by David Joy
Smoke hung heavy on the far side of the room and the brass chandelier overhead set the smoke aglow around a small table. I could see Avery sitting with his back to the window. He said something I was too far away to hear and I caught a glimpse of Maggie. She rocked back in the chair beside him, her head tilted with blond curls trailing, and laughed. Though she smiled as if she were having a good time, it was obvious she didn’t belong. Most of us born here would die here, never having seen anything further away than Pigeon Forge, but not her. When we were nine or ten years old and first learning cursive, she spent hours upon hours memorizing every curve of her name. “All famous people have to sign autographs,” she’d said. I couldn’t even remember the twists and turns of x’s and z’s. Lot of folks set their eyes on the distance at one point or another, but in time those eyes drew back. Maggie’s never had. The biggest difference between her and other dreamers was that she was determined enough and smart enough to will it into existence. It had always been obvious Maggie was only passing through.
Part of me was hesitant to even walk over, but the other ninety-eight percent had Xanax pumping any anxiety that ever existed into oblivion. Avery Hooper was the type of guy that every time he looked at you, you just wanted to haul off and hit him in the fucking mouth. He’d grown his hair long, and tufts of that brown hair rolled out over his ears and curled back toward the ceiling. A tight string of thick wooden beads, one of those necklaces from shit-town novelty shops in shit-town places like Gatlinburg, was fitted around his neck. It was that college look, that I-smoke-weed-and-kick-Hacky-Sacks kind of look, that was spread all over that son of a bitch, and I hated him for it.
I shuffled past the pong game and past the line of girls who had just enough baby fat left to make them vulnerable. When I got to the table, she saw me. Maggie looked up with those silvery blue eyes, and where I’d hoped to find welcome, I thought I spotted some sort of fear. She glanced down at the table and then up to me with eyes getting wider. There was a plate there, one of those floral-pattern plates that parents keep well into silver anniversaries, on the table. And there was powder on that plate, chunky powder flickering like glass shards and cut into lines in that yellow light. I looked at her again and saw a straw in the hand she used to push her hair back behind her ears. Then there was this rage that started building inside of me. There was this anger that washed all of the haze left from reefer and alcohol and ladder bars out of me and left nothing more than a need to break every last bone in that motherfucker’s body. Right then, there wasn’t a thought that could’ve calmed any of it down, and so I went with it.
“You snort any of that shit?” I looked Maggie dead in her eyes, and I could see she was scared.
“Who the fuck are you talking to? Ain’t none of your goddamn business, Jake!”
My eyes flicked over to that mouth that shouldn’t have been talking but was, that mouth that just might shoot me over the edge. Avery’s eyes were lit up like firecrackers and his jaw had been put into motion. “Did you give her that shit?”
“Fuck you, Jake. I suggest you go find some other place to be a fucking hero, because nobody wants you here. There ain’t a goddamn soul that wants anything to do with your sorry ass, especially not Maggie.”
I could hear the music playing, but all the noise of folks talking and hollering had shut quiet. I could feel their eyes pressing into the back of my skull, and those eyes went to pressing so hard until they were pushing me forward. Before I knew it, I was moving too fast to stop and I was into him.
That first punch sent a red mist hanging on air and the blood started pouring and I could see it in his eyes, I could see it in there even as I was hitting him, that he’d never been in a fight and wanted it to end. But that next fist came and split his head against the window, and glass went haywire, and I kept forward. My hands were on him now, and I had him out of his chair and onto the floor and I was braining him, his skull just cracking as it bounced off the tile into another line of knuckles.
It was when his eyes started fading and that wide-eyed rabid look had turned stupefied there on the floor that I got my wits about me. Something came over me, something screaming that anything more would kill him, and it held my fist still as the moon there above him. I stood up, and I could feel those eyes pressing into the back of me, but it was a different kind of pressing now, a feeling like those eyes belonged to kids who weren’t ready to see something like this.
When I got up, I looked at Maggie. I looked at that plate and the place she’d set the straw. I looked at that shit she’d been just seconds away from snorting up her nose, just seconds away from a glue trap that would’ve held her to this place and this life just like me. She was staring at my hands, skin torn, blood of him and me spread across those flattened knuckles. And she just kept staring at my hands while that pile of shit gasped and puddled on the floor.
6.
My eyes opened that next morning into a blurry, brown shadow that slowly came into focus as a pair of leather boots with mud caked to the soles. My mind started running that what-the-fuck-happened checklist, but number one checked out: those were my boots. Hardwood floors, dirty as hell from men too lazy to push a broom, was my second clue that it was all right: I was home. I pushed myself up from the floor with arms that felt loopy, and I could see that I was in my bedroom. I just hadn’t made it quite to the bed.
That was every night I’d ever spent mixing alcohol and Xaney bars wrapped up in a nice, neat little package. Nights that began sharp always had this scary tendency to go black in a hurry. I’d start off having a good time, and next thing you know, I’d wake up to nothing but stories from friends to shed light on what I’d done.
Unfortunately, I’d taken that pill just a little too late in the night. Should’ve started earlier, I guess. I could still see Robbie Douglas’s body wrapped crooked as hell around that rock. It played backward from there and it was clearer than the room I was standing in. I could see his distorted face peeking out of that tarp as Gerald was dragging. I could see his chest go from still to raising and lowering, raising and lowering. I could hear that screaming and I could see his face peeling, and before that, before that, I could see just him, Robbie Douglas, sitting there on a week-long binge with unblinking eyes and a chomping jaw as those wires cut into his arms. That was what pushed me to the bathroom and threw my head into the toilet, and that was what spilt over into the bowl. It was the fact that he was real. It was the fact that he was real and alive and breathing and had parents that buried my head just inches from where vomit filmed on that little pond of toilet water.
“Jacob! Jacob!” Daddy was hollering, and I could feel him pushing on the door where my feet were wedged. “Jacob, what the fuck’s the matter with you?” The sound of his voice made me heave harder and Daddy banged that door open till I was sure every toe I had was severed clean off. He was laughing now as he stood over me. “Well, goddamn, boy. Look at you.” He was chortling something horrible at me. “Must’ve been one hell of a night. Yes, sir, I don’t think I’ve had a night that put me in a place like this in a coon’s age.”
If he was talking about the puking, I’d seen him do it a week or two before. If he was talking about what had pushed me into that bowl, I’d heard the stories.
“Get the fuck up now, and be a goddamn man. I got something that’ll take the hurt out of you.” I pushed off of the toilet with hands still bloodied and scabbed, but just couldn’t find enough strength to get off the floor. “Goddamn, Jacob! Quit being a fucking pussy about it and get up!” Daddy leaned down and braced his arms under mine. He hoisted me up without even a grunt.
I stood there for a minute with my head hung low, my whole body limp as rope. I looked my hands over and hobbled to the sink to wash off what I could from the night before.
“Bloodied the hell out of those knuckles. Who’d you hit?”
“Avery Hooper.” I turned on the faucet and scrubbed hard at my knuckles til
l water stained dark red spiraled down the drain.
“Avery Hooper? That’s old Thomas Hooper’s boy, ain’t it?”
“I think that’s his uncle.” My eyes were focused on that spiraling, the sink seeming to swallow the only thing I cared to remember.
“Yeah, I think you’re right. That’s Thomas’s brother Aiden’s kid, ain’t it? Boy, I used to hate that son of a bitch when we were growing up. Tied that cocksucker to a tombstone one night at Cub Scouts and left him there. We could hear him just screaming down there when we were sitting around the campfire. They kept asking what that racket was, but I told them I didn’t hear a thing. I’d had half a mind to slit his fucking throat.” Daddy started laughing again and stared into the mirror till our eyes met.
“Well, his son ain’t much better.”
“Looks like it. Looks like there might be a little of that McNeely blood in you after all.”
That’s what I was scared of. I cupped a handful of water to wash my face and let some of that handful into my mouth to wet my tongue. My whole mouth was dry as talc, and I just kept filling my hands as fast as the faucet could pour to get some sort of dampness back into my mouth.
“Sounded like you were in here dying. Should’ve known you were just being a pussy.” Daddy stared at me like he couldn’t believe we were kin, like I was the biggest disappointment he’d ever had. “Well, whenever you’re finished, come in the kitchen and I’ll mix you up something to get those hairs standing again.”
From the way he carried himself, I knew old Josephine had given in pretty easy at some point after the tattoo was covered. As he walked out of the room, I could see that the name had been buried beneath flowers like the Mexicans draw inside of skulls, and there up above it was Josie spelled just right, with an i.
—
THE SMELL OF bacon and eggs still held in the kitchen, but it was obvious the cast iron had cooled hours before. It wasn’t that appetizing kind of smell when everything is still sizzling in the pan, but rather that sweaty-feet kind of must that comes on later.
“Well, Jesus Christ, look who decided to get up.”
The sun shone bright through the blinds so that even those slivers of sunlight lit the room to something unbearable. “What time is it?”
“What time is it, he asks. Care to venture a guess?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a quarter past four. You’ve been in there hugged up to the toilet all goddamn day.” Daddy sat on the couch with his bare feet propped up on the coffee table. He didn’t have a shirt on, and his tattoos darkened the places that never saw sun. He stood up and situated a loose-fitting pair of sweatpants on his waist before coming over to the kitchen and grabbing a coffee mug from the cabinet. “Just go sit your sissy ass over there.” Daddy started to mix some concoction into the mug, but I didn’t stick around to catch the ingredients. I stumbled toward the couch and took a liking to the place he’d sat. When he came over, he put the mug down in front of me, some acrid-smelling shit steaming over the rim. Daddy sat beside me and kicked his feet back to the coffee table. He started flipping channels just fast enough for eyes to catch a glimpse of what was showing. “Drink up. That shit’s a goddamn McNeely cure-all.”
I grabbed the coffee mug and took my first sip hesitantly. The taste sent my mouth to spitting and Daddy laughed as the mist glittered the air. “What the fuck is that?”
“Black coffee, a little dash of bourbon, and two Goody’s powders.”
“Tastes like shit.”
“Ain’t supposed to taste good. Just quit being a pussy about it and drink it.”
I took the next gulp in one big swallow, and though my face locked sideways like I was sucking something sour, by the time that medicine had hit my gut, I could feel the heaviness shedding.
“Tell me about last night.”
“Ain’t nothing to talk about.”
“Don’t go giving me that shit. Now, tell me about your night.”
“None of it worked out like you wanted it—”
“Goddamn, you’re loose-lipped! I ain’t even talking about that! The boys came by late last night on a tear and told me all about it. Those are tales that only need to be told one good time. It’s better like that. Better to just let sleeping dogs lie, like they say. That’s the only way to let a fuckup like that come somewhere close to forgetting.”
“Then what the fuck are you asking about?”
“I’m asking about your night. Trying to have a little friendly conversation with my son, if that’s all right with you. So what the fuck kept you out all night and had you plowing my forsythias all to shit?”
“I ran over the bushes?”
“Did you run over the bushes? You come piling up that driveway on a goddamn tear. I was grabbing for britches and a gun just as fast as I could till I seen it was you through the window.”
“Don’t remember that.”
“Bet you don’t.”
I grabbed the coffee mug and gulped down as much as I could stand. “Went to a party that they were throwing for graduation.”
“They graduate yesterday? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, they graduated yesterday and last night they were partying a little bit over there in Foxfire, over at Charlie Mitchell’s house. I don’t really think they wanted me there, and I don’t really know why I went. But one thing led to another, and I left Avery Hooper spread out on the floor.”
“Shit doesn’t just unfold like that, now. Would be out of your character to just walk in and go to hitting somebody. Wouldn’t put it past me, but you avoided that kind of meanness somehow or another. No, I reckon something had to have happened for you to just haul off and hit somebody.”
“Maggie Jennings.”
“And there it is, a goddamn woman.”
“She ain’t just some woman, first of all, and you know that.”
“Well, I know a lot of things. I know you two were tighter than a burl growing up. I know you two were together a good while and, hell, you might’ve even popped her cherry. But I know that a woman’s just a woman, and there’s no changing that. If they didn’t have pussies, the dumpsters would be full of them.”
“How about you stop right—”
“I know anything that can bleed a week straight every month and survive is the devil’s doing.” Daddy guffawed.
“Shut the fuck up! It ain’t like that. It ain’t ever been like that. And it ain’t like none of that trash you keep piled up around here.” I was sitting forward on the couch now and my knuckles were pressing those scabs wide open. “You can say whatever the hell you want about whoever the hell you want to, but you keep her fucking name out of it.”
Daddy resituated himself on the couch into a little lazier position than he’d held. He smirked knowing how riled I’d become, knowing that there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d hit him. I think he pushed me like that just to see if he could drag what genes he’d given out of me to inspect. “Guess my boy’s in love.”
I knew he’d said it just to get my blood boiling, but that didn’t really matter. There wasn’t any woman fit for talking like that as far as I was concerned, not even Josephine, but certainly not a girl like Maggie, certainly not someone so innocent.
“Well, are you going to tell the goddamn story or not?”
“She was there with Avery, and he was fixing to make her do something she didn’t need to be doing, so I hit him.”
“What was he fixing to make her do?”
“That ain’t important.”
“Of course it’s fucking important. Stories hinge on shit like this. So, tell me.” Daddy looked at me with a lowered brow that cast a heavy ledge over his eyes.
“He was cranked out of his brain and was about to try and put that shit up her nose. You happy?”
“Matter of fact, I am. Matter of fact, that makes me awfully fu
cking happy.” Daddy scooted toward me, slapped me in the back of the head, then palmed my crown and rattled my skull. He settled his bare arm around my neck and that warmness in him felt as close to anything fatherly as I’d felt in a long time. “Awfully fucking happy,” he said.
7.
The sun had dropped low until the reflection in clouds sent purples, blues, and pinks prisming through the blinds. I hadn’t moved from the couch and had nodded off for a minute or two before the Walkers began to bark. I stood and walked into the kitchen to peer through the blinds onto the yard.
Maggie Jennings was carefully dancing that thirty-four two-steps, fourteen ball changes, and chassé through the maze of angry hounds. It was a dance she’d learned long ago, and while they say you never forget how to ride a bike, there are certain things that you hold an equal mastery over, certain things that scare you into remembering.
My mind raced as I hurtled over a pile of dirty laundry into the back bedroom and tried to find something to throw on over gym shorts. There was still vomit wiped across my chest, and my mouth still held the taste. Slinging the dresser drawers in a frenzy, I saw nothing but cedar boards. All of the clothes waited on Daddy or me or Josephine, if we were lucky, to run a load. With no time, I ran back into the living room and yanked a wrinkled T-shirt and the pair of sweatpants Daddy slept in from the pile.
I’d just made it to the couch and was trying my damnedest to make it seem like I wasn’t expecting her, when she peered in through the glass and pecked a few times with her fingernail.
“Come in!” I tried to act like I didn’t care if it was her or Jesus, like there weren’t any feelings there.
She opened the door and stepped inside onto a rug meant for stomping mud from boots. She wore tight jeans that seemed fitted to her legs, leather beach sandals showing off lime-green-painted toenails. A loose-fitting tank top, pieced lace the color of coral, draped her torso. The neck was cut low and showed the tan of her chest, the slight shadows of collarbones. She stayed put there on the rug, didn’t come any further, like that little rectangle was an island or something and all that hardwood an ocean that neither of us could swim across to get to each other.