A twisted spire of flame and smoke licked about the sky after Thad doused the cheapjack table with gasoline, tossed a struck match where oil and blood soaked the wooden top, and set the large spool ablaze in the front yard. The fuel spent fast, and within a few minutes the plywood had crumbled into a bed of coals. A few minutes more and nothing but a wide circle of gray ash and black earth lay in the yard like a tarnished coin flipped by the hand of God.
April watched Aiden and Thad from the stoop of her house. She’d yelled something when the column of fire first spiraled into the air. Neither answered her. When April wished her son was dead, when those words came out of her mouth, Aiden knew it was the most heartless thing he’d ever heard her say. Mothers weren’t supposed to say things like that. Fathers, maybe, but mothers never. Then again, she’d never been much of a mother at all.
While the fire burned to nothing, Thad came up with a plan. He chose the shotgun and Aiden took the revolver. Thad made Aiden grab a fence-post driver to use as a battering ram. Once inside, they’d bind them with zip ties and duct tape. Force a confession. After that, Aiden was uncertain. Thad hadn’t gotten that far.
The two of them waited for nightfall, and when that last bit of glow dissolved into the mountains, they drove Booker Branch without headlights, lowered their heads together, and snorted enough crystal to make sure it all happened in the blink of an eye.
They snuck through a laurel thicket and up the darkened hillside on a game trail that switchbacked three times to the trailer. The lights were on inside, and screamo music blared from busted speakers just behind the door. Aiden and Thad didn’t check the windows. They just moved fast onto the porch. Thad shouldered the shotgun and readied himself to bum-rush whoever moved. Aiden slid the revolver down the back of his waistline, the barrel cold against his skin, and took the fence-post driver with both hands.
When Thad nodded, Aiden swung heavy steel into the door, just left of the handle, and the trailer lid slapped the wall behind before rattling loose on busted hinges. Doug Dietz jerked around with eyes wide and his greasy mullet slapping his neck. His pants were down by his ankles and he had the fat girl, Meredith, dogged over the couch, a ratty nightshirt pushed up her back. He was as deep as he could get, with one hand yanking her braided ponytail like a leash, when Thad and Aiden filed inside, Thad screaming, “Get on the goddamn floor! Get on the goddamn floor!”
They were dumbstruck as Thad moved into the house. He swung the buttstock of the shotgun into the base of Doug’s neck before that son of a bitch ever let off. The blow knocked Doug unconscious, and he collapsed forward onto the fat girl’s back, rolled to the side with his ankles tangled in denim jeans, and hit the floor like a lassoed calf.
Meredith crawled down the couch and scuttled toward the kitchen to get away. Her weight was forward as if she were already falling, and her arms circled around her sides like she was some storm-blown whirligig. Thad’s pace never slowed. He kept forward past where Doug lay, and kicked her with a long, loping stride. She crashed headfirst into the base of a countertop that split the living room and kitchen. She was sluggish in her movements, but tried to lift herself from the floor. The thin, moth-eaten nightshirt was up around her shoulders, stretch marks squiggling her back. Thad stood over her and hammered down into the back of her boxy skull with the shotgun, but that first blow did not take her. It took him gripping the shotgun in both hands and raining down on her wildly with the stainless receiver before she melted on the floor.
Aiden yanked Doug’s pants up and was securing his wrists behind his back with zip ties and duct tape when Julie poked her head out of the back room at the far end of the trailer with a bag of frozen corn pressed to her eye. She stood there in red sweatpants with Marlboro written down both legs in cracked white letters, a Slipknot T-shirt hanging loosely from her shoulders. Thad drew down on her with the shotgun, and she dropped what she was holding, tightened rigidly with arms half raised at her chest like some stiffened skeleton set to scare children in a haunted house. “Don’t you fucking move,” Thad said through teeth clenched tight, his words clear over the blaring music, as if no sound stirred at all. Unlike her brother, unlike Meredith, who lay sprawled between Aiden and Thad, Julie Dietz did as she was told.
Thad cinched a fistful of Julie’s hair at the back of her head and led her through the kitchen. He threw her forward by that ball of hair and she tripped over Meredith’s leg, collapsed on a coiled, woolen rug that centered the narrow living room. She turned glassy-eyed toward Aiden, her one eye still swollen purple where Thad had hit her that morning. Pushing herself from the floor, her shoulder blades cut sharply at the back of her shirt.
“Unh-uh,” Thad grunted before she could rise.
Julie crumbled to the rug. Her eyes were set on Aiden as he finished binding her brother’s ankles, Doug’s feet now pulled up behind him and hog-tied to his wrists. Julie’s dark, hollow eyes filled with tears. Her face scrunched before she broke, but Aiden paid her no attention and went on about his business. He bound Meredith just as he had Doug, though she was not near as limber and required a chain of zip ties to link her wrists and ankles. Both were hog-tied now. Both remained unconscious. Julie was the only one awake, and while Thad worked on her restraints, Aiden pulled the revolver from his waistline and checked the rooms.
The Dietzes’ trailer had the same standard floor plan as most two-bedroom single-wides: front door opening into the living room, living room running into the kitchen, bathroom and narrow hall splitting the space between the kitchen and far bedroom, the other bedroom connected to the living room behind the front door, a bedroom capping each end. The living room and kitchen were open to view, but the bath and both bedrooms had yet to be cleared.
Aiden chose the bedroom behind the front door first. Music blared inside. A black light mounted over the bed colored everything ultramarine. A gallery of velvet posters glowed neon on the walls: a mushroom-laden fairyland, a drippy skull with a cobra slithering from one eye, a bearded wizard summoning fire from a dragon’s mouth, and a naked sword-wielding woman whose nipples burned purple on tangerine breasts. All of that color seemed to make the place move, and Aiden felt dizzy. His mind raced, his heart pounded, and he felt for a second like he might black out. It was hard to tell if it was panic or the drugs. It couldn’t be the drugs, he thought. He’d only been up twenty-four hours. He’d only done two rails of dope. He could always last at least two days before the panic set in, before the world fell apart. Aiden ran the pistol all over the room, but found nothing other than the stereo. He turned the volume down, the screaming finally slack. Everything slowed a bit then and he regained what little hold he had. There was no one in the room but him.
On the other end of the trailer, Aiden threw back the shower curtain in the bathroom. Red stains from hard water bloodied the shower, and his own reflection in the speckled mirror glass frightened him for a second. But there was nothing else.
The second bedroom was bigger, a room shared by the girls. Beds stood in each corner and a short table stretched between, with its walnut veneer torn to yellow particleboard. A puddle of scented oil melted in a heated dish on the tabletop, the oil filling the room with the fetor of baby powder. The ten o’clock news flashed by on a small television retelling another story of another man killing another man in another godforsaken town. Filling-station statuary of Indians with feathered headdresses riding horseback stood on shelves hammered to walls, and dreamcatchers twirled on fishing string from the ceiling having failed to catch this nightmare.
Thad yelled from the living room, his scratchy voice breaking some daze that’d come over Aiden. “See if you can’t find some socks.”
“Some what?”
“Something to shove down their throats.”
There were dirtied clothes strewn about the floor, and Aiden scrounged some socks before moving into the living room. Julie sat on the far end of the couch with her ankles bound with zip ties, her arms cuffed behind. The way her arms were fastened hunched her forward, with her stringy hair sweeping her knees. Thad left her mouth uncovered, but had Aiden stuff wadded socks into the mouths of Meredith and Doug, seal their lips with strips of duct tape. Meredith started to wake up when Aiden did this, but she was woozy. The back of her head was soppy with blood. She’d yet to regain any sort of lucidity. With their mouths shut, she and Doug wheezed for breath, their nostrils flaring like sleeping animals.
Thad demanded that Julie tell him what had happened, and for a long time she kept saying she didn’t know what he was talking about. But when he pulled out his skinning knife, pressed the flat side of the blade flush against her lips, and told her he would cut out every tooth in her head, she sang a different song. She told him they’d come for the drugs and the money. She told him they’d broken into the trailer and house. She told him that she and Meredith ripped the rooms apart while her brother searched for the dope, and when he came up empty-handed, that’s what pushed him over the edge, the way that dog would not shut up, that’s when Doug killed her. When she was finally done with all she had to tell, Thad stuffed her mouth with a sock until she strangled and wrapped tape around her head. Mascara washed over her cheeks like shadows until she no longer held tears to cry. She just sat there and choked on her breath, her body shuddering with each bit of air.
That’s how Thad and Aiden left them when they walked outside. That’s how Aiden planned to leave them altogether, but Thad didn’t make it off the porch. Aiden was halfway to the woods, dragging the fence-post driver across a thin sliver of grass that separated the trailer from the hillside, when Thad called, “Where the hell are you going?”
Aiden turned around and stared to where Thad seemed some black silhouette carved in the porch light behind. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“What are you talking about?” Thad asked. “I ain’t going anywhere.”
“What are you going to do, Thad?” Aiden huffed as if it were a joke. “You going to kill them?”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Thad stood there, and though his eyes were wild, the methamphetamine and adrenaline raging inside, his demeanor was calm and collected. “Some people deserve to die,” he said.
Aiden had known Thad his entire life and still could not believe those words. “And who makes that call?”
“God,” Thad said.
“God? Do you hear yourself? You think it’s God telling you to do this?”
“God doesn’t have hands, Aiden.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Aiden said. “You know that, don’t you? You have absolutely lost your fucking mind!”
“No. I don’t think I have,” Thad said.
“And what about the girls?”
“What about them?”
“Those two girls in there didn’t do anything more than try to steal from us. That’s all they did, Thad. That’s it, and that’s no different than what me and you have been doing our whole good-for-nothing lives.”
“They’re just as guilty as he is.”
“You know that ain’t true.”
“You are the company you keep,” Thad said.
Just hearing him say that sent Aiden into a rage. For a long time, he’d felt that anger building up inside and for a long time he’d done everything he could to keep that damper closed. But what Thad was about to do would be the end. This was just one more time around the circle he’d spiraled his entire life, and that broke Aiden’s heart. He dropped the post driver and the revolver in the yard and stood there for a moment breathing heavier and heavier until all of a sudden all of that fire that had built inside let loose.
Aiden shot up the front steps and had his hands around Thad’s throat before Thad could blink. He rammed the back of Thad’s head over and over into the side of the trailer, and Thad didn’t fight him. He just stood there taking it, and Aiden held Thad at arm’s length and punched him as hard as he could in the side of the head. Aiden swung again, then stood there and looked at how Thad stared emotionless and unfazed. He lifted his fist and was about to swing again when Thad said, “That’s enough,” but Aiden reared back farther. “That’s enough,” Thad screamed. There was blood dripping from the corner of his mouth as he shoved Aiden across the porch and raised the gun.
“You going to kill me too?”
Thad didn’t say a word, nor did he lower the gun.
“Then kill me, you son of a bitch.” Aiden came forward until the muzzle was flush against his chest. “Pull the fucking trigger and kill me, Thad. Do it!” He was screaming at the top of his lungs and Thad’s expression did not waver. “Do it!”
“Get the fuck out of here, Aiden.”
“Do it!” Aiden screamed. And when he knew Thad wouldn’t pull the trigger, Aiden slapped the barrel down away from his chest and glared with eyes frosted by tears.
“Get out of here.”
Aiden backed away and stood at the edge of the porch, staring at the closest thing he’d ever had to family. He knew that once he walked away there would be no coming back, and he pleaded. “You’re not going to be able to live with this, Thad.”
“With what?” Thad asked.
“With killing those girls.”
“You don’t know what I’m capable of living with.”
Aiden shook his head and walked out into the yard. He picked up the post driver and revolver, then turned back one last time. “That shit is going to eat you alive.” But Thad didn’t say a word.
Aiden pushed through a briary thicket of brush and limbs to find the trail that led down the mountain. He had never walked away from anything Thad had gotten them into, not once in their whole sorry lives, but he could play no part in this. He’d never drawn a line before, and maybe the lines weren’t things that were consciously drawn. Maybe the line was there all along, deep inside, and no one knew exactly where it was until he was standing at the edge of it.
The woods were loud as they always were in summer, but when that first shot sounded from the top of the hillside, it frightened Aiden, as if it were the first sound he’d ever heard. He cowered into a ball on the ground. He did not rise until there was silence. Aiden turned and looked back to where he’d come from, and when that second shot sounded he cringed. When he made it to the car, he sat there without cranking the engine for a few minutes, waiting for the third shot. But he could have waited there forever, and it still wouldn’t have come. So after a while, he had no choice but to drive away.