Peter Abrahams - Last of the Dixie Heroes

“I was just thinking about the Mountain House when the phone rang, that’s all.”

“Huh?”

“What’s it like?”

“The Mountain House? Is that what you’re askin’?”

“Yeah.”

“A fallin’ down ruin. I haven’t been up there in years.”

“Describe it a little.”

“I just did. Fallin’ down ruin.” Another gurgling sound. “Tell you what, Roy. Why don’t you come out and I’ll take you up there?”

“When?”

“Now’s all right. I got a little opening in my schedule.”

“Between what and what?” Roy said.

Pause. Then Sonny Junior laughed, a big laugh that made the phone vibrate in Roy’s ear. “Family,” he said. “What it’s all about.”

Roy changed the greeting on his phone: “If it’s you, Rhett, I’m up at Cousin Sonny’s in Tennessee.” He gave him the number. Playing it over, Roy found he’d said uncle instead of cousin. He didn’t bother to fix it.

Traffic was as light as it ever got. Roy rode through the nighttime sprawl, his uniform folded beside him on the seat, the carbine in the trunk. Sherman razed all of this, down to the ground. And what else had Lee said? The soul part-unconquered, unoccupied, waiting. The meaning of that eluded him. He pressed play.

“I’m gonna tell my mother howdy

When I get home

I’m gonna shake my father’s hand

I will shake their hands that day

When we walk that Milky White Way

One of these days.”

It was so loud and Roy was so caught up in it, he and his mother walking on stars, that he almost missed the fact that he was running on empty. He filled up at an all-night place near the state line. The pump rejected his credit card, so he had to go in and pay cash. The clerk couldn’t speak English. Roy did something he’d never done, bought a bumper sticker off the rack by the register. This one was the battle flag, not very big, no writing on it. He stuck it on the middle of his back bumper and drove off. In his rearview mirror he saw the clerk watching through the glass. He himself started looking at passing things-cell phone antennas, Super 8 motel signs, golden arches-the way they’d appear framed in that little V on the barrel of the Sharps fifty-two he had in the trunk.

”Looks like you lost some weight there, cuz.”

”I don’t think so.”

”Gonna have a six-pack like mine sooner ’n you know it.” Sonny Junior tapped the hard ridges of his abdomen; muscles popped up in his chest. “Girls’ll be swarmin’ all over you, they aren’t already.”

They stood in a patch of sunlight partway up the mountain, shirts off and tied around their waists an hour or two before on the long climb from where the last dirt lane petered out. There was no path, just trees, rocks, underbrush, the sound of running water and these occasional sunny openings, some of them, like this one, with a view.

“And you’re not even huffin’ and puffin’ yet,” said Sonny Junior, “which is pretty strange for a city boy.”

It was true. Not only no huffing and puffing, but Roy had the odd sensation that his lungs had plenty in reserve. He felt the weight of the inhaler in his pocket, couldn’t remember the last time he’d used it.

“Some view, huh?” said Sonny Junior.

“Yeah.”

“A real-what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“No idea.”

“Starts with p,” Sonny Junior said. He took out a flask, drank from it, passed it to Roy.

“Vodka and Tang?” Roy said.

Sonny Junior gave him a look. “You havin’ fun on me, cuz?”

“Nope.”

“This here’s the good stuff.”

Roy took it, drank: the good stuff. “Panorama,” he said.

Sonny Junior’s eyes widened. Then he clapped Roy on the back, hard enough to move him off his feet a bit. “Got the looks and the brains both, don’t you, Roy? Panorama. Son of a bitch.” He surveyed the view, all green and gold under a sky so densely blue it seemed to be made of something material. “You can see seven states from here,” he said.

Roy scanned the distant vistas.

“Two or three, anyways,” Sonny said. “You know what ticks me off, Roy? This view was ours.”

“Views don’t belong to anybody.”

“Fuck they don’t. Ever been to Malibu?”

“No.”

“Every good view on the planet is bought and paid for. What I want to know is who took ours away?”

“That doesn’t make sense, Sonny.”

“Why not?”

“Whatever happened was… a long time ago.”

“So?”

Roy didn’t answer.

“I’m right and you know it,” Sonny said. A lone bird, hawk or eagle, rose up and up on a thermal, shrank to almost nothing. Sonny took another draw from the flask, passed it to Roy.

Roy drank. “This Old Grand-Dad?”

“From the bottle I inadvertently brought Uncle Roy there at the end, him not having a chance to finish it for obvious reasons. Want another hit?”

Roy didn’t.

They climbed on, back in dense woods for a while, then up a steep section with fewer trees but wildflowers everywhere, red and white. The steep section rose to a towering ridge, all covered with moss, seeping water. They made their way around it, on hands and knees a couple of times, and at the head of the ridge stepped across a narrow stream that came bubbling out of a hole in the rocks a few feet above. Sonny Junior bent down, drank from cupped hands.

“Is that a good idea?” Roy said, remembering a scary article about microbes or parasites or something.

“Huh?” said Sonny.

Roy dipped his hand in the stream. How fast the water ran through his fingers, icy and energetic. He cupped his hands and drank. It stunned him: the best water he’d ever tasted, even better than the water from Chickamauga. Tasting was the wrong word. Tasting meant the taster was the master and the tasted was a thing. This water was the master: the best water he’d ever put inside himself, cleansing, purifying proof that all those eco-people were right about the earth being a living thing.

“This here’s the source of the crick,” said Sonny Junior.

“What crick?”

“Why, ours, Roy, that used to be ours, the crick what run the mill, way down below.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Course it has a name,” Sonny said. “Every crick has a name. This is the Crystal.”

“Crystal?”

“What’s so strange about that?”

“I camped by a creek with that name years ago.” With Marcia, but Roy left that out. “It couldn’t be the same one.”

“Course it could. This here bitty thing goes all the way into the Tennessee River.”

Remember that time up in Tennessee? What was the name of that crick? Crystal: Marcia naked, sitting on a log, leaning back a little, legs spread a little, bare feet in wildflowers, her eyes right on him as he came out from his swim. How they could have done what they’d done in the next twenty minutes, half hour, and then ended up like this, Roy didn’t understand.

They circled the ridge, found themselves in an up-sloping meadow with knee-high grass and more flowers, red and white. The meadow rose sharply at the end, then leveled out abruptly onto a broad plateau. Not far back on the plateau stood a dark-green grove of what looked like fruit trees, and in the green shadows Roy caught dappled glimpses of stone walls, a door frame, a wagon wheel.

“Not much to see,” Sonny said as they got closer.

Not much to see: stone walls, but crumbling, and the roof gone; door and window frames, but no doors and windows; a wagon wheel but no wagon. Roy went through the front door, smelled dampness and rot, looked out at Sonny Junior watching him through the doorway.

“Like I told you, a fallin’ down ruin.”