“Call the police.”
Missy forfeited sectionals because she spent Friday afternoon at the sheriff’s office, answering the same questions so many times, she reeled them off like answers on a history test. Because that’s what they were, right?
History.
Momma was in the kitchen when she came in, and when Missy saw her, she started to cry. Waving her over to her chair, Momma embraced her and whispered in her ear. “Don’t think on it anymore. Just close your eyes and think about something good.”
So Missy did. She thought about the future, lining up on the starting block, a fine sheen of sweat already laying cool on her skin, hair pulled back in a ponytail, muscles taut, twitching with anticipation for the starting gun. And when it sounded, she would fire off the block, eyes on the finish line, her heart alive, a winged muscle in her chest. She’d hear her teammates urging her on, cajoling her to go, go, go, go, and somewhere in the midst of their cacophony, she’d hear her mother’s voice at last, clear and strong, confident and unafraid. She’d hear her saying the things she said in Missy’s dreams, and those words would be the ones more than any others that would keep Missy running.
On the Mountain
I was up watching television, drinking beer, waiting for the night to give way to morning when I heard the horses. I went to the kitchen window and saw three riders. Fetching my shotgun from the mantle, I turned on the porch light, and went out to meet them.
It was my sister, Kate, her husband, Pete, and his brother. They called the brother Sonny.
I waited for them to come close enough to see me. The porch light shone in their eyes.
Kate hung back, staying at the edge of the gravel road; her mare, a beautiful, charcoal-coloured animal, stomped nervously on the rocks, crunching and scattering them beneath her hooves.
Pete and Sonny tied their horses to a gum tree. I waited on the porch.
When they got near enough to make me out, I said, “Howdy.”
Pete wore only blue jeans and a pair of boots. He kept at least ten yards between us. He carried a holstered pistol on his hip, and he glanced back and forth from Kate to me, as if trying to understand how the tenuous connection between us might have led him to my front yard. If he’d heard my greeting, he gave no indication.
Sonny wore even less: his blue jeans had been ripped into shorts. He was barefoot. He stood a foot taller than Pete and was twice as thin. The hairs on his chest were damp with sweat.
“I got a sick dog I can’t shoot,” Pete said.
“A what?”
“My dog needs shooting.”
“And you came all the way down the mountain to tell me that?”
Pete ignored my astonishment. A truck went by out on the road. All of the windows were busted clean out. Somebody hollered “hillbilly,” drawing the word out like a rebel yell. Pete bit his lip and waited for the truck to pass. Sonny glanced at the road and then back to the horses, as if they might be the ones offended by the insult.
“I’ve come close to it. I can’t do what needs to be done.”
I gestured to Sonny. “What about him? He can’t fire a gun?”
“Sonny’s come close to it, too. All of us have.”
I looked at Kate. “What about her?”
“She don’t handle guns.”
“She doing all right?”
“She’s making it.”
I watched Kate, barely recognizing her as the little girl I once knew. She had changed so much, most of it willful, I decided, some of it just due to time. Her body hid inside of a shapeless jumpsuit that concealed her femininity. The paleness of her face made her seem ghostlike in the early morning dark. Even her body language had changed. She sat very still in the saddle, as if afraid that a sudden movement would betray her existence, causing others to remember her. Only her hair seemed unchanged. It was as red and flowing and long as I remembered.
She did not look my way. Instead, she kept her head turned to the road, as if waiting for something. She had not spoken to me in years, and I couldn’t imagine why Pete insisted on bringing her along on these trips down from the hills. Maybe to torture me, to show me that he had taken every bit of her, or more likely, he wanted to give me a visual reminder that he and I were kin, a subtlety that most folks wouldn’t give him credit for.
I wasn’t buying this shit about the dog.
He gestured at Kate, awkwardly. “She’s had another baby.”
“Boy?” I said. She already had a girl.
“Naw.”
“What’s her name?”
“Don’t have one yet.”
I nodded. A long time ago this would have angered me, but Kate had been with Pete since she was sixteen and that was nearly twenty years ago. I might get sad if I thought about things up on the mountain enough, but that’s just it: I kept my mind clear of Pete and Kate. Or at least, pushed them to the back. Otherwise, well, otherwise nothing would make sense, and I’d have to think all types of unpleasant thoughts.
“You going to help?” he said.
“I don’t have a horse.” I knew that my truck, any truck, would never make it as far into the hills as we would be going.
“Sonny will stay. You can take his horse.” Pete chewed on his lip. Sonny grinned at me. His teeth looked ragged like bits of chipped rock.
“No.” I pointed at Kate. “Let her stay. I’ll ride her horse.”
Pete dug up my grass with the heel of his boot while he mulled this over.
“She don’t leave my sight,” he said, and there was a challenge in his tone.
If I had been dealing with anyone else, I would have told them to go to hell, but Pete was different. You didn’t bluff him. You didn’t tell him to go to hell, not if you planned on turning your back after you said it. So I tried to reason with him.
“I don’t leave strangers at my house. He might steal something.”
Sonny’s grin flattened out. His eyes looked drunk, and I found myself wondering if I’d ever heard him talk.
“Sonny ain’t a thief.”
“That’s what you say. I know Kate’s not a thief.”
“That ain’t her name.” Pete kicked the grass and rubbed the back of his hand across his brow.
He whistled and Kate guided her mare over. She kept her head down and did not meet my eyes.
I felt some of the old anger stirring inside me.
“Kate,” I said.
She kept her eyes on her saddle pommel.
“I won’t have her speaking to men,” Pete said.
“Hell, I’m her brother.” I came off the porch like I meant to rush him, but pulled up a couple of feet short. He watched me without flinching, unsurprised by my explosion.
“We got different ways on the mountain,” he said.
“Goddamn, Kate,” I said. “Would you at least look at me?”
Her head did not move; her eyes remained fixed.
“You going to help?” Pete said. “Cause you can ride her horse. She can stay. Maybe she could watch your place—” He glanced around my yard. “—weed your garden. You know, make herself useful.”
“Shit,” I said and spat in a flowerbed.
I didn’t want to help this bastard. He talked about my sister like she didn’t exist, and in a way, I wondered if he didn’t have it right. She had always been rebellious. As a teenager, she listened to death metal and stuck safety pins in her ears and nose. She dated questionable characters—rednecks, druggies, abusive types. My mother and father thought she’d eventually outgrow the need to rebel, to shock. Except, as we discovered when she’d met Pete, it was never about shock or rebellion, as much as it was about debasement, about an erasure of self. That’s why she found Pete and his mountain persona so attractive.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
I didn’t want to help him, but I did want to see my nieces. I decided there might not be many more chances.
He whistled sharply, and Kate dismounted, turning away from me as I climbed onto the horse. Pete and Sonny stood out of earshot, so I whispered to her: “You say the word, and I’ll get you out of there, Kate.”
I turned around and saw that Sonny and Pete were already back on their horses. The sun was up. “Hold on,” I said, and spurred Kate’s horse to the porch, where I reached for my shotgun.
I had known Pete since he was a boy. My family had tried to get him and Sonny enrolled in the public school. Several of the mountain men were waiting on my father when he went up with a sheriff’s deputy to try to enforce the law. The men had shotguns and nobody seemed to doubt they’d use them. The deputy came back, swearing he’d never pay visit to those folks again. Dad said little. The next morning, the sheriff came by to see my dad and informed him that those on the mountain could stay on the mountain. As long as they stayed there, he reasoned, they couldn’t cause any trouble.
He was mostly right, but how could he have envisioned a sixteen-year-old girl running away to the mountain? Dad had gone up and brought her back the first several times she tried it, but she just kept going back. The last time he went up for her, four or five men waited for him with shotguns. They informed Dad that Kate’s marriage to Pete wasn’t going to change. There was nothing my dad could do to bring her back, short of violence, and the men made it clear that violence would be fine by them.
We didn’t see her for eight years, though we got reports from Gerald Hand who would go up from time to time to trade with the families on the mountain. Gerald never said much except that Kate appeared to be in good health, and that as near as he could tell, she wasn’t in no prison, meaning she could come home any time she liked.
My mother died first, and then Dad a year or two later. Kate didn’t come to either funeral. As far as I knew, she didn’t know they were dead.
I saw her and Pete once maybe twice a year, coming off the mountain on horseback. Usually they just went right on by my place, but occasionally, Pete would stop and ask for a favour—little things, help shooing a horse, a broken plough, that sort of thing. I always helped him out, even though I despised him. She was my sister.
It rained hard on the way up the mountain. So hard that the ground in front of us was covered in a dirty white mist that made it impossible for our horses to navigate the rugged terrain with any speed. It was a slow, wet crawl, and we passed it in silence.
After a point, I realized I was deeper into the wilderness than I had been before. I lost my bearings, settling for a vague feeling that we were going somewhere different, and the rest of the world was below us, spread out like the view from an airplane window.
The rain slacked up as we came upon a little wooden structure. It looked like something hikers might use as a shelter, but I couldn’t imagine anyone hiking up here. Pete and Sonny passed it without comment.
After a while, Pete got ahead, and Sonny and I were side by side. I looked over at him, and he grinned back at me.
“What’s the deal with this dog?” I said, not really expecting him to answer me.
“Ain’t no dog,” he said.
“No dog?” I started to say more when Pete turned around.
“Get your ass up here, Sonny.”
Sonny grinned at me again as he spurred his horse on. I followed them for a long time.
At some point, a little boy ran across the trail screaming. Sonny laughed at him. The boy disappeared into the tree line only to reappear a little further up the trail with another shriek. Pete told him to shut up. The boy, small, with elf-like features, shrugged his naked shoulders and tugged on Sonny’s bare leg. Sonny scooped him up and set him on his horse. The boy settled in behind Sonny and turned to stare at me. His face was dirty, caked with mucous and grime, and he watched me unabashedly. I smiled at him. His face remained neutral.
And, suddenly, we were there.
They lived in a clearing that would have been beautiful if not for the trash and the junk and the little shacks that leaned off into the woods and the half-starved dogs that roamed amongst it all, sniffing and grousing for something that might resemble sustenance.
Sick dog, my ass.
There were pigs and two cows and an overgrown garden. And surrounding it all were little shanties without windows or doors. Their roofs were caved in and their walls sagged.
I liked the cool feel of the shotgun barrel in my hand. I couldn’t imagine what Pete really wanted me for, but I felt good knowing I had my gun.
A woman—Sonny’s, if I had to guess—leaned against one of the shanties. Inside a baby screamed.
Pete ignored the woman as he dismounted and brushed past her into the shanty. I looked around and saw Sonny grinning at me.
“Somebody shoot you with happy gas?”
He kept grinning. “Ain’t no dog.”
“You already said that.”
He smiled and smiled.
I climbed off Kate’s horse and started into the structure that Pete had just entered. The woman in the doorway grabbed my pants leg. “No,” she said, and I saw for the first time how emaciated she was.
“He asked me to come,” I said.
“He’ll be back out.” Her head lolled to the side and she fixed me with bloodshot eyes.
“You’re sick.”
“Ate up with it.”
“You need a doctor.”
Her skin was a bright red, and I thought it would be hot to the touch. But I kept my hands on the shotgun.
There was a whistle and the woman looked away quickly. Sonny had seen us talking. He slid the boy off his horse, and spurred the animal over to where I stood. Without warning, he drew back and swung at me. His aim was bad, and his knuckles barely grazed my chin, but I had my shotgun up just the same.
“You son of bitch, don’t you ever try that again,” I said, aiming the shotgun at his stomach.
Sonny studied me carefully, and I swear I felt like he was trying to come to a decision, and that scared the shit out of me. Sane people didn’t contemplate decisions at gunpoint. He didn’t say anything, he just looked me over, his gaze tracking every inch of me, his jaw clenched, the muscles in his shoulders and chest tense.
“That’s my woman,” he said.
“She’s sick,” I said.
“Like I don’t know it.” He relaxed. “You going to see sickness.” He climbed off the horse and led it over to a tree where he tied it down. “Ain’t no dog,” he said. Then he went over to his woman and pulled her to her feet. “We going home, baby.” They walked arm and arm to another shanty and disappeared inside.
I was alone.
I looked around and saw that Sonny’s boy had even disappeared.
The baby, who I could only guess was my niece, screamed.
I wondered where the other girl was. She would be seven or eight now.
Pete came out. “Don’t do it with your gun,” he said. “Use this.” He handed me a pillow. It was pink and someone had sewed a purple teddy bear on one side.
I took the pillow and stepped inside.
The pillow belonged to Kate. She used to carry it around the house when she was a little girl. I could remember her crying when I tried to take it away from her once. Afterwards, Mom had made me hug her and tell her I was sorry. Even after my apology, she had cried for a very long time.
But she didn’t sound anything like the baby that was crying right now.
I didn’t want to look at it, so I looked at the pillow instead. The purple teddy bear had been sewn back on recently with black thread. The pillow was dirty and faded. It looked like flesh in the darkness of the room.
The baby kept crying.
I looked around. The place was deserted. Jus
t a chair that leaned to the left because the legs had been cut unevenly, a collection of empty beer bottles, a dresser without drawers, a handmade baby crib.
Ain’t no dog, I heard Sonny say.
I leaned my shotgun against the chair.
I forced my eyes to see what was in the crib. My niece. Kate’s daughter. She was red, so red I could almost see the heat shimmering off her in waves as she bawled. Her mouth, an open O, sucked in air only so she could scream it back out. Her eyes were squeezed shut. She stank of shit and urine, and I gripped the side of the crib to keep from falling down.
I stayed like this for a long time, and I guess part of me contemplated doing it, and I began to think about things. Things that I hadn’t allowed myself to think about in a good while. I thought about Kate and what Pete must subject her to up here. I thought about how I’d like to kill Pete. I thought about doing it now. My hands did not want to burn with that baby’s fever. I kept gripping the side of the crib. I kept steadying myself and talking to myself.
Once I regained my composure, I picked her up. She burned on my hands just like they knew she would, and she wriggled wildly, kicking me so hard in the stomach that I almost dropped her. Carrying her over to the dresser and peeling off the cloth diaper, I used the clean side to wipe away as much of the mess as I could from her bottom. She screamed at me. I could see her uvula vibrating in the back of her throat.
I picked her up again, squeezing her to me tightly and went outside.
Outside, Pete waited, gun in hand.
“Take care of it,” he said. He raised the gun so that it was aimed at my head.
“She needs medicine. It’s a fever. Some kind of virus.”
“I know,” Pete said. “It gets worse. Take care of it.”
“You can’t expect me to—”
“She’s going to suffer.” Pete was crying now. The gun shook between his fingers.
“I can get her help.”
“I want that child to die on the mountain. Not in some hospital.”
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