Tear It Down

by Nick Petrie

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” said Judah Lee. “Get us out of here.”

  Albert was glad he couldn’t see his brother’s smile in the dark.

  * * *

  • • •

  A day and a night had passed and now Albert was back in his comfort zone, at the edge of a stand of slash pine, sweating in a rubber apron, up to his elbows in blood.

  He was limping around the corral-style hog trap, six pissed-off full-grown wild hogs squealing and grunting as they raced around inside the circular enclosure. They churned up the mud as they ran, slamming their weight against the welded-wire fence and threatening to uproot the metal T-posts that held the corral in place.

  Albert had his daddy’s old long-barreled .44, taking aim at the big aggressive boar with a bristled back and curved tusks longer than Albert’s thumbs. One of the biggest boars Albert had this year, three hundred pounds of angry pig.

  The trick was to shoot a hog but once, halfway between the eye and the ear, and kill it stone dead. A hurt hog, a hog you had to shoot two or three times, would give sour meat, no good for anything but hogburger chili, and overspiced chili at that.

  Albert needed the meat, for himself and for his customers.

  Getting the pigs out of the trap was another problem, but Albert had a tool he’d made himself. From a piece of rebar, he’d forged a long, sharp hook like an oversized fish gaff, then welded it to a long pipe handle with a chain on the end. Working over the top of the fence, he’d slip the hook through the hole in the skull, then use the little hand-crank utility crane bolted to his daddy’s old Mack stake-bed to lift the carcass up and out of the pen without getting himself hurt.

  Albert always killed them one at a time, field-dressing each carcass before shooting the next pig. The meat tasted better that way. He’d already killed and hooked three sows, hung them up by spreader bars, gutted them, cut out the stinky parts, then peeled their skins before he left them hanging to cool and drain. When he ran out of hooks and spreader bars, he’d quarter the carcasses, put them on ice, and start over again.

  Judah Lee hadn’t shown up, of course. Albert had stopped expecting help years ago. The Lord helped those who helped themselves, that’s what their daddy always said.

  It wasn’t work he liked, not the way he liked sitting half-turned on their daddy’s 1950 Farmall, the sun warm on the back of his neck, watching over his shoulder as the plow blades turned the hard winter soil into orderly rows. But killing hogs was work that paid, unlike the home farm. Wild hogs did a lot of damage, and landowners gave Albert cold hard cash to set up his gear on their acreage and trap pigs.

  They didn’t pay much. But with back taxes unpaid at the farm, and foreclosure letters coming in from the bank, Albert couldn’t afford to be picky. He was half-crippled from rolling the tractor six years before. He’d spent the night pinned underneath that overturned old Farmall with a cracked pelvis and a shattered leg, gritting his teeth against the pain, thinking about his health insurance deductible and co-payments, and waiting for help that might never come.

  The way Albert figured it, he was lucky to be working at all.

  The big boar was the one that would turn on Albert if it got loose. Knock him down and tear him up with those sharp tusks. Eat him piece by piece if it could. Hogs would eat anything, and Albert’s bad leg wouldn’t let him move fast enough to get ahead of it.

  Usually he tried to take out the biggest boar first, but pigs didn’t get that kind of size by being dumb and easy to kill.

  In Albert’s experience, wild hogs were pretty dang smart, and this one was smarter than most. Maybe it had been trapped before, and got away. It couldn’t resist that shelled corn bait, but it knew a few tricks. Albert could see the bent wire where it had tried to root up the bottom of the corral fence. Even now it kept circling behind the sows like it knew exactly what Albert meant to do, and Albert wasn’t fast enough to get a clean shot. So Albert had taken the sows as they came, making it harder for the big boar to hide.

  It didn’t matter how big or smart a boar was, Albert always won in the end.

  “You gonna kill them hogs or just chase ’em around for fun?”

  Albert turned and saw his brother, Judah Lee, coming down the dirt track from the farmer’s house.

  * * *

  • • •

  Albert was short and stumpy, thick in the arms and shoulders from a lifetime of labor, but staring hard at the far side of middle age. Most days the pain of his badly healed bones felt lodged so deep it took a handful of pills to turn down the volume. More pills every week, it seemed.

  Judah Lee, Albert’s little brother, was a good foot taller and ten years younger, in the prime of his life.

  Big as he was now, you’d never know Judah had been a scrawny little kid, with Albert always trying to protect him from their daddy. The old man had called the boy Runt, or “that accident,” as in, “Get that accident out of bed before I beat both your backsides. You know Runt’s got chores before school.”

  Making Albert his brother’s keeper, which was a long, hard road.

  Judah Lee might have started out skinny and scared, but early on he turned that scared part into something mean. If he got pissed about something—sometimes real, just as often some imagined insult—he’d never come out and say it to your face. Albert would pull back the covers on his bed and find a copperhead coiled up and shaking its tail. Or open his car door and find a bobcat hissing in the footwell.

  How Judah Lee managed to get a dang bobcat into that little Ford Fiesta, Albert never quite figured out. But the stink of bobcat piss never went away.

  Judah Lee never went after their daddy, who’d beat them both with a belt. Just Albert, who was looking out for him, and often as not took Judah’s licks for him.

  Truth was, Judah Lee had never been quite right, not since the day he came out with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Scared, angry, and mean, and it was always somebody else’s fault. When he grew into his size at nineteen, he wasn’t scared anymore. After that, he was just plain mean.

  Albert was still trying to be his brother’s keeper after all these years, but Judah Lee didn’t make it easy. When Albert was in the Army, trying to find a way into college, Judah Lee got himself kicked out of high school, bounced from job to job and fight to fight, ending up at Parchman Farm. He came out ten years later, bulked up from pumping iron and covered with ink, even on his face.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The worst was the smile he gave when Albert picked him up on the outside.

  His teeth sharpened to points with a rat-tail file from the prison shop.

  Albert told himself Judah Lee was just protecting himself in there, trying to look scary, trying to stay safe. That he hadn’t really joined himself up with those people.

  Albert wanted to believe it.

  But in his heart he knew that Judah Lee had turned himself into a monster of his own free will.

  To Albert’s mind it was all their daddy’s fault, the stories he told about his own daddy and his granddad before him. Stories of their vanished family wealth going all the way back to before that ancient war that felt new every time the plow blades unearthed another hand-poured musket ball, or the dirty bones of long-dead men that still ghosted up through the soil after all those years.

  Even from the grave, their old man was still telling stories, and Judah Lee still believed them. Or wanted to.

  Somehow, Albert had been pulled into Judah Lee’s scheme, despite his own best judgment. He was still trying to look out for his little brother, that was what he told himself. Truth was, maybe he had the same hope that something long ago taken from them might be restored. Their rightful place in the world.

  There had to be more to life than killing hogs.

  * * *

  • • •

  Now Judah Lee took their d
addy’s long-barreled .44 from Albert’s hand. “She loaded?”

  Judah Lee didn’t wait for an answer, just flipped the cylinder open to check the rounds like Albert wouldn’t even know how many shots he had left, like Albert hadn’t already reloaded with one under the hammer like their daddy had taught them both.

  Then Judah Lee took a quick few steps, put a hand on the wooden frame of the trap door, and vaulted the five-foot wire fence into the corral.

  The big boar ran right at him, a three-hundred-pound sharp-tusked meat torpedo, but Judah spun like a dancer, put the gun before the running boar’s ear, and pulled the trigger.

  The pig’s heavy head exploded, a drop-kicked watermelon. Judah Lee smiled.

  “Come on, Albert. We got something more important to do.”

  “There’s a thousand pounds on the hoof yet to deal with. I leave for an hour and these pigs’ll be under that fence or through it. Then I got to come back and rebuild the trap and these pigs’ll just be that much harder to catch.”

  “Brother, you got the wrong priorities,” said Judah Lee, who hadn’t talked that way before all those sessions with the prison psychologist. He showed Albert his new teeth. “But I hear you. Let me help you out with that.”

  He stomped through the corral, using heavy knees to fend off the smaller panicking sows while he put the pistol to their heads, one by one, and pulled the trigger. Then stood planted in the mud with the splatter of pig’s blood across his hands and clothes. His blue tattoos stood out on his flushed pink face. “There. Can we leave now?”

  Albert sighed. “What would Daddy say about leaving good meat to spoil? It’ll be faster with you here to help. Go on, toss those carcasses over the fence. You hang ’em up and I’ll skin ’em out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  They got the remaining hogs quartered and on ice, but Albert knew Judah Lee was losing patience. He’d never had much to begin with. So Albert left the stake-bed Mack with its coolers and carcasses standing beside the corral and followed his brother up the dirt track toward the road, where an old Ford Country Squire was parked on the gravel.

  “Where’d you get this?” Albert peered into the back seat, seeing thick steel plate lining the seatbacks and blocking the doors, wedged in place and held together with angle iron and C-clamps. Two cases of Coors were stacked in one footwell, a rolled-up old horse blanket in the other. “What in God’s name are you up to now?”

  “Get in the car,” said Judah Lee, climbing behind the wheel, setting the reloaded .44 on the dashboard. “And don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to. When are you gonna grow up?”

  Talking to him like Albert was the little brother. Albert just shook his head. He knew he was going to regret this, but he got in the car anyway. The family farm was all he had left, and even that would be gone if the bank and tax man had his way. Albert needed what their daddy had talked about as much as Judah Lee. Maybe more.

  When Judah turned onto the highway, Albert realized where they were going. “Are you out of your dang mind? We can’t go back there. We have to wait. We talked about this.”

  Judah Lee showed his teeth. “I don’t want to wait. Turns out I been waiting all my life and I didn’t know it. I saw that house on the news at the bar. They said that woman’s still there. Looks to me like that truck didn’t do enough damage. Bitch needs a harder push.” They drove the rest of the way in silence. But when Judah finally stopped in front of that ruined old house, Albert saw what he’d been talking about. The beginnings of repairs, a blue tarp nailed up to keep the rain out.

  Judah Lee turned off the car and buttoned the single key into his shirt pocket. “You see what I mean? She’s not moving out. She’s digging in.” He dropped the .44 in Albert’s lap. “Feel free to shoot anybody dumb enough not to run away. You get me?”

  Then he climbed into the back seat, took the rolled-up horse blanket from the footwell, and unwrapped a dang machine gun.

  Not the ancient AK-47 their daddy had smuggled home from Vietnam and used for killing possums on the farm. Definitely not some bolt-action deer rifle. This was a genuine machine gun, long and ugly with a folding bipod on the barrel and a bagful of bullets hanging from its belly.

  “Judah Lee, what in the name of almighty God . . .”

  Then Albert saw the steel plate lining the back seat in a new way. Judah Lee had made himself a bulletproof box.

  Judah dropped the long barrel on the windowsill, set himself on the worn fabric seat, put the butt to his shoulder and his finger to the trigger. “Better cover your ears,” he said.

  “Wait a minute, Judah, just—”

  All hell broke loose.

  The gun was louder than the crack of doom in the closed car, nothing like firing that old .44 out at the edge of the woods. Bullet casings flew everywhere, scorching hot to the touch. Albert was afraid they’d start melting the floor mats, or worse.

  He crouched down in his seat, waving his arms, shouting at his brother, words he couldn’t hear himself and they were coming out of his own mouth. But his eyes were glued to the house, the bricks flying off in chunks, shattered window glass dropping from broken frames, wooden porch posts splintering like kindling.

  The destruction was glorious.

  He didn’t even know someone was shooting back until the radio exploded in the dashboard. Albert ducked farther down, hoping Judah’s steel-plate box would protect him, too.

  When the machine gun stopped firing, Albert heard the deliberate gunshots coming from somewhere behind them, the dull clang of the rounds hitting the steel. He peeked over the seatback to see Judah Lee crouched down, changing out the ammunition belt, the barrel smoking and the smell of spent powder filling the station wagon. The rear window was spiderwebbed, the tailgate and cargo area full of holes. No sirens, no lights. Just shots coming from somewhere behind them.

  Albert pointed their daddy’s .44 out the back window and pulled the trigger until it was empty. The other gunshots stopped for a moment, then started again from a new angle, and coming closer. Judah Lee, oblivious, snapped the cover over the new belt and hunkered down over the sight, ready to open fire at the house again.

  “Give me the key,” Albert shouted over the ringing in his ears. He couldn’t even see who he’d been shooting at. But whoever it was, he was still shooting back, and the police were surely on their way. “Judah Lee, give me the dang car key!”

  Judah Lee looked up at Albert without understanding, eyes bright with excitement, pointed teeth dimpling his lower lip. Lost in the pleasure and the noise and the violence of the moment.

  Albert drew back and clouted his brother in the face with a thick fist. Judah Lee blinked, reeling away. Albert reached forward and tore open his brother’s buttoned shirt pocket and fished out the key. Whoever was shooting at them wasn’t likely to stop.

  Albert slid into the driver’s seat, fumbled the key into the slot, threw the car into drive, and got them out of there.

  They were four blocks away and headed for the freeway before he realized the hot barrel of the machine gun had set the car’s plastic upholstery on fire.

  16

  I told you this was going to escalate,” said Detective Gantry.

  Peter had been shot at and emptied both magazines into the old station wagon, but mostly he was thinking about that weird blue face, maybe a mask, maybe not, staring back at him from the back seat of the station wagon. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, or even what he’d seen.

  After the station wagon pulled away, he’d scrambled to find Wanda in the crawl space of the ruined house, back braced against the heavy front bumper of the dump truck, with her camera bag under her raised knees and her laptop clutched hard to her chest.

  She was shaking, wired to the gills, scraped and dirty from the slide down the splintery slope of the living-room floor in her bare feet. Still, she’d had enough trai
ning from her military embeds to know to shelter behind the engine block, and it had kept her alive.

  Peter had wanted to get Wanda into her car and gone before the cops arrived, but he was still trying to talk her out of the crawl space when he heard the sirens.

  Now she sat blanket-wrapped and adrenaline-crashed on the back bumper of an ambulance, while Peter stood in the side yard with his ears still ringing and Gantry, the cop who sounded like Elvis, asking Peter questions he didn’t want to answer.

  Detective Gantry didn’t look like Elvis. He was black and balding and built like a bowling pin in French cuffs and tasseled loafers. And he wasn’t happy that Peter didn’t have any valid ID because his wallet was gone. Peter didn’t tell Gantry that his driver’s license was long expired.

  Peter didn’t tell him about the gunner’s blue mask, either. Just that he hadn’t seen the man’s face. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen, and he didn’t want to sound like a lunatic.

  After the detective finished grilling him about the station wagon, which Peter was pretty sure was a 1960s Ford Country Squire, and what he thought the gunner’s weapon might have been, Peter handed Gantry the flash drive Wanda had given him.

  “Pictures from yesterday. Wanda got faces and license plates from people driving by. Maybe something there you can use.”

  Gantry looked at him sideways. “Sounds like a lot of overtime.” But he slipped the little drive into his pocket.

  “Where would somebody get a big machine gun like that?”

  Gantry shook his head. “Military weapons are popping up all over the Mid-South,” he said. “Old stuff, probably slated to be destroyed but still functional. Rumor mill says they got sold out of one of the big bases in North Carolina, but it all got hushed up. We’re still paying the price.”

  Then Gantry brought the questions back to Peter, as he’d known the detective would.