Bull Mountain

by Brian Panowich

  “Nobody is getting killed, Darby. He’s not as crazy as everyone says. It’s just what he wants people to think. It’s how he keeps people doing what he wants them to do. My deddy was the same way. Besides, he’ll be too busy with me to worry about you. Just stay in the car, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Whatever you say, Sheriff, but I’m still not feeling good about it.”

  The road opened up into a vast expanse of red dirt and pea gravel. Clayton counted at least ten more armed men watching as they approached, but with their guns pointed down. A few others too twitchy and haggard to be employees wandered about the yard and hovered around the corner of the house near the rain barrel. Clayton assumed they were local tweekers looking to score. There was a time when Halford would never have allowed scrounge like them anywhere near his home. He was getting either soft or sloppy. Either one was a good sign he might be open to a conversation like the one Clayton was there to bring him.

  The man closest to the mouth of the drive was talking into a two-way radio connected to his gun strap with a length of paracord. Clayton had no doubt who was listening on the other end, and hoped it also explained why all the guns were lowered. Halford was being cordial—another good sign. Clayton wheeled the Bronco through the entourage and parked next to a variety of jacked-up, camouflaged pickup trucks, some brand-new and some as old as he was. He thought he recognized his deddy’s old Ford F-100. At least Halford had managed to keep that alive. A simple cabin made of cedar and pine stood in the middle of the clearing. To Clayton it looked frozen in time. If it was any different from the way he remembered it, he couldn’t tell. His old bedroom window faced east, and the same blue curtains he remembered from when he was a boy were still there. Two old men he didn’t recognize sat in rockers on the porch. One of them held a guitar in his lap but wasn’t playing. Two children about nine or ten sat with their legs dangling off the porch, neither of them wearing shoes. The blackened color of the soles of their feet made Clayton wonder if they ever had. One of the children held a hand-carved wooden train car. The other held a knife and was picking at a loose board on the porch. Neither of them looked up as Clayton got out of the truck and approached the front steps.

  “That’s far enough, Sheriff,” a deep voice bellowed from behind the screen door. It was the man himself. Halford Burroughs stood every bit of six feet, four inches tall and took up the entirety of the doorway. He was as thick as a redwood but angular and solid like stacked cinder blocks. Clayton and Buckley had grown to resemble their father, naturally thin, cut, with ropey muscles, red hair, and fair skin—the kind that burned in the shade—but Halford retained their mother’s features. He was olive-skinned; his hair was a thick mound of dark brown ringlets that matched deep brown eyes that curved down at his cheeks. When they were kids, the girls on the mountain called them “sad eyes,” but Clayton never saw a hint of sadness in them. His beard was full and lush, streaked with gray and silver. He stood behind the screen door, unarmed, with a paper napkin draped down the front of a dark undershirt.

  He pushed open the screen door, stepped out onto the porch, and let the door slam behind him. He squinted his eyes as they adjusted to the sunlight and pulled the napkin from his shirt collar. He wiped away what looked like gravy from the corners of his mouth and beard, then rolled the napkin into a ball between his palms and tossed it on the porch. The kid with the toy train scurried over, picked it up, and disappeared into the house. The screen door slammed again.

  “Long time, Hal.”

  “Not long enough. I don’t know what you’re thinking coming here, but it would be in your best interest to go ahead and get your ass gone.” Halford took a step forward and the porch creaked under his weight.

  “If you really wanted me to leave, you wouldn’t have let me up here in the first place. We need to talk.”

  “I don’t talk to cops. Even wannabe cops like you.”

  “I’m not here as the law, Hal. I’m here as your brother.”

  Hal laughed. It was cold and humorless. A yard full of ass-kissers joined in and Clayton gave a quick glance around, feeling uneasy. Halford took another step forward into the sunlight. “First of all, you ain’t the law up here. Hell, you ain’t hardly the law down in the Valley, from what I hear. But more important, the only brother I got done got himself killed by some friends of yours a little over a year ago.”

  “I had nothing to do with that, and you know it.”

  “It’s one big brotherhood, though, right?”

  For the first time, Clayton felt the heat of the day. Sweat was running between his shoulder blades and down his lower back. His shirt was sticking to him and his neck was kinking up from having to look up at Halford. All of a sudden he craved iced tea—laced with a fifth of bourbon.

  “Hal, I didn’t drive out here thinking we had any shot of repairing the damage between us. I’m not fool enough to think that will ever happen, but I got things you need to hear all the same. You don’t want to hear them? Fine. I’ll be on my way. But ask yourself something. Don’t you think if I drove all the way up here, after all this time, and let all these assholes you call family put guns in my face in front of my deddy’s house, that what I have to say might just be important?”

  Hal chewed on that. He studied Clayton, then shot some stink-eye over at Darby, who was melting in the cab of the Bronco. The floorboard went back to being the most fascinating thing Darby had ever seen.

  “Come on, Hal. It’s hot out here.”

  “Fine. Talk, but you can do it from there. No way in hell you’re coming into this house. You lost that right a long time ago.”

  Clayton sighed and took off his hat. He wiped the sweat off his brow with his forearm, and put it back on. He took another glance around the yard at all of Halford’s men, each face more eager than the next to hear what Clayton had to say. “I don’t think you want all these people hearing what I got to say.”

  “Why not, Sheriff?” Halford held his arms out. “We’re all family here, right?”

  Clayton took a step toward the porch and spoke in a hushed voice. “I think I might have . . . a way to help our family.”

  Hal didn’t say a word. He just stared at Clayton like he was a complete stranger. Clayton took another wary step toward his brother and lowered his voice even more. “A way out, and I mean completely out. It’s a chance for you to retire from all . . . this . . .” He held out his arms like a scarecrow and motioned toward the gathered crowd. “I have guarantees,” he said, almost in a whisper now. “You can keep everything you have. The money. Whatever. Just shut down the dope.” Clayton looked at the tweekers by the rain barrel scratching themselves nervously. “No more looking over your shoulder. No more men with guns at your front gate. Just you and God’s country.”

  Hal still said nothing. Clayton needed to give him more. He moved close enough to Hal to almost whisper in his ear, and Hal let him.

  “They’re on to your boy in Florida—Wilcombe.” Clayton waited to see if that put a crack in Hal’s stone visage, but there was nothing, not even a blink. “They also know the locations of all sixteen cookhouses. They know your routes and where it’s all going. They’ve got times, dates, names, everything. If you don’t listen to me they’re going to storm this mountain like you or I have never seen. I can’t stop it. And if that happens, a lot of people—a lot of your people—are going to get killed.” Clayton thought about what Holly had said back in his office about appealing to Hal’s other sensibility—about the money being paramount. Clayton didn’t believe it, but he put it out there anyway. “Think about the money, Hal. You’ll lose it all. Everything you worked for taken from you before you even know what’s happening.”

  Hal spit on the porch, and Clayton thought he caught a slight shift in Hal’s expression.

  “Nothing makes a U.S. federal law enforcement agency drool more than a huge pile of money,” Clayton said, using Agent Holly’s words verb
atim. “And they are coming for yours. But it doesn’t have to be like that, Hal. You can keep it all and put a stop to all this.”

  Clayton thought he saw Halford weighing the possibility of what he was saying. He also thought he heard a whip-poor-will singing through the dead silence that suddenly blanketed his father’s house, but maybe he only wanted to.

  “You’ve got guarantees?” Halford finally said.

  “Yes.”

  “Just me and God’s country, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  Hal reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a coin big enough to be a silver dollar. Without looking at him, Hal motioned to the boy still out on the porch, and he scurried over, the wooden train left abandoned on pine slats. He handed the boy the coin and tousled his hair. “Go inside now and clear my food off the table. I done lost my appetite.” The boy did as he was told and hustled off through the screen door, taking only a second to stop it from slamming again, but once inside, he turned back to Clayton and shot him a bird before disappearing from view. The two old men in the rockers collected their things and moved off the porch as if they’d just noticed a thunderhead forming and were looking to take shelter. Old men were intuitive like that. Halford thumped down the steps of the porch and stood just inches from Clayton’s face. The sheriff stood his ground. Hal spoke in a low, controlled voice. “Do you know what your problem is?”

  Clayton smelled the pork sausage and gravy on his brother’s breath. “Hal, think about—”

  “Do you?”

  Clayton let out another sigh. “What, Hal? What’s my problem?”

  “You never got it. This isn’t God’s country. It’s my country. Mine. It always has been and always will be. God don’t have nothing to say about it up here. You could have been part of it, but you turned your back on us—on your family—on Deddy. That was your decision.”

  “Hal, we don’t need to rehash all this.”

  Halford ignored him. “But it ain’t like we all didn’t see it coming. Ever since you were a kid, you walked around thinking you were better than us, and now look at you, strutting around with that star on your shirt, still trying to prove how much better than us you are. If Deddy were here right now, he’d be disgusted at how you turned out.”

  Clayton felt a twinge of anger tighten up one side of his face, and he matched his brother’s low tone of voice. “You want to talk about Deddy, Hal? Why don’t we talk about why he ain’t here? Why don’t you tell me the truth about the fire?”

  “I don’t need to tell you shit.”

  “You’re right. You don’t. I saw the barn. It didn’t look like no kerosene fire to me. It looked like the place exploded. What happened, you guys learn to cook that shit through trial and error, and Deddy paid the price?”

  Hal’s upper lip curled. “Get off my mountain before I lose my patience and beat you to death where you stand.”

  “Why was the old man in there, Hal? I talked to the fire chief, and he paints a whole different story than the bullshit you tried to pass off. Don’t you think it’s sad? He ran this mountain for seventy years without so much as a scratch and didn’t make it through one when you started making the decisions.”

  Both men stood with their heels dug into the dirt, braced, each waiting for the other to swing. “This is your last warning,” Hal said. “Turn around, get back in that truck, and go back to your life, or so help me, Clayton, I will throw your body in the fuckin’ ravine for the coons.”

  Clayton didn’t hear the threat so much, as he tried to remember the last time Halford had called him by his first name. Not since they were kids. He held Halford’s stare and saw nothing in his brother’s eyes but an empty rage churning like the storm clouds those old men on the porch must have seen coming. Clayton had hoped age would change his brother for the better, for the wiser, but it hadn’t. He had hoped Buckley’s senseless death would have dictated some logic, but it didn’t. Hal was still the same man who could sit and hum a tune while his enemies burned alive tied to a tree less than twenty feet away. Clayton was almost ready to believe his brother could kill him, too.

  Almost.

  “Okay, then, Hal.” Clayton backed down from his brother, adjusted his hat, and made his way toward the Bronco, where his deputy was only now able to exhale. Darby pressed the button on the armrest to unlock the doors.

  “Nice visit, Sheriff,” Hal said, and started back up the steps. His hands were shaking. It surprised Clayton. He opened the door to the truck, took off his hat, tossed it onto the driver’s seat, and began to unbuckle his gun belt.

  “What are you doing, Sheriff?” Darby’s eyes widened. “Are you crazy? We just got a pass. Let’s get outta here.”

  Clayton tossed the belt and sidearm onto the seat and slammed the door. “You want to threaten me, Halford? My whole life I’ve been listening to you talk about what a badass you are, but I’ve never seen you do a damn thing that didn’t involve you telling people what to do. How about we put all that talk to the test, fat man.”

  Darby sank his face into his hands.

  Clayton rolled up his sleeves, then unpinned the small tin star from his duty shirt and set it on the hood of the Bronco. A new expression replaced the anger on Halford’s face, one that was rarely seen by his people—he smiled. “Do you know where you are, boy?”

  “I know exactly where I am. I’m on the northern edge of McFalls County, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Waymore Valley Sheriff’s Department.”

  Halford laughed hard enough to make his belly shake. “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Nobody up here gives a shit about your jurisdiction, Clayton. You’re a joke. An embarrassment.”

  “Yeah, I get that, and I made my peace with the way you see me, but that don’t change the facts.”

  Several men in the yard trained their guns on the sheriff, but Halford waved them all down. “Not one of you harms this man,” he said. “Put your guns down.” Slowly the rifles lowered. Hal cracked his knuckles and twisted his head from side to side to pop the bones in his neck. Then he stepped off the porch.

  4.

  Clayton swung first, but Hal sidestepped it and threw a solid haymaker into Clayton’s ribs. It hit like a railroad hammer and dropped Clayton to his knees.

  “Get up,” Hal bellowed at him. “Get up, boy. Don’t go down with one punch. It’s embarrassing.” He loomed over Clayton with a smile while the sheriff regained his breath. It didn’t take long for Clayton to spring up and go at Hal again. The big man tried to pivot and sidestep the hit again, but this time Clayton anticipated it, and the second punch connected square on Hal’s jaw. It felt like the knuckles in his hand had exploded. Hal shook it off, grabbed his brother by his tan duty shirt, and pulled him into a head butt. Another explosion of pain followed by bright white light and black spots.

  Don’t black out. Don’t black out. Don’t black out, Clayton chanted in his mind. Before his vision cleared, Clayton swung both fists like twin pendulums into the sides of Hal’s head. That hurt him. He let go, and Clayton hammered a quick succession of rabbit punches into Hal’s kidney. As the big man buckled over, Clayton brought up his knee and rammed it into Hal’s face. It caught him in the cheek and sprawled him backward flat onto his back. He sounded like an oak tree falling against the forest floor. Clayton moved in to kick him but noticed all the rifles were back in the air and aimed at him. These men weren’t used to seeing their leader in the dirt. Clayton put his hands in the air and backed away.

  “I said put the goddamn guns down,” Hal said, holding his face. He got to his feet and spit some blood into the dirt and gravel. “The first one to fire on this man dies next.” Hal brushed the dirt from the front of his shirt and trousers and fixed his eyes on Clayton. “You sure this is the kind of fight you want to have?”

  Clayton lowered his hands, but
only enough to form fists and block his face. “Is there any other kind?”

  Hal charged across the lot like a wild boar, slamming into Clayton and lifting him completely off the ground. The two men barreled into the side of one of the hunting trucks, with Clayton taking the brunt of it to his head and shoulder. Before Clayton could gain his breath, Halford pummeled him with punches to the face and gut. Clayton tried to counter and block, but Hal slapped his hands away like they were flies buzzing around his head. When Clayton finally went down, Halford straddled him, pinning his arms under his knees. He crouched down on top of Clayton and buried a massive forearm into his throat, crushing his windpipe. The sheriff scratched and clawed at the ground but barely had any strength left to make a difference. Blood from Hal’s busted lip dripped down on Clayton’s face as it started to take on the color of an eggplant. The more Clayton squirmed, the more Hal crushed down. No tap-outs. No mercy.

  A single gunshot rang out. Hal spun his head, still in a feral state, fully expecting to see one of his men had disobeyed him. Instead he saw Deputy Darby Ellis pointing a shaky service revolver at him. He’d managed to sneak past the redneck hordes who were all engrossed in the fight and got himself close enough to actually become a threat. He’d fired the first shot in the air to get Hal’s attention, like a bell signifying the end of the round. He hoped that was all he’d have to do. “Let him up,” Darby said, then added, “Mr. Burroughs,” then added, “Please.”

  Hal turned to face the deputy but didn’t take his arm off Clayton’s throat.

  “Or what, Deputy? You gonna shoot me?”

  “I don’t want to . . . sir.”

  “Look around you, boy. You see all those itchy trigger fingers waiting for me to tell them to blow your head off?”

  Darby nervously scanned the line of barrels that were now pointed at his head. “Yessir, I do.”