Dwayne had not been back to the cellar, but as he made his way home through the woods he could not pass without speaking. Sitting the gas can by the door, he lifted the heavy bar and made his way inside.
“They’ve come looking for you, brother,” Dwayne said. “And I don’t see them dogs letting off any time soon.”
In the month since Dwayne brought his brother into the root cellar, Carol Brewer’s body had deflated like a forgotten balloon. All of the fluids had drained into an island around him, and now, nearly five weeks after he’d been killed, his skin was a dark grayish-brown and thin as tissue paper. Carol’s face was no longer recognizable and Dwayne could not bring himself to look.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Dwayne leaned his head back against one of the pitched supports and closed his eyes, then let his chin fall to his chest. Setting his hands in the dust at his sides, he opened and closed his fingers, building tiny ridges of dirt between them, and then he traced shallow waves around his handprints. Suddenly he remembered a time when his back was striped and bruised from an extension cord his father swung like a bullwhip. He was only ten or eleven. Sissy might’ve been five or six. But glancing at a long shelf of rough-hewn pine along the wall to the right, he could see the mud pies lined up and hear Sissy saying, “You got to let them cool,” like it was happening right there in front of his eyes.
The boy had an old bath towel tied around him like an apron and was playing house. Dwayne had scolded him for acting like a fag, but Sissy didn’t care and before long his brother was playing right along and the two of them laughed and cut up and forgot for a short while what exactly they were hiding from. Sissy had a smile that could make a man forget he was dying. Crow’s-feet spread at the corners of his eyes, his smile wide and his teeth unusually straight. That image stayed in Dwayne’s mind like a photograph, and thinking of it, he chuckled under his breath and grinned.
The camouflage pants Sissy wore moved at his thigh like something was trying to come out of his pocket. Dwayne stared blank-faced and awestruck. The fabric jerked about again and something showed itself from beneath Sissy’s leg, first a small, brown head swimming back and forth to free its body. Climbing to his feet, Dwayne watched as a young, rib-slatted rat crawled its way from underneath his brother’s corpse and sprinted to the corner of the room. Fury and wrath grew within him and Dwayne held his arms wide as he loped forward.
The rat shot to the right, but Dwayne stomped his foot and cut off its path. It bolted back into the corner, stalled, then went left, but again there was nowhere to run and the rat curled tightly as if, by pulling its body in enough, it might disappear. He was almost on the rat now, and as he neared, the animal showed its small, yellowed teeth and hissed, but Dwayne’s boot came down swiftly. He felt the tiny bones crack like matchsticks. Raising his foot, he saw the rat’s body quivering, its movements now slow and dying. Dwayne braced his hands against cold cobblestones and came down again and again until all that was left was flesh flattened and bloodied in the dust.
Sissy sat there oblivious and rotting. Dwayne turned to his brother and an immense guilt settled in the well of his heart. Some people never have much of nothing, he thought. Some people have everything they love ripped from their hands as if God found humor in their suffering.
The sun burned white outside and Dwayne twisted away from the darkness and walked into the world. He made his way home with tears in his eyes the same as he had when he was a boy. When he reached the yard, he stood by the wood-splitting stump and studied the buzzards in the trees, just high-shouldered shadows scattered about the limbs. Dwayne yelled at the top of his lungs, no words, only a guttural cry from someplace deep inside that was absolutely on fire, and all of those other buzzards lifted to the air so that the limbs shook and the whole tree seemed to move.
To let a man like Calvin Hooper live after what he did was mercy, and there was no room for that in a world absent the slightest kindness. Dwayne’s was a suffering that could only be soothed by knowing he was not alone. The only answer for that kind of loneliness was for others to endure the same.