The brothers

Chapter Two

The handle broke. Now all he had to work with was a long splintered grip that ate away at his hand all day. When the sun rose in the morning he had been there, and now as the sun was fading, he was there. But Danny was not there. Danny never came back. Mike took the hoe up to the end of the next row and slowly made his way back down, stopping again to bend and chew at the splinter lodged in his hand. 

    Mike's hard work and tireless aggression gave his body and his face a fearsome quiet. He saw with fierce concentration what took place around him but never talked about it. And here he stood, plying a splinter from his palm with his teeth, his eyes tirelessly roving about the vicinity when he noticed someone coming up the road. The form lurched with every step - a dark pendulum against the sun. The figure stopped at the edge of the row, but unlike yesterday, Mike did not go down to meet him. It being Sunday, Hoff wore a black three-quarter suit coat and well-polished boots. With a glint of gold from his watch chain, and a waft of thick musk, he thudded up the row. Mike, head half-cocked, still trying to eat the splinter out of his palm, looked him in the eye. 

    "You killed my dog," Hoff growled, balancing precariously on the cane which had sunk nearly half a foot into the soil beneath his enormous weight. "I know you did it. It's no use for you to hold out."

    Finally, Mike drew out the splinter, turned his head to the side, spat it from his mouth, and began to eat at another lodged in his thumb. He paused, glanced at Hoff, then the distant mountains, then the dry weed-stricken field, spit, then looked back toward Hoff.

    "I ain't got no reason to kill your dog."

    "You and your boys went out hunting two nights ago and shot him, thinking he was a deer." 

    "Take a goddamned fool to mistake a hound for a deer."

    Hoff leaned forward so all Mike could smell was the musk and a mouth full of chew. "Are you saying you meant to shoot my dog, or are you just admitting to being a goddamned fool?" 

    Mike took up his hoe. "What I am saying is it don't matter. You already gone and made up your mind."

    Hoff spit tobacco into the field leaving a black mark in the dry soil. He turned back the way he came, moving no slower nor faster but in that interminable lop-sided gait. When he reached the end of the row he paused and stood silhouetted against the whole of the darkening sky. 

Mike walked to his truck and stood with his hand resting on the hood. Black birds spooked and flew off over the field. The horses watched him steadily, their eyes like black bulbs, and snorted long gusts of air searching for his scent. He took up a clod of dirt, held it beneath the dim sky, and let it sift out between his fingers. He thought of what had happened, what he had done, what it meant. He pictured Danny bruised and bloody in the dirt road. A last surge of anger rushed through him and then it was not his brother lying beneath him but her lying there in just that position. He watched it all happen again. The bullet came out of nowhere like some hand of God crashing through the trees. It knocked her down. She landed in the laundry, almost softly, a cushioned fall. Blood ran into the sheets, not red but brown like river water. Helplessly, he tried to pour a cup of water into her unmoving mouth. The water slipped and dribbled on her face, her eyes open wide collecting water. 

    Mike got in the truck and drank from a tin flask, tipping his head back against the seat. Hand and flask fell. He lay and listened and warmth filled him. He closed his eyes for a moment then pushed the truck into gear. 

Light and sound and running legs were all he could see. The ambulance drove right up on the lawn spilling uniformed ghosts who surrounded his mother. He huddled beside her and spoke to her until she rose up on the stretcher, taking to the air, and he chased her and ran beneath her and tried to climb in the truck. He was pushed back by a multitude of disembodied arms. The ambulance tires spun mud and disappeared. Danny stood on the porch, staring down at the flattened grass and red sheet - all that was left to testify to what had occurred. 

    The next few nights Mike did not sleep. He carved a long wooden spear and prowled about the fields and woods, searching for something to shove it into. The spear became bloody with failed attempts to right the imbalance his mother left behind: cats, mice, even butterflies he found sleeping in the tall grass. The nights eventually gave way to sleep as he found nothing he could kill that would release from his chest the weight of his own mother. One night he sneaked into his brother's room and held the spear above his brother's chest, rising and falling in dormant breathing. He stood like this until the sky brightened with morning. Seeing the sun, he cast the spear out the window and ran back to his own room. 

    The headlights arched forward as the dark deepened along the edge of a deep ravine. Rocks and dust flew off the road behind him and off the edge down into the river below. He pulled up to a country store and sat in the parking lot until he finally pulled the splinter out of his thumb - as if that were the reason for the tears. If he and Danny and Mahon were but a trail of molecules and there were nothing more to it, he would be better off. He looked in the mirror and saw blue pools red-rimmed and staring back. Deep and utter nothingness. "Fuck," he said and climbed out of the truck. He walked into the cold florescent light and made his way to the back wall. He pulled six bottles of beer out of the fridge, took them to the counter, and went out again into the moonless night. 

He headed to her house. The white clean monstrosity next door. The engine roared. His mind was a loud thundering place of cadences, sentences finished half-way, arguments, fights, belittling comments left unsaid. The heat outside dissipated as he drove on into the growing dark with the neck of a bottle tight in his hand and the steering wheel palmed and spinning in the other. His mind shifted to her. He thought about it again, the time they met, now what seemed so long ago.

The first time he crawled over her sill it was because she had called him. He heard a whistle coming from the tree line. He looked around, seeing nothing but the soil and trees and sky. The whistle came again. From her window, Mari Hoff leaned against the will of gravity, two fingers in her mouth - whistling. Traces of ash lay in the sill where she sat. All afternoon she sat in the window watching his body move in the fields. Finally she called to him. 

    "Hello?" he called. "Who's there?"

    "My name's Mari."

    "You one of the Hoffs?" 

    "Yes. I'm a Hoff."

    "You the daughter?" 

    "Yes." 

    "What do you want?"

    "Thought you might want some lemonade – it being such a hot day."

    Mike dropped his hoe and began to pick his way through the trees. Coming out on the Hoff side, he saw her there in the window dipping forward into the sunlight. Her light hair blew up in soft gusts of wind and he saw a girl with green playful eyes smoking a slender cigarette. He smiled. 

    "So, you want some lemonade?" she asked. 

    "That's why I'm here," he said. 

    She looked up to the sky, took a deep drag off the cigarette and released the smoke slowly into a thin column rising up through the oak leaves. 

    "Well," she said. "Climb up and get some."

    When he reached the top of her window sill, he said "Where's my lemonade?"

    She smiled. "Lemonade? Now, why would I have any of that?"

~

Mike parked the truck in front of his house and took the beers off the seat. He headed away from his own house where Mahon's silhouette flickered in the living room window, ghoulish and alone with the television's perpetual light. Moving through the trees he heard the ever-present sound of the horses breathing, watching, clomping their hooves. He bent and found a rock and threw it at the darkness. A thud in the night. Emerging on the Hoff side, he brushed scattered leaves from his shirt. The trees gave way to the manicured lawn and the gravel drive and he looked up to where she sat smoking, barely visible except for a thin stream of smoke. He dropped the beers in the grass.

    "You didn't say you were coming tonight," she said as he crawled into her bedroom. He pulled the cigarette from her mouth and tossed it into the yard. Before she could protest, he grabbed her by the shoulders and leaned over her so she could feel his breath on her lips. "Keep quiet, and come on with me," he said. He led her out the window and down to the grass. They crossed through the trees into the fields. 

    "You go first," he said pointing her toward the thick woods. Pawing ahead of her, she saw as if for the first time how dark the trees could make it. Like a child woken in the night trying against the confusion of still dreaming and the immense darkness to find the bathroom down a path known so well in the day, but now so unfamiliar. The limbs and leaves appeared gradually in that gray way, colorless, solid, isolated details of leaves and branches moving back and forth in silent flashes. She sniffed and coughed, smelling the wet earth. Mike directed her from behind but he kept moving her off the path. They crashed over underbrush and tumbled into trees. Images flashed through his mind and he watched his brother stand and fall, stand and fall, the hoe in mid-swing. He saw Danny just laying there grasping his chest with the blood in the corner of his mouth beginning to trickle. The hoe hit his back. He flexed up again, eyes open to the sky – a sprung trap. Another blow brought him down. The dust in front of his mouth moved in short spiral breaths as he cursed. Ahead, the river raced through the trees. Mike was happy to see the water and the moon. He sat her down on the bank and in the quiet they watched the water flow in turbulent eddies of sticks and leaves. 

    "I didn't aim to do it," he said. "It just happened." Mike's hands trembled. He opened another beer and threw the cap into the water. It flipped end over end as it sank to the bottom. 

    "I loved him," she said. "I raised him from a little pup." 

    "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm real sorry." 

    "My dad wants to kill you."

    "I just didn't see him there. He must have been chasing the rabbit too. I swear I didn't mean to shoot him."

    "What did your brother do?"

    "He told your dad about the dog." 

    "That's all?" She lit a cigarette. "You gonna hit me some day?" She turned her head toward the water and spit out the first long tail of smoke.

    "I'm never gonna hurt you."

    "How do you know?"

    "I know what I'll do." 

    "Like you knew about my dog and your brother?"

    Mike shook his head. "Not like them at all."

    They said nothing for a while. Mike opened another beer and watched Mari drink it all at once, her long neck moved up and down with each swallow. He had never wanted anything more. Stiff and tired and covered with leaves, they stumbled away from the stream. He held her about the waist and walked her out of the trees into the open field where the moon now shone bright and he looked down upon her in the light of it. In her eyes, his own dark form looked carefully back at him. 

     Mike smelled the sun-burnt air coming through the window. He rolled over and looked at Mari lying in his bed still covered with the hay and leaves that had followed her back from the field. He could hear Mahon moving around downstairs. A pan clanged in the kitchen. The gas burner clicked and eggs began to fry. 

    "Wake up," Mike whispered. At first she was startled, but then she smiled and that was all Mike could think about as he put on his clothes. 

    "I have to get you home," he said, dragging his fingers through her hair. 

    "My dad will kill me. Sleeping with a dog-killer."

    Mike kissed her. "Don't worry. I'll get you home before anyone notices."

    "Come on then."

    They scuttled out the window and down a tree. They crossed Hoff's yard and quietly climbed up the wall. 

~

What took Mike by surprise was not Hoff sitting in the room or the shotgun on Hoff's lap. It was Mari. She began to utter sounds like Mike had never heard. Deep guttural groans and hisses. She was looking over the bed to the floor in front of Hoff's chair. It took Mike a minute to realize what it was.

     Half-decomposed, stinking in the perpetual retrograde of the sun as noon passed hotly across the sky. The carcass slick with dried blood was gorged upon by flies. The small airborne beasts flew in circles and landed on the eyeless skull. There was a sound coming from them, a low heavy buzz. Satisfied, unhungry, they no longer fevered for the dead thing. The maggots had their fill and the air thickened with their blood-filled forms, like small bladders hovering on invisible wings. They made small clouds above Mari's bed and only through their mass could Hoff be seen. 

    "I found my dog," said Hoff. He sat in a wicker rocker in all black as if Sunday had never passed. He smoked a pipe and the thick hickory smell of it almost overcame the stink of dead dog. 

    "Found your dog, too." 

~

Mike kicked in the door and dragged Mahon's dog through the kitchen so it left a trail of blood and moisture across the dry floor slats until eventually the dog rested beneath Mahon himself. Mahon lay on the couch still blinking and rubbing his eyes. The dog landed wet-heavy and covered with the leaves and dirt and horse shit that gripped the hair as Mike had thrown the dog out Mari's window and dragged the carcass across the Hoff lawn, back through the trees, down the field road and up Mahon's porch. The face was meaningless, a stone-ridden broken thing. When Mahon saw the condition of his dog, he lit up off the couch red as fire just as Mike had imagined he would. Mike stood before Mahon, almost grinning, prepared for the march back to the Hoff land, for what violence Mahon would make with Hoff. Mahon jumped forward and threw his weight into action but Mike, caught unaware, received the brunt of it and flew across the room. 

    "You kill this dog?" Mahon roared. 

    Mike lay heaving on the floor. Tears smeared his vision. "No, you old fuck. I didn't killed your fucking dog."

    "Why not? You think it just happened two dogs were shot in one week? I know damn well you're to blame."

    Thoughtless rage took Mike. Familiar crazed notions filled his mind and he knew them one by one in that short moment on the floor. He had grown them, cultivated them and waited for their fruition. Mike's fingers gripped wildly together and felt their own hardness in the knuckles and came upon Mahon in fury. The feeling of water in the old man's loose face could be felt through his knuckles and Mike took Mahon to the porch by his neck and left him lying gasping for breath. 

    Then he ran.

    He dropped his bloody shirt on the porch and fled down to the road and through the trees cutting back toward the Hoff house. He stood shirtless on the lawn before the porch with the towering columns, raised his bloody fists to the sky, and screamed,

    "You Hoff! Hoff!"

    Hoff came to the porch, caneless, gunless, towering in the relief of the sun. 

    "You killed my dog," said Mike. "You are never gonna be done with it now. You old dirty fuck. You fucking killer. You know nothing about me. You fucking shit. You dirty fucking shit. You think your black coat and gold chain and white house keeps you up on us? Well you fuck, I fucked your daughter and I'll take her away and you ain't gonna stop me. I'll knock you down with or without that cane. You old limping fuck." 

    Mike, a shirtless bare-footed yowling obscenity of a man, barreled off into the thick of the woods. Mahon ripped up a board from his own porch and ran steady behind Mike roaring his name, flailing the loose board. 

    Hoff stood in his doorway holding his coffee, and watched and smiled and thought of Mari and the way fatherhood stopped moving inside him and how quiet and empty the house would be with her gone.

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