His father ran his good hand through his hair, resting his palm against his forehead. “Mr. Augusto weren’t backing up for nobody,” he said. “Ain’t never seen the man in my life and told him he didn’t have no right on that road, how it was company land and how I was the foreman and he should just back on up before I had him put away for trespassing. I know you been in fights, Vernon. I don’t keep my head buried like you might think. You know fighting’s a bad thing?”
“I guess.”
“It is, Vernon,” his father said. “But when two men don’t agree, then they’s nothing left. We could talk in circles for days and them trucks’d still be nose to nose. I had that tire iron just for show. Before I knew it he had a knife on me and cut me bad. And then something come up in me and I hit Mr. Augusto across his skull. He fell like someone switched him off. Weren’t but one hit. I thought a great deal about it last night. When a fire goes out there’s a smoldering and a little smoke left to trail. This man weren’t snuffed like a fire. I switched him off like a houselight, and it don’t seem right.”
Vernon thought of the homes in town with electricity, of the diner and picture show, of how their windows glowed in the dark night.
“I wonder where he was heading?”
“I wonder about that, too,” his father said. “I’ve sure been wondering about a lot of things. I wonder if Mr. Augusto has a wife and children. Ain’t no photos in his wallet, but ain’t none in mine neither.” His father filled his lungs and exhaled and closed his eyes. “I wonder if Hell is real,” he said. “You think Hell is real?”
It wasn’t a question Vernon had ever studied. “I don’t know.”
“I’ve been thinking a great deal about Hell. I don’t want to go there. I don’t know if it’s a real place or not, but a man can’t take his chances.”
“You ought to lay on that bench over there, Pop. It’s in the sun a little. You oughtn’t stay in the shade with those wounds.”
“I been thinking about Jesus, too. I figure Jesus wouldn’t have got nowhere if he were always backing down a road. Even Jesus had to stand and take his licks.”
“That man stabbed you,” Vernon said. “He might’ve killed you.”
“He’s got a name. Don’t call him
that man,
” his father said, and opened his eyes and rose and walked to the dry bench in the sun. “Mr. Augusto surely weren’t going to back down. But he weren’t no different than me.” He lay back on the bench and covered his eyes with his arm. “Vernon?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You know why I believe there’s a God?”
“No, sir.”
“I feel a powerful tenderness for Mr. Augusto. Don’t make no sense otherwise. A man what come after me. A man I don’t know from Adam. Yet I’m still very sorry for him. If you wronged someone and still want to do good by them, I believe that tenderness is God up in you. I feel more tenderness for Mr. Nory Augusto than any man alive. I believe God is full up in me.”
“Maybe the Devil was in you when you did it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What’s better anyway, Vernon? To have the Devil in me, or to have it be me alone?”
“You ain’t a bad man, Pop.”
His father shook his head. “We are what we do.”
“You ain’t bad. I believe in that.”
“No, Vernon,” his father said. “I’m about as bad as they come. Now go on and bring Mr. Augusto in here. I need to lay still and be quiet awhile.”
“Mr. Augusto would’ve killed you.”
“Then he’d be the bad man,” his father said, quietly. “Now leave me be awhile, Vernon. Gather wood for a fire. We’ll need lots of wood.”
Vernon studied his father in the milky light, searching for something in his face, or the way he held his body, that was evidence of the good man he knew as a child. If God didn’t want Mr. Augusto dead, why’d he let Pop kill him? With all the killing in the world, did one more man really matter?
Vernon crossed the room and crawled from the shimmering cavern. Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel. Maybe folks don’t trust in good things no more. Maybe awful things is all God’s got to remind us he’s alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men. Vernon pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.
From the ledge, Vernon could see for miles: knobs of redbuds, poplars, dogwoods. The sky was slashed with smoke. Two thick black columns to the north, what Vernon figured was from the foundry stacks. An airy gossamer of soot far to the south, from coal barges out on the river. A curl of black smoke hung in the distant blue to the west, what Vernon knew was from town. It’d been a hot summer, with many fires; the bowling alley had burned to cinders, as had Prentice Baldwin’s house on the edge of town, the Harroget dairy, a grain silo out by the quarry. Vernon wondered what in town was on fire this time. The woods below had been slapped by drought but were still generally green. In the heart of this green was a circle of bare-branched hickories, leafless as they might look in winter.
Vernon climbed carefully down the cliff and began gathering wood. His eyes were parched knots, and his stomach churned. He strolled the forest looking for fruit trees, but could only find a sun-blanched spread of brambles with a palmful of rock-hard berries. Vernon sucked sourness from seed and pulp, and surveyed the forest floor for more. He saw none and moved on, hunting out anything edible, dead or alive, and trod like an Indian through the fern, trying not to rustle the leaves or make a sound, and imagined himself a boy-shaped breeze drifting above the earth.
Soon he was inside the circle of barren hickories he’d seen from the cliff. The dirt was cragged. The trees were the color of ashes. Limbs like bones stretched into each other. The air smelled of fire, and Vernon noticed threads of smoke leaked from the flayed bark of several trunks. As he collected kindling, a deep hopelessness came over him. He stared at the sky, at heat waves rippling from the tips of black branches. It felt to Vernon as if a bomb had been dropped here.
He sat in the shade beside a smoldering trunk. In a waking dream he imagined the approach of whistling through the woods. The whistled tune grew closer, then out rode a man in a white cowboy hat atop a golden, white-faced horse. It was Roy Rogers on Trigger, exactly as Vernon remembered them from the movie he’d seen the night before. They stopped in front of Vernon, towered over him. Roy wore a pale-blue shirt and a tomato-red neckerchief, his pants tucked inside his boots.
Roy leaned over the saddle horn, tipped his hat. “Hey, Vernon.”
“Hey, Roy,” Vernon said. “She’s a hot one, ain’t she?”
Roy glanced about the stand of trees. “It’s like bull’s breath out here.” He dismounted, patted Trigger’s flank, and looped the reins over a low branch. He stretched his back, then sat on his heels in front of Vernon and broke a twig into small pieces, tossing them off into a patch of chickweed. Vernon saw him glance at his old boots patched with rawhide and wire, then Roy’s eyes lit a pained expression. “You want to sing a song, Vernon?”
“Nah.”
“Ain’t nobody around but us.”
“I ain’t got no voice for singing them dumb songs.”
Roy’s brows pinched together. “My songs ain’t dumb, Vernon. You got a problem with my songs, you got a problem with me.”
“Nothing against you, Roy. I just don’t see why you got to pull a guitar from behind a cactus bush every five minutes.”
Roy snapped the twig, chucked it aside. “I don’t see a damn thing wrong with it,” he said, pulling his gloves tight over his knuckles. “People like it just fine, if you ask me. Maybe you ought to give it a try before making slanderous remarks.”
“I just think I’d feel dumb singing them songs.”
“God damn it, kid,” Roy said, and balled a fist in Vernon’s face. “I ain’t fooling with you. You sing or I’ll bust your teeth.”
“Hey,” Vernon said. “What’s the matter with you, Roy?”
Roy breathed hotly, in and out. His eyes were dark like small burnt twigs. Then he looked away, spat, and backed off.
Roy sat against the tree beside Vernon and gazed down at his hands. “Geez, I’m sure sorry,” he said. “They’ve been putting me through some tough times lately. I know it’s my job and is what it is, but damn it, what with the war and so much fighting I just need to be out on a lonesome plain with me and Trigger and nobody around for a hundred miles.”
“Them boys did lock you in that freezer a couple pictures back,” Vernon said in a comforting way. “And that one gal sent them wild dogs after you, too. Boy, was she some piece of work.”
“Folks think it’s easy because I sing a few songs and have a friendly disposition, but they don’t know how hard it is.”
“I know, Roy. I know what it’s like.”
“You’re a good friend, Vernon. A good man.”
They fell silent and Trigger swatted flies with his tail, and Roy held the bridge of his nose with two gloved fingers. “I sure need to sing,” he said. “Won’t you sing with me? Ain’t nobody around but us.”
Then Vernon was crying, and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “Roy?”
“Yes, Vernon?”
“I hardly know him,” Vernon said. “I hardly know my own father since he come home. I know you better than my own father.”
“Every boy in America knows me better than their father,” Roy said, and patted Vernon’s knee. “That’s why they love me so. Now what say we sing that song?”
“I ain’t like you, Roy,” Vernon said, sobbing. “I’m shit scared all the time. I’m just a rope of sand. What if the war starts up again, Roy? It will sometime, won’t it? Folks say it will. I don’t want to end up like him. Don’t want to kill nobody. What if I got to take my turn?”
“You ain’t any different than me, Vernon,” Roy said. “I just sing a song every now and again to take off the dark edges. What say we sing one now? Just to smooth off the dark edges?”
Vernon wiped his eyes on his arm. “All right then.”
Vernon stood and squeezed the bundle of sticks on his shoulder and ambled off through the forest, singing what words he could recall from “Get Along, Little Doggies.” He took his time, gathering more wood as he went, and soon was back at the honeycomb rock.
He stopped singing and tied the bundle and began to climb, the song gone and the rocks so hot he had to spit on his palms to keep them from burning.
The body lay on the ledge in the summit’s long shadow. Vernon stood over it with the sticks on his shoulder. He nudged the quilt edge with the toe of his boot. A corner folded over and revealed an ear and dark hair salted white and a cheek as smooth as ivory. That skin flustered Vernon. He lifted more quilt with his boot. A green eye showed itself, staring into nothing. Vernon had to see the rest of Mr. Augusto. He pulled a stick from his bundle and threw the quilt open.
The man was thin and wore gray trousers pressed with a hard crease. He wore a matching vest with brass buttons, and a shirt the color of a salmon fillet. He looked like a politician. Like a preacher. The left side of his face was unscathed. The right eye socket was a blood-crusted pit, the cheekbone collapsed, and a gash ran from his forehead down the side of his nose to the point of his chin.
Vernon turned over the boulder to be sick, but there was nothing left inside him. He ran into the cool of the tunnel. Slumped against the wall, he steadied his breathing. Then Vernon descended through strata of pallid light and tried to imagine this man wielding a knife. But he could not rectify the image in his mind and the pristine brass buttons and clean-shaven face.
He entered the cavern to find his father asleep and shivering on the sun-washed granite slab. His father’s hand was unwrapped from its swaddling. Green stitches closed a gash on the back of his hand. His fingers were gnarled and black. Red blisters made a gross topography across his palm and wrist.
Sunlight streamed a harsh tide into the cathedral, and water trickling down the walls threw tiny prisms. Vernon set his load of wood in the center of the benches. He lightly shook his father’s arm. His father’s eyes opened enough to show white through his lashes.
“I need your lighter, Pop.”
His father’s eyes batted, closed again. Vernon dug into his father’s pant’s pocket and found the silver lighter.
The damp air made the fire difficult to start. Soon the wood crackled and let off a thin roil of smoke. His father now sat in a slouch, trying to comb his hair with a quivering hand. Vernon took the comb from him and ran it carefully through his father’s hair.
“You was shivering.” Vernon gave his father the comb. “They’s lots of fires around. Don’t think ours’ll draw notice.”
His father nodded. “Thank you, Vernon,” he said. “Now bring Mr. Augusto in here, please. And plenty more wood. Several big logs. Use the rope to get them up here if need be.”
Vernon found he could no longer look at his father, and just did as told. He exited the cave and to keep his mind off unpleasantness tried to focus on each singular movement: putting his foot in a pock of sandstone, breaking down sticks, piling them on his shoulder, stepping through fern, dragging thick sections of birch he found not far from the rock, and up the cliff, back down, feet moving, hands on hot rocks, stacking logs high on the burgeoning fire.
He dragged the quilt down the calcite corridor, Mr. Augusto’s head knocking against the damp floor. Vernon pulled tenderly, as if dragging a man asleep and trying not to wake him. He became intensely aware of his own skin, the cloth on his fingertips, blisters crinkling the balls of his feet. Soon he felt heat from the fire on his neck, and he tugged the body, as if entering a furnace, through the cavern’s mouth.
The fire lashed flames the size of small trees and the oval of blue sky was overcome by the smoke and the cathedral walls now reflected firelight instead of sunshine. His father approached and they stood with the body in the quilt between them.
“Help get it on the fire, son.”
“You mean Mr. Augusto?”
“That’s right,” and his father solemnly nodded. “Help get Mr. Augusto on the fire. We got to burn him up.”
Vernon stood very still. “I know you hit Mr. Augusto more than one time,” he said. “You says you hit him only once, but that ain’t the truth.”