by Lee Durkee
“Where’d you get them fine boots at?” he asked.
“Some recruiter. From Tex-ass. Them Texas boys don’t give up easy. I ain’t going to Texas. Fuck Texas.”
Noel leaned across the gear lever and ran his fingers against the boot scales. They felt like something still alive.
“Virgin snakeskin,” Matt reported. “Exact same kind Tom Landry wears.”
“Virgin snakeskin? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Matt hesitated. “Snake that’s never been fucked.”
“How can they tell that?”
Matt pouted and stared straight ahead.
Noel said, “Matt, this is the last time I’m asking you nice.”
“I told you. Rat poison.”
“Well, at least Ben’ll be happy to see us.”
“That’s kinda a long shot, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“Us and Ben in the same place?”
Pasquale’s was now a Chinese restaurant called Hop Sing’s. A police car was parked in front of it. Noel pulled into an empty slot near the liquor store next door.
“You got an ID?” he asked Matt.
“Don’t need one. I’m like a movie star around here.”
As soon as Matt stepped outside, a German shepherd in the back of the police car began to growl and scrape one paw against the window. Matt went inside the liquor store, and Noel sat in the Mustang diagnosing his symptoms. He considered having a quick look inside the Chinese restaurant, but the idea of it made him sad. A few minutes later Matt returned outside, opening a pack of Kools. A brown bag was wedged under his arm. Instantly the German shepherd began to snarl and to scrape its teeth against the glass. Matt halted. He shook his head, like someone reprimanding a child, then strolled over to the police car and knelt beside the window and pressed his face against the glass. The shepherd hurled itself forward, hitting the window so hard that Matt fell over backward. He stood, grinned, then fished out a cigarette and began to blow smoke against the window.
The German shepherd was still attacking the window when Matt walked back to the Mustang. Noel forced himself to drive away slowly. In the rearview, the police car was swaying, like there were lovers inside it. He let a mile pass before he began screaming at his brother. What he screamed made little sense, at least to Matt. He screamed for a long time about cops and prison and black cons and about how he was through with all this bullshit.
Finally Noel calmed down and about five miles later Matt started calling out directions, saying he wanted to show Noel something real important.
“I’m not taking you anywhere until you tell me what kinda pill I took.” He stopped the car, this time on the shoulder of the highway. “I’ll break your damn throwing arm, Matt. Say I won’t.” Noel got outside and walked around the front of the car to stand just outside Matt’s open window. “C’mon. Get out.”
“Can’t you even tell yet?”
“It feels like my damn hair’s standing straight up.”
“Like it does on speed? Like on Black Mollies maybe?”
“Speed? I thought that was just for studying.”
Matt said hell no, he used speed for road games and doubleheaders. “Just like Pete Rose does.”
Noel got back inside the car and started driving again. Passing the bottle of George Dickel, they followed a thin highway between a field of cows and a field of soybeans. Noel asked how much time they had before the service started, but Matt assured him there was no hurry. “Those things go on forever, and besides, the real service is in the morning. That’s just the viewing today, that open-casket crap. Anyway, you know what I bet they do? I bet they nigger-rig Ben back together on purpose.”
“What are you talking about, Matt?”
“I bet they do, I bet they rig him back together on purpose. So that his friends see what happens when you drink and drive.”
“Drink and drive?”
“Fucken Rog is even having the wreck towed out to Ben’s school. They’re gonna stick a bottle of whiskey up on the dash, get one of those big cardboard tombstones up on the hood that say, don’t you be next.”
“Ben was drunk?”
Matt nodded severely. “Plowed. That’s what the sheriff told us. And when he told us that—you shoulda seen it, Noel—everybody looked straight at me, like I’d poured it down his throat. That’s why they had to give Rog that shot. Fucker chased me down the street with a baseball bat.”
The car had slowed to ten miles an hour, Noel’s chin almost hooked to the steering wheel. Noel made Matt repeat the whole story, and this time Matt explained that, on the day it had happened, Ben had called home from work to say he was going straight to Tracy’s. “He was hoping they’d get back together.”
“They broke up?”
“She did. Found her some other guy, I heard.”
Noel whistled. “Ben worshiped her.”
“No shit. You shoulda seen it too. After she broke up with him, it was like . . . it was like Ben turned into one of us.”
“I never even seen him drink a single beer.”
Matt did not comment on this, but then a moment later he yelled for Noel to pull over to the shoulder. They crossed the lane and skidded to a stop, and Matt grabbed the bottle and got outside and started walking away from the car over a flattened section of barbed wire into a fallow pasture. Sweating inside his black suit, Noel got out and followed. As soon as he noticed the tree, a thick blackjack oak, about fifteen yards off the road, he guessed what had happened there. The only tree in the pasture, the oak was scaled down to hardwood on the side facing the road. The exposed wood inside this scar was light gold and grooved, as if someone had started to carve a totem there. Matt reached the tree and lit another cigarette, then he tilted the flame from the Zippo against the scar. The silver Zippo had UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS inscribed on its side.
“Ben didn’t have any clothes on,” Matt whispered as Noel walked up. “When he hit the tree he was stark naked. That’s what everybody’s saying.”
The wide blue-yellow flame slithered up the wood.
“Do Mom and Rog know that?”
Matt clipped shut the lighter, shook out his fingers.
“I don’t think so. The sheriff never said nothing about it to us, it’s just what everybody else is saying.” He squatted down and built a small mound of twigs and leaves beneath the tree, then he tried to ignite the mound. After a minute he dropped the lighter and began sucking his fingers. The lighter kept burning in the dirt between the tree roots.
“Everybody’s saying Ben’s head got cut off in the wreck.”
“No, it didn’t,” Noel said.
“How do you know?”
“It just didn’t.”
“Well, everybody’s sure saying it did. Three different guys already asked me if it’s true.”
Noel cleared his throat and spat.
“People are always saying shit like that after a wreck. Saying his head got cut off or how they never found his foot or his dick or whatever. Next thing you know, they’ll be seeing his ghost on the road. Looking for its left nut or some such shit. It don’t mean nothing, Matt. Quit that, you’re wasting good whiskey. It ain’t high enough proof to set on fire.”
Matt quit sprinkling the whiskey onto the twigs.
“You know what else I heard? I heard it’s not the busting through the windshield that kills you. It’s like there’s this giant rubber band that yanks you back inside the car. And it’s the coming back in that fucks you up.”
An orange Ford pickup crossed over the highway and parked in front of the Mustang. The truck had two teenagers inside it. The moment it came to a halt, Matt quit trying to set the tree on fire and started picking up rocks. As soon as he had a good handful, he sprinted at the truck and hurled
the rocks so wildly that he fell forward into a somersault. The rocks pelted both vehicles but mostly the truck, which peeled out forward and then braked. By then Matt had vaulted to his feet and was giving chase. The truck kept staggering the distance between them, taunting Matt forward, but eventually it left him standing in the highway bent over and holding his sides. After a few minutes he straightened and marched back to the tree, where Noel was sitting in the shade and helping himself to more whiskey.
“No skid marks.” Matt’s suit was softened with orange dirt. “That’s the big deal here. That’s what all these yahoos are pouring out to see. That and to look for blood.” He picked up more rocks and bounced them one by one off the tree trunk. Then he gathered up another fistful and leaned back and sprayed the rocks straight up into the branches.
“Wither, motherfucker,” he shouted.
The rocks rained down on them and Noel covered the whiskey bottle with his arms.
They both pissed against the tree before leaving. Matt got to the car first and slid behind the wheel and said that he wanted to drive for a while, that it’d do him good to drive. Noel shrugged and got in the other side, but first he removed his suit coat and shook it out. About an eighth of a mile down the road, Matt stopped the car and fit the gearshift into reverse. Looking back over his shoulder, and placing his right arm behind Noel’s seat back, he pinned the accelerator to the floor. Noel yelled something, not any kind of word, then glanced at the speedometer, which of course read zero. He was grabbing for his seat belt when Matt stomped the brakes so hard that the car whipped around and left the road.
Noel was slammed into the heater. He landed cubbied on the floorboard in front of the seat. Staring up at the nest of red, green, and black wires, he kept waiting for his anger to catch up with him, but it never did. A storm of orange dust had filled the car. From down there Noel could barely see Matt, who had twisted around to stare out the back window. Noel climbed into the bucket seat and sat there as the orange dust thinned, sweeping away in patterns to reveal the scarred totem of the oak tree just two feet away from the car hood.
They continued staring in opposite directions, Noel forward, Matt backward.
When the dust had finally lifted off the highway, Matt coughed twice then cleared his throat and said, “I got your damn skid marks.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THEY LEFT THE CAR on a gravel road sectioned with cow guards and flanked to the east by a twelve-foot hurricane fence. Crimped to the fence were yellow and red warning signs. Yellow for no trespassing, red for guard dogs. Matt left his suit coat behind in the car and scaled the fence. Then Noel lobbed the bottle over to him and started climbing. From the top he could see off in the distance where rusted cars formed a margin along a green meadow and where black cows with white skulled faces stood grazing between the wrecks. He climbed down and caught up with Matt, who already had his head stuck inside the busted driver’s-side window of Ben’s devastated El Camino.
The brown car had been left crab-shaped by the wreck, its fender ends hooked like pincers around an invisible tree trunk. The windshield, or what was left of it, hung in strips. A canvas sneaker stained pink was wedged under the brake pedal. Next to the sneaker was a broken whiskey bottle held together mostly by the label. It was George Dickel too. Matt carefully removed the shards from the window then crawled inside onto the front seat. Rolling over onto his back, he began to kick the driver’s door open with the bottoms of his boots. This took about a dozen kicks before the door gave way groaningly. That done, he turned on his side to eject the cassette tape from the console. Matt studied it briefly then placed the tape in his mouth and began searching under the car seat.
“What was he listening to?” Noel asked from outside. He was looking anywhere but inside the car.
“Wild-Eyed Southern Boys,” Matt replied. “Full blast.”
In the center of the junkyard was a crane pointing up into the sky like a giant finger. The clouds moving behind it made the crane appear to be falling forward. Noel watched the crane as he tried to combine the music with the race toward the tree. From under the seat Matt pulled out a nest of clothing congealed together with blood. A pair of jeans twisted around a short-sleeved plaid shirt. Socks. Some briefs stained orangish black. He lifted the coil, holding it up scruffed like a puppy.
They both stared at the clothes until finally Noel said, “It don’t make no sense.”
Before getting out of the car, Matt sifted through the ashtray and found the better half of a joint. He did not act surprised at this discovery. There was blood-black under his fingernails and his hand was gray with ash when he passed the joint outside to Noel. They sat beside the car and smoked the joint without speaking, then Matt ate the roach and stood and started walking around the junkyard, gathering up loose pieces of newspaper and anything else that would burn. He made a bedding with the paper then sat cross-legged on the dirt and placed Ben’s clothes on top of the newspaper, the pink sneaker on top of the clothes, the cassette on top of the sneaker, then he lit the paper. The fire grew quickly. The cassette curled into itself and produced a black acrid fume. There was no wind, and the smoke rose as straight as a rope on a pulley.
They watched the flames for a while, then Noel picked up an old wiper blade and began prodding the fire. He said, “You got him drunk, didn’t you? His first time?”
Dogs were baying off in the distance. At least Noel thought it was dogs. He couldn’t tell for sure. Maybe it was just dogs inside his head. Matt was holding both hands over the dying fire. When he splayed his hands, the pooled smoke feathered up between his fingers.
“Yeah,” Matt said softly.
“Hell, I got you drunk the first time.”
“Yeah,” Matt said again exactly the same way.
“So it’s just as much me as you.” Noel listened to the dogs some more. Their baying rose and faltered like something drowning. “Did you get him stoned too?”
“You did me.”
“I know, I’m just asking’s all.” Noel poled the wiper blade upright in the ashes then wondered out loud if maybe Ben might have been on something stronger, something besides just booze and pot. “Something like LSD maybe?”
He was hoping that Matt would laugh at this idea, but instead he stopped chewing his bottom lip and whistled. He’d never thought of that, he said. “It makes perfect sense. That’s why he took his clothes off, and all.” Matt whistled again.
“Keep up that whistling, Matt. Them Dobermans need all the help they can get.”
“Dobermans?”
Noel tightened the laces on both his wingtips.
“Hey,” Matt said. “You ever hear that story, the one about the guy who tried to fly off the fire tower?”
Noel did not answer. He was too busy remembering. He was remembering the afternoon not so long ago when he had highly recommended LSD to Ben. “It’d do you a lot of good, probably,” he had told his little brother. He folded his legs Indian style, just like Matt’s were, and stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled three sharp blasts. Instantly the barking seemed to divide. Judging the distance to the fence, he picked up the bottle, drank off a good three fingers, then passed it across the dead fire to Matt.
But Matt only stared at the bottle and asked, “What do you think happens to someone who dies real fucked up, Noel?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean where do they go?”
Noel shook the bottle, but Matt still wouldn’t take it.
“Because you know what I’m thinking we did?” Matt asked.
Noel shook the bottle harder.
“I’m thinking we got Ben sent straight down to you-know-where.” He reached for the bottle. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
“This damn speed,” Noel complained while watching his brother gulp whiskey. “Feels like I’m sitting on the damn electric chai
r.”
Matt gauged the bottle to make sure he’d drunk off more than Noel had, then he passed it back over the dead fire. Noel took the bottle again and held it up to the sun. It seemed to him that at any moment now the dogs might appear over the tops of the broken automobiles.
•••
An hour later Noel was parked behind a monument store and spying over a landscape of blank stones to where a whorled sunset filled the horizon behind the neighboring funeral home. Matt had passed out against the window, but Noel kept himself awake by reciting out loud the names of the mourners he tracked entering and leaving the building. He held mini-conversations with old coaches or with girls he had failed with. The morning-league team that Ben helped coach filed in wearing their green-and-yellow uniforms, and that got Noel to crying, jaggedly, an asthma attack of crying. He couldn’t stop, even after it had started to feel fake. He cried himself passed out.
It was the slam of the car door that uprighted him. At first he didn’t know where he was. It was dark. The parking lot across the street was empty, the funeral home was dark. Noel, feeling wide awake and jittery with the speed, got outside and leaned a shoulder against a small tree to piss. While he was doing this, the windows of the funeral home began to ignite, first room by room, then floor by floor, until every light in the building was on. A few minutes later, Matt came loping through the tombstones and announced that Ben wasn’t inside anymore. “They musta hauled him off to church already.”
Except for the staked white cross spotlighted from the grass, the First Baptist Church at night appeared forlorn and abandoned. They found an unlocked window in the kitchen and followed the blue-yellow flame of Matt’s lighter down a long passageway stocked with canned goods. When the Zippo petered out, they stumbled deeper into the annex, bumping through velvety rooms or dragging themselves up banisters or brushing their hands against walls, searching for light switches. Then Noel got separated. He started calling Matt’s name, but there was no answer. He had no idea in which direction to turn. It seemed impossible that he would ever extricate himself from this darkness. He was very close to panicking when the chapel lights suddenly soared into his unguarded eyes and he found himself to be standing one pew shy of the balcony rail. Below him in the increasing light he could see, alleywayed beside the chapel, a small soundboard above which Matt now stood adjusting various dials and switches. The three ceiling fans started to rotate. A plastic candelabra whitened by degrees. Twin floodlights shone forth onto the stained-glass pictorial of Jesus, who was holding the lamb under one arm and knocking on a large wooden door.