West Virginia. Joe Halstead
he said. “You should be president.”
“It’s just that I’m so scared sometimes and I think maybe—I mean maybe I’m next, maybe I’ll just be running through the park and that guy, or some other guy, or an out-of-control taxi, will come up behind me, and what will my life have been for? I don’t have a family, or children—I’m nearing thirty. It’s easy to make a joke out of what happened to that runner because it didn’t happen to us, but—”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I understand.”
He hated when people got dramatic, so he started scrolling through her Instagram on his iPhone and saw pictures of empty rooms and animal heads.
“So,” he said, “where’re you from?”
She laughed. “Adelaide—south Australia. I really miss it. I’ve thought about going back. You’re from Virginia, you said? Like Charlie Manson?”
“Yeah. Well, not exactly. West Virginia, same as Manson, so…”
“Scary. Do you get back much?”
“Couple times.”
“Since?”
He shrugged this time. The last time he went home was for a long weekend to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. The scene came back to him: eating steaks at a sports bar with his father, the empty pitchers on the table, the particular way they had of addressing each other. Jamie said, “How’re things down here,” and his father said, “Place ain’t changed since last time,” and Jamie said, “And Mom?” And his father said, “Usual.” He said, “What’re you writin’ now?” and Jamie told him, “Nothing really, not at the moment.” And his father said, “You write some of the prettiest things,” and Jamie couldn’t really remember what else he’d said, but it was obvious he wanted to say a lot of things—the most important one being something about home—and his father sighed and said, “You’re gettin’ the feeling you want to move, right? You’re realizing that you need to come home but now you’re wonderin’ if you can, right?”
Quicksand in one of them old Tarzan movies.
“You don’t think you should go see how your family is?” Laura said.
“I was like completely taken aback by it, y’know? And I haven’t been there in so long.”
“Well, then, you just have to decide if it’s worth going back to.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time and he heard the sounds of the endless traffic outside, and he realized there were too many things he didn’t understand the meaning of anymore and he felt worlds away from all that shit. He smoked some of a cigarette.
“Say you could live in any time and be anything, what would you be?”
“What would you be?”
“Someone normal.”
She asked him what was the worst thing he’d ever done.
And so he told the story of the dog.
GROWING UP, Jamie’s best friend was Kenny Bennett. Kenny was a redneck and he talked about how he wanted to be one of the two toughest rednecks in school (“next to Adam Young”), even though he was kind of a pussy, even though they were all rednecks, and Jamie had a suspicion that Kenny wouldn’t let the aspiration go until he did something drastic.
It came at the end of seventh grade. Jamie was in a sleeping bag in Kenny’s backyard, drunk for the first time in his life, listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and he was feeling pretty sick and he tried to pretend that Kenny didn’t say anything, but then Kenny said it again: “Look at how big my dick is, everbody, quick, look.” He was in his sleeping bag and wearing a Mountain Dew T-shirt, Taco Bell sauce in the corners of his mouth, and his knee was pointed upward like a giant erection, and he pretended to masturbate, looking jumpy and excited, rubbing his knee boner, his eyes wide, a Dale Earnhardt hat stuck to the top of his skull.
“Y’all niggers have sapling dicks compared to me!” he cackled.
Tom Melvin, a “known faggot” among the boys because his hair was long and blond and his parents were college educated, was standing near the fire pit and he told Kenny to stop shouting “nigger” because it was the third time and a black person was going to hear him, and Kenny called Tom a dumb idiot because everyone knew West Virginia didn’t have any niggers, and then he asked Tom if he wanted to suck his dick and that he’d say “nigger” all he wanted, and Tom said no he didn’t want to suck Kenny’s dick because he “wasn’t a faggot,” and then a guy named Ben Patrick, a skinny fucker who thought himself a badass because his parents operated a funeral home and because he’d seen the naked corpse of the cheerleading captain who was killed in a car accident, laughed and said, “We gonna do somethin’, Kenny?”
“If Jamie’ll stop bein’ such a pussy,” Kenny said.
Jamie’s eyes rolled up. “Shut up, you fuckin’ little retard.”
Kenny sat on Jamie and started punching his head, and sometime after the fourth blow Jamie grabbed his arm and twisted it up behind his back but lost his balance, and they both fell to the ground and Kenny’s dog, Rocky, a black bull terrier, came up to where the boys were, but the fire was behind him and Jamie had to squint to see what it was.
“Rocky,” Kenny whispered.
Although Rocky was only five he looked older, and this was mostly due to the gunshot wound that’d mangled the left side of his head. He’d once been owned by the Bennetts’ neighbor, Carl Holden, who shot the dog with a .22 pistol. The bullet was deflected by Rocky’s skull and was lodged somewhere behind his ear. When Carl decided he couldn’t finish him off, he turned the .22 on himself. Kenny’s mother adopted the dog.
“Rocky,” Kenny said. “Let’s kill Rocky.”
Ben Patrick laughed and said, “You wanna kill your dog?” and even Tom Melvin started laughing with him and then Kenny said, “Let’s do it,” and then everyone got quiet.
Kenny had this dumb scary grin on his chipmunk face and he reached past Jamie into his backpack and pulled out some baling twine and a roll of M-88 firecrackers he’d gotten in Tennessee, and then he said that one of them would hold Rocky down and someone else would throw the firecrackers in his mouth and tie his snout with the twine. That was the plan. And suddenly Rocky was barking because Kenny was chasing him around the backyard, and Jamie groaned and got out of the sleeping bag again with the realization that he needed to prove something that night: that he could be just as heartless, just as cruel, as any boy from West Virginia. Kenny pinned Rocky and Rocky was moving his body around, trying to escape, and Jamie took the firecrackers and Ben Patrick handed him a lighter, and he didn’t want to see it when it happened so he turned his head and lit the firecrackers and threw them into Rocky’s mouth, and Kenny, laughing, tied Rocky’s mouth shut with the baling twine and then there was an explosion and Rocky was flipping around and his face looked like Daffy Duck after the exploding cigar and he was bleeding all over the grass. Ben Patrick said, “Oh shit,” and looked satisfied in a sad sort of way, and Tom Melvin started crying, and Kenny, still laughing, picked up a piece of Rocky’s skin from the grass and chased Tom around and then threw the tag of skin into Tom’s blond hair and Tom ran around trying to shake it out, and Kenny laughed, and Jamie’s hand was trembling and he tried to compose himself, and Ben Patrick looked over at him but he just looked away. He was about to leave when Kenny yelled something at him, and before Jamie knew it he was pinning Kenny by his sausage biceps and hitting him hard across the head and he wasn’t laughing anymore—he was crying—and after a while Kenny didn’t move and then Jamie sat there for a long time and watched Rocky limp off into the woods. Where he went Jamie didn’t exactly know, though he didn’t find it particularly hard to imagine.
The next night,