Where All Light Tends to Go (5 page)

The sun had dropped low until the reflection in clouds sent purples, blues, and pinks prisming through the blinds. I hadn’t moved from the couch and had nodded off for a minute or two before the Walkers began to bark. I stood and walked into the kitchen to peer through the blinds onto the yard.

Maggie Jennings was carefully dancing that thirty-four two-steps, fourteen ball changes, and chassé through the maze of angry hounds. It was a dance she’d learned long ago, and while they say you never forget how to ride a bike, there are certain things that you hold an equal mastery over, certain things that scare you into remembering.

My mind raced as I hurtled over a pile of dirty laundry into the back bedroom and tried to find something to throw on over gym shorts. There was still vomit wiped across my chest, and my mouth still held the taste. Slinging the dresser drawers in a frenzy, I saw nothing but cedar boards. All of the clothes waited on Daddy or me or Josephine, if we were lucky, to run a load. With no time, I ran back into the living room and yanked a wrinkled T-shirt and the pair of sweatpants Daddy slept in from the pile.

I’d just made it to the couch and was trying my damnedest to make it seem like I wasn’t expecting her, when she peered in through the glass and pecked a few times with her fingernail.

“Come in!” I tried to act like I didn’t care if it was her or Jesus, like there weren’t any feelings there.

She opened the door and stepped inside onto a rug meant for stomping mud from boots. She wore tight jeans that seemed fitted to her legs, leather beach sandals showing off lime-green-painted toenails. A loose-fitting tank top, pieced lace the color of coral, draped her torso. The neck was cut low and showed the tan of her chest, the slight shadows of collarbones. She stayed put there on the rug, didn’t come any further, like that little rectangle was an island or something and all that hardwood an ocean that neither of us could swim across to get to each other.

“Where’s your dad?”

“He’s gone.”

Maggie held a look in her eyes that spoke volumes, but her mouth didn’t mutter a thing. There seemed to be words racing around inside of her, turning a tornado about her brain, but the wall she’d built, the wall I poured the footing for, wouldn’t let a damn bit of it out.

“What you doing on The Creek, Mags?”

“We have to talk.” Her blond curls were balled up on the back of her head and there was something in that hair that had it smelling like honeysuckle. I could smell it from where I sat, such smells having a tendency to carry further in a house that reeked of men.

“What in the world do we have to talk about?”

“There are just some things that I need to say to you, Jacob.”

I scooted to the far side of the couch and cleared a spot for her. She looked down on that rug for a minute as if the moment her feet went any further she’d be leaving a place she could never get back to, but she braved it, came over, and sat beside me.

“What is it, Maggie?”

“I need a minute.”

“I’m not worth more than a handful of texts for damn near two years, and you come over here saying you have something to say but ain’t ready to say it?” I’d always given it to her straight and I think that was one of the things she always liked about me. Growing up in a house where nearly everything was a lie, Maggie respected the fact that I never lied to her.

“I just want my thoughts to be clear. I don’t want to say anything that I don’t mean. I think a lot of times in the past we’ve said things to each other without thinking them through, hurtful things, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to say anything without knowing for certain it’s what needs to be said. But part of it is that after last night, I just wanted to be sure you were all right.”

“Well, I’m fine.”

“Your hands aren’t.” Maggie glared at my knuckles, the place where skin was still rolled back and dried tough as calluses. The cuts were that yellowish brown of scabbed skin and had started crusting over. It stung a little bit, but I wouldn’t tell her.

“My hands are fine.”

“You didn’t have to do that. I can take care of myself, Jacob. It’s not like when we were kids.”

“No, it’s sure not like when we were kids.”

“It’s not like when we were together either.”

“No, it’s not like when we were together.”

“So long as you know that.” Maggie shuffled on the couch as if she were about to stand and leave.

“You came all the way over here just to tell me that?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it? I just want you to know that I can take care of myself.”

Her answer was direct and I sat there for a second unsure how to take it. “He had it coming, Mags. I mean I hate you were sitting there, and I wish you hadn’t have seen it, but he had it coming and has had it coming most of his life.”

Maggie didn’t say anything for a long time. She sat there with her eyes fixed on my hands. I didn’t say anything either but watched commercials flick by on the muted television set. Finally, I turned and looked at her. Those silver eyes were set awfully hard on my hands, and I could see that all that strength I’d admired for so long was there, but fear was fencing all of that possibility deep inside.

“He’ll forgive you, Mags. I reckon if there’s any sense in him at all, he’ll forgive you.”

“It’s not me he’d have to forgive, asshole.” A wide smile spread across her face and those teeth were just about as pretty as anything I’d ever seen, a whole lot more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth. Dimples pressed into the corners of her smile, and raised cheeks squinted her eyes. She was far too gorgeous to be sitting next to me on that ratty couch. This house, this town, and everything about this place were beneath her and always had been. I was beneath her as well, but she’d never seemed to notice, or at least not to care. “You hit him. I was just sitting there.”

“Like I said, he had it coming.”

“You’re right about that, Jacob. Matter of fact, you’re right about a whole lot of things that people never seem to give you credit for.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Nothing.” For the first time since she’d come into the house, Maggie looked me square. Her eyes dilated like she’d just eaten one hell of a pill, but I knew she hadn’t. “Turns out, he and I just weren’t cut out for each other.”

“Well, no shit, Mags. I could’ve told you that a long time ago.” I was damn near jittery in hopes that she’d come to rekindle what we’d had. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to tuck her hair behind her ears and hold her while I kissed her. But I tried to summon what little bit of Daddy’s calm held in my veins so as not to let it show. In all honesty, it was ridiculous to think a girl like that would want anything to do with me, especially after I’d already broken her heart. “What makes you say that?”

“A whole lot of things, Jacob, a whole lot of things that have been building up for a long time. It wasn’t just you hitting him.”

“What the hell did you ever see in him anyways?”

“I don’t know, Jacob. When you left, he was there. I guess that’s part of it. And part of it is that I always thought he had potential to be something. I always thought he had something to offer the world if he’d ever get his shit together.”

“Yeah, it looked like he really had his shit together. Looked like that son of a bitch is really headed somewhere from what I seen.”

“I know, Jacob. I just thought—”

“That kind of thinking ain’t worth a damn, Mags. That type of thinking will have you waiting around a lifetime for something that’s never going to happen. God knows you’re too smart for that.”

Maggie didn’t answer. I know that she knew I was right, deep down she knew that, but those types of things are hard to admit to ourselves.

“You didn’t do any of that shit, did you?”

“No. But he was trying awfully hard to get me to, and to be honest, I was just about ready to do whatever it took to shut him up. I just wanted to shut all of them up. They’re always giving me a hard time, like I’m a goody-goody or something.”

“You kind of are.”

“What?”

“You are a goody-goody, Mags, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s not like any of these assholes are headed anywhere.”

“I’m not any different, Jacob.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Why?”

“Since the moment I set eyes on you, I knew you were headed somewhere. I haven’t ever known where, but I knew you weren’t going to be here forever.”

“No one is, Jacob.”

“Every goddamn one of us aside from you is going to be here forever. You point your finger to one person who left out of here and made something, just one person.”

“Jennifer Brinkley.”

“Jennifer Brinkley? Fuck, Mags, she’s working at a strip club in Greenville! That place isn’t two steps better than hocking jewelry.”

“Well, how would you know that?” Maggie cut eyes at me as if to jokingly disapprove.

“I don’t, Mags. But regardless, that isn’t what I’d call getting out. There’s going to come a time when the only thing she’s got going for her ain’t worth a damn thing to anybody. Then where you think Jennifer Brinkley’s going to be? She’s going to be right back up here on this mountain, or laid up with some old boy in a single-wide in South Carolina and that’s not any better. It’s hot as fuck down there. She’ll be lucky to have air-conditioning.”

“And what about me, Jacob?”

“What about you?”

“You still haven’t said how I’m any different.”

“Different than Jennifer Brinkley?”

“Different than everyone else.”

“Because you’re getting out of here, Maggie. You’re going to head off to college and make something out of yourself, and what you’re going to become won’t have a reason in the world to ever come back here.”

Maggie looked angry, as if there was suddenly something eating her alive inside. Moments passed between us then, silent moments that neither of us knew how to break. She seemed to be thinking long and hard about something that she wouldn’t let out. She was staring at the floor when she finally spoke.

“I was just about ready to do whatever it took to shut them up before you got there.”

“Well, then I’m glad I got there.” I looked at her, and though we hadn’t been together in two years, I felt just as protective over her now as ever. She had places to go and would become something incredible, and I knew it. Even if she couldn’t be mine and even if I couldn’t go with her, I would go against an army with a handgun to make sure her road was paved. “That shit’s not like other drugs, Mags. I mean, it’s not like smoking weed or eating a couple of pills. Just look at my fucking family. That shit’s—”

“I know, Jacob. You don’t have to tell me. I know.” Maggie reached out and grabbed hold of my hands. She held underneath my palms and stroked her thumbs across my knuckles just barely light enough for me to feel. She was holding my hands and looking long and hard at the lines her thumbs ran, and I thought I saw tears rising from just above where those bottom eyelashes turned down. I’d never understood what she saw in me. Even when I was younger I knew that a girl like that kicking around with a guy like me couldn’t last, but she never seemed to notice the lines that had been drawn. I think she’d always thought of me as something worth saving, and when you find something that you truly believe you can save, it’s awfully hard to let that kind of shit go. That’s the only reason I’d ever been able to come up with for why she cared.

She leaned in and looked about as far into me as anyone ever had, like she was going to carry those silver-dollar eyes of hers somewhere deep inside of me and find something to buy and like she was going to bring that thing back out to hold it for keeps. I was going to let her if she wanted to and I thought she was going to kiss me and I just held there not saying a word. Instead she placed my hands onto my lap and stood up from the couch. That gleaming in her eyes started to rise again, and rather than fight it, she headed for the door. Maggie didn’t say another word, but in a way, those eyes had said more than words ever could. She left me sitting there to wonder what those things unspoken might have meant. She left me wondering if I’d been forgiven.

The loud shrill of a chair scooting across the kitchen floor and the gradual increase in volume on the scanner woke me up from a dream that had me pitching a tent and humping a pillow. I started to just get up and close the door, but I needed a drink of water.

There were no lights on in the kitchen, but my eyes were settled to the dark and I could make out a shadow hunkered over the table with its head held sideways toward the speaker. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a carton of orange juice that Josephine liked to mix with vodka and peach schnapps. The refrigerator light flicked on and off, and scintillated a broken view of my father at the table.

“Where are they?”

“Shut the fuck up.” Daddy’s head stayed tilted, his ear chewing on every morsel that came out of the scanner, and he looked right at me with eyes that settled on some far-off place through me, through the refrigerator, outside.

I shut the refrigerator door and took the carton of orange juice with me to the sink, turned on a small tube light so that I could see Daddy sitting there. I took the chair across from him, drank a long swig, and turned my head opposite of his so that I could focus all of the sound into one side like him.

“Charlie-Two, County. I’m going to need you to send another unit this way.”

“Ten-four, Charlie-Two. Can you offer any update on the nature?”

“Subject has been unresponsive to voice commands, County, and has a knife.”

“Charlie-Two, are you able to see the subject from your location?”

“Ten-four, County. Subject is moving from the porch into the house and I’m waiting for backup.”

“Ten-four, Charlie-Two. There’s a unit headed your way.”

There was a long pause of silence with only a few blips of static making their way over the airwaves, and Daddy leaned back in his chair.

“Where are they?”

“At your fucking crazy-ass mama’s house.”

“What for?”

“Ain’t real clear, but the way it sounded at first was like she called the goddamn law on herself. Said she’d reported somebody outside of her house.”

“Reckon anybody was?”

“Hell no, Jacob. That shit’s got her all goony. Ain’t nobody after her. Nobody would want her sorry ass. You know that.”

It took the other deputy a good fifteen or twenty minutes to make it up the mountain, with only one officer usually working this territory per shift. David-One checked on scene and Daddy and I listened for a long while to snippets of a story that never revealed enough to paint any sort of real picture. When it was all said and done, it was Charlie-Two who had more than he could stand and drew his Taser to probe about fifty thousand volts through her. Any bit of fight she’d had must’ve left awfully fast after that, because the weapon was secured and before too long they were checking en route.

“Charlie-Two, County. We’re going to have the subject in custody on a 10-73 and will be coming down the mountain.”

“Ten-four, Charlie-Two.”

—

I WAS ALMOST
dozed off again when Daddy screamed.

“Goddamn it, they’re coming up here now! That fucking bitch, that dumb fucking bitch!”

His bare feet nearly stomped holes in the hardwood as he made his way from his room to mine. The lights came on and I was blinded for a second or two, that brightness just eating at my eyes before it settled.

“Get the fuck up! Come on!” Daddy was at the edge of my bed and slapped my feet beneath the covers. “Jacob, the goddamn law is coming up here and you need to get up quick. Get anything you got put up. Bud, pills, I don’t give a shit, just hide it.”

I didn’t have anything more than stems and a little bit of shake, and that Xanax bar I’d taken had emptied the bottle. As far as real dope, there wasn’t anything in the house that needed hiding anymore, but that type of GO-GO-GO at the first sign of blue lights and badges was something ingrained in Daddy long ago. It had kept him out of trouble many times, so he made it a commandment.

I don’t really know why I went with him. I guess in case he needed help with an alibi or something, but by the time I’d put on a pair of shorts and slid untied boots over my feet, Daddy was in the kitchen peering out of the window to where headlights lit the side field yellow.

“Thought I’d go with you.”

“What for? Use your fucking head.” Daddy thumped against my forehead with his fist like he was knocking on a door. “You know as well as I do they’re looking for me.”

“Thought you might want somebody to back up your story.”

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch if that ain’t a good idea, Jacob. Damn good idea.” Daddy shut the blinds and I followed him to the front door. “Get all your shit put up?”

“It’s up.”

The moon lit the yard a funny kind of blue, even the trails cut by the running of hounds that usually showed red in sunlight had a robin-egg kind of color about them. It was early summer on The Creek, but the night air still held a chill. The hounds barked like they always did and Daddy led the way to the headlights. He was the only person I knew that never had to memorize that dance to escape snarls and teeth. As Daddy walked, the hounds parted like Moses had thrown his hands over them, and even the meanest one, Kayla, cowered back as far as the lead would let her. I followed him closely, and the dogs paid me little mind.

The bull was already out of the SUV and leaned up against the front driver-side fender. His body cast a wide shadow in the moonlight. Neither of us could tell who it was, and neither of us spoke, but the fact that he wasn’t driving the standard black-and-white pinned him for ranked. Then, as we got within talking distance, the bull flicked a Zippo down his britches leg and held the flame close to his face to light a smoke. It was Lieutenant Rogers, the friend of the family, as Daddy said.

Rogers was a thick brute, even thicker now that he spent most of his time behind a desk. He didn’t wear the tan button-down shirt and creased slacks that deputies wore. He fastened his badge to his belt alongside his cuffs and gun. After years of night shifts and a résumé filled with what went for big busts in a place like Jackson County, Rogers had worked his way up to comfortable polo shirts and loose-fitting cargo pants. Those years on the road had taken his hair, and the years behind the desk had added a bit more pooch around the middle, but he was still strong. Toughness never wore out of men born with it.

“Hell fire, Jessup, you piling up in here like that at this hour had me all sketched out.”

“Shit, Charlie, I don’t reckon I’ve ever seen you on edge.” Lieutenant Rogers held the cigarette between his teeth, rocked his gun, cuffs, and magazines on his belt, and leaned back about as far as he could without falling onto the hood of the Expedition.

“What the fuck brings you up here?”

“That’s the thing, Charlie. Had a call over at your old lady’s house earlier in the evening. She was strung out all to hell and called the law up there. Said you were outside of her house wanting to kill her. Said you’d been peeking through the windows all night. Now, you and I both know that’s a bunch of bullshit, but the thing is it was one of those new boys who got the call. Thing is she told him a lot of details as they were riding down the mountain and your name got mentioned an awful lot. I told them she was out of her fucking mind, but to keep them little peckerheads happy, I said I’d come up here personally and see if your story checked out.”

“I appreciate that, Jessup. I really do. Pays to have friends, don’t it?”

“Friends, hell. Just business, Charlie.” Rogers squinted his eyes as smoke rose over his face, and took another long drag from his cigarette.

“So what in the fuck did you ride all the way up here for? You afraid of telephones?”

“Well, I guess because I thought you ought to know that the little lady was throwing your name around.”

“I can’t have that.” Daddy pulled a pack of cigarettes from his side pocket and lit a smoke.

“No, you can’t have that.”

I stood there in silence and tried my damnedest to stay just a sliver more than a shadow.

“Well, Jessup, as you can see, me and the boy are right here safe and sound. Not a whole lot more that I can tell you other than that.”

“Just so I got something to tell them boys to let them sleep a little easier, were y’all here all evening?”

“I’ll do you one better. I’ll give you the whole goddamn day.” Daddy folded his arms across his chest, making his muscles defined in moonlight. “Woke up this morning and cooked myself some bacon and eggs. Then I did my best to get this pussy-ass boy of mine feeling better after he let his body get a little in front of his head last night. After that I headed over to Josephine’s this afternoon to get my pecker wet. And then I guess me and the boy fried up some cube steak and hit the hay.”

“So when’s the last time you saw Laura?”

“You mean the bitch?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I’ve just been calling her the bitch for so long I’d almost forgotten she had a real God-given name.” Daddy smirked, and the way he talked about her, the way he always talked about her, got me riled. But I never had the gall to say anything about it. “Aw, she came over wanting to borrow some money about two or three months back, but other than that, I don’t have shit to do with her.”

“So neither one of you has had any type of contact with her?”

“No.”

I don’t know if it was my way of speaking up after holding back for all those years, or if I’d just grown tired of listening to those two ramble on, but I stepped out of Daddy’s shadow for the first time in my life and looked Lieutenant Rogers dead where that cigarette kept his face aglow. “I saw her yesterday.”

Daddy turned with eyes that looked as if they’d just been hit with a drip torch. We never mentioned her, and if her name ever got brought up, he dogged her and expected me to keep quiet. “The fuck you did.”

I tried to look at Daddy, but the way he stared turned me coward. “I went by there yesterday.”

It was eating at him that after all these years I’d went to see her the day before. His fists clenched and his jaw pulsed. I thought he was going to hit me.

“Say you saw her yesterday, son?” Rogers asked.

“Yes.”

“And was she on the dope then?”

“She was just getting started, I reckon.”

Rogers straightened himself off of the Expedition and folded his arms just like my father. “Now I know the two of you are well aware of what type of life she’s come to lead, and I know the two of you was around to witness it. But I’m going to tell you that the place she’s at right this second is a place that very few ever get to. There are folks going on weeklong vacations with dope crammed plumb up into their brains, and those folks start seeing shit and talking to things that just ain’t there. That comes with the territory. But where she’s at, where she’s at after all these years, is a place long gone from ever getting back from.”

“The boy here’s just too fucking stupid, Jessup.” Daddy still had that meanness lighting him afire, and I kept my mouth shut and didn’t look at him.

“We took her tonight and didn’t charge her. We committed her, you see, and they’ll keep her in there for a week or two if the beds are empty, but probably less, and then she’ll be right back there doing it all again. I’m saying this more for you, boy, than anything else.” Rogers pulled the cigarette from between his teeth and fixed his eyes onto me. “Don’t go latching your feet into stirrups on a horse that’s run lame. It ain’t going to get you anywhere.”

It wasn’t like he was telling me something I hadn’t known my whole life, but at the same time I appreciated the fact that he’d said it. Rogers was tough as piss oak, but he had a heart. I reckon if my daddy had ever been much of a father, that would have been the type of thing he would have carried, some blend of toughness and compassion. But if he had it at all it was something I’d seldom witnessed.

“Thing is, son, a woman like that is just waiting around to die,” Lieutenant Rogers finally said.

Rogers was trying hard to offer some sort of insight into a reality that he knew led to hurt. But I’d known it since I was a kid. That was my reality: the hurt, the shame, and everything else entailed. So, waiting around to die was something I’d known for a long time, and it wasn’t the dying part that ate at me. It was the waiting.