Read Online Mystery Dance: Three Novels by Scott Nicholson - Free Book Online

the trees blurring past, the varying shades of green as the vegetation juiced itself in preparation for summer. This was a hostile planet, a land of pain and strangeness. You could buy pieces of it, hold up deeds and titles, but in the end all you had was the dirt above you, the dirt that busted through your coffin and filled your mouth and lungs. In the end, you didn’t own the land, it owned you, it sucked you under and crushed you and hugged you and smothered you with affection, its worms kissing you into slumber, its weight greater than the tonnage of guilt and fear and rage that you carried in your living flesh.
    “Do you know where Ivy Terrace is?” he finally asked.
    “Them apartments you built up on the west side?” Smalley peered at him as if deciding whether to go to the hospital after all.
    “Yeah. Can you take me there?” He reached for his back pocket. “I’ll pay you, of course.”
    “Oh, no, you don’t. Work is work and favors is favors. Remember that next time somebody else needs a hand.”
    Jacob glanced in the side mirror, and for a moment thought he saw the green Chevy roaring up from behind. He wiped at his eyes.
    “I heard about what happened,” Smalley said, keeping his eyes on the road as the clusters of neighboring houses grew denser. Jacob hadn’t realized how far he had walked. The sun had already started its downward slide toward afternoon.
    “Hard to figure the ways of the Lord sometimes,” Smalley said. He reached to a stained and frayed work coat beside him and pushed it across the seat toward Jacob. “The way I figure, He did plenty of suffering up on the cross, so we all get to do a little in our turn.”
    Jacob looked out the window, thinking of Mattie, remembering the way she had sat on his foot as a toddler and urged him to make it “giddy-up.” What did Smalley know about suffering? He didn’t have a family, or any responsibility. He had a fly rod in his shotgun rack and a truck bed full of scrap lumber and rusty tools. He had a nicotine habit and dirty nails.
    Smalley fumbled in the folds of the coat, opening it so that Jacob could see the bottle. The amber liquid lay greasy and thick within the confines of the glass, rolling back and forth in waves with the motion of the truck. “But the Lord gave us means to ease our suffering. That’s a real blessing, you ask me.”
    Jacob looked at the bottle, the slick brass cap, the brown label that suggested an easy afternoon on the plantation. He pictured himself showing up on Renee’s doorstep half-drunk, an excuse to launch into an abusive rage.
    No, not half. Jacob hadn’t been half-drunk in over a decade.
    “No, thanks,” he said, more to himself than Smalley.
    “Suit yourself. Say, you got any work coming up?”
    Jacob didn’t want to tell the man that M & W Ventures was done. Renee should be the first to know, followed by his partner. Maybe Donald would buy him out and keep the earth machines well fed, continue stacking bricks and laying pavement and raising monuments to progress and ego. Taking up the Wells mantle without benefit of the bloodline. “I’ve been out of touch,” he said.
    “Yeah. I reckon so.”
    They circled the back end of town, past the gray warehouses and boarded-up shops that lined the abandoned railroad. Jacob used to think of this section as a slum, acres and acres in need of a wrecking ball, an urban renewal project he had once calculated as a long-term investment. Turn the old textile mill into a mini-mall, charge outrageous rent for small shops whose proprietors could peddle “handcrafted” Appalachian baskets and quilts that were actually mass-produced by exploited labor in Taiwan. The consumer was only buying an emotion, after all. A mountain town back-street offered plenty of nostalgia for those who longed for better days that had never really existed.
    For the first time, Jacob saw the beauty of the broken glass that sparkled in the dying sun. The ragweed that grew in clumps along