M Coe - New Veronia

“Told you,” he said. “I told you we’d get to Florida. See? No problem.” Jay kept fiddling with the radio. He switched from one brand of static to another until the driver told him to shut it off.

“You got relatives here, I hope,” the driver said into the ensuing silence. “Someone to take care of you, I hope.”

“We do,” Jay said. “Going to see my older brother.”

I shot my eyes over to him, but he was staring at his lap.

“You get straight to him, then. Don’t want to get caught up in anything. Lots of all kinds, see? All kinds you’ll find around a swamp.”

The guy dropped us off before he turned toward his house. On either side of the road, which looked like the sort nobody ever used, vegetation grew huge and looming, a hundred shades of green closing in.

“It’s not that different from Delaware here,” Jay said.

“But there are alligators, right?”

“Crocodiles. Wouldn’t it be wild to see a bear and a croc fight?”

I barely heard him, so preoccupied was I with the question I’d been holding just behind my lips. “Is there something you haven’t told me?” His eyes quivered, sort of like a scared animal’s, a look I hadn’t seen on him before, so I figured that I could press him. “Like about some brother?”

“Oh,” Jay said, “you want to know about that?” He almost sounded relieved, and I told myself that of course he’d been meaning to divulge all his secrets, of course he told me everything. He’d just forgotten about this one.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “Before you moved here.”

I nodded: this all fit. We were walking slowly down the road, heading south because that felt better than being still.

“It was like my second trip. My second or third trip hunting with my dad and my older brother. I was seven, but he was even older than Stella, thirteen, I guess. My dad could sit for hours in the hunting blind, but I was a stupid kid and I got restless, bothering my dad, so my brother took me looking for rabbits or whatever around the pond. We walked out there, and when we were walking back, we decided to play a game. Sneak up on my dad in the blind. He always said he could hear us from a mile off, and we wanted to prove him wrong. Only, a hundred yards out, I stopped being careful. I rustled a bush, and my brother got shot.

“Even when he dropped, he was quiet. I thought maybe we were still playing the game. Still trying to sneak up on the blind. I didn’t say anything for a while; I just kind of watched him while he bled out. Maybe I was in shock. If I had known back then all the stuff I know now, like how to tourniquet or pack a wound and all this other survivalist stuff, maybe he wouldn’t have died, but I guess he did. We put him in the back of the truck like we would have any deer. Sometimes you got to be practical, I mean, we couldn’t have him up in the cab of the truck with us. Wouldn’t have been practical.”

Jay relayed all this in a stoic, unvarying tone. He stared straight ahead at the road we were walking. It was like his brother hadn’t been a secret at all, hadn’t been difficult for him to talk about, and he’d just needed a reminder that he hadn’t told me yet.

“Your dad shot him?” I said.

“No! No way.”

“Then who did?”

“Dad swore he hadn’t fired in that direction at all, so it must have come from somewhere else, I don’t know. It was hunting season.”

Our road started to grow narrower, and the sky ticked towards darkness.

“When my dad was real mad, he used to say, ‘I could kill you off. Wouldn’t bother me none. Your mom and me could make a replacement in nine months.’”

“That’s awful,” I said.

“No, you don’t get it: he was trying to make me feel better. To show me I didn’t take much away from him when I made all that noise and got my brother shot.”

“Oh.” As the air counted down towards night, it became heavy and wet, not like it was going to rain, but like each thread of dark wove into a web for catching dew.

“But,” Jay said, thoughtful, “I hadn’t seen any other hunters out that day.”

“Why’d you tell that guy we were going to see your brother?”

“I don’t know. It sounded more killer than saying we were going to find your mommy.”

“Do you think about him a lot?”

“Not really at all.” As he walked, Jay kicked a stone ahead of us, always landing it directly in front of him, precise as if it were a soccer ball. “One thing I always thought was off: black people, they don’t hunt. They’d rather get food stamps than go out and shoot their own food. It’s strange, is what it is. Don’t make sense.”

I had to admit that Jay saying stuff like this did make him sound like a skinhead, but I couldn’t call him out, not after the way he’d just opened up to me. As we walked, I thought about the story of Jay’s brother, but I couldn’t figure out why it scared me. It had all happened so long ago, before I’d even heard of Delaware. When I felt sure that Jay had told me everything, that he wouldn’t say anymore, I filed away Jay’s history and turned towards the practical. “Now where do we go?”

Jay shrugged. “It’s your mom. Figure out where she lives.”

Something rustled a lime green bush beside me; panic rose in my throat. The road was cracked like an elephant’s skin and barely wide enough for two cars; we should have gotten out near to the freeway, like our driver had offered, but we’d decided instead to go as far south as he could take us.

Jay groaned. “How did we get all the way here without ever getting a map?” He sat on the side of the deserted road, his butt right next to the creeping green and brown and yellow stuff that grew wildly all around us. He covered his face with his hands. This wasn’t how a leader was supposed to act.

“Jay,” I said, crouching close to him, “what’s wrong?” Maybe telling me about his brother had taken more out of him than I’d realized. “We’ll figure it out. Look how far we got already. We’ll find my mom. We’ll be totally fine. Look, sometimes I feel like”—I built myself up; I was going to say it—“we’re brothers. You and me. Right?”

Instead of say that yeah, that was right, Jay’s body slumped like a noodle, and my fingertips pricked with grief. I rubbed them hard against my closed eyes.

Just on the cusp of full dark, I got Jay to follow me away from the road, a few yards into the swamp, where we sat on a log that caved in gently beneath us. White bugs swarmed the ground, but they were only termites; they wouldn’t hurt us.

“I thought that they would find me by now,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The Eye Whites.” His voice sounded weak and out of character; maybe he was delirious. “You would think that someone, one of them, at least, would have seen my tattoo.”

“What do you mean—what about your tattoo?”

“You know, the Eye Whites thing.” He touched the tattoo at the back of his neck. “It’s a mark sort of like so we can recognize each other. It’s political. At the conference, everyone had it. It’s on chicks’ ankles. Or guys’ biceps. Or wherever. We should get you one.”

“Maybe.” But I’d always thought that, if I got a tattoo, it would be words, a quote, some clever Shakespeare quote that people would think was funny and smart. “You never told me your tattoo was part of this whole political thing that you’re into. You said it was a zebra eyeball, once.”

He blew air through his lips. “Sometimes I like to make shit up. To mess with you.” For some reason, this made me feel like Jay had been keeping a fat, monster secret, even though I knew he wouldn’t see it that way. If the Eye Whites were a permanent part of his body, then he had to feel pretty obsessed with them.