The Broken King

by Brian Panowich

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  “Kings don’t resign. They either remain king or they die … and they don’t do it in bed.”

  —Don Winslow from The Cartel

  Gareth Burroughs died by fire during an ice storm.

  The irony of that was not lost on the men who found his body, or on most of the folks who knew him. He’d been a saint to some, a firm hand and a loyal provider for the people of Bull Mountain, but for others, he was a ruthless son of a bitch. An entitled tyrant who governed over those very people with a sadistic anger he’d inherited from his father. It was a well-seasoned anger that passed down through all the Burroughs men who came before him until it was as black and as hardened as cast iron. The Burroughs family had been running Bull Mountain since before the place had a name, and for the last four decades, Gareth had been sitting at the top of the food chain as the man in charge of the dope trade in North Georgia. No one questioned that, and anyone who did found himself dumped in a freshly dug hole, covered in moist dirt, marked by nothing but a scattering of pine straw and oak leaves.

  Of course, no king lives forever, and Gareth was getting old.

  He was familiar with the stink of it. He smelled it on his own father before he picked up the torch, and knew that up here on the mountain, getting older wasn’t kin to getting wiser. It meant getting weaker, and the savages he already struggled to maintain were beginning to catch a whiff of that stench coming off of him.

  During the coldest winter in McFalls County’s recorded history, a North Atlantic cold front swept down the east coast dragging the region and its ill-prepared inhabitants through a brutal solstice. Even the survivalists and life-long mountain folk of the Georgia foothills who made their homes in the highest altitudes of the state struggled to keep their freezers stocked with game and their woodpiles filled. The stories of hunters being found frozen in place while out tracking something—anything—to feed their kin were rampant. The bitter winter assault barely lasted a week at its peak, but it was long enough for the hard frosts to turn red clay to blue steel and put an unshakable chill in the bones of every man, woman and child on that rock. The storm encased everything across the Blue Ridge foothills in ice. Every tree limb, rock, and vine of kudzu, every leaf, weed, tractor, truck, or rusted out engine part had been frozen in place as if time had just stopped. The entire mountain would shimmer in the last morning’s sunlight like some kind of ancient palace constructed of spun glass. The storm’s effects would even have been considered beautiful to a man like Burroughs, but by the time the people of McFalls County got to recover from the damage done and take in the scene, Gareth would already be dead. He’d met his demise on that first night—long before anything beautiful had been left behind to see. Not that it would’ve mattered. Gareth had forgotten all about beauty, or what it even meant for something to be beautiful. Beauty was another day above ground, and now even that had been stripped away.

  When the storm first arrived and began to blacken the skies of Northern Georgia, the winds had already wreaked havoc on a large portion of the marijuana crops twisting in strategic braids across the northern face of the mountain, and that loss would cost the family, along with everyone that depended on the cash flow, thousands. That was a problem. Money was an issue these days. Gareth’s new game, amphetamine production, brought to the table by his eldest sons as the next big market to move the family into, was just getting off the ground. Any excess funds they might have had to make up for the hit to the crops were now tied up in a barn-full of chemicals, vats, and space-age machines they’d just secured from the Englishman down in Florida. Gareth had let his boys talk him into it, and now everyone who depended on him was going to pay for his listening. The boys used phrases on him like Playing the long game and Looking toward the future. Gareth scoffed at that kind of talk. He recognized those terms for what they were, thinly veiled ways of convincing him to become more dependent on outside interests. Ernest and Jimbo had said the same kinds of things about bringing in Mexican Cocaine in the eighties. They said there was a fortune to be made. That may have been true, but Gareth was right to say no then and the same stood true now. But it wasn’t his shot to call, not anymore. Gareth had been losing control of those decisions whether he liked it or not. Like so many old men before him, he was just another son who’d become his father, while his own sons became men. Gareth was feeling what his father, Cooper, must have felt as he watched Gareth march the family into unfamiliar territory with the Englishman over twenty years ago. It was funny how that worked. The history on this mountain could be as invisible and cruel as a sniper in a red oak. One minute your finger is still on the trigger, and the next, you’re the one in the sights.

  * * *

  Gareth’s oldest sons, Halford and Buckley, didn’t seem to mind the cold the night he died as they duct taped a pleading and terrified Tooley Jordan to a birdhouse post in the yard and went to work on him like tag-team boxers on a heavy bag. They didn’t say much either. They just whooped and hollered, high-fiving each other between blows. They circled that helpless bastard like turkey vultures around road kill, each of them swooping in from the left or the right to steal a peck of flesh. Each hit was meaner and harder than the last. Their coats and heavy flannel shirts hung unbuttoned and loose, their chests heaving, the adrenaline surges making them even more oblivious to the cold. Gareth had already taken a few shots at the man on the pole himself. In fact, Gareth threw the first haymaker once ol’ Tooley was good and taped up. He was pretty sure he cracked the man’s cheekbone before stepping back to let his boys take over. Dishing out the hits winded the old man early, so he let the young’uns have their fun. He walked over and sank his forearms down deep into the frigid water in the rain barrel, punching through the thin crust of ice already forming on top, to rinse the blood from his raw knuckles. He tried to remember what this idiot did to deserve the beat down. Buckley had told him right before they taped the guy up, but Buckley also lied about damn near everything. The truth was it didn’t matter what he did. It was done now.

  He left his arms submerged as long as he could take it and stared at his reflection in the water and floating shards of ice. How long had he been doing this, fighting, killing, surviving?

  His whole goddamn life is how long.

  Gareth dug his first grave when he was nine. He murdered two grown men on his front porch just a few years later. He remembered his father’s eyes swelling with tears of pride that night. Gareth grew accustomed to the killing. Hell, he used to revel in it, like his boys were now, beating on that dip-shit Tooley. He used to look forward to the bloodletting, to the whole outlaw bit. Now it was just tiring. It just took his breath and left him sore, and most times it would be for nothing. Every time he put down some ambitious up-and-comer, there was always another one to take their place. Just one asshole after the other, waiting in the wings to take a shot at the crown. The tedium of it was maddening. It was similar to waving flies off a pile of dogshit. There j
ust wasn’t any sense in it. They’d just keep coming, sniffing that shit and thinking its ambrosia.

  Gareth cupped the water and rinsed his face, taking some of it down his throat to wash away the chalky grit. He couldn’t feel his fingers. He didn’t care. They were just the latest part of him to go numb.

  “Deddy,” Buckley hollered over to his father. “Look, I think he’s still breathing.” Buckley propped Tooley’s head up by his chin and turned it toward his father. The man’s face was so mangled and distorted that it didn’t really qualify as a face anymore, just a lump of hamburger meat with patches of hair in all the wrong places. “You want any more of this, Deddy, before he’s off to meet his maker?”

  “Just get it done, son.”

  Buckley dropped the man’s chin and it wobbled down to his chest as if the only thing connecting it to the rest of his body was a length of string. Buckley pulled his knife out and howled like a coyote directly into his brother Halford’s face. Halford was over this scene, too. He’d begun to look bored and was feeling the cold. The heat in his blood had been released, and he was ready to let the festivities come to a close. Now, he just wanted to get warm by the fire.

  Gareth was pretty sure Tooley, the hamburger man, was already dead when Buckley went to carving on him, but there was no point in trying to stop him. He hated to admit it, but he knew his middle son was a goner. The way he jittered and bounced around like an idiot. Not just in the middle of a killing like this one, but all the time. Around the supper table, or trout fishing off the creek bank, those jaws never stopped jacking. It seemed like he never slept and he never ate. He just talked, and talked, most times about nothing, or about shit that made not a lick of sense. There was never any point in trying to answer or talk back, because his crank-riddled brain had already moved on to the next irrational thought. He was a full-blown junkie and everyone on the mountain knew it. Gareth knew it. He’d failed the boy. And now he had allowed that shit pumping through his son’s veins to be manufactured in his own backyard, not twenty feet from the rusty swing-set Gareth used to push him on when he was a boy. Now the old man could add shame to the long list of crimes he’d perpetrated against himself.

  “Cut him down, Buckley.”

  “But Deddy…”

  Gareth didn’t repeat himself. He stared at Tooley’s lifeless sack of broken bones and thought about the last son of a bitch they’d strung up to that pole. Gareth had been in Covington for a while dealing with some other business, and Buckley had left a man to hang there as a warning to anyone else that might’ve thought about stepping up. That damn thing stank like hell when Gareth got home, even after the crows had picked it clean. Those hoisted bones hung up there so long they dried into wind chimes.

  Gareth came back to the moment and gave a hard impatient stare to Halford.

  “Hal, I want you to put two holes in this,” he motioned toward the hanging dead man. “And then get rid of it. Somewhere up the ridge. Somewhere it won’t turn up. You know where I mean?”

  “Yeah, Deddy, I know where you mean.”

  “Not just a dump, either. I want him in the dirt.”

  “All right, Deddy.” Halford cupped a lighter and lit a smoke. He looked just like his long-gone mama. He was olive skinned with dark wavy hair that started low on his forehead. Gareth could never look at him for that long without thinking on her. It had been that way ever since Halford was a boy. He tried sometimes to force himself to stare at his son and see the man he was and not the woman who birthed him, who left them, but he couldn’t, and he hated her for that.

  “Buckley, you help him, and then the two of y’all get back here and clean yourselves up. I got a roast and taters inside, been cooking going on six hours. By the time y’all finish I’ll have the table set.”

  “Hell, Deddy. I ain’t hungry.”

  “Well, that don’t surprise me none, Buck, but you’re gonna eat anyway. Don’t worry. I simmered the butt extra tender on account of that shit that’s rottin’ your teeth out.”

  He waited for an argument from the boy but didn’t get one. Buckley just flashed a big brown and yellow toothy smile, as if to rub Gareth’s nose it.

  Goddamn kids would rebel against oxygen if their parents told them they had to breathe.

  “Now get a few shovels out the barn for you and your brother and get it done.”

  Now came the argument. “How the hell are we gonna dig a hole in the tundra out there, Deddy? The ground is frozen solid. We ain’t got no fuckin’ icepicks.”

  Gareth took a step toward Buckley. The paper-thin red head went to scratching at his arms, leaving pink tracks on his pale skin, but he was standing his ground, a Burroughs through and through. Gareth took another step, and this time Buckley caught the look on his father’s tired face. A beat-down normally followed that look, so this time the boy moved a step back.

  Gareth spoke slowly and paused briefly between each word. “Get this body gone, and then get home.”

  “Yessir.” Buckley said. He might’ve liked to press his father’s buttons, but he still feared him and he was right to.

  “Hal?”

  “Yessir?”

  “When you’re done, I want you to have one of our boys down in Waymore check on your brother.”

  “Clayton?” Halford looked mildly surprised. He rarely looked anything, much less surprised.

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “But, Deddy--”

  “Halford, I don’t need any lip outta you, too. He’s your baby brother, and despite what he is, or what he’s done, this storm is bad, and I want to make sure he hasn’t wrapped that dumb-shit sheriff’s car around a tree somewhere. I want to know he’s safe.”

  “It’d serve him right,” Buckley said.

  Gareth ignored Buckley and narrowed his eyes at his oldest son, Hal. He pointed toward the hamburger man. “Do what I ask with that, before I beat that fidgety idiot to death and you have to do it by yourself.”

  “Okay, Deddy.”

  Halford tossed his smoke, and took a small pistol out of his coat. He fired two shots—the head and the heart—insurance shots. He used the palm of his free hand to block the spatter of blood, but it speckled his face and beard anyway. Buckley jumped at the shots, but more from delight then surprise. He howled again and scratched at his neck like a dog would fleas. Hal shook his head.

  How was it that he always got straddled with all the responsibility, while his two brothers, the junkie and the cop, got to do whatever the hell they pleased?

  He tucked his gun back into his coat, and then used a folding pocketknife to cut loose the duct tape. The body slid down the pole and toppled over onto its side. Buckley just stared at it—mesmerized.

  “Git!” Hal barked at his brother. Buckley jumped again, and then bounded toward the barn. He returned almost immediately with two spade shovels and a thick plastic tarp. He tossed the shovels into the back of Halford’s pick-up and spread the tarp on the ground. “Well c’mon then, big brother.”

  Halford eyeballed his younger brother and curled a shivering hand into a fist, but after a curt glance from his father, he just wiped the blood from his beard and grabbed the dead man’s feet. Together they rolled the hamburger man into the six by twelve navy blue tarp. They bought the reinforced sheets of plastic in bulk from Dollar General, and were as precise about their use of them as soldiers were at folding a flag. Neither brother spoke as they flipped the body in unison and heaved it into the truck bed. There was no need to talk. They’d done this a few times before.

  Buckley slipped into the cab of the truck and Halford caught his Deddy’s eyes for a second time. There was no way either of them could know this would be the last time they’d see each other, but if they had, the hard look of expectation and the weight of the world that hung on both men’s bearded faces, wouldn’t likely have been any different.

  No different at all.

  Gareth left his sons to clean up the mess that used to be Tooley Jordan
and crossed the yard to what was left of the fire in the burn barrel. He tossed in a stack of newspapers to kick up the flames and watched an advertisement for State Farm Insurance slowly blacken and burn to ash. He warmed his arms and tried to get the feeling in his fingers back. The wind was biting into his cheeks as the temperature dropped another ten degrees. He was being hard on Hal by sending him out in this shit, but hard lessons were the only lessons worth learning. Still, he hoped they made it back before the rain. He pulled a wad of tobacco from his cheek, tossed it in the barrel, and set a fresh plug. The embers from the burned out hardwood branches and blacked beer cans twirled about him like lightning bugs and occasionally stung his face and chest. He rubbed at the scar on his chest that ran through the tattoo of his wife’s name. Memories of Annette, their life together, and the night he carved her name off his chest like some kind of cancer, passed through him like a school of ghosts, each of them leaving a chill in his bones. As Halford’s taillights disappeared down the ridge, Gareth walked around to the front of the barn to fetch a jar of hooch. That was Gareth’s typical remedy for dealing with ghosts. He fumbled around in his pocket for his key to the chain barring the door, but the chain was already loose, hanging from the door’s handle and the padlock lay there in the dirt. He sighed, picking up the lock, and hanging it back on the chain. “Damn you, Annette, if you would’ve been here to help out, maybe Buckley wouldn’t be the fuckup he is.” Gareth had started talking to Annette out loud like that about a year ago. Usually it was to blame her for something, but the truth was it made him feel less alone.

  Gareth’s grandfather had used this barn to store crates of corn whiskey during prohibition. His father had been using it as a dry house for weed for over forty years before Gareth built the dry-houses they were using now. He doubted either of the old-timers would recognize the old barn now. Gareth reached into the dark and put his hand exactly where the light switch had been for forty years, but felt the new modern fixture. He clicked it on. Lengths of pale blue electric bulbs popped on one row at a time, flooding the barn with the wrong kind of light. It wasn’t the warm yellow light from oil lamps or general store light bulbs. It was sickly blue hospital light that made everything in the building even more alien to him. New stainless steel tables, plastic jugs, military grade jerry cans full of shit Gareth knew nothing about were packed into every corner. Strange glass and metal contraptions covered the tables and reminded him of old black and white science fiction movies. He wasn’t a fan of that stuff either. He was feeling like his father again—older, dumber, outdated. Florida was sending a cook up here in the next few days to get them schooled on this new poison, but Gareth wasn’t interested. This was the boys’ deal. If this was what they wanted then they could do the learning that came with it. Buckley had done enough learning for everyone. He should be a lesson for them all. Gareth had done his share of killing on the mountain but had never felt like he was in the killing business until now. This barn was going to be a death factory.