“The Devil Is a Southpaw”: A novel by Brandon Hobson

In the spring of 1988, on a Sunday night in our last days escaped out of the courtyard by chewing apart the bottom of the fence’s rotted wood and then crawling underneath it, and at sunrise on Monday morning when the alarm rang throughout the buildings, the guards discovered that Matthew had disappeared, too.

Only then were the rest of us allowed to search deep into the woods without using butcher knives to cut through the thick brush and twigs, as the drill sergeants had proposed, and without a Thermos of water or fruit to keep us hydrated, as the cooks had suggested, because all we really needed was one another. The guards and staff and drill sergeants, who weren’t concerned with finding the dogs, claimed they would call the police and began searching in the more open areas down the hill from the grounds, but they sent us, for whatever reason, into the dark woods. We weren’t afraid of finding snakes or even murderers, not after all the physical labor and punishments we had endured over the past year, and going into the trees was like entering the thin, cool atmosphere of a land we had heard only from fairy tales read aloud to us, because the air was calm with a brooding tranquility, and the susurration and sighing of the trees gave us an immediate sense of repose, and certainly we were silent, not even clearing our throats or gasping in all our anxieties and fear as we trudged slowly through the boggy wet leaves, past dimbles, scrogs, and shrubbery, and into the slanted streams of morning sunlight. All across the narrow paths that curved around trees, where the worms and insects crawled in the dirt that held the tracks of deer and snakes, we heard the sound of footsteps from the little people we assumed were spirits running away from us, those little tricksters, and though we never caught a glimpse of them, we did manage to descry a deranged vulture ahead of us pecking at the ground, eating the last gobbet of a dead carcass. Nora, Matthew’s sister, worried the vulture was chewing on her brother’s body; however, we saw fur and a snout and realized the vulture was, in fact, eating a dead animal, not a human being. Nonetheless, we turned and headed down a different path in an abyss of silence to a berth where we could get a grip of our surroundings and try to keep all the stress and rigors of the deep country, those primeval boondocks, intact.

Matthew had run away once before. The first time the guards found him had been at the beginning of the winter, when frost covered the grass and icicles hung from tree branches after a recent ice storm, and still he walked away without even trying to hide as if he knew he was predestined to be caught and punished, which was inevitable in that dull, sleepy town called Old Dublan, where most of us were born and raised. When they brought him back, he told them that he simply needed to go for a walk to clear the bad thoughts from his head and adjust to the new thinking of the everyday people, that’s what he told them, that his mind was an enervating dissolution of severe anxiety and vulnerability prime for brainwashing. We were always a little uncertain as to whether Matthew was brilliant or a smidge eccentric, possibly even crazy, but we admired his courage. In his earlier punishments, for instance, he had avoided so many food restrictions, beatings, and deprivations, that it seemed almost sententious of him to prefer the long confinement of the Columbus House basement. Yet, as the days passed and the rest of us continued chopping wood and pulling weeds and loading piles of damn dirt in wheelbarrows, even the most impervious among us waited until we were back in the facility at night to share our predictions, such as that Matthew would emerge from confinement unable to speak, that his mind would become so disoriented from the isolation that he would no longer be able to recognize us, and that he would die down there by suicide. Only minutes after he was set free from the basement, the look on his face told us he was fine, that he had, in fact, preferred the confinement because he was able to find the books he had hidden behind a pile of wooden shelves when he was supposed to be sweeping and cleaning in there some time before. Confinement became a spiritual awakening for him as well because he grew closer to God, and soon he was listening to the laughter of angels and the distant laments of his ancestors that encouraged him to be strong in faith and not project his anger onto the everyday men whose foolish words and actions were cruel, and also that he speak very little and listen closely, which was why it was so difficult to get him to talk about those nights of punishment and solitude. Even the most incredulous of us listened to him describe the visions of fleeting stars that were enchanting enough to swoon the most beautiful people on this poor Earth.

Previously, during the extra free time on certain Christian holidays or on weekends, Matthew would shut himself in his room and read, write, and draw as much as he could, later telling us he actually missed that about our public school, reading and writing stories and taking art class, so certainly he devoured an immoderate number of books, reading them as often as he could and staying up late thinking about them, knowing he would be so tired the next day that his muscles would ache, yet he still stayed up late sketching faces and bodies and writing stories and poems in his journal with a pencil he had stolen and kept hidden. No one paid much attention to his journal until Nora told us he was writing about his own death in the future, and that he had, at the age of seven, predicted the exact date and manner of death of their paternal grandfather, whose throat was slashed by an intruder. His grandfather died face down with his left arm under his head as a pillow, three years after Matthew’s documented prediction. Matthew made other predictions listing the specific dates of world events that included bombings, mass shootings in the U.S., and a horrific deluge that killed over ten thousand people and wiped out an entire town —­ all proof, Nora told us, that Matthew held the crucial and compulsory predictions for what was to come for the facility, for the guards and drill sergeants who made our lives miserable, and for all of us. Yet, when we asked Matthew about these predictions, he had only written a story and all the events that passed were coincidental, but those of us who knew him understood he wasn’t being truthful, he invariably displayed peculiar behavior after the lights were out, some would see him with his ear placed to a window in the hall as if he were listening for something outside, others would say he wrote stories in his sleep, but nobody was ever certain who was lying and who was telling the truth despite how much we trusted one another and everything we had been through together, all the daily work and harsh punishment we had endured. Some said he preferred rewriting the fairy tales we had all heard as children.

We felt like we were in some flexuous jungle from one of the Indiana Jones films. Certainly, our journey could’ve been deadly, we feared, yet there was something alluring about existing in the fantasy that we were on the search for a stolen, priceless artifact. (I believe the best movies involve a search in the face of death, as in many of the James Bond films.) The path we took in the woods twisted around trees until we got lost, and for three hours we continued aprowl, calling his name, listening for anything we could, and despite the frustrations we pushed on until we noticed ahead a shadowy figure. The woods were filled with the little people who lived there who captured children and ate them, so we turned down a different path. Back in the courtyard, behind the hedges where Matthew had passed out from anxiety on the same day some of us were beaten for stealing the green apples from the apple tree, were hidden the dead baby rats we kept for future revenge on our perpetrators once we figured out how to make the stench most effective. Maybe Matthew was out here dead, too, we thought.