Jacob looked into the grinning mirror image and his muscles tensed to bring the bottle down in a smashing arc. But, as always, his self-hatred faltered when it counted most. The bottle slipped from his fingers and bounced off the packed dirt.
“Why?” Jacob said through clenched teeth.
His twin brother looked down at the liquor bottle. “Since when did upstanding citizens start drinking five-dollar bourbon straight from the bottle? I thought that junk was for white trash like me.”
“What are you doing here?” Jacob repeated.
“This is the ‘Town That Wells Built,’ ain’t it? If a man can’t return to his ancestral home, where else can he go?” Joshua gunned the engine. “What do you think of my new ride?”
“What’s the idea of stalking me?”
“Hey, lighten up, Jake. Still got that little problem with paranoia? I thought you saw somebody about that.”
“Fuck you, Josh.”
“You’re as pissed off as a snake in duct tape. But get over it, because we got business. Family business.”
Jacob wanted to tear himself away, to run for the safety of the woods, because this threat was bigger and sharper and more dangerous than a homicidal car. But those intense hazel eyes mesmerized him and melted the years away. His lungs hurt, and he realized he’d been holding his breath. “I’ve got nothing to say to you. Go away.”
“This ain’t like blowing out the candles on our birthday cake together. Just because you make a wish don’t mean it comes true.”
Wish me. The night of the fire. “You don’t belong here anymore.”
“We came up from the same dark hole, Jakie Boy.” Joshua’s breath was fetid and thick, mingling with the car exhaust. “And I been in the hole a long, long time. Gets lonely down there. But I guess you’re figuring that out for yourself.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“No, because all of it’s already mine. You was just holding it for me.”
Now that the initial shock had passed, Jacob could see the small differences between him and Joshua that only a few people would notice, the subtle marks of time and gravity. Joshua had a nearly invisible scar above his right eyebrow. Joshua had never tried to control his alcoholism, so the broken blood vessels beneath the skin of his face were more apparent. His teeth were also more yellow and uneven than Jacob’s, the result of different eating habits and lack of dental care. But the rest of the features would fool anyone short of a well-trained detective. Joshua even had the same hair length and density of stubble, as if he’d been observing Jacob’s slide into self-destruction and had made an intentional effort to copy it.
Not that Joshua had ever needed a role model for this particular type of decline. He’d always been inspired on his own. He’d stripped himself of the Wells taint and moved into a rat-infested mobile home just across the border in east Tennessee. While Jacob had been staging his decadent poet’s act in college, Joshua was piloting charter bass boats on Watauga Lake for thirty bucks a day, a cooler of beer at his feet.
“You got your share,” Jacob said. “Now go away.”
“I had a piece,” Joshua responded with a smirk. “That pie tastes so good, I want the whole thing now.”
With an effort of will, Jacob broke Joshua’s stare and looked past him to the gloomy interior of the Chevy. The upholstery was torn and the passenger seat was patched with silver tape. The car smelled of cigarette butts and fast food grease. Two rubber shrunken heads hung from the rearview mirror, their duplicate stretched lips and wizened eye sockets a nightmarish replica of Joshua’s grinning face.
“Got company,” Joshua said, nodding past him toward the construction crew. One of the workers, a white man in an orange hard hat and blue jumpsuit, was approaching. “I reckon the sign at the entrance that said ‘Private Property, Keep Out,’ wasn’t just a suggestion. People take everything so serious these days. Property rights, deeds, ownership. ‘What’s mine is mine’ and all that happy shit. It’s a selfish world, ain’t it, Jakie Boy?”
Jacob said nothing, watching the man in the hard hat approach. “I’ll have them call the cops.”
“Oh, you just go ahead and do that. I’m sure they’d be all ears when I started telling them the truth.”
“You don’t know the truth.”
“The truth is what you make it. There’s what really happened, and there’s the way you set it in your mind so you can live with yourself.”
“You weren’t supposed to come back.” He’d figured his twin brother was gone for good, the seed split for a final time. But the bond was stronger than flesh and ran deeper than blood.
Or maybe only exactly as deep as blood.
“Get in,” Joshua said. Not a command, not an invitation. Just words.
Jacob hesitated as the man in the hard hat took off his gloves and punched at the numbers on a cell phone. The tiny electronic box looked out of place in those thick, scarred hands, as if a Neanderthal had come upon the controls of a time machine. But this machine would summon the police, and Jacob didn’t want to be thrust under their gaze any more than he already was. He might be guilty of crimes he couldn’t remember.
Jacob crossed to the passenger side of the decrepit automobile. The handle didn’t work, so he waited for Joshua to open the door. Foam chunks dribbled from a split in the vinyl as he settled into the seat. The man in the hard hat held the phone to his ear. Joshua backed up in an arc so that the man could get a good look at the license plate, then punched the accelerator and threw up a cloud of dust and gravel. The Chevy had a four-on-the-floor gear shift, and as they exited the construction site and hit the street, Joshua grabbed second and tore a long shriek from the rear tires.
“You haven’t changed a bit, either,” Jacob said.
“I’m as ugly as I ever was.”
Lunch hour had just ended, so the traffic wasn’t heavy. But Joshua’s driving tactics made the street seem crowded and narrow. The speedometer needle bounced at fifty-five as the car wove through the thirty-five-mile per hour zone. They passed an old man in a Mercedes SUV who mouthed a curse at them, but Joshua had already cut the SUV off before the driver reached the horn.
“Where are we going?” Jacob asked.
“Where else? There’s only one place good enough for the two of us. That place we said we’d never go.”
Jacob had the sensation that the car itself was stationary, that instead the world was whirring by in an insane and jumbled blur of color. The business district was brick red and concrete gray, glass green and power-pole brown. The road was a hard river that flowed backward to a black underground source. This moment had always existed, this now was forever, this vehicle was an embryo in which the two of them were bound. He would never escape the creature that had stolen half of his genetic material.
Joshua slid a cassette into the tape deck. Vintage Johnny Cash, falling into a ring of fire. Joshua joined in the chorus: “Burns, burns, burns.”
“You’re a sorry son of a bitch,” Jacob said.
“I wish I could have been there when it happened. Remember in the old days, when we used to share everything? I’m jealous, Jake.”
“No, you’re not. And my life is mine. Even when it turns to hell.”
“A million dollars. Plus the house, what’s that, another three-quarters? You make the old man look like a piker. At least when he played the system, he tried to slip under the radar. You laugh in its fucking face and dare God to catch you.”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“They got newspapers, even where I been living. I’ve always managed to scrape up enough to subscribe to the old Times-Herald. A man’s got to stay up on things if he wants to better himself. But all I read about was how Jacob Wells did this, Jacob Wells did that.”
Here Joshua shifted out of his rural accent so easily that he might have been a drama professor. “‘Upholding the heritage of community service started by one of Kingsboro’s early patriarchs.’ I started to wonder if they was really talking about my older brother, or if some imposter had done took his place.”