The Line That Held Us

by David Joy

  “I guess so.”

  “And every time you’ve ever needed me, right there I’ve been, ain’t I?”

  “Yeah,” Darl said.

  “Then get on with it.”

  Darl stood from the tailgate and the nightglow was bright around them. A full moon rose—a supermoon the news had called it—and there was a lunar eclipse that cast its face a dim orange, the color of farm eggs. Darl was a head taller than Calvin. They were only a few feet apart, and he met Calvin’s eyes for a second or two, though he didn’t hold them and glanced down to his feet. “Come on, then,” he said as he turned.

  Calvin followed Darl to the edge of the woods and they headed into the thicket, the thin brush raking them up to their waists as they melted into the trees. Darl wore a headlamp over his cap, but he did not turn it on. The moon was up and provided enough light to wander. Through the woods, an old Plymouth coupe rusted down into nothing next to a small, trembling finger of creek. They climbed a small knoll and the land opened into a field of broomstraw where a derelict barn rotted into jagged timbers.

  Crossing the field, they entered the trees again, and Calvin knew this place, having been here dozens of times as a child with his father and grandfather to coax speckled trout from the stream. Those times on the creek during summers that seemed as if they’d stretch on forever were about as good as life had ever been. Calvin’s father would bait their hooks with pearls of Silver Queen corn or red wrigglers depending on the color of the water, and they’d slip those speckled trout into the mouth of a jug until they had a mess of fish for supper. His grandfather fried the fish with ramps and wild potatoes, those trout so sweet and delicate they’d eat them heads and all. The stars had seemed brighter then and, as Calvin looked up into the spangled heavens at this moment, he believed that maybe they were. Maybe there’re only one or two moments like that in a man’s whole life and maybe man is just too dumb a creature to recognize that moment’s the one until everything’s long gone.

  Darl held back a whip of laurel for Calvin to pass. When he was through, Darl turned on his headlamp and shined into the woods. They were too deep into the forest now for anyone driving by to see them from the road.

  “Let me go first,” Darl said, as they climbed farther up the hillside. All of a sudden, Darl jerked back as if something had taken a swipe at him and Calvin tripped over the homemade alarm, the cans jingling in the trees above them.

  Calvin was tangled in the line, and as he stepped to get loose, he saw Darl’s light shining on the rusted fishhooks that dangled at their faces. “What the hell is this?”

  “The old man’s ginseng patch,” Darl said. “He’s got the place booby-trapped.”

  They crept along, patting at the air in front of them so as not to get snagged, and in a few more steps Darl stopped with his light shining down on the body. Calvin’s eyes settled first on the treads of the man’s boot soles, his legs twisted, and torso bent with one arm by his side, the other outstretched above. Calvin Hooper stood there in disbelief, not sure what to say or ask or do, stilled and silenced by what lay before him.

  “Who is that?” Calvin finally said, those three words filling his mouth.

  Darl stepped around the body and knelt by the dead man’s shoulders. He reached down and pinched the bill of the man’s ball cap, lifted his head and shined the light onto his face. At first Calvin thought his cheek was bloodied, but then he realized it wasn’t blood. The mark was too purple, too flat in hue. His eyes were clouded over but that birthmark made him unmistakable.

  “Jesus Christ, is that Sissy?”

  “Yeah,” Darl said. “That’s Carol fucking Brewer.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I told you I was out here hunting.”

  “Yeah, but how did this happen?”

  “I was up in a treestand down there in that cove and I heard something rustling around in the leaves up here and when I looked through the scope I thought it was a hog. Hell, he was rooting around on all fours. Looked like a goddamned pig.”

  “Fuck, Darl.” Calvin’s mind cracked. “Why didn’t you call somebody?”

  “He was dead as soon as I got to him. There wasn’t anything I could do. There wasn’t shit anybody could do.” Darl looked up and his headlamp was blinding. “Calling wasn’t going to do him any good.”

  “We got to call somebody,” Calvin said. “We’ve got to get somebody out here.”

  “I ain’t calling anybody, Calvin.”

  Calvin couldn’t see Darl’s face, but the light shook back and forth with his answer. “What do you mean you’re not calling somebody? You’ve got to call somebody, Darl. You’ve fucking killed somebody.”

  “I know that! Don’t you think I know that?” Darl’s voice was loud and stern now.

  “You said it yourself. It was an accident. You might get lawed for poaching, Darl, but it ain’t murder. Not right now, it ain’t. But if you go and do something crazy it might be. You can’t do something like that.”

  “And what then, Cal? What you think’s going to happen after that? That’s Carol Brewer, Carol fucking Brewer! Brewer by God!” Darl said that name loud. “You think his brother Dwayne is going to let that go? You think Dwayne Brewer’s just going to say, ‘Hey, man, I know you killed my brother and all, but you didn’t mean to. No hard feelings.’ You think that’s what he’s going to say?”

  Calvin didn’t answer.

  “I’d be lucky if all he did was come after me,” Darl said. “But knowing him, knowing everything he’s done, you and me both know it wouldn’t end there. I bet he’d come after my mama and my little sister and my niece and nephews and anybody else he could get his hands on. That son of a bitch is crazy enough to dig up my daddy’s bones just to set him on fire.”

  “You’re talking crazy, Darl.”

  “Am I?” Darl looked down at the body and the light lit Carol Brewer’s face. Where the bullet had exited from his shoulder the wound was crusted with fragments of broken leaves and pine needles.

  “So what the hell are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to bury him. I’m going to bury him and ain’t nobody ever going to know anything about it.”

  “You’ve lost your mind, Darl. You’ve lost your fucking mind.”

  “Look, if you want to go, say so. I told you I didn’t want to get you involved. Now if you want to leave, turn around right now and you forget everything and I’ll do what I’ve got to do.”

  “Then why the fuck did you call?”

  “Because I needed a favor, Cal, and you’re the only one I got.”

  Calvin looked over at the body that lay stretched between them. A bluish-purple hue, nearly the same color of the birthmark, had settled into the undersides of Carol’s arms like a bruise. Calvin knelt beside him and put his hand on Carol Brewer’s forearm. His skin was cool and his muscles stiff, but there was no smell to him. Not yet. None of that horror in dying had reached him in these few hours.

  Calvin stood and looked around, the trees towering overhead so that they blacked out the starlight. All of a sudden he felt surrounded. He slowly turned a circle, looking at the darkened woods, the cries of the last few katydids now deafening in their mourning the turn of season. In that moment, he knew that he was standing in the midst of something that would never be forgotten, something he’d carry from this place and bear the rest of his life. There was no turning back.

  That single certainty consumed him.

  FOUR

  At the top of Allens Branch, Sissy shared a whitewashed shotgun shack with a mischief of wharf rats and field mice and one chalk-white possum he called Milkjug. The possum slept all day in the crawl space and Sissy got to where he loved putting leftovers on a plate and setting the food on the back steps to watch that possum scarf down anything from cathead biscuits to cream corn each evening. The small run-down house was where Red Brewer had
been raised, and after his folks died, he handed the keys to his sons.

  For years, Dwayne and Carol split a bedroom, small kitchen, living area, and a dirt-floor bathroom addition until their folks died five years back. After Red drove him and his wife off the side of Cabbage Curve, Dwayne headed back down the road to their childhood home, leaving his brother to fend for himself.

  Dwayne had been sitting on Carol’s couch twiddling his thumbs since eight o’clock. His brother told him that morning he’d be back from digging ginseng by seven, but it was closing in on midnight and Dwayne hadn’t seen hide or hair. The springs were busted in the sofa so he was sunk down into the musty yellow cushions as if crouched in a foxhole. An amber glass lamp across the room lit the walls warm with false firelight, while a fifty-inch flat-screen blared the froggy voice of some nighttime salesman peddling pocketknives. Dwayne looked at the set of samurai swords being showcased on the television screen as he reached for a pizza box that sat at the edge of a white wicker table by his knees. He flipped back the cardboard top and found a slice half eaten by a rodent, ripped away the chewed section, and swallowed what was left whole like a snake.

  For the past hour, he’d been timing himself fieldstripping and reassembling his Colt 1911 as fast as he could with his eyes closed. His fastest time yet was a fuzz over two minutes, but he was sure he could shave another ten seconds off if he focused. A full magazine was loaded, a round chambered as always, when he reached for the gun on the arm of the couch. He placed the pistol on his right thigh, his hand flat overtop, then hit start on his cell phone’s stopwatch with his free hand, instantly closing his eyes and going to work.

  Dwayne thumbed the mag release, the magazine falling into his lap, then yanked back on the slide to eject the chambered round. He heard the tink of brass as the cartridge was ejected onto the couch beside him, and immediately eased the slide back and turned the emptied gun toward himself. Bracing the pistol between his thighs, he mashed the recoil spring plug with his right thumb then turned the barrel bushing clockwise, the spring and plug now free to slide out beneath the barrel. The next step was the hardest without peeking as he pulled back the slide and tried to align the end of the slide lever with a small half-moon notch on the left side. Lined up, he pushed the slide lever free, then flipped the gun upside down, pulled the slide from the frame, then removed the guide rod and barrel. The gun was fieldstripped, the parts placed neatly on the cushion to his left; and now he tore off in reverse. When the gun was back together, he slapped the magazine in, yanked the slide, and opened his eyes. The stopwatch continued past 2:16.

  “Come on now, Dwayne,” he mumbled to himself disappointedly, flicking the safety up to lock the hammer. He dropped the magazine and reloaded the ejected cartridge from the cushion to his right before setting the pistol back on the arm of the couch. When he was done, he reached for a can of Budweiser on the wicker table, wiped the condensation from the sides, and took a long slug of lukewarm beer, America scribbled down the side of the can in cursive.

  Something in his periphery by the door caught Dwayne’s attention and he cut his eyes to see. A wharf rat picked about the corner of the room and Dwayne slowly stretched for the pistol. With the gun in his hand, he thumbed down the safety and drew his aim, lining the three-dot sights over the rat’s body. The rat studied him and bunched into a ball, appearing unsure whether it was hidden or exposed. But there was no time for such questions. The hammer came down and the shot flashed the walls, the sound deafening in that tiny slapdash room. Dwayne’s head rang and he lowered the gun to look. The .45 hollowpoint had shred the animal’s body clean in two. The back half of the rat kicked at the floor, the front half still conscious as it spun itself around on nothing but those front legs, crawled to its flapping back half, and latched on as if that mean living thing must’ve been what did this.

  Dwayne Brewer laughed at this sight, as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen in his life. He was almost in tears as he set the pistol back beside him on the couch and looked at where the blood had splattered against the wall, the meat a reddish-purple like venison. His eyes wandered up the wall to where a picture of his great-grandmother hung in an ornate, golden-scrolled frame the same as it had ever since he was a child. Her hair was in a bun, a white ruffled collar tight against her thick neck, a dark woolen dress beneath. The glass came out from the frame so that it had always appeared as if she was coming into the room, something that had frightened Dwayne as a kid. He stood and crossed the floor to the picture, wiped a speck of blood from the glass with his thumb and smeared it down his pants leg.

  The woman in the picture did not smile. She peered blankly, her face like his grandmother’s, rounded features that had carried down to his brother. He wondered where the hell Carol was. Dwayne glanced down at the dead rat between his boots, shook his head, and smiled, thinking, Sissy’s going to get a kick out of this. He nudged at the rat with the toe of his boot and it was surely dead. Dwayne gathered his things and headed out the door. He’d grown sick of waiting.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE ’78 DEUCE AND A QUARTER that Dwayne Brewer had inherited from his grandparents still rode like a dream. There was some rust around the wheel wells, and the undercarriage was nearly eaten in two from three decades of winter roads covered in salt and snow. But the burgundy paint still held its shine in spots, and the white vinyl over the back half of the cab wasn’t entirely gone. More than sheer beauty, that old two-door Electra floated down rutted-out dirt roads like a goddamn drift boat.

  Dwayne was fiddling with the radio dial trying to pick up the sermon of some dime-store preacher when he swung wide onto Caney Fork and forced an oncoming driver into the ditch. The road wound and rose before dropping back down into farmland where some years they grew corn and some years they grew strawberries and every year they watched whitetail come out of the hedge each evening to graze the field as the last bit of light glowed yellow and gone.

  He swung onto Moses Creek headed toward Coon Coward’s in hopes of finding his brother. A muddy cut shot off to the right, two red-dirt tracks swerving back into the woods where tractor tires left the ground bare and field grass rose knee-high in the space between. A hundred yards back, the taillights of Carol Brewer’s Grand Prix shone red in Dwayne’s approach. He parked behind his brother and took a can of beer from the open cardboard suitcase in the passenger seat, cracked the top, and stepped outside.

  Dwayne took a long swallow of beer, set the can on the roof of his brother’s car, and opened the door thinking the asshole might’ve passed out behind the wheel. The car was empty and he reached across for a crumpled soft pack of Doral 100s, took a cigarette out and lit it from a lighter stashed in the console. Through the woods, he thought he spotted a flashlight, but as he took a step forward and started to yell for his brother, the light vanished and he figured it was ghostlight or a figment of his drunken mind. I bet that son of a bitch has stumbled onto a gold mine, Dwayne thought, knowing that if his brother had found one of Coon Coward’s ginseng patches, he might wind up digging all night.

  He chased a sip of beer with a drag from his brother’s Doral, strutted to the back of the car, and wrote Sissy’s A Puss in the dust on the back glass. He stared up the tractor trail he knew led to an old field where farmers used to graze their cattle out of the heat in summers. Fall was in the air, though the last of summer sound still filled the woods, and he shut his eyes and felt the world close in around him.

  Back in his car, he cranked the Buick and drove in reverse down the cut, the car jumping about as it hit the state road. He headed out the way he’d come, taking a right out of Caney Fork onto Highway 107, with the pedal mashed to the floor. As he rounded a bend, the sky glowed a pale brown behind the mountains, a fogged sky dirtied with light pollution from the college. The silhouette of the ridgeline was black against it, lights from houses dotting that blackness so that it seemed as if the world had been turned on it
s end, the ground suddenly sky speckled with starlight, what used to be clouds now earthen in hue.

  When he passed the university, he’d made up his mind how he’d spend the rest of the night. He’d ride by O’Malley’s and No Name, maybe swing by the new brewery, to see which bar had the biggest crowd. The college kids had a place on the backside of campus called Tucks, but there were always university police keeping an eye out. Dwayne was used to places where bartenders were scared to serve drinks in glass, places where nights ended in the parking lot with knives and sirens, places that weren’t around anymore, like the Rusty Lizard. God those nights at the good ol’ Crusty Rusty, he thought. The world had turned so goddamned soft.

  In the old days, getting in a bar fight was as simple as stepping on somebody’s boots. Now, he had to egg it on all night for someone to shove him. Dwayne wanted to find a group of cologne-soaked frat boys with parted hair and dress shirts and he wanted to break one of those pretty-boy faces simply to see him bleed. If he was lucky, they’d jump on him like a pack of dogs and he’d have the time of his life till the blue lights came and the bodies scattered. He hoped someone might draw a knife so that he could draw his own. It was Friday night, after all, and a man deserved some fun.

  FIVE

  Darl and Calvin dragged Carol Brewer out of the woods in an old tarp Darl kept behind the seat of his truck, and loaded the body into the bed of his ragged Tacoma. Calvin tailed him to the house, at times following so closely that his headlights disappeared from Darl’s rearview. Though Darl hadn’t meant to pull Calvin into this, he was knee-deep now and would soon be up to his neck. Despite Darl’s plan, Calvin had insisted they bury the body at the back of his family’s farm.

  A group of mailboxes stood at the end of the road, different-colored tin with different numbers all sharing the same name. Since before this county was ever a county at all, this land belonged to Hoopers. There were nine of Calvin’s kin signed to the petition on December 10, 1850, for a new county to be formed from Haywood and Macon. One of those signatures was so shoddy that the first name couldn’t be made out, but it didn’t matter because that surname read Hooper just the same. This land belonged to them then just as it belonged to them now. Here there was blood tied to place the same as there were names tied to mountains and rivers and coves and hollers and trees and flowers and anything else that ever seemed worth naming. People and place were some inseparable thing knotted together so long ago that no amount of time had allowed for an answer of how to untie them.