by Taylor Brown
Kingman looked out at the long ranks of hickory trees, each straight-spined as an infantryman.
“To become tables and chairs,” he said. “What a shame.”
“What?”
Kingman turned.
“A lamentation, Docherty. Now, let us see what you have in the trunk.”
He held out his hand. Another agent stepped forward and handed him the keys.
“You do know I was leaving town?”
Kingman sighed and stuck the key in the lock.
“Mr. Docherty, I know all sorts of things.” He opened the trunk. “I know, for instance, that you are easier to catch on your way out of town, when you assume the law won’t be pursuing you. When you won’t resort to oil slicks or caltrops or some other improvised device.”
Rory didn’t say anything.
The man patted the big tank in the trunk, a hollow thud.
“I know this tank is empty. I knew it would be. I could, of course, impound the vehicle and cut it open, check for residue.”
“Whatever tickles your tackle.”
Kingman smiled. It was a tired smile, as if he found all of this taxing. As if it pained him to be cruel.
“The thing is, Mr. Docherty, I know even more useful things. I know, for instance, a number of people in the state department of corrections. In Raleigh? They tell me the washouts, the ones let go for mistreating prisoners and such—several have ended up as orderlies in the state psychiatric hospital. Dix Hill?”
Rory stiffened.
“One of them oversees an inmate there. Bonni Docherty? You might know her. I tell you, those washouts from corrections, they’re downright mean, some of them. Spend too much time in lockup alongside killers and pederasts. Rubs off on them, I guess. A contagion. They’ll throw somebody in a straitjacket just for nothing. Beat them silly first, of course. Get them so bruised they have no way to lie on the floor that doesn’t hurt.” He sighed through his teeth, shook his head. “And what they’ve been known to do to female prisoners? With their batons and all? I tell you, it’s medieval, son. Attila the Hun would turn his head.”
Rory licked his lips.
“What is it you want?”
Kingman set his knuckles on his hips again, two a side. He leaned close to Rory’s face.
“The big prize, boy. Eustace Uptree. And I want him tonight.”
* * *
Rory rode handcuffed in the back of his own car, shivering, while Kingman sat shotgun. One of his agents drove. A crimson Hudson trailed them, the Muldoon machine impounded the week before—the one with a tommy gun found on the floorboard. A party of still-raiders couldn’t drive a string of their own vehicles up the mountain, not if they meant to surprise anyone. Eustace had spotters posted along the roads, old women on porches who knew a government car when they saw one, who could discern the factory purr of a federal unit from the loping throb of a whiskey car. Some had shortwave radios, the dials already set.
Kingman looked back at him.
“Comfy, sweetheart? You want a blanket?”
They’d pressed him against the side of the car and stripped him of his shirt and jacket, then poured a canteen of water down his spine, over the swell of his chest. A cold cloak of pain, the icy fingers slipping beneath his waistband, sucking short his breath. Now they drove with the windows down, their elbows perched on the sills. Casual-like. The wind lashed and tore at his flesh, a frenzy of white teeth ripping him down to the bone. He could close his eyes and see wolves, ice-white, like ghosts of their kind. A whirlwind around him. A white death. He tucked his hands trembling between his knees, heaving, trying to flush blood into the dead pale of his flesh, to will some fire of rage or spirit into the upper branches of himself. Whatever might warm him. His jaw chattered uncontrollably; he could no longer feel his heart. It was buried deep in his breast, blue as a stone.
He thrust his chin at the men.
“I been cold,” he said. “This ain’t it.”
Kingman just smiled. He seemed to know what he was doing. He would wring out the prisoner’s energy, suck him dry of will. Leave nothing for deception. Hunger was good. Cold was better. He took his revolver from the holster beneath his arm and swung out the cylinder. One of the chambers was empty, where the hammer rested during daily carry. Kingman took an extra shell from his pocket and slid it home. A ring of brass rounds, glinting like small gold coins. He pushed the cylinder back into place and slid the pistol beneath his armpit, then looked over his shoulder at Rory.
“Never can be too careful up amongst the savages.”
Rory tucked his lips inside his mouth. They were bloodless, he knew. Bluing.
“You really are a bastard, aren’t you?”
“You just keep giving the directions, sweetheart, and try not to freeze to death.”
Rory sat back and stared through the windshield. They were in the foothills now, the road rolling and twisting through vast forests of hardwood. Before them the mountains shouldered into the sky, the swells of a great black sea that might just swallow them up. A cold sea. Rory tried to find a lighted place inside him, a warm place, but couldn’t. No temple. No chambers of stone. The warm rivers that ran him were going cold, darkening. He leaned forward, the words coming strange from his wind-numbed lips.
“You have to strong-arm Cooley into turncoating, or was he just itching to make a run at me?”
Kingman pulled Rory’s little automatic from his back pocket. An ugly look on his face, like he’d sat on a wad of gum.
“Little of both, I suppose.”
Rory watched him.
“What about that pistol? Cooley wouldn’t have known about that. The Sheriff, maybe. He tell you? He the one set me up for this?”
Kingman sighed and put the pistol in the glove box.
“Sometimes a man’s whole life is a setup, Mr. Docherty, and he doesn’t even know it. It’s a fate that always surprises. I’ve seen it time and again.”
“And what, you think that’s what I got coming down the pike?”
Kingman shrugged.
“I can’t say yet, but I’m a curious man.”
“You do know what they say about curiosity, don’t you?”
Kingman cleared his throat.
“‘Helter-skelter, hang sorrow, care will kill a cat, up-tails all, and a pox on the hangman.’” His eyes flashed over his shoulder, his mustache arched like wings. “The playwright Ben Jonson. Every Man in His Humour, fifteen hundred and ninety-eight.”
Rory narrowed his eyes at him.
“You are by far the queerest revenuer they ever shat out of Washington.”
“It’s possible you have a narrow view of the world, Mr. Docherty.”
Rory raised his cuffed wrists, cupping his palms.
“Here now, I thought I had it all just sitting in my hands.”
Just then a white light flared through the cabin, and the green whale of Cooley’s Hudson roared past them in the other lane. Rory could have sworn he heard, in the wake of the machine, the scream of a panther-cat.
CHAPTER 24
It was nearing midnight. The sky looked ice-glittered, a black veil cast over the sleeping ridges. Granny locked her jaws against a yawn, the cold sucked whistling through her teeth. Slowly she stood, her joints rusty and night-seized, popping and smarting as she rose. Her hips ground in their sockets like seeds in a mortar bowl. Her thighbones were a pair of heavy pestles. Her back an old king post, worm-eaten and warping under the raftered weight of her collarbones. Used to be, she could stay awake all night if she wished, neither man nor coffee needed to race her blood. Now she could use a little of each.
She set the shotgun against the wall and stepped through the door, feeling the aural heat of the woodstove. A tiny hell seen flickering through the slit windows of the iron door. A pot of coffee sat warming on top. She drained the dregs of her previous cup, then tilted the blue well of the mug to the firelight. She would see what signs the grounds had left, what emblem of the world to come. The firelight li
cked down into the enameled hollow, glazing a coil of remnant grounds, and the sign rose to the red dart of her tongue: snake. An omen of both deception and wisdom in the annals of sign lore.
She tilted the mug this way and that, the serpent alive and glistening in its well, and she saw that it had struck itself. She saw jaws unhinging over a ribbed tail, and she did not know which omen would be swallowed rattling into its throat. Wisdom or deceit. Surely one would destroy the other. She splashed a little extra coffee into the mug and swirled the grounds, erasing the sign, crushing the snake yet finer between her teeth.
The language of sign, like so much the old widow had taught her those winters back, seemed but a skeleton-work of knowledge, the final weights and portents waiting to be fleshed and filled. Granny knew the remedies she prescribed—the herbs and roots and tinctures—were in part but talismans, the faith that imbued them more powerful than any sum of their ingredients. A faith of which she must stand as her own deep well, ladling its remedy among they who came to her porch in supplication. Sometimes it was a heavy weight to carry, and little wonder the old widow had made her to sit three days alone under a falling snow. Somehow, the burden felt heavy tonight. Her body old.
She was refilling the cup when the planks trembled beneath her feet, bespeaking intrusion, a foot on the porch, and she was out the door in an instant, mug in hand, ready to cast a wing of scorching coffee into the face of the intruder. No one. The world was still. Then Eli appeared from the trees, as if tardy to the sound of his own steps on the porch. He was plodding, head down, and she knew right then that the holy-oiled ginseng had not worked as hoped. He stopped at the edge of the porch and raised his head, his face purpled and swollen like a battered, bottom-barrel fruit.
“Jesus, son. What did you run into?”
“About twenty knuckles and a steel-toed boot.”
“Sit.” She pointed to the rocker beside her. “Talk.”
He climbed the porch steps and sat with his elbows on his knees, tugging two-handed on his beard. She watched him.
“I ain’t got all night, son. Come now, spit it out.”
He turned an eye up at her through the bruised flesh of his brow.
“You think it’s easy to talk about?”
Granny sniffed.
“If you come all this way to waste a old lady’s time—”
“Okay, okay. Jesus. Here goes.” He cracked his knuckles. “I figured it all started at the church supper last week. Rory, he met these couple girls from the teaching college, were asking him about getting them some whiskey. Said they had a party coming up. Well, him being all knotted up on that Gumtree girl, he told them to come see me if it was whiskey they were after. Which they done. And let me tell you, they were a right fair couple of gals when they shown up, bright teeth, skin like—”
Granny spat on the porch planks, a hard smack like a period. Eli cleared his throat.
“Anyhow, I show up about nine o’clock tonight at this boardinghouse of theirs with a half gallon of high-proof, as agreed. I figure I’ll be the spark of the party, you know, bringing that stuff. But they don’t crack the door but a inch and slide the money through edgewise, tell me to leave the whiskey there in the hall by the door. I can hear the party going on in there, glasses tinkling, people laughing, and they send me packing with a two-dollar tip.”
He shook his head, pulled on his beard.
“I was feeling pretty sorry at that point, so I had a quarter jar and went on down to the roadhouse. Thought I’d see Edna-Lynn. I turn up, there’s not one but two old boys coming out her door—together—the both of them tucking in their shirts. Big timber-cuttin’ sons of bitches, drunk as Cooter Brown. I been using the root like you told me—anointin’ myself—and I was pretty good down there, like old times. Then she pulled me in the door and we start fooling around—and just like that, it starts to wilting on me, sliding home like a worm in the dirt. She goes to work on it and it’s nothing doing, like last time, but this time she doesn’t have the patience. Says, ‘I always did know you was a queer.’ Kicks me out the door before I even got my trousers up.
“I come downstairs and there’s them two timber-cutters bellied up at the bar, drinking whiskey, and one of them says with this big shit-licking grin: ‘Some matter, bud? She ain’t like that rope you was pushing?’ I’d like to think I loosened a couple of his teeth with that first punch, but that was the only one I got in. I made their night for them, I reckon. They got laid and drunk and whupped a man’s ass—it don’t get much better on a Saturday night for a couple sons of bitches like that.”
He shook his head, his breath shuddering from his lungs.
Granny patted his knee.
“Let me get you something for them shiners.”
She started to rise but he caught her wrist, the shock of his rough hand dizzying her slightly.
“It wasn’t the shiners I come about. It was … the other thing.”
Granny looked down at him. Her blood drummed in her ears.
“I know, son. And don’t you worry. I got just the thing.”
She went inside and got down a jar of high wine she kept hidden on the topmost shelf, triple-distilled corn liquor north of 190-proof. She funneled a double-dram into a brown glass vial of ground ginseng and shook it for a full minute, then poured the tincture over a sugar cube set into a teacup. She opened a trifle-box and got out Anson’s windproof lighter, the one made from a brass bullet casing—sent home with his body—and walked back outside. The wind had picked up, the black branches clutching one another, the bottles moaning. She held the teacup before Eli’s lumped and broken face.
“Hold it steady,” she said.
He took the cup in both hands.
“What is it?”
“Hush.”
She snapped the thumbwheel of the lighter. There sparked an orange leaf of flame that quivered in the night. She set the potion alight, a cold blue cone of flame held hissing between them. Now she bent forward, close to his face, and blew it out. A curl of whiskey smoke.
“Drink.”
He turned the cup to his mouth, both-handed, his long throat working down the scorched potion. His head whipped back and forth in the wake of the dose.
“Got-damn,” he whispered.
She took the cup from him.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “One more thing.”
She went back into the house and slipped off her boots and set the woodstove to roaring. An iron hiss traveled up the stovepipe. She slipped off the shawl she wore and the sweater, too, and she knew he could hear the pad of her bare feet along the cold-groaning floors, the squeak of the stove-door. When she stepped again onto the porch, she was wearing nothing save her old faded dress, the thin calico no help against the night. Cold, black fingers slid under her arms and along her ribs, around her neck and up the backs of her legs. Seeking her heat. She stood over him, and she could feel herself whelming with the power of old, his blood rising beneath her. His breath gone ragged in his throat. She watched his eyes widen as she unlaced the bodice of the dress. The flaps swung open like a set of saloon doors, her breasts uncaged. They hung shapely and blue-veined against her ribs, the nipples pert despite their age, buttonlike in the cold. His mouth was open, his eyes fixed, his face stunned as if with religion.
“See something you like?”
He nodded, not daring to blink.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her eyes roved him. Settled somewhere.
“Sporting a sapling down there, are ye?”
He breathed in, licking his lips.
“Oak,” he said.
She knelt before him.
“Sounds serious,” she said. “I might should take a look.”
* * *
The men crowded the trunk of the crimson Hudson, divvying up their raiding tools: shotguns and axes, black-taped bouquets of dynamite. Rory stood shivering next to the warm hood of Maybelline, his shoulders rolled forward, his cuffed hands
clenched at his belt. Between his palms, clutched like a talisman, was the key to the Ford, stolen while the men tightened their boot laces and filled their pockets with shot shells. He tried to control his body but couldn’t. Shivers wracked him, again and again. The sound of clicking jaws filled his skull.
Here came Kingman, his tie tucked between the buttons of his shirt, a shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. A man out hunting pheasant or grouse. He smiled.
“Douse him again,” he said.
The water, so cold, hit him like a sledge. He fell to his knees, his hands thrust between his thighs. His lungs burned, fighting for air. He could see his spirit escaping from his mouth, ghost-white. He blinked, looking up at Kingman.
“I shouldn’t warn you, but I will. He already knows you’re here. He’s ready. He’s been ready for you his whole life.”
Kingman fingered his mustache.
“Get up, boy, and start walking. Stop once, I’ll shoot you in the back.”
Rory rose, swaying on his wooden leg, and led them past Eustace’s army truck, which was covered in a camouflaged net, and on into the trees. The same trail that he and Eli had taken. The half-moon was out, spilling ragged and broken onto the narrow path. The agents filed behind him like commandos on patrol. Rory could hear them breathing. He looked over his shoulder. Men in hats and ties and boots, their mouths smoking like barrel-fires in the cold. Their fingers were curled over the triggers of their pump guns. All but Kingman, who strode square-faced and hatless at their rear, his shotgun cradled against his chest. He winked again. Rory shook his head, looked away. The man no longer bothered him. None of them did. He was out of their domain, at the edge of their laws. Up here, it wasn’t them he feared.
The trees made an archway before them, breaking onto the moonlit bald. The rushing darkness of the creek gleamed silver-skinned under the moon, cutting through the purple meadow grass in a whisper. A cruel wind came lashing down the mountain, moaning like a ghost, burning the shivers from his skin. He could feel his blood slowed, darkened, the cold creeping into his hollows like a spell. Like it had in those other mountains, a world away, when you could only care so long. When you wanted only to sleep.
