by David Joy
“I’m fine,” the deputy said as he walked a circle around the small office and shuffled through piles of paperwork with his eyes. The .38 revolver Daddy’d loaned me the night all went to hell was sitting on top of a stack of work-order receipts on the desk. The deputy eyed that gun for a minute, then took a seat in Daddy’s chair, a tall, leather spinning chair, the only one worth sitting on in the whole room. The bull toed the chair across the laminate and bellied up to the desk. He grabbed the revolver handle between two fingers like he was picking up evidence, turned it in the light to check all sides. “Nice gun.”
“That’s just an old beater Daddy keeps around.” I walked over and stood directly behind the deputy as he held the gun I’d waved that night. I took a sip of coffee, that thick burnt taste holding to my tongue. “Has to keep a gun around. You know how people are.”
The deputy swung open the cylinder and shook out the shells into his palm. He set the empty revolver on his lap and picked up one of the bullets, turned it and looked at it head-on. I stared at that bullet and thought how the slit hollow point could mushroom out inside of his brain. He set the bullet back down in his palm with the others and looked up at me with those blue eyes. “Yeah, I know how people are.” Daddy walked in just as the deputy dropped the last bullet back into the cylinder and slapped it closed. The deputy slid the revolver back on top of the stack of papers and turned to my father. “I was just telling your boy, that’s a pretty nice gun.”
“Can’t beat those old Smiths,” Daddy said. “A lot of those new autos, well, like that one on your belt for instance, will hang up when it gets to rolling. But those old revolvers, those old revolvers’ll fire come hell or high water.”
The deputy didn’t answer.
Daddy walked over to the coffeepot and poured himself a cup of thick brew. The pot stunk of burnt coffee, but he never was one for wasting. “My boy offer you a cup of coffee?”
“Yeah, he offered.”
Daddy sat down in a stiff chair next to the desk. He made it seem like it was all right, but I could tell that it was eating at him that the deputy had taken his seat. He could keep it hidden, but the fact that he gave up any bit of power to that son of a bitch was flat out eating him alive. He scooted the chair, and it grunted against the laminate, skirted against the floor, and left a black mark scribbled like crayon. “Leave us be, Jacob.”
“Sure you don’t need me for nothing?” I wanted desperately to stay, to hear the next line of lies he’d tell, but he wouldn’t have it.
“What did I say, Jacob?” Daddy scowled. “Just fucking listen. Finish up what you’re working on and get the hell out of here, all right?”
“All right.”
The deputy turned and looked at me, squinted those pale blue eyes the same way he’d done days before, and I nodded to him. He didn’t nod back, didn’t even twitch his mustache, just kept his eyes drilling into the back of my skull till I was all the way out of the room. I shut the door behind me and heard music start playing inside as Daddy cranked the knob on a little radio. Like always, he didn’t want outsiders listening in, and this time, it just so happened that I was the one on the outside.
22.
Lightning bugs flickered across the yard, and for a second or two, I found myself remembering a time when I was small, filling a mason jar with bugs to keep as a night-light. Come morning the whole room stunk sour, and Daddy tanned my hide. I’d never much cared for those bugs after that, but in the hazy blue fog that held around Mama’s house that night, the drizzle all but gone, it was kind of beautiful.
I’d never seen her front door closed in summer. Open screen doors and bare feet had always been a part of her routine once temps rose into the eighties. All the lights in the house were on and that yellow light glowed through busted screens and dangling plastic. There was music playing inside from a small stereo she kept in the living room. I didn’t bother knocking, just walked on in.
The living room was empty and New Age country rocked from the small stereo set beneath the picture of that Indian man on the horse. I called for her, but didn’t get an answer, didn’t hear her shuffling around either. I shut the stereo off and called again. I poked my head into the kitchen, but she wasn’t around.
In her bedroom is where I found her, and I’m pretty sure that at that first sight of her my heart stopped beating. I’m pretty sure I didn’t breathe until the screams.
She lay in the bed, her bottom half underneath thin cotton sheets and her top half flopped sideways in the direction the bullet had taken her. Blood flared out wider on the wall the further it moved away from her head in the same way a flashlight’s beam widens further from its source. That blood was thick on the wall near her, thick enough to drip down in long zigzagged lines as it moved over planks, settled into cracks, pooled, and ran again. It washed over the baseboards into puddles alongside the bed. Further away, higher up the wall, the blood was thinner, more of a spray that had settled onto the planks. It was thicker and meatier there on the bedsheets, running out of the backside of her head somewhere behind the ear that lay flat. Where the bullet had entered the blood was smooth, not nearly as explosive as how it exited. That was all I could stare at those first few moments as I stood in the doorway screaming. The blood was the only thing I could see. It took a long while before that screaming settled and I could really look at her.
Mama’s eyes were open and dried into a matte stare, all of that light that had been in them gone and glazed. She peered toward the doorway where I stood and when I blinked I found myself wondering if she had too, if maybe we were blinking at the same time, that maybe she was still alive. I crept inside her bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed, her stare never flinching from the doorway. Her mouth hung open and nostrils held flared, like in one last huff of life, time had upped and stopped right there on her face.
That was when the tears came, and I collapsed beside the bed, knelt eye level with the dead and looked her square. Tears poured until I couldn’t see, and I welcomed that not seeing. Blindness was easier. I heaved for breath between loud, choking whimpers that started heavy and faded like echoes until all of the air was gone. That’s how I stayed for a long time, not moving, unable to move, except the shakes that walked hand in hand with that wailing.
When there were no tears left to fall, I pressed up onto the bed, my hands pushing down into blood spilled. A loose T-shirt hung around her chest, bare breasts fallen along her ribs and showing through the shirt. One arm dangled off the side of the bed beside me, the other lay flat, palm open cradling the gun she’d used to do it. When my eyes first found that pistol, I couldn’t really believe it. I couldn’t really accept that it was there.
The Commander-sized 1911 Daddy had waved around in my face that night, the .45 auto he whipped across both Cabe brothers’ faces and blew a hole in the living room wall with, was what rested in her hand. She had no way of getting ahold of it. Mama never had been much on guns, even in the types of shady places she was known to put herself into. There was no doubt in my mind that he’d given it to her. There was no doubt in my mind that he’d told her what to do. I don’t know what he must’ve said to make her do it, but she had, and it was done. It was long since done, and there wasn’t any coming back from that type of doing.
Then I saw it on the bedside table: a small pocket Bible just like the one Daddy’d shoved in Jeremy Cabe’s pocket, identical to the one slid under Gerald’s suspenders. The Bible was crisp and flat, never having been opened or read, the dimpled cover still shiny black and the edges of pages gilded gold.
My crying turned to rage, and I just sat there on the edge of the bed, her sprawled out beside me, and examined that pistol in her hand. Untreated steel rusted along the slide where Daddy had kept that gun for years in the damp floorboard of his jeep. The rubberized grips were worn and cracked, nearly dry-rotted from all that time heating and cooling from day to night, freezing in winter and cooking ti
ll it was too hot to touch in summer. Her little hand was barely big enough to hold it. Her frail hand, thin fingers little more than bone, spread open around that gun now. Those hands would never do another thing. And whether those hands would’ve done something worthwhile or not I hadn’t the foggiest, but the fact that they would never do another thing ate at me. The hammer was cocked ready to bring life to another round, but I didn’t touch it. I didn’t want any questions asked when the law came.
I turned to the Bible on the bedside table, and more than anything else, it made me question how I was his son. Someone with that kind of wickedness had that shit running through his veins, and if it ran through his, then it ran through mine. With that type of shit inside of me, it was only a matter of time before the darkness showed itself. Having that type of certainty about what I was made me want to take that gun and follow in my mother’s footsteps.
It was harder and harder to look at her. There was a queasiness pushing down deep in my gut, and if I stayed there any longer, I was certain it would come out of me. So when I couldn’t look anymore, when I couldn’t sit there beside her body for another second, I stood up from the bed, walked out of that room, and left her where she lay.
—
WHEN THE HEADLIGHTS and strobes came through the front windows of the house, I was standing there in front of that Indian. I didn’t look away. No, I kept staring right at him and to where he was looking as those headlights ran a line up the picture and wall and settled on the ceiling above me, the room flicking blue.
He must’ve been one of those out-west Indians, the kind John Wayne used to get into run-ins with in old westerns, with the big headdresses that hang feathers damn near the ground. Nothing like the Indians from around my parts; Cherokee never seemed to have much use for those fancy feathers. The Indian looked like some kind of chief or something, and he sat tall on the back of one of those spotted Appaloosa horses. That horse had stopped right at the edge of a ravine and that old Indian was just staring out into open plains, someplace far off that would’ve been hell to get to. There was no telling what a man might’ve found once he got there, but for folks like me and Mama, I doubt it would’ve been much different. I really doubt it would’ve been that much better.
The deputy didn’t bother knocking, just marched into the house, the screen door slapping hard against the frame behind him. That slapping and being that close to a lawman on one side and a body down the hall shook hell out of the trance I was in, and I must’ve been looking at him wide-eyed as an animal when he unsnapped his pistol. I stared right through him for a while, knowing he was there but not really seeing him at all. But when that dilating brought him into focus, I was rattled by who stood there.
“Now, keep your hands where I can see them,” the bull said. He yanked up one side of his belt with one hand, and drove the handle of that pistol and the holster downward with the other, bringing a cockeyed slant to that belt and his stance. I didn’t move a lick, but that didn’t seem to bring him any comfort. “Dispatch said there’s a body in the house. Is that right?”
I tried to say yes, but the words couldn’t come out. I started breaking again and all I could muster was a rattled, crackly “Mama.”
“I’m going to need you to show me where the body’s at, boy.” The deputy kept his hand on that pistol, but lifted it up and down in the holster, never enough to bring it fully into light, but just enough to ensure he could draw it in a hurry if the need arose. “Slowly,” he said.
The young deputy with that high-and-tight do, that eat-shit-and-die expression smeared across him, seemed eager to get me back into cuffs, settle a grudge that surfaced after I spent no more than a few hours locked up after he’d taken me in. But any bit of fight I had was gone, any smart-ass line I might’ve thrown his way any other time was muted by a hurt and a pain that kept me from saying something as simple as “yes.”
“You got any weapons on you, boy?”
I shook my head no, but he patted me down anyways. His patting was hard and determined, and I was so noodly that his hands rocked me back and forth on wobbly legs like he was pushing around one of those children’s bop bags. He motioned with his hand for me to lead him, so I did, down the hallway and to the doorway of the bedroom. I didn’t look inside. I just held there by the open door as the deputy eased past.
“Yep, I’d say she’s dead all right. DRT: Dead Right There.” The deputy’s words left a sour taste in my mouth, and I was certain I could take him from behind, but I let it slide and kept my eyes on him as he neared the bed. The deputy pulled a pair of latex gloves from his chest pocket and stretched the rubber back over his hand till his fingers fanned inside like a cock’s comb. He popped the rubber around his wrists as the gloves grew tight, and that popping sound startled me. I couldn’t handle any kind of noise. Just silence. The deputy secured the weapon out of Mama’s hand, dropped the magazine from the gun onto the bed beside her body, racked the slide to empty the chamber, and eased the hammer back down onto the firing pin. “Awfully big gun for such a skinny woman. Awfully skinny woman. That’s what that shit’ll do to you, ain’t it, boy?”
The deputy turned and looked me up and down in the doorway. He knew that she was my mother. He knew that his words were gnawing me near in two. But more than anything, he knew there wasn’t a fucking thing I could do about it. So there I stood.
The bull bent down and swiped the round that had flown from the slide, set that loaded shell alongside the magazine on the bed. Then he looked around for a minute, found where the empty casing had ejected, and slid an ink pen down inside the brass. He dropped the empty casing into a small bag that he’d kept tucked in his other chest pocket.
The deputy ran his eyes along the wall, squinted at how the blood widened into spray. He looked down at Mama lying there, at her gaping mouth and dried eyes, at where that bullet had entered along the left side of her brow. “Yep, deader than wood,” he said.
He strutted up to the doorway where I stood, and motioned for me to lead him down the hall. I held there for a minute and looked deep into his eyes, brown eyes with that baby kind of glint still holding off any kind of hardness he hoped would overcome him. He was a pussy, and I knew it. Somewhere deep down he knew it too. When he was alone, I reckon it came to him, and he stewed on it awhile. A man can’t hide that type of softness about himself no matter how hard he tries. Sometime or another, it’s going to eat at him.
We headed into the living room, and he told me to follow him onto the porch to wait for the others. On the porch, moths were batting their wings hard to stay in flight, their fat bodies circling and falling around the porch light, the walls of the porch blinking blue from the patrol car’s strobe. The lightning bugs had headed back into the trees and flickered from perches held high on wetted leaves and limbs. I slouched to the edge of rotted planks, scooted my butt onto the porch, and dangled my boots toward a puddle of water that had overflowed filled gutters and gathered along the foundation.
The deputy sauntered over and puffed his chest out. He took out a small notepad and the pen he’d used to pick up the casing. “So she’s your mother, you say?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
The bull breathed in deeply until there was a bucket full of air in his chest. He puffed that heavy breath toward the sky and situated his belt with his free hand. Then he jotted a couple of things in his notepad and looked me up and down. “Makes a lot of sense, I reckon.”
“What’s that?”
“You being her son and all.”
“How’s that?” I looked up from the puddle and set my eyes on him square. I could see in him that he knew he’d struck a nerve, but that cockiness in him couldn’t let it alone. No, he had to push it just a little bit further to see if I’d snap or cower.
“I mean it makes perfect sense you being her son and all.” The bull dropped his hand back down to the handle of his gun and left his other hand d
own around his gut, clenching that notepad and pen. “Folks like y’all have that shit in your blood. Outlaws, I reckon.” He took another deep breath and huffed into the sky like a bull elk. “Shame she had to go and blow her brains out. Always heard she’d fight like a man.”
Every word out of his mouth was chewing, and any minute now I was likely to turn wild. Just one more fucking word.
“Makes sense, though.” The deputy slid the buckle over his firearm and snapped it closed. “Ain’t been out of the nuthouse but a couple of days. Makes perfect sense she’d blow her brains out.”
There was no thought to think, no thinking to stop it, only action. I’d come off that porch in a forceful spread eagle and wrapped around him before he had time to move. I was on top of him. His back pressed into mud. My knees straddled his rib cage and dug down through sparse grass into red clay. I hammered that first fist into his forehead hard as I could, and it dazed him senseless, the blue strobe flashing and seeming to quicken the melee. I pressed one thumb deep into his eye and cracked another line of knuckles across his chin, and that one set him straight. His good eye widened and he knew he was in for it, his hands grasping at his belt for something to stop me. He came out with a shank, one of those bent-handled shivs the cops fancy, and slit it plumb lengthways across my right bicep, but I clenched his wrist and started beating that hand against one of the concrete stepping-stones that made a path up to the house. About the fourth or fifth time his hand rammed the concrete, the knife came loose, and I pushed it out of reach, hit him with an elbow along the edge of his brow. That one knocked him loopy and I had him. Bloodied his nose with the next hammer fist. There was nothing coming to mind to stop me. My mind was blank as I chiseled away at all of that rage I had for him, I had for my father, I had for my fucking life. There was no coming to this time around. I was going to beat him until it was all mush or until my arms gave out. One way or another it wasn’t ending till it was done. His eyes started to roll back, and I was just about to swing away when I got knocked from the side, a big hefty brute on top of me now.
