Within minutes of meeting last December in Beaumont, Brian Woodward ditches me inside a popular seafood restaurant and retreats to the parking lot. Moments later I find him standing beside his 1999 Dodge Ram 1500. “Come on,” he says, climbing into the driver’s seat. He blows into a Breathalyzer to start the car. “I don’t like people,” he tells me. “I walk in somewhere packed with people I don’t know, fuck you, I’m gone.” We drive to a Chili’s in Orange, the easternmost city in the state, where he now lives.



The area in Southeast Texas between Orange, Beaumont, and Port Arthur is referred to as the “Golden Triangle.” In 1901, a gusher in the Spindletop oil field in Beaumont blew for nine days, spouting an estimated 100,000 barrels of oil per day and transforming the region’s economy. The Texas oil boom was on. A century later, refineries and chemical plants are still big employers in the area.

Brian worked at the shipyards upon moving into town. It was arduous labor, just as he liked it. A vessel needing repairs would be dry-docked. From there, Brian and his team, a tight, rowdy crew of ballbusters, would do anything from change rudders to remove the motor. He enjoyed going to work each morning, but soon realized that promotions at the shipyards were unattainable. “The only way you can move up,” he says, “is if someone dies.”

We talk while he drives. “I can go to that shipyard now, ask for a job, and have it. You can’t find too many people that can outwork me. Pound for pound, you can’t beat my little ass. Tommie was the same way. He worked real hard. Most people nowadays, they’re not — they just don’t. Tommie lived with me and worked with me at the shipyards. Then I had to get out. I wasn’t making enough money." Brian worked on tugboats offshore for a while but didn't like being away from home. "I do AC work now. I install air conditioners in people’s homes — million-dollar homes, piece-of-shit homes.”

Brian weaves between lanes on Interstate 10 hugging the 80 mph speed limit; his toolbox clangs violently around the backseat. The Breathalyzer beeps, and he blows into the black plastic tube. “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band plays on the radio. “Why are you grabbing the ‘Oh shit’ handle?” he says after noticing that I’m clutching the passenger side roof handle. “Are you scared?”

Once at Chili’s, Brian orders a 10-ounce sirloin cooked rare. “If they sear it on each side and serve it to me bloody as hell,” he says, “I’d be happy with it.” He takes pride in having eaten things a lot of people wouldn't think to eat, especially during lean times.

“You’ve ever eaten cat? It’s not bad,” he says. For a few months in high school, Tommie and Brian lived in a tent on the banks of the Meramec River. Food was scarce. “The cat kept hanging around — fat motherfucker. I said, ‘I was hungry, so I’m gonna go get it.’ It was more of a vendetta than anything because he kept shitting and pissing everywhere. So I set up a snare to get him. I got him, skinned him like a rabbit — put a stick up his ass all the way through his mouth and then put him over a fire.” How did it taste? “Oily, man. Oily.”

He’s an active storyteller with a McConaughey-esque twang whose eyes gleam when he gets to the good parts. His nickname is Cowboy. Like Tommie, Brian is 5 feet, 10 inches tall, wiry, no more than 150 pounds after Thanksgiving dinner, and wears his long reddish-blonde hair in a monastic ponytail like a Greek priest. The only physical difference between the twins is the webbed toes on Brian’s left foot and a scar outside Brian’s left eye that runs behind his ear, the result of a January 2014 motorcycle accident; the discoloration around the wound makes it look like a tattoo. Brian suffered a fractured skull, broken femur, and shattered pelvis, and was placed in a weeklong medically induced coma following the crash, which also left him with memory problems. “That wreck fucked me up pretty good,” he says. “Tommie helped me. Moral support.” He chuckles quietly to himself.

The Woodward twins were born on July 20, 1986, healthy, on their due date. Their mother, Kelley Creamer-Shibles, stayed home with the twins and Tabatha, one year, one month, and one day older than her brothers, while her husband Tom worked the assembly line at Chrysler. But the couple split when the twins were 3. An acrimonious divorce and custody battle followed.

As teenagers living in Pacific, a small city 30 miles southwest of St. Louis, the twins' divergent personalities manifested: Tommie was the prankster, a social butterfly who made conversation with strangers; Brian was more reserved, sincere. For both, high school was an afterthought, and they dropped out after four years to work fast-food jobs.