Authors: Brandon Hardy
He nearly apologized then said “No. I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Red hair. Drives a pumpkin orange Geo Metro. Surely you’ve seen it out here.”
“Oh yeah,” Duke said, shaking a finger with false recognition.
“Well, anyways, I’d better go look for him. See ya around.” She turned toward the school.
“Gina, wait!” Duke grabbed her hand and scrawled three digits, a dash, and four more digits on the palm of her hand. His blood sizzled at the tactile ecstasy, feeling her cool knuckles, her warm, moist palms.
“My number,” he said proudly.
“Thanks. You can let go now.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He thought she might turn and leap into his arms and whisper something dirty in his ear. But she didn’t.
Now he had a problem. That is, unless Gina never found out he mashed her brother’s face like a potato. He didn’t think Dylan would squeal on him. At the last interlude prior to the eye socket barbecue, Duke had made very clear what would happen if he did.
12
Gina didn’t find Dylan. But she found Jared.
He was almost to his Charger, a classic cruiser from 1968 beaming with flawless beauty. Something flexed within her subconscious, pulling her towards him. She hesitated. Her instincts were directed at her own car that would take her home where she hoped to find Dylan with a lame excuse ready to lay on the table. But there she went, floating uninhibited and unafraid.
“Nice car,” Gina said, stopping him. He turned to look at her. He looked like the weight of the world rested on his shoulders, not at all like the confident hunk of eye candy who winked at her not even twenty-four hours ago.
“Thanks,” Jared said, running a hand over the hood ornaments. “It was my Dad’s.”
“I can’t imagine why anyone would let something like that go to their kid. He jealous?”
“Nah.” Jared looked up at the sky, now invaded by tiny puffs of white. “Well, I guess he could be. He’s up there somewhere, so if he is, he’s not saying anything about it.”
“He a pilot?” Gina threw up the words before she could stop them.
Jared cocked his head slightly, puzzled, more humored than offended. “No. He’s––”
“I’m sorry. So stupid of me.”
“It’s all right. Don’t worry about it. So, you’re Gina, right?”
“In the flesh. I don’t have much of a reputation, so I have to ask how you knew I existed.”
Jared walked towards her, pocketing his hands in his jacket.
“Well, it’s a small school, a small town. I see you in the halls between classes. Heard you called ‘Gina’ by one of your friends.”
“I don’t––”
have any friends
, she meant to say. “I’ve been called worse.”
He smiled at this. She was charming. Nervous but charming. It was cute, and he adored it.
“You live around here? Close to school?” he asked.
“Yeah, not far. You?”
“Same,” he nodded. “You trying to get with Duke Pearson?”
“What? What makes you say that?” She tamed her defenses and sighed.
Jared through up his hands. “Just asking. Although, I assumed you had a guy of your own already.”
In all of her academic years, she had never been so popular, so interesting to the male kind. A full moon, a bad moon, must be on the rise. Hell, a lunar eclipse, maybe.
“I’m single as a sliced cheese.”
Palm slap
, she thought.
“That’s…cheesy.”
The laughed like a couple of morons doped up on antifreeze. Jared’s anxiety seemed to lift, vaporize, if only for a tiny moment. “All right, well, how about I call you sometime?” he asked.
“Yeah. Got a pen?”
He handed her one, and she wrote her number on his hand below a thin scar on his palm. She kept her left fist balled, hoping Jared wouldn’t see the digits tattooed on her palm. She hoped Duke’s phone number had run off with wear and sweat.
Out of the corner of her eye, she thought something moved inside Jared’s gym lying in the passenger seat.
She dismissed it immediately.
Silly girl
,
you’re losing it.
“Great,” he said, smiling. And with that, he said goodbye and drove out of the lot. Gina stood there, dreamy and rattled with emotions that seemed so new and foreign. She got into her car and drove up the lane toward Highway 7.
13
Gina threw her keys in a dish beside the door and kicked off her shoes. Dylan’s puttermobile was in the driveway with a new tire, and the pink carbon receipt from Robinson’s Tire & Lube lay on the kitchen counter, so he had to be here. She called for Dylan and got back only a deafening silence. Then a noise, pitter-patter across the hardwood floors. Fender peaked his nose around the couch and looked at her wearily.
She almost yelled Dylan’s name once more, but something stopped her. Dylan was sitting on the couch with his head lolled to the side, his face and shirt stained brown with dried blood. A sharp pang of horror and disgust flooded through her.
“Dylan?” She cried out. “Dylan!”
He didn’t respond.
Her mind screamed
Oh God, what the hell happenedto you
, but the words refused to come out. She ran to him. His chest was heaving. It was shallow, but enough to let her know he was breathing. He was alive.
“Wake up, Dylan!” She shook him furiously. The smell of sweat and urine hung in the air. “Wake up you little pukeface!”
She reeled her hand back to pop him into consciousness just before Dylan’s eyes slid open.
“Christ Almighty, were you about to
hit
me?”
Gina exhaled and rested her head on his shoulder. “If you weren’t dead, I was gonna kill you myself.”
“I was just napping.”
“Who did this to you?”
“Duke Pearson,” he said. “Got us behind the school. Me and Garrett Eucher.”
“Oh my God.”
“But,” he added, “I got him back pretty good.” Dylan’s puffy lips widened into a smile.
“Get up. I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No, no. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“He mighta broke your nose, Dylan.”
“I’m fine. Go away will ya?”
“Suit yourself.”
Gina walked to the stairs then turned back. His face looked like raw beef.
“I think you’d better clean up before Mom gets home. She’s gonna lose her shit when she sees you, ya know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“How do you feel? Do you need anything? She’s gonna take you to the hospital whether you wanna go or not.”
Linda walked in with groceries. Dylan’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He jumped to his feet and ran up the stairs.
“Hi, Mom,” Gina said, moving into the kitchen.
“Hello, hello. What’s with your brother?”
“He said he was going to hop in the shower, I think,” Gina said and helped put away groceries. Her mother just smiled and shook her head.
“That’s funny. The boy must be sick.”
14
Dylan showered. The scent of Irish Spring soap pleased him, refreshed him. He dressed and went downstairs. Gina was gone. His mother had fallen asleep on the couch cradling a bag of Cheese Doodles. He hunted for the television remote and decided to go outside instead.
Shafts of golden sunshine broke through gaps in a blood-red sky, vibrantly detailed like a massive fresco on the belly of a broad cathedral ceiling.
A lumber truck went past the house. He watched it bend the curb past Whippoorwill Road, cackling over the railroad tracks. The driver hoofed it and disappeared behind a row of pines. Dylan noticed a speck of red high up in the branches.
He leisurely walked a quarter-mile against traffic down Highway 7. The air was still and quiet except for the occasional rustling of wheatgrass lining the asphalt. When he got to the towering pines, he pivoted his head and looked up to see a child’s kite gnarled in the branches. The kite was stuck a good thirty feet up and made Dylan think of a lone ornament on a Christmas tree. It was the vibrant red of a ripened apple, a comparison that brought up hunger pains in his stomach. He had skipped out on lunch, and the usual stop at Avery’s for chocolate milk and a greasy sausage sandwich before school, well, that plan had
blown out
.
He couldn’t think of any kids that lived on this part of Highway 7. There were only two other families that lived on that side of the road. The kite could have belonged to Joe Cunningham’s granddaughter. The Cunninghams were private folks but still managed a smile or a friendly wave of the hand in passing. Dylan once had Phys. Ed. with Joe’s son, Stanley. Stan had been accepted to the University of Tennessee and had a prosperous career ahead of him in the exciting world of accounting, but just shy of two weeks after graduation, his girlfriend spilled the
I’m pregnant
beans. Stan opted for a vocational certificate in automotive engineering and parked a singlewide eyesore on a tract of land he bought on the north side of town. Dylan saw him earlier that day, as a matter of fact, at Robinson’s Tire and Lube tipping a quart of Pennzoil into Harley Robinson’s Camaro. He had broad smears of the stuff on his brow, his hands buttered up to his wrists with blackened oil.
He squinted to see something painted on the surface of the kite––a symbol, a glyph of some kind. He’d never seen anything like it before, and he was actually surprised this was the first time he was seeing it. It looked like it had been up there for decades…
There were stories. Groups of strange, wide-eyed religious fanatics meeting in some remote part of the county to worship––
He shuddered. The skin on his neck prickled then he shook it off.
They’re rumors, Dylan
, he told himself.
Just rumors.
15
The Beetle hugged the road as it went deeper and deeper into the wooded terrain beyond the town limits. Gina drove for what seemed like hours. She had to clear her head before her brain exploded and ran out her ears. Her thoughts jumped from Jared to Dylan to Duke then back to Jared again. An emotional thunderstorm brewed inside her. She was worried about Dylan, and the thought of spending even one second with Duke Pearson made her queasy. That creep had cornered her brother and worked him over pretty good, but at least Dylan grew a pair and stuck that flame where it would hurt Duke the most––his ego––and Dylan may not come out so lucky next time. Even though Gina and that squirt she called a brother pretended to hate each other, she loved him and would have his back till the bitter end, come hell or high water.
As for Jared…
Something had moved around in his gym bag.
Did I really see that? It’s not possible. It couldn’t have moved. Couldn’t have.
But it did.
What the hell?
Someone was standing in the road, silhouetted in plum-colored twilight. Her Beetle slowed to a crawl and lurched forward. The headlamps lit him up. The man was slick-headed and wore bibbed overalls with no shirt. He was leaning on something that looked like a cane. As Gina floated closer, she saw that the man was leaning on the stock of a rifle, the barrel pressed down into something furry.
A group of small children cheered from the hill on the left side of the road. They threw up their hands and jumped excitedly in the air as though they were routing for a track runner to pass the finish line.
When Gina's car stopped just short of the man, the furry creature escaped––a raccoon frantically limping towards the ditch. The pity in Gina's heart imploded as she drove past. The man towering over the defenseless coon began crushing its head repeatedly with the stock of his rifle. She could hear the sharp, terrible claps through her car windows.
The children cheered wildly. One boy almost tumbled down the hill drunk with sick, innocent joy. He waved at Gina.
She passed them by and turned off, nearly retching in her lap at the corn-pone cruelty shrinking in the rearview.
16
He sat in his car looking at the crumpled piece of paper in his right hand. He could barely make out what it said in the soft wink of moonlight coming through his windshield, but he knew what Mr. Pearson had written. He’d read it dozens of times and didn’t want to do what it instructed him to do.
Jared had spent enough time with Ellis Pearson over the years since he and Duke had become good friends in kindergarten and there was no doubt Mr. P filled the shoes of a supportive father after his own had bit the bullet in the Gulf. Lieutenant Galen Kemper had been killed in Saudi Arabia while under Iraqi artillery fire and had widowed a plain-faced girl named Martha who went completely mad and got lost in the good book––and lost a little more than her marbles.
Now Pearson’s asking him to do this. Not as favor, but as a service. He’d been preparing in secrecy for months and he was finally ready. His first. The idea had first scared him, then gradually it intrigued him. He felt powerful. Invincible. If his mother had her way and pushed Jared into an olive drab suit, he wouldn’t be able to continue. Serving his country wasn’t his duty.
This
was his duty.
Jared reached over and unzipped his gym back and stared at them. Fear snagged in his throat, words hammered at his conscience.
I can hear them rustling around in there––writhing around, rattling, hissing. They're going to bite me. Not just one of them, but all of them, I'm sure. They'll find me dead right here––swollen, purple, and dead. I can smell them––that smell of wet earth and urine.
But he knew they wouldn’t. Not now. He had complete control over them.
He zipped the bag and got out of the car.
Somewhere out there in the night, behind the row of pines marching along Highway 7, Jared carried them on his good shoulder, balancing the weight as he walked. The Lubbock house was just up ahead past the railroad tracks at Bingham, but the fog rolling off Goose Creek made it difficult to see.
He stood at the house gilded in moonlight, checked his watch. Susan was here, her red hatchback parked in its usual spot under an overhanging maple with gnarled branches at the end of Macklin Avenue. The house was dark and silent.