Calvin Hooper woke at first light frozen to the bone. He was naked all but boxers and boots, his skin slicked and wetted with mud. The sound of his teeth clacking roused him. He was curled in the fetal position, shivering, and as he opened his eyes, his vision tightened onto something shiny in front of his face. He reached for what he saw, rolled the brass casing between his fingers and studied the copper jacket: a single .45 ACP cartridge, left in the grave like a promise.
Calvin clenched the bullet in his fist, rolled onto his back, and stared into empty sky. A few dim stars had yet to retreat to darkness. He lay there for a few minutes thankful for having woken at all. With the tips of his fingers he traced the cut along his left eyebrow then felt the knot at the back of his head. His skull throbbed with the pace of his heart, and as he stood the pain strengthened, pounding as he crawled his way out of the grave.
His parents’ house overlooked the middle field and he couldn’t risk being seen, so he kept tight to the hillside on his way home, slinking along a sagging fence line with posts grayed and thin as gnawed bones. There were so many questions, so many things he didn’t know right then. He could still hear Dwayne Brewer’s voice echoing, five words as finite and certain as those carved in gravestone. “He paid what he owed,” he’d said. Soon enough Calvin would know his debt. The bullet he now carried in his hand ensured it.
FIELDS GREW THICK on both sides of Darl Moody’s driveway: tall, golden oat grass ready to be cut and baled. Pasture butted against a thick copse of pine, the gravel drive carried on into the trees to where the doublewide stood with its beige siding stained and sagging. The shingled roof was littered rust-brown with pine needles. The ground was strewn the same, so that as Calvin stepped out, the soles of his boots were silent against the yard. He fished his pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his jeans and blew a line of smoke into the sky, the top of the pine above him dead and filled with widowmakers.
A small covered porch led to the front door; a white plastic chair was slung to the side, the door hanging crooked from its hinges. He made his way up the steps and went inside. The entrance opened to a large living area where clothes were piled on a black leather couch. The coffee table in front of the couch was cluttered with bills and remote controls, an entertainment center catty-cornered against the wall.
He walked around the couch into the dining room: a hallway off to the right, the kitchen to the left, another bedroom on around from there. The candlelight bulbs of a cheap brass chandelier were lit over the dining room table, only four of the five bulbs aglow. The table was crooked and there was blood on the floor, that dark red color raising the hackles on his neck. He knelt there and examined the pattern dotted about the carpet. Something under the table caught his eye, a small silver bullet casing.
Still crouching, Calvin surveyed the room searching for where the bullet hit. Above him, the fifth bulb in the fixture hadn’t burned out. It was shattered. The metal chandelier arm was mangled and there was a hole in the tiled ceiling panel behind it. A single casing on the floor and a hole in the ceiling, but there was not enough blood for anyone to have been shot and killed there. He rose to his feet and made his way around the rest of the house, the place empty and silent.
When he walked outside onto the front steps, he could see the barn down the drive through the pines. Two Tennessee Walkers stood side by side in the pasture off to the left when he came down the gravel, the grass high around them, horses old and rib-slatted. Calvin watched them and they didn’t turn. A breeze pushed across the field slicking the grass to one side like parted hair and there was a chill to the air when it reached him.
In his mind, he already knew what was inside. He could walk the place by memory, having been in that place hundreds of times before: a pile of rusted T-posts in the corner, dust-covered quarts of motor oil lining a shallow ledge, brown-glass Clorox bottles, lengths of rope wound and draped on bent nails, bolt cutters here, a set of Allen wrenches there, three cage traps beside a dented gasoline can in the loft. It was a scene not unlike a hundred other barns in the county, a place filled with nothing of great importance. But as his hand touched the cold metal handle of the barn door, he was overcome with an ominous sort of sadness, something coming through his body, assuring him of what he would find.
Pulling the heavy door back on its rollers, he heard a barn swallow fly from its cob nest in the rafters, the sound of its wings pattering overhead then silence. The air carried a mix of old hay and gasoline and the dull iron smell of rust. There were no lights inside, only daylight coming through the open door. From the mouth of the barn, he could see Darl Moody against the round hay bale, his arms stretched at his sides, his head hung to his chest, the neck of his shirt red with blood. The rest of him was hidden behind an old Massey Ferguson tractor. Calvin inched closer to where he could see the loader raised high with its bale spear driven into Darl’s chest, and for a second he stood there in absolute disbelief. In all his life, he’d never seen this sort of wickedness, the spectacle of what lay before him unreal, unfathomable.
Blood covered the front of Darl so that he was highlighted dark with it, the puddle under his feet sitting thick as paint on dirt like what might’ve been left from gutting a deer. Calvin collapsed to his knees. He was staring at the dusty ground, pins and needles stinging the palms of his hands, his arms unable to support his weight. A ringing rose in his ears and the room closed in around him and he couldn’t breathe and he turned and crawled out of the barn, clawing his way across the gravel till his hands found grass, dew seeping through the knees of his jeans, the coldness of the world waking him up with a white-hot intensity.
Mourning found him there, a sorrow so deep that it clenched him into a ball and he sobbed like the world had ended. Seconds were hours and minutes were days, years passing in the decades of tears, a thousand or more before the feeling waned enough for him to make the call.
“Jackson County 911, what is your emergency?”
“I need help,” Calvin said.
“Okay, sir, I need you to tell me your emergency.”
Those three words were all he could stomach. He tried so desperately to speak.
“Sir? Sir, are you there?”
There was not enough breath inside him to answer.