That first week work kept Darl Moody busy sunup to sundown and that was his savior. They were building a rock wall along the front of a piece of property owned by folks who summered in the mountains. The last week had been spent digging and pouring a footer, but now that the concrete was dry, he got to do what he did best—and while his hands worked, his mind was thoughtless.
Now, in theory, with enough time and practice, any man could learn how to lay block. But the truth of the matter is that anyone who’s spent time trying knows good and well that what looks simple enough simply ain’t simple at all. There’s an art to it. There’s muscle memory to throwing mud and there’s a God-given eye for level. Some of that can’t be learned, but Darl Moody was a natural.
Early that first summer out of high school, he went to work and it was clear as day he’d been born with a gift. From the way things normally operated, even an outsider could look on at a crew and tell the pecking order. There were usually four men, and the youngest mixed mud and moved block. If the youngest was smart, he kept his mouth shut and stayed out of the way and watched the older men work and tried his damnedest to learn something in how they moved. Then there was an older one who could prep block and lay it well enough to make quick work of sidewalls, which was easy enough because there were line blocks and mason string to keep things running true. The boss man usually spent most of his time staring through a transit, moving that transit all around the jobsite to make sure everything was plumb. But the man who mattered, the most experienced mason, was the one who built the corners, because all of it, the whole wall, tied back to how those corners were laid.
What took most folks years took Darl Moody about a month. He had a natural eye for balance so that what he put down left little need to check for level. He laid block like a savant, cocking his head to the side, shifting things a hair, so that when his hands let go, it was plumb. Every time. Like clockwork. He didn’t have to think much about it to do it. The truth of it was that when his hands were moving he never thought about anything at all. And that’s how he worked.
The sun came up and the frost burned off and the day warmed the men’s backs so that by lunchtime the others were beat, but Darl kept working. He turned, grabbed block, threw mud, and went on until the day was gone and there was no more light to see.
Visiting his sister had complicated things in a way he hadn’t expected. Though guilt was eating him alive, he’d started to think that maybe that was punishment enough. Having to live with those feelings. Having to hold on to that secret. If he confessed, it wouldn’t just be him who’d pay. His conscience would be clear, but all of that weight would shift onto the people he loved most. So him carrying it started to seem like the more honorable thing to do. Sacrifice the one for the many.
After work, Darl stopped in town, grabbed four junior bacon cheeseburgers from Wendy’s, and scarfed the first three down before he was a mile up the road. He’d save the fourth for breakfast and get started early. Best to stay busy, he thought. Best to just work yourself dog-tired, drink yourself to sleep, and hope you don’t dream. Dreaming was the worst of it anymore. Within that space a man had no choice whether or not he ventured into the shadow of memory.
He shook a can of Skoal to check if there was any left, then threw the empty tin on the floorboard and reached for a new can out of a roll he kept behind the seat. He ran his fingernail around the edge to rip the paper seal and loaded his lip with wintergreen, the tobacco stinging his tongue as he licked his fingers clean.
Darl lived in a doublewide tucked in a grove of scrub pine by the hay barn on the last of his family’s land. His father had rented out the trailer all Darl’s life, but after the old man died of a heart attack not long after his son finished high school, Darl shacked up in the trailer so that he could stay close to home and keep an eye on his mother. At one point in time, the Moodys had owned somewhere close to two hundred acres at the end of Moses Creek. But through the years, bills came due and folks lost jobs and times came where the family couldn’t even afford the taxes, so now they were down to a final twenty-acre plot that didn’t amount to much more than a few thousand dollars each fall when Darl cut the fields for hay.
It was almost nine o’clock when he pulled down the gravel alongside the barn and made his way to the house. A car was in the drive and Darl didn’t know who in the hell the beat-up Buick belonged to or what they were doing at his house. He reached under the seat for his pistol only to realize he’d left it by the bed that morning. As he pulled alongside the car and parked, he could see the shadow of someone sitting in a white plastic chair on the porch. Darl stepped out of the truck, raked the tobacco from along his gums, and tossed the plug of snuff into the pine-needle yard.
“Can I help you?” Darl asked.
“Wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t,” a voice grumbled from the porch.
When he got to the front steps, Darl could see him in the yellow porch light. Dwayne Brewer sat low in the chair, his back bent awkwardly with little posture at all. He wore a pair of dark canvas carpenter’s pants and a white T-shirt that climbed high on his arms. Dark black hair covered him from his shoulders to the backs of his hands. Dwayne stood when Darl came onto the porch. He was a good three or four inches taller than Darl and built like a concrete pillar. His hair was shaved low and he wore no beard, though stubble grew from the base of his neck to his eyes.
“I’m Dwayne Brewer,” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” Darl answered. He fiddled in his pocket for his keys. “What you doing here?” Darl asked, as he stuck his key in the dead bolt and opened the door.
“I got a few things I need to ask you.” Dwayne stood behind Darl as if he were going to follow him inside.
“Well, to be honest with you, I’m beat,” Darl said. “I ain’t much in the mood for company, and I don’t know a thing in this world me and you would have to talk about.”
“It won’t take long,” Dwayne said, a certainty in his voice that ensured he would not leave until he got what he’d come for.
“All right,” Darl said. “Let me just run take a leak right fast.”
“I’ll come inside.” Dwayne waltzed into the house without waiting for a response.
Darl hit the lights in the living room. Clean laundry he hadn’t folded was heaped on the couch. He tossed his keys on a side table and walked toward a darkened hallway. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
A small bathroom opened to the left before Darl’s bedroom, but he headed for the gun. Darl flicked a lamp by the bed and found the M&P Shield where he’d left it and he shoved the pistol down the back of his pants, the grip hanging on the ridge of his belt. In the bathroom, he panicked. He turned on the faucet and stared at his reflection in the mirror over the bathroom sink. The water ran into his hands and he cupped it to his face, droplets catching in the curve of his beard. He tried to tell himself that it was all right, that things were going to be okay, but the feeling in the pit of his stomach said different. Darl flushed the toilet nervously in case Dwayne was listening, then made his way back to the front of the house.
Dwayne Brewer sat at the head of the dining room table, picking at his teeth with his finger while he stared at a picture hung on the wood panel wall.
“Is that your daddy?” he asked, nodding his head toward a picture of Darl’s father sitting on a red Massey Ferguson with Darl as a baby on his lap.
“It is,” Darl said. The front of the doublewide was a living room, dining room, and kitchen all bunched together. Darl walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and grabbed a beer. He offered one to Dwayne, but Dwayne shook his head, and so Darl took one for himself then came back to the table and sat. He could feel the gun at the base of his spine and that was the only thing at all that kept him from falling apart. If he comes at me, I’ll shoot him, Darl thought. If the son of a bitch moves, shoot him.
“Come to think of it, I think I will have a beer,” Dwayne said. He reached across the table and took the can from in front of Darl, popped the top, and sucked the foam through his teeth as it rose over the lid. Swishing the beer around in his mouth for a second or two, he swallowed hard and sighed. Darl didn’t stand to get another.
“What’s this about?”
“I got a few things I’m going to ask you, and after that I’ll be on my way.”
Now Darl went to the refrigerator to get himself another beer and to put enough space between them so that he didn’t have to look Dwayne in the eyes while he spoke. He cracked the can and swallowed about half a Budweiser down in two gulps, the sides of the can crumpling in his fist. “Go on and ask,” he said as he leaned against the side of the cabinets at the edge of the kitchen, Dwayne having to turn to face him. “I’ve done told you, I’m tired.”
“All right,” Dwayne started. “I’ll come right out with it. Somebody told me you was back in there hunting on Coon Coward’s land this past weekend and I want to know what you saw.”
“Well, I don’t know who you been talking to, but I wasn’t back on nobody’s land. Hell, it ain’t even hunting season.” Darl sipped his beer.
Dwayne stood and opened his arms like he was hung on a cross. He turned and sidled over until he and Darl weren’t more than a foot apart. Darl looked up into his eyes, dark hollows as if Darl were staring down the pipes of a side-by-side shotgun.
“There’s a problem with that,” Dwayne said. “I know for a fact that you were. I seen it.” He split two fingers like a peace sign and tapped at the bags under his own eyes.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Darl said.
“There you go again.” He came closer until Darl could feel Dwayne’s breath steaming against his forehead. “You’re going to need to get real honest real fast or this ain’t going to end well. Not for you, and not for anybody else, so why don’t you go back over there to that table, sit down, and start over.”
Darl went back to the table and Dwayne waited until he was seated to join him. A cheap brass chandelier suspended above them cast yellow streaks of light against their faces. Darl ground his teeth and studied the top of his beer can while he twisted it between his hands in circles against the tabletop’s veneer.
“Thing is, I know you spent every evening last week going in and out of Coon Coward’s property like you owned the place. I know that every evening after you got off work, you threw on your hunting clothes, grabbed your rifle, and waltzed in there like Elmer fucking Fudd. I know it like I know my name, because I seen you. I seen you with my own two eyes. You see, you didn’t know it, but that old man has him a game camera in there and it was snapping pictures of you every time you went in and every time you come out and he showed them to me.” Dwayne raised his eyebrows and waited for Darl to speak.
Darl could feel the sweat blistering his forehead and he was edging closer and closer to a moment when he’d snatch that gun loose from the back of his pants and shoot Dwayne Brewer with every bullet he had. It’d be self-defense, he thought. He’s in my house.
“I ain’t hear you,” Dwayne said.
Darl still didn’t speak.
“The way this all come about is that my brother went down in there after one of that old man’s ginseng patches. Sissy told me he was going and I was waiting on him at the house when he never showed. Now you can tell me, like that old man did, that maybe my brother wound up running off somewhere else. But the fact is, his car is sitting right down there on that tractor trail where I know he parked it. That car’s still sitting right there, but he ain’t. So you’re going to tell me what you saw or I’m going to have to think of some other way to find out why you’re lying to me.”
“I ain’t seen nothing,” Darl said.
“Who was that went in there with you Friday night?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dwayne.” Darl was in it thick now, and he couldn’t see any way out. His vision tunneled with the thought that Dwayne knew about Calvin.
“There you go again, Darl. That’s the third time now, and I ain’t going to let you lie me again. Three strikes. Ain’t that how it works?” Dwayne rolled his knuckles along the tabletop, tapping a four count. “The fact I’m letting that slide is about as reasonable a man as I can be. I wish you’d show me the same kindness.”
Darl could see a visible rage building someplace far back in the darkness of Dwayne Brewer’s eyes.
“I saw a picture of you go into the woods Friday evening then a picture of you running out of there two hours later. A little while after that, here you come again only this time you wasn’t by yourself. And the next time, the two of y’all come out of the woods you was carrying something, now wasn’t you?”
“Is this about the deer?” Darl saw his last chance and grabbed ahold.
“What deer?”
“About the deer I poached off Coon Coward’s land. Look, if it’s about the deer, I’ll give it to you. All of it. You just say it.”
“I’ve already told you. This is about my brother.”
“And I told you I don’t know a thing about your brother. I didn’t see him in there once. Not one day.”
“Where’s the meat?” Dwayne asked.
The question caught Darl off guard. “At the processor,” he stuttered.
“At the processor?” Dwayne smiled and cut his head to the side to look at Darl from the corners of his eyes. “You mean to tell me you took a deer, out of season no less, to the goddamned processor?”
“I told him I was hunting depredation tags off a buddy’s cornfield.”
“Told who?”
“The processor.”
“Who’s processing it for you? Burt Hogsed?”
“No, Singleton’s.” Darl thought fast to come up with a story that couldn’t be fact-checked. Bottom line was Wilson Singleton’s drunk ass always had a pile of deer hanging in his walk-in freezer, but half the time he was too sauced to make heads or tails between back strap and chicken thighs.
“Wilson Singleton?” Dwayne Brewer laughed and shook his head. “You might as well let a kindergartner whittle on that deer with a penknife. My daddy went to school with Wilson. Said one time in ninth grade they was dissecting frogs in biology class and old Wilson got caught sticking his pecker in a frog’s mouth. Said they called him Tadpole.”
“Never heard that.”
“Think you’ll get much meat out of it?”
Darl could tell Dwayne was fishing. “Ought to.”
“Not gutshot or nothing? What you shoot? .308? .270?”
“Ought six.”
“I like a 7-08, myself. You handload?”
“No.”
“What was you shooting?”
“Core-Lokt.”
“Deadliest mushroom in the woods,” Dwayne said with a smile, his teeth a shiny white juxtaposition that seemed unnatural. Everyone in his family had jarringly white teeth. “Hard to beat a bullet’s been around seventy years. I’ve switched to the Nosler Partitions. Tried shooting the ballistic tips, but they ate up a lot of meat. Glad to hear you’ll get plenty out of that deer you killed.”
Darl nodded.
“I think I’ll ride over there and have old George give me a pound or two off yours, if that’s all right. My freezer’s damn near empty, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get in the woods this fall or not.”
“Have at it,” Darl said. A pound, the loins, Darl would tell that son of a bitch he could take the whole damn imaginary thing if it’d get him out of the house.
Dwayne pounded his fist against the tabletop and scowled at the table where the base of his hand hit, as if weighing his options. In a moment, he stood and strolled toward the door like he was wandering down the road picking soda bottles out of the ditch. Darl watched him and when Dwayne was almost to the door he stood from the table. Dwayne turned then and stared at Darl in a way that filled Darl Moody with as deep a fear as he’d ever felt, a feeling he’d never known as a man, something older, something he hadn’t felt since he was a child.
“You never did say who that was helped you carry that deer out.”
“Just a friend,” Darl said.
“A friend.” Dwayne grinned and nodded his head. “Friends can get a man in a lot of trouble.” He raised his eyebrows as if willing Darl to speak.
But Darl had nothing to say.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Dwayne said as he went outside and closed the door.
Darl crossed the room and reached for the lock. His hand paused. He wanted desperately to turn the dead bolt, but he was hesitant, fearing that Dwayne might hear that latch turn and come back. He pulled his gun from his waistline and clenched the grip in his fist by his side. You can go out there right now and end this, he thought. You can finish it right now.
But he did not move. He could not move. He simply stood there facing the door.