But the coyote had said what he had to say. He did not bother to respond. Gradually, the dogs, tired of their argument, crawled one by one back under their porches, and were silent.
That’s me all over, Maggie thought. My life’s been one long howl. And one big ruckus after another.
Her mind was all atumble. She could not not-think, but to think brought up more thoughts than she wanted to live with.
So fuck it, she thought. Fuck it all.
It would be just a short walk down her lane and across the road, over the bridge, and up that Pillhead Hill to the house. The lights would be on and the boys would be happy to see her. And of course, they would front her—one or two, or even three or four—enough to get her through this godawful night.
Without willing it or willing against it, she threw the little jacket across her shoulders and stepped into the yard. Without willing it or willing against it, she crossed the yard. At the edge of the road she stopped, out of old habit, and looked to the right and to the left.
Then, when she looked forward again, she saw the coyote in the road. He had not been there when she looked to the right; he had not been there when she looked to the left. But now, as she looked to cross the road, the coyote stood directly in her path. He must have come up from the bed of the creek, she thought. As if in response to the notion, the coyote shook out his coat and cast a silver spray into the moonlight. Maggie stood frozen in place.
The coyote gazed at her, one forepaw raised, as if he were reading her through and through.
Oh my God, she thought, what the fuck am I doing?
She put her hands to her temples and turned back to the house. She stumbled to the couch and collapsed. Shivering, nauseous, utterly emptied of thought, bereft of either hope or despair, she curled up into herself like a child. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
As if it were a prayer.
Pillhead Hill
1
RONNIE WILSON woke in the dark, at the bottom of a gully, cold and soaked with dew. It was just at the rise of an early summer moon, with the moon near full, and all around to one side of him loomed great, isolated trees and great, round elephantine bales of hay. A black tobacco barn towered at the top of the other, steeper slope. But whose barn? Whose fields were these? He had no idea where he was or what he had done to get there.
I bought me a load of trouble this time, he thought. And by the ache in his head and the stale, unsettled feeling in his gut, he could just about tell what had got him to this place. He pondered a moment what lie he might tell Sheila.
He had lied his way through tough situations before, and he could spin a good lie when he had to. Sometimes he lied just to stay in practice. But he needed a place to start, a little kernel of truth to build on, and it would help if he knew what truths he had to keep and which to avoid. He pulled himself up to sit and he rubbed the ache in his head and he tried to remember. Gradually, it came on him that somewhere nearby, probably just beyond the barn at the top of the hill, there was an old, two-story farmhouse. Some folks from the city, new to this county, had holed up there and they had some good dope and he had partied there with those new folks and their good dope and Sheila had not been happy about it. She was stoned herself on Oxys, as usual, but she had not been happy because the boys from the city had started him to seriously consider how he might quit his factory job and help them sell their good dope. And she was angry that a girl among the new people had flirted with him and angry that he had flirted back, and that girl barely eighteen, if she was that.
They argued, it got ugly, and he stormed out of the house with the nub of a fifth of whiskey in his fist, determined to drink the argument off his mind.
He stopped behind the barn at the top of the slope to suck down the last of the liquor and to take a leak. The whiskey had lit him up good and he waited for it to take him past drunk, past high, past buzzed, and right up into ecstasy. But first, to piss!
How he managed to lose his balance while pissing over the hillside was something he decided he did not want to know. But he did lose his balance, and so he tumbled Jack-and-Jill fashion down the slope and into the gully where he now lay among the reeds and thistles.
So, I reckon all of this ain’t dew, he thought.
He sat for a time among the thistles and listened to the trickle of water that ran down to the creek until a new, troubling memory came to him from the time he lay stupefied at the bottom of the hill. It was a vague cloud of a memory crowded with voices, angry voices that grew in their anger. Someone shouted; someone pleaded. Then a rumble of a sound like thunder that went on and on. And then stopped.
* * *
THE DISTANT sound of guns routed Maggie Boylan from her sleep. For a moment—that groggy moment it took her mind to crawl up from the cave of her dream—she thought the sound was the rip and rumble of thunder. But she knew her weather signs. If this was thunder, it was strange thunder. Moonlight flooded her window. There was not a breath of wind, not a hint of lightning, not a leaf that stirred.
That’s not thunder, she thought, that’s somebody shooting guns.
Coon hunters up in the hills, she reckoned at first. It was past the season, but it was a clear, crisp night. She held in mind for a moment the image of a man in overalls thrashing through the thickets behind his hounds. But a coon hunter would fire a single shot, maybe a second if the first one failed to bring down the coon. This was a volley of shots. And that first volley was followed by a single shot, then a second, and a third, and more. Bop. Bop. Bop. Bobop. Then, silence for a time. Then—badop—a quick pair of shots. Then, with a rip like thunder, a final, explosive volley.
God only knows what them boys is up to, she thought.
Them boys were the ones across the road and over the creek and up the long steep lane that led to what they now called Pillhead Hill. She was sober now, almost three months clean and sober, so she did not truck with Pillhead Hill any longer. She had made a decision. Whatever they did on Pillhead Hill was no concern of hers. So she drifted back to sleep.
She woke again when the first siren swooped down from the north like a great, bloody owl and the whoop-a-whoop of it grew and grew until she had to clap her hands over her ears. Then she heard the complaint of tires as the car turned into the lane, then the rumble of the bridge floor and the scratch and rattle of gravel as the first car climbed the hill.
Oh Jesus, she thought. Has some poor fuck gone and overdosed?
In minutes, a second siren wailed up from the south. Others whined, wailed, and whooped in the distance, purling whoop-a-whoop, one on the other, converging from every corner.
She rose and threw on a sweater. She went to the kitchen, lit a cigarette, and stood in the window. She recognized, one after another, the Highway Patrol, the county sheriff, cop cars from various points around, and ambulances from three different volunteer fire departments. Each one wailed down the road, bawled around the turn, rattled the floorboards of the bridge, and scratched its way up the hill. The red and blue lights spilled down the hillside and into the waters of the creek. The mists off the creek were miscolored with them, and the fields, and the trees, the great, round bales of hay in the pasture, and the gravel of her lane. The shambled pickets of her front yard fence were outlined in red and blue light that mixed and spread in a pattern that seemed not of this world. Each of the lights, she knew all too well, had its own pulse. But with so many, and taken all together, the congregated lights had an erratic, stuttering, strained, and unpredictable rhythm like that of a heart in deep distress.
She said a little prayer for the boys who lived on the hill and for whoever had been up there with them.
Oh Jesus, she thought. Please let them be all right.
* * *
WHEN RONNIE Wilson set out from the house with his nub of whiskey, the moon had been down at the tops of the trees like a watcher peeking over a fence and the light the moon cast was splintered and broken by the branches of the trees. Now, the moon was full-launched into the
sky and it spread its unhindered light over the fields. The only dark place was the patch of hillside in the shadow of the barn.
Was it an hour since he tumbled? Two? He guessed, by the position of the moon, that it was no more than that, so he reckoned there was still more party going on. He could hear a distant radio, but nothing of the voices, nothing of the dream-like thunder he had heard before he passed out. The hillside was steep and his path to the house lay in the shadow of the great black barn. And he was still drunk, transcendentally drunk, staggering drunk, so he picked his way slowly and as carefully as drunk would allow, so that he staggered and swayed and stumbled back nearly as far as he moved forward and he wished he had taken just a little hit of speed or a half-line of coke to keep his motor moving.
Then he remembered that half-remembered sound of voices and thunder and he stopped for a while altogether.
* * *
“WHAT’S THAT, babe? What are you doing?” That was all he asked when Sheila turned all hatchets and hammers on him.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you just snorted a line. Baby, ain’t you done enough for one night?” He glared toward Randy the Man but Randy glared back from behind his black brows.
Randy the Man was the guy from the city who owned this house with the new people and the connections to bring in the good dope. He loomed over the kitchen table and flexed his big wrestler’s shoulders, sorting pills with his big, blunt fingers “You want some?”
“Naw, man. I’m good.” Oxy could get ugly and Ronnie did not like what Oxy was doing to Sheila. He lifted the fifth of whiskey he had been sharing with that little, maybe-jailbait girl in her hippie-chick blouse and ragged-up jeans. A little silver ring in her navel winked out from under the hem of her blouse each time she leaned back to take a hit from the fifth and he was delirious with the sight of it. The girl was a little foreign in the way she talked and a little babyish in the flesh, enough that he had to wonder. But she was woman enough in the way she moved her eyes. Woman enough that Sheila noticed how Ronnie’s eye kept drifting south toward the silver ring in the girl’s navel. She looked at the girl and she looked at him and she erupted. “Damn,” she spat. “This is why you want to quit your job? So you can trot after this little sorry thing?”
Sheila went at him buckets and blisters until the OxyContin kicked in and she suddenly went silent and her eyes went empty. She waved him away, sat down, and let her hand fall into her lap.
“So now you ain’t even gonna talk to me?”
She rose from her chair and waved him away again. “Where’s my purse,” she said. Her voice had dropped suddenly to a whisper. “I’m going home.” The purse was not hard to find—it was a big bulky thing covered in spangles. She fumbled in it for a cigarette, lit the cigarette, slowly inhaled, and said, again, “I’m going home.”
“No, you’re not,” he said.
She muttered something else in her voice that had gone suddenly to a whisper. He could not tell what she said, for she spoke in an OxyContin mumble. But he could guess, and that was when he decided he had enough.
“Go if you want or stay if you want,” he said. “I’m gonna find my own damn party.”
She stumbled off in one direction and he in another, he with his bottle in his hand and she with her spangled purse slung over her shoulder as if she really did mean to go home.
Which she couldn’t, since he had the keys to the truck.
But she did whatever she did out the front door of the house and across the yard toward the road. He did not know what she did or where she went, for he could not bear to watch her stumble away with her back turned against him. So he took his bottle by the neck and shambled off in his own direction.
Randy the Man was still by the kitchen door, still counting pills into little plastic bags. “She’s a grown woman, dude. Don’t look at me.”
“I know, I know. I just got to think this shit out, man,” he said.
“Do what you gotta do.”
Ronnie nodded to Miss Possible Jailbait as he passed her and he thought she winked at him. It was maybe just a sneak-wink of a twitch of the eye, nothing more. But yes, once he thought about it, a definite wink and a sign that, if Sheila really did go home, he was bound, before the night was over, to get him a little strange.
* * *
SO HE was not at all sure what he was staggering toward up this shadowed hill. Another fight with Sheila? A little knock-around in the hay with the hope-she’s-over-eighteen hippie chick? Once, he stumbled, and he saw that his empty bottle lay in the grass. He raised it and saw that it was empty. So he threw it down the hill and it broke on a rock.
He still heard the radio.
But no other voices.
They must all be wasted, he thought. Catastrophically wasted. There’s gonna be some seriously elevated buzzes. This is some serious shit going down.
His own buzz was in serious need of tending. He had lost most of the pleasurable part and he was left with the staggering, stumbling, uncoordinated part and the uncomfortable, headachy, stale-in-the-gut early phases of hangover.
A nice, tight line of coke, another long drink of whiskey, and a little, skinny joint to round it out and take off the rough edges. Then he would see where the rest of the night would go: patch it up with Sheila or let his tongue play with I’m-Sure-She’s-Old-Enough’s navel ring.
At the top of the hill, he leaned to rest a moment against the barn wall and looked around. Sure enough, there was the farmhouse, just as he remembered. A radio disc jockey prattled away, but there were still no other voices. Lights blazed in all the windows, but he heard no other voices; he saw nothing that moved.
Man, they can’t all be totaled, he thought. Cause there’s a shitload of dope to be had and the night is young.
There was something like a bale of weed and a crate of liquor and piles of pills of every sort, just waiting to be used and abused.
It’s the Grand Central Station of intoxication, he told himself. And I ain’t nearly through.
He intended to party straight through the night until morning, to get drunker, higher, more fucked up, wasted, blizzed, ruint, stoned, bombed, tanked, hammered, cranked, looped, and fried than he had ever been. He wanted to get as far away from Ronnie Wilson as he could get and still make it back. He wanted to go straight to the edge.
He had lost valuable time. And he was wasting time now. So he pushed himself up off the side of the barn and staggered toward the farmhouse.
Hell yeah, he told himself. We’re gonna party till the last dog dies.
* * *
DEPUTY SHERIFF Timothy Weatherstone crested Pillhead Hill in his cruiser, siren roaring and light bar blazing. He pulled into the drive that ran between house and barn and saw Ronnie Wilson—from out of nowhere—dead centered in his headlights, his beard and hair all crazylit with red and blue light. Weatherstone hit the brakes hard and came to a stop in a spray of gravel.
Wilson slapped both hands down on the hood of the cruiser and shouted, “Motherfucker, you damn near laid me flat.”
But Wilson threw both hands up and backed away when Weatherstone came out with his pistol leveled.
“Holdupholdupholdup,” he called.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Weatherstone shouted back. He looked quick to the left and to the right, just in case, and hoped the crazy in the lights would not notice how his pistol shook. Other sirens railed in the distance, but Weatherstone was the first, and had no idea what he was up against.
Wilson squinted and started to lower his hands. “Timmy,” he said, “it’s me.”
“I said, keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Timmy, you dumb motherfucker.” He brought his hands back up. “It’s Ronnie Wilson.”
“Ronnie? And who else?”
Wilson made a crazy sort of half-laugh. “That’s just the problem,” he said. He seemed to regret his joke right away. “Seriously, man, you got to help me.”
“That’s just it, man. There’s just a mess of shot-up people and I can’t find Sheila.”
Tim Weatherstone looked toward the farmhouse. The lights were on; a radio played. “Who’s in there?”
“A bunch of people with their heads blowed in. Man, you got to help me find Sheila.”
The sirens continued to howl down the valley toward them. A second car hit the bridge floor.
“Who are they?”
“I don’t even know half of them. Man, it’s dead bodies all over the place. And I can’t find Sheila nowhere.”
“How many wounded?”
“Ain’t nobody wounded. Man, they’re all dead.”
A second car began to scratch its way up the gravel lane. “Hold up,” Weatherstone said. He sensed that Wilson was about to run. “Hold up,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“What if it’s the motherfuckers that done all this?
“Then they’re coming in a cop car.” The car had just switched off its siren; he could hear it moaning to a close. But the lights still slashed the night. “Don’t go nowhere,” he said again. “This is one of ours.”
A State Highway Patrol cruiser crested the hill and cut across the yard and came to a stop with Ronnie Wilson pinned into the intersection of the two sets of headlights. In two seconds, the trooper was out of the car with his pistol raised.
“Keep your hands up where I can see them,” the trooper called.
“Man, Timmy, tell him. I’m the one who called 9-1-1.”
The trooper nodded to Weatherstone. “I have him covered. Go ahead and cuff him.”
“Cuff me?”
Weatherstone hesitated, then pulled the cuffs from the back of his belt.
“Man, I got to find my girlfriend.”
“Put your hands behind your back,” Weatherstone said.
“Timmy, man, you gotta help me.” He looked at Weatherstone as if he had been betrayed. “Timmy, man, you and me been knowing each other since second grade. Man, I just want to know what happened to my girl.”
Maggie Boylan Page 12
