I drew a blank. “Nothing. I mean, I have everything else. I just. I can’t believe you would take that from me.”
His silence said enough.
“How many?”
Nothing. Eyes on the road.
“How many memories?”
“Just a few.”
“I can’t,” I began, trying to call up some memories, especially those featuring Deuce.
“Most of those are real enough,” he said, “though maybe I embellished them slightly to give you a little more positive impression of me. I mean, I did help keep you from getting bullied, but I didn’t do everything your memory thinks I did.”
“It’s fucked up,” I said.
“It’s super fucked up.”
“Can you—”
“Jump into everybody’s head? No. I tried. I tried for the longest time — you remember when I was indisposed most of the time?”
“I thought you were dying of some kind of blood poisoning,” I replied.
“I was sick as hell because I was trying to pick my spots, trying to find myself in the company of the people who killed my brother. At first, I thought I would be able to accomplish something. You know, like, if I could jump into Taj’s thoughts and yank out memories of him hanging out with monsters, that I’d be able to place them. That didn’t work though.”
“It only worked on you, Rol.”
“Is where we’re going real?” I asked, half-sarcastic and half-unsure.
“It’s as real as anything I can sort out right now,” he said.
The house was backlit by a floodlight hooked up to a generator, which threw a sickening yellow halo around the house.
We trudged through water soaking us up to the knees. I held my shotgun high above my head, the pistol in a shoulder holster. One in the chamber, ready to go.
He knew we were coming, knew to look out for us. To listen for us. To wait by the door for us to blow their house down.
And yet, we were the ones in the most danger.
I thought there would be more.
I expected bluster, expected men with guns to drop down from out-of-sight and draw down on us. Force us inside and torture us while the girls were brutalized in front of us.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, the door to the front creaked open, and Edrick, looking more like me with every passing moment, stepped out of the place and into the small patch of land which passed for a front yard out here. The ground sank into the water, where it became a pulsing, stagnating mess.
“Brother,” he said to me. “Brotha” to Deuce.
“We’re here,” I said. “Now, the girls.”
He smiled and gestured for the door. “Now, don’t queer this up. We are coming here on open terms, though I don’t think you’d like to admit that.”
“We didn’t have a choice.”
“Nobody dragged you here. You were allowed to come with weapons. Isn’t this it, what you wanted? To step in, guns-a-blazing, to save the poor, defenseless little whores inside?”
He was dressed in a black-and-white suit with grass and water stains up to the knees.
“Where are they?”
“Inside. They’ve practically gone to pieces over the announcement that you’d be coming. They seemed to have taken a particular liking to you. Not to you so much,” he added, talking directly to Deuce.
He looked from me to where my legs disappeared in the water. “I don’t see any reason to begin by throwing insults around,” he said. “We can go inside and sit down to hash this out.”
He cleared his throat. He popped his collar. He smiled, adding, “Like reasonable men. And there is nothing I am more than a reasonable man.“
“We see the girls alive, and we can make a determination on that topic.”
He smiled. “Oh, they’re alive. What condition they’re in, I just can’t say.”
He led us into the shack, meandering along as if on a Sunday hike. We followed him down a set of rickety stairs and came face-to-face with the women.
It was not what we expected.
She lay in a heap on the ground. She was the girl from our little excursion to the swamp, and I could recognize her from her mop of hair. I didn’t need to see the legs that were no longer attached, the hands which had been excised from the wrist. The fingers, which had held a cigarette of mine just days ago.
“She was a struggler,” he said. “She did not go quietly into that good night, but she was never made to be one to lie down and take it. Drink?”
He pulled a flask of whiskey but held onto it.
The other women had been chained to pipes leading up through the walls to the ceiling. It was a gallery of the most intense violence I had ever witnessed.
Edrick was a monster of the lowest order.
In the light, his shirt was covered in a spray of droplets, red as the paint on a ‘58 Chevy. He smiled at us, and though his face seemed detached from reality, he was no longer manic.
It was then, with the smirk pressing against him like a sweater, he was my mother. Slender nose. Light eyes. Two high cheekbones giving way to a set of perpetually upturned lips. It was the sort of moment that does not jibe with reality, seeing someone’s face on another’s body.
I steeled myself against feeling sympathy for him.
He was not a drug dealer. He was not even a peddler of human flesh. He was a murderer, a serial killer, hiding in plain sight among thieves.
“You know that feeling after slitting someone’s throat,” he said, “when the blood sprays in a warm arc over you? Jesus God does that feel like heaven on a ham biscuit.”
I dared not move, not give him a reason to strike.
“Oh, come on hermano,” he replied. “I thought maybe we could discussthe family business for a minute before I put you both out of my misery.”
“Not family,” I managed, choking on the words.
“Am I getting into that skin of yours?” he asked. “Figured it might take a little bit more than that. You’ve been fucked over plenty, am I wrong?”
“I’ve had my own life,” I said.
“Ah, what a pollyanna way to look at it. You live a life, but not your own life. How big a shadow did the old man leave over you? I’m judging by that sourpuss of yours that it was a pretty big one. You see, that fucking bastard of a murderer father of yours ruined all of our lives, didn’t he? You’ve been standing there like a dick in a bear trap, so I hope we can see eye-to-eye in that one aspect of our mutually fucked up experiences.”
“I don’t claim the man.”
He clapped his hands together. “There we go!” he screamed, sending something in a nearby pool of shallow water scurrying for the deep end. “Progress. Common ground. That’s a start in familial negotiations, no?”
“He’s dead. All the evil he caused is just dust and ashes. Even the house I was raised in burned to the ground.”
“Spoken like the eldest,” he said. “You think because that monster is dead he doesn’t have any dominion over us. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. His actions made me who I am, and as long as I live, there will be a shadow hanging over me. The closer I get to killing you, the shorter that shadow gets.”
“What can I do to stop this?” I asked.
“I don’t have your gifts, brother, but I want to — I want to learn. I want to know how it is you do what you do. You and me, we could hop in my ride down the road a ways and take the countryside by storm.”
He allowed that thought to linger. He said, “How far you think the two of us could make it before the county mounties — of wherever we ended up — managed to catch us?”
“Convince me why I shouldn’t put a clip through your forehead right now, and I’ll consider hearing you out,” I said.
He smiled, spat a bloody wad in front of him. “No you won’t,” he said. “But that’s all right. I don’t need love. Compliance is as far as I got in the whole social contract thing.”
A phone came out of his jacket pocket. He opened it, dialed a num
ber, and tossed it on the ground between us. The speaker was loud enough for me to hear a woman’s voice.
“Rol?” the voice asked. “Rolson, you there?”
It was Allison.
This was happiness for him. Him watching me realize what was happening. Eyes watching mine, waiting for me to react. Daring me to shoot him.
“You see,” he began, leaning back, “the man I called daddy was a better person than the Klan member who fathered you, but that don’t account for nothing. I still turned out the way I did, and you turned out the way you did, so maybe raising don’t have a goddamned thing to do with it.”
Allison said, “Rolson? Please tell me you’re okay.”
Her voice echoed in my ears like a joke without a coherent punchline.
“He taught me a few things on love, and then he up and died. I carried his name, until it outgrew me. Then I turned it inside out and just kept going. Funny thing was, I never picked up a record with it, and I was never officially, legally adopted, so it was something I could use with a kind of transient ease. Throw it in here, and there. Did you see how it was on the YouTube page for Nikki’s final…performance?”
He waited for a response that never came.
“Doesn’t matter if you caught it, though I imagine you did. It was there, and part of me always wished you’d find me, find out who I was.”
“Let her go,” I said.
He sucked his teeth, patently disappointed. “Easily said. You know how these things work. There’s no business without show business, and the hoop you’re going to leap through has to be set on fire first.”
“Name it,” I said.
I thought of Allison, imagined her being snatched from her house in Savannah. The way she’d struggle. How much they’d had to rough her up.
“You fight your boy to the death there,” he replied, “and I get to slay the survivor.”
“Sounds fair,” I said.
“You die. He dies. Your girl doesn’t die.”
“Don’t do it, Rolson!”
“They always do that,” Edrick said. “They always say to save yourself, don’t give in, shit like that. But what punk-ass motherfucker is going to let his girl die so he can slither off and live in some hole, just waiting to stick his head out the ground so someone can run it over with a lawn mower?”
He knew what he was getting. He knew what my response was going to be.
“Just kill me,” I said.
He smiled.
“I’ll beg.”
He shook his head.
“I’ll disown my family.”
Again, a tilt of the head back and forth.
“I’ll tell you everything you want to know about her.”
He’d already begun to give me the dissatisfaction of another no, but he stopped himself.
“That,” he said, “is worth listening to.”
He picked up the phone, said, “Let our friend get dressed. Looks like she won’t be a movie star tonight.”
Another pause, then he said, “Yes. Put her up in the hotel. I’ll be by later to…debrief with her.”
He closed the phone.
“Does that make you happy, my level of magnanimity?”
I tilted my head toward my maybe dying friend. “Let him go.”
“I’ve already let you make your decision.”
“Let him go,” I said.
He regarded my friend. “Doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere, homes.”
“He’s a ghost of himself. He’s got a family. Reasons to keep living. Let him go.”
“If he had reasons to live, he wouldn’t be here right now. He’s as dead as the rest of us.”
“You don’t want him. You don’t want anything to do with him. He’s nobody to you. He’s somebody put a stop to your earnings for a few weeks. I’m the person you really want some time with. Let me trade me for him. You can talk to me, knock me over the fucking head, drop me in the water, and be on with your business.”
He ignored me.
He said, “You know, I caught wind of some of the business back in your hometown.”
“That so?”
“It is, actually. That was the point I thought you were closest to seeing my way of things. I imagined you in a pit of self-despair, I don’t know, sucking stale beer out of bottles filled with cigarettes and edging ever closer to sucking down a revolver’s barrel. How close am I? Pretty close, right? Right?”
I shifted from one foot to another.
“That’s all right. Doesn’t matter. End result came out to be the same. You ended up here. I ended up here, and I get to be the one to end it all. I didn’t plan it to go down this way, but I also couldn’t have planned it better. It’s as if the world’s centrifugal force brought us to this exact same orbit. I’m really excited to watch that first spade of dirt cover your face.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said.
He seemed to consider this.
“Wish I could believe you,” he said, “but the universe put us in the same town because we can’t both coexist, now can we? The world is only big enough for one of us.”
“Let us go, and we can walk away,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Deuce responded. “This ends tonight.”
“See?” Edrick added. “That’s what I mean. I didn’t think I could trust you, and now I am fairly certain that’s the case. You stumbled into my town and started making trouble.”
“Taj needed someone to uncover the cause of his death. He deserves that.”
“And you came after me, why? Because you figured I was some chump with a new hold on the streets. That I wouldn’t retaliate?”
“We thought we’d scared you off,” he said.
He waved the gun.
“Then y’all two come out of the woodwork, trying to dismantle the studs holding all of the businesses together. Without the foundations, we are not strong. People got scared of you. That’s got to account for something, now doesn’t it?”
“We still ended up here,” Deuce said.
“Who is we?” I asked.
“Good question,” he responded.
Edrick said, “I don’t have any use for big man there,” he said. “But you, I figure I can use you a little bit. Maybe turn this thing around for us.”
“Impossible,” I responded.
“Aw, come on. You’ll have a chance to know everything you missed about your life,” he said. “About our lives. The last link to something familial.”
Deuce’s eyes met mine. He looked tired, despondent. “Do what you’ve got to do, Rol,” he said. “Seems like maybe your entire life has dragged you here, so consider it.”
“Deuce—”
“They’re going to kill me, either way,” he said, his eyes red and streaming. “They’re going to put me down, and whether or not they put you down is going to depend on your decision, not mine.”
Out of the darkness appeared a handful of miscreants. I glanced from Deuce to my brother. He smiled and tipped his head from side to side. Don’t know what I’m going to do, the look said.
The darkly malignant force bound to my best friend whipped out of him and latched onto the nearest gun-toting wannabe gangster. Wrapped around his shoulders, wrapped around his legs, and bent him backwards. There was a quick snap, and his body was transformed into a Tetris piece. He was an upside-down L, bulging where his guts and his bones slipped, because they had no place else to go.
He only screamed once, a bloody, wet gurgle, before he dropped to the ground. He was silent then.
“The fuck?”
“We didn’t do it,” Deuce said, “and if you let us go, we definitely won’t do it again.”
One of the guys raised his pistol, and the arm was suddenly snapped in half, the bone making a crisp pop, like a free play on an aging pinball machine.
I looked and saw Deuce pointing one hand at the guy.
“Holy fucking Christ!” he screamed, though the sound was cut off by him being dragged under i
nto the water by his feet. A single splash, and he was gone. He did not resurface.
The other men looked frantic, but Edrick calmed them with a wave of the hand. “Be still, men,” he said.
“You see what the fuck they did?” one of them said. “I’m going to blow their fucking heads off, and then I’m-a get the fuck out of here.”
“That is not what you’re going to do,” Edrick said, and he pointed the barrel of his gun at the man, who — incredibly slowly — wilted into himself and nodded.
My “brother” pressed the barrel of his gun against the meaty part of my temple and said, “Make it stop.”
Simply. Emotionlessly. A statement, rather than a command.
I wished I could.
He repeated, “Make it stop.”
A tree crackled and then snapped in half just above us, sending all of us fleeing in different directions. A dark cloud descended upon us. This was the beginning of the end. I wanted to be free of the swamp. I wanted to be free of the burden of looking for Taj’s killer — here he was. I wanted to be free of the pressure to get my shit back together. I wanted only to save Allison from all of this and then go away, perhaps forever. No more Lumber Junction. No more Savannah. No more Georgia or Florida, even. Just…distance.
On one side of the tree was me and Deuce, and on the other was Edrick and his boys. I had slipped off into the woods.
“This was…fortuitous for you,” he said, raising the gun again.
He either didn’t have a chance to fire or didn’t want to, because the cloud appeared again and moved among the men on the other side of the tree. Perhaps they couldn’t see it, but it seemed like they sensed it, because they looked into the air, raising their guns as if to fire at the sky.
“Not going to do any good,” Edrick said, focusing his attention on us.
There was at least a temporary reprieve, as his side men got tangled up with the spirits. Firing at nothing.
Several feet away, one of his associates fired wildly, lamenting some “crazy bullshit.” Sad truth was, he didn’t have much of a chance to scream. And guns could do nothing against the force slowly wrapping its tendrils around him.
The crack of a bone, and he let loose a howl that curled my neck hairs. He squeezed off a few more rounds, the gun pointed into the darkness. Might as well be trying to hit a handful of mosquitoes.
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