by Ninie Hammon
Heading back down the mountain, retracing her steps up it, to the fork where the other logging road took out east give her time to think, and ‘course her mind went to what she’d ought to do about Malachi. Wasn’t nothing but a rooster chasing its own tail feathers to consider it because wasn’t nothing she could do about Malachi. The boy was hurting, bleeding inside where you couldn’t see it, and she was watching him sink further and further into himself every day.
Malachi was her baby. Well, no, Esther Ruth was her baby, always would be. She wouldn’t never be more than six or seven years old and even though she was a woman full growed, she still lit up like a Fourth-of-July sparkler whenever she seen Viola and cried out “Mommy!” before racing to give her a hug. Esther would stay a child forever.
But Malachi was the youngest, the only one of the lot of them had a lick of sense. He was the one of her boys that she’d always intended to run things for her, the one who’d take over the “thriving family business” she’d spent her whole life trying to build. Her enterprises had ebbed and flowed with the commerce of the world outside the mountains over the years, but didn’t none of them thrive.
‘Course there’d always been shine. She’d took that over from her daddy — what was left of him when she got done with him. She’d run a chop shop at one time out of a garage down on Rabbit Run Road. Cars stolen off the streets of Lexington was reduced to unidentifiable car parts in less than an afternoon, drove in one side and come out the other in pieces. She’d fenced other stolen goods, too, had run a couple of rings of prostitutes that worked the coal fields, collected protection money every week from mom-and-pop businesses as far away as the West Virginia line.
There’d been money to be made growing weed back ‘fore everybody got their panties in a wad about it when they busted the Cornbread Mafia over in Marion County six years ago. Anymore, it was almost more hassle than it was worth, had to hide it between plants in a cornfield, grow a little patch here, a little there.
In the last few years, they’d been what the big-city newspapers called an “epidemic of addiction” in the mountains — to a little white pill called OxyContin. Of course, she elbowed her way to the front of the line to make a buck on the drug, but it was hard to turn a profit on something you couldn’t manufacture yourself, when you was at the mercy of some sleazy drug dealer who charged whatever he thought he could squeeze out of you.
For a right smart while now Viola’d been struggling to control a growing rage that life wasn’t never gonna give her what she’d spent all her years chasing. Springtime come and went and come again, and with each new turning of the seasons the anger in her belly grew. It was one thing to have a yearning inside, chewing at your guts like a lazy rat when you was young, looking at years stacked up on top of each other out in front of you. It was another thing altogether to have the pile of years behind you, watching the time grow short and your dream still hanging there out of reach.
Far as the world knew, Viola Tackett was a workhorse who intended to die in the harness, a woman who’d still be out there scrambling while they was shoveling in the dirt.
She scoffed at “retirement.” Said she’d read the Bible through cover to cover so many times she’d about wore the print off the pages, and she hadn’t never run across the part that said you could retire, that you could just quit whatever work it was the Lord had allowed you to put your hand to, kick back in a lawn chair with a beer and never hit a lick at a snake again.
But the truth still in the husk was that Viola Tackett yearned to stop clawing and scratching. Longed to ride easy. Life owed her that. She’d got stomped on hard and she was determined to collect payback — with interest. Going hungry night after night when she’s a little kid, the ache in her belly so constant her jaw was always sore from gritting her teeth. She and her brother Lester had beat Joey Purdom with a stick for the candy bar the preacher’d left and Joey wasn’t never right in the head after. When Lester tried to keep more than half, she’d broke his arm to get her fair share. For nigh on to seven decades she’d watched other people get what she wanted but couldn’t have — stuff, big houses, fancy cars and the like. She never let on to nobody she gave a rat fart about such as that. She’d learned early and well you didn’t never let folks know what really mattered to you ‘cause they’d snatch it away. But she did care. Oh my, yes, indeedy she shore did. She coveted an easy life with fine things and folks doin’ for her and makin’ over her.
But for all her scramblin’ lo these many years, she was still sitting in the weeds on the side of the road, watchin’ other folks drive by in a car they didn’t have to worry wasn’t gonna make it to wherever it was they was going. She was looking the end of life square in the eye, the last of the sand was drainin’ out of the hourglass and it was now or never. It was her turn, and wasn’t nothin’ Viola Tackett wouldn’t do to grab hold of what was due her.
Her boys helped, best as they could. Neb, Obie and Zach, they was good boys, done whatever she told them to do, but dad-gum if wasn’t all of them dumb as fire hydrants. She’d often pondered on what it was that’d made them so, like might be it was from Jack whoring around and he got some kind of disease, but the doctor said no. Said Esther had a thing called Down syndrome and that wasn’t something you could catch from a prostitute.
She knew the fault wasn’t with her female parts when Malachi come along. Jack didn’t know it, of course, but that boy wasn’t his git and soon’s she had the right kind of seed in her womb, she’d growed a boy there to be proud of. Tall and strong, so good lookin’ all the girls was fightin’ to drop their drawers for him. He wasn’t obedient like the other boys, though. She’d told him he’d ought to drop out of school at sixteen to help his brothers in “the family business.” He’d stayed to graduate. After that, she’d laid down the law — he was not going to go off and join the military. She flat out would not have it. And ‘course after a while he went on ahead and done it anyway. They packed him off to some place with a name you couldn’t pronounce and when he come home, he …
Actually, her Malachi never did come home. Somebody who looked like him, talked like him, walked and liked strawberry pancakes like him come home. But her boy never did. He had got lost out there somewhere in the jungles or desert or wherever it was he went.
No, that wasn’t the way of it.
It wasn’t that he’d stayed there. He’d come home alright, but he’d brought that war home with him when he come.
They had a name for it, like giving a thing a name made some kind of difference somehow. Once you knew what to call it, well, everything was gonna be just fine.
PTDS something. Initials. She’d gone to the library in Carlisle right after Malachi got home, looked it up. What she found described what was happening to her boy like somebody’d been standing there watching him, taking notes.
But that’s as far as it went. They named it, and after they done that, apparently everybody smiled at each other and shook hands and went home. Didn’t nobody say nothing about what to do about it, how to fix it. Viola wasn’t surprised. Every person she’d ever knowed with nothing more than book smarts was a fool.
Brushing a stray hair out of her face, Viola glanced in the rearview mirror and didn’t like the old woman who looked back at her. She’d been a pretty girl, not beautiful by anybody’s reckoning, missed it by her features bein’ too big and blunt, and by the space between her two front teeth on the top that she never did get fixed and was there to this day.
But the woman who looked back at her now was somebody she had come to know over the passage of years and to understand, but would never fancy. She had a hard face. Not sharp-angles hard. She had round cheeks to go with her dumpy little body and a soft turkey neck under her chin. The hardness was in the eyes, sunk so deep in caverns she sometimes thought they looked like cigarette burns in her face. Even at almost seventy, her hair was still jet black, only had streaks of white through it now, looked like lightning bolts on a night sky. And it still hung all t
he way to her waist when it wasn’t done up in a bun at the back of her neck.
Around her face, her hair had turned pure white, though, like maybe she’d got a good look into hell as she wasn’t supposed to see and it’d seared her, left its mark. In them eyes was pain. And rage. The pain of Daddy fooling with her and her sisters ever night soon’s it got good dark outside, how he’d take a lantern and set it by the bed cause he wanted to see. Her sisters always cried but Viola never did, never shed one tear, not even when she was squatting by herself in the back of the chicken house, birthing his git, twins, wrung their necks, the both of them ‘fore they ever drew a breath. And it’d been Viola who’d took revenge for all of them, though maybe her sisters’d done the same kind of things she done when they had the chance. She’d never asked and they was all dead now so she never would know.
In them eyes was the sound of Elizabeth Mary — her only other little girl — coughing and coughing. And the silence that roared in when the coughing stopped. There was the pain of them tiny coffins, one after the other of them. Just get one settled in the dirt and you’d pick up a baby to nurse and it’d be cold as a rubber doll. Them coffins was always so small she worried the little ‘uns wouldn’t fit but they always did.
And folks said they was a mean streak in them eyes, too, but they was wrong about that part. Wasn’t no streak of mean in Viola Tackett. What you seen in them eyes — so dark brown you couldn’t hardly see the black spot in the middle — was what you got, and there was waaaay more than just a streak of it. Wasn’t a single person still drawing breath who could lay claim to crossing Viola Tackett. She always settled her accounts, no matter how long it took, and her books always balanced.
The old truck bounced down into another pothole as she was about to cross into Drayton County and she only had time to wonder about maybe picking some okra to fry for supper when she and the truck fell into a black nothingness that sparkled like black glitter, and her ears filled with a sound like static.
Chapter Three
Nower County Deputy Sheriff Liam Montgomery pulled his cruiser out onto County Road 278 West from the shoulder and flipped on his lights. Not the siren, though. He certainly wasn’t an expert on anything having to do with law enforcement, since he didn’t even have a year’s experience in the position, but it just seemed to him that a siren was yelling at people. And he didn’t see any sense in yelling unless folks didn’t answer when you spoke to them the first time.
The fella who’d taught the handful of night classes in law enforcement that Liam had taken at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond had stressed how polite you needed to be. He’d said psychological tests demonstrated that people tended to mirror the attitude of the people around them. You needed to speak nice and respectful to the folks you pulled over—
“Hello, ma am, I hate to tell you but you got a tail light’s burned out.”
If you was being nice, chances are you’d get nice back. But if you put on a “Yore in a heap a’trouble, boy” attitude like you seen in the movies, you’d likely find trouble looking right back at you from the driver’s seat.
Of course, Liam wouldn’t have been able to pull off anything that macho if he’d tried, cursed as he was with a baby face, round cheeks, curly blond hair and almost no chin at all. Still, roaring up behind somebody with your bubble-gum machine flashing and your siren wailing — Liam seen that as just plain rude. And if he didn’t have to be rude, he wouldn’t be.
But the fella driving the car with Pennsylvania plates was either blind or thought if he ignored the flashing lights behind him and just kept going, the officer would think of some other more important thing he needed to do and leave him alone and not give him a ticket for going eighty-five in a fifty-five-mile zone.
Liam reached up and flipped on his siren as he approached the sign the chamber of commerce put up that welcomed folks into the county on one side and told them goodbye on the other.
“Ya’ll come back now, hear.”
The boards of the sign were sagging, the paint chipped. Liam was surprised last night’s storm hadn’t done what years of neglect had failed to do. Though it looked ready to collapse, it still stood beside the road about half a mile from the county line, and if the guy from Pennsylvania didn’t pull over in that half mile, Liam’d have all kind of paperwork to do with the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department. When he passed the sign, he caught sight of the other side in his rearview mirror. Even backwards, he knew what it said. It told you everything you needed to know.
“Welcome to Nower County, Kentucky.” That’s what it was supposed to say. But years ago, some vandals, most likely drunk teenagers, had taken red paint and added two letters to “Nower.” They stuck a big red H between the “w” and the “e” and added another “E” to the end of the word. Then the sign read:
“Welcome to NowHerE County, Kentucky.”
They’d done the same thing to every one of the welcome signs on all the county roads and as far as Liam knew, nobody had ever made any attempt to change the signs back. It was, after all, just calling a spade a spade. Nower County might have been somewhere once. Before the factory closed. Before the new Bluegrass Parkway was routed through Beaufort instead of Nower County. Before they closed the high school and the elementary school, the hospital and nursing home. Before the incorporated township of Persimmon Ridge had un-incorporated itself and most of the stores on Main Street had closed.
There were a handful of un-incorporated areas that still had a business or two. He’d waved a hidey-do to Dr. E.J. Hamilton when he passed him on the way to work this morning at the crossroads. If the story was true — and wasn’t no reason to believe it wasn’t — the intersection of Route 17 and County Road 278 was the geographic center of Nower County.
A little strip mall had tried to happen on the north side of County Road 278 at the crossroads back in the day but wasn’t much left of it now. E.J.’s Healthy Pets Veterinary Clinic and Animal Hospital was the only functioning enterprise there. It was a going concern, but beyond it were four boarded-up store fronts. The Dollar General Store sat in a building of its own next to the clinic.
There was a bus shelter at the bottom of the parking lot about fifty feet back up County Road 278 from the intersection, though bus service into the county had been discontinued decades ago. The roof over the metal bench was held up by walls on both ends that were so covered in graffiti now it was hard to see through the panes of plexiglass. It sat beneath a lone streetlight with a white hood rusted almost completely through.
About fifteen years ago, some enterprising citizen had affixed a professional-looking sign on that light pole proclaiming the area to be the “Middle of Nowhere,” with one of those little “You Are Here” icons at the bottom.
Nobody ever took that sign down either, and it was likely because it had seemed clever at first. The geographic center of NowHerE County … the Middle of Nowhere. Get it? Ha. Ha.
But as life hustled by out there in the rest of the world and droned on in insignificance here, folks didn’t change the signs because they figured they were accurate. This was Nowhere County and they were nowhere people. Simple as that.
The speeder blew past the county line into Beaufort County with Liam only fifty yards behind, light flashing, siren screaming.
And then the world went black. Black but not dark. Sparkling black. Liam caught a final glimpse of the car with Pennsylvania plates flying off into the blackness before everything was gone and a buzzing filled his head.
Chapter Four
Holmes Fischer — Fish to his friends, and most everybody he’d ever met fell into that category — wasn’t certain how he’d gotten here, or where exactly “here” was. He was certain, however, that he had just enough booze in him to comb the tangles out of his nerves but not nearly enough to make the world fuzzy and the memories go away. He was getting there, though. At least he thought he was, if he could just figure out …
Trying to piece together his fragmented thoughts
was like trying to assemble one of those 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. Work on it really hard and eventually you might be able to get the edges straight, but all the stuff in the middle was still a jumble, and you couldn’t help wondering how many pieces were lying on the floor or under the couch, critical pieces without which the puzzle would never be complete. That also served as a convenient out, when the pieces wouldn’t fit together and you were flat-out tired of fooling with it — well, there was a piece missing, that’s all.
He found himself about to quote out loud a line from King Lear about … But he stopped. He had almost broken himself of that habit. You couldn’t go around in Nowhere County, Kentucky quoting Shakespeare and still be accepted by the populace as a not-dangerous vagrant. And he definitely didn’t want the good folks to decide he was mental, that he needed institutionalizing instead of just another stiff drink. If that happened, they’d ship him off on an all-expenses paid trip to Saint Somebody’s Home for the Bewildered and he did not want to spend his last days in a place like that — sober.
If he remained for all to see sane, then he could continue in the lifestyle he had chosen as the county’s homeless man who wasn’t homeless. Well, technically, he was homeless, that being defined by Merriam-Webster as a person without a home. But if you wiggled the edges of the definition just a little bit, stretched it spandex-style to fit a bigger set of hips, then he was more accurately described as multi-homed. On Monday nights, he usually slept in the basement of the Methodist church. He could still let himself in even though the church had folded and the minister’d run off with the only valuable item the church owned — a computer. Though its only riches were long gone, the doors were still locked, but he knew where the key was, and the teenagers contented themselves with vandalizing the sanctuary, spray painting the walls and throwing a pew through the stained glass window, and left his humble abode alone. Had a cot, even a hot plate that had worked until the electric company cut the power to the building.
