The Mountain Page 7

  They walked over to the house, onto the porch, and stood in front of an uninviting obelisk square of pitch-black.

  “Ooh,” Tina said. “This place is spooky at night.”

  “Aw, it’s all right.”

  “It’s awfully dark in there.”

  “That’s why we have the lamp.”

  “Maybe we should go somewhere else.”

  “You kiddin’? Where?”

  “I don’t know—anywhere. I’ve just got a… bad feeling.”

  Charlie smiled. “Aw, it’ll be all right,” he said.

  Tina shrugged and Charlie pulled a plastic cigarette lighter from his pocket, flicked it and a thin flame rose from its top. Tina held the lamp in front of her. A moment later the lamp was lit, and Charlie and Tina followed a dim, yellow glow into the darkness.

  * * *

  “That was amazing, just amazing,” Thel said, as the Honda pulled away from Farley’s parking lot. “He said you were good, but I had no idea. Wow! You rocked the house!”

  The smile on Eddie’s face was like a helium-filled balloon, except instead of rising higher and higher, his grin grew wider and wider. And why not… she was right: he had rocked the joint. A good time was had by all, especially by him.

  “I told ya,” Mark said, lifting a bottle of Coors he’d bought before leaving the bar—one for Eddie and one for himself—took a drink and winked into the rearview mirror at his partner.

  “Yeah, you told me, all right,” Thel said, and then turned in her seat, smiling as Brenda snuggled against Eddie “What exactly are you guys doing up here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Eh,” Mark said. “Just a little business.”

  “Business? What kind of business? Sure as hell ain’t the rock and roll business, which is the only business this guy should be in.”

  Smiling, Eddie said, “Christmas trees.”

  “Oh Gawd!” Thel called out as Eddie tipped the bottle to his lips.

  “What?” Mark said. “We’re hauling a load out to Louisiana to sell to the Cajuns.”

  “You guys just don’t look like the Christmas tree type.”

  “What type do we look like?”

  “The sex, drugs and rock and roll type.”

  Mark laughed. “Well, we’ve done our share of that, too, haven’t we, bud?”

  “No doubt.”

  “Speaking of which, why don’t you fire up some of that badass weed of yours?”

  “Now you’re talking,” Thel said.

  Eddie wedged his Coors between his knees and pulled a baggy from his shirt pocket, extracted a fat joint and lit it. A steady stream of smoke flowed from his mouth as he exhaled and passed the joint to Brenda. A moment later, Thel was having a go—she held it up, saying, “Good shit”, before turning it over to Mark. “So you’re a kickass guitar player on his way to sell Christmas trees in Louisiana—then what?”

  “Get a place and get jobs on an oil rig.”

  “No way!”

  “Doing what?” Brenda said.

  “Roustabout,” Mark said. “You know, kind of like a jack-of-all-trades?”

  “Roustabout!” Brenda chuckled as Thel took another toke. “Sounds like an Elvis movie.”

  Smoke exploded from Thel’s nose and mouth. Her face turned red as she huffed out, “Roustabout! It was an Elvis movie! I saw it when I was a little girl!” She laughed again, and all four joined her, Thel laughing so hard she grabbed her side for a moment before passing the joint back to Brenda.

  “It’s not that funny,” Mark said, but Thel and Brenda kept on laughing.

  “Must be the pot,” Eddie said. “They’re not—”

  “Or the thought of you busting an Elvis move for a bunch of Cajun drillers,” said Brenda.

  Mark chuckled, and Thel laughed out, “Drillers! Don’t drop the soap, Florida Boy!”

  “All right,” Mark said. “Enough of that shit.”

  Still laughing, tears running from her eyes, Thel said, “God! Oh God… “I can’t stop! I can’t fucking stop!”

  “Jesus, Thel,” Brenda said. “It’s not that funny.”

  “I know… I know… hooo boy.” She turned and looked at Eddie, and started laughing again.

  “Good shit, huh?” Eddie told her.

  “No kiddin’.”

  Eddie took another drink as the Honda climbed the steep mountain road. He looked at Thel, who was just now beginning to calm down, shook his head and said, “Geez.”

  Thel reached into her purse, pulled out a half-pint bottle of Jack Daniels and held it up. “Anybody up for a snort?” she said, and Mark said, “I think I’m in love.”

  “Give me your beer.” Thel uncapped the bottle and slugged back a bit of whiskey, and used Mark’s Coors to chase it down. Then she handed the whiskey to Mark, grimacing as she took another swig of beer.

  Eddie took one last hit off the joint, cracked his window and flicked the roach through the opening. Then he was back into his baggy, firing up another doobie and adding more smoke to the hazy cloud drifting across the ceiling.

  “Sooo,” Brenda said, as the pot went back and forth and the whiskey followed. “You got your trees already?”

  “Most of ‘em,” Mark said.

  “Man,” Thel said. “This really is some good stuff.”

  “Gainesville Green, baby!” Eddie told her, and Mark continued, “We’re gonna pick out a few more tonight.”

  Brenda looked up at Eddie. “Tonight?”

  “Yep,” Mark said. “Pick ‘em out tonight and pick ‘em up in the morning.”

  “Pick ‘em out? What do you mean, pick ‘em out?” Thel said, as Mark took a right onto a dirt road and Eddie had a swig of whiskey. He offered some to Brenda, but she turned it down. The mountainside rolled by as they continued down the road. Every once in a while they’d pass a dimly lit house, or a small wooden bridge.

  “Pick out… choose… select…” Mark looked up at the moon sitting fat and stark white above the mountaintop. He nodded at the hills on his right. “Pick out some trees up there, head back through town and do a little midnight shopping on the other side of the valley.”

  “Midnight shopping,” Thel said.

  “Yep,” Mark said, easing off the gas as Thel capped the bottle and laid the whiskey on the floorboard. Brenda passed her the joint, and Thel said, “What exactly do you think you’re going to do?”

  “Not much,” Eddie said. “Knock down a few trees, lay ‘em over and pick ‘em up on our way out of town.”

  “You guys are nutty.”

  “Nah, just broke,” Mark said, and everybody started laughing. He slowed the Honda until the idling engine was pulling them forward, past an upward sloping field on their right, populated by neat rows of fir trees that dotted the mountainside.

  Mark, looking into the rearview, said, “You ready?”

  “You guys aren’t serious,” Brenda said, and Eddie said, “Sure we are… come with me.”

  “Piece’a cake, Bren,” Mark said, chuckling as the car rolled slowly forward. “We’ve been doing it all day. Hell, we’ve appropriated more trees than we’ve paid for.”

  “Appropriated,” Thel snorted out. “Misappropriated, more like it.”

  Eddie put his arm around Brenda, buffed the small of her neck with his lips and she shuddered—her hand brushed across his thigh and he whispered, “Go with me?”

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “Sure. We’ll just take a nice walk in the moonlight. We’ll be back before you know it.”

  “Well… ”

  “Piece’a cake,” Mark said from the front seat, probably relishing the idea of getting Thel alone for a while.

  “I guess… ”

  The car stopped a few yards from a wooden bridge, across from a double-wide trailer that stood in silent darkness beyond the creek. Off in the distance, behind the trailer, was a barn. Water gushed over stones in the creek bed as Mark cut the headlights and popped the trunk, and Eddie and Brenda slid o
ut of the back seat, onto the dirt road.

  Mark, rolling his window partway down, said, “We’ll come by every five minutes or so. Pick out some nice ones.”

  By then, Eddie and Brenda were at the trunk, Eddie grabbing the bow saw and easing the lid down until it clicked shut, the car pulling away and he and Brenda giggling and holding hands as they headed up the mountain.

  It may have been a damn fool thing to do, stealing trees off the side of a mountain that had to be somebody’s property, even if no one was around. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, after all, Eddie thought as he found himself halfway up the hillside, already into the first few rows. They’d had plenty of good fortune this afternoon. Piling tree after tree into the rental truck, nobody had bothered them. As far as Eddie knew, no one had even noticed them, which was amazing considering the big, yellow behemoth they were tooling around in.

  Brenda’s hand felt warm in his… soft and smooth, her eyes gleaming in the moonlight as it washed over her skin, giving it a soft, radiant glow. Eddie hoped the glow came from being with him. She sure seemed to be enjoying herself. The beer, the pot and the whiskey had given him a pleasant buzz. That, coupled with the euphoric rush of the cheering crowd back at Farley’s, had put him into a heightened state. But nothing could match what he was feeling now, with Brenda by his side, the way she looked… the way she was looking at him. Somewhere, long ago, several light years away in a place called Florida, a young man had skulked away, tail firmly tucked between his legs. Eddie vaguely remembered the guy, or the miserable set of circumstances that had sent him hightailing it onto the interstate to meet up with his old pal, Mark Rockley. Now all the shit he’d gone through back in Jacksonville felt like the best thing ever to have happened to him, because it had led him here, to her, and at that moment he could think of no other place he would rather have been.

  A slight breeze blowing down the mountainside felt great washing over him as he stopped and pulled her close. Her arms circled his waist and her hands ran under his shirt, soft as silk on his back. Their lips touched, their tongues, then they were locked together, hips grinding as they swayed to and fro, Eddie holding the saw in one hand while the other dipped beneath the waistband of her jeans, cupping her firm buttock and mashing her tighter against him. Then he dropped the saw and they fell to their knees, Eddie going down on his rump and Brenda sinking onto his lap, kissing and groping beneath a full moon floating along the early December sky.

  Headlights appearing on the road stopped Eddie and Brenda as the Honda drove past, headed back toward town. Their lips met again, a short and sweet kiss before Brenda’s head tilted back, and she said, “Maybe we should get on with it.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Eddie’s face lit up, smiling as Brenda rolled off him. Then his face went red beneath the moonlight when he realized that ‘get on with it’ did not mean what he’d thought.

  “Where you going to start?” Brenda said, brushing the front of her jeans as she got to her feet.

  Eddie smiled and grabbed the saw. “Here’s good,” he said, and then ran the blade across the thin trunk of a fir tree. Moments later the tree hit the ground, and Eddie moved on to another.

  He placed saw against wood, and Brenda touched his shoulder.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t cut them down so close together,” she said. “Take one off each row a few yards apart and they might not even miss them.”

  What possible difference that could make, Eddie didn’t know. After all, they’d be long gone by the time Farmer Brown crawled out of bed in the morning. But he was smart enough to compliment her with, “Hey, great idea!”, and go on to the next row.

  The tree fell, and they moved onward and upward.

  Brenda said, “Look at this one.”

  It was taller than most, its trunk wider. Eddie swung the saw into action but the going got tough. Sweat beaded along his brow as he worked the blade back and forth, Brenda standing over his shoulder, smiling and gripping the fat base of the tree halfway up its length as headlights appeared in the road and then suddenly went out. A snap, and a loud crack echoed in the night; a twisting groan followed and the tree began to fall. A chorus of howls rose up as every dog in the Hollow seemed to be barking in unison at the unseen intruders. Behind the dark double-wide trailer, the barn door flew open, light from inside spilling over a patch of dirt as several men rushed out into the yard.

  They stood for a moment, staring up the mountainside.

  “Down!” Eddie whispered, grabbing a handful of Brenda’s shirt, pulling her to the ground as the dogs kept up their incessant yowling and the men moved forward, away from the barn.

  “Goddamnit!” an angry voice yelled. “Somebody’s up there!”

  The moonlight revealed something Eddie didn’t want to see: four men crossing the narrow wooden archway, one carrying a flashlight; the one beside him, a shotgun. And now they were hurrying over the bridge, across the road and up the long slope of the hill, heading straight for them.

  “What’re we gonna do?” Brenda whispered. “They’ll see us if we run.”

  “Crawl away,” Eddie told her. “Head for that line of bushes.”

  They took off on hands and knees, toward a thick outcropping of underbrush near the left end of the tree line, Eddie pulling the bow saw along beside him, Brenda’s red-and-white checkered blouse glowing like a flashing neon sign beneath the full moon, and Eddie, crawling around in some North Carolina farmer’s lot of trees with a Florida driver’s license in his wallet, wondered how many precious seconds they had left before one of those guys spotted her.

  A head appeared on the horizon. Three more followed. Then they were in the tree line, three rows down. Several yards from the bushes, Eddie pulled Brenda to a stop, wrapped his arms around her shoulders, spread himself over her and dropped the saw to the ground beside them. If they moved they’d be heard, and no way in hell could they risk standing and running. But deep down, Eddie knew it was only a matter of time anyway. They’d been lucky all afternoon. No way was that luck going to hold up now.

  Eddie’s eyes grew wide as a scuffed pair of cowboy boots appeared one row down from where he and Brenda lay, twin serpents decorating the brown leather footwear as the guy moved forward behind the wide barrel of a shotgun. Eddie let out a long, slow, quiet breath as the other three joined their leader. They stood one row down, mumbling and grumbling and sweeping their flashlight back and forth across the mountainside.

  “Well, what have we here?” somebody said, as the light came to rest on Eddie’s shoulder. He slid off of Brenda, shoved her and said, “Run!” She scrambled to her feet and took a few loping strides, but the deafening loud roar of a shotgun blast stopped her dead in her tracks.

  “I’ll be damned,” Butchie Walker said, as Brenda turned and Eddie rolled over and faced them.

  “The fuck are you doing up here?” Joey Markham said.

  “Nothing,” Eddie told him, as the brothers stared bug-eyed at the intruders; their red hair looked rusty-brown beneath the moonlight.

  “Brenda Sykes,” somebody said, and Brenda said, “Bobby? Bobby Jarvis?”

  “You know her?” Butchie said.

  “We went to school together.”

  “Well that explains it, don’t it?” Butchie said. “You told pretty little Brenda about our shit and she brings her fuck-wad boyfriend up here to rip us off. And you don’t even get to feel her up for your troubles—”

  “No way, Butchie.”

  “—and you’ve got trouble, son.” Butchie jacked another shell into the chamber. “Big fucking trouble.”

  “Please,” Brenda said. “You don’t understand.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jerry Markham said. “Why don’t you explain it to us?”

  Brenda stood silent in the moonlight.

  “Just what I thought,” Jerry said, and then took a step toward her. “Pretty little Brenda Sykes, come to rip us off.” He grabbed her shirt, a fistful in each hand, buttons launching and twirling to the ground as he yanked it a
part, the white fabric of her push-up bra standing in stark contrast against her dark skin, Bobby gasping as Jerry grabbed a breast in each hand.

  “Please,” Brenda said, and Eddie gripped the bow saw.

  “No need to beg, darlin’,” Jerry said. Slipping his thumbs beneath the bra, he flipped the fabric up and over her full, round breasts, which jiggled in the moonlight as Brenda cried out, “Nooo!” and Eddie swung the saw like an ax against Butchie’s hand, the shotgun roared to life and Joey Markham cried out “Jerry!”, while his brother’s head rocked sideways and his face disappeared in a fine red mist, reappearing as so much blood, bone and gristle on Brenda’s face and chest, the shotgun dropping to the ground as the twin’s body followed, blood pumping from the half-cratered shell of his head while Butchie Walker shouted, “My wrist, goddamnit! My wrist!”

  And Joey, wide-eyed in panic now, grabbed the shotgun and jacked the handle, swinging the barrel at Brenda and Eddie as they ran for cover, the recoil knocking him flat on his ass when he fired and missed.

  “Gimme that!” Butchie shouted, and snatched the gun from Joey’s grasp. He pumped and fired, pumped and fired again, but his targets were already through the tree line and into the bushes. And he was pretty sure he hadn’t hit them.

  He shoved Bobby toward the underbrush. “Goddamnit!” he shouted, and then stepped over Jerry’s blood-soaked corpse, following Joey and Bobby as they raced across the mountainside.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The first thing Thel said when the Honda pulled away from Brenda and Eddie was, “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Eddie, but, uh, you do know that southern rock is dead as a doornail, don’t you?”

  A snicker came across Mark’s lips, then, “I thought you said he rocked the house.”

  “Well, yeah, he did, but that wasn’t much of a house to rock.”

  Mark tipped back his Coors. “Believe me: he gets the same reaction everywhere he goes.” He wedged the bottle between his thighs. Moments later he was executing a three-point-turn and heading back down the road.