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  DARKANSAS

  DARKANSAS

  A NOVEL

  JARRET MIDDLETON

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  DARKANSAS. Copyright © 2017, text by Jarret Middleton. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Middleton, J. R. D., 1985-author.

  Title: Darkansas / Jarret Middleton.

  Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017003741 | ISBN 9781945814297

  Subjects: LCSH: Family secrets--Fiction. | Twin brothers--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.I359 D37 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003741

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-945814-53-2

  First US edition: August 2017

  Interior design by Michelle Dotter Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my brother, Brett,

  and for Rachel, always.

  Blood a necklace on me all my life.

  —Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works

  of Billy the Kid

  The fact is

  gods love to be honored by men.

  —Euripides, Hippolytos

  COLD CELESTIAL SKY OPENED above the wilds of a long-forgotten grove. Several sylvan acres away lay an awkward bit of Ozarks land fit for farming and raising up a hearty clan named Bayne. Occupiers of the property for every hard year of two or so hundred, they came to be put in that ground for every reason that existed for dying.

  Not long after its bloody inception, that place began to fade with the wear of time. A canopy of trees smothered the grove within its shade and separated it from the farthest reaches of the house, the road, and the surrounding county. Sugar maple, pine, oak, and elm grew strong against a meridian of tall grass. Tanglebrush and bramble spread across depressions and hills cut by jags of chert and barren plateaus of rock. The natural world thrived for most of a lifetime. That was, until the call of a culling warmed the soil.

  Each generation, a peculiar moon would rise. Ethereal women lurked in the waves of overgrowth, beating it back into rows, scythes raised as they tended their special crop. Long black dresses covered their bodies and bonnets concealed their pale faces, each carrying an oblong sack hung down her back. The grove not only grew in its recess upon the earth but it spread back and forth in time, glowing at the hour of its harvest, the shadows of the solemn women cast against the surrounding wall of trees.

  Jordan Bayne stepped out of the dark forest into the bounds of the grove. When his foot touched down in the soft vegetation, an alarm sounded in all directions. A blinding spotlight accompanied the pulsing siren. He could not see beyond the pale light but felt the whispering panic of the field maids. Those closest raised their heads and pinned Jordan beneath long stares. The women shuffled down the rows until they converged in groups that came straight toward him.

  Jordan turned to run back into the trees but his body moved heavy and slow. They kept gaining. He tripped in a gulley and turned over on his back. A horde of grim faces with burning black eyes closed in until Jordan was eclipsed by the tapestry of their habits. Then, in unison, the figments of night raised their scythes and brought their blades down upon him.

  ONE

  THE DREAM ENDED AND Jordan’s face creased with pain. A heavy blue shiner hung beneath his left eye. He swung out each leg and sat on the edge of the bed, his wrought skin the color of rained-on sand. Head bent low, he lit a cigarette and hacked. Watching the smoke he thought how, like a scorned lover, the body reacts poorly to neglect. In the sheets behind him, a mess of blonde hair stirred across a smooth shoulder stitched with skulls and sparrow wings, a trail of ink continuing down her naked body. He followed the tattoo back to the part of her face visible between hair and the pillow. Nothing reminded him of her name.

  In fact, not much came back after last night’s set at Bourbon & Boots, one of the most worn-out shitholes in all of San Antonio. Some prick had to go and point out how Jordan played guitar like his father. “I mean exactly, no two ways about it. You two is kindred, I tell you what,” the man had slurred. There was little that lit his blood more than that. It was true, of course, he just hated hearing it. If anybody cared to compare, Jordan’s presence on stage was a depressing spectacle when matched against the polish of his old man.

  His first chords rang from a Twin Reverb over the din of the drunks, then Jordan closed his eyes and leaned into the microphone. His occasionally accurate tenor came out like he had gravel in his throat. After two he broke, sipped a well drink, rolled his checkered sleeves, then got back stomping that hollow wood, wailing about gut-sick hours lost in some highway motel. A few couples danced beneath the lone light, and he wondered again why that asshole had to crack about his pa.

  He could Travis-pick his way out of a toilet stall faster than his father ever could. He could run those jaunty little Piedmont rags even if they were too lighthearted for a man of his ragged sensibilities. He could do it, though, which was the point. When he played on the couch at home on hot Texas nights, he fell in love with the brutal wind that blew from his chrome National. When he lingered too hard on fourths and minor sevens, bile kicked up the back of his tongue. Those diminished runs more often than not took an evening and drowned it in the river out of mercy. A far cry from the name in lights he always associated with his father. Jordan had been disappearing from the headline his whole life. Walker Bayne, “Mr. Bluegrass” from the Ozarks to Nashville and both coasts to Europe. He sang alongside country’s last heroes and sped across the South pitching perfect harmonies and garbling banjo rolls so fast they only translated on speed and corn whiskey in places they’re far from messing around about anything. So yes, he got his picking from that unreliable miser. His tune, too. Every Goddamned thing. But Jordan would never play one of his songs.

  The crowd had filled in and a smiling woman hoisted a drink through the dark. Jordan reached down and grabbed it before she disappeared back into the amorphous heap. Crowds and drunks bothered him on the rare night, like one in Phoenix four years ago, when a guy tried to make off with the entire microphone stand while it was still plugged in. Jordan caught him by the shirt and swung him around, arms out straight like a nervous prom date, kicked him once in the gut, doubling him over, then without thinking busted his nose, sending a thin film of blood across the stage. He recalled the silence that followed the fat man’s body crashing through the speakers. He had a good laugh about it later as he attempted to get comfortable for the night in his jail cell.

  Jordan wrapped up the set, laid his guitar in its case backstage, and walked back out front. The burly tender put up whiskey and water. Jordan emptied the drink and the bartender filled it again. Jordan hit it and exhaled. Sweat stuck brown tendrils of hair down the sides of his seamless scruff. His mind was empty and calm after performing. He slouched on planted elbows, the fist in his gut loosened, and in no time at all a good-looking woman was drawing out his bone-white laugh.

  Mae was half-Mexican and half-clothed. She kissed Jordan’s cheek and hung her warm hand around the back of his neck. “Aw-pahh,” she said, wiping her mouth. “You’re wetter than a dog.” She handed Jordan a shot, winked, then tipped hers to the ceiling. “Sunrises go down easy ’cause I ain’t got no gag reflex.”

  Jordan cocked an eye at her. “I don’t want to know nothin’ about that.”

  “Sure you do,” she said. Her breath climbed up the knots in his ne
ck. She asked if he was all right.

  They always ask that, he thought, trading a new sigh into a cold beer.

  A drunk named Skunk stared at Mae in the mirror behind the rack of bottles, his rotten-toothed mouth frozen with arousal, his odor impossible to ignore. It wasn’t street-level rank, just a lifetime spent being poor and soused. He edged an emaciated ass cheek onto an open stool and out of something like empathy Jordan ordered them both beers and Skunk the extra shot. He only had to suffer the unconvincing smile of the drunk, his eyes trained on keeping the liquid inside the rim of each glass as he shuffled away. Jordan got up and talked at a table with Marcos and Hernando, two stocky Salvadorans burnt the color of ink from twelve-hour days in a pepper field. He liked them because they were both good-humored and kind, and also because he had that job once, for less than a month eight or nine years ago, until one morning he went to pick up water and cigarettes and just kept driving.

  The three of them stepped outside to smoke. The humidity of late day had been tamed by night, and there was the blonde from his bed, lighting a cigarette by her car in low-cut boots, high shorts, and a ripped shirt slid off of one shoulder. They got to talking. After a time, not long, her lips were parted by a sultry whisper. “How much longer you staying tonight?”

  He stood from the bed, lit a Camel, and checked his cell. Just after noon and one message. Blue smoke trailed as he sat at the kitchen table and closed his eyes while the message played.

  “Ah just said I am. It’s ringin’ now,” a belligerent woman droned. “I’s only calling to wish the scumbag son of Newton County a sad and miserable evening. See, we all heard rumor your sorry no-good motherfuckin’ ass was gon’ be back here for your brother’s wedding.”

  Other voices contributed to the cacophony. “Better ain’t catch you back ere, faggit!”

  “Ah told you,” she explained to the ape at her side. “Brianna’s brother, who owns the Grocery Lot on 413—yeah, that one— they got insurance from that place Malcolm worked all them years. Any fuckin’ way, a group ah us was just here thinking back on what a useless piece of shit y’ar.”

  Disconcerting, how laughter grows heinous in groups.

  “Thar’s a table here, hell thar’s a whole bar a people that would just love to tell it to your face, but you ain’t been round here in years. An ah guess we’re all just real used to that. Get what I’m saying?”

  Growls and hollers and swipes for the phone. “Hey, tell that motherfucker,” a man began, drowned out by a loud scream. The woman’s voice distorted and Jordan wondered whether or not he knew her. He found it prescient how she cupped her hand around the receiver to make sure she was heard.

  “Ah’ll tell ’im, ah said ah’m telling ’im. If ah were you, ah’dn’t be showing your face. There’s plenty more trouble than you could ever cause back here waitin’.”

  The early morning sun had been beating the apartment for hours. Thin walls, cheap leather couch, yellowed blinds tinged with dust, table covered in garbage and ash, the bed and the girl all held the heat like a lung of wet smoke. Jordan pulled on jeans and a white T-shirt and opened the front door, pouring a river of fresh air along the tile floor up across the blonde’s porcelain body. She raised an eye as Jordan stuffed clothes from his dresser into a bag. The glass in the fridge door clinked. He leaned in head first and emerged with half a wrapped sandwich, a plastic container of strawberries, orange juice, and four bottles of Presidente.

  He bent over the bed and kissed her. She held his arm, running her hands over his broad shoulders and through his hair, crossing the mess of tissue that filled one side of his face with dried blood.

  “Oh, baby,” she said. “How’s the eye?” She put her lips on the contour of his bruise.

  “I’ve narrowed it down to a person or the floor that did it, not sure which one.”

  He tied his boots, then piled the bag of food, clothes, and his guitar case in the passenger seat of his truck. The screen door clapped again on his way back in as he searched the table for his sunglasses. A big pile of keys sang in his palm while he straightened a pile of mail, turned off a lamp, and ran his hand down the wall to turn off a power switch.

  “Where you off to?” she called from the bed.

  “Let yourself out whenever you like. Don’t rush on account of me or anything.”

  “You’re leaving me here?” She sat up, confused. “Well, what if I decide to stay?”

  “I don’t care what you do. You might have a week or two before the property manager comes around. He’s all right. His name is Juan. He plays chess.” Jordan stretched his back, doing his best to work out the pain still needling through his side. Behind his sunglasses, he paused to take in another beautiful girl he knew he would never see again. “I’m going home.”

  TWO

  IT WAS ODD TO say, but Malcolm Bayne had a talent for insurance. He got his start at seventeen when he begged for a job as a file clerk at a company called Ringgold a half hour from his house and had practiced nothing but that approximate science ever since. The way the industry calculated risk by breaking the world into categories like fault, force, and blame made a perverse amount of sense to him. Malcolm learned everything he could about his clients—income and debt, probate and penury, genetic predisposition and psychopathology—until he revealed the abhorrent truth behind each façade.

  Malcolm learned to trust his understanding of the almost imperceptible difference between calculated and unforeseen risks. An entire world of threats could be grouped together in a few predictable ways. Most were bound by some degree of commonality, only the rare case proved traumatic or inhumane. House fires, highway accidents, encephalitis. Rich housewives who gambled with matches, widowed spouses who’d lost the will to live. Each act exhibited a pattern. Even acts of God. What appeared to the world as a complex problem was revealed to Malcolm as a simple truth that could be dealt with, or at least easily mitigated. Every small victory over disorder brought its own satisfaction. The joy Malcolm found in his work came from that assurance. Not the presence of something positive, just the absence of fear.

  Thin and darkly serious, Malcolm pulled on the fat misplaced at the bottom of his cheeks. He stood with his back to the empty conference table, studying the liquid curve of his reflection in a wall of windows. The ninth floor of the Garnet building looked out on everything in Little Rock east of MacArthur Park to the river. An impress of clouds textured the sunlit glass in which Malcolm saw his boss charge in behind him, clapping enthusiastically.

  “What fresh hell you come from, boy?” His boss hugged him with desperate rigor as he snapped out of his contemplation. He motioned for Malcolm to follow him back to his office, where they stood in front of his desk and sipped coffee.

  “Your work on primary accounts really put us ahead this summer. Well-deserved time off, well-deserved. Too bad you have to spend it getting married.”

  Malcolm let his boss’s eruption of laughter at his own joke subside.

  “Where’s the ceremony again?”

  “Back home,” Malcolm told him. “Newton County. The house where I grew up, actually.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re up there on the Buffalo River.”

  “Not on the Buffalo, but it’s nearby,” said Malcolm.

  The boss pointed at Malcolm’s chest, swashing his coffee. “See, that’s smart. Janie and me had our wedding here in town. Small fortune, of course. Today? This economy?” He squinted at the ceiling and stopped talking as though he had unexpectedly come face to face with another, far graver notion. Then he asked how beautiful the country was out there.

  “It’s not the sort of place you go back that often. It’s not a place people leave, either. My family’s been on that land since the Civil War. Supposedly, it’s in our blood.”

  His boss stretched, exposing a triangle of heaving stomach under his striped shirt. “Hell, that long, it is your blood. The Bayne clan, couple of true Arkies.”

  Malcolm attended one last meeting under diffuse
halogen. He hurried back to his desk, powered down his computer, and wrangled loose papers into the fold of his leather bag. Lou, who worked across from him, avoided making eye contact through the open door. A miniature basketball hoop hung from the upholstered wall of his cubicle beside the football schedule of his alma mater. Malcolm stood at the corner of the partition, pressing down the plastic net and watching it spring back up again. “Hey, Lou,” he said in a hushed tone, “have fun watching the Razorbacks lose this weekend.”

  Lou swung his pleated legs from under his chair, politely asked an elderly woman to hold on the phone, covered his black goatee and the receiver and said, “Have fun getting married, pussy.”

  From an early age, Malcolm was at his best when he succeeded in beating back abstractions from his mind. When he and his twin brother Jordan were kids, they traded in skills and traits the other possessed—hunting for scouting, math for music, athletics for book smarts, logic for brute force. Jordan not only taught Malcolm how to fight, he even taught him how to play. Not how games were supposed to go, necessarily, but how to relax enough to let himself make believe. In turn, Malcolm urged him to avoid confrontations and stay out of trouble.

  The effort didn’t take, to say the least.

  By the time they were teenagers, they barely spoke. Jordan was beyond reproach and Malcolm was already wrenching free from the hills that raised him. Though obsession with constant progress was the engine that drove him, lately a storm of loud, pointless thoughts had seeped in and showed no signs of relenting. He blamed it on the stress of the wedding and perhaps, too, the prospect of returning home—though he would never admit it.

  His new townhouse stood lit on the edge of night. Malcolm parked and slouched in the driver’s seat long enough for the driveway motion light to switch back off. He loosened his tie and watched his fiancé Elizabeth framed in warm light in the window one story up, her face tapered like a hawk’s breast. Steam rose from the sink, condensing on the windowpane as she caressed a bowl beneath a steady stream of water.