Riprap

A woman sits on the riprap rocks. Little D has got his eye on her.

She trails her toes in the lake water, shifting her attention from a paperback to her children, a boy and a girl splashing in the shallows, orange floaties strapped to thin arms. The woman's hair is cut short, the brown wave of it at her chin. She's not dressed to swim. She's a small person, and the way she sits with her back curved and her shoulders rolled forward makes her seem all the smaller, almost a child herself. A flower-covered cloth tote of towels and three pairs of flip-flops are piled behind her, by her chunky, denim purse.

Every now and again, the woman scans the water, then turns quickly back to her book, as if she doesn't often get the chance. The light falls in hazy swaths through the high branches of firs and cedars. Below the dam, the river crashes and rumbles, regathers. And everywhere bright coolers and brighter swimsuits, voices and shouts, the building bustle and din of a Sunday morning at the lake. Families up from the suburbs organize shade tents and lawn chairs on the crescent moon of beach, older couples tote fishing poles and tackle boxes toward the docks, a knot of young men, likely from the state university, crack open the first beers of the day and laugh and jostle as they warm up at the horseshoe pits. And not a soul is paying any attention to Little D, a boy alone, a boy pretending he is not alone.

In his T-shirt and cutoffs, Little D charges into the lake, jumps and falls and comes up sputtering, the dark water so cold it somehow brightens in his bones. He shakes the wet from his head and waves to no one. He knows he looks younger than his fourteen years, that for his fair hair and smooth cheeks and general scrawniness he can still pretend. So he does. Little D jumps and splashes and—though this is the part he hates—turns and pulls a face, as if he’s been called in against his will. He trudges back up the sand and gravel, his path that much closer to the woman on the rocks. Her little girl, floaties so far above her elbows they force her chubby arms up and out, doesn’t know any better than to stare. And Little D almost thinks not to do it, just in case the little girl says something, just in case she remembers forever what he's about to do. But the woman's purse is right there, a faded blue against the black rocks. An easy swoop and grab—the woman doesn’t even turn—and Little D is off, weaving through the playground, the trees, the parking lot.

At the edge of the river road, Little D shoves his wet, dirty feet into his sneakers—he left them in the bar ditch this morning, right by the speed limit sign—and hightails it across the blacktop and lunges up the mountain, up through ditch weeds, vine maple, and fir saplings. He crests the ridge and slides down through salal and sword fern, plants his feet in creek mud, and stops to catch his breath, to listen.

Nothing but the gurgle of water, the swaying trees, his own hard-charging heart. Little D turns, purse straps slung over his shoulder, and trudges up the mud, stone, and pooling water of Nehemiah Creek.

Little D cases the lake most every day now, even school days. Before the mill closed and all the rules changed, though, he only got to skip school to help Big D, his Uncle Dixon, in the woods.

Little D remembers waking early and pissing out the back door, then making his way down the dark hallway to the kitchen, where there was a small cup of strong coffee and an oven-warmed Pop-tart on a plate. The dark lifted notch by notch as they drove, threads of fog in the ditches and valleys, in among the trees. Then the sigh of caulk boots in fir duff and mud. The scream of the saw.

They'd work for hours, stopping only at lunch to eat cheese sandwiches, peel hardboiled eggs. At the end of the day his uncle—tall, square-shouldered, thick, not at all like him—would slap him on the back.

“Come on, Little D,” his Uncle Dixon would say, “let's get us something to drink.”

The Slash Pile wasn't much on the outside—a low, windowless building in a clearing along the river road—but inside, it was always warm, the light ochre and gold, some dusty country song forever unspooling from the jukebox. They sat up at the bar on stools that spun all the way around, and Big D drank down a mug of Rainier while Little D sipped root beer through a straw, the sweet fizz wild in his mouth and throat. The bartender, a frowning, horse-faced woman, cigarette permanently lodged in the corner of her mouth, might slide Little D a stack of quarters for the jukebox or toss him a sack of peanuts, a package of chewing gum. The other men at the bar were all like Big D, broad-shouldered and loud, happy to be done for the day, happy for another day in the woods tomorrow.

Back at the trailer he and his uncle would shuck their caulk boots and overalls in the mudroom, wash their hands with pumice soap, then sit up to roast beef, hamburger steak, or salmon casserole. His older cousin Starla was in high school then, and with her stone-washed jeans and towering bangs, Little D thought she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. His two younger cousins, the twins, their hair as plain and straight as their older sister's was blond and big, would bring him his homework, fill him in on all the goings-on at recess. And his Aunt Trish, straight-backed and clear-eyed, as she would never be again, would set a final dish on the table—maybe a stack of buttered halves of white bread—and they'd sit up together like that, all six of them, for dinner.

A mile on, Little D hops the creek and scrambles up the steep west bank. He hauls himself over the nearly horizontal trunk of a leaning maple and up onto the flat rock above. From here, he can see down the creek a quarter of a mile, up likely as far, and the red cedar at his back shadows the rocky perch in all weathers. Here, he’s safe.

The purse has a magnetic clasp. Little D pops it open, then clicks it closed. Open, closed. Open, closed. He likes the drifty force of the magnets as you pull them apart, the clack as they come back together. He pops open the clasp a final time and roots around in the purse. Lip balm, breath mints, a small tube of greenish lotion, a wallet, a cold cylinder of pepper spray, a package of peanut butter crackers, a granola bar. Little D eats the granola bar—chocolate chip—in two quick bites, but savors the peanut butter crackers, nibbling a corner at a time as he sorts the purse’s further contents. Two pens, a yellow pencil without an eraser, a notepad from a bank in Portland, a number of hair pins and rubber bands, a pair of glasses in a tortoiseshell case, and—look at this!—a black, four-inch folding knife, the blade clearly never used and razor sharp to a thumb touch. In the wallet he finds two fifties, a couple of twenties, and a mess of fives and ones—Big D will be happy—and plenty of change, which Little D will be able to keep in the ice cream bucket on his dresser. He also finds two credit cards and a checkbook. Big D doesn't mess with the credit cards or checkbooks himself, but he's got a deal with someone who does. So they'll help. There's a punch card from a coffee shop, and one from an ice cream shop, and pictures of each of the children—the girl in a pile of autumn leaves, the boy hugging a fat, orange cat. He can't tell which one's older. Maybe they're twins, like his cousins. As always, he finds tampons and Tylenol, but in this purse, he finds at the very bottom a small Ziploc bag containing a swatch of wavy, blue-black hair. The boy holds the bag in front of him, works the hair with his fingers, the strange texture of it beneath the plastic. He thinks of the woman again, sitting just so on the rock, alone, toes rippling the cold water. It makes him sad about what he's done, and he's glad of the sadness. In among the roots of the cedar, he's hollowed out a little treasure hole, and he hides the Ziploc bag in there. Then he pockets the breath mints, pepper spray, and knife. He roots around in the purse once more, just to make sure, and shovels everything back in and clambers down.

Little D straddles the creek, muddy here with the runoff from the recent rains, and leans down and rinses his face and neck. Drips a moment among the sounds of stone, water, and in the trees the loud, liquid notes of some bird he doesn't know. He takes off running up the trail, which turns away from the creek and snakes up through Scotch broom, blackberry, and scrawny, thigh-high fir saplings and leads—though for the rising ridge he can't quite see it—to their trailer.

It got to be they finished the work day earlier and earlier, stayed at the Slash Pile longer and longer. Got to be Big D held him out of school for no reason at all. Got to be they'd drive around for hours, Big D looking at the woods, wishing.

People talked about the spotted owl. They spit when they did. They cursed Clinton and the goddamn Sierra Club and eco-terrorists. They complained about regulations and lawsuits and federal land. They squared their jaws, the little muscles around their eyes going haywire. But, too, there just weren't that many good trees left. Big D and Little D would drive up and down the river road, and it was all clear-cuts or stands of young, tightly-planted Doug-firs, evidence of former clearcuts. Around the lake, there was a scrim of thick, tall cedars and firs, but that was state park land. And high up in the mountains, deep in the wilderness, there were ancient Doug-firs, red cedars, and hemlocks. But you couldn't cut there, not anymore, and even if you could, you'd cut it, and it'd be gone, and then you'd be right back where you started. Little D turned it around and around in his mind. He didn't see any other way it could go. Which, beyond age and sheer size, was how he was so different from Big D. Little D had learned long ago—in those early years with his mother, mold shawling the walls of one crappy apartment or another, the useless stove knobs, the latest pock-cheeked boyfriend—that the world doesn't owe you anything.

Aunt Trish eventually found work at an office building in north Vancouver, as a janitor on the night shift, which meant no more family dinners, but she was making enough to put groceries in the fridge, to buy new shoes for the twins. It wasn't about the money though. Not to Big D. Big D said a man needed work. And so early one morning, they pulled on their caulk boots and tromped down to the creek. Big D had thirty acres of forest there, from the creek back up to the trailer—part of the original homestead—and though the trees were tall, they weren't ready yet. Big D's father had cut the homestead acreage after the farmhouse burned down, not quite thirty years ago, and many of the trees were just wrist thin.

Big D cranked the saw to life anyway, and together they cut their way up the ridge. In the limbing, the saw made such a mess of those whippy little trees that Big D had Little D go at them with his hatchet, the very hatchet Little D played mountain man with down on the creek. And that's what it felt like, like they were playing, pretending. The work, the woods, the men—all pretend.

Up the ridge, Little D wades through the replanting, most of the swishy tips tickling his knees. It's not woods, he thinks, but waves of green, the slappy, frothing kind that peal from behind a ski boat down on the lake and disappear. At the edge of the replanting, Little D squats down to study the trailer. The blue tarp roped over the north half of the roof, the tumbled cinder blocks below the back door, the gray vinyl faded to the hue of dusty highway gravel—no shade on the trailer at all since they cut the woods.

For the glare, Little D can't make out anything through the back window, though he can see that his uncle's truck is gone. And it's Sunday, which means the neighbors have likely hauled the twins to church in town—they've got five kids, two on either side of the twins—and his aunt, as she always is anymore, is either in bed or on the couch. It started slow, just aches and pains, but a year ago it got so bad his Aunt Trish couldn't work at all. She got benefits for a time. Then she didn't. All she does now is shuffle from bedroom to living room, is gulp down palmfuls of pills, is go to town every few weeks to get more pills. Little D decides he'll give his aunt the lotion and the lip balm. She likely won't tell Big D. And even if she did.

Little D rises, strides across the dirt yard, comes around the side of the trailer. Big D's dog, Tops, naps in the shade by the steps.

“Tops,” Little D says, “you're old and worthless.”

Tops blinks his cloudy eyes, farts, and lays his head back down again.

Little D steps over the dog and up the stairs, weeds blooming between loose gray boards. He's opening the screen door when he hears it—music.

The liquor was real though. Little D had his first that afternoon at the Slash Pile, after they cut the homestead acres. The bartender shrugged and poured Little D a shot of Old Crow, the look of it like dirty light. Big D grinned, showed him how to lift it.

“To woods work,” Big D said, and threw the whiskey down his throat. Little D did the same. Then nearly coughed up a lung. Big D pounded him on the back and laughed. Big D drank down another shot, then started slurping beer.

“They say we're gonna make our money on tourism now. Hell with that. That money's made down in Portland. Buying fancy hiking boots and doodads for the lake. I don't see that money. And I live here. That's what I'm talking about.” Big D slammed his thick hand down on the bar top. “I'm talking about folks who live here!”

The whiskey bloomed and kept blooming in Little D's gut. The heat of it rising through him like flames one moment, then falling the other way like water.

“You can't eat scenery,” Big D added, hefting his silver can. “You just goddamn can't.”

To keep the fire from spreading, the waves from lifting and slapping and drowning him, Little D closed his eyes and held on to the bar top.

“You know those folks having a good time down at that lake?” his uncle asked, though Little D knew he wasn't supposed to answer a question like this, was just supposed to let Big D talk. “They're not paying much attention, are they? And up in the mountains, at those trailheads? That's where they park their fancy cars and go off on their goddamn candy-assed adventures. I seen it with my own eyes. What d'you say, Little D? I say it's only our fair share.”

Little D lifted his head, nodded, and threw up everywhere.

Like it never is, the trailer's flooded with light, jangly music bouncing off the walls, his Aunt Trish sitting up on the couch. There's the reason: his cousin Starla dances across the kitchen floor. She turns, wooden spoon in her fist, and leans way back to lip-sync the song's final line, then relaxes forward, sees Little D, and smiles wide.

“Hey, Little D! Get over here and give your big cousin a hug!” She opens her arms and motions with both hands.

Little D is pleased, embarrassed, full of warm, fluttery wings. Staring at the floor, he drops the purse by the door and comes toward his cousin, lightly puts his arms around her. She pulls him close, squeezes hard.

“Oh, D! It's been too long! You're darn near as tall as me now!”

He isn't, but he likes that she says he is. The planes of her back are beneath his hands, press of her breasts at his cheek. The citrus and cigarette scent of her fills him as he breathes, as he pulls back and takes her in—tight jean shorts, a pink T-shirt that reads Certified Country in puffy white letters, and lots of bracelets and silver necklaces. She's got her big sunglasses on and her curly, white-blond hair cascades over her shoulders, bangs piled high and stiffened with hairspray. Hands on her hips, she smiles and shakes her head, then turns back to the kitchen counter.

“Here, grate this carrot for me. I'm making something healthy for you all. Carrot and zucchini muffins. I know how it sounds, but they're good. I promise.”

Little D takes the bowl, cheese grater, and carrot and clears a small space on the cluttered table and begins to grate. His aunt smiles from the couch, taps her fingers to the music.

“You're living up here like hermits,” Starla says. “My girlfriend dropped me off, and it was so dark and stuffy in here, and the fridge was about empty. I had to take Momma's car down to the convenience store at the RV park just to get some groceries.”

“Oh, now, we do okay,” Aunt Trish says and waves a hand at her daughter, as if batting that last comment away. “But it's sure nice to have you, Sweetie. Nice of you to make muffins.”

“Yeah,” Little D says, trying to make his voice deeper, huskier than it is. “Thanks for coming.”

Starla wraps Little D up in a one-handed hug, blows a smacking kiss to her mother. “Well, I just love coming home and seeing you all—I do!”

“How's Jason?” Trish asks, her voice full of that soft sing-song that means she just took her pills. “He still on at Cascade Steel?”

Starla bangs a whisk on the side of a metal bowl. “Jason's Jason. Cascade's been doing these rolling furloughs, so he's had some time these last months. But he's like Big D. Always got something going.”

Even if his aunt doesn't, Little D knows that's where the credit cards and checkbooks go, to Jason, who to Little D is mostly just a shadow waiting in a silver Trans Am, the one in the empty lot off the freeway. In fact, Little D doesn't know if he's ever actually talked with Jason, can't seem to get the man's features to come together in his mind. He remembers instead Starla's high school boyfriend, Randy. Lean, sharp-jawed, diamond stud in his left ear, Randy was the starting quarterback on the Woodland football team and the one who got Starla pregnant. Little D remembers Big D drunk and angry, remembers Starla's tears. He remembers, too, some months later—after Randy shipped out for basic training, after Starla decided she was going to keep the baby anyway, after they'd all kind of gotten used to the idea—he remembers the lake of blood on the bathroom floor, Starla on her hands and knees, shrieking. He was the one who found her, who woke Big D to drive her to the hospital. That was just before they cut the homestead acres, around the time Aunt Trish first started getting those pains in her back. Next thing Little D knew, Starla was moved down to Vancouver with this Jason, and Big D was pulling into that empty lot, telling Little D to slide over into the driver's seat and start the truck in five, even if he and Jason were still talking.

Trish starts to say something—maybe ask what a rolling furlough is, which Little D wonders as well—but Starla starts singing again, loud. And the guitars in the song are loud, too, and Little D scrapes the carrot across the grater and watches Starla—sway of her hips, swish of her hair, sunglasses sliding down her nose.

That first time, they went down to the lake together. Like everyone else they paid their five bucks to park in the lot, then lifted poles and a tackle box and a couple of five-gallon buckets to sit on from the back of the truck. They weren't in any rush. They surveyed the angle-parked cars and vans and SUVs, scouted around the horseshoe pits and volleyball courts, the playground and picnic tables and built-in grills. They considered the path around the lake, the beach, the riprap rocks, the dam.

Big D showed Little D how to click open the bail and pinch the line, how to swing back and fling the treble-hooked lure at the blue eye of the lake, letting loose at just the right time, so the line unspooled and arced and fell toward the water. Then you clicked the bail back over, waited a moment, and cranked the handle to draw the spinner through the lake. They fished like that a while, not really fishing but watching—Big D pointing out how families filled in across the beach, how kids splashed and played, how as the day wore on towels and toys and folding chairs got moved here and there and people wandered off to hike or nap in the shade or find the shitters, bags and totes forgotten in the sand. How, sun-bleary, they didn’t lock car doors when they went back for the other cooler, the toppers on the backs of pickups left up. How easy it would be, if you were careful, to go ahead and take whatever you thought looked good, looked nice.

“It's the principle of the thing,” his uncle said, zinging his line out over the water. “These woods are where we live.”

What principle was Big D talking about? Little D thought to ask, but just then the tip of his rod bounced and bent down and the line zipped into the lake. He thought something was wrong. What had he done wrong?

“That's a fish,” Big D yelled. “Reel him in!”

A huge silver fish broke the lake's surface and leaped and twisted and splashed back in. Like the line was tied around his ribs, Little D felt each veer and tug deep within him.

“Don't goddamn lose him,” his uncle kept yelling. “Bring him in!”

Little D helps his aunt hobble over to the kitchen table, and Starla sets out three plates, glasses for milk, and a dish of margarine. Little D slices a muffin down the middle and lets thick pats of margarine melt on both halves. Each bite is warm and rich. Sweet with a savory hint of graininess. He reaches for another.

“Told you they were good,” Starla says, and smiles. She leans back and lights a cigarette, blows smoke above their heads.

Little D finishes his third and would like to eat more but thinks he ought to save some for the twins and Big D. Aunt Trish is sensitive to light—like too much of anything anymore, it gives her headaches—and Little D pulls the curtains in the kitchen. The room goes dark and warm, the music droning and bouncing in the background. Little D leans back as well and laces his hands behind his head and waits for Starla to do whatever Starla will do next—but it's his aunt who starts talking.

“Did I ever tell you,” she says, muffin crumbs still stuck to her lips and chin, “about the day you came to stay with us?”

Little D isn't sure, at first, who she's talking to—she's closed her eyes, her face cocked at her empty plate—but then realizes it must be him. His heart whangs and scrabbles, his neck and face go splotchy, hot. He has lived here in the trailer so long it's just the way it is, even if he knows it's not, even if, somewhere in the pit of him, he knows his belonging in this family is once removed, especially when the fridge is empty, when there's not enough money for new shoes, when someone ought to stay home from school to make a little extra cash. Which is why Little D does whatever Big D tells him—in all the world, there's no place for him but here, and even here the binding thread is thin. Even here.

His aunt starts in on the rain, the way that early morning it seemed the whole sky was falling. Ropes of rain, buckets of rain. “But your Uncle Dixon said blood is thicker than water,” his aunt goes on, smiling, her eyes still closed. “I sure remember him saying that. I asked what he'd do if the road was washed out by the time he got back, and he said he'd figure it out. He said no matter what, he'd find a way.”

“You were so little!” Starla breaks in, grinning, stubbing her cigarette out on a plate. “You reminded me of one of my dolls. I just wanted to hug you and hug you.”

Just for something to do, Little D grabs another muffin and shoves it in his mouth. He both loves and hates this story, wants to hear it every day and never wants to hear it again. Aunt Trish is going on about how wet they were, the both of them soaked to the bone when Big D shouldered open the door—

And just as she says the word “door,” the trailer door jumps and rattles beneath someone's hard hand.

Little D had hooked into a lake trout about as long as one of his legs and twice as thick. Big D crowed and hollered and danced around and made sure to show everyone at the cleaning station how big a fish it was, the biggest that day. Little D was both pleased and embarrassed—and, too, he was worried, for all the fuss Big D was making, that some of the fishermen might remember him.

Big D showed him how to rip the knife up the belly and pull out the guts, how to shave the meat from the bones. They slopped the inside mess into the garbage and rinsed the pink-white fillets. They hadn't planned on bringing any fish home and had no cooler, not even a plastic grocery sack. Little D pillowed out his t-shirt, and Big D dropped the thick, floppy hunks of fish meat in there for the ride back up the mountain.

That evening, they dusted the trout fillets in flour and cornmeal and pan-fried them in bacon grease. Aunt Trish had put together a coleslaw, and the twins watched the oven, where they had frozen tater tots cooking. Big D kept shooing the twins out, so he could talk to Little D.

“Here's the most important part,” his uncle kept saying. “You hook a wallet or a purse, don't look inside. Bring it right back to me. That way, someone gets caught down the line—well, you're in the clear.”

Big D lifted the fillets with tongs and dropped them on the wadded up remains of an old grocery sack, the grease wicking off the fish, darkening the paper. Little D didn't think it worked like that. How would not knowing what was folded in a wallet or stuffed in a purse matter? Big D popped open another bottle of beer and clapped Little D on the back, clapped him so hard he stumbled.

“You know, I think my sister must have known. When she named you Dixon, she must have known. You're a good goddamn kid, Little D.” Big D took a great swallow of suds and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, continued. “Glad to be in business with you. Now, step to it. Grab yourself a beer, and let's get this fish on the table.”

The pounding is louder now, even louder than the bass beats in Starla's country music, and Little D watches Starla—a moment ago her hands in the air, face bright—melt back into herself.

“Where's Big D?” Starla’s voice has thinned, gone wavery. “Why isn't Big D home yet?”

Aunt Trish's eyes flap open, then sag back to half-mast. Little D scoots his chair out and stands up, but Starla puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Don't,” she says. “Don't open that goddamn door.” Starla circles the oval of the kitchen table and lifts the curtain, peeks out. “Fuck,” she says, and grabs at her pack of cigarettes. “Everyone just stay where you are. Don't say a thing. Okay?”

Starla blows a great cloud of smoke and pushes her bangs up off her forehead. She cracks the door, steps out. Darkness, then, and Little D is sitting there not knowing what to do. He hears Starla put on a big, happy voice. He hears the low rumble of a man respond. Aunt Trish has drifted off to wherever it is the medication takes her.

Now Tops starts barking, and Starla is saying no, saying she's staying, and the door swings wide again. Starla steps into the trailer, but the man has her by the wrist. Tops barks and barks. The man is yelling, his bony, ugly face so close to Starla's beautiful face, and Starla is struggling to get his hand off her wrist, is pulling one way while he's pulling the other, and Little D realizes, suddenly, that this man must be Jason.

Now Starla's sunglasses slip, and Little D sees her blackened left eye, the bruise big and splotchy and going green at the edges, and he understands, suddenly, why Starla is here at the trailer unannounced in the first place.

Little D stands up, the folding knife flipped open in his fist. He steps into the doorway, right between Starla and Jason, holds the knife up, and in his deepest, biggest voice tells Jason to let her go.

Starla quits pulling one way, Jason the other, and for a moment everything is still, some cowboy singing about coming home on the radio.

Then Jason slaps Little D across the face so hard the bones of his neck crack.

Little D falls back into the trailer, right onto his ass. He's bitten through his tongue. Blood sluices down his chin.

“Look what you did,” Starla yells. “You hurt him, you son of a bitch!” She starts to say something more, but there's the sound then not of a slap but a fist, a duller sound, meatier.

Tops barks once, twice, and doesn't bark again. But Jason is screaming.

They were careful at first.

Little D cased the lake only two or three days a week. He mostly hooked forgotten fishing poles and tackle boxes, which were easy to nab and could be turned around at pawnshops for five or ten bucks. Big D, though, was struggling. He drove from trailhead to trailhead up in the wilderness, tried car doors, and if one was open, took everything inside. Sometimes, though, he'd go five or six days without finding a vehicle left open. And even when he did, he might not get much more than a sleeve of CDs.

A month of this, and Big D sat Little D down at the Slash Pile once more.

“It's not fucking penciling out,” he said, and took a slug of Rainier. “We've got to get to the good stuff. Purses, wallets, stereos. I see they sometimes even leave their little foldable computers in their cars. Just sitting there.”

Big D ran a thick hand over his face, rubbed at the bones of his skull as if they hurt him. “You gotta be down at that lake every day, kid. And no more fishing gear. Purses and wallets. That's what you're after.”

Little D nodded. Aunt Trish hadn't been to work for months. “What about you?” Little D asked, though he was scared to ask. “What are you gonna do?”

Big D finished his beer and called for another. “I don't know. Maybe bust some windows. Nab some licenses plates. Heard you can get money for those.” Big D rolled and knocked the glass bottom of his bottle on the bar top. “Hell, I don't know. I want real work. Woods work.”

Little D heard the give and shatter in his uncle’s voice and suddenly understood that Big D wouldn't ever break any windows, wouldn't ever unscrew a license plate or pry a car stereo from the dash. That was all too easy. The farthest thing in the world from work.

So, then, it was up to Little D.

All they'd have—him, the twins, his uncle, his aunt, even Starla—would be what he brought up from the lake. He'd have to be the one, he realized, to keep them afloat.

Little D swallows at the hot blood pooling in his mouth and blinks and takes bleary stock of the situation.

Starla is splayed on the floor, heaving and sobbing, and even with the mess of her hair covering most of her face, Little D can see she's spit up her two front teeth. They're just lying there, bloody and white, on the yellow linoleum.

Aunt Trish is doddering toward Starla and attempting to kneel beside her.

Tops has bitten Jason in the back of the calf, bitten him hard. Just as Little D gets to his feet, Jason gets his hands around Tops’s neck and begins to squeeze. Tops lets go and yelps—a high, sucking sound. Jason slams the dog up against the side of the trailer one, two, three times and flings the furry rag of him off into the dirt yard.

“Fucking dog stinks,” Jason shouts and hobbles up the steps, the calf of his jeans shredded, blood all over his boot. “Now where’s Dixon?”

Little D wipes at his mouth, at his watery eyes, and when Jason limps up the last step and into the trailer, Little D buries his folding knife in the man's gut, buries it deep and wiggles it and rips up toward the chest.

Now there is a drifty span of time Little D cannot quite make sense of, seconds piling into minutes, the world quiet and stretched, the shapes of things gone blurry. White light shimmers through the open front door. Motes of dust drift and slide. The floor is slick as lake stones.

His Aunt Trish, who is never up and moving around, is up and moving around. Someone hands him a glass of water. Someone has him by the shoulders, is sitting him down on the low couch. Little D is thirsty, has never been so thirsty, and he tips the glass to his lips, but it's empty. He tries again, still empty. Starla's white shirt is red. Just absolutely red.

And now, suddenly, time gets its claws back into him, all the crying and shushing and staggering roars into his ears at once, the edges of things sharp, delineated, terrifying.

Aunt Trish has Starla on a stool by the kitchen sink. Trish is washing her, talking to her. Starla holds a towel up to her mouth. She's leaning into her mother, leaning in and weeping. And Big D is here, too. He's taking Little D's glass and filling it again and handing it back. He's stepping over something on the floor.

Big D kneels down in front of Little D. “Little D? Little D? You okay?” Little D looks at his uncle, his big whiskery face, and he starts to cry, too. “Come on now,” Big D says, shaking Little D lightly. “Don't do that. We got us some things to take care of now is all. We'll take care of things, you and me. We're the men of the house, Little D. You look at me. You listen to me.”

By the time Little D has dug the hole down by the creek, where Big D told him to dig, by the time he's said some nice things about old Tops—how he never meant it when he called him worthless, how the dog did just what he was supposed to do today—and sifted the dirt back over him, Tops looking so small, curled nose to tail there in the bottom of the dark hole, sirens have begun to whirl and sound down on the highway, the reds and blues shifting up Nehemiah Road toward the trailer.

Little D thinks about running away, running to his rock with the cedars at his back, his treasures safely hid, where he’s always been safe, but he doesn’t. He trudges back up the slope, those little firs brushing at his thighs, their soft, swishy tips.

He thought he'd done the right thing—Big D had said so, too—but Jason was still as dead as could be, a big puddle of the man's blood and inside things all over, and, well, you do a thing like that, and you don't get to get away from it. You cut all the trees, and all the trees are cut. You step in to help somebody, and you've stepped in no matter what. He'll face up to what he's done. That's what Big D would want, Little D thinks. What Big D wants.

Little D comes around the side of the trailer, and for a moment he's confused again. He doesn't understand why they've got Big D up against the cruiser, his hands behind him in silver cuffs. Little D starts toward the officers. He's waving his arms and trying to tell them he's the one that did it. Cuffed and pushed up against the slick, white hide of the police car, Big D gives a big shake of his big head, and before Little D makes it more than a few steps across the dirt yard, Trish and Starla have him in their arms, their warm, good, kind hands on him. Shushing him, hugging him.

“No,” Aunt Trish says now, to the officer who wanders over. “No, it happened like we told you,” she goes on, standing up straight, straight and tall as she once was. “The boy's in shock. He's a good boy. Wants to protect his father. They call them Big D and Little D. He's his father's only son.”