Ron Rash - Burning Bright

But I’m still careful. I don’t go inside, just wait by some trees until I see Timmy Shackleford come out. He doesn’t live far from me and I step into the parking lot and ask if he’d mind giving me a ride to my trailer.

“You look like the night rode you hard,” Timmy says.

I look in the side mirror and I do look rough.

“Got knee-walking drunk,” I say. “Last thing I remember I was with a bunch of fellows in a car and said I needed to piss. They set me by the side of the road and took off laughing. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in a ditch.”

That’s a better lie than I’d have reckoned to spin and I figure I have picked up some pointers from Wesley. Timmy grins but doesn’t say anything else. He lets me out at my trailer and goes on his way. I’m starved and have got enough dirt on me to plant a garden, but I just fall in the bed and don’t open my eyes till it’s full dark outside. When I come awake it’s with the deepest kind of fearing, and for a few moments I’m more scared than any time before in my life. Then my mind settles and I see I’m in the trailer, not still in that graveyard.

Come Monday at work I hear how they found Wesley’s truck by the river, and most figure him down there fishing or drinking or both and he fell in and drowned. They drag the river for days but of course nothing comes up.

I wait a month before I try to sell the Civil War stuff, driving all the way to Montgomery, Alabama, to a big CSA convention where a whole auditorium is full of buyers and sellers. Some want certificates of authenticity and such, but I finally find a buyer I can do some business with. A lady at the library has pulled up some prices on the Internet and I’ve got a good figuring of what my stash is worth. The buyer’s only offering half what the value is but he’s also not asking for certificates or even my name. I tell him I’ll take what he’s offering but only if it’s cash money. He grumbles a bit about that, then finally says, “Stay here,” and goes off and comes back with fifty-two hundred-dollar bills, new bills so crisp and smooth they look starched and ironed.

It’s more money than the hospital bill and I give what’s left to Momma. That makes what I’ve done feel less worrisome. I think about something else too, how both them graves had big fancy tombstones of cut marble, meaning those dead Confederates hadn’t known much wanting of money in their lives. Now that they was dead there was some fairness in letting Momma have something of what they’d left behind.

The only bad thing is I keep having a dream where that old man has shot me and I’m buried in the hole with Wesley. I’m shot bad but still alive and dirt’s piled on me and somewhere up above I hear that old man laughing like he was the devil himself. Every time I dream it, I rear up in bed and don’t stop gasping for nearly a whole minute. I’ve dreamed that same exact dream at least once a month for a year now, and I guess it’s likely I’ll keep doing so for the rest of my life. There’s always a price to be paid for anything you get. I wish it weren’t so, for it’s a fearsome dream, but if it’s the worst to come of all that happened I can live with it.

Jared had never been this far before, over Sawmill Ridge and across a creek glazed with ice, then past the triangular metal sign that said SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK. If it had still been snowing and his tracks were being covered up, he’d have turned back. People had gotten lost in this park. Children wandered off from family picnics, hikers strayed off trails. Sometimes it took days to find them. But today the sun was out, the sky deep and blue. No more snow would fall, so it would be easy to retrace his tracks. Jared heard a helicopter hovering somewhere to the west, which meant they still hadn’t found the airplane. They’d been searching all the way from Bryson City to the Tennessee line, or so he’d heard at school.

The land slanted downward and the sound of the helicopter disappeared. In the steepest places, Jared leaned sideways and held on to trees to keep from slipping. As he made his way into the denser woods, he wasn’t thinking of the lost airplane or if he would get the mountain bike he’d asked for as his Christmas present. Not thinking about his parents either, though they were the main reason he was spending his first day of Christmas vacation out here-better to be outside on a cold day than in the house where everything, the rickety chairs and sagging couch, the gaps where the TV and microwave had been, felt sad.

He thought instead of Lyndee Starnes, the girl who sat in front of him in fifth grade homeroom. Jared made believe that she was walking beside him and he was showing her the tracks in the snow, telling her which markings were squirrel and which rabbit and which deer. Imagining a bear track too, and telling Lyndee that he wasn’t afraid of bears and Lyndee telling him she was so he’d have to protect her.

Jared stopped walking. He hadn’t seen any human tracks, but he looked behind him to be sure no one was around. He took out the pocketknife and raised it, making believe that the pocketknife was a hunting knife and that Lyndee was beside him. If a bear comes, I’ll take care of you, he said out loud. Jared imagined Lyndee reaching out and taking his free arm. He kept the knife out as he walked up another ridge, one whose name he didn’t know. He imagined Lyndee still grasping his arm, and as they walked up the ridge Lyndee saying how sorry she was that at school she’d told him he and his clothes smelled bad.

At the ridgetop, Jared pretended a bear suddenly raised up, baring its teeth and growling. He slashed at the bear with the knife and the bear ran away. Jared held the knife before him as he descended the ridge. Sometimes they’ll come back, he said aloud.

He was halfway down the ridge when the knife blade caught the midday sun and the steel flashed. Another flash came from below, as if it was answering. At first Jared saw only a glimmer of metal in the dull green of rhododendron, but as he came nearer he saw more, a crumpled silver propeller and white tailfin and part of a shattered wing.

For a few moments Jared thought about turning around, but then told himself that an eleven-year-old who’d just fought a bear shouldn’t be afraid to get close to a crashed airplane. He made his way down the ridge, snapping rhododendron branches to clear a path. When he finally made it to the plane, he couldn’t see much because snow and ice covered the windows. He turned the passenger side’s outside handle, but the door didn’t budge until Jared wedged in the pocketknife’s blade. The door made a sucking sound as it opened.

A woman was in the passenger seat, her body bent forward like a horseshoe. Long brown hair fell over her face. The hair had frozen and looked as if it would snap off like icicles. She wore blue jeans and a yellow sweater. Her left arm was flung out before her and on one finger was a ring. The man across from her leaned toward the pilot window, his head cocked against the glass. Blood stains reddened the window and his face was not covered like the woman’s. There was a seat in the back, empty. Jared placed the knife in his pocket and climbed into the backseat and closed the passenger door. Because it’s so cold, that’s why they don’t smell much, he thought.

For a while he sat and listened to how quiet and still the world was. He couldn’t hear the helicopter or even the chatter of a gray squirrel or caw of a crow. Here between the ridges not even the sound of the wind. Jared tried not to move or breathe hard to make it even quieter, quiet as the man and woman up front. The plane was snug and cozy. After a while he heard something, just the slightest sound, coming from the man’s side. Jared listened harder, then knew what it was. He leaned forward between the front seats. The man’s right forearm rested against a knee. Jared pulled back the man’s shirt sleeve and saw the watch. He checked the time, almost four o’clock. He’d been sitting in the backseat two hours, though it seemed only a few minutes. The light that would let him follow the tracks back home would be gone soon.