Josh let the Ohio Valley Medical Supply van pull away from the curb and took its parking spot in front of the clinic. He was disappointed to see three patients in the waiting room. Mom and a kid who’d been bit by a snake. Fifteen minutes, he estimated. Old man in a John Deere hat with a nasty gash on his arm, forty-five minutes, depending on the number of stitches. A young woman with crutches and an icepack on her ankle. That might mean X-rays. He figured at least ninety minutes for everyone.
Two hours and two Field & Streams later, Allison entered the room in jeans and a ponytail tied with a red ribbon—a particularly welcome sight, Josh concluded, after one had been looking at nothing but photos of deer and cutthroat trout.
He assumed they would take his Volvo but she had other ideas. “We’ll need four-wheel drive and good ground clearance,” she pointed out. “Besides, I want to drive.”
He climbed into her blue Jeep Wagoneer unable to remember the last time he had been a passenger.
“They checked the x-ray machine today,” Allison said. “I know it’s not what you want to hear but it’s working fine. We haven’t heard back about the film.”
“Those x-rays won’t matter once Pepper calls.” He thought of the phrase Sharon had ultimately found so comforting: It will be what it will be.
Heavy mist turned to rain as they headed east, away from the river. Winston’s old homes, quaint downtown and new subdivisions gave way to a dirt-streaked house trailer behind a huge satellite dish in a scraggly cornfield, an ancient half-painted farmhouse with plastic sheeting in the window and a blue couch on the porch, a collapsed chicken coop overgrown with weeds, a pile of rusting farm implements.
They were all reminders of something Josh had long observed: the further you moved away from the river, the harder life seemed to get.
Near the rivers were great stretches of flat land ideal for farming, a business, a housing development, a town. The state’s cities—Charleston, Huntington, Parkersburg, Fairmont—had developed there. But the mountains buckled quickly from the river plains and developable land elsewhere was scarce. A swatch along a big river tributary might support several dozen farms, some churches, a few stores—a community with a name frequently containing the words “Branch, Fork, Run, Lick.” Further upstream, along the rocky creeks and narrow streams, a parcel of five or ten acres might be found, enough for a hard-working man to support a family through farming, a few animals and the occasional odd job—enough if he and the family had no higher aspirations. But there was no question: when wide rivers turned to creeks and streams, the land got narrower, backyards got more vertical, the going got rougher.
And, it had to be acknowledged, the people and the customs often got stranger. Mountains meant isolation, with education and change sometimes less prevalent than marriage between blood relatives. Vestiges of Elizabethan English, snake handling, and people with abnormal chromosomes could be found in the deep hollows. Josh himself had encountered inbred, pinched-faced, hawk-nosed women and children with skin so translucent, locals unremarkably referred to them as “the blue people.” In covering the trial of two men accused of the murder of their mother, he had learned about the mountain cult that practiced crucifixion.
Josh shifted his attention to Allison. The rain was still light and she drove easily, left hand on the steering wheel, right hand toying with her hair ribbon. He happened to fix upon the position of her driver’s seat and was again struck by her long legs.
They slowed for a six-man state highway crew filling potholes from the previous winter’s freezes.
“Three guys to do the work, one to lean on the shovel, one to drink the coffee and one to watch,” Allison muttered as the smell of hot tar infused the Wagoneer. “All getting overtime.”
The rain began to fall harder. The Wagoneer’s windshield wipers worked to keep up.
Twelve miles later, they turned onto a narrow gravel road that ran parallel to a churning stream red with mud, swollen by the rain. Steep hills loomed around them, deepening the gloom. Allison switched on the Wagoneer’s lights. “We’re almost there,” she said.
Josh bounced hard in his seat as they lurched from one water-filled pothole to the next, the back end of the big vehicle clawing for traction in the mud. Playing the brake and the accelerator perfectly, Allison handled the challenge like a veteran off-road driver. Josh thanked his lucky stars they hadn’t taken his Volvo.
By the time they crossed a rickety metal bridge, water had risen to within a few inches of the top of the bank and only three or four feet below the grated surface of the bridge. A half-mile down the road, they came across a scattering of tired, frame houses on small plots of land. Allison slowed the Wagoneer near a sign that read “Blood Run. Unincorporated.”
“Which place is his?” Josh asked.
“Don’t know. But chances are they’re all Scruggs one way or another.”
Allison assessed which house was most likely to contain people who would help them. She had developed the skill during her medical school residency at Detroit City Hospital when one of her assignments had been tracking communicable diseases. That meant going into neighborhoods where cooperation with authorities was not always highly valued. She found she was more inclined to be welcomed, or at least tolerated, in homes with some external sign of hope—flowers in a window box, toys in a yard, a vegetable garden out back.
A single-story house, with a tin roof and walls clad in faded brown shingles caught her eye. A ringer washer sat on its sagging front porch, along with the one bright object in the whole rainy, dreary landscape—a child’s tricycle with multi-colored tassels hanging from the handlebars. She noticed a wisp of smoke curling from a large weathered shed that sat behind the house on the edge of the creek.
“Might as well start here.” Allison parked the Wagoneer, pulled on her poncho and started down a muddy driveway that ran between a few scraggly rows of corn and a barbwire-fenced pasture occupied by a single anorexic cow. As she walked she became aware of a sweet, cloying smell that permeated the air despite the hard rain. Like sour apples cooking, she thought.
Allison had already knocked on the front door and was attempting to peer through a rusting screen on the clouded front window when Josh caught up with her. “No one here,” she declared. She stepped off the porch and headed around back. Josh followed.
“Smells like someone’s cooking applesauce,” Allison said.
The rain had become a downpour. Allison pulled her poncho over her head and sprinted to the shed, taking shelter beneath a section of the rusted tin roof that overlapped one side. She heard noises. She peered through a gap in the planking.
There, illuminated by a single light bulb, she saw a young man holding a fly fishing rod bent double. As the quivering rod twisted and turned and the man reeled frantically, it looked for the entire world like the man was in the fish-fight of his life.
Josh pulled up beside her. “I’m not believing this,” she whispered, not moving her eye from the gap in the planks. The momentum of the fight shifted. The reel sang as yards of line spooled out. Then she caught sight of the fisherman’s prey. A large brown rat. With what appeared to be a strip of leather clenched in its jaws, it scampered across the floor of the shed, flipping and twisting like a rainbow trout on a fly as the fisherman fought for control and maneuvered to keep the line from tangling. She abandoned her peephole only after the rat darted behind a stack of empty plastic milk jugs, the lure still in its mouth.
In the next second two events occurred so closely together that even as everything turned into slow motion and she watched the earth coming up to meet her she could not tell which came first—the roar of a shotgun or the tremendous force that struck her between her shoulder blades and slammed her into the soggy ground.
She knew she was not dead when she detected again the sweet and sour smell of cooking apples, now mixed with the sharp edge of spent gunpowder. Wet spread across her shirt and jeans and she waited for the pain. She tried to move and couldn’t. Something heavy was holding her down, a feeling she’d known before but couldn’t immediately place.
She became aware of muddy black boots just inches from her face. Her eyes followed the boots up a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt and into the face of the man she had seen with the fly rod.
The weight lifted from her back and she realized that Josh had been lying on top of her. He pulled her to her feet. “You okay?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said, performing a quick assessment of every part of her body.
The fisherman spoke. “You dang fools almost got yourselves kilt. This is private property. Who are you and what in hell are you doin’ here?”
Allison scraped mud from her poncho and jeans. “We’re looking for Ricky Scruggs. I’m his doctor. We didn’t know we were trespassing. You had no reason to shoot at us.”
“I didn’t shoot at you. You musta hit my trip wire. Rigged up to a little ol’ four-ten over there in the woods. Just birdshot but it’ll remind you to keep your distance. You’re lucky your fella pushed you out of the way. Who did you say you are?”
Josh stepped forward. “I’m Josh Gibbs. This is Doctor Wright. She’s Mr. Scruggs’s doctor and she needs to talk with him. I assure you we’re not revenuers.”
The man spit. “You don’t look the part,” he agreed. He turned to Allison. “Why do you need to talk to Ricky? Is he sick?”
“He came to see me. I’m following up.”
“Ricky’s my brother but I couldn’t tell you where he’s at now. Goes wherever the jobs take him. Sometimes we don’t see him for weeks.”
Allison pulled a card from her back pocket card and gave it to the man. “If he shows up or if you hear from him, please ask him to call me.”
“Mr. Scruggs, I have to ask you one more thing,” Josh said. “Back in the shed, you had a fly rod—”
“Rat fishing,” he interrupted. “Trout won’t bite in muddy water. Days like this, you tie yourself a piece of jerky on the end of a line—deer holds up best—and you go out to the shed or the barn or wherever there’s rats and pretty damn soon you’re rat fishing. Once them things get ahold of that meat, they fight like the devil.”
The adrenalin released by the shotgun blast dissipated by the time Allison arrived back at the Wagoneer. She realized she was exhausted, not to mention soaked, muddy and chilled.
“How did you know to push me down?” she asked as she and Josh stripped off their wet ponchos and toweled off with one of the blankets she kept in the back seat.
“I knew it was moonshine from the smell. I happened to spot the trip wire just as you were about to trigger it. How about if I drive home?”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m kind of beat.”
The mud-red, rain-swollen water of the creek had risen over its banks and lapped at the grated surface of the rusty bridge as Josh piloted the Jeep through the narrow hollow of Blood Run.
Allison grabbed a fresh blanket from the back, pulled it around herself and snuggled into the seat. Not having to drive was welcome but it felt strange. She was unable to remember the last time she had been a passenger.