When Aiden’s father pulled the trigger, his head seemed to follow that bullet as it passed through the roof of his mouth and then the roof of his skull. His head slapped back violently and his body collapsed beneath him like some invisible puppeteer had pulled a knife and severed the strings to the puppet. Aiden figured that’s how it always happened, but now he knew differently. Wayne Bryson stood there for a second or two, just stood there, head drooping with part of his face gone before gravity got the best of him. Felled him like a goddamned tree.
“I’ve never seen nothing like it,” Thad said. “I’ve seen some fucked-up shit, but in all my years of living, I ain’t ever seen nothing like it. Have you, Aid?”
“No,” Aiden said.
“I mean one second he was talking, and the next second that shit blew out of him like he’d sneezed. That gun went off and his brains . . .” Thad shook his head like a madman. “Fucking chunks, I’m telling you.”
Thad rocked on the couch in the living room of the trailer. He kept standing up and rubbing his hands down the thighs of his jeans like he couldn’t get the sweat off his palms. He yanked the cigarette he smoked out of his lips and flicked ash in a spasm, tapped at the filter until bits of burning tobacco peppered the carpet around his feet. Then he plopped back onto the couch and hot-boxed another two or three drags, stood up, and repeated that series of movements over and over. Up down, up down.
Aiden’s mind already ran faster than he could stand, and all of Thad’s jumping around poured gas on the fire. Aiden’s brain ran so quickly that there seemed to be a sound to it, a low ringing in his ears like feedback. He already wanted to come down, but there wasn’t any hope for that. He hated the way crystal made him feel, but it never stopped him from snorting it or smoking it or anything else so long as there weren’t needles. Time and time again, he’d get down, and when that mood hit him he’d do anything to feel different, any kind of different, anything at all.
Loretta Lynn was on the couch beside Thad, her straw-colored coat almost camouflaged against the fabric, and she kept nodding her head, panting, and sniffing like she thought the jig Thad danced was for her amusement. When the cigarette had burned down to the filter, Thad scooted to the edge of his seat and smashed the butt into an ashtray on a round plywood table that centered the room. The table was the size of a tractor wheel, an empty conduit spool Thad and Aiden salvaged from the scrap pile of a construction site.
As soon as they’d come inside, Thad dropped Wayne Bryson’s bag of crystal and his long-barreled revolver on the tabletop, and now he was on his hands and knees digging a pinch of meth out of the bag. He patted his back pockets for his billfold and threw it onto the table when he found it. He scanned the room, slapped his hands against his chest with his eyes squinted, like he was trying to find something. A thought seemed to light in his mind and he jumped up and stomped through the trailer into his bedroom.
Staring at the ounce of crystal on the table, Aiden knew right then he needed to take that shit and run. His mind had gone mad, but he understood two things. He knew that the dope would be Thad’s end. He knew that if there was no running out, there’d be no coming down, and that could end only one way. But he also knew there was at least twenty-five hundred dollars in that bag, and that amount of money could be the start of getting off that mountain, so he moved quickly. He came out of his chair, swiped the dope, and was to the door in one clean motion, but even that was not quick enough.
Thad came back through the kitchen with a small glass pipe to his lips. His cheeks swelled as he blew into the stem trying to clear resin left from whatever they’d smoked last. Aiden had one hand on the doorknob and the other holding the bag, and he froze when their eyes met.
“Where the hell are you going?” Thad asked. He had a metal clothes hanger unwound and ran the straightened end in and out of the pipe a few times before blowing again to see if he’d cleared the clog, a slight whistle sounding from the steamroller.
“I’m going to run out to the car right fast,” Aiden stammered. He hoped Thad hadn’t seen the bag, and from his question, Aiden didn’t believe he had.
“Hurry up,” Thad said as he circled the wire inside the pipe. And about that time Aiden heard the glass crack. The steamroller was broken in Thad’s hands and he stared at what he held as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. He reared back and shattered what was left against the wall, screamed “Goddamn it!” before stamping back into his bedroom. But Aiden didn’t stick around to see what came next. He was already out the door and gone.
• • •
AIDEN DIDN’T SEE HER when he hurried inside and rushed to the bathroom to hide the drugs. He was flat on his back on the tile floor with his head in the cabinet, trying to balance the bag of crystal on the trap under the sink. When the dope was hidden, he shimmied out and discovered her hovered over him. Seeing April there caught him off guard, and he hammered the back of his head against the edge of the cabinet in surprise.
“What the hell are you doing?” April asked. She was wrapped in a navy-blue robe, and from where Aiden lay he could see that she didn’t have anything on underneath. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, one blond sliver of bangs cutting across her stare.
He scrambled from the floor and they were chest to chest as he tried to back her out of the bathroom. “Nothing.”
“Sure as hell ain’t nothing,” she said. The two of them were wedged in the doorway. She glared like she might be able to decipher the riddle from the way he looked at her. “Tell me what you were doing under there.”
Aiden stuttered a lie about checking to see if the pipe was leaking, and not one word of it sounded believable because what came out was jumbled and his eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head. She was just about to scoot into the bathroom and check for herself when the front door slammed against the living room wall.
“What did you do with that bag, Aiden?” Thad met them as they came out of the hallway. He stood barrel-chested out of breath with Wayne Bryson’s revolver white-knuckle tight in his hand. April started to scream about the gun and what Thad was doing in her house, and he told her to shut her mouth without even glancing to where she stood. “Answer me, goddamn it!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aiden said. He had his arm stretched across the hallway so that April couldn’t pass, and Thad came forward, raised the pistol, and pressed the barrel straight into Aiden’s forehead.
“You’re going to tell me what you did with it.” Thad cocked the hammer with a look in his eyes that said he was seconds away from pulling the trigger.
“You better get that goddamn gun out of my face,” Aiden said.
“I ain’t doing nothing till you tell me what you did with that bag.”
“Thad, I’m telling you, if you don’t get that fucking gun out of my face I am going to beat your brains out with it.” Aiden could feel the rage building inside of him, and it was one of the oldest feelings he knew. Those who had known his father said that Aiden’s mother had been cheating, while others simply said she’d had her fill of his shit and was ready to leave, but the real reason didn’t matter. What mattered was how Aiden’s father had snapped. It was that unshakable volatility that carried into Aiden. It was that spark-away-from-burning-the-world-down that had always scared him to death, and he was almost there.
Thad prodded the muzzle into Aiden’s forehead, Aiden snatched hold of the barrel, and April ducked under Aiden’s arm before he could even try to stop her. She was between him and Thad with her finger jabbing at Thad’s chest with every word she said. “I don’t know what in the hell the two of you are talking about, but you’re going to get out of my house!”
There hadn’t been more than a few words between them in the two years since Thad had been home. Though they spent every day with nothing more than a hillside between them, April and Thad existed in two different worlds, and it had been that way for more than a decade. The tension had only worsened in the past year, after she’d put the property on the market. Since sixth grade, Thad lived in that trailer, and he was very clear in his belief that the place was just as much his as hers. Aiden didn’t blame him for thinking that. April had always seemed to see her son as a burden. She didn’t say a word when George Trantham moved Thad into the trailer. It was as if she believed that if it hadn’t been for Thad she would’ve wound up someplace better than this. More than that, Thad seemed to know that’s what she thought. So the two of them stayed at each other’s throats and Aiden trod the ground between.
“I’m not leaving here until that son of a bitch gives me what he stole,” Thad said. He still hadn’t lowered the gun.
“I didn’t steal a fucking thing.” Aiden’s mind was wild. He kept telling himself, Thad won’t pull the trigger, there’s no way he’ll pull the trigger, but the more he thought about it, the less he was sure. Aiden was filling up inside, moving closer and closer to that threshold, and once he crossed over there would be no turning back. He’d never been able to stop himself once he’d started. Blank thoughts would wash over him, and he would not come to until it was over.
Thad clenched his teeth with his mouth open so that he looked like some growling dog with squinted eyes. His head slowly wrenched up to the side until he could turn no farther. He exhaled in one long breath, lowered the gun as he did, then dropped the hammer back down to rest.
April shoved hard against Thad’s chest and he looked for a second like he might hit her as he took a step back, but she refilled the gap between them and shoved him again. “I told you to get out of my house.”
Thad slapped her hands away when she tried to push him again. “And I told you I’m not leaving until that son of a bitch gives me what he stole.”
April turned and stared at Aiden, those jade-green eyes taking him hostage when she did. Ever since the first time she brushed her knuckle down his cheek, she’d had control. The truth of it was she’d had a hold on him long before that, but after that first time, she owned him. She knew it and he knew it and neither one of them seemed to care because both were getting something out of the deal. “Tell me what he’s talking about, Aiden McCall.”
Aiden looked at her, but did not speak.
“Now,” she said.
And though Aiden didn’t want to say it, he knew silence wouldn’t end the draw. They’d reached a stalemate, and explaining what had happened was the only way he could see the game ending. So Aiden told the story, and after what seemed an eternity, it was all spelled out nice and clear, from the way Wayne Bryson had turned his brain into sausage to how he and Thad had torn out of there before the gunshot finished bouncing around the holler. Aiden said he hid the dope because Thad was going to kill himself with that much crystal in his hands, and Thad told him it was none of his goddamn business. Aiden explained that he knew someone who just might buy that bag outright, that there was at least twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of methamphetamine and that it was a whole lot easier to divide money than drugs. He told Thad that once it was divided, Thad could spend it any way he wanted, and that seemed to suit him just fine. April just stood there listening until he had finished.
“I’ve only got one question,” she said when everything was finally spread on the table and Thad and Aiden had reached some kind of common ground. Her eyebrows scrunched her forehead, and she hooked strands of hair that had fallen and framed her face back behind her ears. “What else you think he had stashed in that house?”