The Walkers snapped and snarled as I tiptoed just out of reach of their leads. Kayla, Daddy’s prized bitch, was the meanest of them all and she stretched her collar till there was no more give when I approached. She’d always been staked closest to the house, and on that morning, I managed all thirty-four two-steps and fourteen ball changes without a hitch, but that cunt of a dog caught me in the chassé. She leapt and managed to get a nip at the loose part of my jeans and I stumbled back a bit, tripped over my feet, and collapsed into the dust at the bottom of the front steps. The collar yanked hard into her throat and she hacked, but never let off trying to get close. I crawled to my feet and kicked dirt in her eyes, and that mean-ass dog howled wildly. I hoped she’d starve with Daddy gone.
His jeep and the rickety Cavalier that Josephine drove were parked out front. The front door was cracked, but there was no sound inside. I opened the screen door, eased into the living room, and stopped just by the couch. Nothing stirred. The hounds bayed in the yard, but inside was silent, a deafening kind of silence about that place. In eighteen years under his roof, I’d never felt the house so still.
Nothing looked out of place. The television remote, a Merle Haggard album, and an open pack of Winstons lay on the coffee table equidistant and squared off to one another just the way Daddy left things. He’d always been methodical about having things just right. When I was stoned I used to shift it all just a tad when he wasn’t looking just so I could laugh when he came back and fixed it all perfect. He never could stand to have his world even a hair off-kilter, so he kept it all under his thumb.
Dishes and glasses were stacked in one side of the sink, and the other side was filled with clouded water. The few soap bubbles that were left clung to the outer rim. A piece of cube steak rested in congealed brown gravy in the cast iron on the stove, and a pot filled with mashed potatoes that had dried yellow sat on the back burner. I opened the freezer and took a carton of Winstons from the shelf inside the door. Only two packs were gone and I took the next in line, hammered the pack against my hand, shook a smoke free, and lit my first of the morning. Those Winstons tasted a lot better than Lucky Strikes, even more so than Bugler. Winstons had always been our brand.
I was headed to my bedroom to scan it one last time and make sure I hadn’t left anything behind, when I damn near tripped over her. Josephine was sprawled facedown in the hallway, a nasty gash beaten into the back of her head. Her blond hair was matted red and dried stiff where the blood had poured, the puddle still thick and wet where her face lay. Her head was cocked to the side, and if it hadn’t been for all that blood, she might’ve been mistaken for passed out from a distance. The slice across her throat told a different tale, though. Only the places the blade had started and stopped were visible from where I stood, but it was that cut that’d finished her. One arm was tucked under her and the other stretched as far as it could reach. She was naked except for panties, a lacy lime-green stretch of fabric cutting through the crack of her ass. Her legs were turned pigeon-toed, bare feet pointed inward.
Seeing her body made me feel as if I moved inside of a dream. The whole house held that thick, fuzzy kind of illusory blur. My movements were slow and I swam in that thickness, all action molasses-like and sluggish as an ant sinking into syrup. But even in that slothful haze, I understood that this was not make-believe. It was real. She was dead. Spilt all over the floor. There was no sense wading in it. I needed to move. Never mind what was left in my room. Rogers said he’d call the bulls come noon, and I wanted to be long gone by then. Four hours was no time. The safe. The money. Daddy kept it in his room and that’s where I went.
It was there in Daddy’s bedroom where I saw the most grisly scene my eyes ever saw. Blood ran from ceiling to floor on all four walls. Some of the blood had settled like a fine mist breathed onto walls, but in other places it curved in long lines, ran like rivers before it dripped down and dried. There were brushstrokes. Long brushstrokes that painted thick swaths. Short ones tapering like feathers. There were handprints smeared in places like some kindergartner had been pressing red turkeys onto paper for a Thanksgiving arts and crafts project, only these weren’t little kids’ handprints, these were grown man’s handprints, Daddy’s handprints pressed there and there and there. White sheets were stained red, but no child had been born. It was a different kind of blood that had settled onto this place. It wasn’t the blood of anything new, but the blood of something old dying. And then I saw him. Only a part of him first. Just a foot angled out from behind the corner of the bed. I could feel my heart pounding all through my body and for a while I couldn’t find the courage to move. The sight of his foot held some kind of voodoo that turned me gargoyle. I was stone, all stone, with unblinking stone eyes.
I didn’t so much walk as drag myself toward him, boots scraping against the hardwood as they slid. Only the gray sweatpants he wore made him recognizable. He lay flat on his back, his hands clenched into fists and resting at his sides. From his waistline up his stomach, through his chest and into his neck were enough stab wounds to put down a whole passel of hogs. Wide gashes angled and gnarled every which way. Stabs thick and deep darkened almost black. Skin folded back like petals. Places left unscathed were bright red. Dark tattoos shone through like drawings on a wall that needed another coat or two of paint to cover. One of the punctures had caught him right beneath the jaw, slid down his neck till the blade caught bone. But it was his face that turned me.
His face was smashed pulp. One eye drooped from its socket. His mouth was torn at the corner. Bottom lip drooping like rolled clay. My mind pieced together all of that mashed meat, and I could see my daddy lying there, the daddy who had never been much of a daddy at all but the only one I’d ever known. There had been times when I was young when he was perfect, those times we spent in cold mountain streams chasing speckled trout with red wrigglers and wax worms, those times when he genuinely smiled. There’d even been a few times when I was older when there was a glimpse of humanity in him, a reason he’d paid to have the reverend pray over my mother’s ashes. He was a horrible man and no one knew that more than me, but he was my father nonetheless. The way that puzzle pieced together wrung me like a dishrag, and I threw up all over his gray sweatpants. All that came was a thick yellow soup that stung the back of my throat and tasted like bile. I bent and twisted until all of that stomach acid was out of me and there was nothing left but dry heaves, huffing for breath each time my belly unclenched. I fell onto the bed and leaned over him. Tears fell onto his chest and pooled, wetted places where blood had dried in the hours since.
Rogers’s words echoed. “It ain’t the knowing that does that to a man, Jacob. It’s the not knowing,” he’d said. I couldn’t fathom not knowing. I knew who did it before he’d come. I’d let it happen, and in a lot of ways, I was responsible. That shit’ll eat a man too, I thought, and it gnawed into me then. It burrowed down deep and clacked its teeth against the hardest part it could find. There was no place deep enough to bury it, no place buried enough to stop that gnawing.
On the floor beside my father lay a Bible, a small pocket Bible, black leather, gold gilded along the edges of pages. The Bible sat on top of the blood, not a single drop on the cover of the book. Rogers had dropped it there afterward.
I hung down and picked the Bible up from the floor, the backside of the book sticky and wet. I fumbled through a book that had never done me much good and tried to find the words the reverend had shouted at me when I carried my mother’s ashes. I knew the verse, knew it for Psalms, but it had been a long time since I’d navigated those chapters. “Thou wilt light our candle, the Lord our God will enlighten our darkness.” I read it over my father’s body like an incantation and waited again for God to show Himself. I read it over and over, louder and louder, until those words were bouncing all over the room, and I waited for God to show Himself. I screamed and waited, begged for Him to come down and save me, save us, but nothing came. Nothing. It was just as it had always been. Only us. There was no verse that could change that. I knelt beside my father and laid that Bible on his chest, situated it square, then brought his clenched hands to rest over that book and hold it just so.
The tears rode on waves. When I thought it settled, another wave. Choking. Gagging. There was a slow groan when I breathed, an uncontrollable groan that wheezed on every breath, and I knew then that the only way to be rid of it was to run. I stood from the bed but my body hung in the air. My knees bent and my top half drooped limp, but I knew I had to go.
The closet doors were open and the shiny green safe identical to the one at the shop stood in the back corner with its heavy door agape. Long guns were piled inside and pistols sat on the shelves, and I knew if it had been open while Daddy was alive there would have been one more body stiff on the floor. But Rogers wasn’t there. Rogers had made it out.
Daddy had always kept his bills folded in stacks of a hundred, ten thousand dollars cinched tight under each band. Where there should’ve been twenty stacks only one remained, one lonely wad of folded bills with the stretched band holding loosely where some had been taken.
Outside the hounds raged, and I walked out of the bedroom, stepped over Josephine’s body, and stumbled toward the window above the sink to look outside. At the edge of the yard a procession of patrol cars parked behind my pickup, their lights flashing madly in the early-morning glow. Rogers’s Expedition headed the line and he stood by the back bumper of his rig, two bulls with long guns standing one on each side. The three faced the house, while another pair of bulls cleared my truck and rummaged through the cab. It was all a setup and I knew it then. Not only had Rogers taken what was mine, he’d placed me there with blood on my hands. Means, motive, and opportunity, I had them all. The man I respected, the man I had come to trust more than my own father, had given me his word. “That’s all a man has is his word,” Daddy had said. Rogers’s word meant nothing.
I watched Rogers for a long time while the bulls moved around the cars. There were more of them coming up the drive now, all of them jumping out and popping their trunks for long guns. The deputies rushed about, but Rogers didn’t budge. He just held there watching the house, his eyes aimed directly where I stood. I wondered if he saw me, if he could see me peering through the window at him. His face was void, just a blank emotionless gaze. He leaned to the side and pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from the cargo pocket of his britches, lit a cigarette, and made it jump between his teeth. Arms folded, he propped against the Expedition while all of those bulls moved and readied themselves for the moment he gave word.
I’d never killed a man, but for a long time, I’d known I had it in me. If there was one thing my father had given me, it was that. Killing Rogers would make things square, and if there was no getting out, then the best I could hope for was square. Leave this world just how Daddy fancied. I hurried into Daddy’s bedroom and ran my eyes down the rows of long guns in the safe. I chose the rifle that he would have wanted for such a task, an old Marlin .30-30 lever-action that Papaw had given him when he was old enough to hunt on his own. The blued receiver was pitted and matte, just a dull and dark bluish gray swirling about the metal. Daddy had marked every animal he ever took with the rifle along the black walnut stock. Almost all of the wood was marked with X’s and slashes and refinished over so the stain dried dark in the grooves he’d cut. I held the rifle pointed toward the ceiling and racked the lever until brass disappeared into the chamber. I took one last look at Daddy there on the floor with the Bible cradled under his fists, grabbed the stack of bills from the safe, and left him there. I had one last chance to honor my word. One last chance to make him proud.
I stepped over Josephine in the hallway and hurried into my bedroom. The sheets on the bed were just how I’d left them, pulled and mangled from the mattress centering the wall, and I laid the rifle there. On the far side of the bed was the place in the hardwood where I’d hidden things as a child, a place I was certain Maggie would remember. I opened it one last time, centered the stack of hundreds in the hide, and pulled my cell phone from my pocket to text her. There was no time to call, and her voice would’ve broken me. Even thinking those things brought on a heaviness that I could no longer carry. So I just texted her, turned off the phone, put it in the hide next to the money, sealed the floor, and left it all behind.
When I got back into the kitchen and could see through the window, Rogers hadn’t moved from that spot, and the bulls still rushed around. He took a drag from the cigarette and flicked it into the yard, blew a long line of smoke that thinned as it rose. Rogers seemed to stare at the window where I stood, but that blank expression never altered. He mustn’t have been able to see me there, because if he had he would’ve known what was coming. I wouldn’t break the windowsill. I wouldn’t lift the glass. I’d shoot him right through the windowpane. None of them would expect a thing till it was done.
Braced against the windowsill, the muzzle of the barrel held steady as I drew a bead. My left hand sweated, clenching hard on the foregrip, and I pulled the rifle back into me so that the butt of the stock pressed tightly against my shoulder. The hammer was back and my aim was true and I slid my fingertip over the trigger. There was no countdown. No breathing. Only powder burning. Lead sent to air. Glass flew apart when the trigger broke and from the yard screams came loud over the Walkers’ howls, but it wasn’t Rogers screaming. Rogers just lifted his hands to the bottom of his breastbone where that bullet hit, and the blood seeped from under his fingers, all of that red staining the belly of his khaki shirt. His eyes were wide, and even from that distance, I could see the fear and pain settling into him. He looked down at the place that burned and then back to the window as he fell and slid down the tail of the Expedition. There was a calmness I’d never really felt until then that washed over me while I watched him, a calmness that Daddy had always carried, but that I had never known until right at that moment.
The bulls dropped and scurried behind the cars. Their rifles rested on hoods and roofs and anything they could use to steady themselves. They hollered to one another with words I couldn’t understand through all of the ringing. One of them rushed out to get his arms under Rogers and drag him behind the cars. He must’ve asked for cover because right about then a round came from their side and blew away shards of glass that hung just over my head. Even through the ringing I heard the bullet whiz past like a pissed-off hornet, and I dropped down behind the cabinets and knelt there for a long time listening to them yell, listening to the Walkers bay.
A few more rounds came through the open window and hammered holes into the wall across from me. I could see Josephine’s body in the hall from my position, and the way that she slept looked so peaceful that I thought for a second or two of joining her there. That type of peacefulness and stillness was all that mattered anymore.
I crawled over by the refrigerator and opened the cabinet where Daddy kept his liquor. There was a half-filled bottle of Evan Williams that seemed to suit me right then, so I popped the cork and put the bottle to my lips. My mouth was dry and that woody-tasting bourbon hit it just right, so I took another long slug until my thirst was gone and a woozy clarity flushed over me. I crept across the room, sliding my knees and hands and that rifle along the hardwood until I was in the living room and right beside the coffee table. That opened pack of Winstons looked good, so I shook one from the pack and lit it. I hadn’t noticed my hands shaking until I held the cigarette between my fingers, but I was trembling. I set the pack of smokes back where Daddy had left them, squared it off between the record album and television remote just so.
The front door was still cracked open and outside the bulls were waiting. I stood from the floor with Daddy’s rifle in my hands and opened the door a bit further till it was only the screen and the porch and the stairs and the yard and those dogs that separated us from one another. I was on the edge of that ravine now and peered around the corner to where the sun shined brightly onto cars, a fierce white light blinding all of the bulls who stood out there in wait. It was a light that no matter how hard they tried, they would never understand, and I felt sorry for them. There was such a sad, sad truth in how clueless they were to what shined down all around them. The gap between here and there didn’t seem so barren any longer, didn’t seem so far and out of reach. The space between here and there was no distance at all, and I readied myself to go where that Indian had never had the courage to go, the place Mama had peered off onto with a beckoning kind of sadness in her eyes. There was no fear or sorrow or repentance any longer, and I ventured out into that middle ground with a fearless pride that held my back arched and chest out. That restful time was near now, and I finally understood that there’d never been any difference between here or there. Only the middle ground of this wicked world mattered, the vast gap that stretched between, and those who were born with enough grit to brave it.