by David Joy
When Thad was little, he told everyone his father was Cherokee. Thad said his daddy’s last name was Walkingstick, sometimes Pheasant, but usually he stuck with Walkingstick. He carried a big bowie knife with him all the time, twisted crow feathers in his hair, and smeared his chest with mud clods. The way he told it, he was going to be chief, and when that time came, Aiden would be one of the few white people he didn’t have it out for. But Aiden had never seen a redheaded Indian.
In truth, Aiden had always believed, just as everyone else, that the most likely man was the church deacon, Samuel Mathis, the only other redhead ever to come out of Little Canada. All the kids bullied Thad and called him Sam, and more than once Aiden had bloodied a kid’s nose or blacked his eye because of it. Though April could’ve gotten knocked up somewhere off the mountain, it didn’t take a DNA test to see Samuel and Thad were spitting images of one another. Back when Aiden slipped into pews to pilfer the offering plate, there was more than once when he saw how Samuel stared at April the entire service, and how she seemed to notice but for some reason or another refused to meet his eyes. Either way, Thad’s and Samuel’s heads were both as red as ginseng berries. Sometimes the proof was in the pudding.
She was already asleep when Aiden walked into the house. The television was on in the living room, but muted, and flashed an unsteady blue about the walls. A tabby cat named Mittens was curled at one end of the couch. The walls were covered with knickknack shelves, different shapes and sizes, but all having the same square nooks. April collected Stone Critters, chalk animal figurines that fit in the palm of her hand. She bought them from flea markets and yard sales, and though Aiden thought it was silly, collecting those figurines made her happy.
There were things Aiden would never understand about her, like how she demanded the lights be on when they made love. Likewise, she always slept with the lights on, and on nights that Aiden lay beside her, he would get up and turn them off once she’d fallen asleep. Some nights she woke up panicked and would scream when she found someone in bed beside her, so most nights he left the lights on and slept by himself on the couch.
April was gorgeous. Aiden had always thought that. And every time they lay together, in that moment just before he came, he would stare into her eyes, those jade-green eyes, and it was enough to push him over. He loved her and always had, even when he and Thad were little. Sometimes he’d even tell her that he loved her, though she never said it back. She always responded with something like, “I know you do, sweet one.” But she never said those words in return.
The rest of the house was dark as he walked to her bedroom and stood at the doorsill. She was on her side, facing him, the sheet pulled down to her waist and bunched around the curve of her hip. Her body was tan from sunbathing naked in the backyard when no one was around. There were freckles on her shoulders and chest, freckles he’d traced so often with his fingers that he could map them on paper. One arm was tucked under the pillow. The other hugged around her chest. Honey-blond hair streamed over her shoulder and ran into the place where her breasts pushed together.
Aiden turned off the light and climbed into bed beside her. When he drew close she turned over and he spooned in behind. He was wide awake as he pulled close to her, their bodies together in every place they could be. For a long time, he lay there and couldn’t sleep. He’d been hungry so long that the pangs had gone and now returned. He thought about getting up to eat, he thought about a lot of things, but it felt so good beside her that he didn’t want to move. When he shifted his legs to get even closer, she stirred against him.
“Will you turn the light back on, sweet one?”
“I will,” he said. He stood and then did as she asked on his way out of the room. Down the hall, a light was on over the stove in the kitchen and he opened the refrigerator to look for something to eat. She’d made him a plate for supper: cube steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, and a slice of tomato covered in plastic wrap on a plate. He ate the food cold, and when he’d had his fill, patted the plastic wrap down and slid the leftovers back into the fridge.
In the living room, he shook one of her cigarettes from a pack on the coffee table in front of the couch. Mittens rose from where he’d been curled and sleeping and let his front paws down on the floor, his haunches still on the couch as he bowed. The cat lolled over to where Aiden stood by the window and ran its body against his bare legs. Aiden drew the curtain back and stared down the hill to where Thad sat. He finished his cigarette, watching him, glad that Thad was there simply because his being back meant that Aiden was no longer alone.
When Thad left for Fort Bragg, Aiden felt something he hadn’t felt since he was a child. Those nights in the group home while he lay beside the boy who memorized baseball cards, Aiden was frozen with fear. He was alone and helpless, and that feeling was like the world was out of control, like his mind was trying to fathom the speed of light. His palms would get clammy and his ears would ring and his heart raced and he would forget to breathe and he would just lie there knowing for certain that he was about to die and there wasn’t a soul on this planet could stop it.
There’d been so many years since he’d felt it that he’d forgotten. All that time, the feeling lay dormant inside him, buried and unnoticed, until that first morning he woke up alone, that first morning Thad wasn’t there. Aiden couldn’t understand why the feeling came back, he couldn’t connect one time and another, but nevertheless there it was day in and day out.
He told himself that things would be different now. Those dark, racing thoughts were gone, and he’d come to believe that if he and Thad could get off this mountain and head to Asheville, they could get back to the way things were before. That hopeful feeling was as nice a thing as he could remember. So he closed his eyes, the same way he did every night, and tried to think of nothing else.
(4)
Aiden hated to spend every dime they made from the copper on dope, any kind of dope, but he especially hated to blow it all on crystal. Even though he wanted to get high, methamphetamine had never been his drug. Back before Bennie Hazel got gooney and smashed the old lady’s head to a pulp with a T-ball bat, Aiden used to buy pills from Gerty Brinkley. She may have just been the unluckiest woman ever to be born of this earth.
The way the story was told, Gerty and her husband, Frank, had a little girl named Pearl, and Pearl was the cutest thing God ever made. Pearl wasn’t more than five years old, chasing lightning bugs at the edge of a honeysuckle thicket, when a black coyote poured off a hillside and took her without so much as a gasp. Gerty caught sight from the kitchen window and Frank grabbed the gun, laid the lead to that dog, but, when it was settled, that darling girl was mauled something long past saving.
Folks said Frank never spoke another word. One morning he woke up, took his shave like he always did, and ran that long razor right straight across his neck like he was opening a sack of seed. They said he just stood there in front of the mirror and watched without a sound or expression until what washed over him left him too woozy to stand and he collapsed into the puddle he’d made. That’s how Gerty found him. That was before the cancer ate her.
When Aiden came to know Gerty Brinkley she lived off Shook Cove, and doctors kept her prescriptions coming just as fast as pharmacists could fill them. She always had OxyContin and when he was lucky she had Dilaudid. Once she’d had morphine suckers, but the OxyContin was what Aiden fancied.
The old woman barely had a single hair left on her head, just a few thin strands that waved about like feather fluff whenever she moved. The veins in her head shone through her scalp and she wore a thick pair of glasses that swelled her eyes two sizes too big. It was saddening to even look at her, but listening to her was unbearable. She loved to talk Jesus, never would shut up about that water walker. Every time Aiden was there it was all he could do to get away in an hour for the likes of all her preaching, but he had to stay for the whole sermon to score the dope. She said she sold the
pills to raise money for the church, all that cash funding Jesus’s doings. “I can take the suffering now,” she’d say, “just knowing what awaits.”
What awaited Gerty Brinkley was Bennie Hazel, and he’d been up a week straight. They said he beat her until her head was just as flat as cube steak. There were times when Aiden had thought of robbing her, but the few beliefs he had kept him from acting. There was a part of him that had always believed in God and the devil. But when Bennie Hazel did that to Gerty Brinkley, that was the day Aiden McCall did away with God. If there was a God, He wasn’t worth a damn. The devil wins out every time.
Aiden always cared about everything in this world a little too much, like at any minute this old hunk of rock might go spinning off its axis and shoot off into the Milky Way somewhere. Those thoughts kept him up at night and perhaps that’s why he preferred pills. He liked downers and Thad liked uppers. Uppers made Aiden think too much, and him thinking too much had always been a dangerous thing. But ever since Gerty died, there hadn’t been much in the way of pills. There for a while the doctors had prescribed Thad some pretty good painkillers for his back, but when they called him in randomly to check his script and all the pills were gone, that free ride ended fast. Now Aiden did whatever was on the table.
With the house Aiden and Thad stripped, they took 243 pounds of copper. The rate was $2.83 per pound, their haul worth nearly seven hundred dollars at the scrap yard. But they couldn’t go to the scrap yard. The boys who ran the scales snitched to lawmen on those who tried to make an honest living stealing from millionaires and banks. The way Aiden saw it, he and Thad weren’t stripping the houses of hardworking families. They stripped foreclosures, and, in winter, the second homes of millionaires who had the gall to use copper for gutters and downspouts on a mountain where most folks survived on winter gardens and canned meat. Those assholes had it coming.
Since the scrap yard was out of the question, he and Thad sold their copper to a general contractor named Nicholson, who, despite the slow business of others, seemed to keep a full calendar of remodels and, because of that, had a reason to haul truckloads of copper to the yard. Nicholson was a businessman and he knew they had no other option, so he offered two fifty and Thad shook his hand. The whole thing made Aiden sick.
The dope house marked the dead end of a long, muddy cut that ran three miles from pavement. There were trailers scattered along the first mile, but after that a long stretch of woods and rutted trail swept into the holler. The tweakers in those trailers were customers just like Aiden and Thad, and as the two drove by, those wild eyes stared down on them from porches and windows like owls. Late at night, those addicts would stumble down to the road and stand peering into headlights to decipher friend from fiend. But there was still an hour or two of evening light and they knew Aiden’s ride, so there’d be no warning calls sounded.
At the house, the tweakers were always lit. Sometimes there were loads of them bouncing around the property like a circus of fleas, and it wouldn’t take long till Thad jumped onto his pogo stick and sprang right alongside them. The world was already spinning fast and so Aiden had always preferred dope that slowed that whirling to molasses. But life was too slow for Thad, and he loved how buzzard dust mashed the gas.
Two girls, one tall and skinny and a fat gal wearing a nightgown, slinked along the edge of the woods. A wiry man with his shirt off and lightbulbs for eyes came toward the Ranchero as Aiden and Thad pulled up. The man stared into the cab, his face pitted with acne scars and his sunken jaw working like his mind held all sorts of ideas. Aiden watched him closely, but the man walked past and his stringy mullet never turned. He headed further into obscurity and joined those two girls along the muddy drive.
“Where y’all going?” Thad hollered. He was already drunk again, almost too drunk to stand, having bought another bottle of whiskey just as soon as the money touched his hand. The booze was nearly finished before they left the trailer. Thad had drunk faster than usual, knowing that as soon as he got the dope up his nose his mind would even out. He was always loud when he and Aiden went to see friends, just wouldn’t shut the hell up to save his life, but he was especially bad around women. Thad had the door open and stood on the doorjamb with his upper half waving above the cab, as he banged on the roof and yelled, “Nose to nose my toes is in it, and toe to toe my nose is in it. There’s plenty to go around!”
The two girls glanced back and the fat one snickered like that just might suit her, but it was that wiry, wide-eyed boy that stopped and turned. He stood there and didn’t say a word, his eyes aglow from fifty yards like an animal’s. Aiden stepped out of the car and glared to where he stood. They watched each other for a moment, but the man turned, and he and the two girls disappeared like shadows.
The dope house was an old white one-story built like the homes in a mill village. The white paint had aged to the chipped and crackled color of bone. Tall windows were set one on each side with a small porch centered between. The front door was open and light shone through the windows and doorway, making that place look like a skull with a candle burning inside.
Wayne Bryson was on the front porch, shaking a two-liter bottle filled with a bright blue liquid that sloshed and fizzed like some childhood science experiment. He twisted the top and burped the bottle after every shake to ease the gas building inside. His eyes stayed fixed and he never blinked, as if a moment unfocused would crash the spell he cast, his hands whirling household chemicals into crank.
“Who was the legs?” Thad asked as he walked toward the house.
“Shit, that’s Julie Dietz, and that thing’d look like a wagon track through a cow pie.” Wayne’s words blew against a red bandanna he had tied around his face. He flicked his eyes to where the three had vanished, but snapped his stare back onto the bottle and stopped shaking as the plastic swelled tight. White chunks that looked like rock salt washed around in the bottom, and lithium strips melted into a copper film on the surface. Wayne unscrewed the cap, burped the bottle again, and an acrid gray steam seeped into summer air. “My cousin fucked her and he said she don’t even trim down there.”
“You don’t like hair pie?”
“I don’t like it looking like a stump full of spiders. That’s damn near thirty years of growth, boys. I’m talking granddaddy longlegs.”
Thad laughed, and he and Aiden stood there while Wayne worked the bottle until crystals formed.
“Who was that with her?” Aiden asked.
Wayne kept focused on his potion but answered with a nod. “The fat one?”
“No, that wiry boy.”
“That’s Doug, Dougie Dietz, Julie Dietz’s brother. Why?” Wayne spoke speed track sentences that took a second or two to untangle.
“You remember him, Aid. He was the one they caught fooling around with that little girl when we were in high school. It was all over the papers. Her daddy, I can’t remember his name off the top of my head, but he found them back behind the barn and Doug Dietz had that girl mashed up against an old Farmall.”
“What little girl?”
“I know you remember. It was all over the papers. I can’t think of that man’s name to save my life.” Thad looked straight overhead as if God alone could give him the answer.
“Murphy,” Wayne said.
“That’s right. Something Murphy. Lives down there by Ken’s Grocery in that trailer park. Lays rock. He lays rock for a living.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Well, he caught that son of a bitch with his little girl and he damn near beat that Dietz boy’s brains out. Wish he had. I’d do it myself.” Thad toppled forward and put one foot on the wooden step to catch his balance. “And I bet you that’s why his sister right there don’t shave her puss, Wayne. Reckon if she had that thing skinned that old nasty son of a bitch wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her. That’s how them pedophiles are, I’m telling you. Fuck their own sister if t
hey get the chance.”
“I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.”
“Aw, Doug, Dougie don’t mean nothing, man, Dougie just looks like that. He looks like that all the time.” Wayne burped the bottle, shook it once more, and studied what floated and sank as if it might offer some glimpse into the future. “And he swears up and down he didn’t do that.”
“Well, fuck him’s all I know.” Thad slapped the rotted wood railing leading up the front steps and stomped the planks beneath him. “The real question is how much longer you got to dick around with that bottle before you can sell us a bag?”
“Almost there, Mr. Broom. This shit takes time.”
A year before, there was a man named Charlie McNeely who had Jackson County gourded on some of the finest dope to ever hit the mountains. He had crystals as big around as his thumb and just as clear as quartz. How the law told it, Charlie’s son stabbed his old man to death, then took out a deputy or two in a murder-suicide that played out in their front yard. After that, once the McNeely dope dried up, the whole scene turned wild. There was at least one person in every holler who cooked dope, and the folks who finally took the reins were the ones who controlled the medicine. The trick was to build an army to buy every box of pseudoephedrine from Arden to Murphy. The feds had an eye on what was being sold, but if a man had enough people, the ingredients could be walked right out of Walmart. Wayne Bryson had done just that.
When they made it inside, there weren’t enough holes in Wayne’s house to air out the ammoniac stench that settled on windows and walls. He left every yellowed windowpane lifted, the doors opened, and box fans blowing loud as warehouse exhaust, but none of it did a thing to soften the smell. It made Aiden’s eyes water and nose burn like a tomcat had marked every square inch of the house, but Wayne didn’t even seem to notice anymore.
