by Paul Flower
Chapter Nineteen
Having stumbled through the trees, fought his way back through the overgrowth and the years, he found himself, hands on knees, chest heaving, in the place where his journey had begun. Saplings and bushes and high weeds blurred the line that had defined woods versus yard. The house, scarred and wheezing in the wind, squatted in the overgrowth in front of him about twenty yards away. Off to the right, where the weed-choked driveway snaked around from the road, the old station wagon rusted, choking on weeds, stubbornly waiting. Jesse bent, sniffed, and tried to smooth his breathing, palms toward the ground, nervously stretching his hamstrings as though he’d finished a quick morning run along Lakeshore Drive. He tried to tell himself that coming here was merely an accident. But part of him felt the force of the place—he’d been drawn to it, had meant to come here all along. Lungs still burning, he straightened and turned toward the sound of his brother, still behind him, coming through the weeds. Suddenly he knew, he understood, it was time. Time to put an end to this.
****
Elvis felt the house, too, before he saw it. A bleak, cold heaviness in his stomach told him it was ahead. Stumbling, floundering, arms flailing, he navigated through the last of the tall trees, guided by his gut and misty memory. He reached what had been the backyard and fell to his knees, then rolled to his back, his vision swimming. His heart thudded. Here. He was here? Yes. Why? How? Now what? He was here, with him. And the past was close; he could feel it. The gray sky was swollen and brewing, moody. There he was, Jesse, working his way through the weeds and grass toward him, walking slowly and holding his shoulder, that shaggy hair and the face pale, scary-weird familiar against the sky. Elvis rolled his head in the cold, wet weeds. He arched his neck and cocked his eyes toward the house. Two second-floor windows, menacing black eyes, gazed down on him. Welcome home.
Elvis closed his eyes. He was tired. So, so tired. He heard a rumble of long-forgotten thunder and the sound of chirping birds, smelled something that was strong and a little too sweet. He saw Lavern’s note and Donnel’s face. He heard Lavern whisper, “Stay with it baby.”
He suddenly believed her, believed both of them—Lavern and Donnel. The thing between Donnel and Lavern had been the lie. He’d over-thought it and made it something it wasn’t. And whatever had gone on between Lavern and Jesse, well, he figured that was all part of what she’d tried to do to help. Maybe.
Elvis ground his teeth and forced himself to sit up. Still holding his shoulder, Jesse had stopped and had dropped to one knee. He looked toward Elvis, gritted his teeth and struggled to get back to his feet.
Speak, Elvis’ brain sent the signal. His mouth obeyed but not his voicebox. He closed his mouth, re-sent the signal, then opened it again. He coughed and looked nervously toward the road, suddenly wondering about his mom and his wife and the cops. He turned back and looked at his brother, who took another step toward him and stopped. His brother’s pain-filled eyes stared at and through Elvis, through to the back of Elvis’ brain, to where vision was controlled, skewering into the gray matter, and Elvis suddenly could see, blue-gray to blue-gray, he could see in a way he hadn’t seen in years. No. Please. Don’t. Not him.
Yes. He saw him. He was tall, all knobby boned and skinny with his shaggy brown hair. Yes. And he had that hook kind of nose, too, and a tattoo on his forearm that looked like a heart and had “Mom” in fancy writing across it. He could feel him, his aura—the good light that shone out of him on those days when he wasn’t drinking and had worked and come home and showered and smiled at his boys in the yard. Those were days that ended with him sitting out front on the porch, in the blue-gray twilight of summer, fireflies winking from the edge of the woods across the way. Yes. Oh yes. Nights that were pure-honey summer, he, Dad, had you sit right next to him on the porch—on the steps. Sitting there—then, now?—he traced the blue-vein line of that tattoo and he not only could see, but he could hear the story, in a low and soothing voice stained sweet by a southern boyhood, of how he’d gotten the tattoo from a fat woman in Seoul during the war. The voice, soothing and deep and low and real, was a warm hand on his shoulder; it told him the world was at last, again, in balance. The woman in Seoul had been fat, ugly and stunk, that Tennessee-tinged voice said. She had a big gap in her teeth about the size of Ohio “if you don’t include the part up by Lake Erie,” he said. A little-boy giggle jiggled out of him and he felt the gritty warmth of his father’s face, that warm and whiskered cheek against his silky boy cheek. He saw his father’s eyes, content and glittering in the dying light. He smelled his scent; it was a gentle, pleasant aroma of man and SCORE hair cream and aftershave, Old Spice aftershave.
He had loved them, hadn’t he? Oh yes, he’d loved them. Dad had loved both his boys, despite all the pain, the hate, that waited, scowling and smoking, in the shadows of the house behind them.
The meanness had been in Dad too. He’d been two people, hadn’t he? Part of him had the love and the other part the mean.
Jesse was now just a few yards away, leaning with his good shoulder against a tree in the old yard, chest heaving. The brothers’ eyes, cool and blue-gray and liquid, locked.
You remember, Jesse’s eyes said. Yes. You do. We both do. And in the way of twins, their brains seemed to meet.
The thunder rolled through the gray shadows of entwined memory. The cool of the day evaporated. The humidity and heat rose. It was hot and the air had gone thick. The first drops came, fat and shocking—falling onto a ragged yard, a skinny man bent over a lawnmower—then the lightning ripped open the cloud of their shared lifetime of silence and the past, at last, hurtled in fully, fat belly high and bursting, coming down.
A gun. Not a .22. Bigger. Meaner. Why was he carrying that?
Show her.
You’re aiming it at Dad? Wait.
Show her. Show her how strong you are.
No. No. Mistake.
Show her. You can.
Screen door open. Mom? In there, too. Watching.
Show her. Now.
No. Hold on. Don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t.
Show her.
DAAADDD! Look out!
Yes. Now. Show.
STOP. HEY! WAIT!
Show her.
Say something! PLEASE! NO!
Show her who the man is.
NO!
BWAAM!
A siren howled, eerie as an animal. From the front of the house a car door slammed. Gravel crunched. Sitting, knees to chin, arms hugging his legs, Elvis rocked back and forth and heard none of it. Jesse couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe—he sensed something in his brother’s eyes, in his own mind; it was the thing he’d missed until now. He tried to see it, but still couldn’t.
Elvis looked through the wild overgrowth between himself and the past and saw the horror: smoke from his brother’s gun, smoke from the back of the house, from the screen door. Elvis saw what Jesse couldn’t see. In his mind, Elvis saw that his brother had gone flat on his back, the ugly canon-gun pointed up at a cockeyed angle. There was a limb shattered and falling, falling, falling from the old tree behind Dad, Dad, oh, Dad. Those boots were digging. Get up, Dad. Get up. Please, Dad. Why? Dad, why? The shaggy head was cocked up in the air and his face, gray and twisted away from him, looked toward the house. The blood, black-red, was leaking out from under him.
Another car crunched to a stop in the gravel at the front of the house. There was a pause, one door opened, another, then each door shut, bam. Bam. Still leaning against the tree, Jesse groaned against the hollow ache in his shoulder and tried to force the air back in his lungs. This was wrong. All wrong. For a few seconds everything was a jumble. The events of the morning shuffled through his brain in no predictable order, flashes of images overlapped and careened past one another. Nothing had gone the way he’d figured it would. Even after he’d done everything, everything he’d planned to do, it all seemed wron
g. And now this, this certainty that he was really uncertain. That he’d missed something that day. Something important. He closed his eyes, but the world kiltered and swayed, so he opened them again. Come on, he told himself, buck up, you have a job to finish. Yes. Yes. Take care of this. He forced himself to walk toward his brother.
“WHHHHY? WHYYYYYYY?” The voice, half-whisper and half-scream, swirled around the yard on the dirty breeze. Jesse’s legs nearly failed him. It sounded weird—unreal—a fake voice from a movie or something, and it quivered down his back like a wiggle of electricity. He took a step as though to get away, but stopped himself, eyes cloudy, frowning. Wait, he thought, wait. Get a grip.
Jesse took the final tortured steps to Elvis. He stood over his brother. Elvis’ face, the pasty-gray face, was so twisted with pain that it punched his gut. Again, Jesse’s knees wobbled and his breath squeezed to nothing.
“You…” Elvis said. “You got a gun. You. She… my… our… Why? Why? Later, she… you… You went away. You did. Left me here. She made you then you left. Why? My God why?”
Jesse tried to force a synapse around a word.
“You meant to kill him. You did.” The words seethed out of Elvis as he stood. The twins were now just inches apart, facing each other, hook nose to hook nose. “You were just a kid, we was just kids. Just kids! How is that possible? How could you get a gun and walk out here and just—you pointed it and… and…? How is it possible? Then just, what?”
The full weight of it seemed to hit Elvis. His eyes widened. “You just disappeared? How could she? You? Go? It. I. You. I was so stupid. I didn’t think. Forgot. I mean, it was there, but it wasn’t. There. I didn’t stop you, her. I didn’t say anything. I could have. Oh. Dad. Shit. Dad. Why? Why did I not? How could I just stand there? How could I stand there and let her, you… How could we just have… then walked away. All these years?”
Jesse was trying to buck up, but the chemicals in his brain were sluicing free, torn wires were whipping like snakes, cracking and snapping. He floated above himself and—what was this?—he was sobbing and backing away from Elvis, stumbling in the grass. He tripped over a rotted tree limb, fell and landed, his back slamming against a tree. He cried out but made no sound. Now it was Elvis who stood over him. This was wrong, all so horribly wrong. He clawed at a hand. Buck up, he thought. Buck. Up.
“Give me something. Please,” Elvis said. “Give me a reason. Just. Please. Answer.”
But, for Jesse, the angels had returned, humming, humming, humming in a wild, rushing chorus that drowned out all else. It sounded like fire, musical fire, fire fanned by the wings of a million soaring doves. He heard something odd, too, that thing he’d missed before, a syncopation off. Beat. His tired, struggling brain could not pick it out and—oh, hold on, wait—what? There was a horrendous crack—lightning?—then thudding, something thudding to the ground. Jesse closed his eyes and saw it falling, falling, falling, the black-rotted wood behind Dad as he, boy-killer, clambered to his feet, scattering the doves and angels.
His adult-brother’s face was twisted in agony, the lips dry-pink and talking without words. His boy-brother, young and skittering through the weeds, was seeing without being seen. Dad was at once dead, twisting in the shaft of dusty sunlight, and looking toward the back door, the familiar head kicking against the right front wheel of the Craftsman lawnmower. The cowboy-booted feet cut muddy scars in the soft green of the yard. The man’s skinny hands clawed the air like he was trying to pull up on some magic chin-up bar to get out of the dark, deep pit he was falling into. Jesse took it all in, gawking at his grown brother’s tortured face, struggling to catch the one thing he’d missed, hearing the crack and watching his life slip away, wasted by a subconscious misery he had been too stupid to understand.
There was something, something here. It was so slippery, the logic and meaning of it, and Jesse couldn’t hold on. The fall from the police car and the pressure, pressure, pressure of planning and having it all come unraveled and now Gretchen, she was here and Mom, Mom too, and why? He felt drugged and wished he was. He needed a drink and a bath. Definitely a bath, and maybe a drink to figure this out. This. This had not gone well. None of it had. And something was missing. He’d missed something. He’d missed. Jesse struggled to stand. He pushed past his brother and stumbled toward the thicket at the edge of the old property.
The screen door slammed. “You gonna let him get away?” The voice, phlegmy and familar, skimmed through the damp air like a forgotten boomerang. Jesse stopped. Elvis turned. No. Oh. It was her. Or maybe not, maybe she wasn’t real. But no. Yes. Yes. She was coming out of the house, coming this way, hunched and baggy and ugly—a knot of bones and wrinkly skin in a wrinkled blue dress, carrying a battered black purse that hung, heavy, from her shoulder and was too big for her, a cigarette listing awkwardly from her mouth. She was looking at him, Elvis, floundering toward him, sniffing, her nose red from the cold, stopping to scratch a bare leg, the strap of the purse sliding off her shoulder, she pushing it back up, those eyes never leaving his, then coming on, relentless, until she was in front of him. It was her. She was shivering but didn’t seem to notice, the eyes diamond-hard and certain. She reached for him and he recoiled. She snared his earlobe, clamped it hard, and yanked his face down into hers. She smelled like something out of the ground, something that had lived in the dark for too long. Elvis jerked free. She grabbed and clenched the ear even harder and shook it. “You’re going to let him get away.”
Elvis followed her gaze; by twisting his head just so he could see Jesse had reached what looked like the edge of the old woods. He was just standing there, one hand holding a shoulder, the arm limp at his side, just staring their way like an idiot.
Behind Jesse there was movement in the trees. Someone else was in the woods.
“You gonna stand there and cry and let him get away?” Mom’s voice was high and nervous. She took the cigarette from her twitching lips and sent a shaft of smoke out the right side of her mouth. Elvis could feel her foot tapping the ground in front of him. His ear burned.
“I shot him, Mom.”
The words, the voice, prickled the back of Elvis’ neck.
“What did you say?” Mom snapped, shooting a withering look across the old yard at Jesse.
“I shot him, Mom.” The voice was Jesse’s, but Jesse didn’t feel it. He was lost. Forlorn, he looked like a child, his face sagging with sadness. Tears brimmed in his eyes. “I k... killed him. No... nobody’s… getting away. Elvis is stayin’ here. I nailed the sucker to the ground. You saw. I can go away. It’s okay. I did it and now I can go.”
From the back door, inside the house, there was a muffled cry. “Oh, Jesse, no.”
Mom frowned and slid the duct-taped handbag strap back on her shoulder. “Wait a second, there. This is my man-boy right here. This is the one that done his duty. Don’t go tricking your old mother now.” Holding the wayward strap in place, she reached up with the hand holding the cigarette and caressed Elvis’ face. “This is my good boy now; you’re my Jess, aren’t you?”
Elvis opened his mouth. The back door creaked open.
There was a noise from the woods.
“I asked you a question, Jess.” She jerked Elvis’ ear. A tunnel of pain opened in his head, but Elvis barely noticed. Lavern was edging out of the house and behind her, there was another woman. The other woman was pretty, red-headed. She was crying, holding a handkerchief to her nose.
Donnel lumbered out of the woods, stopped, fell to his hands and knees, his breathing loud and ragged.
Elvis forced himself to breathe. Donnel was here. Lavern, Lavern The Freaking Ghost, was picking her way through the overgrowth toward him and Mom, giving him a small sad smile that reached across the yard. A surge of heat, of confidence, shot through him.
More noise, far off, then a few yards beyond Donnel, the cop, Harvey Monahan—his face white-gray and bloody hand to
his shoulder—fell to one knee. Behind him the kid-cop, tall and straight-backed, stepped into view and reached down to help Monahan. Monahan growled something, brushed him away, and struggled to his feet.
“You’re my good boy,” Mom cooed.
“I’m Elvis.”
She looked puzzled. “‘Course you aren’t.”
“No, no, Mom. It’s me. Elvis.”
Mom’s eyes clouded and she tightened her grip on his ear. “Stop that. You’re not my dumb boy, you’re my smart one.” He tried to get free. She yanked him down and the tone of her voice shifted. “You’re the right boy. Don’t I know my boys when I see them? You’re him. Jesse, twin to the King. The King, he’s all flash but not dash. You’re the one smart enough to understand things and keep your yap shut, aren’t you?” She grinned. “You ain’t brother dumb-dumb over there. You at least know what you screwed up. He’s got the motor skills but not the smarts, am I right?” She shot more smoke in Elvis’ face and toyed with the strap of the giant purse. “I mean, heck, you know the truth about everything, but you can’t seem to fix the parts that are broke is all. That’s the dingaling thing of it with you. You got that fancy education but don’t know you didn’t do what you thought you done and what you had to come back for but you can’t seem to get it all straightened out is all. You’re a screw-up is all. Not dumb, a screw-up is all.”
From Jesse’s throat, there was a sound, half groan, half swallowed scream. His brain was suddenly clear, too clear. He covered the ground quickly and was at Elvis’ elbow, his face red and in her face, eyes wide and wild. “You idiot. You sick old idiot. It was me. Me. Don’t you remember? Me. I did everything and that’s all you have to say? After all this, all these years, that’s it? Everything you ever asked, everything, I did. You. I don’t. Believe it. You made me, she made me,” he was screaming, looking around the yard at the audience. “She made me do it. Then I had to leave. I had to just go on. Can’t you believe it? She packed me away. To Iowa. Corn. Corn. Everywhere. And those simple-minded, those people.” The words were coming, unchecked and illogical and red-hot—spitting sparks from the rusty metal mental drawer in which he’d locked them. “I did. The gun, the… I snuck up and… He talked.” Jesse covered his eyes for a second and saw it, the back twisting, the shaggy-haired head coming around. He opened his eyes; they were wide and bloodshot and filled with tears. “He turned and talked to me. And still I did. I did it. Everything. I was a kid. Just a sick, stupid, screwed-up kid. And she twisted me all up inside until I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t think. My God, I couldn’t. And no, here. I came. I. Back. It wouldn’t leave me. It wouldn’t go away. Ever. I couldn’t get away.” Jesse looked toward his wife. He was sobbing. “God hates me, I know he does. You. Him. He knows. He knows everything. No matter what I did I couldn’t come clean. I couldn’t tell anyone. I just tried to make it. Right? I tried to make it right. But it was her, her. I did it. And I know you can’t ever. Forgive me. I was just a kid, a kid. And. I’m so sorry. Dad. Dad. I just. He was my dad. My dad. I just. God knows, he’s always known. And now this. I. I buried him. I buried him.” Again, he stopped, his own heart unable to take in what his brain was sending it.