Chapter Text
The light coming through the window behind him was very, very bright. He kept his back to it, looking down at himself. The hole in his chest closed as he watched, and he found himself remembering his name. Boyd Crowder. And Raylan shot me, and I’m dead .
The last bit of information did not distress him. He felt . . . relieved. Curious, too, that he was still able to think, but perhaps this was the agonal paroxysms of his brain.
Movement in the kitchen. He looked towards it, to the doorway he’d last seen when Ava stood there with a shotgun, and saw—
His mama.
Ines Crowder had been skinny, raw-boned, her shocking black hair and bright blue eyes passing down on to him. Bowman had been fair-haired, like their daddy. Boyd got Bo’s ruthlessness and Ines’ peculiar ways. She’d gone crazy, when he was a young teenager. She didn’t start raving, nothing to get her tossed in a hospital. She just . . . withdrew. Retreated, let the world pass her on by, and left her sons to the tender mercies of their father.
She stood there in the kitchen door, her Sunday dress pressed and starched like she was set to attend Easter service. Boyd felt ragged in his own clothing; he felt the shame on his arm again. What he’d done as a game, he’d told himself. Keep himself alive and relatively untouched in prison, keep himself free of owing Daddy for his safety. The words of the dead could be used, tools to turn a few skinheads to the designs he preferred. Robbing banks, making buys, the dangerous mischief. That he never really believed those words--well, now. He couldn’t decide if that made him a better person or a worse one, and in the end--well didn’t matter did it? Perhaps that was why he was here.
“A puppet pulling other puppets’ strings?” his mama said, coming to sit at the table near him. Sitting near her felt like sitting near an old box tv. Like all his hairs were standing up, the buzzing and static humming in the air.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I guess that’s about right.”
“Not the kind of life I wanted for you,” she told him.
“Mama,” he asked after an incredulous moment. “What kind of life did you think I’d ever have, you leaving us to Daddy? Knowing he’d never let me go to college, never let me do anything but wither under his thumb?”
“I expected you’d find a way out, like I did.”
“You hid in your room and your books,” Boyd said, hearing in his voice the low burn of anger. “You hid until you went walking in the hills and we never found your body.”
“I made my escape,” she told him. “Don’t blame me for falling so far before making your own.” She looked, purposefully, at the place in his chest where Raylan Givens, his only friend, had shot him.
“I carry the responsibility for my choices,” Boyd told her. His anger was gone as abruptly as it had come. “But I’m not the only one who’s had a hand in my path.”
“No one has an untouched path, son,” she said. “But only one person takes the steps on it.”
“Never mind a push in the back, headwinds, or cave-ins.” Boyd smiled a little bit, feeling unsettled and on firm ground at the same time. This he could do, talk. All it took was them both dead to talk again.
Or maybe he was still dying, and this was the prelude to the end?
“It may be,” she answered.
“Now that just ain’t fair, Mama, reading my mind. I don’t get to choose my words.”
“Because you are so good at making choices.” The rejoinder was dry.
“Touche.” He’d forgotten her humor, how when her words hit, they were always on target. “So what choice will I be making now?”
“That is up to you, as you already well know,” she started.
“Do I?” But they were just words to fill the quiet that had snuck into his mind, into the house. She waited, while Boyd filled up on all the no-more and last-of. Books half-read--he had the habit of starting several at a time, leaving them different places, picking up right where he’d left off, and all would go unfinished. Another no-more: No more words would leave his mouth. But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Even as he considered the possibility that the great black was coming down, any second--that was not quite right.
Boyd felt his face stretch into a smile, his chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the bullet lodged in it. “I’m going to wake up.”
“If you want to.” Mama watched him.
He began to consider that she may not be his Mama at all. Mama never looked so pristine, so focused. And Mama had also blinked on occasion.
Before Boyd could speak again, she opened her mouth: “The better question is when you want to.”
That was a hell of a question, wasn’t it, to loom up in his mind on the edge of so much darkness? He put all his attention on it, such that he could. He was familiar enough with scientific thinking to know that some believed time to be relative, that it contracted and expanded based on speed of movement and one’s position in space. He understood the idea that now and then and soon were sometimes thought to be simultaneous. Of course, his own short lifespan--not even forty years--was not even a blink to something like . . . like whatever this was, wearing his mama’s face.
“Any time I like?”
She nodded.
“And I don’t have to live the same way?”
“You choose,” she told him.
“But how will I know? If I--did wake up, some time in my past, how would I know to take a different route? Oh--” And like that, he saw the edge of the sword. He’d wake up. He’d wake up a not-quite-forty year old in his younger man’s body--hell, even his child’s body, possibly--and he’d know everything, everything . He’d know how to conduct himself in the world, how to dodge his daddy’s most ingenious traps. Hell, when to bet on the University of Alabama winning a national football title, and when to bet against.
“You see,” she said, still unmoving, still so still .
“My choice,” he said. Hell, Boyd, you better make this a good one, he thought, aware that this might be the most important choice he was ever presented.
So. Walk backwards.
The last night . When he took his sister-in-law hostage and all but forced Raylan to pull the trigger.
When he chose the Aryan Nation . No. A different choice ended with him used like the prison toilet, maybe dead by his own hand.
Tax evasion. Joke that it was, tax evasion with his tiny pension, living in a no-electricity shack in the holler, just wanting to drink himself to sleep to forget everything he’d seen in the desert.
The desert . No. Not for anything would he go back to the desert.
The cave-in . Now--now here was an event that deserved consideration. He and Raylan had been friends, then, thick as thieves. They’d been the youngest in the mine, probably only hired because of their last names and not wanting trouble with their daddies. The mines assumed, no doubt, that the scions of the Crowder-Givens crime kingdom (though kingdom was far too grand a description for Bo Crowder’s petty local shit-kicking) were in good favor with their fathers, and not in open defiance by seeking honest work. When that mountain had started to rumble, Boyd had grabbed on to Raylan’s coveralls, and hurled him skyward, pushing him ahead, yelling invectives the whole way. Raylan didn’t quit running, though, until he’d left Harlan and made it to . . . where ever he’d gone, after.
It was tempting, to choose the day of the cave in. It felt like an axis. But his life had already been well on the downward path by then, hadn’t it? He didn’t find out until much later, after he got out of prison the first time, when his daddy dropped a stack of mail onto his lap, each one with a university name on it, each one opened, the contents rifled through and too old to be of any use. “Throw ‘em in the fire,” his daddy had commanded, and Boyd had done so, forcing a kind of self-derisive grin through his rage. He’d wanted to kill his daddy, that night. Not for the first time, and of course not for the last.
Daddy had already been stealing his mail, by the day of the cave-in. Truthfully, Daddy had been planning Boyd’s future since before Bowman learned to hold a football in his hands, when Boyd was already taking after Mama with his nose in a book and his head nowhere near Harlan.
The idea of potential loomed large and sudden, as inescapable and not much kinder than oblivion had.
Still. The idea of being around the young, the isolation of it. Then again, was that so different from speaking to a wide room that only seemed to echo back his own voice?
“I’m ready.”
The creature smiled with his mama’s lips.