Cementville (36 page)

To this day, Byard cannot be certain whether it was him or Levon who pulled the trigger on the Baby Browning Levon had taken to toting with him everywhere, bragging how he bought it off a ruined preacher run on a rail out of Tennessee. Levon had been firing the damn thing behind Pekkar's Alley only an hour before, until Byard wrestled it from him and Calvin Pekkar told them both to shove off. And now Byard couldn't remember whose pocket the gun was in, or whose hand was holding it, when a bullet left its snubbed nose and lodged itself into the skull of their erstwhile father.

Hodgister fell on top of Arlene. Blood shot out his neck and across their mother's face. She stirred and moaned and that was how they knew she was still alive. Byard pulled the dead man off Arlene and helped her to the back room and put her under the covers. She was beat up and shivering even though it was late summer and you could cut the thick air with your arm. With a wet rag Byard wiped the blood off her as best he could. Blood of this man, one of however many who had put their seed in her over and over again till Arlene's body was worn out from babies.

Dwayne Hodgister had been making the rounds for as long as Byard could remember, showing up randomly two or three times a year in his piece-of-shit station wagon piled with cheap-ass kitchen appliances no self-respecting homemaker ever bought, and a backseat full of even more cheap-ass presents for Arlene Ferguson's growing progeny. Byard remembered those visits, Dwayne hanging around their mother's house trailer for a week or two at a time, eating up their food and drinking Arlene's beer. No matter where in the valley she moved her brood, Dwayne Hodgister always seemed to find her. A parasite returning to its host. Byard remembered how, when they were little, his big brother ran out to meet Hodgister's car, how Hodgister pulled the scrawny Levon onto his lap and let him drive. The man would hand out ten-cent presents like a bogus Santa Claus, then he would hustle their mother into the back of the trailer while Levon and Byard and Daniel sat in the front room playing with their shitty flower pinwheels and Chinese finger puzzles and noisemakers that never made enough noise to drown out the grunting animal sounds coming from behind their mother's bedroom curtain. The next day, Byard and Daniel would watch their traitorous big brother go off with the man by himself, Dwayne's arm draped across Levon's shoulder, his obvious favorite. Levon would come back with new shoes, or a stringer of perch, or a straw hat from Fountain Ferry, the big amusement park in Louisville.

In Arlene's trailer on that killing night, Byard sat there with his mother until he could time her even breaths. When he came out of
the bedroom, Levon was going through the dead man's pockets and coming up empty-handed, and Byard saw it for the first time: Levon was the spitting image of Dwayne Hodgister.

“Don't know what I was thinking, bum like him having anything,” Levon said.

They became aware at the same time of their little sister, five years old, sitting up in the middle of the couch where she'd been sleeping.

“Blood,” Augrey said, pointing.

Baby Tony woke too and started to bawl. Byard patted the baby's belly, those big eyes staring up at him, the tiny white face glowing from the moon shining through the window. Byard picked up the baby and took Augrey in his other arm and carried them both in to where Arlene slept. He opened the top of her dress to let the baby get at her milk. Augrey curled into her mother's other side and drifted off to sleep. Byard sat a while longer, trying to picture how this all must have looked to the little ones, him and Levon scrabbling in. The blast. The blood.

At eighteen, he did not consider himself a man of faith, but he did pray that night. Byard prayed that the little ones were not yet possessed of mind enough for creating memories. Their mother made soft noises, kind of a whimper, like a baby herself. Mother and babies blended into each other there in the bed, all one flesh. Byard was glad for them, even as he was envious of that temporary comfort, that pulsing warmth and sustenance, and he stood over them a while, watching.

He went out of the room, pulling closed the curtain that stood in for a door.

Levon was trying to drag the heavy body. Dwayne Hodgister was a large man, almost too thick to fit through the narrow trailer door.

“Give me a hand here,” Levon said.

Byard picked up the dead man's feet and the two of them managed to pitch him into the mud below. The bare bulb of a floodlight atop a tall pole threw a buzzing halo of yellow onto the dirt yard.
From the trailer stoop it was not far to the dilapidated shed where Levon kept his hounds penned up. The brothers panted with the effort of their burden. Their hands glinted in the moonlight, shiny with blood.

Byard prayed silently for the second time:
God help me
. But not:
God forgive me
. He wasn't going to ask that.

In the shed, Levon's hounds became excited and commenced with their awful baying, the sound Byard thought held all animal mourning condensed into a single note. His brother always locked them up and starved them four or five days before he aimed to hunt so that the poor bastards would be rearing to go. Levon silenced the dogs with one sharp command, then took the hatchet from the wall.

Byard closed his eyes as the extraordinary quiet of the shed was sliced by the sound of a juicy thud. Levon worked methodically. The hounds lay in a mute row against the shed wall. Then, at Levon's signal, Georgie Boy, the granddaddy hound, walked over with his head low and licked one of the feet. He checked again with Levon, a questioning look—Was it all right?—before he carried the foot off to a corner.

Each dog after that came over and selected a piece. They lay together in a contented circle, chewing. Byard stood still in the dark shed as if cast in a salt pillar by a pitiless god.

“Unless you plan on sleeping in there, you best come on out,” Levon said, and Byard realized his brother was getting ready to lock up. He joined Levon under the circle of light outside. Levon locked the shed door. He hung the key on a nail at the corner of the building.

“There's something rewarding about taking care of a problem once and for all, isn't there, little brother?” he said, and there was a chilling softness in his voice, a sincerity, as if he were giving to Byard a teaching, sharing a profound knowledge of something that had been long and arduous in the learning.

Byard tried to stand up straight but he was shaking hard and he braced himself against the wall of the shed. He bent over and retched
into the crabgrass that fanned out from the base of the building. Levon patted Byard's back. Byard threw his brother's hand off. When he was finally able to stand on his own, Levon laughed in his face.

“Don't tell me you're actually shedding tears over that motherfucker.”

“We should have called the police,” Byard said. “They might've hauled us in for questioning, but he was ready to kill Mama. Nobody would have blamed us shooting him.”

“Us? You pulled that trigger, little brother. It was you.”

“No.”

“ 'Fraid so.” Levon raised his hands as if he was framing a headline and recited deadpan: “Teen comes home, murders father, chops him up in the woodshed like so much kindling.”

“Your gun, Levon,” Byard said. “Your ax. Your hounds.”

“Your ass.” Levon's lip curled with untroubled glee. “I saw it. Mama saw it. Hell, if they'll let a five-year-old testify, Augrey saw it.”

Byard covered his face with his hands.

“Now, now.” Levon patted him again. “I can keep my mouth shut. If you think you can.”

When Byard removed his hands from his face, his brother was waving the gun in front of him. Byard batted at it and missed.

“Careful. Didn't anybody tell you to never play with guns?” Levon laughed, but his cheer seemed to have lost steam. He dropped the gun to his side and his expression went flat. He staggered over to Dwayne Hodgister's car and a second later the engine burbled to life, its muffler rumbling and coughing. Levon eased it over the shallow ditch and out onto the road, presumably heading to the reservoir, where the old station wagon would sink deep into the source of the county's drinking water.

Byard went into his mother's trailer. He stayed up most of the night cleaning the blood. Before dawn, he went out to the shed and let the dogs out and scattered new straw over the dirt floor. What bones he found he buried deep enough so the hounds wouldn't dig them up again. It would be as if the man had never lived.

If anybody in Cincinnati ever wondered what became of Dwayne Hodgister, nobody in Cementville ever heard tell of it.

Levon didn't come back for days.

But Byard awoke several hours later to the smell of frying fat-back. He had fallen asleep on the couch, and his mother stood at the little two-burner stove. Baby Tony sat in the middle of the floor, beating a pan with a spoon. Daniel came in with a few eggs he'd cadged from a neighbor's coop.

“You want one or two?” Arlene said when Byard came over and gave her a peck on the cheek. She hid her blue-black face with a tea towel, as if wiping sweat.

“One'll do me, Mama.” Byard sat at the table where Daniel and Augrey were drawing pictures on flattened grocery sacks. Byard offered up a thank you to whatever force out there had arranged for Daniel to be spending last night with his cousins over at Bett's house. He shook his head at the number of times he'd engaged in something that came awfully close to prayer in the last twelve hours.

“Where's Dwayne?” Daniel held a fat Crayola in the air and blinked at Byard with his sweet blue eyes. He was too old for coloring, Levon would have told him, too old for the sissy games he still played with Augrey. Daniel at twelve or thirteen years old was going on five.

Augrey did not look up from her drawing, which Byard could see was a house with a blue door and pink curtains in the windows and a stick figure family assembled in a neat line on the perfect green lawn. A big yellow sun tickled across the whole thing with jagged rays in every color.

“Reckon he must have shoved off again,” Byard said.

Arlene cracked an egg on the edge of the skillet and it sizzled in the grease.

“Good,” Daniel said.

“Good,” Augrey said.

S
LEEP DOES COME, IF ONLY
for a while, a purifying fog he foolishly believes has done the trick. MaLou stirs next to him, waking Byard from the light doze he had finally managed. Standing by the bed is the figure again, a cartoon version of a lost soul.

“You can't stay here,” Byard whispers, but Donnie's ghost responds only with his bland pose of mingled abjection and bewilderment. To prove his point, Byard stands and walks through the apparition to the window, which MaLou has left open. He shoves the sash down and turns to see if Donnie Ray Goins has gone, then clicks the latch in place.

We will be okay
, he thinks, watching MaLou sleep. We will leave here. We'll go to Canada and make a life. He could crawl into bed now, could reach for her. He longs for nothing in this minute but to press her body into his, to tell her:
Baby, it's time
. Maybe the shudder of her breath, the warmth of her skin as she rises to him—

But no, he had made the mistake of letting it all back in, of falling asleep with the vision of Dwayne Hodgister's scattered parts, of his mother's blue-black face, of the bloodied trailer. The doctor in Canada had told him he had to get the poison out of him, the memories of his father's death. That night was possibly the real beginning of his fugue state, the doctor had said. There were several terms the doctor mentioned, and they'd been nothing but a confused swarm in Byard's head. Dissociative disorder, depersonalization, psychogenic amnesia. None of it made sense; and none of that matters now anyway. He has MaLou. What does matter is that he do something about Levon. Because this is what the night of Dwayne Hodgister's death did teach him: It was Levon. It has always been Levon.

Levon had made him go out tonight. If Byard had stayed home with MaLou, had watched another stupid, insulting episode of
The Beverly Hillbillies
and turned in early the way she wanted him to, none of this would have happened. Levon is the poison, and they share the same blood, and no amount of talking or “sharing,” as the Canadian doctor tried to get him to do in group therapy, is going to get a man's blood out of him.

He closes his eyes again—
Sleep, sleep!
he tells himself, but there it is again, the insistent sound of the stranger's pleading whine, the man's thin legs shaking where he stood just hours ago on the bridge railing.

It is too early to be up, but anything resembling real rest is out of the question. It is as if the stranger has locked Byard inside an endless loop tape, and is making him live tonight over and over, punctuated at intervals by Levon's satisfied grimace. The poison. He has to get it out of him.

In the dirty half-light of dawn, Byard pulls on the dungarees still wet from tonight's rain. He closes the bedroom door soundlessly behind him. In the kitchen drawer where Martha keeps the phone book, Byard finds a pen and notepad.

To Sheriff O'Donahue
, he writes across the top in block letters.

Do with this information what you will
.

He has to put it all down before he explodes.