by David Joy
“Yes,” she whispered. She was crying and there seemed to be little else inside her but that word. Her head rocked against Dwayne’s chest. “Yes,” she said.
Dwayne Brewer lowered his face to the side of her head and spoke as if he were telling her a secret. “He didn’t know?”
“No,” she said. Her head was shaking and she was blubbering hysterically. “No.”
“What a strange, strange world, how a man ends up where he does,” Dwayne said. “Sometimes it’s his own doing, but most the time, most the time, it’s like we’re led along like starved dogs.”
“Let her go.” Calvin’s voice was weak now, absolutely broken. He could feel his knees buckling beneath him, his legs about to dissolve. “I’ve already called the law, Dwayne. I called and they’re on their way. They’ll be here in a matter of minutes.” He hesitated, his brain flooded with emotion. “You’re not leaving here with her.”
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Dwayne said. “There was never any need for anyone outside of me and you. This was between us, friend. Just us. And I really wish you wouldn’t have made me do this.”
“Put the gun down, Calvin,” Angie squealed. He could see Dwayne’s arm tightening around her, the knife pressing harder into her throat. “For God’s sake, put the gun down.”
“I never wanted to hurt her,” Dwayne said. “I never wanted anything to do with the lot of you. All I wanted was what you took.” There was a deep and furious anger kindling on his words. “All I wanted was one thing, one thing, and I could’ve gotten by, but even that you took.”
“Let her go,” Calvin pleaded. “Just let her go.”
There was something inexplicable in what Dwayne Brewer said next. It was as if he weren’t talking to anyone there.
“All my life I’ve been begging You for mercy and not a day has it come. Not one day. Now I’m asking once more, and after this I’m done. I’ll never ask You again,” Dwayne said. “Now this is how it’s going to play out if you want this baby to live, Calvin. I want you to walk right over there by that dogwood and sit that rifle down.”
“Let her go.” Calvin could tell that Dwayne was coming apart at the seams, and that instability scared him to death.
“Please, Calvin.” Angie wept. “Just do what he says.”
“I’ve asked you twice and that only leaves once more,” Dwayne said. “You need to think about what you stand to lose, friend. Your load is heavy and my burden light. I cut her throat and everything you love is gone.”
“You hurt her and I’ll shoot you dead you son of a bitch.”
“And I’ll welcome that moment like company, friend,” Dwayne said. His words were soft and calm.
“Put the gun down,” Angie whispered. Calvin looked at her eyes, those eyes begging for salvation, begging him for something man was not meant to provide.
“I told you all along your time would come,” Dwayne said.
“Do it, Calvin. For God’s sake, just do what—”
“Are you willing to lay down your life for the ones you love?” Dwayne cut Angie’s words short. “Are you willing to lay that rifle down and let me kill you to save her, to save the child she carries?”
“What?” Calvin’s mind was whirling.
“It’s simple,” Dwayne said. “Are you willing to die for the ones you love?”
Calvin watched Angie’s face flush white. Off from where they’d come, he could hear voices echoing in the distance and he knew the law would soon be upon them.
“Make up your mind, friend. One of you is not leaving this place today and only you can decide. If they reach us, it’s over. You’re the only one who can decide whether it’s you or her.”
Calvin had the rifle aimed at the bridge of Dwayne’s nose, but he lowered his eyes to the ground. From her feet, he followed her legs upward settling on her stomach, imagining an entire life stretched before him. The swimming of his thoughts stifled the sounds around him. In that moment, his mind cut from madness to absolute certainty. There was no balancing between what it would be like to live without her and what it would be like to die. It was as easy a decision as he’d ever made in his life.
Without a word, he dropped his left hand from the foregrip, his right still bearing the rifle as he lifted the barrel to the sky. Backing toward the crooked dogwood, its bark scaled like snakeskin, he laid the rifle on the ground, held his hands at his chest with his palms open before him.
“Now get back over there where you were,” Dwayne said. He neither lowered the knife nor lessened its pressure.
“Okay,” Calvin said. “Okay.” He sidestepped and Dwayne moved toward the rifle.
When he reached the dogwood, Dwayne shoved Angie forward and she crumbled loosely to the ground. There was no breath in Calvin’s lungs as Dwayne shouldered the rifle, settled his cheek against the stock, and took his aim. He came forward and soon enough the muzzle was within feet. Calvin lowered his head and stared at the ground, the place he would fall. This is it, he thought. This is where it ends. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes trying to imagine what would come, death the greatest question of all.
“Raise your head,” Dwayne said.
Calvin lifted his eyes to Angie. She was curled on the ground wailing and beating her fists bloody against the earth. She screamed his name at the top of her lungs but he heard nothing. He met Dwayne’s eyes only for a moment, looking upward until there was only sky, cloudless and blue, the last of light filtering in from somewhere off to his left.
“Now can you see it?” Dwayne asked.
“Yes,” Calvin said, and he could. He could see that there was a single, magnificent truth holding this world together. “Yes, I can see it.”
“And isn’t it beautiful,” Dwayne said. “Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
Calvin closed his eyes. He waited for the hammer to fall, the explosion of sound and light, the everything and the empty. Years passed in that waiting. Lifetimes. And though he was certain he was near, he would wait like all the rest for that great question to be answered, for when he opened his eyes and followed the sky down to where Dwayne had stood, he was gone, the woods empty, the devil having disappeared as if he’d never existed at all. Over the western horizon, the sun rode low on the ridge, a dull sunset so ordinary and unspectacular he would likely never remember. The voices neared, footsteps now loud in the cove.
Calvin fell to his knees and crawled to her. He wrapped his arms around her and held on to Angie as tight as he could, their bodies melding into a singular beating thing. His mind spun too fast for thought, his heart as wild as a panther’s. He knew what it was to need and what it was to have plenty.
She was all there ever was.
FORTY
That last day of October, Dwayne Brewer drove through town at sunset, blue lights screaming past like meteors. Steam bellowed from the smokestacks of the paper mill, white roiling into dull yellow sky, and he watched that place disappear in his rearview like everything else before.
Passing Harold’s Grocery headed into Dillsboro, he saw hundreds of birds filling the sky, a cloud of buzzards shifting on thermals, their wings tilting back and forth to steady their wide-set whirling. He leaned low against the steering wheel to watch them as he crossed the bridge over Scotts Creek. He wondered if they would follow him, if they would always follow, and his heart knew the answer, that their work lies all where and their wings tire not.
Through the windshield, empty flea markets and dimly lit filling stations blurred by in his periphery. He rode past fields separated from the highway only by thin tree lines, yellowed fields of oat grass and sedge where old barns crumbled in on themselves like gray ash. The highway was empty once he passed Bryson City, the dark shadows of mountains closing in, the night now fully upon him.
Fontana Lake opened over a bridge that crossed the Little Tennessee where it slowed t
hrough the narrows into stilled slack water. A few miles farther, the highway split one way into the gorge, the other toward Almond, and he followed the northwest fork along Fingerlake and over the mouth of the Nantahala.
He wasn’t sure what to do with the car. His instinct said siphon the gas and douse the Grand Prix with fuel, plug the tank with a gasoline-soaked rag, and burn Carol’s car to the ground. In such darkness, the fire would be seen for miles, drawing the law like moths, tall flames whipping at the sky, black smoke only serving to veil the starlight. He thought then of sinking the car in the water, the stilled surface gurgling a story until it stilled again. There were so many things buried here, entire towns, like Judson, flooded and forgotten, that he could not bear the thought of adding a single ghost. In the end, he simply pulled into a ditch near Fontana Village, rolled the window up on a white rag to make it seem as if he’d broken down and traveled on.
Dwayne backtracked two miles to the marina, slinking along the edge of the woods with Darl Moody’s rifle stretched across his shoulders, his arms draped over the gun like a scarecrow. When he reached the water, a green tin roof covered the rental complex, the red glow of a Coke machine all that offered light. The dock stretched forth lined on both sides by pontoon boats, and from the shadows, he watched the place for a long time before he moved. The marina had been abandoned for season. The tourists and part-timers willing to fork over hundreds of dollars to rent a boat for an afternoon had already left and gone.
Canoes lined the end of the dock with their gunwales resting on sun-bleached planks, their hulls facing the sky. Dwayne flipped one of the canoes and balanced the keel against the edge of the dock to ease the boat into water. He found a paddle stood against the wall by the snack bar, the rolling counter door pulled down and padlocked for winter, and when he loaded all that he had into the canoe, he pushed out from the dock and cast his eyes over the water.
That night, Dwayne Brewer paddled across the sky. Each stroke dipped into the heavens, the stars vibrating on the water’s surface like the strings of an instrument strummed by his gentle passing. He paddled four miles over the next few hours, recognizing the cove by a long strip of land that cut into Fontana like a dagger. He paddled past Cable Branch and Laurel Branch, tiny trickles of water heard rather than seen, then farther back to Proctor, where he beached the canoe on a shoreline muddied with clay. There at the edge of the woods his mind finally caught him and he leaned against the trunk of a dying hemlock thinking about all that had brought him there.
All his life he’d only known one answer to suffering, but that long-held truth had given way to something new. There in those woods with that knife held to Angie Moss’s neck, he’d thought of his brother, thought of all that he’d lost, and that pain festered into a familiar feeling, a rage he could feel at the backs of his eyes. He wanted so desperately to kill her. He wanted to see that horrified, broken look sink across Calvin Hooper’s bloodless face. He wanted someone else to suffer so that he wasn’t alone, so that for once they were all the same, one no better than the next. With that gun in his hand, he was certain it would be so satisfying to kill him. His finger was nearing the trigger’s break and it was almost euphoric. Right at that moment of reckoning, there was a feeling that came into him like molten lead, like he was being poured full, his insides searing with heat. He felt hands clasp on to his shoulders and all thought escaped him and he could hear a voice, a voice that did not speak in any language he’d ever heard though he immediately knew the meaning of what was spoken and did not question.
Let it go, the voice said. All of it. Let it go.
Dwayne sat against that hemlock all night watching the water, his body shivering cold, his heart a burning fire. The night gave way to morning, the stars drawing back and drawing back as darkness surrendered to light. A tangerine sun blushed the sky with a hue so breathtakingly beautiful that he was moved to tears. All that he’d carried all of his life rained from his eyes and soaked into the ground. Sunrise singed trees crimson, lit the lake the color of blood. The word dwelled there amongst him and he wept until he was weightless as dust blown to air.
Right then he knew both everything and nothing.
His mind was wiped clean as a child’s and the former was passed away.
* * *
• • •
A HARD FROST bit the beautiful that spring, yellowed the willows the color of mustard and robbed the redbuds their bloom. But soon enough the temperatures rose and Dwayne Brewer was thankful.
The winter had been trying and many nights he believed he would freeze. He made shelter inside an earthen cavern carved beneath great boulders by water and time. When he arrived, he had nothing aside from a pair of jeans and a rifle. No shoes. No shirt. No food. Those first few weeks he broke into nearby cabins to scavenge clothes, rummaging through the dressers and closets of retirees, seldom finding anything that fit. A small general store by the marina kept beer and groceries, brightly colored tourist T-shirts with black bears and sunsets covering the front, the words VISIT THE SMOKIES stitched across the chest.
This morning he wore a pair of thin, pleated dress pants that had belonged to a man who was wider than he was tall. Dwayne cinched the brown trousers tight at his waist with his belt, unstitched the cuffs to give an extra inch though they still hit him mid-shin. He’d cut the ends out of a grass-stained pair of white leather Stride Rites, his toes hanging over the fronts, the cotton tube socks he wore were black and damp where they touched the ground. Only the middle letters of the word FONTANA shone on the turquoise T-shirt, a woman’s navy blue trench coat buttoned tight around him. The coat fit him crudely, only the bottom button finding room to close. He was far too broad, so that the shoulder pads made sharp ridges between his neck and arms, the fabric about to pop. All that he wore was dirtied with soil, the colors darkened to earthen tones that blended against the mountainside. His hair was long and hot beneath his toboggan, his beard hanging down to his chest.
Winters were hard to survive as plants died back to nothing and a man was left to hunt small game for meals. But now the world was blooming and soon he’d have plenty: ramps and branch lettuce, maypops and chicken of the woods, dandelion greens and pokeweed, wild strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, huckleberries, muscadine, purslane and chicory, fiddlehead ferns and yellowroot. He walked a hillside covered with white trillium and mayapple that had yet to flower, the lobed leaves circling the shoots like umbrellas. The trapline made an irregular oval through the cove, a series of simple deadfalls and squirrel poles, tiny snares strung from fisherman’s string. Most often he found chipmunks crushed under the stones, though when he was lucky, squirrels and rabbits fell prey.
Up ahead, Dwayne could see a robin thrashing about the ground, its tiny leg snared, its wings beating madly beside a young poplar thin as a cane. He sped toward the bird in great loping strides because sometimes things didn’t hold, sometimes what was right in front of a man’s eyes got away from him. Setting Darl Moody’s rifle on the ground, he closed his hands around the robin’s body, only the head showing from the top of his fist. He looked at its eyes, those black seed eyes outlined by white, the dark gray feathers of its head and sharp goldenrod beak. In an instant, he plucked the bird’s head off like he was pulling a grape from a vine and set the body on the ground, its wings flapping hard, legs pulled inward, movements slowing, slowing, then stilled. He plucked orange feathers from skin, tore the breast free, and ate the tiny gob of flesh raw in a single bite, his fingers stained red and sticky with blood.
At the stream, he balanced the rifle against a tangle of exposed roots, cupped handfuls of water to his mouth and drank, wiping his beard with the back of his hand. He held his hands in the water, the creek ice-cold and clear as crystal. A school of small, olive-backed minnows darted about his fingers. The water held in an eddy and he could see his reflection and he stared at himself for a long time, barely recognizing what had become of him. He scrubbed his hands
in the water to wash the blood, and as the surface sloshed about, his reflection muddled into glare and light. A tiger swallowtail landed on his knee, its papery wings swaying softly open and closed. The butterfly sipped water from the wetted fabric of his trousers then lifted and fluttered downstream.
A fleck of color caught his eye and Dwayne turned. Rising from the black soil, a single pink lady’s slipper had bloomed early, its thistle-colored flower hanging from a thin green stem like a human heart. He strolled over and knelt beside it, tracing a petal with the tip of his finger, something so delicate and soft his callused skin could not feel. This world is awash with miracles, he thought. How marvelous to simply bear witness.
Crouched at the top of a knoll overlooking Possum Hollow, he could see down into the cove where a trail followed the stream and continued on around to the lakeshore. A pair of hikers, a young man and woman, had made primitive camp at the edge of the trail beside a thick copse of laurel. Their pale gray dome tent rose from the ground like a boulder. Their packs were leaned against a log. Dwayne had heard them the night before, could hear them laughing, and see the glow of their fire haloing the top of the hill. He knelt behind a fallen tree. The bark was gone and the wood was stained a deep rotted brown. They were cooking breakfast and the smell of it traveled between them, the sweet smoky smell of streaked meat sizzling in cast iron on the coals.
He braced the rifle against the trunk of the fallen tree and watched them through the sights. The hammer was back, the safety thumbed away. The woman had her palms open to the fire as if begging heat from the flames. The man was on hands and knees by circled stones, jabbing a fork at their meal, flipping their breakfast so that it would not burn. With the barrel balanced on the tree, Dwayne bore the rifle’s weight solely with his right hand. He scratched the ridges along the front of the trigger with his fingernail. He had his left hand in the pocket of his pants and he was rolling his brother’s teeth through his palm, Sissy’s smile ticking in his hand like a fistful of marbles.
