It was already daylight when I hobbled out of the house for the last time. I would’ve felt better leaving if I’d have doused the whole place in gasoline, poured a trail up the drive, and lit that motherfucker up like a pile of dead Christmas trees, but I didn’t. No, I just gathered my shit and left. There was a few hundred dollars stashed in a hide in the hardwood floor by my bed, a place where a single plank lifted and revealed joists and insulation. I’d always hidden things there. When I was a kid, I hid packs of stolen cigarettes, a porno mag or two at times, and never told a soul other than Maggie. But aside from the money, packing was just a matter of piling clothes in the pickup, swallowing the last two Xaney bars I had, and driving away.
I spent that first night parked way back on a dirt road where hippie kids from the university liked to camp and burn empty bottles of Aristocrat vodka and Barbarossa spiced rum. The campfires they lit left dark ovals up and down both sides of riverbank. A long ways back, a man by the name of Aiken owned all of that land, and Daddy had told me once while we were fishing that Aiken blew the whole front end off a kayak when a couple of tree huggers demanded access to the gorge through his property. According to those stories, old man Aiken had already made his stance quite clear, and when those water rats decided to take their chances, Aiken hammered off a shot from a .30-30 high up on the ridgeline just as soon as the paddle made its first cut into water. That was back when mountain ways still mattered, back when men were men, and the neighbors were too scared to call the law.
Nowadays it was all game lands overseen by the Forest Service, though it was seldom patrolled by the dark green pickups the rangers drove and that’s why I’d come. The rangers with fancy college degrees, who wore golden badges and government-issued logging boots with kilties rolled back over the laces, spent most of their time cutting fire lines.
I had parked at the end of a rutted trail down to the river where water purred and whispered over smooth stone. It was a good quarter mile from the main road, a main road that was loose gravel and only wide enough for one car. During the day, the road saw lots of drivers, the dust never seeming to settle back out of the air. After sunset, though, the fly fishermen and paddlers headed out, and the road was traveled only by drunks looking to cross the mountain without the hassle of saying their ABCs backward, standing on one leg, or touching their noses with their eyes closed. I sat on the tailgate and struggled to roll a loose cigarette out of a bag of Bugler with my good hand, no more money for name-brand smokes and no Winstons to steal. Stale tobacco burned with a dusty smell and puckered a bitter taste in my mouth with every puff.
The woods already smelled like rain, though the clouds hadn’t arrived just yet. A summertime thunder-boomer echoed over a set of peaks just to the south, and the sky flashed with light a few seconds before each wave of sound arrived. I knew it wouldn’t be long before summer rain pushed the river over its banks and washed the shoreline clean.
I didn’t know what to think of Daddy agreeing to pay for my mother’s funeral. I’d never really expected he would. I’d never really seen anything close to compassion in his heart. I hated him for what he’d done. I hated him for what he’d raised me to become. But there was a tiny bit of respect that came the night before, when he told me to head to his lawyer’s office to work out the details of my mother’s burial. In the morning I would visit Queen, and in a few short days I’d put Mama in the ground. I had Daddy to thank for that, and being thankful toward him was about as confusing a thing as I’d ever felt. Mama wasn’t the only thing that needed burying. I wanted to shovel dirt on those feelings too, bury them deeper than six feet.
The first drop of rain fell through an opening in the jack pines. It smacked me in the top of the head and burned at the place where Daddy had cold-cocked me with the butt of his pistol. Somehow or another the blows he hammered hadn’t split my scalp, but a tender knot had risen on my skull and that’s exactly where that first drop of rain struck. Another drop fell and thumped the pickup, then another and another, and within seconds the rain came. I snatched my cell phone and the pouch of Bugler off the tailgate and threw the things not suited for water into the cab. But I wanted the rain on my skin. I wanted that coldness on my muscles, and I climbed back into the bed to lie there and let the world wash over me. My shoulder hurt and my neck was whiplashed stiff. Raindrops stung the places where skin had yet to heal, but it was a soothing kind of pain that I welcomed. The water was cold and the air warm, chills raising goose bumps on my arms, and all that rain seemed to wake me up out of a nightmare that had held for too long. For the first time in a long time, I felt alive.
Lightning screamed sideways across the sky, and beneath a tall stand of pines was a place most wouldn’t have found comfort, but it was the closest I’d ever been to baptism. My mind cleared and that clearheadedness brought on a dream of setting the world right. It wasn’t vengeful or fueled by hatred, but rather a settling of debt owed, a righting of the world that had needed righting for a long, long time. Daddy had been dead-on about two things: I was grown, and I could fend for myself. But that was all he had right.
He was wrong about those numbers he’d ciphered in that book all of my working life. Those numbers weren’t shit like he’d said. No, he’d been wrong about that. The money was something I’d earned, a small payment for the burden he fixed to my back when I was young. Seeing as he’d piled on a weight that would stay with me as far into the future as I could imagine, probably hanging around my neck and weighing me down till the day I died, Daddy owed me that. And it wasn’t just me who needed that money now. It was Maggie. I was certain I could talk her into taking the money, and I was absolutely certain that I wanted her to have it. I knew my father kept enough in the safe at the shop to cover most of what I’d earned. I wasn’t sure how I’d manage to get in and out of there quite yet, but the one thing I understood was that the time for cashing out had come.
I spent hours texting Maggie that night to convince her to take the money. I lied about where it came from, but it was a lie that I knew had to be told. She loved me, but she never loved the life I led. She respected me, but she never respected how I made my money. I knew she wouldn’t have taken it any other way. So I told her it was my inheritance from when my grandfather died. I told her it was a loan rather than a gift, and that she’d have to pay it back. And after a whole lot of telling, a whole lot of convincing that it wasn’t me giving her anything, she finally agreed. She’d mail the paperwork in and she’d be out of here come fall. The minute she made that promise, I felt happy, truly happy, and that happiness grew from the fact that Maggie would never have to surrender to anything. Maybe I wouldn’t either.
The rain poured, all the while those thoughts becoming a little clearer and a little more certain. When it was done, I’d never be able to come back, but that fact didn’t frighten me. There had never been anything here for me anyways. No, it was staying that frightened me. Staying was something that I just couldn’t figure. I knew right then that there are things in this world far worse than dying, things that’ll push a man to greet death like an old friend when he comes. Staying was one of those things. Staying meant that I’d become just like him in time.