Bread and Blood (pt 2).

The first bad sign was that the walk wasn’t shoveled; if there was one thing Dan Gamble was nuts about it was keeping his house up, and when the bald guy Dixie’d hitched a ride with let him off (after grabbing at his dick, but Dixie didn’t care) he saw that the yard was a white sheet of blank frosting from one side to the other.

The second bad sign was that the back door was open. He’d stood there for what felt like years staring at the half-open door and the snow drift that curved like mother of pearl into the laundry room. It’s all clean now: he’s shoveled the front, the side path, and the entire driveway, now leaning on the handle and huffing, his heart banging at his ribs. Mrs. Moran is watching him out her kitchen window and Dixie gives her the finger; she wouldn’t even look at them after his mom took off.

He goes inside, closing the door. The heat is on as high as it will go; he finds a towel and wipes the floor, and one second is dragging the mop out from behind the dryer and the next is swinging it like a bat, smashing piles of unwashed glasses and bowls on the kitchen counter. He brings the handle down on the stove, denting the burners, and then flips over the table – there’s still gum on the underside of it, pink and blue pieces that his little sister stuck there. Dixie throws the handle at the wall and moans.

After a little bit he can stand. There is a dog bowl on the counter and a dog collar sitting next to it; they never had a dog when he lived here and there’s no other sign of one now. Dixie fingers the worn leather and slips it into his pocket. He lifts the phone off the wall and listens to the tone; it’s missing the redial button from a radio contest he was trying to win ten years ago. He holds on to the walls and follows them into the living room, hearing boards creak under him and knowing which ones are the worst. A couple of hours ago he charged right through here yelling for his dad, but now he takes his time looking at the walls of newspapers, waves of clothes, and the chair and tv dead center of it on a layer of beer cans. The photos on the wall have been replaced with calendars and articles about natural disasters; he finds them in a bucket under the stairs, the frames broken and glass cracked, of him in his team uniforms, him when he was in the Army, two of his mother, and just one of Davie and Ellie, spitting water on each other like the little kids they were going to be forever.

There are water stains on the ceiling, huge booming brown marks from when Ellie turned the faucet handle the wrong way on a day the pipes froze and when they melted while they were at school the whole house flooded; dad never painted over it.

And the railing on the stairs is shaky because he and Davie used to slide down it until it broke and they ran away for an entire day before coming home, and in the end all their old man said to them was to get a hammer and help him fix the goddamned thing.

And the stair at the top is slick as shit, so be careful when you’re in your socks or you’ll go all the way down and fuck yourself up. They all did it a dozen times when they were kids who could bounce off things like it was nothing. But nobody here is a kid anymore.

Dixie leans down and puts his hands on the step, breathing through his teeth.

Fuck you, he says to it. Fuck you.