The dog wore a sheath of fat over pure muscle, rolled through black ink and bristling hair. It was never fed from their hands. It came and went, bringing gifts to their doorstep; rodents with crushed skulls, birds that they were never sure how it caught. Often these gifts were half eaten. It was the habit to bury them behind the shack, where the swamp never rose high enough to carry them to the surface. If the gifts were tossed away the dog brought them back again and again until what remained of their jellied flesh crawled with maggots. That was until the day it came in a storm with nothing in its jaws but dripping foam and a growl that shook the cinderblock foundations of the shack. Then their father took the old double cast off from the rack beside the cast iron stove, cocked both hammers, and gave its mouth two barrels worth of buckshot. They buried the dog in the grave where they’d dumped all its gifts. There was barely any room.
Johnny Adulani murdered his brother and brought him home to bury.
It had been ten years since they had left. He drove the pickup he used for bodies, rolling through the swamp on the path he knew from his youth until rain seeped through the skeletal branches above to melt the road away. Then he had to make his way on foot with the shotgun and the hand cart.
He had wrapped Donny’s body in plastic and laid it out morgue-style on the hand truck, with the handles pressed against his hips. He picked his way through snaking sheets of rain, taking the easy paths he knew. The storm pressed in around them and brought out the rotten egg haze of the swamp. His brain was on fire from the pills he’d taken before stepping out of the car. The rain pooled into shards of light among the crevices of the plastic.
He parted capillaries of drooping moss to see the house rising from a bed of thorns. As he pushed through the threshold of underbrush it dragged across the hand truck’s cargo, hard green fingers prodding maggot white plastic. He’d roped the sheets tight to the body and the body tight to the cart. The hand truck’s tires caught in a pothole as he pushed through, splashing his XL snakeskin boots and making the body rock back and forth, a tired passenger. He bumped the truck with his thigh until it lurched free and rolled ahead of his steps again. His free hand cradled the gun tucked under his arm, pale maple stock pressing coolly into his shirt.
The house was higher than Johnny Adulani remembered. It towered, rain stained plywood walls that loomed black through creeping mist. Once, they had all sat cloistered within, father chewing tar the same color as his eyes while mother knitted the same comforts over and over again in the heat of the cast iron stove, his brother rocking back and forth on sharp sit-bones and throwing the wooden blocks that father had carved into the corners of the room. One night the boy crawled to the shadows and took them in his lap and hunched over them when they heard the scratching, the whining at the door. It had something for them.
The tightness in Johnny’s gut spread to his fingers. His knuckles creaked on the hand truck. He propped it up on its lip and walked to the corner of the house. The walls were blind, without windows. Around them the swamp grew a cruel bush, spools of dark brown that rose in twisting arcs, tangling into high and bristling beds. He knew their teeth. He reached out and touched them. Always sharp. They had always bitten him the most, always making his skin itch, every cut infecting. He wanted to take the hand truck around to the back and be done with it; Donny always said he wanted to be buried with Ma and Pa—whining syllables that the little prick had never outgrown. But the swamp had overgrown into his path, encroaching around and behind the house all the way to the edge of the clearing. He knew it also would have overrun the pair of graves he and Donny had had to mark with two by fours. There was no way around that.
So Johnny returned to the front, the last and thinnest place that the swamp had closed upon as it walled his home away from him, a traitor in his absence. He used the butt of the old double cast off to tear at the growth that blocked his way. The shotgun was long and sturdy and he stirred it, staring down its empty iron eyes with his fingers wrapped around the barrels. He could still smell the gun smoke rimming them. There was a machete in the house for clearing, but Donny had lost it somehow when they left. He should have kept a closer eye on Donny. He should not have used both triggers.
When he finally broke through to the door he found that his head barely touched the knob. He did not remember the house being so high up. He bent and peered into the crawl space beneath. It was as dark under the floor as it was under the ground. Maybe that could be enough for Donny.
Johnny backed away with a bitter taste in his mouth returned with the handcart to bump its peeling red spine against the door. It was a short square of particleboard, wedged and bolted closed. Its hinges were dusty orange from countless other storms. They refused to move no matter how hard he pushed and twisted the knob. Donny’s shapeless head bobbed towards him and away. His hand came back with burning flakes on the finger tips. Sweat broke out on Johnny Adulani’s forehead.
He braced the butt of the twelve gauge beside the knob and set the barrel over his shoulder. The thumping was lost to the rain in his ears and the latch bending open was hidden by his sodden hair, tangled black spider legs against the white flesh of his scalp.
The door took one final blow before it swung out of sight with a muffled bang. He slid the shotgun back to his chest and put a foot inside the house, lifted himself up with one hand on the frame. His gut scraped the step and the muscles across his chest quaked as he put both feet back home. He wavered in the doorway, neck bent and arms crossed tight across himself as the storm moved from his ears to pound against the walls. His eyes skipped over lumpy silhouettes rising between him and the back window, its smudged glass shining white from sunlight carried through the swamp on mirrors of fog. Johnny listened. His home was ten years silent.
He wiped the sweat off his mouth and turned to the doorway again, showing the furniture his back. He reached down for the red arch of the hand truck. He set his legs and leaned back until the tires bumped the doorstep. The body lurched as he lifted the truck fully into the house, snapping the cart straight just as it got inside the house. Johnny fell. The back of his head slammed into a jutting floorboard. The shotgun almost went off. The action was vibrating under his fingers.
Dust fell from the sheet metal ceiling and stung his eyes. At his feet, Donny slouched towards the storm outside like a bleached tree in the wind, the ropes straining against him. The red hand truck in the open doorway was a blister standing out on white lips, the same as the sores on his father’s mouth when he had whispered nonsense, the smell of the swamp seeping into the room on his last breath. Bring something like that into my house will you boy.
Johnny could feel a vein on his forehead standing out like a white hot wire. He pulled himself up by one of the truck’s handles and put his back to it, facing the inside of the house and the shadows it arrayed against him.
His father had kept candles in a box by the door. Johnny’s pocket had a lighter and a hundred cigarettes inside it, replacements for the overgrown tooth with the branding end that so often hung from his lip. It was for putting two black marks above the eyes, like the iron eyes of the shotgun, so they knew that it been Johnny Adulani’s job.
A sick heat passed over him, hot embers in his stomach. He hung his head again.
Pa had kept candles in a box by the door. He kicked the latch open with a shit brown snakeskin boot and found them huddled in a corner like newborn mice. He snatched them up in his paws, elbow pinching the shotgun to his gut. He backed into the darkness, keeping eyes on the storm and stolen light outside, staring beyond the red cart and the thing that he’d brought.
The table bit into the back of his legs. He wheeled and slammed the candles down on it. His eyes were adjusting to the light; he could make out the slab of green wood and the sharp edged legs beneath it. He bent and caught one of the candles as it rolled, pulling something hard in his back as he did so. He had never learned to stand up straight. His hand fumbled a lighter out. Fire singed his fingertips and flickered against a wick for agonizing seconds. It caught in a flash, he saw his home.
The sight struck his hands down to the table, struck his back until it was bent again and the candle singed his open collar. The yellow armchair that they’d taken from a city dump squatted sourly in one corner. Father had sat there to watch them. Candles thumped like dead weights into the floor. Mother’s toothpick rocking chair was aimed to greet him and Donny coming home. He had always wanted to smash that damn thing, with the squeaking sound it made.
He turned away again and went to close the door. It shut out the growing roar of the storm. A few drops flecked the side of his face and he wondered at how warm they were against his skin. He turned to press his shoulders into the water-grayed door and face the room again. He picked the candles up from the floor, lit them, and set them in the free corners: one by the cast iron stove and one by the bright spot on the floor where Ma and Pa–where mother and father’s mattress had been, before mother stopped sleeping and father began to cough. His eyes jumped over the handcart when he passed it and then to the window at the back of the house. It was just next to the back door, father’s sitting place half blocking the way. Through that door he would find the twin two by fours. He’d forgotten to bring one for his brother–burying bodies unmarked had become a habit, but that could not be done here. There was a reason for that. He and Donny had left the shovel with the graves, thinking they would never come back anyways. Goddamn it if they hadn’t been half-right.
The shotgun was rattling in his hands. There was nothing for it now.
His eyes were pulled over the walls. When they touched on the faceless cross his lip turned up and showed a yellow canine. His feet dragged forwards and he saw the rack on the wall opposite his father’s chair, two hooks crooked and beckoning. The iron length of the old double cast off was warm and solid in his hands. He would be damned if he would give it back. He backed away.
His father’s chair knocked his legs out from under him. He fell back into it with a cry and the yellow arms enveloped him, bristling and sticky cool. Johnny fought his way from the fold of the seat with his fingers digging into the arm rests, upright fibers stabbing under his fingernails. He swore and kicked out at the chair. The toe of his boot folded like paper when it hit and an electric numbness shot up his foot. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He snarled, ignored the pain, and plucked at the sleeves of his dress shirt to get the broken yellow fibers off. Now the smell of mold clung to his clothing, reacting like a poison reagent with the sweat that had glued the shirt to his gut. He sucked the blood from under his nails and it was like licking gunmetal. Last night some of Donny’s blood had leapt across the room and touched his mouth like that, leaping through the spray of black powder and the smoking breath of buckshot. His brother’s face was always so surprised. There was nothing for it now.
The prickling feeling from the chair became a lash on his back. Johnny turned and lunged for the door in the alcove behind the chair. It shook when his hip slammed into it and the rusted latch popped off its bolts, clattering to the floor. His teeth ground together as he hammered away again, pale stock flashing in the candle light. Now the rain was drowned out by the splintering, but its moisture seeped between his fingers and the barrels as sweat.
The door exploded open and he almost fell through. For a moment he clung to the frame, dangling with both arms yanked back. Beneath him the swamp ran like a river under its blanket of thorns, flooded by the storm. The brambles had taken everything behind the house. He set his boots down in a clear space and saw a thinner way through, leading to where he could see the two posts rising at odd angles. They rose higher than before, he thought.
He set out, using the shotgun to make a path as he always did. The steaming rain cut through the haze and boiled the ground until it ran over and into his boots. It stung like dry ice on the foot with the broken toes.
Twigs and thorns clutched at the stock of the shotgun and scratched the barrels as it rose and fell; he used it like a lever to tear the swamp apart. The rain brought the twinge of gunmetal into the air. Johnny Adulani peeled back his lips and drew it in through his teeth, relishing the smell of freedom.
The shotgun struck one of the two by fours. It was unmarked, sagging sideways. Johnny looked down. He was standing on the rise. He stepped back and went to make a clearing for the next one. The swamp haze prowled at the edge his clearing. He found the shovel. It had fallen sideways with a wedge of soil balancing on the tip of its blade. It seemed to wobble, as if the churning of the flood kept it buffeting up to the surface. He bent again, careful of his back, and grabbed the shovel. When he pulled the blade out of the soil it released something else, and that same stench of rotten eggs crept in fumes around him to clog his nostrils.
Johnny filled his lungs and leaned the shotgun up against his father’s grave—or was it his mothers?—he forgot which grave it was and checked to make sure the gun would not fall sideways, its butt planted firmly on the rise. He walked a few feet away from the two by fours. Then he locked his eyes between his boots and set into the dirt with both hands on the shovel.
Soon he was breathing heavily. The rain rolled over his neck and down his back and it was as burning hot as cooking sheets. His shirt seemed to be dissolving, rising off his body as steam. He took a moment to catch his breath and saw dark specks appearing on his forearms, standing out against wrinkled white sleeves. He thought they were spots from his work on the grave, but as he watched they began to grow. He scratched at them. The spots stayed and prickled coldly. He propped the shovel between his legs and tore the shirt off his back, threw it out into the swamp. It might have been Donny’s shirt, it was too small for him anyways. He went back to scratching at his arm. The thorns only dug deeper in.
He snorted and shook himself, freeing droplets from his hair, his undershirt stretching too tight. He spat into the half-finished hole and went back to work. It was almost over.
The handle of the shovel was raw, and he could feel it starting blisters on his fingers as it twirled beneath them. The smell of deep soil rose around him and he half closed his eyes, again sucking it in through his teeth and rolling it over his tongue. He ignored the itching madness on his arms and the feverish warmth crashing on his skin, ignored the pounding in his head and the numb floating of his foot. The numb feeling was spreading from his broken toe.
He finished the grave. He drove the shovel hard into the ground at its head, splitting the sick-colored stream of tainted rain water that was trying to fill it up again.
He pivoted on one foot and something popped inside it. He threw a glance at home, still looming, and went to grab the shotgun. He started back on the short path he’d made, the steps drumming up a whistle from inside him. The song had been his brother’s favorite—he would find it on the radio later. He wanted to light up one of the cigs from his pocket but they were probably all ruined. It was almost over.
Johnny stood before the door he’d forced open and did not look at the house or the cyclopean window. He still had the lighter, still had the shotgun. He could set fire to that fucking chair, to the whole fucking place, and it would be done. He put a foot inside and hoisted himself up, the nose of the shotgun bumping on the frame with a loud crack. Johnny wiped the rain out of his eyes and rounded the corner, blinking to adjust to the candle light again. He made for the red hand truck on the other end of the room and stopped.
The body was gone.
Johnny’s spine arched and he felt his hackles bristle, his hands tighten vice-like and twisting on the shotgun. He swiveled it through the shadows and candle light, scratches and glistening mud shining off of its barrels. His brother’s white cocoon sitting in the yellow armchair. Ghost white plastic swaying gently in his mother’s rocking chair. Water dripped from the end of the shotgun. Something white and fetal twitching, crawling beneath the cast iron stove, rustling there in the dust. He could hear the scratching on the door again.
An iron ball rose from his stomach and forced its way out his throat. He wobbled, doubled, and threw up. The candles turned it piss yellow and a cloying sweet made him gag again. He put a foot forwards, dizzy, aiming the shotgun from corner to corner. He opened his mouth and his long lips peeled back, evidence of the retching foaming at his chin. Johnny Adulani growled into the shadows.
“I know you’re here, Donny boy. Here boy.” White flashed in the corner.
“Got you.” He swivled and squeezed both triggers.
The shotgun exploded in his face.
The barrels rippled and bloomed backwards into steel petals. A flash of red singed Johnny’s eyes and shards of ice hit him just below the rib cage. A sulfurous smell blasted him in the face and he looked down. He was holding the stock in his hands like a singed and broken bone. It tumbled to the floor from the bright red tips of his fingers. He held his hands up to his face and they were scorched with soot, his hairs bristling black as ink.
Past his hands he could see the window that had tricked him. Its blankness leered. Johnny staggered, his neck in spasm as if slapped. His ears rang. He spun back to the hand cart and saw Donny’s body at its foot, propped half way up in the shadow of the doorway where no candle light could reach. The body had slipped down out of the ropes that kept it to the cart—he had not tied him tight enough.
Johnny swore and kicked the shotgun’s broken stock under the stove. A second later he scrambled after it, hunched on all fours, and pawed it back into his hands. He cradled the broken stock and tried to stand again but the cold pain in his gut synched tight and he could not. He looked down and saw the metal splinters growing from his belly. They seemed to ease themselves further in with every breath he took. He looked up. The sound of the rain was coming back, thundering through the ringing in his ears. Lightning flashed off the white thing leaning against the door.
Johnny loped to his brother and grabbed the ropes he’d used to tighten the sheets. He could get the fingers of one hand under them, but it was not enough. His fingers trembled as he placed the broken shotgun stock in his mouth and bit down to keep it there. It was bitter from wood polish and bathed his tongue in sulfur.
He forced his fingers under the rope and pulled. Donny’s body lifted off the ground. The sheets shifted but they did not move, thank god, thank god, thank god it was almost over.
Johnny started backwards. He could feel the cooling air of the swamp on his back as he passed the chairs, the cross, the cast iron stove. He cursed each of them under his breath. The stiffness in his spine stopped him from looking over his shoulder, so he did not see the doorway until he fell through it.
They missed the path he’d made. The body fell on top of him, the thick condensation on the plastic rubbing into his skin. Somehow the smell of the swamp had gotten into that moisture and now it was in his skin, rubbed in by the sheets as they fell straight into the bramble.
Thorns anchored themselves into him. He tried to rise on his knees but the body weighed him back and the wiry spools of brush sprung inwards, pulling him down again. They plucked his skin as if it were a mask coming loose. He thrashed and the body slid back over him, a white slug in the thorns slimy and cold. Johnny Adulani screamed and dropped the shotgun stock. He lunged after it, the body and the swamp dragging on him, and then fell on his hands. He saw a flash of maple and scrabbled through the barbs, tearing his fingers into bloody claws. By the time he reached the mud the last of the old double cast off had been sucked beneath it.
Johnny’s throat ripped from the sound that came out of it. The body was knocked across his chest by a wild swipe, sticky with blood and anchored by a dozen thorns. Johnny wrenched one leg free, then the other. He put his fingers under Donny’s ropes and stood.
Pain exploded in his guts. When he looked down at the pure red undershirt he could no longer see the metal slivers sticking out. The numbness bloomed in his spine, his insides jerking and pulling all together around the ice in his stomach.
When he fell the third time he never stood up again. Instead he rolled back onto his hands and knees and crawled. He had never learned to stand up straight. He looped the body’s loosening rope over his shoulder, dragging it broad side along with him. The black wire tore his skin and pulled him back with springing tension, but he moved. At some point one of Donny’s sheets came off. He could see something white out of the corner of his eye, swollen and bobbing up and down with a shock of black hair. His brother’s face was always so surprised. It shone like jelly in the haze and rain. The storm drowned him, each drop a hammer of ice into his back. He put one hand in front of the other. The mud was as cold as ice but it sucked his palms back every time he pulled them up. His knees shuffled past each other. There was nothing for it now. He had lost his boots, and he was dragging half the brambles with him by the tangles in his jeans. His skin had gone clammy. Here boy. Each drop of sweat was an ice cube dripping down his chin. He could no longer feel the broken foot, the itching on his arms, the tears in his skin that the thorns left. The iron slivers in his gut had frozen everything away, and now the rotten smell of the swamp was coming from inside him.
He fought his way to the graves and found that the bodies of his mother and his father had boiled to the surface of the earth; white hands like weeds poking through the downpour and the streaming mud, their porcelain toes jutting as the tombstones he had refused to give them. He had not buried them deep enough.
He dragged himself past them, tried to shoulder Donny into the empty grave but the rope had fused into his skin. He lowered himself into the grave, under the cold brown waterfall filling it, dragging Donny with him.
He lay atop his brother’s corpse. The earth was warm against his cheek.
There was barely any room.