by J. A. Kerley
“The perils of a guilty conscience,” I said, buoyed by Harry’s sprawling and cheerful voice. “How Oakes get enlisted?”
“A couple ex-cons showed up a week before Crayline was brought to the Institute for hypnosis. Hardcore Aryan types, the kind of assholes who think Bobby Lee Crayline’s something to aspire to. They brought a carrot and stick. The carrot was fifty grand if Oakes bought in. The stick was, Don’t help Bobby Lee, and he’ll take it real hard.”
“Fifty grand is nothing compared to being on Crayline’s shit list,” I said.
“Like you figured, Carson, the hay bales were the hiding place. Oakes drove away from the madness, brought Bobby Lee to the farm, hid him in a dug-out dirt hole under the house. The space was about the size of a coffin. Get this: Crayline stayed there seven weeks.”
“Seven weeks?”
“When the roadblocks were taken down and everybody thought Crayline was five states away, he slipped out.”
I tried to imagine the willpower it would take to stay almost motionless for one week, unable to stretch, starving, bitten by insects, voiding yourself, all in a casketsized hole in the ground.
I said, “Crayline say anything to Oakes before he booked?”
“Oakes asked Bobby what he planned to do with his new freedom. Bobby Lee said he was going to kill history, Carson. His exact words.”
“Kill history?”
“You got any idea what that means, bro?”
“Nope, brother. And I don’t want to.”
Harry had a call on the second line and I reluctantly let him get back to business. I walked to Cherry. She looked at me expectantly.
“You were smiling during the call. Good news about Mix-up?”
“Just some input on a case far from here, the one I referred to earlier.” I felt my shoulders slump, like someone was letting the air out of my body.
Cherry studied my face. “I know just what you need, Ryder. A fix. Just like what I need. Good thing my dealer is about a minute away.”
She drove down the steep hill. Instead of pulling to the highway she continued straight a quarter mile, ending up at an acre of asphalt, a parking lot. To the left was a wooden cottage with a sign saying SKYLIFT TICKET OFFICE – SOUVENIR SHOP. Towering beside it was a huge and horizontal steel wheel. The slow-spinning wheel was running cables to a rocky peak about a half-mile distant. Suspended from the lift’s cables were red park benches, basically, some heading up, others returning from the top. Most were empty, the lateness of the hour, I figured.
I swallowed hard and followed Cherry into the cottage, saw racks of souvenir T-shirts, caps, postcards. A smiling man stood behind a cash register. He was in his sixties, round-faced and pot-bellied, wearing a Natural Bridge cap that looked fresh from a rack.
“This is Bob Quint,” Cherry said, nodding to the capped man. “He’s my dealer.”
“Been a while since you’ve had a fix, Donna,” the guy said. “At least on my watch.”
“Twenty-seven days. No wonder I’ve been such a bitch.” She rummaged in her purse for some bills. “I need to get a ticket for my friend here.”
“You don’t need a ticket?” I asked.
“Donna has a lifetime pass,” Bob said, winking at Cherry. “Something we worked out a few years back.”
Ticket secured, Cherry yanked me out the door like a toy wagon. “We need to get on before anyone else shows up.”
“Why?”
She ignored my question, tugging me out to the platform where a teenager took our tickets. A bench coming down the mountain swirled in a circle, came around and we jumped aboard. The kid dropped a heavy restraining bar across our laps and whoosh, up and away we went.
At first we skimmed the ground, no higher than twenty feet, following a path rising toward the mountain, a hundred-foot-wide swath cleared of trees, looking like a golf fairway. To the sides the trees were thick and dark. A small creek ran at the woodsy edge to my right. We passed beside a huge boulder. Previous riders had pitched coins atop it for fun. The surface glittered. I wondered if I could jump to it and make my escape.
“What was that about a lifetime pass?” I asked Cherry.
“It’s a long story,” she said, watching a cardinal in a nearby tree, a dot of red in the green.
“Edit,” I said.
“Bob and his wife Cindy own the lift, not the state, which receives a cut of the proceeds from passengers and the concessions. The skylift cost a helluva lot. When the previous owners wanted to retire, Bob put together financing from several places but was still two hundred grand short. He made a naïve decision.”
“Borrowed from a shady source?”
She nodded. “The interest jumped from manageable to oppressive in six months. It looked like the lender might grab the lift, which was the plan all along. I renegotiated the deal with the lender, grabbing his attention by offering ten-plus.”
“Per cent interest?”
“Years in prison.”
The ground began to fall away. Suddenly we were fifty feet up. Eighty. A hundred. I cleared my throat and checked the firmness of the restraining bar. We passed one of the cable supports. I wondered when it had last been maintained.
“You look nervous, Ryder. Don’t you have the hots for rock climbing?”
“I’m fine,” I said, forcing a yawn. “I imagine a skylift gets inspected at regular intervals, right?”
Cherry patted my arm. “It’s steel. The supports are rooted in bedrock. But you feel safer hanging your life off a tiny bolt fifty feet up. Is that sweat on your forehead?”
I mumbled something. She laughed. “You know what’s going on here?” she said.
I looked past my dangling shoes. The ground had dropped away another twenty feet.
“What?”
“It’s control. You’re in control when you climb. You have no control over the lift. That’s it, right?”
I didn’t answer, afraid my voice would squeak. I looked ahead. The lifting cables ceased paralleling the ground and rocketed up the vertical cliff face. How could they be so steep and not rip from the upper supports on weight alone?
Cherry spun to check the benches behind us. Empty. There was no one coming down, either. We were alone on the lift.
She said, “This is way against the rules, but …”
Cherry pushed the restraining bar up and over our heads. We now sat unrestrained on a slender bench dangling above a rocky chasm. And rising. Cherry crossed her legs and pointed to the ground, growing more distant every second.
“Look at the world, Ryder,” she said. “What’s it doing?”
No way I was looking down. “I don’t know. Rotating?”
“It’s falling away.”
A gust of wind made the bench quiver and I grabbed the edge of the seat. Cherry smiled serenely and put her hands behind her head.
The lift took us higher than most surrounding mountains, providing a panoramic view of miles of rugged, rumpled green. Cherry sighed, the good kind, where fresh air replaces bad thoughts, tight muscles unfurl and, for her at least, the world falls away.
Reaching the peak, I jumped off to feel the joy of solid ground pushing back against my feet. It was a short walk to Natural Bridge, the park’s namesake, a magnificent natural arch carved over millennia by wind and rain, twenty feet wide, a hundred long, flat on top. We stood near the edge and scanned the mountaintops.
“I can’t figure out how it works,” Cherry said.
“How what works?”
“When the world starts to drive me nuts – like the past three weeks – I jump on the skylift and it’s truly as if the world falls away. I’m above it all, at least for a while. I feel better. Cleaner. You studied psychology. Does that seem crazy?”
“What do you mean?”
“The skylift’s just a glorified carnival ride that lifts me a few hundred feet. Nothing’s changed. But it makes me feel different, better. Why is that?”
“You surrender yourself to the metaphor,” I said.
“Making the journey a symbol for escape, being above it all. If you’ve prepared yourself to believe strongly enough – to trust the metaphor – your subconscious allows it to happen.”
“I needed someone to tell me that. Thank you.”
She smiled and turned to the view. I wanted to hold her hand. Not in any romantic fashion, but to verify the presence of another human being standing beside me in the sky. But when I opened my hand and moved it toward hers, I felt a thrill rise in the pit of my belly and realized that perhaps there could have been a passing touch of romance in my heart.
And then a following wave of folks from the lift – two dozen German tourists – came down the trail chattering and taking pictures. The spell was broken and we returned to the world below.
Chapter 33
“Here’s my plan,” Cherry said as we climbed into her ride. “The FBI’s back in the picture tomorrow and I’ll be running errands for Dark Lady Krenkler. I’m going to drop you by your cabin so you can check on your doggie. Then we’re going to my place for supper.”
“I don’t know if I should—”
“The hell with the world, Carson. I want to stay up in the sky a while. Have supper with me.”
She’d never used my first name. I can’t explain it, but at that moment I would have jumped headlong from the nearest cliff had she asked.
“The sky it is,” I said.
Mix-up wasn’t at the cabin, but I hadn’t expected it. Cherry gave me directions to her place and boogied. I showered away the day and changed into a fresh white cotton shirt, barely used cords, brand spanking new socks. I put out fresh food for Mix-up and changed the water. When I looked into the woods and felt my gut begin to hollow out, I took a few deep breaths and thought of Cherry beside me in the sky where she had felt free, at least for a few minutes.
When I drove off for her home, directions in my lap, I passed my brother’s home. He was on the porch and reading a newspaper. He didn’t look up.
I twice passed the drive to Cherry’s house and would have taken a three-fer if I hadn’t finally swerved into the gravel drive I’d initially thought an ATV trail. Unruly vegetation bordered the lane, as though Cherry enjoyed making visitors brush shoulders with nature. I followed the track several hundred feet, stopping in a graveled parking strip at the rear of a two-story log cabin with a steep metal roof of green. I pulled next to Cherry’s cruiser, beside it her muddy and jacked-high Jeep.
“Come on ’round front,” I heard Cherry’s voice yell.
My heels found limestone slabs forming a walkway to the front of the cabin, passing a massive stone chimney set against square-cut logs chinked with gray caulk. Looking ahead, I faced a breathtaking mountain panorama of verdant forest studded with massive rock cliffs and outcroppings. The impression was of rock-hulled ships pressing their bows from beneath the green.
I turned the corner to find Cherry above on the cabin’s broad porch, drifting lazily in a swing, one hand on the chain. Music fell from the open windows, a woman singer with a plaintive voice singing a rock song rooted in madrigal. Cherry wore a dress, white and simple, the neckline square and open, the hem at her knees. The effect was limited by a ball cap touting Ruger firearms, but it still took a second to start breathing again.
“How about a cool brew for a warm day?” she asked.
“Sweet idea.”
She padded inside, her feet bare, her sandals beneath the swing. I returned to inspecting the view. The cliff’s edge was directly before Cherry’s porch, twenty feet of scruffy grass ending in a dozen feet of dark sandstone. Beyond lay only air.
I crept as near the edge as my skittish heart allowed, looking far down into dense treetops parted by a slender thread of creek. Adjoining cliffs rose from the valley, sheer cuts of sandstone between hillsides angled just enough to hold vegetation. I found myself holding my breath as if underwater, not knowing why.
“Watch that first step, Ryder,” Cherry’s voice called from behind me. “The second one doesn’t show up for four hundred feet.”
I returned to the porch, where Cherry was setting down a tray with sandwiches and bottles of beer. “I was sure I had some duckling à l’orange left over from yesterday,” she winked. “But all I found was sandwich stuff.”
“You really ought to put a barrier at the edge of the cliff,” I suggested, picking up a half-pound of roast beef and cheddar on rye. “A fence or a rock wall or something.”
“I know where the edge is,” she said. “And a fence would block my view.”
“It’s a helluva view. I’ll give you that. And a real fersure log cabin.” I tapped my knuckles on the door frame, as solid as concrete.
“Built thirty-three years ago by Horace Cherry, my uncle on my father’s side. My father passed away when I was seven. Horace never had kids, and always took a shine to me. When he died, three years back, he left the place to me, knowing I loved being here as much as he did.”
“Do you have any siblings?”
“I have a lot of relatives, but I was an only child.” She smiled wistfully. “I’m the last Cherry on the tree.”
“Everyone around here seems someone’s kin in some way.”
“When there’s only a few dozen families who inhabit a three-county area for the first hundred years after a place gets settled, everyone’s kin to everyone’s kin, in some way or another. That’s changing, but not as fast as everywhere else. A writer once called Appalachia the most foreign of American cultures.”
“Foreign?” I said. “Isn’t it Scots-Irish, mainly?”
“And English, and plenty of Germans. Yeoman farmers, back in the old countries, people who knew farming and animal husbandry and pulling food from land that blunted plows and busted the spirits of lesser folk. It’s not foreign because the people are so different from the rest of the country, but because they’re similar to the way they always were. They’re only foreign in time.”
I took a bite of my sandwich. “Are you foreign in time?”
“I grew up with people who have never been out of the mountains, never will. Not even as far as Lexington. There are more of them than you’d think. I’ve been to college, spent a few months traveling abroad. Even been to New-freakin’-York and Los Angeles. I like big cities. But I love it here, too. So I guess I’m sort of suspended between two worlds. Come on inside, Carson. Let me give you the tour.”
I followed her into her home, basically the floor plan of my cabin back at Road’s End, just fifty per cent larger. There was a living area with vaulted ceiling, a half-loft above, a door at the end leading into an upper bedroom.
The wall open to the high ceiling on the fireplace end of the living area had been plastered or dry-walled and painted a creamy white. Ditto the wall beside the stairs to the loft. The seamless white formed the background for dozens of items from photographs through old advertising posters to antique tools. A tan and red-banded hat of straw centered the collection. Arranging a sizeable number of items on a surface is difficult – it’s composition – but Cherry had an eye for balance.
I studied the tools, odd assemblages of wood and leather and metal. A couple of them looked cruel, almost threatening. “I’ve never seen tools like these before,” I said. “What are they?”
She padded over and stood at my side, beer bottle in hand. “I have no idea. They were in Uncle Horace’s shed. I suppose they have something to do with horses. The hat’s his, too; he wore it everywhere. Here’s my favorite picture—”
She pointed to a photo of a pretty young girl, eight or nine, standing beside a barrel-chested man with waxed dark hair. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, dark bolo tie, and the same tan hat hanging on the wall. He was grinning like he’d just won the lottery.
“Uncle Horace and you?” I asked.
“Yep. That’s Uncle Horace in most of the shots.”
I studied another photo, Horace Cherry bedecked in an ice-cream suit with cocked and jaunty hat riding his crown. His smile seemed radiant and boundless, the young
Donna Cherry at his side looking heartbreakingly innocent.
“He always wore the suit, right?” I asked, knowing it was a uniform.
“With the hat atop his crown everywhere he went. He was a dandy. It was funny.”
Something in the photo started to make me uneasy. Something in the eyes perhaps. Or maybe it was the age of the photo, a darkening of the shadows.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea.” Cherry crouched to reach into a low cabinet, pulling out a squat brown bottle. I tried not to notice the way her dress hugged her body. She shook back her hair and studied the bottle’s yellowed label as she stood. I saw her nipples buzzing against the fabric of her dress like anxious bees. I wanted them to carry honey to my tongue.
“It’s some kind of special cognac,” she said. “A gift from Uncle Horace years ago. He said to have a sip on special occasions. Want a tipple to celebrate your first skylift ride? All in all, you liked the trip, right?”
“It was wonderful,” I lied, feeling a smile rise to my lips as I moved a half-step closer to Donna Cherry. My knees loose with the promise of honey, I started to reach for her hand.
And stopped. Froze with my hand suspended in midair. I couldn’t tell if the hand was part of the me I knew as me or the priapic rogue my brother kept telling me was me. Was it me interested in Cherry or was it he, the broken me? From nowhere my brother’s mocking voice rose unbidden in my head.
“Part of your childhood damage manifests in a shy roguish charm you use to warm yourself with temporary lovers, Carson …”
I realized he’d said those things knowing I’d hear them at moments like this. I’d forgotten how consuming was his need to affect others from a distance. To keep a tight chain.
“Wait here a second,” I told Cherry.
“Uh, Carson, did I say something?”
“You’re fine. I’ll be right back.”
I walked outside, close to the edge of the precipice, where I crouched and found a round chunk of sandstone. I mentally mapped my position, turned to the general direction of the hollow, trying to aim my eyes directly at my brother’s cabin, visualizing him sitting on the porch. I side-armed the stone high and away in his direction and closed my eyes. I pictured the rock traveling five or so miles, falling from the sky like a meteorite and smacking my brother dead-center in his forehead, knocking him backwards in his chair, newspaper fluttering down on his startled face.
