by Kirby Gann
Harlan looks like a nineteenth-century river town preserved under glass. They leave the state highway at the next exit and head toward Black Mountain. Cole has never seen Black Mountain and his skull feels carved out and he has always wanted to hike the highest mountain in the state someday. The thought launches from casual idea to committed goal, an experience he must have, essentially now. Better yet he should take Shady, wouldn’t it be great if he turned around and sped through the night to fetch her so the two of them could enjoy Black Mountain together?
He checks the speedometer to see if he is speeding again and it’s hard to reconcile the tempered needle locked on its judicious number with his certainty that they’re flying but there the needle sits at 43 mph, two below the law. Maybe they’re to meet on Black Mountain, he would definitely like to see Shady again, she’s taken an apartment in Montreux he hasn’t even seen yet; she’s already started the summer’s first-term semester, remedial courses in anatomy or something to get back into the swing of things before beginning med school proper in the fall and he’s unsure what this means for him, for them, for the two of them together—Creed directs him to another road that winds hills and demands concentration. Every detail suddenly matters. To his left begins one of those slave-stacked stone walls (or else a fabricated one, he forgets how many actual slave-made walls are said to exist, but this one appears old enough to amaze him—and no mortar that he can see), it runs nearly a half-mile before giving to a three-plank fence working as a dam to the thick woods cascading behind. Here Creed leans forward and tells Cole to slow down, which allows him to gather that the fence isn’t planked after all but crossed with hewn logs, many of which have fallen, pushed from their posts by the encroaching trees. The entry they turn into is less a gate than a gap in the woods, no postal box, two ruts of dirt road angled up to the night sky.
A constant whisper of tall grass drags against the undercarriage. On either side gleam white spiny sculptures, vaguely figural, spectral forms at the edge of the headlights stilled in fields of high fescue teetering in the wind. Atop the ridge, a white scalloped curb runs along the rutted track and another fence begins on his left, close enough for Cole to identify what swings between the planks, bleached canes forming tripods around each post. The rim of the moon far across the valley rises behind the next ridge like a sun.
“These are bones?” he asks. The road banks right to descend the hill in earnest.
“Them be the Truth’s cow bones,” Creed half-mutters, half-sings, without further elucidation.
Cole can make out their destination some way still ahead and below them, where vapor lights illuminate a compound of cleared land between a two-story farmhouse and a few low outbuildings rounded as Quonset huts. There’s a gathering of vehicles—old battleship cars and late-model pickups—parked in a tight mass of no discernible order. The fence follows the drive along various slow serpentine curves, adorned with the chalky bones smooth and bright and swaying in Cole’s headlights, lending the fence the semblance of breathing, of being alive in some way.
The lot’s packed gravel grinds beneath the van, a sound that, met with the crank fueling his veins, Cole takes for his grinding teeth. Creed points between the house and the first Quonset and they pass lit windows, but see no one inside. Then they turn behind the long low building and Cole has to step hard on the brake: a lone figure stands before them, eyes set above the headlights.
Dangling from his left hand is the longest pistol Cole has ever seen. The girth of the barrel implies large caliber. The man himself is small: narrow-shouldered, lean as the parade of bones they just passed, a skinny chest naked beneath a set of denim overalls a size too large, overalls weathered to a blue wash punctuated by an explosion of white fibers where the chest pocket had been. He’s small but looms bald and pale, made top-heavy by a thick and weighty brow that juts a shelf over the eyes, shading them, masking the face like one glimpsed at the edge of an inscrutable dream.
Creed makes no remark. The van idles long enough that the exhaust turns nauseating. Cole keeps his hands visible on the steering wheel even as it occurs to him that he can’t be seen above the headlights’ glare. The man appears to be breathing hard, his reedy shoulders drawn back and heaving, his mouth contorted in a furious snarl.
After another moment Creed begins to cackle. He rolls down his window and leans out. “We gone do this or not you fuckin’ hillbilly?” he shouts, slapping the outside of his door.
The man breaks into a smile; his teeth glisten with metal. He steps toward Creed’s side of the van using the pistol against the gravel as a cane and he’s cackling, too. “Did I get you or not?” he asks. “I’m a hell of a scary sight aint I?”
Creed hops out and the two embrace with the closeness of brothers separated during a protracted war, both happy to have made it through alive. With the door open, exhaust fills the van and Cole cups his hand over his mouth, and music blares from the house, some kind of cantina or mariachi tune compounded by the voices of guests joining in to sing along. It sounds like a raucous party back there, but he cannot see anyone through the windows. The van’s slide door opens and the man with the pistol takes a seat in back, setting the gun across his lap, his face cheery.
“I love breaking me in new boys,” he says with a wink. “Welcome to Wolf Stills, James Cole. Now get me the hell out of here.”
The man guides them along another two-track deeper into the property, dropping into the valley until it joins a paved road that Cole follows with increasing dismay at each added turn and curve—it seems they looped back through a dense thicket of woods at one point (he believed he recognized a small bridge crossing a feeder creek)—and even with the rising moon’s bright light he is soon at a complete loss for direction. Through gully and hillock and dense woods heavy with new leaves the world is sightless beyond his headlights. Meanwhile the man behind him mutters a melody about murder by the sylvan brink, a song that sounds very old. They pass twenty minutes in this way.
“What county are we in?” Cole asks. The comment fuels general sniggering but no answer.
They make another farm and a weathered barn there and park beside a rusted pickup pulled up close to the barn door. Inside, three Latinos stand before the horse stalls cooing to a few nags. A dull yellow light set high on a beam makes even the bushels of hay look sick. At the sight of them, the Latinos set to work immediately and without word, carrying packing boxes from a stall to the van. Creed and the bald man disappear with the suitcase. Already the reefer is in books, surrounded by packing material and wrapped tight in tinted cellophane. Cole bends down to pick up a box, and one of the men bursts from where he was kneeling and shoves him backward, not quite violently, but still showering him in a torrent of angry language and with a finger in his face, Cole back-stepping until stacked hay bales hit his legs and he sits. The man, small but powerfully built, glares over him to make his point; he stinks of heavy cologne. Each of the Latinos reek of it, the same cologne, a vigorous dusky smell that tickles the throat and hangs about inside the barn.
He ends up holding the van’s doors open as the three workers—dressed entirely in soft blue denim—remove the athletic gear and unlatch the back bench and fill the van neatly with cargo. Once the van is full, they rearrange the gear as a covering, and then the workers return to their pickup, two squatting in the bed and the third, the one who had become so angry with him, taking the driver’s seat. The man starts cigarettes and passes them on to the guys in back. Cole waits, uneasy and silent against the barn planks, not knowing what to say to these strange foreigners, who seem now with their work done to have forgotten him, content to smoke with their heads back, contemplating the dead light of spring stars above and the brightness of the huge moon hovering above the trees.
He thinks to look for a toilet in the barn even as he realizes Creed had been right, he no longer feels the need. More than anything he’s thirsty, and the surge from the crank has settled as an insistent reverberation in his tricky knee, where
it aches and glows in rhythm with the fireflies pulsating everywhere. He decides it’s not a bad drug, except for a faint unrelenting feeling of panic.
Creed and the bald man reappear from around the barn without the suitcase. Creed’s spitting a happy patter low into the other’s ear, pointing emphasis with his hand before them and then giggling at what he’d said. The man swings and plants his long pistol, and as they near him Cole can feel himself grow apparent beneath the moonlight, feels himself the subject of close scrutiny even as the man appears to be ignoring him.
Creed tells him he’s proud of Cole for making it halfway through the job without fucking them up. He smacks him once on the shoulder in a comradely fashion unusual in him, and then announces that he’ll ride with the river-runners. “The Truth rides with you. Now you don’t want to get lost with twenty-five-to-life in the van,” he adds, “so stay close to these guys. I sure as hell don’t know where we’re at.” He hops into the back of the pickup and slaps the thigh of one of the workers in welcome: “What up, Pancho?”
Already the Truth is in the van with his window down, filling a long curved pipe in his lap. And again Cole feels the scrutiny—like he is being surveyed, examined—even though the man seems focused on something else entirely, lighting the tobacco. Beside them the pickup roars into reverse; pauses; and then with a hard spin it peppers the van with gravel, its rear end veering wildly before the truck steadies and vaults forth into the night, running lights blurred by the dust behind it.
“And they ask why they don’t get to make runs,” the man beside Cole sighs, watching the truck by the large sideview mirror, the dust beginning to mix with the odor of burning plums.
“The Truth. Why does Creed call you that?” Cole asks. He eases the van into reverse, wary, his voice chippy from the crank and too much silence.
The man clamps his mouth onto the pipe and stares around the vicinity of Cole’s right leg. “It could be because Mister Creed is what my old man, lost to this world these many years now, would have called an im-bee-cile”—he draws out the word with long disgust—“but I’ll grant he can carry money. Or it could be that truth is what everyone gets from me. It is all I deliver.”
He smiles the degree that his eyes shut and Cole is charmed, comforted by the man’s steady cadence and general grandfatherly calm, a calm he feels particularly sensitive to just now as his own body thrums along the opposite end of the spectrum. The pickup’s taillights disappear over a rise in the land as they pull out. “Can I ask your real name then?”
“Surely. My name is Nathan Crutchfield.”
Cole touches the brakes and their momentum carries both men forward in a lurch. “You’re the Crutch?”
“That is not the name my old man give me. Mostly I think of myself as Nate.”
“Okay, Nate. Wow. Man do I have a lot I want to ask you. But I guess first thing is how do we get back to where we’re supposed to be? It feels like we’re on another planet out here.”
“I bet it do. If I was you I’d do as your man Creed said and hightail it after them Mexicans. I don’t know quite where we are myself.”
Cole grins at what he hopes to be a joke but speeds up just the same. At the top of the ridge he can see the taillights have moved very far ahead of them.
“I try to stay home mostly,” Crutchfield says. “Now if we had all day and was walking I could deliver us no trouble, I know these hills like the back of my eyelids. But we have to take roads, we’re fastened to them you could say, and it is night. You might want to accelerate.”
Cole presses the gas. He doesn’t believe the van can go very fast over this kind of terrain—the chassis shudders and lurches with the speed over the two-track and the wheel fights him even as he despairs at the sight of the taillights turning off the farm way ahead. “Do they know I’m following them?” Cole shouts over the noise of squinched shocks and creaking steel, the soccer balls bouncing from one side to the other.
“I believe so. My Spanish is not good, and they are Mexicans with a party to get to, so it’s easy to imagine I did not express myself clearly enough for them to understand.”
Cole pushes the van as best he can. It’s an automatic and he stamps the pedal to the floor once he makes the paved road—but he does not want to put the van in the trees, either. His heartbeat churns into a thrash-metal percussion in his head.
“I am not being fair.”
“What?” The van’s laments overpower Crutchfield’s voice.
“I said I’m not being fair. Alfaro, the driver, he’s no Mexican, he’s from El Salvador. That’s bad country there, you can’t blame him for making his way to the bluegrass. And now I think of it, Humberto, the one with the cologne”—his shoulder bumps Cole’s on a steep curve, Cole thinking it impossible that only one of the men had been wearing that powerful cologne—“Humberto’s from Honduras. Only one of those scamps come from Mexico, I think. But they’re all Mexicans to me. Why is that?”
They bank out of one hollow and rocket to the top of another and briefly sail over a railed bridge hardly wide enough for two vehicles. At the top of the next hill Cole slams the brakes, surprised by a T-section stop sign, and the balls surge forward in their net and clap both men on the back of the head. He hardly notices the impact in his searching: he looks left and right down the long stretch of empty country road. He cranes forward and scans both directions again, but there’s no sign of any truck, no glow from fleeing taillights. He slumps back into the seat and his hands fall from the wheel. They ache from the grip he’d had them in.
“Can’t say it matters much where your driver Alfaro comes from now, Mister Crutchfield. Alfaro is far, far away.”
Crutchfield reenacts Cole’s search in a slow-motion pantomime: he leans forward, peering left down one end of the road, peering right the other way, eyes asquint against the smoke of his stinking-plum pipe. Then he, too, eases back into his seat. He stares a moment at the windshield without speaking, and again Cole feels that odd sidelong scrutiny in which his core fiber seems to be under measure. What is he supposed to be doing here? What does the man expect of him? Crutchfield bleats a puff of disappointed air through rubbery lips.
“James Cole, you didn’t think we were really going to catch that truck, did you?”
They ride along the country roads without a single identifier to location save a bridge, a certain sharp curve, the glomming mass of trees creating an illusory uniformity to either side of the lane. He directs Cole to turn left and at another bend the road rises and the hills part and the bright moon captures them with the clear focus of a spotlight. “I know who you are,” Crutchfield says, settling back in his seat, one hand firm on the pistol. “Know your type, too. The dutiful son and brother. You’re of a kind that goes all the way back to the Bible. Not that its long history helps me understand the type, though. The motivation.”
Before the windshield the road unfolds on banks and angles that lift and guide the van through curves and inclines, and it feels like the road is constantly rising.
“I don’t get what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t want to be here, James Cole.”
It’s true. A sour rush wells within him as he realizes this—yes, it’s true.
“First time I ever met your kind up close was in the service. I used to fly those C-54s, the transport planes? Wasn’t much older than you are now. One time a civvie comes to recruit a few of us to take part in some scheme, CIA wanted to overthrow Cuba—they didn’t tell us that then, but that’s what it was for. You ever hear of the Bay of Pigs?”
Cole has heard of it. He doesn’t know exactly what it was about and admits as much.
“It was a turd on a plate was what it was. And no reason for anybody to raise his hand and say ‘I’m in,’ but still some went. I know it is so because I watched them go. That amazed me. I had this buddy Angus, he volunteered. I didn’t want any part of some secret mission, hell I was only there because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. Got to ask
him before he went off to his island training, I asked him, ‘Gus’—that’s what we called him, Gus, he hated his given name being a kind of beef—I says, ‘Gus, why volunteer for a mission you don’t have to do what might get you killed?’ And he says to me, he looks at me like I just fell from the moon. Like we never bunked together or spoke English from our own two mouths. He says, ‘Duty calls, Nate.’”
Crutchfield lifts his pistol and pokes the barrel into the dashboard, hard enough to leave small indentations in the plastic. It doesn’t look like the kind of mark that will fade, and Cole wonders what softball-playing churchgoers will make of it—wonders if they’ll even notice or wonder where it came from. Crutchfield feigns two shots out the windshield and sets the gun down again. The pipe swirls smoke throughout the cab; he seems hardly to pull any smoke from the pipe himself, enough only to keep it going, otherwise gesturing with it in the air, a priest swinging incense.
“Course I knew what duty was, and I understand honor and duty are supposed to be virtues. Especially family honor. But I never understood why anyone would die for it. Anytime I hear duty calling, that’s the time I need my ears checked, you get what I’m saying? You don’t ask to be born, not one of us do, and for years you don’t get one say in how your family is going about making you the person you are. Then by the time you do have a say—suddenly everbody’s got expectations on what your obligations are to them. Most people, they just go along. I don’t get it. Never have. Can you explain it?”