Gods of Howl Mountain

by Taylor Brown

  Alvin looked up the hall, down. Pebbled-glass doors, a drinking fountain, activity sheets curling on the walls.

  “You already paid this month.”

  “This is something extra. You got any ex–prison guards on staff?”

  Alvin slid the envelope into the pocket of his smock.

  “One or two.”

  “They work in Mama’s ward?”

  “No.”

  “I want you to keep an extra-special watch on them for me. Make sure they don’t try and get near her. Can you do that?”

  Alvin tapped his pocket.

  “For this I can.”

  Rory nodded.

  “You ever wonder where that money comes from?”

  “I’m not the curious type.”

  “That’s good. But there’s one thing I want to make clear. You let something happen to her in here, you better start watching for me. I’ll be the one shows up with a machine gun. You ain’t seen crazy till then.”

  Alvin raised his hands.

  “Hey now, there’s no need for any of that.”

  “You better hope not.”

  * * *

  That night he lay a long time in bed thinking of the Sheriff. He considered the man’s every feature from memory, like he would a girl’s. The sharpness of his face, carved as if with a knife. The veins that reached into his collar like roots, bulged like they might burst, the smile lines so neatly creased. This king of the valley. This killer. Rory could see himself reflected in the twin mirrors of the man’s glasses. He wondered if the man saw Connor Gaston in his face, risen again. The mystery of blood, carried through the long dark of the womb. He wondered would the man be surprised when his fate revealed itself, like that Chinese infantryman under Rory’s shovel. Or would he seem only to expect it, as if he’d seen it coming long ago, a seed sprung into man?

  * * *

  Granny watched him with one eye, tapping her pipe against the heel of her hand. A storm hung throbbing over the valleys to the east, silent from this distance. Rory sat in the rocker beside her, watching, a jar held nearly untasted between his black-stained hands. His eyes were faraway, coal-dark save reflected veins of lightning. He seemed colder since his night on the mountain, more remote, as if he’d never really come down.

  She cleared her throat.

  “How’s the car coming?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “How about that town girl, what’s-her-name?”

  “Christine,” he said. “Haven’t seen her.”

  “Them young ones, you got to keep ’em keen. She don’t see you for too long, she’s likely to find another buck.”

  “Yeah.”

  Granny looked down at the thin cuts that seamed her arms. They were scabbing now, the flesh already forgetting her dash through the woods even if the rest of her hadn’t. She felt tangled yet in brambles, her world turned turvy, her bones heavy.

  “You wouldn’t believe who come by the house today while you were down at Eli’s. Couple of them housewives from the church, wondering could they buy some that butter I put in the cake. Might come a day it ain’t just whiskey you’re hauling to them town-people.”

  “Might.”

  She could feel him slipping out of her grasp. Like Bonni had. She looked down at her hands. They were so old now, the gnarling hands of a crone. She began to reach for her pipe.

  “You ever wonder who done it?”

  Granny stopped, pipe in hand, and looked at him.

  “Every day.”

  Rory sipped from the jar, keeping his gaze leveled on the far-off ridges, the blue wires of lightning racing above them.

  “Somebody like that, seems they must have something in them, some evil none of the rest of us got.”

  Granny looked at him, then out at the darkened mountains, the leaves all browned or fallen. The bottles jingled in the spirit tree, storm-livened, as if to tell her something.

  “More the opposite, I think. It’s that they’re missing something. They was born without it and won’t never have it. They don’t even know to look.”

  Rory squinted as if he’d caught sight of something in the distance, a lone bird hanging tiny and dark against the storm.

  “Sure,” he said. “That could be it.” He took another sip from the jar, swallowed with his mouth open. “Could be I got some of that in me. Some hollow. Like those bottles up there, just waiting for whatever evilness happens past.”

  “You don’t.”

  She flashed her eyes at him, to light her words, but he was looking at the glass jar in his hand. She saw the veins standing from his arm, risen like tiny worms or snakes.

  “Could be I was filled up once, but it evaporated. Got poured out, maybe.” He looked out at the mountains, so sharp and black. His hand was shaking, like he might crush the jar in his hand. “Or froze.”

  “Rory,” she said. “Rory.” He looked at her, but slowly. She pointed her pipe at him. “It didn’t, son. It had, you wouldn’t be asking. That there’s proof enough.”

  He looked away, back to the coming storm, his jaw locked shut.

  * * *

  Rory sat behind the wheel of his car, the rain hammering the roof, a barrage of tiny lead mallets. He was watching her house. In the wet night, the bungalow glowed like a lantern, a refuge of warmth and light. The mongrel dog lay beneath the porch steps, his chin on his paws, watching the sky come down. On Rory’s knee sat a store-bought steak still wrapped in butcher paper. In his mind a dim plan to feed the dog, then shimmy the drainpipe and knock on her window. He would apologize. In this vision of the future she would let him into her room. She would be waiting for him, knowing he would come. She would pull him through the window, shaking, and sit him on her bed, peeling away the wet clothes that kept him so cold. She would see his leg. She would unbuckle the straps, and she would see the place that shamed him, the giant elbow where the rest of his leg should be. This appendage he kept hidden like a vestigial tail or pair of webbed feet. The flesh of it uneven, the skin scarred, as if shaped by the hands of an amateur potter.

  She would touch him there.

  I’ll sew you a sock, she would say. So it won’t chafe.

  The stone of his heart would burst into flame. They would be a knot of flesh on her bed, trying every which way to bind themselves tighter, harder, their mouths bit shut so the house wouldn’t hear.

  Now a shape rose against the yellow light of her window. He blinked, watching. He wondered whether a younger Sheriff had watched his mother from such a vantage, devising his own plan of possession. Revenge. Cutting eyeholes in a sackcloth hood, loading a set of ax-handles in his trunk. Rory tried to think of what he would say to Christine, but the words would not come. They were shapeless stones in his mouth, indecipherable syllables like the language of tongues. Some things were too big to be spoken. Too terrible or sweet. No words could hold them. Only silence seemed honest.

  Slowly he unwrapped the butcher paper, the hunk of meat sitting bright and bloody in his hand. It seemed almost too red, like store-bought beef always did, like some iron-rich ore from the earth’s crust. He rolled down the window and tossed it, high and arcing. The mongrel came tearing from under the porch, arriving just after the steak splashed into the yard. He stood slunk-shouldered in the rain, knifing through the offering. Rory turned and slid behind the wheel. He fired the engine and throttled gently away.

  CHAPTER 26

  The infield of Gumtree Speedway shone beneath the floodlights, a city of steel and chrome and glass that rattled and quaked. Grease-faced men bent beneath raised hoods, tuning and feeding the iron hearts bolted in their keeps. The motors idled and raced by turn, alive with power, speaking in their own cruel tongue. The air fairly growled above them, the streamers snapping in the wind, the track red as a wound in the earth.

  Rory pulled them into an open slot and cut the engine, stepping out. The air stung his nostrils, that heady mix of burnt rubber and gasoline that smelled like speed or war. They’d been working since sunup o
n the car. It wore bigger rubber in the rear now, tires so meaty and new you could almost eat them, and a triangular screen of chicken wire covered the nose, protecting the radiator from flying debris. The window glass was gone, along with the liquor tank and bulletproof plates, and the headlights each wore a black X of tape to keep them from shattering. Rory had bought a surplus flight helmet and pair of tank commander’s goggles from the Army-Navy store in Boone. He wondered if they might have been Big Carling’s once.

  They knelt beside the car with a roll of white tape, affixing their race number to each of the doors. Other drivers cruised past in their race machines, spitting or nodding as they went. Rory worked to line up his numbers with the doorjambs and body lines, cataloging the most offensive of the squinters as they passed, the ones most likely to give him trouble on the track. Anything to distract him from the plot humming darkly in his mind. The thought of what he was going to do tomorrow night. What had to be done.

  Soon he heard footsteps come thumping along the ground. He looked up to see Cooley Muldoon with a kinsman on either side of him, their cheeks pouched with chaw. The boy spat in the grass.

  “Maybe you ain’t as yellow as I thought, Docherty. Or should I say chicken.”

  Rory rose, wiping his hands on the front of his trousers.

  “How’s your windshield?”

  “Oh, had to get me a new one this week. Somebody threw a rock at it.”

  Rory nodded.

  “You don’t say? Some arm. Too bad they didn’t aim a little to the right.”

  Cooley shrugged.

  “Bad for you, maybe.”

  Rory stepped closer to the three men. Eli watched him from across the car, eyes white in his purpled face.

  “I come to give you a shot in return. That’s what you want, ain’t it?”

  “Christmas come early, far as I’m concerned.”

  “I want this to be the end of it then. Whatever happens out there, it’s peace between the two of us after.”

  “If there is two of us after.”

  Rory nodded. “If. And if there isn’t, you let alone my kin.” He extended his hand.

  Cooley shook hands with a lopsided grin.

  “It’s warm where you’re going, Docherty.”

  “You’re wrong there, brother.” Rory shook his head. “It’s cold.”

  Cooley cocked his head, confused, but Rory was already turning back to the car.

  They had just finished taping the numbers onto the doors when a race official showed up. He had a seed cap perched high atop his head, a clipboard in his hand.

  “Qualifying,” he said. “Ten minutes.”

  Eli began double-checking tire pressures and lug nuts and hose clamps, whatever he could get his hands on. He fiddled under the hood, holding his breath, letting it out in stressed little chuffs like a steam engine. Things rattled and clanked under there, accompanied by grumble and cuss. He stood finally, gripping the squirrel’s tail of his beard in one fist.

  “Ready.”

  Rory nodded, donning his flight helmet and goggles. He fired the big motor and rumbled out of their spot, between the parked cars, and onto the pit lane. An official waved him on, and he throttled the car out onto the straight. It was three times the width of the country lanes that kept him fed, banked like a bowl to keep the cars from flying out. A road looped endlessly back on itself. In the flag stand stood three old men with stopwatches, their faces squinted and pouched beneath ratty newsboy caps. The wheezing gods of horse and dog and automobile tracks, meting out judgment with yellow thumbs. Rory stepped hard into the machine, the ambulance motor throating its power, the tires chewing for traction. He tore around the track in big billowing circles, casting the car sidelong through the turns, ripping a red tornado of dust from the track like some kind of clock-crazed fool.

  He qualified seventh out of twenty-seven racers, impressive for a street-legal liquor car. When he rolled back to their parking spot, the motor thumping, the looks of the other drivers said as much. Eli was beside himself. He thrust his arms over his head and whooped like a savage, raining whiskey on himself. He licked it off his face and pushed himself through the open window and kissed Rory on the cheek.

  “Hot damn!”

  Rory cut the motor.

  “It will be a whole other thing with other cars on the track.”

  Eli wasn’t listening. He was caressing Maybelline’s swelled fender, a look of awe on his face.

  * * *

  The moon rose against a black sky, imperfectly round, not full but nearly. It looked chunked from ice; the stars, too. The stands were full despite the cold, the spectators sitting with blankets over their knees and mittens on their hands, drinking whiskey and honey steaming from metal thermoses. Rory fit his helmet. It was cue-ball white, like those the jet pilots wore in their fighters over Korea. He fastened the chinstrap and left the goggles hanging at his throat to prevent them from fogging.

  The infield was alive with open-class racers making their way to the grid. Modifieds. They seemed clumsy at such speed, each throbbing and jerking like something on a leash, not built for going slow. Their idles unsteady, irregular, on the edge of stalling—the sound of hot motors that lived at speed. Rory got in and cranked the engine. It turned over twice and caught, roaring, the big pistons chugging in the block. He rapped the throttle and the car shivered on its springs, torqued clockwise, the supercharger whining under the hood. He slid the gearshift into first. Eli put one hand on the roof and looked in, a jar of whiskey curled against his chest, his breath near flammable.

  “You break any more than a leg out there, I’ll shoot myself and whup your ass in hell.”

  They clasped hands. Rory tried to pull his away but Eli wouldn’t let go, not yet, staring home his words.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “I know,” said Rory.

  He let out the clutch, easing the car forward, their arms tautening until they snapped apart. He rolled out of their spot, between rows of jacked-up machines, making toward the starting line. The car grumbled as it went, such violence waiting to be loosed.

  The cars quaked and fumed on the grid, junkyard resurrections professing allegiance to car lots or wrecking yards or speed shops, missing hoods or doors or fenders, their bodies crinkled and soldered. The drivers sat masked and inhuman as their cars beat ugly and loud beneath them, throbbing in place. A green Hudson coupe sat on pole.

  Cooley.

  Rory pulled the goggles over his eyes, drew the bandanna over his mouth. He watched the flag stand, keeping his grip light on the wheel. The world trembled.

  Green.

  He jumped off the line, roaring blind through sudden dust, and he thought he should let off the throttle but didn’t. He planted it, sliding wildly in that red-gone world, braced to wreck, and then he was out of it under the bright lights, booming toward the first turn, the machines stretching into a long steely chain behind him. The cars ahead of him broke into the turn, one after another, wheeling like pinballs into a slot, and then he was flying tail-out through the corner himself, steered opposite the turn, the infield rotating before him as by merry-go-round. The tires grabbed coming out of the corner and he yanked the shifter into third, flat-footing the accelerator. The car surged down the back straight, barreling past a slower coupe as the gauges raged, needles quivering, and then he was hurling the car broadside into the next turn, fighting the wheel, the tail whipping and thrashing for traction beneath the mighty power of his foot.

  Six cars ahead of him.

  He ripped through the turns and sang down the straights, merciless, hoping the car would hold. In front of him a wheel sheared free of an axle, the crippled machine plunging in a blast of dust, flashing its undercarriage, the orphaned wheel bounding up off the track like a jackrabbit.

  Five cars ahead of him.

  The Ford rattled with speed, enraged, slashing past slower machines. The drivers tried to bump him as he passed, to cut and roll him, their silver-toothed grilles flash
ing just shy of his bumper. Down the long straights the motor charged on and on, an endless well of power. An engine blew two cars head, a cloud of bluish smoke unraveling from the hood, as from a stricken aircraft.

  Two cars.

  Ahead of him thundered a hoodless coupe, the header pipes slashed upward like gleaming tusks. The driver’s face shone in his car’s tiny round mirrors, blocking Rory whenever he tried to pass. Rory watched the great squared-off tires bouncing before him. They were unfendered. Coming down the back straight he pushed right in on the car’s bumper, sucked to greater speed, then cut hard to the inside, his bumper grazing one of the rear tires, the coupe sent slithering in the dirt.

  Second place.

  They were more than halfway in now, fifteen laps to go, and the green rump of the Hudson floated just in front of him, bucking and sawing over the red-churned surface like a big animal in flight. They ran together in turn two, clanging and bullying, Rory unable to get by. He wanted to pass Cooley clean, by motor and skill, so the boy couldn’t run his mouth. He drove right up on him coming down the front straight, bumpers kissing, then dove low in the turn, sliding in the rutted clay. The Ford was tail-happy, fishtailing dangerously as he came abreast of the Hudson, but he kept the power on, feathering the throttle to keep from spinning, then floored it as the track straightened, pulling ahead.

  First.

  He cut a look in his mirror. Too much dust to see Cooley’s face, but he could imagine the boy’s wicked grin hanging over the downturned mouth of his machine. Rory looked away, but the Hudson crowded his mirrors, right on him, its brightwork glaring like a threat. The boy would drive him into the trees or pits. He would roll him, crush him to jelly in his seat. Rory drove the car harder into the turns, deeper, torturing the car to speed.

  Ten laps to go.

  Cooley bumped him twice, hard. Rory felt caught in a whirlwind, his machine whirling and screaming through this crazed orbit of power. He could feel cooley’s desperation, the Hudson diving and missing again and again. Being driven like a weapon.

  Eight laps to go.

  Coming out of the last turn, the gleaming arc of a torn-away fender stood in the racing line, upended, leering like a giant metal rictus. Rory yanked the wheel hard to miss it and lost control for a long moment, the wheel spinning through his fingers like the helm of a rudderless ship, the car snaking this way and that, weightless almost, showing him first the stands and then the pits. He feared it would catch a rut sidewise and roll down hard on its roof, his world collapsing in a steely fist, his body crushed bloody. He fought the wheel, straightening the car, and went.