THEY TIED UP AND CARRIED THE NUTRIA AND THEIR TAILS down the path. Colby dropped his load at the shed and made for the camp, a change of clothes, and the beer.
“I don’t know how to clean these,” Jonah said.
“That’s all right,” Dex told him. “I’ll take care of it. Things smell terrible when you cut into ’em.”
Inside, Colby stood in a pair of boxer shorts drinking a beer. Jonah told him to get some clothes on. After a while Dex brought strips of meat in on a plate and put a new case of beer into the refrigerator. He made chili with the nutria meat, and they ate and drank late in the quiet of the camp. Colby was drunk, talking. When he paused, Jonah spoke up, something on his mind.
“Dex, remember that night we came over here? When I was little?”
Dex stared into the neck of his beer.
“The night just me and you—”
“I remember.”
Did Dex think of the way Pop hit him? Jonah remembered the thud of Dex’s back against the floor. Jonah gestured at the frames on the table. “I’m glad there are some pictures in here now.”
Dex smiled, slightly, without looking at him.
“Do you still believe what you told me that night?”
“I don’t know. What did I say?”
Jonah picked at the label on his beer. They had been sitting in this very room. Earlier that same day, Jonah remembered, some boys at school had been talking about the country going to war, going after the terrorists. Jonah was worried about Bill having to go, potentially, and he wanted to talk with Dex about it. “You told me”—Jonah cleared his throat—“we only lose the things we care about, so it was better if we didn’t talk about him or think about him or anything.”
“I said all that?”
“Yeah.” Jonah wanted to know if Dex still believed it. Luz was out there, and they were going to have a kid, and Jonah didn’t know where she was or what she was doing, but he wanted to think about her, he wanted to talk about her.
“Hell.” Dex drained his beer, got up. “I was only eighteen. I didn’t know shit.”
Jonah strangled his bottle. When he glanced at Dex, Dex looked away.
Dex returned with new beers and handed one to Colby: “You got any brothers or sisters?”
“I got a brother. Jamal.”
“What’s he do?”
Colby drank a lot of the beer quickly, set the bottle on the coffee table, and slid off the couch onto his sleeping bag. “Jamal been locked up in Angola for almost four years.” He closed his eyes but continued to speak, voice faltering as he neared slumber. “Nobody used to mess with me. People were scared of Jamal, ya heard? Nobody fucked with me. But he gone now.” His voice trailed off, and Jonah thought his friend had fallen asleep, but Colby spoke up again, smiling dimly. “I told people I knew kung fu. Ha. They didn’t believe me. I don’t. I don’t know kung fu.”
Colby’s breathing evened out and there was silence in the room. Jonah got to his feet. “I’m going for a walk.” He carried his beer out back and set off down the path.
He walked to the landing, and this newer and grander construction made him feel like a stranger to his own history. He sat in the old boat and drank. His eyes burned. He drained the beer and watched the moon rise and bore through the sky like a lode of silver, and he got up and hurled the beer bottle at it. The night swallowed up the bottle as soon as it left his hand. The glass spun somewhere out there until it splashed, a feeble sound.
“Hey.” Dex appeared on the jetty alongside the flatboat. “I wonder if Jamal knows Uncle Dexter.”
Pop’s brother, the one for whom Dex was named, was also in the penitentiary. Their other uncle, for whom Jonah was named, had died long ago in Vietnam, and they only knew stories about him. Once, Jonah heard Mom tell Pop that it was a curse, so many boys in the family. Sometimes he figured his mother had been right.
Dex sipped his beer and stepped into the boat and sat across from Jonah. “Do you remember,” he began, “that night Pop went looking for the guy who crashed into Mom?”
“What?” Jonah said. There was nothing there, an awful vacancy. “No.”
“Yeah. Month, maybe two, after the funeral.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Pop drank most a bottle of whiskey, then got in his truck. He’d found the man’s address. I tried reminding him that the dude was in jail, me and Bill did. Pop was crazy, wouldn’t listen. I kept thinking he was so drunk he’d kill someone looking for the guy who killed Mom and how the fuck would that ever make sense. Something like that never woulda dawned on Pop, I thought, so it made me hate him more—I could imagine it, see what I mean, and I was only fifteen years old. But then Pop didn’t come home and we didn’t know what the hell had happened. Me and you and Bill were alone all night. When Bill wasn’t looking I tasted Pop’s whiskey and about coughed my guts out.”
“I didn’t know any of that.”
Dex bobbed his shoulders and drained his beer and set the empty in the boat.
“Where was Pop?”
“Got pulled over on the way there. Spent the night in jail himself. Lost his license for a while.”
A frog trilled. The boat was moored, but Jonah felt adrift.
Dex started to get up. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
“Wait—”
Dex paused on the boards and turned, eyebrows raised.
“What’s the point?”
“Of what?”
“Of that story.”
Dex put his hands on his hips. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why’d you tell it to me?”
“Didn’t know if you remembered, I guess.”
“You think I’m doing something dumb, don’t you, going to Mexico.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah, but you think it.”
“Hell, Jonah. Did you hear me say that?”
Jonah stood in the boat, felt it pitch. “I never hear you say anything, Dex.”
His brother shook his head. “It ain’t my place to tell you what to do.”
There were words on the tip of Jonah’s tongue: Shouldn’t it be somebody’s place? There’s no one else but you, Dex. What are you so afraid of?
But Jonah balked and swallowed the sentences. He couldn’t bring himself to ask for his brother’s advice. Stubborn, but also hurt and angry. And now Dex turned and went, and Jonah stood in the boat and listened to the swamp.