The Line That Held Us

by David Joy

  Dwayne Brewer sat at the head of the dining room table, picking at his teeth with his finger while he stared at a picture hung on the wood panel wall.

  “Is that your daddy?” he asked, nodding his head toward a picture of Darl’s father sitting on a red Massey Ferguson with Darl as a baby on his lap.

  “It is,” Darl said. The front of the doublewide was a living room, dining room, and kitchen all bunched together. Darl walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and grabbed a beer. He offered one to Dwayne, but Dwayne shook his head, and so Darl took one for himself then came back to the table and sat. He could feel the gun at the base of his spine and that was the only thing at all that kept him from falling apart. If he comes at me, I’ll shoot him, Darl thought. If the son of a bitch moves, shoot him.

  “Come to think of it, I think I will have a beer,” Dwayne said. He reached across the table and took the can from in front of Darl, popped the top, and sucked the foam through his teeth as it rose over the lid. Swishing the beer around in his mouth for a second or two, he swallowed hard and sighed. Darl didn’t stand to get another.

  “What’s this about?”

  “I got a few things I’m going to ask you, and after that I’ll be on my way.”

  Now Darl went to the refrigerator to get himself another beer and to put enough space between them so that he didn’t have to look Dwayne in the eyes while he spoke. He cracked the can and swallowed about half a Budweiser down in two gulps, the sides of the can crumpling in his fist. “Go on and ask,” he said as he leaned against the side of the cabinets at the edge of the kitchen, Dwayne having to turn to face him. “I’ve done told you, I’m tired.”

  “All right,” Dwayne started. “I’ll come right out with it. Somebody told me you was back in there hunting on Coon Coward’s land this past weekend and I want to know what you saw.”

  “Well, I don’t know who you been talking to, but I wasn’t back on nobody’s land. Hell, it ain’t even hunting season.” Darl sipped his beer.

  Dwayne stood and opened his arms like he was hung on a cross. He turned and sidled over until he and Darl weren’t more than a foot apart. Darl looked up into his eyes, dark hollows as if Darl were staring down the pipes of a side-by-side shotgun.

  “There’s a problem with that,” Dwayne said. “I know for a fact that you were. I seen it.” He split two fingers like a peace sign and tapped at the bags under his own eyes.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Darl said.

  “There you go again.” He came closer until Darl could feel Dwayne’s breath steaming against his forehead. “You’re going to need to get real honest real fast or this ain’t going to end well. Not for you, and not for anybody else, so why don’t you go back over there to that table, sit down, and start over.”

  Darl went back to the table and Dwayne waited until he was seated to join him. A cheap brass chandelier suspended above them cast yellow streaks of light against their faces. Darl ground his teeth and studied the top of his beer can while he twisted it between his hands in circles against the tabletop’s veneer.

  “Thing is, I know you spent every evening last week going in and out of Coon Coward’s property like you owned the place. I know that every evening after you got off work, you threw on your hunting clothes, grabbed your rifle, and waltzed in there like Elmer fucking Fudd. I know it like I know my name, because I seen you. I seen you with my own two eyes. You see, you didn’t know it, but that old man has him a game camera in there and it was snapping pictures of you every time you went in and every time you come out and he showed them to me.” Dwayne raised his eyebrows and waited for Darl to speak.

  Darl could feel the sweat blistering his forehead and he was edging closer and closer to a moment when he’d snatch that gun loose from the back of his pants and shoot Dwayne Brewer with every bullet he had. It’d be self-defense, he thought. He’s in my house.

  “I ain’t hear you,” Dwayne said.

  Darl still didn’t speak.

  “The way this all come about is that my brother went down in there after one of that old man’s ginseng patches. Sissy told me he was going and I was waiting on him at the house when he never showed. Now you can tell me, like that old man did, that maybe my brother wound up running off somewhere else. But the fact is, his car is sitting right down there on that tractor trail where I know he parked it. That car’s still sitting right there, but he ain’t. So you’re going to tell me what you saw or I’m going to have to think of some other way to find out why you’re lying to me.”

  “I ain’t seen nothing,” Darl said.

  “Who was that went in there with you Friday night?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dwayne.” Darl was in it thick now, and he couldn’t see any way out. His vision tunneled with the thought that Dwayne knew about Calvin.

  “There you go again, Darl. That’s the third time now, and I ain’t going to let you lie me again. Three strikes. Ain’t that how it works?” Dwayne rolled his knuckles along the tabletop, tapping a four count. “The fact I’m letting that slide is about as reasonable a man as I can be. I wish you’d show me the same kindness.”

  Darl could see a visible rage building someplace far back in the darkness of Dwayne Brewer’s eyes.

  “I saw a picture of you go into the woods Friday evening then a picture of you running out of there two hours later. A little while after that, here you come again only this time you wasn’t by yourself. And the next time, the two of y’all come out of the woods you was carrying something, now wasn’t you?”

  “Is this about the deer?” Darl saw his last chance and grabbed ahold.

  “What deer?”

  “About the deer I poached off Coon Coward’s land. Look, if it’s about the deer, I’ll give it to you. All of it. You just say it.”

  “I’ve already told you. This is about my brother.”

  “And I told you I don’t know a thing about your brother. I didn’t see him in there once. Not one day.”

  “Where’s the meat?” Dwayne asked.

  The question caught Darl off guard. “At the processor,” he stuttered.

  “At the processor?” Dwayne smiled and cut his head to the side to look at Darl from the corners of his eyes. “You mean to tell me you took a deer, out of season no less, to the goddamned processor?”

  “I told him I was hunting depredation tags off a buddy’s cornfield.”

  “Told who?”

  “The processor.”

  “Who’s processing it for you? Burt Hogsed?”

  “No, Singleton’s.” Darl thought fast to come up with a story that couldn’t be fact-checked. Bottom line was Wilson Singleton’s drunk ass always had a pile of deer hanging in his walk-in freezer, but half the time he was too sauced to make heads or tails between back strap and chicken thighs.

  “Wilson Singleton?” Dwayne Brewer laughed and shook his head. “You might as well let a kindergartner whittle on that deer with a penknife. My daddy went to school with Wilson. Said one time in ninth grade they was dissecting frogs in biology class and old Wilson got caught sticking his pecker in a frog’s mouth. Said they called him Tadpole.”

  “Never heard that.”

  “Think you’ll get much meat out of it?”

  Darl could tell Dwayne was fishing. “Ought to.”

  “Not gutshot or nothing? What you shoot? .308? .270?”

  “Ought six.”

  “I like a 7-08, myself. You handload?”

  “No.”

  “What was you shooting?”

  “Core-Lokt.”

  “Deadliest mushroom in the woods,” Dwayne said with a smile, his teeth a shiny white juxtaposition that seemed unnatural. Everyone in his family had jarringly white teeth. “Hard to beat a bullet’s been around seventy years. I’ve switched to the Nosler Partitions. Tried shooting th
e ballistic tips, but they ate up a lot of meat. Glad to hear you’ll get plenty out of that deer you killed.”

  Darl nodded.

  “I think I’ll ride over there and have old George give me a pound or two off yours, if that’s all right. My freezer’s damn near empty, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get in the woods this fall or not.”

  “Have at it,” Darl said. A pound, the loins, Darl would tell that son of a bitch he could take the whole damn imaginary thing if it’d get him out of the house.

  Dwayne pounded his fist against the tabletop and scowled at the table where the base of his hand hit, as if weighing his options. In a moment, he stood and strolled toward the door like he was wandering down the road picking soda bottles out of the ditch. Darl watched him and when Dwayne was almost to the door he stood from the table. Dwayne turned then and stared at Darl in a way that filled Darl Moody with as deep a fear as he’d ever felt, a feeling he’d never known as a man, something older, something he hadn’t felt since he was a child.

  “You never did say who that was helped you carry that deer out.”

  “Just a friend,” Darl said.

  “A friend.” Dwayne grinned and nodded his head. “Friends can get a man in a lot of trouble.” He raised his eyebrows as if willing Darl to speak.

  But Darl had nothing to say.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” Dwayne said as he went outside and closed the door.

  Darl crossed the room and reached for the lock. His hand paused. He wanted desperately to turn the dead bolt, but he was hesitant, fearing that Dwayne might hear that latch turn and come back. He pulled his gun from his waistline and clenched the grip in his fist by his side. You can go out there right now and end this, he thought. You can finish it right now.

  But he did not move. He could not move. He simply stood there facing the door.

  TEN

  Some swear a predator can smell fear, but whether there’s an actual scent or something else entirely doesn’t really matter. Dwayne Brewer could sense weakness. That feeling came to him like goosebumps. That natural. That fast. And in those moments Dwayne had always known he was in complete control. Walking out of the doublewide, he knew Darl Moody was scared, but whether or not he’d seen Carol in those woods, Dwayne wasn’t sure.

  A waning moon shone through scraggly pines, a ring around it so that its white face was haloed. Old-timers said that meant it was going to snow, but while there was a bite in the air, Dwayne didn’t believe this. He believed in all kinds of wives’ tales like that eggs set on Sundays would hatch all roosters or that yellow rattlesnakes always followed black ones, but despite his superstitions he was sure it wasn’t going to snow the last day of September.

  He stood on the edge of the porch for a moment and slipped a soft pack of smokes from the ruler pocket along the seam of his pants. He struck a match from a book that had come from Hill’s Minnow Farm, took a long drag, then blew the smoke before him so that he parted his own cloud as he went down the front steps into the yard. He was in no particular hurry. Instinct told him Darl Moody was full of shit, but then again there hadn’t been any pictures of his brother on that camera so he couldn’t be sure. He’d find out one way or another, though. There was always a way to backtrack what a man said, and if Darl was lying, Dwayne would return.

  The Deuce and a Quarter sat crooked by a burning bush that glowed yellow even in the cold tones of night. Darl’s truck was parked close, and as Dwayne reached the driver’s-side door of his car, he stopped and looked in the back of Darl’s pickup. A cheap, drop-in liner bowed and warped across the bed. The bottom was ridged so that water would run out the back. Pine needles and dirt filled the grooves, with half an eighty-pound bag of Sakrete and a few loose penny nails scattered over the plastic bed. On the far side something caught Dwayne’s eye. Metal flashed with moonlight so that there was a dull glare from whatever lay between the ridges of the bed liner. He walked around the back of the pickup, rested one arm on the tailgate, and reached for what he’d seen.

  Dwayne Brewer held a pocketknife he’d held a thousand times over the course of his life. He turned the cheap Case sodbuster over in his hands, twisting it by its ends like he was rolling a cigarette. The yellow Delrin handle was split on one side so that only half the scale remained. This had happened long ago when the knife slipped from his own pocket and cracked against a rock while he and his brother were playing in the woods as children. Red Brewer had slapped Dwayne unconscious and put a cigarette out on Sissy’s arm for letting his brother steal their father’s knife. Dwayne squeezed the notch and opened the carbon steel blade, holding it in the light so that he could see the waves of dark gray patina blued into the steel all these years. Swipes against whetstone had eaten the blade back so that it was now thin as a fillet knife, though it still held a razor’s edge. This was the only thing Carol had wanted of their father’s when he died, and Dwayne hadn’t argued. At the time, he hadn’t been sure whether his brother specially liked the knife or whether it was something else altogether, a sort of portal to a memory that he could hold in his hands and go back and forth between the before and after.

  A rage grew in him now, something he always felt first in the center of his chest that grew upward with a fiery intensity until it pushed into his eyes. What came next was thoughtless and wild as it had always been, a body driven by emotion rather than sense. Dwayne crossed the yard onto the porch and took the front door off its hinges with his fifteen-wide logging boot. Darl was by the dining room table and he turned, stupefied with terror, and slapped around at the table before coming up with the gun. Dwayne was already on him by then, and as Darl raised the pistol, his wrist was forced upward toward the ceiling so that the shot blasted against the brass chandelier, a bulb shattering in the wake, the fixture swinging from its cheap chain and cord. Dwayne had one hand gripping Darl’s arm and the other squeezing the air from his windpipe. Darl’s back arched against the table and then he was on the floor, the gun being hammered from his grip, Dwayne’s fists coming down like stones.

  Dwayne settled in and the fire spread over him. He could feel his entire body warming as if by a shot of whiskey. His fists came down and Darl cried for help at first, blood coming out of his nose and mouth; but soon there was no other sound than the dull clap of knuckles against meat. Dwayne hammered Darl’s forehead and his scalp opened and that flash of white bone that quickly filled red triggered a moment of reason in a mind that had been wiped clean and blank. Dwayne’s shoulders fell loose and he settled his hands around the neck of Darl’s T-shirt, letting his weight sink onto Darl’s collarbones. Darl Moody was unconscious beneath him, and Dwayne sat there straddling his stilled body, unable to catch his breath.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN DARL MOODY WOKE, he rolled his head from side to side looking swollen eyed around the room as if trying to make sense of where he was. His family’s hay barn was filled with faint light and shadow. He stood with his back against the spiraled face of a large, round bale of hay. His arms were stretched wide, his wrists bound by nooses of half-inch cable ratcheted to a shoulder-popping tension around the bale by a come-along on the opposite side.

  Dwayne sat on a flipped milk crate and dug black soil from under his fingernails with the tip of his brother’s knife. He glanced up at the sound of Darl’s breath quickening as he came to. A mix of blood and mucus drooled from Darl’s mouth and nose. His face was pulverized, his heavy panting labored and loud. When their eyes met, Darl screamed for help but his voice stammered as his breath ran out. He sucked for air and screamed again, this time his feet stomping wildly at the ground though the weight at his back could not be moved. Darl grunted and coughed then wailed again until his body finally wilted with exhaustion.

  “Are you done?” Dwayne asked calmly, his eyes barely glancing up as he swiped the grit from the knife’s tip back and forth against his thigh. Darl screamed again at the top of his lung
s and Dwayne shook his head with disgust, then went back to cleaning the dirt from under his nails.

  When the place was quiet, Dwayne Brewer stood, pinched the knife blade between his fingers, folded the pocketknife closed, and slid it into his pocket. He crept within a few feet and stood with his legs shoulder-width apart, his hands behind his back. Darl watched him and when their eyes met this time, he dropped his chin to his chest.

  “Are you ready to tell me what happened?” Dwayne asked, his voice still low and collected.

  Darl started to yell again and right then Dwayne grew sick of waiting. He lurched forward until the two of them were face-to-face and screamed into Darl’s eyes. Darl was shaking his head and crying, his voice falling into a whimper, but Dwayne hovered there in front of him so close that he could smell the wintergreen on Darl’s breath and he wailed with all of his might and all of his air like some lonely animal howling into the sky for anything that might return his call.

  The barn smelled of seasoned hay, the ground a soft dust beneath him as Dwayne spun and scanned the room. The same rusted Massey Ferguson from the picture in the house of Darl and his father sat in the center of the barn with a loader attached to the front hydraulics. Bolted onto the loader, a long, dull bale spear with its mustard paint worn from the shaft jutted from the base of the bucket. Dwayne walked over to the tractor and climbed into the seat.