Elmer had seen a skull once, as a child, by the Zigzag river. There’d been moss growing over the bone as if it were another river rock, trilliums climbing up out of the mouth. He’d turned it over in his little palms, picked off the moss with his nubby fingernails and found the cracks where the pieces of the cranium fit together like a puzzle.
He had never told anyone about it. He didn’t know who it belonged to. He hadn’t thought of it as part of a person, but those cracks, jagged like the river itself, like someone had scribbled them on the bone with a fine pen, had stuck in his mind. He would sweat in bed at night as a boy, picturing his own head falling open, falling apart, brains spilling out like oatmeal. He felt his skull now, trying to make out where the cracks would be, under the flesh, under his wispy blond hair. Everything solid wasn’t really. Everything, underneath, was filled with secret cracks.
Elmer’s jaw rattled as the truck bounced down the mountain road. They needed new shocks. The whole rusty truck was bound to break apart underneath them, but Little John wouldn’t get it fixed. Little John wouldn’t get a damn thing fixed on credit. “Ain’t nobody gonna ruin our good name,” is what he told Elmer. He spat when he said it, each time. Elmer pictured that spit falling clean to Rhododendron and landing on some fine lady’s face. “All a man’s got in life, I mean, really got, is his name.”
Elmer was fifteen. He hadn’t been old enough to go to war like Little John, who’d come home that year with one eye gone, and he was grateful. His happiness over his own life sloshed around inside of him like too much beer. He was guilty and sorry, but drunk with it—delighted to a pitiful degree. He’d prayed, though he hardly believed in God, that the whole thing would go on out there in Europe without him. He hadn’t even prayed for Little John. He hadn’t prayed for his brother’s safe return even once. He figured it was every man for himself when it came down to it. His brother must have done enough praying of his own to make it out with his skull intact, the bullet coming so close and all.
“There are some people in life, Elmer, who only see beautiful things,” Little John said, taking one hand off the wheel to point at him. “Can you believe that? There are folks who pay someone else to see all the shit so they don’t have to.”
It was pitch dark outside, the moon full and ripe in the sky and the scent of snow all around them, though it hadn’t started to fall yet. Elmer sat on his hands to keep them warm. He didn’t say anything. Little John’s speeches had begun to annoy Elmer. He was sick of hearing about how the world was. He was sick of thinking about everything.
“I’m talking about the whole lot of ’em,” Little John said. “The whole goddamn lot of them who run this country and only see some words on paper, then go home to their big houses and drink their liquor and smoke their cigars and put on their goddamn silk robes.”
The truck’s headlights shone on the dirt road ahead. He knew exactly where they were headed, though he hadn’t been there for years. Everyone knew just where Coyote Smith lived. Elmer wondered, though, if the man could actually still be alive. He couldn’t think how old he’d be now. He’d seemed ancient when Elmer was just a boy.
It’d been cold that night too, all those years ago. The first real cold of the season. The brothers had managed it by hiding under a woolen blanket in the bed of the truck. Elmer still could call up the smell of mildew and his brother’s warm rancid breath under the blanket. The shocks must’ve been better on the truck back then, but Elmer remembered how small he’d felt as they bounced over these same mountain roads. He’d been bruised afterwards, for weeks, hot yellow welts.
The brothers hadn’t seen them take him. When they’d stopped at the house, the same house they were approaching now, everything was so dark. They’d lifted their heads from under the blanket and peered around the side of the cab, but they couldn’t see anything at all. There was the sound of broken glass, a clattering of furniture, but no screams. Elmer felt sure if there had been screams he’d have remembered.
It was all great fun.
The boys had ducked back under the blanket when their father and the other man—Elmer couldn’t remember who it had been—brought Coyote Smith out to the truck and threw him in the back. He scooched up next to the boys without knowing they were there. Elmer felt before he saw how small the man was. There was hardly any give in the truck bed at all and he sure didn’t take up much room. He’d always pictured Coyote Smith to be at least as big as Big John, but he wasn’t at all. He seemed much closer to Elmer’s size, and Elmer felt a strange swell of pride at the realization.
When Elmer peeked over the edge of the blanket, once the truck was moving again, he could see the general shape of him through the darkness. His head was a large lump, but of course they’d already put the gunny sack over him by then. He struggled to keep himself steady against the bouncing truck bed and Elmer realized they’d tied his hands behind his back. Elmer was close enough to smell campfire and tobacco smoke on his clothes.
Elmer never saw where his father dropped him. He imagined the woolen blanket was his own sort of gunny sack when he felt the truck stop. He shut his eyes tight and tried to think of the twists and turns they’d just made until his mind was dizzy with failure.
That time, it took six hours for Coyote Smith to stumble back into Zigzag, sit right down at the inn, and order a pint. It wasn’t a record for him, in fact it was just about straight-down-the-middle average, but the number stood out in Elmer’s mind because it had been their father who’d planned that one. It’d been Big John who stumbled out of the truck when they arrived back, a little drunk, whooping.
◆
“You think he’s still here?” Elmer said. They’d pulled up close to the house and switched the car off, then walked the last quarter mile. He’d brought a flashlight and the beam illuminated a cold, dark little shack. “Jesus,” he said. “I don’t remember it being so dumpy.”
The whole house was boarded up. There was no glass to break this time. “Think the son-of-a-bitch up and kicked the bucket on us?”
“Without nobody in town finding out?” Little John said. Their voices were hushed, though part of Elmer wanted to yell, scream, throw something against the shabby-looking front door in case Coyote Smith was really in there. He suddenly felt the old man could do with a warning this time. For once.
Instead, Elmer switched off the flashlight when Little John whispered, “Turn that shit off.”
The forest was black on black again. Elmer longed to be back in the truck, under that mildew-smelling blanket. He longed to be anywhere except exactly where he stood. His stomach was painful and sour as he lifted his boots high so he wouldn’t trip, and tried to set them down gently. He could hear Little John feeling around the door with his hands. He imagined that this was what Little John must have felt like, in the war, like a scared little boy in the dark, out somewhere he shouldn’t be. Or maybe Little John felt something else entirely. Little John had never been the sort to have nightmares about fractured skulls or brains like oatmeal.
Before Elmer could think another thought the door burst open. Elmer nearly jumped out of his boots at the sound. For a moment he thought Coyote Smith had heard them, that he’d opened the door himself with a rifle in hand, but when he switched the flashlight on he saw the door itself had broken away from the padlock that held it shut, the boards splintering in a way that suggested how many times it’d been broken before.
The inside of the cabin was as cold as the outside, and Elmer thought that they were home free. The old man wasn’t there after all. Nobody could live in a place that cold. He aimed the beam around the little room. There wasn’t much to it. A cold woodstove in one corner, a little wooden kitchen table with a stained red-and-white tablecloth. There was no bathroom, no convection oven, not even a damn kitchen sink.
First, he smelled him. The tobacco. He couldn’t believe how quickly and strong it all came back. Then, he saw him, on the little bed behind the chest of drawers. “Who, boy!” It was Little John who spoke. Little John who walked over to the bed. Elmer thought he was dead, just lying there like that, his eyes gone all glassy. He thought of the skull again, his heart pounding in his ears. Even when he began to speak, a mumbling stream of curses, Elmer couldn’t bring himself to admit that this person was living.
Little John looked huge, staring down at the body writhing in the sheets. The light wavered and Elmer realized his hands were shaking. He stepped forward as Little John tugged the gunny sack out from under his belt.
◆
They drove. There was a little thrill, in the beginning, having Coyote Smith himself in the back of the truck. Elmer couldn’t deny it. He felt they’d gotten away with something, like when they were boys and used to steal Bit-O-Honeys from the market, tearing the wrappers off as soon as they were outside and gnawing at the hard, almond-studded taffy.
Elmer tried to pay attention to where they were going. At first he recognized the turns, the storefronts, the passing trees. He’d rarely ever left this little part of the world and he could navigate all around Zigzag with his eyes closed, but it didn’t take long before he got turned around. They’d seemed to be going down the east side of the mountain, but then, all of a sudden, they were on the west, driving straight through Main Street in Sandy, the storefronts all dark, not another car on the road.
“Isn’t this too far?” Elmer said, his stomach getting all tied up again. Little John held a smile in the corner of his mouth. The moon kept inching across the sky.
Coyote Smith had slumped against the tailgate. “We’re gonna kill him,” Elmer said, once, quietly. He wondered if he should repeat it, but he didn’t.
Little John went back to talking about the bigwigs who ran things in this country. How he was never gonna get his cut. How the house always wins. How they’d kill you every chance they got.
When the truck finally idled and slowed Elmer had no idea where they were. “Hope to hell you know how to get back,” he said.
Little John laughed as he opened the door.
Elmer switched on the flashlight as he stepped outside. They were in some kind of clearing. The trees here were smaller, mostly deciduous. Their bare branches stretched up against the black sky like so many skeleton arms. He thought he heard the sound of water.
They lifted Coyote Smith out of the truck together. His was still breathing, Elmer noticed, his panting under the gunny sack short and rapid. He was so thin and frail; Elmer was worried he’d break him. He couldn’t help it, that damn skull appeared again. He could see it in his mind’s eye, crawling with worms, falling apart inside his hands. He cursed the skull, cursed himself.
Elmer caught the ammoniac smell of urine. The poor bastard had wet himself.
They set him up against a tree and Little John took out a knife. Elmer watched as he sawed through the rope around his ankles and jumped back as Coyote Smith scrambled to his feet. The two of them ran back to the truck, slamming the doors. They didn’t drive away at first, but sat watching Coyote Smith, still in his gunny sack, with his hands tied, run back and forth in the beam of the headlights like a confused animal. His plaid shirt was frayed at the wrists. Dark streams of urine stained his pants.
He started rubbing his shoulders against the trees and John, who was in the cab again, said, “What’s that crazy son-of-a-bitch doing?”
Coyote Smith bent down and snagged the gunny sack on a twig, maneuvering his head out of it. He then turned to the truck. Though Elmer knew he couldn’t see inside with the glare of the headlights, he seemed to be staring directly at them. His eyes were not narrow in the light, but wide and feral. What was left of his white hair radiated outward from his shining skull.
Even Little John seemed aware, at least for a brief moment, that they were witnessing something mystic, something they could not bring back to Zigzag. It was like seeing a demon or an angel. You could say it to someone, but not in a way that explained it. That look in his eyes. The way he could see them without seeing them.
◆
It was well past midnight when they rolled the truck back into town and sauntered into the cellar of the Zigzag Inn. Tradition dictated a round of beers for everyone in the bar, which would be reciprocated again and again as they all waited the long night hours for Coyote Smith to return.
Elmer and Little John slid onto barstools. Nobody bothered about Elmer’s age anymore if Little John was with him, not with the missing eye. Elmer watched as Little John leaned over the bar, waiting for him to tell, waiting for the cheers to ring out across the cellar. Little John sat perched there for too long, with Rita looking at him from the back of the bar like he might be crazy. Why wouldn’t he say it?
“When you’re good and ready,” she laughed.
Finally, he scoffed a little, and shook his head at himself. Elmer breathed again, here it was, he would say it after all. But no, instead he mumbled, “Sorry, Rita. Just two beers here.”
The beer fell down Elmer’s throat but didn’t fill his stomach. He thought if he looked down the beer would actually be all over the floor, having slid straight through him. He wished Little John would talk about the bigwigs again or about all the ways they were put-upon. He could maybe listen this time. He could feel sorry for himself a little instead of whatever he was feeling now.
But Little John was quiet. He stared straight ahead. Elmer could see the scar under his eye patch, the place where the bullet had gone in and come back out at just the right angle not to make its way back into his brain.
Elmer rubbed his hand over his head. It ached like it was splitting apart, but in fact it was still solid. Though his fingertips roamed through his hair he couldn’t find where the cracks were.
Little John slammed his empty pint glass on the bar and pulled his wallet from his back pocket.
Elmer was swept up in a swift whoosh of relief then. He could barely keep from smiling.
They would go home. They would go home and not ever tell anybody anything. They wouldn’t ever talk about it again. They both knew what had happened anyway. They wouldn’t have to wait and see.