The Borrowed World Series | Book 8 | Blood & Banjos

by Horton, Franklin

  “What happened?” Nathan said, his face bright red. He was ready to cry.

  “I think that means his throat isn’t working right,” Sharon admitted. “He can’t swallow on his back. His saliva runs into his lungs and causes him to cough.”

  “What does that mean?” There was a note of fear in his voice, an underlying awareness of what this meant. The boy just didn’t want to put it into words. He needed to hear it from someone else. Someone with more experience. Someone with authority.

  “It probably means he’s going to die, Nathan.”

  18

  Along Clinch Mountain

  Jim and Lloyd spent the afternoon riding a faint hunting trail along the ridge of Clinch Mountain. At times the jungle became impenetrable and they dropped to the north side of the crest, above the communities of Rosedale and Belfast. The sounds of industry and human effort rose from the valleys below them. Those who’d previously used grid power to push electricity through their fences sought other means to keep their cattle contained.

  They hammered barbed wire to those same posts that held the now-useless electric fencing. High-tensile electric didn’t require nearly as many posts as other means of fencing so farmers found themselves forced to add more posts. They resurrected rusty steel posts, lengths of cedar, old pipe, and anything else capable of standing upright and holding a strand. Young farmers scratched their heads as they tried to rediscover the way in which previous generations had performed this task.

  In the search for barbed wire, farmers scoured their barns and outbuildings. They took down old, abandoned fencing and raided the rusting mounds of trash packed in the old sinkholes farmers used as landfills. Those who couldn’t find enough resorted to even older methods of fencing, using wedges and sledgehammers to split logs into rail fencing that they either stacked or affixed to posts, depending on the availability of nails. In a throwback to the days of the Great Depression, bent nails were no longer casually discarded. They were laid on a flat surface and tapped back into rightfulness so that they might be used again.

  Other farmers struggled to free those pieces of horse-drawn equipment that had served as nothing more than lawn ornaments for the last half-century. Some pieces yielded easily, perhaps eager to find new purpose in the powerless world. Other equipment, grown rusty and arthritic with the passage of time, preferred to sit this one out, perfectly content as the centerpiece of a roadside flowerbed.

  The riders saw cattle grazing the steep slopes of high pastures, but saw no one tending them. They spotted no hunters, though they stirred deer of all age and size, from the spotted fawn to the heavy old bucks. They drove rabbits from cover and flushed ruffed grouse that exploded from the brush with a heart-pounding intensity. Several times they heard an indelicate crashing in the deep brush off-trail that they attributed to bear, but only once did they meet one. They ran headlong into an old black bear who shared their trail and had no more interest in surrendering it than the riders did.

  Lloyd drew his shotgun and sat ready to shoot.

  Jim raised a hand to stop him. “No, I don’t want these old farmers to think we’re up here poaching cattle. If we have to interact with them, I might be recognized.”

  “I ain’t getting ate up just to keep your secret,” Lloyd hissed.

  The horses shied and skittered beneath them, nervous at the sight and smell of the predator. Every equine instinct told them to flee.

  “Usually bears are more afraid than this,” Jim said. He turned his attention back to the distant bear, head raised and sniffing at the air. “Hey bear!”

  The common backpacker’s chant, the call of “hey bear”, had no effect on the animal. Perhaps isolated on this distant and hiker-less peak he’d not gotten the memo. Maybe he’d missed the instruction that other bears got, not understanding he was supposed to flee at those magic words, leaving the relieved hikers with a good story to tell.

  “He don’t care about all your ‘hey bear’ bullshit,” Lloyd growled. “If you can’t get rid of him, I’m shooting him with this shotgun.”

  With a sigh, Jim dismounted.

  Lloyd looked at him in concerned confusion. “You going to go all Daniel Boone on him? Fight him bare-knuckled and kick his ass?”

  Jim stared at his friend like he was an idiot, then selected a rock the size of a tangerine from the trail. With a hand on the reins of his horse, he heaved the rock with all his might. It hit the bear broadside with a hollow fur-muffled thump. The bear bellowed and huffed, then twisted, charging away full-speed into the dense forest. To ensure it didn’t lose its motivation, Jim retrieved a second rock and chucked it in the general direction of the fleeing bear. They could no longer see the bear and the sound of its escape was growing fainter. It was gone. Jim swung back into the saddle and gave Lloyd a satisfied grin.

  Lloyd wasn’t impressed. “Yeah, any peckerwood can throw a rock. A real man would have kicked that bear’s ass.”

  “How about you show me on the next one,” Jim said. “You want to ride point?”

  Lloyd had no interest in that and quickly changed the subject. “We going to sit here until he gets back or are we going to get riding?”

  Jim nudged his horse and they resumed their ride. They’d gone about seven or eight miles from the site of the plane crash when they ran into a more heavily-traveled trail crossing their path.

  “I think this is the old farm road from Belfast to the lake,” Jim said. “The Clinch Mountain Wildlife Management Area used to be part of Rockdell Farms but they sold it off.”

  The farm road paralleled a utility right-of-way, a swath of cleared land that sliced through the hardwood forest like a scar bereft of pigment, forever a shade lighter than its surroundings. Useless high-tension powerlines hung from galvanized steel towers, no better than a disused clothesline at the moment. The riding was easier here. Though the land had seen no maintenance in this past year, there were signs that someone kept it open prior to that, a dozer or tractor passing through to mow down saplings and clear thorns.

  The horses seemed to know their business here, perhaps following some remnant scent of past horses that had traveled this way. It was also possible that they simply preferred the easier traveling of going downhill and would do so until directed to do otherwise. The lay of the land and the dense forest conspired to hide the lake from view as the two riders descended, but Jim knew it was there. Though he’d never come by this route, he’d been to this lake many times over the years—hiking, kayaking, and fishing.

  Laurel Bed Lake was a high-altitude lake situated in an almost Alpine setting. It was man-made, created when the state dammed a creek moving through a vast bog. The lake was over three hundred acres and surrounded by forest on all sides. It was beautiful and rarely crowded because there was no easy way to get there. The shortest route to the lake, the one Jim and Lloyd were now traveling, was closed to the public and inaccessible to most vehicles. Every other route was a long haul over winding dirt roads, with the last miles winding up steep hills.

  Even as they neared the bottom of the trail and the gravel road that ran along the lake, they only caught glimpses of the water. The tree canopy was too dense at this time of year to offer much in the way of long views.

  Lloyd reached the gravel road first and reined his horse to a stop. “I don’t know this place. Which way?”

  Jim considered. “Let’s go right. That will take us to the boat ramp and the dam. There’s a trail there that will get us to my favorite campsite, as long as it’s not taken.”

  Lloyd frowned. “I can’t imagine it’s crowded.”

  “Maybe not, but we might not be the only folks up here either.”

  Jim turned his horse in that direction and headed off, gravel crunching beneath the hooves. They didn’t go far before they had to skirt the first of several downed trees. Some of these remote wilderness areas required a lot of maintenance. Without constant attention and a supply of fuel, the wilderness quickly retook the ground it had once yielded. Perhaps
it had always understood that man’s attempt to claim domain over it was both inadequate and impermanent. It had only to wait patiently for men to falter and fail, certain of that inevitability.

  The gravel parking lot beside the primitive boat ramp was rarely crowded on the best of days. Many visitors used canoes or kayaks and didn’t require a ramp. The riders found a rusty old RV, which they first assumed to be abandoned and vandalized. It was a short 1970s model that had seen better days. The vehicle was surrounded by a circle of what could have been trash, camping gear, or someone’s possessions. It was hard to tell. There was a homeless camp vibe about the setting.

  “Look at that,” Lloyd said, pointing toward a portable toilet left at the ramp for the convenience of boaters.

  Jim quickly noticed what had gotten Lloyd’s attention. Someone had used an ax to chop a hole in the sewage tank compartment. All of the contents of the bright blue outhouse streamed in a pungent and discolored trail down toward the water.

  “Someone must be using it,” Jim said. “Think someone lives here?”

  “Someone does live here, by damn!” came a voice from inside the camper. “That someone was taking a nap till you come up here with your jawing and judging.”

  Lloyd looked at Jim with raised eyebrows, but Jim didn’t catch his gaze. He was spinning his rifle off his back and leveling it toward the camper. The vehicle rocked on its springs and the door flew open with a creak. The RV disgorged its occupant into the parking lot and the pair found themselves staring at a toothless old man with thick, misshapen gray hair. He was wearing long denim shorts and a grubby blue t-shirt that said “Show Me Your Bobbers and I’ll Show You My Pole”. He assessed the situation for a moment before speaking to them.

  “You can just put that gun away right now,” the old man scolded. “Ain’t no call for that.”

  “Are you alone?” Jim asked.

  The old man squinted his eyes and bobbed his head. “Can’t say they ain’t no one else around but if there is, they ain’t with me. I’m alone. Been up here alone since this whole mess started.”

  Jim lowered his gun and clicked the safety back on. He kept his hand on the grip and the gun laying across the saddle in front of him. He could get it up in a moment if the old man was lying to him, but Jim didn’t get that feeling.

  “Don’t mind my buddy there,” Lloyd said to the old man. “He’s just that way, a little awkward when it comes to meeting people. I try to tell him that’s why he ain’t got no friends but he don’t listen. You say you been up here the whole time?”

  The old man took a step away from his camper, his gait impaired by a limp. “Damn right. I lived in a trailer park there in Richlands. People there’ll steal from you on a good day. The last thing I wanted was to get stuck there if times got worse. I saw the writing on the wall and got my ass out of Dodge.”

  Jim nodded. “Smart man.”

  “Momma didn’t raise no fool,” the old man crowed. “My name is Andrew. Andrew Jackson. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

  “I’m Lloyd. My buddy here is—”

  “Jay,” Jim interrupted. “My name is Jay.”

  Lloyd squinted at him as if he were being an idiot, but Jim gave him a warning look. He had no idea how far word of the bounty on his head had spread. He had no intention of giving out his real name to anyone he met on the road.

  “Why did you come up here?” Lloyd asked. “This is the middle of nowhere.”

  Andrew gestured at the lake. “Middle of nowhere is where you want to be. Hell, I was up here all the time anyway, fishing or hunting. I couldn’t think of a better place to be.”

  “Get much company?” Jim asked.

  Andrew looked at him, then flinched and rubbed the back of his neck. “Look, y’all are welcome to stay and shoot the shit but you’re gonna have to get offen them horses. It pains my neck to keep looking up at you.”

  Lloyd glanced at Jim to see what he wanted to do. Jim gave him a “why not” shrug and the two dismounted.

  “We’re going to tie our horses off where they can get a drink,” Jim said.

  “Suit yourself,” Andrew said, dragging a camping chair out from beneath his camper and taking a seat.

  There were several posts in the ground along the water for tying off boats. The riders tied their horses to them and rejoined the old man.

  “Ain’t got no more chairs but you’re welcome to pull up a bucket,” Andrew said, gesturing at a couple of five-gallon buckets with lids on them.

  Jim and Lloyd found a couple of buckets and plopped down on them. Jim sat far enough away that he could keep an eye on his surroundings. He kept his rifle on his lap.

  Andrew leaned toward Lloyd with a conspiratorial air. “Your buddy there is a little edgy, ain’t he? Don’t like to let no breathing room get between him and that rifle.”

  Lloyd sighed as if Jim was a disappointing son. “I’ve tried to talk to him about it. He ain’t a people person like us. He don’t act right half the time.”

  Jim sighed. “When y’all are done talking about me, I’m wanting to hear if you get much company up here.”

  Lloyd gestured at Jim as if his words were further confirmation of the point they’d just been discussing. “See, he’s like that all the time,” he told Andrew. “All business. And God forbid you cross him.”

  “Testy, is he?”

  “Lord, you ain’t seen nothing to beat it,” Lloyd said, his voice animated and musical as if he were about to launch into a song. “He’d just as soon shoot a man as look at him.”

  “Is that right?” Andrew drawled as if it was the darndest thing he’d ever heard. “Reckon I’m safe even sitting here?”

  “You’re probably safe if I’m sitting here with you, Andrew. Just don’t make any sudden moves.”

  Andrew winked at Lloyd. “Iffen I go to scratch my ass, I’ll do it slowly.”

  Jim watched the two of them without a hint of amusement. It was bad enough dealing with one lackluster comedian and now he was confronted with two of them. He tried again to get things back on a serious track. “So, you get much company in these parts?”

  “Reckon I better answer him this time,” Andrew said in an aside to Lloyd. Then, giving Jim a friendly smile, said, “Some but not much. It’s a far piece to all but those who live just over the mountain there. Got a few dirt bikes and four-wheelers at the beginning, when people noticed they wasn’t no law on duty anywhere. Get a few hunters and every once in a while someone shows up on horseback, like you two. Some of them camps a night or two but nobody stays long. I reckon I’m the only full-time resident. In fact, folks has taken to calling me The Mayor.”

  “What folks?” Jim asked.

  “Why, the folks who pass through,” Andrew said. “Ain’t many, like I said, but enough that I’ve become a fixture around the place.”

  “You get by alright up here by yourself?” Lloyd asked.

  “I’m fine on both accounts. I get by alright and I don’t mind being by myself.”

  “I’d get lonely,” Lloyd mused.

  Andrew shook his head adamantly. “I used to be married and it was an awful time. I swore if I got out of that I’d never complain about being lonely again. That woman was lazy as the day is long and ugly as a look into Hell. If I start to get lonely, I just think about her and the fact she ain’t here. Next thing you know, I’m grinning like a possum.”

  “You got plenty to eat?” Jim asked, casting a sideways glance at the belongings piled around the truck.

  “I see you there with your judgey eyeballs,” Andrew said, “looking at my rig like it’s a piece of crap, but don’t let looks fool you. I’m a retired coal miner and I didn’t do nothing in my off hours but fish, hunt, and camp. When I saw the writing on the wall, I loaded up all my gear into my camper and strapped my canoe on the top. I stopped by the grocery store and stocked up on a few things. Got rice, beans, and noodles. Lots of canned stuff.”

  “I’m assuming you hunt too?” Jim asked.
>
  “Oh yeah, since there ain’t no game wardens to be concerned about I use a few means the law ain’t particularly fond of. I got fishing lines out on old milk jugs and pop bottles. I run a trotline on the trout stream that feeds out of here. I got snares for beaver, rabbit, and deer. For squirrels, I nail them big old rat traps right to the tree and put bait on them. Works like a charm.”

  Jim smiled. “Sounds like you’re working smart. You got traps hunting for you while you’re doing other stuff.”

  Andrew gave him a smug look. “Sorry you gave me them judgey eyes now, aren’t you? There you were, thinking I was dumbass, and I had to go and prove you wrong. Smarts a mite, don’t it?”

  “I never thought you were a dumbass,” Jim replied. “I didn’t know you well enough to make that call. Usually it takes me a few minutes to figure it out and go to putting labels on stuff.”

  “What label you gonna give me now?”

  Jim considered. “Resourceful.”

  “Damn right,” Andrew said. “And you don’t even know the half of it. The tailwaters below the dam are full of cattails. I eats the shoots all spring and eats the roots in the fall and winter. I got morels in the spring, chicken-of-the-woods and hen-of-the-woods in the summer. I dry them and eat on them all winter.”

  “That a bird?” Lloyd asked confused.

  “Mushroom,” Jim said.

  Andrew grinned eagerly. “I cooks up fiddleheads too. Ever eat’em?”

  Jim nodded. Lloyd looked confused.

  “It’s a fern,” Andrew said. “You eat them when they’re coming up in the spring. They’re curled up like the head of a fiddle. Easy to spot. There’s nuts and berries too. Plenty to eat if you know what you’re looking for.”

  “Sounds like you eat well,” Lloyd said.

  “Grew up poor but never went hungry,” Andrew said. “The mountains provide if you know where to look. Say, speaking of fiddleheads, that a banjo I spy on your horse there?”