Read Where All Light Tends to Go for Free Online Page B

backward from there and it was clearer than the room I was standing in. I could see his distorted face peeking out of that tarp as Gerald was dragging. I could see his chest go from still to raising and lowering, raising and lowering. I could hear that screaming and I could see his face peeling, and before that, before that, I could see just him, Robbie Douglas, sitting there on a week-long binge with unblinking eyes and a chomping jaw as those wires cut into his arms. That was what pushed me to the bathroom and threw my head into the toilet, and that was what spilt over into the bowl. It was the fact that he was real. It was the fact that he was real and alive and breathing and had parents that buried my head just inches from where vomit filmed on that little pond of toilet water.
    “Jacob! Jacob!” Daddy was hollering, and I could feel him pushing on the door where my feet were wedged. “Jacob, what the fuck’s the matter with you?” The sound of his voice made me heave harder and Daddy banged that door open till I was sure every toe I had was severed clean off. He was laughing now as he stood over me. “Well, goddamn, boy. Look at you.” He was chortling something horrible at me. “Must’ve been one hell of a night. Yes, sir, I don’t think I’ve had a night that put me in a place like this in a coon’s age.”
    If he was talking about the puking, I’d seen him do it a week or two before. If he was talking about what had pushed me into that bowl, I’d heard the stories.
    “Get the fuck up now, and be a goddamn man. I got something that’ll take the hurt out of you.” I pushed off of the toilet with hands still bloodied and scabbed, but just couldn’t find enough strength to get off the floor. “Goddamn, Jacob! Quit being a fucking pussy about it and get up!” Daddy leaned down and braced his arms under mine. He hoisted me up without even a grunt.
    I stood there for a minute with my head hung low, my whole body limp as rope. I looked my hands over and hobbled to the sink to wash off what I could from the night before.
    “Bloodied the hell out of those knuckles. Who’d you hit?”
    “Avery Hooper.” I turned on the faucet and scrubbed hard at my knuckles till water stained dark red spiraled down the drain.
    “Avery Hooper? That’s old Thomas Hooper’s boy, ain’t it?”
    “I think that’s his uncle.” My eyes were focused on that spiraling, the sink seeming to swallow the only thing I cared to remember.
    “Yeah, I think you’re right. That’s Thomas’s brother Aiden’s kid, ain’t it? Boy, I used to hate that son of a bitch when we were growing up. Tied that cocksucker to a tombstone one night at Cub Scouts and left him there. We could hear him just screaming down there when we were sitting around the campfire. They kept asking what that racket was, but I told them I didn’t hear a thing. I’d had half a mind to slit his fucking throat.” Daddy started laughing again and stared into the mirror till our eyes met.
    “Well, his son ain’t much better.”
    “Looks like it. Looks like there might be a little of that McNeely blood in you after all.”
    That’s what I was scared of. I cupped a handful of water to wash my face and let some of that handful into my mouth to wet my tongue. My whole mouth was dry as talc, and I just kept filling my hands as fast as the faucet could pour to get some sort of dampness back into my mouth.
    “Sounded like you were in here dying. Should’ve known you were just being a pussy.” Daddy stared at me like he couldn’t believe we were kin, like I was the biggest disappointment he’d ever had. “Well, whenever you’re finished, come in the kitchen and I’ll mix you up something to get those hairs standing again.”
    From the way he carried himself, I knew old Josephine had given in pretty easy at some point after the tattoo was covered. As he walked out of the room, I could see that the name had been buried beneath flowers like the Mexicans draw