My husband was a lot of things. A high school dreamboat. A lowlife bully. An athlete who could’ve gone pro, if only. A junkie. A jerk. And yes, he was a killer. Eventually—and eventually, we’ll get to that part. I mean to tell you everything. But it’s not enough, just to tell the truth; I’m telling you a story, and I want it to come out right. You have to know how it all began to understand the ending.
My husband could be a real bastard.
But he wasn’t a wife beater.
Even during the worst times, when he was really raging, drunk or stoned or both. I could see in those moments that he would’ve liked to hit me. But he didn’t, and I think it’s because he knew if he did, I’d hit back. And I’d make it hurt. I knew where his soft targets were.
He’d never have risked it. For all his legendary abilities on the ball field, the rocket arm that might have made him a star, my husband wasn’t a man who enjoyed a challenge. The Prince Charming of my fucked-up fairy tale preferred his fights unfair, his opponent hopelessly outmatched, and his outcomes guaranteed. In high school, he was the big guy who’d stick out a boot in a crowded hallway just to watch some puny eighth grader go sprawling. He was the kind of man who took a weird, grotesque joy in following a spider around the house, letting it scuttle almost all the way to freedom before he brought down a shoe or a rolled-up magazine and turned it into a smear on the floor. Or the goddamn bug zapper—he loved it. He’d watch it like a movie, sitting there, beer in hand, while mosquitoes and blackflies floated out of the twilit woods, drawn by the hypnotic blue glow of the Flowtron in our backyard. If you closed your eyes you could hear them hitting it: Bzzt! Fzzt!
Dwayne would let out this idiot’s chortle every time one of them incinerated itself, this duh-huh-hurr sound from deep in his throat, and eventually he’d drain his beer and pitch the can away into the yard and say, “These bugs are so fucking dumb.”
That was my man: half-drunk on a Tuesday, reveling in his superiority to something that doesn’t even have a central nervous system. Picking on someone his own size would have taken a kind of integrity he just didn’t have.
But the men in Copper Falls were like that. Not all of them, maybe even not most of them, but enough. Enough to make it a trend. Enough so that if you were one of them, you could look around and assume that the way you were was the right way to be. Your own father was probably the same; he would be the one who first taught you that there was a sense of power to be had in stamping on spiders, zapping flies, snuffing out a life so much smaller than yours that it hardly meant anything at all. You’d learn early, while you were still a boy.
Then you’d spend the rest of your life finding little things to crush.
It happened the summer that I was eleven, still young enough to feel that the place we lived had a kind of magic to it. Our trailer sat at the end of the lot nearest the road, the heaps rising up behind it like an ancient, ruined city. It felt like the edge of another world, and I liked to pretend that it was, and we were its keepers, my father and I—sentries at the borderland, charged with guarding ancient secrets from trespassers and plunderers. Snaking corridors of hard-packed dirt wound back between the piles of scrap metal, splintered furniture, broken and discarded toys. There was a line of busted-up cars marking the property line to the west, stacked like oblong building blocks, so old that they had been there not just since before I was born but since before Pop took the place over. Pop hated them; he worried out loud that they would topple one day, and warned me away from ever climbing them, but there was nothing to be done. The machine that had been used to lift and stack them had been long since sold off to pay some debt, and so the cars stayed, slowly rusting. I would weave my way back to the place where that line ended, where the heaps stopped and the woods began, a narrow path of yellowed grass winding into the trees just beyond the bumper of a crushed Camaro. This was the oldest part of the property, from some long-ago time before it became a repository for unwanted things. A hundred yards into the trees was my favorite spot: a clearing where the rusted-out husks of three ancient trucks sat facing each other, sunk into the earth up to the wheel wells. Nobody knew who they’d belonged to or how they’d come to be left there, nose to nose like they were paused in the middle of a conversation, but I loved the shape of them: the curvy hoods, the heavy chrome fenders, the big, black, bug-eyed holes where the headlights used to be. They were part of the landscape now. Animals had nested in the seats over the years; vines had threaded themselves through the chassis. One of them had an oak tree growing straight through it, rising out of the driver’s seat and through the roof, blooming into a lush green canopy overhead.
It seemed beautiful to me. And even the ugly parts, that line of stacked cars or the piles of busted junk, seemed like something exciting, dangerous, a little mysterious. I hadn’t figured out yet that I was supposed to be ashamed—of the trailer or the heaps behind it, of our cheap furniture, of the way Pop would pluck toys or books out of the boxes of crap people left at the junkyard, clean them up, and present them to me at Christmas or birthdays all wrapped up with a bow on top. I didn’t know they were trash.
I didn’t know we were trash.
I have Pop to thank for that. For that, if nothing else. I was able to imagine for a long time that we were the blessed guardians of a strange and magical place, and I realize now that it was because of him, that he took it upon himself to keep the world’s meanness at bay so that it wouldn’t interrupt my dreams. Even when things were tough, when the winter had lasted a month longer than usual, and the car broke down, and he had to spend our grocery money for a new transmission, he never let on that we were desperate. I still remember how he would walk into the woods at dawn and come back with three fat squirrels strung over his shoulder, the way he’d grin when he said, “I know a lucky gal who’s getting my nana’s special limb-chicken stew tonight.” He was so convincing with his “special” and “lucky” that I clapped my hands with joy. One day, I would realize that we weren’t lucky but broke, and that our choices were squirrel meat or no meat at all. But in those early days, neatly clipping the feet off my dinner with a pair of bloodstained tin snips, undressing them out of their skins the way Pop had taught me and his daddy taught him, it all felt like an adventure. He shielded me from the truth about who we were for as long as he could.
But he couldn’t do it forever.
I was alone a lot that summer, just me and the heaps and the junkyard cats. We’d always had a few skulking around, raggedy feral things that I rarely saw except out of the corner of my eye, a lightning-quick flash of gray slinking low from between the heaps and into the woods. But there had been a litter of kittens that winter; I could hear them mewing from somewhere near the trailer, and one day I saw a lean tabby cat disappear down a passageway into the trash with a freshly killed mouse dangling from her jaws. By June, the tabby had left for parts unknown, but the kittens were still there, grown into three curious, leggy adolescents who would sit on the heaps and watch me every time I walked through the yard. Pop gave me a long look the day I told him I wanted cat food from the grocery store.
“Them cats can hunt for themselves,” he said. “That’s why we don’t chase ’em away, ’cause they keep the yard clear of vermin.”
“But I want them to like me,” I said, and I must have looked truly pathetic, because I saw him suck in his cheeks to keep from laughing—and the next time he went to the market, he came back with a bag of cheap kibble and a warning: no cats in the trailer. If I wanted a pet, he said, he’d get me a dog.
I didn’t want a dog. Not that I didn’t like them, understand. I always liked animals, liked them better than people for the most part. But dogs, they were just so much. The slobber, the noise, the desperate desire to please. The loyalty of a dog is overrated; you get it for nothing. You could kick a dog every day and it would still come back, begging, wanting to be loved. Cats, though—they’re different. You have to work for it. Even the new kittens at the junkyard, the ones who hadn’t learned yet to be wary of people, wouldn’t take food from my hand right away. It took days before they didn’t run from me, more than a week for me to earn their trust. Even when they would take scraps from my fingers, only one of them ever let his guard down enough to crawl into my lap and purr. He was the smallest of the bunch, with a white face and gray markings that covered his head and ears like a cap, and a funny pair of front legs that bent inward like a pair of human elbows—what some people call a “twisty cat.” The first time he crawled out of the heaps, I laughed out loud at the sight of him, hopping forward and sitting up on his hind legs like a kangaroo, appraising the situation. He didn’t seem to know that he was broken, or if he did, he didn’t care. I loved him fiercely and immediately. I named him Rags.
My father didn’t understand, nor share my warm feelings for broken things. The first time he saw Rags come creeping out of the heaps, his face darkened.
“Oh, hell, girl. He can’t hunt with those cockeyed forelegs,” he said. “He won’t survive the winter. The kind thing to do would be to put him down, before he starves.”
“He won’t starve if I feed him,” I said, balling my hands into fists and glaring. I was ready to fight, but Pop just gave me that dark look again, frustrated and sad, and walked away. That summer more than most, he didn’t have time to battle it out with a stubborn kid over the sad, brutal facts of life. He’d worked it out with Teddy Reardon to buy the house at the lake—it was on the verge of collapse then, a hundred years old and barely used for the last twenty-five—and would leave me to watch over the junkyard most afternoons while he worked to fix it up. I took the job seriously for about three days, which is how long it took me to realize that everyone in town knew what Pop was up to, and nobody was going to come around looking for scrap metal or car parts when he wasn’t here.
I didn’t mind. I was used to spending long hours alone, playing elaborate make-believe games based on things I’d read in books. I’d cast myself as a pirate, or a princess, and imagine that the heaps were high walls surrounding a strange and mysterious land that I was trying to either escape or plunder, depending on the day. I was good at pretending, and I preferred doing it alone; other kids would always mess up these games, breaking character or breaking the rules, and shattering the fantasy along with it. By myself, I could occupy a single story for hours or even days, picking up where I left off as soon as Pop’s car had disappeared down the road.
The weather that morning was ominous. The day had dawned gray and grim, the sky already heavy with low-hanging clouds. Pop had glanced at them, grumbling; he was still patching the roof of the lake house, and unhappy at the prospect of the work being interrupted by what seemed like an inevitable storm. To me, though, the massing clouds were just part of that day’s story: a witch had taken up residence in the woods, I decided, and had cast a curse that was slowly spreading like a dark sickness over the sky. I would have to make my way to her lair, and battle her black magic with my own. I filled a glass jar with the makings of a counterspell: clover blossoms, a length of ribbon, one of my baby teeth from a box where I kept odds and ends. (The tooth fairy had stopped showing up at our trailer as my father’s drinking grew worse, though I wouldn’t make the connection for years yet; in the meantime the unclaimed teeth made themselves useful at times like this.) When Rags crept out of the heaps, I gathered him in my arms and added him to the game: all the other cats in the yard were the witch’s servants, I decided, but this one had changed his allegiance after she cursed him with twisty legs.
I didn’t hear them arrive; I don’t know how long they’d been there, watching me. I was moving slowly and carefully through the heaps, making my way back toward the magical spot where the three rusted trucks sat nose to nose: if ever there were a spot to perform magic, that would be it. Absorbed in the game, lugging Rags along while he contentedly napped against my shoulder, it took me by surprise to realize that I wasn’t alone. A group of three kids, two boys and a girl, stood staring from beside the long stack of cars, blocking the yellowed grass path into the forest. I knew all three, of course, from school and from town. Two of them, a girl and a boy with dirty blond hair, were Brianne and Billy Carter, twelve and thirteen years old, the children of our nearest neighbors on the other side of the woods that abutted the back of the yard. Once upon a time we’d played together, back when my mother was still alive to facilitate such things, but that friendliness had disappeared when she did; now they only ever showed up to throw rocks at the cars, and my father had spoken to them more than once about not crossing onto our property. Clearly, they hadn’t listened.
The other boy, DJ, was younger—he’d sat a row behind me in Miss Lightbody’s fifth-grade class the previous year—but he was big for his age, so that he and Billy stood almost shoulder to shoulder. From the smirks on their faces, I guessed they must have been watching me for a while.
“Oh my God, it’s disgusting,” Brianne said loudly, and her brother grinned.
“I told you,” Billy said. “She kisses it and everything.”
“Oh my God,” Brianne said again, and let out something between a giggle and a shriek.
It took me a beat to understand that they were talking about the cat, who was still obliviously snoozing in my arms with his funny forelegs tucked up under his chin. It took me longer to understand the full meaning of that “I told you,” to realize that this wasn’t the first time Billy Carter had crept onto our property and watched me while I played in the yard with Rags. He had been here before, maybe more than once, maybe hanging back in the woods so I wouldn’t see him—or maybe I’d just been so lost in my stupid games that I never noticed I wasn’t alone. Now he was back, and he’d brought an audience.
Billy and his sister sneered and laughed as I gathered Rags more tightly to my chest, but it was DJ who stepped forward.
“You shouldn’t be touching that cat,” he said. “My dad says cats like that have a disease. He’s gonna give it to the other cats and soon they’ll all be messed up like him. He shouldn’t even be alive.”
I bit down on my lower lip, unable to form my thoughts into words. My mouth was dry and my mind felt fuzzy, like I’d just jolted awake from a vivid dream, and my skin was prickling all over with the unpleasant shock of being intruded on. I wanted them all to go away. I hated Brianne and Billy, who had come through the woods and onto our property even though they knew they weren’t allowed, even though they’d been warned. Pop had told them that the next time they trespassed he was going to call their folks, or maybe even the cops, and yet here they were, so sure that they could just tromp and stomp all over our yard and get away with it. But it was DJ who made me more nervous, the way he kept taking little steps forward, the way he looked at Rags with a mix of disgust and fascination. The way his red, wet mouth formed the words, He shouldn’t even be alive.
I should have run. I could have run. I knew the yard better than anyone, and I was fast; I could have made it back through the heaps to the trailer and shut myself in, and Rags, too, safe behind the locked front door. We could have waited there until the intruders got bored and went away. Even though Pop said no cats in the house, he would have understood that I had to, that breaking the rules was the only way to keep the terrible thing that happened from happening.
But I was too slow. Too stupid. Too innocent to understand that we lived in a world where some people liked to stomp on little things—and where they’d tell you afterward that what they had done was a sort of kindness. I remembered all at once what Pop had said, the meaning of which I had stubbornly refused to really hear.
You ought to put him down before he starves.
DJ, the little boy with the red mouth, was fast, too. And unlike me, he had come with a plan: I would find out later that he’d tagged along with the Carter kids just for this reason, to do this thing he’d been taught was necessary. He grabbed Rags out of my arms before I knew what was happening. One moment my arms were wrapped around the cat; the next they were empty, and Rags was dangling by his armpits from DJ’s hands, which held him fast as he squirmed. I tried to rush forward.
“No!” I screamed.
“It’s gotta be fast. Keep her back,” DJ said, his mouth set in a grim line that made him look older all of a sudden, like a grown-up man with a job to do. The low, gray clouds overhead had started to mass and darken, and from inside my head, from the part of my mind that could keep me preoccupied for hours with make-believe stories, a small voice whispered, It’s too late; the curse is spreading. Brianne and Billy obeyed instantly, running to me, grabbing my arms, pushing me backward as DJ carried the squirming cat away, and I was screaming because I finally understood, too late, what was about to happen. What he was going to do. He shifted his grip on Rags, flipping him in the air, holding him by his hind legs. A single drop of rain sliced against my cheek as I struggled against hands that held me fast. DJ stopped in front of the stack of crushed cars, so tall and solid and unforgiving. I saw him shift his weight like a ball player, pivoting his knee, bending his elbows, his body coiling with pent-up energy as Rags swung helplessly by his hind legs—and then from inside my head, another voice spoke up, one that sounded like my own, but older and tired and ice-cold.
Don’t look.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
There was a yowl, abruptly cut off by a terrible, echoing clang.
The hands that held my arms let go.
The rain began to fall hard, harder, dampening my T-shirt against my skin.
“Hey,” said DJ’s voice beside me. “Hey, look . . . it didn’t suffer.”
I didn’t answer.
The rain kept falling.
I sat in the mud, shivering, eyes closed, until I was sure I was alone.
Pop arrived home not long after, and found me sitting on the folding stairs in the rain. I was soaked to the bone and holding Rags’s limp body in my arms, my T-shirt covered with blood and matted fur.
“Lizzie?” he said. “Jesus, what in the hell . . .”
I looked up, and said, “It’s okay, I didn’t bring him inside, because you said—you said—” and then I was sobbing, and my father was scooping me up in his arms, me and poor, dead Rags together, and carrying me inside, where I eventually stopped crying and told him what had happened. I remember the look on his face as he listened and then stood up, grabbed his keys, and set out down the road in the direction of the Carters’ house: it was the same look I’d seen on DJ’s face an hour before, the determined expression of a man with an unpleasant but necessary job to do. He told me he would be back in ten minutes, but it was much longer, closer to an hour, and whatever he said, Billy and Brianne never set foot on our property again that summer—and come September, they were gone entirely, the whole family moved downstate never to be heard from again.
DJ was another matter, a more delicate one. His daddy was the preacher at the hilltop church in the village, and his family name was among the oldest in town, even engraved on the founders’ monument that stood on the green. My own father, who’d grown up far from Copper Falls and shared blood with nobody in town but me, had to tread carefully—this was what he told me as we dug a grave for poor, sweet Rags in the clearing behind the yard, and I laid a bouquet of clover blossoms and dame’s rocket on the freshly turned earth. He made me tell the story again, and then a third time, listening carefully as I repeated the sequence of events. The appearance of the kids at the edge of the yard. The way Rags was in my arms, and then wasn’t. The way DJ flipped him, head to tail. The terrible resonant clang as bone covered by fur collided with the fender of a crushed Camaro. The feeling of the rain soaking my shirt, my hair, as I sat in the mud with my eyes closed—and then the sight that greeted me when I opened them. He asked me, gently but with great seriousness: Was I sure about what DJ had done? That it was, indeed, him? Even with my eyes closed? And just as seriously, I nodded. Yes, I was sure.
The next morning, Pop shaved his stubble, combed his hair, put on a clean shirt, and drove into town. He was gone a long time; the sun was midday high when he finally came back. He wasn’t alone. As I stood watching from the folding stairs, a second car, newer and nicer and cleaner than Pop’s old pickup, pulled in behind. The preacher was at the wheel. There was a smaller figure in the passenger seat.
“I’ll be inside,” Pop said, then cast a look back over his shoulder at DJ, who stepped out of his father’s car and stood with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. “This boy got something to say to you. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, sir,” DJ said.
I watched as he approached, my arms folded carefully across my chest. I thought I’d be sick at the sight of him, at the memory of what he’d done, but I wasn’t; instead, I felt curious. The boy walking toward me seemed like a different person from the one who’d taken Rags from my arms. That grown-up look was gone from his face. He looked young, unsure, unhappy. He stopped a few feet away, shifting from one foot to the other.
“My dad says I owe you an apology,” he said finally. He kept his eyes down. “He says that even if it’s right on principles to put a cat like that out of its misery, I shouldn’t have done it. Because, um, because”—he cast a quick look back at the figure behind the wheel of the car—“because it wasn’t my place, Dad says. So he drove me over here to tell you.”
“To tell her what, boy?” said my father’s voice, and DJ and I both startled; he was standing just inside the trailer door, a shadow beyond the screen, and I felt a flush of gratitude that he had stayed to see this through.
“I’m sorry,” DJ said.
I didn’t know I was going to speak until the words were already out.
“Are you?” I said, and for the first time, the boy lifted his eyes and met my gaze.
“Yeah,” he said, and then, so quietly that only I could hear him: “I wish I hadn’t done it. I wished it right away.”
Of course, there was no undoing it. Sorry or not, Rags was dead, and so was the part of me that believed in fairy tales, in magic spells, in saving broken things from a world that wanted to hurt them. I stopped playing in the heaps after that. I never fed the junkyard cats again. I didn’t tell myself pretty stories about our place in the world. When I stepped out the door, I knew who and what I was: a girl who lived at the center of a mountain of trash.
And now it’s all gone, and so am I. I bet you can see the smoke from that burning yard for miles. If you squint, maybe you can see my soul floating skyward along with it, lifted on a column of putrid, billowing black. I wonder where my father is, if he’ll finally leave. He should. Business torched, daughter dead; there’s nothing to keep him in Copper Falls.
But wait: this story isn’t over. I almost left out the best part.
Because after the forced apology and sudden expression of regret, DJ nodded and turned away, and walked with hunched shoulders back to where the preacher’s car sat with the engine still running. The man in the driver’s seat rolled down the window, and a cloud of cigarette smoke curled out through the opening and into the hazy air.
The preacher said, “All done now, Dwayne Jeffrey?”
The boy said, “Yes, sir.”
Because that boy, the one who killed my cat—reader, I married him.