Valley of Bones (22 page)

When I woke up I was in a small room, in a big old-fashioned high wooden sleigh bed, the dark lit by a yellow glow from a bug light outside the window. My head hurt so much it was making me nauseous and showing sharp colored lights every time I moved it. When my eyes adjusted I saw there was a woman in the room with me, small, slight with some kind of white headdress on that covered all her hair. I thought of the sisters in Miami and I said are you a nurse? But she didn’t answer and I asked where’s Orne? But she didn’t answer that either she just looked at me and smiled in a funny way. She had a long nose and strange long eyes like willow leaves. I asked her if I could have an aspirin or codeine and some water, but she just sat down on the bed and took my hand or that’s what I recall happening but then I must have blacked out again and then I woke up again and the woman was gone and so was my pain.

I felt well enough now to rise from the bed and leave the room. There was a narrow hallway outside and I stood still for a moment and tried to get the feel of the place. It reminded me of Gran’s house, that smell of dust and old paint and cooking you get in a wood house that’s been around for a while silent now except for the usual creaks and the wind outside and crickets. I could almost
have been in Wayland except for the cool of the night and a kind of sulfur smell and a distant rumble of some engine. I found a bathroom and used it, washed my face and tried to straighten out my tangled hair, what a mess, bruises and smudgy rings under my eyes. Then I followed the light out to the front room.

Orne was lying on a cracked brown leather couch reading. I could just see the top of his yellow-haired head and the book’s pages and his feet in gray socks up on the other armrest and I just felt so good watching him that I didn’t say a word just looked around. There was a square enamel stove over in one corner of the room and a big scarred table and some chairs and a rag rug on the floor, a fireplace and a mantelpiece, an old rocker with a quilt on it, and the rest of the room was all books, thousands it seemed like, on shelves covering every wall from floor to ceiling except for where the windows poked through. And everything was neat as a pin, no clutter, the floors swept and mopped, and no books jammed anyhow into odd spaces in the shelves like they were at Gran’s, more like at the library.

I took a step and a plank creaked and up Orne shot like a snake, on his feet and the book gone flying a .380 tight in his hand. Shit he said and took a couple of deep breaths and put the little pistol in his pocket and he said I’m not used to other people in the house at night and I felt glad because it meant he didn’t have a girlfriend. He asked me how I felt and I said fine and asked him who the woman was who tended me. He looked at me funny then and said there was no woman it was I tending to you and no one else. And we agreed it must’ve been in a dream. He said I had been out more than twenty-four hours and he had been worried and if I hadn’t got up pretty soon he was going to take me down to the community hospital in Bradleyville.

My stomach growled just then astonishingly embarrassingly loud in the quiet room and we both laughed and he said come on we’ll get you fed. He had a big pot of stew, venison, we ate a lot of venison on Bailey’s Knob, the deer were swarming in the
state forest and God knew we had plenty of guns and no respect for the hunting laws, although I didn’t learn that until later. He warmed some up and watched me eat like a hog, tipped back in his chair drinking a glass of murky beer. I had some too, malty and bread-tasting, homemade like most of the stuff we fed on. I asked him what the throbbing noise was and he said the generator, we’re off the grid here.

The question foremost in my mind then—actually the next foremost, since the first was when I was going to get into bed with him—was why he had come looking for me but I didn’t know how to say it, but then he seemed to read my mind and said the question and answered it. He’d been looking for a woman, young, trainable—he didn’t actually say that but that’s what he meant—bright, capable, and he thought I was the one. It was time for him to start a family, past time really but he had been so busy with his Work. Capital letters here because that’s what it always sounded like when he said it. I had heard some of this when he came and talked to me at Hunter’s place but now it all came out in a spate, me listening while I ate and nodding agreement. The great collapse was not far off, they were running out of time to prepare, the Bastards had ruined the world with their money and manipulations and thought control and there would be a blowup pretty soon, engineered plagues and nuclear war and anarchy, just like in those African countries, all the assholes thought we were immune but no and we had to prepare. Billions would die as the control systems collapsed and all those people who only knew how to manipulate symbols, who thought that symbols were real and thought the food came from a supermarket and energy came from the walls and water came from a tap and wastes just vanished by magic, they’d be helpless. The only people who’d survive would be the ones who understood the Real Stuff, who weren’t moral cowards whining to a dead god, no, after all the loser and dirt people were swept away we would found a new race and its foundation stone would be the people that the
Bastards had disdained as white trash. Why? Because they were the best stock in the world, the descendants of Vikings and warrior Celts and Teutonic tribes, they’d come here with nothing and built here in these mountains the only decent civilization that had ever existed in America yeoman farmers proud and independent, free of social garbage from Europe and Africa and Asiatic hordes, until the Bastards had come to the Appalachians and destroyed everything decent with their commodity capitalism and their man-eating coal mines and now they were eating the land itself ripping mountains apart in their greed turning everything on the planet into money well let the Bastards try to eat their money and their fucking data when the day of doom arrived!

He wanted me to appreciate the funny part of it—the triumph of the trash paid for by dope that the Bastards needed because their miserable money-grubbing lives and their dead god couldn’t give them anything to live for, no decent food, no decent air or water, their heads full of TV crap concocted by Jews, no decent sex, their manhood dried up by the gray lives they had to lead to make the money they thought they need to buy the garbage the Jews and the faggots told them they had to have to be men…and on and on like this it must have been hours, and it made perfect sense to me as an explanation of the shittiness of the world although to be frank I had kind of lost focus when he mentioned decent sex. Although you might have thought that given my experiences in that line I would’ve been off the whole thing but you would’ve been dead wrong there because you know while all of that was going on from age nine I had only one thought in my head that I was holding on for someone who would make it all turn out right who would redeem my fouled body with blazing passion and wipe the stains away, redemption through sex a common American trope and I did not need any Jews or faggots to put it there either it is in the air of my native land.

I finished eating and he was still talking away, few are made for independence it is the privilege of the strong, Nietzsche, oh,
my, could he wail on Nietzsche, pages of it in his head, his gospel, him and the two Toms, Jefferson and Paine, and he was still talking as I took my bowl and cup to the sink and washed and still talking when I turned around and he only ran down a little when I ripped my T-shirt off and yanked down my pants so I was jaybird naked and jumped up on him wrapping my legs around him and grabbing his still talking mouth with my mouth, but he shut up for a while after that and I made him fuck me on the cold enamel of the kitchen table.

As I reflect now I have to say that in all the time I was with him he never said he loved me nor did we exchange many words of tenderness. We lived with each other like fierce beasts an occasional snarl a cuff of the paw and then all submerged and forgotten in blazing sex. I believe many people live in this way and some of them write songs about how great it is and I thought it was great too I thought that was what love
was.
I love him still. If he walked through the door right now I might give it all up and follow him, I can’t be sure, my faith is so weak really it needs a bodyguard of saints. God will judge not me.

The next morning I got the tour. Bailey’s Knob was not a commune or even much of a community. It was a company town, Orne being a CEO straight out of Ayn Rand and the business was the growing of high-grade marijuana. I guess that the people who lived there more or less believed what Orne believed about the government, they were all some kind of survivalist type of person, but I never saw much organization aside from the guard roster, which everyone accepted as a business necessity. It wasn’t a Christian Identity center or any other kind of center and I doubt whether any of the people I met knew who Nietzsche was or cared. They were all lanky, pale people with light hair and tin-pail eyes, the children and grandchildren of miners tossed off their land by the strip mines or unemployed by the deep mines closing down. They had a grudge sure enough and guns and they weren’t going to send their kids to the town schools where they’d learn to despise who
they were, like I had. They had no use for the kind of America they saw on TV, they didn’t understand it and didn’t want to. Not big fans of diversity but not exactly fascists either because while they respected Orne there was no cult of personality going on that I could see. They mainly wanted to be let alone, and if Orne gave them the opportunity to support themselves and their families they’d give him a wary loyalty and most of them believed that the world was really going to crash just like Orne said, or maybe they were just hoping it would and didn’t want to be left behind. The Foys, it turned out, were originally mountain people from around here. Most of them had lit out for north Florida and become the depraved tribe I had grown up with but some of them stuck, and Orne had come back and with money that came from no one knew where, had bought a whole mountain’s worth of busted coal mines and ruined streams and piles of spoil and started his business.

The heart of the operation was Caledonia Number Three, which was the name of his coal mine, in a gallery two hundred feet down inside the mountain. We took a cage elevator down, and it was not dark as a dungeon at all but full of blazing light from Gro-Lux lamps in long rows shining down on tables covered with long rubber tubs in which grew dense green marijuana plants over eight thousand of them at various stages from seedlings to harvest-ready. A team of women was moving up and down the line, tending plants, fertilizing from shoulder tanks, pinching buds into plastic pails, snipping and trimming. Orne said they regularly tested different plants for yield, part of the breeding program. Then we went to the processing center in a side adit where some other people men and women and young girls were stripping the buds from harvested plants and tossing the leaves and stems into a hopper, for later chopping and processing into low-grade weed and some were compressing buds into bricks with a hydraulic rammer. They wore masks so they could remember what they were there for and not work the whole day stoned from the fine intoxicating dust that hung yellow-green in the air and
coated every surface. I got a buzz from five minutes in the place.

They had a shipping area too where they packed the bricks in shrink-wrap and loaded them into cartons. Orne moved bulk around the country in regular trucks and private planes just like UPS. He had a computerized billing system and inventory control. As a cover operation he bought crafts—dolls and quilts and rag rugs—from local women and shipped those out to mail-order. It explained the boxes going out air freight and washed the dope money.

He was moving tons of the stuff right out in the open like that and never a sniff from the cops, because according to him the cops and the DEA were set up to catch dummies really, not smart people like Orne or Kaczynski the Unabomber, a local hero, unless they’re betrayed by someone close to them. In another gallery of the mine he had the armory and we took a look at that too. He had every kind of weapon, pistols, rifles, machine guns, mines, rocket launchers, boxes of shells and ammunition, plus other military hardware like radios and generators and in another room stores of food and water for when the nuclear destruction came and they had to all sit it out down in the deeper tunnels where the radiation couldn’t follow. The electricity to run the place they generated from methane that came from a digester fed on hog manure from North Carolina and he also had a little steam generator that ran off of coal, but that wasn’t hooked up yet. We cooked with the methane too.

So I began my life on Bailey’s Knob. Everyone was friendly to me in that reserved, formal mountain way, except for a couple of the younger women who had their eyes cocked on Orne and were mad that I had got him instead, but nothing too bad. The whole place ran on kin spirit, they were all Randalls, Warrens, Wendells, Coles, more or less related to one another and to the Foys, because you couldn’t run an operation like that with just hired help. Any one of them could’ve blown us but none of them ever did and I will not blow any of them now by supplying names. The other thing
about the Knob was no TV. There was no reception of course because of the mountains and no one wanted a satellite dish. They listened to the radio and made music themselves, like in the olden days, or watched movies on VCR. I thought it was real restful, not to have people blaring at you from commercials every night and besides it left more time to read. And no phones, no ringing to distract you, to bring news from the outside no electrical bane or boon interrupting life. No phones no taps, was Orne’s rule and he wouldn’t have one on the place. The pay phone outside the grocery in Tiptree was our only contact with the outside, and Orne paid the salary of a girl there all she did was answer the phone and take messages for him. Once or twice a day she’d ride up the mountain and deliver the messages and every couple of days or once a week Orne would go down there and make calls.