Where All Light Tends to Go

by David Joy

  “I don’t think that’s how it happened.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me how the fuck it happened, Jacob?” Daddy was screaming. He’d jumped from the bed, thrown that apple to the floor, and spit like a seed spreader as he yelled in my face. His eyes bulged, and his face sizzled red. He pressed the barrel flush against my temple, but I didn’t flinch. No, I prayed he’d do it. “Tell me what the fuck you think happened since you’re so goddamn smart!”

  “You want to know what I think happened, then I’ll tell you.” My words were calm, and I kept my eyes fixed on the wall in front of me, never bothered glancing his way. “I think you got it in your head that she’d ratted you out the night Lieutenant Rogers came up to the house. Then I think, no, I know, he gave you a heads-up when she got home. I think you got it in your mind that she was too much of a threat, so you went over there and told her she had two choices. Either you could take her out of this world and take your damn precious time doing it, or she could do it herself. And then you gave her the gun to do it.”

  “You don’t know nothing!” Daddy slapped me across the face repeatedly with a hand that seemed big enough to palm a beach ball, and I didn’t move. His strikes came numb at first but then grew into stinging like frozen skin washed under scalding water. “You ain’t got a goddamn clue!” He slapped me back and forth across the face until his chest heaved again, all of those tattoos swelling and shrinking with every breath he took. He fell back onto the edge of the bed and buried his head in his hands. I was rooted against the wall, my whole face afire. And that’s when I saw him do something that he’d never done. My daddy, that hard-as-nails piece of shit, sobbed like a child. He wailed down into his hands and let out one of the god-awfulest roars I ever heard.

  He hadn’t cried when he had to lay lead to his best hound, a dog he loved more than me. He hadn’t cried when his daddy was eat up with cancer so bad that he spent that last winter coughing on blood and choking on his own spit, nor when he buried Papaw on that slanted ground in Hamburg Baptist Cemetery. And he’d certainly never shed a tear that I’d seen for any life he’d taken. But whatever this was, whatever worms were digging into his gut right that second, shattered every bit of man he thought he was. I think there was a place deep in him where he held something heavier than any other weight that he carried, a part of him that still loved her.

  “Goddamn it!” he screamed, with his wetted face aimed straight toward the ceiling. “Goddamn that worthless cunt!” He glared toward the light and blinked his eyes fast to try and clear them.

  “Bury her,” I said.

  Daddy turned his attention to me, a confused look lowering his brow, his eyes red, and his face sheened with tears. “What the fuck did you say, boy?”

  “I said bury her.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You pay to have a preacher do his prayers over her, and you pay to put her in the ground.” For the first time since that rage, I was looking him square. “That’s the closest you can come to setting this right.”

  “She ruined my life.” Daddy started to break again, but he didn’t hide it behind his hands. He sat there and let me see it. “She ruined my fucking life!”

  “And she’s paid for it.” I looked deep into him and tried to pick at that one piece of humanity that I’d never seen. “All you can hope is to set this right.”

  “I won’t spend a goddamn dime on that bitch! I don’t owe her a fucking thing!”

  For a minute I stewed on all of that hate in his heart. Those moments of silence that passed between us felt like days. Then words finally came to me and I spoke. “Then set it right with me.”

  Daddy stared at me as if he were really rolling it around in his head, milling that thought up till nothing remained but absolute fact. “Truth of it is, I don’t owe you a fucking thing either, Jacob. Truth of it is, you’re grown. You can fend for yourself.” The anger came back over him, and his eyes hardened till there wasn’t a bit of light left in them, nothing alive in him anymore.

  “What about my share? What about all those numbers you’ve been adding up and subtracting ever since I can remember?”

  “That’s all just a bunch of shit, boy. Like I said, I don’t owe you a fucking thing.”

  I picked myself up from the wall, my body beaten near limp, only pride holding me there. I limped to the edge of the bed and stood over him. I looked him dead in his eyes, eyes that had been sucked dry a long time ago, eyes that should have held something in them but didn’t, the way a dead man stares. All living things I’d ever seen held that light, but those bulbs had burned out on him a long time ago. “Bury her, and we’ll call it square.”

  Daddy looked up at me, all of that pain flushing his face, his eyes like wetted stone. “I’m going to bury her, boy, but it ain’t got a goddamn thing to do with you.”

  24.

  It was already daylight when I hobbled out of the house for the last time. I would’ve felt better leaving if I’d have doused the whole place in gasoline, poured a trail up the drive, and lit that motherfucker up like a pile of dead Christmas trees, but I didn’t. No, I just gathered my shit and left. There was a few hundred dollars stashed in a hide in the hardwood floor by my bed, a place where a single plank lifted and revealed joists and insulation. I’d always hidden things there. When I was a kid, I hid packs of stolen cigarettes, a porno mag or two at times, and never told a soul other than Maggie. But aside from the money, packing was just a matter of piling clothes in the pickup, swallowing the last two Xaney bars I had, and driving away.

  I spent that first night parked way back on a dirt road where hippie kids from the university liked to camp and burn empty bottles of Aristocrat vodka and Barbarossa spiced rum. The campfires they lit left dark ovals up and down both sides of riverbank. A long ways back, a man by the name of Aiken owned all of that land, and Daddy had told me once while we were fishing that Aiken blew the whole front end off a kayak when a couple of tree huggers demanded access to the gorge through his property. According to those stories, old man Aiken had already made his stance quite clear, and when those water rats decided to take their chances, Aiken hammered off a shot from a .30-30 high up on the ridgeline just as soon as the paddle made its first cut into water. That was back when mountain ways still mattered, back when men were men, and the neighbors were too scared to call the law.

  Nowadays it was all game lands overseen by the Forest Service, though it was seldom patrolled by the dark green pickups the rangers drove and that’s why I’d come. The rangers with fancy college degrees, who wore golden badges and government-issued logging boots with kilties rolled back over the laces, spent most of their time cutting fire lines.

  I had parked at the end of a rutted trail down to the river where water purred and whispered over smooth stone. It was a good quarter mile from the main road, a main road that was loose gravel and only wide enough for one car. During the day, the road saw lots of drivers, the dust never seeming to settle back out of the air. After sunset, though, the fly fishermen and paddlers headed out, and the road was traveled only by drunks looking to cross the mountain without the hassle of saying their ABCs backward, standing on one leg, or touching their noses with their eyes closed. I sat on the tailgate and struggled to roll a loose cigarette out of a bag of Bugler with my good hand, no more money for name-brand smokes and no Winstons to steal. Stale tobacco burned with a dusty smell and puckered a bitter taste in my mouth with every puff.

  The woods already smelled like rain, though the clouds hadn’t arrived just yet. A summertime thunder-boomer echoed over a set of peaks just to the south, and the sky flashed with light a few seconds before each wave of sound arrived. I knew it wouldn’t be long before summer rain pushed the river over its banks and washed the shoreline clean.

  I didn’t know what to think of Daddy agreeing to pay for my mother’s funeral. I’d never really expected he would. I’d never
really seen anything close to compassion in his heart. I hated him for what he’d done. I hated him for what he’d raised me to become. But there was a tiny bit of respect that came the night before, when he told me to head to his lawyer’s office to work out the details of my mother’s burial. In the morning I would visit Queen, and in a few short days I’d put Mama in the ground. I had Daddy to thank for that, and being thankful toward him was about as confusing a thing as I’d ever felt. Mama wasn’t the only thing that needed burying. I wanted to shovel dirt on those feelings too, bury them deeper than six feet.

  The first drop of rain fell through an opening in the jack pines. It smacked me in the top of the head and burned at the place where Daddy had cold-cocked me with the butt of his pistol. Somehow or another the blows he hammered hadn’t split my scalp, but a tender knot had risen on my skull and that’s exactly where that first drop of rain struck. Another drop fell and thumped the pickup, then another and another, and within seconds the rain came. I snatched my cell phone and the pouch of Bugler off the tailgate and threw the things not suited for water into the cab. But I wanted the rain on my skin. I wanted that coldness on my muscles, and I climbed back into the bed to lie there and let the world wash over me. My shoulder hurt and my neck was whiplashed stiff. Raindrops stung the places where skin had yet to heal, but it was a soothing kind of pain that I welcomed. The water was cold and the air warm, chills raising goose bumps on my arms, and all that rain seemed to wake me up out of a nightmare that had held for too long. For the first time in a long time, I felt alive.

  Lightning screamed sideways across the sky, and beneath a tall stand of pines was a place most wouldn’t have found comfort, but it was the closest I’d ever been to baptism. My mind cleared and that clearheadedness brought on a dream of setting the world right. It wasn’t vengeful or fueled by hatred, but rather a settling of debt owed, a righting of the world that had needed righting for a long, long time. Daddy had been dead-on about two things: I was grown, and I could fend for myself. But that was all he had right.

  He was wrong about those numbers he’d ciphered in that book all of my working life. Those numbers weren’t shit like he’d said. No, he’d been wrong about that. The money was something I’d earned, a small payment for the burden he fixed to my back when I was young. Seeing as he’d piled on a weight that would stay with me as far into the future as I could imagine, probably hanging around my neck and weighing me down till the day I died, Daddy owed me that. And it wasn’t just me who needed that money now. It was Maggie. I was certain I could talk her into taking the money, and I was absolutely certain that I wanted her to have it. I knew my father kept enough in the safe at the shop to cover most of what I’d earned. I wasn’t sure how I’d manage to get in and out of there quite yet, but the one thing I understood was that the time for cashing out had come.

  I spent hours texting Maggie that night to convince her to take the money. I lied about where it came from, but it was a lie that I knew had to be told. She loved me, but she never loved the life I led. She respected me, but she never respected how I made my money. I knew she wouldn’t have taken it any other way. So I told her it was my inheritance from when my grandfather died. I told her it was a loan rather than a gift, and that she’d have to pay it back. And after a whole lot of telling, a whole lot of convincing that it wasn’t me giving her anything, she finally agreed. She’d mail the paperwork in and she’d be out of here come fall. The minute she made that promise, I felt happy, truly happy, and that happiness grew from the fact that Maggie would never have to surrender to anything. Maybe I wouldn’t either.

  The rain poured, all the while those thoughts becoming a little clearer and a little more certain. When it was done, I’d never be able to come back, but that fact didn’t frighten me. There had never been anything here for me anyways. No, it was staying that frightened me. Staying was something that I just couldn’t figure. I knew right then that there are things in this world far worse than dying, things that’ll push a man to greet death like an old friend when he comes. Staying was one of those things. Staying meant that I’d become just like him in time.

  25.

  Irving Queen kept his office in a two-story house just a block or two off Main Street in downtown Sylva. White paint chipped from the wooden siding, but the black shutters were fresh and shiny, giving a mascara outline to every window on the house. The windowpanes were that old kind of glass that had a wavy look about it when the sunlight hit it just right, but the sun wasn’t out that day. Up close, bubbles were visible in the glass, little pockets of century-old air frozen inside the panes. A rocking chair swayed back and forth as I walked across the porch, and the warped porch planks squeaked against rusted nails.

  I turned the tarnished brass doorknob that fit loose in its socket and walked into the front room of the office. Box fans were placed obtusely throughout the room, and the breezes blew in every direction, an indoor dust devil whirling about that place. A middle-aged woman behind a cluttered desk slapped a glass paperweight down on a stack of papers just before the top pages caught wind, the cross breeze generated when I opened the door proving too much.

  I’d never met her, but I’d heard the stories when Daddy drank. Queen was married to his high school sweetheart, a woman who put on the weight not long after vows and aged poorly in the years to come. Whether he was just too chickenshit to leave or stuck around for appearances, Queen never divorced. But like most men, he’d started sleeping around a few weeks after the honeymoon. Being one of the few lawyers around, he’d always done well, and that type of money dazzled the eyes of girls who’d been raised on mayonnaise sandwiches in the holler. When he was still young he was able to keep a whole mess of girls around, but those chances faded once his hair thinned and gut bulged. Now all he had was this one mistress who worked as his secretary. Daddy had always called her Franken-slut after all the nose jobs and tit jobs Queen had paid for to keep her looking young.

  “Ought to have somebody tighten the screws on that doorknob,” I said as I walked toward her. “Felt like it was going to come off in my hand.”

  “Haven’t noticed.” The secretary pushed a pair of narrow reading glasses to the tip of her nose and ran her eyes from my boots up to my face and back down to where my hand was wrapped in an old shirt. The hand Daddy rammed through his bedroom window was cut to bits, and I’d wrapped it as best I could. She sized me up, and the disgusted look on her face seemed to say she didn’t figure me for the type who could pay. “And who exactly did you say you were?”

  “I didn’t say, but it’s Jacob. Jacob McNeely, and Mr. Queen ought to be expecting me. We have a meeting at noon.”

  She flicked a loose-fitting wristwatch up onto her hand and turned the face of it till cheap crystals sparkled in the light. The time must’ve suited her, because she went straight into flipping pages behind the leather cover of her appointment log. “There you are, dear.” For the first time she smiled at me, finally figuring I wasn’t delinquent. “Let me just go see if he’s ready for you.”

  The secretary stood up and walked to a closed door at the far end of the main room, her high heels knocking and knocking across the floor. A tall slit rose in the back of her skirt and she rocked her hips as if she walked a catwalk for some imaginary crowd. Across the room she pecked at the closed door, turned to me and smiled. A voice I couldn’t make out over the fans must’ve told her to come in, because she did and disappeared into the room for a second or two before she strutted my way.

  She looked like she might’ve been pretty at some point earlier in life, but instead of riding that natural beauty out gracefully, she’d opted to hitch her wagon to Queen and let doctors pinch and poke and stretch and prod till wasn’t anything left that duct tape could fix. Her face looked as if wires pulled all of the skin back behind her ears. A low-cut white dress shirt was unbuttoned far enough to expose her breastbone, a breastbone that wouldn’t have looked near so bony and rippled if the skin
that once covered it hadn’t relocated onto the sides of implants two sizes too big. Doctors had worked long and hard to counteract gravity on her body and failed miserably.

  “He’ll be just a minute, dear,” the secretary said as she returned to the desk. Her blond hair was pulled up, feathering at the top, just how porn stars playing secretaries wore it in the movies. Those hackles that sprigged off the top of her head blew around in the breeze of box fans. She settled into her desk and smiled at me, overly white teeth beaming against the orange glow of spray tan. “You just go ahead and have a seat right there, dear. You can keep me company.”

  Her smile put me off, and I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I was more focused on deciphering the riddle of surgeries that pieced her together than conversation. “At least it’s nice outside.” It wasn’t. I knew it was stupid as soon as I said it. The storm from the night before had spread till there wasn’t a bit of sunshine to be had, just gray clouds and drizzle. The secretary glared past me and through the bubbled windows to see if she’d missed something, but she hadn’t. Her eyes squinted as if to ask, “Are you dumb or something?” but before either of us had time to answer, the door slammed at the other end of the room and Mr. Queen shuffled across the floor.

  Now, if Humpty Dumpty hadn’t fallen off that wall, and if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men hadn’t tried so damn hard and failed, I would’ve sworn old Humpty slipped on a Jos. A. Bank’s, moved to Sylva, and changed his name to Irving. That pudgy little bald-headed devil was a walking, talking hard-boiled egg.