"Calm your ass down and let the man say his piece," the Rev said, a little too loudly and with a touch of uncharacteristic meanness that sounded strange coming from him. It sounded as fake and staged as Poke's sorry story, meant to please Roy's ears. He leaned in close, his lips brushing Emmit's earlobe.
"Keep your mouth shut, it won't do any good," he whispered, his voice scarcely more than hard stresses and the quiet sensation of his lips moving. "Poke is like his lieutenant, man. He's gonna take his side, don't make it worse."
Pup finally arrived, half-heartedly putting his hands on Emmit's heaving chest. All eyes were on Poke, and to Emmit, his injuries suddenly seemed much more severe, much more pronounced than they had been only a few moments before. Every wound he had given him seemed to scream for Roy's notice.
Roy held his open palm out to Poke.
Continue.
"He took his hammer and hit Muddy in the leg with it. He broke it so he couldn't run. Then he took off. I'm sorry Roy, but I followed after him. I couldn't save Muddy, not if he couldn't run, know what I mean?"
Emmit lunged forward, and the Rev gently pushed him back. His eyes were fierce, locked on Emmit's with a cautionary, fatherly intensity. He shook his head from side to side in one solid motion that felt like the period at the end of a sentence.
Don't, he said without saying it.
"Your face," Roy said, in an eerily calm voice that was robotic and monotone. "This blood. What happened?"
Poke shifted from foot to foot, looking like a mischievous child imprisoned in the principal's office. He was looking at the floor as he pointed to Emmit.
"When we got back, I gave him shit for it. I told him I was gonna tell you everything that happened, and he said he'd kill me if I did. Then he just started beating my face in, Boss."
Emmit was sick with rage, sick the way a man sometimes felt when he finally found himself alone in a back bedroom with a girl he had been obsessing over, and all she wanted to do was tease and play hard-to-get. The urge, the need, to beat Poke to death felt every bit as urgent and all-consuming as the burning desire for sex was when it reared its slathering head. It was animalistic, almost subhuman. He wanted nothing more than to sacrifice his own hands to the act of reducing Poke's face to runny oatmeal. His vivid, white-hot anger felt like being horny because it was something he desired, badly, even more than food and water, and he knew the act would feel oh, so good.
"Go stick your face in a snow drift," Roy said, still speaking in his emotionless answering machine voice. "It'll help with the swelling and it'll ease up some of the tension in here."
Poke gave an awkward wave and smirked, then let himself out without even dressing. He pushed the door shut gently behind him, as if a loud noise might detonate a bomb. There was a bomb in the room after all. And it was turning to stare Emmit down.
"You," he said. He crossed his massive arms, piling them on top of one another like felled trees. "You have a real funny way of saying 'thank you.'"
Emmit stared up at him, jaw clenched and eyes calm with a stoic acceptance. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and no matter how hard he fought, that wouldn't be changed. He felt like a condemned man being marched to the gallows, but the only crowd there to watch were the very same men restraining him.
"He didn't tell you the truth," Emmit said tonelessly. "I know you don't believe me, but Poke killed Muddy. He stabbed him in the leg, and—"
"Why should I believe you over someone who has been here with me, in this frozen fucking hellhole, for years? Poke has never gone behind my back. Not once. What's more logical, Papa? Poke suddenly goes rogue, or a newcomer..."
He suddenly lashed out and grabbed Emmit's chin with one vice-like hand, mashing his cheeks between his teeth as his jaws were forced open by Roy's thick, curled fingers. He jerked Emmit's face up to meet his. His breath smelled faintly of burnt meat.
"...a newcomer whose ass I saved and whose stomach I filled? And just who did that to his face? Did he do that to himself like Jim fucking Carrey?"
He released Emmit's chin, leaving a dim ache behind, and seized Emmit's hands. He spotted Emmit's busted hand and held it up as if Emmit might never have seen it before. The fingers were lifeless and limp. Defenseless.
"I suppose you did that jerking off in the corner over there."
He let it fall to Emmit's side like a dead salmon dangling from a hook.
Emmit felt a gentle squeeze on his emaciated bicep from the Reverend and it helped to quell the last of his fear, dispelling it like a priest casting a handful of wayward ghosts out of the dusty halls of some old manor house. Emmit stared Roy directly in his eyes, burning like twin headlamps in the darkness of the handprint that tarnished his face.
"Roy," he said, breathing easy and keeping his voice as steady as he could manage.
Take what's coming. He's not going to kill you. Take what's coming and live to escape later. Live to find the light. Live to see Deacon.
"What."
"I'm sorry about Muddy. Take that however you want to take
