“I’d say.” Charlie finished his beer. “You know, it feels kind of odd seeing you back here like this. Not many of the young ones come back anymore.”
“I don’t suppose they do, Mr. Simpson.”
Reed thought back to the day he left, his father screaming and cursing him, looking swollen like a great beast in his rage, throwing rocks, bottles, anything he could get his hands on, even Indian relics from his collection—his most prized possession, maybe the only thing he prized in his entire life.
Reed remembered thinking his father had finally snapped, finally gone over, and that any second he’d be going into the house and getting his gun and killing his own son then and there.
Reed had never come back that night; he was on the train to Four Corners within hours.
Two months later the coal waste dam up above the valley had given way, sending tons of the gunk down the Simpson Creeks, and wiping out half his neighbors and all traces of his family.
The Pierce place was pretty much as he’d remembered it, although a bit worse for wear. Ben explained in the truck on the way over that hard times had finally come to the Pierce children. The insurance hadn’t covered Hector’s hospital bills, and as the fortunes of the Nole mine went down, so did Inez’s boarding house. Now there were only a handful of miners staying at her place, and she just didn’t have the money to do her annual spring repairs. The old house badly needed new paint, and work on the plumbing, the gutters, the roof, the electrical system, the foundation stones, most everything. Both Ben and Charlie had offered their free labor and some materials, but Inez had been too proud, assuring them that everything was “just fine at the Pierces’.”
It was the only house with gables and a full wraparound porch in the town, and Reed still loved the looks of it. Daddy Pierce had built it after the Civil War, putting in twelve bedrooms since all the Pierce relations were living together at the time. Reed had seen pictures of old man Pierce—a tall, ugly gentleman with the largest wart he had ever seen planted on one side of the distinguished, hawk-bill nose. At one time every room but one was occupied by a miner or someone who worked for the Nole Company, with one bedroom kept pretty much free for salesmen and other transients. Inez had had to live in a converted pantry at times, the place was so full. She would serve three meals a day for everyone, doing everything by herself, included in the price of the room. It had been said that she was the finest cook for counties around and that some local men used to rent the transient room for a night or two just to escape their wives and get a taste of Inez’s home cooking. This actually clouded her reputation for a time—some of these wives started talking about how “improper” such arrangements were. Until Inez visited each woman individually and put them straight.
Now there was just old lady Inez, a few coal miners—including Joe Manors—who were more or less permanent residents, and the old transient’s room still available for the occasional stranger. Strangers like myself, Reed thought.
One other person lived in the house, on the top floor, Reed discovered. Inez Pierce’s brother—Hector. Inez had been overly solicitous when Ben brought Reed in, wanting to make sure everything was just right with his room, wanting to know his favorite foods so that she might work them into the menu. She showed him the transient room with great pride, and brought up clean linen and towels right away. Like he was an important guest. A stranger.
That night, on the way back from his bath, Reed passed a half-open door, and smelled lilac scent over something stale. Peering around the door frame, he could see the old man tossing in bed, his splotched arm out of the covers, pulling on the sheet, then stroking the smooth walnut headboard, pulling the sheet, then making a wrinkled fist over one eye.
A hoarse voice out of the sheets, “The cab here yet? You take that box of cookies…I’ll take the others. You’re that Mullins boy, aren’t you? The one rode away in the Packard. My credit’s good…my son will pay you soon’s you get me to his place in that yellow cab. You got any cookies?”
“No, I…”
“You got any cookies for the little crippled kids? They sure do like ‘em! I got some for them. I know. I can tell by your voice you’re that Mullins boy. The one with the Packard. I don’t see the cookie box. Mommy downstairs? Ya…ya. Daddy in the mine this mornin’…Lord, he a good man. You…like ta sell that Packard maybe?”
The old man turned over to face the door, and the sheets and quilt cascaded off the side of his bed. He wore bright pink pajamas with white socks like bags over his feet, rolled around the ankles. Reed realized with a shock that both ankles were tied to the bed frame with heavy rope.
Hector Pierce stretched one arm toward Reed, stiff, bent fingers wavering, forearm shaking his sleeve like a banner. Reed walked over and lifted the covers back onto the bed. He looked into the old man’s eyes; he appeared blind, maybe half-conscious as well. His head was thrown back against the pillow, three ridges of skin stretched tightly from chin to collarbone. With his slash mouth, uncontrolled tongue leaving spittle at the corners, dry, flaked skin, he looked like a lizard suddenly discovered under a sun-warmed rock.
Although slightly squeamish about it, Reed found himself tucking the old man into bed, straightening the covers. “Bear! Terrible eyes!” the old man suddenly cried out, then “Her hair’s on fire!” He clutched the sleeve of Reed’s shirt tightly, twisting it with the arthritic fingers until Reed thought it was going to tear, and this filled Reed with a strange panic. “You…” the old man whispered hoarsely, the fear drawing dark lines down his face. “Part of you stayed behind…with teeth!”
Reed pulled himself away and backed out of the room, away from the old man’s trembling, pointing finger.
A short man clutching a bottle stood out in the hall. Reed figured him to be Joe Manors, the miner Inez said had the room next to his. The man’s breath made Reed pull back; he’d had a sizable amount to drink. Flipping his hand at the old man’s room, he muttered, “Ask you if the cab was here? Inez’s older brother…been crazy ever since he got caught in a cave-in up at the mine. Now tonight he was up on Big Andy stark naked. Crazy old man! Been waitin’ for a cab hours now. Hell, ain’t no taxi cabs in Simpson Creeks nohow.”
Chapter 13
Reed sat out on Inez Pierce’s porch long after everyone else was in bed. Whether he was afraid of dreaming his first night home, or if he was just so anxious to start out for the old homesite in the morning, he didn’t know, but he couldn’t sleep. Big Andy Mountain stretched out just beyond the house, a pitch-black body with a shallow fringe of pine illuminated by the moon on one bare slope. There were darker bands of pine farther up, then they thinned out again approaching Big Andy’s near-bald pate.
Much of the mountain must have been stripped away; he remembered there being more. When? He couldn’t remember when, sometime when he was a child, and the mountain in those days had looked like a giant wooly worm.
Two small suns lit up clearings on opposite sides of the range. The coke ovens at Dante and Trashtown: he’d grown up with their twin glows. One could be seen from his room’s window, the other from momma’s kitchen window. But which was which on this night, over a decade later? He couldn’t tell; the steady progression of the stripping and the flood had changed the mountain completely, until it was hardly Big Andy anymore.
Like his Uncle Ben had said in the truck tonight, “Mountain like that can’t have a name no more.”
A dark shadow approached the porch from the side yard. Lumbering. Brushing against one of Inez’s immense lilac bushes. Reed started from his chair, ready to cry out or run. Would the bear have come this close to town? Jake Parkey staggered into the light cast from the porch lamp.
The drunken man weaved about on his feet, then climbed the porch steps rapidly, sliding into the chair next to Reed’s. He held out his bottle. “Drink?”
“No…thanks.”
“Suit y’self…” Jake took a long pull from the bottle, then threw it over the porch railing into one of the lilac bush
es. Then he turned on Reed, swiftly and off-balance, almost toppling from his chair. “Why you back here!” He gestured in a sweeping motion with one finger.
“I was born here.” Reed leaned back into his chair.
Jake looked at him with a puzzled expression, then frowned. “Friend o’ mine died ‘night. Mister Amos Nickles. Real good friend o’ mine.”
“I know. I was really sorry to hear.”
“Got et by a bear, crazy bear.”
Reed watched him carefully, wanting to leave, to go to bed.
“I knowed about your family!” Jake said suddenly.
“Yes?”
“The way they drowned up that holler…” Then he fell silent.
Reed thought about digging into the family land the next day and felt a little foolish. Who knew how much red clay had baked over the ruins in ten hot summers, how many feet he’d have to remove to get to any of his family’s things, or how far downslope the water might have spread the debris? What had Uncle Ben told him about the flood waters down that section of the hollow? He couldn’t remember if it had been better or worse there than in the rest of the valley.
Then Jake began his story, in that breathless, whiskey-sour voice of his. Reed tried not to listen, tried to leave, tried to shut the drunk up, but nothing would stop this last torrent of old family news.
“Swear boy, water twenty feet high…took out four bridges up above Carter, ‘fore it even got started, hell, cows and trees, four-foot rocks, houses—rollin’ over each other. People too…men, women…couldn’t tell no difference even with their clothes…ripped off…they was so tore up, worn out like creek stones…horses with their guts hanging, stuck on broken trees. Clothes. Swoll up dogs. Saw three houses, explode against that…state bridge ‘fore ya get to Two Forks. That coal waste dam, what it was. The company just kept dumpin’, an’ dumpin’ there. Couldn’t hold, after a rain. Hundred people, boy. Kilt and mangled. Company man say, it were an act of God. Didn’t see God…behind the wheel…them coal company dozers. Boy, ya hearin’ me? Saw yore daddy’s hand, yer momma’s dress, miles down, from home. Never did find…yer baby sister. Boy? Just to get a little strip of coal… hear that?”
Of course, he didn’t believe the bizarre detail concerning his father’s hand, which made some of the other details of Jake’s story suspect as well, but the audacity of the lie was almost exciting. He’d heard that Jake didn’t have much sense, and he supposed this proved it. But lots of people around the Big Andy had always seemed to possess this heightened sense of the grotesque, including the members of his own family.
Once his father had described to him in detail how a friend of his had died with rabies when his father was just a boy. And there were stories his grandfather used to like to help the old doctor with some of his operations, would even make rounds with him.
Jake fell asleep in the chair. Reed didn’t disturb him, just watched the mountain. Finally Jake woke up and stared at Reed several minutes before rising and stumbling off the porch.
Reed found himself reconsidering the job he had set up for himself for the next day. Chances were he wouldn’t find anything; the flood would have scattered his family’s possessions far and wide. Or what he did find…he might just as well not know about.
It seemed slightly ironic that while his father had prepared him for very little in life, had given him almost nothing, he had at least prepared him well for the task of excavating the old homesite. When his father had reached his sixties and the company forced him to retire from the mines, he started collecting odd rocks and Civil War and Indian relics. As he read more books on the subject, he started taking long trips down to the universities in Louisville and Knoxville, carting boxloads of his findings to various professors, learning more, collecting, and then reading more. He’d always been a large, pale man, and stoop-shouldered from a lifetime down in the mines. But the older Daddy Taylor was straight-backed and sunburnt. And the fierce, coal black eyes had taken on a thoughtful aspect. It was difficult sometimes connecting the two: the thoughtful amateur archaeologist with the hard-drinking, swearing, brutish bear of a man Reed had grown up with.
Reed had always tried to believe that he and his father had nothing in common. But over the years various traits—little habits, the way Reed told a story, or talked “around” awkward subjects, or prowled his room with nervous energy, too nervous, almost, to let his feet fall—had made it all too clear that just wasn’t true. In many ways he was very much his father’s son. So it was no surprise, really, when he took up archaeology in college. Dr. Simms and his father, they’d both helped foster that obsession in him.
All that death and destruction just to get a little strip of coal. Seems his father had said that once; now Jake Parkey was echoing him. Reed shared, he suddenly realized, his father’s interest in bitterness as well.
Funny how his cold seemed so much better now. Maybe he was already getting used to being home.
Before Reed went to bed he walked out into the front yard to get a better look at the stars. A shadow crossed his. He turned. Miss Pierce’s brother was standing up in the window, looking down at him, mouthing words silently against the glass like some pale fish in an aquarium.
But Hector Pierce was tied to his bed. Reed strained his eyes. The figure seemed shorter than Hector Pierce. Dark hair. Slight build.
He couldn’t make out the face. He couldn’t tell who it was.
Chapter 14
The bear stopped at the edge of the woods, gazing down at the town below, the place where it had killed the dog only a few yards away. There were lights there, and human beings, and although it had a strange need to go into this lighted place, to be with these human beings, it did not. It would not go near.
It could not understand or relate to anything in its bear experience what had happened with the men and dogs that night. It had recognized those human beings, although it had never been to this place before. It had recognized them, seen them inside itself, and this had enraged it.
But it would not have eaten and torn so, except that there was something else inside it that was also angered…something that did not belong inside it but was inside it and was angered. Had hated.
So the bear had torn and killed in its angers and irritations. It could not even remember everything it did that night.
It was very frightened.
It somehow knew that these things happening inside it were not over. This thing inside it was very angry. This made the bear agitated, and angry too.
The lights had gone out; the human beings were leaving. A man it had seen inside itself before was the last to leave.
The thing that did not belong inside it was angered as the man left. It wanted the bear to leap, to rip, to kill. But the bear snarled the thing inside away. It kept the thing from making it charge. The bear knew it would not be able to stop this thing very often, but now this thing inside it was very tired.
The bear was tired too.
The bear turned slowly and lumbered back into the dark wood.
Charlie Simpson installed a dead bolt lock on the store’s front door that evening after everyone had left, the strongest one he carried. He felt a little foolish about it; no one had ever broken into the store and it didn’t seem likely that anyone ever would. But strange things were happening, and it just made him feel a little more secure to have the extra lock on. He wondered foolishly if the lock might discourage a bear that size.
He was pretty drunk when he started the job, so it took a while to make the lock secure. When he opened the door to leave, he hesitated before the darkness, then went back to pick up the loaded shotgun he kept under his counter. Again, it seemed a silly thing to be doing, but he had an idea his usual habits had been changed permanently and irrevocably. He’d had to help carry Amos Nickles’s body into the abandoned depot—he hoped the coroner got there before too late tomorrow afternoon—and the feel of the man’s body, emptied of half its capacity of viscera and blood, would stay with him for a long ti
me. No one should die like that.
He sat awhile after climbing into his truck. The woods seemed closer tonight, the sky a little lower. He gazed at the mountain. Incredibly, someone’s campfire seemed to be burning there. But no…he could see the light was moving down the mountain. Someone carrying a lantern. But it was moving so swiftly, as if someone were running down the mountain.
Damn. He must have been half-crazy with exhaustion up there, scared out of his wits, seeing what he did. All that burning hair. Hector Pierce’s story must have been on his mind. But he’d never hallucinated before. Damn strange thing.
He wished Buck were here. Lord, how he wished it. He’d take him home with him, keep him in the house so nothing could get at him. And Charlie wouldn’t have to be alone tonight. Oh, why didn’t he take better care? Lord, Lord, Lord…
He stopped himself. Shivering. Then he started the engine.
Doris Parkey sat in her living room by the window, gazing out at the darkened street. Headlights came up suddenly, then Charlie Simpson’s truck came roaring past the window, spitting gravel everywhere, then it was gone and the street was pitch-black again. They should get streetlights, they really should. The merchants should pay for them; they would be benefiting from them. A body wasn’t safe out in those dark streets, what with everything that had been happening.
Amos Nickles dead. She had seen the body when they brought it back and it like to drove her crazy…she’d never seen the like. Things were turning dark in Simpson Creeks; she wondered sometimes if maybe the apocalypse was coming, the final times, when the dead would be walking the earth.
The dead walking the earth…yeah…that’s what it felt like. That bear like some monster…weren’t no ordinary beast. Jake himself could see that. Told her all about how it had looked, almost a man’s eyes, the vengeful way it attacked them…
They ought to go drive a stake through Amos Nickles’s heart, that’s what they ought to do. No telling when he might get up and start walking.
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