Fully Loaded (9 page)

Oatha
thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.

“What now?” Nathan asked.
 
“
Wanna
call ourselves a truce, get to the business a
livin
?”

“Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll know you
ain’t
full a shit on that proposition.”

Through the wall of snow
Oatha
had broken through, he saw the shotgun sail through the air and disappear into a
snowbank
.

Nathan called out, “Anytime you
wanna
do the same with Marion’s Colt, feel free.”

“Wish we had some spice,” Nathan said.

The steaks they’d carved out of Marion’s rump sizzled, marbled with fat,
Oatha
thinking the odor couldn’t even be called unpleasant.
 
His right shoulder seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, and he wondered how many pellets of buckshot some sawbones was going to have to dig out of his back when he reached Abandon.

“I’ve smelt this before,” he said.
 
“Or
somethin
like it.”

“You’ve et man?”

“No, in a
San Francisco
nosebag.”
 
He thought on it for a moment, said finally, “Veal.
 
Smells like veal.”

“Don’t it feel peculiar
settin
here about to—”

“If I weren’t
starvin
to death, maybe.
 
But I think we’d be advised to steer away from any sort a philosophical conversation about what we’re about to do.”

They stood on the cusp of night, cloudless and moonless, the brightest planets and stars fading in against the black velvet sky like grains of incandescent salt.

Nathan flipped the ribcage.
 
“I believe this is ready.”

The saloon was Abandon’s last—thin walls of knotty aspen, weak kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling, three tables, presently unoccupied, and a broken-down piano.
 

Jocelyn Maddox stood wiping down the bar when the door opened.

“You’ve made it by the skin a your teeth,” she called out.
 
“Thirty seconds later, it’d a been locked.”

The man paused in the doorway, as if to appraise the vacant saloon.

“Not for
nothin
, but it’s twenty degrees out there, and the fire’s low.”
 
The barkeep motioned to the potbellied stove sitting in the corner, putting out just a modicum of heat at this closing hour.

The late customer made his way in, Jocelyn noticing that he walked like a man who’d crossed a desert on foot, limping toward her, and even though his hat was slanted at an angle to shield his face, she knew right away he was a newcomer.

As he reached the bar, half-tumbling into it, she saw that his face was deeply
sunburnt
, the tips of his ears and nose blackened with frostbite.

“You could use a cowboy cocktail,” she said.

The man leaned his hammer shotgun against the bar and reached into his frockcoat, pulled out two leather pouches, then another, and another, lining them up along the pine bar.

“One
a
these has money in it,” he said at barely a whisper, the pretty barkeep already uncorking a whiskey bottle, setting up his first shot.

“The hell happened to you?” she asked.

The man removed his slouch hat and set it on the barstool next to him.
 
He lifted the whiskey, drank, said, “How much for the bottle?”

The barkeep leaned forward, her big black eyes shining in the firelight.

“Yours, free a charge, you tell me what you been through.”

He hesitated, then said, “Rode out from Silverton three weeks ago.
 
Got waylaid by an early snowstorm.
 
I been
walkin
three days to get here.”

“Was you alone?”

He shook his head, poured another shot of whiskey.

“Where’s the rest a your party?
 
Where’s the men these wallets belong to?”

“They didn’t make it.”

“But you did.”

“Maybe I should just pay you for the bottle, ‘cause this line a questioning is
gettin
pretty old.”

“You
ain’t
gotta
worry.
 
I’m on the scout myself, and this
ain’t
the worst town for
layin
low.”

“That right.”

“For a fact.
 
So, how’d you make it when your friends didn’t.”

“I
et
‘
em
.”
 

Jocelyn threw back her head and laughed as hard as she could remember since arriving in this dying town, a fugitive in her own right, the man wondering if she was laughing because she thought he’d made a joke, or because she was crazy, and on the fence as to which reason he might prefer.

He drank the whiskey, poured himself another shot, said, “Care to hoist a glass with me?”

Jocelyn set up a tumbler for herself, and they raised their glasses, the man feeling better already.
 
Maybe it was the hunger and the thirst, exhaustion bordering on madness, but he felt a surge of something, and though he couldn’t name it outright, having never known it, he suspected it was peace, the embracing of a thing he’d had his back to going on thirty years.

He said, “To you—what’s your name?”

“Joss.”

“To you, Joss.”

And he made a quiet toast to himself also, to finding his good, red road, to Dan and to
Marion
, and to Nathan of a now crushed skull, having brained the man in his sleep with a still-warm stone from the fire-ring upon which they’d roasted
Marion
.

He wondered what
Sik’is
would’ve thought of this new thoroughfare he’d found for himself, then realized he no longer cared.

As he swallowed his whiskey, the glow spreading through his stomach, to the tips of his filthy fingers, dulling the pain in his shoulder, he was overcome by a joy that sheeted his cloudy irises with tears.
 
He felt thankful for every painful second of those twenty-one days in the wilderness, for the starvation and the thirst.
 
He regretted nothing.
 
If he’d never met Nathan and the boys, he’d have rolled into Abandon right on schedule, that weak, miserable fuck of a man he’d been for thirty long years since he’d watched his brothers die on Malvern Hill.

“You all right?” Jocelyn asked.

Oatha
reached for the whiskey bottle.
 

“Strange to say, but I believe I just woke up.”

An introduction to “Shining Rock”

When I was a boy, I did a lot of backpacking with my parents and younger brother, and one of our favorite places to go was Shining Rock Wilderness in the North Carolina Mountains. One summer evening as we were setting up camp in a remote area of the wilderness called Beech Spring Gap, a gentleman came over to our camp and introduced himself. He was a burly fellow in his fifties wearing blue shorts and a vest brimming with camping accessories and various patches. He also had a machete lashed to his back and mentioned in the course of small-talk that he’d fought in Vietnam. The interaction was unsettling and more than a little awkward. I was twelve at the time but found out years later from my father that he’d been terrified, so much in fact that he and my mom had whispered in their tent late that night, debating leaving because they were afraid this man was going to come back and murder all of us while we slept. Obviously, that didn’t happen. My family struck up a friendship with the man (who turned out to be a gentle soul) and we accompanied him on future backpacking trips. But the strangeness of that initial encounter and the fear my parents must have felt never left me, and the experience inspired a short story called “Shining Rock.”

shining rock

They’d been coming to the southern
Appalachians
for more than a decade, and always in that first week of August, eager to escape the Midwestern midsummer heat.
 
Last year, it had been the entire family—Roger, Sue, Jennifer, and Michelle—but the twins were sophomores at a college in Iowa now, immersed in boyfriends, the prospect of grad school, summer internships, slowly drifting out of their parents’ gravitational field into orbits of their own making.
 
So for the first time, it was just Roger and Sue and a Range Rover filled with backpacking gear, heading south through Indiana, Kentucky, the northeast wedge of Tennessee, and finally up into the highlands of North Carolina.
 

They spent the night in
Asheville
at the Grove Park Inn, had dinner at the hotel’s Sunset Terrace, watching the lights of the downtown fade up through the humid dark.
   

At first light, they took the
Blue Ridge Parkway south
into the Pisgah Ranger District, the road winding through primeval forests, green valleys, past rock faces slicked with water that shimmered in early sun.
 
Their ears popped as the road climbed and neither spoke of how empty the car felt.

By late morning, they were pack-laden, sunscreen-slathered, and cursing as they hiked up into Shining Rock Wilderness on a bitch of a path called the Old Butt Trail.
 
Roger let Sue lead, enjoying the view of her muscled thighs and calves already pinked with high-altitude sun, glistening with perspiration.
 
He kept imagining footsteps behind him, glancing back every mile or so, half-expecting to see Jennifer and Michelle bringing up the rear.

They crested Chestnut Ridge in the early afternoon, saw that the sky looked cancerous in the west, a bank of tumor-black clouds rolling toward them, the air reeking of that attic mustiness that heralds the approach of rain.
 
They broke out the raingear.
 
The pack flies.
 
Huddled together in a grove of rhododendron as the storm swept over them, thunder cracking so loud and close that it shook the ground beneath their boots.

They reached Shangri-La a few hours shy of dusk.
 
Sue had named it on their first trip here, thirteen years ago, having taken the wrong trail and accidentally stumbled upon this highland paradise.
 
The maps called it Beech Spring Gap, a stretch of grassy meadows at 5,500 feet, just below the
micaceous
outcroppings of
Shining
Rock
Mountain
.
 
Even the hottest summer afternoons rarely saw temperatures exceed eighty degrees.
 
The nights were always cool and often clear, with the lights of
Asheville
twinkling forty miles to the north.
 
Best of all, Beech Spring Gap was largely untraveled.
 
They’d spent a week here four years ago and never seen a soul.

By
8:30
, they were in their sleeping bags, listening to a gentle rain pattering on the tent.
 

‘Night girls, Roger thought.
 
It would be easy to fall asleep tonight.
 
Too easy.
 
He used to stay up listening to the twins talking and laughing.
 
Their tent would have been twenty yards away in a glade of its own, and he’d have given anything to hear their voices in the dark.

The next two days transpired like mirrors of each other.
 

Warm, bright mornings.
 
Storms in the afternoon.
 
Cool, clear evenings.
 

Roger and Sue passed the time lying in the grass, reading books, watching clouds, flying a kite off the nearby peak.
 

The emptiness seemed to abate, and they even laughed some.

Their fourth day in Shining Rock, as the evening cooled and the light began to wane, Roger suggested to his wife that she take a walk through the meadow with a book, find a spot to read for a half hour or so before the light went bad.
  

“Why do you want me out of camp all the sudden?” she asked.
 
“You up to something?”

When Sue returned forty minutes later, a red-and-white checkered picnic blanket lay spread out in the grass a little ways from their tent.
 
Roger was opening a bottle of wine, and upon two dinner plates rested a bed of steaming pasta.
 
There was a baguette, a block of gruyere, even two of their crystal wineglasses from home and a pair of brass candlesticks, flames motionless in the evening calm.

“You brought all this from home?” she asked.
 
“That’s why your pack was so heavy.”