Bull Mountain

by Brian Panowich

  CHAPTER

  4

  KATE BURROUGHS

  2015

  The digital clock from Clayton’s side of the bed showed 2:15. The glow of the numbers washed the room in a soft orange hue and seeped into Kate’s restless eyelids. Clayton normally covered the clock with a T-shirt or something to block the light, but tonight he hadn’t, and the damn thing always kept Kate awake. She was a light sleeper anyway, not that she would be getting any sleep tonight. Not after the bomb Clayton had just dropped on her. She loved him, of that there was no doubt, but she’d never once claimed to understand him. At what point in your life do you just accept a spade for being a spade and move on? Every time her husband raised a hand to help the people on this mountain he’d had it slapped away, but he always jumped at the chance to try again. It reminded her of the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown to kick. Everyone knows she’s going to snatch it away at the last minute and poor Charlie is going to land flat on his back; even he knows it, but he does it anyway out of sheer faith in the goodness of the world. She’d heard once that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. If that was true, then her husband was insane. Hell, maybe she was, too. After all, this whole lawman thing was her idea.

  It was one of those moments in time that sneak up on you from nowhere, without warning or provocation, and change your life forever. She and Clayton had been dating for a little more than a year and he was bound and determined to prove to her, to everyone, that he wasn’t anything like his father. Even so, he still seemed lost. That might have been what initially attracted her to him in the first place. It was clear to her, by the way he cut short conversations about his childhood or took hard left turns whenever the subject came up, that he’d seen, and maybe done, things he wasn’t proud of, and it had changed him, robbed him of the things that make falling in love with a girl across a diner table enjoyable. He always acted like he didn’t deserve the good things in life that other people take for granted. He was broken, and she liked fixing broken things. She didn’t know that about herself then but she knew it now, and this close to forty, she might as well start admitting it. She also knew Clayton would have done anything for her back then. Anything. And that kind of power over a man, in the hands of a twenty-six-year-old woman, could be dangerous. She liked that, too.

  They’d been sitting in Lucky’s after church—that was saying something right there. Clayton Burroughs had never stepped foot in a church before her, but there he was, hair combed and shirt tucked in, pretending to be comfortable—the two of them sharing a massive plate of cathead biscuits, peach preserves, and fresh butter. Kate had the figure for that kind of thing back then. That memory made her reach under the covers and pinch at her love handles, then cup the pudge of her belly with both hands.

  The gossip in the air that morning at the diner was about Sheriff Flowers’s stepping down. Sam Flowers had been the law in McFalls County since she was a little girl, but something about a bad shooting, him being drunk or something, was forcing the old man into retirement, and the gossip hounds were out in full force. Kate remembered as if it were yesterday how she’d casually formed the words that would change both her and Clayton’s lives. She originally said it as a joke, but the look on Clayton’s face when she said it, as if she’d just solved all the world’s problems with a single sentence, was enough to wish she could freeze time and erase it from his memory.

  “You should run, Clayton. You’d make a great sheriff,” she’d said, and after that there was no stopping him. Come November, they both added shiny new accessories to their nightstands—a modest diamond engagement ring for her and a silver sheriff’s badge for him. He ran unopposed and considered that a lucky break, although the whispers that coated the edges of every conversation through the election were that no one dared to run against a Burroughs—even the good one. The next decade was filled with the sleepless nights of a cop’s wife. A cop whose primary goal was to buy back the soul of a family that had grown accustomed to being soulless. And it was her fault.

  Kate got out of bed, crossed the room, and laid a towel from the floor over the maddening glow of the clock. She walked to the bathroom and quietly lowered the toilet seat with mild annoyance. She sat down, letting her head fall into her hands. And after that fiasco at Buckley’s funeral? she thought. Is he out of his mind? Buckley had been completely psychotic, as far as Kate was concerned. He scared her more than Halford ever did. If Clayton was the good, and Halford was the bad, then Buckley was the ugly in spades. It didn’t surprise her or anybody else to hear he was shot to death in a gunfight with the police. Buckley was the shoot-first-think-never type, who most likely deserved everything that happened to him, but he was still Clayton’s brother. He was still family, and Clayton had the right to pay his respects, no matter what Halford and the rest of them thought.

  Kate was supportive of Clayton’s attending the funeral; she even insisted on being there with him, but even she’d tried to change his mind about wearing his dress uniform. She groaned now and ran her hands from her head to the back of her neck, pressing down on the tense knot of muscle. She pictured him standing in front of the bathroom mirror, decked out in starched polyester with military creases and polished brass, wrestling with a tie for maybe the first time in his life. His well-worn hat was traded in for a stiff-brimmed sheriff’s hat she didn’t even know he owned. Standing in the doorway watching him like that, all she could think about was how this thing—this bad decision—would be the thing that got him killed. He insisted without urging that it was a way to honor his brother and in no way a massive fuck you to Halford and his cronies, and maybe, deep down, some of that was true, but she knew better. It was Burroughs piss, spite, and ego. Only, he couldn’t see it. None of them ever could. None of them ever thought they were wrong. She could smell the whiskey on him, too, no matter how much mouthwash he swigged to cover it up. She knew if she’d searched the cabinets and drawers, she’d find at least one, if not more, drained half-pint bottles of cheap bourbon. She let it go. She always let it go.

  They were the last to arrive at the funeral, if you could even call it that. Outwardly it looked more like a crowd who’d turned out for a cockfight. Just a bunch of unkempt men standing around in a circle in their dingy work coats and boots, holding jars of corn whiskey, smoking, and carrying on. The few women who’d been allowed to come sat silent, bound together by expressions of profound sadness that were in no way inspired by the departed. They all looked much older than they were, tired and bleached out, the color of summer hay bales. Kate felt equal parts compassion and resentment toward them all, but also found herself trying to tug a few extra inches out of her skirt to cover more of her bare legs. No reason to rub it in.

  Halford wouldn’t allow his brother’s body in a church, or a preacher to be present, so the men just stood together out on the banks of Burnt Hickory Pond, telling their stories and pouring whiskey on the ground. Soon they would just dump the body in a hole next to the one his father was buried in.

  Clayton’s grandfather, Cooper, had been buried in a field near Johnson’s Gap, intending it to be the burial site for all the Burroughs to follow, but his son, Gareth, Clayton’s father, had wanted to be buried here, at Burnt Hickory Pond. No one knew why. The graves spoiled memories she had of this place when she was a girl. Swinging out on the old tire swing with silly teenage boys, beating their skinny bird-chests, being loud and young. This place used to be a symbol of her childhood, of summer, something dear. Now it was the burial ground of murderers and thieves. She was surprised that the lush grass and bright green moss around the pond wasn’t rotting and brown, considering the amount of bad blood in the dirt.

  From the moment Clayton pulled the truck up next to the line of primered pickups and ATVs, every set of eyes locked on them. First on her, in her not-so-conservative black dress, then on Clayton, in a uniform that evoked the purest for
m of disgust and hatred these people could muster. The crowd broke in half as she and Clayton approached, revealing Halford Burroughs hunched over a plain pine box next to a freshly dug hole. The box held a man shot to death by men dressed the way her husband was dressed now. Halford’s eyes were red and swollen from crying, and it was maybe the first time since meeting Clayton’s family all those years ago that she’d ever seen the big man show any type of emotion that wasn’t fueled by spit and vinegar, but his face faded back into the slab of cold granite she was used to seeing when he laid eyes on his little brother. Right then, in that moment, Clayton said something to her under his breath, but she didn’t hear it. Maybe it was an admission of this having been a bad idea after all, but she couldn’t be sure. She did ask him when it was all over what he had said, but he told her he couldn’t remember. It was the first time, to her knowledge, that Clayton had ever lied to her. The crowd either stood silent or whispered and pointed as she and Clayton joined the group, but it was Halford who verbalized the mood with just three words.

  “How. Dare. You.” He fumbled to draw the gun poking out of his pants, and Kate had thought she might pass out right then and there. She felt the tingle in her fingertips and saw the flashing black starbursts in the corners of her vision. It was the most frightened she’d ever been in her adult life. Thankfully, Halford’s men grabbed him and held him back. He roared a string of obscenities at them and fought to get at Clayton, but, thank God, his people were successful at keeping him in check. Clayton never flinched. He never reached for his own sidearm, he simply reached a hand across Kate’s abdomen and calmly pushed her back a step behind him. Kate remembered in the middle of all her panic how sexy he’d looked at that moment.

  “He was my brother, too,” Clayton said, “and I deserve to be here.”

  Halford spit at them, getting most of the slick brown spittle on the pine coffin. One of the men Kate recognized and knew as a good man at least on the surface, a man Clayton called Scabby Mike, yelled back while struggling to contain Halford’s gun arm. “Well, be quick about it, Clayton, or we’ll be burying two of y’all today.” Kate believed that, and nudged Clayton forward. An eternity could be fit into the time it took her husband to say his piece to that simple closed pine box and rejoin her at the truck. She couldn’t remember even taking a breath. But he did eventually come back, and they left, driving slower than she would have liked. She looked back and saw the men gathered around Halford. He’d stumbled and they were helping him up off the ground. She saw that he’d started crying again. Maybe it was proof of a soul in there somewhere, but she didn’t want to stick around to find out. She just wanted to go home. She put her hand on Clayton’s leg and went to speak, but saw that he was crying, too.

  CHAPTER

  5

  HALFORD AND CLAYTON BURROUGHS

  1985

  “You ever been stung by a hornet?” Hal said out of the blue. He didn’t look at his kid brother when he spoke. It was pitch black out, so he just kept his eyes on the dirt road ahead. He had one hand dangling lazily over the steering wheel, and the other gripped around a can of Stroh’s in his lap—his third since they’d left the house.

  “Sure I have,” Clayton said. “It stings like the dickens.”

  Hal narrowed his eyes and studied his little brother’s face. It was a boy’s face. “Well, I don’t think you have, then, Clayton, ’cause if you did, you wouldn’t say ‘It stings like the dickens.’ That just don’t cover it. Those sum’ bitches hurt like nothing else in this world. Pain you ain’t never gonna forget. You get stung by one of those suckers and it’s enough to bring tears to your eyes. God forbid you get stung by a bunch of ’em . . .” Hal paused to find the right wording. He blew out a long trumpeter’s breath of air and shook his head. “You get hit by a bunch of ’em—buddy, you’re going down.”

  “No, really,” Clayton insisted, “I did get stung once. It was only one and I killed it when I stepped on it, but I thought my foot was going to swell up like a watermelon.”

  Hal killed his beer and slung the can onto the floorboard at Clayton’s feet. “Did you know that hornets will attack you for no reason? Not like a yellow jacket, or a bumblebee like the one you stepped on.”

  Clayton didn’t argue.

  “Bees will mind their own business if you do the same by them, but a fuckin’ hornet? You could just be walking by a nest and those ornery bastards will chase you down. Did you know that?”

  “Uh-uh,” Clayton said, shaking his head. He had no idea why his brother was talking about hornets, but he didn’t much care, either. Hal never really talked to Clayton at all, so he was enjoying having a little of his attention. The brothers were born ten years apart, with Buckley born slap between them, so they didn’t have that much in common. Besides, Hal was normally too busy with the crops higher up the mountain to be fooling with his kid brother. Clayton understood that. Business first. But ever since Clayton turned twelve and Deddy started letting him help out on runs, Hal didn’t really pay Clayton no mind. This conversation was probably the most Hal had ever said to him at one time. Clayton liked to think maybe it meant Hal was starting to see him as a man—a brother. That thought made Clayton sit about a foot taller in his seat.

  Hal pulled the Ford pickup onto a pig path anyone who wasn’t from around here would have missed. It wasn’t so much a road as it was two channels of dirt cut into the dander and weeds by the tires of trucks much like this one. Clayton rolled up his window to keep overgrown brush and tree limbs from whipping him in the face, and Hal cut the truck’s headlights down to the orange parking lights. Clayton could barely make out the road in the moonlight, but that didn’t slow his brother down a bit. He just hauled ass through the dark like he’d done it a hundred times before.

  “You remember Big Merle?” Hal said.

  “Sure,” Clayton said, gripping the armrest with white knuckles. “He was that fat kid that used to come get schoolin’ from Miss Adel before she died.”

  “Yeah, not that it mattered, no amount of schoolin’ would help that fat fuck. He was as dumb as a sack of hammers.” Hal grabbed another beer from the six-pack on the seat between them and peeled the pop-top off with his teeth. “Anyway, he may have been a dumb-shit, but he was still a buddy. A good buddy. The fella would do just about anything you asked without a bitch or complaint.” Hal handed the open beer to Clayton, who beamed and eagerly grabbed it with both hands. Hal let a brief smile escape before he popped open another beer for himself. “Anyways,” Hal said, “when we was kids, a few of us were out by the Southern Ridge, shooting at squirrels—me, Buckley, Scabby Mike, and Big Merle. He was a fat shit even then. It was the year Deddy bought me that shitty .22 rifle. I think you got that gun now.”

  Clayton said he did. He didn’t tell him that the gun was his prize possession because it used to be Hal’s. Instead he took a sip of warm beer and did his best not to gag. It tasted like swamp water.

  “We were having a pretty good time,” Hal said, “just dickin’ around, and Big Merle says he needs to take a piss, so he bolts into the woods. If it were me, I’da just whipped it out right there, but Merle was pee-shy. Little pecker, I guess. Anyway, a few minutes later he comes barreling out of the woods, trying to yank his pants up, screaming like a banshee. Wailing like I ain’t never heard before.” Hal paused and took a sip of his own beer. Clayton watched his brother remember back on what sounded like a fond memory.

  “Hornets?” Clayton said.

  “Yeah, buddy. Hornets. A whole damn swarm of ’em. He only got a few feet out of the woods before he toppled over. There must have been hundreds of ’em on his ass.”

  “What’d y’all do?”

  Hal looked at Clayton like he had just asked the dumbest question ever asked. “We ran like hell, is what we did. I ran so goddamn fast I thought my heart was gonna explode, and I didn’t stop ’til I was inside the hunting cabin up near Johnson’s Gap.”

&nb
sp; “Dang,” Clayton said, “that’s far.”

  “I know, right?”

  “What happened to Merle?”

  “He managed to get his big ass off the ground and to his folks’ house, but he was all messed up. He had to be holed up at the hospital down in Waymore for damn near two weeks. The poor bastard almost died. We didn’t get to see him until way after, but even then he had tubes and shit runnin’ out of him to drain the pus, and his eyes were swollen shut. He never did talk right again. We felt bad, ’cause of runnin’ and all, but damn, what were we supposed to do?”

  “That’s messed up,” Clayton said.

  “Yeah, well, we handled it the next day. Once we found out Merle was in the hospital, we headed back up to the Southern Ridge to clear those suckers out. I mean, that was our spot. We hung out there. A bunch of hornets weren’t gonna just build a nest and sting up our friends. We were there first. You understand what I’m saying?” Hal shot a stern look at his little brother to reinforce the question, and awareness spilled over Clayton like a bucket of well water. He nodded. They weren’t just talking about hornets.

  “We marched our happy asses into the woods, and sure as shit, we found the nest hanging in a hollowed-out pine tree probably right over where Big Merle tried to take a piss. We brought a can of gas to torch the thing, but it was way too high for any of us to reach, so Buckley’s crazy ass starts dousing the whole damn tree. We could’ve burned the whole mountain down—dumb-ass kids—but we didn’t know no better. Scabby Mike lit that bitch up, and it took off faster than all get-out.”

  “The whole tree?”

  “The whole tree. We just sat back and watched it burn. When the fire took to the hornet’s nest, I swear I could hear ’em screamin’. Whistlin’ like fireworks. It felt good to hear them burn like that.”