To his right, off beyond the last black swatch of trees in silhouette cresting the nob, he could hear a long cry of tires on the curves; in a little while the sound of a motor racking the night. The car came through the cut of the mountain, howling brokenly in the windgap. Fine pencils of light appeared far below him, swinging an arc, shadows racing on the lit trees and then lining down the road and the car hurtling into sight, small and black, pushing the lights ahead of it. It rocketed down the grade and in a thin and slowly fading wail of rubber slid to darkness again where the road curved at the foot of the mountain.
The old man’s legs began to cramp under him and he rose and stood about trying to work the stiffness out of them. He balanced on one leg and bent himself up and down by the strength of his knee. Then he stooped all the way down and tried to raise himself, an old man, exercising at midnight on a mountain top — too old to get up that way, and that was the good leg too. He hadn’t been able to do it with the other leg for years and it creaked like dry harness. It still had birdshot in it, above the knee and higher, almost (he could remember yet the doctor pointing to the last little blue hole) to where a man surely oughtn’t to be hit. Years later the leg had begun to weaken. The head too, the old man told himself, and got up, looked out over the valley once more before starting up the road.
Toward Red Branch a dog barked again. Another answered, and another, their calls and yaps spreading across the valley until the last sound was thin and distant as an echo. No dogs howled in the Hopper or down along Forked Creek where the old man lived. He thought of Scout bedded under the house, old and lame with his tattered hide half naked of hair, the bald patches crusted and scaly-skinned as a lizard. Scout with his hand-stitched belly and ribboned ears, split their length in places, whose brows so folded over his eyes that he could see at all only by holding up his head — which gave him an inquisitive air as he walked, as if he followed forever some wonderful odor strung out before him. Big even for a redbone, a strong dog in his day, but he was seventeen years old. The old man had traded a broken shotgun for him when he was a pup.
He walked and ruminated and furrowed the dust absently with his cane until he came to the circle at the end of the road and the knoll beyond where the trees had been plucked from the ground and not even a weed grew. A barren spot, bright in the moonwash, mercurial and luminescent as a sea, the pits from which the trees had been wrenched dark on the naked bulb of the mountain as moon craters. And on the very promontory of this lunar scene the tank like a great silver ikon, fat and bald and sinister. When he got to the fence he stopped and leaned his cane and hooked his fingers through the mesh of the wire. Within the enclosure there was no movement. The great dome stood complacent, huge, seeming older than the very dirt, the rocks, as if it had spawned them of itself and stood surveying the work, clean and coldly gleaming and capable of infinite contempt.
He clung there wrapped in the fence for some time, perhaps the better part of an hour. He did not move except that from time to time he licked the cold metal of the diamonded wire with his tongue.
When the old man reached home again the moon was down. He did not remember coming back down the mountain. But there was the house looming, taking shape as he approached, and he felt that he had come a great distance, a sleepwalker who might have spanned vast and dangerous terrains unwittingly and unharmed.
As he turned his steps up the path a shadow swirled past his knees and fled soundlessly into the night.
In one corner of the front room there was an old wooden footlocker and the old man cleared away papers and clothes from the top of it and set the lamp on the floor close by. Then he undid the broken hasp and lifted it open. He rummaged through it, stopping now and again to examine some object: a brass watch weighing perhaps a quarter of a pound, a pair of cock-gaffs, a.32 rimfire revolver with owlhead grips and the hand broken so that the cylinder spun smooth as a barrel in water. Reams and sheafs of old catalogs and lists he thumbed through. An eight-gauge shotgun shell. At length he came up with a small square box decorated with flying ducks and this he set on the floor beside the lamp. He dropped the lid of the locker closed and the lamp flickered, on the wall a black ghoul hulking over a bier wavered.
He took the lamp and the box to the kitchen and placed them on the table. From the drawer he took a short curved meat knife and tested the edge on his thumb, pulled the drawer out further and reaching back in it came out with a worn gray piece of soapstone. With this he honed the knife, trying it from time to time on the hair of his arm until he was satisfied, then replaced the stone and opened the box. There were twelve bright red waxed tubes in it and he set them out on the table one by one, their dull brass bases orange in the lampglow. He selected one and with the knife made a thin cut around the base of the paper where the brass met. He examined it carefully, then deepened the cut, turning the shell against the blade. He checked it again, nodded to his nodding shadow and put the shell back in the box. He performed the same operation on the remaining eleven, putting each in turn in the box again. When he had finished he replaced the knife in the drawer and returned to the front room where he took them one by one, the twelve circumcised shotgun shells, and deposited them in the pocket of his coat.
6
Ef Hobie’s father had been dead too long for the people who admired Ef to remember him. They were a whiskey-making family before whiskey-making was illegal, their family history mythical, preliterate and legendary. They had neither increased nor prospered and now Garland was the last surviving son. Ef had died in a car wreck in 1937, less than a year after coming out of Brushy Mountain. Not in the wreck either — he lived three weeks and was even back on his feet, where he wasn’t supposed to be at all, and in the store where people looked uneasily at his gaunt frame, who had weighed just short of three hundred pounds. He had been thrown clear of the car and then the car had rolled on top of him and they had removed a good part of his insides in the process of restoring him to health. He was showing them the slick red scar that angled across his withered paunch and sucking long drafts from an orange dope.
They performed a autopsy on me and I lived, he told them. Then he laughed and got down off the drink box, emptied his orange and reached to put it in the rack. The bottle clattered on the floor, he lurched once, wildly, collapsed into the bread rack and went to the floor in a cascade of cupcakes and moonpies.
So there were only two Hobies, Garland and his mother, and hard luck dogged them. Within the month Jack the Runner was arrested and sent up to Brushy for three years himself and county deputies broke into their smokehouse and took off what whiskey was there and took Mrs Hobie, aged seventy-eight, off to jail, sending her back home only when it was discovered she had cancer of the duodenum.
So Garland had to carry the whiskey up the mountain now to a den in the honeysuckles just below the circle and leave it there for Marion Sylder to pick up and haul to Knoxville. There was a gate across the orchard road since the installation had been set up on the mountain and only official carriers were permitted access — olive-painted trucks with gold emblems on the doors, passing in and out of the gate, the men in drab fatigues locking and unlocking the chain sedulously. With like diligence Sylder bolted and unbolted the ring-plate that held the chain on his comings and goings in the old Plymouth. But the two parties using the road kept different hours and they never met.
It was four o’clock in the morning when Sylder heard the old man shoot the first hole in the tank. He almost let go the case of whiskey he was carrying and then when the second shot came, hard upon the first, he set the case down carefully and stood dead still, waiting for cries, commands — an explanation. All was quiet. The birds were stilled in their first tentative and querulous chirpings. Low in the east and beyond the town a gray soulless dawn gnawed the horizon into shape. He was braced for another report, holding his breath, echoing the outrageously loud concussion in his inner ear before it came — two more shots, evenly spaced, something deliberate about them. Sylder made his way stealthily along the edge of the honeysuckle jungle, crossed an open space, arm of the orchard, going in the direction of the shooting.