'The principal always assumed anything bad that happened at the school was Andy's fault, whether it was or not,' Matt said. “I had a clean record, so I knew they'd go easy on me, but if Andy went down for this one, they'd expel him from school for good.'
'And he knew that the beating I'd get from my daddy wouldn't be nearly as gentle as the one he got,' Andy said. “That's Matthew Cahill for you.'
The crowd applauded again, raising their glasses and guzzling more beer in Matt's honor. One of the loggers gestured to Matt and yelled at the bartender, 'His money is no good here!'
'That's good, because after today, I'm not going to have any,' Matt said.
Everybody laughed and headed back to their seats, except for Andy, who lingered at the bar, eyeing Rachel with curiosity.
'Did you come down here to console us?' Andy said.
'Just because I work in the front office, that doesn't mean I don't care about what happens in the yard.'
'That's real nice, but I'm plenty consoled already,' Andy said. “My buddy Matt here, however, has hardly been consoled at all. I've never met a man more in need of consolation than him.'
'Go away, Andy,' Matt said.
Andy started to go back to his table when Rachel asked a question.
'So who really did it?'
Matt replied, 'Did what?'
'Left the horse manure in the principal's office,' she said.
'They never found out,' Matt said.
Andy grinned. “They knew right off.'
Matt looked at Andy with genuine surprise. “You really did it?'
'Of course I did,' Andy said. “You knew that. Who else but me would have had the balls?'
Andy laughed and turned to share the hilarity with the other loggers, all of whom found it as wildly amusing as he did.
Matt got up quietly from his stool. When Andy turned to look at him again, Matt hammered him in the face with a right hook that might as well have been a brick.
The blow knocked the mug out of Andy's hand, splattering him with beer, and sent him tumbling back into his friends, who caught him before he fell. The mug shattered on the floor.
Matt tossed a few bucks on the counter and met the bartender's eye.
'That's for the broken mug,' Matt said and walked out without giving Andy another glance. If he had, he'd have seen that the punch failed to knock the grin off Andy's face, but it did smear his front teeth with blood.
'See?' Andy said to Rachel. “He's feeling better already.'
'You're an asshole,' she said and followed Matt out the door.
Andy watched her go, bounced back to his feet, wiped his bloody mouth on his sleeve, and turned to his friends.
'Beer me!' he yelled, and the party continued.
CHAPTER SIX
Twenty minutes later, Matt and Rachel sat across from each other in a booth at the Denny's on the edge of town. They each had a cup of lousy coffee in front of them and picked at a piece of banana cream pie that looked incredible but tasted synthetic.
'How could you not have known that Andy was guilty?' she asked.
'Maybe I want to see the best in people.'
'Or you're blind, at least when it comes to him. What's he got on you?'
'What do you mean?'
'Did he take a bullet for you? Give you his kidney? Or does he have pictures of you doing something terrible, like molesting little boys? Whatever it is, it must be huge.'
'It's loyalty,' Matt said.
'That's it?'
'It's huge to me. He's my oldest friend. I'll always have his back. That's all there is to it.'
'But he's an asshole,' she said.
'Not to me.'
' Especially to you. How come everyone else can see it and you can't?'
Matt set down his fork. “You want to know what I see when I look at Andy?'
She nodded.
'Terror,' he said.
They called the narrow, rectangular houses in Matt's neighborhood shotgun shacks. The four rooms were laid out in a row without any hallways. So, in theory, if all the doors were open, and you happened to be standing on the front porch with a loaded shotgun, you could fire it into the house and all the pellets could pass through to the backyard without hitting a wall.
That was how some people thought the shacks got their name. Another theory, the one Matt's parents subscribed to, was that it came from all the impoverished people who blew their heads off with shotguns rather than continue living in those miserable dumps.
Matt's father had remodeled their shotgun shack so extensively that it wasn't really one anymore. He'd built the place out, added a hallway, and erected a gable on their flat roof.
But the house next door, the one that the Goodis family moved into during the blistering-hot summer of Matt's eighth year, was still the original, cramped floor plan.
Sam Goodis, his wife, Marla, and their son, Andy, kept to themselves. Sam was a huge man, covered with tattoos, and worked as a mechanic in the railroad yard.
In the nights that followed, Matt often heard slapping, and crying, and yelling, and things breaking in the Goodis house. He could rarely make out what was actually being said, beyond the pleading in Marla's voice and the rage in Sam's. He never heard a sound from Andy.
Matt went to his parents about it and asked them to do something, but they told him that what happened under another family's roof was none of their business and that it was best not to mix in.
So Matt was left to wonder why Marla was always bruised and why their son, Andy, never wanted to play and always seemed as furtive as a feral cat.
But that changed one Sunday when Matt's parents were at church and he was home sick with a stomach flu. He was in bed, a towel laid out on the bedspread and a bucket on his nightstand, when he heard a scratching sound under the floor.
He got out of bed, went down on his knees, and pressed his ear to the wood. And when he did, he could swear that he heard breathing.
There was a dog in the neighborhood that liked to bring the small animals and birds that it killed under their house. The dog would gut the animals, leaving the carcasses behind, and the rotting smell would permeate the entire house for days. Matt was nauseous enough as it was without having to deal with the smell, too.
So he got up, grabbed a flashlight and a broom, and went outside to scare away whatever animal was under their house. They'd had everything down there. Dogs, cats, snakes, rabbits, squirrels, even a rabid raccoon that his dad had to shoot.
But he'd never heard anything breathing down there before.
He stepped off the porch, lay down on his stomach, and peered into the crawl space under their raised foundation, sweeping the beam of his flashlight into the cobwebby darkness.
What he saw surprised him.
It was Andy, curled up in the deepest, darkest part, one of his eyes nearly swollen shut, blood on his cheek. Andy looked at Matt imploringly and raised a finger to his lips, mouthing a silent Shhhh.
Matt was puzzling over it when he felt a presence looming over him. He scooted back and looked up to see
