Where All Light Tends to Go Read online

  “That’s what you said. You just told me I had to smoke outside.”

  “I didn’t ever say that shit.” She scooted closer. “Give it here.”

  I bent forward, rested my elbows on my knees, and held the roach out to her. Mama picked it from my fingers like some cranked-out chimp culling fleas, and I stood up from the couch to let her lay with it. She sucked back on what little bit of paper was left to burn, and all of a sudden that son of a bitch shot into her throat, and she went to choking till I was sure her eyeballs were going to pop out of her head. I couldn’t stop laughing and fell into the doorframe on my way to the bathroom while she coughed and gagged and tried her damnedest to curse me without enough air to start a blow-and-go.

  There were tears streaming from my eyes by the time I made it in front of the bathroom mirror. I pulled a bottle of eyedrops out of my pocket, tilted my head back, squeezed a bead into each eye, and stared at my reflection. Seeing a smile spread across my face lumped that uneasy feeling into my throat. I shouldn’t have found how bad-off she was funny, but with a lifetime of disappointment, it was the only way to handle it. Smiles outweighed tears. Laughter outweighed pain.

  I turned on the faucet and wiped a palm full of water across my face. Daddy needed to see me in an hour, and he never liked handling business when I was stoned. My green eyes began to clear, and I brushed my thick brown hair with my wet hand. Daddy never cared that I smoked. He didn’t care that I popped pills. He drank and smoked and was known to eat a few painkillers when the mood hit him. The only drug off-limits was crank, and seeing what it’d done to my own mother, I’d never wanted anything to do with it anyways. But the line of work my father ran demanded a clear head, so I had to appear collected.

  When I headed into the main room, Mama was in the kitchen, one foot standing in the seat of a dining room chair, the other foot propped up onto the back. She leaned out over the table to get her hands on the lightbulb, her head constantly shaking hair away as she twisted the bulb free. Her shirt lifted up and her belly hung out: loose skin, no meat, and stretch marks still visible after all these years from where she’d carried me. Just when I was about to speak, the chair rocked and she slapped down out of the air onto the floor. Her head smacked the laminate tile hard, but it didn’t faze her. She popped up to her knees and scanned the room, her jaw still chewing, and I didn’t say a word. I left her there on the floor like a bad joke, a bad joke that’s really not funny at all, but that a man is forced to chuckle through until the awkwardness fades.

  3.

  The Walkers belted out long, jowl-stiffening howls as I pulled up the drive. It had never seemed to matter much that I’d been the one to fill their feed bowls each morning. Those dogs still snarled and bit at the tires every time I drove up to the house. Everyone in the country knew Daddy had the meanest line of hounds to ever run bear or hog in these parts. He’d had offers from far-off places like Maine and Wisconsin to have his hounds stud, but that never interested him.

  Dogs were tied strategically across the property so that anyone making their way onto McNeely land would have to know a dance consisting of precisely thirty-four two-steps, fourteen ball changes, and a chassé to get anywhere near the door without being mauled. In the old days, Daddy used it as a tactic to ensure that only the customers in the know ever made it up to the window for late-night sales. Nothing ever really moved through the house anymore, and hadn’t in years. The business was too big for that nowadays, but I guess he kept the hounds out of habit more than anything.

  I’d been around crank my whole life, so it had never been a drug, only money. When I was young, Daddy would put it to me like we were carrying on a family tradition, a matter of course that started with moonshine runs in chopped cars to make enough bread to survive the winter. It didn’t seem so bad when he put it like that. Outlawing was just a way of earning a buck. By the time I was nine or ten, Daddy had me helping him break down big bags of crystal into grams, never anything smaller, and I got a cut just like most kids got allowance. That’s what he told me anyways, though he kept the money for “safekeeping,” and merely upped the number in a little notebook for the day I’d cash out. Birthdays brought on new responsibilities, and by the time I’d hit tenth grade, I was staying up half the night working for him. I went to school to keep child services off his back, but slept through every hour right up until the day I turned sixteen, walked out of Walter Middleton, and never looked back.

  From the porch, I could hear Conway Twitty’s “I’d Love to Lay You Down” and the drone of some mechanical buzzing that sounded like a bug zapper. I walked into the house, and a cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the room around my waist. Daddy was bent over a folding chair with his back exposed and some long-haired Hispanic man was digging into Daddy’s skin with a tattoo gun. Neither of them looked up. The only one who did was a skinny blonde Daddy had been seeing, who glanced me over before focusing back on the tattoo.

  I didn’t speak but walked over to the coffee table and grabbed someone’s pack of Winstons. I flipped a cigarette into my lips and fell back onto the sofa beside the blonde. From where I sat, I could see that the Hispanic was halfway through spelling out that skinny blonde’s name in cursive between Daddy’s shoulder blades. He was covered in tattoos for the most part, and in the patchwork of my father, nearly all of them had started off as a woman’s name at one point or another, only to be covered by something more permanent down the road.

  “What in the fuck are you putting her name on your back for?” I leaned into the sofa and lit the cigarette with my eyes still stoned and half closed.

  “Shut the fuck up, Jacob!” Josephine hollered, but none of the others even looked up.

  The tattoo gun shut off, the Hispanic man patted my father on the shoulder, and Daddy straightened up and reached for his cigarettes. The Hispanic had snubbed her name short at Jose, and I started to laugh, the joint from earlier still heightening humor. “Who the hell is José?”

  “It says Josie, dipshit, that’s your daddy’s nickname for me, but what do you know? Ain’t like you can spell. You never even finished school.”

  Daddy cut eyes at her to shut her mouth, and she knew to shut it fast. It was a mouth he’d paid for after all, so I reckon it gave him that right. Her teeth were damn near rotted out the first time she came around, but Daddy said he saw something in her, put fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of work into those gums just to have her smiling with teeth like corn pearls.

  “From over here that looks like J-O-S-E, and far as I know, that spells José.” I glanced at the Hispanic and his stare widened. Part of him looked like he was about to laugh, but then there was this fear I could see way back in him like he just might piss himself.

  “J-O-S-E?” Daddy turned around to look the Hispanic man square. That fear I’d seen suddenly shot up to the front of the Hispanic man’s eyes.

  “Son of a bitch, that dumb fucking spic left out the i,” Josephine squealed. She was boiling now, her face getting flushed as she stood up with legs that ran from ankles to heaven in short shorts, and a tank top that she was all but pouring out of. For a split second, I thought I saw what Daddy had seen in her, but then she opened that mouth again. “Charlie, you better not let him do this to me! You better not let some spic ruin what we have.”

  The Hispanic man watched her with eyes spread, and I knew if I handed him a knife at that moment, he’d stab that old loudmouth bitch till there wasn’t any sound left to be made but gurgling.

  Daddy stayed calm like he always did, and there was something a bit more frightening about a man that could stay at ease while doing the sorts of things he was known to do. He never raised his voice and never raised his hand, just turned to the Hispanic man and asked him if he could fix it.

  “Hell no, he can’t fix it!” Josephine squealed. She started to open her mouth again, but Daddy duct-taped her lips closed with nothing more than a glance.

  “T
he two of y’all just get the fuck outside, so I can have a talk with Jacob.” Daddy rose and carefully rolled his T-shirt down over his back. “You’re going to fix this when I’m done talking to the boy.”

  The Hispanic man stood first, laying the tattoo gun down on a side table before sidling toward the door. Josephine, on the other hand, stuck around for a minute, rose and hung around my father’s neck like a yanked-loose necktie with corn pearl teeth strung at the knot. She kissed him on his neck, and he paid her little mind. Josephine strutted toward the door and glared at me as if I was responsible for the misspelling of her name. I smirked, and it ate her up.

  Daddy walked over to the record player—even now in 2009 “nothing sounded as good as vinyl”—and cranked the knob on the speaker dial till Twitty filled the room. He always turned the music loud when it was time to talk business so as no one outside of the conversation could catch a word without ears pressed close to our lips. He dragged the folding chair in front of me and straddled the chair backward.

  Even to me Daddy had that look about him like he’d seen and done things that glazed over any bit of light that had ever been in his eyes. All that was left was what folks from war called that “thousand-yard stare,” and though he was my father and hadn’t ever done me wrong in any sort of way deserving of my cower, I was always a little fearful when he spoke.

  He lit a fresh cigarette with the one still burning and leaned close so that I was certain to hear him. Dark hair was slicked and parted across his brow, and divots from teenage acne freckled the flanks of his face. His nose had a bit of a crooked hook to it, but it was the acne scars that drew a man’s eyes, the way his face seemed pitted. “You’re going to go to the camp tonight.” Afternoon beers swerved along his words. “You’re going to make sure it happens just like I need it to happen.”

  I knew what he was talking about, so I just nodded. I reckon in the old days when Daddy first started the business, he didn’t have any choice but to dirty his own hands, but that time had long since passed. The story had started when he made some small-time connection with a mid-level crystal dealer from somewhere over in Tennessee, back when it was one-percenters responsible for most of the trade. Back then they’d run an ounce or two across state lines in the crankcases of their motorcycles. For a long time Daddy stayed pretty low on the ladder, but connections came about and he latched on. Now he no longer touched anything that came or left Jackson County. He just directed traffic with low-spoken conversations in music-filled rooms. Methamphetamine was a living, breathing body in Appalachia. The dope came from Mexico, but Daddy was the heart of the body here, pumping the blood through every vein in the region. Though it all started here, by the time that crystal made it into the hands of local crankers, it had been passed all over the mountains a dozen or more times to lap back.

  What this problem boiled down to, though, was the way that Daddy handled the money. Once it went from being just enough to get by on to big money, he’d had to come up with a way to make all those dollars look legal to prying eyes. That’s how he came up with the idea for McNeely’s Auto Repair. In a tight-knit scheme where every service offered cost four or five times that of any normal mechanic, Daddy laundered the money into something legal. Every dollar that came back to him had a receipt. Everyone who brought in a car to be serviced was on the payroll, and the majority of cars being worked on had been purchased at one time or another by my father. They paid him in his own money.

  When legitimate folks brought in a car, they left outraged at estimates. When some rookie deputy got the gall to try and figure out what was going on, he got the same price gouge as anyone else. A few of those deputies even forked it over to try and get close, but nothing ever came of it. Some of those bulls were on the payroll too, and the folks on the payroll were tight-lipped. They just brought in the cars and paid to have them serviced, and in return Daddy kept food on their tables when winters killed everything from field grass to dreams. The one thing he’d never done was allowed anyone cranked-out to get near the business. That was up until now, and now that one person was threatening it all.

  “You understand what I’m asking, Jacob?”

  I nodded.

  “This ain’t something you can just nod about, goddamn it. I need to hear you fucking tell me that you understand what I need done.”

  “You want me to head out to the camp with the boys and take care of Ro—”

  Daddy slapped me hard against the side of the head. “Don’t say his fucking name! Don’t you ever say his fucking name! You don’t know his name, you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good.”

  That was all that was said about it and that’s the way it had always been. Daddy only said enough to ensure that what needed to be done got done, because any added details might lead to confusion. There was no room for confusion in a business like this.

  Daddy hoisted himself from the chair and wandered to the front door. He opened the door, stretched his arms wide, and yawned as he headed onto the porch. The Walkers were still howling, noisy even over the blare of “She Thinks I Still Care” from the speakers. Though the sun would still be shining for another hour or so in the flat land, here on The Creek it was already casting an orange haze through the open doorway as sunlight melted behind the mountains. I took the pack of smokes from the coffee table and lit another. The three of them stayed out on the porch, Daddy silencing the other two so the Hispanic and Josephine didn’t start cutting each other. I just let the record play.

  4.

  The camp sat way back in a dark, damp holler between Walnut Creek and Ellijay. Though a full moon had kept the road nearly lit enough to ride without headlights for most of the drive, soon as the pavement ended and dusty gravel swept into the mountains, there wasn’t an ounce of moonlight that made it through the trees. The old logging roads saw little upkeep anymore, and it wasn’t a place many ventured without a good four-wheel-drive and a chainsaw.

  I’d been there hundreds of times through the years, and in the days before rich folks went to preserving this and preserving that, Daddy and I would spend many a night at the camp during open seasons for hog and bear. That’s really all the camp was good for, keeping folks dry and from freezing when the weather snuck in, but it was hardly good enough for that anymore. The shack was dilapidated and caving, just skeletal remains of curved gray planks and rusted tin.

  I could tell the boys were already inside. A rectangle of thin light around the door and a few sparse beams shooting through holes in the roof were all that shone in the darkness. I made my way down to the camp on a path cut through laurels. The sound of a small stream bubbled up from behind the shack, but I could hear them talking inside.

  Robbie Douglas was cinched down with wire thin as guitar strings binding his arms and legs to a metal folding chair. Blood ran from his forearms where the wire had sliced clean when he, at one point or another, tried to yank free. He was sitting there calm as a beat dog now, his shirt off and bare chest riddled with burns where the boys had pressed their cigarette butts. Despite his body giving out on him, Robbie’s mouth was in a constant struggle to detach itself from his jaw. Bug-eyed and vicious, his stare took on a wildness I’d only ever seen in a coon’s eyes after a night spent in a trap.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Jeremy spoke first. It was just him and his brother, Gerald, there in the room with Robbie. The brothers spent their days working for Daddy at the shop. Both of them were certified mechanics to make the whole deal look pretty official. Really, though, there’d never been much of anything official about Jeremy Cabe aside from a few mug shots. He was a skinny little cuss with cold blue eyes, a mustache that never seemed to grow ripe sprigging over his lips. Those wiry, wide-eyed types often proved the most dangerous men, and that’s what it was about Jeremy Cabe that made me uneasy. He always had a glint in his eye like if you didn’t believe what he was saying he’d prove it right tha
t fucking second.

  “Tree must’ve fallen after you came through. I had to saw my way in here,” I said.

  “This son of a bitch gave us a hell of a time! Spit all over my work shirt and scratched the hell out of Gerald’s eye!” Jeremy looked down at his navy blue work shirt and rubbed at a smeared white splotch that looked like a cum stain above his name patch.

  I could barely distinguish Gerald’s face as he stood in the far corner of the room behind the chair. A small lantern was set on a makeshift table beside Jeremy and a 315,000-candela spotlight was propped on the floor and angled directly into Robbie’s eyes. Gerald stood in a shadow cast by Robbie, but I could still make out a dark red line running sharply from the corner of his eye down into his beard. He was the type of man that wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and other than those blue eyes, the brothers looked absolutely nothing alike. Gerald was as big around as a forked hemlock and always wore a set of suspenders clamped to his britches with a T-shirt just short enough to allow his belly to fold over his belt buckle. He kept a tangled mat of hair stuffed under a Joy Dog Food trucker cap, and had a grisly beard wiring from his face. But as intimidating as he was, it was Jeremy you had to keep an eye on.

  “Calm the fuck down, Jeremy. Looks like y’all handled yourselves just fine without too much blood to show for it.”

  “Calm down hell! If it wasn’t for your daddy, we’d have this son of a bitch buried down deep in an old asbestos mine or somewhere! I be damned if anybody’s going to be calm!”

  “Judging by the cigarette butts on the floor and these burns all up and down his chest, I’d say you’re about even.” I tried to sound tough and calm, and as the words came out of my mouth, I thought I’d done a pretty damn good job. Daddy wanted me to be a man and it was things like this that made you one. Truth was I hadn’t ever taken part in anything like this. Truth was, shit like this didn’t come up too often. For the most part business was smooth, and folks had enough respect or fear or whatever you call it for Daddy to never let it come to this. I was scared shitless. “Has he said anything yet?”