Red Mountain

by Dennis Yates

  One day his luck has to come to an end. What if a cop decides to pull us over and wants to see what we’ve got stashed in the back? What then?

  “Can you slow down?” Robert asked.

  Will glanced over and nodded, but his foot never let up on the gas. Robert shut his eyes.

  Thick rain clouds spilled on them as they moved down a twisted road toward town. Robert was thirsty, and as he sat with his arm wrapped around Nugget, he fought off the ungodly pain stabbing at his hip. Will hadn’t failed to notice. He reached under the seat for a half pint of tequila and shoved it into Robert’s hand.

  “Do me a favor and take a hit or two. I can’t stand seeing you this way.”

  Robert took a few deep pulls, and when he offered it to Will he shook his head. “The exit to the hospital is the one after this.”

  Will rolled his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, you probably already know. I’ll shut up.”

  When he looked at Will’s face again, he saw there was something wrong.

  “You are taking me to a hospital, aren’t you?”

  Will laughed, but Robert knew it wasn’t because what he just said was funny.

  “Come on, you said yourself I might need stitches.”

  Will peered into the rearview mirror before turning to Robert. “Right, if I take you in there they’ll be phoning the cops before you even sit down in the waiting room to look at the magazines.”

  “And why the hell would that happen?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Will frowned. “The cops received an anonymous tip last night. Someone claimed it was you who drowned the guy they fished from the Tabor reservoir. They’re showing your face all over the news, Bobby. I just about choked on my lunch when I saw you on the television tonight, and that was before I even checked my phone messages.”

  “So they really think I killed the guy?”

  Will stared back at him. Robert could see the slight smirk in the corners of his mouth. God he sometimes hated him when he did that.

  “Well did you?” Will asked.

  “Fuck you. You really think I have it in me to drown someone?”

  “No, I don’t… But then again, if I thought this asshole was one of the guys who broke into my house, beat the shit out of me and stole my family then yeah, I’d be tempted to show the bastard a good time!”

  “I didn’t know him, Will. He had nothing to do with what happened the other night.”

  “So what the hell were you doing up there man. Giving swim lessons?”

  Robert stared numbly at the black road rushing under them. He glanced around for cars, then brought the bottle of tequila to his lips and swallowed. After a few minutes he wasn’t aware of the pain as badly, and his head felt clearer than it had been for days. Nugget nuzzled her head against his neck, and while they cruised the desolate freeway back to Will’s house, Robert told him everything that had happened. Afterwards he cried for Steven, and he cried for Peggy and Connor although he refused to believe they weren’t still alive…

  ****

  Once the garage door rolled down behind them, they went to the back of the El Camino and pulled away the leather cover from the top of the bed. Lying at the bottom was a shape wrapped in a black muddy tarp, a plump human form with a rope tied around its neck and ankles and anchored down by the same rusted tire rims Will had kept back there for years. There was a breathing hole punched in the tarp approximately where the mouth would be, no larger perhaps than what a head of a screwdriver could make and bloody around the edges …

  Robert edged up closer, heart hammering with rage and his eyes playing tricks. What he thought he saw lying before him was a demon, and before he was aware of what he was doing, his fists were raining blows against the plastic-wrapped head of the railroad shooter Will had ambushed.

  “Robert!” Will shouted. “Stop!”

  Robert paused, but his fists were still bobbing before him. “Where are they? What have you done with them?” he screamed at the shape.

  “Go fuck yourself!” squealed a voice below the plastic.

  Robert cut into him some more. Blood spouted from the mouth hole. The shrouded figure squirmed as Robert’s blows warmed the plastic until it molded mask-tight against an anguished face.

  He’s just a man. A pathetic bag of human shit…

  Will seized Robert by the wrists and held him until he stopped fighting. Overcome by dizziness, Robert gripped the tailgate to keep from fainting. They both watched as the man’s barrel-shaped chest heaved high a final time.

  Swiping a remote control from his workbench, Will kicked a stereo into action. Speakers attached to the rafters instantly thundered with Metallica, one of Will’s favorite bands, keeping what was really happening inside the garage from seeping into the outside world.

  Will shouted. “Are you done, Bobby? Because I hope you didn’t want to just bring him here to kill him. You could have done that back at the tracks.”

  “You know I can’t make any promises. If he doesn’t start giving me anything useful he’ll be bringing it on all by himself.”

  “Then give him a fucking chance to talk some more, okay?”

  Will turned down the volume of the stereo to a bearable level. He bent over the body and poked at it with his finger until it began to wiggle beneath the tarp. The man beneath it released a low howl. Will glared back at Robert.

  “You had me worried. I thought for sure you’d knocked him out, or worse.”

  Will saw how Robert’s face seemed to have deepened into layers of shadow. His friend’s eyes had greatly changed since he’d seen him at Connor’s birthday party last month, playing horseshoes in the backyard and laughing. Instead they were heavy now with a pale fire—something Will hadn’t seen since Mexico. He saw it in himself too… The signs of a darker consciousness moving in, taking up residence. In this state all boundaries lost their meaning. Rules were for people who never had to take on evil with their bare hands.

  He’d prayed in his own way that they would never have to go back to this place again…

  But it wasn’t their fault. It had come looking for them.

  “So what do you plan to do with him when you’re done?” Will asked.

  Robert wiped his hands with a rag. “Do you know where I can find a trash compactor?”

  Will shook his head and then moved nervously over to the big freezer where he normally stored his elk and salmon steaks. For the past couple years he’d lost his desire to hunt or fish. It wasn’t the same as it had been in his younger years. Hardly anyone showed nature much respect these days. They left loads of garbage behind, vandalized and killed or maimed things just to be mean.

  Robert was surprised when Will lifted the door of the freezer and his hand came out with two icy bottles of beer. He limped forward and stared inside. It was empty except for some frost-covered bags lying at the very bottom. Ancient vegetables.

  He was struck by an idea...

  Will popped the beers and handed one to him, then tipped back his own bottle and drank the whole thing down all at once. Will rarely drank his beers slowly, for they always warmed up way too soon for him, became what he commonly referred to as donkey piss.

  “Ah shit that’s cold!” he said, striking his chest with his fist and belching, just as Robert had seen him do hundreds of times. Will’s face was flush with color.

  “Now what do you think we should do with our new friend?”

  “I think I should take care of this alone.”

  “Bullshit. You’re in no shape to do anything right now. Do you realize how far you must have fallen off that train trestle? I thought for sure I’d have to scrape you into a bag.”

  “I know. But I think I should…”

  Suddenly the floor shifted below Robert’s feet, and Will caught him by his upper arm before he fell forward.

  “Whoa, buddy. You’ve got to take it easy. You need to let your old friend Will carry the water for awhile.”

/>   A wave of nausea swept up and down Robert’s body like cold jelly. Gradually, it sloshed to the bottom of his stomach, where it appeared to settle. He took several deep breaths.

  “This has nothing to do with you, Will. I’ve dragged you into my problems before, remember? You almost got fucking killed.”

  “Look, you’re like a brother to me, Bobby. No matter how bad things get, I’ve got to be there with you. You can’t do something like this all alone.”

  Robert patted Will’s shoulder. “I know. But you must listen to me. You need to go inside and let me handle him my own way.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “And you’re not going to kill him, right?”

  “Of course I won’t.”

  Frowning, Will handed Robert the remote control to the stereo. “Then you might want this.”

  Robert ran his thumb over the small panel of buttons and grinned. “Do you have any Beethoven?”

  Will gave him the finger as he turned to leave. When he got to the door that opened into the house, he heard a loud thud from behind. He turned and saw Robert dragging the tarp mummy across the floor while Nugget frantically sniffed at it. As Will closed the door the freezer filled the garage with its sterile opaque light accompanied by muffled screams.

  Will’s teeth began to chatter.

  Jesus. He’s going all out…

  CHAPTER 36

  After he’d taken a bath and bandaged his hip, Robert fed Nugget some cooked hamburger Will had in the fridge before lying down on the couch to rest and eat a sandwich. His knife wound hadn’t been quite as bad as he’d feared, and the butterfly bandages and gauze seemed to pull the wider places together. Still it hurt like hell and could have really used a few stitches, but Will had left him something for the pain before going to bed.

  The man in the garage was asleep and not going anywhere. Robert’s interrogation had yet to produce anything.

  He petted Nugget and consoled her the best way he could. Then he turned on the local news and saw his face flash up on the screen. It was so unreal to see himself a wanted suspect, another face among the many you saw paraded in the press every day.

  Interesting, he thought. There was no mention of Peggy and Connor missing and nothing about Steven or his family. Maybe the police were trying to keep a tight lid on it, until they were able to find Robert and question him. He channel-surfed over the other local news stations and saw them report the same headlines in almost exactly the same manner.

  Robert wondered if any reporters had tried talking to his mother, and was relieved to see they hadn’t so far. She wouldn’t have said anything anyway. She hated most news reporters and their perfect hair and their obsessions with finding the most sensational angle possible. Milking misery until innocent people had their reputations ground into the dirt.

  His stepfather would be a different story...

  He imagined Dan saying something to the effect that he’d seen Robert have a serious temper on occasion, but otherwise he appeared to be a good father to his adopted son. But that was Dan, and Dan and Robert were never on good terms after Robert caught him talking abusively to his mother one day and called him on it.

  There’s still time motherfucker. I’m sure you’re dying to help them decide I’m guilty…

  Robert turned off the television. As soon as he lay his head down on a pillow he fell instantly to sleep.

  ****

  Mexico—a dream. He was following the man dressed in white, the one whose shoes had flecks of blood on them from the dogfight he’d just attended. Robert had been keeping tabs on him all afternoon, waiting for the man to show him the way back to where his father and uncle were being held captive.

  For several blocks Robert followed the man through crowded streets, watched as he bent over and petted some sleeping puppies a young boy was selling from a wood crate. Then the man continued onward, unaware Robert was less than a block behind. He crossed a busy street and stepped out onto a beach covered with dozing tourists and colorful umbrellas, the sound of salsa music on radios and the greasy smoke of cooking meat.

  Before Robert reached the beach he was accosted by a marionette maker. He stopped when the toothless old man began to make the puppets dance. One of them resembled Robert, surrounded by skeletons made from the small bones of animals held together with bits of dirty rag. The old man laughed as he made them dance faster, and the more Robert tried to break past the circling skeletons, the more they’d pick up speed and throw him back to the middle.

  He ran from the old fool and his puppets. But when he got down to the beach the man in white was gone…

  “Try it again, dad,” said a boy’s voice.

  He turned and Connor was standing beside him. A silver kite had materialized in Robert’s hands. He tried to teach Connor how to fly it, but as soon as he got it ten feet in the air a big gust of wind came along and caused the kite to spiral downward and crash into the sand. After the third time he could no longer hide his frustration from Connor.

  “I can’t fly these damn things anymore.”

  He turned the kite over again to see if he could find any defects. From behind he heard a sound that was between a snort and a cough. When he looked he saw Peggy with both hands pressed to her mouth, trying to suppress an explosion of laughter.

  “If you think you’re so good with these things…”

  The wind roared down the beach again, and this time it whipped the kite from Robert’s hands. The silver arrowhead climbed high into the sky and was swept out over the frothing surf. Connor jumped up and down with excitement, not upset at all that Robert had lost it.

  They watched the kite until it drifted even further offshore. Soon it became a brilliant speck of mercury on the horizon—as close to what Robert imagined an angel might look like if he believed in such things—before being swallowed by a swiftly moving squall line.

  The world went black, and he heard Peggy and Connor’s screams for help. He thrust his arms out into the darkness, hoping they were within reach. He felt someone’s head and gently drew whoever it was toward him. When the squall line passed he found himself under a sweltering Mexican sun again and he looked down to see what he’d been holding.

  It was his uncle Barney’s severed head. And next to Barney were the severed heads of a dozen eyeless pigs hanging from hooks in an outdoor market flashing with bottle-flies. He could hear the man in white laughing from a balcony somewhere high above the lines of drying laundry. It was the laugh of the devil.

  Robert let go and screamed. Barney’s head swung back and forth on its rusty chain while fresh blood streamed from the corners of his mouth. His black eyeless sockets snapped opened and he began to speak.

  “Look inside the wooden box, boy. I’ve got something in there for you.”

  It wasn’t Barney’s voice, but the ghost who had once pursued Robert through the woods up at his grandfather’s mountain cabin. Just the memory of the tall glimmering figure made his skin feel as if it had been coated with stinging frost.

  “What box? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “You’ve seen it before. On that day you were snooping in your grandmother’s attic.”

  “I swear, I don’t remember.”

  “Then you must try harder.”

  Cold hands squeezed his shoulders and began to shake him. Somehow the violent movement loosened his memory of the object, made it tumble back into his conscious mind.

  An oblong-shaped box no larger than a man’s hand, partially wrapped in the very brown paper it had been mailed in. With carvings on it that moved when you touched them…

  Of course this was what the ghost was talking about, Robert thought. But he’d been so young when he’d first discovered the heirloom that he later dismissed it as a dream. His grandmother’s attic had always been a world full of mysteries to him. He never got to spend enough time up there before she’d shout at him to come back down.

  ****


  “Bobby. It’s Will. Wake up.”

  Robert rolled over on the couch, shaking. He opened his eyes and saw Will standing above.

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re safe. You’re inside my house.”

  Robert was drenched with sweat and he had a raging headache. Will must have anticipated this, for he pushed a couple aspirins into Robert’s mouth and forced him drink from a glass of water. Nugget stood next to Will, her eyes following everything.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Four hours.”

  Robert sat up fast, wincing as a network of pain went red hot. “You’ve got to be kidding. How come you let me sleep so long?”

  “I couldn’t wake you up. So did you learn anything from that guy?”

  “No. I think he’s a waste of time.”

  “Well I’ve got some great news. Maybe it’s just a perfect good-cop, bad-cop thing we’ve got going, but Mr. Frosty was in a really talkative mood when I checked on him a few hours ago. I found out where they’re keeping Peggy and Connor…”

  “What?”

  “He says they’ve got them up at this old farmhouse near Wrath Butte. I cross-checked some things on line and I think he’s telling the truth.”

  Will sat down in a chair and began cleaning a revolver with a small cloth.

  “Wrath Butte?” Robert seemed to recall the place being a topic of conversation recently but he’d forgotten to whom he’d been talking. Then the image of Steven came rushing back to him—the memories they’d traded about a past family reunion and the realization they both had the same great grandfather Jared Horn.

  The dots were beginning to connect but Robert was no closer to understanding why. It was driving him crazy. At the moment he had little sense of how deep the dots would take him far into the past, that before his great grandfather there’d been a man named Charlie Maynard, and before Maynard a mysterious and powerful dark skinned man from an island on the other side of the world…

  He felt the depth in his flesh and bone. It was as if he were on the edge of a giant canyon on a moonless, starless night. Staring into the void. There was so much he needed to understand…