“You didn’t hear this from me.”
Chapter 6
Lizzie
My husband was a lot of things. A high school dreamboat. A lowlife bully. An athlete who could’ve gone pro, if only. A junkie. A jerk. And yes, he was a killer. Eventually—and eventually, we’ll get to that part. I mean to tell you everything. But it’s not enough, just to tell the truth; I’m telling you a story, and I want it to come out right. You have to know how it all began to understand the ending.
My husband could be a real bastard.
But he wasn’t a wife beater.
Even during the worst times, when he was really raging, drunk or stoned or both. I could see in those moments that he would’ve liked to hit me. But he didn’t, and I think it’s because he knew if he did, I’d hit back. And I’d make it hurt. I knew where his soft targets were.
He’d never have risked it. For all his legendary abilities on the ball field, the rocket arm that might have made him a star, my husband wasn’t a man who enjoyed a challenge. The Prince Charming of my fucked-up fairy tale preferred his fights unfair, his opponent hopelessly outmatched, and his outcomes guaranteed. In high school, he was the big guy who’d stick out a boot in a crowded hallway just to watch some puny eighth grader go sprawling. He was the kind of man who took a weird, grotesque joy in following a spider around the house, letting it scuttle almost all the way to freedom before he brought down a shoe or a rolled-up magazine and turned it into a smear on the floor. Or the goddamn bug zapper—he loved it. He’d watch it like a movie, sitting there, beer in hand, while mosquitoes and blackflies floated out of the twilit woods, drawn by the hypnotic blue glow of the Flowtron in our backyard. If you closed your eyes you could hear them hitting it: Bzzt! Fzzt!
Dwayne would let out this idiot’s chortle every time one of them incinerated itself, this duh-huh-hurr sound from deep in his throat, and eventually he’d drain his beer and pitch the can away into the yard and say, “These bugs are so fucking dumb.”
That was my man: half-drunk on a Tuesday, reveling in his superiority to something that doesn’t even have a central nervous system. Picking on someone his own size would have taken a kind of integrity he just didn’t have.
But the men in Copper Falls were like that. Not all of them, maybe even not most of them, but enough. Enough to make it a trend. Enough so that if you were one of them, you could look around and assume that the way you were was the right way to be. Your own father was probably the same; he would be the one who first taught you that there was a sense of power to be had in stamping on spiders, zapping flies, snuffing out a life so much smaller than yours that it hardly meant anything at all. You’d learn early, while you were still a boy.
Then you’d spend the rest of your life finding little things to crush.
It happened the summer that I was eleven, still young enough to feel that the place we lived had a kind of magic to it. Our trailer sat at the end of the lot nearest the road, the heaps rising up behind it like an ancient, ruined city. It felt like the edge of another world, and I liked to pretend that it was, and we were its keepers, my father and I—sentries at the borderland, charged with guarding ancient secrets from trespassers and plunderers. Snaking corridors of hard-packed dirt wound back between the piles of scrap metal, splintered furniture, broken and discarded toys. There was a line of busted-up cars marking the property line to the west, stacked like oblong building blocks, so old that they had been there not just since before I was born but since before Pop took the place over. Pop hated them; he worried out loud that they would topple one day, and warned me away from ever climbing them, but there was nothing to be done. The machine that had been used to lift and stack them had been long since sold off to pay some debt, and so the cars stayed, slowly rusting. I would weave my way back to the place where that line ended, where the heaps stopped and the woods began, a narrow path of yellowed grass winding into the trees just beyond the bumper of a crushed Camaro. This was the oldest part of the property, from some long-ago time before it became a repository for unwanted things. A hundred yards into the trees was my favorite spot: a clearing where the rusted-out husks of three ancient trucks sat facing each other, sunk into the earth up to the wheel wells. Nobody knew who they’d belonged to or how they’d come to be left there, nose to nose like they were paused in the middle of a conversation, but I loved the shape of them: the curvy hoods, the heavy chrome fenders, the big, black, bug-eyed holes where the headlights used to be. They were part of the landscape now. Animals had nested in the seats over the years; vines had threaded themselves through the chassis. One of them had an oak tree growing straight through it, rising out of the driver’s seat and through the roof, blooming into a lush green canopy overhead.