“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.
I was reminded of the calm and stillness I most enjoyed reading in. When my parents and sister were elsewhere and I was out on the porch, or in my room, with a comic or a paperback spread in my hands, and there seemed a hush over the whole of the earth. A stillness just for me, as if the universe were holding its breath just so I could enjoy my book.
So that when the soft running of the stream began like a whisper, and then a little louder as the road curved towards it, I was almost disappointed at the end of the silence. The appearance of the stream meant we were heading in the direction of where I’d initially met Bobby, and it was past that spot where I would have continued in my beeline for the mystery object, be it UFO or fallen star, if I hadn’t been interrupted.
I pointed this out, and we crossed the stream. The tinkling of the water seemed an invitation for us to join it and speak freely.
“So, you going to hit the fair?” Fat Bobby asked Jim as we splashed across.
“You bet,” Jim said.
“Why don’t you go with us?” I said.
“Sure thing,” he answered with a curt nod of his head, as if he’d been waiting for the offer.
On the other side the world awoke as if we’d crossed some threshold, some barrier between dimensions. The twitter of birds, two at least, calling and answering each other, was like the last song on earth, eerie and almost unnatural, following so soon after the preceding quietude. We stopped our talk in unison to listen to it, unconsciously rolling our steps to reduce the noise of our passing. Farther out in the woodlands other critters chittered and yapped, joining in on the chorus.
Soon the stream gurgled more distantly behind us, fading, and then was gone. A break in the trees to the west revealed one of the rocky outcroppings I’d seen that first day on the hill, trying to locate a landmark against which to find the fallen star. The outcropping rose like an ancient monument, and its stones like natural steps led to the top. I imagined natives with torches walking to the peak, and up there an altar and a bound virgin, willing sacrifice to the sun god.
I told Jim and Bobby how I’d seen just such a craggy hill near the light source.
“Maybe we’ll see something from up there,” Jim said, and so we broke the path of our straight line, heading on over to the foot of the monument hill.
The climb was easy and took only a few minutes, as if the stones and rocks scaling the hill had indeed been put there as steps to aid just such as us. Flat stones sat upon a grassy area at the top, with one large stone standing upright that if you looked at from the right angle looked like one of those Easter Island heads. Unfinished maybe, as if the sculptor had decided halfway through that there were better things he could do with his time. We sat with our backs against it and sipped our water, looking out over the top of the woods, daylight pouring down on us hot and bright.
“It sure is high up here,” Fat Bobby said.
“Yeah,” Jim replied, “kind of cool.”
“Like we’re on a tower, looking down on our kingdom,” I said.
“You use words like a writer,” Jim said, and his tone made this something like a compliment. “You ever think about being one someday?”
“I don’t know,” I said, when in fact that was all I ever thought about my future being. Whether it was books or comics, or something else I hadn’t thought of yet, it was stories that I wanted to tell. “What about you?”
“What about me?” Jim said, playing with the cap on his water bottle.
“What do you want to do, you know, when you grow up?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his brown skin beading with sweat under the high sun. “My dad wants me to do some kind of police work. Says I’ve got the brains for it. That I can see things and figure out how they work or how something happened.”
“What does your mom think?” I asked, earnestly, but also with a kid’s curiosity as I had yet to meet his mom. A mental CAUTION! detector blinked in my mind’s eye, recalling Bobby’s tragic answer to a similar question not so l
ong ago. Sometimes things were better left not knowing about, and I hoped this wasn’t one of those times.
“I don’t see her that much,” Jim said. His tone was matter-of-fact, so devoid of either anger or sadness that I knew he had to feel one or the other. Perhaps both. “She met my dad young. She was still in college when she got pregnant. Had real big plans to become a lawyer. So Dad offered to take sole custody after I was born, so she could stay in school.”
I pondered this, turning it over. It seemed to me that Jim’s ability to control his emotions was just the kind of temperament an officer of the law would need, and so I said as much.
“I bet you’d make a good cop.”
Jim smiled, nodded slightly in an unspoken gratitude, our blooming manhood inhibiting anything further. I then turned to Fat Bobby.
“What about you, Bobby?” He looked over at me all surprised-like, his mouth open just a bit, as if he’d never expected to hear someone ask him this question. “What do you want to do?”
He shifted uncomfortably for a second or two, then grew still and looked out over the woods like he was trying to find something. He looked about to speak a couple times, his mouth working like words wanted to come out, and then he’d close his lips and grind his teeth. Jim and I looked at each other, and he offered me a shrug. When Fat Bobby finally answered, it was brief and to the point and spoken matter-of-factly as if it hadn’t taken him such a time to say it.
“I want to be gone from here,” he said, and I think we all knew that here meant his home, his dad, and the things like that shiner dark around his eye. I remember praying something at that moment, not like a formal prayer or anything, but just silently offering up some words to God and hoping He wasn’t too busy to hear them when they drifted His way.
Please God, let him find his way out of here, let him find what he’s looking for.
And, in the end, when all’s said and done, isn’t that pretty much what every prayer is about?
* * *
Some minutes later Jim bolted up and pointed and said: “Look!”, and I stood up and Fat Bobby did too. Following the line of his finger, we saw out to the west not more than half a mile away among a thick copse of trees, a flash of something, maybe glass, maybe metal. We started down from the rocky hill, our lookout tower, and found our way back to the access road. I wanted to cut directly through the forest in the direction of the light, but Jim suggested we follow the road a little more, and so we did. Not a hundred yards away we found that the road branched, and in one direction it continued east and in the other it looped back, heading northwest.
There was an old faded rectangular sign fallen on the ground covered by rust and weeds. I bent and tore away the weeds, but the rust I could do nothing about, and the sign remained mysterious and unreadable. For all we knew it read “DEATH AHEAD FOR STUPID BOYS,” but it didn’t matter. We took the northwest branch, which looped us back in the general direction of the light.
This branch of the road was weed strewn and deeply pitted and rutted, as if it had been in a state of disuse and in need of repair decades ago. Never tended to when it was still in use, now abandoned it seemed an artefact, a remnant of some ancient settlement recently excavated. Maybe awaiting a second death, when in the course of eons the earth would swallow it again under the dust of ages.
Bandit found his way easily enough and bounded along ahead of us, muzzle to the ground, sniffing and snorting as he followed trails that we could never see. We didn’t bound speedily and confidently about like him. We picked our way carefully along the half-hidden road, planning and measuring each step, lest a foot slip into a hole or rut and one of us snapped an ankle like a twig.
I don’t know exactly where I expected to find the proposed abandoned car, if a car it actually was, but smack dab in the middle of the road like it was waiting for us wasn’t among the possibilities I imagined. I thought of finding a cave and the car somehow in the cave (how we saw reflected light from within a cave, this scenario my imagination didn’t answer; it just seemed cool, a car in a cave!). Or the car rolled down a ditch and blackened by the flames of its explosion in the distant past. Or maybe up in a tree as the forest had grown around it, lifting it up in its branches so that it ended up like a tree house of sorts.
But right there in the middle of the road … no, that’s not what I expected at all.
Yet that’s what we found, an old Buick family affair, color long flaked away so that it was gray with the metal beneath, gray and drab, like the husk of a giant metal beetle. The forest had indeed begun to grow around it, and roots and weeds were tangled about what remained of the tires and crawled up along the grill and bumpers. The headlights were busted, shards of plastic and glass like tiny daggers littering the forest floor. We walked around the thing reverently, in silence, and tried to peer in the windows, but they were covered by years of bird shit and dirt caught in the wind and slapped onto the glass like a second skin.
Jim tried one door, Bobby another, and I a third, and all three were locked or rusted shut. Jim tried the fourth door, only to find it likewise immovable. Bandit circled the car, sniffing, poking his head underneath it, searching, his tail pumping like a crank. Eventually, we settled on the front bumper and drank from our bottled water, only Bandit still running about the car, trying to get at what was in it.
“Well,” Jim said after awhile, “we found it.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring out at the woods, not knowing what I was feeling, whether it was disappointment or just not having all the answers at once.
“I wonder what’s in it?” Fat Bobby said, and that was what we were all thinking about. Those locked doors were like a challenge. They were defying us with their stubbornness not to open and reveal to us what was inside. “Why don’t we just bust the windows?” Bobby said, and he bent over to pick up a fist-sized rock from the ground.
We looked at each other and then with a shake of our heads dismissed that idea. It would be like vandalizing a museum or a church: it just wasn’t right. We wanted to get into the car, but we wanted to do it the right way. In a way that respected the car, and how it had sat here for years waiting for just this moment, waiting for us.
“We’ll get it open,” Jim said, and he said it like it was so, like there was no alternative, no other possibility. “Don’t forget, my dad owns a car yard.”
I thought to myself, Yeah, that’s right. If anyone can find a way to open the thing, it’s this guy right next me. My momentary funk dissipated, and I was able to just sit there like I was at a park bench, enjoying the setting.
“We’ll come back,” Jim repeated, as if settling the matter. “We’ll open it.”
So it was settled, and so I knew it would be.
But the fair was tomorrow, and we made our plans for that as we made our slow way back towards the highway. And in the wake of the events of the day that followed the car was for a time, if not forgotten, then relegated to some back row of our young brains, in the shadows, biding its time.
CHAPTER FOUR
1.
The day of the fair arrived and, to my distress, the whole family was going. I should have expected such a possibility, but thoughts of the high Ferris wheel and rollercoasters and haunted houses and finding Tara somewhere there, radiant in the lights of the place, pushed out all other considerations. I hadn’t even entertained the notion that my parents and sister would want to go also. So when Dad made his announcement and started herding us to the door, I moved with exaggerated sloth-like shuffling strides impossible to ignore.
“What’s wrong?” he asked when we were all in the foyer, each jockeying for one last look in the standing mirror.
“I wanted to go with my friends,” I said, unable to keep a certain tone from my voice that I knew wouldn’t go over well with my dad.
“Well, you’re going with us.”
This last brooked no argument, stated with a not so subtle, unspoken warning that I would go with them or not at all. In protest, I made sure my f
eet plodded through the door and onto the porch with a little extra emphasis.
Bustled into the car, dressed warmly for the night in coats and sweaters, we rolled away onto the highway. I scowled in the backseat, staring daggers at my family. Sarah didn’t seem perturbed by this at all, and with some new guy she’d met I thought she would have put up a bigger fight than I had with Dad. But she seemed smug and happy as can be, and I thought I knew why. She was probably meeting the guy at the fair, and was thinking that she’d slink away from the rest of us when we were actually there, batting her lashes and mooning over Dad to win him over.
Figuring I could probably do the same thing, except for the batting the lashes part, I tried to keep my spirits up. Truth be told, it wasn’t all that hard to do. As the highway made its final slow descent into town, the great lights of the fairground rose outlined against the early evening sky. With its rollercoaster loops and arches stretching high, it seemed like an alien city, some strange metropolis landed upon our world.
The noise of the fair drifted to us before we even arrived. Traffic slowed to a crawl as we approached, and the laughter and screams of those lifted above carried on the night wind, through the streets, and into the windows of the cars turning into the parking lot.
The long snake-train of vehicles moved forward inch by anxious inch, until we pulled up alongside a booth, and an attendant leaned out of a window. Dad took some bills out of his wallet and handed them over to the attendant, saying: “Two adults and two children.” The attendant disappeared and then popped back into view like a jack-in-the-box, handing over four tickets to my dad and then waving us through.
We found a parking space far enough away so that when we climbed out I could look up and there were the humps of the rollercoaster, like the arched spine of a fierce dragon. Over there a ways the Ferris wheel stood like a portal and the lights of the cabs all around it twinkled in a vast “O”. The screams of the people high upon it wafted down, shrieks of joyful fear like a primal, cultic chanting. I wanted to be up there with them, and it was all I could do to refrain from tugging at my parents’ sleeves like the child I was but no longer wanted to be.
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 7