The Boulder

[Repugnant Abomination]

This is damn near as close to a final draft of chapter 1 as I've ever been. I know the temptation for you assholes is there, but I'd sure appreciate honest feedback for those willing to read it.

<3


The Boulder
Chapter 1

They came like locust across the sea and plains, a madness driven by some demon through dysentery, hunger, cholera and thirst. Roads cloven by hoof and wheel – trails of oxen bones, uprooted lives. The scorched ground and makeshift hovels marked their progress west, into the unknown. Harbors became a forest of masts, mud and men smiling tightly through bleeding gums and rotten teeth, while tinkers peddled their overpriced wares to desperate buyers. Those first squalid cities wild with the reek of men from every continent, packed shoulder to shoulder. Abandoned ships were upturned and fashioned into hotels, taverns and brothels, serving tough sons of bitches fed on nothing but pickled pork and hard bread. Those who survived plundered the earth, yellow the prevailing color of their dreams; to what ends they chased those glittering hills, those golden promises – men of Midas fighting for their golden apple.

The tattered remains of that great migration weigh the present down with memories and machinery left by its forefathers: sluice boxes rot inside hollowed mills, termite eaten outposts look ready to collapse, trommels collect dust – whole mountainsides dredged out, hills and valleys of rock and dirt. At night the wind haunts deserted cabins that housed men indistinguishable from beasts. Usher’s cabin is one of them, named after a 49er that struck it rich and bought the land with the gold he pulled out of it. He disappeared not long after. His sons searched him out when they came of age, but they never did find him.

Descendants of the dead live off the river, bunkered in, unwilling to leave. Their only birthright the history left to them. Most get by. Some don’t. The rest are buried in the graveyard beside the church – oldest church in the state. At one time a modest but devoted congregation belonged to it, but the years have not been kind. Nobody can recall the last time anyone set foot on that hollowed ground.
Just one more thing this mountain swallowed up.

***

Willy rose from the muddy forest floor with twigs and leaves and clay hanging from his white beard, like some sort of primordial woodland abomination, formed from the very mountain itself. Rain poured down from the gray, shapeless sky. Dozens of holes of various width and depth surrounded him. He moved to the shelter of an alder tree not far off and huddled beneath it, clutching a rusty tin pale underarm with a hole in the side. He scooped out clumps of mud from it and felt around. At the bottom was an old brown medicine bottle. He tilted it and watched the sluggish goop inside the oval belly slide from one side to the other. Some illegible letters were blown into the side – a secret message, some hidden meaning, just one more thing beyond his reach.

Thunder boomed. He looked up as a streak of hot white flashed across the sky, then faded. Water dripped from the brim of his fedora onto his dirt-streaked face. Despite the cold, stormy weather, he had worked up a sweat. He removed the hat and wiped his handkerchief across his forehead. Then he took out a map from his coat pocket and unfolded it. It was worn and creased and a little smudged, but he memorized it long ago. It showed the different mining sites, living quarters and outposts miners used nearly a century ago. Notes were scribbled under each site, as well as symbols and marks that only Willy understood. Tapping his finger on the area labeled Yank Gulch, he looked around, frowning. Records indicated this was one of the group’s most profitable sites – there were still tailing piles all around as proof. In those days you could pluck golden nuggets from the ground. One story told of a butcher turned prospector named John Nalley who awoke early one misty morning and stepped out to take a leak. Midstream he looked down to see he was pissing on a quartz rock covered with gold the size of his fist.

Willy drank from his canteen, surveying the area and waiting for the rain to let up. When it didn't he zipped up his jacket as high as it would go and set off, hiking along the side of the bluff, where the terrain was rockier and not as slick. There was no need to rush – he couldn't get any wetter – and it would be all too easy to twist an ankle on the wet, slanted mountainside. But in truth he was feeling his age. Once a bear of a man, even by mountain standards, he was well past his prime. Taut muscles sagged, bones ached, and fatigue struck whenever he exerted himself. If he stood too suddenly his knees would pop or his back would tweak. He paused every few minutes to catch his breath. During his breaks he looked out over the expansive mountainside, with its distant, snow covered evergreens, motionless, as if frozen in time. Willy himself was frozen in time, or lost in it – a life caught in the past and doomed to the future, living somewhere in-between, but for neither.

As he continued the bluff opened into a cave. The entrance was wide and gaping, like the mouth of a hungry giant ready to swallow him whole. He heard water dripping inside and smelled sulfur from deep within. The mountain was full of caves like this, most explored for ore a long time ago. Crouching, he sat on his haunches, struck a match and peered in. The initial flare died down to a steady flame that he cupped in his hand while moving forward into the damp, cold gloom. It reminded him of his first year on the mountain, when he ran out of firewood halfway through winter. The cabin's insulation was poor. He spent those days wrapped in a wool blanket, burning whatever he could and sipping hot water mixed with whiskey. When spring came and melted the snow he built a shed and kept it stocked with dry, chopped wood at all times.

The ceiling was high, but gradually sloped down into darkness. Condensation made the rocky floor slimy, as if covered by algae. As the ceiling lowered he hunched his back, a preview of what older age had in store for him. When the match went out he cast it down and lit another, continuing. He looked over his shoulder at the shrinking portal of light that was the entrance and suppressed the primal urge to scurry back to it – the unknown of dark was a fear that hadn’t gone away with age. While looking over his shoulder his foot slipped and he tumbled down the slope, bracing his fall with outstretched palms. He landed on his hands and knees. His cry ricocheted, assaulting him from every direction. The warm sticky liquid was blood. It was dark now – he couldn't see a thing other than the opening that was nothing more than a speck of light, high above. Accompanying his breathing was a deep moan coming from farther inside the cave. He held his breath and listened. It was breathing – the cave was breathing. Deep inhales of air being sucked in to an unseen cavern. With each inhale Willy felt it pulling him deeper into the shadowy unknown. Out of matches, he rolled onto his stomach and pawed blindly at the ground and wall, searching for any sign of previous activity: missing slabs of rock, old equipment, even bedding. He found nothing. Above him the light seemed more distant than ever, almost unreachable, and the pull of the cave's steady inhalations continued sucking in him. The nauseating smell of brimstone began to overwhelm him as he slid farther in, until there was almost no light at all. His breathing labored and his skin cold and clammy, he tucked his face into the crook of his arm and clawed his way back up the slope.

The ice cold water of a nearby stream rushed over Willy's gnarled, arthritic hands as he submerged them, traveling over bulging blue veins, knobby knuckles, and liver spots. He held them under for as long as he could bear, and then examined them. They were cut up pretty good and shaking from cold. It was still raining. His reflection in the water showed a ruptured blood vessel in his eye that had left a red streak running down to the corner, and he wondered when that happened. His reflection was strangely unnerving to him – a mirror image that seemed false yet all too real at the same time. He dropped a stone onto it, sending it rippling in every direction.

An excavation site lay up ahead – a huge pit surrounded by tall mounds of wet earth. Willy walked around scattered equipment dotting the site, including a broken down truck, some early Ford model, with a pile of rocks on its bed that weighed the suspension down. It was like walking amongst the remains of some lost city, the faint whispers of the dead lapping at the back of his neck. Hundreds of men worked there during the height of its operations, pouring their sweat and blood into it. Their bones now lay buried in the earth they used to tramp on, a sea of shallow, unmarked graves.

A storage shed at the edge of the pit had a bicycle propped up against the side, its tires flat and a basket attached to the handlebars. Something was in it but covered by a piece of scrap linen. A man moved to stand in the doorway. Willy recognized him as Quigley, a homeless vagabond who roamed the mountain. He was not well liked or trusted. Willy came across him sometimes, once in the woods, where he was heating stones in the pit of an open fire. The stones went into the foot of his sleeping bag during cold winter nights – whatever it takes to keep warm.

Quigley leaned against the door frame, regarding Willy from behind greasy, low hanging hair. His clothes were filthy and patched together in places.
“Got a smoke?”
“Gave it up,” said Willy.
Quigley spat. There was nothing predatory in his gaze, but it was pointed and hard, and his gravelly voice matched his haggard appearance.
“Why don't you come get yourself out of the rain.”
“Got to keep moving.”
His hospitality rebuffed, he smirked and scratched the underside of his chin, where his facial hair was particularly scraggly and in need of a trim.
“Hell, I know your fancy cabin is real sweet on the eyes, but aint nothing wrong with this here shed. Some of us folks might even think it not half bad.”
“Never said it was.”
“Shit, I was only offering cause of the rain. What bright idea prodded you out of your hole in such weather, anyhow?”
“Wasn't raining when I set out.”
“Were them hands all torn to bits when you set out?”
“No.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Sure nothing. Out chasing ghosts again, I bet.”
“Just found some old cave is all.”
“Come on in here out of the rain, old man.”
“Need to get home.”
Quigley ran his tongue across yellow teeth that were crowded and overlapping and he spat again, as if trying to get some bad taste out of his mouth.
“You find anything in that old cave of yours?”
“No.”
“Well aint you just a right lucky thing.”
“Never counted myself lucky before.”
“Might've found you what our boy Yolkam did. He was one of them ghost chasers too.”
Willy looked down. His palms were throbbing and he suddenly realized how cold he was. When he looked up Quigley was sipping on some bottle wrapped in a brown paper sack. He held it out but Willy shook his head.
“You don't look too good, old man. Why don't you get on home to your warm bed. Might even think on staying there if you know what's good for you.”
Willy didn't have anything else to say, so he tipped his hat and moved on.
“Aint like all us folks have a real nice, warm place to stay, after all. Some of us sleep in cold abandoned sheds on hard floors – and that’s if we’re lucky! Never counted yourself lucky – well count yourself lucky now you old son of a bitch!”

A carpenter in his past life, Willy built the cabin he lives in with his own hands. It was a stalwart looking square box, built in his own image and weathered from the harsh environment it occupied on a small hill that overlooked the rest of the overgrown property: an open space with worktables of various uses leading to bird cages of wood and wire that used to house pheasants and quail and chickens that squabbled with each other night and day. Beside them reeked an outhouse running parallel to a knee high rock wall where red-tailed squirrels skittered over and around the rusted heads of pickaxes, old ore carts and decayed axle nuts. The wall separated his work area from the glade where he gardened. Tall grass dotted the field between thick green stalks covered in fuzzy hairs and clusters of lichen that grew at the base of fallen trees he liked to sit and think on. Bullfrogs and fish swam their colorful swim to sounds of their own making in the pond just below the garden.
He called this place Rollins.

Inside the cabin was a single room. Dirt, splinters of wood and tiny rocks embedded in the trim carpet crunched beneath his boots on his way to the stained oak table in the corner. He emptied his pockets and set the contents – pocketknife, compass, Leatherman, map – on the table, then shrugged off his jacket. He hung it, as well as the rest of his soaking clothes, on a clothesline suspended over the rough-hewn iron stove in the center of the room, where a pot of stew bubbled. The dripping water hissed and evaporated as soon as it hit the hot iron surface. Shivering, he toweled himself and put on thermal underwear. The sound of kindling crackled inside the stove. He stood near for warmth. Afterwards he ladled stew into a chipped clay bowl and sat on the edge of his bed, taking slow, deliberate bites.

The dirt road from Willy's cabin spiraled down the mountain, eroded at the edge and full of potholes. There were no safety barriers, and many of the turns were blind. He'd gotten into the habit of honking around those dangerous turns, back when logging trucks still drove through, but no longer. Madrone trees leaning over the road from the embankment reached out with their twisted branches, blocking half the sky, and on the other side, over the edge of the road, lay a lush valley set against red clay banks the natives regarded as sacred. He passed broken down cars, deserted houses with smashed in windows and a speed sign riddled with bullet holes. Every once in a while he drove around a fallen branch.

The road led across the bridge to a small town built into the mountain, always empty that time of day – people kept to themselves, tucked away in whatever little world they had created so far from civilization. Their ramshackle houses littered the roadside along the cold black river, and their filthy trailers with beat up cars and trucks were parked in undersized yards wrapped in rotting fence. Deflated balls, buckets of nails and tangled wires scattered around a mutt gnawing a bone on the side of the road. Farther down a little blonde haired girl with dirt smudged on her face played with a chipped yard gnome on the steps of her daddy's trailer. He passed all of these things to the steady hum of generators melding with the rushing sound of the river that settled over the town like a blanket. The air was still heavy with rain and the smell of damp vegetation was intoxicating.

The post office stood a quarter mile from the bridge, a hollow rectangular building with a couple dozen bronze mail slots built into the wall. As he walked in he glanced at the community message board. There were only a few fliers. Most had been ripped off. One was of a lost dog named Buck on bright yellow paper with a washed out contact number; probably taken by a cougar. Another flier, this one posted by the restoration council, was searching out volunteers for their next project – something to do with noxious weeds, salmon populations and tribal aid.

Inside the stuffy room he inhaled the stale, rusty metallic smell and retrieved his mail from the slot labeled Borlotus. He leafed through a stack of seven letters. At the bottom was an envelope from Pacific Medical Center. He didn't have to open it to know what was inside. He allowed himself a moment to look away and run his eyes over all the mail slots. Each name he read – Davis, Terkel, Samson, Wyatt – brought a rush of fragmented memories rearranged and pieced together, giving him an essence of the past but nothing concrete. The faces attached to those names were like phantoms rolling around in his mind and crashing against his skull, revealing themselves, only to fade when he focused too hard. Willy looked out the window facing a rundown house across the street, gripping the ledge for support. After reading the letter he just stood there.
He stood there for a long time.

He parked in the gravel lot of the only store in town. Walking up the thick slate steps, he felt as though the air was congealing, like he was walking underwater. He tried to shake the feeling, pausing beside the pay phone. It was overrun with puncture vine and no longer worked. The joke was whenever a flatlander passed through and needed to make a call one of the locals would point him in the direction of the phone and then laugh about it with whoever would listen.

Jingling bells announced his arrival. An overweight, middle aged woman wearing a crème colored sweater came from the back holding an inventory list. Her brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun and her bangs were cut straight across over un-plucked eyebrows. She wore glasses.
“We’re getting ready to close.”
“Just need propane.”
“Oh, Willy. It’s you.”
People, people – it's about people, she always told him. People are what makes us human – isolate yourself and you’ll become something else entirely. It doesn't have to be much. Make eye contact. Say hello. Open up or you'll die alone. By the end of those conversations she only felt she pushed him farther away, but for whatever reason she was the only one he let talk to him that way, so she kept at it. Today, however, she was just too tired to be a pest. She wrote a ticket for his purchase and said, “That daughter of mine is driving me crazy. She wore that harpy costume I sewed for her last Halloween, you know, the one with the feathers and talons. Well she was just screeching and flapping around all day, hollering and carrying on until finally I just had to send her out and work the store alone. I don’t know where she gets it. Sixteen and pretending she’s an oversized bird. The girl needs to make some friends. It’s just not healthy for her to be so insider her head all the time. Oh I don't know, maybe it's me. I can't help but feel selfish for keeping her here, but I just can't bear the thought of moving away. Maybe you can give me some advice for a change. Willy? Are you even listening?”
“My daughter's dead.”
She stared at him, and then looked down at the envelope in his hand. The dull hum of the heater was the only sound between them. He carried his purchase out onto the porch and she joined him. It was dark now. Lights began turning on in houses and trailers along the river and hillside, trying to ward off the darkness in vain.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder.
He didn’t respond. There was a faraway look in his eyes.
“Poor Gabriella. I know I'd only met her a few times but I always liked her. She was so pretty.”
Willy didn't say a word.
“For God's sake, say something, Willy.”
When he didn't still she rang her hands on the railing, kneading it, as if she could massage the tension out of the situation. Then she let out a sob, but quickly caught herself and covered her mouth.
“It’s just wrong. It’s all wrong. It’s not supposed to be this way.”
“Was a long time coming,” said Willy.
He had an unlucky way of outliving the women he loved.
“What are you going to do?”
He left her on the porch, walking down the steps to his truck.
“She lived in San Francisco, Right? What about Sebastian? Are you going to the funeral?”

He was not.

Heat rose up the flue of the kerosene lamp, giving off just enough light for him to eat his canned beans and bread at the oak table. He used the bread to soak up the juices on the bottom of the bowl and when he finished he leaned back and brushed crumbs out of his beard. A light rain was falling. He listened while studying the massive oil painting of two pioneers on horseback surveying the wilderness that hung on the wall beside a smaller, hand drawn portrait of an old Indian wearing a hawk on his head whose long wings cascaded down and doubled as hair. Kneeling in front of the stove, he poked at its glowing belly with the poker. The fire popped. He slid another log in.

He stared at the letter for a long time, running his fingertips over the smooth texture, the protruding ink, the name of the deceased: Gabriella. Pouring himself a glass of whiskey, he read it again. Afterward he just sat watching the lamp’s flame. The blue base stretched up into a bright orange body and rounded head that danced from side to side, his cheeks looking hollow and his eyes sunken in, in the faint glow of the orange light. He downed the whiskey and went to stand in the doorway, looking out into the wet, starless night. Not even the moon penetrated the blanket of dark clouds that covered the sky. Behind him the fire roared and crackled but gave no warmth at all.

[THEINCREDIBLEdork]

I don't trust your stories anymore. You never finished that story about Sebastion, the gay angsty teen.

[Repugnant Abomination]

Same story, bro.