A dirt track.
Well, they are common enough in north Georgia, but I had not known that one existed so close to our enclave. Surely some of the residents up here would have complained about it. Liam used to say that he attended the Residents’ Meeting to make sure that they were not planning to hand out smallpox-infected blankets to the locals. Of course, they would do no such thing, but I did think that they would object to a dirt track in proximity of their luxury homes.
Eddie had knelt down on the ledge. He tapped my arm, pointing excitedly at the spectacle below. Mud flew and a phalanx of cars slid forward, spraying red mud in their wake. A race had begun. I watched the rainbow of cars circle the track for a moment, and the one that pulled ahead as it took the corner at full speed caught my eye. Red and silver. Liam’s number. The paint scheme identical, even down to the sponsors’ logos.
Rage struggled with amazement. Was this what he had come to show me? This cheap imitation, this flagrant image theft, a greater sacrilege than a few knock-off tee shirts?
“You can’t do this!” I said, shouting into the silence, for the sounds of the track did not carry all the way to the mountain top. They had copied my husband’s race car in every detail. I kept staring down at the track below, while I screamed the words into the wind. Copyright infringement... lawyers... fraud...“I won’t allow it!”
I shook with fury, the grieving widow now suddenly transformed into the keeper of the flame. Of the business, at least. I was ready to call lawyers to this solitary mountaintop, as one might summon dragons.
I paused, gasping for breath, and I would have said more, but all the while I had been staring down at those cars weaving and cornering around the track in a pavane on wheels. The way they took the corners at full speed, but never got loose. The way they passed on the track, a tap on the bumper here and there, but no driver spun out. No one hit the wall.
How many races had I seen over the years? Five hundred? A thousand? Watching at first only to see if Liam would walk away, but finally understanding the rhythms of the dance. At last able to judge the skill of the dancers themselves. I had seen them all, and without consciously trying to train my eye, I became able to tell good from great. I could discern style. I cannot explain it. A horse show judge will tell you that before a rider is halfway across a ring he will know the novice from the expert, even at a walk. After a while you just know.
As I knew now.
The pink 51. The red 25. The black and red-orange 28. The black number three. Oh, yes. I knew them all. And right out there among them, where he belonged, was Liam in his red and silver Chevy. All of them driving like no backwoods dirt track driver ever could, in perfect control, with surgical precision at breathless speeds—reaction time a blink, a heartbeat. A hundred things to watch all at once, swoop and glide, cut and corner, but never, never slowing down in the river of air.
It was them.
Neil Bonnett, killed at Daytona in 1994. The late Tim Richmond. Davey Allison, who had crashed his helicopter on the speedway grounds at Talladega in 1993. Talladega will kill you. Dale Earnhardt, the Intimidator, the man in black, who wouldn’t take no for an answer, even from Death, apparently.
And my lost love, Liam.
Impossible, but just slightly less impossible than the notion that anyone but they could drive with such perfection... And I looked and a whirlwind came out of the north... Like angels in chariots. NASCAR’s legends, but without crowds or cameras or a licensed speedway... Just them... Out here in the middle of nowhere.
And Liam. I had found him.
But he shook his head, and held up his hands, imploring me not to follow as he turned back toward the dark woods. I stumbled after him, crying out for him to stop, not to leave me alone on the mountain. But in an instant he was gone, and when I could no longer hear the sound of his footfalls in the bracken, I turned back to the ledge, thinking that I would find my own way down to the valley. I would follow the lights.
But they, too, were gone.
I knelt down and crawled to the very edge of the precipice, leaning as far over as I dared, straining for a glimpse of what had been so clear before. All I saw from the rock outcrop was a dark and silent plain, black with an unbroken sea of trees. Cold and silent under the distant stars.
* * * *
I have walked this mountain every day since then, at dawn, at twilight, even sometimes at midnight when the dew soaks my shoes and the night mist turns my hair to sodden strings. But Eddie never came back, and the local people swear they have never heard of him. Or perhaps they had. At the general store one old man smiled at my question. “Choestoe, he said his name was? Why, ma’am, he must have been joshing you. I reckon there could be folks still around named that, but Choestoe means rabbit in Cherokee. The rabbit was the trickster god in Cherokee lore. He could help you or hurt you, depending on his mood—and,”—he looked at me appraisingly—”on how you treated him, I reckon.”
I thanked the old man and left the store, knowing it was no use searching for the boy any more. But I could not help trying to find the place.
Abide with Me. Though I have walked those woods a hundred times, with that old hymn circling in my head, keeping time with my heartbeat, I have never found the rock ledge or that place in the valley where heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee.
A plaque, a photo, a cardboard likeness. I have all these things still. And a stone and glass house on a mountain, close to heaven.
“The Mountain House” was quilted together from several sources of inspiration, beginning with “The Haunted Palace.” That poem reminded me of the time I was giving a speech in a North Carolina mountain resort community on a Sunday afternoon, which meant that I was missing the NASCAR race. (In the course of researching my novel St. Dale, the Canterbury Tales set in NASCAR, I had become a fan of stock car racing, a sport which began in these mountains where the story is set.) When I finished my speech that afternoon, the race was still going on, so a kind stranger invited me up to watch it on TV at the mountain top mansion, where he was the caretaker. That house became the setting for the story, and both Eddie and Liam voice the sentiments of the native mountain people about this yuppie invasion. The rock ledge in the story exists atop Fort Mountain. I saw it a few months earlier while I was hiking with Georgia fantasy author Tom Deitz.
The heart of the story is Liam, the dead race car driver. To create the character I propped two photos on my keyboard: the rookie year photo of a NASCAR driver friend of mine and a shot of him taken ten years later. I wrote what I saw in his face, and what I felt when I watched him race. In the 2001 Daytona 500, fourteen cars slammed into him broadside at 200 mph, and 25 laps later in that same race, Dale Earnhardt did die. That’s where the story’s grief and the terror came from—watching a good friend race week after week, and never being sure that he would come back safe.
The emotions in this story are genuine: the feelings about the danger and the beauty of stock car racing, and the resentment of the human kudzu who are invading the mountains.
<
* * * *
Both of Glen Hirshberg’s first two collections, American Morons and The Two Sams won the International Horror Guild Award and were selected byLocus as one of the best books of the year. He is also the author of a novel, The Snowman’s Children, and a five-time World Fantasy Award finalist. With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a traveling ghost story performance troupe that tours the west coast of the United States each October. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including multiple appearances in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Inferno, The Dark, Dark Terrors 6, Trampoline, and Cemetery Dance. He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and children.
* * * *
The Pikesville Buffalo
By Glen Hirshberg
Late that November, a few months after his twenty-four year-old wife was diagnosed with breas
t cancer, Daniel felt a sudden urge to see the Great Aunts. He tried Ethel first, calling five times over a two-hour period, but kept getting the busy signal which meant either that she was talking to one of her children or stepchildren or—more likely—that she’d taken her phone off the hook to avoid talking to them. Finally, he called Zippo and got her on the first try.
“Of course, dear,” she told him, sounding muffled as ever, as though she were speaking through the orange wool shawl she always kept about her shoulders.
“Could you beam the news over to Aunt Ethel?”
“What? Oh, Daniel.” It was an old joke, his father’s, about the telepathic link that seemed to connect the sisters.
“How’s your lovely Lisa, honey?” Zippo asked.
“Okay, I think. Still not sleeping very well. The doctors think they got it all.”
“Poo-poo,” said Zippo, and Daniel hung up.
The next morning, he awoke before five, kissed Lisa where she lay twisting in the blankets, and, for the first time in over a year, drove the hour and a half from his dumpy beach-neighborhood shack on the Delaware coast into Baltimore and out Reiserstown Road toward Pikesville. The early morning gray never lifted, and the grass everywhere had already died. Something about the old neighborhoods near the Great Aunts had always unsettled Daniel, even during his childhood when he’d visited them every weekend. The low, redbrick houses seemed to have too few windows, too many chimneys, and they were always tucked back in the shadows of the tallest trees on their lots like little warrens. Rotting, unraked leaves littered the lawns. The oaks and elms and black locusts stood midwinter-bare.
Pulling up outside Ethel’s house—which was small, stone, and too long at either end for its slanted roof, as though emerging from the maples with its hands on its hips—Daniel shut off the car and was surprised to see his own hands shaking. He sat a few seconds, staring through the windshield at the gray, thinking not of Lisa but of cancer. It was true, what Zippo had told him not long after his father had died. Cancer didn’t just kill people; it blurred them, left a hazy, pointillist blotch where memories of the lives they’d lived before the disease should have been.
Abruptly, he slammed his fist down on the horn. For all they knew, Lisa really was finished with cancer. Forever. They’d caught it early, taken it out. He really needed to get the hell over it.
Which was exactly why he’d come. Popping open the door, he stepped onto the pavement, expecting Pikesville silence, winter wind. Instead, he got Xavier Cugat.
Before he even reached his Aunt Ethel’s front steps, Daniel was smiling. It wasn’t just the incongruity—all those congas and horns sashaying down this street of old homes and older Jews—but the volume. Daniel swore he could see the surrounding houses shuddering on their foundations, the drawn curtains in nearby windows twitching their skirts. He half-expected the police to arrive any second.
Daniel tried the front doorbell first, but of course, that was useless. Hunching against the cold, he slipped around the side. He was already past the screened-in porch when his Aunt opened the side door.
“Oy-yoy-yoy,” she said, nodding at his coat, one hand fluttering off the hips she could no longer shake and making mambo motions. “Is it really that cold out?”
Daniel stared. The rooster-crest springing from his aunt’s scalp glowed a luminous, freshly dyed red. She was wearing blue-jean shorts, a yellow t-shirt with a Queen of Hearts playing card and the legendAunty Up, Baby imprinted on it, and yellow vinyl slipper-sandals that displayed her virtually nail-less hammer toes in all their glory.
“Can’t you feel it?” Daniel half-shouted, moving forward to give her a kiss.
“Skin of a crocodile.” Aunt Ethel pulled demonstratively at the folds on her forearms.
“Toes of a troll.”
She smacked him playfully on the cheek before kissing him in the same place, then smeared the lipstick she’d imprinted there. “You find a troll who looks this good at eighty-two, give him my number, okay?” With an arthritic lurch Daniel realized afterward was a butt-bump, Aunt Ethel shuffled off inside, beckoning him with more of her rhythmic, slinky hand movements.
“Aren’t you worried about the neighbors?” Daniel called, shutting the door.
“What?”
“The racket. What if they call the cops?”
“The music? Honey, everyone within four blocks is stone deaf.”
She disappeared into her tiny kitchen to bring him the bagel, lox, and purple onion tray he knew she’d have prepared and refrigerated for him last night. The stereo shut down, and for one delicious moment, Daniel found himself alone, submerged in the familiar dimness of his Aunt Ethel’s house.
The memories that assailed him centered mostly around shivas, but were no less sweet for that: there was the midnight flag football game in the sleet fourteen years ago, two days after Uncle Harry’s death, when Daniel’s father—frail already, and with a hacksaw cough, but still slippery as a snowflake—solved the absence-of-spare-socks problem by suggesting they use yarmulkes for the flags instead; there was the morning he’d crept upstairs with Ethel’s perpetually wan, humorless thirty-four year-old son Herm after the early Mourner’s Kaddish at the shiva for Zippo’s second husband Ivan. He and Herm had used an entire roll of electrical tape, some torn-up egg cartons, and a box of discarded nine-volt batteries to try to get Herm’s homemade, childhood train set to run just one more time. It hadn’t, but the light-towers at the miniature baseball stadium flicked on a few times, and one of the crossing gates lowered and its bells rang. There was the three-hour jokefest after Rabbi Goldberg went home on the last night of Mack’s funeral two years ago. It began with Daniel’s recitation of Mack’s favorite about the rabbi, the leather worker, and the circumcised foreskins, and ended when Daniel’s father—barely able to speak, and confined to a wheelchair he couldn’t even sit up in—somehow gasped his way through the Fuck One Goat joke, while all the cousins and step-cousins alternately giggled and snuck glances at Aunt Ethel’s half-horrified mouth, quivering as it fought the laughter welling behind it. Daniel had been laughing, too, until he saw Zippo leaning into the shadows against the hallway wall, her eyes riveted on his father, her mouth pursed and her shoulders drawn back as though she could do his breathing for him.
Or had that been at the shiva for Zippo’s third husband, Uncle Joe, whom Daniel had only met twice, but who had the gorgeous lesbian granddaughter? Or for Uncle Bob, Mitchell’s shyer, gentler oldest friend?
No. Mack’s, because of the jokes. Just the way Mack would have wanted it. If he’d had his way, he’d probably have had Aunt Ethel blasting Xavier Cugat during the graveside service, too.
Standing now in Aunt Ethel’s tan-carpeted living room with the tea mugs on glass shelves and the library-sale Dick Francis hardbacks lining the walls, Daniel thought of what his mother had called Aunt Zip, years and years ago: the Angel of Mercy, or else the Worst Luck in the World. Tears teased the corners of his eyes, which had adjusted to the gloom, now. He glanced toward the wall of photos, blinked and moved closer.
“Uh... Aunt Ethel? Where’d everybody go?”
In she came, balancing not just the bagel tray but a chipped, porcelain jug of orange juice and a set of thirty year-old novelty glasses featuring stencils of Jim Palmer in his Jockey underwear on the sides.
“Eat; you look thin,” she said, somehow maneuvering the tray and glasses onto the tiny coffee table. “I got your favorite. Onion, sesame, pumpernickel.” She gestured toward the pile of toasted bagels.
“Just one of my favorites would have done.”
“Well, I have to eat, too, don’t I?”
Without waiting for him to choose, Aunt Ethel bent forward, drew half an onion bagel from the stack, and began slathering it with cream cheese and onion bits. Daniel gestured at the wall.
“Aunt Ethel, we really have to talk about you letting the buffalo herd play with the photographs.”
She lifted an old, open hardback off the table out of the w
ay of the food and held it to her chest. The phone rang.
“Ugh,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking.”
Daniel grinned. “Okay, I’ll leave.”
She tsked and smacked his leg with the book, then studied him a while.
“Too thin,” she said.
She reoffered the bagel, and Daniel took it, though he wasn’t hungry. Almost casually, he glanced at his aunt’s hands, looking for signs of shaking. There were none.
“Seriously,” he said. “What happened to the boys?” He nodded toward the wall, most of which was blanketed with the same collage of framed snapshots of children and stepchildren and grandchildren Daniel had practically memorized during all those childhood visits, or more likely during the shivas, when there was so little to do but eat and stare at faces. But sometime in the past year, Aunt Ethel had apparently replaced the photos of herself and Aunt Zippo and the six husbands they’d buried between them.’
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