Valley of Bones (27 page)

It seems like all we did that winter was talk, the three of us in Orne’s living room around the hot cube of the stove occasionally tossing in a chunk of oak and pulling out of our mouths some idea, cut to size, quartered, aged, and dry like the wood. It was mostly me and Skeeter who talked, which I found strange because Orne had always been the biggest talker I knew, but he seemed content to sit sipping home-brewed beer or corn liquor and listen to us chop logic.

Topping was what our conversation was mainly about, I have to say that even though Skeeter was supposed to be Orne’s best pal he was mean to him in a sly way that for some reason Orne didn’t seem to resent, always putting him down about things of the mind. He was hard as blazes on old Nietzsche because he knew Orne had sort of built the whole structure of his life on that philosophy, and Skeeter had got pretty good at tearing it
down. Nee Chee, he would say, how can you take him seriously? He never made any money and he never got laid. What the fuck good is his philosophy if he never made any money and never got laid, when the point of his philosophy was you ditch God and then you’re the superman and you can do what you want, and here’s superman Nee Chee wandering around Europe jerking off in low-end hotels collecting cheap soup in that stupid mustache. And more like that.

So I am drifting again. This is not the important material. The important thing was that Orne was fading away from me that winter. I thought it was because I couldn’t get pregnant and Orne was a planning man and a planning man don’t like it when his plans go awry even in a small detail like that. I said I could go to a fertility clinic I looked up in Roanoke, but he said no because he didn’t trust doctors. He had a couple of theories about them too. It never did occur to me that every time I wasn’t there Skeeter was tearing me down to his best buddy, but I didn’t find that out until it was much later and didn’t matter anymore.

So one day he was off on one of his trips without even a farewell fuck like we used to and near as soon as his dust had settled on the road the best buddy was trying to get into my pants. And I wouldn’t let him and it really peed him off, because we were not what you would call a moral bunch, a point he made a good deal of. I mean why not? What’s a fuck between friends after all, why is it different from borrowing a truck or a tool, he would say, Orne won’t mind, you want me to ask him? In fact, I can see he’s trying to get rid of you already, and listen, darlin’, I wish I had a dollar for every time Orne and me switched off girlfriends, I mean what
is
your problem?

On the other hand…I guess that besides being tedious and all it was also interesting to be courted that hard, something you kind of miss in the whore business, and Skeeter was an interesting man aside from him being a bandy rooster type with the shaved head and the tats, although built up from lifting weights.
He really had been to all those places, buying and selling weapons, and occasionally he would seem to forget about his seduction routine and just go on about Abidjan and Mombasa and Nairobi and the mountains of the moon and the Andes and slipping planes into secret airports at night and the sweating faces of desperate men shining in the light of flares.

So one day, Orne still gone who knew where, Skeeter said to me I have to go see a Depot of the Damned and would I like to come and I said what’s that and he explained about how army units accumulated stuff that they weren’t supposed to have and the officers and NCOs lied about it and hid it during inspections in some truck or other and that after a while the stuff got too conspicuous and they had to get rid of it, no questions asked, and Skeeter supplied the disappearing service. He was a pilot, did I mention that? We flew down to Georgia in a Cessna and he wore me down so I let him fuck me in the back of the plane just to get past it and to get back at Orne too and it turned out to be my very last voluntary fuck as I shall tell.

It is real hard to practice evil unless you are a hypocrite, and lie to yourself about what you’re really doing. I have seen a lot of evil men in my time and Skeeter Sonnenborg was one of the few I met who didn’t lie in that way—he was bad and gloried in it—and another good part about him I have to say is he didn’t hold a grudge, he was not that flavor of evil. He bought me a big box of fudge at the airport and stuck his business card from the Gun Nut onto it with a note that said anytime, babe, and boy was it stupid I mean
fudge
but it touched me because I had not experienced much in the way of gifts without some immediate payoff expected.

Orne got back the next day and he was colder than he had been before he left. The problem with living like fierce beasts is that not much talking goes on and if your credo is an individualism so extreme that intimacy feels like oppression then there’s not much you can say anyway. Do you want me to leave? Do whatever you want. So I moved my quilt and pillow into an empty
room and cried my little eyes out for a couple of nights, hoping he would hear and come in or relent or something, but no. After about a week of this, I came out to the kitchen one morning to make some coffee and there was a girl there younger than me fussing with the coffeemaker, Sharon her name was, and we sat down and had a civilized conversation over coffee and sweet rolls and she told me that she was carrying his child and I could stay as long as I wanted she didn’t want to kick me out or anything.

I thought about killing the two of them Sharon and Orne and then myself, really thought hard about it for days, the devil in me painting a pretty picture of how it would feel the look on his face and such, but in the end I just didn’t, God was directing me to a different fate. I did want to kill
something
though, and so one dawn I dressed up in a heavy winter camo jacket and overalls and my good boots. I took Orne’s Jarrett 280 with the Swarovski PH scope, which nobody but him was ever supposed to touch, and my Buck knife and a pack frame and rope, and headed out to get a deer. As I walked out of the place someone was playing a banjo and singing

Up in the Blue Ridge mountains

It’s there I’ll take my stand.

A rifle at my shoulder

A six-gun in my hand.

Our theme song you might say.

The place we usually hunted from was a little knob overlooking a meadow that ran down to the banks of Crittenden Run, the little stream of the holler that our mountain overlooked. There was good cover on the knob, and the deer would come down to water, and in the spring the bucks would use the meadow for their joustings. I got comfortable in a little scoop of ground full of the season’s leaves that we’d covered with a camo tarp and from where I could look out from under a laurel bush at a view of most
of the meadow and the stream. Through the scope I could see deer tracks in the sandy shore on my side of the stream. I loaded up and waited and before long a buck and a pair of does came down to the stream to drink. I put the crosshairs on the buck and as always when I hunted thought of Ray Bob, how he had taught me not to try to keep the cross rock steady on the target but to control its waver, moving it in tiny circles and slowly squeezing your trigger at the same time in coordination so that when the round went off the sight picture would be just right. Where I come from we are not sentimental about edible animals. The buck raised his lovely head from the water and stiffened, only his ears twitching, and I dropped him with one right behind the eye.

An hour later I had him gutted and skinned out and a haunch bagged and tied on to my pack frame, when I heard the first shots, which I didn’t pay any mind to, and then a whole lot more, automatic fire in volume and then the whole face of the mountain shook and there was a whomp of noise and I started to run up the trail. I thought it had to be an accident one of the demo charges must have gone off and I thought of all the workers in there crushed and dead. I honestly never thought that he had set them off on purpose that the Knob was under attack by the law until I came off the trail onto the gravel road and I saw it was full of SUVs with government markings. Men were crouched down behind cars, and some of them were shot and bleeding and there were bullets cracking overhead and they were returning fire. Two of them spun around and looked at me, they were like space aliens in gas masks and helmets. I guess they thought I was one of the defenders. I had a rifle in my hand, and it didn’t occur to me to throw it down. Instead I turned and ran and one of them shot me in the back and I fell off the road and down the side of the mountain rolling and rolling until I crashed and disappeared into a big patch of laurel.

It was dark under the leaves and stank of rot and that peculiar laurel smell. I had wound up facedown, with the heavy pack
frame pressing me into the cold earth and the little hard laurel stems. I didn’t move for the longest time. Gradually the firing died down. There were other explosions, but not as loud. I could hear sirens too and truck engines and the sound of people talking urgently on radios. The pain from my back wasn’t so bad, more of a pressure hard to tell from the weight of the deer meat where it bore on the frame and pressed it into my own flesh, worse were the little laurel spikes, there was one that felt like it was going right through my breastbone to my heart. I thought I would die there in the laurel but I didn’t yell or anything, I just tried to think if Nietzsche had said anything about death and came up pretty blank except it was ignoble to worry much about it.

I drifted off, or maybe I fainted, and when I woke up it was dark and quiet with the patter of freezing rain on the leaves above my head. And cold. Which seemed to wake me up. The shiny man was there I could see him in the glint of the raindrops and he was telling me all about how I would get eaten by animals and beetles and turn into a skeleton and wasn’t it sad, poor Emmylou, and this made me so angry I shucked out of the backpack and struggled upright and then the pain really hit me.

I crashed along downhill for a while stumbling and falling the rain heavier now the Run where I crossed it up to my thighs and of course I slipped and fell and rose coughing soaked to the skin and thought if I could just lie down a second and rest I would feel better but the nurse said not here not here child go ahead go just a little farther. The nurse from before when I was alone that first night in Orne’s house, with the willow-leaf eyes. I didn’t give a thought to how she had got there it seemed so natural that she was there I could see her white headcloth shining although the clouds were low and heavy and there was no moon showing. But it glowed.

The nurse was speaking now but in a language I couldn’t understand, I mean I couldn’t understand the words but I could extract their meaning she said God has brought you this far
child now you must go the rest of the way yourself and I said I don’t believe in God and that’s when I knew I was dying and that this was a dream.

Then I was warm again and floating up around the ceiling of a long white room and thinking oh this is what dead is. I could see close to my head the rough texture of the plaster and the light fixture and the white paint flaking around where the chrome of the fixture was attached it said KayBee Electric Inc. Decatur GA on the base plate and looking down I saw a row of hospital-type beds empty except me and bango it was morning and I was on my back in the bed not dead but feeling like it and a brown woman in a white headcloth and apron was taking my blood pressure. Our eyes met and for a moment I thought it was Sister Trinidad Salcedo in Miami and maybe all that happened since I last saw her had been a dream, but no, no such luck, she said well you’re back with us, how are you feeling, and I said the traditional where am I and she said this is the infirmary at St. Catherine’s Priory and I’m Sister Mercedes Panoy. Who are you she asked and I said I was Emily Louise Garigeau. I said, you’re a Blood Sister aren’t you? She gave me a funny look and asked if I were comfortable, which is what nurses say when they want to know if something hurts like hell and when she said it I realized that my whole back was in agony shooting pains radiating all across it from my left shoulder blade. I said no my back hurts and she went away and came back with a couple of red-and-white capsules and a paper cup of water.

I spent the next week in an oxycodone haze. I learned I had been shot through the shoulder blade but that my meat-filled pack had reduced the force of the bullet, which probably saved my life. When found, I was suffering from hypothermia and a raging infection, as well as from an immune reaction owing to the deer meat that had been forced into my wound. No one asked me how I had been shot and I didn’t volunteer. I was in a facility of the Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ as I had surmised, actually their central training facility in North America.

When I was well enough to walk around, after about ten days, I took myself to the little dayroom they had there and read the Roanoke Times. The story was still getting play, a massive raid on a marijuana-growing empire international criminal white supremacists, six officers and an unknown number of criminals had been killed in the shoot-out and explosion, including Percival O. Foy, the mastermind. There were protests from the usual idiots, the Feds had blown up the innocent victims and oh how awful armed militia in our state Virginia is for lovers ban the guns.

So that was the end of Orne Foy, blood and fire, the death of a Nietzschean hero, as he wanted. I discovered I had no tears for him then although he was the first being I loved, loved in the sense that I wanted his good more than my own. He of course did not believe in that kind of love at all and looking back I see that God gave him to me to make the first crack in the armor of my self and only a tool as hard and as merciless as Orne could have held the edge that did it. I believed in him too, in his nonsense, his apocalypse, and also I see that now as my introduction to the
act
of belief, and also practice in loving the fairly unlovable, my darling racist killer. “I have done that says my memory; I cannot have done that says my pride and remains adamant. At last, memory yields.”—Nietzsche. But not for me, I am denied even that.