by Chris Offutt
“Not no more. He got hisself saved now. Carries a Bible in the truck. Nobody wants to work with him the way he carries on. Only man who will is his cousin.”
“Old Dewey. I bet he’s the same.”
“He ain’t likely to change.” Orben chuckled. “Was he engaged when you were there?”
“No.”
“He’s going with some girl from Pick County. It’d take two men and a boy to keep up with them. They’re broke up one day and getting married the next.”
“Pick County.” Joe shook his head. “What’d he think he was doing over in there, I’d like to know.”
“Getting about what he deserves.”
Orben and Joe laughed together until it trickled away, leaving an awkward space of time. Orben adjusted his cap and lit another cigarette.
“Grade school’s closing,” Orben said.
“Ours?”
“Yeah, buddy. They’re already building a new one halfway to town. Remember that bunch of trailers called Divorce Court?”
“Yeah, I used to pick their garbage up.”
“Well, they’re all tore out. And that’s where the new school’s going in,”
“By the drive-in?”
“That’s gone, too.”
“Anything else?”
“Post office shut down. Zeph, he retired, and down it went. I always liked him.”
“Me, too,” Joe said. “Reckon how old he is?”
“I don’t know, but he’s up there. Don’t he look like a turtle to you?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “I never thought about it, but he did. The way his head set on his neck. How about the bootlegger?”
“You won’t believe it,” Orben said. “They’re trying to get bars in town now, and all the bootleggers are glommed up with the preachers to fight it. Go to church and there’s a bootlegger on the front row, like a hen trying to lay a goose egg,”
“You just know the bootleggers are giving them money.”
“Shoot, yes. Every church in the county’s got a new air conditioner and fresh gravel.”
“Who they calling for to win?”
“It’ll go wet if the college kids vote. The whole fight’s over keeping them out.”
Joe wondered if they’d build new bars, or convert stores to taverns. People who drank in cars might prefer to stay away.
“You’d not know town, Virgil. Eight here lately, there’s talk of building a bypass.”
“A bypass of what?”
“Main Street.”
“Where would it go?”
“They want it to run alongside of Main Street, back toward the creek.”
“Why the hell would they do that?”
“Takes too long to get through town. Funny thing, they want to put traffic lights on the bypass. Pretty soon they’ll need a bypass for the bypass.”
He laughed and Joe grinned, The world had passed Rocksalt by for a hundred years, and now the town was going to make it easier.
“Town,” Joe said. He shook his head. “I’d still yet rather sit in the woods any day. Even if they ain’t my woods.”
“Only thing Rocksalt’s good for is getting out of.”
Again a sense of unease entered the air between them. Wind carried the smell of juniper and spruce from deeper in the woods.
“What happened to my trailer?” Joe said.
“Marlon sold it. That’s how he started his muffler shop. They say the people that bought it draws the biggest government check in Blizzard.”
“They got a bunch of babies, or what?”
“No, nothing like that. There’s just the two of them. It’s the crazy check I reckon.”
“Is there anything else gone on without me?”
“You can get Ale-8 all over the county now.”
“I’d give twenty dollars for a bottle right now. You ain’t got one, do you?”
“Not on me, I sure don’t,”
Joe’s leg hurt and he shifted position to stretch it across the dirt. Orben tensed at the movement, gripping the rifle. The woods were quiet Sunlight spread through the tangle of pine boughs.
“Ever hear anything on old man Morgan?” Joe said.
“Don’t believe I know him.”
“He went deep in them woods past Sparks Branch and set down a long time back. Supposed to have killed a bunch who worked in the old clay mines.”
“I heard that story. My mamaw used to tell me if I didn’t act right, he’d get me. It’s bullshit.”
“He’s real,” Joe said. “He told me you’d come.”
“I don’t reckon.”
“Not you, by name. He said if I shot Billy, there’d be somebody to come. Said they always would be. Said as soon as you Mil one man, you got to kill more. Said it wasn’t no easier either.”
Orben watched him without moving, his hands tight on the rifle.
“You ain’t talking me out of it,” he said.
“I’m ready to die. Half my family’s dead and I can’t go home. Same thing’ll happen to you. If you go back, somebody’ll sneak up on you. Same as you done me.”
“Damn straight, Virgil.”
Orben lifted the rifle to his shoulder. It was a battered Remington, good for squirrel, rabbit, and beer cans. Ty wouldn’t stock it.
Joe’s voice was soft, as if speaking to himself.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I never done it. When I first got here I thought it was the same as Kentucky only the hills were taller. But it ain’t. You’re the first person in a year I talked to who knows how I was raised—start right in talking and tell everybody everything all the time. These people out here don’t say much.
“It’s like my world got a hole in it and all the life run out. I can’t walk on land and know I’ve walked it a thousand times. I miss coming up the creek and seeing my home hill setting there waiting on me. I miss being in the woods bad. Hunting ginseng and mushrooms. I ain’t seen a lightning bug in a year, or dew either. The colors here don’t change much. The hills stay dark green, then get white in winter and back to dark. There’s no songbirds or whippoor-wills. I could eat a mile of soupbeans and cornbread. I miss pork something awful. I don’t reckon they ever heard of a hog out here.
“I miss my family most. Mom. Sara and them. I miss Boyd, too, even dead. He didn’t leave no tracks in this country. Out here the only place he’s alive is inside my head.
“I miss Virgil Caudill,” he said. “Who the hills made me into. This land’s not mine. It’s great to look at, but it’s not part of me. The house I live in isn’t mine. Even the kids aren’t mine. Everything I’ve got is left over from somebody else.”
Joe inhaled deeply and held the air in his lungs as long as possible. He could talk all day. Orben cleared his throat. He moved the rile until it lay across his lap, aimed into the brush.
“I knew Boyd,” Orben said. “All my buddies did. He was sure something to us. Even my mamaw liked him. She used to say the truth must be in him, because it ain’t never come out yet.”
He flicked the safety shut behind the trigger, a snapping sound that hung in the air. Joe realized that Orben might not shoot him and felt a dim pang of disappointment.
“I never did like Rodale,” Orben said. “They was some said he got what he deserved. Said they seen it coming when he was just a tad-whacker. My great-uncle said it would have happened sooner in his day.”
“Who was that?”
“Shorty Jones.”
“Lives on Redbird, don’t he.”
“Yes,” Orben said. “He raised me part way up. He don’t know I left, and he don’t know I took his gun. When my cousin called me, coming after you sounded like fun. I just jumped in the car and took off, but I didn’t like them flat states. You can drive all day and not get nowhere. It made me nervous. Every time I stopped for gas I wanted to lay down to keep from tipping over. I don’t see how people can get around on land with no hills to go by. You’d need a map just to find the store.
“By God, I was five
days and three hundred dollars getting to Butte and then my car broke down. I saw the biggest mine hole in the world, I mean big, Virgil. Makes ours look puny. A rough-seeming people but they treated me good. I sold my car and took a bus to Missoula. Wrapped my rifle up in cardboard and put it over my head like it wasn’t nothing.”
“How’d you get down here?”
“Walked.”
“All the way from town?”
“I couldn’t hitchhike packing a rifle. Nights sure throw a chill.” Orben gazed around the somber woods of cedar, spruce, and fir. “I don’t see how you’ve lasted this long, Virgil.”
“I didn’t have much choice.”
“I seen pronghorn by the road out here. Antelope, too. And elk. They got buffalo?”
“I never saw none,” Joe said. “Why don’t you come up to the house and get something to eat.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I got a sandwich right here. Baloney on light bread, and there’s coffee in a thermos.”
“Now, no.”
“Half, then,” Joe said. “It’s in that poke setting on top of the woodpile.”
Orben propped his rifle on a log and opened the sack. He ate most of the sandwich in three bites before offering the rest to Joe, who shook his head.
“You got to,” Orben said.
He passed the food to Joe and poured coffee into the plastic lid of the thermos. He lit a cigarette.
Joe changed the position of his legs and reached behind his back. The pistol grip was cold in his hand. He began easing it free of the holster. He thought of the holes in Rodale’s face, of Morgan living alone like an animal in a lair. He’d killed Rodale for his brother, but he couldn’t kill for himself. He released the gun and sat straight.
“Back bothering ye?” Orben said. “I know how that is. I slept outside the last two nights. There’s a knot in my hip like somebody drove a nail in.”
“I got something for you,” Joe said. “It’s in my pocket, so don’t get nervous.”
“Shoot, takes more than you to make me nervous.”
Joe tilted sideways and pushed his hand in his pants pocket and removed the belt balancer that Morgan had given him. It was the last thing he owned of the hills. He tossed it to Orben.
“Know what that is?”
“Belt balancer,” Orben said. “Uncle Shorty made a many till his eyes went. This is a nice one. Poplar, my opinion.”
He threw it in an arc that landed in Joe’s lap, Joe held the piece of wood in his palm, surprised that it had returned so rapidly, like a boomerang.
“Reckon what I’ll tell them in Blizzard,” Orben said.
“I don’t know. Maybe the truth.”
“Yours or mine?” Orben said. “Damn, this coffee’s good.”
“Best way is not to say nothing. They’ll think the worst for a while, then they’ll forget about it. You can’t get in no trouble that way. I used to think a good lie was close to the truth. Now I think it’s not saying a word. That way they make up their own lies.”
“They always said you was smart, Virgil.”
Orben placed the thermos on a stump and stood. He lifted his rifle until its barrel aimed at the sky.
“See you, Virge,” Orben said.
“Don’t run off.”
“Anybody you want me to howdy for you?”
Joe shook his head. Orben walked to the edge of the clearing. Joe slowly stood.
“Hey,” Joe said.
Orben turned, his expression wary. The rifle lowered slightly. Joe wanted to memorize the way he looked, a final image of home.
“What was it Boyd did,” Joe said, “that made Billy shoot him?”
“I don’t know,” Orben said. “I surely don’t.”
He stepped into the woods and disappeared among the brown trunks and drooping lower boughs of the trees.
26
* * *
An immense loneliness settled over Joe. He was both exhausted and exhilarated from the talk with Orben, as though he’d suddenly gone home for a day. The events that had transpired in his absence lay like unsorted lumber in his mind.
The sky was streaked by smoke. His eyes burned and he wondered if they needed to evacuate. The sound of aircraft echoed off the river. He walked up the slope past tumbleweed piled against the broken fence line. He had no idea how much time had passed. Orben’s accent still roared in his head. He felt as if the hills of Kentucky were walking away from him.
In the house the kids were sitting on the couch. Abilene sucked his finger and held Dallas’s hair, who cocked his head toward his brother’s grasp.
“Coop’s mad,” Dallas said. “He said if we came in his room, he’d shoot us.”
“Nobody’s shooting anybody around here,” Joe said.
Joe went to his old room, where Coop slumped over the radio like a cardplayer in an all-night game. Botree held a finger to her lips. A new map lay on the table, unmarked save for a single black circle among the whorls of elevation. Inside the circle was the letter F like a cattle brand. The CB squealed and Frank’s voice crackled over the air.
“Hear this, you jackbooted thugs? Hear it?”
There was the quick noise of scraping metal and a louder sound of something ramming into place.
“That’s full-auto rock and roll. Camp Megiddo is waiting. My army of patriots has fifty-caliber machine-gun emplacements. We have antitank artillery. We have surface-to-air missiles. The man who kills me is only following orders. The Bill of Rights is dead. If the government excludes itself, why must I then abide? Bless them, Father, they know not what they do.”
The transmission stopped abruptly. Coop’s face was slack and haggard, but his eyes gleamed.
“Does Frank really have that stuff?” Joe said.
“I don’t know,” Botree said.
“It might be more of his bullshit.”
“Coop picked up people on the scanner. I heard it, too. You can tell it’s official.”
“Probably firefighters.”
“It sounds like Feds,” she said. “ATF or somebody. Other people in the valley heard them, too. Frank’s been calling for volunteers all morning.”
“I hope Johnny didn’t go.”
“I got word to him at the Wolf. Asked him to come home. Then he radioed in and said there was a roadblock a few miles north of the ranch. He said he was going to leave the truck and follow the river home.”
Joe studied the topographical map. The black circle was ten miles from the ranch, accessible only by a narrow draw. It reminded him of Morgan’s place—one way in, one way out. Morgan had lasted forty years. With the weapons Frank claimed to have, he could repel all but the most fierce attack. The Bills would have to be overrun, bombed, or burned out.
The scanner sputtered and Coop turned slowly, his body moving like a machine that needed to be taken apart and cleaned. He squelched the noise and adjusted the scanner’s controls until a different voice came.
“White Dog to Delta. What’s your sitrep?”
“The approach is in our control. Repeat, the approach is in Delta control.”
The voice gave way to a buzz of static, Botree was right, it sounded like a military operation rather than firefighters. Joe realized that White Dog was the command post while Delta was a ground force moving into position.
Coop leaned over the map and drew a small line with a pen. There were other marks that Joe hadn’t noticed, tiny black dots that progressed up the draw. The last one was at the top of the hill near the F in a circle. Joe understood that he was seeing Frank’s holdout, and the advance of the attacking force. He wondered how many people had joined Frank.
From the CB came Frank’s voice again.
“Come and get it, heathens,” he said. “Your day of calamity is at hand. Thomas Jefferson warned us two hundred years ago—‘The strongest reason for the people to keep and bear arms is to protect themselves against tyranny in government.’ ”
The transmission ended, leaving a sudden si
lence in the tiny room. Joe hoped each side was attempting an elaborate ruse designed to make the other surrender. The attackers might have superior firepower, but the Bills knew the terrain and wouldn’t be bluffed.
Coop reduced the volume on the scanner and began changing channels on the CB, revealing scraps of talk along the valley as he moved slowly down the band.
“. . . won’t let you drive past the Jackson place . . .”
“. . . a trick, I’m telling you. They wouldn’t . . .”
“. . . plenty of water and ammo, what else . . .”
“. . . she thinks it’s Armageddon but I say the FBI . . .”
Joe felt as if the walls of the tiny room were compressing him. He left the room, feeling empty as last year’s bird’s nest. Missing his mother’s funeral was the worst blow of all.
The sound of gunfire startled Joe, three quick shots. He thought it came from the radio until Botree ran down the hall.
“That’s outside, Joe.”
“Where?”
“Toward the back pasture.”
“Put the kids in the tub.”
“What?”
“It’ll protect them.”
He withdrew the .38 from the nylon holster on his belt and went to the mud room. He found a towel in a corner and wrapped one end around the pistol and placed the other in his mouth. He peered through the window. As he turned his head, the pistol moved with him like a snout. The pasture was empty. Wind cleared smoke from the air, and the sky shone like the waters of a lake. When his eyes burned, he reminded himself to blink.
The shadows of the treeline stretched along the grass of the pasture. His bad knee began to ache and he shifted his weight. He was hungry. Metallic voices issued from the radio down the hall. Joe strained to recall the gunshots, hoping to gauge their caliber, but the memory eluded him. He wondered if they had been a signal to a team that was preparing to attack the house.
Joe shook his head to concentrate on the pasture. Lines of smoke rippled along the distant peaks. A man left the woods and ran toward the house. Joe leveled the pistol sights at the man’s chest. His hand swayed back and forth as the strained muscles of his arm began to quiver. He steadied the gun and inhaled. He wanted to wait until he was certain of his target. The man was close, running very fast, and Joe recognized Johnny.