by John Brandon
On a vista that overlooked the pond and wouldn’t flood, they began digging. Kyle started about eight feet from Swin and they worked toward each other. The mosquitoes had their fill, then moved on. The sun set. Kyle and Swin had decided that Bright and Nick should not be buried together, that, in fact, Nick should not be buried on the park grounds. There seemed to be a lot of vague reasons having to do with staying out of trouble, with distancing themselves from Nick and his uncle, to take Nick’s body elsewhere, but mostly it was Kyle’s insistence that it wasn’t right for Bright’s killer to be buried in Bright’s park. Kyle had other plans for Nick. He knew a spot.
Kyle’s grip started to go, so he tossed aside his gloves. He was making headway twice as fast as Swin, who had taken off his shirt and was treating the creation of a grave as exercise, glancing down at himself after each shovel fling. At midnight they rested, drinking RC Cola, listening to the grebes in the pond squabble. Swin complained of his blisters and said six feet was only a custom.
“That’s true,” Kyle said. “And it’s a custom we’re going to follow.”
By two-thirty they were nearly banging shovels, so Kyle told Swin to hop out and let him finish. His shoulders were mush and his fingers wouldn’t straighten, but his mind was in better shape than his partner’s, who was pacing unsteadily and spitting.
They had to lug Bright three hundred yards, one holding the arms and one the legs, Bright swaying like a man in a hammock. They stopped to rest several times, never having to speak to know it was time to let their plastic-wrapped load meet the ground. By the time they reached their vista, the sky was losing darkness. Kyle told Swin he didn’t want anything said. They would spare Bright any stupid words they could come up with. They ate some bananas, then picked up their FSP shovels. The filling took only two hours. They covered the area with twigs and moss and looked over the tan pond. The grebes had calmed.
“I forgot to check if anyone was following us,” Swin said. “I take responsibility.”
“What good does taking responsibility do?” asked Kyle.
“Makes me feel better. Makes me feel civilized.”
“I already know it was your fault. You don’t have to tell me that.”
“And you don’t have to be a dick. I’m apologizing; it’s what people do.”
“It’s not what I do,” Kyle said. He turned at the waist, running cracks and pops up his spine. “What you don’t get is that it has nothing to do with paying attention. You should have felt someone following you.”
“So-called ‘gut feelings’ come from your brain. I was thinking about some-thing else. I got distracted.”
“Thinking about what?”
“I don’t know now. I think about shit all the time. I spent my life training my brain to race, and now I can’t get it to stop. That’s why you’re good at this shit—your brain is manageable.”
Kyle stayed still. He thought he might laugh. He thought he might shove Swin down the hill, into the pond.
Swin looked away. “Why didn’t we run away as soon as we saw them dead?”
“In whose car, Bright’s? With whose money, Frog’s? Headed where? Back to Athens and Vanderbilt?”
“But we didn’t even consider it.”
“I did,” Kyle said, and kicked a clod of dirt off the embankment. “You ever consider that if we run off, it looks like we planned this? It looks like we have a reason to run?”
“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.”
“Someone’s going to show up wanting an explanation and we’re going to tell them the truth. Except about being followed. They’ll assume the uncle knew where we were going and sent the nephew.”
Swin sniffed, half-convinced.
“I’ll try to get in touch with Colin, too. It’ll be better to tell the story ourselves than have it trickling up the chain of command.”
“Bad metaphor. Things trickle down.” Swin dropped his shoulders. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s not me; it’s my mind. My mind is a stickler. My mind is a real asshole.”
Kyle nodded his agreement. “I’ll try Colin first. If that doesn’t work, I guess Gregor.”
“Yeah, I have someone I can try—the guy who referred me.”
“It works,” Kyle said. “It’ll work out.”
“Even so, don’t you think maybe it’s time for a gun? I’ve pretty much gathered Bright was lying about having rifles for us.”
Kyle flexed his hands, wincing. “Bringing in guns doesn’t settle a situation down.”
“What if just you had one? You trust yourself, right?”
“The answer is no.”
“Do you think it makes you tough to be unarmed?”
Kyle turned his head but didn’t look at Swin. “Which one of us recently shot someone?”
“Knew that was coming.”
“You did, huh?”
“You were taking care of business and I was minding the nest. Who cares?” Swin rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t get you. Nobody would know if we had a weapon hidden somewhere.”
“If Frog wanted us to have guns, we’d have guns.”
Swin could not concentrate on the music. He stayed quiet and held Johnna’s hand, and she seemed to like him this way—preoccupied. They watched a band from Canada composed of four children who made selfdeprecating jokes between songs. These children believed they were hot shit, which, in Canada, they likely were. Songs came and went, and Swin attempted to force the dead bodies from his mind. He saw Bright and Nick stacked in the tub, saw the hopeful expression on the kid’s face, saw Bright’s wrists and ankles worn raw from Swin and Kyle carrying him across the park. Swin wished he would’ve gone with Kyle to kill the uncle. He felt like he had had no say. Maybe Kyle was right and things weren’t so bad. Maybe it was best to do nothing, to stay put. To lifelong criminals, a couple guys getting killed wasn’t an enormous deal. Maybe Swin was only freaking out because he was new to it. Maybe in this life, when a couple guys dropped below the surface, it barely made a ripple. Bright didn’t seem like a guy that wouldn’t make a ripple, though; he’d do a cannonball. Swin tried to convince himself to quit worrying so much, to let it go, to hope for the best and let the universe take care of him. Swin believed the universe was fond of him, even if the universe didn’t always show it. The universe might mess with Swin, but it wouldn’t kill him or put him in prison. He and Kyle should simply remain in their trailers and act normal. They would get in touch with someone and explain themselves. They would stay calm. A drunk man leaned on Swin and tried to focus his eyes.
“I met you about a month ago,” the man said. “If I was an asshole, I apologize.”
“No. You were terrific.”
The man, who Swin had never seen before, chuckled, then ambled off. The children onstage began a song that went, “You ain’t a Nova Scotian if you don’t like fish,” in which they listed dozens of seafoods they enjoyed. These kids could not have imagined that someone in the crowd, a subdued young man holding a nurse’s hand, hated their guts.
For this concert, Swin and Johnna had driven to the next county, to a town named Feston whose citizens had erected a cinder-block bandshell on the banks of a reservoir. Feston held shows each weekend. Swin and Johnna had been handed a flyer of upcoming events, which included a canoe-fashioning lesson and a tribute to Earl Scruggs.
Swin was glad when the show was done. He felt calmer when he was moving. He and Johnna got in her long, low car and left the reservoir behind. Johnna unfurled herself in the passenger seat, making a show of being relaxed. She said one of her favorite things was getting driven around out of town. She didn’t drive out of town herself because she always got lost and fell into a rage.
They passed through a cluster of houses that still, or already, had up Christmas lights. Johnna took out a squat brown flask and suggested a shot. She threw her head back, then passed the empty flask to Swin. He held it upside down over his tongue and felt something prickly drip out.
“I want to stand in the middle
of a sunflower ranch,” Johnna said. “Biggest one they got. I want to go over a ten-mile bridge. I want to go where it snows in the summertime.”
Swin gathered that Johnna was nervous. He should’ve been too, but all he could think of was digging. Drowning Bright in dirt. No priest or family or agent of the law—no buffer between the dead man and the black forever. All he could think about was the fact that he’d been involved in something that was very bad for a lot of people and, against his instincts, was not running away. Staying was the right thing to do. Swin trusted Kyle. He did. For some reason, Kyle had the ability to think through matters of crime more clearly than Swin could, and if Swin believed in anything, it was that people should defer to superior expertise. Anyway, this mess had to be good for someone. Maybe Frog had wanted Bright dead. Maybe Frog wanted Kyle and Swin to take over. It was a simple promotion. You’re assistant manager and the manager dies: promotion.
Swin and Johnna crept onto the park grounds and Swin brought the car to rest next to his trailer. It was still strange to Swin that he lived in a trailer. Trailers were for unwashed white people, not Ricans who did okay for themselves. Swin didn’t like the space between the trailer and the ground, or the undersized kitchen appliances, or the smell of wet cord that lingered inside. This was no place to bring a girl back to, but Johnna had been raised in trailers. Plus, Swin already felt that Johnna was his friend.
They went inside and Bedford was stretched out on the table like a luau pig. Johnna went over and shook his paw. The dog had begun to grow roots. Johnna said to wait about a week, then shave him. She put the apple-juice bowl in the closet, then shut Bedford in there as well. “All right, then,” she told Swin. She opened the futon and punched the mattress. Swin was not in the mood, but he knew it didn’t matter. This was the moment that had been chosen for him. He had to meet it.
Afterward, Johnna tripped away from the futon and leaned in a corner. She talked under her breath and hummed. Swin’s frayed nerves had caused him to last nearly an hour, during which Johnna had handled all the writhing and bouncing, talking herself through it, assuring herself it would be okay if she came now or came later, okay if she slowed or sped up, okay if she took a moment to shake her hip out.
She returned to the futon and stretched out without touching Swin. They could hear Bedford pawing around in the closet and the scrape of a tree branch on the roof. Swin was thirsty and weak. Somewhere in the past hour he’d lost the illusion that he had control over his life, that there was any use in wondering why he did the things he did—why he’d founded a fake club and stolen a bunch of useless jewelry and sacrificed seeing his sisters to his stupid pride and bought an enormous pickup and then agreed to sell it and fallen in love in this redneck nowhere and convinced himself he was a criminal and not noticed a car trailing him for hours on end on the way back from Louisiana. A Puerto Rican park ranger.
“I played baseball for one season,” he said. “That’s what Latinos are supposed to do. We sold stickers door to door to buy uniforms. People were really snapping them up, so I stole all the stickers and quit the team.”
Johnna set her fingertips on Swin’s head.
“Took three years to sell out. I always spent the money the day I got it. Nine hundred thirty dollars.”
Johnna cleared her throat. “I used to steal pennies from my grandpa’s jug and buy candy cigarettes. Guess that’s not so bad.”
Swin rolled and clung to Johnna’s arm.
“I can’t see my sisters.” He immediately regretted saying this. It felt good to say it, but it was a stupid topic to bring up with Johnna. He didn’t want her to try and make him explain why he couldn’t see his sisters: because it would be terrible if they knew what he was doing, because he’d run off from Nashville with a bunch of people’s money, because he was embroiled in a couple of murders at the moment, because he was possibly in danger and anyone he associated with was possibly in danger.
“I’d rather have none, like me, than not be able to see them.”
“There’s too many. There’s no way all their lives can turn out well.” Swin couldn’t help himself. He said their names: Rosa and Rita and Luz and Lizzie. They all had long legs and weighty black eyes. They were a squad of serious, beautiful women who loved Swin no matter what.
“Where are they?” Johnna asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Might as well be on the moon.”
Johnna made a face.
“The other day, I couldn’t picture Luz,” said Swin. “I could see her teeth and that’s it.”
“Don’t you have pictures?”
“No, I have little toys. I wouldn’t want pictures.”
“Pictures are pretty good,” said Johnna. “Especially with writing on the back.”
“I hired an investigator.” Swin squirmed against Johnna. “I had him check out our stepdad, the Blond Baron.”
Johnna moved her head so she could look at Swin. “You paid some scumbag to dig stuff up on your stepfather?”
“That’s what I did.”
Johnna seemed to take this in without much difficulty.
“I don’t think he’s that scummy,” said Swin.
“Your stepfather?”
“The PI.”
“How much did he cost?”
“I had money from selling my truck.”
“Did he find out anything bad?”
“Not even close.”
Swin and the PI had patched the story together this way. Swin’s stepdad had been born in Virginia, in 1951, to parents who were never U.S. citizens. His father soon returned to Europe, after which his mother got sick and died. Swin’s stepdad grew up in a Catholic shelter, then got a full ride to a mostly black college in Alabama, where he double-majored in social work and finance. He volunteered all over town and became friends with an old woman who was involved in a lot of service clubs. When this old woman died, she left him some money, which he donated to her favorite charity. A short time later, so it seemed, another old woman died and she left him money—more this time. He kept enough of it to found an insurance company that catered to low-income families and single mothers. He became expert at securing grants. He built this insurance company up and then handed it over to his underlings, then spent six or seven years managing trusts and endowments for nonprofits, never accepting much pay. Now he worked as a consultant.
He’d gotten in trouble twice, once in college for scuffling with repo guys who were trying to take a poor family’s refrigerator, and once, later, for screwing a plastics and oil corporation out of six hundred thousand dollars and redirecting it to aid groups. He’d done a few months in jail, during which he organized a program where inmates raised dogs so they could learn love.
Swin remembered how his mother and stepdad had met. She had a gig cleaning offices overnight and he’d been working late in one of them. He helped her finish her work and then took her to brunch at the Don Cesar. When she’d come home, four hours late, she was giddy and drunk and took a nap right on the living-room floor. When she woke up, she ran out and bought a dress she couldn’t afford. From that day forward, Swin had felt he couldn’t wholly trust his mother.
The PI said Swin’s stepdad was not in debt. He wasn’t having an affair. He drank a lot of milkshakes. He exercised by keeping his hands in his pockets and jumping as high as he could.
“That’s the story,” Swin said. He assured Johnna he was done with the PI, but he knew he wasn’t. He’d have to know about his sisters. He’d have to get a cell phone soon. The only pay phone was at the market, where there were always people around. Kyle would go nuts, Swin knew, if he found out Swin was sneaking calls to a PI on Bright’s house phone.
“Aren’t you glad he’s a good guy?” Johnna asked.
Swin shrugged.
“Could be a lot worse.” She bit his shoulder. “Let me ask you something. What the hell do you spend nine hundred dollars on when you’re ten?”
“Fat shoelaces. Swatch watches. Pop music. Though I suppose all mu
sic is pop music.”
“How so?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
Kyle, in Nick’s Datsun, headed toward a swamp outside Little Rock where the government had tried to grow rice, public ground no one went near. He checked the rearview for Swin, who was following in the Bronco. Swin had Nick’s body in the back, covered with whiskey boxes and coffee crates and fishing gear. The interior of Nick’s car smelled like tarnished silverware and bad fruit. The seat would not recline at all; it forced Kyle into the posture of a responsible citizen who trimmed his azaleas and bought cleats for needy punks. The Datsun was loaded down with cement yard doughnuts, riding low. Kyle skirted the old section of town and led Swin onto a built-up clay lane, then onto a service road.
They threw the cargo off Nick and tethered cement doughnuts to his arms and legs. Kyle realized they should knock out his teeth. He found a lead sinker the size of a grenade and brought it down over and over on Nick’s face. The boy looked older with every blow, his jowls widening and lips splitting. Kyle plucked a handful of teeth out of Nick’s mouth, rinsed them in the swamp water, and dropped them in his pocket. Swin was pale and looked off to the side as they dragged Nick to the swamp’s edge and lowered him in. They took the Datsun about a mile away, to a part that looked deep, shoved it in, then stood aside and watched the bog eat the car with the even appetite of a trash compactor.
They headed south in the Bronco, back on the interstate. Kyle fastened his seat belt and tried to hold seventy-one miles an hour.
Swin rolled his window halfway up. “It was my fault this shit happened, but it doesn’t mean I’m taking a demotion. I’ll let you be leader, but I want to be consulted on everything.”