THE MORNING LIGHT was beginning to blue the small windows of the hog shed and split through the chinks between the aluminum walls and ceiling. It was five a.m., and the migrants would be out in the fields picking cabbages and green beans, maybe even Brussels sprouts for all he knew—he never ventured close to the big farms, as if the very land were poisoned. Gene sat on the concrete floor, his back against a ridged wall furred with dirt and grime. He stared at his brother and popped a couple tropical fruit-flavored Tums into his mouth. While they dissolved on his tongue, he recalled sitting with Miller and feeling queasy in the bed of Ralph Edson’s rusty red pickup, much like his own now, the first time they’d helped castrate pigs. His life with Miller had come full circle, not a perfectly round circle, but a jagged and lopsided one.
“You haven’t aged well,” Gene said to him. Besides being dead, Miller looked bloated, no longer the slim six foot two he remembered. Gene had always been a pudgier five foot ten, though now at thirty-eight he’d probably lost an inch. Gene had seen enough bodies to account for the natural bloating—Miller had gained thirty or forty pounds since he last saw him, and he seemed shorter now in death. His hairline had receded dramatically, and the bald spot on the back of his head left him a sparse, ridiculous wreath of hair. He looked like a sick monk—pale, bloated, solemn, with a bad haircut—and probably hadn’t looked much better alive.
“You should have just shaved off all your hair and been done with it,” he said as if they were sitting at a kitchen table. “Proud son of a bitch.” Gene had never liked his brother, even when they were young, but now his anger came from somewhere else, and he wasn’t sure where. “Clueless fucking idiot. What the hell did you get yourself into?”
Gene considered the options. Feeding Miller to the hogs was the most obvious. Or he could give him a proper burial, which would risk someone finding the body and ultimately either fingering Gene for the murder or forcing him to reveal the source of his supplementary income the last few years. So many wild dogs, coyotes, possums, and turkey buzzards prowled the area that Miller’s remains would likely turn up within a couple weeks. Gene considered building an air-tight coffin and sticking Miller in an unmarked grave in their family plot by the Little Wabash, but some bored neighbor would almost certainly see him and want to find out what he was so busy doing. The thought of feeding Miller to the hogs seemed wrong. Even Miller, who presumably had no love for his brother, or at the very least no time or attention or respect, wouldn’t feed Gene to the hogs if their situations were reversed. Gene imagined Miller making a big production of a burial with honor and dignity although they hadn’t seen each other in over a decade.
An even bigger question suddenly loomed in Gene’s mind: How the hell did this happen? Miller was the editor of The Metropolis Planet & The Southern Scene, which carried a circulation of less than 2,000 and served a population of less than that, a population dwindling every day. Like the Carmi Times, it published mostly community events and obituaries. These papers served to chronicle the last dying gasps of small Midwestern towns and the pathetic attempts to stave off the boredom of those not yet dead or part of the exodus. But how had Miller gotten mixed up with Tosti? Gene had heard through their mother, before she’d completely lost her mind at the nursing home forty-five minutes down the road, that after his divorce Miller had moved to Metropolis to edit the paper, but the connection of events stopped there. Metropolis was a couple hundred miles from St. Louis. Miller had never expressed any interest in writing about organized crime in the city and probably didn’t even know there was any. He couldn’t have known Jimmy Tosti. He never expressed anything but disdain for local politics and political ambition. Miller thought globally, not locally. It made no sense.
For a second, Gene almost reached into his pocket to pull out his cell phone and give Miller a call—he still had the number programmed, though he couldn’t remember the last time they’d talked—and then he snorted at himself.
“Hey, Miller—it’s Gene,” Gene said out loud. “How the hell’d you die anyway?” He snorted again. “Shit, lookit me.”
Instead, he called the last number he had for Jimmy Tosti. He had no idea what he would say or if it was the right number since Tosti’s calls never registered a number anymore. The phone went straight to a greetingless voicemail.
“It’s Gene Barnes. Call me. It’s important.”
Gene next pulled out Miller’s scraggly notes and tried to make sense of them. Moisture had smudged the top right part of the page, but he could make out the words “County Commish” and an unreadable phone number, and below those scrawls, “Roy Kissel, State Rep” with a somewhat readable number. In Miller’s handwriting, the lowercase a, u, v, and o looked much the same, unclosed, and the letters g and s looked the same, loose and unclosed. Lowercase h and n looked identical as well. Gene read a name that could be “Don Hanger” or “Dan Huhser” with a half-smudged phone number, and something that looked like “Chug Maien, huild. and ops mgr, Tovani Brus” with the most readable number on the list and beginning with 314, the St. Louis area code. The only thing that was clearly legible was an address—1009 Wiley Rd—and he had no idea where that was. It wasn’t a promising start. What was he supposed to do—call up the state representative and ask if anyone knew how his brother died?
Gene refolded the paper into his T-shirt pocket and decided to table the question of what to do with his brother now. He at least owed it to Miller to find out how he died. Despite himself, Gene could feel something starting to stir in his blood. It wasn’t vengeance exactly, but he could feel something akin to outrage and family pride. Miller would do the same for him if their positions were switched. He was certain of that. Gene remembered once when they were kids living in the Evansville suburbs and a pack of neighborhood kids—or rather, two neighborhood kids and a pack of onlookers—were picking on Gene. One of Gene’s buddies, Blake Beaumont, had run to the Barnes house to tell Miller, and Miller ran down the hill to help his brother. Gene had been in fourth grade, Miller in seventh. Fists in a whirlwind, Miller immediately laid into Gene’s tormentors, and one fat kid, unfazed by the fists, leaned into Miller and put him in a headlock. Another kid pulled off Miller’s shoes and tossed them into the creek. It had been a humiliating day for the Barnes family, but at least Miller had bravely done his best to protect his brother and defend the family honor, deflecting all torment and malice away from Gene and taking it himself. When the boys left Miller—bloodied, torn, and shoeless in the yard—they sneered and squinted at Gene but left him alone. Gene decided it was the least he could do now to find out how Miller’s life had come to such an ignoble end. Or maybe it was a noble end. The further Miller’s death sunk in, the more it stirred Gene’s sense of family honor—and also some guilt from the years of no contact between the two brothers and perhaps an obligation to repay this one outstanding debt from Miller’s feeble heroism so long ago.
Leaving Miller stiffening against the rail, Gene walked out of the hog shed and up the hill, past the old barn, the cement well that had once provided the foundation for a now-vanished grain silo, and past the open storage where he kept both trucks. He passed Pretty Girl’s fenced-in house a few yards from his porch. Gene lived in a one-and-a-half-story farmhouse, the back of which faced the access road and the front of which faced the barn, Pretty Girl’s house, the hog shed, and eighty acres of cornfield. The house once wore white clapboard siding, but now wore margarine-yellow vinyl siding that was a magnet for bottomland dust. Gene had to hose off his house several times a year if he didn’t want to feel bad about himself. Between his dust-filmed house and dirt driveway, the gas tank, which looked like a huge, silver summer sausage and fed his furnace, water heater, and stove, began to glare as the sun pulled up over the trees.
He went in the house and put on his riding gear. Ever since he’d hit a deer, he made sure to wear protective clothing and padding whenever he rode. If he hadn’t been wearing it then, he would have died. The bike, a Harley Super Glide, had been totaled. It hadn’t handled well when he needed it most and Gene vowed never to sit a Harley again. When the hospital released him a few days later, despite severely bruised ribs, he immediately grabbed his bow and went hunting for the rest of the season, killing three does and two bucks. The last, he was sure from the scars on its legs and flank, was the one he hit. His freezer was full of deer steaks, ground deer, and deer sausage. Gene grabbed three pounds of deer jerky he’d made that season and put it in a backpack. He grabbed a clean change of clothes, his travel toothpaste and toothbrush in a little travel bag, and a few bottles of Dixon Springs water, supposedly bottled in the area although Gene had his suspicions. But at least he was buying local.
Gene kept his motorcycle, a blue BMW R 1100, in his living room. Even though it was a yuppie bike, he loved it almost as much as he loved Pretty Girl. Crime around Carmi was higher than when he was a kid, and he didn’t want to take any chances. He had even widened the front doors and built a ramp on the front porch next to the steps. He’d found the bike on eBay—almost never ridden, sold to him by a woman whose boyfriend owned it but who was doing time in Joliet prison for making and selling crystal meth. Gene wondered how the man would feel when he got out and found his bike long gone.
He dropped the backpack into one of the saddlebags then went into his bedroom, pushed aside piles of dirty clothes and dirty dishes, and pulled the footlocker out from under his bed. He pushed his five-button code, heard the satisfying click as it unlocked, and lifted the lid. Inside lay an organized collection of guns and knives, nunchucks, and ammunition, as well as several shotguns and rifles—one of them, an old Over/Under, a 20 gauge shotgun on the bottom with a .22 rifle on the top. It actually belonged to Miller, and the two boys used to shoot bottles and cans together in their grampa’s tractor shed, corncrib, and down by the creek. Miller had let Gene keep it and take care of it for him while he was away at college and grad school, but Gene refused to give it back when Miller asked for it, telling him, “You don’t know how to take care of it.” Gene thought of himself as the gun expert, and the Over/Under would stay with him for safety as well as historical reasons. Miller hadn’t put up much of a fight, but now Gene wondered if things would’ve turned out different if Miller had kept the gun. Gene almost picked up his M-1 submachine gun, which he bought the day before it became illegal to buy one. All of these guns he cleaned and oiled regularly, though he rarely shot them anymore. When he hunted these days, he used his bow.
As he made preparations, the image of Miller’s face when he first turned him over kept flashing through his mind. Gene had seen plenty of dead people, on battlefields and littering the sides of roads in Iraq. He had justified taking this job from Tosti by telling himself these people, like the bodies during the war, were already dead, just bodies—what difference did it make what happened to them after death since no one was suffering? Yet from the beginning he avoided looking at their faces. Turning Miller’s body over and seeing not only a familiar face but one resembling his own was horrifying. It jolted his whole perspective and filled him with shame, which leant more urgency to his preparations—as if he could fix all this—and he worked quickly and efficiently.
Gene grabbed the Recon Bowie knife and sheath, which he always took on road trips, and fastened it inside his right boot. He owned an assortment of pistols, but he had three in this locker: an Uberti Cattleman revolver, the tiny SIG SAUER P239, and a Smith & Wesson M&P9 Pro, his newest acquisition. Gene dropped the SIG inside the inner pocket of his leather riding coat and put the Smith & Wesson in the back of his bike and locked it.
Pushing his bike across the creaky porch and down the ramp, Gene crossed his yard of dust and weeds to Pretty Girl’s house. She was a big German Shepherd that he used to keep inside, but she chewed and ate everything—his clothes, the pillows, the couch—even as an adult dog. Pretty Girl yipped and danced her front paws a foot off the ground in excitement as he came near her pen.
“Just a minute, girl,” he said and walked down to the hog shed, grabbed a bag of hogfeed and dumped it into the hog trough. The morning sun was already heating up the shed, and the ammoniated air was getting thicker and stronger. He decided to move Miller into a rusty old metal chair in the corner of the shed. Gene tried to push him into the seat and position him in a thoughtful pose, maybe something that made Miller look a little intellectual, but his arms were too stiff and he kept falling over, so Gene leaned him back to look like he was just catching some Zs. Gene drove his work truck into the shed then walked over to Pretty Girl’s house and fed her, too.
“Bye, girl,” he said, stroking her behind the ears as she gobbled up her Iams.
When she finished her bowl, Gene filled it up again along with her water bowl. Then he kneeled down on one knee and nuzzled Pretty Girl and let her lick his face.
“Such a pretty girl! Yes, you are! Take good care of everybody while Daddy’s gone, huh, Pretty Girl?”
Every time Gene left her on road trips he got a little teary eyed, the same way he did when he watched Sesame Street episodes or Mary Poppins, two of his favorite things to watch on TV. He couldn’t help the teariness, and he wouldn’t have admitted it to anybody, but it was growing worse the older he got. Some commercials these days even made his eyes a little moist and his bottom lip start to tremble. He hated it. Most people, especially old girlfriends, had told him he was too stoic or emotionally remote or didn’t even possess normal feelings, but he knew different. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things, it was that he felt them too intensely. He simply had no idea how to express those feelings in language or deeds and didn’t want to look like a jackass or a sap trying.
He gave Pretty Girl one last pat and then nearly tripped over Butterscratch, one of the farm cats weaving in and out of his legs, also expecting food. Gene filled up a couple bowls and made sure there was plenty of water for them, too. He never officially adopted the cats, but when they showed up—wild, sometimes starving, injured, or half-dead—he’d take care of them and feed them. If they survived past a few months, he’d give them names, though farm cats tended to have short, furious lives. Currently he had three—Butterscratch, Feisty, and Jose, who only had one eye and whom Gene usually tossed an extra treat if he had one.
Pulling out his cell phone, Gene called Keith to leave a message. They only saw each other a few times a year any more, a friendship that had drifted in and out since high school. Keith never answered his phone and usually forgot to keep it charged.
“Hey, buddy,” Gene said, hoping his voice sounded normal. “I’m taking a road trip and might be gone a while. OK if I need you to come by the house and feed Pretty Girl in a couple days if I’m not back yet? Let me know.”
Gene was about to get on his bike and go, but one more thing occurred to him. He went back inside and slid the footlocker out from under his bed again. He pulled the Over/Under out from its orange vinyl cover and went back into the hog shed. The fingers were the stiffest of all, but with work and probably by breaking at least one, he positioned them around the gun and put it on Miller’s lap, like he’d dozed off while keeping predators away from the hogs. Then Gene straddled his bike and started it up. He pulled out of his driveway at 5:35, the humidity of the day already turning Southern Illinois into a thick, simmering stew.