Dwayne wiped the cobwebs and dust from the lamp globes and filled the fonts with oil. The wicks were old and tattered, but when they were soaked with fuel they lit just fine. Low tongues of light tapped against the cobble walls and now he could see her. He watched the fire reflect in her eyes, then turned to his work.
Stepping over Angie’s body as if she were little more than a log across his path, he unloaded the groceries he’d taken from the house onto a long pine shelf. When he’d finished, he came back and hooked his hands under her arms, hoisted her up, and propped her against the wall so that she sat with her arms at her back, her knees to her chest.
“I’m going to take that tape off and it’s going to hurt,” Dwayne said.
He stepped toward her and scratched at the tag end of tape and when he had it up he ripped the duct tape around her head, hair and skin coming with it as it freed. Angie winced and her eyes glassed over, but she neither screamed nor cried.
“You know who I am?” Dwayne asked.
She shook her head. “What is this place?” she asked. “What’s that smell?”
“I want you to look across the room there.” Dwayne nodded to the wall behind him and Angie leaned to peer around a pitched support.
The room was dark, but the lamplight reached the body enough to show Carol Brewer sitting there like some grotesque dummy. The skin was a dark gray in the yellow light, his face something from Halloween. Only the rough outline of his figure, the muddied clothes he wore, showed any sign that he’d ever been a living, breathing thing.
“What is that?”
“That’s my brother,” Dwayne said, and he turned to look where she stared. What was left of Carol filled him with great sadness.
“I’m going to be sick,” she said, and no sooner had those words left her lips, Angie lunged to the side and threw up into the dirt beside her.
Dwayne pulled a yellow paisley handkerchief from his back pocket, unfolded it, and wiped the corners of her mouth. “You’ll get used to the smell after a while.”
“I don’t understand,” Angie said. “What happened to him?”
“What happened to him is why you’re here.”
“I don’t . . .” she stuttered. “I don’t understand.”
“Darl Moody killed my brother,” Dwayne said. “Darl Moody killed him and Calvin helped cover it up. The two of them threw my brother off in a hole and buried him like trash. I wouldn’t even have done a dog the way they did.”
“That can’t be true,” Angie said. “Calvin couldn’t have done that. There’s no way. There’s no way they could’ve done that.”
“You can believe anything you’d like, but the truth’s the truth just the same. The truth don’t change because we don’t want to believe it. God knows what the two of them did just like I do.”
“What do you know about God?” Angie’s face bled with anger.
Dwayne Brewer smiled and took a seat on the dirt floor. He crossed his legs and sat so they were looking eye to eye.
“Oh, a great deal, I imagine,” he said. “I’ve read that book over and over again and I believe as much as any God-fearing man on this mountain that He’s up there watching all this. The difference is that I know something they don’t. What I know’s He’s got one sick, sick sense of humor.” Dwayne shook his head and grinned. “Way I see it, the only thing He ever got right, the only thing He made absolutely perfect was these mountains. These trees. These creeks. Now, He got that part right,” Dwayne explained. “But then He created man. He makes an animal so dumb that it destroys the very gift it was given and He sits back and watches. Now you tell me that ain’t a sick sense of humor.”
He traced his fingers through the dirt at his sides and continued.
“Take the story of Job. It was like He was sitting back and watching a kid pull the legs off a spider. The devil took everything Job had. On a bet, God let him murder Job’s sons and daughters while they were sitting together at the supper table. Think about how that would eat your heart in two. If that wasn’t enough, he covered that old boy’s body in boils, let him get so sick that Job was begging God to end it, and only then, only after all of that, does the Lord finally say, ‘All right. I reckon that’s enough.’”
Dwayne slapped the floor with both hands at his sides and laughed.
“No, I ain’t that sick. I can see the humor in it, but I ain’t that sick.”
Angie was vacant and silent.
“So the thing is, I’ve read that book front to back a hundred times if I’ve read it once. I know what that book says more than most people. I just don’t see it like they do. A God of mercy, they say. I look around this world and I don’t see no mercy. They talk about a God of compassion. I want you to look around. You show me a place where compassion outweighs selfishness. The only thing we might agree on is forgiveness.” Dwayne nodded his head. “I reckon He’d have to be forgiving when He’s done plenty worse Himself. A God of forgiveness. Now that I can see.”
Dwayne stood and walked a small circle around the room. He kicked at the dirt with the toe of his boot and when he was back near her he leaned against one of the support beams.
“You know, me and my brother used to play in here when we were kids. My grandfather built this place. Dug the whole thing out with a shovel and mattock. He carried the stone from the creek and cobbled these walls. He did every bit of it himself. Never asked nobody for nothing.
“When I was little, he used to use this place for a root cellar and canning shed. Sometimes he’d hang meat in here. Had a smoke shack he built up by the house, but he cured meat in here, salted it down on that plank right there.” Dwayne nodded to where he’d set the supplies. “By the time I was growing up, though, he was old, and people didn’t do a whole lot of stuff like that anymore, at least not like they used to. So me and my brother we kind of just took this place over as our own, used it like a sort of playhouse I guess you’d say.”
“What was his name?” Angie asked.
“Who?”
“Your brother.”
“Carol,” Dwayne said. “His name was Carol, but we called him Sissy.
“I remember one time me and Sissy stayed here almost all summer. We’d sneak down to the house every couple days or so and steal enough food to get by, but other than that we stayed in the woods and did whatever we wanted.”
Dwayne laughed at something that came into his mind, shook his head, and continued.
“One day we got bored of sitting up here and we decided we was going to walk all the way to town. So me and Sissy, we took off down Chipper Curve and on around by the paper mill and come into town, and there used to be this newsstand on Back Street and they used to sell candy bars and beer, magazines and what not. Sissy got the idea he was going to steal him a titty magazine. Well, right when he’s shoving that magazine down the front of his pants that old boy that was running the register seen him and before I know it we were tearing out of there as hard as we could. We jumped the road and slid down into Scotts Creek and come up the other side and down the railroad tracks we went, now, by God we was gone.”
Angie watched with a look on her face like she couldn’t understand why he was telling her this.
“We get back here and we start looking through that magazine and old Sissy got all grossed out and I looked at him and I said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And he said, ‘I ain’t know it looked like that.’” Dwayne laughed. “He said, ‘I ain’t know it looked like that, Dwayne.’ And I told him, I said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’ Old Sissy never was one for women,” Dwayne said. “I think that first look ruined him or something. I don’t know. He was different. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say is my brother was just different. He wasn’t cut out for the way this world is. But I loved him. Ain’t make a bit of difference to me. I loved him.”
“I’m sorry,” Angie said. “I’m sorry for what happened to your brother, but there’s no way Darl and Calvin could’ve done what you’re saying. There’s no way.”
As soon as she said it, Dwayne jumped the gap between them and took ahold of her throat. “Don’t you tell me they couldn’t do it,” Dwayne snarled. “I know what the two of them did! I know it because I heard Darl Moody say it right before I slit his throat! I know it because Calvin told me what they did when he dug my brother’s body out of his pasture! So it don’t make a goddamn bit of difference what you think happened or what you think the two of them are capable of because the truth’s the truth just the same! I know what the two of them did just as God Himself knows it!”
Angie’s face was flushed red and her eyes were wide and white. Dwayne squeezed Angie’s neck as tight as he could before shoving her head against the stone behind her. When she was free, she took a gulp of air then another. Gradually she caught her breath and when her breathing eased Dwayne spoke with a strange calmness as if the rage that had filled him seconds before had never existed at all.
“The two of them took everything from me,” he said. “They took the only thing I loved in this world.” Dwayne glanced at his brother’s body. “What’s sitting right there is all that’s left. A few more days and there won’t be a thing. They took everything I loved, and that’s why you’re here.”
“I’m sorry,” Angie said. She was sobbing. “I’m sorry.”
Dwayne reached into his pocket and came out with a knife that he flicked open effortlessly, its wide blade flashing white in the lamplight.
“No,” Angie pleaded. “Please.”
He stepped forward.
“I’m going to cut your wrists loose,” Dwayne said. “And when I’m gone you can take that tape off your ankles.”
“Please,” Angie said. “Let me go.”
“Each one of those lamps will burn close to a day,” Dwayne said. “I’d burn one at a time if I was you. There’s food and water there on that shelf.”
“Just let me go.”
“I’ll be back in a day or so to check on you,” Dwayne said. He stood before her with the knife held casually at his side. “Calvin does what he’s told and all this’ll be over.” He knelt and reached for her hands at the small of her back, slid the knife under the zip cuffs and cut her free.
Dwayne closed the knife and slipped it back into his pocket as he rose. He crossed the room to the door, the rusted hinges groaning as he swung the door open. The world outside glowed blue with little more than half-moon. The night was cold and clear. He glanced up to stars that shined as steady and certain as they always had. Taking a deep breath, he felt the coldness of the air in his nose and when he lowered the heavy, iron bar across the door, he exhaled, not knowing when he’d return.
For so long, Dwayne Brewer had worked to keep everything under his thumb. Control. That was the only way he’d ever felt at ease: when he was in complete control. This world is about power, he thought. This world is about those born with it and those who take it for themselves. As he came through the woods, he was filled with uncertainty, a feeling he hadn’t known in a very long time. The world was completely out of his hands.