He’d known a gun-team leader back in Vietnam. Corny college kid from Indiana, everyone called him Early. Early went out on patrol with his squad one day, but some dipshit grunts up on a hill, noting movement in the bush, opened up on them with mortars without knowing what-all/who-all they were shooting at. Friendly fire: They took the whole squad out. Owing to V.C. snipers, John Rye’s squad couldn’t get down into the valley until the next day, when they found Early, lying face-up in a ditch, mangled but smiling. “Jesus?” he’d asked, all beatific-like, as if the Son of Man Himself—decked in fatigues with a Lucky Strike tucked behind his ear—had come to fetch him at the head of a heavenly infantry squad. “Not yet, asshole,” one of the corpsmen joked, but Early said again, with tender recognition, “Jesus,” looking straight into the gas mask of the corpsman, who flipped Early over before John Rye could warn him not to . . . then, boom. Early’d been booby-trapped. The explosion shattered the corpsman’s gas mask, blinding him instantly. For several long minutes, despite his whole side having been blown out, Early kept calling to Jesus like a happy kid playing Marco Polo in a pool, until finally another corpsman, trying to pluck the glass out of the blinded corpsman’s shredded eye sockets, shouted, “Will someone please tell this motherfucker that Jesus is busy and will call him back later?” Remembering this now, John Rye drew an ugly crooked line in his head between himself and Early: Jesus hadn’t been there in that free-fire zone. And maybe Jesus hadn’t been there beside that fiery Ford Fairlane on Thorngrove Pike. Maybe it had all been a trick of the mind, optical adrenaline, some sort of merciful psychic response to the trauma he’d witnessed: the brain overlaying random postcard images of serenely verdant earth to screen the sight of all that trapped burning humanity. An eleven-year trick of the mind that had sent him fleeing into the woods and had cost him the only woman he’d ever truly loved.
At this juncture, John Rye could have repented or relented—same difference. Surrendered to his doubts, come down from the ridge, started fresh back in Knoxville. He didn’t. Instead he dug in, burning those weedy doubts out of his mind—it’d been God all right, he decided, and who was to say Jesus hadn’t been there that day in La Drang Valley, invisible but to Early’s doomed eyes?—and finally acquitting himself, after that long mental trial, for Janie’s disappearance. The latter he accomplished by widening the circle of blame further—diffusing it, letting it bleed over his property lines to the outer world. Janie, he told himself, had been happy until. Janie had been fine until. Until the State of Tennessee had invaded, until Micah had been swiped from them, until John Rye had had to go off on his terrible chase to bring her back home where she belonged. They’d done it, not him. They’d run Janie off. Or maybe, he got to thinking, they’d done worse—paranoia trailed his grief, and late at night, as he pieced and re-pieced the evidence together, other, darker theories blossomed. He thought of that bucktoothed deputy, fingering Janie’s banjo, that Slim Jim on his breath smelling like moldered lust. And, too, he thought of the deputies who’d come to take Micah, with their service pistols drawn, and the way they’d eyed Janie as she’d clung to her daughter . . . he’d seen that kind of look before, on GIs sweeping through rice-paddy villages on Search & Destroy missions, surveying the skin-curves of the daughters and the mama-sans, knowing their M16s gave them the privilege to take anything they wanted, sometimes taking all they wanted back behind a hooch while the rest of the squad waited smoking cigarettes, one of them shouting after a while, “Jesus, Randall, get a move on already! You don’t gotta make her come too.”
Homemade corn whiskey fertilized these theories. The whiskey he got from a neighbor, Motee Lusk, who’d come calling during the search to offer the use of his coondogs and been impressed by John Rye’s primitive setup. Motee, who was seventy and lived on disability, had an ideological beef against government in any form, and after a while was spending long afternoons at the cabin appending exclamation marks to every one of John Rye’s theories while contributing ever-darker scenarios of his own. “They mighta got rid of her just to chase you out,” he offered. “Been coal-company men crawling up and down this here valley. Me and you sittin square on what they want.”
During these slanted, boozy hours Micah was all but forgotten. “You gwine cook that girl supper?” Motee would sometimes say at twilight, jogging John Rye back into the present. “Fry her up some bacon, how bout.”
By this time John Rye had said to hell with the re-custody agreement and all its stipulations, had burned the paperwork in the fireplace—this came as a relief to Micah, who had zero desire to ever return to a school—and told his daughter he’d shoot that goddamn social worker if she dared show herself on their ridge. Motee loaned him a battered AK-47 which the two men would occasionally take turns firing down the ridge—drunkenly, and without much aim. Micah made the discovery of her first menstrual period during one of these firing bouts and for several terrified minutes feared she’d been struck by a ricocheting bullet.
In time Motee’s nephew and grandsons started hanging around, ostensibly to hunt but mostly to pass a quart jar of white dog down the porch. “You respect this here man,” Motee told them. “He been privy to the voice of God.” Respecting Micah, however, wasn’t listed in the rules. John Rye either didn’t see or ignored the doggy looks the boys directed at Micah, too preoccupied by his status as the leader of what they’d come to call the Unicoi Holy Freedom League, the boys mumbling “I hear that” to every anti-government rant and scriptural snippet John Rye could muster, their eyes fixed upon Micah, nevertheless, as she’d dump slop for the pigs or stand chopping at the earth with a hoe. It wasn’t long before she’d outgrown her mother’s old bras, and the boys took openmouthed notice of the loose swing of her breasts and the way her nipples embossed her dress-front.
Micah was not without her own curiosities, and one day, at fourteen, she led the youngest, gentlest, and gawkiest of the Lusk boys, Johnny, down to a deep hole in the stream where she often went swimming. Sharing a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot cabin with her father, she’d noted the way a man’s nether regions could expand and contract; getting out of bed in the morning, to head to the outhouse, her father’s bedclothes were often strangely tentpoled at the middle. After daring Johnny Lusk to skinny dip, she asked him what made a man’s thingamajig get big.
After he’d shown her she floated nude on her back in the cold spring water, watching the backlit oak leaves flitting and swaying greenly above her, feeling strangely nonplussed.
“Is that what sex is?” she asked Johnny, who’d retreated to the shore to put his clothes back on, itchy to leave.
“That’s right,” he told her, chewing on a blade of grass, not looking at her.
“I can’t say I like it all that much.”
“I ain’t sure you’re supposed to,” he said.
If John Rye possessed any inkling about what his daughter was doing with the Lusk boys (after Johnny came Nate and T.J., though never Wade despite his insistent pleas) down at the swimming hole (and by the side of Wisner Creek, in the bed and the cab of T.J.’s pickup, and in the trailer Nate shared with his mama and three sisters), he never let on. Harlotry, he would’ve called it, in full Old Testament rage. By this time, however, Micah sensed she’d become less a person than a symbol to him: a spectral memory, like Janie, that he used for stoking his own resentment and that of his disciples. A martyr to his jumbled cause. Railing against the government, the authorities, all the enemies of liberty, he would often cite the abduction of his wife and daughter, as if Micah wasn’t standing there behind him with a plate of hot fried chicken for him to eat, rolling her eyes. No doubt puberty was also a factor. He had lost his little girl—as irrevocably, in some sense, as he’d lost Janie. This new woman-child who’d taken her place bewildered and frequently unsettled him, and though a distant gleam of tenderness still lit their relationship—without irritation Micah cooked for him, swept and cleaned the cabin, fetched him rags wrung with cold springwater when it felt as if the morning lig
ht had cracked his head open like an egg—he found it ever harder to talk with her except about the livestock, weather, or snake-sightings. Wordless hours crept by after nightfall, during which they seemed like different species of birds forced to share a nest. Consequently Micah spent more and more evenings at the Lusks’ trailers, zooming back and forth on Motee’s four-wheeler, while John Rye read scripture aloud in the empty cabin by the glow of a lamp powered by a generator Motee had generously donated to make refrigerated beer available to the members of the Unicoi Holy Freedom League.
T.J.’s trailer was where Micah met Leah. Leah was nineteen, from Marin County, California, trippy and lithe and so resolutely blonde that you had to look discourteously close to confirm the presence of eyebrows. Her venture capitalist father had made millions backing internet browser technology in its protean days; Leah disdained the family wealth—a barcode tattoo on her neck was a rebuke to the “commodification” of humanity—though not earnestly enough to forswear her trust fund. For several weeks she’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail solo, aiming to thru-hike all the way to Maine before winter. At a gas station near the trailhead she’d met T.J. and Wade, who, after elbowing each other about the wedgie-like cling of her denim short shorts, invited her back to the trailer to help them drain their brand-new case of Bud Light. Leah didn’t drink, but, having vowed to embrace every possible life experience along the trail, took them up on the offer anyway. Wade rode in the truck bed on the drive back, his amazed and paled face so close to the rear window that T.J. kept slamming the brakes to squash him into the glass.
Micah was sixteen that spring, and unbearably restless. Only her mother’s wretched legacy was restraining her from hiking down to the highway and hitching a ride out into “the World,” as her father scorned everything beyond their property lines. Back during the war, “the World” was what they’d called civilization: that infantryman’s dreamscape of hot meals, soft bedding, dry clothes, English-speaking girls, mortar-free nights. For John Rye, however, it had become code for something different: a society in thrall to the idols of materialism, stripped of its old core values, its honor, its ancient natural balance. The World, he thought, was what God had ordered him to flee, and what had later stolen Janie from him (whether by force or seduction, it didn’t matter). When Micah, as a young girl, had asked him about the airplanes she saw coursing high above the mountains, John Rye had answered, “It’s people trying to escape the World.”
“What happens?” she said.
“Nothing,” came his reply. “They run outta fuel and have to come back down.”
Yet here was Leah, fresh from the World and embracing rather than fleeing its horrors. The way she talked reminded Micah of a shaken can of Coca-Cola (her second-favorite World attraction, behind Reese’s Pieces): frothy, bubbling, impossibly sweet. She displayed none of the sour lassitude of the Lusk women, who spent the bulk of their days and nights smoking generic menthols on the trailer steps, looking withered and put out, as if waiting on a locksmith on account of their bozo husbands’ drunk and absentminded ways. Leah had soft scarless hands with unchewed fingernails, and she smelled like the inside of a pumpkin blossom, half floral and half vegetal, an alluring mixture of winsomeness and nourishment. She’d been to Africa (“must be shitloads of niggers over there,” Wade cut in, to which even T.J. objected, slapping Wade upside the head and saying Shut the fuck up) and to Europe and to the Galápagos Islands, where, she said (rapidly, effusively), she’d talked her way aboard an Ecuadorian Navy boat to patrol for shark poachers. When she grabbed Micah’s hands, in a flurry of excitement about some sea lions with which she’d hobnobbed on the island of Floreana, Micah gasped with what felt like the strongest surge of pleasure she’d ever experienced. Almost immediately she recognized the sensation as love. This identification was not difficult to make; she’d never seen a sea lion before but felt sure she’d recognize one if it came waddling up to the cabin. When Leah offered to cut Micah’s hair—which hadn’t been cut since her mother’s disappearance, its tattered split ends hanging slackly past her waist—the Lusk boys finally gave up on her, conclusively slapping their knees then stomping outside to sulk. “At least she didn’t drink none of our beer,” Wade said to T.J., in limp condolence.
The next morning, John Rye awoke to the sight of Leah asleep on his floor, swaddled in a synthetic orange sleeping bag. Tusker was lying beside her, as if he’d dragged her inside the way he’d done with squirrels and rabbits as a leaner, faster dog. Micah was already up, piling squarely folded dresses into an Army Surplus rucksack.
“I’d do for some water, if you don’t mind,” John Rye said from his bed. The previous night’s combination of Leviticus and moonshine had left singemarks on his brain. Even his tongue felt charred. When Micah delivered it, he asked her, “Who’s that?”
“My new friend Leah,” she said, shifting back a few steps to make the subsequent announcement more formal and, she hoped, less contestable: “I’m gonna hike to Maine with her.”
John Rye took a long desperate swig of the water. “All right,” he said quietly, then repeated it. He pulled himself up and over to the edge of the bed and ran a comb of three fingers through his beard. “What’s in Maine?”
“The end of the trail.”
“I see.”
He raised his feet and stretched his toes, examining them with a scowl.
“And the whole world, Daddy,” she went on. “I’m sixteen. I can’t be living like this forever.”
Still inspecting his toes, he said calmly, “Like this, how?”
How? For a few moments she stammered—not wanting to hurt him, not wanting to desert him the way her mother had (maybe) deserted him, not wanting to accelerate the desolate downward spiral that her mother’s disappearance had set in motion—then argued around the edges: “With nobody but the Lusks to talk to! With nothing but the Bible to read. With nothing in my life but . . . seventy-seven acres, Daddy. You should listen to where Leah’s been. France, Africa, the Gapa . . . Gapagalo Islands . . .”
He just stared at her.
“They’re in South America,” she said.
“I know where they are.”
“Then how come I didn’t?”
He paused, cocking his head. “We got plenty other books besides the Bible . . .”
She snapped back, “You ain’t brought a new book home since Mama disappeared,” which brought a flinch to his face. As if by ricochet, an identical flinch quirked Micah’s face: She wasn’t cushioning her blows enough. “There’s something like six billion people in the world, Daddy. And I don’t know but, like, ten of ’em.”
“The Lusks, they’re good boys,” he protested. “You seen how they help us out.”
She could’ve batted down this point in a millisecond, by noting the varied degrees of help they’d given her in semen form. Instead she said, “I can’t understand what’s wrong with the World ’less I see it for myself, can I?”
The question—cleverly indisputable, Micah thought—hit him like a droplet of water on a hot skillet. “You been out there!” he exclaimed, with enough vocal force to make her shoulders jump. “What happened, back at that school? You recall that? And what about them people they stuck you with?”
“I ain’t saying I’m moving to Knoxville!”
To which he shouted back, “And I ain’t saying you can’t . . . go.”
The confused frown on her face belied the tandem surges of relief and joy she was feeling. She moved three steps toward her father, close enough to touch him. “Then what?”
For a long while John Rye re-examined his toes and said nothing.
“Oh, Daddy,” she finally said, tossing her arms around him and kissing his neck, which tasted of the turpentine he dashed himself with, cologne-style, to ward off tick bites. In later years, when she’d tell the story of her childhood, she’d resent the pity that inevitably followed it, and the disdain her listeners would often heap upon her father for “imprisoning” (Lola’s term) her
and her mother in the mountains for all those years (“a classic caveman maneuver, cloaked in religion”: Lola). How could he have done that to you, they’d ask, interpreting Micah’s tenderness as some filial subset of Stockholm Syndrome, sometimes trying to fish suppressed rage out of her to induce a therapeutic reckoning. Yet there was no rage within her, or even mild disgruntlement. Any pity, she thought, should have been steered his way: for trying and failing to shield her. He’d tried to remake Eden, and she’d been the snake, or if not the snake the apple—the thing that’d opened a portal to the lesser world, that’d brought evil down upon them. “Then what?” she said.
“It’s just a bad world,” he said quietly.
They were both startled by Leah, drowsily countering from the floor, “It’s a beautiful world.”
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