“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.”
“Now, no.”
“Half, then,” Joe said. “It’s in that poke setting on top of the woodpile.”
Orben propped his rifle on a log and opened the sack. He ate most of the sandwich in three bites before offering the rest to Joe, who shook his head.
“You got to,” Orben said.
He passed the food to Joe and poured coffee into the plastic lid of the thermos. He lit a cigarette.
Joe changed the position of his legs and reached behind his back. The pistol grip was cold in his hand. He began easing it free of the holster. He thought of the holes in Rodale’s face, of Morgan living alone like an animal in a lair. He’d killed Rodale for his brother, but he couldn’t kill for himself. He released the gun and sat straight.
“Back bothering ye?” Orben said. “I know how that is. I slept outside the last two nights. There’s a knot in my hip like somebody drove a nail in.”
“I got something for you,” Joe said. “It’s in my pocket, so don’t get nervous.”
“Shoot, takes more than you to make me nervous.”
Joe tilted sideways and pushed his hand in his pants pocket and removed the belt balancer that Morgan had given him. It was the last thing he owned of the hills. He tossed it to Orben.
“Know what that is?”
“Belt balancer,” Orben said. “Uncle Shorty made a many till his eyes went. This is a nice one. Poplar, my opinion.”
He threw it in an arc that landed in Joe’s lap, Joe held the piece of wood in his palm, surprised that it had returned so rapidly, like a boomerang.
“Reckon what I’ll tell them in Blizzard,” Orben said.
“I don’t know. Maybe the truth.”
“Yours or mine?” Orben said. “Damn, this coffee’s good.”
“Best way is not to say nothing. They’ll think the worst for a while, then they’ll forget about it. You can’t get in no trouble that way. I used to think a good lie was close to the truth. Now I think it’s not saying a word. That way they make up their own lies.”
“They always said you was smart, Virgil.”
Orben placed the thermos on a stump and stood. He lifted his rifle until its barrel aimed at the sky.
“See you, Virge,” Orben said.
“Don’t run off.”
“Anybody you want me to howdy for you?”
Joe shook his head. Orben walked to the edge of the clearing. Joe slowly stood.
“Hey,” Joe said.
Orben turned, his expression wary. The rifle lowered slightly. Joe wanted to memorize the way he looked, a final image of home.
“What was it Boyd did,” Joe said, “that made Billy shoot him?”
“I don’t know,” Orben said. “I surely don’t.”
He stepped into the woods and disappeared among the brown trunks and drooping lower boughs of the trees.
26
An immense loneliness settled over Joe. He was both exhausted and exhilarated from the talk with Orben, as though he’d suddenly gone home for a day. The events that had transpired in his absence lay like unsorted lumber in his mind.
The sky was streaked by smoke. His eyes burned and he wondered if they needed to evacuate. The sound of aircraft echoed off the river. He walked up the slope past tumbleweed piled against the broken fence line. He had no idea how much time had passed. Orben’s accent still roared in his head. He felt as if the hills of Kentucky were walking away from him.
In the house the kids were sitting on the couch. Abilene sucked his finger and held Dallas’s hair, who cocked his head toward his brother’s grasp.
“Coop’s mad,” Dallas said. “He said if we came in his room, he’d shoot us.”
“Nobody’s shooting anybody around here,” Joe said.
Joe went to his old room, where Coop slumped over the radio like a cardplayer in an all-night game. Botree held a finger to her lips. A new map lay on the table, unmarked save for a single black circle among the whorls of elevation. Inside the circle was the letter F like a cattle brand. The CB squealed and Frank’s voice crackled over the air.
“Hear this, you jackbooted thugs? Hear it?”
There was the quick noise of scraping metal and a louder sound of something ramming into place.
“That’s full-auto rock and roll. Camp Megiddo is waiting. My army of patriots has fifty-caliber machine-gun emplacements. We have antitank artillery. We have surface-to-air missiles. The man who kills me is only following orders. The Bill of Rights is dead. If the government excludes itself, why must I then abide? Bless them, Father, they know not what they do.”