How Fire Runs

by Charles Dodd White

  When Harrison turned thirteen his father started taking him up to LaFollette on weekend turkey hunts in the spring. The family had a sixty-acre tract of land back in some deep coves where Harrison’s grandfather had built a small frame hunting cabin that sat next to a nameless creek. For many years the cabin had been primarily used by the old man for telling lies and drinking in the absence of women, perhaps justified by the infrequent wetting of a fishing line. But that had changed one morning when the elder Harrison stumbled out to relieve himself after a night of head-pounding whiskey drinking. He heard a picking and scratching in the nearby brush. A twenty-five-pound tom turkey with a beard that dragged the ground stood ten feet away. Without a fleeting thought to sportsmanship the old man pulled a .45 Derringer and shot the bird twice through the breast. Though it wounded the turkey mortally, the tom kicked and cried for a minute before the killer stepped over and ground his boot heel into its blood-enflamed head. Despite the gift of mercy, he soon realized that the pistol had done significant damage to the meat. Though by the time his sons had begun hunting the land that detail had been ignored. What mattered was that the woods there were full of turkey and the Harrison men considered it as much a part of their inheritance as the property deed itself.

  Harrison’s grandfather was dead by the time his father began taking him on the hunts, though a picture of the old man still hung above the cabin’s mantelpiece. Next to it was nailed the wispy black beard that had grown from the legendary turkey’s breast. When his father and uncle would sit up playing spades with their sons they’d often fall to drinking and comparing that relic to the other turkey beards they’d cut from their own kills. Robert was the better hunter of the brothers because he was committed to rising early every morning regardless of the weather and putting the time in walking the ridges. But Harrison’s father was the better caller. He practiced endlessly with the diaphragm mouth caller, yelping with that long seductive hook that lured toms to his hypothetical hen. So each had several trophies to boast, though Robert was loathe to grant any parity. And when he was drunk, the competition got mean, and there were few moments at the hunting camp he wasn’t drunk.

  One night Robert had gotten particularly bad, insisting that Harrison’s father had been cheating at cards.

  “I’ve caught you two passing signals,” he said, including Harrison in his accusing gaze. “Bunch of fucking table talk. You all work up some kind of father and son code before you came up here? I imagine I would too if I was getting whipped like a runaway slave ever time I came up to the woods. But shit, man, you ain’t supposed to treat family that way.”

  His father said he was drunk and talking crazy, but Robert became more enraged at the denial. His fist came down so hard on the card table it knocked Harrison’s half-full can of Coke to the floor.

  “Clean that shit up, boy! I don’t want a bunch of fucking ants running around in here because of that sugar. Jesus.”

  Harrison did as he was told. His father did nothing to stop him.

  Robert sat there shuffling the cards. Daniel scratched at a pimple until it started to bleed.

  “Now there’s only one way to handle this, little brother. And that’s for you to catch up with me on the whiskey. I’ve always found a little brown liquor is about the best guarantee of some truth-telling in this round world. Danny, go pour your uncle a cup of that Jack Daniels and don’t go stingy on it.”

  The teenage boy hitched his overlarge jeans as he strode to the pantry and filled a coffee cup full of the whiskey. He took a quick sip himself before setting it on the card table.

  “If I drink this will you stop being such a shit?”

  “Drink up, brother.”

  Harrison’s father gulped the liquor until his face reddened.

  “All right. Deal those cards.”

  They played late into the night. Whenever the whiskey cup ran low, Robert nodded gravely at Daniel, who went and topped it off. By the time the game was done Harrison’s father could barely speak. Robert and Daniel carried him to his bunk and threw him there like game set aside to butcher, giggling as they went off to their own beds. Harrison went over and spread a wool blanket over his father before he pulled out the sleeping sofa and crawled inside his sleeping bag.

  A brusque shake of his shoulder brought him awake in the predawn. Robert stood over him. He was fully dressed and holding a shotgun.

  “Jesus, Miss Priss, wake your ass up. You hunting or playing with your clit under the covers?”

  He sat up, saw that his father was still passed out.

  “He ain’t going to be able to hack it, Daddy,” Daniel said. “Look at his own daddy over there. Sawing logs.”

  “Is that right, boy? You ain’t able to hack it? I think it’s high time somebody sends you to hack it school then.”

  Harrison quickly pulled on his jeans and a short-sleeved camouflage shirt, grabbed his single-barrel .410 from the gun cabinet and shoved his pockets full of shells on his way out the door. Robert and Daniel said something to one another he couldn’t hear and laughed.

  They walked up to the old turnaround and stood at the edge of the woods in the dark and listened for a tom to gobble. Robert called on his box and when that elicited nothing he hooted like an owl and that set one off, maybe three-quarters of a mile away. He hooted once more and when the tom responded again he marked its direction and they plunged into the brush after it.

  It was hard to keep up. Robert and Daniel moved with easy strides and an uncanny ability to avoid shadow-locked branches and vines, whereas Harrison seemed to find every snare and exposed root along the trail. He scuffed along, stubbed his toe every few steps. Robert whirled around and told him through tight teeth to not make so goddamn much noise. He tried to, aware of his crashing footfalls and his uncle’s brimming anger.

  At daybreak they stopped and cut small branches and stuck them in the ground to erect a hasty blind. Robert called on the box. The third time the tom answered, some few hundred yards distant, though remaining out of eyesight. Harrison measured his breaths, tried to make himself as small and still as he could. He was close enough to Robert to smell the sour sweat coming from his body, the electric musk from Daniel. They were a small pack of animals there, as much a part of the wilderness of the bird they’d come to kill. This predatory idea sharpened inside Harrison and he felt his senses quicken. And though this made the immediate reek of the man and boy harder to bear, it accessed something within him. He leaned in, felt his surroundings register, became dizzyingly present.

  So, he was surprised when the others failed to see it as clearly as he did. The turkey strutted from cover at the far ridge and came straight on toward the creek bed. His mouth dried and he felt shaky. He cut his eyes to Robert, but his uncle was concentrating on a different quarter of the woods. Daniel had taken the turkey caller in his hands and was chalking it for its next use. Harrison was the only one who saw the bird.

  “Uncle Robert, do you see it?” he whispered.

  “See what?”

  “The turkey. He’s right over there.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Right there,” he said reaching his arm out and pointing.

  Robert slapped his hand down.

  “Don’t move, you goddamn moron. Shit.”

  The tom released a quick series of agitated clucks and trotted back toward the ridgeline. Robert put the butt of his shotgun to his shoulder, but the range was already too great. He lowered it and grabbed the caller from Daniel, tried a series of turkey talk that received no answer. A moment later the tom topped the ridge and disappeared over the other side.

  “Come on, dumbass. Now we’ve got to chase him.”

  They picked up their gear and started down toward the creek, tramped through the water and up the opposite hill. Harrison’s sneakers were soaked and he could feel where his sock rubbed a blister along his heel, but he was able to keep up better now. He watched the backs of Robert and Daniel, saw how they weaved past the
lower branches and raised their feet to avoid the stumbling traps of deadwood and crawling undergrowth. At short intervals they paused and Robert would call again to see if he might slow the tom, but the bird remained silent and all they had to guide them was the endless cross work of traveled game trails. In half an hour it seemed like they’d gone nearly two miles. Harrison’s legs burned and he began to fall behind once more. He began to wish that he’d stayed behind with his father, but recognized too the need to last on the trail as long as he could.

  An hour later they still had not sighted the tom but Robert and Daniel continued hiking the steep hillsides. They did not slow as they grew more distant. Harrison sat and rested against a granite outcropping, knew he was lost, but his legs shook with each step and he felt on the verge of collapse. He leaned his shotgun against the stony flat and pried his sneaker off. The blister at his heel had split and a crusty patch of blood darkened the sock. He pinched the fabric to draw if away from the skin and it made a sound like plastic tearing. With the shoe in one hand he crutched his way with the shotgun after the others.

  He walked on for another half hour without any signs of where they might have gone. The day had become hot and the only water he had to drink was from the slow-moving pools of the creek. He had been told not to drink from these, but as his thirst became overpowering he had no choice. Finally, he made it to the highest ground he could see and broke open the action on the .410 and removed the shell. His father had shown him how to blow into the muzzle of the gun so that it made a distinct bugling sound that could carry over a great distance. He put his mouth to the barrel and blew down into it until his face lost its color but the sound never came. He sat and cried.

  He stood once more and tried to gather the direction he’d come, but the shifting daylight had merged the woods into an impossible similarity. He raised the shotgun and fired it into the treetops, broke open the action, reloaded, and fired twice more. Then he sat there with an empty gun and waited.

  It was midafternoon before Robert and Daniel found him. They came out from the higher country and straight to where he sat as easily as if they’d located him by the point of a compass.

  “Miss Priss get lost?”

  “Where’s my dad?”

  “He’s back there at the cabin nursing that hangover of his. Man that age and still not able to hold his liquor, I swear.”

  “Why you got your shoe off?” Daniel sneered.

  He turned his foot, showed the bloody heel.

  “You need to run to the store and grab a maxi-pad for that?”

  Robert laughed at his own joke. Harrison got up and followed them as they headed back the way they came. Soon, however, they had resumed a quick pace that straggled him as soon as they mounted into steeper country. He didn’t want to ask them to slow, knew it would do no good if he did.

  “Well goddamn,” Robert said as he turned and stopped at the base of a granite outcropping. The land rolled away on all sides. “Why don’t you drag that sweet ass of yours up here so we don’t have to do this all over again? Come on, Miss Priss. We ain’t going to maroon you.”

  As soon as he caught up, Harrison’s toe caught on a hidden catch and he went sprawling. Without thinking, he threw his hands out to brace his fall. The shotgun clattered through the brush.

  “Get that gun, Danny. Hand it here,”

  Robert took the .410, broke open its action to find it empty, snapped the action back closed.

  “Get that boy’s belt down,” he told his son.

  Daniel straddled Harrison, pressed his face down into the muddy leaves while his free hand snaked around to the boy’s belly. Harrison bucked and tried to push up but the teenager was too strong to move him off. Daniel’s fingers slipped under his T-shirt and found the brass clasp. It came loose with a hard, gasping sound. Harrison yelled and kicked but Daniel had him then, yanked the tight denim legs down to the bottom of his thighs so that he lay there hobbled by his own clothes.

  “Stop squirming, you little shit!”

  Later, he would never understand why he didn’t try to get to his feet once more and run, but as Daniel stood and Harrison was exposed there in the clearing, it was as though a greater weight pressed him down, one that was as unopposable as the strange gravity of bad dreams. Some new creature had him in its hold, something interposed between his uncle and cousin and him. He realized then that something as light as air could contain the mass of the world.

  The cold nose of the shotgun muzzle jabbed up between his ass cheeks and rammed just above his scrotum. With that jolt of pain he felt like his stomach was going to empty. His fingers arched down into the soft dirt as he tried to pull away. He gained just the slightest distance when Robert pulled the shotgun back and pressed it sharply forward, this time ensuring that it ran up inside him. Harrison screamed and cried.

  “Hush. Get up now you punky little bitch. Get up and stay up or I’ll keep this big old black dick up inside you all the way back”

  He said he’d keep up. He said it as many times as Robert wanted him to.

  Daniel looked away when Harrison stood and pulled up his jeans. Robert looked on and shook his head.

  “Quit your blubbering, honeysuckle. The goddamn thing wasn’t even loaded.”

  17

  KYLE WAS IN TOWN DROPPING OFF SOME PLANTS AT THE INDEPENDENT grocery when he got a call from Orlynne, telling him to get down to the courthouse as quick as he could, that somebody was likely to be killed if he didn’t. He dumped the crates in the parking lot and skidded his tires on the way out. The manager yelled at his tailgate, said he wouldn’t pay full price for busted product, by damn god.

  He saw the police lights before he reached the square, a couple of deputies already suited up in their assault gear and carrying AR-15s at the ready. They were talking into radios clipped to their shoulders. He could hear Sheriff Holston squawking back. There were no empty spots along the main road so he drove up onto the sidewalk and left the truck there next to a memorial bench in the city park. He walked straight on when he saw the deputies were unhurriedly heading up the middle of the street.

  He got his phone out, dialed Orlynne.

  “Where are you?”

  He could hear her talking over her shoulder to someone before she answered.

  “We’re up here inside the courthouse. We’re sitting with the sheriff.”

  “What the hell’s going on, Orlynne?”

  “Go on up to the square. You’ll see.”

  He rounded the corner. Four of Gavin’s men stood in a small diamond formation with Gavin at their center. They blocked the courthouse’s main entrance. Across their bodies hung assault rifles similar to the ones carried by the county deputies. Roadblocks had been put out on either side and several people were standing there looking on. The police light flashed across in long silent swathes.

  Kyle raised his phone.

  “Orlynne, let me talk to Holston.”

  She told him to wait a minute. A fumbling across hands.

  “Morning, Commissioner Pettus.”

  “You care to explain what I’m looking at right now?”

  “I imagine that would depend on where you’re standing. But if you’re in the immediate vicinity of the county courthouse then I imagine you’re seeing a small group of men gathered in a protest of Commissioner Pickens’s recent decision to remain seated on the county commission board.”

  “This isn’t a protest. It’s a naked threat.”

  “Calm down, Pettus. Do you think I’m stupid enough to not see what’s going on here? Do me a favor and take a closer look at those rifles. Look at their chambers specifically.”

  Kyle could see that each of the chambers was locked in the open position and that the magazines had been removed from the receivers. The rifles were empty.

  “Do you see?” Holston asked.

  “Yeah, I see it. That still doesn’t mean it’s not a threat.”

  “Of course it’s a threat. It just isn’t a technically illegal one.
There’s nothing in Tennessee law that says you can’t be in public with an unloaded long gun. You know, the law is my business after all. While you might have the advantage of following it as a part-time distraction, it is how I earn my grub.”

  “You’re making no effort to get rid of them?”

  “I’m exercising what the diplomats call strategic patience. It has the advantage of not getting anyone killed even if a few people get their feelings hurt. I do hope that’s alright with you. I worry about the health of our working relationship when we have these little disagreements.”

  Kyle ended the call, told the dead phone line to damn itself. He approached the street blockage and stood among a few of the onlookers. One woman had drawn up a sign on a piece of poster board that said NAZIS HATE AMERICA. She had set the message in front of her, resting against her belly. She had her hands free to smoke.

  “You mind if I bum one from you?” he asked.

  “Sure thing, bud.”

  She tapped out a long filtered Camel and lit it for him. She was maybe thirty years old with dreaded hair and wore a T-shirt of an Indian head in profile. Above it was an oil pump jack attached to the back of the skull where what appeared to be blood was siphoned out.

  “I like your shirt.”

  “Thanks, I bought it up at the Dakota pipeline protest last fall. They had a lot of cool shit for sale up there. I wish I’d gotten more.”