What the ground had slowed hastened those first few days Sissy sulked against the wall. His shoulders fell and his body limbered, but he was swollen now, his face grotesque and disfigured. The smell of rotting meat washed over Dwayne Brewer the minute he opened the door. That hot, soured smell was similar to roadkill bloated by sun, but it was bigger, richer, so that you could sense the size of what decayed.
Dwayne came into the room and sat down in front of his brother. He looked at his face, how his cheeks were a greenish-blue. Large blisters covered his arms, marbled skin almost glossy. As Carol bloated to twice his size, he outgrew his clothes so that the fabric cut hard into his skin, the bottom of his shirt rising high on his stomach. His eyes were popping out of his head, his tongue bulging from his mouth, and it was hard for Dwayne to see this, but for whatever reason he couldn’t help but look.
Over the past few days, he couldn’t stop remembering. It was like his mind was suddenly flooded with all the years they’d spent together, memories boiling out of him without any trigger or control.
One fall when Dwayne was about twelve years old, he’d camped in the wreckage of a fort he’d built. When he woke, a rafter of turkeys were picking about the ground for acorns, coming out of a thick hedge of laurel where they’d bedded down while he slept. “It’s strange of turkeys not to roost in the trees, but these slept on the ground,” Dwayne told his brother when he went home. That night they decided they’d wake up early the next morning and try to kill one with a bow and arrow.
The sun had not broken the ridge when he and his brother climbed the leaf-littered hillside to the ruins of the fort. Walls constructed with busted tires and pieces of scrap two-by-fours and plywood collapsed in on themselves, and the long piece of rusted tin he’d salvaged from the stream for a roof was crumpled like a smashed beer can.
The turkeys were scattered about the ground, dark shadows crouching in laurel. One of the birds was closer than the rest, a clear uphill vantage from here to there, and Dwayne coaxed his brother to take the shot. He took an arrow from his quiver and nocked it onto the bowstring, then handed the weapon to Sissy.
Drawing back, Sissy settled his aim. There was the short, swift thooot, and that arrow was into that bird’s side before Dwayne ever had a thought. He watched as the bird screeched in terror, all of those other turkeys waking up and tearing off over the ground in a deafening madness, and that bird beat furiously with one wing, its other run through and pinned to its body by the arrow.
Dwayne and his brother prowled closer and the bird flapped itself in circles as that one side tried desperately to get away while the other was as useless to its body now as a tumor. When the bird stopped, Dwayne could see the blood pumping over its mottled feathers, a red so bright that it seemed to glow against such a dark backdrop. The bird cocked its head to the side and opened its sharp beak toward him and Dwayne could see something familiar in its eyes, something so familiar in its suffering.
The turkey collapsed onto its side and they stood there for a minute watching, waiting for what would come. Dwayne tiptoed closer. He’d never seen a bird blink its eyes until right then, and something about that, something in the way its eyes opened and closed, made him feel a sentience in its existence. Like that turkey wasn’t some bird but something else entirely, something exactly like him. There was so much blood, all of the feathers wetted with it, and the bird opened its beak, a wheezing sound coming then like it was out of breath. Dwayne knew the bird was dying and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He also knew that it was suffering, and all he could think was that they had to end that suffering, to hasten its death. This was what was meant by mercy.
“You have to finish it off,” he said.
Carol had the bow in his hands and he was watching the bird vacantly, his eyes filled with tears.
“Kill it, Sissy,” he said, but his brother neither moved nor spoke.
Dwayne looked around the ground for something, not knowing exactly what he was looking for, and his eyes settled on a rock about the size of a football, a large hunk of milk quartz muddied with red clay. He picked up the rock with both hands. Standing above the bird, he raised the stone over his head and readied himself to end it. When it came down he closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw he had failed. The ground was soft beneath the bird’s head so that the blow only mangled it further, its wing flapping wrathfully, its head in slow contortion. Within its black stare, the boy could see forever and he could hear his brother wailing behind him.
He hurried and grabbed the rock again, readied himself, and came down harder, and this time when he opened his eyes the deed was done. The only movement now was in the way the wind ruffled bronze feathers. Dwayne Brewer had killed plenty of small game—rabbits, squirrels, and doves. He’d even killed his first deer the fall before. But this was something different entirely. He wasn’t bothered by it. It was just different. It had felt necessary. Absolutely necessary.
When he turned around he saw his brother on his knees, his face beet red, that dark birthmark glossed with tears. Dwayne understood that his brother was not meant for this place, that some people were born too soft to bear the teeth of this world. There was no place for weakness in a world like this. Survival was so often a matter of meanness.
“You never had a mean bone in your body,” Dwayne said as he looked across the floor to where his brother rested against the cobbled wall. And true as it was, the world’s cruelty had found him just the same.