by Alex Bledsoe
“Maybe I don’t trust me.”
“You can’t get close enough to snap on that leash from all the way over there.”
“I suppose that’s true.” He stood and gestured at the door. “Your car or mine?”
“Oh, mine. There’s something I want to show you.”
They left, aware that every eye followed them. Just before the door shut behind them, Rachel dropped a beer glass from her shaking hand. The shattering sound was the last thing they heard.
* * *
Junior sidled over to Nigel. “You ain’t going with ’em?”
“I can’t imagine they would want my company.”
“Think he’ll kill her?”
Nigel looked at him. “You sound rather eager for that to happen.”
“Nah, I just … I mean, that’s what he’s here for, ain’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know.” But Nigel did know that he wished he could have met with Jeff alone before Bo-Kate took him away. If the plan was to let Byron handle Jeff the way he’d done with the others, then Jeff didn’t really have much of a chance. And if Bo-Kate intended to take care of it herself, then Jeff had no chance at all.
He looked around for the white-haired young man Tain had described, who wanted to meet with him. He almost yelped out loud when a voice spoke practically in his ear. “I reckon you must be Nigel,” Snowy said softly.
Nigel turned, and did a slight double take at the other man’s white hair and paradoxically young face. “Ah. Now I understand. ‘Snowy.’”
“Nicknames tend to be obvious.”
“Indeed.”
“Well, we seem to have a few minutes. Shall we chat?”
Nigel looked around. Many eyes were on him, none of them friendly. “Here?”
“Follow me. Nobody’ll bother us.”
“Nobody will bother you.” But Nigel followed him through the crowd and into the kitchen.
Arshile looked up from the grill. “Snowy,” he acknowledged.
“We’re just going into the pantry to talk,” Snowy said. “If anybody looks for us, you ain’t seen us.”
“Who said that?” Arshile deadpanned.
When the door was mostly closed—he wanted to be able to hear if anyone did approach—Snowy said, “Your boss is out to destroy us, Nigel. The whole Tufa community. That may sound a little melodramatic, but it’s true.”
“No, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” he said.
“I understand you’re having second thoughts about it.”
“I assume you heard this from Tain?”
“Doesn’t matter. Are you?”
Nigel realized that Snowy stood between him and the door. “I did not comprehend the depth of her acrimony until I saw some of her actions once we got here.”
“So what does she really want?”
“She wants what she says she wants. To be totally in charge, and to wreak as much havoc as possible.”
“And she’s willing to do anything to get that? Including killing people and changing the town’s name?”
Nigel hesitated, then nodded.
Snowy paused while he absorbed this. Then he said, “There’s a deadline. For reasons that wouldn’t make any sense to you, it’s all going to be decided Tuesday night. We know she’s got something planned. What is it?”
Again Nigel hesitated, though not from fear of betraying Bo-Kate. “If I tell you … there’s a great chance, percentage-wise, that you won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“She’s found … someone. A man who should have died sixty years ago. She plans to present him as proof of her power.”
“Why should some old man—?”
“You misunderstand me. He’s not an old man. He’s exactly as he was sixty years ago. He looks no older than you, if that old. That’s what she thinks makes him special.”
“Who is he, then?”
“He’s … Byron Harley.”
It took a moment for Snowy to recognize the name. “Wait, the Hillbilly Hercules? From the ’50s?”
“That’s him. And it’s no exaggeration. He’s huge.”
“And she brought him back from the dead? That’s not possible.”
“Orpheus believed the same thing. But I assure you, it’s happened. I’ve seen him and spoken to him. He’s no impostor.”
Snowy nodded thoughtfully. “Well … that complicates things. Tell me: Will you help us?”
“In what way?”
“Our own secret weapon is off with Bo-Kate right now. If he doesn’t work out…”
“Are you asking if I’d be willing to kill her?”
“Well … yeah.”
Nigel was speechless, although the idea had been rattling around in his mind. The look of sheer glee she got when Byron was beating up those two men was a side of her he’d never seen before, and it left him a little sick. But to kill her outright …
“No. I can’t do that.”
“Are you going to tell her we talked, then?”
Again Nigel thought before speaking. “No. I won’t. I must be Switzerland in this conflict.”
Nigel waited to see if Snowy would move aside or try something harsher. Snowy seemed uncertain as well. Then he sighed, opened the door, and gestured for Nigel to precede him.
“Remember what you said,” he warned as Nigel passed. “Neutral. You ain’t got a dog in this fight.”
Nigel nodded, grateful that he did not have to speak, since his mouth was bone dry. He wondered what Bo-Kate and her long-lost paramour were doing just then.
* * *
Jeff couldn’t stop staring at Bo-Kate’s profile as she drove. She kept her eyes on the road, but he could sense the same tension within her.
She said, “Where to? The old elementary school where we met? The creek where we made love for the first time? The high school where you killed Jesse Spicer for trying to rape me?”
Each option send a jolt through him, bringing back emotions with an immediacy that shocked him. It was like all the intervening years had never happened, and he was in danger of falling back into the same thoughts and feelings she had always inspired. And that way, he knew, lay madness. He said, “Only one place we should go, Bo-Kate. Emania Knob.”
She snorted. “You’re so predictable, Jeff.” And he realized that’s where she’d been heading all along.
The trees cast mottled shadows on the road as they took the winding path up the mountain. Over the road noise, he said, “They tell me you’re here to take over for Rockhouse.”
“Who tells you?”
“Bronwyn, Bliss. Some guy named Junior. Mandalay.”
She snorted. “You do what a little kid tells you to now, Jeff? That’s not your reputation. You stopped representing that little Annie Hawk like a hot potato the first time she took naked pictures of herself that ended up on the Internet. Everybody said you were crazy, but sure enough, six months later, she was starring on a reality show, and a year after that she was dead.”
“Annie wasn’t anything like Mandalay, BK.”
The snarky superiority left her voice, replaced by almost a choke. “Nobody ever calls me that.”
They drove the rest of the way in silence until the SUV burst into the open on the snowy flat mountaintop. She put the vehicle in park but left the engine running.
Jeff nodded at the mound in the middle of the opening. “That where they buried Rockhouse?”
“It is.”
“Did you come to the funeral?”
“No. I watched it from the roof of my parents’ house.”
He laughed. “That must’ve been a sight. The whole county turned out, I bet.”
“They did. I was surprised they didn’t have a line to go up and pinch him, to make sure he was dead.” Again they were silent, until Bo-Kate added, “I didn’t kill him, Jeff.”
“You didn’t exactly help him out.”
“No, I didn’t. I cut off his extra fingers to get him out of the way for good. But I swear, when I left him he
was still alive. That seemed a lot worse than killing him, to be honest. Do you believe me?”
He looked at her. The planes of her face, the way the light caught her eyes, the texture of her lips … all those details had been exiled to his dreams, refused admittance to his conscious thoughts. The rise of her breasts against her blouse, the curve of her hip and waist …
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I want to. I want to believe you’re at least a little different.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah. What we did was terrible, Bo-Kate. We wiped out an entire family. We hurt everyone. Most days I can’t believe we did that, but then it comes back to me, and I can smell the blood, and hear the screams, and I know we did.”
“You enjoyed it at the time, Jeff.”
“That’s the worst part. I know I did.”
She reached across the seat and took his hand. It was like she’d completed a circuit that had been humming for eternity, waiting for the inevitable connection. His body responded to her touch the way it always did, and it took everything he had, every single bit of strength, to sit still.
“Jeff, I want to bring this county into the modern world. I want us to be the new Nashville, or at least the new Bakersfield, California. We can do it, too. We change the name, we start getting the word out about the great musicians here, and it’ll work. And if in the process, we get a little revenge, then so much the better.”
The certainty left her voice on the last word, and Jeff understood that their reunion was throwing her own emotions askew just as it did his. He felt the last thing he ever expected to feel about her again: tenderness. He pulled his hand from hers, reached over, and stroked her cheek.
“Why did we fall in love?” he asked, his voice raw.
“For me, it was your laugh,” she said so softly, he could barely hear it. “What was it for you.”
“This,” he said, and pulled one long black curl into her face. “I saw you with this falling into your face. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful, before or since.”
“One curl did it?”
“One curl.”
They gazed at each other, and all the years seemed to withdraw, leaving them both the same lovesick, aching teens they once were. His hand cupped her cheek, and she closed her eyes and leaned into it with a sigh. He moved closer, and their lips almost touched. Then they both stopped.
They opened their eyes.
“Let’s stretch our legs,” she said. He did not argue.
They got out of the SUV. Neither seemed inclined to walk toward the grave, so they went to the edge of a sixty-foot cliff that overlooked a deep gully. The tops of the trees below, where the sun never penetrated, shone white with snow and ice.
“How did you get back here?” Jeff finally asked.
“It’s not a pretty story.”
“I really didn’t expect it to be.”
“Do you remember Naomi Barden?”
“The singer who overdosed?”
“Yeah. I promoted her last tour, and we got to be friends. Could you hear it in her voice?”
“What?”
“She was Tufa.”
“No way.”
“Oh, yes. It went back to her great-grandmother, a full-blood directly related to Rockhouse, so what made it down to Naomi was thin, but she could access it like throwing a switch. That’s why people loved hearing her sing. She had no idea, of course. She just thought it was cool and exotic, like being part Cherokee or something.”
“And?”
“And … I killed her.”
The wind was the only sound for a long moment.
The class ring around his neck seemed to burn against his skin. “Why?”
“I got her some heroin that was a lot more pure than what she normally used.”
“That’s ‘how,’ not ‘why.’”
“The ‘why’ is easy: I saw a way back, and I wasn’t about to let it pass. As for the ‘how’ … when she was unconscious, I cut out her heart and ate it.”
“You ate her heart?”
“Yes. While it was still warm. Still beating, or at least twitching.” She looked at him steadily, her chin defiantly raised.
“How did you…? Good God, Bo-Kate, what made you even think of that?”
“Lydia.”
“Who?”
She laughed. “It’s a band. Lydia, out of Portland. Bunch of slackers with more beards than talent. They did a song called ‘Eat Your Heart Out.’” She walked to the edge of the cliff. “I don’t know, Jeff. I just looked at her one day and saw the spark. Maybe it was the shadow of her wings, so faint, they were like pollen in the sunlight, but…” She sighed. “Anyway, I just knew what I had to do. To overcome what they did to us, I had to be willing to do something awful, something I couldn’t undo or turn back from. So … I did it.”
“Wow.”
“Don’t waste any sympathy on her. She was a stuck-up, entitled little bitch. She would’ve died before she was thirty anyway. At least I made sure she got into the Twenty-seven Club with Cobain, Joplin, and Morrison.”
“Yeah, but still—”
“Oh, come on, Jeff!” Her voice echoed out of the gully below. “You killed Jesse with your bare hands, remember that? You beat him to death for putting the move on me. I didn’t kill Naomi, I … well, hell, I sacrificed her. She was a waste of skin with the voice of an angel, that’s all. There’s one of her in every other nightclub in Nashville. I gave her the only immortality her kind can ever achieve: a death at their peak.”
Jeff started to say more, but the look in her eye stopped him. Not because it frightened him—although it did—but because it was familiar. He’d seen that look before, when they were committing the crimes that got them banished. In the intervening time, he had come to regret what they did, truly and deeply regret the pain and hurt they’d inflicted. He realized that Bo-Kate had not, and never would.
She seemed to read the thoughts as they passed through him. “What’s the matter, Jeff? Feeling sorry for those people? Sorry for Adele Anker and her family? Let me tell you, not a one of them would’ve been of any account even if we hadn’t burned down their house with them in it. No one who knew them, missed them.”
He said nothing. They stood right at the edge of the cliff, and it would’ve taken very little to push her over, into the treetops below. That would’ve settled things between them once and for all, and stopped the coming troubles. And yet …
“Thinking about pushing me over, Jeff? Sending me to my death? Getting to stay here for good if you do it?”
“No. Thinking about this.” He pulled the class ring from his shirt and let it fall outside his coat.
She stared at it, then back at him. “What does that mean?”
He still said nothing.
“Are you saying you still love me?”
Part of him—a larger percentage than he liked to admit—wanted to scream, Yes!
“Or,” she said, stepping close to him, “are you going to go over the cliff with me? The two great lovers, falling to their death to escape a world that won’t let them be together?” She raised her arms above her head. “Come on, Jeff. Wrap me in your arms one last time. Hold me close as our souls fly to earth.”
“Bo-Kate,” he started to say.
She snorted. “Coward.” And then she pushed him off the cliff.
31
Jeff had time to think, I should’ve seen that coming; then he hit the first treetop.
Luck was with him, though—he slid off the side of the topmost spire, then bounced down through the branches. He finally stopped about halfway down the big pine tree, splayed across two limbs and gasping from the blow across his back that had knocked the wind from him. Cold, powdery snow drifted down onto his face, dislodged by his passage.
Above, through the branches, he saw the gray sky and the side of the cliff. He couldn’t see Bo-Kate.
She tried to kill me, was the first thought that solidified in his head. She pushed me off
the fucking cliff and tried to kill me. Then he remembered pondering the exact same move, but being unable to do it. All he wanted to do, really, was pull her into his embrace, kiss her, and tell her everything would be okay if they just turned around and left Cloud County for good.
And when the wind tousled one long black curl into her eyes, he almost wanted to cry.
What had she called him as she pushed him off? A coward? He realized she was right. He’d been afraid to take her in his arms, to tell her the things in his heart, because to do so meant he might once again become the Jefferson Powell who had done those horrible things.
He could breathe more easily now, and he managed to roll over enough to look down. The tree, due to its position at the bottom of the ravine, had branches only near the top, where they could reach the sun. The last twenty feet were bare trunk all the way to the rocky, still-sloping ground.
“Great,” he wheezed.
He rested a bit longer, then started the treacherous descent. Without gloves, his hands quickly grew cold and numb. His grip failed him, and he slid more than he climbed. At last he sat on the lowest branch and contemplated the drop to the slanted, rocky ground below.
A real Tufa, a true Tufa, would be able to drift down as lightly as a falling leaf. And while Bronwyn had sworn he was wholly reinstated, he hadn’t tried to fly on Tufa wings in longer than most people could remember.
Still, the choice was try, or take bets on which leg he’d break. And a broken leg out here, even for a Tufa, was the same as death.
He closed his eyes. He tried to remember his boyhood, when taking to the night winds had been second nature. But he needed a song to ride, a tune to bolster his wings. Think, you moron. Surely you must know one song that will work.…
And then he smiled. The first song that came to his mind was actually a song he hated for its inane rhymes and self-important seriousness. But it was still a song, and he knew it by heart.
He began singing the chorus to Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle.”
He didn’t. Fly like an eagle, that is. He flew like a badly made paper airplane, but he still flew, and although he hit the ground, it wasn’t hard enough to break anything. He again knocked the wind from his lungs and lay atop a pair of protruding rocks until it returned.