“Get him back away Fred! That boy getting loose… means a fucking bullet…”
Fred pulled away and held onto Ben like he might crush the life from his body. Small, hitching whimpers came from the giant as he wept.
“Fucking Christ!” Clay muttered. He extended the gun, then pulled it back, switched it to his left, and shook his right hand out hard enough to crack the knuckles. “Fucking Christ!” he repeated and tried again.
Amanda breathed deeply and worked to maintain control. She judged he didn’t have much longer before the play was abandoned. It was clear to anyone with eyes enough to see that he couldn’t carry through.
“One last time!” Clay shouted. “I want Jake! One of you knows where the fuck he is! You give him the fuck up, and this is all over!”
Don’t you fucking say anything, willed Amanda. Look at him, he’s falling apart!
“Right NOW!”
His hand shook even worse, jigging through the air so violently that the slide rattled against Otis’s scalp. Otis squeezed his eyes shut and hunched his shoulders.
Clay’s eyes drew to the right toward the thrashing boy as though by magnetism and he found he had to jerk back to center before they completed their circuit. He couldn’t hold his hand still, and he felt light-headed. He studied the back of Otis’s head, the heaving of his back as he sucked in air like a drowning man, and dropped the pistol to his side.
“What the hell are you doing?” he thought.
He stuffed the pistol into its holster, slumped and numb, and muttered, “You fuckin’ people…”
He felt simultaneously exhausted, abused, and grateful.
Shaking his head at the lot of them, he turned and walked toward the steps of the cabin porch, wiping the sweat of his hands on the legs of his jeans.
A gunshot crashed behind him, caving in the air like a cannon, and in the aftermath, he heard screams and wails subsumed beneath the ringing of his ears. He whirled on his heel and paused, forcing himself to reconcile the image of Otis spilled along the dirt. The body was laid over on its left side and what little remained of the head stretched several yards beyond, pointing out toward the Connex homes like a red arrow.
Clay looked over at Fred; saw the man now down on his knees, eyes closed against Ben’s soundless screaming. Clay wondered a moment if he’d gone deaf somehow, then realized shortly after he could hear the shouts and wails of the others, and understood the boy had screamed himself voiceless.
Pap slipped his .44 back into its holster and shook his head sadly.
“Pa… Pap? What the fuck did you do?”
“It’s alright, Baws, it’s—”
“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DOOOOO?”
He rushed at Pap, howling in dismay, and the sight of him coming on so alarmed the cowboy that his mouth dropped open in a naked expression of hurt and betrayal. Clay saw these aspects in Pap’s face, hated him all the more for their presence, and backhanded him fully across the jaw. Pap collapsed to the dirt like a felled redwood, now crying himself. The sounds of his distress were light and high, unnervingly like the sobs of a squeaking child.
“GODDAMN YOU, PAP, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO!”
He held his hands up over his head to guard against further punishment, but none came. His torso jiggled under the force of his hitching sobs, and he choked out, “It’s… it’s o-okay! You don’t ha-ha-have to do ’er alone, Baws! It shouldn’t always be on you…!”
“Oh, Jesus…” Clay moaned. He’d gone faint and weak through the knees; found his ass firmly planted on the steps of the porch a second later with no memory how he came to be so. “You stupid bastard, Pap,” he said. “You… you stupid, goddamned son of a bitch…”
The women out there wailed on. The son and the man who held him wailed on; the worst by far. Clay lurched to his feet, stumbled up the steps—having to grip the rail in both hands as he went—and collapsed through the front door. Barreling down the hallway, into the back office, he threw himself onto the sofa, heaving.
A moment later he’d retrieved the bottle of whiskey from the bureau, spat the cork into the room’s corner, and spilled at least three fingers to the floor before shattering the tumbler against the stones of the fireplace and pulling directly from the bottle’s mouth. Soul kiss or CPR, he couldn’t decide which analogy fit the best.
The room spun about his head, and his hands shook so horribly that he jammed them under his armpits in a sorry attempt at control.
He swiped again at his eyes, and the breaths he gasped came seasoned with whimpering.
Barbara’s cabin was the least upset out of the homes nestled in the valley, owing to its diminutive size and the fact that she’d adopted in her declining years a philosophy similar to that of the late George Oliver. Specifically, she had very little of anything at all; her needs were few and far between. The single-room dwelling qualified as less than a studio apartment, with the footboard of her single bed encroaching well past the boundary of the kitchen and the two-foot-square card table shoved into the only windowed corner. Beyond these things, she had room for a rug, and an antique semainier scavenged from town dominated the south wall. There’d been little for Clay’s men to topple in the joint and, considering her heartbroken eyes seemed always to follow them in their duties, it may have been they failed to pursue the task with the enthusiasm necessary to drive the intended point home.
She removed her single place setting from the table—arranging its constituent parts upon the basin—folded the legs, and laid it on the bed. Then, laying a blanket down over the rug, she directed the remains of Otis to be set thereupon. Oscar worked away at their rapidly growing burial ground with pick and shovel, opening up a fresh cradle in the earth, while Barbara tended to her own work in the cabin, lowering ponderously to her knees as her joints protested in cracking, irate fury, and passed a sponge over the remains.
She’d stripped him, of course, offering a hand towel in preservation of his dignity, and washed him neck to toe, giving focus to and exploring each smallest part, learning the details of his form to the same degree of certainty as a lover. And love him she did, washing away dirt and gore in equal measure, allowing the tears to run where they may. Settling back to lean against the bedframe when the strain on her spine or the strain on her heart became too great.
In the steamer trunk at the foot of her bed there was the remainder of a bolt of dark cloth; the greater part of which she’d used to sew a dress for Rose at spring’s open. She cut a square yard from the fabric and used it to bind up the dangling remains of Otis’s head, the left side having been burst apart by the slug of the .44 magnum. Of his eyes, only the right remained, milked over like hazy plastic, and she covered this and bound it all together before she could think too long about the diminished aspect of the body; how it looked nothing close to human, let alone the man she’d known.
Outside on the common ground, a woozy Gibs kicked piles of dirt over the bits of organic matter missed by the shovel. He’d tried earlier to assist in the digging of the grave, only to be sent away after bending double behind a tree to wretch violently following the fifth swing of his pick.
Barbara dressed the body in the cleanest of Otis’s clothes that they could find and, when the grave was dug, Amanda came to tap on her door. Tom stood close behind along with Fred and Samantha. Their faces all held the pallor of those grown used to such proceedings. They entered Barbara’s home, retrieved Otis, and conveyed him away.