Where All Light Tends to Go

by David Joy

  The bulls looked at their ringleader standing behind my lawyer, and that older bull shook his head okay. That quick and the key clicked, the teeth were loosened, and I was rubbing the red bracelets left behind off my wrists. As quickly as I’d come, I was headed out in true McNeely fashion. Like I thought, I’d be home by supper.

  —

  MR. QUEEN AND I walked out of the front of the Jackson County Administration Building through doors that opened with a push rather than buzzing. It was almost night now, yellow fading into darkness over the peaks. He led me to a long, fat Lincoln trimmed in gold where most folks would’ve settled for chrome. While I’m certain it had cost him a pretty penny, I personally found the touch a tad gaudy. The look was a bit jarring to me, reminiscent of those thick gold earrings old women with blue hair wear in church, the kind that drag their earlobes down and make the piercing holes stretch long.

  “Nice ride you got here, Mr. Queen.”

  “Irving.”

  “What was that?”

  “I said call me Irving.” Mr. Queen shot me a smile and scrunched his glasses back up over his eyes. He hit a switch on his key chain, the headlights blinked, and I could hear the latches flick up on the inside of the Lincoln.

  The car smelled of stale cigar smoke with a hint of baby powder, an offensive odor that fit him well. Leather seats were stained with coffee spills and the passenger-side floorboard was littered with empty coffee cups and pints of whiskey. He had classed it up a bit on the inside with one of those air freshener trees hung on the vent.

  “Think you might want to trash these liquor bottles?”

  “For what purpose?”

  “In case you were pulled over.”

  “Pulled over for what?”

  “I don’t know, just pulled over.”

  “Now, if you’re going to start throwing around scenarios, you’re going to have to be specific. Generalities won’t get you far in this line of work.”

  I kicked my feet through the swamp of trash, and Mr. Queen headed down the hill out of the parking lot. “Let’s just say you came up into a traffic stop. Let’s just say the law had one of those roadblocks they like to set up so good, and—”

  “I’m assuming this roadblock is perfectly legal? Not set up in a racially profiling manner, you know? Not set up on a road traveled primarily by migrant workers, is it?”

  “Perfectly legal, and let’s just say you pull on up there, and they get to seeing all these liquor bottles.” I kicked my feet around until the hollow bottles clanked against one another. “Let’s say they ain’t too keen on a man in a fancy car with liquor bottles piled up in the floorboards.”

  “Ain’t a damn thing illegal about being a good community steward, Jacob.”

  “Community steward?”

  “Yes, a community steward. Litter cleanup is all. I just have a habit of keeping the highways clear of litter.”

  “And I reckon it’s whiskey bottles making up the majority of litter on these highways.”

  “Well, of course it is. Folks guzzling RC Cola certainly don’t throw bottles out of car windows. No, sir. It’s the drunks you have to worry about.” Mr. Queen pulled a mashed-out cigar from the ashtray and put the butt end between lips that wrapped around his face like kielbasas. He struck a match and nearly veered across the white line as we headed into town. He puffed hard to get that cigar going, his cheeks sucking and blowing till fat wads of smoke started pouring out of that old potbelly. As the fire crept, snubbed leaves of tobacco peppered lit embers into his lap. “Goddamn it! Goddamn it!” he screamed, and yanked the car onto the shoulder as his right hand patted hard in his crotch. “Not the Jos. A. Bank’s! Not the goddamn Jos. A. Bank’s!”

  We rode through town in silence. I think I’d crossed him a little when he damn near lit his junk afire and I laughed, but as we passed the university, he finally continued the conversation.

  “Remember what I was saying about trial?”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “Remember I was telling those deputies that you were a free man till trial? Remember that?”

  “I reckon so.”

  “Well, don’t you worry about that, Jacob.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there isn’t going to be any trial.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, there was a reason I was the one that came to pick you up this evening. You see, your father went to have a little talk with Mr. Hooper and it seems they’ve come to an understanding. Seems it couldn’t have been you that did that to his son, seeing as you were with your father at home on that night. I reckon the victim must’ve been mistaken.”

  “And it’s all going to work out like that?”

  “Why, yes, Jacob. I just need to have Mr. Hooper accompany me to the district attorney’s office, the district attorney and I go way back, and Mr. Hooper will explain that this was all a big misunderstanding, you see. After that, free and clear.”

  “Free and clear, huh?”

  “Free and clear.”

  We rode past the Moonshine Mini Mart, a cream-colored building with a cobble foundation where bear hunters often stopped to shoot the shit. The parking lot was always filled with pickups covered in antennas, dog boxes filled with dead-tired hounds. Anyone with a lick of sense had known for a long time that the owners were running a shake-and-bake lab right beneath the register. It was bad, cheap yellow dope that only the lowest folks turned to when the money for McNeely quality ran out. I’d always been amazed at how none of the bulls stumbled onto the man running that operation. Every time he handed out change to deputies buying tins of tobacco, it was plain as day that his hands were eat up from burping bottles, the lithium strips just bubbling in the syrup beneath the register. How those bulls never caught a whiff of all those chemicals, I’ll never know.

  Mr. Queen shot a glance up Caney Fork Road, and to me, it seemed he was looking way back into the place he’d come from. He resituated himself against the leather seat and tugged on his Jos. A. Bank’s lapels. There was pride in the way he jerked on that jacket. He’d come a long way, I reckon, a long way from that holler he’d slithered out of. But if it had been me, I’d have slithered a little further. If I were going to leave, it would be to a place where nobody knew me, a place where McNeely was just another name. Folks like us needed aliases.

  12.

  There was no hero’s welcome. No rib eyes sizzling over charcoal briquettes. No cold beer in koozies. Instead I walked in like a discordant note on the Townes Van Zandt song spinning around the record player.

  The Cabe brothers were sitting on the couch—the skinny one, Jeremy, pressing his hand nearly white against his forehead. Red oozed out from under Jeremy’s hand like he’d smashed a tomato just above his eyes. The blood dripped down onto his baby-blue T-shirt and had dotted lines along the thighs of brown canvas britches. Gerald sat beside his brother with his arms folded and resting across his knees. He was hunched over, fat swallowing suspenders, and seemed to just kind of hover there with his stare fixed on the hardwood. My father was standing over them, his slender frame casting a shadow that neither Cabe brother could’ve crawled out from under. Daddy had his shirt off, white skin almost completely covered in ink, and as the screen door closed behind me, his eyes cut into me in a way I’d never seen in any man. That stare, that cold, rage-filled fucking stare, cowered a man’s soul, and suddenly, all of the stories I’d ever heard about him were glaring down into a place inside of me that had never been touched.

  “Goddamn it, Jacob! Of all the fucking days to get pinched! Of all the fucking days in your shitty-ass little life to get pinched, you go and do it on a day like this!” I just stood there frozen in headlights lit by rage and waited for him to tell me to move. “Sit the fuck down over there.” Daddy motioned with a .45 auto, a Commander-sized 1911 he’d gotten for a short bag of dope when bags were stil
l pushed through windowsills, but I still couldn’t move. “Goddamn it, boy, I said sit the fuck down!”

  Jeremy’s knees were knocking and his eyes had grown two sizes too big for his head. “Do we really need to get the boy into—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Daddy backhanded the pistol across Jeremy’s face and the front sight caught just beneath his eye, cutting a sliver that shone white for a second before filling red. Gerald’s arms lifted from his knees and he looked like he might stand, but Daddy hammered the bottom of the magazine square into his nose and that knoll of flesh mashed flat. Under the bill of his Joy Dog Food trucker cap, Gerald’s eyes watered and he squinted to hold it in, but there was nothing to stop the fountain that dumped out of both nostrils, ran over his lips and chin like a stream over stone, and dripped into a stain on his undershirt. The Cabe brothers’ eyes were fixed on Daddy now, and it was a fear of what might happen when the trigger broke that held them there. I still hadn’t moved. “Jacob, I’ve already told you with my mouth.” He motioned with the pistol to the chair beside the couch. I scampered over to the chair and sat down, never taking my eyes off of Daddy or that gun. “What do you think happened, Jacob? Why do you think these two are piled up over there on the couch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, sir. I don’t reckon I do.”

  “You don’t reckon you do.” Daddy smirked and sort of chuckled under his breath. “You don’t reckon you do. My own fucking flesh and blood, my own fucking son, and you don’t reckon you do!” In an instant Daddy had slid the pistol into the back of his sweatpants and was straddling me. His hands settled around my neck and squeezed so hard that in the first seconds I knew I was dying. There was no gradual rise into choking. I knew he was going to kill me. I was drowning in his hands, and the lights in the room were changing. I tried to breathe but there was nothing. I searched as hard as I could for air and there was nothing, and I knew I wouldn’t last a second more, and just before it all went black, Jeremy rose out of the corner of my eye.

  Daddy was off me and had the gun back out in one clean motion, and he hammered the side of the pistol into Jeremy’s face, sent his skinny frame flying and falling limp beside his brother. Gerald started to rise again and Daddy yanked the slide back, pulled the trigger just as the hammer set. BOOM!

  The shot ripped apart music still blaring from speakers and my ears rang as I coughed for breath. My eyes jumped to where Gerald had sat, and as my vision cleared, I was sure I’d find a mess in that first moment of clarity. I was certain there would be an entry hole .45 inches wide in Gerald’s forehead, a splash of color on the picture that hung behind the couch, pieces of brain spread like bits of ground sausage on the hardwood, but there wasn’t. There was a hole exactly .45 inches wide in the wall just to the right of where Gerald’s head had risen.

  We held there silent as prayer when Daddy walked into the kitchen. None of us moved an inch while Daddy turned up a bottle of bourbon and breathed through bubbles. He set the bottle down calmly on the kitchen table and ran his forearm across his mouth to dry what spilt. Daddy pulled a crumpled soft pack of smokes from the pocket of his sweatpants and flipped a Winston into his lips. He lit the cigarette and returned.

  “Now I’m done with the bullshit.” That animal look about him had sobered and Daddy was back to that crazy sort of calmness I knew well, a part of him that I honestly feared more than rage. “Y’all are family. Y’all are all I’ve got in this world. But I want y’all to understand one thing. Nobody says another goddamn word until I’m finished talking. You got that?”

  No one nodded. No one moved. No one said a fucking word.

  “We’ve already been talking, Jacob, but I reckon I’m going to have to back up a bit to get you up to speed.”

  Daddy walked over to the record player, lifted the arm, and set the needle into a line that never stopped spinning. He started the record over and the first notes of “For the Sake of the Song” started crackling and popping through the speakers. Daddy cranked the volume knob a little higher and Townes’s melancholic voice rose.

  “You see, there was this family, Jacob, and this family had a dog that had a tendency to go crazy on a scent. The family had got this old hound from one of those shelters, I guess, a stray that must’ve never done much good running bear. Now, this dog still had the hunt bred into him. Wasn’t ever much of a family kind of dog. Anyhow, this dog caught a smell that suited him and those fucking eyes lit up and before anybody in the house could even know to holler, ‘Sit,’ that dog was off. And so here this stupid-ass dog goes trampling off in the woods and hunting down a smell that took him miles from that yard.

  “Well, a little while later the family gets to missing that old dog pretty bad, and they go to calling and calling but never hear a yelp. It’s sometime early morning and the wife gets to nagging at the husband that he better go looking for the dog, and as husbands are prone to do, that dumb motherfucker listened.

  “Now, there’s a dog still trampling off through the woods, and there’s a man knowing good and well that if he don’t find that dog, he’s not going to get a lick of pussy anytime soon. That thought never leaves this man’s head as he’s trudging through the woods, stepping over rattlesnake dens and everything else just for the chance that he might get some ass if he can track down that dog. That thought just kept eating at him and eating at him and driving him further and further from home until all of a sudden he gets to this clearing, a big ol’ sloping hill scattered with rocks the size of Volkswagens, and he hears a single bark cut across open air.

  “I bet his dick got hard just as soon as that bark tickled his eardrums, so he tore up that hill ready to grab that fucking hound by the collar and drag his ass back miles through thick woods just for a chance at pussy his wife would probably end up teasing him with anyways. Well, as this man gets up the hill he finds that old hound nestled up next to a half-naked man wrapped tight around one of those rocks. There’s a smell about that body after a few days and the man thinks he just might get sick, but he leans down there anyhow and gets to looking past all those burns and all that blood and he hears something. You know what he hears, Jacob? He hears him breathing.”

  Daddy took the gun and scratched at an itch on his temple with the holey end. He took a real deep breath, rocked his head back, and closed his eyes for a second or two before they settled into me. “He was fucking breathing, Jacob.”

  A heaviness clinched down around my whole body, a heaviness like I was in a vacuum, and as the magnitude of what my father had said set in, I was choking again. I tried to breathe but couldn’t, only Daddy’s hands were still right there hanging by his sides. I felt like I was going to be sick, and then, out of nowhere, this numbness came over me and it was as if my body was still sitting in that chair, but my eyes had floated off for a better view. I could see the whole room, the Cabe brothers and me sitting there while Daddy stood over us with the pistol. I was floating even higher now, and it was a calming sort of feeling the further I got away. As I rose, the rubber band started stretching thin the further I went, until there was no more give to be given and that rubber band snapped and I shot back into myself, all of that reality driven home that at barely eighteen years old, I was as good as dead, and I threw up all over my lap.

  Daddy looked down at me with a disgusted sneer wiped across his face.

  “Now, I don’t have to tell any of you how serious this is. I don’t have to tell you that the fact a man who was supposed to be buried two goddamn days ago is alive and breathing in a hospital bed tonight is a problem. Every single one of you knows that this is a big fucking problem. This is the type of mess that can’t be cleaned up, and there ain’t a goddamn thing any of us can do but sit back and wait for the story to unfold.

  “So there’s two things that could happen. Right now as we speak, that cranked-out son of a bitch is laid up in a hospital bed unconscious w
ith breathing machines doing most of the work to keep him tied to this world. Any minute that son of a bitch could flatline, and aside from a few John Laws trying to figure out what the fuck happened, we’d be in the clear. That’s one thing that could happen.

  “The other thing that could happen is that those doctors could keep him alive for days, weeks, months even, and one day in a split second that son of a bitch could wake up and when the words finally settle in his mouth and get to tasting good, he might just have a story to tell. It’s that story that presents the problem. It’s that goddamn story that gets every single one of us locked up for the rest of our fucking lives. At my age and where I’m at in life, that’s the kind of thing that I just couldn’t let happen.” Daddy stopped for a second and stared at that pistol as he turned it back and forth in the light. “At my age, I reckon I’d just blow my fucking brains out in the trees somewhere and let the crows have a taste. But for y’all’s sake, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. For y’all’s sake, let’s hope that son of a bitch keels over.”

  Daddy walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He laid the pistol on the tabletop and slid the bottle of bourbon into his chest. His dark hair was slicked and wetted with sweat, and his jaw seemed to flex with every beat of his heart. He pulled the cork and took a long swig, washed that rotgut around in his mouth for a moment, and swallowed. There wasn’t another word spoken. “Don’t You Take It Too Bad” bled into “Colorado Girl” on the Townes album, and when the song finished out, someone would have to turn to Side B.

  Daddy was staring into the bottle and scratching away at the tabletop with the tip of the pistol when the Cabe brothers eased from the couch and snuck for the door. There still wasn’t a word said, and the final refrain sounded from the speakers as the screen door creaked closed. The final crackles and pops of blank album slid away under the needle and the arm rose, pushed off to the side, and fell into the cradle. Silence.