The Killing Hills

by Chris Offutt

  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hard to raise somebody else’s kid. A man you barely know. The kind of man who’ll fuck another man’s wife while he’s away.”

  “It’s not genetic.”

  “Yeah? What do you know about him? His family? Nothing. You don’t know a damn thing about half that baby in you. A musician who married up and slept down.”

  He watched a wave of anger tighten her face. It wasn’t vengeance he wanted to inflict but something else. He wanted her to fully comprehend the situation she’d put him in. They’d groped along through twelve years of marriage, each decision the best at the time, based on available information. Now she’d discarded everything. A battlefield calm settled over him. His perceptions sharpened.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “It’s a little late to think about me.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You didn’t eight months ago.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said.

  “Can you stop contradicting whatever I say?”

  “I’m not.”

  “It ain’t the time to pick at me, Peggy. We’re not talking about where to put the couch or what kind of mesh for the screen door.”

  “We have a storm door.”

  “The porch has a screen door, damn it.”

  Her expression reflected satisfaction that he’d gotten angry. He knew it meant she was so mad at herself that she wanted him to be, too. But it wasn’t anger that he felt, it was dismay and disappointment.

  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  “You want me to choose, Mick? Is that it? Give the baby away and keep you? Either you or the baby? Is that what you want?”

  Her onslaught of yes/no questions passed through him, easily ignored. It was a technique of control, asking a question while presenting two options for response. Lawyers and journalists did it every day. So did unskilled interrogators. In a way, she was talking to herself.

  “What should I do?” she said.

  “It’s your body. Your life.”

  “It’s your life, too.”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Not any more.”

  “What does that mean? Are you leaving me?”

  “What I mean,” he said slowly, “is that I don’t know what you’ve been thinking about all this time. What your plan is.”

  “My family thinks it’s your baby. Mom comes over every couple of days. She’s staying away because you’re home. I can’t tell her the truth. Nobody knows but you.”

  He looked at her as if surveilling through binoculars. Her body was turned away, arms folded over her chest, legs crossed.

  “At first,” she said, “I decided to have the baby and give it away before you got back. I’d tell everybody it was stillborn. Then I was scared you’d get in early. I couldn’t talk on the phone because I was afraid I’d tell you and I didn’t want you to fly back with all this on your mind. Then Linda called you.”

  She shifted position, aiming her body toward him and stretching one arm across a throw pillow. He recognized her movements as relief for having told him everything. Mick believed her. He nodded again.

  “And now,” he said. “What’s your thinking now?”

  “Go to Lexington and give the baby up. I can stay with Aunt Fran. She won’t tell a soul.”

  He nodded and stood.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  He went outside and she heard the old six-cylinder engine turn over twice then start with a roar. The house was suddenly hers again—bigger somehow. Mick’s psychic presence filled any enclosed space but never the woods or the desert or a beach. In those places he seemed to vanish and go unnoticed by people and animals. She’d never understood it.

  Peggy felt better than she had in months. She’d feared his reaction and now it was over. He’d been calmer than she anticipated. She’d forgotten his nature, the pragmatic dispassion he brought to problems big or small. This was the worst and it was over. The relief lifted a burden she only recognized when it was gone.

  Keeping things from Mick did more damage to her than him, created distance within herself that found expression between them. She’d always relied on him to bring her back. Talking had alleviated the anxiety and given her fresh energy.

  She scooted to the end table beside the couch and called Aunt Fran. As the phone rang she began mentally compiling a list of household tasks. She’d let things slip. Seeing the house through his eyes put everything on display—a layer of dust, potato chip crumbs on the carpet, empty bowls from days ago. She’d open the windows and air out the house.

  Chapter Twenty

  Mick felt like a shell, as if he was outside of his body watching someone else occupy his life. He wasn’t driving the truck, the other person was, the other Mick. He was angry and exhausted and lost. The thing he’d feared was true, the thing he’d avoided thinking about. The baby was someone else’s.

  A fragment of his mind wished he’d never come home while another part wished he’d never left Kentucky in the first place. He wondered where his home was now, what home meant. It wasn’t the house he’d bought with his wife, the cabin in the woods, or the bases he’d inhabited overseas. He lived out of a duffel bag containing two sets of clothes, socks, and underwear. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d lived anywhere long enough to stock the bathroom cabinet with shaving cream and a toothbrush. On his last leave to Rocksalt he’d hung a nylon Dopp kit on a towel hook. Maybe if he’d bothered to unload it and settle in, Peggy wouldn’t have felt so restless when he left.

  At the eastern edge of town he stopped at a construction site. The workers were gone for the day. Building material sat on pallets. Beside it was a dumpster the size of a railroad car that leaked from rusty holes in the bottom. He got out of the truck and walked around it twice. He felt like part of his mind had come unmoored and he was in danger of drifting away from himself.

  He dropped the tailgate and slammed it shut, then did it three more times, meaningless action that felt substantive but not enough. Under the bench seat he found a heavy crescent wrench rusted tight at the knurl. He lowered the gate again and beat on the Ford engine block in the bed, striking it over and over until his arm hurt and shoulder ached. The jaw of the wrench broke from impact and flew across the dirt lot. He climbed into the back of the truck, crouched behind the engine, and pushed. His legs quivered with effort. He felt the strain in his arms and his back. The engine scooted along the metal with a terrible sound, gouging furrows in the bed and the gate. With a final effort, he pushed it off the truck, the momentum carrying him with it. He landed on top of the engine, his body draped over it like cloth. He wanted to cry but didn’t know how. It was like a switch hidden inside him, out of reach.

  He lay on the engine block for several minutes, catching his breath. He slowly stood, grateful that no one was around. His clothes were greasy from the engine, his fingers stiff from the blows with the wrench. He drove east on old 60, then began making the turns onto smaller roads, each branch narrower than the last until he left a county-maintained gravel lane for a dirt road. He checked the topo map. The old Gibson place lay ahead. He drove until the road disappeared in a washout from a creek. He parked and retrieved his gun and a knapsack containing a canteen, compass, knife, rope, and first aid kit.

  As he walked, the holler tightened until he was moving beneath boughs of hickory and maple that wove to a canopy overhead. A squirrel watched him without fear as if it had never seen a man before. Mick waved hello. The road faded into heavy woods. He skirted a blackberry patch higher than his head, and came to a wide opening at the head of the holler. An ideal location for a house, the land was sheltered from weather with a natural spring flowing off the rock cliff. He saw movement and froze. It moved again, something pale blue and he knew it wasn’t an animal. He crabwalked sideways into the woods, stood, and began circling, staying just inside the tree line. He held the pistol at his side.
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br />   The house had burnt down years ago, leaving a rock chimney amid a rectangle of weeds. A man in a workshirt poked at the ground with a stick, then stood and looked directly toward Mick as if able to see through the foliage. Mick frowned, knowing he was too well-concealed for sight. The man moved into a shaft of sunlight and Mick recognized the janitor. Mick tucked his gun away and walked across the land, brushing aside horseweed that marked an old drain ditch.

  “Hidy, Mr. Tucker.”

  Tucker nodded once and stepped back into the shade. He held an oak walking stick and a burlap sack. Mick stared at the ground as he walked the perimeter. There was no evidence of a cookfire or matted area for sleeping. Bent grass and a snapped off weed marked the eastern boundary.

  “You come in that way?” Mick said.

  “Yep. Broke that snakeroot weed you’re worrying on.”

  “I didn’t see your vehicle.”

  “Ain’t but a half-mile walk on the ridge.”

  “You hunting for the killer, Mr. Tucker?”

  “Naw. I’m keeping track of nine sang plants over here. Still yet need another year.”

  “Down by those oaks yonder?”

  “Ain’t saying.”

  The surrounding hills were steep enough to skin your nose on climbing, strung by pine and yellowwood clinging to the limestone cliffs. The only sound was a distant cicada and an occasional blue jay irritated by the presence of humans. A squirrel chittered from the first fork of the nearest oak. Mick pointed to it.

  “I was just thinking,” he said, “about a squirrel that acted like he ain’t seen a man before.”

  “Could be. They live about ten or twelve years. I knew a squirrel that made it to twenty.”

  Mick pondered a couple of responses, then decided to let it go. No sense debating the life span of wild animals or what Tucker meant by having known a squirrel. How do you get to know one? You can hardly know a human, even your own wife.

  “Who were these people?” Mick said. “The Gibsons.”

  “Jerry and Gayle Gibson. They was old when I was a pup. Had fourteen kids.” He pointed to the ground. “Two bedrooms right there, one for the boys and one for the girls. The Mister and Missus slept in the back.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Typhus got half the kids. The rest left. One road out and they everyone took it. Not a one come back.”

  “Pretty place with a rough history.”

  “Not a hill here you can’t say that about.”

  “I reckon,” Mick said. “You needing you a lift home?”

  “Thank ye, no,” Tucker said. “Quicker on foot.”

  Tucker lifted his chin in a brief motion of farewell and vanished into the woods as if the trees welcomed one of their own. Mick walked to his truck thinking about sixteen people living in four rooms, the parents watching their children die one by one.

  He drove out of the holler and crossed the county on a series of back roads. After consulting the map, he followed Lick Fork Creek to a dirt road and stopped at the support struts of a swinging footbridge that had collapsed into the creek below. There was no sign of recent traffic. He left his truck and descended the slope, using saplings to prevent falling. As a boy he’d developed a method of skidding down a hill in a slight crouch, one foot extended to steer his body through the undergrowth. His weight was on the back foot turned sideways to act as a brake. Selection of hillside was crucial—too sheer a slope and he’d pitch forward in a terrible tumble, too slight and gravity wouldn’t pull him. He’d gotten the idea from seeing a TV show about surfing. It had been his favorite activity as a child.

  He waded Lick Fork and climbed the opposite bank to the Branhams’ land. They were a storied bunch—three sisters who lived together—Gloria, Loretta, and Candy. Buxom and single, they were courted by men from three counties. People said the perilous footbridge was how the women culled serious suitors from the sporting ones. Any man willing to cross had good intentions. Once you were in with the sisters, you could have a wild time, and bringing a jar of liquor never hurt. The Branham sisters were gone by the time Mick heard about them. Candy ran off with a man from Elliott County who didn’t mind her pointed ears. Loretta had a stroke and Gloria took care of her until they both died.

  At the top of the creek bank he circled the house. It was surprisingly big and he figured the builder had felled the trees and milled the lumber on the site. Wind and weather had stripped the old tarpaper roof to shreds. Someone had set a washtub over the chimney but the bottom had rusted through and the metal loop sat like a giant wedding ring around the mortared rock. A copperhead sunned itself at the edge of the shade as if too weary to go any farther. Mick nodded to the snake, which flicked its tongue toward the human scent.

  He continued his recon around the house and peered through each broken window. Satisfied that the structure was empty, he entered the back door. Long tunnels of hardened dirt built by mud-daubers clung to the walls. The rooms held a few broken scraps of furniture, four squirrel nests, several shed snake skins, and the scattered bones of mice and field rats. Everything of the slightest value was gone. There were no doors or wiring, furniture or dishware. The window handles were missing. A thick layer of undisturbed dust coated every surface. No one had been here in many years, certainly not a killer on the run.

  Mick returned to his truck and headed toward town. The next place to investigate was close but the geography was impenetrable. He needed to make a long drive that looped Rocksalt, Triplett Creek, and Clack Mountain. He stopped for gas. While the tank was filling he pulled his cell phone from the glove box. His sister had called twice and sent a text for him to get in touch. He pressed the return button and his call went to voice mail.

  He called twice more as he drove back to Rocksalt. Both times he got no service due to the terrain. As he neared town he saw a car parked in a trampled field beside the road. A man was walking a loose circle, looking at the sky, his hand to his ear. Mick pulled over and called his sister. It rang twice, then lost service. He walked in the field while pressing redial. The other man ended his call and approached Mick.

  “If you stand facing that big walnut,” the man said, “then turn a little to your right and take a few steps, you’ll get a call through.”

  “Thanks.”

  “These damn things. First they get you hooked on them. Then they jack the prices higher than a cat’s back and change the cords so you got to buy a new one. Then the damn things don’t work.”

  “About like a leash is what it is.”

  “We used to have a party line,” the man said. “Every house up the holler on the same telephone line. Nobody told nobody nothing because everybody else was listening in.”

  Mick followed the man’s advice and got through to Linda. The connection was weak, her voice garbled and full of static. He was able to discern a street name and the anxiety in her tone.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mick drove to town and followed Second Street north to Knapp Avenue, surprised at how far the street had extended over the years. Newer brick homes were snugged tight against the hillside. Strands of dry dirt deposited by flooding encroached the blacktop. He passed thick piles of dislodged brush, tree stumps, and rocks. A large flatbed truck carrying logs trundled down the street, its load swaying, and Mick swerved onto someone’s yard for safety. Several ruts in the ruined grass indicated that other drivers had done the same.

  At a fork he saw the flashing lights of first responders to the left, and headed that way, parking well back. Two police cars, including his sister’s black SUV, were parked in the yard beside an ambulance. A city cop was directing traffic while another one guarded the entry to a small house made of yellow brick. Mick asked for Sheriff Hardin.

  “Busy,” the city cop said.

  “Johnny Boy Tolliver, then.”

  “Not here yet.”

  A plain late-model car arrived and Marquis Sledge the undertaker disembarked and walked slowly toward the house, posture erect with his h
ead slightly bowed in deference to his work as county medical examiner.

  “Hey, Marquis,” Mick said.

  “Mick,” he answered in his professionally solemn tone.

  “You know him?” the cop said to Marquis.

  “Linda’s brother,” Marquis said. “He’s all right. Unofficial deputy.”

  Mick followed Marquis into a living room with a couch and two chairs flanking a worn rug. Tanner Curtis lay on his back with three gunshot wounds to his torso. Blood had soaked through his clothes and seeped across the floor, settling into the cracks between floorboards. His open eyes stared without life at the ceiling. Mick recalled the nervous young man he’d interviewed in jail, then quickly shoved aside the image of Tanner Curtis alive. His status had shifted to an object on the floor.

  Marquis examined the body while Mick moved about the room, mentally cataloguing its contents. A knick-knack shelf on brackets held four ceramic ducks. A bookcase with a bible, four high school yearbooks, nine romance novels, and a guide to raising chickens. On the walls were an array of family photos depicting Tanner as a baby, school pictures from first to twelfth grade, and several group pictures taken at weddings and holiday gatherings. All the relatives resembled each other except him. A photo of teenage cousins dressed in finery included Tanner, but he stood separate as if the six other kids had pulled away. Or maybe he had.

  Voices drifted up the hall—his sister’s urgent tone and a man with a high quivering voice. Pulsing beneath the indistinct conversation was the rise and fall of a woman weeping. Marquis offically pronounced Tanner Curtis dead, nodded to Mick, and departed. Mick squatted beside the body. Three small wounds, probably from a pistol. One hole in Curtis’s shirt had a thick pattern of gunshot residue indicating the weapon had been fired at close quarters. Slightly lower on his chest was a second bullet hole with a fainter circle of speckled residue. The third entrance hole was unmarred save for slender threads on his shirt that were tinged red from blood.