Ordinary Souls

by J. S. Bailey

  The chalet came into view on the right, looking like a log cabin built by millionaires, with two floors and a walkout basement overlooking the valley below and another mountain rising up a mile or so away.

  Simon’s ten-year-old daughter Catherine and twelve-year-old daughter Jasmine let out a collective gasp from the middle row of seats.

  “It’s so beautiful!”

  “Dad, can we move here?”

  “I want the room with the balcony!”

  “I’m older, you let me have that one!”

  Simon put the Mercedes in park and switched off the engine as the minivan pulled up beside them, cutting off the view of their home for the next week. “We’ve already discussed this,” he said, craning around to look at the girls. Both appeared exhausted—it had been a very long trip. “This chalet has four bedrooms. You two get to share a room, just like everyone else.”

  Jasmine’s shoulders slumped. “O-kay.”

  Simon stepped stiffly out of the car, stretched, and breathed in a lungful of fresh mountain air, then held his breath when he became aware of an eerie, muted keening sound he couldn’t place.

  Then the minivan door opened, and the keening turned into an earsplitting shriek that could have only come from the mouth of Darnell, Shonté’s three-year-old.

  “Alpine Rest,” Simon muttered. “I doubt it.”

  He watched with a heavy heart as his cousins-in-law spilled from the green van like clowns from a car. It hadn’t been his idea to bring them along, but Keisha had insisted, claiming they all needed to spend more time together as a family.

  Simon would have rather spent more time filling cavities, but he’d dutifully clicked off of the two-bedroom chalet he’d been looking at online and reserved a four-bedroom chalet instead, while brainstorming ways by which he might successfully avoid Shonté and her second husband, Bruce Armstrong, for an entire week.

  Shonté stood beside the van in a black maxi dress that made no attempt to hide her ever-growing baby bump, barking orders at her five children like a drill sergeant.

  Bruce came up to Simon and awkwardly stuck out a hand. “Nice place you picked out,” Bruce said, nodding at the chalet. He’d shaved his head bald and wore Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses, a navy blue blazer, and a diamond stud in his left earlobe.

  “Thanks,” Simon said. “I do my best.”

  “I think we’re going to have a great time this week,” Bruce said as Darnell’s wailing continued unabated.

  Simon hit the trunk release on his key fob and made a point of not looking Bruce’s way. “I’m sure we will.”

  AS soon as Simon finished unpacking, he flopped down on the queen-sized bed in the second-floor bedroom he and Keisha had won in a coin toss against Shonté and Bruce. A ceiling fan hung motionless overhead, and a set of sliding doors led to the balcony overlooking the valley. If he’d had the energy, he would have gone out there now to further marinate himself in the Tennessee air, but he was tired, oh so tired from that nine-hour drive, and maybe if he got lucky he could get some shuteye now…

  “Rawr! I’m a bear!”

  “Eeeeeee!”

  Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

  Bang!

  His bedroom door was flung open, and Alisha, Shonté’s nine-year-old, burst in with her fingers curled like claws. “Look, Simon, I’m a bear!” She wrinkled her nose and bared her teeth at him, then let out another “Rawr!”

  “That was…that was very impressive,” Simon worked up the strength to say. “Now be a good bear and get the hell out of here so I can sleep.”

  Tears welled up in Alisha’s big brown eyes. She scampered out of the room without closing the door, wailing, “Mo-ooom! Simon said the H word!”

  “As if you haven’t said it yourself.” Simon plodded across the room, shut and locked the door, tore open the new box of earplugs he’d set on the nightstand, and jammed a plug into each ear.

  “Now if only they’d invent mouth plugs,” he muttered as he settled onto the bed once more. He knew a few people who could use one.

  SIMON ambled downstairs after dozing an hour and found Keisha and Shonté in the kitchen leaning over a cookbook while Ebonee and Isaiah, two more of Shonté’s offspring, ran in circles around the table, squealing at the top of their lungs.

  Bruce sat in the living room, watching a nature program on television.

  “Simon, would you get a pot of water boiling?” Keisha asked, her lips twisted into a smirk as Ebonee veered off course and ran headlong into the wall. The four-year-old burst into tears and held a hand against her forehead, and Shonté swept from the kitchen with the grace of a fashion model and began to coo over her daughter to console her.

  Simon dug through a cabinet and found a pot with something burnt to the inside.

  He shrugged and filled it with water anyway.

  “So,” he said as he waited for the water to boil. “What’s for dinner?”

  Keisha was now busy pulling ingredients out of the fridge—half the back of the SUV had been full of coolers containing odds and ends meals for the next seven days. “Manicotti. Remember? Shonté found the recipe online.”

  “Of course she did.” Simon winced as something in another room fell over with a crash.

  “Kids!” Shonté boomed without warning. “How about we all go for a walk while Simon fixes dinner?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Woohoo!”

  “Let’s go!”

  And just like that, Shonté and five children filed past Simon and out the door.

  Bruce remained on the couch watching his nature program. With the exception of the one incubating inside of her, Shonté’s children weren’t his.

  After Keisha ducked out of the room a moment, Jasmine and Catherine wandered in from whatever refuge they’d taken. “It’s quiet in here,” Jasmine said.

  “Yes,” Simon said. “It is.”

  “Dad, are you going to be okay?” Catherine asked, brown eyes full of worry.

  Simon pretended to be surprised by the question. “What do you mean, okay? I’m always okay.”

  “You know what we mean, Dad.” The girls wandered off again, whispering among themselves.

  Twenty minutes later, the front door flew open and in marched Shonté holding a screaming Darnell.

  “We saw a bear!” Alisha said, her face awash with delight. “Darnell tried to run but fell and scraped his knee.”

  Shonté plopped Darnell down on the counter and ministered to his wound with a damp paper towel. “For the thousandth time, there are no such things as bears!”

  “Uh-huh!”

  “Mama, we saw it.”

  “You didn’t see nothin’.” Shonté threw the bloodied towel in the waste can and set Darnell down on the floor.

  “But we did,” Shonté’s oldest son Darian said.

  Shonté’s cheeks darkened. “Why don’t you ask your big cousin Simon if bears are real or not? He’s a smart man.” She shot Simon a warning look that reminded him all too much of his wife.

  Knowing he would never hear the end of it if he didn’t comply, Simon drew in a deep breath and said, “Nope, bears are definitely not real. Like unicorns.”

  Darian and the other children looked disappointed in him. He couldn’t blame them. He was disappointed in himself.

  AFTER dinner, the children went down to play ping pong in the basement while Simon and Bruce were left to scrub all the dishes and Keisha and Shonté stood out on the deck snapping pictures of the view.

  Simon looked up in time to see Shonté stiffen, and roughly half a second later a chorus of bloodcurdling screams issued from down below.

  “Mama, there’s a bear!”

  Simon failed to stifle a laugh. Bruce frowned at him, holding a soapy pot in one hand and a limp dishcloth in the other. “You think it’s funny having kids believe in stuff like that?” Bruce said. “They’re never going to sleep now.”

  The kids were still screaming. Keisha and Shonté rushed inside, and Simon a
nd Bruce followed them down to the walkout basement.

  Simon had to hide a smile. A rather unimposing black bear stood on all fours about ten feet from the glass doors, apparently uninterested in the gaggle of small humans gawking at it in terror.

  Alisha pointed at the bear. “Mama, you lied to us!”

  “Don’t you dare call your mother a liar!” Bruce said, his face darkening.

  “You can’t tell me what to do! You’re not my daddy!”

  “Mama, is the bear gonna eat us?”

  “Look, it’s moving!”

  “What if it breaks down the door and comes inside?”

  At this, the smallest children shrieked, and something inside of Simon, some sane fiber of his being, snapped in two like a cut wire.

  “I can’t take it anymore!” he roared most unlike himself, feeling a wave of heat wash over him. “I’m leaving!”

  He stormed upstairs despite Keisha’s objections, snatched the car keys off the counter, and strode outside, all bears be damned.

  His cell phone started ringing in his pocket when he was halfway out to the main road. He turned it off. No amount of scolding on Keisha’s part would convince him to reenter the chalet and the chaos contained therein.

  The plan—the carefully-crafted vacation plan, constructed weeks before they’d set out for the mountains—had been to drive into Gatlinburg on the second day of the trip, but Simon headed there now. He was a grown man who stared at mouths fifty-one weeks a year. He had the right to do whatever he wanted. A God-given right!

  “Father, whatever you do, deliver me from this madness,” Simon prayed.

  It took him twenty minutes to reach the town limits and another ten to find a place to park. Then he stood outside basking in the lights from all the shops and restaurants and touristy things like the Space Needle jutting up into the sky and the Ripley’s Museum with its artificially-cracked walls giving it the appearance of a crumbling building.

  Look at me! everything seemed to say. See me! Try me! Buy me!

  Simon had never been to Gatlinburg in all his fifty years and wasn’t quite sure where to begin, so he shrugged and started walking, feeling his sanity return piece by tiny piece.

  Within a few minutes it became apparent that Gatlinburg existed as a place where people went to buy things. He’d passed t-shirt shops, fudge shops, old-time photo shops, and successfully dodged a woman selling timeshares when a sign reading “Free Moonshine Tasting” caught his eye.

  “Huh,” he said, and followed the direction of the sign’s arrow.

  He entered a building teeming with people of all ages. Three or four counters had been set up like islands amid a sea of tourists, and while he watched, the people crowded around the nearest counter held up their IDs so the woman working behind it could see them.

  Simon inched his way closer to the counter and watched as this free moonshine tasting began. Men and women tried various flavors of moonshine one by one, grimacing and laughing and just having a good time like people were supposed to on vacation.

  In that moment, Simon found himself reevaluating his morals. Having been brought up in a strict Baptist family, he hadn’t once let alcohol touch his lips for fear of bringing the Lord’s wrath down upon him.

  These people here didn’t look much like sinners, though. They were just regular folks out to have a good time.

  Perhaps this was a sign that his prayer for deliverance would soon be answered.

  Simon found a counter where the tasting hadn’t yet begun and fished out his ID.

  A skinny white woman wearing an unbuttoned plaid shirt over top a t-shirt advertising the distillery smiled and winked as she leaned in to make sure Simon indeed exceeded the age of twenty-one. “Good, good,” she said in a southern twang once she’d checked everyone else’s IDs. “Looks like everyone here’s legal. Now who here has never tried moonshine before?”

  Simon and two other people raised their hands.

  The woman went on. “We make all of our own moonshine legally right here in Gatlinburg, and in just a minute you’ll have the opportunity to try ten different kinds. You’re welcome to skip any you don’t want to try.

  “Now first we have our classic forty-proof moonshine, White Lightning.” The woman proceeded to fill a thimble-sized shot glass for everyone. Simon looked at his dubiously. The stuff looked just like water.

  He poured it back and nearly coughed it back up as a searing fireball burned its way down his throat. Unmanly tears sprang into his eyes, and he prayed no one would notice.

  “This next one is peach moonshine,” the woman said, selecting a new jar.

  Simon thought about skipping that one to allow for a moment of recovery, but she poured the peach moonshine into the tiny glass before he could speak up.

  Shrugging, he poured that one back, too, and to his surprise, it wasn’t too bad—not nearly as strong as the White Lightning had been.

  The next one was grape-flavored, the one after that cinnamon. Simon drank them all, and even though their combined quantity couldn’t have amounted to more than a few ounces, he felt a sort of mellow buzzing inside of him like he’d become home to a hive of happy bees.

  Happy bees, he thought in disgust at himself as he finished the final sample, a cherry-flavored moonshine he found he didn’t care for. You’d never have thought of that before you put that stuff in your stomach.

  Still, he didn’t feel too bad. He wandered back out to the sidewalk where hordes of tourists milled about holding shopping bags and snapping selfies, and a short distance away Simon could see where the famous Sky Lift snaked its way up a steep mountainside.

  “Sorry, Keisha,” he said as he made his way toward it.

  He paid for the ride at the ticket window and got into one of the dangling yellow lift chairs that carried him over a street and then a creek and up the wooded mountain. Looking down, he eyed a ridiculous quantity of lost flip-flops that had fallen off of hapless riders’ feet, then congratulated himself on having chosen sensible footwear prior to his departure.

  He got off the chair at the top of the mountain, perused the gift shop for a minute or two, then got in a chair heading back down. The return ride offered a full view of Gatlinburg and the green mountains that cradled it.

  “Now this,” Simon said, “is a vacation.”

  Before departing Gatlinburg to return to Alpine Rest, he stopped to experience a second moonshine tasting and then bought a Mason jar of White Lightning to take with him.

  One did what one had to in order to survive.

  “HOW was Gatlinburg?” Keisha asked. She and Simon sat on the balcony outside their bedroom looking up at the stars.

  Simon sipped on a bottle of Coke, which he’d discreetly spiked with White Lightning. “Crowded.”

  “You must not have minded too much. You were gone three hours.”

  “Really?” Simon flinched when something in a room below theirs fell over with a thud.

  A new wave of anger reared its head inside of him, though it wasn’t nearly as strong as it would have been had he not consumed any moonshine. “Damn it, Keisha, this was going to be our vacation. Do you think I work all year so I can be rewarded with this?”

  Somewhere a child screamed. Then two children. Then two children and Shonté.

  “I’m sorry,” Keisha said, glancing away from him.

  “Not nearly as sorry as I am.”

  “Simon, stop acting like an infant.” Keisha’s voice turned cold, and he felt a shred of guilt. “The reason I invited them was, well, I’d hoped maybe it would help me feel closer to my baby cousin. Being so much older than her…”

  “Only by fifteen years.”

  “I could practically be her mother. Besides, with all those kids, Shonté hasn’t been able to afford a vacation in so long. I just thought it would be nice for them to have one.”

  Someone clomped up the stairs, and the bathroom door slammed. Amazing, how you could hear it all even when you were outside.

  “
I’m sorry,” Keisha said again. “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

  Simon gazed up at the sky in silence, tempted to go to the car and retrieve the jar of White Lightning he’d stashed under a seat so Keisha might partake in its magic, too. He held back, though. It might not be in his favor to be found out.

  “DAD, can we go hiking today?” Jasmine asked over breakfast while Ebonee and Darnell proceeded to throw bits of scrambled eggs at each other.

  “I don’t see why not.” Simon’s head throbbed. He’d popped three Advil when he got up and was still waiting for them to kick in. “I don’t know if that would be good for the little guys, though.”

  “Or for me.” Shonté patted the bulge in her stomach, which she’d covered in a tight-fitting yellow t-shirt. “Ain’t no way I’d go out there like this. Don’t want to have this kid out on the trail.”

  “You’ll be staying here, then?” Simon kept his tone even so Keisha wouldn’t give him a lecture later.

  Bruce cleared his throat. He’d traded in his blazer for a green Lacoste polo. “We were planning on taking the kids into Pigeon Forge. You’re more than welcome to come with us.”

  “I’d rather go hiking,” Jasmine said matter-of-factly, casting Simon a sly glance. Catherine nodded in silent agreement.

  “That settles it,” Keisha said. Simon didn’t think he imagined the look of relief on her face. “Girls, you can help clean up after breakfast so we can head out before the crowds. Okay?”

  “Okay!” they chorused with knowing glints in their eyes. Simon felt a surge of pride that gave his migraine a few seconds of reprieve. They were definitely their father’s daughters.

  “WOW, this is great!” Catherine snapped pictures of the tree-filled abyss below them on her pink digital camera as the four of them paused to rest on the trail leading up the side of Mt. LeConte, one of the highest peaks in the Appalachians. “I feel like the queen of the mountain!”