Read an Excerpt
1.
The sun sank behind the ruins in ribbons of red, long shadows running the length of the junkyard. Cars stood in towers above the old man. He steered the front loader as two prongs pressed down on the hood of a rusted Crown Vic. A claw emerged and the engine block came out clean. In the distance, a hydraulic slab crunched a Ford truck like a beer can.
The last of the day’s light caught and gleamed on a small glass bottle in the man’s breast pocket. Tucked neatly behind the bottle was an envelope. Sounds of destruction crackled as the man guided the Crown Vic into the crusher atop the flattened Ford. He reached for the pocket, letting his finger slide across the bottle’s plastic lid, rough at the edges. He took the envelope instead, black fingerprints on white paper, eyes scanning the words:
Dear Joanna Fitzjurls,
We are delighted to inform you that the Committee on Admissions has admitted you to the University of Arkansas’s class of . . .
The letter crumpled in the old man’s hands. He stood in the cab, stretched, then exited. His steps stirred small clouds from the dried red dirt. He walked up close to the crusher. Close enough to see the dark splotches marring the giant slabs. In the dying light, the oil stains reminded him of blood. With a flick of his wrist, the letter disappeared inside the deconstructed Crown Vic.
Junkyards were good for that.
Still, the old man knew nothing was ever buried in the junkyard, only lessened, reduced, then stacked high to the sky, pyramids built block by block, secrets hidden deep within their tombs.
The crusher descended again and the old man limped away. He was thick around the waist. More square than round. Thick all the way through, from his ankles to his neck with skin the color of natural leather, pale but tan. The oval nameplate on his Carhartt work shirt read, “Jeremiah.”
The sun disappeared over the heap as he made it back to the office, a sheet-metal structure with concrete walls. No windows. A small patch of thorny roses grew up through the cracked earth beside the front door. Jeremiah steadied himself, the bottle quivering in his fingers.
“Drink up, Hattie,” he said, pouring the brown liquid around the base of the stems, a ritual he performed every evening.
Jeremiah tucked the bottle back in a pocket of his camouflage cargo pants and opened the door. The office was more than an office but not quite a home. A fireplace. A hearth. Two chairs around a table in what could be considered a kitchen. Cellar shadows shrouded the expanse, darkening a largemouth bass that hung above the doorway. Jeremiah closed the door, tapping at an electronic keypad welded to the wall. A red light, a green light, and then a heavy clunk—the office doors locking behind him.
Music came from the depths of the office house. The trebly tenor out of place. The walls reflected the sound in eerie echoes, the thick concrete erected for protection, not acoustics. Jeremiah tiptoed his way through the living room, glancing toward the melody. In the corner, back behind the threadbare sofa, there stood another door, this one small, barely reaching his shoulders, but thick. Six inches of steel. Jeremiah ducked as he entered the vault.
Inside there were enough guns to start a war, or end one. The room was an armory, the walls lined with friends from his past: sawed-off shotguns, Glocks hanging from their trigger guards, assault rifles with bump stocks, infrared scopes, and banana clips. An M72 LAW, an anti-tank weapon, lay atop a table in the back of the room as if it were a rusty lawnmower blade, some broken part the old man had put off fixing.
Jeremiah dug in his pocket for the bottle, then placed it on a shelf. The handgun went up next. He hung the belt and the holster from a hook up high. Dangling beside the gun was a Bronze Star, a thing Uncle Sam had given Jeremiah once he’d taken everything else away. In rows beside the star stood books, shelves of them: Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, even some John Grisham and Stephen King. Then there were the ancient tomes, books that held the answers: Plato’s Republic, a few thicker volumes of Schopenhauer, a skinny paperback edition of the Tao Te Ching, and of course, the Bible, its spine loose and bendy—leathery—like the old man’s skin. There were more books than guns. Jeremiah learned long ago a book was a weapon, and like always, he’d gone about arming himself.
There was a single picture tacked to the wall: an old man and a child, the sun setting over the tip of a distant Ozark hill. Jeremiah lingered there, eyes falling to the lone rusty rifle in the vault. The rest of the guns were clean, spotless, even the old rocket launcher. Jeremiah closed the door on his way out.
He walked briskly through the house now, free of burden, the music growing louder the deeper he went. He stopped outside the bedroom door, peering through the crack, and watched as his granddaughter mouthed the words to a song he did not know. Her room was dull despite the pinks and paisleys, the only light coming from a fluorescent tube flickering above her head. She wore shorts and a Razorback T-shirt, the University of Arkansas mascot snorting across her chest. A full-length, fancy blue dress hung long and sequined from the closet door. It had cost more than the junkyard brought in over the last two weeks. The dress sparkled as Joanna brushed layer after layer of thick pale powder onto her cheeks.
“Can’t hide it, Jo,” Jeremiah said, standing outside the door. “You are what you are.”
Joanna glanced over her shoulder. “And what’s that?”
“My granddaughter.”
She smiled.
“Just think you might be overdoing it.”
“Go get dressed,” Jo said, leaning into the mirror. “You got to be presentable, too.”
“You sure about this?”
“Who else is gonna walk me?”
Jo turned and looked at her grandfather, her face a mixture of everything good from both her parents: steel-blue eyes, full lips, high cheek bones, and the cutest little nose that turned up at the tip when she smiled. But try getting the good people of Taggard, Arkansas, to see beyond the girl’s history, her father, or worse—her mother. Maybe tonight, Jeremiah thought, lost in those dark-blue eyes. Maybe just for tonight, they’ll forget.
“You hear me?” Jo said.
Jeremiah blinked.
“You think we could call him?”
“Already running late.”
“Shit, Pop.”
To look at her, you’d think Jo was a saint, but the girl already had a mouth on her, and Jeremiah knew right where she’d gotten it.
“Cost an arm and a leg to make that call,” Jeremiah said. “Hell, there’s no guaranteeing he’ll call back.”
“Pop.”
That was all she had to say: that one word, those three letters, and Jeremiah would do just about anything. He produced a blocky flip phone out of his cargo pants. He dialed the number, pressed the ancient device to his ear, and waited. Jo eyed only the phone. There was a silence behind the music. They were closer now, back to where it had all begun. The junkyard felt it too, despite the four-foot-thick weatherproof walls, despite the armory in the living room vault. These hallowed grounds had not forgotten the storm.
“Need to leave a message for an inmate,” Jeremiah said, breaking the silence. “Yeah, Thomas Fitzjurls. Tell him to call his daughter in the next thirty minutes. She’s about to win Homecoming Queen.”
Jo beamed and turned back to the mirror. Her hair was woven in tight braids around her head, an attempt to control her thick mane. Jeremiah knew she’d done the braids herself. A girl raised by a grandfather had to learn to do things herself: hair and makeup, cook and clean.
“You heard anything else from Tech?” Jeremiah said, sliding the phone back in his pocket.
“Tech?”
“I’d sure like to keep you close.”
“You know I’m going to the University, Pop. Going up to Fayetteville,” she said, pointing at the snarling tusker on her shirt. “They got the best pre-veterinary program in the state.”
“I could still use some help around here. And money, we ain’t even talked about the money.”
He studied her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes gave nothing away, steady and focused. He knew the school would email her—he could only crush so many letters—and then summer would come and she’d be gone.
“Jo?” Jeremiah said, tugging at his lapels. “I’s thinking tonight, me and you could climb up Babel and watch the stars.”
“But we got the dan—” Jo cut the word short, eyeing her grandfather. “Yeah, Pop. Sure. That sounds good.”
Jeremiah grinned.
“But now I got to try and squeeze my ass in that dress.”
“Right,” Jeremiah said and turned.
“Let me know when Dad calls.”
Jeremiah closed the door behind him. He waited until he heard the security chain on the other side slide across the groove, a sturdy, secure sound, and then he limped back down the hall.
It took Jeremiah less than five minutes to shave and change into his suit. His pants were black, the blazer blue. Dangly buttons lined his cuffs like golden cicada shells. Jeremiah was unaware of anything other than his old phone, waiting for something he knew better than to wait for.
“Damn it, Tommy. Call the girl back.” The old man’s voice hissed against the silent walls. “It’s the least you could do.”
He tossed the phone up, caught it, then walked back to Jo’s room.
Three knocks.
Nothing.
Jeremiah knocked again and then he heard talking, low hushed tones. He knocked twice more before the security chain slid away. Jo stood before him, the dress erasing any misconceptions he’d had of her still being his little girl: tight in the hips, the curves of a woman above and below.
“Talking to somebody?” Jeremiah said.
“Humane Society. They want me to work tomorrow.”
“The Saturday after Homecoming?”
“Said it’s the least I could do, since you’re always crunching up their strays.”
Jeremiah nodded, but his eyes were trained only on the phone in her hand. “You didn’t call her, did you?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“Pop, come on. I don’t even have her number.”
Jo held the cell phone at an angle where Jeremiah couldn’t see the screen. She’d heard this speech before. She turned to face the mirror, smiling at her reflection as she said, “This’ll do.”
Jeremiah had never been good with words, especially when Jo and sparkly dresses were involved.
“You hear from Dad?”
Jeremiah considered lying, telling her the prison had called back and said the phones were down, but it was too late. Jo was staring at him now. Jeremiah looked away, down at the nightstand. The stationery he’d gotten her last Christmas—and every Christmas since she’d first learned to read and write—burned holes into the old man’s memory. The fountain pen she’d bought herself with the money she’d earned from the Humane Society rested neatly on the stationery, a half-written letter to a man she barely knew.
“I’m sure something came up,” Jo said and turned from the mirror, snatching her purse as she started past him. Jeremiah caught her arm before she made it to the door.
“You check your gun?”
Jo flashed him a look.
Jeremiah wasn’t letting this one go.
“It’s in the nightstand drawer, Pop. Right where it’s supposed to be. Safety’s on and everything.”
“One in the chamber?”
Jo leaned forward on her toes, pecked his cheek, and whispered, “There’s always one in the chamber.”
And then she was gone, down the hall, halfway across the living room when Jeremiah called out for her.
“Yeah?” she said, already at work unlocking the series of bolts and chains attached to the front door.
“I’s thinking maybe tonight you should take The Judge.”
Jo stopped and turned to face him, eyes wide because she knew the reverence her grandfather held for his truck: a jacked-up, 1984 Chevy Silverado 4x4 with KC lights, a brush guard, and ribbed mud tires so thick they made short work of the Ozark hills.
“You mean it?”
“Figured you might need something mean to go with that dress.”
“What’re you gonna drive?”
“Thought maybe we could ride in together.”
Jo looked down. “But I’m already late.”
“I’m ready,” Jeremiah said, lifting his keys from the kitchen table.
“No,” she said, then caught herself. “I mean . . . All the other girls won’t be riding to the game with their parents.”
“Neither would you,” Jeremiah said, a look on his face like I’m just Pop.
“You know what I mean.”
Jeremiah tossed the keys across the living room. Jo caught them with one hand.
“But I will be the only girl rolling up in a souped-up Chevy.”
Jeremiah watched his granddaughter turn and start working the locks again. Beyond that door were bloodlines and violence that ran deeper than the limestone caves burrowing their way through the Ozarks. He’d tried to explain it all to her before, tried to drudge up their history and put what had happened into words, but it never came out right. There were no words for the past.
The old man was so lost in his memories he didn’t realize the door was open now, revealing the junkyard and all that came with it. Jo’s voice brought him back, though, just like it always did.
“See you at the game, Pop. Don’t be late.”
