Fallen Mountains, page 6
What nobody besides his cousin Laney knew, however, was that Possum ran a lucrative business selling that junk on the Internet. When he gave his mother, Lissette, a new Dodge Neon for Christmas one year, a gift he had proudly paid cash for, she’d frowned and said, “Promise me this is from them antiques of yours, not something else.” He’d assured her it was.
Possum lived in a trailer next to his mother’s at the edge of town, just across the Ninth Street Bridge, behind which there was a shed where he stored all of his wares. The shed was twice the size of the trailer, and Possum kept it meticulously organized so that he knew exactly where every item was. He traveled the state and even ventured into Maryland or New York attending auctions, yard sales, and flea markets gathering items for his business. He knew his antiques well, knew which kinds of nesting hens were more desirable than others, knew the best angle for photographing Depression glass. And perhaps most importantly, he knew how to sell these things with vivid but not dishonest descriptions. That’s what often gave him an edge, he believed. He’d always been a good writer, at least that’s what his English teachers had told him in high school, before he’d dropped out. Recently, he’d purchased China Rose Spode china, service for twelve, for a hundred bucks at a garage sale, and turned around to sell it for nine times that price online. That type of situation wasn’t typical, by any means, but he could live off that profit for weeks.
After what happened with his stepfather, Vance, Possum never went back to high school, although he did earn his GED from jail. It was in jail that he began getting into antiques. He read book after book, memorizing names and dates and numbers. His mother took them out from the library under her name and brought him one or two each week when she visited. As soon as Possum got out, he borrowed some money from his mother and used it to pick up a handful of items at an auction: a Walter Bosse Metzler Ortloff figurine, a garnet pendant, and a brass hotel bell. He sold them, and with the profit, paid back his mother and purchased a couple more things. Within a few months of his release, he had established a viable business.
He also foraged for mushrooms, in the spring and summer. The very first book he read in jail was one someone had left behind in the pathetic stack of random titles the guards called the library, a thin book titled Pennsylvania’s Edible Mushrooms. He read it carefully, cover to cover, and then he read it again, memorizing the names—king bolete, chicken of the woods, horn of plenty, morel—and then the descriptions and where to find them. When he was released, he ordered the exact same book for himself and started looking for those mushrooms, wandering the trails of the national forest nearby, following the book’s instructions on how to prepare them, too.
He told Chase Hardy about his new endeavor, and Chase invited Possum to roam the property looking for morels. He’d found his best spots on that Hardy land, and like all morel hunters, he’d never told a soul about his good luck—it was a secretive business, mushroom hunting. Not far from the farmhouse, there was a tulip poplar with a patch of them at the base, but the greater treasure was way off, deep in the woods, close to the national forest line. There, two dying elm trees with the bark sloughing off created the perfect environment for morels, and every spring for years now, Possum had gone there with his Adirondack pack basket and gathered dozens.
He thought of that sacred spot in the woods now, on the stoop of his trailer, as he finished his cigarette and stomped off snow. With Transom Shultz back in Fallen Mountains, running the Hardy farm, what was Possum supposed to do about his morels? Ask for permission? Drive right past the farmhouse and hope he wasn’t noticed? Sneak in some other way? He had a few months to figure it out, but the mere thought of it—Transom ruining yet another thing for him—was enough to make his blood boil.
The thing was, it wasn’t that hard for Possum to blame everything that had ever gone wrong in his life on Transom Shultz. If it hadn’t been for Transom, maybe Possum would’ve been a better student. Maybe he would’ve gone on to college and moved away. Maybe he wouldn’t have snapped that day after school, his junior year, when he came home and found his mother on the floor, knocked out cold by one of his stepfather’s heavy fists, and Vance standing over her, so drunk he didn’t even recognize Possum in the doorway. If it weren’t for Transom, maybe he would’ve ended up living a regular life. Maybe he would’ve been normal.
In recent years, Possum had been training himself not to think about Transom Shultz, and he’d convinced himself he’d let it go, all that anger and hate that used to burn at him, deep in his gut like a coal blistering its way out. It was in the past, he told himself. They were just kids, stupid kids. He’d moved on. He’d carved out a decent enough life for himself in Fallen Mountains. He was good at his work; he enjoyed it. He had a chunk of change in the bank. He’d even recently started talking with a woman, a Russian named Alla, in an online forum.
But now, with Transom Shultz back in town, Possum felt as though he’d been flung right back to his school days. Transom shoving him into the janitor’s closet, crushing him with his incredible strength and hissing, hot against his face: “You call out, you tell anyone, I swear: I’ll mess you up so bad you’ll wish you were dead.” Then the heat, the smell of bleach and pine-scented cleaner in the closet. The mice, too. And all his classmates shuffling past, unaware that he was trapped, their shadows flickering across the small crack at the bottom of the door. Then, of course, there was the other thing, that summer when the cicadas had teemed and eaten their way through the treetops, Transom hovering above the trunk, dumping kerosene, Transom saying, I don’t want you to be afraid, the trunk easing closed.
In the kitchen of his trailer, Possum grabbed a butterscotch crumpet and plopped down at his computer. As he logged in, his hands continued to shake. He needed a distraction, something to shift his attention from the fear. That’d been his technique in the past: find something else to think about, focus on it until his body could recover and the shaking would subside.
For three weeks now, Possum had been talking to Alla, a fellow antiques dealer whom he met in an online forum designated for discussing wares. He’d picked up a hand-painted Ukrainian egg at a flea market and was trying to estimate its age and value; he posted four pictures and a description, and Alla responded to his post. Alla lived in Moscow and specialized in folk crafts, and the two sort of hit it off, at least as far as Possum was concerned.
Sometimes Possum found himself staring at the photograph Alla had posted in her profile, her blonde hair shimmering in the sunlight and lifting with a gust of wind, her head tilting just to the side. He felt a little strange doing this—he hated creeps who stalked people on the Internet—but he couldn’t help himself. She was beautiful, just breathtaking. Of course, Possum was savvy enough to know that Alla could be a fat man in his forties who snapped a picture of a random woman on the street, but something told him she was real, that the person in the photograph was the same one he’d been talking to online. Possum wasn’t someone who allowed himself the luxury of imagining he would get married one day, have a family, be happy. It never felt like something that was in the cards for him, and he’d come to terms with that. So this thing with Alla was new to him, and scary—he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
On this day, though, even chatting with Alla didn’t help. His hands still juddered; he sweated profusely; his heart pounded. After a few minutes, he told her he needed to go and signed off. In a brown bottle in the medicine cabinet were anxiety pills, and he could take one, he knew, but instead, he stepped back outside, into the bitter January morning, and lit another cigarette. Knowing Transom Shultz was back in Fallen Mountains, feeling that fear that had consumed him for all those years, and then sensing how quickly that same old rage engulfed him again, Possum realized he’d been deceiving himself, all that time. He wasn’t over anything at all. He hadn’t let it go, and he never would.
AFTER
Red lay in his bed, fighting for sleep, the June air still and heavy, the heat ruthless. The crickets bellowed outside his open window, and their noise, which he usually didn’t mind, put him on edge. He realized just how deafening they were—just how much they limited his ability to hear anything else. Like someone prowling about the house on Crocus Street. Or a vehicle pulling up outside.
He couldn’t shake off the experience in the Allegheny National Forest from that afternoon, playing it over and over in his mind. What had it been, there in the woods? Had it been an animal, or had someone been following him? Red remembered the words from that night at the trailer, long ago. He had it coming. Bastard had it coming. Like a bad song they kept playing on the radio, no escaping it. Maybe he, Red, had it coming, too? His mind darted through all the questions, all the possibilities.
But then came the doubt. It very well could have been an animal out there in the woods. Worse—maybe he’d imagined the noise, the thrashing through the mountain laurel. Maybe he’d made the whole thing up. Was he getting paranoid in his old age? Was this how dementia started?
Beside him, in the filtered white light from the streetlamp two houses down, the sheets and comforter lay flat, and as he looked, the same old sadness swept over him. Perhaps the cruelest part of grief was that it kept on winding back, over and over, so you didn’t lose the person once, but again and again. Two years in and he’d still wake up sometimes and forget Sue was gone. He’d reach for her, the small of her back, her shoulder, and when his hand grabbed at air and fell to the bed, he’d remember.
Red wasn’t sure what he thought about the capacities of people who’d crossed that threshold into the life beyond—did they float among us, soul-presences that we could sense but not see? Did they watch from above, defying the laws of nature, leaping about the clouds? He didn’t know, but there were times when he’d talk to her, there in the bed, when all the houses around him were dark and still and nobody would hear the voice of the lonely sheriff swimming through the thin glass of his home on Crocus Street. Late, late at night. Pretend Sue, Ghost Sue.
“I messed up,” he said now, his voice a whisper. “Way back, when Junior was small. I hid something that shouldn’t have been hid.” He looked at the ceiling, stained in the corner from a leak in the roof the fall before. “I know this is a disappointment, you being the most ethical person I ever met. You wouldn’t have put yourself in such a predicament. The thing is, now I don’t know what to do.”
He’d met Sue at the wedding of a mutual friend, a wedding he hadn’t wanted to go to because, like all weddings, this one would no doubt depress him. He’d earned his associate’s degree, but he was working as a clerk in an auto parts store back in The Rocks, living in a run-down duplex two blocks away from his parents. At nights he’d sit with the window open and watch the headlights glide over the bridges, the river glittering below, everything alive and moving, and he was stuck. Most of his friends were married by then, most of them had at least one kid, some of them three, and he was that guy, the bachelor that the husbands sometimes envied and the wives pitied and tried to fix up with their friends, single women who were single for a reason he could always put his finger on right away. Red had pretty much given up on the idea that he’d meet someone wonderful and have a family. And then he’d gone to that wedding and been seated next to Sue at the reception on the lawn. Sue, eleven years his junior and from a town he’d never heard of, Sue who would toss her head back in laughter, Sue with auburn hair gleaming in the October light. She’d asked him to dance and he’d asked for her number and a year later they were married and living in Fallen Mountains in the house on Crocus Street.
Now, in his bed, he imagined Ghost Sue scooting across the sheets and pulling him close. Everybody makes mistakes, she would say. You’ll find your way, you always do. And you look at me, John Redifer. Look me in the eye. (This is what Sue used to say when she really wanted his attention: Look at me, John Redifer, when every other time she’d call him Red, like everybody else.) You’re a good man, Ghost Sue would say. You’re a good man.
For so many years, he’d convinced himself that was true. But was it? Or maybe, all along, it had been Sue’s goodness that he’d felt. It had radiated off her, a warmth, and he’d been able to absorb some of it himself. Maybe it was just that he was a great pretender, and because he’d been able to convince everyone around him that he was a good man, including Sue, he’d started to believe it himself.
That terrible summer, seventeen years earlier, had been hot, like this one—hot in a way that the air always felt heavy and your clothes never felt dry, and yet it never rained, and even in June the grass had already fried to hopeless brown tufts. There were more rattlesnakes that year than usual, the creatures descending from their isolated spots in higher elevations to lower areas, creeks and springs, desperate for water. But what Red remembered most of all were the cicadas, seventeen-year locusts, emerging in multitudes from the ground, their brown shells everywhere, litter crunching beneath your feet. Then their sound, a paranormal thickness, deafening to the point that you’d have to lean in closer to hear a person talk.
Junior was five that year, and sick. He’d had trouble with ear infections since he was a few months old but the year he turned five, the doctor said he needed surgery, and when that didn’t work, he needed another. It was on the schedule for September, the big procedure. Recurrent acute otitis media. Adenoid hypertrophy. The surgeons had gone over the diagnoses and shown him and Sue a plastic model of an ear, the pink folds and blue canals—eustachian tubes, middle ear, inner ear—but none of that meant anything to them, only that Junior would emerge from the other end of it all with ears that worked right, his balance restored, the raging pain that would shake his body, gone. He and Sue hoped.
The night the incident at the shale pit happened, Red and Junior sat on the porch on Crocus Street studying a cicada Junior had caught in a jar.
“Scary, huh?” Red said.
Junior, obsessed with insects, shook his head. “Not scary,” he replied. “Different. Look at their wings.” He unscrewed the lid and took one out, holding it in his palm and watching as it crawled up his arm.
It was Possum’s cousin, Laney Moore, who called the house phone that evening to say Possum hadn’t shown up to work at the Dairy Freez, that he wasn’t home, either. “Sheriff,” Laney had insisted on the phone, when Red tried to assure her that there was no need for concern, “something’s wrong. He wouldn’t just skip work like that. I know him, and that’s not the type of thing he’d do.”
When he hung up, Red sat with Junior, the boy’s tiny hands folded inside of his, and prayed, as he did each night, Dear Lord, please help Junior to sleep safe and sound. Please help his ears not to hurt tonight. Amen. He told Junior to be a good boy and go to bed for his mother, kissed them both good-bye, and grabbed the 30-30 from its case at the back of the hall.
He fired up the Jimmy and decided to head to the shale pit out along 28—if kids were involved, that was always a good place to start looking. They drove quads there and partied, their tire tracks and IC Light cans and cigarette butts and Twinkie wrappers as evidence. Afterward, Red saw that if he hadn’t gone there first, he may not have gotten there in time; he may not have arrived before things went south, really south.
Red pulled the Jimmy into the parking lot. Night was folding in, the sky with just the slightest hint of blue left in it, the sun gone, and darker there in the pit, with heaps of shale piled high like small mountains. He grabbed the rifle and slid a bullet in the chamber, skimmed his thumb over the safety mechanism. The cicadas were tapering off with the waning daylight, and the crickets were taking over.
Red clicked on his flashlight. “Hello?”
The insects too loud.
“Someone there? Hello?” he called again.
It was impossible to hold that light and the rifle at the same time. He slung the 30-30 over his shoulder. As he rounded the bend, he saw the shape of a person, standing on one of the mounds of shale, his silhouette dark and looming against the sky. Red flashed his light, just before the person turned to dart off into the woods, and he saw the body, the face, and he was sure of it, sure—that big figure in the dark, it was the Shultz boy, the pitcher for the baseball team whose name was in the sports page of the Fallen Mountains Gazette all the time. Transom.
“Hey!” Red called into the darkness. “What you doing out here?”
And then pounding, bang bang bang, muffled voice, he could barely hear it with the crickets, filling the dark with their song. Red flashed the light around, into the woods again, flickering left and right across the trees. An old car was parked about fifteen yards away, tucked between two heaps of shale. Was someone in there? He pulled the rifle off his shoulder and held it, his left hand on the barrel, right hand on the stock. Flashlight in his mouth now. He walked closer, the noise growing louder, faster, more desperate. The trunk. He set the rifle on the ground and struggled with the handle, old and rusty, not wanting to move. He struggled to pull it open, both hands, light still in his mouth, jaw sore from the stretching. Finally it gave, wailing as he opened it, and there, in the trunk of the old car, hands and wrists and mouth tied with pieces of a t-shirt, his own, it turned out, a shirtless boy, skinny, back blue and purple with bruising, squinting in the light, the stench of urine and kerosene rising as Red leaned in.
“Possum?” he said, recognizing him as Lissette Miller’s son, the boy with the wild hair and big eyes. Red reached in, removing the cloth from the boy’s mouth. Possum began to shake hard, whole body convulsing. “Possum, you all right, son? What happened?” He looked up, shining the light over the trees again, the shadows large across the lot, the insects loud and night closing in, no sign of anyone in the woods.
