tinny against the undercarriage. The harsh planes of the mountains, the geometric tracings of the ridges slowly gave way to foothills. Gentler, softer. Rolling green balds spotted here or there with shaggy-coated cattle, some horses, all of them circumscribed in palings and fence-wire. Life seemed easier here. The soil deeper, richer. There were scarce hollers or coves to hide in; it didn’t seem you had to. He turned onto an unpaved road, then another, angling his way across the darkening countryside, avoiding the little hamlets and yellow-lit farmhouses when he could.
He was running the speed limit, the big motor hardly working, when he crested a small rise and saw at the bottom of the hill a sign that read: DRINK CHEERWINE. He thought of the cherry-flavored pop, the way it bubbled bloodred on your tongue. His flesh felt full of such stuff tonight, a red elation just beneath his skin. A wildness, wanting out. He wondered whether he would see the jade-eyed girl. Whether her eyes could quell him. He wondered if there was something wrong with him. Some madness. His heart felt too big for his ribs, inflamed, as if his blood might jump his skin. He breathed in, deep, thinking of cool air, of silence and stone.
He was exhaling, slowly, when he passed the billboard. A white sedan sat hunkered in the shadows, clean and undented. A government car. The bright ray of a spotlight leapt across the night, filling the coupe. Everything burned the brightest white, exposed, as if lightning-struck, and Rory clenched his jaw, unbreathing. One second, two. Nothing. Then came the cherry-red throb of light in the rearview mirror, the long wail of the siren winding up.
Rory’s body leapt to action, as if loosed. He stomped the clutch and downshifted, waking the big motor with his foot. The car shuddered, in awe of itself, then squatted and went. He could hear the tiny scream of the supercharger spooling up, the exhaust racketing through the night. He reached under the dashboard, cutting the taillights with a hidden switch.
He knew this road.
He needed to get off of it.
He crossed the yellow line through a sweeping curve that made the tires howl. He was back up into third now, pushing ninety, when he crossed a flat bridge over a creek, the springs slamming over the joints, and he saw what he was looking for: a red sweep of clay into the road. He had his hands at the bottom of the wheel, palms up, just for this. He braked in hard bursts, to keep the tires from skidding, then hove the big wheel hard over with one hand, downshifting with the other, rotating the car more than ninety degrees back into a firebreak that hit the road at a diagonal.
The road was dry and red. The revenuer’s headlights smoked in the whirling dust he made, angry meteors trying to keep up. Failing. They grew smaller, fainter, their powers of illumination weakening under his foot. The road thrust its way through the night, a long red wound in the earth, and Rory slid neatly through the turns, between long stands of unfelled timber, the motor shouting its power through the hickories and oaks. He rounded a curve and stared head-on into a parked logging truck, the big washboard grille glaring madly out of the darkness, big as anything. He cranked the wheel hard, sliding just alongside it. Then the trees broke away, the world opened up. Just stumps in every direction like the aftermath of a bombing run, the night arcing hugely over it all. Earthmoving machines flared out of the headlights to either side, silent as some species of great, angular giants slumbering in the wilderness.
Then trees again, and, behind him, no lights.
* * *
“I didn’t know them boys was out there,” she said. “Honest.”
Rory upended the crate he was holding, the jars bursting on the floor at Madame Erma’s feet. Between the two of them a vicious wreckage of shards and slivers, a hundred gleaming teeth.
“Next time you walk on it.”
The money was already in his back pocket. The whiskey-filled air burned like nitro in his lungs, a lighter’s click from going boom. He turned to go, his wooden foot prodding the one jar left intact. He bent and picked it up.
He sat at the wheel of the coupe, the jar cozied between his legs, the church pulsing before him. Bodies, backlit, jumped darkly against the glowing windows, shadow-figures thrown as if by cave fire. The walls of the place fairly shook, a gutbucket throb he could feel in his chest. The sandwich was gone, a few crumbs in his lap. He rubbed the ancient poke between his fingers, the brown paper soft-worn as new velvet. Probably Granny May had eaten lunches from this bag, in school. She wouldn’t throw out a thing. He set it aside and sipped again from the jar, the whiskey rolling white-hot down his throat. He looked at his hand: the nails hard and square, the day’s grime yet unknifed from their quicks. He opened his folding blade with a click.
He sipped as he pared his nails. He could feel the whiskey working in him, in his temples and teeth. A mild roar, like unseen whitewater. Distant falls. He was breathing through his mouth. His nails clerk-clean, pale as little moons. He was not very afraid.
He belched through his teeth.
He had to piss.
He got out of the car and set the jar on the roof, the half-drunk whiskey slopping back and forth. He peed in the grass, then started walking toward the church, drawn toward it like a flame.
* * *
He peeked through the door. Inside they were dancing, heads tilted back, mouths open. Some of them palsied, seizing, shaken as if by unseen hands. Their arms held in the air before them, twirling, the soles of their broken loafers and pumps thumping on the stained concrete. They sang, or simply said the word again and again: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
Rory didn’t see the girl. He opened the door a fraction wider for a better look. An older woman, standing near, turned and saw him. She reached through the door and took his hand, pulling him into the room, the double-bay garage that held them. The lights seemed to flicker or pulse above him, maybe it was the fluorescents. The people around him were sweating. They shone under the lights—their faces, their chests, their hands—as if glazed in oil. Their eyes were mashed tight or opened wide to worlds he did not know. Their faces so round, like the stone idols of Korea, sitting cross-legged in their thrones of fire. The music charged through them, their bodies jerking as if lightning-struck, the guitar whanging and crackling through the air like raw electricity. He felt his own body livened, his legs moving as if of their own accord. Slow at first then quickening, his blood rising, his body light. His foot there, there, there—banging the floor in time.
Before he knew it he was dancing, his boots stomping and jumping like black-shined pistons, his arm-moves wild and unplanned. The throng leapt and trembled on every side of him, singly and together. A roaring of flesh. A living fire. He was lost among them, weightless. A part of them, inseparate. He saw the girl. She w
as near the front, her eyes closed. She was speaking a language he’d never heard, to a God he’d never known. He had the sense of being in a shielded chamber, a fortress of gold and light, and everyone was beautiful, and he loved them all. He didn’t know what place it was, whether it was inside him or out. He didn’t care.
He closed his eyes, opened them.
A little boy, ten, maybe, came in the door and ran down the aisle between folding chairs. His forearm had a big streak of grease on it. The pastor bent down, and the boy cupped a hand to his ear. The man looked up, straight at Rory. Looked with one of his eyes, at least. The other eye stared off in its own direction.
Lazy, perhaps. Or made of glass.
CHAPTER 10
Eustace rose against the ceiling of the bedroom. His weight sent a tremor through the cabin, rattling the bottles and crockery. He looped the galluses of his overalls over the mountains of his shoulders. Granny watched him from the bed, scratching a match for the cigarette she’d just rolled. This was the only time she smoked tobacco.
“What you know about these Muldoons?”
Eustace grunted, putting on his boots.
“Upstarts out of Linville, more balls than cock. Run radiator-whiskey bust your head like a watermelon.”
“You got truck with them?”
“What’s it to you?”
“The youngest, Cooley, come by for a potion couple weeks back. Snakes crawling through the head, that one.”
“Every litter’s got one.”
“Who was it in yours?”
“Who you think?”
“You got Rory protected when he’s down there?”