“You can’t go out there alone, Zur. Let me go with you,” she pleaded.
“I won’t hear it. You stay tight and protect this house.” He roped his hand around his leather belt, slid the curved sheath of his knife loose, and showed Eleanora the blade. “I’ll be back before you know it.” He leaned in and kissed her on the head.
Maurel and Casey ditched the truck and ran into the subterranean entrance of the mine. The light died, forcing them to stay close and navigate the dirt walls by touch. They went far enough in then ducked behind a stack of crates, hoping to remain hidden long enough to catch a breath. Insulated by tons of earth, any movement or sound either of them made was amplified and would give away their position. Maurel whispered to Casey, grasping for a plan, but both fell silent when men with guns emerged behind brash echoes that stormed from the mouth of the mine. They had pulled up their truck as far as it would go and the blinding beams flooded the entrance. Outlines of the McShay gang approached in unison, their rifles drawn. Maurel grew sick as he realized that they were pinned down in their position with no direction to turn. To go back was almost certain death, but to head further underground without a light was to venture into oblivion. He peered over the edge of the crate, surprised to see the men had turned their backs and were now approaching someone else, who had ventured in after them.
“Who the hell is that?” Casey hissed. “I can’t see a thing beyond those lights.”
When the gang got close enough, they shined a lantern on the new intruder. Zuriel stood in his gray thermal underwear and boots, wielding his knife in the faces of the armed men. The boys recognized the hobbled shape as their father, and when a McShay raised a rifle, Maurel jumped from behind the crate and rushed him, knocking the gun to the ground. Casey went straight for Dunny McShay and cracked him in the face. Zuriel sliced up the man in front of him, but he and another man hugged Zuriel’s arms to his sides and unloaded a series of crushing blows to his ribs and stomach. As the fight raged, Casey dropped to his knees and searched for the gun. He felt rock and sand and got his fingers caught under boot heels. A man fell over his back and thankfully took no notice of him. Casey could not produce the rifle. Instead, he unearthed the head of a pickaxe from out of the ground.
“Case!” yelled Maurel, dust shot through with bands of light. Casey popped up from the mirth below and threw the axe to his brother, who caught it firm and stared at it strangely, expecting to be clutching the gun, before he swung it high and hard at his attacker. The pick pierced through the brittle dome of bone at his temple and out the other side, fastening the dead man’s head to the curved dirt ceiling above.
Familiar, holy visions coursed through Zuriel. He set his gaze on his assailant, turned his shoulder to drawn him forth, exposing his midsection, then came around low from the opposite side and slid the full length of his blade in at the kidney. The tall body fell over his shoulder and Zuriel flipped him over and crawled on top of him. He wrapped his bicep around his throat, intertwined their legs, and choked the man until the life coursed out of him.
The three Baynes struggled to their feet and made sure they were not wounded. The boys brushed the dirt from their clothes and came to realize that Dunny McShay was missing just as the shadow of a rifle barrel extended through the caustic glare and rested at the base of Zuriel’s spine. The boys froze, their hands out in front of them. Maurel was crouched down, and he lowered one of his hands until he clutched hold of a jagged rock and raised it up and smashed Dunny in the face before he could fire a shot. He dropped his rifle and this time Casey recovered and righted the gun. He handed it over. Maurel gritted his teeth and got out half of the word motherfucker before firing three bullets in succession, dropping Dunny in a heap.
The echo from the discharged rounds faded into a low vibration that grumbled throughout the surrounding earth. The low ceiling began to leak hourglass streams of dirt between the rotted trusses of wood. Maurel reached for his injured father, but Casey grabbed his arm and held him back. The roof of the mineshaft groaned and cracked as though it was being devoured by a great machine. Their father collapsed on one knee, shielding himself from falling dirt, when the main support buckled and the shaft collapsed above Zuriel.
Casey pushed Maurel back toward the entrance and forced him to run until their lungs tasted fresh open air. They sprinted ahead of the collapse and dove beside McShay’s truck, landing on their chests. A torrent of rocks and dirt flew over their heads, swallowing the fallen McShays in the mouth of the mine and burying their father in the midnight of his tomb.
NINE
A PAIR OF GLOVED HANDS unearthed blue and tan fingerlings from neat mounds of dirt along the side of the Bayne house. Hulking pallid squash and enormous green beans swirled from the vines, which Jordan clipped and gathered in a bucket. Blueberries and blackberries fell from bushes, feverish and overgrown. He culled their fruit with a metal-toothed comb affixed to a coffee can. He hauled his varied bounty up to the kitchen and set it on the counter, where Walker was helping Elizabeth and her mother prepare jam pastries. Jordan wiped his neck with a rag and rummaged through his suitcase on the floor in the living room. Elizabeth stole a glance at his sweating back before he pulled a clean white shirt over his head. Jordan sensed her there and turned around, catching her off guard. “Would you like a drink?” she asked. “You look like you could use one.”
Jordan nodded.
“I’ll get you a beer,” she said.
“Actually,” Jordan stopped her. “I would like some of that lemonade, if you don’t mind.”
Elizabeth smiled. “Sure thing.”
Malcolm came through the screen door misted with sweat himself, headphones still blaring from his morning run. Elizabeth kissed him and handed Jordan a cold glass of lemonade, then rejoined her mother in the kitchen. Jordan took the damp rag in his hand and threw it in his brother’s face. He sneered, then used it to wipe his brow anyway.
Laughter erupted from the kitchen. The boys watched their father prance in an apron, flour on his nose and in his beard.
“What’s got into him?” Malcolm pointed with the rag down the hall.
“The fairer of the Truitts, I imagine.”
Mary was making the crust for her pie, folding chilled water and lard into the dough. “Don’t feel bad,” she taunted Walker. “No need to be ashamed of your rather pedestrian cooking.”
Walker kneaded dough beside her on a wood block. “That’s all right, ladies,” he said. “I’d have you get your hands up rear of them ducks we’re roasting tonight if I didn’t think you’d have too good a time with it.” He turned away as Mary and Elizabeth threw pinches of flour at him.
Jordan hovered over the pie fixings and stuck his finger in the fruit. Elizabeth slapped his hand away. “What’s for dinner?” he asked.
“Main course is duck, roasted and stuffed. We’re mashing those potatoes with fat from the bird, turn the collards in that, too. Cobbler of them brambles and, oh yes, a pecan pie.”
“Sounds like we’re fixing on a feast. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
Walker drew a slow laugh out of his belly, looking at both his sons. “Who y’all think’s going to get us them ducks?”
Bethlehem Creek shimmered with incandescent waves that refracted the glare of the sun. Malcolm and Jordan suited up in rubber waders pulled from the trunk of Malcolm’s SUV, each checking a pack of supplies and sight-lining their shotguns. On the narrow trail, their covered feet moved clumsy in the brush. They stumbled down the bank but managed to make it to the bottom of the slope that skirted the contour of the shore. Slowly, their bodies submerged into the muck. Rings rippled in each direction and dispersed across the surface.
“I used to fish here,” Malcolm said, disappeared up to his chest. He arched his neck, scanning the ash-colored sky for movement. They passed along the ridge of the shore, one behind the other. “Trout came easy here at the right time of year,” he said. “Got a forty-inch muskie once.”
&
nbsp; “Bullshit,” Jordan scoffed.
“All right, maybe that was Roscoe. He used to come down here to lay his girl, Marie.” Malcolm could see Jordan smirking. “He told me about it, so what?”
“Nothing,” Jordan said. “I didn’t know you had friends in high school.”
“Shut up.”
After a few hundred yards the shelf dropped off, sending both of them sideways up to their chins. Elbows raised above the surface, they held their guns overhead. Eventually, they found their footing as the shallows rose to meet them. They followed a narrow slip that lead out to a raised finger of submerged grass that could not be accessed from any point on shore. Malcolm blew the duck call while Jordan cracked two cans of beer and handed one over, staying in place until the water grew still. The trees on shore hushed with the onset winds of autumn. Malcolm turned his ear to the bank across the gyre that churned in front of them.
“We used to do this all the time,” Jordan said after the calm set.
“Man, what happened?” Malcolm took in fresh air and held it in his lungs.
“I don’t remember much of nothing. Sometimes I think I have brain damage, I swear.”
“No shock there,” Malcolm said, sweeping his vision from side to side.
“How’s that?” Jordan asked.
“Who knows what you know,” said Malcolm. “I think back to when we were in school. You and I would drive around in your truck all summer, going to parties, fishing up at Beaver Lake. We would head down to New Orleans. Leave the city at dawn, fried out of our minds. We had some good times. I tried for years to figure out if something happened. You and I were okay, but by the time we finished school you just had the breath of hell in you. I didn’t know where it came from. I was worried. Your friends said you were at the bar talking about leaving. Harrell said you blacked out and woke up in his truck, rambling about how everything was so fucked that you were either going to leave or kill yourself. He didn’t think much of it, because, well, no offense, but we had all sort of gotten used to that kind of talk from you. So, I asked him what happened. He said he pulled over on the side of the road and you fell out the passenger side and threw up. After a minute he didn’t hear nothing, so he went around the far side of the truck and you were gone, just like that.”
A long-buried sorrow clawed its way through Jordan’s chest and clenched shut the bottom of his throat. Malcolm looked over as his brother turned away. “I went off to college a couple months later. Had to move on, for better or worse.”
“Sorry,” Jordan muttered.
“Doesn’t matter now,” Malcolm told him. “We’re standing up to our balls in muddy water, aren’t we?”
Jordan angled his barrel across the sky, following a loon that flew a few hundred yards in a matter of seconds until it glided from sight. He lowered his shotgun.
Malcolm stuffed the crushed cans in his pack. He handed Jordan another beer. “We were talking the other day about music. Curious if you gave it any more thought.”
“Who knows,” said Jordan. “There are songs in my head I know I can write, I don’t know why I don’t.”
“You could start by getting out of San Antonio. Go to Austin, or come back here. Stop fighting it.”
“I think that’s what I’m doing,” Jordan admitted. “I like being back with you and Dad, and I’m happy you found someone.”
Malcolm blew the high wheeze of the duck call and asked if Jordan had a girl, the question sprawling like a bridge to all he still didn’t know about his life. “Saw you and Leah outside the bar the other night.”
“She said she would consider seeing me again, to my amazement. Enough time must have passed to soften her entrenched desire to murder me.”
Malcolm swished around in the water and aimed his rifle above Jordan’s shoulder into a thick canopy of trees. A rustle rose from inside the wood. “Blow the call,” Malcolm whispered.
A shrill note blew across the expanse—nothing. Jordan reached in the water and dug out a smooth black stone. He threw it in a long arc that landed with a hollow knock against the base of a tree, flushing three slender bodies from the brush. Jordan fumbled to aim and fired off a rogue shot that sent the birds flapping faster, gaining height. Malcolm took his time squinting down the track of his barrel, drew a sharp breath, and fired three steady shots. One duck continued to rise. The others faltered from the sky, landing with a hard splash in the shallow water.
Jordan spread a dead bird on the cutting block in the kitchen. The ligaments cracked at the base of the wings, but he wedged in the corrugated sheers and snapped through the muscle on each side. He made similar cuts on the rest of the ducks, then severed each set of bony legs above the joint. Two pots filled with water sat on the stove, steam pouring from one, the other cold. Jordan dropped a block of paraffin into the boiling pot, then gripped one of the carcasses by the neck and dunked it below the wax, coating the feathered body. He held each bird below the surface, pulled them out, and plunged them into the pot of cold water, solidifying the wax into a hard shell. He cracked open the wax with a knife and pried outward with his fingers, pulling the keratin quills out of the denuded skin in clusters. He worked the shoulders and breast until all the feathers were removed.
He severed their lifeless heads with a butcher’s knife. Dark blood leaked out of each orifice and Jordan rushed to pinch them closed. He hooked his finger into the cavity at the neck and drew out the organ sack intact. More blood rushed across the table. He did the same to the other two, then scraped the vinous organs, severed heads, spiny feet, and bloody sinew into the trash.
“Look at those beauties,” said Walker. He and Mary came into the kitchen carrying groceries. Jordan could tell the presence of women was making him lively and it was already wearing on his nerves. “Malcolm always was one hell of a shot,” he continued.
Malcolm warmed himself up with a cup of tea. “What did I do?” he asked.
“Bagging these drakes for our feast,” Mary said.
“Actually,” Malcolm said, “Jordan nailed both of them.”
He exchanged glances with his brother. Walker took a moment to stand corrected before patting Jordan on the shoulder as he passed, reticent to offer a knowing look of his own.
After dinner, those who were staying retreated to different corners of the house and Walker asked Jordan to join him in the garage. There was something he wanted to show him.
“An old friend sends me this tobacco he grows out in Virginia. If this ain’t the best stuff you ever smelled,” said Walker. He removed the lid from the crate to show Jordan huge brittle leaves stacked in parchment, sun-struck brown, sweetly aromatic. “I shred a couple at a time as needed, keep it in this jar for special occasions.” Walker rolled two big cigarettes, fastening the single brown wrap over itself. He handed over a lighter and Jordan pulled his until it was lit and inhaled. They stood together, smoking in quiet.
“How come Uncle Jake ain’t around no more? He was here all the time when we were kids, y’all were close.” Walker glared through the purity of white smoke, not addressing the question, so instead Jordan asked him about Maurel. “I read the letters in his foot locker,” he said. “I didn’t know he was in the war.”
Walker felt his face grow hot. “What’s bringing this on, huh? For years you couldn’t have been bothered to give a damn, now suddenly you’re interested in family history?”
For once, Jordan decided to be honest with his father. “I’ve started to realize how little I know about us. There are gaps in my memory, things I can’t remember happening or having done. I can’t imagine what I’ve missed, and I mean all of it. Mom, Jake, Grandpa Maurel. There’s a lot I’m seeing for the first time. The more I find out, the more I want to know.”
A disappointed sigh escaped Walker. “What’s done is done. Let’s work on getting the future right.”
“See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Jordan countered. “You didn’t address anything I just said. Why does everything always have to be shr
ouded in such mystery?”
Walker sniped his smoke in the ashtray and smoothed down his beard. “Listen, boy,” he said, solemn. “Believe me when I say, it ain’t in some things’ nature to be known.”
Late that night, when the house was still, a low whisper crept over the arm of the couch as Jordan lay asleep. “Wake up,” hissed Malcolm, jostling Jordan by the shoulder. “Come on, get up.”
Jordan pried open his eyes to see Malcolm standing over him dressed in black, fiddling with two flashlights. “What are you wearing?” he asked, sitting up. Malcolm got one of the flashlights to work and turned it on inches from Jordan’s face. He flung out his arm to defend against the blinding light. “I forgot how annoying you can be,” he groaned.
“Let’s go,” Malcolm urged. “We’re going out there.”
Jordan mumbled, seduced by sleep.
“The grove in the woods,” Malcolm said, hitting him again. “Remember?”
Jordan sat up and rubbed his eyes a final time. “It’s two in the morning, and you want to go for a walk in the woods?”
Malcolm knew it was the sort of idea Jordan could never resist.
“We haven’t been out there since we were kids. I wouldn’t even remember how to get there,” Jordan told him.
“I remember,” said Malcolm. “Come on, follow me.” He pulled the drawstrings on his hooded sweatshirt and tossed Jordan a black Carhartt jacket from the rack by the door. The flashlight bounced throughout the downstairs of the house as they escaped out the back.
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