“Didn’t you already tell him he couldn’t do that?” Horace said.
Cooper had. Rye’s sudden disappearance had solved the timber issue but opened up a lot of new problems regarding how to transition out of shine and into weed. Rye was always the go-between for the family and the people living on the mountain. He knew how to talk to people. Cooper would rather not talk to anyone about anything, but he was running things now, so that wasn’t an option. Albert Valentine was one of those problems. Rye had promised him a piece of the shine business once the timber deal was in place. Cooper wasn’t having it. “I told that old bastard that I wasn’t having no Negro run my deddy’s Georgia Peach off this mountain. Even if it was a Negro my brother fancied.”
“Well, Coop,” Horace said, clearly happy to be the messenger, “I reckon he thinks he can do whatever he wants, ’cause he sure is crating up a ton.”
Cooper worked at an itch in his beard and took the chewed-up stem from his mouth. After a moment he pointed it at Delray and Ernest. “You two go down to the Gap with Horace and bring Valentine to me.” Delray dropped the twine and sheathed his knife. Ernest finished tying off his bale and threw it at Cooper hard like the last one. This time Cooper knocked it to the ground. He took off his hat again and put his face inches from Ernest’s. Ernest was a big man with nearly a hundred pounds on Cooper, but he shrank back all the same. “You got a problem, Ernest? Here’s your chance to vent, but I’m not taking any more of your fuckin’ attitude.”
Ernest met Cooper’s stare. “Why don’t you just give it to him?”
“Give what to who?”
“Give Old Man Val the still. The route. All of it.”
“Why the hell should I do that?”
“It’s the way Rye wanted it.”
Cooper felt the twinge of something mean run up his back, and the left side of his face tightened up. “Rye’s dead,” he said with a low rumble.
“And don’t we all know it.”
Cooper backed away from Ernest and turned toward the truck. He could feel the heat rising under his skin and took a deep breath through his nose. Delray fumbled for the right thing to say to lighten the moment but fell short and just stood slack-jawed.
“Rye showed his people respect. He didn’t work us like dogs in the heat, and he didn’t call us women for wanting to take a minute’s rest.”
“Shut the hell up, Ernest,” Delray said. Cooper said nothing. He just stood with his back to the men, staring at the main house.
“Or what, Delray? Am I suppose to be scared of him just ’cause he’s the boss? Nobody was scared of Rye.”
“And look what that got him,” Delray said, and regretted it immediately. It just slipped out. Cooper turned around.
“What do you mean, Delray?” he said.
“Hell, Coop, I didn’t mean nothing.”
Cooper took a few steps toward the two men. Delray took a step back and Ernest moved to the side.
“I’m not sure what you’re implying there.” Cooper stared at Delray hard enough to knock him down.
“I ain’t implying anything, Coop, I mean, come on, we all know what happened.”
Ernest stepped farther away from Delray. He was going to get them both killed. Standing up to the boss about fair treatment was one thing, but accusing him of killing his brother was something else altogether. Rye was killed in a hunting accident. That was the official story, and whether anyone chose to believe it or not, you didn’t question it. Not to the man’s face, anyway. Cooper and his son had tried their best to save Rye’s life that day. They grieved his death for months. Cooper depended on that truth to be the only truth.
Gareth came out of the house with the glass pitcher of tea and a stack of paper cups and held them both up for his father to take. Cooper took the pitcher and held it in his hand like a hammer. Delray tried to get off a last word, right before Cooper bashed the glass pitcher into his head. The glass shattered and spun Delray down to his knees. A large sliver of glass was wedged into Delray’s skull, and smaller chunks, all shiny and reflective in the sun’s light, stuck out of his cheeks and bottom lip. It looked like his jaw was broken as well, because it just hung there open and loose, disconnected from the rest of his face. Cooper shoved a booted foot into Delray’s back, forcing him down flat in the dirt, then pulled a nickel-plated Colt Python from the waistband of his trousers. He didn’t thumb the hammer or point it at anyone. He just held it, letting it be known.
“And that . . . is that,” Cooper said. “Ernest, you and Horace get this sack of shit off my mountain, and don’t let me see no more of him.”
Ernest didn’t try to keep Cooper’s stare this time. He was too scared to even look at him. He grabbed Delray by the shoulders, careful of his ruined jaw, and dragged him toward his truck parked by the tree line, leaving a trail of red mud, iced tea, blood, and broken glass. Gareth helped without having to be asked. Before they reached the trees they heard Cooper call out, “Ernest.”
Ernest turned and looked back at the truck, where Cooper was already working on the next bale.
“Yeah, boss?”
“After you get Valentine up here, take the rest of the day off. But tomorrow, bring a friend. We’re going to need to catch up.”
“Yessir.”
2.
Gareth came into the main house dirty and tired, his hands caked with dry blood and glass dust. Cooper ran him a tub of water to wash up in and went back outside to tarp down the load on the truck. It was getting dark and Gareth’s mama would have supper ready soon. Roasted venison, butter beans, and fresh-cut collards were a welcome diversion from the day’s events, but thoughts of supper vanished like steam from a kettle with the sound of trucks coming in from the Western Ridge. Cooper pulled the canvas tarp down tight over the bales of marijuana buds and tied it off. Gareth appeared on the porch, toweling off his hands, hoping he wouldn’t have to get them dirty again.
“That’s far enough,” Cooper said, and held up a hickory ax handle he kept under the seat of his truck. The first vehicle stopped and Ernest got out with Horace, Albert Valentine, and a few other men Cooper had working the crops. A second truck following swiftly behind the first carried Valentine’s wife, Mammie, and his young son, Albert Junior. Gareth and Albert Junior were almost the same age and spent most of their summers together swimming and fishing in Bear Creek, or picking wild blackberries or scrounging for pecans for Albert Senior to bake into pies. The old man made the best pies. Cooper loved the old man’s pies.
“Val!” Gareth yelled from the porch, happy to see the younger boy and oblivious of the trouble his father was in. Albert Junior ran to the porch. Mammie followed after him but kept her eyes on Cooper. Cooper watched the boys briefly before turning his attention to the old man.
“What did I tell you, Albert?” Cooper said.
Valentine held his hat to his chest with both hands. “I know what you told me, Mister Cooper, sir . . . but, well, it just ain’t right is all.”
“What ain’t right? You making and selling shine off this mountain with my family’s stills against my wishes? Is that what ain’t right?”
Ernest, Horace, and the boys settled in around Cooper and Valentine like a murder of blackbirds.
“It’s like I told you already,” Valentine said. “Rye done gave me the still. He done gave me the route, too. Ask anybody. Ask the owners of the pool halls down ’round Tennessee, who’s been buyin’. They were expectin’ me. Rye told them to.”
Cooper arched an eyebrow in surprise. “You already been selling?”
“Yessir, and this here is for you.” He motioned to the only other black man in the crowd, who produced a brown paper bag from his pants pocket and handed it to Cooper. Cooper knew the feel of a stack of cash, so he didn’t bother to open it.
“What is this?”
“Twenty percent of the first run,” Valentine said.
“I think that’s fair.”
“You do?” Cooper said softly.
“Yessir.”
“You think it’s fair to steal from me and my family and come here and throw a little money in my face like that’s gonna settle things? You did spend a lot of time with my brother.”
“But, sir, Rye . . .”
“Rye’s dead, and you setting up shop on our mountain after I done told you no is disrespectful to his memory and a goddamn slap in my face.”
Valentine squeezed at his hat and looked down at it. “Yessir.”
“Now, the way I see it, I got two choices. I can kill you right here and be done with it, or because you were my brother’s friend”—Cooper stopped and looked at the length of hickory in his hands—“you could tote an ass-whuppin’ and go on home. Either way, you’re out of the liquor business.”
“Please, Mr. Burroughs, please don’t hurt him,” Mammie said from the porch. Gareth and Albert Junior sat wide-eyed behind her. Gareth knew his father wouldn’t hurt Val’s dad. He was just mad is all. Cooper didn’t answer.
“You hush your mouth, woman,” Valentine said, and stood a little taller. His broad shoulders were nearly twice the size of Cooper’s. “You do your worse, sir. I know I can’t stop you. But I know what Rye give me, and I know what’s right is right.” That was all Albert Valentine had to say. Cooper didn’t hesitate. He swung the ax handle and hit Valentine in the jaw. The crowd roared with surprise and Mammie screamed. The old man spun almost completely around before falling to the ground. He lifted his hands to cover his face, but Cooper swung again and again, snapping the bones in Valentine’s hands and fingers like campfire kindling. The sticky night air was filled with whooping and laughter from most of the men in the crowd as Cooper beat Valentine with the hard wood. Mammie never stopped screaming, and tried grabbing Cooper’s arm. He flung her away without much notice and the crowd kept her from trying again. Valentine’s son threw himself on top of his father to stop the beating, but Cooper grabbed the boy and tossed him to the side like a bale of weed. He lifted the ax handle high for a final blow. Valentine’s eyes were already swollen shut behind shiny purple knots.
“Deddy, stop!” Gareth said, getting in between his father and the beaten old man. Cooper gripped the wood gone slick with blood.
“Move yourself, boy.”
“No, Deddy, don’t kill him. He’s a nice man. He won’t do wrong no more. He won’t.”
Cooper stood holding the hickory up high, twirling it in a slow circle like a ballplayer. He looked around at the faces surrounding him, which ranged from thrilled to terrified. Gareth’s hands were shaking as he held them up to block his father from hitting the old man again.
“Please, Deddy, please stop.”
Cooper lowered the length of wood. “Get him out of here,” he said. Mammie and Albert Junior scrambled to help the old man. Cooper looked at his son with a confused expression, partly impressed and partly disgusted. “Pick up that bag and get in the truck.”
Gareth looked around on the ground and found the paper bag full of cash. He tucked it under his arm and slid into the front seat of his father’s truck. Albert Junior waited for Gareth to look at him, and when he finally did, he nodded. Gareth nodded back.
“Ernest,” Cooper said, wiping the ax handle clean on the canvas tarp hanging off the truck. “I want you to follow these people back to their house and collect the rest of the take from that run and bring it with you to work tomorrow.”
“Yessir,” Ernest said, and gave Mammie a hand lifting Valentine to his feet.
CHAPTER
8
GARETH BURROUGHS
1958
Gareth sat in the passenger side of his father’s old Ford, holding Annette Henson on his lap by her hips. The night outside was starless and pitch black. He tried counting the fireflies blinking on and off outside the truck’s window to keep his eighteen-year-old libido in check, but it was the bird that did the trick. “Do you hear that?” he whispered in Annette’s ear.
“Hear what?” she said.
“That bird. What is it?”
Annette stopped dry-humping his lap for a moment and looked at him funny. “I don’t hear any birds, Gareth.”
“Just a second ago. I’ve never heard any bird like that before.”
Annette grabbed one of his hands and put it on her breast. “You need to be paying attention to me and not some bird.”
“I’m serious, ’Nett. I don’t think that was a bird.”
Annette tilted her head, more than slightly irritated that he wasn’t giving her his full attention. “You’re being paranoid, Gareth.”
Of course he was being paranoid. He was Cooper Burroughs’s son. He was raised to be paranoid. To be observant. To be aware. The bird outside the truck didn’t sound right. He spent most of his nights listening to the night birds sing to him outside his window, and the chirping he’d just heard was foreign. It didn’t belong. With both hands, he gently pushed Annette’s face back from his and wiped the fog off the window glass.
“Seriously, Gareth, what is it?” she said in a husky whisper, her eyes barely open.
“Shhh,” he said, but she made an attempt to bite at his raw lip anyway. This time he pushed her back with a little more force and held a finger to her lips. She almost protested. She wasn’t happy about being postponed. The Ruby Bliss lipstick she’d borrowed from her sister just for tonight was supposed to be unpostponable. Out of instinct she scanned the truck’s bench seat for her handbag to apply some more.
“There it is again. Did you hear that?” Gareth whispered, and tried to concentrate on the blackness outside the window.
“All I hear is your heart beating, sugar.”
Gareth was no longer in the mood for the teenage dream. He slid his hands down her curvy frame and lifted her off his lap. The look of disappointment on Annette’s moon-shaped face was one Gareth would remember and talk about for years to come. He slid her over behind the steering wheel. “Keep your head down, and don’t get out of this truck, no matter what happens.”
“Gareth, I . . .”
“I’m serious. Don’t get out of the truck. I’ll be right back.” He quietly clicked open the glove box and pulled out his father’s .44-caliber pistol.
“Jesus, Gareth. What are you going to do with that?”
He didn’t answer her. He reached up above his head and switched the overhead lamp to the off position, and slowly opened the door. He waited a few seconds between movements and carefully slipped out the door to the ground. Immediately he thought he caught shadows moving in his peripheral vision. His arms and legs suddenly felt heavy, like he was submerged in a pool of molasses. No matter how fast he tried to creep toward his father’s house, he was moving in slow motion. His hands were sweating so bad, every few steps he had to wipe his palms on his jeans and switch the massive wheel gun from hand to hand in fear of dropping it. The path from the truck to the wraparound porch wasn’t lit, but he could maneuver the yard with his eyes closed, if he needed to. He must have made better time than he thought, because by the time he approached a small thicket off the back porch, the shadows he saw by the truck had become two full-fledged figures decked out in camo taking the steps behind his house. The figures took each step with a ten count, feeling out each footfall, careful to avoid a creaky board. Gareth’s heart was pounding in his chest. The blood rushing in his ears was so loud, he wondered how the two men at his father’s back door couldn’t hear it. He watched the smaller of the two men pull something out of his coat—a small fixed-blade knife. He crouched down in front of the back door and oh-so-quietly began to jimmy the handle. The bigger man covered him with what looked like some type of military assault rifle. Gareth had seen them only in magazines and on TV. He closed his eyes, but for only a moment, and breathed in through his nose like his deddy taught him. He raised the gun, exhaled, and fired at
the bigger man holding the rifle. He hit the would-be assassin dead center, and the big man bounced off the house and hit the porch like a side of beef cut off the chain. The smaller man at the door flinched from the noise but didn’t try to stand up. He didn’t even turn around. His body just went slack and he dropped his chin to his chest. “Please,” he said, “let me explain.”
“You should have learned your birds,” Gareth said, right before he put three rounds in the man’s back and two more in the oak door.
If the men attempting to break into Gareth’s house had any more undisclosed members in their hit squad, they had hauled ass after their point man’s and his partner’s bodies hit the porch. Floodlights filled the pastures. Cooper appeared on the porch completely naked, leading with the business end of a 12-gauge. He saw the two dead men on his porch and his only son holding his gun. The sudden illumination of the porch made Gareth aware of all the blood, and he immediately got sick in the bushes, over the handrail. Cooper had known ever since he was a boy that being around death and being the dealer of it were entirely different things. It was a lesson he’d waited a long time for his son to learn. The older Burroughs barely glanced at the dead bodies on the porch. It didn’t matter who they were. He regarded them as a problem solved—a problem his boy had solved. He stepped over them and the pools of blood seeping through the cracks between the boards and grabbed his son back from the handrail. He leaned the shotgun against a wooden post and hugged Gareth tightly to his chest. It was the first time Gareth had killed anyone, to Cooper’s knowledge. It was also the first time Gareth had ever seen his father cry. They cried together, as father and son, cradled in gun smoke, blood, and vomit.
Annette Henson almost cried, too. She had opted not to listen to the instructions Gareth gave her before he took to killing those two men. Almost immediately after Gareth left her in the truck, she followed him out the same door and watched the whole thing play out from the bushes only a few feet from where Gareth stood. Her panties were soaked through. She decided right there and then she was destined to become Mrs. Gareth Burroughs.
Bull Mountain Page 7