by Chris Offutt
He rose at dawn. The rising lilt of birdsong surrounded the trailer and seemed to press against its walls. Virgil spread a mound of coffee grounds in an old handkerchief, twisted it into a tight ball, and dropped the knot into a cup. He poured boiling water in the cup and carried it outside. The morning sun bestowed a sweet light upon the hills. He wrapped a few of Boyd’s old weapons in a feedsack, put it in the trunk of his car, and drove to town.
Mist rose like smoke from the creek. In Rocksalt a patrol car waited at a light and Virgil had a quick panic but continued through town to the interstate. As he accelerated up the ramp, he felt as if he were leaving a creek for a river of tar and cement. He wondered if the government had foreseen the results of building the four-laner. The road provided escape, but nothing of merit had been brought in yet.
He exited at Mount Sterling and drank coffee in a diner. Montgomery County had legal bars, lots of money, and a new jail. Virgil recalled the time Boyd had gotten arrested on a drank charge in Rocksalt. It was late Friday night and the jail was full. The cop phoned the Mount Sterling police. By the time they arrived, Boyd was sober and the Montgomery County jail was full. The jailer kept him in his office until his shift ended, then took him home and locked Boyd in his son’s old room. In the morning Boyd woke to the smell of sizzling bacon. The jailer released him, gave him a clean towel, waited outside the bathroom until Boyd finished, and escorted him to the kitchen. After breakfast the jailer and his wife drove Boyd back to his mother’s house, and stayed for supper. Boyd liked to say that the only better jailing he ever did was with a boy who’d smuggled dope into the cell.
Virgil finished his coffee and found a gun store. He carried his bundle inside, where a large man stood behind a glass display case. His shoulders lay across his body like a bench. Behind him was a poster that said “American by Birth, Kentuckian by the Grace of God.”
The man jerked his chin to acknowledge Virgil. Razor burns marred his jaw. His right hand was out of sight and Virgil knew it held a pistol.
“He’p ye?” he said.
Virgil unwrapped the burlap feedsack to display two shotguns and an old semi-automatic .22 from Sears, Roebuck. He opened the breech of each weapon. The man inspected them slowly, working the action, squinting along the sights. His face showed no sign of his appraisal.
“You sure they’re yours?” he said.
Virgil nodded.
“I ain’t going to have the law in here looking to confiscate them, am I.”
“I can’t speak for the law,” Virgil said. “But those are my guns.”
The man kept his stare fastened to Virgil. His eyes were pale blue and separated by a space the width of three fingers.
“Sale or trade?” the man said.
“Little bit of both.”
“What are you wanting?”
“Depends on what they’re worth to you.”
“Well, that .22 ain’t worth more’n a few bucks.”
Virgil began wrapping the weapons in burlap. The man placed his empty right hand on the counter.
“I might could use them other two,” he said. “What are ye hunting?”
“Pistol.”
The man moved to a case fall of handguns. Virgil inspected a .45 automatic, a .357, and a nickel-plated .38. He bypassed an expensive Glock 9mm and returned to the 45. It was heavy but attractive, with handcrafted wooden grips. As he hefted it, he casually asked how much his own weapons were worth. The man named a high price, and Virgil knew it was relative to the cost of the pistol he was holding. He set it down and asked for a cheaper .22 revolver. The man’s lips tightened. Boyd would have liked to play against him in a poker game.
“If we swap straight up,” the man said, “we’ll just keep Uncle Sam out of it. No Brady, no tax. Nothing.”
Virgil traded for a box of cartridges, drove home, and cleaned the pistol. The sharp scent of gun oil filled the trailer’s kitchen. He reassembled the pistol and ate a sandwich of baloney on white bread. Everything was in place, there was nothing left to do. He wore a jacket so he could carry the pistol and ammunition in a pocket and entered the woods behind his trailer.
A chunk of cloud came over the hill and through the sky. He moved downslope, grabbing saplings to slow his pace. The woods held fall summer’s green and he crossed a dry rain branch and began to climb. The western sun had made tree leaves crinkle and drop. Virgil felt as if he’d moved from summer to autumn simply by crossing a creek. He walked deep into the mineral company’s land. No one would bother him there, and he’d not have to worry about trespassing. Company land was handy to have around. He wondered if city people had the same attitude toward a park.
He loaded the pistol and began firing. He was concerned with smooth action rather than accuracy, and after sixty rounds he felt satisfied. It was very loud. The problem with gunfire was that it sounded like gunfire. Many people recognized the differing sounds of pistol, shotgun, and rifle, and some could name caliber. Virgil let the revolver cool before slipping it in his pocket. He had never seen a silencer except on television, and he no more understood how one worked than he did an aspirin.
He returned to his trailer and watched dusk arrive. He wished his brother were alive to give him counsel. He’d be jealous that “Virgil got to have the fan of revenge. It was a task more suited to Boyd.
9
* * *
After work the next day, Virgil cashed his paycheck and closed out his bank account in Rocksalt, asking for the cash in hundreds. The teller had been skinny and old when he was a kid and now she looked the same. She never gossiped or misspoke.
“How’s your mother?” she said.
“Pretty fair.”
“And your sister?”
“Not much changes with her.”
“More kids?”
“Says she’s done.”
“How about Abigail?”
“Got herself a promotion.”
“I heard that.”
She counted a few thousand dollars onto the counter and slid it into an envelope.
“Here you are, Virgil,” she said. She smiled without showing her teeth, a sly expression that drained twenty years from her face. She winked. “Hope you young people luck.”
Virgil was astonished at the wink. She’d heard that he and Abigail were getting married. The story had probably gotten back to Abigail by now and he felt bad that he’d not seen her in a while.
He strolled the familiar sidewalk of Main Street, passing people whose faces he recognized—as Boyd put it, men he’d howdied but never shook. Teenage boys outside the pool hall stood very close to each other. As they got older, they would move farther apart. Old men in front of the courthouse owned a segment of space that surrounded them like a web. He tried to think of the changes since he was a kid coming to town once a week for groceries with his mother. The drugstore had moved across the street. A new theater had been built, its carpeted floor providing enough static electricity to create fingertip shocks. The small stores were still operated by the same families. There was absolutely nothing to miss.
At a realtor’s office, he transferred ownership of his land and trailer to Sara. He explained that it was a surprise gift, and the realtor promised to keep the transaction a secret.
He drove to his sister’s house at the head of Bobcat Hollow. The dirt road crossed the creek several times, and in spring the two mixed freely. At the top of the ridge, trees glowed with autumn colors, but near the creek, the leaves were still green. Two dogs loped around the house and barked. A young billy goat with one horn stared at him through a fence, the only penned animal on the place. Sara stood in the garden behind the house. Her legs were spread as she bent from the waist among the furrows. A lard bucket filled with stove ash sat beside her.
“Lord love a duck,” she said. “Look what the dogs drug in. Will miracles never stop?”
She stood straight and rubbed her lower back.
“You know, Virge, sometimes I’d rather sort cats than hunker in the
dirt all day.”
“Best wear welding gloves for that chore.”
“They’s some to cut the claws off a cat. Did you know it?”
“It’s untelling what people will do to an animal.”
“I’ve seen them treated better than kids.”
“How’s yours?”
“Susie wants to wear lipstick and Jeannie wants to play basketball. Them boys fight bad as roosters.”
“Ary a one here?”
“They’re in the holler somewhere.”
Sara walked primly between the farrows to the porch. She settled into a metal glider with rust spots showing through white paint. Virgil sat in a chair he recognized from his mother’s house. It fit the contours of his body like an old coat.
“Wondered what happened to this chair,” he said.
“You came around more, you’d know.”
“That’s sort of why I came by today.”
“I kindly had the idea you had something to announce.” Sara’s grin was sly. “I know you.”
“Do you, Sara? I don’t feel like the person everybody thinks I am.”
“Abigail knows you good enough.”
The glider creaked in a steady rhythm that reminded him of bed-springs while making love. One side of the hollow was in shadow. By morning, there would be frost on the dark side of the hill.
“Turning off cold overnight,” he said.
“Reckon you came to talk about weather.”
“Look, Sara, I know I don’t visit enough to suit you. And I got no excuse for it. I envy what you and Marlon have. This is a good place for you all, a peaceful pocket,”
“You could have it, too, little brother.”
“Maybe, maybe not. That ain’t what I’m here over, either. The thing I’m trying to say, what I want you to know. It’s just that. Well.”
He suddenly recognized the safety of living in a hollow, the security of flanking hills with one route in. There could be no surprises here. Everything came at you straight on. You gave up sunlight but you were shielded from rain, wind, and ambush.
“I know we didn’t always get along, Sara. And I know you think I never liked Marlon, but that’s not true. I wish. I hope. Well, what I’m trying to say. Sara, I’m glad you’re my sister.”
“I love you, Virgil. You’re a good brother.”
Virgil wished everything could be that simple for him. He was unable to say those words, let alone reduce the complexities of family to such acceptance. What he was planning had everything to do with family but nothing to do with love. He stood. He wished she would stand so he could hug her. He faltered slightly as if tired. He wanted to leave before the kids arrived.
“You tell Marlon what I said. Hug your babies for me. Keep them warm. Tell them the truth about me, hear.”
“Why, Virgie, the way you talk, anybody’d think you were fixing to elope on us.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it.
“You don’t have to tell me nothing,” Sara said.
“Keep in mind you said that,” he said. “Don’t you ever forget what you just said.”
The glider swayed. As he walked away he knew that he’d never be here again, a thought that was a bludgeon. He backed the car in a half-circle, honked twice, and headed out of the hollow. He wanted to memorize every piece of it, the old fence post covered with vine, a willow that dangled its fronds in the creek. He reached The Road, grateful not to have encountered Marlon or the kids on his way out. Bobcat Hollow stretched toward darkness in his rearview mirror, just another dirt road that followed a creek into the hills. It was behind him now and always would be.
He sat on his trailer steps and listened to the sounds of evening in the woods, the rustle of animals, the call of owl and bobwhite. A strip of scarlet lined the horizon. He was perceiving the world with greater appreciation, like someone who’d nearly died. He lay awake a long time, running through his plans.
In the morning he drove to work for the last time. At the end of the shift, the sound of the time clock hitting his card was a familiar comfort. He lifted the card and dropped it in the hole again. He punched the clock several times until someone yelled behind him, and Virgil placed his card in the rack and joined the flow of men moving down the hall, through the door, and into the sunshine. His car sat between white stripes with the others in the lot. He belonged.
He stopped walking and the men moved around him like water parting for a snag. The old ones plodded to their cars while the young men flicked one another’s caps to the ground. The air held an autumn snap. The sky was crisp and clean. This was the time to lay in wood for winter and turn the earth with fall plowing. It was the season to hunt.
He waited for Rundell by his car. The two of them leaned against the hood.
“I know I ain’t been much good here lately,” Virgil said.
“You work.”
“It ain’t like it was.”
“Live long enough, Virge, you find out nothing ever is.”
“You’re a good man, Rundell. Best boss I ever had.”
Rundell was quiet.
“I’ve learned a lot off you.”
Rundell nodded.
“I’m fixing to make some changes, Rundell.”
“Change is good for a man.”
“I don’t see no way around it.”
“You won’t be so alone either,” Rundell said. “Best thing about it for me was kids. Now I got grandbabies.”
“That ain’t exactly it.”
“I ain’t saying she’s pregnant.”
“You don’t understand, Rundell.”
“Work buddies see each other different from family and regular friends.”
“Maybe so.”
“You’re a good man, Virge. You ain’t afraid of work and you ain’t mean. Ever what’s eating at you will go away. Just start eating it back.”
“Might be that don’t do no good.”
“Then go on a diet.”
Rundell laughed, the lines of his face etched hard but gentle. Virgil reached in his pocket for a small knife.
“Here,” he said.
“That’s your knife.”
“No it ain’t, it’s yours. No sense in me walking around with another man’s knife in my pocket. Take it, now. Go on and take it.”
Rundell accepted the knife. He opened the Made, spat on his forearm, and shaved a patch of hair to test its sharpness.
“Good steel,” he said.
Virgil walked quickly away and drove out of the lot. He was giving away all his goals at once—his father’s cabin, a life with Abigail, becoming a crew boss. There was little to life but work and family, and he was throwing them over the hill. He cut down a side street and parked beside Abigail’s car. Virgil climbed the stairs to her apartment door and she let him in.
“Hidy,” she said. “I thought you died in a wreck.”
“Ab.”
He stepped into the room, slightly dismayed as always by the furniture. Abigail had received a touch of sophistication in Ohio, and every surface was made of chipboard covered by woodgrain vinyl that glowed with a perpetual shine.
“Sit down, Virgil. You look peaked.”
“I’m all right.”
She brought him a bottle of Ale 8, Kentucky’s native soft drink, with a distribution limited to one end of the county. The dark green bottle chilled his hand. He took many small sips because he didn’t know what to say. He admired her chin.
“You looking at my chin again?” she said.
“Reckon.”
“That’s why I put up with you, Virgil. You’re the only man to think it makes me special.”
“When we were kids, you were pretty much all chin.”
“And you were one solid cowlick.”
Abigail laughed, a familiar sound, and he wondered if everyone’s laughter stayed the same, like a fingerprint. He suddenly realized that he’d not considered the leaving of fingerprints. The only gloves he owned were heavy work gloves, not suited to h
andling a pistol. He wasn’t sure if it was a necessary concern since there’d be little question as to who he was. He supposed a man could wrap rubber bands around the joints of his fingers and use a razor blade to carve new prints.
He realized that Abigail had been talking and was now waiting for a response. He felt as he had in grade school when a teacher called on him and he hadn’t been paying attention.
“What,” he said.
“Now I know what folks are talking about,” she said. “I heard you were out of it half the time. Somebody said you were smoking pot, but I said no.”
“Not hardly.”
“Virgil the hophead.” Abigail laughed. “No, it just don’t fit.”
“People talk, Ab. I know what they been saying, too. I hope you don’t let it get to you too bad.”
“I don’t listen at it much.”
“There’s something I want to tell.”
Her eyebrows rose and Virgil recognized her listening face. When she became truly interested, a vertical line formed between her eyes. He hadn’t planned on the visit, let alone what he would say.
“Ab,” he said. “Ab.”
She nodded. Late afternoon sun refracted through the window, soaking her face and hair with light.
“Ab. I know I’ve not been close lately. I mean, sort of distant.”
He glanced at her and she nodded.
“So what I want to tell you is that it’s going to get worse. A lot worse.”
He shuffled his feet, wishing he smoked so he could spend a good two minutes lighting a cigarette.
“Now, Ab. You know how I feel about you, and us and all. That’s what you’ve got to remember. Always know that. But I want you to promise me something.”
She was very still, as if poised to leap.
“Ab, if anything ever happens, don’t you wait around. There’s plenty of men in this county to treat you right. You know what I’m saying.”
She shook her head tightly. Her fingers were gripping the chair arm, Virgil became aware of a terrible tension in the room and he didn’t know what to do.