The Weight of This World

by David Joy

  The Dietzes’ trailer had the same standard floor plan as most two-bedroom single-wides: front door opening into the living room, living room running into the kitchen, bathroom and narrow hall splitting the space between the kitchen and far bedroom, the other bedroom connected to the living room behind the front door, a bedroom capping each end. The living room and kitchen were open to view, but the bath and both bedrooms had yet to be cleared.

  Aiden chose the bedroom behind the front door first. Music blared inside. A black light mounted over the bed colored everything ultramarine. A gallery of velvet posters glowed neon on the walls: a mushroom-laden fairyland, a drippy skull with a cobra slithering from one eye, a bearded wizard summoning fire from a dragon’s mouth, and a naked sword-wielding woman whose nipples burned purple on tangerine breasts. All of that color seemed to make the place move, and Aiden felt dizzy. His mind raced, his heart pounded, and he felt for a second like he might black out. It was hard to tell if it was panic or the drugs. It couldn’t be the drugs, he thought. He’d only been up twenty-four hours. He’d only done two rails of dope. He could always last at least two days before the panic set in, before the world fell apart. Aiden ran the pistol all over the room, but found nothing other than the stereo. He turned the volume down, the screaming finally slack. Everything slowed a bit then and he regained what little hold he had. There was no one in the room but him.

  On the other end of the trailer, Aiden threw back the shower curtain in the bathroom. Red stains from hard water bloodied the shower, and his own reflection in the speckled mirror glass frightened him for a second. But there was nothing else.

  The second bedroom was bigger, a room shared by the girls. Beds stood in each corner and a short table stretched between, with its walnut veneer torn to yellow particleboard. A puddle of scented oil melted in a heated dish on the tabletop, the oil filling the room with the fetor of baby powder. The ten o’clock news flashed by on a small television retelling another story of another man killing another man in another godforsaken town. Filling-station statuary of Indians with feathered headdresses riding horseback stood on shelves hammered to walls, and dreamcatchers twirled on fishing string from the ceiling having failed to catch this nightmare.

  Thad yelled from the living room, his scratchy voice breaking some daze that’d come over Aiden. “See if you can’t find some socks.”

  “Some what?”

  “Something to shove down their throats.”

  There were dirtied clothes strewn about the floor, and Aiden scrounged some socks before moving into the living room. Julie sat on the far end of the couch with her ankles bound with zip ties, her arms cuffed behind. The way her arms were fastened hunched her forward, with her stringy hair sweeping her knees. Thad left her mouth uncovered, but had Aiden stuff wadded socks into the mouths of Meredith and Doug, seal their lips with strips of duct tape. Meredith started to wake up when Aiden did this, but she was woozy. The back of her head was soppy with blood. She’d yet to regain any sort of lucidity. With their mouths shut, she and Doug wheezed for breath, their nostrils flaring like sleeping animals.

  Thad demanded that Julie tell him what had happened, and for a long time she kept saying she didn’t know what he was talking about. But when he pulled out his skinning knife, pressed the flat side of the blade flush against her lips, and told her he would cut out every tooth in her head, she sang a different song. She told him they’d come for the drugs and the money. She told him they’d broken into the trailer and house. She told him that she and Meredith ripped the rooms apart while her brother searched for the dope, and when he came up empty-handed, that’s what pushed him over the edge, the way that dog would not shut up, that’s when Doug killed her. When she was finally done with all she had to tell, Thad stuffed her mouth with a sock until she strangled and wrapped tape around her head. Mascara washed over her cheeks like shadows until she no longer held tears to cry. She just sat there and choked on her breath, her body shuddering with each bit of air.

  That’s how Thad and Aiden left them when they walked outside. That’s how Aiden planned to leave them altogether, but Thad didn’t make it off the porch. Aiden was halfway to the woods, dragging the fence-post driver across a thin sliver of grass that separated the trailer from the hillside, when Thad called, “Where the hell are you going?”

  Aiden turned around and stared to where Thad seemed some black silhouette carved in the porch light behind. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Thad asked. “I ain’t going anywhere.”

  “What are you going to do, Thad?” Aiden huffed as if it were a joke. “You going to kill them?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Thad stood there, and though his eyes were wild, the methamphetamine and adrenaline raging inside, his demeanor was calm and collected. “Some people deserve to die,” he said.

  Aiden had known Thad his entire life and still could not believe those words. “And who makes that call?”

  “God,” Thad said.

  “God? Do you hear yourself? You think it’s God telling you to do this?”

  “God doesn’t have hands, Aiden.”

  “You’re out of your fucking mind,” Aiden said. “You know that, don’t you? You have absolutely lost your fucking mind!”

  “No. I don’t think I have,” Thad said.

  “And what about the girls?”

  “What about them?”

  “Those two girls in there didn’t do anything more than try to steal from us. That’s all they did, Thad. That’s it, and that’s no different than what me and you have been doing our whole good-for-nothing lives.”

  “They’re just as guilty as he is.”

  “You know that ain’t true.”

  “You are the company you keep,” Thad said.

  Just hearing him say that sent Aiden into a rage. For a long time, he’d felt that anger building up inside and for a long time he’d done everything he could to keep that damper closed. But what Thad was about to do would be the end. This was just one more time around the circle he’d spiraled his entire life, and that broke Aiden’s heart. He dropped the post driver and the revolver in the yard and stood there for a moment breathing heavier and heavier until all of a sudden all of that fire that had built inside let loose.

  Aiden shot up the front steps and had his hands around Thad’s throat before Thad could blink. He rammed the back of Thad’s head over and over into the side of the trailer, and Thad didn’t fight him. He just stood there taking it, and Aiden held Thad at arm’s length and punched him as hard as he could in the side of the head. Aiden swung again, then stood there and looked at how Thad stared emotionless and unfazed. He lifted his fist and was about to swing again when Thad said, “That’s enough,” but Aiden reared back farther. “That’s enough,” Thad screamed. There was blood dripping from the corner of his mouth as he shoved Aiden across the porch and raised the gun.

  “You going to kill me too?”

  Thad didn’t say a word, nor did he lower the gun.

  “Then kill me, you son of a bitch.” Aiden came forward until the muzzle was flush against his chest. “Pull the fucking trigger and kill me, Thad. Do it!” He was screaming at the top of his lungs and Thad’s expression did not waver. “Do it!”

  “Get the fuck out of here, Aiden.”

  “Do it!” Aiden screamed. And when he knew Thad wouldn’t pull the trigger, Aiden slapped the barrel down away from his chest and glared with eyes frosted by tears.

  “Get out of here.”

  Aiden backed away and stood at the edge of the porch, staring at the closest thing he’d ever had to family. He knew that once he walked away there would be no coming back, and he pleaded. “You’re not going to be able to live with this, Thad.”

  “With what?” Thad asked.

  “With killing those girls.”

  “
You don’t know what I’m capable of living with.”

  Aiden shook his head and walked out into the yard. He picked up the post driver and revolver, then turned back one last time. “That shit is going to eat you alive.” But Thad didn’t say a word.

  Aiden pushed through a briary thicket of brush and limbs to find the trail that led down the mountain. He had never walked away from anything Thad had gotten them into, not once in their whole sorry lives, but he could play no part in this. He’d never drawn a line before, and maybe the lines weren’t things that were consciously drawn. Maybe the line was there all along, deep inside, and no one knew exactly where it was until he was standing at the edge of it.

  The woods were loud as they always were in summer, but when that first shot sounded from the top of the hillside, it frightened Aiden, as if it were the first sound he’d ever heard. He cowered into a ball on the ground. He did not rise until there was silence. Aiden turned and looked back to where he’d come from, and when that second shot sounded he cringed. When he made it to the car, he sat there without cranking the engine for a few minutes, waiting for the third shot. But he could have waited there forever, and it still wouldn’t have come. So after a while, he had no choice but to drive away.

  (18)

  When a firework of buckshot opened against Meredith’s back, something inside Thad came to life with horrifying intensity. So when he swung the shotgun to draw a bead on Julie, he didn’t even focus on his target. Thad looked through her and pulled the trigger, everything deafening with sound thereafter.

  The ringing made it seem as if he were inside the resonation of some giant bell, his entire consciousness having been swallowed by sound. The report slowly hummed away until the only thing left was the absolute truth of it all, some sort of full-color enlightenment. He’d felt this the first time he fired and his life depended on it, the first time that shot wasn’t headed for a metal target down range, and the thing about it was he’d come to love that feeling, that adrenaline-fueled madness. He’d been missing and chasing that feeling ever since.

  He stared down to where Doug Dietz was writhing on the floor. The gag Aiden had secured in his mouth capped everything inside of him, Doug’s eyes bulging, his face flushing red each time he seized. Thad knelt beside him, held Doug’s head as if he were going to scalp him, and forced him to face where his sister was lying. He wanted Doug to suffer. He wanted Doug to feel how he felt. “Look at what you’ve done,” Thad said.

  Doug shut his eyes and shuddered with tears running like tiny wet fingers down his cheeks. He coughed against what had been shoved into his mouth and seemed to struggle more and more to find a breath.

  “No, you’re going to look at her,” Thad yelled. He shook Doug’s head like a can of paint, then set the shotgun on the floor and used his free hand to pull back Doug’s eyelids. Doug’s eyes rolled back into his head until they were nothing more than smoothed pebbles as cloudy white as milk quartz. He was screaming now with all of that sound muffled, his flared nostrils blowing snotty breaths each time he ran out of air. Thad didn’t want him to suffocate before he finished what he’d started, so he yanked the tape from Doug’s mouth, and Doug spit the gag onto the floor.

  “What the fuck did you do?” Doug screamed. He looked around the room and then directly into Thad’s eyes. The words were loud, but still hummed within the ringing. “What in God’s name did you do!”

  “Don’t you mention God to me,” Thad said. He hammered Doug’s head against the floor. “God has no mercy for people like you.”

  When Doug’s breathing slowed, Thad stuffed the wetted sock back into his throat. He grabbed the roll of duct tape from the floor and wrapped Doug’s head just as he had Julie’s a few minutes before. Thad didn’t want to question God right then. He knew he was right, that God didn’t have mercy for people like Doug Dietz. But sometimes he questioned if there was any mercy at all. Those questions that came afterward were what haunted him most, so it was best not to think during the thick of things.

  George Trantham had dragged Thad to church all his life, but Thad never believed in God until he saw war. Pinned behind a rock with PKM fire raining down, everyone came to believe in something. Thad believed because, no matter how hard he tried, nothing else made sense. There was only one reason some made it and some didn’t. And ever since, Thad had been trying to imagine a God who would forgive the things he’d done.

  With his hand clenching Doug’s hair, Thad turned him so that they were staring each other eye to eye. He pulled Doug so close that he could feel him breathing. “There’ll come a time when I ask forgiveness,” Thad said, “but it won’t be from any God who’d answer you.”

  (19)

  There was music playing when Aiden walked into April’s house. His first thought was how strange it was that the computer hadn’t been stolen or wrecked, but, then again, nothing was taken. What Doug and those girls were looking for was on the table at Leland Bumgarner’s when they came. They hadn’t even found the few hundred dollars Aiden had stashed in the front closet. Julie and Meredith had ripped the trailer apart while Doug searched for the drugs, but now there wasn’t even proof they’d been at April’s at all. The floor scattered with broken figurines and shelves just hours before had been cleared. The only real difference was that the walls were bare and the house smelled of paint.

  Mittens rose with his back arched from the couch cushion where he’d been sleeping, and stretched his front legs with claws opened and catching in the thin sofa cover. The cat dropped lazily onto the floor and sidled over to where Aiden stood, ran his head and body against Aiden’s shin. The cat followed him into the kitchen and leapt onto the table as Aiden shook one of April’s cigarettes from the pack that lay there. He grabbed the lighter, lit his cigarette, and tossed the Bic back onto the table. The lighter slid to the far side and the cat batted it back and forth between his paws before both he and the lighter fell to the floor. Aiden watched without a thought in this world, the drugs and the days running him out of his mind.

  He looked around the room, to how the stove top and counters were wiped clean. Even the edges of cabinet doors were absent the faintest smudge of dust. There were no signs left of the work she’d done, no dirtied paper towels, no smell from Clorox or 409. There was a fresh bag in the trash can, and Aiden thought for a second how April had seemed to spend her whole life cleaning up messes she hadn’t made. There was nothing fair about it, but then again there was nothing fair about the world at all. Her hand was no worse than his own. She just seemed better at playing cards, better at her poker face, better at everything. The world heaped it higher and she shoveled as best she could, and she’d gotten pretty good at it, he thought, at least better than himself.

  In the second bedroom he found her curled from exhaustion on the floor. When she’d spent a week holding paint swatches against each wall in the house, it was a pale, yellow shade of white called eggshell that she chose for the second bedroom. Aiden told her all that paint was a waste of her time and money. People looking to buy a house would have their own favorite color and wind up painting it over, but he couldn’t help but think it looked good now. The room glowed with that color, her arms and face speckled with tiny dots that had spattered when she rolled the walls. The twin bed, the dresser, and the old treadle Singer sewing machine were pulled out, and she’d almost finished the trim. Aiden bent to one knee and dug his arms underneath her body. He brought her into his chest and carried her into her bedroom. Only in her bed, when Aiden pulled the wagon wheel quilt over her, did she wake for a split second.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “A little after one,” Aiden said, walking out of the room. He flicked on the light and pulled the door closed behind him.

  There was a little bit of paint left in the roller basin and Aiden used it to finish the trim. He moved a small stepping stool along the wall as he made his way around the room, and, somewhere midway through, that
feeling like he might black out washed over him again. He felt heavy, but the painting kept him from thinking about Thad. He needed to stay busy, to do something with all of that restlessness, so he painted until the room was finished. When it was done, he peeled the blue painter’s tape from the ceiling, baseboards, and window frame. He carefully slid each piece of furniture within an inch of the wall and then went outside.

  The night was filled with the same sounds as always, though it seemed quieter than it ever had before. The world was muffled by the way he felt. He wandered down the hillside to his car and fished through the trash littering the passenger-side floorboard. The empty pack of cigarettes he’d crumpled on the way back held the pills Leland Bumgarner had given him, the cocktail of Ativan and some other drug Aiden’d never heard of at the time and couldn’t remember now.

  He opened the cellophane and took one of the capsules, rolled the other back up, and slipped it into the cigarette pack. Aiden was never one to swallow pills, preferring instead to let them dissolve in his mouth so that the drugs hit faster. With his head rocked back, he twisted the casing apart over his tongue. The crushed pills were bitter and he stumbled over to the side of the trailer to drink from a spigot that came out of the ground. Tomorrow Aiden would meet Leland’s connection and sell everything.

  When he climbed the hill back to April’s, he didn’t go inside. Instead, he sat on the stoop and stared at Thad’s trailer below, stared at the way the moonlight made a scab out of the darkened patch of ground where they’d burned the table. That scar was a bitter reminder that all of this was real, and that realization made Aiden thankful that it didn’t take long before the drugs began to come over him in waves. His mind overflowed with thoughts, thoughts about Thad, about what Thad had done and whether or not he’d gone through with it or whether those shots were just warning shots and where he was right then and whether there was any coming back from that place. Aiden thought about April too and what she’d do if anyone ever decided to buy her house and where she might go and whether after she left he’d ever see her again. He thought about all kinds of things, but the one thing he tried to avoid thinking about was himself. All of that thinking made him uneasy, but the drugs were taking hold and the thoughts seemed to ebb a little further away each time the waves came. The tide was going out and he welcomed that feeling. In a few minutes he was almost there.