Someplace to Be Flying (47 page)

Grief is a stone in my chest and I know nothing’s going to ease the pain because nothing can bring Nettie back. But this isn’t something I can let go. Everything’s shut down in me, except for this thing I’ve got to do.

I make a visit to a gunrunner down in Tyson, wake him out of bed around four in the morning. He starts to give me some jaw, but then he takes a look at my face and he shuts right up. I tell him what I need, my voice still a husky rasp, and he sells me an old army-issue U.S. carbine, a .30 calibre Ml, throws in a half-dozen boxes of ammo rounds, thirty cartridges to a clip. By four-thirty I’m heading back up past Hazard in a stolen car.

It’s getting on to dawn when I leave the car at the foot of ‘Shine Road and start walking up toward Freakwater Hollow and the Morgan farm, the same route Nettie took, though I’ve got different business with the Morgans. The pockets of my duster are weighted down with ammunition clips. The rifle’s in my hand, loaded. I’m not making any secret of what I’m doing up here. You don’t need to see the rifle-all you’ve got to do is look in my face.

If those Morgans were smart, they would have hightailed it as far and fast as they could go, left the county, left the damn country. But they’re not smart. They’re mean, through and through. Bullying, cruel, maybe even cunning. But not smart.

The first guard’s dozing under one of those tall lonesome pines. He jolts awake as I come walking past him, starts to get up. My bullet takes him in the throat and drops him back into the pine needles and I keep walking. I kill the second one, too, but the third lives long enough to tell me what I need to know. I engrave the names he gives me on the stone in my chest.

Idonia. Washington. Daniel. Callindra. A half-dozen more. These are the Morgans directly responsible for what happened to Nettie.

“You … you’re a dead man,” he says, coughing up blood.

“You think I don’t know that?” I tell him.

He has something else to say, but I pull the trigger before he can get it out.

It goes on like that. I keep cutting down Morgan boys and make my way up that winding dirt road. I take my time, doing a thorough job of it. I shoot some of them out of the air, most of them in the woods that run alongside the road. A few of them get off a round or two, but it’s like the cold stone of grief that’s lodged in my chest is an enchantment against their bullets. I can’t be touched.

By the time I step into the farmyard, I’ve gone through my first clip and snap another into the carbine. Behind me I’ve left a trail of dead Morgan boys, but I’m only getting started here.

They don’t deserve to die clean and fast like they do, but this isn’t just about vengeance. I mean to clean out the whole nest of them, the way you deal with vermin. What happened to Nettie can’t happen again to anyone else.

The sun’s up now.

Somebody steps out of one of the outbuildings. She’s got her hands up in front of her, like she wants to talk, but there’s nothing to discuss. The rifle lifts in my hands. There’s the loud crack as the bullet exits the muzzle, traveling at six hundred and fifty yards a second. When it hits the figure, it slams her back against the wall of the building.

There’s a flurry of gunfire then, coming from all sides, but the charm that’s kept me alive this far is still holding. I start picking them oft?, through the windows, from the rooftops, in the woods.

It’s over fast. The quiet that follows is profound. Nothing much lives up in Freakwater Hollow, but you can’t hear anything now. No birdsong. No insects. Just the stillness, smelling of death. I drop a second clip onto the dirt of the farmyard and snap in the next. Wait a moment. See a movement alongside the barn. Drop another Morgan.

There’s a shout from the house then. Anger or grief? I can’t tell. I turn to face the clapboard building and Idonia’s standing there in the doorway with a shotgun in her hand.

“How many of us are you planning to kill?” she says.

The barrel of that shotgun’s aimed my way. It’s a good weapon for a mediocre marksman. Lots of stopping power and the odds are good of scoring a hit if you’re in the limits of its effective range. I’m well within the limits.

“How many you got?” 1 ask.

“Christ, you’re such a little pissant,” she says. “Can’t you take a joke?”

We both know how this is going down. There’s nobody left. If there was, she wouldn’t be standing there by herself. But if she’s got to take a fall, she’s going with bravado. The only thing a cuckoo carries more of? than meanness is pride.

“I didn’t think it was funny,” I tell her.

I drop her before her finger can tighten on the trigger, shoot her in the throat like I did the first of her boys down on the road coming up. The impact sends her reeling back into the house. The shotgun goes off, blowing out the upper right-hand corner of the doorjamb, but it’s only a reflex of her hand muscles.

I know I’ve cleaned out the whole nest of them now, but they’re not all dead. Not all the Morgans live up here in Freakwater Hollow. But these are the only ones I had to deal with today. These are the ones that hurt my wild fox girl.

That grief swells strong in me again. I let the carbine fall to the dirt and I can’t move. All I can do is stand there, with my heart turned to stone.

about as many human friends as they did corbæ. But the difference is, they looked white, and bad though they were, some things always come down to skin color. In these hills, poor white trash is still a tall step up from a black man.

They take me to the county seat in Tyson to stand trial. There’s some more killing as I wait for my court date. The ones dying are Morgans, coming up from other parts of the country, looking for payback, meeting up with corbæ before they can get to me in the jail. Pretty soon those Morgans get the message.

Chloë stands me a lawyer, but there’s not much he can do. The only thing I’ll say in my defense is, “They needed killing,” and that’s no defense at all. It leaves everyone to worrying about what’s going to happen to me. Except for me. I don’t think at all. All I am is empty and cold. All I know is that stone of grief I’m carrying with me. I don’t go away like Raven-the grief holds me here-but I don’t know much else. Everything goes by fast and I don’t pay much attention to any of it, can’t seem to focus. Not on the trial, not on the jury’s verdict of guilty, not on the judge’s sentencing. Makes no difference to me if I’m in the county jail while the trial’s on, or sitting on death row, waiting to die.

Because Nettie’s still dead. None of their words, nothing they can say or do to me, can change that.

That lawyer Chloë hired me wants to appeal, but I’m not interested. He-means well. He tries to argue with me, but all I can think is, when did Nettie get a chance to appeal?

When they finally set a date, I don’t even hear them tell me I’ve got two weeks left to live.

It just doesn’t seem all that important.

One winter’s night, the week before my execution, Annie comes to see me. I don’t know how she gets in. Slips in through some window somewhere, I guess, and ghosts her way down to my cell. Or maybe she finds a fold in the way the fabric of place is bunched up around here. I haven’t been looking myself. There’s no need for shortcuts where I’m going.

I’m stretched out, taking up most of the narrow bed in my cell when she comes in. My eyes are open, but I’m not looking at anything. It takes me awhile to register her presence. I don’t know how long she’s been sitting there on the end of? the bed before I finally notice her.

“You got a death wish?” she asks.

It takes me awhile to work that through.

“I don’t have any wish at all,” I say.

Though that’s not true. Given a wish, I’d ask for Nettie to be alive. For her not to have died, and died so hard and alone.

Annie shakes her head. “When’re you going to tell us what this is all about?”

“Nettie’s dead.”

“We
know
that, Jack. But what happened? What did those Morgans do to her that’d make you up and kill them all?”

I’ve never explained. It’s bad enough I’ve got the memory of it, that big stone of grief taking up all the breathing space in my chest, without handing over pieces of it to the rest of my kin. No one else should have to feel this cold I’ve got in me, like they’re walking dead.

Annie leans forward. “Jack,” she says. Her voice is soft, soothing. Always was. Lord, that girl can hold a tune. You’d never think she was a jay, to hear her speak. “They’re going to kill you next week.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not even going to argue with you about why you’re not putting up a fight,” she says. “But you can’t let her story die with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not right. You’ve told me yourself, in the end, stories are all we’ve got. They’re who we are and what we are and why we are. We’ve got to share them with each other, the good and the bad. Maybe especially the bad, you said to me once, because anyone who doesn’t remember history is doomed to repeat it. Do you want whatever it was that happened to Nettie to happen to someone else?”

I shake my head wearily. “That’s why I killed them all.”

“You didn’t kill them all,” Annie says. “The world’s still full of cruelty and meanness-human and blood. Cuckoos are still breeding and dropping their eggs in other people’s nests. You think your killing a few Morgans is going to stop all the rest of the misery in the world? You think it’ll stop those cuckoos from hurting somebody else?”

“I don’t know anymore,” I say. “I don’t know that the stories do any good. We’re all so good at hurting each other, even when we mean well. Even when we know the stories.”

“There’s a big difference between doing something wrong by accident and doing it on purpose,” Annie tells me. “And how’re people going to know it, unless someone tells them the stories?”

I’m thinking, she just doesn’t understand.

“Talk to me, Jack.”

But then I remember what not giving Nettie my story got us.

“Sorrow halved, Jack,” she says. “When you share it. Remember that? It’s something else you told me.”

I remember Chloë pointing at Raven one time and reminding me how we had two choices. We can carry on, or we can go away, withdraw from the world like Raven has, and that doesn’t do anybody any good. I realize then that what I’m letting happen to me is just another way of going away.

I open my mouth to speak, but the words won’t come. I’m thinking of my Nettie and tears flood my eyes. My throat gets so thick it’s like that stone of grief is trying to rise up it. I try to close it all down, to go away, to embrace the cold-this is too raw; this hurts too much-but Annie won’t let me. She puts her arms around me and draws my head down onto her shoulder. She doesn’t make like it’s going to get better, doesn’t promise me anything, but just her being there’s enough.

Sorrow shared.

It’s a long while before I can find my voice. After a time we end up lying together on that narrow bed of mine, she’s holding me, and I’m talking, I’m telling her the whole sorry tale, and it’s while I’m telling it that I remember the promise I made Nettie.

All that killing I did killed something in me, but I can see a glimmer of it shining bright when I’m talking. It’s way off in the dark, flickering and calling to me, but I know the way to chase it isn’t to go away like Raven did, but to carry on. I sit up and swing my feet to the floor.

“I’ve got to find that girl,” I say, my voice a hoarse whisper.

Annie sits up beside me. “You can’t do that by dying.”

“I’m not dying.”

“Not anymore you’re not,” Annie tells me and then she walks me out of that place.

I hear later that the crow girls came by and left a changeling in my place- some kind of jackdaw man they put together out of twigs and mud and moss and things. Dressed it up in my prison clothes and left it on the bed. It wasn’t made to last long, but then it didn’t need to. It only had to stay of a piece for as long as it took the guards to walk it down that long hall on death row and execute it. Long enough for them to dig a hole for it and then throw it in.

By the time the gravediggers had that makeshift man covered up with dirt, it was already turning back into whatever it was the girls had made it out of and I was long gone, walking the piney wood hills around the Bean farm, looking for that daughter of Nettie’s and mine that never got herself born.

Hazard//Long Beach, Spring, 1984

I spend that winter in the hills around Hazard, but I have no more luck finding the lost girl than Nettie did. I have more to go on in my search than Nettie ever had, access to secret places she never knew existed, long views of the winter woods from high up in those frosty skies, but it doesn’t help. I find every hidden fold in the fabric of those hills and check it out, once, twice, a dozen times, just to be sure. I fly over more square miles of wooded hills than you can imagine.

There’s no gossip about her the way there was for my little wild fox girl that summer we first met. If the lost girl was ever here, she didn’t leave any traces behind her. Nothing. She’s got less presence than a ghost, less substance than a memory-though Lord knows there’s plenty of them here for me.

I have help from time to time, but nobody’s got a reason to stick with it the way I do. When the months go by, nobody tries to talk me out of it, nobody tries to tell me that I did my best and it’s time to give it up now. I guess they figure it’s better to have Jack out walking these hills on a fruitless quest than stepping out of the world the way Raven did. At least this way nobody’s got to care for me the way Chloë looks after him.

There are Morgans back in Freakwater Hollow, but they keep their distance from me, and I keep mine from them. I can’t afford to step back into that place where that killing frenzy took me last year. It’s not just because being there would shut me away from my search. It’s that it’s wrong. I don’t want to be the person I’d be if I let myself go there again. That’s something I know I can’t repeat because if I did, I know this time I’d never get back again.

I guess it’s close on the end of April when I get the notion to see how the twin that got born is doing, thinking maybe I can find some clue by looking at her, listening in on her life, watching over her.