The Borrowed World (Book 4): No Time For Mourning

by Franklin Horton

  It was about feeding a hunger.

  Around midday, Tommy took up his guns and retrieved two jars of stewed venison from the canning in the springhouse. He went to the charred remains of his parents’ home, rubbed some charcoal on his fingertips, and smudged his face with black stripes for camouflage. He walked through the woods to the property line between his land and that belonging to the Cross family. He walked with ever-increasing caution until he found himself in the woods outside their home.

  His presence was quickly detected by the two short-haired curs sleeping in the patchy yard. Tommy immediately opened the venison jars. The smell reached the dogs’ nostrils, stirring their hunger. Motivated by their stomachs, the dogs chose to investigate rather than start barking. When they tracked him to a shadowy clump of brush, he tossed chunks of the stewed meat in their direction. They flinched at his movement, but soon realized that he was feeding them and not threatening them. They abandoned their responsibility as guardians of the Cross home and stood a safe distance from Tommy, waiting on him to throw them more chunks of meat. He’d always had a way with dogs. They both shared the simple belief that friends brought food. As a bringer of food, he was their new friend and he was welcome.

  He watched the family’s movements from a distance. He had no idea who lived at the house before the terror attacks. The only people he saw coming and going now were Lisa, her uncle, her dad, and his wife. They may have only been four people, but they held the collective meanness of any group of two dozen on the planet. People who knew the family said it was the matriarch, Oma Cross, who was the cold core of the family. She was bitter and scornful, having raised her children at the business end of a stick, a belt, and occasionally even a fist. The children’s accomplishments went unnoticed. Transgressions were met with a fury that led to bruising and scars. In the same way that Oma Cross made her family tremble under her gaze, her family went on to do the same for the community at large. Oma sowed the seeds; the community suffered the bitter harvest.

  Tommy sat in his hide with the stillness of a hunter. He sat so quietly that the wildlife came to ignore his presence. A squirrel scrabbled down the very tree that Tommy lay against, running onto his shoulder before realizing its error and fleeing. A misshapen cat of questionable genetics walked up on him as it scoured the weedy hills for rodents. The cat smelled him before it saw him and scurried away.

  It was only when a snake slithered by oblivious to his presence that Tommy struck upon an idea. He’d been a young man working in the coal mines in 1989 when the UMWA went on strike against a local coal company. The strike was a long one and there was a lot of bitterness. The company hired scabs to come in and replace the striking miners. The scab wages were so high that many unemployed could not resist the tempting money. It came at the cost of being shot at, beaten up, and threatened. Tommy knew of scab truck drivers who’d had to get armed family members to ride with them as protection while they hauled coal.

  While the strike had been a battle between the company and the miners, it sometimes seemed that it was a battle between the strikers and the Virginia State Police. They were the officers usually put in the position of having to arrest miners and keep the peace. Often local deputies would avoid making those arrests since they had to live in the community and didn’t want to have to watch their backs all the time.

  One of Tommy’s favorite memories involved a picket line on a hot August day. The strikers were sitting down at the gate of a coal processing plant to block scab truckers from hauling coal in. Troopers had to pick up the miners and drag them out of the road. They were not always very gentle about it. Tommy had been part of a group selected to stay out of the protest while busloads of miners got hauled to jail.

  The state troopers were parked along the road and left their windows cracked against the summer heat. Tommy and a friend moved along the road, using thick welding gloves to pull copperheads out of a sack, shoving several of the snakes through the window of each trooper car.

  He never got to hear about the fruits of his effort though he often imagined the looks on their faces as the snakes slithered from beneath their seats. He wanted the Cross family to know that same fear.

  Chapter 21

  Valentine

  When he was working as a security guard at a coal mine, Valentine lived in a rented trailer close to his job in an area known as Convict Holler. The trailer park was overcrowded, full of junk, and without a blade of grass anywhere. There were more broken down cars than running ones. Children ran like pack animals without regard for whose yard they were playing in or whose possessions they were breaking. Drinking and drugs were rampant, as was violence and abuse. Every day some child or someone’s wife was getting smacked around.

  As best he could tell, Valentine was the only person in the trailer park who held a job. Rather than being a mark of honor, this drew hostility from the other men in the trailer park. If he could find a job, their wives, girlfriends, and mothers would nag them harder to find one. Being employed led to him having luxuries the others couldn’t afford, like a drivable car and a telephone. Rather than being conveniences, those items were more of an inconvenience to Valentine in the end. Someone was always wanting to use the phone or asking him to drive them somewhere.

  Valentine had grown up rough, and the bleakness of the trailer park did not bother him. His attitude toward the undercurrent of violence was that it was not his problem as long as it didn’t directly impact him. When it did, he would react. While his position as a security guard bought him no respect or deference in the neighborhood, the fact that he was six foot four inches tall and weighed nearly three hundred pounds did. He would be a hard man to fight. If you were a scrawny drunk or meth-head, he could twist you in a knot and roll you home.

  Moving into an environment like Convict Holler was like joining a pack. There was always a hierarchy in place and his role within it would have to be established. The challenges began within days of moving in. He’d barely pulled in from a night shift one morning. It was around 10 a.m. and some men were out enjoying their first smokes of the day. As soon as he turned off his car, one of the men was at his car door, leaning through the open window. The man was scrawny with unkempt hair, brown from loafing in the sun all day, and had crude tattoos on his hands. Valentine could smell his rotten breath and sour body odor.

  “Hey, carry me to the store,” he demanded. “We’re out of smokes.”

  “Not my fucking problem,” Valentine said. “I just got off work. I’m going to bed.”

  “That ain’t neighborly,” the man said. “You might need something from me one day.”

  “I don’t need a damn thing from you,” Valentine said. “Now back up so I can get out.”

  “Maybe I’ll borrow your car,” he said, making a grab for the keys in the ignition.

  Valentine latched onto the man’s arm, twisted it violently, then hit the power window. The window raised against the inside of his bicep, trapping it.

  He cursed and flailed, trying to jerk his arm back out. He balled up his other fist, rage contorting his face. “I’ll bust this fucking window out!”

  Valentine was still gripping the man’s trapped arm. He changed his grip, moving it from the forearm to the hand, pointing the man’s index finger at the ceiling of the car. That finger was designed for one motion – straightening and curling. Valentine wrapped his own fingers around the index finger, like he was holding a butane lighter and preparing to flick it. Then he put his thumb against the tip of the finger and began pressing the joint sideways.

  “Roll this fucking window down now or you’re a dead man!”

  Valentine pushed the joint harder, dislocating the tip of the finger until it bent sideways at an angle. The man began flopping, his face turning red. He yelled. His friends were standing up but didn’t approach. Valentine met his eyes then moved to another finger.

  “Nooo!”

  Valentine dislocated it too. He gave his victim a small smile that was not returned. The
man was nearly screaming at this point, trying to jerk his arm from the window. Valentine unlocked his door and shoved it open, the arm still trapped in the window. He jerked a .357 magnum from his console and unfolded his body from the low vehicle. He shoved the pistol into the man’s face and thumbed back the hammer.

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  He shut up, though he trembled, his eyes bulging and his face red from the pain. Valentine thought he might pass out.

  “You don’t ever look at me again,” Valentine said. “You don’t ever talk to me again. You got it?”

  “I got it,” he said in a high voice. “I got it!”

  Valentine swung the gun onto the onlookers, who threw up their hands. “Same goes for you all. Don’t look. Don’t speak. We clear?”

  No one replied.

  “We clear?” he yelled.

  There were mumbles of agreement. Valentine dropped a finger to the window button and lowered it, and the man dropped onto the dirt driveway. He lay there for a moment, his injured hand cradled to his chest. Valentine started to yank him to his feet and send him on his way when his rage got the better of him. He drew back his polished black patrol shoe and kicked him in the side several times. Then he locked his car and started toward his trailer.

  He whipped back suddenly, pointing his gun at the man on the ground. “One more thing. Anything happens to my car, even a scratch, and I’m taking it out of your ass!”

  He went inside and watched from the window as the man’s buddies retrieved him. He made sure they left his car alone. Maybe they had some sense after all.

  Valentine ended up living there for about two years before his job ran out. There were some tight months before he applied at the community college and got that position. To be less than seventy-five miles from home, he hadn’t expected it to be very different but it was. It was entirely unlike any place he’d ever been before. Valentine was a hillbilly. He didn’t realize that until he left the company of other hillbillies. He was not only a hillbilly, he was a hard, violent hillbilly, and they didn’t always settle well into the world of civilized men, despite their best efforts.

  Not long after reaching Wallace County and moving into an apartment, Valentine began dating a waitress at Pizza Hut. Her name was Molly and she was a hillbilly too. He’d asked her about her accent, embarrassing her until she caught enough of his own to realize their roots were similar. It turned out that she was from Dismal, a community near where he’d grown up. She’d had a baby with a man who’d turned into a jerk and had moved over to Wallace County to hide from him and his family. Finding someone from home, someone who spoke her language and didn’t tease her about it, was like a dream come true. She and Valentine began spending more time together.

  Her son was six and Valentine tried to like the boy. He found him to be soft, a sissy. He understood that without a man in the boy’s life it would be hard for him to toughen up the way he needed to. It wasn’t the kid’s fault. Valentine felt like it was his duty to toughen the boy up. He tried it in front of Molly, correcting the boy and offering recommendations on parenting until Molly eventually drew the line. She felt Valentine was too harsh and told him that they couldn’t continue dating unless he accepted that her son was her responsibility, not his.

  Valentine publicly accepted that. There was an issue once at the local K-Mart. The boy had wanted a guinea pig. Molly had told her son no and Valentine had agreed that was best. The animals were noisy, smelly, and disgusting. The boy had responded with a crying fit and Valentine had not been able to contain himself. He’d never have been allowed to act like that. No one when he was a child would have. He couldn’t tolerate it.

  “I’ll whoop your little ass!” he told the child, drawing offended stares from other patrons. The comment drew an icy response from Molly, who then conceded and bought the pet to try and make the child forget the terrible way Valentine had spoken to him.

  Valentine had pouted all afternoon. The child responded by gloating, practically rubbing it in Valentine’s face that he’d ended up with the guinea pig despite Valentine’s best efforts. While Valentine wasn’t very talkative that evening, he stayed over that night at Molly’s request. It seemed like she was trying to smooth things over with him.

  The next morning, Valentine was fixing breakfast for Molly and her son when they got up. Molly was pouring herself a cup of coffee when her son came in and asked where his guinea pig was. It was then that Molly noticed the bloody cutting board on the kitchen counter. The small pieces.

  She met Valentine’s cold eyes and knew.

  Molly told her son to go look in his room and she would look through the rest of the house. When he was gone, she tried to find words to ask the question she already knew the answer to. She never did find the words.

  “I think you should leave,” she said. “I’m probably going to call the police.”

  Aware that he would lose his job if she did, Valentine shook his head. “You tell anyone and I’ll call your husband’s family in Dismal. I’ll tell them where you’re at. I’ll bring them to your fucking work.”

  “Then go,” she said. “Don’t ever call me again.”

  Valentine picked up his coat and left without a word.

  Molly took the frying pan from the stove and walked it out to the trash dumpster, dropping it inside with a hollow thud.

  Chapter 22

  Randi

  Randi fully intended on reaching the valley where Jim lived in one long day on horseback. Although in her plans it had seemed completely possible, it was not working out that way. While she had never looked at it on a map, she had an imaginary overview of how she thought her local fields, woods, rivers, and private property all fit together, the day was proving her wrong.

  For example, she knew from years of driving that the Clinch River passed under a particular bridge and then a few miles down the road passed underneath another bridge. In her head, that meant that traveling along the river for the purpose of staying off-road and low key shouldn’t be a very significant detour. What she would have found if she’d actually studied a map was that the river took long, meandering routes through farmland before returning to cross under that second bridge. Following along the river hadn’t added only another half-mile to the trip, it had added seven miserable and bug-infested miles.

  She assumed that cutting across a farm of several hundred acres would bring her out along the main four-lane highway that traversed the area. However, she navigated without a compass, relying on feeling more than bearing, and brought her family out on a dirt road several miles from where she had intended. By this time, it was getting very late and the sun was setting.

  The children were now becoming fussy and exhausted. They were hungry, bug-bitten, and not interested in the traveling provisions that Randi had packed for them from the meager selection in the dairy. They were asking for things that Randi’s mother could have fixed them had she still been alive and had a house to cook them in. It was a sobering and saddening realization for all of them, the little things they would no longer experience.

  At Carla and Sherry’s insistence, Randi threw caution to the wind. They traveled in plain sight on the dirt road, knowing it would eventually lead to the four-lane road that stood between them and what they referred to as Jim’s valley. There were occasional ranch-style houses of brick or aluminum siding. Some people came to windows and doors and watched them pass. No one raised a hand in greeting and no one spoke. How quickly the civility and friendly nature of rural America was changing. For Randi, that was fine. She was just glad that no one was trying to steal their horses or pointing guns at them. She didn’t expect friendly from the world anymore. She expected anger and violence.

  The world was proving her right.

  It was twilight when they finally crossed the four-lane highway. It felt like a significant waypoint, like the barrier between one world and another more promising one. Between one life and another. On the positive side, they were standing at the abandoned str
etch that Randi had been shooting for all day, they were simply reaching it six hours later than she intended. There were no cars visible either moving or stalled. There were no homes or businesses on this section, either, only vast fields on both sides. Randi urged her horse forward and it walked across the pavement, its shoes on asphalt sounding very loud to her, like the ringing of a bell or the honking of a horn.

  They plodded across the median, across the next lane, then off the gravel shoulder on the other side. There was a sagging gate fastened to a rotting post with a rusty chain. There was a new padlock on it. Randi got off and checked it because sometimes padlocks were left hanging in a manner that made them appear locked. There was no such luck in this case.

  Randi had bolt cutters on her saddle and she used those to cut the lock. She led her horse through and waited for her family to pass, then closed the gate. She arranged the chain and the lock to look like they had not been tampered with, then remounted her horse.

  “Can we stay in that barn?” Carla asked, pointing to a large red hay barn off the highway.

  Randi shook her head. “No way. Too close to the road. It’s not safe.”

  “Well, I hope there’s a place we can stop soon,” Carla said. “My ass is killing me.”

  “It’s only about a few more miles,” Randi said. “And we’re all tired.”

  The grandchildren pitched in at this point, a chorus of whining and crying that tugged at Randi’s heart. Obviously, they wanted to stop.

  “If we don’t get to Jim’s tonight then we’re going to have to sleep outside and all we have is the horse blankets and a tarp. No tents or anything. We need to keep moving while there’s still light.”

  “It’s already getting dark, Mom,” Carla said, her voice rising. “I don’t like horses anyway. I don’t want it stepping in a hole and killing me.”