Gods of Howl Mountain

by Taylor Brown

  Above them stood the cloud forest of the summit, a black castle of spruce and fir. He started the raiders across the meadow, climbing toward the high trees. The meadow grass bent and whirled, catching long whips of wind, and Rory struggled, his boots slipping in the dirt. His hands were numb, his face. He felt strange to himself, bloodless, his flesh the flesh of a stranger. The stars watched him, high and bright, uncaring. The moon hung broken among them, like a hunk of hammer-split stone. They were halfway up the slope, following the creek that zagged through the grass, when Rory stopped. He stood flat-footed, closing his eyes.

  Keep walking, boy, or you never will.

  The rack of a shotgun behind his back, loud across the meadow, and he opened his eyes. He looked at the black forest above them, waiting. He knew what would come.

  A flash from the trees, fire-colored, and the night shuddered and cracked, rent by a long streak of light. Now more of them, a staccato burst of flame from the trees, and the night was slashed with machine-gun fire, bright fates searing down from the summit like a judgment. The earth rose up at their feet, black-sprung, and there was no cover. Rory turned, and the revenue men were already in flight, their shotguns useless at such range. They were running headlong for the lower tree line, tracers chasing after them like lightning unbent, chewing at their heels.

  Rory tried to follow in their wake, hurling his wooden foot down the slope in his stunted dash, hearing the hot zip of rounds, the smack of lead in soil. His wooden leg buckled underneath him and he fell crashing and tumbling down the slope, end over end, limbs askew, seeing grass and dirt and stars. The creek wheeled overhead and he crashed into the glitter. Cold struck his temple like a hammer. He raised his head dripping from the creek, coughing water onto his chest. He was upended, his legs splayed on the bank above him. His foot gone, torn loose in the fall. A flat twist of trouser leg. The stars leered over him, swirling like glow flies, and he was so tired. He wanted only to sleep. He was numb. He was struggling, dizzied, fighting to right himself, when a new mountain rose against the sky.

  Eustace.

  The old man stood at the edge of the bank, an ancient machine gun shelved across his belly. The bipod was spread, the muzzle smoking. He swung the long boom of the liquid-cooled barrel toward Rory’s face.

  “Ought to do you here like a lame animal. Put you out your misery.”

  Rory looked down the black tunnel of the gun. He imagined himself blown mindless into the creek, his red selfhood sliding in bright threads down the mountain, into the valleys and lowlands. He didn’t want it that way, but all his wanting had retreated down into the deep of him, so cold he could hardly feel it.

  “It’d be a neat place to do it,” he said. “Little cleanup.”

  Eustace crouched before him, a smile belying what was in his eyes. What malevolent light. His forked spoon peeked from the bib pocket of his overalls, shining, too, a mean little face catching the moon.

  “You think you’ll live from crossing me?”

  “I didn’t count on it.”

  “That’s smart.”

  “They were threatening her.”

  “Granny?”

  “Mama. That new agent, Kingman, said he’d have her straitjacketed. Beaten. Said they’d do … bad things.” He took in a breath, held it, looked the old man square in the eyes, steady as he could. His only shot. “I done what they told me to, Eustace, and I would again. What would you do, it was your mother?”

  Eustace looked at him a long time, his head slightly cocked. Rory could see thoughts silvering behind the man’s eyes.

  “The same,” said Eustace. “I would of done the same.”

  Now the old man rose, swinging the barrel away from Rory’s face. He looked down the slope, sure as a lord.

  “How was it they caught you?”

  Rory sat up. A cold ball of pain in his skull, heavy as stone. He tried to blink it away.

  “They had another tripper in a pursuit car. That Cooley Muldoon.”

  “And they were waiting for you?”

  “Yes, sir. I think they tried it last week, but I didn’t bite.”

  “You seen the Sheriff tonight?”

  Rory nodded.

  Eustace swelled with breath. He lifted his head and squinted at the stars, as if reading them for signs.

  “There’s something I got to tell you, son.” He paused, licked his lips. “Something I been keeping from you. About Sheriff Adderholt.”

  “Keeping?”

  Eustace rubbed the top of the rifle with one hand, nodded.

  “He’s got to give them revenuers somebody every once in a while, just to keep his place. This new one, surely. Kingman. But that ain’t what I’m talking about.” Eustace looked out across the meadow, pinched his beard. “Goes back a long time,” he said. “Having to do with that mill boss’s son. And your mama.”

  “What about them?”

  Eustace had a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Winston Adderholt, see, he was the one done them all that.”

  “Say what now?”

  “It was him,” said Eustace. “That done it.”

  “That beat Gaston to death?”

  “And struck your mama dumb.”

  Rory’s eyes burned.

  “No.”

  Eustace nodded again.

  “Them Adderholt brothers was kings of the valley before they flooded it. Asa trucking the whiskey and Win—just a deputy then—running protection. Thought they was kings of the world. Win, he was sweet on Bonni, see, and she was the one thing he couldn’t have. That only that mill boss’s son could. So Winston, he went and showed them what was what.”

  “No,” said Rory.

  Eustace tugged on his beard and nodded.

  “I’m sorry, son.”

  “How you know it was him?”

  “I had ears in that valley, son. I know. There ain’t much I don’t.”

  “And you never did nothing?”

  Eustace bit his bottom lip.

  “The valley wasn’t mine to law.” He paused. “And it wasn’t blood.”

  Rory turned his head and spat.

  “You ever tell Granny this?”

  Eustace shook his head.

  “Never. She would of got herself kilt.”

  “And you weren’t gonna tell me, neither?”

  “I was waiting, son. Till you was old enough.” Eustace twisted his pinch of beard into a knot. “Till I knowed you could do it.”

  “Do what?”

  Eustace’s breath fogged the air, clouding against the fir-darkness of the mountain. This great black temple of stone and tree and root. The cruel moons of his eyes glowed.

  “What has to be done.”

  * * *

  Granny woke, eyes wide, sensing a shudder in the night, a rapid-struck thunder from high on the mountain. An echo of her dreamworld or the one without. She looked to her bedroom window. Light flared, but it was early yet for dawn, and the word rose panicked against her throat: fire.

  She threw off the quilt and scrambled from bed, Eli groaning as she crawled over him, his mind still thick with sleep. Her bare feet hit the floorboards and she raced across the cabin, taking up the shotgun and unbarring the door. She pounded down the front steps and around the back of the place, where she froze flat-footed as if before a wall. The stilted little house of the chicken coop was aflame, a hellish crown of licking tongues racing high into the darkness. The square door was latched closed, the ladder kicked away, the gray-weathered walls scorched in evil black teeth. They were climbing toward the sloped roof.

  Eli came scurrying up beside her, still trying to buckle his trousers. Before he could grasp her arm, she was dashing toward the fire, unheeding of his cries, one arm shielding her face from the blaze. She turned the shotgun butt-first and drove the stock through the leaping flames once, twice, busting the crude wooden latch on the door. It swung open and out burst a long slug of smoke, a stricken hen squawking and flapping into the cold night that wouldn’t save it
. It tumbled to the earth, and then others poured out, a whole shot-blast of them arcing in smoking trajectories across the yard, crashing in spats of feathers.

  Granny was already running again, her bare feet crunching in the frosted grass, Eli hollering behind her. She burst through the tree line, ripping through tangles of branches and brambles, the moon shorn ragged upon the forest floor. She could feel her flesh burning in tiger stripes of blood, the very trees and shrubs and briars trying to hold her back, a thousand outstretched arms. She tore through them, her nightgown falling away in white rags, a flock of tiny ghosts left fluttering in her wake, hanging on branches and thorns, and she splashed knee-deep through the icy sluice of the creek and knew she was close. She saw white lights dancing through the trees, bodiless as the spook-lights of lore, and then the hulking machine that bore them emerged from the darkness, growling in the road. A specter in a flannel shirt rose from where it squatted before a blown tire. It leapt across the hood and around the open door, one hand yanking the column shifter into reverse even as she burst from the trees and leveled the shotgun. The machine roared, retreating in a storm of dust, and the gun bucked against her shoulder. A fist-size crater opened in the center of the windshield, the glass spidering in long crooked legs, but the big machine kept backpedaling down the road, undaunted.

  Her heart was crashing in her breast, her face burning like a skillet. She fell to her knees at the edge of the iron-spiked road, cursing her aim. Later: strong hands beneath her arms, lifting her upon jellied legs, and then the long ride through the night-forest, her limbs dangling from Eli’s arms, her head against his shoulder, the white shreds of her nightgown sighting the way home.

  CHAPTER 25

  Rory stood behind the house, a quilt covering his shoulders. The black rubble of the chicken coop whispered smoke. The world lay undawned, cauled yet in hoarfrost, the chickens arranged in crazed attitudes about the yard. Charred lumps of beaks and feet, empty sockets of heat-burst eyes. He waited for anger to flame up inside him, or hate. None did. His blood ran cool despite the quilt, through lands strange and cold and mute.

  Eli came up beside him, swollen-eyed, a steaming mug held out.

  “Granny says for you to drink this here tea.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “The hell you don’t. You look like something drug from the bottom of the lake.”

  “Just pour it out and tell her I drunk it.”

  “I ain’t lying for you.”

  Rory took it. The mug tingled in his bloodless hands.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I seen her boiling something looked like root bark.”

  Rory sniffed the tea. Sassafras.

  “She ought to be the one drinking the stuff.”

  “She is. I seen to that.”

  Rory lifted the mug to his lips but didn’t drink. Instead he looked at Eli over the rim, the purple-blue lumps of his friend’s face.

  “Them timber-cutters did you a number.”

  “Least one of them will be shitting out a tooth or two this morning.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Nothing. Just some drunks shooting off at the mouth.”

  “Well, I reckon we ought to be thanking them. They hadn’t busted your face, you wouldn’t been up here getting looked after. Who knows what might of happened to her.”

  Eli examined his boots.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I reckon so.”

  Rory leaned on his wooden leg. He’d climbed from the creek last night to find it standing where Eustace had been, a gun-shaped hollow in the calf.

  “Listen, I need to borrow a car today.”

  “You want the shop truck?”

  “Will it make it to Raleigh and back?”

  “Raleigh? Hellfire, you ought to be in bed, not driving halfway across the state. I’m sure your mama would understand.”

  Rory looked down into the mug, the steam condensing like fever-sweat on his nose and cheeks. When he looked up, his face felt cold, hard.

  “I’m not asking for advice just now, only if I can borrow a car.”

  Eli looked a long moment at him, then spat.

  “You can borrow that Merc I been working on. Owner ain’t paid his bill.” He looked back toward the house. “Poor Maybelline.”

  The car was sitting in the front yard on shot-out tires. The windows were riddled, the glass blown pebbled across the seats and floor, the front grille punctured with a blast of buckshot. The work of vengeful revenue men. The machine had limped home, the flats skidding in the dirt, the engine running hot. Rory fighting the wheel, drunk with cold.

  He scratched his neck.

  “We best get to work on her directly. I need her ready come Friday.”

  “Friday?”

  “For the speedway.”

  Eli straightened, his eyes widening under the bruised ledge of his brow.

  “Change of heart?”

  “I reckon.”

  “What about the cost?”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  Eli’s eyes narrowed in their purple pouches.

  “What about Cooley Muldoon?”

  “Him, too.”

  “You get on that track, he’s liable to kill you.”

  Rory sipped once from the mug, a hot root reaching down into his belly. Warming, grounding.

  “He’s liable to kill me if I don’t.”

  He poured out the rest of the tea undrunk, a steaming patter in the grass.

  * * *

  He thought of his mother as he drove. She’d sat three days in that old cabin by the river, staring at the boy they killed. They had to peel her from the floor, the blood glued to her like a shroud. She said nothing, her voice fled from her throat. Her head swollen. Her eyes vacant, as if her spirit had been loosed with the dead man’s, her body shuffling on by rote. At first, the doctors said it was only the shock. That she would snap out of it, the dam broken, her voice returning in a bright gush that never came.

  Rory was wild with worry, imagining how they might have hurt her. Kingman calling in favors among the orderlies, a burly ex-screw in yellowing smock who’d more than once stepped into a cell and keyed the lock, dropping a thick wad of spit like a gift onto the end of his baton. He thought of what he would do to such a man. How he would paint the walls with his blood. He knew Kingman was likely bluffing, but his heart wouldn’t listen. It was going like a siren, wailing in his chest. He could see stars at the edges of his vision before he realized he was holding his breath.

  He breathed in, out. He tried to remember that temple in Korea. The safety, the calm. He could not seem to find the place in his mind. He stepped only deeper into the accelerator, the oaks of Raleigh lashing past the windows. He was constantly yanking through the gears, roaring past slow-going church traffic. Twice he went up over the curb; stop signs were but suggestions. The Colt, which Kingman had left in the glove box, rode shotgun. In the parking lot of the asylum, Rory hiked up his pantleg and fitted the gun back into the cutout of his leg.

  She was the same as always when they brought her out. Unhurt, if you could call it that. A shy, gentle creature still unaccustomed to the scraping chairs and chatter of the visiting room. Her eyes bright, unguarded, as if someone had broken the shield she carried against the world. As if the light inside her could be seen naked, leaking out.

  She put her hands on his and smiled.

  “Hey, Mama,” he said. “You been doing good?”

  She nodded, her black hair falling forward to frame her face.

  “Nobody’s been mistreating you, have they?”

  She shook her head.

  He kneaded the knuckles of her hands under his thumbs. Bony ranges underneath the skin, a whole mountainous country he hardly knew.

  “I come to tell you something, Mama.” He looked down at their clasped hands, then up. Her eyes shone, waiting. “I know who it was that done it.”

  She cocked her head slightly, still smiling.

&n
bsp; “Who murdered him.” He paused. “The Gaston boy.”

  Her chin began to slide sideways, as if in deflection.

  Rory leaned closer, lowering his voice.

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  Her cheek was fully turned to him now, her eyes wide, like a shooed-at horse. Her mouth opened but nothing came out. She began to shake her head, her hair rising in dark wings to either side. Her grip on his hands tightened. She was so strong it frightened him. An otherworldly strength. A clinging desperation, as if she were being ripped away from him.

  Then she was.

  The orderlies had seen what was happening, that she was having some kind of fit. Two of them came white-smocked to pull her from the table, but she wouldn’t let go. She had Rory’s hands, tight-clasped, and he hers. The tabletop was rocking beneath them, the chairs knocked skittering across the floor. Then the duty nurse came hurrying from her station, needle in hand, and Rory looked into his mother’s face. Such fear in her eyes, the orderlies might have been monsters coming to drag her into a well. The nurse pulled the hood off of the needle, flicking the vial, and Rory let go, his limp fingers sliding through her hands, and the orderlies had her now, each wrangling an arm. They dragged her kicking and writhing from the room, her shoes squeaking on the floor. Just before they reached the door she looked right at him, and it was like he was the thing she was afraid of. The monster. The tendons of her neck flexed, a sudden deepening of vents and hollows, as if she might speak some words wedged hard against her throat. Then she was through the swinging doors, gone.

  Rory stood, his mouth dry, his heart thumping. There did not seem to be enough air in the room. He found the head orderly, Alvin, in the hallway that led to the waiting room.

  “What happened in there?”

  Rory sniffed and held out an envelope.

  “Don’t worry about it.”