The three-bay garage smelled of burnt oil and transmission fluid, and the banging and grinding of an impact wrench covered any sound of summer birds chirping outside. Daddy had an International Scout on the lift and was taking off the last tire when a patrol car pulled into the front lot.
“Roll over those tires and wheels from over there in the corner.” Daddy only stopped the impact wrench from busting lugs long enough to speak and ash his cigarette.
“Dad!”
The clatter of torque hammering away at rust-locked lugs kept him from hearing.
“Dad!”
The words caught him just as one nut came free and he dropped the wrench to his side like he was holstering a pistol. “Goddamn it, what?”
“A deputy just pulled up.” I kept my eyes fixed on the patrol car.
“About fucking time. Thought I was going to have to wait around all day.”
A middle-aged deputy stepped out of the vehicle and flipped open a pair of sunglasses before slipping the shades over his eyes. He resituated his belt, slammed the car door, and headed toward the first open bay. The raised Scout partly concealed Daddy and I from view.
“Over here,” Daddy hollered, and the deputy caught himself mid-stride, changed directions on a pivot like he was marching in the Marine Corps.
“McNeely?” the deputy asked, as he rounded the back bumper on the Scout and first made eye contact.
“Yes, sir. Charles McNeely. Nice to meet you.” Daddy smeared the grease from his palms down his jeans and held out his hand to shake, but the deputy never offered his hand.
“Dispatch said you wanted to file a missing-persons report?”
“That’s right.”
“And who might this missing person be?”
“Well, it’s actually two missing. Both my mechanics, two brothers, you see, ain’t been around since last Thursday. Now, it’s not like these two to go missing, and I haven’t been able to get them on the phone. Hell, I even stopped by their house on Saturday and Sunday, and it’s like those two just vanished. Seeing as they don’t have any family left, I kind of figure them for my own.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe that he was going so far as filing missing-persons reports on two boys we sent to the bottom of the reservoir. But I kept my mouth shut and listened for his reason.
“These brothers have names?”
“Cabe. Jeremy and Gerald Cabe.”
“How old are they?” The deputy had a notebook out now and was jotting down the bullshit my daddy was feeding him. I’d never seen that fat-ass deputy before, but I knew he wasn’t any friend of the family. His hair was speckled gray on the sides, and the thick mustache over his lips held that same speckling. The tan button-down and black slacks he wore looked pressed like he had his uniform dry-cleaned to look real official. His fat face never showed any signs of emotion, just pudgy and hanging there, sunglasses hiding his eyes so that we couldn’t see if he was looking us square or sleeping.
“I reckon Jeremy’s about thirty or so, and, well, Gerald would have to be a good three or four years older, so I’d figure him for thirty-three or thirty-four. Got their birth dates back there on their paperwork if you want me to run and check.”
“That’d be proper.”
Daddy wiped his hands down his jeans again and headed toward the office at the front bay. Just me and the bull now, and I wasn’t sure what kind of guilt or innocence I had spread across my face.
“How you doing today, son?”
“I’m doing.” I tried to keep it short and leaned around the Scout to see if Daddy was headed back.
“Helping your old man out today?”
“Yes, sir. Just till he gets his help back.”
“That’s good. That’s good.” The deputy held one hand to his face and spread his mustache with his index finger and thumb. “You know, I’ve heard a lot of stories about this place.” He kept spreading that mustache over and over. “A lot of stories about your father too.”
“That right?”
“Yeah. But you know I got to say, he keeps this place looking pretty official.”
“It’s a nice shop.”
“That ain’t what I meant, son.”
Just as the line of questioning was venturing into briary country, Daddy came around the corner carrying two file folders splotched with greasy fingerprints. “Let’s see.” Daddy thumbed through the top folder. “Now, Jeremy, it says right here, was born on April twentieth of 19 and 78, so I reckon that would put him at thirty-one years.” Daddy slid the paperwork back into the folder and thumbed through the next. “And Gerald, well, it says he was born on September third of 19 and 75, so that’d put him at thirty-three, no, thirty-four this fall. That sound about right?”
“I guess.”
“I’m not too good at ciphering.” Daddy chuckled and slid the papers back into Gerald’s file.
“And you say these boys have been missing since Thursday?”
“Well, they were here all day Thursday right up till closing, but I haven’t seen them since. They were supposed to be in on Friday and then again on Saturday, but like I say, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them, not even at their house.”
“Whereabouts they live?”
“You know the fire station up there on Yellow Mountain?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re the next drive on the right. Big chunk of land, but just a little old single-wide tucked there at the back of the property.”
“You got an address?”
“No. No, don’t reckon I do. But like I said, it’s just over there on Yellow Mountain Road, next right after you pass the firehouse.”
“Now, they didn’t happen to tell you they were planning a trip or going to see somebody, whereabouts they might have been headed, did they?”
“Well, I reckon if they had, I wouldn’t have had much fucking reason to call, would I?”
The deputy pulled his glasses away from his face and slid one of the sunglasses’ arms into his front pocket so they’d stay fixed there. Bright blue eyes squinted a little bit and focused hard on my father. Those blue eyes, big creepy blue eyes, were just a few hues from white. “No, sir. I don’t reckon you would’ve.”
“So, is there anything else?”
“Not sure.” The deputy opened his eyes wide as if to question whether what he’d been told was the whole story. “Is that all you can tell me?”
“To be honest, the only other thing I can really remember is that last Thursday afternoon we were talking about how they found that Douglas boy over there in Macon County. The two of them seemed awfully skittish when I told them how those deputies had found that Douglas boy alive over there near Ellijay. The shape he was in and that he was still alive, you know?”
“You saying you think the Cabe brothers had something to do with what happened to that Douglas boy, Mr. McNeely?”
“No, now, I ain’t saying that at all. I’m just saying that’s the last thing I remember us talking about. Probably wasn’t even worth mentioning.”
“But you did.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. I reckon I was just trying to think back on it and see if I could think of anything else that might’ve been helpful.” Daddy leaned down and picked up the impact wrench from the concrete floor. He held the wrench in one hand and grabbed the nut from where he’d set it in the rim he was working loose. “Sorry I can’t help you more, but I sure would hate if something were to have happened to those boys. Damn good mechanics. Damn good guys, for that matter.”
The deputy closed his notepad and slid it into his front pocket. He pulled the sunglasses free from his shirt, pressed them back over his eyes, and spread that mustache two or three more times before he spoke. “Guess I’ll run over there to Yellow Mountain and see if I can see anything, but you let me know if you hear from them. All right?”
“Sounds good, Deputy. And you do the same.”
“I’ll be in touch either way.”
“Sounds good.” Daddy nodded at him and smiled, and as the bull turned away, Daddy focused his attention back on the Scout.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off the deputy, though. I watched him walk stiffly from the garage and situate his belt again before climbing into his patrol car. I watched him in his car fiddling with the computer and rearranging something that I couldn’t see in the passenger seat. The deputy sat there for a long time just staring forward, no way to know which way he was looking with those sunglasses covering his eyes. After a few minutes, he pulled out of the front lot, and I heard the V8 barrel through first as he mashed the gas up the highway.
“What in the world you do that for?”
“What in the fuck are you talking about?”
“Telling him all that shit.”
“For fuck’s sake, boy, somebody was going to realize those Cabe brothers were missing sooner or later, and it’s always better if you can have your hand in the deck. Best if you’re the one dealing out those cards.” Daddy pressed the tire of the raised Scout up onto his shoulder and slid it off of the lugs. He grunted when it came free and all that weight was balancing on him, but he didn’t ask for help and dropped the tire to let it bounce a few times before settling on the floor.
“Why’d you mention Robbie?”
Daddy smacked me hard against the side of the head and stared deep into me. “I told you not to ever speak his fucking name, Jacob. Don’t you ever mention his fucking name again.” Daddy looked at me for a moment, then rolled the last tire off the Scout to where he’d piled the others. “Bottom line is if they ever go to connecting those dots and tying those Cabe brothers to what happened there that night, that little seed will have been planted. Dead men tell no tales, Jacob. The ones left to living are the ones who write the history.”
Daddy pulled his soft pack of Winstons out of his shirt pocket and flicked a cigarette up into his lips. He struck a match against the running rails on the Scout, lit the cigarette, and passed it to me. I took it and pulled a long drag as Daddy flicked another cigarette out of the pack and lit it just as the match was burning down into his thumb.
“Now go get me those new tires and wheels from over there in the corner, Jacob.”
I did what I was told.
A hand in the deck was one thing. Waltzing into Robbie Douglas’s trailer was another. Taking Robbie’s belongings and raking them out thick as manure in the Cabe brothers’ place was damn near crazy, but that’s what I decided to do. “Best if you’re the one dealing out those cards,” Daddy’d said, and the way I figured, it was my turn to shuffle. If that burnt-up son of a bitch ever did wake up, he wouldn’t have to mutter more than a few words for me to be skinned. I imagine a few of those first words might be “Jacob McNeely.” I couldn’t leave it up to that kind of chance. Better to just water that seed Daddy’d planted in the deputy’s mind and let that story grow.
Robbie Douglas lived way back in a damp holler that had rusted that old tin box just as soon as the tractor unhitched and pulled away. From where I crouched in the laurel, it looked like rust colored everything in the yard burnt red: an old push mower, the pull cord rotted in two and dangling; a children’s tricycle, chrome pitted, plastic handlebar streamers bleached pink; a wheelbarrow that had a grate thrown over the bucket for grilling, a hole burnt slap through the bottom. The whole lot was in dire need of a tetanus shot.
I’d parked the pickup on a four-wheeler trail cut high on the hillside above his property and hiked down to that small nest in the laurel thicket to play lookout for a while. Nothing stirred at the trailer, only a murder of crows that swooped down low over the property and cut up into a tulip poplar across the way. The crows cawed and cackled back and forth between limbs. Still I knelt there and scouted. I wanted to make damn certain no one was around. The story that was unfolding with Robbie Douglas was one that no soul would want to be tied to, so I took my time and gave myself plenty of room to run.
The coast clear and daylight burning, I made my way through the snagged curls of laurel and trotted down a steep bank that flattened at the front steps. Algae slimed the wood green, slicked those steps like creek stone, and the planks mushed and warped under my weight. A blue tarp had been tacked from the roof of the trailer and held in a droopy bend over a small deck by a pair of sawn two-by-fours. Brown-tinged water fattened the place where the tarp sagged, and from underneath I could make out leaves and twigs, pine needles and a crescent wrench stagnant in that water and illuminated by daylight. The front door didn’t sit square, but rather at an angle like might have been found in a fun house or a maze of mirrors, a shape my geometry teacher had called a parallelogram way back in my learning. I never knew why I remembered shit like that, but those funny words a man never had use for were the only thing that stuck from all that schooling.
The door wasn’t locked but still required jimmying to break loose from the frame. The thin door bowed under pressure and slapped against the wall behind when it finally budged. The smell hit me first, the smell of clothes soiled wet and dried and soiled again, a sour stench that clung like armpit stains. Whatever storm had come through that holler had skipped the yard altogether and manifested right there inside. It had slung everything Robbie owned into an ankle-deep pile that had to be waded.
I slipped a pair of leather work gloves onto my hands, the thick, rough kind never meant for anything delicate, but the only thing I had to hide my prints. I first filled the black garbage bag I’d brought for toting with tangled wads of clothes, but realized about the time that bag started to bulge lumpy on the sides that those clothes could’ve belonged to anyone. It wasn’t like Robbie Douglas had scribbled his name on the tags of his underwear with permanent marker. It wasn’t like the Cabe brothers were doing his laundry either. So I dumped the clothes back onto the floor, T-shirts and shorts piling into a little knoll of an island in that sea of trash and filth. I did keep a flannel shirt, one of those bricked-off red flannel shirts that held a few hairs off Robbie’s head from the last time he wore it. I figured the law could run those hairs and get about as much guarantee of Robbie Douglas as an ID card, and that was the type of shit that needed collecting.
The main living space of the trailer led right into the bedroom, only a side door to the john acting as a hallway between the two rooms. The mattress sat cockeyed on box springs and thin cotton sheets were ripped away from the elbows of the mattress, the sheets crinkled wavy where it bunched. The mess from that front room bled over the threshold into the bedroom, but fanned out and stopped like a high-water mark near the bed. A tall stack of mail, bills left unpaid, teetered on a side table, and I checked the little plastic windows on the fronts of envelopes for his name. All of the envelopes held that certainty, so I shoved them down into the bag.
Sticking out from under the bedsheets was the edge of a leather-bound book, the corners worn round and shabby. I pulled the book from under the pile, HOLY BIBLE pressed in all caps and gold leaf across the front. The book was old and tattered, thin pages transparent and yellowed. The front page had been scribbled like a ledger, all different kinds of names and dates in all different kinds of handwriting and ink. Only one thing held similarity down the page: every name, no matter the front, ended in Douglas. A folded photograph had been shoved about two-thirds through the book to serve as a marker. It was a picture of Robbie smiling and holding that Bible when he was twelve or thirteen. His folks stood proudly at his sides. It must have been taken at some sort of confirmation or religious dunking at the Baptist church, his hair seeming wetted and slicked in the photo.
I looked that picture over and seeing him brought on the same paranoia that shook me from dream each night. I could feel the sweat beading on my temples and my palms going clammy. I shut the photograph back in the book and chucked the Bible into the bag, but that image of him stayed taped up on the backs of my eyelids. My mind warped that still image and melted away at his face, melted it just how I’d seen, and the screaming rang back deep in my memory. I wanted it gone, but it was all so fresh. I could still smell his skin burning, see the way that skin peeled and held to the tarp as we drug him through the woods. Those types of things don’t just fade away. They are the worms of the living and eat at a man for as long as he’s breathing. I reckon I deserved what burrowed in me just as Daddy deserved his.