Chris Offutt: The Good Brother

“For a man says he knows as many women as you do, you sure don’t know a lot about them.”

“What are you saying?”

“Reason women shoot little guns,” Rundell said, “is it’s men who teach them to shoot. Not many a man wants to give his woman a gun that’ll put him down. Me, I trust my wife and she can handle any gun in the county.”

Virgil turned at a long building that housed married students. A narrow lane behind it held rows of overflowing garbage cans. The men left the truck and Virgil eased forward until Dewey signaled him to stop. He and Taylor emptied cans into the hopper.

Rundell walked ahead of the truck, checking the garbage for buckets of paint and old motor oil, neither of which they picked up. His primary job was to set the pace. This was dependent on the condition of the men — the worse off they were, the faster the pace. The trick, he’d explained to Virgil, was in figuring out how to cover your own ass while covering the men’s, too. That was the whole key to being crew boss, he’d said, that and making them work.

Virgil had spent two years taking courses while working part-time at maintenance, but hadn’t fit in with the students. An hour after sitting in a classroom, he’d be on his knees in front of the same building, painting the curb yellow. The majority of students came from the surrounding counties and tried to conceal their hill-bred traits, a doomed enterprise since everyone recognized not only the habits but the attempts to hide them. Virgil’s presence was a reminder of what they wanted to leave behind.

His decision to quit school and stay in garbage perplexed everyone. What Virgil enjoyed was that no trash man could pretend he was more than what he was. Education was like a posthole digger, a good tool, very expensive, but worthless unless you needed pestholes dug.

Rundell was moving fast and it wasn’t just because of Taylor being drunk. Emptying dumpsters was the sole chore for the day, which meant the sooner they finished, the sooner they could loaf. Garbage was impossible to fake like other jobs, because once it was picked up, you were done. As Dewey said, “If folk don’t want to put out their garbage, you can’t stop them.”

People left the apartment building for school. Each time a woman drove past, Taylor smiled and waved, but couldn’t draw a glance. An old Nova went past, its big engine rumbling. A suspension kit had been added and the back end rocked gently over dips in the gravel road. Chrome mags flashed silver inside each tire.

“A loud-looker, ain’t she,” Taylor said.

“Wonder what’s under the hood.”

“I was talking about the driver,” Taylor said. “I’d eat a mile of her shit just to see where it came from. Wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t reckon.”

“Why? You got something against eating shit?”

“More or less.”

“What are you, stuck up?”

“Yeah,” said Virgil, “I’m the first stuck-up garbageman to ever walk the earth.”

“There wasn’t nothing snobby about your brother. You ever hear about the time me and him went to the bootlegger for a couple of half-pints?”

Virgil shook his head. This was the first time that Taylor had talked about Boyd since the funeral. Virgil knew they’d buddied all over the hills for a spell. Boyd had a way of using people up. He ran with a man until he’d out-wilded him, then he’d go on to the next restless boy from the darkest hollow or longest ridge. Every season he extended his range, like an animal hunting food. His former running buddies included the incarcerated, the dead, and the recently religious.

Taylor talked around his cigarette.

“It was me and Boyd and another boy name of Hack Johnson. Nobody much liked Hack on account of him dropping a tree on a man while they was logging. But Boyd, he just never went in the woods with him. I was up front with Hack. Boyd sat in the back with a brand-new coonhound that Hack was afraid to leave at home and get stole.

“We pulled up to the bootlegger and around the comer come the biggest German shepherd you ever did see. Blacker than the ace of spades. Hollering to beat hell. It was jumping at the window, tearing at the side of the car. That coonhound went right back at it. It was standing in Boyd’s lap, just filling the car with racket. I thought the window was going to bust out.

“We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t get our whisky with that dog out there, Boyd told Hack to let the dogs fight, but Hack said no. Said that dog had cost him a hundred bucks and a good.38 to boot, and he wished he had that pistol now, he’d shoot that shepherd. He asked if me or Boyd had a gun but we didn’t.

“After a while, that coonhound started slowing down its barking in the back seat. So did the shepherd. When the coonhound stopped, the shepherd went back to the bootlegger. I looked back to see what made it stop, and there set Boyd jacking that dog off. Calmed it right down, by God. I started laughing, but Hack, he got mad. Said it would rain the dog for breeding.

“Ol’ Boyd, he got mad right back. Told Hack, he said, ‘Go fetch that fucking whisky before I have to reach up there and do you like this dog.’ Well, Hack jumped out of that car like he’d got set on fire. He came back with the whisky and Boyd said to put that dog in the trunk. Hack didn’t want to. Boyd told him now that he’d gotten a taste for dog, he might just want some more, and Hack started driving fast, saying let’s get away from that shepherd first. He pulled over at the first wide spot. That coonhound was laying in a circle asleep and there set Boyd with half his liquor gone already. He had that big grin on him. Hack picked up his dog and Boyd looked at it and said ‘Bye, honey’ and Hack got so tickled he like to dropped that damn dog. He put it in the trunk.

“We finished that whisky and went and got some more and drove all over hell and back and finally Hack asked Boyd what made him think to jack that dog off. Boyd, he just sat there a minute. ‘Give me a cigarette and I’ll say,’ he told Hack. Hack was the only one with smokes left and he didn’t like to give them up. He’d served two years in the pen over killing that man with a tree and the only change in him when he come out was getting stingy with a cigarette. Well, he gave me and Boyd both one and that was like a flat miracle for Hack.

“Boyd opened his second pint and threw the lid out the window. He took a pull. He lit that cigarette. Said one time he’d been over to Mount Sterling drinking in a rough little bar and there was a boy wanted to fight him something awful. The boy was bad drunk. Nobody liked him. Said this old boy just kept swinging and missing and staggering, and Boyd hit him a couple of times but it was like hitting a cow. Didn’t do no good. Then the boy got a lick in and made Boyd mad, Boyd, he picked up a beer bottle by the neck and busted it and held the jagged part out at the guy. The bartender came up then and said to Boyd, ‘Hey, there’s people in here barefoot’ Boyd set the busted glass down and somebody took the little drunk outside. Boyd said he couldn’t sit down because he’d got a hard-on like a prybar jammed in sideways and hung on his underwear. Said when that dog started barking, he remembered all that. It just made sense to help the dog out that way.

“We ended up wrecking that night. Run into the creek and not a one hurt. Killed the dog, though. Drowned it. Hack never did blame your brother. He knowed it wasn’t Boyd’s fault, same as Hack falling a tree on that man wasn’t no fault of his.”

Taylor stood by like a clock run down from all the talking. His clothes didn’t fit right and he was moving inside them, his body twitching like a horse shaking off flies. There was a lit cigarette in his month and he started to light it again. The pupils of both his eyes were big.