A/N: This pre-series story is an expanded rewrite of "Cleaning Up Will Dixon's Mess," which has been removed from the archives. It adds scenes from Carol's perspective that were not included in that story, and it also makes some changes to Daryl's backstory.
[*]
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…" - Yeats
[*]
Will Dixon lay face down in a pool of his own vomit. Empty cans and bottles oozed their last drops of beer into the rough wood floor. The tit-shaped ashtray had been knocked off the end table, scattering dry cigarette butts everywhere. "Always knew he'd drink himself to death," Daryl muttered.
"Didn't drink himself to death, dumbass!" Merle pointed to the dark clot in their father's graying brown hair.
Daryl squatted down on his haunches and noticed, for the first time, the gunshot wound.
"Suicide?" Merle asked.
"In the back of the head? Who's the dumbass now?" Daryl drew himself into a standing position. He swatted a fly off one of his bare, muscular shoulder, just below the jagged edge of his cut-off shirt.
Their cousin Billy Ray had called them last night to tell them, "I think your daddy's on another bender. Gave him a job at the bar, but he ain't shown up the last few days. Might want to check in on him."
"Smells," Merle observed.
"Smells like two days," Daryl agreed. "Maybe three." He'd learned a bit about dead bodies working for the county mortician part-time doing "recoveries." That meant he had to pick up unidentified dead bodies wherever they were found and bring them back to the morgue. But he wasn't doing recoveries anymore. Merle had gotten them a job painting houses in a new cookie-cutter development twenty miles south, and they were living in the work trailer.
"Gotta report this," Merle said. "But we better clean up first."
They started with the moonshine still, which they disassembled and put it in the bed of Merle's pick-up, along with a few ceramic jugs. Next they searched every nook and cranny for drugs. They found some meth, which Merle claimed for himself. Daryl took the five dollars from his father's wallet. They went to his bedroom closet and removed the fake wall and loaded up the weapons.
"I get that crossbow," Daryl said.
"Fine. But I'm takin' the rifles."
Daryl aimed the bow at the poster of the naked woman just above his father's bed and shot her right in her left tit.
Merle laughed. "Not bad, little brother. Gave her a nipple piercing."
Daryl turned the bow back and forth in his hands to examine it. "Damn, the old man made a good decision for once in his life. This un's better than my old one."
"Which handgun ya want?"
Daryl glanced over his shoulder. "Take the Sig."
Merle handed it to him, and Daryl made sure the safety was on before shoving it in the waistband of his pants.
When the truck was loaded up with everything they wanted to keep – or didn't want the cops to find – Merle drove it off and hid it in the woods. Daryl followed on his father's motorcycle and then brought Merle back to the cabin, where they called the cops.
They spent the next hour answering questions they had no answers for. Daryl left Merle behind with the cops to wander off in the woods to take a piss, since they weren't letting him in the house. He ducked under the yellow tape and walked passed the small crowd of neighbors that had gathered around the unraveling scene. When he was returning, and was about to duck under the tape again, he heard a familiar voice: "Well if it ain't Daryl Dixon."
He turned around to see one of the neighbors, Darlene Cox, in a pair of tight, cut-off jean shorts. Her pink halter top clung tightly to her breasts, and her dirty blonde bangs curled over her forehead. He'd known her since he was a kid. She was halfway between his age and Merle's. One hip thrust out, she said, "Long time no see."
Daryl grunted.
"Yer daddy all right?" she nodded to the police tape.
"Dead. Got murdered."
"Sorry to hear that," she said.
"No ya ain't."
"Well, your daddy ain't exactly the best neighbor a girl ever had."
Merle sauntered up and ducked under the police tape. "Well hello there, sugar. Wanna fuck? I got a few minutes."
Darlene rolled her hazel eyes. "I hear you got the clap."
"Anything I may or may not have procured is well treated. C'mon, girl. You know you want to go for a ride on the Merle express." Merle humped the air.
"I'm engaged, Merle."
"Like hell you are."
Darlene held up her ring finger, like she was flicking him off, and a diamond engagement ring glinted in the sunlight.
"Well I'll be damned," Merle said. "Who agreed to marry you?"
"You wouldn't know him. He's an educated man. And unlike you, he knows how to romance a girl."
Merle snorted. "Let's be honest, Darlene. Ya ain't exactly the romancin' kind."
Now Darlene did stick up her middle finger.
"Oughtta get back to the police," Daryl said. "Gonna look suspicious talking out here."
"Listen, if the cops ask you any questions," Merle told Darlene, "you don't know shit about shit. You don't know what our daddy owned, what kind of business he was in, nothing. You hear?"
"I do know something, though," she said. "I think I know who killed your daddy."
"Who?" Daryl asked.
"Earl Hayes," she answered.
"Earl Hayes?" Merle scoffed. "Earl Hayes ain't never hurt a fly."
"Earl Hayes is a damn good shot with a .22. It was a .22 rifle that got him, wasn't it?" Darlene asked.
"Yeah," Daryl conceded. "But Earle ain't never even been in a real fight. He sure as hell don't go around killin' people."
"He's gone clear off his rocker, though," she said. "Since last week. Talking 'bout flesh eaters. Sayin' there's some kind of disease. People 'round these here woods, they been getting sick and dying and turning into cannibals. Claims he's seen it happen three times now. Says you got to get the brains." She pointed to her forehead. "Probably thought your daddy was one of 'em."
"Why in the hell would Earl just go insane all the sudden?" Daryl asked.
"I don't know," Darlene said. "And maybe he ain't. I mean...maybe he's right."
"What?"
Darlene hugged herself. "Just...I don't know. Thought I saw one once, lurchin' around the woods. I was a little drunk, so I'm not sure."
"A little drunk. Yeah, sure." Daryl shook his head. He ducked under the tape, muttering, "Cannibals my ass."
[*]
"Pelter?" the U.S.P.S. man behind the counter asked. He was a smiling, bald black man whose name tag read Theodore Douglas. The name seemed vaguely familiar to Carol, though she didn't know why.
"Peletier," Carol corrected him. She missed her maiden name. No one had ever messed up Jones.
"Is your husband French?"
"I suppose his ancestors were." Carol had once daydreamed of marrying a French prince when she was a little girl. He would rescue her from a fiery dragon on his majestic steed. Ed had rescued her, she supposed, from loneliness, crippling debt, and an uncertain future. He'd rescued her and then trapped her; saved and then condemned her.
"Oh, your dad used to be the town butcher!" he said. "I know you. We went to elementary school together."
"I doubt that." He looked a full ten years younger than her.
"I was two grades below you. The kids used to call me T-Dog."
Carol did remember him, now that he mentioned it. He was one of only two black kids in her entire school.
"My parents divorced when I was in fifth grade," he said, "and I moved to Atlanta with my mother. I just came back this year. My dad's been sick."
Carol nodded, but she didn't say anything. She'd learned not to make eye contact with other men, or to be too pleasant to them. Ed didn't like it.
"You never moved away though, did you?" Theodore asked.
"No," she answered curtly.
Carol had lived in this small town her entire life. Her parents had both died by her eighteenth birthday, leaving her nothing but a house that was mortgaged to the hilt. College wasn't in her cards. She'd gone to work at the local high school as a secretary and struggled to make the mortgage payments, spending very little money on food and clothing and none on entertainment.
Carol met Ed three years later at – of all places - church. He'd moved into town to take a job at the liquor store. That year Carol had to replace the roof on the house after a storm and broke her ankle. Because bad things always come in threes, next, her car broke down, and she couldn't afford the repairs. She couldn't even afford to make her next mortgage payment. Ed offered to give her rides to work. Then he offered to marry her and save the house from foreclosure. She said yes like she was seizing a lifeline.
Ed had been charming back then, young and tall and handsome and hardworking, though perhaps she should have seen all the red flags: he was a high school dropout who had not been in contact with his own family for years. He was fond of beer. He'd gotten jealous anytime she so much as looked at another guy, but she'd been fool enough to find that flattering back then.
The first two years of their marriage weren't bad. Ed got irritated more often than was comfortable, but he didn't start really yelling at her until the third year. He began to cut her off from her friends during the fourth. Then, when he was promoted to manager of the liquor store, he insisted she quit her job. He said he could take care of her, and after all those years of struggling, part of her wanted to be taken care of.
Only then, when she had nothing and no one but Ed, did the hitting begin.
Walking away wasn't as easy as people imagined. She'd tried it once. She'd driven through the night for seventy miles to a shelter she'd read about on a community bulletin board. But after having her wallet stolen, and seeing her daughter Sophia accosted by a crazy woman, she'd crawled back to her husband. Carol had learned to read his moods, to deflect them, and, when she couldn't, to brace herself for the blows.
"So what are you doing these days?" T-Dog asked. "You were always so creative. You used to – "
"- It's box 506," Carol interrupted him.
Ed didn't know about the P.O. box she'd opened. He didn't know about the letters his father sent Sophia. Ed's father had kicked Ed out of the house when he was seventeen. Ed had told her one version of events when they were dating. Ed's father had told her another when he learned he had a granddaughter and reached out to her.
Now, Ed's father wrote Sophia once a week. He'd spoken to her on the phone a few times. It was Sophia and Carol's dirty little secret. Ed could never know.
Sophia's grandfather seemed like a good man, and every time he wrote his granddaughter, often with a $5 bill tucked in the folds of the letter, Carol thought of writing back: "Your son beats me. Help." But she never did. And sometimes Ed would go months without hitting her, as if he'd gotten religion. But then it would always start again.
T-Dog lay the stack of mail on the counter – all junk mail, except the one with a return address in the mountains of northeast Georgia, from Edward Peletier, Sr.
Carol scooped up the pile and thanked him without meeting his eyes.
[*]
The county sheriff beckoned the Dixon brothers over. The man had graying black hair, a short but grizzly beard, and weary, brown eyes. He appeared to be in his early sixties and looked like he'd lived some life. The little badge atop his pocket read Sherriff Judge Roy Law. He looked at the bulge under Daryl's shirt just above his waistband. "Mr. Dixon, do you have a permit to carry that handgun concealed?"
"Now, Sheriff," Merle said, "you and I both know a man don't need a permit to carry concealed on his own private property."
Sheriff Law tipped up his hat. "Except this isn't exactly his property. It's your father's."
"Well, it's ours now," Merle said.
"Is that so?" the sheriff asked. "You stand to inherit everything, do you?"
"We ain't gettin' shit," Merle backtracked. "Bank's gonna take the land and cabin."
Will Dixon had taken out a second loan to rebuild when the old cabin burned down with Daryl's mother in it. The man had been in debt up to his eyeballs. "Our daddy died without a pot to piss in," Daryl said. "Ain't no one killin' him for his inheritance."
"And as for Daryl's gun...C'mon, Sheriff. This here's Georgia." Merle leaned forward confidentially. "You ain't one of them sissy suburban cops. You know damn well every man out here's got a gun on him." He nodded behind the police line, where the neighbors were peering and whispering. "You gonna ask every damn one of them to see a CCL?"
"Let me see your gun," Sheriff Law insisted.
Daryl drew the Sig out and handed it to him butt first.
The sheriff turned to Merle. "Yours too."
Merle sighed, drew his out, and handed it to the Sheriff, who examined them both before handing them off to a deputy. "These guns did not kill your father."
"No shit, Sherlock," Merle replied. "Think we'd be standin' out here with the murder weapon?"
"We're going to hold onto these guns for a bit," Sheriff Law said.
"Why?" Merle asked.
"Because I don't want y'all armed when we take you into the station."
"What we need to go to the station for?" Daryl asked. "We done answered all yer questions."
"Because," Sheriff Law said, "we're going to examine you from head to toe for bite marks. We found human flesh in your father's teeth."
