Hard Mountain Clay

Praise for

HARD MOUNTAIN CLAY

"Resonant and harrowing, Hard Mountain Clay is a haunting and visceral story of survival, betrayal, and the power of hope. Like a Californian William Gay, Blackwell writes with compassion and honesty about the worst, and the best, of human nature taking us deep into the dark to see glimmers of beauty. Raw, wrenching, and brave, Hard Mountain Clay will change you."

—Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs

Clipped, dipped, and dripped in the blood of the land, Blackwell carves mountain noir straight from granite and jams it down your throat in digestible bites that crave for more, more, more. If Lou Holt doesn't sear his name with fear on your bones, ya ain't paying attention!

—Ashley Erwin, author of Grit, Black, Blood

HARD MOUNTAIN CLAY

Text copyright © 2023 C.W. BLACKWELL

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by Shotgun Honey Books

Shotgun Honey

215 Loma Road

Charleston, WV 25314

www.ShotgunHoney.com

Cover by Bad Fido.

First Printing 2022.

ISBN-10: 1-956957-11-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-956957-11-2

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1            23 22 21 20 19 18

for Amy, Enzo, and Miles

HARD MOUNTAIN CLAY

1

He took the turns hard.

Wheel cranked; shoulder dipped.

He leaned into it.

Lou always told us you didn’t need brakes if you knew what the fuck you were doing. Even in a big F-250 extended cab with eighteen-inch mudders and a cable winch. He’d say a professional like him could circle the globe on a single pair of brake pads with nothing but the gearshift and his good looks to slow him down. Maisy and I joked about Lou trying to drive that big dumb truck across the Pacific Ocean, yanking the wheel through undersea canyons down there in the dark with the eels and the angler fish, holding his breath all the way to Japan in a feat of sheer pride.

We didn’t joke about it to his face, though.

Never to his face.

Lou Holt blew into our lives a few months after Mama got a job waitressing at the Oak Street Diner. He drove a truck for one of the local tow companies—Speedy Tow, not Ballard’s—and he’d take long-haul jobs on the side for extra cash. She’d been complaining about needing work done to the house, so he started sniffing around the place to see what he might get in return. Soon enough, he was stopping by every weekend with his tools and his truck and his simmering temper that frothed under every word he said to Maisy and me.

One day, he just never left.

Lou wasn’t all bad, though. At least, not at first.

Once, he gave me a brand new harmonica.

You’re the first to put your lips on this sonofabitch, he said, taking it out of the package and holding it to the sun so the metal gleamed. Part of getting a present was doing the unwrapping yourself, but this was the kind of thing Lou did all the time. He’d take even the smallest wins for himself, as if there were only so many wins in the world and he needed to collect all he could before they ran out.

I blew a few chords into the harmonica and looked it over.

You got it upside down, dummy, he said. The numbers go on the top.

Mama crossed her arms whenever he called us names, but she never told him not to. Maybe she’d bat her eyelashes and give him a tight-lipped smile like oh come on now, Lou, but she’d never say anything. Maybe she felt like she’d run off too many men and had to choose her words carefully now. She’d take notes in her mind of all the nasty things he’d say to us and try to build us back up after he left.

I flipped the harmonica and gave it another try, but Lou snatched it from me.

That don’t sound good either, he said. Here, do it this way. He put it to his lips and played a little riff and made a sort of wow wow wow sound by slapping his fingers over the back of it. It didn’t sound great, but Mama was delighted. She clapped her hands and made a wow sound of her own.

See that, Benny boy, she said. If you practice, you can be that good someday.

I ended up giving the harmonica to Maisy.

We both loved music, loved staying up late listening to the radio. We didn’t have MTV like the other kids, so our little Panasonic radio taught us everything about all the new bands coming out of Seattle, just a few hundred miles up the coast from us. But Maisy seemed to understand music better than I did. I’d catch her spinning the dial from one end to the other, listening to oldies and classical music, even the AM country stations. It wasn’t just that she was older than me—we were only eleven months apart—she was just a little better at everything. I wasn’t jealous about it either, but proud. I looked up to her. And even though the kids teased her for being skinny and frail, she looked out for me like an older sister should. So when she got good at the harmonica, I wasn’t surprised at all. She’d listen to the blues programs on the college radio station and play along. She picked up a riff here and a riff there, and soon she was better than Lou. Much better.

While Lou was giving me things like harmonicas and pocketknives, he’d give Maisy prissy trinkets like dolls and unicorn school binders. She hated everything he ever gave her. Once, he gave her a flower identification guide that boasted over three hundred illustrations of native California wildflowers. She thumbed through the pages and glanced around the front yard. It was February and neither of us spotted any flowers around, save for a few dandelions that hung sadly in the shaggy grass. The book suddenly looked heavy in her hands. Lou read her expression and his face tightened up, jawbone grinding under that wiry black beard. He stroked his chin and flecks of dandruff sprinkled onto his shirt like ash.

Mama took the book and looked it over with a certain manufactured flourish, like she made a living selling flower books. With all the rain we've been having, I bet flowers will be springing up all over the place. She swept her hand through the air like a gameshow model demonstrating all the prizes we could win. Won’t that be something, Maisy girl?

Maisy shrugged. I guess so.

Ain't girls supposed to like flowers? Lou said. The way he said it came with hooks, barbs, and sharp edges all at once. We could tell Lou had an accent, like something we’d heard in some old TV rerun or seventies Western flick, but he never told us where he came from. He mentioned East Texas, Tennessee, even Boca Raton. Wherever he’d come from, we wished he’d go back—and soon.

I guess some do, said Maisy.

I slipped the book out of Mama’s hands and flipped it open to a section on sticky monkey flowers. A bouquet of tiny orange petals filled the page.

I like flowers, I said.

I bet you like flowers, boy. Lou’s voice was ice cold. I bet you like them just fine.

I didn’t understand what he was getting at, at least not then. But that’s when I ended up trading Maisy the harmonica for the flower book. Come spring, we’d sit along the creek and she’d play sad blues riffs into her palms and I’d scoot around looking for new wildflowers to identify. I found plenty of Blue Houndstongue and forget-me-nots, some brodiaea on the hillsides. I’d pepper the stream with tiny blue petals and watch them whorl and glide out of sight, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, I guessed. Maybe it wasn’t how Lou pictured it, but we didn’t care. In time, those peaceful moments grew shorter and shorter as Lou took over the house. Soon we were like those little blue petals, spinning and looping in the current toward some dark and unfathomable end.

2

Mama didn’t come home on the last day of school.

I insisted we hold out until dark before eating dinner without her. We had our little traditions that we looked forward to when school ended, and this year marked the end of elementary school for Maisy—and the first year I’d attend school without her. In other years, Mama would bake cupcakes and frost half with chocolate frosting and half with vanilla since Maisy and I liked them differently. Then she’d sing us a graduation song and complain about how fast we’d grown and how old we’d become.

Darkness came, and the house grew cold. Mama still hadn’t come home. At nine o’ clock, Maisy put on a kettle, and we made instant oatmeal and scooped it up with torn heels of white bread like crude utensils. The heels always tasted stale, but when it came right out of the toaster with butter,