The Borrowed World Series | Book 8 | Blood & Banjos

by Horton, Franklin

  Jim nodded, seeing no reason to deny it. “Afraid so.”

  “My friend also seems to think that no problem is too great to be solved as long as you kill the right person,” Lloyd went on.

  “He was awful quick to whip that gun up,” Gandy said. “I guess I should feel lucky he didn’t kill me?”

  “You probably should,” Lloyd agreed. “It’s his go-to solution for everything.”

  Jim frowned. “Okay, enough about me, Lloyd. If you got the energy to sit there and flap your jaws, you’ve got the energy to get up and ride. Let’s move it.”

  An amused Gandy made eye contact with Lloyd. “Your friend here is a bit testy. How long have you two been on the road together?”

  Lloyd checked his pocket watch. “Maybe ten hours?”

  “Jesus,” Gandy replied. “If you get a chance, stop by my camp on your way home. I want to know how this ends.”

  Sensing that the only threat remaining was to his dignity and not to his life, Jim dropped to his knees and shoved his sleeping bag into the waterproof stuff sack. When he was done, he folded his ground cloth and tucked that beneath the straps of the stuff sack. He grabbed his saddle off the ground and went to toss it on his horse.

  “Well, I’ll leave you guys to it,” Gandy said. “Nice to meet you and thanks for not killing me.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Jim said. “You stay safe.”

  Gandy clucked his tongue. “Come on, Max.”

  The dog reluctantly fell in behind Gandy’s horse, looking as if he had unfinished business with Jim.

  Lloyd rubbed his eyes with his palms. “Damn, it’s early.”

  “Your tongue is obviously awake already. You can’t seem to quit rattling it.”

  Lloyd reluctantly rolled off his sleeping bag and began packing it up. “I don’t know why you’re so defensive. You are quick on the trigger.”

  Jim ignored the comment. He got his horse squared away with a bridle, blanket, and saddle, then got the packhorse ready. When both animals were saddled, he lashed on his gear.

  “You bring coffee?” Lloyd asked, stretching as got up, sleeping bag tucked under his arm.

  Jim scowled at him, then heaved a loose water bottle in his direction. “Mix in some dirt and use your imagination.”

  Lloyd dodged to the side, the bottle barely missing him. “You know, there really is something wrong with you. You need therapy, or at least a regular-sized human heart instead of that stunted mouse-sized heart you got.” He bent over and picked up Jim’s water bottle, then began to lower his zipper.

  “Don’t you do it!” Jim warned. “You piss in that bottle and this won’t end well.”

  Lloyd tossed the bottle back to Jim. “I thought you knew I needed to go. I thought you were being helpful.”

  “You should know better than that. When have I ever been helpful?”

  Lloyd scratched his head dramatically. “I might have to think on that.” He wandered off to water a rock.

  Twenty minutes later, they were riding uphill through high alpine-like meadows. Every few minutes they were compelled to stop, turn around, and reexamine the world below them. From this high vantage point they kept seeing new things, new places, and it stirred up old memories. Sometimes it wasn’t so much the things they saw as the things they no longer saw. The places that were part of them, or at least had been part of an earlier version of them, that had been torn down to make way for something else.

  Jim could see the vacant lot where The Hub used to be. It was a cluttered variety store run by an industrious old character who sold a bit of everything. There was the location of the old Rack-N-Snack where you could get a bag of potato chips and shoot a game of pool. There was the old putt-putt course and the skating rink, both of which fell victim to the rise of shopping malls as a form of entertainment.

  “Sure are a lot of things that have been burned down,” Lloyd said, taking a peek through Jim’s binoculars. “There’s burned-out buildings everywhere.”

  “It’s the hillbilly way. We kill people and burn their shit down.”

  Lloyd threw an accusatory look at him. “Some of you have clearly mastered the skill.”

  “Sticks and stones, Lloyd. Now I’d suggest you shut up and save your energy. We got places to go.”

  14

  Oliver’s House

  When Sharon saw Oliver in his bed, the twisted expression and the terrified eyes, she knew exactly what was wrong with him. She’d seen it before. It was a stroke. Her heart surged and swelled, tears filling her eyes. She went to his side and took his hand. It was all she knew to do. She’d known people who’d had strokes before. Some had lived for days, others for decades longer, trapped in the uncooperative husk of their bodies. Those people had advanced medical care and life support though. She had nothing like that to offer Oliver.

  She held his hand until she saw the panic subsiding, talking to him the entire time. “We’ll get through this, Oliver. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you. We’ll keep you comfortable. Do you know what’s happened to you?”

  He was unable to move his head but she took the look in his eyes and the intelligent, accelerated blinking as an answer.

  She gave him a tender smile. “I think you’ve had a stroke.”

  His eyes glued to hers, acknowledging her comment. She noticed his gaze peeling off, scanning the walls of the room. She wasn’t sure if it was an involuntary movement or if he was seeing something there that she couldn’t see.

  “I have to get help, Oliver. I want to move you into a more comfortable position but I can’t do it by myself. I need to get Nathan to help me. It’s going to take me a little bit to get back to camp, then return with someone. Will you be okay while I’m gone?”

  She could swear that for a moment his expression said something like ‘Are you nuts? Of course I’m not going to be okay.’ The sense that this was his intended response was so pronounced that she had to respond to it. She squeezed his curled hand, feeling like something of warm and overstuffed leather. “I’m just trying to figure out if I can leave you behind for a bit. It might take me an hour to get to the camp and back. Do you need any water?”

  He didn’t blink this time, which she took as an indication that he didn’t. She hoped she was guessing correctly.

  “Then I’m going to head to the camp. I’ll be back here as soon as I can.”

  Oliver wasn’t paying any attention to her. He was looking back to the walls of his room, at something she couldn’t see. She released his hand and tugged his homemade quilt up over it. She scanned the walls before she left, curious as to what had Oliver so engaged.

  She hurried from the room and rolled down the hall with its high ceilings and dark maple wainscoting. The front of the house had a high porch that was not accessible with her chair so she usually came and went through the kitchen. It was a big room designed for a large family. The cabinets were white metal, the sink cabinet made of porcelain-covered steel.

  The floorcovering was an old 1970s vinyl flooring that probably laid in half the kitchens in the area. Most of those other homes had probably updated their flooring, but Oliver never had. It seemed a waste to the practical Oliver to remove perfectly good flooring just because it was a touch outdated. It wasn’t so perfectly good now. There were holes beneath the legs of the kitchen table and chairs, and thin spots worn in front of the stove and sink where a person would stand when cooking. Beneath those worn spots, layers of previous flooring peered through like layers of old paint.

  Sharon tugged the back door open and navigated her way out past the heavy aluminum storm door with its damaged screen. An old wringer washer with a rusty galvanized basin and a pair of heavy rubber ‘mangling’ rollers stood off to the side. Several pairs of muddy farming boots were lined against the wall. For some reason, the sight of those boots brought her to a stop. She could picture Oliver starting nearly every day by stepping into a pair of those boots and wandering out into the misty fields of his farm to see what the day brought.
The image filled her with a profound sadness.

  The sound of Honey tearing tufts of grass from the high weeds snapped her back to the task at hand. The back porch was only one step high and Oliver had installed a short ramp there to make it easy for her comings and goings. Sharon rolled down the ramp and unclipped the small horse from the leaning post that had once held a clothesline. She clipped the carabiners onto her wheelchair and took up Honey’s reins.

  She clucked her tongue at the gentle animal. “We need to get moving, girl. This is an emergency.”

  The pony began walking but there was no hurry in its vocabulary. Its urgent pace was the same as its meandering pace and that was just as well. The rigged up wheelchair buggy was functional, but just barely. The tiny front wheels with their solid rubber tires were unforgiving. They jolted with every bump and rock. They had on occasion even dug into soft earth, nearly causing Sharon to turn over and land on her face.

  The larger back wheels were more forgiving in handling impacts though not by much. The wheels were of plastic construction with air-filled rubber tires. The plastic spokes flexed if the chair leaned in either direction. Through his friends in the community, Oliver had managed to collect a few more wheelchairs of different types that they’d hoped to assemble into something more durable, but there hadn’t been the time. They would have to make time, though. One day this chair would fail from the abuse they were subjecting it to, and if she didn’t have a backup, she’d be stuck.

  With no choice but to continue up the farm road at a reasonable walking pace, Sharon’s mind wandered. She had been so dependent on Oliver’s experience, wisdom, and guidance. What was she going to do if he passed away? It wasn’t likely to be an “if” at this point, it was more likely to be a “when”. She held no illusions that they could keep a stroke victim alive without medical assistance.

  She’d nearly died from the accident that injured her spine, but she hadn’t. She’d rejoiced in her survival and gone on to live an amazing life. In some ways, her accident gave her an awareness she hadn’t had before. From that point forward, she never forgot the fragility of life. She never forgot that death was always lurking out there, waiting to snatch you into the darkness. She never forgot that each day was a gift and she had to make the most of it.

  It wouldn’t be the same for Oliver. There wasn’t going to be any recovery. The odds of a miracle were highly unlikely. The probable outcome was that he’d be trapped in a useless body for the rest of his life, cared for by a group that loved him but could do little for him. She didn’t even know at this point if he could eat or drink. Stroke victims sometimes lost the ability to swallow. Without the ability to provide a feeding tube or intravenous fluids he would die if that was the case.

  For a moment she wondered if it would be kinder to euthanize him.

  She pondered that as she bounced up the road but decided she could not do that. Under different circumstances maybe, such as if he was suffering profoundly and she had the ability to halt that suffering. Otherwise, she couldn’t imagine herself doing it. She could not snuff out a life that was not threatening her or the children. She had too much respect for the resilience of the human spirit to do that. She would have to allow nature to take its course.

  15

  Beartown Mountain

  When they reached the treeline, the terrain instantly became more difficult to negotiate. Jim’s last venture onto the mountain had been in late winter for a variety of reasons. Hunting seasons were over by that point, bears were typically sacked out for the winter, and the leaves had dropped from the underbrush. He still had to hack at rhododendrons with a machete to make any progress, but that wasn’t an option from atop a horse. The last thing he needed was to injure himself or his horse with a wild blow from a sharp blade.

  “Surely we’re not going to ride through this mess,” Lloyd complained. “It’s like a jungle.”

  “There’s something I want you to see. We’ll tie the horses off up ahead and walk. It’s not far.”

  Lloyd looked doubtful. “If you say so.”

  When they could make no further progress, Jim dismounted, tying his horse and packhorse off to a gnarled, wind-whipped tree. “Everything up here kind of looks alike but I think it’s close.” He headed off, carrying his rifle in his hands, and didn’t wait on Lloyd.

  Lloyd rolled his eyes. “I don’t know what your damn hurry is. You could wait two seconds for a man to get situated.” Lloyd preferred riding horseback in the open pastures to walking in this rough terrain but felt like he had no choice at the moment. He’d signed up for this ride, for better or worse. He’d assured Jim he was up to the challenge even if that might have been a slight exaggeration. He slung his shotgun over his back and fell in behind Jim.

  Both men were soon sweating in the heat. Their arms itched from scratches inflicted by the dense brush. Jim lost sight of Lloyd at some point but could hear him cursing and banging around so he knew he wasn’t far behind. Shortly, Jim came across the first piece of wreckage. It was a curved piece of aircraft aluminum laying dirty and without context in a pile of old leaves. From its thickness and numerous sheared bolts, it looked like something structural but Jim wasn’t familiar enough with planes to recognize it. It was only the first piece. He remembered from his last hike on the mountain that there would be more.

  Soon there were. More pieces of debris appeared, the paint faded by time and extreme weather. Perhaps forty yards from the first debris Jim found the intact fuselage of a small plane. It sat slightly askew, wings and landing gear missing, but surprisingly intact. In the decades since the crash, new growth had emerged around it. Trees locked around it like greedy fingers, clutching and establishing domain over the wreckage.

  “Jeez, look at that,” Lloyd gasped, leaning against a tree to catch his breath.

  “This crash occurred in 1974. It happened on a cold night. People were inside with their windows closed and no one heard it. No one saw a thing. The bodies lay in there for a year and a half before bear hunters found them.”

  Lloyd straightened up and walked closer to the wreckage. “Weren’t they looking for it?”

  “The pilot wasn’t rated to fly at night so he was supposed to stop along the way and spend the night in Georgia. He didn’t. He kept going with his wife and his children until they hit the side of the mountain. No one knew where to start looking.”

  “That’s sad,” Lloyd said, approaching the plane. He wrestled a door open and stuck his head inside for a look.

  “Sad part is that the crash probably didn’t kill them. They were all injured but likely survived the initial crash. They died strapped into their seat belts, probably of hypothermia, blood loss, or dehydration. Can you imagine the hopelessness of that? No idea where you are or if help is coming?”

  “I don’t want to imagine that,” Lloyd said. “I’ve had enough tragedy in my own life that I got no interest in trying on someone else’s for fun.”

  Jim hadn’t gone any closer to the aircraft, hanging back with a reverence that didn’t entirely make sense for a man so determined to get there. While he’d had no compunction about going inside the burial cave, this place was different for him. There were memories and feelings associated with it. That was part of why he’d always wanted to come back here—to gauge things, to see if the memory was the same in the light of day.

  “About four or five years ago I came up here on a backpacking trip. It was February and I came up from the Tumbling Creek side, which is east of here. There are easier ways to get here but they’re all on private land. Sometimes you can get permission and sometimes you can’t. The access from Tumbling Creek is brutal. Steep hills, climbing, and fighting for every inch of elevation. It’s one of the hardest hikes I’ve ever taken.”

  “Then why the hell did you do it?” Lloyd asked. There was a mouse nest in the back seat of the plane made from the gnawed up foam of a seat cushion. He swept it to the ground and took a seat inside, his legs hanging out the door.

 
Jim shrugged. “I’m a mountain masochist. I’ve never been in the shape to be good at it, but I love climbing around mountains. I like getting up here and seeing the things not many people have seen. It hurts but the pain shows you that you’re earning something.”

  Lloyd looked doubtful. “Whatever floats your boat, man. Sounds like a lot of work to me.”

  “It was a lot of work,” Jim admitted. “I was worn out when I got here. I had just enough time to watch the sunset and then I set up camp back over that way. There was a clearing big enough for a campsite.” He pointed in a southerly direction.

  “You camped up here?” Lloyd said it was as if it were the most distasteful thing he could imagine.

  “I did.”

  “That must have been creepy. You’re a long way from everything and you’re by yourself.”

  “I didn’t think it would be creepy, but it was. It was winter and it got cold that night. It was in the low thirties and there was a strong wind. The wind chill was probably in the teens. I kept a fire for a couple of hours before I crashed out and not for one minute did I feel like I was alone that night.”

  Lloyd raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “I didn’t see anything crazy,” Jim said, “but I definitely didn’t feel like I was alone. This isn’t the only crash up here. There are several. Civilian and military. Most were fatal. That’s a lot of death on an isolated mountaintop.”

  “That’s a lot of ghosts.”

  “I’m not saying they were ghosts, but there were presences here. There was something. I could feel them.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Cold,” Jim said without hesitation. “Like the cold you feel when you have a fever. A cold so deep that nothing will ever warm you.”

  “Fuck that,” Lloyd said. “I’d have run down the side of this mountain and all the way home.”

  “Not a possibility. I was too exhausted from just getting here. I didn’t have another mile in me.”