by James Wade
Blood covered most of the face, and the eyes themselves had been removed entirely. Great gaping holes of black and blood and loose, hanging tissue. His head was cocked to the side, staring up, blind, toward the corner of the porch roof, as if all the answers of men were writ there and he could never again look away.
The boy swallowed down the sickness in his stomach. He looked closer. Amid the blood-matted hair across John Curtis’s forehead, the boy saw a single bullet wound. He moved around behind the body and saw where the bullet had exited the back of the head, leaving another dark cavern and bits of brain matter which stuck to the back of the neck.
The boy braced himself on the chair and as he did so the body slid to the side and took the chair toppling over with it. The boy jumped backward.
“River,” he called. “Where are you?”
He peered through the window but the lights were off and he could discern nothing of the inside. He moved to the door, took a breath, then swung it open. The heat from the stove swept forward and past him and into the night. The boy squinted into the darkness. The burning end of a cigarette danced toward the center of the cabin.
“River,” the boy said, and felt along the wall for the lights.
When he threw the switch the girl was not there. Instead, a thin man sat smoking on the couch. He wore black jeans and a gray silk shirt. His legs were crossed and there was terry cloth wrapped around each boot. His hands were gloved and he was, the boy saw, at work on the disassembly of a handgun and its adjoining silencer.
“Come in,” the man mumbled without looking up or removing the cigarette from between his lips. “Shut the door. Fucking mosquitos.”
The boy did as he was told.
“You killed him,” he said.
The man stopped his work. He placed the parts on the glass table in front of him and ashed the cigarette in a deer antler tray. He looked up at the boy.
“I did.”
“And River?”
“Who is this?”
“The girl. There was a girl.”
The man nodded.
“I see,” he said.
“What do you see?”
“The same thing as you.”
The boy’s words caught in his throat. He felt weak. He staggered back against the door.
“No,” he managed. “I don’t believe you.”
The man went back to work on his weapon.
“Yes, you do,” he said.
“No,” the boy repeated, louder this time. “I want to see her.”
“What difference would it make?”
The boy slumped down to the floor and wept.
“I loved her. I want to see her, goddamnit.”
The man paused, then nodded his head and continued.
“I will show you. But it will not help. You will never unsee. It is better to know her as she is now, in your memory.”
The bedroom door had been kicked in. She sat upright in the bed, as if she was expecting someone, as if it was the natural thing to do. And yet there was nothing natural about it. Her eyes were open but unseeing, and if she did see it was on some plain yet to be discovered. The dried blood pooled on the sheets beneath her.
The boy traced the blood’s path in reverse and saw there a deep-red stain just above her left breast, and the white of her gown turned dark. Her hair hung in purple and blond streaks and when the boy reached out to touch it the girl’s head lolled forward. He recoiled and cursed and cried, and then he turned about the room as if there were someone else to whom he could appeal his case.
He bit his lip and tasted the salt of his tears and looked back at the bed and the blood and the truth of things. The girl’s head was bowed and tilted to the side as if she were in the throes of some solemn thought, a problem to which there was no solution. The boy collected himself and approached her again and used his hand to close her eyes, and then he embraced her, sobbing.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s alright. We can still go to the ocean. We’ll still go. We can just—we gotta figure out a better way. We’ll go though, I promise. We’ll go.”
The boy drew in a choked breath and shook his head and held the girl close.
“Goddamn,” he cried. “Goddamn everything. I told you, didn’t I? Goddamnit, didn’t I tell you? Why didn’t you listen? I told you and you should of goddamn listened.”
He rocked back and forth with the girl still in his arms and her weight fell against him, lifeless and awkward, as if she were a child playing at some game meant to frustrate her companion. He tumbled over with the girl’s body and there he lay, rocking and crying, until the thin man’s shadow fell over them.
The boy sat up.
“You’re a goddamned murderer.”
“Your time is up. I must be going. You would do well to also leave. This scene would not look so good for you.”
“I’ll kill you,” the boy said and pulled the gun.
“And I will be dead. And my story finished.” The man sighed. “The greatest stories are stories of death, are they not? It is the one true commonality of all men. The story of Christ would mean nothing without his death. And in this, are we not like Christ? Like god?”
“You don’t know anything about god.”
“God.” The thin man smiled. “This is a world built and held delicate upon those most fragile of pillars. There will always be some disaster on its way. Every step we take is overtop a grave atop a grave and so on to the center of the earth wherein our reckoning lies hidden and built over. If there was a god in this world we buried her under our own ambitions long ago—sacrificed her upon some limestone altar turned black with blood, then used the selfsame blade of her demise to war with one another, each dying man passing on this tool of death like an ill-starred inheritance and each progeny accepting of their charge through generations untold; and why not, when meaning is so handed to us and otherwise such terror to find on our own. When our existence is defined for us, there can be no true choosing. We may choose god, but this is a false choice. There is no god.”
The boy was crying and shaking his head. He let the gun rest by his side.
“You’re him, aren’t you,” he said. “You’re death.”
The thin man smiled again.
“But let us say there is a god,” he said, ignoring the boy’s question. “As so many believe there to be. Well. Here were all the worlds to choose from, and god laid this one at our feet, created the day and the night and gave to us bounties and love and gave to us his wrath and gave to us free will to choose between them. A choice we’ve long since made. A choice made for us by ancestors we’ll never know save in spirit. They started us in a direction, some thousands of years ago, and that direction was built upon and hastened by each new generation until the direction was itself our only destiny, all the while pulling us further away from god. So tell me: If there is a god, and if we are to be judged by him in the end, do you believe it will be love or wrath with which we are met?”
“You didn’t have to kill her,” the boy said, his voice weak. “She didn’t deserve to die.”
“Deserve. Ameritar. No. No one is deserving to die. No one is deserving to live. Each is an accident. Each is an inevitability. Do you know why it is I come here to your mud river and kill your mud people?”
The boy shook his head. He ground his teeth as the tears fell silent.
“I think you know.”
“I don’t, goddamnit.”
“Some might say it is the drogas. This would not be wrong. But drugs existed before me. Before these people. They will stay after we are gone. So why then am I here? Choices, and each one leading to the next. This man has made many choices, each one leading to me. At any point he could choose differently. Choose to turn some other way. And then, I am not here. He is not there.”
“But she never did anything to you.”
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“To me? No. But still, she made her choices. As we all do. You came here to kill this man, did you not?”
The boy wiped his eyes with the back of his arm and nodded.
“Yes. I have seen this,” the thin man said. “You have visited me, I believe, in my dreams.”
“I hadn’t visited nobody.”
“Then how is it I have seen you in them?”
“We can’t account for what all we see in our dreams.”
The man clicked his tongue.
“Do dreams not belong to the dreamer? What is a dream, if not a story you tell yourself?”
“You don’t have no control over it, though, your dream.”
“Why must there be control for it to be yours? When the doctor takes up his instrument and taps at your knee, are you in control of your leg as it kicks outward?”
“No.”
“No. But it is still your leg, is it not? Yes. And so it is with a dream. A story your subconscious tells you. A story inside of you that you have not yet heard.”
“If it’s inside me, how could I have not already heard it?”
“Something causes the leg to kick. Something else causes the story to be told. But both reactions are already there, waiting.”
“I dreamed the world was flooding, that don’t mean it’s true.”
The man shrugged.
“Perhaps you are seeing something yet to come, or perhaps you are seeing what has already been.”
The boy looked away.
“Do you aim to kill me?” he asked, wiping his nose.
“Do you want to be killed?”
The boy was silent.
“I am thinking the answer is no. And this is good. I do not want to kill a child.”
“But you would.”
“I have.”
“So why not me?”
“You are not a supplier, not a dealer, not a pusher. You don’t use the drug. You cared only for the girl. You are a poor boy. You have no means. You do not know me. You will never see me again. What threat then are you to me? Unless . . .”
“Unless I shoot you in the back as you’re walking off.”
“Si. Unless this.”
“I ain’t going to.”
“And so now, the choice is mine. Believe you, or no.”
“I guess so.”
“Ah, yes. Each choice is a guess. A guess at good or bad. Right or wrong. So I must guess if you are lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Is this not what a liar would say?” The thin man raised a brow.
“Why not just kill me, then you won’t have to worry about it?”
“If I kill you, I will never know if I made the right choice. So, I will turn now to leave. You will have perhaps two dozen steps until I am gone forever. I have made my choice. Now you must make yours.”
“I already said I ain’t gonna shoot you. Just get out of here and leave me with her.”
“Very well.”
The thin man turned and left the room and the boy heard the cabin door open and shut and he heard the man’s footsteps on the porch and they stopped short of the stairs.
“Very well,” he heard the thin man say again, then the shotgun fired, and the boy could hear Mr. Carson calling for him.
50
One night, with Daddy in the hospice, before Delores and Thomas had come to visit, the old man gets to moaning in his bed. Of course I shot up and went over to him, as if there was something I’d know to do other than call a nurse.
“Daddy, you hurting?” I asked him.
Then he quit. Just like that. He opened his eyes and there was a light there, like a spark of life, that I hadn’t seen since they first put him in that bed.
“Daddy?” I said again.
“Ed,” he said. “Ed, you’ve got to hold on for a minute.”
Well. I knew he weren’t talking to me. I’m Eddie, and he never called me anything different. His brother was called Ed. Uncle Ed had passed nearly twenty years before from throat cancer.
“Your brother’s dead, Daddy,” I told him. I don’t know why I said it. I felt bad as soon as the words came out. But Daddy didn’t pay me any mind. He looked straight past me, like there was something in the corner of the room he was trying to see.
“I can’t, Ed. Please. Just for a minute, now,” he said.
The hair raised up on my skin. I took a step back.
“I think them shells are in your coveralls,” he said, and then he closed his eyes. Went back to sleep.
He didn’t die. Not that night, or the next. It was another month or so before he went on. But that night has stuck with me for a good long while, and I don’t know what to make of it. I know what the preacher would say, and I know what the scientists would say back. I just wish I could ask Daddy what it was that happened in that room. Fact is, I wish I could ask him a great many things.
51
The air was cool and wet with the front end of a false fall and the boy’s bare arms were prickled goose flesh. The porch light was still on despite the morning and the boy heard nothing from within and when he reached up and tried the door it opened without fuss and he lifted himself inside.
There sat his father. On the floor, slumped, his back against the couch and his arms resting on his knees brought up toward his chest. He smoked. The lights off and the shades drawn, his father was but a shadow of a man and neither the boy nor the shadow spoke. The boy stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the outside light he kept from coming in. His father raised his arm and drew from the cigarette and the burning cherry cast a soft glow upon his mouth and chin and the sidestream smoke rose and swirled and then stopped, hanging in the dark room as if it were air made visible.
“I’m back,” the boy said at last, holding the gun at his side.
His father coughed.
“Yeah,” he said, sour. “Yeah, I can see that. I thought you said you were gone for good. What happened? You come to finish me off?”
“No.”
“What about your little whore?”
The boy tensed and swallowed and said nothing.
“Well, I hope you at least got some pussy out of it.”
The boy closed the door and walked past his father and into the kitchen and turned the faucet and nothing came out.
“Jug in the icebox,” his father said.
The boy opened the fridge and no light came on and the air was stale and warm. He took the water jug and drank from it and put it back and closed the door.
“I thought about killing you,” he told his father.
“Yeah. I thought about killing you back.”
The man drew at the cigarette and coughed and laughed and winced in pain all together.
“You remind me of her, you know,” his father said. “Your big fucking eyes.”
“You miss her?” the boy asked.
“Your grandfather told me there was only three things I should never do. Join the military, get a tattoo, get married. I figured two out of three wasn’t so bad. Meatloaf wrote a fucking song about it. Anyway. We bought this trailer, moved out here to live free from the rest of the world.”
“Did she like it here?”
The man’s words caught, eyes watering. He nodded.
“She loved the river. Loved the animals and the forest. Like a goddamn woods witch, the way she walked barefoot through the trees.”
“Why’d she leave?”
“I done told you why.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The boy’s father readied a harsh word but stopped. He looked tired.
“Believe what you want.”
“She wouldn’t just leave me.”
“But she did.”
“Tell me why.”
“Would that all fathers and
mothers loved their children, but they don’t. What do they call it? The circle of life. That’s all it is. A way to keep the circle tracing over itself again and again, until one day the pen pokes through the paper.”
The man shook his head.
“So you tell me,” he asked the boy. “How was I supposed to look at you after that?”
“I don’t know why I came back.”
“I don’t neither.”
“All I wanted was for you to . . .” the boy let his words trail. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I wanted.”
“Never does. Now go on. Get out from here. I ever see you again, I will kill you.”
52
The truck sped north through the night—the driver’s eyes wide, hands tight on the wheel. The passenger cracked his window and discarded a used needle. He slumped down in his seat.
“I don’t even know nobody in Canada,” Lonnie moaned, then giggled, writhing against the back of his seat as the meth and his body began to pulse together. “Shit, I don’t even speak Canadian.”
Frank shook his head.
“If I never thought in my whole life that Momma was right about things, I do right now,” he said. “Right here in this moment.”
“How come, Frank?” Lonnie asked, his head tilted up, mouth hanging open.
“Because here I am running from the cartel, and who am I stuck with but the dumbest sumbitch that ever drew breath—a feat, by the way, that I still ain’t sure how you continue to pull off.”
Lonnie looked hurt, then he giggled again.
“I don’t know about going to no socialist country,” Lonnie said. “Why can’t we stay in America?”
“We’re gonna drive this truck until the last road in all the world gives out. And when it does, we’re gonna hope the Mexicans have forgot all about us. We’ll wait until things cool off. Then, maybe, we can come home someday,” Frank told him. “And Canada ain’t socialist. They just have some socialist-adjacent policies. Like we do.”