Page 163 of Five Brothers
I shoot off, running after Macon.
He crosses the bridge pathway, and I run alongside, my shoes soaked in mud and water. “What are you doing?” I yell as he hauls the man back to the center of the Bay. “Where are you going?”
“He said he wanted to die,” Macon says all too calmly. “His family is better off.”
“No!” his wife begs. “You care about him. I know you do. He needs you. Please. You’ve always been there for him. Don’t do this.”
I follow in horror as Macon walks onto the main road. The Jaeger house stands tall across the street, and I spot Paisleigh still doing her homework in the garage. She doesn’t seem to see us.
Macon takes the man into the small junkyard behind Mariette’s, and a lump lodges in my throat as I watch him throw the guy into a car, lock the door, and grab the control from Santos standing nearby.
I shake my head, my heart racing a mile a minute. Screams fill the air as Macon presses the button and the compressor starts up, coming down on top of the car, slowly flattening it.
Men filter in, watching, but not a single person races to help him.
“Macon!” the guy cries from inside the car.
His wife only sobs quietly now.
I come to Macon’s side. “Stop,” I order him.
“He’s a drain on my time and Bay resources.”
“You can’t kill him.”
He doesn’t reply, simply watching the crusher come down. The windows blow out, and I jump. Fuck this. I start after the guy. I have to get him out of the car.
But Macon yanks me back into him. I fight, but he holds me tightly, forcing me to watch.
I don’t know what I was going to do to help the guy, but no one else is moving.
“Your pretty little ass wants to go to bed with us,” Macon growls in my ear, “but you don’t want to wake up with us.Thisis the Bay.” He shakes me. “Fun, isn’t it?”
The hammers close, flattening the car more and more, the earsplitting screech of metal all we can hear over the man’s screams. I shake, nearly in tears as the guy disappears to the floor of the car, forced down.
“People say they want to die all the time, Krisjen,” Macon says. “Most don’t.”
His arm around my waist tightens.
“They’re just tired of fighting to live. They’re tired of problems.
Tired of nothing ever changing …” He pauses, his voice softening as his chest rises against my back. “Tired of money. People. Themselves.Sotired of themselves and being in their own heads.”
I shake my head as the car gets smashed.
“Right now he’s remembering the color of the wrapping paper at his fifth birthday,” Macon tells me. “How good a cheeseburger tastes. How he wanted to have a store of his own someday, learn how to surf, and see some redwoods. The time he laughed so hard while watching a movie with his mom one night, how it felt to wake up to the smell of good food cooking, and how it felt to kiss a beautiful girl for the first time.” His voice drifts off as if the memories are his, too. “And that one time the night air smelled like flowers, the top was down, and his song came on. The wind was a perfect temperature …”
A tear spills down my face. It’s like he sees it. As if he’s remembering it himself.
His voice is a whisper. “Right now he’s remembering everything he’s forgotten.”
He releases me and the compressor stops, the man still crying out from inside the car.
While I exhale in relief, the men move over and rip off the door, pulling him out by his feet.
He falls onto the ground, wet with sweat and red from the panic, but otherwise uninjured.
They don’t help him up, though.