Oren
As the sunlight at the roof vents dimmed and darkened, the generator in the back of Carol’s truck ripped, sputtered, ripped, and hummed. The floodlights went on and the vents glowed again. Cereb and Flip barked, Jimmy laughed, and, right on schedule, music started to play – loud music with a deep beat that entered the old roof beams and made the house tremble.
‘When I was born,’ I said to Lexi, ‘Amon moved into the house with Kay and her father. Kay at this time had been going to school only occasionally and then only so that she could steal oil crayons and paint from her art teacher. Because she lived in such a remote house or because of her strange personality, she had few friends other than Walter, who lived up-island. Walter was a skinny kid given to running away from home but never far, never crossing the bridge from Black Hammock. He slept in the woods in the summer and, on cold winter nights, wrapped himself around the Jakobson’s tar kiln for warmth. When Kay went to school, they rode the bus together from the base of the bridge, and in the afternoons Walter lounged on the porch with her, watching her draw or paint. Her pregnancy had brought him still closer. As her belly swelled, he’d spent more time at the house and treated her and the unborn baby as if the baby was his own, as if he would stand between her and any threat to her.’
Jimmy’s motorcycle roared, and the speakers in the back of Carol’s truck blasted Bachman–Turner Overdrive’s ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.’
‘After moving in, Amon put an end to Walter’s visits,’ I said. ‘He discouraged Kay from seeing this child who reminded him that he had gotten another child pregnant – and maybe also reminded him of the young man he had been in Saigon, little more than a boy himself – a boy-man who had also believed that he would sacrifice himself to protect his lover and their daughter, but instead had thrown his daughter on to a live grenade.
‘Lying in bed with Kay, with their baby asleep in a crib near the open window and the smells of lovemaking and the baby’s new life mingling in the night air, Amon should have been happy. When he’d come back from Vietnam, he’d seemed destined for loneliness and misery, and when Phuong failed to respond to his letters, he had learned to expect no more than that. Kay’s appearance in his life, her pursuit of him, and the child she had given him had been a great miracle, a miracle no less extraordinary, to his thinking, than the laying of hands on a cripple. He should have been happy.
‘But as Kay lay naked in bed beside him, her hand on his thigh, her fingers digging into his flesh, he sensed in her a hunger that scared him. When he had first known her, she had wanted to see him naked, asking him to take off his towel and underwear as he’d stood before her. She’d asked him to expose himself to her. She hadn’t asked him to do such things again, but she hadn’t needed to. He’d taken off his clothes for her and she’d taken hers off for him. But he’d sensed in her eyes and her touch a desire to go deeper, down to the blood and bones, to get into the parts of him where he held his most brutal memories of himself and those he had loved before her, the parts where damage rolled into damage like underwater currents. Seeing his old wounds would not be enough for her. She would want to rip away the scars and see what moved beneath.
‘He had read enough books and experienced enough of life to know that he might be projecting his own fears and guilt on to her. If his own sense of himself coursed through his veins as thick and bitter as the pine tar that dripped from the kiln into the box under it, that might not be her fault. But more than once in the middle of the night he had awakened to her touch and had felt as if she were prodding him with a needle or the blade of a box cutter.
‘The anger and misery that had lifted when he first had carried Kay into his bedroom, in the house that he’d built with his own hands, now settled back on to him with a weight that seemed all the heavier because he knew it was unwarranted. Not her fault, he repeated to himself, but he blamed her anyway. She had made him happy, and if he had lost that happiness, he reasoned, who else could be the cause?
‘But me, he loved,’ I said. ‘When I wasn’t in my crib, I was in his arms. He carried me through the house, through the yard, and out into the woods. He introduced me to the smell of the pine trees and the heat of the tar kiln. Instead of a mother’s breast, I felt the rough skin and cloth of a man who had rubbed hard against the world.
‘Except when he had me in his hands, he turned mean. Kay had re-taught him his strength, and he used that strength to assert himself into the house, starting the kiln fire in the morning before Kay’s father was awake, greeting the tar customers who drove over the hill and into the yard, inviting Tilson into the house to drink with him in the late afternoon, and collapsing at the end of each day into the chair that Kay’s father always had claimed as his own. Amon took over the responsibilities of the house so fast that by the time Kay’s father stopped appreciating the extra help and started to resent it, Amon had completely displaced him. Four months later, Kay’s father died from a stroke or a heart attack or something else – no one checked, but it was quick – and Amon suspected that the man had just stopped breathing when he realized he’d become useless.
‘At first, Kay was as attracted to Amon’s new hardness as to his old wrecked self. She reached for him in bed. She followed him into the pine woods. She pushed my crib out into the hallway, closed the door, mounted Amon, and groaned as if she was singing a song.’
Lexi asked, ‘How do you know this? Why would you want to?’
‘He told me,’ I said.
‘That’s messed-up,’ she said.
‘He was a complicated man,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just messed-up.’
‘So Amon started to push Kay away,’ I said. ‘The mounting, groaning girl wanted to get inside him, he believed – wanted to see, touch, and smell parts of him that he wished to reveal to no one. So he treated her as roughly as he had treated her father, and though they continued to share a bed, they rarely touched each other.’
Outside, Jimi Hendrix whined his guitar through the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’
I said, ‘When the sex stopped, Kay went back to drawing pictures of Amon – Amon sleeping, Amon holding me against his sweaty chest, Amon shooting one of his guns into the air, Amon standing by the kiln with red-streaked eyes and soot- and tar-stained arms and cheeks – and she gave each picture to him, as they previously had given their bodies to each other. He took the pictures and, she thought, hid them – an act that would have had its own intimacy and that, while it lacked the pleasure of sex, made her think that, in spite of the torment that was driving him away physically, they still shared a bright place that excluded everyone else. But one morning she saw him in the yard with a charcoal drawing. It showed him standing shirtless in the sunlight with an axe in his hand. Now, in the yard, he looked identical to the drawing except that instead of an axe he held the picture. She watched, wondering if she would see where he was hiding her gifts. Instead, he ripped the picture and put it into the kiln. He loaded pine strips on top of it, added Spanish moss, and covered the pile with soil. He threw dry brush into the bottom oven, poured kerosene on to the brush, and tossed in a lighted match.
‘After that,’ I said, ‘Kay made only self-portraits and kept them for herself.’
‘Oh,’ Lexi said.
‘See?’ I said. ‘Amon was no hero. His meanness was bigger than other men’s meanness. But so was his love. Shortly after I could walk, he tried to teach me skills that few children are capable of learning at a young age and that few parents are interested in having them know. How to sharpen a knife and use it on rope and wood. How to fish and clean out the organs with the scoop of a finger. How to dig trenches and build fences. How to sleep in the open air with only an embankment of earth and a blanket of pine needles to stay warm and keep off the insects. When I turned four, Amon taught me how to shoot a rifle and a pistol. It was as if he was preparing me to survive on my own, not only without the help of others but despite their hostility to me. He seemed to feel a jealous love for me, a love so strong that he feared it had to come to a bad end.’
‘You remember this how?’ Lexi asked.
‘I remember everything,’ I said.
‘You’re making it up,’ she said. ‘Or someone made it up for you.’
‘Just go with me,’ I said.
‘That depends on where you want to take me,’ she said.
I said, ‘When a social services worker came to the house shortly after I turned six, Amon panicked. The lady brought a questionnaire that asked about vaccinations and health, schooling, household conditions, and parenting. Amon had good reason to worry, but the lady showed no real disapproval. When she visited my room, she picked up an open pocketknife and a spent shotgun shell from my bed and placed them in Amon’s hand without a word. When she asked why I hadn’t started kindergarten, she quietly wrote down Amon’s answer that he was teaching me all that I needed to know at home. She complimented Kay on her pictures before driving out over the hill.
‘But her visit was like pushing Amon down the stairs. He wondered if she would try to take me away from him, and he decided that she would. So that same night, as Kay slept, he stuffed our clothes and the money that remained from his parents’ house behind the passenger seat of the Chevy pickup that Kay’s father had bought in the early seventies. He wrapped a few of his best guns in a plastic sheet and put them in the bed of the truck. He ripped the phone line from the outside wall to slow Kay when she tried to report him—’
‘This is when he left?’ Lexi asked.
‘The first time,’ I said.
‘It happened more than once?’
‘Just listen,’ I said. ‘Amon carried me downstairs, still wrapped in my blanket, and put me in the passenger seat. By the time that Kay awoke at the house, we were driving across the Panhandle with the sun shining through the rear window, Amon white-knuckling the steering wheel, and me with my blanket draped around my shoulders. I knew that the world had begun spinning in a new direction during the night.
‘Amon’s paranoia rose with each mile that we drove, and so we left the highway and took rural routes through small towns, bypassing cities entirely or else driving into them and circling through the tangles of streets as if doing so would shake our scent.
‘The first night, we camped inside the truck, tucking our clean clothes against the doors to make ourselves comfortable. The next day, Amon bought a tarp at a hardware store so that we could sleep in the truck bed. By the end of the third day, the pickup cab smelled of our bodies and breath and of the roadside food that we were eating. It was easy to forget the house on Black Hammock Island – or to see it as a dream and my present situation in the truck with Amon as my only possible reality. I didn’t ask where we were going or why we had left. I knew we were going where we needed to go.
‘We zigzagged north and then west toward California. When we needed breaks, Amon drove through small towns until we found playgrounds – the first that I had ever seen. I would go down the slides time after time, or swing on the swing sets, or pull myself to the tops of jungle gyms and sit on the metal bars, while Amon lay on park benches staring at the tree branches or the sky.
‘During the long daily drives, Amon told me about meeting Kay and the history of their relationship and my own history with him. And he told me about Vietnam, about the woman he had loved there, and about the sister I would never meet. He told me place names – Saigon, Bien Hoa, Dong Nai, Phu Nhuan, Nha Trang – and the names of people, and asked me to repeat them to him, quizzing me, repeating parts of his story as if it would make me understand who and what I was, where I had come from, and where I was going.
‘As we drove from Kansas City to Tulsa, the clouds, which had hung low and brown for the past hundred miles, turned green, and, though rain had fallen and dampened the ground, a wind kicked dust into the air. I asked if we could look for a playground, but Amon just looked up at the sky and accelerated as if the forces that he had feared were following us through the maze of American roads had collected above and would come down on us like a fist. The wind died and the air seemed clenched as we drove out of town. The clouds darkened over the farm fields to the east. Amon rolled down his window and bent low to watch the storm as it moved overhead.
‘When a tornado dropped from one of the clouds, Amon let out a short laugh, as if the storm had confirmed all that he’d suspected since the social worker came to our house. If he had accelerated, we could have driven away from the tornado. Instead, he took his foot off the gas and glided to a stop on the road shoulder next to a hayfield. He told me to get out.’
‘Stupid,’ Lexi said.
I said, ‘We walked together into the field, the green hay mashing under our feet. We walked toward the tornado, which darkened as it picked up dirt and debris.
‘“Dad?” I said.
‘“Shh,” he said, as if he expected the tornado also to speak and he wanted to listen.
‘The tornado grew and blackened. Shingles and pieces of plywood and barn siding rose through the funnel and flew out when they reached a certain height, but still the tornado pulled more dirt from the ground. Wind started to whip around us. Overhead, a set of telephone wires throbbed.
‘“Lie down, son,” Amon said.
‘“Dad—” I said.
‘“Do as I say,” he said.
‘We lay together on the rough hay, and the sky seemed to tilt above us.
‘“Hold my hand,” he said. I did, and he said, “Listen.”
‘Then I heard the tornado. It was a low rumble. Then it was a roar. Then it was a sound like the sky and the ground were tearing at each other. I gripped Amon’s arm and climbed on top of him, clutching his chest, and he was laughing, and his laughter was as terrifying as the storm.’
‘How close did it come?’ Lexi asked.
‘A hundred feet?’ I said. ‘Or a hundred yards? It came close, but it passed.’
‘He was stupid,’ Lexi said.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But how was he to interpret the passing? Had the tornado been a warning that worse would come? Or had it purged Amon of his past, freeing him? Had it meant something else, or had it meant nothing at all? Amon said it must mean something.
‘He carried me, still clutching his chest, out of the field, set me on the passenger seat of the pickup, and closed my door. That day, we drove until we left the storm clouds far behind and long after the sun set. When we pulled over and drew our tarp over the truck bed on the bank of the San Gabriel River in Texas, the stars shined hard against the blackness. The next morning, when we awoke still in the dark, Amon pointed to the one constellation that he knew – Orion – not quite my namesake but, with its shield and sword, enough to reassure me that the universe might protect as well as destroy me.
‘Over the following days, we drove west into New Mexico, up through Albuquerque, and into Colorado. We drove up the valley of the northern Rio Grande, past the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and with each mile Amon became more sullen and silent. At night, lying in the truck bed under stars that seemed brighter and colder as we drove higher, I clung to him for warmth and comfort, and he clung to me too as if we risked flying apart. But during the days, Amon stopped looking for playgrounds, and he stopped telling stories of the places he had been and the people he had known.
‘After crossing the border into Wyoming, just short of Cheyenne, on a strip of rough concrete road that paralleled the Interstate, Amon pulled the pickup on to the shoulder, turned around, and, without a word, began driving south again, back across the border into Colorado, and down toward New Mexico. If I had been older, I might have questioned Amon’s sanity. As it was, I pulled my blanket around myself in the passenger seat and looked forward to the night-time when I would lie in the warmth of his muscular arms.
‘Between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, Amon turned the truck on to a road that headed to the north again, but the next day we swung to the west and crossed into Arizona. We dropped to the south, and two days later, sixty miles short of Tucson, we turned west and drove into the desert, which, with its emptiness, terrified me as much as the tornado.’
Outside in the yard, one of my friends shot a gun. Shot it again and again and again. It popped like a string of firecrackers. Lexi jumped. The speakers in the back of the truck started to play ‘Reptile’ by Nine Inch Nails. The music sounded like ripping metal and machines that ate ripped metal.
I said, ‘When we reached San Diego, Amon’s mood lifted. Maybe being close to an ocean again after all the miles we had driven gave him a sense of peace. Maybe he was just happy to be at the end of the journey. For a week, we parked at a campground above the beach. In the mornings, while the air was cool with the salt breeze, I played on a rusting slide outside the park reception office and swung on the one swing that still hung from the swing set. In the afternoons, we waded into the cold Pacific Ocean water, shivering and laughing as the waves slapped against our skin and the salt stung our eyes. On our fourth day at the campsite, Amon bought a boogie board for me and a fishing rod for himself, and that evening, with my skin sunburned and scraped raw by the sand, I ate white seabass that Amon had caught in the surf and then cooked over a charcoal grill that he’d rented from the park office.
‘For a long time, I blamed myself for what happened next. After all of our days on the road, being stationary made me think of home. The charcoal grill reminded me of the tar kiln, and the comforts of the park made me think of the comforts of Black Hammock. As Amon pulled the tarp over the bed of the pickup that night and a filmy layer of clouds crossed the rising moon, I told him that I missed my mother.
‘When he said nothing, I told him again.
‘In truth, I couldn’t remember ever having been happier than I’d been that afternoon as the waves lifted me on my Styrofoam board and carried me on to the beach, or that evening as I ate dinner with Amon at a picnic table. But I was six years old and at that age happiness was enough reason to cry, and so the tears came and I cried quietly and, when Amon still said nothing, cried more loudly.
‘What did I want? I wanted Amon to pull me into his arms and hold me. If he had done that, my day would have been perfect.
‘But instead Amon tore the tarp from us and climbed out of the truck. I sat up and Amon spun on me as if he would climb back in and kill me. In the moonlight, his eyes shined with an anger unlike any I had ever seen – the anger of betrayal, the kind of anger that might lead a man to throw his own child on to a grenade.
‘I backed away. I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to reverse time and erase my tears and my words about missing my mother. Instead, I said, “I want to go home.”’
Lexi said, ‘That bastard. He totally brainwashed you.’
I said, ‘I don’t want you to think of him that way. He was a good man but—’
‘He completely fucked with your head,’ she said.
‘These were difficult times,’ I said. ‘For the next three days, Amon stayed at the truck when I went to the playground by the reception office or sat on the beach while I swam. He brooded, and the weight that he had shed as we drove into San Diego lowered upon him again.
‘When I woke on the eighth morning at the campground, Amon was already out of the truck picking up the clothes that I had left to dry on the hood overnight and gathering the odds and ends that we had accumulated and left outside. Amon picked up the boogie board, snapped it in half, and stuffed it in the garbage barrel at the side of the campsite. He stuffed his fishing rod in too. He carried the rented charcoal grill to the reception office as if it was the only object in Southern California worthy of care. When he got back to the pickup, I was sitting on the passenger seat, my blanket close around my shoulders.
‘We drove up through Los Angeles and on to the Pacific Coast Highway. The mountains climbed over rockslides and mud runs outside of my window. The ocean waves pounded against stone cliffs and washed in and out of rock basins outside of Amon’s. When I saw sea lions lying on a spit of sand, with the sea mist sparkling in the air above them, I begged Amon to stop. He accelerated around the next bend. “I want to go home,” I said, and he accelerated again.
‘That night, we slept by Limekiln Beach, south of Carmel.’
Lexi said, ‘None of this really happened. Did it?’
‘Shh. Some of it did,’ I said. ‘When the damp and cold woke me in the dark, Amon was crying silently, his tears shining in the moonlight.’
Lexi asked, ‘How much of it happened?’
I said, ‘Everything that matters is true.’
‘Why should I believe you?’ she asked.
‘Because,’ I said, ‘I watched Amon crying, and I was unsure and scared, and so I climbed on top of him and held my face close to his wet cheeks. I wanted to kiss the tears – to take his salt – but instead I touched the skin under one of his eyes with a finger.
‘“No,” Amon said, and lifted me off him, setting me on to the cold metal truck bed.
‘In the morning, neither of us mentioned the crying, and Amon even seemed cheerful. “You want to go home, son?” he asked.
‘I said nothing. I was unsure what I wanted.
‘“That’s fine,” Amon said. “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll take you home.”
‘I was only six years old and I not only loved my dad, I had a kind of crush on him, but I knew he was lying.
‘He bundled the sleeping tarp and put it in a garbage can, and I climbed into the pickup and wrapped myself in my blanket. Amon spun the tires of the pickup in the gravel and dirt as we pulled from our camping spot back on to the highway.
‘Late that morning, we arrived in San Francisco. We cruised through the streets and up and down the hills as if we were tourists. Then we drove through the Presidio and on to the Golden Gate Bridge. Amon slowed until the other cars honked and sped around us. He peered past me, out the passenger-side window, and down to the churning water of the bay. “That’s something, isn’t it?” he said.
‘“I’m hungry,” I said.
‘“Soon,” he said. “Real soon.”
‘When we reached Sausalito, on the other side of the bridge, Amon turned the truck around and took us back over to San Francisco. Then we drove across the city and got on the highway to Oakland. We climbed the ramp on to the Bay Bridge, and Amon again slowed and peered through my window. “That’s more like it,” he said, and when I said nothing, he asked, “Isn’t this more like it?”
‘“Yes,” I said, wanting to please him, though I was unsure what it was like or even what it was.
‘Amon pulled the pickup to the side, and as cars blew their horns and whipped past, he got out and came around to my door. His eyes were wet but he smiled and said, “You ready to go?”
‘He climbed over the metal rail and lifted me after him. We stood with the cold metal behind us and an expanse of open air in front, the concrete bed of the bridge ringing under the tires of the passing cars and then going silent as traffic stopped and people got out and spoke to us – dozens of frightened voices calling over each other. A cold wind blew my hair back and whistled in my ears. A brown gull hung in the air as if gravity was only a thing of the human imagination. The sun glimmered on the water below, and the surface looked as permeable and harmless as light itself, as if an object could pass through and arrive in another realm that was invisible only because of the glare. Amon held my hand, and though only a thin ledge kept me from falling, I felt safe.’
Lexi said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
I said, ‘This is how it was with him then. Fearless.’
She said, ‘I wouldn’t want it.’
‘Pretty terrible,’ I said. ‘But in its way, I’ve never known anything better.’
She said, ‘Definitely wouldn’t want it.’
I said, ‘So Amon asked, “Are you ready?”
‘I was ready for anything he wanted me to do. But a voice that came from a place inside me that I hadn’t known existed said, “No.”
‘“Come,” Amon said, and inched close to the edge.
‘“No,” I said.
‘“It’s nothing,” Amon said. “Like flying.”
‘“I don’t know how to fly,” I said.
‘The people who had gotten out of their cars moved closer, almost to the rail, but Amon gave them a look that made them stop and back away.
‘“There’s not much time,” Amon said. “We’ll miss it.”
‘“Miss what?” I asked.
‘He said, “Our one chance.”
‘But I pulled my hand from his and sat down on the ledge, my legs crossed under me. He easily could have picked me up, thrown me off the bridge, and jumped after me, but he sat next to me, his legs dangling over the edge. He put an arm around my shoulders.
‘Sirens approached from both ends of the bridge, and megaphones told drivers to move their cars out of the way. A helicopter swooped in and hovered a hundred yards away, the pilot, visible through the windshield, wearing a white helmet and sunglasses that made him look like a hard-headed insect. By the time a San Francisco Marine Unit boat and a Coast Guard cutter arrived, the police had put all the onlookers back into their cars and made them drive away and had barricaded the bridge entrances. A plain-clothes officer climbed over the bridge railing and sat a few feet away from us on the ledge – with his legs, like mine, crossed under him.
‘“Why are you out here, sir?” the officer asked.
‘“Taking the scenery,” Amon said.
‘“Better places to do that,” the officer said. “What do you mean to do now?”
‘Amon said nothing.
‘The officer looked at me. “Are you all right?”
‘I looked at Amon, and he nodded.
‘“Yes,” I said to the officer.
‘For an hour or more, the officer talked with Amon, asking where we were from, who we had left behind, why Amon had chosen to come to San Francisco. When Amon stopped answering the questions, the officer talked about the weather, a visit that he had made to Florida with his family when he was a boy of about my age, and then about hope, love, and his belief in humanity – matters that belonged on the earthward side of the glaring water. Then, in the same calm, matter-of-fact voice that he’d been using since he joined us on the ledge, he told me to stand up and climb over the railing on to the road.
‘Amon, who had seemed not to be listening, gripped my shoulder, though I hadn’t tried to follow the officer’s instruction.
‘The officer said to Amon, “If you look behind you, sir, you will see a policeman with a rifle aimed at you. You can make a decision about your own life. But you will not take your child with you. Do you understand?”
‘I looked and saw that what the officer had said was true.
‘Amon didn’t look, but after a few seconds he eased his grip on me. Then he stood and climbed back over the railing on to the road, where two policemen rushed to him and handcuffed him.
‘The plain-clothes officer grinned as if he had won a game. “Climb over, son,” he said.
‘I stood and peered over the side of the bridge. With Amon’s steadying arm gone, I tottered as I watched the slow eddies behind the Marine Unit and Coast Guard boats. The water seemed to pull at me and I leaned toward it. I heard Amon’s voice telling me, It’s nothing.
‘But a policeman’s hands reached over the railing and sucked me back. In a moment, I was on the other side, and a second policeman was wrapping a blanket around me – not the blanket that I had carried in the pickup from Black Hammock Island but a clean one – and I was shivering, though I felt a fever rising from my chest to my head.
‘Afterward, Amon denied that he ever meant to jump or to harm me. The court hospitalized him for evaluation and sent me home on an airplane. Kay looked at me as if she was unsure whether I had caused or was the victim of Amon’s flight, and, though we had never had as close of a relationship as most mothers and their children, I felt a new coldness. In San Francisco, the doctors dug up Amon’s records and said that he had suffered from a breakdown triggered by the visit from the social worker, which had made him fear losing me as he had lost his daughter Lang. It was a sympathetic story once the newspapers, magazines, and television news retold it. The doctors reassured Amon that rest, therapy, and, most of all, an encouraging letter from the state Department of Children and Families would restore him to mental health. Photographers from Newsweek, Time, and the San Francisco Chronicle snapped pictures of him as he walked out of the hospital, wild-eyed and bearded, his long hair uncombed. Amon had broken no laws, except maybe negligent driving and criminal trespassing for crossing the guardrail and the law of common sense for running off across the country the way he did with me. The police made a collection, bought another plane ticket, and sent him home.’
‘Christ,’ Lexi said.
Out in the yard, the music had stopped, but the generator hummed and Jimmy’s motorcycle droned far and near as he rode out over the hill and back toward the house.
I said, ‘For about a week after Amon returned, we were famous, though Amon chased away the reporters who made the trek to Black Hammock Island. But one of the soldiers who’d known him at the Bien Hoa military base – a man named Eric Cantrell – saw a Time Magazine article and got to thinking. He’d been among the guys who’d taken Amon to the Hall of Mirrors brothel on the weekend when he met Phan Thi Phuong, but Cantrell had left the service after one tour and, until reading the article, had heard only rumors about the death of Amon’s Vietnamese daughter. Now he lived in New Orleans and owned a bar that he had decorated to look like a miniature Hall of Mirrors, though the two Cambodian hookers he’d convinced to run their business from his bar stools in the early nineteen-eighties had been arrested and then had disappeared. Decades had passed since he’d left Vietnam, but he still met with other Bien Hoa vets every six or eight months. He rode a Kawasaki Eliminator, and the others owned a variety of bikes ranging from the barely street-legal to a grandpa-and-grandma thing with a homemade sidecar. One man was a real estate lawyer, another a high-functioning addict who shot up in gas station bathrooms as they traveled, a third a high school history teacher, another a roofer.
‘When Cantrell called to tell them he was riding to Black Hammock Island to see Amon, only two of them could join him – Rob Terrenbaum, the realtor, and Stevie Abbott, the addict, who said he was bringing his sister, Denisa, even though she’d caused problems on earlier rides. Terrenbaum rode from L.A. to Taos, where Abbott met him with Denisa sitting behind him on his bike.
‘“Is she necessary?” Terrenbaum asked.
‘“Can’t trust her alone,” Abbott said, though in truth on her last trip with them it was his own need for drug money that resulted in her getting beaten up.
‘When they arrived in New Orleans, Eric Cantrell left the keys to his bar with one of his bartenders, and the next day, five hundred miles to the east, the motorcycles roared across the bridge to Black Hammock Island.
‘As Amon’s friends expected, Amon was a mess. On returning from San Francisco, he’d stuffed the packet of phone numbers and psychotherapy resources into the kiln. He’d stopped bathing and mostly stopped eating. He was living in the yard, unwilling – it seemed, unable – to step on to the front porch. He was cared for only by Tilson, who had brought a plastic sheet from his own house for him to sleep under when it rained. I went outside to him when I could, but Kay mostly kept me upstairs.’
‘Did this really happen?’ Lexi asked.
‘Every bit,’ I said.
Lexi said, ‘Mom never told me any of it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t. During Amon’s absence, Walter had begun coming to the house again. He was no longer a skinny boy but a man nearly as large as Amon, and Amon seemed to lack the strength or the will to chase him away. Early one morning, a week after Amon returned, I was watching from a window as he slept under Tilson’s plastic sheet. Walter walked into the yard, eyed the sleeping heap, stooped by it, and spoke so quietly that I couldn’t hear. Amon showed no sign of hearing either, and Walter spat on the sheet, then crossed the yard, climbed the porch steps, and came into the house without knocking. He went upstairs, walked into Kay’s bedroom, and closed the door.
‘I ran out to the yard and shook Amon, telling him where Walter was. But he said nothing, did nothing.
‘When Amon’s Vietnam friends roared into the yard and found him flea-bitten and stinking, they sat by the kiln with him and got him drunk – blackout drunk, vomiting drunk, drunk into oblivion. Then, after listening to his drunken, disjointed mumbling, they beat the hell out of Walter.’
‘Good,’ Lexi said.
I said, ‘The next morning, when Amon sobered up enough to stand, Stevie Abbott’s sister went to him and kissed him with her hard, thin lips. He shoved her away. She came back and kissed him again and kept coming back until he stopped shoving her. She took off her shirt and stood, skinny and hard-breasted in the shivering morning light. So he unzipped her jeans and lowered them to the dirt. As Kay watched from her bedroom window and I watched from mine, he turned her around and pushed her to her hands and knees.
‘Apparently, he felt better afterward,’ I said. ‘He drew water from the well and bathed. When Eric Cantrell went inside to the kitchen and brought back the turpentine, he scrubbed the deepest stains from his skin. He poured the remaining turpentine into his bowl of well-water and slicked back his hair. Only then did he realize that these men, who had disappeared from his life more than twenty years earlier, had come to save him.
‘Amon’s friends spent nearly a month at the house. Mostly they stayed drunk. When the liquor ran out, Cantrell or Terrenbaum would ride over the hill on a motorcycle and return an hour or two later with new supplies. Abbott found a dealer a couple of islands up the coast. His sister sometimes wandered into the woods for a day or two or walked out on the road and crossed the bridge, but when she came back she would go to Amon and they would find a hidden spot or sometimes stay right out in the open, and afterward Amon would eye Kay like a housecat with a bird in its mouth that it was unwilling to give up. The men invited Tilson to join the party, but though he would pick up their spent bottles and trash from the yard, and even bring them new bottles when they called for them, he stayed sober, as if he knew that they needed someone to watch over them. Lane Charles, though, came from next door and drank as hard and laughed as loud as the rest. Walter appeared twice at the edge of the pine woods, watching and waiting, until Stevie Abbott got on his motorcycle and chased him into the trees.
‘Terrenbaum left first, and a week later Cantrell rode out, followed by Abbott with his sister behind him hugging him with her skinny thighs. Denisa had spent the previous night with Amon, but when she climbed on to the motorcycle, she gave him the finger as if to say he should expect no tears.
‘When Amon’s friends left, the battle between him and Walter flared. Walter tried to go back to the behavior he’d adopted when Amon was gone. He walked out of the pine woods, crossed the yard, calling to the chickens as if they were his own, mounted the front porch, and entered the house without knocking. But now Amon stood inside with a club of pinewood that he’d picked from the kindling. He split Walter’s head with it, and Walter jumped on him and threw him to the floor. As blood came from the wound, turning Walter’s face into a red mask and dropping from his eyes like tears, the two men wrestled, gripping each other by the throat, pounding each other’s head on the floorboards, silent except for moans, as if their fight was about something more than sex or territory – about more than themselves.
‘Kay watched from the kitchen doorway – holding me behind her – and though blood smeared across Amon’s and Walter’s faces and arms and stained their clothing, though they knocked over chairs and lamps and broke the table, she never tried to stop them. When they exhausted themselves, they lay in each other’s arms, breathing each other’s breath, drenched in each other’s sweat and blood, until one of them drew enough energy to throw an elbow into the other’s cheekbone or to raise the other’s head and slam his skull against the floor. It seemed that they wouldn’t stop until one of them was dead.
‘But then Walter pulled himself from Amon’s hands, got up with great difficulty, and, instead of dropping on to Amon again and crushing him, turned away. Without a glance at Kay, he walked to the door and went out. Amon lay on his back, breathing hard through his torn and bloody lips. A broken tooth – Walter’s – clung to his forehead. His eyes focused on the ceiling as if he was looking for stars. He clenched and unclenched his fists, though his fingers were broken.
‘Then Kay went to Amon, dropping to her knees. She said his name and said it again, and though his eyes remained on the ceiling, he raised a hand and searched the air until he found her and gripped her.
‘“I’m sorry,” he said.
‘Tears filled Kay’s eyes.
‘“So sorry,” Amon said.
‘She kissed his wrecked lips, and he tried to pull her to him.
‘But first she said to me, “Go.” The kiss had smeared Amon’s blood on her face. “Go,” she said again as Amon tried to bring her body to his own. “To your room,” she said, and she let herself be drawn down to Amon.
‘The next two years were calm,’ I said. ‘Amon moved back into the house and shared a bed with Kay. She set up an easel and a mirror in the front room and painted the self-portraits that made her famous. He shaved his beard and cut his hair short. In the mornings, he tended to the chickens or, with Tilson’s help, cut kiln wood in the back acres. In the afternoons, he collected the drippings from the tar box and sold pails of tar and jars of turpentine to customers who drove over the hill and into the yard. Many days, Lane Charles came with a bottle of vodka. In the early evenings, Amon would sit in his chair reading one of his books, or he would set up a target and shoot at it with one of his guns, or he would walk with me through the pine forest, telling me stories about the life he had lived. Shortly after sunset, he and Kay would tuck me into bed and then disappear behind their bedroom door.’
Jimmy cut the engine on his motorcycle. Everyone in the yard was quiet. Only the generator hummed, dull and constant, boring into the night.
I told Lexi, ‘When you were born, Amon loved you with the same intensity that he loved me, but he also seemed to fear you. Maybe you reminded him of Lang. Maybe he’d learned the danger of loving a child too much. And when Cristofer was born, Amon started spending more time in the yard again, but each night he came inside and locked the door behind him, and before disappearing into his bedroom with Kay, he stood for a long time in your doorway and Cristofer’s and mine. As much as the family ever had been – as much as we ever could be – we were happy.
‘Once when returning from the woods, though, I thought I saw Walter slipping away from the house. And sometimes when Amon was cutting wood with Tilson, Kay set down her paintbrushes, put you and Cristofer into my care, and left the house for a morning. I would follow her until she walked out over the hill and turned up-island on the road toward Walter’s house.
‘The night that Walter came back for good had been no different from the months and months of nights before it. Amon had knocked back a bottle of Smirnoff with Lane Charles in the afternoon and had invited Tilson to join the family for dinner. We were eating big meals in those days, but dinner was done now, and the table was covered with greasy plates, platters with bones and the tendon remains of a chicken, the head of a red fish that Tilson had contributed, and bowls with the last, uneaten greens from a kitchen garden that Kay had started.
‘Amon, Tilson, and I remained at the table. Kay had taken you and Cristofer upstairs to put you in your cribs. Amon and I watched as Tilson gathered the bones from the chicken legs and thighs, used his teeth to scrape off the remaining cartilage, and sucked away the specks of blood.
‘Amon said to him, “I’m not much given to the fine points of table manners, but do you want to explain what the hell you’re doing?”
‘Tilson wiped the grease and saliva from the bones on a pant leg. “Seem to me you get luck now,” he said, and he cupped the dry bones in his hands, shook them, and cast them like dice on to the tabletop. Then he gathered them and cast them again. Though he hadn’t drunk Lane Charles’s vodka, he stared at the bones with glazed eyes.
‘Amon asked, “They say I’m going to be lucky?”
‘Tilson swept the bones into a pile. He said, “Good luck, bad, or something else, sure.”
‘Kay came down the stairs. But instead of joining us at the table, she stood holding the bottom of the banister. Amon patted his lap, inviting her to sit, but she stayed where she was.
‘The look in her eyes scared me, and though I had no reason to, I looked from her to the door. Outside, the sun had lowered through the pine woods, but the frogs and locusts that usually sang after dark were silent. Still, the house felt safe and tight.
‘Then Walter walked in. He was wearing his work overalls, a pressed white cotton shirt, and on his feet a pair of polished black dress shoes. “Good evening,” he said, calm and easy, as if he expected a warm welcome and a hot plate of food.
‘Kay stayed at the banister, and Amon, surprised but sure of his power in the house, remained in his chair. I was too scared to move. Only Tilson shoved back from the table.
‘Amon cupped his chin in his hand and said, “What can we do for you, Walter?” If he’d gotten up and gone for one of his guns, everything would have been fine – he must have owned forty by then, and he kept some of them loaded.
‘Walter came to the table and stood by him. “I’ve come to tell you it’s time for you to go,” he said.
‘“Go?” Amon said, and he grinned.
‘“Go,” Walter said. “Time to leave. You did it before. No one missed you. I didn’t.”
‘“You didn’t, no.” Amon nodded at me, as if he had everything under control. “No, you moved right in. A man might forgive another man for walking into his house uninvited once. He might even forgive him for walking into his bedroom. But twice? That wouldn’t be a man. That would be either a saint or a man with no self-respect. A coward. And I’m none of those.”
‘“I’m sorry, Amon, but you can’t stay.” Walter almost managed to sound apologetic.
‘“That’s your decision, is it?” Amon grinned around the room – at me, at Tilson, at Kay.
‘“It’s our decision,” Walter said. “Kay’s and mine.”
‘Amon’s grin cracked. He looked at Kay.
‘She said, “You’ve exhausted me, Amon. There’s too much of you. Soon there will be nothing left of me.”
‘Walter said, “We’ll give you one chance, Amon. You can walk out now. If you don’t—”
‘Amon bellowed, his chest and face swelling in his rage. He looked as if he would vomit, as if tears would shoot from his eyes. He rose from his chair and turned over the dinner table. Plates, bowls, and glasses shattered on the floor. At that moment, I knew that someone in the room would die that night.
‘Walter backed away one step, but one step only. Kay moved from the banister and threw something to him. It was one of the splitting chisels that Amon used to hack pine logs into strips for the kiln. Until that afternoon, the chisel had been rusty and dull, but Kay had taken a stone to it, and it spun as bright as a star into Walter’s hand.
‘Tilson rushed him, but Walter went to Amon and sank the chisel into his chest. The chisel made a sucking noise as Walter pulled it out. Each time that he thrust it again, it cracked bones and ground against something inside of Amon. Amon fell to the floor, and Walter mounted him. Amon must have died fast, but Walter kept plunging the chisel into him until his chest and stomach were a black bloody hole.’
‘That’s a lie,’ Lexi shouted. ‘My dad ran away. He’d done it before.’
I said, ‘That’s what Kay told the police when Lane Charles reported him missing. She didn’t call the police herself. When they asked her about that, she said that Amon had left once and she’d taken him back. Now that he’d done it again, she said, she didn’t want him back.’
‘No,’ Lexi said. ‘Why would the police believe her?’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’ I asked. ‘As she said, he’d left before. They knew he’d been unstable, and a quick check – if anyone bothered to make one – would show that he had never gotten the treatment that the doctors in San Francisco had said he needed. It seems that only one young cop thought something was wrong.’
‘Daniel Turner,’ Lexi said.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘And Lane Charles also knew in his heart that his friend was dead, though he had no more proof than Daniel Turner did. He’d seen Kay walking up-island toward Walter’s place all those mornings when Amon was cutting wood, and he’d kept a close eye on the house. But when Daniel Turner asked, Walter admitted to the affair and hinted that learning of it might have sent Amon running for a second time. When Daniel Turner pulled the charred scraps of a bloody dress from the tar kiln, Kay pointed out that, with all the axes, chisels, and saws, everyone in the house bled from time to time. When the police – who, in an unrelated case, were searching a section of South Georgia woods along the Interstate Highway – found the burnt-out car that Amon supposedly left in, Kay and Walter could offer no explanation and acted like it wasn’t their obligation to offer one.’
‘How about Tilson?’ Lexi asked. ‘He saw—’
‘He saw everything,’ I said. ‘He knew everything. He buried Amon’s body by the chicken pen.’
‘Why would he do that?’ she asked.
‘Self-interest? Self-preservation?’ I said. ‘He knew that justice is slow and it takes years and years to get rid of the blood of a killing like Amon’s. Tilson is smart. He knew that you can scrub the floorboards with bleach and a wire brush, and you can rub pine oil and pitch into the rest of the floor so it takes the same color as the stain, but those are superficial cures. Tilson disliked Kay and Walter. Walter treated him badly, and Kay mostly ignored him. Only Amon had been good to him. But the best he could do for Amon was to dig a hole for him in the yard so he could be close to the house when justice came. That and he could protect me.’
‘What happened to you?’ Lexi asked.
‘When Amon was lying on the floor, I climbed on top of him the same way I’d climbed on to him when we were driving west. The pool of blood and broken bones where his belly and chest should have been felt hot, and if I could have, I would have climbed into his skin and stayed. When Walter pulled me away, I bit and scratched him. I tried to kill him. But Walter threw me down on the floor and left me there.
‘However much planning Kay and Walter had done before killing Amon, they’d failed to figure out what to do with me. I might be old enough to be believed by the police and the courts, and I wouldn’t be coaxed or threatened into silence. But Kay had drawn the line at killing me. Walter could torture Amon if that’s what it took for him to feel free. He could cut off Amon’s arms and legs. He could stir his insides with a wood chisel. But I was a child – her child, even if I didn’t act like it. Walter had reasoned with her. He’d countered every scenario she had offered where they remained safe after Amon’s murder with a scenario of his own where I betrayed them. Still she had refused to let Walter hurt me. Even when Walter came into the house that night – even when she held the wood chisel to her thigh as she stood by the banister – she had convinced herself that there was another way.
‘But as I lay on the floor where Walter had thrown me, covered with Amon’s blood, Kay knew that Walter was right. She watched me lying on Amon’s body, burrowing into it. She must have thought that I was irretrievable. Amon had taken me, made me his own and no one else’s. If Amon had to die, then I did too. I was no longer her child. Outside, the frogs and crickets began to sing. The air in the house smelled of brine, the first smell of death. “Not here,” Kay said.
‘Walter sighed with relief. Not here meant In another place. He asked, “Where?”
‘“In the woods,” she said. “I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to hear it.”
‘He came to me and picked me up – like a father picking up a sleeping child to carry him to bed.
‘But Tilson, who had stood by Amon’s bookshelves as if he wished to be forgotten, said, “I do it.”
‘Walter and Kay stared at him.
‘He said, “You never trust me again if I don’t. You think I tell the police unless I got blood on me too. I do it, then you don’t got to worry.”
‘They stared at each other, and Kay nodded. Walter said to Tilson, “Take a shovel. Do it where the soil is wet.”
‘Tilson said, “I live here my whole life. I know where to put him.”
‘“Don’t tell me where,” Kay said. “I swear, if I hear anything—”
‘Tilson said, “I know how to be quiet. All you life I been quiet. That ain’t no problem for me.”
‘Tilson carried me out into the night, across the yard, and into the pine woods. Maybe I should have panicked but I felt as secure in the arms of this man who had just promised to kill me as I’d felt in my dad’s arms. A yellow crescent moon, as sharp-ended as a bull’s horn, was rising through a cloud, and I watched it over Tilson’s shoulder. “It all right, boy,” Tilson said as he walked. “Ain’t nobody but nobody, yeah, it all right.”
‘In the woods, Tilson circled to a path that ran along a rise that separated a grove of slash pines from a stand of loblollies. A night bird dropped from a low branch and swept past us, and then the only sounds were Tilson’s heavy breathing and the crush of pine needles under his feet.
‘The path left the woods and cut across a low meadow. Tilson carried me through long grasses and over the tops of sand dunes, then into neighboring woods and back out into another meadow.
‘Tilson lived in a windowless shack under a pecan tree, and the ground around it was covered with dried husks and split shells. The shack was made of weathered wood that Tilson had mudded to fill the cracks. A padlock held the door shut.
‘“Hush now,” Tilson said, and set me down. He unlocked the door and hurried me inside.
‘The floor was made of wooden planks laid side by side, swept clean of dirt and dust. The bed – a mattress on a thin wooden frame – was covered with cotton sheets and a piece of carpet. Glass jars – holding stones, small branches, and dried leaves – lined one of the side walls. The facing wall was pasted over with the yellow sheets of an old newspaper. The air smelled of animal skins and rotting wood and cheap wax. Tilson said, “I come back tomorrow, maybe next day, maybe day after. You don’t make a sound, you understand? They water in the jug if you got to drink. They meal and biscuit in the tin. You got to piss or shit, you do it inside against the wall. We worry about that later. You understand? I come back when I can.” He went outside then, closed the door, and snapped the padlock on it, locking me inside.
‘He returned three nights later, at which point I was more than half insane with fear, filth, and hunger. I had wrecked the inside of the house so badly that the best that could have come to it was burning, but Tilson just helped me clean myself, fed me half of a sandwich, and, with neither anger toward me nor an apology for being away so long, led me away from the shack, across some fields, and to a road that reached from the interior of the island to the bridge. There, a brown sedan was standing on the shoulder with a woman at the wheel. “She take care of you, OK?” Tilson said, and pushed me toward the passenger door. “You keep you mouth shut. You understand? You do that for you daddy. And you never come back. You understand? You come back and someone got to die, and I think that someone be you.”
‘I asked, “Where is she taking me?”
‘“Far away, boy,” Tilson said. “Farther the better.”
‘The woman in the brown sedan was a cousin of Tilson’s mother, and she lived outside of Atlanta. Her name was Bessy Ross – “like the flag,” she said – and she was big-boned and diabetic and suffered from ulcers. She was tough, though, and when her neighbors asked what a sixty-year-old black, Southern woman was doing with an eight-year-old white boy, she let them know it was none of their damn business, and when whites on the bus or on the street looked at her with suspicion, she gave them a look that made them turn away in embarrassment or shame. She wasn’t loving toward me, but she was caring. I had never been to school, though Amon had taught me to read, so, after teaching me the basics of addition and subtraction, she found a place that would take me. After my second day, I told her, “The flag isn’t Bessy. It’s Betsy.”
‘“No, child,” she said. “They’ve got that wrong.”
‘She bought me good-enough clothes and fed me good-enough food. When I cried at night, she closed the door so I could have privacy.
‘She cleaned house and cooked meals for a divorced lawyer and her two sons, and on days when I had no school she brought me with her to the woman’s house. She put a broom or a dust rag in my hands and she didn’t complain when I left my work unfinished and played with the lawyer’s younger son, who was my own age. One evening, after she had finished cooking the lawyer’s dinner, the lawyer asked her to sit at the table with her and then said, “Now, Bessy, tell me about this boy.”
‘Bessy Ross shooed me out of the room, and for two hours she and the lawyer talked. After that night, I often caught the lawyer watching me as I swept the kitchen floor or played with the younger son. I learned fast. If nothing else, after living in the house with Amon and Kay, I’d figured out how to pay attention. I caught up with the other children in school, and when I was at the lawyer’s house, I copied her sons’ manners.
‘Then Bessy Ross got sick with cancer, and on a Saturday morning, two months after the diagnosis, the lawyer pulled up in her Audi and helped me carry my belongings to the trunk. “You’re going to live with us for a while as Miss Bessy takes care of herself and gets healthy,” she said. “Would you like that?”
‘I said I would.
‘Three weeks later, Bessy Ross died.
‘A careful lawyer would have turned me over to child welfare. But, like Bessy Ross, this lawyer was more interested in being charitable than careful. For the next nine years, I shared a bedroom with her younger son, Jimmy. On my last night on Black Hammock Island, I had slept in a windowless shack, and now I woke each morning when sunlight shined through a clean window in an air-conditioned house that smelled of furniture polish and lavender soap. Downstairs, the cook would be setting bacon and toast on the kitchen table, and a woman who I barely knew but who treated me more gently and kindly than anyone else I’d ever known would be reading the newspaper and drinking coffee. As if this was the way real people lived.
‘When the lawyer’s sons became teenagers, they turned wild, the way that kids with parents who are more generous than sensible sometimes do. They talked their mother into buying them a dirt bike, which they rode on a local trail. Once, while stoned, they jumped from their second-story roof over a tile patio into the deep end of their backyard pool. I took a hit from the joint and, closing my eyes, jumped from the roof into the air after them.
‘Neither of my brothers – that’s what I came to think of them as – went to college. Their interest in dirt bikes grew into a love of motorcycles, and, after some long arguments, the lawyer agreed to give them money to open a dealership, which, by the time that Jimmy turned twenty-two, had expanded into three dealerships and an offshoot repair garage.’
Outside, a heavy piece of metal slammed against the roof at the back of the house. Unless Paul had changed our plan, that would be a ladder.
Lexi and I listened. There was no more noise. Lexi asked, ‘Are the men outside the lawyer’s sons?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Jimmy and Robert.’
‘Who’s the man who drove you here?’ she asked.
‘Paul. A friend of mine.’
‘The woman?’ she asked.
‘Carol. I’m going to marry her,’ I said.
‘This is screwed-up,’ Lexi said.
The ladder scraped against the roof.
‘What are you going to do?’ Lexi asked.
‘What would you do?’ I said.
More scraping.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Yes, you do,’ I said. ‘And you think I’m right to do it.’
‘What about me?’ she asked. ‘And Cristofer?’
Footsteps went up the roof above us. Robert and Jimmy were climbing on to the house. If I punched through the plywood, the shingles, and the tar, I could have grabbed their ankles.
‘What are they doing?’ Lexi asked.
‘It’s moving day,’ I said.
‘What does that mean?’ she said.
Then, down inside the house, the front door slammed.
‘Are they coming in?’ Lexi asked.
‘No,’ I said. Not unless they were innovating.
They weren’t. Walter had gone out. In the yard, his .22 popped twice, three times, twice more. Then the heavier guns shook the house. The door slammed again. Walter was back inside.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Lexi asked.
‘Don’t you think I deserve it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not this.’
‘I’m doing it for you too,’ I said.
‘Don’t,’ she said.
The footsteps went down the roof. The ladder scraped. Then the house was quiet.
Lexi flipped on the flashlight and slid to the attic hatch. ‘I’m going down,’ she said.
I repeated what I’d said the first time we came to the attic. ‘You can’t tell Walter and Kay who I am.’
‘Or what?’ Lexi asked.
‘What will they do to me if they know?’ I said.
‘What will you do to us?’ she asked.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ I said.
‘Cristofer?’ she asked.
‘Never,’ I said.
‘Mom?’ she asked.
I turned my eyes away.
‘Walter?’ she asked.
I said, ‘What do you expect?’
‘Not this,’ she said.
‘You could help me,’ I said. ‘You should. Walter has hurt you. They both have.’
‘No,’ Lexi said.
‘Are Amon’s guns really gone?’ I asked.
She gave me a look that could have pitied me. ‘A long time ago,’ she said. ‘Mom made Walter dump them.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
She said, ‘In Clapboard Creek.’
I saw no reason for her to lie.
‘We’re defenseless,’ she said. ‘You can do whatever you want with us.’
I said, ‘You should help me. I’m your brother.’
‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said.