Betton On Highlands

BETTON ON HIGHLANDS

a novel

Kevin Williams

A Betton Universe Novel

she brought all of herself. highlands kept the rain on.

Michaela

The rain started at four in the morning.

I know because I was already awake. I’d been awake since around three, which I wasn’t going to examine too closely, lying in the specific not-quite-dark of a Highlands night with the window cracked the way I always have it cracked and listening to the mountain do what the mountain does before the rain arrives. The particular quality of the air changing. The trees moving differently. The silence getting the kind of full that means something is coming into it.

Then the rain. Soft at first, the way it almost always starts up here, like it’s asking permission, and then committed, the way it always ends up, like it decided the answer was yes and acted accordingly.

I lay there and listened to it for a while.

Danica was going to drive up in that car.

In this rain.

On these roads.

I had made my peace with this approximately two weeks ago when she texted me a video of the Temerario taking a switchback somewhere outside of Asheville at a speed I was not going to calculate and followed it with a single emoji. Not a nervous emoji. Not a question. Just the one that means look at this with no apparent awareness that look at this was doing a lot of work in that context.

I had watched the video twice. I had not responded to the emoji.

I got up at six and made coffee and stood at the kitchen window the way I stand at the kitchen window, which is with both hands around the mug and no particular agenda, watching the rain come down through the trees. The fog was sitting low in the valley the way it does after a night rain, which meant the view from the ridge road coming up into Highlands was going to be the specific view that makes people from Atlanta pull over and stand in the wet and take photographs.

Danica was going to do that.

She was going to pull over and stand in the rain and go live and try to explain the fog to four hundred thousand people and she was going to fail to explain it in the most specific and accurate way anyone had ever failed to explain it and the chat was going to lose their minds and then she was going to get back in the car and come the rest of the way up the mountain.

I had made my peace with this too.

I took my coffee to the porch.

The rain had settled into its middle register — not the asking permission version and not the full commitment version, just the steady unremarkable rain that Highlands produces the way other places produce traffic. Ambient. Expected. There in the background of everything the way it always is. I sat in the chair that faces east and drank my coffee and watched the fog and thought about what it is to know someone is coming.

Not abstractly. Specifically. What it is to know this particular person is coming, in that car, up this road, to this town, which is my town, where Loretta is twelve minutes away and Chelsea is four streets over and Madison’s is on the corner and the mountain knows my name in the specific way mountains know the names of people who grew up in them.

Danica had never been here.

I had been to her Atlanta. I had stood in Thread & Theory in the afternoon light and watched her work and fallen asleep in a leather chair at 10:47 with my head in her lap on camera and been completely fine about all of it. That was her territory. Her neighborhood. Her city, her store, her chat, her energy filling every room she walked into until the room adjusted to accommodate it.

This was mine.

I was trying to figure out what I thought about that and not arriving at anything particularly conclusive when my phone buzzed on the arm of the chair.

A location pin. Danica’s location. Moving.

Already on 26.

Already coming up the mountain.

Below the pin, three words:

y’all I’m COMING.

I looked at the pin for a moment. Then I looked at the fog. Then I looked at the pin again.

I finished my coffee.

I went inside to make another pot because whatever was about to happen to Highlands, I was going to need it.

* * *

Forty minutes later, I heard it.

Not saw. Heard.

I was in the kitchen. The rain was doing its thing. The mountain was being the mountain. And then something happened to the air that had nothing to do with weather — a sound coming up from somewhere below the ridge, low at first, working through the trees, the specific mechanical conversation of an engine that has no business on a mountain road and has decided not to let that stop it. Getting louder. Getting closer. The turbo doing something between corners that the mountain had genuinely never been asked to process before.

I set down the coffee mug.

I went to the window.

I could hear it but I couldn’t see it yet. Just the sound coming up through the wet trees, getting larger, getting more specific, and then the turbo blowoff on the last switchback before the ridge like a punctuation mark the mountain didn’t ask for.

Then it came around the bend.

Neon blue.

Four inches off the ground.

Moving at a speed I was not going to examine.

And parked — if you could call it that, if that word applied to what happened — half on the road and half on the sidewalk in front of my house with the specific decisive energy of a vehicle that had decided it was done moving and was done moving here, approximately, close enough.

The engine cut.

The mountain went quiet in the way mountains go quiet when something has just happened to them.

The door opened.

Danica Betton stepped out into the Highlands rain with her camera already up, already live, already talking, arms going wide like she was trying to hold the whole mountain in them, her laugh coming up the street before the words did —

“Y’ALL. Y’ALL I MADE IT. LOOK AT THIS. LOOK. AT. THIS.”

I stood at my kitchen window with my second cup of coffee and watched four hundred thousand people see Highlands for the first time through Danica’s camera.

The fog was exactly what it always was.

The rain was doing what the rain does.

And something in the mountain that had been very still for a very long time was not still anymore.

I didn’t examine that too closely either.

I went to open the front door.

Danica

Danica Betton had somewhere to be, and no amount of mountain road switchbacks was going to stop her. She was going to Highlands, North Carolina to visit Michaela Rainwater, and driving like the spirit of the late rally racing great Colin McRae had briefly taken over.

“Aight y’all, I’m almost there! The zigs are zigging and the zags are ZAG-GING, OK? But I got this.”

gobbledygook404: THE ZIGS ARE ZIGGING

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: AND THE ZAGS ARE ZAGGING

tacobellcanteen: she said she’s got this

yungappalachian: I grew up in these mountains. I have driven these roads my entire life. I have never once driven them like THAT.

midwest_gothic: Danica Betton has just invoked the spirit of Colin McRae on a North Carolina mountain switchback and I need everyone to understand that Colin McRae died doing this and she said she’s got this.

gobbledygook404: MIDWEST_GOTHIC

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: THEY SAID COLIN MCRAE DIED

tacobellcanteen: in this economy

yungappalachian: midwest_gothic has a rally racing knowledge base and I have so many questions about how that happened

midwest_gothic: I contain multitudes. also that guardrail is decorative at this speed.

gobbledygook404: THE GUARDRAIL IS DECORATIVE

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: Danica what is the drop off on your left right now

tacobellcanteen: DO NOT ANSWER THAT

yungappalachian: I know exactly where she is on that road and I am not okay

midwest_gothic: yungappalachian has local knowledge and is deploying it as anxiety and I respect the specificity.

blessyaheart_shug: Baby those curves are very sharp up there. Maybe slow down just a little bit. 🙂

gobbledygook404: ...

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: MAMA B SAID MAYBE

tacobellcanteen: she deployed maybe

yungappalachian: blessyaheart_shug knows those roads

midwest_gothic: of course she does. blessyaheart_shug knows every road her daughter has ever been on. she has been in the front row for all of them. the maybe is load bearing maternal concern delivered through a smiley face and I need Danica to receive it.

gobbledygook404: Danica

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: DANICA RENEE

tacobellcanteen: your mama said maybe

yungappalachian: the maybe means please

midwest_gothic: the maybe means I have watched you since before you had twelve followers and I would like you to arrive in one piece and I am saying it with a smiley face because that is who I am but the maybe is real. slow down.

“Mama I hear you! I’m going a RESPONSIBLE speed for this car on this road, OK? Like, relatively speaking.”

gobbledygook404: RELATIVELY SPEAKING

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: SHE SAID RELATIVELY

tacobellcanteen: that is not the same as slow

yungappalachian: relatively speaking on a Lamborghini going up a mountain switchback in the rain is a VERY wide range of speeds Danica

midwest_gothic: the rally suspension was built for this. she knew from the moment she had it installed. this road was always the destination. Michaela Rainwater’s mountain was always where this car was going to find out what it could do.

gobbledygook404: midwest_gothic said Michaela Rainwater’s mountain

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: MICHAELA RAINWATER’S MOUNTAIN

tacobellcanteen: the archive has a new entry before she even arrives

yungappalachian: entry one. she drove like Colin McRae to get there. noted.

midwest_gothic: noted. the archive is open. we wait for arrival.

blessyaheart_shug: Relatively speaking isn’t the same as carefully Shug. 🙂

gobbledygook404: ...

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: MAMA B CAME BACK

tacobellcanteen: with the correction

yungappalachian: blessyaheart_shug knows the difference between relatively and carefully and deployed it with a smiley face

midwest_gothic: Delia Betton just made a precise semantic distinction between two adverbs in a rally driving discussion and did it with complete warmth and a smiley face and I want that in the record as the most elegant maternal correction this chat has ever witnessed.

“OK MAMA FAIR POINT—”

The turbo blowoff hit the next switchback like an announcement.

Like an arrival.

Like something that had been coming for a long time and had finally decided it was here.

The chat went quiet for exactly one second — the specific silence of four hundred thousand people simultaneously understanding that something was about to happen.

Then Highlands came into view.

“Y’all.”

She said it quiet. The first quiet thing she’d said in forty minutes on this road.

“Y’ALL.”

The fog sitting in the valley below. The mountains doing what they do in the rain, which is turn a specific shade of green that has no name in any language Danica had available to her. The town up on the ridge, small and specific and completely itself, the kind of place that didn’t know it was beautiful because it had always just been there.

“Y’all I can’t— how she just LIVE here. How you just LIVE somewhere that look like this. I grew up in the mountains and I’m looking at THIS going— y’all the MOUNTAINS back home said hold my sweet tea, OK?”

gobbledygook404: THE MOUNTAINS SAID HOLD MY SWEET TEA

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: DANICA

tacobellcanteen: she just compared the Blue Ridge to the Blue Ridge and the Blue Ridge lost

yungappalachian: as someone from these mountains I am going to need a moment

midwest_gothic: Danica Betton just drove up a North Carolina mountain switchback like Colin McRae and arrived at the top and the first thing she did was go quiet. the mountain did that. Michaela’s mountain specifically. entry two. the quiet. filed.

gobbledygook404: ENTRY TWO

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: BEFORE SHE EVEN PARKED

tacobellcanteen: the archive is moving fast today

yungappalachian: she hasn’t even seen Michaela yet

midwest_gothic: she hasn’t even seen Michaela yet. no. and the mountain already got her. Loretta’s mountain. the rain’s mountain. the mountain that made Michaela Rainwater and has been waiting at four thousand feet for whatever this is. entry two. the quiet. we wait for entry three.

blessyaheart_shug: It is beautiful up there isn’t it Shug. 🙂

gobbledygook404: ...

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: blessyaheart_shug has been to Highlands

tacobellcanteen: OF COURSE SHE HAS

yungappalachian: blessyaheart_shug has been everywhere her daughters have ever been going to

midwest_gothic: Delia Betton has been to Highlands North Carolina and has been waiting for her daughter to see it and said it is beautiful up there isn’t it with a smiley face like she’s been sitting on that information this whole time and I need a moment.

gobbledygook404: SHE KNEW

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: SHE ALREADY KNEW

tacobellcanteen: from the front row

yungappalachian: where she’s always been

midwest_gothic: where she’s always been. yes. entry two footnote. Mama B knew what the mountain was going to do to Danica before Danica got there. she always knows. filed.

Danica pulled up in front of Michaela’s house.

Half on the road.

Half on the sidewalk.

She cut the engine.

The mountain went quiet the way mountains go quiet when something has just happened to them.

The door opened. Danica stepped out into the Highlands rain with her arms going wide —

“Y’ALL. Y’ALL I MADE IT. LOOK AT THIS. LOOK. AT. THIS.”

And standing in the open doorway of a small house in Highlands, North Carolina, with a second cup of coffee and the specific expression of someone who had made their peace with all of this and was finding out that making your peace with something and actually watching it arrive were two entirely different things —

Was Michaela Rainwater.

Danica saw her.

The camera swung.

The chat saw her too.

gobbledygook404: ...

DontTalkToMe_Brenda: ...

tacobellcanteen: ...

yungappalachian: ...

midwest_gothic: entry three.

blessyaheart_shug: She has good hands. 🙂