2

  It’s hard to believe that the very next night started out as fun as any I’ve ever had, despite the things weighing on my mind.

  The annual Thomas Edgar Fox Pen is a wonder of the world that follows the old mantra that you have to experience it to believe it. I always dreaded the over-nighter a little bit because I’m the type of guy who likes his own bed and wants to take a shower in the morning to clean off the oily night-stinks. But you see, the namesake of this fine country event is a relative of mine, and we were obligated to attend. Not obliged, just obligated, as my dad liked to say. Although I know he enjoyed shooting the shit with all those old fellas as much as anyone.

  Almost secondary to the shooting-the-shit part, and definitely secondary to the drinking-the-beer part, was the actual event itself, where dogs chased foxes inside a huge fenced-off area of woods on the Whittacker property. It was probably a hundred acres or so, and the purpose was to train the dogs, I guess. Get their sniffers and barkers in top shape after a long winter of no hunting. Honestly, I don’t have a clue if there was a purpose. More likely the old men wanted an excuse to get out of the house once the weather turned.

  Either way, my night usually consisted of four parts, and that night was no different.

  First came supper, a meal that made the whole ordeal worth every last second of longing for home. These men knew how to barbecue every beast of the field, and some of the air, in ways that a person’s tongue could never forget. Smoky, sweet, and spicy are words that come to mind when I think back on it. And then there were all the fixins, as they were called—fried potatoes, corn bread, green beans, lima beans, baked beans… there may have been a slight obsession with legumes. It’s a happy feeling being so stuffed with food, but that’s not to say there wasn’t some discomfort as well. And the poor little bathroom at the cabin had a hell of a time keeping up with things afterward.

  Next came the activity portion of the festivities, which meant different things to different people. For me, it consisted of a white-knuckled ride on the back of a four-wheeler while an absolutely insane kid named Rusty Johnson drove like a drunk motocross reject. My old friend, Alejandro, usually ended up on there with me, and we always had a running bet on who’d die first. He was a quiet kid, kept to himself, mostly, but we’d known each other since birth and that counted as friendship in these parts. So far neither one of us had won the bet.

  It’s a wonder we didn’t kill any dogs or humans that night in particular, as Rusty seemed hell-bent on catching every piece of the action as the canines chased the foxes. My senses could hardly handle the overload of input—the smells of pine and manure and churned mud, the feel of the wind on my face, the incessant barking and baying of the dogs, the rev of the engine as we chased them, Alejandro’s startled giggles on every bounce, the trees and brush eerily lit up by our headlight, the world telescoped down into what lay before us as we jumped and jostled along. And, every once in a while, even bat-shit crazy Rusty would stop and admire the stars above us, switching off the light so they could shine down their brightest.

  Of all the moments so engrained in my memory, the star-gazing is what touches me most, still to this day. And on that night, with thoughts of Pee Wee Gaskins and Andrea’s maybe/maybe-not dream fresh on my mind, it actually helped to know that I was only a tiny speck of dust in a gigantic, infinite universe. It made me feel safe, tucked away in a forgotten corner, an abandoned mote that no force of evil would ever bother looking for.

  But the night was young, and the night was long.

  3

  Parts three and four of these Fox Pen adventures were always simple enough—sitting around a hefty bonfire, listening to the old men talk, and then finding a bunk bed in the vast cabin built by some forgotten Fincher relative a half-century ago. After eating all that food, and after two hours cruising on a death-mobile, my fingers aching from their clutch of the grill on the back of the four-wheeler, and after who-knows-how-long sitting next to a warm fire, even the most resilient person gets dog-tired. Call me a wimp, but I swear I was always the first one—maybe the only one for all I knew—who toddled off to bed in the middle of those chilly nights.

  It was probably 11:00 or so when I hurried to find a good position near the fire, dragging a lawn chair to a spot not too far from several men who’d already settled in, including my dad. Each man sat with one leg crossed over the other, their arms draped across their armrests, beer cans hanging from their dangling fingers, seemingly by magic. Orange light from the roaring fire flickered on their faces, creating and destroying tiny shadows that lasted only milliseconds. But the glow in their eyes was steady as they stared into the flames, as if that’s where they discovered the agenda for the evening’s topics of conversation.

  The closest thing to a beer they’d let me drink was of the root variety, and I had a special disdain for root beer. So I had a sip of my cold Mountain Dew, fresh from the cooler, its sweet nectar icy on my throat, and leaned in to hear the good ole boys shoot the shit.

  “Ya’ll remember the Dixon boys?” a man named Kentucky—I swear to Heaven above his name was Kentucky—asked. He was a large fella, worked at the dairy, had the ugliest beard I’d ever seen. Looked like Spanish moss, which doesn’t go too well with a human face. “Grew up down Shiloh way, by the brick church?”

  Alejandro was sitting across the fire from me, and he caught my attention, raised both of his thumbs and made a goofy expression of glee. He loved all the stories as much as I did.

  “Remember?” my dad replied. “How you expect us to forget those two knuckleheads? It’s a wonder the school’s still standin’ after they came through.”

  “Thank God their daddy got laid off,” a man named Mr. Fullerton griped. He was a lawyer in town, as tall as he was smart. “I think they moved down to Charleston, chasing a port job. Good riddance. You think the boys were bad, well… let’s just say the fruit didn’t fall far from that rotten tree.”

  “That bastard was a sumbitch amongst sumbitches.” This came from an ancient man known only by the name of Gramps. I think he was so old that no one remembered his name.

  “Sure was,” Mr. Fullerton the lawyer agreed, “and coming from Gramps, that’s saying a lot.”

  This brought a few chuckles, even from the old man himself. I laughed a little harder than I should have, and Gramps gave me a side-eye that made me shrink back in my chair for a minute or two.

  “Why’d you bring those two kids up, anyway?” my dad asked Kentucky.

  “Say what you want about their good-for-nothin’ daddy,” the man answered behind his scraggly beard, “but those boys told us a story one night that made me laugh till my cheeks hurt. They were helping over at the dairy and set up like vaudeville comedians at lunchtime, had the whole cafeteria lending their ears. By golly it was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “Well, spill it, then,” a man named Jimmy One-Sack urged. I never discovered why people called the guy One-Sack, and I’m not sure I wanted to. But he was nice, younger than most of the other men, worked behind the counter at the hardware store in town. “We ain’t got all night.”

  “Yeah, we do,” my dad replied, and this brought another round of chuckles. Except for Gramps, who just shifted in his seat and scratched his nether regions.

  “Alright, then,” Kentucky said, sitting up straighter. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Not sure if those boys are twins or not, but might as well be. Poor bastards got their looks from their daddy’s side of the family, and he ain’t much of a looker if you know what I mean. Got a nose like a squashed school bus, and that’s his best attraction. Anyway. Both them boys tell a story about the day they figured they’d try flying off the watchtower with a damned bed sheet for a parachute.”

  “What?” several men asked at the same time.

  “Done heard this story,” grumbled old man Gramps, who proceeded to spit a wad of something dark directly on the ground at his feet. It was powerful enough to splash onto a kid’s shirt sitting nearby.

  Kentucky continued on as if no one had interrupted him. “Now I ain’t got a clue what those kids’ names were—we just always called them the Dixon boys, like they were of a piece. I’ll just call them Dumbledee and Dumbledumb. Anyhow, they got this fool notion in their heads they was gonna jump off the watchtower out by the Fullerton place, tied up to the end of a bed sheet, planning to drop down to the corn field like paratroopers in World War Deuce. Well, at the last second before they climbed those rickety stairs of the tower, Dumbledee makes the suggestion of a lifetime.”

  “What was that?” my dad asked.

  “Henry.”

  A moment of silence passed, the question obvious.

  “Henry was their damned dog, you bunch of slowpokes. They decided to test the parachute idea on the poor little pup.”

  “Who the hell names a dog Henry?” Gramps barked. “At least call the sumbitch Hank for Pete’s sake.”

  “Anyway,” Kentucky said, his feigned annoyance fooling nobody. He was enjoying every second of this. “Dumbledumb agrees with Dumbledee that this is a fine idea, just to be safe, ya know. I mean, the odds of disaster were slim to none and Slim just left town, as they say, but just in case, you see, they decided to have a try with old Henry. So there they climb, tromping up those rattling stairs, around and around they go, till they finally reach the top. Then the Dixon boys proceed to tie two ends or four ends or I don’t know what of that sheet around the dog’s body then rightly threw him off into the wind.”

  “You have got to be shittin’ me.” I didn’t notice who said this, too mesmerized by the story.

  “I ain’t no judge to tell ya how true it is,” Kentucky responded. “Just shut the hell up and let me finish, would ya?” He took a deep breath, and I could tell he was prepping for the big ending. But when he started talking again he could barely keep the snickers at bay. “Well, needless to say that old bed sheet made a piss-poor parachute, that’s for sure. The Dixon boys told me it looked like nothing but a shoe string”—here the man had to pause to gain his composure, his whole body shaking with laughter—”nothin’ but a shoe string as that dog plummeted to its death amongst the corn stalks below. Just a dog with a string trailing it like a kite. Later, when their mama asked ’em if Henry was dead, they said ‘Sho ’nuff, Mama, it’s graveyard dead.’”

  I looked around me and the men were laughing along with Kentucky; most of the boys looked somewhere between confused and horrified. Alejandro was loving every minute of it.

  “To this day,” Kentucky said, “when you come across those boys, they’ll say the same thing if you ask them about it. ‘If it weren’t for old Henry the dog, there wouldn’t be but one Dixon boy today!’” He laughed a bit, then said it again through his snorts, “There wouldn’t be but one Dixon boy today!”

  At this point, Kentucky completely lost it, and so did I. It wasn’t so much the punchline as seeing just how hilarious the man thought it was. I’m sure the beer helped, but he practically fell off of his chair, and several others actually did, pounding the ground with their fists as they shook with laughter. It filled me with indescribable joy to see such gaiety among these men that I’d often thought cold and distant and rough-edged. Alejandro was outright giggling on his side of the fire. The whole affair went on for another five minutes at least, flared up again anytime someone repeated the infamous last line or, even better, “Sho’nuff, Mama, it’s graveyard dead.” Even my dad joined in. More guffaws, more dirt pounding, so on and so forth.

  It was a good time, a time to remember.

  Shockingly, it was another half hour before anyone brought up Pee Wee Gaskins. But bring him up they did.

  4

  The conversation started oddly enough. As you can imagine, the beer was flowing like the Nile by this point.

  “Boy, you ever been wid a girl?”

  It took me a moment to realize that I was the one who’d been addressed. Somebody kicked me and I looked up.

  “Huh?”

  “I asked if you’d ever been wid a girl.” It was Kentucky. Good thing my dad had gone off to take a piss or he might’ve whopped the man a good one. That, or laugh, I honestly don’t know.

  “Shut your fool mouth, ‘Tucky,” someone named Branson said. He’d been quiet most of the night so far. “Cain’t you see that boy ain’t but 13 years old?”

  “I’m actually 16,” I said quickly, and rather defiantly I might add. If there’s one thing for which a young person will rise to the occasion, it’s to defend their age.

  “I don’t care if you’re votin’ come November,” Branson responded. “You’re way too young to be courtin’ them ladies.”

  Alejandro barked a laugh, pointed at me mockingly.

  “Courtin’?” Kentucky repeated. “Too young? Branson, I swear, you are perpetually stuck in the 50s and there ain’t no help for you.”

  It was all said in good fun and Branson did nothing but flip the appropriate finger at his longtime friend.

  “Ya’ll know good and well what you should be asking young David.”

  I turned around and saw that the honorable Mr. Fullerton had returned from getting another beer. My heart started sinking before the name even sprung from his mouth.

  “Pee Wee Gaskins.” He said it like a death sentence, like a pronunciation of the Black Plague. “This fine young man has seen and heard more about it than any of us. And I think it’s high time we quit acting like a bunch of pussies and talk about what’s troubling this county of ours.”

  My dad stepped up right then, and I’ve always wondered if it hadn’t been orchestrated beforehand.

  “Now just a minute, there, Jackson,” he said. “My boy’s been through enough.”

  Mr. Fullerton held up a hand. “Edgar, I’ve got all the respect a man can have in this world for you. And you’re one of my oldest friends. But I think it needs to be talked about. Talked about before we find somebody else with a head missing. George wasn’t the most handsome fella this side of the Appalachians, but I would’ve liked to see his face in that casket at the funeral.”

  “Well why didn’t Sheriff Taylor or his deputies come tonight?” my dad asked feebly.

  “Too busy with the investigation, is what they told me. That and a ‘kiss my ass’ is about all they’ll say on the matter. Hence we need to talk to David, here. He’s smart and he’s tough and he can take it. Can’t ya now, David?”

  I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do. Alejandro looked kinda guilty for poking fun just a minute earlier.

  My dad folded his arms and looked into the fire for a few seconds, the reflective spark in his eyes a little too demonic for my taste. Then he sighed and came over to me, knelt down, and spoke quietly.

  “Do you wanna talk about it, son? You don’t have to, now. Say the word and I’ll march you into the cabin, myself. But…” He paused and looked at the ground. “Sometimes it helps to get things off your chest, and frankly I think it might help these boneheads to hear some things straight from the horse’s mouth.” He squeezed my knee. “Sadly you’re the horse in this here situation.”

  I smiled and he smiled, though his seemed a little forced.

  “It’s fine with me, Dad.”

  He gave a stiff, authoritative nod. “Alright, then.” He stood up and faced Mr. Fullerton. “This boy’s going to bed in 20 minutes. Until then, he’s all yours, counselor.”

  This brought another round of low chuckles, but there wasn’t a whole lot of spirit to them, the subject matter too grave.

  Mr. Fullerton put his hand on my shoulder from behind. He had to stoop to do it—like I said, he’s so tall his head brushes the clouds. “David, you’re one of the good’uns, I swear to God Almighty. Why don’t you stand up and just tell us whatever pops in your head about what happened. Start from the beginning and work your way through it. In a half hour you’ll be snug as a bug in a rug—Tommy’ll find you the best bunk in the house.”

  I wanted to say that sleep—unfurling a canvas for all kinds of dreams about Pee Wee—sounded like the worst idea of the night, but I refrained. Just nodded instead, and the nod Mr. Fullerton returned had so much confidence woven into it that I sprang from my chair bursting with something like pride, as foolish as that sounds. I felt like Alexander Hamilton himself, facing the original Congress. Addressing the crowd of old men and a scattered few younger ones, I began.

  “Well, it was three weeks ago. My friend Andrea and I were hikin’ in the woods—ya’ll know where, down by those old, rusty abandoned tracks—and we came across Pee Wee.”

  “That sumbitch,” Gramps muttered.

  “Yes, sir, that’s what he is. It was kinda dark so it was hard to make out much, but he was grunting and breathing heavy and obviously sawing away at something. There was blood, that’s for sure. When he looked up at us, we ran, and luckily he didn’t follow. But Andrea saw”—here my voice faltered just a titch and I hoped they didn’t notice—”she saw a head, just lying there on the ground like a rock.” One of the boys listening, a kid named Fenton, had eyes as wide as the moon.

  I continued. “We went straight to the Sheriff’s office and they called our parents, wouldn’t let us talk till they got there. We told everyone there what I just told you guys. I mean, there wasn’t a whole lot to tell. There was Pee Wee, blood, and somebody’s head, cut clean off.” I shrugged as if to say we’d stumbled across a dead possum in the road, though that was far from how I felt. Recalling that evening brought something sharp and weighty onto my chest.

  “What happened next?” Mr. Fullerton asked.

  “Sheriff Taylor asked if we’d mind too much going out with them to the scene of the crime. My dad and Andrea’s mom came along. Pee Wee was long gone by the time we got there, and so was the body. And… the head. They shone the flashlights down”—I shuddered; the memory of those white lights on glistening red will forever haunt me—”and there was a bunch of blood and… little chunks, I guess. But nothing else.” I wanted to vomit.