The Pallbearer Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Jordan Farmer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photo by iStockphoto

  ISBN: 978-1-5107-3650-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3651-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my family,

  whose support and sacrifice made these pages possible

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART II

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART III

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  THEY TOOK THE Dairy Road toward Huntington with a sawed-off twelve gauge, two Glocks, and some premium hydro that Shane had been skunking the Chevy with since Lynch, its smooth haze leaving Huddles with raw retinas. Rain cascaded down the windshield and drenched the road until their headlights reflected off the drowning yellow lines. This glare helped Huddles fight sleep while Shane, fortified by his daily cocktail of meth and steroids, rested like a stump in the passenger seat. The big man’s deltoids bulged with strips of chemical muscle, his shoulders great hunks of chiseled flesh that made Huddles feel scrawny beside him.

  Late runs rarely bothered Huddles. He preferred traveling at night, the last driver on the road with only the occasional yattering from coyotes on the hillside. It was the departures at dusk, times when the sun had just begun its descent behind the mountains, that let his lethargy take over. Often, he could avoid those trips. He would complain about a lack of sleep and beg his brother for a few hours to nap on the couch. Better at night anyway, he’d say. Less traffic, only the few state troopers roving to bust drunk kids, but standing on the steps of The Cat’s Den earlier that evening, his nostrils filled with the scent of some distant neighbor’s burning trash, he knew Ferris would send him anyway.

  The Dairy Road began to straighten. The narrow margins were marked for two lanes of traffic, but really only wide enough to safely accommodate one. In the days of the real coal boom, when the road was the only way to Huntington from Lynch, coal trucks constantly moved from the mine at the crest of the mountain. Now, it was mostly for the people who still lived in the backwoods that diverged from the route or night runners, like Huddles and Shane. With the mines closing, Huddles figured in ten more years there would be no cars left on the road at all. The woods would reclaim things by growing over the asphalt.

  In the distance, Huddles made out the black humps of cattle. There weren’t many farms in West Virginia, just strip mines that killed the fish in the creek. Before he dropped out of high school, his teacher referred to this sort of mentality as a product of Appalachian fatalism, but that always sounded like shit to Huddles. No one in Vermont, the Yankee state Mr. Walker hailed from, ever paid the teacher’s great granddaddy in scrip. Maybe that’s why Huddles loved taking the ­college kids’ money. There was real satisfaction in wadding crisp denominations up with rough hands and shoving the cash inside his pocket.

  Shane packed another bowl. “Your brother should have let us sleep,” he said.

  Things would have been easier if Huddles could’ve avoided Shane’s death metal. When his partner finally tired of the thrash guitars and relinquished control of the radio, Huddles left it on the classic country station where the spectral voices of dead crooners seeped from the speakers. All the twang and outlaw fiddle helped him focus.

  Ahead loomed a barn with all the windows busted out, its rotting wood eaten away by termites and years of elemental erosion. Behind the barn, a giant oak grew alone in the field, its crooked branches like the broken necks of young turkeys still alive enough to stretch skyward. Huddles watched the building so intensely that the Chevy hydroplaned across a deep puddle, but he regained control without colliding into the guardrail. He checked the speedometer. They’d been pushing nearly seventy, so he slowed down.

  “Careful,” Shane took a long hit off the pipe and hacked into his elbow.

  From behind them came the whimper of something in the distance. At first, Huddles thought it might be a catbird that had yet to roost, but then a blue glow filled the rearview and Huddles’ mind immediately jumped to his brother. He thought about the older man’s scarred knuckles covered with faded ink and how those knuckles would feel knocking against his bare teeth, loosening them from the root.

  Shane hacked again, fanned the smoke in the car and said, “You’d better pull over.” He cracked the window and pitched the pipe out into the night. It sailed a moment in the weak lights before the darkness swallowed it.

  The Chevy didn’t slow. It was as if the motor had become sentient and wanted to keep moving. The Dairy Road hugged close enough to the mountain for Huddles to pretend he was searching for a wide spot to pull over. He used this time to consider the lies he’d spout to the officer. Their stash was hidden in the trunk, but Huddles knew Shane’s pistol was under the passenger seat. The gun worried him. Shane seemed frantic, almost shaking as he lit a Marlboro and sucked deep to fill the car with some scent that might mask the weed.

  “Be cool when you pull off,” Shane said. “Just let me talk.”

  Huddles looked over Shane’s face, the hard jaw and bruises around his dark eyes from barroom brawls. No cop would believe any story from them. An ex-con and a sixteen-year-old traveling a useless road together was too suspicious. Ahead on the left sat a Marathon station that was robbed every other month, the last stop for gas for anyone headed towards Lynch, the first sign of civilization for travelers headed toward Huntington. Huddles knew he should pull off among the deserted pumps and let Shane try his luck, but something in him went rabbit and he pushed the throttle down.

  “Fuck,” Shane said. Huddles buckled his seatbelt while his friend’s fingers splayed on the dash. The knuckles bulged from multiple breaks and poor splints.

  The radio changed over from a Hank Williams tune to Merle Haggard’s lonesome intro on “Mama Tried.” Huddles felt the Chevy’s grip on the road loosen again. The car skidded into the guardrail, bounced off, and Huddles kept driving while the Crown Vic grew in the rearview. The siren became a wildcat scream behind them as the blue lights flashed inside the car. Ten feet separated their bumpers.

  Huddles’ brother kept invading his thoughts. He imagined the first few days after Ferris finished his prison stint. It was the same year their father died, and Ferris attended the wake swollen from all the time inside with nothing to do but build his body into some kind of flesh machine, proof he’d refused to yield to the diet of Wonder Bread and bologna. Something about him seemed invincible, unwilling to acquiesce to the inevitable mortality they’d recently witnessed.

  Shane pulled the Glock. The strip of duct tape used to secure it beneath his seat still hung from the slide. Huddles watched it flutter near the AC vent like a flag. “I’m lighting his ass up,” Shane said.

  The cruiser connected with the Chevy’s back bumper. Shane dropped the pistol onto the floorboards. He scrambled to pick it up, but it slipped too far under the seat for him to get a grip. Huddles put the pedal down harder.

  Another connection and they spun a half turn, their headlights shining through the cruiser’s windshield. The Chevy’s hood crunched into the guardrail and they stalled. Huddles tried to throw it into reverse, but the car’s engine simply gurgled. The brown sugar sweetness of coolant evaporating on the radiator filled his nostrils.

  The trooper exited the car with his gun and flashlight raised. Huddles squinted against the beam while Shane still tried to get a handle on his piece.

  “Leave it,” Huddles said.

  The trooper stood at the window screaming for them to place their palms on the dash and not move a fucking muscle. Huddles looked at Shane and tried to let his eyes say what his mouth couldn’t. When the officer opened the door, Huddles got a better look at him. A big young trooper, Smokey the Bear lid concealing light eyes full of fear. He seemed to vibrate as he stood with his feet spread and the gun train
ed on Huddles in that perfect stance that was still academy fresh. Huddles put his feet on the ground and the trooper threw him around into the car door, yanked his arms back and cuffed them while screaming for Shane to lie on his belly. After the bracelets were biting his wrists, Huddles sat on the wet ground and watched as the trooper tossed the car. He considered hitting the hills while the cop was busy in the back seat, but the idea of stumbling through the woods with the cuffs on didn’t make much sense. The trooper mumbled into his radio and threw fast food wrappers out of the Chevy’s floorboards as he searched.

  It didn’t take long to find the guns. The trooper pulled them from under the back seat, cleared the chambers on the pistols, ejected the clips and laid them on the hood. He came out of the trunk holding one of the Ziploc bags of pills in front of him, his Maglite shining on the assorted capsules as he shook it like a man calling chickens to feed.

  “I guess you boys had good cause to run,” he said.

  The trooper read their rights. Huddles tuned it out, his mind lost on the woods and the way his brother used to run through them, bare chested and dirty in the early fall when the mountain leaves changed into a multitude of colors. He recalled the animal scent of Ferris when he came home, the way the mud would be caked on his shins, clinging in the coarse hair of his legs. Huddles was never able to keep up with his brother’s long strides whenever he tagged along.

  Huddles and Shane were both loaded into the back seat of the cruiser, and then they were moving again, the country ghosts’ singing replaced by the static from the cop’s radio as he called in the arrest.

  “You boys got anything to say?” the trooper asked as they drove back towards Lynch.

  “Lawyer,” Huddles said and laid his head back, eyes closed until the only thing left was the sound of tires on asphalt, the occasional random piece of coal lost from a truck pinging as it was tossed up into the wheel well.

  PART I

  THE CHILDREN

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN EARLY SUMMER storm had killed the power on Fuller Street, casting the turn of the century coal company duplexes into darkness. The high winds tore branches from trees rooted low on the mountains and collapsed a sizable oak onto a generator. The live wire lay convulsing in the road beside a church that had been converted from the old company store, the pulpit now sitting where the cash register once resided. Repair men stood around the downed line, its wiring hanging out of the black casing like the exposed guts of a slain beast. They removed their hard hats, wiped perspiring brows and debated who would go tell the neighborhood it might be days before the lights were back on.

  Fuller Street had never been a place of wealth, but it contained a sense of economic diversity rare in America as suburbia continued its sprawl. The two rows of houses were bisected by derelict railroad tracks and status. The poorest on the left, slightly better off on the right. The few families not destitute often bulldozed the old company houses, building more modern homes with central heat and bay windows. These renovations sat near houses ready to fall in on themselves, the porches rotten with splintered planks bowed up like malformed spines, the yards constantly filled with cinder blocks and scavenged lumber as the owners tried to get a tourniquet on the slow decay.

  Henry Felts’ place was the worst on the street. For many years it was the local drug den, a nuisance due to the migration of addicts who flocked there for week-long binges. Fuller Street was too far from town for anyone to give a damn until someone in the house was shot with a squirrel rifle. After the incident, the police raided the hovel and the county auctioned it cheap.

  Terry Blankenship had been helping Felts with the repairs. Even at sixteen, Terry was no stranger to labor and didn’t mind the work, but the place felt like a lost cause to him. There were holes in the roof, like God routinely put his fist through the ceiling in a rage, and the front of the house remained bare to the lumber, the patchwork of half-­aluminum and half-wooden siding either gone completely or hanging from the frame like skin flayed from bone. The entire structure seemed as if it were staggering before it fell over. Worse still, old man Felts preferred to bend his elbow and supervise. Terry’s young back did most of the work. Considering Felts’ penchant for injuries, it may have been the better system. Terry had worked alongside his father on unlicensed contracting since he was twelve, had witnessed all manner of workplace mishaps, including a man shooting himself through the calf with a nail gun, but he’d never seen someone as accident prone as Felts. Three consecutive days of minor electrical shocks, multiple fingers crushed by hammers, and trips over extension cords kept Felts hobbled while Terry took over whatever half-finished duty felled the boss.

  They worked at night to avoid the heat and since the sun would be rising soon, Terry decided to finish prying up the kitchen floor around the sink. He felt bad every time he drove his pry bar into the pulp that had once been blond hardwood before the water damage. It was too hurtful to consider what the place had been in the past, so Terry just focused on work until the dirt underneath the house was exposed. He was looking at the nests of torn cloth brought under the foundations by creek rats when Felts shambled into the room and handed him a chilled Old Milwaukee.

  “Let’s call it a day,” Felts said. “My nephew’s coming up to look at the place.”

  “You want him to see it like this?” Terry asked. The cold can felt good in his blistered hand. Terry placed it against his warm neck.

  “He’s seen worse.”

  They sat on the porch steps and looked out across the overgrown yard. A pile of aluminum siding lay near the gravel driveway. Another stack of vinyl beside it. Eventually, all this mismatched shit would be stripped from the house, and Terry would be responsible for replacing it with something new. He was thankful for the weeks of work. The money was better than any other opportunity in town, and Terry needed all he could get his hands on. Boys in Lynch grew up aware of what other young Americans were just beginning to understand. This generation would have to work three times as hard as their parents or starve.

  A battered Ford truck pulled off the highway. When the engine died, Terry watched a small man jump down from the high cab. He might have stood five feet tall, the overgrown grass brushing against his shirttail. As he approached, Terry noticed the man’s stunted legs were the only strange appendage on him, the torso and arms proportional to a slightly larger body. His face was startling once close enough for Terry to make out his features in the darkness. A heavy brow with green eyes, cheekbones so high and sharp they might chisel through his tight skin. His nose ran a tad long, the end pointed downward like the blade on a hawkbill knife.

  The man grinned at them on the porch, only the left side of his mouth rising into a smirk, and Terry felt a stirring he hadn’t believed such a small man could create. He was certainly handsome in an unconventional sort of way. Terry thought he might have been truly beautiful if those femurs were only afforded a limp pecker’s worth of added inches. The tragedy was this missing stature would keep the man invisible to so many. Terry knew what it meant to be different in a nowhere town. Strange is hard enough anywhere, but small towns hammer down on the unusual. Any absence of conformity and you find yourself marked. Terry knew people talked about him, aired their private suspicions in small congregations, but he could hide if necessary. Staying closeted created a certain pain, but it was still an option in a place where being yourself meant risking your life. He felt sorry for the little man. It must’ve been scary being branded with difference for all to see.

  “You have bought yourself one serious mess,” the small man said. His voice sounded like dry reeds rubbing together.

  Felts smiled. “Wait until the bats come.”

  “Bats?”

  “Living inside my eaves.” Felts pointed to a small opening in the shingles. “They’ll fly home soon, but I’m ready.” His finger traced down to the corner of the porch where a Remington pump sat against the railing.

  “You’ll never hit one,” Terry said.

  “Gonna try,” Felts replied. He looked at the house, perhaps speculating where the first bat might enter before turning back to the small man. “Terry, this is my nephew, Jason Felts. Jason, this is Terry Blankenship. He’s helping me out around here.”