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Chapter 1

SOMEWHERE NEAR THE VIRGINIA/WEST VIRGINIA LINE

LATE-DECEMBER, 2010

It was—oh, but delimitation seems called for regarding the unwritten theorem that unless one is, say, Charles Dickens, the writer must never begin a novel with the words It was, due to the shiftlessness of the simple-past form of the verb to be. Poet extraordinaire Ezra Pound, for instance, asserted that the verb to be (and all its indicatives: is, was, were, etc.) was indeed the most important verb in the English language but also the weakest. Exceptions to all rules, however, must be minded; and on that desultory note—considerate Reader—we shall begin again…

It was thirteen days after the 9-year-old hillboy, Crory Tuckton, son of Dumar and Mary Beth Tuckton (the maiden name of the latter being Martin, niece of the late Jake Martin), and grandson of 57-year-old Helton Tuckton, had disappeared.

To reiterate: the boy disappeared.

Without a trace.

Hence, nearly the last fortnight, the Tuckton household (or more accurately shackhold, for they domiciled in Helton’s sprawling, dilapidated oak-plank and cedar- and tin-roofed shack) had lived its life beneath a caul of tense, imponderable despair. No one dared speculate aloud what had become of the boy, though in somber privacy, Helton himself supposed that young Crory, whilst venturing to Hog Neck Lake to trap crawdads as he did every morn, had gotten hit by a copperhead. The idea that he had been abducted had never occurred to any of them.

Nevertheless, though in his simple yet strident backwoods wisdom, Helton Tuckton rarely bowed to such whimsy as superstition, nor was he given in particular to the neurotic compulsion known as triskaidekaphobia (i.e. the fear of the number 13). On this day, however, the thirteenth day, he paused to scratch his massive gray-blond beard and postulate, Blammed if it ain’t been thirteen days since Dumar’s tike disser-peered. Shore as hail hope that don’t bring no bad luck…

It would.

Crory’s mother, the aforementioned Mary Beth Tuckton, in the throes of liquor-amplified sorrow, had hanged herself six days after the little shaver’s disappearance, which is mentioned here only as an interesting formality: 13 being the unlucky number, and 6 being the imperfect number.

Regardless…

The cool December air turned Helton’s breath to mist, and dense thicket it was that he lumbered his large frame through. He checked his ‘shine stash fairly regularly for, see, one phobia he did suffer from was the fear of thieves, and thieves were rife in these parts. Said stash he produced himself, and stored exclusively for family consumption; he never sold his moonshine, in other words. But it was no big secret that a stash might indeed exist, and that existence was a constant topic of idle discourse among the region’s more commerce-minded producers of illegal corn liquor, Hall Sladder and “Snot” McKully being the most ostensible. Helton was halfway to his stash that day when, in the distance, his ear detected a familiar sound—

sheeeeeeeeeeeesh…SWACK!

—which would be the sound of his 20-year-old nephew, Micky-Mack Martin, hunting squirrels with his sling. Micky-Mack possessed a finely honed talent for the proper use of this device; in fact, it had been Helton who’d taught him the art.

“Hey there, Micky-Mack,” greeted Helton when he emerged from the brush. “You catch us a fat-ass squirrel fer supper I’se hope?” but then Helton stopped mid-step when he noticed the lean, blond-headed young man standing with his jeans all the way down, his right hand pumping back and forth with pointed precision.

“Boy? What’choo doin’ jerkin’ off in the woods?”

Micky-Mack grinned over his shoulder. “Got me a hankerin’ to cream on this splittail, Unc Helton. Don’t know why, just…do.”

Helton approached the ludicrous scene, first raising a proud brow upon noting that Micky-Mack’s genital endowment was quite formidable and in keeping with the Tuckton/Martin tradition—well, that and then some. But this “splittail” he had a “hankerin’ to cream on” lay perfectly still amid the leaves. A skinny thing, lank black hair, sucked in face, tiny tits laying on a chest denuded of its trashy halter, tiny cut-off shorts skimmed away. The chill air puckered the nipples, and her mouth hung open as if she were unconscious. Yet even more ludicrous was the fact that Micky-Mack stood a full six feet away from the girl.

“Boy, I know full well you can shoot a jizzer farther than most fellas but—shee-it!—you’re standin’ six feet away! Ain’t no man can belt a load six fuckin’ feet!”

Micky-Mack maintained the over-the-shoulder grin. “Watch me, Unc Helton,” and after a few more shucks of the hand, out flew not one, not two, but seven lines of semen six fuckin’ feet, all of which landed neatly around the girl’s chest and face, and several of which went directly into her mouth.

Micky-Mack nodded in a self-approving way. His penis remained more-than-momentarily hard—ah, the benedictions of youth!—and when he flexed it once, a remnant squiggle of sperm flipped fascinatingly into the air, somersaulting like a piece of flicked spaghetti. Then he re-hoisted his jeans. “Tolt ya, Unc Helton.”

“Damn, boy,” commented Helton, the spectacle leaving him for a lack of more concise verbiage. “Ain’t thunk it possible for a single fella to shoot that much cum out his bone that far.”

Micky-Mack shrugged. “Just as I been gettin’ older, the more I shoot, the fartherer.”

“Damn, boy,” Helton reiterated but then finally the more serious question arrived…

“And who’s that skinny gal there with the puckered nips stickin’ out, and why’s she…lying there lookin’ like she’s out cold?”

“Don’t know the bitch’s name, Unc, but I seed her around a bunch. I think she’s shorely one’a Hall Sladder’s corn-mash whores and, see, Unc, I was fixin’ to fuck her but once I got her li’l whory shorts pult off I’se took a close peek and see she got warts all over her cooter’n stuff hangin’ out, so’s I just said hail with it’n beat off on her.”

Not a man to chronologically integrate proper questions with observations, Helton peered through his confoundment, then stooped his hulking frame to examine the girl’s privates. Sure enough, the agape, hair-rimmed parcel that was her labia majora appeared pocked with bumps and blisters the size of tree-frogs; and within there seemed to be a fleshy and inflamed disgorgement of afflicted tissue. “Fuckin’-A, boy, you’se right,” and he pronounced “right” as rat. “This gal’s cunt is packed up with disease the same way a turkey’s packed up with stuffin’. Was wise’a ya not to be stickin’ yer bone in that mess,” but then, like a quick snap! of someone’s fingers, a thought of higher priority snapped! in his brain. “Wait a minute now. What the fuck’s wrong with her? Looks like there’s…blood on her head. You find her like this, passed out in the woods? And—fuck!—wait a minute! I heard you fire off a shot from yer sling!”

“Well, shore, Unc Helton. I weren’t huntin’ squirrel as you might’a thunk. See…it was her I hit. And she ain’t passed out, no sir. This fester-pussied bitch is dead.”

Rage stood Helton right back up, and he had to struggle not to raise a beefy hand and strike his nephew right across the kisser—something he was known to do on occasion. Helton’s vocal anger, however, was not so restrained. “Boy! Yer Daddy’n me always taught ya—never put a ruckin’ on a gal less’n she deserves it, and never, and I mean NEVER kill no one that ain’t done you a serious peck of harm first! It’s unethical!” and he pronounced “unethical” as unether-krull.

“Un…huh?”

“It’s wrong! This hillgirl you just come all over were innocent! Which means you up’n murdered her!”

The younger man cowered in the midst of his uncle’s displeasure, though even shivering he stood his ground. “Sorry yer dander’s so up, Uncle, but way I seed it, there ain’t nothin’ innocent ’bout her. First of all, she were trespassin’—”

“Aw, shit, boy! Yer grabbin’ fer shit! Just tryin’ to juster-fy what ya done!” Helton bellowed.

“And second of all, like I said, she’s one’a Hall Sladder’s corn-mash whores, and ever-body knows how bad Hall wants to find yer stash so’s he can snatch it. So’s I figure it were shorely Hall who sent this whore’a his to scout our property and try and find yer stash.”

Helton frowned at the excuse, suspecting it was just more of the boy’s fear forcing him to rationalize a sociopathic act and very poor error in judgment, but before he could give voice to this notion, a few of his mental cogs slowed down.

My…stash…, he reflected. That’s what he’d been out here to check on in the first place.

“Come on, boy. Help me check the stash,” Helton ordered, and off they tromped through the woods, and within a few minutes they’d come upon the camouflaged outcropping of hillock beneath which existed the egress leading to Helton’s corn-liquor stockpile. He produced a flashlight, then threw back the O.D.-green tarp covered with stitched-on branches and dead vines.

Helton awkwardly fitted himself in, followed by Micky-Mack, but only one sweep of the flash transfigured his rage to sadness.

Helton had had at least a hundred gallons of grade-A white lightning hidden here, but now? The entire storage space stretched before them, empty.

“Holy shee-it, Uncle Helton!” cried Micky-Mack.

But what good was rage now? Dolefully, Helton said in the dark, “You was right, boy, and I’se truly apollergize fer nearly raisin’ my hand. Shorely, it was indeed that skinny whore who helped Sladder rip-off my stash. Why else would one’a his whores be on my land?”

“Dang, Unc Helton. That shore does suck. I only wish I’d gotten myself out here earlier so’s maybe I would’a caught ’em in the act.”

“You’re a fine boy, Micky-Mack, and you got balls, which shore as shit makes me and yer Daddy proud,” Helton commiserated, “but that cut-throat cracker Hall Sladder ain’t one to fuck with all’s by yerself. We’ll get him back proper in due time.”

“She were probably comin’ back, hopin’ they’d over-looked a jug or two, fixin’ to take ’em fer herself.”

Helton nodded with the boy’s simple logic but it was a similar logic that trudged them back to the final resting place of Sladder’s confidante. Revenge must be enacted but in this case only revenge of the post-mortal variety was feasible. Belabored exposition need not be made, only that the slim corpse was flipped over and an orifice other than the poxed vagina was utilized for purposes of angst-assuagement, after which Helton declared, “Wish ya’d got her alive, boy, ’cos it would’a just tickled me pink to put one holy hail of a ruckin’ on the tramp, but I’se guess it’s good enough to leave the whore to rot with a buttful’a our cum,” and then they headed for home.

Though Helton could hardly have been aware of it, he’d taken precisely thirteen steps back toward his shack when the outrage of this treacherous theft would be reduced to insignificance. It was then that his 35-year-old son Dumar called out from afar, “Paw! Come on back the house! We’se just got a package been delivered!”

Helton’s squint found a similar squint on Micky-Mack’s face.

“A package?” the youth questioned.

Indeed.

For Helton and most of his kin were what the Census Department would label “documentation elopement cases”; in other words, they’d fallen off the People Radar long ago. Tax records inactive for decades, no Social Security trail, no utility records. Though they lived on land properly owned by Helton’s mother, Petunia Tuckton, they were essentially squatting there, and this status included Dumar and Dumar’s wife, their missing son Crory, and Micky-Mack. Hence, with no official address, how could any “package” be “delivered?” None of them had seen a mailman in years; and, that said, it must be abstracted now that though Helton could have no idea of what the very near future would reveal, the unmitigated outrage of his “stash” being stolen would just as quickly be reduced to utter unimportance…

Because, thirteen days after the dread and inexplicable fact, the mystery of young Crory Tuckton’s disappearance was about to be disclosed.

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