Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Okay. Let’s go.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. You first.”

“Okay.”

They climb the hill single file, hop the fence, and disappear from the little wild for the edge of town. They don’t talk as they go. They don’t talk at all, unless they have to.

Down the VA they call Agaju Threefer, or at least they used to, back when he went. Shorthand for Three-for-Four on account of his no legs and one arm. Blame Vietnam. Still enough life left in his ruined mutilation to fuck two sons into two different beer hall cheaps, though. Even married one of them for almost a year. Long enough to saddle him with one of the boys. Nobody remembers which one, though. Doesn’t exactly matter. Bastards. All fucking bastards.

Around town, most people butcher his name, pronounce it Aggie-you or Aggie-jew, else they just call him the priest. They don’t come out to the house ’less they have to. They don’t know what he does the rest of the time inside the shitty clapboard trailer-and-a-half just outside the city limits, they’re content to clank and drink and fuck their lives away, whispering rumors to each other and living in fear of his boys, the marked one and the one with the serial killer stare. Something wrong with the whole genetic line, half-buried out there in the dust.

Still, they need them. Don’t mean they have to like it.

The boys pretend not to notice.

Agaju’s hunched at the altar when they walk in, folded over in his chair and grunting and cranking on himself among the candles and incense. Skeet and Leonel wait quietly in the kitchen until he’s finished. The hot smell of it, sour and musky, stains the air and he yells for fucko to bring him the rag.

Always fucko. Never Leonel.

Fucko forever.

The older boy stalks through the house, looking for the embroidered handkerchief that his dad calls the rag, stained and blackened from dozens of rituals past. When he brings it, his father snatches it out of his hand, then waves him off. He can do the cleaning himself. Soaks up the filth with the silk, then folds it and sets it on the altar. Pulls on his stitched-shut pants with his one arm, hard as oiled ship rope from years of solo work, then glowers at his older son from behind his patchy scrub of beard.

“You bring him?”

Leonel nods. Knows better than to actually try and speak to the old man.

“Then go get him. Bring him in here. Fuck you waiting for?”

Leonel shuffles off. Whispers from the kitchen. Skeet wanders in, hands deep in his pockets.

“Fuck you been, huh?”

Skeet stares at his shoes, still caked in muck. “Down the crick.”

“Doing what?”

“Just, I don’t know. Drawing. Stuff.”

“Drawing and stuff? What the fuck is drawing and stuff?”

“Like drawing in the mud and stuff. Throwing rocks. Just stuff.”

“Drawing what?”

“Just pictures.”

“Pictures like what?”

“Just pictures.”

“Pictures like the old language?”

“No. No. Promise.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, boy?”

“No, Dad.”

“Shit’s not to be fucked with. S’bad old magic, you hear?”

“I hear.”

“What?”

“I said I hear.”

“Good. You know what happened?”

“The mayor?”

“Good. Yeah. Look at me, boy. Said look at me.”

Skeet looks. The sight of his gnarled stumps and raw, home-done tattoos makes his stomach twist and crawl in living tangles, a basket of pregnant snakes. Agaju sticks a Marlboro between his bloody, chapped lips and lights it, the Bic so buried in his knotty paw that it almost looks as if he’s summoning the fire from nothing. Skeet’s pretty sure that his dad can’t actually do that, but he’s not a hundred percent. Agaju blows a grubby cloud in his son’s face. It stings his lungs with a familiar buzzing that he’s almost learned to enjoy.

“You know this one’s important.”

“I know, Dad.”

“Can’t have anybody fuckin’ it up for us.”

“I know, Dad.”

“Not you, not anybody out there, and ’specially not that fucktard brother of yours.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“We pull this one off, we get to eat for the next few years. This isn’t parlor trick shit, a few bucks here and there from strangers. This is real work, and real work means we eat. You wanna eat, right?”

“Right.”

“So don’t fuck up. And keep that retard far out of it. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good. Go wash up and get ready. Imma prep the altar. Gonna give these hicks a hell of a show. That’s what they’re expecting, right?”

“Right.”

“You’re motherfuckin’ right, right. Go.”

Skeet goes. Agaju stays. Sits still until he hears the rickety shower start up. Starts pulling together the rest of the ingredients he needs—fresh blood, mezcal, sage. A few bullets, a couple small amethyst daggers of scante. Teeth. Hair. A little glass phial of gasoline, another one of holy water. A straight razor, a box of matches. And the soppy rag.

American magic is brutal, and ugly, and messy, but goddamn it fuckin’ works.

Happy with the collected mojo, the old man slowly creaks to the garage, and his homebaked tattoo gun. Strips his pants off and picks out a bare spot on top of his left stump. Dips the sharp end of the rig in the ink and starts drawing. Rides the needle deep, ’til red seeps out around the wet black. He relishes the hurt, drinks it in. The ritual demands sacrifice. When it gets too much, he starts to groan and growl and then he’s coming again.

Leonel’s out in the back lot breaking bottles against the rocks and fence when everything goes quiet. It’s not one of those strange moments when synchronicity descends on the world for a perfect breath of shared silence, nothing like that. More like all the noise gets sucked out of reality. He can’t even hear the ringing in his ears that sings him to sleep every night, a memento from one of Agaju’s cerveza-and-meth-fueled hurricanes. The scar on the far side of his head tells the same story in a different language.

The silence is perfect, absolute. Crushing. It presses the air out of him, throbs the inside of his head in hot swells of blood. He tries to battle back the nothing, but he can’t even scream. He tries and tries, feeling his face turning red, sweat breaking out in thick lines across his forehead. Futility. Gives him the spins. Not long before he hits the dirt, but it doesn’t help. Just feels like he’s being pestled into the side of the planet. He throws up a little in his mouth.

Then he rolls over and sees.

There, behind the bathroom glass door. Skeet, staring at him from over those fucked-up, ratty X’s like drunk crosses. He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t move. He’s the one doing this. It’s him, it’s always him. Except when it’s not.

Leonel grabs for one of the beer bottles and whips it at his brother. It cartwheels through the air and bursts against the glass, exploding the window inwards in a razor spray. The sound is catastrophic, a gale sucked through a pinhole. There’s a terrible wet ripping just beyond the inside of his eardrums and the first thing he hears when it stops is his own useless shrieking. Agaju’s impotent yawling from inside, mush-mouthed rage like fuckenshit’s wrong with you fucko. An insistent low-frequency hissing that he thinks is snakes until he remembers that Agaju made him kill all the snakes.

What is that?

He gets to his feet and follows the sound, shaky and a little bit painful still. There’s a raggy hole in the side of the house where the sliding glass door used to be. Beyond it, Agaju bellows, the sound carried on the back of the hissing. Blades of glass blanket the bathroom floor tile, some rimmed with thin red. Steam rolls across the tops of them and out into the sunlight and Leonel understands. His brother’s showering.