“Probably best if we just use that tarp for the dragging. There’s a decent game trail for most of it,” Jeremy said.
I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t supposed to be around for this part. The way Daddy’d planned was for me to get Robbie to tell who he’d talked to, and then I’d leave the Cabe brothers to handle the end part, but we were all in it together now. There wasn’t any way out of that darkness but forward.
Gerald yanked the tarp out of the truck bed like some drunken magician trying to pull a tablecloth from under a coffin, and Robbie’s body folded and fell to the ground. Those burns on his face proved sticky and held on to the blue tarp in places, and I had to look away to keep from getting sick. He was the first dead person I’d ever seen outside of the niceties of mortician makeup and dimly lit funeral parlors. Even at that moment, I understood that what was taking place was the type of thing that would never leave a man, the type of thing to shake him from dream for the rest of his life.
Jeremy leaned down and wrapped the body up in a cocoon with the tarp, and I was glad that I didn’t have to see it any longer. We trudged off into those woods with Jeremy clearing a path, Gerald doing most of the dragging, and me kicking the tarp free every time it hung on a root or rock.
“I don’t know about you boys, but I got me a date with Jack and Ginger when all this is said and done,” Jeremy said as he brushed back a laurel tangle to let Gerald pass. “Yep, I can hear that whiskey and ginger ale calling to me right this second. How about you? Got any plans?”
I found it strange that he could talk so casually amidst the horror, but like it or not, we were partners right then and partners had to amuse each other to make the time pass. “Thought I might slide by a party on the way to the house.”
“A party? Well hell, Jacob, why ain’t you tell us you knew of a party? We might all pack up and go. Ride together, you know, make one hell of an entrance. Those folks won’t think they ever knew what a party was before we got there and I pop into that motherfucker like
tah-dah
with my pecker out.” Jeremy jumped and turned to look at us. He dry-humped the air with a shit-eating grin spread wide enough for rotten teeth to catch moonlight.
“Ain’t much of a party. Just a bunch of high school kids.”
“Sixteen’ll get you twenty, Jacob. Reckon I’ll stick with Jack and Ginger.”
The woods were loud with nighttime sounds in the distance, but it was quiet where we walked. The silence rode with us. Gerald let out a grunt as we got to a steep embankment on the hillside and we all pitched in to drag the body to the crest. The bluff wasn’t so much a sheer rock face as a steep decline riddled with boulders that hadn’t been moved since water set them there thousands of years before. I stood back while the Cabe brothers grabbed the tarp by the ends and started swinging. When the body swayed high, Jeremy let loose of his end and Robbie’s body rolled limp, limbs flailing, down the hill till it caught on a big, round stone. Gerald folded the tarp up as if it was something worth keeping, and I stared down at the place where the first man I’d ever seen die fit around the boulder like a tongue and groove. The Cabe brothers started making their way toward the trucks. “Later, Jacob,” Jeremy hollered. But I just stood there for a while and stared at it. I figured if it was going to hang with me for a while, I might as well get the details right.
Cars parked crooked on every square inch of grass and had started bleeding out onto the side of the highway by the time I got there. The whole place looked like a Scrabble board, with all those blocks spelling words like “underage” and “drunk tank.” Though the law would have to show at some point or another, the deputies were usually civil about giving kids a good start on a night they’d never remember. Besides that, I kind of hoped those squad cars would pull up any minute and get a damn fine look at my face. That would have to be as strong an alibi as any.
I was already half lit off a bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy’s that Daddy wouldn’t miss from the liquor cabinet, seeing as it was still months from cold season. Between those menthol schnapps and a half a roach I’d found in the truck ashtray, I was well on my way when I dropped a white Xanax bar onto my tongue and swallowed.
There were kids spilling out into the yard, most of them too drunk to stand upright as they made out with friends they’d grown up with and confessed love that would fizzle by dawn. I hoped she was there. I hoped that somewhere in the crowd Maggie was there and that she’d be happy to see me. I couldn’t have cared less about the rest of the faces. It didn’t matter if any of those old chums were alive or thrown out on some bluff for the buzzards to pick apart.
The inside of the house was ransacked and any dignity that had ever resided there had called it a night. Charlie Mitchell’s parents would undoubtedly wring his big-ass Adam’s apple plumb flat whenever they came home, and maybe that’s why he was running around picking up empties and filling black trash bags with the clock just a hair past one. That poor boy was sweating, beads forming under that bright red hair just as fast as he could wipe. He did a double take when he caught me standing in the doorway. His eyes swelled for a second as if I’d just dropped a shit on a night that was already piled high and steaming.
I scanned the room filled with faces that I’d known all my life, but it was different now. When I was sleeping in the back of the classroom and even a few months after I’d dropped out, those kids had looked at me like some sort of hero, like I was doing things and going places that they’d always dreamt about but never had the guts to say aloud. Not anymore. Now they recognized me for what I am, I guess. Trash. Trash that wouldn’t have known a fucking thing about them if it weren’t for Facebook.
Blane Cowen was the first to speak to me. He came stumbling up on gimp legs and that top half of him circling around just a few degrees short of full orbit. His curled mess of hair was coming off his head in every which way and he blinked slow, made it look like he was drunker than Cooter Brown and barely able to talk when he said hello.
“What’s up, Jacob?” Blane dragged out my name as if it were hieroglyphs.
“Not shit. What about you?”
“I’m fucked-up, man! Drinking. Smoking. I’m fucked-up!”
I laughed a little bit. Playing along with that kid’s game was almost enough to make me forget where I’d just come from for a minute or two. “I hear you, buddy.”
“All right, man.” Blane seemed to sense that the type of attention he warranted wasn’t anything I could give. “Well, it was good seeing you, man! Hit me up sometime. We’ll go burn one.”
I didn’t respond but watched Blane stumble away till he got in the center of the room. That was the place he’d always wanted to be, right there in the center of things. Only no one was watching. He turned his head every which way and with eyes held half closed, he waited to catch anyone looking. When a couple folks got to noticing, Blane fell stiff as a board face-first into the couch. The ones who were watching snickered, and old Blane started grunting and mumbling things that didn’t make a lick of sense. He was destined for Hollywood.
I made my way through a crowded hall where rap music blasted family pictures into angles on the walls. Most of the kids didn’t even notice me passing, but the ones who did lifted Dixie cups filled with warm beer to their lips so that they wouldn’t have to speak. I don’t know what it was about being gone for two years, not spending every waking hour next to those sons of bitches, but they looked at me nowadays like saying hello would throw their whole universe off-kilter.
Along an island bar in the kitchen the popular guys were throwing beer pong, while the girls with crushes stood near wondering if any of those boys were lit enough to consider putting their panties on the ceiling fan. What they didn’t know was that those types of guys were too worried about impressing one another to concentrate on important shit like pussy. Those guys were too busy chugging beers and trying to memorize rap lyrics to pay attention to what girl had that fuck-me look in her eyes. Still, I knew if Maggie was at the house, she’d be somewhere close by. The guys splashing Ping-Pong balls into Dixie cups of suds had ridden Avery Hooper’s coattails to get to that table, and I was certain she was there somewhere with him.
Smoke hung heavy on the far side of the room and the brass chandelier overhead set the smoke aglow around a small table. I could see Avery sitting with his back to the window. He said something I was too far away to hear and I caught a glimpse of Maggie. She rocked back in the chair beside him, her head tilted with blond curls trailing, and laughed. Though she smiled as if she were having a good time, it was obvious she didn’t belong. Most of us born here would die here, never having seen anything further away than Pigeon Forge, but not her. When we were nine or ten years old and first learning cursive, she spent hours upon hours memorizing every curve of her name. “All famous people have to sign autographs,” she’d said. I couldn’t even remember the twists and turns of
x
’s and
z
’s. Lot of folks set their eyes on the distance at one point or another, but in time those eyes drew back. Maggie’s never had. The biggest difference between her and other dreamers was that she was determined enough and smart enough to will it into existence. It had always been obvious Maggie was only passing through.
Part of me was hesitant to even walk over, but the other ninety-eight percent had Xanax pumping any anxiety that ever existed into oblivion. Avery Hooper was the type of guy that every time he looked at you, you just wanted to haul off and hit him in the fucking mouth. He’d grown his hair long, and tufts of that brown hair rolled out over his ears and curled back toward the ceiling. A tight string of thick wooden beads, one of those necklaces from shit-town novelty shops in shit-town places like Gatlinburg, was fitted around his neck. It was that college look, that I-smoke-weed-and-kick-Hacky-Sacks kind of look, that was spread all over that son of a bitch, and I hated him for it.
I shuffled past the pong game and past the line of girls who had just enough baby fat left to make them vulnerable. When I got to the table, she saw me. Maggie looked up with those silvery blue eyes, and where I’d hoped to find welcome, I thought I spotted some sort of fear. She glanced down at the table and then up to me with eyes getting wider. There was a plate there, one of those floral-pattern plates that parents keep well into silver anniversaries, on the table. And there was powder on that plate, chunky powder flickering like glass shards and cut into lines in that yellow light. I looked at her again and saw a straw in the hand she used to push her hair back behind her ears. Then there was this rage that started building inside of me. There was this anger that washed all of the haze left from reefer and alcohol and ladder bars out of me and left nothing more than a need to break every last bone in that motherfucker’s body. Right then, there wasn’t a thought that could’ve calmed any of it down, and so I went with it.
“You snort any of that shit?” I looked Maggie dead in her eyes, and I could see she was scared.
“Who the fuck are you talking to? Ain’t none of your goddamn business, Jake!”
My eyes flicked over to that mouth that shouldn’t have been talking but was, that mouth that just might shoot me over the edge. Avery’s eyes were lit up like firecrackers and his jaw had been put into motion. “Did you give her that shit?”
“Fuck you, Jake. I suggest you go find some other place to be a fucking hero, because nobody wants you here. There ain’t a goddamn soul that wants anything to do with your sorry ass, especially not Maggie.”
I could hear the music playing, but all the noise of folks talking and hollering had shut quiet. I could feel their eyes pressing into the back of my skull, and those eyes went to pressing so hard until they were pushing me forward. Before I knew it, I was moving too fast to stop and I was into him.
That first punch sent a red mist hanging on air and the blood started pouring and I could see it in his eyes, I could see it in there even as I was hitting him, that he’d never been in a fight and wanted it to end. But that next fist came and split his head against the window, and glass went haywire, and I kept forward. My hands were on him now, and I had him out of his chair and onto the floor and I was braining him, his skull just cracking as it bounced off the tile into another line of knuckles.
It was when his eyes started fading and that wide-eyed rabid look had turned stupefied there on the floor that I got my wits about me. Something came over me, something screaming that anything more would kill him, and it held my fist still as the moon there above him. I stood up, and I could feel those eyes pressing into the back of me, but it was a different kind of pressing now, a feeling like those eyes belonged to kids who weren’t ready to see something like this.
When I got up, I looked at Maggie. I looked at that plate and the place she’d set the straw. I looked at that shit she’d been just seconds away from snorting up her nose, just seconds away from a glue trap that would’ve held her to this place and this life just like me. She was staring at my hands, skin torn, blood of him and me spread across those flattened knuckles. And she just kept staring at my hands while that pile of shit gasped and puddled on the floor.
My eyes opened that next morning into a blurry, brown shadow that slowly came into focus as a pair of leather boots with mud caked to the soles. My mind started running that what-the-fuck-happened checklist, but number one checked out: those were my boots. Hardwood floors, dirty as hell from men too lazy to push a broom, was my second clue that it was all right: I was home. I pushed myself up from the floor with arms that felt loopy, and I could see that I was in my bedroom. I just hadn’t made it quite to the bed.
That was every night I’d ever spent mixing alcohol and Xaney bars wrapped up in a nice, neat little package. Nights that began sharp always had this scary tendency to go black in a hurry. I’d start off having a good time, and next thing you know, I’d wake up to nothing but stories from friends to shed light on what I’d done.
Unfortunately, I’d taken that pill just a little too late in the night. Should’ve started earlier, I guess. I could still see Robbie Douglas’s body wrapped crooked as hell around that rock. It played backward from there and it was clearer than the room I was standing in. I could see his distorted face peeking out of that tarp as Gerald was dragging. I could see his chest go from still to raising and lowering, raising and lowering. I could hear that screaming and I could see his face peeling, and before that, before that, I could see just him, Robbie Douglas, sitting there on a week-long binge with unblinking eyes and a chomping jaw as those wires cut into his arms. That was what pushed me to the bathroom and threw my head into the toilet, and that was what spilt over into the bowl. It was the fact that he was real. It was the fact that he was real and alive and breathing and had parents that buried my head just inches from where vomit filmed on that little pond of toilet water.
“Jacob! Jacob!” Daddy was hollering, and I could feel him pushing on the door where my feet were wedged. “Jacob, what the fuck’s the matter with you?” The sound of his voice made me heave harder and Daddy banged that door open till I was sure every toe I had was severed clean off. He was laughing now as he stood over me. “Well, goddamn, boy. Look at you.” He was chortling something horrible at me. “Must’ve been one hell of a night. Yes, sir, I don’t think I’ve had a night that put me in a place like this in a coon’s age.”
If he was talking about the puking, I’d seen him do it a week or two before. If he was talking about what had pushed me into that bowl, I’d heard the stories.
“Get the fuck up now, and be a goddamn man. I got something that’ll take the hurt out of you.” I pushed off of the toilet with hands still bloodied and scabbed, but just couldn’t find enough strength to get off the floor. “Goddamn, Jacob! Quit being a fucking pussy about it and get up!” Daddy leaned down and braced his arms under mine. He hoisted me up without even a grunt.
I stood there for a minute with my head hung low, my whole body limp as rope. I looked my hands over and hobbled to the sink to wash off what I could from the night before.
“Bloodied the hell out of those knuckles. Who’d you hit?”
“Avery Hooper.” I turned on the faucet and scrubbed hard at my knuckles till water stained dark red spiraled down the drain.
“Avery Hooper? That’s old Thomas Hooper’s boy, ain’t it?”
“I think that’s his uncle.” My eyes were focused on that spiraling, the sink seeming to swallow the only thing I cared to remember.
“Yeah, I think you’re right. That’s Thomas’s brother Aiden’s kid, ain’t it? Boy, I used to hate that son of a bitch when we were growing up. Tied that cocksucker to a tombstone one night at Cub Scouts and left him there. We could hear him just screaming down there when we were sitting around the campfire. They kept asking what that racket was, but I told them I didn’t hear a thing. I’d had half a mind to slit his fucking throat.” Daddy started laughing again and stared into the mirror till our eyes met.
“Well, his son ain’t much better.”
“Looks like it. Looks like there might be a little of that McNeely blood in you after all.”
That’s what I was scared of. I cupped a handful of water to wash my face and let some of that handful into my mouth to wet my tongue. My whole mouth was dry as talc, and I just kept filling my hands as fast as the faucet could pour to get some sort of dampness back into my mouth.
“Sounded like you were in here dying. Should’ve known you were just being a pussy.” Daddy stared at me like he couldn’t believe we were kin, like I was the biggest disappointment he’d ever had. “Well, whenever you’re finished, come in the kitchen and I’ll mix you up something to get those hairs standing again.”
From the way he carried himself, I knew old Josephine had given in pretty easy at some point after the tattoo was covered. As he walked out of the room, I could see that the name had been buried beneath flowers like the Mexicans draw inside of skulls, and there up above it was Josie spelled just right, with an
i
.
—
THE SMELL OF
bacon and eggs still held in the kitchen, but it was obvious the cast iron had cooled hours before. It wasn’t that appetizing kind of smell when everything is still sizzling in the pan, but rather that sweaty-feet kind of must that comes on later.
“Well, Jesus Christ, look who decided to get up.”
The sun shone bright through the blinds so that even those slivers of sunlight lit the room to something unbearable. “What time is it?”
“What time is it, he asks. Care to venture a guess?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a quarter past four. You’ve been in there hugged up to the toilet all goddamn day.” Daddy sat on the couch with his bare feet propped up on the coffee table. He didn’t have a shirt on, and his tattoos darkened the places that never saw sun. He stood up and situated a loose-fitting pair of sweatpants on his waist before coming over to the kitchen and grabbing a coffee mug from the cabinet. “Just go sit your sissy ass over there.” Daddy started to mix some concoction into the mug, but I didn’t stick around to catch the ingredients. I stumbled toward the couch and took a liking to the place he’d sat. When he came over, he put the mug down in front of me, some acrid-smelling shit steaming over the rim. Daddy sat beside me and kicked his feet back to the coffee table. He started flipping channels just fast enough for eyes to catch a glimpse of what was showing. “Drink up. That shit’s a goddamn McNeely cure-all.”
I grabbed the coffee mug and took my first sip hesitantly. The taste sent my mouth to spitting and Daddy laughed as the mist glittered the air. “What the fuck is that?”
“Black coffee, a little dash of bourbon, and two Goody’s powders.”
“Tastes like shit.”
“Ain’t supposed to taste good. Just quit being a pussy about it and drink it.”
I took the next gulp in one big swallow, and though my face locked sideways like I was sucking something sour, by the time that medicine had hit my gut, I could feel the heaviness shedding.
“Tell me about last night.”
“Ain’t nothing to talk about.”
“Don’t go giving me that shit. Now, tell me about your night.”
“None of it worked out like you wanted it—”
“Goddamn, you’re loose-lipped! I ain’t even talking about that! The boys came by late last night on a tear and told me all about it. Those are tales that only need to be told one good time. It’s better like that. Better to just let sleeping dogs lie, like they say. That’s the only way to let a fuckup like that come somewhere close to forgetting.”
“Then what the fuck are you asking about?”
“I’m asking about your night. Trying to have a little friendly conversation with my son, if that’s all right with you. So what the fuck kept you out all night and had you plowing my forsythias all to shit?”
“I ran over the bushes?”
“Did you run over the bushes? You come piling up that driveway on a goddamn tear. I was grabbing for britches and a gun just as fast as I could till I seen it was you through the window.”
“Don’t remember that.”
“Bet you don’t.”
I grabbed the coffee mug and gulped down as much as I could stand. “Went to a party that they were throwing for graduation.”
“They graduate yesterday? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, they graduated yesterday and last night they were partying a little bit over there in Foxfire, over at Charlie Mitchell’s house. I don’t really think they wanted me there, and I don’t really know why I went. But one thing led to another, and I left Avery Hooper spread out on the floor.”
“Shit doesn’t just unfold like that, now. Would be out of your character to just walk in and go to hitting somebody. Wouldn’t put it past me, but you avoided that kind of meanness somehow or another. No, I reckon something had to have happened for you to just haul off and hit somebody.”
“Maggie Jennings.”
“And there it is, a goddamn woman.”
“She ain’t just some woman, first of all, and you know that.”
“Well, I know a lot of things. I know you two were tighter than a burl growing up. I know you two were together a good while and, hell, you might’ve even popped her cherry. But I know that a woman’s just a woman, and there’s no changing that. If they didn’t have pussies, the dumpsters would be full of them.”
“How about you stop right—”
“I know anything that can bleed a week straight every month and survive is the devil’s doing.” Daddy guffawed.
“
Shut the fuck up!
It ain’t like that. It ain’t ever been like that. And it ain’t like none of that trash you keep piled up around here.” I was sitting forward on the couch now and my knuckles were pressing those scabs wide open. “You can say whatever the hell you want about whoever the hell you want to, but you keep her fucking name out of it.”
Daddy resituated himself on the couch into a little lazier position than he’d held. He smirked knowing how riled I’d become, knowing that there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d hit him. I think he pushed me like that just to see if he could drag what genes he’d given out of me to inspect. “Guess my boy’s in love.”
I knew he’d said it just to get my blood boiling, but that didn’t really matter. There wasn’t any woman fit for talking like that as far as I was concerned, not even Josephine, but certainly not a girl like Maggie, certainly not someone so innocent.
“Well, are you going to tell the goddamn story or not?”
“She was there with Avery, and he was fixing to make her do something she didn’t need to be doing, so I hit him.”
“What was he fixing to make her do?”
“That ain’t important.”
“Of course it’s fucking important. Stories hinge on shit like this. So, tell me.” Daddy looked at me with a lowered brow that cast a heavy ledge over his eyes.
“He was cranked out of his brain and was about to try and put that shit up
her
nose. You happy?”
“Matter of fact, I am. Matter of fact, that makes me awfully fucking happy.” Daddy scooted toward me, slapped me in the back of the head, then palmed my crown and rattled my skull. He settled his bare arm around my neck and that warmness in him felt as close to anything fatherly as I’d felt in a long time. “Awfully fucking happy,” he said.