Glass Boys (3 page)

“Up and out,” Roy bellowed as he booted Lewis in the back. “Needs find you lass. Kiss that. Lips's softer an dirt.”

Lewis swiped the specks from his mouth and cheeks, crawled onto all fours, then up again, lumbering forward. Side to side, gravity drunk. Up on the gravel road, they rolled along in the heat of the late afternoon sun. Roy's chest was bare, his shirt lost somewhere along the way. Limping, one boot now missing, black sock sliding down over the pasty skin of his heel.

“You smell sum-um?” Nose rooting the air above him, huffing, nostrils flaring.

Lewis swaggered alongside him. “Sssmoke.”

“Meat. Burning. Meat.”

“Chri. Some nose on. Jus' smoke.”

“Gone, buddy. Starved. Eat my fuckeen boots.”

“Only got a one.”

“Tongue the tongue.” Eureka moment, and Roy struck Lewis with his fist. Lewis faltered, righted himself. “Lez go.”

“Nuts, my son. I idn't go Eli Fagan's. Apt to shoot you come through the woods. Say you fuckin' moose.”

“Ah, c'mon. Nab a bite him.”

Something in Lewis alerted him to the fact that staying away from town was a wiser choice, and he did not protest. Trailing close behind his brother, he tumbled down over the embankment, across the mucky ditch and through the woods. His limbs burned with boozy ammunition, face unaware of the damp whipping boughs. Roy like a banshee in the near distance, loping along, swinging from low lying branches, body flying through the cool air. One bare foot flashing in the shadows, stomping onto slippery exposed roots, soft moss.

They were about to pull off the greatest heist ever. Lewis could picture it all, and he could barely contain the electricity that had crept into his marrow. First, enter yard, then wrestle man, steal meat, bound off into the woods, canines clamped down on juicy reward. But before Lewis reached the edge of the woods, Roy had already burst out of the brush, and into Eli Fagan's backyard. Panting, Lewis stopped, wrapped his arms around the bubbly trunk of a fat spruce, laughter firing out from his cannon chest, legs weakening, as he watched Roy charge towards the smoking barrel where Eli stood. His blood shot eyes watering, his diaphragm hiccuped inside his chest, and he leaned, tried to catch his breath.

Sensibilities smashed, the brothers were unable to clearly see what was happening in this backyard. They did not notice young Garrett Glass's face, the pink welt that caused his left eyelids to kiss, purplish bruise that spidered out from his cheekbone. Or that Eli Fagan's wife was holding her diminutive son firmly by the straps of his wet overalls, and that he fought her, writhing, gnashing his teeth. They did not see her catch his wrist, twisting, his knees buckling until he squatted down, subdued, on a worn hump of grass. They did not heed her face, lips pale, eyes numbed and drowning inside their sockets, how her rake hand leapt to cover her mouth when Roy and Lewis appeared at the edge of their yard. They failed to see the fragments of broken black plastic, the shards of glass from a shattered pickle jar, lying in the grass near Eli Fagan's feet. Or that he was stabbing his arm into smoke and flame, poking, poking, deep into the rusting barrel with a sharp kitchen utensil. They did not know he was deafened by the crackling, the snaps and pops, and they never sensed the depth of his anger, how it cranked his shoulders up, how it enabled him to drive his hand into ripping fire without feeling a single pinch of pain.

Arms flailing, an exchange of some sort when Roy reached Eli. Lewis could not make out what was being said. The words, after bumbling across the yard, were distorted and watery. As Lewis watched, the two men seemed to embrace, hold each other for a moment, like old friends. But when Lewis caught sight of Eli's face, it was hot poker red. And then Eli shifted, and Lewis saw Roy's face, his features pulled back in a strange sort of smile. Then, an altogether different sound showering down from up above. A sound a young deer might make, if shot, but only wounded. Lewis scanned the woods, then looked towards his brother, whose head was arced backwards now, searing cry erupting from his mouth. Hands to his bare stomach, and brightness tumbling from somewhere beneath his fingers.

Mind shocked sober, body slower to respond, Lewis stumbled across the yard, falling forward, knuckles grazing spots of grass, then gravel. He caught his brother as he collapsed, back bowed, pinning Lewis to the ground. “Jesus Christ. Help him,” Lewis tried, but the phrases were trapped beneath his tongue, sounding nothing like they should. Thin liquid poured down over Roy's abdomen, belly button filled, fish-stained jeans soaked, soil drinking. Lewis cranked his neck, looked this way and that. Eli and his wife were gone, and Garrett, the boy, was beside the barrel, eyes slit by smoke, trying to hook something out with a serving fork. Hugging Roy as best he could, Lewis tried to whisper into his ear, “Shush, shush. Someone's coming for you. Someone's coming. Going to be alright.” Wrapping his arms around Roy's waist, Lewis moved his hands over his brother's muscle and skin and thick pelt of fat. As he gripped, two fingers slipped into a hot opening in Roy's flesh. He'd located the source of the rapid blood loss. Lewis pressed hard, tried to plug the hole. But it was a useless consummation.

3

THE AIR INSIDE the courthouse was cold, and smelled of paper and wood. Lewis sat in a hard-backed chair, fingers knotted together in his lap, rib cage shivering and sweating inside his dress coat. “I don't care what he says. I know what he did.” Fourteen months Lewis had waited for this day, and he was struggling to stay seated.

“But did you actually see him commit this act?”

Lewis mumbled. “I saw.”

“Okay.” The lawyer paused. “I will rephrase my question. Do you remember? Do you remember seeing your brother die?”

“I was there.” He let his nails bite the backs of his hands. “I was right there.”

“Yes, sir. That is not in dispute.” The lawyer stood directly behind Eli Fagan, then leaned forward, gripped Eli's shoulders, continued. “But is there anything you can tell us that contradicts the sequence of events put forth by this gentleman? That what happened so long ago was an accident. An accident. An honest and tragic mistake.”

“A man is dead.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He knows what he did.”

“Your opinion, Constable Trench.” The lawyer released his hold on Eli, clapped his hands lightly. “Forgive me for saying so, but in this particular case, that doesn't count.”

ON THE STONE steps of the courthouse, Lewis heard statements like a loudspeaker bellowing inside his head.

“Might've had a fighting chance,” Dr. Doke had testified. “If he hadn't of been so inebriated. Potato whiskey. With a substance like that, there's no telling the alcohol content of what you're consuming.”

“Not a good start, Constable Trench,” Eli Fagan's lawyer said calmly. “Not a good start to your career.”

Then, the judge. “This is not just a man's life here, but that of a family. Mr. Fagan has demonstrated he is a hardworking individual, and a dedicated husband and father to his wife, his stepson, and his newborn daughter. I accept Mr. Fagan's testimony. That Mr. Trench and his brother, Constable Trench, trespassed onto his property. In an inebriated state, Mr. Trench accosted Mr. Fagan, and following a brief tussle, Mr. Trench fell upon the tool Mr. Fagan was utilizing at that time. Furthermore, I accept Mr. Fagan's plea that in no way did he intend to cause bodily harm to Mr. Trench.” The judge licked the tips of his fingers, turned a page. “While the loss of life is no doubt tragic, further destruction of this family would only serve to compound the misfortune. Moving forward, you both need to return to your homes in Knife's Point, live side by side as neighbors, find some way to forge a peace between you. And begin again.”

Lewis waited as Eli Fagan emerged through the doors, taking each step with a heavy foot. His gray suit was snug and covered in pills, and the legs of his trousers rested an inch above his ankles, revealing mismatched socks. Underneath the over sized collar of his shirt screamed a gaudy tie, bright and, Lewis thought, disrespectful. Lewis had never known much about Eli, other than his reputation for being a son of a bitch. But Lewis had stared at him so long and hard in the courthouse that he could describe everything about the man now. How his hand twitched whenever a lawyer spoke Roy's name, how a dozen coarse hairs curled out of his ear holes, how he turned the ridged base of his empty water glass around and around, clinking it against the wooden table. Lewis saw him as a dog, fighting against being caged.

“I hope you rots in hell,” Lewis said quietly through clenched teeth. “The entire load of you.”

Eli stopped. Turned towards the swinging doors of the courthouse. His wife paused there, wispy and stern, a fat bundle splayed in her arms. But Eli didn't appear to notice her or the new baby. Instead he seemed to focus on the boy, his stepson Garrett Glass, already standing on the steps, gnawing at his cuticles, spitting. The boy squinted, but did not stare back. He had grown so quickly, torn away from his boyishness, almost overnight. Lewis watched as Garrett touched a shadow of hair creeping along his jawline, twisted a few of the longer strands between his fingers.

“Needn't worry,” Eli said, and he coughed, wiped his shiny forehead with a handkerchief. “We will, Constable Trench. We will.”

4

DRIVING IN A rattling pickup with his mother and stepfather, Garrett Glass was on his way home. They were heading north, away from the city, away from the courthouse, back to their farm in Knife's Point. He was perched on the hump in the cab between his parents, his damp body jiggling even when the pavement was smooth. Garrett kept a hand cupped over his mouth, could smell dirty metal on his skin. If he threw up now, Eli would certainly pull over, kick open a door, toss him out onto the dirt shoulder, and tear on over the highway. No flicker of brake lights. Garrett swallowed constantly, kept his head turned away from Eli, and scanned the rocks and barrens and clumps of straggly trees. Imagined how he would survive if the acid and the mangled French fries spewed onto the worn floor below.

He would be alone in the woods, with the bears and foxes and the moose. But, Garrett told himself, he might be okay. He had some smarts. His father, his real father, had taught him plenty of things when Garrett was a small boy. How to make a snare from a stretch of spruce root or some wire, how to strip bark from a birch to kindle a fire. How to sleep comfortably on dry boughs, away from the wet ground. Garrett ran his hand over his pockets, felt nothing. No perfect coil of wire appearing out of thin air, no fishing hooks, not a candy to tease an empty stomach. He didn't even have his pocketknife. “You can't take that into a courtroom, for God's sakes,” his mother had said when she saw it in his hand, and she'd grabbed it from him, tossed it into an overflowing drawer.

Garrett tried to distract himself. Thought about the farm. Thought about school. He didn't have a single friend. He had tried to blame it on the white scar that snaked from his upper lip and right nostril, or the red flaking patches on his elbows and knees. Perhaps his clothes were too small, sweaters darned, white worn line where the hem on his trousers had been let down. Or that his shoes were oversized, paper stuffed in the toes, and he clomped when he walked. Maybe it was because his mother insisted on shaving his scalp so he wouldn't catch ticks. But he couldn't deny there were other kids who wore worse clothes, had worse haircuts, and they still managed to find their pack.

In the woods up behind the school, older boys often surrounded him, pulled crushed stone from their pockets and chucked it at his head. If Garrett couldn't escape the enclosure, they might pin him down and let long strings of slime hang from their mouths, dangle just an inch from his face. Or, roll him over, jam a hand down the back of his trousers, grab his underwear, tug until his private parts chafed and burned. They ignored his cries for mercy, chanted “hinbreed, hinbreed, you're a hinbreed,” made him crawl home on hands and knees, torn cotton up around his ribs, sharp sticks and pine needles stabbing his palms.

Once, in a moment of bravery, he asked what it meant to be a hinbreed, and this fellow named Willie called him a dickhead, told him he was the spawn of boy cousins poking girl cousins and brothers poking sisters. “You knows,” Willie had said with a filthy wink, and he rammed his index finger into his loose fist, gave a few throaty snorts, hips bucking in time with his fingers. Blood going sour, he said. Babies with their feet on backwards. Fingers for toes. “That's why you got donkey ears, stupid-ass. And your snout is like a bloody faucet. Shit, you're lucky your eyes idn't crossed. You're lucky you got eyes t'all. Some hinbreeds only gets holes and they sticks marbles in their heads.”

Growing up on a farm, Garrett knew all about poking, and, in the case of two beagle dogs his stepfather Eli kept in a chicken wire pen, the occasional getting stuck. When he asked his mother for the truth, if his real father had been her relative, and if she knew she was going to grow a hinbreed, her mouth hung open for a moment, then she cried, “You, my son, is fortunate to have your feet on this earth.”

“That's not what I asked you.”

“Of all things. You are a perfectly fine little boy. Perfectly fine. Can't you think for yourself?”

“I am thinking. Thinking I'm a hinbreed.”

She sighed, and Garrett knew that sigh was her final word on the subject.

They were smart too, those boys. They were the ones who were quick to stick their hands in the air, math problems solved, while he was still counting his fingers, and finger-like toes, underneath the desk. So he knew they weren't just spouting lies.

One wheel of the truck struck a pothole on the highway, and Garrett listened to a stream of curses, saw a bubble of Eli's spit on the steering wheel, a second bubble land on the dashboard. Garrett closed his eyes, thought about the item tucked into his back pocket. Miraculously, that tiny scrap had somehow survived in the barrel, even after the fire had eaten everything else. Garrett had raked his hands through the black ash, and there it was. Buried underneath a warm rock. Such a gift. And whenever Garrett felt especially lonely, he would hide in his bedroom, stare at it, put it to his mouth, pull the acrid odor into his lungs. Then, carefully, he'd hide it away, and make a silent vow that he would never get caught again.