by David Joy
Thad prodded the muzzle into Aiden’s forehead, Aiden snatched hold of the barrel, and April ducked under Aiden’s arm before he could even try to stop her. She was between him and Thad with her finger jabbing at Thad’s chest with every word she said. “I don’t know what in the hell the two of you are talking about, but you’re going to get out of my house!”
There hadn’t been more than a few words between them in the two years since Thad had been home. Though they spent every day with nothing more than a hillside between them, April and Thad existed in two different worlds, and it had been that way for more than a decade. The tension had only worsened in the past year, after she’d put the property on the market. Since sixth grade, Thad lived in that trailer, and he was very clear in his belief that the place was just as much his as hers. Aiden didn’t blame him for thinking that. April had always seemed to see her son as a burden. She didn’t say a word when George Trantham moved Thad into the trailer. It was as if she believed that if it hadn’t been for Thad she would’ve wound up someplace better than this. More than that, Thad seemed to know that’s what she thought. So the two of them stayed at each other’s throats and Aiden trod the ground between.
“I’m not leaving here until that son of a bitch gives me what he stole,” Thad said. He still hadn’t lowered the gun.
“I didn’t steal a fucking thing.” Aiden’s mind was wild. He kept telling himself, Thad won’t pull the trigger, there’s no way he’ll pull the trigger, but the more he thought about it, the less he was sure. Aiden was filling up inside, moving closer and closer to that threshold, and once he crossed over there would be no turning back. He’d never been able to stop himself once he’d started. Blank thoughts would wash over him, and he would not come to until it was over.
Thad clenched his teeth with his mouth open so that he looked like some growling dog with squinted eyes. His head slowly wrenched up to the side until he could turn no farther. He exhaled in one long breath, lowered the gun as he did, then dropped the hammer back down to rest.
April shoved hard against Thad’s chest and he looked for a second like he might hit her as he took a step back, but she refilled the gap between them and shoved him again. “I told you to get out of my house.”
Thad slapped her hands away when she tried to push him again. “And I told you I’m not leaving until that son of a bitch gives me what he stole.”
April turned and stared at Aiden, those jade-green eyes taking him hostage when she did. Ever since the first time she brushed her knuckle down his cheek, she’d had control. The truth of it was she’d had a hold on him long before that, but after that first time, she owned him. She knew it and he knew it and neither one of them seemed to care because both were getting something out of the deal. “Tell me what he’s talking about, Aiden McCall.”
Aiden looked at her, but did not speak.
“Now,” she said.
And though Aiden didn’t want to say it, he knew silence wouldn’t end the draw. They’d reached a stalemate, and explaining what had happened was the only way he could see the game ending. So Aiden told the story, and after what seemed an eternity, it was all spelled out nice and clear, from the way Wayne Bryson had turned his brain into sausage to how he and Thad had torn out of there before the gunshot finished bouncing around the holler. Aiden said he hid the dope because Thad was going to kill himself with that much crystal in his hands, and Thad told him it was none of his goddamn business. Aiden explained that he knew someone who just might buy that bag outright, that there was at least twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of methamphetamine and that it was a whole lot easier to divide money than drugs. He told Thad that once it was divided, Thad could spend it any way he wanted, and that seemed to suit him just fine. April just stood there listening until he had finished.
“I’ve only got one question,” she said when everything was finally spread on the table and Thad and Aiden had reached some kind of common ground. Her eyebrows scrunched her forehead, and she hooked strands of hair that had fallen and framed her face back behind her ears. “What else you think he had stashed in that house?”
(6)
The sun always took its precious time to set on this place. In the longest days of summer, the sun might dip its yellow face behind the peaks at seven o’clock, an invisible glob of molten orange that dripped behind the mountain, until all that was left was red, as if a drop of blood had soaked back into the earth on the other side. That lolling sometimes lasted until nine thirty before the wick extinguished into darkness. Everything seemed to drag on forever, nothing in any sort of hurry. But it was finally dark.
April watched the taillights of Aiden’s Ranchero stare back at her as the car wound down the drive until they were swallowed completely by the laurels lining the road. She was uncertain of what Aiden and Thad might find at Wayne Bryson’s. It had been unlike her to make that type of suggestion, just as it was unlike her to say it was okay to keep the drugs in her house. There was a look of confusion on Aiden’s face when April asked what might have been left behind, but Thad seemed to think it was the only sense his mother had ever made. The answer was simple: money. If that bag was worth twenty-five hundred, then what if there were two bags? Three bags? What if there was a pile of money rolled up in his sock drawer? If Aiden and Thad wound up finding drugs or cash, they’d be that much closer to having what they needed to leave, and them leaving would mean one less thing for her to worry about when she sold the house. Though Thad would’ve never believed it, April did worry what would happen to him and where he’d go when the trailer was gone. She knew Aiden would be just fine, but there was no telling with Thad.
She could hardly remember Aiden McCall before he came to live there. She knew he’d been missing when Thad brought him out of the woods and put him up in the trailer. She knew he had run away and that the sheriff’s office was looking for him, and she knew what his father had done, because it was the gossip all through Little Canada. Even the gaggle of old women at church whispered back and forth in the pews on Sunday mornings about what had happened, saddest thing they’d ever heard. So when Thad brought Aiden home and George Trantham called the law and a convoy of patrol cars came to take Aiden into custody and hand him off to social services, April thought it was probably for the best until she watched it unfold.
When the deputies went onto the porch at the trailer, Thad met them at the door with a .410 shotgun he used to squirrel-hunt. He screamed that they’d have to drag Aiden out of that trailer, but he was just a twelve-year-old. The deputies barged inside and Aiden shot out of the front door and into the brush like a rabbit. After a few minutes, the deputies came out of the woods with muddied uniforms, dragging the boy by his arms.
That night, April convinced George Trantham that letting Aiden stay might keep Thad out of their hair. Maybe if Aiden was around to keep Thad busy, she wouldn’t have to relive the darkest hour of her life every time she looked at her son, and maybe George wouldn’t get so pissed at Thad that he drank till he couldn’t stand, then beat her till she couldn’t either. She signed the stack of paperwork and Aiden was back within a few days. From then on, the two boys raised themselves in the trailer, and she stayed cooped in the house until the good Lord finally answered one prayer and ate that drunk son of a bitch up with cancer, killed George Trantham before he could ever hit her again. But the boys were practically grown by then.
When Thad left for Fort Bragg and Aiden stayed behind, she watched him come and go for months before a word was ever spoken between them. She was lonely and he was there, and that’s how it started. He’d always been able to make her laugh, and she needed that. One evening, she walked down to the trailer with a plate of food and a bag of weed. They sat on the front steps and passed a joint back and forth while lightning bugs came out of the ground and gradually floated into the trees. After that, she gave him odd jobs and asked him in for supper. She enjoyed his company. She liked the way he made her fee
l. Aiden wasn’t like any man she had ever met. He was polite and timid and always waited for her to say the first word or make the first move, and so one night she did.
After he’d washed the dishes, he sat at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette, and she sidled up behind him and ran her hands down his chest. As he turned toward her, she kissed his ear and his neck, then led him to her bedroom. When it was just the two of them, she almost forgot about everything bad that had happened in that house, everything bad that had ever happened to her on that mountain: from the times in high school when her stomach started to show to the day her parents told her she was dead to them. There were so many things she carried, memories that lay heavy as stone. All of those things stayed bottled and building. All of those things had damn near broken her in two. She welcomed any chance to forget.
(7)
They were halfway between Charleys Creek and Booker Branch when Thad finally said, “I want you to look at this,” but Aiden did not turn to face him. He kept his eyes on the road ahead and tried to block out the fact that Thad was in the car at all. “You need to look at this, goddamn it,” Thad said. And it wasn’t so much the sternness of Thad’s voice as the clack of metal that grabbed Aiden’s attention.
He turned and looked to where Thad had the revolver pointed dead between his eyes, the cylinder opened to the side. Thad spun the wheel and Aiden could see gaps of light flicking by like an old film through the empty chambers.
“There wasn’t a thing in it,” Thad said. He dug around in the side pocket of his jeans and came out with five cartridges cupped in his palm, those .500s looking as long and fat as Swisher cigars.
“I don’t give a fuck!” Aiden yelled. Until then he’d been chewing at the inside of his cheek, nervously trying to figure out what had gotten into April. The dope always made him grind his teeth, that chewing seeming to be some physical thing that tried to keep up with how fast his mind raced. “I don’t care if it wasn’t loaded, Thad. That’s twice today. Two fucking times that somebody has pointed a gun at me. And both of those times the one pointing said, ‘Aww, it ain’t loaded.’”
“I had the shells in my pocket—”
“I don’t care, Thad. Wayne Bryson said the same goddamned thing, and you saw what happened. He blew his brains out.”
“Wayne Bryson was an idiot, Aiden. Always has been. You know that,” Thad said. “He shot himself in his own leg with a twenty-two when we were in high school. I ain’t Wayne Bryson. I know my way around guns and you know it. You know I wouldn’t have pointed it at you if it was loaded.”
The truth was, Aiden wasn’t quite sure whether he knew that or not. He knew Thad was as close a thing to family as he’d ever had and he knew Thad would’ve regretted anything he’d done just as soon as it happened, but he also knew Thad Broom was just like him, so short-fused that nothing was ever out of the question. There’d never been anything between thought and action with either of them, and that’s what Aiden had worked so hard to change. All their lives, they snapped time and time again. A thought would come and they would act. Nothing in between. Not a moment. Not a second thought. Nothing. So Aiden wasn’t sure Thad wouldn’t stick a loaded gun into his forehead. All Aiden knew was that he’d felt the blood run up into his face and his palms go sweaty. All Aiden knew for sure was that his mind was whirling out of control.
“I shouldn’t have pointed that gun at you, and I’m sorry, I really am, but you don’t know what it’s like, Aiden. You can’t know what it’s like. You might like getting fucked up, but mine ain’t a want, mine’s a need, and that’s a big damn difference.”
“I’m going to go ahead and tell you right now, Thad, you ever stick a gun in my face again and one of us is going to be burying the other.”
“I said I’m—”
“I heard you the first time,” Aiden said.
Thad sat rattling the pistol cartridges in his hand like he was about to throw dice, and neither spoke for a good while. They rode along steep highway cut into the side of the mountain, rock face and trees towering to one side, a steep descent into the gorge below. And when the tension finally seemed to have eased just a hair, Thad broke the silence.
“Who you think’s got enough money to buy an ounce of dope?”
Aiden glanced over and didn’t say anything at first. He knew his answer was one that wouldn’t sit well. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it? You tell me you’ve got somebody that’ll buy a whole ounce of dope, damn near twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of crystal, and then say don’t worry about it? Who the fuck’s going to buy this shit, Aiden?”
“Leland,” Aiden said.
“Bumgarner?” Thad squawked.
“Yeah.”
“Goddamn, Aiden, are you kidding me?”
“If there’s anybody on this mountain that knows where to unload an ounce of crystal, it’d be Leland.”
“And if there’s anybody on this mountain that’d fuck his own family over for a dime, it’d be Leland too. That rotten son of a bitch tried to dicker the doctor down when his wife was in the middle of popping out that kid of theirs. I’m telling you we might as well just flush it down the toilet.”
“You know anybody else?” Aiden asked. He stared at Thad for a short moment, and when it was obvious there would be no reply, added, “Then Leland’s the only shot we’ve got.”
“Just don’t say a word when he winds up dicking us over.”
“He ain’t going to dick us over.”
Aiden and Thad knew just how snaky Leland Bumgarner could be because they’d always been friends with him. They’d sat back and laughed as he fucked over everyone from kids at school to his own lazy-eyed mother. Every man has something that makes him tick, and ever since Leland was old enough to pickpocket kids on the bus for nickels, it had been anything that would spend. He and Thad had a mixed history of horse trading and fistfights, and the conclusion Thad drew was that Leland couldn’t be trusted. There was no arguing there. Aiden agreed wholeheartedly. But Aiden also understood that Leland was the only chance they had at making money off that bag, let alone money off whatever else they might find lying around Wayne Bryson’s house. They were only a mile or so away now and Thad was still shaking those cartridges around in his hand nervously.
“Now, when we get back over there, I want you to stay in the car till I make sure that house is empty,” Thad said. “You just stay out in the car and keep an eye out in case somebody comes riding in on us.” Thad dropped one of the shells into the floorboard and he hunched over, rummaged through the trash between his feet, and came up with the cartridge pinched between his index finger and thumb, the other four shells still clamped in his hand. “You just wait out in the car and I’ll clear the house,” he said, half talking to himself as he slid each shell back into its chamber and slapped the cylinder closed with a flick of his wrist. “You understand?”
Aiden just nodded and stared up the road.
In the headlights, two orange eyes glowed in all that darkness like the lit ends of cigarettes, and Aiden couldn’t make out if it was a possum or coon dragging a mangled hide of flesh and fur from the roadway. Whatever kind of animal it was slunk into the ditch, nothing more than a high-shouldered shadow, before Aiden could make it out. A thought struck him as he veered to straddle what the animal had dragged between the Ranchero’s tires, and he steered on around the next curve. It wasn’t just possums and coons that learned to eat what’s left behind, that learned to make meals off scraps picked from bone. A man who spends enough time at the bottom learns to do the same. They were all alike in that way. Everything was feeding off another. It’s the scavengers that turn predators to prey, he thought, and if a person can’t see that, he’s probably the one being taken.
• • •
WAYNE BRYSON COULDN’T SEE anything anymore. He just lay there by the coffee table on his stomach, his head cocked
to the side, exit wound up. Where the bullet had twisted out of him, the flesh was gnarled, skin lapped, folded, and curled around a dark hole, but most of the blood seemed to have dumped from the other side of his head because of how he fell. The blood hadn’t so much pooled as thrown a sticky mess across the carpet around him. What poured from the exit wound had washed Wayne’s face red, like it might’ve been painted. His mouth hung open, dumbstruck. His eyes were closed. Aiden was thankful his eyes were closed.
The stereo had been on repeat since they left, the same Drive-By Truckers album still playing. There was no telling how many times it had played through in the hours since, but it was almost finished again. Patterson Hood was singing “Lookout Mountain,” and there wasn’t but one song after that. Aiden knew this because the last cut on the record had always been his favorite.
When they arrived at Wayne Bryson’s, the front door was open, and neither Aiden nor Thad could remember if they’d left it that way. Thad told Aiden, again, just to stay in the car until he’d cleared the house, and Aiden watched Thad go inside. He didn’t lower the revolver from the time he was out of the car until he’d checked every room. But only Wayne was there and he was no different from how they’d left him. Aiden and Thad just stood over his body for a second before Thad seemed to remember why they’d come.
“You just going to stand there staring at that son of a bitch or you going to help me?” Thad sidled past and grabbed the tactical rifle Wayne had folded in two from the table, slid that carbine and the digital scales into a black book bag. He and Aiden both brought bags to loot Wayne’s house. Aiden’s was still empty. Thad knelt between the couch and coffee table, snatched the pump shotgun from the carpet where he’d set it, and held it toward Aiden, pistol grip first, the barrel pointed back toward his own stomach. “Snap out of it and carry something.”
