“Alex, son, wake up.”
It was my father, shaking me awake. It was late and this had never happened. I was 12.
“Son, the Sheriff called. They arrested a man in a stolen car at the drive-in tonight and he’s confessed to killing the man who had owned it. He’s taking them to find the body. Do you want to go?”
Of course I wanted to go. The Sheriff had called my father because he was the publisher of the newspaper, but his inviting me to accompany him was unheard of. Why had he thought of it? I don’t know. Perhaps because he thought, at 12, I was old enough to see something harsh and real. Perhaps he knew that this sort of adventure would appeal to me. Perhaps because he knew if he had been 12 he would have wanted to go. He never explained and I never asked.
We drove to the Court House to meet the others taking this night journey. The man who had done the murder was in the back of a Sheriff’s car. There was another sheriff’s car and our car. The newspaper’s photographer – Bobby Burns – was there too, to take official photographs for the Sheriff’s Dept, which he often did as a sideline. Bobby was young and frisky. I liked him. He rode next to my father, and I took the back seat.
We drove toward the mountains. Our town was in a valley that is rimmed on the south by the Smoky Mountains – called the Unaka Mountains in our area. The small town and its surrounding fertile valley of dairy farms and rolling pastures was very different from the mountains. The mountains were dangerous. The people there were a violent tribe apart, who made moonshine and feuded with each other. And sometimes killed each other. After dark, especially, town and valley people did not go there.
We drove for about 20 minutes on a two-lane blacktop, then turned left onto Bald Mountain Road, which abruptly tilted up and into darkness. As the small procession made its way into what seemed total black on the narrow and twisting gravel road, I started to notice something from the backseat.
Tiny points of light began to appear. First, as we passed a rough wooden cabin beside the road, a light would turn on just as we went by. Then, in the inky black, I could see pinpricks of light up above, ahead of us, going on one after another.
I realized that in this closed world, they somehow were telling one another that we were there. Interlopers. Strangers. People from the valley and the town.
There was a clear urgency to our trip up the road. The cars bounced and jerked, hitting ruts and holes and rushing on. We went up and up, sometimes slipping sideways as we hurried. The darkness swallowed everything but the cones of light from our headlights, and on either side was a murky wall of thick underbrush and trees. It was summer, and the forest was dense.
Finally, beside a steep embankment that fell off to the left, we stopped. I was told to stay in the car as a shackled figure was hauled out of the back seat of the Sherrif’s car and roughly escorted to the edge of the embankment. He walked back and forth at the embankment’s edge and then gestured. There, he seemed to say.
A deputy made his stumbling way down the embankment and, after a moment or two of searching the leaf-strewn hillside, he called out, “Here he is.”
Immediately, the shackled figure was shoved back into the Sheriff’s car and the car began turning around, which was difficult on such a narrow road with a steep wall of trees on one side and a steep embankment on the other. It turned, backed, turned, backed, turned, backed. Finally, it was pointed down the mountain road and immediately it shot down the mountain. Why, I wondered. Why did that car leave us? We were fewer now, and I felt we were more vulnerable. It was as though a member of our small party had abandoned us on this lonely mountain road.
I was forgotten, so I climbed out of the car and made my way to the embankment, where the yellow circles from flashlights were playing over something. It was the torso of a man, torn by animals, not whole, stained dark with blood. It didn’t look like a man, but it once had been.
We stood there, looking, the men muttering quietly. We seemed to be waiting for something.
Within minutes, cars converged on us from above and below. And I only then understood the urgency, the frantic effort to turn the car, the rush down the mountain.
The men who emerged from the newly-arrived cars were indistinct, dark. But they were carrying shotguns and other weapons. Baseball bats and tire irons. And they were grim.
The Sheriff told them that the man in shackles was headed back to town and that they should get back in their cars and go home and let the law take its course. They exchanged words. Not angry, but deadly earnest. They were there to kill the killer. No question. And if he had been there? Who knows?
But he wasn’t there, so they left.
Soon after, my father said, “Get in the car, son.” And we too made that difficult turnaround and went back down the mountain to the valley and the town.