The Line That Held Us

by David Joy

  Dwayne stood there for a minute mesmerized. The deer was still aside a slight flare of his nose. When Dwayne came toward him, the young buck dipped his head to the ground and sauntered out of the way for him to pass. Dwayne crept almost close enough to touch him, to trace his fingertips along buckskin flank, and as he glanced out of the corner of his eye he had this overwhelming sense that he was looking at his brother. The thought made him woozy and he stumbled until there were twenty or thirty yards stretched between them.

  When he turned back, the deer stood on the path and examined him with that same glass-eyed stare. The buck took a few steps forward, stopped and craned his neck, then a few more. Dwayne knew what the old-timers said of such things and he wasn’t ready to accept that fate, to allow that soul to usher him to his end. He scanned the ground and picked up a small white stone and chucked it as hard as he could.

  “Get!” he yelled as the rock whizzed over the deer’s back.

  The buck took a few startled steps, but did not run.

  “Get out of here!” Dwayne yelled again, stomping against the ground, and this time the deer turned, leapt, and in the blink of an eye was gone.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The first lamp had burned out some time ago, the flame pulling back and then gone. Angie’d slapped around the pine plank to find the box of kitchen matches, struck a match against the side of the box, and lit the next wick in line. The air was so still there was no need for glass chimneys, so she left them off to make things easier when the time came, the torch and jar of oil still sitting right there waiting.

  Her thin black skirt was spread over the dirt floor like a beach towel and she sat on it with her legs hugged to her chest, her chin rested on her knees. Her skin was covered with goosebumps and she was shivering cold, having stripped down to her underwear so that she’d be ready to run. She wouldn’t take the chance of getting tangled up again, tripping and falling because of her own stupid clothes.

  All her life she’d been fast. She’d never had a long stride, but that hadn’t stopped her from embarrassing every boy in her class at a footrace all the way up into high school. There was something about that place her mind went after the first mile or two, how thoughts gave way to an empty space governed solely by body and breath. She could run for days through these mountains, and as soon as she had her chance, she would.

  Suddenly a sound at the door stole her breath. Her eyes opened terrified and she listened with an instinct-driven alertness because she wasn’t sure if she’d really heard a noise or was starting to lose her mind. There was a heavy bang outside the door like metal breaking free and she jumped to her feet, snatching up the torch she’d made and lighting the end from the oil lamp’s flame into a tall fire that whipped about the rafters and filled the room in amber light.

  Her hands were shaking when she grabbed the Ball jar she’d filled with lamp oil, and the oil spilled over the rim and greased her fingers. The door started to open and the light outside was blindingly white. Dwayne Brewer manifested out of sunlight as her eyes adjusted to the brightness. Rushing forward, hissing through her teeth, she saw this look of absolute confusion spread over his face as she threw the oil onto him like she was pitching a cup of water into the yard. The lamp oil splashed his chest and soaked his shirt and Angie jabbed the torch at his stomach trying to light him on fire.

  There was too much distance between them. Dwayne drove into the room, loping furiously forward. The smell of fuel drenched him like cologne and Angie swung the torch back and forth frenziedly, finally flinging the fire in a last-ditch effort before he reached her. The flames caught the top of his jeans and the fire roared up his chest and arm. He was engulfed, whirling his arm in violent circles and wrestling his shirt over his head. Angie shot for the opened doorway and he traced her arm as she passed. Tearing outside, she ran as fast as her legs would take her.

  The air was unseasonably warm and birdsong filled the leafless trees. She glanced around, flustered, not recognizing where she was or having any idea which direction to go. Hillsides rose steeply to each side with outcrops of stone mounting jagged from dark soil, moss and bracken breaking the gray-brown deadness with evergreen. Trees towered high overhead and crosshatched a cloudless sky. There was no obvious trail to discern. Everything looked the same. She ran straight ahead with thin vines snaring her arms and legs like jute twine, briars clawing deep into her skin as she searched for an opening but found none.

  Up ahead, she heard water and soon she was upon it, plodding downstream using the creek bed for her path. The stream was shockingly cold and the free stone bottom shifted beneath her steps. Her right ankle rolled hard and a bolt of pain fired up her leg. The water was so clear that judging the depth of her next step became impossible. She plunged into a pool where current wrapped her knees, then stumbled forward, bashing her legs on the rocks. Angie could hear something coming fast behind her, but she didn’t look back. She picked herself up and kept going forward, stumbling now, her shins and knees hot with pain. The banks steepened at the sides into a deep gulley and soon the creek was loud. Water poured over a staircase of blackened boulders slick as glass. There was no way into the valley from here.

  Dirt crumbled under her feet as she tried to scale the bank and seized a handful of long-stemmed ferns, trying to claw herself out of the bottom, but their thin roots pulled free. Slipping onto her stomach, she fought with everything in her power to get up the side of that bank, but the land was too steep and the dirt was too soft and there was nothing to grab on to, and that fast he had her. She felt hands clamp on to her ankles like bear traps, and as she looked over her shoulder there he was, Dwayne Brewer shirtless and crazed with burns spread red over his chest, arms, and neck like rash.

  He yanked Angie down the bank and scrambled over her body, straddling her chest as she felt something slam into the side of her head like a meteor. Her vision flashed silver and returned in a stupefied blur. Her legs were covered with dirt and the air smelled of loam and moss and it filled her nose with a jarring sort of sweetness when the next blow came. Her head felt empty and she went out for a moment, all of her movements sluggish so that the next fist came without any resistance at all, hammering into her cheekbone. A firework flash of color filled her eyes, ears ringing, a split second of hot-white pain followed by absolute darkness.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  When he had her back in the cellar, he laid her on the floor, pulling her arms behind her, and cinching her wrists with a zip tie behind a pitched support worn smooth by time. He did not bother to bind her feet or to tape her mouth.

  As soon as Dwayne caught her, he’d wanted desperately to rip that knife back and forth across her neck till he hit bone. There was a feeling of betrayal, a feeling he couldn’t reconcile because he’d had no reason to trust her in the first place. What stopped him from killing her was that she was the last chip he had and the final hand had not been dealt. At any moment the law could show and she’d be his ticket out of there. The time had come to run. This was the hour to gather his brother and leave this place forever.

  Standing over Sissy’s body, Dwayne studied what was left of him. Carol’s eyes were empty sockets, his mouth open in a wide, peculiar smile just as perfect as ever, white teeth so even and straight they looked like they’d been filed and polished. Scarecrow clothes fit loosely over a body shriveled down into nothing. Lime-dusted skin almost black in such light, the hide of his arms draping his bones like wet fabric. Studying his brother’s face, Dwayne felt a mourning and regret that filled him with a revelatory desolation. He reached down and traced his fingers against the side of Carol’s head and his brother’s hair floated away from his scalp like stirred dust. Leaning down, Dwayne closed his eyes and kissed his brother’s forehead.

  “We’re going to get out of here, now,” he said. “Me and you, Sissy. Just like it’s always been. Just me and you.”

  Dwayne shoveled his arms under his brother’s body, one ar
m under his legs and one arm under his back. There was no weight to him now, and as he lifted, Carol’s skin ripped apart like paper, the stained yellow bones of his arms finding light as they dangled under him. There was something wet and waxy against Dwayne’s skin and he glowered in deep contemplation at what he held and how it crumbled. Carol’s head was rocked back at an unnatural angle. His mouth drooped open, teeth startling white against black skin. The weight of Carol’s boots were too heavy for what was left of him and his right foot broke away from his body, the boot landing on its side in the dust. The sight of this was the straw that broke him.

  Carefully, he lowered his brother back to the ground. There was no way to carry Carol’s body from this place without loading the pieces of him into some other vessel. He knelt there with his hands on his thighs, rocking back and forth, his eyes wide and empty. All that he loved had dissolved in his arms and the world was now void.

  “‘Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’” Dwayne whispered, the words little more than breath. “All my life,” he said. “All my life You have forsaken me.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  When she woke, Angie could barely open her left eye, her vision a muddled streak of colors and light blurred like frosted glass. Her head throbbed, every heartbeat a sledgehammer against her temples. She could tell that the side of her face was swollen and bruised.

  The ground was cold against her bare legs. The heavy iron door was open and she could see outside into the woods. A strip of sunlight crossed the dirt floor and warmed her feet. She heard footsteps and in a second there he was standing over her like a tombstone. His figure was a dark silhouette backlit by the open door and it took a second to see him in any sort of detail.

  Dwayne Brewer wore a pair of dirtied blue jeans, the fronts heavily stained and the knees muddied with dirt. He was barefoot and shirtless, the burns stretching from his stomach to his chest, climbing his neck and wrapping over his jaw. A faded tattoo was inked on his left breast. She glanced down and saw that he was holding a butcher knife loosely in his right hand. Her reflection shone in the face of the steel.

  “Please,” she whimpered. “Please, just let me go.”

  Dwayne shuffled forward with his feet on either side of her body, and when he was standing directly over her, he dropped to his knees with his legs straddled over her thighs like a saddle. The two were face-to-face. He took the blade and poked the knifepoint straight into her forehead. Angie’s head rocked back until her crown was flush against whatever stood behind. He held the knife there like a needle prick and she felt a drop of blood run cold the length of her nose then fall to her chest.

  “All I wanted was my brother,” Dwayne said. “That’s all I wanted.” He pulled the knife back and swiped its tip against his pants. “You couldn’t let me have that. You couldn’t let me have one thing.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please, just let me go.”

  “You’re exactly like the rest of them,” he said. “I didn’t think you were, but you are. You look at people like me, and think you’re better than I am. Well, I’ve got news for you. You’re no better. You, Calvin, and Darl, the whole lot of us. ‘A worthless person, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech, winks with his eyes, signals with his feet, points with his finger, with perverted heart devises evil, continually sowing discord; therefore calamity will come upon him suddenly; in a moment he will be broken beyond healing.’ You know that verse?”

  Angie shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said again. She kept repeating those two words with every breath she took.

  “That’s Proverbs,” Dwayne said. He placed his hand flat on her thigh, ran his palm up her leg, and hooked one finger under the hip of her underwear. Angie flinched, disgusted he could touch her.

  “Please, please,” she said. “I’m with child.”

  Dwayne’s face shriveled with repulsion.

  “I’m carrying a child,” Angie said. “Please, just let me go. I have a baby.”

  “I don’t consider it any sort of blessing to bring a child into a world like this.”

  Angie wept. “But I have a child. I have a child.” That one thing was all she knew now, the only truth she held. The child. There was nothing outside of that.

  He rose and hovered over her. “I’ve got to run back to the house,” he said. “But I want you to think about what that verse means, what the last part of that verse is saying. ‘Broken beyond healing.’”

  Dwayne didn’t say another word. He simply turned and walked into the light. In a moment, he was gone, and the only sounds were those of birds and of Angie whimpering softly on the floor.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It took Calvin Hooper all of five minutes to find Dwayne Brewer’s address using an online property finder provided on the county’s website. In the age of the Internet, a man could find anybody he wanted with little effort at all.

  When Sheriff John Coggins stomped into the jail that morning shaking his head, he said he had no idea what had gone on the night before aside from a chicken-brained clusterfuck left on his desk like a lunch sack stuffed with shit. Calvin rushed out of the Justice Center and called one of the men who worked for him, a Hispanic named Miguel who could skin a tomato with a trackhoe blade. Miguel didn’t ask any questions. He gave Calvin a ride to his truck and Calvin went home only long enough to grab the .45-70, throw the brush gun in the cab, and head back to town.

  A dozen NO TRESPASSING signs marked the head of Dwayne Brewer’s driveway, but Calvin eased past and motored on around the next bend. The road was cut into a hillside strangled by kudzu on both sides. He parked the truck in a shallow pull-off carved where dead vines lay over the ground like mats of tangled gray hair. A groundhog stood tall and watched him from a mound of red clay that marked its burrow in the kudzu patch. Calvin grabbed the gun and headed back the way he’d come.

  He didn’t know if Dwayne Brewer had made it home or not. All he knew for certain was that Dwayne had tromped out of the cellblock a good hour before the sheriff cut him loose. Either way Dwayne had a head start and odds were he was already home, but if he wasn’t and he came up the road and saw Calvin’s truck sitting in the ditch, there’d be no chance for surprise and that’s why Calvin had driven past and parked up the road.

  Tall jack pines stood on both sides of the driveway, the gravel washed-out and rutted with deep red-clay veins. A deer skull was screwed into one of the pines at the mouth of the road, a young cowhorn with thin green moss staining patches of milk-white bone. Calvin pushed into the woods to follow the driveway. Thick undergrowth strangled the forest floor the way it did everywhere in the mountains anymore, the hills no longer allowed to burn the way they would naturally so that briar and shrub grew almost impenetrable. He used the short barrel of the lever action to push his way through blackberry bramble and honeysuckle vine along the right side of the drive. Darl’s rifle was made for country like this, for a quick swing in thick cover when black bear and hog decided to charge. Thorns scratched at Calvin’s arms and beggar’s lice specked his clothes, but soon enough he was close.

  When he could see the house through the trees, Calvin knelt to the ground and peered through a veil of saplings and brushwood. The trees were loud with birds and the whipping sound of a pileated woodpecker flapping heavy through the forest on wide-set wings. The weather had turned funny, a cold front coming in and bringing on fall a month ahead of schedule and now an Indian summer the last of October when the leaves were already gone. The sun beat hot against his back, the dark camouflage shirt he’d thrown on soaking up the heat. He sat still and quiet waiting for any movement, any sound from the house, but nothing came. When he was sure no one was outside, he climbed the hillside for a better vantage.

  The house sat in the bottom of a shallow bowl, the land rising on all sides but the front. Calvin crept up the slope in a wide arc above the home. A tall, craggy-barked locust had fallen
downhill with its base ripping the ground into a vertical barricade of mud and gnarled white roots. He could see the house clearly from here and decided to use the deadfall as a sort of ground blind to scout the property. The front yard was open, no windows on this side of the house, and a brown painted tin shed stood at the back of the property along the edge of the yard.

  For a long time, nothing stirred except small, gray juncos flicking around the bushes and boomer squirrels racing back and forth from the pines. Calvin was antsy to move, already fearing the worst, but then he heard the sound of something coming through the woods on the opposite hill. Leaning around the roots, he saw a man coming through the trees. The man looked naked from such distance but as he came into the yard, Calvin could see that Dwayne Brewer had no shirt or shoes, a light pair of denim jeans being the only thing he wore.

  There were only seventy-five, maybe a hundred yards between them, Calvin never having been a good judge of distance. He shouldered the Marlin rifle, rested his cheek on its gray laminate stock, and used the roots to brace his aim, to center the target through ghost ring sights. Easing the lever forward and back, he chambered a 300-grain Beartooth with little more than a dull click. There was something in Dwayne’s hand, maybe a knife or a machete, but from such distance he couldn’t be certain. Calvin’s heart raced, his palms sweaty. He followed Dwayne with the sights to where he disappeared behind the house. A few seconds later, Dwayne emerged in the backyard and headed to the shed at the back of the property.