by David Joy
The wipers had dried to the glass, so that the first swipe when Aiden cranked the car split the blade on the driver’s side, the torn rubber wagging about wildly with each stroke. The thin strip of rubber lashed about the windshield like a baby blacksnake he and Thad found slithering through the yard one time when they were thirteen or fourteen. It reminded him of how the snake’s pencil-thin body had whipped about the ground after Thad chopped its head off with a hoe blade. He could still see the snake’s decapitated head with those black, unblinking eyes as it snapped its mouth open and closed and tried to bite whatever came close in those last seconds of life, a hatred for the world right up to the bitter end. He and Thad prodded sticks into the snake’s mouth until it finally quivered closed, with the top jaw crooked over the bottom.
Aiden always found himself thinking about times when he and Thad were kids. The simplest things triggered flashes of memory. Those times when they were children stayed so clear to him—the images and the sounds and the smells, the way those moments had tasted—but yet he could not remember a single detail of a single afternoon from times when Thad was gone. He wondered if there was anything worth remembering anymore. He wondered where the hell Thad was in that darkness. Everything would be okay if he could just find Thad.
Pulling out of Jimmy’s, he could barely make out the road ahead through heavy rain and fogged windows. When he passed Booker Branch, he thought that he never should have left Thad behind, but he had, and now he needed him. He remembered where Thad had gone those few months he disappeared. Bonas Defeat was hell on earth, but if Thad had run, that was exactly where he’d be. So Aiden paid no attention when he reached Charleys Creek and the road home shot off to the left. He just kept on Highway 281 deeper into Little Canada.
Through the rain, Aiden drove more by memory than road signs or landmarks. He barely had time to read the white letters spelling names like Dark Cove and Old Mill Road and Neddy Mountain and Wolf Pen on green signs as he came upon and passed them in the same instant. He knew the Mathis family had tree farms just through the woods to the right and that Fraser fir stretched in rows from the creek to the ridgeline. Turkey loved to walk through those trees all year long, and Goob Coward got lawed for shooting a hen through the neck with a .22 lever-action one spring. The tree farm had been there ever since Aiden could remember, and Goob Coward poached turkey and speckled trout off the Mathises’ land for years before he finally got caught. Aiden knew that a little farther up the road the Messers had cattle and goats and two great big blueticks named George and Stella that walked all over the pasture with their noses to the ground and broke off into sprints, chasing the goats, when the mood struck them to do so. The Messers had always raised goats and cattle there, and they’d always had blueticks that took ribbons in the Mountain State Fair every fall. Nothing about this place had changed in all of Aiden McCall’s life, and maybe that’s why he’d come to hate it so badly. Everything was exactly how it had always been, the haves having and the have-nots starving to damn death. Few in Little Canada had much, but they were salt-of-the-earth people for whom church and work and family were enough to make life worth scraping by. But none of those things had ever belonged to Aiden. Every year bled into the next and the next, just on and on until the day he’d die, and maybe that was all there was to look forward to anymore. Maybe that’s all there is to this old life, just waiting around to die.
When he came to the end of Grays Ridge Road, his headlights swept across the back of a red Geo Tracker and he remembered having seen that little jeep outside the Dietzes’ trailer. He left the Ranchero running and the headlights on, stepped out, having almost forgotten how bad his ribs hurt until then. He stumbled over to the Tracker to look inside, but there was nothing to be seen. When he yelled out for Thad into the night, he knew there would be no answer. He knew how far the trail stretched ahead and how rough the country was through the gorge. There was no chance of finding Thad then. Aiden was unsure if he could even make it home.
(27)
April flashed a lighter to the end of her one-hitter and took a toke. Mittens sat like a statue on the kitchen table in front of her, the cat’s posture like those concrete lions people with gates on their driveways set on brick pillars by the road. She set the pipe on the table, watched it roll a radius across the wood, and stared blankly as Mittens strolled over and casually slapped the pipe onto the floor. She didn’t even bother to pick it up. April was just glad to finally stop thinking for a minute or two.
Ever since Tom Rice called she’d been at the table running figures through her mind, ciphering numbers on a notepad, and trying to imagine how long the money would hold out. She wondered what kind of life she might have if she took the offer and left. April was still too young to collect survivors insurance from Social Security as a widow, but there was a thousand-dollar check that came on the fifteenth each month from an insurance policy George Trantham had for years. That check would keep coming until the policy ran out, but that wasn’t near enough to live on. The seven hundred fifty she’d taken in each month as a lease on the land for the radio tower is what made her lifestyle viable after George died. Between those two checks, she took in $21,000 a year, which might not sound like much, but when the farm’s bought and paid for and all you have to do is sit on your ass and collect, there are worse ways to make a living. If she sold the property, that lease check was gone, and that meant she’d drop to $12,000 a year. The question became how long the money Trantham had in the bank and the money from selling the property would last. She figured she could make it years if she was smart. Worst case, she could get a bartending job or wait tables. She didn’t have the body she’d had at twenty years old, but she’d held up better than most and could still turn heads. Flirting with old men for tip money might just be worth it to leave.
She took a sip of coffee, lit a cigarette, and walked into the living room to get on the computer. She thought she might look into some places on Tybee Island, see how much it would cost to rent an apartment. That was one of the few places she’d ever been, and she’d fallen in love with that town when George took her and Thad there not long after she married him. There’d been some sort of pirate festival going on that weekend and there were all these ships built onto trailers being pulled through the streets. There were men dressed up with tricornes on their heads and buckles on their shoes and one with a peg leg and one with an eye patch and even a midget waving a curved saber that was longer than he was tall. There were women in blouses with ruffled sleeves and corsets pressing their breasts up to their necks, and some wore their hair braided and some wore bandannas as skullcaps and one turned up a bottle of booze and blew a mouthful of liquor into a ball of fire. April wondered if she could do that—not the fire breathing, but riding on one of those ships in the parade and playing dress-up and throwing candy and beads down to kids in the street. She guessed most everybody who lived there played a part in the parade. She guessed all she’d have to do was move down there and make friends. She wouldn’t have to tell them where she was from. She could make up a name if she really wanted. Start from scratch.
The front door flew open and April almost came out of her skin. The rain was still pouring outside and Aiden walked into the house with water dripping from him, his pants and shirt and face covered in blood. She gasped when she saw him standing there like he’d been in a car crash, and maybe he had.
“Jesus, Aiden. What happened?”
He didn’t say anything at first. He just stood there as if he were about to collapse.
“What happened, Aiden?” April walked toward him.
“I got robbed,” he said. “That son of a bitch Leland Bumgarner sent me to meet . . . they beat the shit out of me. Robbed me fucking blind.”
“Where’s Thad?”
“I’m going to kill them,” Aiden screamed. “I’m going to kill those motherfuckers and I’m going to kill Leland Bumgarner for setting me up.”
“Where is
Thad, Aiden?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Aiden said.
“He didn’t go with you?”
“No, April. For fuck’s sake, I told you.” He walked to where April had been sitting at the computer, grabbed her pack of Dorals from the desktop, and lit a cigarette.
“Your head’s bleeding.” She moved around to the back of him to get a better look at the cut on the crown of his head.
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“You need to get to the hospital.”
“I ain’t going to the hospital. They’ll ask all sorts of questions. They’ll have the law in there before you can bat an eye. I ain’t going to no hospital. Period.” He plopped onto the office chair and bent forward with his face in his hands. The cigarette between his fingers trailed smoke against his face, and April watched as a drop of blood ran through his hair, slid along his jaw, and dripped from his chin to the floor.
“We got to get you cleaned up,” April said. “We need to see how bad it is.”
She hurried down the hall into the bathroom, shoved the rubber stopper into the drain at the bottom of the tub, and cranked the water. The bathtub started to fill and she headed back into the hall to the linen closet for more towels and washcloths, old ratty ones she wouldn’t mind throwing away. Under the sink, April rummaged through the cabinet for medical supplies. There was a bottle of iodine she’d had since Thad was little, a bottle of alcohol, and a half tube of Neosporin pinched flat. She slapped the cover down on the toilet seat and piled everything on the lid. There were some large square gauze pads, a small tin of Band-Aids with only the sizes and shapes that no one ever used, and a roll of brown elastic bandage with little silver clips that had started to rust. That was everything she had. She didn’t know the first thing about stitching him up.
In the living room, Aiden was still hunched over in the desk chair and the cigarette had burned out between his fingers. He’d thrown up on the floor between his boots and he looked like he was asleep, and those two things worried April to death because, while she knew little about bandaging someone up, she knew a lot about concussions. She’d had three that she knew of, one that kept her throwing up for two days after George Trantham came home staggering drunk off white liquor and damn near beat her to death. The few times it had been bad enough that she had to go to the hospital, the doctor told her not to go to sleep because a lot of times people wouldn’t wake up after going to sleep with a head injury, after having fallen down the stairs. She rushed over and shook Aiden by the shoulder and he raised his head slowly toward her.
“Let’s get you back there in the tub,” April said. “We need to get you cleaned up.”
Aiden didn’t move, just kind of blinked his eyes in a daze.
“Come on.” She prodded. “Get up, Aiden.”
She led him down the hall slowly. He hobbled on heavy steps, and when she got him into the bathroom, she had him stand there while she undressed him and eased him into the tub. He slid down into the water, the cuts and blood on his stomach immediately spreading a cloud of red into the bath like drops of dye. Those marks and that gash on the back of his head seemed to be the only places he was bleeding, but from the looks of his clothes, he’d been bleeding awhile. There were marks all over him, places that were red and blue. A bruise that looked like a birthmark as big as a quart jar was stamped across his ribs.
April dipped one of the washcloths into the water, and as she dabbed at the cuts along his stomach, he sighed a bit. But when she squeezed a washcloth full of water over the cut at the back of his head, he winced.
“Goddamn,” he yelled. “That hurts like hell!”
“I know it does, but I can’t see it till it’s cleaned up,” she said. “You need stitches.”
“No, it don’t.”
“Trust me, it needs stitches.” April took another washcloth full and this time pressed it directly on top of his head to let the water run down through his hair and wash the blood away. “Now, who did this?”
“A bunch of spics,” Aiden said. He was deep in the bathtub with water lapping at his chest. His feet were up against the tile by the tap handles, with his legs bent out of the water.
“And you don’t know who they were?”
“I ain’t see them.”
“What do you mean you didn’t see them?” April asked.
“They put something over my head.”
“Who did?”
“That spic,” Aiden said, opening his eyes for a second or two this time as April rinsed more water over the cut. “Some spic named Eberto, or at least that’s what Leland said his name was.”
“But you don’t know him?”
“For God’s sake, April, are you not fucking listening!” he screamed. He’d never raised his voice like that to her in all those years.
“Don’t talk to me like that.” April was shaking. “I’m just trying to help.”
“Well, can’t you fucking listen,” Aiden said. “I told you I don’t know who they were. If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“I don’t need this,” April said. She stood up and dropped the washcloth onto his chest. “I’ve got enough already. I don’t need this anymore.”
Aiden mumbled like he was talking in his sleep, and April couldn’t make out what he said, but it didn’t really matter what he said. She didn’t care to listen. She was tired of always worrying about someone else’s problems.
The more she thought about it, the more it didn’t matter how little those assholes from Atlanta wanted to offer her for the land. She’d take it. She’d take the check out of their hands with a smile on her face if it meant getting the hell off this mountain. She didn’t care if she had to get a job and survive off tip money like those first few years with Thad, those years before she married George Trantham just so she wouldn’t have to struggle. She didn’t care about having to leave Aiden behind, because she’d done everything she could to try and help him. No matter what she said, he still did the same things over and over again. Her out was here and she had to take it, or live with the fact that it might never come again. That made the decision easy. April was done with regret.
(28)
Thad dreamed about waterboarding a man with diesel fuel. He dreamed this because it had happened. It was something he’d done. He was given a direct order and he poured the gas, and ever since, he’d tried to forget the smell and the sound of that man gagging and the way the fuel felt cold on his hands as he shook the metal can empty.
The man might’ve been thirty years old, though he could have just as easily been younger. Unlike most Afghani men, he did not wear a full beard. His dark face was patchy with hair and a scruffy mustache. Black hair draped the shoulders of his navy-blue thawb. Over the tunic he wore an olive-colored vest and on his head a Chitrali cap the same chestnut brown as his skin. He was kneeling in the middle of the road with a small trowel, like he might’ve been digging ramps when the patrol rounded a steep outcrop of sandstone. But that dirt merchant wasn’t digging anything out of the ground. He was burying something.
There was nothing more cowardly than burying IEDs and running into the mountains to play shepherd. If Thad’s patrol had come any later, it was likely the soldier whose boot found the trigger would have been killed and the rest would have been left to scour the ground for body parts to ship home.
They bound the man’s hands with zip cuffs and bagged his head in a black sack. Sergeant Spencer Lawing gave Thad the order. While one soldier held the man’s legs and another pinned his shoulders to the ground, Sergeant Lawing steadied the man’s head and told Thad to pour. The ANA interpreter shouted and Sergeant Lawing directed the questions and the man cried, and every time an answer didn’t suit the sergeant he simply hollered, “Gas!” and Thad would dump the diesel down the man’s throat. The can glugged and thumped, and Thad kept pouring until all twenty liters was emptied.
The part that was different in Thad’s dream was what came when the sergeant yanked the sack off the man’s head. Instead of finding that scraggly jihadi with his face greasy with fuel, everything was reversed and Thad was now the one being tortured. He could feel the gas in his eyes and coating his mouth and throat with a thick metallic taste. The smell stung his nose and he felt like he was suffocating. He was staring into daylight and it was hard to make out who was standing over him because his vision was blurred, but when that figure finally came clear it was Doug Dietz. It was Doug Dietz smiling down at him and Doug tossed the empty fuel can to the side and fished a lighter from his pocket. That was the moment Thad gasped and his eyes shot open and he slapped around the wetted ground to try and separate dream from reality.
Seconds passed before he realized what he had dreamed was not real, minutes more to realize where he was, and until those realizations came, he just lay there shivering in the cut bank with the shotgun clenched tightly in his hands. The rain had stopped sometime while he drifted in and out of sleep, but it was dark now. The creek had risen and lapped at his feet. Random split-second showers sounded when something high in the trees buckled and sprinkled water onto leaves below. He figured daylight was close because a titmouse kept calling from some hidden perch. He thought about how many times in his life he’d woken to the sound of that bird, and how he’d never once really thought about that fact until right then. He’d never heard it when he was on deployment. That place had its own birds with their own calls. This was a sound from where he’d grown up, a sound he’d known all his life. It only took something that simple for the world to solidify.
Once he realized where he was, Thad’s mind worked to remember how he’d gotten there. Ever since he’d come home there was always this washing around between the during and after, between here and there. He’d spent so long trying to build this separation so that he could navigate those two worlds, and suddenly he was back to where he’d started. All of it was mixed up and he couldn’t make sense.