Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy Page A

you up to speed.”
    Daddy walked over to the record player, lifted the arm, and set the needle into a line that never stopped spinning. He started the record over and the first notes of “For the Sake of the Song” started crackling and popping through the speakers. Daddy cranked the volume knob a little higher and Townes’s melancholic voice rose.
    “You see, there was this family, Jacob, and this family had a dog that had a tendency to go crazy on a scent. The family had got this old hound from one of those shelters, I guess, a stray that must’ve never done much good running bear. Now, this dog still had the hunt bred into him. Wasn’t ever much of a family kind of dog. Anyhow, this dog caught a smell that suited him and those fucking eyes lit up and before anybody in the house could even know to holler, ‘Sit,’ that dog was off. And so here this stupid-ass dog goes trampling off in the woods and hunting down a smell that took him miles from that yard.
    “Well, a little while later the family gets to missing that old dog pretty bad, and they go to calling and calling but never hear a yelp. It’s sometime early morning and the wife gets to nagging at the husband that he better go looking for the dog, and as husbands are prone to do, that dumb motherfucker listened.
    “Now, there’s a dog still trampling off through the woods, and there’s a man knowing good and well that if he don’t find that dog, he’s not going to get a lick of pussy anytime soon. That thought never leaves this man’s head as he’s trudging through the woods, stepping over rattlesnake dens and everything else just for the chance that he might get some ass if he can track down that dog. That thought just kept eating at him and eating at him and driving him further and further from home until all of a sudden he gets to this clearing, a big ol’ sloping hill scattered with rocks the size of Volkswagens, and he hears a single bark cut across open air.
    “I bet his dick got hard just as soon as that bark tickled his eardrums, so he tore up that hill ready to grab that fucking hound by the collar and drag his ass back miles through thick woods just for a chance at pussy his wife would probably end up teasing him with anyways. Well, as this man gets up the hill he finds that old hound nestled up next to a half-naked man wrapped tight around one of those rocks. There’s a smell about that body after a few days and the man thinks he just might get sick, but he leans down there anyhow and gets to looking past all those burns and all that blood and he hears something. You know what he hears, Jacob? He hears him breathing.”
    Daddy took the gun and scratched at an itch on his temple with the holey end. He took a real deep breath, rocked his head back, and closed his eyes for a second or two before they settled into me. “He was fucking breathing, Jacob.”
    A heaviness clinched down around my whole body, a heaviness like I was in a vacuum, and as the magnitude of what my father had said set in, I was choking again. I tried to breathe but couldn’t, only Daddy’s hands were still right there hanging by his sides. I felt like I was going to be sick, and then, out of nowhere, this numbness came over me and it was as if my body was still sitting in that chair, but my eyes had floated off for a better view. I could see the whole room, the Cabe brothers and me sitting there while Daddy stood over us with the pistol. I was floating even higher now, and it was a calming sort of feeling the further I got away. As I rose, the rubber band started stretching thin the further I went, until there was no more give to be given and that rubber band snapped and I shot back into myself, all of that reality driven home that at barely eighteen years old, I was as good as dead, and I threw up all over my lap.
    Daddy looked down at me with a disgusted sneer wiped across his face.
    “Now, I don’t have to tell any of you how serious this is. I don’t have to