LITMIR.BIZ

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way to understand for sure, and nobody can do that. The rest is just the law.

      What would you do if you did know for sure, asked Cole.

      Fleece handed him the one-hitter and the fixed angle of his eyes indicated he was thinking it over. Cole went through the ritual of pinch, plant, and flame and then took tiny hits off the heated brass, the metal hot on his lips and the raw smoke too harsh, scalding a passage down his young throat to a hot blossom in his chest. Fleece could kill the hit in one deep inhalation; Cole nursed it. His brother, amused, yet not going so far as to tease, watched him baby the cylinder until he finished.

      What am I going to do, Fleece said then. Kill him back? I’m off the lake, so I’m supposed to kill him back. Maybe I would if I knew the story ended there, but it wouldn’t, the story just changes, and in that one I’m hiding the rest of my life from any sons or brothers the guy had.

       It’s just not right to kill somebody like it cost nothing.

       We don’t know what it cost him. He might be paying for it to this day.

      You sound like you’re defending him, Cole said. The guy who killed your father, you defend him like you’re his lawyer.

      I was just a kid then, Fleece said, no more than sixteen, seventeen himself at the time. I want to believe tomorrow might be just a little bit better than today, and even better the day after that, and on and on. And forget what I come from. Shoot. If it came out right I might even go work for the man.

      Fleece smiled at the thought. He drew a moist hand over his face, and then drove a frank stare into Cole that implied how well he knew his brother, that he understood his thoughts and wonder because he himself had been through them already as separate items and as a constellation of issues for a much longer time, wrestling, and had reached some equanimity with the matter that Cole could not yet make. You know, lots of times a story doesn’t have an end, it just changes shape, he said. Then abruptly he stood and stepped one pace away, and by doing so finished the conversation right there, wherever they were, wherever they found themselves together that day; Cole remembers only his brother, their words, the blue sky presenting ropes of snaking clouds in perpetual motion.

      I’ll catch up with you later, Fleece had said, exchanging the little wooden box in his pocket for the butterfly knife again, the end of which he stabbed unopened against his thigh as he walked away, leaving little Cole holding the corner of yet another question he assumed he could never resolve on his own.

      The statement I’ll catch up with you winds through Cole’s head like a carousel of thought tracing the inside of his skull as he drives the interstate north to Pirtle County. The words scroll across the screen of his mind, turn briefly illegible as they follow one another in a circle and turn backward, as AMBULANCE appears on the hood of one so that it can be read in a rearview mirror, then passing clear before his eyes again. I’ll catch up with you. Cole has always seen it the other way around: catching up with Fleece had been practically his life’s work, all he longed for. To catch up on seventeen, to catch up to his brother, whose way of being was like a pattern Cole had hoped to slip into, to be so much like him as to be him. Sometimes he felt—even then, a young boy—hardly more than a ghost, trailing after his brother’s full incarnation, seeking to be conjured into actual flesh by this brother who understood what Cole needed to be. Yet he knew they were inescapably different as well; Cole was Cole and Fleece was Fleece and no matter how much he might wish otherwise, this fact would remain forever the case. A recognition underscored by Cole’s floating eye and stiff leg, his gimp knee a throbbing alarm in changing weather like any hill-bound geezer, while his brother rioted the night, humming guitar lines as he hot-footed that Nova reckless over bad roads, suffering no doubt or dread, to whatever destination he had in mind.

      By the time he hits Lake Holloway the sun has retreated enough to make headlights necessary in the woods, and the shine off the black Audi cabriolet parked behind his mother’s car appears to leap at him from the dusk. The sight strikes a great chord of emotions: first, hopeful expectancy—Shady Beck has come to see him. Or she has already turned up Fleece and wants them to know. Then it’s the realization that Shady Beck is alone with his mother, and he doesn’t know for how long, and his hopefulness withers into anxiety. She won’t have news; she wouldn’t know how to turn up any. He imagines Shady describing abandoned seminary rooms and packs of starving dogs, and his brother’s famous car set afire before their eyes looking down from a rooftop, Lyda grousing how Cole cares nothing for family honor.

      He expects the heads of both women to turn as he enters the house, their faces craning to greet him over the half-wall partition that divides the kitchen from the front room, the oak-doored cabinets (pine within, handmade by his father, Mack) blurred behind the haze of Lyda’s cigarettes, a radio playing Lite FM hits of the seventies from where it balances atop the clothes washer; he expects to walk in, perhaps, on their laughter at some shared comment he will not quite hear. He finds he is wrong. The house sits silent, the kitchen table empty, one wooden chair pulled back before a tin cup, speckled green like a leaf under siege by aphids. Three lemon cookies sit on a ceramic plate among crumbs. Cole puts one in his mouth and lets the tart fruit sizzle on his tongue. The women are out back, on the slope facing the woods across the creek. Through the kitchen window he sees his mother amid the recounting of some tale, her hands active, tracing forms through the air. Shady stands attentively in gray cotton sweatpants, her name in purple-and-gold high-school lettering visible from the kitchen light in an arc across the rise of her ass—old warmups he recalls eyeing from the risers years before as the girls did wind sprints on the track, Cole braving this same November cold beside Spunk, their behinds clenched on the aluminum, sharing weed and inventing conquests as they watched.

      She turns with Lyda at the high squeak of the back door opening. As he smiles hello he pursues her face, inspects her gray eyes, the corners of her mouth, the tilt of her head, for any hint of why she’s there or what she and Lyda have been talking about, but her face reflects only bland and friendly welcome. Opening his mouth feels like plunging face-first into dark water of uncertain depth.

      Shady beats him to it. “We thought you’d be home an hour ago,” she says, pressing to her sternum a blue tin cup speckled to match the one in the kitchen, above her breasts lost in the baggy, hooded sweatshirt.

      “That was a long day, sugar, you do it all yourself?” Lyda’s voice is slow, soft over consonants.

      “All by myself,” Cole says. “Any coffee left?”

      Together the women announce, as if in celebration, that they are drinking tea. As she starts up the slope his mother says she’ll make coffee if he wants some. Her hair, colored mahogany (she calls it “strawberry jam”) but grown out to show dark roots with bands of gray, froths in a wild flurry about her head, perhaps originally styled as a kind of bun or twist but since harassed beyond recognition. He can tell she has massaged the day past concern in a blend of pills on the couch with her Doral Golds and daytime TV, with long breaks before the bathroom mirror examining her look. A day off from her life of days off. She stabs out her smoke in the matted grass by her bare foot and throws the filter into the plastic bucket by the door, the bowl yellowed and soiled by rain and sand mixing weeks’ worth of spent butts. She brushes past him with a kiss to his cheek and he smells the tobacco over sweaty perfume. He asks if she’s going out tonight.

      “Not tonight, I’m plumb wore out—my back’s up again, and my neck,” she says, reciting symptoms gleaned from her Merck Manual used to pull prescriptions, manifestations practiced to the point that they have become a kind of truth. “I can only do so much,” she adds from behind the closing door.

      A lot of work goes into scoring meds. No one would describe Lyda as a nervous busybody, but she does possess abundant physical energy, a drive that, without an outlet, easily transforms to anxiety and paranoia; she needs to keep her hands busy. Oxy, Nembutal, Flexeril, Dilaudid if she can get it, keep her steady—so she tells Cole. Who takes most statements at face value and wishes he didn’t. But when the pills wear off, the skittish edge trills apparent about her. Sober,

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