If You Go Down to the Woods: The most powerful and emotional debut thriller of 2018!

If You Go Down to the Woods: The most powerful and emotional debut thriller of 2018! Seth C. Adams GET READY FOR THE MOST POWERFUL AND EMOTIONAL DEBUT THRILLER OF 2018!Perfect for fans of It by Stephen King, The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor and the TV show Stranger Things.SOMETHING IS HIDING IN THE SHADOWS…We were so young when it all happened. Just 13-years-old, making the most of the long, hot, lazy days of summer, thinking we had the world at our feet. That was us – me, Fat Bobby, Jim and Tara – the four members of the Outsiders’ Club.The day we found a burnt-out car in the woods was the day everything changed. Cold, hard cash in the front seat and a body in the trunk… it started out as a mystery we were desperate to solve.Then, the Collector arrived. He knew we had found his secret. And suddenly, our summer of innocence turned into the stuff of nightmares.Nothing would ever be the same again…‘An atmospheric, gritty page-turner’ Alex Lake, author of After Anna‘I went through every emotion reading this novel’ Sam Carrington, author of Saving Sophie‘Chilling and absorbing’ Phoebe Morgan, author of The Doll House If You Go Down to the Woods SETH C. ADAMS A division of HarperCollinsPublishers www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) Copyright (#u3c3d025b-365a-52ef-ac7c-dd9c7f011366) KillerReads an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018 Copyright © Adam Contreras 2018 Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com) Adam Contreras asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008280246 Version: 2018-01-24 Dedication (#u3c3d025b-365a-52ef-ac7c-dd9c7f011366) This story is about family, friends, and a good dog (which qualifies as both!), and so it is to these I dedicate the novel. To Mom and Dad, for allowing—and encouraging—their weird son to read whatever he wanted. To my own group of Outsiders that enriched my life throughout the school years. We may have never fought off assassins and gangsters, but sometimes just surviving life is a fight all its own, made a bit easier with a good group of pals. To Sheba, Rusty, Outlaw, and Banjo: great dogs, and even better friends. Table of Contents Cover (#u81237a33-3781-5e8a-b8af-6c16f32730da) Title Page (#u7c00afba-5f39-58c3-97eb-8b2fa9c790bf) Copyright (#u6ff43480-9e69-5c80-b9cb-993bdcd38672) Dedication (#u8c2cd835-24c5-5f95-a103-d193e9b9853d) Part One: The Promise (#u527dc3b0-08e5-5cfe-9f09-b6dca8e2c676) Chapter One (#u7da63162-7242-50a0-b5cd-818c57a7a255) Chapter Two (#u97444620-4b83-5b40-a950-f9d433dc93e4) Chapter Three (#u31f66108-5a9d-5db3-a0ca-76b4d941ef31) Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo) Part Two: The Car and the Collector (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Part Three: This is the Night (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PART ONE (#u3c3d025b-365a-52ef-ac7c-dd9c7f011366) CHAPTER ONE (#u3c3d025b-365a-52ef-ac7c-dd9c7f011366) 1. This is the night. These are the times. I heard these words for the first time from a killer the summer I met the Outsiders’ Club. Years passed before I finally understood them and, by then, everyone—my friends, my family, my dog—were long gone: some to the dirt that eventually claims us all, others to the remote reaches of time and memory. The promise the Outsiders’ Club made to each other had a part to play in the way things went down. No doubt about it. But much of it was just life itself, and things beyond our control. Yet I still wonder how it all would have turned out had other choices been made, different roads taken. This is called regret, and it’s very important you listen to what it says. In my case, the long trail of dead that summer demands it. Sometimes life’s fucked up that way. Sometimes the darkness lingers. Here’s what happened. 2. My family moved to Payne, Arizona when I was thirteen. My dad, John Hayworth, got a job as the manager of a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and we moved there from Southern California. Mom, a college-educated woman, decided that being a mother was far more important than searching for meaning in the writing of centuries-dead English novelists, and wholeheartedly supported the move. For those prematurely crying sexism, this was a two-way street kind of respect: Dad supported her, offered to be the stay-at-home parent as she climbed the ranks of prestige in academia. But I think Mom saw more value in passing on her passion for the written word to her children, reading us stories snuggled in our beds or on the sofa, than lecturing youth enrolled in electives, packed like sardines in large lecture halls. My sister and I had to leave our friends, and though I was sad about some of the people I left behind, I also saw it as something of an adventure. Sarah, on the other hand, sixteen going on retarded, acted like she was saying goodbye to her whole life and every shot at happiness. She had some greasy-haired boyfriend that she was leaving behind, some young stud who thought wearing a leather jacket and slicking his hair back with a few pounds of hair gel made him some sort of James Dean. I thought it made him look like he’d melted butter and greased his head with it. I told him so once. He flipped me off. I laughed at him and gave the old jerk-me-off sign language. Sarah didn’t talk to me for a week after that. That was fine by me. Likewise, I tolerated her like a bothersome rash: it was there, it caused discomfort, but there wasn’t much you could do except live through it. Looking back, I realize she wasn’t all that bad. I might even go so far as to say she was a good older sister in some ways. But try telling that to a thirteen-year-old boy, just learning the mysteries of girls and the smaller head in his pants, living in a small house with an older sister who liked barging into his room at any hour to bestow upon him the gifts of noogies, wedgies, and wet willies. Last, but most definitely not least, I can’t forget my dog, Bandit, a German shepherd mix, with some of that mix maybe being wolf. White and gray and silent like some sort of ghost dog from an Indian legend, Bandit was large and stoic and loyal, obedient but obstinate in his own way, and never left my side if I allowed it. He slept in my bed, his loose hairs finding their way up my nose and in my mouth, and my sinuses suffered for it for years. Dad invariably scolded me about keeping that dog in my bed, but there’s something about dogs and boys, how they’re meant to be, and the years that dog spent with me—warm friend, heartbeats lulling each other to sleep on cold nights—and I don’t regret a day. I remember the long drive through the desert highways to our new home. Hills that seemed to roll to forever in every direction. Sparse trees like stubble on the earth. Mom and Dad took turns driving so the other could rest. Sarah dozed across the seat from me in the back or stared pathetically out the window, a hand under her chin in melodramatic melancholy. Bandit sat or stood on the seat between us, going from window to window, paws on my lap to try to get a good sniff of what was passing us by, and I’d let him, until a stray paw stepped on my nuts, then I’d push him away. I stared out the car windows as well, watched the fiery skies of morning give way to the bruise-blue of afternoon, and remember thinking that though things were changing it might not be all that bad. I was a simple kid to please. All I needed for contentment and happiness were a good book, some comics, and horror movies, and with Dad a manager at a Barnes & Noble I’d have those things in spades. A whole summer of lazy afternoons, curled in my bed in my room or on a chair on the porch or sprawled on the grass of the lawn, seemed like the superfluous joys of heaven. The new house didn’t let me down in that regard. I’d seen pictures of it my parents had taken on a trip they’d made earlier in the year to see the property, but the still images didn’t do the majesty of the place justice. As Dad turned the station wagon off the highway and onto a country residential sprawl of a road, I found myself leaning forward in anticipation. When we turned the last bend, and I recognized the house from the pictures, I alternately gripped the seat and wiped my palms on my jeans. It sat on two acres of well-manicured land, carpeted by grass the green of emerald dreams. The whole place was fenced by chain-link, which to some might have made it seem vaguely white-trashy in nature, but to my boy’s mind made it seem a secluded fort of a kind. The porch had an overhanging awning and was enclosed by a screen mesh that let you see out but made it hard for others to see in, so all they saw were dark shadows and silhouettes. There was a pool in the back, dry and mossy in places, the cement lining cracked in others, that Dad promised to have repaired and filled soon. Apple trees dotted the yard, and in the summer the branches were in full bloom and heavy with their juicy burden. The lawn was speckled with the fallen fruit, and as soon as the car braked to a stop with a little cloud of dust, I leapt out, dashed across the grass, scooped up an apple and let it fly. Perhaps thinking I’d filched one of his tennis balls from the trunk without him seeing, Bandit darted out of the car behind me, and charged after the green sphere. Finding it among the litter of others, he spun around in a frenzy, confused and smiling and uncertain by the mass of apples. To his dog’s brain, they must have seemed the sweet, multitudinous edible balls of some canine paradise. “Come on, Joey,” Dad called after us, stepping out from behind the wheel and stretching. “There’ll be time for that later. We got work to do.” The moving trucks arrived well before us, and the sweat-drenched men had our boxes ready, piled high in totem-like stacks along the porch. Motioning for Bandit to follow, we bounded up the porch steps together. I found the growing stack of boxes with my name written on them in large Sharpie marker letters and began taking them to my new room. The work went on for hours, and Dad had a cooler set out on the porch, along with plastic chairs, and we all took breaks when we felt like it. Pop open a soda, cram one of Mom’s sandwiches in my mouth, and for me it was relaxing. Work, yes, but also fun in a way as I looked out across the desert town in the distance. At times my gaze would drift over to the faraway woods bordering the township, and that dense, mysterious greenery seemed to call to me and Bandit. Slowly, afternoon crawled into the first evening, purple-black over our new home. My bed set up, having unloaded several boxes of books with many more to go, I sat in bed, the window beside it open. The cool desert breeze drifted in and stirred things with a whisper. A volume of Ray Bradbury stories was open in my lap, propped up by a pillow. Bandit was at my feet, large and furry and kicking his feet occasionally with rabbit filled doggie dreams. The act of reading usually soothing, I had trouble keeping my mind on the pages before me. My gaze kept drifting to the walls and contours of the room. Realizing I’d spent the last fifteen minutes or so on the same page, I finally gave up and set the book aside. The room was painted an earthy brown and seemed spacious and snug at the same time. I had my own TV, a gift from last Christmas, and I knew exactly where I wanted it to go. Mom promised she’d call the cable company “tomorrow,” and I dreamt of late-night horror marathons. I had boxes of books and comic books yet to be unpacked, and imagined the bookshelves that would line the walls like sentinel soldiers. There were the other magazines that I had also, buried among my books and filed secretly in between the comics. Magazines of a certain nature all boys must look through at some point, cracking the covers open ever so slightly, ever so slowly, as if lifting the lid to a treasure chest. Treasures they were, too, and I thought of being able to look at these at my leisure in the privacy of my new room. Then the door to my room swung open and there she was, that rash that wouldn’t go away, a look of demented sisterly pleasure on her face. “You know what I’m here for,” she said. And I said: “Yeah, but I’m all out of Ugly-Be-Gone.” When she charged across the room, I scooped up the book to try and defend myself, and the Queen of Noogies sent me to sleep with bruises and one bastard of a headache. And the tired realization that some things would never change. 3. I met Fat Bobby first. His real name was Bobby Templeton, but fat he was and knew it, seemed to despondently accept it, and so Fat Bobby he became. Now I don’t know about God or anything like that. I guess I’ve asked myself the Big Questions like just about anyone else has in their life at some point or another, but I guess my brain is too small for the Big Answers. There isn’t much in this life that makes sense to me, but one thing I’m pretty sure of is that there isn’t any such thing as coincidence. It seems that how one thing leads to another and that to another, so that there’s a whole series of events that gain momentum and become inevitable, is a natural consequence of cause and effect, and there isn’t anything coincidental or accidental about it. I think Fat Bobby was the first in just such a chain of events. I think on how it all ended, the pain and the loss and the misery, and wonder how it all would have been different if I had just passed on by that fat kid in the woods. But then there wouldn’t have come the other things: the friendship, the trust, the laughter. All things good in this haphazard mess we call life. * * * On Dad’s first day at the store, I woke up early, thinking I’d cut through the woods and walk into town, maybe check out the local comic book shop, perhaps pay Dad a visit. Lazily excited, I rolled out of bed and stumbled my way to the bathroom across the hall, Bandit following. Starting the water in the shower stall, I waited for it to warm, stripped, and climbed in. Bandit watched with a perplexed expression from the throw rug in the center of the bathroom’s tiled floor, as if he wondered why he was excluded from this splashy fun. After throwing on jeans and a T-shirt, hair still wet from the shower, I raced downstairs. Mom was preparing breakfast, something sizzling tantalizingly in a pan atop the stove. She asked if I wanted some bacon and eggs, and though I was sorely tempted by the smells, I told her my plans and said I’d have Dad get me something from the bookstore cafe. A mild scowl told me what she thought of the nutritional value of a cafe breakfast, but Mom didn’t object. “Just make sure if you’re going down to the woods,” she said, “don’t go alone. Take Bandit with you.” I hardly needed her advice on this, and neither did Bandit, prancing so close behind me that if I stopped abruptly he’d end up nose first in my backside. Out on the porch, Bandit at my heels, Mom called after me and asked when I’d be back. Down the porch and into the yard, I yelled back an “I don’t know!” and continued down the road. Our dirt road led to the highway, which in turn led into Payne proper, but as I walked my eyes drifted to the nearby woods. I remembered Dad telling me that a stream ran through the forest and eventually into town. I figured I’d head that way, find the stream, and maybe idle away some time there with Bandit, leisurely making my way to civilization. The highway led north, while the woods and stream were somewhat westerly. I walked with the sun at my back, the heat coming down like fiery arrows. My hair dried pretty quick, but by the time I reached the edge of the forest I was wet again, this time with a sheen of sweat. Bandit’s tongue lolled out like a strip of unrolled carpet, yet he wasn’t panting, still moving silently at my side like that Indian ghost dog. The path to the woods led up a steady incline. When there was still about a quarter mile left to go, I paused with Bandit to rest. From my new vantage point, I looked over the woodlands like a god upon his domain. To the north I could see the town of Payne, rustic earthy adobe and brick buildings splayed out like an Old West settlement. I could see the roads crisscrossing the municipality from one end to the other, the entirety of the place laid out there below me like a toy model. I half expected to see buggies and wagons and men on horses kicking up dirt clouds, and maybe a blacksmith pounding red-hot metal with a huge hammer. Perhaps a gallows where outlaws and criminals were hanged, looped rope and maybe a corpse swaying in the summer breeze. I turned back to the woods and, off in the trees a distance, I saw something catch the golden sun like a mirror, twinkling and casting back the light. A hand cupped over my eyes like a visor, I squinted, had to turn away as the sunlight flashed off the object again. I tried to pinpoint its location by some sort of landmark, maybe a tree larger than all the others, or a rock formation that broke the thick landscape around it. There were a couple craggy hills poking about through the surrounding tree coverage, but nothing remarkable. Nothing I could check on the map in my mind as noteworthy, like a marker on a treasure map. All the trees looked the same, and though I saw some outcroppings interspersed out among the green landscape, none were very close to that sparkling object. So, I set imaginary crosshairs in the direction of the reflecting light and walked straight as an arrow, hoping for a minimum of obstacles on my route that would make me stray. “Come on, Bandit,” I said, and he trotted at my heels, big dog smile splitting his face as if this was all that he needed: his boy, a sunny day, and a long walk with no particular destination. At best I judged the source of the bright light to be a couple hundred yards into the woods, and I came to the stream long before I’d trundled that far among the trees and bushes and fallen limbs. The stream was about two car lengths in width, clear water sparkling the sun in a million daggers of light, and at its center I could only just see the bottom. Vague and distorted water-rippled rocks peppered the riverbed. Fish like silvery lasers darted beneath the surface. The sound of the stream moving and rushing along its course was soft music, and a fine spray—wet and cool—carried the current’s song in the air. Bandit had seen the fish as well, or smelled them, and he slipped into the water as silently as he walked, a phantasm entering the flow of the Styx. I settled down on a rock that seemed to be formed just for that purpose. I took off my shoes and socks, thinking I’d dip into the water also, its sharp clarity and cleanness inviting me. Wiping sweat from my forehead, I wished I’d brought a bottle of water. I thought about leaning over to drink from the stream, but seemed to remember hearing something about fish shit in stream and river water, and it making people sick and giving them the shits. Spending the first week of summer squirting diarrhea until my ass was raw didn’t seem such a hot idea. So I didn’t drink the water, tried swallowing some spit in my parched throat instead. Reckoning I’d have to settle for just dipping my feet in, maybe splashing about with Bandit a little to cool off, I started to do so. A shout and a loud splash from further downstream brought me to a stop with one foot in the water, the other still on the bank. Leaning in the direction of the sound, head cocked to hear better, I watched the flow of the water to where it ran around a bend in the streambed and out of sight. Bandit’s ears pricked up at the sound also, and he started that way, forgetting the darting fish for the moment. Keeping my voice low, I called for him to wait. We moved along in the water together, boy and dog, one trying to be as stealthy as a ninja, the other naturally so. A second cry traveled through the air around the bend and, in it this time, I distinctly heard the words “Please! Stop!” and more splashing. Despite the high-pitched whine of the voice, and a decidedly embarrassing nasally sound on the verge of being full-blown crying, I could tell it was a boy’s voice. A kid probably around my age by the sound of it. Following the whining-almost-crying and the splashing, I heard laughter, at least two or three distinct voices, and I had a good idea of what was going on. As did Bandit, by the way his ears pressed back against his head and he lowered himself until his chest was touching the water. Ready to lunge, lips peeled back in a grimace, even I found him frightening and had to remind myself this was my dog and it wasn’t me that had to be worried. Around the bend a twisted tree stretched out a gnarly limb as if in greeting. The stream widened here, almost becoming a proper river. The shoreline was rocky and strewn with pebbles and sticks. Three boys, taller and bigger than me, maybe sixteen or seventeen, high school kids definitely, stood among the pebbles and sticks, bending to pick some up from time to time and chucking them into the water. Their target was a fat kid in the water, stripped to his underwear, trying to fend off the incoming missiles with his forearms. A rock hit him on the breast, a tit larger than most girls’, and he staggered. A stick sailed through the air and struck him on the shoulder. Another rock struck him squarely in his massive belly, making the flesh there ripple like a shockwave. This last impact made him stagger again, then topple, and he fell in what seemed like slow motion, hitting the water and sending a splash and wake like a tanker sinking offshore of the Pacific. “What’s wrong, Bobby Templeton!” one of the older kids called out, a guy with greased-back hair that made me instantly think of Sarah’s boyfriend back in California. The guy wore tight jeans and a white T-shirt that showed his fairly muscled arms. The guy obviously thought he was some sort of biker or something, maybe thinking greased hair and a muscle shirt balanced out the explosion of acne that pocked his face. “Have a nice trip?” The other two guys hooted and hollered at this, as if they’d never heard anything funnier. High fives were exchanged all around. The fat boy tried getting up, his legs and arms like dough, and he slipped again and sent up another large splash. I thought to myself that this might be kind of funny if it wasn’t so fucking sad. “Bobby Templeton!”one of the other guys called out, slimmer than the first, wearing jeans and a suede jacket. He was also shaking with laughter, but more in control of himself as he did so, hands casually at hip pockets. He watched the whole thing with a crooked smirk that made me think of serial killers in movies. “Maybe we ought to call you Chubby Twinkie-by-the-ton!” The third guy, ironically, not so thin himself but not nearly as fat as the kid in the stream (Bobby Templeton, I told myself), laughed and threw another rock. This one struck the fat boy on the forehead, and I watched him sort of totter there for a moment or two, a hand going to his forehead, finding blood, and then he toppled over into the water again. As not numbering among the largest kids ever birthed, I’d been in my fair share of fistfights in school and, like then at the stream in the woods, out of school. I wish I could say I gave more than I got, but I don’t honestly know if I’d kept a win and loss scorecard of all my scraps as a kid which side would have the most marks. But Dad had taught me how to throw a punch, much to Mom’s chagrin, and also a few sneaky maneuvers with my legs that used my center of gravity and my opponent’s momentum against them and in my favor. I’d taken punches before, hard ones, and though I didn’t much like them I wasn’t scared of getting hit either. I looked at the older, bigger kids, and knew my chances with all three of them weren’t that great: as in no chance in hell. I’d fought bigger guys before, and older guys, so I wasn’t really scared about that. It was just a practical matter. I knew I wasn’t some superhero, and held no delusions that if I took them all on I wouldn’t be leaving there with bruises or worse. But I had Bandit, and figured that evened things out pretty squarely. Apparently so did he, because he let out a growl so low and deep and vicious that for a moment I was again afraid of being so near him. He sounded like a wolf then, something primal and ferocious, something wild, and I thought that maybe there wasn’t any German shepherd in him at all. The three high school kids hadn’t seen me yet. They’d squatted to choose again among the smorgasbord of missiles about their feet. Targeting the fat kid in the water once more, taking aim. Then they heard the growl, and froze. Even the guy in the suede jacket with the Charles Manson face. It was as if a monster had just passed by, a thing from nightmares and dark places, and the primitive man in them all took note. The three of them turned in my direction, saw me, saw my dog. Their gazes seemed more directed at Bandit than me, but eventually the Manson kid turned his eyes my way. “Hey, kid,” he said, nodding in my direction like we were acquaintances. He tried to keep that not-so-concerned smirk on his face, like nothing really bothered him. Like he was somehow separate from the rest of the world. But I noted the bead of sweat on his forehead, watched it start to roll down his face. “Call off your dog.” I’d known his kind before. However this ended up, he wouldn’t let it be. I’d interrupted his fun, his amusement, and he didn’t like it. It was all there in his smirk and eyes. He’d remember me. He’d marked me. This pretty much meant I had nothing to lose. “I have an idea,” I said, my voice far sturdier than I felt inside. “How about I take a shit and you eat it?” What remained of the smiles and good humor of the greasy guy with the head like a planet populated by pimples and the chubby guy was gone in an instant. The lean Manson guy tried to hang on to his smirk, but even that twitched and missed a beat. “That’s pretty brave for a kid with a big ass dog with him,” said Mr. Smirk. His thumbs were still in his hip pockets as he tried to remain cool and distant from it all. “That would almost be funny if it wasn’t so fucking retarded,” I said. “Talking about being brave, and you there, three against one, and him smaller than you.” I hooked a thumb in the fat kid’s direction. He’d sat up in the stream, blood still trickling from his forehead, watching the whole thing unfolding with an expression short of amazement on his face. He was looking at me and Bandit, and then looking at the three older guys on the shore, back and forth, like he was watching some alien spectacle. I had the urge to check to see if I had tentacles coming out my backside or something. “He’s hardly smaller than us,” the chubby guy said, and I almost laughed. It was as if in his tight jeans and black shirt he didn’t realize he wasn’t exactly Mr. Universe either. Or maybe he did, I thought with something akin to revelation, and that’s why he said it. “The lard-ass pot calling the kettle black,” I said, and the fat boy (Bobby) barked a quick laugh before stifling it with a hand to his mouth. The three high school guys gave him a brief hateful look before turning back to me. “Look,” Mr. Smirk said. One hand finally unhooked from his jeans pocket and went palm up in front of him, in a friendly where-is-this-getting-us gesture. “I don’t think you realize what you’re getting yourself into. Just take your dog and walk away and I’ll forget I ever saw you here.” He’d forget me as soon as he forgot how to breathe, and that wasn’t anything I was going to hold my breath for. So I decided to roll with it and keep on going. “Look,” I said, giving him the same friendly, conversational palm-up gesture. “I don’t think you realize you’re a dickweed.” “You fucking asshole,” Mr. Pudge said, and took a step forward. Perhaps emboldened by his friend’s initiative, Mr. Planet Pimple Head stepped forward too. Bandit’s growl, having continued to rumble through this exchange, rose a notch, from bestial to demonic. Mr. Smirk stopped his friends with either arm outstretched to block them. “Look,” Mr. Smirk started again, “let’s make a deal. This is a small town. You’re obviously new here. You’re not going to have your dog with you every minute of every day. You leave now, instead of killing you, I just kick your ass one time, someday, and then we call it even.” “Look,” I said, mocking his nonchalant tone, “I have a deal for you. A counteroffer, if you dumbshits know what that means. My dog rips one of your guys’ nutsacks off, and I find the largest rock I can and beat the living shit out of one of you other two. That’s two-thirds chance of any of the three of you getting messed up real bad. Either nutsack chewed off,” I held one hand up, “or head bashed in,” and then the other. Lifting them up and down, my hands weighed something invisible like they were scales. “Personally,” Bobby said, and we all turned to him, equally surprised that he’d found the guts to talk, “I’d like to keep my nuts.” I smiled at him. He smiled back. And there, at that moment, I saw through the pathetic overweight kid who’d been crying moments ago, and knew him for the kid he could be. The friend he could be. Silence hung in the air like a thick curtain. There were decisions being made in that utter quiet. Gears were moving. For me there was a sense of inevitability, as if these were things that were to always be, like I’d walked into something and somewhere that I belonged. There was no turning back. “Okay,” Mr. Smirk said, tugging on the front of his suede jacket, brushing at lint or specks that weren’t there. “You’ve made your choice.” He pointed across the way at me, his forefinger out, his thumb up like a gun hammer. “I’ve made mine too. I think we’ll be seeing each other again someday.” With that he turned away, hands in his pockets, as if nothing at all unusual had gone down. His friends, Mr. Pudge and Mr. Pimple Planet, turned likewise, trying to imitate their leader’s nonchalance. I looked at Bobby Templeton, sitting there fat and pathetic and almost naked in the stream, and he looked back at me and nodded. I smiled and nodded at Bandit. “Go for the nuts, boy!”I yelled, and Bandit, poised in the stream, that growl still in his throat, darted forward. The high school guys looked back, even cool Mr. Smirk, and they saw him coming. All one hundred pounds of him, teeth long and sharp and white. Breaking into a run, all coolness forgotten, the three older boys tripped and stumbled over each other and the fallen branches in their path. Crashing through the undergrowth they ran out of sight, leaving me in the stream with a nearly naked fat boy. 4. Bandit came prancing back with an as-happy-as-can-be dog smile splitting his face, though to my mild disappointment without greaseball scrotums and testes dangling from his jaws, just as Bobby Templeton was pulling his shirt and pants back on. Tossed away among some nearby bushes by the high school guys, thorns caught in the fabric poked him in awkward places and he winced and yelped as he dressed. Bandit walked up to him, and though a bit apprehensive, maybe wondering if the dog still had balls on the brain, Bobby knelt to give my dog a good rubdown. Bandit obliged, rolling on his back to offer his furry tummy. “Cool dog,” Bobby said, looking my way. “Yeah. He’s the best.” “I’m Bobby.” The fat kid held out a hand. “I’m Joey,” I said, and pumped his hand up and down like a lever. “Who were those guys?” I gestured with a thumb over my shoulder in the direction the three older boys had run. “The guy in the jacket is Dillon,” Bobby said. “The other two are Stu and Max.” His gaze followed the direction my thumb indicated and, though they were long gone, the worry in the fat kid’s eyes was clear. “Don’t worry,” I offered. “They won’t be coming back anytime soon. Not with Bandit here.” I punctuated this with a playful tug on my dog’s ear, and he nipped at my hand good-naturedly in return. “Why were they after you anyway?” Bobby gave a weak little shrug and looked down at the same time. “That’s just what they do,” he said, but his slumped, defeated posture seemed to also say this was just what he was: the kind of kid others beat on and humiliated. I couldn’t exactly argue with that, and so said nothing. “I was just walking into town,” he added. “You can cut through the woods and get there faster instead of going down the highway.” I started back around the bend in the river to retrieve my shoes. Sitting on a rock, I pulled them on and laced them up. Bobby hurried to keep up, as if even a few yards of distance between us would put him in danger again. “Aren’t you scared they’re going to come after you now?” “Sure,” I said, shrugging, “a little. But I got Bandit and I know how to take care of myself.” “I wish I was that brave,” Bobby said, hanging his head so pathetically that I wanted to slap him. “It’s not so much about being brave.” Trying to explain, I realized as I was talking I was using pretty much the same words Dad had with me sometime back. “It’s about knowing that there’s some people, if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile. And so you learn to know these people when you see them, and not to take any shit.” “Your dad teach you how to fight?” Bobby raised his head, looked at me, genuinely interested. “Some,” I nodded. “But someone else can teach you only so much. Then it’s when something actually happens, you find out if you’ve got it or not.” “Aren’t you afraid of getting hit?” Still sitting, I tried to think of how best to answer. Again, finding myself thinking back to the answers Dad gave me when I asked nearly the same questions. “Sure.” Standing, we started walking again. The sun was still high, its light shining through the trees in patches. I thought to myself how the standoff with the three older kids had seemed so long. It seemed to me as if hours should have passed. Tension will do that to you, Dad had said. Make you think time was standing still or moving too fast for you to handle or both at the same time. I thought this was important to get across to Fat Bobby, but I wasn’t quite sure how. “You never completely get over the threat of being hit, being hurt,” I said. “If someone says they aren’t scared when it seems like there’s something bad going to happen, they’re either lying or crazy.” I kicked a rock and sent it sailing into some bushes as I tried to gather my thoughts. A startled squirrel darted out of the brush and up a tree, chattering angrily at me when it found a safe branch. Bandit darted towards the base of the tree, looked up questioningly at the rodent. Soon, seeing his potential toy wasn’t coming down, he turned and strode away. “You get to the point where you just try to give as much as you get,” I said, picking up where I’d left off. “It doesn’t matter if they’re bigger or older. Someone pushes you, you push back. Someone hits you, you hit back.” “And what if you get more than you give?” Bobby said, and his constant uncertainty, his insistence on the negative, the downbeat, the altogether pussy-ness of his whole demeanor, solidified for me. Though I tried to keep my thoughts and words kind, his name for me as Fat Bobby, which also meant Weak Bobby, Sissy Bobby, Yes-I’m-A-Big-Fat-Wuss-Come-Kick-My-Ass Bobby, became fixed in my mind. “That happens sometimes.” I put my hands in my pockets, clenching them into fists there, then relaxing them. Trying mightily not to get mad at this fat kid who had somehow learned in life that it was okay to get stepped on, to get kicked in the ass. That maybe that’s how things were for some people, and there was nothing to be done about it. “But you go down swinging, and really connecting with at least a few good ones, that person who knocked you down is going to have a fat lip, or a busted nose, and they’re going to wonder if it was worth it. That maybe there’s easier targets to focus on. Either way, whether you give more than you get, or you get your ass handed to you but you do it throwing punches, you’ve won.” “That sounds like a hard thing to learn, and a lot of punches to take to learn it,” Fat Bobby said. We’d reached the dirt road that I’d taken from home to the woods, and I stopped. Fat Bobby took a few steps more before he noticed, then he stopped too and looked back at me, his hands in his pockets, his gut bulging beneath his shirt. He stood slouched, shoulders slumped, back bowed, as if a great weight were strapped to him. “I’d rather have a quick and early hard lesson than to live my life taking shit from assholes,” I said, and regretted it even as I said the words. I felt and heard the heat in my voice, and I saw pain and hurt in Fat Bobby’s eyes as I looked him up and down as I spoke. It was obvious what I was looking at, and that I wanted him to know it. Him. I was looking at him: his fatness, his complete and utter defeatist attitude, his self-pity bullshit. The hurt my words caused him were immediate, his doughy face falling slack in shame and embarrassment. “Point taken,” he said, looking away from me, looking at his feet, idly kicking at a rock. “Geez,” he added, and that was all. Not “geez, why you being such a jerk?” or “geez, don’t be an asshole” or anything else that any self-respecting person would have added. Just “geez,” and that one-word response did more than anything else could have. It made me feel ashamed. I felt embarrassed. I felt like I was one of them. That I belonged with the three high school kids, standing with them and throwing rocks and sticks at the fat boy crying in the stream. Bandit trotted over to Fat Bobby and pressed close against the kid’s leg. My dog looked back at me from that distance, and I saw something like condemnation in his wolfish features. Maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe I was projecting my thoughts irrationally onto an animal. But that look from my dog—my friend, my brother—made me feel even shittier. “I’m sorry,” I said, and now it was me with my hands in my pockets, head down, not meeting Bobby’s eyes. Kicking idly at a pebble on the ground. Meekly, I looked up, saw Fat Bobby nod. There was a glimmer in one eye that may have been a tear, or perhaps just the reflected daylight. “Come on,” I said, and started walking again. I clapped him on the shoulder as I passed by, he fell in beside me, and I knew then that for better or worse we were friends. * * * “Your dad sounds pretty cool,” Fat Bobby said when we reached the top of the hill. The road overlooked the woods to the west, and to the north the highway led into town. “Yeah. He isn’t bad at all.” “I wish my dad were like him.” “Your dad can’t be all that bad,” I said, but I remembered the fat kid in his underwear crying in the stream, doing nothing as three other guys assaulted him, and that in itself spoke volumes. That a dad would raise a son like that said more than I needed to know about the man. I knew my lie for what it was as soon as I said it, and the silence that followed told me Bobby did as well. I turned, cursing myself for not knowing when to shut up. I looked back over the forest we’d just left. Remembering the light that had caught my attention in the first place, I scanned the woods for it. Nothing. As before, all the trees seemed one endless growth, no one distinguishable from the rest. Could it have just been the stream water, catching the sunlight in a million little diamond pinpoints? I didn’t think so. The reflected light had seemed farther out than where I placed myself to have stopped near the stream. I wanted to ask Fat Bobby about it, turned to him to do so, and saw a shadow of the earlier sadness and hurt still on his face. A better idea came to me. One that made me feel less shitty as a person and a friend. “You like comics?” I asked. Fat Bobby looked at me like I’d spoken some alien language. “I’ve never really read them.” “My dad runs a bookstore,” I said. “Come on, I’ll show you some things.” Down the hill, north, we started out, the world stretched out before us in shades of bleached desert-white and earthen browns. Walking along the highway, a dog and two boys, friends, taking the road to where it took us. CHAPTER TWO (#u3c3d025b-365a-52ef-ac7c-dd9c7f011366) 1. Dad was making his rounds about the store when we pushed through the glass doors. Bandit walked into the store with us, and some old lady with thick makeup like cake batter gave me a dirty look. I looked right back at her and said: “Service dog, ma’am. I’m borderline retarded.” She harrumphed and walked away, and I felt proud of myself. Dad saw us and walked over, gave me a hug. I liked his hugs and never felt embarrassed when he gave me one in public. They were manly hugs, like ballplayers or boxers showing their respect after a long game or twelve rounds of exchanging punches. He gave Bandit a glance, looked towards me like he was about to say something, and then he noticed Fat Bobby. Dad saw the cut on his forehead almost scabbed over and dry with some help from the summer sun, and turned to me. “What happened?” he asked. It was like he had some sort of radar that sounded when something had happened that needed to be told. He called it his Bullshit Detector, and it was backed by a lifetime warranty with an Ass Whooping Clause. For emphasis, he held up his hand and pointed at my butt whenever he said this. My dad never actually hit me when he said this, but the intention was clear: be honest with him or pay the consequences. The consequences were usually his disappointment and displeasure and that was always enough for me. A stern, disapproving look from him and I felt like a worm caught in the sights of a bird. So I told him what happened and, as I did, he walked us back to his office, motioned us both to sit in the swivel chairs in front of the desk. Pulling out a first aid kit from a file drawer, Dad put some disinfectant on Fat Bobby’s cut and two Band Aids in the shape of an X on his forehead. The office door open, I had a view of the adjacent break room and an employee, a girl about my sister’s age, eating her lunch there at a table. She was tall, thin, and her brown hair hung in spirals like little galaxies. Her dress, a flower print affair, clung to her like a second skin, and then there was her skin itself, golden and tanned like she took precise measurements to get it that way. Just so much sun; just the right amount of lotion; a dollop of genetic luck or God’s favor; and it equaled something I wanted to run my hands over. She saw me looking and smiled warmly. I smiled back, but quickly broke eye contact. “Pay attention, Joey,” Dad said, bringing me back from where I wanted to be, to the real world and the situation at hand, which was far less appealing for my young boy’s brain. “Yes, sir,” I said, turning the swivel chair so it faced him. “I think we ought to call the police,” he said. “Throwing rocks isn’t fun and games. Those boys could have really hurt you.” He said this last while looking at Fat Bobby, but I knew he included me in that equation also. “I can take care of myself, Dad,” I said, a little louder than necessary for the benefit of the girl in the room behind me. “Plus Bandit was with me,” I added and leaned over to pet my dog, saw he wasn’t there, spun the swivel chair some more, saw he was out in the break room with the girl. He had his head in her lap, gazing lovingly up at her as she shook his head from side to side, massaged his ears, and cooed at him. I prayed fervently for God to let me swap bodies with Bandit just for a few minutes. God didn’t oblige, and I had some choice words for Him spoken in my head. Dad saw where my attention had gone again, and he wheeled his chair so he was leaning past me and looking out into the break room. “Tara?” he called out, and the girl looked up. “Yes, sir?” “Isn’t lunch just about over?” Dad said, not harshly or mean-like at all, but not overly friendly either. He was irritated at me, and taking it out on her. An image of me dueling my dad for her honor sprang to mind and, in the daydream, I skewered him with my sword, and Tara leapt joyfully into my arms. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I just had to pet this cool dog, though.” She rebelled against my dad by lingering a few moments longer, ruffling Bandit’s coat and cooing at him some more with baby talk. Then she was up, throwing her trash into a bin and walking out of sight, but remaining in my heart. Bandit stared after her for a time before walking despondently into the office where the three of us sat. He settled on the ground beside me with a sigh, as if he were settling for second best. I tried to beam him a mental message. Traitor. His eyes rolled up at me as if he heard and was bored. “She’s too old for you, son,” Dad said, and after a moment to register the words I turned back to face him. “What? Who?” “She’s fifteen and a half,” he said. “It’s some sort of work experience thing through her school. She’s only here a few days a week.” But I heard none of that, save the first part. Fifteen and a half. Round down to the nearest whole number and that left fifteen. I was thirteen, with fourteen only a few weeks away. When you thought of it that way, you may as well just say we were the same age. Dad saw my thoughts had trailed off again. Sighing, he brought us back to the subject at hand. “These boys. Do you know their names?” he asked, facing Bobby again. Bobby nodded hesitantly, but I interjected before he could say anything. “I told you, Dad,” I said, knowing I was walking on thin ice by objecting to him when he was in a mood like this. Someone had threatened his family, and he wasn’t too keen on that. My dad liked books; obviously, he managed a bookstore. But he also had a punching bag in the garage, and he liked chopping wood, and seeing him shirtless like he often was in the summertime to do yard work, you’d think God had run out of flesh and bone and made my dad out of stone. Once, a drunk man had accosted Mom when we were out for a family dinner. The drunk man had had two not-so-drunk friends with him, egging him on. Dad ended up accosting all three of them, and an ambulance took them away in gurneys for a stay at the hospital, where their busted teeth required of them a diet of Jell-O and apple sauce. “I can take care of myself,” I finished. “I don’t doubt that, son,” he said, and though he hadn’t raised his voice yet, his face was flat and stern, like a slab of rock with eyes, ears, a nose, and mouth. I knew he would only let me go so far. He wouldn’t lose his temper at work either. He’d wait until we were both home, then there’d be that disappointed look, he’d verbalize it, and I’d trail down the hall to my room with my tail between my legs. “But you know how I feel about fighting. There’s no reason for it—” “Unless there’s no other option,” I finished for him. “That’s right.” He ignored my mildly mocking tone. “And here we have an option. And that option is to call the police. Now, Bobby,” and here again he turned to face my new fat friend, “can I have those boys’ names please?” Dad, poised over the office tabletop, pen in hand. Bobby, head bowed, not looking at my dad. Me, thinking Bobby doesn’t know what he’s doing. Son or no son, it doesn’t matter. My dad wants something from you, you better give it over. “Bobby,” Dad said, his tone prodding and urging, but uncompromising at the same time, “where I come from, when an adult asks a kid something, the kid gives a response.” The quiet between them stretched for a few moments more. The ticking of a clock somewhere could be heard. I thought if I farted it would be like a bomb blast in peacetime. “Bobby?” Dad’s gaze penetrated like a drill. I looked at Fat Bobby and saw his double layer chins quiver. I saw that glimmer of a tear in his eye again. This kid is a real waterworks, I thought, again with a hint of disgust, and quickly on the heels of that, shame at the thought. “I … really don’t want you to call the police … sir,” he said without looking up. “Why on earth not?” Dad asked. He was leaning forward in what he probably thought was a confidential, comforting manner for Bobby. But a large man, muscled and burly, leaning towards you in such a way would seem like a mountain with a face leaning over you, towering over you. The shadow would probably eclipse the sun. “You haven’t done anything wrong.” The quivering chins flapped faster. I remembered something on The Discovery Channel about Hubble or other telescopes picking up the wobble of distant stars. Fat Bobby’s wobbling chins would have short circuited NASA’s instrumentation. “I … don’t want my dad … to find out,” Bobby said. A single tear began to roll down his cheek. Dad looked at me, and I shrugged. I saw the same look of mixed concern, mild disgust, and shame at his disgust that I’d felt many times around Bobby in the short time I’d known him, pass over my dad’s face. “Again, I ask the same question,” he said. “Why not? You haven’t done anything wrong.” Whatever dam had been holding it all back finally gave way under the pressure, and Fat Bobby really started crying. Embarrassed, but also saddened without knowing completely why, I reached out and swung the door to Dad’s office closed. In the room with the door shut and the wider world cut off, it was only the three of us, and Bandit too, who again stood and moved to Fat Bobby’s side and rested his head on the fat boy’s leg. Dad scooted his chair closer to the crying boy and something amazing happened, something I’d never seen before outside my own home and my own family: he leaned over, pulled Bobby close, and engulfed the large boy in his larger arms. Those arms that had held me before in the aftermath of nightmares or scoldings or the various and countless other things in a boy’s life. “It’s alright, son,” he said to a boy not his son, and I knew as never before my dad was a great man. He tried to keep his voice a whisper, but it was a soft rumble like a swarm of bees. “It’s alright, everything will be alright.” And because my dad said it, I trusted it to be true. 2. Dad gave us ten dollars each and told us to get some comics with it or a drink from the caf?. With the ten dollars in his hand, you would have thought Fat Bobby was holding the Holy Grail or something, his face was beaming so. His sudden and simple joy made my dad smile, and when Bobby and I made as if to leave the office for the sales floor, Dad stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. I called to Bobby and told him I’d meet him in the comics aisle. He waved, still clutching that ten dollars like it was something magic from a fairy tale. “You’ve never chosen your friends easily, Joey,” my dad said. “You march to your own beat. Always been a bit of an outsider that way, and I can respect that. If you and Bobby are friends, then he must be a pretty okay kid.” Knowing he wasn’t done yet, that he was working his way to what he really wanted to say, I didn’t respond. Just nodded my head where it felt appropriate. “I know you already know this, son,” he said, me looking up at him like I was looking up at a skyscraper, “but I want to say it anyway.” I nodded again, waiting. “It’s never okay for a man to hit either women or kids.” His hand squeezed my shoulder gently. “A man that does that isn’t really a man at all.” Still I didn’t say anything, knew I wasn’t really supposed to. He was telling me something, something important, and it was for me to listen and take it in. Nothing else. “I won’t call the police this time, Joey. But I want you to stay away from those three guys. They’re nothing but trouble. And if you come across them, walk away, head the other direction. Got it?” I didn’t want to, felt like I was already relinquishing my manhood and I wasn’t even a man yet, but I nodded and said: “Yes, sir.” I started to walk out of the office, and his hand on my shoulder stopped me again. “But to be on the safe side …” he began, then paused. “Yes, sir?” “Keep Bandit with you all the time,” he finished, and smiled. I smiled too, and ruffled my dog’s coat and slapped him on the flank. “Yes, sir. You can count on that.” Then I was out the door, through the break room, and into the bookstore, a maze of covers and bindings and that smell of new leather and paper—something akin to what I imagined heaven must be like—I breathed it in, and went looking for my new sad friend in the comics section. * * * Comic books and how to read them, and which ones to read, is a thing of intricacy bordering on something like art. You have to read certain storylines to make sense of other storylines, and you have to understand the relationships between characters for those stories to make sense. Furthermore, add in variables like the creative teams, the artists and writers who put together the stories—some of whom shouldn’t be doing anything higher brow or complicated than Archie; others whose imaginations and love of magic had led them to novels and movies and other creative pursuits—and you have a recipe for disaster unless you have yourself a guide through the whole mess. I tried being that guide for Bobby, virgin of all things Marvel and DC, allowing him to peruse the rack and shelves of titles. Deftly, I steered him clear of the craptastic stuff that really shouldn’t be used as anything other than backup asswipes when the toilet paper recession hit. When he reached for some sort of Japanese manga garbage, I grabbed it out of Bobby’s hands and just barely restrained myself from throwing it across the aisle and stomping on it. I replaced it with a trade collection of a book called Preacher by a guy named Garth Ennis. “Forget that manga shit,” I said. Mrs. Old Lady Makeup was walking by just then and gave me a dirty look. She saw Bandit was still with me and gave another harrumph. “Sorry, ma’am. I have Tourette’s syndrome,” I said, and flinched and jerked and twitched my face and said another “shit” just for good measure. She stormed away again, presumably to help the makeup stocks rise for the Wall Street makeup tycoons. “Read this,” I said, turning back to Fat Bobby, pressing the Preacher book closer to him, like he might lose it. “It’ll change your life.” “Okay,” he said uncertainly, eyeing the disturbing cover with confusion. Then his face, confused but still pleased at the prospect of what my dad’s ten dollars could get him, fell and slackened again, and I thought to myself, Oh great, what now? “Joey, I don’t think I can buy this.” “What are you talking about?” I asked, listening but turning back to the shelves at the same time, trying to decide if I wanted X-Men or Spiderman, or both. “You got ten dollars there, you can get whatever you want,” I said, then quickly added: “As long as it’s not that crap,” and pointed at the manga stuff. “It’s my dad,” he said, and though he wasn’t blubbering or crying this time around, I could tell that the thoughts that led to that were stirring just below the surface. “I don’t think he’d let me read comics. He’d think it was sissy stuff, a waste of time. He’d probably throw them away.” Having been raised on books, novels, and comics alike, the value of comics, both monetary and otherwise, fuel for a kid’s imagination, had been ingrained in me since time immemorial. The very idea of someone throwing away comics, discarding them as if they were merely cartoons on paper, horrified and angered me. It was an injustice I couldn’t allow. “We’ll keep them at my house,” I said. The idea came to me spontaneously, right there, and I didn’t know where it came from but it felt right. “I’ll get you a separate box. You can come over and read them whenever you want.” That shiny, beaming look erupted again on Fat Bobby’s face, that same joyous rapture that had sprung up when Dad had presented him with the $10 bill. It spoke of things too powerful for words, equal parts gratitude, appreciation, and something else altogether. It was as if Bobby were seeing things with new eyes, or maybe just seeing things that he’d never seen before. And it amazed him that things could be this way. “You’d do that for me?” He seemed not like a boy my age but a child years younger, looking up at someone they thought a hero. Someone almost worthy of worship. I think I must have felt how my dad felt earlier in the office, consoling this large, fat boy like he was still an infant. It felt good to be held up this way by someone else. It made you think, even if in vague and flitting spurts, of the person you could be, if only you had the courage to be a certain way all the time. “Sure. No big deal.” If possible, his smile grew even wider, like a fissure ripping a massive planet in two. That look of near worship again in his eyes—I felt high and mighty, but in a good way, not an uppity one. I just hoped he wouldn’t build some sort of shrine to me in a closet at home. That would be sort of queer. “Thanks, Joey.” I shrugged as if it were nothing. He looked again at the comic in his hand. “Preacher huh? Are you sure?” My mouth was open and I was about to say something, when a sound like music interrupted me. The music formed words and a shiver went through me tingling like electricity. “I’d go with something Batman personally,” said the voice like music, and I thought, Oh, this is it. This is what an angel sounds like.I turned, and there she was, the girl from the break room. “Something by Frank Miller or Jeph Loeb,” she said, and my mind quaked with nerdy excitement, my dork sensors reaching overload. No way in hell does she read comics, I thought. No way does she know the writers and artists, I added. I was in love, and I had no idea what to do next. I shuffled from one foot to the other. I crammed my hands into my pockets and pulled them out again. My face felt hot and I knew I was blushing, probably redder than the sun. I was scared, far more frightened standing there looking at her than I had been back at the stream with the three high school guys. This fear was somehow pleasant, though, and there was no other place I wanted to be. “Hey, Tara,” Fat Bobby said nonchalantly, as if he knew her, and she said hi back as if she knew him, and I thought, Holy shit, they know each other. Then I was mad because Fat Bobby hadn’t told me this, and this was fucking important information. This was bigger than who shot Kennedy, if there were little gray men in Area 51, bigger than discovering that Atlantis wasn’t lost at all but bobbing around right inside your crapper. I wanted to strangle him. I wanted to look at her. I wanted to run and hide. “Who’s your friend, Bobby?” she asked, looking at Bobby, and I thought to myself, trying to beam the message to her like I’d beamed messages to Bandit just a few minutes ago in Dad’s office: Don’t look at the fat boy! Look at me! Look at me for the love of God! “This is Joey,” Fat Bobby said. Then she was looking at me, holding her hand out for me to shake; and I thought, trying to beam the messages at her: Oh God! I’m gonna melt! Please don’t look at me! Don’t look at me! Taking her hand I felt my face getting hotter, and I wondered if my head exploded and I sprayed chunks of myself all over her and her pretty dress, would she still talk to me? Would she have pity on a headless freak and let me hear her voice again? “Hi,” I said, lamely, and her hand in mine was like worlds colliding, stars going supernova, and all sorts of stuff that I could analogize now, but back then it was a pleasant tingle through my whole body. A lightness in my head and thoughts that I didn’t want to ever end. Smelling something like strawberries, I knew it wasn’t me, and it definitely wasn’t fat boy next to me, and I realized it was her. It was the shampoo she used on her bouncy, galaxy spiral hair. Or a perfume she dabbed on her neck like I’d seen my mom and sister do. Or it was just the smell of her. Tara, I thought. The smell of Tara. I wanted to lean over and smell that hair. I wanted that smell in my head, in my mind, and I wanted to lock it away in there where I could always get to it. “Hi,” she said back, smiling, and I found myself looking at that smile, those lips, and thinking of touching them. I was looking at her mouth, still holding her hand, pumping it up and down, and I thought that if the Makeup Lady came around a third time I could turn to her and say: See, I really am retarded, and it would be true, painfully true. Turned retarded by way of a girl. That’s got to be a medical condition. I should look it up someday. I know other guys have felt the same way before. We could start a support group. Sit in a circle, share our stories and have a good cry. Bandit walked over to her, tail slapping side to side like a feather duster, and she dropped my hand. I held it outstretched there for a moment or two longer, dumb with shock at the loss of the contact. I stared daggers at Bandit, tried to send him some more telepathy. “Oh! There’s that cute dog! There’s that silly dog!” She knelt and cooed to him again, just as she had back in the break room. Her skirt swished as she knelt, a sound like a whisper, a whisper directed at me. I found myself looking at the curve of her backside, and then quickly looking away when she turned again to face me. “What’s his name?” I told her. She said some more nonsense to my dog, this time using his name, and I cried out in my mind for her to say my name. You know my name! Say my name! Then she did, and my heart nearly stopped. “I like your dog, Joey.” “Thanks,” I said, though I didn’t really know if that was something to say “thanks” about, and I could have kicked myself. “Mr. Hayworth, that’s your dad?” she asked, and her quick change of subject startled me as easily as everything else about her. I nodded, wanted to say something, but my mouth felt glued shut, and then I thought of what I’d said so far and maybe that was a blessing in disguise. “He’s a nice guy. He treats everyone here really well. I mean, I’ve only met him today and all, but some people you can just tell, you know?” You got that right, I thought. To her, I nodded. Fat Bobby was shuffling about now, left out of the conversation, and I really didn’t care. Her words were for me; her eyes were for me. No one else. “You like comics too?” she said, and I latched onto that single word, “too,” and what it implied, what it verified. That she liked comics, and that commonality between us was like some invisible bridge running from me to her, and I wanted for all I was worth to run across that bridge to her side of it. “Yeah.” My voice trembled the slightest bit; I tried to consciously still it and, with my following words, it seemed to work. “I’ve been collecting them for years now. My dad got me into them. I have boxes and boxes of them. Some are really rare, that he gave to me from when he was a kid. I spend all my money on them. Books too, I love books. I love to read.” Shut the hell up, you idiot,I told myself, and reapplied some of that glue to my jaws again, swearing I’d try not to speak anymore unless I absolutely had to. And even then to keep my responses to single words. Monosyllabic if possible. “That’s cool,” she said. She wore a laminated name tag around her neck, dangling from a cord, and I thought: That’s cool, that name. Tara. Tara. Tara. I stared at her name tag and repeated her name in my head like a mantra. After a time, I realized it might look like I was staring at her boobs and, thinking that, I actually did, my eyes drifting to the swells there, pushing out against the fabric of her dress like little mountains. I sent out another quick and urgent prayer to God, told Him I forgave Him for not answering my last prayer, swapping mine and Bandit’s bodies. This time what I wanted was a lot easier: just miniaturize me and give me some mountain climbing lessons. By an enormous feat of determination and willpower, I turned my eyes back to her face, hoping she hadn’t noticed where my gaze had wavered to and, if she had, hopefully she was too polite to say anything. I hoped for the latter, but readied myself for a fist to the face or a can full of Mace to the eyes for being a perv. She was still smiling, one side of her mouth turned upward, slightly crooked; something I decided right then and there was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. She kept talking without missing a beat, and for that I silently thanked her. “Maybe someday I can take a look at your comics,” she said. I shuffled from foot to foot again, hands in my pockets, wanting to stop, knowing I looked like some sort of gimp. My head turned this way and that as I looked everywhere, anywhere but at her, as if following the path of a kamikaze fly buzzing through the air. “Sure,” I said. When? is what I wanted to say. Where do you live? What’s your number? You want mine? All valid options I could have added, but I couldn’t. Literally, I couldn’t. It was as if those thoughts were stopped by some sort of brick wall, and the words lost in the ether like smoke in a breeze. “Well,” she said, and the way she said it I knew our current encounter was winding down, and I cursed the universe for its cruelty, “I really should get back to work. I’m sure I’ll see you around, your dad working here and all.” She made a little dance of a motion, like a pirouette, with a twirl of her skirt, and started to walk away. I wanted to reach out and snag her, pull her back to me like a planet pulling its moon. Down the aisle she glided, moving further away, taking my heart with her, and still I couldn’t say anything, not even when she gave a half turn in my direction and gave me a little wave and another one of her crooked little smiles. I tried to wave back, but my hands crammed in the bottomless pits of my pockets snagged there, me pulling frantically to free them. In that torturous moment I thought she’d walk out of sight and I’d have to wait some unknowable span of time to see her again, but the fat boy saved me. The fat kid who’d been nearly naked in a stream that same day, crying pitifully as he was used for target practice by a bunch of assholes. He, whom I would forever remember as Fat Bobby, whom I would always remember with an uncertain mix of fondness and disgust, called out to the girl who had stolen my young boy’s heart, and saved me. “I guess we’ll see you at the fair next week?” he called after her, and Tara stopped, kind of hop-skip-dancing backwards for a moment. With a nod of her head and a one-word reply of “Yeah!” muted like a whisper across the distance between us, she turned a corner and was gone. In the days that followed, morning to evening, light or dark, awake and in my dreams, there was one thing that came back to me again and again. Consisting of two words, those words played over again and again in my head like a song on a playback loop. My heart thudded jackhammer-like against my breastbone, a prisoner pounding against his cage, as I dwelt on the thing in my mind. The fair. 3. The first trucks began to arrive that Saturday, and Fat Bobby and I watched as the massive diesels pulled into the park at the center of town. I brought Bandit with us, as Dad had told me to and as I would have done anyway, and he lay at my feet while Fat Bobby and I straddled the log-post fence that surrounded the park like it was a huge corral. Large canvas tents and tarps billowed up and high, supported by their wire- and pole-frame skeletons, like the humps of ancient creatures. Game booths and food stands were constructed also, crews of shirtless and sweat-shiny big men pounding away with hammers and shouting out orders to each other. Glass-cased popcorn machines and the spinning skewers of hot dog vendors; Whomp-a-Mole machines and BB gun shooting ranges; a merry-go-round spinning slowly, hypnotically, on a test run; and the large, imposing monolith of the Ferris wheel, standing tall against the backdrop of the clear summer sky like the monument of some lost civilization—each, in turn, unveiled upon the land like an invocation. “It sure is something, isn’t it?” Fat Bobby asked, downing the last of the soda he’d filched from my house. One corner of a plastic bag stuck out of the breast pocket of his shirt like it was playing peek-a-boo, the sandwich that had been in it, of my mom’s making, long gone. “It sure is,” I said with genuine awe, the sounds and sights of the fair coming together like the sounds of a dream long lost slowly coming back. “This will be the first year I’ve got to go in a long time,” Fat Bobby said. “My mom used to take me. But it’s not really the kind of thing my dad likes to do.” Knowing full well this might be a road I didn’t want to go down, that such a topic could quickly dispel the glory of the day, I went ahead and asked the question that was on my mind anyway. “Used to? Where’s your mom now?” The momentary silence before Fat Bobby’s answer confirmed for me that we were about to turn down Depression Road, followed by a hard left down Misery Lane. “She died a couple years ago. Car accident. Dad was driving.” I didn’t know what to say to that, and so said nothing. Which may have been the best course of action because, in a few minutes, we were lost in the chorus of the fair’s construction again. It was a balm of sorts watching those men work their magic, the tents and rides going up, as if the landscape of a forlorn past were being patched over by something better. As afternoon stepped aside for evening, the sky going from blue to red to bruise purple, we turned away from the fairgrounds. The clanging and banging of its assembly, its growth, its becoming, had a rhythm almost a heartbeat, and there was a sadness to our stride as we moved along: a drag of the legs, a slump of shoulders. Along the highway, in the deepening night, we walked, and at some point on the long road, we waved to each other and parted; the unspoken desire for the fair between us and the wait for it almost unbearable. Ghost dog by my side, I watched my friend blend into the night and, on the dark road, I continued home. I was several yards from the turnoff on the highway to our street, when the sound of an engine coming closer rumbled behind me. Stepping further onto the shoulder just for safety, as I had for a half dozen cars before it, I waited for the vehicle to pass on by. It didn’t pass. Pulling up alongside me, a sleek black Mustang slowed to a crawl, almost like a shadow rolling, a part of the night detached, matching my stride. The electric hum of the windows rolling down was loud in the night. Inside, Mr. Smirk, Mr. Pudge, and Mr. Pimple Planet—Dillon, Max, and Stu—looked out. Clouds of smoke billowed out of the car, drifting up into the night like dragon’s breath. Bandit let out that monstrous growl he’d made back at the stream not so long ago. I knelt to clutch his collar and gave him a bit of a tug, letting him know to stay by me as we walked. Dillon was at the wheel, but he didn’t watch the road. He stared out at me. The other two were in the backseat, watching me as well. “Out past your bedtime?” Dillon asked. He had traded his suede jacket for a black leather one and, in the black car in the black night, the effect was disconcerting. He almost seemed like only a head and hands, pale and floating there in the shadow car. “It’s dangerous to be out alone this time of night.” He looked briefly away from me, out through the windshield at the moon above, like he was confirming the hour. “Bad things can happen at night.” I tried to remember the things I’d told Fat Bobby a few days ago at the stream in the woods. Not to be afraid. Not to take shit. But home, so near, had never seemed so far away. “Yeah,” I said, trying to control the tremor in my voice, “like getting your nuts bit off.” I looked at Dillon in the driver’s seat to gauge his reaction, and I felt I’d scored at least a point when I saw a tick of anxiety as he looked down at Bandit. Probably imagining his unmentionables being torn and chewed like a frankfurter and beans. But to his credit, and my growing unease, it was only the slightest of distractions, and then he was looking squarely at me again. “The brave little man with his dog,” he said, and I watched as one of his floating phantom hands left the steering wheel and reached into a pocket of his leather jacket. My first thought, the Southern Californian in me, cried out Gun! Gun! Run! Hit the ground! But even as these thoughts fired across my synapses, my muscles tensing to run or hit the ground, Dillon’s hand came back out and it wasn’t a gun he held. “I was thinking about your dog, after that stunt you pulled in the woods.” I watched him flick his wrist, a quick and simple motion like a magician would do, and a long and silver blade sprung like magic from his fist. “And I think I came up with a viable solution.” That blade, four inches and gleaming with moonlight, held my eyes as effectively as Tara had, though for different reasons. The thought of that knife punching into my dog, ripping into Bandit’s guts, tearing the life from him, made my stomach do a little queasy flip. I felt like a small boy, and I wanted my dad. Hell, I wouldn’t have turned away my mom either, had she at that moment come running down the highway to save the day. I pushed the images away, the momentary horror of what could be, of what I no doubt knew this guy in the leather jacket, driving the deep black Mustang, would do if given the chance. Instead, I tried to snatch the anger that hid behind the fear. “You ever touch my dog and I’ll use that knife to cut off your limp dick,” I said. Then, speaking before the thought was even fully formed, as if it were almost a revelation, something inferred from the mists of a crystal ball, I continued. I think it was something like how I’d known the kind of man Fat Bobby’s dad had to be, even as I said he couldn’t be that bad. “And I’ll mail your tiny noodle limp dick to your dad, so he’ll know what a fucking pansy ass his son really is.” The tires squealed with the braking of the black car. The Mustang lurched with the sudden friction, and stopped. The pungent smell of burnt rubber wafted up in the darkness. “I’ll fucking kill you,” Dillon said, and I looked at him square in the eyes, and his smirk, that lopsided grin like he didn’t give a shit about anything, like he was separate from it all, was gone. His hand held the switchblade with white-knuckle intensity, making his hands even whiter than they already were, contrasted with all the black. The blade quivered, and the moonlight twinkled upon it. The driver’s door opened, and he stepped out. I snatched at Bandit’s collar again, to let him know he was to follow, and I turned and ran, forgetting all my talk about not taking shit, not being scared. I ran for the turnoff like I’d never run before, faster than for any track meet or scrimmage ball game I’d ever been a part of. I ran and didn’t stop running until I was home, through the door, throwing the lock behind me. Not wanting to, but needing to know, I peeked through the curtains of the adjacent window. The black Mustang rolled by as if on cue, the windows up so that I could imagine it driven not by a teenage thug, but maybe driving itself, fueled by otherworldly forces. Then it was out of sight down the road, once more part of the night that had birthed it. Breathing fast and loud and harsh, bent over clutching my legs, I turned away from the window and looked up to see Mom there wringing a dish towel in her hands, looking at me, looking at the door, waiting to see what hordes of hell and damnation had to be on my heels. CHAPTER THREE (#u3c3d025b-365a-52ef-ac7c-dd9c7f011366) 1. With a whole week before the fair was to open to the public, Fat Bobby and I needed something to do to occupy our minds. We’d spent a couple hours reading comics, and I’d let him go through my boxes and pick and choose what he wanted to read. But I stayed close by as he read them, never leaving him alone for even a second. I’d instructed him on how to hold and care for the comics properly so as not to crease the covers or bend the binding. Nervously, I pretended to read as well, but watched my friend’s elbows and legs shuffling as he sat on my bedroom floor and flipped through the books. He came frighteningly close to trampling the comics at times, like a large circus elephant dancing dangerously close to the gleeful, pointing children, but disaster was always averted. Finally, filled to the brim with mutants and krytponians, radioactive spiders and dark knights, even Fat Bobby had had enough superheroism for one morning and looked up and asked what we should do next. I wanted to get out of the house as well, but was afraid to, and so didn’t immediately respond. Sleep the past couple nights had been fitful and restless. I tossed and turned beneath the sheets, disturbing Bandit at the foot of the bed. Outside my window the branches of the apple trees tapped and clicked constantly, as if imploring my attention. Little nubs on the branches looked like switchblades, and every time headlights passed I was sure it was a sleek black Mustang out there cruising through the night. I hadn’t told Mom or Dad about the guys in the car trailing me, or the driver with his gleaming knife. I knew I should; I knew Mr. Smirk—Dillon—was a dangerous kind of guy, not someone who’d be satisfied with just a fistfight. But I thought of the fuss and drama that would follow if I told them. How I’d probably be under house arrest until Dad got a hold of the police and the police got a hold of Dillon, his two friends, and their parents. The thought of missing even a single day of the summer was intolerable. That was a foolish train of thought. What we as adults call irrational. I knew that even then. But kids aren’t the most rational of beings, as I’m sure you know. And boys the least of all. Gathering up the comics we’d been reading, Bobby and I started slipping them back into their plastic sleeves as we silently considered his question. Light from the dresser lamp shone off the clear plastic sleeves in streaks and whorls of color. Thus bagged, we filed the books into their respective boxes, pushed the boxes back into the closet. The light off the comics made me think of the light I’d seen from atop the hill on the dirt road overlooking the woods. I told Fat Bobby about it—he seemed vaguely interested—and we got up, went to the kitchen, grabbed a couple sodas and, with Bandit between us, we headed out. As we walked, Fat Bobby’s interest seemed to grow, almost reaching a minimum level to qualify as excitement, and so mine did also, by proxy. He asked questions, and I found myself answering eagerly. “Was it like a ghost light?” he asked. “I’ve heard that sometimes people see strange lights floating about in swamps. Was it like that? Ghost lights?” I shook my head. “No,” I said. “It wasn’t like that at all. Besides, there aren’t any swamps here. It wasn’t no ghost lights.” He looked vaguely disappointed, a scowl scrunching his face and making it look like a pile of unbaked dough grimacing. Then he smiled as some other idea struck him, something better, and the disappointment was a memory. “Was it UFO lights?” he said, the eagerness in his tone raising his voice an octave and making me remember uncomfortably those high, whiny pleas that had first led me to the crying, nearly naked kid in the stream. “You know, all flashes of blue and green and white as the ship lands and the aliens get out and laser some holes into some cows and stuff.” “No, no.” Shaking my head briskly, irritation gaining a foothold, I tried not to let it show. “No, it wasn’t no spaceship landing.” I wondered if maybe I should put Bobby on some sort of comic book restriction, give his brain a few days to come down from the clouds. “It was like a twinkle or something, you know, when the sun flashes off of something glass or metal.” “Oh,” Fat Bobby said, “I think I know what that is.” The disappointment returned to his face, and he started walking ahead of me up the dirt hill. I had to trot to catch up to him. Up at the top, the woods ahead of us a carpet of green, Fat Bobby pointed into the distance. Away from the woods. My eyes followed the line of his finger and arm and, sure enough, there it was: the light I’d seen—the fallen star—the sun reflecting off some surface in fiery flashes that made me squint. I swiveled my head like a periscope, looking back towards the woods where I’d originally seen the reflective light. I saw nothing there among the trees as I had the first time. But turning my head the other way, in the direction Bobby was pointing, and there it was, that bright light like some sort of signal, twinkling, sparkling. How had it moved? What was it? I scanned the landscape this way and that, and with each turn of my head I saw something surprising. There wasn’t just one flashing light out there among the hills where Fat Bobby had directed me to look. There were several. It was a veritable village of flashing lights, like bits of shattered glass or grains of sand on a beachfront catching the sunrays and throwing them back. “What is it?” I asked, mystified. “Come on,” Fat Bobby said, “I’ll show you.” * * * The junkyard held mostly dead and dilapidated cars, parked side by side and fender to fender on dirt so barren that I felt sad for the sparse and dry weeds growing out from the cracks, like fingers of penitents from hell reaching through the grating of the earth. We walked the perimeter of the chain-link fence that surrounded the yard, heading towards where Fat Bobby said the entrance was located. As we walked we heard short and harsh sounds like firecrackers exploding, and I again thought Guns! Guns! Run! Duck! as the sounds cracked the silence like small thunders. Bobby saw me flinch, and I looked to him seeing that he hadn’t, and he gave me a wry smile that seemed to say Not always so tough, are we, dumbshit? and I thought: good for you, maybe there’s hope yet. “That’s Jim and his dad,” he said. “They run the place.” We reached the sliding gate that served as the entrance to the yard, and there a sign read “NO TRESPASSING.” As I gazed into the yard I realized that it wasn’t as haphazard and slapdash as I’d first thought. There was a large garage in the center of the automotive graveyard, three bay doors rolled up, and inside were various cars and trucks elevated or with hoods propped open. Parts and pieces littered the floor of the garage among shelves and tables full of tools. This wasn’t just some scrap or auto yard. This was a mechanic’s shop. “Come on,” Fat Bobby said, grabbing the fence. He started to push, and the large entrance gate wheeled open with a screech in its rusty tract. “Wait!” Looking at the sign and hearing the loud firecracker sounds coming from somewhere in the yard, I hung back. “It says no trespassing!” “Don’t worry.” He looked back at me as he slipped inside. “I know them.” Hesitantly, I followed. As we crossed the yard towards the garage, walking around the cars in various states of disrepair and stages of rust, stepping over flaking tires and old engine blocks like the remnants of machines after Armageddon, I took in the fading chrome and metal, the shattered windshields and sun-cracked bumpers, and thought to myself: So these are my fallen stars, my great treasure in the woods.That realization carried with it a light sadness, and a soft sigh, barely perceptible, escaped me as the loss of possibilities played out in my mind. Maybe Bobby’s talk of ghost lights and UFO landings had sparked an excitement in me despite my pretenses otherwise. At certain angles, the sunlight glared off of the dead vehicles as intense as it had from far off on the hill, yet this close up the magnificence had left the display and it was just daylight bouncing off scrap metal. Fat Bobby led me around the garage. The building in the middle of the refuse was like the last fortress on a battlefield, itself pockmarked by age or mortar fire. Then we turned a corner and there, a few feet away, were black people with guns, and with California memories like wartime flashbacks I once more thought Guns! Guns! Run! Gang war! Bobby called out over the gunfire to the duo. Bottles and cans set up on a segment of wooden post some distance away jumped into the air, shattered, or ripped into aluminum shreds as I looked on, and I thought of the anxiety-filled freeway trips through Compton or Long Beach of years past. The larger of the two, a tall and wiry black man with close-cropped curls of gray peppered hair, turned, saw us, flashed a bright white smile, and holstered his weapon. The second black person, a kid really, no more than a year older than me, if that, saw this, turned to look at us too, and lowered his gun also. “Hey, my man!” the man said, in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, grease and oil-stained, looking very much the mechanic. He stepped over to Fat Bobby, held out his hand palm up, and Bobby gave him a mighty slap, a smile brightening his fat face as I hadn’t seen it do since my dad had given him the comic book money. Bobby gestured to the older man, then the boy, and looked at me as he said: “Joey, this is Mr. Connolly—” “Ernest,” Mr. Connolly interjected, and shook my hand with one of his, large and long-fingered and hairy so that I thought of a tarantula as I shook it. I put him at around sixty or so, and yet he carried himself with a mild swagger and confidence of a man thirty years younger. “—and his son, Jim,” Bobby finished, and my hand was released and taken up by the smaller hand of the black kid, wiry like his dad, but his head bald as a baby’s. Jim smiled that same flashy ivory smile his dad had, genuine and friendly, and I thought to myself for a fat kid with no friends Bobby sure had a lot of friends. Tara bloomed in my mind briefly like a puff of smoke, and I smothered the thought and what accompanied it (the fair the fair a beautiful girl and the fair) and brought my thoughts back to the here and now. “Joey saw the light shining off all your cars and wondered what it was,” Fat Bobby explained, “so I brought him here. Hope it’s not a problem.” Mr. Connolly dismissed this with a combination snort and bark of a laugh, and waved the very idea away. “No problem at all,” he said. “You know you can come around here anytime, Bobby.” With that Mr. Connolly gave Bobby a massive slap on the back, which he probably meant to be friendly but rocked Fat Bobby on his heels. Turning to his son he gathered up the pistol his kid had been using and started to walk away. “You kids have fun,” he said to all of us. And this just to Jim: “Be in for lunch.” Then it was the three of us: Fat Bobby, myself, and the first black kid I wasn’t afraid of being shot or stabbed by in a long, long time. And Bandit, of course, off somewhere nearby, sniffing the cars and parts of cars, and the dirt and the thin, dying weeds, scents invisible in the air, there but unseen. I felt it again, that sense of things moving and me being carried along for the ride. Another link in the chain of events, the moving of the gears, and I felt I was on a trail myself, following it like Bandit to wherever it inevitably led. 2. “It actually wasn’t one of the cars here I saw,” I told Jim as the three of us strolled casually through the yard, like three buddies on a fishing trip. I’d answered all the initial questions boys always had when meeting each other, like where I was from, where I lived, what I liked to do, things like that. Of course he took to Bandit real quick, which was a point in my favor: a good dog like a sign that said, Hey, I ain’t so bad. I’m pretty damn okay, actually. See, I have a dog! “Oh?” he said, twirling a metal pipe he had scooped up off the ground. I noticed his motions weren’t clumsy, that the pipe whizzed in circles and semicircles in his hand with deftness and ease, and as sure as Bandit was a sign about me, this was a sign about Jim. It said I know how to take care of myself and like a telepathy of some sort I knew Mr. Connolly had bestowed a similar philosophy upon his son as Dad had done with me. Don’t let fear control you. Don’t take shit from anyone. With just the right twist of his wrist, I knew Jim Connolly could whack something good with that small pipe. Probably without the pipe too, and I knew this was one kid I didn’t want to get in any pissing contest with. I was glad we’d hit it off so well. “Yeah,” I said. “It was a lot like the sun shining off these cars here, but it wasn’t here. I saw it off in the woods.” “You probably just forgot exactly where you saw it coming from,” Fat Bobby said, picking up a stick, trying to twirl and spin it like Jim. The stick went flying out of his sausage-like fingers, sailed dangerously close past my face. I slugged him on the arm. I checked the punch at the last moment, not hitting him too hard, but Bobby still gave me an injured What’d you do that for? look. “There’s at least half a mile between the woods and here,” I said. “I’m not fucking blind.” “Geez,” Fat Bobby said, rubbing his shoulder where I’d hit him. “Sorry.” “Actually,” Jim said, “there’s service roads that run all through the woods.” “Service roads?” I asked. “Yeah, you know, for forest rangers and firefighters and shit like that.” He had given me a look when I’d hit Bobby that said: Don’t hit the fat kid. To his credit he didn’t make a big deal about it, and so I made a mental note to myself not to hit Fat Bobby like that anymore, even in play. That Jim would come to Fat Bobby’s defense, even with just a look, was kind of cool in my book, and my respect for the kid rose a notch or two. “So it’s possible you saw something where you said you saw it.” “I did see something where I said I saw it.” The note of challenge in my voice made Jim look up at me, and he flashed his bright smile again. I knew that he was liking me more as well, what with me not backing down from him, even about something as dumb as where some ghost lights or UFO beams had come from. “Only one problem,” he said. “What’s that?” I asked. We came to the far rear fence of the yard at that moment, and Jim pointed off to where the woods started a hundred yards off or so. A dirt road led off that way into the trees, and there was a barricade across it, large metal crossbeams in the shape of an X. As if for added determent, thick coils of chain looped around the crossbeams, then around two trees on either side of the barricade, and a thick padlock hung at the center where the ends of the chain met up. “Those roads have been closed for some time,” he said. * * * I lay in bed that night wondering how the car I had actually seen gleaming with reflected sunlight deep in the forest—not the cars at the Connolly yard that Fat Bobby assumed I’d seen—had ended up where it was. According to Jim the access road barricades were put in place a long time before, when careless campers or hunters would improperly put out campfires; the embers would be caught in a breeze after the people had left, and acres were burnt to crisp and ashes. Only rangers and the fire department had keys to unlock the chains of the barricades, and hefty fines and jail time kept most people from messing with them. This left me with only a few options and conclusions. One, the access road at the Connolly yard that Jim had shown us seemed to be the closest route to the general area in which I had seen my single, distinct, reflective surface, me presuming it’s a car. Since that road was barricaded, obviously if anyone had used it, it had been someone with the keys to the chain. This would mean a ranger or the fire department. But Jim hadn’t said anything about seeing rangers or fire trucks use that road, and it was a pretty good chance, him and his dad working there, one of them would have seen or heard a vehicle driving that road. Add to that the fact that I hadn’t seen any smoke or fire when I had seen the shiny object in the distance, my fallen star, and that pretty much ruled out the rangers or fire department. This led naturally to conclusion number two. If it hadn’t been a ranger or fire truck out there, someone authorized to pass through the barricades, then maybe it was someone with no legitimate right whatsoever. Maybe someone had busted through one of the barricades; an off-season poacher possibly, or kids doing the fleshy tango in an out of the way place, or perhaps a coven of Satanists for all I knew, dancing naked smeared with blood and chanting to the Dark Lord. Sacrificing goats, having orgies, all that crap. But the access road barricade at the Connolly yard, the most direct route to the general area of the light I’d seen, obviously hadn’t been run down or forced open. That didn’t mean another access road hadn’t been used, and I’d asked Jim how many there were. He said several, exactly how many he didn’t know. But they were all barricaded, he said, and the rangers were real regular with their duties, checking on the barricades and patrolling the woods. Fat Bobby verified this by saying that Tara’s dad was a ranger, and he always saw the man out and about in his park jeep or truck around town, and when he wasn’t around town he was presumably out in the forest, checking on things. I nodded at this like it made sense, which it did, but inside I was cursing up a storm at Fat Bobby for once again knowing more about this beautiful girl than I did. So, if only rangers and the fire department could easily get vehicles into the woods, and neither one of them had been there when I saw the bright light on the ground, then that left only one other option I could think of. And it was this one that left me tossing and turning for some time, thinking of adventures and mysteries and all things that made a boy’s heart and mind race with life. What if the car I’d seen shining back the sunlight like a beacon had been there in the woods before the barricades had gone up? How long ago would that have been? Years? Decades? And why was this possible car still there after so much time had passed? Was it forgotten? Or did people just not know where to find it? I’d only seen it myself because I’d been on high ground, looking in a particular direction. That last intrigued me the most for some reason. If people didn’t know where to find it, why not? Had someone put the car out there intentionally? Was there something there that wasn’t supposed to be found? For me, in the long stretch of summer with nothing but time on my hands and a fertile imagination, this wasn’t something I could just forget. Plans were already forming in my head and the morning seemed too far away, dangling like a carrot in front of a horse, beckoning, teasing. The night lingered, taunting me, and sleep seemed a misty thing to catch, slipping through my fingers in ethereal tendrils. 3. Fat Bobby lived north down the highway heading into town, about a quarter mile from our place. I hadn’t been to his house before, but he’d pointed it out once from a distance when we’d been walking home from town. Whereas my neighborhood seemed something of a checkerboard with immaculate well-tended lawns and freshly painted, manicured houses interspersed with weed-strewn dirt expanses where a lawn had once been, and run-down affairs that could have been boxes and rusted shingles slapped together disguised as houses, Fat Bobby’s neighborhood was nothing but the latter. Houses with exteriors of peeling paint like flaky scabs, rusted automobiles parked out front like the husks of dead creatures, and mangy beasts with matted hair chained to posts that I could only guess were some sort of dog, were tossed about his street as if by a tornado. It was because of these last, the dirt encrusted, sun beaten animals I thought were dogs, that I left Bandit home this time around. That might seem counterintuitive, leaving behind my dog and best protection when I was planning on walking a neighborhood populated by canine monstrosities. But that was exactly why I left him behind. Not wanting Bandit in any sort of dogfight with these sad and horrid beasts, perhaps hosting an early stage of rabies, I trusted myself to outrun these mangy mutts, but not Bandit to avoid getting into a scuffle where he might end up poisoned by the contaminated spit sluicing about their jaws. Turning off onto Fat Bobby’s street, I moved warily along the dilapidated and depressing dirt landscape of his neighborhood. This area held not a hint of the Old West vibe that the town of Payne proper had held for me when I’d seen it from atop the hill. Rather, this neighborhood seemed like a Calcutta or something akin to one of those African villages seen on the Give-Us-Your-Money heartstring-plucking Christian Children’s Fund commercials. These weren’t homes I was seeing, but hovels, trailers weather-beaten and uncared for so that they seemed not like trailers at all, but like the shells of structures after a nuclear blast. Trees tried growing in a few of the dirt lawns and seemed like the emaciated skeletal structures of ancient beasts, gnarled and twisted by age and decay. I approached the trailer Fat Bobby had pointed out before, a rectangular thing with duct-taped windows and flaky wisps of what might have once been blue paint fluttering down from its walls, like dying butterflies. Empty lawn chairs sat before it with loose flaps slapping about in a light breeze, like little flags. I don’t know what I expected Bobby’s dad to look like; I guess maybe I leaned towards something like Fat Bobby himself, just a larger version. A fat and lazy man with a gut like a beach ball stuffed beneath his shirt, and beer cans littered about his feet like carelessly delivered babies. But the man in the yard that the trailer sat on, leaning over the hood of a white Toyota pickup, wasn’t fat, and the thick cords of muscles glistened by sweat and shiny by sun showed he wasn’t lazy. He heard me approaching, stopped fidgeting with whatever part under the hood he’d been fidgeting with, and withdrew from beneath the hood to stretch to full height. And the height was mountainous. As I’ve said before, my dad was a large man. I was used to being dwarfed by the larger of my gender. But whereas Dad was lean and muscled like a fast stallion, Fat Bobby’s father was thick and solid like a bull. Mr. Templeton’s face was likewise bulbous, as if it was permanently swollen. This wasn’t a swelling by anything like a bee sting neither, but a red swelling of meanness, as if there was something on the inside of him that wouldn’t go away. Maybe a volcanic pressure, and at any moment he could explode with the force of the heat inside him. He looked at me like he was looking at a fly that had alighted on his food and taken a shit. He wanted to squash me, no doubt in my mind. Yet it wasn’t personal either. I remember thinking he wanted to squash anyone and everyone. Like the existence of other people was offensive. Dad was no pushover by any definition of the word, but seeing this man, in torn jeans and a faded flannel shirt like he was some lumberjack-Sasquatch hybrid, I thought of the two of them tangling, Dad and Mr. Templeton, and I didn’t think I’d want to place any bets either way. “What the hell you want?” he asked. His lips moved beneath a wild beard like a miniature wilderness. I wondered if food crumbs and bugs lived in that tangle somewhere, in a little world separate from the one we were in. Maybe there was a whole civilization of lost bits of food and beetles in there somewhere, and when he talked it was like an earthquake and the voice of God from on high to the wee beard folk. For a moment I thought I’d laugh. Then I knew if that happened, I’d die, and so I didn’t laugh. “I’m here to see Bobby, sir.” I tried sounding as respectful as I could muster. Afraid of my head being popped like a grape, I think I did pretty good. Fear’s a fabulous motivator. “Are you the kid he’s been hanging out with so much?” I thought about answering but he kept on talking, and so I clacked my mouth shut. “He’s been shirking his chores, the fat lazy bastard. Gone all day long, comes home late, like this is some sort of motel he can just come and go from whenever he likes.” He paused like maybe he wanted me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say so I continued to keep my mouth shut. “You shirk your chores too? Out here running around like you got nothing to do.” Silence still seemed the best option on my end. Then: “Your parents some kind of fucking hippies? Let their kids run around and shit?” “No, sir,” I said, not really knowing which part I was answering to. “Yeah right,” he said, and I didn’t know which he was referring to either. Not that it mattered, even with him talking bad about my parents in some offhand manner. I imagined myself briefly trying to stick up for my folks, flipping this guy off or something, and him coming at me, and me trying to use one of the tricky leg maneuvers that Dad had taught me. This guy just laughing as I tried to tangle his legs with mine, or kick at a kneecap like a boulder, and he just twitched a big toe or something and I busted like a little glass figurine. “May I see Bobby, sir?” I said, deciding politeness was still the best course of action. “You talk like a fruit, kid.” He smiled, and he had teeth yellow-stained by years of nicotine. As I watched he pulled a crumpled pack of Camels from a breast pocket, pulled out its last inhabitant, and lit it up with a lighter shaped like a little pistol. “‘May I?’” he mocked, murmuring around the cigarette. “‘Sir,’” he said in a high and whiny voice. “Goddamn queers everywhere nowadays.” At that moment the door to the trailer swung open and hit the wall it was attached to with a metallic rattle. We both turned at the sound, and there was Fat Bobby standing in the doorframe. It took a second or two for me to notice what was different about my friend. The dark ring around his right eye seemed to call my gaze to it, like the target circle of a dartboard. I looked back at Mr. Templeton. He looked at his son, then looked down at me. It was clear he knew what I’d seen but he didn’t seem much concerned. As in not at all. “You know what happens in another body’s family isn’t none of your concern, don’t you, fairy boy?” he asked, and immediately, obediently, I nodded. “You don’t doubt that if you caused me any sort of trouble I wouldn’t think twice about bouncing you around some, do you?” I shook my head. No, I didn’t doubt it one bit. “Good,” he said, then he looked from me back to Bobby, still standing silent and slouched in the doorway of the trailer. “Get out of my sight.” Turning back to the Toyota he leaned once again under the hood. Bobby stepped off the porch lightly, making almost no sound, which, with his girth, was a tremendous feat of skill. Slowly, he walked towards me, moving as if he were trying to avoid disturbing a beehive. When he was close, he waved for me to follow and together we walked softly away from the miserable trailer, out of the neighborhood like a Third World ghost town, and onto the highway. After several minutes of silence like a period of mourning, I finally opened my mouth and told him what I wanted to do. Fat Bobby smiled as I spoke, and with that smile the effect of the black eye seemed to dwindle. Though we cheered up considerably talking about what we were going to do, time and again I turned to look at my friend and that shiner and, in my mind, I saw the fist that caused it coming down like a hammer. * * * On the way to the Connolly yard, we stopped at the hill on the dirt road overlooking the woods. I immediately saw the object casting back the sunlight that I’d seen before, far out into the forest among the thick carpet of trees. Fat Bobby saw it too, and I actually heard him breathe out something like an ‘ahhhhh’of amazement. “That isn’t ghost lights or a UFO,” he said. “No, it isn’t,” I said and looked at my watch. It was approaching noon, and I tried to think back to that day I’d first met Fat Bobby, and what time I’d been standing on this very hill. It could have been around noon. Which meant that the object down there, be it abandoned car or something else, for some reason only reflected the sun at a certain time of the day and from a certain angle. This was intriguing, and I was eager to get on with our plans. “Come on,” I said and started to walk again. Bobby lingered for a moment, as if the light down there held him by a tether and was reluctant to let go. I knew the feeling. It’s that thing between boys and the mysterious, the unknown. Like an umbilical cord that gives and returns life. * * * Before hitting the Connolly yard we stopped by my house to pick up Bandit. The aroma of fresh cookies wrapped about us like tantalizing fingers as soon as we walked inside. We stayed awhile, watching my mom in the kitchen pulling out trays lined with brown baked delights and scooping them onto the counter to cool. We wanted them hot and begged for them, and Mom gave us each a handful. A glass of cool lemonade that fogged the glasses just a bit accompanied this feast, and we ate slowly, enjoying every bite and swallow as if they might never come again. Mom noticed Fat Bobby’s shiner, but she didn’t say anything. She gave me a look and I gave her one back, and somewhere in that secret exchange she understood the message: Not now. I’ll tell you later. She nodded as if she’d actually heard this, told us to enjoy our cookies, and then was off somewhere else in the house. As we were putting our glasses in the sink, Sarah came down the stairs in a summer dress, and her hair and face were all done up like for some sort of pageant. Date, I said to myself, and had to smile. Apparently, her true love in California was forgotten. Out of sight and out of mind. She saw us in the kitchen, saw my blooming smile, and pointed at me threateningly. “Don’t say a word,” she said, and that was like an invitation. “I think you need more makeup,” I said. “We can still see your face.” There was something in her other hand, the one not pointing like a dagger at me, and she wound up her arm and threw it and, too late, I saw it was her sandals and one of them hit me in the chest. The heel was broad and thick and it hurt when it struck. I laughed, though, seeing my sister’s face had turned red with the jab. “You don’t want him to know you’re a mutant on the first date.” And here came the other sandal, fast, and I stepped aside at the last moment and it sailed by my head, striking the refrigerator with a thump. My sister stomped determinedly towards me, and that was when Mom stepped back into the kitchen from the living room and planted herself between us. “What on earth is going on in here?” “Oh, Joey!” my sister bawled. “Why do you have to be such a retard?!” She was away and back up the stairs as quick as she’d appeared, not even bothering to gather up her ballistic missile sandals. Upstairs a door slammed, the impact reverberating throughout the house. I imagined her in her room or in the bathroom, staring at herself, wiping her face clean and trying again with the makeup and lipstick and whatever other chemicals and goop girls used. That made me smile. That smile made my mom frown. It wasn’t one of her vaguely comical-puzzled frowns, either, that asked “How did this happen?” Rather, it was one of her dangerous and angry frowns that said: “What the hell is your problem?” and sometimes ended with her whapping me upside the head. In moments, under that reproachful gaze, my smile dwindled and then faded altogether. “Why are you and your sister so mean to each other?” I shrugged. Looked down and away from her disappointment. “You know someday it’ll just be you and her,” Mom said. “Your dad and I won’t be around forever.” “Yes, ma’am,” I murmured. “Someday you’ll need each other.” “Yes, ma’am,” I muttered, really thinking: Yeah, right, like I need a rash on my sack. “She’s growing up, Joey. Jokes like that aren’t so funny anymore. She needs to feel good about herself.” “Yes, ma’am,” I said, head still hung low. “You might not understand now, but someday you’ll meet a girl and want to say nice things to her. Then maybe you’ll think back to now and the things you said to your sister.” I thought of Tara. I thought of the things I wanted to say to her. I thought of her in her dress at the bookstore. The shape of her. How the lights caught in the swirls of her hair. Her smile and her skin like velvet. Suddenly, the things I’d said to my sister indeed didn’t seem so funny. But I wouldn’t—couldn’t—admit as much to my mom. So I settled with another “Yes, ma’am”, and then my mother was moving upstairs, trailing after my sister, and me and Fat Bobby were free and so we headed outside. Bandit trotted along beside us. “Why are you so mean to your sister?” Fat Bobby asked after we were across my yard and back on the dirt road. “Because she’s a dork,” I said, as if that explained it all. “She’s kind of pretty.” I looked at him like he said the sky was falling, and I saw his face was red. I remembered how I’d felt around Tara, and I thought to myself, horrified and wanting to laugh at the same time, Fat Bobby is sweet on Sarah! But rather than laugh at him I just kept walking, adding these words in response: “If by pretty you mean pretty stupid, then you got a point.” 4. Back at the Connolly yard we slid through the large sliding gate again and picked our way through the rusted heaps of automobiles and parts and piles of parts. From a distance we saw Mr. Connolly and Jim lying on rolling boards slid under an old Chevy in the garage. A clang and scuffle of metal on metal from beneath the car preceded the emergence of father and son when they heard our approach. Oil and grease-stained, the duo waved at us instead of shaking hands. We pulled Jim aside and started to tell him the conclusions I’d come to and what we wanted to do. Pretty soon he was nodding along to our words and one of his flashy white smiles spread across his face. Although we stood grouped together in a corner of the garage and kept our voices low, Mr. Connolly lingered nearby wiping his hands on a towel. I knew he’d overheard some of what we were saying. He didn’t make any objections, but instead smiled one of his own bright smiles, as if he wished he were a boy again and could come along with us. “If you boys are going down to the woods, stick together. Have fun and be safe,” was the closest he came to any admonishment, and then: “I have some calls to make and other office work. Be home for dinner, Jim.” With that Jim’s dad opened a side door and disappeared into the room beyond. Jim walked to a small refrigerator humming along one wall, opened it, and fished out three bottles of water. Handing one each to me and Fat Bobby, he led the way out back, across the rear of the yard, and opened the small gate at the end of the walkway. Side by side, with Bandit doing his ghost impersonation padding along silently about us, we walked to the barricaded access road, stepped around the barrier and into the dense forest beyond. * * * Shadows and light passed upon us and the earth as the sun stabbed through the branches overhead in intermittent fashion. Green-heavy limbs and thick brown trunks rose all around us, so that walking the access road through these I felt as if I’d entered some fantasy world; a deep woods in which some wily wizard or wrinkled witch holed up in an old shack cast spells and charms. Looking in either direction off the road, visibility lasted only feet or a few yards at best, and then it became like a wall, the trees and the branches and the bushes obscuring things. Deep in the woods the quiet around us was startling, so that we talked to each other just to break the silence. I thought that this far in the forest there would be sounds: birds twittering and things moving in the trees and bushes. Maybe the rustle of leaves and branches as a breeze sidled through like someone in a crowd. But this was as if only a painting of a forest, just colors and shapes, with no real life to it. “Why is it so quiet?” I asked, my voice loud in the otherwise vast silence. “Most of the animals around here are migratory,” Jim said. “They’re always moving and sometimes all of them are moving at once, so they’re gone for awhile and you get this.” He made a vague gesture to indicate the silent world around us. “Kind of creepy,” Fat Bobby said, looking about nervously with little jerks of his head, as if he were trying to watch all directions at once. “Not really,” Jim said. “I think it’s kind of peaceful.” Initially, I felt inclined to agree with Fat Bobby, thinking the silence and stillness of the forest was sort of spooky. I could imagine things out there in the trees or hiding in the bushes, watching us, biding their time. Creatures with fangs and claws, and holes where they dragged their prey kicking and screaming into subterranean dens. But as we continued to walk along the access road, the quiet began to lose some of its macabre atmosphere. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/seth-adams-c/if-you-go-down-to-the-woods-the-most-powerful-and-emotional-d/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.