by David Joy
“You know who I am?” Dwayne asked.
She shook her head. “What is this place?” she asked. “What’s that smell?”
“I want you to look across the room there.” Dwayne nodded to the wall behind him and Angie leaned to peer around a pitched support.
The room was dark, but the lamplight reached the body enough to show Carol Brewer sitting there like some grotesque dummy. The skin was a dark gray in the yellow light, his face something from Halloween. Only the rough outline of his figure, the muddied clothes he wore, showed any sign that he’d ever been a living, breathing thing.
“What is that?”
“That’s my brother,” Dwayne said, and he turned to look where she stared. What was left of Carol filled him with great sadness.
“I’m going to be sick,” she said, and no sooner had those words left her lips, Angie lunged to the side and threw up into the dirt beside her.
Dwayne pulled a yellow paisley handkerchief from his back pocket, unfolded it, and wiped the corners of her mouth. “You’ll get used to the smell after a while.”
“I don’t understand,” Angie said. “What happened to him?”
“What happened to him is why you’re here.”
“I don’t . . .” she stuttered. “I don’t understand.”
“Darl Moody killed my brother,” Dwayne said. “Darl Moody killed him and Calvin helped cover it up. The two of them threw my brother off in a hole and buried him like trash. I wouldn’t even have done a dog the way they did.”
“That can’t be true,” Angie said. “Calvin couldn’t have done that. There’s no way. There’s no way they could’ve done that.”
“You can believe anything you’d like, but the truth’s the truth just the same. The truth don’t change because we don’t want to believe it. God knows what the two of them did just like I do.”
“What do you know about God?” Angie’s face bled with anger.
Dwayne Brewer smiled and took a seat on the dirt floor. He crossed his legs and sat so they were looking eye to eye.
“Oh, a great deal, I imagine,” he said. “I’ve read that book over and over again and I believe as much as any God-fearing man on this mountain that He’s up there watching all this. The difference is that I know something they don’t. What I know’s He’s got one sick, sick sense of humor.” Dwayne shook his head and grinned. “Way I see it, the only thing He ever got right, the only thing He made absolutely perfect was these mountains. These trees. These creeks. Now, He got that part right,” Dwayne explained. “But then He created man. He makes an animal so dumb that it destroys the very gift it was given and He sits back and watches. Now you tell me that ain’t a sick sense of humor.”
He traced his fingers through the dirt at his sides and continued.
“Take the story of Job. It was like He was sitting back and watching a kid pull the legs off a spider. The devil took everything Job had. On a bet, God let him murder Job’s sons and daughters while they were sitting together at the supper table. Think about how that would eat your heart in two. If that wasn’t enough, he covered that old boy’s body in boils, let him get so sick that Job was begging God to end it, and only then, only after all of that, does the Lord finally say, ‘All right. I reckon that’s enough.’”
Dwayne slapped the floor with both hands at his sides and laughed.
“No, I ain’t that sick. I can see the humor in it, but I ain’t that sick.”
Angie was vacant and silent.
“So the thing is, I’ve read that book front to back a hundred times if I’ve read it once. I know what that book says more than most people. I just don’t see it like they do. A God of mercy, they say. I look around this world and I don’t see no mercy. They talk about a God of compassion. I want you to look around. You show me a place where compassion outweighs selfishness. The only thing we might agree on is forgiveness.” Dwayne nodded his head. “I reckon He’d have to be forgiving when He’s done plenty worse Himself. A God of forgiveness. Now that I can see.”
Dwayne stood and walked a small circle around the room. He kicked at the dirt with the toe of his boot and when he was back near her he leaned against one of the support beams.
“You know, me and my brother used to play in here when we were kids. My grandfather built this place. Dug the whole thing out with a shovel and mattock. He carried the stone from the creek and cobbled these walls. He did every bit of it himself. Never asked nobody for nothing.
“When I was little, he used to use this place for a root cellar and canning shed. Sometimes he’d hang meat in here. Had a smoke shack he built up by the house, but he cured meat in here, salted it down on that plank right there.” Dwayne nodded to where he’d set the supplies. “By the time I was growing up, though, he was old, and people didn’t do a whole lot of stuff like that anymore, at least not like they used to. So me and my brother we kind of just took this place over as our own, used it like a sort of playhouse I guess you’d say.”
“What was his name?” Angie asked.
“Who?”
“Your brother.”
“Carol,” Dwayne said. “His name was Carol, but we called him Sissy.
“I remember one time me and Sissy stayed here almost all summer. We’d sneak down to the house every couple days or so and steal enough food to get by, but other than that we stayed in the woods and did whatever we wanted.”
Dwayne laughed at something that came into his mind, shook his head, and continued.
“One day we got bored of sitting up here and we decided we was going to walk all the way to town. So me and Sissy, we took off down Chipper Curve and on around by the paper mill and come into town, and there used to be this newsstand on Back Street and they used to sell candy bars and beer, magazines and what not. Sissy got the idea he was going to steal him a titty magazine. Well, right when he’s shoving that magazine down the front of his pants that old boy that was running the register seen him and before I know it we were tearing out of there as hard as we could. We jumped the road and slid down into Scotts Creek and come up the other side and down the railroad tracks we went, now, by God we was gone.”
Angie watched with a look on her face like she couldn’t understand why he was telling her this.
“We get back here and we start looking through that magazine and old Sissy got all grossed out and I looked at him and I said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And he said, ‘I ain’t know it looked like that.’” Dwayne laughed. “He said, ‘I ain’t know it looked like that, Dwayne.’ And I told him, I said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’ Old Sissy never was one for women,” Dwayne said. “I think that first look ruined him or something. I don’t know. He was different. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say is my brother was just different. He wasn’t cut out for the way this world is. But I loved him. Ain’t make a bit of difference to me. I loved him.”
“I’m sorry,” Angie said. “I’m sorry for what happened to your brother, but there’s no way Darl and Calvin could’ve done what you’re saying. There’s no way.”
As soon as she said it, Dwayne jumped the gap between them and took ahold of her throat. “Don’t you tell me they couldn’t do it,” Dwayne snarled. “I know what the two of them did! I know it because I heard Darl Moody say it right before I slit his throat! I know it because Calvin told me what they did when he dug my brother’s body out of his pasture! So it don’t make a goddamn bit of difference what you think happened or what you think the two of them are capable of because the truth’s the truth just the same! I know what the two of them did just as God Himself knows it!”
Angie’s face was flushed red and her eyes were wide and white. Dwayne squeezed Angie’s neck as tight as he could before shoving her head against the stone behind her. When she was free, she took a gulp of air then another. Gradually she caught her breath and when her breathing eased Dwayne spoke with a
strange calmness as if the rage that had filled him seconds before had never existed at all.
“The two of them took everything from me,” he said. “They took the only thing I loved in this world.” Dwayne glanced at his brother’s body. “What’s sitting right there is all that’s left. A few more days and there won’t be a thing. They took everything I loved, and that’s why you’re here.”
“I’m sorry,” Angie said. She was sobbing. “I’m sorry.”
Dwayne reached into his pocket and came out with a knife that he flicked open effortlessly, its wide blade flashing white in the lamplight.
“No,” Angie pleaded. “Please.”
He stepped forward.
“I’m going to cut your wrists loose,” Dwayne said. “And when I’m gone you can take that tape off your ankles.”
“Please,” Angie said. “Let me go.”
“Each one of those lamps will burn close to a day,” Dwayne said. “I’d burn one at a time if I was you. There’s food and water there on that shelf.”
“Just let me go.”
“I’ll be back in a day or so to check on you,” Dwayne said. He stood before her with the knife held casually at his side. “Calvin does what he’s told and all this’ll be over.” He knelt and reached for her hands at the small of her back, slid the knife under the zip cuffs and cut her free.
Dwayne closed the knife and slipped it back into his pocket as he rose. He crossed the room to the door, the rusted hinges groaning as he swung the door open. The world outside glowed blue with little more than half-moon. The night was cold and clear. He glanced up to stars that shined as steady and certain as they always had. Taking a deep breath, he felt the coldness of the air in his nose and when he lowered the heavy, iron bar across the door, he exhaled, not knowing when he’d return.
For so long, Dwayne Brewer had worked to keep everything under his thumb. Control. That was the only way he’d ever felt at ease: when he was in complete control. This world is about power, he thought. This world is about those born with it and those who take it for themselves. As he came through the woods, he was filled with uncertainty, a feeling he hadn’t known in a very long time. The world was completely out of his hands.
TWENTY-SIX
The Deuce and a Quarter hissed across damp gravel and rambled over rippled road so that Dwayne bounced around in the driver’s seat like he was riding a horse. The road cut hard through a thicket of laurel that camouflaged the cliff face to the right, the left side dropping to a staircased creek that shaped the mountain now as it had for thousands of years before.
The gravel road hugged the hips of mountains, cutting back and forth along switchbacks to rise. In the years since the economy tanked and big money pulled out of the county, the private road had failed above a steep descent into the river. Erosion had bloodied the Tuckaseigee’s west fork for weeks. The homesites once cleared for potential buyers were grown over with stickseed and saplings.
But now there was the promise of new money. Fix the roads, clear the lots, cut the golf course, slap up a billboard or two of some PGA star endorsing the place, and a drove of half-wits would pile north from Florida in Lexuses and Mercedes and Land Rovers to scope out second and third homes like a mass exodus of sun-stroked cattle. Those born here hated them. They cussed them at the grocery store and when their morning and evening commutes doubled because the leaf lookers drove twenty miles per hour up a mountain slated for forty-five. They cussed them under their breath and smiled to their faces because they had to, all the while wanting deep down to pull out a sodbuster and cut out their sunburned guts. But most of those born here made livings off of their fat pockets, and so in that way the relationship was symbiotic.
A sign showing off an architectural sketch of the future clubhouse framed with painted four-by-fours and an eve braided with cut laurel stood off the road to the right. Dwayne steered onto a gravel path that opened to an expansive clearing carved flat into the swale. The clouds were low so that the night’s fog made it hard to see the trees at the edges. A plain of red clay stretched in all directions like a dried lake bottom.
Calvin Hooper stood there in dark slacks, a stained T-shirt, and a heavy duck canvas coat. He raised a lever-action rifle to his shoulder and came straight into the headlights, stepping sideways as the Buick neared until he was aimed at Dwayne’s ear through the side glass. Dwayne rolled down the window like he was about to order food at a drive-thru, hung his arm casually down the door outside. He wore an olive-green thermal shirt, the box-weave tight on his chest and arms. His face was shaved close, but the hair was dark enough that even shaved it left a shadow that rose high on his cheeks.
“Get the fuck out of the car,” Calvin snarled with his chin set out in anger and his brow low over his eyes.
Dwayne killed the engine and cut the lights. “This is probably the closest you’ve ever come to killing somebody, ain’t it?”
“I said, get the fuck out of the car.”
Dwayne smiled, paying no attention to the gun or the prospect of dying. He stared deep into Calvin’s eyes because that’s where the truth lay. “See, that’s what most people never understand. You get deep enough and that feeling’s buried inside everything that’s ever had a heart that beats.”
“Shut the fuck up, and get out of the car.” Calvin kept lowering his aim just a hair and jerking it back up like he was scared to lose sight of Dwayne even for an instant.
“Take the Sylva Seven, or, shit, take what that Broom boy did to Doug Dietz a few years back. Cut the soles off a man’s feet and made him walk to his own grave.” Dwayne shook his head and examined the Buick emblem on the steering wheel. He rubbed his thumb over the raised vinyl. “Now, some folks couldn’t imagine what’d bring a man to do something like that. But you tell them about Doug molesting that little girl, and that’s all it took for plenty of folks, God-fearing Bible thumpers, to swear Doug Dietz got off easy. I heard an old lady say they should’ve run a pike pole right up his ass like a skewer. The crazy thing, she wasn’t just saying it. She meant it. She’d have stood right there and watched them do it. And the thing they’re all too blind to see is that one’s no different than another.”
“I’m not fucking around, Dwayne. Get out of the car.”
“What I’m saying is that it’s easy to take the high road so long as there aren’t any stakes. But the minute you’ve got something to lose, a man’ll do all sorts of things.” Dwayne grabbed a pack of smokes off the passenger seat, slipped a filter between his lips, and mashed the car’s lighter into the dash. In a moment, the lighter popped and Dwayne lifted the orange glow to his cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled a thin cloud of smoke into the space between them. “The only problem with what you’re doing right now is that you ain’t seen my cards.”
“I’m the one with the gun, Dwayne.”
“Life ain’t the kind of thing you want to go all-in on one hand, Calvin.” Dwayne opened the door and stepped out. Calvin backed away a few steps, the gun still high on his shoulder. He stared down the length of the barrel with both eyes open. “It’s a whole lot smarter to bet a little at a time, see what a man’s got in his hand before you go sliding all your chips into the middle.” Dwayne strolled toward Calvin’s truck.
“Don’t go no farther, Dwayne! I mean it!”
Dwayne strutted unconcernedly toward Calvin’s pickup.
“One more step and I’ll blow your head off!”
“If you don’t mind me asking, what’d this truck set you back?” He took a drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke down his chest.
“What’d you say?”
“I asked how much this truck cost. You look like you’re doing pretty good for yourself, you know? Nice truck, big job, everything’s lining up for you. I can see what a girl like her might see in a man like you. If a man’s willing to sell his soul, he can have about anything in this world, can’t he? I reckon that�
�s what this is, ain’t it? Selling your soul?” Dwayne opened his arms to the cleared land around him, at what used to be the top of a mountain.
“Shut the fuck up, Dwayne!” Calvin came forward until the gun was a foot from Dwayne Brewer’s mouth. “Why don’t you just shut—”
Those next words were cut off as Dwayne Brewer shoved the barrel of the rifle toward the ground, pulled his pistol from his waistline, and jammed it into Calvin’s temple. With his grip tight on the rifle, Dwayne turned Calvin like they were dancing and rammed him hard into the front bumper of the truck. Calvin’s back arched with the weight of Dwayne pressing down on him, the pistol still crammed against the side of his head, and chest to chest Dwayne leaned forward till his lips were flush against Calvin’s ear. “I was getting awful tired of you pointing that gun at me. So you’re going to listen now, and I’m going to help you see things a little clearer than how you’re seeing them.” Dwayne eased away. “Let go of that gun and we’ll talk like men instead of a couple kids playing cowboy and Indian.”
Calvin nodded his head and let go. Pushing back, Dwayne held the lever action rifle down by his leg and holstered the pistol in the back of his pants.
The two men stood there catching their breaths in the fog.
“What this boils down to is what you’ve got to lose, Calvin, and that ought to be real clear right about now or else the two of us wouldn’t be standing here. Stakes,” Dwayne said. “When a man’s got something to lose, that changes things. You find something a man loves more than himself and you can get him to do about anything in this world. Now you’re going to do something for me. You do it and everything’s going to be fine. But if you go any other route, Calvin, you do anything else at all, and I think you know how this is going to end. You know good and well what I’m capable of.”
“What do you want me to do?”
