Chris Offutt - The Good Brother

“Yeah, I used to pick their garbage up.”

“Well, they’re all tore out. And that’s where the new school’s going in,”

“By the drive-in?”

“That’s gone, too.”

“Anything else?”

“Post office shut down. Zeph, he retired, and down it went. I always liked him.”

“Me, too,” Joe said. “Reckon how old he is?”

“I don’t know, but he’s up there. Don’t he look like a turtle to you?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “I never thought about it, but he did. The way his head set on his neck. How about the bootlegger?”

“You won’t believe it,” Orben said. “They’re trying to get bars in town now, and all the bootleggers are glommed up with the preachers to fight it. Go to church and there’s a bootlegger on the front row, like a hen trying to lay a goose egg,”

“You just know the bootleggers are giving them money.”

“Shoot, yes. Every church in the county’s got a new air conditioner and fresh gravel.”

“Who they calling for to win?”

“It’ll go wet if the college kids vote. The whole fight’s over keeping them out.”

Joe wondered if they’d build new bars, or convert stores to taverns. People who drank in cars might prefer to stay away.

“You’d not know town, Virgil. Eight here lately, there’s talk of building a bypass.”

“A bypass of what?”

“Main Street.”

“Where would it go?”

“They want it to run alongside of Main Street, back toward the creek.”

“Why the hell would they do that?”

“Takes too long to get through town. Funny thing, they want to put traffic lights on the bypass. Pretty soon they’ll need a bypass for the bypass.”

He laughed and Joe grinned, The world had passed Rocksalt by for a hundred years, and now the town was going to make it easier.

“Town,” Joe said. He shook his head. “I’d still yet rather sit in the woods any day. Even if they ain’t my woods.”

“Only thing Rocksalt’s good for is getting out of.”

Again a sense of unease entered the air between them. Wind carried the smell of juniper and spruce from deeper in the woods.

“What happened to my trailer?” Joe said.

“Marlon sold it. That’s how he started his muffler shop. They say the people that bought it draws the biggest government check in Blizzard.”

“They got a bunch of babies, or what?”

“No, nothing like that. There’s just the two of them. It’s the crazy check I reckon.”

“Is there anything else gone on without me?”

“You can get Ale-8 all over the county now.”

“I’d give twenty dollars for a bottle right now. You ain’t got one, do you?”

“Not on me, I sure don’t,”

Joe’s leg hurt and he shifted position to stretch it across the dirt. Orben tensed at the movement, gripping the rifle. The woods were quiet Sunlight spread through the tangle of pine boughs.

“Ever hear anything on old man Morgan?” Joe said.

“Don’t believe I know him.”

“He went deep in them woods past Sparks Branch and set down a long time back. Supposed to have killed a bunch who worked in the old clay mines.”

“I heard that story. My mamaw used to tell me if I didn’t act right, he’d get me. It’s bullshit.”

“He’s real,” Joe said. “He told me you’d come.”

“I don’t reckon.”

“Not you, by name. He said if I shot Billy, there’d be somebody to come. Said they always would be. Said as soon as you Mil one man, you got to kill more. Said it wasn’t no easier either.”

Orben watched him without moving, his hands tight on the rifle.

“You ain’t talking me out of it,” he said.

“I’m ready to die. Half my family’s dead and I can’t go home. Same thing’ll happen to you. If you go back, somebody’ll sneak up on you. Same as you done me.”

“Damn straight, Virgil.”

Orben lifted the rifle to his shoulder. It was a battered Remington, good for squirrel, rabbit, and beer cans. Ty wouldn’t stock it.

Joe’s voice was soft, as if speaking to himself.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I never done it. When I first got here I thought it was the same as Kentucky only the hills were taller. But it ain’t. You’re the first person in a year I talked to who knows how I was raised — start right in talking and tell everybody everything all the time. These people out here don’t say much.

“It’s like my world got a hole in it and all the life run out. I can’t walk on land and know I’ve walked it a thousand times. I miss coming up the creek and seeing my home hill setting there waiting on me. I miss being in the woods bad. Hunting ginseng and mushrooms. I ain’t seen a lightning bug in a year, or dew either. The colors here don’t change much. The hills stay dark green, then get white in winter and back to dark. There’s no songbirds or whippoor-wills. I could eat a mile of soupbeans and cornbread. I miss pork something awful. I don’t reckon they ever heard of a hog out here.

“I miss my family most. Mom. Sara and them. I miss Boyd, too, even dead. He didn’t leave no tracks in this country. Out here the only place he’s alive is inside my head.

“I miss Virgil Caudill,” he said. “Who the hills made me into. This land’s not mine. It’s great to look at, but it’s not part of me. The house I live in isn’t mine. Even the kids aren’t mine. Everything I’ve got is left over from somebody else.”

Joe inhaled deeply and held the air in his lungs as long as possible. He could talk all day. Orben cleared his throat. He moved the rile until it lay across his lap, aimed into the brush.

“I knew Boyd,” Orben said. “All my buddies did. He was sure something to us. Even my mamaw liked him. She used to say the truth must be in him, because it ain’t never come out yet.”

He flicked the safety shut behind the trigger, a snapping sound that hung in the air. Joe realized that Orben might not shoot him and felt a dim pang of disappointment.

“I never did like Rodale,” Orben said. “They was some said he got what he deserved. Said they seen it coming when he was just a tad-whacker. My great-uncle said it would have happened sooner in his day.”

“Who was that?”

“Shorty Jones.”

“Lives on Redbird, don’t he.”

“Yes,” Orben said. “He raised me part way up. He don’t know I left, and he don’t know I took his gun. When my cousin called me, coming after you sounded like fun. I just jumped in the car and took off, but I didn’t like them flat states. You can drive all day and not get nowhere. It made me nervous. Every time I stopped for gas I wanted to lay down to keep from tipping over. I don’t see how people can get around on land with no hills to go by. You’d need a map just to find the store.

“By God, I was five days and three hundred dollars getting to Butte and then my car broke down. I saw the biggest mine hole in the world, I mean big, Virgil. Makes ours look puny. A rough-seeming people but they treated me good. I sold my car and took a bus to Missoula. Wrapped my rifle up in cardboard and put it over my head like it wasn’t nothing.”

“How’d you get down here?”

“Walked.”

“All the way from town?”

“I couldn’t hitchhike packing a rifle. Nights sure throw a chill.” Orben gazed around the somber woods of cedar, spruce, and fir. “I don’t see how you’ve lasted this long, Virgil.”

“I didn’t have much choice.”

“I seen pronghorn by the road out here. Antelope, too. And elk. They got buffalo?”

“I never saw none,” Joe said. “Why don’t you come up to the house and get something to eat.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I got a sandwich right here. Baloney on light bread, and there’s coffee in a thermos.”