by Alex Bledsoe
The case was warm but not hot. He said a little prayer before he reached for the catches. He held his breath as he opened the lid
His Gibson J-45 acoustic, with his first name in pearl inlay along the neck, didn’t have a scratch.
“Fuck me,” he sighed in wonder.
He looked around at the crash site anew. Byron was not a religious man, despite having been raised in the Pentecostal church, but it was hard not to see the hand of God in his deliverance. “Lord, looks like I owe you one,” he said. The Lord did not respond.
Then he remembered that the plane might explode at any moment. He had to get away from the crash, find a road or a house with a phone, and let the authorities know. He had to call Donna, so she wouldn’t panic if she heard the news on the radio first. Ever since Harmony had come along, Donna’s emotions had been on a hair trigger anyway; if she thought he was dead, it would send her shrieking down the street.
He knew that there would be no help up the slope, toward the mountaintop. All the houses or roads would be down lower, in the valley. He stumbled down the hill through the fog, bumping into tree trunks and low-hanging limbs, wrenching the guitar case free when it wedged into something. Once away from the fire, the ground grew icy and slippery, with patches of snow where the treetops gapped. In no time the glow from the wreck faded, and he was lost in cold, black darkness. He was glad he wore his leather jacket, but the chill would get him soon if he didn’t find shelter.
Twice the frozen leaves flew out from under his feet, and once he slid for a frighteningly long way before he slammed into a fallen tree. He had no idea how long he’d been moving when, ahead of him, he saw another orange glow.
At first he feared he’d traveled in a circle and inadvertently returned to the plane. But no, he’d been moving downhill the whole time. As he got closer, he saw that it wasn’t the plane burning ahead of him; it was a campfire.
He approached it as carefully as he could, but his footsteps sounded to him like the passage of an elephant, and his exhausted breath rasped loud in his head. Up here in the mountains they could be moonshiners tending a still, working late and not in the mood for visitors. Through the mist the light grew gradually brighter and sharper, until he could make out the camp’s details.
Two men sat on logs on either side of the fire. One looked small and shrunken in clothes made of old rags stitched and tied together. He had an immense, bushy beard and wore an old top hat. The other man wore a more modern winter coat and held a large jug.
A big dog lay between them. When he caught Byron’s scent he jumped up and barked once, a big barumph sound that seemed impossibly loud in the silence.
“Hesh up, Acrasia,” the bearded one snapped, and the dog obeyed.
Byron stepped into the open. His size often intimidated people, and sometimes that was useful, but not now. He smiled as much as he could, gave a little wave with his free hand, and said, “Howdy, gentlemen.”
The two men turned to look at him. The bearded one’s eyes glittered with reflected firelight. The other, clean-shaven and dressed more normally, looked familiar, but Byron’s crash-fuzzed head couldn’t place him. He did note the absurdity of running into someone he might know in the middle of the Appalachian woods after surviving a plane crash.
“You look plumb lost,” the clean-shaven one said. His voice was neither friendly nor suspicious, just neutral.
“My airplane crashed,” Byron said, startled at the statement’s absurdity.
“That’s what that noise was,” the clean-shaven man said to the other. “Told you it weren’t thunder. Anybody hurt?”
“Everybody but me is dead.”
For a long moment, all three were silent.
“Ain’t that a hell of a thing,” the clean-shaven man said at last. “How many we talking about?”
“Guy Berry … Large Sarge Sargent … the pilot.” Even saying it aloud couldn’t make it seem real. They had played before hundreds of people just hours before. There was no way both of them, all of them, could be dead. “And some fella the plane hit when it crashed.”
“It hit somebody on the ground?” the clean-shaven man said.
“It did unless he was up in the air flying around the plane.” This made him flash back to whatever Guy had seen just before the accident, but of course there was no way it could have been a person.
The man in the top hat said thoughtfully, “I might need to go up there and take a look. You got any biscuits or hardtack on you, John?”
The other man felt around and pulled out something wrapped in a napkin. “This is all I got.”
“That’ll do.”
“I need to get ahold of somebody,” Byron interrupted. “Let ’em know what’s happened. Where you reckon I could find the nearest phone?”
“Well, ain’t no way to get down off the mountain in this fog,” the bearded man said. “That’s why we’re sittin’ here. Have to wait till daylight or we’re likely to walk off a cliff.” He raised the jug and offered it. “But that don’t mean we can’t be sociable. Reckon you need a drink, son.”
Byron squatted on the log, his bad leg out straight and his other knee nearly up to his chin, and gratefully took the jug. He winced as the moonshine burned his gullet and exploded in his belly. It took him a moment to get his breath back, but the two men didn’t laugh at him. “Thanks,” he croaked.
“Whoo-ee, you sure is a big ol’ feller,” the man called John said. “How tall is you?”
“Six foot four,” Byron said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was used to questions about his size. “Weigh about two-twenty.”
“Your mama must’ve had a hell of a time feeding you.”
Byron laughed. “Well, she did say we needed to have our own truck patch just to make my school lunch.” He passed the bottle back to one of the others. “I can pay you if you’ll take me down the mountain right now.”
“Ain’t got nothin’ to do with money, son,” the bearded man said.
“You don’t know the way?” Byron asked.
He grinned, his missing teeth clear in the firelight. “I know the way just fine. But ’tween the fog and this moonshine, I wouldn’t trust myself to find my pecker with my left hand.” He laughed at his own joke.
Byron said nothing. Now that he was reasonably safe, he felt numb, the evening’s experiences too extreme for his mind to absorb.
“My name’s John,” the better-dressed man said. “Yonder sits Eli. And that’s his ol’ hound dog, Acrasia.”
“Will he bite me?” Byron asked.
“Might slobber you to death,” the bearded man said.
Byron scratched the dog between his ears. He’d owned a similar dog as a boy, and after recent events, it was comforting just to touch the short, bristly fur. The animal let out a satisfied whine. “My name’s Byron.”
“Where you from?” John asked.
“California. Born in Albert Lea, Minnesota.”
“Where’s that?”
“Down close to the state line with Iowa.”
“They done give towns two names like a person now?”
“Not sure how it got that name. Didn’t live there long. Moved to Virginia, then out West.”
“Either way, you’re a long way from home,” Eli observed.
“That’s the truth,” Byron agreed. The liquor’s warmth spread through him, muting the panic and urgency he’d felt since the crash. When the jug came his way again, he took another swig.
John reached down behind the log he sat on and produced a fiddle and bow. With no preliminaries, he began to play “Be Kind to a Man When He’s Down,” its long, mournful notes filling the quiet forest. Byron had heard that song all his life, from a scratchy old record his dad treasured. He and the bearded man sat in silence, listening, the fiddle giving voice to emotions too strong to be expressed any other way.
When he finished, John nodded at Byron’s guitar case. “You play that twang plank?”
“I’ve been known to
pick at it,” Byron said.
“You know ‘The Brown Girl’?”
“About that girl that gets her head cut off and kicked against the door?”
“That’s the one.”
Byron had an unfailing memory for tunes, and could recall almost anything he’d ever heard, and certainly anything he’d ever played. “I reckon I can find my way around it.”
“Why don’t you two pick a little,” Eli said as he stood, “while I go attend to some business. Be back before you know it.”
He wandered off into the dark. Byron assumed he was going to pee, but if he’d been more aware, he’d have noticed that Eli headed off uphill, toward the plane crash.
Byron took out his guitar. When he looked up, John let out a long, plaintive wail from his fiddle, and Byron strummed along.
“Who’s gonna sing?” John asked.
“I’ll give it a shot,” Byron said, and when they began the next verse, he did:
Come riddle me, riddle me, Mother, he says,
Come riddle me all in one,
Whether I’ll go to court fair Helen,
Or fetch you the brown girl home.
If it registered on Byron that neither of these men seemed overly concerned with the plane crash or its victims, that neither had inquired about whether Byron was injured, and that the moonshine jug never seemed to get any emptier, Byron pushed it aside. Right now the most important thing was that he was jamming with a great fellow player. And if that seemed impossibly odd as well, out in the middle of the Tennessee woods, he’d just deal with that later, when they’d finished playing.
Unfortunately, he had no idea how long that would truly be.
2
Winter 2015
The first real snow fell quietly that January, without the slicing wind that sometimes accompanied it, and left three inches of powder on the ground, and on every tree branch on the mountainside. Now the sun blazed on it, reflecting in blinding white across the eastern slopes. Luckily, the trail led the woman around to the western side, where it was colder but the light was more bearable.
After hiking for two hours, she stopped to rest and drink from the water bottle in her bag. The trail seemed to take the most difficult path instead of the easiest, going up steep inclines and then sharply down into gullies. Fallen trees blocked it in places. She knew, though, that this all meant she was going the right way. She appreciated that confirmation, since she hadn’t been in this area in a frighteningly long time.
She took off her sunglasses. She appeared to be a woman of about thirty, with the dusky skin and jet-black hair typical of the Tufa. Unlike the generally straight or slightly wavy hair of most, though, hers poked long ebony ringlets out from under her ski cap. She had high cheekbones, big green eyes, and full lips. She was attractive, but would never be beautiful. And the determination in her eyes had frightened away many a weak-souled man.
As she rested, she watched a squirrel run down the length of a fallen log, leaving little puffs of snow in its wake. It scampered up a tree trunk and disappeared into the bare branches. She smiled, stretched, and sighed with contentment. She’d been away too long.
She sang:
The snow it melts the soonest when the wind begins to sing;
And the swallow skims without a thought as long as it is spring;
But when spring goes, and winter blows, my lad, and ye’ll be glad,
For all your pride, to follow me, be ye either joy or sad.
When she finished, she laughed to herself. Such a simple thing, singing, and she’d been separated from it for so long.
She looked up at the slope. It appeared particularly difficult, which meant she didn’t have far to go.
Just then her cell phone rang. She took it out and stared at it, surprised that she got any reception here. Indeed, it was only the faintest single bar. She pushed the TALK button and said, “What?”
A distinctly British voice said, “Hello, my dove. Do you know what I’ve seen in the last half hour?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Not a bloody thing. I keep waiting for the wonders of nature to appear, but it seems they’ve taken the day off. Unless you count sticks.”
“Bored, huh?”
“One could say that.”
“Can’t you read your book?”
“I finished it. The butler did it, by the way.”
“What was it called again?”
“The Butler Did It.”
“Well, play games on your phone, then.”
“I don’t dare. I’m afraid to use up the battery, in case I have to wander through the forest in search of rescue.”
“You go wandering through this forest, my friend, you won’t need rescue.”
“See? That is not reassuring. You’re actually quite terrible at reassuring people.”
“You’re a grown man, you shouldn’t need—”
“Bloody hell!”
“What?”
“Some sort of animal! Just outside the truck!”
“What does it look like?”
“A bloody big bird! Like an ostrich, only it’s green!”
“Sounds like an emu. Probably got out of somebody’s yard.”
“It’s gigantic!”
“It’s just a bird, you big baby.”
“I think it can hear you. It’s looking this way.”
“It just sees its reflection in the windows.”
“Can it break the glass?”
“I don’t think so. Just ignore it, it’ll go away.”
“How much longer will you be?”
She looked back up the trail. “Not long. If I can get a signal, I’ll call you when I start back down.”
“Well, if a bird answers, hang up.”
She put away the phone and resumed her climb.
* * *
The old man opened the door set into the side of the hill and squinted out into the light. The trees were bare, and the winter sun filtered through them onto the fresh snow. The air bit at him, cold and damp.
A woman stood on the old railroad ties that made up his front porch. She wore a stylish fur-edged leather coat, expensive boots, and sunglasses.
He put the electrolarynx against his scarred throat and said, “Yeah? This ain’t no camp shelter. Get your ass off my property.” The voice came out flat and unaccented, an automated shadow of its former, powerful self.
The woman frowned. “Damn, Rockhouse, you sound like one of them video games kids play. You got a remote control that walks you around the room, too?”
Rockhouse Hicks looked more closely at the woman, then recognized her. He hid his surprise and said slowly, “Bo-Kate Wisby.”
She smiled and took off the sunglasses. “Was beginning to think you’d forgotten me. How long’s it been?”
He rocked back on his heels but didn’t quite retreat. “Been a while.”
“That’s a fact.”
She looked around at the stones that formed the doorframe and the inside walls. She nodded at the electrolarynx, and the puckered scar tissue on his neck beneath it. “Your daughter Curnen did that, didn’t she? Tore your damn voice out with her teeth, from what I hear. That must’ve stung.”
“What do you want, Bo-Kate?” he said again.
“Can I come in?” She made a complex gesture with her hand, then bowed her head in apparent supplication.
He wasn’t fooled. “Not till you tell me why you’re here. Last I heard, you was working over in Nashville.”
She chuckled. “Rockhouse, a lesser woman would think you didn’t trust her.”
“I don’t. I remember what you did. And I know what your song is, Bo-Kate: ‘Young Hunting.’ And I ain’t gonna be another Lord Henry.”
She laughed, a snort of utter contempt, and reached into her bag. “Old man, you ain’t never been my Lord Henry. And we ain’t close enough related for you to see me that way. You think I don’t know why Curnen did what she did? Hell, everybody knows. You’re a cliché, you know that? A
n inbred, inbreeding old mountain man who doesn’t even have indoor plumbing.” Her voice turned hard. “Now let me the fuck inside.”
He fumbled and dropped his electrolarynx as he tried to slam the door in her face.
She pressed her lipstick-sized stun gun against his belly. He stumbled back, convulsing. She followed him inside, holding the device against him, careful not to shock herself. When she pulled it away, he fell twitching to the floor. A wet stain spread across his crotch.
She closed the door and looked around the room, waiting for her eyes to adjust. His boots scraped the floor as his legs spasmed.
A tepid fire burned in the hearth, putting out very little heat. A table with two straight-backed chairs, a rocking chair, and a bed were the only furniture. The walls were damp, moldy stone. No windows admitted light; a trapdoor peeked out beneath a tattered rug.
“Great gosh a’mighty, Rockhouse, you really do have a rock house,” Bo-Kate said as she looked around. “You really live like this? With all the power you used to have, you decide to live in a damn burrow? You must be part gopher.”
Five banjos on stands lined the wall. There were no pictures, no feminine touches, and the place smelled unwashed and sealed off.
“Well, no sense putting off what I’m here for. I’d tell you I was sorry, but that just flat ain’t the case. I’m not the least bit sorry for what I’m about to do.”
She knelt beside him. Foam collected at the corners of his mouth, and he wheezed. She checked his pulse and, satisfied that he wasn’t actually dying, bent close to speak in his ear. “I know you can hear me, so pay attention. When I heard about what happened at the Pair-A-Dice, well, I just knew it was my time to come back. You lost your power that day, and that makes you useless. And it leaves an empty chair.”
She opened her purse and pulled out a heavy pair of industrial clippers, the kind used to cut tire rubber or metal sheets. She squeezed them a couple of times; the big spring between the handles squeaked.
“Besides, it’s time for somebody new to take over, somebody who won’t coddle those damn First Daughters. They’re led by a twelve-year-old, for God’s sake, and you never put ’em in their place. You’re too soft, Rockhouse, and I don’t mean that little withered pecker of yours.”
