Lefty, he can't sing the blues
all night long like he used to
the dust that Pancho bit down south
ended up in Lefty's mouth.

That afternoon, Sylvia rode the Third Street bus to the end of the line. She'd splashed some cold water on her face in the obstetrician's office, hoping it would take away the mascara under her eyes and the redness on her cheeks, although it had made her look more like a deranged clown than a girl who had spent the past hour crying.

She had never felt so exhausted in her life, did not know that it was possible to be so worn down. Recalling her last conversation with Tim Shepard made her shiver - the unfamiliar darkness in his tone, the weight of his body as he held himself over her, the anger in his eyes that turned them the color of steel - and she pulled her knees up to her chest. How would she tell him the news when she couldn't even begin to accept it herself?

She let herself imagine what would happen: Her, nervously showing up at Buck Merrill's unannounced, the walk up the stairs both familiar and strange. Knocking on his bedroom door, not waiting for him to answer. And she would allow herself in and there he would be, sitting in the chair by the window, his jaw hard as stone as he stared at her until she felt worms crawling on her skin, until he made her spit it out. Once she did, he would light a cigarette, say that there were other ways to take care of her - and at this point he would flick a bit of ash onto the floor - problem. Like she was the one who had caused it, was the one who had asked for it in the first place, when they both knew it wasn't true.

There was a clinic right over the border, in Joplin, that he would drive her to. He would wait in the reception room until she was done, and on the ride home, they would not speak a single word of it. It would be quick and simple and nearly painless, and he would tell her that she should be grateful, that they confronted the situation before it got out of control.

Control, she thought. What a funny word.

xxx

"As of today, investigators are still unsure about what started the deadly fire at the West Memphis Jail three days earlier. Of the four-hundred and fifty-two prisoners, thirty-three survived, including arsonist…"

Pete turned the television off and took another sip of his beer. Twenty-three hours, sixteen minutes and five-seconds separated him from his old life, when Nick was alive and Wade hadn't gone crazy, not yet, and the mess they'd gotten into with the Shepard gang was merely an illusion. But in an instant - the time it took for a building to explode, for a gun to be fired - his nightmare had sunk its teeth into his reality, like a starved dog chewing through bone, and he was helpless.

Wade had offered to give him some space. "I got—I got stuff to do," he'd said the morning before, after the news had come out, when they'd sat inches apart and neither grieved, could not remember how to do so. "I have to…"

Pete had nodded, barely noticing him slip out the front door. An hour or two he'd sat at the kitchen table, ignoring the pressure in his chest and behind his eyes, trying to make sense out of something that could never be explained. Then he'd burned through a pack of cigarettes, and when that was done, he went out onto the back porch and let the wind dry his tears.

He wanted to scream until blood came out of his mouth. He wanted to smash his fists through glass, hurtle his body through Wade's windshield as he crashed into a streetlight. He wanted to break every single bone in his body, until he was in so much physical pain that the pain in his heart, the pain that couldn't be medicated, would become duller, manageable.

He wondered if it had hurt. If Nick had tried to escape, to run from the heat, or had sat there on his mattress, simply amazed at the red and orange and yellow eating up the walls.

His beer bottle was now empty. He tossed it into the growing pile in the corner of the living-room, not caring if it made it that far, and reached for another. As he did so, the back door opened, and Wade came inside.

"It's fuckin' freezing," the older man spat, shaking a few snowflakes off of his hair. "Jesus. I don't know how we're gonna manage to drive that shipment down to Abilene in this weather - the roads are shit. They're expectin' it in two days' time."

"I can do it. I'll… I want to drive."

It was the first time he'd spoken since the news, and his voice came out sounding raw, as if his mouth was full of gravel.

Wade tossed him the keys. "Finish that," he ordered, pointing at the beer, "and you can go."

Pete downed it in three sips, then stood up, reaching out for the arm of the couch to steady himself. The mid-morning light that seeped through the window made all that was in front of him - the two chairs, the end table, and finally Wade, who leaned crookedly against the wall - indistinct.

A minute later, as the door shut behind him and he walked down the porch stairs, he hoped that the drive would take off whatever glare that had suddenly come over him. And that along the way, he would find someone - or something - that would make it impossible for him to come back alive.

xxx

"When it goes off, you're gonna want to jerk your arm back, but keep it locked. If you don't, you'll smack yourself in the face."

"Is that how your front tooth broke?"

"Yeah. Now, concentrate. Remember what I told you."

"Shoot to kill."

"And?"

"Keep your arm locked."

In Pete's peripheral vision, he saw his brother smile, and tried to do the same.

xxx

The sound of the telephone ringing caused Angela to stub her toe on the bottom stair as she ran into the kitchen to pick up the receiver. Although she'd gotten out of the shower a half-hour ago and was now wearing her warmest sweater and jeans, her skin still felt damp, as if she'd changed into her clothes soaking wet.

"Hello?" she said, breathless. She was stupid to expect it to be Tim - after all, he'd taught her not to hope for things that they knew would never happen - and again, it wasn't.

"Ang?" came a soft voice from the other end. "It's Sylvia."

Angela cleared her throat to cover the disappointment, a sudden warmth in her face and neck. "Oh. How are you?"

"Fine. Is your, um, is your… brother home?"

"Curly?" Angela wrinkled her eyebrows - why would she be calling for him? - and cast a look down the front hall. "I haven't seen him -"

"No," Sylvia interrupted, "I meant Tim."

"Tim? He's not - he's not living with us anymore. He didn't… he didn't tell you?"

The last she'd heard, they'd become closer since Dallas' death, though her brother had clearly denied any physical involvement from the start. She's going through a lot, was all he'd said on the subject, then abruptly changed the topic to how he needed to make sure Curly wasn't fucking around again with the neighbors' dog. He liked to torment it by throwing the butts of his cigarettes through the fence, snickering whenever one landed on the dog's ass.

"He might've, I guess I just wasn't listenin'."

"What were you gonna tell him? If you want me to, I can -"

"I think I have to handle this on my own."

Angela bit her lip in frustration. She wanted to argue with Sylvia until she admitted what was wrong, what her brother did that had made her voice so deflated, and brainstorm what they could do in revenge. "Well," she finally said, "if you ever want to talk, you can call me."

"Yeah," her friend lied, and hung up.

xxx

Curly climbed the porch steps of the roadhouse with a lump in his throat.

Since he'd heard about his brother's scuffle with Darry Curtis, he'd pressed Ponyboy for details, although his friend had given him little information. All he knew was what was on the surface: a black eye, swollen pride, tension so deep you could slice it with a knife. Considering the present situation they were in, he would have never imagined going to see Tim by himself, partly because he was afraid of facing their fallout, and because he did not know if they could move past whatever bridge they had crossed.

He hadn't come to the decision lightly. It had taken him days to allow himself to even think of the possibility, and then another of worrying over the what ifs: if Tim would brush him away, acting as he always had - nonchalant, slightly annoyed, like Curly was taking up too much of his time - or if he would, at last, let him in to see the broken man that hid behind too much alcohol and sleazy deals and girls hanging off his every word.

Nostalgia hit him as he opened the screen door. At the bar, he'd hit on his first girl - Carmen - and failed in front of a few older guys in the gang, who, for months afterward, had teased him relentlessly about it. The table in the right back corner, near the juke box, was where he'd gotten into his first drunken fight with a straggler from Brumley territory. And in the kitchen in the back, he'd spent countless nights sitting on the counter, watching his brother beat someone's ass in poker, and others leaning over the sink, vomiting, Tim looking at him in disgust and pity.

When Curly had walked up ten minutes ago (he'd cowered in the alleyway for another five), he hadn't seen Buck's car in the lot, and had hoped that the cowboy was far away, at a rodeo on another planet, perhaps, so that he wouldn't have to see whatever Shepard shit hit the fan. Over the past two weeks, launching himself into his schoolwork had kept the nausea at bay, deluded the urge to run, to control the anxiousness with something other than his brother's (stolen) antidepressants or beer or cigarettes. Only when he was alone - in the shower, in his bed, in a stairwell as he ran to a class, late - did the feelings rise up again and grab hold of his throat and legs.

And he wanted it to stop. He wanted to stop fighting. He wanted to accept the fear that greeted him in each room of his house as he walked in and saw that his brother wasn't there. He wanted the reassurance that no matter how badly he fucked up, three was a way, some way, that it could be fixed. He wanted to remember what it was like to be human, what it was like to wake up and know that he had a purpose, to know that the acceptance he'd been striving for his entire life was within reach.

He counted each stair as he climbed them. On the landing, as he paused to wipe his palms on his jeans, the door at the far end of the hallway opened, and his brother - his brother, who he could not live with but somehow, after all of this time, could not live without - stepped into the light.

xxx

"What is that?"

The voice came from the other side of the bedroom. Tim, half-crouched in the darkness, hastily shoved the box into the back depths of the closet and stood.

"I thought you were goin' out tonight," he said, trying not to slur. It was the one excuse that he could think of on the spot, the most plausible. On his feet now, he swayed slightly to the left - he must've had more to drink than he'd thought.

But there was no reason to count anymore, not when that kid from the Curtis' group, Johnny, up and died and Dallas aimed an empty barrel at the fuzz and expected them to fire.

The whole situation was fucked, so entirely fucked. The fucking gun - Tim's own fucking forty-five - wasn't even loaded. He'd taken out the bullets weeks before because he wanted to save them for when someone deserved to get shot. And Dallas - Dallas who did not follow the rules, who had gotten too close, too trusting - had done it to himself, had fucking deserved it, deserved to bleed until he realized his mistakes, until he understood that it was wrong to become attached, to let another person in.

Eventually, the cops would trace the heater back to him, sure, although he wouldn't be charged with anything because he hadn't used it. He'd spent his entire life cleaning up other people's messes - his mother's, his brother's, his sister's mistakes - and he couldn't this time, he would force himself not to. Besides, he reassured himself, it wasn't his place. It wasn't his responsibility; hell, it wasn't his blood on the pavement - and the one that should've been there, on his hands and knees with a washcloth and soap, wiping away the stain, had been too ignorant to predict the disaster he would leave behind, the fucker.

"I thought… I thought you might want to talk about it."

"Talk?" he retorted, and what adrenaline was leftover from the rumble, the numbness from drinking, the news of his friend collapsing without him there to see it - to stop it - fizzled out. "Who the fuck talks anymore? You think that would bring him back? You think it would help?"

She shouldn't have barged into his bedroom like that, the bitch - he had raised her to know better, to respect others' boundaries. His door had been shut for a reason, and she'd gone and opened it without thinking, without asking, without caring. Like Dallas, who had left his door open for longer than he should have - and look where it had led him, to a cheap wooden box and a shitty funeral service and a girlfriend who didn't know how to fill the hole he had carved into her life.

"I want to help you!" she cried. "Why won't you let me help you?"

"Please God, get the fuck out of my room, Angela."

But he wanted her to stay. He wanted her to go away. Why could he not have both?

xxx

For an entire minute, Tim stared at Curly in disbelief, unable to see the similarities between them, the differences that had not existed before. His brother's cheekbones were shaper, his mouth taut, the ligaments in his neck strained. What was most concerning, however, was his gaze: It was hostile, as if he'd been through a war and did not know how to assimilate into society after being through such trauma.

"What - what are you doing here?" Tim finally asked, barely able to say the words.

He remembered the day he'd learned Curly had told Wade Hamilton he was out on parole, when the anger and the confusion and everything that went along with it began. The pain, so clear in his brother's eyes, that he could never acknowledge outright - that he was the one, all along, who had wrecked such havoc. The sadness, the depression he had lived with for the past month - maybe longer - because he had, at last, fucked up, had made the same fatal mistake that Dallas had been paying for his entire life.

His hands began to shake, and he slid them into his jeans pockets, tried to act casual. Like he and Curly were suddenly on speaking-terms, as if the impasse between them had somehow closed without his knowledge and consent.

Curly opened his mouth. "I don't…" he started, then swallowed. "I don't know."

"Maybe you should've figured that out."

"Yeah, maybe I should've."

Tim nodded. "How's Angela?"

"Good."

"And school?"

"It's going."

"It's going, huh."

"Yeah."

They had been through so much - too much - and it was impossible to look back, to move forward. He had run for such a long time that he had forgotten what it was like to stand still. But if there was one thing he was completely sure of, it was that he was a Shepard, and they weren't left behind - they were the first to leave.

xxx

"Hey, Chief, I think I got somethin'."

Two days had passed since the investigation at Milly's had started, and any lead, Mike Harold guessed, was important to check. He walked over to the investigator in question, who had pulled aside one of the crates that had been stacked against the wall, and leaned down.

"Oh, my God," he said, "is that -"

The other man nodded solemnly. A handprint, the color of blood, was smeared across the plaster.