Gods of Howl Mountain

by Taylor Brown

  He was dancing like she figured he would be. Like she hoped. He was her age, narrow-built but man-tall, long in the leg with tight-cut pants and polished hobnail boots. He had on a chambray shirt buttoned to the throat, and his light hair was tousled rakishly atop his head. He had a big smile, all teeth, that he wore all the time. The dancers were spinning in one big circle, holding hands, and then they split into four groups of four, still spinning, and Anson went hoot-owling between the caged arms of his partners, his long legs bowing and scissoring, his heel-irons pounding the plank floor, his smile big as an upturned half-moon.

  When the song ended she went right up to him. She never was afraid, and she was the prettiest there, besides. He looked down at her, smiling.

  “I know you?” he asked.

  “Nope.” She cocked her head, showing the curved line of her neck. “But you ought to.”

  His smile grew bigger, if that were even possible.

  Lord, could she dance. All night if she wanted to, and they did. That music set her feet a-going, her eyes alight. His, too, and his hands were big and dry and warm, his body strong and taut when he touched her. Afterward, they went out under that blade moon to neck in the shadowed lee of the barn. Her blood was singing, hot. She wanted to climb him like a tree and hang in his branches.

  When other couples came out to do the same, they retreated up into the woods. The ground was cold but they didn’t care, neither of them. It was her first time. He was like a skillet-handle. He bit her ear as he pushed inside, and he felt like something pulled red-glowing from the coals. It hurt so bad and it didn’t. A year later they were married, Bonni on the way, and then he was sent to France with the rest of the boys and delivered home in a pinewood box. There wasn’t much way to make a living in the hills as a single woman, and she’d done what she had to for her daughter. Moved into one of the boardinghouse bawdies in Boone, then migrated down into the foothills, Gumtree, when the northern companies started building their textile and furniture mills, drawing cheap labor out of the mountains. A lot of lonely men, then, with a little jingle in their pockets.

  She sighed. She hadn’t disliked those days as much as she should have. Cash folded thick in her pocket, a razor tucked sharp between her breasts. A line of men hard for the soft country of her flesh. Then there was what happened to Bonni, when she swore off the world below the mountain for all time. Sometimes she wondered how she had birthed a creature so beautiful and kind. So full of light. How she had failed to protect this creature from the evils of the lower world. She had never found the men who did it, never exacted payment from their throats or hearts. Since then, her world had been slightly out of true, a wobbling top. She, with her wiles and witchcraft, had failed to set the balance aright. And now her grandson had come home with war in his blood, and she worried where it might drive him. Down what roads, long sunk beneath the flood. She worried what pain and guilt might come, slithering black through his heart. She knew them so well.

  Granny shook her head and pulled hard on the pipe, swelling her lungs with smoke, then exhaled, blowing out this blue host of worries. She let the medicine draw her again into her rocker. The stiff spindles of the chair, the hard boards beneath her feet. The mountain, solid as an army at her back. She was here. Now. She was blood and bone.

  She watched a wolf spider creep through a slanted pane of light on the edge of the porch, hunting, and she could almost hear the whisper of its legs over the boards. She heard a brace of grouse explode to flight, startled by some predator, their wings thumping the air as they rose in a storm from the trees. Closer, the bottles sang faintly from the limbs of the golden chestnut, a shifting cascade of light as the breeze nudged them. Below this crouched the old bootlegging coupe, coal-black and mean, the hood opened like a great maw. That big machine-heart gleaming under the sun, full of chambers and valves and unmade song.

  The boys scrambled here and there about the car, shirtless, black to the elbow in grease and oil. They had rags dangling from their back pockets, wrenches slung from loops in their dungarees. Their stomachs constricted into a lattice of angular planes when they breathed, their skin gleaming under the fall sun.

  Lord, if she were twenty years younger.

  * * *

  Eli leaned across the Ford toward Rory. He had a long beard, bushy as a squirrel’s tail, which might or might not have something living in it. In his hand was a glass flask of something that looked like water but wasn’t.

  “I seen your grandmama eyeing me again,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder, licked his lips. “It ain’t wholesome.”

  Rory stood from the motor and looked at him.

  “Maybe you ought to give her what she wants.”

  Eli took his beard in hand, softly, as if to comfort some pet. He cut his eyes back to the porch.

  “Shit,” he said. “That old chicken hawk?”

  Rory held out his hand.

  “Hand me those plugs.”

  Eli belched through his teeth, distracted, handing over a paper box of sparkplugs sitting on a stool beside him. He was not yet thirty, but his hands were ancient, gnarled and hardened and permanently grimed, like the roots of an oak. They had plunged into the innards of nearly every machine that crawled or panted or growled about these mountains. He kept alive a whole fleet of whiskey cars, ass-jacked coupes that sputtered and shook like ticking bombs, that exploded with power when gigged. This 1940 Ford—Maybelline—was his queen of the lot. Powered by a 331-cubic-inch ambulance motor, supercharged.

  He watched Rory fit the first plug into his wrench.

  “I heard Cooley Muldoon came by here Sunday morning.”

  Rory didn’t look up.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Oh, you know, it come up the mountain this way or that.”

  “So?”

  “So I heard you about lit his tackle afire.”

  Rory threaded the plug into the block.

  “He brought that on himself.”

  “You been gone a time. Them Muldoon boys, they ain’t like to let these things slide. Not these days.”

  Rory looked at the V-shaped house of iron beneath his hands. It had eight chambers, fired black, whose songs poured through the stainless organ pipes of the exhaust. This motor had saved him time and again, more surely than any church.

  “Fuck the Muldoons,” he said.

  Eli squeezed his beard, then uncorked the flask again.

  “You might not be as quick as you used to,” he said. “And I hear the government’s sending down some new revenuer from Washington ain’t afraid to use his gun.”

  Rory shrugged.

  “Better than a club,” he said. “Or a shovel.”

  Eli cocked his head.

  “What?”

  Rory shook his head, as if caught by a shiver, and bent again to the motor.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  I. HARVEST MOON

  Bonni saw him first in the little town library, where she liked to come during lunch. It was a small brick building, stately. She liked the silence of the place, the smell. The swish of the librarian’s skirts between the shelves. She would sit cross-legged in the deepest annals, surrounded by Zola or Yeats, and draw in her notebook, pausing now and again to eat her tomato sandwich. Here she would not be forced to speak to anyone. Instead, she would feel the silent voices of the books, each full of such power, their words floating about her like dust motes.

  Connor turned down her aisle. He was carrying three books harnessed in a leather belt, a violin case under his arm. A pair of binoculars dangled from his neck. In his mouth, a fat Magnum Bonum apple, yellow with red flushes. Seeing her, he froze, as if he’d run into a wall. Then he set his shoulders and came on. He set down the violin case on one side and the books on the other and sat between them, taking the apple from his mouth.

  Know what Magnum Bonum means?

  Bonni shook her head.

  Means “great good,” he said, holding the fleshy planet before their eyes
.

  Bonni looked down at her own apple, a hard little Granny Smith. She was not sure what to say. But the boy had already set aside his fruit.

  Know where they got the money for this place? The Carnegies. Father says they have more money than God. They’ve funded more than two thousand libraries, all over the world …

  He talked and talked.

  Bonni soon found herself nodding to his words, as if they were music.

  CHAPTER 5

  The sky was purple, the mountains dark. The lesser ridges rifled away into the distance, each successive line more ghostly than the last. A pair of headlights, bug-eyed and yellow, came bobbing up the drive, towing a long dark shape in their wake. A truck. A Ford flatbed, which squeaked to a halt before the coupe. The door clicked open and Eustace Uptree climbed down from the cab. Eli’s uncle. He was born the same year as Granny—1898—but the man seemed much older, a creature born full-grown and bearded on the mountain. A big man, bald, his beard frost-bright in the dark. Like Santa but uglier, smelling of woodsmoke and sour mash and mule sweat.

  The boys wiped their hands on the seats of their trousers as he approached. Eli leaned, whispering from the side of his mouth, “Don’t he look cheery tonight.”

  Rory watched him come, his body rumbling beneath his overalls. People said the old man could disappear in a wink, despite his size, moving sure-footed and silent through the woods like a grandfather bear. Others said it wasn’t him that disappeared, it was anyone who went hunting him. They said the mountain had subtracted over the years from the ranks of various law enforcement agencies, and who was behind it but him? They said he had been a machine gunner in the Great War, had mowed down whole companies of the Hun. It was in his eyes, they said, cold and gray as the sea. They said he had ears in the trees, spies in the woods. Every leaf was a tongue, speaking a language only the old man could hear. They said he could tell you where any stranger was at anytime on the mountain down to a foot.

  Most all of it was talk, Rory knew, the lies of gummy old men in their rockers, on their nail kegs in front of the feed store. Stories punctuated by black bullets of tobacco juice spat quivering in the dust, attended by ageless hounds that lay tongue-out in the shade like something dead. Only one thing wasn’t disputed: Eustace had gone up the mountain the day he got back from France and he hadn’t hardly come down. No one knew where he even slept. Some said never in the same place twice.

  Rory knew that wasn’t strictly true.

  The old man stood in front of them, hands on his hips, and spat.

  “Maybelline running good?”

  “As ever,” said Eli.

  Eustace looked at his nephew a moment, blinked, then extended his hand to Rory. Rory shook it. The old man’s eyes, like always now, lingered a moment on his absent foot.

  Eli cleared his throat. “It ain’t growed back yet.”

  Eustace gave Rory a deep nod, then took his nephew’s hand. This with pleasure, the knuckles crackling in his grip. Eli grimaced, trying bravely to make himself smile.

  He couldn’t.

  Eustace dropped his hand.

  “Show you what I got,” he said, turning to the truck.

  He unfastened the tie-down straps and pulled back the tarp. Half-gallon glass jars, hundreds of them, packed twelve to a crate. The zinc lids shone like neat little apprentices under the moon.

  “Hunnerd gallons of the white stuff,” he said. “Doubled and twisted.”

  He took up a jar and shook it, then held it against the sky. It swelled before them, moon-silver. People called it tiger spit or white dog, panther breath or corn or moon. The three of them watched bubbles the size of frog eyes foam and burst against the glass.

  “Good bead on it,” said Eustace. “Proof out one-twenty, at least.”

  Eli reached for a jar of his own. “I might should taste it.”

  Eustace swatted his hand away. “Git them dick-beaters off!”

  He pointed his finger at his nephew’s chest a long moment, his hand shaped like a gun.

  Eli raised his hands to his shoulders, as if this were a holdup.

  Rory cleared his throat.

  “Best get loading,” he said.

  Eustace sniffed. He replaced the jar, then jutted his chin toward the house. The porch was empty.

  “Granny home?”

  “She’s home,” said Rory. “Been smoking that pipe of hers again.”

  Eli snapped his suspenders against his chest.

  “You’re getting too old for her, Eustace. You know she likes them young.”

  Eustace spat just short of Eli’s boots.

  “You jealous, nephew?”

  “Shit,” said Eli, rocking back on his heels.

  Eustace turned and walked for the house, flicking his nephew in the balls as he passed. Eli yelped like a kicked dog, bending double.

  “Son-bitch,” he said. “Son-bitch.”

  The big man lumbered up the steps, his bulk filling the yellow pane of open door.

  Eli waddled to the truck, one hand in his pants, making sure everything was intact. He took up a jar and unscrewed the lid.

  “Son-bitch.”

  The coupe sat ass-high, ready for a load. They set the crates in one after another, and the car squatted down on its haunches like something tame, factory-built. The humped fenders housed oversize blackwalls, good for cornering, and the car had minimal brightwork. The heavy chrome had been removed, the leftover rivet holes lining the body like the work of a machine gun. Here was the car of a feed salesman or Bible-peddler or young man on his way to see about a heifer or sow. Here was the most common car on the road, in the most common color. Everything extra was hidden under the hood or behind the wheel or in the driver’s seat.

  Rory checked the tires for nails or punctures, the headlights and blinkers for light. He walked around the front of the car. The big engine was ticking from its warm-up, the hood radiating heat. The sides met in a vertical crease up front, like the prow of a U-boat, the whole car leaning into that ramlike nose.

  Rory’s arms were swelled with blood by the time they finished, jag-veined, and the nub beneath his knee ached against the leather rigging that bound it. He slid under the big steering wheel, the hoop thinly ribbed like a man’s knuckles. He looked at his watch. Half past seven. Eli shook his hand through the open window.

  “Luck,” he said, slapping the sill.

  Rory nodded and fired the big motor. It caught straight away, thundering rhythmically under the hood. He looked up at the old four-room house, log-built of ax-hewn oak with dovetailed corner timbers. The porch was sagging a little beneath the tin roof, but holding. The windows burned golden; the clay chinking shone like white stripes in the darkness. Beyond that the single-crib barn, missing a few roof boards, and the hogpen and smokehouse. Everything in its place. Not perfect but neat, the surrounding meadow flushed a deep blue under the moon.

  He depressed the clutch with his wooden foot and slid the gearshift into first. He eased the Ford from beneath the big chestnut and started down the rutted drive, wincing as the glass in the trunk protested. He looked up once in his rearview mirror. There was Eli, waving at him from beneath the dappled moon-shadow of the spirit tree. The bottles glowed in the branches above him, as if they housed some luminous substance.

  * * *

  The shadows of the trees played across the road, the interspersed moonlight rippling across the hood like an electrical current. The ridges pressed their case on every side, night-blued, here or there the lonesome flicker of a still-fire. The road spilled down out of the mountains before him like a moonlit creek. He knew it well, as he knew the lesser roads that branched along the ridges and forked down into the hollers, that swung along great walls of blasted stone and through tunnels of black oak and hickory.

  He had been driving these roads since he needed a pair of schoolbooks tucked under his butt, his load of sugar or corn or barley thudding over the ruts. First there were the local runs, in-county, delivering ingredients here or
there for Eustace’s still-hands, saving every dollar he could. He bought the Ford the day he turned fifteen, ready for the big runs out of the mountains. The car was bone-stock, unmodified. He and Eli tore the machine down, bolt by bolt, rebuilding it into a thing that roared.

  The car sat on heavy-duty springs from a one-ton pickup, with eight-ply truck tires tucked under the fenders. It had a two-speed rear end, a two-ton truck clutch, and the overhead valve motor from a wrecked ambulance. It had a McCulloch supercharger, which spooled like a tiny banshee under the hood, forcing a river of air down the iron throat of the motor. An armor plate protected the radiator. Exhaust tubing snaked doubled and twinned through the undercarriage, exiting in a growl. The car would go ninety miles per hour in low gear, booming like a weapon through the hills. There was only one name for such a machine.

  Maybelline.

  It could haul 120 gallons of whiskey in half-gallon glass jars, with four cases riding shotgun to distribute the weight. There was the rattle and clink of jars in the trunk, the machine balling down out of the mountains, crossing the hill-roads where the revenue men prowled in their unmarked cars. By sixteen, Rory could make a hundred dollars on a Saturday night—more than a week’s worth of wages cutting timber or picking lint in a mill. Plenty for a grandmother who raised him, who said she needed nothing but would, and for the mother who wanted to raise him but couldn’t.

  Then came the war.

  Floating on a hospital ship off the Korean coast, surrounded by other half-mummified men, he wondered what he would do in the mountains after the war. The timber outfits wouldn’t take a one-legged man, the mills either. He could maybe sweep floors. He came cross-country from Camp Pendleton on the long silver slug of a Greyhound bus, his discharge papers stuffed in the inner pocket of his jacket, his olive duffel riding in storage. His stump still sore, an angry knob that pulsed its hurt.