Black Sunshine: A Novel, page 13
The goat carving, the lost-cat carving—you could chalk those up to extreme coincidence. But the score of a basketball game?
The only reasonable explanation was that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax and Granny and JoJo were lunatics or liars—so much for reasonable explanations. Though in truth, it seemed the two of them didn’t have to swallow nearly as hard as he did to accept that Jamey’s carvings were…what? Magical? Yeah, maybe so. At the very least, they came from some place not governed by the same laws of time as the rest of the world, a place where past, present, and future were mingled in a way Will couldn’t even begin to understand.
He sat up on the side of the bed and sighed.
You can slice and dice it any way you want to, Pal, but the truth in long johns with the butt flap down is pretty simple: the kid can carve events and people he’s never seen and a reality that hasn’t happened yet.
But that was absurd!
Yeah, it was. It was also true.
Will got up and wandered out into the kitchen, his hair a tousled display of bed head, and when Granny turned from the sink to greet him, she laughed out loud.
“I’m that funny looking?”
She put her hand over her mouth to hide her teeth and continued to giggle.
“Aw, it ain’t that, Will.” For a moment, her cinnamon eyes sparkled with unshed tears. “I’m so glad to have you here, with your hair all upside down, the pure joy of it makes me wanna dance a jig or laugh out loud. And I’m too old to dance.” She gestured toward the table where an empty place setting still rested. “Sit y’self down and I’ll make you some bacon and eggs. Coffee’s hot.”
“Just toast, Granny. Thanks.” Obviously JoJo had already left for work. “Where’s Jamey?”
“He’s up the shed gettin’ a potato digger and a burlap bag so’s the two of you can go sangin’.”
Will was grateful Granny had her back turned when she said it—couldn’t see the emotions that surely were displayed on his face. Ricky Dan had taught Will how to hunt for ginseng, showed him the kinds of places it was likely to grow and how to dig it up once he found it. Those had been the best times he spent with Ricky Dan.
“Jamey Boy was supposed to go with Lloyd,” Granny said as she blew by Will’s request for “just toast” and cracked two eggs into the skillet of bacon grease. “They go ever now and then, not’s often as you and Ricky Dan usta. They had it set up for today, but Lloyd called this morning and said he wasn’t comin’, said you’s here, you’d oughta take Jamey.”
She stopped and turned to Will.
“Lloyd’s ate up with some’m. Sounds so mad and cold I ain’t even sure it’s Lloyd I’m talkin’ to. It’s ’bout you bein’ here, but for the life of me I cain’t figure why that’s got under his skin the way it has.”
“He believes he has a right to be mad at me,” Will said quietly. “And I can’t say I blame him.”
Before Granny could ask what he meant by that, Jamey burst in the back door and rushed into the kitchen. He held a burlap bag in one hand and a garden tool that looked like an oversized ice cream scoop in the other. For one breathless moment, Ricky Dan stood before Will, laughter in his voice as he delivered one of his famous one-liners: Will, you got to enjoy life; it’s got an expiration date.
The image vanished as soon as Jamey opened his mouth. This was a boy in a Ricky Dan suit, a kid as excited about going sangin’ as Will had ever been.
“Granny said you’s gonna take me sangin’ ’cause Lloyd cain’t,” he said. “Are you ready? Can we go now?”
“Soon as I finish breakfast.”
Hunting ginseng had been a mountain tradition for generations. Though very little was used commercially in the United States, it was exported to Asia where it served as an ingredient in everything from toothpaste to chewing gum, in soft drinks, candy, and cigarettes. In Japan, ginseng was used to reduce stress, lower cholesterol, enhance strength—even make race horses run faster.
But the plant wasn’t easy to find. And to command the highest price, it had to be harvested properly between August and November—keeping the branching forks of the root intact. Farmers’ domesticated ginseng plants sold for two hundred to two hundred-fifty dollars a pound, but prime Eastern Kentucky mountain ginseng could bring upward of five hundred dollars a pound—at least it used to when Will and Ricky Dan had taken theirs to Somerset to sell.
“They’s sayin’ at the post office the other day that Wilson Fur and Ginseng in Russell Springs is payin’ eight-fifty for ’sang,” Granny said. “Least that’s what JoJo heard.”
After Will finished his breakfast, he and Jamey set out up the hill behind the house past the shed where Jamey did his arts and then north across the top of the mountain. Two men and a yellow canary. ValVleen was perched on Jamey’s shoulder and every now and then she’d burst into a hauntingly beautiful melody of chirps and tweets.
Will had to scratch around in his head to find the old maps, but once he located them and blew the dust off, he used them to guide him through the woods. He knew what to look for as a place ginseng would grow—shadowed land with good drainage. But he wanted to go back to the places he and Ricky Dan had found—partly because the ginseng would still be prospering there if it had been harvested properly by anyone else who’d come upon it over the years. But mostly because he wanted to take Jamey to the places he’d gone so often with Jamey’s father.
They walked together in amiable silence for about 15 minutes, made their way through bright yellow oak and chestnut trees, crimson dogwoods, fiery red sumac and orange witch hazels and listened to the crackle of leaves hurried across the ground by a scolding wind. And to the call and response of barred owls, demanding to know Who? Who? Who’s out there?
Will carried Jamey’s tattered backpack with their lunch—peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and bags of Cheetos—and a water bottle. Jamey carried the potato digger in a burlap bag thrown over his shoulder. When they crested a ridge, Will paused to catch his breath. Jamey hadn’t even broken a sweat. Booze had taken a heavy toll on Will’s body as well as his soul.
That’s when Will noticed that Jamey wore a necklace. All he could see was the thin silver chain, almost too dainty for a piece of men’s jewelry.
“What you got on the chain?” he asked and pointed to Jamey’s neck.
The boy smiled as he fished around in his shirt for the pendant. When he found it, he held it up for Will to see—a tiny silver cross, plain, elegant in its simplicity.
“JoJo give it to me. It’s her favoritest necklace.”
“If it’s her favorite necklace, why’d she give it to you?”
“Because she did.”
Hard to argue that.
Will pointed to a distant ridge. “I thought we’d check under that big rock outcrop on the south side of Gizzard Ridge—over by Tiresome Creek—you know the place?”
“Uh huh, Lloyd showed me.”
“We’ll go to the places your dad and I used to go first.” It was still hard for him to use the word “dad,” in relation to Ricky Dan, who was frozen forever in his mind as a young man not much older than Jamey. “Then we’ll check out some other likely spots.”
“First thing you look for is rattlesnake ferns,” Jamey said, like a first-grader reciting the alphabet.
“Very good,” Will said, struck yet again by Jamey’s eyes, the same luminous green as Ricky Dan’s.
“Then spleen worts, Jack-in-the-pulpits, and…” Jamey’s face went completely blank, like somebody’d taken out his batteries. His eyes took on a far-away look and then he put his hands together in front of him, his fingers intertwined. Each wiggled back and forth, like the tentacles of sea anemones in a strong current. “And ginger, wild ginger!” he squealed. “Them’s the three things Lloyd and me look for.”
His face darkened, like a cloud briefly crossing in front of the sun.
“Granny won’t let me go sangin’ by myself, won’t ’low me to go no farther into the woods than the shed ’thout somebody goes with me. She says I’ll get lost.”
“I got lost out here once. I’d probably still be lost if your daddy hadn’t found me.”
Jamey’s eyes lit up.
“How’d my daddy find you?”
So Will told him the story. How he’d gone to look for wild mushrooms one morning and had been walking along a trail he knew well when his foot slipped and he slid down a long embankment. Rather than climb back up the crumbly, leafy hillside, he figured he’d go around and catch the trail at a different place. Then a windfall blocked his path and he had to go around it, a thicket got in his way next and he had to detour again. Pretty soon he was hopelessly turned around.
“I got scared when I realized I didn’t know where I was and couldn’t even find my way back to where I’d slipped. I wanted to keep looking, to run around until I found the path, but then I thought real hard about what I should do, got real still like you just did. And I remembered what your dad told me to do if I ever got lost in the woods.”
Jamey’s attention was so focused he didn’t appear to breathe.
“He said, ‘Will, soon’s you know you’re lost, hug a tree. And you keep on a-huggin’ that tree ’til I come find you.’ ”
A crease appeared between Jamey’s eyebrows that reminded Will of Granny.
“That don’t make no sense. Why’d he want you to hug a tree?”
“So I’d stay put. If you’re lost and you keep going, you get more lost, farther away from where you started. And it’s a whole lot easier to find somebody who stays in one place than it is to look for a moving target. It was almost dark before I heard him calling my name.”
Will had hollered until he was hoarse before Ricky Dan came over the hill and down to the dry creek bed and found him. He’d wanted to be tough, act like getting lost was no big deal, but as soon as he saw Ricky Dan he broke.
“I ran to him, threw my arms around his waist and started sobbing.”
Ricky Dan had held him tight and let him cry.
“I could hear your dad’s heart thudding in his chest and it dawned on me that he’d been scared, too.”
When Ricky Dan was finally able to peel Will off, he got down on one knee, eye level with the boy and reamed him out good for wandering off in the woods alone, made him promise he’d never do anything like that again. Then he stood up and did a strange thing. He took Will’s hand—like Will was a little kid and not 10-going-on-11 years old!—and he held on tight as they walked back home.
“He never told anybody that I cried when he found me,” Will said.
“How come?”
“He knew it’d embarrass me. Your dad joked and carried on, seemed to make light of things, but he was…a whole lot deeper than most people knew.”
Will looked hard at the young man who was so very like Ricky Dan on the outside and struggled to find words to tell him what kind of man his father’d been on the inside.
“Ricky Dan had Bowman’s strength and character and Granny’s humor and courage. He was brave—like you.”
“Like me? I ain’t brave.”
“You go down in that mine, work there in the dark, danger all around you. That’s brave.” Will paused. “I couldn’t do it. Tried, but I wasn’t strong enough. I’m terrified of coal mines, Jamey.” He worked to keep his voice level. “But your daddy, he wasn’t scared. He was a better man than me.”
Will turned away quickly and walked to the crest of a hill, then started down the other side. The rock outcrop and the creek he was looking for was on the other side of the next hill. Up ahead lay a small meadow.
THE TARGET STOPPED right before it stepped out into the meadow at the base of the hill. The hunter moved the crosshairs slightly, fixed them squarely on the target’s chest. Could go for a head shot, but a chest shot was safer. Bigger area to aim at.
The hunter drew in a breath and let it out slowly.
Then he squeezed the trigger and sent a bullet hurling through space toward the third button on Will Gribbins’s shirt.
CHAPTER 16
LLOYD DIDN’T SLEEP at all the night before he went to Granny’s to make sure his own self that it was true, that Will was alive, that he really had shown up just in time to destroy Lloyd’s life. He’d tried to rest, but he couldn’t just lay there in the bed and stare at the ceiling. So he’d got up, smoked one cigarette after another and paced, watched the sky outside, saw the black become charcoal and then gray. Soon’s it was light, he’d gone outside and loaded up the piece of jet for Jamey.
He didn’t go to work that afternoon at three—called in sick. He’d called in sick again this morning, too, after another sleepless night. But it wasn’t because he was afraid to go down in the mine with his mind muddy. He was alert, as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he’d ever been. In fact, he was so totally awake and…alive…. he wondered if this was how them people felt who snorted cocaine up their noses.
His son had told him about it. Hollered at him about it. Called him ig-nert and backward, said he didn’t know nothing, didn’t understand how it felt to be on top of the world—strong and powerful and in charge.
Of course, Jesse hadn’t never been none of those things. He was a weakling who wouldn’t have lasted 5 minutes in the mine. Lloyd had pampered him, hadn’t come upside the boy’s head when he’d needed it like a father’d ought to, give him too much. That boy was no more in charge of his own self than an oak leaf floating down a creek.
But what Jesse had described, the feeling he got when he was high, that’s how Lloyd felt now. Only he really was in charge of his own self, and he wasn’t about to let Will Gribbins write the end of his story.
He’d called in sick this morning because he had a job he should have finished that day in the mine back in 1980. But he’d thought at the time that Will was dead. He’d thought the same thing for the past 20 years, and he’d been wrong both times. Will Gribbins was alive. Least he would be until Lloyd put a bullet through his heart.
As he fastened his Browning bolt-action .30-06 rifle in the gun rack across the back window of his pickup truck, he considered how surprisingly easy it had been to get to this place.
Sometime during the second night of no sleep, the idea had come to him. His mind hadn’t put up much of a fight against it, neither. It wasn’t like he’d agonized over the decision. It felt like a natural progression, the next step. When the law come swooping down on Lloyd like a barn owl on a mouse, he’d tell them the story he’d been practicing in his head for two decades. But his story would only work if Will wasn’t around to say it wasn’t so.
And Lloyd could arrange that.
Hunting accidents happened all the time, particularly when the hunters was poachers, huntin’ out of season. Poachers took chances. If they’d been the kind of people who followed rules they wouldn’t be in the woods with a deer rifle the second week of October.
Will wouldn’t be dressed in hunter safety gear—fluorescent orange—to go out sangin’. You wasn’t likely to be mistook for a deer by men using bows and arrows. They had to get close to their prey—30, 45 yards away. Bow hunters wasn’t shooting from five hundred yards out, where a tree stump or a big rock could look like an eight-point buck.
And if poachers accidentally shot somebody, they wasn’t likely to come forward and man up to what they’d done, not if they wasn’t supposed to be in the woods with a gun in the first place!
Lloyd got behind the wheel, drove down the dirt road in front of his house and headed out to the four-lane. He planned to go around to the far side of the mountain, park there and walk over. He knew where the ginseng was; he knew where Will would go to find it. He already had in mind the perfect spot for an ambush. As he turned down Possum Trot Lane, he calmed his frayed nerves by concentrating on his ace-in-the-hole defense. If something bad happened to Will Gribbins, wouldn’t nobody come knocking on Lloyd Jacobs’s door—because Lloyd was Will’s best friend and he didn’t have no reason in the world to want Will dead. Least not one anybody knew about.
He parked his truck off the road, deep in the undergrowth where it couldn’t be seen, and struck out on foot. With every step, he felt stronger, more in control of his life, less at the mercy of other people and random events.
Lloyd had never had it easy like Ricky Dan, whose folks was good people. Lloyd’s family was a train wreck. Things happened in his house when the doors was closed and the rest of the world couldn’t see that…But even so, Lloyd’s life hadn’t slid totally off the tracks until #7 blew. What had happened down in the dark that day had colored every day of his life since.
It was hard even to remember those first years after it happened, hard for everybody in the hollow to remember. Folks was in shock, coping the best way they knew how. For Will, that was running away. For Lloyd, it meant drinking and carousing. He’d knocked up Norma Jean, then after Jesse was born, he’d beat her a time or two. Didn’t hurt her bad, didn’t never break nothing. He couldn’t seem to grab hold of his self—got fired from two crews for showing up to work drunk with a temper that even he knew would get him into serious trouble someday.
But everything had changed in the spring of 1990; his whole world had turned upside down.
To keep Norma Jean from pressing charges against him after he blacked her eye and split her lip in a drunken rage, he took her out on a “date.” Drove dang nigh a two-hundred-fifty miles round trip, all the way to Somerset to eat at Cracker Barrel and then go to the picture show. Didn’t know what was showing; didn’t care. He’d planned to sleep through whatever it was.
He didn’t sleep through it, though. He sat riveted to his seat.
The movie was called The Mission. It was the story of a man who had killed his brother, and to atone for his crime, he had dragged a load of shields and armor through the jungles and mountains of South America.
