The fixed-blade skinning knife was my first thought. Push that thick drop point down into his throat and listen to him gurgle. But that would’ve been too messy, might’ve even given him a chance to fight back for a second or two. So I settled on the .22 pistol, same as he did. Seemed awfully fitting to put that son of a bitch down in the same way he did the rest of the animals. One shot and done.
When I was younger and Daddy used to keep a passel of hogs, he would slop the pigs when it came time to butcher. He’d pick one out and toss a whole bucket full of feed and wait till that hog got to chomping, and the hog never even saw him put the barrel to the back of its ear, never heard the shot. Killing a man wasn’t so simple. Men had a way of not getting so fixed on one thing, and men like Daddy always had an eye out for the world to fall off-kilter. So I did it while he slept.
The clouds had cleared, and the moon had come out by then and lit his bedroom a funny kind of blue through the window. Everything was cast in blue: the dresser top where he kept his wallet and spare change; the side table where the lamp hovered over a .40 S&W auto he used as bedside protection; the white cotton sheets he slept beneath. A sapphire kind of shade draped everything, even skin. Daddy always slept on his back like a corpse, his arms folded around his stomach, toes pointing straight up under sheer sheets. With his head rocked back on a down pillow, Daddy sawed logs in a sleep deep as hibernation. But it wasn’t him I was so worried about waking. It was her.
Josephine was curled up in a tight ball beside of him, her head nuzzled up against his chest, blond hair feathered across his arm. She was naked underneath those sheets, and the fabric had drawn down to her rib cage, one tit glowing blue and round. She was pretty except for the talking, so she was always sexiest when she slept. How she managed a wink of shut-eye with all of that rasping and grunting, wheezing and snoring, was beyond me, but that’s where she lay most nights. She slept heavy too, but often woke up in the middle of the night for a swallow of water and a trip to the john. Her eyes twitched the way one’s do in a dream, so I didn’t think she’d wake, not in the time it would take to do it.
The plan was to do it how he’d done. One round for each of them, load them up in his jeep, and sink them down in that wet graveyard with the Cabe brothers and God knows who else. I’d feed the deputies the same lines: got to talking an awful lot about Robbie Douglas, started acting awful funny, and then poof. He vanished. Make those bulls think he was on the lam or something.
I’d taken my shoes off to soften my footsteps and neither had stirred when I entered. I’d been standing over the two of them for what felt like days, but according to the alarm clock on the side table was precisely three minutes. 2:42 a.m. The bottoms of my bare feet were getting sticky with sweat and seemed to glue me to the hardwood floor. But I was as close as I needed to do it.
The long bull-barrel Ruger hung by my side. Like all guns, this one Daddy kept loaded with one in the hole, racking that first bullet into the chamber and refilling the clip so he was always one over capacity. “Ten ain’t near as good as eleven,” he’d say, but I only needed two. I was thankful I didn’t have to chamber a round, just one less noise to worry about waking them.
It took more than once for my brain to tell my arm to raise, and those first couple of times my arm was flaccid and unresponsive. But then my arm rose stiff as a pipe, settled when that front fiber optic glowed red over his face. “Just the front sight you have to worry with,” Daddy’d said when I was young, and he first taught me to shoot. He’d been right, and the Harrington and Richardson ripped apart every clay he threw. That was one of the few times he’d been proud of me. I could count those times on one hand even if I had lost two or three fingers in a sawmill. Thinking of that fact brought on the anger, and I needed that anger more now than ever. I needed it to fuel me. The second I saw that gun in Mama’s hand, I knew what it would take to make things right, and I needed that anger to ensure the deed got done.
The front sight quivered right and left across his face and I took a deep breath to still my hand. I was counting down in my head, backward from a hundred, and when the numbers ran out I’d do it. Pull the trigger on the exhale. About 75 the doubt set in, but by 50, I was good. Each breath came and went. The numbers fell. 30. Breathing became less and less about keeping me standing and more and more about steadying my aim. 15. The breathing quickened during that last set of ten and it was all I could do to hold it there, my hand gripped bloodless, knuckles pressed white. Zero came and I pulled, swung the pistol to Josephine right after that first crisp trigger break.
Only when Daddy moved did I realize there hadn’t been a bang, just a loud click as the firing pin hammered away on nothing. I moved fast then, yanked back those bolt ears to eject a misfired round, but the bolt held on an empty chamber. Daddy’s eyes were open and out of the grog he came, rising so fast that it sent Josephine rolling out of the bed, just a naked top of woman parts spinning wildly on the floor. Both hands had ahold of my wrist and ran me back into the wall, the pistol falling out of my grip as Daddy rammed my hand through the windowpane. He lifted me up and flipped me in midair, body-slammed me, my shoulder hitting first, then my neck and head cranking against the base of the dresser. By the time I rolled over, my back holding me up against the wall, he was overtop of me, having already grabbed his pistol from the bedside table. Josephine screamed and yanked the sheet off of the bed to wrap herself up. She sprinted out of the bedroom, her feet catching in all of that cloth as she hit the door, and tripped face-first into the hallway.
“Don’t you fucking move!” he screamed. Daddy shuffled for the light switch, never taking that gun or his eyes off me. Josephine’s screams moved further and further away, her footsteps banging across the floor, the screen door slapping hard behind her, and those Walkers baying and snarling just as soon as she stepped foot outside. Her screams turned to a high-pitched cry as one of the hounds got ahold of her, but she must’ve wrestled free, since the next thing I heard was her car crank and tires spin gravel down the drive.
That first flash of light blinded me, my eyes having long since settled to the darkness. When my eyes unknotted, the white light brought color to the room. Daddy stood over me. His tattooed chest heaved. The gun never wavered from my head.
“Jacob!” Daddy hollered. “Jacob! What the fuck are you doing?”
I could barely move my arm. My shoulder felt dislocated and my neck near broken. But I sat up as much as I could, and scowled with rage that had not waned. “You killed her!” I screamed. “You fucking killed her!”
“Who the fuck are you talking about?”
“Mama. I found her there and you killed her! You killed her, you son of a bitch!” I pushed up off the floor with my good arm and rammed toward him, but a swift blow pounded me in the top of the head as Daddy smashed the pistol and hammered me back onto the floor.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I found her there and she’d blown her fucking brains out! She’d blown her fucking brains out with the gun you gave her! And then you left one of those fucking Bibles there beside of her, you sick fuck!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jacob, but what in the fuck were you doing standing over me with that gun?” Daddy never took that pistol off aim. The hammer was back and it was a sure bet that he wasn’t sitting on empty.
“I was going to kill you, you son of a bitch! I was going to blow your fucking head off and make shit right!” I came off of the floor again, got about the same distance that second run, but when the steel found its mark, my vision spiraled like the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon until all that was left was black.
—
WHEN I CAME TO, Daddy sat on the edge of the bed, sweatpants rolled up to his knees, bare chest graffitied with tattoos, one hand resting the pistol on his lap, the other hand holding an apple up to his mouth as he took another bite. I slumped against the wall as it all came into focus, and noticed he’d wrapped my hand up in a shirt to stop the bleeding from where he put it through the window. I stared at him and didn’t really know what to say. My anger was stupefied and weak. Daddy picked the pistol up from his lap and gestured like he was about to say something as he chewed on the apple.
“You ready to talk now?” Jagged bits of apple peel and mashed fruit cut somersaults along his sentence. He spoke so matter-of-factly that there was a part of me wondered if any of what I remembered really took place, but there was that pain running from my shoulder to my neck, that bloody hand wrapped in a shirt to remind me. I kept quiet and didn’t answer, not exactly sure what to say. “Well, all right then, I guess I’ll do the talking. Seems you think I had something to do with your mama dying, is that right?” I nodded and he continued. “And seems you think that gun that she used might have been something that I gave to her, is that right?” Again, I nodded. “Well, you’re goddamn right I gave her the gun, and you’re goddamn right I told her to do it. You fucking piece of shit, you ought to be thanking me.”
“Thanking you?”
“Yeah, Jacob. That woman was a fine piece of work, a fine fucking piece of work, I tell you. Want to know how fine a piece of work she was? Fine enough that she stole from her own husband, fucked every friend I ever thought I had, and left you, you, Jacob, her own fucking son, like a bloody fucking tampon. That’s what kind of woman your mama was.”
“And that was cause for what you did?”
“No, I don’t reckon it was. I reckon if that’d been cause, I would’ve shot that sloppy bitch a long fucking time ago. I’d have done it my fucking self.” Daddy took another bite of apple, scratched at an itch with the end of that pistol, an itch that hit him right where a bunch of spiderweb was inked on his chest. “No, I guess what I did was just show her the error of her ways. I guess I just explained to her how much hurt she’d caused and how much hurt she was still causing, and then I gave her an out. The out I gave her was that gun you saw, and just like she should’ve, that fucking bitch took it.”
“I don’t think that’s how it happened.”
“Then why don’t you tell me how the fuck it happened, Jacob?” Daddy was screaming. He’d jumped from the bed, thrown that apple to the floor, and spit like a seed spreader as he yelled in my face. His eyes bulged, and his face sizzled red. He pressed the barrel flush against my temple, but I didn’t flinch. No, I prayed he’d do it. “Tell me what the fuck you think happened since you’re so goddamn smart!”
“You want to know what I think happened, then I’ll tell you.” My words were calm, and I kept my eyes fixed on the wall in front of me, never bothered glancing his way. “I think you got it in your head that she’d ratted you out the night Lieutenant Rogers came up to the house. Then I think, no, I know, he gave you a heads-up when she got home. I think you got it in your mind that she was too much of a threat, so you went over there and told her she had two choices. Either you could take her out of this world and take your damn precious time doing it, or she could do it herself. And then you gave her the gun to do it.”
“You don’t know nothing!” Daddy slapped me across the face repeatedly with a hand that seemed big enough to palm a beach ball, and I didn’t move. His strikes came numb at first but then grew into stinging like frozen skin washed under scalding water. “You ain’t got a goddamn clue!” He slapped me back and forth across the face until his chest heaved again, all of those tattoos swelling and shrinking with every breath he took. He fell back onto the edge of the bed and buried his head in his hands. I was rooted against the wall, my whole face afire. And that’s when I saw him do something that he’d never done. My daddy, that hard-as-nails piece of shit, sobbed like a child. He wailed down into his hands and let out one of the god-awfulest roars I ever heard.
He hadn’t cried when he had to lay lead to his best hound, a dog he loved more than me. He hadn’t cried when his daddy was eat up with cancer so bad that he spent that last winter coughing on blood and choking on his own spit, nor when he buried Papaw on that slanted ground in Hamburg Baptist Cemetery. And he’d certainly never shed a tear that I’d seen for any life he’d taken. But whatever this was, whatever worms were digging into his gut right that second, shattered every bit of man he thought he was. I think there was a place deep in him where he held something heavier than any other weight that he carried, a part of him that still loved her.
“Goddamn it!” he screamed, with his wetted face aimed straight toward the ceiling. “Goddamn that worthless cunt!” He glared toward the light and blinked his eyes fast to try and clear them.
“Bury her,” I said.
Daddy turned his attention to me, a confused look lowering his brow, his eyes red, and his face sheened with tears. “What the fuck did you say, boy?”
“I said bury her.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You pay to have a preacher do his prayers over her, and you pay to put her in the ground.” For the first time since that rage, I was looking him square. “That’s the closest you can come to setting this right.”
“She ruined my life.” Daddy started to break again, but he didn’t hide it behind his hands. He sat there and let me see it. “She ruined my fucking life!”
“And she’s paid for it.” I looked deep into him and tried to pick at that one piece of humanity that I’d never seen. “All you can hope is to set this right.”
“I won’t spend a goddamn dime on that bitch! I don’t owe her a fucking thing!”
For a minute I stewed on all of that hate in his heart. Those moments of silence that passed between us felt like days. Then words finally came to me and I spoke. “Then set it right with me.”
Daddy stared at me as if he were really rolling it around in his head, milling that thought up till nothing remained but absolute fact. “Truth of it is, I don’t owe you a fucking thing either, Jacob. Truth of it is, you’re grown. You can fend for yourself.” The anger came back over him, and his eyes hardened till there wasn’t a bit of light left in them, nothing alive in him anymore.
“What about my share? What about all those numbers you’ve been adding up and subtracting ever since I can remember?”
“That’s all just a bunch of shit, boy. Like I said, I don’t owe you a fucking thing.”
I picked myself up from the wall, my body beaten near limp, only pride holding me there. I limped to the edge of the bed and stood over him. I looked him dead in his eyes, eyes that had been sucked dry a long time ago, eyes that should have held something in them but didn’t, the way a dead man stares. All living things I’d ever seen held that light, but those bulbs had burned out on him a long time ago. “Bury her, and we’ll call it square.”
Daddy looked up at me, all of that pain flushing his face, his eyes like wetted stone. “I’m going to bury her, boy, but it ain’t got a goddamn thing to do with you.”