by Tony D'Souza
"Don't fucking give them anything," Russell shouted at her.
"I thought you were my friend," Mason said. "You ain't my friend."
"Go fuck yourself," Russell said.
Mason barked at the girl, "Get all your fucking shit together. We're gonna go sell it."
Russell said, "All we got left is the goddamn TV. You want the goddamn TV?" He swung the golf club and smashed the TV.
It was then that I saw that time had slowed. Because only then did I notice that the dogs were going crazy, running around Russell's and Mason's legs with their tails between their legs and their shoulders hunched as though they expected to be hit. They were making awful crying sounds, too.
Mason said, "Give us our weed."
"It's gone."
"Give us something."
"Go fuck yourself."
Mason ran howling across the room. He swung the tire iron. Russell stepped back from it. Mason glanced over his shoulder at me as if saying Help me! I sprinted across the room and hit Russell in the face with the bat as hard as I could.
He dropped like a sack. Then Mason and I were whaling on him. Somewhere the girl was saying, "No! No! No! No! No!" I managed to stop myself. I grabbed Mason and stopped him, and we were both panting, and I had no fucking idea who we were.
The girl went to Russell's side and crouched down. She said to us, "Let's help him up." We took his arms and pulled him up. His eye was swollen and his mouth was welling blood. He was stunned, swaying. He lifted his hand to explore the damage to his mouth. I could see the blood all over his teeth.
"Okay," Russell said in a normal voice.
"We want our fucking money," Mason said.
"Okay." Russell nodded. "I'll take you to an ATM."
The girl said, "I'm not going anywhere."
Mason grabbed her hard by her upper arm, shook her. He said, "Fuck yeah, you are! You spent our money, too."
"What the fuck, Russell? What the fuck, Russell?" the girl screamed at him, as if it was all his fault. But she was letting Mason hold her arm, wasn't fighting him at all.
"Gotta get my wallet," Russell said. We followed him into the bedroom, Mason yanking the girl along. Russell found his wallet on the dresser in the dark, and we all went out the window one by one. "Landlord changed the deadbolts," Russell said as he climbed down.
Mason said, "You stole our money and couldn't pay your rent? You're a fucking dumbass."
We went up the street, I pushed the clicker for the 300. We all got in, Mason and Russell in back, the girl up front beside me. I had the baseball bat between my legs. I started driving. At the corner, I said, "Which way?"
Russell said, "Left."
At the ATM, we sat in the car with the girl and watched Russell stand under the security light and push the buttons on the machine. He looked off into the night while he waited, then took his money. When he was in the car again, he said, "It's two hundred. It's all I have."
"You think I believe that?" Mason said.
The girl said without turning around, "It's true. That's all that's left."
Mason said, "Then we're going to your fucking mother's."
Mason gave me directions in a calm voice and we drove onto the highway. Everyone was quiet. We crossed the water, got on the eastbound 10, drove awhile. Mason told me to take the next exit. There was a sign for a wildlife refuge, sandhill cranes. We crossed over the interstate and turned northbound on a dark country road. Russell said, "Can I smoke?"
Nobody said anything, and I realized he was asking me because it was my car. I said, "Yeah, you can smoke."
"Got a cigarette?"
"Jesus Christ," Mason said. I heard him rummaging around and then I heard the flick of a lighter.
I said, "What are we going to do at his mother's?"
We drove along and nobody said anything.
Russell said, "Gotta pee."
We drove along. It was dark.
Russell said, "Gotta pee like a fucking horse."
"Me, too," I said back to Mason.
We drove along. Mason said, "Fuck it, turn here," and I turned onto a dirt track into the woods, the headlights playing over the trunks of trees. The car banged up and down over stones in the dirt, and there was nowhere to stop. As we went deeper into the woods, the redhead said, "Where we going?"
Nobody said anything.
She said louder, "Where we going?"
Mason said, "Shut the fuck up, LaJane!"
The dirt track opened onto a field with the moon hanging over it. The plants at the field's edge, lit by the headlights, were young, knee-high. "Park," Mason said, and I did, turned off the car and the headlights. Once my eyes adjusted, I saw how big and flat the field was. The silver moonlight dappled the plants and made the field look like the sea; the backlit clouds drifting across the sky looked like ice floes. We all got out, except for the girl. I heard crickets. "What kind of crop is this?" I said as I walked off, unzipped.
Russell said, "Cotton."
"Pop the trunk," Mason said, and I pressed the button on the clicker in my pocket and started peeing. The car beeped behind me in response. Russell ambled off, smoking his cigarette. He wasn't peeing. I heard the tire iron thump against the bottom of the trunk. Then Mason walked by me with the samurai sword in his hands. The moonlight glinted on the blade; there was nothing I could do. Mason walked up to Russell and said, "You gonna apologize to me?"
Russell turned around. Before he could say anything, Mason drew back, plunged the sword all the way into Russell's belly. I'd never seen anything happen like that. Mason pulled out the sword and started slashing Russell's body as he went down. Then Mason was sticking the blade into Russell's back over and over.
I heard a car door open behind me, turned and saw the girl sprint from the car and into the cotton. Mason saw her, gave chase. She was running, he was right behind her, and they made it a good long way into the field together under the moon. Then Mason swung the sword and clipped her on the side of the head and she tumbled down. He started swinging that sword on her like he was chopping wood.
On the ground where he lay, Russell lowed like some kind of ancient species of cattle. It was the worst sound I'd ever heard. Then he was wheezing like a bellows. Then he wasn't making any sound at all.
Mason walked toward me through the field from that long way off, the sword dangling from his hand. He looked like a field hand returning home from work. He stopped out there, lit a cigarette, and then started walking toward me again. He was breathing heavily when he threw the sword at my feet.
"You kill that girl?"
He didn't say anything.
"Why'd you kill that girl?"
He turned and looked out at the field. Everything was quiet, sickening.
Mason held a cigarette out to me from his pack. I watched my shaking fingers take it. He lit it, said, "You gonna tell?"
I couldn't speak.
"James? James? You gonna tell?" He shouted, "What about my family? What about my kid?"
I'd been thinking, Don't panic, don't panic. Now I was thinking, Can I turn him in?
Mason said, "You did this, too."
"No I didn't!"
"You were standing right here. You didn't even try to stop me."
"Stop you?"
We were quiet. Then Mason said, "We have to get them out of here. Someone'll come and find them."
Then he said, "James!"
I shook my head. I said, "How the fuck are we going to get them out of here?"
"In the car."
"We can't put them in the car."
We smoked. I said, "I'm leaving. You're turning yourself in."
"No way."
"I'm not getting in trouble for this. I didn't have anything to do with it."
"Yes, you did!"
In a minute, I said, "Where could we even take them?"
"We'll dump them in a lake."
"What lake?"
We smoked some more. I looked at the moonlight on the plants, then at the moon. I
was going to vomit. What could I do? I had to save my life. I opened the door of the car, grabbed one of my phones out of the glove compartment. I called Eric Deveny. What if he didn't answer? What if he did?
Eric Deveny was at a loud party. He said through the phone, "Why you calling so late? You busted?"
"No, no. Nothing like that."
"James?"
"I need your help. I've got a huge fucking mess on my hands."
"Calm down!"
I took a deep breath. "Something happened, Eric. I can't say it on the phone."
Eric was silent. I heard the noise of the party receding as he left it. If he didn't say anything, I had no idea what to do. Then he said, "What happened?"
"The guy who ripped me off? Something went down."
"He do something to you?"
"No, no. The other way around."
"The other way around?"
"It's over."
He was silent. Then he said, "It's over?"
"Yeah."
"What's over?"
"The guy."
"The guy's over?"
"Yeah."
"For real?"
"Yeah, for real. There's two of them."
"Two of them?" He was silent. I couldn't hear the party anymore. Then he said, "Anyone see you?"
"No, nobody saw."
He was quiet for second. He said, "Why didn't you just call me and let me do it?" Then, "Where are you? Can you get the mess here without anyone seeing?"
"I'm in Biloxi. I fucking have to."
"Get it here, I'll help you. It's going to cost you. You're going to have to give that weight to me. Don't come to my house. I'll text you an address. Wait there when you get there, then don't do anything. Don't call this phone again. You'd better not fuck this up."
I grabbed the duffel bag, tossed it in the backseat. My hands became bathed in blood as Mason and I wrestled Russell's heavy body into the trunk. Then we walked out into the cotton field. At first we couldn't find her, had to hunt all around. Could she have gotten away? Then we found her. She was lying face-down in the plants like she was sleeping. But she wasn't sleeping. She was almost weightless when we carried her out of the field. We put her in the trunk on top of Russell, shut the lid on them. Mason handed me the bloody sword. I opened the trunk, averted my eyes, threw it in.
"We have to pick up all these cigarette butts," I said.
We started doing that. Then I said, "Forget it. We have to get out of here."
I drove us back out to the road with the headlights off. I was trembling. "If we get pulled over, you did it. You tell them you were going to kill me, that you made me drive."
"Fine."
I turned on the headlights, drove us back to Biloxi. The baseball bat was beside me; I chucked it out the window on the way. Mason smoked, didn't say anything. When we arrived at his car, he started to climb out. "What are you doing?" I said.
"I can't go with you."
"I can't do this by myself!"
We sat there saying nothing. There was no one around. It was the middle of the night. We couldn't sit there forever. Mason opened the door again. He said, "Please let me go. Please let me go. You know you can do it."
What could I say? I said, "Get the fuck out of my car."
I put the 300 in gear. Then I stopped, powered down the passenger window. I said, "Throw that fucking sword away." I popped the trunk, Mason took out the sword, put it in his car. Then I pulled away. Then I stopped, reversed back. I powered down the window. I said, "You have to let those dogs out. You have to be careful."
"Okay."
"What the fuck is wrong with you? What if I get caught out there?"
I got on the road. Mason had killed two people. There were two dead bodies and weed in my car. I knew I couldn't think of that.
My phone lit up. It was a text, directions. I drove through the night. My mind was in this dead zone. The stripes of the roadway flashed in the headlights and I was the only car on the road. Every inch of the way I knew that my life was at stake.
I found the place at first light. There was a two-car garage on a cement slab in the woods with a big pond beside it. The garage was yellow. No one was there. Crows and starlings were flying around everywhere. There was blood on the steering wheel, dried blood all over my hands, bloody handprints on the dashboard where Mason had touched it. I lay in the backseat of the car with my jacket tight around me, looking at the tops of the pine trees waving in the wind.
Someone rapped on the window and startled me. It was Eric Deveny and his bearded brother. I got out of the car, crammed my hands deep in my jacket pockets. Nearby was Eric's Mercedes, a white utility truck parked beside it. The brother walked to the garage, unlocked the overhead door, and yanked it open. I could see work benches and tools inside. Eric was dressed in white. He said to me, "You all right?"
"No."
"Show me."
I popped open the trunk. Eric looked inside. He bit his knuckle and his eyes lit up. He said, "Holy shit! Hand-to-fucking-hand."
I gave him the duffel bag of weed, which was his payment, and took a walk along the pond. I stared at the trees reflected in the water and wondered if there were any fish in it. Time passed. I heard a generator come to life behind me. Then I heard a Skilsaw start up in the garage. I crouched and washed my hands at the water's edge, walked along, crouched, and washed my face. In the distance I saw Eric in his white clothing striding around the pond toward me, floating like a specter. He was smiling when he reached me, and he said, "You okay?" I shook my head. He asked me, "How much did they take from you?" I said, "Not much."
"Did you do that to them?"
"It wasn't me. It was a guy I work with."
"But were you there?"
"I was there."
"Did you plan it?"
"No."
"Where did it happen?"
"In a cotton field."
"And nobody saw?"
I shook my head.
"If your guy talks, you're fucked," he said. "So maybe you should bring him here, too. Somehow that girl was still breathing. Don't worry, she isn't anymore." He put his arm around me and led me back to the garage. "It's okay. It happens. Give it a couple days. Then don't think about it again."
When we reached the garage, I could see parts of Russell's and LaJane's bodies on the floor, red and meaty where they had been cut by the saw. The 300 was parked outside, dripping because Eric's brother had washed it out with a hose they had.
Eric smiled and said, "You okay to drive?" He laughed and shook his head. "I know what you're feeling, believe me. It's fucking heady, isn't it?"
I got in the car, started it, put it in reverse. Then Eric and his brother trotted up to the window. His brother's clothes were covered in blood like a butcher's. When I powered down the window, they were laughing. Eric's brother was holding something out to me on his bloody palm. It was a tiny curled finger with a red-painted fingernail on it. The brother said, "You want it, dude? You earned it." I was gagging as I reversed past the Mercedes and all the way through the trees to the road.
Kate, Romana, and I flew to Rome the next day. It was hot there. Everywhere we went, I saw statues and paintings, and all of the statues and paintings were dead bodies. Kate kept asking me, "What the hell's the matter with you?" and I kept saying, "Nothing" or "I don't feel good, Kate." "Well," she kept saying back, "you're ruining my fucking trip." Kate bought a lot of clothes with the money we'd brought with us in Romana's diaper, and in Milan Kate shopped all day for leather boots, trying on dozens of them in a dozen different stores before buying three pairs. "Why do you need three pairs?" I asked. She said, "It's my trip, isn't it? Mind your own business."
I expected men to come up to me with guns drawn, to knock on the door of our hotel room and arrest me. But nobody came up to me and nobody knocked on our door. After Milan, Kate made me drive us to the Alps, and then to Lake Como. The mountains were beautiful, the lake was beautiful, and for the three days and two nights we had there
, I calmed down. As we walked along the lake, Kate asked again and again, "Do you love me?" I answered her every time, "Of course I love you."
I didn't want to go back, and I couldn't go back, and I knew I could not tell Kate. At passport control in D.C., I knew they'd surround me, take me into custody, but the bored immigration officer stamped my passport and said, "Welcome home." When the taxi dropped us off at Siesta Key, our house was waiting for us like we had never left.
I turned on the news. I'd been checking the news every day, many times a day. There was never any news. When I called Mason, he said, "Nothing's happened. Nobody knows. I'm fucking sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. It's all my fault. You didn't have anything to do with it. I shouldn't have made you come. I'm the one who's crazy. I'm the one who has to live with it. Did you tell Kate? Tell me you didn't tell Kate."
I did not want to do this anymore. I e-mailed all the editors I had ever worked with and asked them if they could use any travel articles about Italy. Most of the e-mails bounced back, because those editors had lost their jobs by now. The only one I received read, "Not in the budget. Good luck, sorry."
Five days later, I was parked in the lot outside Mason's apartment building with a duffel bag full of weed. I sat there for a long time. I did not want to go up there, and I did not want to go up there, and I did not want to go up there. And then I went up there. We had a cigarette together on his porch, and he said, "Everyone thinks they ran away together. We weren't the only people they owed money. Nobody is searching for them and nobody knows. I'll understand if you don't want to be my friend anymore."
We had another cigarette. I said, "Did you let those dogs out?"
He said, "Yeah, I carried them out that window and shooed them away."
"Did you take the tags off of them first?"
"Yeah, I took off the tags."
"What did you do with the tags?"
"I threw them away at a gas station."
"What did you do with the sword?"
"I threw it in Lake Pontchartrain."