I carried the mug across the living room and out through a sliding glass door that opened onto a large deck. It was unseasonably warm for mid-November. The thermometer with the Cheerwine logo nailed to one of the deck posts read sixty-five degrees, and I was comfortable in a sweat shirt and jogging pants. Not that I had any intention of jogging—those days were long gone. A bullet through the leg will do that to you.
In the distance a small scattering of fog drifted through the trees like coal smoke trailing from the chimney of an old train engine. They call this area the Great Smoky Mountains, and on most mornings, if you didn’t know any better, you’d swear fires were burning out of control all through these hills.
I sipped my coffee and fought the urge to go back inside and check my email again. The cabin didn’t have Wi-Fi, so the laptop was connected to a DSL modem on a counter next to the sink, and the cable wasn’t long enough to stretch farther than the kitchen table. Maybe that was a good thing.
The cabin was nestled into a steep hill in the Pisgah National Forest in a little town called Cruso. Cruso isn’t really a town, by definition. It doesn’t have a main street or a post office or even a bar; the closest alcohol is twelve miles away in Waynesville. But it does have a volunteer fire department, a Mexican restaurant, a golf course, and a gas station filled with cigarettes, beef jerky, and scratch tickets. It also offers what I was looking for most—solitude.
I’d discovered the cabin on Craigslist. A man named Dale Johnson was advertising it for $575 a month; I’d called from Charleston and asked if he’d take $500 if I’d pay six months in advance. I told him it would be just me, no pets, no drama, no trouble, just one guy who wanted some peace and quiet in order to write a book. Dale said he was a deputy with the local sheriff’s department and knew how to handle trouble. We went back and forth for a bit until he finally accepted my terms. I packed up the Mercedes that same day and headed out, leaving behind what I was trying to escape and wondering if it would still be there when I got back.
Four hours after leaving Laura’s house in Charleston, I drove across the North Carolina border and through a small town called Canton, where a paper mill enveloped the streets in a sour-smelling haze. A few minutes later I was headed east on U.S. 276 when I passed a sign that read WELCOME TO CRUSO: 9 MILES OF FRIENDLY PEOPLE PLUS ONE OLD CRAB. I figured if I stayed here long enough, I might be in the running for that title, or at least Old Crab Pro Tem.
Just past the golf course, the road curved to the south. The houses began to spread out the farther I drove, and by the time I reached the campground where Dale said he’d meet me, I thought I’d literally entered that storied location known as East Bumfuck.
I’d called Dale from Canton to tell him I was about twenty minutes away, and he was waiting in his patrol car when I pulled into the campground. When he stepped out, I couldn’t help but wonder just how out of shape a person would have to be to fail the physical fitness requirements for a law enforcement job in the area. He was at least 275 pounds, and not an ounce of that was ass. His back was flat as a board, but his belly hung over his belt like a sack of fertilizer about to fall off a tailgate.
I got out of the Mercedes and shook his hand.
“Davis Reed,” I said.
“Dale Johnson, nice to meet ya.”
I reached in my pocket and handed him a check for $3,500. He stared at it for a moment, then finally seemed to accept that it was legit. He grinned and said, “Follow me.”
We got back on 276 and continued south along the east fork of the Pigeon River to a dirt road marked by a black mailbox with the word JOHNSON spelled out in gold stick-on letters. We turned right and followed the road up a steep incline, doubling back several times. It was like tracing the path of an erratic EKG. The road was surrounded by forest and barely wide enough for one vehicle. I wondered what we would do if we met someone coming in the opposite direction, but Dale didn’t seem to be worried about that possibility—his patrol car slung gravel and whipped from side to side like he was responding to a break-in in progress. It was all I could do to keep up.
Eventually the road straightened out and we entered a clearing with a modest wooden cabin built into a steep bank. There was a rusted-out Jeep parked off to one side of the clearing next to a few pieces of firewood peeking out from under a ragged gray tarp. The cabin looked tired and worn, and I wasn’t sure if it had been wise to pay six months in advance for a place sight unseen.
The inside of the cabin was sparse. There was one bedroom, a tiny bathroom, and a wood-paneled living room with a stone fireplace along one wall. The kitchen was painted pale yellow, and a small wooden table sat in the center of a stained linoleum floor. A door next to the refrigerator revealed a set of wooden steps that led down into darkness. “There ain’t nothing down there,” Dale said when I opened the door and peered into the black expanse. “But look at this.” He grabbed my arm, and I followed him through the living room and out onto the deck. The view was breathtaking.
“You said you’s writing a book about Cold Mountain, right? Well, there it is. That’s it.”
The deck sat above the tree line like the top floor of an observation tower at a national park. In the distance a few small hills in different shades of blue and gray rose up from a valley of trees. Behind them, perfectly framed in the center of the vista, was the tall, rounded peak of Cold Mountain. It was a view that could never get old. If I’d had 3,500 extra dollars in my bank account, I would’ve written Dale another check right then and there.
“Incredible,” I said. “How long have you owned this place?”
“It’s belonged to my family for years. Me and my ex lived here a while before things turned bad. When she moved out last spring, I figured I could move in with Daddy and rent this place out. Weren’t no reason for me to stay up here. Daddy’s got plenty of room, and his place is closer to town anyways. I started doing weekly rentals, but that shit got old quick. Folks would come up here with a bunch of kids and they’d bitch about the internet and cell phone service and this and that, like I was running a motel. So in October I started advertising it by the month. You were the first person to call. Most people ain’t interested in coming up here in the winter.”
Dale sat on the deck while I brought in my stuff from the Mercedes. With my leg injury, it was a pretty slow process, but Dale never offered to help. When he saw me unload my brewing equipment, he told me he’d recently started brewing beer himself. That began a long conversation about recipes and brewing techniques. As the sun dipped below the hills, I poured him a glass from one of the sixty-four-ounce growlers I’d brought with me from Charleston, an American pale ale that I’d been tweaking for months.
“Damn, brother, you know what you’re doing,” he said, after taking a swig that drained half the glass. “This is some good shit.”
We kept drinking through the evening and on into the night. When the moon appeared above the tree line, Dale pulled out his phone and scrolled through his music selection.
“Now this is the kind of shit I like,” he said.
Seconds later Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark at the Moon” was blaring out of the tiny speaker in Dale’s phone. I’d grown up listening to eighties heavy metal and had since moved on to hip-hop, electronica, and jazz. But Dale was committed to what he’d listened to back in high school, what many consider to be the most embarrassing of hard-rock eras, the hair metal period. That evening he played tracks from Dokken, Poison, Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Cinderella, and Ratt. It was nice to hear songs I’d thought I’d long outgrown. And I was surprised to find those ridiculous lyrics still occupied some dusty cabinet in my brain.
As the music played and the beer flowed, Dale and I swapped stories. I told him about my short time on the Charleston police force and my half-ass career as a private detective. About the cheating husbands and insurance frauds I’d been hired to photograph doing things they shouldn’t be doing. About my parents dying in a car accident a week shy of their forty-ninth wedding anniv
ersary, and a heavily redacted version of what had happened to me in that storage unit. I told him about my plans for the book and how I hoped to be finished with it by the time I left Cruso in the spring.
In return Dale told me how he’d grown up in the area and played football in high school. How he’d spent one year on a football scholarship at the University of Tennessee before drinking himself into an expulsion. How he’d come back home and started taking criminal justice classes at a technical school while watching his mom slowly die of lung cancer. He told me about joining the sheriff’s department and about the young man he’d shot and killed during a drug raid at an apartment complex over in the nearby town of Clyde. He told me a little about his ex, Carla, and a lot more about the women he had dated since his divorce, most of whom he described as “chunky.”
“I don’t like them women that’s all skin and bones,” he said. “It’s like fucking a pile of paper clips.”
By the time Dale eased his mass out the deck chair and said good-night, we’d finished off almost six growlers of beer, the equivalent of over twenty pints.
I hadn’t come to Cruso to make friends, but Dale and I seemed to have a few things in common. We were both in our midforties, we both loved good beer, and we both suffered from early-onset grumpiness.
* * *
That was twenty-seven days ago, and since then I’d spent many evenings on the deck with Dale, talking about the things we agreed on (beer and music) and arguing about the things we didn’t (just about everything else).
In fact, most of my days were spent on the deck as well: drinking beer, popping pills, and not writing a book. This morning was starting out no different from the rest—me, hungover, taking turns staring at Cold Mountain and at a blank legal pad where I kept hoping a book outline would magically appear.
Hope was about all I could do. I had no idea how to write a book. It had seemed like a good idea when I was in the hospital and wondering what to do during my recuperation. I’d thought working on a book might force me to focus. And if I could focus long enough to finish it, I might earn a little respect from all the people who’d watched me fail time and time again.
I finished my coffee and opened a beer. Then another. Then another. By midafternoon I was four beers deep and the legal pad was still blank. I was about to get a fifth beer when the angel on my shoulder suggested that a change of scenery might stir up my creative juices. The devils laughed at the idea, but I silenced them with a Xanax and a promise to ignore the angel for the rest of the day.
I went to the laptop and pulled up a trail map of the surrounding area. After clicking around for a few minutes, I settled on what looked to be an easily accessible and fairly flat trail at a place called Black Balsam. I knew I wouldn’t be able to walk very far, but at the least I would appease the angel for a while and feel like I was being productive. I changed into some old jeans and hiking boots, then hopped in the Mercedes and headed toward Cold Mountain.
2
After my hundred-yard hike on the Black Balsam trail, I drove to Dale’s father’s house, which was a few miles west of the cabin. The house sat at the end of a gravel driveway that snaked along the edge of a small family graveyard where four generations of Johnsons presumably rested in peace.
As I approached, I noticed Dale’s patrol car out front and caught a glimpse of his pudgy face looking out through one of the kitchen windows.
“I hope that trunk’s full of beer,” Dale yelled as he waddled down the steps toward my Mercedes.
“The IPA’s not ready yet,” I said. “It’s got a few more days of conditioning.”
“A few days? Shit, I might wither away before then.”
I had a better chance of staying sober than Dale had of withering away.
Dale loaded his mouth with chewing tobacco and said, “So what brings you around?”
I tossed him a large silver key ring holding numerous keys.
“Did you rob a janitor?” he said.
“I was up at Black Balsam today and found them on the trail.”
Dale stared at the mass of metal. “That’s a shitload of keys.”
“Is that your official opinion, Deputy?”
“What do I want with ’em?”
“I didn’t see anyone else in the area, and there were no other cars in the parking lot. I thought they might belong to a ranger. I didn’t know where else to take them.”
Dale shot me a suspicious look. “What the fuck were you doing up at Black Balsam?”
“Book research.”
Dale scoffed, then started to examine the keys closely. “What is all this shit?” he said.
“I don’t know—usual stuff, house keys, car keys, some padlock keys.”
Dale’s eyes grew wide as he held up the ring by a long silver key etched with black markings.
“Holy shit! Do you know what this is?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” He laughed and threw the key ring back to me. “People lose shit up on the parkway all the time. Keys, cameras, phones. Take ’em up to the ranger station at Pisgah, somebody’ll claim ’em.”
I heard a couple of grunts and turned to see Dale’s father standing just outside the home’s front door.
“How are you, Junebug?” I yelled.
“I ain’t for shit,” he said.
I should have known better than to ask. It hadn’t taken me long to come to know Junebug as a quarter ton of grumpy hillbilly poured into the largest pair of overalls I’d ever seen.
Junebug spit a long stream of brown fluid into an empty flowerpot, then asked, “Did you bring some beer?”
“It’s not quite ready yet,” I said. “Give it a few more days.”
“Well, hurry up. Dale’s beer tastes like skunk piss.”
“That don’t stop you from drinking it all,” Dale yelled.
“I’ll bring you some as soon as it’s ready,” I said, as Junebug turned around and squeezed himself back through the doorway.
I looked at Dale, who seemed a little dejected. “My beer ain’t that bad,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know. I’ve never tasted skunk piss.”
After Dale and I traded insults for a few minutes, he looked at his watch. “Since you drive about as slow as you walk, the ranger station will be closed by the time you get up there.”
I didn’t bother telling Dale that I had no intention of going to the ranger station immediately. There were impatient devils to tend to first.
“I’ll come by and get you in the morning,” he said. “We’ll ride up together.”
It was unusual for Dale to offer assistance, and I figured there was an ulterior motive for his generosity. But in the end I just nodded and climbed into my Mercedes. By that time the devils were screaming so loud I could hardly think.
3
The next morning I was sitting on the deck, basking in the warmth of cheap coffee and pricey benzodiazepines, when I heard the sound of gravel crunching under tires. It was soon followed by the siren squawk of a patrol car. Dale loved to announce his arrival.
When he pulled into the clearing, I leaned over the railing and raised my mug.
Dale rolled down his window and held up a bottle of Mountain Dew.
“I got my caffeine right here. Now grab them keys and get your ass down here. It’s a nice day for a ride on the parkway.”
I went into the bathroom and swallowed another pill. If I was going to ride with Dale, I needed to be as numb as possible. No matter where he was headed, Dale drove his patrol car like he’d just stolen it. When I slid into the passenger seat, Dale was on his phone. He used a different carrier and had service all through the area.
“I understand, sir,” he said. “But I ain’t gotten that impression.”
He looked over at me and mouthed the words Sheriff Byrd.
“Yessir, he’s writing a book on Cold Mountain, ’bout that airplane that crashed up there.”
Dale started the car, gunned it out of the clearing, and race
d down the dirt road. When we skidded onto 276, Dale punched the accelerator for the ten-minute drive up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Although with Dale behind the wheel, it would probably take less than five.
“Yessir, I’ll be sure to tell him,” Dale said into his cell.
He pressed a button and wedged the phone into a holster on his belt.
“Sheriff Byrd’s pretty curious about you. He seems to think a private detective from Charleston, showing up out of nowhere and sniffing ’round the department, is probably up to no good.”
“I’m not sniffing around the sheriff’s department,” I said. “Where did he get that idea?”
“Byrd knows you and I hang out, drink beer, talk shit. He’s got a buddy with the Charleston PD and they’ve probably been talking about that storage unit mess.”
So the local sheriff and the Charleston PD were talking about me. I didn’t like that one bit. I was supposed to be recuperating and trying to get my shit together enough to write a book. I was also hiding, albeit in plain sight. Whoever had shot me was almost certainly with the Charleston PD, someone in cahoots with Greg who drove a gray Audi. I worried that if that person knew my exact location, they might come and try to finish the job.
I wondered who Sheriff Byrd’s friend in the department might be. I remembered several of the guys on the force talking about vacationing in the mountains around Asheville. It wouldn’t be strange for one or more of them to make friends with a local sheriff.
“He wants to have lunch with you,” Dale said. “Tomorrow at twelve thirty down at the Mexican place, El Bacteria.”
“Is it a request or a demand?”
Dale finished his Mountain Dew and tossed the empty bottle onto the back seat.
“Well, that all depends on how you look at it. But I’d go if I was you. You don’t want on Byrd’s bad side. Just tell him about your book. How’s it coming along, anyway?”
I looked out the window at the blur of trees.
Graveyard Fields Page 2
