Melvin didn't hesitate, lunged forward. Stabbed with sudden force. Buried the two shiny prongs of the serving fork deep into Garrett's gut. They came together, for a moment, hugging, almost like old friends, and Melvin felt the full weight of the man against his chest.
Warmth seeped through Melvin's clothes, and then, as he opened his arms to release, something pierced his side. Garrett fell backwards, struck the wall, and Melvin looked down at his own belly, lifted his shirt. He'd been cut, too. In the shape of a pink smile. Red beading formed at the corners. He knew his tunnel had been sliced, bright water was beginning to leak out. Streaming. He took three steps backwards, sensed two segments of flesh, top and bottom, once knitted together, now slipping against each other. A pair of greasy lips. He slumped back against the bed, breathed deeply.
Liquid coursed down his shirt, over his faded jeans, but Melvin was not alarmed. The fear that had held him by his throat for months and months had evaporated. And he lifted his face to the ceiling. To the sky. The temperature in the room dropped, and he began to shiver. It was then he noticed a boy, hunched, a few feet to his left. Melvin leaned, tumbled onto his side, his elbow sinking into the soggy shag. He looked down at his hand, now a snowflake, and he watched the ice crystals crawl out towards the little boy. Crawl backwards through his body. Shivering harder now. Color draining from his lips. “We can go home now, Toad.” He moved his crystal fingers further. To touch his brother. A second snowflake. Touch him, and bridge the space in between.
STANDING INSIDE THE kitchen, Toby was shaking. Even though the spoons and forks were quiet on the floor, the aggression was still cutting through the air. He stared at the holes in the wall, the broken phone, and suddenly he wanted to talk to Angie. Wanted to talk to her badly. Even though they'd been going together for a full year, Toby had never called her. They had worked to keep everything between them a secret, but at that moment he had to talk to her. He needed to hear her say that everything would turn out okay. No matter how bad it got, a time would come when life would be normal. Life would be kind. “Another storm,” he'd say, using their private code. “Occurring or imminent,” she might reply. “Squall already moved through. Damages moderate.”
He unplugged the phone in the kitchen, ran to the hallway. Dialed her number, let it ring. Once, twice, three times. Then a pang in his stomach made him hang up. Her voice would not be enough for him right now. He would have to see her smiling face, her solid body. Smell her hair, the faint smell of her scalp, and have proof that she exists. Tonight he would march up to her door, stare her mother and father straight in their squinting eyes, and tell them “She may sleep under your roof, but the one part that keeps her alive belongs to me. And there idn't nothing you can do about it.” If Mr. Fagan held up his battered fists, challenged him? After a whole year of secrecy, Toby had had enough. Tonight, if gloves were raised, he would strike the old man down. Beat him into a mushy speechless pulp. Anything for a sliver of her love.
Tugging a wool hat down over his ears, he stomped through the kitchen, out into the night. In a flutter of a wing, he reached her door. Courage tempered by the brisk walk, he tapped lightly, rephrased the words that sat on his tongue. “Might I see your daughter? Might I talk to Angie for a minute?” No one answered his tapping, and Toby pressed his face hard against the metal screening, stared into the kitchen. Someone had left a light on over the stove, and it threw a faint glow on the mound of shoes and jackets in the porch. Then, as he was about to turn and walk home, he spotted something. Just beside a plastic bucket of metal pieces, Toby spied another pair of shoes. Separate from the others, neatly laid side by side. Sneakers, white with blue stripes, heels worn where the owner scuffed. Toby knew they were Melvin's.
Courage moved out of his heart and into his muscles. He opened the screen door, and stepped in. Took three more steps into the kitchen. Directly above his head he heard scrambling sounds, and his stomach flip-flopped, contents squelching. Without thinking, he moved through the kitchen and into the hallway, slowly moved up the staircase, step by step. Found a door ajar, and he knocked it with his toe, closed his eyes as it creaked open.
Blood everywhere. On the walls, the carpet. Toby sucked in his breath, saw Garrett Glass, slumped, holding his stomach. Sheer curtains billowed with the salty wind, and when they parted, Toby saw a pair of young fingers, gripping the sill, slipping, slipping, then a loud thunk as the owner fell to the earth below. Toby rushed to the window, stared out across over the moonlit backyard, saw a child, pale arms and back, limping over the frozen lawn. He turned, discovered a layer of his brother's clothes on the opposite side of the room, strangely full as though they were stuffed with bloody hay. Surely, it's just his clothes. Just his clothes. Just his clothes. Toby tilted his head, tilted, and his knees nearly folded when he saw Melvin's hands, his head, somehow tucked under the metal bedframe, hidden.
He ran to Melvin, hauled him out, wrapped his arms around his torso, squeezed. Melvin's bloody clothes were slippery against Toby's skin, and Toby tried to sit him up, then thought to lay him flat. “Shush, shush,” he whispered into Melvin's cold ear. “Someone's coming for you. Someone's coming. Going to be alright.”
“Help!” he cried. “Help him!” But no one answered.
His brother lay dying. Toby began to whimper. No one was coming, and he was too afraid to get up and find their phone. He needed to hold his brother, hold Melvin, and be present. He couldn't allow himself to steal away inside his own head. Melvin would not die alone.
ELI FAFAGAN TRIPPED over the shoes in the front porch. “Christ Almighty.” A pair of white and blue sneakers right in the middle of the mat. For several moments, he stared at those sneakers, wondering where they belonged. Whose feet had just been in them.
Something propelled him forward. Made him aware. In the kitchen, he looked up, saw a bright bug near the fluorescent light. Closer inspection, the bug was growing, spreading outwards, not a bug at all. He stood directly underneath it, and watched as a black drop formed, fell, struck him on the forehead. Reaching up, he wiped it, looked at the blood on his dirty fingers.
Upstairs, he could hear someone grousing, and he gripped the banister, ascended the stairs as fast as his prickly bones would carry him.
Once inside his stepson's bedroom, Eli's farmer mind calculated things at an extraordinary rate. He saw Garrett lift a hand towards him, heard him moan, “Me, father. Meee.” And he recognized the Trench boys, one clinging to the limp body of the other. He clenched his jaw, rubbed a hand over a wrinkled forehead, spoke, “Get away from him.”
Toby was defiant, didn't budge. “No, sir. I won't.”
“Get on, I said.”
“I won't let go.”
But Eli Fagan gripped his arm, yanked, broke Toby's grasp. Then he stepped behind Melvin, eased the boy back, put a pillow under his head. Felt his clothes, fabric already sticking to the wound. He didn't lift the clothes away, removed his own shirt instead, balled it and applied pressure.
“Go,” he said to Toby. “Call.”
“Call?”
Eli shook his head. “Call the operator, my son. Call your father. In the hallway.”
Toby stood there, mouth gaping, lungs constricting.
“Go,” Eli growled this time. “Don't got much time.”
“You got to save him, Mr. Fagan. You got to. He's my brother.”
Toby found a phone in the hallway, perched on a tiny table, chair attached. He scooped up the receiver, stuck his finger in the right hole, twisted all the way, waited ages for the plastic dial to reorient itself, number to connect.
“Operator.”
“Missus Bussey? Missus Bussey?”
“Yes, darling.”
“We needs help. I'm at the Fagan farm. My brother is hurt.”
“Who's this?”
“It's Toby.”
“Okay, lovey. Hurt bad?”
“Yes, yes. Bleedin'. Bad. Cut.”
“Oh, my lovey, lovey. Oh my. Just one sec, and I'll get someone out there.” He heard her making another call, after a moment, she returned. “Want me to call your dad?”
“Yeah.” He sat down. Closed his eyes.
“I got him here for you,” Mrs. Bussey said after a moment. “I'll connect.”
Toby took a deep breath, felt his father on the other end before he even spoke.
“You there, Toad?”
Toby couldn't speak. Words hitched in his throat. Incomprehensible. How could he form the sentences, tell his father that Melvin's goodness was drifting away? Drifting out through that open window, and Toby was unable to close it.
MOST AFTERNOONS THAT fall, Mrs. Verge prepared warm meals in the Trench kitchen, rabbit covered in pastry or stew and dumplings. Tonight, she served up mounds of steaming pasta with spicy sauce of ground meat and tomatoes. “You won't believe that's moose,” she said as she laid two plates on the table. But most of it went uneaten, Toby being absent, and Lewis's stomach unable to accept more than a spoonful. He picked at the rest, rearranged it on his plate, and finally scraped back his chair and left the table.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “Was delicious, though. What I tried of it.”
“Yes, I allows.”
“No, no really. It was good.” He put his fist to his stomach, pushed. “Toby'll eat for sure when he gets home.”
“You can try again later,” she said as she placed a second plate upside-down on the first, slid the works into the fridge. “You got to be gentle on yourself. You got to remind yourself you done the best you could.”
Lewis shook his head, put his hand up to stop her. He couldn't hear those kind lies. “I'm going out,” he said.
“Working?”
“No. Remember they sent in that young feller? Wish they didn't. Gives me too much time on my hands.”
“Oh, yes. Blessing in disguise if you asks me. Working yourself into the ground all these years. Nothing wrong with a bit of help.”
“No, nothing wrong,” he said as he took his coat, shut the door quietly behind him. He closed his eyes, leaned the back of his head against the door, felt the moist air on his cheeks for a moment, and then walked down the steps.
He wandered over the dirt road, picked his way through an overgrown path in the woods. The brisk movement calmed the sadness that had settled into his legs. He hadn't intended to go anywhere in particular, but that night he found himself standing on the edge of Eli Fagan's backyard. Face against a wet tree, he stared out over an expanse of slick black grass. The house and barn were dark, empty, nothing more than uncertain silhouettes in the night. Maybe there, maybe not. He reached up, touched a low branch, fingers running over the knobby bark. Instantly, he could imagine Roy. Bounding through the woods, his strong shoulders and back oiled with sweat, perhaps even gripping that very branch, swinging, and then tumbling out into the backyard. Towards his own death. Lewis moved out from his shelter, spray transformed into icy drizzle. He walked a dozen steps straight ahead. Squinting, he managed to see the remains of the old barrel, a circle of rusting teeth sticking up out of the tired lawn.
When he reached it, Lewis stomped the edges, and some of it crumpled, a shard of it stuck into his boot. He sat down in a sodden patch, thought about how his brother's blood was still here, on this very spot, still feeding the grass and the earthworms, and the dandelions. Still breaking down every winter as life decayed. Picked up again when spring fought its way back through the snow. If. If, on that day, I had kept my head stuck underneath that sink. I had opened a can of beans and wieners to feed his crying stomach. I had grabbed his wrist before he tore off through the woods. I had held him tighter on this very spot. I had said good-bye.
Cold winds slid across Lewis's open mouth, and he found it difficult to breathe. These days all he thought about was Roy. He could do that, stick a poker into those old embers, let them sputter and smoke. Choke him, blind him. But he couldn't think about his boy. Not yet. About everything that a good father might have done to prevent things or fix things, or make things better. Lewis couldn't manage to think about any of it, though the weight of regret stunned him, made him feel as though a jokester had found a hole in his back, filled his entire soul with sand.
ELI RESTED ON a bench in the barn. He'd been puttering about for most of the afternoon, cleaning tools, sharpening blades, organizing bolts and screws and straightened nails into butter tubs. Things would be tidy for Angie, he'd decided. All ready. She would have enough on her young shoulders when the time came. She didn't need a mess.
The afternoon passed away and night drifted in. Eli was lost in shadows. Beside his thigh was a lantern, and he placed his hand on the cold glass chimney. When he lifted it, he caught the bitter odor of kerosene, knew the cotton wick was ready. But he didn't strike a match. He hated the dark, the way his hands disappeared, lost at the end of his arms. But, more and more often, he sought out these quiet places filled only with absolute blackness. Reasoning that, given time, he might get used to the sensation of night pressing in on his skin.
He leaned forward, removed the tweed hat from his head. Pinching it in his fists, his fingers worried the fabric. Only a few weeks earlier, Eli had been to visit Doc Rideout. Overnight, his body had morphed from tight leathery pelt and good stores of fat to a heap of saggy paper skin, protruding bone. He'd been vomiting bile and blood daily, felt a painful fullness in his guts, and there were visible sores on his tongue. After a battery of tests, Doc pronounced cancer. “Started in your stomach, I reckons,” he said, “but now it has progressed to your tubing, your throat and into your mouth.”