Bull Mountain

by Brian Panowich

  CHAPTER

  9

  ANNETTE HENSON BURROUGHS

  1961

  1.

  “That’s where my boy killed those sons-a-bitches dead,” Cooper yelled at the preacher. The crowd of wedding guests cheered and laughed. Gareth smiled at that. Annette did, too, but it came forced. She glanced down through the white veil at the bloodstain on the porch more out of reflex than pride. She’d seen the ugly thing a hundred times before. One of the men Gareth killed that night was Cody McCullin, the son of Delray McCullin, seeking revenge for something Cooper had done to his father. It was the night she fell in love with Gareth. Three summers later, here they were getting married on the same steps. The preacher looked to Cooper for permission to continue and the old man lifted his flask. “Go on,” he said. “Get on with it.”

  2.

  Halford Jefferson Burroughs was born the following spring of ’62. Annette had heard from other mothers on the mountain how wonderful and blessed the experience of having a little one grow inside her would be, but nothing about it was wonderful at all. She was tired all the time. Her tiny, pretty figure that made all the other women of Bull Mountain envious began to warp and contort into something she couldn’t bear to look at in the mirror. And her hair, her hair went from being as slick and shiny as a black diamond to looking like shit-covered straw at the bottom of a horse trailer. When the baby kicked, it wasn’t a warm, comforting event. It didn’t create a bond between mother and child. It hurt, was all. It just hurt. Sometimes it was painful enough to keep her hunched over in the bed for days. On days she felt well enough to leave the house, she couldn’t go nowhere, not even out to the market, without some group of old biddies wanting to feel her up and put their hands on the blessing. Most days she just wanted to scream, and scream she did. Childbirth was pain Annette wasn’t prepared for. She thought about a picture book she had checked out once from the library down in Waymore. It was full of photographs of Alaska. Picture after picture of sprawling snowcapped mountains and swirling colored lights in the sky that looked better to her than any fireworks she’d ever seen. While Halford was busy tearing a hole in her belly, Annette soared over those mountains in her mind. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever come back.

  The entirety of the Burroughs clan and nearly every other family living on Bull Mountain surrounded Annette, waiting on a chance to see the newborn, while Gareth glad-handed and got drunk. Most of the people there came only to be seen by Cooper. To show respect, they called it. To kiss his ass was more like it, Annette thought. Her own family was no different.

  “That’s a fine-looking boy,” Annette’s father said, stroking the baby’s cheek with the side of a curled finger. Her mother, Jeanine, held the baby like it was made of fine china.

  “Thank you,” Annette said out loud. Fuck you, she said in her mind.

  “And where is the proud grandfather?” Jeanine asked.

  Like you care, Annette thought. You only want the old man to see you holding his grandson so maybe someday if you need some of his money, or a favor done, he’ll be more prone to give it. She wondered when she’d gotten so bitter. She should be happy. If not now, when?

  Annette looked at Gareth, who looked around the crowded room. “I’ll see if I can find him,” he said. He moved through the house, shaking hands and looking over shoulders, until he spotted Cooper through the kitchen window. He was pacing the pastures outside.

  “Pop,” Gareth yelled, but Cooper didn’t respond. He was talking to someone, but Gareth didn’t see anyone else out there. He made his way outside, walked up to his father, and took his arm. “Deddy?”

  “Goddamn it, boy!” Cooper said, and snatched his arm away.

  “What are you doing out here, Deddy? Come see Annette. Come see the baby.”

  “I don’t care about all that nonsense. We need to settle this business right here.”

  “What business? What are you talking about?”

  Cooper took a hard pull from the copper flask in his hand. “Tell him,” he said, motioning with the flask toward the woods. “Tell this stubborn son of a bitch.”

  Gareth looked out into the darkness. “Tell what to who?”

  “To Rye,” Cooper said. “Tell your stubborn-ass uncle Rye. Tell him we had to do it. Tell him I’m tired of listening to his whinin’.”

  Gareth considered his old man for a moment and looked back out into the darkness, this time knowing there wasn’t anything there. He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. Cooper tried to shake it off again, but Gareth held on. “There’s no one out here, Deddy. Just us.”

  “Tell him we had to do it. Tell him.” Cooper shook his flask at the woods, spilling whiskey on the ground. “He just talks and talks and talks with nothing to say. I can’t shut him up, boy. We need to shut him up.”

  “There’s no one out here, Deddy. Uncle Rye’s dead. You’re just confused, is all. Come on inside.” This wasn’t the first time Gareth had witnessed his father talking to himself, not making any sense, but this was the first time he’d given his hallucination a name. Uncle Rye died out there in the woods when Gareth was nine years old. He tried to contain it, but Cooper never really recovered from losing his brother in that accident. The older he got, the more it seeped through the cracks in his armor. Gareth barely remembered the man. “Just come inside, Deddy. We can sort this out later.”

  Cooper sipped at the flask and let his son lead him into the house. Annette smelled the whiskey on them both as she handed her newborn baby over to its daddy and granddaddy. If she could’ve got up and run off right then, she just might’ve. She closed her eyes and saw Alaska.

  3.

  Annette had always heard that blood was spilt by the bucketful on Bull Mountain. Hell, she’d even witnessed some of it, but she also knew from experience that sometimes it happened one drop at a time. She didn’t leave Gareth the first time he hit her. She was drunk in love with him ever since that bloody night at his father’s house, and the slap came more as a shock than an assault. She didn’t even remember what set him off. It didn’t matter. She would come to find out that it was impossible to gauge what would set him off once he put a drunk on. He carried the burden of leadership on his shoulders and sometimes he lost his head. She understood that. He wouldn’t do it again. But he did. The second time he hit her was in front of their two sons, Halford and Buckley. She was eight months pregnant with their third. He was drunk on corn whiskey, but that was no different from most every other night. When they were younger, the whiskey on his breath turned her on. It always led to dark, violent sex. She used to crave it, and shiver at the thought of it. Now the stink of liquor was only a precursor to a different kind of darkness. A violence she prayed would pass over her like a thundercloud. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn’t. He never hit the children, but she could see it brewing right behind his eyes. If her sons had been born daughters they wouldn’t have been shown the same mercies. She tried to convince herself Gareth would always see her the way he did back when she wore the Ruby Bliss lipstick and barely weighed a hundred pounds, but she was fooling herself. She became more of a burden to him as each son was born, as if a part of the love and respect he had for her was transferred into each new boy until one day there would be nothing left for her. The thought of it woke her at night, slick with sweat, her heart beating like a hammer in her chest.

  The night Gareth backhanded her at the dinner table in front of her children, Halford let a small laugh escape before he covered his mouth with both hands to stifle it. She thought she might get sick. She wiped a single drop of blood from her nose with a cloth napkin and watched it soak in. It spread across the fabric like a cancer. She saw the sum of her entire life in that growing crimson stain, and in a perfect moment of clarity she knew that when the baby growing in her belly was born, she would have served her purpose. She’d be used up. The days of passionate lovemaking and planning the future with her dang
erous new husband and stable of loyal sons were a distant and fading memory. Her life as the partner and confidante to an exciting, powerful man was over. She’d be regarded as no more than a burdensome housekeeper to this family of men. He’d teach her sons to view her that way. The boys would be raised in his image. There was no stopping it. She’d spend the rest of her life living in fear, watching her sons be poisoned, until the one night she stepped too far to the left or right of what was expected of her. Then Gareth would kill her. She was sure of it.

  4.

  Clayton Arthur Burroughs was born on December 22, 1972. He was named after Annette’s father. A small indulgence Gareth allowed her. The family enjoyed one of the biggest Christmas celebrations in the mountain’s history.

  When Annette recovered from the trauma of childbirth she would leave, without a word or a note. She would vanish into the night as if she had never been there at all. It would have been her fate regardless, but this way it was on her terms. Maybe she could go to Alaska. She would never be looked for. She was sure of that. She would just be referred to as “that no-good bitch that run out on a good man and her three adoring children.”

  “How could she?” was the question everyone would ask.

  “How could she not?” would be her answer.

  CHAPTER

  10

  GARETH BURROUGHS

  1973

  1.

  Gareth pulled the business card from the center pocket of his overalls and tossed it on the table. “Tell them what you told me,” he said.

  Jimbo Cartwright picked up the card and sat back in his chair. He looked around the table at Ernest Pruitt, Albert Valentine Jr.—Big Val to his friends—and the old man. Cooper didn’t add much to these meetings anymore, but Gareth insisted that he be present, out of respect. “We got us a problem, fellas,” Jimbo said. “And this guy?” He held up the card between two fingers. “This guy is the solution. A situation like yesterday can’t be allowed to happen again. We got lucky and y’all know it. It won’t happen like that again. We can’t afford to lose any footing here. If Milkbone Arnie or the Hall boys figure out we don’t have the firepower to protect these crops, they’re going to push harder than they did yesterday and we’re gonna lose.”

  “So what do we do?” Ernest said.

  “We acquire sufficient firepower from this guy.” Jimbo tossed the card back on the table. Ernest reached for it, but Val picked it up first.

  “Wilcombe Exports?” he said, reading aloud.

  “We need guns,” Jimbo said. “This guy Wilcombe has guns.”

  “How do you know him?” Ernest asked. Val handed him the card.

  “Last year when me and Jenny were having our troubles, I spent some time riding in Florida. Before I came home and threw in with Gareth.”

  “Riding?” Ernest asked.

  “Yeah, riding.”

  “Riding what?”

  “Harleys. What the fuck else would I be riding?”

  “Take it easy,” Ernest said. “I didn’t know you were into that kinda stuff.”

  “I am. I mean, I was. I had me a brand-spanking-new Electra Glide Classic. Traditional colors. Jenny made me sell it.”

  Val smirked. “Did you ask Jenny for permission to be here?”

  “Kiss my white ass, Val.”

  “Get to the point, Jimbo,” Gareth said.

  “Right. Anyway, I fell in with an outfit out of Jacksonville making a little side money working for a fella named Bracken Leek. The guy’s solid. Good people. He’s a big boy, too, Val. About your size.”

  Val shrugged.

  “Anyway. We made some money, a lot of money, and I trust him. Him and this guy Wilcombe are joined at the hip, and guns are his thing—big guns.”

  “Where does he get them?” Val asked. “Gareth has gone to great lengths to keep us off any federal radars. We can’t put that in jeopardy.”

  “We won’t,” Jimbo said.

  “It might,” Val said. “If, say, a massive shipment of traceable weapons stolen from the military led the United States government straight up our ass.”

  “They’re not stolen.”

  “So where do they come from?” Ernest said.

  “That was my first concern, too,” Gareth said. “Tell them, Jimbo.”

  “They build them,” Jimbo said. “Wilcombe Exports has factories throughout the Panhandle, Central Florida, and Alabama. Mostly, they build custom motorcycle parts for shops and motorheads all over the world, but some of their larger facilities are capable of building other things.”

  “Other things,” Val repeated.

  “Yes, other things.”

  “And how do you know all this?” Ernest asked.

  “Because I’ve seen it. Bracken showed me. I’m telling you. These guys are stand-up. This solves our problem. I’m not talking about buying some secondhand guns with the serial numbers filed off from some colored street hustlers in Atlanta—no offense, Val.”

  Val blew Jimbo a kiss and flicked him a bird.

  “I’m talking about fifty to a hundred untraceable semiautomatic assault rifles to arm every man we’ve got working the crops, with access to another hundred more anytime we want. Ammo, too.”

  “Is this what you want, Gareth?” Ernest asked.

  Gareth rubbed at his whiskers and looked at his father. “What do you think, Pop?”

  Everyone turned to Cooper.

  “Heh?” the old man said, shuffling his weight in the seat.

  “What do you think about the guns?”

  “You already know what I think, boy.”

  “Well, why don’t you tell us anyway?”

  The old man pulled the thin, clear tubing that supplied his supplemental oxygen off his nose and let it hang around his neck. He tapped a thin finger on the table, clicking his fingernail against the hard wood. “I’ll tell you, but I already know it ain’t gonna matter nohow. You’re just going to do what you want.”

  “Pop, I’m trying to—”

  “This family doesn’t need anything from anybody.”

  “Cooper,” Ernest said. “This time it’s different.”

  Cooper stared at Ernest hard and long. His look was cold with genuine confusion. “Who the hell are you?” he finally said. “And why are you in my house?”

  Gareth and Val both narrowed their eyes at the old man, then at each other. “That’s Ernest,” Gareth said. “And this is my house, Pop. Not yours.”

  Cooper glared at his son. “You got all the answers, don’t you, Rye? No tellin’ you nothing. I don’t know why you even ask.” He tried to replace the tubing in his nose but couldn’t. His hands had taken to shaking too bad. They did that when he got upset. Which meant they did that all the time.

  “Jimbo, help him with that and do me a favor. Bring him home.”

  “Sure, Gareth,” Jimbo said, and got up to reattach Cooper’s oxygen. “Where are we with all this?”

  Gareth looked at Val first, and the big man nodded. Ernest did, too.

  Gareth slid back in his chair and seated a fresh plug of chew in his cheek. “Everybody give me a minute.”

  2.

  After the room cleared, Gareth picked up the card and turned it over and over in his fingers, running his thumb over the embossed lettering. His father was sick—and dangerous—but he was right about keeping the family safe from outsiders. It felt wrong, but something had to be done. He sat folding, unfolding, and refolding the small cream-colored card between his calloused fingers. Plain block letters printed across it read WILCOMBE EXPORTS, with a phone number underneath with a 904 area code. He noticed the thing barely held a crease. Some kind of goddamn crazy space paper, he thought. He wondered how much something like that cost. He wondered what kind of asshole would pay for something like that.

  The same kind of asshole that could supply h
im with what he needed.

  The same kind of asshole Cooper had traded his sanity to keep his family safe from.

  He slipped the card back into his pocket, walked over to the phone, and dialed. It rang twice before a husky female voice answered. Not at all what he expected an asshole to sound like. More like a vampy late-night deejay spinning those terrible disco records.

  “Wilcombe Exports. How can I help you?” The woman’s voice dripped with enough honey, Gareth almost asked for a meeting with her instead of her boss. He centered himself and spit a string of tobacco juice into a coffee-can spittoon. “I need to speak with Mr. Wilcombe.”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Go ahead.”

  There was a long pause on the line before the woman’s voice finally said, “Sir?”

  Gareth spit again. “Look, honey, my name’s Gareth Burroughs. I got this card from a fella named James Cartwright. You might know him as Jimbo or you might not. Why don’t you go ahead and put your boss on the phone.”

  “Please hold the line, Mr. Burroughs,” the woman said without losing a bit of her late-night sizzle. Gareth listened to a few seconds of David Bowie crooning “Starman” on the line and looked at the phone like it had just mutated into a dead fish. He guessed that’s what folks like Wilcombe were passing off for music in the sunny state of Florida. He held the phone a few inches from his ear until the line picked back up.

  “Mr. Burroughs?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oscar Wilcombe here.” His voice was nasally and monotone. This was the voice Gareth expected. Weak. Fancy. Entitled. He already missed talking to the female. “Mr. Cartwright said you might be calling.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “How can I help you, Mr. Burroughs?”

  Gareth also took the man’s voice as foreign, but clearly he’d been stateside long enough to make his accent barely noticeable. Probably Cubano, he thought. Florida is full of them Cubanos.