Summer Sons(86)

“Fulton curse,” Sam said.

Andrew paused to orient himself and scratched at the scabs on his left arm. Sam smacked his hand loose to make him quit it. He finally said, “The story gets weirder from here, if you want me to stop.”

“When I was fifteen, my dad knocked me through the glass of the storm door,” Sam said. “Cut my ass up. Little less spooky, more domestic, I guess. That was the first time Mom had to take me to the hospital after something he did. Mamaw picked me up from the hospital, brought me here, and I never saw either of them again. Not one time, not even for fucking Christmas. She was a hard old bitch, but she was sure about keeping her grandbabies safe.”

“Well, shit,” Andrew said.

“Riley’s parents aren’t violent, but they’re real religious. His mom wouldn’t let him change his name. He came out here too after he got his ass whipped at school too many times.” He let out a breath. “Fifteen is the year for moving in with your grandmother, in our family.”

Sharing the grisly truth was easier if he didn’t have to acknowledge the shit being said, if each of them just—spoke out loud, to be heard without being dug at. So in turn, Andrew said, “Eddie wasn’t himself when I did find him,” though that was nowhere near the whole truth of it.

He remembered Eddie’s skinny arm crossing his shoulder and the sharp shock of Eddie’s fingers curling into his lacerated back, bringing the beastly muttering of the curse into his ears. Remembered pain bowing him, fresh blood rolling in fat drops from his armpit to his elbow to his wrist and then to the fingers supporting Eddie’s limp head. When the blood touched Eddie’s hair his neck turned, an unnatural jerk, and he flicked his tongue over Andrew’s wet skin. Dizziness struck Andrew while the mouth dragged up his arm, as if it was lapping up more than the blood alone; he collapsed facedown in the chill water, gasping and choking when it got into his mouth. Eddie loomed over him and palmed his cheek to turn his face out of the water, letting him swallow and spasm. One corpse-cold hand tilted his chin and squeezed his jaw open while the other slid bloodied fingers into his mouth, gagging him as it reached deep down his throat to make him consume, in turn, as he had been consumed.

The warmth had drained out of him into the ground. Eddie curled up around his inert flesh, whispering the cavern’s toneless whispers in his ear, words he had no recollection of later, except that he’d felt them changing him to his bones. The curse tied him to the ground and to the blood coating his throat, reached past the boundaries of his skin and turned him inside out. The edges of his flesh, split like an overripe tomato, pulled along the length of his back; under the cold, coagulating gore, the abrupt itch of healing stung.

He struggled to articulate even a portion of those memories, the violation of them, and managed only, “He did some fucked up stuff. Made me drink his blood. The Fulton curse, that shit’s real. I laid there all night, with him on me, and when the sun came up I like—felt it. I felt the ground warming up. Daybreak brought him around, back to normal, and he didn’t remember a thing. And then it still took two more fucking days for them to find us.”

Andrew stuck his thumbnail between his teeth and started to gnaw, curled on himself, too awkward to wriggle into the shirt again but feeling utterly naked. Sam lay a hand on his shoulder, one squeeze.

“So, as a kid, you knew you were going to die,” he said.

“Yeah, I did, after that first night. I thought I had died already.” That part, he’d never said aloud, not once—not even to Eddie. “I thought I was some sort of really visible ghost, for a whole week after. Took burning myself on the stove making tomato soup to realize I was still kind of alive. After we got out, we both, we weren’t…” normal. He couldn’t say that, couldn’t keep talking. His offering to Sam dried up.

“I kept raising Riley out here, after our grandmother died,” Sam offered in return. “On paper, all I am is a good-for-nothing piece of shit mechanic who gets drunk four nights a week and lives in his dead mamaw’s house. But Riley’s better than that. He’s the only one in our family who’s gotten to college, and he deserves to get out from under all our history. That kid’s the reason I’ve kept it together.”

Andrew said, “That’s all good, but he deserves to live how he likes too. And coming from outside, that age difference between y’all seems like nothing. He’s just another guy to me.”

“To me he’s always going to be the kid that came here with a backpack and nothing else, and asked me to shave his head in the bathroom. I’m responsible for him,” Sam said.

“Except he’s grown,” Andrew repeated with care, “and you’re not his father.”

Sam stood, knees cracking. “Fine, I’ll be the one to talk to him, but I’d still prefer you not pull him in deeper. The pair of us, that’s different, we can handle it. Just keep him on the edges.”

Andrew kept sitting, lost in thought, though he jolted when Sam palmed the topmost point of his scar as he brushed past—glancing, curious. The hydraulic stop on the screen door released with a hiss when Sam went inside. Drained from the conversation and the argument preceding it, Andrew was glad to be alone for a minute or thirty. The unlit living room welcomed him later on with sustained quiet and a pile of blankets on the couch, all for him and offered without comment.