Buried Alive (4 page)

I grinned. “I dated a climber a few years ago. She gave me the basics.”

“She done good. But you’re ready to move past the basics. You’re coming back, right?”

“Try and keep me away.”

I packed up my rented climbing gear and began coiling ropes. The eight other climbing students did the same under Gary and Pete’s watchful eyes. We heard the labored
grind of an engine and turned to an SUV arriving on the old logging trail connecting the main road to our cliff face. The insignia on the door read
US Forest Service.
We were on their turf, inside the Red River Gorge Geological Area of the Daniel Boone National Forest.

The high-sprung vehicle crunched to a stop and two occupants exited, a big, square-built county cop about my age, mid-thirties. His face was a broad, flat plain centered by a button nose, as if a normal nose had been sectioned and only the tip pasted to his face. The man’s eyes were a gray wash and his mouth so lipless and tight I couldn’t imagine it smiling. His belly rolled three inches over a wide belt hung with police implements. The cowboy boots were alligator and the hogleg pistol he carried would only be standard issue in a Wild West wet dream. His uniform was too many hours from an iron.

Beside him, in visual opposition, was a trim and tall older guy in a hard-creased green uniform that looked ten minutes from the dry cleaners. It took a second to register that he was a forest ranger. He had a relaxed and dreamy smile on a tanned and ruggedly pleasant face, leaning back to stretch his spine. But I noted his half-closed eyes vacuuming in his surroundings. It was interesting.

The cop went to talk to Pete and Gary. I carried on coiling rope and watching from the corner of my eye. The ranger had nodded to the instructors before leaning against the trunk of a hemlock, whistling to himself and studying the sandy ground.

I looked up and caught a hard and cold appraisal from the sheriff, like he found something offensive in my bearing. I feigned indifference and walked my coil of rope to the van. Turning, I saw the ranger cross my path to pick up a tiny foil wrapper, as if collecting errant litter. He tucked the foil in his pocket, looked down again, headed back toward the SUV.

I knew what he was doing, and it had little to do with litter collection.

“Sheriff Beale,” the ranger said.

The cop turned from Gary, pushed back his hat. “E-yup?”

“We’re done.”

The big cop shot me another hard glance, then nodded and followed the ranger. They climbed in the Forest Service vehicle, pulled away slowly, the ranger at the wheel. As he passed in front of me, I smiled.

“Not the shoe prints you were looking for, right?”

His eyes held mine for a two-count. Then the eyes and the SUV were moving away and I tossed my second coil of rope in the van with the gear of the other students. They’d driven six miles from the outfitters in Pine Ridge. The cliff we’d been using for practice was only three miles from my lodgings, so I’d driven over on my own.

Gary shot a thumbs-up out the window, said, “See you later,” and the van rattled away.

I stared up the wall of rock – for a brief moment wondering how far up I could get on my own – then came to my senses and climbed into my pickup, pausing
to enjoy the view and the strange journey that had led me here, a
pas de deux
with fate, or perhaps blind luck.

After talking with Lieutenant Mason, I had been sitting at home and shuffling through a lapful of travel brochures snatched from rest stops over the years. They were heavy on entertainment-oriented venues: Branson, Orlando, Gatlinburg, and other places that made me break out in a cold sweat. I was wondering if I should just put Mr Mix-up in the truck and start driving à la Steinbeck when the phone rang.

“Mr Ryder? This is Dottie Fugate at RRG cabin rentals up here in the Kentucky mountains. Feel like a little vacation getaway?”

“I, uh … What?”

“You stayed with us a while back, right?”

My family had lived in the area for four months when I was a child of seven, following my father in his job as engineer and bridge-builder. Then, almost a decade ago, at age twenty-seven, I’d returned before joining the MPD, a self-imposed weekend retreat to sort out a jumble of warring factions in my head. It hit me that I must have stayed at an RRG cabin.

“The last I was in your neighborhood was nine years ago, Miz Fugate. You keep records that long?”

She laughed.
“Yep. An’ ever’ year we drop all the previous guests’ register cards in a hat and my daughter pulls out a winner of free use of a cabin. She plucked out your name. I sure hope you can come back and stay with us.”

Clair Peltier, a pathologist for the state of Alabama and my significant sometimes other, believes in the concept of synchronicity, thinking a webwork of logic underlies the fabric of the visible world, a fluid and spiritual mathematics with a sense of humor. She would have explained that my seeking a vacation spot and one arriving via phone was synchronicity: it was not luck, but an item on the universe’s to-do list.

To me it was just weird. But it had dropped in my lap, and it was free.

“You got any cabins available, say, next week?” I asked.

I heard pages flipping, Dottie Fugate checking a calendar.

“Choice is tight, cuz it’s summer tourist season, but we got one open starting Saturday. It’s in a holler in the backcountry and damn remote, to tell the truth.”

“I’ll take it.”

I started the engine and my truck ascended from the valley through pine and hemlock and maple, passing sheer rock faces where vegetation wouldn’t grow. I saw huge house-sized chunks of rock that had toppled from the ridges eons ago. The dark boulders sat in the forest like sentinels, and I recalled that during my brief childhood stay in the mountains I had imagined the boulders whispering to one another during the night, not through the air, but the ground.

I headed back to the cabin, stomach growling, breakfast burned away by hauling my ass up rock faces. The road was asphalt, potholed, crumbling at the edges, but
a main county road nonetheless, the shoulders dappled with wildflowers. I curved past a cliff face and cut on to a tight lane, the truck’s springs squealing as the tires dropped from asphalt on to rutted double track of dirt and gravel.

Directly ahead, the road seemed to disappear, the effect of a precipitous winding drop into the tight cleft between two mountains, a hollow, or what locals called a “holler”. I eased down until the lane flattened out. Another few hundred feet and the road forked. To the left was the only neighboring dwelling, a sizeable log cabin visible through the trees.

The right-hand path took me a half-mile deeper in the hollow to my cabin, slat-sided and roofed with dark green metal. Behind, three towering hemlocks pushed into the blue sky, taller by a third than the surrounding white pines and oaks. The dark, raw-wood cabin looked native amidst the forest, as if it had sprouted on its own.

I climbed the porch and pulled my key, for the first time noting that the keychain had a label with the cabin’s name. Vacation retreats were given names –
Rocky Ridge, Timbertop, Braeside
and so forth – mine apparently named by its remote placement.

Road’s End.

I heard a hellacious din from inside and saw a blur of frenzied motion at the window. I sighed and opened the door.

A tornado blew out.

“Jesus, ouch, damn … calm down, Mix-up.”

Having saved my dog from the euthanasia needle with about a half-hour to spare, many would have figured his wild-eyed, slobbering delight was joy at greeting his savior, but jubilant chaos was his default setting: spinning in circles, bumping my legs, rolling on his back, a dog that delighted in everything.

Mix-up thundered between my legs, and I went down. When my head was on his level he began licking it like a beef roast.

“Stop, dammit. No, Mix-up. Sit! SIT!”

A strange thing happened, something I didn’t expect in a hundred years.

He sat.

His body twitched, but his haunches stayed glued to the ground. I stood, staring at the phenomenon. For a year I’d been working on commands, Mr Mix-up immune to my imprecations. I’d say
Sit,
he’d thunder in circles. I’d say
Stay,
he’d follow me like my pants were made of bacon. I’d throw a stick and yell
Fetch,
he’d roll on the ground and pedal his legs at the sky.

A couple months ago I’d spoken about Mix-up’s recalcitrance to his day-care lady, Lucinda Best, who volunteered at the animal shelter from which I’d rescued him. She’d recommended a nearby obedience school and I’d taken him thrice-weekly for a month, a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of watching other dogs learn to heel, fetch, sit and stay while Mix-up went his merry way.

It appeared he’d managed to learn something, though. Did one of his many breeds have a learning lag time?
I held up my hand and quietly said,
Stay.
I backed away. He stayed. I back-stepped down the drive for fifty paces, hand up, repeating my command every few seconds. I stopped, gestured my way, said,
Come here.

He exploded toward me. When he was two dozen feet away I thrust my hand out, said
Sit.

He skidded to a stop in sit position. I backed away again, keeping him in place with the
Stay
command. I found a foot of busted branch on the ground, threw it down the drive yelling
Fetch
!

He tipped over and began pedaling his paws at the sky.

“Two out of three ain’t bad,” I told him, rubbing his belly. “Let’s go grab some chow.”

I opened the cabin door and went inside, the air cool and smelling of wood and my breakfast bacon. The walls were pine decorated with cheap buys from local flea markets: a red-centric quilt, a sign advertising Texaco Gasoline, calendar-style photos from the Gorge stuck in a variety of dime-store frames. The living room had a vaulted ceiling, with loft space above. Dormers let light pour in. The dining room and kitchen made one long unit.

I showered away the morning’s sweat and grit. Afterwards, I went to the kitchen area and lashed together two sausage and jalapeno cheese sandwiches. I cracked open a cold Sam Adams and dined in a rocker on the sun-dappled porch, serenaded by insects, birdsong and the tumble of water over rock in the nearby creek. Swallow-tailed butterflies skittered through the warm air.
Somewhere on the ridge above the cabin a woodpecker drilled for bugs.

I leaned back in the rocker and set my bare heels on the railing as something puzzling happened in my neck and shoulders. At first I didn’t recognize the feeling, then it came to me.

They had relaxed.

I spent the remainder of the day hiking in the Gorge, watching Mix-up bark after squirrels and turkeys and splash through the creeks. With the wide blue sky a constant companion, we pushed through green thickets of rhododendron, crossed slender ridges no wider than my truck, yawning drop-offs on both sides. We climbed up and down the steep grades until my knees went weak and we had to return.

I hit the mattress at eight thirty, worn and weary and happy as a clam.

In the morning a strange chirping roused me from my dreams, the sound resolving into the cellphone beside the bed. I thumbed the device open and put it to my ear.

“Hello?”

“—ot a police emer—cy,” bayed a female voice, the lousy reception chopping out half of her words.

“I can’t hear you,” I said.

“We have—lice emerg—” the woman repeated in a twangy mountain accent, giving no sign she was receiving me.

The phone showed a half-bar of reception. I’d quickly learned cell signals were haphazard in the mountains, wavering. I sprinted out the door and up the hill beside the cabin, yelling, “Hang on!”

When I’d put fifty or sixty feet on my altitude, I looked at the phone and saw another strip of bar on the meter.

“This is——Cherry of———of Kentucky. We need you——mergency.”

“I can’t hear you!” I yelled.

“GPS—ordinates are …” I pulled out my pen, focused on nothing but hearing. The coordinates were spoken twice and I managed to get them, I hoped.

“Who is this?” I yelled. “Identify yourself.”

The call warbled, howled, beeped and died. No caller number had registered. My head whirled with questions as I stumbled down the hillside. Who had my caller been? Who knew I was vacationing in Kentucky?

Wait… the caller thought I was in Alabama. That made a lot more sense. Just to be sure, I grabbed my brand-new, bought-for-the-trip GPS and entered the coordinates.

The position was maybe four miles from the cabin. My caller had been local. There was nothing to do but holster my weapon in the back of my pants, leave my dog a fistful of snacks to distract from my leaving, jump
in the truck with the GPS set for the coordinates, and hope for an answer to the mystery.

I followed the jittering GPS arrow until turning on to a gravel road. The gravel crunched under my tires for four miles, diminishing to dirt studded with pebbles. I rounded a copse of pines and saw what remained of a house. Small, single story, rickety porch, brick chimney at one end, the mortar etched thin by the elements. The paint had been scoured away, leaving bare wood turned barn-side gray. I saw a leaning utility pole behind the house, its insulators made of glass, the line part of the rural electrical grid installed in the 1930s, finally allowing many Appalachian families entrance to the twentieth century.

A black power line stretched from the pole to the structure. I saw bright copper connections at the insulator, like the line was an illegal tap, jury-rigged. It fired up alarms in my head as I exited my truck. I double-checked my GPS readout: This was where the woman had directed me.

“Hello?” I called.

Nothing answered but distant crows, though for a few seconds I heard a distant siren. I approached the house with eyes down, wary of snakes in the overgrown weeds. The porch was side-slanting, creaking with my footsteps. The mesh had rotted from the listing screen door.

I slipped my gun from my back-of-belt holster and pushed on the door. It grated open over warped floorboards. The living room was a clutter of rotted furniture
and wood lath and plaster fallen from the walls and ceiling. With the windows boarded, there was little light. I smelled an overwhelming stench, like foul meat mingled with feces. My stomach churned and I tied my red bandana handkerchief over my nose and lower face. The flies were a cloud of dots racing in circles.