Hellbender (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 2)

by Miller, Jason Jack

  I’d gotten up before everybody else. While looking for my sandals I remembered that I’d left them by the fire. I pulled on my shorts, by now a little stinkier than I would’ve liked. I threw the flannel shirt over my shoulders, left it unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeves. I put my old ball cap on last.

  The world that I stepped into was exactly the same as yesterday. Red Run rushed through the gray sandstone. Rhododendron buds swelled, prepared to bring a shower of pink and white to this green mess. Fog filled the stream valley like a washtub with too much rain water in it.

  The world that I stepped into was the same as yesterday with one tremendous exception.

  Yesterday when I woke up, Alex hadn’t been waiting for me.

  She sat in a halo of sunlight, shivering next to the dwindling fire, wearing an old Carhart jacket that’d been passed down from Jane to Chloe. Her cowboy boots sat propped up against the fire ring rocks. When I stepped from the tent she stood, revealing a thin cotton dress that fell to just above her knees. She clutched Jane’s envelope, much thicker than when I’d last seen it. Rachael and Katy had added to it, no doubt. On her right hand, she wore the claddagh I’d found in my dad’s closet.

  “Henry.”

  Her bare feet danced over the soft pine needles.

  “Hey.” I breathed deep to take in ocean-sized breaths, but oceans of her were not nearly enough. In her hair, on her skin and clothes, was the profusion of earth and river, sunlight and dew, wood smoke and green tea. She smelled like she’d soaked in everything we had ever known together, every sight and conversation we’d ever shared.

  The hair on my neck and arms stood when she kissed me. Her breath was cool, like the wind that twisted the spruce on the huckleberry plains above. When she said my name I couldn’t tell if I was hearing words or the arrival of summer.

  Somehow, in the time since I’d last seen her, she’d been reborn. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “You,” I stammered. “What are you doing here?”

  I laid my fingers against her cheek. Champ came out and sniffed at Alex. I turned toward the tent.

  “Henry. What’s going on here?” My pap called from inside the tent. He shuffled, then pulled the old canvas flap aside. “I feel—”

  “John Henry,” Alex said.

  “My God, girl. What are you doing here?” Pap turned around and quickly pulled his pants on.

  “Rachael said I needed to find you. She said I could help you.”

  “Rachael said that, huh?” My pap tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. He pulled the flask from the pocket of his jacket and drank a few sips of breakfast. I could smell that panther’s breath all the way over here. “Well if Rachael sent you…if Rachael sent you then things are about to get worse than I thought.”

  Over the next hour the rest of the gang awoke and were briefed. Plans were discussed and dismissed and half-assembled and set. We loaded food items and blankets and tents into the trucks, then filled our packs for a double-time ramble up the mountain. Most of what we carried consisted of shells for the rifles and pistols. Food became an afterthought. For the most part, if it wasn’t preserved or couldn’t be eaten raw we loaded it into the truck to be taken home.

  The plan was for Preston and Ray to take the trucks up to Canaan Valley Loop Road and wait for us up there. With any luck, they’d get help on the way. Local authorities were out of the question, though. Fenton told them to try to get state cops, if at all possible. Our plan was to lose the Lewises, maybe find a place where we could use the landscape to our advantage. In our best-case scenario, we detain the Lewises until help arrived from the outside. We didn’t plan for a worst-case scenario.

  Saying goodbye to Ray and Preston wasn’t easy. They felt guilty for leaving. We even decided the dog would go back with them. If I had my way, everybody would be rolling home. No matter what anybody else said, I couldn’t help but feel that this whole episode was my fault.

  By nine, we were heading further up the same trail that we’d driven in on, basically an old railroad grade. Large rocks made travel by anything other than foot nearly impossible. The trail turned steep fast. The laurel brakes grew thicker, the spruce more abundant.

  The forest was a constellation of earth tones caught in the particulate light that filtered through the trees. Shafts of white light trickled through the thick canopy here and there. Shadows breaking up the beams gave the appearance of movement in the distance. Every now and then I stopped to wait for Jamie or my pap. As the morning warmed, I shed the heavy, quilted jacket Fenton lent me and carried it. Eventually even the flannel shirt became too warm. I had to roll up my sleeves and unbutton the top few buttons.

  Everybody dealt with the march in his or her own way. Alex hummed as we walked, a haunting and melodic old tune. She twisted ash twigs into small figurines, little four- or five-pointed shapes. She’d make one, become dissatisfied with it, then drop it to the ground before beginning another one. Greg mumbled poems. Jamie shoved his hands into his pockets and chewed on peppermints. He walked with my dad, and their conversation was private. Fenton rubbed a brass shell casing. It caught the sunlight and reflected it like the scales of a darter. He spent a lot of time looking over his shoulder. Ben was out front somewhere, breaking trail.

  After an hour or so we pushed through the laurel and found sky instead of pine needles above. Magnificent outcrops of white rock stood before us, impenetrable, like a wall. We scrambled along the base, looking for a crack to lead us to the top. We moved quickly, knowing as the rocks warmed rattlesnakes and copperheads would swarm to the heat.

  Just to our east, Canaan Mountain welcomed morning with outstretched arms. Buzzards and raptors soared below our feet. The shrill call of the hawks pierced the air. The lazy buzzards were content just to circle. And circle. And circle.

  For a hundred square miles, all I could see was the spread of trees; green gushing from this tremendous gash in the earth. All of Appalachia was represented in a single view; tulip poplars from the southern Appalachians; sugar maples from Vermont and New Hampshire; white oaks and hickories and walnuts from Kentucky, so the squirrels got fed; red spruce from Maine at the tippity-top.

  This combination couldn’t have occurred anywhere else on earth. The Carolinas were too warm, Pennsylvania too cold. West Virginia’s ridges and plains and canyons provided everything this population needed to thrive.

  I pulled myself away from the view, and caught up with the group.

  Over the next mile or so, I kept a close eye on my pap. His balance was becoming questionable; his staggered steps, more frail. I stayed close to him, and eventually asked if he was okay, but he waved me off. Ben caught wind of my concern and doubled back.

  “We can’t outrun them,” he said. Ben rested his hand on the pistol he had tucked into his belt.

  “The hell we can’t. Nobody’s quitting.” My pap rested on a knee-high slab of rock. “That’s not what he’s saying, Pap. But if we can’t hide out until the law intervenes…I mean, isn’t that what we’re doing here? Waiting for help?” Ben looked over his shoulder. “So far, we’re still alone out here.”

  “None of us know. How could we?” Fenton turned around and joined the conversation. “But you’re right. We need to make a stand somewhere, find a safe spot to reason with them.” He rested the butt of his rifle on the toe of his boot while he talked. “I ain’t saying we give up, but we need to see this through to some kind of end.”

  “There’s the rocks,” I said, pointing at the escarpment.

  “If they trap us on the huckleberry plains above, without an escape route, we don’t have much to negotiate with,” Ben said. He offered my pap a pinch of snuff before filling his lip, then went on. “We could try crossing the stream then doubling back, using the stream as our barrier.”

  Nobody replied. Nobody wanted to be wrong.

  My dad finally spoke up. He took off his hat and crossed his arms. “I used to hunt over on the other side. The trail bottlenecks. Cliff on one side, w
ater below. They’ll have to come single file. I think that’s where we should be headed.”

  After a minute or two Fenton said, “It’s the best we got.”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets. “I don’t know. I think you all should just head up to the trucks. I can stay out here while you get things straightened out with the cops. It’ll be easier for the two of us to hide. You’ve already done a lot. I can’t ask you to go any further—”

  Ben cut me off. “No, Henry, we’re all here because we want to be here, not because we have to be. I’d like to think in a similar situation you’d all do the same for me.”

  I shook my head. “I just don’t think I deserve it. That’s all. And maybe if you knew everything, if you knew the whole story, you wouldn’t be so willing to help me.” My hands started to shake. “Like how I cut their tires and hydraulic hoses down in Cheat Canyon.”

  “I think we know about all we need to.” Fenton gave me a chance to shut up. My mouth got dry, like it was full of pine needles. My tongue kept sticking to my teeth. “And Alex…I didn’t know. How could I know?”

  “Henry, keep your head.” Jamie interrupted. “We know, son.”

  “Does everybody here know? Greg doesn’t know. I know Pap doesn’t know. My dad doesn’t know.”

  Alex turned away from me.

  My dad said, “Know what?” He took off his hat and ran his sleeve across his forehead.

  Alex kicked stones off the trail. “Know that I’m one of them. Distantly related, but still related.”

  “First comes the ax, then the knife. Right? Charlie wants her dead. Her mom thought we could protect her,” I said, almost moving in front of her, defending her case. “That’s why you all should go. Alex and I will figure a way out of this.”

  Pap pulled Alex into his chest. She started to cry. He put his hand around my neck and stood me next to her. I gave Alex my sleeve to wipe her eyes. My pap said, “Why should that matter?”

  He released us and took a step back. To Alex he said, taking her hand, “Henry’s mother was a beautiful young lady. She was sweet and loved those kids more than anything. But she had an encounter with Odelia and I ran her off. I was afraid Odelia’d kill her. It hurt as much as losing my own daughter did.”

  He leaned against an old snag that had been picked apart by woodpeckers and mice. The old man pulled a blue bandana from his pocket and held it up to his mouth. “I could’ve killed Odelia Lewis in Morgantown. Every day I think about how things’d be different if I had been a little braver.”

  “Well, none of that matters now,” I said. “I don’t want any of us getting hurt.”

  Nobody said anything. I reckoned this was where we said goodbyes. “Please just head on home. Come back with help. We’ll be able to hide for a few more days.”

  “Who’s going home? Dad’s not. Levon and Fenton aren’t and I know sure as I’m standing here Pap ain’t.” Ben lifted his pack out of the grass. He threw it over his shoulders and said, “So let’s hit the fucking road.”

  We dropped down from the trail one at a time. If the slope hadn’t been so steep we all would’ve been separated in a matter of yards, the laurel was so thick. But as it was, the only direction to go was down. The rushing stream below guided us like a beacon. A tiny light in a muddy green sea.

  My dad and Ben went ahead to find a suitable place to cross Red Run. Greg went down with them, but moved a little slower. Fenton and Jamie waited with my pap. He was too stubborn to ask but smart enough to realize the extra hands might keep him from really getting hurt.

  Alex and I brought up the rear. Her delicate feet found sure footing with each step, those old cowboy boots never once slipped or skidded. It was as if she floated, like a maple seed slowly whirling on a windless summer afternoon. I tried to catch her, but she slipped through my fingers, always spinning.

  She dropped from ledge to ledge unafraid. White threads from her dress got snagged in jaggers and trailed out behind her like silk from an orb spider. When she stepped down from one rock to the next, the fibers pulled taut, like a spider web, allowing her to slip down the mountain. This was how she skated past me, over crevasses, onto boulders, with nary a drop of sweat to glisten her brow.

  I struggled just to keep upright. Between the steepness of the hill and the thickness of the laurel brake, I had difficulty keeping my feet below me. Sweat poured into my eyes, burning them with the sting of salt. My ankles twisted and bled. But Alex dropped through effortlessly, trailing spider silk and clutching the envelope the whole way down.

  On the thick bedrock at the stream side we regrouped. We’d landed on a small shelf on the inside of a bend—a dramatic spot for a chase. Just upstream, a set of falls slid over the red sandstone like an otter through mud. Downstream of our landing was another falls, but I couldn’t see anything more than the void created by the drop. Across from us rose a wall of stratified sandstone twenty feet high. The pool in between us was at least as deep. Its profound green reflected a cloudless sky.

  Fenton appeared from upstream, sweating, saying it’d be safe to cross above the falls. We fell into line, single file, in pretty much the same order as we had before. Ben stood guard at a particularly steep spot to point out hand holds and steps while Fenton waited at the top with a rope. He had it wrapped twice around a tree, occasionally stooping to lend a hand to help the others top out. The scene was as dramatic as any I’d yet seen in these mountains, the flash of cascading water just inches from the climbers. The rock was slick with moss. I held my breath while I watched.

  Alex began a traverse that took her easily past the others. Ben offered a hand to her, but she refused it. “I’ll go ahead.” She started across the stream.

  “Wait!” I climbed faster to catch up. “You don’t know where to go.” “Do you?”

  I stuttered a little. “I don’t want you running off getting lost.”

  “We’re already lost. But I know where I’m going as much as you or anybody else does.”

  From my angle at the lip of the pool above the falls she appeared to be walking on the water, rather than on the rock just inches below the glassy surface.

  She opened Jane’s envelope and slid out a neatly-folded sheet of notebook paper. “I’ll leave you a trail of breadcrumbs,” she said. Before I could reply she started singing and disappeared into the laurels.

  “Dude,” Ben said. “Keep an eye on her.” Ben made a few frantic circles with his finger.

  “I know. I’m going.

  “We’ll catch up.” Ben traded me his pistol for the rifle I carried. “For snakes.”

  Right off the bat I thought I’d lost her, but her trail was clear. The words she sang came to me on a strong breeze. The lilting notes penetrated the sound of shiny leaves slapping my face and arms. Like whispered bells, the tones hung in the air until I passed through. She sang, “Deer’s in the hell, the rabbit’s at home, the wolf ’s on the trail, so the rabbit don’t roam.”

  I rushed headlong into the brake, into laurel and rhody thick enough to make a preacher cuss on Sunday. No longer could I distinguish up from down, east from west. Direction and shadows were just words, all but drowned out by the drone of her voice.

  “Don’t shoot at blackbirds, don’t shoot at crows, blackbirds can’t find heaven and the crows turn into ghosts.”

  The notes drifted away from me. Wrong way. I turned, and quickened my pace.

  “Stars in the sky and a fire at home, stars show the way but they ain’t very warm.”

  My breathing came heavier now. This wasn’t a path, it was a climb. Only ever up. Little cuts formed on my knuckles. I didn’t duck fast enough and a branch cut my cheek. “Slow down!”

  She didn’t hear, and kept on singing. “Morning star in the east, evening star in the west, don’t know if it’s day or night, ain’t no way to find my nest.”

  The sound of tears broke her voice. In a panic I drowned in the waxy green of laurel. The tough branches jabbed my shirt, poked my skin.

  “
Alex!”

  “Don’t shoot at blackbirds, don’t shoot at crows, blackbirds can’t find heaven and the crows turn into ghosts.” She stopped somewhere up ahead.

  “Leaves on the trail, leaves on the road, how can I find my home without a hand to hold?”

  My heart leapt into my throat as a deer came thrashing past. The ruckus of snapping branches preceded a torrent of birds that darkened the sky overhead. They swirled, black waves rippling above the newly budding trees.

  Alex’s frantic voice shattered their cries. The notes snaked away from the melody. “Don’t shoot at blackbirds, don’t shoot at crows, blackbirds can’t find heaven and the crows turn into ghosts.”

  Alex begged with fits of sniffles and shortness of breath. “Got no rosin for my fiddle, ain’t no music coming through my door, been walking ‘round this mountain forever. I can’t find my way home no more.”

  The slope began to level and I broke into a run. Her words no longer came from her throat. They came from the forest itself. Like pollen or gnats.

  “Don’t shoot at blackbirds, don’t shoot at crows, blackbirds can’t find heaven and the crows turn into ghosts.”

  “I’m right here.” I put my hands over my face and barreled through the last few yards of laurel.

  She sang the last line as I stumbled upon her crumpled form spread out on a rock cliff. She was crying, and turned a wet eye my way. Little breaths came from her mouth. “Don’t shoot at blackbirds, don’t shoot at crows, blackbirds can’t find heaven and the crows turn into ghosts.” Little bits of Alex came back to me in her words.

  “Please, talk to me.” I sat her up and pulled her to my chest.

  She started to speak to me, but another voice came from the trees. A woman’s voice, as deep and angry as Alex’s was bright, sang, “Blood on the mountain, these hills and their curse.”

  “Alex…” I said. “Who is that?”