Chapter Nine
The day had been more tiring than Alex expected. He’d experienced a jolt of adrenaline when Mike Hackett’s body was found, but on the drive back into Silver Gap it had faded, leaving him drained. They stopped at the Cup & Cow and ordered some takeout, since the place was filling fast. Back at the Mountain High Lodge, they broke it out and dug in, sitting on chairs that the Durbins had set outside the cabin Peter and Ellen shared.
Mountain sun had pinked Peter’s face even more than usual. His whiskers looked white against it. He slouched in the chair, elbow on the armrest, chin resting on his fist while he picked at an order of baked ziti. The sun had dropped behind the hills, plunging the valley into premature evening.
“What’s up for tomorrow?” Ellen asked.
“Tomorrow I’m going to find the guide that couple in the restaurant recommended. Robbie Driscoll. If he’s available, I want to go back up into the high country, do some location scouting and research.”
“What kind of research?”
“I want to get some core and bark samples. Something’s killing trees up here, and it’s been pretty convincingly established that it’s bark beetles. Just the same, I want to have an independent lab confirm that. The results will give the film more weight, and we might get some back-door publicity by promoting the research separately.”
“Long as you’re not talking about a bunch of talking-head geeks in lab coats,” Peter said. “Or charts. Nothing kills a documentary faster than fucking charts.”
“I promise we’ll keep charts to a minimum.”
“Dude, you know I’m down with whatever you got in mind. And I think you’re right on about getting location footage from the fronts of the climate war that people aren’t talking about. I can get you some brilliant shit up here.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“But you gotta let me tell the story visually.”
Alex had already had this discussion, or some variation on it, with Peter several times. Peter was all about the eye, the lens, and he would make a silent movie if he could get away with it. But Alex needed this film to do more than just thrill the eye; he needed it to reach a wide audience and deliver an important lesson.
Coal money was paying for it, and Alex hoped it would go some distance toward making up for the destruction his family business had caused. But there was a lot to make up for, and he wanted it to be done right. If that meant overruling Peter, then that’s what he would do.
Howie Honeycutt drove both ways, up to where Mike Hackett’s body had been found, and back again. George Trbovich had been assigned to recover the remains; Howie had volunteered to go along. He’d be working a graveyard shift, but he didn’t mind being awake. Not for this.
Coming back, especially, George was kind of gloomy. Howie chattered, because he always did when he was excited. Whenever the conversation waned, when he let the chatter die, his mind drifted back, to Hackett and to something else. Something that Hackett reminded him of.
The first dead body Howie had ever seen was that of an accident victim. But she was also a girl he knew from school, and he had sometimes wondered if that had been the key thing about her.
He had just missed seeing it happen, though he’d heard it.
He had been riding home on the school bus, outside Collinsville. The Little Egypt part of Illinois, people called it, mostly country and small towns, closer to Kentucky and Missouri than Chicago. He had enjoyed growing up there, as much as he would have enjoyed it anywhere with his momma being dog-poor and hooking up with a succession of losers, men with quick tempers and hard fists, sometimes men who didn’t like making love to a woman in the same room as her son was sleeping, and sometimes ones who liked it too much.
But when he was outside their tiny house, at school or on the bus or even just walking in the open fields, free from the smells of his momma’s bad cooking and cheap smokes and spilled liquor, he figured he was happy as anybody. Every adult he knew struggled to buy groceries and pay rent and keep the kids in clothing and shoes. He had a few friends and he liked being around farms, watching animals being born, growing up, finally being slaughtered. That part was best; the powerful feeling that came from seeing a human being snatch the life from a big animal, a cow or a pig, the brutal finality of the killing blow, the almost godlike roar of the saw.
So on that afternoon, on the bus, he had been sorry he’d missed the impact. Karen Carty, a senior who was just about the sexiest female he had ever seen, with her long, bleached hair and the way she switched her hips when she walked, had gotten off the bus at her usual stop. She was flirting with a couple of the football players and didn’t see that a pickup truck was racing past the bus, ignoring the flashing lights and the little stop sign that extended from the side. The pickup’s driver, drunk and hurrying to get home from his mistress’s house before his wife got off work, didn’t see her in time, or didn’t think she would step away from the open window that boys’ arms were hanging out of. He hit her head on and smeared her across forty feet of roadway.
Howie missed the impact, but he got a good look at the aftermath. The bus had to wait for the sheriff to come out, and although the driver told everybody not to look, some of the football players forced open the door and piled out. Howie joined them. He saw Karen Carty with her eyes open and her clothes mostly shredded and torn off, saw her jubblies and the tuft of hair over her ladybits and the guts that had spilled from where her stomach had opened up wide.
He’d had to walk home from the bus stop with his books held in front of him that day, to hide the stain on the front of his pants. His momma wasn’t there when he arrived, so he took jelly from a jar and smeared it all over the pants, and told her he had spilled trying to make a sandwich. She had turned her current boyfriend loose on him that night, for wasting food.
But from that day on, whenever he touched himself in the john or in his bed while his momma grunted and rutted in the next one, he thought about Karen Carty. Not how she had looked in life, with her makeup and her hips shaking and her behind encased in tight-fitting jeans, but the other way, in death, naked and spread out for everybody to see.
Even then, he had known that one day, the memory would no longer be enough.