Bull Mountain (5 page)

“Baby . . .”

“Let me finish.” She turned to face him. “I’m your wife. I swore to stand by you for better or worse and I don’t take that vow lightly, and believe me, anything that
puts us in direct contact with your lunatic brother is the very definition of
worse.
That being said, you do what you have to do. But hear me, Clayton Burroughs, I will not let some cop, no matter how
genuine
he is, drag you down a hole you can’t climb out of to help a man who doesn’t want or deserve your help.”

“He’s my brother, Kate.”

“He’s goddamn crazy, is what he is.”

“That doesn’t
make him any less my brother. No less my family.”

“
I’m
your family now.
I
come first. That’s what you promised me when you put that ring on my finger, and you aren’t getting out of it. Ever. Do you hear me, Sheriff?”

“I hear you, woman.”

Clayton grabbed a handful of T-shirt and pulled her down on top of him. He loved it when she called him Sheriff. He pushed her down on her back and
slid himself on top of her. That way, he wouldn’t have to look at the rafters.

CHAPTER

K
ATE
B
URROUGHS

2015

The digital clock from Clayton’s side of the bed showed 2:15. The glow of the numbers washed the room in a soft orange hue and seeped into Kate’s restless eyelids. Clayton normally covered
the clock with a T-shirt or something to block the light, but tonight he hadn’t, and the damn thing always kept Kate awake. She was a light sleeper anyway, not that she would be getting any sleep tonight. Not after the bomb Clayton had just dropped on her. She loved him, of that there was no doubt, but she’d never once claimed to understand him. At what point in your life do you just accept a
spade for being a spade and move on? Every time her husband raised a hand to help the people on this mountain he’d had it slapped away, but he always jumped at the chance to try again. It reminded her of the
Peanuts
cartoon where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown to kick. Everyone knows she’s going to snatch it away at the last minute and poor Charlie is going to land flat on his back;
even he knows it, but he does it anyway out of sheer faith in the goodness of the world. She’d heard once that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. If that was true, then her husband was insane. Hell, maybe she was, too. After all, this whole lawman thing was her idea.

It was one of those moments in time that sneak up on you from
nowhere, without warning or provocation, and change your life forever. She and Clayton had been dating for a little more than a year and he was bound and determined to prove to her, to everyone, that he wasn’t anything like his father. Even so, he still seemed lost. That might have been what initially attracted her to him in the first place. It was clear to her, by the way he cut short conversations
about his childhood or took hard left turns whenever the subject came up, that he’d seen, and maybe done, things he wasn’t proud of, and it had changed him, robbed him of the things that make falling in love with a girl across a diner table enjoyable. He always acted like he didn’t deserve the good things in life that other people take for granted. He was broken, and she liked fixing broken things.
She didn’t know that about herself then but she knew it now, and this close to forty, she might as well start admitting it. She also knew Clayton would have done anything for her back then. Anything. And that kind of power over a man, in the hands of a twenty-six-year-old woman, could be dangerous. She liked that, too.

They’d been sitting in Lucky’s after church—that was saying something right
there. Clayton Burroughs had never stepped foot in a church before her, but there he was, hair combed and shirt tucked in, pretending to be comfortable—the two of them sharing a massive plate of cathead biscuits, peach preserves, and fresh butter. Kate had the figure for that kind of thing back then. That memory made her reach under the covers and pinch at her love handles, then cup the pudge
of her belly with both hands.

The gossip in the air that morning at the diner was about Sheriff Flowers’s stepping down. Sam Flowers had been the law in McFalls County since she was a little girl, but something about a bad shooting, him being drunk or something, was forcing the old man into retirement, and the gossip hounds were out in full force. Kate remembered as if it were yesterday how
she’d casually formed the words that would change both her and Clayton’s lives. She originally said it as a joke, but the look on Clayton’s face when she said it, as if she’d just solved all the world’s problems with a single sentence, was enough to wish she could freeze time and erase it from his memory.

“You should run, Clayton. You’d make a great sheriff,” she’d said, and after that there
was no stopping him. Come November, they both added shiny new accessories to their nightstands—a modest diamond engagement ring for her and a silver sheriff’s badge for him. He ran unopposed and considered that a lucky break, although the whispers that coated the edges of every conversation through the election were that no one dared to run against a Burroughs—even the good one. The next decade
was filled with the sleepless nights of a cop’s wife. A cop whose primary goal was to buy back the soul of a family that had grown accustomed to being soulless. And it was her fault.

Kate got out of bed, crossed the room, and laid a towel from the floor over the maddening glow of the clock. She walked to the bathroom and quietly lowered the toilet seat with mild annoyance. She sat down, letting
her head fall into her hands.
And after that fiasco at Buckley’s funeral?
she thought.
Is he out of his mind?
Buckley had been completely psychotic, as far as Kate was concerned. He scared her more than Halford ever did. If Clayton was the good, and Halford was the bad, then Buckley was the ugly in spades. It didn’t surprise her or anybody else to hear he was shot to death in a gunfight with the
police. Buckley was the shoot-first-think-never type, who most likely deserved everything that happened to him, but he was still Clayton’s brother. He was still family, and Clayton had the right to pay his respects, no matter what Halford and the rest of them thought.

Kate was supportive of Clayton’s attending the funeral; she even insisted on being there with him, but even she’d tried to
change his mind about wearing his dress uniform. She groaned now and ran her hands from her head to the back of her neck, pressing down on the tense knot of muscle. She pictured him standing in front of the bathroom mirror, decked out in starched polyester with military creases and polished brass, wrestling with a tie for maybe the first time in his life. His well-worn hat was traded in for a stiff-brimmed
sheriff’s hat she didn’t even know he owned. Standing in the doorway watching him like that, all she could think about was how this thing—this bad decision—would be the thing that got him killed. He insisted without urging that it was a way to honor his brother and in no way a massive
fuck you
to Halford and his cronies, and maybe, deep down, some of that was true, but she knew better. It was
Burroughs piss, spite, and ego. Only, he couldn’t see it. None of them ever could. None of them ever thought they were wrong. She could smell the whiskey on him, too, no matter how much mouthwash he swigged to cover it up. She knew if she’d searched the cabinets and drawers, she’d find at least one, if not more, drained half-pint bottles of cheap bourbon. She let it go. She always let it go.

They were the last to arrive at the funeral, if you could even call it that. Outwardly it looked more like a crowd who’d turned out for a cockfight. Just a bunch of unkempt men standing around in a circle in their dingy work coats and boots, holding jars of corn whiskey, smoking, and carrying on. The few women who’d been allowed to come sat silent, bound together by expressions of profound
sadness that were in no way inspired by the departed. They all looked much older than they were, tired and bleached out, the color of summer hay bales. Kate felt equal parts compassion and resentment toward them all, but also found herself trying to tug a few extra inches out of her skirt to cover more of her bare legs. No reason to rub it in.

Halford wouldn’t allow his brother’s body in a
church, or a preacher to be present, so the men just stood together out on the banks of Burnt Hickory Pond, telling their stories and pouring whiskey on the ground. Soon they would just dump the body in a hole next to the one his father was buried in.

Clayton’s grandfather, Cooper, had been buried in a field near Johnson’s Gap, intending it to be the burial site for all the Burroughs to follow,
but his son, Gareth, Clayton’s father, had wanted to be buried here, at Burnt Hickory Pond. No one knew why. The graves spoiled memories she had of this place when she was a girl. Swinging out on the old tire swing with silly teenage boys, beating their skinny bird-chests, being loud and young. This place used to be a symbol of her childhood, of summer, something dear. Now it was the burial
ground of murderers and thieves. She was surprised that the lush grass and bright green moss around the pond wasn’t rotting and brown, considering the amount of bad blood in the dirt.

From the moment Clayton pulled the truck up next to the line of primered pickups and ATVs, every set of eyes locked on them. First on her, in her not-so-conservative black dress, then on Clayton, in a uniform
that evoked the purest form of disgust and hatred these people could muster. The crowd broke in half as she and Clayton approached, revealing Halford Burroughs hunched over a plain pine box next to a freshly dug hole. The box held a man shot to death by men dressed the way her husband was dressed now. Halford’s eyes were red and swollen from crying, and it was maybe the first time since meeting Clayton’s
family all those years ago that she’d ever seen the big man show any type of emotion that wasn’t fueled by spit and vinegar, but his face faded back into the slab of cold granite she was used to seeing when he laid eyes on his little brother. Right then, in that moment, Clayton said something to her under his breath, but she didn’t hear it. Maybe it was an admission of this having been a
bad idea after all, but she couldn’t be sure. She did ask him when it was all over what he had said, but he told her he couldn’t remember. It was the first time, to her knowledge, that Clayton had ever lied to her. The crowd either stood silent or whispered and pointed as she and Clayton joined the group, but it was Halford who verbalized the mood with just three words.

“How. Dare. You.” He
fumbled to draw the gun poking out of his pants, and Kate had thought she might pass out right then and there. She felt the tingle in her fingertips and saw the flashing black starbursts in the corners of her vision. It was the most frightened she’d ever been in her adult life. Thankfully, Halford’s men grabbed him and held him back. He roared a string of obscenities at them and fought to get at
Clayton, but, thank God, his people were successful at keeping him in check. Clayton never flinched. He never reached for his own sidearm, he simply reached a hand across Kate’s abdomen and calmly pushed her back a step behind him. Kate remembered in the middle of all her panic how sexy he’d looked at that moment.

“He was my brother, too,” Clayton said, “and I deserve to be here.”

Halford
spit at them, getting most of the slick brown spittle on the pine coffin. One of the men Kate recognized and knew as a good man at least on the surface, a man Clayton called Scabby Mike, yelled back while struggling to contain Halford’s gun arm. “Well, be quick about it, Clayton, or we’ll be burying two of y’all today.” Kate believed that, and nudged Clayton forward. An eternity could be fit into
the time it took her husband to say his piece to that simple closed pine box and rejoin her at the truck. She couldn’t remember even taking a breath. But he did eventually come back, and they left, driving slower than she would have liked. She looked back and saw the men gathered around Halford. He’d stumbled and they were helping him up off the ground. She saw that he’d started crying again.
Maybe it was proof of a soul in there somewhere, but she didn’t want to stick around to find out. She just wanted to go home. She put her hand on Clayton’s leg and went to speak, but saw that he was crying, too.