67

I pulled myself up to safety just in time to get knocked back down. The Hill Brother swung the stock of the rifle hard, and it landed against my jaw. I dropped to wooden planks, scrambling to hold on to something to keep from sliding off and joining Savanna in the fall.

“You killed my brother,” he said, and drove the stock of the rifle into the center of my back. My body lit up with pain that flashed outward to my extremities. Fingers, toes, even my teeth hurt.

“Why did you kill my brother?” he asked, and I swear it wasn’t rhetorical. He expected me to answer, but I had no answer. Why was the toughest of all the mysteries. Even how couldn’t come close.

“I don’t know,” I moaned.

He sucked in a breath, and I understood he was raising the gun again. I waited a beat before kicking his shins with both of my boots. He gasped in pain and dropped the rifle onto my back. I screamed as the pain came back, like a flame that ran along my nerve endings. The bridge rocked as he fell.

“Help,” he said. Gradually, I worked myself up to my knees and turned to see that he’d been pitched headfirst off the bridge, and somehow his leg had become twisted in the rope. The rest of him dangled headfirst over the dark gap. It was the same way I’d hung as a boy, so many lifetimes ago.

I slid over on my knees and examined the situation. I could easily let him fall by simply pulling up on the rope, releasing the snag that had saved him.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He said nothing, his arms spread out like he was ready to embrace the darkness.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m going to help you.” I just didn’t have it in me to watch somebody else disappear into that darkness. I just didn’t. Besides, maybe he still had a chance now that his mother was gone. Was being put in a shed in the woods when he was a small child his fault?

“You wearing a belt?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“If you’re wearing a belt and can take it off, then you could toss it up to me. I can hook it to my belt, and then you can get a hold of it. Then I can let your foot loose and pull you up.”

He reached for his midsection and unbuckled his belt. Once he’d pulled it through the loops, he let it dangle in his hand, holding it by the buckle.

“Are you ready?” he said. I realized I’d never heard him speak in a normal voice before. His voice was low and gravelly, almost poetically powerful. Calmer than I’d expected.

“I’m ready,” I said. “Make it a good throw.”

He swung the belt up and let go of it. The buckle gleamed in the moonlight. It was a bad throw, and I had to lunge to get a hand on it, disrupting the balance of the bridge again. I caught the belt and landed flat on my belly, my arms and head out in space. The rope his boot was tangled in shuddered, and he slipped down into the gap two or three inches before it snagged him again.

I unhooked my own belt and then spliced the two of them together. I held onto one buckle, sliding it over the middle finger of my right hand. “Here it comes,” I said, dropping the rest of it into the open gap. “Can you reach it?”

He didn’t have to answer. I felt the tug on the belt. “Make sure you’ve got a good two-handed grip. When I undo this boot, everything is going to change.”

“I got it,” he said.

“Okay, here goes.”

He said nothing.

I lifted the rope with my free hand. It was harder to lift than I’d expected, but eventually I created enough space and his boot slipped free. I felt the sudden weight of the man just an instant before I doubled up my grip. I was dragged forward with him as he started his fall, but when I got two hands on the belt, I was able to curl my arms up, to fight against gravity again, to make my muscles forget the past and live in the now.

Together we worked to get him up to the bridge. I lay there on my back, panting, and a memory I’d lodged inside the blacked-out places of my mind came back to me suddenly and vividly.

This was where I’d lain drunk, looking up at the stars, and decided there was no point in continuing to try. Hell, I was so done with life, I didn’t even have the energy to off myself. I just wanted to go to sleep and let the chips fall where they fell, which I was quite sure would be in the gap my father had once promised me would by my destiny.

But my destiny was still writing itself. The past isn’t set in stone even if we want it to be, because it’s a living, fluid thing, open to a thousand interpretations and evaluations, influenced by the present as much as the other way around. Destiny and the past are intertwined because they can both be manipulated by the present.

And right now, I felt like a man who’d done a hard day’s work, and a man who still had a few jobs to do, but I’d have to do them after I rested a bit. But just before I faded off, I heard the Hill Brother speak.

“What?” I asked the dark.

“It’s Jeb,” he said. “My name. It’s Jeb Junior.”

*   *   *

I dreamed of my father and Mary and Rufus. Ronnie was by my side and we were in the woods, on some island in the middle of some river. My father was a ghost we saw on the path, and Mary lived in a small hut beside a small stream where she made moonshine and happiness, just not the kind that could do me any good. We encountered Rufus last of all, lying faceup in a stream that looked a lot like Ghost Creek. He was naked except for the tattoos on his chest. They shimmered in the clear water and came alive in the radiant light of a moon brighter than any I’d ever seen.

On his chest was a road map tracing the path of his life from the Holy Flame to the Harden School to Two Indian Falls and then back to the church. It was a circle, and I was struck by the strength of the circle, the way the present ate the past and subsumed the future. I reached a hand out to him, and he opened his eyes and saw me. I helped him out of the stream, and that was when I realized my dream had played a trick on me in the way dreams sometimes do: Ronnie had vanished and in his place was Joe. I patted his shoulder and pushed him toward the creek. And now Rufus had been replaced by Harriet and her wheelchair in the creek. She extended a creek-dirtied hand, and Joe took it.

Harriet closed her eyes again and nodded. Above us, the moon went dim, and then all of us were as blind as we’d been in the womb, the last safe place before death.