by David Joy
The ratty couch with yellow flowers had been flipped onto its back, its cushions strewn about, with one balanced in an angle against the wall like the start of a little kid’s lean-to. Past the living room into the kitchen, cabinet doors stood at various angles, everything inside ransacked and piled into a broken heap of dishes and glass, the shards dusted with cornmeal and slopped with spent cooking grease. A dust devil of fruit flies whirled up from the pile when Aiden scuffed through, but there was no absence of places to light, and in a split second the air was still.
Aiden peeked into Thad’s bedroom at the far end of the trailer, but it was hard to tell whether the room was ripped apart or just how he’d left it. Navy-blue sheets bunched away from one corner of the mattress, the dark sheets splotched with dried gray stains. The bed was slung sideways, dirty clothes strewn carelessly about the room. Gun magazine centerfolds were taped to the wall. Drawers were ripped from the rails of the dresser. The closet emptied into a mixed mound of filth.
Down the barrel of the trailer, Thad was still hovering over Loretta Lynn’s body. He was motionless, but the potential for him to ignite was packed in his gunpowder stare. Gravel spun beneath tires outside, just a dark blue blur as April’s sedan shot past the open doorway, and that sound pulled the trigger.
By the time Aiden made it onto the porch, Thad was halfway up the hill. April was out of the car and slammed the passenger-side door with her free hand, a paint roller and tray balanced under her other arm. Cocked to the side by the gallon of paint she was carrying, she evened the load between her hands, but dropped it all when she saw her front door standing open. Her tabby cat, Mittens, wandered onto the stoop and circled lazily, back arched as he ran his body along the door frame. Thad was almost to the house, his fast pace and raised shoulders hinting that when he got there something bad was going to happen. Aiden took off after them and Thad followed his mother into the house just as Aiden crested the hilltop. When Aiden made it inside, they were already screaming.
“My house is ripped to shreds, Thad. Don’t you think if I was here I would have done something?” April stood in the living room with her arms raised over the mess. Light yellow paint had dried in her hair, speckled her black tank top and loose-fitting carpenter’s pants. She turned and looked around the littered floor. “I’d like to kill whoever did this to my house.”
“Well, where were you?” he screamed.
“I went to get paint.”
“Paint?”
“I needed more paint, Thad. Is that hard for you to understand?”
“You and this house.”
“This house is all I’ve got. This house, Thad, is torn all to shit and I guaran-goddamn-tee it was some no-account you was running around with did it.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said I’ll bet you a million dollars this had something to do with those skanks you had piled in that trailer last night.”
“Just shut the fuck up!”
“No, Thad. No. I won’t shut the fuck up. I won’t shut up and you know why? Do you have any idea why?”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you why. Look around, Thad. They broke my entire collection.” April kicked at a broken figurine that used to sit on one of the shelves by the door. The knickknack shelves were smashed into jagged wooden scraps. The chalk statues were shattered over the carpet. “I’ve been collecting those my whole life. My mama and daddy gave me some of those when I was a little girl. You have any idea how much that collection meant to me?”
“Your collection?” Thad moved toward his mother.
“Can you really not understand what I’m saying?”
“Your collection?” He was almost to her.
“My—”
Before April could get another word out of her mouth, Thad grabbed hold of her face, mashed her cheeks and lips together in his hand. He kept forward until she was on the floor and he was on top of her, her eyes and mug still scrunched into a wrinkled wad in his hand like some chubby kid making faces. “They killed my dog!” Thad was screaming down at his mother words that broke apart and pelted her face. “They killed my fucking dog, you dumb bitch!”
Aiden loped forward and tackled Thad away from his mother, the two of them rolling into a knotted melee on the floor beside her. They wrestled around for a minute or two before Thad’s rage gave him the upper hand. His knees dug into Aiden’s ribs as he hammered square into Aiden’s forehead. Thad brained Aiden again, and that second one dazed him for a moment, but when a clear thought came, it crashed like a meteor and lit Aiden afire. That’s when Aiden rolled Thad onto his back and pinned his arms behind his head. Thad was trying to knee Aiden in his kidneys, trying to climb his way up his body, and it took almost a minute before he spent, that tantrum finally fizzling, him just heaving for air on the floor.
When it was over, Aiden twisted off and let go of Thad’s wrists.
Thad spun to his feet and walked to the open doorway. He turned to face them. April sat beside Aiden with her arms wrapped around her knees and her head buried and sobbing. “Fuck you, Aiden,” Thad said. His features were hidden in shadow, the world glowing white behind him. April looked up from her arms with her face sunken with tears. “Fuck you both,” Thad said as he shook his head, turned, and melted into the sunlight with his mother and best friend speechless on the floor.
(15)
The memory of how Thad came to be had not waned in twenty-four years:
Every night for two weeks April had gone to the church to practice piano until the song she would play that coming Sunday was something memorized in the tips of her fingers. She’d turned off the lights and was headed to lock up, the sanctuary so still that even her muffled screams echoed.
There was little light to be had, which made it hard to see who was holding her there, her vision so frosted by tears that everything blurred, impossible for her to see the man, just a shadow figure that smelled of corn liquor and Aqua Velva, the way he always did, the way he always did even on Sundays, even when he stood at the reverend’s side and broke bread, even when he dressed up as Santa Claus that one Christmas when the congregation gathered in the fellowship hall and held a cakewalk for the Aikens, who’d lost everything in a fire. Booze and cheap cologne, he’d always smelled like that, and that’s how she knew.
She didn’t need to see his face. She could smell him. She could smell him as he moved over her. She could smell him as if her face were buried in him. She could smell him from then on. She could smell him in the fragrance aisle at Walmart when she went to town. She could smell him any time someone who’d been drinking breathed. It was something she hadn’t forgotten, something she could never forget, not now, not ever, a smell nine months older than Thad, a smell that, to this day, left her helpless with fear, her body tightening to stone, her mind a furious turning.
The man who broke her had said to keep quiet, and she did. She kept quiet when her stomach started to swell and the kids she’d grown up with called her a whore. Having sex didn’t make you a whore, but getting pregnant did. She kept quiet when her parents kicked her out of the house, and when they left the church and moved out of Little Canada from shame that they’d raised her. She kept quiet when Thad was old enough to ask about his father and she could barely look at him and all she could do was lie and say the man was Cherokee. When George Trantham forced her to go back to that same church on Sundays, when she had to look at the man who’d hurt her sitting piously behind the reverend, she shoveled it all deep inside and never said a word. But all of that anger and all of that hatred was reflected onto Thad, the one reminder that could not be buried.
April relived all of those feelings as she knelt on the floor and cried into her hands, a queasiness in her stomach that built till she was certain she’d be sick. The way Thad had rushed her and pinned her to the floor seemed some eerie revelation that her son’s deepest truths were rooted in blood and co
uld not be blotted out or erased. He was his father’s son. In her mind, he was no different from the man who’d raped her. But for the first time in all those years, the sickness that rose with the resurfacing of memory filled her more with rage than fear. She stared through the open doorway into the light outside where Thad had disappeared and prayed that the sun would burn him alive. She prayed that he would be incinerated and in that moment her memory would be erased and it would be as if he’d never existed at all.
“I wish he were dead,” April said under her breath, wiping the tears from her cheeks with both hands as if she were washing her face.
“What did you say?” Aiden asked.
Neither of them had moved from the floor since Thad walked out, and these were the first words spoken between them.
“I wish he were dead,” she repeated, so matter-of-factly that it was clear how many times she must’ve thought it before.
“You don’t mean that,” Aiden said. He stood and looked down on her.
“I’ve never meant anything more in my life.”
(16)
Thad buried his dog above April’s house in a long sweep of yellowed grass that bent as stiffly as rake tines any time the wind blew. The radio tower reached into the sky over the mountain and broke apart late-summer sun with metal bones that cast a skeleton shadow down upon where he dug.
Each spring, creeping phlox spread a pale blue blanket over the hillside. The color always seemed to burst unexpectedly like some delicious explosion that happened overnight. Thad had always heard that dogs were color-blind, but Loretta Lynn seemed to see those flowers bloom. The minute she saw them, she sprinted for the hill as if the flowers were trespassing, and upon discovering they were only flowers, squirmed around on her back with her tongue lapping about her jowls, like the whole world suddenly made sense again. Watching her made Thad happy. Even though the world was tearing apart at the stitches, seeing her roll around in those flowers that spring had made Thad laugh.
That spot had to be Loretta Lynn’s favorite place. That little patch of ground was probably the closest thing either of them would ever know to heaven, and that’s why he buried her there. He didn’t say a word as he dug. He didn’t even notice that Aiden stood behind him. He just worked until the hole was deep enough. Then he wrapped her in a blanket, placed her in the ground, and covered her body with dirt.
When the work was done and he leaned over the shovel, the grayed wooden handle seeming to hold him up like a scarecrow, he glared stone-eyed down to where Aiden was standing. The white T-shirt Thad wore was stretched about the neck, and he lifted the shirt from his belly to wipe sweat from his face.
“You know she was right,” Thad said after a long spell.
“What?” Aiden asked.
“She was right in there.” He stared into the sky trying to make sense of something that lacked reason.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aiden said.
“About all this having something to do with those girls.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I just know it,” Thad said.
“You think those two girls could do that?”
“Not those girls, Aiden, but that brother of hers, Julie’s brother, that Doug Dietz, you’re goddamn right I do.”
“I still don’t know what would make somebody do that.”
“I do,” Thad said. “And that’s my fault.”
“How the hell is it your fault?”
“Because I told them.”
“You told them what, Thad?”
“I told Julie about Wayne Bryson. I told her about what happened and what we took.”
“What the hell do you mean you told her?”
“I know I shouldn’t have said nothing.”
“Jesus Christ, Thad. Do you have any—”
“I know what I did, Aiden!” Thad screamed. “I’m the reason this happened. I know that.” Thad braced the shovel across his shoulder, hung his arms over the handle, and made his way down the hill.
“Well, what the fuck are we going to do?” Aiden asked as Thad came near.
“Ain’t but one way to make this right,” Thad said without even turning to look as he went by. His eyes were set on nothing at all as he headed toward the trailer. Something broke inside him then. His mind retreated to a place more familiar. There was a sergeant who told Thad the infantry were the hands of God, and that idea made sense to Thad because it was no different from what he had heard all his life growing up in church. The old-timers said some prayers needed feet. But there was evil in this world that had to be strangled. And so it wasn’t just a matter of giving those prayers legs. Sometimes a prayer needed hands just the same.
(17)
A twisted spire of flame and smoke licked about the sky after Thad doused the cheapjack table with gasoline, tossed a struck match where oil and blood soaked the wooden top, and set the large spool ablaze in the front yard. The fuel spent fast, and within a few minutes the plywood had crumbled into a bed of coals. A few minutes more and nothing but a wide circle of gray ash and black earth lay in the yard like a tarnished coin flipped by the hand of God.
April watched Aiden and Thad from the stoop of her house. She’d yelled something when the column of fire first spiraled into the air. Neither answered her. When April wished her son was dead, when those words came out of her mouth, Aiden knew it was the most heartless thing he’d ever heard her say. Mothers weren’t supposed to say things like that. Fathers, maybe, but mothers never. Then again, she’d never been much of a mother at all.
While the fire burned to nothing, Thad came up with a plan. He chose the shotgun and Aiden took the revolver. Thad made Aiden grab a fence-post driver to use as a battering ram. Once inside, they’d bind them with zip ties and duct tape. Force a confession. After that, Aiden was uncertain. Thad hadn’t gotten that far.
The two of them waited for nightfall, and when that last bit of glow dissolved into the mountains, they drove Booker Branch without headlights, lowered their heads together, and snorted enough crystal to make sure it all happened in the blink of an eye.
They snuck through a laurel thicket and up the darkened hillside on a game trail that switchbacked three times to the trailer. The lights were on inside, and screamo music blared from busted speakers just behind the door. Aiden and Thad didn’t check the windows. They just moved fast onto the porch. Thad shouldered the shotgun and readied himself to bum-rush whoever moved. Aiden slid the revolver down the back of his waistline, the barrel cold against his skin, and took the fence-post driver with both hands.
When Thad nodded, Aiden swung heavy steel into the door, just left of the handle, and the trailer lid slapped the wall behind before rattling loose on busted hinges. Doug Dietz jerked around with eyes wide and his greasy mullet slapping his neck. His pants were down by his ankles and he had the fat girl, Meredith, dogged over the couch, a ratty nightshirt pushed up her back. He was as deep as he could get, with one hand yanking her braided ponytail like a leash, when Thad and Aiden filed inside, Thad screaming, “Get on the goddamn floor! Get on the goddamn floor!”
They were dumbstruck as Thad moved into the house. He swung the buttstock of the shotgun into the base of Doug’s neck before that son of a bitch ever let off. The blow knocked Doug unconscious, and he collapsed forward onto the fat girl’s back, rolled to the side with his ankles tangled in denim jeans, and hit the floor like a lassoed calf.
Meredith crawled down the couch and scuttled toward the kitchen to get away. Her weight was forward as if she were already falling, and her arms circled around her sides like she was some storm-blown whirligig. Thad’s pace never slowed. He kept forward past where Doug lay, and kicked her with a long, loping stride. She crashed headfirst into the base of a countertop that split the living room and kitchen. She was sluggish in her movements, but tried to lift herself from the floor. The thin
, moth-eaten nightshirt was up around her shoulders, stretch marks squiggling her back. Thad stood over her and hammered down into the back of her boxy skull with the shotgun, but that first blow did not take her. It took him gripping the shotgun in both hands and raining down on her wildly with the stainless receiver before she melted on the floor.
Aiden yanked Doug’s pants up and was securing his wrists behind his back with zip ties and duct tape when Julie poked her head out of the back room at the far end of the trailer with a bag of frozen corn pressed to her eye. She stood there in red sweatpants with Marlboro written down both legs in cracked white letters, a Slipknot T-shirt hanging loosely from her shoulders. Thad drew down on her with the shotgun, and she dropped what she was holding, tightened rigidly with arms half raised at her chest like some stiffened skeleton set to scare children in a haunted house. “Don’t you fucking move,” Thad said through teeth clenched tight, his words clear over the blaring music, as if no sound stirred at all. Unlike her brother, unlike Meredith, who lay sprawled between Aiden and Thad, Julie Dietz did as she was told.
Thad cinched a fistful of Julie’s hair at the back of her head and led her through the kitchen. He threw her forward by that ball of hair and she tripped over Meredith’s leg, collapsed on a coiled, woolen rug that centered the narrow living room. She turned glassy-eyed toward Aiden, her one eye still swollen purple where Thad had hit her that morning. Pushing herself from the floor, her shoulder blades cut sharply at the back of her shirt.
“Unh-uh,” Thad grunted before she could rise.
Julie crumbled to the rug. Her eyes were set on Aiden as he finished binding her brother’s ankles, Doug’s feet now pulled up behind him and hog-tied to his wrists. Julie’s dark, hollow eyes filled with tears. Her face scrunched before she broke, but Aiden paid her no attention and went on about his business. He bound Meredith just as he had Doug, though she was not near as limber and required a chain of zip ties to link her wrists and ankles. Both were hog-tied now. Both remained unconscious. Julie was the only one awake, and while Thad worked on her restraints, Aiden pulled the revolver from his waistline and checked the rooms.
