by David Joy
What Thad remembered was a night when the Red Bull and the snuff couldn’t keep him awake. He fell asleep on watch with a dip of Skoal wintergreen in his lip, and woke up to metal clanking and then the bawling of sheep. By the time he saw the small herd, he could also see the man who pushed the animals through the canyon. Thad barely had time to raise his gun before the first sheep was there. He screamed for the shepherd to stop and the others in the squad woke from their dreams and joined him with guns aimed until the ANA interpreter figured out the man was nothing more than a farmer who’d spent an entire day tracking down sheep that had run off and was now just trying to get home. The shepherd led his flock on through the canyon and the other soldiers cracked jokes before trying to get a few more hours’ sleep, but all Thad could think about was how he’d failed them, how he’d fallen asleep on watch, and how if that shepherd had been anything other than a shepherd they all would have been goners.
It had been five or six days since he’d last slept and he was just as tired right that second as the night he pulled guard. With the shotgun hugged against his chest in the cut bank, he lay with his body shivering, the fire all but gone and nothing left dry enough to burn. His body was exhausted. The dope had taken him into a foggy space between waking and dream where his mind couldn’t separate past from present. He couldn’t make sense of where he was or how he’d gotten there. Everything seemed some strange vision, and he could no longer remember where he had been just an hour before.
Memories seemed as if they happened right that second, and in those flashes when he snapped back out of his mind, he was scared to death. He drifted into this sort of lucid dreaming where he was on patrol, always at some low vantage, trying to keep eyes on the hillside when the first crack of gunfire sounded, that crack snapping him awake. Thad stabbed at the coals to try and stoke any heat left in them, and then curled into a trembling ball and stared out into the rain. He let his mind wander back into that place that felt real, and he told himself that someone else was on watch. Someone else was looking over him, guarding him, and would keep him safe while he slept. And when his mind was there, he closed his eyes and fell back into that dream that washed him around and shook him awake with eyes wide and wild. He drifted in and out of his mind, in and out of this place, and only after a very long while did what he feared most find him.
(24)
The front door clacked against the wall on a howl of wind that blew rain inside the trailer. The pry job Doug Dietz did to get inside made it impossible for the door to hold shut, the dog-eared door now clapping against the wall as the wind blew off the mountain. Aiden woke from a dreamless sleep to the sound of the doorknob hammering the wall. Through the doorway, he could see the rain sweep across the yard in sheets. He did not move. He just lay there on the couch until his vision cleared and watched the wind turn loose paper across the floor, those tumbling pages a raspy clatter like dried leaves.
He knew neither how long he had slept nor whether the low, gray light outside indicated morning or night. The room seemed empty now without the spool in front of the couch. When he thought of the table Aiden thought of Loretta Lynn, and when he thought of the dog he thought of Thad. He wondered if Thad was asleep in his bedroom. He wondered what time Thad had made it home, if he’d made it home, and what he had done in those hours between when Aiden left him on the front porch of the Dietzes’ trailer and now, however long that might have been.
Most everything in the kitchen had been thrown onto the floor and the same was true for the posters and photographs that had been tacked to the walls. The only thing that still held exactly where it had been was an electronic weather station hung on the side of the cabinet that showed sunshine and thirty degrees rather than rain and whatever temperature it was. He paid no attention to the forecast. What he was interested in seeing was the date and time because they were accurate.
The screen said it was Saturday, August 21, and almost eight o’clock in the evening. That meant Aiden had only slept the day away, which was good, he thought. Leland had told him to meet his contact that afternoon, but going a little late wouldn’t be a big deal. He and Thad could be down there before eight thirty or nine. After wading the trash piled in the kitchen floor, he stuck his head into Thad’s bedroom to see if he was in bed. He wasn’t. The room was empty and just how Aiden had seen it the afternoon before, the bed pulled away from the wall with navy-blue sheets in a bunched mess.
This worried him, but he always got ahead of himself, so he tried to stay calm by thinking that Thad could’ve just as easily come home and left again. There was no way to know. All he could do was take care of what needed to be done. There was a schedule that had to be kept, and though he hated to do it alone, he was already late. When he got back from selling the dope, if Thad was still gone, he could go look for him. If Thad wasn’t back by then, Aiden was fairly certain he knew where to find him.
• • •
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN Charleys Creek and Tuckasegee, the rain shifted from a torrent that made it impossible to see the road to just a steady fall. Further still, the rain lessened into a hazy drizzle that steamed from the blacktop, as if the world were just shy of catching fire. Aiden cracked the window and listened to the hiss of his tires on the highway, lit a cigarette, and wished on his life that Thad were with him. The more he thought about where he was headed and what he was doing, the more his mind raced, and before long he’d worked himself into a panic.
He knew where to go, but not who was waiting there. He’d even forgotten the name that Leland Bumgarner gave him, but fortunately found it scribbled on an empty pack of cigarettes in the floorboard of his car: Eberto. That name was all he had, a name he’d written down as soon as he and Thad got back in the car. He didn’t know Eberto, and he didn’t want to know him. All Aiden wanted to do was sell the drugs and leave.
Jimmy’s set on the corner where Highway 281 dead-ended onto 107. The mom-and-pop convenience store was the first place to stop for gasoline coming out of Little Canada. Most folks came in for Zebra Cakes and SunDrops, a box of Copenhagen or a carton of Dorals, but whatever they wanted to buy had to be purchased early because Jimmy’s closed not long after the sun went down. A building next door had been a dozen restaurants in Aiden’s lifetime, his favorite having been one called Granny’s, where he and Thad would eat streaked meat and grits, sometimes biscuits and sausage gravy early mornings on their way to high school. Now the place was some Mexican restaurant with a name Aiden couldn’t pronounce that served tamales and sopes to migrant workers who’d dodged deportation and had no plans to leave.
The parking lot was empty and he circled around under the covered island and parked at the pumps with the car facing back the way he’d come. The apartments where Leland had told him to go were just behind him through a copse of scraggly pines, but there wasn’t any way in hell he would drive right up to the building. If a man wheeled in and things turned sour, there he’d be with no way to get out. Things could get hairy fast. So Aiden planned to leave his ride at Jimmy’s and walk over to the apartments. Then, at least, he’d have a shot at running. If things went south, he could tear off through the trees and get back to his ride and the Ranchero would already be aimed where he needed to go. He’d just turn her over, dump her into drive, mash the pedal to the floor, and get the hell out of there.
Despite the ill feelings Aiden had for people with names like Eberto, spics he blamed for undercutting hardworking white folks right out of construction jobs, he put those feelings aside. Whether Eberto was white or Mexican or some yellow-haired albino with pink eyes, if he was the only man in Jackson County who could take that much dope off Aiden’s hands, then that was exactly who he needed to meet. Money’s funny like that. Bills spend just the same no matter what color hand slaps them on the counter. Green is green and that’s the only color that mattered.
Just the same as he wouldn’t drive into the apartments, he wouldn’t walk in carrying the dope. Leland
’s last words of advice had been never to take all the drugs at once, and that made sense. Aiden stepped out of the Ranchero and unlatched the truck box behind the cab. He took out the ammo can, opened the lid, and grabbed the rolls of money, the digital scales, and the long-barreled revolver. He emptied everything out of the can but the dope, then shoved the revolver down the back of his pants, held the ammo can at his side, and locked the rest back in the truck box.
The break in the rain was a blessing, especially now that it was dark outside. Toads hopped all over the pavement and made quick meals of earthworms brought out of the ground by the storm. About fifty yards north of Jimmy’s on Highway 107, Tuckasegee Baptist Church sat directly across the street from the gravel entrance that led into the apartments. He would hide the drugs by the church. That was somewhere close enough to hurry over and grab it when the deal went down, but far enough away that it wouldn’t be found if it came time to run.
There was a house and old shed by the road at the church, a trailer down below that. A mixed-breed heeler that was chained to a post in the yard made one hell of a fuss as Aiden walked into the church parking lot. There were cars at the house, but they appeared to be rusted junkers that hadn’t been driven in years, grass grown up to the bumpers where whoever owned the place hadn’t mown. The lights were off in the house and Aiden was thankful that no one was home to hear the dog, to peer through the windows and see him looming outside.
A streetlight at the far end of the church parking lot illuminated one corner of the building and the front row of headstones in the graveyard at its side. Aiden walked to the light and checked the names on the graves: Hooper, Woodring, Queen, Barnes, names that were tied to this place and its history. There was a tall, cobbled monument with REV. HOOPER stamped into stone, and he chose that marker to hide the ammunition can behind, setting it so that the only way to see it was from behind, nothing back that way but woods and river. He took a gram of dope in a little square baggie out of the can and pocketed it so that he could show Eberto what he had for sale. If that spic came up with the cash, Aiden would bring him the rest. But only once he had his hands on the money.
He would’ve given anything to have Thad there with him, but he was alone and the only chance he had to leave Jackson County rode on this one shot. With his palms sweaty, he pulled the revolver from the back of his pants and swung the cylinder open to see how many shells were left. Checking the gun hadn’t occurred to him until then, and he quickly realized just how useless that monster was to carry. Four of the five rounds had spent primers. There was only one shot left. Aiden slapped the cylinder closed and held the hammer back as he rotated to find that one chamber. Hunched over, he tried to use what scant light the streetlamp offered to make sure he found the last round. When he was certain of it, he eased the hammer back down onto the shell and stuffed the revolver into his waistline. He should’ve brought another gun. He should’ve checked the one he had. But it was too late now. It was too late to go back and change a thing. He would just have to make do, hope he wouldn’t need a gun at all, and if he did, pray to God one bullet would be enough. There was no place to go but forward.
(25)
April looked at pictures of her high school boyfriend, Ron Schiele, on his Facebook page, and gauged how his life had turned out. When they were in high school he played football and ran track and was cut with muscles. Halfway through tenth grade, he had a scholarship offer to run the hundred meters at some college in South Carolina. He had these blue eyes and a smile that held people captive, even the teachers, could get away with anything, the type of guy everybody knew would wind up perfect.
All the girls hated April’s guts. They smiled to her face and told her they loved her earrings or her hair or her hand-me-down blouse or whatever it was they needed to love to play the game, but she saw the way they looked at her when they thought she wasn’t looking. She saw them sneer when she walked by in his coat. She knew the girls who asked if she and Ron wanted to ride to the prom in the limousine one of their parents had rented were the same girls who spread the rumors about her. They were the same girls who wrote on the bathroom stalls how she’d given Ron head in the field house during homeroom. They made up all kinds of stories about her and smeared her name from Sylva to Andrews until the day came that there was something bad enough that they didn’t have to make up stories anymore. She was pregnant.
Up until then Ron had never batted an eye to the stories boys told in the locker room. But soon as April started to show, Ron was quick to tell anyone who’d listen that the baby wasn’t his because, despite what everyone believed, they’d never actually done it. Folks had assumed, and Ron was fine with those assumptions on the long bus rides to away games, but when she got knocked up, it was like he’d never even thought about it. “That thing would’ve eat my dick off,” he’d say. “Only reason I was with her was because she swallowed.”
April slipped one of her Dorals out of the pack on the desk and laughed. Turned out Ron Schiele’s life hadn’t wound up so peachy, after all. He drank himself out of that track scholarship in just under a semester and was back home working in the paper mill before Thad cut his first tooth. The trophy wife he scooped up at twenty didn’t look so good at forty. The seven boys his wife gave him reaped hell on her body, and April figured that girl had either grown udders after the third one or more than likely her titties warped into something out of National Geographic. Ron hadn’t aged well either. He was losing his hair and his teeth were bad and he’d eaten himself into a caricature of the war on poverty. Not even the insulin could save him now. He’d resorted to prayer from friends, and April laughed at his status: “Going to the doctor tomorrow to see if they’ll have to take my leg. Please pray.” She liked it.
It was funny how things panned out. Life had a way of rolling over like a lake in fall. All those folks who had everything in high school wound up with nothing when it mattered. And people like Tom Rice, who she’d seen get hit so hard in the chest with a rotten apple Ron Schiele threw one afternoon at lunch that he shat himself in the courtyard with the whole school watching, wound up being the ones who got away.
The phone rang in the kitchen and April ashed her cigarette into a cold cup of coffee that had been on the desk since morning. She took another drag and walked into the kitchen to grab the cordless by the stove. When she picked up and said hello, she was taken aback by the voice she heard.
“April, it’s Tom,” he said. “How are you?”
April started to say that she’d just been thinking about him, but then it struck her how weird that might sound, or maybe it wouldn’t sound weird at all since he’d been there earlier that day. All of those thoughts hit her at once and tongue-tied her so that what she said made no sense at all.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I’m, I’m fine, Tom,” April stuttered. “How are you?”
“I’m well, April, but if I’ve caught you at a bad time I’d be more than happy to call back after the weekend. I know it’s getting late and I probably caught you in the middle of something—”
“No,” April interrupted, “No, I’m not doing anything.”
“Well, good. That’s good,” Tom said. “Listen, I don’t want to keep you, but I just wanted to call and tell you some good news. Some pretty good news, I think.”
“What is it?”
“Well, the Lathans have put in an offer on your property.”
“That is good news,” April said. She took two quick drags from her smoke, then turned on the faucet and held the cigarette in the water. When it was out, she turned off the tap and walked over to the trash can to throw the butt away.
“The thing is, it’s a lot lower than what you were asking.”
“How much lower?”
“About a third,” Tom said. “They’re wanting to give you sixty thousand.”
“That ain’t even tax value on the land,” April said, “let alone the hou
se.”
“I know it, but it’s like they said when they were there, April. They’re not interested in the house, just the land, and they’re wanting to offer you ten thousand an acre.”
April suddenly felt sick to her stomach and she wanted another cigarette, but her pack was in the living room by the computer. She walked out of the kitchen and grabbed the Dorals off the desk, the cordless phone going all staticky until she got back by the stove. The next words came from the corner of her mouth, a cigarette in her lips. “So did you try to get them to go any higher, or did you just turn over?”
“Of course I tried to get the price up, April. You think I want to sell low? I don’t stand to make anything at that price, but I just know how long you’ve had the property on the market, and so at the very least I thought I’d put it on the table.”
“The county’s got these six acres valued at a hundred thousand dollars, Tom. A hundred thousand dollars, and that ain’t even counting the house,” April said. “Between the land and the hundred twenty they’ve got valued on the house and the thirty thousand on the trailer, I’m paying taxes on a quarter million dollars of property every year. What they’re offering is a slap in the face, and the fact that you’re putting it on the table—”
“Now, I’m going to have to stop you right there,” Tom said. His voice was stern and it was obvious to April she’d ticked him off. “You and I both know the value the county has on that land is high. The last time property was assessed was at the height of the market, and that place isn’t worth half that now. I’m sorry to put it like that, but it’s just the truth. The property is not worth that. So to be completely frank, I think ten thousand an acre is a generous offer, and I think if you’re really wanting to sell it right now, at the very least, you need to entertain it.”
