“Because I was in striking distance.”
“No. That was the other times. This time, it was because you broke her little ceramic rooster.”
“I didn’t break her ceramic rooster.”
Joshua laughed, lit another cigarette, sucked in the burning tobacco as if it were a hit of eternal life. “Hey, I tried to tell her, but she didn’t believe me. So I reckon it was either you or somebody who looked a lot like you.”
“You bastard.”
“When the eagle head of that cane knocked against your bone, I heard it clear across the house. Figured it served you right. Still, that wasn’t no excuse to mess with her cane like that.”
“You’re the one who snuck into their room and stole it.”
“As a favor. You’re my brother.”
Jacob had a little pocket knife, a Case with two blades that their father had given him for a Christmas present. When Joshua brought him the cane that night, Jacob slid it under his blankets and kept it there until he heard Joshua snoring across the room. Jacob had intended to mar the cane in some way, maybe carve his initials or try to raise a few splinters to catch his mother’s skin. But he’d found a soft vein in the wood near the bottom and he worked the knife deep into it, gouging until the cane had a little flexibility. Jacob thought maybe the cane would crack as Momma swung it at him and missed. He never dreamed it would give way while she was descending from the top of the stairs.
An accident, they had said. Warren Wells was the one who found her, sprawled and twisted at the bottom of the stairs, one shattered leg poking through a broken baluster. Dad didn’t scream or moan or even shed a tear. He didn’t bother calling 9-1-1. With the calmness of an undertaker, he had called the sheriff’s department and then the ambulance service, telling them not to hurry. He seemed more upset over the broken baluster than over his wife’s death.
She was insured for two million, after all.
“I didn’t mean for her to get hurt,” Jacob said.
“That’s a good one. Ever notice how everybody close to you ends up getting hurt sooner or later? And never on purpose?”
“Except you. I could never hurt you enough, and you’re the only one I ever wanted to kill.”
Jacob looked out the window at the top of the barn. The morning sun caught the hills beyond the house, capped them with the golden anger of dawn. The light glinted off the barn’s tin roof and the drops of dew that lay across the surrounding meadows sparkled like leaky diamonds. As a child, Jacob had often awakened before anyone else in the house, even his insomniac mother, and he would go out into the fields alone to breathe the air of an unspoiled day.
“When’s the last time you visited her grave?” Joshua said.
Jacob realized Joshua was staring at the family cemetery on the top of the ridge, where a few stone markers were fenced off from the cattle. Cemeteries required permanent easements. The land could never be used unless the bodies were disinterred and moved to other resting places. When Jacob had learned of that legal detail, he had forever become a believer in cremation. There were no laws governing the disposal of ashes, and such a send-off didn’t damage real estate values.
“Why would I visit Mom’s grave?”
“Ain’t her I was talking about.”
“Mattie doesn’t have a grave.”
“The other one. Christine.”
“That burial was for Renee. She was still Catholic then.”
“So you think the dead sleep better in tiny pieces, scattered on the wind?”
“Except for those like you who go to hell.”
“Mattie could have been buried here,” Joshua said, nodding toward the family plot that held three generations of the Wells dead. “You know kin is always welcome under home ground.”
Something thumped outside the room, a sound eerily similar to the one Mother had made while tumbling to her death down the stairs. Jacob tried to stand, then gave up.
“We have a guest,” Joshua said, showing teeth that were brown from tobacco.
“Renee?”
“No, she’s Thursday, remember.”
“Not...”
“Heh. I’m sure you two will have a lot to talk about. It ain’t been that long, has it?” Joshua called out of the room. “Honey, we’re in here.”
Jacob lay back on the bed again, his head swimming, his pulse sluicing through the veins of his temples like liquid barbed wire. He wondered how quickly a physical addiction to alcohol could cause a case of delirium tremens. Footsteps came down the hall and stopped at the doorway. He closed his eyes against the dawn.
“Hello, stranger,” she said.
He didn’t have to look to picture her. Her face was dark, the tan color of a worn football, eyes as black as midnight crows. She was several inches shorter than Joshua but she’d be standing straight, her breasts small and firm beneath the men’s shirt she always wore. Her hands would have their first wrinkles now, the fingernails chipped. Her hair was thick and dark and flowed down her back to her waist. Drinking would have been hard on the skin around her eyes, and he wondered if she had let her hygiene deteriorate to match the environment in which she lived. But she had made her bed, tangled its blankets, stained its sheets, and now she could lie in it and rot for all Jacob cared.
“He’s in a mood,” Joshua said.
“Poor chiquito,” she said. “He always was the sensitive type.”
Her voice hadn’t changed over the years. It was still that same husky silk that even a telephone line couldn’t diminish, the clipped accent not much influenced by her exposure to eastern Tennessee. He could even smell her now, a woodsy, animal odor, a wisp of sweat, a perfume that blended patchouli and cinnamon. Beneath that lay the faintest scent of her vagina, as if she and Jacob had made love in the bed across the room from him as he slept.
Or maybe that was just his imagination. She would never do such a thing. Nothing to tease him or hurt him. Or remind him that he would never be Joshua, no matter how much he tried.
“Come on, look at me,” she said, and all that old bravado was back, her cruel and tantalizing indifference. He wished he could run to her, throw his arms around her, clamp his hands around her throat, kiss her and slap her and bite her lip.
But in the end, all he could do was obey her. Just like always.
“Carlita,” he said.
Her eyes were hard and flat, dry obsidian marbles. That was all he allowed himself to absorb at first glance. It was drink to a drunk, heroin to a junkie, d-Con to a starving rat.
“Your face is red,” she said. “Are you blushing?”
“Jake got a little too close to the campfire while he was roasting his weenie,” Joshua said.
“Oh, that thing. I didn’t know you still had one,” she said to Jacob.
Life had marked her, the plows of time and hardship dragging furrows into her face. But her lips were as robust as October persimmons, though the corner of her mouth twisted in disdain. She had probably been born with that mannerism, hatched in the dirty hut of an illegal immigrant’s shack in Piney Flats, where the Christmas tree farms leached their insecticides into the slow-moving creeks. On land that Warren Wells had owned and lorded over.
He couldn’t look away from her eyes. They were as deep and dark as that grotto into which he had descended while hospitalized. They held the promise of cool suffocation, a slow and pitiless drowning. Though her skin had changed, losing some of that caramel luster, her eyes were untouched by the years that had passed since he had last seen her. Those eyes were as ancient as Mayan idols.
“How is the wife and kids?” she asked.
Jacob looked at Joshua, who smiled as if he had swallowed a greasy lizard. “You told her, didn’t you?” Jacob managed.
Joshua shrugged and snuffed his cigarette against the wall. “Family secrets.”
Jacob’s head throbbed, the sun now high and bright and piercing him as if its needles were sewing his skin to his flesh. “I need a drink.”
“Drinking is a want, not a need,” Joshua said.
Carlita lifted her bottle of beer and drank. The bottle was beaded with moist drops of water, further arousing Jacob’s thirst. She twisted her mouth again and pressed the Corona Light to her forehead, the motion causing her unbridled breasts to sway beneath her checked flannel shirt. Her denim jeans were tight around the curves of her thighs. She hadn’t borne any children. She had moved too fast to be pinned down, had evaded all sperm that swam upstream against her unwelcoming currents.