by Farris, John
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, hands between his knees, when his father woke up with a kind of wary readiness in his face, lying at full length but inobtrusively up on one elbow before Terry could blink.
"Hey—Terry. Time's it getting to be?" Whit looked at his chronometer. "Ten to six? Might as well get up."
Terry didn't move. Whit became aware of the clenched hands, his son's drawn, worried face.
"You okay? Something wrong?"
Terry almost blurted it out, everything: the silvery trailer with one tire crushed down to the axle, the limping man in monk's habit, the— He took a long breath and shook his head. He delivered the simplest explanation possible.
"I was—I went for a walk."
"Still waking up too early, huh?"
"Yeah. Do you think we could get going?"
"Now? They won't open for breakfast here for another hour, aren't you—"
Terry suppressed a shudder. "No. I'm not hungry. We can eat later, can't we?"
"Sure, I guess so." Whit sat up, stretching. "Be ready to roll in fifteen minutes."
"Okay," Terry said, as his father got out of bed and went into the bathroom. He sat staring at the door he had double-locked, lips tight, half-expecting something really bad to happen momentarily.
They knew he was staying at the motel, he'd foolishly told them that. But they wouldn't know in which room to look for him, would they? Even if they did, they couldn't get inside. But if they broke the door down—
His father could handle them; his father would stop them.
Wouldn't he?
Chapter Three
By the time they reached the summit of Waterrock Knob in the Plott Balsam mountains, forty-eight tediously winding and upturning miles from the motel outside of Asheville, the sun had risen and the rental car was overheating again from the altitude. At this point the Blue Ridge Parkway was the highest motor road in the east, and they had been traveling a mile above sea level for most of the way; here they were at six, thousand feet.
Whit Bowers pulled off onto the graveled crescent of an overlook, to give the radiator a chance to cool down so he could pop the cap and add water before they made the long descent through Soco Gap. It was cold on the knob, not much above forty degrees. The air thin but invigorating. Whit pulled on his thick wool sweater, with the oil still in the wool for shedding cold pelting Alpine rains. Rising mist hid the pinnacles of fir and red spruce, but the sky above the mountain ranges surrounding them in oceanic waves—the Balsams, the Newfounds, the Great Smokies, the Cowees—was barefaced, with a becoming blush, like a young girl rising from sleep.
On the rock wall around the overlook he unfolded a geological survey map of the area to look for reference points. The Qualla Reservation of the eastern Cherokee nation lay immediately below them, in its settlements a slovenly place of unwanted people, extending north to the boundaries of the national park on the North Carolina–Tennessee line. Clingmans Dome, at the heart of the Smokies, was unmistakable, an indigo giant shedding torrents of smoke in a westerly direction.
He had never laid eyes on this imposing land, but he had done some background reading, he knew its history well. All of the mountains in this near-primeval region, untouched by glaciers or the heated seas of distant epochs, were heavily forested to their summits despite the best efforts of lumbermen, whose venality, in the first four decades of the century, had been criminally inflamed by a million acres of virgin timber green as new money. Whit used his binoculars and located, to the northeast, a sparkling thread of river in the valley of the Cat Brier, and Tyree, the only town of any consequence in the moistly radiant, sapphire-and-gold valley.
"Where's Wildwood?" Terry asked. He'd been keeping his eyes on the road, but they had seen only a few cars on the parkway since leaving Asheville.
Whit drew a rectangle on the map, the low side of which intersected the Balsam Mountains less than a mile north of Waterrock Knob, and shared part of the eastern boundary of the Cherokee reservation.
"Wildwood covers all of this area." He handed the binoculars to Terry. "About eighteen square miles. A third of it is inside the park now, but the company still hasn't deeded the land over to the government. Langford Industries has been fighting a holding action for the last twenty years, but eventually we'll have to compromise. There's enough scenic land outside the park boundary for what we want to do."
With his pencil he shaded a small area inside the rectangle.
"The lake would go here, near the headwaters of the Cat Brier. Tormentil Mountain is fifty-three hundred feet high, and there should be room for a dozen good ski runs on the slopes."
Terry seemed to be forcibly concentrating, trying to show interest.
"Ski runs? Does it snow much this far south?"
"No. But we're looking ten to fifteen years ahead. By then we should have the machines for making artificial snow economically."
They heard a car coming up the grade to the overlook. Terry put the binoculars down quickly. The car, a big tan Olds, came into view. There was a trailer hitched to it—a silvery Airstream with the familiar breadloaf shape.
"Oh, shit," Terry said under his breath, instinctively getting a grip on the sleeve of his father's sweater.
"What's the matter?"
"Let's go."
"I have to fill the radiator." Whit stared at Terry, whose lower lip was bloodless between his teeth. The boy raised the binoculars for a fast look at the driver as the car and trailer pulled off the road and came toward them. The car had Pennsylvania plates. The Keystone State.
A heavyset man got out, rimless glasses flashing in the sun. His hair was white, planed down to a stiff flattop. He brushed crumbs from his cardigan sweater and gray twill pants and smiled.
"Say, this road's a killer. Just about pulled the guts out of my Eighty-Eight. But you can depend on Oldsmobile. Surrrre you can. Never bought any other make of car since I was old enough to drive."
A woman was emerging slowly and unsteadily from the other side of the car, like a sickly chick from a litter of eggshell. She also wore glasses and was noticeably bowlegged, but otherwise they looked normal to Terry, an ordinary couple.
"Don't forget the camera, 'Stelle," the crewcut man advised her. "This is the big view, we came up here for. Now where're you going?"
"I need to get an Alka-Seltzer from the trailer, Joe, and use the toidy. It's your fault. You never should have tempted me with those cinnamon doughnuts."
"Now, now." He had a slight accent that reminded Terry of Lawrence Welk, the Champagne Music Man on television. He turned and winked at Whit and Terry. "Joe Kunzelman's my name. Homestead, P.A. I walked out of the plant gates for the last time Friday a week ago, and the little lady and me, we're seeing the country.Been looking forward to this trip all my life. 'Stelle, she'll get her travel legs eventually. Just wait till we come to New Orleans. She'll like that. Surrrre she will. The French Quarter. Ha-cha!" He winked again.
Terry, unsmiling, asked, "Do you have anybody else with you in the trailer?"
"No, there's just 'Stelle and me. Care to have a look inside? After 'Stelle gets off the toidy, I mean. These Airstreams are just wonderful for long-distance travel. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you we've got all the comforts of home. Built solid, too. Nine thousand rivets!"
Terry shook his head. "We're in kind of a hurry. Aren't we, Dad?"
As they were driving through Soco Gap Whit looked for a third time at his uncommunicative son. Even Little Richard and Fats Domino on the car radio hadn't lightened his mood. He was chewing at a hangnail, chewing it to the quick.
"Why did you ask him if there was somebody else in his trailer?"
"I don't know," Terry mumbled.
"You must have had a reason."
"Skip it."
"Terry—" Whit's jaw was bunched ominously over his wad of gum.
Terry almost shouted at him.
Okay, okay! This morning I saw a trailer just like the one at the overlook and in that trail
er was an old guy who had curly horns a foot long growing out of his head, and ears like an animal. Is that what you want me to tell you?
Just thinking about it made him feel as crazy as he suspected he would sound; never mind the fact that he was absolutely certain of what he'd seen.
So he bit his tongue hard enough to make it bleed and sat back with his arms sternly folded for a minute. Then he said abruptly and a little wildly, "Is there an airport around here?"
"I suppose so. Why?"
"Because I want to go home! I don't like it here."
"Home to Paris? Your mother isn't—"
"I know she's not there! Claude and Berthe can look after me if everybody thinks I need looking after so bad." They were the couple who had maintained the eighteenth-century apartment on lie St. Louis for as long as Terry could remember.
"I thought we were starting to get along," Whit said in exasperation. "Why the change of heart?"
Terry sat rubbing his forehead with the heel of one hand, a self-mesmerizing gesture that had a gradual calming effect, allowed his common sense to rise to the top of his brain. The truth was (he would never doubt it) he'd seen a living gargoyle no less intimidating than many of the medieval ones in stone and soot grimacing down on the oblivious city in which he lived. Undoubtedly the homed man was a freak of some kind, unless Terry was prepared to believe in the existence of the devil; he was not, he decided, although he had run through the mist this morning half-convinced he was escaping from a traveling sideshow of hell. My brother has come home to die, the other man had said. All but hidden in his monkish robe, exhibiting the goggle eyes of a lizard, a big lump of club foot in a dirty sock. The croquet mallet in his hand not necessarily a threat. Adding everything up, the facts of his escapade looked different to Terry. Probably the Airstream trailer and the dying old man were traveling in a different direction by now; even in this sparsely settled region he should never run into them again. What a shame. Squirming on his seat, Terry was uncomfortable: the morning sun through the closed window hot on his right cheek, his father's unspoken questions silently grilling him on the other side.
"It isn't you," Terry said finally, giving Whit a quick conciliatory look.
"Glad to hear it." The bulge in Whit's jaw smoothed out, he chewed his gum slowly. "You know it isn't practical for you to go back right now. There are things I need to accomplish here. Get a close look at the area, see if any of the railroad spur line is salvageable. I'll put you on your flight a week from today. Until then maybe you'll do your best to cooperate. It's really beautiful around here, if you take the trouble to appreciate what you're seeing."
"Yeah, okay," Terry said glumly. "I told you I was sorry."
"Not exactly." But Whit smiled, relenting.
Billboards were everywhere as they neared the intersection with U.S. 19, advertising junk attractions and souvenir shops at the fringe of the park, tribal handicrafts in the Cherokee nation. Whit drove east, toward Tyree.
"I think you'll like Arn Rutledge. If I can locate him."
"Is he a moonshiner?"
Whit laughed. "Wouldn't suprise me to find out Arn was in the whiskey business; he used to talk about 'shine, how it was made. His father and most of his other male relatives earned a living from stills before the war. But the government's making it more difficult for them these days."
"You depended on him a lot in the war, didn't you?"
"He was the best squad leader I had; I was a company commander going into Sicily. His troopers were all tough country boys or mountaineers; nobody got their respect unless he earned it. We missed the DZ, jumped too high and too fast, and I lost track of Arn's stick. The battalion was scattered over a wide area in the dark; none of us had any idea where the hell we were, except we knew we were behind the lines. I regrouped part of my company and we headed south toward the beachhead, raising hell with small patrols, making as much trouble as we could along the way. We cut telephone lines and blew up bridges. Some of our kids had shaved their heads back in Tunisia, and they were wearing war paint. The civilians we ran into were terrified; the Germans had told them that all American paratroopers were convicted murderers, parolees from death row. Counting walking wounded, we had less than four thousand troopers roaming around as far south as Santa Croce Camerina, about twenty miles from the DZ. But by dawn the Italians and Krauts were convinced it was more like sixty thousand. Intelligence wasn't very good on either side. We didn't know there was a Goering Division Panzer unit in Sicily until we ran into a column near Biazza Ridge. We didn't have antitank weapons, nothing that could even slow down a sixty-ton Tiger. We dug in anyway, down about eight inches into bare rock, and held until we got some help from a battery of .155's on the beach. There were so goddamn many tanks on the ridge, all they had to do was fire for effect. I rounded up all the able-bodied men I could find—clerks, cooks, riggers, you name it. We crawled forward a few feet at a time, knocking out pillboxes—until we ran smack into a big Tiger sitting in a ravine and drawing a bead on us. I thought we were goners. But the top of the tank popped open and there was Sergeant Arn Rutledge grinning at me. He'd surprised the tank crew outside having a smoke and a piss, polished them off with a grenade. Then he crawled inside to take a look at his new tank. 'Hey, Captain,' he said to me, 'if we can figure how to turn this fuckin' thing on, we'll have the area policed up directly.'"
"Did he get a decoration for taking the tank?"
'The first of many. A couple of nights later he was burned pretty badly pulling some British commandos out of a glider that crash-landed. In France we had days of going from hedgerow to hedgerow, house to house, flushing out the Krauts. I don't know how many snipers he killed. Mountaineer's savvy. He had the old squirrel-hunter's knack for knowing where to look, where to shoot, before they spotted him."
"How long has it been since you've seen him?"
"The summer the war ended. I had to miss the '48 reunion. It was a testimonial to the sergeant-major, so some of the guys made damned sure he was there. They told me Arn stayed drunk for three days, not very drunk, just enough to keep his distance and maybe his dignity."
"What's a sergeant-major?"
"Highest ranking noncom in the army. There's only one per company. Arn could have had battlefield promotions on up to major if he'd wanted them. But he never cottoned to the idea of being an officer. Held most of us in contempt."
"But not you."
"I never behaved in any way he found disgraceful."
Terry smiled slightly. "Do you think he'll take us to Wildwood?"
"If we can find him and he's not busy doing something else. I'd like to have him along. He must know every foot of the way."
Now they were driving through the Cat Brier Valley. Cove country: woodlots in pale green leaf, pastures smothered in wildflower. Phosphorous yellow and coolly passionate lavender. Lolling cows enclosed by the zigzag of split rail fences, old gray wood weathered hard as iron. They crossed the river, not a torrent but full to its banks, and clean, entered the town between two churches facing each other on hillsides. The Baptists in tall white frame and with a belfry, tombstones haphazardly spaced over most of the rest of their hill. The CME church was brick and blue shingle, squarish, utilitarian, a red, white, and blue crusader's shield over their doorway. The graveyard near the CME church was of old dismembered vehicles, rust-red hulks half buried in tenacious kudzu like collapsed tents.
Tyree, North Carolina. Population 1705. The Lion's Club met on the last Friday of each month at Fulcrum's Cafe. The BPOE had their own shacky place, next door to a John Deere dealership. Machines more formidable than the grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End were grouped on the gravel of the front lot as if mounting a long-term siege. There were signs of life: a tall man in slouchy Big Smiths was talking to another man, bald as Eisenhower, who wore a yellow John Deere cap backward on his head. Big Smith pulled away in his running-board pickup as Whit turned into the drive. The man in the John Deere cap sat in a wooden armchair beneath a sagging rus
t-stained tin roof and regarded the newcomers with a tilt of his head. He had one stale eye and a contented manner, as if he'd fathomed the strategy of the machines, and couldn't be bothered.
"Help you?"
"I'm looking for a man who grew up around here," Whit said. "Arn Rutledge. Do you know him?"
"Everybody knows Arn."
"Could you tell me where I might find him?"
The man turned his head so that Whit could see only the stale eye, which was like having a door shut in his face, one with a Closed sign dangling in it.
"We were in the war together," Whit explained. "Eighty-Second Airborne, 505th parachute infantry regiment. I was his commanding officer. Thought I'd like to say hello, long as I was down this way."
"And you would be—"
"Whit Bowers."
"New York plates on your car, but can't place the accent."
"Texas."
"Well, howdy," the man said, as if they were starting over, and favored Whit with his good eye. "The five oh five, eh? Heard tell that was the toughest outfit in the U.S. Army."
"We liked to think so."
"You just might of come a piece for nothing. Arn ain't the easiest sort to get hold of. What you could do is, drive on into town to the traffic light—they's but one in Tyree, and buddy I don't know what we need that'n for—then you go left and from the lumberyard it's three-quarter mile on up the cove. You'll see his store there on the left-hand side the road. Cash grocery and gas, and he's got him some cabins scattered back there 'mongst the tall trees. Rents to a few tourists ever summer but he's off the main road and the sign he put up out the other side of town don't pull 'em in none too regular. Arn, he's around the store sometimes. Hard to say when."
"How does he run a business, then?"
"Wife's there. And his nephew, Jewell, who is not too strong in the head but can make change."
"Okay, thanks."
