Breaker by Richard Thomas Read Free Book Online

the woods.
    With the bonfire blazing—Tully surrounded by a pile of empty beer cans at his feet, eyes darting to me and then away—the memories came flooding back. Waking up naked, and unsure why, not a bruise or pain on my body, but the panic and fear washing over me anyway. The gestures and sounds that came from his side of the bed as I pretended I was asleep, forcing myself to block it out. This night had been a long time coming, and I was ready.
    As the sun started to set behind the woods, we fired rifles at the many cans he’d emptied. I held the rifle and stood tall, Tully standing behind me, his arms on my shoulders, and then running out to place new cans on the rocks that ran around the pond. When he came back, I handed him the rifle, his turn to shoot, my finger lingering on the trigger for just a moment, the tip of the gun angling up toward his face, his eyes going wide as I pulled, the rifle he held going off in his face.
    We were miles from anyone, just the way he liked it, and as he fell back to the ground, the gun clattered to the dirt. He lay in the fading light, gurgling—the wound opening up his skull, part of his head blown off, his eyes blinking at me, unable to speak. I stood over him and watched the light fade out of his confused gaze.
    “Better you than me, Uncle Tully,” I said, my heart racing.
    As the life drained out of him, I slipped on a pair of old gloves and went into the trailer to bring out the rest of the beer cans. I poured them into the pond and crushed them up, just like he’d been doing, and scattered the empties around the fire—easily a case of beer, now. I did not cry. I did not get sick. In the darkness, I found his cellphone inside his coat pocket and called the police.
    “There’s been an accident,” I said. “Oh my God, come quick—my uncle.”
    I sat at the edge of the fire in a ball, rocking back and forth. That’s the way they found me, flashlights splitting the woods. They took one look at the beer cans, the gun, my uncle and me, and nodded their heads.
    “Happens all the time,” one of the officers said, a dark blue shadow on a black expanding sky. “You okay?”
    “I just…I just…I don’t know what happened. It just went off. I thought he was aiming at the cans, he slipped, or set it down, I don’t even know….It was getting dark, I heard him grunt, and it went off and then…”
    They nodded.
    I don’t think the police really cared. There were lots of guys like Tully out in that neck of the woods. His blood alcohol content was off the charts. My parents came to get me, and I cried, my face streaked with dirt. I was ten. On the ride home, in the dark, Stephanie found my hand in the backseat of our car, and held it between her sweaty palms. She rested her head on my shoulder—a mix of Off and sweat, musky Drakkar and hand sanitizer filling the back of the car. It wasn’t long after that night that my hair turned from light brown to blond to nearly white, and my slight frame started to fill out, slowly on my way to becoming the monster I am today.
    In the kitchen, the soup is cold, but I sip it up anyway. The cheese in my stomach sits like a rock, the darkness seeping in the windows, not a light on anywhere.
    I leave it that way, my hands clenched in front of me, resting on the table.
    I regret nothing.

Chapter 12
    Twenty years later and my sister, Stephanie, is still going to bowling alleys with strange men, sipping cheap beer, and looking for trouble. Her knock at my door is always the same—shave and a haircut, two bits. She never buzzes in downstairs, just appears on my doorstep like a lost puppy. She is afraid of me, but she is kin. She has seen what I can do, what I have done. She’s grateful, but she’s also cautious. Like me, she is a liar.
    I open the door and she is standing there shivering, a faded jean jacket hardly enough to keep her warm. On her head is a brown knit hat that looks like an acorn, the sides running down over her ears,