by David Joy
It had all happened so fast that I never saw the other deputy drive up, but he had me up and my arms cranked behind me. He wrenched upward until I was certain my elbows would snap. I yanked to see who had hold of me, but couldn’t get turned, and that rookie deputy on the ground lifted himself and drew his Taser from the front of his belt. The laser beamed a red dot on my belly and that deputy was just seconds away from firing probes into me, when a voice yelled from behind.
“Goddamn it, goddamn it! Put that fucking thing away, Deputy! Put that fucking Taser away, now!”
The bull could barely stand and looked baffled for a minute, the scowl scrunching his face and blood into a beaten row of dark red furrows. Then the fire died back out of his stare and he holstered the Taser along his belt.
When I gave in and relaxed, the bull holding me let my arms down to my sides, but he wrapped one arm around the front of me, hugged my chest and kept me there. He motioned for the rookie to go to his patrol car. The young bull tried to brush off mud, but it only soiled deeper into his slacks, and he headed toward the Crown Vic. The deputy never took his eyes off me while he stomped away, leaned up against the front fender of his car, and wiped the blood from his nose along the sleeve of his shirt.
The bull behind spun me around then, held me at arm’s length with his hands clamping my shoulders. “What in the fuck has gotten into you, Jacob?”
I could see him now, Lieutenant Rogers standing there with a confused look on his face. He was a big man, more round than tall, but handled himself well. I’d heard stories, so I knew he’d taken it easy on me when he tackled me and hemmed me up. He was bald on top, but the shape of his head wore it well. He wore the same uniform as before, just khakis and a polo shirt, the sheriff department insignia embroidered over the left pocket of his shirt.
“Tell me what the hell happened?”
I knew I could trust him with anything I said, but right then words failed me. Instead I was going to cry. There was no holding it back or hiding. No, it came out of me like a deluge through floodgates, and I fell into his chest, crying my eyes out into him. Rogers wrapped his arms around me tightly and held me there. He pressed the back of my head into him harder, clenched me tight enough that I didn’t even have to stand. I couldn’t remember anyone ever holding me like that, and I thought at that moment that it had to be what love felt like. If that feeling and that comfort wasn’t what love felt like, then love never existed.
Rogers didn’t say a word until my heavy breathing slowed, and all of the tears I’d carried had soaked into him. When that weight was gone, Rogers pushed me back to arm’s length. “Let’s go talk in my truck,” he said. He led me over to the unmarked Expedition he drove and to the passenger side with his hand never leaving my shoulder. He opened the door for me, and I climbed inside.
Sitting there was the first time I really noticed my arm bleeding where the bull had cut me. It was the first time I felt it stinging. The blood seeped into the sleeve of my T-shirt mostly, but some of it dribbled down to my elbow and dripped onto my britches. I pulled my sleeve down over the cut and pressed it hard to make it clot.
Through the windshield I watched Rogers walk up to the other deputy. The young bull packed a tin of tobacco in his hand and loaded his lip full of long cut. The deputy slid that wad of tobacco along his gums with his tongue till his cheek pushed out like a boil. They talked back and forth for a minute, and about the time the deputy’s first line of spit bounced off the ground, Rogers let into him with an intensity that had me believing words could strangle the life out of a man. I couldn’t hear the words he screamed, only the fierceness in his tone, and that wildness lighting in the electric blue strobe. The deputy tried to say something, but Rogers chewed his ass and the deputy’s stare fell to the ground. He wouldn’t look up again. He just stood there and took it like the bitch that he was.
Not long afterward, the deputy climbed into his patrol car and shrank inside, his silhouette flickering each time the blue lights flashed. Rogers marched back to the Expedition with his anger holding his shoulders high and stiff as he came. My blood was spread across the front of his shirt where he’d held me, but he never paid it any mind. He climbed onto the driver’s seat and turned his eyes on the patrol car in front of him, then shot his look to me.
“Now, what happened in there, Jacob?”
“Mama shot herself.”
“I know that. That’s how the call was paged, but I mean, did you see her do it? Did you just walk in on her like that?”
“Yeah, I found her like that.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, son.” Rogers leaned back in his seat and yanked at his britches legs to loosen them around his thighs. He breathed deeply, blowing his cheeks out until the air hissed from his lips. “There’s nobody needs to see something like that, especially nobody your age, and especially not their own mama.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I’m sure you will be, son, but a lot of folks ain’t. For a whole lot of folks seeing something like that changes them, and that’s all right too.” Rogers leaned over and settled his hand onto my shoulder.
“Really, I’ll be all right.” The crying had turned into numbness now, that same kind of numbness that came after leaving Robbie Douglas wrapped around a rock and that same kind of numbness that came as I drove the Cabe brothers to water. Just as it had then, it was the numbness that scared the shit out of me. Feeling things like pain and fear seemed natural. But feeling nothing at all made me question what I’d become.
Rogers slipped two cigarettes from a pack of Lucky Strikes and passed one of the smokes over to me. He ran the Zippo down his britches and lit the wick aflame with a tall jumping fire. He ran the fire to his first, bit that cigarette between his teeth like he always did, and then passed the flame over. I took a long drag and let it settle deep until it burned at my lungs, that first shot of nicotine rendering me woozy the longer I held my breath. I welcomed any feeling at all.
“You know what was strange in there?” I took another puff from the cigarette and slouched against the seat.
“What’s that, son?”
“The gun that was in there.” I turned and looked Rogers square. “The gun that was in there, the gun that Mama used to do it, that was Daddy’s gun.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That was his .45.” I pressed my head back against the headrest and aimed my stare at the ceiling. “And you know what else? He left a Bible in there beside of her.”
A confused look came over Rogers, and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “A Bible? What the fuck are you talking about, a Bible?”
“One of those little Bibles like will fit in your pocket. He left one in there on her nightstand.” I took another puff of smoke and blew a cloud against the ceiling where I stared. “Always heard he left those Bibles, but never put much stock in it till I seen it.”
“Best not to say things like that.” Rogers pulled away and propped against the door. He clamped the cigarette hard between his teeth, the smoke rolling up around his face and shrouding his eyes from me. “Best to just keep things like that to yourself.”
I didn’t say another word about it. It made sense for Rogers to say that, seeing as he was the one who called the house to tell Daddy the very moment Mama was cut loose. The thing about it, I wasn’t mad at Rogers for lying. The way I saw it, Rogers was on the payroll and the pay had a way of outweighing morality. Rogers took home rolls of money to keep his mouth shut and Lord knows his family needed that cash. He got paid shit to wear that badge, and he had mouths to feed. Who I was mad at, who I had just enough anger inside of me to kill, was the one who gave her the gun, my own flesh and blood, my own fucking father. That was the son of a bitch that fueled the fire growing inside of me. That was the son of a bitch that held it all.
23.
The fixed-blade skinning knife was my first thought. Push that th
ick drop point down into his throat and listen to him gurgle. But that would’ve been too messy, might’ve even given him a chance to fight back for a second or two. So I settled on the .22 pistol, same as he did. Seemed awfully fitting to put that son of a bitch down in the same way he did the rest of the animals. One shot and done.
When I was younger and Daddy used to keep a passel of hogs, he would slop the pigs when it came time to butcher. He’d pick one out and toss a whole bucket full of feed and wait till that hog got to chomping, and the hog never even saw him put the barrel to the back of its ear, never heard the shot. Killing a man wasn’t so simple. Men had a way of not getting so fixed on one thing, and men like Daddy always had an eye out for the world to fall off-kilter. So I did it while he slept.
The clouds had cleared, and the moon had come out by then and lit his bedroom a funny kind of blue through the window. Everything was cast in blue: the dresser top where he kept his wallet and spare change; the side table where the lamp hovered over a .40 S&W auto he used as bedside protection; the white cotton sheets he slept beneath. A sapphire kind of shade draped everything, even skin. Daddy always slept on his back like a corpse, his arms folded around his stomach, toes pointing straight up under sheer sheets. With his head rocked back on a down pillow, Daddy sawed logs in a sleep deep as hibernation. But it wasn’t him I was so worried about waking. It was her.
Josephine was curled up in a tight ball beside of him, her head nuzzled up against his chest, blond hair feathered across his arm. She was naked underneath those sheets, and the fabric had drawn down to her rib cage, one tit glowing blue and round. She was pretty except for the talking, so she was always sexiest when she slept. How she managed a wink of shut-eye with all of that rasping and grunting, wheezing and snoring, was beyond me, but that’s where she lay most nights. She slept heavy too, but often woke up in the middle of the night for a swallow of water and a trip to the john. Her eyes twitched the way one’s do in a dream, so I didn’t think she’d wake, not in the time it would take to do it.
The plan was to do it how he’d done. One round for each of them, load them up in his jeep, and sink them down in that wet graveyard with the Cabe brothers and God knows who else. I’d feed the deputies the same lines: got to talking an awful lot about Robbie Douglas, started acting awful funny, and then poof. He vanished. Make those bulls think he was on the lam or something.
I’d taken my shoes off to soften my footsteps and neither had stirred when I entered. I’d been standing over the two of them for what felt like days, but according to the alarm clock on the side table was precisely three minutes. 2:42 a.m. The bottoms of my bare feet were getting sticky with sweat and seemed to glue me to the hardwood floor. But I was as close as I needed to do it.
The long bull-barrel Ruger hung by my side. Like all guns, this one Daddy kept loaded with one in the hole, racking that first bullet into the chamber and refilling the clip so he was always one over capacity. “Ten ain’t near as good as eleven,” he’d say, but I only needed two. I was thankful I didn’t have to chamber a round, just one less noise to worry about waking them.
It took more than once for my brain to tell my arm to raise, and those first couple of times my arm was flaccid and unresponsive. But then my arm rose stiff as a pipe, settled when that front fiber optic glowed red over his face. “Just the front sight you have to worry with,” Daddy’d said when I was young, and he first taught me to shoot. He’d been right, and the Harrington and Richardson ripped apart every clay he threw. That was one of the few times he’d been proud of me. I could count those times on one hand even if I had lost two or three fingers in a sawmill. Thinking of that fact brought on the anger, and I needed that anger more now than ever. I needed it to fuel me. The second I saw that gun in Mama’s hand, I knew what it would take to make things right, and I needed that anger to ensure the deed got done.
The front sight quivered right and left across his face and I took a deep breath to still my hand. I was counting down in my head, backward from a hundred, and when the numbers ran out I’d do it. Pull the trigger on the exhale. About 75 the doubt set in, but by 50, I was good. Each breath came and went. The numbers fell. 30. Breathing became less and less about keeping me standing and more and more about steadying my aim. 15. The breathing quickened during that last set of ten and it was all I could do to hold it there, my hand gripped bloodless, knuckles pressed white. Zero came and I pulled, swung the pistol to Josephine right after that first crisp trigger break.
Only when Daddy moved did I realize there hadn’t been a bang, just a loud click as the firing pin hammered away on nothing. I moved fast then, yanked back those bolt ears to eject a misfired round, but the bolt held on an empty chamber. Daddy’s eyes were open and out of the grog he came, rising so fast that it sent Josephine rolling out of the bed, just a naked top of woman parts spinning wildly on the floor. Both hands had ahold of my wrist and ran me back into the wall, the pistol falling out of my grip as Daddy rammed my hand through the windowpane. He lifted me up and flipped me in midair, body-slammed me, my shoulder hitting first, then my neck and head cranking against the base of the dresser. By the time I rolled over, my back holding me up against the wall, he was overtop of me, having already grabbed his pistol from the bedside table. Josephine screamed and yanked the sheet off of the bed to wrap herself up. She sprinted out of the bedroom, her feet catching in all of that cloth as she hit the door, and tripped face-first into the hallway.
“Don’t you fucking move!” he screamed. Daddy shuffled for the light switch, never taking that gun or his eyes off me. Josephine’s screams moved further and further away, her footsteps banging across the floor, the screen door slapping hard behind her, and those Walkers baying and snarling just as soon as she stepped foot outside. Her screams turned to a high-pitched cry as one of the hounds got ahold of her, but she must’ve wrestled free, since the next thing I heard was her car crank and tires spin gravel down the drive.
That first flash of light blinded me, my eyes having long since settled to the darkness. When my eyes unknotted, the white light brought color to the room. Daddy stood over me. His tattooed chest heaved. The gun never wavered from my head.
“Jacob!” Daddy hollered. “Jacob! What the fuck are you doing?”
I could barely move my arm. My shoulder felt dislocated and my neck near broken. But I sat up as much as I could, and scowled with rage that had not waned. “You killed her!” I screamed. “You fucking killed her!”
“Who the fuck are you talking about?”
“Mama. I found her there and you killed her! You killed her, you son of a bitch!” I pushed up off the floor with my good arm and rammed toward him, but a swift blow pounded me in the top of the head as Daddy smashed the pistol and hammered me back onto the floor.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I found her there and she’d blown her fucking brains out! She’d blown her fucking brains out with the gun you gave her! And then you left one of those fucking Bibles there beside of her, you sick fuck!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jacob, but what in the fuck were you doing standing over me with that gun?” Daddy never took that pistol off aim. The hammer was back and it was a sure bet that he wasn’t sitting on empty.
“I was going to kill you, you son of a bitch! I was going to blow your fucking head off and make shit right!” I came off of the floor again, got about the same distance that second run, but when the steel found its mark, my vision spiraled like the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon until all that was left was black.
—
WHEN I CAME TO, Daddy sat on the edge of the bed, sweatpants rolled up to his knees, bare chest graffitied with tattoos, one hand resting the pistol on his lap, the other hand holding an apple up to his mouth as he took another bite. I slumped against the wall as it all came into focus, and noticed he’d wrapped my hand up in a shirt to stop the bleeding from where he put it
through the window. I stared at him and didn’t really know what to say. My anger was stupefied and weak. Daddy picked the pistol up from his lap and gestured like he was about to say something as he chewed on the apple.
“You ready to talk now?” Jagged bits of apple peel and mashed fruit cut somersaults along his sentence. He spoke so matter-of-factly that there was a part of me wondered if any of what I remembered really took place, but there was that pain running from my shoulder to my neck, that bloody hand wrapped in a shirt to remind me. I kept quiet and didn’t answer, not exactly sure what to say. “Well, all right then, I guess I’ll do the talking. Seems you think I had something to do with your mama dying, is that right?” I nodded and he continued. “And seems you think that gun that she used might have been something that I gave to her, is that right?” Again, I nodded. “Well, you’re goddamn right I gave her the gun, and you’re goddamn right I told her to do it. You fucking piece of shit, you ought to be thanking me.”
“Thanking you?”
“Yeah, Jacob. That woman was a fine piece of work, a fine fucking piece of work, I tell you. Want to know how fine a piece of work she was? Fine enough that she stole from her own husband, fucked every friend I ever thought I had, and left you, you, Jacob, her own fucking son, like a bloody fucking tampon. That’s what kind of woman your mama was.”
“And that was cause for what you did?”
“No, I don’t reckon it was. I reckon if that’d been cause, I would’ve shot that sloppy bitch a long fucking time ago. I’d have done it my fucking self.” Daddy took another bite of apple, scratched at an itch with the end of that pistol, an itch that hit him right where a bunch of spiderweb was inked on his chest. “No, I guess what I did was just show her the error of her ways. I guess I just explained to her how much hurt she’d caused and how much hurt she was still causing, and then I gave her an out. The out I gave her was that gun you saw, and just like she should’ve, that fucking bitch took it.”
