A spot fire on Moses Creek rim-lit the mountains, but the wind was wrong to pose any real danger of it jumping the ridge to Wayehutta, a place locals pronounced worry hut. Raymond sat on his porch the way he did every evening, listening to the police scanner while he smoked a Backwoods and rattled Redbreast over ice in the bottom of a jelly jar.
A man needed something constant, something unchanging, that he could lean against when the world went to pot. Sooner or later, the cards always fell that way and the difference between those who buried their heads in their hands and those who kept their chins above water became a matter of reprieve. With the good and the bad, Ray started his days with a pot of coffee and a book, and ended them with four fingers of good whiskey and a gas station cigar.
From the sound of the radio chatter, the woods had caught down around the campsite where the forest turned to gamelands. Volunteer firemen had cut lines and the fire was contained, but lately that word “contained” was only relative. The whole region was dry as grain. As soon as one fire burned out, windswept embers lit the next, scorching swaths of land left black in the wake. Honestly, it was amazing it hadn’t happened sooner. Thirty years as a forester told Ray that. Decades of mismanagement had left the forests thick with fuel. Anybody with a lick of sense should’ve seen it coming.
Ray drew a few quick puffs from his cigar, then picked a piece of tobacco from the tip of his tongue and wiped it on the heel of his boot. There was a book he’d bought that summer at City Lights Bookstore sitting on his lap, the story of how coyotes spread across the American landscape. Ever since Doris passed he’d become obsessed with coyotes. In the beginning, Ray couldn’t figure out the reason. Maybe it was all the sleepless nights and hearing them in the woods above the house. But the more time he spent thinking, the more he came to figure that maybe it was how he’d watched mountain people and culture be damn near extirpated over the course of a few decades, while those dogs had been persecuted for a century and thrived. It was admiration, he thought. Maybe even jealousy.
The first coyote Raymond ever saw in Jackson County was back in the late 1980s on a piece of forestland in Whiteside Cove. There were more of them now. It was nothing to see them lining the sides of the highways, hit by semis at dawn and dusk. Sometimes late at night while he lay in bed, a patrol car or ambulance siren would scream past and that sound would trigger the dogs to sing, one voice sparking another and another until a chorus filled the darkness around him. The research said the coyotes were taking a census. But for Ray the reason was less important than the feeling. All Ray knew was that when he heard that sound he felt as close a thing to joy as he knew anymore. Just imagining it right then he rocked back in his chair and smiled.
He was almost finished with his glass when the phone rang inside the house. A cane-back rocker was nestled in the corner of the front room where his wife used to sit and talk with her sister and her friends and telemarketers and anyone else who’d listen because truth was that woman just loved to talk. Her and Ray had balanced each other out that way, him never saying boo to a goose and her having enough stowed away for the both of them.
“Talk to me,” Ray grumbled into the receiver. His voice was deep and gruff, words never seeming to make it out of the back of his throat. The stub of his cigar was hooked in the corner of his mouth and he scissored the butt between two fingers so as to clear his lips to speak. He could hear heavy breathing on the other end of the line, but no one said a word. “Hello.”
“Dad,” a voice whimpered, “Dad . . .” He was out of breath. “They’re going to kill me.”
Raymond ran his hand down his face and stretched his eyes, trying to will his wits about him. He started to hang up, but hesitated. His hand clenched the phone so hard that he could hear the plastic cracking in his fist.
The boy’s voice was the same as when he’d been ten years old and called from Gary Green’s, having burned down the man’s barn with a G.I. Joe, a magnifying glass, and a Dixie cup of kerosene. It was the same as the first time Ricky got arrested, and the second and the third, the same scared-to-death, I’m-in-over-my-head horseshit Ray’d heard so many times over the course of his life that he couldn’t bear to listen. He was almost immune. Yet, right then, same as always, he found himself incapable of hanging up.
Ricky’s breath stuttered out like he was on the verge of tears and he said the same thing again, “They’re going to kill me.”
“What in the world are you talking about, Ricky? Nobody’s trying to kill you.”
“You need to listen to your son, Mr. Mathis.” Another voice came onto the line.
Ray could hear Ricky pleading in the background.
“Who’s this? Who am I talking to?”
“That’s not important,” the man said, “but you’ll want to hear me out. I’ve got something I need to tell you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your son’s a junkie, Mr. Mathis.”
“I don’t know who you are or why you’re calling here, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. I know what my son is. I’ve been answering calls like this going on twenty year.”
“I don’t think you’re listening, Mr. Mathis. Right now your son owes me a great deal of money, and one way or another I plan to get what I’m owed.”
“Whatever my son owes you, that’s between you and him. I don’t know what in the world you’re dragging me into it for. What he owes ain’t got a thing to do with me.”
“I’d say if you know your son at all you know he doesn’t have two pennies to rub together.”
“That sounds about right,” Ray said.
“And that’s why you’re being dragged into it. That’s why we’re having this conversation. Like I said, I’m owed a great deal of money and one way or another this debt will be settled.”
There was a strange calm in the way the man spoke, an indifference that set this call apart from any Ray had answered from his son before. This wasn’t Ricky calling and crying that he needed a few dollars to get back on his feet. This wasn’t one of his junked-out friends calling and telling him Ricky was locked up and needed bail money, words spoken so fast or so slow and garbled that Raymond couldn’t tell what the hell was being said. This was different. It was real. He knew in the pit of his stomach.
“How much money are we talking about?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” Ray huffed. He could hardly believe the number. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“That’s a good bit less than a funeral, don’t you think?” There was no inflection or change in his tone. “Besides,” he continued, “that’s what he owes.”
“I don’t know why in the hell you think a man can just pull that kind of money out of his ass, but I’m here to tell you right now that—”
“I’m going to stop you, Mr. Mathis. Your son seems to think different. From what he’s told me, you recently came into a little bit of money.”
Ray closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. Immediately he knew what Ricky had told him, and truthfully he couldn’t have hidden it if he wanted. The Sylva Herald had written stories about the deal. His face had been on the front page of the paper for weeks while he bickered back and forth with the state over a land dispute.
After Ray retired with thirty years from the Forest Service he’d come home and realized awfully fast that a man like him wasn’t fit for idle. Six months retired, he bought a small lot on the side of 107 and built a produce stand. Mathis Produce was going on ten years when the state forced him to sell with eminent domain so they could widen the road. They squabbled back and forth over a year in the papers and on the news, but recently the check had come and the deal was done.
Ricky was screaming in the background and suddenly it felt like all the blood had left Ray’s face. No matter how strong a man was, there were moments in life that left him empty, things that could hollow his heart like a cavern in little more than an instant. For a mother or father it was as simple as the sound of their child crying. He’d never known that kind of vulnerability before he held that boy in his arms.
“Let’s say I had it to give. What’s to stop you from killing us both the minute I hand it over?”
“You hold up your end and I’ll do the same.”
“I’m supposed to trust somebody who’s trying to extort me for—”
“This isn’t extortion,” the man interrupted. “It’s more like mercy.”
Neither spoke for a few moments and then the man continued.
“This is a courtesy call, Mr. Mathis. You can go right or you can go left, and honestly it makes no difference to me. Pay me what I’m owed, or bury your son. Those are your choices.”
Ray’d been staring at the same thing too long. He couldn’t make sense of the world anymore. It felt like looking at a puzzle and seeing the holes and holding the pieces in your hand but having no understanding of how things fit together. He wondered how many more times he could save his son, and the answer shred his heart into pieces because what he wanted more than anything was to just hang up the phone. All he wanted was to walk away and be done.
His stare pulled back until his eyes were focused on a photograph he’d thumbtacked beside the door. It was a black-and-white picture of his late wife when she was maybe twenty-five. She stood at the sink with sunlight filtering through the curtains, her face and chest burned white by the slow shutter speed. There was a steel coffeemaker on the stovetop behind her, a pair of pearl studs he’d bought in her ears.
“Mr. Mathis?”
“I’m here,” Ray said.
“Which way is it going to be?”
Ray studied that picture of his wife and inhaled through his nose until his lungs could hold no more. He held his breath until his head started to swim. “Where should I meet you?”
When the line was dead, he walked to the bedroom, unable to feel his legs beneath him. He knelt beside a safe in the closet. Inside, a stack of birth certificates and Social Security cards was tucked under a yellowed marriage license and his wife’s death certificate. A stack of hundred-dollar bills rubber-banded together lay next to a small snub-nosed revolver. It was everything he had left from what the state had paid him.
Ray balanced the stack of cash in his palm as if trying to measure its weight. His eyes were fixed on the revolver, but his mind was someplace else.
This is the last time you do this, he told himself.
That thought settled onto him like hands gripping his shoulders, and he closed his eyes and let that feeling dig someplace deeper still. He locked the safe and shoved the money in his pocket as he stood. By the front door, he stopped in front of her picture and outlined his wife’s figure with the tip of his finger.