19

“At first, I told myself it wouldn’t last. That they would see they couldn’t break Eddie. I swear I don’t know where he got it from, but Eddie is tough, and he’s determined, and he knows the difference between right and wrong. Ain’t that something? A daddy like Jeb Walsh, and he still turns out to be a great kid.”

I smiled. “Sometimes the apple does fall a long way from the tree.”

“And sometimes it doesn’t,” she muttered. “Our other boy, Andy, is evidence enough of that.”

“So what happened?” I asked. “Did they break him?”

She shook her head. “Not yet, but I swear they’re determined to. There’s only so much one person can take.”

“Have you thought about going to child services?”

“I have. In fact, I spent nearly a month on the phone with them trying to get someone from their office to the school. The problem is they don’t find me credible.”

“Why not?”

“Jeb has spread lies about me being on drugs and spending time in a halfway house.” She closed her eyes and kept her face still, as if she were trying to endure a great pain. “The drugs are a lie. I did have a breakdown earlier this year, but it was over Eddie. It wasn’t a halfway house. I simply checked myself into a psychiatric care center. They put me on some medication. I’m doing better. But nobody ever wants to hear that part. All they hear is Jeb telling them in that ‘aw-shucks, I’m just a simple country boy’ voice he’s fucking mastered how his wife went crazy and his youngest child is at reform school because she wasn’t a good parent and let him run wild.”

“I’m sorry.”

She waved me off. “I should be apologizing to you for the way he treated you. I’m not even married to him anymore, and I got an earful about what kind of a special liberal snowflake you were.”

I shrugged. “If being a snowflake means taking care of others, I’m fine with it.”

“Exactly. My thoughts as well.”

I glanced over at the kid at the bar in the bad suit. He was still darting glances this way. None of them were friendly.

“About three months ago, Eddie called me. They get to make one call a month. Can you imagine that? One call every month? Hardened criminals get more than that. He’d told me before how he and another boy had hit it off. They were friends, but I knew by him saying friends, he meant they were thinking about being more than that. A month or so later, he called and said they were ‘dating.’ What that meant at a place like that, I have no idea. But I was happy for him. I just told him to stay out of trouble. I told him there was no way he could let anybody find out. I wanted to tell him to stop immediately, but I hadn’t heard him sound so happy in months. I couldn’t bear to do it.”

I didn’t like where this was going. I felt myself getting tense just listening to her talk now, and the next time I glanced over at the kid, he was glaring at me with a kind of naked hatred that made me want to punch him in the face. It was one of my flaws. Injustice made me angry. Anger made me violent. I was working on it.

“So, the last time he called—this was three months ago, in March, maybe early April—he was in tears. It took a while for him to tell me what was bothering him because he was crying so much. When he finally got it out, I was stunned. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘they killed him.’ I just started crying right there on the phone with him.”

“Wait,” I said. “His boyfriend was murdered?”

She shrugged. “He’s dead. The school claims he committed suicide. There’s a waterfall behind the campus. They call it—”

The screen door swung open. I turned and saw two men enter. The Hill Brothers. As interested as I was in Eleanor Walsh’s story, I couldn’t focus on her words. Instead, I sat transfixed as the two men approached the bar, both of them crowding around the kid who had been looking for a fight. Neither man acknowledged him as the taller one leaned against the bar and said something to the fat bartender, still slumped in his chair. The bartender’s face changed when he saw the brothers, and he pulled out two bottles of beer, twisting off the caps before passing them over. No money exchanged hands as the two boys took the bottles and scanned the small, hot room. The long-haired brother lifted his bottle and touched it to the side of his hairy face. As he did, his shirt rode up to reveal a scarred midsection and the top of a pearl-handled revolver protruding from the waistband of his blue jeans.

Their eyes never stopped, never rested, flitting around the room like there might be an attacker lying in wait among us and they’d need to be ready. They still stood too close to the young man in the suit, and his anger had shifted away from me toward them.

I turned back to Eleanor. “Hold that thought,” I said softly. “I want to see this.”

The Hill Brothers had finally given the kid some space, as one of them stepped toward the door and the other one settled in against the far wall. It seemed odd to see them like this, still at last, their ceaseless motion finally stopped. Whenever I’d seen them before, they had always been on the move, and their long, dogged strides had become almost a part of their character. Now I saw a different side of them. Now their attitude was somewhere between fuck this place and we’re going to stay for a while.

Just when I was about to turn back to Eleanor, the kid said something under his breath. When no one reacted to his words, he said it louder. “Assholes come in like they own the place.”

Neither Hill Brother acknowledged him. Instead their eyes went from their beer bottles to the windows, back to me and Eleanor at our table, an endless cycle, like each stop was a note in a song with its own curious tempo.

“Hey,” the kid said, looking at the taller Hill Brother, the one with the bowl cut. “I’m talking to you.”

Bowl Cut looked at the kid briefly before setting his beer bottle on a table and pulling out a pouch of tobacco. He reached into the pouch for a huge hunk of dark leaves and stuffed it down deep into his jowls. He sucked on it for a while, then opened the window behind him and leaned out to spit.

“Livingstone!” the kid cried. “You gonna let him chew tobacco in your place?”

Livingstone sat up in his chair behind the bar. “He ain’t hurting me.”

“And what about paying for them beers? I want a free beer too.”

“They got a tab, Slim. You better just mind your own business.”

Slim slammed his beer can on the bar, and for the first time I realized he wasn’t just drunk, he was also filled with something else, something that had found him when he was a young man and stuck inside him, something that managed to drive him and move him and imprison him all at once. There were places in these mountains where they say bad water messed with young people’s minds and made them insane, incapable of living in polite society. Maybe that explained what we were witnessing.

“I don’t think it’s right!” Slim said. He stood up and stepped in front of Bowl Cut, jabbing a finger in his face. “You need to take your uneducated asses back to the woods.”

Bowl Cut lifted his beer bottle to his lips and drank it empty. Then, instead of putting it down on the table, he turned it over in his hand until he held the bottle by the throat, the fat end jutting out from his grasp like a baseball bat. With a sudden and terrifyingly efficient motion, he slammed it into Slim’s head. The bottle exploded, glass flying all over the small room. A piece landed in my hair, and I brushed it out as I stood up, reaching for my .45. Two things happened before I could get it out. Slim hit the plank floor with a hollow thud. The other Hill Brother pulled out his pearl-handled .38 and aimed it at my face. His eyes settled on me, still for the first time. There was nothing in them. Nothing to make me think he wouldn’t shoot me, nothing to make me think he’d care if I was dead or alive.

I raised my hands in the air.

“He’s going to need a doctor,” I said.

Bowl Cut’s eyes fell on me before flitting to Livingstone. “Two more for the road,” he said in a voice that might as well have been the mountains themselves speaking, it was so dusty and deep and unused.

Livingstone snapped to, grabbing four beers instead of the two Bowl Cut had asked for. “On the house,” he said.

Bowl Cut dropped the neck of the broken bottle he was holding and scooped up the new beer bottles. He nodded to his brother, who lowered the gun. Bowl Cut stepped over Slim and followed his brother out the door. I went to the screen door and watched as they headed through the tiny dirt lot and into the trees, disappearing like shadows at dusk.