by David Joy
The girls on the shore screamed. One of the boys on the cliff rushed to the ledge and hurled off after her. Thad and Aiden didn’t move for a second or two, a mixture of smoke and shock holding them captive, but when they realized that none of the other boys were moving from the cliff, they dived into the water and swam to help. Thad could still remember how the water seemed so cold against his sunburned skin and how hard it had been for the three boys to tread water with her body. She wasn’t dead but her legs were useless and her arms did nothing more than clutch at the boy’s shoulders as she cried. By the time they got her to shore, her legs were completely black. Everyone crowded around her gasping and in awe, and after a long time they carried her out.
On the ride home that afternoon, Aiden and Thad joked that if those were the types of things learned in universities, then they weren’t missing anything. Most of those college kids looked down their noses at folks like them, but every year there was one or two who jumped off that cliff and sank to the bottom. There were two types of lives, and he and Aiden had been born into one where ASVABs made more sense than SATs. But, looking back now, Thad couldn’t seem to draw that separation. Whether a man was born one way or another, he wound up doing things that haunted him the rest of his life. People made mistakes that couldn’t be fixed, and in the middle of the dam staring out over Wolf Lake, Thad could see everything he’d ever done. When it all boiled down to it, the only difference between one person and another was whether there was someone to jump in and keep you from drowning.
(30)
When Aiden woke up, he was in April’s bed, but she was not beside him. The sun shone a soft white glow through the curtains. He hurt all over and his head throbbed. Aiden rolled over to check the time on an alarm clock on the bedside table, and that’s when the stabbing pain in his ribs hit him. He figured at least a few were broken, but he just lay there and took short breaths so the pain was bearable. It was eleven a.m.
He found some of his clothes folded in a neat pile on the seat of a cane-back rocking chair in the corner of April’s bedroom. These weren’t the clothes he’d worn the night before. There was a fresh pair of jeans with a camouflage Mossy Oak T-shirt on top, a pair of plaid boxers, and some socks. He kept clothes at April’s and some down at the trailer, though she never set clothes out for him. His boots were on the floor in front of the rocking chair and there was a little bit of mud still caked on the soles. There was no sense lying there any longer. Staying in bed wouldn’t do anything. He’d get up and find some Advil if April had any, maybe take a hit of her weed if there was any left. That might numb the pain a bit.
There were muddied brown and yellow bloodstains on the pillow when he stood, and he noticed the slashes scabbed over his stomach. He patted at the back of his head and traced his fingertips around the wound, winced as he tried to bend over and get his boxers. He left the rest of the clothes on the chair and limped into the living room. April was sitting at the computer and she looked over her shoulder at him as he came close, but turned back to the screen once he was behind her. He put his hands softly on her shoulders, but even right then, it felt like she was already gone.
“You got any Advil?” he asked. He felt bad asking her for anything at all.
“If I do, it’d be in there in the cabinet over the sink,” April said. She double-clicked the mouse and a website opened on the screen, a slideshow of pictures—the beach, and buildings, a swimming pool and a gym—playing out over the text. “I think there might be something in there.”
“You care if I make some coffee?” Aiden asked.
“There’s some left from the pot I made this morning that you can heat up.”
He stood there, not sure what to say and not sure how to thank her. He knew that him coming into the house like that was just another thing she hadn’t needed to deal with, but like always, she didn’t say anything about it. She just picked up the pieces. April deserved better than what life had given her, and Aiden knew that. Maybe he didn’t deserve any better, but she did. “What are you looking at?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. She scrolled through the rest of the page quickly with the mouse and closed the browser, then sat there and stared at the screen as Aiden bent down and kissed the top of her head. She stood from the desk and walked over to the couch and picked up the remote to turn on the television. She didn’t turn to look at him. Aiden just stood there and watched the TV flick on.
There were a few Aleve left in a bottle in the cabinet over the sink in the kitchen, and he took one and left two. The coffeepot was still about a third full and condensation sweated on the inside of the glass. He hated old coffee about as much as anything, but he didn’t want to take something else, so he just poured a cup in a Christmas mug he found in the cabinet, heated it up in the microwave, and sat down at the kitchen table. The cigarette he smoked evened out the burnt taste of old coffee, or at least made it bearable, and he just sat there sipping that coffee and smoking that cigarette, thinking of how things had fallen apart so quickly.
When life went bad it always seemed to go bad in a hurry. Nothing came gradually so that a man might have a chance to grit his teeth and swallow a little bit at a time. No, life had a way of heaping shit by the shovelful like God was up there cleaning out the horse stalls and you just happened to be standing where He threw it. Aiden had been standing in a pile most his life, but the past few days had been the worst he remembered, maybe even worse than when he was a child. That thought sent his mind racing and he wished to God that Aleve would kick in so his head would quit pounding, but they didn’t, and his hands started to sweat and he hated that feeling. God, he hated that feeling.
He lit a second cigarette off the tip of his first and stubbed the one that was gone into an ashtray on the table. When he stood, he tilted his shoulders side to side, trying to test his ribs, and when he bent to the right, everything was fine but if he turned his body to the left, it felt like someone had stabbed him. There was nothing he could do to make it better aside from going to the doctor, and he wasn’t going to any doctor. He’d let time heal it into something misshapen and twisted as everything else.
In the living room, April didn’t even glance when he took a seat at the other end of the couch. Mittens hopped onto the cushion beside him and climbed into his lap, and Aiden reached for an ashtray on the coffee table in front of him and set it on the armrest.
“I got an offer on the house,” April said. There was a rerun of Law & Order on TNT and the volume was loud enough to muddy her words, especially with how she didn’t turn to speak them.
It took a second or two to register as he took a drag from his cigarette. “Who?”
“Some people from Atlanta,” she said. “The husband said he wants to turn it into a tree farm.”
“Trees?” Aiden asked confusedly. “There ain’t enough land.”
“I know that,” April said. She leaned toward the coffee table and grabbed her pack of cigarettes and lighter. “But they made an offer and that’s what they aim to do.”
“How much?”
“How much what?” she asked.
“How much did they offer?”
“Not nearly what it’s worth. Not even half of what it’s worth.” April clicked off the television and the room was suddenly silent except for Mittens purring in Aiden’s lap. She turned and looked him square. “But I’m going to take it.”
“What the hell are you talking about, April?”
“I’m going to cut my losses, take the offer, and get the hell out of here.”
He sat there for a long time without saying a word. He stared through the window that looked out over the yard and down the hill toward the trailer, and though he couldn’t see any of it from where he sat, he knew exactly what was there, because it was the same thing that had always been there, a place he knew by heart.
“And where the hell are you going to go?”
“I do
n’t know for sure.” April sat there shaking her head. “But I don’t think it really matters. It doesn’t matter where I go just as long as it’s away from here, just as long as it’s absolutely nothing like this place. I want to go somewhere where nobody knows a thing about me, where nobody knows who I am. All my life I’ve been right here on this mountain, and all my life I’ve been filling up picture books with bad memories. I’ve always been too chickenshit to do anything about it.”
Aiden understood what April said in a way that he couldn’t have explained. That’s all he’d ever wanted, a fresh start. But Thad wasn’t going to Asheville, or anywhere else. He knew now that he could wait an eternity for Thad, and that in the end he’d never make it off that mountain. Aiden had to get off that mountain. He had to leave, but he was scared to do it alone. “And what if I told you I’d go with you?”
“No,” April said. “You’re not going with me, sweet one.”
“Why?”
“Because this isn’t about you.” She set her hand on the cushion between them. “It’s like I told you before, sometimes you just have to do something entirely for yourself. There’s a part of me that thinks you were right.”
“About what?” Aiden asked.
“About me never having done anything for myself.”
“And what the hell are me and Thad going to do? Where the hell are we going to live?” Aiden was getting angry.
“I can’t keep worrying about that,” April said. “I just can’t.”
“But I love you, April.”
“I know you do, sweet one,” she said, and just one time he wished to God that she would say it back.
Aiden could feel his entire world crumbling around him. Everything that he’d ever known, the only two people he’d ever been close to were burning off like fog and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do to stop it.
“When I get the check, I want to give you some money for all the work you did.”
“I don’t want it,” Aiden said.
“I want to give you five thousand dollars,” April said. “I know that ain’t much, but I owe it to you just the same.” She leaned toward Aiden and put her hand on top of his. “It won’t last forever, but I think you can string it out a few months if you try. I think between that and the money you’ve been saving, it’s enough that you can go to Asheville and find something.”
“I don’t want your money,” Aiden said, and it was true. As much as he wanted for him and Thad to head off to Asheville, he didn’t want it to happen that way. He didn’t want to walk away feeling like he owed somebody something.
“I don’t care if you want it or not. I’m going to give it to you. I owe you that much at least.”
“I ain’t going to take it,” Aiden said. He stood up and walked over to the window and stared down over the property. “You don’t owe me anything.”
April started to speak, but Aiden limped over to the front door and hobbled out of the house. He closed the door behind himself and stood on the stoop, looking out over the yard. It was hot outside, even standing in nothing but his boxers, as he watched a wake of buzzards fly circles over one another in the cloudless sky. There was no breeze, just heat, like all the air had been sucked out of this place and all that was left was that temperature that bore down on everything. All the weight of this world seemed to be on him right then and he just stood there staring out into nothing at all, unsure how much longer he could go without buckling beneath it.
(31)
Thad parked the stolen truck at an abandoned brick house with the windows broken out and the front door gone so that from the yard he could see the trash that littered the floor inside. The house was just up Sols Creek Church Road on the hill that stretched toward Dodgen Ridge. He’d seen the place many times but never stopped. In the yard, a derelict shed crumbled in on itself, its tin roof rusted and sinking on grayed boards half-rotten beneath. An oil tank stood beside the shed, and farther, two crashed cars sat side by side, with their tops smashed in, grass high over the dry-rotted tires and hubs, with no one around to tell their stories.
Down the hill, across Highway 281, on the corner of Charleys Creek sat the church. Cars filled the gravel lot, and Thad waited in the pickup for the noon bells to chime. He studied the church, just a plain white clapboard building with brick steps leading to the door, no front windows, a steeple holding its cross into the sky. From the outside it was like most churches in Jackson County, the only difference being that this was where he’d been baptized, once shortly after he was born and once years later.
That second baptism came after confirmation, and that time both he and Aiden got dunked. That was one of the few things George Trantham ever forced them to do. At home the boys were nonexistent, just eyesores that picked about his property like wharf rats. But on Sunday mornings he loaded them into the car with April and, for those few short hours, pretended they were something else entirely. Thad suspected Trantham did this because he made his living off the congregation. And Thad and Aiden played along because Trantham kept them from living solely off mayonnaise sandwiches and, otherwise, left them to do whatever they damn well pleased.
Soon after the church bells rang, the church deacon, Samuel Mathis, opened the front door and the congregation filed out. Children were the first down the steps. Little girls in cotton dresses and patent-leather shoes strung daisy chains in the grass, while boys yanked their shirttails loose and chased one another around the building. The older kids huddled into circles. Teenage girls pulled out their cell phones to text one another. They snickered as they glanced back at boys the same age who kicked the dirt with the toes of their shoes and told lies that Thad could read in their gestures. Middle-aged men helped widows down the stairs while the men’s wives desperately tried to round up their kids and corral them into the cars. The older couples were always the last to leave. They stood hunched over and slowly grazed their way around the gravel on canes until all their good-byes had been said. Only then did they drive away to lonely farms that no longer had crops to grow. They’d eat their Sunday suppers and wait for Wednesday service, and when the day came that they were widowed, they’d take their meals alone.
Thad had seen this a thousand Sundays before, but never from this vantage. In the years before Trantham died, when that old cocksucker still dragged them to church like some make-believe family, Thad had stood right there among the congregation week after week, year after year, like clockwork. But that was years ago now. He had not been back in a very long time.
When only one car was left in the lot, Thad lit a cigarette and cranked the truck. He watched Reverend Donald Messer drag his oxygen tank behind him, pick the tank up step by step until he’d climbed the stairs and disappeared into the church alone. The reverend was why Thad had come.
He drove down Sols Creek, crossed the highway, and wheeled the stolen pickup beside the reverend’s Buick. There were just the two of them, and Thad left the shotgun in the passenger-side floorboard. The snub-nose lay on the passenger seat. He smoked the cigarette until there was no more tobacco to burn and stubbed the butt out into an ashtray on the dash. It took him a while to build up the nerve. Minutes passed before he was ready. But when the time came, he shoved the revolver down the back of his jeans and headed inside. The end had finally come.
• • •
THE REVEREND DONALD MESSER shuffled between the pews and centered each Bible and hymnal just so on the bench. He seemed to disregard the wheels on his oxygen carriage, opting instead to lift the tank off the floor and set it ahead of him with each step, as if it were a cane. He wore a pair of ironed black slacks, a white dress shirt, a bright-red tie, and a brown glen-check wool blazer even in the middle of August. The sanctuary was dim with scant sunlight through frosted-glass windows so Thad couldn’t make out all of these details, but he knew them to be true just the same. That’s what Reverend Donald Messer wore every Sunday, and Thad was certain t
hat once he got close enough he’d see the gold tie clip with an oblong jasper stone clamping the reverend’s necktie to his shirt.
The reverend did not notice Thad standing there until the door latched. With one hand braced on the handle of his oxygen and the other reaching into the pew, he turned his head up to see who’d come into the sanctuary. One of his eyes always stayed half-closed and his mouth hung slightly open like a fish. That’s how he was looking at Thad as he straightened. He lowered his upper lip to resituate the tubes in his nose and moved them about with his hand when he couldn’t seem to get comfortable.
“My heavens. Is that Thad Broom standing at the back of my church?” He hadn’t seen Thad in eight years or more and still he recognized him immediately. The reverend walked with his oxygen tank out of the pew before answering himself. “Why, yes. It sure is.”
“I hate to show up like this,” Thad said.
“Why, son, you ain’t keeping me from anything. I was just closing up. About to head down to have lunch with the Gunters, but I’m not in any sort of hurry.” The reverend’s hair had thinned but was still raked across his head how he’d always worn it. Liver spots freckled his face, and his neck sagged like a turkey wattle under his chin. He slowly walked toward Thad, and Thad couldn’t help but notice how much the reverend had aged in the time he’d been gone. “Lord, I hope that woman has us something to eat other than chicken.” The reverend stopped just a few feet short of Thad, turned his head to the side, and shook it down theatrically on his next word. “I’m tired of chicken,” he said. “All these years, it don’t matter where I go, these people want to feed me chicken. I’m telling you I’ve eat so much there’s pin feathers coming in on my shinbones.”
