Dealbreak
Mark Jacobs
Garland wasn’t picking up. Mason, a responsible man who never failed to answer his calls, swallowed his aggravation with a mouthful of coffee. The Dawes brothers were working together on the Carwiller roof over in P.E. County. Mason was a skilled roofer. He could handle the job on his own if he had to, that wasn’t the point. Garland needed the rhythm of regular work, even if it wasn’t carpentry. You wanted normal in your life – Garland swore he did, and Mason believed him – you got up in the morning, you hoisted your hammer. By normal, Mason meant no drugs.
In the truck, he switched on the engine, switched off Kickin’ Country, dialed Garland’s number again. No answer. He was tempted to head over to Carwiller’s on his own. J.B. Carwiller was a captious old man who grumbled in his beard, criticizing every move Mason made. Mason was ready to be done with the job. Instead, he drove to his brother’s place.
Which was not really his brother’s. The double-wide and the ten acres it sat on belonged to the last woman he had lived with before his problems drove her out. Only Garland had what it took to make a woman come up with the idea of surrendering her home by choice. Joanna Farley was staying with her sister in Briery hoping that having a place to spend the night would do something to stabilize the man she loved. She understood what Mason understood. Stable, Garland Dawes would win the world.
Joanna’s ten acres lay on rolling ground at the summit of Baker Hill Road. Geographically speaking, it was as though the hilltop had been scooped out by divine hands to make some green and comfortable space for the trailer now sitting a quarter mile back at the end of a gravel drive Garland used to be good at maintaining.
The door was open. Likely Garland was out back pissing in the woods, smoking a cigarette, watching the August morning come to itself.
The toilet in the trailer was clogged. There had been a time when his brother would have tackled the job before breakfast.
Mason parked his truck expecting Big Cat to come barreling at him from somewhere, teeth bared and howling up a storm. Strangely, there was no sign of the Catahoula hunting dog Garland cherished the way he would cherish a child if he had one. Close as the brothers were, Big Cat never took to Mason. In fact he never took to anybody. A one-man dog if ever was. Jealous was one way of putting it. Mean was another. Garland got a kick out of the dog’s unfriendly attitude and encouraged it.
The younger Dawes brother went into the trailer half-thinking he would take a plunger and fix the toilet himself, never mind the rebuke that implied.
Maybe he should have expected it. He didn’t. On the floor in front of the couch, on Joanna’s braided rug, his brother’s body.
Garland lay on his side, crumpled in the permanent aftermath of pain. Mason knew he was dead before he knelt to feel for a pulse. The cold flesh he touched made him sick to his stomach. Tears burned his eyes. Through the blur he noticed an open medicine bottle on the end table next to the couch. Fentanyl. Half a dozen of the damnable gray-green pills lay scattered on the table top. Mason picked one up. He threw it at his brother’s dead face. It stuck under his eye, in the hollow of his cheek.
Now Mason understood. Big Cat was gone, having smelled the death on Garland. Spooked, he lit out through the open door.
Limbs trembling, stomach turning over, Mason sank into the upholstered chair across from the couch. He folded his hands in his lap in an instinctive gesture of respect. He looked at Garland, whose slate-blue eyes were open. The Dawes eyes. Mason had them, too. Striking, people always said about those eyes. The only decent thing Daddy ever did for his offspring, was what Garland liked to say.
Throughout the long slide downhill, Mason’s brother had stayed handsome. He still looked like the shortstop he once was, compactly muscled. He had a hero’s face on which death now conferred an old-fashioned nobility, an expression Mason would not see again on a human face.
Deal over, Mason heard himself say out loud. His voice sounded funny.
He had to let people know, Momma first and foremost. He would do what he had to do. Steel himself, drive to her place, tell her Garland was gone, catch her when she collapsed. But not yet. It was not his brain that was stuck, it was his will. For the life of him he could not get to his feet.
A memory. Garland was sixteen and never minded his kid brother tagging along. The older boy had a girlfriend but not yet a license. The girlfriend was seventeen and had the use of her daddy’s Ford 250. She let Garland drive, she didn’t mind about the license. The three of them skipped school, taking the diesel tank of a truck out to Copperhead Bottom on a chilly morning in late fall. The cold drew copperheads out of the swampy ground on either side of the road. They made their way onto the macadam and lay there sunning in snaky bliss.
Except Garland had a pistol. They took turns aiming for the snakes’ beady evil heads. The girlfriend was a pretty good shot. Mason shot indifferently. But Garland never missed. Way out there in the middle of nowhere not a copperhead lived to tell his skinny grandkids about escaping Garland Dawes’ deadeye prowess.
A perfect morning, or as close to perfect as Mason knew how to conceive. Then, leaving the bottom, Garland drove to a scrap yard on the edge of Briery, around which a fence did nothing to hide the high hills of dead vehicles and other metal objects that might or might not be worth something, recycled. Stay here, he told them. This won’t take a minute. Without knocking, he went into the one-room shack that served as an office.
Mason never knew what it was his brother put into his body that day. Alcohol, or a drug of some kind. He didn’t know whether it spiked him up or cast him down. What he did know was what he had always known. Garland – stronger, smarter, better at everything than he – needed protection.
It fell to Mason to do the protecting. That was how the deal began, although when it began was impossible to say. There was never a time when Mason was not aware of his agreement with God. Take care of Garland, and I’ll make up the difference. I will make two good decisions for every bad one of his. I will ask nothing special, be nothing special. I will seek no favors. In exchange – he had grown into consciousness already locked into the deal – God would grant Garland the exemption he needed to be himself.
It had worked, more or less, until an unknown hour last night when his brother hauled himself out of bed, hunted up the fentanyl that in his druggy cunning he had stashed in a handy place, and took the number of pills required to kill him.
Finally Mason was able to stand. He went to the bedroom and stripped a sheet from the bed. He covered Garland with the sheet. With great revulsion he forced himself to close his brother’s eyes. As he did, cold burned his fingertips.
~ ~ ~
At the Spring Branch Baptist churchyard, the funeral was worse than ten bad dreams. The unforgiving wet heat of Southside August came down like a cloudburst as they stood alongside the gaping hole at the bottom of which lay the casket guilty of bearing away a fallen shortstop.
Rev. Jenny, a thin Baptist married to a beefy Presbyterian who pastored his own church, was reading from Isaiah. Mason was familiar with the verses, but the words sounded off to him. The harder he listened, the more garbled they became until she was spouting nonsense, making a joke of the ceremony. He looked around the crowd of family and friends gathered to bury his brother. Nobody else seemed to be having any difficulty understanding the pastor. It was him, not Rev. Jenny. Collecting himself, he took a deep, slow breath.
Then the vultures. There had to be forty of them, black and turkey both, riding the thermals with a winged grace that belied their supreme ugliness. Something big must have died in a pasture. A deer, or else maybe a cow the landowner had yet to get to. Forty was no coincidence. It was a Biblical number. The death of Garland Dawes needed heavy ballast.
All those swirling carrion birds spooked Phoebe Ray Dawes, who was crazy with grief over the loss of her first-born son. During the service the tall woman with red elbows slumped and fell to the ground twice. Mason let his sisters pick her up. Standing with Louisa on his arm, he kept his distance, adding his mother’s hurt to his own. Finally they had to get Phoebe Ray away from the sight of the casket, so they pretty much dragged her to the parking lot and laid her out in the back seat of her car where she lay hyperventilating for the longest time. Sure enough, the left-front tire was flat as a pancake, and no obvious puncture. An omen, not that they needed one.
After the service the mourners gathered in the fellowship hall for coffee and cake and reminiscing. Garland’s sisters had put together one of those slide shows and memorabilia exhibits that everybody did for the dead nowadays.
Calvin was there, late as always, even for his son’s funeral. His hair was uncombed and his eyes were bleary, doing his best to make out that his suffering was bigger than anybody else’s. Never mind that he had been out of the family picture for twelve years, and when the Dawes became aware of Garland’ drug problem Calvin was nowhere to be found.
The heat was building in Mason, watching his daddy act out a pathetic little show. Louisa saw what was happening. She came over and took Mason’s arm and said something quiet that put a quick end to his outrage. No drama about the woman. That was one of the things he liked about her. He liked brown hair. He liked blue eyes. He liked an easygoing temperament and the ability to read people and the kind of faith that never spoke its own name. Put it all together and it added up to the ring on her finger, a date on the calendar, a hope of happiness.
“I’ve had enough,” he told her.
“All right. What you gonna do?”
“Thinking about going to work.”
“On the day your brother is put in the ground?”
He shrugged. “I’ll call you later.”
She kissed him goodbye, and he left the hall as soon as he decently could. But did not escape.
“Mason.”
It was Rev. Jenny. Up close, she made Mason think of a scarecrow, floppy with straw hair and a tied-together look. There was intelligence behind the green eyes.
“I won’t ask you if you’re all right,” she told him. “That would be dumb. It’s just, I had the feeling, I don’t know, I thought you might want to talk.”
She said all the right things, and she said them well, heart and head interlocking. The loss of a loved one, especially someone as close as Garland was to Mason, tested Christian faith. God must want it that way. Time and prayer, faith and fellowship, would not remove the pain, but they would allow Mason to feel in his bones and in his soul the power of God’s love.
“Thank you, Rev. Jenny.”
“I’m not reaching you, am I?”
“It’s okay.”
“Call me,” she said.
He said he would, knew he wouldn’t. The deal was broken. It was not that he had suddenly quit believing in God. Okay. Then what was it?
He drove to the trailer. He had a key and went inside feeling like a detective investigating the scene of a crime. The dishes in the sink were dirty. He washed them.
In the bathroom, clipped to the mirror was a piece of paper with a couple of lines in his brother’s hand. It was baseball terminology. Cleanup, outfield assist, base on balls, stand-up double. Why were they there? The words hit Mason hard, an insult to fresh injury. Before Garland started going downhill, the Pirates were wanting to sign him to play on their Altoona team. Double A was just the beginning. Nobody in Southside Virginia ever played shortstop like Garland Dawes. Sitting in the bleachers, watching him make a gravity-defying catch: no happiness as big as that was likely to come Mason’s way any time soon.
His eyes teared, and he remembered the last time he was here in the trailer. Garland had developed a diabolical preference for the drug that finally killed him, and Mason found a plastic bag with twenty tabs of fentanyl jammed behind a stack of DVDs. This when supposedly his brother was cleaning up and he and Joanna were going to have a baby and he was starting to work again. He was an able carpenter and never lacked for work when he was able to get himself to the job site. You lying son of a bitch, Mason had hollered at the man he had worshipped and wondered at his whole life, and stomped out.
Now, he could not bring himself to leave the trailer. He wandered into the bedroom and lay on the bed, where the sheets seemed to have taken an impression of his brother’s shape. A Garland halo. Mason lay on the halo. He fell asleep, waking half an hour later in a nightmare of sensation. He was in chains. The chains burned his flesh. Monsters clawed at him, drawing blood. Pain was the only god that mattered. Even fear bowed down to him. He sat up, shaking off the feelings. Somehow, the halo had been impregnated with fentanyl.
He went outside hoping Big Cat would show, but before he had a chance to tromp the woods looking, here came Joanna’s little red Jetta up the drive. She stepped out of the car looking like the best of yesterday. There was something sexily out of date about Joanna. She wore her blonde hair in pigtails. Her cutoff jean shorts looked like last summer at the beach. Her bra straps were skinny blue. Her eyes were red from grief.
They hugged, and Mason felt her volatility.
“I couldn’t bear seeing the casket,” she said.
“I know that, Joanna. It ain’t nobody blames you.”
That was not true, and she knew it.
“I was looking for Big Cat,” he told her.
“Ain’t seen him. Course I ain’t been out here in some time.”
“I guess you’ll move back in, now.”
She shrugged. “It don’t matter. Does it.”
“If you look around inside, chances are you’ll find some drugs.”
“I do, I’ll flush the shit out of ‘em.”
Then she came on to him, right there in the yard in front of the trailer. This was the occasion of deep surprise in Mason. Garland had never lacked for beautiful women. At his best, at his worst, at every point between the extremes, attractive women put themselves in his way knowing it was harm’s way, too. Mason, for his part, had never been that kind of lucky.
“Things are different now,” she told him.
“What do you mean, different?”
“All those years, you were the good son because Garland was the wild child. Everybody loved him, didn’t they? But they depended on you. Any more, you don’t got to make your choices based on what your big brother done or failed to do.”
She guided his hand to her breast, and the unfamiliar blindness of surrender took him down. She kissed him. He smelled her unperfumed scent and kissed back. But he pulled himself up short. He shook his head.
“It ain’t right.”
“Who says? Come on, Mason, it ain’t no harm taking a little consolation where a body can.”
He was not up to a word battle with her. He would lose. Losing meant a betrayal of Louisa, and that he would not countenance, never mind the persuasive case being put by his erect dick.
“I had a deal,” he told her.
“What kind of deal?”
Maybe he could say to Joanna what he had not said to Rev. Jenny. How he felt, his deal with God to protect Garland having come to nothing. No. He could not.
“Never mind.”
He gave her the key to the trailer. “I’ll gather his stuff and take it with me.”
“Okay.” She kissed him chastely on the cheek.
When she left, he sank onto the stoop. He was an active man attuned to work and duty, and never in his life had lassitude so thoroughly overcome him. He felt the slack in his bones, felt the gristle turn to glue. The afternoon heat, which had not yet peaked, pressed down on him.
Memory was a lake. Sometimes you fell in.
Last game of the season, Garland’s senior year at Broadhope County High School. The stands were full. Everybody wanted to see Garland Dawes go out in style. Well, he did; did he ever. In the seventh inning he hit a grand slam homer that put the game out of reach for the visitors. That was fine, it was sublime, it was what everybody craved seeing. But those who truly loved the game valued more the two double plays he set up and executed, one in the fifth and the other in the sixth, moving like grace itself. Total awareness of the field of play, coupled with command of his body. As the stands emptied out, ‘legend’ was on people’s lips.
Mason had his driver’s license by then. Phoebe Ray had given him the car, told him to make sure their daddy made it to the game. Easier said than done. Mason looked everywhere but did not locate his father, whose child-support shortcomings went way beyond the financial.
A hunch. That was all it was. After the game, Garland disappeared in a car driven by his girlfriend of the time, a ferocious, dark-haired beauty named Donna Elizabeth who laughed at all the wrong things, didn’t mind a bit that every girl in the school hated her. She appeared to thrive on their contempt. Mason followed them at a prudent distance.
Seven miles out of town to a spot along the Powhatamie River where lovers liked to pull off and get to know each other and drinkers tested their limits. Nature enthusiasts were always organizing cleanup campaigns to get rid of the litter left by the lovers and the drinkers.
A dirt trail, just wide enough for a single vehicle, cut a crooked path through the woods. At the head of the trail, Mason pulled to the side and went forward on foot.
The river bank was high. The spot was official, so the Commonwealth forest service kept the brush and saplings down. For a good hundred yards you had a scenic view of the water under a canopy of grandfatherly trees.
Right there, on the bank of the Powhatamie, Garland sat with his shirt off, his beautiful shoulders bare, facing the sullen brown river. Behind him stood Donna Elizabeth holding his black leather belt. Mason went closer until he had an unobstructed view and could hear them talk.
Donna Elizabeth brought the belt down on his brother’s back. Garland flinched but took it. Blood broke the surface of the skin, and a welt quickly formed. She struck him again. Words went back and forth between them, oddly calm, disturbingly intimate. Later, Mason could not recall a single thing that was said. They were speaking a private language that was beyond his power of comprehension.
Mason stood there watching. She hit Garland five times before they agreed it was enough. Then he made his way back up the trail to the family car and drove home with a secret that could not be told or understood or forgotten while he walked the earth. Donna Elizabeth had left Broadhope County that same summer. Nobody ever heard a word from or of her. Mason did not have the courage to ask his brother what became of her.
Memory was a lake. Sometimes you fell in. You thrashed, but you could not keep your head above water.
On the stoop, Mason had that prickly sensation that came from being watched. Big Cat. The handsome black hound was standing on the edge of the woods, looking at him.
Mason stood up and called to him. No luck. The dog didn’t move. In Big Cat’s eyes, the man at the trailer was a trespasser, responsible for the death of his master.
Mason did not want the dog, would not keep him. But he could not just leave the animal out in the country to starve or turn feral. He walked slowly, through high grass that Garland hadn’t gotten around to mowing, in the direction of the dog. Big Cat let him get close enough to see how skinny he looked, the ribs showing. After three days in the woods he was bedraggled.
“Come on, Cat. You want something to eat? I’ll rustle something up.”
The dog bared his teeth and snarled at him. For a moment, Mason thought he was going to lunge, maybe take a bite out of his leg. But he turned tail and disappeared into the trees.
Food. That was the solution. He had to lure Big Cat close enough to leash him. Mason went back to the trailer. He hunted up the leash. In the kitchen, he opened the door of the refrigerator. Bare. Garland liked taking drugs better than he liked eating. In the freezer there was a frozen hunk of beef. Mason pulled it out.
There was no microwave to thaw the rock-hard hunk, so he put a skillet on the stove and began to sear it. The meat did not have to be cooked, just soft enough the dog could sink its teeth in. The skillet smoked. He looked for oil, butter, margarine, but found nothing to come between meat and metal.
He splashed on some water and turned down the heat. He went to the door. Big Cat was back. Out of the woods now, alert in the grass, facing the trailer, waiting to see what happened next.
Mason tossed the leash onto the stoop. He went back inside. Turned off the burner, picked up the skillet, carried it outside and dumped the beef onto the ground in front of the stoop. Dogs were known for their sense of smell, weren’t they? He sat.
Big Cat sniffed and took a step toward the trailer. He was not yet persuaded.
Here it was. Maybe it did not matter that he was unable to say the words to anybody, though maybe it did. He was a man with a hunk of hard meat trying to coax his dead brother’s dog back to a borrowed trailer. God had not abandoned Mason, but he had let him down. Perfect love and perfect emptiness, it turned out, could occupy the same human space. It was a falling out. Faith did not enter in. Hurt did, though. Hurt was a flood, and nobody could hold his breath long enough. For the first time, he felt the power of his brother’s absence. Out in the high grass, Big Cat took a vigilant step in his direction.
Mark Jacobs
Garland wasn’t picking up. Mason, a responsible man who never failed to answer his calls, swallowed his aggravation with a mouthful of coffee. The Dawes brothers were working together on the Carwiller roof over in P.E. County. Mason was a skilled roofer. He could handle the job on his own if he had to, that wasn’t the point. Garland needed the rhythm of regular work, even if it wasn’t carpentry. You wanted normal in your life – Garland swore he did, and Mason believed him – you got up in the morning, you hoisted your hammer. By normal, Mason meant no drugs.
In the truck, he switched on the engine, switched off Kickin’ Country, dialed Garland’s number again. No answer. He was tempted to head over to Carwiller’s on his own. J.B. Carwiller was a captious old man who grumbled in his beard, criticizing every move Mason made. Mason was ready to be done with the job. Instead, he drove to his brother’s place.
Which was not really his brother’s. The double-wide and the ten acres it sat on belonged to the last woman he had lived with before his problems drove her out. Only Garland had what it took to make a woman come up with the idea of surrendering her home by choice. Joanna Farley was staying with her sister in Briery hoping that having a place to spend the night would do something to stabilize the man she loved. She understood what Mason understood. Stable, Garland Dawes would win the world.
Joanna’s ten acres lay on rolling ground at the summit of Baker Hill Road. Geographically speaking, it was as though the hilltop had been scooped out by divine hands to make some green and comfortable space for the trailer now sitting a quarter mile back at the end of a gravel drive Garland used to be good at maintaining.
The door was open. Likely Garland was out back pissing in the woods, smoking a cigarette, watching the August morning come to itself.
The toilet in the trailer was clogged. There had been a time when his brother would have tackled the job before breakfast.
Mason parked his truck expecting Big Cat to come barreling at him from somewhere, teeth bared and howling up a storm. Strangely, there was no sign of the Catahoula hunting dog Garland cherished the way he would cherish a child if he had one. Close as the brothers were, Big Cat never took to Mason. In fact he never took to anybody. A one-man dog if ever was. Jealous was one way of putting it. Mean was another. Garland got a kick out of the dog’s unfriendly attitude and encouraged it.
The younger Dawes brother went into the trailer half-thinking he would take a plunger and fix the toilet himself, never mind the rebuke that implied.
Maybe he should have expected it. He didn’t. On the floor in front of the couch, on Joanna’s braided rug, his brother’s body.
Garland lay on his side, crumpled in the permanent aftermath of pain. Mason knew he was dead before he knelt to feel for a pulse. The cold flesh he touched made him sick to his stomach. Tears burned his eyes. Through the blur he noticed an open medicine bottle on the end table next to the couch. Fentanyl. Half a dozen of the damnable gray-green pills lay scattered on the table top. Mason picked one up. He threw it at his brother’s dead face. It stuck under his eye, in the hollow of his cheek.
Now Mason understood. Big Cat was gone, having smelled the death on Garland. Spooked, he lit out through the open door.
Limbs trembling, stomach turning over, Mason sank into the upholstered chair across from the couch. He folded his hands in his lap in an instinctive gesture of respect. He looked at Garland, whose slate-blue eyes were open. The Dawes eyes. Mason had them, too. Striking, people always said about those eyes. The only decent thing Daddy ever did for his offspring, was what Garland liked to say.
Throughout the long slide downhill, Mason’s brother had stayed handsome. He still looked like the shortstop he once was, compactly muscled. He had a hero’s face on which death now conferred an old-fashioned nobility, an expression Mason would not see again on a human face.
Deal over, Mason heard himself say out loud. His voice sounded funny.
He had to let people know, Momma first and foremost. He would do what he had to do. Steel himself, drive to her place, tell her Garland was gone, catch her when she collapsed. But not yet. It was not his brain that was stuck, it was his will. For the life of him he could not get to his feet.
A memory. Garland was sixteen and never minded his kid brother tagging along. The older boy had a girlfriend but not yet a license. The girlfriend was seventeen and had the use of her daddy’s Ford 250. She let Garland drive, she didn’t mind about the license. The three of them skipped school, taking the diesel tank of a truck out to Copperhead Bottom on a chilly morning in late fall. The cold drew copperheads out of the swampy ground on either side of the road. They made their way onto the macadam and lay there sunning in snaky bliss.
Except Garland had a pistol. They took turns aiming for the snakes’ beady evil heads. The girlfriend was a pretty good shot. Mason shot indifferently. But Garland never missed. Way out there in the middle of nowhere not a copperhead lived to tell his skinny grandkids about escaping Garland Dawes’ deadeye prowess.
A perfect morning, or as close to perfect as Mason knew how to conceive. Then, leaving the bottom, Garland drove to a scrap yard on the edge of Briery, around which a fence did nothing to hide the high hills of dead vehicles and other metal objects that might or might not be worth something, recycled. Stay here, he told them. This won’t take a minute. Without knocking, he went into the one-room shack that served as an office.
Mason never knew what it was his brother put into his body that day. Alcohol, or a drug of some kind. He didn’t know whether it spiked him up or cast him down. What he did know was what he had always known. Garland – stronger, smarter, better at everything than he – needed protection.
It fell to Mason to do the protecting. That was how the deal began, although when it began was impossible to say. There was never a time when Mason was not aware of his agreement with God. Take care of Garland, and I’ll make up the difference. I will make two good decisions for every bad one of his. I will ask nothing special, be nothing special. I will seek no favors. In exchange – he had grown into consciousness already locked into the deal – God would grant Garland the exemption he needed to be himself.
It had worked, more or less, until an unknown hour last night when his brother hauled himself out of bed, hunted up the fentanyl that in his druggy cunning he had stashed in a handy place, and took the number of pills required to kill him.
Finally Mason was able to stand. He went to the bedroom and stripped a sheet from the bed. He covered Garland with the sheet. With great revulsion he forced himself to close his brother’s eyes. As he did, cold burned his fingertips.
~ ~ ~
At the Spring Branch Baptist churchyard, the funeral was worse than ten bad dreams. The unforgiving wet heat of Southside August came down like a cloudburst as they stood alongside the gaping hole at the bottom of which lay the casket guilty of bearing away a fallen shortstop.
Rev. Jenny, a thin Baptist married to a beefy Presbyterian who pastored his own church, was reading from Isaiah. Mason was familiar with the verses, but the words sounded off to him. The harder he listened, the more garbled they became until she was spouting nonsense, making a joke of the ceremony. He looked around the crowd of family and friends gathered to bury his brother. Nobody else seemed to be having any difficulty understanding the pastor. It was him, not Rev. Jenny. Collecting himself, he took a deep, slow breath.
Then the vultures. There had to be forty of them, black and turkey both, riding the thermals with a winged grace that belied their supreme ugliness. Something big must have died in a pasture. A deer, or else maybe a cow the landowner had yet to get to. Forty was no coincidence. It was a Biblical number. The death of Garland Dawes needed heavy ballast.
All those swirling carrion birds spooked Phoebe Ray Dawes, who was crazy with grief over the loss of her first-born son. During the service the tall woman with red elbows slumped and fell to the ground twice. Mason let his sisters pick her up. Standing with Louisa on his arm, he kept his distance, adding his mother’s hurt to his own. Finally they had to get Phoebe Ray away from the sight of the casket, so they pretty much dragged her to the parking lot and laid her out in the back seat of her car where she lay hyperventilating for the longest time. Sure enough, the left-front tire was flat as a pancake, and no obvious puncture. An omen, not that they needed one.
After the service the mourners gathered in the fellowship hall for coffee and cake and reminiscing. Garland’s sisters had put together one of those slide shows and memorabilia exhibits that everybody did for the dead nowadays.
Calvin was there, late as always, even for his son’s funeral. His hair was uncombed and his eyes were bleary, doing his best to make out that his suffering was bigger than anybody else’s. Never mind that he had been out of the family picture for twelve years, and when the Dawes became aware of Garland’ drug problem Calvin was nowhere to be found.
The heat was building in Mason, watching his daddy act out a pathetic little show. Louisa saw what was happening. She came over and took Mason’s arm and said something quiet that put a quick end to his outrage. No drama about the woman. That was one of the things he liked about her. He liked brown hair. He liked blue eyes. He liked an easygoing temperament and the ability to read people and the kind of faith that never spoke its own name. Put it all together and it added up to the ring on her finger, a date on the calendar, a hope of happiness.
“I’ve had enough,” he told her.
“All right. What you gonna do?”
“Thinking about going to work.”
“On the day your brother is put in the ground?”
He shrugged. “I’ll call you later.”
She kissed him goodbye, and he left the hall as soon as he decently could. But did not escape.
“Mason.”
It was Rev. Jenny. Up close, she made Mason think of a scarecrow, floppy with straw hair and a tied-together look. There was intelligence behind the green eyes.
“I won’t ask you if you’re all right,” she told him. “That would be dumb. It’s just, I had the feeling, I don’t know, I thought you might want to talk.”
She said all the right things, and she said them well, heart and head interlocking. The loss of a loved one, especially someone as close as Garland was to Mason, tested Christian faith. God must want it that way. Time and prayer, faith and fellowship, would not remove the pain, but they would allow Mason to feel in his bones and in his soul the power of God’s love.
“Thank you, Rev. Jenny.”
“I’m not reaching you, am I?”
“It’s okay.”
“Call me,” she said.
He said he would, knew he wouldn’t. The deal was broken. It was not that he had suddenly quit believing in God. Okay. Then what was it?
He drove to the trailer. He had a key and went inside feeling like a detective investigating the scene of a crime. The dishes in the sink were dirty. He washed them.
In the bathroom, clipped to the mirror was a piece of paper with a couple of lines in his brother’s hand. It was baseball terminology. Cleanup, outfield assist, base on balls, stand-up double. Why were they there? The words hit Mason hard, an insult to fresh injury. Before Garland started going downhill, the Pirates were wanting to sign him to play on their Altoona team. Double A was just the beginning. Nobody in Southside Virginia ever played shortstop like Garland Dawes. Sitting in the bleachers, watching him make a gravity-defying catch: no happiness as big as that was likely to come Mason’s way any time soon.
His eyes teared, and he remembered the last time he was here in the trailer. Garland had developed a diabolical preference for the drug that finally killed him, and Mason found a plastic bag with twenty tabs of fentanyl jammed behind a stack of DVDs. This when supposedly his brother was cleaning up and he and Joanna were going to have a baby and he was starting to work again. He was an able carpenter and never lacked for work when he was able to get himself to the job site. You lying son of a bitch, Mason had hollered at the man he had worshipped and wondered at his whole life, and stomped out.
Now, he could not bring himself to leave the trailer. He wandered into the bedroom and lay on the bed, where the sheets seemed to have taken an impression of his brother’s shape. A Garland halo. Mason lay on the halo. He fell asleep, waking half an hour later in a nightmare of sensation. He was in chains. The chains burned his flesh. Monsters clawed at him, drawing blood. Pain was the only god that mattered. Even fear bowed down to him. He sat up, shaking off the feelings. Somehow, the halo had been impregnated with fentanyl.
He went outside hoping Big Cat would show, but before he had a chance to tromp the woods looking, here came Joanna’s little red Jetta up the drive. She stepped out of the car looking like the best of yesterday. There was something sexily out of date about Joanna. She wore her blonde hair in pigtails. Her cutoff jean shorts looked like last summer at the beach. Her bra straps were skinny blue. Her eyes were red from grief.
They hugged, and Mason felt her volatility.
“I couldn’t bear seeing the casket,” she said.
“I know that, Joanna. It ain’t nobody blames you.”
That was not true, and she knew it.
“I was looking for Big Cat,” he told her.
“Ain’t seen him. Course I ain’t been out here in some time.”
“I guess you’ll move back in, now.”
She shrugged. “It don’t matter. Does it.”
“If you look around inside, chances are you’ll find some drugs.”
“I do, I’ll flush the shit out of ‘em.”
Then she came on to him, right there in the yard in front of the trailer. This was the occasion of deep surprise in Mason. Garland had never lacked for beautiful women. At his best, at his worst, at every point between the extremes, attractive women put themselves in his way knowing it was harm’s way, too. Mason, for his part, had never been that kind of lucky.
“Things are different now,” she told him.
“What do you mean, different?”
“All those years, you were the good son because Garland was the wild child. Everybody loved him, didn’t they? But they depended on you. Any more, you don’t got to make your choices based on what your big brother done or failed to do.”
She guided his hand to her breast, and the unfamiliar blindness of surrender took him down. She kissed him. He smelled her unperfumed scent and kissed back. But he pulled himself up short. He shook his head.
“It ain’t right.”
“Who says? Come on, Mason, it ain’t no harm taking a little consolation where a body can.”
He was not up to a word battle with her. He would lose. Losing meant a betrayal of Louisa, and that he would not countenance, never mind the persuasive case being put by his erect dick.
“I had a deal,” he told her.
“What kind of deal?”
Maybe he could say to Joanna what he had not said to Rev. Jenny. How he felt, his deal with God to protect Garland having come to nothing. No. He could not.
“Never mind.”
He gave her the key to the trailer. “I’ll gather his stuff and take it with me.”
“Okay.” She kissed him chastely on the cheek.
When she left, he sank onto the stoop. He was an active man attuned to work and duty, and never in his life had lassitude so thoroughly overcome him. He felt the slack in his bones, felt the gristle turn to glue. The afternoon heat, which had not yet peaked, pressed down on him.
Memory was a lake. Sometimes you fell in.
Last game of the season, Garland’s senior year at Broadhope County High School. The stands were full. Everybody wanted to see Garland Dawes go out in style. Well, he did; did he ever. In the seventh inning he hit a grand slam homer that put the game out of reach for the visitors. That was fine, it was sublime, it was what everybody craved seeing. But those who truly loved the game valued more the two double plays he set up and executed, one in the fifth and the other in the sixth, moving like grace itself. Total awareness of the field of play, coupled with command of his body. As the stands emptied out, ‘legend’ was on people’s lips.
Mason had his driver’s license by then. Phoebe Ray had given him the car, told him to make sure their daddy made it to the game. Easier said than done. Mason looked everywhere but did not locate his father, whose child-support shortcomings went way beyond the financial.
A hunch. That was all it was. After the game, Garland disappeared in a car driven by his girlfriend of the time, a ferocious, dark-haired beauty named Donna Elizabeth who laughed at all the wrong things, didn’t mind a bit that every girl in the school hated her. She appeared to thrive on their contempt. Mason followed them at a prudent distance.
Seven miles out of town to a spot along the Powhatamie River where lovers liked to pull off and get to know each other and drinkers tested their limits. Nature enthusiasts were always organizing cleanup campaigns to get rid of the litter left by the lovers and the drinkers.
A dirt trail, just wide enough for a single vehicle, cut a crooked path through the woods. At the head of the trail, Mason pulled to the side and went forward on foot.
The river bank was high. The spot was official, so the Commonwealth forest service kept the brush and saplings down. For a good hundred yards you had a scenic view of the water under a canopy of grandfatherly trees.
Right there, on the bank of the Powhatamie, Garland sat with his shirt off, his beautiful shoulders bare, facing the sullen brown river. Behind him stood Donna Elizabeth holding his black leather belt. Mason went closer until he had an unobstructed view and could hear them talk.
Donna Elizabeth brought the belt down on his brother’s back. Garland flinched but took it. Blood broke the surface of the skin, and a welt quickly formed. She struck him again. Words went back and forth between them, oddly calm, disturbingly intimate. Later, Mason could not recall a single thing that was said. They were speaking a private language that was beyond his power of comprehension.
Mason stood there watching. She hit Garland five times before they agreed it was enough. Then he made his way back up the trail to the family car and drove home with a secret that could not be told or understood or forgotten while he walked the earth. Donna Elizabeth had left Broadhope County that same summer. Nobody ever heard a word from or of her. Mason did not have the courage to ask his brother what became of her.
Memory was a lake. Sometimes you fell in. You thrashed, but you could not keep your head above water.
On the stoop, Mason had that prickly sensation that came from being watched. Big Cat. The handsome black hound was standing on the edge of the woods, looking at him.
Mason stood up and called to him. No luck. The dog didn’t move. In Big Cat’s eyes, the man at the trailer was a trespasser, responsible for the death of his master.
Mason did not want the dog, would not keep him. But he could not just leave the animal out in the country to starve or turn feral. He walked slowly, through high grass that Garland hadn’t gotten around to mowing, in the direction of the dog. Big Cat let him get close enough to see how skinny he looked, the ribs showing. After three days in the woods he was bedraggled.
“Come on, Cat. You want something to eat? I’ll rustle something up.”
The dog bared his teeth and snarled at him. For a moment, Mason thought he was going to lunge, maybe take a bite out of his leg. But he turned tail and disappeared into the trees.
Food. That was the solution. He had to lure Big Cat close enough to leash him. Mason went back to the trailer. He hunted up the leash. In the kitchen, he opened the door of the refrigerator. Bare. Garland liked taking drugs better than he liked eating. In the freezer there was a frozen hunk of beef. Mason pulled it out.
There was no microwave to thaw the rock-hard hunk, so he put a skillet on the stove and began to sear it. The meat did not have to be cooked, just soft enough the dog could sink its teeth in. The skillet smoked. He looked for oil, butter, margarine, but found nothing to come between meat and metal.
He splashed on some water and turned down the heat. He went to the door. Big Cat was back. Out of the woods now, alert in the grass, facing the trailer, waiting to see what happened next.
Mason tossed the leash onto the stoop. He went back inside. Turned off the burner, picked up the skillet, carried it outside and dumped the beef onto the ground in front of the stoop. Dogs were known for their sense of smell, weren’t they? He sat.
Big Cat sniffed and took a step toward the trailer. He was not yet persuaded.
Here it was. Maybe it did not matter that he was unable to say the words to anybody, though maybe it did. He was a man with a hunk of hard meat trying to coax his dead brother’s dog back to a borrowed trailer. God had not abandoned Mason, but he had let him down. Perfect love and perfect emptiness, it turned out, could occupy the same human space. It was a falling out. Faith did not enter in. Hurt did, though. Hurt was a flood, and nobody could hold his breath long enough. For the first time, he felt the power of his brother’s absence. Out in the high grass, Big Cat took a vigilant step in his direction.
