by Greg Walker
And then, sitting in that apartment one night, he saw a newspaper article about the drug trade in Erie while on his way to the sports page. He read it out of boredom and curiosity and came across a line about a Brody Stape, formerly a player in the heroin market, doing ten years but due for release. He read those lines again and again, as though they would offer more information, tell what this meant for him, what he should do. Because he had to do something. This had been given to him. Perhaps he had to confront Brody; even fight him if necessary, whatever the exorcism required. If he stood up to him now, it could negate all that had come before. He could go back to Michelle whole. He could even tell her then, what he had done, so she would know who her man was.
Of course, he had other problems. He had slept with one of the caterer’s staff at a sales conference a year ago. He had chosen his career over her and his son at countless junctures, but had shrugged off their disappointment and anger, imagined the expressions of contentment once he had finally made it. To fix it all, he had to go back to the start, right the greatest wrong and then move up the line from there.
It wasn’t hard to find Stape. He came back to live in the house his parents had occupied during high school. Will had been there before, as a high school sophomore, watching from the woods on a bluff that surrounded the place, looking out over the cornfield for his tormentor, imagining a wild attack, blood and freedom. On the few occasions that he did glimpse Brody, he balled up his fists and dared himself to do…something. But he never took the dare, slipped away back to his bicycle hidden in the trees and then on home to stare at the ceiling in his room and ponder the meaning of the word coward.
He had felt like that kid again, at first, when driving past after Brody’s release from prison. The Mustang sat in the driveway, but it was early evening and no lights burned in the house. After his third pass, he slowed and then stopped, pulling about a hundred yards away to the side of the country lane on which he had seen no cars at all in the half hour he had used it. He put his flashers on, in case someone stopped or came out of the house and so could claim car trouble. He found the rocks in the soft dirt at the edge of the cornfield that the road bisected, taking the largest two that he could find and carry.
His palms sweated, and he found it hard to breathe as he walked towards the house, passing over the abstract designs of tar drizzled onto the road to fill potholes, listening for the bark of a dog or the bang of a door.
The corn ran almost up to the end of the driveway on this side, with just a thin strip of lawn as a buffer. He stepped into the last row and took deep breaths, felt the sweat bloom beneath his shirt, wondered what he, a nearly middle-aged man, was doing here but the boy inside with unfinished business knew only too well. It was nearly dusk, the details and colors of the daylight fading into shapes and shades of gray. He took one more breath, blew it out, and stepped into the yard. He stood still, watching the house, listening for any other sound than the hum of a distant lawnmower rushing to beat the darkness and the mixed languages of insects. A slight breeze rippled through the cornstalks and produced a scratching sound that grew to a crescendo and then ebbed away.
Will ran, throwing away all caution, and heaved the first stone like a shot-put through the back window, creating a hole where it passed through with a curtain of shattered glass sagging into the vehicle in orbit. He ran to the front of the car, let out a whoop and launched the second stone through the windshield. His now empty hands twitched, demanding to engage in more destruction and he returned to the cornfield, found a rock nearly the size of his own head and hauled it up, stumbling to the Mustang, forcing it even higher until he could bring it down on the hood with some expectation of damage. The bang and screech of metal brought him up short. He had forgotten to watch the house or the road, and now he stood still again, slowly scanning everything within his field of vision.
He saw no one, but fear had settled in and Will quickly walked back into the corn and then down the row to the road. He returned to his car without incident and drove towards Tanville, flush with the small victory and eager to celebrate with the one person that could appreciate it.
But as the excitement faded, as his pulse slowed and the sweat in his shirt dried, Will felt hollow, like a coward, failing to overcome that singular dragon he had come out to slay. But he could not find the courage to go back and wait until Brody came home. The Idea of Brody loomed large in his mind, a nemesis that had only grown since high school, his reach extending across decades. If anything, he would be far worse, more powerful, his cruelty and viciousness honed by his time in prison, sharpened through contact with men like himself and worse. And Will had done nothing to prepare himself for any event that required physical confrontation.
He went back home, back to Erie, and went through the motions of what remained of his life, but he felt sure that everyone – his customers, the girl at the checkout counter, the man walking his dog on the other side of the street – could all see inside him, see the ingredients of shame and fear comprising the coward that walked among them, had already weighed and found him wanting. He slogged through the winter, trying to forge ahead but the nearness of the thing that he had set in motion but failed to finish worked at him like stones in his pocket, another added each day until he bowed under its weight.
In March, with the date of the camping trip set, he drove back to Tanville and slipped an envelope into Brody’s mailbox and sped away. It read:
I’m the guy that wrecked your car. I’ll be at Ravensburg State Park the second weekend of May if you want to discuss it.
He didn’t include that he had acquired a pistol, nor did he explain that he wouldn’t be alone; either to Brody, or to Jon. But Jon belonged there, too, so that they could finally make things right. He had second thoughts and sleepless nights afterward, ultimately glad that the note was now irretrievable, the only option left not to show up. He grappled with fear, waves that would hit him without warning when he forgot and then remembered the looming deadline. Several times he nearly contacted Jon, to call off the camping trip. But in the end, the gun made the difference. No matter what nature of devil Stape might be, he wasn’t bulletproof.
When the bikers had pulled into the camp, he had expected instant recognition if one proved to be Stape, all the while his heart beating double time. But the article he had read did not include a picture to detail the changes in his nemesis since high school. The gun had been tucked away in his duffel bag in the car since his arrival, a reassuring presence of which he kept an image of in his mind. He only planned to use it as leverage, not to actually shoot anyone; to speak in a language that Brody could understand.
If Brody came, he had always visualized him alone, not with a companion. And he couldn’t be sure that the smaller man was in fact Brody Stape. He seemed about the right size, but leaner, and the lines and hair on his face effectively disguising any trace of the boy he had known, if the word boy had ever applied to him, a creature of another class entirely. In the movie that played in his head, Brody drove right up to their campsite, got out of a car, and asked directly if one of them had left the note in his mailbox. He hadn’t considered anything like this. He watched for Jon's reaction, waited for him to ask in a strained voice if the guy reminded him of someone, but either Jon did not recognize him, or chose not to.
Will waited, his gut a cauldron of anxiety, and when the man had come over to confront them, the ridiculous bit about their laughing, he looked hard for Brody Stape, but the firelight revealed so little. And then, when they had moved their motorcycles he wanted to shout out Brody's name. But he kept silent. Brody didn’t have a corner on harassing others, wasn’t the only one that got his kicks from preying on the weak, and they might have just run into these guys coincidentally while waiting for the bully with the invite to show up. And if it wasn’t Brody, he didn’t want to reveal his plan to Jon and have to explain. So Will hardened his resolve, refused to be chased away or drawn in, determined not to be the first to reveal himself or
be run off by thugs no matter who they were.
To flee would be his final undoing.
When he had offered the Pop-Tarts, he believed recognition and confrontation inevitable; that up close, in the daylight, either he or Brody would blink, or he would realize it was not Brody at all. The hidden gun had given him courage to play this game, happy for any courage mustered by any means.
When the bikers had left, they had left him convinced that he dealt with two entirely different people that knew nothing of him and Jon, and this both unsettled and angered him, that they were apparently natural targets for the cruel amusement of others. And he had to admit the relief he felt to himself. Maybe he would send Brody another note. Maybe there was another way to approach this. Maybe he should just leave it alone. He hadn't run, and maybe that was enough.
And then they had returned, and brought in the Amish kid, and the game changed. Now, with Chris dead, Stape revealed, and the gun and control of the situation entirely gone from his hands, Will fought hard to hold back tears of frustration and anger, barely registering as Jon, with the casual manner of a man casting stones into a pond, threw the rock.
Will was mistaken; there had been someone at home. Brody had fallen asleep on his worn couch, on top of a blanket thrown over the threadbare cushions to hide the stains and holes. The impact of the first rock had woken him up, and he remained motionless inside the dark home, his senses piqued, waiting for another sound, ready to move. He had learned to sleep lightly in prison, never sure if he had really slept at all there, every scrape or muffled footfall carrying with it the potential of violence and death.
At the second noise, Brody had rolled from the couch to the floor, determining that it had come from outside, towards the front of the house. He pulled his pistol out from under a couch cushion and crept low to the window, staying below the frame to avoid presenting a target.
He reached the window and parted the curtain the smallest fraction, just enough to see a tall, thin man struggle with a massive rock, wrestle it into position and drop it onto the hood of his Mustang. Brody’s finger twitched on the trigger, his instinct telling him to shoot the man. Ten years ago, that man would not have left intact, if he had left at all. But prison had changed him, made him more cautious; he knew that he had enemies and that rushing outside could be an expected reaction by others lying in wait, looking to put holes in him.
The man suddenly stopped and looked all around, and Brody believed that they had made eye contact, sure he had been seen. But he paid no particular attention to the window, and soon fled into the corn.
Brody waited for something else, heard a car start and drive away, finally went out the back door, inched down the side of the house away from the cornfield, sliding along the grimy siding in need of a power wash, and waited at the corner, his gun ready. He listened for a muffled cough, the scraping of the corn leaves without any breeze to stir them, the smell of tobacco smoke, anything to betray an ambush. Torn between this need for caution and his natural aggression, Brody finally stepped out into the yard. No one shot at him. He relaxed and moved towards the damaged vehicle, furious at the shattered glass and buckled metal, but intrigued despite all that.
He pictured the man: his awkward and furtive movements, the utter lack of awareness to his surroundings; someone new at this type of thing, like a kid dared by some older boys, a rite of initiation. But the guy had to be pushing forty, and he doubted he was looking to join the mob as a fix to a mid-life crisis. This attack had the hallmarks of something personal, and he thought of the boyfriends and the occasional husband of women he had seduced, tried to place the man in that line-up but failed. Not that he had a file on each one and still maintained it as a possibility.
He waited to see if the man would come back. He and Crush repaired the Mustang in the garage that his friend owned and at which he worked - not wanting to re-enter the drug trade, but not reformed in any accepted sense of the word - keeping his eyes open for that one big score that would make the day to day risks unnecessary. He didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but the ten year vacation courtesy of the state had shaken him. He never wanted to go back there, would rather go out via suicide-by-cop than caught and caged again. He wasn’t like those others. He had reasons for being what he was, and they only had excuses.
He had dutifully visited his parole officer, a man that reminded him of Mr. Giles from high school, had maintained a humble, yes-sir-I-be-reformed-now attitude, the man pleased that he had found employment and seemed to be staying out of trouble. And he truly intended to do that, for now, except for the possession of firearms. In the wake of the next time he made trouble, Brody either would have vanished with enough cash to finish out his life in style, or be lying on a slab in the morgue full of holes and tagged for an unmarked grave.
The days turned to weeks, summer into winter, and no one came, nor any indication of who destroyed his car or why. Although still angry about the damage, the event faded from his list of priorities, and whatever revenge the act fulfilled seemed to have sated the man.
In the spring he had gone to the mailbox and found the plain envelope among the solicitations for credit cards and the water bill, read the two lines typed on an unremarkable piece of paper tucked inside. He felt a thrill of fear and a ripple of excitement. Both emotions surprised him; the whole thing so bizarre, coming from some unknown and indecipherable quarter, nothing that fit any pattern or behavior he understood. The people he knew, if they believed his release meant a desire to take back the turf yielded on his incarceration, would not have left a calling card as subtle as rocks through his windows. If a small army didn't just open fire on his house, he would have had a gun pressed to his head or pushed into his mouth while forced to listen to a sermon of dire warning; an undeniable show of force to convince him that his time had passed.
He went inside and looked at a map, found Ravensburg. Checked the date. He rode out there alone the weekend before, scoped out the campground, watched the Amish drive back in forth in their buggies on the highway. Looked for the places he would set up an ambush if he had arranged the meeting, still tried to make sense of it. He asked Chris, a former employee that had run drugs for him on his motorcycle, to join him on the camping trip, specifically because he had a Harley and another for Brody to ride. And because Chris liked to hurt people.
He had recognized the tall man as soon as they had ridden in, felt his eyes while passing by, but didn't acknowledge him. The second man looked harmless and miscast for any scene requiring violence, even more than the first. But as the evening wore on, he began to doubt the quick identification. He hadn’t gotten a good look at his face while peering out of his window and the grime that had accumulated over the past decade. There were plenty of tall men around.
He decided to poke them and see if they poked back. And when that failed to rouse any telling reaction, to poke them again. He considered that they could be FBI or DEA, even off the clock looking to avenge some grudge for holes drilled into a fellow agent, but their haplessness seemed too genuine to be cover. By the time he had hijacked the Amish kid as a last ditch effort to create a situation to draw them out, even leaving Chris alone with them to stack the odds in their favor - never once considering that Chris would end up floating face-down in the creek - he was convinced that the guy had lost his nerve and hadn’t shown up, that he had picked on some garden variety soccer dads here to enjoy some camping and fishing.
He didn’t mind the lack of resolution, exactly. He would get this guy eventually, if he kept throwing rocks into the hornets' nest, maybe even find out who had set him up for the bust and prison if it were somehow related. The ride out here had been relaxing, and hey, he had always wanted to drive an Amish buggy. And it provided a distraction to keep from brooding on his future, so unclear since being freed from his cage.
Now, Chris was dead, and he struggled between exacting retribution for that act, controlling his laughter at the identity of the two men before him and processing
the surprising swell of affection, even nostalgia, for them both and the memories they evoked. He could barely see through his tears, couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed this hard, when Jon threw the rock at Will.
Chapter 8
Jon saw Brody react and raise the pistol at him in his periphery, but he didn’t think he even cared if Brody shot him. The rock sailed through the short space and struck Will in the shoulder.
“Ow! Jon, what are you doing?”
“Hey, cut it out. We need to…”
Jon didn’t care what Brody needed. The anger took precedence. He stood up, and the other two followed suit, shared lines of tension binding them together.