Disintegration

CHAPTER TEN

"You ain't changed a bit, brother."

Jacob looked into the grinning mirror image and his muscles tensed to bring the bottle down in a smashing arc. But, as always, his self-hatred faltered when it counted most. The bottle slipped from his fingers and bounced off the packed dirt.

"Why?" Jacob said through clenched teeth.

His twin brother looked down at the liquor bottle. "Since when did upstanding citizens start drinking five-dollar bourbon straight from the bottle? I thought that junk was for white trash like me."

"What are you doing here?" Jacob repeated.

"This is the 'Town That Wells Built,' ain't it? If a man can't return to his ancestral home, where else can he go?" Joshua gunned the engine. "What do you think of my new ride?"

"What's the idea of stalking me?"

"Hey, lighten up, Jake. Still got that little problem with paranoia? I thought you saw somebody about that."

"Fuck you, Josh."

"You're as pissed off as a snake in duct tape. But get over it, because we got business. Family business."

Jacob wanted to tear himself away, to run for the safety of the woods, because this threat was bigger and sharper and more dangerous than a homicidal car. But those intense hazel eyes mesmerized him and melted the years away. His lungs hurt, and he realized he'd been holding his breath. "I've got nothing to say to you. Go away."

"This ain't like blowing out the candles on our birthday cake together. Just because you make a wish don't mean it comes true."

Wish me. The night of the fire. "You don't belong here anymore."

"We came up from the same dark hole, Jakie Boy." Joshua's breath was fetid and thick, mingling with the car exhaust. "And I been in the hole a long, long time. Gets lonely down there. But I guess you're figuring that out for yourself."

"I don't owe you anything."

"No, because all of it's already mine. You was just holding it for me."

Now that the initial shock had passed, Jacob could see the small differences between him and Joshua that only a few people would notice, the subtle marks of time and gravity. Joshua had a nearly invisible scar above his right eyebrow. Joshua had never tried to control his alcoholism, so the broken blood vessels beneath the skin of his face were more apparent. His teeth were also more yellow and uneven than Jacob's, the result of different eating habits and lack of dental care. But the rest of the features would fool anyone short of a well-trained detective. Joshua even had the same hair length and density of stubble, as if he'd been observing Jacob's slide into self-destruction and had made an intentional effort to copy it.

Not that Joshua had ever needed a role model for this particular type of decline. He'd always been inspired on his own. He'd stripped himself of the Wells taint and moved into a rat-infested mobile home just across the border in east Tennessee. While Jacob had been staging his decadent poet's act in college, Joshua was piloting charter bass boats on Watauga Lake for thirty bucks a day, a cooler of beer at his feet.

"You got your share," Jacob said. "Now go away."

"I had a piece," Joshua responded with a smirk. "That pie tastes so good, I want the whole thing now."

With an effort of will, Jacob broke Joshua's stare and looked past him to the gloomy interior of the Chevy. The upholstery was torn and the passenger seat was patched with silver tape. The car smelled of cigarette butts and fast food grease. Two rubber shrunken heads hung from the rearview mirror, their duplicate stretched lips and wizened eye sockets a nightmarish replica of Joshua's grinning face.

"Got company," Joshua said, nodding past him toward the construction crew. One of the workers, a white man in an orange hard hat and blue jumpsuit, was approaching. "I reckon the sign at the entrance that said 'Private Property, Keep Out,' wasn't just a suggestion. People take everything so serious these days. Property rights, deeds, ownership. 'What's mine is mine' and all that happy shit. It's a selfish world, ain't it, Jakie Boy?"

Jacob said nothing, watching the man in the hard hat approach. "I'll have them call the cops."

"Oh, you just go ahead and do that. I'm sure they'd be all ears when I started telling them the truth."

"You don't know the truth."

"The truth is what you make it. There's what really happened, and there's the way you set it in your mind so you can live with yourself."

"You weren't supposed to come back." He'd figured his twin brother was gone for good, the seed split for a final time. But the bond was stronger than flesh and ran deeper than blood.

Or maybe only exactly as deep as blood.

"Get in," Joshua said. Not a command, not an invitation. Just words.

Jacob hesitated as the man in the hard hat took off his gloves and punched at the numbers on a cell phone. The tiny electronic box looked out of place in those thick, scarred hands, as if a Neanderthal had come upon the controls of a time machine. But this machine would summon the police, and Jacob didn't want to be thrust under their gaze any more than he already was. He might be guilty of crimes he couldn't remember.

Jacob crossed to the passenger side of the decrepit automobile. The handle didn't work, so he waited for Joshua to open the door. Foam chunks dribbled from a split in the vinyl as he settled into the seat. The man in the hard hat held the phone to his ear. Joshua backed up in an arc so that the man could get a good look at the license plate, then punched the accelerator and threw up a cloud of dust and gravel. The Chevy had a four-on-the-floor gear shift, and as they exited the construction site and hit the street, Joshua grabbed second and tore a long shriek from the rear tires.

"You haven't changed a bit, either," Jacob said.

"I'm as ugly as I ever was."

Lunch hour had just ended, so the traffic wasn't heavy. But Joshua's driving tactics made the street seem crowded and narrow. The speedometer needle bounced at fifty-five as the car wove through the thirty-five-mile per hour zone. They passed an old man in a Mercedes SUV who mouthed a curse at them, but Joshua had already cut the SUV off before the driver reached the horn.

"Where are we going?" Jacob asked.

"Where else? There's only one place good enough for the two of us. That place we said we'd never go."

Jacob had the sensation that the car itself was stationary, that instead the world was whirring by in an insane and jumbled blur of color. The business district was brick red and concrete gray, glass green and power-pole brown. The road was a hard river that flowed backward to a black underground source. This moment had always existed, this now was forever, this vehicle was an embryo in which the two of them were bound. He would never escape the creature that had stolen half of his genetic material.

Joshua slid a cassette into the tape deck. Vintage Johnny Cash, falling into a ring of fire. Joshua joined in the chorus: "Burns, burns, burns."

"You're a sorry son of a bitch," Jacob said.

"I wish I could have been there when it happened. Remember in the old days, when we used to share everything? I'm jealous, Jake."

"No, you're not. And my life is mine. Even when it turns to hell."

"A million dollars. Plus the house, what's that, another three-quarters? You make the old man look like a piker. At least when he played the system, he tried to slip under the radar. You laugh in its fucking face and dare God to catch you."

"You don't know anything about it."

"They got newspapers, even where I been living. I've always managed to scrape up enough to subscribe to the old Times-Herald. A man's got to stay up on things if he wants to better himself. But all I read about was how Jacob Wells did this, Jacob Wells did that."

Here Joshua shifted out of his rural accent so easily that he might have been a drama professor. "'Upholding the heritage of community service started by one of Kingsboro's early patriarchs.' I started to wonder if they was really talking about my older brother, or if some imposter had done took his place."

"I'm only older than you by seventeen minutes."

"Still, that was good enough for the old man to make you the Number One Son."

"Lucky fucking me."

They reached the outskirts, heading west toward soft, rolling farmland. In the pastures, cattle bent their brown necks for the new growth. Barns stood peeling red paint against the breeze. Here and there a tractor bit steel teeth into the earth, demanding a future harvest of the dark soil. Along the highway, shadows filled the inside of an abandoned produce stand, a forlorn stack of wooden board bones and chicken wire skin that had been around since the days of sharecropping.

The Johnny Cash song ended, gave way to "Walls of a Prison."

"You're a clever bastard, Jake. First, you pulled the wool over the old man's eyes, fed him that line about how you wanted to carry on his life's work. Stepped into M amp; W like it was a pair of broken-in shoes. Played that 'settling down' role so good you could have put Tom Hanks to shame."

"It wasn't a game, Josh. I was… confused, that's all. I tried to get away, pretend I was somebody I could never be. But you can't escape who you are, can you? When I came back here, I was facing up to it."

"Confused, huh? Is that what Daddy paid all those doctors for? To get you unconfused, fill you full of his brainless bullshit?"

"You'd just as soon piss on his grave as cut the grass. But you bailed out. You never got to know him."

"I took my hand out of his pocket. No matter how many millions, it wasn't worth the price. Even the devil offers a better deal than that. The pointy-tailed son of a bitch with the pitchfork only asks for one soul. Warren Wells wanted two."

"You haven't answered me yet. Why did you come back?"

Joshua took his eyes from the highway and tapped the shrunken heads that hung from the mirror. The taut-skinned plastic skulls seemed to sway and dance in delight, clacking against one another in a noise that resembled chuckling. "Haven't you heard the old saying? Two heads are better than one, Jakie Boy?"

Now Johnny Cash was singing "I Don't Like It, But I Guess Things Happen That Way."

"How's Carlita?" Jacob asked, his gut in knots.

"Fine as ever."

"Where is she?"

"You want to see her?"

"Yeah."

Joshua reached up and squeezed one of the rubber mirror ornaments, making its face distort into a leer. "Wish me."

"We don't play that game anymore."

"Wish me."

Jacob felt the years fall away. "Wish me a kingdom and make me a king."

Joshua's crazed cackle drowned out the rumbling muffler.

They reached White River Road and drove parallel to the water for several miles, then crossed an old wooden bridge. Jacob looked at the cold currents passing below them. The water was up, fed by the melting snows that had seeped from the granite slopes weeks before. The banks were lush and verdant, the saplings arching toward the sun, fighting toward the canopy of the established oak, wild cherry, honey locust, and sugar maple. The land across the river was changed in a subtle way, as if its skin were somehow more vibrant, its dirt thicker, its trees more commanding and stark. The hills hinted at old secrets, a land thrust up by the pressure of hell's forge and then worn down over the eons by heaven's rain.

This was home.

Jacob hadn't been here in years, not since the afternoon call that informed him of their father's death and then during the burial that followed. The man-made aspects of the landscape were unchanged: the long barn with its tin roof catching the sunlight, the split-rail fence running along the sweeping curve of the drive, the two-story white Colonial that perched on the hill like a military command post. It was the property itself that was different, possessed of some unseen aura of menace. Or maybe Jacob himself had changed, and the memory of his past came rushing at him like a ghost wind.

"What do you think, Jake? Daddy would be proud, wouldn't he?"

Jacob glared up at the window on the second floor, the room that he had once shared with his twin brother.

"Hey, now, don't go frowny-face on me," Joshua said. "Daddy gave me the keys to the kingdom. Since I can't sell it, it's a hundred-and-forty-acre pain in the ass. A patch of hell with back taxes."

"You've painted it the way it was when we were children."

"Bugs the hell out of you, don't it? You'd think the old man would want us to profit from his death, judging from the way he sold out his own family. But lifelong philosophies have a way of changing when you're on your deathbed."

"There's no 'deathbed' when you suffer a sudden heart attack."

"There you go again, getting all mixed up. That was a long time ago and none of it matters now. All that matters is making up for lost time. Setting things right."

As they approached the house, the years fell away, and Jacob could see himself in shorts and sneakers, riding the tire swing beneath the apple tree in the side yard. His childhood seemed part dream, part nightmare, viewed through the gauze of old wounds. He could almost hear his father shouting from the den, demanding that someone bring his pipe and newspaper. He could almost hear the crash of glass, the dull thump of bone-filled meat tumbling down the stairs-

He closed his eyes as the Chevy came to a stop beside the front porch. The abrasive engine was an affront to the stillness of the estate. The place deserved to be allowed to rest in peace. The house was as much of a coffin as the shiniest metal-encased box down at McMasters Funeral Home, this one holding the corpse of an entire family instead of one person's moldering mound of flesh and bone.

Joshua killed the engine and Johnny Cash's train-wreck voice cut off in mid-verse. "I was tempted to move back in, you know. Figured I'd play royalty, see what being a Wells was like. But it takes money, scratch, boatloads of Franklins, and I wasn't in the mood to join the working class just to stay in Kingsboro. A million ain't what it used to be. And it ain't nearly enough."

"I'll get you the rest, but you promised to stay away."

"You worry too much about things that ain't none of your business. Just like always. Seems like you'd be better off taking care of your own business instead of worrying about mine."

"Go to hell."

"Short trip." Joshua opened his door and got out, took an exaggerated gasp of fresh air. "Ah, the sweet smell of Wells country. Or is that chicken shit?"

Jacob stared at the twin shrunken heads. For the first time, he noticed that one of them had tiny cuts on its face, as if someone had slashed the rubber with a sharp knife. One ear was melted and charred, the nylon hair above it singed. Psycho voodoo, another of Joshua's mind games.

Joshua leaned forward and pressed his face against the tinted windshield, making a distorted dark mash of his nose. "Ain't you coming in? You're gonna hurt my feelings."

From the porch, Jacob couldn't resist taking in the panoramic view.

"Prime territory, half of it good bottom land," Joshua said, as if he'd sold real estate all his life. "Convenient to town yet with all the peace and quiet you can stand without going crazy. Do you know how much this would bring if you parceled it out right? Especially the way the second-home market is booming here in the mountains."

"Not interested."

"Come on, Jake. You've got money now. It don't matter where it came from, neither. I'd be the last one to ever pass judgment on a thing like that."

"I don't have the money. Renee got it."

Joshua's grin froze, a speck of saliva on his lower lip glistening in the sun as he stood by the car. "What are you talking about?"

"We separated. She blames me because of the fire. And Mattie." Jacob faced the breeze so his tears would dry. He wouldn't give Joshua the pleasure of his pain.

Joshua pounded the bottom of his fist on the Chevy's hood, denting the sheet metal. "Damn. I should have known she'd try some stunt like that. Leave it to a dumb bitch to take ever goddamned thing you got and still cry for more, more, more-"

"It's not her fault. I just-"

"And after you stood by her when Christine died."

Jacob turned, his fists clenched. "You don't know anything about that. Shut the hell up."

"She was family to me, too. I meant to send a card, but how do you say you're sorry when something like that happens?"

Jacob had been asking himself that same question for nearly a year. Christine's death had been different, tragic in a quieter way. Christine meant "follower of Christ," Renee's choice. Coming from Joshua's lips, the name now sounded like a grim cosmic joke.

"So when my other child dies, you pop up out of nowhere," Jacob said.

"Misery loves company," Joshua said. "Just like the good old days."

He reached up and rattled the brass pipes of a wind chime that hung from the porch's support beam. A die-stamped metal sparrow perched atop the chime, its crevices gritty with age. The chime had been there as far back as Jacob could remember. Their mother had tapped it with her cane to summon them to dinner or bedtime, and the soft notes were a reminder of long summer nights in the forest or games in the barn.

Joshua mimicked their mother's high voice as he climbed the porch steps. "Time to come in, boys." His voice rose to a piercing shrillness. "Jake! Josh!"

Joshua took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, then stood aside. The damp, woody odor of the trapped air enveloped Jacob. Joshua gave him a gentle nudge in the back.

Jacob took a tentative step forward, on the threshold of a life he'd spent a decade burying. A long Oriental carpet led into the foyer where the dining room, sitting room, stairs, and hall intersected. The framed photographs of dead Wells ancestors hung on the walls, dim with dust. A rustic butcher-block table stood on uneven legs against the far wall, topped by a gray doily and an empty crystal vase. A wrought iron coatrack skulked in the corner like a sharp-edged stalker. A path was worn in the center of the oak stair treads. The bottom baluster was still splintered from their mother's fall. Except for the smell and cobwebs, everything was as it had been on Jacob's last visit. The day they'd buried Warren Wells. This house was a museum of pain, a mausoleum of bad memories.

Jacob waded forward, as if the past were a wet stack of calendars. Even Joshua's voice, coming from behind him, sounded years younger. "I haven't had the power turned on. No phone, neither. Didn't want anybody to know I was around."

Jacob finally mustered enough oxygen to speak. "How long are you staying?"

"That's up to you." Joshua lit a cigarette and the acrid smoke helped drive the stench of failure from the foyer.

Jacob reached the entrance to the sitting room. Books lined the shelves around the central fireplace, the burnt umber of the leather a complement to the bricks. Spread across the mantel was a collection of knickknacks, clay cats, glass figurines, hand-carved exotica from across the world. Their mother had been a collector and had wiped down the objects weekly, spacing them in such a precise manner that she could tell if a piece had been shifted even so much as a centimeter. She would have slammed her cane against the floor in anguish to see the figures now, clouded by accumulated dust.

Joshua crossed the sitting room, his boots shedding dried mud. He flicked his cigarette ash into the fireplace, picked up a crystal poodle, and held it to the muted light that leaked through the drapes. He rubbed a finger across the animal's head then raised his arm as if to fling the object against the grate. Instead, he tossed his cigarette onto the brick apron of the hearth, mashed it out with his foot, and returned the poodle to its proper place in the menagerie.

"It's a little chilly in here," Joshua said. He pulled a couple of thin books from the nearest shelf. "Hemingway. Dad's favorite writer. I think we ought to build a fire."

Jacob sat in a Queen Anne chair, a piece of furniture not designed for comfort. If the foyer was a hallway into the past of the entire Wells family, this room was solely his mother's, stiff and formal and brutal, as severe as a prison cell. Jacob had rarely spent time here during his childhood, and he perched on the edge of the chair as if expecting his dead mother to clatter around the corner, cane-first, and shout at him not to disturb anything. He breathed shallowly, afraid even to stir the air too much.

Joshua stooped and opened one of the volumes to the front pages. "First edition, what do you know?"

He tossed the books onto the log irons, where they lay like clumsy giant moths with paper wings. He pulled out his lighter. "Welcome home, Jake."

He flicked the flint wheel and stared into the dancing flame. The flame touched the brown pages and burst into brighter life, sending shadows crawling along the curtains. Joshua grinned, his eyes sparkling with the reflected fire. He echoed familiar words, written words:

"Hope you like the housewarming present."