In one way or another Dwayne Brewer had been thumbing for a ride all his life. That afternoon was hot as hell for the last of October and as he followed the edge of the road, stumbling backward as cars approached, nobody slowed down and nobody stopped.
He’d walked out of the Justice Center without any boots and by the time he made it up Kitchens Branch the soles of his feet were black and raw. The front door of his childhood home was kicked in and he hobbled inside only long enough to grab a roll of duct tape and a bag of zip ties from a junk drawer in the kitchen, a butcher knife from a wooden block on the counter, and the Bible from his bedroom.
Smash-and-grab dipshits and frat boys fighting DUIs chose lawyers with billboards mimicking Better Call Saul, sleazebag attorneys with coffee-stained teeth who ran TV commercials with spaceships and cheesy special effects. But this wasn’t Dwayne’s first rodeo. Irving Queen was as filthy as they came in the courtroom, but the difference was, he usually won. Queen came from Caney Fork like the Moodys and the Hoopers, and most Queens were great people, one of the most talented bluegrass families to ever come out of Appalachia. Irving’s side, though, was questionable at best, shady if you wanted to get right down to it. Starting with his great-grandfather, four generations had all run shine, so being a snaky-ass lawyer was an honest-to-God step in the right direction.
Before the guards even had time to get to lunch, that greasy little potato of a man waltzed into the Justice Center with sweat oozing from his bald head and he slapped a writ of habeas on Sheriff John Coggins’s desk. Coggins wore a silver flattop and a jet-black Magnum, P.I., 1970s porn ’stache that looked like absolute shit. His face turned sour at the sight of Queen, at the sight of what lay on his desk that morning. Knowing what his detective had pulled the night before was questionable at best, borderline illegal, he cut Dwayne loose rather than wait around for a judge to smack him in the back of the head.
Crossing the yard, the way the brittle grass crunched underfoot, the clay damp and cold, reminded Dwayne of childhood, the way they’d never worn shoes outside of winter. There was something strange about having been in a single place his entire life, growing up right there in that house and having never left. There was no telling how many times in his life he’d hiked this trail between his parents’ and grandparents’ houses. But yet there was no sentimentality tied to this place. There were no mixed feelings about leaving. In fact, he was surprised it had held together this long. He had always figured the time would come to run, and now that it was here it seemed like an overdue day of reckoning.
The buzzards no longer sat in the trees, and their absence made the world seem strangely empty. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, why they’d come and where they’d gone. There was a sunken feeling in the pit of his stomach like he was nearing a moment of inevitability, like this hallowed hour was exactly what he’d always been headed toward.
All morning in that holding cell he’d racked his mind with where they’d go from here. There wasn’t time to bury his brother and he wasn’t ready for that anyways. Lying on that thin jail mattress, the wool blanket itching his bare back, he was almost thankful. If he’d been let out right then, turned loose after seeing Calvin Hooper pissing himself behind those bars, Dwayne would’ve acted in a moment absent of thought, and those types of decisions were almost always mistakes. The morning had given him time to think and now he had a plan. He’d take Carol’s body with him and disappear to a place their grandfather had taken them when they were kids.
Dwayne was eleven or twelve when they paddled across Fontana in a fiberglass canoe with a hole crudely patched in the hull. It was late summer, something he had always remembered because there was jewelweed flowering all over the banks. Orange horn-shaped flowers spotted bloodred on the petals dangled like ornaments from stems fine as thread. As a kid, Dwayne believed the plant was magic, the way the seedpods exploded like fireworks if you brushed them with your fingertips, the way the backsides of their leaves lit silver when his grandfather held one underwater, a leaf turned to metal by some sort of Appalachian alchemy.
They followed the creek from where it emptied into the lake, catching horny heads and speckled trout on Little Cleo silver spoons for supper, wandering settlements long since abandoned, with names like Proctor and Cable Branch, Bone Valley and Medlin. Nearly a week in the woods away from home and their father, that trip might’ve been one time in their lives when they actually felt completely safe. When they were grown, he and Sissy ventured back to that place many times to walk in the footsteps of their past. Steal one of them boats at the Fontana Village marina, he thought, and that’s where we’ll go.
The land between Kitchens Branch and Allens Branch rose to a crooked spine of ridgeline that continued north through hard timber toward Indian Camp Gap. The trail to his grandparents’ shack wasn’t so much worn into the land as a path carved by memory. The terrain steepened and the wet leaves felt like leather under his feet. A laurel thicket dropped off one side. Dwayne hugged an outcrop of lichen-covered granite and when he came around the bend a young cane-legged deer lifted its nose from the ground and stared with wide, unblinking eyes black as his own. Sunlight shone through the deer’s raised ears, turning flesh to soft pink stained glass, his tall vertical antlers still in velvet.
Dwayne stood there for a minute mesmerized. The deer was still aside a slight flare of his nose. When Dwayne came toward him, the young buck dipped his head to the ground and sauntered out of the way for him to pass. Dwayne crept almost close enough to touch him, to trace his fingertips along buckskin flank, and as he glanced out of the corner of his eye he had this overwhelming sense that he was looking at his brother. The thought made him woozy and he stumbled until there were twenty or thirty yards stretched between them.
When he turned back, the deer stood on the path and examined him with that same glass-eyed stare. The buck took a few steps forward, stopped and craned his neck, then a few more. Dwayne knew what the old-timers said of such things and he wasn’t ready to accept that fate, to allow that soul to usher him to his end. He scanned the ground and picked up a small white stone and chucked it as hard as he could.
“Get!” he yelled as the rock whizzed over the deer’s back.
The buck took a few startled steps, but did not run.
“Get out of here!” Dwayne yelled again, stomping against the ground, and this time the deer turned, leapt, and in the blink of an eye was gone.