Fallen Mountains, page 10
As he leafed through his mother’s collection, he wondered: Were there letters at the Shultz house, sweet, incriminating words from Lissette tucked somewhere private, a desk drawer, a hidden spot in the garage? Had Transom, like him, come across them one quiet afternoon when no one was around? How much did Transom know? And then, a more horrifying thought: that mean blood pulsing through his worst enemy’s body—it was flowing through his, too.
Outside the trailer, the spring night was closing in. Dave Matthews Band was playing a concert on MTV now, the flute and the alto sax flitting through notes, the crowd high and mesmerized. Possum wandered to the kitchen, where his mother had left a note: Leftovers in the fridge. Love you. He heated up his chicken casserole and ate it on the floor of his mother’s room, pouring over the letters again. Anger knit its way from his gut to his throat. It was too much, all of it at once. This mess—Transom shoving him into the janitor’s closet; the cruel, haunting words like knives in his chest—it was their fault. JT’s. His mother’s. If it weren’t for their secrets and lies, none of it would’ve happened. Every day of his life, he was paying the price for their selfishness, and he’d had enough.
And then Possum made a decision. He stacked the letters, ordered by date now, and tied them together with brown twine from a kitchen drawer. He gathered the gifts—microscope, remote control helicopter, the binoculars, the ten-speed, too— and then slipped into his hat and light coat. In the front yard, he loaded the letters and gifts in his red wagon, the one he’d been given for Christmas when he was five, and he walked west, toward the sprawling ranch on the outskirts of town, the biggest house for miles. The wagon rumbled behind him, the stack of letters pitching and swaying. He looked over his shoulder at the sun dipping behind the ridge, the sky orange and pink and blue, and walked on. It was time to put an end to this, he thought.
At the Shultz house, the lights in the kitchen were on, and Possum could see Transom and his mother inside. Marjane Shultz wore an apron and stood at the counter, mixing something in a giant, stainless steel bowl. Transom sat at the table, watching her, smiling, papers and a textbook spread in front of him, doing homework while his mother baked. It was so perfect, so All-American. So false. It also represented everything Possum wanted in his own life but would never have. He leaned over and picked up the wagon and carried it to the front door so that no one inside would hear the roar of its heavy tires. He rang the doorbell, and ran as hard as he could into the night.
Now, seventeen years after that lamentable evening, as Possum walked across town in the February dark to Laney’s house, he thought again of how things might have gone differently if he’d handled it another way, if he hadn’t been bored and snooping in his mother’s room, if he hadn’t ever opened that box, even if he’d opened it and read the letters and kept the secret to himself. What had he been hoping to accomplish, anyway? In all the years since, he’d never quite been able to put a finger on it. Did he want his mother and JT to pay for the pain they’d caused him? Was he hoping maybe JT would change the path he’d selected, that Transom and Marjane would leave, that Possum and his mother would live a different, shiny life with JT in that big white house outside of town?
Instead, a week after Possum delivered the letters, Marjane Shultz, beautiful and perfect Marjane Shultz, tried to kill herself with a kitchen knife. People said she’d been shipped out to a psychiatric ward somewhere, but they were speculating, Possum knew. All anyone really knew for sure was that she never came back to Fallen Mountains. JT and Lissette stopped seeing each other. There were no more letters, no more secrets. More devastating was the fact that his mother sprouted a sadness he’d never before witnessed in her. A sadness he knew he was responsible for. Shortly after Possum dropped off the letters, his mother began dating that loser, Vance, who drank too much and beat the both of them. And Transom—well, Transom had tried to kill him.
As he climbed the steps to Laney’s house, he pushed those ugly thoughts from his mind, shuffled the regret back into the stack of things he thought of only sometimes, and rang the doorbell. It was Tuesday night and Possum and Laney had a weekly tradition they’d been following for years, since the week Possum got out of prison. They took turns picking up Wheeler’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes, then ate it at Laney’s house, sometimes at the tiny kitchen table, sometimes in front of the television watching Inside Edition, sometimes, if the weather cooperated, on the covered porch. Their mothers were sisters— two half-stable women with appallingly bad taste in men—and, through all the ups and downs of their rocky childhood and adolescence, Possum and Laney had stayed close.
Kip bounded from the kitchen toward him and jumped up at the door, his claws scraping the glass. Possum let himself in, and Kip jumped up, paws sinking into Possum’s bony chest, nearly knocking him over. Kip sniffed at the containers of fried chicken.
“Kip! Get down,” Laney said, grabbing the dog by the collar. “Sorry. You know how much he likes you.”
He handed Laney the food and kneeled to rub the dog’s ears and scratch his back. “Feeling’s mutual.” He lifted his chin and let Kip lick his face. “Do you think I should get a dog?”
Laney walked into the kitchen and grabbed two sodas from the fridge. “Kip would not approve,” she said with a laugh.
“True.” He tussled the dog’s ears again and stood. “How’ve you been?”
She shrugged. “Same old. You?”
He slid into the chair at the kitchen table and opened his box of food. “All right. Good, actually. I been talking to a girl, online.” He felt a little embarrassed, saying it out loud.
Laney’s face lit up. “Really? Tell me.” She grabbed her first piece of fried chicken and dabbed it with her napkin, soaking up some of the grease.
“Her name’s Alla. She’s from Russia.”
“Oh, like a mail-order bride? I’ve heard of those.”
Possum snorted and rolled his eyes. “No, not like a mail-order bride. We met in a forum for antiques dealers.” The truth was, he’d looked into it once, mail-order brides, one winter when he was feeling especially sorry for himself. Sometimes they worked out, those relationships. Sometimes not. He read a horror story about a woman who poisoned her husband and then took over his estate, a rich widow, and that was enough to make him give up on the idea altogether. He sunk his fork into the mashed potatoes. “We sort of hit it off. I mean, I think we did.”
Laney paused and stared at her cousin. “Wow.”
“I can’t stop thinking about her.”
She took a drink of soda and grabbed his hand. “Don’t get mad when I say this, but—do you think she’s real?”
Possum shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s like, I never thought of myself as falling for someone. I know I ain’t handsome; I live in a trailer in a dumpy little town. And here in Fallen Mountains, you don’t really get to unhitch yourself from your past. But I guess this has made me realize the world’s bigger than I used to think it was.”
Laney leaned forward, fingers greasy from the chicken. “Possum,” she said grinning, “I’ve never seen you look like this. Your eyes, your face: you seem happy.”
“I know.” He took a swig of soda and smiled, unable to contain his delight. “It’s scary.” He thought for a moment. “It’s like I’m so close to something I really want, and then there’s this thing where if it don’t happen, if things don’t work out, the whole world will buckle. Sorry, I’m talking nonsense.”
“No, I completely understand.” She sighed, leaning back in her chair. “Believe me.”
“Yeah? Any progress with Chase?” Possum was well aware of Laney’s feelings toward Chase, and he approved, wholeheartedly. He liked Chase, and he loved Laney, and if the two of them could be happy together, he was happy for them.
“Well, with Transom back, things have gotten a little tricky.”
Possum’s face darkened and he began stabbing the mashed potatoes with his fork. So far, he’d managed to avoid any interactions with Transom because if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he did not want to have to see that monster, face-to-face. Nor did he want to talk about him over fried chicken. “What does that loser have to do with anything?”
Laney traced the edge of a Styrofoam box. “We had a thing,” she said. “Me and Transom.”
Possum began to chew slowly. “I know. A long time ago.” He remembered when he’d heard about Laney, from Jill Rispoli in his homeroom: Your cousin and Transom, did you hear? Possum had tried to warn her, back then. He’d tried to explain that Transom was dangerous and unpredictable, that he wasn’t who he seemed to be, that she should stay away from him. But, without the truth of what had happened at the shale pit—Possum had never told her about it—his warnings held no weight.
Laney swallowed. “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“How so?”
“It wasn’t just in high school.”
He squinted. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we hooked up, every time he came home.”
Possum slammed the table with his fist, the silverware clanging, the Pepsi in the glass fizzing.
Laney pulled back from the table, mouth open.
It was one of the things he hated most about himself, his tendency to veer so quickly into darkness. Judgment, rage. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to get a handle on it, that anger that could bubble up with just the slightest provocation. He opened his fist, took a breath. “Sorry.”
Laney sat there for a moment, biting her lip. She slid her chair back to the table and dabbed her chicken with another napkin. “I know you’ve always hated him. I know he was mean to you sometimes, back in high school. He was mean to everyone.”
He tried to kill me, Possum thought about saying: the words sailing out of him like a confession. Why was it, he wondered, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, nothing except be him-self—ugly and scrawny and awkward and poor, the son of two people who shouldn’t have loved each other—and yet he felt like that’s what it would be, a confession? A weight from which he could release himself, a freeing up, as though he were the one who needed absolution. He looked at Laney and took a bite of chicken. “Chase?”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t know. I want things to work out with him,” Laney said, balling the napkin in her hand. “I see that now. I care about him. I see a future with him. At least I want a future with him. I think now, he wants it, too. But at the time, I didn’t know that. I mean, he hadn’t even told Transom about us.”
Possum tugged at his chicken. “Maybe that was out of respect,” he said. “Chase is sort of old-fashioned. He isn’t like some men, who go around announcing to the whole world every time they score.” He remembered Transom’s exploits in high school, the names of various girls rippling through gymnasium pep rallies and auditorium assemblies. Possum felt sick. Transom showing up and wreaking havoc, taking advantage, just like he used to. Would Possum ever escape that circle of damage that seemed to ripple from the man?
Laney’s hands shook as she reached for her soda. “I was in love with him, a long time ago. Transom. He was my first. And I think a little part of me will always love him, like maybe every person you ever love takes up a little corner of your heart, and you don’t ever really get it back.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Possum said, unable to mask the bitterness in his voice. Lucky Wheeler’s chicken and mashed potatoes were churning in his stomach now, food mixed with fury: a bad combination. He could forgive Laney for getting mixed up with Transom once, back when they were kids and stupid and Transom was a baseball star, rich and popular and Laney was a silly teenage girl, but all these years? She was older now, a grown woman with some sense, he’d thought. And with a good thing going with Chase, who, poor guy, was in the middle of this.
Laney frowned and looked at him hard. “I messed up. I get it. But don’t look at me like that, Possum. Don’t, please.”
He didn’t want to judge, he really didn’t. When he’d gotten out of jail and everyone in Fallen Mountains had looked at him like some kind of violent freak, mothers tucking their children to their sides, old ladies crossing the street to avoid him, Laney had invited him over for fried chicken. He didn’t want to judge, but this? This was sickening. “I should get going,” he said.
“Possum, whatever happened between the two of you—it was a long time ago.”
He wished it were that simple. “Listen,” Possum said, his voice thin and unsteady, “I want you to be careful, that’s all. Transom, he’s not who you think he is.” He wanted to say, remember back in high school, that night you called the sheriff because I didn’t show up for work at the Dairy-Freeze? The next day I told you I had the flu, but that was a lie. What really happened was this: I was walking to work and Transom ran me off the road. He threw me in the trunk, drove around. When he finally stopped, he opened the hatch, dumped kerosene in, told me I would burn. Possum wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know. But the words lodged in his throat, the horror of that night, the shame of everything that had led up to that point, paralyzing him.
“You’ve said that before, about Transom not being who I think he is.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“He’s capable—he’s done bad things. Very bad things.”
Laney reached across the table and placed her hand over his. In that way that only his dearest friend could say and get away with, she whispered, “So have you.”
Possum tore off a piece of chicken and whistled for the dog. He let Kip eat it from his hand, the dog’s soft tongue licking his palm. He folded his Styrofoam box closed, tossed it in the trash, and washed the chicken grease from his hands at the kitchen sink.
Laney wrinkled her nose. “Don’t leave,” she said. “Don’t be mad. What about Inside Edition?”
Possum forced a smile. “I’m not mad. I just forgot I have to post some new items tonight,” he lied. He slid into his red vest and tugged his cigarettes from his pocket. One of these days, he kept on telling himself, he was going to quit. “See you next Tuesday,” he said. On Laney’s front porch, he pulled one out of the box and lit it and walked into the bitter winter night.
AFTER
Red sat in the passenger seat as Mick Dashel pulled his silver Buick in front of the Hardy farmhouse, and watched, dismayed, as the man grabbed his backpack from the back seat, sailed out of the car, and crossed the old porch. Mick knocked on the door, waited a minute, and when nobody came to answer, he tried the handle. For a moment he seemed surprised: it wasn’t locked. He leaned in and hollered something into the house, then turned and looked over his shoulder at Red, who still hadn’t unbuckled his seat belt. He held up his hands. “You coming?”
Red struggled out of the car, knees protesting as he stood, the heat assaulting him as he lumbered across the yard, brown grass crinkling beneath his feet. “You just going in?” he asked Mick.
“We have a warrant. We can do whatever we want.” He walked into the living room and swung his backpack onto the sofa table behind the couch.
“It’s just—it just seems—sort of rude.” Red looked around the living room he’d seen many times over the years, by invitation, as a hunting partner of Jack Hardy’s, as a guest. Despite the difference in age, they’d been close friends, the four of them. He and Sue would sit at the fireplace and drink coffee or come to dinner, Jack and Maggie and often Chase and his parents at the dining room table. Transom, too, sometimes. Laney Moore, once. Maggie and her Home for Semi-Orphans, Sue used to say of her friend, because, over the years, Maggie had seen each one of those kids in need, and she’d taken them under her wing. They were just children who needed a place to be kids, was the way Maggie put it. That’s the type of home this had been, the type of people they’d been, Jack and Maggie both. They saw a need, and they did whatever it took to meet it. Red missed all of them at once— Jack, Maggie, Sue—and his loneliness gripped him hard there in the living room. How had he been so lucky as to clamber out of that blank and lonely chapter where he watched the city lights from The Rocks and stumble into such sweet and generous company? How had he been so unlucky to be the last one left?
“Rude?” Mick Dashel grabbed latex gloves from his backpack and handed Red a pair. “You’re getting your stories crossed, man. What’s rude is someone buys your land, gets you out of debt, free and clear, and you don’t like what they do with it, so you shoot them dead, or worse, something uglier, and then you pretend like the person just left town. That’s rude.”
Red could barely fit his fat hands into the gloves, and the sweat didn’t make things any easier, latex rolling up, his pinky about to burst through. He hated the idea of Chase Hardy getting dragged into this mess. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Red said to Mick. “We ain’t found nothing yet.”
Mick rifled through his backpack and pulled out a hard plastic case, inside of which was a small fingerprinting kit. He opened it and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you haven’t found anything because you don’t know how to look.” He grabbed a blacklight. “I don’t mean any disrespect by that, please understand. JT tells me you’ve got an old-fashioned town here, no major crimes, just you taking care of things. And that’s all well and good, and I envy you folks. But I double-majored in forensics and psychology, and I’ve been doing this for eight years now. This—” He waved his hands over his equipment, a magician with his bag of tricks. “This is what I do.”
