The Wettest County in the World (5 page)

Much appreciated, Mister Forrest, Jefferson said.

Well, I appreciate your help, Forrest said. It won’t happen again.

Jefferson scratched his head and looked at him thoughtfully.

I’d like that, Jefferson said.

That makes two of us, Forrest said.

L
ATER
M
AGGIE
was standing in her coat and men’s felt hat counting the money in the till. The restaurant was quiet and empty. Jefferson and Hal had both gone home, Hal driving south down the hill into Henry County, and Jefferson Deshazo striding off into the snowy darkness to his cabin that lay a few miles south. Maggie had her own car, a cut-down Model T truck that was her father’s before he died, and she always insisted on driving herself wherever she wanted to go. She usually stayed late, counting out the till and collecting the receipts. Forrest had a place on Cook’s Knob, to the north up in central Franklin County, but it was a long drive and it had been snowing hard in the mountains. On nights like these he would stoke the stove hot and have a few knocks of white mule and sleep in the back on a bedroll between the racks of canned goods. Forrest stood there watching for a moment but she didn’t look up, her eyes intent on the small pieces of paper and stub of pencil.

Whata you doin’? Forrest asked.

Eatin’ ice cream, Maggie said.

She took a cup down from the cupboard and poured herself coffee and tucking her long hair behind her ear she gave him a tight smile, her dark eyes smudged with weariness. Her coat hung open and Forrest could see a fine spray of dried blood across the waist of her dress.

You better get on, Forrest said. The roads are fillin’ up.

I’ll be out in a minute, she said.

Forrest stepped out into the parking lot to check on the snowfall. It fell slowly and in fat shapes, large torn pieces drifting so slow you could catch any one you wanted to, and this meant that it wouldn’t last much longer. Still, there was far too much on the road for him to get up across Thornton Mountain. There was a splash of blood on the snow and Forrest pushed some fresh snow on top of the mark with his foot. Across the lot Maggie’s truck stood next to his pine-green 1928 Ford. Something seemed wrong with the shape of it, the outline of it against the falling snow, and so Forrest walked across the lot to his car and as he neared he could see that there was a body slumped against the front fender. It was the man he had hit with the knuckles, the blood coagulating on his forehead in a dark smear. He must have dragged himself there. The other man he had kicked into unconsciousness was gone. The car lot was empty other than his car and Maggie’s truck. There was no wind and Forrest could hear snow falling softly through the trees and the whine of a truck engine somewhere high up in the mountains.

Then he saw his hood slightly ajar and the hot anger returned and he figured he’d toss this man into the ditch and break his legs for it. He’d prop his ankles on a stone and stomp until his shinbones cracked. The thought of it made him tired and he sorely wished the man hadn’t done it. He bent down to feel the man’s neck for a pulse and felt the steady pull of blood. He was alive, and that meant he would suffer much more before the night was out. It amazed Forrest that so many men seemed to wake up in the morning needing some kind of beating or another, men saying and doing fantastic things for the sake of getting another man to smash his face. Perhaps it was the aftermath, the burning humiliation of it they sought, when the aching morning came and they rolled over in the dirt and felt their mouth for teeth or lightly touched the split ear, the face in the rearview mirror swollen and crusted with blood. Forrest figured if these men wanted it he might as well give it to them. Either way he would push him off into the ditch and break his legs and if the man died then it was his own fault.

He squatted down and grasped the man’s lapels and was about to shift him off the running board of his car and drag him to the ditch when the man’s eyes shot open and his cold hands gripped Forrest’s wrists. His face curled into a snarl, blood still surging between his lips as Forrest twisted his hands to free himself.

Damn, son! Forrest said. You want more?

Suddenly he felt another man close at his back and hands around his collar. The man behind him leaned on his back and the weight kept Forrest from standing. The man holding his hands grinned, sticking out his stump tongue like a mottled piece of bloody sausage, his eyes wide, his swollen goiter flopping against his chin and collar. The man behind him hooked a forearm under Forrest’s chin and pulled his face up to the sky. Low clouds rolled dusky gray and charcoal.

Forrest felt the razor being drawn across his neck, a cold sensation like the line made by a piece of ice on skin, a cool tracing of metal, and for a moment he marveled at how smooth and painless it was, watching the specks of stars through torn clouds, knees in the cold snow, feeling the dampness of his boots, the man behind holding him tight, the man in front holding the wrists of his outstretched arms and leaning his face in close, grinning. Their combined breath billowed around them. A weight drained out of him and a sudden weakness took its place. Then he felt the blood pouring down his chest and down his throat, swallowing the stuff in salty gulps—that was what got him:
Down my throat? My God, he is cutting through, he will cut my head clean off!
The man behind him was sawing roughly at his neck and Forrest lurched and bucked, pulled an arm free and stuck it into the face of the man behind him. He felt a cheekbone and an eye socket and pried his thumb into the soft part and the man cried out and was off him and Forrest got his feet under him and staggered a few steps back toward the restaurant, then fell heavily in the snow on his hands and knees. He marveled at the quantity of blood that poured from him like a watery bib onto the snow, making a steamy slush between his hands. He crawled across the lot to the wall of the restaurant. There was the splintering sound of a door kicked open and shouting from inside the restaurant and he knew they had gone inside.

Forrest leaned against the wall, searching for the edges of the cut with his numb fingers, the ground a world of white in front of him. He gripped the edges of his cut throat and thought to himself that this would be one of the times where one ought to consider the balance of his life; but all that came to mind was that these men had wanted a beating and he had given it to them and so what was all this about?

A part of me is missing, he thought. There was only one whole being in the universe and it was the one who rose in the morning, who stepped over the mountains and reaching down with massive, blunt fingers plucked men’s souls like weeds in the furrow. When Forrest looked up the roof of the sky was gone, just a ragged hole, the stars gone out and light coming down in slow glistening streams. The hole in the sky rotated and he felt his weight shift and it seemed like the earth and all the people in it were in a box that was being tipped over, to be dumped out into the black. Not yet, he thought. More shouting and breaking glass from inside. A woman screaming, a strange, high, desperate scream that burrowed into Forrest’s heart and twisted something in him, hard, but he couldn’t focus on why it was happening or who it was. Forrest looked at his legs splayed out before him, trousers sticky with blood, and knew that they wouldn’t respond.

Later it was quiet and Forrest watched the ragged wisps of snow, like falling clouds settling in a white layer on his legs and the lot and the trees beyond the road. He let his heartbeat settle; his breath coming regularly in short puffs. His muscles began to relax.

It wasn’t so bad, he thought.

The soft pat of falling snow. Faint music from the radio coming through the window above him. He turned his mind to the music that slowly faded, then a voice saying:

Then a chorus of voices singing a hymn, slow and deliberate, the words unclear.

Forrest jerked his eyes open. Somewhere across the road and at the edge of the wood there was a smear of movement. He couldn’t tell what it was. If it was God then he would have him. He would reach out and break his head and kick him to pieces in the road like a clod of dirt. It wasn’t so bad, in fact it all made perfect sense. Then his face was down in the snow, the ice on his cheek, fingers still holding the edges of his throat as he fell into darkness.

H
OWARD
B
ONDURANT AWOKE
lying on his side on the front seat, the steering wheel pressed against his bared teeth. He sat upright and stared out the windshield. A whiteness enveloped the world as if the ground were lit up from underneath. He lay back down on the seat for a while, pulling his legs up into a fetal position, kicking his toes against the dashboard to regain feeling, groping at his armpits with his burning fingers. His gut ached and he shuddered and wished desperately to slip back into unconsciousness.

Later Howard wrenched the truck door open, breaking a crust of ice and nearly a foot of snow from the roof that fell into the cab, covering his pants and shoulders as he swung his legs off the seat, some of the cold powder going down his neck. Sky and ground were the same, luminous white and rolling and for a moment he didn’t understand if the truck was straight or crooked or floating in the air. To his left the snow undulated up a hill then across, evenly spaced bumps of white suggested a fence line. To the right a stand of pines stood in a line as far as he could see, their tops bent with weight, each drooping in different directions like a crowd of people sitting in chairs asleep. The truck lay half-buried at a steep angle and Howard figured he must have put it in a gulley. He watched the trees for a while until the thin breeze ruffled their bent tops, sending sprays of snow drifting off like banks of rolling mist. The mountains began to separate from the air, and putting a frozen elbow awkwardly against his knee he bent and retched into the snow.

Forrest.

Using the muffled fence line and the pines as a guide Howard started off down the road, heading east, toward the pale disk of the sun.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Emmy Bondurant stood in the kitchen in her housecoat with a book of matches in her hand, the air in the house spiked with cold and the damp chill of morning. Jack watched his sister light the stove and make coffee for their father who was sleeping later now than he ever did during the first fifty years of his life. Emmy was tall and bird-stooped like Jack and his brothers, the narrow blades of her shoulders like fins as she craned over the stove. She cut off a hunk of fatback and tossed it into the skillet. She kept her hair short and pushed to the side with a nervous finger as she stirred the sizzling fat. Her hair was once blond-white, almost like glass, but had developed streaks of steely gray even though she was only sixteen, two years younger than Jack.

Jack stood by the window as he buttoned his shirt, watching the snow-covered road for signs of his brother. Forrest made a delivery on the first Friday of each month around the county and sometimes he took Jack along to run the cans. Jack had to watch the road because Forrest would never come up the drive to the house with a carful of liquor, and he would stop on the road only for a few minutes. If Jack wasn’t sharp he would be left behind.

On these mornings Jack would spy Forrest’s car nosing the end of the drive and he would gulp the rest of his coffee and bolt out the door and down the driveway with a cold greasy biscuit in his mouth and another in his pocket. Running toward his brother’s car Jack felt the urge to whinny like a colt and he would bound down the dirt path past the livestock barn, passing through the long rows of peas, beans, and cabbage, summer vines rotting in their furrows. In the car the silhouette of Forrest’s hooked nose and fedora lined down the road, the flared fenders of the car squatting over the tires, weighed low by sixty gallons of liquor. Making local deliveries with Forrest meant dollars in his pocket, and being seen in Rocky Mount with his brother always made Jack fill out his jacket a bit more.

Jack would hop into the back of the car, nestling tight in a niche left in the stacked five-gallon metal cans and crates of half-gallon jars, his forearms across the sloshing liquor, holding it steady as Forrest pushed the stocky four-cylinder Ford up the hard road. Along the way they stopped off at various farmhouses, Jack scooting up and around to the back of the house to drop the cans on the back porch. In Rocky Mount they hit nearly half of the houses and business locations, Jack running through spattered alleys to leave jars on the back windowsill of an office; stamping up flights of stairs and knocking on doors in cramped, slanted apartment buildings, the residents answering the door to find a jar sitting on the floor in the echoing hallway; deliveries around the courthouse, the police station; they delivered to church parsonages, to lawyers, to judges, to city-council members.

Then they would head north up Grassy Hill and go westward into Burnt Chimney and Boone’s Mill, stopping at a little crossroads where a cross-eyed man at a filling station stood under the porch, a rifle leaning against the wall, a car idling in the lot, unloading thirty gallons without a word. Then east to Smith Mountain Lake and dropping off the rest at a filling station run by a man named Hatcher, a group of men waiting in cars and trucks, the squared Nash Victoria Six, long Studebakers, supercharged Packards, the ubiquitous Model A’s, the hubs riding high over the wheels, the springs tuned tall and tight to handle the weight. Men standing quietly, some with pistols sticking out of their beltbands or casually thrust in pockets. In a car idling in the parking lot Sheriff Hodges and his son Henry, a deputy, sat sipping hot coffee out of a metal thermos.

Sometimes there would be a small paper packet on the back stoop when Jack dropped off a can and he would bring this to Forrest who would put it in his shirt pocket. In all the times he went out with Forrest he never saw anyone handling money. The open rush of it worked in Jack’s blood; waiting at the corner in downtown Rocky Mount, men and women out on the morning streets and Jack in his brushed boots, cap at a sly angle, a five-gallon can in each hand, his long arms knotty and taut with the weight. He enjoyed the way people glanced over him without seeing him, how all kinds of people struggled unnaturally to avert their gaze. How young women’s eyes widened for a moment just before they looked to their hands folded on cotton smocks and pleated shirtfronts. Jack could tell that they felt his presence like a dark field, an invisible weight moving through them like charged wind. He relished each moment and relived them in his dreams.

T
HAT MORNING
Forrest never came. The road was a smooth white drift; no one had traveled down it since the snowfall and Jack figured his brother was unable to leave the restaurant. After standing by the window for an hour he gave up and sat down to a sullen breakfast. Emmy served Granville his biscuits and apple butter, then brought hot coffee, fried eggs, and a steaming bowl of hominy with cracklings. By the time she joined them, Granville and Jack were nearly finished bolting the grub. Jack saw Emmy smirking in her coffee and he wondered if she was glad that Forrest failed to show. Why the hell would she be so happy about Forrest leaving him out once again? Granville poured his coffee into a saucer and sipped like a whiskered penitent. When he finished he scratched his beard with both hands and looked out the window.

You goin’ somewhere this morning?

I thought I was, Jack said.

Well, Granville said, then it looks like you can get that stack of pine out there. First break up the water in the barns and give them a bit of the silage.

Forrest might show any time now, Jack said.

Granville turned to Jack and squinted at him like he was looking at something far off. His father’s forehead was a tangle of creases, starburst eyes, throat mottled with spots and hanging skin puckered in three parallel lines.

You don’t have to go anywhere, Granville said. You help your sister with what she needs and then see to them cows and that wood. Emmy stood quickly and began to gather the dishes. Jack eyed her face, looking for some indication of amusement or accomplishment.

I’m supposed to be helping Forrest, Jack said.

Well, get him to put you up then, he said.

Granville got his hat and coat and went to open up the store. When he was outside Jack turned to Emmy at the sink.

What? Why you smilin’?

I didn’t say nothing.

She bustled with the dishes and Jack figured there was little use trying to pry the source of amusement out of his sister. He stood and drank his coffee at the window and watched his father clearing the smooth cap of snow off the car and gingerly negotiating the driveway to the road, his snow chains tinkling as he passed up the hill.

J
ACK WAS SPLITTING
wood when Hal Childress came up the drive in his car. The day had warmed considerably, remnants of snow clinging miserably in the trees, and Jack was stripped down to his undershirt, his body steaming like a workhorse. Hal picked his way through the snow and Jack could tell there was something wrong because the old man’s face was drained of color and he held his clenched fists in front of him like a drunken boxer. Jack wondered why he was here instead of running the grill at the County Line.

I don’t right know, Jack. Hal said. Think somethin’ done happened to Forrest.

Jack looked back to the house. The windows were dark, the dim outline of curtains, his mother’s rocking chair. Hal rocked in the snow.

Howard about?

No, Jack said. I ain’t seen ’im.

A car chugged up the road, snow chains rattling, and both men turned to watch it pass. Jack’s skin felt prickly and his feet itched in his wool socks.

What happened? Jack asked.

Don’t rightly know, Hal said. A deal with some boys from Shootin’ Creek went bad. Took care of it, but now this morning Forrest’s car is there but he ain’t.

Jack thought about his father at the store, probably standing with the usual group of gassy old men around the potbellied stove, shuffling their feet in the sawdust. He wished Howard was about as his brother wouldn’t say a word but simply get in the car with Hal and Jack could then ride along and everything would be fine.

Hold it a second, Jack said, and he walked quickly into the house.

The heat in the house was stifling and Jack wiped a sleeve across his forehead. Emmy was sitting in their mother’s old chair, holding a book and looking at him with large eyes.

I don’t know, Jack said. He’s sayin’ something happened at the County Line.

Jack walked into the cold-storage room that was filled with shelves of canned goods and jars of vegetables and preserves that Emmy and Granville had put up that fall. Jack knew his father kept a rifle in the room, but he wasn’t sure where. He pawed through the shelves, looking through an old bureau in the corner. When he realized he was opening drawers that couldn’t fit a rifle he felt like a damn fool and cursed under his breath. He didn’t want to find that gun, he didn’t want to deal with this at all and this thought wedged under his organs like a sickle thorn.

Jack stopped in the living room and rubbed his hands together for a moment. He could tell his sister was pretending to read, watching him.

Look, he said, don’t say nothing to Daddy about this.

Emmy nodded, wide-eyed.

Jack walked back out into the yard, slinging on his coat.

Well, he said, let’s go see.

The air was clear and the snow melting fast. During the drive Hal explained to Jack the nature of the altercation they had at closing time with the men from Shootin’ Creek, how Maggie had sliced the man’s hand with the carving knife and how Forrest had finally subdued them. As they drove the snow chains made a racket on the hard road and Hal had to shout.

Forrest’s car was still there in the restaurant lot, the hood ajar. Man makes a near hundred dollars in a week, Jack couldn’t help but think, and he buys an eight-hundred-dollar cracker-box Ford. They pulled up to the restaurant door and cut the engine. The tire and foot tracks were clear and smoothed by another inch of snow, and it seemed clear to Jack that there was an awful lot of activity in the lot that night.

Look here, Hal said, and gestured to the restaurant door, which was closed but was splintered around the handle, kicked in. Jack was looking at a trail of stained snow that led from the side of the building to a large crusty maroon patch, melted down to the gravel next to Forrest’s car.

We got that one fella good, Hal said. But all this here ain’t his. Not unless he opened up a vein hisself.

Inside the restaurant was littered with broken glass and shattered furniture. The register lay smashed on the floor, drawer gaping, every shelf behind the counter cleared of its contents. The carving knife on the bar, its blade smeared with a dark crust.

Maggie? Jack asked.

She normally leaves just after us, Hal said. Car’s gone, so I ’spect she made it home.

In the kitchen Jack kicked through the pans and utensils that littered the floor.

We done cleaned up, Hal said, Jefferson and me. It wudn’t like this.

We better call Hodges, Jack said.

Better check in the shed first, Hal said. Forrest wouldn’t want us to bring the sheriff around here with all that white mule on hand.

They went out the back door of the kitchen and found a clear set of tracks that led to the storage shed and then around to the front, and the ruts of car tires indicating a series of trips. The storage shed was open, the door in splinters, hacked apart with an ax that lay in the snow. The sun blazed on the back lot and Jack put his hands on his head and tried to think, his mind like a hive.

How much did he have in here, Jack asked.

Near two hundred I ’spect, Hal said.

In the dark shed there were some broken jars and a few empty five-gallon cans scattered on the floor and the air was fetid with hard corn liquor. After his eyes adjusted to the dark Jack could see the shed was otherwise empty. So many gallons; they must have had several vehicles, several men. Worth at least five hundred dollars. He stepped out of the shed. Hal clenched his hands in front of him. Jack felt like he had just woken up from a long sleep, slight traces coming off the points of things, the trees shaking even though there was no breeze and no sound except the two of them crunching through the slush. Jack knew that Forrest wouldn’t have let that much liquor go without a fierce scrap, and the thought struck him that the men who had taken the liquor had also taken his brother out of this world.

J
ACK FIGURED
the first thing would be to ring the hospital in Rocky Mount and see if they had admitted anyone matching Forrest’s description. They used the phone at the County Line, Hal sweeping the debris as Jack was connected. The next call would be to the morgue. But Forrest was there, in the ICU ward, alive, and the two men drove in to Rocky Mount. Forrest was stretched out unconscious, his throat a swath of bandages. They stitched up the ragged line across his throat, starting just under one ear and passing under his chin just an inch above his Adam’s apple and ending at his jaw on the other side. The blood loss was massive and the transfusions replaced every pint he had. The nurses said that he came into the hospital sometime in the night under his own power, staggering into the lobby, holding the edges of his throat together with his fingers. Before Forrest passed out he told the doctors that he’d had an accident. It was nearly twelve miles to Rocky Mount from the County Line Restaurant, most of that twisting through the mountains on rough roads. When asked how he arrived there, Forrest replied that he walked.