The Clearing of Travis Coble
By Jonathan Janz
Copyright 2013 by Jonathan Janz
Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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The Clearing of Travis Coble
By Jonathan Janz
Myers climbed out of the Civic and passed a sweaty wrist across a sweatier brow. As he stretched his arms, his back unleashed a barrage of meaty popping sounds. He glanced at the car and grunted. The mountain path had painted the silver Civic white. He drew a finger over the hot metal to make sure his car was still there under the dust, then wiped the chalky powder on one hip of his linen trousers. He took a deep drag of the morning air and felt its dusty heat baking his lungs. A colleague in Chicago had told him that Tennessee was a bad place to be in July, and now Dick understood why. A gang of mosquitoes hovered over the road in a menacing black cloud. Why, he wondered, would anyone live in such a place?
Padding along the packed dirt road in his ill-chosen loafers, Myers tried to ignore the sizzling of the Civic’s weary engine. The car had never broken down on him before, but he’d never driven it up a mountain either. The task before him loomed formidable, and the thought of getting stranded up here was enough to bring a chill, despite the suffocating heat. What if he ended up like one of the characters in Deliverance? People always talked about the guy who got raped, but really, none of them made out very well. If that was what a man had to go through to learn more about himself, to hell with it. Myers needed no harrowing battle with crazed hillbillies to achieve illumination. His problem was that he’d already achieved it, and what had been illuminated would have been better off left in the dark. While most men in their late forties came to a crossroads, Myers found himself at a dead end. He knew his days at the university were numbered.
Jesus, it was hot. If it wasn’t a hundred degrees, it would be soon. What good was the shade, Myers wondered, if all it did was stifle the breeze? He ambled down the lane, the leather satchel already hanging heavy on his shoulder. To his left towered a hulking wall of evergreens. They glowered down at him like hostile sentries.
* * *
He halted at the edge of the road and put his back to the angry pines. There was no name on the mailbox before him, but he’d followed Coble’s directions carefully. This had to be the place.
Gazing at the house, it was easy to conjure the way Travis Coble had appeared back then: shaggy black hair with an almost ursine sheen. A short, wiry body that seemed to thrum with tensile strength. And the eyes. Was it the eyes that had so enthralled the curious public?
Though he was only nineteen when his younger brothers disappeared, Coble was savvy enough to frustrate even the most veteran reporters covering the case. Calmly, sardonically, he’d avoid their verbal snares and slowly reveal them for the fools they were. Perhaps it was this quality more than any other that had made the case such a sensation. When the trial became national news, like everyone else, Dick Myers and his colleagues in Chicago took notice. Murderer or not, the teenager from the Smoky Mountains was a fascinating case study.
The twentieth anniversary of the trial was coming up at the end of the summer, and writing a paper about the man, a kind of retrospective reexamination of the case and its effects on Coble’s life, seemed like a hell of an idea back at the university. But during the drive through the mountains, Myers’s excitement had curdled into trepidation. The hairpin turns on the winding mountain road made his balls shrivel and his lips tighten in a grim white line. On one particular curve—a ridiculously sudden and savage buttonhook that wouldn’t have been out of place in an amusement park—Myers had hissed like a terrified grandmother and had actually felt the Civic’s back end swing out over a yawning abyss before it again found purchase on the rutted road.
The interminable, tortuous drive had left him enervated and hollow. Now, when he needed it most, his well of enthusiasm was drying up. Here in the wilds he felt naked and ill prepared.
Myers glanced up and down the primordial road and tried to recall the last time he’d seen another soul. The paucity of dwellings up here—he dared not call them houses—filled him with a crawling dread. Despite the cloying effluvium breathing out of the pines behind him, Myers could not compel himself to enter the yard. He forced one loafer forward, but the moment his foot touched grass, a blackbird shrieked a strident warning, as if to disabuse him of the notion.
He licked his lips and stole another glance at the mailbox. He thought about taking out the Dictaphone and recording his thoughts, but he pictured himself standing beside a deserted country road speaking into a tape recorder and felt absurd. What could he say about the mailbox anyway? Early-model metal letter receptacle. Once black, now faded non-color. Stanchioned by a splintering oak plank. Weeds and crabgrass surrounding it in standard haphazard formation.
Myers blew out disgusted breath. He felt like a bargain-basement private eye. The white rayon shirt with light green stripes seemed like a good choice back at the bed-and-breakfast, but now it felt ridiculous. Who could take someone who wore such a shirt seriously? He was a teacher, not a researcher. Granted, as a psychology professor, a certain amount of grunt work was expected of him, but going out in the field often made him feel incompetent.
Sighing, he took in the scene before him.
The yard was overgrown and littered. A rusty fishing reel lay discarded on the ground. A metal card table, its thin legs jutting up out of the weeds, reminded Myers of a wasp desiccating on a windowsill. Broken toys, bleached pale by time, were strewn about the grass. A whiffle-ball bat with a circumcised handle. A limbless Barbie doll, her blond hair caked with soil. And somehow more upsettingly, a telephone with a grinning face and a missing handpiece, the frayed rope that once connected it trailing limply on the ground like a severed umbilicus.
A sour taste had begun to boil in the pit of his throat. Myers swallowed it back, considered heading back to town for some bottled water. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten to bring it.
He glanced to his left and spotted an old tire on a blotchy hemp rope that dangled from a diseased elm tree. It twisted slowly in the shade despite the absence of a breeze. Frowning, he moved through the weeds toward the house. There shouldn’t be toys here. Coble never had children.
It was possible the toys were from Travis’s own childhood, but how then a Barbie doll? There had been three brothers and no sisters, though Myers supposed a neighbor girl could have left the doll behind.
His curiosity aroused, Myers took out his Canon and snapped a couple shots. In the morning shadows, Barbie’s skin looked leprous.
He snapped a shot of the house. He’d studied it in the pictures at the library, but the building before him bore little resemblance to the images. The microfiche pictures revealed a small place, not untidy, bu
t not meticulously cared for either; the house before which he now stood was a monstrosity. It had been added onto in both directions and was twice as long as Myers remembered. What was once a quaint country home was now an eyesore. A broken screen door hung uselessly from one rusty hinge. The windows were warped and misshapen, and while some of them were patched with tarpaper, others stared blank and empty as gouged-out eye sockets. The roof sagged in the center, its curving mouth a perverse, mottled leer. A section of detached gutter canted deliriously into the faded siding, reminding Myers of a compound fracture puncturing the skin of a forearm.
Reaching back, he slapped at a mosquito drilling his spine. He adjusted the leather satchel on his shoulder and glanced doubtfully at the house. Would people outside of Sanger County still remember the case? It had been national news at the time, but now it seemed the world was too fixated by death on a grand scale to be shaken by a measly double-murder in the Tennessee backwoods.
To hell with it, he thought. He was here now, five hundred miles from the university. “Publish or perish,” went the saying.
He hated that saying. His value as an instructor was great, he knew, though he wondered if the new head of the psych department agreed. Bill Jackson’s remark seemed innocuous at the time, just a desultory comment as they visited their mailboxes at the office, but in the weeks since then, it had taken on sinister undertones in the theater of his memory.
Nice article in the New England Quarterly, Bill.
Oh, thank you, Myers.
It reminded me of my early research on trauma patients.
Thank you, Myers. Of course, your strongest work was your essay on rapists and remorse. How long ago was that, five years?
Three, Bill. Three years ago.
Of course.
Three years wasn’t that long, surely. But Jackson had built his reputation by churning out articles every three or four months, quality be damned. Myers, on the other hand, was content to rely on the effectiveness of his classroom instruction and the quality of his occasional published pieces. Many ways to skin a cat, Myers was fond of saying; there was room in the university for all kinds.
But what if Jackson didn’t feel the same way?
Myers frowned. There were whispers about him, he felt sure, amongst his colleagues, and he was up for review next spring. The thought of facing the board without a new piece in print made him sick in the pit of his stomach.
He had to go through with this. The article must be written and it must be good.
No. Not good.
Sensational.
A thought arose that was ugly enough to stop him in his tracks.
What if the article wasn’t accepted? The university publishing houses favored the prolific. Myers made no secret of his disdain for the direction the business was taking. Word traveled swiftly in academia. What if they refused his article out of spite?
Or worse, what if Coble refused to cooperate? The man hadn’t granted an interview in years, so maybe his agreement to meet with Myers was only a mean-spirited joke. It certainly fit the mental profile Myers had constructed for him. Cunning. Mischievous.
But not stupid. No, that was the mistake the district attorney made during the trial. The court notes demonstrated that. Smug and overconfident, the Sanger County D.A. underestimated Travis Coble. The press bridled at the acquittal and the public’s need for a scapegoat cost the once-promising D.A. his job.
Myers started toward the front door, but thought better of it. The building needed to be razed. With eerie clarity, he envisioned the cinderblock-and-plywood porch collapsing on him. Better check the back yard before knocking.
He gave the house a wide berth as he made his way around. It was silly, but a childlike fear was growing in him that Coble might leap out of a window just to scare the shit out of him. It was just the kind of welcome a weirdo like Coble would dream up.
Myers reached the rear of the house and waded into a hoary sea of broomsedge and switchgrass. Here and there were scattered elms and maples. Each one stood solitary, sequestered from the others, yet together, their splayed branches and broad leaves threw most of the yard into shadow. Of course, it was difficult to tell exactly where the yard ended and the woods began. Apparently, the property had never been cleared. The trees and tall grass went on for acres. Most of the forest that spread out before him was steeped in an olive gloom, but close to the house occasional shards of sunlight slashed through the shade. Intrigued by the effect of the light, he raised the camera and snapped a picture.
A low voice said, “Don’t believe in askin’ permission?”
Myers jumped and glanced at a figure sitting by the house. Myers put a hand on his chest and peered into the gloom. No wonder he hadn’t noticed the man, camouflaged as he was by the shadows and the junk surrounding him. Nestled under an awning and girdled by wooden barrels, the moveless figure surveyed him with inscrutable black eyes.
Myers had feared that after so many years he’d be unable to recognize the man. But one look into those crocodilian eyes and he knew that this was Travis Coble.
“I hope I didn’t disturb you,” Myers said and gestured feebly at the woods. “I figured I’d just take a shot or two.” His words died in the air between them. Myers glanced at the camera as if he’d been caught shoplifting.
The man went on as though Myers hadn’t spoken. “Downright rude to take pictures of another man’s property.”
“Yes, well. I am sorry.” Myers looked at the camera again and wondered if he should return it to his satchel as a gesture of good will.
The man watched him.
“Are you…” Myers paused and took a hesitant step forward. “You’re Travis Coble, aren’t you?”
“You the reporter?”
“I’m the man you spoke to on the phone, yes. Professor Myers. Dick, you can call me if you’d like.”
“You sure you ain’t a reporter?”
Myers took another step in the man’s direction. This close to the object of his research, the thrill of a goal attained gripped him. He was afraid Coble would vanish like a wisp of smoke. He imagined it was the way Margaret Meade must have felt when she first beheld her monkeys.
Myers cleared his throat and turned on the charm. “No, Mr. Coble, I’m not a reporter, nor do I have any desire to sensationalize your story or capitalize on what happened to you.”
Coble eyed Myers a moment longer. Then he nodded. “Come on over and have a seat then.”
Myers smiled broadly. “Thank you, Mr. Coble. I appreciate your hospitality.”
He approached and looked around but saw only the barrels and a white plastic five-gallon bucket. Coble sat in a duct-taped lawn chair that appeared ready to collapse. Myers glanced about, wondering where it was the man meant him to sit. Thinking again of Deliverance, he prayed that Coble would not expect him to sit in his lap. Not for the first time that day, he reflected on his distance from home, his isolation.
“There doesn’t seem to be—”
In answer, Coble extended one steel-toed workboot and scooted the five-gallon bucket in Myers’s direction.
“Oh. Well then.” Myers grimaced in the direction of the woods, unshouldered the satchel, and eased down on the plastic bucket.
He imagined how silly he must look and wondered whether or not this humbling had been premeditated. It certainly fit the psychological profile. Sharper than the average rube. Fond of mind games.
He risked a glance at Coble.
With his protuberant forehead, stubbly beard, and deep-set black eyes, Travis Coble certainly appeared capable of dark deeds. The black Jack Daniels shirt clinging to the hard, knobby shoulders was faded navy blue and chicken-pocked with holes.
Rooting around in his satchel, Myers asked, “Do you mind if I record our interview?”
“Would you mind if I minded?”
Myers stopped and looked up. Coble sat expressionless, his black eyes staring off into the woods.
Myers held up the Dictaphone. “If you don’t w
ish to be recorded, you need only say so.”
Coble’s triceps flexed. Myers waited.
“Guess it’s okay,” Coble muttered.
Check, Myers thought. The article would be better for it. He’d never been good at shorthand, and trying to write everything down would have distracted him from asking the right questions. Something told him he’d need all the focus he could muster to stay ahead of Travis Coble. Twenty years ago, overconfidence had been the district attorney’s undoing; Myers didn’t intend to make the same mistake.
Still, he understood how it could have happened. Sitting there on his rickety lawn chair, the man didn’t look like much. His wardrobe was right out of the lost-and-found, and that forehead made him look like something from the left side of the evolutionary chart.
Of course, Myers reminded himself, his own purpose was quite different than that of the deposed district attorney. Instead of seeking a conviction, Myers sought the truth. He hoped Coble would come to appreciate that.
After the acquittal, the man had become a recluse. A latter-day Lizzy Borden. Like many tried in the court of public opinion, Coble was branded guilty and bore the stigma to this day. The woman at the bed-and-breakfast, the people at the public library, even the old men he’d solicited at the local diner; they’d all donned veiled expressions when Myers brought up Travis Coble and his missing brothers. It didn’t matter to them that Myers was a professor here to write a scholarly article instead of some ghoul out to make himself rich off of the town’s skeletons. The subject was taboo.
Myers took a steadying breath, depressed the Record button, and placed the Dictaphone on the concrete between them.
Why, he asked himself, was he so nervous? Coble was innocent so there was no real danger in talking to him. Yet it was only with an effort that he kept his hands from trembling as he grasped his pen and paper.
Bill Jackson, no doubt, would be able to cut right to the heart of Myers’s tension. The arrogant prick was a self-proclaimed expert on everything. Jackson could write a paper on any topic, regardless of its irrelevance, and the most troubling part was that the university funded every project he proposed. Jackson could request twenty grand to study the mating rituals of transgendered sparrows, and the purse holders would eagerly cut him a check. Myers, on the other hand, had to go through reams of paperwork just to get his gas money reimbursed.
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