Bull Mountain (8 page)

“Twenty percent of the first run,” Valentine said. “I think that’s fair.”

“You do?” Cooper said softly.

“Yessir.”

“You think it’s fair to steal from me and my family and come here and throw a little money in my face like that’s gonna settle things? You
did
spend a lot of time with my brother.”

“But, sir, Rye . . .”

“Rye’s dead, and you setting up shop on our mountain after I done told you no is disrespectful to his memory and a goddamn slap in my face.”

Valentine squeezed at his hat and looked down at it. “Yessir.”

“Now, the way I see it, I got two choices. I can kill you right here and be done with it, or because you were my brother’s friend”—Cooper stopped and looked at the length of hickory
in his hands—“you could tote an ass-whuppin’ and go on home. Either way, you’re out of the liquor business.”

“Please, Mr. Burroughs, please don’t hurt him,” Mammie said from the porch. Gareth and Albert Junior sat wide-eyed behind her. Gareth knew his father wouldn’t hurt Val’s dad. He was just mad is all. Cooper didn’t answer.

“You hush your mouth, woman,” Valentine said, and stood a
little taller. His broad shoulders were nearly twice the size of Cooper’s. “You do your worse, sir. I know I can’t stop you. But I know what Rye give me, and I know what’s right is right.” That was all Albert Valentine had to say. Cooper didn’t hesitate. He swung the ax handle and hit Valentine in the jaw. The crowd roared with surprise and Mammie screamed. The old man spun almost completely around
before falling to the ground. He lifted his hands to cover his face, but Cooper swung again and again, snapping the bones in Valentine’s hands and fingers like campfire kindling. The sticky night air was filled with whooping and laughter from most of the men in the crowd as Cooper beat Valentine with the hard wood. Mammie never stopped screaming, and tried grabbing Cooper’s arm. He flung her away
without much notice and the crowd kept her from trying again. Valentine’s son threw himself on top of his father to stop the beating, but Cooper grabbed the boy and tossed him to the side like a bale of weed. He lifted the ax handle high for a final blow. Valentine’s eyes were already swollen shut behind shiny purple knots.

“Deddy, stop!” Gareth said, getting in between his father and the
beaten old man. Cooper gripped the wood gone slick with blood.

“Move yourself, boy.”

“No, Deddy, don’t kill him. He’s a nice man. He won’t do wrong no more. He won’t.”

Cooper stood holding the hickory up high, twirling it in a slow circle like a ballplayer. He looked around at the faces surrounding him, which ranged from thrilled to terrified. Gareth’s hands were shaking as he held
them up to block his father from hitting the old man again.

“Please, Deddy, please stop.”

Cooper lowered the length of wood. “Get him out of here,” he said. Mammie and Albert Junior scrambled to help the old man. Cooper looked at his son with a confused expression, partly impressed and partly disgusted. “Pick up that bag and get in the truck.”

Gareth looked around on the ground and
found the paper bag full of cash. He tucked it under his arm and slid into the front seat of his father’s truck. Albert Junior waited for Gareth to look at him, and when he finally did, he nodded. Gareth nodded back.

“Ernest,” Cooper said, wiping the ax handle clean on the canvas tarp hanging off the truck. “I want you to follow these people back to their house and collect the rest of the
take from that run and bring it with you to work tomorrow.”

“Yessir,” Ernest said, and gave Mammie a hand lifting Valentine to his feet.

CHAPTER

G
ARETH
B
URROUGHS

1958

Gareth sat in the passenger side of his father’s old Ford, holding Annette Henson on his lap by her hips. The night outside was starless and pitch black. He tried counting the fireflies
blinking on and off outside the truck’s window to keep his eighteen-year-old libido in check, but it was the bird that did the trick. “Do you hear that?” he whispered in Annette’s ear.

“Hear what?” she said.

“That bird. What is it?”

Annette stopped dry-humping his lap for a moment and looked at him funny. “I don’t hear any birds, Gareth.”

“Just a second ago. I’ve never heard any
bird like that before.”

Annette grabbed one of his hands and put it on her breast. “You need to be paying attention to me and not some bird.”

“I’m serious, ’Nett. I don’t think that was a bird.”

Annette tilted her head, more than slightly irritated that he wasn’t giving her his full attention. “You’re being paranoid, Gareth.”

Of course he was being paranoid. He was Cooper Burroughs’s
son. He was raised to be paranoid. To be observant. To be aware. The bird outside the truck didn’t sound right. He spent most of his nights listening to the night birds sing to him outside his window, and the chirping he’d just heard was foreign. It didn’t belong. With both hands, he gently pushed Annette’s face back from his and wiped the fog off the window glass.

“Seriously, Gareth, what
is it?” she said in a husky whisper, her eyes barely open.

“Shhh,” he said, but she made an attempt to bite at his raw lip anyway. This time he pushed her back with a little more force and held a finger to her lips. She almost protested. She wasn’t happy about being postponed. The Ruby Bliss lipstick she’d borrowed from her sister just for tonight was supposed to be unpostponable. Out of instinct
she scanned the truck’s bench seat for her handbag to apply some more.

“There it is again. Did you hear that?” Gareth whispered, and tried to concentrate on the blackness outside the window.

“All I hear is your heart beating, sugar.”

Gareth was no longer in the mood for the teenage dream. He slid his hands down her curvy frame and lifted her off his lap. The look of disappointment
on Annette’s moon-shaped face was one Gareth would remember and talk about for years to come. He slid her over behind the steering wheel. “Keep your head down, and don’t get out of this truck, no matter what happens.”

“Gareth, I . . .”

“I’m serious. Don’t get out of the truck. I’ll be right back.” He quietly clicked open the glove box and pulled out his father’s .44-caliber pistol.

“Jesus, Gareth. What are you going to do with that?”

He didn’t answer her. He reached up above his head and switched the overhead lamp to the off position, and slowly opened the door. He waited a few seconds between movements and carefully slipped out the door to the ground. Immediately he thought he caught shadows moving in his peripheral vision. His arms and legs suddenly felt heavy, like
he was submerged in a pool of molasses. No matter how fast he tried to creep toward his father’s house, he was moving in slow motion. His hands were sweating so bad, every few steps he had to wipe his palms on his jeans and switch the massive wheel gun from hand to hand in fear of dropping it. The path from the truck to the wraparound porch wasn’t lit, but he could maneuver the yard with his eyes
closed, if he needed to. He must have made better time than he thought, because by the time he approached a small thicket off the back porch, the shadows he saw by the truck had become two full-fledged figures decked out in camo taking the steps behind his house. The figures took each step with a ten count, feeling out each footfall, careful to avoid a creaky board. Gareth’s heart was pounding in
his chest. The blood rushing in his ears was so loud, he wondered how the two men at his father’s back door couldn’t hear it. He watched the smaller of the two men pull something out of his coat—a small fixed-blade knife. He crouched down in front of the back door and oh-so-quietly began to jimmy the handle. The bigger man covered him with what looked like some type of military assault rifle. Gareth
had seen them only in magazines and on TV. He closed his eyes, but for only a moment, and breathed in through his nose like his deddy taught him. He raised the gun, exhaled, and fired at the bigger man holding the rifle. He hit the would-be assassin dead center, and the big man bounced off the house and hit the porch like a side of beef cut off the chain. The smaller man at the door flinched from
the noise but didn’t try to stand up. He didn’t even turn around. His body just went slack and he dropped his chin to his chest. “Please,” he said, “let me explain.”

“You should have learned your birds,” Gareth said, right before he put three rounds in the man’s back and two more in the oak door.

If the men attempting to break into Gareth’s house had any more undisclosed members in their
hit squad, they had hauled ass after their point man’s and his partner’s bodies hit the porch. Floodlights filled the pastures. Cooper appeared on the porch completely naked, leading with the business end of a 12-gauge. He saw the two dead men on his porch and his only son holding his gun. The sudden illumination of the porch made Gareth aware of all the blood, and he immediately got sick in the
bushes, over the handrail. Cooper had known ever since he was a boy that being around death and being the dealer of it were entirely different things. It was a lesson he’d waited a long time for his son to learn. The older Burroughs barely glanced at the dead bodies on the porch. It didn’t matter who they were. He regarded them as a problem solved—a problem
his boy
had solved. He stepped over
them and the pools of blood seeping through the cracks between the boards and grabbed his son back from the handrail. He leaned the shotgun against a wooden post and hugged Gareth tightly to his chest. It was the first time Gareth had killed anyone, to Cooper’s knowledge. It was also the first time Gareth had ever seen his father cry. They cried together, as father and son, cradled in gun smoke, blood,
and vomit.

Annette Henson almost cried, too. She had opted not to listen to the instructions Gareth gave her before he took to killing those two men. Almost immediately after Gareth left her in the truck, she followed him out the same door and watched the whole thing play out from the bushes only a few feet from where Gareth stood. Her panties were soaked through. She decided right there and
then she was destined to become Mrs. Gareth Burroughs.

CHAPTER

A
NNETTE
H
ENSON
B
URROUGHS

1961

1.

“That’s where my boy killed those sons-a-bitches dead,” Cooper yelled at the preacher. The crowd of wedding guests cheered and laughed. Gareth smiled at that. Annette did,
too, but it came forced. She glanced down through the white veil at the bloodstain on the porch more out of reflex than pride. She’d seen the ugly thing a hundred times before. One of the men Gareth killed that night was Cody McCullin, the son of Delray McCullin, seeking revenge for something Cooper had done to his father. It was the night she fell in love with Gareth. Three summers later, here
they were getting married on the same steps. The preacher looked to Cooper for permission to continue and the old man lifted his flask. “Go on,” he said. “Get on with it.”

2.

Halford Jefferson Burroughs was born the following spring of ’62. Annette had heard from other mothers on the mountain how wonderful and blessed the experience of having a little one grow inside her would be, but
nothing about it was wonderful at all. She was tired all the time. Her tiny, pretty figure that made all the other women of Bull Mountain envious began to warp and contort into something she couldn’t bear to look at in the mirror. And her hair, her hair went from being as slick and shiny as a black diamond to looking like shit-covered straw at the bottom of a horse trailer. When the baby kicked, it
wasn’t a warm, comforting event. It didn’t create a bond between mother and child. It hurt, was all. It just hurt. Sometimes it was painful enough to keep her hunched over in the bed for days. On days she felt well enough to leave the house, she couldn’t go nowhere, not even out to the market, without some group of old biddies wanting to feel her up and put their hands on
the blessing.
Most days
she just wanted to scream, and scream she did. Childbirth was pain Annette wasn’t prepared for. She thought about a picture book she had checked out once from the library down in Waymore. It was full of photographs of Alaska. Picture after picture of sprawling snowcapped mountains and swirling colored lights in the sky that looked better to her than any fireworks she’d ever seen. While Halford
was busy tearing a hole in her belly, Annette soared over those mountains in her mind. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever come back.

The entirety of the Burroughs clan and nearly every other family living on Bull Mountain surrounded Annette, waiting on a chance to see the newborn, while Gareth glad-handed and got drunk. Most of the people there came only to be seen by Cooper. To show respect,
they called it. To kiss his ass was more like it, Annette thought. Her own family was no different.

“That’s a fine-looking boy,” Annette’s father said, stroking the baby’s cheek with the side of a curled finger. Her mother, Jeanine, held the baby like it was made of fine china.

“Thank you,” Annette said out loud.
Fuck you,
she said in her mind.

“And where is the proud grandfather?”
Jeanine asked.

Like you care,
Annette thought.
You only want the old man to see you holding his grandson so maybe someday if you need some of his money, or a favor done, he’ll be more prone to give it.
She wondered when she’d gotten so bitter. She should be happy. If not now, when?

Annette looked at Gareth, who looked around the crowded room. “I’ll see if I can find him,” he said. He moved
through the house, shaking hands and looking over shoulders, until he spotted Cooper through the kitchen window. He was pacing the pastures outside.

“Pop,” Gareth yelled, but Cooper didn’t respond. He was talking to someone, but Gareth didn’t see anyone else out there. He made his way outside, walked up to his father, and took his arm. “Deddy?”

“Goddamn it, boy!” Cooper said, and snatched
his arm away.

“What are you doing out here, Deddy? Come see Annette. Come see the baby.”

“I don’t care about all that nonsense. We need to settle this business right here.”

“What business? What are you talking about?”

Cooper took a hard pull from the copper flask in his hand. “Tell him,” he said, motioning with the flask toward the woods. “Tell this stubborn son of a bitch.”

Gareth looked out into the darkness. “Tell what to who?”

“To Rye,” Cooper said. “Tell your stubborn-ass uncle Rye. Tell him we had to do it. Tell him I’m tired of listening to his whinin’.”

Gareth considered his old man for a moment and looked back out into the darkness, this time knowing there wasn’t anything there. He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. Cooper tried to shake it off
again, but Gareth held on. “There’s no one out here, Deddy. Just us.”

“Tell him we had to do it. Tell him.” Cooper shook his flask at the woods, spilling whiskey on the ground. “He just talks and talks and talks with nothing to say. I can’t shut him up, boy. We need to shut him up.”

“There’s no one out here, Deddy. Uncle Rye’s dead. You’re just confused, is all. Come on inside.” This wasn’t
the first time Gareth had witnessed his father talking to himself, not making any sense, but this was the first time he’d given his hallucination a name. Uncle Rye died out there in the woods when Gareth was nine years old. He tried to contain it, but Cooper never really recovered from losing his brother in that accident. The older he got, the more it seeped through the cracks in his armor.
Gareth barely remembered the man. “Just come inside, Deddy. We can sort this out later.”

Cooper sipped at the flask and let his son lead him into the house. Annette smelled the whiskey on them both as she handed her newborn baby over to its daddy and granddaddy. If she could’ve got up and run off right then, she just might’ve. She closed her eyes and saw Alaska.

3.

Annette had always
heard that blood was spilt by the bucketful on Bull Mountain. Hell, she’d even witnessed some of it, but she also knew from experience that sometimes it happened one drop at a time. She didn’t leave Gareth the first time he hit her. She was drunk in love with him ever since that bloody night at his father’s house, and the slap came more as a shock than an assault. She didn’t even remember what
set him off. It didn’t matter. She would come to find out that it was impossible to gauge what would set him off once he put a drunk on. He carried the burden of leadership on his shoulders and sometimes he lost his head. She understood that. He wouldn’t do it again. But he did. The second time he hit her was in front of their two sons, Halford and Buckley. She was eight months pregnant with their
third. He was drunk on corn whiskey, but that was no different from most every other night. When they were younger, the whiskey on his breath turned her on. It always led to dark, violent sex. She used to crave it, and shiver at the thought of it. Now the stink of liquor was only a precursor to a different kind of darkness. A violence she prayed would pass over her like a thundercloud. Sometimes
it did. Sometimes it didn’t. He never hit the children, but she could see it brewing right behind his eyes. If her sons had been born daughters they wouldn’t have been shown the same mercies. She tried to convince herself Gareth would always see her the way he did back when she wore the Ruby Bliss lipstick and barely weighed a hundred pounds, but she was fooling herself. She became more of a burden
to him as each son was born, as if a part of the love and respect he had for her was transferred into each new boy until one day there would be nothing left for her. The thought of it woke her at night, slick with sweat, her heart beating like a hammer in her chest.

The night Gareth backhanded her at the dinner table in front of her children, Halford let a small laugh escape before he covered
his mouth with both hands to stifle it. She thought she might get sick. She wiped a single drop of blood from her nose with a cloth napkin and watched it soak in. It spread across the fabric like a cancer. She saw the sum of her entire life in that growing crimson stain, and in a perfect moment of clarity she knew that when the baby growing in her belly was born, she would have served her purpose.
She’d be used up. The days of passionate lovemaking and planning the future with her dangerous new husband and stable of loyal sons were a distant and fading memory. Her life as the partner and confidante to an exciting, powerful man was over. She’d be regarded as no more than a burdensome housekeeper to this family of men. He’d teach her sons to view her that way. The boys would be raised in
his image. There was no stopping it. She’d spend the rest of her life living in fear, watching her sons be poisoned, until the one night she stepped too far to the left or right of what was expected of her. Then Gareth would kill her. She was sure of it.

4.

Clayton Arthur Burroughs was born on December 22, 1972. He was named after Annette’s father. A small indulgence Gareth allowed her.
The family enjoyed one of the biggest Christmas celebrations in the mountain’s history.

When Annette recovered from the trauma of childbirth she would leave, without a word or a note. She would vanish into the night as if she had never been there at all. It would have been her fate regardless, but this way it was on her terms. Maybe she could go to Alaska. She would never be looked for. She
was sure of that. She would just be referred to as “that no-good bitch that run out on a good man and her three adoring children.”

“How could she?” was the question everyone would ask.

“How could she not?” would be her answer.