Bull Mountain(23)

“Jesus, Gareth. What are you going to do with that?”

He didn’t answer her. He reached up above his head and switched the overhead lamp to the off position, and slowly opened the door. He waited a few seconds between movements and carefully slipped out the door to the ground. Immediately he thought he caught shadows moving in his peripheral vision. His arms and legs suddenly felt heavy, like he was submerged in a pool of molasses. No matter how fast he tried to creep toward his father’s house, he was moving in slow motion. His hands were sweating so bad, every few steps he had to wipe his palms on his jeans and switch the massive wheel gun from hand to hand in fear of dropping it. The path from the truck to the wraparound porch wasn’t lit, but he could maneuver the yard with his eyes closed, if he needed to. He must have made better time than he thought, because by the time he approached a small thicket off the back porch, the shadows he saw by the truck had become two full-fledged figures decked out in camo taking the steps behind his house. The figures took each step with a ten count, feeling out each footfall, careful to avoid a creaky board. Gareth’s heart was pounding in his chest. The blood rushing in his ears was so loud, he wondered how the two men at his father’s back door couldn’t hear it. He watched the smaller of the two men pull something out of his coat—a small fixed-blade knife. He crouched down in front of the back door and oh-so-quietly began to jimmy the handle. The bigger man covered him with what looked like some type of military assault rifle. Gareth had seen them only in magazines and on TV. He closed his eyes, but for only a moment, and breathed in through his nose like his deddy taught him. He raised the gun, exhaled, and fired at the bigger man holding the rifle. He hit the would-be assassin dead center, and the big man bounced off the house and hit the porch like a side of beef cut off the chain. The smaller man at the door flinched from the noise but didn’t try to stand up. He didn’t even turn around. His body just went slack and he dropped his chin to his chest. “Please,” he said, “let me explain.”

“You should have learned your birds,” Gareth said, right before he put three rounds in the man’s back and two more in the oak door.

If the men attempting to break into Gareth’s house had any more undisclosed members in their hit squad, they had hauled ass after their point man’s and his partner’s bodies hit the porch. Floodlights filled the pastures. Cooper appeared on the porch completely naked, leading with the business end of a 12-gauge. He saw the two dead men on his porch and his only son holding his gun. The sudden illumination of the porch made Gareth aware of all the blood, and he immediately got sick in the bushes, over the handrail. Cooper had known ever since he was a boy that being around death and being the dealer of it were entirely different things. It was a lesson he’d waited a long time for his son to learn. The older Burroughs barely glanced at the dead bodies on the porch. It didn’t matter who they were. He regarded them as a problem solved—a problem his boy had solved. He stepped over them and the pools of blood seeping through the cracks between the boards and grabbed his son back from the handrail. He leaned the shotgun against a wooden post and hugged Gareth tightly to his chest. It was the first time Gareth had killed anyone, to Cooper’s knowledge. It was also the first time Gareth had ever seen his father cry. They cried together, as father and son, cradled in gun smoke, blood, and vomit.

Annette Henson almost cried, too. She had opted not to listen to the instructions Gareth gave her before he took to killing those two men. Almost immediately after Gareth left her in the truck, she followed him out the same door and watched the whole thing play out from the bushes only a few feet from where Gareth stood. Her panties were soaked through. She decided right there and then she was destined to become Mrs. Gareth Burroughs.





CHAPTER





9




ANNETTE HENSON BURROUGHS

1961

1.

“That’s where my boy killed those sons-a-bitches dead,” Cooper yelled at the preacher. The crowd of wedding guests cheered and laughed. Gareth smiled at that. Annette did, too, but it came forced. She glanced down through the white veil at the bloodstain on the porch more out of reflex than pride. She’d seen the ugly thing a hundred times before. One of the men Gareth killed that night was Cody McCullin, the son of Delray McCullin, seeking revenge for something Cooper had done to his father. It was the night she fell in love with Gareth. Three summers later, here they were getting married on the same steps. The preacher looked to Cooper for permission to continue and the old man lifted his flask. “Go on,” he said. “Get on with it.”

2.

Halford Jefferson Burroughs was born the following spring of ’62. Annette had heard from other mothers on the mountain how wonderful and blessed the experience of having a little one grow inside her would be, but nothing about it was wonderful at all. She was tired all the time. Her tiny, pretty figure that made all the other women of Bull Mountain envious began to warp and contort into something she couldn’t bear to look at in the mirror. And her hair, her hair went from being as slick and shiny as a black diamond to looking like shit-covered straw at the bottom of a horse trailer. When the baby kicked, it wasn’t a warm, comforting event. It didn’t create a bond between mother and child. It hurt, was all. It just hurt. Sometimes it was painful enough to keep her hunched over in the bed for days. On days she felt well enough to leave the house, she couldn’t go nowhere, not even out to the market, without some group of old biddies wanting to feel her up and put their hands on the blessing. Most days she just wanted to scream, and scream she did. Childbirth was pain Annette wasn’t prepared for. She thought about a picture book she had checked out once from the library down in Waymore. It was full of photographs of Alaska. Picture after picture of sprawling snowcapped mountains and swirling colored lights in the sky that looked better to her than any fireworks she’d ever seen. While Halford was busy tearing a hole in her belly, Annette soared over those mountains in her mind. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever come back.