Some swear a predator can smell fear, but whether there’s an actual scent or something else entirely doesn’t really matter. Dwayne Brewer could sense weakness. That feeling came to him like goosebumps. That natural. That fast. And in those moments Dwayne had always known he was in complete control. Walking out of the doublewide, he knew Darl Moody was scared, but whether or not he’d seen Carol in those woods, Dwayne wasn’t sure.
A waning moon shone through scraggly pines, a ring around it so that its white face was haloed. Old-timers said that meant it was going to snow, but while there was a bite in the air, Dwayne didn’t believe this. He believed in all kinds of wives’ tales like that eggs set on Sundays would hatch all roosters or that yellow rattlesnakes always followed black ones, but despite his superstitions he was sure it wasn’t going to snow the last day of September.
He stood on the edge of the porch for a moment and slipped a soft pack of smokes from the ruler pocket along the seam of his pants. He struck a match from a book that had come from Hill’s Minnow Farm, took a long drag, then blew the smoke before him so that he parted his own cloud as he went down the front steps into the yard. He was in no particular hurry. Instinct told him Darl Moody was full of shit, but then again there hadn’t been any pictures of his brother on that camera so he couldn’t be sure. He’d find out one way or another, though. There was always a way to backtrack what a man said, and if Darl was lying, Dwayne would return.
The Deuce and a Quarter sat crooked by a burning bush that glowed yellow even in the cold tones of night. Darl’s truck was parked close, and as Dwayne reached the driver’s-side door of his car, he stopped and looked in the back of Darl’s pickup. A cheap, drop-in liner bowed and warped across the bed. The bottom was ridged so that water would run out the back. Pine needles and dirt filled the grooves, with half an eighty-pound bag of Sakrete and a few loose penny nails scattered over the plastic bed. On the far side something caught Dwayne’s eye. Metal flashed with moonlight so that there was a dull glare from whatever lay between the ridges of the bed liner. He walked around the back of the pickup, rested one arm on the tailgate, and reached for what he’d seen.
Dwayne Brewer held a pocketknife he’d held a thousand times over the course of his life. He turned the cheap Case sodbuster over in his hands, twisting it by its ends like he was rolling a cigarette. The yellow Delrin handle was split on one side so that only half the scale remained. This had happened long ago when the knife slipped from his own pocket and cracked against a rock while he and his brother were playing in the woods as children. Red Brewer had slapped Dwayne unconscious and put a cigarette out on Sissy’s arm for letting his brother steal their father’s knife. Dwayne squeezed the notch and opened the carbon steel blade, holding it in the light so that he could see the waves of dark gray patina blued into the steel all these years. Swipes against whetstone had eaten the blade back so that it was now thin as a fillet knife, though it still held a razor’s edge. This was the only thing Carol had wanted of their father’s when he died, and Dwayne hadn’t argued. At the time, he hadn’t been sure whether his brother specially liked the knife or whether it was something else altogether, a sort of portal to a memory that he could hold in his hands and go back and forth between the before and after.
A rage grew in him now, something he always felt first in the center of his chest that grew upward with a fiery intensity until it pushed into his eyes. What came next was thoughtless and wild as it had always been, a body driven by emotion rather than sense. Dwayne crossed the yard onto the porch and took the front door off its hinges with his fifteen-wide logging boot. Darl was by the dining room table and he turned, stupefied with terror, and slapped around at the table before coming up with the gun. Dwayne was already on him by then, and as Darl raised the pistol, his wrist was forced upward toward the ceiling so that the shot blasted against the brass chandelier, a bulb shattering in the wake, the fixture swinging from its cheap chain and cord. Dwayne had one hand gripping Darl’s arm and the other squeezing the air from his windpipe. Darl’s back arched against the table and then he was on the floor, the gun being hammered from his grip, Dwayne’s fists coming down like stones.
Dwayne settled in and the fire spread over him. He could feel his entire body warming as if by a shot of whiskey. His fists came down and Darl cried for help at first, blood coming out of his nose and mouth; but soon there was no other sound than the dull clap of knuckles against meat. Dwayne hammered Darl’s forehead and his scalp opened and that flash of white bone that quickly filled red triggered a moment of reason in a mind that had been wiped clean and blank. Dwayne’s shoulders fell loose and he settled his hands around the neck of Darl’s T-shirt, letting his weight sink onto Darl’s collarbones. Darl Moody was unconscious beneath him, and Dwayne sat there straddling his stilled body, unable to catch his breath.
WHEN DARL MOODY WOKE, he rolled his head from side to side looking swollen eyed around the room as if trying to make sense of where he was. His family’s hay barn was filled with faint light and shadow. He stood with his back against the spiraled face of a large, round bale of hay. His arms were stretched wide, his wrists bound by nooses of half-inch cable ratcheted to a shoulder-popping tension around the bale by a come-along on the opposite side.
Dwayne sat on a flipped milk crate and dug black soil from under his fingernails with the tip of his brother’s knife. He glanced up at the sound of Darl’s breath quickening as he came to. A mix of blood and mucus drooled from Darl’s mouth and nose. His face was pulverized, his heavy panting labored and loud. When their eyes met, Darl screamed for help but his voice stammered as his breath ran out. He sucked for air and screamed again, this time his feet stomping wildly at the ground though the weight at his back could not be moved. Darl grunted and coughed then wailed again until his body finally wilted with exhaustion.
“Are you done?” Dwayne asked calmly, his eyes barely glancing up as he swiped the grit from the knife’s tip back and forth against his thigh. Darl screamed again at the top of his lungs and Dwayne shook his head with disgust, then went back to cleaning the dirt from under his nails.
When the place was quiet, Dwayne Brewer stood, pinched the knife blade between his fingers, folded the pocketknife closed, and slid it into his pocket. He crept within a few feet and stood with his legs shoulder-width apart, his hands behind his back. Darl watched him and when their eyes met this time, he dropped his chin to his chest.
“Are you ready to tell me what happened?” Dwayne asked, his voice still low and collected.
Darl started to yell again and right then Dwayne grew sick of waiting. He lurched forward until the two of them were face-to-face and screamed into Darl’s eyes. Darl was shaking his head and crying, his voice falling into a whimper, but Dwayne hovered there in front of him so close that he could smell the wintergreen on Darl’s breath and he wailed with all of his might and all of his air like some lonely animal howling into the sky for anything that might return his call.
The barn smelled of seasoned hay, the ground a soft dust beneath him as Dwayne spun and scanned the room. The same rusted Massey Ferguson from the picture in the house of Darl and his father sat in the center of the barn with a loader attached to the front hydraulics. Bolted onto the loader, a long, dull bale spear with its mustard paint worn from the shaft jutted from the base of the bucket. Dwayne walked over to the tractor and climbed into the seat.
The keys were in the ignition and he pedaled down the clutch with his left boot, then turned the key. The starter whined before the engine caught. The tractor rumbled drowsily, then climbed into a faster groan as Dwayne adjusted the choke to a quickened idle. He toyed with the hydraulic levers till he figured out how to raise the loader and bale spear, and when he understood the controls, he put the tractor in gear and eased forward. The spear climbed until it was aimed at Darl’s chest. The tractor skulked forward, and when he was close, Dwayne dropped the tractor into neutral, cut the engine, and feathered the brake so the machine inched ahead, the spear easing into Darl’s sternum as the tires rolled.
Dwayne did not wish to impale him and the tractor spear did not break skin. Instead, it pushed into Darl’s chest, the hay cushioning his back, so that he now wheezed for the slightest breaths. There was no sound but that of the engine ticking as it cooled and the asthmatic moans from Darl’s lips. Dwayne climbed off the tractor and kicked at the front tire with his boot. He looked at Darl then and sniffed the air, a mix of gasoline and exhaust now filling the barn.
“Now we can talk,” Dwayne said.
Darl had to save up two or three shallow breaths to speak, and when he did, his words were barely more than a whisper. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Yes,” Dwayne said matter-of-factly, as if giving an answer to whether or not he was hungry.
Darl started to cry, hardly any breath reaching him now so that he choked as if he were drowning. Dwayne shook his head. He was absolutely disgusted by how a man could sit there with no fight left in him, sit there crying, helpless as a fucking child. There was no room in this world for the weak. He crossed the few feet between them and turned his face close to Darl’s so that he could feel each exhale from Darl’s mouth against his cheek.
“You know what I’ve seen,” Dwayne said. “You know I know you were there and that you and somebody else carried something out of the woods that night. What I want to know is what was in that tarp?” Darl didn’t speak. Dwayne pressed his finger hard into Darl’s forehead and roared. “Answer me! Was that my brother?”
“Yes,” Darl whimpered.
“Who was that with you?”
Again Darl Moody did not speak.
“You’re going to tell me or I’m going to take them farrier pliers over there and start taking pieces off of you like a goddamned science experiment. I think you’ll be surprised at how much a man can lose without dying. You’ll pass out, but you’ll come to. You’ll wake up and I’ll keep going.”
Darl sobbed and blubbered something indiscernible.
“What was that?” Dwayne asked.
Darl wept harder, and with every bit of air he had, he groaned his best friend’s name, “Calvin Hooper.”
Dwayne nodded his head and backed away from Darl’s face. He stepped toward the tractor and rested his right foot on the front tire. “Did y’all bury him or just dump him off in the woods someplace?”
“Buried,” Darl said.
“And did Calvin Hooper help you bury him?”
Darl nodded his head and tried to swallow a mouth filled with spittle and blood.
That was all Dwayne needed to know. He didn’t much care how it happened, whether it was an accident or on purpose. Either way, his brother was dead, and either way two men had put him in the ground. Two men were what it all boiled down to now. Two men who both knew the same thing. One was no better than the other. Either could take him to the grave. Whittling that number down would make things so much easier.
Dwayne Brewer took his brother’s knife from his pocket and unfolded the blade. He checked the sharpness against his thumb, the edge shining sheer white in that tiny bit of lamplight. He came forward fast and in one clean motion ran that blade lengthwise against Darl Moody’s neck, his throat opening like lips. Blood shot out in long lines, rushing down the front of him, painting his shirt and that bale spear and his pants, and spilling onto the dirt floor. Darl was choking and his feet stamped violently at the puddle he made. Despite the way movies made things look easy, there was no grace in dying. He was pissing and shitting himself, the sound of him searching for air gurgling like a clogged drain.
Dwayne stood there staring into Darl’s eyes like he was watching the nighttime sky. As a child, he’d been fascinated by the fact that stars could die and there’d been so many nights he and his brother had lain in the woods behind their house, watching through gaps in the trees, waiting for the lights to burn out above them. In all those nights, they did not see one. The stars held on to their shining, all those years, all those years, but in a few short seconds Darl Moody’s eyes did not.