BLOOD CREEK - EXCERPT

Near the northern end of Haagen Road, where Danny lives, was Sayers Hill Road. It lay along One Pine Mountain like a piece of gray thread and then dropped down between One Pine Mountain and Two Pine Mountain. Just fifty yards north from that confluence, sat the house and the land that was the last place my aunts were alive. The same house and the land that they come to find me in the dark of night when I was a six-year-old pup determined to outdo my brother. As I got older, I come to understand how lucky it was that they found me. It was my turn now. Me and Danny’s.

I stopped at the second checkpoint at the intersection of those two roads. I could see about a half mile up Sayers Hill before a sharp, upward bend in the road bit off my line of sight from what was behind. All I could see was the trees and the hill itself. Looking west from the second checkpoint, I could see Oviston Mountain Road running northwest up the mountain and southeast down the mountain into Romola. I could see Danny’s trailer from that spot. Danny was sitting on the porch. 

I thanked the people that gathered at the second checkpoint. They offered me something to eat. I couldn’t say no. That’s who these people are. Taking care of others on the day before Thanksgiving when they should be in their own homes with their own, taking care of the things that was part of their own traditions. But here they were. Stamping their feet like cold cattle. Standing together with guns. And they were there for us. And they offered me food. Like I said, I couldn’t say no. That was how the Lucas family done things. No one we asked said no. And others that wasn’t even asked, showed up anyways.

I finished a plate of hash and ate three strips of pan-fried salt pork. I took another plate and walked up to Danny’s.

“Danny?”

He didn’t answer. Wrapped in a wool Army blanket. Bare feet on the wooden porch. The 788 laid across his knees.

“How long you been sittin’ there?”

Whatever he was looking at wasn’t me. “I don’t know. All morning.”

“It ain’t still morning?”

“Hell. I don’t know then.”

“Where’s your boots?”

Danny sighed. 

I eased up the steps. Set the plate of food on a wood chair next to him. “It’s for you if you feel like eatin’.”

“I don’t.”

“All right.”

“What are you lookin’ at?”

“I don’t know. Hell …”

Danny don’t drink. Anyone else might thing he was working off a hard night of alcohol.

“Danny?”

He didn’t answer. The food sat there. A cat pushed his head out of the weeds across the street. It sniffed at the air. Then retreated. I was starting to feel the same way about stepping up on this porch.

“Where’s your head at?” I asked.

I studied the fields. Not a thing shifted. Nothing twitched. Nothing rustled. No grackles landed to peck at any remaining autumn seeds. A wash of lead paint replaced the sky. A truck rumbled down Oviston Mountain Road, engine braking. It hauled a mesh trailer full of feed corn. Soon, it would all be down. I hated that part. When the corn came down to nubs and the land goes from high and regal to low and messy in the blink of an eye.

There are sometimes like this time that I look out on these fields, rising and falling with the gentle folds of the dirt that makes up Strong Land, and those fields look like oceans. I been to the ocean once. The Atlantic. I was eleven. Mom took me and Pen and Danny. Relda came too. It must have cost them most of all they had between them to do it. They watched from the sand, sat out on blankets they brought from home. I remember running out into the waves and getting tumbled. I did it again. And again. The sand ground my shoulders through layers of skin. The salt burned like hell. I saw fish I’d never seen before twitching and swishing around my ankles. Danny walked far out into the water. I wanted to be that tall. The saltwater equalized our height. Pen and I hooked arms, arched our backs and floated on top of the water. I saw a starfish on the sand. Dead and brittle. I threw it back into the ocean. It rolled back onto the shore. I left it. The next morning Pen woke me up. Come on Nickie, she said. We are going to the ocean again. I told her I ain’t going. Why not? I done seen it. Even then I knew I’d take a field of late fall corn, golden and rustling and smelling of something more than pure, over any ocean. When the last rows were cut down, well, every year, it made me feel like bawling. Goddamn, I hated that part.

“Danny?”

“Yeah.”

“You remember us going to the ocean?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever think about it?”

Danny didn’t respond.

I was rushed with a feeling like I shouldn’t have set foot on his porch and I would be best suited to retreat like that cat.

Danny got up. “Wait here.” He come back a few minutes later. His hair was wet and his clothes were changed. “I’m going to the bank.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep. You comin’ with?”

“We holding it up?” 

Danny grinned. “Nope. Got all the money and things I need right where you stand.”

His food set there. “You gonna eat that?” 

“I ain’t hungry.”

I flipped the food off the plate, it sailed across the street, landing on the grass. I gave it ten seconds. The cat darted out and snatched a slice of bacon and then ran back to the field.

“Thought so,” I said to the cat.

“Don’t talk to my cat like that.”

“Danny, you ain’t got a cat?”

“All right.”

“You want to bring anyone with us?”

“You packing?”

“Yep.”

“Then no, I don’t.”