by David Joy
I watched her as she leaned over him and brushed his hair with her fingers so that it lay in a part across his head. I couldn’t say a word. Seeing her there and knowing what had been done to her son made me feel sick inside. Daddy had thought that type of shit would harden a man, but all it had done to me was poke at all those places where I’d always been soft.
She ran her hand across his face where all of that skin stretched and curled. Then she pulled the sheet up around him and folded it back just a touch like she was tucking in a child. “It’d take an awfully bad man to do this to one of God’s children. An awfully bad man.” She turned back to me and scowled. “I just hope they’re ready for what they’ve got coming. Whether it’s in a courtroom or at the right hand of God, they’ll have to answer for what they’ve done.”
I’d stayed calm the entire time I worked my way through that hospital. I’d played everything perfect to get into that room. But looking at him lying there and listening to her talk about her son, I was absolutely terrified. She didn’t know it, but I was already answering for what I’d done. I was answering every day of my life, every minute I slept. The things I had seen could not be unseen. The things I saw haunted me.
“I know you, boy.” Robbie’s mother walked up and stood directly in front of me. She tilted her head and looked up so as to get the best look her old eyes could piece together.
“No, ma’am. I don’t think we know each other.”
“Yeah.” She drug out that word like the last note of a song. “You’re Charlie McNeely’s boy, ain’t you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“There’s no hiding who you belong to. You’re the spitting image of him.”
I could hear the bull’s footsteps clapping their way back down the hall, and it wouldn’t be long before that line of questioning came from both sides, and I didn’t have an answer for any of it. I backpedaled away from her and through the doorway, out into the hall where all of those white lights shined so bright.
“Where are you going, boy?” Robbie’s mother walked toward the door. “Ain’t you going to at least tell me your name?”
The footsteps were getting close to turning the corner, and Robbie’s mother wasn’t but a step away from coming into the hall. I was tingling all over, and my hands were sweating something horrible. I was feeling like a rabbit again, a rabbit that had done let them get too close and had to run, so I did. “The man who looks back gets caught,” Daddy’d said, so I didn’t look back. I didn’t look back as I tore down that hallway, ran past that counter and that pretty little Cherokee girl, and into that dim hallway where the stairwell came up on the left. I didn’t look back when I jumped those first two flights of steps one right after the other, my knees damn near exploding like Black Cat firecrackers when I smacked down out of the air. I didn’t look back when I made it into that lobby and ran through all of those doctors and nurses in funny-patterned scrubs and past that aquarium with all of those colorful fish and through that heavy fan and those electric sliding glass doors. Even when the truck was running, and I was mashing the gas and reaching for the headlights, I didn’t look back, not for one fucking second. No, I didn’t look back in that rearview until I’d crossed into Jackson County, and even then it was hard, expecting sure as shit those blue lights would flash and there I’d be. But they didn’t come for me that night. I didn’t look back, and I didn’t get caught. Daddy’d been right about that.
30.
No one had been hired to clean the blood from the walls after the coroner loaded up Mama and took her off for burning. All of that mess was still just as thick as it had been the day I saw it, and I kept my eyes closed when I pulled the door shut to seal the room off. There was nothing nice about staying there, but it beat sweaty sleep in the cab of my pickup so I’d slept there every night since her funeral. The storm front that blew into the mountains four nights back made it impossible to sleep in the bed of my truck, so I slept in Mama’s house on the ratty couch by the front door.
Inside the house smelled of mildew, the smell strengthening with the doors shut. Mold fuzzed from the cracks between pine planks along the walls, and that smell had eaten at my nose each night. Straight-line winds sent the jack pines in the yard to flapping, and those thin trees cast shadows that moved like fingers through the house. The walls tended to move with those shadows, swaying and teetering and the crossbeams creaking loudly like I was living out my days on some rickety ship. To watch it gave me motion sickness, so I closed my eyes and listened to heavy rain pelt the tin roof, the sound of torn plastic ripping a bit further from the windows each time the wind howled.
I hadn’t seen Maggie since the night we fogged the windows of my pickup, but we talked for at least an hour every night, texted each other till the tips of our fingers callused. She’d send me pictures of her, dozens and dozens of pictures, and there was never a moment when I tired from opening the next. She was the one bit of light I had, and though the light had always been something I refused to notice, Maggie was slowly becoming the one thing that kept me moving forward. We were both busy, but both moving forward. I was trying to take care of my end of the promise, and she spent most nights filling boxes with things she wanted to take with her, throwing out the things she didn’t. Move-in day was a month and a half away, and she’d leave this mountain for good.
I’d yet to tell her I planned to go with her, but my mind was made up. Maggie was the sole reason I’d go through with what Daddy asked. When he paid me off for doing it, I’d take that cash and foot the bill for Maggie’s first semester, head east with her, and start building a life together if she’d let me. It’d make it easier on Robbie’s mama too. Maybe she’d be able to sleep when it was all said and done. At least that’s what I told myself.
I’d already talked to Maggie once that night while I ate room-temperature beans and franks for supper from a dented can I’d found in Mama’s cabinets. Everything was set from Maggie’s end. She’d faxed over the paperwork, committed to Wilmington, registered for classes, and was waiting on her room assignment. Now the only thing left was to cut a check, and that rested on me. The check had to clear by July 15 to make sure her schedule held. When the job was done, I’d give her the cash and have her get a cashier’s check from the bank. If her parents questioned where the money came from, then fuck them. So far she hadn’t mentioned them asking. Either way, it was their fault she didn’t have the money. It was their fault their daughter’s future rested in my hands.
I called her again hoping I might catch her just before she fell asleep. As the phone rang, I told myself that I’d tell her this time around. I’d tell her exactly how I felt about her and tell her I’d follow her east to give us a good go at sticking together and tell her all of those things that I hoped she wanted to hear, but the phone rang and rang and she never answered. I texted, “I love you,” but she’d already fallen into dreams.
—
THE THIN WINDOWPANE rattled against the aluminum frame, a loud banging outside that woke me out of a nightmare I was having about being interrogated for the murder of Robbie Douglas. The dream made little sense. I was tied to a chair in the center of a dark room, only a single lit bulb hanging from the ceiling above me, and a detective, one of those suit-wearing bulls with a tanned leather shoulder holster and a tie tacked to a dress shirt, circled me. He yelled out questions, his spit speckling my face, and just when an answer came to me, just when I found a lie that might get me off, he’d rack me in the top of the head with a Maglite. Bang, bang, bang! He kept circling and screaming those questions, and just as the words came to my mouth—bang, bang, bang! I was still trying my damnedest to speak when the banging woke me and my eyes began to settle to daylight.
The rain and wind had finally stopped and pale yellow sunlight shone through what foggy mildewed plastic still held to the window. A dark shadow moved on the porch, but it took my eyes a while to adjust and see who stood there. I scrubbed the cru
sts from the corners of my eyes and sat up on the couch. Lieutenant Rogers leaned over a bit to peek through a section of glass where the plastic had torn away.
“You alive in there?”
I walked to the front door, undid the dead bolt, and swung that rotted table of wood agape on creaky hinges. Rogers opened the screen door, came inside, and let the screen smack closed behind him. I was still in my boxers, but Rogers was dressed for a day in the office. He wore a khaki-colored polo shirt and a loose-fitting pair of dark green cargo pants. His gun was holstered and at his side.
“You must’ve been sleeping sound in here, son. I’ve been banging on that window for ten minutes. I’d just about decided to head down the mountain.”
I peered outside to where Rogers’s Expedition was parked right up to the back bumper of my pickup. The fog left behind by days of rain had yet to burn off. “What time is it?”
“A little late for some, a little early for others,” Rogers said as he walked past me and plopped down on the sofa where I’d slept. He glanced up at me, and I leaned back and stretched, yawned till my lungs couldn’t hold any more air. “Judging by the way you’re looking, I’d say you fall into the latter.”
“That still doesn’t answer what time it is.” I walked toward the kitchen and he answered just before I crossed through the doorway.
“Half past seven.”
Mama had little in the refrigerator or cupboard, but she kept two big red cans of coffee, and I’d been drinking it like water. I turned the sink on and waited for the air to push through the lines and clear water to run, held a steel kettle beneath the faucet and filled it to the brim. “Going to make some coffee if you want a cup.”
“I’ll take it black,” Rogers hollered from the living room.
I put the kettle on the stove, turned the knob so the eye burned red, and headed back to the couch where Rogers sat. The bag of Bugler rested against a tarnished brass lamp on the table by the couch. I shook a tangled mess of tobacco from the pouch into a creased 1.5 and twisted up my morning smoke.
“Rolling your own, huh?”
“Ain’t got money to buy a pack.”
“Here.” Rogers reached into the side pocket of his cargo pants and tossed an unopened pack of Lucky Strikes down the couch. “Have those.” He pulled a cigarette from an open pack and put it between his teeth.
We smoked those first cigarettes together while the sun rose behind trees and burned the fog from the ground. Rogers hadn’t said why he was there, but I imagined he’d seen my truck in the drive and wanted to check on me. He was loyal to my father, but he didn’t seem to hold that same meanness in his heart. That blend of toughness and compassion was what I admired. I liked to think of myself in the same way, that my softness wasn’t really softness but rather some sort of innate compassion, the type of humanity that Daddy never had. There was a lot more to admire about a man who could handle whatever the world threw without flinching and still be standing there to help someone else. In a lot of ways, he felt more like a father than Daddy ever did. Neither of us spoke. We just sat there and watched that morning sun come up.
The kettle whistled from the stovetop, and I went into the kitchen to finish the coffee. Mama hadn’t kept a real coffeemaker, so I just poured the boiling water into a tall mason jar and scooped in a few spoonsful of grounds. I’d done my best to swirl those grounds down into the water with a long wooden spoon, but the cups I carried back still had grains swirling on top of the coffee like fine bits of pepper. Some of the grounds washed up and stuck on the rim where the coffee swashed, but most of it came together in islands that rocked back and forth when I set the cups down on the table.
“Thank you, Jacob.” Rogers lifted his cup and blew steam from the surface. It was still piping hot when he held it to his mouth, took a sip, and let out a long sigh.
I smacked the Lucky Strikes against my palm to pack the tobacco down, tore off the cellophane, and lit my second smoke of the day. The coffee was strong and bitter and tasted old, no telling how long it had grown stale in the cupboard.
“Guess you’re probably wondering why I stopped by, Jacob.”
“A little, I guess.”
“Thing is you said something the other night that’s been eating at me ever since.” Rogers situated himself on the couch so that his body faced me and he could look me square. “You said something about a Bible that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind.”
“I was just hot-headed.” I ashed the cigarette into an empty glass. “Ain’t like me to talk.”
“No, no, I think you’re misunderstanding me. I didn’t come here to growl about what you said. I came here to get you to clarify.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean?”
“I mean, I want you to tell me about that Bible you were so fixed on back yonder.” Rogers turned and nodded back down the hall toward Mama’s bedroom.
“I just said there was one of those Bibles in there, one of those little pocket Bibles that Daddy’s known to leave, and that was one of the ways I knew he had something to do with it.”
“Yeah, that’s what I wanted you to tell me about.” Rogers lit another cigarette just as I mashed mine out. “I found that Bible back there just like you said I would, but what exactly did you mean when you said he was known to leave them?” He talked with the cigarette jumping around in his mouth while he rummaged through his pockets for his Zippo.
“Come on now. You’ve known my father for as far back as I can remember. You mean to tell me you ain’t ever heard that?”
“Heard what?”
“You’ve got to be full of shit, Rogers. There’s no fucking way you’ve never heard those stories.”
“Now, I want you to think about something, Jacob. What is it your daddy pays me to do?”
“Keep an eye out, I guess.”
“Exactly. We ain’t friends, and never have been. I don’t know anything more than what he’s told me. I keep an ear out for anything in the office, let him know of any type of federal shit that might be coming down the pipe, and try my damnedest to keep eyes off of him. That’s it. That’s all I do for him. So what about those Bibles?”
“I’d always heard he left them on the bodies.”
“No, I hadn’t ever heard that, but I don’t see why that surprises you. I mean, think about it. How often does your daddy get his hands dirty anymore?”
“Seldom.”
“And how often do bodies show up around here?”
“Not often.”
“Exactly. Now, I’ve heard stories about the type of shit he was known to do back in his day, but I ain’t ever heard a thing about Bibles. No, I never heard anything like that.” Rogers rolled up from the couch and rested his arms over his legs. He smoked on that Lucky Strike and stared to someplace out in the yard like he was really trying to get a good look. He didn’t say anything else.
Before Robbie Douglas, there hadn’t been anything close to a body being found in a long time. If something did need done, Daddy had folks to do it. Besides that, the stories of what he was capable of kept most people in line. I finished my cup of coffee and took the mug back into the kitchen for a refill. The mason jar still held a cup or two, the dark liquid just warm now, with steam beading back into water on the sides of the glass. “Want another cup?”
“I think I’m good.”
When I walked back into the living room, Rogers stood in the open doorway and stared through the screen door out into the crowded lot of jack pines. I seemed to startle him when I came back into the room, and he turned. He looked me up and down like he didn’t expect me to be there, like I was a spook or something, and waited for me to sit back on the couch before closing the main door and joining me there.
“You ever know that I had a brother, Jacob?”
“No, I don’t reckon I ever knew that about you.”
“Well, I
did. Had a little brother named Joe, and he was a mean little shit.” Rogers blew a short laugh from his nose and squinted his eyes while he remembered. “Even when we were little, he had this air about him like he knew he was tougher than I’d ever thought about being. I was always a good bit bigger than him but that never seemed to matter. He just had that fight in him, you know?”
I nodded and took a long swallow of warm coffee, lit another cigarette, and listened to Rogers tell his story.
“Well, when we got older he got into some pretty rough shit and wasn’t a one of us could tell him nothing. Mama’d get a call that he was in jail, I’d go get him out, and we’d settle him down for a week or so, give him a place to stay. I was working at the concrete plant back then and didn’t have much time to keep an eye on him. Then one morning we’d wake up and he’d be gone. Never so much as good-bye.” Rogers scrunched his eyes until they were almost closed, but what little bit of white showed glassy as quartz. “One morning we got a call that they’d found him outside of Burrell’s, that little old honky-tonk that used to sit across the state line, and he’d been stabbed to death. There were cuts all over his hands where he’d fought, but most of it had caught him where it mattered. The law down there never found who did it. It never even seemed like they looked.”