Where All Light Tends to Go (15 page)

“What about my share? What about all those numbers you’ve been adding up and subtracting ever since I can remember?”

“That’s all just a bunch of shit, boy. Like I said, I don’t owe you a fucking thing.”

I picked myself up from the wall, my body beaten near limp, only pride holding me there. I limped to the edge of the bed and stood over him. I looked him dead in his eyes, eyes that had been sucked dry a long time ago, eyes that should have held something in them but didn’t, the way a dead man stares. All living things I’d ever seen held that light, but those bulbs had burned out on him a long time ago. “Bury her, and we’ll call it square.”

Daddy looked up at me, all of that pain flushing his face, his eyes like wetted stone. “I’m going to bury her, boy, but it ain’t got a goddamn thing to do with you.”

It was already daylight when I hobbled out of the house for the last time. I would’ve felt better leaving if I’d have doused the whole place in gasoline, poured a trail up the drive, and lit that motherfucker up like a pile of dead Christmas trees, but I didn’t. No, I just gathered my shit and left. There was a few hundred dollars stashed in a hide in the hardwood floor by my bed, a place where a single plank lifted and revealed joists and insulation. I’d always hidden things there. When I was a kid, I hid packs of stolen cigarettes, a porno mag or two at times, and never told a soul other than Maggie. But aside from the money, packing was just a matter of piling clothes in the pickup, swallowing the last two Xaney bars I had, and driving away.

I spent that first night parked way back on a dirt road where hippie kids from the university liked to camp and burn empty bottles of Aristocrat vodka and Barbarossa spiced rum. The campfires they lit left dark ovals up and down both sides of riverbank. A long ways back, a man by the name of Aiken owned all of that land, and Daddy had told me once while we were fishing that Aiken blew the whole front end off a kayak when a couple of tree huggers demanded access to the gorge through his property. According to those stories, old man Aiken had already made his stance quite clear, and when those water rats decided to take their chances, Aiken hammered off a shot from a .30-30 high up on the ridgeline just as soon as the paddle made its first cut into water. That was back when mountain ways still mattered, back when men were men, and the neighbors were too scared to call the law.

Nowadays it was all game lands overseen by the Forest Service, though it was seldom patrolled by the dark green pickups the rangers drove and that’s why I’d come. The rangers with fancy college degrees, who wore golden badges and government-issued logging boots with kilties rolled back over the laces, spent most of their time cutting fire lines.

I had parked at the end of a rutted trail down to the river where water purred and whispered over smooth stone. It was a good quarter mile from the main road, a main road that was loose gravel and only wide enough for one car. During the day, the road saw lots of drivers, the dust never seeming to settle back out of the air. After sunset, though, the fly fishermen and paddlers headed out, and the road was traveled only by drunks looking to cross the mountain without the hassle of saying their ABCs backward, standing on one leg, or touching their noses with their eyes closed. I sat on the tailgate and struggled to roll a loose cigarette out of a bag of Bugler with my good hand, no more money for name-brand smokes and no Winstons to steal. Stale tobacco burned with a dusty smell and puckered a bitter taste in my mouth with every puff.

The woods already smelled like rain, though the clouds hadn’t arrived just yet. A summertime thunder-boomer echoed over a set of peaks just to the south, and the sky flashed with light a few seconds before each wave of sound arrived. I knew it wouldn’t be long before summer rain pushed the river over its banks and washed the shoreline clean.

I didn’t know what to think of Daddy agreeing to pay for my mother’s funeral. I’d never really expected he would. I’d never really seen anything close to compassion in his heart. I hated him for what he’d done. I hated him for what he’d raised me to become. But there was a tiny bit of respect that came the night before, when he told me to head to his lawyer’s office to work out the details of my mother’s burial. In the morning I would visit Queen, and in a few short days I’d put Mama in the ground. I had Daddy to thank for that, and being thankful toward him was about as confusing a thing as I’d ever felt. Mama wasn’t the only thing that needed burying. I wanted to shovel dirt on those feelings too, bury them deeper than six feet.

The first drop of rain fell through an opening in the jack pines. It smacked me in the top of the head and burned at the place where Daddy had cold-cocked me with the butt of his pistol. Somehow or another the blows he hammered hadn’t split my scalp, but a tender knot had risen on my skull and that’s exactly where that first drop of rain struck. Another drop fell and thumped the pickup, then another and another, and within seconds the rain came. I snatched my cell phone and the pouch of Bugler off the tailgate and threw the things not suited for water into the cab. But I wanted the rain on my skin. I wanted that coldness on my muscles, and I climbed back into the bed to lie there and let the world wash over me. My shoulder hurt and my neck was whiplashed stiff. Raindrops stung the places where skin had yet to heal, but it was a soothing kind of pain that I welcomed. The water was cold and the air warm, chills raising goose bumps on my arms, and all that rain seemed to wake me up out of a nightmare that had held for too long. For the first time in a long time, I felt alive.

Lightning screamed sideways across the sky, and beneath a tall stand of pines was a place most wouldn’t have found comfort, but it was the closest I’d ever been to baptism. My mind cleared and that clearheadedness brought on a dream of setting the world right. It wasn’t vengeful or fueled by hatred, but rather a settling of debt owed, a righting of the world that had needed righting for a long, long time. Daddy had been dead-on about two things: I was grown, and I could fend for myself. But that was all he had right.

He was wrong about those numbers he’d ciphered in that book all of my working life. Those numbers weren’t
shit
like he’d said. No, he’d been wrong about that. The money was something I’d earned, a small payment for the burden he fixed to my back when I was young. Seeing as he’d piled on a weight that would stay with me as far into the future as I could imagine, probably hanging around my neck and weighing me down till the day I died, Daddy owed me that. And it wasn’t just me who needed that money now. It was Maggie. I was certain I could talk her into taking the money, and I was absolutely certain that I wanted her to have it. I knew my father kept enough in the safe at the shop to cover most of what I’d earned. I wasn’t sure how I’d manage to get in and out of there quite yet, but the one thing I understood was that the time for cashing out had come.

I spent hours texting Maggie that night to convince her to take the money. I lied about where it came from, but it was a lie that I knew had to be told. She loved me, but she never loved the life I led. She respected me, but she never respected how I made my money. I knew she wouldn’t have taken it any other way. So I told her it was my inheritance from when my grandfather died. I told her it was a loan rather than a gift, and that she’d have to pay it back. And after a whole lot of telling, a whole lot of convincing that it wasn’t me giving her anything, she finally agreed. She’d mail the paperwork in and she’d be out of here come fall. The minute she made that promise, I felt happy, truly happy, and that happiness grew from the fact that Maggie would never have to surrender to anything. Maybe I wouldn’t either.

The rain poured, all the while those thoughts becoming a little clearer and a little more certain. When it was done, I’d never be able to come back, but that fact didn’t frighten me. There had never been anything here for me anyways. No, it was staying that frightened me. Staying was something that I just couldn’t figure. I knew right then that there are things in this world far worse than dying, things that’ll push a man to greet death like an old friend when he comes. Staying was one of those things. Staying meant that I’d become just like him in time.

Irving Queen kept his office in a two-story house just a block or two off Main Street in downtown Sylva. White paint chipped from the wooden siding, but the black shutters were fresh and shiny, giving a mascara outline to every window on the house. The windowpanes were that old kind of glass that had a wavy look about it when the sunlight hit it just right, but the sun wasn’t out that day. Up close, bubbles were visible in the glass, little pockets of century-old air frozen inside the panes. A rocking chair swayed back and forth as I walked across the porch, and the warped porch planks squeaked against rusted nails.

I turned the tarnished brass doorknob that fit loose in its socket and walked into the front room of the office. Box fans were placed obtusely throughout the room, and the breezes blew in every direction, an indoor dust devil whirling about that place. A middle-aged woman behind a cluttered desk slapped a glass paperweight down on a stack of papers just before the top pages caught wind, the cross breeze generated when I opened the door proving too much.

I’d never met her, but I’d heard the stories when Daddy drank. Queen was married to his high school sweetheart, a woman who put on the weight not long after vows and aged poorly in the years to come. Whether he was just too chickenshit to leave or stuck around for appearances, Queen never divorced. But like most men, he’d started sleeping around a few weeks after the honeymoon. Being one of the few lawyers around, he’d always done well, and that type of money dazzled the eyes of girls who’d been raised on mayonnaise sandwiches in the holler. When he was still young he was able to keep a whole mess of girls around, but those chances faded once his hair thinned and gut bulged. Now all he had was this one mistress who worked as his secretary. Daddy had always called her Franken-slut after all the nose jobs and tit jobs Queen had paid for to keep her looking young.

“Ought to have somebody tighten the screws on that doorknob,” I said as I walked toward her. “Felt like it was going to come off in my hand.”

“Haven’t noticed.” The secretary pushed a pair of narrow reading glasses to the tip of her nose and ran her eyes from my boots up to my face and back down to where my hand was wrapped in an old shirt. The hand Daddy rammed through his bedroom window was cut to bits, and I’d wrapped it as best I could. She sized me up, and the disgusted look on her face seemed to say she didn’t figure me for the type who could pay. “And who exactly did you say you were?”

“I didn’t say, but it’s Jacob. Jacob McNeely, and Mr. Queen ought to be expecting me. We have a meeting at noon.”

She flicked a loose-fitting wristwatch up onto her hand and turned the face of it till cheap crystals sparkled in the light. The time must’ve suited her, because she went straight into flipping pages behind the leather cover of her appointment log. “There you are, dear.” For the first time she smiled at me, finally figuring I wasn’t delinquent. “Let me just go see if he’s ready for you.”

The secretary stood up and walked to a closed door at the far end of the main room, her high heels knocking and knocking across the floor. A tall slit rose in the back of her skirt and she rocked her hips as if she walked a catwalk for some imaginary crowd. Across the room she pecked at the closed door, turned to me and smiled. A voice I couldn’t make out over the fans must’ve told her to come in, because she did and disappeared into the room for a second or two before she strutted my way.

She looked like she might’ve been pretty at some point earlier in life, but instead of riding that natural beauty out gracefully, she’d opted to hitch her wagon to Queen and let doctors pinch and poke and stretch and prod till wasn’t anything left that duct tape could fix. Her face looked as if wires pulled all of the skin back behind her ears. A low-cut white dress shirt was unbuttoned far enough to expose her breastbone, a breastbone that wouldn’t have looked near so bony and rippled if the skin that once covered it hadn’t relocated onto the sides of implants two sizes too big. Doctors had worked long and hard to counteract gravity on her body and failed miserably.

“He’ll be just a minute, dear,” the secretary said as she returned to the desk. Her blond hair was pulled up, feathering at the top, just how porn stars playing secretaries wore it in the movies. Those hackles that sprigged off the top of her head blew around in the breeze of box fans. She settled into her desk and smiled at me, overly white teeth beaming against the orange glow of spray tan. “You just go ahead and have a seat right there, dear. You can keep me company.”

Her smile put me off, and I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I was more focused on deciphering the riddle of surgeries that pieced her together than conversation. “At least it’s nice outside.” It wasn’t. I knew it was stupid as soon as I said it. The storm from the night before had spread till there wasn’t a bit of sunshine to be had, just gray clouds and drizzle. The secretary glared past me and through the bubbled windows to see if she’d missed something, but she hadn’t. Her eyes squinted as if to ask, “Are you dumb or something?” but before either of us had time to answer, the door slammed at the other end of the room and Mr. Queen shuffled across the floor.

Now, if Humpty Dumpty hadn’t fallen off that wall, and if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men hadn’t tried so damn hard and failed, I would’ve sworn old Humpty slipped on a Jos. A. Bank’s, moved to Sylva, and changed his name to Irving. That pudgy little bald-headed devil was a walking, talking hard-boiled egg.

“Jacob, my boy, how the hell are you?” Mr. Queen slithered up beside where I sat, smiled at me with nubby, yellowed teeth. Cheap whiskey and gas station cigars fogged his breath. He wrapped his hands around my shoulders and gave as tight a squeeze as he could muster.

“Ain’t worth a damn, Irv, but I reckon you knew that.”

Mr. Queen pulled up on one sleeve of my T-shirt, and I stood out of the chair. He pressed at the base of my back and opened out his other hand to gesture toward his office. “Good, good. Glad to hear,” he said, smiling and nodding at the secretary as he ushered me across the room. It wasn’t until we were in his office and the door was closed that his smile straightened and his eyes narrowed.

The wall behind his desk was lined with framed papers with cursive writing, fancy gold leaf seals, and wide-arced signatures. One of the bubbly glass windows on the sidewall looked out onto a pin oak in the front yard. Mr. Queen sat down at a chair behind an executive desk, reached into a drawer, pulled out a pint bottle of whiskey, and took a long, bubbly slug. He leaned back in the chair till I was certain it’d tip, propped his feet up on the dark wood desk, and rested the bottle on his belly where lapels flared away. I took a seat across from him, the leather inlaid desktop all that stretched between us.

“We’ll get straight to business. I’m a busy man with little time to fool with such piddly affairs. But seeing as your father has managed to keep hundred-dollar bills falling out of my pockets for all these years, I’m obliged to do what he asks. Just know that my obligation lies with him and him alone, and that is the only reason I’ve agreed to take any part in this. These types of things are generally the responsibility of the family, not an established attorney such as myself. So go ahead and tell me what you’re after, keeping in mind that I’ve got other things to tend.” Mr. Queen lowered his head and goggled at me with wide, impatient eyes. Tilting his head pressed what little neck he had flat, just a fat face spreading into a thick roll where his neck overlapped his collar.

“I don’t really know what you’re looking for.”

“Details, Jacob, I need to know details: what you want, where you want it. Do you want a preacher, or do you not? Do you want it in a church, or do you want it in a funeral home? Flowers, songs, what? Details, Jacob, and hurry along with it.”

“Well, I reckon I haven’t given it that much thought.”

“Then what in the fuck are you doing here, boy? Wasting my time? Is that it?” Mr. Queen slapped the chair back flat and bellied up to the desk. He slammed the bottle of whiskey down on the desktop and narrowed his eyes onto me.

“In a church, I guess.”

“Good, good. Now we’re getting somewhere. What church?”

“Hamburg Baptist. That’s where she grew up, and I guess that’d be my church too.”

“And I take it you’ll want a preacher with it being in a church?”

“Yes. I definitely want that.”

“And do you have a preacher in mind?”

“Well, Hiram Bumgarner, I reckon.”

“Who’s this?”

“His name’s Hiram, and he’s been the reverend there at Hamburg all my life. I guess he still is.”

“I’ll see if he is and if he’d mind holding the service.”

His agitation and the fact I really didn’t know what to say had me flustered. I picked at the wooden laminate of his desk along the edge with my thumbnail and stared at the floor. When a clear thought finally came to me, I looked up at him and spoke. “As far as burial, I reckon I’d like the casket to be—”

“Whoa, whoa, now. Burial? Who said anything about burial?”

“Well, I just figured—”

“There’s nothing left for burying, my boy. I mean you could bury the ashes if you want to, but I don’t see it justifiable of any dollars being spent.”

“Ashes? Did you say ashes?”

“Yes, son. Ashes. What did you think had been done with the body?” Mr. Queen took another glug and screwed the top down on his pint of whiskey. “She’s been cremated. I thought you knew that.”

“Cremated? Now, who in the hell told them to do that?”

“These things happen quickly, my boy. Your father made the call and it was done.”

I could feel the anger boiling my blood up into my face, my cheeks turning hotter than hell by what he said and how he said it. Mr. Queen leaned back in his chair and interlocked his fingers. His two index fingers pushed together and pointed upward like he was building a church and steeple with his hands. He raised his eyebrows as if to ask what else I wanted, so I told him. “Put one of those things in the paper, telling folks what time the service will be.”

“You mean an obituary. Well, how do you want it to read?”

“I don’t know, Irv, however they’re supposed to fucking read. Something about her being in a better place or some shit, I don’t know. Just let folks know she’s gone.”

“One problem, my boy. The papers have already run, both of them weekly, you know. That little rag out of Cashiers ran Wednesday, and
The Sylva Herald
ran two days ago. So if you really want to get it in the paper, we’re going to have to hold the whole thing off for a week, which won’t be too big of an issue as I see it, with there not being any sort of burial. So, is that what you want to do?”

“No, I want it done.”

“So then no obituary?”

“Just scratch the fucking newspapers and get it done. Get it done as quickly as possible, tomorrow if you can. See if the reverend is willing to say a few words and call it done. I don’t want to be waiting around for it.”

“I understand, boy. Say no more. I’ll see what I can do.” Mr. Queen jotted a few notes down on a long legal pad, yellow paper scribbled with chicken scratch that only he could read. “So, is there anything else?”

“No, I don’t reckon there is.” I was seconds away from coming across the table and sinking my hands where a neck should’ve been. I’d pop the head off that snaky bastard like the old-timers had done, grab him by the rattles and snap him like a bullwhip till his head severed clean off. That’s what snakes were fit for.

“Good, good, my boy.” Mr. Queen bellied back up to the desk and opened his booze. He took a long sip and let the whiskey roll around in his mouth for a bit before he swallowed. A tiny dribble leaked from the corner of his mouth, and he leaned back in his chair and rested the bottle on his gut. “I trust you can show yourself out,” he said as he fanned out one arm, his hand opening as if to direct the way. I was just about through the door when he spoke up from behind the desk. “One last thing, Jacob.” He spoke loudly to try and overrun the clatter of box fans. “Seems there’s going to be a trial after all for that assault. Just couldn’t get Mr. Hooper to go along with it, you know?” Mr. Queen smiled slyly and licked the dribble of whiskey that beaded at the corner of his mouth. “I won’t be able to represent you since you and your father have parted ways. Conflict of interest, but you understand.”

I turned around and stopped myself just before I rushed him. “Oh, I understand. I’ve understood most of my life.”

“Good, good, my boy.” Mr. Queen squirmed in his chair, all of his movements slithering and serpentine. He opened a desk drawer, took out a three-dollar cigar, and sliced the end off with a razor blade against his desk. The cigar angled toward the ceiling as he slobbered it between his lips and squinted. “And if it wouldn’t trouble you, how about shutting the door.”