Up the Hollow

By the time the mare would let anybody near her, Ezra Cline’s barn was a black frame against the ridge, and the chief had quit coughing long enough to cuss me.

“You’re going to doctor that horse first,” Harlan Mullins said, “or you’re going to stand there looking at my arm like it owes you money?”

“Your arm’s bleeding.”

“Arm’s fine. She’s the one that went through a wall.”

He was right, and I hated it. The mare was a big bay named Sugar, twenty years old and fat as a tick, and she was standing spraddle-legged in the middle of the wet yard with her head down and her sides heaving and a burnt smell coming off her mane that turned my stomach. Somebody had thrown a blanket over her and she’d shaken it off. The engine from Station Nine was still parked at the end of the lane with its lights going round, red on the white of the fog, and the last of the volunteers were rolling hose in the field. It was a quarter to four in the morning. I’d been asleep at three.

I went to work on her. Harlan held the lead rope and talked to her the whole time in a low, steady voice like he was gentling a wild thing, which he was. I flushed her eyes with saline and listened to her chest and didn’t like it, and gave her something for the pain and something for her lungs, and cleaned the burns on her shoulder and her hip where the hay had come down burning. The worst was a strip along her neck as wide as my hand. I put silver cream on it and she shivered under my palm and let me.

“She going to make it?” Harlan said.

“If her lungs hold up through tomorrow. I want her somewhere clean with no dust. Not hay, not straw. Shavings if Ezra’s got them.”

“He’ll have them by breakfast if I have to drive to Beckley.” Harlan looked over at the old man, who was sitting on an upturned bucket by the porch steps in his bathrobe and boots, with one of the volunteers’ coats around his shoulders. “He’s had her since she was a yearling. She’s all he’s got left that remembers his wife.”

“How’d she get out?”

Harlan didn’t say anything. One of the volunteers, a woman named Patty who drove the tanker, said it for him as she went by with a coil of hose.

“He went in after her. Roof was already going. Ain’t nobody else fool enough.”

“Patty,” Harlan said.

“Well, it’s true.” She kept walking.

I looked at him. He had forty pounds on me, most of it in the chest and belly, and under the soot his face was brick-red above a white-grey beard cut short. His turnout coat hung open over a T-shirt gone black down the front. The sleeve of it on his left arm had burnt clean through, and the skin under it was red and blistered from the wrist halfway to the elbow.

“Sit down,” I said.

“I’m fine.”

“Chief. Sit down on my tailgate before I sedate you.”

He eyed me a long second. Then he sat on my tailgate.

I cleaned his arm with saline from the truck and he didn’t flinch, just watched me with his jaw set. It wasn’t as bad as it looked. I told him so, and told him he needed to see a real doctor anyway, and he told me I was a real doctor, and I told him I was a horse doctor.

“You been doctoring me for six months,” he said. “You just ain’t noticed.”

I looked up from his arm. He wasn’t smiling, exactly.

“The calving call in April,” he said. “That heifer of Dwight Shrader’s that wouldn’t come. I held the light for you three hours and you talked to me the whole time like I was somebody worth talking to. Then the dog bite in July. Then that Percheron with colic up on the ridge in August, and you let me walk him all night in circles because you said I had the patience. I been finding reasons to show up wherever your truck is ever since.”

The fog was coming up off the creek. Down at the end of the lane somebody shut off the engine’s light bar, and it went dark.

“Harlan,” I said.

“No need to say anything. I’m too old to be shy and too tired to be smart.” He pulled his arm back and looked at the dressing I’d put on it. “Come up to the house when you’re done here. You smell like a tire fire and so do I. I’ll make you coffee. That’s all I’m asking. Coffee.”

I finished up with the mare. I gave Ezra Cline his instructions twice and wrote them down for him once, and he gripped my hand in both of his dry old ones and said, “Thank you, Doc. You come back Thursday and eat with me,” and I said I would. When I came out to my truck Harlan’s pickup was idling at the end of the lane with the headlights on, waiting.

I followed him up the hollow.

---

His house was a two-storey frame farmhouse at the head of the hollow where the road ran out, white paint gone grey, with a deep porch and a woodpile stacked against the side neat as bricks. The sky was going pale over the ridge. Inside it was warm and smelled of woodsmoke and coffee, and there was a scanner on the kitchen counter murmuring low, county dispatch talking to nobody.

He showed me the bathroom upstairs. There was a towel already laid out on the toilet lid, and a pair of grey sweatpants and a Laurel Fork VFD T-shirt folded on top of it.

“Those are going to be big on you,” he said from the doorway.

“I’ll manage.”

“Coffee’ll be on.” He went downstairs.

I stood under that shower a long time while the water ran black, then clear. I could hear him moving around in the kitchen below, the pipes knocking when he ran the tap. I was forty-four, eight months into a job in a county where I knew nobody, and I’d been out since veterinary school and careful since the day I’d signed the lease on the practice. And I’d been watching Harlan Mullins hold lights for me since April, every single call, and thinking about his hands.

I thought about Columbus, where I’d gone to school and stayed fifteen years, and the practice I’d left there, and how everybody back home had told me I’d last one winter in a hollow in West Virginia before I came crawling back to the suburbs. I thought about my first two months here, when nobody would call me, and then that night in April when Harlan Mullins had walked into Dwight Shrader’s barn with a light and said, “Where you want it, Doc?” like he’d been waiting on me.

When I came down in his sweatpants with the legs rolled twice he’d showered in the downstairs bathroom and was at the stove in a clean undershirt and jeans, barefoot, frying eggs. His beard was wet. The dressing on his arm was still dry and clean, which meant he’d held it out of the water the whole time like I’d told him to. I liked that a good deal.

He set down a plate for me and a mug of coffee strong enough to strip paint, and sat down across the kitchen table with his own.

“I’ll say it plain,” he said. “Then you can eat your eggs and drive home, or you can do whatever you want. I’m fifty-nine. I have been chief of this department twenty-two years, and every soul in this hollow knows what I am and has the manners not to say it to my face. I never minded that. Then you showed up in that ugly white truck and started talking to me at calvings.”

“It’s not ugly.”

“It’s ugly.” He turned his mug around on the oilcloth. “I’d like to take you to bed, Doc. If you’d like it too. And if you wouldn’t, that’s all right, and you’ll still be the vet, and I’ll still hold the light.”

I put my fork down.

“Wes,” I said. “My name’s Wes. You’ve called me Doc for six months.”

“Wes,” he said, like he was trying it out.

“I’d like it,” I said. “I’ve wanted it since that heifer. I’m saying yes, Harlan. Yes.”

He breathed out long through his nose. His hand came across the table and covered mine on the oilcloth, big and warm and rough, and stayed there.

“Eat your eggs first,” he said. “You’re going to need them.”

---

I ate about half of them. Then he stood up and I stood up and he kissed me by the stove with the scanner muttering behind him, and that was the end of the eggs.

He kissed slow, slower than I’d have guessed from a man who’d walked into a burning barn. He took my face in his hands and kissed me like he’d planned it, careful and thorough, his beard soft and his mouth all coffee, and when I laid my hands on his chest he made a low sound in his throat and pressed into them. His heart was pounding under the undershirt. I got my hands under the cotton and up over his belly, thick and furred and warm, and he shivered.

“Upstairs,” he said against my mouth. “I ain’t doing this on the linoleum. My knees are fifty-nine too.”

His room looked out the back, with a window on the ridge going pink and an old iron bed with a white chenille spread. He sat down on the side of it and pulled me in between his knees and pushed his own sweatpants down off my hips.

“Lord,” he said quietly, and swallowed me.

I had to grab the iron footboard. He sucked me slow and wet and deep, one big hand holding the base and the other gripping my thigh from behind, and he made noise while he did it, low rumbling sounds deep in his chest that I could feel all the way up. He came off me and licked me end to end and looked up at me with his eyes half-shut.

“This been on my mind since April,” he said. “You know what it’s like holding a light for a man three hours and not looking at his arms?”

“I’ve got some idea.”

He laughed and took me down again. When my legs started to shake I put my hand on his shoulder and stopped him.

“Lie back,” I said. “I want to see you.”

He lay back on the chenille. I got his jeans and his undershirt off him, and for a second I just knelt there and took him in, spread out heavy in the dawn light with his cock standing up off his stomach and his dressed arm laid out careful on the pillow beside him.

“Stop word,” I said. “If you want to stop, you say hold. Like on a call.”

“Hold,” he said. “Lord, you’re a fire chief yourself.”

“There’s lube?”

“Bathroom shelf. Blue bottle, water-based.”

I got it. When I came back I stood at the edge of the bed with it in my hand.

“I want to wear something,” I said.

“Then wear it,” he said. “Come here.”

I knelt on the bed between his legs. I wet my fingers with it and found him, hot and tight, and when I pressed one finger slowly into him he dropped his head back against the iron rail and let out a groan that came up from his boots.

“Too much?”

“No. Lord, no. Keep on.”

I kept on. I opened him slowly, one finger and then two, crooking them up until I hit the place that made his whole body jerk on the bed. He swore. I did it again and he swore louder, and his hand found my wrist and held it there.

“That,” he said hoarsely. “Right there. Do that again.”

I did that again. I did it until he was rocking down onto my fingers with his heels shoving at the chenille and his cock drooling onto his belly, and when I added a third he grunted like he’d been punched, only glad of it, and said my name, the first time, Wes, low and rough.

I got myself ready. Then I knelt up and got my hands under his hips, and he understood and lifted for me, and I pulled him up onto my thighs so his ass was resting on them and his back was still flat on the bed. His feet came down flat on the mattress either side of me, knees wide open. He looked up at me from down there, flushed to the chest, with his good hand spread on his own belly.

“You ready, Harlan?”

“I been ready since April,” he said. “Put it in me, Wes. Go on.”

I pushed in slow. He was tight enough that I stopped, and he rode it out with his eyes on mine, and then his body opened up for me and I slid in deep, and he made a long low noise that went right through me. I held still with my hands on his hips and the whole of me inside him.

“God,” I said. “God, you feel good.”

“Move,” he said. “Lord, Wes. Move.”

I didn’t, not yet. I stayed there, deep, and ran my hands up his inner thighs and over his belly and into the grey on his chest, and he shivered under them like the mare had.

“You all right?” I said. “Tell me straight.”

“I’m better than all right.” His voice cracked. “You’re in me, Wes, and you’re kneeling there looking at me like that. I’m fifty-nine years old and nobody ever looked at me like that with the lights on.”

“Then I’ll keep looking.”

“Look all you want,” he said. “Just do it while you fuck me.”

I moved. Kneeling up like that, with his hips in my lap, I could pull him down onto me as I pushed in, and every stroke went deep and hit that place that made his belly jump. He gripped the iron rail over his head with his good hand. The bed started to creak. He was loud, and I hadn’t expected that either, a deep rough voice that got louder with every thrust, half words and half groans.

“That’s it. Lord, that’s it, don’t you let up. Wes. I walked through a burning barn tonight, I can take you.”

“Say what you want,” I said. “All of it. I want to hear it out loud.”

“I want you deeper. I want this bed walking across the floor.” He hauled a breath and pushed his heels down to lift into me. “I want you to wreck me, and I don’t care if I’m stiff on that engine Thursday. Hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Then quit listening and do it.”

So I let go. I held his hips and drove in, and his feet pushed against the mattress to meet me, and the old iron bed banged against the wall in a rhythm that would have carried down the hollow if anybody had lived close enough to hear. Sweat ran down my chest. His belly shook with every thrust. His cock slapped against it, hard and leaking.

“Listen to this bed,” I told him. “Whole hollow’s going to know the chief got fucked proper this morning.”

“Let ’em,” he said, and dug his heels in to meet me. “Let the whole county know.”

“Christ, Harlan,” I said. “You’re gripping me so hard. That’s you, pulling me in.”

“Good,” he said through his teeth. “You’re that big in me, I want you to feel me back. Don’t slow down. Fuck me hard as you can. Wear me out.”

I gave him everything I had. I watched his face, red and wide open, his mouth hanging open, his eyes on mine, and I felt it building low in my back and couldn’t stop it.

“Harlan, I’m close. I’m going to come.”

“Then come,” he gasped. “Do it in me. Go on, let go.”

I came with my teeth gritted and his name coming out of me, as deep as I could get, my hands locked on his hips, shaking. He held on to the rail and took it and talked me through it, low and dirty, “That’s it, give it here, Lord, I can feel you jumping in me,” until I was done and gasping and bent over him with my forehead nearly on his chest.

He was still hard. His cock lay thick and dark and wet against his belly, untouched.

I pulled out slow and he hissed. I cleaned up fast. Then I slid down between his legs on the chenille and got my mouth on him.

“Oh, Lord,” Harlan said. “Oh, Lord, Wes, yes.”

He was close already. I sucked him hard and fast, one hand flat on his heaving belly, the other pressing two fingers back into him where he was open and slick, and he jerked against my mouth and grabbed at the spread and said my name over and over, louder each time, until his whole body went tight.

“I’m going to come. Wes, I’m going to come in your mouth.”

I swallowed him to the base and held there. He came with a roar that rattled the window, pumping hot into my mouth in long pulses while his ass clenched on my fingers, his good hand twisted in the chenille. I drank him down and stayed till he was done and shivering and pushing weakly at my shoulder, too sensitive.

I crawled up and lay down beside him on the narrow bed. He pulled me in against his side with his good arm. The sun had come over the ridge and was lying in a long gold bar across the floorboards.

The bed creaked once and settled. Neither of us had anything to say yet.

---

“I’ll need a nap,” he said finally, “and then I’m going to need you to look at this arm again, Doctor.”

“Horse doctor.”

“Don’t care.” He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me. “You going to drive home?”

“I’ve got a clinic at one.”

“It’s seven-thirty.”

“Then I’ve got five hours,” I said.

It was his first smile all night. It took ten years off him and put them somewhere I’d like to find them later. He was just settling his head back when his phone went off on the nightstand. He reached over me for it, read it, and held it up so I could see.

It was from Ezra Cline, who typed with one finger. It was a photo of Sugar standing in a clean stall on a bed of yellow shavings with her nose deep in a bucket of mash, and underneath it said: SHE ATE.

Harlan studied it a while. Then he set the phone face down and settled back against me with his bad arm across his chest.

“You told Ezra you’d eat with him Thursday,” he said.

“I did.”

“I’ll drive you up. You listen to her lungs, and I’ll hold the rope.” He shut his eyes. “Then we come back here.”

“Then we come back here,” I said, and he was asleep before I’d got all the words out.