by Taylor Brown
KINGDOM COME
The boy dropped the knife into the stone mouth of the well and watched the blade glitter into the depths, blood from its edge red-clouding its wake, haunting the blade like tidings of its history. In seconds the implement disappeared into profound and lightless depth. Who knew how long it would fall through such darkness, fluttering end over end.
The boy watched and waited. He thought at the bottommost point he might sense the plunge of the blade into lifeless silt, into companionship with sundry other items of such provenance. Pistols and pruning shears, medallions of broken promise, skulls newly crowned and arrested newborn, their sockets forever agape with wonder. Among such wreckage his blade would have a home, and some affinity however grotesque and sin-ridden might strike home the notion that he was not alone in the world, not the only one cast out by work of his own hands.
He felt no bottom, no plunge. After a time he pulled himself from the mortared stone rim and looked at the cold brown fields and heaps of snow, the naked trees, and when he walked away the earth beneath him seemed a hollow place where his blade danced ever deeper toward the heart of something black and whole and without end.
His loose-laced boots crunched on the frosted mud road. The road wound over a small rise to the west and toward this he tread, his black slouch hat haloing his head in shadow, the sun rising pale and heatless at his back. He had no pistol, no car. No kin to hide him. None who would. He had only her, his stepsister, no blood between them but what they’d made, and whether she would love him or hate him for what he’d done he could not know. Would not. Her husband’s face had looked so surprised at his end, his blood so bright and diffuse against the hard-packed snow.
At the crest of the rise he pulled his coat tighter around his fatless body and looked down a long slope to the next village west. Little houses sat white-roofed with snow. Spires of chimney smoke hung undizzied in their rise from the valley floor, straight as prayers recited at a hearth of warmth and peace. Everything storybook from such height.
He was about to move toward that place when something stopped him. A sound, a rumble out of the east. The way he’d come. He moved quickly off the road and into the trees, grabbing the first broken branch he could to swipe over his tracks. He retreated deeper and deeper into the wood, there being sparse underbrush to hide him. The sound rose rumbling along the road. It was a V8, one in particular. No other motor in this country made a sound like that.
He hid himself best he could behind a slim tree, slim as him, and watched. The car crested the rise and rolled to a stop at the place where he’d just stood. It was the McEvoy car, a ’40 Ford in black. The rear end stood much higher than the front, unsprung, no load of shine to set it level. The idle of the engine sounded grumpy, mean, not used to so little throttle.
A McEvoy elder stepped out of the passenger seat and walked to the front of the car, a shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm, a ragged hole at the elbow of his coat. The bootlegger crouched and examined the road, his hair white beneath his black stovetop hat. He touched the road with two fingers and the boy held his breath to slip nothing from behind his tree. Then the man looked up, right in his direction.
***
Bridgett had come to him first years ago under an October moon, their parents just married. He was at his father’s still a half mile up the mountain from the small cabin where they were all learning to live as one family. She had a fur wrapped over her shoulders against the cold and she appeared out of the hill-slanted trees like a mythic beast of some kind.
“Evening,” she said.
“Ain’t it past your bedtime?”
“Couldn’t sleep. I was wondering could I have a sup of moon. I ain’t ever had any.”
“Never?”
She shook her head. “Never-ever.”
“Well in my experience, it don’t put you to sleep. Not till it knocks you flat out.”
“I said I couldn’t sleep. Not that I wanted to.”
“Well.”
“Well why not? This is a bootlegging family I been daughtered to, right?”
“Bootleggers run the stuff. What we do is make it.”
“And what do you call that?”
He sniffed. “We don’t.”
“Well, I’ll just be going then.”
She got up.
“Wait,” he said.
He brought the jar from where it sat in the black puddle of darkness between his boots, the liquid cold and moon-silvered in the clear glass, the lightning hidden somewhere in that thick clarity so seemingly without substance or danger or bite.
Her face tightened after the first sip, the white heat in her throat, but she didn’t cough or make any sound.
“Goddamn,” she said, exhaling.
They passed the jar back and forth between them, the boy showing his palette stoic against the brew. The moon fell slantwise as they drank and slanted they became, the thick liquor glowing whitely at their temples. Before long other starlights rolled over them, alien and leering, and no familiar constellations could be reckoned out of the sky. All had been undone, made liquid, and the world would be recoupled along whatever deviant vectors sought intersection.
***
Boyd McEvoy was third of five sons, best driver of the lot. So people said, at least. He was not yet thirty with a black beard already struck through with shoots of white when he came for the first time to haul a load for the boy and his father, Old Oldham. The boy did the loading himself, the trunk of the Ford blacker than the surrounding night. Boyd and the boy’s father watched side by side, waiting and smoking, and the boy caught Boyd making sideways glances at his stepsister. What he felt was like the scalding flare of moon in his belly.
***
When Boyd married Bridgett the boy was there in the white chapel, erect and attentive alongside the quartet of McEvoy brothers, all in groomsmen’s black. The boy stood on the end, the shortest. Before the service began they slapped each other slyly and mussed one another’s hair and whispered jokes magnificently unfit for the Lord’s house. But when that wedding song started the procession, they went grim-lipped and serious and the boy, an only child but for Bridgett, welled with awe and envy for the blood that could bound them so tightly, could keep their wilder natures at bay.
The night before the wedding she had come to him at the still for the last time. She had come to say goodbye. She would be moving to Boyd’s cabin on McEvoy land, of course. Step-siblings, they had done the thing a last time, no moon to blame, and when she’d left the boy had drunk until the white liquor struck him comatose, sundered from the world, and in the morning he’d woken heaving and sick.
After the wedding he followed everyone down the front steps of the chapel and watched Boyd open the passenger door for his stepsister in her white dress, and she folded the billows neatly underneath her thighs and sat lady-like in that famous Ford. Boyd came around the other side all smiles and cranked the big supercharged motor that had outrun Federal revenuers year after year and drove his bride away, no reason to blame him.
The boy turned away wet-eyed and saw his shadow thrown crazed and misshapen against the church house door.
***
She started showing four months after the wedding, right on the cusp of suspicion. The boy’s father, long sick, passed away a few days later. The widow moved onto McEvoy land to take care of her pregnant daughter. The boy lived on in the once cramped cabin all alone, haunted by shadows and sighs.
***
When Bridgett’s water broke, Boyd was away on a run to Knoxville. A midwife and the girl’s mother and assorted McEvoy women were there to deliver the baby. When the head crowned the McEvoy women left the birth room and did not come back.
***
Bridgett’s mother arrived at the small cabin on horseback in the dark stillness before dawn. When the boy opened the door he saw in his stepmother’s eyes the rage of all evil afflicted her condensed into a single sin. His own. But when she opened her mouth and told him of the r
ed tuft of hair on the pate of the baby boy, a color conceived from a lineage of dark hairs and blackest the father’s, her words shook with fear.
“You,” she said. “You of all must do something.”
“What?”
“You of all,” she said. “You goddamn fool. Boyd will kill it and maybe Bridgett too. You as well. McEvoys do not brook such disgrace.”
The boy turned surveying the dim implements cluttered about the cabin.
“The shotgun is up at the still,” he said. “I got to get it.”
“No time, boy. Boyd will be back sunup from Knoxville.”
The boy shook his head and told her to wait a moment and pulled his britches off the bedpost and when he looped his belt he stuck the leather scabbard of his bowie knife through the front. He punched his slouch hat on his head and stove his feet into his boots, no time to lace them.
“Take this here horse,” she told him, handing him the reins. “You got to hurry.”
He looked up at the horse.
“Yes ma’am,” he said.
***
He took an old horse trail he knew to cut the distance, black spines of ridge and hill limned sheer-edged from the dimmest lightening of dawn. He came down the broken path and intersected the paved road five miles below McEvoy land. He got there just as Boyd’s Ford was racketing up the road bug-eyed from the valley below.
The boy broadsided the horse on the road and raised one ungloved hand toward the oncoming car. When it got close the nose and headlights dove toward the pavement, the tires nearly screeching but not.
Boyd hung an elbow out the window, then his black-haired head.
“That you, Oldham’s boy?”
“There’s been a problem, Boyd.”
“With what?”
“With your wife.”
Boyd gunned the motor. “Get to the point,” he said.
The boy was not sure what point to make. He needed him out of the car.
“Her baby, it ain’t yours.”
Boyd hung farther out his window.
“Not mine?”
“No, sir.”
“Who in the hell’s is it then?”
“Mine, I reckon.”
The door clicked and swung low and wide and a mustard-colored boot came down on the pavement.
“You reckon, do you?”
He put one big hand on the door and pulled himself out of the car and the boy saw a Colt .45 in his other hand.
“You sick son of a bitch.”
“Hold on,” said the boy, but Boyd was already leveling the pistol. The boy hauled the horse hard around and slapped her rump hoping Boyd would follow him but what followed was the shot flat and long down the road. The horse faltered, sunk still running to the pavement, and the boy was thrown rolling down the asphalt and off the shoulder into the snow.
The horse screamed somewhere behind him. A second shot silenced her.
“Made me kill one of my horses,” said Boyd, standing tall over him. “Maybe that ain’t all. This better not be no joke.”
“It ain’t.”
Boyd squatted down low.
“You and me, we’re supposed to be brothers now. Brothers-in-law. But sounds like you went and broke that law, didn’t you? Just couldn’t keep it to yourself. What we got here is a outlaw.”
“Like you’re the one to say.”
“Get up.”
The boy did as he was told.
The sun was over the trees, the light strange and gray, the dead horse russet as stillborn fire where the headlights touched her. The road was gunmetal, made crooked by the land, the hills tall and close. Down the pavement a ways an offshoot of dirt wound westward where no great mountain stood. The car idled brokenly behind them. The boy could feel the motor in his chest, the percussions.
He looked at Boyd.
“She’s my wife,” said Boyd. “And that’s my baby in her. So you, you son of a bitch, you won’t be coming near her ever again. Understand?”
The boy nodded his head.
“No,” he said, “I want to hear you say it. Say you understand.”
The boy licked his lips to better pronounce the words, his gaze set past Boyd’s shoulder on the mud road west.
“I understand,” he said, extending his hand.
When Boyd switched hands to shake the boy pulled the knife.
Afterwards he did not take the pistol, the car. Both scared him, the pistol still clenched in Boyd’s hand, the car idling meanly and alien as the engine caged behind his ribs.
***
The boy turned edgewise the tree to slim his silhouette from the McEvoys on the road. The black bark of the trunk exploded yellow-hearted from the blast and the boy took off running, his hat snagging on a low branch, his progress a crackling of dead limbs, his red hair wild among the black and white wood. Other shots caromed through the trees, each report a relief that the slug had not struck him.
He splashed through a creek clear as moonshine and the water cut right through his loose-laced boots, cold beyond all his reckonings, and it was that ice-couriered clarity more than the shots that told him he would not get cleanly away.
A slug erupted in his hamstring and he fell turning and twisting red-slushed down a long slope toward a broken jaw of black rock upthrust on the verge of a high ridge. He twisted and turned flailing trying to stop his fall and the dirt and stone and root of the land were too slippery and frost-hardened to help him.
He struck the black-toothed crags and felt things crack inside him like all those dead and broken limbs through which he’d plummeted. He opened his eyes and saw his fall red-inked upon the slope above him, and then the stove hats and moon faces of McEvoys appeared on the ridgeline.
He turned from them through jets of pain and saw below him on the valley floor that picture perfect village, the whispers of smoke still unharried by wind or mania, the roofs so white on the neat outlay of shoveled streets.
Kingdom come, maybe, but come not for him.
He turned and saw the line of them still assembling, this family, their hats steepled blackly against the pale sky, their barrels pointing him down like a man being judged.
She and the baby would be safe now, satisfaction given. She could say he forced her. She could say anything.
He turned and pulled himself over the rock edge, turning end over end into the storybook kingdom, his head fire-colored against the slate face of his fall.
THE TATTOOIST’S DAUGHTER
Annie looked at the dime-sized spot of crimson fluid left at the bottom of her mother’s glass. Her opportunity.
“That Benson boy has been accepted to medical school,” her mother said. “You two used to be so cute together.” She paused here as if to await confirmation.
Instead Annie raised her glass and polished off her last inch of wine. She had to catch up.
Her mother rubbed one finger along the rim, thin-edged as a curved knife beneath her fingerprint. Her face blank. “So cute together,” she said again. “Of course, who knows what he would think of you”—her eyes drifted to Annie’s sleeveless top and exposed arms—“what he would think of you now.”
Annie scooped her palm underneath the crystal sphere-shape of her mother’s glass, taking the stem between the webbing of her middle fingers. She did the same to her own glass and stood. “More wine?” she asked, smiling.
“There’s a merlot in the top right corner of the wine rack.”
“You don’t want to finish the Cardinal Zin?”
“I think we’ve had about enough of that, don’t you?”
“There’s half a bottle left.”
“Be a sweetie and open the merlot, please.”
“Yes, mother.”
On the way into town, Annie had swung by the grocery store to buy a homecoming gift, a bottle of wine. If she drank wine in the city, she drank red or white, nothing fancy, though she stuck mainly to a marquee concoction of her own design: Jack Rabbit Slim. Jack Daniel’s, diet cola, and a dash of white powde
r. Sometimes the real thing, sometimes not. She had an image to uphold, after all. A business.
But she was coming home and that meant wine. At the grocery store, she’d perused the long shelf of bottles, judging labels one against another. Annie loved the labels, how much art and artifice could be condensed into a 5x7 rectangle of paper. How much identity. The Cardinal Zin bottle offered a manic-sketched debauchee in sacerdotal vestments. His mustaches were straight-inked like Salvador Dali with no playful upturn. Annie had known her mother would hate the bottle. Sacrilege. She’d bought it.
Now she saw it sitting on the kitchen counter alongside the cutting board and the hardening hunk of uncut cheese. She placed the glasses on the counter and thumbed the cork deeper into the zinfandel bottle. When she did, the topless mermaid on the underbelly of her forearm writhed suggestively. The Cardinal stared back at this half-naked specimen lusty-eyed, a kindred djinn of some kind trapped in one dimension just like the tattoo he watched.
“You know,” said her mother over the back of the couch, “when you first got here I thought you were wearing long sleeves.”
Annie moved Cardinal Zin into the shadows against the wall and slid the bottle of merlot her mother had requested from the rack. “That’s what it’s called, Mom. A sleeve.”
“In this town we call it trash.”
Annie looked over her shoulder and saw her mother sitting primly cross-legged on the couch, her back to her, her face turned in profile to speak better behind her. Her Gucci slipper, gold-buckled, hung expertly from the end of one perfect red-painted big toe. She was not watching Annie. Her head couldn’t turn that far around, Annie told herself. Though she didn’t put much past the woman.
Annie had her own vices, devices. She reached into her clutch on the counter and removed a caramel-colored pill bottle. Careful not to rattle the pills, Annie removed a benign-looking white tablet. Mother’s little helper, she thought. That’s what the Rolling Stones had called it, their tribute to suburban anti-anxiety prescriptions. She placed the Xanax underneath the heavy glass base and worked the bottle like you would a mortar and pestle, grinding the pill to a white dust on the countertop. She was practiced in this art.
