Bad Moon On The Rise (35 page)

“
Half a mile or so,”
Ramsey told me.

“
I can’t do it,” I said.
“I just can’t.” My lungs felt as if the air had been sucked out of
them with a vacuum cleaner and a deep pain in my abdomen told me I
was going to pay for not working out while in prison.

“
You can do it,” Ramsey
said confidently and, I swear, the bastard was barely winded.
“We’re going to take the road out the rest of the way.”

“
Is that safe?” Trey spoke
for the first time. “I want to see Meemaw.” His voice broke and
Ramsey patted him on the back again, this time gently.

“
It’s safe,” Ramsey
predicted. “I’ll take the lead and keep an eye out for approaching
vehicles.  If you see me go down, I want you to hit the ground
like you have never hit it before. Dive into the drainage ditch on
the side. This time of year it’ll be filled with leaves. Bury
under. Don’t even breathe. I’ll give a whistle when it’s time to
run again.”

As if that would calm us! Just hearing
his strategy was enough to paralyze me with fear, but when Ramsey
slid down the incline, I gave Trey a gentle push to get him going
and slid down after him. Once we hit the smooth dirt of the graded
road, we sprinted along in the darkness, the moon high and bright
above us. It seemed benevolent and supportive, guiding us toward
escape. I began to think we had a chance. The road was solid and
predictable and I felt like a long distance runner closing in on
the home stretch. I could go on like this forever.

“
Down!” Ramsey shouted as
lights flickered across the tops of some trees ahead. “Get down
now!”

We dove for cover in the drainage
ditch and I buried under the leaves. They were damp from melted
snow and sticky with pine resin. I held my breath and prayed. An
engine roared past at top speed. Then a bigger roar rattled my
fillings as another vehicle zoomed past, followed by another and
yet another.

The silence that followed was eerie. I
could hear my heart beating in my chest. Dust swirled up from the
road and my mouth was choked with leaves and pine
needles.

But we had done it.

Ramsey jumped to his feet, triumphant,
and whistled for us to follow him.

As he led the charge to the end of the
private road, it was as if I had stepped through a wrinkle in time.
I could see it all in my mind’s eye as clearly as if I was there,
rifle in hand, tattered flag leading me forward—Ramsey, or perhaps
his great grandpappy, leading the charge out of the hills of
Tennessee down onto the plains of Georgia, taking on the Union
soldiers though they were outnumbered and outgunned, Rebel madmen
triumphant at having survived the slaughter at Vicksburg,
determined to never give up the fight, fueled by a false sense of
their own immortality.

No wonder we had made it through the
last few days. Ramsey was one of the chosen. The blood that ran
through his veins had been blessed by the mountain gods, or perhaps
even Aries himself. I would be safe with him.

I returned to the present the moment
my feet hit the blacktop of the highway, all too aware that we had
to escape while we could still hear gunshots echoing across the
acres behind us. It was harder to gauge what was happening from so
far away, but smoke wound in swirls upward toward the moon. The
steady pop-pop of rifles was interspersed with the rapid tat-tat of
automatic fire, all punctuated by occasional explosions. Grubb and
his men were making their stand. I hoped it was all they had wanted
it to be, for I had realized something profound when I witnessed
them leaping into battle. They didn’t really have any ideology.
They had no plans for global domination or a new world order. What
they really wanted was much more simple: a chance to prove
themselves, a chance to assert their independence, a chance to
repudiate and transcend the mundane lives that circumstance had
forced upon them. They had spent years preparing for battle,
wanting battle, and now they were getting their wish. The battle
was upon them.

Ramsey was fishing in the darkness for
his keys, searching the hollow of the tree nearest his truck. “I’m
pissed about my knapsack,” he said sourly. “It was
waterproof.”

“
I’ll buy you a new one,”
I promised as I fought to regain my breath. “I’ll make Burly buy
you an entire North Face store.”

He snorted in contempt. “That store is
for assholes,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He held up the truck keys in triumph
and we piled into the cab, following Ramsey’s orders: “Casey, open
the glove compartment. We still got cash and plastic?”

“
Check,” I
said.

“
Trey, scooch over and
take the middle spot. I don’t want to get any nearer to that woman
than I have to. She’s trouble with a capital ‘T’ and I do believe I
am done bailing her ass out.”

“
Bailing me out?” I cried
indignantly as I squeezed into the crowded cab. “I’m the one who
saved your ass.”

“
Yeah,” Ramsey said as he
ground the gears and backed up onto the highway. “Casey here talked
our way to freedom. She ended up boring that poor commander into
letting us go. It’s a wonder we escaped with our hearing
intact.”

“
Ramsey Lee,” I said
furiously. “I’ll have you know —”

“
Hey!” Trey said. “Take it
easy, would you? I’m stuck in the middle here.”

The kid had a point. I had to laugh.
“Okay, I admit it. We did it together,” I conceded. “And I can’t
believe we did it. We did it!”

I rolled down the window as Ramsey
picked up speed, tearing down the mountain highway like the hounds
of hell were on our tail. “We did it!” I screamed out into the
wind. “You can’t touch us! We did it!”

I rolled the window back up and turned
to my companions in triumph. Trey was sitting stock still, staring
at me, eyes wide. He turned to Ramsey and, with the air of a man
who is so above it all when it comes to women, he asked our
fearless leader, “Is she always like this?”

“
Oh, you have no idea,
son,” Ramsey answered. “You have no idea at all.”

I had promised Trey I’d take him
straight to see his grandmother but I feared that I had promised
him something I could not deliver. Corndog Sally had been going
downhill fast last time I had seen her. Who knew if she was even
still alive? If it was too late, I would never forgive
myself.

The fear gnawed at me for over an hour
as we sped down the gentle slope of the highway that led from the
foothills to the center of the state. As soon as I was sure we
weren’t being followed, I told Ramsey I had to make a phone call.
Our cell phones had been confiscated by the men in the compound, so
we’d have to go low-tech. “It’ll have to be a pay phone,” I told
him.

“
For which you will need
to borrow change,” he guessed.

“
I’ll pay you back,” I
said. “But I don’t actually know where we should take the kid from
here so I have to make the call.”

Trey had fallen asleep between us. He
looked younger when he was sleeping. You could still see a hint of
roundness in his jaw and his expression was as innocent as a
toddler’s. It moved me that he could hold on to even a whisper of
innocence after all that had happened to him, both before and after
his mother had been killed.

“
It’s not going to be easy
finding a pay phone,” Ramsey predicted and he was right. It had
become a cell phone world sometime between the death of leggings
and the birth of iPods. We finally found a truck stop that let you
call anywhere in the state for a buck and a quarter—you just had to
talk fast, since all you got for your money was three minutes.
While Ramsey distracted the kid with an offer of hot chocolate
topped with whipped cream, I dialed Marcus’s number and prayed he
would answer.

By then it was after midnight. Marcus
was the only one I knew who’d still be awake and was in a position
to help me. I pictured him in his silk bathrobe and matching
slippers, fumbling for the telephone.

“
I need your help,” I
said, before he could start yelling.

It didn’t stop him. “Where the hell
have you been?” Marcus shrieked. “Do you know what you’ve done?
Bill Butler has gone so far out on a limb for you that he’s
dangling from the edges of it, clinging to vines, while the Perry
County cops jump up and down on it trying to drop him into the
snake pit.”

“
I have two minutes air
time left,” I pleaded. “No time for mixed metaphors.”

“
The police think you
killed Tonya Blackburn. I’ve been interrogated by them twice just
for being a ‘known cohort’ of yours. Imagine that? One moment I’m a
respectable civil servant, the next I’m a ‘known cohort.’ Plus,
Bobby left some incomprehensible message about you being in prison
somewhere and he’s going into the joint, too?”

“
Stop,” I pleaded. “I need
to know where Corndog Sally is. I found her grandson and I’ve got
to get him to her while she’s still alive or everything I’ve gone
through over the past few weeks will have been completely in
vain.”

“
I’m going to have to call
more than Sally,” Marcus said. “My job is on the line. And, by the
way, that junkie kitten you foisted off on me? It shredded my silk
drapes. Shredded them. He was swinging from them like Tarzan on
crack. I came home from work and they were nothing but ribbons
fluttering in the wind.”

“
I’m sorry, I really am,”
I told him. “But I’ve got a bad feeling about Sally and it’s
getting worse. Please find out if she’s at in the hospital or at a
hospice or what. Last I saw her, she was being taken away in an
ambulance and was headed to a hospice, but I don’t know the
name.”

“
Fine,” Marcus said
wearily. “Who am I to stand in the way of a dying woman’s last
wish? I’ll call you back.”

“
You can’t,” I explained.
“We have no cell phones.”

“
We?” he asked.

“
Me and Ramsey Lee. We got
captured by white supremacists in this compound in the mountains
and they took everything.”

It is a credit to our long friendship
that this explanation did not give Marcus pause. “That skinny guy
with the smelly dogs that look like they have permanent hangovers?”
Marcus said, horrified.

“
They’re called
bloodhounds.”

“
I thought that was all
over on account of his mother pulling a shotgun on you. You
recycling boyfriends now?”

“
His mother pulls a
shotgun on everyone,” I said impatiently. “And it’s still over
between us.” Suddenly, the need to make what we had gone through
real washed over me. The words poured out like vomit, even though
they sounded insane, even to me:

“
I called Ramsey after
Bobby broke me out of prison and had a heart attack in the woods
and Ramsey came to my rescue and helped me find this old timey
music festival and I saw a wild boar, it was a sign, and, really,
no one else could have—“

“
Stop your world, I want
to get off,” Marcus interrupted. “You have fifteen seconds left.
And I can only take so much.”

“
I’ll call back in an
hour,” I said. “By then we’ll be closer to...” But the disconnect
kicked in and all I heard was a dial tone. I’d save my remaining
quarters for the follow-up call and pray Marcus came
through.

Marcus came through. We’d stopped at
the last Krispy Kreme before the doughnut wilderness kicked in,
with about an hour and a half more to go until we reached Raleigh.
I’d sensed a tightening in Trey as we drew closer to his future.
His right knee had started to jerk up and down in a nervous,
subconscious staccato. I felt for the kid. He was walking into the
unknown: a father he had never known, a future he had no inkling
about, a beloved grandmother who might or might not be alive. His
whole life hung on what he found waiting for him in Raleigh. But
there was nothing I could have said or done to help him, so I gave
him his privacy and kept my trap shut.

Once we hit the Krispy Kreme, while
Ramsey and Trey were deep in a discussion about whether to be
purists and get nothing but original glazed or mix it up with a
couple lemon- and cream-stuffed doughnuts, I walked a half block to
a pay phone on the corner, as out of place in these times as a
gas-lit lamp from the Sherlock Holmes era might be.

Even though we were in the middle of a
rural hamlet north of Burlington, in the dead of the night, there
was a skinny white kid waiting by the phone for his drug supplier
to call him back. He took one look at me and scurried down the
sidewalk without even being asked to beat it. He either figured I
was a cop—or I was still carrying my prison mood around with me and
it showed.

Marcus was waiting for my call. He’d
tracked Sally’s whereabouts through ambulance and hospital records,
then found a cell number for Sally’s snooty daughter, Alicia, and
confirmed we were on our way. Sally was alive, though barely, in a
hospice outside Knightdale, a small bedroom community on the other
side of Raleigh.

I knew why Sally was holding on and I
also knew that as soon as she saw him, Sally would let go. I was
bringing Trey to his future, but I was also bringing death to
Corndog Sally.