Rude Boy

“There?” the boy said, pointing out to the darkened field near the tool shed where the mower and all else were kept.

“No,” his dad said. He spit. “It’s out at the water. Out at the pond.” 

“Oh.” The boy sped up to keep up with his father who was walking faster now, maybe in spite of him and what he had done, he thought. 

“I told you it was at the pond. You forgot I said pond?” 

“I didn’t forget.” 

“Then why did you ask if it was out there by the shed?” 

“I don’t know,” the boy said. And it was true. He did not know why he asked what he asked despite knowing the answer was no. Maybe it was simply the only way he could talk to his father at that current moment. He couldn’t just bring up any old thing. So maybe he asked some dumb question he already knew the answer to for no reason other than he wanted to fill the air with his father’s words and not just the silence of the gray cold morning. “Maybe I forgot, I guess. I guess I forgot.”

His father spit again and it got close to the boy’s shoe. He could smell the mint flavored tobacco that he didn’t understand the appeal to beyond it was just something that men did and maybe one day he would do it too given that he was also a man and would be full grown one day and so would need to take on the trappings of someone full grown as well. “Come on now,” his father said. 

When they got to the pond it was too dark to see what had happened in its fullness from where they stood. All that they could see standing from the southern end of the pond was a dark lump laying there on the shore of the northern end. But, even so, seeing wasn’t necessary for the boy to know what that dark lump was and what had happened to it. His stomach grew knotty and his heart began to beat faster. He felt his cheeks go flush. 

His father pulled a long, metal flashlight from his jacket and shined it across the water. The light dulled out that far but it showed all that needed showing. The horse lay on its side, dead. “I told you triple check,” his father said.

“I did.” 

“Hell of a job then.” 

Neither said anything. They stood there and looked at the dead thing far across the way as it lay in the tube of dullen light. The boy wished it would move. That it would get up and strut off and he could say, See! Nothing wrong! But it didn’t, of course. It lay there still and dead and he knew it was his fault that it was still and dead because he hadn’t locked up its stable right and had left the front gate unlocked too and so the horse just pranced out there in the middle of the night and got eaten by coyotes. 

His father spit and clicked off the flashlight. “Well.” 

They walked on, looping around the pond. It took them five or so minutes and no one said a word and it was cold and the sun was just starting to rise up. The son wanted to leave. Not to go back to the house but to leave in a more general way. To not be where he was and instead to be somewhere alien and strange and unaware of where he had come from and its nature. At first this feeling was of shame and of the desire to be somewhere that could not shame him but as they approached the horse and began to see what had been done to it, it became a desire to be away from this place as it was evil or was hosting some kind of evil and he feared that evil finding him and snatching him up as it had the horse.

“Christ,” his father said, standing over the massive thing, shining down on it with a flashlight. He quickly turned off the light to save the boy the sight but they were close enough now to see it without the flashlight anyway. But what lay before them he wished night had covered and that he had not seen ever.  As he got older and became a man that chewed his own tobacco and worked his own jobs and kept a life of his separate from that of his parents, he wished, nearly each day, that he had not seen what sat in front of him and his father there. 

What he saw was this: the horse had not been attacked; it had been mutilated. And it wasn’t coyotes that had done it either. The work was too precise, too exact. A cut had been made clean around the horse’s neck, starting on top of its withers and rounding off right above its breast. And then the skin had been pulled up somehow. The boy could not understand how it was done and when he became a man and it was explained to him he could not understand it then either. Not really. But the skin had been pulled up and over the horse’s neck and head and it had been taken away somewhere else. They skinned it, whoever they were, from the neck up. And they had skinned it alive more than likely, the boy thought, given that it’s legs were bound with rope looping around the entirety of each long and muscled limb and then those ropes were bound to each other along the horse’s barrel as well so the horse could only thrash it’s body, which they must have found some way to manage as well given the cleanness of the work. And they left it there, half skinned and bleeding and, as became clear now, half alive. “It’s breathing,” the boy said, pointing. “I can see it breathing. 

“Christ.” 

The boy got older and he held that story close to his heart. And when he finally left the south and brought himself and the story to Providence, Rhode Island where he would study history on a partial scholarship to Brown, and where he would slowly watch the accompaniments of where he’d come from fade from his person like barnacles and algae being chipped away from the underside of a boat, and where he would rarely speak about where he had come from other than that it was in the south in a part of North Carolina that no one had ever heard of and whose name, Epsom, meant nothing to anyone beyond that it was a sound that corresponded with something you might imagine some hick saying out in some hot cornfield somewhere––or it simply reminded you of soaking in a bath––he told the story to no one save for a singular person: a bartender named James something or other at a place on Peck Street called Kips’ that opened the same year Austin had moved into that cold and foreign and steeply hilled place, arriving with no coat thick enough to withstand a real northern winter nor the social ability to win the favor or interest of anyone other than a few professors who more than likely only showed a liking to him for his attendance and engagement and maybe found joy, as most do, in the simply pervisity of placing someone like him in a place like this, and this bartender, who, either out of uncare or actually quite a lot of care, had never bothered to ask him his age and served him gladly because he was one of the few people that ever bothered coming into the sticky and poorly lit alleyway of a barroom.

“Who did it?” the bartender asked. “Did they find out who did it?” 

“Not for a while,” Austin said. “For a while no one had a clue. It took about three years for anyone to start to figure it out.” 

“What happened? How’d they figure it out?” 

Austin drank down his beer. He was already very drunk and he wondered if he would even feel any more beer but it didn’t matter as already a new one was being poured for him. “They did it again,” Austin said. “It happened again.” 

The bartender, James, placed the beer in front of him, trading it for the empty glass. “No.” 

Austin nodded. 

“How did no one hear of this? How was this not on the news?” 

“It was. For a little while. But it died out at a certain point. It all got too––I don’t know. It became hard to put on the news, I guess.” 

“Well what happened? What happened the next time they did it?” 

Austin nodded some more and felt like a drunk man doing it. He felt he was nodding in the way that a drunk would nod: full bodied, unrestrained, drunk. “It got worse,” he said. “They got more elaborate.” 

“They?” 

He nodded and felt the residual shame of a time and place no longer encircling him; the phantom of a locale and how one must act within it creeping into one’s mind when far, far away from it. You weren’t supposed to admit that it was a group of people if anyone ever asked. His father had made this clear. A group made it seem like the town had been taken over by some concerted and organized effort; some entity with membership. He did not bother to ask why, exactly, his father cared so much about what people thought of the town as it was not his town alone, nor did he hold any type of real stake in it that he could understand at that time––later he would understand the stake but not then. Yet he respected the wishes of his father all the same. If asked about it by an out-of-towner, the only type of person that would ask as anyone from Epsom would never do so, you were to say that one man, one teenager, nearly a boy really, Harry Lancer, had done it alone and it was because he was troubled and only grew up with his mom who was troubled too and so he became bad and had started doing drugs at a very young age and soon developed a taste and interest in doing awful, awful things. Austin nodded again. “It was a group of them doing it,” he said. “Would be too much for one person to do alone, I think. You ever seen a horse in person?”

“Once or twice.”

“Then you know.” 

“Know what?”

“That they’re bigger than hell.” 

James laughed. “I guess I know that, yeah.” 

A brief silence passed between them. Neither made eye contact. “The next time they did it it was to a bunch of different animals,” Austin said. “They went down to another farm. A bigger one. And had their way with it. I think it was a horse, a sheep, and a dog this time.” 

“A dog?” 

“Yeah. Pretty one too. Big black labrador.” 

“They skinned it?” 

“Yeah. Skinned all of them. The same way they had skinned that horse. From the neck up and then left them there, bound and suffering.”

“Oh my god.” 

“Yup.” 

“How did no one hear of this?” 

“They did. Down there everyone heard of it. Had a name for them too. Called them The Skinners. Couldn’t call them the Epsom Skinners ‘cus it would sound like they were talking about skincare or something so they just called them The Skinners. Like they were some band or something. But everyone had heard of them. Everyone I knew heard of them.” 

And they had. After the second attack it had taken over the town and every town over. News vans began pouring in from Raleigh and Charlotte and soon national coverage started up as well. There was talk of a movie in the works before they even figured out who had done it. In those days, when he was around the age of fourteen, you couldn’t walk a step about town without being reminded of it. It was the first time that he had been made aware of the actual size of his home and how it was constructed, the new visitors adding so much weight to the delicate foundation so that all you could feel on those days was that at some point, if someone stepped wrong, it would all come crashing in on itself. 

His father had been tense then. Each news van that he seemed to understand as a personal insult or attack. He refused any questioning from anyone and installed a shoddy wire fence at the front of the property, requiring all media people to stand behind it. He eventually stopped going into town too, leaving the son and his mother to go in to collect groceries and all else where they would, of course, be questioned relentlessly by the media. But the isolation from the stir had done his father no good. It did him worse, perhaps. Because whenever they came back from these trips his father’s condition, his tension, would seem to have gotten worse. That something inside him was bound much like those animals, and the ropes would get tighter when he was left alone. 

One night Austin had seen him from his bedroom window standing in the front yard in nothing but boxers and boots. He carried with him that same flashlight and he shined it southward, past the house, and toward the pond that sat a half mile back. He just stood there and shined the flashlight, clicking it on and off every so often. When Austin asked him about it the morning after, doing his best to act as the behavior was normal, he said, “Was there something out there last night?”

“Hm?” his father said, a coffee cup up near his lips. 

“I saw you out last night with the light. Was there something out there?” 

His father placed the cup down. “There was not.”

“Well what were you looking for? What were you doing out there?” 

“I guess I was just looking,” he said. “Sometimes I just like to go out there and look.” 

Austin sipped his beer. His stomach was aching and he now remembered that he had not eaten. He liked doing this and he liked the ache in his stomach. He liked being light headed and not feeling restricted by himself. He sipped his beer again. “You know how parents will make use of a child’s stupidity?” he said. “As a way to keep them from knowing things they aren’t ready to know?” 

“I do,” James said.

“And you know that at some point that becomes that biggest thing the kids resent them for too. That the parents were both hiding things from them and that they were taking advantage of them being too stupid to know any better in order to do it. That it’s the shame that brings the resentment. Not the feeling of being wronged or lied to. But the shame You know that too?” 

“I know that too.” 

“But then, eventually, you get a little older and you understand that what your parents were doing was good for you and that you were really not ready to see what it was that they were hiding and that you were, in fact, a little stupid, and they would be pretty stupid themselves, frankly, not to take advantage of that fact. And you weren’t stupid in, like, a real way. But simply stupid in the way that you hadn’t had the time to learn all you needed to learn just yet. But so you get over all that and you forgive them and you forgive yourself because you realize that the stupidity in question is common in everyone, even your parents at some point, and then you can stand as peers. You know about that?” 

“I do.” 

“Well here’s what I figured out as well. That only happens sometimes. That only happens for some people. Lucky ones with parents that know how to put reason to their actions. But sometimes you can’t. Sometimes the world either gives you too much reason or too much action and you can’t make the two fit together.” He paused and became aware of his accent and country way of speaking slipping back. He breathed in and out of his nose and did his best to restrain it. “That make sense?”

“That makes sense. I think.” 

“What I’m saying is I don’t necessarily blame my father but I do resent him in a certain way that I might just have to go ahead and live with. And the reason I resent him is because I could not understand him. And I could not understand him, I found out later, because he could not understand himself. And he could not understand himself, I found out later than that, because he could not understand the world he’d been given. And so he was unknowable. To me and to anyone else. And so that moment I was talking about, that shared recognition that he had been making use of my idiocy for my own benefit––that he was withholding something he would later reveal when I was ready to see it––that moment did not come. What happened instead was I got older and so did he and eventually he could no longer muster up the energy to keep the thing hidden. And when it was no longer hidden, and I could see it, I could see that what was hidden was not something understandable, but something that he never understood. Does that make sense?” 

“You’re starting to lose me.”

“How so?” 

“Well, for one, what the hell does this have to do with the animals?” 

“The animals?” 

“The ones that got skinned.” 

“It has everything to do with it if you’ll just let me tell the story.” 

“I guess I wasn’t sure if you’d gotten sidetracked.” 

“I hadn’t.” 

“It’s alright if you did.” 

He sipped his beer. 

“Well alright,” James said. 

Austin put the beer down and wiped his lip. He cracked his neck. “So around that time is when both I and everyone else, given my father’s strangeness and how much he began to isolate himself, given the fence and late night walks in his boxers, began to suspect him of something. Maybe I suspected him differently though. I thought that something was going wrong with him. That his mind was going undone or that he had been burdened by something, which he had, but which I didn’t understand and still fully don’t for that matter. Everyone else just thought that he did it. That he was the one that skinned them animals.” 

James nodded. 

“He didn’t, of course. I knew that from the start. We had a whole barn of animals he could have skinned and gotten rid of discreetly. And he took me out and showed me the first one himself. So why bother going to skin someone else’s animals? And why show me the first skinned horse if he was the one that did it?” 

“Maybe for a cover up? Maybe he was trying to, like you said, make use of your idiocy.” 

“I guess that’s possible, but it just seemed to me if you wanted to torture the animals, why get me involved? Why not just go and torture them?”

“Maybe people seeing it was part of the excitement? Why else tie them up and leave them out like that? People say that about serial killers. Some of them at least. It’s not the killing that gets them off. It’s the notoriety.” 

“Well that’s all possible but I don’t think that’s what was happening.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because I know who did it and I know it wasn’t my dad and I’ll tell you who, in fact, did it, if you just let me tell the damn story.” 

James perked a brow, as if to say all that had been unsaid all night. That he knew that Austin was underaged. That he knew he had no friends and that his coat was cheap and he would nearly die from the cold on the walk back to campus and that he was doing him a very big favor by simply letting him sit here in the bar at all. 

“Sorry,” Austin said. 

James laughed in a fake seeming way. “No need to apologize. Go ahead and tell the story.” 

“Alright, well, I knew it was not my dad from those things, but I knew it from other things too. But everyone else started to suspect him of it. Now when we went into town the way people treated us was different. When me and my mother went into stores or to eat somewhere––my father still at home, of course––people would barely look at us. And the news people, they would only ask us a few things all circling around the same thing: did your dad do it? Of course they didn’t ask that outright. They would ask around it saying things like, Why has your dad boarded himself up? Why has he refused to comment? But you knew what they meant when they said things like that. They meant Why did your dad do it? And why won’t he tell us that he did it? 

“It got to be a lot as you can probably imagine. At certain points the people started to seem kind of aggressive. And I would be lying if I said that I didn’t start to wonder the same thing as them. I had to. And so I started to talk to my dad like the media people talked to me. I’d say things like, ‘Dad, why are you hiding yourself out here if you didn’t do anything?” 

“What did he say to that?” 

“What you think he said? He’d just say, ‘I ain’t hiding.’ Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything at all. But the silence was enough. The silence was enough for you to know you pissed him off and to leave him alone. But, so, eventually people got tired of the silence. And they got tired of talking to me and my mom too. And so they did what they do. They went hunting around for someone to simply say something to them worth noting. But it was all the same. Maybe the way that people imagined my father and I guess how they imagined us got more elaborate. And some people that we might have wronged somehow took the opportunity to get even then. I know some of that was happening. But they didn’t find anything different snooping around like that. ‘Cus there was nothing to find really. But even with the attention going away from him, my father kept growing separate. He got more and more private. He barely left his room. Weeks would go by without anyone hearing a word from him. You’d just hear his footsteps in the house, here and there. At some point I remember my mom going and taking all the guns out of the house and putting them somewhere else. I didn’t think anything of it then. Just some reorganizing or something. But when I got older I knew what she was doing. But my dad didn’t stop her. Didn’t protest to that. Didn’t even bother to say anything.” 

“What about work?” James asked. 

“What about it?” 

“Didn’t he have to go anywhere for work?”

“He’s a horse breeder. And at the point he was a pretty successful one. With a full crew that did pretty much everything for him. Meaning he didn’t have to do much beyond make sure that the property didn’t light on fire overnight or make sure that the horses didn’t get mutilated overnight either. Which might explain his disappointment with me upon initially finding that thing lying out there. And even after it was discovered that it was some people that had done it and not coyotes or whatever, I think he still held some type of grudge against me. I think he always will. But I think that’s because he has to in order to feel normal about the whole thing. Not because he actually thought I had any hand in it.” 

Three women now walked into the bar. They were college students, clearly, though which college it was not clear. Austin watched them unwrap themselves of their winter adornments and thought that by the fact that they were all wearing carpenter pants and two had nose rings, and one had really short hair and that they all looked a little gay they probably went to RISD. But girls at Brown looked plenty gay too. Even some girls from Providence College looked gay, though not as many. Every woman in the north seemingly was a little gay, Austin thought. At least they dressed that way. At least during the winter they did. In the winter everyone in the north was a little gay. 

James turned to the women and smiled and offered a friendly nod. “Excuse me,” he said to Austin. He walked down to their end of the bar and spoke with the women for a moment until they had provided him with orders. Then he went to his bar tools and began making drinks for them. He poured some gin and some Campari into a mixing glass and Austin thought to himself, they are drinking negronis. All three of them are drinking negronis and they are doing it because they think it’s some grown up thing to do. That the bartender isn’t gonna ask them their age ‘cus they ordered negronis and that they must feel all grown up for that. But the bartender wasn’t gonna ask anyone their age. Especially a girls. And negronis tasted like ass, as far as Austin was concerned. It was just something that people thought they were supposed to order. 

He thought to himself on why he was being so mean spirited about these women and couldn’t come up with a reason. Maybe they had interrupted his story? Maybe it was because his brain had made a daddy connection to the bartender and now these girls were taking daddy away. Or maybe the bartender was mommy, ‘cus he was feeding him in a certain fashion. And now the girls were taking away mommy and so he had to be angry about it and call them gay and all else. It didn’t matter really because the bartender now finished making their drinks and they took them to a booth in the corner and  now he came back. “You should go talk to those girls,” he said. 

“Why?” 

“Because maybe one of them will suck your dick.” 

“I don’t need anyone sucking nothing.” 

“I might have to disagree with you there.” 

“What? I’m supposed to go over there and say what? Howdy, could one of you please suck my dick?” Austin became aware of his speaking volume and worried his voice had traveled over to that corner. 

“Well I probably wouldn’t say it like that.” 

Austin looked to the girls in the corner and none were looking back at him. They had entered into their own world in that booth and he could never enter into it without being seen as some kind of meteorite coming to crash land and fuck everything up. “I don’t feel like it,” he said. 

James nodded. “Well, so, alright.”

“I was gonna tell you how I found out who did it to them horses.” 

“Right. Well, who did it?” 

“A few people. I said that already, right? That it wasn’t just one that did it but the only one that ever got in trouble for it was that one boy Harry Lancer. He took the rap for the whole thing. One day he just showed up at the police station and he said, ‘Hello, I’m here to turn myself in.’ I shit you not. He said it exactly like that apparently. And when someone asked about what he was there to turn himself in about he just went and said, “Them animals. I’m the one that done them things to them animals.”

“But it wasn’t just him? There were more? That’s what you’re saying?” 

Austin nodded. “There were more. And I know their names too: Alex Hershel, Billy Turney, Scott Black. But the only one that ever got in trouble for it was that boy Harry Lancer. ‘Cus once he turned himself in no one really wanted to bother with it. People already wanted the whole thing to be gone and so when that boy came and said it was him all the people said well alright. Let that be the way then.” 

“What about the cops? They probably knew, didn’t they? How does one kid do that to a massive horse? Or all those other animals.” 

“Probably. Probably. But, well, it was just animals. It doesn’t really matter what he done to them, legally speaking.”

James made a face.

“I know it’s awful what they did to them but in terms of the law it’s just a misdemeanor. It’s just a misdemeanor to torture an animal.” 

“That’s true?” 

“That’s true. It has to do with animal eating I think. That’s the only way I’ve come to understand it. Because if you start to extend out that idea of torture and say, alright, you gotta go to jail for ten years you torture an animal, people will start to say well what exactly does torture mean? Does it mean skinning an animal alive and leaving it there to die? Sure. Obviously I think. Well does it mean caging an animal up in such a small space it starts to go crazy and turn cannibal? Or whatever the right word for an animal eating another animal of its kind is. Is that torture?” 

James shook his head.

“This is in pretty much every state too. This is not just some hick shit I’m talking about. You could take a dog into Times Square and gut it in front of everyone and the worst thing that might happen is you get a year of prison. Same level offense as stealing something from Walmart. They can’t charge you with anything serious because as soon as they do, people will start saying, well what about them meat companies. That’s torture too, ain’t it? So you’re just stuck with this little slap on the wrist.”

“Well shit.” 

“I mean, why else you think that boy didn’t flinch about telling on himself? Why you think he was ready to take the rap for everyone? And, well, why do you think everyone was ready to let it blow over the way that it did? And everyone already thought the boy was crazy. He’d been caught doing plenty of nasty things so why not let him get caught doing this too? People just wanted the thing to be gone.”

James didn’t say anything. He stood there and nodded. The girls in the corner laughed about something. He turned and looked at them. 

“You understand why people wanted that, don’t you? Why people from Epsom would act like that?” 

James looked back. “I don’t think I do.” 

“Well then maybe this will help it make sense. My daddy, that night, he saw them boys working on that horse. He saw them do it. Let them do it, really. That night. That night he showed me that horse laid out like it was, he wasn’t surprised by it. He acted surprised, sure, but he wasn’t surprised. What he was, really, was guilty. Not in any legal way but in a moral way. A spiritual way. It took a lot of years going by for him to tell it to me and when he told it, it didn’t make me feel any better about anything besides the simple feeling of completeness knowing the whole story will give you, but that feeling of resolution, that never showed up.” 

“He saw the boys do it?”

Austin nodded. “Apparently he had heard them out there just as soon as they got on the property. They were clumsy and loud and so my father went down to the stable with the shotgun and intended to put the fear of god or whatever into whoever it was that was down there. But when he got close to the stable he said he heard something strange. He heard them boys talking to the horse. You know, talking to it like it was a person.”

“What?” 

“Yep. And when he looked around the corner he saw it was them four boys I named. And he knew them. They were well known boys. Respected boys. Three of them on the football team and one was supposed to be going to Duke in the fall. But here they were, in our stable, talking to our horse like it could understand english.” 

“What did he do?” 

“Well he said he just sat there and watched it. He stood out there in the dark and he watched the boys talking to that horse saying all kinds of things. And you have to understand that seeing this sort of thing broke my father’s spirit just about completely. He told me that seeing them boys talk to that horse like that stunned him so severely he had to just sit there. He was stunned, he told me. Completely stunned.” 

“What were they saying to it?” 

“Strange things. Things that only make sense in a dream. My dad told me only a couple of the actual things they said. One he remembered them repeating often. They kept saying, You can’t eat with such a bad attitude. They kept saying that. Talking to the horse like they were its parents. You’re so hungry but have such a bad attitude. So rude. Such a rude boy.”

Austin drank some of his beer. 

“Then what happened.” 

“Well they marched the horse on out of the stable. Apparently that boy Harry Lancer was riding on it bare back and the other boys had it roped up and were guiding it. My dad said that boy Harry Lancer had put on some type of crown he must have made out of paper and rode that horse bareback like he was a king or something and the other boys his servants. Then they took it down by that water and started to get to work on it. And my dad sat there and saw the whole thing. He saw them tie that thing up and then push it on its side and he heard them laugh about it. He heard them cackling. Calling it rude boy. Saying, Rude boy cannot stand on his feet. Such a rude boy can barely stand up. And then they pulled out them knives and all my father said is he could hear that horse screaming. Not making any kind of horse sound, he told me. But screaming. It screamed. Don’t scream, rude boy, they would say. Don’t you scream.” 

“Jesus.” 

“And he just sat there. My father did. He just sat there, knowing it was happening. Seeing it was happening, but not being able to move. And when they got done with it and left it there and watched them boys walk off the property. He said they walked right by him and were just chatting. Like it was the most normal evening ever. Like they were catching up between classes in the hall. And off they went. And then an hour or so later he had come and got me and then took me out there to start this whole mess up.” 

James said nothing. Austin said nothing. They both remained fixed on either side of the bar. Austin finished his drink. “But you know why he acted like that, don’t you? You know why he didn’t do anything that night or any other night? You understand it, don’t you.” 

“I truly do not.” 

“Shame feels different in a town like that. Can you understand that? Shame doesn’t just come passing by like it might here. Or get frozen by the winter so when spring comes around you get a new start on things. Shame, if it comes, lives in those places forever. And once it comes into one of those places, you can’t really get it out. Do you understand that? Do you understand that my daddy couldn’t have done anything that night or any other night after that because of how the shame works down there? You can really feel it if you walk into a town like that, that’s been thoroughly shamed. It stains. It stains the whole thing. And you can feel it like a deep humidity when you go into somewhere that’s been shamed like that. Like a haunting. Like a hex. You understand that?” 

“This is a real story? This really happened?” 

“You understand it don’t you? I know you never been down there but you can understand it, can’t you? You can think about it and sort of see it in your head?” 

James shook his head. “I’m not really sure.” 

“I’m drunk,” Austin said. “Maybe I’m not telling it right.” 

“I think you told it fine.” 

“I’m drunk,” he said again. “I’m probably not telling it the right way.”