The Mountain Read online

“Jesus,” Mark said. “That would mean Willem fucked, er, had sex with your aunt, who was also his mother.”

  “Yep.”

  “Dude, that’s seriously fucked-up.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Man.”

  “Which brings us back to your question. Why’d we bring you up here.”

  Mark sighed. “Oh, man,” he said. “Color me crazy, but I’m dying to hear this shit.”

  The consternated look of worry on Brenda’s face said, ‘Not me. I just want to go home’.

  Eddie kept on playing, and Dolly, who seemed delighted in the confusion she’d helped to create, kept swaying back and forth with the music, lifting her dress up to her shoulders, and then letting it drop, momentarily exposing her underdeveloped breasts to Eddie, who shook his head and kept on fingering the fretboard.

  The joint Arley held had gone out during the conversation. He grabbed Eddie’s lighter off the table and fired up the short stub, sucked in a lungful and slowly let it out.

  “Well, this here’s the deal. We got a lot of relations runnin’ ‘round with some fucked-up shit, much worse than me, worse than Dolly, even, if you can believe that. A month or so ago, Gerald—you met him just before he and his girlfriend hauled ass up to Elbert’s. Anyway, Gerald met Cindy and she told us the reason all these people had all this fucked-up shit wrong with ‘em was ‘cause we’d been fuckin’ the hell outa our own kin all these years. Which didn’t make no goddamn sense to Elbert, but she seemed to know what she was talkin’ about, and it made sense to Willem and me. Hell, we do have some odd-looking folks around here—and you ain’t seen the half of ‘em.”

  Arley took another toke, twisted around in his seat and grabbed the moonshine, blew out the smoke and took a swig of shine, and then set the jug on the chair Eddie had vacated.

  “Anyway, she got this idea to invite some of her friends up here, thinking they’d get to know some of us and, you know, marry up with us. Hell, some of us ain’t bad lookin’. Just look at Gerald and Willem, they ain’t got nothin’ wrong with them, and I ain’t too hard to look at.” Arley looked over his shoulder at Brenda. “Am I?”

  “No,” she said, as Arley turned back to face Eddie, calling over his shoulder, “Glad to hear ya say that.”

  An army of goose bumps marched slowly up Eddie’s back, and for the first time he actually considered rushing the prick. Maybe if he did, Mark would grab his arm or something, keep him from pulling the gun and blasting them to hell before they could kick the shit out of him. But Eddie knew he wasn’t going to rush the guy. He didn’t have it in him. He wasn’t going to do anything except keep on plucking those goddamn guitar strings.

  “’Cause there’s a good chance you and me could end up married—that’s the plan, you know. Hell, that one down there’s promised to Lewis. I’m hopin’ you and me can marry up. She’ll have Lewis a baby and you’ll have one for me. These two studs’ll knock up Dolly and some other womenfolk, next thing ya know we got us a passel of good lookin’ healthy babies runnin’ ‘round the mountainside, and we don’t have to worry about no more defects, as Cindy calls ‘em.”

  “Dude, c’mon. You’re telling me you guys hauled us up here to be a buncha baby makers?”

  “Yep, that’s what I’m tellin’ ya, stud.”

  “Man, I ain’t doing that shit.”

  “What, you’re not a faggot are ya?”

  “No.”

  Muffled laughter rang out behind Arley. He laughed too, as Mark shook his head, a look of stunned disbelief twisting his face into an indignant scowl. The laughter rose and Eddie kept playing, because he was afraid that if he stopped, he might start screaming and never stop. Arley hit the joint again and the laughter rose even higher. Eddie looked over at Brenda, but the exaggerated sounds of merriment weren’t coming from her.

  The doughnut cutter’s girl was making her way around the table, giggling wildly in a fit of uncontrolled laughter as she stepped past Mark, whose stunned look only intensified when he noticed her.

  Arley, still chuckling, looked over his shoulder at Brenda, who shrugged her shoulders and smiled weakly. He turned to see Tina standing at his side, a look of pure insanity on her face as the laughter kept bubbling up.

  “The fuck’re you laughin’ about?”

  She swung her fist, screaming, “I’m on the fucking PILL, YOU PSYCHO SON OF A BITCH!”

  Arley screamed when the tines of a fork clutched in Tina’s hand plunged into his eyeball; he went for his gun but Mark grabbed his, while Tina twisted the fork and Arley howled like a wounded animal, much like Butchie Walker had shrieked when Willem ripped the arrow from his eye socket. Two long strides and Eddie slammed the edge of the guitar down on Arley’s head. Then he brought it back up, swinging it like an ax with all his might, the wooden frame splitting in two when he drove it into Arley’s skull, and the stunned mountain man slumped sideways in his chair.

  Dolly took off running but Mark grabbed a fistful of hair, flinging her violently across the table as knives and forks and Tina’s bowl of stew crashed to the floor, and Dolly landed on her back, Dolly screaming while Tina ran around the table, grabbing another fork as she went. She pounced on the shrieking girl, grabbed her by the throat and shouted, “If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out!”

  “No!” Dolly yelled. “Please!”

  Tina raised the fork high above her head—

  “I know where they took that other girl!”

  —slammed it down but Brenda blocked her arm before the tines hit home.

  “Wait,” Brenda said. “Stop, we’ve got to help Thel!”

  She released Tina’s arm, and her friend held the pointed ends of the fork mere centimeters from Dolly’s good eye, one hand gripped tightly around her throat as she pressed the fork into the soft skin covering the edge of her eye socket. Tiny drops of blood welled up around the tines as Tina said, “Remember what your cousin or your uncle or your daddy or whatever the fuck he is said about trying anything? Well, you fuck with me one goddamn time, little girl; I’ll dig out your eyeball and feed it to you.”

  “Come on,” Brenda said. “Tina, come on.” She gently touched her arm, and Tina pulled the fork away. “She’ll be quiet, won’t you, Dolly?”

  Dolly nodded yes, and Tina removed the hand from her throat. She stood up, and she and Brenda made their way around the table. Eddie was at the front of the cabin, peering through slightly parted curtains. Mark stood over Arley, who lay flat on his back on the floor, moaning, the fork sticking out of his eye like a planted flag—his fingers just below it fluttering against his cheek like a Parkinson patient. Mark held Arley’s gun in his uninjured hand. The huge hunting knife Arley had used on Bobby Jarvis was still in its sheath, the broken guitar in pieces on the floor where Eddie had dropped it.

  “You see anything?” Mark said, and Eddie said, “Huh uh, nothing.”

  Brenda nodded at the prone mountain man. “What’re we gonna do with him?”

  Mark gave his shoulders a shrug. “I don’t know. We can’t leave him here like this… tie him up?”

  “Fuck that,” Tina said, and then lifted her leg and stomped down, driving fork through brain tissue until the back of Arley’s skull jolted the fork to a sudden stop. For a brief moment his body went stiff. His fists clenched. Then a gurgled breath rushed from his mouth and he fell limp, his fingers unfurling like blooming flowers as his hands dropped to the floor. Tina lifted her foot and his head lolled sideways, leaving what was left of the fork bent over the bridge of the dead lunatic’s nose.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mark said, as Eddie walked wide-eyed toward them.

  Mark handed the gun to Eddie. “Here,” he said. “You’re gonna have to wield this bad boy.”

  “Me?” said Eddie.

  “Yeah, you. I’m right handed, and in case you haven’t noticed, some crazy motherfucker pulled an arrow straight through the son of a bitch.”

  “Okay, man,” Eddie said. “No problem.”

  Eddie,
the revolver in his hand, started to slip it into his waistband, but he didn’t. He had never fired a gun before, had never even held one. With the way his luck had been running tonight, he’d probably end up shoving it in his pants and blowing his balls off. Then again, maybe his luck was turning, maybe their luck was turning. Moments ago they were on their way to God only knew where, probably to becoming sex toys for a bizarre bunch of one-eyed freaks, or worse—if anything could actually be worse than that. Now the tables were turned and they were on their way to… to where? Not straight down the mountain to the valley, which was where he wanted to go—where he thought they should go. No, they were on their way to Granny’s to find Thel, wherever the hell that was. But they couldn’t very well leave her behind. He sure as hell wouldn’t want them leaving him behind if he was lying wounded in… where? Where the hell was she, and what in the name of Heaven would they have to do to get her back?

  Eddie sighed. “All right,” he said. “Let’s huddle up and figure out what we’re gonna do. First off, Dolly: where the hell is our friend?”

  Dolly, who a moment ago had stood, and was now leaning against the wall in the corner of the cabin, said, “She’s in the caves.”

  “Caves?” said Brenda. “I thought she was at Granny’s.”

  “She is. Granny lives in the caves down by the Peak, with a bunch of our other kin, the ones that look way worse than me. That’s why Elbert and Willem put ‘em down there, ‘cause they look way worse than me. Most of ‘em is half crazy, some all the way.”

  Willem. A shudder ran through Eddie at the mention of his name, one that grew in intensity when he tried to imagine what ‘way worse than me’ could possibly entail.

  Mark knelt down beside Arley, studying him curiously, almost as if he were an artifact unearthed from some archeological dig. He stood up, and Eddie said, “C’mon over here, Dolly.” When she was by his side, he put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Listen, you take us on down there and help us get our friend back, and I won’t let anybody harm you. We’ll let you go once we get her back.”

  “If I help ya will ya marry up with me?”

  “Keep talking, bitch,” Tina said. “So I can feed your eyeball to you.”

  Eddie sighed. “Would you just take us down there?”

  “I said I would, didn’t I?”

  “All right,” Eddie said. “Let’s get the hell outa here before Willem and the jolly green redneck gets back.”

  The five of them moved to the front of the cabin, Mark and Eddie and Tina and Brenda, and the grotesque-looking little girl whose cousin had just died before her very eyes. Eddie swung the door open, and ghostly fingers of misty morning fog reached inside, beckoning the nervous quintet forward.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  There were several things Tom Traber could have expected to find when he drove across the narrow wooden bridge in front of Butchie Walker’s place: the double-wide lit up and heavy metal music blaring from the sound system, or maybe some southern rock or some down-home country; the Markham brothers passing a joint back and forth while taking turns swilling down Jack Daniels. It wouldn’t have surprised him to happen upon a thoroughly plastered Bobby Jarvis, puking into the dirt while Butchie railed away at him and the redheaded Markham boys dropped a volley of F-bombs and one-liners on his drunken ass.

  He didn’t expect the trailer to be dark and deserted and light filtering out though a wide-open barn door into the fog swirling around in front of it. But that was exactly what he found when he pulled up beside Butchie’s pickup and slammed the gearshift into Park, killed his lights and engine and stepped out of the car. Bobby’s Mustang was backed up to the barn. Traber walked over and laid a hand on the slick cool surface of its hood. Somewhere inside the weathered wooden structure, somebody was announcing a charity car wash over in Asheville. Then a song came on the radio. Traber thought something was missing, and something was missing: voices, the loud and boisterous voices of Butchie and his crew, who, if the barn door was wide open and the lights and the radio were on and the trailer was dark, most certainly should have been inside.

  “Hey!” he called out on his way to the barn, and then stepped inside to see four empty chairs sitting around an old wooden table in the middle of the floor. Rows of pot plants hung upside-down from the ceiling. Behind one of the chairs were five stacks of sealed cardboard cartons—Traber counted twenty of them. Beside the chair, an open carton sat on the ground next to a black, fifty-gallon trash bag. A pile of the bulging black bags lay in a corner of the barn, next to a couple of stacks of the flat corrugated cartons Butchie used to transport his reefer throughout the state. A scale and a roll of packing tape sat on the table. A clear, bulging plastic Ziploc bag of pot lay open beside it. Beside the Ziploc bag, a round mirror encased in a thin wooden frame held a large mound of white powder. Beside the mirror was a cut-off length of plastic straw, a half-full Mason jar of shine, and a thick bud of marijuana damn near as long as Traber’s forearm. Several bottles of Michelob Lite—some empty, some only halfway—were also scattered around the table.

  Many a day Traber had spent getting high with Butchie Walker and his boys while they bagged up their crop. But where were they now? It wasn’t like them to leave their shit unguarded in the middle of the night, the door wide open and the radio playing, not to mention the heaping mound of coke in the center of the table. Where the fuck did they go? It wasn’t a raid, it couldn’t be. Traber would’ve heard about it beforehand, unless somebody thought he was involved. Even then, the state and federal boys would be here taking the place apart, board by board and brick by brick.

  Unless they’re on the way now.

  The thought sent a chill up Traber’s spine.

  Could they be?

  And how in the hell would Butchie know about it?

  He wouldn’t.

  If he had friends in higher places than Traber, he wouldn’t have been able to keep it a secret. He would’ve bragged about it, rubbed it in Traber’s face. Pot plants all over the place, a mound of coke in the middle of the table; no telling how much of the shit they’d snorted to have left that much lying out in the open—probably a mountain of it. All wired up and nowhere to go. Wired up and couldn’t sit still, more like it. Probably took off on a beer run in Joey Markham’s Celica, so high they didn’t even realize they’d left the door open. There wasn’t any beer scattered around the table, no six-packs, no case of Michelob Lite. Just the empties. Maybe that was it. Maybe they’d hauled ass down the mountain and got distracted. For all Traber knew, they could be shacked up somewhere with a shit-load of women, cozy in bed while he stood alone in the barn, with… the keys to the goddamn Kingdom!

  Traber stood for a moment, eyes sweeping the room while he considered the possibilities. He stepped up to the table and looked in the open fifty-gallon trash bag that was half-full of pot. Just beyond that, those twenty boxes packed full of sealed pound-sized containers stood before him. Boxes plumb full of weed. What was to stop him from taking one? Nothing, except that Butchie more than likely knew exactly how many he’d left stacked in the middle of the barn.

  He wouldn’t know if Traber filled up an empty carton and tossed it into his trunk.

  Unless they pulled in while I was in the middle of filling the son of a bitch up!

  Traber looked out across the barn, at the bulging plastic sacks stacked up in the rear of it. Why settle for a box-full when he could take one of those bad boys? No way could Butchie be sure of how many were in that pile, not with all the shit those guys had slammed up their noses tonight. They had to be high as hell to leave the place unattended like this.

  Hell, why not take two? Take two and haul ass, worry about the alibi in the morning.

  Traber hurried across the barn and grabbed one of the plastic bags, surprised at how heavy it actually was. He hefted it up and over his shoulder. Then he was moving across the dirt floor and out into the night, a redneck Santa bearing gifts for himself. When he got to his car he leaned forward, balancing t
he pot on his back while he dug for his keys. Moments later the lid was up and the pot was in the trunk, and Traber was headed back for another load.

  Halfway across the barn, the mirror caught his eye, and the mound of white powder upon it. Why the hell not? Traber reasoned as he walked over and took a seat. He picked up the straw, utilizing its end to carve a thick line out across the mirror. Then he fit the straw into his nostril, leaned over and huffed up half the line. The immediate rush sent a strong and powerful jolt racing through his nervous system. He pinched his nose and sniffed, releasing a nostril to clear out whatever coke remained. Then he sat for a moment, enjoying the buzz before picking up the shine and guzzling a mouthful. He returned the shine to the table and fit the straw into the opposite nostril, leaned over the table, dipped the straw in the coke, and heard a car rumble across the wooden bridge.

  Headlights swept through the open doorway as the vehicle pulled up outside.

  A door opened, and then slammed shut.

  And here was Traber, caught red-handed with a pile of Butchie’s shit. Son of a bitch was going to be all over his ass, especially if he saw the sack of weed out there in his trunk. Be pretty hard to get him to go along with his bullshit alibi story now.

  Oh, well, fuck it. He’ll come around, if he wants to keep his operation a secret.

  Traber sucked up the rest of his line, already running a list of asinine excuses through his drug-addled brain.

  Before him, someone shouted, “Traber!”

  Someone who wasn’t Butchie Walker.

  Traber looked up to find Harry Edwards standing in the open doorway, moonlight glinting off the blue-steel barrel of the shotgun he held before him. Traber, a cut-off piece of straw between his index and forefinger, a shitload of coke on the table and tiny pharmaceutical flecks clinging to his nose hairs, looked up at the pot plants curing on their taut strands of rope from one end of the barn to the other, looked back at Harry and sighed.

  “Ain’t this a hell of a thing?” he said, a shit-eating grin spreading across his face. “Goddamn Butchie Walker. Hell, I knew that boy was wild, but look at this shit!”