The Stranger was not done with him, though. It began to fold the gang member into a tight little cube, the size of a piece of carry-on luggage. Legs bending backwards. Elbows flipping the wrong way. It all looked so unnatural, but the worst of it was the eyes. The eyes held something that could not be encountered with any dignity or grace.
When it was all done, the body dropped heavily to the ground.
My brother ignored the growing dismay of his associates and stepped ahead of them, right out into the middle of the fray.
“I knew you were into black magic bullshit,” he said. “I heard that back when you was burning Savannah to the ground. Fitz and I crossed paths, so I catch his occasional business.”
“And you heard I was into voodoo?” I said.
He rolled his eyes. Aimed for Deuce’s chest. “Just put an end to it.”
I tried. Summoned up all the bad vibes in me, in hopes I’d set the lot of them on fire. I threw visions of flames into the spot just above my third eye and hoped beyond hope.
And all I got for the effort was a few pale dots in my field of vision.
“You having a fit?” he asked. Calm as a pond at sunrise. His buddies with the pistols starting to get squeamish, pressing their hands against their bellies, the fabric stretching out like a fist pressing against the logos. The sounds emanating from their open, drooling mouths coming off like worried cows.
Their faces contorted into something inhuman. Their mouths hung agape, and they were beginning to look like non-corporeal forms. The vibrations running through them dragged them from their bodies and into the air above. I saw a separation, which expanded as the volume knob in my head got turned way up.
At the center of it was Deuce. The sweating, tense figure putting off all this energy, so much more powerful than I had been.
This wasn’t just whispers of corpses. It was a literal dead reckoning.
Deuce had it. The gift, if you could call it a gift, was his now. His face shone with droplets of sweat like biblical boils.
His entire body was shaking. He was pulling Edrick’s henchman inside out by their guts, and I couldn’t have stopped it if I wanted to.
Not that I did.
I thought of how the women had been tied up and beaten, strangled and impaled and bled out, probably sexually abused on top of that, and I sent dark thoughts in hopes of helping Deuce out.
Deuce wasn’t a violent man. Wasn’t a vindictive man. He didn’t want to kill them, but this was life-or-death, and you can’t blame the carpenter for the tools at his disposal.
I suppose they lucked out that it was he and not myself who was in charge of the dead. We’d have been out here all night.
Only, there was Edrick.
Everybody else was bent over as if dosed with a weaponized dysentery, but my brother-figure stood in the middle of it, calm as a summer breeze. He seemed to relish this violence, to take pleasure in seeing even his own sidekicks get taken down, one by one. This was chaos in its purest and most reckless form, and if Edrick could be credited with anything, it would be setting all of this in motion.
Meanwhile, my best friend had dropped to one knee, trying desperately to get as much of this out of him as humanly possible, and for the most part, it was working. There was no heavenly light, no force field, but there was something.
A tumultuous wind swept off of him. He was creating a tornado, a spiral of air, and it whipped around, knocking the trees against one another with tremendous force. For a time, I couldn’t decide where the freight train between my ears originated. It blew back my brain and sent glass shards into my ears, but I endured it, because it kept me from getting a slug to the face.
One tree swept down and knocked men off the ground and out of their shoes, and Edrick stepped out of the way just in time to miss a deadly blow.
And then, as quickly as this storm built to a violent crescendo, it ended. The wind died down. The ear-splitting buzz vanished. The screams of terrified men disappeared as the men themselves slipped down into the darkness of death. All the lights went out as if on a timer. It reminded me of lights coming up in a theater after the credits, only the reverse.
The men collapsed. It the sound of rotten tomatoes dropped from a great height. The buzzing in my ears slowed to a swaying hum. Two discordant tones struggling to resolve into a harmony.
Deuce looked imploringly at me, but I could do nothing. My mojo was gone, and I was being held captive by this man. By my brother. By family.
“I ain’t done yet,” Deuce said, breathing heavily, “but I’m just almost there.”
All that was left in this group were the two standing behind me and Edrick himself. Death covered the rest of this area like a wet blanket.
“Oh, I think you’re absolutely done,” Edrick said.
He blinked. Long, slow blink. Then, a small shrug. An infinitesimal gesture.
The gun swiveled from me to Deuce, and the sound of reports from the pistol knocked us all silent and slack-jawed.
For a moment, it seemed like the world was ending. Everything darkened. An eye to the storm. Deuce dropped in his tracks. Crumpled bonelessly to the ground, same as the dudes he’d tortured. Didn’t even try to catch himself.
“Big boys do fall hard,” Edrick said, admiring his handiwork. There was now silence in the swamp, even among the trees and plants curling out of the water like dessicated hands.
I took a step, thinking maybe if it was going down this way, might as well be now. But as I clunked ahead, the gun whipped in my direction, and a wagging finger warned me it might be a bad idea to get in his way.
“Don’t think you should do that just yet,” he said. “We haven’t even had our chance to parlay on the subject of our upbringings, and something tells me you’ll want to get into the heavy stuff before we cut the cord. So to speak.”
I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye, and it welled up. I hadn’t any chance to blink it away, so I just it ride. Deuce was indestructible, a human Titan. It was impossible to believe he might actually be dead. He wasn’t moving, and he lay in a puddle of water deep enough to fill his lungs several times over.
But that wasn’t all for him.
Just as I began to contend with the idea he might be dead, Deuce splashed, sat up. He was hurt, groaning. Chest spurting blood as if it were fed by an underground spring. But he wasn’t dead.
“Ugh,” he said, pressing a hand against the wound. His opponent was not so lucky. He lay face-down in the mud at Deuce’s knees.
Not to say Deuce was any better off. Blood seeped through his fingers and stained his shirt. Blood that wouldn’t return to him. What he lost, he lost forever. This was it. This was the End Times.
I hoped. I wished. I didn’t pray, but I thought maybe this would be the time for the Fates to step in and do their goddamned jobs.
He’s pulled through worse than this, I thought. He can make it.
I was on the verge of giving up on him, but the big guy lurched out of the mud, emerging like a vehicle pulled by chain from the depths of a swamp.
He roared out of pain and anger but was not deterred.
A quick two step of a leap brought him face-to-face with more of Edrick Sutton’s cronies. He used an elbow on the bastard’s face, and the gun went sailing into the mud. This was the return of the fearsome Deuce I remembered from high school.
When I was at my lowest, I used to watch Deuce play on the big screen above the bar at Virgil’s. Had to endure the jeers of Falcons fans who didn’t particularly care for the Saints, what with them being in the same division and all.
One time, I even took a trip to Atlanta to see him play. Falcons-Saints, one of the NFL’s bitterest rivalries, at least to hear a Falcons fan tell it. He didn’t know it, and I wasn’t in shape to run him down. I was twenty pounds overweight, bloated and sunken-eyed, the kind of implicit warning against drinking you might see in a book full of mugshots.
But Deuce, he was in the prime of his life. He had reached the moun
taintop, had seen into the promised land, and he was headed there himself. He had the entirety of his life ahead of him, and if things continued on the way it seemed like they would, he’d be another Reggie White, a Junior Seau, a Mike Singletary. He was beloved and feared in all the right ways, and now was his time.
When they announced his name during the pregame, I crumpled into my seat, covered in goosebumps. My eyes leaked water — I wouldn’t dare admit to myself I was crying — as I watched him take the field.
Darron “Deuce” Gaines burst through the entrance to a volley of boos from the Falcons fans and a smattering of cheers from those who knew him as a hometown boy done good. He relished the moment, you could tell. The way he whirled and pointed.
Nearly splitting the arms of his shirt, he was no longer that star athlete but a troubled and powerful man, capable of the type of violence seen mostly in horror movies and comic books. He clenched one fist and snapped the forearm of another lackey in Edrick’s crew, tossing the gun aside before any real damage could be done. The man’s arm dangled askew as if it were made that way, eyes bulging as realization set in.
As the man backed away, hand flapping ridiculously, Deuce clenched one fist in front of him, and the guy’s torso cracked and bent backward. He screamed once and then was silent. The last image of him was his mouth agape in horror, going away as his head was thrust between his knees the wrong way.
The image flickered, Deuce going wonky under the weight of my darkening vision. Swinging wildly, taking down any number of comers, knocking them into the dirt and moving toward me.
I saw Deuce in all his forms. Deuce’s name being called over the speaker system. A bone-crunching tackle, his face, number, and information going wide on the Jumbotron. In the video that plays, a shot of him from the neck up, he’s smiling widely, a Georgia boy without a care in this world.
Back in the swamp, dozens of phantom monsters were tackling him, taking him down. The image flickered again, screeching audibly as what was and what should have been fought for possession of reality.
One guy in a baggy tee and a stocking cap had a silver-handled knife and was going at Deuce’s chest and stomach with it, with movements quick as rattler strikes. He brought Deuce’s shirt to a bright crimson, and as this man stepped back, Deuce stumbled forward, perhaps for the final time.
The Georgia Dome going silent as Deuce Gaines levels Chris Chandler, sending him shoulder-first into the turf. He emerges holding one hand in the air, running for the sidelines as the punt return team shoulders onto the field.
He settles into his quiet, zen-like existence on the sidelines, turning only once to wave at the pocket of Saints fans as his name is called. Ironically enough, I’m sitting in that section and imagine that he’s waving at me, holding out hope at this point that my life is not in tatters.
He turns back toward the action, and the Falcons get pushed back into the red zone on their heels, and a slow, grinding drive breaks their resolve. The Saints go up by seven points, and they never look back after that.
It’s all because of Deuce. He is the change agent for the game.
The bright lights of the Georgia Dome faded into darkness, and I was left with a simple hallucination. Despite all that was going on in my head, there were no broken henchman here, and Deuce was not standing like Samson among the pillars, tearing everything down with him.
The night reemerged as it was, as it perhaps had always been. Deuce had not been snatched asunder by innumerable enemies. He had not re-emerged from the mud. He was a shape among other shapes. I wished he had come back, but he lay face-down in the mud with the other monsters.
A mere hallucination, like the memories of him sacking the Falcons quarterback. Nothing more than a faulty brain impulse.
We were in the middle of the clearing, and he was not moving. Hadn’t moved, it was obvious, for some time now.
A light emerged from the middle of Deuce’s chest.
Something I and I alone could see. Bonds tethering it — Him — to my best friend letting go. The final release from the torment which had plagued him departing from the woods in the wilds of North Florida.
His body became a wild flash of light, a neon splash of yellows and pinks and oranges, lifting skyward in a blinding show. It pulled him off the ground, as if making him hover, and then it disappeared altogether.
His body jumped. Well, twitched. Involuntarily, it seemed. Biological charges of some kind firing off randomly.
There was no more him to speak of.
No more Deuce.
No more Darron Gaines.
Not even the shadow of him. He was as gone as gone could be, and if I made it out of this swamp, I’d be forced to leave him behind, as well. An eternity trapped in the muggy depths.
Blood and human waste and the remnants of several people lay strewn around us, but the silence was the largest item to fill the void.
My brother collapsed nearby, taking a seat among the carnage.
“I’m not going to kill you right now,” he said.
That was not to say I didn’t try on my end. My power was gone, but I attempted to crush him into a fleshy, broken cube. I focused all my hate in his general direction.
It didn’t work. I was tired and sad and fucking disappointed.
He laughed. Motioned for me with one hand. I sat down accordingly. I had no choice. He was still pointing the gun at me.
He seemed to bask in our shared presence for a while. He kind of stared off in the distance, waving his head as though involved in some invisible, inaudible symphony. Not really regarding me. Not peppering me with questions, the way I thought he would.
In that space, I thought I heard something. Of course, there were the natural sounds of the swamp, but in the midst of that swishing of tree branches and casual slurp of the water, a slow buzzing came to me. It seemed to originate from within, as though I were a transformer on a power line.
It took me a few moments to realize it wasn’t just the feeling. There was something else to it, and it was coming from Edrick. He was not only channeling it; he was creating it. The head-swaying that was going on appeared to come out of the sheer power running through him.
I thought briefly that I could hear the thoughts emerging from his head, that he and I were the same person, the last remnants of a poisoned genetic material, but even that wasn’t true. The thoughts I had were my own, and yet I distrusted them, because they bade me sympathize with this man.
There was the idea that I could right now get up and end it, kill him like he had killed so many others, but it was like white noise from a station I didn’t want to watch. Even if it were possible, it was not going to happen. There was nothing in me to make me do it.
“This is the living end,” he said. “Fate, if there is such a thing.”
“If I’ve come to believe anything, it’s that anything at all is possible.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he said. “Sit down.”
I hesitated. He pointed the gun, and I did.
I was tired of fighting. Tired of having to figure out ways of not dying. There was also the need for a beer, and I wasn’t going to ignore that instinct.
The most important aspect here, though, was my need to feel connected with my past. This man was the closest thing to family I had left.
So I sat, and I tried to work out what it was that I actually wanted to know about him.
He saw me staring, said, “I can see you there, Rolson. What’s going to happen’s going to happen, so we might as well have it out right now, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t as if I had any choice.
He got up, ambled over to a parked car and pulled free a small cooler. He dragged it back out to the clearing and sat on it.
He hawked up something vile and spat it between his feet.
“I don’t reckon you want to hear what it’s like growing up on the other side of the looking glass, do you?”
I said, “It wasn’t like growing up on the
inside of it was any better.”
He twitched. It was the only reaction I’d seen out of him all night.
To break the silence, Edrick said, “My mama — our mama — she wasn’t nothing but a whore, and a nigger lover to boot.”
He said this last phrase with as much venom as he could muster. The words seemed to curl the air around him.
He continued. “It was her ways in a south that wasn’t hers that got her killed, and I was the one that done it. The beast from her loins. She never meant to have me, never meant to let me climb from the cesspool of her union with my father.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said. “You don’t have to look at it in those terms.”
“You ain’t got a goddamned thing to say to me that will make it a mite better. You hate your father, hate what he did. That’s fine. You grew up with a lot of angst. That’s fine, too. That white guilt you live with, the kind that drives you to be friends with a black man, that don’t change the fact of who you are, how you came to be who you are. You at least knew the bastard who put you on this godforsaken planet.”
“The doctor who raised you was a good man. You grew up in a situation better than most from the Junction.”
“Don’t put shit in my mouth and tell me it’s pie.”
“I’m not.”
“He was all right. He had more heart than sense. He knew Lumber Junction wouldn’t accept me the way I was.”
“Hasn’t changed much,” I replied.
“You go anywhere today, though, and all you see is little mixed babies. I was out in front of that, and I had people calling me ‘nigger’ and ‘Oreo’ my entire life. Couldn’t figure out who the fuck I was.”
“So you became a sociopath?”
He smiled, perhaps to hold fast to whatever emotions he was feeling and got up. Opened the hatch of the cooler. He tossed me a bottle of imported beer. I uncapped it, tugged a third of it down, and burped. Tasted like German piss, but it would do. Weird for my final beer.
I took another swig. Regarded my friend. Poured the rest of that bottle out, tossed it into the swamp. I heard it clank against a tree. I burped.
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