He had asked his brother:
You ever wonder at how lakers seem like they’re in on one big secret? I walk these woods and wave hello to people and I wonder, What’s the story there? How’d they end up here instead of somewhere else? You got the Akins place, and Boyle Akins went nuts and killed his wife and even all the dogs. Only time I ever seen police lights in Lake Holloway. What happened in that house, why’d he go nuts like that? Or you pass the Kelso’s and there’s the old man with his glass eye out, turning the thing over in his one hand because the left hand’s gone, and the side of his face looks melted. How did he lose his eye and his hand? What happened to his face? You can’t ask, and no one ever tells you.
Fleece said he didn’t know but he could guess. Then he said he didn’t care. Later he added he’d heard Boyle Akins ran too long on his own crank. But to most of Cole’s questions he said,
It’s their story, not mine.
So why did Bethel get shot?
Cole asked.
That’s your story, isn’t it?
Fleece rolled his eyes over his brother as he would an empty room he was about to exit. His hands played with his butterfly knife, an all-metal Spiderco Spiderfly, flipping it open in the air and then catching it again, creating a fine percussive rhythm with the repetition.
You think too much, pup.
Don’t you want to know? Don’t you care?
I care enough not to go look for any more trouble than what already finds me.
He lost interest in the knife and flipped it shut and tapped it down into his shirt pocket. He kept his hand over the pocket, palm flat like a shield to cover his heart, looking as though he were swearing an oath if not for the fact that Fleece never pledged allegiance to anything but his own desires.
Sure I’d like to know, sometimes. But what’s the knowing worth? Bethel Skaggs was a hard mean skinny little fucker, a real son of a bitch. Look at Momma—you think she got that way on her own? Hell no, that’s my so-called dad still giving it to her every day.
His palm slid from his heart to his thigh, sliding further to the knee and back, uncertain where to go without the knife to trick.
Not sure it even matters much, who exactly did the deed,
he said.
Knowing who wouldn’t explain
why
. Could’ve been the last thing his killer wanted to do.
Or he could have loved every second of it,
Cole said.
He was whistling, after. I remember.
You got the way you feel, and you got what you want people to think you feel,
Fleece said.
Now his hands found their purpose, searching his jeans for the one-hitter box. It was in the breast pocket of his jacket, and he fixed a pinch into the pipe.
Say he loved every second of it. Say he sits alone and gloats over each detail of that day and how he got away with killing Bethel Skaggs. What’s changed now? Would we be better off with Bethel alive?
Cole thought, I would have grown up with you, but he knew these words were nothing his brother wanted to hear. He watched the tendril of a flat cloud break away and dissipate into empty sky before admitting he didn’t know if they’d be better off with Bethel alive or no.
The thing is this,
Fleece said.
The only way to know the truth of a story is you got to go through the whole story yourself. You have to be in Bethel’s shoes and you have to be in the shoes of the guy that shot him. It’s the only way to understand for sure, and nobody can do that. The rest is just the law.
What would you do if you
did
know for sure,
asked Cole.
Fleece handed him the one-hitter and the fixed angle of his eyes indicated he was thinking it over. Cole went through the ritual of pinch, plant, and flame and then took tiny hits off the heated brass, the metal hot on his lips and the raw smoke too harsh, scalding a passage down his young throat to a hot blossom in his chest. Fleece could kill the hit in one deep inhalation; Cole nursed it. His brother, amused, yet not going so far as to tease, watched him baby the cylinder until he finished.
What am I going to do,
Fleece said then.
Kill him back? I’m off the lake, so I’m supposed to kill him back. Maybe I would if I knew the story ended there, but it wouldn’t, the story just changes, and in that one I’m hiding the rest of my life from any sons or brothers the guy had.
It’s just not right to kill somebody like it cost nothing.
We don’t know what it cost him. He might be paying for it to this day.
You sound like you’re defending him,
Cole said.
The guy who killed your father, you defend him like you’re his lawyer.
I was just a kid then,
Fleece said, no more than sixteen, seventeen himself at the time.
I want to believe tomorrow might be just a little bit better than today, and even better the day after that, and on and on. And forget what I come from. Shoot. If it came out right I might even go work for the man.
Fleece smiled at the thought. He drew a moist hand over his face, and then drove a frank stare into Cole that implied how well he knew his brother, that he understood his thoughts and wonder because he himself had been through them already as separate items and as a constellation of issues for a much longer time, wrestling, and had reached some equanimity with the matter that Cole could not yet make.
You know, lots of times a story doesn’t have an end, it just changes shape,
he said. Then abruptly he stood and stepped one pace away, and by doing so finished the conversation right there, wherever they were, wherever they found themselves together that day; Cole remembers only his
brother, their words, the blue sky presenting ropes of snaking clouds in perpetual motion.
I’ll catch up with you later,
Fleece had said, exchanging the little wooden box in his pocket for the butterfly knife again, the end of which he stabbed unopened against his thigh as he walked away, leaving little Cole holding the corner of yet another question he assumed he could never resolve on his own.
The statement
I’ll catch up with you
winds through Cole’s head like a carousel of thought tracing the inside of his skull as he drives the interstate north to Pirtle County. The words scroll across the screen of his mind, turn briefly illegible as they follow one another in a circle and turn backward, as AMBULANCE appears on the hood of one so that it can be read in a rearview mirror, then passing clear before his eyes again.
I’ll catch up with you
. Cole has always seen it the other way around: catching up with Fleece had been practically his life’s work, all he longed for. To catch up on seventeen, to catch up to his brother, whose way of being was like a pattern Cole had hoped to slip into, to be so much like him as to
be
him. Sometimes he felt—even then, a young boy—hardly more than a ghost, trailing after his brother’s full incarnation, seeking to be conjured into actual flesh by this brother who understood what Cole needed to be. Yet he knew they were inescapably different as well; Cole was Cole and Fleece was Fleece and no matter how much he might wish otherwise, this fact would remain forever the case. A recognition underscored by Cole’s floating eye and stiff leg, his gimp knee a throbbing alarm in changing weather like any hill-bound geezer, while his brother rioted the night, humming guitar lines as he hot-footed that Nova reckless over bad roads, suffering no doubt or dread, to whatever destination he had in mind.
By the time he hits Lake Holloway the sun has retreated enough to make headlights necessary in the woods, and the shine off the black Audi cabriolet parked behind his mother’s car appears to leap at him from the dusk. The sight strikes a great chord of emotions: first, hopeful expectancy—Shady Beck has come to see him. Or she has already turned up Fleece and wants them to know. Then it’s the realization that Shady Beck is alone with his mother, and he doesn’t know for how long, and his hopefulness withers into anxiety. She won’t have news; she wouldn’t know how to turn up any. He imagines Shady describing abandoned seminary rooms and packs of starving dogs, and his brother’s famous car set afire before their eyes looking down from a rooftop, Lyda grousing how Cole cares nothing for family honor.
He expects the heads of both women to turn as he enters the house, their faces craning to greet him over the half-wall partition that divides the kitchen from the front room, the oak-doored cabinets (pine within, handmade by his father, Mack) blurred behind the haze of Lyda’s cigarettes, a radio playing Lite FM hits of the seventies from where it balances atop the clothes washer; he expects to walk in, perhaps, on their laughter at some shared comment he will not quite hear. He finds he is wrong. The house sits silent, the kitchen table empty, one wooden chair pulled back before a tin cup, speckled green like a leaf under siege by aphids. Three lemon cookies sit on a ceramic
plate among crumbs. Cole puts one in his mouth and lets the tart fruit sizzle on his tongue. The women are out back, on the slope facing the woods across the creek. Through the kitchen window he sees his mother amid the recounting of some tale, her hands active, tracing forms through the air. Shady stands attentively in gray cotton sweatpants, her name in purple-and-gold high-school lettering visible from the kitchen light in an arc across the rise of her ass—old warmups he recalls eyeing from the risers years before as the girls did wind sprints on the track, Cole braving this same November cold beside Spunk, their behinds clenched on the aluminum, sharing weed and inventing conquests as they watched.
She turns with Lyda at the high squeak of the back door opening. As he smiles hello he pursues her face, inspects her gray eyes, the corners of her mouth, the tilt of her head, for any hint of why she’s there or what she and Lyda have been talking about, but her face reflects only bland and friendly welcome. Opening his mouth feels like plunging face-first into dark water of uncertain depth.
Shady beats him to it. “We thought you’d be home an hour ago,” she says, pressing to her sternum a blue tin cup speckled to match the one in the kitchen, above her breasts lost in the baggy, hooded sweatshirt.
“That was a long day, sugar, you do it all yourself?” Lyda’s voice is slow, soft over consonants.
“All by myself,” Cole says. “Any coffee left?”
Together the women announce, as if in celebration, that they are drinking tea. As she starts up the slope his mother says she’ll make coffee if he wants some. Her hair, colored mahogany (she calls it “strawberry jam”) but grown out to show dark roots with bands of gray, froths in a wild flurry about her head, perhaps originally styled as a kind of bun or twist but since harassed beyond recognition. He can tell she has massaged the day past concern in a blend of pills on the couch with her Doral Golds and daytime TV, with long breaks before the bathroom mirror examining her look. A day off from her life of days off. She stabs out her smoke in the matted grass by her bare foot and throws the filter into the plastic bucket by the door, the bowl yellowed and soiled by rain and sand mixing weeks’ worth of spent
butts. She brushes past him with a kiss to his cheek and he smells the tobacco over sweaty perfume. He asks if she’s going out tonight.
“Not tonight, I’m plumb wore out—my back’s up again, and my neck,” she says, reciting symptoms gleaned from her
Merck Manual
used to pull prescriptions, manifestations practiced to the point that they have become a kind of truth. “I can only do so much,” she adds from behind the closing door.
A lot of work goes into scoring meds. No one would describe Lyda as a nervous busybody, but she does possess abundant physical energy, a drive that, without an outlet, easily transforms to anxiety and paranoia; she needs to keep her hands busy. Oxy, Nembutal, Flexeril, Dilaudid if she can get it, keep her steady—so she tells Cole. Who takes most statements at face value and wishes he didn’t. But when the pills wear off, the skittish edge trills apparent about her. Sober, his mother trembles as though some inner engine has broken its mount. She complains of spinal bursitis, bulging discs, a pinched nerve; she moans at random. Yet tonight is liquid calm, moving smooth and deliberate as the gentle creek running below the yard’s slope. She has been more or less smooth and deliberate since he learned to talk—and often as inscrutable as that creek’s voice tumbling over mute stones.
He can’t get anything from Shady’s face. He nears her and asks, furtive and quiet, masking indifference, what brings her to Lake Holloway early on a Saturday night. Shady ignores his conspiratorial air, and answers in a voice that hails Lyda already in the house: “Dad says I can’t sit around the house just ’cause I’m between schools, I got to find a job. So I’m out looking for one, far as he knows.”
“You told me that already,” Lyda calls from behind the open door. “Now what you going to do with that fancy degree, Miss Prettier-Than-I-Am?”
His mother has always liked Shady. She had held hopes the girl might turn Fleece around, making her son into the man he was not. Mothers live on wishes and hope, she would say.
“Your momma’s in a new dress,” Shady whispers on their way up the yard. “She said you wouldn’t notice but you might surprise her if you did.” She answers Lyda once they are in the kitchen. “I
don’t know. Sit around and deal some solitaire? Stare out the window? Whatever a girl in crisis is supposed to do. Go to church?”
Lyda snorts derision. And then quickly apologizes, as though her mockery had burst out as unexpectedly as a belch. “Never had much use for church myself. All they wanted was me to sing His praises and keep these knees squeezed tight. You can see how
that
worked out.”
They laugh, but the entire scene feels false to Cole, a performance he is expected to play along with without question.
“It’s not like that where I go,” Shady says. “Brother Ponder at CWE, he’s about the positives God wants us to nourish in ourselves. God didn’t put us here to fail. It’s a good message, good to be reminded of sometimes.”