Hellbender (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 2) (29 page)

Even when the sun grew higher and brighter, I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. A downpour of flower petals, the white petals of mountain laurel and dogwood had coated the campsite. They fell on my shoulders like snowflakes. They fell on the tents, stumps and logs around camp. Floral snow had fallen upon the carcasses of the deer Lewis’s men had poached and butchered yesterday. Late spring winter had fallen onto the branches of the trees, the spruces and oaks dipped low with the weight of the petal blizzard. Almost two feet of it.

Throughout  the  forest  thunder  cracks  from  snapping  branches  echoed through clearings. All around old limbs had succumbed to the weight of the floral precipitation. Large limbs fell across the loggers’ living and cooking area. Widow makers, if somebody happened to be sleeping beneath one.

As the men awoke they showed their disbelief with as much emotion as Charlie would allow. He told them to ‘Shut your fucking hole,’ and kept saying ‘Cocksuckers better get busy.’ They obeyed just like they were on the clock. But they couldn’t ignore the evidence that they’d been visited during the night.

“She was here!” Charlie yelled. His men wouldn’t make eye contact. “That cunt was right fucking here. You cocksuckers didn’t even know it. Who was watching?” He shuffled through the knee high fluff on a course that ended right at my nose.

I wanted to shove a smart-ass remark right down his throat, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even raise my eyes to meet his.

“Not talking, huh? Doesn’t matter. When we find her we’re fixing to burn her. You just watch. I’m going to burn that skinny little uppity bitch in that very fire. I’m going to pull that ring off her finger and I’m going to fucking feed her to you.” He pointed to the workers who were milling about the fire trying to escape notice. “The rest of you stay put. If any one of you’s not here when I get back I’m going to find you and burn you, too. Anybody thinks I’m lying? Fucking try me.”

He grabbed my throat and pushed me back into the tree. My windpipe made sucking sounds, like water going into a gutter. “Keep an eye on him. When the rest of them wake up tell them I said to wait here. They better not go running off nowhere.”

He released me, and I fell into my bindings. Tears streamed down my cheeks.

Charlie said, “We’re coming back with dogs to find that witch. Trees are going to suck up a lot of blood tonight.” Charlie assembled Eddie Tasso, Len—who was still bleeding—and his nephews by a trail that led down the slope to the river. Perhaps the road even. Without so much as a look back over their shoulders, they marched on, leaving a faint trail through the snow.

The men that stayed back left me alone for the most part. They stoked the fire, added wood and went through their own quiet routines. Pissing, smoking. One of them began to pick petals out of the pot. I recognized Matt Wilson from school. His dad used to cut hay with us. One time I asked my dad how much we got paid for it and he told me not to worry about it. They needed it more than we did. Matt joked with a guy carving a decoy out of a hunk of oak. He had the body right, but the duck’s head was wrong. It was too small.

Levi brought a case of Coors Light from a tent. They began to drink beer as the food reheated over the fire. He watched me while he drank. Like he wanted me to say something. I could smell the meal—venison, potatoes and carrots. My belly rumbled. My mouth watered and I remembered last night’s dreams and wondered if I’d ever wake up.

Somehow it had become a hallucination. Maybe it was the hunger, but all around, I heard Alex, saying, “Don’t worry.” I dismissed it and shook it off. Even when I knew the words were false they continued to find me from deep within the forest, like the wind. “Don’t worry.”

I can’t trust it
. Trusting my eyes and ears led me here. And even if she’d been whispering in my ear I wouldn’t have trusted it.

All I knew was that this couldn’t be real.

All I knew was that if this was real, the universe was a bastard. Worse than Charlie Lewis.

All I knew was that if this was real then I must’ve done something to deserve it. As I wrote the poetry of my failure, more men gathered and ate from the pot over the fire. Eight of them drinking and laughing. Danny meandered out of his tent and sat down, but he never once made eye contact with me or looked my way. They talked about their families, their children, Friday nights at the bar, sports, girls they wanted to fuck, family, trucks, hunting. A few more came from the tents and took food and joined the conversation. They talked about football, and coyotes and liberals. They all ate. I could’ve stopped any single one of them from dying.

The first one got a nosebleed. The others kind of poked fun, not realizing. When the first guy doubled over, the others continued to watch and eat. He vomited just as the second one’s nose began to bleed.

A third victim showed signs. He held his forearm against his nose. Then a forth.

The first guy convulsed as the rest watched. The snap of bones made me wince, made me want to turn away, but my head was bound too tightly. I closed my eyes. That wasn’t enough to shield myself from the dying.

The men’s screams sent ravens  fleeing from treetop perches, their caws diminishing as they fled. The smell of vomit and bile made me dizzy. It reeked of decay and acid, like the ballooning carcass of a road-killed deer left to bake in the hot sun. I heaved, but there was nothing in my stomach to eject. My body’s retching drew new blood from my healing wounds, ripped scabs and clots from their tender bonds.

I started blacking out from the pain. I fought with everything in me to remain conscious.

But they screamed well after they were dead. And in my semi-conscious state, the in and out of here and not here, I heard every last cry.

As soon as the forest returned to silence, she appeared. “Alex.”

I could smell her watery essence above the death and wood smoke, a smell that I would forever associate with her.

She kissed me. Tears streamed down her face as she inspected my wounds. “Henry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry.”

With a small stone she cut the twine. She held my head. My neck was too weak to support it. She worked down to my shoulders, carefully removing the twine from my open cuts. I leaned against the tree as she worked, afraid that my legs wouldn’t support me. When I was free she held me. She shook with great waves of sadness. “I’m a monster. I
am
one of them. There were more of them here than I thought.”

“It’s okay, Alex. I’m okay.” I held her face in my hands, her soft skin and fine hair were like morphine for my bruises. “They would’ve killed me.”

Her eyes, once blue like a chicory sky, had become green like the mountains. Green like so many wild rivers. Green like the spruce that clung to the ridge tops. Green like the mossy stones that hid hellbenders and stonefly nymphs. Green like the eyes of any animal that strode naked through this wilderness, killing so as not be killed herself.

My head rested on a flat slab of conglomerate. I lay there, content to let my muscles heal. She had wrapped my cuts in patches of sphagnum moss that had been soaked in a tea of horsetail stems and acorns. The recipe was Jane’s, the notebook page sat unfolded on her envelope.

“Where are we?” I said.

“Not as far from the Lewises as I’d like to be.” Alex looked into the forest for movement, listening for sounds. “They’re real close.”

The light of late afternoon filtered through the red spruce. A warm breeze blew from lower in the canyon, bringing with it a hint of summer. The bright green leaves of the canopy silhouetted her head, made it difficult for me to see her face. Beyond the forest the sun shone brightly, but down here it was still cool. Out there was a sky so blue it was nearly purple and cumulus that’d hurt your eyes to look at.

“I was afraid you’d leave me.” I tried to sit up, but the burn from the cuts changed my mind.

“Where else would I go?” Alex had placed a few sad strawberries on my chest. She fed one to me.

“I found an old saw mill,” she said. “It’s downstream, down by the road past a big bunch of laurel and stuff. It’s real thick. It took a long time just to walk around it.”

“How far’s the road?” I asked while I chewed.

“It took me about forty minutes to walk there, so maybe two or three miles? I don’t have a watch.” Her eyes looked over my cuts and bruises. “It’ll take you a lot longer I think.”

“May as well be a hundred miles,” I said. “At least while I’m unable to move, anyway.”

“Doesn’t matter how far it is. We have to go.” She put the recipe back into the envelope and shoved it into her jacket’s inside pocket. “Now.”

“Alex, what’s going on?” I rolled onto my right shoulder.

Alex grabbed my hand, helping me to my feet. “They’re close.”

I got a little dizzy and my bones ached. My skin rippled with stinging pain. Like it had shrunk in the wash.

She pulled me down the slope, her frantic eyes making me wish I could go faster for her sake. My legs moved, but never quite fast enough, while my heart pumped way too fast.

“Are they real close?” I tried to conserve words and hide my heavy breathing. “I held them off for a while by leading them up the mountain away from here. But they brought dogs.” Her small hand felt so good in mine.

We scampered downhill, taking care to avoid the worst of the laurel hells. Now wasn’t the time to get turned around. The hells would beat us up and get us caught. They’d make us suffer for the bodies we left back at the camp. And so far, my home court advantage wasn’t paying off. We were still too deep in the mountains for a chance of a rescue. I was still too unlucky to have things go my way.

I slowed to catch my breath. “We need to head downstream instead of downhill. This is going to get steeper the closer we get to the river.”

“But that’s where they are. They came up that dirt road.”

I stopped and dropped to my knees. “I need to see a doctor. Soon.” I couldn’t lift my arm away from my ribs they hurt so badly.

Alex studied me for a moment, then began to tear at the hem of her dress. She ripped a thin strip and tied it to a laurel. “We need to go through here.”

“I can’t. No way.” Just thinking about bending and stooping and twisting to get through the thick laurel brake made me breathe heavier. “I can’t.”

“It’s the only way. If we stay out in the open they’ll catch us. But if we go in there and slow down the pace we can lose them.” She’d already taken a step toward the laurel brake.

“Alex…”

She met my protest with absolute denial. As I stammered, she responded by moving forward into the hell. I bit my lip, clutched my ribs and followed her in. I had no choice.

Thick, leathery leaves offered fierce resistance to my feeble muscles. Little birds like juncos and finches flew ahead of me. I tried to move as tenderly as possible, agonizing over each step. Each time I bent over I felt certain I wouldn’t ever get back up. I held my breath because I thought they’d be able to hear me grunting in pain. But holding my breath made me dizzy, made my heart race. All I could do was follow Alex and her little trail of fabric.

“The witch leaving the breadcrumbs.”

Within minutes of entering the hell I saw the first copperhead, coiled just behind a log. It gave me the willies and I pushed through the laurel on the other side of the trail to avoid it. The dogs sounded closer now, like they were about three or four minutes behind me.

Those little white strips were my salvation. Just when I thought I was lost, another appeared before my eyes. Limp little prayer flags. My head hurt from watching for both her markers and for snakes.

Knowing I could follow her let me slow my pace. After looking for snakes, and being sure there weren’t any, I took a knee beneath a marker, just to catch my breath. Bluebirds and cardinals chirped and chittered in the branches above. The dry air hurt my throat a little. A bearable pain against all of the unbearable ones. Something fell on me. For a second I thought it was bird shit.

“Seriously,” I said as I ran my hand down my arm. But it was all liquid. Thin, cloudy. And it came from the laurel, not a bird.

Sap
?

It wasn’t syrupy or sticky. It had a creamy texture. I pulled the branch closer and saw it wasn’t the branch at all—the liquid came from Alex’s cloth strip.

“Milk.”

I heard hounds. They sounded like they were in the hell with us now. I released the branch and watched the steady trickle of little droplets fall. From each strip that I passed it was the same thing. Always a steady trickle.

Dripdripdripdrip
.

That was how I followed her. Step by step over the rough terrain. Avoiding the milk. A magic I still didn’t believe. Tripped by roots and rocks hiding beneath the leaf litter. Always aware of copperheads and that cucumber smell that told you they were nearby. The little bastards didn’t have manners enough to warn you before biting. The hell was saturated with them, like the entire ground would strike if I slowed down long enough.

The pain kept me sharp. When I got too casual a jolt from my ribs reminded me where I was. When I got lazy or tired a root would grab my ankle and throw me toward the rocky ground. I learned my lesson fast.

Lewis’s men were close now. They called out my name, but it was the sad braying from the hounds that kept me moving, always on Alex’s trail. The dogs were, in some ways, more human than their handlers. They at least conveyed a sense of regret.

Alex stopped and waited for me. “Hear that?”

Our pursuers had split up. Dogs barked from uphill and now from downhill, too. The men began to drive us like they would a herd of deer. Three or four separate parties pushing us into another group that waited at the other end. Charlie Lewis was probably waiting to pick us off as soon as we ran out. “Alex, wait.” I couldn’t take another step.

“Not now, Henry. You have to.” She didn’t stick around to hear my protests. Sharp pain accompanied my breathing. Dull pain flooded my joints. Burning pain consumed my muscles. Pain made the inches seemed like feet. Pain made the feet seem like miles. Pain made me weaker, slower, and clumsier than I’d ever been. But she had asked me to keep going. So I did.

The hounds barked from just a few yards behind us. Somehow we managed to evade them. I could hear voices, always confused, always lost in the ever- thickening laurel brake. The men fired their guns in an attempt to regroup, but they were always just a few feet short of finding each other.

I caught up to Alex again. Something was wrong.

“What is it?”

“Roadblock,” she said. “We have to go around.”

We’d come upon a fallen giant spruce resting flat against the earth. When it had stood, it had to have been ten feet across at the base. Now that it’d fallen, it acted just like a ten foot high wall. The old bark was covered with a dense mat of bryophytes, ferns and mosses thick enough to become lost in. The tree disappeared into the laurel after just a few yards in either direction.

“Let’s go over,” I said. “It’ll take too long to go around.”

We moved uphill to a rock outcrop that poked up through the hell. Small steps to the top enabled me to look out over the sea of green. Miles of it, like a thick shag carpet, in all directions. Occasional deciduous trees popped up from the brake. I climbed slowly, trying to avoid using my right arm. The slightest pull sent pulses of fire through my ribs. Alex was more nimble. She made it up quite easily. I stepped onto the shaggy carpet of mosses on top of the giant log and saw a football field’s length of tree that eventually disappeared into the laurel as the tree’s diameter shrank. I prodded the moss with my toe.

“Look for a way down,” I said, and crept down the log. The surface was mushy, and gave like a sponge with each step.

“Stay low,” Alex said. “They might see us.”

Before  I  could  reply,  my  foot  broke  through  the  dry-rotted  wood  like a mountain climber falling through ice. It dangled into the emptiness of the hollow log. Alex ran to try and catch me. I reached up to take her hand, and the wood beneath me gave. The sensation of falling ended with a quick drop into more thick moss and sawdust.

“Henry!” Alex squealed. She peeked down at me from the hole I fell through. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

She plopped into the soft humus behind me.

I pulled myself into a sitting position to get my bearings. The entire tree was a façade, the woody core had rotted away long ago. All that remained was a tightly bound tube of mosses and vines, ferns and seedlings growing on the skeleton of the old spruce. The far end appeared to be open to daylight.

“It’s a tunnel?” Alex said.

The smell was of dryness rather than moisture—it wasn’t musty at all. Insect larvae and moles clung to the matted walls. It was warm, cozy, like an old sleeping bag. I didn’t want to leave.

We padded along the spongy trail, a much-needed change after the rocks in the hell on the outside. In some places we sank as deep as six inches. Alex took off her boots and walked in her bare feet. Outside we could hear the dogs, at times just a few feet from our route. Their long, sad howls told their handlers where we were, but the giant spruce confused them. We could hear wood hicks arguing with each other, pissed that the dogs had lost our scent.

We slowed when we got closer to the open end. A wave of warmth descended from the sunny mountaintops as the sun fell toward evening. Shadows fled to the steepest parts of the canyon below. The earthy scent of last fall’s leaves in decay, of earthworms and grubs churning soil, of buds about to bloom pushed away the last fragments of spring. The smell gave me hope. I wondered how a moment like this one could exist amidst all these bad ones.

The warm moss at the edge of the tree tunnel was free of rocks, and best of all, free of snakes. Thick laurel shielded us from the outside world. Alex crawled back beneath the glossy green leaves and joined me on the ground.

She laid her head on me. Her touch was a balm that let me drop back into the moss like a salamander into a spring. The knee-deep layer of emerald-green bryophytes felt better than laying in my own bed, from what I could remember. It was dry and warm. Alex was asleep within minutes.

I knew I had to stay awake, listen for dogs. The barks came from far away. They didn’t sound very threatening anymore. Crickets chirped as evening grew nearer. Peepers called from ponds and puddles. I kept my eyes peeled for the first firefly.

Alex was curled up like a kitten, dreaming. I watched the rapid movement of her eyes beneath her eyelids and considered waking her. She mumbled, then drifted away. “They’re here,” she said with a whispered gasp.

“Who?” I asked. The barking dogs seemed to move back toward us.

Her breathing quickened. She twisted her mouth, like she was in real pain. I tried to shake her awake. “It’s all right, Alex. I got you.”

Dogs barked in the thicket no more than a few hundred yards away. I could hear voices muffled by the brake. They shouted to each other. They were lost. And scared. In the distance I heard pickup trucks bouncing over tree roots before drifting to a stop.

“Wake up.”

But she wouldn’t. She rocked back and forth. A scream formed on her lips. I tried to muffle it with my hand. She bit me with enough force to draw blood.

“Alex!” I said in a muted shout.

She screamed through my fingers and the barks came closer, more freely, like the hounds had been let off their leashes. They called to the other dogs, formed a pack, rushed this way. Men cried out as they tried to keep up. From behind us I heard Charlie. “Get ‘em boys! That’s it.”

“Shit,” I said. They’d surrounded us. Cornered us. The road, and the mill, had to be close. “Get up!”

She screamed again.

Charlie said, “I hear you now. And when I catch you, you little bitch, I’m fixing to run a spit through you and feed you to every last one of those cocksucking Collins. We was being courteous last time, trying to play fair.”

He was less than thirty yards away. Had to be.

“Odelia’s got big plans for you, girl. You don’t go against family. You have to know that.” He fired a few shots into the laurel.

“Darren!” He fired a few more times into the thicket. “Over here.”

I squeezed Alex’s hand and gave her a few light slaps on the cheek. “Please.” “They are here,” she said again.

“I know. Right here, now get up.”

“They burned up in the fire.” Alex was frantic.

“Who did?”

Her eyes snapped open. She gasped for breath. Her arms paddled through the air, like she was drowning.

“Alex!” I pulled her into a sitting position.

She looked at me, tears dripped from her eyes. Blond hair fell across her face. Strands darkened by her tears clung to her lips and cheeks. She sang, tiny words punctuated by sniffles and gasps for breath. Another spell. “
Bluebird says she can’t flap her wings no more
.”

She gulped for air. “
She could leave the mountains, but what for?
”

She grabbed at the moss while she sang, ripping it from the ground. An odor like wet, rotting fruit came out.

“Stop it, Alex. The dogs will find us.” I was on my feet pulling at her.

But she persisted until the smell coming from beneath the moss made me sick. The fetid, mold-filled air darkened our sanctuary. I pulled my shirt over my mouth to keep from inhaling it. She sang, “
Bluebird still sings like she’s going home, in the morning I see here, tell her she’s not alone
.”

She gasped again, and tore right down to the bare bones of the earth, the jumbled rocks that supported this forest. I saw something nesting between the rocks. Metal and glass.

“Jars,” I said, but she persisted. “Leave them.”

“
Bluebird loves me and knows my song, when I get down he tells me to just hang on.
”

First there were ten, then fifteen, then twenty killing jars beneath the blanket of moss she stripped from the jumbled sandstone. Barks came and went from all directions, but they somehow never found their way to us. They howled, like when one of them gets a raccoon up a tree. I pulled Alex with my good arm while I watched through the trees. “Stop it. Please.”

One of the dogs burst into our clearing and I froze. I scanned the ground, looking for a stick or a rock. The young brown hound sniffed us, then sniffed the air. He circled. His back was wet. It was the milk from the laurel. He tried to lick it off, then ran out into the brake, barking and howling.

“Holy shit,” I said.

Alex worked to the edges of the small clearing, green chlorophyll covered her arms like sleeves. All around the barks of confused hounds mingled with the voices of their handlers.

I said, “You did that?”

Alex mumbled as she dug. Or chanted, I couldn’t tell.

Lewis yelled, “Where are you going?” and banged his truck’s cab with the butt of his rifle. His men didn’t hear him. Frustration filled his rant. He leaned on his truck’s horn. An unmistakable command. “She’s over this way!”

The hounds departed down Alex’s trail and loped back toward the heart of the brake. I listened as voices trailed off, completely unaware of how lost they were. Charlie fired his rifle.

“They’re leaving,” I whispered. “It worked.”

When I turned, Alex knelt, surrounded by all of the Mason jars she’d discovered mixed in with the cobbles of sandstone. The lids were rusty, but the glass was clear.

She held a jar at the end of each outstretched arm.

“Alex!” I rushed over as her eyes rolled back in her head. She quivered, trembled, then seized.

I gently lowered her to the ground and tried to pry one of the jars from her grip. She wouldn’t release, her hand was white from squeezing so hard.

“Alex, please.”

I twisted one of the jars out of her hand. In the clear liquid floated a kitten. Its eyes were closed like little half-moons. Its mouth was a quiet little curve. The tip of a tiny pink tongue lapped from beneath an incisor.

Its gray fur wavered with my movements. I was about to set the jar back down when the kitten moved.

I held it up to my face. The kitten’s eyes fluttered.

Horrified, I dropped the jar. When it hit the ground and shattered Alex gasped. Her breathing slowed momentarily, and I relaxed a little. “You’re good, okay?”

Her green eyes found me, then without warning, she seized again.

I picked up a rock and smashed another jar. And then another. With each, she gained a little more consciousness, a little more breath.

Alex watched me work, realized what was happening, then picked up a baseball- sized cobble. She helped me smash them. The curled kittens just lay there, as fresh as the day they were placed in the killing jars.

Alex’s voice was the last bit of her to return. She coughed. Water trickled from her mouth. I put her head on my shoulder and she cried. “Odelia Lewis did this. She’s fixing to kill me. Like she killed Jane.” She wiped her mouth.

And I held her, despite my pain and the blood, as all around us kittens shook water from their fur and gathered around Alex’s ankles. They mewed for milk.

“Are you okay to go?”

“I think.” It sounded like breathing still wasn’t coming easy for her. “It felt like a spell.”