A pre-series look at the life of the Dixon brothers from childhood right up until the start of the apocalypse. Written as a memoir from Daryl's point of view.
Fair warning that this story will include potentially offensive language, depictions of both verbal and physical abuse, drug and alcohol use and abuse, and sexual content. This is the Dixons we're discussing, after all. I hope you enjoy!
In my earliest memory, I am drowning.
It was the middle of July and the air was thick with humidity and gnats and the sun was beating down hard and fierce through a canopy of criss-crossing branches. I was three years old then, and I'd been running as fast as my legs could carry me. Barefoot, my sunburnt skin splattered with mud and dirt, I jumped over branches and swerved around rocks and pushed against the scarred bark of ancient trees as I chased after my brother, all the while yelling his name at the top of my little lungs.
Merle, he was nine then, with longer legs and a longer stride and what our mama liked to call selective hearing. I didn't know what that meant. Whenever she sighed it at Merle and he groaned back at her I always laughed like I got the joke, but really I couldn't riddle it out to save my hide.
Every now and then Merle would stop and throw a glance over his shoulder to make sure I was still there. "Where we goin'?!" I tried to ask him every time, but he would just laugh and tell me to trust him and take off again, faster than before. My brother, he was always telling me to trust him, but I don't think he ever really had to; trusting Merle was instinct, like the way birds just know when to start flocking south before their whole world freezes.
So even though my cheeks were burning red and there was sweat stinging my eyes and plastering my mop of hair to my forehead and my muscles were screaming to slow down, dummy, you need to slow down I kept on running right after my brother.
The dirt turned to mud under our feet and Merle yelled at me to watch out seconds before the ground sloped down. Merle dug his heels in, this big, broad grin splitting his face as he slid down the riverbank. I tried to copy him, but I think my brain told my feet what to do a second too late because I skidded down the tiny hill and flipped over into the thick, squishy mud.
My hands reached out as I slipped and tumbled and rolled towards the water, desperate to grab onto something, anything, that might stop me from falling in. I opened my mouth to call out to my brother but my shout got lost in the huge splash of my landing. The murky water closed over me and I looked up, still reaching towards the surface, fingers grasping at the bubbles that floated up and clouded my vision.
Here's what happens when you're drowning: your chest burns and the water that's all around you spills into your open mouth and glugs down your throat and fills up your lungs so that your chest burns even more. I could vaguely feel the fluttering fins of passerby minnows tickling my kicking, flailing legs and later on, after all the chest-burning and pump-pump-pump heart-bursting and stinging eye-watering (because yes, your eyes can tear up under water—there's something they don't tell you in science class), I thought that maybe those little fish were confused. Just breathe, they were probably thinking. Don't you know how to use gills? I told that to Merle that night, after we'd gotten home and were lying in the dark listening to Mama and Dad's argument through the walls. Merle laughed at me and said that fishes didn't have enough brains in their tiny little heads to think thoughts like that. I said he didn't know what he was talking about, and he said that I should go to sleep.
Anyway, there was water in my eyes and in my nose and in my mouth and in my ears. The longer I stayed flailing and fighting under its weight the more scared I was and the more everything hurt. All the kicking and the punching and the slapping I was doing kept a cloud of bubbles swirling around me and soon every blurry thing I saw got fuzzy around the edges.
I didn't hear Merle jump in after me. I didn't see him swimming towards me. When I felt something grab me under the armpits I started trying to wriggle away. I thought that maybe my graceless dive had awoken some angry, red-eyed river-monster and now it was going to kill me to get its revenge.
The surface drifted closer, and closer, and closer until another splash opened up the terrestrial world to me again. That hot, blazing sun scorched my face as I came sputtering and gasping and coughing into the air. I clung to my brother, his soaking-wet shirt clutched tight in my two tiny fights as he navigated over mossy rocks to the shore.
"Dar, stop, you're fine," were the first words that made it past my waterlogged ears and into my brain as Merle deposited me clumsily on the mud. I fell with a hard thump and my brother knelt down in front of me, his knees disappearing in the mushy ground. I kept on coughing and sniffling and sputtering and he reached around me and slapped my back with what I thought was a little too much force. Maybe it was just enough, though, because bitter-tasting river-water splashed out of my mouth. I spat after it, and my chest was heaving because I was breathing so hard, and Merle was just watching and hitting my back until I didn't have anything to spit up anymore.
"Look at me," Merle demanded. My eyes flicked up. I had to blink a few times to get the two dancing images of my brother's face to merge into one. "You okay?" It was a question, but the way that he said it made it seem like the only right answer was yes. I bit my lip and I nodded. Merle nodded back, and then he stood. I wanted to reach out for him, to ask him to scoop me up like he sometimes did when the mood struck him, and I even started to but a curt shake of Merle's head had me pushing myself up to my wobbly legs.
We trudged back up the slope of the riverbank, Merle ahead of me like he always was. It took a really long time for me to make it to the top. A few times I slapped my palms into the mud and used my hands to push myself up.
We lived in a rickety old house in a decrepit old town full of drunks and druggies and whores. There were two other houses on the same dirt road and ours was nestled right in the middle. We had a lot of space; our lawn was this sprawling expanse of unmowed grass with a thicket of thorn bushes acting like a fence on the very edge of one side of the property—Dad's property. It wasn't ours, it wasn't the family's, it was Dad's, and he always made damn well sure we knew it.
Dad worked in an auto-shop two towns over; he didn't work long hours, but he was always out of the house all day long. The sun had long blinked farewell by the time he'd stumble back through the door reeking of sweat and whisky. Dad liked the bars, y'know? He got kicked out of them a lot, too, because he was what Mama called a rowdy drunk.
Mama sure did turn up her nose at Dad's drinking. Never in front of him, of course, but he didn't like her saying a whole lot in front of him. I don't think I ever saw them exchange any pleasantries or whisper any sweet nothings to each other. When Dad was gone all day, working and drinking and working and drinking, Mama would go on these long rants about your daddy, this and your daddy, that. She'd call him all kinds of things, muttering "that lousy drunk" to herself while she mopped up all the messes that Dad left behind.
The funny thing is, once she'd exhausted her soliloquies on Dad, she'd plop herself on the couch or on her bed or at the kitchen table and she'd pour herself a really tall, really big glass of wine. I guess everyone's got their vices. That's the excuse she used, anyway.
Mama really liked her wine, and she liked her Virginia Slims, and she liked paperback romance novels. She had stacks of them rising up from the floor all along her side of hers and Dad's bedroom. What she really didn't like was me and Merle "causing a ruckus" while she was trying to concentrate on her books. She'd always groan and blow a stream of smoke out of her mouth and ask if we, "Couldn't go do what little boys an' get your asses on outside?"
We didn't really mind it, especially because the house stank of cigarette smoke and spilled bourbon and red wine. Outside suited us. Of course, there were days when big gray clouds turned the sky near-black and thunder rumbled a drumbeat over our heads. We'd really want to go back inside, but we knew that Mama would just tell us to get our asses back outside, and that's how we'd wind up at Lilah Inola's house.
Mrs. Inola was our elderly neighborhood, and even though she was old with tanned, leathery skin pulled tight over her bones, she didn't act it. She insisted that me and Merle could call her Lilah instead of Mrs. Inola. She didn't even want us to call her Miss Lilah, no sir, it was just plain Lilah. She smiled so bright it light up her dark eyes, and her dark hair only had a few little streaks of silver to it.
We wound up befriending our neighbor Lilah by mistake. Merle and I had been playing tag when the rain clouds rolled in and starting spraying us with a preliminary mist. We ran through the drizzle like we always did, darting between the drops until they got too big to avoid and the first peel of thunder shook the sky.
"Find cover!" I yelled, because that's what we always yelled when it started raining really heavy. I took off, shooting like a bullet straight ahead, not realizing the creaky porch I was aiming for wasn't my own—our game had gotten me a little turned around, though Merle didn't seem to mind. He must have been just turned around as I was because my big brother was right on my heels, soaking wet and squinting against the sheets of rain pouring over his.
Lilah must've heard our thudding feet on her porch. She opened the door a crack and gasped when she saw us, her puckered mouth making this little 'o' at the sight of two dirty, barefoot, sopping wet boys standing at her door.
We froze. I hid my tiny body behind Merle's leg because I always thought it was the safest spot to me when anyone bigger than me got mad. I trusted Merle, remember, and he'd always kept me safe.
Well, it turned out Lilah wasn't mad at all. Her shock melted and she grinned at us and expressed this tinge of despair at how drenched we were. Our clothes were sticking to our skin. Our hair was matted down on our heads. I could see a bead of water on the very tip of my nose.
"Let me get you boys some towels," Lilah said, and she disappeared into her cozy little house. I looked up at Merle and he shrugged at me and I think he was about to suggest that we head on home when Lilah reappeared in the doorway with the towels she had mentioned.
That was the start of our friendship, me and Merle and Lilah and two towels waiting out a flash storm under the protection of Lilah's porch awning. Lilah was Cherokee, and she had a lot of stories to tell; very, very old stories that her mama used to tell her and that her grandmama used to tell her mama and that her grandmama's mama used to tell her grandmama.
We passed the time listening to Lilah's stories. Merle would sort of get distracted sometimes, watching the rain inside of listening or pacing the length of Lilah's porch while she talked. She never minded his restlessness, just like she never minded my questions.
She told us one story about the purple and white and yellow flowers that budded on the big bush on the side of her house. They were called Cherokee roses, and they were supposed to bring comfort to mamas who were crying about losing their babies.
I remembered the story a couple of weeks later when I found one of those flowers growing wild in the woods behind our house. I knelt down by it, feeling the silky petals between my fingers, and I looked over to Merle. "If one of us went missin' 'r somethin', d'ya think these flowers'd grow where Mama cried? Like in Lilah's story?"
Merle didn't take very long to think up his answer: "Mama wouldn't cry."