Where All Light Tends to Go

  Also by David Joy

  NONFICTION

  Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  Copyright © 2015 by David Joy

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Joy, David, date.

  Where all light tends to go / David Joy.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-18258-5

  1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Drug dealers—Fiction. 3. North Carolina—Fiction. 4. Appalachian Mountains—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.O947W54 2015 2014023349

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by David Joy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  For those with whom I share my morning coffee:

  Rudy, Cecil, and Clyde

  Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

  —CORMAC McCARTHY, Blood Meridian

  1.

  I hid the pickup behind a tangled row of pampas grass that had needed burning a good year or so before. The law never liked for folks to climb the water tower, but I hadn’t ever cared much for the law. I was a McNeely and, in this part of Appalachia, that meant something. Outlawing was just as much a matter of blood as hair color and height. Besides, the water tower was the best place to see graduation caps thrown high when seniors wearing black robes and tearful smiles headed out of Walter Middleton School one last time.

  Rungs once painted white were chipped and rusted and slumped in the middle from years of being climbed by wide-eyed kids looking to paint their names on the town. Those things that seemed as if they’d last forever never did. I didn’t even make it out of tenth grade, and maybe that’s why I hadn’t felt the need to scale that tower with britches weighed down by spray-paint cans. There was no need to cement my name. A name like Jacob McNeely raised eyebrows and questions. In a town this small, all eyes were prying eyes. I couldn’t show my face, didn’t want the problems and rumors that being down there would bring, but I had to see her leave.

  The grate platform circling the water tank had lost all but a few screws and curled up at the edges like a twice-read book. Every step I took shifted metal, but it was a place I’d stood before, a place I’d navigated on every drug I’d ever taken. With only a buzz from my morning smoke lingering, there wasn’t need for worries. I sat beneath green letters dripping a nearly illegible “FUCK U” across the front side of the tank, pulled a soft pack of Winstons from the pocket of my jeans, lit the last cigarette I had, and waited.

  The school I’d spent the majority of my life in seemed smaller now, though looking back it had never been big enough. I grew up twenty miles south of Sylva, a town that really wasn’t much of a town at all but the closest thing to one in Jackson County. If you were passing through, you’d miss Sylva if you blinked, and the place where I was from you could overlook with your eyes peeled. Being a small, mountain community that far away, we only had one school. So that meant that kids who grew up in this county would walk into Walter Middleton at five years old and wouldn’t leave until graduation thirteen years down the road. Growing up in it, I never found it strange to share the halls with teens when I was a kid and kids when I was a teen, but looking down on it now, two years after leaving for good, the whole thing was alien.

  The white dome roofing the gym looked like a bad egg bobbing in boiling water, the courtyard was lined in uneven passes from a lawnmower, and a painting of the school mascot, centered in the parking lot, looked more like a chupacabra than any bobcat I’d ever seen. To be honest, there wasn’t too much worth remembering from my time there, but still it had accounted for ten of my eighteen years. Surprisingly, though, that wasn’t disappointing. What was disappointing about that school, my life, and this whole fucking place was that I’d let it beat me. I’d let what I was born into control what I’d become. Mama snorted crystal, Daddy sold it to her, and I’d never had the balls to leave. That was my life in a nutshell. I took a drag from my last cigarette and hocked a thick wad of spit over the railing.

  I was watching a wake of buzzards whirl down behind a mountain when the side door cracked against the gymnasium brick. One kid tore out in front of the crowd, and even before he jumped onto the hood of his car, I knew him. Blane Cowen was the type to drink a beer and scream wasted. I’d tested him once back in middle school, brought him up here on the water tower to smoke a joint, and when his legs got wobbly and vertigo set in he decided awfully fast he didn’t want to play friends anymore. In a school filled with kids who swiped prescription drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets, Blane was the village idiot. But despite all that, I kind of felt sorry for the bastard, standing there, arms raised in the air as he dented in the hood of a beat-up Civic, no one in his class paying him a lick of attention while he howled.

  The parking lot that had seemed so desolate just a minute before was crawling now as friends hugged, told promises they’d never be able to keep, and ran off to parents who had no clue of who their children had become. I knew it because I’d grown up with them, all of them, and all of us knew things about one another that we’d never share. Most of us knew things that we didn’t even want to confess to ourselves, so we took those secrets with us like condoms, stuffed in wallets, that would never be used. I wanted to be down there with them, if not as a classmate,
then at least as a friend, but none of them needed my baggage.

  Not until she took off her cap did I recognize her in the crowd. Maggie Jennings stood there and pulled her hair out of a bun, shook blond curls down across her shoulders, and kicked high heels from her feet. The front of her graduation gown was unzipped, and a white sundress held tight to her body. I could almost make out her laugh in the clamor as her boyfriend, Avery Hooper, picked her up from behind and spun her around wildly. Maggie’s mother hunched with her hands covering her face as if to conceal tears, and Maggie’s father put his arm around his wife’s waist and drew her close. A person who didn’t know any better would have thought them the perfect American family. Live the lie and they’ll believe the lie, but I knew different.

  I’d known Maggie my whole life. The house she grew up in was two beats of a wing as the crow flies from my front porch, so there hadn’t been many days of my childhood spent without her by my side. About the first memory I can recall is being five or six with pants rolled up, the two of us digging in the creek for spring lizards. We were tighter than a burl, as Daddy’d say. In a way, I guess, Maggie and me raised each other.

  Back before her father found Jesus, he’d run off on a two- or three-week drunk with no one seeing hide nor hair of him till it was over. Her mother worked two jobs to keep food on the table, but that meant there wasn’t a soul watching when Maggie and I’d head into the woods, me talking her into all sorts of shit that most kids wouldn’t have dreamed. I guess we were twelve or so when her father got saved and moved the family off The Creek. Folks said he poured enough white liquor in the West Fork of the Tuckasegee to slosh every speckled trout from Nimblewill to Fontana, but I never figured him much for saving. A drunk’s a drunk just like an addict’s an addict, and there ain’t a God you can pray to who can change a damn bit of it.

  But Maggie was different. Even early on I remember being amazed by her. She’d always been something slippery that I never could seem to grasp, something buried deep in her that never let anything outside of herself decide what she would become. I’d always loved that about her. I’d always loved her.

  We were in middle school when the tomboy I grew up with started filling out. Having been best friends, when I asked Maggie out in eighth grade, it seemed like that shit they write in movies. We were together for three years, a lifetime it had felt like. What meant the most to me was that Maggie knew where I’d come from, knew what I was being groomed into, and still believed I could make it out. I’d thought my life was chosen, that I didn’t really have a say in the matter, but Maggie dreamed for me. She told me I could be anything I wanted, go any place that looked worth going, and there were times I almost believed her. Folks like me were tied to this place, but Maggie held no restraints. She was out of here from the moment she set her eyes on the distance. If I ever did have a dream, it was that she might take me with her. But dreams were silly for folks like me. There always comes a time when you have to wake up.

  I was proud that she was headed to a place I could never go, and I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket to text her, “Congrats.”

  When Avery let go, Maggie jumped into her father’s arms, bent her legs behind her with bare feet pointed into the sky. Her father buried his head into his daughter’s hair, pretended for a split second that he’d had something to do with how she turned out, then placed her on the ground for her mother to kiss. Maggie stood there for a moment, rocked back and forth before she turned away. She glanced behind her to say something as she ran off to Avery’s truck, but her parents had said their good-byes. In a way, I think they knew she was already gone. They knew it just as much as I did. A girl like that couldn’t stay. Not forever, and certainly not for long.

  2.

  Jack pines crowded the property in all but a tiny sliver carved out a long time ago to make room for a house. The old pine plank cabin Mama lived in had always sat at an angle just right enough to hold off folding in a strong wind. The house was truly unfit for any sort of long-term living, but she’d been there most of my life. Boards once pitched dark had lightened with years and rotted with rainwater that held this place damp year-round. Transparent plastic I’d put over the windows to keep her from freezing a few winters back hung loose and torn from the frames, the plastic now opaque and dotted with mildew.

  I wasn’t old enough to remember the day Daddy sent her there. The way he told it, she was stealing crank and spent most of her time climbing around the peter tree. So he sent her to this place. Loved her too much to give her nothing, but giving her anything at all squared things so he’d never have to love her again.

  I don’t recall going over there much when I was a kid. I don’t remember seeing her but once or twice a year when those I’m-going-to-set-this-right moods hit her. It was always just me and Daddy, but I was older now, old enough to take the good and the bad for what it was worth and never any more. Besides, I just needed a place to kill a few hours and a safe spot to dodge the law while I got stoned.

  The front screen door was propped open with a tin bucket half filled with blackened sand and smashed-out cigarette butts, and I could see straight through the house. I heard her before I saw her: yelling profanities, breathing heavy, snorting and sniffing. From the sounds of her, a line of dope had just lit her afire, and, while it may have seemed wild to anyone on the outside, I knew I was lucky to catch her at the beginning rather than the end.

  She rammed her shoulder hard against the doorway into the kitchen as I came into the house. Her eyes wide, she seemed to look right through me. Her jaw racked and her teeth chomped on some imaginary thing she could never get chewed enough to swallow. When her eyes pulled back and settled onto me, she went to scratching her arms. “Where the hell did you come from?” She meant that question wholeheartedly, as if maybe I’d just manifested out of an Appalachian summer.

  “Just pulled up. Needed a place to hide out for a bit.”

  “Well, you’re just in time.”

  “Just in time for what?”

  “Just in time to help me find that goddamn lightbulb.” Her head yanked to the side, and she scurried into the back of the house, but I didn’t follow.

  I plopped down on a ratty couch within falling distance from the front door, foam pushing through tears in the cushions. I reached into my pocket and took out what was left of a sack of weed, just shake now, but still enough to roll a pin. There was a half-empty pack of JOB rolling papers propped against a tarnished brass lamp on the side table. I pulled a paper from the sleeve, creased a fold in the 1.5, and dumped in buds that had been ground to powder. I was already twisting it tight and licking it sealed when Mama stumbled back into the front room.

  “Jacob! Jacob, you not going to help me look?”

  “Look for what?”

  “The goddamn lightbulb, I done told you I need the goddamn lightbulb.”

  I lounged back on the couch, struck a lighter to the end of the joint, pulled hard, and offered it toward her for a drag.

  “Have you lost your ever-fucking mind, Jacob? You know I don’t smoke that shit and you can’t smoke it in here, you got to go outside if you’re going to be smoking that shit ’cause the last thing I need is the goddamn law.”

  My mother was the definition of rode hard and put up wet. Her eyes were bulbous, her face sunken in, just a thin layer of skin stretched tight over bones. Hair that was thick and brown in old pictures strung greasy down her neck now. She was nothing like those pictures anymore, though she was exactly how I’d always remembered. She was absolutely pitiful. Before I could even respond, she was off again hunting that lightbulb, and I just loafed there and toked till a run crept down the seam of the joint. Licking a little spit onto the tip of my finger, I dabbed the fire, kept it burning even, and hit it again.

  I slid my cell phone out of my pocket and checked to see if Maggie had written me back. She hadn’t. I knew she’d respond eventually because she always did,
just never right away. Maggie hadn’t cut me out entirely, but there seemed to be few words left between us, or words too heavy for either of us to say. She loved me too much to let me go and I loved her too much to drag her down. That type of love doesn’t work. I recognized it before she did, I guess, so instead of hurting her for a lifetime, I broke her heart right then and there, and now she was gone. Probably in another world, I thought, and leaned back into the couch smoking on that joint to find a universe of my own.

  I could hear Mama in the back cussing, drawers being ripped off rails and slamming against the floor, and only when there was nothing else to throw did she return. “Jacob, what the fuck did you do with that goddamn lightbulb?”

  I laughed and coughed and spit on words that couldn’t make it out of my mouth quick enough to stop me from choking. “I didn’t do anything with a lightbulb.” She had me gassed, but there was always uneasiness in laughing at my mother. Even while I was laughing, there was an uncomfortable feeling that settled in the pit of my stomach. She’d given birth to me. She was blood. Those types of things are deserving of love, and I did love her. Since I was a kid, I’d carried those few moments when she came around sober like treasure. I’d always hoped she’d become a real mother. But with time, I realized that someone can’t give what they don’t have. She was what she was, an addict, and there was nothing that could be said or done to change her. Death was her only savior.

  Staring intensely, her eyelids seeming to roll back even further on eyes the size of taw marbles, she swept her hair back against her neck, trotted over to the couch, and cannonballed down beside me. “Give me a hit off that shit.”

  “You didn’t even want me to smoke inside, and now you want to hit it?” I leaned away from her and took a few quick drags off the roach that was already burning my fingertips.

  Her jaw still racked like she was trying to saw logs with dull teeth, and that serious look never left her face. “What the fuck do you mean, I didn’t want you smoking inside?”