If You Go Down to the Woods

by Seth C. Adams

  Despite the smile that had temporarily returned to his face under the lights of the fireworks, Fat Bobby didn’t accompany me. Healing is a slow thing, I guess, and we all do it in our own time.

  With only Bandit at my side, I walked amidst the stirring yet still sizable crowd. It wasn’t unlike moving through the woods, stepping around and ducking, dodging people instead of trees.

  I came to the steps of the courthouse, and a large sycamore to the side of them stretched high and the branches of it reached wide and far. I thought again of the town as a throwback in time and imagined the outlaws on their steeds and the sheriff’s posse in pursuit on desert landscapes, dirt clouds kicked up high by plodding hooves.

  Climbing the courthouse steps I looked back over the crowd from my better vantage point. None of those I saw were those I was looking for and I started down the stairs again, slightly disappointed. This night of flowered lights and blooming universes was something that should have been shared with Jim and Tara, and that neither of them could be found, even after the show, was disheartening. I aimed myself in the general direction of my family and started back.

  “That was quite a display,” a voice called from behind me. I stopped and turned in the direction of the speaker.

  Two figures left the shadows under the sycamore and stepped into the light cast by the bulbs of the courthouse. In gray suits and ties, with shoes polished to such a shine that I thought if I bent over and peered at the leather surfaces I’d see myself staring back, the pair looked like distinguished businessmen.

  Bandit growled beside me, and I pulled him close by the collar.

  The speaker was the shorter of the two, an older man somewhere in his fifties, with silver-gray hair streaked back tight against his skull. Lines like borders and rivers on roadmaps spread across his face. Despite these signs of age, his black eyes were alert and aware and intelligent.

  His companion was large and blockish, and a buzz cut like a marine made his head even more sharp-edged and angular. I remember thinking that block of a head could be used maybe as a carpentering tool to measure right angles if the need ever arose. The blockish man’s nose was crooked, pointing off to the right like it didn’t care for the smells of the world and turned away in disgust.

  I knew without having to ask that these men weren’t locals, and the events of the past month had given me a good radar upgrade when it came to reading trouble. Wondering if I gave off some sort of pheromone that attracted trouble, I made a silent promise to start showering better.

  “Yeah,” I said, stepping backwards and continuing back towards the crowd and my family somewhere among them. “It was cool.”

  I turned and kept walking, and they fell in to either side of me, the older man on my left, Mr. Blockhead to my right. I felt like the innards of a sandwich, and the big guy especially looked hungry.

  Bandit beside me looked to either side, that low growl still rumbling in his throat, and I shushed him sternly. I was thinking of the punches he’d taken from Bobby’s dad, and for some reason I thought these two men would do more than punch my dog, and that made me sick inside.

  “I bet people from all over come to this small town,” the man with the silver hair and black eyes said. He leaned a bit towards me like we were buddies palavering. “Just to see the country, take in all this open space. Breathe the air.”

  He stretched out his arms as if to embrace it all. Closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Sure,” I said. We reached the outskirts of the remaining crowd still milling about. Though the fireworks were over, people idly talked and shook hands with friends, and little bouts of laughter danced about the park. “I guess so.”

  “I bet people even come here for business,” the older man said. His voice was slightly accented, and that along with his suit and fine hair made me think of maître d’s at fine Italian restaurants. “In fact, now that I mention it, I think this is just the sort of place I’d come to if I had business matters to attend to or associates to meet.”

  I felt one hand touch me at the small of the back in a familiar way like we were friends, and I looked up at him and he looked down at me and smiled. His teeth were straight and white and reminded me of tombstones.

  “An out of the way place like this might be just the sort of place big city folk might come for business affairs that require a bit of—how should I say this—discretion,” he said and tapped his chin with a finger like he was thinking carefully. “Wouldn’t you say so, Brock? That this is just the sort of place for a quiet, professional retreat?”

  I turned to look at Mr. Blockhead (Brock) but he didn’t look at me. He was looking straight ahead, and as he walked people parted for him like the waters of the Red Sea for Moses.

  “Yes, Mr. Perrelli,” he said with a voice like a buzz saw. “A fine place for business affairs.”

  I could see my family now, through the moving bodies of the crowd. I thought about running, and the two men seemed to sense my intention and moved in closer, squeezing me more tightly between them. Bandit had to dart out from between the closing vise of the men and, trotting a few steps before us, he turned and showed his teeth.

  “Now this isn’t the place for a scene,” the older man, Mr. Perrelli, said. “Not on a nice evening like this, the Fourth of July, celebrating the independence of our great nation. Is it, Joey?”

  He knew my name and my heart skipped a beat when he said it. My name out of his mouth was like a poison and I wondered if I was infected. He knew me, and I was sure that wasn’t something I wanted.

  “No, sir,” I said, giving up on running, seeing we were still moving towards my family anyway. Realizing that neither he nor the behemoth on the other side of me would do anything rash with so many witnesses about. At least I hoped not.

  “Good boy,” Mr. Perrelli said and he clapped me on the back and gave my shoulder a little squeeze. “I’m in town for awhile on business, Joey. And I think you know what that business entails.”

  With that his arm left my shoulders and the two men fell behind me and it was just me and Bandit now, walking towards my family. I didn’t look back until I was there, standing close to my dad, and him looking down and smiling at me.

  I tried to smile back.

  When I finally turned and looked behind me the two men were gone. In their suits, so out of place on a summer evening, they should have been easy to pick out of the crowd. I scanned the throng but didn’t see them.

  I’d see them soon enough, though. That I knew.

  They had business to attend to and that business was me.

  3.

  Even the incident with Mr. Perrelli and his man Brock couldn’t fully dispel the magic of the Fourth of July fireworks display. Those lights in the sky and the people gathered below watching them reminded me of the way things had been. The simple joy that could be had with others. Life in its fundamentals.

  The day following, I called Jim and I learned that he and Tara had indeed been there, he with his dad and she with her parents. We simply hadn’t come across each other in the multitudes present.

  But we’d all seen it, and in our minds maybe we’d been together. Transmitting the wonder of it, the majesty of the lights and the power of the spectacle, to each other.

  After talking to Jim, I called Tara, and hearing her on the other end was like hearing an old song on the radio. A favorite you hadn’t heard for awhile and your heart kind of fluttered at hearing it again.

  We agreed to meet at the sandwich place in town where we’d eaten last time. Having recently passed her driver’s exam, Sarah borrowed Mom’s car and drove us all into town, Bandit in the backseat with Fat Bobby.

  After the incident on Lookout Mountain, Sarah and Barry hadn’t seen much of each other. Through overheard secondhand snippets of conversation between my parents and sister, I got the gist of the situation. Barry’s parents didn’t want him around my sister anymore and Barry, though going on eighteen, didn’t offer up any sort of resistance. It seemed hi
s parents were paying his tuition after his senior year of high school for some expensive East Coast university, and he really wanted out of the dead end of Arizona.

  So he did what his parents wanted him to, which included politely, but succinctly, dropping my sister like a bad habit.

  This ended up with Sarah locking herself in her room for three days straight, the wracking of her sobs shaking the wall between our rooms. The sound of it was like the moans from torture chambers in hell. She came out only to eat and use the bathroom, and though several remarks came to mind on the spare moments during those days when I passed her, red-faced and bleary-eyed, her hair in tangles, I for some reason checked myself and kept my mouth shut.

  All of this, along with what she’d gone through with the rest of us atop the hill, led to a strange outcome the likes of which I’d never imagined: I didn’t mind my sister’s company, almost preferred it.

  Sarah pulled over at the curb in front of the restaurant’s patio.

  The look Jim gave me when we approached the patio table he and Tara had already claimed, said he wasn’t too thrilled with this turn of events.

  I gave him a not so subtle middle finger scratching my chin and he smiled. Tara rose to give Fat Bobby a hug, and I think I heard her whisper an “I’m sorry.” I didn’t need to ask what she was sorry about. Though she hadn’t shot Mr. Templeton, it was the chaos of the gunfire that had sent he and the Collector tumbling down. No doubt, she would feel at least indirectly responsible for Bobby’s dad’s passing. Bobby, to his credit, didn’t show any animosity, and he hugged her back.

  Then we all sat down, no one else made an issue of Sarah’s inclusion, and we ordered and ate.

  Tara was to my right and her presence sent periodic tingles through me like an electric charge. There was a feeling like sparks jumping between us, and I remembered my old thoughts in the first days following the events on the mountain. How I thought things would never be the same and how we deserved it.

  But there she was, and here I was, and I still felt things, and even if I didn’t deserve it I wanted it. I wanted her, and not merely in the pop a boner way either. I wanted what she represented: happiness and friendship and good things.

  The five of us talked about stuff as we ate, Bandit under the table waiting for the stray crumb or scrap. The things we talked of were incidental and unimportant, and that’s why we spoke of them. We talked about movies and music and books. We recounted the fireworks and how they lit up the sky. Jim told dirty jokes and we laughed and food sprayed out of our mouths and soda out of our noses.

  What had happened on Lookout Mountain was still there, hanging over us like a cloud, but it didn’t seem to me as oppressive. Like maybe it was breaking apart and in time the light would shine through.

  In the back of my mind lurked also Mr. Perrelli and Brock, and I wondered if I should mention them to my friends. I knew the answer to that, yet the laughter and smiles around the table made me push those darker thoughts away.

  Then as if to slap me in the face and show me the error of my ways, some more people came onto the patio, taking a table nearby, and I saw them and they saw me, and that storm cloud seemed to settle overhead again. Dillon Glover gave me a little wave as he sat, that familiar smirk spread upon his face. Stu and Max settled into chairs on either side of him, their gazes aimed our way as well.

  Jim was telling another joke and everyone else was laughing around me but it was like hearing noise through a thick wall. I saw only the three older kids looking at us across the patio.

  “What’s wrong?” Tara said from beside me, poking me on the shoulder. She followed my gaze and then said: “Oh shit.”

  Jim heard this, and Fat Bobby too, and they turned and looked at the table behind them. Dillon smiled at us like he was privy to a joke the punch line of which he wasn’t sharing. Only it wasn’t a funny, ha-ha joke, but a mean one. Sarah realized no one else was laughing anymore, and her laughter trailed off as well as she turned to see what we were looking at, then turned back to me.

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  I told her.

  “Those are the guys from the fair? He’s the one that pulled the knife on you?”

  She motioned at Dillon with a slight nod, and I nodded too.

  She looked to Dillon again, seemed to measure him. I knew what she was seeing. His face, his sneer, the eyes that screamed Hey, I like pulling knives on people. He had that face of casual, suppressed violence, the kind of face you passed in a crowd and felt a chill down your spine like you’d just come too close to something soiled. Something not right and maybe filaments of it had reached out to touch you.

  “Maybe we should call the police,” Fat Bobby said, and I turned to look at him, saw his face pale like maybe he was going to get sick.

  I shook my head.

  “They’re not going to do anything in public,” Jim said, apparently sharing my assessment of the situation. “They’re just fucking with us.”

  “And doing a good job,” Tara said.

  Dillon gave us another wave.

  Tara flipped him off.

  Instead of exploding in anger and running over to stab us all to death with the knife he no doubt had secreted in his jacket somewhere, as I half expected him to, Dillon just leaned back in his seat and his smile broadened. Pudgy Stu and acne-scarred Max did the same, and I knew something wasn’t right. These weren’t guys who had patience or tolerance to spare. These were guys who flew by the seat of their pants, reacted, gave in to impulses rather than thinking things through.

  “I think we should go,” I said, knowing that they wouldn’t do anything in broad daylight with other strollers and diners about. But that wasn’t the fear: that they’d do something. The fear was that maybe they didn’t have to, and I wasn’t sure what made me think that until I scooted my chair back and stood.

  A hand on my shoulder like a clamp pushed me back down.

  The sound of a chair scraped along the patio concrete behind me, drawing up to our table, and Mr. Perrelli in his black-gray suit and with his hair like spun silver scooted in between me and Tara. He folded his hands on the table and looked at everyone—Jim, Bobby, Tara, and my sister—and then turned sideways slightly so that he was looking at me. He seemed like an executive at a board meeting, us all around the conference table, and I remembered his words from the night before, that he was here on business. We were about to learn what that business was.

  “What a fine day for a bite to eat,” he said, sitting head and shoulders above the rest of us. That hand was still on my shoulder, and I knew if I turned I’d see the man-mountain Brock. The head like a granite slab looking down on me. “A fine day for a friendly chat.”

  My friends and my sister looked at him and at the figure behind me, unseen by yours truly but the hand on me firm, and the confusion on their faces was clear.

  Bandit growled from beneath the table. I felt him rise under there, brushing against my legs.

  I wondered why the other patrons on the patio or those in the restaurant didn’t come out to ask us how we were doing. Didn’t they know something was wrong? Wasn’t it obvious? There was a young couple at the far end of the patio, in their twenties maybe, and they spared us not a single glance. People walked past on the sidewalk, and not one stopped to ask why this old man and his square-headed companion were bothering five kids eating lunch.

  In suits and for all appearances professional and affable, they nonetheless nearly reeked of danger and malice. It was like it lived beneath their skin, oozed from their pores, and could be smelled on the air that came along and carried it from them.

  These two men weren’t like Dillon and his two buddies. They weren’t thugs or punks. These two weren’t even like Mr. Templeton, Bobby’s late father, bored and complacent with the suppressed violence within him. They weren’t like the Collector either, who collected what was owed, yeah, but also sometimes collected for himself and was gratified by it.

  These two men were of a differ
ent breed.

  I knew their potential for violence, but it wouldn’t be violence out of vengeance or vendetta. They would hurt people—they would hurt us—because it was what they did. It was their business, their livelihood, and when Mr. Perrelli pulled the trigger and blew your face off, or brought the garrote over your throat and choked the life out of you, there would be no personal malice in it at all.

  He was just doing a job.

  “I hear you kids came across something pretty interesting some weeks back,” Mr. Perrelli said, again favoring everyone around the table with a glance. The CEO and his board members all around. “These fellas,” and he pointed at Dillon and company with a thumb, “were kind enough to fill us in on the details. When we told them what we were looking for, they were only too eager to help us find you.”

  I looked again at Dillon Glover. His smile was still there and again he waved, just a twiddling of his fingers like a patron flagging a waiter.

  “I’ve spoken to lots of people,” Mr. Perrelli said, “and I’ve read the newspaper stories about what happened out in the woods a couple weeks back. But I think maybe there were some parts left out.”

  He looked at me and his eyes twinkled with a light that spoke of profound intelligence. He favored me with a chummy grin again like we were old friends, and then he passed that grin around the table to my friends and sister.

  “It’s those parts that were left out that interest me,” he said. “There was a car mentioned in the papers. An old car. A Buick. But the paper treated it like just a small detail. Some place you kids liked to hang out.”

  All of us exchanged glances at this, and I remembered a fire on the hilltop, and millions burning to ash and carried away on the wind like dust.

  “I think there was something in the car,” Mr. Perrelli said. “Maybe a couple somethings depending on where you looked. And those somethings belonged to me.”

  He said this again not with malice or accusation or anger, but as simple fact.