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From the sound of the radio chatter, the woods had caught down around the campsite where the forest turned to gamelands. Volunteer firemen had cut lines and the fire was contained, but lately that word "contained" was only relative. The whole region was dry as grain. As soon as one fire burned out, windswept embers lit the next, scorching swaths of land left black in the wake. Honestly, it was amazing it hadn't happened sooner. Thirty years as a forester told Ray that. Decades of mismanagement had left the forests thick with fuel. Anybody with a lick of sense should've seen it coming.
Ray drew a few quick puffs from his cigar, then picked a piece of tobacco from the tip of his tongue and wiped it on the heel of his boot. There was a book he'd bought that summer at City Lights Bookstore sitting on his lap, the story of how coyotes spread across the American landscape. Ever since Doris passed he'd become obsessed with coyotes. In the beginning, Ray couldn't figure out the reason. Maybe it was all the sleepless nights and hearing them in the woods above the house. But the more time he spent thinking, the more he came to figure that maybe it was how he'd watched mountain people and culture be damn near extirpated over the course of a few decades, while those dogs had been persecuted for a century and thrived. It was admiration, he thought. Maybe even jealousy.
The first coyote Raymond ever saw in Jackson County was back in the late 1980s on a piece of forestland in Whiteside Cove. There were more of them now. It was nothing to see them lining the sides of the highways hit by semis at dawn and dusk. Sometimes late at night while he lay in bed, a patrol car or ambulance siren would scream past and that sound would trigger the dogs to sing, one voice sparking another and another until a chorus filled the darkness around him. The research said the coyotes were taking a census. But for Ray the reason was less important than the feeling. All Ray knew was that when he heard that sound he felt as close a thing to joy as he knew anymore. Just imagining it right then he rocked back in his chair and smiled.
He was almost finished with his glass when the phone rang inside the house. A cane-back rocker was nestled in the corner of the front room where his wife used to sit and talk with her sister and her friends and telemarketers and anyone else who'd listen because truth was that woman just loved to talk. Her and Ray had balanced each other out that way, him never saying boo to a goose and her having enough stowed away for the both of them.
"Talk to me," Ray grumbled into the receiver. His voice was deep and gruff, words never seeming to make it out of the back of his throat. The stub of his cigar was hooked in the corner of his mouth and he scissored the butt between two fingers so as to clear his lips to speak. He could hear heavy breathing on the other end of the line, but no one said a word. "Hello."
"Dad," a voice whimpered, "Dad ..." He was out of breath. "They're going to kill me."
Raymond ran his hand down his face and stretched his eyes, trying to will his wits about him. He started to hang up, but hesitated. His hand clenched the phone so hard that he could hear the plastic cracking in his fist.
The boy's voice was the same as when he'd been ten years old and called from Gary Green's, having burned down the man's barn with a G.I. Joe, a magnifying glass, and a Dixie cup of kerosene. It was the same as the first time Ricky got arrested, and the second and the third, the same scared-to-death, I'm-in-over-my-head horseshit Ray'd heard so many times over the course of his life that he couldn't bear to listen. He was almost immune. Yet, right then, same as always, he found himself incapable of hanging up.
Ricky's breath stuttered out like he was on the verge of tears and he said the same thing again, "They're going to kill me."
"What in the world are you talking about, Ricky? Nobody's trying to kill you."
Excerpted from When These Mountains Burn by David Joy. Copyright © 2020 by David Joy. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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