Daren Dean

The Last Country Western

Smith Newlin Posey struck him with a machete in the bicep out behind Click's old outhouse looking at a broken down heap of a Farmall tractor.  The blade had cut all the way to the bone that had caused the deputy to lose consciousness. When he awoke it was dark and his body was riddled with fresh cuts. The snow was covered with the rust smell of his own blood. He tried to remember what they had been talking about just before. What had Posey said to him? It was something like, If you aren't for us, you're again us. He hadn't been aware of doing anything wrong. Just trying to help keep the family informed. But the Poseys and the Lynches were the craziest most unpredictable families he had ever heard of. Now, all he wanted to do was get back home — maybe quit his job as deputy.

To make matters worse the High Sheriff, Del Hampton, had named Deputy Ted Oberhaus as his successor. Not that the people didn't vote on it, but Hampton would throw his considerable weight and influence behind Oberhaus — connections counted in Fairmont. Oberhaus was the kind that followed Hampton around with his nose pressed firmly against Hampton's favorite hemorrhoid for the last three years ever since Hampton first mentioned he might retire soon. Now Skitmore was thinking about going back to work for the State Hospital, where he used to be an orderly ten years ago, rather than work for an incompetent. He had heard the State paid for your schooling if you wanted to take night classes at the local college and become an RN. Maybe marry a nice local girl if he could get shut of this predicament.

Out of one swollen eye he could see Smith from where he lay on the cold ground. What everyone ever said about Smith was true. He would just as soon kill you as look at you. No lie. He was willing to kill the law. Crazy. Skitmore was thirsty. He wondered how bad his wounds were. If he could get up. He was awestruck when a black dog, part wolf maybe, with the rheumy eye of a prophet came up to stare him in the face with a growl, and then loped off into the woods beyond the back pasture. A girl's voice called plaintively to the wolf disappearing into the treeline.

Smith was talking to someone. It was the girl. Smith's girl, Memphis. This might be his only chance. He began to use his feet to push himself backward. He slid across the snow. After he managed to get a few feet that way he turned to get up on his hands and legs. He hobbled down the pasture in the direction the wolf had taken. He tried to cradle his right arm across his body. It didn't seem to want to work properly. There was an old wood-framed shed with corrugated metal sheets for a roof that he ran by hunched over; a dump the Poseys had been using for years full of junked cars and tractors and lawnmowers; a Silverline trailer; an old flat wagon from another era in farming. A dozen or so scrawny herefords were trotting skittishly away from him and back up the ridge. He managed to get over the barbed wire fence and made for a deadfall of piled timber to get between himself and Smith. Until finally he came to feral grapevines, he ran through their bare grasping shoots as best he could. Muscadine vines pulled at his legs to trip him up as if they were Posey's tenants. The stygian trees grew dense now causing him to crouch at the waist and push young oak and elm growing too close to one another with his palms stretched out in front of him like a sleepwalker or a creature in a B movie crashing through the woods in an ill-fitting costume. He passed a large birch that his little boy referred to as a cow-tree.

Skitmore had known Smith his entire life. They had hunted deer together with other men from the tavern. Now, Smith was shooting at him. He ran even after the stitch in his side begged him to stop. The Posey land had been bought cheap years earlier off Fairmont mining company. It was no good for farming. There had always been stories that if you stepped in the wrong place you might fall down an old coal shaft. A sheer cliff of limestone bluffs grew out of the ground off to his left under another little creek he had swum in with Trout and Junior back in high school. Familiar quarry rocks deposited between the pits like markers from an ancient religious sect.

Skitmore was still frightened as he ran, but he began to seethe with anger directed at Oberhaus for snatching up his rightful place in the world. He had worked under Del Hampton almost five years longer than Oberhaus, and then the thought entered his mind. If he could make it out of this situation alive, he would do something about it. He had worshipped Hampton like a god, but now he saw chinks in the armor. The old man wasn't so much now, he thought. He was just the son of an old farmer. Skitmore vowed to bring Hampton down. The trees quaked softly in his field of vision with tears. Dawning comprehension hit him like twin headlights on a dark highway--the reason he was even out here--Del  Hampton's dearest friend in the world was Cordel Lynch. Stranger things had happened. One had become a country outlaw; a local legend in this part of the country. While the other, had become the law. Lynch and Hampton had served in Korea together back during the Punic wars. No wonder Smith Posey was after his ass. He heard someone now. It sounded like crying. He stopped near a sapling and placed his hand on the trunk and held his breath. The sound was gone. He breathed again. Just as he began to exhale — the crying sound. He stumbled and took a knee in the snow like they used to in football and wrestling when the coach spoke to them as a group back in high school.

When he emerged out of the skeleton tendrils of winter bull briars into a clearing he knew he had made it to the clay pits. There was a stagnant smell like oil and fish coming from the water even in the cold. The ground around the pits was scarred and barren save for a few stunted hedge and pine trees. The snow had melted here enough to reveal bald patches of gray rock reflecting the light of the pale yellow moon. He figured he would be safe from most men, but Smith was not most men. Smith was a Vietnam Vet. A genuine war hero. Coming across the country he just had would deter anyone, but not Smith. He picked a path between the clay pits and stumbled forward. There was the sound of something back in the treelike. Could Smith have caught him so quickly, he wondered. He decided to hazard a look over his shoulder, but didn't see anything. Just then he tripped over his own feet attempting to run at an angle and fell into the clay pit on his right. 

The clay pit was iced over. He was lying on the surface of the water. It was frozen solid. He began to laugh, until his wheezing lungs reminded him why he was here. There was no one to see him so he gave out a few tearful gasps until he controlled his emotions. He tried to stand up, but fell hard on his shoulder. The waterline was lower by several feet than the surface. When he stood once more he reached up to grab the roots of a tree covered with caked mud in an attempt to pull himself up, but the roots came tearing out of the ground in his hands. He fell back on the ice. The ice cracked audibly beneath him. His heart hammered in his chest. He had only come to warn the Poseys that the Lynch clan were not people to mess with. Between Cordel, Gutshot, and Glennray Lynch — there was nothing they wouldn't do if they were of a mind to. What Skitmore hadn't counted on was that they were all related. Smith had taken obdurate offense at what he had said about those sons-of-bitches--Sheriff Hampton notwithstanding. He heard a dog bawling not too far away, getting closer, and he realized it was not the wolf he had seen or thought he had seen earlier but that insane dog tied around the neck with a logging chain off to the side of the house.

He had been asleep or his eyes had been closed. One of the two. Great fat flakes of snow were beginning to fall furiously around them. His great grandmother used to tell him when it snowed that the angels were fluffing their pillows in heaven. A blinding halogen light in his face caused his eyes to pop open. An arm barely raised to shield himself from the cycloptic gaze of the battery-powered torch. For a moment he thought it might be the very presence of God he had heard about in Sunday school — the biblical fear was real anyway. Skitmore was waiting for the voice. The voice that would tell him it was all over now. Time to rest for good. Instead a dog slobbered rage almost hovering in mid-air by an unseen immortal coming in and out of focus with the beam of the torch. Skitmore was beyond cold. His body shivered violently there on the ice. The wood turned silent. Memories came flooding into his consciousness--only to be interrupted by the leathery sound of nightwings beating in the frozen air as he fought against the lucid moment. A stick or good-sized pole was jabbing him in the ribcage now. Menacing laughter fell down from above.

"Hey, Nelson," a voice called. "Looks like you're in one hell of a shape now."

The torch was lowered. The saturnine face of Smith Newlin Posey came out of the dark indistinct and ghostly, a deathmask beyond fury or rage. The face of implacable demi-devil stared through him as if his face were only a mask. The eyes sucking down terror, wrath, and his energy like a psychic vampire. It was a rough-hewn face as though from a block of wood like the Indian in the old country-western song.

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January 4, 2010