Disintegration

'The chickens didn't.'

'Heh. So you remember that, huh?'

Jacob grew faint and wanted to lean back on the bed but was afraid Joshua would take it as a sign of weakness. His lightheadedness was partially due to the hangover, but Joshua's torture of the animals still had the power to shock him. The things Joshua did with a lit cigarette and that place where the guinea hens' eggs came out…

He swallowed a hard knot of liquor nausea. 'Daddy never did figure out why the hens quit laying.'

'The Gentleman Farmer. What a joke. He just wanted a big driveway so he could see his enemies coming from a long way off. That Wells paranoia runs deep, don't it, brother?'

'You could have sent me a letter. I would have paid you and you wouldn't have had to come back.'

'It's more fun this way.' Joshua went to the closet, grinned, and opened the door. Jacob closed his eyes. The creak of the hinges hadn't changed in two decades. The sound was still a dry scream combined with a perverted snicker.

'Wish me, Jake,' Joshua said, and they may as well have been eleven years old again. Wish Me started out as a game where one of them would guess which toy the other boy was holding in his bed across the dark room. Then Wish Me evolved into an elaborate fantasy in which they pretended to be someone else.

From Captain Kangaroo to Pete Rose to Batman to Shaggy on the 'Scooby Doo' cartoon, they would run through the heroes of the day. Then Joshua started on monster movies, Dracula and the Mummy, using sinister voices that were as creepy as those of swarthy Hollywood actors. Instead of staying on his own bed, Joshua would sneak across the dark floor and slide under Jacob's.

'Wish me a monster with fangs and red eyes,' Joshua would whisper in the darkness.

Jacob would barely be able to breathe and his vocal chords grew as tight as banjo strings. 'I'm not afraid of you.'

'It's not me you're afraid of. It's the Sock Monster.' And the sock would climb over the edge of the mattress, Joshua's hand inside, scratching softly against the blankets. And no matter how many times Jacob told himself it was only a hand, the menace in Joshua's voice made the Sock Monster a real and terrible threat. And Jacob would squirm away and bunch up near the headboard, only to find the Sock Monster crawling through the bed's gap to snap and claw at his flesh.

All the while, as he pinched and poked, Joshua laughed and made cruel comments in his creepy fake voice. He would keep up the Sock Monster game until he was bored or tired, then he would say, 'Do you give, you big sissy?'

By that time, Jacob would be curled into a shuddering and whimpering ball.

'Suck that snot back up your nose and tell me you give.'

'I give,' he said when he could part his clenched teeth.

Each morning, Jacob never failed to find a sock under the bed, pocked with small round spots of dried blood. His blood. As if the Sock Monster had really dug teeth into him, pulled his hair out by the roots, gnawed his fingers and toes.

Eventually, Joshua stopped sliding under the bed and began hiding in the closet instead. That's when things really started getting nasty. And Jacob was eleven again.

'Wish me, Jake,' Joshua repeated, and Jacob opened his eyes to find himself in the present, in the room he never thought he'd see again except in occasional nightmares.

'I don't want to play.'

'You better. Or I'll tell.'

'I'm not twelve anymore.'

'No, but the statute of limitations don't run out on murder.'

'It wasn't murder.'

'Well, I guess in a court of law they'd call it manslaughter or reckless endangerment or something to make sure you got off with a slap on the wrist. Since you're so upstanding and all. But we both know it's a killing no matter what name you give it.'

Jacob felt as if his ribs were splintered and digging deep into the meat of his lungs and heart. 'I was just a kid.'

'That cane was her life, Jakie Boy. She hardly ever took a step without it. Even when she sat and read the newspaper, or dusted her little knickknacks, that cane was right there with her. She probably could have beat off a rabid mountain lion with that thing. She sure enough knew how to whoop us with it.'

'She shouldn't have hit me. Not right there on the elbow, where it made my arm go numb.'

'You always was the type to carry a grudge. Look what you done to me. Let me live like scum while you rode that golden ticket to the top. And I reckon you figured Momma was in the way, too.'

'She shouldn't have hit me.'

'The stroke crippled her up a little, but it didn't hurt her mind a bit. Helped her focus. Just made her hate us that much more. You remember why she hit you?'

'Because I was in striking distance.'

'No. That was the other times. This time, it was because you broke her little ceramic rooster.'

'I didn't break her ceramic rooster.'

Joshua laughed, lit another cigarette, sucked in the burning tobacco as if it were a hit of eternal life. 'Hey, I tried to tell her, but she didn't believe me. So I reckon it was either you or somebody who looked a lot like you.'

'You bastard.'

'When the eagle head of that cane knocked against your bone, I heard it clear across the house. Figured it served you right. Still, that wasn't no excuse to mess with her cane like that.'

'You're the one who snuck into their room and stole it.'

'As a favor. You're my brother.'

Jacob had a little pocket knife, a Case with two blades that their father had given him for a Christmas present. When Joshua brought him the cane that night, Jacob slid it under his blankets and kept it there until he heard Joshua snoring across the room. Jacob had intended to mar the cane in some way, maybe carve his initials or try to raise a few splinters to catch his mother's skin. But he'd found a soft vein in the wood near the bottom and he worked the knife deep into it, gouging until the cane had a little flexibility. Jacob thought maybe the cane would crack as Momma swung it at him and missed. He never dreamed it would give way while she was descending from the top of the stairs.

An accident, they had said. Warren Wells was the one who found her, sprawled and twisted at the bottom of the stairs, one shattered leg poking through a broken baluster. Dad didn't scream or moan or even shed a tear. He didn't bother calling 9-1-1. With the calmness of an undertaker, he had called the sheriff's department and then the ambulance service, telling them not to hurry. He seemed more upset over the broken baluster than over his wife's death.

She was insured for two million, after all.

'I didn't mean for her to get hurt,' Jacob said.

'That's a good one. Ever notice how everybody close to you ends up getting hurt sooner or later? And never on purpose?'

'Except you. I could never hurt you enough, and you're the only one I ever wanted to kill.'

Jacob looked out the window at the top of the barn. The morning sun caught the hills beyond the house, capped them with the golden anger of dawn. The light glinted off the barn's tin roof and the drops of dew that lay across the surrounding meadows sparkled like leaky diamonds. As a child, Jacob had often awakened before anyone else in the house, even his insomniac mother, and he would go out into the fields alone to breathe the air of an unspoiled day.

'When's the last time you visited her grave?' Joshua said.

Jacob realized Joshua was staring at the family cemetery on the top of the ridge, where a few stone markers were fenced off from the cattle. Cemeteries required permanent easements. The land could never be used unless the bodies were disinterred and moved to other resting places. When Jacob had learned of that legal detail, he had forever become a believer in cremation. There were no laws governing the disposal of ashes, and such a send-off didn't damage real estate values.