Fallen Mountains, page 16
Years after Possum left the letters on the front porch of the Shultz residence, after Marjane Shultz attempted suicide, after Transom tried to kill him, after Possum bashed in Vance’s skull and done time for it, Possum’s mother gave him this gun.
“This was your father’s,” she said.
It was spring, a few months after he got out of prison. He’d already gone to his first auction and sold his first item online. He’d already found a good spot for morel mushrooms on Chase’s farm, and he was tossing them in melted butter in a skillet in his mother’s kitchen.
Possum turned to her, the mushrooms sizzling, water capering up and throwing steam. “My father?” He’d never told his mother about the letters he’d found, but of course she knew. Still, neither one of them had ever spoken of it.
She held out a wooden box. Possum wiped his hands on his jeans and set the box on the counter, then lifted the lid. Heavy. Inside, a pistol, shiny and new, the stock a tigered brown— antler, Possum figured. The barrel was black, etched with intricate designs and plated in gold. He’d never held a handgun before, and the weight of it surprised him. Smith and Wesson, .44 Magnum. He looked at his mother.
She leaned back against the counter and took a deep breath. “I know you figured it out. I also know what you done: the letters, the gifts. The wagon. We both knew it. From the start we didn’t handle anything right, neither one of us did.” She looked out the window and stared at the lilac bush in the small side yard, heavy with purple blossoms. “It was complicated. When I got pregnant, Marjane was already pregnant. JT was unhappy but couldn’t leave her, not when she was pregnant, and he tried to convince me to—to consider other options. But I wouldn’t. I knew it would be hard. I was twenty-one and I knew what I was getting myself into, and I wanted to keep you. I wanted you.”
Possum turned the .44 over in his hand again, unsure of how to feel about it.
“A long time ago, he gave it to me,” she said. “For protection. You were little. He worried about us, here in the trailer park.”
Possum placed it back into the box and slid it toward her. “You should keep it.”
Lissette shook her head. “He would want you to have it.” She sighed. “Listen, I need you to know that we loved each other, in the way that we could,” she said. “And we loved you, too. Both of us.” She reached out and placed her warm fingers on his neck. “He wasn’t a father to you; I know that. But he thought of you as a son. You were always his son.”
Now, Possum sat on his bed, holding the .44. The gift still brought up an assembly of conflicting emotions for him. On one hand, it suggested JT really did care about him and his mother. He wanted to keep them safe. On the other hand, JT hadn’t given the gun to Possum; he’d given it to Lissette. Possum placed the gun back into the frame and swung the front closed again. He grabbed his pocket calendar, on the nightstand. Wednesday. He was supposed to talk to Alla in twenty minutes. Then he planned to go out to the national forest to look for some king bolete mushrooms, which he’d seen growing there the week before. He’d also been working on mapping a way to access his good spot for morels on the Hardy farm from the national forest. Now that Transom owned the place, Possum wouldn’t dream of going the way he’d always gone, up the farm road, right past the house and barn. But the morel cache was on the far end of the property, and he was fairly certain he could get there if he bushwhacked from the national forest.
Before he set out for the forest, though, he had to take care of a small chore for Lissette. She’d promised him a dinner of pork and sauerkraut in exchange for washing her queen-sized comforter set. Since it wouldn’t fit in either of their small washing machines without causing some sort of problem, the comforter set had to be taken to the laundromat.
He stood up and stretched and peered out at the morning, the sun pulling through, the fog burning off the baseball field across the street, the trees greened up and swaying. He picked out a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt and went to the bathroom to wash his face. He stared at himself in the mirror for a minute, tried to press his cowlick down with a dot of pomade he’d picked up at the store. No luck—the hair shot right back up. He brushed his teeth.
He logged in and waited for Alla. He sat there for forty minutes, anxiously rubbing his pointer finger over the knuckle of his thumb. He checked the time again. Was he early? Had he gotten the time wrong? Miscalculated? At his desk, he kept a chart he’d printed from a website that listed all the time zones in the world. He counted the hours ahead to Moscow once more. Alla should’ve been there. With each minute, Possum’s anxiety deepened—he always assumed the worst in people; he tried not to, but he couldn’t help it—and he wondered: Was Alla standing him up?
It was in Possum’s nature to fret, and he knew that. He’d always been a worrier, even as a boy, at least that’s what his mother said. Whenever she brought it up, Possum had to resist the urge to point out that maybe if she hadn’t been running around with JT during his childhood, that maybe if she hadn’t married that good-for-nothing prick Vance, maybe he wouldn’t be that way. Saying those things would only hurt her, though, so he never actually did. She meant well. Besides, he suspected she probably already knew all of that, somewhere in that head of hers. She apologized sometimes: vague, strange apologies. “I’m sorry,” Lissette would say. And he would say, “For what?” And she would look at him, a deep, remorseful sadness in her eyes, and say, “For all of it.” He would tell her it was all right, that she needed to let it go, that he had let it go, even though that wasn’t true.
What concerned him today was that he’d scared Alla off. In their previous conversation, Possum had said something about how pretty she was, and as soon as he’d typed it, he regretted it, second-guessed himself, felt insecure. Why would a woman like her have any interest in a guy like him? Why had he gone and mentioned her appearance? He hoped he hadn’t come across as creepy.
Almost an hour later, Alla logged in, apologizing. A client had come into the shop, asking lots of questions, poking around, delaying her trip home. So Possum hadn’t scared her off, after all. He was ridiculously relieved about this. Giddy, even. And then he felt embarrassed for his relief. They talked for a while and promised to connect again the next day, same time.
He slid into his red vest, hoisted the mesh laundry bag over his shoulder, locked the trailer door behind him, and headed down the street, a skip in his step. Possum walked almost everywhere in Fallen Mountains. You could see a lot more when you walked. You noticed more. In the summer months, you could see the thistle, its prickly stalk and pinkish tufts, growing along the banks by the 4th Street Bridge where the train used to cross. You couldn’t see them from a car. Nor did you notice the hornet’s nest that hung from the locust tree behind the laundromat. Or the people in their vehicles. In fact, Possum was sure he knew more about relationships in Fallen Mountains than anyone else. He knew, for instance¸ many months before the man’s wife ever found out about it, that Ted Martin had been running around with Melissa Dexter. Possum had seen them in his truck five or six times, always around lunchtime, and he had put two and two together.
He knew also that in the months since his reappearance in Fallen Mountains, Transom Shultz had been meeting up with a man in the parking lot just outside of town, close to Possum’s trailer. The guy drove a white F-250 with a lift kit and a roaring diesel engine and always wore sunglasses, so Possum never really got a good look at his face. The most distinguishing characteristic of this fellow was that he was always squeezing a purple grip strengthener, pump pump pump. At first, it seemed like the two of them got along, Transom and the gripper, but more recently, they seemed to be arguing every time they met up. The gripper had stopped coming alone, as well. Someone else was sitting in the truck, though Possum never saw the person get out.
As he got closer to the laundromat, Possum noticed Chase’s gray Chevy in the lot. Inside, the two exchanged hellos.
“Nice comforter,” Chase said.
“My mother’s,” Possum said with a smirk. It was off-white, with a pattern of enormous pink roses and three layers of lace around the edges.
Chase smiled a little. “Sure it is.”
He looked older, Possum thought. His eyes were bloodshot, and dark circles had appeared beneath his bright blue eyes. His hair, which he had always kept short, had grown longer, a thick and wavy mess, and even though it was spring, a time when Chase should’ve been spending a good bit of time outdoors, he looked pale.
“Your washer broke?” Possum asked.
Chase pointed to two garbage bags of laundry. “The water ain’t been right out at the farm.” He paused, folded his arms, and leaned against a dryer. “Ever since they started digging around out there, something’s been wrong with the well. The pressure’s unpredictable. And sometimes it tastes bad. Like dirt. At least, that’s what I figure went wrong. I mean, all them years, things were fine.”
“It’s a shame,” Possum said.
Chase stared out the window, his mind elsewhere. “You can’t imagine.”
A concrete truck roared by, its large beehive end spinning slowly.
Possum leaned against the washer. He could imagine, he wanted to say. Not so much on the matter of the land, but on the feeling that your whole world had been yanked out from beneath you. Feeling alone. Feeling helpless. The same monster who had betrayed Chase had hurt Possum in ways he wished he could forget.
“There’s men out there, maybe twenty, hard to say. I think they’re living on the property because I don’t see them leaving at night, and where would they go, anyway? Not like there’s a hotel in town.”
Possum had seen a few of these people, picking up Styrofoam boxes at Wheeler’s, drinking Yuengling beer at Johnnie’s bar. Once, he’d seen a pair of men he didn’t know buying hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and deodorant at the grocery store.
“I don’t know where they sleep. There’s a trailer, but it wouldn’t fit all of them. Maybe in their vehicles. Twelve different trucks out there, I counted. Here’s the thing that really gets me, though. No job johnny. And they sure ain’t coming to the house to go. So where are they doing it?”
Possum shook his head.
“In my fields is where. In the woods. Which they aren’t really much of woods anymore, after Transom had the loggers come in and cut. All them people and no job johnny. What kind of operation are they running out there that they can’t get a portable outhouse? You mean to tell me the oil company can’t afford to rent one?” He took a deep breath and adjusted his hat. “I’m sorry. I’m rambling, wasting your time.”
“It’s all right.”
“It’s just I love that farm,” Chase said, voice hoarse, cheeks growing red. “Love it more than anything in this world, which maybe that’s a sin, to love something so much you’d do anything to save it—Jack would’ve said so, he would say I’ve got my priorities out of whack—but he was never in my position, having to watch the place go to pot, and nothing I can do about it.” He started grabbing clothes from the garbage bag and loading them into a washer.
Possum pulled the comforter from the mesh bag and shoved it into an open washing machine.
“Can I ask you something, man to man, friend to friend, and you won’t say nothing to anybody?”
Possum pushed the last pillowcase in and closed the washer door. “Sure.”
“Did you think about it ahead of time?”
“What?”
“With Vance.”
Possum frowned. The day he came home and saw his mother on the floor of the trailer, he’d thought she was dead. Vance had finally gone too far; he’d done her in. In the moment, all that hurt and frustration, not just toward Vance, who’d been pushing him around and hissing meanness at him for months, but also at Transom, who’d shoved him in a trunk a year earlier, and at Sheriff Redifer, who’d driven him home and promised he’d take care of things. On the day Possum laid into Vance, it was like every mean thing that had ever been done to him, every punch from his stepfather’s thick fist, every night in the janitor’s closet, every broken promise, all of those things gathered up inside him like one massive wave, pulling strength as it moved. It was a powerful thing, that much anger, the sense that it was taking you over. An ugly thing, too. “No,” he told Chase, shaking his head. He fed quarters into the machine and started the cycle.
As he watched Chase continue to push laundry into the machine, he wanted to offer something—some advice, or an indication that he could relate to what his friend was going through—but he wasn’t sure what to say. He couldn’t tell what it was—fear, hurt, wrath, maybe all three—he saw churning in his friend’s face, but it was full of emotion, more emotion than he had ever seen from the man he had always considered laid back and composed.
Possum thought of warning Chase: Don’t get swept up in it, your anger. Don’t let it take you under. Because Possum, of all people, knew that you couldn’t just pull free when you wanted to. No, just the opposite. He thought about cautioning his old friend to let it go, while he could. If he still could. But he didn’t, because a tiny, foul part of him loved the idea that now someone else hated Transom Shultz as much as he did.
AFTER
After his night on the porch with Jack Daniels and Ghost Sue and the fireflies, Red woke up on the couch with a headache that blared and bloomed. The morning light a terrible affliction, the chanting cicadas outside the window, a greater travesty than usual. The family pictures on the wall, the television set, everything blurry, fringed in white. He lay on the couch, and the truth was he had no recollection of how he’d gotten there—had he walked? Crawled?—or when he’d come in. Middle of the night? First light? He squinted at the clock and realized it was midmorning already. Leigh. He fumbled for his phone but couldn’t find it. Surely Leigh had called, worried, and if he didn’t get moving soon, she might show up at his front door with the spare key she knew he kept in his desk.
He dragged himself up from the couch. The room spun. He sat back down. “I know,” he said out loud, to Ghost Sue, to himself. “I shouldn’t have drank so much. Trust me, I know.”
He stumbled out onto the back porch and found his phone, right between his glass and an empty bottle. No wonder he felt horrible.
Three missed calls from Leigh.
He slipped his phone in his pocket, tucked the bottle under his arm, and headed back into the kitchen and sat there, looking at the stained glass trinkets suction-cupped to the window, items collected by Sue over the years. Anytime they’d gone somewhere new, she looked for some little piece of stained glass. A ruby-throated hummingbird, beak in a pink flower, from Canada. A cactus from a trip to Arizona one year. A waterfall from Watkins Glen. This is it, he thought. This is what you have after a quarter century of marriage. An empty kitchen and a bunch of stained glass knickknacks hanging in your kitchen window: shiny, colorful reminders of what you used to have.
Rapping. One two three. Knuckle to glass.
“Sheriff?” Mick Dashel at the front door, hollering through the glass. “Sheriff, you in there? If you don’t answer, I’m gonna open the door. I got a key. Your secretary sent me over.”
Red stood and ran water from the spigot into a glass and slumped into the captain’s chair at his kitchen table and surrendered himself to the fact that there was no getting out of the predicament he’d fashioned.
Key sliding into the lock, door handle, blinds tapping the window from the movement. “Sheriff? You here?”
He heard Mick Dashel’s footsteps on the floorboards, coming closer.
“In here,” he called softly.
Mick Dashel appeared in the kitchen. “What’s going on? Why didn’t you answer? Leigh’s about to have a coronary. We thought something was wrong.”
Tell him, Ghost Sue whispered. Just tell him.
“I had too much to drink last night.”
Mick eased into the chair across from him and looked at the empty bottle of whiskey. “Looks like it.”
“There’s something else.”
Mick leaned in closer, his blue eyes bright. “All right.”
“Long time ago, I think Transom Shultz may have kidnapped and tried to kill a person. Thomas Miller. Possum, he goes by. They were kids, both of them, fifteen, sixteen. I got a call, Possum hadn’t shown up to work.” He told Mick what happened at the shale pit and then afterward, all those years ago. His heart was racing now, the room gaining a new clarity, the stress subsuming the hangover.
Mick Dashel traced the outline of the placemat on the table and then looked hard at Red. “How long you been carrying that around?”
Red sighed, the secret that had haunted him, now out in the open. He closed his eyes, the room white and spinning again. “Seventeen years.”
“And you’re thinking maybe Possum has decided to seek his revenge.”
“Yes.”
Mick shrugged. “Statistically speaking, it’s very unlikely. But you never know. We’ll bring him in, ask him some questions if that’ll make you feel better. I’ll run him through the ringer.”
“Nobody knows about it.”
“I get it,” Mick said. He looked at the window, his eyes scanning the pieces of stained glass. “Let me make you some coffee, Sheriff,” he said, and walked to the kitchen to look for a mug.
A few hours later, they were in the boardroom of the police station again, with Possum across the table. Red wiped his hands, clammy with sweat, on his jeans. He took a deep breath and prayed he could hold it together. And then he prayed again that Possum wasn’t involved with Transom’s disappearance, because Red wasn’t sure but maybe, maybe if Possum had indeed done something sinister, that meant Red was also somehow at fault.
