Holler Calls

by Katie Garner

“I heard something in the woods last night,” says Charlie, wiping her palms down her mud-soaked jeans.

Emmett swings down, splitting the log with a thunderous crack. “Yeah? What’d it sound like?”

Charlie’s face scrunches. Pulls her bushy eyebrows inward. “Dunno. Somebody talking, maybe. All mumble-like.”

They stop what they’re doing and glance at the dense thicket of trees, as if expecting to hear echoes of that phantom chatter.

Nothing comes.

Emmett shakes his head. “Pay it no mind,” he says, lining up another log. “Foxes sound like people, sometimes. Probably heard one of them.”

“Wasn’t no fox,” she grouses.

“A bird, then.”

Charlie throws him a look unique to indignant teenagers, and the predictable sourness of it nearly tugs Emmett’s mouth into a grin. If the muscles in his face even remember how to do that.

Pain radiates his knuckles, climbing up his arm. He winces, dropping the axe.

Charlie frowns. “You okay?”

Emmett grits his teeth. Flexes his hand. “I’m fine. You go on back; I’ll finish up here.”

She stares at him hard, stares through the lie, but she doesn’t challenge him on it. Gathering up Emmett’s old tools, she starts down the gravel road and trudges past the family well, the footfalls of her boots crunching with every step.

When she’s crossed the holler, Emmett shifts his gaze to the woods. Wind sighs over the trees, leaves clattering in a way that reminds him of rain. Greenery chokes the world here in nowhere, Appalachia. Come late summer, a thick curtain of darkness will make it nigh impossible to see. Even now, only a few skeins of light penetrate the foliage ceiling, shielding whatever lives inside.

He summons the endurance to slice another chunk of oak before throwing the axe atop the logging cart, wheeling it home.

The throbbing sensation in his hand eventually fades to a dull ache.

###

Charlie browbeat her way into Emmett’s orbit five months ago.

It was a slow night. The regulars nursed their drinks at the bar, only murmuring to flag him down for a refill or to curse at the Kentucky State football players flailing on his grainy television screen. He passed the hours shining the glassware, tidying the mixers. Listening to the faucet drip. A little later, he’d spray and wipe down the counters, stack the chairs, and pound a shot of whiskey to help knock himself out for the night.

The door creaked open a half hour before closing. Emmett half-expected to see his cousin Tanner, a pot-bellied moonshiner who dropped by once a week for a round of taste-testing. Instead, an unfamiliar figure hovered in the doorway. A girl, by the looks of her. Ruddy-haired and ugly as could be. Her hesitation lasted a handful of seconds before she stomped over to a corner table and slouched down, oversized hoodie drowning the shape of her.

Emmett threw the towel over his shoulder and walked over. “What can I get you?”

“Beer,” the girl said, quiet but quick.

He assessed her. “I don’t know if you’re old enough for that.”

“I’m eighteen,” she said, glowering.

“Well, I don’t know that I believe that, miss. And even if that were true, the legal drinking age is actually twenty-one.”

Her lips curled back. “Water.”

“Coming right up.”

The regulars stumbled out soon after, slapping a few dollars on the counter and burping their thanks. The minutes crept past ten, but the girl remained in her seat, head low. Her face a storm of troubles.

As he initiated his clean-up routine, Emmett called out, “I’m closin’ up, miss.”

Her eyes tightened. She didn’t respond.

“Can I call someone for you? Your parents, maybe?”

At that, she grimaced. “No. I’ll go.”

He watched her rise, assembling the pieces of herself together. “Have a good night,” he said. “Be careful out there.”

Pulling her hood up, she stalked across the floor and shouldered the door open, letting it slam behind her.

Mentally, Emmett wrote it off. He got teenagers in here, sometimes. They wanted to score booze at a tavern miles away from town, away from prying eyes. Unfortunately for them, Emmett was protective of his liquor license.

He’d almost forgotten about her entirely until he took out the trash. He found her curled up by the dumpster, head buried in the nest of her arms. Blanketed in newspapers. Judging by the way she shivered, they did little to stave off the cold.

Angry, purple bruising peppered her forearm. The sleeve of her hoodie had ridden up to reveal fingerprints—like someone had grabbed her.

Several facts collated all at once.

Emmett gritted his teeth. He turned the potential scenarios over in his mind, reviewing all the steps that might have taken place to lead her here. All of them pissed him off. If she thought sleeping here was her best option, then all the people in her life must have failed her.

He refused to be one of them.

###

Trying to coax the girl to the tavern’s spare room was like trying to mollify a feral cat. Not that Emmett minded. He would’ve been more concerned if she wasn’t suspicious of the middle-aged stranger living above a bar.

They made a deal. She could rent the room free for a couple of days if she promised to help out, clean the gutters, that kind of thing. Dirt and disrepair had coagulated around the tavern, a natural consequence of its owner spending all his spare time rotting in bed, mind gummed by alcohol. He needed the extra set of hands. In return, she didn’t have to freeze by a dumpster.

The girl, Charlie—short for Charlene, she’d said, but nobody calls me that—took to the work like a machine. She helped with the simple sanitation tasks, first. Cleared the keg lines, scraped ice chunks off the freezer. She moved with a single-minded intensity, hands never faltering even after hours of labor. On the third day, when Emmett ran out of stuff for her to clean, Charlie dug his tools out of the supply closet and started fixing things. The faucet, and the roof, stopped leaking. Floorboards no longer squeaked underfoot. Lightbulbs, once flickering on the patio, glowed steady and bright.

Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months.

Someone was probably looking for her. Emmett knew that. But Charlie didn’t want to be found. As far as he was concerned, she could sleep in the spare room and polish the windows and whatever the hell she wanted to do, for as long as she wanted to do it.

Charlie seemed to prefer taciturnity, especially around the barflies and the coal miners who spent their evenings drinking themselves into a stupor. Time, however, had eased her temperament around Emmett.

“You kill all them bucks?” she asked, gesturing at the mounted deer heads on opposite ends of the tavern.

“Yes, ma’am,” Emmett confirmed, pouring himself a glass of a Jack Daniel’s.

Charlie nodded. “That’s cool.”

Emmett snorted. “Glad to hear it.”

“You still hunt? Can you teach me?”

An old ache twinged in his chest. He took an impressive swig of his drink and said, “Not anymore. And no.”

The light in her eyes dimmed at that, making him feel like a right piece of shit. To soften the blow, he said, “There’s not much game around here, anyway. You’re better off learnin’ to do something useful. Like knitting, or something.”

He didn’t miss the way her face pinched, and immediately he regretted the suggestion. A girl like Charlie had no business knitting. Just wasn’t in her nature. Emmett couldn’t hold that against her.

“Listen, you’re not missin’ much, kid,” said Emmett, sighing. “I’m a shit teacher, anyway.”

She shrugged away her disappointment. “Whatever.”

###

Sometimes, the woods call Emmett’s name at night.

It started years ago, not long after Leanne signed the divorce papers and moved out. God, he missed her something terrible. The silence was deafening, all-encompassing, after she left.

He wanted to follow her. Beg her for forgiveness. She wasn’t even all that far—she’d moved back in with her aunt in the neighboring county. But he couldn’t. The edge of the woods marks the perimeter of Emmett’s holler-sized life, the geography of his world. His feet can take him to the mouth of the holler, but no further. Leaving feels like death. Like the end of everything.

Emmett clocks his days with the rise and fall of the sun, the swinging of the door, the weekly grocery shipments from Tanner. He avoids the rooms that remind him of better days. He drinks.

And sometimes, when he lies awake at night, he hears something out there call his name. Goading him. It’s as smooth and clear as a siren’s song, the sound of a promise to balm his wounds. Appealing to the black hole in his heart. It scares him to know just how much he wants to chase that voice into the woods, to never come back.

Instead, he pounds a shot of whiskey before bed.

###

“You need to see a doctor,” says Charlie, after they’ve closed up for the evening. Her sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, brows furrowed.

Emmett pauses. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Your arthritis is going to get worse unless you see somebody. I read about it. If you don’t treat it, it can damage your joints real bad.”

“I’m fine.”

She balls her fists. “No, you’re not. There’s a doctor in town. Let’s see him on Monday.”

Irritation seeps into his tone as he says, “There’s no point in seeing someone who’s just going to tell me to pop a few Tylenol and take a nap. Leave it alone, Charlie.”

“What is it?” she snaps. “Why can’t you leave the holler?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Charlie arches over the bar, forearms pressed to the counter, scowling. Tension always seems to simmer under her skin like an electric current. But this is the first time Emmett’s ever seen her truly angry. He crosses his arm and leans against the wall, unwilling to look her in the eye.

“You know what I think?” she asks, not expecting an answer. “I think you’re punishing yourself, but I don’t know why. Why the hell do you want to be miserable?”

Rage bubbles up.

“At least I’m not a homeless runaway,” he snaps back, slamming his fist down on the counter. “If you don’t like the way I live my life, then you can go back to the hell hole you crawled out of.”

A hush falls between them. Charlie’s lips press into a thin line.

“Fine,” she spits out, turning her back on the conversation. She strides to the stairwell, harsh footfalls thunking against the steps as she ascends. Soon after, a door slam reverberates throughout the tavern.

Emmett tries to stew. He did that a lot during the last six months of his marriage to Leanne when their screaming matches ended with her crying in the bathroom and him sipping a Cognac at the bar. Stewing did little to exorcise his frustration. All it did was hasten the dissolution of his marriage.

With that sobering fact in mind, Emmett locks the bottles away.

###

In the middle of the night, that voice from the woods shakes him from the trenches of a deep slumber. But this time, it’s not his name he hears.

It’s Charlie’s.

Emmett stumbles out of bed, fear pulsing white hot in his chest. He’d been half-convinced that the voice was a hallucination. An invention of his drunk, depressed brain. If that’s the case, why would it call out for Charlie?

Shambling down the hall, he knocks loud and insistent on Charlie’s door. “Charlie? Charlie, are you there?”

No response.

Grunting, he tries the handle. The door creaks open with ease.

Her bed is empty, unmade.

Adrenaline surges down his throat. He races back to his room, shoves on his boots, and wraps himself in a jacket. She’s gone to the woods, his thoughts cycle. She’s gone to the woods. She’s gone to the woods. He lifts his rifle off the wall, blowing off a layer of dust in the process. It’s been years since he last fired it, but it would have to do.

Leaping down the stairs, Emmett sprints out of the tavern. He doesn’t hesitate as he plunges into the woods.

The night was already dark, but in here, not even moonlight can permeate the thick, intersecting coverage of trees. He dashes into the darkness anyway, heaving and panting, suppressing his panic.

Wet petrichor saturates the air. It’s colder here, somehow. Like wading through a cloud.

“Charlie!” he yells. “Don’t listen to it!”

He doesn’t know how long he careens through that inky blackness, tripping over roots, colliding with bark. His knees and eyes burn, but he presses on, searching and calling. Regrets wallow inside him. The longer he spends staggering through the dark, the deeper sinks the realization that he might lose her. The one good thing in his life. And he would have no one but himself to blame.

Bending over, he takes a moment to collect himself.

A wheeze rumbles behind him. Twigs snap under the weight of something colossal as it approaches, hot gusts of air billowing from its mouth. A foul odor follows, a smell like blood and graveyard soil.

Emmett stills. He wonders if he’s attracted the attention of a bear when a rasping voice pierces his eardrums.

“What makes you think,” it croons, “that you can be a father again?”

His mouth goes dry.

The thing behind him shifts. He can feel its breath ghosting the back of his neck. “You couldn’t even protect your son. Stupid, worthless man. You weren’t even in the room when he picked up your hunting rifle and shot himself.”

His shoulders begin to shake. This is a nightmare made flesh. “It was an accident,” he whispers.

It laughs. A croaking, baleful sound. “Excuses. Meaningless noise.”

Emmett closes his eyes, lowers his rifle. Nothing it says can compete with the cacophony of loathing he’s already said to himself. He’s dwelt on his own mistakes long enough—what matters now is Charlie.

“I know,” he manages. “I know that. But I need her back.”

“You will fail her too.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Please, give her back.”

Silence follows his plea. Then, it chuffs. The overwhelming presence of this creature slowly rescinds back into the shadows of the woods.

When he opens his eyes, threadbare beams of morning light filter through the trees.

###

Emmett finds Charlie resting against a tree trunk a few yards behind him, dazed but conscious. Alive.

Lifting her, he carefully piles her atop the expanse of his back. Her arms wrap around his frame, clinging to him. They walk like this for a while, listening to the mourning doves. Carrying her feels good. It feels stabilizing.

“You left the holler,” she says quietly.

He grunts. “That I did.”

“The voice...it sounded like my little sister. I left her behind, and I thought maybe...I thought maybe she was here.”

Emmett digests this. “You don’t have to explain. I get it.”

Her arms tighten around him.

“I didn’t mean what I said, earlier,” says Emmett, after a pause. “You might be a runaway, but you’re not a homeless runaway. You got that? You have a home here as long as you want it.”

She buries her face into his shoulder, nodding. He feels the fabric dampen, but he doesn’t comment on it.

Crossing the threshold of the wood’s edge, they descend the hillside. The tavern awaits.