Where All Light Tends to Go

by David Joy

  “He’s said a whole lot of shit, but that’s it, just a bunch of bullshit. Ain’t said a fucking useful word.”

  Gerald still hadn’t spoken, but walked over and stood directly behind Robbie. Gerald’s belly was almost close enough to rest on top of Robbie’s head.

  “I’ve already told y’all I ain’t got nothing to say, I ain’t said nothing to nobody and that’s it, that’s all there is to it.” Robbie spoke fast and it was hard to unravel the words with his jaw racking in that way as he chewed on the same invisible thing that kept Mama’s teeth sawing.

  “If you haven’t said anything to anyone, then that’s good,” I said. “That’s good, Robbie. But the problem is we heard a little different. Problem is that person you talked to is someone my father has known for a long, long time.”

  Robbie had gone under the radar for months. He didn’t come around too often and maybe that’s why none of us knew how hard that crystal had him. If Daddy’d known, it wouldn’t have come to this. But Daddy hadn’t known, and it took Robbie getting the deputies called on him while he tried to steal a stereo and television from his own folks before Daddy found out. Robbie hadn’t ever been deep. He’d never made runs, never even seen the dope the Mexicans were bringing in nowadays. He’d been on the payroll for a long time, though, driving in different rigs for high-price oil changes and such, and he had a pretty good idea of how it all worked. When the deputies had taken him in, it was a bull on the payroll, a “family friend” as Daddy called them, who conducted the interview. Without even a line of questioning building up to it, Robbie went to spilling beans that shouldn’t be spilled.

  He’d been up for nearly a week at that point and was starting to come down. That coming down was always the hardest, it seemed, and when the hole got deep, folks lashed for any rope they could find to drag themselves out. That’s what separated the crankers from any other type of drug addict I’d ever been around. Folks on pills or cocaine or methadone or any other kind of dope could hold it together when they were in that hole. I’d done everything under the sun and never had any mind to start snitching. Crank, on the other hand, seemed to bring on a certain paranoia. After a week or so running that high, no dreams to let you regain any sort of grasp that you ever had, the mind starts going places that minds oughtn’t go. After that, those lips’ll say just about anything to get back some sort of clarity. That’s why Robbie was here. That’s why this had to be done. If he told one, he’d tell them all, and there wasn’t any way of knowing who those others might be. Some dogs had to be put to sleep.

  “What in the fuck are you talking about, Jacob, you know me and I’ve known you for a long time now, hell, your daddy has known me for a long time, and I ain’t ever been nothing but good to none of y’all, and now you’re going to treat me like this, saying I said something to somebody, and I ain’t said nothing.” All of that rambling left him out of breath, but Robbie sat still from the waist down. It was his neck and head that were in a constant wrestling match, his head wanting to spin off like a top.

  “You said something all right.” I knelt down and tilted the spotlight out of his eyes and beamed it onto his chest so that he could look me square while I approached. His scruffy, thin face jittered, but those big dark eyes that were popping hung on to me as I spoke. “It’s not a question of whether or not you said something. We know you said something. What we need to know is who all you said it to.”

  I don’t know if it was me moving closer or Robbie finally being able to see something other than white light that triggered it, but at that moment he convulsed every which way with those wires cutting into him like razor blades. “I ain’t said nothing!” he screamed over and over, the blood pooling on the floor now as the wires cut deeper and the blood ran down and dripped from his elbows and fingertips.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jeremy rush forward and Gerald start back-stepping fast, and before I knew what the hell was happening, Jeremy had splashed something all over Robbie’s face and the screams electrified the room. It was like Jeremy had just run a high-voltage line into that little old shack and all of a sudden everything was bright. Robbie was screaming till the veins bulged out of his neck, and after four or five of those screams that bellowed till there was no air left for fuel, the skin on his face started whitening and peeling off like wetted tissue. I was a hunk of granite during all of that commotion. I couldn’t have moved to step away from the gallows. But Gerald moseyed casually across the room and grabbed a tin pail from the corner. There was no hurry in his step while he strolled, nor when he dumped what must’ve been water overtop Robbie’s head.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “Wasn’t saying nothing,” Jeremy said. He had a wild look about him, like a kid that had just slapped a frog against the concrete. “Had to kick it up.”

  “No, I mean what the fuck was that? What the fuck was that you threw on him?”

  “Acid, man. Sulfuric acid a buddy of mine swiped from the paper plant over there in Canton.” Jeremy let into a loud whooping holler that rose above the screams for a second or two, and then he started laughing like he’d just witnessed the funniest thing he’d ever seen. His brother never said a word, nor did his facial expression change. I could feel my face turn. I could feel it still souring as the smell swept over me.

  “Well, who the fuck told you to do that? Who the fuck told you to bring that in here in the first place?” I was looking dead at Jeremy now, but he still had that smirk on his face. He had a leather work glove over the hand he’d thrown it with, and even that was starting to burn as a few drops of acid crept along the side of the pint jar he’d used to contain it. “Did my daddy tell you to bring that shit? Did my daddy ask you to handle it?”

  I could see that the mention of my father and what he might do for something like this forced Jeremy’s hand.

  “Sorry, man. It’s just, it’s just he wasn’t saying a goddamn thing. Bullshit. Bullshit was all he’d said and that ain’t going to cut it.” The funny smirk on Jeremy’s face turned sinister. “Your daddy asked us to get to the bottom of it, and he ain’t saying shit.”

  Robbie Douglas was still screaming, and if his eyes had held any tears to cry, they would have poured, but the skin was peeling where those eyes used to sit. He was still shaking hard in that chair, those wires still cutting, and none of us said a word until his body gave out and all that was left was heavy lifting and falling in his chest.

  “Now, Robbie, you know me as good as anyone and you know it’s not like me to sit and let this happen.” I put aside the toughness and went back to what I knew. “You need to tell me who else you talked to so that I can make it stop.”

  “I done told you, I ain’t said nothing to nobody, no time, and it wouldn’t matter if I had ’cause y’all are going to kill me one way or another, and I know it, and I’d rather it happen now, right now, right this fucking second.”

  Jeremy ran forward again and splashed another jar full of acid against Robbie’s face before I ever knew it was coming, and that meanness, the sheer meanness of what Jeremy did, seemed to spark a trail of gasoline straight to his brother. Gerald pulled out a curved skinning knife with a gut hook angled back from the end of the blade. There was a dangerous look in his eyes, a vicious calmness as if he knew he would not only keep pace with his brother’s actions, but also try to top him. He loped forward and yanked that knife back hard just above Robbie’s collarbone. The screaming let loose again, and I pulled a revolver Daddy had given me in case things went awry from the back of my jeans and pointed dead between Jeremy’s eyes.

  “I told you it wasn’t your place!” I tried to yell over the screams, but my voice seemed muted, like my lips opened and closed but no sound came out. “I told you Daddy sent me to handle this!”

  Jeremy didn’t say a word. He just stared down the dark hole of that barrel and kept his mouth shut, but out of the corner of my eye, I caught Gerald easing ou
t from behind Robbie, face peeling, blood dumping out of his shoulder, and screaming. I mean screaming. I turned the gun on Gerald and backed myself into the closest corner I could find to where I could see both Cabe brothers at once. Gerald knelt down and wiped his blade against Robbie’s pants leg, and sheathed the knife to his hip.

  “Ain’t no need for us turning on one another!” Jeremy hollered. “Nothing good’s going to come of it!” And as Jeremy spoke that second sentence, the screaming stopped and all of a sudden his words were loud and clear.

  The three of us looked over at Robbie, his head fallen down to his chest, and that heavy rising and falling going slack. His breathing shallowed over the next few minutes, and none of us said a word. One last big wheezy huff and then all of a sudden he was as still as water freezing. Silent.

  —

  THE LOGGING ROAD ended at the start of a creek bed where the first bits of water seeped from bedrock. There was a sparse clearing in the trees, and the moon filtered through to set the small stream flickering with light.

  “There’s a bluff on over that hill, but we’ll have to drag him to there,” Jeremy said.

  The brothers had wrapped the body in a tarp, loaded it into the bed of my pickup, and tailed close behind up the logging road until there was no place left to drive. Daddy’d always said that at the end of the long, cold day the only thing that mattered was who you could really trust. I knew I couldn’t trust either of those Cabe brothers as far as I could throw them, so I crammed that snub nose down the back of my britches and stepped out into the night.

  “Probably best if we just use that tarp for the dragging. There’s a decent game trail for most of it,” Jeremy said.

  I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t supposed to be around for this part. The way Daddy’d planned was for me to get Robbie to tell who he’d talked to, and then I’d leave the Cabe brothers to handle the end part, but we were all in it together now. There wasn’t any way out of that darkness but forward.

  Gerald yanked the tarp out of the truck bed like some drunken magician trying to pull a tablecloth from under a coffin, and Robbie’s body folded and fell to the ground. Those burns on his face proved sticky and held on to the blue tarp in places, and I had to look away to keep from getting sick. He was the first dead person I’d ever seen outside of the niceties of mortician makeup and dimly lit funeral parlors. Even at that moment, I understood that what was taking place was the type of thing that would never leave a man, the type of thing to shake him from dream for the rest of his life.

  Jeremy leaned down and wrapped the body up in a cocoon with the tarp, and I was glad that I didn’t have to see it any longer. We trudged off into those woods with Jeremy clearing a path, Gerald doing most of the dragging, and me kicking the tarp free every time it hung on a root or rock.

  “I don’t know about you boys, but I got me a date with Jack and Ginger when all this is said and done,” Jeremy said as he brushed back a laurel tangle to let Gerald pass. “Yep, I can hear that whiskey and ginger ale calling to me right this second. How about you? Got any plans?”

  I found it strange that he could talk so casually amidst the horror, but like it or not, we were partners right then and partners had to amuse each other to make the time pass. “Thought I might slide by a party on the way to the house.”

  “A party? Well hell, Jacob, why ain’t you tell us you knew of a party? We might all pack up and go. Ride together, you know, make one hell of an entrance. Those folks won’t think they ever knew what a party was before we got there and I pop into that motherfucker like tah-dah with my pecker out.” Jeremy jumped and turned to look at us. He dry-humped the air with a shit-eating grin spread wide enough for rotten teeth to catch moonlight.

  “Ain’t much of a party. Just a bunch of high school kids.”

  “Sixteen’ll get you twenty, Jacob. Reckon I’ll stick with Jack and Ginger.”

  The woods were loud with nighttime sounds in the distance, but it was quiet where we walked. The silence rode with us. Gerald let out a grunt as we got to a steep embankment on the hillside and we all pitched in to drag the body to the crest. The bluff wasn’t so much a sheer rock face as a steep decline riddled with boulders that hadn’t been moved since water set them there thousands of years before. I stood back while the Cabe brothers grabbed the tarp by the ends and started swinging. When the body swayed high, Jeremy let loose of his end and Robbie’s body rolled limp, limbs flailing, down the hill till it caught on a big, round stone. Gerald folded the tarp up as if it was something worth keeping, and I stared down at the place where the first man I’d ever seen die fit around the boulder like a tongue and groove. The Cabe brothers started making their way toward the trucks. “Later, Jacob,” Jeremy hollered. But I just stood there for a while and stared at it. I figured if it was going to hang with me for a while, I might as well get the details right.

  5.

  Cars parked crooked on every square inch of grass and had started bleeding out onto the side of the highway by the time I got there. The whole place looked like a Scrabble board, with all those blocks spelling words like “underage” and “drunk tank.” Though the law would have to show at some point or another, the deputies were usually civil about giving kids a good start on a night they’d never remember. Besides that, I kind of hoped those squad cars would pull up any minute and get a damn fine look at my face. That would have to be as strong an alibi as any.

  I was already half lit off a bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy’s that Daddy wouldn’t miss from the liquor cabinet, seeing as it was still months from cold season. Between those menthol schnapps and a half a roach I’d found in the truck ashtray, I was well on my way when I dropped a white Xanax bar onto my tongue and swallowed.

  There were kids spilling out into the yard, most of them too drunk to stand upright as they made out with friends they’d grown up with and confessed love that would fizzle by dawn. I hoped she was there. I hoped that somewhere in the crowd Maggie was there and that she’d be happy to see me. I couldn’t have cared less about the rest of the faces. It didn’t matter if any of those old chums were alive or thrown out on some bluff for the buzzards to pick apart.

  The inside of the house was ransacked and any dignity that had ever resided there had called it a night. Charlie Mitchell’s parents would undoubtedly wring his big-ass Adam’s apple plumb flat whenever they came home, and maybe that’s why he was running around picking up empties and filling black trash bags with the clock just a hair past one. That poor boy was sweating, beads forming under that bright red hair just as fast as he could wipe. He did a double take when he caught me standing in the doorway. His eyes swelled for a second as if I’d just dropped a shit on a night that was already piled high and steaming.

  I scanned the room filled with faces that I’d known all my life, but it was different now. When I was sleeping in the back of the classroom and even a few months after I’d dropped out, those kids had looked at me like some sort of hero, like I was doing things and going places that they’d always dreamt about but never had the guts to say aloud. Not anymore. Now they recognized me for what I am, I guess. Trash. Trash that wouldn’t have known a fucking thing about them if it weren’t for Facebook.

  Blane Cowen was the first to speak to me. He came stumbling up on gimp legs and that top half of him circling around just a few degrees short of full orbit. His curled mess of hair was coming off his head in every which way and he blinked slow, made it look like he was drunker than Cooter Brown and barely able to talk when he said hello.

  “What’s up, Jacob?” Blane dragged out my name as if it were hieroglyphs.

  “Not shit. What about you?”

  “I’m fucked-up, man! Drinking. Smoking. I’m fucked-up!”

  I laughed a little bit. Playing along with that kid’s game was almost enough to make me forget where I’d just come from for a minute or two. “I hear you, buddy.”

  “All right, ma
n.” Blane seemed to sense that the type of attention he warranted wasn’t anything I could give. “Well, it was good seeing you, man! Hit me up sometime. We’ll go burn one.”

  I didn’t respond but watched Blane stumble away till he got in the center of the room. That was the place he’d always wanted to be, right there in the center of things. Only no one was watching. He turned his head every which way and with eyes held half closed, he waited to catch anyone looking. When a couple folks got to noticing, Blane fell stiff as a board face-first into the couch. The ones who were watching snickered, and old Blane started grunting and mumbling things that didn’t make a lick of sense. He was destined for Hollywood.

  I made my way through a crowded hall where rap music blasted family pictures into angles on the walls. Most of the kids didn’t even notice me passing, but the ones who did lifted Dixie cups filled with warm beer to their lips so that they wouldn’t have to speak. I don’t know what it was about being gone for two years, not spending every waking hour next to those sons of bitches, but they looked at me nowadays like saying hello would throw their whole universe off-kilter.

  Along an island bar in the kitchen the popular guys were throwing beer pong, while the girls with crushes stood near wondering if any of those boys were lit enough to consider putting their panties on the ceiling fan. What they didn’t know was that those types of guys were too worried about impressing one another to concentrate on important shit like pussy. Those guys were too busy chugging beers and trying to memorize rap lyrics to pay attention to what girl had that fuck-me look in her eyes. Still, I knew if Maggie was at the house, she’d be somewhere close by. The guys splashing Ping-Pong balls into Dixie cups of suds had ridden Avery Hooper’s coattails to get to that table, and I was certain she was there somewhere with him.