The final fifty-fiver sits a dozen yards from the rest. It’s empty, but I got an idea for it.
They’s no sound but whispers from trees and water rolling over rocks at the brook a few yards into the dark. I gather smooth oval crick stones from the fire—anything but sandstone. They’s still warm, but not hot. Tonight’s bath won’t be a slow soak. I roll em into a leather sack and tote em to the tub. Rest em easy on the bottom. I skim crick water into a five-gallon bucket.
I got something in mind for that barrel, is why it’s away from the rest. Something Stipe and his boys won’t like.
Stipe and his boys sure appreciate shine, though.
Chapter Two
Joe Stipe sucked in the sweet smells of battle. The last match had taken forty-five minutes, and even the victorious dog was barely upright. Stipe tucked his thumbs under his waistband. The deepest scent was the earth. The ground was black with centuries of accumulated humus, matter once alive and now dead. The scent of trees hung above that, then sweet engine exhaust as revelers fired their trucks and motored off.
Stipe stepped to the pit and leaned against an oak shipping pallet standing on end that formed part of the ring’s perimeter. His most trusted employees were breaking down the fight circle, lifting pallets vertically over the steel pickets that held them erect. They’d leave the pickets—this circle had many fights left before the dogs wouldn’t willingly enter. Stipe’s men guffawed as they retold moments from the night’s spectacle.
How Achilles had turned and placed his stunning career in jeopardy. The men had gasped. He’d never been a coward. But his turn quickly became a spin, a feint; Achilles had whirled around his opponent in a flash of teeth and fury. He’d snapped his jaws to the other’s neck and the move proved the winning gambit. For the next twenty-five minutes he never released, and the men watched in silent awe until his opponent finally wheezed, trembled, and died. Far from being a coward, Achilles had demonstrated that his bravery matched his cunning. He would someday be a grand champion. It was worth reliving a dozen times, from every conceivable viewpoint.
Stipe listened to his men and smiled.
He studied the ground where Achilles’s opponent had bled. The dog’s bladder and sphincter had released. The odors were still there, trampled into the black dirt. Stipe’s nostrils flared and he thought for a moment he detected the very evidence of Achilles’s inspirational performance. He released his breath and leaned closer, inhaled deeper, savoring the stink.
That was the last scent. Death.
Stipe was alone with his three closest workers and two hangers-on. Lou Royal, Stan Lucas, and Mitch Freeman disassembled the fight ring. In minutes the pallets would be stacked four high on the beds of three trucks so as to remain below the bed walls. Although insulated by the attendance of local police chief Horace Smylie, Stipe insisted his operation remain clandestine. Girly men—and there were a lot of them around Asheville—would raise a stink. Until a man stood beside the ring and felt adrenaline gallop through his veins, he wouldn’t understand the service Stipe provided.
A fourth man, Ernie Gadwal, loitered at the edge of the lantern light. He was half Stipe’s height and possessed a weasely aura, always lurking, always spying. He wanted a piece of the action but had nothing to offer.
A fifth man, Burly Worley, stood with his hands crossed at his groin. Stipe knew Worley, going back years and years.
“You staying out late,” Stipe said.
“Wanted to bend your ear.”
“Have at it.”
“I got myself unemployed. Didn’t know if you could use any help at the garage. Hell, driving even?”
Stipe shook his head. “Shit, that’s rough. I feel for you. I’m full up on help.”
“And the other sort of help?”
“I don’t think you play as rough as these boys.” Stipe noticed Stan had stopped lifting a pallet long enough to grin.
“Thanks.” Burly turned.
“Hold up, now.”
“Yeah?”
“Shit. Just hold up is all I’m saying. I’m thinking.”
Burly Worley had a wife and a son and you could be damn sure Burly would raise him right. Burly was the kind of man who wasn’t happy unless he went to bed tired and broken from a hard day’s labor, and no smart organization turned its back on help like that. Burly had the ethic, and in the modern age of pussified men, it made sense to hire him on principle and build a job underneath him.
“I don’t have anything,” Stipe said. “But I want to think on this. How long you been without work?”
“Two months.”
“Sign up for the unemployment, did you?”
Burly scowled.
Stipe extracted a fifty from his pocket. “For now, help Stan and the boys red up. Come see me at the garage tomorrow. I’ll think of something.”
Burly looked at Stipe’s hand almost as if to reject the money. A battle played out on his face. Pride fought duty, and his wife and son won. Burly grabbed the bill, nodded to Stipe, and spun to the other men.
Stipe watched him for a moment. Burly was an example of an honest American, raised with decent principles, getting screwed by the system. He was tough, ornery, and prideful, and probably said meaningful prayers every night. Not like these others Stipe saw around town, the girly men.
Even in Gleason, city ways had crept in. Gentlemanly behavior aroused more dirty looks than thank-yous. It demeaned a gal; as if she couldn’t open the door herself. And correcting a woman was equally obtuse—what right did any man have to correct a woman? Whether they’d read the Good Book or not the fact remained that the order of things was written: these girly men were failing their divine charge. Children weren’t merely tolerated, they were coddled. Self esteem was more important than competence. Rights were more important than achievements. Even the last sanctuary of manhood, a Sunday football game, failed against the universal assault on masculinity. Enviro-whackos selling cars. Sitcoms featuring dull men and dominant women. Nowhere in society except Stipe’s fight ring could men go for a truly gritty thrill. Nothing else filled men’s nostrils with the rich odor of blood. Nothing fulfilled their innate lust for carnage. Stipe alone was willing to battle for the old ways.
Stipe noticed Burly Worley staring toward the remaining trucks. Stipe turned.
Cory Smylie sat on a tailgate, hands on his knees, head low like a calculating dog. Cory had a wrestler’s build, thick shoulders atop a wiry frame. His smooth face and greasy hair combed to a duck’s ass in the back. Put Cory in a t-shirt and fold a deck of Marlboros into his shoulder, you’d never know he was a half-century removed from his atavistic decade of choice.
His father was Horace Smylie, Gleason police chief. Cory had been raised by a modern woman and a spineless man, and neither had the inclination or gumption to keep him on a short leash, set some boundaries, by God. Cory had enjoyed every toy, pursued every whim, had been guaranteed the world owed him his dreams. Stipe could tell just to look at him. That’s what the schools taught nowadays. Cory was a perfect example of modern flawed thinking.
Since taking an interest in him, Stipe had learned Cory’s history from his father, and his present from other men in their mutual orbit. Stipe knew things Chief Smylie didn’t.
Cory had rejected higher education. When economic realities slammed him to the dirt, he’d chosen the easiest path. He used connections forged as the child of a well-traveled mother and began a small-time hook and crook operation. He stole. He sold drugs. He lived for intoxication. And then he lived in jail. His father knew most of what had landed him in the slammer, and being a Christian who believed in second chances, Chief Smylie had waged a personal campaign to get him accepted at UNC Asheville. But Chief Smylie was unaware that his son didn’t attend classes and only set foot on the university grounds to deliver drugs.
Cory Smylie was irredeemable, but given the vastness of Stipe’s enterprise, odd jobs presented that were uniquely suited to irredeemable men.
Cory had adequa
tely performed his recent assignments, and unlike Burly Worley, Stipe didn’t care if Cory Smylie ended up dead or in jail or just plain disappeared. However, although Cory’s general demeanor was arrogance and entitlement, if Stipe could turn Cory into a man he’d be striking a blow for mankind.
Thinking of his problem with Baer, Stipe lifted his arm and stepped toward Smylie as if to take him under wing.
“Tell me. You got an eye for the rifle?”
Chapter Three
“What the fuck’d you say?” Baer stepped into the group—they were all in Larry’s grade, a year ahead. They were the boys Larry jawed about getting in with. They were cool.
Burly Worley said, “You heard me—”
Baer launched, swung left and right. Connected with skull and jaw, and as he reared for a third swift blow one of the other boys grabbed his arm. Another joined with a knee to his groin. Baer doubled over and a fourth boy drove him to the floor with an elbow to his shoulder.
They were beside the lockers, twenty feet from the principal’s office.
Boys shouted and cursed. Girls screamed and wilted. Inched closer. That blonde Larry was all crazy about leaned against a wall locker, shifted sideways for an unobstructed view.
Baer absorbed kicks at the bottom of the pile. Burly Worley sat on Baer’s ass and pummeled his kidneys. Baer spat blood, struggled to breathe. At last only Burly was hitting him, in the same section of his back over and over. His stomach turned. Kids shouted. The blows ceased and the crowd parted. Baer rolled to his side and stared at patent leather shoes and cuffed trousers. Principal Doolittle had lifted Burly by his lapels and slammed him into a locker.
The girl was there, the blonde. Ruth Jackson, the snotty daughter of the Asheville judge.
“What you get yourself into?” Larry said, kneeling at his back. “Come on, get up.”
“You heard what Burly said,” Baer said.
“My office, Creighton.” Principal Doolittle pointed the way, as if Baer hadn’t had a dozen visits in the last month. “This is the last time.”
“You’re out permanent? Permanent?” Larry said.
They walked home. Baer dragged his feet, kicked loose rocks.
“‘Expelled’, Doolittle said.”
“Why you always starting shit?”
“You heard what Burly said about Ma. Why wasn’t you in there with me?”
“Because she is a whore.”
Both boys were skeletons with skin stretched by growth spurts into gangly knots of knees and elbows. Larry had Baer in size, but not moxie.
Larry had been acting acutely aware of their poverty; every disdainful smirk on another kid’s face aroused shame on his. His pants ended before reaching his ankles. His wrists extended beyond his sleeves and he’d taken the habit of rolling them, even in winter. He talked of wealth and mused out loud that his penchant for mathematics might carry him beyond his beginnings. Larry watched the cliques that roamed as units, intimidating like stampeding cattle—and Baer knew Larry wanted to join them.
Ever aloof, Baer saw the herd and scoffed at its noise.
Their father worked in Asheville but lived with another woman and took his earnings to her. Their mother sewed, cleaned, catered.
And performed other services to put food on the table.
“She ain’t a whore, damn you! She’s your mother!”
Baer swung. His fist glanced Larry’s shoulder, smashed into his ear. Baer connected shoulder to shoulder and drove Larry to the field. On the ground, he landed a punch to Larry’s gut before his brother wrestled sideways. Larry jumped to his feet with a pocketknife in his hand. Baer led with a left before Larry could open the blade. Caught Larry in the nose.
He stood dazed. Baer brought another. Larry fell, but not without grasping Baer’s shirt and dragging him along.
On the ground Larry used his weight advantage to straddle Baer. Pinned, Baer brought his knee up hard.
Larry toppled to the side, hands cupped over his groin. His mouth was open like he wanted to speak or breathe and could do neither.
“You heard him say it, and you know she ain’t,” Baer said. “And even if she was you got to stand up for her. Asshole.”
Mother didn’t understand why her boys were always at sixes and sevens. Baer made sure she didn’t know why they’d fought this time. They’d entered the house sullen, bruised and bleeding. Mother trotted from the kitchen and cuffed each.
“What the sam hell happened?”
Neither brother responded. Larry, leaning forward and breathing shallowly, eased into a seat at a desk closest the door. Baer dropped Larry’s books in front of him.
“Fine. You got homework? Sit and do your homework.”
“Ain’t got any,” Baer said.
“Sit at that desk and read something,” Mother said. “Here, read this.”
“The Constitution? Again?”
She pointed.
Baer turned on a lamp with a green dome and a brass base, the only item in the house that suggested money. He opened the pamphlet to “We the People.”
Larry remained hunched with his hands at his groin, showing immense concentration.
The brothers sat at opposite sides of the room with a glass-topped coffee table between. A painting of no particular ocean hung on the wall above Baer. Mother returned to the kitchen and trussed a chicken.
Baer read until his eyes flitted ahead, skipping words, lines; his hands joined the revolt and flipped two pages at a time. Three. Behind, Larry mumbled and growled. Whimpered. Baer closed the pamphlet. Mother appeared.
“Where you think you’re going?”
“Take a piss.”
She grimaced.
“What?”
“You come right back.”
He entered the bathroom and stood above the bowl. At the bottom of the water, colored the same yellow as the stained porcelain, lay a rubber. He flushed the toilet and urinated into clean water. Rinsed his hands and splashed water into his eyes. Came out wiping his hands on his pants—
The lamp was off.
Larry watched, mouth flat, eyes hollow. Baer returned his glazed look and lifted the cord from the floor below the outlet.
“Thought you was supposed to be the grown-up,” Baer said. “Asshole.”
He shoved the plug into the socket—thinking as he did that the cord felt shaved to bare copper.
Electric flashed through him. He crashed backward on the coffee table; the thick glass held but the legs collapsed. He quivered on the floor, eyes open, unseeing. His lungs shook and his heart rippled. He was aware, detached.
A dormant cluster of cells awoke deep within a corner of his mind.
Mother beat his chest with paired fists.
Baer batted her arms. “Ma!” he choked. “You’re going to kill me!”
She rocked back and sat on her legs, skirt crumpled above her knees. He saw rug burns.
“Oh baby,” Mother said. She took his hand.
Electricity trickled through him as if from the room, like he was an antenna.
She got to her feet and stalked to the lamp. Lifted the unplugged cord at the base, hand over hand like a rope. She studied the burned plug where it met the cord.
“It’s been whittled down,” she said.
Baer watched her eyes fall on him, then shift to Larry.
Baer felt the shock again, strong.
“I didn’t do it,” Larry said. His eyes pulsed red. He collapsed. “My balls are like lemons.”
Mother drove her sons to the hospital. They watched Baer a few hours and released him.
*
First time I saw the red light in a fella’s eyes was after Larry tried to electrocute me.
The glow wasn’t particularly strong, but my sense of it was. Whether I get the electric first or the red depends on if I’m standing next to the liar, or can’t see his eyes.
That’s all I know about my curse, except it started when I beat Larry’s ass and he tried to murder me for it. After that it was
hard to trust folks when I could see they was all the time deceiving.
S’pose I’m like a rat. Every time I try to cross the cage they shock the shit out of me.
The curse wanes with age and drink. Sometimes I think it’s gone on account of me not seeing anybody for a week, and then someone shows up for likker and I know I still got it.
Everybody lies, and I see every one.
Chapter Four
Cory Smylie slugged a can of Coors and tossed the empty behind the seat of his F-150. He’d had speed for breakfast and was deep into the rush. It was time to moderate things.
He lifted a .30-06 from the window rack. He’d followed an old logging trail a quarter mile off the road and parked in an overgrown thicket of blackberry brambles. He locked the truck; a leather gym bag below the seat stored items he didn’t want found.
Stipe had given him this task and though Cory hadn’t been looking for work, it aggravated a part of him that he innately wanted aggravated. The thought appealed like the sting of pulling off a scab. Stipe had intimated that this next assignment would do far more than elevate him in Stipe’s esteem.
It would make him feel like a man.
Cory placed his hand in his pocket and felt the folded piece of paper Stipe had given him. “Get his attention, and make sure he finds it.”
Stipe had said his dogs weren’t natural-born killers. They only developed into brutes through the patient application of training, conditioning. Nurturing. A man was no different. You take this task and help me solve a problem, your nuts’ll swell into cannonballs and you’ll walk with an honest swagger, not this pimp-punk-bitch thing you got now.
Cory had hunted these woods years ago after his father bought him a rifle and four-wheeler at the age of fourteen. He’d been up and down these trails and knew where he was going.
At fourteen it was difficult to score alcohol, especially as the son of the police chief. Cory had heard of a man who lived in the woods and distilled hooch. He’d stalked the man with binoculars and ingratiated himself with the man’s niece. He’d even approached his camp while the surly bastard was absent—only to be stopped cold by a bristling brindle pit bull.
My Brother's Destroyer Page 2
