If You Go Down to the Woods

by Seth C. Adams

  I didn’t want to see. But I couldn’t turn away.

  The big man extended Jim’s index finger. Yanked it backwards with one quick tug. There was a quick and brittle sound like a dry stick snapping.

  Jim’s scream climbed the sky in octaves I would have thought impossible outside an opera house.

  Brock let go, and Jim fell to his knees, crying, holding his damaged left hand in his right. Cradling it to his chest like a baby at the teat, he cried, and I realized I was crying as well, and my finger hadn’t even been the one pulled back.

  “I want my money,” Mr. Perrelli said. His tone was quiet and soft and in a way serene, yet it carried over Jim’s cries of agony effortlessly. I looked up at him from the dirt, then away and at my dog still lying in a heap. I thought I saw the slight rise and fall of breathing, but wasn’t sure. “I have all the time in the world. But the longer I have to wait, the more I have to use Brock to negotiate.”

  I didn’t ask for elaboration.

  He gave me a bit anyways.

  “Escalation, Joey,” he said. “Escalation is the key word here. I need my money or the negotiating gets tougher. And I expect our business to stay just that: our business. No parents, no police, no anyone but us.”

  I looked up at Mr. Perrelli again. Then I glanced side to side, up and down the highway. It was long and deserted both ways, like a road to nowhere. I wondered how far Jim’s cries had carried. Wondered if anyone cared even if they’d heard them.

  “Do we understand each other?” Vincent Perrelli asked, removing his sunglasses, fixing his gaze on me. His eyes sparkled like dark jewels.

  I nodded.

  He nodded also, turned, and climbed back into the Cadillac. Brock walked around the car and got in on the driver’s side. They drove away, leaving us in a plume of dust. When the dust cleared there was only pain: the cries of my friend cradling his broken finger; my dog coming to with a whimper; me with my throbbing head in my hands, the world seemingly trembling with each thrum and pulse of my skull. As if it were on the verge of falling apart around us.

  2.

  We walked the rest of the way to the Connolly yard, Jim crying the whole time. I had my arm around his shoulders and wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to be doing so with another guy. Bandit strode on wobbly legs beside us, like he’d just drunk an entire bowl of Purina Dog Beer.

  Trying not to look at the horror of my friend’s backwards pointing finger, I gave weak words of encouragement and consolation, like “It’s not that bad” and “I’ve seen worse”, which were both lies.

  What should have been a walk of a few minutes turned out to take us, the sorry battered lot that we were, fifteen minutes or so, pausing now and again as Jim stumbled, cradling his finger, or Bandit stumbled, knotted head giving him faulty dog radar. Only when we were at the turnoff to Jim’s home did another car finally pass, and seeing us stagger about drunkenly with our injuries, the driver slowed, rolled down his window, and asked if there was anything wrong. Why he couldn’t have driven by twenty minutes earlier when two mobsters had been busy beating us, I didn’t know. But it pissed me off and I flipped off the driver, a bald man in his fifties, and his eyes widened in shock. He cussed at me and drove on.

  Mr. Connolly saw us coming up the road to the gate of the yard. He was leaning on the bumper of a car he’d been working on, still in a T-shirt and jeans like I’d always seen him, so that I wondered if that was all he owned. If maybe his whole closet was wall-to-wall grimy oil-stained white shirts and dirty, faded jeans. He saw me supporting his son, his son cradling his injured hand, and Mr. Connolly came running down the path, throwing the gate open. Ushering us in quickly, he led us to the garage.

  “What happened?” he asked with a tone like a hammer blow.

  Jim was still crying, his finger poking up like a crooked periscope, and though his face was stern and smooth, Mr. Connolly’s eyes shone with an urgency. My friend unable to speak, it was left to me to think of a quick lie.

  Vincent Perrelli had said no parents or police were to be involved.

  He had spoken of escalation, and I knew he meant it.

  So I said what first came to mind, and the simplicity and stupidity of it is what I think made Jim’s father believe me.

  “He fell,” I said, and then thinking perhaps a little elaboration was needed: “We were running, horsing around, and he fell.”

  “I have to get him to the hospital,” Mr. Connolly said.

  Grabbing a set of keys from a pegboard on the wall, he herded his son out of the garage and into a jeep. The vehicle started smoothly and rolled out of the still open gate, leaving me alone in the car yard. Standing there with my woozy dog, I realized I’d have to make the short walk home back down the highway—alone.

  * * *

  I made it home without any black cars full of mobsters pulling over to whack me. As I strode up the driveway I saw the garage door was rolled up. Inside, Dad was home for lunch and throwing some punches with Fat Bobby, who, I realized from a distance, wasn’t as fat as he’d always been. I took this in with something like mild amazement, seeing that the rolls of fat were still there, but maybe not as many. Whereas previously he’d been monstrously fat, now he only seemed fat. Like there was freak show fat lady fat, and then baby fat, and Fat Bobby seemed to be leaning more towards the baby fat kind of fat, which was still fat, but not obscenely so.

  It was all very complicated, these gradations of fatness.

  I walked past and Dad saw me and waved, and Bobby turned and waved. I gave them one back and continued up the porch and went inside. Mom was there and noticed the redness where Brock had backhanded me across the face. She looked worried and asked what had happened, and I told her Jim and I had been wrestling. Her worry went from the type I’d seen after the episode at the Haunted House, or when Dad had tussled with Mr. Templeton—the urgent, wringing-her-hands worry—to the motherly scorn of someone who had to deal with the trouble of boys on a daily basis. She took in the dirt smears on my clothes and shook her head and told me to go wash up. I gladly went upstairs, away from those probing eyes.

  I made a beeline for Sarah’s room.

  Taking a cue from her, I went inside without knocking, found her sitting in front of her nightstand mirror, an array of pink and red goop in front of her. Applying some of it to her lips and face, she was making all sorts of weird expressions in the mirror. When the door opened, her hand jerked in surprise and the stick of red lipstick she’d been applying made a smear on her cheek, so that she looked like a brave putting on war paint. Or a clown putting on his funny paint.

  I went with the clown and told her so.

  She threw a makeup compact at me and it hit me on the chest.

  “Get out of my room,” she said, her face blushed red so now she looked more like an Indian, but a retarded one that couldn’t put on their war paint correctly. Maybe her warrior name was Dumb Deer Clown Face.

  I told her this, and she got up and came at me like she intended to hit me, which she did, hard, but instead of retreating I stayed in her room and closed the door. Though it was obvious I wasn’t going anywhere, she hit me a few more times.

  “Would you stop hitting me?” I said, bringing up my arms to fend her off.

  “Get out of my room then!”

  She moved past me to the door, as if ready to open it and throw me out if I didn’t leave of my own accord.

  I moved between her and the door.

  “Mr. Perrelli got to me and Jim while we were walking down the highway,” I said, blurting everything out in one big stream of words. “He broke Jim’s finger, and told me not to tell Mom or Dad or the police. He said he still wants his money and he’d be back for it. That we better have it ready or—”

  I didn’t finish because Mr. Perrelli hadn’t really detailed what would happen if we didn’t have the money. But he had left the distinct impression that it wouldn’t be pleasant. I walked over to my sister’s bed and sat heavily on it. Burying my face in my hands,
I started crying.

  Sarah, wiping the streak of lipstick off her face, came over and sat beside me. She put a hand on my back and patted me there, and I again remembered that night after the Haunted House. When, later that night, having learned what had happened to me and my friends, Sarah had come to my room and hugged me.

  No, she really wasn’t that bad of a sister at all.

  “What’ll we do?” I said when my sobs died down enough for me to speak semi-coherently.

  Like an epiphany, I realized I was asking the wrong question, and with that realization came the answer. It wasn’t what “we” were going to do. This whole thing had started because of me seeing some light in the woods and wanting to know what it was. It was me that had brought everyone else into the whole mess. First my friends, and now, if I was unable to get Vincent Perrelli what he wanted, and since I didn’t have his money I couldn’t think of any way that I could, his threat of escalation might include my family also.

  The responsibility was mine, and mine alone.

  Knowing what I had to do, unable to tell my sister, I sat with her for a few minutes longer, then got up and walked out. Knowing what I had to do and knowing it might be the last thing I ever did was emotionally taxing, and I suddenly wanted to be alone with my burden.

  3.

  Hindsight being what it is, I can see that deciding to meet with Mr. Perrelli alone was the dumbest decision I’d ever made.

  If you took all the dumb asses on the planet—the kind of people who struck matches near aerosol sprays; set electronics on the edges of their bathtubs while bathing; stuck their hands in kitchen appliances to try to fix them while the machines were still plugged in—increased their stupidity by making them all mental retards, and gave them all lobotomies to top it off, you still wouldn’t have reached the level of God-awful stupidity that I was possessed of when I made this decision.

  Of course I didn’t see it as foolish then. I thought I’d come to some sort of revelation. I would find Mr. Perrelli and confront him with the truth, alone, and by me being alone and having the courage to tell him face to face that the money was gone, he’d have no other option but to believe me.

  Now, he might hurt me, hell, he might kill me. But I thought that even if he did hurt me or kill me, he would still see the truth of it, that his money was gone, and having taken his frustrations out on me, he’d leave everyone else alone. Didn’t even gangsters have a code of honor? In the movies they did. And so, in a strange way, my death would be a heroic one.

  Well, I never did claim to be the smartest kid around.

  It was the day following the brutal assault on Jim that I walked into town by myself. I left Bandit at home, fluffing a pillow on my bed for him so that he could settle down and rest his battered skull.

  The walk down the highway and into town was a long and nerve-wracking one. I expected to see the black Cadillac at any moment, swerving in a rubber-squealing arc to cut me off on the shoulder of the road. Brock would step out and grab me and throw me in the backseat and lock the doors. Then would come the finger breaking, this time not Jim’s but mine. When all my little fingers were snapped back like those jointed straws they give kids at restaurants, I’d be driven out into the desert, like mobsters did on TV, and thrown out into a ditch. As I tried to crawl out of the ditch with my crippled hands, a hammer or a shovel or a baseball bat would come slamming down on the back of my head, and that would be it for me.

  Broken, lifeless, left in a ditch.

  With my luck, my body would probably be found in an embarrassing position. Maybe with my pants down around my ankles. Or I’d loosened my bowels upon dying. Or birds would shit all over me.

  But I made it into town okay. Strolling past housing tracts and into the business district, I passed the bookstore and saw my dad’s car there. I walked slowly by the storefront, looked through the glass, tried to spy Dad or Tara and, seeing neither, continued on my way.

  People were milling about on the sidewalks, window shopping at the various mom and pop stores that lined the streets, or sitting on the outdoor patios of the diners and restaurants interspersed among them. I watched these people, trying to find a pair of particular faces, and I looked at the cars parked along the streets and in the small parking lots, keeping an eye out for the distinctive black Cadillac.

  I knew they were out there somewhere, watching me. How else had they found me the first time at the courthouse and then, at lunch with my friends and, finally, walking down the highway with Jim? Yes, they were out there, watching, and I hoped if I lingered long enough they’d approach me. Then whatever happened after that would happen.

  I found myself walking the Town Square park, strolling the low grassy hills where a few days earlier the fireworks had exploded above in kaleidoscopic patterns. The smell of sulfur and smoke still lingered in the air, and I had the sense of walking the outskirts of hell itself.

  Crossing the courthouse lawn, I cut a path to the sycamore near the broad concrete porch steps, where Mr. Perrelli and Brock had stepped out of the shadows that first night. I figured this was as good a message as any, if they saw me. I was saying, as clearly as I could think of: Hey, here I am, I want to talk, come over here.

  Even at that age, the irony wasn’t lost on me.

  Here I was at the steps of a courthouse, waiting for mobsters.

  And they came, the silver-haired one and the blockheaded one, both in their black suits on that hot and arid summer day, walking across the park in my direction. Watching them approach, I thought briefly about calling my plan off, about running home and telling my parents everything, all of it, the truth about the money and the body in the trunk of the Buick. About the Collector and what he wanted, and the arrival of Mr. Perrelli and Brock, and how they wanted the same thing. But then I thought again of what Mr. Perrelli had promised—escalation—and what that could mean for the people close to me, those I cared about. My family, my dog, my friends; all of them. So I remained where I was and watched the two men approach. They stopped in front of me and I felt trapped, which I guess I was.

  “You look like a kid with a lot on his mind,” Mr. Perrelli said.

  His hands were in his pinstriped jacket pockets like he was out for a casual stroll, not a murderer and monster walking the world in the guise of a man.

  “I want to talk about the money,” I said, my voice calmer than I felt inside. Inside I felt sick and fragile and tremulous, like I might fall apart at any moment.

  “That’s a wise decision,” Mr. Perrelli said. He smiled what he probably thought was a friendly smile. “But not here. Take a ride with us.”

  He made a nodding motion with his head, the intention clear: Follow.

  I didn’t move.

  Now that it was happening, my idea didn’t seem so inspired and heroic anymore. I imagined being in a car alone with these two, maybe in the backseat with Brock or Perrelli, as one drove and the other guarded me. Or maybe in the front seat with both of them, trapped in between them and nowhere to go.

  “As long as you tell us what we want to hear,” Mr. Perrelli said, coming forward and putting a hand on my shoulder like a reassuring friend, “you have nothing to worry about.”

  With that arm he drew me towards them, and I had no choice but to follow or run. I didn’t run, and we crossed through the precision-mowed, Irish-green grass, under the high and bright sun like a fiery eye. At the curb there it was, the black Cadillac, only it didn’t seem like a Cadillac to me anymore, but a hearse, and there was going to be a funeral procession and I had the leaden feeling that it just might be in my honor.

  * * *

  We drove for several minutes, ending up in a nondescript rural neighborhood of spaced out manufactured houses dotting the land so that nature and construction appeared at a peaceable truce. The houses, about a half dozen, were hues of warm tans and whites, and the acreage of each plot leant the area an air of both seclusion and neighborliness. Here one could wave to a neighbor in the distance, and yet go about one
’s business in relative privacy.

  The road curved in a wide cul-de-sac and Brock steered the Cadillac into the driveway of the house at the heel of the U. Beyond, the buzz of traffic along the highway we’d just departed could be heard, a background noise that lulled in this pocket neighborhood slightly removed from the rest of civilization. Mr. Perrelli got out and held the door open for me like a doorman. I got out, wondering how many doormen in the world had killed people and did time in prison. Scary thing to think of next time you’re walking into a fancy hotel or restaurant and that bellhop is holding the door open for you.

  My advice: tip big.

  We walked up to the front door of the house together, me between the two men like the President escorted by Secret Service. I don’t think any president had to worry about finger-breaking Secret Service agents, though. Brock fished out a key and unlocked the door, and we stepped into the house together.

  First thing I noticed was the dried rust-brown stains dotting the carpet and wall of the foyer. To the left of me more dots of that brown stain, and a couple smears leading to a door I guessed led to the garage. I wondered who had lived here before Mr. Perrelli and Brock had arrived in town, and where those people were now.

  A faint astringent, unpleasant odor came from beyond that door to the garage, and I thought maybe I had an answer to where the owners of the house had gone off to. People stuffed in boxes or in the walls and dry-walled over came to mind, and I told my mind to shut up. I didn’t want to think about it, turned away from the garage door, and followed Mr. Perrelli across the living room.

  There was a lamp knocked over, little pieces of the bulb that had shattered shining in the shag of the carpet like diamonds. More smears of that ugly brown color on the dividing wall of the living and dining rooms could have merely been the careless prints of finger-painting children, I told myself. A couple pictures hanging askew gave away the lie. The pictures showed an elderly couple, gray-haired and wrinkled but lively and smiling like their company returned to each other the life that time sought to steal away.