When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  Cordell stood in the corner of the den with his arms crossed. He kept shifting back and forth on his feet nervously. Denny tried to make eye contact, but Cordell didn’t want anything to do with him.

  Denny was on the couch, dope-sick as hell. His stomach was in knots and his joints were aching. He was scared to death he wouldn’t be able to pull it off, and that in the end Carla would be the one to pay the price.

  He thought he recognized one of the agents, and then all of a sudden it hit him. The Mexican fellow in plain clothes had been at the house the night all of this started. He’d been at the table stabbing the knife between his fingers when that spiky-headed kid damn near cut his finger off. He’d been the one to crawl under the trailer when the fire broke loose.

  “Hey.” He tried to get the man’s attention. “Hey, I know you.”

  The agent glanced over for a split second, then disappeared out of the house without saying a word. Denny was sweating and he raked his fingers through his hair and wiped his palms on the thighs of his jeans. They’d splattered his clothes with blood and between all the running around and coming down he’d somehow seemed to forget. His heart was pounding and he could smell his sweat souring the air.

  “That fellow that just walked out, I know him. I’ve seen him before.”

  “All right, Denny, we’re going to give you this phone.” No one had given their names and Denny didn’t know this man who was suddenly standing in front of him talking, but he figured he was the one running the show. Everyone kept asking him questions and he kept giving them answers.

  “Nobody’s listening to me.”

  “I’m listening. And that man that just walked out is one of our agents. You may very well have seen him before, but right now you need to listen. You’re going to take this phone.”

  “I don’t got a phone.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you have a phone. We’re giving you this one.”

  “They’ll know that ain’t right.” Denny was rocking back and forth and couldn’t stop rubbing his hands on the sides of his legs. “Every phone I ever had, I stole. If I had a phone, I’d have traded it on a bag. There’s nothing I ain’t give away and they know that. They’ll know that ain’t right.”

  “Then you just got a new phone. Somebody gave you a phone. Your sister gave it to you to keep tabs on you. You say whatever you need to say, but this phone stays on you.” The agent thumbed at the screen and opened the photos. He turned the phone so Denny could see. “You’re going to show him this picture.”

  The agents had taken a few quick snapshots of Raymond Mathis sprawled across the kitchen floor. Ray was up now and sitting at the table with the deputy and sheriff, and Denny could hear them talking but couldn’t tell what they were saying. The old man had a wet rag in his hand and was wiping the blood off his neck. There were too many people talking at once.

  “Denny, are you listening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going to show him this photograph to prove it’s done.”

  “He don’t need me to prove it’s done.”

  “For God’s sake, Denny, you’re the one told us he said he wanted a picture. That’s the only reason we’ve done any of this. We’ve made that kitchen look like we’re staging a scene out of Titus Andronicus.”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter who. The point is, this whole thing is turned backward and the only reason is because you said flat out he wanted a picture. And now you’re saying he doesn’t need one. You take this phone and you show him this photograph.”

  “He makes one or two phone calls, he’ll know. If they’ve got people knew what I said to the law, then they’ve sure as shit got people to tell them whether or not somebody I say’s dead’s dead.” He raised his voice as he spoke. “Tell them, Ray, they got people working on the inside. They’ve got people knew he’d gone to the police. You don’t think they can make one or two phone calls and figure out whether or not a body’s been found at a house over here?”

  “Who’s to say his body’s been discovered, Denny? Who’s to say anyone has even come by this house? We’re talking about a couple of hours from now. He could lay here weeks before someone found him.”

  “Yeah, but if they do—”

  “You don’t worry about any of that, Denny.” The agent cut him off. He reached out and grabbed hold of Denny’s shoulder, and Denny couldn’t remember the last time someone touched him when they weren’t about to break his legs. It left an uneasy feeling right in the center of his chest. “You just focus on what I’m telling you. We’ll handle everything on the back end.”

  “Yeah.” Denny glanced over at the man’s hand on his shoulder and then up into his face. There was a coldness about him, and Denny couldn’t tell whether it was the situation or a matter of character, but it didn’t matter right then. It was just one more thought racing around his head, gone before there ever came an answer. “Yeah, all right.”

  “No matter what, you keep this phone in your pocket.”

  “I’ll keep the phone, but I ain’t wearing no wire. I walk in there and they pat me down and they find that tape recorder strapped to my stomach, it don’t matter who you got waiting outside, I’m good as dead. I ain’t wearing one.”

  Another agent, a short stocky fellow with a closely trimmed goatee, came over and handed a snapback baseball cap to the agent running the show.

  “It’s not like the movies, Denny. We’re not going to duct tape some tape recorder to your ribs. You’re going to wear this hat, and this button right here on the top is a microphone. This microphone’s going to talk to that phone in your pocket.”

  “I don’t wear hats.”

  “Well, you’re going to wear this one.”

  “I ain’t wearing that hat. I don’t wear hats. You don’t get it, mister. These people know me. These people known me all my life. They know I don’t wear hats. They ain’t ever seen me wearing a hat. And now you want me to just walk in there wearing one all of a sudden, and what are they supposed to think? Ahh, Denny Rattler just up and decided to put on a hat today. That what they’re supposed to think? I ain’t wearing it.”

  “Todd, you got something else out there in the car?” The agent turned to the stocky fellow who’d handed him the cap.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, run out there and see.”

  In a minute or so, the agent came back into the house with a denim jacket draped over his forearm. “This is all we’ve got.”

  “You good on wearing this jacket, Denny?”

  “I ain’t got a coat looks like that.”

  The agent shook his head and laughed. “You think these people keep tabs on your wardrobe? It’s the coat or the hat. One or the other.”

  “But I done told you, I don’t wear hats.”

  “Then wear the coat. Tell them you put the coat on to cover the blood on your shirt.”

  It struck Denny as the first logical thing the man had said. “That makes sense.”

  The agent handed the jacket to Denny and he tried it on. The arms were short and the width was tight on his shoulders and he was already wearing a gray sweatshirt he’d found in a ditch, so the room was suddenly hot as hell. Denny was losing his mind and he didn’t know how much longer he could stay holed up in there.

  “Just don’t mess with that top button, okay? Whatever you do, you make sure to keep your hands off of that button.”

  “I look like an idiot in this coat.”

  “They ain’t going to give a shit what you look like, Denny. Just do what the man’s telling you.” Cordell Crowe came across the den and stood beside the agent. He had his hands clenched into fists. Whereas Denny didn’t trust any of those agents as far as he could throw them, he knew Cordell was probably the one man on earth he needed to listen to right then.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

&n
bsp; The agent walked away and Cordell took a seat on the couch beside him.

  “Everything’s going to be fine. You just do like they told you and it’s all going to be fine.”

  “I can’t let nothing happen to Carla. That’s what these people don’t get. I fuck this up and it’s on her. I can’t—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to your sister. I’ll make sure of that. You’ve got my word, Denny. You just do like they told you. All right?”

  “Yeah,” Denny said, but nothing he heard was helping. He was scared in a way that he’d never been in all his life.

  When a man reached the end of something, it was one thing to look down in your hands and see your own life broken into pieces, but it was another thing altogether to look back and see everything wrecked in the wake. Lives could only go the one direction, and what lay behind was a powerful and permanent thing. For so long, he’d refused to turn his head. Now he couldn’t bear the thought of going forward.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The Suzuki cussed and spit at a landscape that seemed to be laughing, and Denny couldn’t quit imagining what Jesus must’ve looked like hanging there on that cross. One man was selfless enough to give his own life for every person on earth and here Denny was having done nothing but taken. He was crying and the tears were streaming from the corners of his eyes, some running into his sideburns and wetting his ears while others flicked off from his face like drops of rain.

  He swung into the Quality Plus off 441 to get his wits about him. Some old crusty fellow with a hook for an arm was standing by the newspaper bins smoking a cigarette with his good hand and Denny asked if he could bum one and the man obliged. They didn’t speak to one another, but Denny kept eyeing him and the more he looked at the man, the more he thought he looked just like Jesus, but clean shaven, with a haircut, and a hook arm if Jesus ever did look that way. The man walked over and climbed into a dented Mercury, where a woman with a neck tattoo was waiting with the engine running. Denny hollered just before the door slapped shut, “Thanks for the smoke, mister,” but the man didn’t hear him or didn’t care and now he was standing there alone.

  The air was dead so that the smoke had settled onto the mountains like a sheet tossed over a flea market table. Ash floated down from the sky and littered his hair and the shoulders of the denim coat he wore. A black SUV was parked at the corner of the building and Denny could see the agent behind the wheel watching him with his face shielded behind his hand.

  There were only ten or so miles left to go. Within the hour, he’d be inside that house with his final hand spread on the table, waiting to see how the cards would play. He thought about his sister then. He wondered what she would think when Cordell showed up at her house. He wondered if her knowing he’d put her life in danger would be the final fence between them.

  Decisions have a way of adding up. The numbers get away from you. The more time goes on, the harder things are to reconcile. Sometimes there is no accounting for the wrongs a man has amassed over the course of his life, and Denny knew he’d long passed that point, that for years his relationship with his sister had been a matter of mercy rather than forgiveness.

  When he climbed onto the Suzuki and swerved out of the filling station, the SUV waited for a few cars to pass and fell in behind him, but he didn’t see this because he was on up the road. It was nighttime, almost midnight when he reached the house. He was alone. There was no moon or stars to pierce the haze above him, but the porch light shone out into the yard and caught the glitter in his turquoise helmet as he propped it on the seat of the scooter.

  A thick light-skinned brute stood on the porch barefooted with the bottoms of his sweatpants hooked under his heels and muddied. He had on a red T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and his arms were tattooed. Little white squiggly scars crawled up his shoulders where his skin had stretched from lifting weights. He’d cut his hair since high school so that he didn’t look like the pictures that used to run in the paper, but Denny recognized him just the same. He’d played line on both sides of the football and damn near led Cherokee to its first state championship. His head was shaved but he still had that big pumpkin face that lifted his cheeks into the bottoms of his eyes.

  “Watty inside?”

  “Yeah, he’s in there.”

  Denny started up the steps and the big fellow pressed his hand into the center of Denny’s chest.

  “You wait out here.”

  Denny lifted his hands in front of him and looked down to where the old boy had touched him. He studied the flipped collar of the denim jacket and the top button those agents had told him not to touch, and he wondered if that fellow already knew something was off as he disappeared behind the door.

  There was a giant moth batting around the porch light. Denny watched it latch onto the finial at the top of the lamp. The bug opened its wings, chestnut brown with two large eyes that looked like an owl’s. Denny stared into them like he was seeing the future, the moth waving so that the eyes seemed to blink. He was trying to make sense of what it meant when the door opened and the big fellow invited him in. For a split second, Denny didn’t move. He just stood there on the edge of the porch staring at that moth, but there was no sense to be made of it. There was no sense to this world at all anymore.

  At the end of the hall, Watty’s blue heeler stood in the doorway snarling with teeth reflecting what light stretched from the room. Denny followed the man through the darkened house, the floor creaking underfoot. The dog sniffed Denny’s legs and shoes as he came into the den, then calmed and ran over to stake his claim on the couch. Watty Freeman was in his black leather chair and he squinted his eyes as cigarette smoke rolled over the features of his face. He was holding a cold beer against the knot on his forehead.

  Watty wore a black hooded sweatshirt and a pair of brown Dickies slacks with faded creases drawing a single pinstripe down each leg. His hair was wet like he’d just gotten out of the shower and he was pulling it straight back through the teeth of a fine-toothed comb with his free hand. Denny glanced back over his shoulder and the big man filled the doorway. There was no getting out the way he’d come. He turned his eyes to the French doors straight ahead, then glanced at the dog. That heeler would be on him before he made it around the side of the house.

  An unexpected calm came over him then, because if there was no escape, there was nothing a man could do but surrender. He remembered being a kid and flying out to Oklahoma with his uncle once for a powwow. He’d been so scared to step foot on that airplane and was terrified sitting there on the runway, but the minute the engines roared and the nose tilted up into the sky, all of that fear fell away. Either you were going to live or you were going to die and there wasn’t fuck-all you could do about it.

  “Have a seat, Denny Rattler.”

  “Where?”

  “On that couch.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “You afraid of dogs?”

  “No, I ain’t afraid of dogs.”

  “Then sit down.”

  Denny toddled over and eased himself into the seat closest the door. The heeler had been lying with his head rested on his front paws, but he stood and stepped closer when Denny sat down. The dog’s claws kneaded the cushions like knifepoints. Out of nowhere the heeler lapped the side of Denny’s face with his tongue and Denny leaned to the side with his eyes squinted. He reached up to scratch behind the dog’s ear and damn near lost his hand.

  “Bruce!” Watty snapped his fingers. “Get down from there!”

  The dog looked at Watty, then to Denny. He dropped his front paws off the couch and stretched his spine lazily.

  “That dog lives on his own terms.” The dog took his spot under Watty’s feet.

  “No worries,” Denny said as he wiped his palms on the sides of his pants. He was coming down hard now and the cold sweats were starting to sink into him, his bones like icicles, his skin damn
near afire.

  “I didn’t expect to see you this soon.”

  “I did what you told me.” Denny shifted onto his left hip and dug the phone out of his pocket. “Got a picture like you said.” He unlocked the screen and thumbed his way into the photos. There was a picture of Raymond Mathis lying on his kitchen floor. The picture was rushed and out of focus, taken from a few feet back looking down. The agents had said it would look more natural, but Denny wasn’t so sure. He scooted across the couch and handed the phone to Watty.

  Watty looked at the screen without expression. “Let me see your hands.”

  “What for?”

  “Hold your hands out and let me look at them.”

  Denny held his hands flat out in front of him like he was setting them on an imaginary bar top. His fingers were trembling.

  “Now your palms.”

  Denny turned his hands over and Watty studied the lines on his palms as if he was trying to read Denny’s fortune.

  “Not one scratch,” he said. “A man does what you did and usually his hands get nicked up and cut. No way around it really. Blood gets on you, knife gets slippery, you cut yourself in the tussle. But there’s not a scratch on your hands. No blood under your fingernails. You look like you just got a manicure. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I washed my hands real good.”

  “And how did it happen? You know, like how did it all play out?”

  “I mean, I come across his neck with that knife and we stumbled around for a minute and he just sort of toppled over like a drunk man.”

  “Like a drunk man, he says.” Watty smiled and looked over at the big boy standing in the doorway. “Either you’re lying to me or you’re a cold-blooded killer.”