Louis Youngman stepped through the living room in bare feet, the floorboards creaking under him like a bear’s growl, so much louder in the dim light of dawn than at any other time of day. There was a racket still lingering in his jaws and teeth, as if he’d been pummeled about the face in his sleep. He ran a finger through this mouth, half expecting to find it covered in blood when he brought it out.
The grind of his brother’s snoring seeped in from the opposite wall, rhythmic and intrusive. He did not want to share this time with Vinnie. There was so little of it for himself anymore, these moments of quiet solitude. Outside in the driveway, the streetlights washed his cruiser in a gentle coat of ashy blue. The sky was only now beginning to break. A single pickup truck passed by with barely a hum.
On the ridge of the sofa was his uniform, exactly where he’d laid it the night before, the star barely winking where the five-thirty sun caught hold of the tines. There were wrinkles in that shirt that he ought to have ironed out, but then wrinkles and creases, and dust, seemed to be the way of Louis’s world. Some days, he felt like it was all he could do to swing those stubborn legs of his out of bed and walk across that cold oak floor to see what the previous night had left for him.
“Lou.” Vinnie’s voice, dropping like a dead branch.
Louis froze, his bare feet still waking up. Tiny needles. “Go back to sleep,” he called out. He went on by his brother’s bedroom, then past the dining room table that hadn’t been used for anything other than bills and paperwork in years, and the framed photos he hardly noticed anymore. There were, instead, the scattering of handwritten signs taped up as constant guideposts for Vinnie—directions to close the door and stay inside, to leave the plugs and outlets alone. Phone numbers to call and reminders that no one other than Delores Jackson was allowed inside the house while Louis was gone.
The bulb over the mirror was lousy and fluttered like a moth, but it cast enough light for Louis to shave without the risk of cutting an artery. He leaned in and opened his mouth wide, and ran his finger in there again, looking over his teeth. They were one of the few sturdy things in him left, he thought. And as he stood there, gaping like some trout left on the creek bed, the dream came back to him.
He had been drinking beers with Vinnie at a roadhouse, some place that probably existed in the world somewhere but nothing that sparked a memory for Louis in any real way. Vinnie had reached over to take the bottle from Louis’s hand. “It’s busted, Lou,” he said, his walrus-mustache working over his lip. And sure enough, the thing was jagged halfway down the neck. Louis fished a finger into his mouth and began removing spires of glass, blood washing over his hand as he drew them out.
“That ain’t a good look on you,” Vinnie said to him.
“It sure isn’t,” Louis answered. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, and the molars broke loose like pebbles from a mud bank. Vinnie’s eyes gawked at him in horror, and it was then that Louis woke up, wrapped in an ache like he’d been socked in the jaw, his teeth ringing from back to front.
There were times when this happened more often than others, these dreams where, at some point, his mouth came apart in pieces. Dr. Syd told him it was all connected to his teeth, from the sleep grinding, and the unreasonable stress he wasn’t bearing up well enough under.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Louis started, knocking his hip against the sink edge.
His brother stood there in the bathroom doorway, yellowed long johns sagging from stumpy hips, shock of white hair sticking out all over like a dandelion head.
“Jesus, Vinnie,” he said. “You look like you just hatched out of an egg.”
Vinnie squinted into the glare of the bare bulb, that divot in his forehead catching a smoky shadow. “I gotta pee,” he said.
“That’s fine.” Louis backed up and let his brother past him. “I’m gonna head on into the station,” he said. “Do my shower there.”
Vinnie leaned over the bowl, the stream pungent and unsteady.
“Hit the bowl, Vin.” The noise of water, finally.
“What time are you home?”
“It’s next to the clock,” Louis said. It was always there, on the yellow strip of paper he’d taped to the wall.
Vinnie did himself up and moved past Louis without so much as a flush, and made his way back to his bedroom. He was older than Louis by four years, but it had been a long time since Louis felt like a kid brother, since Vinnie’s mind started to get lazy. He stopped in the doorway and waited for Vinnie to find his place under the blanket.
“Be nice to Delores,” he said. “They won’t be sending anyone else out.”
“Don’t they have somebody white down there they can send?”
Louis picked at the paint on the molding. “Don’t say that, Vinnie. That’s ugly. Be lucky they have anyone at all who’s willing.” He looked over at his uniform draped over there like it was his own body that lay over the back of the sofa, flat, empty, and lifeless. “Delores Jackson is a good woman.”
Vinnie snorted and rolled over onto his side. “She’s a pain in the ass.”
Louis set his jaw, and the electricity reached from his teeth into his eyes. “You’re a pain in the ass,” he said. And then he closed Vinnie’s door harder than necessary, and went to find his shoes, in the hopes that he might get himself to the station before the rest of Stevens County was awake.