by Lee Mandelo
“Fuck you,” he said to himself, and to the boy who whispered in his dreams. Then he shoved mental fingers into the snake pit of creeping potential coiled in the base of his guts.
Disgusted and clumsy without practice, he woke the cold pulse into his veins and his tongue and the fingertips he curled into the dirt. Eddie had practiced drawing out the power; Andrew never had, not once. Fuck you, Eddie, fuck you for making me do this, he thought on a loop. Eddie would’ve crowed to see him. He’d been pushing so long for Andrew to embrace himself, their difference, their death-made-life. Andrew reached into the ground, and instead of Eddie’s praise, fresh blood pulsed up from the otherwise summer-dried earth with a reverberating strike that knocked the wind out of Andrew’s lungs. An unnatural gust stirred the leaves up in a tiny red-spattered cyclone around Andrew’s wrist, his fingers, stinking of rot and life.
The vision he’d called for spilled up from the ground and into his flesh, bowing him face-first into the wet earth and forcing his hands deeper into the solid ground: cool lax limbs spread to their full length, knife lying suggestive at the knee, jaw hanging a fraction loose. Uncaring alien fingers adjusted the dead weight and thumbed the livid purpling bruises at the elbows, the wrists, chafed and burned around his matched tattoo. Andrew existed in that moment as both the dead man and himself, inside and outside, witness and victim all at once in an immense moment of confirmation—someone else was there. Another set of hands arranging the stiff corpse.
Violence hadn’t found Eddie here in the forest, not at this resting place, quiet and green under the leaves that had scattered themselves on Andrew’s call in a paroxysm of sacrifice. The land had known Eddie, had given him its rites, drunk the dregs of him down. He was one and the same as that earth. But the true death had happened elsewhere, not beneath the handsome tree in the woods far from home. The soil had so little spilled blood to give as offering to Andrew when he came for his inheritance.
Andrew came into his skin heaving, slumped on his side in the fetal position. The blood on his hands might’ve come from his cracked nails, but he knew otherwise. The dampness on his face might’ve been sweat or tears. Footsteps approached and paused at the side of the tree, and he scrubbed his fingers ineffectually on his shirt.
“I leave you for five minutes,” Sam said, strained.
“He didn’t die here,” he slurred.
“Remember that thing I told you, about not fucking with things you shouldn’t fuck with,” Sam said. There was a subdued fury in his voice. “This is one of those things. What even were you doing?”
“I needed to be sure.” He planted his back against the tree, legs spread. A tremor crept up from his hips to his heart. He was lying now in the same spot Eddie had been staged. Panic raced and spasmed. “Someone killed him, someone fucking—”
Halse grabbed his upper arm and hauled him to standing, grip like iron. Andrew staggered against him. “That’s the real reason you’ve been asking around, huh? Asking questions about me and him? It didn’t occur to you to wonder why Riley told me all that shit when he hadn’t told me before? We all met up last night to talk about you, compared notes after your party with Ethan.”
The blazing fire in his stare was the realest thing Andrew had seen in weeks.
“Say it to my face,” Halse snarled. He released Andrew’s arm and took a step and a half back, shaking his elbows out. “Fucking hell. Ask me if I did it, you fuck, come on.”
“Fine.” Nausea gripped his esophagus. “Was it you who killed him?”
Halse’s fist caught him square in the stomach.
15
The second blow landed off-center, knuckles on his bottom ribs, and Andrew crumpled around the breath Sam drove out of him. He clawed a hand into the neck of the other man’s T-shirt and grabbed his bicep with the other. The edge of Sam’s jaw pressed into his temple as they grappled. Ragged, silent struggle took up the quiet calm of the spreading oak’s embrace, broken by gasped breaths. Sam’s clumsier free hand crashed into the meat of Andrew’s upper back three times in quick succession. He wedged his palm around Sam’s throat to push, up and out, separating their clinch. Sam choked as he staggered free. Spit flecked his cheek and mouth, viscous. Andrew wiped it with his forearm. He smelled blood and dirt. Skin-on-skin contact seared the chill from his bones.
The pair circled, hands hovering near collarbones in neutral loose fists. Andrew kept his attention on the winged movement of Halse’s elbows, the taut corded muscle of his arms.
Halse said, “Get at me, come on.”
Andrew dove for him. Halse accepted the tackle that bore him to the ground and flipped them in mid-fall, slamming Andrew into the dirt. One knee grounded Andrew’s inner thigh to pin the leg while he attempted and failed to hook the other around Halse’s waist. Andrew reared up savagely but Sam dodged the headbutt, then slapped him open-handed with the full weight of his arm behind it. Andrew’s vision streamed with color. His ears rang. The burn seared from temple to jaw, spreading over the whole side of his face. As he reeled, Halse pinned his wrists, bringing them face to face.
“Fuck you for thinking I’d hurt him,” Halse said.
Andrew went performatively limp, wheezing. Sam slid his knee off the meat of his leg to kneel straddled over him. A fraction at a time, he released his grip on Andrew’s arms to settle at rest on his heels. Andrew scooted out from under him, still supine. The throbbing of his thigh ached worse than his face, radiating the phantom pain of Sam’s weight crushing muscle to bone. The smack was just shocking, unlikely to leave a mark but disorienting all the same. Tension dispersed as Halse stared at his hands. The blood streaking their skin and clothes belonged to neither of them.
Sam said, “You’re talking about actual murder. Not just someone messing with him, pushing him to off himself.”
Someone killed him, he thought with a shameful burst of relief. The nightmares he’d had, the revenant shaking him in its teeth like a dog with a bone, clicked into place: how many times had he been forced to see the ragged wounds, the blood pouring out? All that hadn’t been enough to quell a last miserable twang of uncertainty, raised through the lies and misdirection. Even after experiencing the desperation of Eddie reaching out to him at the end, he’d allowed himself to doubt—no surprise the haunt had pushed him, punished him.
“People don’t get fucking murdered often, Andrew. That’s a big jump from suicide. How can you be sure? You weren’t even here.”
Andrew hissed, “I just saw it. Believe me or don’t, I’m goddamn certain.”
“All right, then,” Sam said, disgruntled but—Andrew noticed Sam hadn’t stopped looking at his inexplicably bloodied hands—acquiescent.
In unspoken accord, Andrew took the hand Sam offered him a moment later. His ribs felt compressed. He spat a mouthful of phlegm on the ground. Sam lifted his own palm and examined the fresh print of red-black mud. The tiniest shiver shook his fingers. He wiped the evidence on his pants. Andrew remained at the tree as Sam took off for the path, tracing the initials one more time. Maybe days after he had died, Sam had stood here with his pocketknife and carved a spot to remember Eddie by.
At the car, Sam stood smoking. Two cigarette butts lay at his feet. The third glowed orange and crisp between his lips. Andrew plucked it from his mouth and burnt it to the filter with two hard drags that seared his lungs. Sam snorted and unlocked the car. Andrew considered the weight that had lifted from his shoulders, thinking: I guess I believe him. Neither of them spoke as each settled into their seats, prickly with the aftertaste of another physical boundary crossed.
Fifteen minutes into the quiet drive, Halse said, “I shouldn’t have been taking him on errands with me. I get that. If someone killed him, for real, then maybe I’m the one who set that off. He didn’t have the sense god gave a dog when it came to leaving people’s business buried.”
“Ethan told you I had questions,” Andrew said.
“He told us he took you out, and that you asked about me and Ed while
you were rolling, how we got along and all,” he said. “You could’ve asked me. First time you met me, you could’ve just asked.”
“Not if you did something,” Andrew said.
“Glad you’ve got such a high opinion of me, Blur,” he said.
“I didn’t know you.” He shifted in the constriction of the seat, belt digging at his ribs. He wasn’t injured, but he was going to be bruised his whole time in Nashville at the rate he was going, wearing his hurt on his skin. “I might now, I guess.”
“Didn’t trust the drug dealer fuckup cousin after meeting the smart one, makes sense,” he said.
“It wasn’t like that.”
Halse drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. His bitter grin flashed white in the streetlights. “I’m not stupid. I know what I am and I know what I’m not. I guess I’d have pegged me for trouble too.”
The nakedness of that admission hit like stumbling into a friend’s bathroom without realizing they’d gotten in the shower. He hadn’t seen a thing, but he was too close to revelation.
“I didn’t kill him. But you’re saying someone did, fuck,” Sam marveled, horror and disbelief mingled in his voice, the same as they were inside Andrew’s chest—enormous, impossible, with awful certainty.
The interstate spread in front and behind them. Night descended in degrees. Andrew watched shadows grow in the divots of Sam’s wrists, his exposed collarbones. His belt buckle peeked from underneath the hem of his shirt.
“Ed was a good man,” Sam said. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about his extracurricular crazy shit, he did a bunch of things for Riley I couldn’t have, even if I worked at it for ten more years. I tried to do for him in exchange, but he made shit difficult.”
“Riley said he felt like he owed Eddie,” Andrew said.
“I thought that before he died, sure as hell think it after.”
Andrew said, “He wouldn’t have agreed.”
“Don’t matter much, does it?”
“No, it surely doesn’t.”
The slip of Andrew’s accent, dead and buried, threw him from the conversation. Eddie had never quite lost his. Riley’s was cultured over, but still audible in the vowels. Halse, though—Sam Halse talked thick and dripping when he got into it, fat vowels and stretched consonants. He had come from here and he’d die here, that was clear. Halse had taken Eddie on his business runs, out to the hills, where Eddie met strangers and asked after their family secrets. He bet Eddie had sat on a dozen couches and two dozen porches, beer and a joint in hand, prodding grown men for ghost stories, digging up mischief and murders and feuds.
There would’ve been stiff rides back, Sam telling him to keep it to his damn self. Then Eddie took to going out on his own, like Ethan said. Eddie roaring down back roads in his car worth twenty acres of decent land, so fucking sure of himself. Somewhere between there and here, he’d gotten his wrists cut and his corpse laid out under a tree in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t unlike how they’d ended up trapped in the cavern as kids, with Eddie too clever and too stupid by halves—listening to his instincts, whether or not that was smart.
Sam let the silence hold until he pulled the hand brake in the familiar comfort of his garage. The door grated shut behind them to seal the small concrete space in darkness. Blindness lent plausible deniability to the fingers that swept across the line of Andrew’s shoulder, the broad hand squeezing the nape of his neck. The thumb pressed under his ear had two owners in his mind, welcome and alien at once. Then Sam released him and clambered out of the car in a hurry.
Andrew thumped his head onto the seat. He’d spotted Riley’s car on the side of the drive. He needed a minute before this conversation. Maybe Sam hadn’t done the deed himself—but Andrew didn’t think either of them had absolved him of guilt. Andrew still had more questions than answers. He heaved himself out of the bucket seat and slammed the door behind him, stumbling through the dimness. Short steps from the garage led into a messy laundry room with a laminate floor, past which was the kitchen. He crossed through toward the sound of quiet voices in the living room.
Riley gave him a once-over when he collapsed onto the couch opposite the cousins. He said, “I guess that advisor meeting got canceled, huh.”
“Guess so,” Andrew said.
He awkwardly checked his phone and tapped open Troth’s response to his email.
Andrew,
I’m sorry to miss you. Would you be able to do the same time tomorrow, or if not/regardless, attend the faculty and student gathering I’m hosting later this week? You’re welcome to bring along a partner as well, if you wish.
—Jane
He replaced the phone in his pocket without answering.
“What happened?” Riley asked, first to step over the invisible line.
Andrew said, “We went to the tree.”
“Shit,” Riley said. He glanced at Sam, like he wasn’t sure how to proceed, then continued, “Well—how’d it sit with you, being there?”
“I saw something,” Andrew said, but his throat locked up before he could explain.
How to put to words that he’d seen a stranger’s hands arranging Eddie’s corpse in a cruel parody of care, that knowing the truth recast his haunt-dreams from covetous punishments for his absence to stark evidence of his failing loyalties? The revenant had shown him in its crooked, horrible way, and he’d ignored its efforts. He jerkily shook his head at Riley’s inquisitive noise.
“Ed’s phone wasn’t out there either, so we’re gonna help him look for it,” Sam added.
“I didn’t ask for help,” Andrew choked out.
Sam said, “Don’t you know how to make friends, Blur? It goes like this: you meet them, you like them, you get to spending time with them, then your shit to deal with is their shit to deal with. Ed did that with us before you even showed up, so we have to help you out for his sake. Blame him if you’re feeling fussy.”
Unprompted vertigo struck him with a burst of sick-spit in his mouth. He bent to brace his forehead on the heel of his clammy, dirty hand. The sensation that he’d been hanging on to the edge of a cliff with his fingernails gave way abruptly, a scatter of debris into free fall. He stood unsteadily from the couch.
“What,” Riley started, and Sam covered his mouth. Andrew made a beeline for the porch door. Breath stuttering in choppy bursts, he sat down hard against the exterior. The sob that wracked him, sudden and brutal, wasn’t a surprise. He gripped the back of his skull with both hands, knees pressed to his eyes, and cried. Throughout, he was aware of them inside the house, close and ready if he were to call out. For a moment, he hadn’t felt alone.
* * *
The door opened. Andrew propped himself up on his elbows, rising a meager amount from the long sprawl he’d taken up on the warm wooden deck. Riley handed him a paper towel with four strips of bacon on it. He grunted his thanks and popped half of one piece into his mouth. Riley leaned against the wall.
“Sam has work in the morning, figured I’d head out. You coming?” he asked.
The last time he’d spoken to his roommate, before this, had been about the fact that he’d been getting social with his boyfriend. The phrase still stuck in his head. The whole group knew, or understood, the dynamic between Riley and his—people. Andrew was starting to come around to the idea that the three of them weren’t as much like the mess he and Eddie and Del had made of each other as he originally imagined, but he wasn’t sure how else to understand it.
“I wanna ask about you and Ethan and Luca,” he said.
“Been waiting for that, yep,” Riley said, popping the last letter. “Questions, comments, concerns?”
“All three together, or just—” he trailed off and sketched a descriptive V-shape in the air.
Riley said, “Option two, for the most part. Ethan’s not into women much, excepting special occasions where he’s got a dude to engage with too. Me, for example.”
“Okay. Okay,” Andrew said, not sure where he intended to go with his q
uestions. Special occasions, that was—something to review. He filed it away for the time being.
“So are you coming home, or was that, like, relevant somehow,” Riley said.
Andrew stuffed another piece of bacon in his mouth. His face felt tight. He’d wiped his nose on the inside of his shirt enough to gross himself out, and he desperately needed a shower.
“Coming home,” he said.
“Good,” Riley replied with ease that belied the gravity of the night.
Andrew followed on his heels through the house, offering his casual goodbyes to Sam, who saw them off at the front door. Leaving Sam standing on the porch alone, the immensity of the spectral revelation weighing on his shoulders too, unsettled Andrew, but the urge to flee was stronger than his burgeoning desire to stay.
In the car, Riley asked lightly, “How’d you like Ethan’s law school buddies, anyway?”
Andrew said, “Seemed like a lot of felonies for anyone who wants to be a lawyer.”
“Right? Kids these days.”
Andrew attempted a smile. Woods coasted along outside, lending their green smell to the humid breeze.
“Would’ve paid to see you rolling. Ethan said you were a real treat, all big eyes and flopping around like a sexy rag doll,” Riley noted.
The tips of Andrew’s ears went hot; he ignored the comment. The Mazda purred on the hill road, coasting fast toward the city. Andrew rubbed his eyes with his thumbs to grind the salt crust away. Better to pull the Band-Aid off before the ball of silence in his chest swelled to an expansive, choking burst. It was made easier, somehow, by Riley’s rare lack of prying.
“While I was outside, did he tell you about what happened at the tree?”
Riley’s throat worked in a sudden swallow. His grip on the steering wheel clenched; he said in an almost-whisper, “Yeah, but maybe you should too.”
“He didn’t die there.” The tree branded with Eddie’s initials would survive for more generations than Andrew had a sense of, roots stained with his death, even if only the afterimages of it. “I, uh, I…”
