Jack reached over and turned off the alarm clock the second it started to buzz. He’d awakened at four a.m. with a sense of foreboding so strong it felt like someone was sitting on his chest. He was used to vague, intangible fear. He’d lived with it his entire adult life. Fear left over from when there was a reason for it, the way an amputee still feels pain from a missing limb. But this was different. It was as if he’d been jarred awake by a loud noise, but he couldn’t remember hearing anything.
And then he’d had the most ridiculous urge to call Cam. Where the hell had that come from? He hadn’t seen or talked to Cam in almost a decade. He rarely thought of his brother, and when he did, he still felt an anger bordering on rage. Why would he think of calling Cam? What did he think he’d say? “Hey, asshole, it’s the Ghost of Christmas Past. How’s your cushy life?”
As soon as he’d sent those thoughts packing, his mind began to bombard him with memories of things completely forgotten about. Vignettes from his childhood, random and meaningless. Like fishing trips with his mother’s twin brother, Uncle Ryland, the only member of the extended family who had ever acknowledged their existence. Ryland had adored the boys, and they’d adored him, even if he was a certified loon. It was Uncle Ryland who had taken them to the Rotary Club–sponsored Huck Finn Day at Lake Allatoona, the one summer they’d managed to attend that much-heralded event. It was one of his few pleasant childhood memories. Their mother had dressed the four of them in matching overalls and different-colored plaid shirts, borrowed from Ryland’s kids (cousins they’d never met), and they had passed themselves off as a normal family. Tallen caught the biggest fish of the day and got his picture in the paper. Probably the only time in his life Tallen had his picture in the paper without breaking a law. There was something about Tallen and fish. Ryland used to say that all that boy had to do was call them.
Their father had been unimpressed. Said fish liked Tallen because they had so much in common—their main thought in life was how to keep from being caught. He also said Tallen wasn’t any better at it than the fish were. He always seemed to have even more contempt for Tallen than for the rest of them, which was saying something. Jack’s theory was that it was because Tallen so obviously worshiped Will. Will Landry was not comfortable with anyone’s affection, and made it a point to punish those who bestowed it.
It suddenly dawned on Jack why he was thinking about them. He’d had that dream again. It had been worse than usual, in some way he couldn’t remember. It would come back to him, though. The bad stuff always did.
The phone rang. It had to be Rick, the guy who owned the temp company through which Jack usually worked. Rick was the only person who had this number; the only reason Jack owned a phone (let alone an answering machine) was to find out whatever he needed to know about his next job. The machine picked up. He cringed at the sound of his own voice, as always, and waited for Rick’s.
“Yeah . . . Jack . . . This guy called here looking for you . . . I told him I’d check with you and call him back. He sounded kinda . . . official . . .”
Jack picked up the receiver.
“I don’t care if he sounded like the president, Rick! How many times do we have to have this conversation?”
“Well, he said it was important.”
“What do you think he’s going to say? ‘This is an asshole reporter’?”
“I just thought . . . I mean, do reporters still call you?”
Jack sighed. No use explaining to Rick why that wasn’t the point. “This year is the tenth anniversary,” he said with forced patience. “Reporters love crap like that.”
“Oh. God. Sorry. I didn’t think of that.”
“Well, start thinking. And don’t give anyone my phone number. Anyone. Ever. No exceptions.”
Rick apologized again and hung up.
Jack wrenched himself out of bed. The day was off to a lovely start.
He headed for the bathroom, hoping there was a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet. He should keep a record, he supposed. Did he always wake up with a headache after the dream? If the headaches got any worse, he’d have to go back to the pain clinic in Atlanta, and they’d ask him about things like that.
There were two aspirin left in the bottle. He swallowed them without water. He closed the cabinet and glanced at his face in the mirror. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all. Felt like it, too. At least he didn’t have to be anywhere early. The job he’d been working had finished yesterday, and he didn’t start a new one until Monday. He might pick up something for today if he went and stood in front of the Western Auto with all the other day-labor candidates. He didn’t have to worry about getting there early. The black and Hispanic guys might sit out there for hours, but the minute a white guy showed up—even him—half the town would remember odd jobs that couldn’t wait. Blond hair was all the résumé he needed.
He really didn’t care whether he worked today or not. It had been a good month, and it wasn’t like he needed to save for anything. Maybe he’d go down to the coffee shop. Maybe a decent breakfast and half a pot of black coffee would be enough of a bribe for his headache. Besides, the thought of being around other people was not as repulsive to him this morning as it usually was.
Half an hour later he was dressed and headed down Route 36, hands in his pockets, his work boots crunching the loose gravel on the side of the road. The early-morning sky was a dull gray, and the fine mist that was falling felt good on his face. If it turned into a steady rain, he’d have a guilt-free excuse for not working.
“Men in the Rain.” A poem Ethan had written when they were in school. Something about walking along beneath John Deere hats . . . dirt disturbed . . . a final destination . . . Their mother had taped it to the door of the refrigerator. (Lucy had always gone out of her way to encourage their artistic pursuits. Anything to keep them inside, out of trouble.) He remembered the title because the rest of them had given Ethan a hard time about it, had made all sorts of insinuations about Ethan’s sexual preferences. (Tallen, home during one of his brief bouts with freedom, had said, “Go steal a car, Ethan. You’d love reform school.”) What a joke. There had never been a shred of real doubt about any of them, as far as that went. Even Cam was a raging heterosexual.
Why the hell couldn’t he get his mind off his family today? Most of the time he didn’t think about them at all. He stuck militantly to the safe subjects: what should he eat, what should he read, where was he working tomorrow? Lately, more and more of the other stuff was slipping through the cracks. Was he getting careless? Or was it somehow safer now? He couldn’t figure why it would be.
The dream was coming more often, too. He used to have it about three times a year. He’d already had it twice this month. He couldn’t remember when it had started. Was it after Ethan died? Or his father? Or Tallen? Hard to remember; he got the funerals mixed up. Not something he felt great about, but it was the truth.
Whenever it had started, he’d been having the dream for years. Some things about it varied, others remained doggedly consistent. It was always dark. He was always walking down some lonesome stretch of two-lane. Desolate. The sky more purple than black. Angry mountains in the distance. The whole scene always looked like one of those gloomy landscapes Tallen used to paint. Jack would walk along, not knowing where he was headed or why, and suddenly he’d come upon some colossal, gruesome accident. There were always red lights flashing everywhere. Sometimes he would see dozens of cars piled on top of each other, smashed and twisted, shards of glass and metal covering the ground like confetti. Other times, there would be no cars. Just the bodies. Bodies lying everywhere. Horrible-looking bodies—bloody, with limbs broken or missing, some of them decapitated. And no one seemed to be helping them. He’d walk through the carnage, recognizing people from his past—old friends, teachers, distant relatives. At the end of the line, he’d always find them—Ethan, Tallen, his father, and later, his mother. All badly mangled, reaching out for him, calling him, as if he could do something. He’d stare at them, and more than fear or horror or anything like that, the strongest feeling he’d have was always his wonder that he wasn’t with them. Cam was never with them, either, but that made sense. Cam had never been with them.
Even after it had become familiar, the dream would cling to him for days, like a filmy coat of something old and sour. He was sure the dream was symbolic as hell, and that it recurred because he didn’t know what it meant. Sooner or later, his subconscious would get the message that he didn’t give a crap what it meant and would leave him the hell alone.
The coffee shop was not terribly crowded. He sat at the counter, where he was least likely to draw attention to himself.
“I knew you were gonna be here today.” Sherry, the new waitress, was already pouring him a cup of coffee. She was an energetic redhead in her midtwenties. Pretty, in a JCPenney sort of way, but she talked too damned much.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m psychic.” She fished her guest-check pad out of her apron pocket. “Let’s see if I can guess. Two eggs, scrambled, bacon, wheat toast.”
“Over easy, sausage, Sunbeam. Don’t hang out your shingle just yet.”
“You did that to be ornery.”
“And a side of grits.”
“I knew that.”
She left to take the order to the kitchen. Jack watched her go, almost smiling to himself. She had only been working there for a couple of months. He guessed she was new in town. It was the only possible explanation for the fact that she flirted with him. He responded mechanically. On those rare occasions when someone tried to engage him in conversation, his basic rule was to go along with it. Easier to stay invisible if he just went with the flow.
Jack poured cream into his coffee and watched as it turned a smooth caramel color. From an unseen radio Reba McEntire was wailing about whatever man had done her wrong this week, over which floated the usual country small talk: “Whatch’all know good? How’s your mama ’n’ ’em?” From somewhere else he could hear his mother’s voice. “Jackson Landry, please write the word ‘once’ and show me where there’s a t at the end of it. There aren’t many things in life that I can control, but I will not have my boys talking like a bunch of ignorant country hicks.”
Sherry returned from the kitchen and went down the counter collecting saltshakers. She came back with a handful and stood in front of Jack to refill them.
“So is it gonna rain?”
“You’re the psychic, you tell me.”
“Smart-ass.” She smiled as she said it. A plump, dark-haired waitress brushed by Sherry and nudged her with an elbow.
“I gotta talk to you.” The woman disappeared into the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
“That’s Darlene. She usually works the dinner shift.”
Jack nodded, although he didn’t know why she felt the need to explain it to him.
“She probably broke up with her boyfriend for the fifth time this week. Sonny Reynolds, you know him?”
Jack shook his head no, which he would have done even if he had known the guy.
“He’s a prison guard over in Jackson.” She leaned down and lowered her voice. “It must not take brains; he ain’t got the sense God gave a june bug.”
Jack stared into his coffee cup, lest his eyes yield any clue that he didn’t need to be told about prison guards. Sherry prattled on.
“I know she’s no beauty queen or nothin’, but she could sure do better than that ignoramus.”
The door to the kitchen opened and Darlene stuck her head out.
“Sherry.” She gave Sherry a look that meant business and disappeared again. Sherry looked at Jack and rolled her eyes. She screwed the top on a saltshaker and, with an exasperated sigh, headed into the kitchen.
Jack took the opportunity to survey the breakfast crowd. The usual eclectic mix. Lawyers. Farmers. A couple of housewives and their kids. The janitors from the courthouse. He knew most of them by name—the lawyers and the janitors. He’d gone to school with them. The coffee shop divided into the same cliques the high school had. He’d felt so alienated from them all back then. He hadn’t known anything.
He then spied his least favorite coffee shop regular—the priest from the postage stamp–size Catholic church at the north end of town—seated a couple of stools away. As usual, “Father” was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt over a thermal undershirt, sleeves rolled just right, like he thought he was a lumberjack. The guy never wore his collar, and Jack wouldn’t have known who he was except that it was impossible to move to Barton without being the buzz of the coffee shop for a few days. The previous priest had died three or four months ago—of a heart attack, a stroke, liver cancer, or AIDS, depending on which rumor one chose to believe. Father Casual had made his appearance a few weeks later. Jack had heard he’d transferred from New York City and figured he must have screwed up royally to have been exiled to rural Georgia.
Jack rarely had the emotional energy to hate someone on sight, but he’d made an exception for Father. It was partly the clothes. It was also the John Lennon glasses and too much hair for a guy who looked to be in his late forties. And it had to do with Jack’s aversion to religion in general, although the Protestant ministers didn’t inspire the loathing in him that this guy did.
It might have something to do with the way the guy always stared at him. Once he had tried to strike up a conversation, but Jack had warded it off with “Look, I don’t know whether you’re trying to save me or seduce me, but the answer is no either way.”
The door to the kitchen opened and Sherry returned, no longer smiling. She put the plate of food down in front of him.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked. The perkiness was gone from her voice.
“No, thanks.”
She tore his check out of her pad and laid it on the counter in front of him. He watched her as she went back to refilling saltshakers. She was spilling a lot more than she had been before. She glanced up and their eyes met. She quickly turned and busied herself checking coffee filters. Jack watched her with growing anxiety. A hazy suspicion was trying to form, but he pushed it away.
Suddenly Sherry was in front of him again. She crossed her arms and sighed as if she was disgusted.
“This is so dumb.”
“What?”
“Darlene telling me how to run my life.”
Jack relaxed a little. This was just some tiff between a couple of waitresses. He reached for his coffee cup and Sherry dropped the bombshell.
“She thinks I shouldn’t talk to you.”
Jack felt the muscles in his stomach contract as his dark fears were confirmed. Something in Sherry’s eyes triggered an old anger. He caught it, turned it off.
“Fine.” His voice was calm and quiet. “Don’t talk to me, then.”
“So is it true? What she said?”
“I don’t know what she said.”
“You know. About your family.”
“What about them?” He’d be damned if he was going to make this easy for her.
“You know.”
He stared at her, unflinching. She looked around to make sure no one was listening, then looked back at him and spoke quietly.
“She said you had a brother who was executed.”
It had been a while since Jack had heard those words. They went through him like a cold wind. He didn’t answer.
“She said it was a few years ago.”
Ten. A decade. Another lifetime.
“She said it was in Alabama.”
“Well, Darlene is handier than the World Book Encyclopedia, isn’t she?” His voice was calm and steady, but it was an effort.
“He musta done something terrible.”
Jack stood up and dropped more than enough money on the counter.
“You mean she left that out? Get her to fill you in. I’m sure it’d make her day.”
Heading back down the road, he told himself it was his own fault. He never should have let himself get drawn into that. He could hear Tallen’s voice from long ago: “Why do you talk to them? They don’t care about us. They’re just looking for gossip. We’re their entertainment.”
No matter where they’d lived, the Landrys had always been the family in town whose name was never spoken without the word those in front of it. Actually, Will Landry’s name was usually spoken alone, in a tone that said all anyone needed to know. And most people felt sorry for Lucy, for all she’d had to endure. But the boys were those Landrys. A blight on the community. The kids everyone warned their kids to stay away from.
Jack couldn’t even remember, really, how he and his brothers had first come to be disenfranchised youth. He remembered the earliest deeds, but not the compulsions. Maybe it was as simple as the fact that “juvenile delinquent” was an identity within their reach, and a negative identity was better than none at all. Or maybe it was because they’d inherited Lucy’s pride, and they simply couldn’t stand the way people looked at them. Maybe they’d provoked people’s ire to be spared their pity.
This notoriety had not been easily won. In rural Georgia, adolescent wildness was given a wide berth before it was looked on as anything other than good-old-boy-in-training behavior. Smoking and drinking and poaching a deer or two were hardly enough to raise any eyebrows. Drugs were a right step in the wrong direction—a step that all of them had taken as often as they could afford to. Upon realizing that the Landry brothers hurting themselves was not going to keep anyone up nights, they began to go that necessary extra mile. They hot-wired cars for joyrides, leaving them wherever they happened to get bored. They vandalized property. (Turning over the Coke machine in the basement of the courthouse was one of their favorite pastimes.) They committed all sorts of petty thefts and burglaries. Nothing hard-core in those early days. They’d left themselves room to grow.
None of this, of course, applied to Saint Cam. It wasn’t like he openly sided against them, or ratted on them when he knew something. He mostly stayed in his room and ignored them. But whenever he’d have occasion to meet their eyes, he’d give them a look that left no doubt as to the degree of his scorn. They’d made his path difficult, and he made sure they knew he hated them for it. Meanwhile, he studied hard, kept his nose clean, and walked around with his put-upon attitude, as if nothing short of some great cosmic blunder could have landed him in a house with these people.
The truth was, Cam knew better than that, he just chose to ignore it. He was too bright and too close to the source to be able to write them all off the way the rest of the world did. He couldn’t look at them and say “white trash, lowlife, end of story.” He knew damned well that wasn’t the end of the story. It wasn’t even the beginning.
Jack himself wasn’t really sure where it began. Maybe it had to do with the polarity of his parents: Lucy, a sensitive and delicate beauty from an old Savannah family that no longer had any money, but whose remaining forty acres allowed them to keep thinking of themselves as landed gentry. (They’d all disowned her when she’d married Will.) And Will Landry, a lone hellcat of a man whose only parent had been a mentally unbalanced daughter of sharecroppers; he’d never known anything but poverty and rejection—a fact he did not accept quietly. The two of them had been attracted to each other because of their vast differences, and then spent the rest of their lives trying to kill each other for them.
The boys had grown up caught in the middle. Lucy did everything to encourage the artistic inclinations they all seemed to have inherited from her—Cam’s prose, Ethan’s poetry, Tallen’s painting, Jack’s love of reading. Will thwarted her efforts at every turn; he was violently opposed to anything that made his sons look unmanly. He’d never managed to beat the art out of them (though God knows he’d tried), but he’d successfully trained them to sabotage their own efforts. All of them except Cam.
As far as Jack was able to figure, the difference was that Cam had used his talent to pull himself out, and the rest of them had clung to art as a source of comfort in the prison they thought they had no hope of escaping. Was it really that simple? he wondered, thinking about it now. Did it all boil down to the fact that Cam had felt hope and the rest of them hadn’t? And, if so, where had that hope come from? Was it something a person was born with, like blue eyes? Had the rest of them just been born without it? Where was the justice in that?
He chuckled to himself. Justice. What in God’s name was it going to take for him to stop considering the possibility that somewhere, somehow, the world was fair and life made sense? The truth didn’t have to be fair. The truth could be that Cam had been born with a chance and the rest of them hadn’t. Cam wouldn’t have liked that theory much; it would have deprived him of the right to feel superior.
Well, none of that mattered now. The accident waiting to happen they’d called a family had exploded. Jack and Cam had been the surviving debris, hurled in opposite directions, landing intact, but not whole. Now Jack spent his days going through the motions of living, never really sure why he bothered. And somewhere out there, Cam was busy turning his life into a quest for vindication. Maybe he’d even gotten it. Well . . . fine. Good for him.
The drizzle had turned into a steady rain, and Jack could feel the wet chambray of his work shirt sticking to his back. He’d be drenched by the time he got home. What the hell. This day had never had any intention of being on his side.
Suddenly it flashed back to him. The thing that had been different about the dream last night. He didn’t know why it had left him so upset, but he knew what was different. Last night, for the first time, Cam’s body had been lying there, too.