The Third Hill North of Town

by Noah Bly

  I can’t believe this, Elijah thought, with a tight knot in his stomach. He had known the separation with Jon was coming, of course, but until that moment he’d managed to put it out of his mind. First Julianna, now Jon.

  Hold your shit together, Jon Tate ordered himself sternly as he felt his eyes beginning to burn. Don’t be a baby.

  “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” the minister intoned, “amen.”

  Mary Hunter looked at her son and Jon, and without a word spoken she herded Jon’s parents and the rest of the adults away from Julianna’s grave, allowing the boys some privacy to say their good-byes. Elijah and Jon stood in awkward silence until the others were out of earshot, and then Jon knelt slowly beside Julianna’s grave and tossed a handful of earth onto her casket. Elijah knelt beside him and stared with dismay at an earthworm wriggling around in the wall of dirt an inch or so above the lid of the coffin.

  “So,” Jon muttered. “That’s everything, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Elijah whispered. “I guess so.”

  Jon glanced over at him and cleared his throat. “You clean up good,” he said. “I can’t get used to seeing you in a suit.”

  Elijah was wearing a new dark blue suit his mother had bought him for the funeral. The bruises on his face were beginning to fade and the bags under his eyes had vanished. Jon was also wearing a suit; his parents had brought the brown three-piece Jon had last worn to his senior prom in high school. It was a little too short in the arms now, but it still fit reasonably well and made him appear older than usual.

  “You look okay, too,” Elijah answered, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “You shaved.”

  Jon grimaced. “Mom made me.”

  “My mother made me shave, too.” Elijah paused. “I don’t really know why, though. I’ve only got about four hairs on my whole face.”

  They fell silent again and listened to the wind blowing through the stones of the graveyard. They could hear the adults talking softly over in the small gravel driveway beside the church; Edgar Reilly was holding forth about something or other and it sounded as if Mary Taylor was teasing him.

  Elijah cleared his throat. “So are your folks still mad?”

  Jon shrugged. “They’ve stopped chewing me out for taking the money and running away, but Mom keeps going on and on about Becky Westman and the baby. She stopped yelling at me for a few minutes this morning, though, so I think she’s starting to run out of steam.”

  Elijah bit his lip. “Will they make you get married?”

  “I dunno.” Jon broke apart a dirt clod and let the loose earth run through his fingers. “Before I ran away, Becky’s parents said they’d call the cops if we didn’t get hitched, but maybe they’ve calmed down by now.” He paused and sighed. “I doubt it, though. They were mad as hell.”

  Elijah untied a shoe and then retied it. “Maybe they’ll just let you pay child support or something.”

  “Maybe.” Jon resisted scratching at the wound in his chest; it was itching a lot as it healed. “But either way I’m going to have to get a real job now, I guess.” He tried to smile. “I’m not too worried about it, though. Know what I mean? After everything you and me have gone through, Becky and her folks don’t seem so scary.”

  Elijah smiled back. “Yeah. At least they’re not shooting at you.”

  “Yeah, that’s a plus.” Jon sighed, smile fading. “I almost wish they would, though. It might make things easier.”

  Jon’s dad called out to tell them they had to leave soon if they were going to be on time for their flight. Jon waved to acknowledge he’d heard.

  “Listen . . .” he started, turning back to Elijah, but his voice stopped cooperating before he got any further.

  Elijah nodded and his eyes brimmed over. “You better get going.”

  Jon’s chin trembled and he struggled to swallow. “I’ll come visit as soon as I get things straightened out a little,” he said. “That’s a promise, man. Okay?”

  Elijah nodded again and wiped his eyes. “I’d like that. I can show you around our farm.”

  Talking about getting together helped, but not a lot.

  He’ll probably forget all about me, Elijah thought.

  Once he gets home I’ll probably never hear from him again, Jon told himself.

  Elijah rose to his feet and helped Jon get up, too. They stood beside Julianna’s grave for another long moment, then Jon reached out and pulled the younger boy into a fierce embrace. Elijah squeezed back just as tightly, feeling Jon’s ear against his own ear, feeling his friend’s tears on his own cheek.

  “Seeya, man,” Jon murmured at last.

  “Seeya,” Elijah said.

  Deputy Bonnor Tucker would wear an eye patch for the rest of his days. To his endless torment, this did not lessen the taunts about his name; in fact, it worsened them. The scamps of Creighton County found demonic inspiration in Bonnor’s misfortune, and came up with a fresh batch of nicknames—including “Long John Nutsack” and “Bonerbeard”—to add to the old standbys.

  Dottie Buckley had a terrible time dealing with the death of her husband, Ronnie. She moved out of the apartment above the Maddox jailhouse and rented a small house a few blocks away, but her loneliness grew with each passing day, and she tried to take her own life just four short months after Ronnie’s funeral. What pushed her over the edge was the premiere broadcast of McHale’s Navy on television. Seeing Ernest Borgnine on the small screen was too much for her; she couldn’t bear remembering how well Ronnie had imitated Borgnine, and how much pleasure it would have given him to watch his Oscar-winning hero each and every week, in the privacy and comfort of their own living room. Dottie, never a drinker, promptly ran out to the liquor store and purchased a bottle of rum, which she then slugged down in its entirety, along with a quantity of sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed the week before. She had been having trouble sleeping in spite of the pills, but on this night she almost found eternal rest, curled up in Ronnie’s old armchair. One of her sons dropped by for a visit, however, and discovered her in the nick of time; the same son came to the hospital the following day to get her after she had recovered, and insisted she come live with him and his wife. Dottie became a grandmother soon thereafter, and found a great deal of joy late in life helping to take care of little Ronnie, her grandson, who looked a great deal like Ernest Borgnine.

  Orville Horvath, the fire-worshipping marshal from New Hampshire, nearly burned to death in an accidental blaze at his own home, but was saved at the last minute by Lucy the Rottweiler. The diminutive marshal had decorated his Christmas tree with multiple candles (in the Scandinavian fashion) and had fallen asleep on the floor while admiring his handiwork. The tree caught fire, and Lucy—who had been confined to the basement earlier in punishment for eating one of the candles—clawed her way through the basement door and physically dragged Orville from the living room after he had passed out from smoke inhalation. Lucy’s frantic barking alerted a neighbor who summoned the fire department, and both Orville and Lucy escaped from the fire unscathed, save for the bite marks on Orville’s ankle from where Lucy had clamped on to him. Unfortunately, Orville suffered extreme humiliation after waking up on his own front lawn: The tree-lighting ritual he had been engaged in (decidedly un-Scandinavian in origin) had required him to be naked, and even after being wrapped in a blanket by the firemen, he was unable to conceal the excitement he felt as he gazed at the flames ravaging his home. His superiors dismissed him from active duty shortly thereafter, and he and Lucy moved out of the state, never to be heard from again.

  Mary Taylor lived another seven years after the deaths of Julianna and Gabriel Dapper. She passed quietly in her bed one night, dreaming of her husband, Silas, and her son, Ben, and of their years together in Pawnee. Edgar Reilly wept when he heard of her death; the two of them had become unlikely pen pals and he found himself missing her letters terribly after she was gone. She was buried in the Lone Rock Cemetery with her family, and because she ha
d outlived almost everyone with whom she had shared her life, there was almost no one at her funeral. Her passing marked the true end of Pawnee, as well, for she was the last soul on earth who had once lived there, and could still picture the little town in her mind’s eye.

  Dr. Edgar Reilly was forced to retire at age eighty-two from the Bangor State Mental Hospital, because he himself was exhibiting signs of dementia. The hospital staff members who had been most closely linked to Julianna—Helen Gable, Jeptha Morgan, and Connor Lipkin—were all long gone by then, but Edgar had begun to address all his nurses and orderlies by the names of their vanished predecessors. By the time he was released from his responsibilities, his desk drawers were crammed to overflowing with M&M’s and lemon drops, and he was whistling the tune of I’m a Little Teapot nearly nonstop each and every day. Edgar died of a heart attack on the same afternoon he was scheduled to be admitted to a nursing home; the paramedics found him on his sofa, surrounded by hundreds of Tootsie Roll wrappers and the collected works of Carl Jung. It took six strong men, grunting and cursing, to carry his substantial body from the house.

  June 24, 2012

  At the top of the third hill north of town, a purple Volkswagen Beetle with Maine license plates sat by itself on the side of the gravel road, basking in the hot sun. The Beetle was bug-spattered and muddy from a long journey; its windows were open and its backseat was littered with Pepsi cans and empty wrappers from various fast-food restaurants. Next to the gravel road were rows and rows of knee-high cornstalks, blanketing the hill and reaching down into the valleys on either side: an entire army of corn, standing at rigid attention and awaiting inspection.

  In the middle of the cornfield, right at the crest of the hill, stood Elijah Hunter, watching Jon Tate wander around the cornfield, looking for the boarded-up well that had once been the last trace of the Larson farmstead.

  “I guess they filled it in,” Jon called out. “But it was right around here.”

  Elijah nodded. “That’s what I remember, too,” he called back. “Or maybe a little behind you.”

  Jon walked back toward him and Elijah watched him come. The half century that had passed since the last time they had visited this hilltop had been kind to Jon; he was turning seventy in another month but he might have passed for a man in his mid-fifties. He was still slender and handsome, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair; his face was relatively unlined and he moved easily across the field. The only sounds on the hill were of the breeze moving through the corn, and the hum and chirp of insects.

  Jon stopped in front of him and sighed. “Pretty weird, huh?”

  Elijah smiled. “Which part do you mean?”

  Jon grinned back. “All of it.” He looked around the field. “Fifty years ago it was a war zone up here, and a long time before that, Julianna’s whole family got wiped out on this exact spot. Now it just looks like a great place for a picnic, and we’re the only ones left alive who know what happened here. Us and your folks.” He turned back to Elijah and raised his eyebrows. “And then there’s us: Two retired old geezers on a road trip, paying our respects to the lady who almost got us both killed—oh, and by the way, she had schizophrenia, and her son blew up two cars with grenades.”

  Elijah laughed. “Yeah, okay, it’s a little weird.”

  He squatted and put his arms around his knees, and his face slowly sobered as he studied the field. The memories of that long-ago night on the hilltop were still vivid; he knew if he closed his eyes it would be waiting for him, ready to play itself out like a movie in his head.

  Jon knelt beside him. “So if the well was over there, then . . .”

  “Then this is about where Julianna died,” Elijah finished. He put a hand on the dark Missouri soil, dug his fingers into the earth. “Yeah. I guess it probably would be.”

  Jon was right about the strangeness of everything; Elijah felt a surprising ache of sadness as he remembered the feel of Julianna’s hand in his and the sound of her voice.

  Since that frantic weekend in 1962, five decades had passed, and the boys they had been were just as dead as Julianna. Elijah and Jon had both lived full, busy lives: For Elijah there had been college, two tours in Vietnam, law school, a successful law practice, marriage and kids, grandkids, and now a great-grandkid; for Jon there had been marriage to Becky, kids, college, divorce, grad school, remarriage, a college teaching job, more kids, and now grandkids, as well. Their friendship had never faltered through any of it; they still lived in separate towns in Maine but they saw each other all the time; Jon’s kids worshipped Elijah and Elijah’s kids adored Jon; Jon was also a second son to Samuel and Mary Hunter, who were now in their nineties but healthy and happy, and still very much in love. Mary kept herself busy by terrorizing the staff at an assisted living facility in Elijah’s hometown, and Sam spent his days playing cribbage with ex-Sheriff Red Kiley, who lived next door to them in the same facility. Elijah and Jon went to visit the elder Hunters often, separately and together, and never left without a kiss on the lips from Mary and a bear hug from Sam.

  In short, Elijah had a very good life, and he knew it. But until that moment he had not realized how much he still missed Julianna Dapper.

  He brushed the dirt from his hand and looked up to find Jon watching him.

  “What?” Jon asked.

  Elijah shrugged. “I was just thinking about what our lives might have been like without Julianna. I’d probably still be wetting my pants every time I had to leave my house, and we never would have met. And you’d probably be . . .”

  “. . . I’d probably still be on the run from the law.” Jon paused, considering all the years that had passed since he had gotten into an Edsel on a rainy day in June, when he was nineteen, and far from home, and hating his life.

  He studied Elijah Hunter’s well-known and much-loved face, remembering the first time they’d met. Elijah was mostly bald now, with a fringe of short white hair above his ears, but his eyes were the same, brown and sensitive, and his smile was the same, too, warm and generous. There was no denying the deep wrinkles around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, though; he was starting to look like a grandfather, and a man with a far longer road behind him than the one he still had to travel.

  “She took us on one hell of a ride, didn’t she?” Jon asked quietly, unable to keep from grieving a little bit for everything that had been lost to time, and all the loss still to come. “Do you think she’s waiting for us someplace?”

  Elijah read the shift in Jon’s mood and reached out with a gentleness that had always been his, putting a hand on the other man’s shoulder. He didn’t say what he was thinking, though; it was too hard to put into words. Yet if their time with Julianna Dapper had taught him anything, it was that the world was an arbitrary and ridiculous place, where all things were possible. Coincidence and human stupidity held sway much of the time, but not always: There was love, too, of course, and companionship, and now and then even a measure of grace.

  At least for those who were wise enough to have faith in the ridiculous.

  The very last thing that passed through Julianna Dapper’s mind before she died, oddly enough, was a memory of two boys, running side by side down an alley in a small, nameless Midwestern town. It was early morning, and there was a stripe of green grass in the middle of the alley, and a puddle of water that shimmered in the sunlight as the boys skirted it and came back together on the other side. Julianna was standing next to a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle in a gas station parking lot, and she was waiting for her friends to come back to her. She could hear the sound of their shoes on the gravel and see the glint of perspiration on their skin; she could smell freshly cut grass from a nearby lawn. She watched the boys run together, and she thought how beautiful they were—like a pair of mismatched colts, one black, one white—and she wished the alley were longer so she could keep on watching them for a while. But even as she wished this they were at her side again, and talking about stopping someplace for breakfast soon, and wonder
ing how much farther it was to Pawnee.

  “Not far,” she told them, thinking what a fine thing it was to have such good company on the road home. “We’ll be there before you know it!”

  As last images go, it was a good one.

  Please turn the page for a very special

  Q&A with Noah Bly!

  Where did you get the idea for this novel?

  My grandmother, Nellie Nixson, was born and raised in Pawnee, Missouri, a tiny little town in northern Missouri that burned to the ground sometime around the Great Depression. When I was a kid, she used to take my family and me around the area where Pawnee stood, showing us where her house was, where the blacksmith’s shop was, etc., but everywhere she pointed there was nothing left to see but cornfields and weeds. This made a big impression on me, knowing that a thriving little community had come and gone without leaving a trace behind, and I always wondered what this must have been like for Grandma looking at all that nothingness through the lens of her childhood memories. The book is completely fictional, of course—save for the actual name of the town and the fact that it was destroyed in a fire—but I like to think my grandmother would have been tickled to see Pawnee briefly resurrected, even if only on paper.

  You’ve said that this book is in the picaresque tradition. What do you mean by that?

  I think it can be seen as a more modern take on Don Quixote: a crazy person on a quest, aided by sane friends—kind of a “rogues on the road” sort of thing. The cross-country journey and the oddball friendship between Elijah Hunter and Jon Tate both remind me somewhat of Huckleberry Finn, too, though the similarities didn’t dawn on me until I was most of the way through my first draft.