Road to Thunder Hill

by Connie Barnes Rose

  Olive prattles on, “I worry about her, you know. Let me ask you something, have you noticed how she’s letting herself go lately?”

  “Like how?”

  “She has stopped wearing a bra, when really she shouldn’t.”

  “Oh well, I hate bras more than anything,” says Alana. “Maybe even more than cats. I whip mine off the second the last customer leaves the store.”

  “But I don’t think she wears one all day either. Even when people like Bear James showed up like he did today.”

  Hearing Bear’s name, Alana will stop to think. “So that’s where he went when he left here. Sandra Birdshell called in a big flap because of her window or something.”

  Olive says, “And sometimes her house is so dirty I don’t dare sit down. Today there was a slice of roast beef sitting on the table, with no plate under it, just a piece of meat! And guess what was lying right next to it?”

  “Let me guess, a fly-swatter?” Alana says. “She’s been known to leave those on the table too.”

  “Not quite, but close,” says Olive. “It was a hair brush! And the hairs in it were touching the meat! I hate to say this about my own half sister, but I can understand why Ray got fed up. You should have seen the dust balls that attacked me from underneath her couch!”

  Maybe the bath water is hotter than I realized because suddenly I’m melting out of my tub with all my bones slithering under the bathroom door, out through the kitchen and porch and spilling into the gravel outside my kitchen door. There I go, swallowed up by the red earth around my house. And no one, but no one, will notice me missing until Monday morning when I don’t show up for work.

  Don’t be silly, I tell myself as I waver between waking and dozing. If a person was truly melting she’d slip through the drain to the septic tank and not out the kitchen door at all. I pop out the bath plug with my toes. My ears are still full when the water drains from the tub. It must be picking up speed now because the swishing noise is now a roar, a roar that gets louder until I realize I’m not dozing and that the noise isn’t coming from my tub at all. My heart lurches, and I bolt upright for the second time this day. Only now I know exactly where I am because of the sound a flue fire makes when it rages through the center of a house. Scrambling out of the tub I make a rush for the kitchen.

  The stovepipe glows red, and the shrieking noise coming from the chimney sends me straight out the front door. Except for the rubber boots and the blanket I grabbed from the couch, I’m totally naked. From the yard, I peer up at the roof. So far there aren’t any flames shooting through the chimney. I run back inside to shut the stove drafts. I can see the fire through a hole in the rusted pipe. For six months now, Ray has been after me to replace that pipe.

  I phone the Thunder Hill Volunteer Fire Department and speak to Maynard Fleming. He asks me if everyone is out of the house and says to throw a box of salt into the fire and try to relax because there’s nothing more I can do. Either the creosote will burn itself off or the flames will escape through the rusted pipe and the house will burn to the ground. Like the Morsey house last year. They’ve been living in a trailer ever since. Diana Morsey says what she misses most are her photo albums.

  I run up the back stairs to where the stovepipe rises through Gayl’s bedroom. It’s red too. I kick away the pile of clothes lying next to the pipe. And then I tear down the front stairs and out the back door to watch the sparks flying from the chimney. Snow pellets bite at my cheeks.

  “Oh shit. Oh man!” I say to Suzie who has followed me out and is barking at me like it’s all my fault. I can’t blame her because only a few minutes ago her life was normal.

  This isn’t my first flue fire and I know they usually burn out on their own. Panic will do me no good. Now where did I last see my photo albums?

  Back in the kitchen, I’m staring at the fire in the pipe like it’s something in a museum, and then, just like that, it’s over. The roaring rumbles and fades. The fire truck should be turning down my lane anytime, now that the danger is over. Of course it’ll be all over Thunder Hill before the day is out, especially the part about the deplorable condition of the stovepipe. I sure hope Danny got called out to the salt trucks, and isn’t on fire call today. Those firemen might like a cup of tea after they’ve stomped through the house checking for flames hiding in the walls. I go to fill my kettle before I remember that my stove is totally useless. When I finally find my old electric kettle under the pantry cupboard, I notice how frayed the cord is. When did I become such a fire hazard? I pull the red blanket tighter because I’ve begun to shake. Look at me. I have no clothes on and the volunteer fire department will be here any minute.

  PART II

  7. Hog Holler

  THE WIND SOUNDS LIKE the hurricane we had about seven years ago. It sounds even louder than it did an hour ago.

  Bear and I are at Hog Holler and Perry Card is drinking the last of my rum. Perry says he’s drowning his sorrows because now he’ll have to cancel his fishing trip tomorrow down at Diligent Brook. And here he’d thought he’d get a jump on the season, before the black flies came. “Who’d’a known the weather could turn around so much in twenty-four hours?”

  I don’t bother telling him that Alana predicted this storm last night when Gayl and I stepped out of the Four Reasons. There was an orange ring circling the moon. Alana had said that meant trouble.

  One of the lamps in Hog Holler is shaped like a pig’s head. Its light bulb snout flickers every time the wind gusts around the building. Old stickers of Porky and Petunia Pig cling to the beer fridge door. Porky gives a bouquet of flowers to Petunia who bats her eyes.

  Almost everything in Hog Holler goes along with the pig theme. There’s a calendar of pig pin-ups; the teats on this month’s sow are covered with tiny black brassieres. Perry tells anyone who bothers to ask that he was forced to open up Hog Holler because everybody was always giving him pig paraphernalia. And here he is a bootlegger, not a pig farmer. But his father was.

  I hang up the phone. There was no answer at my mother’s house so I left a message saying that I’d taken Gayl’s advice to leave and that I was safe and sound. What I forgot to mention was that I had ended up at Hog Holler.

  Earlier, when Bear and I had brought in a swirl of snow, Perry turned his hooked nose towards me and proceeded to act far more shocked than he needed to: “Well, look who’s slumming it tonight.”

  “Try not to get too excited,” I told him. “I’m here because I had nowhere else to go.”

  Perry laughed. “Why do you think anyone ever comes here?”

  It’s true. I’d never dream of hanging around Hog Holler, except maybe to pick up rum or beer and then it’s just in and out. Half the time I don’t even bother to look around to see who’s there. It’s well known that Saturday night is “ladies” night, and that Perry lets what he calls “the pussies” drink for free. But some of them must drink too much, because right under the sign saying, “Saturday Night is Ladies Night” it says, “Except for Deenie Card and Mary-Lyn Carty.”

  “Hey,” I say “Where’s all the free booze that sign says I’m supposed to get for being a lady?”

  “No free booze,” Perry says, his hands behind his head. “Unless you can prove you have a pussy.”

  I say, “But that was my bottle we just finished!”

  Perry wags his finger at me. “No way. Just because you’re Trish Kyle doesn’t mean you get out of spot checks. Right Bear?”

  Bear is busy patting Suzie and acting like he hasn’t heard Perry, which turns out to be the smart thing to do.

  I’m not so smart, so I say to Perry, “What do you do, make all the women drop their drawers at the door?”

  “Nothing like that,” he says, leaning so close I can see all his blackheads. “It’s a manual check I do.” He raises his fingers to sniff them. “This is how I tell them apart.” />
  I turn my head and say, “Okay, Perry, you win the award for the grossest human on earth.”

  Perry cackles and Bear shakes his head at me. “You asked for it.”

  I say, “I need a drink.”

  “You’d best be careful tonight, Bear,” Perry smirks and points to the cupboard next to the fridge. “Pussies will do just about anything for a drink. Maybe even you!”

  Bear winks at me. “Only in my dreams.”

  This shouldn’t be making my face grow so hot.

  Then Perry says, “Hear you had a little excitement over your way today with the flue fire. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that you got to keep on top of your stuff, you know. You should hear the stuff I hear about people who don’t take care of their stuff. It’s the same old story. Someone forgets the dog in the car on a hot day and it cooks. Somebody don’t bother to take their socks off the electric heater and the whole house burns down. Careless people are with their stuff.”

  I stare at him, thinking I’ve reached a new low having to put up with a Perry Card rant. His yard is full of junked cars and leaking refrigerators, and the two beef cows he keeps in a shed next to the house live in manure up to their bellies. And here in Hog Holler, it looks like he’s got about fifteen electrical cords all running out of two sockets. Hog Holler is the only bar between Thunder Hill and town and he gets away without a license because he doesn’t charge for the booze. Not outright anyway. But everyone drops two bucks into the piggy bank by the fridge for every drink they take. So Perry never has to leave home to party, and everybody has to show him respect because he’s always threatening to close the place.

  “Hurry up over there, laddie,” Perry shouts at Bear, who’d been rummaging through some cupboards. “You’re keeping the lady waiting.”

  Bear returns with a bottle of rum. I watch the way he moves his lips as he’s filling my glass and I think he really does look good without his beard. I think that just before I take a long sip. That rum sure does warm the throat. There’s nothing like behaving like a yahoo at Hog Holler when you thought you were in for a quiet weekend with your husband. Oh well, I decide, as I clink glasses with Perry, I can always blame it on the rum, or the storm, or Ray.

  Less than an hour after the flue fire, Ray phoned. I still felt pretty shaken up and was getting the guts up to tell him about it, because Ray is fanatical about insurance policies. He is always after me about things like car inspections and fire hazards. I was supposed to get someone over here to fix the stovepipe but I hadn’t gotten around to it. Anyway, before I even had a chance to say anything, he said, “I don’t think I should drive anywhere today, honey. It’s storming pretty bad down here.”

  He never calls me “honey.” I looked out the window and up the road. “It doesn’t look all that bad out there to me, honey.”

  I heard him sigh. “Okay, Trish, if you want I’ll jump in the truck right now and spend the next five hours on the road, that’s if I’m lucky enough to stay on the road.”

  “I guess it’s a question of what you want.”

  “You think I want to stay here and listen to the guys fart and tell dirty jokes all weekend?”

  “The guys? That’s not what I hear,” I blurted out. “Olive said she heard all kinds of women when she spoke to you earlier.”

  “Women?”

  “Yeah, women,” I said. “You know, the other half of the human race?”

  “Okay, okay. But I don’t know what Olive’s talking about. Unless…” He suddenly got right quiet on me.

  “Unless? Unless what?”

  “Unless…” he said, “unless there were women near the phone at the gym this morning.”

  “There’s a gym in Newville?”

  Hearing about this gym felt like something had just been spliced into the film clip of Newville that I carry around in my head. The one that shows Ray waking in the morning, walking to work, spending a long boring day on the Payloader, heading back to the boarding house where old Mrs. McCarthy fixes the men hot stew with dumplings. In the evenings he plays cards with the farting joke-tellers, or watches TV, and except for the past three weeks he usually phones me before going to bed. How did a gym suddenly get into this picture?

  “Gym?” I said, clearing my throat. “You … why would you join a gym?”

  “Why does anybody?”

  “I never thought you were interested in that stuff.”

  “Maybe I’ve changed. Do you think it’s a bad thing?”

  I guess my silence let on what I was thinking, because he said, “I only joined a while ago. I haven’t been going for that long.”

  “Well, when did you start?”

  “Oh, I guess about five weeks ago.”

  “But you’ve been home since then. We’ve talked on the phone at least a dozen times. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because … because I’m tired of being grilled all the time about what I do here in Newville. And I knew you’d have something to say about me joining a gym.”

  “You mean like I might ask how much it costs to watch a bunch of women sweating in tight clothing?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “So,” I said. “I guess that explains why you’re not in any big hurry to get home these days.”

  “Oh, Trish,” he sighed. “Don’t you see why we’re not living together anymore?”

  I couldn’t answer because I felt like he’d just kicked me in the stomach, and it reminded me of how bad things had gotten between us before he moved to Newville in the first place. Since he’d come back that first weekend we’d both tried so hard that we’d convinced ourselves that we could be happy together. I guess we must have been thinking the same thing because for the longest time we stayed quiet, listening to the hum of two hundred kilometres of phone wire.

  Finally, he broke the silence. “Gayl up yet?”

  “She’s gone into town.”

  “By herself?”

  “She picked up Biz.”

  “How could you let her take the car out in this weather?”

  “Because with me here and you there, someone has to make these decisions.”

  And that’s pretty well where we left it. I still hadn’t mentioned the flue fire. I stared at the hole in the stovepipe and all the bits of rusted metal that had fallen onto the stovetop. Ray had joined a gym, of all things, and he wasn’t coming home this weekend.

  I banged the phone down on the table and that’s what sent me running straight for the rum.

  “Goddamn spring storms. Every goddamned year I get screwed up because of some storm.”

  Perry has been staring out at the blowing snow for the past hour. Suddenly, he grabs his cap from his chair and goes out the door without even saying goodnight, without even reminding us to lock up when we leave.

  For some reason Bear feels responsible for seeing that he makes it across the yard and into the house all right. In a nor’easter like this, a thirty-foot walk can turn into the last walk you’ll ever take, if you’re drunk enough. But we shouldn’t have worried about Perry.

  “He’s on automatic pilot,” Bear says.

  We’re standing at the window, our hands cupped around our eyes. The snow or sleet or freezing rain whipping around out there makes it so we can barely see Perry stumble up the stairs to his back porch. We watch him crash into both sides of the doorway before heaving himself into his house.

  Bear laughs, “He always does that when he drinks.”

  “What?”

  “Goes through the door like he’s trying to thread a needle.”

  “Jeez, Bear, I didn’t think you came here to the Holler all that often.”

  “I don’t usually, Trish,” he says, slipping into a cowboy voice at the same time as he hooks his thumbs into his belt loops. “But a man gets
pretty lonely way up there on Thunder Hill. In the dead of winter his thoughts might start wanderin’ over to the Hog Holler gals.”

  “You must get real lonesome, then,” I say in the exact same cowboy voice but suddenly the fun fades from his eyes and is replaced by a look that really is lonesome. Seeing Bear looking so lonely is making me feel mighty lonesome too.

  8. The Failed Hermit

  FOR SOME TIME BEAR has been calling himself “a failed hermit.” This after he used to call himself “a failed freak.” Right after our farm got busted, he decided that trying to live with lots of people in harmony was impossible. Perhaps it would be better for everyone if he was to become a hermit. Yet, every year, he throws a huge gathering in August and calls it his “Failed Hermit Party.”

  Once, when we were helping him get ready for one of those parties, Alana asked him how he thought he had failed.

  He turned away from the pot of venison and turnip stew he’d been stirring and said, “Look, I’ve been living here alone for all these years. I have my own water and heat source, I grow almost everything I need, but look at me!”

  We looked. After all, there’s a lot of Bear James to see, which is how he got his name; well, that and because of all the hair. Whenever he slips into hermit mode, Bear grows out his hair and beard. He says he does this to keep the ladies away so they won’t distract him from serious hermit business.

  Underneath all that hair is a handsome face. He has strong cheekbones and soft brown eyes like a deer’s. Dark curls tumble over his forehead and around his ears.

  Whenever he shaves off his beard, even Gayl’s friends go on about how hot he is.

  “We’re still looking at you, Bear,” Alana said, poking him because he seemed distracted by the stew.

  “And we’re still waiting to hear why you’ve failed as a hermit,” I said.

  He turned away from the stove and waved the wooden spurtle he’d been using to stir the broth. I quickly held out my hand to catch the dripping stew. Last Christmas, he gave every household in Thunder Hill one of his hand-carved stirring spurtles. No one, not even Olive, who has the weirdest gadgets in her pantry, had ever heard of a “spurtle.”