Leaving Miller stiffening against the rail, Gene walked out of the hog shed and up the hill, past the old barn, the cement well that had once provided the foundation for a now-vanished grain silo, and past the open storage where he kept both trucks. He passed Pretty Girl’s fenced-in house a few yards from his porch. Gene lived in a one-and-a-half-story farmhouse, the back of which faced the access road and the front of which faced the barn, Pretty Girl’s house, the hog shed, and eighty acres of cornfield. The house once wore white clapboard siding, but now wore margarine-yellow vinyl siding that was a magnet for bottomland dust. Gene had to hose off his house several times a year if he didn’t want to feel bad about himself. Between his dust-filmed house and dirt driveway, the gas tank, which looked like a huge, silver summer sausage and fed his furnace, water heater, and stove, began to glare as the sun pulled up over the trees.
He went in the house and put on his riding gear. Ever since he’d hit a deer, he made sure to wear protective clothing and padding whenever he rode. If he hadn’t been wearing it then, he would have died. The bike, a Harley Super Glide, had been totaled. It hadn’t handled well when he needed it most and Gene vowed never to sit a Harley again. When the hospital released him a few days later, despite severely bruised ribs, he immediately grabbed his bow and went hunting for the rest of the season, killing three does and two bucks. The last, he was sure from the scars on its legs and flank, was the one he hit. His freezer was full of deer steaks, ground deer, and deer sausage. Gene grabbed three pounds of deer jerky he’d made that season and put it in a backpack. He grabbed a clean change of clothes, his travel toothpaste and toothbrush in a little travel bag, and a few bottles of Dixon Springs water, supposedly bottled in the area although Gene had his suspicions. But at least he was buying local.
Gene kept his motorcycle, a blue BMW R 1100, in his living room. Even though it was a yuppie bike, he loved it almost as much as he loved Pretty Girl. Crime around Carmi was higher than when he was a kid, and he didn’t want to take any chances. He had even widened the front doors and built a ramp on the front porch next to the steps. He’d found the bike on eBay—almost never ridden, sold to him by a woman whose boyfriend owned it but who was doing time in Joliet prison for making and selling crystal meth. Gene wondered how the man would feel when he got out and found his bike long gone.
He dropped the backpack into one of the saddlebags then went into his bedroom, pushed aside piles of dirty clothes and dirty dishes, and pulled the footlocker out from under his bed. He pushed his five-button code, heard the satisfying click as it unlocked, and lifted the lid. Inside lay an organized collection of guns and knives, nunchucks, and ammunition, as well as several shotguns and rifles—one of them, an old Over/Under, a 20 gauge shotgun on the bottom with a .22 rifle on the top. It actually belonged to Miller, and the two boys used to shoot bottles and cans together in their grampa’s tractor shed, corncrib, and down by the creek. Miller had let Gene keep it and take care of it for him while he was away at college and grad school, but Gene refused to give it back when Miller asked for it, telling him, “You don’t know how to take care of it.” Gene thought of himself as the gun expert, and the Over/Under would stay with him for safety as well as historical reasons. Miller hadn’t put up much of a fight, but now Gene wondered if things would’ve turned out different if Miller had kept the gun. Gene almost picked up his M-1 submachine gun, which he bought the day before it became illegal to buy one. All of these guns he cleaned and oiled regularly, though he rarely shot them anymore. When he hunted these days, he used his bow.
As he made preparations, the image of Miller’s face when he first turned him over kept flashing through his mind. Gene had seen plenty of dead people, on battlefields and littering the sides of roads in Iraq. He had justified taking this job from Tosti by telling himself these people, like the bodies during the war, were already dead, just bodies—what difference did it make what happened to them after death since no one was suffering? Yet from the beginning he avoided looking at their faces. Turning Miller’s body over and seeing not only a familiar face but one resembling his own was horrifying. It jolted his whole perspective and filled him with shame, which leant more urgency to his preparations—as if he could fix all this—and he worked quickly and efficiently.
Gene grabbed the Recon Bowie knife and sheath, which he always took on road trips, and fastened it inside his right boot. He owned an assortment of pistols, but he had three in this locker: an Uberti Cattleman revolver, the tiny SIG SAUER P239, and a Smith & Wesson M&P9 Pro, his newest acquisition. Gene dropped the SIG inside the inner pocket of his leather riding coat and put the Smith & Wesson in the back of his bike and locked it.
Pushing his bike across the creaky porch and down the ramp, Gene crossed his yard of dust and weeds to Pretty Girl’s house. She was a big German Shepherd that he used to keep inside, but she chewed and ate everything—his clothes, the pillows, the couch—even as an adult dog. Pretty Girl yipped and danced her front paws a foot off the ground in excitement as he came near her pen.
“Just a minute, girl,” he said and walked down to the hog shed, grabbed a bag of hogfeed and dumped it into the hog trough. The morning sun was already heating up the shed, and the ammoniated air was getting thicker and stronger. He decided to move Miller into a rusty old metal chair in the corner of the shed. Gene tried to push him into the seat and position him in a thoughtful pose, maybe something that made Miller look a little intellectual, but his arms were too stiff and he kept falling over, so Gene leaned him back to look like he was just catching some Zs. Gene drove his work truck into the shed then walked over to Pretty Girl’s house and fed her, too.
“Bye, girl,” he said, stroking her behind the ears as she gobbled up her Iams.
When she finished her bowl, Gene filled it up again along with her water bowl. Then he kneeled down on one knee and nuzzled Pretty Girl and let her lick his face.
“Such a pretty girl! Yes, you are! Take good care of everybody while Daddy’s gone, huh, Pretty Girl?”
Every time Gene left her on road trips he got a little teary eyed, the same way he did when he watched Sesame Street episodes or Mary Poppins, two of his favorite things to watch on TV. He couldn’t help the teariness, and he wouldn’t have admitted it to anybody, but it was growing worse the older he got. Some commercials these days even made his eyes a little moist and his bottom lip start to tremble. He hated it. Most people, especially old girlfriends, had told him he was too stoic or emotionally remote or didn’t even possess normal feelings, but he knew different. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things, it was that he felt them too intensely. He simply had no idea how to express those feelings in language or deeds and didn’t want to look like a jackass or a sap trying.
He gave Pretty Girl one last pat and then nearly tripped over Butterscratch, one of the farm cats weaving in and out of his legs, also expecting food. Gene filled up a couple bowls and made sure there was plenty of water for them, too. He never officially adopted the cats, but when they showed up—wild, sometimes starving, injured, or half-dead—he’d take care of them and feed them. If they survived past a few months, he’d give them names, though farm cats tended to have short, furious lives. Currently he had three—Butterscratch, Feisty, and Jose, who only had one eye and whom Gene usually tossed an extra treat if he had one.
Pulling out his cell phone, Gene called Keith to leave a message. They only saw each other a few times a year any more, a friendship that had drifted in and out since high school. Keith never answered his phone and usually forgot to keep it charged.
“Hey, buddy,” Gene said, hoping his voice sounded normal. “I’m taking a road trip and might be gone a while. OK if I need you to come by the house and feed Pretty Girl in a couple days if I’m not back yet? Let me know.”
Gene was about to get on his bike and go, but one more thing occurred to him. He went back inside and slid the footlocker out from under his bed again. He pulled the Over/Under out from its orange vinyl cover an
d went back into the hog shed. The fingers were the stiffest of all, but with work and probably by breaking at least one, he positioned them around the gun and put it on Miller’s lap, like he’d dozed off while keeping predators away from the hogs. Then Gene straddled his bike and started it up. He pulled out of his driveway at 5:35, the humidity of the day already turning Southern Illinois into a thick, simmering stew.
FOUR
THE OLD FAMILY plot lay choked with cactus. Other family plots in the area grew, if not daisies, at least green grass and clover. Gene had never seen prickly pears grow anywhere else in Southern Illinois and never could decide whether it was a result of the sandy, silty soil or the prickliness of the people buried there. As he rode down County Road 1650 N, he imagined the paddle-shaped cactus twisting in the heat from long shoots and tendrils that had burst through cracks in caskets, their source and sustenance, his ancestors.
He turned on to Route 1, Main Street, and drove through downtown Carmi. As he crossed Church Street, it struck him that this might be the last time he would ever see his town and these small monuments to his childhood and family, so he took in the sites as he might have viewed them on shore leave in a new country—studiously, not with the sightless eyes of a native. He passed First Bank, the bank his great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Miller, started after the Civil War. His mother still owned considerable stock, the dwindling dividends of which went to pay for her nursing home. He passed the strip with mostly vacant retail and restaurant space, the vacant Showtime Cinemas movie theater, and a smattering of fast food chains.
Church ran toward the Little Wabash in one direction and to Danise’s small house in the other. Gene had often told Danise it was funny that she lived on Church Street since she was a Bible-thumping, cigarette-smoking, bourbon-drinking slut who bore three children by three different fathers, none of whom she married, and who averaged half a dozen boyfriends a year, usually two or three at a time. One of them was Gene, and Danise was the closest thing he’d had to a girlfriend in a long time. The only thing that bothered him about her list of characteristics was the Bible-thumping, at least when she thumped it at him.
On his right, the cement bulldog, larger than his BMW, stood guard in the front corner lawn of Carmi High School. He rarely failed to appreciate the mascot’s resemblance to his oversized grandmother on his father’s side, with fleshy jowls and a not unkind face pecked by time and weather. On his left sprawled Vongotten Funeral Home, with its bright new awnings and carports—death being one of the few thriving businesses in this shriveling town. His maternal grandparents had each been drained and pickled there, and in a few years he’d send his mother there for draining and pickling. He’d likely end up drained and picked in their fake parlor too, probably sooner rather than later. Miller would not be drained and pickled, or even have a headstone in the family plot, which seemed wrong.
Gene passed the Dairy Queen, behind which stretched a rickety little bridge that led to his grandmother’s house, the house where his mother had been born. He had no idea who owned it now. He and Miller had crossed that bridge hundreds of times, brought burgers and treats back from Dairy Queen, and spent considerable hours of their boyhoods playing in the huge ditch the bridge spanned.
Gene also spent much of his childhood alone in that backyard, which was where he learned to shoot. His grandma had encouraged him to shoot the crows and sparrows because they chased away the robins and cardinals, and he went after them with a zeal beyond what anyone imagined possible for a seven-year-old boy. He shot dozens and dozens of birds and clipped them all to the clothesline, rows of glorious feathered trophies, rainbowed oil dangling in the breeze, until the neighbor, Mrs. Edwards, called and complained.
“It’s gruesome!” she’d squawked. “I can’t walk out there and hang up my laundry. If you’re not careful, that boy’s going to grow up to be a cold-blooded killer!”
His grandmother said Mrs. Edwards was overreacting, but made Gene take the birds down. They burned them with yard waste and newspapers in a large stone outdoor fireplace with a chimney—built before Carmi had trash pickup, when residents simply burned all their garbage in their backyards. The fire had blazed and crackled and sizzled, and Gene and his grandmother continued throwing more sticks, leaves, and gas-soaked birds on the pile until nothing was left but little black twigs of bones.
Gene passed the fairgrounds to his right, then the string of fast food restaurants and the Buy-Lo grocery story, which used to be Big John’s with a twenty-foot plastic Big John in front wearing a big, confident grin and holding four big bags of groceries. He always loved Big John, as a boy wanted to be Big John or at least ride around on his shoulders, and still missed him every time he passed the Buy-Lo.
Past the Carmi Country Club, it was a straight and uneventful shot down Route 1 to Norris City, where Gene planned to turn toward Eldorado and stop and see his mother at the nursing home before heading to Metropolis. While riding into the morning wind, its long fingers finding their way into the few gaps in his riding attire, Gene tried to formulate some kind of plan. In the past, his mother had complained that Miller spent too much time and money at a bar called The Egyptian or something like that, and he figured that was as good a place to start as any. If the place was even still in business. From what he’d heard over the years, Metropolis was dying faster than Carmi.
What had possessed Miller to take a job in Metropolis anyway? Gene had barely thought of his brother in years, and suddenly what little he knew and remembered raced toward him like riding into sheets of rain. He could never remember a time when he hadn’t resented Miller. As firstborn, Miller had received the family name, while he was stuck with Eugene. Once at somebody’s house, probably some girlfriend who had kids or was pregnant with somebody else’s, he saw a Name Your Baby book on the nightstand. He’d snorted a good one when he read that Eugene actually meant “well born.”
Everybody had always called him Gene, but Eugene wasn’t all that much worse than Gene—not even a host of family genes but one measly Gene, and that gene wouldn’t let Gene have kids for it contained the trait asthenospermia. The condition was discovered accidentally, after extensive VD tests following an outbreak-laden Asian tour and a ship doctor’s recommendation. Gene could never spread his genes—his sperm lacked tails and either couldn’t move at all or moved too slow, and Gene often considered that this impotency characterized his whole life. He was too slow, too late, too stuck, luckless, second place, second rate.
But everything happened easily for Miller. He never studied in school and got all As. He never studied in college and did well. He excelled in writing, music, sports, and women. Miller had probably slept with twenty women before Gene had nailed his first, and three of the first few women Gene had slept with—not counting the Filipino whores he’d screwed during his first tour of duty—had been Miller’s cast-offs, after Miller had moved on to college, grad school, and other women.
Gene struggled in school and never even considered going to college. Instead, he signed up for the Marines his senior year of high school. After four years of duty, right before his honorable discharge, the war broke out and he was reassigned to drive a tank and shipped to Kuwait. When he’d enlisted, Gene had figured if he could get through the Marines he could get through anything, but after he came back from the war he couldn’t get through anything at all. He’d held all sorts of jobs because it was impossible for him to make a living as an independent farmer with no help. He’d worked for five diesel repair shops, applying the skills he learned in the military servicing his tank and AMTRAK to repairing tractors, but he quit or got fired after getting into one too many arguments and once even a fistfight with the owner. He dug swimming pools by hand with a shovel for one local evangelical Christian contractor who never paid him. He spread asphalt for a meth-head who drove his wife’s pink Cadillac after he totaled his truck. And he operated construction equipment in a coal mine until some idiot on another shift left dynamite for a bulldozer to roll over an
d the mine exploded. He hated that job anyway, especially the foreman, and he smiled remembering how Miller had laughed when Gene told him that the foreman was a son of a bitch and he “wouldn’t piss up that bastard’s ass if his kidneys were on fire.”
Miller had gone right from grad school to a job as reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and soon became the editor of the arts or culture section. The only bad luck spell Miller ever hit was when he went through a divorce with his wife, but even that worked out because Miller had joint custody of their two kids and could continue his previous lifestyle of banging multiple girlfriends and hanging out in dive bars. It was about then, after Miller’s divorce ten years ago, when they’d lost touch.
Over the years the brothers had shared some affectionate moments, but they had happened after too many pitchers of beer, and those isolated instances never lasted beyond those particular nights, and none of them could ever overcome the letter Miller sent to Gene during Operation Desert Storm. Gene figured Miller had good intentions, but who the hell wants to read a letter from your brother saying he’s sorry you’re risking your life fighting a war on behalf of a a bunch of billionaire oil executives while you’re sitting inside a tank in the desert as enemy shells explode all around you? No one, that’s who. Miller was always prancing around on his high horse, in person or on paper, and it pissed Gene off.
Their mother, a few years before Gene put her in what he called the slobber house, had told him that Miller was going to move to Metropolis, almost in their own backyard, to take over as editor in chief. Big Chief in a small village, Gene had thought. The Pulitzer family sold the Post-Dispatch to some newspaper chain, who offered Miller a buy-out.
“How about that?” Gene had mused. “The guy gets laid off, and even then he comes out ahead.”
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