The Weight of This World

by David Joy

  He wandered into the yard and lay down in the grass, the dew soaking through his clothes and wetting his back. The ground seemed to buzz as if there was music buried there that he could now feel humming against his body. The way the earth tingled felt good to him and he let the ground take him deeper.

  Above, the stars shone, and as he looked down over himself, the heavens came with him. The stars traced from the sky to his body so that he became a mirror image of what was above. He lifted his shirt and could see the stars on his skin. He could feel them. He could feel them touch him and he thought that this must be what it felt like to be touched by God. He fell a little bit deeper. A few seconds more and deeper still. He took in as much air as he could hold, as if he were about to dive into some bottomless pool, and he closed his eyes and right at that very moment he surrendered. Aiden let the ground swallow him whole.

  (20)

  A red Geo Tracker with its black ragtop sunken on the metal frame like hide over a skeleton was parked at the far end of the Dietzes’ trailer. The plastic windows were opaque and torn. Mud caked the tires. Thad opened the driver’s-side door and found the keys in the ignition. He tried to turn the engine over, but the motor wouldn’t crank. He stamped the gas pedal a few times, rolled the key again, and on the second go the engine sputtered to life, a belt screeching beneath the hood before dying into a lower shrill. The small four-wheel-drive rattled, and Thad left it to idle while he went back inside.

  On patrols, they bagged the heads of those they captured, black sacks over their faces as if they were trying to trick cats from finding their way home. The only thing the prisoners knew about where they were headed was in the jarring of Humvees traversing rocky ground. But the whole countryside was rocky, with one place looking and feeling no different from the next, so the only thing for certain was that the mountain at the end wasn’t the same mountain as the beginning. This confusion kept the prisoners from running, which was a must, because orders stopped the soldiers from killing those detained. But there was nothing stopping Thad now. He had no need to put a pillowcase over Doug’s face. There wasn’t anyone to tell him no.

  One slip of the knife and Doug Dietz was no longer hog tied. His hands were still bound behind him, but his feet were no longer pulled up and linked to his wrists. Thad slid his knife back into the sheath on his hip, then lifted Doug to his feet by his elbows and shoved him toward the door. He led Doug into the Tracker’s headlights. From the passenger side, Thad slid the seat forward and crammed him into the back floorboard. Doug tottered about, tried to roll from his stomach, and managed to get onto his side just as Thad slammed the seat back against him. That fast, and they were off.

  Left out of Booker Branch, headed east up 281, the road rose above Cedar Cliff Lake and alongside Bear. Thad drove past Christmas tree fields and a goat farm and swerved around a gaze of raccoons eating from a bag of trash ravaged across half the two-lane highway. He drove by ditch-side memorials where families put plastic flowers and white crosses and stuffed teddy bears in memory of their loved ones. He headed past hand-painted signs nailed to trees, signs with single words dripping down them, words like REPENT and JESUS bloodred on whitewashed scraps of barn wood. Charleys Creek Road shot off to the left toward home, but Thad kept going, rounding the next bend and crossing over Sols Creek and Neddy Creek, narrow troughs of water barely deep enough for deer to wet their noses and drink. Then he was at Grays Ridge Road and whipped the short-axled Tracker onto the cut at the right and felt the bald tires slip a bit around the switchback. He followed past abandoned shacks, past farmhouses and single-wides where good people eked out hard lives. The paved road ended at a small parking area where a gated gravel road wound farther into the valley. From here, they would have to walk.

  Thad wore the headlamp, the lantern beaming square from his forehead so that when Doug Dietz looked at him Thad must’ve appeared as some hellish figure with a head made entirely of light. Yanking Doug from behind the seats, Thad pressed the shotgun into the back of his head. “You’re going to walk, and you don’t want to stop walking till I tell you. You understand?”

  Doug Dietz turned and nodded. His mouth chewed behind the duct tape and his eyes were wide. The headlamp spotlighted his dirty face and grease-strung hair, and until right then Thad hadn’t noticed just how blue Doug’s eyes were.

  With the shotgun prodded into his spine, Doug stumbled forward along the gravel road. Oat grass, sedges, and bull thistle leaned in from the ditches, all of it slick with dew that wet the two men up to their waists as they headed farther into the darkness. They were nearly a mile in when the sound of water overcame the usual nighttime chatter. At the metal bridge, current slipped over smoothed stones, dropped bench by bench down the mountain, and within the bigger pools the surface roiled in a reflection of the movement beneath. They crossed the bridge, and, reaching the other side, Thad grabbed Doug by the nape of his collar and guided him underneath the iron trestles to where an old roadbed cut farther into the mountains. The roadbed dead-ended onto one that was maintained and led to a transfer station the power company had built, just a small building and a tower. Thad’s headlamp lit the eyes of a black bear in the middle of the logging road that moved further still. Doug froze in his tracks when he saw the bear watching them, but Thad kicked at the backs of his knees and shoved him forward with the barrel. The bear tore through the laurels and vanished.

  The logging road curved and headed upward, but Thad pushed Doug to the right to follow the river. The name of the place was Bonas Defeat, and Thad knew the gorge well. This was where he’d come when his mind could take no more. Old-timers said the name came from a hunting dog, a Plott hound named Bona, that shot out of the yard after a deer one Sunday and wound up chasing the young buck through the bushes and over the cliff, both animals kicking wildly against the air until they hit bottom. Though everyone who grew up in Little Canada knew the place, very few ventured here. There was no reason to go.

  Bonas Defeat was nearly solid rock, boulders as big as houses teetering with an unsettling stability after having been set there by water thousands of years before. A man couldn’t plant a thing in this place, nor was it land to hunt, and though there were speckled trout in the stream, the number of rattlesnakes and copperheads denned up in this country made fishing too risky to be worth the time. The only people who ever came to this place were outsiders, thrill-seekers with a mind to climb a rock face or rappel into caverns, at least one or two killing off each summer in a fashion that left local men to risk their own lives to retrieve the bodies. People who grew up in this place didn’t hunt for things like that. It was a burden on their neighbors, oftentimes their own blood, for men to come drag their body out of somewhere they had no business being to begin with. Living was plenty hard enough.

  When they reached the start of this rocky place, Thad told Doug to sit and rest. They took a spot along the river where a large slab of granite lay flat. Thad peeled the duct tape off Doug’s mouth and Doug spit the sock into the water, the gag pale and waving as it moved downstream like a palomino trout in the nightglow. Doug flopped onto his side, buried his face in the river to drink, and when his mouth was wet enough for words he lay there and said, “I can’t keep going.”

  “You’d be surprised what a man can do when he has to,” Thad answered. He pulled a flat stone from the river and stroked his fingers across its face. The sound of water was so loud that to talk to one another they were nearly shouting. When Thad had the stone just how he wanted, he pulled out the skinning knife and swiped the blade back and forth to reclaim the edge. He was turned so that the shotgun across his lap stayed aimed at Doug, who’d finally managed to rock himself upright, his arms behind him and hunching him forward, legs spread in front of him. Thad stayed focused on the stone, that simple swiping of the blade having always been one of the things that calmed him most. Every night in the mountains of Paktika Province he’d stayed up and sharpened that same knife while the others
took advantage of what sleep they could find. Thad didn’t sleep, and running the knife’s edge against whetstone became meditative.

  “You know, there was these people in Afghanistan,” Thad started to say, but stopped abruptly when he’d finally finished tuning the edge. He tossed the stone back into the river and checked the blade against a callus on his hand, the skin slicing clean as paper. “There was these hajj in the mountains there and everybody was scared to death of them. When we’d enter one of those villages the folks who lived there would get to telling stories.”

  Doug stared at Thad as if he were confused by why he told him this. He glanced to where the shotgun lay in Thad’s lap, but darted his eyes away when Thad settled his hand onto the pistol grip and ran his finger over the trigger.

  “There was this one story those hajjis told every time we started in on them,” Thad said. “They told that same story over and over. It was why they wouldn’t tell us shit. What they said was that there was this woman who got taken one time, and that woman had been talking to the Americans and the Taliban knew it. So they took her off into the mountains, and you know what them hajjis said they did to her?”

  Doug shook his head.

  “They cut off the soles of her feet and made her walk to her own grave.”

  Thad rose and pushed the gun into Doug’s temple until Doug’s head bent sideways. “I’m going to need you to get on your stomach,” Thad said before kicking at Doug’s shoulder, him tipping onto his side.

  Doug Dietz rolled around for a minute like some grub having fallen out of its rotten home. He finally settled with his chest flat against the granite slab, his right cheek pressed against the cold, damp stone. Thad straddled Doug’s body and sat where his hands were bound at the base of his back. He pulled one of Doug’s feet toward his chest and Doug immediately began to kick and scream wildly. It took a second or two of fighting to lock Doug’s foot against his chest, but once it was there Thad took the knife and went to work. When the pain overcame him, Doug passed out. Now there was only the sound of water, and Thad worked quickly until it was done.

  • • •

  DOUG DIETZ WHIMPERED SOFTLY when he finally came to. Thad was close by, with his legs hugged to his chest, and when Doug noticed that dark silhouette beside him he began to cry. Thad stood but did not speak. He simply bent down, hitched his arms beneath Doug’s elbows, and hoisted him to his feet with a heavy grunt. The second Doug was left to stand on his own, he screamed out into the night and collapsed first to his knees, then onto his face. Thad stomped one heavy kick into Doug’s rib cage before he jerked him back to his feet.

  “Now walk,” Thad said, but Doug couldn’t. He just fell back to the ground and lay limp. Thad knelt and whispered so close to Doug’s ear that those first few words made him cringe. “You think you know how this is going to end and you think because it’s going to end that way you might as well just stop doing what I’m telling you,” Thad said. “Well, you’re right about that ending, but you’re wrong about having any sort of say. I can keep you alive as long as I want to, Doug Dietz. I can drag this ending out as long as you’d like. Now I’m going to stand you up and you’re going to walk. You’re going to walk on your own two feet to the very end.”

  Thad lifted once more, and as Doug stood bent-legged like some reptile, Thad severed the zip ties that bound his wrists.

  “You can get up yourself from here on,” Thad said. “Now walk.”

  Doug hobbled a few tiny steps but when his foot came down that third or fourth time it was like he’d stepped on a nail. His legs collapsed beneath him and he just lay there and shook and cried on the ground.

  Thad did not feel the least bit sorry for him. Doug Dietz had killed one of the only things in this world Thad loved, and before that, even more unforgivable, Doug had taken the innocence of a child. In Thad’s eyes, Doug was just the same as those towelheads who posed as unarmed shepherds, who strapped explosives to the chests of little girls and spent hours skinning prisoners before beheading them, hanging pieces of their mutilated bodies from tree limbs like wind chimes. He wasn’t sorry then and he wasn’t sorry now. There was wickedness in this world that swallowed any light that might’ve been, darkness that could be answered only with darkness.

  “Get up,” Thad said.

  Doug trembled on the ground. “I can’t,” he muttered. “I can’t!”

  Thad stood a few feet behind while Doug repeated those words like a mantra, and in a few minutes Doug’s breathing was heavy and calm, as if he’d fallen into some painful meditation. When Doug regained what composure there was to be had, Thad said again, “Get up,” and this time he did.

  They made their way forward across rocky ground, over a landscape constructed by stone and water. The river swept through spaces in a valley cobbled by monoliths, water dividing, then disappearing and running through hidden passageways that could be heard but not seen, a living river that split like veins, only to find some new convergence downstream. They crawled along the edges of great cairns, stones the size of houses balanced with an unfathomable gravity as if they’d been set just so by the hands of some watchmaker god. They moved beneath stone, through caverns created by granite overhangs, places that held the sound and echo of water and words and breath, hollows where they could hear the whispering of their own hearts. A mile in, they stood beneath a sheer rock face, a cliff that rose some hundred feet above them, its edge, in such darkness, marked only by the absence of stars. This was the cliff where the place had gotten its name, the cliff where Bona had chased the young button buck, its antlers burled under skin into velveteen knolls, off into the sky, off into nothing, off into forever. They stood there for a moment at the place where the world had fallen, and when they’d caught their breath, they moved on.

  When Doug Dietz’s body finally gave out, he screamed, “No more! No more! I can’t go any goddamn further.”

  Looking down over Doug’s sprawled body, Thad said, “This place will do just fine.”

  He allowed Doug to crawl those last few feet onto a rock that angled high above the others, the water somewhere deep beneath them. The river seemed to go underground, the current just a faint washing sound deep in the gaps left between rocks. It had taken them the entire night to reach this place, and Thad’s body was nearly spent. Over the eastern mountains the darkness began to crack apart. It would still be hours before the sun rose from that jagged horizon, but when it did, Thad would be gone from this place and Doug would be gone from this world.

  There were holes augered through the rock where Thad and Doug sat, similar holes in the rocks that surrounded them, some drilled straight through, others carving deep tubes and bowls into the stone. Thad pulled out his cigarettes and lit a smoke while Doug lay there so worn-out that, despite the pain and drugs, he was almost asleep. Thad remembered hearing one time how those holes are created, how stones get caught in depressions and how water washes those stones in circles and how given enough time—thousands of years, maybe—pebbles so small that you can hold them in the palm of your hand can bore through a rock the size of a house. Thad reached into a cup-shaped depression in the rock. The water that pooled there was cold, almost shockingly so, and he dug around till he found the pebble at the bottom. He pulled the stone out and turned it in his hand, a light pink stone not much bigger than a buckeye. He wondered if, given enough time, this stone might make its way through the mountain. He wondered how long it would take to burrow to the center of the earth.

  (21)

  She whispered in his ear, but that did not wake him. Aiden dreamed about the day the law had come to the trailer to take him to the group home, the day Thad Broom toed the line with a gun in his hand to keep Aiden from going back. “You’re not going anywhere you don’t want to go,” Thad said, as he stood there with his single-shot .410 broken open under his arm and slid a shell into the chamber. Aiden could see in Thad’s eyes that he meant it. There were crows caw
ing from the treetops outside, and for once, as he curled under the bed in silence, he felt protected. Everyone else he’d ever trusted had abandoned him, but Thad promised to keep him safe. Right then, Aiden put all his trust into one person and closed his eyes. He held his breath to keep quiet and in his mind he prayed.

  He opened his eyes to fog. Clouds lowered onto the mountain, swallowed the ridgeline, and strung everything with tiny beads of dew almost every morning, the trees and leaves and grass shimmering as if they’d been given jewelry by the night. It had always seemed strange that what most people spent their entire lives staring up at actually pushed down on this place. Everything was always pushing down on them.

  When Aiden’s eyes settled on the woman who stood over him like a pale angel it seemed as if dream delivered him to dream.

  “We need to get you up, sweet one,” she said, but he didn’t stir.

  “It’s nice here,” Aiden said, and rolled his head against the grass and closed his eyes as if he might just go back to sleep.

  “You can’t stay in the yard. There’re people coming. We need to get you down the hill, get you on the couch.”