Chapter 2

Doober awoke in his childhood bedroom. The bunk beds were gone, and the daybed was uncomfortable because he could not stretch out his legs all the way. His mother had purged the childrearing stuff from the house, turning his old room into a knitting den. All her works hanging on the wall or thrown on the chairs and daybed had orange in them. His mother loved orange.

The house was a small tract home, a squat rectangular building sitting on a concrete slab. The yard was full of untamable weeds in between the blades of grass. A few scraggly bushes managed to survive despite the benign neglect. Once each year in late spring, Doober and his brother would come to the house with a pressure washer to hose down the outside of the house and wash the car. The afternoon was spent trekking from the house to the yard where they would purge the new fire ant hills with boiling water. Momma would make meatloaf special-like with the onion soup mix.

“I wanted to wake you up, but you looked just drained through and through,” she said. “It’s all over the news. There was a shootout on the highway and a highway patrolman was killed and two deputies were wounded. They were terrible men: murderers and thieves and rapists and who knows what else. They’re dead, now, thank the Lord.”

Doober glanced at the couch before sitting. He and his brother had learned the hard way to check out the furniture first. He lifted the plastic sheet that she draped over the cushions to keep them looking fresh and unceremoniously threw it aside. He knew she was giving him a dirty look, but at the moment he did not care. As he eased back into the cushions, he kept running his fingers through his hair from his forehead to the nape of his neck.

“Jesus, ma,” Doober said. “Gary, Dinty, and Mucker are dead. If I hadn’t gone for beer, that could have been me.”

“Yeah, you be thanking Jesus, boy,” his mom said. “If Jesus hadn’t been at your right side protecting you from harm, I would be planning another funeral today. You need to come to church and thank the Lord in person. Today is Wednesday and Pastor Greyson is having Bible Study tonight. You are going to come and get down on your knees, Douglas. I will be right beside you, thanking Jesus with you for protecting my son.”

“Thanks, ma,” Doober said. He had not stepped into a church since leaving home and he had no real plans to ever step in one again. Her minister, Reverend Greyson, was not a holy roller or a six-week Bible school graduate. He had a real college degree and all sorts of smarts, but he was also stiff and formal-like. Doober was confident that the man had never said anything offensive to him or his kin in the years his ma and pa attended the church, but Doober did not like the church stuff or most of the church folk. He was not going to say “no” though. A man had to hedge his bets, especially after a close call. If Jesus was going to give the holy word to anyone, it was going to be someone like Reverend Greyson.

“Are you going to call your girlfriend?” his mother asked. She was standing in the kitchen wearing an apron with bright yellow chickens with red beaks and combs across the front while she held a spatula in her hand.

“We broke up the night before last,” Doober said.

“Good to hear, son,” she said. “I know you don’t want to hear it now and now is not the proper time,” she continued with a deep breath. “That woman is no good for you. She is not just a whore, Douglas, she is a cheap whore with the manners of a pig. Lord knows she squealed like one. She is so loose I expect her innards to fall out through her hoohaw any time now. I pray to God you used protection.”

“Ma!” Doober said. “You don’t use the word hoohaw around me. You are not supposed to know about hoohaws, especially Mary Sue’s hoohaw.”

Doober was looking up at the ceiling in disbelief when he felt something thump his head. He turned around to witness his mother raising her spatula above her head again. “You don’t want sonofabitches and I don’t want sonofabitches for grandchildren. At least you got your brains out of your dick before this tragedy.”

She turned back towards the kitchen. “I hate to break the news to you, son, but your mother has a hoohaw too. I’m making biscuits and I got a chicken in the pot for soup.”

Doober grabbed the remote in its orange knit sleeve, popping on the television. He stared at the commercial for fabric softener with a quick breath of relief. He was not sure that he wanted to watch the story, yet he was compelled to follow it anyway. The commercial cut away and a pretty woman with perfect blond hair was sitting at the anchor desk while a big picture of the shootout scene taken from a helicopter floated behind her.

The highway was blocked in both directions with police cars, all with their lights twirling. When he registered what the lights were, he felt an intense hatred for them. “Damn lights,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

He almost forgot to look at the car in the center, a tan SUV, one of the small ones pretending it had horsepower, pick up, and pinpoint steering. Never having seen Mucker’s car from above because he had never been that stupid drunk to climb on top of it, he still recognized it. Even from the helicopter he could tell that the front and rear windshields were shot out.

“Who would have believed?” he said softly. He could not take his eyes away from the screen until he felt a hand rest on his shoulder.

“You can turn the sound on if you want,” his mother said. “I cut the sound to let you sleep.”

“I’m having a hard-enough time just looking at the picture, ma. I don’t think I wanna hear it yet. Buy a paper tomorrow or something like that; could be easier to digest.”

The timer on the stovetop went off making Doober start. “Biscuits are ready. Butter or jam, Douglas?”

They ate in silence although Doober’s brain would not stop running a full tilt. He remembered staring at his boots on the running board of his truck, feeling completely helpless. He looked up from his food and realized that he left the beer in the cabin. Then he remembered that there was yellow tape across the doorway barring him from his beer. He glanced at his mother’s fridge and decided that the last thing he needed was a drink.

He did not drink alone, not his way of doing things usually. He drank with his friends. His friends he drank with, they were dead. He dropped his head into his hands and sobbed.

“I called Martin’s parents this afternoon.” His mother’s words sounded like a bass drum thumping next to his ear. “They are coming to church tonight, too. I haven’t spoken to Gary’s mother in years, but Sybil said she would call her. I also called Daniel’s parents and left a message on their phone.”

“I don’t know if I can do this, ma,” Doober said. “Their sons are dead, brains blown to smithereens.”

He felt hands under his chin lift his head. He stared into her eyes. “Douglas, you are going to have to trust me. I know that you are all grown up and out of the house. I also know you don’t believe like I believe, but you still got a good heart. You need to sit in church tonight even if you don’t pray. There are loads of people who care about you, who want to sit with you even if you can’t talk yet. You sit in that pew, and you hold on to your momma. Grab the back of pew in front of you and hold on if you must.

“Reverend Greyson told me to bring you around to the back of building and he will let you in through the kitchen door. He’s concerned the media is going to show up and he wants to protect your privacy. I know this sounds crazy, but I want you in church tonight because I know you will be safe there. Can you do that for me?”

“Yeah, ma,” Doober said with a sigh. “He was Mucker, not Martin and Daniel was Dinty because of the bag of cans he brought on the boy scout camp-out when we were in seventh grade. It ain’t their Christian names but it’s their names. Names we all earned one way or the other.”

“When I use their Christian names, it’s like offering up a prayer,” his mother said. “I always call you Douglas and I always shall. It’s like calling down a guardian angel to protect you.”

“Really, ma? Really?”

“What did your daddy say every time you grabbed the keys and announced that you were going out?”

“Drive safe! I can hear his voice in my head, ma. Drive safe.”

“He meant it, Douglas. He thought that if he reminded you to be careful with the car, then bad things wouldn’t happen. He may have been pulling a superstition, but he meant what he said. You made it home safe, son, and your daddy would be pleased.”

“Am I going to be okay, ma?” Doober asked with great seriousness. “They’re dead, butchered.”

“Let me ask you a question: are you going to be okay for the next five minutes? Are you going run off and do something stupid?”

Doober shook his head. “Then son, for the next five minutes you are going to be okay. Then we will work on the next hour and continue after that. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Doober’s mom stood up and started gathering the dishes on the table. He returned to the couch, slouching forward to stare at the screen. They were showing pictures of his friends from the high school yearbook. They all wore stupid hair and dorky ties. None of them had worn a tie since their graduation as far as he could remember. Mucker’s fro was gone, and Dinty’s hair was no longer down to his shoulders. Gary with his round face still looked like Gary. Or he did. Doober reached for the remote and hit the power button. Curling up in ball, he lay on the couch and let loose a deep, long sigh.

Her Bible was on the shelf below the television, right at his eyelevel. She was the only reason left for him to remain in the area. His friends were no more; everything was mud and sweat and mosquitoes. Anyone with ambition left after high school; at least that is what they used to say. Most everybody knew they had dead end jobs and dead-eyed marrying prospects. Sitting on a couch with broken springs in the middle of a bayou had a certain sad poetry to it, at least from the outside.