by Ron Rash
“That’s Leonard?”
“Yeah,” Shank said. “The one and only.”
“He don’t look like much.”
“Well, he’ll fool you that way. There’s a lot more to him than you’d think. Like I said, you ought to see that son-of-a-bitch shoot a gun. He shot both that yankee’s shoulders in the exact same place. They say you could of put a level on those two holes and the bubble would of stayed plumb.”
“That sounds like a crock of shit to me,” Travis said. He lit a cigarette, felt the warm smoke fill his lungs. Smoking cigarettes was the one thing his old man didn’t nag him about. Afraid it would cut into his sales profits, Travis figured.
“If you’d seen him shooting at the fair last year you’d not think so,” Shank said.
Leonard walked over to Travis’s window, but he spoke to Shank.
“Who’s this you got with you?”
“Travis Shelton.”
“Shelton,” Leonard said, pronouncing the name slowly as he looked at Travis. “You from the Laurel?”
Leonard’s eyes were a deep gray, the same color as the birds old folks called mountain witch doves. Travis had once heard the best marksmen most always had gray eyes and wondered why that might be so.
“No,” Travis said. “But my daddy grew up there.”
Leonard nodded in a manner that seemed to say he’d figured as much. He stared at Travis a few moments before speaking, as though he’d seen Travis before and was trying to haul up in his mind exactly where.
“You vouch for this guy?” Leonard asked Shank.
“Hell, yeah,” Shank said. “Me and Travis been best buddies since first grade.”
Leonard stepped back from the car.
“I got beer and pills but just a few nickel bags if you’ve come for pot,” Leonard said. “Supplies are low until people start to harvest.”
“Well, we come at a good time then.” Shank turned to Travis. “Let’s show Leonard what you brought him.”
Travis and Shank got out. Travis pulled back the branches and feed sacks.
“Where’d you get that?” Leonard asked.
“Found it,” Travis said.
“Found it, did you. And you figured finders keepers.”
“Yeah,” said Travis.
“Looks like you dragged it through every briar patch and laurel slick between here and the county line,” Leonard said.
“There’s plenty of buds left,” Shank said, lifting one of the stalks so Leonard could see it better.
“What you give me for it?” Travis asked.
Leonard lifted a stalk himself, rubbed the leaves the same way Travis had seen tobacco buyers do before the market’s opening bell rang.
“Fifty dollars.”
“You’re trying to cheat me,” Travis said. “I’ll find somebody else to buy it.”
As soon as he spoke he wished he hadn’t. Travis was about to say that he reckoned fifty dollars would be fine but Leonard spoke first.
“I’ll give you sixty dollars, and I’ll give you even more if you bring me some that doesn’t look like it’s been run through a hay bine.”
“OK,” Travis said, surprised at Leonard but more surprised at himself, how tough he’d sounded. He tried not to smile as he thought of telling guys back in Marshall that he’d called Leonard Shuler a cheater to his face and Leonard hadn’t done a damn thing about it but offer more money.
Leonard pulled a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off three twenties, and handed them to Travis.
“I was figuring you might add a couple of beers, maybe some quaaludes or a joint,” Shank said.
Leonard nodded toward the meadow’s far corner.
“Put them over there in those tall weeds next to my tomatoes. Then come inside if you’ve got a notion to.”
Travis and Shank lifted the plants from the truck bed and laid them where Leonard said. As they approached the door Travis watched where the Plotts had vanished under the trailer. He didn’t lift his eyes until he reached the steps. Inside, it took Travis’s vision a few moments to adjust, because the only light came from a TV screen. Strings of unlit Christmas lights ran across the walls and over door eaves like bad wiring. A dusty couch slouched against the back wall. In the corner Leonard sat in a fake-leather recliner patched with black electrician’s tape. A stereo system filled a cabinet and the music coming from the speakers didn’t have guitars or words. Beside it stood two shoddily built bookshelves teetering with albums and books. What held Travis’s attention lay on a cherrywood gun rack above the couch.
Travis had seen a Model 70 Winchester only in catalogs. The checkering was done by hand, the walnut so polished and smooth it seemed to Travis he looked deep into the wood, almost through the wood, as he might look through a jar filled with sourwood honey. Shank saw him staring at the rifle and grinned.
“That’s nothing like the peashooter you got, is it?” Shank said. “That’s a real rifle, a Winchester Seventy.”
Shank turned to Leonard.
“Let him have a look at that pistol.”
Shank nodded at a small table next to Leonard’s chair. Behind the lamp Travis saw the tip of a barrel.
“Let him hold that sweetheart in his hand,” Shank said.
“I don’t think so,” Leonard said.
“Come on, Leonard. Just let him hold it. We’re not talking about shooting.”
Leonard looked put out with them both. He lifted the pistol from the table and emptied bullets from the cylinder into his palm, then handed it to Shank.
Shank held the pistol a few moments and passed it to Travis. Travis knew the gun was composed of springs and screws and sheet metal, but it felt more solid than that, as if smithed from a single piece of case-hardened steel. The white grips had a rich blueing to them that looked, like the Winchester’s stock, almost liquid. The Colt of the company’s name was etched on the receiver.
“It’s a forty-five,” Shank said. “There’s no better pistol a man can buy, is there Leonard?”
“Show-and-tell is over for today,” Leonard said, and held his hand out for the pistol. He took the weapon and placed it back behind the lamp. Travis stepped closer to the gun rack, his eyes not on the Winchester but what lay beneath it, a long-handled piece of metal with a dinner-plate-sized disk on one end.
“What’s that thing?” Travis asked.
“A metal detector,” Leonard said.
“You looking for buried treasure?”
“No,” Leonard said. “A guy wanted some dope and came up a few bucks short. It was collateral.”
“What do you do with it?”
“He used it to hunt Civil War relics.”
Travis looked more closely at the machine. He thought it might be fun to try, kind of like fishing in the ground instead of water.
“You use it much?”
“I’ve found some dimes and quarters on the riverbank.”
Leonard sat back down in the recliner. He nodded at the couch. “You can stand there like fence posts if you like, but if not that couch ought to hold both of you.”
A woman came from the back room and stood in the foyer between the living room and kitchen. She wore cut-off jeans and a halter top, her legs and arms thin but cantaloupe-sized bulges beneath the halter. Her hair was blond but Travis could see the dark roots. She was sunburned and splotches of pink underskin made her look wormy and mangy. Like some stray dog around a garbage dump, Travis thought. Except for her face. Hard-looking, as if the sun had dried up any softness there once was, but pretty—high cheekbones and full lips, dark-brown eyes. If she wasn’t all scabbed up she’d be near beautiful, Travis figured.
“How about getting Shank and his buddy here a couple of beers, Dena,” Leonard said.
“Get them your ownself,” the woman said. She took a Coke from the refrigerator and disappeared again into the back room.
Leonard shook his head but said nothing as he got up. He brought back two cans of Budweiser and a sandwich bag filled with pot
and rolling papers. He handed the beers to Travis and Shank and sat down in the chair. Travis was thirsty and drank quickly as he watched Leonard carefully shake pot out of the baggie and onto the paper. Leonard licked the paper and twisted both ends.
“Here,” he said, and handed the marijuana to Shank.
Shank lit the joint, the orange tip brightening as he inhaled. Shank offered the joint back but Leonard declined.
“All these times I’ve been out here I never seen you mellow out and take a toke,” Shank said. “Why is that?”
“I’m not a very mellow guy.” Leonard nodded at Travis. “Looks like your buddy isn’t either.”
“He’s just scared his daddy would find out.”
“That ain’t so,” Travis said. “I just like a beer buzz better.”
He lifted the beer to his lips and drank until the can was empty, then squeezed the can’s middle. The cool metal popped and creaked as it folded inward.
“I’d like me another one.”
“Quite the drinker, aren’t you,” Leonard said. “Just make sure you don’t overdo it. I don’t want you passed out and pissing my couch.”
Travis stood and for a moment felt off plumb, maybe because he’d drunk the beer so fast. When the world steadied he got the beer from the refrigerator and sat back down. He looked at the TV, some kind of Western, but without the sound he couldn’t tell what was happening. He drank the second beer quick as the first.
Shank had his eyes closed.
“Man, I’m feeling so good,” Shank said. “If we had us some real music on that stereo things would be perfect.”
“Real music,” Leonard said, and smiled, but Travis knew he was only smiling to himself.
Travis studied the man who sat in the recliner, trying to figure out what it was that made Leonard Shuler a man you didn’t want to mess with. Leonard looked soft, Travis thought, pale and soft like bread dough. Just because a man had a couple of bear dogs and a hotshot pistol didn’t make him such a badass. He thought about his own daddy and Carlton Toomey, big men who didn’t need to talk loud because they could clear out a room with just a hard look. Travis wondered if anyone would ever call him a badass and wished again that he didn’t take after his mother, so thin-boned.
“So what is this shit you’re listening to, Leonard?” Shank asked.
“It’s called Appalachian Spring. It’s by Copland.”
“Never heard of them,” Shank said.
Leonard looked amused.
“Are you sure? They used to be the warm-up act for Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
“Well, it still sucks,” Shank said.
“That’s probably because you fail to empathize with his view of the region,” Leonard said.
“Empa what?” Shank said.
“Empathize,” Leonard said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shank said. “All I know is I’d rather tie a bunch of cats together by their tails and hear them squall.”
Travis knew Leonard was putting down not just Shank but him also, talking over him like he was stupid. It made Travis think of his teachers at the high school, teachers who used sentences with big words against him when he gave them trouble, trying to tangle him up in a laurel slick of language. Figuring he hadn’t read nothing but what they made him read, never used a dictionary to look up a word he didn’t know.
Travis got up and made his way to the refrigerator, damned if he was going to ask permission. He pulled the metal tab off the beer but didn’t go back to the couch. He went down the hallway to find the bathroom.
He almost had to walk slantways because of the makeshift shelves lining the narrow hallway. They were tall as Travis and each shelf sagged under the weight of books of various sizes and shapes, more books than Travis had seen anywhere outside a library. There was a bookshelf in the bathroom as well. He read the titles as he pissed, all unfamiliar to him. But some looked interesting. When he stepped back into the hallway, he saw the bedroom door was open. The woman sat up in the bed reading a magazine. Travis walked into the room.
The woman laid down the magazine.
“What the hell do you want?”
Travis grinned.
“What you offering?”
Even buzzed on beer he knew it was a stupid thing to say. Ever since he’d got to Leonard’s his mouth had been like a faucet he couldn’t shut off.
The woman’s brown eyes stared at him like he was nothing more than a sack of manure somebody had dumped on the floor.
“I ain’t offering you anything,” she said. “Even if I was, a little peckerhead like you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
The woman looked toward the open door.
“Leonard,” she shouted.
Leonard appeared at the doorway.
“It’s past time to get your Cub Scout meeting over,” she said.
Leonard nodded at Travis.
“I believe you boys have overstayed your welcome.”
“I was getting ready to leave anyhow,” Travis said. He turned toward the door and the can slipped from his hand, spilling beer on the bed.
“Nothing but a little peckerhead,” the woman repeated.
In a few moments he and Shank were outside. The last rind of sun embered on Brushy Mountain. Cicadas had started their racket in the trees and lightning bugs rode an invisible current over the grass. Travis tried to catch one, but when he opened his hand it held nothing but air. He tried again and felt a soft tickling in his palm.
“You get more plants, come again,” Leonard said from the steps.
“I was hoping you’d show us some of that fancy shooting of yours,” Shank said.
“Not this evening,” Leonard said.
Travis loosened his fingers. The lightning bug seemed not so much to fly as float out of his hand. In a few moments it was one tiny flicker among many, like a star returned to its constellation.
“Good night,” Leonard said, turning to go back inside the trailer.
“Empathy means you can feel what other people are feeling,” Travis said.
Leonard’s hand was on the door handle but he paused and looked at Travis. He nodded and went inside.
“Boy, you’re in high cotton now,” Shank said as they drove toward Marshall. “Sixty damn dollars. That’ll pay your truck insurance for two months.”
“I figured to give you ten,” Travis said, “for hooking me up with Leonard.”
“No, I got a good buzz. That’s payment enough.”
Travis drifted onto the shoulder and for a moment one tire was on asphalt and the other on dirt and grass. He swerved back onto the road.
“You better let me drive,” Shank said. “I was hoping to stay out of the emergency room tonight.”
“I’m all right,” Travis said, but he slowed down, thinking about what the old man would do if he wrecked or got stopped for drunk driving. Better off if I got killed outright, he figured.
“Are you going to get some more plants?” Shank asked.
“I expect I will.”
“Well, if you do, be careful. Whoever planted it’s not likely to appreciate you thinning their crop out for them.”
TRAVIS WENT BACK THE NEXT SATURDAY, TWO FLAT-WOVEN cabbage sacks stuffed into his belt. After he’d been fired from the Pay-Lo, he’d about given up on paying the insurance on his truck, but now things had changed. He had what was pretty damn near a money tree and all he had to do was get its leaves to Leonard Shuler. An honest-to-god money tree if there was ever such a thing, he kept thinking to himself when he got a little scared.
He climbed the waterfall, the trip up easier without a rod and reel. Once he passed the NO TRESPASSING sign, he moved slower, quieter. From the far bank’s underbrush a warbler sang a refrain of three slow notes and three quick ones, the song echoing into the scattering of tamarack trees rising there. Travis’s mother had once told him the bird was saying pleased pleased pleased to meetcha.
Soon cinnamon ferns brushed like huge green feathers against his
legs, thick enough to hide a copperhead or satinback. But he kept his eyes raised, watching upstream for the glimpse of a shirt, a movement on a bank. I bet Carlton Toomey didn’t even plant it, Travis told himself, probably somebody who figured the Toomeys were too sorry to notice pot growing on their land.
When he came to where the plants were, he got on all fours and crawled up the bank, raising his head like a soldier in a trench. A Confederate flag brightened his tee-shirt, and he wished he’d had the good sense to wear something less visible. Might as well have a damn bull’s-eye on his chest. He scanned the tree line across the field and saw no one. Travis told himself even if someone hid in the tulip poplars they could never get to him before he was long gone down the creek.
Travis cut the stalks just below the last leaves. Six plants filled up the sacks. He thought about cutting more, taking what he had to the truck and coming back to get the rest, but figured that was too risky. On his return Travis didn’t see anyone on the river trail. If he had and they’d asked what was in the sacks, he’d have said galax.
When Travis pulled up to the trailer, Leonard was watering the tomatoes. He unlatched the tailgate and waited for Leonard to finish. Less than a mile away, the granite north face of Price Mountain jutted up beyond the pasture. Afternoon heat haze made the mountain appear to expand and contract as if breathing. God’s like these hills, Preacher Caldwell had said one Sunday, high enough up to see everything that goes on. It ain’t like stealing a cash crop like tobacco where a man’s shed some real sweat, Travis reminded himself, for marijuana was little more bother than a few seeds dropped in the ground. Taking the pot plants was just the same as picking up windfall apples—less so because those that grew it had broken the law themselves. That was the way to think about it, Travis decided.
“How come you grow your own tomatoes but not your own pot?” Travis asked when Leonard laid down his hose and came over.
