Where All Light Tends to Go

by David Joy

She had me gassed, but there was always uneasiness in laughing at my mother. Even while I was laughing, there was an uncomfortable feeling that settled in the pit of my stomach. She’d given birth to me. She was blood. Those types of things are deserving of love, and I did love her. Since I was a kid, I’d carried those few moments when she came around sober like treasure. I’d always hoped she’d become a real mother. But with time, I realized that someone can’t give what they don’t have. She was what she was, an addict, and there was nothing that could be said or done to change her. Death was her only savior.

cursive between Daddy’s shoulder blades. He was covered in tattoos for the most part, and in the patchwork of my father, nearly all of them had started off as a woman’s name at one point or another, only to be covered by something more permanent down the road.

Those wiry, wide-eyed types often proved the most dangerous men, and that’s what it was about Jeremy Cabe that made me uneasy. He always had a glint in his eye like if you didn’t believe what he was saying he’d prove it right that fucking second.

Crank, on the other hand, seemed to bring on a certain paranoia. After a week or so running that high, no dreams to let you regain any sort of grasp that you ever had, the mind starts going places that minds oughtn’t go. After that, those lips’ll say just about anything to get back some sort of clarity.

Along an island bar in the kitchen the popular guys were throwing beer pong, while the girls with crushes stood near wondering if any of those boys were lit enough to consider putting their panties on the ceiling fan. What they didn’t know was that those types of guys were too worried about impressing one another to concentrate on important shit like pussy. Those guys were too busy chugging beers and trying to memorize rap lyrics to pay attention to what girl had that fuck-me look in her eyes.

A tight string of thick wooden beads, one of those necklaces from shit-town novelty shops in shit-town places like Gatlinburg, was fitted around his neck.

When I got up, I looked at Maggie. I looked at that plate and the place she’d set the straw. I looked at that shit she’d been just seconds away from snorting up her nose, just seconds away from a glue trap that would’ve held her to this place and this life just like me.

“Well, I know a lot of things. I know you two were tighter than a burl growing up. I know you two were together a good while and, hell, you might’ve even popped her cherry. But I know that a woman’s just a woman, and there’s no changing that. If they didn’t have pussies, the dumpsters would be full of them.” “How about you stop right—” “I know anything that can bleed a week straight every month and survive is the devil’s doing.” Daddy guffawed.

There wasn’t any woman fit for talking like that as far as I was concerned, not even Josephine, but certainly not a girl like Maggie, certainly not someone so innocent.

This house, this town, and everything about this place were beneath her and always had been. I was beneath her as well, but she’d never seemed to notice, or at least not to care.

I’d never understood what she saw in me. Even when I was younger I knew that a girl like that kicking around with a guy like me couldn’t last, but she never seemed to notice the lines that had been drawn. I think she’d always thought of me as something worth saving, and when you find something that you truly believe you can save, it’s awfully hard to let that kind of shit go. That’s the only reason I’d ever been able to come up with for why she cared.

She leaned in and looked about as far into me as anyone ever had, like she was going to carry those silver-dollar eyes of hers somewhere deep inside of me and find something to buy and like she was going to bring that thing back out to hold it for keeps. I was going to let her if she wanted to and I thought she was going to kiss me and I just held there not saying a word. Instead she placed my hands onto my lap and stood up from the couch. That gleaming in her eyes started to rise again, and rather than fight it, she headed for the door. Maggie didn’t say another word, but in a way, those eyes had said more than words ever could. She left me sitting there to wonder what those things unspoken might have meant. She left me wondering if I’d been forgiven.

I’m going to tell you that the place she’s at right this second is a place that very few ever get to. There are folks going on weeklong vacations with dope crammed plumb up into their brains, and those folks start seeing shit and talking to things that just ain’t there. That comes with the territory. But where she’s at, where she’s at after all these years, is a place long gone from ever getting back from.”

Rogers was trying hard to offer some sort of insight into a reality that he knew led to hurt. But I’d known it since I was a kid. That was my reality: the hurt, the shame, and everything else entailed. So, waiting around to die was something I’d known for a long time, and it wasn’t the dying part that ate at me. It was the waiting.

The land was of little use for farming, so the folks who settled way back when were mostly drunkards and thieves. I was generations away from those earliest outlaws, but things like that have a way of staying in the blood.

“I couldn’t stand the thought of keeping you here. I couldn’t stand the thought of it then and I can’t stand the thought of it now. You’re better than this place. You always have been. You’ve had your eyes set on someplace else since we were kids, but where you’re different is that you’ve actually got something that can get you there. You’re smart enough to do any fucking thing you ever wanted to do, and you’re stubborn enough to make it happen. But I’m not, Maggie. I’m not getting out of here and I know that. I came to terms with what I was born into a long fucking time ago. I can’t get out of that. So how in the fuck would that work? One way or another you were going to get hurt. I loved you too fucking much to drag it out.”

me. There was a part of me hopeful that soon as that truck made it onto the barge he’d put one into me as well, send me to the bottom of the lake with the Cabes. But there was a bigger part of me, a fearful part of me that said no matter what, I was his son, and there wouldn’t be any getting out of this mess that easy. In just a few short minutes, dying had become simple. It was the living part I feared.

Those types of things don’t just fade away. They are the worms of the living and eat at a man for as long as he’s breathing. I reckon I deserved what burrowed in me just as Daddy deserved his.

There was no escaping who I was or where I’d come from. I was shat out of a crank-head mother who’d just been cut loose from the loony bin. I was born to a father who’d slip a knife in my throat while I slept if the mood hit him right. Blood’s thicker than water, and I was drowning in it. I was sinking down in that blood, and once I hit bottom, no one would find me. Some souls aren’t worth saving, I thought. There’re some souls that even the devil wants no part of.

It was the closest thing to a normal conversation I’d ever had with her. It was the closest thing to a mother she’d ever been. And if we’d have been normal, I reckon that would have been the time we’d have hugged each other and she’d have kissed me on top of my head. I reckon that would have been the time that we looked each other square and said we loved each other. But we were a far cry from normal. There never had been any room for that sappy shit. There was a part of me that was happy for that, a part of me that thought the hardness that came with it helped to protect us from all the other bad that was in this world. But there was a part of me that knew the downfall. There was a part of me that understood that with that hardness came an inability to ever let anyone worth having get close enough to love.

When we were together it seemed like everything else, all the bad shit that surrounded us, stopped and we were all right for a moment or two. It was never a thing that felt like forever, but sometimes all a person needs is a chance to catch their breath.

The life I was born into seemed set in stone from the moment my last name was scribbled across my birth certificate. But in a lot of ways I’d come to terms with it. There comes a time when you’re so worn that you can’t fight that type of shit any longer and so you just surrender. There’s a peacefulness that comes with surrender. Slowly but surely it seemed that I was finding peace.

Hope and faith are loaded guns.

Her little hand was barely big enough to hold it. Her frail hand, thin fingers little more than bone, spread open around that gun now. Those hands would never do another thing. And whether those hands would’ve done something worthwhile or not I hadn’t the foggiest, but the fact that they would never do another thing ate at me.

I found myself gazing up at the giant cross above the altar in the same way I’d done every Sunday as a child, and waiting for some sign, some light, to shine down and show me God was real. I’d been waiting around all of my life for that light, but so far nothing had ever come. When I was a kid, I expected it would appear like magic, but even then the idea seemed silly. I did wonder what happened when we died, though, and I’d wondered about it for most of my life. Thinking that nothing happened, that there was absolutely nothing following all of this pain, seemed just as silly as magic. No, there had to be something. And if there had to be something, then there had to be God, so in some way or another I was a believer.

There was a place where all light tends to go, and I reckon that was heaven.

The place where all that light gathered back and shined was about as close to God as I could imagine.

Knowing only darkness, a man doesn’t have to get his heart broken in search of the light. I envied him for that.

Daddy had thought that type of shit would harden a man, but all it had done to me was poke at all those places where I’d always been soft.

The gap between here and there didn’t seem so barren any longer, didn’t seem so far and out of reach. The space between here and there was no distance at all, and I readied myself to go where that Indian had never had the courage to go, the place Mama had peered off onto with a beckoning kind of sadness in her eyes. There was no fear or sorrow or repentance any longer, and I ventured out into that middle ground with a fearless pride that held my back arched and chest out. That restful time was near now, and I finally understood that there’d never been any difference between here or there. Only the middle ground of this wicked world mattered, the vast gap that stretched between, and those who were born with enough grit to brave it.