Wildwood

by Farris, John

  "But I can guess. Some sort of development. Summer homes and a golf course or two, and a big lake for rich people to scat around on in their powerboats."

  "If it's feasible, then the company wants to develop a few sites. Most of Wildwood wouldn't be touched. We know that indiscriminate development would spoil its scenic appeal."

  "But people come from all over, and the land gets spoiled in spite of your good intentions. Already happening up there in the park, and when they put that new interstate through east of here, it'll get worse than ticks on a bald dog.

  "Do you think Arn would be willing to guide me up to Tormentil?"

  She put her hands deep into the pockets of her culotte, a gesture of resignation, of withdrawal: she had done a lot of talking with accompanying graceful hand movements, and he felt a vague sense of loss.

  "You'll have to ask him. I doubt it. Even Arn never goes that far. And he's real touchy about Wildwood—more than any man, he feels it's his own private preserve. Anyway, he just might not be back here before you have to leave."

  "Did he tell you when to expect him?"

  "He never does. This time he took all the dogs. That could mean serious tracking; a week, two weeks—"

  "What is he tracking?"

  "We don't talk about the hunts," she said, and there was a searching look in her eyes momentarily, as if she were trying to think of something they did talk about that mattered. "Maybe he's after a Rooshian. That's wild boar. Arn does get a craving for boar meat now and again."

  Whit had a strong sense of being lied to; the act of lying deadened her whole face. But there seemed to be no point in pressuring her for a revised explanation.

  "While we're waiting for Arn, Terry and I might charter a plane and flyover Wildwood. I want to get a closer look at the terrain and take pictures."

  "Lon Bramlett owns a flying service. He's in Waynesville, the county seat."

  "Thanks, Faren."

  "I'll get the big cabin aired out for you. If you want to leave your luggage at the house, I'll see to it everything's put away for you. And maybe you'll plan on having supper tonight with me—with us, figuring ole Arn gets back?"

  "That sounds good. How do we find Bramlett?"

  Her hands were out of her pockets, she held her head high again. "Back down the road here to Route Nineteen, then head east and follow the signs to Waynesville. That'll be Lon's hangar and his collection of junker planes sitting around the field half a mile outside of town."

  Chapter Five

  Whit took his new Hasselblad camera with him, and two changes of lens: one telephoto, one for wide-angle photography. They found Lon Bramlett tilted back in a chair against the side of his Quonset hangar, trading jokes with a youthful mechanic who was working beneath the cowling of a war surplus Aeronca. Lon had an overdeveloped upper body and short bandy legs, a reddish nap of hairline that had receded almost to the center of his flat skull. He chewed Mail Pouch tobacco and wore aviator's sunglasses with one cracked lens, and an old khaki shirt, darned in many places, that had a faded Air Corps insignia hanging by a few threads on one sleeve. Lon got up from his chair as soon as Whit's ring told him he was shaking hands with a West Point graduate.

  "Whitman Bowers? Not related to General Blackie of the 36th Texas, are you?"

  "He was my father."

  "Well, I'll be dog. I flew your pap around a couple of times, Salerno and Utah Beach."

  "Grasshopper pilot?"

  "Yes, sir, the whole war. You know that old man of yours wasn't afraid of nothin'. He was all the time tellin' me to get lower, lower, Lon. And I'd try to explain to him, hell, General, this ain't no Mustang I'm drivin', we're so low now the krauts could shoot us down with a half a pint of spit."

  "Sounds like Blackie."

  "No offense intended, you must've come off a tall branch of the family tree somewheres, 'cause you surely don't resemble the general as I recall him. He was a plucky son of a gun, but he needed a stepladder to see over a dime."

  "I was a foster child. Blackie and Ruth adopted me just before I went off for my plebe year."

  Lon nodded. "I see. Well, sir, what can I do you for this fine mornin'?"

  "Faren Rutledge told me you might be willing to fly us over Wildwood long enough for me to take some pictures."

  Lon rubbed a stubbly jaw. "Ain't much in the way of photo opportunities from up top. Just trees and more trees. Let's see now." He looked around his field. In addition to the Airknocker the mechanic was working on, he had a couple of Piper Cubs in stages of disassembly, a Twin Beech 18, an old bi-wing Tiger Moth, a pale blue and gray camouflaged Navy Six, and an L-9, more war surplus. "The Beech'll run you sixty-five an hour on account of those big Pratts are gashogs, 'course you can't beat the comfort. But the Stinson is my best rag-wing. A three-seater, and I can fly her the rest of the week on a sawbuck's worth of fuel. I know she ain't much for looks, but Termite—he's my mechanic there, ain't much for looks nuther but he's got his A&P ticket—he keeps that engine purrin' like a whore on a hundred-dollar date."

  Whit looked over the airplane; it was painted, tentatively, several shades of red, as if Lon had been unable to make up his mind which he liked best.

  "How long would it take to fly up to Tormentil mountain and back?"

  Lon said with a slightly sour twist of the mouth, "Oh, figure half hour. Twenty-five bucks be okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Before you spend your money, only fair to tell you I don't like to joyride in that particular area. Tormentil: 'the Tormentor,' we 'un's call it."

  "Why?"

  "I was personally involved in some incidents near the mountain. One time, came near to crashin' a old Cadet I later traded off. Engine just died. And summer before last, took up a couple photographers Life magazine sent down here. They wanted photos of the area where that crazy old coot built his chateau way back when. Reckon you've heard of him?"

  "Company I work for owns Wildwood."

  "That explains your interest. Well, I know the Stinson was in perfect workin' order when I took her up. But I come to the mountain and they wanted me to fly over it, and I couldn't. Geezo Pete, all of a sudden it was like pushin' against a big wall. That ain't a word of a lie. Couldn't make no headway and I was down to stallin' speed before I could bat an eye. Veered off. Tried again. Same phenomenon. Then I started gettin' vibrations that worried me, so I hightailed it out of there, and when I got her on the ground I discovered there was a bend in the prop hadn't been there before, and it was causin' cracks in the metal around the air intakes. Lucky to have made it home. But I know of one other pilot went down in the vicinity of Tormentil, and son he ain't been found yet. The truth is, you can fly circles around the Tormentor but you can't fly over it. That air space is off limits."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. Airplane, hawk, turkey buzzardnothin' crosses over the mountain. If there's a pilot left in the tri-state area don't know to avoid Tormentil, he can count on a specific warnin'—like a main bearing in the engine goes, or suddenly he gets flipped upside down. That happened to Bob Binford, Delta captain out of Atlanta. He was flyin' his own stagger-wing Beech at the time, not a Convair, so he lived to tell about it. I'll get you within one, two miles of the mountain, but I don't want to press my luck. Already squeezed it down to the last drop, maybe, flyin' spotter planes from the Eye-talian coast to Normandy."

  Whit reached for his wallet and counted out twenty-five dollars. Lon folded the cash into his shirt pocket, relieved himself of a cheekful of tobacco juice, hitting a one-gallon lard pail from six feet away.

  While Lon was attending to his preflight checklist Terry stared at his father and then said, "Do you think-that's another tall tale?"

  "About not being able to fly over Tormentil Mountain? I'm no pilot, but I know there are freakish air currents and headwinds, particularly in mountainous areas, that can push even a big plane, a C-47 or bomber, off course. I also know pilots are a superstitious bunch, and if you've had a close call or two in a particu
lar area, you tend to stay away, blame it on gremlins or whatever. Has Lon got you spooked? You don't want to go up?"

  "Sure I do. I'm not afraid."

  When they were airborne Lon Bramlett picked up the course of the Cat Brier River and followed it north toward Tormentil on the North Carolina—Tennessee line. They could see it from a long way off, distinctive because it stood somewhat apart from the rest of the Balsams range, and because its summit came to a balding, half-scalped peak, different from the serenely rounded mountains to the west and north. A mountain with a specific and, from what Whit had been hearing, not particularly pleasant personality.

  The Tormentor.

  Lon and Whit were trying to carry on a conversation above the noise of the ninety-horsepower engine.

  "How do you happen to know Faren Rutledge?" Lon asked.

  "I just met her this morning. Served with her husband in the 82nd Airborne."

  "Beautiful woman, and far as I know she's full-blooded 'Kee. My daughter, Jen, she's workin' on her DCE down there at Holy Bible A&M in Greenville—that's what they call Bob Jones University—Jen was in school with her two years at East Tennessee State. Smart woman. Mind of her own. Not many Cherokee get college educated, particularly a foundling. Reckon I'm only tellin' you what ever'body knows already—it's a common occurrence on the Boundary. No idea who her father was. Mother died dead drunk early on, facedown in some filthy ditch water. Faren was took in by a Quaker family doing missionary service, and raised in Kingsport. They give her a good upbringin', and a sense of mission, too, judgin' from the way she takes on the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Sorriest bunch of bureaucrats ever assembled in Hog-Heaven, D.C. The Cherokee never have had much of a deal down in Qualla. Whole place used to stink to the skies, the infant mortality rate was a shame and a scandal. Now the Public Health Service is startin' to clean up the water supply and get rid of the mosquitos and rats; there's plans under way for better housing and a hospital. Faren, she must have that good Snowbird stock in her, them were the mountain Cherokee that defied the guv'mint when the rest of the tribe was removed to Oklahoma. Reckon you've heard about the Trail of Tears. She'll stand up to anybody, fight till she drops. But it finally did take a toll on her."

  "What do you mean?"

  'Heard she had a nervous breakdown a year or so ago, they had to put her away for a while. Kind of a high-strung woman anyhow, and of course Arn—you know Arn. Can't imagine he's easy to get along with, although after they got married he managed to settle down for a couple years. Nobody can figure him marryin' a Indian in the first place—but there he was, past forty, no chick and no child, and here come along this young woman, who in my humble opinion is ever bit as good a looker as Miss Audrey Hepburn, and Arn had to have her. He was always a rake, but give him credit, he weren't no rounder. His entire life all he's needed to do is just look at a woman that certain way—Son, you got to be born with it, you can't learn it—and she'd be on her back with her knees drawed up, pantin' for him to get on with the lovin'. —Guess you didn't hear that back there, did you, Terry?"

  "I heard you," he said, with a touch of scorn at being considered too childish to know about the commonplace lusts of adults. He lived in Paris. He knew a lot already.

  "So that might have been what kept the relationship goin'," Lon continued. "But it's five years and there's no kids, and Arn I'm told is away from the house most of the time, won't give up none of his ideas—"

  "What ideas?" Whit asked.

  "Don't want to prejudice you agin' Arn. Expect if you be talkin' to him, ole army buddy, he'll open up and it'll all spill out. Sometimes he just don't care how crazy he sounds. He's got somethin' to prove, and that's all that matters to him anymore."

  Whit was looking down, focusing his Hasselblad through a reasonably clean window. The hardwood wilderness beneath them shimmered, evanescent as a rainbow, not yet solidified to the choked density of high summer. Some very large oaks, slow to awaken to the more potent angle of the sun, were spiky with green but not full-leafed. You could see down through the tinted branches as if they were made of spun glass to a dark-floored limbo agitated by sparks of wildflowers. Here and there a dead tree, limbs blunted like those of ,a punished beggar standing out starkly in a well-dressed crowd. Then marshland, gilt willow and stinging sumac beside the lemony-green stains of sulfur-laden groundwater. Not so much as a single red-dog road, few clearings, no habitations or campgrounds. A view of a wide bend in the river, which he photographed; mossback boulders and the river falling deep and clear between them. The plane high above it all, black cross of shadow weightless, skimming treetops, undulating like a watery serpent.

  "Take a look at the compass," Lon advised him. "It just went diddly-shit."

  A slight, almost imperceptible shudder disturbed the airplane. A few moments later it was repeated. The air speed had dropped.

  "What's going on?" Whit asked.

  "Told you, it's the fuckin' mountain! This here's just a little sample of what we could run into."

  Whit looked past his shoulder at the altimeter. They were at seven hundred fifty feet. Clear sky, and below, more woodland, some very tall trees now interspersed with evergreens in the foothills of the looming mountain. The wilderness surrounding Tormentil looked less inviting to him, harsher in color and texture, an area where they'd be unlikely to walk away from a forced landing.

  "How close are we to the summit? About a mile?"

  "And that's too close," Lon grumbled. "Gonna dogleg it east toward Chiltoes, then head back home on the west perimeter. Tell you now, about all you'll see is some big heath balds—laurel hells, the old-time mountain men called 'em."

  The red Stinson shook gently once more as Lon changed course.

  "There used to be a spur line of the Shenandoah and Texas Railroad up to the mountain," Whit said.

  "You won't see a trace of it from the air," Lon assured him. "Probably couldn't even locate the roadbed on foot anymore."

  They were now flying uneventfully on the altered course over the foothills of the Balsams. Whit was disappointed in his first assessment of Wildwood. Access to the mountain was going to be a major problem. At least twenty miles of all-weather road was the first requirement. Looking back, he caught a glimpse of the Cat Brier, or a tributary, what appeared to be a waterfall in a vaporous glade. Build a road, build bridges, flood several hundred acres—an expensive undertaking, perhaps prohibitive, depending on the potential return. Not his money—but it was up to him to make the recommendation, and he was already tense thinking about the project. He had what Blackie used to call "a tiger in the gut," a warning that it shouldn't happen, that they must not disturb this enchanted place.

  Enchanted? Faren Rutledge's term—and an image of her solemn lovely face came to him with a vividness that was more than memory; it was as if, witchlike, she occupied his soul. He was startled from a reverie that had begun to darken at the edges, as when in childhood sleep would steal over him. Fanciful way to describe Wildwood. All he saw, in the afterglow of Faren's watchful eyes, was a spectacular woodland, grandeur he hadn't been prepared for by the maps and old black-andwhite photos. A sanctuary.

  The mountain was a different matter. He had felt the trembling of the airplane in his bones. Clear air turbulence, he reasoned. Not some invisible barrier turning them away. But instinctively he disliked—no, hated—Tormentil. He had observed the bulging set of Lon's jaw, the way he worriedly drew a fist across his chin as, for a couple of moments, Lon's reliable old bird had failed to respond to the controls.

  Whit tried to imagine what it would be like parachuting onto the Tormentor. It would mean certain injury, perhaps death. He had seen, from a mile away, only the spires of mighty balsam and spruce and several shallow depressions in all that shadowed greenery, freckled with spring color. The heath balds Lon had mentioned, deceptive in their beauty. He knew they would be one vast tangle of thorny little trees.

  Nevertheless, in order to make a recommendation to at least bring in the survey crews
, he needed to climb Tormentil. Arn Rutledge knew the best way to get there, if any man did. Faren had suggested that Wildwood was her husband's "private preserve." But he didn't own a square foot of the land, and no matter how much he resented the assumed encroachment, he might, like everyone else, have to take a step or two back out of the way of progress.

  Chapter Six

  Arn Rutledge heard Lon Bramlett's Stinson off to the west felt a twinge of attraction but didn't trouble to look up from his place of concealment near the leafy glade he'd staked out for the past twenty hours. The intrusion of the slowly motoring plane was only a minor annoyance, and the sound of its engine had faded within thirty seconds as it flew toward Tormentil. Am kept his eyes on the lightly misted bathing place which he knew the girl favored because of hot springs that fed the wide pool at the base of a waterfall.

  His dogs had led him to a woodfem niche enclosed by boulders, where she'd made her toilet recently, fastidiously covering her droppings with a grasp of mint leaves before stepping down (probably, he speculated, able to go no deeper than her waist) into the water. He looked forward to seeing how she managed her bath. It had been a while since his first and only glimpse of her, as if .through veils and the blazing red leaves of autumn's zenith. His body tended to stiffen too easily nowadays, there was a persistent ache in his left shoulder, but his eyes had never gone back on him.

  Just a glimpse. Since then she had never been far from his mind, or out of his restless dreams.

  Now the dogs were tied up more than a mile behind him, in the lee of an ocoee overhang, occupied with their day-old bones or catching forty winks in the cold shade. And he was alone with his gray-steel Winchester rifle, a razor-edged knife that his father had made from the broken blade of a crosscut saw, the net he'd knotted together from strong twine.

  From the first glimmer of day he'd held his position, not moving as much as a foot in any direction even when he had to piss, accomplishing that with a minimum of movement, lying on his side, good strong flow and arc for a man of his years, who had had a wealth of pussy since he was thirteen and drunk his part of whatever was handed to him. Even while relieving himself he never took his eyes from the bathing place. He had at his back a ledge of rock overgrown with blueberry and sand myrtle so thickly intertwined a titmouse couldn't hop through it without his hearing. Profuse nettles made him invulnerable to attack from either side of the natural blind. Juncoes and sparrows twittered in and out, a red squirrel dug in the soft ground for hickory nuts, paying him no mind. He was perfectly at home in this scheme of things, just a little sore from waiting. He knew she would come eventually; but he did not know if she would come alone. If there was more than one of them, he had decided he would shoot quickly, to kill. Regrettably but necessarily the girl would die first, from a 30-'06 bullet dead-center of her fair and unlined brow.