I rubbed my eyes, shaking myself further awake and away from the screaming dead men. "You sound like a tour guide."
"I know." He looked out the windshield. Tears brimmed in his eyes but he was smiling. "You have any idea how long I've dreamed about seeing this road again? I knew it would be just the same. Most roads like this in Kentucky never change. Thank God."
I sat up. Outside it was raining—nothing spectacular, just one of those constant gray drizzles that leaves the road slightly muddy and everything else looking as if it's shimmering from somewhere deep inside.
Have you ever driven through Kentucky? Now, I know from books and television and movies that actual cities are rumored to exist there, but from the route Christopher was taking, you'd never be able to tell it.
I have never seen so many hills in my life. The road we were on was this twisting, turning, narrow two-lane snake that wound through lush trees crowding closer to the side every time we made a turn. Even though it was only two-thirty in the afternoon, a luminous mist skirled across the road like ghost-tides lapping at shores no longer existent except in their ghostly memory. We were going uphill all the way so far, and I think we passed maybe four cars, at least three times as many deer, and two semis who moved with the deep-gutted roars and slow, desperate deliberation of dinosaurs crawling from the tar. The one time I dared to peek out the side window and look over into one of the deep ditches—just to see how deep it was—I about passed out from vertigo; the side of the hill (or was it a mountain?) dropped straight down, at least three hundred feet, and into a river speckled with the knotted, bare branches of trees gliding along, having caught a free ride on the current.
Still, I stared at that sheer drop. "You've never driven this road before, have you?"
"Nope," said Christopher. "But I've driven some damned dangerous ones, so don't worry—I'm not about to send us sailing over the side."
"Could I have that in writing?"
"Enjoy the view, why don't you?"
"I'm trying."
"Try harder."
Eventually, and about as suddenly as a roller coaster, the road plummeted to a short steel bridge that rattled and shook like a bag of bones as we crossed it. Then I remembered that we had an actual bag of bones in here with us and heard the dead men screaming and felt sick and sad all over again.
Through the windshield I saw the shear side of a mountain—a rock face—then the road hung a 90-degree to the left, pointing us through yet another set of hills lined on either side with yet more thick firs and pines. A family of deer stood among the trees nibbling at the grass; they lifted their heads and looked at us as we lumbered past. I felt like we were intruding.
The road narrowed down to a single rutted lane here, and I occasionally spotted old, rusted railroad rails scattered among the trees, as well skeletons of homemade chairs, what looked like blankets, and swear I once spotted the remains of a log cabin.
Here and there, up on the mountainsides in the distance, shelves of rock hovered over what looked like shallow caves.
I pointed up toward one. "Are those caves or something else?"
Christopher looked in the direction I was pointing. "That's a cave—if it was a mine, you'd see timber propping the entrance."
"You know about mining?"
"You bet. My grandfather worked these mines. He used to talk about it a lot after he got sick and came to stay with us.
"All these mountains you're looking at, they're limestone with seams of coal. Sometimes the seam goes straight into the mountain, but usually it sort of just angles in and the coal shaft follows the seams. The shafts are propped with timbers, and generally slate lies above the coal. You take out enough of the coal and that slate—wham!—it'll come crashing down right on top of your head."
"Even if there are timbers propping it up?"
"Hell, yes. Timber gets soaked over the years, it weakens, doesn't take much to make it snap. Limestone is really porous, so there's always ground water. In those days, when my grandpa worked the mines, if a miner hit a narrow seam, he had to lie on his back in the water—can you imagine what that must be like? There you are, God-only-knows how deep down, in the dark, on your back in water, between all these rocks, pushing shovels backward over your shoulder to draw out loose coal."
"I'll stick with cleaning toilets and doing windows, thank you."
"Yeah… I wish Grandpa would have done something else. Goddamn mines killed him. Turned his lungs into blackened Swiss cheese and twisted up his back so bad he couldn't stand up straight. He had to use a walker to move around, and even then me and Paul had to help."
I look ahead into the road. The canopy formed by the tree limbs grew lower and thicker the wetter it was made by rain, and soon Christopher had to turn on his headlights.
"How much longer until we get to our first stop?" I asked.
"About that," he said. "There's been a change in plan." He looked at me. "If you don't mind, I want to stop by my family's place first. I've been thinking about what you said, about how I'm above it now, better than him"—he gestured with his head back toward the trailer—"and I've decided that this has to end now. You talk to my folks, do your Mr. U.S. Marshal number, then I'll show myself and we'll call the cops and they can take him and do whatever they want."
"What about the bodies in there with him?"
Christopher paused, blinked. "Think the police will believe it was self-defense?"
"I honestly don't know—but after what you've been through, I doubt any judge is going to want to put you in prison."
He nodded. "Well… I'll guess we'll see, won't we?"
"You realize that I have no idea what your last name is?"
He laughed. "I guess it didn't come up, did it? It's Matthews."
I held out my hand. "Pleased to meet you, Christopher Matthews."
He shook it. "A pleasure, sir."
I sat back, checked myself in the mirror—the black eyes were so dark I looked like a raccoon—then patted down my hair and said, "My grandmother treated my dad like garbage his entire life."
"Now we get to it."
"You told me about your Grandpa, I'm going to tell you about my grandmother—unless you interrupt me again."
He mimed zipping closed his mouth.
"Look, the list of things she did to him when he was a kid—let alone what she did to him as an adult—would go on forever and depress the shit of you, so I'm just going to skip to thing that made me write her off permanently, okay?
"The last Christmas before Dad retired, money was a little tight—hell, money had always been tight, but this year it was even tighter than usual, right? Dad only had sixteen dollars to buy Grandma a present, so the day before Christmas, he puts on his best coat and best boots and walks downtown because he doesn't want to waste money on a cab—no, my folks didn't drive, either one of them. I mean, they used to, but both their eyesight was going and, besides, they could always call Tanya or me. Anyway, he walks downtown—we're talking three, four miles in the middle of winter, ten degrees and snowing, a sixty-three-year-old man who's still recovering from radiation treatments from the first bout of cancer—he walks down and goes through all the stores, looking for something nice he can buy her with his sixteen dollars, and eventually he finds this really, really nice scarf, gloves, and perfume boxed set, thirteen bucks. He shoots the other three bucks to have them gift wrap it because Grandma is supposed to come over and pick up her gifts that night. Then he walks all the way back home in snow that's getting wetter and heavier.
"Grandma never showed up that Christmas Eve, she didn't show up on Christmas Day, or the day after, or the day after, not for New Year's… that present sat in their house for six fucking months before she got it—and even then she sent one of her other grandkids to get it, then went out of her way to call and tell him that she already had plenty of gloves and scarves but maybe she could use the perfume. It broke his heart. By then he was getting sick again—that little Christmas Eve stroll left him with walking pneumonia, and it was while he was being treated for it that his doctor discovered the cancer was back.