by Greg Barth
“This from a guy with a bloody length of pipe under his passenger seat.”
“I don’t kill out of anger. I kill methodically and in an efficient way.”
“By getting up close and bashing people’s heads in, while the blood splatters everywhere.”
“You, on the other hand, kill for revenge. We’re very different.”
“Damn right we’re different. You’re the fucked up one.” I took a long drink from the bottle.
“Pot and kettle,” he said.
“Pot? You want me to roll us one?” I slurred.
“Would you, please?”
We went on like this for miles.
We were on the road a couple of days. Those days were divided by an overnight stay at a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere—a night filled with rough, drunken sex. I have vague memories of me wearing only the boots, pulling my legs back so my ankles were up next to my head and him pouring a bottle of expensive red wine over my naked body. I’m not saying that happened—I was pretty drunk—but I have that image in my mind. Red wine, white sheets, and my big man Ragus.
Late the next day, back on the road, we could make out blue formations in the distance, looming along the edge of the horizon. At first they looked like rain clouds, but as we drew closer, we could tell they were mountains. We were entering Appalachia.
The mountain chain starts in Northern Georgia and climbs the map northward, marking the division between Northeast Tennessee and Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, and Southwest Virginia. They extend further north through West Virginia. The mountains go even farther north, but I lose track of them there. As an Appalachian girl, if you speak to me about Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, you may as well talk to me about Paris and Hong Kong. I would never see any of it.
But once you were in the mountains, it didn’t really matter what state you were in, you were in Appalachia. Nobody claimed Appalachia. That’s why there are the designations—Western North Carolina, Northern Georgia, Southwest Virginia. Trust me, you’re either from Kentucky or from Eastern Kentucky. There’s a distinct difference.
They all had someone to look down on, namely one another. More specifically, they looked down on the girls of one another. The boys in Virginia asked, “What does a West Virginia girl do when she wakes up in the morning? She goes home. Ha ha. Get it? She goes home!” And then the West Virginia boys would say, “What’s the definition of a Kentucky virgin? Huh? An ugly twelve year old who can outrun her brothers! Har, har, har. Oh, I’ve got another one! What did the Kentucky girl say after sex? Get off me dad, you’re crushing my cigarettes! What’s the difference between a Kentucky girl and a bucket of shit? Huh? The bucket!”
Yeah, I’ve heard them all. I’ve been the butt of them all. After all, I’m the one without a bucket. Get off me dad you’re crushing my cigarettes? Fuck you.
All this came back to me the closer we got to home. You think you leave a place, stay away for years, grow and develop as a person, and when you go back there you go back as someone else, someone with a new perspective on things. You go back and you impact the place, not the other way around. But that just isn’t true. You go back and the reality of the place and your history there overwhelms you. The place makes you the person you are. Nothing has changed. You can’t go home again? Yeah. I wish.
I lit up a joint as he drove us toward the mountains. “Hey Ragus? You know what separates the men from the boys in Eastern Kentucky?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’re going to tell me.”
“Restraining orders. Ha. Get it? Restraining orders?”
“Uh huh. That’s nice. Can you stop talking now? I’m going somewhere I don’t want to go, and I’d hate to miss any of the attractions because of your yammering on about nonsense.”
“Sorry mister buzzkill.”
He took his eyes off the road and looked over at me. I saw a weight in them that I didn’t recognize. “You know, you never bothered to ask me where I’m from.”
That shut me up. A chill swept over me as his words sunk in. Appalachia is a large area. A lot of people are from there. A lot of people had a fucked up childhood too.
I took his hand. He laced his fingers through mine and moved our hands over to rest on my bare thigh. I tried hating him. It took some work.
I passed him the bottle of Evan Williams and he took a long pull.
I didn’t have Ragus take us directly to my father’s trailer. In fact, I didn’t even have him enter the county. In that part of the country, county lines run along natural formations such as rivers and mountain ranges. I grew up on the edge of the county up in the holler. We lived deep in the hills and only a couple of miles from the county line. By going in from a neighboring county and taking the old, winding roads through the hills, we were able to come in behind my father’s property.
As the road grew narrower and the curves steeper, the houses were more and more impoverished. Eventually we passed nothing more substantial than falling apart tar-papered shacks and old-model house trailers. They sat on the edge of the hills, their roofs and metal underpinning rusted and dented. Weeds grew up along the sides. Trash and junk cars littered the properties. Empty beer bottles lined the sides of the road. Satellite dishes sprouted on the sides of the homes. Most of the trailers had a green box in the front yard. I explained to Ragus that these boxes were insulated fiberglass covers for the electric pumps that drew water from the wells drilled in the ground. “There’s no city water through here. It’s all piped up from underground.”
I knew from much experience that the water from these wells was sulfuric and noxious. You could hardly wash your laundry, the water was so hard. Growing up, my family used a wringer washing machine that stood on four white metal legs on the deck outside our kitchen. We had to double the amount of powdered detergent recommended just to get it to produce suds—triple when my father washed his mining clothes. We had no electric dryer, instead we had a clothes line that we hung our wet laundry on to air dry.
We rounded a bend in the road, and a narrow gravel lane turned off to the right.
“Take this turn,” I told him.
“Where in god’s name are you taking me, Selena?” he said.
“Trust me,” I said.
He glanced at me warily as he navigated the steep curves.
We followed the road for a few miles. There were only a couple of homes along the way. Both looked long abandoned.
“The natural gas company now owns everything up this way.”
“Private property? We trespassing here?”
“The gas company don’t give a shit. We could move in one of those houses, they wouldn’t care.”
The road came to an abrupt end at what looked like the entrance to a forest of vines.
“What the fuck is this?” Ragus said.
“Kudzu,” I said.
“Holy fuck,” he said.
Everything in front of us—the road, trees, houses, road signs, power poles, everything—was covered in a thick layer of brown vines. Green leaves poked up here and there.
“Oh, this is nothing. You should see it in a few weeks when the vines have a chance to green up.”
“It looks like the end of the world,” he said.
“Nah. Kudzu’s an aggressive plant, but it ain’t the end of the world.”
“So this is like an abandoned town or something? There’s houses everywhere under this shit. I can see the outlines of them now.”
“It’s an old coal camp. Pop the trunk, would you?”
“Coal camp?”
“Yeah, the mining companies came in, built these houses—they all look exactly alike—for the workers, a main office, company store, everything—the bosses had larger houses, the workers had smaller houses—they paid the workers in script, and they all lived here together. Sort of like a commune, I guess. Anyway, coal mining went to shit, and king kudzu reigns now.”
“Fuck,” he said. He pushed the butt
on to pop the trunk.
“You’re impressed with this? ’Cause honey you would shit over some of the ghost stories I’ve heard about this place.”
“I bet. If ever there was a place to inspire ghost stories, this is it.”
“Truth is, the only ghost here is the ghost of money. There used to be some. People sold mineral rights, the companies came in and sucked all the coal out of the ground and put it in the air. The men had jobs for a while until their lungs got clogged with dust, and they died gasping for air. What you see here is all that’s left. My granddad once told me that god put coal down in the earth so that men would have good work, so they could feed their families. Now the men gotta sell pills and meth and the family is on foodstamps.”
I got out and walked around to the back of the car.
Ragus got out and joined me. “So what now?”
“We park here and hoof it. It’s not far, but it’s not an easy walk.”
We each had backpacks with some basic supplies. We had a sleeping bag each, and Ragus carried an ultralight tent in his pack. I had my bow and quiver. We didn’t carry water other than a liter bottle each. Water was too heavy. Instead we had a filter we could use to get creek water as needed. I carried whiskey, of course.
“You wanna do a line before we go?” he said.
“What? Fuck yeah.”
We drew out four lines on the trunk lid and used a straw to snort the powder. We stood by the car clearing our sinuses with loud, deep sniffs while the icy powder trickled down my windpipe like snow flurries. It did its work. I was wide awake, alert, eyes dilated, ready to take to the forest. I picked up my pack and put it on my back.
I noticed how the shadows of the trees were growing long. I forgot how morning came late and evening early in the hollers. The surrounding mountain ranges raised the horizon on all sides and compacted the sky.
“They show you how to put up that tent?” I said. “Looks like we’ll need it tonight.”
“They did. Pretty simple. It’s going to be pretty, uh, cozy, I guess.”
“We’ll keep warm then. Let’s get moving.”
Ragus held up the car keys so he could see what he was doing with them. He placed them on a tree limb just out of view on a tree next to the car. He raised an eyebrow.
I nodded. I’d know where the keys were if needed.
Ragus shouldered his pack. He slipped a rifle with a sling over one shoulder. He picked it up at the sporting goods store when he got my compound bow. It was a used Ruger .44 magnum semi-automatic carbine. Short and compact with no scope. Held five rounds in the magazine, but Ragus had also purchased a magazine that hung down from the carbine that extended its capacity. He had told me that he had a record, so fuck if I know how he bought it, but he did.
“You just never fucking know,” he’d said.
I didn’t tell him that Henry also used a .44 magnum, but I appreciated that both men saw a certain logic in having a .44.
The .44 magnum was a handgun cartridge, Ragus explained. But in the dense, hilly forests of Appalachia, the .44 magnum also made a great carbine bullet. What it lacked in range, it made up for in knockdown power.
Jesus. We were going to visit my family, and he was telling me about knockdown power.
But he was right.
T HIRTY
Selena
WE FOLLOWED THE vine-covered road through the ghost town into the darkening evening. The vines formed an almost solid thatch underfoot, so there was little risk of tripping. It was eerie to see trees and houses completely covered in kudzu and recognizable only by their profiles.
The vines thinned out after the first quarter mile, and we were in natural forest on the edge of the coal camp. The road narrowed and followed the hillside at a gradual slope up to the top. With the coke driving us, we set out at too fast a pace. By the time we were halfway, my heart was pounding. I felt like I could go on, but a sober thought reminded me of my recent chest injuries and surgery.
“Let’s slow down a bit,” I said.
Ragus stopped and took a sip of water.
We let our pulse rates slow, then resumed at a slower pace. We neared the top of the ridge taking steady baby steps and I felt much better. When we crested the top there was a refreshing cool breeze from the air spilling over the higher range to the west. We were up over 3,500 feet, unimpressive to westerners, but quite nice in the ancient Appalachians.
Ragus pitched the tent. He was right about its cozy nature. They don’t call these lightweight hiking tents “body-bags” for nothing. It would have housed one of him, or two of me, comfortably; but not both of us at once.
We made a small campfire and sat by it drinking. We were both tired from the drive and the hike and decided to turn in early. We spread the sleeping bags inside the tent. The ground was hard, but padded bags would give us some comfort. Once inside, we made love until we passed out.
I have a hard time sleeping after doing a lot of coke. This night was different. We were inside the tent with the sun setting, and I didn’t crawl back out until the sky was gray in the east.
I felt well rested when I stepped out of the tent. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. The clouds were low that morning. I watched them blow through the tree tops like spirits. I walked along the top of the ridge to find a spot to pee.
I spotted a doe with her fawn down the slope from me. The doe munched leaves from a bush as the fawn nursed.
Ragus crawled out next. He began packing up the tent without saying a word.
Once everything was rolled up and on our backs, the sun had burned off most of the fog, and a clear blue sky spread over the tops of the trees.
We followed the ridge for half a mile, then I took a spur trail that branched off and led down the slope.
“We’re pretty close now. We’ll find a level spot out of sight, but within walking distance of dad’s home. His dogs may be a problem.”
“We can deal with them,” Ragus said.
“Don’t hurt them if you don’t have to. He may not still have any.” Dad sold his hounds when he needed money. If he still had the same ones, there was a chance they might remember me.
We found a spot and set up camp. We spent the day nibbling on power bars and doing coke. We didn’t drink much. I wanted to be alert when the time came. We spread our sleeping bags out on the leaf-covered ground and made love under the blue sky with the birds singing in the tree tops above us.
That evening I got my bow and arrows ready. Ragus slung his rifle over his shoulder and we approached the road that led down to my father’s trailer.
I stopped us by a bramble thicket up the hill from the house. I took a pair of field glasses from my pack and watched the trailer. “No dogs,” I said.
“So what’s the plan? We just going to go up and knock on the door?”
I shook my head. “I need to confirm something first.”
We sat there watching the house into the afternoon. Ragus was getting antsy and talking about going back to camp for a bump.
“You didn’t bring any?”
“No. Hell, I didn’t know this was going to take all day.”
“Hush,” I said. I saw movement. I looked through the binoculars and saw the door to the trailer open. My dad stepped out. He was carrying a black plastic trash bag. He took it up to the galvanized metal can up at the edge of the road. He took the round lid off the can and stuffed the bag down inside.
Dad hadn’t changed much. He’d gained some weight. His hair was stringy and thin—he was past due several haircuts. His face was scruffy where he hadn’t shaved in a few days. He wore a yellow cap with a bent brim. His white, v-neck t-shirt was smudged and dirty. The neck of a plastic hip flask stuck out of his pocket.
“Here he is,” I said.
Ragus put his field glasses up to his eyes. “That’s your dad?” he said.
“In the flesh.”
“Holy shit.”
“You know how it is, man. They can’t all be ugly like you. Somebody’s got t
o fuck the prom queen after all.”
“You were adopted.”
“I wish.”
“No. Serious. There is zero family resemblance.” We both watched as the old man took the flask from his pocket, unscrewed the cap, turned up the bottle and drank several gulps. “No, wait. Stop the paternity test. There it is. I see it. You’re legitimate after all.”
His words stung, but I didn’t tell him that. He didn’t mean to hurt me, but he did. Seeing my father again after all I’d learned, after I’d started thinking of the things that he’d done to me in the past, flooded me with emotion.
Ragus’s rude comment coupled with seeing dad put me in a foul mood.
Dad went back in the house. “Let’s get that bump,” I said without looking at Ragus.
He put his arm around me. “I want to snort it off your chest,” he said.
I pushed his arm away. “You think I’m in the fucking mood?” I shoved his shoulder hard.
“Jeez, what the hell did I do to you? The next time you decide to shift into bitch mode, just fucking tell me, so I can keep up.”
I wiped tears from my eyes. I couldn’t help it.
“Hey,” Ragus said. “Whatever it is, I’m sorry. Whatever I did, I didn’t mean to. Okay?”
Typical fucking man. I tried not to sob, but I couldn’t hold it back. “That man hurt me, Ragus. And that man is my father.”
“Then I don’t like him. Maybe I’ll hurt him.”
In my bitchiest tone of voice I spat my words at him. “Well, don’t go and do anything out of emotion, mister professional.”
Ragus had a dumb look on his face. “I don’t know what changed between us just now. Or even what happened. I’m—”
“Don’t you get it? He did this to me.”
“Okay. Did what?”
“I don’t know.”
He helped me stand up. “I’ll carry your bow,” he said.
“Leave me alone. I fucking hate you sometimes.”
Ragus looked down the hill through the trees at my father’s trailer for a long moment. The look in his eyes scared me a little.