Before the apartments were built, Tommy Pressley kept the Mexicans stacked in buses like cordwood. For years, his family had brought the migrants in at seed and harvest, worked them to the bone for wages no white man would have broken a sweat over. They housed the workers in the same buses used to haul them from field to field. That was the start of it. That was when the Mexicans first came to the mountains and to Jackson County.
They could just as easily have been Guatemalan or Honduran or Salvadoran or Colombian or anything else, but none of that mattered to people who’d never seen them before. They were Mexicans. They were farmhands who worked spring and fall, and outside of those times were nowhere to be found. Then one year, Tommy Pressley got the bright idea to build dormitories that later became apartments. The idea came to him just the same as it had to mill owners who built the houses where the workers lived and paid them in scrip. Build the world they live in and they wind up handing back the same money they’re paid. That was the idea, that’s what he’d done, and that’s how it started.
The problem was that once those Mexicans had places to live that weren’t just seasonal, they had to find ways to earn a living outside of farming. Most had trades they’d learned back home, trades like Aiden, who mostly laid rock, but could do about anything with his hands. They were stonemasons and plumbers and framers and painters and electricians and roofers and operators, and some hung drywall and some hung gutters and some hung hardy board and some did grading and some poured concrete, and all drank Tecate and shared lunches of beans and spiced meat with tortillas and two liters of orange soda. Their work was just the same as any white man’s and they did it for eight dollars an hour at first, then negotiated to ten, which was still a break because none of the locals would even think of lacing up their boots for anything less than fifteen. This meant higher margins for contractors, so they came to prefer the work of Mexicans to white men: two-thirds the wages and no need to pay taxes or 1099 them. Done deal.
Aiden still found work when the market was strong because there was just that much work to be had. Developments popped up along every ridgeline in Jackson County faster than contractors could pull permits, so fast that the county had to build a second permitting office at the southern end just to try and keep up. But when the market crashed and the plug was pulled and construction sites dried up overnight, leaving houses that were half-finished abandoned like the end of the world had come, the white jobs were the first to go and the Mexicans lost theirs not long after.
None of that mattered because they were there by that point, whole families filling every trailer park and apartment slum from Cashiers to Cullowhee. Cantinas popped up all over the place and their parking lots were always filled with foreign cars with South Carolina tags, all of those Mexicans learning quickly that they could register the cars they shared in the state below without a lick of insurance. If one of them crashed drunk at night, he’d pop the tag off with a screwdriver, leave the car in the ditch or wrapped around a tree, run like hell, and have the same plate on a new ride by morning. All sheriff deputies had were blood trails that trickled out away from the crash. Nobody to arrest. Nobody to charge. Just a mess to clean up.
There were some jobs starting to pop back up now, two years after the housing bubble burst, but that same pattern from before now worked in reverse. The first jobs went to Mexicans who’d do the work for half the price, and so the market coming back didn’t mean a thing to Aiden. He was still out of work and carried all of that hatred with him as he headed up the gravel drive to the apartment building where Eberto lived.
Dim yellow lights over doorways lit the ground floor and the balcony above, a group of men on the second floor talking loudly and singing. One of the men tossed a bottle down into the parking lot, where the glass shattered any stillness there might have been and sent a stray cat hightailing for shelter. Another group of men huddled together at the corner of the building and didn’t make a sound, just stood there. They were the first to notice Aiden as he came up the drive. The group of men opened up, most of them wearing canvas pants, dirtied T-shirts, and work boots, their clothes caked with dried plaster and concrete and paint. One man wore a pair of clean blue jeans and a nice button-down dress shirt tucked in, a straw cowboy hat on his head, with the tips of his boots and his large belt buckle catching all light there was to be had. There was also an old lady toward the middle of the building who snapped beans from a metal folding chair. She was hunched over by age and work, and never even looked up until Aiden was directly in front of her.
“Do you know which apartment Eberto lives in?” Aiden asked.
“No,” the old woman said without lifting her eyes. She pulled another string from a pod, snapped the bean in three places, and tossed the quartered sections into a plastic grocery bag at her feet.
“There’s supposed to be an Eberto lives here. You don’t know anyone named Eberto?”
“No Eberto,” the old woman said, and just then a small girl cracked the door behind the old woman and peered out at Aiden with curious eyes. The little girl looked to be five or six and had her hair pulled up into two loose pigtails that ran to her shoulders. She wore a bright red T-shirt with a cartoon dog on the front, and the shirt was too small, her brown stomach lifting the fabric at the bottom to where Aiden could see her belly button. The old woman turned and shouted something in Spanish and the little girl cowered back into the apartment. Her eyes caught something behind Aiden and she looked frightened just before the old woman yanked the door closed, and Aiden felt the burlap sack yanked over his face.
The sack smelled of potatoes, the porch light checkered through the loose weave. Two men had Aiden’s arms and he felt someone yank the revolver from the back of his pants, the front sight raking his skin as the gun was ripped free. Aiden tried to pull away and scream but it did no good. Then he felt something heavy hammer him in the back of his head, a white light flashing in his eyes and a fire burning over his scalp. Then they moved him forward. He stumbled over his feet and tripped onto stairs, and they yanked him back up and led him farther to someplace he couldn’t see. He heard a door open and the heavy two-beat bass of music coursing from speakers on the other side of a wall, and he knew he was inside because he could smell food and marijuana smoke as whoever held him pushed him into the room. He started to scream and was hit again. This time the blow knocked him to his knees and he thought for sure he would go unconscious. Falling forward onto his chest, his face against the floor, he could feel something wet and cold moving over his scalp, his hair slick with it. A knee was in his back and those same hands hadn’t moved from his arms, though he felt a new pair of hands rummaging through his jeans and pulling everything he carried out of his pockets.
Aiden heard three or four voices shout things in Spanish and then he was rolled onto his back with his arms and legs pinned to the floor. He bucked his head wildly, but could not get the sack off his face. There was a light above and a dark figure that hovered over him, but everything was broken into a crosshatched blur.
“Where’s your partner?” someone asked with a thick Hispanic accent.
“I’m by myself,” Aiden grunted.
“Leland said there were two of you.”
“Leland doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Aiden felt a boot press down on his cheek, and his head turned beneath it.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” the voice spoke. “He wouldn’t lie. Not with what he stands to make. So I’ll ask you again, where is your partner, your compañero, friend?”
“I’ve done told you, you cocksucker, I’m by myself.” The boot vised down onto Aiden’s face, and he knew then that he’d been duped. Leland Bumgarner had been a snake since they were children, but until right then Aiden and Thad had never been the mark. They’d always been friends, or at the very least they’d always been in on the joke, the three of them laughing at whomever Leland swindled.
“Where are the drugs?” the man asked.
“Fuck you!” Aiden yelled. He thrashed his head back and forth to try and get free, but he couldn’t move against the hands that held him. Suddenly he felt something hot burn into his forearm, someone putting a cigar or cigarette out against his skin, and he screamed like a child, though his screams were met only by laughter and the repetitive thump of music that played on the other side of a wall to his left.
“You tell me where the drugs are or else I am going to castrate you like a becerro.” The voice was calm and collected, those words spoken like dinner conversation.
“Fuck you!” Aiden said again.
This time his words were met with someone pulling his shirt up his chest, and a sharp pain dug into his stomach. He knew he was being cut slowly, a knife carving something into him. He tried to say something, but couldn’t put words together, just broken profanity and grunts as he felt the blade press deeper into his skin.
“I will ask you again, my friend, where are the drugs?”
The pain was unbearable and Aiden could feel the muscles in his stomach tighten. Blood washed over him and wet his pants and underwear, and he knew he could not get away. All he could do was tell them what they wanted to know and hope that was enough. “Just don’t kill me,” Aiden said. “Just don’t kill me.” The knife kept cutting.
“Where are the drugs?” The voice stressed every word, as if each were its own sentence.
“At the church!” Aiden screamed. “At the fucking church!”
“What church?”
“Across the street.”
“Where?” the voice yelled angrily.
“I told you, across the street!”
“Where at the church?”
As the man spoke, Aiden felt the knife or razor or whatever was being used to cut him dig deeper, and he suddenly knew that the man who spoke was the same one who cut him because of how the blade seemed to punctuate his words. “In the graveyard,” he screamed. “In the goddamn graveyard.”
“You’re going to take me there.”
There was one final slash across his stomach and Aiden was jerked to his feet. He could feel the blood run down the front of him into his pants. He could feel the shirt now wetted against him as the men turned him and led him into the night. He kept tripping over his own feet and fell to his knees, and he almost tumbled down the stairs, but the arms that held him caught him as his legs swung free. Once they were on the ground, he could hear the gravel crunch beneath his boots and he knew they were leading him across the parking lot, the world darker. The rain was falling again, the break in the storm now over. He heard a car pass on the highway, the hiss of tires, then silence as the ground changed from gravel to pavement. Then he could see a light up ahead and he knew that it was the streetlamp at the side of the church and he knew they were almost there and he hoped that the drugs would satisfy them, that they’d leave him there alive and breathing, anything but dead. Aiden was in the light now and the ground softened beneath him. The headstones were barely visible, but he could see their shapes.
“What grave?” the voice said.
“Hooper,” Aiden answered. “That tall one with river rock. Reverend Hooper.” He heard someone move past him and shout something in Spanish from up ahead and he knew that whoever it was had found the ammunition can behind the grave because even from where he stood he heard the heavy, rusted latches pop and the hinges creak open. There were a few more words in Spanish and then the voice spoke again.
“Don’t come back here,” the voice said, just as calm as before. “You come back or you try to sell anything and I’ll kill you. Muerto. Estarás muerto. Do you understand?”
There was a sharp kick to the backs of Aiden’s knees and he collapsed to the ground. He could feel the earth seep into his pants and then he was stomped in the back and fell to his stomach. There were kicks all over his body, every square inch of him on fire with pain. No one held him now and he turned, trying to fight his way off the ground, his hands ripping at the sack on his face, but the blows only came harder. Finally he was in too much pain to move and just curled into a ball and covered his head the best he could. He could barely breathe, and when he did get a breath, it felt like a spear point jabbing into his ribs and the breath shuddered out of him. All of a sudden the burlap sack was ripped off and his vision was blurred and the night seemed blinding the way the rain pelted his face. He tried to see the shadows that moved around him, tried to make out their faces, but he could not see a single thing, just figures. And then there was one final crack to the side of his head, the toe of a boot driving hard into his temple, and the world went white.
• • •
WHEN AIDEN REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, the rain came down so hard that it seemed to pin him to the ground. His first thought was to burn the goddamn place to the ground. If he couldn’t be certain of who had done this to him, then his best bet was to set fire to them all. He would pour gasoline around the entire apartment building and burn them up like a nest of yellow jackets.
But then Aiden thought of the little girl who stood in the doorway just before the sack was cinched over his face. All he could think about was that little Mexican girl with pigtails and a belly and dark eyes that had looked so scared at what she saw as the door was being closed in her face. When he remembered that little girl, he knew that he could not go through with it. He knew he would not be able to bear knowing that one of the screams was hers. What needed to be done was something he could not do alone. He needed to find Thad. Everything would be okay if he could just find Thad.
Aiden tried to stand, but fell back to his knees when a sharp pain pierced his side. He struggled to get to his feet and found that if he stayed hunched over, with his body cocked just so, he could keep the pain in his ribs at bay. That’s how he managed to stagger out of the graveyard into the light. He was covered in his own blood, the white shirt he wore now red with it, the front of his jeans darkened almost purple. Blood and rain soaked his clothes and he stood there for a minute in the streetlight in front of the church looking over his body, amazed at what had come out of him, and unable to comprehend how anything could be left inside to keep him alive. His stomach burned as he lifted his shirt, the fabric tight to his skin and making the pain worse, and when it was lifted to his chest, he could see the dark lines carved into him: XIII. A deep X and three lines had been cut into his skin, the last slash hurried and not nearly as deep as those preceding it, the bottom of the line tailing off toward his waistline. He had no clue what it meant, the roman numeral thirteen carved into him as if he were a tree.
At the road’s edge, Aiden could see the yellow porch lamps that looked like a strand of Christmas lights strung along both floors of the apartment building through the trees. He could barely make out the building other than those lights, and he certainly could not see if anyone still stood outside, but that didn’t matter. He would not go back alone. Down the road he hobbled with the rain against his body until he reached his car. He patted his pockets to try and find his keys, but they’d taken his wallet and his pocketknife, the change he had, and the gram of dope, everything. The windows were fogged on the Ranchero and Aiden checked the door. Luckily he’d left it unlocked and there were spare keys in the glove box.
The wipers had dried to the glass, so that the first swipe when Aiden cranked the car split the blade on the driver’s side, the torn rubber wagging about wildly with each stroke. The thin strip of rubber lashed about the windshield like a baby blacksnake he and Thad found slithering through the yard one time when they were thirteen or fourteen. It reminded him of how the snake’s pencil-thin body had whipped about the ground after Thad chopped its head off with a hoe blade. He could still see the snake’s decapitated head with those black, unblinking eyes as it snapped its mouth open and closed and tried to bite whatever came close in those last seconds of life, a hatred for the world right up to the bitter end. He and Thad prodded sticks into the snake’s mouth until it finally quivered closed, with the top jaw crooked over the bottom.
Aiden always found himself thinking about times when he and Thad were kids. The simplest things triggered flashes of memory. Those times when they were children stayed so clear to him—the images and the sounds and the smells, the way those moments had tasted—but yet he could not remember a single detail of a single afternoon from times when Thad was gone. He wondered if there was anything worth remembering anymore. He wondered where the hell Thad was in that darkness. Everything would be okay if he could just find Thad.
Pulling out of Jimmy’s, he could barely make out the road ahead through heavy rain and fogged windows. When he passed Booker Branch, he thought that he never should have left Thad behind, but he had, and now he needed him. He remembered where Thad had gone those few months he disappeared. Bonas Defeat was hell on earth, but if Thad had run, that was exactly where he’d be. So Aiden paid no attention when he reached Charleys Creek and the road home shot off to the left. He just kept on Highway 281 deeper into Little Canada.
Through the rain, Aiden drove more by memory than road signs or landmarks. He barely had time to read the white letters spelling names like Dark Cove and Old Mill Road and Neddy Mountain and Wolf Pen on green signs as he came upon and passed them in the same instant. He knew the Mathis family had tree farms just through the woods to the right and that Fraser fir stretched in rows from the creek to the ridgeline. Turkey loved to walk through those trees all year long, and Goob Coward got lawed for shooting a hen through the neck with a .22 lever-action one spring. The tree farm had been there ever since Aiden could remember, and Goob Coward poached turkey and speckled trout off the Mathises’ land for years before he finally got caught. Aiden knew that a little farther up the road the Messers had cattle and goats and two great big blueticks named George and Stella that walked all over the pasture with their noses to the ground and broke off into sprints, chasing the goats, when the mood struck them to do so. The Messers had always raised goats and cattle there, and they’d always had blueticks that took ribbons in the Mountain State Fair every fall. Nothing about this place had changed in all of Aiden McCall’s life, and maybe that’s why he’d come to hate it so badly. Everything was exactly how it had always been, the haves having and the have-nots starving to damn death. Few in Little Canada had much, but they were salt-of-the-earth people for whom church and work and family were enough to make life worth scraping by. But none of those things had ever belonged to Aiden. Every year bled into the next and the next, just on and on until the day he’d die, and maybe that was all there was to look forward to anymore. Maybe that’s all there is to this old life, just waiting around to die.
When he came to the end of Grays Ridge Road, his headlights swept across the back of a red Geo Tracker and he remembered having seen that little jeep outside the Dietzes’ trailer. He left the Ranchero running and the headlights on, stepped out, having almost forgotten how bad his ribs hurt until then. He stumbled over to the Tracker to look inside, but there was nothing to be seen. When he yelled out for Thad into the night, he knew there would be no answer. He knew how far the trail stretched ahead and how rough the country was through the gorge. There was no chance of finding Thad then. Aiden was unsure if he could even make it home.