Hellbender (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 2) (16 page)

“How bad was it?” She put her hand on my knee. “I saw.”

“I don’t know. Could’ve been worse. But after all the shit this week I just wanted somebody else to be the adult. Like I needed to come back here and worry about him, too. Wondering is he mad or is he going to do something stupid? I just don’t need this. He’s the reason I left in January.”

Alex said, “I’ll go wherever you go.” She rested her head on my arm.

Time stopped for a moment. I was able to see the moon set into the western hills, the morning and all that came after. My heart warmed with the thought of all the days and nights Alex and I still had to spend together.

I kissed her. She relaxed into me, sliding a hand up to my neck and through my hair.

“I won’t let you down, I promise,” I said, running a finger down her cheek. We held each other for a while. I wished that there were fireflies in this part of the valley this time of year.

She picked up a mewing kitten and said, “Maybe we should get back to the party? Maybe, um…we should dance?”

“Sure,” I said, and we slowly wound our way back through the dark side of the big tent, almost hidden by the music coming from Katy and Preston.
They’re good
, I thought. Seeing Katy so happy made me smile.

Making it a point to avoid my dad forced me to go the long way around, but when I saw that he’d left, I cut through the middle. My pap stood up and gave me a big old bear hug.

“Go ahead, Alex. I’ll catch up.” To my pap I said, “What’s going on?”

He spoke softly into my ear. “You’re back. Tell me you’re back for good.”

“I am,” was all that I could say. He was drunk now, too. I could tell by the way his eyes never quite found me.

He took a deep breath, held it, then said, “I’m sorry that your old man can’t give you what you want. It’s my fault you know.”

“Hey,” I said, “I’m sure—”

But he squeezed my arm, making damn certain I was listening. “I made him the way he is. I’m the one that ran your mother off.”

I tried to pull myself away, to look at his face, but he buried it on my shoulder, and said, “Alice begged me to let this curse be buried with our little girl when she died. But I didn’t.”

He trembled. “I couldn’t. I believed running your mother off was the only way to save her life.”

With that, he released me, sat back at the table and returned to his drink.

FIVE

Wood smoke from the dying fire tricked me into thinking breakfast was cooking somewhere, teasing me with thoughts of thickly sliced bacon and buckwheats. And our plans for the day had included breakfast. But a lot of time passed between talking about breakfast and getting our asses in gear. Thus, our drive to Spruce Knob for an impromptu overnighter was punctuated with stops in Davis for salads and ice cream since 11 a.m. was officially no longer breakfast in the Mountain State.

We left town in a burst of speed along the flat, straight stretch of highway through Canaan Valley. Ben laughed while he drove, ice cream dripping down his hand as it jabbed the air to add extra oomph to punch lines and anecdotes and army jokes.

Alex was crammed in the seat behind Ben, feet up, knees pulled to her chest. Her blond hair flew about in the chaos of the open windows. She playfully sucked the white plastic spoon between bites. Whenever Katy insisted Ben slow down, we all laughed. Ben got to her by riding on the shoulder and across the center line.

I hung out the window, half into the party beside me, half into the blue sky, clear as glass over the wide valley. The dry air magnified a crispness that made the sights sharper, made distant objects seem like they were just inches from my fingertips. With my left hand I could pull pebbles from the rocky crest of Cabin Mountain. With my right, I gently stroked the velvety green expanse of Canaan Mountain.

“Was it worth it?” Ben asked, seemingly out of nowhere. “You could’ve died, you know. Does Katy know what you did?”

Ben looked in his mirror and said, “Miss Katy, you know you stole Henry’s thunder last night, right? He pulled a guy out from under a rock. Guy would’ve drowned.”

“Henry, really?” She stuck her head between the seats, effectively cutting Preston and Alex off from the conversation.

“Does a rocking horse have a wooden dick?” I said, taking one of Ben’s best lines.

“Colorful, Henry. You kiss grandma with that mouth?” She sighed, and said, “You’re going to get killed one of these days. Even a cat’s only got nine lives.”

“Yeah, but a hellbender never dies. You ever see a dead one?” I answered Katy’s question. “I’d take Dimple Rock a thousand times to make up for not being able to do anything about Jane.”

And the second I said her name all conversation stopped.

We left Canaan and followed the Dry Fork up to Harmon, the only noise came from the hole in Ben’s tailpipe. There we went east, up and over the Continental Divide. To our right the steep face of the Spruce Knob National Recreation Area slumbered. The smell of smoking brakes and hot rubber led us to the bottom. Busloads of tourists guaranteed that we wouldn’t be stopping at Seneca Rocks today. Instead we drove south, between the Allegheny Front and North Fork Mountain. A land of giants. Peaks over four thousand feet were as common here as bluets. Even in my dreams the streams weren’t as clear, the mountains as tall, or the valleys as deep as they were for real.

North Fork Mountain kept people out of this part of the world; it was the first ridge in a series that ended at the Shenandoah in Virginia. Where Spruce Knob was capped with its namesake vegetation, North Fork Mountain had rocky fins of Tuscarora Sandstone crenellating its long, narrow expanse. Wanderers and outcasts gave in to the pull of West Virginia’s secret border, a place the rest of the country ignored. But the exposed rock nestled in a bed of white pine finally forced me to smile.

We stopped to pee and to get more alcohol at a little country store that resided in an old post office. Preston said, mostly to Katy, "Currences lived back that way.”

At Circleville we left the highway to begin the slow climb up the backside of Spruce Knob. I barely noticed Ben’s busted tailpipe. The quiet meadows along the road were about to erupt with the greens of wild bleeding hearts and tiger lilies. Some dark pocket on the backside of the ridge probably hid the last painted trillium of the year.

The pavement turned into a gravel fire road that clung to the side of the mountain like wings to a June bug. When the trees parted, valleys and streams less than twenty people knew the names of were revealed. Alex pointed out buzzards and raptors floating in the open sky far below. Behind us a cloud of white dust grew. For a second the Jeep seemed more like a rocket, leaving Earth to visit worlds not yet explored.

As the fire road turned north to follow the Continental Divide, Alex continued to gape at the thousand-foot drop-off to her right. Now, North Fork was in our shadow. The farms and homes sprinkled throughout the New Germany Valley looked tiny, uninhabitable.

The vegetation changed once more as we neared the summit, becoming a moonscape of azaleas and blueberry bushes. We left behind the oak-hickory forest a long time ago. The maples of the higher elevations diminished with every mile we drove. Now spruce and mountain ash dominated, with laurels sitting in the dark hollows to confuse and confound trespassers. Tongues of gray conglomerate rock flowed in the contours like streams. Broken by the frosts that hit so hard up here, the tongues of rock were notorious for twisting ankles and scraping exposed skin.

We bounced along the rough roads for another forty minutes before finally stopping at a wide meadow. Birds chirped with gusto as the sun dipped toward late afternoon. The air was so clear we could’ve seen the Pacific if the earth were just a little less round.

Preston had his guitar out as soon as the Jeep stopped rolling. He laid on his back and strummed made up chords and lyrics. I brought the only tent, which Katy claimed for the girls, should it get too cold. “Listen here,” I said. “Not sure who put you in charge, but in that thirty-two square feet…” I pointed at my little blue tent. “I’m the king.”

Preston laughed.

“Don’t be a douche,” she said.

“You learn that on the road?” Ben asked. He carried the cooler over to the fire ring, dropped it into the dirt then turned around and sat on it. “From your little hipster hillbilly wannabes?”

“Nope. Learned that from Preston.” She circled three times, just like a cat, before plopping down in the grass next to her man. “Isn’t that right, honey?”

He responded by busting out a John Lennon song.

We drank wine in between gathering firewood and picking at the food Ben had stolen from his old man. Cheese and bread mostly, not that Carlo Rossi was necessarily a bread and cheese type of wine. We heckled Preston, shouting out stuff like “Freebird” and “Blackbird” and other songs that may or may not have been about birds. To his credit, we had a real hard time stumping him. Ben finally said, “I guess you’ll do just about anything to get out of getting firewood,” and disappeared into the forest.

While he pouted, Katy asked Alex to get Jane’s envelope. Alex went to the Jeep, and returned with a small overnight bag. Before she even opened her bag Katy was on her feet grabbing for Jane’s envelope. They moved on the other side of the fire ring, away from me and Preston. Katy spread out a big old Mexican blanket, and plopped down in the middle. Alex looked over Katy’s shoulder as she spread the scraps of paper out. Almost immediately she started sorting them into two piles.

“What are you doing?” I asked, moving to keep an eye on where she was putting everything.

“Separating the stuff you need from the stuff you don’t.” Katy crossed her legs and sipped her wine.

“Do you know what all of that is even? Jane had meant for me to have it, not you.” I crossed my arms.

“Yes, Henry, that’s probably true. But what are you going to do with it? Do you believe any of it? That you can call serpents or poison a spring? Part of me thinks there’s a bunch of really good reasons for you to remain skeptical. Like, through all of this, your skepticism may serve a purpose. So this,” she shook a fistful of papers at me, “this is something you can leave to me. Yes, the envelope had your name on it, but I’m almost certain that Janie expected you to do what was best with it. Which, in this case, meant getting it to me. So congrats.”

“Whatever. You know…forget it.” I started to walk away. I didn’t want to fight with her.

“Henry, before you run off and pout, here’s the deal. For, like, twenty years nobody on our side wanted to do anything. Those Johnny Bulls did everything they could to twist the knife in Pap’s gut. And for what? They don’t go to half as many funerals as we do. I guarantee it. This half,” she waved her hand over the papers and scraps she’d set aside for me. “This is your case. This is your justification to get really pissed off and do something about it.”

“Like what? What do you expect me to do?”

Ben appeared at the edge of the meadow dragging a pair of long branches.

“I expect you to end this. You were closest to Jane. It’s your duty. Nothing else in the whole wide world matters as much as avenging your sister.”

“So you want me to go on a rampage, take out Charlie and Odelia and Darren and go to jail for the rest of my life? So I can get raped and beaten while you all just go on with your little road show?”

Ben dropped the limbs near the fire ring and sat down. I looked at him for some kind of back-up.

He said, “Don’t stop on my account. This sounds like it’s about to get good.”

Katy stood up, made a fist and held it against her hip. “First of all, I don’t expect you to do anything without the rest of us there. You shouldn’t be going off alone, ever. First rule of dealing with Lewises—never get caught alone.”

I shook my head and tried to force a laugh. “What kind of future am I looking at? Running from the law?”

“What kind of future do you have now? Look at what they’re doing to Alex. And she’s blood.”

Ben perked up. “Really? Alex, tell me it ain’t true.”

“Jesus, Ben.” I turned on him like a copperhead in a corn crib. “Who do you think she’s hiding from? This ain’t some kind of summer camp, where people just drop in and dance around a fire because they feel like it. Charlie Lewis wants Alex’s to be the next body in the ground. So you know what?” I didn’t want to have to answer.

“You may be slicker than shit, but you can’t slide on barbwire.” But Ben had to push it. He said, “Tell me ‘what?’”

“Back the fuck off. That’s what.” I poked his shoulder.

“Stop it. You guys just need to cool it. I love how Collins men get a little booze in them and all of a sudden everyone gets all Iron-horse Irish like nothing can hurt ‘em. If that were the case we wouldn’t be holed up where the internet doesn’t even reach waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“So what’re you saying, Katydid?” Ben started breaking limbs over his knee.

“What I’m saying, and I want you boys to listen— you too, Preston—cause you may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.” Katy sat back down and began tucking everything neatly back into the envelope. “What I’m saying, is that Darren and Billy and Curtis don’t have kids.”