Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 924 & 925, September/October 2018

Sometimes You Have to Climb a Mountain by Tom Tolnay

Short stories linked to form a “novel in stories” are enjoying increased popularity, and Tom Tolnay’s new book, Profane Feasts, belongs to the category. “The myths of the extended Hestiakos clan are colorfully retold” in its 13 tales (some from EQMM), Iconoclast said. “Though they are Greek, this family could be many other ethnic families bound by love, hard work, and loyalty.”

As my cleated tires thumped up our gritty driveway I didn’t see Hazel’s CJ-5 parked out by the woodshed, but I dragged myself into our sagging house anyway. For the past year she’d been keeping her mind and mouth to herself... until the two of us had reached a place where we’d stopped thinking and saying the things a husband and wife oughta be sharing with each other. With its fiberboard walls surrounding our every move in five and a half tiny rooms, the prefab had grown increasingly cramped and cruel. Some days the silent stillness between us felt like a fork prong jabbed under my fingernail, and I’d exploded — shouting and swinging my fist at her face which, once soft and worth staring at, had grown stiff with resentment.

I squeezed the back of my neck, trying to loosen a knot that was promising to swell into a full-blown migraine. All the while I kept glancing out the living-room window, still hoping, expecting to see Hazel’s car rumble up the driveway. It was only later, when I noticed the one suitcase we owned was missing from the front closet, that I began thinking this time she wasn’t coming back.

Sinking onto the loveseat’s squashed cushions, I rocked back and forth between anger and regret: blaming her for not appreciating how shitty my life had become — earning a half-assed living as a self-taught carpenter, part-time woodsman; keeping our doors and windows sealed against the wall of cold north woods surrounding us, splitting and stacking firewood for the wood stove in the kitchen, making sure the Nissan pickup would start so I could drive off to replace the steps leading into the Bellows village hall or align someone’s front door — and finally coming around to admitting my wife had plenty of reasons to quit on me. I’d slumped into a routine of taking a few drinks and, when I could get hold of some, sniffing coke or smoking a joint or two, putting what little income we had at risk by flaking out or getting into a fight on the job, and never placing hands anywhere on Hazel’s body unless my fingers were clenched.

Frustrated with waiting for something that seemed increasingly unlikely to happen, I kicked the back door open, hopped into my pickup, and left our patch of scraggly acreage in the rearview mirror. In town I cruised past the post office, where Hazel worked helter-skelter hours: Her Jeep wasn’t parked outside, so I continued along Main Street to the edge of Bellows, pulling up at and entering Toby’s Tavern. The jukebox was blasting a Country Western ditty as I stomped my heavy boots across the floor of the house trailer that Toby had converted into a bar. I signaled Jim for a shot of whiskey even before sitting down. Wobbling on one of Toby’s short-legged stools, I wondered what had become of Toby — one day he’d disappeared from Bellows just like my wife: Where did these people who were here one day and gone the next go?

After a coupla quick belts I began sniffing around, asking if Jim behind the bar, or Randy and Mitzy on stools, happened to see Hazel in town that day. Even if any of them had bought stamps from her at the post office, or saw her bumping along in the CJ-5, I doubted they’d have said so: I suspected word had gotten around that I’d hit her. More than once. Four shots of Wild Turkey went down as I watched the jukebox flash red and blue and yellow. Finally, slapping greenbacks on the gouged oak counter, I shagged out to my truck and bounced along the rutted road that led back to my house. Hazel’s parking spot was still empty, but I went inside and stormed from room to room anyway, stupidly calling out her name.

Irritated by the prefab’s emptiness, I allowed my knees to buckle and dropped onto the kitchen floor, where I slipped the Altoids box out of my jacket pocket and rolled up a pinch of my stash. Lighting up, I sat there exhaling sour, smoky breath in between sucks on the joint, keeping at it until it had burned down to a nub, stinging my fingertips. But this time the weed didn’t help. I jerked up onto my feet and stumbled out the door, furious not only at Hazel but with everyone in the village, everyone in the whole stinking world. As I hoisted my ass into my Nissan and sank into its cushioned bucket, for a moment I felt weirdly safe, the truck having become more of a home to me than the house.

The sun was setting behind the hills that surrounded Bellows as I gunned past Jeanette’s General Store, the Agway outlet, Charlie’s auto-repair shop, and, on the lot beyond the Baptist church, Toby’s Tavern. Soon I was skipping along the tattered forest road north. My eyes were bleary, my head was throbbing, but that didn’t stop me from keeping the pedal close to the floorboard, wanting to put as much distance as quickly as I could between me and that house, and that village of bullshit artists.

Zooming along straight strips of cracked tar and squealing around broad curves for a ton of miles, I could feel blood rushing into my face as if it were trying to keep up with my speed. The longer I drove, the dizzier I felt — the whiskey, the pot, and the speed catching up to me.

In the dimming light I spotted a kid — maybe fifteen years old — hiking along the narrow shoulder of the road, a tent and sleeping bag strapped to the frame of his backpack. My truck sank into a dip in the pavement, causing the vehicle to sway wildly a moment before I heard a thud against my right front fender: In a blink of the dying light I saw the boy sailing into the dense bramble at the edge of the woods.

Jumping on the brake, I came to a squealing halt, immediately trying to justify what had happened by telling myself the kid would’ve been hard to see even before the sun started melting away. I jerked the pickup into reverse and roared backwards, stomping the brakes and sliding in a clatter of pebbles.

Dazed, unsteady, uneasy, I lowered myself out of the truck, arms and legs shaking crazily. When I reached the spot I figured had more or less been the point of impact, I forced my way into the interlocking thicket, stiff and scratchy with the approach of winter. My chest was clanging painfully as I pushed through the growth, keeping at it until I’d reached the forest’s line of pine and deciduous. Beyond these trees the terrain rose abruptly into a large hill, almost a mountain, toward the top of which I could see the branches of silhouetted spruce stretched out as if expressing dominion over the forest below. Bumbling around for several minutes, stomping on brush, holding branches aside to get a better look, I could find no sign of the boy.

I stalled, wary of the shadows closing in around me, swiveled my head in all directions, but could detect no movement, hear no sound other than my own croaky breathing. The arms of the trees along the bordering woods poked me with their spiny fingers. Backing away from them, I cranked my knees higher to help tear through the tight thicket, gaining another fifteen or twenty feet: Still I couldn’t find him. Confused and growing discouraged, I started wandering back toward the shoulder of the road. Despite the chill, sweat was running down my spine like an icy stream. My hands were scratched and bleeding. Thwarted by the terrain, stumped by not finding the boy, I began to think the accident hadn’t really happened.

I hauled my hundred eighty pounds up into the driver’s seat of the Nissan and, except for quivering hands, sat motionless for a minute or two, trying to make sense of what had happened. When I couldn’t find any place of balance in my head, I sought comfort in the fact that I was utterly alone on this stretch of backwoods road in the central Adirondacks, a road used only sporadically, especially this late in the year. No one, with the possible exception of a curious moose, had seen what I had done.

I slipped the Altoids box out of my pocket and rolled my last pinch of grass, hands trembling so wildly I was barely able to touch the flame to its twisted tip. As I sucked on the joint, trapping the smoke in my lungs as long as I could, I peered through my smoky exhalations into the facade of tangled growth beyond the windshield. And when I still couldn’t find any sign of what I was looking for, I found myself imagining the boy would come ambling out of the bushes at any moment, shaken, bruised, but not broken. After all, judging from the sound of the impact, I couldn’t have hit him squarely, more of a glancing blow. I leaned forward over the steering wheel, closer to the windshield, focusing on a particularly dark area in the underbrush, but it turned out to be the trunk of a dead tree.

If the kid should appear, I knew what to do: hoist him carefully into the truck and drive him to the one-room clinic in Stony Ridge — up the road another ten or fifteen miles; that would be quicker and smarter than turning back to Bellows, which didn’t have a doctor in residence, much less a medical shack. I waited, watched, sucked in smoke, but the boy didn’t appear. Sprinkling into the ashtray the last crumbs of the joint, I tried to piece together a strategy for what I’d do if I couldn’t find him.

Convincing myself my pickup must’ve struck the boy farther back along the route than I’d originally thought, I twisted the ignition key. But the goddamn engine wouldn’t kick in, so I tried again, and still it wouldn’t turn over. Not until I’d punched the dashboard several times, skinning my knuckles, did the engine begin to rumble halfheartedly, blowing black smoke out its ass. Rolling backwards at five miles per hour, I crunched over debris, peering out the side window for signs of disturbance in the jagged growth at the road’s edge. Maybe two hundred feet back from where I’d been parked I stopped the truck, leaving it idling — just in case. As I climbed out of the cab, I slipped and tumbled onto the ground. Furious at my misstep, I got back up, slung a couple of curses into the forest, and began scanning this new stretch of tangled shoulder. Nothing visible from where I stood. I pushed my way into the wands of dry brush, past spikes of midget hawthorns, some of them grabbing my jeans and jacket as if trying to prevent me from going deeper into the snarled vegetation. All these weeds, I thought, and none of it could be smoked.

After maybe ten minutes of rummaging around, I could find no hint the boy was here. Anger leapt up in me like flames. I kicked at the dormant stalks, trying to flatten them, and they sprang back at me, lashing my hands and face. Tearing myself free, I stalked farther away from the truck, moving parallel with the road until I came upon a big outcrop of rocks. Circling all around them, again I came up empty. Too depressed to go any farther, I turned back toward the pickup. On the way, a bird I could not see cackled shrilly, surely laughing at me.

As I closed in on the truck I saw that my right front fender was pushed in, and I tried to remember if that damage had been picked up on some earlier misadventure — a glancing blow against a leaping deer, or maybe some drunk had backed into my truck when I was parked outside Toby’s. Though I couldn’t call up such an incident, I told myself that if I’d really hit the kid, the dent would have been much more substantial.

An image of the boy flying through the air kept replaying in my head, and it made me think I should race back to Toby’s Tavern to ask Randy or one of the other regulars to help me find the kid; if none of those jerks were willing to come up here with me — by then the forest would be in total darkness, I could drive over to my cabin, taking one last shot at finding out if Hazel had come back home; if she had, I’d grab that six-volt lantern out of the garage and ask her to drive up here with me to help search for the boy.

A Land Cruiser with a mumbling muffler rushed by, one parking light lit, and quickly disappeared around the bend. I’d had an impulse to jump into the road to wave the vehicle down, but it had appeared so unexpectedly, passed by so quickly, my arms remained frozen at my side. I wondered if that had been Charlie Grimson’s Toyota — I couldn’t make out its color in the faint light. Whoever it was, my Nissan had been spotted by a passing driver at the scene where a boy went missing.

Noticing a break in the closely packed forest at the foot of the slope, I reached into the cab, shut off the engine, and started toward the opening. In a few minutes I found myself completely surrounded by woods. What little light had been sifting out of the sky along the road was almost entirely shut off by the army of taller growth, the shadow of the small mountain. But I was able to see well enough to detect a trail strewn with forest debris. Without considering whether it was a good idea, I started following the trail, and only five minutes passed before I could feel the incline grow sharply steeper. As I followed the blurred outlines of the path I began to experience a sense of liberation — as if in climbing farther away from my truck, and from the road where the accident had occurred, I was becoming less responsible for what had happened. I had nothing with me to justify the hike — no canteen filled with water, no compass, no knife at my hip; no knapsack containing a trail bar, matches, extra socks, sweater. Not even a flashlight; nothing but me and the trail, under the dying sun.

As I ascended through the gray-black terrain I had the distinct sensation the forest was watching me, while its dormant yet living fabric crowded closer on all sides. After another fifteen minutes of steady climbing I could feel the energy draining out of my body. Before long I was reduced to moving from tree to tree, from stone to boulder, and soon I could hear the trickling of a stream not far off the trail. The way became increasingly interrupted by ruts, rocks, and broken branches, but the land beneath my feet continued to swell upward, drawing me higher. Until, at one point, I realized I was no longer following the trail so much as the sound of that stream.

Footholds kept surfacing, urging me to continue climbing higher. By now fewer trees seemed to be cluttering the terrain, mostly pine, making the way somewhat easier to negotiate despite the darkness. But I was straining for every step I took, the muscles stretched across my back beginning to ache. The previous night, as on so many nights over the past year, I’d slept only a couple of toss-and-turn hours, and the accumulated fatigue was sharpening the pain. The only comfort I could claim was that the headache that had been building up down below had stopped pressing against my skull. It was then that the question popped into my head: Had the boy been walking close to the edge of the road on purpose? Had he faked getting hit to lure a passing driver into the forest and up the side of this mountain? All those missing people we read about. Where had they gone?

If that was what was going on, I thought, I should’ve been able to find him. But he was nowhere, and I was nowhere too, and knew only, for reasons unknown, that it had become essential to me to reach the top of the mountain. I wondered, fleetingly, if this climb was an attempt to express my remorse for the man I’d become — or was it simply that, sometime or other in your life, you have to climb a mountain?

Before long I was leaning low and twisting and bending as I moved, grabbing hold of saplings, clutching earth-lodged rocks, pawing myself forward a yard at a time — ever more distant from my truck and the road that skirted the mountain. And as I climbed, the sound of the boy’s body thumping against my fender, the image of him sailing like a great injured vulture into the forest, came to me again, triggering another vision, of the miscarriage Hazel had suffered nearly a year ago.

Halting to rest for a few moments, wavering in the dark, I could feel the air growing increasingly heavy. I drew my army field jacket tighter around me, flipped up its collar, and started climbing again. As I gained two or three steps at a time, I could feel the mounting weight of my fatigue. I was bowing closer to the earth as the slope led me higher: The little mountain seemed to grow steeper the higher I climbed, making its pinnacle not closer with each yard I gained but farther away.

A sharp screech pierced the forest, and thoughts of the boy hiking along the road crowded my head again — under his backpack he’d been wearing a yellow slicker, its brightness supposed to protect him against the very thing that had happened. Somewhere beyond that road below a father and mother, a sister or brother, must’ve been talking about the boy’s journey at their kitchen table — the youngster had set off on an adventure to hike into the forest on his own, to set up his tent, gather wood for a fire, heat a can of beans for dinner, and crawl into his sleeping bag for a night’s sleep among the dying debris and awakening creatures. An initiation into manhood.

As I moved into an open area that permitted a smudge of black-blue sky to break through, I realized the place would’ve made a good campsite for the boy.

And then I saw him!

Sitting near his campfire, close to his tightly pitched tent. Smiling, a shank of dark hair falling over his eyes, the boy waved me into this sanctuary. Relief and wariness stirred within me. I hadn’t killed him, but if he’d lured me up the side of this mountain, could it be to my own death?

I stepped closer, and turned momentarily, looking for a rock or tree limb to rest on. And when I turned back an instant later, his campfire was extinguished, and he was gone. Disappeared into the forest mist!

For long moments I stood scanning the surrounding shadows — trees barely outlined in the dark — frozen in uncertainty and dread.

After a while I could no longer feel the raking cold against my face and hands, pinching my feet, clasping my chest. I had nothing left but a resolve to keep climbing, to reach the top.

I forced myself unsteadily up onto two legs, barely able to see five feet ahead, moving by my hands not my eyes, while seeing clearly in my head that I should never have left the place where my pickup had run down the boy. I should’ve pulled off the road at an angle and used my headlights to shine into the places where he might’ve been lying injured; or I could have stood in the middle of the road hoping for another vehicle to approach, waving it to a stop to get help finding what had become of him. But it was too late to turn back now. I continued moving higher, with only a faint sprinkle of light from the rising moon.

As I struggled on, it all began to seem like a dream — maybe I was actually stretched out on the sofa at the house, having fallen dead asleep after knocking down four whiskeys at Toby’s and finishing off a joint. Maybe I would wake up at any moment to the sound of Hazel pulling up in her CJ-5. Yeah, that had to be it! All this had just been a bitter dream, triggered by trapping too much bad smoke in my lungs, swallowing too much cheap whiskey, going without sleep too many nights. Once I was fully awake, everything would go back to the way it used to be: Hazel and I would be husband and wife again, she’d have forgiven me for filling her with bad seed, and we would soon be making love with a shared desire to bring new life into the world.

As I forced my legs to swing out before me, I could feel myself losing contact with the body I had dragged up the mountain. My limbs, my feet, my arms, my hands had become mechanical things as I clawed my way on toward the dark cape hanging over the mountain. Having used up every drop of energy I’d possessed, I was being carried forward not by sinews and muscle but by a head-strong determination to reach the peak.

No longer was I thinking about the boy, about my wife, but only about what might be awaiting me at the top: perhaps an eaglet nestled in an eagle’s nest, yowling into the night.

Bodiless, mindless, I tripped and fell forward, mashing my face against the hard earth. As I lay there, my entire being blunted by my fall, I thought I heard something in the surrounding woods. Painfully lifting my head off the bed of pebbles and needles, I couldn’t see anything except streaked shadows in the bleakness. I reached out and moved my hand until it came in contact with the stem of a sapling, and gripped it with the idea of pulling myself up off the ground. But I couldn’t do it. Again I thought I heard a faint shuffling through crumbling leaves, and in my mind the sound became a bear — thousands of them were out here, building up reserves of fat as winter approached.

My head sank back onto the disheveled earth, and I thought again of trying to get up and resume my climb, to find out what was waiting for me at the top. But my body felt lifeless, and the chilled air was pressing me down against the rubble.

Stiff and still I lie now, waiting for that sound to surface again, holding my breath, hoping to hear it again. Nothing comes to my ears, but I watch a swath of mist descend, swirling against the black backdrop of the mountain, and after a time my wife appears in its midst — I’m sure it’s Hazel, drifting toward me through the silvery veil.