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Chapter 5
  Shooting at the Dump

His father made him ride in the back of the pickup truck, sitting on the wheel hub as they drove down the feeder road beside I-10, with his father driving, and his mother nestled next to him in the front seat. His father called her his slut, and insisted she ride slut, which was next to him on the truck’s bench seat. He called Marty his dog, whistled to him, and thumbed for him to jump into the truck bed, over the tailgate like a good puppy.

They made the U-turn beneath the Trinity River bridge and turned eastward on the far side of the freeway from the house. The .22 rifle lay at his feet, and Marty kept a boot on it to keep it from rolling around. There was nothing else in the bed of the truck, not even a toolbox. His father said the goddamned Mexicans would steal anything he put back there, ever since someone stole his spare tire.

The marshland extended here for miles, reaching almost to the feeder road. The muck and stench followed alongside the truck as it slowed to make the turn onto Cemetery Road. Marty heard the squeal of the brakes and the clicking of the blinker, and then they were bumping along the one-lane blacktop that wound beside the marshland.

To the west the levy held back the brackish bay-water, and allowed these dry acres to exist. To the east, fences surrounded the farmland and a few houses, tucked back in the pastures with long rutted driveways leading up from the blacktop. Trees hung over the road, and the Spanish moss swept across the top of the pickup and Marty’s head.

They passed an iron gate flanked by two large stone pillars, marking Jackson-Williams Cemetery, and then they were inside the woods. Trees suddenly appeared next to the road on either side close enough for Marty to reach out and touch.

The smell of garbage and rot hit him before he could see the trash dump. His father turned off the pavement and onto a dirt road where the trees hugged closer. Limbs scraped the side mirrors and grass brushed the undercarriage. Marty held on to avoid being bumped off the fender well. He kept his foot on the .22 rifle to keep it from sliding away. He really didn’t want to touch the gun, but his father had threatened a beating if he let it get scuffed up sliding around the bed.

When they made the turn into the trash dump, the trees opened into a wide bowl-shaped field. Piles of garbage surrounded the dump, tall as the pines, which jutted up from behind the piles of junk as if they were peeking to see what was inside the bowl of garbage. If not for the levy of garbage, the pines might come to life and walk right in.

Seagulls swarmed up when Marty’s father jostled the truck to a halt and cut the engine. The birds squawked at them and swam through the air to the far side of the dump, where they glided down and continued their job of gobbling up what edibles the locals threw away.

His father tumbled out with his mother in tow as if she were a newborn calf, wobbly and off-balance, with a white-faced blank stare.

“Let me know if you need help carrying something,” Marty’s father said to his mother. “Betsy!”

Marty’s mother didn’t respond, but stalked away from them without looking back. She wore jeans and a tank top, and a pair of used-up leather boots. As she walked, she twisted her hair into a ponytail and pulled on a pair of work gloves, and ignored him and his father so completely that they might not ever have been born.

“That woman’s crazy, boy,” Marty’s father said. “But dadgum if she ain’t the finest thing this side of south.”

Marty’s father was still shirtless. He leaned inside the truck, opened a paper bag in the floorboard, hauled out a Miller Lite, opened it, drank heavily, and then extracted a cigarette and his lighter from his back pockets. The lighter was one of the old metal ones with a lid on it, with a brown recluse spider on the front. Marty’s father flicked it open, ran his palm over it like a magician creating flame, and held it to the cigarette, flicked it shut, and spewed smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Gimme that gun, boy. Hop out and set up some targets and we’ll shoot until that crazy momma of yours gets out of sight, least enough she can’t see you. I’ll let you shoot a clip, alright.”

“I don’t want to,” Marty said.

“You ain’t got a choice. Hop out, boy.”

“Yes, sir,” Marty said. He handed his father the rifle, rolled out of the truck bed, and ran to the nearest wall of trash for targets. He found bottles of alternating green and brown and set them up in a row.

When he was finished, his father shoved the gun into his face and pressed it against his shoulder. “Hold it like this, boy.”

“I know how to hold it, Daddy.”

“Don’t sass me, boy, or I’ll beat you senseless.” He pressed his Miller Lite to his lips and pointed at the row of bottles.

“Now take off the safety and squeeze the trigger, boy. Don’t go yanking or you’ll pull right.” Marty’s dad turned the beer can to his lips, drained it, and threw it over his head arcing toward the bottles. “Shoot that can first. It’s close and you ain’t shot in forever.”

It had been two summers since he last pulled a trigger, when he was ten, and that bullet put Gerald in the woodshop.

“Come on, sissy-boy. Shoot.” His father squeezed the top of Marty’s head. “Shoot it in the head. You can do that, can’t you? Shoot the damn head off.”

Marty’s eyes blurred, and at first he didn’t know why he couldn’t see. He sniffed, and that’s when he felt the pinch in the middle of his chin and the pressure against his Adam’s apple. He tasted snot in the back of his throat and swallowed it down, and fought the urge to cry. The gun dipped, and his father put his hand under the stock and pushed it back up.

“Shoot it, goddammit,” his dad said. “You got to get back on the horse, boy. I don’t want no sissy in my house. You shoot that beer can and you’d better not start crying. You start crying and I’ll leave your ass here in the dump to pick with your momma and them seagulls. Come on, sissy-boy. Shoot the can.”

Blinking away the blurs, Marty aimed for what was now the one can in the middle of a group of three. It was all blurry, but when he pulled the trigger, he felt that familiar bump against his shoulder, the whiff of air against his cheek, and saw the can twist against the impact.

His dad jumped out of the way of the spent casing that hit him in the chest. “Eh, boy. Now start busting them bottles. I’ll make more targets.” His dad ducked into the truck and dug out another Miller Lite.

By the time Marty finished with the first clip, his dad had finished two more beers and pissed once on the rear truck tire. The Billingsley’s had driven into the dump while his father was pissing, and Marty saw the old man shake his head, wave, and crack a small smile. Mr. Billingsley’s grandson in the seat beside him was laughing. They had a washer and dryer in the bed of the truck.

Marty reloaded the clip and handed the gun to his father. He shot all the bottles, of which there had only been six, and he expected his father would hold to his promise to only make him shoot one clip.

Instead, his father waved him off and said, “Go ahead, you’re doing alright. Keep shooting.”

“I don’t want to shoot no more,” Marty said.

“Don’t you disrespect me, boy.” His father cuffed Marty on the head and tugged at the rifle. “You got to get the re-hang of killing again. Just like when I sobered up and I had to learn to drink again.” His father laughed and belched and then somehow drained the beer like it was nothing thicker than a warm glass of water. “Can you hit in the air? Get ready, boy. One. Two.
T
HREE
!”

Marty’s father threw the can in the air. Marty watched the can, but kept the rifle pointed down. The barrel was hot. The ground was hot. His head was so hot and his blood was so hot that Marty thought he might be boiling inside, and if someone cracked him open, they might see steam coming out. He wanted to cry, and he wished his father would beat him instead of making him shoot.

“Pussy,” his dad said. “Used to I could have hit that with that .38 pistol. Had a hair trigger, Marty, you know that, don’t you? Damned near shot my own foot with that god-loving pistol.” His dad held his foot up toward Marty, stumbled, grabbed the side of the truck for balance, and wiggled his foot. “Still got all my toesies, though. Guess my feet are luckier than you and Gerald’s head.”

His father laughed and lit another cigarette with his magician-flame lighter.

The Billingsley’s drove past on their way out. Mr. Billingsley tilted his hat at Marty but didn’t look much at his father, who had his spider-back to them anyway. His grandson held up a finger-gun and shot Marty several times before they cleared the gate and disappeared around the stand of trees lining the entrance.

Marty didn’t turn around until he heard his father say, “Give me that gun, boy, give me the gun.” By then he knew it was too late, because he knew what was about to happen.

Marty turned, and his mother didn’t walk so much as fly around the front of the truck. She moved so fast her hair spun out behind her, and Marty heard the snap of her gloves as she clenched her fists and laid her knuckles into the side of his head.

She was on him with the same frightening silent agility she had displayed in the house so many times before. She fell on top of Marty, and his head smacked the ground. Marty wedged the rifle between him and her, and he tried to shove her off using it as a lever, but she rained down on him with hammer-fisted gloves into the side of his head and cheeks. Marty felt his nose pop when she landed the side of her hand there.

His father appeared behind his mother, a steady image in stark contrast to the blurred fury on his chest. “Get it out of your system, Betsy,” his father said to his mother. “She needs this, boy, just take it. Take it like a man, not some queer. Your momma’s got to get back on the horse, too, and you need to man-up for what you done.”

Her hands opened, and she slapped his cheeks and chest and the top of his head. She screamed at him, now, with her hair whipped out of her ponytail and framing her face like thorny limbs. The words were hardly human, shrieked as they were and ringing out between the thuds inside his head as she shook his ear bones with each clap of her fist.

When she finally slowed, Marty used what strength he had to roll out from under his mother, and stumble away from her. He held his hand to his nose, and fell into the side of the truck where his father had pissed. He sat in the warm piss-spot and held his free hand up toward his mother, protecting his face and eyes.

She stood, clapped her hands against her thighs, and eyed Marty as she panted. Her breasts were dirty, and heaved with breath. She scooped up the .22 rifle, and with his father standing beside her she pointed it at Marty. The gun swayed with her breath, but it stayed mostly pointed at Marty. He noticed she had her finger against the trigger, not on the trigger-guard where you were supposed to keep your finger if you weren’t meaning to shoot.

“Goddamned therapeutic, ain’t it, baby,” Marty’s father said to his mom. “Don’t hit the truck, woman.”

With those words Marty rolled away from the truck and ran toward the back of the dump, toward the place where he found the Bowie knife and the grinding brush. There was a path in the junk that the boys always used.

The rifle cracked behind him, and Marty heard the bullet slice the air beside him. His mother screamed more profanities as eight more shots rang out in rapid succession, and he sprinted into the pile of junk.

The last thing Marty heard was from his mother. “Run Sugar, run!”

He found his hiding place in the burnt-out oil drum and crawled inside. He curled into a fetal position and finally cried as quietly as he could manage, until his shirt was soaked with snot and blood from his nose.

Chapter 6
  Cutting Onions

It was early afternoon, and Sadie was in her bedroom looking toward the Jameson house. She had a book in her lap—it was about vampires because that’s all people wrote about these days—and she thought how the Jameson house looked haunted. A vampire could live there, or a zombie, and it was the second possibility which stuck in her mind and demanded a deeper, more serious consideration. It was a place where the unburied dead mired themselves between life and death. It was a place of half-living, half-dead, spiritless creatures, and except for Marty, what lived there did not walk and dwell like other living things, but crawled and crept and slithered and hid from the light.

The whole structure was a run-down, weather-beaten gray, all of it decayed and abandoned of life-giving color. The crawlspace beneath the house seethed with a boiling dark current that spilled into the overgrown yard, even in the afternoon sun. There were four windows on this side, and if it was laid out like Sadie’s, those would be the kitchen, the walk-in toilet, and the master bedroom. Only the bedroom had blinds, and those were torn and bent.

Above the bedroom was the attic window where Marty would sit, alone with a pitch black emptiness leaning over his shoulder watching him as he worked. He never looked down at her or back at the darkness but always seemed to be doing something important. He was a living spirit haunting the dead, a thing of color and light and life thrust into the gray world of the undead like a burning torch.

As she watched, Marty crossed the feeder road in front of the house and tumbled over the fence. He passed through his back yard, and even though he didn’t look up at Sadie, she could see his face was bloody, as was his shirt. The blood streaked out of his nose in a red beard that didn’t end until it touched his trousers.

“Momma,” Sadie said. “Come here, hurry.”

Marty walked up to the mimosa tree next to his carport and grabbed the lowest limb, agile and strong as a primate, and hauled himself up the tree and onto the roof. He ran across the carport half-hunched. He navigated the broken shingles and disappeared over the far side of the rooftop, which at its peak was over two-stories high.

“What is it, honey?” Sadie’s mom asked. She had a knife in her hand and half an onion in the other. She was blinking, and the stench of the onion stung Sadie’s eyes and nose.

“Marty’s hurt, I think,” Sadie said.

Her mother leaned over and looked out the window. “Where is he?”

“Up there.” Sadie pointed at the attic.

Her mom wiped a sleeve across her nose as they waited for Marty to appear in the attic, but it stayed blank and black and as empty-looking as a dirt-dug hole.

When Marty didn’t show after about a minute, Sadie’s mom turned the wheelchair away and closed the blinds. “Honey,” her mom said. “You need to stay out of their business. That’s a bad house.”

“But if he’s hurt, don’t you want to help?”

“Yes, but you have to remember these aren’t people like you and me. They’re different. I went to school with Marty’s dad and mom. I remember how his mom was before she got messed up with the Jameson boys, and you remember what happened to his dad’s brother, Ricky?”

“He did drugs and died of AIDS.”

“That’s right. And Marty’s dad was just as bad as Ricky. Both those Jameson boys ran the woods selling drugs and Lord knows what else, and I’d lay wage Ike still sells drugs. Betsy Babineaux, that was her name before she married Ike Jameson. He moved her out to the woods near Yellow Pine Bay when she was still in high school, knocked her up with that boy Gerald, and then around the time I had you, she had Marty.”

“But what if Marty’s hurt?”

“You didn’t let me finish,” Sadie’s mom said. “Betsy and Cooper used to live right there in that house when we were kids, and this was still grandpa’s house. We weren’t good friends or anything, but a few times she and Cooper—I sort of had a crush on him—we all three sat in the back yard eating peaches with the fence between us. Betsy was a nice girl until she met up with Ike. He got her into drugs and Lord knows what else, and now she’s got one kid in the back room and another one doing Lord knows what else up in that attic. I just, I don’t know.” Sadie’s mom waved the knife and onion in front of her, stirring the air. “I don’t know, honey. I just don’t want you messing with Marty, okay? He’s trouble. He shot his brother, for Heaven’s sake. Why don’t you read and quit looking out the window.”

Sadie looked down at her book. On the cover was a vampire wearing armor with a shield draped across his back. In one hand he held a glimmering sword pointed at the ground, in the other the head of a zombie, and that brought Sadie’s mind back to the question she had been contemplating earlier.

“Okay,” Sadie said. “But can I ask you something?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Is Gerald a zombie?”

Her mom for a moment didn’t appear to breathe. She looked at Sadie with a face and eyes frozen as if by the snap of a camera. “What?” she said.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Her mom shook her head. “No. He’s on life-support, far as I know.”

“But didn’t you say they pronounced him dead after Marty shot him? That would mean Gerald was dead but came back to life, like a zombie.”

Her mother nodded. “That’s what I heard. Dr. Haley asked the attending physician about it, and they called the time of death and everything, but then he blipped or something, and they resuscitated him. If you ask me, and Dr. Haley even said this, the boy would have been better off if they had let him go.”

“Like we did with Daddy?”

Sadie’s mom pinched her lips together and maybe it was the onion, but she wiped her eyes, and stood and walked back into the kitchen.