Where All Light Tends to Go Read Free Page B

fuck outside, so I can have a talk with Jacob.” Daddy rose and carefully rolled his T-shirt down over his back. “You’re going to fix this when I’m done talking to the boy.”
    The Hispanic man stood first, laying the tattoo gun down on a side table before sidling toward the door. Josephine, on the other hand, stuck around for a minute, rose and hung around my father’s neck like a yanked-loose necktie with corn pearl teeth strung at the knot. She kissed him on his neck, and he paid her little mind. Josephine strutted toward the door and glared at me as if I was responsible for the misspelling of her name. I smirked, and it ate her up.
    Daddy walked over to the record player—even now in 2009 “nothing sounded as good as vinyl”—and cranked the knob on the speaker dial till Twitty filled the room. He always turned the music loud when it was time to talk business so as no one outside of the conversation could catch a word without ears pressed close to our lips. He dragged the folding chair in front of me and straddled the chair backward.
    Even to me Daddy had that look about him like he’d seen and done things that glazed over any bit of light that had ever been in his eyes. All that was left was what folks from war called that “thousand-yard stare,” and though he was my father and hadn’t ever done me wrong in any sort of way deserving of my cower, I was always a little fearful when he spoke.
    He lit a fresh cigarette with the one still burning and leaned close so that I was certain to hear him. Dark hair was slicked and parted across his brow, and divots from teenage acne freckled the flanks of his face. His nose had a bit of a crooked hook to it, but it was the acne scars that drew a man’s eyes, the way his face seemed pitted. “You’re going to go to the camp tonight.” Afternoon beers swerved along his words. “You’re going to make sure it happens just like I need it to happen.”
    I knew what he was talking about, so I just nodded. I reckon in the old days when Daddy first started the business, he didn’t have any choice but to dirty his own hands, but that time had long since passed. The story had started when he made some small-time connection with a mid-level crystal dealer from somewhere over in Tennessee, back when it was one-percenters responsible for most of the trade. Back then they’d run an ounce or two across state lines in the crankcases of their motorcycles. For a long time Daddy stayed pretty low on the ladder, but connections came about and he latched on. Now he no longer touched anything that came or left Jackson County. He just directed traffic with low-spoken conversations in music-filled rooms. Methamphetamine was a living, breathing body in Appalachia. The dope came from Mexico, but Daddy was the heart of the body here, pumping the blood through every vein in the region. Though it all started here, by the time that crystal made it into the hands of local crankers, it had been passed all over the mountains a dozen or more times to lap back.
    What this problem boiled down to, though, was the way that Daddy handled the money. Once it went from being just enough to get by on to big money, he’d had to come up with a way to make all those dollars look legal to prying eyes. That’s how he came up with the idea for McNeely’s Auto Repair. In a tight-knit scheme where every service offered cost four or five times that of any normal mechanic, Daddy laundered the money into something legal. Every dollar that came back to him had a receipt. Everyone who brought in a car to be serviced was on the payroll, and the majority of cars being worked on had been purchased at one time or another by my father. They paid him in his own money.
    When legitimate folks brought in a car, they left outraged at estimates. When some rookie deputy got the gall to try and figure out what was going on, he got the same price gouge as anyone else. A few of those deputies even forked it over to try and get