High Lonesome Sound

by Jaye Wells

  She nodded, a queen indulging a beggar. “You seem to be in a better one now.”

  He returned her nod, accepting the lie.

  She raised the cup to her mouth and blew away some of the steam. “Allison called.” She took a dainty sip. “She’s worried.”

  “Don’t know why she would be.”

  “Don’t you have a book proposal due?”

  He laughed. “My deadlines are no longer your business. She shouldn’t have called you.”

  She mumbled something he didn’t quite understand. Frowning, she removed the tea bag from the cup and set it aside. The liquid spread across the napkin like a bloodstain.

  He dipped his head to catch her eye. “Speak up, Renee.”

  “I said, she called me about something else. Something besides you. While we were speaking, she asked if we were in touch. I told her I’d try to reach you.”

  Despite the heat from the mug warming his palms, coldness crept up his arms and across his shoulders. “What would my editor be calling you about that didn’t have to do with me?”

  The silence that followed wasn’t dead, exactly, but it was definitely terminal.

  He got in her line of vision, forcing her to look at him. “Renee?”

  “I have some news.” Her tone was synthetic, overly bright, like her smile.

  She once told him her daddy spent thousands of dollars making sure his little girl had a mouthful of perfect white teeth. The neon brightness of that smile had always reminded Peter of Las Vegas. He hated that town.

  “I’ve sold a book,” she said.

  No words had chilled him so much since the first time she’d used divorce as a verb. “What? What book?”

  Renee scanned the store for potential witnesses. That’s when he realized why she’d requested this location for her big reveal. She knew he’d be too conscious of his reputation to throw a scene in a bookstore.

  She cleared her throat, and in that brief sound he heard a chorus of guilt so loud it would have drowned out the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. “A memoir.”

  If he avoided sudden movements, maybe he could keep the rage at bay long enough to win this conversation. “A memoir about what, exactly?”

  The laugh is what did him in. The nervous giggle that admitted her guilt at the same time it attempted to dismiss his anger. “Just a thing I wrote … about my life.”

  “I know what a fucking memoir is, Renee.” His whisper came out as a hiss. “What I meant was, what part of your life is so interesting, so fucking compelling that you felt moved to commit it to paper and sell it to my God-damned editor?”

  “You don’t get take that tone with me anymore.” Her gaze darted around the store. At that moment, the guy came out from behind the curtain separating the coffee bar from the back room. She relaxed.

  Peter raised his hands in conciliatory gesture instead of speaking again and hoped that would be enough to encourage her to continue. He didn’t trust himself not to scream.

  “I—It’s just about living through a …” She trailed off.

  “A what?” Menace crept into his tone again but didn’t care. He needed to hear her say it. “Living through a what?”

  Her hand toyed with the wooden stirrer. “Remodeling the house and what came after.”

  He closed his eyes to enjoy the poison of his fury. “What came after?” He opened his eyes again and leaned forward. “You mean how you destroyed our marriage?”

  Renee leaned across the table, meeting his gaze with a go-to-hell twinkle in her baby blues. “No, Peter, this is non-fiction.”

  If he hadn’t already wanted to kill her, he might have admired the comeback enough to want to take her to bed again. “How much they paying you to make a fool of me?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She answered too quickly for the real answer to be insignificant.

  “Hardcover?”

  “Yes.” She smiled, a pure, acidic screw you. “A big autumn release next year.”

  Renee in hardcover. He’d entered some Kafka-esque alternate reality.

  “Let me guess—you’re getting the full nine. Book tour, fifty thousand copies—”

  “A hundred thousand plus placement on the front table of every major bookstore in the country.”

  He wanted to vomit. “Of course. Tell me, what did I do that was so evil that you needed to shame me publicly?”

  Her hand tightened on the cup. There was still a faint indent on her fourth finger where his ring used to live. She didn’t answer him, so he switched to offense.

  “You’ve been around the business long enough to know that a hundred thousand books in print ain’t a guarantee of shit.”

  “I still have a better chance of hitting a list than you’ve ever had, sweetheart.”

  His hand tightened on the table. He wished it were her neck—the long, ivory column that used to arch when he kissed it. The throat that would produce such lovely sounds when they made love. Now he wanted to bruise it until she begged his forgiveness for laughing at him.

  “Peter?”

  “What?” He looked at a spot just above her right ear. The air beyond it had a hazy quality, like looking down a long, hot stretch of road in August.

  “It’s not fun, is it?”

  “What?”

  “Having someone you trusted using your life as material for their stories.”

  The road burst into flames. Maybe if he were lucky, the heat would singe his wife’s perfect blond hair and char the smirk off her perfect face.

  “Believe it or not, writing this memoir wasn’t about you. It’s about me needing an outlet to process everything. Surely you, of all people, can appreciate how healing writing can be.”

  He pulled his attention away from the mirage of Renee burning auto-da-fé-style. “Is that what your self-help books told you?”

  Her smile was too cold for a woman he’d just imagined burning at the stake. “You can blame me all you want for ending our marriage, but I gave you what you wanted—to be left alone to play God to your imaginary people. They’re so much easier to deal with, aren’t they? You can boss them around and kill them off if they don’t behave.”

  “You’re right, as always, sweetheart. Real humans are far too fucking needy—and too quick to stab you in the back.”

  “Then you should be happy.” The final word exited her red lips with ironic bitterness.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because you pushed away everyone who needed anything from you.” With that, she tossed back the last of her tea and rose. “Call your fucking editor.” She laid a five on the table and pushed it toward him. “For the tea.”

  He stared at the money she’d earned by selling his secrets to New York.

  The guy at the coffee stand and the woman behind the counter watched Renee go. Judging from their too-casual expressions, they’d heard every word. The only way it could have been more humiliating would have been if Renee had kicked him in the balls literally instead of just figuratively.

  He pushed back his chair to leave so he could go somewhere and feed his anger with some cheap whiskey. His elbow knocked into his coffee. “Shit!” The brown liquid splashed across the cover of the book he’d brought to the table. He grabbed napkins from the holder and attempted to mop up the worst of the spill.

  “Yo, dude,” the guy behind the counter called. He wore a Tar-Heel-blue T-shirt, and his eyes had the glassy sheen of a liberal arts major. “You’re gonna have to buy that.”

  Peter looked up. “Huh?”

  “The book.” He nodded at the swollen pages. “You spilled on it so you gotta buy it.”

  He wanted to snap at the kid. Ask him if his parents were proud they’d paid a hundred grand for an education so their sweet boy could serve coffee for six bucks an hour and use deplorable grammar. But the last thing he needed was for this punk to tweet that Peter West came into the store and acted like “a total douchebag” or whatever kids were calling assholes these days.

  “I was going t
o buy it anyway,” he lied.

  The book landed on the passenger seat with a wet plop. Peter slammed the door and gripped the steering wheel. Hot breath scraped up and down his throat. He wanted to turn the key and drive the car right through Wicked Ink’s front door. He closed his eyes and imagined his bumper pinning the college kid’s body to the espresso machine. Coffee and blood would spray on every book in the place. He laughed, wondering how much his bill would come to for all those ruined books. Maybe he could ask Renee for help covering the damages.

  The giggle that escaped at that thought sobered him right up. He’d be damned if he allowed Renee West née Broussard to drive him into the nuthouse. No, what he needed was some old-fashioned poetic justice. Not the violent kind. Even though his mind sometimes felt like the most vicious place on earth, in reality, he didn’t have the gumption to carry out any real violence. He preferred to keep it on the page. Less chance of arrest that way.

  Renee thought she’d bested him at his own game. But he knew how things worked. His ex-wife had about as much writing talent as a chimpanzee throwing shit at the wall. First thing Allison would have done after reading the piece of trash would have been to hire a ghostwriter to punch it up. He could hear Allison now, telling some eager young writer working for pennies to “clean up this shit show of a manuscript.”

  No, Peter was the writer in the family. Renee might sell a lot of copies, but she’d never be able to out-write him. The question was, how did he prove that to her?

  Through his windshield, he looked at the storefront. Posters advertising upcoming book signings filled the windows. He knew a couple of the authors they’d scheduled. He’d signed with one of them, Rex Franklin, at a convention in Dallas a few years earlier. The guy had gotten famous for writing novels based on true crimes. Peter asked if he felt limited by the facts of the stories he was telling. Rex laughed and lit a cigar. “Hell, no. These are novels. I just use the true stuff as a jumping off point. I change the names of the real victims and stuff and just run with it.”

  Peter had always trusted his imagination to provide ideas for his novels. He’d had horrible nightmares as a child that still plagued him when he’d had too much to drink. Those dreams alone had provided enough fodder for three novels. But now he rarely had any dreams at all, and the words that once had come so easy had dried up.

  Coffee seeped from the pages of the folklore book and into the cheap fabric of the passenger seat. He’d bought the sensible compact sedan from a used-car lot after he’d sold his Range Rover to help pay for his divorce lawyer. Rex had a brand new Mercedes with heated leather seats that he’d paid for by telling other people’s stories.

  He picked up the book and ignored the odor of dark roast and wet paper. He ignored the slippery wetness of the cover and the way the pages rippled. But he could not ignore the quickening in his middle when he opened the pages to the section he’d read earlier—the part about the mysterious happenings in the coal mines.

  He quickly read the story, which talked about a town in southern Virginia called Moon Hollow. There was an image on the front page of that chapter of a church with a shard of twisted metal instead of a cross on the steeple. It looked like the sort of place a bestselling horror story might be set. Rex’s words came back to him. I just use the true stuff as a jumping off point.

  He tossed the book in the seat, threw the car in gear, and backed out of the lot. All thoughts of the bar he’d planned on camping out in that afternoon evaporated. Instead, he steered his car in the direction of NC State’s research library. On his way, he finally called his editor.

  3

  The Scream

  Ruby

  Three weeks after they buried Mama, Ruby got the girls ready for church. She oversaw Sis and Jinny putting on their best dresses, which also happened to be their only dresses. In a fit of twelve-year-old rebellion, Sissy had insisted on doing her own hair. Ruby didn’t argue because she had her hands full braiding eight-year-old Jinny’s corn-silk strands into braids. After warning them not to mess up their nice clothes, she sent them to watch TV, took a deep breath, and went out to the back porch.

  Cotton Barrett sat in a rocking chair on the pitted wood of the porch. The roof leaked something fierce, but he didn't seem to notice the cold water dripping on his creased face. A cigarette smoldered in his left hand. Judging from the length of the ash, the old man had forgotten all about it. However, the empty liquor bottle in his right hand proved he hadn't forgotten about the white lightning he'd been nursing all night. Ruby hesitated on the threshold and took in the bluish cast to his face, which was punctuated by dark brown stubble.

  "Daddy?" She wasn't sure if she'd chosen the soft tone so she wouldn't startle him or in the hope that he'd not hear her at all.

  Those glassy eyes blinked once, twice before slowly tracking in her direction. The whites of his eyes were a sickly yellow shot through with red.

  She swallowed. "We have to be getting to church soon."

  No response.

  "I pressed your shirt. It's on the bed with your Sunday britches."

  He blinked heavily.

  "Daddy?"

  His mouth opened, but instead of a response, a whimper escaped. The sound should have made her feel something—a shiver up the spine or the dark bloom of her own grief or maybe the icy-hot sensation of pity deep in her gut. But after weeks of keeping the family together while he slowly fell apart, Ruby wasn’t capable of feeling anything for him. The minute Mama died, something inside Ruby died, too.

  While Daddy climbed into the bottom of a bottle, she'd taken care of her sisters and kept the bills paid and the house as clean as she was able. While he slept off a bender, she'd picked out the plain pine casket that became her mama's home for eternity.

  Another sob followed the first and his body crumpled forward. The cigarette butt fell to the puddle at his feet and hissed before dying. Something hot and sharp snapped inside her. Searing heat burned off the cool detachment. She wanted to lunge at his throat and shake him ‘til his brain rattled in his skull. But, even angry, she knew better than to get within arm’s reach when he was in this mood.

  Instead, she repeated, “We’ve got to get to church.”

  “Ain’t goin’.”

  “You have to. If Deacon Fry—”

  “Fuck Deacon Fry! He don’t know what I’m goin’ through.”

  “But you already missed two services.” As a deacon in Christ the Redeemer Church, he was required to attend all services except in the case of illness or acts of God. Deacon Fry might forgive one or two absences on account of grieving, but three strikes equaled a sin. According to the head deacon, worship cured all of life’s problems and washed all of a man’s sins away.

  “You have to go,” she said.

  His jaundiced eyes cleared and took on a darkness that scared her. “What did you say, girl?”

  She swallowed hard. “Daddy, I—”

  He rose faster than a man whose blood was eighty-proof should move. She bolted like a spooked animal. Before she’d made it two steps, iron hands caught her arms and swung her around. He jerked her roughly toward his face. His breath stank of whiskey fumes and something more rancid and sinister, like a rotting soul.

  She held her breath and braced for the smack. No child grew up in Moon Hollow without knowing the sting of leather to flesh. But Daddy didn't remove his belt or raise his fist. Instead, he smiled like a snake. "You're getting too big fer yer britches, girl."

  "Please,” she whimpered. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

  "I don’t answer to you or Deacon Fry. If he asks where I am, you tell him one of our animals got loose.” He shoved her away as if he couldn't stand the sight of her. “Take off that makeup before you go. I won’t have no daughter of mine looking like a whore in the Lord’s house."

  She stumbled toward the safety of the kitchen. The creaky screen door slammed behind her. She grabbed a flour sack towel from the counter. Two years earlier, Mama had embroidered delicat
e yellow flowers along the edges. Now, Ruby shoved it between her lips. The dry fabric sucked the spit from her tongue. She bit into the cotton folds so hard her gums ached.

  With the scent of Mama’s lemony laundry detergent filling her nostrils and the curses of her drunken father filling her ears, she screamed until her lungs burned.

  4

  Crossing The Threshold

  Peter

  Pine trees cast long shadows over the mountain road. Up here, the air was cooler, and recent rains intensified the sharp green scent of pine and the earthy perfume of wet leaves. He leaned an elbow out of the open window and turned up the radio. The reception was getting spotty, and the only station coming in clear was playing Hank Williams. It was the kind of music that made him long for a dark bar, a cold beer, and a lonely woman, but he hadn't seen a building, much less a woman, for miles.

  The map he'd bought at the gas station in Asheville, the last major town he’d seen before crossing the border into Virginia, lay in a heap in the passenger seat. The cashier had asked where he was headed. When he said the name of the town, the old man had smiled and shook his head. "That map ain’t going to do you no good. Must be a hundred hollers hidden up in them hills."

  He bought the map anyway because it made him feel like he had a plan.

  The car cruised around a wide bend in the road. Rhododendrons were just starting to bloom alongside mountain laurels at the bases of oaks and tulip poplars. The trees created walls of green that offered only brief glimpses of the rise and fall of hills as far as the eye could see.

  He pressed harder on the accelerator. He wanted to fly.

  Fly toward the story he'd come to find. But, more importantly, away from the worries he'd left behind in Raleigh. Renee lurked five hours behind him in the house they’d restored together in the Inner Beltline. He’d refinished the hardwoods himself and tiled the bathrooms under her gimlet gaze, but the sweat equity hadn’t earned him forgiveness or a new key after she’d changed the locks.