The Absolution on the Mountain Pass| Tyler Donegan

Read by Rodney Lopez

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The evening before they saw the fire up on the mountain the
patrons of the Red Pine Country Deli sat discussing poor young Joel.
“How about old Joely,” one of them had said, and the drinkers
all commenced into a ceremonious lowering and shaking of heads. A
fire had been lit against the cold and the snowfall outside and they all
held their mugs with gloved hands.
“Somebody ought to do something to help that boy.”
“Why I just did this morning,” Avery Brenn said. “He came
in to buy gas. Just to fill up an old can, not the truck, and I said why
don’t I buy that gas for you.”
The drinkers nodded their approval.
“I pray for that boy every night,” Miss Anne said. She had
stopped wiping the bar. “And the lord knows that to be true.”
“And I helped him dug the grave. Was the least I could’ve
done.”
The drinkers raised their mugs to this and drank despite know-
ing well that digging graves was Henry Eckels’ occupation and that
the four-foot plot for Joel’s daughter could not have caused him too
much trouble.
A silence gathered as they tasted their beer and cider and set
their mugs back on the tabletops. Henry Eckels wiped his upper lip
with his jacket sleeve and turned toward Arthur Owens.
“Say, Owens, ain’t you kin to Joel?”
Arthur sat at the bar with the rest of the older folks and turned
his head over his shoulder to meet the gleefully accusatory gaze of the
grave digger. He nodded.
“Cousins?” Henry Eckels asked.
“Second cousins.”
“That’s the closest kin old Joely has in town, ain’t it?”
Arthur craned further to survey the room behind him. Every-
one was looking, waiting.
“I’m the one gave him my old RV when his old man skipped
town way back and they took the cabin from him.”
They still looked, white eyes on dim faces in the firelight.
“It was me gave him that place to sleep when he would’ve had
nowhere else. And I told him he was moren welcome to leave the RV
there in my yard and come in for a meal when he needed one.”
He wiped his nose and turned back to the bar. When he heard
the murmurs of approval he ran the back of his gloved hand over his
eyes and forehead and looked into his drink, at the foam swirling, at
the reflection in the pale gold and carbonation.
“Course, he ended up taking the RV up to the mountain,” Av-
ery Brenn said.
There were nods, and someone said that’s right, and someone
said didn’t he.
“The boy never was too keen on accepting help.”
“It’s true.”
“That’s right.”
Avery Brenn shifted in his seat. “Matter of fact, he didn’t even
let me pay for his gas when I offered this morning. I was just trying to
be neighborly. He refused.”
A stir was going through the room. “The boy was never too
keen on neighbors, either, I suppose,” someone said.
“I wish he’d let us help him. Maybe he’d be alright then.”
“We always told him that girl he’d found was trouble.”
“It really was no shock when she left.”
“Lord knows he was too young to fool around like that, any-
way.”
“And lord knows we told him that. I told him myself. You’re
still a kid yourself, I said.”
“And he went ahead and had one anyway.”
The room fell into a tangle of speech until Miss Anne conclud-
ed, “It’s just one of those things where all you can do is pray.”
Everyone nodded and raised their mugs and some said “Hear
hear” and they all drank.
Arthur Owens stood from the bar and walked through the
cluster of tipping mugs toward the door. Storm sound swelled when
he opened it and the drinkers halted in their celebratory swig to watch
it swing closed behind him and after he was surely gone began to
discuss the impoliteness of his abrupt departure.
The window lights of the Red Pine were visible from up on
the mountain, only distant red flickers on the dark land through the
snowfall. Joel walked carefully backwards with the gas can, his boots
crunching, and poured a silver line in the fresh snow. He stopped and
tipped the can to make one final pool at the end of the trail and set the
gas can down beside him and looked at the RV, where the trail led.
He had visited her grave once more after the service, but it
didn’t feel like she was there. Now his breath wisped southward out
of his mouth with the wind, and he watched it swirl out of the light
cast from inside the old RV and into the dark and the snow, down the
mountain, toward the Red Pine.
The lighter was in his hand. He had thought about lighting a
cigarette and flicking it into the gasoline, but the action felt staged
and performative and he felt ashamed for thinking it. He thumbed the
lighter open and snapped the flint once, twice, then looked up into the
dark sky, the falling snow, and wondered what he was doing and why,
wondered what drove his daughter into the world and so swiftly out
and why she seemed so much wiser and he could not shake the feeling
that she was somewhere, watching, embarrassed and ashamed of her
father’s outburst. Father, he thought, seemed a strange title. He only
exceeded her by seventeen years. Joel struck the flint so the flame
caught and dropped it onto the pool of gas at his feet.
Flame leapt from the silver indent in the snow and flashed
along the trail into the RV where it bloomed, shattering the windows,
glowing the white mountainside orange and illuminating sheets of
snowfall in the air. Joel had fallen backward and took his ungloved
hand from the snow behind him to block his face from the heat. He
shuffled backward and lowered it, slowly, to watch the flame furl
about his old home.
He was standing eventually. There was an odd serenity in the
destruction. The flame moved calmly, it seemed, and black smoke
billowed up into the snowfall above it and metal groaned and leaned
as the RV burned and melted and shifted into the ground. His face
glowed orange and there was a red sheen over his eyes. He thought
of words, for it seemed fitting to speak now, but when he opened his
mouth he had to cover his face with a hand and when he tried to speak
again he fell into the snow and couldn’t speak or hardly breath for a
long time.
When the RV was but glowing metal, he was still lying there
in the snow and his breathing had calmed enough for speech. “You
were the best thing I ever did,” he said, his words still stunted with
shaky inhales, and he said it many times until he could say it steadily.
Then he rose, and standing there looking at the glowing wreck of his
home, with all the ceremony he could muster, said it once more in a
flat and serious voice so that it could be heard from heaven.
The snowfall had slowed. When he climbed into his truck and
clicked the headlights on the flakes falling through the beams were
frail and sparse. The fuel gauge and speedometer put dim orange light
on his face in the dark, and he tapped the gauge where the needle
teetered near E. He didn’t need to go far, he thought. He looked at the
smoldering heap in the rearview, then saw his own red eyes and the
red rings around them. The truck shifted into gear and rolled away
from the remains.
Arthur Owens saw the explosion up on the mountain just after
the door to the Red Pine had shut behind him. He stopped halfway
across the snowed porch, his hands frozen in the motion of raising his
jacket hood. That’s where Joel’s house is, he thought. The mountain
itself was invisible in the dark snowfall, and the fire was a distant
orange glow suspended in the sky like the throes of dusk.
The door opened and Arthur Owens turned to see the patrons
of the Red Pine stepping out with upturned faces. Some were pressed
up against the windows.
“Fire up on the mountain pass,” someone said.
“Say, that’s old Joel’s house.”
They had to speak loudly in the wind and snow. It was cold
but they all knew the cold well.
“Ain’t it pretty though.”
Some had gone back in to retrieve their drinks from the tables,
and people started wiping snow off the deck chairs and porch railing
to sit.
“You all think old Joely’s alright?”
“I pray he is. Ain’t nothing we can do for him at this point.”
A murmur of agreement went through the drinkers. Arthur
pulled his hood tight over his hat and stepped off the porch, into the
parking lot and out of the light of the Red Pine.
It was slow going up the mountain pass. Joel’s RV was the
only house on the road and it was sparsely traveled for it. Arthur
Owens’ truck lost traction four times and once sent him gently into the
guard rail and each time he considered turning around and leaving.
But soon he saw the glow of flame through the trees in the night and
kept driving, carefully.
By the time he turned onto the path toward the RV he could
see it had been reduced to glowing metal. A pair of headlights clicked
on next to the heap. They sat stationary for a moment, and then began
rolling toward him. Arthur stopped his own truck and cranked the
window down and leaned out as they approached. The cold stung and
he pushed his hood back so his face could be seen and raised a hand
when the lights drew just near.
He ain’t going to stop, is he, Arthur thought as the lights didn’t
slow. He was right. They rolled past and Arthur turned to see Joel’s
blue pickup ambling down the road, the taillights pitching over bumps
and illuminating the light snowfall red.
“Cranky bastard,” Arthur said. He rolled the window back up.
“Hell do I owe him.”
He turned the truck back around and drove to the entrance of
the path where he stopped with the wheel angled rightward down the
mountain pass. He looked left with his foot hovering over the gas and
saw the red taillights just for an instant before they turned a corner
or were obscured by the snowfall. He sat there for a moment with his
hands on the wheel and his breath fogging. He could see the lights of
the Red Pine down the mountain.
“Damn,” he said, and angled the wheel left.
The mountain pass was long and lonely and led high into the
cold of the mountain. It was seldom used nor maintained ever since
newer and faster roads had been carved. Joel figured his truck had
enough gas to get to the highest point on the road, and once the engine
died he figured he could walk the rest of the way to the peak.
His bare hands gripped the cold metal of the steering wheel
and the air in his lungs and on his face was cold. The yellow beams
from the headlights invigorated him, as if he were intruding on the
night of the mountain, as if he were a soldier very far away, and then
he felt embarrassed for the boyish fantasies, reminded that he was
young, too young to give a daughter a good life and he felt bad again
after the brief excitement. He turned the headlights off and sped up.
Joel didn’t end up needing the little gas that was left because
he crashed the truck into a guard rail not long after turning the lights
off. The truck was going fast enough that it bent the rail and lifted two
posts from the ground and the nose hung over the edge of the moun-
tain suspended by the groaning rail and it teetered there like a beast
ensnared. Joel had hit his eye on the steering wheel and he wiped it
and shook his head and then opened the driver door to see the drop off
into the night. I don’t really want to die, he thought, and he thought
that his eye hurt.
The window separating the cabin from the truck bed could
slide open so he opened it and climbed into the bed, the truck shifting
with his movements, and then he jumped out of the bed onto the road
and turned to look at the red taillights angled upward in the snowfall.
He kicked the rear of the truck, but it didn’t move. He tried pushing
next but that didn’t do anything either.
“Have it!” He said.
He pushed again with his shoulder and the cold of the truck
stung his hand where it was splayed against the metal and he shoved
with his feet slipping against the frozen road but it wouldn’t move.
Joel didn’t stop pushing until he slipped and fell under the truck and
he was crying in an angry sort of way, and the tears really hurt his
eye and he wanted to stop but couldn’t for a long time. It was awfully
cold.
Arthur Owens was about to turn around when his headlights
fell on the crashed truck up the road.
“Christ,” he said.
He stopped his truck far enough away and started walking
towards the crash. The snow was getting high and he had to really
lift his feet to walk through the road, and he realized his truck would
probably get snowed in if he stayed any longer.
“Joel,” he called up the road.
It’s cold enough to kill up here, he thought. Arthur had
stopped walking and he turned to where his truck was stopped in the
snow, then back towards the wreck. I’ll just check and then leave, he
thought. He knew Joel was probably dead.
There was no one in the truck or near it. The engine was still
running and it sat there, tilted and neglected, and it reminded Arthur
of an injured horse that had to be shot. He went around the back and
saw blood in the snow and a patch of skin on the rear of the truck
as if someone had frozen their skin against it and then pulled it free.
Footprints and spots of blood led across the road and off it and up the
mountainside. Arthur traced the path with his flashlight.
“Damn if it isn’t cold,” he said, and started up the mountain.
The trees were thin and sparse this high up and a swift wind
blew through them. It worsened as he went higher, following the
footprints, until sheets of snow blew across the ground and made the
tracks hard to follow. Arthur’s windward side was soon white, and
soon he lost the trail.
“Christ,” he said. It couldn’t even be heard over the wind. “I
am a God-damned fool.”
Arthur noticed his own tracks had begun to blow away behind
him, and he tried to scramble after them but fell in the snow. The
wind was fast and full of snow that low to the ground and he stood up
in a hurry. He hadn’t dropped his light and decided that was the last
chance God was going to give him to leave Joel behind and get down
off the mountain. Before he started walking again he turned up the
mountain and shouted, “just know I tried to help you!”
Avery Brenn’s weaseled face appeared in his mind.
“Damn it all!” Arthur knelt in the snow with his gloved hands
over his tightly hooded head and tried to think rationally, and even
though it was rational to stand with the people of the Red Pine, ratio-
nal to not follow this foolish child down his path of self-destruction,
he couldn’t change the feeling in his chest and stomach and as he tried
to force himself down the mountain that feeling became more tortur-
ous than the cold.
“Damn you, Joel!” Arthur rose yelling and striding up the
mountain. “Damn you, show yourself! You’re a Goddamned fool!”
He swept the snowed and howling land with his light and lifted his
legs running through the snow up the mountain, and he never stopped
shouting.
Arthur didn’t see Joel’s collapsed and snowblown shape
during his mad charge up the mountain and when he tripped over him
he thought it was a rock, and stood up to kick it down the mountain in
his rage when he saw the brown jacket flap flagging in the wind and
a blue bare hand in the snow. He laughed a single, very loud and very
blank laugh as he fell to his knees next to the boy.
“You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch!”
Arthur grabbed the boy under the arms and lifted him and
shouted at him to wake the hell up, you miserable son of a bitch. Joel
half-consciously moved his legs to stay upright as Arthur dragged him
back down the mountain and Arthur was glad for it. He tucked the
boy’s bare hands into his jacket and thought: he don’t even got a hat,
he don’t even got a hat.
When they came onto the road Arthur was rasping his breaths
and his breath tasted like salt and mucus and they were very sharp in
his chest. They had come back a little higher up the road than where
the truck was and he cursed and began carrying the now completely
unconscious Joel over his shoulders like how they taught him in the
army. The snow had stopped but Arthur’s truck was snowed in any-
way, and it was still running when they reached it and he wrenched
the passenger door open and deposited Joel in the seat and then went
around the driver’s side. When the door shut, the sound of the wind
muted and he could hear each of their breathing.
“By God you’re the most miserable son of a bitch I ever
knowed. God I hope you live so I can… Aw, Jesus.” Arthur leaned his
head back and clamped a hand over his eyes. “Jesus,” he said.
The engine warmed the car and he put his hat on Joel’s head
and put his jacket over him like a blanket. He tried to move the truck
but the wheels only spun. The night passed slowly and Arthur never
slept and kept listening to Joel’s breathing. When the morning came
and Joel seemed warm enough Arthur went out and dug through the
snow on the side of the road for big, flat rocks and when he found one
he would wedge it under the front of each tire and hammer it under
the tires with a smaller rock.
The wheels caught traction on the rocks and he was able to
get the truck moving this way and he turned it back down the road
without stopping and whooped and drove through the high snow
down the mountain, only getting stuck once more and using the same
process to get free. By just before noon he was passing the wreck of
Joel’s RV and the mountain pass had been plowed up to that point and
several cars were parked in the road. People were mulling about the
remains and he saw Miss Anne carrying a kettle she had found in the
wreckage. Avery Brenn and many others saw his truck coming down
the pass and ran up to him. He rolled down the window and looked at
them flatly.
“Where you been up there for?” Avery Brenn said.
“By God, that’s Joel there, isn’t it,” someone said.
Miss Anne heard the commotion and hurried over to the win-
dow, tucking the kettle under her jacket and saying, “Thank the lord!”
when she saw Joel.
Arthur looked at them. “Damn you all,” he said, and drove
away.
Joel had woken up and was looking at Arthur sideways from
the passenger seat. His eye was swollen shut and scabbed red and
the other eye was narrowly open, the iris dark and inquisitive. Arthur
noticed he was awake and glanced at him before turning back to the
road.
“Ain’t you sorry looking,” he said.
Joel turned away to look out the window, leaning his face on
the glass. “You can drop me off here,” he said.
Arthur chuckled and Joel looked at him inquisitively.
“You’re coming home with me.”
“Won’t you just let me out.”
Arthur glanced at him again, then adjusted his grip on the
wheel.
“You know, when I gave you that RV—”
“I know, I’m an awfully ungrateful son of a bitch, and you’re a
real kindred soul for helping me out even that much.”
“No,” Arthur said. He looked serious now. “No. No, that was a
cowardly act I did there.”
Joel looked at him with his one questioning eye, still squinted
from the swelling.
“When someone been through what you been through. Well.
They get a stink to them. And people want away from it. And more
than that they want a reason to be away from it. That RV I gave you,
that was my reason. I thought it was a good reason. But it wasn’t. And
you were right to burn it.”
“That’s not why I burned it,” Joel said.
“It don’t matter why you burned it. I suspect there ain’t much
of a concrete reason for it anyway.”
Arthur glanced at Joel, who was looking straight ahead out the
windshield at the cold and snowed land.
“What matters is,” Arthur said, and he paused and wiped his
nose with his sleeve. “Well I don’t really know. All I know is that I
shouldn’t of gave you that RV and ignored you. And I’m starting to
think that following you up into that mountain last night, and dragging
you back off it, well I’m starting to think it was the best thing I ever
did.”
Joel looked at him with his slitted eye. Arthur didn’t look
back. The truck continued down the mountain pass, the road pale and
hard in the cold, and somewhere up the road Joel’s truck’s battery
died and the headlights went off and it hung there, suspended, un-
til the day Joel and Arthur went back to retrieve it when winter had
thawed.