A WINTER DREADFUL COLD it was. He thought before it was over that he would look like one of the bitter spruces that grew slant downwind out of the shale and lichens on the hogback. Coming up the mountain through the blue winter twilight among great boulders and the ruins of giant trees prone in the forest he wondered at such upheaval. Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed. Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls.
It snowed again. It snowed for four days and when Ballard went down the mountain again it took him the best part of the morning to cross to the ridge above Greer's place. There he could hear the chuck of an axe muted with distance and snowfall. He could see nothing. The snow was gray against the sky, soft on his lashes. It fell without a sound. Ballard cradled the rifle in his arm and made his way down the slope toward the house.
He crouched behind the barn listening for sound of Greer. There in the frozen mire of mud and dung deeply plugged with hoofprints. When he came through the barn it was empty. The loft was filled with hay. Ballard stood in the forebay door looking down through the falling snow at the gray shape of the house. He crossed to the chicken house and undid the wire that held the hasp and entered. A few white hens eyed him nervously from their cubbynests on the far wall. Ballard passed along a row of roosting rails and went through a chickenwire door to the feedroom. There he loaded his pockets with shelled corn and came back. He surveyed the hens, clucked his tongue at them and reached for one. It erupted from the box with a long squawk and flapped past and lit in the floor and trotted off. Ballard cursed. In the uproar the other hens were following by ones and pairs. He lunged and grabbed one by the tail as it came soaring out. It set up an outraged shrieking until Ballard could get it by the neck. Holding the struggling bird in both hands and with his rifle between his knees he crowhopped to the small dustwebbed window and peered out. Nothing stirred. You son of a bitch, said Ballard, to the chicken or Greer or both. He wrung the hen's neck and went quickly through the nesting boxes gathering up the few eggs and putting them in his pockets and then he went out again.
IN THE SPRING OR WARMER weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. Ballard went through the woods kicking down his old trails where they veered over the hill toward his onetime homeplace. Old comings and goings. The tracks of a fox raised out of the snow intaglio like little mushrooms and berrystains where birds shat crimson mutes upon the snow like blood.
When he reached the overlook he stood his rifle against the stones and watched the house below him. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. Ballard watched with his arms folded. He asked Greer where he was today. A gray and colder day with all the melting snow ceased from its dripping and runneling. Ballard watched the first flakes fall like ash into the valley.
Where are you, you bastard? he called.
Two minute doilies of snow settled and perished on the crossed arms of his coat. He watched until the silent house grew dim below him in the gray snowfall. After a while he took up the rifle once again and crossed the ridge to where he could see the road. There was nobody going up or down. Already the snow was falling so that you could not see up the valley at all. A spray of small birds came out of the snowfall and passed like windblown leaves into the silence again. Ballard crouched on his heels with the rifle between his knees. He told the snow to fall faster and it did.
AFTER THE SNOW CEASED HE went every day. He'd watch from his half mile promontory, see Greer come from the house for wood or go to the barn or to the chicken house. After he'd gone in again Ballard would wander about aimlessly in the woods talking to himself. He laid queer plans. His shuffling boot tracks trampling out the prints of lesser life. Where mice had gone, or foxes hunting in the night. The dovelike imprimatur of a stooping owl.
He'd long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outerwear as well. A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape. Down there the valley with the few ruststained roofs and faintest wisps of smoke. The ribboned slash of mud that the road made up the white valley and beyond it the fold on fold of mountains with their black weirs of winter treelimbs and dull green cedars.
His own tracks came from the cave bloodred with cavemud and paled across the slope as if the snow had cauterized his feet until he left dry white prints in the snow. False spring came again with a warm wind. The snow melted off into little patches of gray ice among the wet leaves. With the advent of this weather bats began to stir from somewhere deep in the cave. Ballard lying on his pallet by the fire one evening saw them come from the dark of the tunnel and ascend through the hole overhead fluttering wildly in the ash and smoke like souls rising from hades. When they were gone he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself.
III
YONDER IT IS, SHERIFF SAID the sheriff's deputy.
All right. Go on to the top and turn around.
They drove on up the deeply mired road fishtailing slightly and unreeling long slabs of wet mud from under the tires until they came to the loop at the end of the road. Coming back down you could see the ruts where they went off into the weeds and you could see where the young trees were crushed and where the tiretracks went on down the side of the mountain.
Yonder she lays, said the deputy.
The car was turned on its side in a deep ravine some hundred feet below them. The sheriff wasn't looking at it. He was looking back up the road toward the turnaround. I wisht we'd of been here three days ago when they was still some snow on the ground, he said. Let's go down and look at it.
They stood on the side of the car and raised the door up and the deputy descended into the interior. After a while he said: They ain't a damn thing in here, Sheriff.
What about in the glovebox?
Not a thing.
Look up in under the seats.
I done looked.
Look some more.
When he came up out of the car he had a bottlecap in his hand. He handed it to the sheriff.
What's that? said the sheriff.
That's it.
The sheriff looked at the bottlecap. Let's get the turtledeck open, he said.
In the trunk was a spare tire and a jack and a lugwrench and some rags and two empty bottles. The sheriff was standing with his hands in his pockets looking back up the side of the ravine toward the road. If you wanted to get from here to the road, he said--which you would if you was here--how would you go?
The deputy pointed. I'd go right up that there gully, he said.
So would I, said the sheriff.
Where do you reckon he went?
I don't know.
How long did you say his old lady says he's been gone?
Since Sunday evenin.
They sure the girl was with him?
So they say. They was engaged.
Maybe they took off through the woods or somethin.
They wasn't in the car, the sheriff said.
They wasn't?
No.
Well how did it get here?
I believe somebody's shoved it off in here.
Well maybe they run off together. Might better find out how much he owed on the car. That could be what ...
I done have. It's paid for.
The deputy nudged a few small stones with the toe of his boot. After a while he looked up. Well, he said. Where do you reckon they've got to?
I reckon they've got to wherever that gal got to that was supposed to be with that boy we found up here.
She was supposed to of been goin with that Blalock boy we talked to.
Yeah, well. These young people keep pretty active some of em. Let's go up here.
They walked up the road to the turnaround.
On the far side they found shoetracks in the mud along the edge of the road. Further down the circle they found more. The sheriff just sort of nodded at them.
What do you reckon, Sheriff? said the deputy.
Why nothin. It could just be where somebody got out to piss. He was looking off down the road. Do you reckon, he said, that if you was to shove a car off from along in here it might get as far as where we're parked down yonder fore it left the road?
The deputy looked with him. Well, he said. It's possible. I'd say it might could.
So would I, said the sheriff.
BALLARD'S NEW SHOES sucked in the mud as he approached the pickup truck. He had the rifle under his arm and the flashlight in his hand. When he got to the truck he opened the door and flicked the light on and trapped in its yellow beam the white faces of a boy and a girl in each other's arms.
The girl was the first to speak. She said: He's got a gun.
Ballard's head was numb. They seemed assembled there the three of them for some purpose other than his. He said: Let's see your driver's license.
You ain't the law, the boy said.
I'll be the judge of that, said Ballard. What are you all doin up here?
We was just settin here, the girl said. She wore a sprig of gauze ferns at her shoulder with two roses of burgundy crepe.
You was fixin to screw, wasn't ye? He watched their faces.
You better watch your mouth, the boy said.
You want to make me?
You put down that rifle and I will.
Any time you feel froggy, jump, said Ballard.
The boy reached to the dashboard and turned on the ignition and began to crank the engine.
Quit it, said Ballard.
The engine did not start. The boy had raised his hand as if he would bat at the riflebarrel when Ballard shot him through the neck. He fell sideways into the girl's lap. She folded her hands and put them under her chin. Oh no, she said.
Ballard levered another shell into the chamber. I told that fool, he said. Didn't I tell him? I don't know why people don't want to listen.
The girl looked at the boy and then she looked up at Ballard. She was holding her hands in the air as if she didn't know where to put them. She said: What did you have to go and do that for?
It was up to him, said Ballard. I told the idjit.
Oh god, said the girl.
You better get out of there.
What?
Out. Come on out of there.
What are you goin to do?
That's for me to know and you to find out.
The girl pushed the boy from her and slid across the seat and stepped out into the mud of the road.
Turn around, Ballard said.
What are you goin to do?
Just turn around and never mind.
I have to go to the bathroom, the girl said.
You don't need to worry about that, said Ballard.
Turning her by the shoulder he laid the muzzle of the rifle at the base of her skull and fired.
She dropped as if the bones in her body had been liquefied. Ballard tried to catch her but she slumped into the mud. He got hold of her dress by the nape to raise her but the material parted in his fist and in the end he had to stand the rifle against the fender of the truck and take her under the arms.
He dragged her through the weeds, walking backwards, watching over his shoulder. Her head was lolling and blood ran down her neck and Ballard had dragged her out of her shoes. He was breathing harshly and his eyeballs were wild and white. He laid her down in the woods not fifty feet from the road and threw himself on her, kissing the still warm mouth and feeling under her clothes. Suddenly he stopped and raised up. He lifted her skirt and looked down at her. She had wet herself. He cursed and pulled down the panties and dabbed at the pale thighs with the hem of the girl's skirt. He had his trousers about his knees when he heard the truck start.
The sound he made was not unlike the girl's. A dry sucking of air, mute with terror. He leaped up hauling at his breeches and tore through the brush toward the road.
A crazed mountain troll clutching up a pair of bloodstained breeches by one hand and calling out in a high mad gibbering, bursting from the woods and hurtling down the gravel road behind a lightless truck receding half obscured in rising dust. He pounded down the mountain till he could run no more nor had he breath to call after. Before long he had stopped to buckle his belt and he went lurching on, holding his side, slumped and breathing hard and saying to himself: You won't get far, you dead son of a bitch. He was halfway down the mountain before he realized he did not have the rifle. He stopped. Then he went on anyway.
When he came out on the valley road he looked down toward the highway. The road in the moonlight lay beneath a lightly sustained trail of dust like a river under a mantle of mist and for as far as he could see. Ballard's heart lay in his chest like a stone. He squatted in the dust of the road until his breathing eased. Then he rose and started back up the mountain again. He tried to run at first but he could not. It took him almost an hour to make the three miles back to the top.
He found the rifle where it had fallen from the truck fender and he checked it and then went on into the woods. She was lying as he had left her and she was cold and wooden with death. Ballard howled curses until he was choking and then he knelt and worked her around onto his shoulders and struggled up. Scuttling down the mountain with the thing on his back he looked like a man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs bowed akimbo like a monstrous frog.
BALLARD WATCHED THEM from the saddle in the mountain, a small thing brooding there, squatting with the rifle in his arms. It had been raining for three days. The creek far below him out of its banks, the fields flooded, sheets of standing water spotted with winter weeds and fodder. Ballard's hair hung from his thin skull in lank wet strings and gray water dripped from his hair and from the end of his nose.
In the night the side of the mountain winked with lamps and torches. Late winter revelers among the trees or some like hunters calling each to each there in the dark. In the dark Ballard passed beneath them, scuttling with his ragged chattel down stone tunnels within the mountain.
Toward dawn he emerged from a hole in a rock on the far side of the mountain and peered about like a groundhog before commiting himself to the gray and rainy daylight. With his rifle in one hand and his blanketload of gear he set off through the thin woods toward the cleared land beyond.
He crossed a fence into a half flooded field and made his way toward the creek. At the ford it was more than twice its right width. Ballard studied the water and moved on downstream. After a while he was back. The creek was totally opaque, a thick and brickcolored medium that hissed in the reeds. As he watched a drowned sow shot into the ford and spun slowly with pink and bloated dugs and went on. Ballard stashed the blanket in a stand of sedge and returned to the cave.
When he got back to the creek it seemed to have run yet higher. He carried a crate of odd miscellany, men's and ladies' clothes, the three enormous stuffed toys streaked with mud. Adding to this load the rifle and the blanketful of things he'd carried down he stepped into the water.
The creek climbed his legs in wild batwings. Ballard tottered and rebalanced and took a second grip on his load and went on. Before he even reached the creekbed he was wading kneedeep. When it reached his waist he began to curse aloud. A vitriolic invocation for the receding of the waters. Anyone watching him could have seen he would not turn back if the creek swallowed him under. It did. He was in fast water to his chest, struggling along on tiptoe gingerly and leaning upstream when a log came steaming into the flat. He saw it coming and began to curse. It spun broadside to him and it came on with something of animate ill will. Git, he screamed at it, a hoarse croak in the roar of the water. It came on bobbing and bearing in its perimeter a meniscus of pale brown froth in which floated walnuts, twigs, a slender bottle neck erect and tilting like a metronome.
Git, goddamn it
. Ballard shoved at the log with the barrel of the rifle. It swung down upon him in a rush and he hooked his rifle arm over it. The crate capsized and floated off. Ballard and the log bore on into the rapids below the ford and Ballard was lost in a pandemonium of noises, the rifle aloft in one arm now like some demented hero or bedraggled parody of a patriotic poster come aswamp and his mouth wide for the howling of oaths until the log swept into a deeper pool and rolled and the waters closed over him.
He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?
When he reached the willows he pulled himself up and found that he stood in scarcely a foot of water. There he turned and shook the rifle alternately at the flooded creek and at the gray sky out of which the rain still fell grayly and without relent and the curses that hailed up above the thunder of the water carried to the mountain and back like echoes from the clefts of bedlam.
He splashed his way to high ground and began to unload and disassemble the rifle, putting the shells in his shirtpocket and wiping the water from the gun with his forefinger and blowing through the barrel, muttering to himself the while. He took out the shells and dried them the best he could and reloaded the rifle and levered a shell into the chamber. Then he started downstream at a trot.