My Brother's Destroyer

by Clayton Lindemuth

  Cory pressed down the sides of his fake mustache and threw on a ball cap. Trees along the drive obscured the parking area but so far he hadn’t heard any gunfire. He slipped on dark sunglasses but the sun was already behind the mountain. Sunglasses at dusk looked queer, not country. He tossed the shades to the console.

  The driveway opened into the parking area. Cory was alone.

  He parked and filled his pockets with a marker, thumb-tacks, and three boxes of cartridges, then carried the Mauser to the back of the Sykes building. A row of triangular shooting tables sat under a rusted sheet-metal roof, supported by weathered, salt-treated deck lumber. A cold gust made his eyes water. An unanchored piece of metal tapped a post. Cory chose a table with a serviceable chair and rested his rifle on the sandbags.

  When he’d been here as a teenager, his friends had ridiculed him. He’d never shot seriously, for accuracy. But he listened to his friends’ tips and watched their mechanics. He learned to control his breathing, assume the same posture every time, and find an identical sight picture before firing. He fused his friends’ lessons with his innate sense and over a few weeks he became the best shot of the group. Cory looked downrange with trepidation and regret. How much skill had he lost? How much life had he pissed down the drain?

  He emptied his pockets and carried the targets and tacks to the leftmost fence at two hundred yards. He affixed a black bulls-eye and returned to the rifle.

  When he’d come to this place as a teenager, he’d been steady and his eye was clear. Now his mind was ringing. His nerves were sharp from the absence of drugs. He was kind of spacy, kind of focused. He’d hold a thought with relentless concentration and then realize after a moment that he’d been thinking of something entirely different, and couldn’t remember what he’d thought before. At any moment he might penetrate some deep truth. He was conscious that he was conscious, and his self-awareness felt like an awakening. A turning point. He would choose what he wanted to be. He would be anything he chose.

  He slipped a cartridge into the Mauser’s open chamber. He would be lethal.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Ernie Gadwal had felt a rush watching through binoculars as Baer Creighton buried his mutt. He’d shifted sideways a little and pressed his pants, shifting the erection below with the palm of his hand. Wished he could do something about it.

  Misery drove Creighton’s shovel into the dirt. Wrath pulled it out. Ernie had studied Creighton’s motions and thrilled, musing how Creighton would react if he knew his dog’s slayer was so close.

  Like Nietzsche said, build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius.

  Ernie followed Creighton’s long forest trek to the cave bearing the remains of an old-timer’s still. Ernie followed Creighton to his busty niece’s house. Several times he’d thought Baer had spotted him, but his size and craft kept him safe. Ernie had never walked so much in his life, and when Creighton took off in his niece’s car, Ernie had a use for the free time.

  Burly scared him, but Ernie saw their eventual partnership as a détente between men who had more to gain by cooperating with each other than by destroying each other.

  Requisite to détente was the ability to mount a strong defense, and Ernie had grown weary of fearing for his life every time Burly was around. If Burly was going to wear a Bowie knife, Ernie strapped a surprise to his ankle—a .25 caliber pistol he’d picked up at an Asheville pawn shop a year before. It wasn’t accurate but Burly was big.

  Ernie sat on the trunk of his car. He spent as much time glancing over his shoulder toward town watching for Burly as he did the other side for Creighton. Ernie had duplicated Burly’s preparations in case Creighton crossed to Brown’s farm while Burly was absent. There were four five-gallon jerry cans of gasoline in his trunk, right under him.

  Two days ago Burly had led Ernie to believe he’d return the following morning. He hadn’t. A day later, Ernie was certain Baer would make his move. Ernie had returned to the hillcrest after filling gas cans and grabbing his .25 caliber, and had spent every anxious moment reviewing his plan.

  It had to work. Stipe would realize Ernie’s value, and other elements would fall into place.

  Overtaking Stipe would be a long, surreptitious operation. Ernie would be clever and endearing until Stipe was no longer useful. Then they would become competitors, and Stipe wouldn’t know what hit him.

  Ernie returned his thoughts to the present. He knew he could get Burly to imagine being more powerful than Stipe. But could he convince Burly success was only possible with Ernie as his partner?

  Burly said Stipe wanted Creighton dead sooner rather than later. Burly would return, and when he arrived he would go to Creighton’s, shoot him, throw him over his shoulder, and carry him to his final resting pyre at Brown’s.

  Creighton would be equally dead whether Burly followed his troglodytic impulse or Ernie’s nuanced plan. The method of execution only mattered insofar as Stipe knew Ernie had conceived it. Ernie drummed his fingers against the car trunk.

  The money would make a stronger argument—money, and a challenge to Burly’s courage.

  It felt like madness, giving half the gold to Burly. But in exchange Ernie gained Burly’s most fervent labor. Ernie had considered all this before. He could steal every dollar from the money tree, keep it and pay Burly by the hour, but a wage man wouldn’t toil like a fifty-percent-equity man.

  In the end, he would exchange half the fortune for Stipe’s favor and Burly’s labor. Wasn’t that how empires were built? Strategic bets at opportune moments?

  A distant, high-pitched sound came to Ernie and he glanced toward town. A dust plume chased a black sport utility vehicle up the hill. Ernie leaped from his trunk. He dashed across the fifty-yard stretch to the road and arrived as the Suburban crested the hill.

  Ernie waved and watched for the Suburban’s nose to dip. Instead it raced closer.

  Ernie jumped to the center of the road and threw his arms wide. The Suburban swerved and skidded. Inside, Burly cursed and beat his fists to the dashboard. The window lowered and Burly craned his head out. “Get off the road, you stupid asshole! Move!”

  Ernie looked downhill toward Creighton’s place, a half-mile away. He motioned with his hands for Burly to keep his voice down.

  “Move, shithead!”

  Ernie put his hands on the bug deflector. Burly revved the engine. “You have to wait a minute. It won’t be long ‘til he goes to the Brown house and we can do it the right way.”

  “I want it done with. Get off the road. You think Stipe gives a shit how it happens?”

  “I do, and if he don’t he ought to. My way leaves no evidence. You can’t just off a man and carry him two hundred yards in broad daylight dripping blood! Besides, there’s no poetry to it. There’s nothing to give it any class.”

  “Step aside or I’ll throw your body in Brown’s house too.”

  Ernie rushed around to Burly’s side window. Burly reached for the shifter.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Ernie said. “I know a million reasons you don’t want to do that.”

  “What?”

  “I know where Creighton’s hid a million bucks. His life savings, all in gold.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Think about it. What’s he do with all that money he makes? He lives in a damned lean-to! You can kill me too, if it isn’t true.”

  Burly wrinkled his brow. “So why don’t you go get it?”

  “I need your help. All I know, he’s got booby traps all over. He’s wily. If you go after Creighton right now, you’ll be dead inside of five minutes. I’ve followed him twenty-four seven for the last two weeks, damn near. There’s no way you can get the drop on him. He’s got eyes in the back of his head. Closest I got was two hundred yards, and that’s in the woods. But you wait for him to get inside the basement of that house, those eyes in the back of his head won’t matter. He won’t stand a chance. When that’s done, then we get the money.”

  Burly frowned and st
ared down the hill. “You followed him everywhere?”

  “I followed the night he got the drop on you after that dog fight, and left you for a black bear to maul.”

  Burly looked away and spit as if trying to remove a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. “A million dollars, huh? Don’t make sense for you to tell me when you could have it all yourself.”

  “I need your help. Not just to get through all those booby traps. What to do with it. Think what you and me could do with a million bucks, you being so tight with Stipe. We’ll go into business.”

  Burly grunted and removed his hand from the shifter. “What kind of business?”

  “I’ve given it some thought. I can see from your face you think I’m batshit, but that money’s real and I’ll show you where it is once Creighton can’t put a bullet in my back.”

  “What makes you think I won’t?”

  “That’s a chance I’ll take. Think about running your own business, with an operations guy like me handling the paper and gathering the intelligence. You in charge. Think of passing men on the street and their eyes light up with fear. Respect. Their voices shake when they talk, and by God they say ‘Mister’ if they say anything at all. You wearing a black suit, driving a new Lincoln truck. Tell me that wouldn’t make you proud as shit. Let’s get real. You’ll be bigger than Stipe.”

  Ernie paused and lifted his hands from Burly’s window.

  “If I’m wrong, you just go on down the hill and get shot. I’ll partner with someone else. But if I’m right, why don’t we go back to the lookout? We’ve got business to talk. We got capital, we can do anything. There’s going to be a shortage of top-notch moonshine in a week or two.”

  “Get in.”

  *

  I sit for two days looking at Fred’s grave before I make the absolute final decision.

  Brown used to have a still. I seen it in the basement—little two-gallon can with five six feet of copper. Operation I have in mind, that’s subpar. But they ain’t a lot of places a fella can go for a twenty-gallon cooker.

  I slip to the drive, look both ways before crossing. Feel hunted on my own land. Every time I pass where Fred bled in the dirt and grass it’s like a fist inside my head and eggbeaters in my belly. The one makes me mad enough to kill; the other makes me want to bowl over and throw up.

  I look from the blood-stained ground up to Brown’s house, with its bowed porch looking like a dopey smile and the shattered upstairs windows like stoned eyes, and I’m reminded everything decays, and that’s the way of it. And as soon as I murder every man that watched Fred get chewed, things’ll be right as rain.

  Brown never was a full-time operator. He made soap and he made likker and sometimes the one tasted like the other. I study the device he left. A little professional attention and Brown’s booze machine’ll find its voice.

  I glance over tools on the workbench, hanging on the wall, stuffed on shelves. Coffee cans of rusted screws. A carpenter’s level. A square. A plumb bob. Trowel. Fishing poles between the joists, tucked above white electric lines. How long it been since I had a batch of leeks and trout?

  I carry a hacksaw to the water heater on the opposite corner.

  The inch-thick copper out the top is too fat and won’t bend. But I already took all the thin, flexible stuff, and the goons hacked it to pieces. I cut close to the water heater until the pipe dangles. Fetch a rickety stool and saw again, fifteen feet from the water heater, where the pipe hangs below a two-by-six.

  With a claw hammer from the bench I pry the U-shaped supports and then cart a long, bowed pipe and the two-gallon still from the house. I rest em on the ground out front. Down the road a ways on the Gleason side, a big old rooster plume of dust billows up. Somebody’s making good time.

  I head back to the basement. Boiler that small, it’ll be twice the work unless I get a doubler. Water collects as the sqeezins pass through. I shake a turpentine can and find it empty. I’ll drill the sides, slap on a couple fixtures. Good thing Stipe didn’t burn my toolshed.

  They’s a motor outside. Door clunks shut. Somebody got a dog to get rid of? That vehicle was coming from town, not the other way.

  I think on it.

  A long-lost heir come to claim the rust and rot? Or somebody looking to settle a score with Baer Creighton? Turpentine can in one hand, Smith in the other, I take the steps sideways, each foot slow. I listen. No more sounds. I got electric on my arms and neck. Electric on my nads. Evil come to town. They stay outside. I hear metal tinkle with the timpani sound of a jug of liquid. Jerry cans, maybe. Voices mumble.

  I climb the steps and stay within the shadows at the top, looking into the kitchen. Through a busted window I see a black Suburban got a shiny white bumper sticker on the front left side.

  I bet a bucket a gold it says DEPENDS ON THE DEFINITION OF TREASON.

  Just like at the fight when I got my ass beat. Burly Worley’s Suburban.

  Short man crosses front of the window, got his eyes pointed at the base of the house like he’s looking bugs. He’s gone. Says something to another somebody, out of eyeshot.

  Glass shatters and metal clangs.

  I smell gasoline. They laugh.

  “Go ahead. Stand back.”

  That’d be Burly.

  I creep down a stair and ready myself for a kamikaze run. Whole house is a tinderbox.

  They’s a whoosh and a roar! Wood crackles. Sound rushes around the house; flames shoot past the window and dance inside. Them boys lit the fire; Burly Worley and some short gidgit is walking back to they vehicle.

  Let’s think a minute, before all I got time for is raw-assed panic. Them boys won’t stay outside forever, smoke headed high and calling attention miles around. They’ll scoot.

  Black smoke already hangs at the ceiling. Flames flash and glow in each room.

  Years and years ago I sat with Brown in this kitchen. He liked to play solitaire while he talked, whether he was telling lies about an eight-point buck he saw eating apples or how he was going under the knife to cut out the cancer. I bet he never foreseen this.

  Burly Worley’s little sidekick puts me in the mind of a taco dog always hopped up on drugs. Each carries a shotgun like he thinks a bird’ll flush. I’m the bird. Burly points to the right while he steps to the left, and they split to cover all four sides of the house from opposite corners.

  Flames jitterbug through the kitchen. Walls is orange and the ceiling black. Getting right hot. I back down a step as I got nothing needs cauterized just yet.

  I rumble down the stairs and get my mind right in the basement. Above is pure hell, no way out but through it. If the fire don’t get me the shotguns stand a chance. They’s a door out the basement, one of them slope-roofed jobs—but Burly and the taco dog would see it pop open, and if they knew I was here and was hoping I’d end up a charred corpse, it wouldn’t be too damn hard to put a cap in my ass coming out and toss me back in. That electric jolt that upended the hair on my nuts—that wasn’t ’cause they come to throw a party.

  I wonder if one of them fired my house, went to the still site and put a hole in Fred? Maybe the taco dog left the child’s footprint.

  The upstairs roar sucks air out the basement. I see flames between floorboards. Glass shatters. I step half across the basement. Stop, jog back to the stairs. I got that boiler outside.

  Shit. I don’t think good sober.

  Two windows let in outside light, but they ain’t twelve inches tall, and they bottoms is seven feet up.

  I climb in the slope-door cubby. Dank and spider-webby, and the whole damn joint’s getting hot. Smoke even down here, lower and lower. Some point, shit’ll start falling through. A cast iron tub on the head’d do the trick.

  Stone blocks is cool. I press agin em and keep my head low.

  A rattle sets me back.

  Snake!

  I ease back. Where the hell is he? I check my parts and step back again. He didn’t strike, yet. You’d think I could see his eyes or something. Shoot him? N
ot exactly easy to see down here, but he’s coiled back in the cubby.

  They’s an old shovel handle with no blade, other side the basement. Ducking smoke, I run over and grab it. Head back to the snake. He ain’t happy, got that tail-rattle snapping. I toss him across the floor and probe with the handle along the steps.

  I’m off the side now; whole house could fall in and it wouldn’t hit me. Can’t get air from the door—can’t open it for fear of two wandering shotguns.

  I freeze, all but my heart. Scales and slithering on my leg, where the pant’s pulled over the boot. Snake crosses my ankle, give me a shiver up the spine. I got something on my neck feels like a big old freaked-out spider. Every inch of my body tingles and I never knowed fear my whole life until now. I’m resolute on that. That rattler’s a long somebody, seems like fifteen minute ‘til the last of him crosses.

  I smash some bug was on my neck, wipe my hand on the cement.

  “Look’it that!” Voice outside the slope door.

  “Shoot the damn thing!”

  I roll down the cement steps and a shotgun barks. Part of the door blasts inward and I’m looking out a hole. Sunlight sheets in through the smoke, and I see Burly Worley’s got his shotgun pointed. He grins at the dead snake and don’t see me.

  I just about can’t breathe. Upstairs is howling. Smoke burns my lungs. I’m low as I can get but the smoke goes to the cement floor. I hold my breath.

  They must’ve seen the still and pipe out front. They wait.

  I’m ready to come out shooting. Move forward on my belly, Smith up front. Upstairs is all whooshing and roaring. Them boys got to be back ten fifteen feet else they’ll get suntans off the house. I blink away the burn in my eyes but it comes right back. Try to breathe with my sleeve over my mouth, but it don’t cut shit.

  Something upstairs drops. Sounds like the whole damn place is falling in. Back in the cubby. If they’s more snakes in here they ain’t worried about me. Shaft of light comes through the shotgun hole; the smoke looks heavenly.