by Josh Weil
The dog was going back and forth on its zip line now. The lights had come on in the kitchen windows. Stillman could see the son moving around in there, wrapped in a towel, Mr. Last Day himself paying no heed to his old man’s bell. Mr. Time to Retire was an offspring too busy getting breakfast. It pissed Stillman off. And made him thank God—or his almost-ex—one more time for his daughter, and no husband yet to take his Caroline from home, and the fact that she was, still, not dead.
He jogged back to the truck cab, reached in to flip the switch, and got the crank going. The chain slithered along the gravel, yanked taut. For the first time in half a century the Deutz moved. Moans of metal, hoop wheels crumbling stones, the winch struggling with the load, the entire truck trembling with it. Six thousand pounds of iron and steel woke and rolled. Stillman watched it come.
It wasn’t until he was back in the truck and pulling out of the lot that he looked to see what kind of trouble he was in. The rearview showed the dark grass and glint of dog chain and, coming down the hill from the Pfersick house, a flurry of cloaked figure with waist sash fluttering behind like a tail. Look at that fat son of a bitch run, he thought. Stillman spat gravel and hit road. Right out from under Mr. Past Your Prime’s nose. Right out from under Mr. Time to Take It Easy’s bathrobe-flapping, soap-scrubbed balls. Adrenaline coursed through his cheeks. His heart ricocheted like it had come loose. Calm down, he told it, reached to his chest to rub as if the thumping muscle were a too excitable pet.
Back there, in the last few seconds before the trees blocked it out, he could still see the old war machines—a Howitzer, a 613 Earthmover, a glass-nosed B-26—spread out at the top of the distant hill where Pfersick had displayed them for the pass-ersby. Between them and Stillman, just the light in the doorway of the dark brick house and that almost imperceptible glint flickering over and over: the lever on the half-dead man’s warning bell.
Then he was around the bend and it was gone. Ahead were the thick miles of trees. For a minute more he drove the asphalt curves, eyes flicking from road to mirror, expecting with each glance to see the Pfersick son’s headlights spring into view. Just the trailer hauled behind and the tractor’s grill, that bold logo—DEUTZ DIESEL—in the red of his taillights. Normally, he did not like to look up at the mirror, didn’t like to tempt misfortune with his eyes absent from the road, but he couldn’t keep them off the Deutz. No more than he could keep Caroline’s truck reined to a less reckless speed. The speedometer said nearly sixty. His normal limit was forty. On the six-lane highway that slashed across the state, he pushed it to fifty, but only because Caroline had convinced him that anything slower would put him at more risk. I’m not talking accidents, she’d said. I’m talking someone’s gonna shoot out your fucking tire. Hell, I’ll shoot it out, I get stuck behind you doing forty on 81.
Now, he brought the needle on the dash down to an even thirty and kept it there, steady as he could. He concentrated on a picture of his heart like that, that steady, that calm. And he slowly brought the beating down, too. His daughter had left her Road Hawk driving glasses on the dash. He put them on. The world in his headlights went anemic, but it was true: he could see things sharper. He had bought her the night-vision glasses a couple Christmases ago, hoping they’d help her drunk eyes enough to get her home safe. She’d hooked on the big black frames with their big yellow lenses, hunched her massive shoulders, put her hands to her ears, and swiveled her pillar of neck from side to side. “Hoot,” his daughter said.
Near the top of the ridge, in government land, the orange bar of the Jefferson Forest gate popped into his headlights. It was open and he turned in, trading prying eyes in oncoming cars for the deep cover of the pines. Inside the national forest, the land hugged the high granite slabs and shadowy knobs of the Urquhart Range. He topped the ridge and headed down the other side, seat belt on, one hand hovering over the emergency break, the truck crawling in first, until he emerged from under the grotto of trees into the gray of first morning.
Below, in the fog, stretched the valley of the Swain. He could just make the river out, glinting where it oxbowed in pastures and twisted along the edges of fields. Between it and him lay the Demastus farm. The national forest road cut down through the beef pastures with wire fencing on either side, switchbacking toward Route 42 below. He could see the Demastus home place and the leaning barns with their caved-in roofs, abandoned since the Demastuses had switched to the plastic-covered round bales everyone was using now. All along the high edges of the pastures the old chestnut fences were stapled into the fog: they had been made by Damastuses no longer living, out of wood logged by hill families long gone, from a species of tree felled by blight, extinct now from all the valley. It pained him to think of that, the same way the sight of the hand-hewn split rails, standing after all these years, made of a wood that refused to rot, boards that would remain forever, gave him peace.
He pulled up, double-checked the hand break, punched on the hazards. To get out, he had to jump. It was his daughter’s truck, a half-ton Power Ram from the early years of the last decade, and she had jacked it up high on its oversize tires. Plus, the years of her full weight had smashed the driver’s seat so flat he’d had to take a cushion off the couch to use as a booster. He had bought her a swivel cushion to go under her—a lazy Susan padded with poly-fleece that the catalog swore made getting in and out a breeze—but she had installed it in her room instead, on the floor in a corner flanked by mirrors; under all her weight it made a whimpering sound when it turned; he had heard it going on nights she brought men home. He didn’t like to think on that. He leaped down from the truck cab, thinking of her knees, instead: his could take it, sure, but hers … He stamped his mind with a note to install a couple foldaway steps before the week was gone.
Beneath the rumble of the Power Ram’s engine he could hear another rumble, deeper. He shook his head, once, as if the sound was stuck in his ears, then, walking around to the truck bed, pulled out a tarp, Caroline’s, camouflaged in orange and brown. It leaked an ammonia scent, the thick plastic crackling in his arms.
He had it over the Deutz, and was tying down the last corner, when a gunshot cracked the air. He froze. That was no bird gun. That was meant to take down something big. He listened to the under-earth thunder that followed the shot. It sounded like a stampede on a barn floor. A sudden volley of rifle cracks rolled up the swale toward him, each one biting at the tail of the last, and he was around the trailer, then, fast, yanking open the driver’s door … A scream. He froze, foot on the runner. The ding ding ding of the truck’s warning sound. An animal cry, a bleating moan. He snapped the headlights off. The sound was furious now, a whole valley full of wailing rising up the slope to him, the calls stretched one on top of the other, split by gunfire, gathered again in panic and fear: it was a sound he’d heard hoofed animals make only in the worst of panic and pain. Beneath the crack and boom of the guns came the wild lowing, and beneath that the thunder of hooves on wood. He left the truck door hanging open on its hinge and ran up the rise, pushed past the shaking cedars and into the old chestnut fence, hands on the splintery wood, blood thumping, looking down at the valley below.
They were killing the whole herd. Down there, hidden from the road, where the pasture dipped low, a backhoe showed its teeth above a hole it had disemboweled of soil. The gouge was deep and wide enough it could have fit all four pickups parked at its rim. A sickle of trucks half-surrounding three stock trailers and blasting them with their headlights. Wood-sided and double-wheeled, the trailers were packed with beef cattle. Through the yellow lenses, in the gaps between the boards, Stillman watched the frenzy: slats shaking, bodies slamming, a roiling churn of cattle, slick sheens of blood, the whole mass of meat smashing against each other in a panic to flee the bullet storm. Perched on pickup hoods, standing beside open doors, half a dozen Demastus kin lay down a hellish fire. The trailers spat pieces of their wood slats into the headlights. The last animals left—bleating calves and gut-shot heifers and a b
ig bull with his giant skull swinging from the severed muscles of his neck—charged for the openings left by shot-away slats. The Demastuses poured it on.
Stillman watched until they were all dead. The men moved carefully about in the new quiet, easing a gun down on a truck hood, pressing a door shut, as if the dawn had suddenly become too fragile for hard sounds. Gradually, they tried to fill the void of no cattle noise with their voices. Stillman, watching them, thought how he had always respected the clean, well-grazed pastures of the Demastus farm, liked to see the fields full of spindly-legged new January calves and the brothers out there checking them in the morning. Now, the Demastus men woke their trucks, hitched them to the death-loaded trailers, backed them up against the burial hole. The banging of trailer gates flung open. The groan of the backhoe shoving animal carcasses onto the dirt. It made no sense to Stillman, slaughtering the entire herd, burying all that good meat. Was it some dread disease? Some desperate insurance scam? He had always heard the Demastuses made it good in the business of beef. Well, not anymore.
He rolled the Power Ram over the cattle guard, shaking with the metal ribs, all that animal death lingering in his mind. The rush of the tractor heist was gone. He wanted only to get the Deutz hidden. He crossed the bridge over the Swain, the trailer clattering behind, and left 42 for his homeward road. In the valley fog, he passed riverside trailers half-eaten by sumac, ancestral homes hunkered beneath hundred foot oaks; gates and cattle guards and lone rusted mailboxes, signal arms amputated at the flag; and then, suddenly, in the headlights one bright green and bulbous, plastic deterrent against the baseball bats of teens: number 282. The Wings.
It was a home made of logs. Once, there had been five others like it strung out in half-acre plots along the riverbank. Growing up, he had always thought to take over his daddy’s place on the other side of Narrows, out near Harts Run, and then, when that was lost to his parents’ reckless ways, he had thought all through his twenties that he would one day buy it back. The fading curve of that decade met the rising one of the next in a spinode of years so hopeful with love he had begun saving to make his move back home. But 1961 reshaped his nearly-wife into his nearly-ex-wife and bereaved him of all that as suddenly as 1938 had bereaved him of his parents so long before. Two dark dates that seemed to him, some days, to be just waiting for a third. He had bought the log home on the bank of the Swain three years after 1961, in the panic of his daughter’s sudden arrival. There had been something easeful about the solidity of whole tree trunks, the dull thud when he knocked his fist against the walls. The first settler homes had been made of logs. You could stumble on them still, scattered around the valley in tangles of briar: chimneys crumbled, doors turned topsoil, but those near-black ancient chestnut logs still solid as the hills. In the sixties the Swain valley was still so rural there was no electricity on that road. No neighbors, but a rumor of hill people who kept to themselves somewhere way up where the water first spilled off the ridge. You won’t see them, the real estate agent had said, as if they were ghosts, as if he was worried that Stillman might believe in such things enough to back out of the deal. Stillman had been the first to buy. Maybe that had given the developer false hope. One log home caught a toss of lightning and burned to the ground. Two more went unsold, finally disassembled to leave gaping basement holes and parts scattered in the weeds. The fourth one, right next to Stillman’s, was bought and sold every decade until the last when Rog and Arlene Booe moved in and started on improvements like they meant to stay.
Stillman had made his own improvements long before the Booes’. Over the past thirty-five years his home had become as much a reflection of him as was his Caroline, full-grown and still living inside. After the first flood, he raised it eight feet up on posts. The Swain had never risen more than a foot above its banks, but Stillman was not a man to abide slipshod ways. He had covered the entire inside, upstairs and down, in stain-proof carpet, installed a second safety rail on the staircase, a smoke detector in every room, and compact fluorescents that took long seconds to sputter on but were guaranteed to have ten times the life of any regular bulb. The couch in the living room had been replaced by a straw mat that he imagined was in the Japanese style; the TV paired alongside a two-foot plastic waterfall mounted in a fishless fish tank and trickling a soothing sound.
The whole south wall had been redone in triple-paned glass. Originally, it had looked out on a view of the river, but the farmland had grown up in sumac and possum haw, scrawny maples and hornbeam that the deer loved to chew. They would gather so thick in the scrub woods behind his home that in the heat, when Stillman would open the windows to hear the river he could no longer see, the breeze brought such a powerful stench of lice-ridden hides and antler molt that he would have fired at them with a shotgun, if he had allowed guns in the house. Instead, he would open the screens, search out the firecrackers his daughter stashed for her yearly risk of limbs, put on his welding gloves and mask, and, bent on branding deer minds with whiz-boom panic, fire off bottle rockets into the trees. On the opposite side of the house, across 364, the apple orchard rose on its hill. To the west, a carport with room for his and Caroline’s vehicles side by side. To the east, his workshop: big garage door, small windows, cinder-block walls, and all the tools he’d gathered over all his working years.
Before turning in, he shut off his headlights to keep them from stealing in through his daughter’s windows—Caroline home (he hoped) and sleeping (he hoped) in her room. The motion sensor smacked him with the flood. He sat in it, the truck idling, looking at the carport. It had been empty when he’d left the house two hours ago at four a.m. when Caroline still wasn’t home, as usual. He’d persuaded her to trade that night: her Ram for his Toronado Olds. Now the Oldsmobile was back from wherever she’d taken it. And beside it, squatting in the space allotted for the truck, a brown station wagon. Not the one that had been there earlier in the week, or the one owned by last weekend’s fucker, or any of the other fuckers that he could remember. He didn’t use the word out of meanness. Fucker was simply a more accurate portrayal of the role than that inapt insult to the truth: lover. He didn’t recognize the fucker’s car, but he could paint a picture of whatever man drove it: skinny, shame-filled, and from a town far enough away that she wouldn’t have to run into him next week. With Caroline and men it was paint by the numbers. This one had a bumper sticker: My child is an honor student. An orange and yellow stuffed animal clung to the rear windshield, paws suctioned to glass, staring back.
He backed up, wrangled the truck around, and eased the trailer to the mouth of the workshop. Jumping down from the seat, he dragged the tarp off, punched the remote. The metal door squealed on its track. Behind him, in the truck’s taillights, a wide black hole gaped with inner walls blood red. Winch groaning, he slid the tractor in. When he had planted it inside, he stood back and beheld it: the Deutz. Moribund, cadaverous, a shell of what it once had been. But his now. He got the garage door shut. No one had seen it. No one would. Not even Caroline. He had sworn to himself: Not even Caroline. Not from now until it was done. Not until that day when he would bring it out, and drive it into Narrows, some autumn evening of the Festival of the Hills, when town was full up with crowd. He would call them all with its sound, show them how he had brought it back and made it whole, how for every nearly junked part he had cheated death’s lot of the Deutz.
A noise. He held his breath. Shouting. From the Booe house. He pressed the button on his watch to make it glow: 6:08. What the hell were they doing up? The Booes were weekend sleepers; on Sundays—like today—their house stayed quiet and dark till noon. But there was Rog Booe shouting something about the minivan, the hospital, all interspersed with Arlene telling him to calm down. He knew married couples were supposed to live longer, but he also knew stress cut your years. From what he’d overheard since they’d moved in, he figured the best the Booes could hope for was a wash.
Their house door smacked open. Stillman crept to the privacy hedge the Booes ha
d planted just that month. Over the too-short sprucelings, he watched Rog race down the front steps, fling open the minivan door, start it up, run around the passenger side, fool with the seat, and get back to the house steps by the time Arlene was on them. She was moving slowly and carefully. Her hands cradled her distended belly. Rog tried to take her waist. She smacked him away. He tried to take her elbow. The same. He hovered over her until she stopped midway to the truck, and seemed to seize up, and then he started his shouting all over again. For a moment, he was all movement —jerking and dancing around her like a fly at a lightbulb—and she was all not. Then she started again and a minute later they were backing out the drive. Rog put his construction site flashers on. They whirled their orange light over the road, the shriveling orchard leaves, the tops of the tiny spruces, Stillman watching. Then the flashers sucked their light around the last of the curve and, in the stillness after, he felt someone looking at him.
Turning to his house, he watched the high window back. There, in the dark of her bedroom: the shape could have been hers—those huge sloping shoulders, that heavy sense of sag—but when he waved to it, it disappeared. He let his arm drop. The fucker would probably wake her now. Is that your husband outside? Your brother? And she would come to the window. He waited for a light to bloom—the sudden battering of moths and his daughter, freshly awake and wearing her girlhood sleepy face in the yellow lamplight, searching the yard for the sight of him—waited for the window to slide open, hoping.