“Yeah, that wadn’t right, not that he didn’t beat on him none. He just used his foot mostly.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Fuller kicked him?”
“We all kicked him, but it was Dale that kicked the shit out of him, you understand what I’m sayin’ to you?” Paul explained it as if he was tallying a math problem that was too complicated for me to follow.
You add 8 lies to 7 fudged facts, carry the half-truth and you get…I’m not buying this shit, I thought. “So you’re telling me Dale lied on the stand?”
“It ain’t a party without the booze,” he said, grinning like I finally got it. “We drove out Timberland Road to the old turn off and left the pickup lights on. Dale had been riding in the back of the truck, making sure our boy was gettin’ the royal treatment. They were both laid up on that musty couch Fuller kept against the cab. He’d been feeding beers to Prichard faster than you could pull the tabs off. So there we were facing the trees what led down in the gorge. You remember?”
“I know the ones.” A big cross stood in the ground there now.
“Well, Dale got out back and Fuller started yelling at Pritchard to climb down, which ain’t happening. He’s sittin’ stone still as a frog on a log. And I’m on the other side of the truck yellin’ for him to get his stick-ass off the couch. ‘We got us some talkin’ to do, nigger.’ But old Pritchard’s not having any of it.”
“Why didn’t you leave him alone?”
“That wadn’t the plan.”
“Thought you said you didn’t have a plan.”
“No made up one anyway,” he said. “Dale went around back to drag his ass over the tailgate when Pritchard unloaded a full beer can at him and busted his nose. That’s when Fuller swung his hand out and hit the wheel well. You could hear it clear as a bell when he broke it. Fuller was screaming and I climbed up on the running board an’ got hold of the back of Pritchard’s shirt, and yanked him over the side. His head hit the dirt with this popping sound. There must’ve been a rock or something he landed on. Blood was everywhere. I mean I was stepping in it. And Dale come charging around the truck with this crazy look in his eyes, and kicked Pritchard right in the side of the head. And he just quit moving.”
“Hold on. Stop a second.” I heaviness settled in around my eyes and I swore I was going to be sick looking at my brother. Studying the open rafters above my head, I breathed until the nausea passed. “Christ, Paul, what in the hell did y’all mean to do?”
“It wadn’t to kill him,” he confessed, lips peeling undone at the dry corners of his mouth. “I swear to cupcakes and Christ, kicking his ass was it.”
“But somebody killed him! Now who?”
If there were any tell tale signs of remorse they couldn’t be found. He pressed his fingertips up along the bridge of his nose, rubbing the bones outlined in his thin cheeks.
“Dale fucked it up,” he said.
I listened, but didn’t let him off. “Oh, you helped him fuck it up plenty.”
“But I never meant to kill nobody.”
“Paul, I wanna believe you, but there’s parts that...” I hesitated, trying to find the right words. “Don’t make any damn sense. You picked him up knowing y’all were gonna hurt him. And what happened to Charles later—nobody deserves that. I don’t care what your problems are.”
“Dale done it.”
“He killed him then?”
“What I said. He kicked in the skull. Pritchard started doing this twitching thing with his arms. Foam’s coming out his mouth.”
My stomach clenched in hopeless knots. All the air went out of me. “He was having seizures?”
“Bad ones. If he didn’t get to the hospital stat—”
I cocked my head. “Stat! What’re you, a doctor now?”
“Listen, I turned him over on his side when he started throwing up.” He patted his chest. “That was me that done that. And he was still breathing.”
I sat there processing it all. “So why tie him up?”
“I didn’t. I drug Pritchard up on the truck by my own self. And that’s all.”
“Where was Fuller?”
Paul’s face grew more agitated. “Already in the cab.”
“Then who put the rope on him?”
“I guess it was Dale.”
“You guess? Fuck you were there.” I pointed out.
His teeth snarled out. “Done told you I was driving. All I remember was Dale standing up in the back and hearing this rolling around sound. Then him hollering and clapping and shit, yelling ‘How’s that feel nigger.’ But I ain’t paying no real attention. Hell, it was Fuller that told me.”
“Told you what?”
“He said ‘Oh shit, you ain’t gonna believe what he done did,’ and I looked around, only there wadn’t no Pritchard back there no more, jus’ a rope drawn across the tail gate.”
“So Dale pushed him out of the truck?”
He held his hands up. “It wern’t me.”
“Because you were driving?”
“I done said so.”
I scratched my face and waited as all the information filtered like a funnel through my head, sweating out the bullshit. I knew what he’d said, but I was more interested in what he’d done. “You’re lying to me,” I shot back, knowing the other facts in the case.
He smacked his lips and winced with disdain. “Now you hurt my feelings. Why you wanna do that?”
“How come you didn’t get up on the stand?”
“Would it have made a difference?” he barked. “There was my record. Nobody was gonna believe me.”
I recalled the gruesome details lining the courtroom wall. “There was blood all over the road, Paul. They showed us the damn pictures at the trial.”
“Why didn’t they just put ’em on a billboard? Anything looks worse blowed up!”
“It was two miles, Paul. You drug him until the asphalt tore his clothes off, along with his face, for Christ sake! They couldn’t find his arm, because you ground it off at the elbow.”
“I was drunk!” Paul argued back. “I done explained that.”
“You haven’t explained shit.” My body started trembling as about a hundred lights flashed off in my head at once. “You said Dale stood up and then you heard the sound of something rolling in the back? How did you see him stand up?”
He smiled at me like an alligator coming out of the water to eat. “Guess it was the rearview mirror.”
“You guess, huh?”
“I told you what happened.” He spat his words at me like we were kids again.
“Here’s a news flash for you then. It doesn’t explain two miles of pavement with a man’s skin burned in it.”
Paul leaned back, holding on to the edge of the picnic table and looked over at the guards by the chain fence, the ones holding the rifles. “I hate you,” he said. “I hate you more than I ever hated this place. If I got one wish, when they were supposed to strap my ass in the chair six months ago, it’s that you could’ve ridden my lap when they threw the switch.”
A thread of panic sowed up the joints in my back. It was time to leave. And something said never come back.
“You’re pathetic.”
He offered up a greasy wink from across the table. “You want your precious truth so damn bad you can taste it. I see that look in your eye. It’s killin’ you, ain’t it? I know something and you don’t.” He tapped the side of his head, the smell of smoke on his breath as he barely whispered, “It’s all in here.”
“Then tell me!”
“You really wanna know? Then I’ll tell you.” He leaned in close, wet a finger and stroked the edges of an eyebrow. “I killed that fuckin’ sorry assed nigger. Put him on the edge of the tailgate, so that when I took off he’d fall out. The only thing Dale’s guilty of is not stopping me.”
The taste of disgust made it too hard to swallow. I tried to say something, but his confession had crushed every hope of finding any humanity left in him. And the emotional weight o
f that pressed heavy on my chest.
“All Dale could do was leave his stomach in the back of the truck bed—weak little fucker. So, yeah, I did it. How fuckin’ happy are you now? You know my little secret. Feel special yet?”
“You killed a man,” I said.
He shrugged a shoulder and laughed, cigarette ash snapping off with a twitchy movement of his thumb and forefinger. “He was just a nigger.”
“You use that word again, and I’m gonna come across this table and knock your teeth out.”
He brought his finger to my face. “It’ll be the last thing you do. I can promise you that.”
“I could care less. So test me.” My fists clenched under the table. While Paul fidgeted with a decision, tension spread rapidly through my joints, and I was comforted by it in some strange way. He could push me only so far before I would snap. The fact I would jump across the table and grab him up by his neck was something he wasn’t ready to chance.
“You know who you sound like?”
“Our conversation’s over.”
“The Good Shepherd,” he spit the words out, as though he hadn’t heard a thing I said. “Sounded just like him, I swear.”
“I may sound like him, but you’ve damn near put on his pants and walked a mile or two.”
“That’s funny stuff, bro. But let me tell you something.” He had eyes like barbed hooks the way they stayed on me. “I respected that man almost as much as I feared him.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Well, we all gotta embrace something. You think Pritchard didn’t know to fear me? Now that would have been a mistake.”
“Mistake for what, laughing at you for pissing yourself?”
“Yes, it was.” His smug eyes danced from under his brow.
“You’re not even sorry, are you?”
“Why would I be?”
“You tell me,” I snapped.
“The same way Jefferson Dupree could bend me over my bunk at night and scream in my ear, ‘Daddy’s bringin’ home the bacon’ when he came in my ass. The same way I faked Darla’s death and watched her drive off on a bus. Same fuckin’ way I lied about it the next day. Because I don’t care.”
A tight string of anger broke across my vision, and I almost fell off the bench. “What the fuck are you talking about? Darla’s dead.”
“Oh, no. That’d be where you was wrong.” He rolled his finger at me and then back at himself. “And I was right. See…I wanted you to believe she was dead, so I could fuck with you a little bit.”
A raw sickness lurched up through my throat, bringing doubt with it. “You’re lying again.”
“Why do you think Marcus left a month later?”
Tears strained the corners of my eyes, as I tried to measure some glimmer of truth. “You’re lying to me.”
A look of accomplishment came over his face. “Get control of yourself, you’re makin’ me sick over here. Besides, she was carrying Marcus’ little bastard in her when she left. Think about it, I couldn’t make that kinda shit up. Hell, I caught ’em bumping uglies in the barn the year before.”
The muscles in my jaw flexed tight. “You’ve gone to her grave with me to lay down flowers.”
“Carnations. Yeah, you’re so stupid.”
“You would’ve said something.”
“Wrong! And you’re supposed to be so fuckin’ bright. Look at you cry baby. Nobody cared anymore after the church fell a part.” He held out his arms and hugged his shoulders, chains rattling across his chest. “We had to take care of each other. And little ole Darla was a sweetheart, worked us out a little arrangement on the side so she’d give me a taste too. She was good about taking turns, if you know what I mean.”
If my brain had been glass it would have shattered into pieces. The mental image of Marcus and Paul having sex with my little sister made me sick. “You think I’m stupid? I’ve shitted smarter things than you, and quite frankly, you’d be a waste of paper. I hope you rot in hell.”
“Don’t be angry.” He tapped the tabletop as friends would at a bar ordering a round of drinks. “You wanna know why?”
I shook my head no. “Keep it to yourself.”
Paul laughed then. It was a deranged thing, a sound coming off its hinges. “Oh, no, that’d be too easy, because I want you to hear it. Hear how the Good Shepherd—ain’t that what you called him? Whatn’t nothin’ good about him. I never did get that dumb ass nickname. But I knew one thing, his seed didn’t fall too far from the tree, cause that bastard Marcus was jus’ like him, two peas in a fuckin’ pod. Like father, like son, everybody got a turn.” He made it rhyme when he said it. “And Darla was an easy ride.”
“And you’re sick.”
He looked off along the fencing, eyes busy following a guard behind the chain link. “I like when you’re thinking, bro. You know why? ’Cause it makes you fuckin’ dumb and numb when you should be worried about things…like me.” His eyes cut back hard on mine, a frozen stare lost in the darkness of his pupils. A darkness I was sure I had not seen before.
The muscles in my neck knotted up, mouth turning dry. “You supposed to scare me now? You better go on inside.”
“I’ll go when and where the fuck I want to.” He smiled and his teeth came through slowly.
“I’ll make sure to let Amy know how you’re holding up.” I pushed down the cake ball in the back of my throat. “So there’s no confusion on why she shouldn’t come down here.”
“I don’t think you’re gonna be doing that.”
“Wanna bet I won’t?”
“Well.” He drifted up easily. “If’n I were a betting man I’d be throwing my money away on you.”
Drawing back away from the table, I forced myself to my feet. His hand dropped open, and I followed the shiny sliver of metal falling down between his fingers. I turned to run and absorbed the impact of his body with a grimace, arm slipping over my shoulder and neck, the firm grip of chains closing around me.
“You should have feared me, Lee.”
For a split second I was twelve again, bowels loosening at the sound of those eerily familiar words. It could have been my stepfather leaning in behind me, only much worse. The puncture of my brother’s first swing brought a fire to my ribcage, the unexpected sensation of skin separating along a point of entry. My body quivered as the shank rotated over and released from my side, pain radiating up through my chest from the throbbing wound. I hunkered down as the breath left out of me. Almost at once, I knew he had punctured a lung. Hitting the concrete floor drove the remaining air out of my body. There was nothing to scream with. And in that instant Paul’s eyes became vast fields of thin ice I had misjudged. The realization of my mistake flowed over me in a drowning wave of regret; I had skated out too close to the center, past the danger signs, and fallen, painfully, through the surface.
Paul leaned to the side of my face and kissed me, terrible smells of his breath pushing into my nose as I struggled to fill my deflated lung with air. He pulled back as he whispered, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?”
I remembered mouthing the word, “No,” as he motioned his arm to stab me again in the throat or face or wherever he thought best, then hearing the single report of a firearm. Of watching him collapse on his side, mouth flexed open against the concrete. All of the small red bubbles popping with each passing gasp.
16
“Why didn’t you share that with me?” Amy touched my arm and I gravitated away from her trembling hand.
I looked around and saw the sporadic circle of faces staring into mine, their trail of eyes a mixture of sorrow and support, two things I did not feel worthy of. And like a well-seasoned sailor who understands the greater complexities of weather, I tacked hard in defense of the storm that was my sister, Hurricane Amy.
“Don’t look at me that way. It’s not like you didn’t know most of this,” I said.
Rolling waves rode out their course behind us, silence remaining behind with all of the depth and layers it sometimes
brings to a conversation.
Charlie flipped a stick in the fire, flames seizing hold of it. “Nobody’s judging you. I think it’s simply digesting what happened that’s left us on our heels. We’re all probably shocked. I know I am. When you sit here and try to imagine all this...it’s a lot to absorb.”
Nicole looked at Charlie as though she were a disease in a book. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re scratching the surface of a question that should have been answered years ago.” The contempt was both sudden and face punching as she turned to me. “You’re a selfish asshole, and I mean that with a capital A. You know that? Why in the world didn’t you tell her about your sister?” She pointed to Amy and I didn’t bother to follow her hand.
The Weight of Glass Page 17
