When These Mountains Burn Read online

  “I don’t know why in the hell you think a man can just pull that kind of money out of his ass, but I’m here to tell you right now that—”

  “I’m going to stop you, Mr. Mathis. Your son seems to think different. From what he’s told me, you recently came into a little bit of money.”

  Ray closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. Immediately he knew what Ricky had told him, and truthfully he couldn’t have hidden it if he wanted. The Sylva Herald had written stories about the deal. His face had been on the front page of the paper for weeks while he bickered back and forth with the state over a land dispute.

  After Ray retired with thirty years from the Forest Service he’d come home and realized awfully fast that a man like him wasn’t fit for idle. Six months retired, he bought a small lot on the side of 107 and built a produce stand. Mathis Produce was going on ten years when the state forced him to sell with eminent domain so they could widen the road. They squabbled back and forth over a year in the papers and on the news, but recently the check had come and the deal was done.

  Ricky was screaming in the background and suddenly it felt like all the blood had left Ray’s face. No matter how strong a man was, there were moments in life that left him empty, things that could hollow his heart like a cavern in little more than an instant. For a mother or father it was as simple as the sound of their child crying. He’d never known that kind of vulnerability before he held that boy in his arms.

  “Let’s say I had it to give. What’s to stop you from killing us both the minute I hand it over?”

  “You hold up your end and I’ll do the same.”

  “I’m supposed to trust somebody who’s trying to extort me for—”

  “This isn’t extortion,” the man interrupted. “It’s more like mercy.”

  Neither spoke for a few moments and then the man continued.

  “This is a courtesy call, Mr. Mathis. You can go right or you can go left, and honestly it makes no difference to me. Pay me what I’m owed, or bury your son. Those are your choices.”

  Ray’d been staring at the same thing too long. He couldn’t make sense of the world anymore. It felt like looking at a puzzle and seeing the holes and holding the pieces in your hand but having no understanding of how things fit together. He wondered how many more times he could save his son, and the answer shred his heart into pieces because what he wanted more than anything was to just hang up the phone. All he wanted was to walk away and be done.

  His stare pulled back until his eyes were focused on a photograph he’d thumbtacked beside the door. It was a black-and-white picture of his late wife when she was maybe twenty-five. She stood at the sink with sunlight filtering through the curtains, her face and chest burned white by the slow shutter speed. There was a steel coffeemaker on the stovetop behind her, a pair of pearl studs he’d bought in her ears.

  “Mr. Mathis?”

  “I’m here,” Ray said.

  “Which way is it going to be?”

  Ray studied that picture of his wife and inhaled through his nose until his lungs could hold no more. He held his breath until his head started to swim. “Where should I meet you?”

  When the line was dead, he walked to the bedroom, unable to feel his legs beneath him. He knelt beside a safe in the closet. Inside, a stack of birth certificates and Social Security cards was tucked under a yellowed marriage license and his wife’s death certificate. A stack of hundred-dollar bills rubber-banded together lay next to a small snub-nosed revolver. It was everything he had left from what the state had paid him.

  Ray balanced the stack of cash in his palm as if trying to measure its weight. His eyes were fixed on the revolver, but his mind was someplace else.

  This is the last time you do this, he told himself.

  That thought settled onto him like hands gripping his shoulders, and he closed his eyes and let that feeling dig someplace deeper still. He locked the safe and shoved the money in his pocket as he stood. By the front door, he stopped in front of her picture and outlined his wife’s figure with the tip of his finger.

  THREE

  Ray drove toward the Qualla Boundary with ten grand in cash on the passenger seat and a snake charmer stretched across his lap. The double-barrel .410 was sawn down to fourteen inches, the buttstock lopped and sanded round like the club handle of an old dragoon. He’d always stored the gun under the seat for timber rattlers and copperheads, but the pumpkin-ball loads he chambered before the drive would lay a man stone cold dead.

  As soon as he crossed the line, there was no turning back. In a lot of ways the rez was another world, a place with its own form of law and order. If the United States government thought holding fifty thousand acres in trust and allowing a couple casinos had settled the debt, they were out of their minds. There were Cherokee who refused to carry twenty-dollar bills because they didn’t want to look at Andrew Jackson’s face. The Trail of Tears wasn’t a singular event in history. It was a continuum. The government had never stopped shitting on natives. There was not a single moment in history solid enough to build any sort of trust upon. So there were places white men weren’t welcome, places that if you grew up here you knew not to go after dark, and Raymond understood. If the shoe had been on the other foot, he would’ve felt the same.

  He rode with the windows down into Big Cove, the coldness of the night keeping him alert. Seven hundred acres smoldered someplace upwind and the smoke had settled over the road like a fog. His headlights barely pierced the veil so that he did not see the marker until he had almost passed it—a bleached-white elk skull anchored into the trunk of a tree.

  A gravel cut barely wide enough for a car slipped off into the timber. Laurel crowded the narrow drive, small spearhead leaves brushing against the doors of the International Scout as Raymond crept farther into darkness. Rusted I beams tied with poplar slats made a rickety bridge over a cobbled stream, and just on the other side, a red cattle gate stood open on the road. NO TRESPASSING signs were nailed all over the trees, but it was the video surveillance warning that made Ray nervous.

  The dirt road was hedged on both sides by old growth, a tall grove stretching a canopy so that no starlight shone his path. Trees broke away to the right, opening to a slanted slope strewn with derelict singlewides, their windows a yellow glow in the haze. On the hill he could see silhouettes amongst the trailers, their shadowed faces lit only by the glow of cigarettes. He could feel their eyes and he clenched the grip of the gun tight in his fist, tracing the arc of the trigger to calm his nerves. The land lowered into a pine flat and between the bare trunks he could see the windows of a house, a large barn off to the right catching what little house light could reach it. As he approached, a man walked straight into the headlights and when he was close the man raised his hand to usher Ray to stop.

  The man wore a pair of Danners untied and opened, the necks flared so that his jeans caught awkwardly on the mouths of his boots. A black T-shirt with the words SOUTHERN CHARM over the left breast fit tight to his chest. There wasn’t all that much height to him, his arms spindly and ridged with veins. A bright red bandanna was tied around his face so that only his eyes showed. He had long hair pulled to the back of his head, and as he came around the side of the Scout, Ray could see that a ponytail sectioned with rubber bands hung the length of his back.

  “Throw it in park, Mr. Mathis.” A thick, throaty drawl hung on the vowels with a sort of low drum, an accent that pegged him for Cherokee, but more specifically as someone from the Cove. He had a strange way of talking, every word enunciated and clear.

  “Where’s the boy?”

  “Like I said, Mr. Mathis, go on and put your truck in park.” The man leaned down and crossed his arms on the windowsill of the door, and as he did, Ray angled the snake charmer into his eyes.

  “You can bring me my son or I can open up your head like a jack-o’-lantern,” Ray said. “One or the other. And it don�
�t make a lick of difference.”

  “I think you may want to put that down.” The man spoke casually, not an ounce of fear in his voice. “There’s no reason for all of us to start shooting one another.” He raised his eyes and nodded across the cab. “This is just business, Mr. Mathis. I’m owed a great sum of money and I want what I’m owed. Nothing more.”

  Ray eased the gun back along his stomach so that the man couldn’t reach in while he turned. He peeked to the passenger side where a big brute watched wide-eyed down the barrel of an AR. The man’s hair was shaved close and he also wore a bandanna tied around his face. He was light-skinned so that his head shone blue as a robin’s egg in the twilight.

  “Like I said, I just want my money,” the man said. “So go on and put that gun down, throw your truck in park, and we’ll get this squared away.”

  Raymond thumbed back the rabbit ears on the side-by-side and kept his aim true. “The money’s on the seat,” he said. “Tell that fellow to take it, you bring me my son, and we’ll be on our way.”

  The man in the window didn’t speak. He glared into the muzzle, then at Ray, cut his eyes across the cab, and nodded.

  Behind him, Ray heard the man reach in for the cash and in a few seconds the big fellow was in the headlights. The man weighed a good four hundred pounds and wore a soiled wife-beater, his stomach lapping the waist of black basketball shorts. Tattoos sleeved his arms. He tossed the wad of banded bills onto the hood and stood by the front bumper with the assault rifle shouldered and aimed through the windshield.

  “Is there any need for me to count it?”

  “Think you can count to a hundred?”

  The man at the window chuckled and shook his head. He gripped tight to the door of the Scout and leaned back like he was about to swing from a trapeze. “You know, you’re all right, Mr. Mathis.” He patted one of his hands on the door and stepped back from the truck. “I like you all right,” he said.

  The man walked to the front of the truck and took the cash from the hood. Flipping the edges of the bills against his thumb, he looked through the windshield at Ray and slid the wad of money into his back pocket. “Go get him,” he said.

  The big boy lowered his rifle, his expression suggesting concern about leaving his partner alone. “You sure?”

  “I said go get him.”

  Ray put the truck in park and stepped out, leaving the engine running. The man took a pack of smokes from his pocket and slipped a cigarette into his fingers. He stood the cigarette on end against the hood of Ray’s truck, slid his fingers down the sides, and flipped it from butt to tip over and over, playing a sort of Jacob’s ladder with the coffin nail.

  “You know, I hate it has to be like this, Mr. Mathis, but it’s just business. It’s not easy dealing with junkies. That’s nothing against you. Just the way things are.”

  “Just business, huh?” Raymond stood with the shotgun down his side. He was watching the house, waiting for them to bring him his son.

  The man leaned back on the truck, bracing his elbows on the hood. “If it was anything other than business, you’d have been dead before you got up the driveway. Wouldn’t matter. I’d have the money just the same. So, yeah, it’s just business.”

  “After tonight you don’t have any more business with that boy.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “I think it’s pretty simple. I don’t care if he crawls in here begging, you don’t have anything for him,” Ray said. “You send him on down the road.”

  “I can’t guarantee something like that.” He fit the cigarette into his mouth through the bandanna, a crease in the fabric marking his lips. Cupping a lighter in front of his face, he struck the flint to flame and exhaled a trail of smoke between them. “Somebody shows up here with a fistful of money, what right do I have to turn him away?”

  “You sell anything to my son again and I’ll walk you to the gates myself.”

  “You’re placing the blame in the wrong place, Mr. Mathis. It’s like those bumper stickers say. How do they say it?” He lifted his eyes to the trees and took a long drag from his cigarette. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “And it’s like I said,” Ray grumbled. “You sell anything to that boy again and I’ll blow your goddamn brains out.”

  “I hear you,” the man said, a touch of sarcasm in his voice. He leaned with one elbow against the Scout, his body turned casually to the side so that he was facing Ray.

  Light and smoke made a yellow haze out of the yard so that everything looked as if it were coming through a filter. Two figures came around the side of the house and when they were in the headlights Ray could see the big boy had Ricky thrown over his shoulder. A skinny kid walked beside him. He looked like he couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Red shaggy hair hung ragged over his ears, his pants sagging off his waist so that he had to waddle to keep them from falling. He carried a cardboard box and had a bandanna over his face the same as the others.

  The big boy tossed Ricky on the ground like he was dropping a bag of sand. Ricky’s head bounced off the packed clay. Raymond walked over and knelt by his son. Ricky’s clothes were torn and his hair was caked with blood. Both eyes were swollen shut, flesh dark as plums. Dried blood crusted his nostrils. There was a split at the side of his mouth, an open gash just above his ear. He’d been beaten within an inch of his life and looking at him Ray couldn’t quite tell whether he was alive or dead.

  He pressed his fingers to the side of his son’s neck and checked for a pulse. Ricky’s heartbeat was faint but steady. Ray could hear the air crackling from his son’s nose, shallow breaths no more than a whisper. He reached for his hands. Ricky’s knuckles were busted and that tiny thing meant something to Ray because it meant that even in the worst of times the boy hadn’t lain down.

  Sliding his arms beneath his body, Ray cradled him like a child, Ricky’s head bobbing as his father carried him back to the truck. Ray opened the door and propped his son in the passenger seat. He pulled the seat belt across Ricky’s body, his chin resting on his chest as if he was sleeping.

  Ray slammed the door and walked around the back of the truck. When he was just about to climb behind the wheel, the man spoke.

  “I think all this silverware probably belongs to you.”

  Ray turned to where the man stood in the headlights just a few yards in front of the bumper. The man kicked at the cardboard box sitting on the ground, the clatter of metal clinking inside. Ray grabbed the snake charmer off the seat and went to the front of his truck. Carrying the box back to the opened cab, he glanced inside: mismatched silverware and a few cheap picture frames Ricky must’ve imagined were worth something. Ray tossed it into the backseat, paced back to the front of the truck, and raised the gun to the bridge of the man’s nose. The big light-skinned boy who was standing off to the side barreled forward and jammed the assault rifle hard into Ray’s ear.

  “I want you to take a long look at that fellow sitting there in that truck. I want you to remember his face,” Ray said. “You don’t have any more business with him, you understand?”

  The man held Ray’s eyes, reached off to the side with his left hand, and lowered the barrel of the AR to their feet. “If that’s the case, Mr. Mathis, I’d say you need to get that son of yours some help.”

  FOUR

  Denny Rattler wasn’t some smash-and-grab dipshit. Breaking and entering was more like a magic trick, like some sleight of hand where, when performed with the right amount of grace, the homeowner never even knew they’d been robbed.

  Most obituaries left a list of people who wouldn’t be home at the time of the funeral. He’d check the Cherokee One Feather, “so-and-so went home to be with the Lord,” and focus on those survived. Family was tightly knit in the mountains so that often four or five homes might be clumped together in a holler and he
could climb out of one window right into the next to work his way from house to house, trailer to trailer, and split before they ever filled the grave.

  According to the paper, Bobby Bigmeat dropped dead from a heart attack at twenty-six years old. He was survived by Wolfes and Cucumbers, Locusts, Hornbuckles, and half a dozen other Bigmeats. The funeral started at noon. Denny eased the box fan out of Gig Wolfe’s window and climbed into the back bedroom.

  The carpet was a garish oxblood red that looked almost biblical. Just standing there on all of that color, he felt off-balance as he surveyed the room for anything promising. Two black dresses lay across a neatly made bed, garments as square as throw blankets. From the looks of it, Gig’s wife was as wide as she was tall. Towels draped the top of the headboard to keep the heavy brass railing from banging the wall. A pastel painting of a flowered landscape hung over the bed. Lamplight shone from a nightstand on the far side and he slinked over to check the drawer. Cheap reading glasses sat diagonally on a devotional by the lamp and he rattled the drawer open to find a little pink framed pocket pistol tucked next to a box of tissue. This was the mistake most thieves would make.

  Kicking down the door and stripping a house to the wiring was fine if you were planning to skip town and pawn everything someplace down the road. But you never shit where you eat. If a homeowner didn’t know they’d been robbed, they didn’t call the law, and if they didn’t call the law, a man had no reason to hide. Denny’s rules were simple enough: never take more than five things from any given house and never steal what’s left out in the open. If it’s only one or two things and they disappear from places seldom checked, most folks either didn’t notice at all or second-guessed themselves for having ever put it there in the first place. Either way, you were home free.

  He eased the drawer closed and turned his attention to a jewelry box on the dresser to his left. There were bracelets and rings fit neatly between gray velvet lips, and earrings stowed in a square space to the right. He reached for none of it. Instead, he lifted the tray to check the bottom of the box because most women were the same. Kinked chains and mismatched studs were always strewn in the bottom and forgotten, jewelry that was out of fashion or broken or that she’d never liked, and none of that mattered when it was melted down. He checked the clasps on three necklaces before he found one stamped .925 for sterling. That was what he took—a long herringbone necklace, maybe an eighth of an inch thick, that was knotted up and might fetch twenty-five dollars if he was lucky.