“She was with you,” Dillon said.
Preston shook his head. “Man, I really messed that up.”
Dillon wanted to say something about finally learning that Stacy would always be Preston’s, no matter how much he wanted her to be his, and that he thought he’d finally let go of all that in the last year, but Preston started talking to the window again about buying the motorcycle to try to be a big shot and about losing his legs in the accident. He seemed so empty.
“Things would have been real different,” Dillon said. “Some bad things happened that no one would have predicted.”
“What are you talking about?” Preston said, and Dillon realized Preston wasn’t aware he’d been talking aloud.
“You okay?” Dillon asked.
Preston came back. “Yeah, I’m okay. Tired, is all.”
“Wanna go back home and catch some shut-eye? Gun down some tin cans later?”
Preston shook his head. “No. I’m not that tired. This is the day for it.”
Dillon thought he meant shooting cans.
Preston pulled the van up next to the high old wooden fence surrounding the Crown Point Cemetery, about four miles outside the city limits. Crown Point had been the main graveyard in the 1800s, when Three Forks was a spot in the road rather than a budding city of two hundred thousand. Dillon reached into the back and hauled out Preston’s chair, custom made of light alloy with special athletic wheels, carried it around the van, and opened it next to the driver’s door. His dad and he had pooled their money and got it for Preston when he came home from the hospital in hopes that he’d get interested in wheelchair athletics. It didn’t work. Preston played on a wheelchair basketball team for a little while, and he wasn’t bad; but in a short period of time he secretly named it the Miami Express and started running drugs out of the Dragon tavern for the Warlocks. He had told Dillon at one point that the bartender in the Dragon checked a person’s ID about once every third year, so he had no trouble coming and going from his new home base.
Preston extracted their grandfather’s old German Luger out of the glove compartment and tucked it in his belt. For as long as Dillon could remember, Preston had kept that gun oiled and polished as if it were brand-new. Dillon collected both twenty-two rifles from the back and leaned them against the van before scouting the area for unsuspecting bottles and cans. Crown Point was a well-known make-out spot for Three Forks teenagers and offered up an abundance of beer and pop containers, and Dillon filled two empty cases with them while Preston wheeled the weaponry to a good flat spot from which to shoot.
While Dillon placed the targets carefully on tree stumps and fence posts and in the crooks of the branches of trees, Preston loaded the Luger’s clip and filled the chamber of each of the rifles. Their game was simple: Choose a target; miss it and the points double for the other guy. No target was placed closer than thirty yards, and at least four of eleven were more than forty-five. Preston didn’t miss one in the first round and finished it with a count of seven to Dillon’s four. When Preston shattered a Bud bottle Dillon could barely see in the crotch of two large tree branches for his seventh to end the first round, Dillon hustled out to set up another eleven, thinking all the while how strange Preston was acting, how he kept shifting from loud and engaging to distant and silent. Preston had been silent throughout the last four shots.
“You feeling okay?” Dillon asked, walking back toward him from the tree where Preston had shattered the final Bud.
Preston had wheeled his chair nearly twenty feet from the spot they’d been shooting from, leaving the rifles back on the ground. The Luger was in his lap.
“Not tough enough, huh?” Dillon said. “Need a little bigger challenge?”
Preston picked up the pistol and fingered it slowly, looking down at it momentarily, then back at Dillon. Dillon thought for a split second Preston was going to shoot him. “Hey, Pres,” he said, stopping at the rifles, “what’s the matter?”
“A lot,” Preston said. “A lot’s the matter.”
“What.”
“Well, to start with,” he said, picking up the gun in both hands and leveling it at one of the closer bottles, “you. You’re the matter.” He pulled the trigger, and the Luger jumped in his hands. The bottle nearly vaporized.
Dillon watched carefully, confused as to how he should feel, whether to be scared or not, as Preston leveled the gun again, this time kicking a can on the cemetery fence post ten feet into the air. “What’re you talking about?” Dillon said. “What do you mean I’m the matter?”
“I got to go out honest,” Preston said. “If nothing else, I got to go out honest. Do you know what it’s like watching what I could have been if I were big and strong and so goddamn cool all the time? So frigging funny?”
Dillon took a breath. “No, I guess I don’t.”
Preston nodded. “Nope. I guess you don’t.” He nailed a bottle at the edge of a ground squirrel hole. “Well,” he said, “it ain’t a lot of fun.”
Dillon started toward him, but in that instant the barrel of the Luger was tight against Preston’s temple. He said, “Stand fast, soldier.”
Dillon stood fast. “Hey, Pres, you on something?”
Preston reached into his coat pocket and turned it inside out, dumping a mid-size street pharmacy onto the ground. “Yeah,” he said, smiling, “I’m on a little something.”
Dillon’s throat knotted. He knew he might not have a chance to slow this down with Preston on drugs. He couldn’t for the life of him predict Preston when he was high. For one thing he never knew what drugs Preston had taken, and even if he did, he’d never known all that much about the effects of drugs anyway. “We can talk about this,” he said.
“Oh, yeah, we can. We can talk about it.” Preston lowered the Luger to his lap. “Go ahead, little bro. Go ahead and talk about it.”
Dillon stood dumb, his heart pounding in his ears.
“At a loss for words?” Preston mocked. “You?”
Dillon said, “Yeah, I guess I am. I mean, I don’t really know what’s wrong, Pres. I didn’t even know you were pissed at me.”
Preston smiled and relaxed a trifle, and Dillon believed there might be a chance. “Ah, it’s not just you. You’re only a little of what’s the matter, really. Got time for a story?”
“Yeah,” Dillon said, moving a little closer, “I’ve got all the time you need.”
In a flash the gun was back to Preston’s temple. “Just sit tight,” he said. “I can tell it from a distance.”
Dillon stopped, and Preston lowered the gun again. “When I left last night, I was hating you bad. Both of you.”
“Me and Dad?”
“You and Dad. I was sick of all the patronizing bullshit. All the goddamn support. All the time telling me I’m not the reason Mom and Christy left. Where’d you guys learn that stuff? You been talking to a shrink?”
Dillon said, “Dad talked to a drug counselor, I think. Hey, man, we didn’t know what to do. You wouldn’t go get any help or anything.”
“Yeah, well, I was full up to about here of you guys,” Preston said, measuring off a spot just under his chin to show exactly how full of them he was, “and thinking I’d been straight just about long enough. So I went over to the Dragon to look up a few of my old buddies. By the way, Dad’ll be a little pissed when you get back. He’s missing about three hundred bucks. Square it up for me, will you? Like, tell him I’m sorry.”
“I’m not going back alone, Pres,” Dillon said.
Preston smiled. “Oh, you’re going back alone, all right. Unless you pick somebody up on the way.”
Change swept over Preston before Dillon’s eyes. The meanness drained out of him like dirty bathwater. “It’s not you, Dillon. That was a bad rap. If it were, I’d shoot you. All you ever did was show me what I’m not.” He was quiet for a long minute; Dillon stood frozen, realizing for the first time that Preston really meant to kill himself and that he had no chance of doing anything about it unless he
could keep him talking until Preston came down from the drugs.
“There was a woman in the Dragon,” Preston said, and he was glazed over now. “A girl, really. I’d be surprised if she was seventeen. Nobody checks ID. She was crazy to be there. Everyone else was bikers and biker’s mommas and dopers. The place was thick with meanness, and this girl was pushing it all the way, waving her boobs around like they were water balloons at a summer picnic, grinding her butt in the air over by the pool table. Picked herself up a following.” Preston put the gun up to his temple and made a firing sound with his throat, as if in dress rehearsal, then rested it back in his lap.
“I had about a half dozen cross tops in me and a nose full of coke, washed down with a pitcher of Bud, and I was making a deal for a little crack—four months of clean living wiped out in fifteen minutes. And I tell you, little bro, being on shit is the only way I ever felt big. And I was feeling big.
“So somebody—hell, it might have even been me—said we oughta give this honey some of what she was asking for. It went up for a quick vote and came back by God unanimous. Wolf goes over and picks her up—she’s squealing and pawing at him—and throws her on her back on the pool table; you heard her head hit. All of a sudden she’s scared, real scared, starts to fight him, but hell, one of Wolf’s tattoos weighs more than her whole self. He just pins her down by the throat with one hand and tears off her skirt and goes to town. And then they line up.”
Preston stopped a second and lowered his head. Dillon quickly considered charging him to try to get the gun, but too much distance stood between them. And he knew he wouldn’t get a second chance. Preston was serious.
“I watched it all,” Preston said. “I cheered them on. I even hollered out some techniques I thought ought to be tried, and every one was. By the time they were halfway through, she was dead behind her eyes.” Preston paused and looked away. “Then I’m being lifted out of my chair, laughing and all surprised, and next thing I’m on my back on the table, ’cause I don’t perform all that well with no legs and all. Wolf tells her to straddle me, while he’s undoing my pants. She gazes at him, and she’s a mess, face all bruised and blood trickling out of her nose, and she says no. I don’t know how she could have it in her to say no; but she does, and old Wolf slaps her so hard I think her face will come right off her head, and then his knife is at her neck. So she does it finally, and somewhere in there Wolf’s attention turns away, and she passes out, just slumps over and falls off the table. No one but me even noticed. It was over for them when they sat her on the cripple.”
Dillon said, “Preston . . .”
“You know what I thought about?”
Dillon shook his head.
“Remember Old Lady Crummet’s cat? Old Charlie? I thought about old Charlie while I was struggling to get my pants back on up on the pool table. While I should have been thinking how the hell I was going to get down and get more drugs, I was thinking of old Charlie. I was remembering how I told myself, clear back then, if I ever got that far out again—anytime in my life—well, that would be the end of me.” He nodded, staring at the Luger. “Well, last night I did it.” He looked at Dillon straight in the eye as he raised the gun. “I left you a note, Dillon. And I left something else.”
He put the gun to his temple; Dillon screamed and lunged for him, but it wasn’t even close. He didn’t actually see Preston do it, didn’t see the blood or the brains or the mess because he jerked his eyes away the moment he saw the pressure of Preston’s finger on the trigger. But Dillon heard it. And he saw it in his head.
I can’t begin to describe what’s gone on inside me since that day, Pres. There are lots of times I want to take the blame. I mean, you said it: If I hadn’t been “mirror, mirror on the wall,” constantly serving up the wrong answer, well, things might have turned out differently for you. And I was always so goddamn flip about the reasons I thought Stacy should dump you and pick up on me—way before you ever got involved with dope and all those bad actors. But there was certainly never any danger of her doing it, and I really don’t think I ever meant it. Stacy was hopelessly yours.
There are other times, though, when I’m so mad at you I want to shove a steel tube down into your grave and pour raw sewage into it. Where the hell do you get off blaming me for your size and temperament? And your choices, for Christ’s sake. And where do you get off tricking me into watching you die?
There’s a lot to consider. I have never loved and hated anyone at the same time and so ferociously as I do you for what you did. My emotions churn inside me like a hurricane, and when it’s at its worst, I can only lay back and let them take me away.
I miss you, Pres. I don’t miss the drugs and the craziness of the end, but I miss the real you from back before.
Your brother
CHAPTER 5
Jennifer sat on the edge of her hospital bed, absently fiddling with the electric position controls while she read the Sunday paper and waited for Coach to come pick her up. There had been no word from her parents, which didn’t surprise or bother Jennifer in the least, but she was anxious to get out of there and get home. She always preferred to be home ahead of them, like a wolf marking the corners of its territory. It gave her the hint of an illusion of power or of safety. Of course, it was only an illusion. Her only chance in her war against her stepfather was always to be there first and always to be prepared. When she was away for long, the sense of urgency would creep into her throat until she feared she would choke on it.
“Renee Halfmoon,” a pitiful John Wayne imitation at the door said, “crawl back into your hole. Jennifer Lawless’ll be takin’ over in these here parts, thank ya, pilgrim.”
Jen smiled and looked up to see Dillon Hemingway peeking around the doorway at her.
“What’re you doing here?” she asked. “Another five or ten minutes I’m outta this place.”
“Less than that,” he said, then slipped back into his fraudulent facsimile of Rich Little doing the Duke. “Ah come to take ya away from all this, ma’am. It’s a sorry thing when a heroine the stature of yourself can’t find a gown to cover her backside.” In his own voice: “If I invite you to the prom, will you wear that?”
Jennifer glanced down to discover the open back on the ridiculous hospital gown had slid around to the side, exposing part of her hip. She fired the sports section at Dillon. “If you invite me to the prom, I’ll wear three rolls of adhesive tape. You won’t get your hands on anything but money for my dinner.”
“Tape scissors,” he said, stepping around the doorway and revealing a pair of jeans and a Wenatchee sweatshirt in one hand and Jennifer’s underthings in the other. “I’ll bring tape scissors.” He threw her the jeans and sweatshirt, then turned toward the hall with the rest. “I’ll wait out here with these,” he said. “Just give me a few minutes. . . .”
“Where’d you get those?”
“Don’t you remember?” Dillon asked, feigning affront. “You said it was a night you’d never forget. You said . . .”
“If you’re seeing your life pass before your eyes as we speak,” Jennifer said, “it’s because the Lord knows it will end in three seconds if you don’t give me my underwear.”
Dillon opened his mouth to speak.
“Before you say one more word,” Jen warned.
“Only fooling.” Dillon smiled big and threw the sacred garments in Jen’s direction, then stood outside the door while she hurriedly put them on.
“Where’d the sweatshirt come from?” she called to him.
“It was from the warrior’s room untimely ripped,” Dillon called back, bastardizing Shakespeare beyond even his own usual limit. “It’s a trophy. Like a ground squirrel’s tail or a moose head.”
“Where’d it come from?” Jennifer asked again, patiently.
“Renee Halfmoon. She wanted you to have it.”
“Really?” Jen said as Dillon walked back into the room, having sensed she was dressed. “Really? It came from Renee Halfmoon?”
“Really.”
“God, that’s nice.”
Dillon shook his head. “Chicks,” he said. “You guys really know how to compete. If I’d have been Renee Halfmoon and I played as good a game as she played and still lost, I’d have ripped a set of lockers off the wall, or something dignified like that. Renee Halfmoon gives you her sweatshirt. No wonder wars have to be fought by men.”
“No wonder at all,” Jen said, standing. “Get me out of here.”
Outside, Dillon opened the van’s passenger door to let Jen in. Jen knew Dillon’s brother, Preston, had owned the van—outfitted with state-of-the-art wheelchair gear, including a lift that Preston had seldom used and apparatus to operate the accelerator and brakes by hand—after he was crippled and before he died. Dillon had not altered it since Preston’s death and had in fact, because of an oversight on the part of the Department of Licensing, been able to keep the handicapped license plates. It was never hard to find a good parking place.
Jennifer noticed the plates, as she did every time she rode with Dillon, and shook her head disapprovingly. “You could go to hell for that, you know.”
“I only keep them for Caldwell.”
“Why Caldwell?”
“He called me into his office a couple of months ago to let me know what a slime bucket he thought I was for taking advantage of the less fortunate in our society.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him if they could see my golf game, they’d issue me handicapped plates anyway.”
Jennifer smiled. “Bet he thought that was cute.”
“Not so you’d notice. But it gave him the opening to tell me what a horse’s ass I am for withholding my ‘marvelous athletic talents’ from the school.”
“I don’t get the connection.”
“There isn’t one, other than it falls under the general heading of 1001 Ways to Shirk Responsibility, by John Caldwell as told to Dillon Hemingway.” Dillon pulled the van out of the hospital parking lot and eased onto Grande Avenue, headed up onto the North Hill. They rode in silence a few moments, Jen staring out the window at the sledding hill in Chief Joseph Park, lost in thoughts about the game.