Bread and Blood (pt 4).

Across the street a nigger is shuffling towards the Wonder plant: they go there at night to huddle up against the exhaust grates to stay warm and the guards give them burned bread they can’t sell. His old man used to be a delivery driver and he said it’s like with cats, if you feed them they never go away.

This one sees Dixie watching and hisses, hunching into his coats and hurrying out of the street lamp’s ring of light. My dad would have killed you, Dixie shouts after him, and then wonders why he said it.

He walks inside into the kitchen and leans against the sink. After his mom left him and his dad would stand here and eat sloppy meals over the drain, arguing about war: Dixie was for it and his dad said fuck that, he was in Vietnam and it wasn’t as bad as people said but killing gooks was like stepping on ants. If you kill somebody, he said, it makes you stronger than everybody, but what else you got in you, man?

There nothing, Dixie thinks. Nothing at all. Weeks ago he ran over a girl out way past her bedtime and he thought it would send him to hell, but it didn’t. In the Army he did a Thing to somebody, a thing so bad he just thinks of it as the Thing, and that didn’t send him to hell. What hell really is, is never getting to get there.

My dad is in hell, he thinks; he’s in the stairwell, touching drops of blood on the wall that say he went down pretty hard, and as busted up as he must have been he still got back to his room for how long it took. Snowing outside and the door wide open and nobody came by to see what was wrong because everybody was glad.

I’m supposed to do something, Dixie whimpers, his fear swallowing him like sleep and not letting go until the stairs are destroyed, the bannister smashed and the walls dented with his fists that are now split and bleeding. He’s better now; he turns the heat up until the windows are sweating and cloudy, stripping off his soaked shirt and leaving it on his dad’s recliner. There are knots of scars down half of his back that only two others have ever seen, though he told each a different lie about what happened: the real of it is that when he was fourteen he took his dad’s truck with his brother and sister on a joyride, and on Starlight Road he drove over the tracks too fast and rolled twice, and somebody died each time. But that did not send him to hell.

He holds his hands to his chest and starts up the stairs; he knows the places they creak and avoids them all, moving as silent as snow.