Base Matter

 The boy was halfway down the stairs when he heard the door to Mamma’s bedroom open. He heard a man step onto the landing and Mamma murmuring from somewhere far away. The boy stood staring at his feet, waiting for something; he didn’t know what.

There was a sharp, echoing crack from outside.

He didn’t dare look up. He remembered the last man he’d seen, big and naked on the creaking landing. Curls of matted hair. Penis glued to a milky thigh. Milky belly shaking. No face. He remembered the grotesque mystery, born behind closed doors, something that should have stayed there.

Crack.

Jack bolted down the stairs. He heard the man's thudding steps cross the landing and the door of the bathroom open and shut. I better not tell Ben, he thought. In the living room to his left, Cora was splayed out in front of the television, limp and motionless as a doll. He poked his head through the door, waiting for her to turn. She did not.

“I was on the roof, looking at the dove’s nest,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“The Mamma dove wasn’t there, but her babies was fine.”

He’d taken one in the palm of his hand and tossed it off to see if it would fly; and when it didn’t, he threw the others with it, one-by-one, and now there were none left.

“That's good.”

“Yeah, I went up earlier.” Around the side of the house, he heard Ben going crack, crack, crack at his workbench. “That’s Ben. He been working all morning?”

“I guess,” Cora said, shrugging.

“Ben’s real strong, isn’t he? He’s getting big. I’ll bet soon enough he’ll be able to fight anyone.”

“I guess.”

“Don’t you care, Cora? Don’t you care about Ben?”

Jack went out the front door into the heavy summer air. He was wearing nothing but his drawers and a white tee that needed washing. The tall grass scratched his legs, flinging droplets of water as he waded through to the half-collapsed eave by the cellar, wincing as he padded across pools of sunlight. He was quick and misfitted, a creature from some dark, orderless realm.

Crack, crack, crack.

Ben kept his tools and scrap wood on the table he'd made a month ago, covering them in a green tarp when he wasn’t working. He was stripped shirtless, frozen with the hammer raised, and did not turn when Jack said his name. He struck the panel like a snake lunging to bite.

“Ben...”

His brother cast aside one board and picked up another. Last summer he'd built a treehouse that the whole neighborhood used, but now Jack could see no design or purpose to what he was doing, other than that it was a kind of primitive language for him, a ritual of brute articulation with which he called to or answered the clamor of a universe he didn’t understand. Jack didn’t understand. Why? Why does he beat the second board until it is splintered and then cast it aside too? He was better at building things than most grown men. At least, he usually was.

“What’re you doing, anyway?” Jack said.

Ben grunted. His body was sheened with sweat. When he lifted his arm, Jack noted a light, mossy down in his armpits and a shadow on his lip.

“What’re you doing?”

Crack.

“Wanna go to the quarry today? Wanna take Cora?”

Crack.

“I didn’t want to tell you, but she’s . . . even when they said she shouldn’t. Hell, what’re you doing, Ben?”

Crack.

“What do you want to do?”

Jack looked down the garden over the long grass and through the haze above the brook, then to the brown stacked buildings around the fields where they used to play before the city put a fence around them and some contractors dug a huge pit. Ben would make a good contractor. He was a better builder than anyone Jack knew, and not long ago he’d been best at wrestling and chasing and hiding on the fields around the forest. It was their forest, and Ben made sure nobody bothered them, not even the kids across the quarry; not even if it meant a bloody nose and all kinds of trouble. That wasn’t so long ago. Not so long ago, they were all together, and Cora was up on Ben’s shoulders, and they were wading ankle-deep in the stream after the spring rain, which made the water fast and heavy, in Jack’s mind a torrent unleashed by primal forces at once terrible and sublime.

“You think we should go out, Ben? Go somewhere today?”

Crack.

Jack examined his brother intently. His brother was the kind that seemed made for wherever he happened to be at any given time; as if he’d always been in just that place, doing just that thing, inextricably bound to it; you couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. He had stopped working and was wiping his face with a balled-up t-shirt.

“Where’s Cora?” he said.

“She’s just watching cartoons.”

“What time is it?”

“About ten.”

“It’s too early, is what it is.”

He pushed past Jack, round the side of the house, tossing the hammer from hand to hand.

“Are you angry, Ben?”

Mr. Spine stuck his head out the window, leering down as they approached the back entrance.

“How’s your Mamma?” he said, whistling through the gaps in his front teeth. “She never takes a day off, does she?”

Ben froze in the kitchen doorway with his head cocked, listening for a moment. Spine, evidently disappointed by what he perceived as indifference, spat into the yard and drew back savagely.

“Just make sure you keep down all that hammering and banging, okay?”

They went through the kitchen and into the living room, and Ben crouched by Cora, reaching out to ruffle her muddy blond hair. There was a thud directly above them. The man’s voice. Their mother’s voice. Unsettling laughter, high but mirthless. Jack looked up as if he half expected something monstrous to come collapsing through the ceiling.

“He was buck naked just standing there,” Jack said to nobody in particular. “He was real ugly. I remember the last time.”

He dropped from the sofa and scrambled towards the television. “What show is this?” he said. “What show is it, Cora?”

“It’s Charlie Rat.”

“Sure, but which one?”

“You know,” Cora said. “Quit teasing me.”

“I’m not teasing you,” Jack said. “I never tease you.” He prodded her arm.

“Leave her be,” Ben growled.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Stop bothering her.”

Ben took care of them both. Now, he was watching Cora closely, chewing on his bottom lip as secret thoughts moved darkly through his mind. Jack watched to see if he could catch a glimpse of them in the way Ben moved, in the fixed intensity of his eyes; they were like the strange fish he sometimes saw beneath the surface of the stream, creatures that seemed like they shouldn’t be real. Cora paid her brothers little mind. She sat cross-legged, gazing at the old television with such intent in her glassy blue eyes that she probably wouldn’t have noticed the room catch fire. And yet silently, without looking away from the cartoon, she’d taken Ben’s hand and was stroking his palm gently with her fingers. It was an entirely natural gesture. She could make it because she was five and love came effortlessly to her, and expressing it didn’t require thinking or desiring, or even needing anything more complicated than your attention. Jack tried to take her other hand. She pulled it away.

There was a thud from above, a muffled sob followed by the steady murmur of a man’s voice.

“I’ll bet that’s them doing it,” Jack said, looking at Cora and grinning.

“Huh?”

“It’s nothing,” Ben said. “Look what Charlie’s doing now.” He shot Jack a murderous glare.

“We could go to the fields,” Jack said. “We could all go to the river together. You never go anymore, Ben. We could swim.” He felt a strange sadness move through his bones.

Cora’s expression was ponderous, almost severe. She gazed at the screen. “I’m just watching is all.”

“She ain’t allowed to go to the river,” Ben said. “We’d just lose her.”

“You could look after her, though.”

“No.”

“We should go to the river.”

“No.”

Jack didn’t know anything. He knew nothing would go on forever. Everything real has a beginning and an end. I am getting older and Ben is older, and he’s bigger and stronger than he was, and his body is almost like a man’s, but not like the man that I saw through the dust on the stairs that time not so long ago. We’re all together now, and nothing goes on and on unless it isn't real. He started to laugh. I threw them birds off the roof, I did. He was laughing.

There was more muffled conversation from upstairs, then heavy footsteps, and a strange, shrill cry that beat and battered all the peace from the air. All those men. They knocked the ice around in their glasses and looked at Jack with small, wet eyes. They emptied Jack out and made him feel lonely. He was grinning. He could picture their small wet eyes, lined up in the darkness like the raccoons they saw in the garden at night. They were not supposed to —come—everybody said it. Aunt Sally said it. Mamma’s minister, Mr. Reacher. Even a doctor had said it, once. They weren’t supposed to come here. But she cannot help it, Aunt Sally whispered. She can’t help herself, the poor girl.

Ben stood. He paused for a moment, then turned quite calmly, quite deliberately, to the table next to the television stand, raising the hammer and then swinging it down hard with only a second’s pause before Jack could even open his mouth to form a hopeless protest. The blow sent a long-splintered fissure across the surface of the wood and a crack into the air. Picture frames fell from the wall, and a vase toppled, strewing wilted flowers. But it was not quite the robust sound that he’d managed outside, more hollow and vibrating this time, frail against the steady whirr of the house. He paused and looked at the ceiling as if he might get a direct, decisive answer from above.

“Why’d you go and do that,” Jack said, staring at the smashed picture frames, the limp, half-dead roses, like bodies scattered after an act of God.

“I don’t know,” Ben said, shrugging. “I really don’t.”

 There were dangerous fragments all over the grubby carpet.

“He was mad about something,” Cora said. “Wasn’t you, Ben? What was you mad at?”

“Nothing,” Ben said, examining the hammer as if he might find the answer there. He bent by Cora and stroked her soft, red cheek.

“You’re fine, aren’t you?” he said. “She doesn’t even notice.”

“I’m hungry,” Cora said, stretching her arms and yawning. “I didn’t get any breakfast.”

Ben tensed. “She didn’t get any breakfast. Nobody got her breakfast.” He stood, swinging his arms, the hammer moving like a metronome.

“I could’ve,” Jack said. “But I didn’t think to. You should’ve got her breakfast, Ben.”

“I ate an apple,” Cora said.

“She ate an apple,” Ben said. “Someone got her an apple, so it’s okay.” Jack watched as his brother drifted into the hall and began up the stairs, taking short steps, one at a time.

“What are you doing, Ben?”

They went up the stairs.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben? Are you gonna do something bad?”

His brother stopped abruptly, just as their heads were drawing level with the landing. “We could go down to the river,” Jack whispered. “Or, you can go up if you have to.” He was frightened and excited at the same time.

His brother was a step above, his body still shining with sweat. Light from the slatted windows made ribbons and pearls over his bronzed skin as if he were some cheap ornament on display. The light moved slowly as clouds passed across the sun outside.

“I don't hear anything now, anyway. He must have gone.”

Ben leaned over the banister, letting a long rope of spit fall from his mouth onto the dirty floorboards below.

“We can go up together,” Jack said. “I’ll have your back and you’ll have mine.”

Ben stared at him blankly for a moment, close enough now that Jack could smell his sweat, and the still-boyish loam of his flesh, the wet wood and grass.

“Why’d you come up here?” Jack said.

“What if I crack him?” Ben said. “What if I beat his head with this hammer, tell him to go away and not come back?”

They always came back.  It was a different one every time. They were dumb and loud, but it wasn’t their fault. And it wasn’t their mother’s fault, either. Jack didn’t know whose fault it was. They were just loud and stupid, or sullen and mean; but if she was busy with them, she wasn’t flying around wailing about the angels.

“You wouldn’t hurt Mamma, would you?” Jack said.

“Not her,” Ben said. “She’s just . . . Not her, anyway.”

“But Ben, you’re just a kid.” Jack felt a tightness in his gut, a strange heat on his hands. “Aunt Sally says we best just leave her alone. She told me once. It was a secret; she said that since Dad went to the Moon, Mamma needs space and time to…time to...” He couldn’t remember exactly what Sally had said. “Well, she told me we should just leave her be.”

“Fuck Aunt Sally,” Ben said. “Aunt Sally’s no better than us, and she knows it.”

“She said we shouldn’t upset her.”

“Aunt Sally’s a drunk. She thinks a lot of herself, but she’s really just a drunk. And our Old Man didn’t go to the moon, you dumbass; how stupid are you, for Christ’s sake? He’s two towns over with his other kids.”

“His other kids?”

Jack looked at the bedroom door again. The sound of whispered conversation drifted steadily into the heavy air, so low you couldn't be sure you were hearing anything. Ben took a breath and went onto the landing, striding down with the hammer held out in front of him. His thin lips were set in a hard line, and he was outside the door and about to open it, or hit it, or whatever else he had planned. He seemed too small on the landing by himself, smaller than Jack had ever seen, and at the same time filled up with something, like when it’s only drizzling, but the clouds are black and you know the sky’s full up with a storm. For a moment, he stood with his shoulders up and his whole body pulled tight, and Jack wanted him to go into the bedroom, and he did not want him to go in.

“What’re you gonna do, Ben?” he whispered.

Ben looked back, his face a mix of shame and rage, the rage tightening to a sharp point in his eyes. It was the way their mother looked when she was in one of her frenzies. He had her flat, delicate features, the intense blue of her eyes, the same wild, mercurial energy. He just held it in better.  He flung open the door and went inside, slamming it shut behind him. The silence on the landing was deafening. For a moment, Jack just stood. Then he ran to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against it. The sound of blood in his head made it hard to hear anything; just muffled conversation, a sob, laughter, another sob, a man raising his voice; the words remained as senseless as ever.  A long time passed. He heard one voice, then another, then the steady drone of three together. The door opened and Ben pushed past. In the dark bedroom, Jack could see the stranger sitting straight-backed on the chair by the window, a broad-chested man in black pants and a stiff white shirt. A minister’s stole gleamed around his throat like a colorless eye. He was watching Jack fixedly, his expression sour and somber, lifeless as if made from wax. Their mother sat cross-legged on the bed with her hand out for someone to hold.

“Is that Jacky, out there?” she said. “Come hold Mamma’s hand, Jacky. Come in, honey. Come to Mamma.”

“Come pray with your mother,” the minister said.

“I can’t,” Jack said, taking a step forward. “I can’t. It’s just stupid. Did Ben do it?”

“Come now, Jacky. Come to your Mamma.”

“Did Ben do it, Mamma? Did Ben pray?”

“My babies are still with me—you see, Mr. Reacher? They still come to see their Mamma.”

“I can’t do it,” Jack said. He shut the door and went to the top of the stairway. He saw Ben standing sullenly in the entrance to the living room, still carrying the hammer as if it were an extra appendage. But it had lost all its menace now; all the danger had drained away and it was little more than a toy. It made Jack want to laugh.

“Come outside with us,” Ben said to Cora. “Come on, you can’t stay inside all day.”

“I’m just watching,” she said.

“You gotta come out, Cora. It’s bad for your eyes to sit like this.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“Fuck the both of you, then,” he roared. “Fuck all of you—the both of you upstairs as well.”

He went into the garden, slamming the door so hard that another of the picture frames fell from the wall.

Jack went down and picked it up, shaking the glass from its face, brushing off shards from the faded image. There was a baby gathered in a woman’s arms with the ocean in the background and a strange smiling frown looking out from under her sun hat. It took him a moment staring at it to realize it was just the stock image that had come with the frame. Someone had just forgotten, or never bothered to swap it out. He tore the picture in two and bent by Cora.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t do nothing,” he said. “You don’t have to worry.”

She nodded, her eyes still not leaving the screen.

“You don’t have to worry.” He said, suddenly taking a handful of her hair and tugging it savagely so that her whole head snapped back and she was looking at him upside down. “I’ll be right here,” he said, his whole body shaking with senseless rage. “Ben’s too big now, and he has to worry about more important things.” He stood and stretched. What was there to do after all that? What should he do now?

He left Cora crying and went out into the garden. He saw Ben at the back, standing by the ditch where the polluted stream ran along a mossy gutter. Sometimes they would challenge each other to jump over it, one or the other, usually Jack, ending up ass flat in the filth. His brother's laughter would rake the air for a few moments before he jumped down to help. Then Jack would be crying. Then they would both be laughing, thrashing around in the mud.

He went across the yard, chased by Cora’s steady, but receding wailing. Everything was badly overgrown, and the grass went up to his waist, spiteful and scratching as he waded through it. He stood staring at his brother’s ropy back.

“What did he tell you?” Jack said. “Was it Mister Reacher, Ben? What did he make you do?”

“Nothing,” Ben said.

“Did he make you pray?”

 “He didn’t have a chance. I hit him straight away. I killed them both.”

“I saw, Ben. You didn’t. I saw it was just the minister.”

His brother spat savagely into the water. If he heard Cora’s wails, he was ignoring them.

"I really thought it was one of the other ones,” Jack said, feeling empty and angry and grateful inside. “I wanted you to hit him, but it was probably best you didn’t. You shouldn’t hit a preacher, should you?”

Ben said nothing.

"Would you have hit one of the other ones, Ben? Would you have done it? I’ll bet you would.”

The older boy turned, his features twitching, examining Jack as if he didn't understand what he was seeing; maybe just the raw substance of things, just the flesh and violence from which they'd both been divined, all of it laid out neatly for them to fail to understand. It seemed to confuse him and make him mad, and maybe a little afraid; all these feelings were happening on his face at once. It was nothing more or less than what they were, all just parts in a sequence of reflections that showed the same thing again and again. Blood makes blood, and there’s no escaping it.

Ben swung his fist hard and caught Jack square on the nose, sending the younger boy a few steps back before he toppled into the long grass. Only a patch of russet hair was visible over the stalks. There was an aching thunderous roar in his ears, then a protracted stretch of silence, disturbed only by a chorus of insects, which was, in its absolute unity, a kind of quiet itself. Ben took the hammer from where he’d dropped it, and stood over Jack, a black shape against the sky. He looked as confused as ever, even as he raised the hammer and held it against the branches above.

It was senseless and Jack couldn’t bear to think about it—the preacher in his mother’s room, the men, Aunt Sally, the way Ben smashed and splintered all those spare boards for no reason. Senseless. His ears were full of the sound of insects, turning his head to the side, looking into the long, rippling grass where a dirty beer bottle lay half buried like some forgotten monolith in miniature. It was kind of peaceful now, kind of like nothing had happened, like he’d just stretched out in the sun to doze. 

“You can get the next one that comes around," Jack said softly. “I’ll bet you can. You’ll be big enough to beat him up good.” The grass was long and yellow at the top, and dark and wet where it met the soil. It moved gently in the breeze and its depths were safe and dark. When he turned his head again, Ben was gone.

He lay gazing up at the arms of the trees that stretched across his body like mourners praying over a corpse. He felt the blood flow three ways down his chin and both his cheeks, and then dry and harden in the breeze. Some strange amount of time must have passed. He heard the birds playing in the trees, saw baby doves falling frozen from the roof, their wings too frail to beat their small bodies into flight. He lay peacefully, forgetfully. Then he heard the steady crack, crack, crack of the hammer beginning again, as if nothing had happened and no time had passed, as if it had all been just thoughts in his head. The sound no longer seemed entirely real.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.