There was no hero’s welcome. No rib eyes sizzling over charcoal briquettes. No cold beer in koozies. Instead I walked in like a discordant note on the Townes Van Zandt song spinning around the record player.
The Cabe brothers were sitting on the couch—the skinny one, Jeremy, pressing his hand nearly white against his forehead. Red oozed out from under Jeremy’s hand like he’d smashed a tomato just above his eyes. The blood dripped down onto his baby-blue T-shirt and had dotted lines along the thighs of brown canvas britches. Gerald sat beside his brother with his arms folded and resting across his knees. He was hunched over, fat swallowing suspenders, and seemed to just kind of hover there with his stare fixed on the hardwood. My father was standing over them, his slender frame casting a shadow that neither Cabe brother could’ve crawled out from under. Daddy had his shirt off, white skin almost completely covered in ink, and as the screen door closed behind me, his eyes cut into me in a way I’d never seen in any man. That stare, that cold, rage-filled fucking stare, cowered a man’s soul, and suddenly, all of the stories I’d ever heard about him were glaring down into a place inside of me that had never been touched.
“Goddamn it, Jacob! Of all the fucking days to get pinched! Of all the fucking days in your shitty-ass little life to get pinched, you go and do it on a day like this!” I just stood there frozen in headlights lit by rage and waited for him to tell me to move. “Sit the fuck down over there.” Daddy motioned with a .45 auto, a Commander-sized 1911 he’d gotten for a short bag of dope when bags were still pushed through windowsills, but I still couldn’t move. “Goddamn it, boy, I said sit the fuck down!”
Jeremy’s knees were knocking and his eyes had grown two sizes too big for his head. “Do we really need to get the boy into—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Daddy backhanded the pistol across Jeremy’s face and the front sight caught just beneath his eye, cutting a sliver that shone white for a second before filling red. Gerald’s arms lifted from his knees and he looked like he might stand, but Daddy hammered the bottom of the magazine square into his nose and that knoll of flesh mashed flat. Under the bill of his Joy Dog Food trucker cap, Gerald’s eyes watered and he squinted to hold it in, but there was nothing to stop the fountain that dumped out of both nostrils, ran over his lips and chin like a stream over stone, and dripped into a stain on his undershirt. The Cabe brothers’ eyes were fixed on Daddy now, and it was a fear of what might happen when the trigger broke that held them there. I still hadn’t moved. “Jacob, I’ve already told you with my mouth.” He motioned with the pistol to the chair beside the couch. I scampered over to the chair and sat down, never taking my eyes off of Daddy or that gun. “What do you think happened, Jacob? Why do you think these two are piled up over there on the couch?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, sir. I don’t reckon I do.”
“You don’t reckon you do.” Daddy smirked and sort of chuckled under his breath. “You don’t reckon you do. My own fucking flesh and blood, my own fucking son, and you don’t reckon you do!” In an instant Daddy had slid the pistol into the back of his sweatpants and was straddling me. His hands settled around my neck and squeezed so hard that in the first seconds I knew I was dying. There was no gradual rise into choking. I knew he was going to kill me. I was drowning in his hands, and the lights in the room were changing. I tried to breathe but there was nothing. I searched as hard as I could for air and there was nothing, and I knew I wouldn’t last a second more, and just before it all went black, Jeremy rose out of the corner of my eye.
Daddy was off me and had the gun back out in one clean motion, and he hammered the side of the pistol into Jeremy’s face, sent his skinny frame flying and falling limp beside his brother. Gerald started to rise again and Daddy yanked the slide back, pulled the trigger just as the hammer set. BOOM!
The shot ripped apart music still blaring from speakers and my ears rang as I coughed for breath. My eyes jumped to where Gerald had sat, and as my vision cleared, I was sure I’d find a mess in that first moment of clarity. I was certain there would be an entry hole .45 inches wide in Gerald’s forehead, a splash of color on the picture that hung behind the couch, pieces of brain spread like bits of ground sausage on the hardwood, but there wasn’t. There was a hole exactly .45 inches wide in the wall just to the right of where Gerald’s head had risen.
We held there silent as prayer when Daddy walked into the kitchen. None of us moved an inch while Daddy turned up a bottle of bourbon and breathed through bubbles. He set the bottle down calmly on the kitchen table and ran his forearm across his mouth to dry what spilt. Daddy pulled a crumpled soft pack of smokes from the pocket of his sweatpants and flipped a Winston into his lips. He lit the cigarette and returned.
“Now I’m done with the bullshit.” That animal look about him had sobered and Daddy was back to that crazy sort of calmness I knew well, a part of him that I honestly feared more than rage. “Y’all are family. Y’all are all I’ve got in this world. But I want y’all to understand one thing. Nobody says another goddamn word until I’m finished talking. You got that?”
No one nodded. No one moved. No one said a fucking word.
“We’ve already been talking, Jacob, but I reckon I’m going to have to back up a bit to get you up to speed.”
Daddy walked over to the record player, lifted the arm, and set the needle into a line that never stopped spinning. He started the record over and the first notes of “For the Sake of the Song” started crackling and popping through the speakers. Daddy cranked the volume knob a little higher and Townes’s melancholic voice rose.
“You see, there was this family, Jacob, and this family had a dog that had a tendency to go crazy on a scent. The family had got this old hound from one of those shelters, I guess, a stray that must’ve never done much good running bear. Now, this dog still had the hunt bred into him. Wasn’t ever much of a family kind of dog. Anyhow, this dog caught a smell that suited him and those fucking eyes lit up and before anybody in the house could even know to holler, ‘Sit,’ that dog was off. And so here this stupid-ass dog goes trampling off in the woods and hunting down a smell that took him miles from that yard.
“Well, a little while later the family gets to missing that old dog pretty bad, and they go to calling and calling but never hear a yelp. It’s sometime early morning and the wife gets to nagging at the husband that he better go looking for the dog, and as husbands are prone to do, that dumb motherfucker listened.
“Now, there’s a dog still trampling off through the woods, and there’s a man knowing good and well that if he don’t find that dog, he’s not going to get a lick of pussy anytime soon. That thought never leaves this man’s head as he’s trudging through the woods, stepping over rattlesnake dens and everything else just for the chance that he might get some ass if he can track down that dog. That thought just kept eating at him and eating at him and driving him further and further from home until all of a sudden he gets to this clearing, a big ol’ sloping hill scattered with rocks the size of Volkswagens, and he hears a single bark cut across open air.
“I bet his dick got hard just as soon as that bark tickled his eardrums, so he tore up that hill ready to grab that fucking hound by the collar and drag his ass back miles through thick woods just for a chance at pussy his wife would probably end up teasing him with anyways. Well, as this man gets up the hill he finds that old hound nestled up next to a half-naked man wrapped tight around one of those rocks. There’s a smell about that body after a few days and the man thinks he just might get sick, but he leans down there anyhow and gets to looking past all those burns and all that blood and he hears something. You know what he hears, Jacob? He hears him breathing.”
Daddy took the gun and scratched at an itch on his temple with the holey end. He took a real deep breath, rocked his head back, and closed his eyes for a second or two before they settled into me. “He was fucking breathing, Jacob.”
A heaviness clinched down around my whole body, a heaviness like I was in a vacuum, and as the magnitude of what my father had said set in, I was choking again. I tried to breathe but couldn’t, only Daddy’s hands were still right there hanging by his sides. I felt like I was going to be sick, and then, out of nowhere, this numbness came over me and it was as if my body was still sitting in that chair, but my eyes had floated off for a better view. I could see the whole room, the Cabe brothers and me sitting there while Daddy stood over us with the pistol. I was floating even higher now, and it was a calming sort of feeling the further I got away. As I rose, the rubber band started stretching thin the further I went, until there was no more give to be given and that rubber band snapped and I shot back into myself, all of that reality driven home that at barely eighteen years old, I was as good as dead, and I threw up all over my lap.
Daddy looked down at me with a disgusted sneer wiped across his face.
“Now, I don’t have to tell any of you how serious this is. I don’t have to tell you that the fact a man who was supposed to be buried two goddamn days ago is alive and breathing in a hospital bed tonight is a problem. Every single one of you knows that this is a big fucking problem. This is the type of mess that can’t be cleaned up, and there ain’t a goddamn thing any of us can do but sit back and wait for the story to unfold.
“So there’s two things that could happen. Right now as we speak, that cranked-out son of a bitch is laid up in a hospital bed unconscious with breathing machines doing most of the work to keep him tied to this world. Any minute that son of a bitch could flatline, and aside from a few John Laws trying to figure out what the fuck happened, we’d be in the clear. That’s one thing that could happen.
“The other thing that could happen is that those doctors could keep him alive for days, weeks, months even, and one day in a split second that son of a bitch could wake up and when the words finally settle in his mouth and get to tasting good, he might just have a story to tell. It’s that story that presents the problem. It’s that goddamn story that gets every single one of us locked up for the rest of our fucking lives. At my age and where I’m at in life, that’s the kind of thing that I just couldn’t let happen.” Daddy stopped for a second and stared at that pistol as he turned it back and forth in the light. “At my age, I reckon I’d just blow my fucking brains out in the trees somewhere and let the crows have a taste. But for y’all’s sake, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. For y’all’s sake, let’s hope that son of a bitch keels over.”
Daddy walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He laid the pistol on the tabletop and slid the bottle of bourbon into his chest. His dark hair was slicked and wetted with sweat, and his jaw seemed to flex with every beat of his heart. He pulled the cork and took a long swig, washed that rotgut around in his mouth for a moment, and swallowed. There wasn’t another word spoken. “Don’t You Take It Too Bad” bled into “Colorado Girl” on the Townes album, and when the song finished out, someone would have to turn to Side B.
Daddy was staring into the bottle and scratching away at the tabletop with the tip of the pistol when the Cabe brothers eased from the couch and snuck for the door. There still wasn’t a word said, and the final refrain sounded from the speakers as the screen door creaked closed. The final crackles and pops of blank album slid away under the needle and the arm rose, pushed off to the side, and fell into the cradle. Silence.
Daddy stood and walked calmly into his bedroom. After a few seconds, he came back out carrying a .22 pistol he used to put down hogs on days when a knife proved too much work. Daddy slid the long bull barrel down into the back of his sweatpants and headed out the front door.
I sat right there and didn’t move until I heard two short snaps like a cap gun echo from the yard. I got up and peered out of the window then. Daddy was walking back from the Cabe brothers’ pickup and the moonlight lit his bare chest blue in places where Irish skin still shone. The Walkers spread as he came through the yard, every hound moving as far back on its lead as it could to get away from him. The bullet hole and splash of color I’d been sure would spread wide open just a few short minutes before was certainly spread now. There was a mess that would need cleaning soon.