by Chris Offutt
“Why’s that?”
“On account of it eating meat. Same with cat or man. They ain’t fit.”
“Owl gets pretty good sized, don’t it.”
“Ain’t hardly no meat to it. Biggest part of them is head and the rest voice. Kindly greasy, like a coon. A one of you boys ever eat lobster?”
Arlow and Virgil shook their heads.
“Me neither, but I seen pictures. They’re pretty much a crawdad growed to the size of a squirrel and covered over with a shell. By God, it was one hungry son of a bitch who thought to eat that goddam thing. And after all the work put into it, they ain’t no more meat than a baby rabbit. Well, owl’s about the same. I drawed the line at dog. Guess I got to know too many. Squirrel’s my best.”
“Why’s that?” Arlow said.
“Quick and easy, I reckon.”
“Over in England,” Virgil said, “they don’t eat squirrel.”
“Why’s that?”
“They say a squirrel’s kin to a rat.”
“Well,” Morgan said, “it might have some rat to it. It gets around like a rat, and it sure as hell chews stuff up like a rat. But I’d say it’s fourth or fifth cousin. About like them Rodales.”
Morgan was staring hard at Virgil, his eyes narrowed to folded slits. Virgil didn’t move.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with getting shut of a aggravation like that. Best way is to kill it off leaf, limb, and root. But you got to be ready for the work, same as that boy who ate the first lobster. They ain’t no easy to it. More than that, you got to be ready for afterwards. That’s the hard part.”
“What are you talking about?” Arlow said, “Killing rats is easy as rolling off a whore.” He repeated himself and laughed again until the sound sputtered out. The silence confused him and he finished his beer. “Where’d you say that possum was?”
Morgan tipped his head to indicate the rear of the house, Arlow stepped into the darkness, cursing as he bumped walls.
Virgil felt as if a hole had opened in his mind and he wasn’t sure if stuff was leaking out or coming in. He felt sober. The old man kept his vision locked on Virgil’s face. It was the first time anyone had mentioned Boyd to him without sympathy or expectation. Morgan’s tone had been practical, as if discussing the best way to keep deer out of a garden.
Arlow staggered through the narrow house carrying a stuffed possum with its mouth open in a snarl Its feet were nailed to a board.
“See there,” Arlow said. “Bet my thumb there’s more than a hundred teeth in its mouth.”
“I’ll not take that bet,”
“Arlie-boy,” Morgan said, “That’s your possum now. You can have it.”
“Now, no. You can’t give a thing like this up. Ain’t too many, my opinion. Might be worth something.”
“Take and put it in the truck, Arlie-boy. Then you set and wait for your buddy here. He’ll be down directly.”
“They ain’t nothing I’ve got to give you back.”
“You give me plenty, you just don’t know it. Now hush and go. Wait on Caudill, here.”
“Thank you. I mean it. Thank you.”
Arlow cradled the possum to his chest as if it were a sack of eggs and went outside. The call of a bobwhite came through the door. Virgil felt nervous alone with Morgan.
“I’m fixing to tell you something I ain’t told a soul in nigh forty years,” Morgan said.
He closed his eyes and began to talk, slowly at first, as if he were a man who’d just learned how to use his voice.
“Used to, they made firebrick from the clay herebouts. Brickyard’s been shut down a long time but my daddy worked at it. They was a union war. Not like in the coal fields, but over who was going to run things—the AFL or the CIO. They’re joined up now. Back then they was enemies.
“My daddy, he was on the CIO side. He’d moved here for work and his buddies had went CIO. They had themselves a gunfight at Hay’s Crossing. Two AFLs was pinned down by more CIOs than you could count. They was all young and it was big fan, shooting all day and pissing on the gun barrels to keep them cool. One boy got sent home for food, ammo, and whisky. Daddy said it was the prettiest day in a month.
“Long on to dark, one AFL boy tore the bottom off his T-shirt and stuck it on a stick. Hollered that he was give out on fighting. The CIOs could have the union. He just wanted to go home and eat his supper. Well, nobody shot or said nothing. He come out of the brush scratched up and waving that flag, and got shot twice and went down like a stuck hog. As forehanded a man ever walked these hillsides. He lived but limped.
“My daddy, he got the blame on account of not having no kin living here. That way it was just him and not a whole gang to fight. It was best for everybody but us. Daddy saw he didn’t have no choice, and let it stick, but he told me he never done it.
“Somebody bushwhacked Daddy walking to work. Shot him right square in the same leg as the AFL boy. Now they both limped. Folks said you could see one coming and you’d not know which it was till he was foil on you. Things got back to peaceable after that. It was the AFL boy’s father who done the shooting and everybody knowed it, even Daddy, but he let it go. He got religion. They was too many to go up against anyhow. Daddy said it was the price of moving into a place where you didn’t know nobody. Said he had a good job and his family was happy. It was just me. They’d tried to have more kids but something was seized up in Mommy’s forks.
“Daddy, he took me out to the woods and learned me how to shoot pistol, riflegun, and scattergun. Daddy said he didn’t ever want me to be crippled up. Said a crippled man wasn’t worth the extra dirt his leg dragged. Said it wasn’t religion that kept him from getting that bunch back, it was being a coward. Not even Mommy knowed that.
“Then he’d beat me with the stick he walked with, tear me up one side and down the other. If I was to try and run, he’d laugh and say nobody ran from a gimp but a chicken. Said he was beating me so I’d not be yellow like him. Said he’d quit the day I just stood there and let him do it. He’d know I was brave.
“Then a bad thing happened, the worst thing. He got blood poison and the doctor cut his leg off. Took four men to hold him, but it was too late. That poison was in him like a snake. He died.
“Well, I practiced shooting every day for nigh a year. Then I had me a growth spurt. I was sixteen and ort to have been sniffing girls out, but I never. Nobody had ever liked us. I didn’t have nary a friend and Mommy stayed at the house. They hated us for not leaving. We reminded them of what they were—a whole creek full of liars.
“I didn’t know that then. All I knew was what it felt like to grow up a stranger. I decided to give them a reason to hate me and do what Daddy should have done. He never had the chance to see how brave his beating made me.
“I worked it all out in my head. If I was to go on a shooting spree, they’d damn sure know it was me, and they’d get me. What I done was not do a damn thing different. I went to school. I chopped wood and hauled water for Mommy. I worked in the garden and every now and again I killed me a man. Nobody knew who it was. They was all scared and they took to suspicioning each other, the same way I’d lived my whole life. They laid the blame off on first one then the other. About the time they was ready to shoot somebody, I’d Mil another man and the whole thing would start again. By God, I was proud. I ain’t no more, but I was swelled up then like a poisoned pup. It was the first time I ever felt like I belonged there.
“They was one last man I wanted took care of and then I set down in this holler. They ain’t exactly big gobs of people know I’m over in here. Your brother was one. He was like a son to me. But he don’t know what I told you.
“I know what you’re thinking on doing and I know why. You’d best be stout is all I can say. The doing ain’t easy, but it’s the living after that’s hard. I’ve set here and studied on it plenty. They’s better ways to live a life than always on lookout.”
Morgan lifted his concealed right arm and placed the barrel of a revolver against Virgil’s forehe
ad. The motion was smooth and very fast, the metal cold against Virgil’s skin. Virgil stopped breathing. He wanted to swallow but was afraid his face would move and Morgan would fire.
“The thing about killing,” Morgan said, “it makes you worry about getting killed. Just remember, there’ll be somebody to track you down. You’ll have to kill again and it don’t get no easier. You just get better at it.”
He lowered his arm and tucked the pistol from sight, moving with the cunning of an animal. Morgan’s face glistened from water that had leaked from his eyes. It ran into the creases of his face like rain hitting gullies on a hillside.
Virgil moved to the door and breathed the sweet air of the woods, listening to the silence. The hills surrounded him like a box. The sky was a black slab etched with stars. He wondered how many shallow graves lay in the earth nearby.
The path curved into the woods and he stopped to let his eyes work out where he was. The light from Morgan’s house was gone. He followed the darker color of the path and slowed when moon-glow glinted off the truck. Arlow’s head was tipped against the door, his eyes closed. Air whistled from his mouth. The stuffed possum stood on the seat beside him.
Virgil pushed him across the seat and backed to the fork, where he turned around. Morgan’s story had worn him to a nubbin. The whisky was coming on him like a landslide and he wanted to go home. His trailer was eight miles away by the woods, twenty by road. The bottle held three fingers of whisky and he drank half, feeling it revive him. Dust blew in the windows and settled on his eyebrows. He turned from the hollow onto The Road and the warm night air rushed against his face. He remembered Boyd’s first car wreck, when he was fourteen. He’d run an old Dodge into the creek. “That damn car,” he told their father, “it just laid down, on me.” It became a family joke—if you tripped and fell, it wasn’t your fault, your boots just laid down on you.
At his trailer, Virgil dragged Arlow onto the couch that spanned the narrow wall. He left the possum in the truck. He went out the back door and sat on a log and looked into the woods. He finished the last of the bourbon. He had no idea what he wanted to do, but he was pretty sure what he didn’t want to do. If he could pile that up on one side of his mind, he could sniff out whatever was left over.
He flung the empty bottle up the hill. Everything came back to killing Rodale and that made him sick. He didn’t even hunt. What he wanted was his father’s cabin and to be left alone. He’d marry Abigail and have a mess of kids and get his name on a shirt.
He stretched on his back in the dirt and looked at the sly. The moon was gone. Its absence made more stars visible, as if they’d come from hiding. When he was a kid, Boyd told him that stars were holes in the land’s roof and the moon was the gap where an old stove flue had poked through. Clouds were shingles that got blown around. A rainbow was an exposed rafter.
6
* * *
Virgil opened his eyes to a monstrous thirst. He could not bear the light. He closed his lids and let time move around him.
Something jabbed his leg. A man was kicking him and he thought it was his brother waking him for school.
“You hurt?” the kicking man said.
Virgil’s slow awareness that he wasn’t dreaming sent a sliver of fear along his spine. Knots of memory exploded in his head. He was unable to move his arm. He looked at the shirtless man, who continued to kick him.
“Don’t,” Virgil said.
“What happened to you?”
“Nothing. Just sleeping.”
“This your place?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure you ain’t hurt now.”
“Can’t move my arm.”
“Hell, you’re jammed up against the woodpile.” The man extended a hand. “Here.”
Virgil took it and the man pulled until Virgil was able to sit. His head spun with such pain that it felt detached from his body, and he wondered if he’d been struck in the face. He looked at the man and remembered his name.
“I feel rode hard and put up wet,” Arlow said. “We didn’t have a wreck or nothing, did we?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good. Did I drive?”
“No.”
“Good. One more pop and I lose my license.”
Sunlight slid through the tangled tree limbs overhead. The scent of honeysuckle came on a breeze. Virgil knew he needed to get up, but wasn’t sure he could make it. He felt poisoned and beat up. He began the slow operation of standing, trying to keep his head level. His body swayed and he wanted to hold something for balance, but there was only Arlow.
“A short beer would fix us right up.” Arlow said.
“I ain’t drinking no more.”
Virgil clung to the doorjamb as he entered the trailer, ashamed of the weakness in his limbs. He filled a glass with water and drank.
“I’m going to lay down,” he said.
“How do I get out of here?”
“They’s not but one road off this hill.”
“We’ll see ya, buddy. Old Morgan’s a case, ain’t he.”
The memory of Morgan’s story flared in Virgil’s head like a blowtorch. He gripped the sink and stared at the faucet.
“Goddam son of a bitch!” Arlow yelled from outside. “There’s a fucking possum in my truck! You got ary a gun?”
Virgil nodded but an eruption of pain stopped the motion. It hurt to move his eyes.
“Rifle’s no good this close,” Arlow said. “I might could use some help if you’re able.”
Virgil moved to the door and looked at the three steps with dread. Arlow had his hand on the truck door handle. In one quick motion he jerked the door open, slipped and fell, and began scooting backwards. He circled the truck and looked at the immobile animal.
“Sick, ain’t it,” he said. “Might be rabies. Good thing I seen it. Jeezum Crow, it could have got me.”
“It ain’t real,” Virgil said.
“Damn sure is.”
“It’s dead, Arlow.” Virgil began to laugh and tried to stop because it made his head hurt. “It’s stuffed.”
Arlow leaned to study the possum through the safety of the windshield.
“By God if it ain’t,” he said. “Now where the hell did that nasty thing come from?”
“Morgan.”
“Ain’t nobody else fool enough to stuff a damn possum.” He opened the passenger door and kicked it across the bench seat and out the driver’s side, “There, by God. It’s yours now.” He laughed, then turned his head and retched a stream into the dirt. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“About time,” he said. “I been waiting on that all morning. You ort to, too.”
He got in the truck and slammed the doors and started the engine. He leaned out his window. “Keep your ass wiped,” he said. Rock and dirt flew from his rear tires as he drove down the road, honking the horn. The possum lay on its side in the yard. A blue fly veered past it to Arlow’s vomit soaking into the earth.
Virgil took four aspirin and stumbled to his room and lay on his bed. He wondered if it was possible to die from a hangover.
When he awoke he felt better but not muck The smell of alcohol rose from his skin. He stepped into the shower and hunched beneath the hot water spraying the back of his neck. As soon as he left the bathroom he felt worse. He returned to the shower’s comfort until the water turned cold.
He drank coffee on the trailer steps, staring at the stuffed possum. It didn’t know it was dead. Only the living cared, but the way Virgil felt, he didn’t care enough. Knots of grass made green patches in the sloped yard’s clay dirt. The sun hung above the western hills. He hoped no one came visiting because he was embarrassed to be seen. He stepped into the woods.
Two cardinals flashed low through the brush, and Virgil turned his head to watch, scraping his face on a tree limb. He preferred its sharp pain to the dull thud inside his head. He circled a blackberry patch and went downslope to a low ridge. He was sweating inside his clothes. The
effort to negotiate the woods made him forget how bad he felt, but he could feel the liquor tearing at him. His eyes were dry and heavy. His head hurt.
He reached a low ridge, very narrow with no trees. On the ground lay a variety of feathers. Pale bones poked from the leaves. Beneath an evergreen was a gray owl pellet the size of a crow’s egg. Virgil was in a hunting zone. It was an ideal place for an owl to kill whatever animal came along.
The shadows opened to light and he headed for it, moving through a wall of pine that covered him with the smell of sap. The heavy woods ended at the ridgeline that marked the boundary of what everyone called “company land.” It was owned by the mineral company that had left holes in the hills forty years before. The land was routinely logged. Younger men had begun growing marijuana on it. Virgil remembered having come here years back with Boyd, hunting a Christmas tree for their grade school. They had shared a pair of gloves, one apiece, each keeping the bared hand in a pocket. Boyd used a shotgun to blast the tree down. They dragged it to their school and walked home through the early darkness. Wind blew cold along the ridge. High hills ringed the gray sky, treetops aiming at the stars. Like many mountain families, they had an artificial tree, a sign of town sophistication. Boyd said people who lived in cities preferred real trees.
Now Virgil was squinting down the hill, seeking evidence of the tree they’d taken twenty years back. The crimson light of afternoon sliced into the eastern hillside, moving slowly along the ridge. When the sun reached the top, it would be full dark in the hollow, like the bottom of a well. Climbing the hill gained an extra hour of daylight.
At the top, the land opened from its steep-walled maze to the Blizzard Cemetery. Virgil and Boyd had come to the graveyard as kids to smoke cigars, then cigarettes, and eventually dope. They’d dared each other into the graveyard. Boyd had gone first. He always did—first down a snowy slope on a car hood, first to get thrown from an unbroken pony, first to ride a mini-bike up a homemade ramp. Now he was first dead.
Virgil crossed the road in the immense silence of the hilltop and climbed the fence into the cemetery. Gnawed acorns lay beneath the oaks. He hadn’t been back since the funeral but he walked straight to the grave, approaching from an angle so he wouldn’t have to read the name on the stone. The earth was still slightly humped. Wired to the marker was a bouquet of plastic flowers that Boyd would have hated. Beside it was their father’s grave.