CW: death, bodily harm, drug abuse.
Chuck was wire-sick again, so he hobbled up onto Jerome’s porch one sunny afternoon, need curling his spine like a bent clothes hanger. Jerome was the guy who could get you whatever you needed, as long as what you needed was wire, or crank, or a pallet of Captain Chompberry cereal, or twenty cartons of stolen Lithuanian cigarettes.
It was a kind, bighearted day. The sun winked bright and lovely off all the nice things in the world, knifing him in the eyes. Chuck’s hand trembled when he knocked.
Peach, Jerome’s brother, answered the door. He was gigantic.
“What you want, man?” said Peach. His eye roved up and down through the wedge of the open door.
“It’s Chuck,” Chuck said.
Peach snorted. “I know who the fuck it is, Charles. What do you want?”
Chuck could hear Jerome, deeper in the house, asking who it was.
“It’s Charles,” Peach called back.
Chuck heard Jerome say “shit,” like he was sad to hear it.
“Come on, man,” said Chuck.
Peach sighed and opened the door. Inside, the living room was choked with gloom, only a tiny shard of sunlight falling across the floor. Piles of clothes, dirty plates, socks flung around like skinned little animals. A single piece of bread was mashed into the carpet with a shoe tread in the middle. The room brimmed with the deathly potpourri of old farts and corn chips. Jerome and Peach were playing F*ckpunch on the Xbox, and a glass bong shaped like a giant toadstool sat next to Jerome’s foot. The buzzing flies made it seem like being inside a person’s rotten brain. Chuck stood there on his ruined, throbbing feet.
Jerome stared at the TV and mashed buttons. “What do you want, Charles?” He didn’t look away from the screen.
“I need some wire,” Chuck said.
“’Course you do,” Peach said, putting his feet on the coffee table. The bottom of his socks were black with grime.
On the TV, Jerome pulled off one guy’s head and kicked it down the street like a soccer ball. Gouts of blood shot out, painting the ground, but then he had to run away because the cops came and shot at him. Chuck could see the TV screen reflected in Jerome’s eyes.
“How long you been on the wire anyway, Charles?”
“I don’t know. A while.”
“But, like, you were already a motherfucker of a certain age, right? When you started? Not like you been on it since you were fifteen or whatever, right?”
“No,” Chuck said. “I mean, yeah. You’re right.”
Peach smiled at his brother, said quietly, “He’s all fucked up.”
“How old are you, Charles?”
“Forty-eight.”
Peach’s eyes widened and he sat up on the couch and cackled. When he slapped his knee, it sounded like a pistol shot. “Forty-eight? That’s it? You’re lookin’ sixty-eight, man! Jesus!”
Chuck kept his head dipped in the necessary supplication, the requisite shame. He felt like the character in F*ckpunch, who was being harried by drone-dogs now, and lashed with whips by men in spiked leather outfits. He ran his hands down his pant legs in one big sweep of sweat and said, “You got any wire or not, Jerome? Damn.”
Jerome sighed and handed the controller to his brother. He stood up. “Don’t let my guy die.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Peach. He had Jerome’s guy on the screen drop an old-timey anvil on a puppy and a bunch of bonus points zipped up around the mashed head.
Jerome stood there in his sweatpants, assessing Chuck and scratching at his armpit. “How’s your feet, Charles?”
“Fine.”
“He was hobbling like a bitch coming up here,” Peach said. His guy on the TV beat a policeman to death with the corpse of the dead dog. The graphics were good, amazing, realistic, horrifying, vastly, overwhelmingly different than the pixelated video games of Chuck’s boyhood.
“Let me see your hands,” Jerome said.
Chuck held out his hands, the nails whole and unbloodied.
“You just do it in your feet?”
“Yeah.”
“How much you want?”
Spit flooded Chuck’s mouth. “Three spools?”
Jerome named an amount of money that was right on the cusp of unreasonable.
Chuck, shivering, opened his wallet and handed him the money. Jerome walked down the hall and Chuck stood there watching Peach mash buttons.
The plastic baggies Jerome handed him were fogged with cold; he must keep them in a freezer somewhere. Chuck had never been able to tell the difference between cold wire and not. Everyone had an opinion on it. Crystals hung fat on the coils, big as grains of salt. Jerome had a good connection.
“Charles, you got that big fucked up house off Reynolds Road, yeah?”
Chuck nodded. He wanted to get out of there.
“You got that barn there?”
“Yeah.”
“Listen, how about this. I give you another spool—for nothing. For you to owe me a favor sometime.”
Even through the corkscrewing scream of his need, Chuck was suspicious. “Why?”
Jerome snorted, went to go sit on the couch. “Shit, never mind.”
“No, no,” said Chuck. “Okay.”
Jerome turned and pulled out his phone. “Give me your phone number.”
Chuck recited it to him, and Jerome texted him right there. They both heard Chuck’s phone ding in his pocket.
Jerome stood up. “When I reach out to you, Charles, you’re on board, you feel me?”
“Okay.”
Jerome went down the hall and came out with another baggie.
He handed it to Chuck. He said, “I call, you answer.”
• • • •
He drove out to the lagoon and did his business. He took his work boots off and the stink of rot filled the truck’s cab. He had yet to fix under his fingernails and told himself he never would. So far it had been true. But his feet were getting to be a problem. Not as bad as photos you could find on the internet, but the nails were peeling off in damp yellow chunks, and the toes were purple, gelatinous black blood suppurating from the flesh, the whole affair heavy with that stink of decay. Traceries of purple veins climbed his feet up to his ankles. Everything from the shins down throbbed sickly in time with his heartbeat.
After he fixed and the world softened, he put his socks back on, thinking only for a moment about driving into the lagoon, letting the brackish, silty waters overtake him.
• • • •
Krista was lying on the couch, watching TV when he got home. Her belly was starting to show beneath her I’m A Pepper Too T-shirt. She still had a while to go. Her mother, Chuck’s sister Denise, was doing ten years in Junco Bay on a big-time distribution charge, and Chuck was the only family Krista had left. She was nineteen and the dad, whoever he was, was a ghost in the wind.
He sat down in the recliner, which loosed a pained farting noise when he leaned back. He was enveloped in a quiet, wordless euphoria that threatened in its own way to overcome him. A hush and purr in his brain, the television a corona of light, Krista gilded with a kind of angelic clouding, like icing, or cotton candy.
They watched television, talking little, as the surge of the wire’s chemical euphoria slowly faded from his blood, his litany of pains slowly returning to him. It lasted less and less these days. “What kind of show is this?” he asked.
“They’re looking for ghosts.”
“They look like frat guys.”
“Yeah, they are. They challenge the ghosts to fight and go to all these haunted burial places and do keg stands and stuff. They just try to make them mad.”
“What’s the point?”
Krista didn’t answer. What was the point of anything, truly?
He fell asleep and awoke to find that she had laid a blanket over him. He needed to be on a roof in Troutdale at seven the next morning, and he closed his eyes, falling back to a dream-fogged hush.
• • • •
Two weeks later he was down to the last little curl of the last spool of wire when Jerome texted him: You home? I’m coming over.
Chuck was indeed at home. It was pissing rain outside, and his foreman had given the crew the day off. Krista was at her part-time job, cashiering at an art supply store. The house sat heavy with silence, Chuck enveloped in the morose fog that always accompanied the end of a spool.
Jerome and Peach arrived in a white Ford pickup, a horse trailer behind it. Chuck stood on the porch, motioning them toward the barn beyond the house, then put on his coat and limped after them.
Jerome stood beside the trailer, his arms crossed, a grin splitting his face. Peach sat in the driver’s seat.
“That barn locks, right?”
Chuck looked at the barn, as if it had just appeared there. Rebuilding it had been the last thing his grandfather had done to the property before he’d died seven years before. It was still in good shape.
“Yeah.”
“Good. I need you to hold something for me.”
“What?”
“My cousin,” Jerome said, and opened up the back of the trailer. Chuck could make out a crouched figure, the glitter of an eye. The serpentine slither of chains along the floor of the trailer.
Chuck heard himself say, distantly, “Why do you have your cousin chained up in a horse trailer, Jerome?”
“Well, he’s not well,” said Jerome.
“And you want him in my barn?”
Jerome slapped the side of the trailer and Peach got out of the truck. “Yeah, he doesn’t give a fuck, trust me.” Peach unhooked the eyelet of the chain that was set into the floor of the trailer and wrapped the chain around his wrist. He pulled it and Jerome’s cousin stepped out of the gloom.
He was emaciated and milk-pale. The chain connected to a collar at his throat; his hands scrabbled at it uselessly. He was shirtless. His eyes had gone vacuous, all understanding blown out of them. Both eyes covered in a milky blue haze, like cataracts.
Peach yanked on the chain, hard, and Jerome’s cousin fell in a snarling heap onto the mudded driveway, limbs starfishing as he rolled onto his back, hands still working at the chain.
“No, man,” Chuck said. He stepped back. “Sorry. You can’t keep him here.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious.”
“That’s not our deal,” Jerome said, lifting his chin toward the barn. Peach started dragging his cousin along the mudded driveway.
“What’s his name,” Chuck said helplessly to Jerome’s back.
“It used to be Michael,” Jerome said over his shoulder. “Doesn’t have one anymore, though.”
Michael gagged and yanked at the chain, drawn down to this single purpose of escape. Scrabbling to his knees and falling as he was pulled along. The afternoon smelled of rain and churned mud.
Chuck trotted past them—Michael distractedly swatting at him as he passed—and unlocked the barn door. It was a dark and fusty place despite its relative newness; Chuck never came out here. The shapes of old farming equipment lay rusted and furred in cobwebs.
Peach hurled the length of chain over a rafter and grabbed it as it landed on the floor. He threw it over the rafter again, and then once more. There was a sizeable length of chain left, and Peach handed it to Chuck.
“Hold him,” he said.
He ran to the van and came back with a steel peg and a hammer, and he took the chain back from Chuck and pounded the peg through one of the chain’s links into the floor.
Chuck said, “He’s dead, right? That’s what we’re doing?” It was just a thing that happened to some people, like rosacea or being double-jointed. Uncommon but not unheard of. A death that required a second, truer, more exacting death.
Jerome reached in his pocket and handed him two spools of wire. “They’re working on shots for them, did you know that?”
“So that they can come back to life?”
Jerome laughed. “Nah, man, so that when you die, you just fucking die. None of this shit here.”
Chuck was peering down at the spools in his hand when Peach grabbed him by the wrist and stretched out his arm, twisting it taut. Then he brought the hammer down on Chuck’s elbow, pretty damn hard, just one time.
Chuck dropped the baggie and doubled over, gasping. Even through the pain he heard the hiss of the chain as Michael lurched towards him. Chuck backpedaled out of the way, still clutching his arm.
“Don’t ever tell me no again,” Jerome said as he and Peach walked out of the barn. “You think that’s a smart idea, you got a profound misunderstanding of how this all works.”
• • • •
Why wire, he sometimes wondered. What kind of lunatic had invented it? Why craft something so medieval? Something intended for pleasure? Wire under the nails? It had the cadence of torture. Torture, until it wasn’t. Until the crystals dissolved, and the world bloomed, and the darkness peeled its face back to reveal some meager but holy light, and every looming wall suddenly leaned back from you, gave you space.
Chuck had been a roofer for almost thirty years. It was work that wrecked your body. Entire days of kneeling, the bending over, the hammering on roofs at difficult angles. Killed your back, killed your knees. Chuck knew he’d be hobbled even if he didn’t wire up. He’d done everything as a younger man—coke, crank, snorted heroin, popped pills—and wire hit something in him that nothing else did. Absolved him of ownership of the terrible things. Benighted him in some arcane way. This wretched thing he did to his body, and the light just started spilling out of him.
• • • •
A week later he was sitting in his recliner after spending most of the day installing two-inch flashing through a difficult section of a pitched roof, everything aching enough that he was considering hobbling into his room and fixing another snip of wire, when he heard Krista crying in the kitchen.
He rose with a grunt from the recliner. He found her leaning over the stove, her arms wrapped around her stomach. She was cooking hot dogs, and there was a bag of bread and a bottle of ketchup on the countertop, next to an open bag of chips and some carrots she had sliced. She had said she’d cook for them that night, and something in him nearly broke at the sight of this girl making a dinner for them that he’d have made for himself as a child. It was a tenderness toward her that felt like indebtedness for its size and depth, its vastness.
Krista wiped her eyes. “I just get so freaked out sometimes,” she said.
He stood there with his hands jammed in his pockets. He wanted to put his hand on her back, her shoulder, something, but they had never been that kind of family. She sniffed and pushed the hissing hot dogs around with a spatula.
“You’ll be okay,” he said quietly, leaning against the doorframe.
“I know.”
“You’ll probably be okay.”
Covering her mouth with her free hand, she laughed and then went back to crying.
• • • •
One damp, gray-skied morning, the man in the barn began making odd keening noises that cut through the walls. It sounded like an animal being hurt, being killed, and Chuck could not imagine a human voice making such a sound. He had been sitting on his bed, staring at the nickel-sized spot of blood seeping through his sock after he’d fixed. His bedroom looked out on the misted field and the barn, and he had to resist the urge to cover his ears. Krista, thank Christ, was working the morning shift.
He dialed Jerome’s number. He was surprised when Jerome picked up.
Chuck opened his window and held the phone out towards the barn. He put the phone to his ear again. “Can you hear that?”
“The fuck do you want, Charles?”
“That’s your cousin making that noise.”
He heard Jerome conferring with someone on the other end.
“What’s he doing out there? It’s not like he’s dying, right?”
“That ain’t the problem,” Jerome said. “Look, I’ll be over in a bit.”
• • • •
The sun had burned off the morning fog by the time he and Jerome stood outside the barn, listening to Michael scream.
“I’ve never heard of this happening before,” Chuck said.
“They do this,” Jerome said. Peach was not with him, but Jerome had a pistol tucked in the back of his jeans, and it made Chuck nervous. It was like this unspoken thing between them, and to speak of it would invite Jerome to brandish it. “He’s crying, is what it is.”
“He’s what?”
“He’s crying for help, I said. They cry sometimes. You didn’t know that?” Jerome stepped forward and took the pistol from his jeans. He used the handle to rap against the barn door. “Shut the fuck up, Mike!” he barked, and the sound stopped.
Jerome looked at him and wiped the sweat from his upper lip. Seeing Jerome afraid made Chuck afraid.
“If he starts up again,” Jerome said, “just bang on the door. They don’t like loud noises.”
“Jerome,” Chuck said, “how did Michael die?”
He took some care, at least, in putting the gun back in his pants. Now that Michael was silent, birds began singing again. “He died,” Jerome said, handing Chuck a single spool of wire, “by owing the wrong people money. He died, Charles, by being a dumb motherfucker.”
• • • •
Chuck awoke that night with pain galvanizing his legs; in his dream, someone had thrown gasoline on them. He sat up in bed, his hands twisting in the sheets, legs rigid before him. Gasping, all the shapes of his bedroom limned and strange, blood thundering in his ears. Muscles in tight accordance, as if grafted to the bone, artlessly stapled there. Chuck hissed and staggered out of bed, fell to his knees, the joints snarling in protest. He bowed in petulant supplication, the warm fust of his sheets in his nose, the screams in his legs slowly subsiding. He looked at the twist of wire on his nightstand and hissed at himself to have strength. His breathing eventually slowed, the fire subsiding. The house was silent around him. He sat on his bed and shut his eyes, put a hank of wire under the fingernail of his left hand. He swore he could feel Michael out there in the barn, unblinking and silent in the dark.
• • • •
He came home the next evening to find Krista sitting on the couch looking uneasy, her knees bundled to her chin. Chuck’s first thought was that something had happened to the baby.
Instead, she lifted her chin towards the back of the house and said, “There’s an animal trapped in the barn. It’s been making crazy-ass noises since I got home.”
Chuck hung his coat on the hook by the door, his heart hammering. “Did you go out there?”
“Hell no, dude.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just stay here.”
“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, trust me.”
The keening began as soon as he stepped out onto the back porch. Dusk was graying the horizon, the moon like a pale scythe up there. Trees far off along the road skeletal and reaching. It was as if—he hated to think it—Michael could tell he was getting near; the sound increased in pitch and frequency the closer he got. By the time Chuck put a trembling hand on the barn door it sounded like something was being murdered inside.
Steeling himself, he unlocked the chain wrapped around the door handles and pulled. The door groaned, and Chuck stepped back, half-expecting Michael to come lurching out. But he was there in the gloom, still with the chain lashing him from his collar to the rafter above. The peg still driven in the floor. His figure ghostly and white, leaning toward Chuck with his arms outstretched. Lips pulled back in a rictus. Black gums, yellow teeth, those grinding dead vocal cords.
Michael’s eyes—cataract-blue, fractured as the depths of an iceberg—roved his face, that expression of frozen rage and contempt never changing. A centipede made the circuitous journey from nostril to mouth and Chuck gagged and stepped back again, all resolve vanished.
Dead, undead—they were only names for the simplest of things. The chain grew taut along its length as Michael strained towards him. Chuck ventured forth again—there was plenty of room, now that he took a moment to see—and slapped at the light switch on the wall. A circuit of the floor was scraped free of dust where Michael had walked in place for days. This endless engine of his body, never tiring, never needing rest.
Chuck feinted slowly left, slowly right. Michael’s response lagged. He ducked past and saw then, before Michael could turn, the congealed jelly of gore that spilled between hanks of hair and down his shoulder blades. One, two shots to the back of the head. No exit wounds. Chuck had rifles in the house, had gone hunting many times with his grandfather as a boy. These were small caliber rounds.
A .22 would do that, he thought. Two shots to the back of the skull, let the bullets tumble around in there, do their work.
He died by owing the wrong people money, Jerome had said.
Chuck pivoted once more, stood there a few feet in front of Michael. Something like loss feathered through him. Michael tilted his head like a dog at a strange sound. Iceberg eyes endlessly searching.
“I’m sorry,” Chuck said, though for what exactly, he couldn’t say yet.
He kept the light on and closed the barn door. Hung the chain once more around the handles. Silence rang through the house and the fields for the rest of the night.
• • • •
Chuck drove Krista to her doctor’s appointment. Seven months pregnant now, and she was navigating it with only him and some friends from her work as anchors. Chuck’s place was supposed to be a fresh start, and this was what he’d offered her? A dope fiend uncle and a dead man in the barn crying for a second death? Jesus.
Chuck drove with the window down in spite of the threatening rain; he had begun to smell his own decay, and there were hours now when his right foot was ghost-like with numbness. The afternoon was giving way to darkness now that winter was upon them. In the gloaming their little town looked like a postcard, a painting of some world where men did not live breathlessly in barns, did not lift up their own fingernails with narcotics. Did not consider, with some measure of seriousness, driving their truck into a tree were it not for their pregnant niece in the seat beside them.
“Do you think everything’s going to be okay?” Krista asked him softly as they pulled into the parking lot.
Chuck turned off the truck and they sat there in the silence. Just the ticking of the engine, the parking lot light washing across them.
“I think it will be hard. But I’ll help you. And your momma will help you when she gets out.”
“Pshh,” Krista said. “Yeah, right.”
“You never know. Grandbabies have a way of putting folks on a straight path.”
“You don’t know that for sure, though.”
Chuck nodded. “I don’t know anything for sure,” he said.
Krista looked straight ahead and said quietly, “Is it going to straighten you out?”
Chuck scratched his chin, his body flooded with cold. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you’re doing wire, Uncle Chuck.”
Chuck said nothing. Stunned at her discovery.
Krista fiddled with the strings on her hoodie. “Mom thought she was being subtle too,” she said, “and she’s gonna be in Junco Bay until this kid starts school, man.”
“Well, I’m not dealing,” Chuck said. “That’s one difference right there.”
Krista rolled her eyes and opened the door. It took her a bit to get her feet on the ground—she really was getting close.
To open your mouth and say the many things you could say, would he ever manage it? Would he ever be brave like that? To say I’m sorry? To say I will try to do better? Instead, he rolled down his window and said, “Do you want me to come in with you?” to which she waved him off before going through the door. Chuck sat with his hands in his lap, trying to remember when he could last move his toes.
• • • •
They rode home in silence, Krista tight-lipped and contained inside herself. If there had been any bad news at the obstetrician’s, she was not interested in telling him. The desire to drive into a tree had left him. All desire had left him, it seemed.
Full night now, starless. They turned down their long driveway off the county road, the headlights bouncing in the ruts.
“What’re you feeling for dinner,” Chuck said, and Peach leapt at the truck, his arm clearly snapping at the shoulder as he swiped at the headlights, a single glance from those icy-blue cataracted eyes, a bullet hole big as a dime and bleeding above his left eye, before he was gone spinning in the dark. Krista dropped her phone on the floorboards and screamed. Chuck tried—too late—to wrest control of the truck; they plowed into the weatherworn wooden fence that lined the driveway. He peered back where Peach had fallen and saw nothing. Krista was still screaming.
“Stay here,” Chuck managed.
Krista wheeled around frantically in her seat. “What was that?”
“Just stay here.” He undid his seat belt, handed her the keys. “If I don’t come back in five minutes, drive to the diner and call the cops.”
“Uncle Chuck.”
“Just five minutes. Lock the doors.”
He had once been careful about leaving tools in his truck—they had been stolen so many times over the years—but with the wire, he had grown careless. He reached into the truck bed and grabbed a hammer, tested its heft in his hands. The night was blunt with a promised rain. He saw Jerome’s white van parked in front of the barn now, the barn door open, the headlights on.
Oh, it hurt to run. He staggered along the rutted driveway in the hopes that Peach—what had become of Peach—might follow him.
The barn was bright with light, Jerome standing before Michael, who stood there pale as carved soap, his gums gone blue and bloodless. He lashed and writhed towards Jerome, who stood in front of him with a pistol in one fist.
“Peach is out there,” Chuck said, his hands on his knees.
“Yeah, shit got away from me,” Jerome said without turning around.
“He’s dead too,” Chuck said, as if it wasn’t brutally obvious.
“Yeah, it runs in the family sometimes. They can check now, did you know that? Do a blood test? Tell you if you’re one or not. I might have it, you never know.”
“My niece is out there,” Chuck said.
Jerome turned, frowning. There was a flatness in his eyes that Chuck couldn’t place, and that terrified him more than Peach running his body against the truck a moment before. It seemed like resignation. A willingness. “You got a niece, Charles? Out there?” He peered over Chuck’s shoulder. “In your truck, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Jerome looked him over, offered a fey smile. “Wire’s doing a number on you, Charles. Goddamn.”
“You’re the one that Michael owed money to, weren’t you?”
“What’s your plan with that hammer, Charles?”
“You’re the one that killed him, right? You killed him and Peach.”
Jerome raised the pistol and scratched his eyebrow with the barrel. Chuck flinched, and it made Jerome grin. “Second deaths are what it takes, you know? Twice dead is when they stop running around. I’m wrapping all this shit up, man. Should have been done a long time ago.”
“They’re your family.”
“My family?” Jerome turned and shot Michael in the forehead. The sound was flat and sharp. Michael fell, the chain tightening so that he hung there leaning back, half-crumpled to the floor. Jerome turned back and Chuck was still holding the hammer. The time to do something had passed. Jerome’s face was twisted with hurt and ugliness. “Family doesn’t do you like they did to me.”
Peach found them then—Chuck could hear him hissing and snarling out there in the dark. He turned and saw the skittering shape, the arm hanging useless and strange, slapping against his leg as he ran. Jerome’s eyes went wide. He grinned; there was a joyousness there.
Chuck turned and ran out of the barn, past the van, towards the truck that still sat there in the distance. Peach in front of him, getting closer, slavering, his ice-blown eyes wide, an arm stretching for him. Behind him was Jerome, the sudden deep peal of gunshots. Chuck snared between these two men. Thinking of Krista, the headlights out there in the dark.
Oh, it hurt to run.
