My eyes opened that next morning into a blurry, brown shadow that slowly came into focus as a pair of leather boots with mud caked to the soles. My mind started running that what-the-fuck-happened checklist, but number one checked out: those were my boots. Hardwood floors, dirty as hell from men too lazy to push a broom, was my second clue that it was all right: I was home. I pushed myself up from the floor with arms that felt loopy, and I could see that I was in my bedroom. I just hadn’t made it quite to the bed.
That was every night I’d ever spent mixing alcohol and Xaney bars wrapped up in a nice, neat little package. Nights that began sharp always had this scary tendency to go black in a hurry. I’d start off having a good time, and next thing you know, I’d wake up to nothing but stories from friends to shed light on what I’d done.
Unfortunately, I’d taken that pill just a little too late in the night. Should’ve started earlier, I guess. I could still see Robbie Douglas’s body wrapped crooked as hell around that rock. It played backward from there and it was clearer than the room I was standing in. I could see his distorted face peeking out of that tarp as Gerald was dragging. I could see his chest go from still to raising and lowering, raising and lowering. I could hear that screaming and I could see his face peeling, and before that, before that, I could see just him, Robbie Douglas, sitting there on a week-long binge with unblinking eyes and a chomping jaw as those wires cut into his arms. That was what pushed me to the bathroom and threw my head into the toilet, and that was what spilt over into the bowl. It was the fact that he was real. It was the fact that he was real and alive and breathing and had parents that buried my head just inches from where vomit filmed on that little pond of toilet water.
“Jacob! Jacob!” Daddy was hollering, and I could feel him pushing on the door where my feet were wedged. “Jacob, what the fuck’s the matter with you?” The sound of his voice made me heave harder and Daddy banged that door open till I was sure every toe I had was severed clean off. He was laughing now as he stood over me. “Well, goddamn, boy. Look at you.” He was chortling something horrible at me. “Must’ve been one hell of a night. Yes, sir, I don’t think I’ve had a night that put me in a place like this in a coon’s age.”
If he was talking about the puking, I’d seen him do it a week or two before. If he was talking about what had pushed me into that bowl, I’d heard the stories.
“Get the fuck up now, and be a goddamn man. I got something that’ll take the hurt out of you.” I pushed off of the toilet with hands still bloodied and scabbed, but just couldn’t find enough strength to get off the floor. “Goddamn, Jacob! Quit being a fucking pussy about it and get up!” Daddy leaned down and braced his arms under mine. He hoisted me up without even a grunt.
I stood there for a minute with my head hung low, my whole body limp as rope. I looked my hands over and hobbled to the sink to wash off what I could from the night before.
“Bloodied the hell out of those knuckles. Who’d you hit?”
“Avery Hooper.” I turned on the faucet and scrubbed hard at my knuckles till water stained dark red spiraled down the drain.
“Avery Hooper? That’s old Thomas Hooper’s boy, ain’t it?”
“I think that’s his uncle.” My eyes were focused on that spiraling, the sink seeming to swallow the only thing I cared to remember.
“Yeah, I think you’re right. That’s Thomas’s brother Aiden’s kid, ain’t it? Boy, I used to hate that son of a bitch when we were growing up. Tied that cocksucker to a tombstone one night at Cub Scouts and left him there. We could hear him just screaming down there when we were sitting around the campfire. They kept asking what that racket was, but I told them I didn’t hear a thing. I’d had half a mind to slit his fucking throat.” Daddy started laughing again and stared into the mirror till our eyes met.
“Well, his son ain’t much better.”
“Looks like it. Looks like there might be a little of that McNeely blood in you after all.”
That’s what I was scared of. I cupped a handful of water to wash my face and let some of that handful into my mouth to wet my tongue. My whole mouth was dry as talc, and I just kept filling my hands as fast as the faucet could pour to get some sort of dampness back into my mouth.
“Sounded like you were in here dying. Should’ve known you were just being a pussy.” Daddy stared at me like he couldn’t believe we were kin, like I was the biggest disappointment he’d ever had. “Well, whenever you’re finished, come in the kitchen and I’ll mix you up something to get those hairs standing again.”
From the way he carried himself, I knew old Josephine had given in pretty easy at some point after the tattoo was covered. As he walked out of the room, I could see that the name had been buried beneath flowers like the Mexicans draw inside of skulls, and there up above it was Josie spelled just right, with an i.
—
THE SMELL OF bacon and eggs still held in the kitchen, but it was obvious the cast iron had cooled hours before. It wasn’t that appetizing kind of smell when everything is still sizzling in the pan, but rather that sweaty-feet kind of must that comes on later.
“Well, Jesus Christ, look who decided to get up.”
The sun shone bright through the blinds so that even those slivers of sunlight lit the room to something unbearable. “What time is it?”
“What time is it, he asks. Care to venture a guess?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a quarter past four. You’ve been in there hugged up to the toilet all goddamn day.” Daddy sat on the couch with his bare feet propped up on the coffee table. He didn’t have a shirt on, and his tattoos darkened the places that never saw sun. He stood up and situated a loose-fitting pair of sweatpants on his waist before coming over to the kitchen and grabbing a coffee mug from the cabinet. “Just go sit your sissy ass over there.” Daddy started to mix some concoction into the mug, but I didn’t stick around to catch the ingredients. I stumbled toward the couch and took a liking to the place he’d sat. When he came over, he put the mug down in front of me, some acrid-smelling shit steaming over the rim. Daddy sat beside me and kicked his feet back to the coffee table. He started flipping channels just fast enough for eyes to catch a glimpse of what was showing. “Drink up. That shit’s a goddamn McNeely cure-all.”
I grabbed the coffee mug and took my first sip hesitantly. The taste sent my mouth to spitting and Daddy laughed as the mist glittered the air. “What the fuck is that?”
“Black coffee, a little dash of bourbon, and two Goody’s powders.”
“Tastes like shit.”
“Ain’t supposed to taste good. Just quit being a pussy about it and drink it.”
I took the next gulp in one big swallow, and though my face locked sideways like I was sucking something sour, by the time that medicine had hit my gut, I could feel the heaviness shedding.
“Tell me about last night.”
“Ain’t nothing to talk about.”
“Don’t go giving me that shit. Now, tell me about your night.”
“None of it worked out like you wanted it—”
“Goddamn, you’re loose-lipped! I ain’t even talking about that! The boys came by late last night on a tear and told me all about it. Those are tales that only need to be told one good time. It’s better like that. Better to just let sleeping dogs lie, like they say. That’s the only way to let a fuckup like that come somewhere close to forgetting.”
“Then what the fuck are you asking about?”
“I’m asking about your night. Trying to have a little friendly conversation with my son, if that’s all right with you. So what the fuck kept you out all night and had you plowing my forsythias all to shit?”
“I ran over the bushes?”
“Did you run over the bushes? You come piling up that driveway on a goddamn tear. I was grabbing for britches and a gun just as fast as I could till I seen it was you through the window.”
“Don’t remember that.”
“Bet you don’t.”
I grabbed the coffee mug and gulped down as much as I could stand. “Went to a party that they were throwing for graduation.”
“They graduate yesterday? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, they graduated yesterday and last night they were partying a little bit over there in Foxfire, over at Charlie Mitchell’s house. I don’t really think they wanted me there, and I don’t really know why I went. But one thing led to another, and I left Avery Hooper spread out on the floor.”
“Shit doesn’t just unfold like that, now. Would be out of your character to just walk in and go to hitting somebody. Wouldn’t put it past me, but you avoided that kind of meanness somehow or another. No, I reckon something had to have happened for you to just haul off and hit somebody.”
“Maggie Jennings.”
“And there it is, a goddamn woman.”
“She ain’t just some woman, first of all, and you know that.”
“Well, I know a lot of things. I know you two were tighter than a burl growing up. I know you two were together a good while and, hell, you might’ve even popped her cherry. But I know that a woman’s just a woman, and there’s no changing that. If they didn’t have pussies, the dumpsters would be full of them.”
“How about you stop right—”
“I know anything that can bleed a week straight every month and survive is the devil’s doing.” Daddy guffawed.
“Shut the fuck up! It ain’t like that. It ain’t ever been like that. And it ain’t like none of that trash you keep piled up around here.” I was sitting forward on the couch now and my knuckles were pressing those scabs wide open. “You can say whatever the hell you want about whoever the hell you want to, but you keep her fucking name out of it.”
Daddy resituated himself on the couch into a little lazier position than he’d held. He smirked knowing how riled I’d become, knowing that there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d hit him. I think he pushed me like that just to see if he could drag what genes he’d given out of me to inspect. “Guess my boy’s in love.”
I knew he’d said it just to get my blood boiling, but that didn’t really matter. There wasn’t any woman fit for talking like that as far as I was concerned, not even Josephine, but certainly not a girl like Maggie, certainly not someone so innocent.
“Well, are you going to tell the goddamn story or not?”
“She was there with Avery, and he was fixing to make her do something she didn’t need to be doing, so I hit him.”
“What was he fixing to make her do?”
“That ain’t important.”
“Of course it’s fucking important. Stories hinge on shit like this. So, tell me.” Daddy looked at me with a lowered brow that cast a heavy ledge over his eyes.
“He was cranked out of his brain and was about to try and put that shit up her nose. You happy?”
“Matter of fact, I am. Matter of fact, that makes me awfully fucking happy.” Daddy scooted toward me, slapped me in the back of the head, then palmed my crown and rattled my skull. He settled his bare arm around my neck and that warmness in him felt as close to anything fatherly as I’d felt in a long time. “Awfully fucking happy,” he said.