Bull Mountain (6 page)

CHAPTER

H
ALFORD AND
C
LAYTON
B
URROUGHS

1985

“You ever been stung by a hornet?” Hal said out of the blue. He didn’t look at his kid brother when he spoke. It was pitch black out, so he just kept his eyes on the dirt
road ahead. He had one hand dangling lazily over the steering wheel, and the other gripped around a can of Stroh’s in his lap—his third since they’d left the house.

“Sure I have,” Clayton said. “It stings like the dickens.”

Hal narrowed his eyes and studied his little brother’s face. It was a boy’s face. “Well, I don’t think you have, then, Clayton, ’cause if you did, you wouldn’t say
‘It stings like the dickens.’ That just don’t cover it. Those sum’ bitches hurt like nothing else in this world. Pain you ain’t never gonna forget. You get stung by one of those suckers and it’s enough to bring tears to your eyes. God forbid you get stung by a bunch of ’em . . .” Hal paused to find the right wording. He blew out a long trumpeter’s breath of air and shook his head. “You get hit by
a bunch of ’em—buddy, you’re going down.”

“No, really,” Clayton insisted, “I did get stung once. It was only one and I killed it when I stepped on it, but I thought my foot was going to swell up like a watermelon.”

Hal killed his beer and slung the can onto the floorboard at Clayton’s feet. “Did you know that hornets will attack you for no reason? Not like a yellow jacket, or a bumblebee
like the one you stepped on.”

Clayton didn’t argue.

“Bees will mind their own business if you do the same by them, but a fuckin’ hornet? You could just be walking by a nest and those ornery bastards will chase you down. Did you know that?”

“Uh-uh,” Clayton said, shaking his head. He had no idea why his brother was talking about hornets, but he didn’t much care, either. Hal never really
talked to Clayton at all, so he was enjoying having a little of his attention. The brothers were born ten years apart, with Buckley born slap between them, so they didn’t have that much in common. Besides, Hal was normally too busy with the crops higher up the mountain to be fooling with his kid brother. Clayton understood that. Business first. But ever since Clayton turned twelve and Deddy started
letting him help out on runs, Hal didn’t really pay Clayton no mind. This conversation was probably the most Hal had ever said to him at one time. Clayton liked to think maybe it meant Hal was starting to see him as a man—a brother. That thought made Clayton sit about a foot taller in his seat.

Hal pulled the Ford pickup onto a pig path anyone who wasn’t from around here would have missed.
It wasn’t so much a road as it was two channels of dirt cut into the dander and weeds by the tires of trucks much like this one. Clayton rolled up his window to keep overgrown brush and tree limbs from whipping him in the face, and Hal cut the truck’s headlights down to the orange parking lights. Clayton could barely make out the road in the moonlight, but that didn’t slow his brother down a bit.
He just hauled ass through the dark like he’d done it a hundred times before.

“You remember Big Merle?” Hal said.

“Sure,” Clayton said, gripping the armrest with white knuckles. “He was that fat kid that used to come get schoolin’ from Miss Adel before she died.”

“Yeah, not that it mattered, no amount of schoolin’ would help that fat fuck. He was as dumb as a sack of hammers.” Hal
grabbed another beer from the six-pack on the seat between them and peeled the pop-top off with his teeth. “Anyway, he may have been a dumb-shit, but he was still a buddy. A
good
buddy. The fella would do just about anything you asked without a bitch or complaint.” Hal handed the open beer to Clayton, who beamed and eagerly grabbed it with both hands. Hal let a brief smile escape before he popped
open another beer for himself. “Anyways,” Hal said, “when we was kids, a few of us were out by the Southern Ridge, shooting at squirrels—me, Buckley, Scabby Mike, and Big Merle. He was a fat shit even then. It was the year Deddy bought me that shitty .22 rifle. I think you got that gun now.”

Clayton said he did. He didn’t tell him that the gun was his prize possession because it used to be
Hal’s. Instead he took a sip of warm beer and did his best not to gag. It tasted like swamp water.

“We were having a pretty good time,” Hal said, “just dickin’ around, and Big Merle says he needs to take a piss, so he bolts into the woods. If it were me, I’da just whipped it out right there, but Merle was pee-shy. Little pecker, I guess. Anyway, a few minutes later he comes barreling out of
the woods, trying to yank his pants up, screaming like a banshee. Wailing like I ain’t never heard before.” Hal paused and took a sip of his own beer. Clayton watched his brother remember back on what sounded like a fond memory.

“Hornets?” Clayton said.

“Yeah, buddy. Hornets. A whole damn swarm of ’em. He only got a few feet out of the woods before he toppled over. There must have been
hundreds of ’em on his ass.”

“What’d y’all do?”

Hal looked at Clayton like he had just asked the dumbest question ever asked. “We ran like hell, is what we did. I ran so goddamn fast I thought my heart was gonna explode, and I didn’t stop ’til I was inside the hunting cabin up near Johnson’s Gap.”

“Dang,” Clayton said, “that’s far.”

“I know, right?”

“What happened to Merle?”

“He managed to get his big ass off the ground and to his folks’ house, but he was all messed up. He had to be holed up at the hospital down in Waymore for damn near two weeks. The poor bastard almost died. We didn’t get to see him until way after, but even then he had tubes and shit runnin’ out of him to drain the pus, and his eyes were swollen shut. He never did talk right again. We felt bad,
’cause of runnin’ and all, but damn, what were we supposed to do?”

“That’s messed up,” Clayton said.

“Yeah, well, we handled it the next day. Once we found out Merle was in the hospital, we headed back up to the Southern Ridge to clear those suckers out. I mean, that was our spot. We hung out there. A bunch of hornets weren’t gonna just build a nest and sting up our friends. We were there
first. You understand what I’m saying?” Hal shot a stern look at his little brother to reinforce the question, and awareness spilled over Clayton like a bucket of well water. He nodded. They weren’t just talking about hornets.

“We marched our happy asses into the woods, and sure as shit, we found the nest hanging in a hollowed-out pine tree probably right over where Big Merle tried to take
a piss. We brought a can of gas to torch the thing, but it was way too high for any of us to reach, so Buckley’s crazy ass starts dousing the whole damn tree. We could’ve burned the whole mountain down—dumb-ass kids—but we didn’t know no better. Scabby Mike lit that bitch up, and it took off faster than all get-out.”

“The whole tree?”

“The whole tree. We just sat back and watched it burn.
When the fire took to the hornet’s nest, I swear I could hear ’em screamin’. Whistlin’ like fireworks. It felt good to hear them burn like that.”

“Then what happened?”

“Deddy saw the smoke from the house and him and Jimbo Cartwright come haulin’ ass out there. We cut a break to contain it and managed to get the fire out before it spread.”

“Was he mad?” Clayton immediately regretted
asking that question.

“Well, goddamn, Clayton, what do you think? Hell, yeah, he was mad. I toted a legendary ass-whuppin’ that night. So did Buckley.” He paused again, then brought his voice down. “But I gotta tell you, little brother, it was worth it. It was worth it to hear those little bastards screaming.”

Clayton forced down the rest of his beer and tossed the can on the floorboard
like his brother had done. Hal stopped the truck and cut off the parking lights. He popped open the last beer and downed it in three huge gulps. His belch was hearty, loud, and long. Clayton wished he could burp like that.

“We gotta walk from here,” Hal said. He grabbed his shotgun, racked it, and quietly got out of the truck. Clayton followed suit. He thought maybe he’d been here before with
Deddy, but couldn’t be sure in the dark. This part of the mountain was peppered with stills, but a lot of them were in disrepair. Ever since the focus had shifted to the crops under the northern face, this area was tended to less and less. It wasn’t abandoned, just not a priority.

They walked about a quarter mile into the woods before they could see the dim light of a campfire through the
trees.

“Hey, Hal,” Clayton said. “Whatever happened to Big Merle? I haven’t seen him around for a while. Did his family move off the mountain?”

“He’s dead,” Hal said. “Buckley beat him to death with a piece of stove wood and dropped him in a hole. Fat bastard wasn’t happy with his place in the pecking order—got greedy. It happens. Now be quiet, we got a job to do.”

Hal crept silently
through the trees toward the glow of the fire, and Clayton mimicked his every move. The closer they got, the quieter Hal moved until even Clayton could barely hear him from only a few feet away. When they were close enough, Clayton could see it was one of Deddy’s stills, one that was supposed to be decommissioned. It wasn’t. They stopped at a cluster of pine trees and watched a blond-haired man
with a patchy beard stoke a fire under a massive copper boiler. The heat coming off the barrels felt good on Clayton’s face after the long hike through the cold woods. He tugged at Hal’s shirt to get his attention, and Hal leaned in close.

“There’s only one,” Clayton whispered. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s good, but it ain’t the one we want.”

“So, what do we do?”

“What do you do
when you can’t reach a hornet’s nest?”

Clayton didn’t take long to come up with the answer his brother was looking for. “You set fire to the tree,” he said.

“Very good, kiddo.” Hal ruffled Clayton’s bushy red hair. “I think Deddy’s got you all wrong. Now stay here.” Hal put a finger to his lips and vanished into the darkness. He reappeared less than a minute later directly behind Blondie,
who was now copping a squat by a small campfire, thumbing through a skin mag, his rifle propped up against a tree to his left. Hal drew back and hit the man in the temple with the butt end of his Mossberg. Blondie never knew what hit him. He went down hard, face-first into the dirt. It was the coolest thing Clayton had ever seen. His brother was awesome.

“Clayton,” Hal said, snapping the boy
back into the moment, “get out here and tie this pig-fucker to that hemlock tree.”

Clayton shuffled out of the woods with a quickness. He’d always been good with the knots. He was sure Hal knew that. Hal pulled a length of paracord from his jacket and tossed it to Clayton, who bound the unconscious man in no time. Hal kicked over the huge metal boiler—the heart of the ancient still—and the
coals spilled out all over the small clearing. Once some of the underbrush started to ignite from the coals, Hal used the high-octane hooch in the barrels as an accelerant, dousing the entire site. Almost instantly the small patch of woods became a blazing inferno.

“Holy shit, Hal! How we gonna put this out?”

“We’re not. They are.” He pointed to the man tied to the tree.

Clayton was
confused.

Hal explained. “This fire is going to be seen by the fella Deddy sent us here to find, and I promise you he’ll be along shortly. When him and his boys are all tuckered out from fightin’ a woods fire, we’ll pick them off like fish in a barrel. It’ll be fun. C’mon, let’s go find a place to watch.”

“What about him?” Clayton pointed to the blond man, who was starting to come around
due to the intense heat.

“Fuck him,” Hal said. “Come on.”

“But he’ll burn alive.”

“And?” Hal said, beginning to lose his patience. “Get your ass up that path before I leave you here to burn up with him.”

Clayton couldn’t move.

The man tied to the tree by Clayton’s knots awoke completely when the fire started licking his feet and legs. He swiveled his head back and forth, wide-eyed
and frantic, taking in the scope of what was happening to him. He struggled to free himself, drawing his knees up to his chin. He screamed at Clayton to help him. He begged. Clayton just stared at him—horrified. Hal gripped Clayton hard under the arm and nearly ripped it off dragging the boy back out the way they came.