Stay Away

by Ike Hamill

  Eric thought about telling her everything. If he managed to explain it all, he wondered if she would be convinced, or if she would continue to insist that it was better for him to stay.

  It was obvious.

  She would argue. That was just her nature. The only way that she would understand is if she witnessed it firsthand.

  “What if I told you that me staying here would put everyone in danger?” he asked.

  “Honestly? I would still tell you to stay. Listen to me, Eric. Regardless of the danger, there is nothing I wouldn’t do to try to help you, you know why?”

  He shook his head.

  “Because I know that you would do the same for me. And, believe me, your family feels exactly the same way.”

  He tightened the straps of his pack reflexively, shaking his head.

  Eric realized that he should have never come to her house and never knocked on her window. Her thoughts had a way of infecting his brain. He was beginning to see things her way.

  1975

  JESSIE

  “JESSIE? PHONE,” HIS MOM yelled.

  Jessie ran down the stairs, his socks slipping every direction on the shiny treads, and grabbed the phone just as she was setting the handset down on the side table.

  “Yup?” he asked.

  “We got sticks,” Ben said on the other end.

  “When?”

  “I dunno. Bout now, I guess.”

  “Kay.”

  When Jessie heard the line click, he racked the phone and ran back for the stairs.

  “Jessie?” his mom asked.

  “Can’t talk—gotta run,” he said.

  Back in his bedroom, he changed into his pants, a Led Zeppelin shirt, and his tall, laced boots. He was halfway through lacing one of the boots when he said, “Shit!” and furiously began to un-lace it again. Carrying the boots, he turned the corner to the hall and skated down the shiny floors until he reached the first doorway on the left.

  Eric was sitting at his desk, working his way through his prep book.

  “Hey,” Jessie said. “Can you…”

  Eric put up a hand to ask for a second, finished writing, and then turned.

  “Can you give me a ride to the landing?”

  “I don’t think we would make it that far,” Eric said with raised eyebrows.

  “Shit. I forgot about the damn thermostat.”

  The part hadn’t come in yet and the radiator was currently drained of coolant.

  “Your bike…”

  “Chain,” Jessie said. “Why is everything always fucked up around here?”

  Eric smiled at him. Every now and then, his cousin’s cheery reaction to everything was useful. Most of the time, it was just annoying.

  “I’ll walk with you,” Eric said, getting up. “I have to go to the store anyway.”

  Jessie turned and went back towards the front of the house. Neither one of them ever used the back stairs, even when it would be more convenient. Out on the front porch, the spring sun was warming everything up fast. Birds were everywhere, pulling out thatch from the lawn to use for their nests. The buds of leaves on the trees seemed to grow whenever Jessie looked away and then looked back. He laced up his boots while Eric slipped on sneakers.

  Together, they headed across the lawn.

  “You’re lucky you don’t have to go to school,” Jessie said.

  “Trust me, school is easier.”

  “You don’t know,” Jessie said. “It rips ass every single day.”

  Without a glance, they crossed Elm. There was a sidewalk on the other side. As soon as they got down to the Dawson house, they took the shortcut down to the River Walk. Most kids were afraid of Mr. Dawson. Eric tilted a hand and said hello to him on the way by. Mr. Dawson loved Eric.

  “Dad said you guys are doing the rec room next week?” Jessie asked, just to make conversation.

  “Uncle Rey is a terrible judge of how much time stuff will take. We still have to finish pulling all the wires before we can close up the wall.”

  Jessie kicked a rock that was on the asphalt path. It bounced off a tree and flipped into the underbrush, hitting something that rang like metal. Jessie wanted to go check it out, but Eric was walking fast. He rushed to catch up with his cousin.

  “Who’s at the landing?” Eric asked.

  “Nobody. I’m meeting Fish and Holdty up at Prayer Rock.”

  Eric gave him a sideways smile. “Aren’t you worried about the lady?”

  “Shut up,” Jessie said. He waited to see how his cousin would take that.

  Eric was still smiling.

  “When I was on the road…” Eric began.

  Jessie practically held his breath. He always wanted to hear stories about Eric out in the world, but Eric never told them when asked. They had to come organically, or not at all.

  “…there were a ton of ghost stories. There were certain freight cars that nobody would hop. One was this bang stroke on the FIR. They just used this car to connect two others. The door was always open, but nobody would ride it.”

  “How come?” Jessie asked.

  Eric continued on like he hadn’t heard.

  “There was a red skull painted just inside the door. I was running to catch up and hop in when an old guy caught my arm and held me back. He told me to let that one go. If you rode through the night, they said that a skinny woman with hollow eyes would jump on if you passed under a bridge. As soon as she got on the car, nobody would be able to breathe. If, while you were convulsing, you managed to shake yourself out of there, and if you survived the drop and roll to the ground, then you had a chance. Otherwise, someone would find your body the next day.”

  “And it was her?” Jessie asked.

  Eric snapped back to the present.

  “She wasn’t real, Jessie. She was a ghost, like the Lady at Prayer Rock.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, it was probably just a story. My point is that it didn’t matter how smart the people were—lots of guys have superstitions. Sometimes, those superstitions don’t make any sense. It’s no good to judge them. If you’re still around when other people have taken a wet exit, then who’s to say that your way of doing things was wrong?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “That said, the story about the Lady at Prayer Rock is pretty dumb,” Eric said.

  They both laughed together.

  “What else happened on the road?” Jessie asked.

  “I’ll tell you another time. I’m headed to the store. Have fun tugging off Fish and Holdty.”

  “Shut up,” Jessie said.

  When Eric took the path on the right, he raised a hand over his shoulder to give Jessie the finger.

  Jessie broke into a run, clomping his boots on the asphalt all the way to the path that led to Prayer Rock.

  # # #

  He heard them laughing when he was only halfway down the path. He crested the top of the rock just as Charlie Holdt made his first cast. With the heavy magnet on the end of the line, Holdty couldn’t cast it overhand. He swung the weight several times and then let the line go. It plunked into the shallows.

  “You suck,” Fish said. “My turn.”

  “That was my first try,” Holdty said, reeling the line back in.

  “I thought you said you had more than one stick,” Jessie said as he joined his friends. They tilted their heads towards him as a greeting.

  “We do,” Fish said. He pointed at another pole that was laying on the rock. “But we only have one magnet.”

  Jessie nodded. He rounded carefully behind Holdty. The kid wasn’t paying any attention to where he swung the magnet. Jessie finally got to the second pole and inspected it with a frown. His father hated fishing, so they never went. The line was doubled back down the pole and a simple barbed hook was stuck into one of the rings. Jessie freed it and then hunted around for something to use as bait.

  “Yes!” Holdty shouted.

  Ben Trout—Fish to his closest friends—skittered down the rock to
the bank of the river.

  “Okay, pull it in slowly. Don’t get it caught on anything,” Fish said.

  When Holdty tried to raise the pole, it bent over hard. The line didn’t give at all.

  Fish got down on his butt and tore off his socks and shoes so he could wade in. When his toes hit the cold water, he whooped and cursed.

  “That’s fucking cold,” he said.

  “Just hang still for a second. You’ll get used to it,” Holdty said.

  “There’s still ice in the water, dipshit. Why don’t you come down here and I’ll tell you how to freeze your toes off?”

  When Fish looked back down, trying to find the next place to step, Holdty and Jessie locked eyes. They were barely containing their laughter.

  “I see it!” Fish yelled. “I think you’re on it.”

  “There’s no way you got it on the first cast,” Jessie said.

  “Maybe,” Holdty said, tugging the pole again, “I knew just where it was.”

  “Still.”

  “Nope,” Fish said. He started to quickly pick his path back to the rock. “Nope. You’re just caught on a rock.”

  “Don’t come back,” Holdty said. “We have to get unstuck. There’s only one magnet.”

  “Nope, I’m done. Feet are froze. You would have to go swimming to get unstuck.”

  Holdty looked dismayed. They had schemed and plotted for a week to find the right magnet, tested it against bicycles in the neighborhood to make sure it would work, and then gotten the right stickers on their library cards so they could check out the fishing poles. This whole scheme had taken more work to execute than any of them had ever exerted in the past. Now, just seconds after it had started, it looked like it was going to fail.

  “Give me that,” Jessie said.

  Reluctantly, Holdty handed over the pole. Jessie tucked his jeans into boots and began to work his way upstream along the rocks, trying to find a place where he could get a different angle on the line. Holdty and Fish sat next to each other on the rock. Fish had his hands clamped around his feet, trying to squeeze life back into them.

  “You’re lucky the lady didn’t get you,” Holdty said.

  “I told you before, she’s down at the dam. You know that guy Gary that works at Brooks?”

  “Bear hunter?”

  “Yeah—that’s the one. He said that the lady almost got him when he was a kid. Said she’s at the rocks just below the dam.”

  “I thought nobody ever got away from her,” Holdty said.

  “Lightning storm that night. Gary said that every time the lightning flashed, she would go away for a few seconds. He was able to get away.”

  While he tried to work the line free, Jessie paid close attention to the new information. It was the first time he had heard of adults talking about the lady. That assumed, of course, that Fish wasn’t making the whole thing up.

  The tip of the pole released a little and Jessie realized that he wasn’t actually snagged. Whatever the line was caught on, the thing had moved a little. A jolt of fear ran through him. He shook it away. Magnets wouldn’t stick to bones and flesh.

  The reel clicked when he turned the handle. He collected some of the line and played the end of the pole farther out towards the center of the river.

  The whole project would be simple if the water were warm enough for swimming. They never swam in the river though. It wasn’t because they were above the dam—they were far enough away that there would be plenty of time to get back to shore if they got caught in the current. There was no good reason for it, but nobody swam in the river. They would hike over to the quarry behind the high school, or even go all the way up to Bradley Pond, but the river remained off limits.

  “Are you getting somewhere with that, Jess?” Holdty asked.

  “Not sure,” he said, but he managed to reel in another few feet of line.

  “Did you guys hear about John Whitten last Thursday?” Fish asked.

  Jessie kept his eyes on the place where the line met the surface of the river. He was trying to move that dimple a little further out from the rock, thinking that his prize must be wedged on something on that side.

  “Didn’t he have tickets for Steve Miller?” Holdty asked.

  “Yeah. He and Mike went to hitchhike up there after school. They got picked up by a blind guy and a kid in one of those big Ford Galaxies.”

  “A blind guy was driving?”

  “No, the kid was driving, but the blind guy was working the pedals. Mike got real nervous about the way they were veering left and right on 201. He asked the guy if he should drive and the blind guy threatened to throw him out, so they kept quiet after that,” Fish said.

  Through the line, Jessie felt a clunk. Something shifted down under the black surface of the water. It almost felt like it was free.

  “They took that left off of 201 onto Thorofare Road, you know where it crosses Cobbosseecontee Stream?”

  “Sure,” Holdty said. He was tenting his hand over his eyes to block out the sun. Holdty seemed to sense that Jessie was about to make a breakthrough.

  “Anyway, they get going down that hill and the blind guy turns to Mike and John and says, ‘I hope you’ve made your peace.’ The next thing they knew, both the old man and the kid had passed out. Meanwhile, the Ford is going a good forty miles an hour and it was headed right for that tiny bridge.”

  “That’s, like, one lane.”

  “Exactly. John tried to climb over the seat to grab the wheel. Mike pushed open his door, thinking he might jump and roll, but there is a guardrail there and he said he figured he would get decapitated if he tried.”

  “Jesus,” Holdty said.

  “But John slipped before he could get the wheel. He slid all the way down between the kid and old guy, and hit the transmission hump and fell to the left. He was trying to push his way out when Mike screamed. Then, the kid and blind guy started waking up.”

  “What?” Holdty asked. “Who told you this story?”

  “I heard it right from John. The kid started yelling at him and the blind guy hit him with a rolled up newspaper until John got in the back seat again. Mike said that the kid and the blind guy were unconscious for exactly the amount of time that they had water on either side. As soon as they got back to land, it was cool again.”

  “That’s bizarre,” Holdty said.

  Jessie was barely paying attention to the story. The whole time, he had been working and reeling. As the thing moved closer to the surface, it got easier and easier to manipulate. Now that it felt like it was close, he started to walk over to a place where the rock sloped more gently down to the river’s edge.

  “Hey, man, I think you have something,” Holdty said.

  “Any other news flashes, Nostradamus?” Fish asked.

  Jessie ignored them, focused only on lifting whatever was caught on the line. They saw some blurry red shape through the water and Holdty jumped up and nearly feel in.

  “Oh shit! That’s really it,” Holdty said.

  “Of course it is,” Fish said. “It was practically brand new when they threw it in there and now it’s going to be ours.”

  Jessie saw that the line was attached to the back wheel. It was murky, but he was pretty sure he could see the bulge on the frame where the motor was. This was no ordinary bicycle. They had actually found it.

  “Just hold it. Right there,” Fish said. “You go any higher and the line will snap.”

  He still had his shoes off. Fish pushed his pant cuffs as high as they could go and plunged in. There were no histrionics this time. Fish could see the prize and there was no way he was going to let it get away.

  NICKY

  EVEN WITHOUT HER GLASSES, she knew who it was. She could tell by the way he walked with his shoulders up. When Eric was alone, he pulled into himself, like a turtle into its shell.

  “Hey, dropout!”

  Nicky ducked behind the pillar just as he was turning around. When she glanced back to see if he spotted her, Eric was
walking twice as fast away from her. His arms were tight to his sides and his shoulders were even higher.

  “Shit,” she whispered. It was against her code of ethics, but she actually ran to catch up to him. She was panting by the time she got close enough to speak at a normal tone. “Hey, Eric, I was just teasing.”

  When he turned and recognized her, his whole body language changed. His smile lit up his whole body and he relaxed all at once.

  “Hey. I didn’t realize it was you.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “This isn’t your normal habitat,” he said, gesturing around. He was right. Normally, Nicky hated coming anywhere near the strip of shops. One end was nothing but families and old people shopping for groceries. The other end was nothing but burnouts and nerds—the natural prey of the bullies and jocks who orbited the pizza place. She didn’t need to be any part of those scenes.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  He pointed at the bookstore. “I ordered another prep book.”

  They walked together towards the door. He held it open for her and she wanted to kick him in the shin. Instead, she settled on raising her eyebrows and waiting for him to go first.

  After a quick conversation with the woman behind the counter, she disappeared in back to fetch his order.

  Nicky whispered, feeling intimidated in the house of books for no reason that she could pinpoint.

  “What do you need another prep book for? That test is bullshit.”

  “I’m going to take the SAT too, while I still remember everything.”

  “That’s easy.”

  “Maybe for you. I missed a lot of school. I failed the GED the first time I tried the practice test.”

  Nicky thought of a number of things to say, but she kept them to herself. Eric had been a solid student before he left. It seemed impossible that he would have a hard time with those tests. The woman returned with a thick book and Eric began to dig in his pocket. He paid with wrinkled bills that he carefully counted out. The woman put the book in a bag and handed it over.

  This time, Nicky beat him to the door. She pushed it open, went through, and let it close on him when he tried to follow.