How Fire Runs Read online

  Kyle went up a few more paces until he could see Gerald sitting behind his porch rail with a scoped 7 mm Magnum. At his right hand a cup of coffee and between his teeth a brier pipe. Kyle couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he was wearing a bathrobe over his clothes and his PROUD VIETNAM VETERAN ball cap.

  “What if I decline?” he asked the sheriff, though by then Holston had turned back the way he had come and was headed out of the direct line of sight. Kyle recited a few epithets to his back before he went on up the hill.

  “Who goes there?” Gerald hollered down.

  “I imagine you can see me just fine through that scope you’ve got trained on me, Gerald. I’d be obliged if you took those crosshairs off my chest.”

  “Crosshairs ain’t on your chest, anyhow. They on your head.”

  Kyle could tell the old man was enjoying himself. Still, he went on.

  Two of Gerald’s goats met him on the way up. Molly and Malone, he believed their names were. Each cocked a yellow alien eye at him, stamped a hoof. Malone then bounded into the higher brush like the banished wood spirit he was. Molly, the one with white socks, bleated as she dropped a quick chain of turds before clattering up the steps and peering out from beneath the porch railing. Her nose twitched at him like she smelled something bad in the wind.

  Gerald was known to leave the front and back doors of his cabin open all through the course of a day so that his pet goats could come and go as they pleased. He had told Kyle once that he preferred their company to most others who would have had business darkening his door. When Kyle had asked what he did if one of them took a shit indoors the old man told him that he only had to worry about it once. That a butcher knife and a crock pot made short work of any recidivists.

  “Hey, Gerald.”

  “Howdy.”

  “You care to explain the events of the morning?”

  “I’d say you probably have a good idea of it already.”

  “It’s not looking too good for you from what I’ve heard so far.”

  “You been listening to the wrong end of a gassy hog then.”

  Kyle sighed, eased his weight onto the porch rail, tried to get within reach of the deer rifle as casually as he could.

  “You can’t shoot at people, Gerald.”

  “People he calls them. This is what he comes up here to tell me.”

  “It’s not civil.”

  “Wolf is at the very door and he tells me to kowtow.”

  “The wolf, huh?”

  “You step in there to the front door and get that pair of birdwatchers on top of the mantel. You look over yonder and tell me what you’d call it then.”

  “If I do will you put that damn gun up?”

  He mulled this over.

  “I’m open to the possibility,” he said.

  Kyle went in and got the Otasco binoculars from above the fireplace, came back and glassed the neighboring front.

  “All I see is three boys who are likely wearing loaded britches.”

  “Look on further back. Up there in front of the old asylum.”

  Kyle searched through the shaded distance and was about to set the field glasses aside when a slim languid movement of red slipped across a bright hole of sunlight. The breeze played at the edges of the flag before it fluttered and flung out to its complete length. He saw the swastika.

  “Do you see it?”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  He placed the binoculars on the porch rail.

  “Will you hand me that rifle now, Gerald?”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  “What the hell else do you want me to say? You’ve got some rednecks taking up residence across the road from you? That’s hardly breaking news. You know how many Confederate battle flags I passed coming out to market this morning?”

  “But these are Nazis! This isn’t some broke-down sonofabitch who likes to play dress up and yell ‘Shiloh, bloody Shiloh.’ Can’t you see the difference?”

  “Only thing I see right now is an old man about to spend the rest of his commissioner term in the county courthouse jail unless he hands over his hardware. Now unload that goddamn thing and give it to me so I can do my best to keep you out of more trouble than you’re already in.”

  Gerald sat there glaring for the better part of a minute, plumes of pipe smoke floating up around his head like vapor cusses. Reluctantly he worked the bolt, kicked out three fully jacketed brass rounds that thunked and rolled across the porch floorboards. Molly came over, sniffed at each one before she popped her heels in the air and danced briskly away, disappeared somewhere inside the cabin.

  “Go get whatever you need to get done before we leave. I don’t think you’ll be back here today.”

  The old man stood, removed his pipe, spat.

  “Let’s get on. These animals can see to themselves.”

  Kyle folded the rifle under his arm with the muzzle pointed at the ground and walked down with Gerald at his right shoulder. When they got to the edge of the road he called out that he had the gun and the old man was coming of his own volition. The deputies appeared from behind their positions of cover and concealment behind oak trees and cruiser doors. Sheriff Holston came forward and idly unholstered his service revolver. Finding it an odd and awkward piece in his hand, he just as idly returned it and waved them on with his empty hand, told them to hurry up and get the old sonofabitch into the back of his patrol car before somebody ended up properly shot and killed.

  2

  FROM HIS BEDROOM WINDOW GAVIN NOON HAD SEEN THE MAN when he had come off the mountain carrying the rifle, had watched when the three men he’d sent out had come to shake his hand and how he had spoken a few words to them but had not taken their offered hands. This would be something to deal with then. He turned at the sound of footsteps at his door. It was Harrison’s woman, Delilah.

  “What the fuck we going to do about this, Gavin?”

  He smiled, went to his dresser to look in the mirror and comb his hair. He watched her in the slight distortion of the glass. Despite the tattoos, the dark cropped hair and the stray leavings of brightwork pieced into her face, she remained attractive, if primitively so. She reminded him of a mean animal or a sharp knife. He knew that she enjoyed this fact about herself. Mistook it for an advantage.

  “There will be ample time to make things right, Delilah. No one can say how time finds its channel. No one can steer it on their own.”

  “Your men out there getting shot and you stand here at the bedroom window and talk high. That’s about what I’d expect out of you, you blind bastard. I think it’s time you got those glasses of yours checked. My man nearly died and all you have to say is something that sounds like it comes out of one of these goddamn books,” she said, waved her hand at the shelves jammed with volumes of Spinoza, Rockwell, Rosenberg, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Moore, Hitler. “You need to realize there’s more to this than a bunch of vocabulary. There’s people out here ready to die for something that matters. There’s people out here that . . .”

  “Delilah, enough!”

  She stilled as Harrison came in behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. Gavin could see where Harrison’s bandaged forearm seeped with the darkening of blood. He went to his desk and poured out a tumbler of Jack Daniels, handed it to him.

  “Does it sting?” he asked.

  Harrison shrugged, said, “Only glass.”

  Gavin nodded, poured himself a tumbler for no other reason than to buy himself a moment to think.

  “Delilah, I need to speak with Mr. Harrison alone for a few minutes if you think you might spare us the privacy.”

  Harrison squeezed her shoulders and she left without a word.

  “Is everyone alright?”

  “Nothing they won’t get over. Nothing but a crazy old man anyway.”

  Harrison strolled past Gavin, canted his shaven head to study the close rows of book titles pressed together. He was an impressively built man with developed muscles that belied a gr
aceful carriage. The six years spent in the penitentiary had been time put to good use if it resulted in a body assembled into this kind of weaponry. He was exactly the kind of man Gavin needed. Exactly the kind this new nation deserved.

  “Do you see anything that interests you?”

  “I read this one when I was inside,” he said, pointed out the Nietzsche. “I liked it. I liked how it sounded like he wasn’t going to take shit from anybody for believing what he did.”

  “You’re welcome to borrow any you like. I would enjoy hearing what you think of them.”

  Harrison stood, took nothing, his colorless eyes staring into distance. A soldier awaiting instruction. Little more than what circumstances had made of him then. A pity.

  “Could you do me a favor, Harrison? Once the tires have been replaced could you have Jonathan bring the car around. I believe I’ll need to go into town.”

  His lieutenant nodded briskly, left the room, granted Gavin the silence that was his most welcome companion.

  HE WORE a suit and tie and a brushed peacoat over that. A gray fedora with a black band. He liked the completion the hat lent. He would not have these people make a cartoon of him. There was too much of that already in the libelous media. The jackboots and fanatics let loose on the world to froth barbarously at the mouth. He meant to demonstrate the principles of his community and its democratic right to exist. It was time.

  “Here, you can park on the street, Jonathan. I don’t believe it should be terribly long.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll keep the motor running.”

  He stepped onto the neat sidewalk and gazed up at the quaint brick building with its pediment and tall columns. As apt a picture of the small-town courthouse as could be desired. It touched his own sentimental recollections of his boyhood Kentucky home. He remembered the small-town life that had been the only retreat from the slums of Vietnam-era America. The things that he’d watched in the living room with his mother. The televised horrors of war in the jungle with helicopters and machine guns and Agent Orange and of the more immediate war of blacks tearing themselves apart in northern cities like scavengers ripping apart the flanks of some great dying beast. His father had been a truck driver and would come home telling stories of what he had witnessed and how lucky they were to have a home apart from that failed experiment of racial integration. Gavin was afraid, yes, but thrilled too that his father ventured out among that hazard of men with their razors and cheap wine and women, seeing in his mind’s eye those black cities rife with crime.

  He mounted the front steps and went on into the lobby, checked the directory board for the sheriff’s office listing, then went down the hall and entered the front office. A woman with salt-and-pepper hair and cat’s-eye glasses looked up from her desk and asked if she could help him with something. He touched his hat, smiled, said he’d like to speak to the sheriff if it were possible.

  “I’ll be happy to take your name, sir,” she said, turned over an appointment book, started to write. “But it’s been busy today. Sheriff’s tied up at the moment.”

  “I’m afraid I might be the cause of his busyness. Indirectly, at least. My business concerns the man who shot out the tires of my automobile.”

  She laid her pen down, said, “Have a seat over there please, sir. I’ll step back there and see what I can manage.”

  He sat against the wall, turned his hat in his hands as he watched her stride back to the sheriff’s private office. She leaned in, said something he couldn’t hear, then crossed the threshold and shut the door behind her. It was overheated in the waiting area and he loosened his tie. He hated being delayed, knew that the sheriff would have to see him and that making him wait was pointless. To kill time, he studied the pictures decorating the walls. Images of different municipal buildings, the dam out on Watauga Lake, the railroad stop, all the old Kodak colors blanched.

  He knew some of the main facts of the town before he’d begun his search for a place to found his own Little Europe. Elizabethton was a hair under fifteen thousand souls, many of whom hailed from families holding in this corner of Northeast Tennessee since the overmountain men of the Revolutionary War. It was the forgotten adjunct of the Tri-City area of the immediate region, surrounded by Bristol, Kingsport, and most immediately, Johnson City. Those towns had their industry, their highway connections to support them while Elizabethton was one step closer to the big mountains, and though these mountains held no coal, they did have water that could be caught and controlled. So, the Tennessee Valley Authority had come in and made Elizabethton what it was. Built its dams and gatehouses. Made the rivers into a commodity. But even with electric power, the people of the place remained largely unchanged. They were proud white men and women. Gavin counted on them to be.

  “Sir, the sheriff’s got a minute if you can come on back.”

  He went in and sat in one of a pair of green leather chairs facing Sheriff Holston and his antique walnut desk. Behind him the two flags of state and nation. The secretary stepped out and clicked the door politely shut.

  “Mister Noon, I hope you didn’t think we needed anything more from you. If you were under that impression I’ll have to apologize for my deputies straightaway. They collected all the statements they needed when they were at your property . . .”

  His stream of talk ceased at Gavin’s raised hand, his smile.

  “Sheriff, I’ve had a chance to talk to everyone involved. Everyone involved on my side of the affair, at least, and I believe there’s been a grave misunderstanding.”

  “A misunderstanding?”

  “Yes, I don’t think there’s any reason to make this any harder than it has to be. I’m not entirely sure any crime, any crime of intent that is, ever took place. It’s my understanding that Mister Pickens is incarcerated?”

  Holston leaned back in his swivel chair until it creaked and strained like it was about to give way.

  “Yes sir. He’s locked up until we can get the judge to see him. Probably won’t be until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Mister Pickens, he’s an older gentleman from what I can tell.”

  “Yes, sir. He’s a codgerly seventy-three if I’m not mistaken.”

  “I really don’t think this is all that necessary then, is it? I mean, it seems like the fact that he’s already been brought to the jail, that should be lesson enough, don’t you think?”

  Holston leaned over a ledger, flipped some pages.

  “I’ll have to say, Mister Noon, I’m not too fond of locking somebody up that’s been as much a part of the community as he has. I might not agree with his politics, but he’s served the county the better part of thirty years. Lots of little old ladies wouldn’t have their Rotary Club garden beds if it wasn’t for him. Still, no one would argue him being in the wrong. But if you realized that it was a matter of him target shooting in his front yard and not knowing you and your group had moved into the old asylum, then that might significantly change the complexion of things. The DA might be open to the possibility of revisiting some of the details of the incident. That place where you’ve moved in has been vacant for twenty years at least, and there ain’t nothing further up the holler until you get to state land. Might still stick a misdemeanor on him, but nothing that amounts to anything. If you’re of a mind that that’s what may have happened, at least.”

  Gavin nodded, said, “That’s very reasonable. As new members of the community, my family and I are interested in neighborly relations. The last thing I’d want to do is cause any unnecessary friction. There’s no reason people can’t live beside one another despite whatever difference of opinion they might harbor. Don’t you think?”

  Holston cleared his throat, said something about the wisdom in such a thought, stuck his soft hand across the desk. Gavin took it as he would a rare and complicated gift.

  3

  KYLE SAT in front of the woodstove with a bowl of canned chili and drank one of those craft beers made down the road in Johnson City. The beer was good and dark and he dr
ank it with deliberate pauses between sips. Otherwise it would have been hard not to get carried away and slip over into a lazy buzz. He’d been close to useless for much of the afternoon once the deputy had driven him back and he’d sent Orylnne home for the day, told her as little about what had happened as he could, though he knew she’d find out the details soon enough. He was worried about Gerald, didn’t see any way out of things getting out of hand as soon as the word got out.

  He had been on the laptop chatting with a couple of the guys from the veterans group. They were trying to schedule a time when they could all meet for their next reforestation project. Kyle had already set the seedlings aside in the greenhouse, ready to be loaded up and driven to the new site up on Buckhorn Ridge, but they needed to meet once to go over the map and settle all the particulars. They were working out the best time the next morning when he glimpsed something coming through that dark, the shafts of car headlights climbing the drive. He wasn’t expecting anybody, so he went back to his bedroom to get the .380 from his bedside table, tucked it into the back of his waistband and stepped out to see who had come up this far into the country unannounced.