You and Me and the Devil Makes Three (2 page)

Y
OU PULL UP
to the curb in front of a ranch-style home in an addition off Mallard Creek, houses repeated in three or four templates, distinguished only by basketball goals, hardwood fences, the level of care given to winter lawns. You are sick from the blood you’ve been swallowing and sick from the atmosphere in the car, the fading daylight, the faint smell of exhaust. The Ohioan reaches between you and pulls the parking brake and motions for you to turn off the engine. You do and the silence swells up around you. Something in the dash ticks several times and stops. You can hear the breeze against the window glass.

“Out,” the Ohioan says.

You go up a flagstone walkway between hedges and toward the front door. There are two vehicles in the drive—a tan Taurus and a silver Suburban—and it occurs to you both will be significant someday, but you can’t imagine how. You and Jackson walk slightly ahead of the Ohioan and when you reach the porch, the Ohioan switches his pistol to his left hand, tries the brass handle on the storm door, and finds it locked. He steps back a few feet, raises the pistol, and fires two shots in quick succession.

Then you are inside the house, the three of you, down a narrow hallway, standing in a living room that smells richly of vanilla. There is a middle-aged man in a recliner wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and a girl of about nine or ten years curled on a loveseat beside him. The man starts to speak, but the Ohioan steps over, puts the muzzle of the revolver to his forehead, and eases him back down. He looks over at the girl.

“Get your sister,” he says.

The girl looks at him as if she’s been expecting exactly this. She wears a matching pink outfit, little kangaroos all over the pants and blouse, and she stands and walks out of the room. The middle-aged man has turned completely white. He says, “Now Curtis,” and then speech fails him and he just sits.

The Ohioan looks at this man as if he is very far in the distance and the thought inside you is
not another word,
but then the girl comes back into the room leading a somewhat larger version of herself: late teens, pretty, blonde. She wears an oversized T-shirt that hides either a pair of shorts or underwear and when she sees the Ohioan, she begins to cry. You watch her and you watch the Ohioan and you turn and look at Jackson, whose eyes look like they are staring through time. The Ohioan’s face colors and you think, for a moment, he is going to cry as well.

“Everybody on the floor,” he says.

You drop to your knees on the shag carpet—flecks of orange and brown and yellow—then lower yourself onto your stomach. The carpet smells faintly of pets. The television says,
Here in New Hampshire
,
it’s time for a ride,
and the air from the shattered storm door prickles the skin on the back of your neck. The girlfriend continues crying and the carpet feels rough against your cheek and you have the urge to scratch it, but you don’t. You lie very still and then you close your eyes.

Your heart beats high in your chest. You can feel it hammering against the floor. You imagine it as a piston, an engine pulsing red heat, red light, the last red light of day bleeding through the curtains of your eyelids, back to the pupils, the brain. The heart pumping light and the sun pulsing light and the brain construing bloodlight and sunlight and converting them to life. You can sense it rising—adrenaline—and it feels as though every nerve in your body stands at attention. You are young—first time you’ve even considered it—electrically alive, and then you hear the roar of the pistol, and it is like the shout of God.

The shot is louder than you knew a shot could be and there is a ringing in your ears and a metallic taste on the back of your tongue. The smell of gunsmoke. Gunpowder. A stinging in your eyes. You don’t need to look to see what has happened, you know what has happened, and before another thought can germinate, it happens again. Another shot, another roar. A pain inside your ears like razors and then the third shot and your hearing goes suddenly muffled, a muted underwater sound. You feel the warmth of the urine that darkens the crotch of your jeans. It is all a letting go—Jackson will be next, you will be next—and it is the same sensation you recall as a child, releasing your grip on the monkey bars and falling to the earth.

There is time, now, for you to cup your ears with your palms and plunge inside yourself. Time to fold your hands and pray. There is time to mutter a few final phrases or time to consider the choice that brought you here, and then, of course, time is over and you attempt to brace yourself, but there is nothing to brace against—you are in free fall, weightless—and the room goes quiet and you feel the creak of floorboards beneath the carpet and you can tell the Ohioan is behind you.

You can’t help wondering if you will feel the bullet, if it will be like throwing a switch, and then you hear the click of the hammer falling on a spent cartridge, and then three more clicks—each a dry metallic snap—as the cylinder rotates and the hammer drops on the firing pin.

You come up on your palms and the balls of your feet and your body is moving forward, sprinting, no connection between thought and action, the legs might as well belong to someone else, the flailing arms. Down a hallway and through a kitchen—flash of refrigerator with boxes of cereal atop it, a colander upended on a square of paper towel—then past a washer and dryer and across a strip of linoleum, hand outstretched to push open a screen door, and then over a short flight of concrete steps, on grass now, dead grass, running toward an unpainted picket fence, crotch cold and wet and you are up over the fence, through a small playground, then on blacktop, a block, two blocks away, before you remember to draw your first breath.

Y
OU SIT IN
a wood-paneled room on the second floor of the courthouse, your attorney beside you, the girls’ mother and the girls’ aunt and the girls’ grandmother seated across the conference table with their lawyer. They’ve asked you to testify—Jackson will testify—but you’re trying to keep that from happening. Somewhere in the bowels of this building is the man himself and you don’t want to be in the same world with him, much less the same room.

It’s been six and a half months since you met the Ohioan and your hair’s gone completely white. It started one day with a single pallid strand, and then there were others, and now they are all you have. The dentist pulled your top row of teeth after the doctors reset your jaw, and you wear complete upper dentures with partials on either side of the bottom incisors. The uppers aggravate your gums—you can’t really eat with them. You’ve lost twenty-one pounds in the last ninety days and your mouth has the sunken appearance of the elderly poor.

The Dillards’ grandmother has that mouth. She has thin hair that’s someone’s dyed an almost purple black and her shoulders have started to slump. When you glance up, she forces a smile and gestures toward a plate in the center of the table which you’ve yet to notice, cake of some kind stacked in crumbling little squares.

“Would you like a piece?” she asks you.

“No, ma’am.”

“It’s pretty good,” she says, but you shake your head no.

Your attorney—a burly man in his early forties named Gerald Colclazier with the broad shoulders of a defensive lineman and a balding pattern like the tonsure of a monk—says, “We might as well get started,” and then everyone just sits. Seems no one wants to start.

“Jerry,” says the Dillards’ lawyer, “would your client like to make a statement?”

You’re studying the grain of the mahogany beneath your hands. You have the statement tucked in the inside pocket of your blazer, one you’ve written and rewritten, gone through 184 pages preparing. Colclazier’s secretary typed it up after Colclazier revised it, and you’ve practiced it in front of the mirror, but now the words swim into one another and your tongue seems to swell.

You manage the first sentence: “On December 8, 2010, I drove Anthony Jackson and Curtis Hawkins to the home of Francis Dillard, 629 Scrimshaw Lane.” You stop and clear your throat. The second sentence starts, “I did not realize what course of action,” but you don’t read it. You place the paper flat against the table and smooth it over with your hand. You’d folded it quarterwise to fit inside your pocket, and the folds divide the paper into quadrants. You feel Colclazier’s eyes on you. You feel the eyes of the Dillards and the Dillards’ attorney.

Everyone sits.

Then the mother says, “You know what’ll happen if you don’t do this? You know that, right?”

You’ve yet to look at this woman and you don’t look at her now. You stare at the reflection of the overhead lamp in the table’s lacquered veneer. The mother continues talking. All the emotion’s been burned out of her voice and you could just as easily be listening to an intercom.

She says, “I brought you pictures. I brought pictures you need to see.”

You hear something unsnap and papers being riffled. Then pale, slender fingers begin placing photos atop the table, snapping them like cards. A girl’s face. A girl’s back. Two smiling girls in swimsuits—small girl and smaller—and then you shut your eyes.

Several seconds pass. You can hear your pulse in your ears.

“I want you to look at these,” says the voice.

The pulse gets faster. You keep your eyes closed tight.

“You drove him to our
house,
” she says, the last word of her sentence like a hiss. “He had a
gun
and you drove him to our
house.
”

You feel the electric jangling you get when you slam your elbow against a door. You hold your palms to either side of your face as though surrendering. Your head begins to shake back and forth and it occurs to you it might never stop.

The mother says, “We can make you.”

You place your hands on your head to try and keep it from shaking, then press your palms against your eyes. You feel your stomach start to weaken and her lawyer mutters, “Kathy.”

You’re startled enough that you actually open your eyes—the voice can’t have a name, the name can’t be
Kathy
—lower your hands, and look across the table. All your life you’ve heard about despair and it has always been a dictionary word that comes before
desperado
and after
desorption,
but now it is a spasm you can’t get to relax, a hollow place where your insides used to hang.

Colclazier clears his throat and you imagine him glancing at the Dillards’ attorney, exchanging a look, but the next voice you hear is the voice of the grandmother and it brings everything to a halt.

“Sweetie,” she says.

You look at her. There is a handkerchief clutched in a hairy hand and you take it from Colclazier and swipe it across your face.

“Sweetie,” she says again.

“He was a stranger,” you hear yourself saying.

“I know it.”

“He was one person and then he was something else.”

“I pray for you,” she says. “I pray for you and your friend.”

You try to respond to this, but your voice goes away, and you actually mouth several words before you notice you can’t hear them. You can feel yourself begin to disperse.

The grandmother herself is in the process of dissolving, fading out into her seventies, but her eyes are alive and amber, and they are somehow younger than yours. She nods a few times and her lips tighten and she exhales slowly through her nose. You think she’s about to tell you how to testify, but that isn’t what she does. She sits another moment. Then she reaches across the table and takes you by the hand.

It weighs almost nothing, her palm against your knuckles. An old woman’s palm, skin like Bible paper, the bones brittle as the bones of birds. You feel the blood pulsing weakly at her wrist, the faintest tap against your fingers. It has a little heat to it and you hope it transfers, travels down to thaw the frozen place below your lungs. You draw a breath. Her pulse taps. And taps. And taps. Her hand on yours is steady and warm.

About Aaron Gwyn

Aaron Gwyn grew up on a cattle ranch in rural Oklahoma. He is the author of the story collection
Dog on the Cross
, finalist for the 2005 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and a novel,
The World Beneath
. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in
New Stories from the South
,
McSweeney's, Glimmer Train
,
The Gettysburg Review
,
The Missouri Review
, Esquire.com, and other magazines. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
www.aarongwyn.com

By Jess Walter

T
HE
F
OAMING
F
ORTIES
need a big man. Even in the lowly Double-C Division of the Spokane County Recreational Basketball League, the better teams all feature at least one—usually some bearded six-five mountain man who looks like he just finished gutting a deer on the hood of his F-250.

By contrast, the Forties’
tallest
player is also their thinnest—Josh “Eck” Eckles, a legitimate six three if he were to somehow defy gravity and stand up straight. But Eck is a man of narrow shoulders and fall-away jumpers, who barely tips the scales at 180. As the only African American on the team (it’s been suggested that he broke the Forties’ color barrier twenty years ago, but
the talent barrier
remains intact), Eck dismisses his teammates’ suggestions that he rebound and play defense as subtle forms of racial stereotyping.