Desert Places (Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series 1)

“You put that in your mouth, boy, or I’ll twist your head off.”

Tears slide down my cheeks. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

“Boy, you take that now. And you do me good. Like you mean it. And mind those braces.”

The moist bulbous head of his c**k touches my lips, and I take it for a full minute.

A grapefruit-size rock drops beside me into the water, and Willard staggers back into the opposite wall and sinks down into a sitting position in the water. He’s dazed, and I don’t understand what’s happened until I see Orson’s hand lift the rock back out of the water.

Because Willard is holding his left temple, he never sees Orson wind up again. The rock strikes him dead in the face this time, and I hear the fracture of bone. The man’s face is purple now, rearranged. On his hands and knees, he struggles toward the mouth of the tunnel. Taking the rock again, Orson mounts him, like we used to ride on our father’s back, and brings the granite down into the man’s skull. Willard sustains four blows before his arms give out.

With both hands, Orson lifts the rock up high and dashes the man’s head out like a piece of soft fruit. When he’s finished, he turns to me, still astride Willard, his face speckled with blood and pulp.

“Wanna hit him some?” he asks, though there isn’t much left to hit.

“No.”

He lobs the rock into the pool and comes over and sits down beside me. I lean over and vomit. When I sit back up, I ask him, “What’d he do to you?”

“Put his thing in my butt.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Look at what else.” Orson shows me his tiny penis. There’s a blister on the end, and it makes me cry to see it.

I walk over to Willard and roll him over. He doesn’t have a face. His skull reminds me of a cracked watermelon shell. I find the soggy pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. The lighter’s inside the pack, so I take it, along with one cigarette, and sit back down beside my brother. Lighting the cigarette, I pull down my pants and brand myself.

“We’re still the same,” I say, whimpering as the pain comes on.

Willard Bass was a fly buffet when the dogs found him. Though our parents forbade us from playing in the woods for the remainder of the summer, they never seemed to notice that their sons had been hollowed.

It’s funny. I don’t remember forgetting.

Silence reigned for a long time after Orson finished. The darkness inside the car became complete, and the storm raged on.

“Guess you think that explains a lot,” I said.

“No. You want to know what I think? I think if you and I had never gone into that tunnel, we’d still be in this desert. I am not who I am because I was raped when I was twelve. Willard Bass was just gas on my fire. When will you see it?”

“What?”

“What’s really in you.”

“I do see it, Orson.”

“And?”

“And I hate it. I fear it. I respect it. And if I thought for a moment it could ever control me, I’d put a gun in my mouth. Time for your injection.”

33

WHEN I woke up, I didn’t hear the wind. The clock read 10:00 a.m. Orson was breathing heavily, and though I shook him, he wouldn’t stir.

It had grown uncomfortably hot inside the car, so I shut the vents. I turned the windshield wipers on, and they knocked off a wedge of snow. The sun shone into the front seat with eye-splitting brilliance.

The snow depth had risen above the hood, and as I stared out across the white desert, I saw only an occasional tangle of mature sagebrush poking up through the snow. The sky was orchid blue.

I saw a white ridge several miles ahead, and I wondered if it was the same one that rose behind the cabin and the shed.

Watching my brother sleep in the passenger seat, I felt a knot swell in my stomach. Bastard. I’d dreamed about Willard Bass making me take it. The rage lingered, festering in my gut, and the more I shunned it, the more it swelled. He should not have done that to me.

“Orson, wake up!” I slapped his face, and his eyes opened.

“Oh my,” he mumbled, sitting up. “There’s three feet on the ground.” Orson cracked his neck. “Roll down my window.” A clump of snow fell onto Orson’s lap as the glass lowered into the door. “I see the cabin,” he said.

“Where?”

“Two black specks on the horizon.”

I squinted through the passenger window. “Are you sure that’s it?”

“There isn’t another structure within fifteen miles.”

“How far is it?”

“A mile or two.”

I reached into the backseat, grabbed an armful of clothes from the suitcases, and dropped them on the console between Orson and me. “I’m gonna let you out of the cuffs till we reach the cabin.”

“We’re going now?” he asked, incredulous. “There’s no way we’ll make it.”

“Orson, we can see it. We got less than a quarter of a tank of gas left. That’s not enough for another night of heat, and what if there’s another storm coming? We’re going.”

“Any of these clothes waterproof?”

“No.”

“Then forget it. That ice will saturate cotton, and it’ll take us several hours at least to reach the cabin in snow this deep. Ever heard of frostbite?”

“I’ll risk it. I’m not staying in this car another night with you.”

I dug the handcuff key out of my pocket.

“I’m sorry I told you about Willard,” he said. “Andy?”

“What?”

“You gonna forget again?”

“Don’t say another f**king word to me.”

The snow came up just shy of my waist. I’d never walked in snow so deep that each step required you to expend the energy of a toddler climbing a staircase. I made Orson walk several yards ahead of me, and, just as he’d predicted, we hadn’t taken fifty awkward steps before the ice began to soak through the layers of my khakis and sweatpants. We’d gone a quarter of a mile when the initial icy burn set in above my knees, like a swarm of needles poking in and out of my raw red skin. It hurt to walk. It hurt to stand still, and by the time we’d hiked a mile through the snow, even my eyes burned from the sunny crystal glare. I wondered how I could possibly reach that minuscule black dot, which still seemed a fixture on the horizon.

Orson trudged on at his tireless gait, showing no sign of pain or fatigue. The burning in my legs had grown so unendurable that my forehead broke out into a cold sweat.