Page 93 of The Corruption of Hollis Brown

They took a moment to give me the same treatment. Boxed my ears so hard they took to ringing and I could barely hear their questions. They wanted the money of course, but I had less than a quarter left, and there are things worse than death. I knew I was as good as gone, but I couldn’t let them get Toji’s cut, his family needed it as much as mine.

They broke my ribs and fingers and jaw, cut beneath my nails and burned me something fierce.

But, Hollis, I couldn’t die. I was so angry at being poor and hungry, at fighting for nothing but greed. At seeing Toji’s little sister’s hair getting thin and my own blood, my family get so weak from not having enough meat.

Walt looked up at the sky. The moonlight threaded through the trees, and the hollow filled with light.

When you die, there’s a moment everything goes still in the room.

There’s a door that you didn’t see before and you know that it’s where you gotta go. There’s no singing angels, no bright light. Just the door and the feeling that you’ve got an appointment, and the knowledge that if you keep standing there you’ll be late.

But I stood next to my body and ignored that door. I stared at the man holding the pistol that killed me and I hated. I hated harder than I ever had in my entire life.

Then I walked right into him.

We didn’t shake hands, didn’t make no kind of a deal, I just took him like he was mine. Like I took that money.

I took his hand and I bent it toward his own face and I shot him.

Then I walked into the man who was guarding the door. Bent his screaming body to untie Toji.

And Toji looked into my eyes and saw me.

He wasn’t afraid. Somehow, he just knew.

The body I was in was dying again, quick just like Annie, so I opened the door and found myself another. I wanted to tell Toji that I left him some money. I wanted to tell him sorry, but the bodies kept vomiting and dying too fast.

I slid into your body like putting on an old jacket, Hollis, but I’ve had practice. I’ve had time to learn how to do it right.

Back then, I tore them apart and didn’t even know I was doing it.

I knew this would end real bad, so I left Toji behind. I jumped into enough people to get to a guard and then threatened my way into my first deal. He lasted long enough for me to write out a confession implicating me and the two men they’d kept in the room with Toji. This body was even polite enough not to expire for the length of a car ride back to Chicago.

The early days were such a blur that I don’t count them in my tally of bodies. I can’t.

I was living like a beast.

After a year though, things settled and Toji got his call. I’d figured it out by then, managed to settle in a street cleaner and hung around the bank to see if Toji would come pick his money up.

When Toji walked up the street, I could tell he was different. He was dressed finer, stood taller, looked prouder. He was older, and I knew then that I wasn’t. I knew, looking at him and seeing time on his face, that I was stuck.

Toji went inside and got his money and walked out. Stopped on the curb to smoke. I didn’t even have to call him for Toji to know I was there. He just turned to me and said, “How are you holding up?”

The way he used to after work, when we finished our shifts, still covered in steel dust and aching.

“Fine,” I said. “Just fine.” But I was lying, and he knew it.

He shook his head like he was disappointed in me. Then he told me the Callaghans killed them. Killed them all.

Who?

Everyone. My ma, my pa, my sisters, my grandfather who had been living with us. They wiped them from the face of the earth and there was a new family already living in our house.

Walt was crying. Hollis pushed down his anger and rocked him.

I was an orphan in an old man’s body, in the center of a city I didn’t love. I had no one and I am no one and I should be dead and I’m too much a coward to even do that right.

All this has just been wasting time.