I marched Peewee in a textbook headlock along the asphalt’s verge to my sister’s place.

“Ty, she’s lyin’, my dude. She’s—”

“Hold your pistols, Pewee. This is an arbitration, and all parties ain’t present.”

We jack-knifed down the long dirt drive to my folks’ farm, or what was left of it, me kicking my heels to give his downturned face a dusting.

I scanned the spoils, dominated by that corrugated stretch of chicken shed. A burn pit simmered. The hulk of a tractor rusted. The sloppy fences bowed and bent. It was all familiar blight, just new layers of rot.

“Are you taking care of your responsibilities ‘round here, Peewee?”

“Sure! I-I’m tryin’!”

“Try harder.”

I jostled him to the porch, sitting and squaring him on the busted white steps. He rubbed his neck, spluttering and spitting. “It wasn’t exactly all milk and honey when we took over, y’know!”

“I know, I know,” I shunted open the front door, rushing through the haunted house with its paper walls that held me ‘til seventeen. ‘til I could get the hell out. I grabbed two cold bottles of Bud’ from the fridge, retracing with my eyes closed, my breath held. The smell of bleach-scrubbed animal waste still lingered.

“Tia, get your ass down here!” I yelled back before the screen door slammed, slumping next to her worthless husband, cracking his beer open with my teeth and clomping it down.

“Them’s Tia’s,” he said, studying the brutal blue horizon. “I don’t drink no more. I’m in a programme.”

“I’m drinking. You’re drinking.”

“No, I ain’t.”

Alcohol was a friend that always showed up and stole from you. It had that in common with Peewee. He was the agitator in our hometown crowd—the mouth. The grifter. The shithead.

I took a swig from mine. “Suit yourself. Thanks for stopping.”

“You would have chased me, and you know where I live. You think our trucks will be alright out there?”

“Don’t change the subject. Why did my sister have a black eye, Peewee? My girl at the Dunkin’ Donuts saw her, clear as day.”

“Call her! Ask her, instead of dragging my ass!”

“I called her. Her phone’s dead. Tiaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” I tossed over my shoulder.

“Maybe she ain’t here?”

“Sure, she is,” I gestured to her pick-up with a glistening bottle neck. It was our daddy’s, bequeathed to the dutiful child, older by ten minutes, who stuck around to oversee both parents’ end days. They’d always pitted us against each other—me with my football scholarship and ability to take a belt, Tia with her sneaky good humour and knack for dodging even a promised whooping.

“Did I tell you I saw Bobby the other day?” Peewee appealed, his buck-tooth smile glinting. I felt a rush of the glory days.

“Huh. Bobby. No way. Was he still wearing his mom’s fur coat?”

Peewee snorted. “Why the hell did he wear that?”

“He went to New York once.”

“Well, he’s a goddamn high school English teacher, now”

“Bobby is?! He used to eat gum off the bottom of the bleachers!”

“Yeah, but he was always a word pervert. You remember when we caught him reading in the strip club?”

I scrutinized Peewee’s nervous profile—his pockmarked cheeks had filled out, living high on the hog of my inheritance, no doubt. He was welcome to it. Tia was his nightmare now. Her heart, or whatever, was a righteous theft. They’d been together for the guts of a year. I’d shown up for the wedding, for the sake of the old faces. To save mine, maybe.

She and Peewee were a meeting of vacant minds and serpent spines. I was there when Peewee skewered his testicles in junior high, breaking into the junkyard, so spawn seemed unlikely. Small mercies.

“I didn’t hit her, Ty. Well, not ‘black eye’ hit her, anyway. But you gotta know she gives as good as she gets.”

Why I’d stuck around after the ceremony was harder to say, orbiting between odd jobs and working the door of our favourite dive bar—my juvenile pissing patch. Egged on by Peewee, I’d broken a three-hundred-pound biker’s jaw there before I needed to shave. Now, I turned the dark side of my other cheek to the curled lips of entitled freshmen—a nameless moon without a planet.

“She’s got this new crowd, Ty. They’re no good, y’know, but I don’t have the headspace to babysit a grown woman.”

I tapped the heel of my bottle against my wedding ring. Why did I still wear it? I wanted credit for the intention, I guess. For an attempt at a life outside the faded firefly jar of my boyhood.

“What was that girlfriend you had in tenth grade?” I cajoled Pewee, who was rolling a cigarette. Getting comfortable. “You know, the one with the lazy eye?”

“Err, Charnelle?”

“Charnelle, right. She used to carry that glue bag with her. Then she’d huff it and ride you ‘round the parking lot like a rodeo clown.”

Peewee hooted. “Jesus, me and the wild ones, huh? She works over at the abattoir. She has five kids and a—”

“Yeah, I remember you cuffing her at Digger’s New Year’s Eve party.”

Peewee’s beady eyes blazed. “And I remember you laughing your ass off!”

“You misremember.”

Peewee swallowed hard. A soft cuck-cuck-cuck cacophony carried on the silence, on the strings of the dry earth and the vast, stingy sky. I hummed Thunder Road to block it out.

“Listen, okay. I-I-I haven’t been home in days, Ty. We had a quarrel.”

“Save it, Tiaaaaaa-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!” I roared at the shell of a house.

“Y’know, she… she’s been out a lot recently. With this… this new crowd I was tellin’ you about. Maybe she got picked up. Maybe—”

I stomped upright, draining my beer in four strides, turning and tossing it like an axe at the floor. The splintered glass showered Peewee’s shins. He cowered, like he did when my wallet fell from his jacket pocket on that road trip to see Springsteen at the Hollywood Bowl.

My knee brushed his cheek as I hauled myself inside.

“Tia, where you at?”

I jogged up the stairs, blinkered to the family portraits spiralling diagonally at my elbow—me and her, and us altogether. Graduations. Reunions. Homecomings.

The last frame blared. I couldn’t resist looking. The old man and me, arm in arm, grinning like eels, him in those stinking overalls, me a foot taller than my maker. Ten minutes after it was taken, he’d asked me to stay, to help with the chickens. Tia was in jail for torching an ex-boyfriend’s Subaru Impreza. I’d tried to explain—college starts again in a week. I’ve met someone. It’s not for me. He didn’t hear. Didn’t listen. We argued. He clapped me across the ear. I could’ve killed him with my bare hands without breaking a sweat.

I lurched from room to room. “Tia, c’mon.”

“Tia, come talk.” I hammered at the bathroom door. It swung open, empty.

I held my breath and stepped into the final room.

It still sagged with my pennants and shelves of dulled trophies. Apart from those relics, it was just space—a mixed message to callers; that the someone who slept here was worth something once.

Without the caretakers, there was no forced gratitude. No me versus her. Just an absence, stretched between the skirting boards.

How did I boomerang here, after all this time?

I heaved myself down the stairs, the berserker spell wearing off. My toe caught on loose carpet in the hall, freshly laid. Dried blood was smudged underneath. I followed it up to the banister—a speckle of crimson.

I shoved through the front door, clamping Peewee by the scruff, launching him into the dirt of the drive.

“Where’s Tia?!”

“I-I don’t… I don’t…” his eyes darted to the chicken shed.

I dragged him over there, his shirt collar tearing in my grip, my pulse thumping in my temples.

Inside, the sea of poultry chattered—the bony, dirty birds in their rows of measly pens, scrabbling through their measly lives. The same stink that permeated my father. Our home. Shit and feed, but something else. That smell—when we found our mauled cat’s body in the crawl space after a month missing.

In the walkway between the cages, a blue tarpaulin bulged.

“What’s that?” I gulped, breathing through my mouth.

“I’ve got no clue.”

“Take it off.”

Peewee trembled under the heat lamps. He stood over the plastic sheet, rubbing his fingers together. He turned to me, shaking his head. Begging me not to make him.

I booted him in the ass. His rat face twisted in impotent resistance.

“Show me,” I insisted, the sting of dammed tears at my eyes.

He wrenched the tarpaulin free.

Chickens. Dead chickens. Rotten. Crawling with maggots.

“Urgh,” I recoiled, retching. “Peewee, what the f—”

He bolted past me, into the wide open, pumping up the long dirt drive to the road.

I charged after him, filling my lungs, muscle memory taking over. I ate up the ground, metre by metre, inch by inch, spearing him through the ramshackle fence.

He was crying now. Crying, like my mom on the phone after another Thanksgiving no-show. Crying like Charnelle at Digger’s New Year’s Eve party; her button nose smashed and streaming.

“You can’t just leave them in there like that!” I grimaced, pacing over his quaking carcass. “There’s disease! They’ll infect the whole flock!”

“I… I can’t look after no chickens, Ty! You understand that?! It ain’t dignified work. We… we have the infrastructure… w-we could grow weed!”

“Tia’s a felon, you stupid prick. You wouldn’t get a license.”

“Well, y’know, I—I could set up without Tia. You and me, maybe?”

A new stench rippled over the decay. The burn pit simmered behind him—a hole in the earth. The volume—the charred contents—too big for chickens. Too big for a tarpaulin.

I offered Peewee a hand. He took it. I rag-dolled him, locking his breakable arm. He cawed and thrashed as we slow-danced towards the smoulder.

“What is it?” I spat, the black mass gazing back.

“Just… stuff. Stuff we don’t want. Mattresses and clothes and… and I hit a deer the other night. I brought it back, I don’t know what I was thinking, but some of its bones, maybe…”

“Maybe?”

“Yeah, they’ve got bones, don’t they?”

“Fish it all out.”

“Fish? It’s toxic, Ty! It’ll get in my lungs, and – ”

I unlocked his arm, clapping his ear. He sprawled backwards, yelping and flailing on the anonymous ash, scrambling clear and hugging my legs.

“I-I was so damn happy when you came back, Ty! Everything that happened to you, man – ”

“Shut up.”

“—it wasn’t fair, man—”

“Shut the hell up, Peewee.”

“You were like a brother to me! Your folks, they were good people!”

“They were garbage! They were ghouls! They wanted me and Tia to fight to the death over who would be lord or lady to this… this fuckin’ graveyard!”

“Okay. Okay, I understand. You didn’t need to be treated like some service anim—”

I socked him in the mouth at eighty percent, remembering the time he saved me in the creek, when I got tangled in the reeds. He could always swim better. Float better.

He shunted a shoulder into my knee. I screamed – the hair-trigger pain from the ligament damage—the football injury that forced me to retire at twenty-two. I crumpled down beside him at the rim of the pit.

Peewee rocked on his haunches. He was laughing.

“Y’know, I loved to watch you play, Ty. I came to all your games, remember? Shit, I… I could never believe a stud like you was hangin’ with a goon like me. I… I think that was part of the appeal, with Tia, y’know? A chance to… to be in your shadow again.”

Tia would’ve resisted. She would’ve bled. It’s what she did—how our parents taught us. Stay. Stand your ground, as the drains back up. As home becomes a fetid sewer. As death binds and chokes you.

I righted myself—a caber, clenched above him, the pity seeping from my marrow.

“I see how it is, Ty. You want me to beg? You got the wrong stiff. Y’know, your daddy begged. When your mom got sick, he begged for his son. And on his deathbed. Yeah, I was there, and you better believe, he—”

I punted his jaw. His skull rattled, his unrooted teeth clacking against a tree stump.

I stooped to the slaughter, like a dutiful son.

 

My legs splay in the dust. I knead my thick neck on the porch steps.

My crooked knuckles bleed.

My ash-caked fingers quiver around a vanishing sliver of cigarette. Pewee rolled them tight. He was better at that. He was careful.

The restoked burn pit smoulders in the distance. I avert my eyes to the pill bugs scurrying under their home of a dead-headed plant pot.

I think I hear a harmonica. A piano. The steadfast refrain of Thunder Road.

I’m deaf to the rumble. The squeal of brakes. The car door.

“Thanks, Julie, baby. Next one’s on me.”

A clot hangs over me. Her dress sways.

“Jesus, baby brother, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Tia?”

I shield my eyes from the haze of heaven.

“Who else? ‘scuse the shiner. You remember Clementine Dean, the pastor’s daughter? She found out I’d been foolin’ around with her husband. Turns out she’s got a right hook on her. The way I see it, that bitch only puts out on his birthday, I’m doing everyone a favour.”

“Tia, I—”

“Peewee will freak, no doubt, but I ain’t scared of him. He’s a pussycat these days. Him and his sobriety, sitting in a tree…”

“Tia… please…”

“Damn! What the hell are you so upset about? There ain’t no suckers to attend to at home no more. No bodies to quarrel with, neither.”