When These Mountains Burn
Page 6
“Just so we’re on the same page here, that’s the last of it.”
“The last of what?”
“The last of what little bit of money I had squirreled away.” Raymond unzipped the pocket on his bib and pulled out the crumpled pack of Backwoods cigars he kept stashed there. He tapped the pack against the inside of his leg repeatedly, taking time to weigh his words. “What I’m getting at is this is it. There’s no more saving you. I don’t have anything left to give.”
Ricky didn’t speak.
“I’ve thrown you ropes till my arms is give out, and I ain’t got no more to throw.”
What Ray said was true, but knowing that it was truth didn’t make saying it any easier. A mood came onto him then, or rather a combination of feelings that overwhelmed him. There was guilt and there was anger and there was sadness and there was shame and there was love and there was pride and there was hatred and there was all of it at once so that Raymond felt absolutely overcome right then and couldn’t stand the thought of sitting there another second. His hands shook and his heart raced and it felt as if there was so much friction inside of him that he might catch afire.
He stood and walked toward the door without so much as a glance at his son. He was almost to the threshold when Ricky spoke. The sound of his son’s voice caught him before the words registered. Deep down Ray already knew what the boy was going to say. He was going to offer a simple apology, because that’s how it always was, a bunch of sorry-ass I’m sorrys that never amounted to anything.
“What time did that doctor want me to take that other pill?”
Every muscle in Raymond’s body locked tight. All that was asked was a selfish question no different than any of the ones Ricky’d asked most his life. There was no want in the boy’s heart for forgiveness. No room in his mind for change.
TEN
Sometimes Raymond Mathis would wake up and Doris was still alive. When he was lucky, that believing might last a few minutes, but most the time he wasn’t and it only took a moment or two to remember. That next morning he knew his wife was dead just as soon as he opened his eyes.
First thing he saw was a stained-glass hummingbird in the bedroom window. The ornament had always been suspended above the kitchen sink, but one day toward the end, Doris asked for it out of the blue and Ray brought it to her. He drove a nail at the top of the window frame and there it hung, throwing light till her eyes clouded over one Tuesday and she was gone.
She’d always kept flowers and birdfeeders. One summer the rain got so bad she tied umbrellas onto tomato stakes to keep her dahlias from drowning. Ray came home from work and thought it looked like a circus had set up in front of the house—all those parasols open like mushrooms, all that color polka-dotting the patch grass yard.
When she got too sick to walk, he would carry her to the porch so she could watch chickadees and titmice fight over seed in the feeders. She’d close her eyes when the redbirds got to singing or when a hummingbird zipped through the porch. She also closed her eyes when he cut a few lilies and held them to her nose. Eventually she got too weak. It took too much out of her for him to pick her up and carry her, and maybe that was why she’d asked him to bring that piece of stained glass into the bedroom, something beautiful she didn’t have to move to see.
Three years had passed and the thought of taking that hummingbird back to the kitchen hadn’t even occurred to him. It was just one of those things like how her jewelry box still centered the dresser or how her clothes still filled the closets or how her rain boots sat outside by the rocking chairs with mud still caked to the soles. There were folks at church who’d told him he ought to start moving some of that stuff out of the house. They told him it would help and Ray nodded politely because he knew they meant it as a kindness. But deep down it took every fiber not to reach out and take them by their throats, not to scream as loud as he could, “Don’t tell me how to goddamn grieve.”
In his mind, three years was no different than a day. A man loses a woman like that, time just sort of surrenders itself to the before and after. What was no longer is and can’t be again. That’s how time works. A man gets trapped in the after. There was the life he had with her, and then there wasn’t. There comes a point in life when all there is is remembering. A life is nothing but the sum of its yesterdays. That’s the only truth Raymond Mathis knew anymore.
He rolled back the sheets and sat at the edge of the mattress, mashing the heels of his hands into the corners of his eyes. The T-shirt he wore the day before hung on the bedpost and he sniffed it before slipping it back on. His overalls lay at his feet and he stepped into them, then pulled the suspenders over each shoulder. Like clockwork, Tommy Two-Ton’s collar jangled in the other room and Ray heard the dog’s toenails ticking across the kitchen floor.
Ray walked barefoot out of the room and down the hall, fed the dog, and started a pot of coffee. He waited at the table while it brewed. He did this without a single thought crossing his mind because this was ritual. This was one of those moments in his day that allowed him to hold true north.
A hand-hewn wooden dough bowl centered the white oak table. There was a scrap of paper tucked under the far side of the bowl so as not to get lost. Before he left, Herschel wrote down the regimen to wean the boy off the dope because he knew Ray was bound to forget just like he knew pride would keep him from calling. The doctor’s cursive was stylized and clean, penmanship that seemed to belong more in a museum than where this world had spun. The coffeemaker percolated on the counter and Ray reached for the pills in the dough bowl where he’d left them. They were gone.
The first feeling that found him wasn’t anger at the boy, but rather contrition. How could he have been so dumb as to leave them out? It wasn’t like this was his first rodeo. This wasn’t some fool-me-once affair. Ricky had stolen every kind of pill the doctors gave Doris until finally she asked Ray to stop filling the scripts. She said she’d rather just suck it up than feed his habit, that one pain was easier than another.
Ray clenched his hands into fists, then spread his fingers across the tabletop. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on the way the wood felt cool against his palms. Ricky had barely been able to move, couldn’t even get to the bathroom on his own, so the thought that he could actually get up and walk into the kitchen hadn’t even crossed Ray’s mind. Cut yourself some slack, he thought.
Ray stomped toward the boy’s bedroom, his footsteps loud in the otherwise silent house. Halfway down the hall, he stopped in front of the bathroom door. Crack light made a rectangle around the edges of the door. The doorknob hadn’t worked in years and he pushed the base with his toes only to find the door latched from the inside. Pulling his Case knife from his pocket, Ray opened the clip blade of the jackknife, pressed the door in as far as it would go, and slid the blade up the crack until he felt the door hook lift free from its eye.
The room was tight, a half bath stretched to a full with the sink on the right, the toilet just past the sink, the tub on the left-hand side running the length of the room. White tile checkered the floor and climbed halfway up each wall before shifting to painted Sheetrock. The tub, toilet, and sink were all the same color, a squash-yellow porcelain that hadn’t been sold since the ’70s.
Ricky was seated on the floor in the space between the toilet and tub. His body was bent like a question mark balanced on its curve—legs pulled to a right angle, his spine an unnatural arc. He was naked except for a pair of plaid boxer shorts that rode high on his legs and cut against his hips like briefs. Midway up his left thigh a long pink scar widened into a darker depression that looked like a firework where doctors had first lanced and later cut out an abscess that had almost reached the bone. That was where Ricky first started shooting, into his leg, though now it was anywhere he could still find a vein. Everything in his arms had collapsed as if his own body had turned against him. Nowadays his only choices were his groin or his neck.
The hand he’d used to shoot had fallen palm open and up as if he was waiting on someone to hand him a set of keys or some spare change. Ricky’s head was turned. The needle was still in his neck, hanging at an awkward angle so that it twisted his skin. From where he stood, Raymond couldn’t make out any of the boy’s face and he was glad for that. He studied Ricky’s chest for movement, though deep down he knew there was no breath in him. Ricky’s side was painted purple, the bruise now yellowing along its edges.
For years, Ray had pictured this exact moment. He’d rolled it around in his mind too many times to count. Sometimes he dreamed about an image. Other times it would hit him out of the blue—while he was eating supper, while he was tying up tomato vines, once while he was sweeping Doris’s hair from the floor while she slept. He’d imagined it so many times that looking at the boy right then wasn’t even surprising.
Doris had always preferred the nights Ricky came home and the nights the sheriff called to say he was in jail and the nights she sat beside him in the hospital because those nights she didn’t have to imagine where he was. But for Raymond it’d always been the opposite. Knowing where the boy was meant the game wasn’t over, and if the game wasn’t over, he had to watch Ricky break his mother’s heart at least one more time. At least with death there was finality. The body had fight-or-flight, but the mind carried its own means of survival. As dark as it was, Ray had always imagined that his son was dead, that it was finally over. That had always been his way of coping.
Crossing the bathroom floor, Ray crouched in front of his son and brushed back a scythe of hair that had fallen across Ricky’s face. He rested the back of his hand on his son’s bruised cheek and something that soft nearly ripped Ray’s heart into pieces. He glanced at the crushed pills and spoon on the toilet lid, then turned to the needle in Ricky’s neck, the barrel flush against his collarbone. Despite the fact Raymond couldn’t hide what his son was, or the fact that every single person whose opinion mattered already knew, he couldn’t stand the thought of the law coming into his house and finding the place like this.
Ray reached out and pulled the needle from his son’s neck. A low groan grumbled out of the boy’s throat and Ray nearly leaped out of his skin. He patted Ricky’s cheek and the boy scrunched his face and pulled his hands up to his chest. All the blood in Ray’s body rose into his face. His arm shot forward and he squeezed the boy’s cheeks in his hand until Ricky’s lips puckered and his head rolled, his right eye groggily opening. Ray stood up and clenched a fistful of his son’s hair at the back of his skull like he was about to scalp him.
Ricky choked for breath as he was yanked to his feet and led out of the bathroom. They were barreling down the hall faster than his legs could move. His feet slipped and slid like he was walking on oil and just that fast he was through the front door and skipping across the dirt porch and floating through the air for one short-lived second, arms flailing until he crashed face-first onto hard-packed clay. The fall knocked the wind out of the boy, but there was no time for him to catch his breath. Ray was already on top of him. He straddled Ricky’s back and forced Ricky’s face into the brittle yellow grass, leaning in close until his lips were hot against his son’s ear.
“You can stand and walk or you can hold low to this ground and crawl your way out of here, but you’re going to leave right this minute or I swear to you I will take you from this world myself. Do you understand me?”
The boy wheezed and gasped but couldn’t speak.
Raymond gripped hard on the back of his son’s neck and shook him. “You need to tell me you understand.”
“It—” Ricky stuttered. “It hurts.”
“You don’t know what hurt is,” Ray growled. “Now, say it. Say that you understand what I’m telling you.”
“I understand.”
“What do you understand?” It was a moment that demanded clarity.
“That I can’t come back.”
“Ever,” Ray said.
“Ever,” his son repeated.
Ray pressed against the back of Ricky’s shoulders to push himself to his feet. He scowled at the boy’s body sprawled in the grass like one of those chalk outlines from the movies, his arms and legs bent like he was frozen mid-stride. Ray stood there for a minute breathing hard, his fists clenched bloodless and white by his sides.
“Just let me get my clothes,” the boy finally said as he rolled onto his side. There was dead grass stuck to his face and his chest. His eyes were wet with tears.
“You’re not going back in that house,” Ray said.
“But—”
“Naked you came from your mother’s womb, and naked you’ll depart. Ain’t that what it says?”
“My shoes,” Ricky begged.
“You need to get on,” Ray said. “Get out of here before I lose my temper.”
Tommy Two-Ton stood at the door with her tail between her legs. Her head was canted and her long ears were perked the way a hound does when she’s trying to make sense of the world.
Ray spoke to the dog as he passed. “Get inside, Tommy.”
The dog took one last glance over the yard and did as she was told.
ELEVEN
For months, Rodriguez had been unable to get anyone west of Asheville to flip. The farther you went into the mountains the more tight-lipped people became. The Asheville kid giving up Cherokee might not have sounded like much to Holland, but at least it was a step in the right direction. There was something about it that made sense.
If the dope was coming from Atlanta, the Qualla Boundary would make a fine hub. Jump on 441 and it was a straight shot across the state line from Clayton. If they were running 74, they might be using tribal lands in Murphy as well. Between the casino traffic and the jurisdiction technicalities of policing a sovereign nation, the fact was, Cherokee offered a lot of shelter. There was a pile of dope coming into western North Carolina from somewhere and the lines didn’t seem to run east to west. The only way to make any headway was to get inside.
Dipshit criminals always asked undercovers if they were cops, believing wholeheartedly that the answer to the question constituted entrapment. Every white agent that ever worked the streets had been asked, but Rodriguez had worked three years without hearing the question once.
Between the build-the-wall bullshit and the fact that the orange-haired man leading those chants had told the world men who looked like Rodriguez were drug dealers and rapists, no one batted an eye. There was no way he could be a cop. Fact was, in this line of work, being of Latino descent made things easier. Rodriguez didn’t even have to make up a cover story. He had brown skin, so all he had to do was roll his r’s.
The first move into new country was always the same: get picked up on a dope charge, go through the rigmarole of booking, make friends in the cell, and wait for the office to post bond. There was no telling who you could trust in a local department, so it was best to play the game from the inside out, never let them know you were anyone other than who you said you were.
Rodriguez stuck an empty needle in his arm and pretended to be passed out in a gas station bathroom in Whittier. He left the door unlocked and cracked so the clerk would find him. Problem was the gas station was connected to a hunting-and-fishing supply store called the Outpost, and when she saw him she ran next door to grab some big goon who whipped out an ankle-holstered Glock and held Rodriguez at gunpoint till deputies arrived. Whole thing was sketchy as hell, but in the end it worked.
He was in a holding cell with some horse-faced w
hite man with spiky hair who was in his mid-to-late thirties but trying to look much younger. The man’s eyes were too close together and his mouth hung open like he was either stoned or dumb as a fence post. He strutted over and inspected Rodriguez from top to bottom soon as the deputies closed the door.
“You Cherokee?”
“No, I’m not Cherokee.”
“Must be Mexican then.”
“My parents are Venezuelan.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Mexico and Venezuela are two different countries.”
“You like tacos?”
“Yeah, I like tacos.”
“Well, all right then.”
Rodriguez laughed.
“My name’s Chevis, but nobody calls me that.”
“What do they call you?”
“Everybody calls me Rudolph.”
“That your last name?”
“No.”
“So why do they call you that?”
“On account of I’m from Murphy.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Like Eric Rudolph.”
Rodriguez shook his head.
“You don’t know who Eric Rudolph is? Blew up a bunch of abortion clinics or something. I don’t know. Anyhow, he hid out in the woods for years and then one day he got caught digging around in a trash can back behind the Save A Lot.”
“Okay.”
“It was in Murphy. The Save A Lot was. Sure as shit you heard of Eric Rudolph.”
“No.”
“What’s your name?
“Rodriguez.”
“I get it now.”
“Get what?”
“That you’re a Mexican, not an Indian.”
“I’m not Mexican.”
“Then what are you?”
“American. I was born in America.”
“Yeah, and I’m Eric Rudolph.”