In The Forest Of Harm Page 4

  He shifted the sack to his other shoulder. “We gotta find us a place fast, Buster. We don’t want to get lost in the Hell.”

  Since midmorning Brank had skirted Godfrey’s Hell, a huge tangle of laurel named for a long-ago bear hunter who’d once followed his dogs into the monstrous coil and had never been seen again. When Brank heard that story, all he could picture was a frantic man forever careening through a viney maze with a pack of frothy-mouthed dogs, and he’d given the Hell an extra-large dollop of respect ever since.

  He squinted at the ground. A finger of a trail beckoned through the fog—nothing more than a dark track through the mist. He followed it carefully, keeping the ridge on his left, the Hell on his right. If he could just find a cave, or even an overhang to hole up and build a fire in, then he and Buster could wait out the weather.

  He trudged on. He despised picking his way down a mountain like this, with clammy vapors icing your bones and putting blinders on your eyes. When he’d first come into the woods he thought whiteouts fun, like walking through giant swirls of cotton candy. But he’d been younger then, and losing yourself in a cloud was not a problem when lost was what you badly needed to be.

  Suddenly he stopped. A noise, off to the right, coming up from the Hell. He sank to his knees and shouldered his shotgun. Maybe it was Trudy. He’d tracked her all the way from Nova Scotia, catching sight of her at dusk, slinking like a tawny scarf through the trees, at night screaming like some caterwauling demon. He’d been able to follow her by the remnants of what she ate—gnawed-out Holstein calves in Pennsylvania; mangled little shoats in Kentucky. These days she fancied fawns and feral pigs. Every place he’d tracked her though, she’d been too canny for the special trap he’d designed, and he’d never been able to draw close enough to get a shot off. Shit , Henry thought in disgust, aiming into the white nothingness. You’ve wandered up and down these mountains for thirty years and you still can’t beat Daddy’s little girl.

  He listened, peering into the mist, but he heard nothing more. “Musta been a troll,” he muttered, rising to his feet. Immediately his father’s voice boomed through his head. Der Kobold will come and pluck out your eyes, he said. Then he laughed that jouncing, beer barrel laugh. Hohohoho. Poor little sissy Heinrich. All these years and still scared of goblins.

  Brank shook the mocking voice from his head. His father was dead now, surely. His mother, too. All the Branks of western Pennsylvania were gone. All except him and Trudy.

  He picked his way down the ridge, testing each step, careful not to veer off the trail and plunge headlong into the Hell. At a small gap the fog thinned, and he spotted a shallow limestone niche that a spring had eroded from the mountainside. He wouldn’t be able to stand upright inside, but he could at least crouch away from the cold wind.

  “Here we go, Buster.” He flung his sack into the damp crack. “I’ll build us a fire and we’ll roast Thumper here for lunch instead of dinner.”

  It took him a while to find enough dry tinder beneath the damp leaves, but soon he had a small pine blaze built on the edge of the rock.

  With four quick strokes of his knife he beheaded and eviscerated the rabbit. He pulled the skin off, then cut a green hickory branch from beside the spring and suspended the body over the now hot fire. Small droplets of oil began to bead up on the rabbit’s flesh. Brank grinned. Rabbit had always been his favorite.

  He stretched out his legs and pulled Buster out of his sack. The mud-colored snake was a yard long, the pattern on its back similar to that of a rattler. It twisted angrily in Brank’s hand, annoyed at being plucked from its warm bed and thrust into the cool air. “Just get off your high horse, Buster,” Brank warned the writhing reptile. “You’ve been sleeping on a hundred and twenty-seven primo coon skins all day. Not many snakes can say that.”

  The fire sent up wisps of thin gray smoke that carried the aroma of roasting meat. Brank put Buster back down on top of the sack and absently began to pluck the beggar lice that clung to his pants. Tomorrow, if the whiteout lifted, he would reach the Little Jump Off Post Office. There, people would ship his pelts to Michigan and sell him coffee and magazines. A shiver of anticipation ran through him.

  The rabbit’s juices began to drip down into the flames. The smell made Henry’s stomach wrench with hunger. He smiled. Rabbit had been the first thing he’d learned to kill in the woods.

  He was sixteen when he fled down here from Pennsylvania. He’d hung around the edges of small mountain towns, hungry for the sound of talk, finding thin comfort in the neon-lit windows of roadside bars. Even though he had his shotgun, the woods still terrified him and he lived on the sodden french fries and half-chewed steak bones that he dug out of restaurant trash bins. But what he had left behind at home had scared him even more and at night he always retreated into the woods where no one could find him. He would curl up beneath some tree, where every slithery sound the forest made sent a bolt of stark terror straight through him. Most nights he stayed awake, trembling, praying that God would arrange some kind of dispensation that would allow him back into civilization. Then, one morning while he shivered under a log on the north side of Big Stone Gap, a man appeared out of a locust grove. He wore a battered felt hat pulled down over his blind right eye and carried a shotgun with silver scrolling on the stock.

  “Hidy, boy,” he said, smiling an odd smile. “You look to be in a fair amount of discomfort.”

  That was how they met. Fate Lyons was a Vietnam vet from West Virginia who, in exchange for certain favors, taught Henry Brank tracking and trapping and the million other things he needed to know to survive these mountains. Though Fate’s unrestrained appetite for boys eventually led to their parting, Brank still thought of him often, and with gratitude. He doubted he could have survived long without Fate Lyons’s tutelage.

  He wiggled the rabbit’s haunch. It moved freely away from the body, golden-brown and glistening. He pulled the whole carcass from the spit and bit into the shoulder, putting a small chunk of the inside meat in front of Buster. The tiny forked tongue sniffed with interest.

  “That’s good stuff, Buster,” Brank said, biting off a chunk of the meat. “Rabbit à la Fate.”

  He ate until he’d sucked the bones dry, then he threw the delicate skeleton into the fire and looked out into the thick wet cotton that surrounded him. There was no point in going further today—in two hours he’d lose what little light he had. If he continued down the ridge, he might find himself plunging headlong into the Hell like poor Godfrey and his hounds. It would put him behind schedule, but he’d do better to wait out the fog here.

  With a deep sigh he took off his belt and unbuttoned his damp shirt. Icy wisps of mist chilled his flesh. He spread his shirt out close to the fire to dry, then turned, bare-chested, to his sack, from which he pulled a bottle filled with clear liquid. He uncapped it and took a long drink. As always, the first swallow scorched his throat and teared his eyes, but in a minute an easier, more pleasant heat radiated through him, turning him jocular and expansive.

  “Damn, that’s good,” he whispered. He removed his boots and socks, and stood up, unzipping his pants and laying them beside the shirt. His body bore the marks of years of a hardscrabble mountain existence. Though he was half a foot taller than when he’d first come here, no fat covered his bones. Pale white skin stretched over a sinewy skeleton; the veins in his hands formed a bas-relief over the taut muscles of his arms. Scars from bites and scratches decorated him like tattoos. Five of his teeth had rotted away and a mis-set bear trap in Maine had nearly snapped off his leg. That day he thought he might die, in fact, prayed he would die, but he didn’t. He’d bound his mangled shin and crawled off to chew up some pills he’d stolen from a hiker. After a month of fever dreams punctuated by a torturous thirst, he could walk again, though never as straight or as fast as before.

  He crouched by the fire nude, his penis shriveling in the crisp air. He held his arms out to the thick white murk, as if to implore the weather to cease. In th
e firelight his pale body looked like a long sycamore branch come suddenly alive, and his beseeching motions linked him to an older time, when all men sat around fires and invoked the gods for good fortune.

  When the whiskey had turned his frozen-up muscles warm and limber, he pulled another knife from his sack. He placed this one at the end of one log, then slowly, with inward-gazing eyes, he spread his fingers and felt inch by inch the skin of his skull, then the skin that lay beneath his dark, matted beard. “Good!” he grunted when he reached the point of his chin. “Nobody home.”

  He did the same thing to his neck, then his shoulders, then his chest. He stopped suddenly, half an inch below his left nipple. “Ha!” he muttered, parting the thick hair that grew there. “Here’s one little bastard trying to suck my tit!” Pressing his long thumbnails together, he wedged underneath the spot on his skin and plucked out a tick the size of a dime. He held the creature up to the air, then he licked it with his tongue and placed it on the now-warm blade of his knife. The tick did not move.

  Carefully he resumed his procedure, going down both legs, searching between his toes, then ending with the coarser hair that curled around his genitals. He leaned back and sighed with pleasure, as his fingers searched that damp, familiar territory. He had begun to think that maybe today there would be just the one when his right hand felt a bump between his penis and scrotum.

  “Damn!” he said with delight. “It’s always the sweet meat!” He took a deep breath, then jerked the tick out. He sat up and peered at his crotch. A single drop of blood had spattered against his thigh.

  He stared at the squirming bug between his fingers. “You’re gonna go dancing with your buddy,” he announced, placing it next to the other tick on his knife. “It’s not nice to suck people’s blood.”

  He curled around the fire and placed the knife over a lapping tongue of flame. The ticks were oblivious to it. They would be at first. Then the blade would heat up and they would begin to crawl faster and faster, searching for a way off the red-hot blade, only to find that their only way off was into the fire itself. Brank chuckled as he settled down to watch the show. He loved tick dances. He held them most every night.

  When the ticks finally plunged into the fire with a sizzle and a sputter he put Buster back in the sack and wrapped up in an old wool blanket. He wondered if he wasn’t getting too old for all this damp cold. His leg ached every night and there was a stiffness in his shoulders that no longer went away. Maybe now was the time to head south. He’d read that living was easy in Florida if you could get past Disney World. ’Course there were alligators and coral snakes down there, but it was warm, and the Everglades were, to his knowledge, without cold and frost and the specter of his sister. He sighed. If he could just kill Trudy once and for all, heading south would be exactly what he would do.

  He pulled his shotgun close beside him, curled himself around the fire and stared out into the cottony haze. Not being able to see anything made him edgy—his nose and ears had never been as good as Fate’s. And who knew what madness Trudy or the trolls might do if they snuck up on him unawares? He hugged his rifle close and sighed. Maybe they couldn’t see him, either. Anyway, there was nothing he could do about it now.

  “Don’t borrow trouble,” Henry Brank chided himself as he settled down to rest. To hike these pelts to Little Jump Off without getting lost in the Hell or eaten by Trudy would be trouble enough of its own.

  FIVE

  Mary, do people like Cal Whitman ever get to you in court?” Joan sprawled lazily in the tire swing that hung from the oak tree, watching as Mary and Alex finished their lunch.

  “Oh, please don’t get her started on that,” Alex mumbled through a mouthful of one of Charlie Carter’s special turkey-and-jalapeno sandwiches. “She’s not convinced she’s hung the right man.”

  “Really?” Joan sat up straight in the swing. That Mary might doubt a conviction surprised her.

  Mary sipped a diet Coke, a faraway look coming into her eyes. “Not totally.”

  “How come? I thought you had that guy nailed from the get-go.”

  “His dick was hanging out of his pants when the cops got there,” Mary replied. “Don’t you think a man would at least zip his fly before he broke a girl’s neck?”

  Alex snorted. “Not if he’d raped her, and they were both stoned. It seems weird, but not impossible.”

  “Yeah.” Joan spun around once in the tire swing. “Didn’t the defense counsel say Cal had no memory of what happened that night?”

  Mary nodded. “That’s supposedly why he never took the stand.”

  “Well, then just take the dumb conviction and run.” Alex finished her last bite of sandwich. “You stew about these things too much, Mary.”

  “I know.” Mary frowned at the rust-colored mountains that encircled the little church and its placid grave-yard. “Something about that case just doesn’t feel right, though.”

  Joan lit a cigarette and shivered. “I envy your courage. I don’t see how you can deal with that stuff every day.”

  “Our little Mary is tough.” Alex leaned over and tapped Mary on the head. “See how hard that noggin is?”

  “No, really,” Joan persisted. “Don’t you ever think about quitting the DA’s office and doing what Alex and I do? We see a lot of corporate bastardy, but jeez, nobody winds up with their neck broken.”

  Mary looked toward her mother’s grave. “I can’t, Joan,” she answered softly. “At least, not yet.”

  They packed up their trash and got back in the BMW. The white clapboard church and yellow meadow disappeared as they recrossed the creek and joined the main road. This time Alex drove more slowly, passing under a glowing bronze canopy of beech trees that rose as tall and magnificent as any cathedral.

  The road twisted farther into the mountains. On the right a shallow river spewed white over iron-gray boulders while thick green rhododendrons tangled along its banks. To the left, the mountains thrust upwards with dark pines standing rank and file, thick as soldiers. High above the trees the sun shone gold; down here the mountains filtered the light to shadow, with only dapples of yellow coins dancing through the leaves.

  “You know, up close these mountains don’t look soft at all,” Joan said as she peered at the woods that crowded against both sides of the road. “In fact, all these trees look kind of creepy.”

  “You’re just not used to them yet.” Alex grinned over her shoulder. “This time tomorrow, you’ll be calling them all by name.”

  At a wide, gravel-lined clearing they passed a long cinder-block building that had begun life as a motel, then evolved, as a weathered sign indicated, into the “Demon’s Den—A Private Club for Motorcyclists of Distinction.” Currently it was nothing but an empty, rust-streaked shell save for one lone figure who stood beside a wooden placard that read, Have Your Picture Taken With A Real Life Cherokee. The figure was a slender man, with the same dark hair and high Cherokee cheekbones as Mary, but he wore the full eagle-feathered headdress of a Sioux war chief. Mary watched his face stretch in a surprised smile as the BMW flashed by, his right hand raised in greeting.

  Joan craned her neck. “Who was that guy? And why is he waving at you?”

  “Gosh, I think that’s Billy Swimmer!” Mary laughed as she waved out the window. It was amazing how little things changed around here. “I went to high school with him.”

  They twisted through a series of turns, then, on the right, between the road and the river, stood a long ramble of a building constructed of chinked logs. Half of it was two-storied, with small grimy windows overlooking the road. The rest of it just meandered along the creek bank, as if the owners had added on to the structure whenever time and money allowed. At the far end, the parking lot widened enough to accommodate a single gas pump and a rusty trash Dumpster. Mary’s pulse ratcheted up as if she’d run a mile.

  “This is where we need to stop, Alex,” Mary said. She felt Alex’s questioning glance, but kept her eyes straight ahead.


  “Hey, do they sell cigarettes in there?” Joan asked as Alex nosed the BMW into the parking lot.

  “Joan, do you realize how often we have to stop for you to get cigarettes?” Alex said. “I thought people who sang opera weren’t supposed to smoke.”

  “Why do you think I quit?” Joan’s voice quivered extravagantly. “One awful night I realized I had to choose between Verdi and Virginia Slims. Nicotine won, hands down. The evil tobacco empire had me hooked. I was drummed off the stage, a hopeless addict.”

  “I thought they said you were too small,” Alex countered.

  “Well, that, too,” admitted Joan.

  Laughing, Alex shook her head. “That’s what I love about you, Joan. Your unerring instinct for melodrama.”

  “Hey, you sing opera, you get melodramatic.” Joan shrugged. “What can I say?”

  Alex parked the car just beneath the Little Jump Off, North Carolina, Postal Service sign and turned off the engine. “Look at all that wood,” she said, gazing at a line of slender upright hickory logs that stretched the length of the porch.

  “Somebody must make bows here now.” Mary’s voice was a whisper; her legs had turned to stone.

  Alex and Joan got out of the car, but Mary could not move. Be calm, she told herself, willing her racing heart to slow. You wanted to come here.

  As Joan went ahead into the store, Alex paused and looked back. “Mary—are you sure you really want to go in there?”

  “No,” Mary answered softly as she stared at the wood-lined porch. “But I’ve got to try.”

  Alex shook her head, her face clouded with concern.

  Mary got out of the car and followed Alex up the broad wooden steps. A cowbell jingled as Alex opened the door. Mary stopped for a moment, then she stepped inside. The familiar sweet smell of burned applewood permeated the ancient chinked walls. Where once an old stuffed boar head commanded the stone fireplace, several recurve bows now hung like delicate sculptures from the ceiling. The Farmer’s Almanac calendar on the wall read 2000 instead of 1988. Otherwise, little had changed. Mary kept her eyes away from the far corner. You don’t have to look, she reminded herself. At least not yet.