by David Joy
The cigarette dangled from Calvin’s lips and he squinted his eyes to block them from smoke. He leaned back in the chair and shoved his hands into the front pocket of a dirty black hoodie with the HOOPER EXCAVATING logo on the chest.
“This is an official statement just the same as the written one and that means what you tell me better not change from here on out, you understand?”
Calvin nodded and the cigarette glowed from his lips.
“This is being recorded.” Stillwell flicked his eyes toward the camera in the corner of the room. “So I need you to answer everything I ask as honest as you can. Tell me everything you can think of even if it doesn’t seem all that important.”
Again, Calvin nodded. He took his hand out of his pocket to ash the cigarette, flecks of burning tobacco hissing as they hit the coffee.
“So what time did you get over there to Darl’s this morning?”
“About seven,” Calvin said. “Maybe a little before.”
“And what were you doing there?”
“I’d come over to try and help him with his tractor. He busted the boom. Wanted me to see if it was something we could fix or if he needed to buy a new one.”
“So why’d you get there so early?”
“Seven ain’t early,” Calvin said. “Me and Dad got a big job going right now. I’m busy as hell at work and so was Darl. That’s the only time either one of us had. I was going to take a quick look at it and head on to work. He was going to do the same.”
“He was expecting you to come by this morning?”
“Well, yeah.” That question seemed stupid to him. “Darl had some work this weekend and he needed to get the tractor fixed.”
“When’s the last time you talked to him?”
“I don’t know. A day or two ago.” Calvin took a long drag and tapped a fingernail of ash into the coffee. “I guess a couple days ago. I told him I’d be by there this morning.”
“And you talked on the phone?”
“No.” Calvin closed his eyes and shook his head. “No, I ain’t talked to him on the phone since sometime last weekend.”
“Then how’d you talk to him?”
“I ran into him at Ingles. He was sitting in his truck eating Burger King and I stopped by Ingles to pick up some milk and happened to see his truck.”
“Was anybody with you?”
“No.”
“Anybody see you?”
“I don’t reckon.” Calvin was starting to get confused. The questions Stillwell was asking made it seem like he was a suspect. “What’s it matter if somebody saw me talking to him or not?”
“I’m trying to help you, Cal. That’s all. If somebody tells me they were at the Ingles, it’s my job to figure out whether or not that’s true. So if somebody can tell me they saw you there, that helps all of us.”
“I told you I was there.”
“I know you did.”
“Then why else would I have said it?” Calvin dropped the cigarette into the cup, the yellowed filter spinning where it floated.
“Tell me about this morning.”
“What about it?”
“What’d you find when you got there?”
“I pulled up to the house and the door was standing open so I figured he was awake. When I got on the porch, I hollered for him and didn’t get a response and so I went on in. I saw some blood there by the dining room table, but I didn’t really think much of it right then—”
“You didn’t think much of it?”
“No. A man works with his hands, he busts something open every day.”
“So . . .”
“So I went on around the house thinking he might’ve been in the shower and I hollered back there in the bedroom, and when I never could find him I walked down to the barn figuring he might already be working on the tractor and that’s when I found him.”
“What did you find?”
Calvin Hooper slammed his fists against the table. The coffee cup rattled, but neither toppled nor spilled. “What the fuck do you mean what did I find?” His green eyes were wide and his bottom jaw jutted out in anger.
“I need you to tell me what you saw.”
“You know what I saw! I saw Darl tied to that goddamn hay bale.” Calvin fought hard to keep from crying. He could feel his eyes frosting with tears. “And I saw the blood. I saw all of that blood and him hanging there.”
“And what did you do then?”
“Are you dumb or something? I called you!” Calvin started to sob and he buried his face in his hands. Stillwell reached over and set his hand on Calvin’s shoulder and Calvin jumped away startled before crying harder when Stillwell squeezed onto him. “He was my best friend,” Calvin stuttered. “Darl was like a brother to me.”
Calvin hadn’t slept or eaten in days, and over the past few hours he’d reached his threshold, the place deep inside that no man can point a finger to until he buckles. The place where he could take no more had come and gone in the blink of an eye and now here he sat little more than a husk of what he was a week before. The only sound now was their breathing and the slow tick of the second hand working its way around the clock face. Neither moved, and finally, in a few minutes, Calvin Hooper lifted his head, reached for his pack of smokes on the table, and lit another cigarette. He spun the lighter around on the tabletop a half turn at a time, staring blank and emotionless.
“What I’m going to ask you now is probably the most important thing I’m going to ask, Calvin.”
Calvin looked at Stillwell from the corners of his eyes. He bit at a hangnail on his thumb and then took a long drag from his Winston.
“Who hated Darl enough to do that?”
“Nobody,” Calvin said.
“You sur—”
“I’m sure,” Calvin interrupted. “Darl Moody never met a stranger in his life. He never had a cross word with anybody that wasn’t settled right then and there.”
“Had he gotten into drugs? He owe anybody any money that you can think of?”
“No,” Calvin said. “Darl drank a few cold beer, but that was it. Look, I don’t know what you want me to say. Darl Moody was the same kid we went to high school with. He worked his ass off all week, loved to get in the woods, and usually tied one on come Friday. About the worst thing I ever knew him to do was to put that raccoon in Donald Ray’s little gay-ass Miata when we were in eleventh grade. Outside of that, he was about as good a man as I ever knew.”
“What happened was personal,” Stillwell said. “What happened in that barn ain’t the kind of thing somebody just up and decides to do.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“What happened to your eye?” Stillwell leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.
The question caught Calvin off guard and for a short second he looked puzzled. “What?”
“I said what happened to your eye right there?” Stillwell gestured with the back of his hand to the side of Calvin’s face.
Calvin lifted his left hand and patted gently beside his eye almost having forgotten what was there. He took a few quick puffs from his cigarette to finish and twisted the cherry off the filter before dropping it into the coffee. “I was cutting wood.”
“When did you do that?”
“Yesterday,” Calvin said. “I was felling a few trees and a limb come out of the top of one of them and smacked me in the back of the head. I got knocked down and landed on a rock.” He kept his hand at the side of his face.
“Where were you cutting trees?”
“Up behind the house.”
“Let me see the back of your head.” Stillwell leaned to the left to try and get a better view and Calvin tilted his head forward and showed the egg-shaped knot. Stillwell grunted. “That looks like it hurt.”
Calvin patted tenderly around th
e wound, grabbed his pack of cigarettes from the table, and shoved them into his pocket. “The way you’re asking all these questions seems like you’re saying I might’ve had something to do with this.”
Stillwell didn’t answer.
“Is that what you’re saying? Am I a suspect?”
Stillwell made a fist with his right hand and fit his left overtop of it. He stared at his hands and squeezed his knuckles. In a moment he looked up. “It’d be naive to think that you weren’t.”
“So do I need to talk to a lawyer?”
“I don’t know,” Stillwell said. “Do you think you need to get a lawyer?”
“Look, am I under arrest here, because I—”
“No, no, you ain’t under arrest,” Stillwell interrupted him.
“Well is there anything else?”
“You got your phone on you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then pull it out and put my number in it.”
Calvin slid his cell phone from his pocket and entered the number Stillwell gave.
“You think of anything else, you call me.”
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Calvin said. He stood and Stillwell looked up and nodded, not another word spoken as Calvin left the room.
In the front lobby, a wall was lined with brass plaques engraved with the portraits and names of past sheriffs. Calvin didn’t know why, but he walked over and studied the portrait of Sheriff Griff Middleton, who was killed in a holler up Little Canada in 1953 while he was hunting down some Woods boy for assaulting Norvella McCall. Sixty-three years later, having happened three decades before he was born, Calvin knew the story the same as everyone else to ever come out of Jackson County. Things had a way of never leaving these mountains. Stories took root like everything else. He was a part of one now, part of a story that would never be forgotten, and that made bearing the truth all the more heavy. Just as Dwayne told him the night before, a man’s mind is its own kind of hell.
FIFTEEN
What the ground had slowed hastened those first few days Sissy sulked against the wall. His shoulders fell and his body limbered, but he was swollen now, his face grotesque and disfigured. The smell of rotting meat washed over Dwayne Brewer the minute he opened the door. That hot, soured smell was similar to roadkill bloated by sun, but it was bigger, richer, so that you could sense the size of what decayed.
Dwayne came into the room and sat down in front of his brother. He looked at his face, how his cheeks were a greenish-blue. Large blisters covered his arms, marbled skin almost glossy. As Carol bloated to twice his size, he outgrew his clothes so that the fabric cut hard into his skin, the bottom of his shirt rising high on his stomach. His eyes were popping out of his head, his tongue bulging from his mouth, and it was hard for Dwayne to see this, but for whatever reason he couldn’t help but look.
Over the past few days, he couldn’t stop remembering. It was like his mind was suddenly flooded with all the years they’d spent together, memories boiling out of him without any trigger or control.
One fall when Dwayne was about twelve years old, he’d camped in the wreckage of a fort he’d built. When he woke, a rafter of turkeys were picking about the ground for acorns, coming out of a thick hedge of laurel where they’d bedded down while he slept. “It’s strange of turkeys not to roost in the trees, but these slept on the ground,” Dwayne told his brother when he went home. That night they decided they’d wake up early the next morning and try to kill one with a bow and arrow.
The sun had not broken the ridge when he and his brother climbed the leaf-littered hillside to the ruins of the fort. Walls constructed with busted tires and pieces of scrap two-by-fours and plywood collapsed in on themselves, and the long piece of rusted tin he’d salvaged from the stream for a roof was crumpled like a smashed beer can.
The turkeys were scattered about the ground, dark shadows crouching in laurel. One of the birds was closer than the rest, a clear uphill vantage from here to there, and Dwayne coaxed his brother to take the shot. He took an arrow from his quiver and nocked it onto the bowstring, then handed the weapon to Sissy.
Drawing back, Sissy settled his aim. There was the short, swift thooot, and that arrow was into that bird’s side before Dwayne ever had a thought. He watched as the bird screeched in terror, all of those other turkeys waking up and tearing off over the ground in a deafening madness, and that bird beat furiously with one wing, its other run through and pinned to its body by the arrow.
Dwayne and his brother prowled closer and the bird flapped itself in circles as that one side tried desperately to get away while the other was as useless to its body now as a tumor. When the bird stopped, Dwayne could see the blood pumping over its mottled feathers, a red so bright that it seemed to glow against such a dark backdrop. The bird cocked its head to the side and opened its sharp beak toward him and Dwayne could see something familiar in its eyes, something so familiar in its suffering.
The turkey collapsed onto its side and they stood there for a minute watching, waiting for what would come. Dwayne tiptoed closer. He’d never seen a bird blink its eyes until right then, and something about that, something in the way its eyes opened and closed, made him feel a sentience in its existence. Like that turkey wasn’t some bird but something else entirely, something exactly like him. There was so much blood, all of the feathers wetted with it, and the bird opened its beak, a wheezing sound coming then like it was out of breath. Dwayne knew the bird was dying and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He also knew that it was suffering, and all he could think was that they had to end that suffering, to hasten its death. This was what was meant by mercy.
“You have to finish it off,” he said.
Carol had the bow in his hands and he was watching the bird vacantly, his eyes filled with tears.
“Kill it, Sissy,” he said, but his brother neither moved nor spoke.
Dwayne looked around the ground for something, not knowing exactly what he was looking for, and his eyes settled on a rock about the size of a football, a large hunk of milk quartz muddied with red clay. He picked up the rock with both hands. Standing above the bird, he raised the stone over his head and readied himself to end it. When it came down he closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw he had failed. The ground was soft beneath the bird’s head so that the blow only mangled it further, its wing flapping wrathfully, its head in slow contortion. Within its black stare, the boy could see forever and he could hear his brother wailing behind him.
He hurried and grabbed the rock again, readied himself, and came down harder, and this time when he opened his eyes the deed was done. The only movement now was in the way the wind ruffled bronze feathers. Dwayne Brewer had killed plenty of small game—rabbits, squirrels, and doves. He’d even killed his first deer the fall before. But this was something different entirely. He wasn’t bothered by it. It was just different. It had felt necessary. Absolutely necessary.
When he turned around he saw his brother on his knees, his face beet red, that dark birthmark glossed with tears. Dwayne understood that his brother was not meant for this place, that some people were born too soft to bear the teeth of this world. There was no place for weakness in a world like this. Survival was so often a matter of meanness.
“You never had a mean bone in your body,” Dwayne said as he looked across the floor to where his brother rested against the cobbled wall. And true as it was, the world’s cruelty had found him just the same.
SIXTEEN
The coroner held Darl Moody’s body till Tuesday so that he was buried two days later, nearly a week after Calvin found him. Leading up to the funeral, Calvin didn’t think that he could do it. He couldn’t imagine being able to carry the casket from the front of the church to the hearse, from the back of the hearse to the grave, knowing what he knew. But when Darl’s mother asked him to be a pallbearer, he couldn’t say no.
Strangely,
as he carried that shiny black casket up the hill, he hadn’t felt what he’d expected. Truth was, he’d felt nothing at all, merely a sleepy sort of delusion like he’d woken out of a dream. Strange. Unreal. Like he’d woken into a new world having never stepped foot there before.
It had always seemed unnatural for the sun to shine on a funeral. It had always seemed strange to bury bodies on a hill. Graves here were uneven things, one end dug deeper than another. Headstones dotted the slope above Chastine Creek. Some of the markers were so old and worn that the names had been erased by time. Some of the oldest had never held names because those left to the mountains knew who lay beneath them.
Darl Moody’s mother wore a black dress that fit her like a nightgown and a stoic expression that demanded she had no more tears to cry. The plot beside her husband’s grave was dug, a mound of red clay hidden on the other side. It must’ve been so extraordinary to be staring at a piece of ground meant for her, a grave that in time would’ve held her casket. Mothers should not bury their children. That was all Calvin Hooper could think as he stood there in a pair of pleated khakis and the nicest shirt he owned.
Darl Moody’s death ripped Jackson County apart. Things like that didn’t happen here. There were two or three homicides a year, but rarely more than that, and the ones that did happen were usually tied to drugs. Plenty of folks were bad off on meth or gooned out on pills, and folks like that had a tendency of stumbling into dangerous places, but not men like Darl, not families like the Moodys. Everyone in the county knew their family and there wasn’t a cross word to say about a one of them. What happened was a tragedy and the community rallied behind them with hotdog suppers and cakewalks and gun raffles and turkey shoots to help with expenses like any other time something unexpected struck one of their own.
While the preacher read from the book of Corinthians, Calvin stood to the side and watched a murder of crows strut through the churchyard below. Angie leaned against him, her parents standing behind her.