Ashkettle Crazy

by A. M. Goetz

  Ashkettle Crazy

  Ashkettle Boys, Volume 1

  A.M. Goetz

  Published by A.M. Goetz, 2017.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  ASHKETTLE CRAZY

  First edition. August 7, 2017.

  Copyright © 2017 A.M. Goetz.

  Written by A.M. Goetz.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I: Bo

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Part II: Dack | 12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Part III: Sonny | 21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

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  About the Author

  For Karen

  Prologue

  Bo was named for the Boquet River that winds through Essex County in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Turbulent but serene, plunging yet dormant, the Boquet hugs its banks like a doting mother, giving shelter to lake trout and salmon and helping coax the roots of Joe-Pye weed and goldenrod grow deep and strong. And I guess that’s fitting because Bo’s little brother, Dack – Pop named him for the mountains that this river helps sustain.

  It’s fitting because I can’t count on both hands the number of nights Bo lay curled around his little brother in a ditch in the woods as the kid lay hurting from another one of Merle’s beatings. If Bo had roots, he’d give them to Dack, something to anchor him down in this life, make him feel strong. Give him some sense of stability. But Merle Ashkettle stood guard over those boys, towering tall and stubborn like the northern white cedar that dominates the banks of the Boquet and casting his angry shadow for miles.

  Growing roots in that kind of shade can’t be done. I know because Sonny tried. The second he was legal, Sonny tried to leave with Bo and Dack. But Merle chased them down before they ever made it past the end of Old Blake Road. At the time, we didn’t know what he threatened Sonny with to get him to back off, but the oldest Ashkettle was gone that next day – gone like Pop’s old truck. Gone like Pop too, maybe.

  If I live to be a hundred and ten, nobody will ever convince me that Merle was an Ashkettle by blood. His mean went clean through and poked out the other side like an arrow shot through a deer. Ashkettles were never mean like that. Pop wasn’t. Bo and Dack and Sonny weren’t like that. If my dad hadn’t been so damaged back then, he’d have called Merle an anomaly. The boys and I – we just called him mean and a liar.

  Bo and Dack and Sonny took care of each other for months after Pop passed on, until Merle showed up with his guardianship papers and his meanness and his instant, all-consuming hatred for Dack.

  I know in my heart, someone will probably have to kill Merle someday, and I get this sad feeling down deep when I think about it. Back then, anytime Dack screwed up – even a little – Merle landed on him like a sack of concrete. Bo huddled in a corner too many nights listening to it: Dack’s head being thumped over and over against the crumbling sheet rock in the living room. Kid never made a sound, and deep down Bo knew it was because he was forced to listen. Dack kept himself quiet, even when it hurt so bad he’d pass out. He kept quiet because he knew it would hurt Bo to hear his screams. Like it didn’t hurt the older boy to see the dents in the wall next morning, to see the same dents reflected in the bruises on his kid brother’s face.

  I never said much when we were kids, but I saw a lot, and Bo told me the rest. Later, after college, and once I started teaching in my own classroom, I learned how to spot the Ashkettles and the Gentrys of the world. They came to school afflicted—tired, beaten down, starving. Their clothes were questionable, and their loyalties fierce. And they were smart—Dack Ashkettle smart—and that’s saying a lot. Maybe it was because I’d been right in the thick of it back then, but coming from where I did, and growing up with Dack and Bo and Sonny, gave me an edge that few of my fellow teachers could rival. I had a sort of sixth sense when it came to spotting the kids who’d cut their teeth on neglect and grown up in fear.

  Dack was just a kid when Merle first came around, just about 9 years old. He was sixteen when the boys made their break—too damned young to be so damned sick—but it was Merle who’d made him that way. Merle, with his scarred, fat fists and his love of white powder and hard liquor, was like a germ infecting Dack’s mind and degrading it into a billion fragmented pieces.

  But unlike influenza or even rabies, there was no cure for Merle. And maybe there was no cure for Dack either, but I knew Bo, and I knew he had to try.

  That’s what this story is about.

  Part I: Bo

  I come home early that night, feeling a sick kind of skittish. It was a Tuesday in November, two days before Thanksgiving, and I’d been feeling it all day—nerves. Pop would’a said it was just a goose walking over my grave, but I knew my little brother, and I knew he was in trouble. So, I’d lied at work and lit out early for home, praying I’d find Dack okay, or even better—find him gone. Dack was a master at making hisself disappear, and I helled it home, picturing my little brother safe, curled up somewhere in the woods with a beat-up book and that old flashlight that would flicker even if God hisself held the batteries.

  It didn’t happen that way though.

  I pulled up to the front of Pop’s house, my heart beating hard in my chest as soon as the headlights cut the swath across the porch. And sure enough, Dack stepped out from the shadows, arms wound tight around his belly and patches of his hair snatched clean off his head. Blood trickled down from sad, bald places on his scalp and pooled in the corners of his eyes and mouth, mixing with fresh snot and the dried tracks of tears.

  “Don’t go in.” Dack whispered desperately, dragging hisself barefoot across the splintery boards of Pop’s porch. “Bo. Don’t go in. Just ... git back in the car.” He grabbed hold of the railing and began carefully lowering hisself down to the ground, step by agonizing step, his breath wheezing in his chest like steam pumping in an old engine. He was hurt bad, inside and out, and I run up the last two steps to grab onto him. And even through the pain, I saw hope and relief surface in his eyes.

  My brother always looked at me like that – like maybe I was the second coming of Christ back on Earth for no other reason than to do battle on Dack Ashkettle’s behalf.

  “What’d he do, Dack?” I gritted my teeth and willed myself to think about my brother and not all the ways I longed to kill the monster that called hisself our uncle. I slipped Dack’s left arm over my shoulder, wincing when he winced, breathing shallow when he breathed shallow. “What’d that bastard do?”

  “... McAllisters is here.” Dack murmured, bare feet finally touching cold, solid earth, as the hairs on the back of my neck did a horrified dance.

  “Shit.” I breathed, suddenly terrified. “Shit. Shit, Shit! Git in the damned car!” I pulled harder than I should have, and the kid let go this sound that I’ll never forgit long as I’m alive. It was some kind of cross between a sob and a scream, but it came out garbled and breathless, like it slipped out and away before he got a good handle on it.

  McAllisters hated all Ashkettles except for Merle, and they was the meanest, most soulless sons-a-
bitches on the planet. When he was at his drunkest, Merle would taunt Dack with the McAllisters ‘cause he knew we was both terrified of the twin brothers who we’d watched Pop and the sheriff take away time and time again.

  He’d never made good on it though. Not ‘til tonight.

  Without thinking too much about it, I yanked the passenger door open and shoved Dack inside, pushing his poor feet in after. I slammed the door, yelling at Dack to lock it, and I leaped up and over the hood to git to my own side just as Merle and Shaw and Shane come pouring out the front door like cockroaches. I made it into the driver’s seat and clapped down on the lock a split-second before Merle yanked on the handle, his bulging, ugly face pressed right up to my window. He splayed a bloody palm flat across the glass then, and I swear to God, he still had a clump of my brother’s hair caught in his ring. He hurled curses at us through the barrier, his fist trying to break through so he could have another go at Dack. But my hands was steady when I shoved the key into the ignition and backed away, tires squealing. I barked at Dack to git his seatbelt on as I stole a silent look at the gas gauge—less than a quarter tank—and I was broke till Friday.

  None of that mattered though, ‘cause Dack and me, we was finally free. Dack had passed 16 two days ago—legal age to quit school without the state coming after him—and there was nothing holding us here now.

  Later, I’d learn just how sick my brother had managed to become when I wasn’t looking. But as we raced off into the night that last time, all I could see was sweet freedom in our windshield and nothing but a raft of bad memories behind us that I was all too willing to forgit.

  So I took Dack, and I hightailed it out of those mountains that had sheltered us for years before they began to smother us slow. I took him, and I pushed the pedal all the way to the floor and lit out for someplace safe like we was on fire.

  And maybe we was; we was burning one hell of a big bridge, the one that had caused us nothing but broken bones and heartache and my brother’s sanity for seven hellish years. Seven years under Merle’s thumb felt like a lifetime to me. To Dack, it probably seemed more like a damned death sentence. But we’d suddenly been paroled.

  We was gonna take that good fortune and run with it. And I made a vow right then and there, as we shot down the entrance ramp onto I-70, that bastard would never git his filthy hands on my little brother ever again.

  I’d kill the son of a bitch first.

  2

  Dack used to talk to weeds. He’d sit outside on Pop’s old well cap at the house in Pennsylvania and start up conversations between two stems of yellow foxtail, of all things. He’d bring them weeds to life while he talked, and they’d work through problems just like real people.

  Sometimes Dack made the weeds mad. Other times, they’d be happy, obliged. Those weeds talked about everything we couldn’t, everything we didn’t dare.

  They was just weeds, though—two spindly things tucked away in the hollow and having hardly no impact at all on the world around them. Like us, them weeds grew tall and skinny in the Appalachian Mountains, easy to sway and not a damned thing special about ‘em.

  But they was special to Dack. I think they was Dack’s way of coping, his therapy of sorts. He could usually smile again after an hour or two spent with them yellow foxtails. He’d seem lighter, happier, like maybe he’d figured some things out.

  Them weeds was fearless ‘cause they thought only Dack was listening, but any time I seen my brother heading for the well cap, I’d make for the clump of sumac trees that grew behind ‘em, where I could sit and listen without being discovered.

  Dack had a voice and a mind like a poet, even back then. He could spin yarns that would keep me hooked for nearly an hour. It was like watching some bizarre version of Late Late Theater, but better ‘cause Dack and me—we was the stars of the show.

  And for some reason I’ll never git, Dack always made me out the hero. The yellow foxtails loved me; they worshipped me even. And after years and years of hearing how I’d come to Dack’s rescue over and over again, how could they not?

  Them weeds, though, they never heard the real versions of things. They just heard Dack’s side of the story.

  If they had, they’d know’d for sure the coward I was. And no matter how many times I lowered Dack’s hurt, broke body out the back window of our room afterward and pulled him into the damp safety of the woods, it was always too little, too late. Even though I kept blankets and pillows and aspirin and a canteen stashed down in the hollow for the next time we’d need ‘em, and even though I’d wrap myself ‘round my brother’s body as he lay next to me shivering on the cold ground, covered by damp fabric that smelled like dirt, it was never enough.

  I never managed to git him out before the beating began. It was always afterward. Them yellow foxtails – they’d hate me if they knew.

  Sometimes, after it was all over with, and Dack was safe, and Merle was somewhere sleeping it off, I’d steal back to the house and sit myself down on Pop’s old well cap under the glow of the dusk-to-dawn light. With fiery hatred steeping like rancid tea in the pit of my stomach and katydids screaming all around me like girls at a Frampton concert, I’d pull up a weed and try desperately to start a conversation.

  3

  Maybe I wasn’t expecting what I seen when I pulled up into Pop’s driveway that night in November, but I sure knew where I was headed once I had Dack strapped into the seat beside me, and I pointed my old beater straight for Jane’s. Her house was back up on the side of Timber Mountain, out of the way of everything and everybody, and the perfect place for two terrified kids on the run to make a pit stop for some gauze and aspirin.

  Jane was my age and the prettiest girl in school, but she was poor like a Ashkettle, and that made her different. The other girls, they spoke when they passed her in the hallways, but once she’d turned the corner, they’d snicker. They called her LumberJane ‘cause she wore Ben’s old hand-me-down flannel shirts held together by holes, and they said she smelled.

  But the only odor I ever caught wafting off Jane was the smell of wood smoke in the winter. Her daddy had an old wood stove he’d fire up every fall to heat the house, and Jane and Ben, they spent October through March with the smoke clinging like beggar lice to their clothes and hair. Me and Dack and Sonny, we didn’t mind. Jane was always nice to us. She wasn’t a bit stuck up, and she never judged us for being broke or for showing up to school hours late with leaves and bits of twigs meshed with our hair or snagged in the cuffs of our clothes. And when Dack come to school after one of Merle’s beatdowns, she’d plop down right beside him at lunch, never mentioning his bruises, and share with him half her boiled eggs or her jelly toast or whatever other paltry scraps she’d managed to scrape together in her father’s neglected kitchen.

  Jane loved us, I think. And I know we loved her. She was the subject of more than one of my best dreams once I hit puberty, and maybe she starred in Dack’s too.

  Jane was a Gentry, almost as low down the list as a Ashkettle, and her old man had miles of baggage left over from The War. But she’d sneak out at night by climbing down her mom’s old wisteria trellis, and she’d come climb up onto Pop’s porch roof. With Dack keeping us all captivated with stories about the comets that made ‘em, we’d sit there and watch the meteors in summertime, just the four of us, with Jane in one of Ben’s gray and faded wife-beaters and a pair of boy’s jeans cut off below the knee. Her feet was always in flip flops and her toes was always painted some ridiculous color that would have scored her a beating or at least a good hair-pulling from her Baptist aunt if she’d seen.

  Her get-up was made of necessity and completely worn out, and she still managed to make all our hearts beat way too fast. She had long hair, shiny and black like the pieces of chipped obsidian rocks we picked up along the C&O for cash. And she had green eyes that could laugh at us without being cruel. And anytime I was in some kind of fix that I couldn’t wiggle my way out of, finding Jane was always my first priority.

&n
bsp; And it was Jane who popped into my head first that November night as I glanced over at Dack slouched down in the seat, holding his hand over a particularly bad bald patch, smiling blankly and humming some nameless tune in a sort of frantic loop. Dack needed help, and I needed a quiet place, and we both needed Jane’s steadying presence, so I steered the car for Ridge Road and made the twisty climb up Timber Mountain. Jane’s old man sat on the front porch steps, staring off into empty space, and he smiled and nodded at us as we pulled up. And once my headlights hit the front of the house, I saw movement in Jane’s window. Seconds later, she was shinnying down the wisteria trellis. It wasn’t necessary—the stealth—‘cause Jane’s dad was right there, and he nodded and smiled at her just like he done at us, but I guess it made Jane feel sneaky or something to skinny out the window and creep down the side of the house like that.

  I killed the engine and had time to step out of the car before Jane was beside me, eyes curious and scanning me all over for injury. Jane knew all about Merle. She was the only one who did, and she’d patched us both up more times than I could count on both hands.

  But I shook my head this time, “It’s Dack.”

  I saw beautiful, teal eyes widen as she come to a stop just a few feet away. She opened her mouth, a question in her eyes, before Dack stepped from the car.

  It all stopped then when she took in the patchy hair and the blood that still run in congealing rivulets down Dack’s face and neck. The kid held one arm close to his body, and I wasn’t sure if it was his stomach that was hurting, or his elbow. Both, if I knew Merle.

  Jane stared, mouth open, but to her credit, she didn’t say nothing. She just took one great, long look and then gathered herself together. She nodded and crossed over to Dack, slipping her slight body beneath his own, his arm across her shoulder. I slipped in on Dack’s other side, and we half-walked, half-carried my kid brother up the dusty, wooden steps and into the house, Jane’s old man smiling to us as we passed.