Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  Later, when Dustin’s parents were out, Dustin and Rusty went through their dresser drawers. They found copies of pornographic magazines in Dustin’s father’s T-shirt drawer, at the very bottom; in his mother’s bra and panty drawer, they found a small baggie full of what Rusty said was marijuana.

  Rusty took a little for himself, and Dustin nearly started crying.

  “Don’t tell,” Rusty said to him. “You’re not going to tell, are you? You know your mom and dad could get in trouble with the police if they ever got caught.”

  “I won’t tell,” Dustin whispered.

  —

  Dustin’s father seemed like a regular father, except for his arm. Sometimes, on Saturdays after breakfast, Dustin and his father and Rusty would drive up into the hills with Dustin’s father’s 10-gauge rifles. Dustin’s father lined up beer cans and mayonnaise jars and such along a fence, and they would shoot at them. Dustin’s father could not hold the gun well enough to aim it himself, but he showed Dustin and Rusty how.

  —

  The first time Rusty took the gun, his hands were shaking. “Have you ever handled a gun before, son?” Dustin’s father said, and Rusty slowly shook his head.

  Dustin’s father showed Rusty where to hold his hands, how the butt of the gun fit against his shoulder. “Okay, okay,” Dustin’s father said. He stooped behind Rusty, his chin right next to Rusty’s ear. “Can you see through the crosshairs? Right where the lines meet?”

  Dustin watched as his father and Rusty took careful aim, both their bodies poised together. When the mayonnaise jar burst apart, Dustin leapt up. “You hit it!” he cried, and Rusty turned to him, eyes wide, his mouth slightly open in quiet wonder.

  —

  Dustin’s mother was waiting with lunch when they got home. She made hamburgers and corn on the cob.

  She seemed to Dustin like a typical mother. She was slightly overweight, and bustled, and was cheerful most of the time. When Rusty first came, she would sometimes give him hugs, but he would always become rigid and uncomfortable. After a time, she stopped hugging him. Instead, she would simply rest her hand on his shoulder, or on his arm. Rusty wouldn’t look at her when she did this, but he didn’t move away, either.

  Dustin thought of what he was learning about plants at school. They drank in sunlight as their food; they breathed, though you couldn’t see it. He thought of this as he watched Rusty sit there, with Dustin’s mother’s hand on his shoulder. Her hand briefly massaged his neck before she took it away, and Dustin could see the way Rusty’s impassive expression shuddered, the way his eyes grew very still and far away.

  —

  Dustin saw Rusty standing at the edge of the backyard, the silhouette of Rusty, so motionless he might have been a fence post. Dustin observed silently as Rusty seemed to stare out into the distance. Miles away, the red taillights of semitrucks were moving along the interstate, and Dustin was suddenly aware that there were people inside them, that they were traveling to distant places and they would never know that he and Rusty were watching them. It made him feel a strange, tingling kind of ache.

  “What are you staring at?” Rusty said at last, and it was startling; it was like being woken from a dream. Rusty didn’t turn to look at Dustin. His voice came out of his shadow. “What do you want?” he said.

  “Nothing,” Dustin said.

  “Come over here,” Rusty said, and Dustin stepped forward uncertainly. He felt suddenly shy. He was afraid of being tricked. Often, his older cousins, Kate and Wave, would fool him by talking softly in that way.

  But Rusty didn’t even glance down when Dustin crept up beside him. He just kept peering out toward the interstate. “God!” he said. “You’re so stupid, you know that, Dustin?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Dustin said, and Rusty turned his face to him at last. Grinned.

  “Ha-ha,” he said. “You’re like Little Red Riding Hood skipping through the forest.” He tilted his head, considering Dustin’s face. “Do you know what would happen if a kid like you got sent to a foster home?”

  “No.” And Dustin breathed as Rusty’s eyes held him without blinking.

  “They do really nasty things to the little kids. And if you try to scream, they put your own dirty underwear into your mouth, to gag you.” He stared at Dustin ruefully, as if he was imagining it.

  Then he pointed up toward the sky. “You see that?” he said. “There’s the Big Dipper.” Rusty stood behind Dustin and put his hands over Dustin’s ears, his fingertips pressing firmly into Dustin’s scalp. He tilted Dustin’s head back.

  “You see it?” Rusty murmured, and Dustin nodded. He let himself lean back into the grip of Rusty’s hands, imagining that his head was a globe that Rusty was holding, that he was floating in space and he could see galaxies. But he kept his eyes closed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I see it.”

  —

  Sometimes, they all seemed so happy. Here they were, watching TV in the evening, his mother sitting on his father’s lap in the big easy chair, laughing at some secret joke, his mother blushing. Here they were, camping at the lake, roasting marshmallows on sharpened sapling sticks over a campfire; Dustin climbing on their father’s shoulders out in the lake and standing up, his feet flat on either side of his father’s neck, wobbling, balancing, raising his hands into a diver’s pose.

  Jumping into the water as if his father were a diving board.

  At night, Dustin and Rusty would wade along the edge of the shore with a flashlight, catching crawdads. Rusty wasn’t afraid of their pincers. He would grin hard, letting them hang dangling like jewelry clamped to the lobes of his ears.

  Dustin didn’t know what the feeling was that filled him up in such moments. It was something about the way the flashlight’s beam made a glossy bowl of light beneath the water, the way, under the beam, everything was clear and distinct—the bits of floating algae and minute water animals, the polished stones and sleepy minnows flashing silver and metallic blue, the crawdads, sidling backward with their claws lifted warily. It was the sound of his parents’ voices as they sat around the campfire, the echoing waver as their father began to sing. Rusty was a silhouette against the slick blue-black stretch of lake, and Dustin could see that the sky wasn’t like a ceiling. It was like water, too, deep water, depth upon depth, vast beyond measure. And this was something Dustin found beautiful. And he loved his young mother and father, and his aunt and uncle, laughing in the distance, and his girl cousins in their tent, already dreaming, and Rusty himself, standing there silently in the dark. He was filled with a kind of awed contentment, which he thought must be happiness.

  —

  Later, deep in his sleeping bag in the tent, Dustin could hear his parents talking. Their voices were low but he found that if he listened hard he could understand.

  “I don’t know,” his mother said. “How long does it take to get over something like that?”

  “He’s all right,” Dustin’s father said. “He’s a good kid. He just needs to be left alone. I don’t think he wants to talk about it.”

  “Oh,” his mother said, and breathed heavily. “I can’t even imagine, you know? What if I lost all of you like that? I don’t see how I could go on. I’d kill myself, Dave. I really would.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Dustin’s father said. “Don’t say stuff like that.”

  And then they were silent. Dustin looked over to where Rusty was lying and saw that Rusty was awake, too. The tent walls glimmered with firelight, and the glow flickered against Rusty’s open eyes. Rusty’s jaw moved as he listened.

  Dustin woke in the night; he could feel something pressing against him, and when he opened his eyes the tent’s thin walls were almost phosphorescent with moonlight. Rusty’s sleeping bag was rolled close to his, and he could feel Rusty’s body moving. Inside their sleeping bags, they were like strange, unearthly creatures—thick caterpillars, cocoons. Rusty was rocking against him and whispering, though the words blurred together in a steady rhythm, r
ising and falling until Dustin could almost make out the words, like something lost in the winds: “Waiting…I’ve…when are you…Oh I am waiting for…and you never…” and the rocking quickened and he thought Rusty was crying. But Dustin didn’t dare open his eyes. He kept himself very still, breathing slowly like a sleeper would. Rusty was making a sound, a high thread of tuneless humming, which, after a moment, Dustin realized was the word Mom, stretched impossibly thin, unraveling and unraveling. And Dustin knew that this was something he could never speak of, to anyone.

  —

  Yet even then, even in this still and spooky moment, there was a kind of happiness: something wondrous in Rusty’s whispered words, in the urgent pressing of Rusty’s body, a secret almost glimpsed. What was it? What was it?

  He couldn’t ask Rusty, who was more silent and sullen than ever in the week after they returned from their camping trip. He would disappear for hours sometimes, trailing a heavy silence behind him, and if Dustin did encounter him—lying faceup in a ditch thick with tall pigweed and sunflowers, or hunkered down by the lumber pile behind the garage—Rusty would give him a look so baleful that Dustin knew he shouldn’t approach.

  When Rusty had first come to live with them, Dustin had said, “Am I supposed to call Rusty my brother?”

  They were sitting at the supper table, and both his father and mother stopped short and looked up. “Well,” Dustin’s father said cautiously, “I know we’d sure like it if Rusty thought of us as his family. But I think it’s up to Rusty what you call him.”

  Dustin had felt bad at the way that Rusty had shrunk when they all looked at him. Rusty froze, and his face seemed to pass through a whole series of uncertain expressions. Then he smiled. “Sure, Dustin,” he said. “Let’s be brothers.” And he showed Dustin a special high-five, where you pressed your thumbs together after slapping palms. You pressed your thumb against the other person’s, and each of you fluttered your four fingers. It made the shape of a bird, probably an eagle or a falcon.

  Of course, that didn’t really make them brothers. Dustin knew that Rusty had probably only said something nice to please Dustin’s parents, just as he called them “Dad” and “Mom” to make them happy. But that was okay. Something had happened. Something strange and unexplainable passed through the pads of their thumbs when they slid against one another.

  —

  Dustin remembered that handshake again as he watched Rusty. Rusty was slouching thoughtfully near an abandoned house not far from where they lived. Dustin had tracked him that far, but he kept his distance. He watched through a pair of his father’s binoculars as Rusty picked up an old beer bottle and broke it on a stone, throwing back his arm with a pitcher’s flourish. The windows in the old house were already broken out, but Rusty hit at the empty frames with a stick for a while. He lifted his head and looked around suspiciously. He didn’t see Dustin, who was hidden in a patch of high weeds, and after a time, feeling somewhat content, Rusty settled onto his haunches and began to smoke some of the marijuana he’d taken from Dustin’s parents’ dresser.

  Dustin observed: the way his eyes closed as he drew smoke into his mouth, and the way he held it in his lungs, then exhaled in a long breath. Rusty let the handmade cigarette hang loosely from his lips, as if he were a movie detective. Then he inhaled again.

  —

  Rusty seemed more relaxed when he finally came back to the house, around dinnertime. He even deigned to play a game of rummy with Dustin, which he almost never did. They sat side by side on the living room floor, and when Dustin said, “Gin!” and laid down all his cards, Rusty wasn’t even mad. Rusty gave him the old high-five. The eagle or falcon flying. He grinned at Dustin kindly. “Rock on,” Rusty said.

  —

  But that night, as he and Dustin lay in bed, all Rusty wanted to talk about was leaving. New York. Los Angeles. Nashville. Learning how to play electric guitar. He was thinking of writing a letter to the rock band Black Sabbath and asking if he could work for them.

  “I’ll take you with me,” Rusty said. “When we go. Black Sabbath are very cool. I could tell them you were my little brother. And we were, like, homeless or something. They’d probably teach us to play instruments. So, you know, when they got older, we would take over. We’d be, like, Black Sabbath, Part Two.”

  “What would I be?” Dustin asked. He wanted to see himself in this new world clearly, to imagine it whole, as Rusty had.

  “Probably the drummer,” Rusty said. “You like drums, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Dustin said. He waited, wanting to hear more about himself as a drummer, but Rusty merely folded his hands behind his head.

  “We’d probably have to kill them, you know,” Rusty said.

  “Who?” Dustin asked. “Black Sabbath?”

  “No, asshole,” Rusty said irritably. “Dave and Colleen. Your parents. I mean, we could get the gun while they were sleeping and it wouldn’t even hurt them. It would just be like they were asleep. We could take your dad’s car, you know. I could drive.”

  Dustin thought of his father’s new Jeep Wrangler, in the driveway, still shiny. He pictured sitting in the passenger seat, with Rusty behind the wheel. He didn’t say anything for a minute. He didn’t know whether Rusty was joking or not, and he was both scared and exhilarated.

  He watched as Rusty drew his bare foot out from beneath the covers and picked at a knobby toe. “You could kill them while they were sleeping. It wouldn’t hurt them. It wouldn’t matter.”

  He paused dreamily, looking at Dustin’s face. “And then if you lit the house on fire, no one would ever know what happened. All the evidence would be burned up.”

  He said this steadily, but his eyes seemed to darken as he spoke, and Dustin felt his neck prickle. He watched as Rusty’s mouth hardened, trying to tighten over a quiver of his lips, a waver in his expression. He said, “They’d think we died, too. They wouldn’t come looking for us, because,” he whispered, “they wouldn’t know we were still alive.”

  Rusty stared at him, his face lit silver in the moonlight, and Dustin could feel a kind of dull, motionless panic rising inside him, as in a dream. A part of him wanted to shout out for his mother, but he didn’t. Instead, he slid his legs slowly onto the tile of the floor. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, and stood uncertainly. For a minute he thought he would start to run.

  But the minute Dustin stood up, Rusty moved quickly, catching him by the arm. The sweet, coppery smell of feet hung on his bare skin as he pulled Dustin against him.

  “Shh!” Rusty’s fingers gripped, pinching Dustin’s arms. “Don’t scream!” Rusty whispered urgently. They stood there in a kind of hug, and Rusty pressed his mouth close to Dustin’s ear, so that Dustin could feel Rusty’s lips brush against the soft lobe. Rusty didn’t let Dustin go, but his grip loosened. “Shh,” he said. “Don’t cry, Dustin. Don’t be scared.” He had begun to rock back and forth a bit, still holding Dustin, still shushing. “We’re brothers, aren’t we? And brothers love each other. Nothing bad’s going to happen to you, ’cause I’m your brother, man, I won’t let it. Don’t be scared.”

  And Dustin looked up at Rusty’s face. He didn’t know whether Rusty was telling the truth or not, but he nodded anyway. Rusty’s eyes held him as they rocked together, and Dustin swallowed tears and phlegm, closing his mouth tightly. It was true. They did love each other.

  —

  For the next few days, or maybe weeks, Rusty paid attention to Dustin. There were times when Dustin thought of that night that Rusty had talked of killing, of lighting fires, and there were even times when he felt that it would happen, sooner or later. But when he woke from a bad dream, Rusty was always awake, sitting on the edge of the bed, saying, “It’s okay, don’t be afraid,” passing his hand slowly across Dustin’s face, his fingers tracing Dustin’s eyelids until they shut. During the day, Dustin and Rusty would take walks, strolling silently out into the bare stubble fields. An occasional jackrabbit would spring up from a patch of we
eds and bolt away, leaving little puffs of dust behind its large, fleeing feet. They turned over rocks and found sow bugs, centipedes, metallic-shelled beetles. Sometimes, Rusty found fossils, and he and Dustin took them home and examined them under a magnifying glass.

  After a while, Dustin’s worries passed away; he stopped thinking he should tell his parents about what Rusty had said that night. Rusty himself never spoke of it again. Sometimes, as they looked at the fossils—imprints of fish bones and ferns and clamshells—Rusty would lean over Dustin, letting his face brush Dustin’s hair. It was said that there had once been a great sea covering the land where they now lived. That was where the fossils came from.

  —

  There were times, during that last month of summer, when it seemed that he and Rusty were the only ones alive. The rest of Dustin’s family seemed to be in a kind of trance, sleepwalkers that he and Rusty moved among. Dustin imagined them jolting awake, suddenly, blinking. Where are we? they would say. What happened to us?

  But the trance didn’t break. Instead, Dustin’s parents often seemed like statues in a faraway garden, people under a curse, frozen. Across the stubble field, in the old abandoned house, Dustin and Rusty gathered wood together and made a little bonfire in the center of what must have been the living room. They pretended it was after a nuclear holocaust, and they were the only two people alive. The smoke rose up in a sinewy column and crawled along the ceiling toward the broken windows. Dustin and Rusty took vegetables from the garden and put them in a coffee can with water and made a delicious soup, boiled over their fire. Later, they put one of Dustin’s cousin’s Barbies in the can with a G.I. Joe. They watched as the dolls’ plastic limbs melted together, drooping and dripping. Removed from the heat, the two were fused together in a single charred mass.

  —

  Kissing: on the floor of the old house, shirtless, Rusty on top of him, their hands clasped, Rusty’s sticky skin against his own, their mouths open. When Dustin closed his eyes, it felt as if a small, eager animal were probing the inside of his mouth. It felt funny; he liked it.