For a minute we stood outside, snow stinging my face, listening. Rosco pressed against my side. Up here the acoustics can lie to you. Between the wind and the granite, voices carry. Out of the darkness, we heard something that sounded like a muffled scream. More like the second half of an echo. There it was again. Louder. And longer.
Rosco stood motionless, staring northeast toward the ridgeline above us, his muscles taut as a wound spring. I tapped him on top of the head, and he tore up the hillside and into the tree line, his paws flinging snow as he ran. I followed, slipping with each step. Four minutes later he was back. He stood thirty yards in front of me and spun in a circle. Then a second time. When I stepped toward him, he disappeared again into the trees. I fast-jogged up an old logging road toward a saddle between two six-thousandfoot peaks where two backpacking trails intersected at a waterfall, a popular summer hiking destination. No one really swam up here. At least not for more than a few seconds at a time. Even in summer, the water temperature never rose above thirty-six degrees. Right now it hovered in the upper twenties. The sound was growing closer. Someone was frantically calling a name.
I sprinted onto the saddle and let my eyes adjust to the snow and poor light. The attraction to this area of the trail was Big Tom’s Fall. Big Tom was the unlucky fellow who happened upon the dead body of Elisha Mitchell, after whom the mountain is named, back in the 1800s. Big Tom’s Fall is a sixty-meter cascading section of rock, steep enough and slippery enough to ride down on your butt before it empties into a small pool of water. The Fall drops off at about a seventy-degree angle. Too steep to walk unaided but doable with the right length of rope and sure footing.
I reached the top of Big Tom’s to find two people, one larger than the other, leaning over the precipice, screaming down into the water. If they leaned any farther they’d join whoever was down there. Coming out of the bottom were the muffled cries of what sounded like a young girl. To the wide-eyed amazement of the two at the top, Rosco and I ran up alongside them and stared down. It took me about half a second to realize that as this woman and her two children had been walking the knife’s edge between Big Tom Mountain and Craig Mountain, the little girl slipped. Their problem was threefold: snow, ice, and no rope. The little girl below wasn’t moving, and her head was barely sticking above water. Either she couldn’t swim or the cold wouldn’t let her.
I clicked the carabiner tied to the end of my rope to the steel anchor sunk into the rock by the forestry department. I tossed the rope down, peeled off my coat, and began rappelling backward. Sure purchase was nonexistent, so I slid my way down. At the bottom, unable to slow my descent, I splashed into the waist-deep water. The shock took my breath away, momentarily paralyzing me. Rosco appeared out of a side trail that’s longer and only accessible by a cougar or a cocky dog. He jumped into the water and swam toward the girl. I forced my body to start moving and walked sideways across the flow of the water. I grabbed the girl, who clutched my back with a whimper, and we made our way back to the rope while Rosco climbed out, shook, and disappeared the way he’d come.
I pulled the girl around in front of me, draped her arms around my neck so she was hugging me, and said, “Hold tight.” She was nearly limp as a Raggedy Ann doll and crying, which I took as a good sign. Trying to ignore the growing loss of gross motor movement in my hands, I began pulling us up, fist over fist. Step by slippery step. I used my elbows and forearms to hold the girl close to me. Above me I could hear Rosco barking and the woman screaming. Twice my hands slipped, causing my feet to fly out from beneath me, slamming me against the rock, where my forearms took the brunt of the blow while I tried to protect the child.
At the top I was met by the woman. Her lips were blue and terror covered her face, but she was laser-beam focused on the little girl.
The wind was howling, so I had to raise my voice. “You got anyplace you can get warm?”
She shook her head.
I held the girl in my arms and nodded. “My coat!” She snatched it off the ground, and I wrapped it around the girl and pointed. “My cabin. I got a fire.” She nodded and I led the way.
The woman followed step for step, along with the boy and Rosco. We descended the trail as quickly as we could, almost a half mile, where it spit us out onto the logging road. A quarter mile later we could smell the smoke of my fire. Every part of my body was screaming with lactic acid buildup.
The woman opened the door, and all three of us converged on the fire. I set the girl down on top of Rosco’s bear rug, and the woman immediately began stripping the clothes off the kids. I fetched two sleeping bags, added several logs to the fire, and helped the woman slide the kids into the bags. They were shaking uncontrollably, and the little girl was whimpering.
“You’d better get in there with her,” I said. “I’ll get you some dry clothes and put on some water to boil.”
The woman peeled off her wet clothes, I handed her some sweats, and she wrapped the bag tight around the two of them. As they began to thaw and warm, the shaking became more violent, proving that they had been cold for quite some time. Seeing that the boy needed some extra warmth, I scooted Rosco up alongside him. The boy unzipped his bag, wrapped his arm around Rosco’s tummy, and pulled the dog in closer.
Rosco stared at us like we’d all lost our minds. The boy snuggled up next to Rosco, and the four of them started the long—and painful—process of warming up. Getting cold is one thing. Getting warm again is another entirely. The only sounds in the room were the crackle of the fire, the chattering of their teeth, the little girl’s cries, and the sound of Rosco’s tail happily pounding the floor in rhythm as the boy scratched his tummy.
I stripped out of my wet clothes and laid an extra wool blanket over each of them. The young girl was the worst. I don’t know how long she’d been in that water, but she was irritable and having a tough time sounding coherent. I made some hot cocoa and topped it with spray whipped cream. The can was probably a year old, but when I turned it upside down and pushed the nozzle, it made that shhhhhh sound and produced a mound of white. I handed the mug to the woman and she held it while the girl sipped, poking the end of her nose and cheeks into the whipped cream.
Seeing an opportunity, Rosco exited his sleeping bag and began licking the girl’s lips and cheeks and nose. At first she was irritated by it, which further encouraged the dog, but then she began to giggle. I made a second mug and handed it to the boy. He looked as if he wanted to smile but was waiting for permission. Finally I made one for the woman—who watched me carefully. She held the mug between both hands and hovered over the steam. The fear had not left her face.
She shot a glance at the door and spoke with a thick accent. “A man is following us.” Her eyes darted. “A bad man.” She lowered her voice. “If he finds you . . .”
The children’s faces confirmed her words. “How far?” I asked.
“Close.”
I pulled on my dry pair of boots and a black jacket and beanie. She climbed out of the bag. Her hand was trembling when she touched my shoulder. “He will kill you.” Another pause. “Without thinking.”
While she talked, I rubbed my hand along the soot on the outside of the fireplace and began wiping it on my face. “Where’s he from?”
“Juarez.”
“Drugs?”
She nodded.
“He killed men?”
Her eyes were cold. She never hesitated. “Many.”
“How old is he?”
“Thirty.”
I didn’t know squat about Mexican drug lords, but if he came from Juarez, the mere fact that he’d lived this long told me he was good at his job. I pulled a double-barreled shotgun from behind the door, broke it open, loaded it, and handed it to her. “You know how to use this?”
The way she held it told me she did.
I handed her my Jeep keys. “If I’m not back by the time this storm lets up, you drive out of here and flag down the first police officer or fireman or ambulance driver you can find.
Understand?”
Her face told me she was not going to do that.
“You don’t want to do that?”
“They’ll send us back . . .” She glanced at the window. “He has friends.”
I handed her a box of shells. “Then hunker down and shoot straight.”
I looked at Rosco, who, having watched me dress, now stood at the door with his nose pressed against the crack. “Stay.” He backed up, but the muscles in his shoulders were taut. I pointed to the boy but spoke to the dog. “Lie down.” Rosco lay down next to the boy. His whimper told me he didn’t like me leaving without him. I zipped up my coat and pulled the door behind me. I needed to get away from the house—without creating more footprints. That meant I had to backtrack.
Tricky.
Mount Mitchell is the tallest mountain east of the Rockies: 6,684 feet. Running north from the summit is a twelve-mile hikers’ trail called the Black Mountain Crest. It follows the ridgeline along eleven other peaks, each greater than six thousand feet, ending at a place called Celo Knob. This vast and steep wilderness is encompassed by what is called the Pisgah National Forest. It’s a rugged landscape. More vertical than horizontal. Most people live down below in the valleys, but I am not most people. My cabin sat at five thousand feet, with the closest neighbor more than two miles away.
I stood along the tree line, listening, staring back at the cabin. I couldn’t remember the last time I had visitors. If ever. The snowfall had tapered off, leaving our footprints half full. Bread crumbs. Whoever he was would have seen my larger footprints as well as theirs. That meant he knew about me. I closed my eyes and listened for the quiet crunch of snow beneath careful feet.
It didn’t take long.
6
An hour after daylight I washed my hands in the snow and knocked gently, standing off to one side. Out of the line of fire. The blast wouldn’t penetrate the cabin wall but it’d blow right through the door. I slid open the door and was met by a growling Rosco, baring his teeth and standing between me and them. Beyond him I saw the barrel end of my shotgun. I knew my blackened face would scare everyone, so I showed them my hands and said, “It’s just me.”
The woman sat, exhausted. Evidently she’d not slept. The gun rested across a chair in front of her where she’d kept the muzzle pointed at the door. Five shells were laid out in front of her. She leaned back, separating her shoulder from the stock of the shotgun. She had only one question.
The boy sat up, the girl lay sleeping. I washed my face and hands, trimmed the lantern wicks, and then sat on the hearth. I reached into my back pocket, pulled out a worn beef butcher’s knife in a sheath, and set it on the ground in front of the boy. He stared at it, afraid to touch it. As if it might wield itself. Slowly he reached for it and took hold, then laid it flat across his palm and stared at it. The woman’s mouth cracked open just slightly and her eyes turned slowly to me. The boy just sat there. Holding the knife like a bomb. The woman stared from it to me, back to it and back to me.
She pulled the boy to her chest, and tears streaked down her face. Tears without sadness. She wrapped her arms around the children and began shaking.
The boy spoke with his face pressed against her bosom. “Mama?”
“Yes.”
The little girl was awake now, and sitting up. “Is Juan Pedro going to find us?” she asked.
Her mother looked at me. “I don’t think so, baby.”
“Looks like you three had quite the hike.” I tried to smile at the children. “You are two of the toughest kids I’ve ever met. Most folks can’t do what you did in summertime with a pack full of food and water. You hungry?”
Their blank faces told me they hadn’t thought about it.
“Let me get cleaned up. I can scramble a mean egg. Just ask Rosco.”
My cabin doesn’t have running water, so I take bucket showers with room temp water. Given that my cabin was one room, and that I lived alone, I’d never made concessions for privacy. With six curious eyes watching my every move, I hung a wool blanket in the corner, creating a divider, and then stripped and stepped into the tub. Pretty quickly the water started turning red. My fingers found the source, I dressed the wound, and then I started stitching up the cut in the fat just below my left rib cage. The absence of a mirror and the location of the cut made it difficult to work on, so I pulled on my pants and poked my head around the blanket.
“Could I trouble you?”
The woman rose, almost obediently, and stood at the blanket. Head bowed. I pulled back slightly on the blanket, allowing her to see what I didn’t want the kids to see. She quickly stepped behind the curtain, knelt next to the tub, and began carefully bathing the skin in peroxide and then stitching the skin together. Her precision told me that she’d had either some medical training or some prior experience.
When she finished, she stood, waiting for me to dismiss her. But there was a second emotion. There was shame. Along with a growing posture of servitude. Since I’d mastered her master.
I pointed toward the kitchen side of the room. “There’s food. Whatever you like. The matches are sitting on a shelf above the stovetop.”
She shot a quick glance at my stitches.
“It’s nothing. Rosco scratches me worse when we wrestle.” A forced chuckle. She looked at me briefly, then turned and exited through the side of the blanket. When I walked out, dressed and having put on deodorant for the first time in years, she had fried bacon, scrambled eggs, cooked some grits, browned some toast, and brewed a fresh pot of coffee.
The kids were sitting at my table watching their food get cold. I gestured. “Please. Eat.” Having been released from their cages, they pounced. They inhaled their food more than chewed it, putting down a dozen eggs, six pieces of toast, half a jar of jelly, nearly a pound of bacon, and the entire pot of grits.
While the kids ate, the woman and I sat near the fire. “Did he bring you across the border?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
She shrugged. “Maybe five years.”
“You got any family in the States?”
“A brother in Florida. Maybe more.”
“You want to see them?”
I don’t think she had thought past the next five minutes, because planning requires freedom. “I don’t know exactly where they are or how we’d get there. I have . . . nothing.”
“I can put you on a bus.”
She paused, afraid to make eye contact. “I can’t pay you.”
There were two conversations going on here. The one we were having on the surface, about my having money. And the one we were having beneath the surface—about her being a vulnerable woman, with a woman’s body, who needed money. I studied her expression, wondering if something about me made her feel this way or if she was so accustomed to having life taken from her that she was unable to think otherwise. It was as if her soul had been tattooed and she’d not asked for the ink.
I stood and let the fire warm my back. “There’s a bus station in Spruce Pine. I can put you on the late afternoon to Asheville. From there you can get a ticket most anywhere.”
She nodded. Again without looking.
I spoke softly. “You don’t have to pay me. Not with money or anything else.” I don’t know whether she believed me or not, but the look in her eyes told me she was struggling with the idea.
7
By the time we got down the mountain, through Busick and the Carolina Hemlocks, through Micaville and into Spruce Pine, it was almost two o’clock. I checked the schedule and saw that the bus to Asheville didn’t leave until five. I bought three tickets and only then realized that the aroma of the burger joint next door had caught the kids’ attention.
The girl backed up when I spoke to her. “You hungry?”
She didn’t answer.
I pointed at the neon marquee. “Cheeseburger?”
She looked up at her mom, who nodded, and the little girl nodded, though still not smiling.
??
?You like French fries?”
Another glance at her mom, followed by a nod.
“Single or double?”
She looked confused.
I held out my hand, barely separating my thumb and index finger. “One patty, or . . .” I widened the gap between the fingers. “Two.”
She held up one hand and two and a half fingers. Seeing the one finger stuck in the half position, she reached up with her other hand and folded it back down, extending a perfect peace sign.
The restaurant was a grease pit, but the food was hot and the kids needed calories. We ordered, and because making small talk had never been my strength, we waited in silence. Given a few minutes, I checked my blood sugar, calculated, and injected two units of insulin into the fat of my stomach. The three of them watched me with curiosity but said nothing.
A television hung above the counter. The local news was just starting. The underlying soundtrack suggested a breaking news story. The news anchor behind the desk started his monologue.
“An explosion at what authorities are calling a methamphetamine cookshack rocked the small town of Celo last night, mixed with several minutes of automatic gunfire.” The anchor turned his attention to a second reporter standing in front of the Burnsville Emergency Room. “Frank Porter reports. Frank, tell us about it.”
“That’s right, John. It began with a routine traffic stop and turned into what authorities are calling a gang-related drug war. Last night around six p.m. a Yancey County deputy attempted a routine traffic stop. The driver, attempting to escape, ran over one deputy and the spike strip the police had stretched across the road. Unable to drive on four flat tires, he exited the vehicle and opened fire on the other two deputies. He then returned to the metal cookshack disguised as a utility barn where he was joined by at least ten men armed with automatic weapons. When more than a dozen officers responded to the ‘Shots fired—officer down’ call for help, they were met with a barrage of bullets. No one really knows what caused the explosion, but eight men inside were killed, and four sustained critical injuries from burns to gunshot wounds. And in what authorities are calling the most bizarre aspect of the entire night, deputies stumbled upon the mangled body of a man named Juan Pedro Santana Perez—a known Mexican drug runner with over thirty arrests and just as many deportations. Mr. Perez was declared dead at the scene. Medics who attended him say he died of blunt force trauma with multiple broken bones in his extremities and skull.”