“Morning, brother. How did you sleep?”
“Worse than ever.”
“You got no peace of mind. Them shrinks didn’t do you a bit of good.”
“How long do I have to stay here?”
Joshua flicked his cigarette, sending ashes onto the rug. “You act like I’m holding you here against your will.” He laughed, the barking of a thirsty dog. “I ain’t my brother’s keeper. Pretty funny, huh?”
“Can I go, then?”
“It’s a long walk back to town.”
“I’ll call a cab.”
“Sorry. I can’t let you use the phone. You might say something we’ll both regret.”
“Okay, then. I’ll walk.”
“So you don’t want to wait for your dear, sweet honeybunches of a wife.”
“Leave her out of this.”
“That ain’t the deal.”
Jacob looked at the closet. The door was closed. He wondered what was hidden behind it. “You have the house. And what I already paid you. Isn’t that enough?”
“What the hell good is this old place since I can’t sell it? Nothing but a snake den of memories that sneak out and bite you. You owe me plenty more, Jake. You’ve owed me for a long time. Now it’s time to pay up.”
“Whatever you want. Just leave us alone.”
“‘Us’? I thought you’d decided your wife was a cheating bitch who deserved to die.”
Jacob rubbed his eyes with the tops of his fists. “No. I didn’t say that. You said it, didn’t you?”
“Jake, how many times do I got to tell you? I’m only doing what’s best for you. I’m only doing what you would do, if you had the cojones.”
Jacob leaned forward, straining, and looked under the bed. Nothing. “You never took care of me.”
“Better than the old man ever did, that’s for sure.”
“Because he loved you the best.”
“Love? The old man? Them words don’t go together.”
“He did all of this for us, Josh. He wanted both of us to carry on for him.”
“Except I never wanted it. Not the fucking legacy, not the place in the community, not the life given in tireless service to others. I just wanted the money. But Dad fucked me over by leaving me the house instead. Laughed all the way to the goddamned grave, with you sitting there holding his bedpan and a fresh copy of the will.”
Jacob’s head throbbed and his tongue rasped against the roof of his mouth, the result of too much whiskey. He looked around the room. The only time he had ever desired ownership of this house was when the lawyer cracked open the will and announced that it belonged to Joshua. Maybe he should have bought it then. Surely the lawyer could have found a way around the covenant that prevented its sale.
The room seemed smaller and less forbidding than it had in their youth. Two baseball gloves hung on a row of pegs above the dresser. One was right-handed, one left-handed. Jacob had learned about transverse twins, and how the embryo split and the two halves developed as mirror opposites, facing each other, confronting each other. Jacob clenched his right hand. Joshua, as a lefty, had always been the better baseball player, especially as a pitcher.
That was one of the few ways their grade school teachers could ever tell them apart: by the hand with which they wrote. Occasionally Joshua would force Jacob to cover for him while he was off skipping school or smoking marijuana under the football stadium bleachers. Jacob had practiced writing with his left hand until the print was legible. He didn’t want to disappoint Joshua, and of course Joshua wielded the ultimate weapon against him.
Jacob had often imagined the two of them facing each other in the womb, fighting for Mom’s physical resources and sapping her strength. Then, at the moment of release, struggling toward the bright opening above in a desperate, winner-take-all race. As if they each knew the prizes that awaited and the stakes of life and death.
“Renee doesn’t know about you,” Jacob said.
“She knows enough.” Joshua went to the window.
Outside, the sun had risen but was veiled in ragged clouds. A spring breeze whistled through the shutters and a loose slat knocked against the exterior wall. Tap tap tap.
Mother had made that same sound walking down the hall after her stroke, tapping with her cane. Jacob could picture her hunched inside a peach flannel nightgown and wearing frayed slippers, ankles streaked with thick blue veins. Her body trembled as she slid a foot forward, balanced herself, swung the cane and planted its tip against the floor, adjusted her weight on the handle, and slid the second foot beside the first. Repeated over and over, slowly, until she reached the stairs. Then the tap of the cane would be broken by the clatter of her spidery hand against the railing.
“We had some good times in the old barn, didn’t we?” Joshua said, without turning.
“The chickens didn’t.”
“Heh. So you remember that, huh?”
Jacob grew faint and wanted to lean back on the bed but was afraid Joshua would take it as a sign of weakness. His lightheadedness was partially due to the hangover, but Joshua’s torture of the animals still had the power to shock him. The things Joshua did with a lit cigarette and that place where the guinea hens’ eggs came out . . .
He swallowed a hard knot of liquor nausea. “Daddy never did figure out why the hens quit laying.”
“The Gentleman Farmer. What a joke. He just wanted a big driveway so he could see his enemies coming from a long way off. That Wells paranoia runs deep, don’t it, brother?”
“You could have sent me a letter. I would have paid you and you wouldn’t have had to come back.”
“It’s more fun this way.” Joshua went to the closet, grinned, and opened the door. Jacob closed his eyes. The creak of the hinges hadn’t changed in two decades. The sound was still a dry scream combined with a perverted snicker.
“Wish me, Jake,” Joshua said, and they may as well have been eleven years old again. Wish Me started out as a game where one of them would guess which toy the other boy was holding in his bed across the dark room. Then Wish Me evolved into an elaborate fantasy in which they pretended to be someone else.
From Captain Kangaroo to Pete Rose to Batman to Shaggy on the “Scooby Doo” cartoon, they would run through the heroes of the day. Then Joshua started on monster movies, Dracula and the Mummy, using sinister voices that were as creepy as those of swarthy Hollywood actors. Instead of staying on his own bed, Joshua would sneak across the dark floor and slide under Jacob’s.
“Wish me a monster with fangs and red eyes,” Joshua would whisper in the darkness.
Jacob would barely be able to breathe and his vocal chords grew as tight as banjo strings. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“It’s not me you’re afraid of. It’s the Sock Monster.” And the sock would climb over the edge of the mattress, Joshua’s hand inside, scratching softly against the blankets. And no matter how many times Jacob told himself it was only a hand, the menace in Joshua’s voice made the Sock Monster a real and terrible threat. And Jacob would squirm away and bunch up near the headboard, only to find the Sock Monster crawling through the bed’s gap to snap and claw at his flesh.
All the while, as he pinched and poked, Joshua laughed and made cruel comments in his creepy fake voice. He would keep up the Sock Monster game until he was bored or tired, then he would say, “Do you give, you big sissy?”
By that time, Jacob would be curled into a shuddering and whimpering ball.
“Suck that snot back up your nose and tell me you give.”
“I give,” he said when he could part his clenched teeth.
Each morning, Jacob never failed to find a sock under the bed, pocked with small round spots of dried blood. His blood. As if the Sock Monster had really dug teeth into him, pulled his hair out by the roots, gnawed his fingers and toes.
Eventually, Joshua stopped sliding under the bed and began hiding in the closet instead. That’s when things really started getting nasty. And Jacob was eleven agai
n.
“Wish me, Jake,” Joshua repeated, and Jacob opened his eyes to find himself in the present, in the room he never thought he’d see again except in occasional nightmares.
“I don’t want to play.”
“You better. Or I’ll tell.”
“I’m not twelve anymore.”
“No, but the statute of limitations don’t run out on murder.”
“It wasn’t murder.”
“Well, I guess in a court of law they’d call it manslaughter or reckless endangerment or something to make sure you got off with a slap on the wrist. Since you’re so upstanding and all. But we both know it’s a killing no matter what name you give it.”
Jacob felt as if his ribs were splintered and digging deep into the meat of his lungs and heart. “I was just a kid.”
“That cane was her life, Jakie Boy. She hardly ever took a step without it. Even when she sat and read the newspaper, or dusted her little knickknacks, that cane was right there with her. She probably could have beat off a rabid mountain lion with that thing. She sure enough knew how to whoop us with it.”
“She shouldn’t have hit me. Not right there on the elbow, where it made my arm go numb.”
“You always was the type to carry a grudge. Look what you done to me. Let me live like scum while you rode that golden ticket to the top. And I reckon you figured Momma was in the way, too.”
“She shouldn’t have hit me.”
“The stroke crippled her up a little, but it didn’t hurt her mind a bit. Helped her focus. Just made her hate us that much more. You remember why she hit you?”
“Because I was in striking distance.”
“No. That was the other times. This time, it was because you broke her little ceramic rooster.”
“I didn’t break her ceramic rooster.”
Joshua laughed, lit another cigarette, sucked in the burning tobacco as if it were a hit of eternal life. “Hey, I tried to tell her, but she didn’t believe me. So I reckon it was either you or somebody who looked a lot like you.”
“You bastard.”
“When the eagle head of that cane knocked against your bone, I heard it clear across the house. Figured it served you right. Still, that wasn’t no excuse to mess with her cane like that.”
“You’re the one who snuck into their room and stole it.”
“As a favor. You’re my brother.”
Jacob had a little pocket knife, a Case with two blades that their father had given him for a Christmas present. When Joshua brought him the cane that night, Jacob slid it under his blankets and kept it there until he heard Joshua snoring across the room. Jacob had intended to mar the cane in some way, maybe carve his initials or try to raise a few splinters to catch his mother’s skin. But he’d found a soft vein in the wood near the bottom and he worked the knife deep into it, gouging until the cane had a little flexibility. Jacob thought maybe the cane would crack as Momma swung it at him and missed. He never dreamed it would give way while she was descending from the top of the stairs.
An accident, they had said. Warren Wells was the one who found her, sprawled and twisted at the bottom of the stairs, one shattered leg poking through a broken baluster. Dad didn’t scream or moan or even shed a tear. He didn’t bother calling 9-1-1. With the calmness of an undertaker, he had called the sheriff’s department and then the ambulance service, telling them not to hurry. He seemed more upset over the broken baluster than over his wife’s death.
She was insured for two million, after all.
“I didn’t mean for her to get hurt,” Jacob said.
“That’s a good one. Ever notice how everybody close to you ends up getting hurt sooner or later? And never on purpose?”
“Except you. I could never hurt you enough, and you’re the only one I ever wanted to kill.”
Jacob looked out the window at the top of the barn. The morning sun caught the hills beyond the house, capped them with the golden anger of dawn. The light glinted off the barn’s tin roof and the drops of dew that lay across the surrounding meadows sparkled like leaky diamonds. As a child, Jacob had often awakened before anyone else in the house, even his insomniac mother, and he would go out into the fields alone to breathe the air of an unspoiled day.
“When’s the last time you visited her grave?” Joshua said.
Jacob realized Joshua was staring at the family cemetery on the top of the ridge, where a few stone markers were fenced off from the cattle. Cemeteries required permanent easements. The land could never be used unless the bodies were disinterred and moved to other resting places. When Jacob had learned of that legal detail, he had forever become a believer in cremation. There were no laws governing the disposal of ashes, and such a send-off didn’t damage real estate values.
“Why would I visit Mom’s grave?”
“Ain’t her I was talking about.”
“Mattie doesn’t have a grave.”
“The other one. Christine.”
“That burial was for Renee. She was still Catholic then.”
“So you think the dead sleep better in tiny pieces, scattered on the wind?”
“Except for those like you who go to hell.”
“Mattie could have been buried here,” Joshua said, nodding toward the family plot that held three generations of the Wells dead. “You know kin is always welcome under home ground.”
Something thumped outside the room, a sound eerily similar to the one Mother had made while tumbling to her death down the stairs. Jacob tried to stand, then gave up.
“We have a guest,” Joshua said, showing teeth that were brown from tobacco.
“Renee?”
“No, she’s Thursday, remember.”
“Not...”
“Heh. I’m sure you two will have a lot to talk about. It ain’t been that long, has it?” Joshua called out of the room. “Honey, we’re in here.”
Jacob lay back on the bed again, his head swimming, his pulse sluicing through the veins of his temples like liquid barbed wire. He wondered how quickly a physical addiction to alcohol could cause a case of delirium tremens. Footsteps came down the hall and stopped at the doorway. He closed his eyes against the dawn.
“Hello, stranger,” she said.
He didn’t have to look to picture her. Her face was dark, the tan color of a worn football, eyes as black as midnight crows. She was several inches shorter than Joshua but she’d be standing straight, her breasts small and firm beneath the men’s shirt she always wore. Her hands would have their first wrinkles now, the fingernails chipped. Her hair was thick and dark and flowed down her back to her waist. Drinking would have been hard on the skin around her eyes, and he wondered if she had let her hygiene deteriorate to match the environment in which she lived. But she had made her bed, tangled its blankets, stained its sheets, and now she could lie in it and rot for all Jacob cared.
“He’s in a mood,” Joshua said.
“Poor chiquito,” she said. “He always was the sensitive type.”
Her voice hadn’t changed over the years. It was still that same husky silk that even a telephone line couldn’t diminish, the clipped accent not much influenced by her exposure to eastern Tennessee. He could even smell her now, a woodsy, animal odor, a wisp of sweat, a perfume that blended patchouli and cinnamon. Beneath that lay the faintest scent of her vagina, as if she and Jacob had made love in the bed across the room from him as he slept.
Or maybe that was just his imagination. She would never do such a thing. Nothing to tease him or hurt him. Or remind him that he would never be Joshua, no matter how much he tried.
“Come on, look at me,” she said, and all that old bravado was back, her cruel and tantalizing indifference. He wished he could run to her, throw his arms around her, clamp his hands around her throat, kiss her and slap her and bite her lip.
But in the end, all he could do was obey her. Just like always.
“Carlita,” he said.
Her eyes were hard and flat, dry obsidian marbles. Th
at was all he allowed himself to absorb at first glance. It was drink to a drunk, heroin to a junkie, d-Con to a starving rat.
“Your face is red,” she said. “Are you blushing?”
“Jake got a little too close to the campfire while he was roasting his weenie,” Joshua said.
“Oh, that thing. I didn’t know you still had one,” she said to Jacob.
Life had marked her, the plows of time and hardship dragging furrows into her face. But her lips were as robust as October persimmons, though the corner of her mouth twisted in disdain. She had probably been born with that mannerism, hatched in the dirty hut of an illegal immigrant’s shack in Piney Flats, where the Christmas tree farms leached their insecticides into the slow-moving creeks. On land that Warren Wells had owned and lorded over.
He couldn’t look away from her eyes. They were as deep and dark as that grotto into which he had descended while hospitalized. They held the promise of cool suffocation, a slow and pitiless drowning. Though her skin had changed, losing some of that caramel luster, her eyes were untouched by the years that had passed since he had last seen her. Those eyes were as ancient as Mayan idols.
“How is the wife and kids?” she asked.
Jacob looked at Joshua, who smiled as if he had swallowed a greasy lizard. “You told her, didn’t you?” Jacob managed.
Joshua shrugged and snuffed his cigarette against the wall. “Family secrets.”
Jacob’s head throbbed, the sun now high and bright and piercing him as if its needles were sewing his skin to his flesh. “I need a drink.”
“Drinking is a want, not a need,” Joshua said.
Carlita lifted her bottle of beer and drank. The bottle was beaded with moist drops of water, further arousing Jacob’s thirst. She twisted her mouth again and pressed the Corona Light to her forehead, the motion causing her unbridled breasts to sway beneath her checked flannel shirt. Her denim jeans were tight around the curves of her thighs. She hadn’t borne any children. She had moved too fast to be pinned down, had evaded all sperm that swam upstream against her unwelcoming currents.
Disintegration: A Mystery Thriller Page 14
