by Ed Gorman
The other boy bent over him, shaking the white envelope in David's face.
The tall boy left abruptly, with no further words, with no warning of any sort. He turned and ran at a trot into the woods, and then vanished, seeming to be as much a creature of the forest as a fox.
David lay in the rain for a long time. I doubted he was badly hurt. Even the kick couldn't have done all that much damage. But he was probably embarrassed and afraid, the way I'd always been at his age when bullies had taken their turn with me. Even with nobody around to witness your beating, you still felt humiliated.
Eventually, he struggled to his feet. He was soaked. He took a few tentative steps and then fell into his regular pace. He was all right.
He reached the sidewalk and then finished the rest of the walk home.
In the next three weeks, he met the blond boy three more times. Always on Wednesdays. All three times, David handed over a white number ten business envelope and the blond boy quickly peered inside. David had obviously done what the other boy had demanded. The boy accepted the envelope, said a few words I couldn't hear of course, and then went back into the same dark woods he'd come from.
Who was he? Where did he live? What was in the envelopes David was giving him?
A week later, I got to the site where they met and hid myself in the woods, far to the right of the narrow dirt path the blond boy always used. I got there half an hour early.
He came up from the wide creek that wound through the center of the woods. He moved as usual at a trot, showing no signs of exertion at all. On a sunny spring day like this one, he wore only a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
He reached the mouth of the woods, stopped, and within a minute or so, David was there, looking nervous as usual, handing over the white envelope as if in appeasement to a dark god who might smite him dead at any moment.
As I hunched down behind the low-hanging branches of a jack pine, I saw an American Copper butterfly light on a green bush, and I felt a terrible and sudden melancholy, thinking of what had happened in the past and how my wife still woke up sobbing at night, and what surely lay before us in the days ahead. I wanted the peace and wisdom of the butterfly for my own, to know the succor of sunlight and release from my rage.
But all I could do was follow the boy back into the woods, into the shifting shadows and ripe spring scents in which squirrels and stray kittens and birds slept and romped and luxuriated.
The boy went back into his trot, indifferent to the branches slapping him on face and arms.
He came to a fork and went west, toward the wide muddy creek.
After a few more minutes, I lost him completely. I couldn't even hear him disturb the undergrowth.
I was just inching my way to the clearing on the bank above the creek when he reappeared.
He climbed without pause to the very top of the railroad truss bridge that lay across the fast-moving creek. He scurried up to the top chord, which rose twenty feet above the tracks below, and stood there gaping at the countryside.
He was king-of-the-hill up there, taking a package of cigarettes from his jeans pocket and lighting up, looking over the world below with his customary sneer.
A train came soon enough, twenty-six swaying rattling boxcars pulled by an engine car running hard and fast and invincible.
This was the nightmare shared by every parent in our neighborhood—that one of our children (even though strictly forbidden to play anywhere near the bridge) would fall into the path of the pitiless engine and be killed instantly.
The train roared through.
The entire bridge swayed.
But the boy, still enjoying his cigarette, rode the top span of the bridge as if he were aboard a bucking bronc. He stood upright, swaying with the power beneath him, becoming one with its rhythm.
And then the train was gone, taking its furious sounds with it, till all you could hear in the silence after was the incomprehensible chitter and chatter of birds.
From my hiding place, I watched the boy a few more minutes, trying to make some sense of that sullen, angry face and insolent stance. But I could make no sense of him at all.
Soon after, I left.
Next afternoon, it rained again. I parked two blocks down from school.
When I saw David I honked my horn. Today I was in my own car, and without hat, so he recognized me right away.
He came over and opened the door.
"Hi, Mr. Rhodes."
"Hi, David. Get in and I'll give you a ride home."
He looked confused for a moment. What was I doing parked along the street this way? he had to be wondering.
"Really, Mr. Rhodes, I can walk."
"C'mon, David, get in. It's going to start raining again anytime now."
He still seemed apprehensive but he reluctantly got in and closed the door.
I pulled away from the curb, out into traffic.
"So how've you been, David?"
"Oh, you know, fine, I guess."
"Your dad tells me you're getting good grades."
"Yeah, well, you know." He half smiled, embarrassed.
"Makes me think about Jeff. You know, how he'd be doing in school these days."
I looked over at David. I knew he'd get uncomfortable and start squirming. Which is just what he did.
"He'd be doing just great, Jeff would," David said. "He really would," David added, as if he needed to convince me of it.
"You ever think about him?"
"Sure. He was my best friend."
"He felt the same way about you."
David was getting uncomfortable again. Staring out the window.
His house was approaching. I sped up.
"Hey, Mr. Rhodes, we're goin' right past my house."
"Yeah, I guess we are."
"Mr. Rhodes, I'm gettin' kind of nervous, I mean, I wish you'd just let me out right here."
I stared at him a long moment and said, "David, you're going to tell me what happened to Jeff or I'm going to hurt you. Hurt you very badly. Do you understand?"
He got pale. He was just a kid.
I said, "I want to know what's in that envelope you're giving that blond kid every Wednesday, and I want to know who the blond kid is. Though I think I've got a pretty good idea."
I made it as pleasant as possible. I took him to a Pizza Hut in a nearby mall. We had a double-cheese and two large Cokes and eventually he told me all about it.
He didn't show up Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, the blond kid, but Wednesday, just as I reached my hiding place back of the clearing, I saw him climb the bridge and stand on top in that swaggering way of his.
I watched him for a few moments and then I walked into the clearing and through the buffalo grass to the bridge.
I wasn't nearly as good at it as the kid, of course. He was younger; the monkey in him hadn't yet fled.
He watched me. He watched me very carefully and very curiously.
He wasn't afraid. If he had been, he'd have walked down the other side and run into the woods.
No. He just stood there smoking his cigarette watching me as I finally reached the top chord and started across to him.
For the first time, he showed some anxiety as to who I might be. "Nice up here, ain't it?" he said.
But I didn't hear him. I heard only the approaching train. "Don't usually see guys your age up here," he said, smirking a little about my thirty-eight years.
The train, right on time according to what I'd been able to observe over the past week, rumbled toward us. You could feel its power shuddering through the iron box of bridge.
The blond kid looked behind him. At the other end of the bridge. The free end. He looked as if he wanted to turn and run now.
The big bass horn of the train set the forest animals to scurrying. And then the engine came hurtling around the bend into the straightaway across the bridge.
The kid finally figured out what I was going to do but he was too late.
I grabbed him by the hair, jerked him to me and then
held him till the train was twenty yards from crossing the bridge. We were up too high for anybody in the train to see us. He smelled of sweat and heat and dirt and cigarette smoke.
His mouth swore at me but I couldn't hear in all the noise. He fought but he was no match for me, not at all.
I shoved him downward just at the right moment.
I suppose I should have looked away but I didn't. I watched every moment of it.
How he hit the tracks on his back, legs flung across one track, head and arms across the opposite track.
He screamed but he was in pantomime. He tried to scramble to his feet but it was too late.
The train lifted him and punted him into one side of the bridge. When his body collided with the iron, he splattered. That's the only way to describe it. Splattered.
Then the train was gone, receding, receding, and there was just birdsong and sunlight and the fast muddy movement of the creek far below, and the ragged bloody remains of what had once been a human boy. The animals would come soon, and feast on it.
Just as I was getting in bed that night, my wife came in and said, "My God, Charlie, on the news."
She was ashen.
"What about the news?" I said, sliding between the covers.
"A boy. Fourteen years old. Playing on that railroad bridge. He—was killed just the way Jeff was."
She started sobbing so I held her. She was a good true woman and good true mother and good true wife. Nothing bad should have happened to her. Not ever.
I suppose that was why I never quit looking into our son's "accidental" death. Going through his things one day up in the attic, I'd come across a note he'd written to David Mallory, saying that even though David was mad at Jeff because Jeff kissed his girlfriend . . . Jeff didn't think it was fair that David would hire Lon McKenzie to beat him up.
David had finally told me all about it that afternoon at the Pizza Hut. The blond kid was one Lon McKenzie from the steeltown section of the city, a bully who not only took pride in his work but charged for it. If you wanted somebody taken care of, you hired Lon to do it and if the price was right, your enemy would receive a beating that he would remember for a long, long time.
A hit man for the junior high set.
Lon had probably followed Jeff to the bridge, where Jeff—despite our constant complaints—frequently played. Jeff loved to sit up on the top span and look out at the woods.
Afterward, McKenzie had bragged to David that he'd killed Jeff on purpose. He'd never seen anybody die before and he was curious. Then he'd started blackmailing David. Twenty-five dollars a week—or McKenzie would go to the police and implicate David in Jeff's death. David had been scared and guilty enough to go along, saving every bit of his allowance to pay McKenzie.
Now it was all done. I suppose I should have hated David but I couldn't quite. Foolish as he'd been, he hadn't wanted to see Jeff die.
My wife turned off the light and got in next to me and clung to me in the darkness the way she would cling to a life preserver.
"I just keep thinking of that boy's poor parents," she said, starting to cry again. "It must be terrible for them."
"Yeah," I said there in the darkness, seeing again the train lift Lon McKenzie's body and boot it against the bridge, "yeah, it must be awful for them."
THE REASON WHY
"I'm scared."
"This was your idea, Karen."
"You scared?"
"No."
"You bastard."
"Because I'm not scared I'm a bastard?"
"You not being scared means you don't believe me."
"Well."
"See. I knew it."
"What?"
"Just the way you said 'Well.' You bastard."
I sighed and looked out at the big redbrick building that sprawled over a quarter mile of spring grass turned silver by a fat June moon. Twenty-five years ago a 1950 Ford fastback had sat in the adjacent parking lot. Mine for two summers of grocery store work.
We were sitting in her car, a Volvo she'd cadged from her last marriage settlement, number four if you're interested, and sharing a pint of bourbon the way we used to in high school when we'd been more than friends but never quite lovers.
The occasion tonight was our twenty-fifth class reunion. But there was another occasion, too. In our senior year a boy named Michael Brandon had jumped off a steep clay cliff called Pierce Point to his death on the winding river road below. Suicide. That, anyway, had been the official version.
A month ago Karen Lane (she had gone back to her maiden name these days, the Karen Lane-Cummings-Todd-Brown-LeMay getting a tad too long) had called to see if I wanted to go to dinner and I said yes, if I could bring Donna along, but then Donna surprised me by saying she didn't care to go along, that by now we should be at a point in our relationship where we trusted each other ("God, Dwyer, I don't even look at other men, not for very long anyway, you know?"), and Karen and I had had dinner and she'd had many drinks, enough that I saw she had a problem, and then she'd told me about something that had troubled her for a long time. . . .
In senior year she'd gone to a party and gotten sick on wine and stumbled out to somebody's backyard to throw up and it was there she'd overheard the three boys talking. They were earnestly discussing what happened to Michael Brandon the previous week and they were even more earnestly discussing what would happen to them if "anybody ever really found out the truth."
"It's bothered me all these years," she'd said over dinner a month earlier. "They murdered him and they got away with it."
"Why didn't you tell the police?"
"I didn't think they'd believe me."
"Why not?"
She shrugged and put her lovely little face down, dark hair covering her features. Whenever she put her face down that way it meant that she didn't want to tell you a lie so she'd just as soon talk about something else.
"Why not, Karen?"
"Because of where we came from. The Highlands."
The Highlands is an area that used to ring the iron foundries and factories of this city. Way before pollution became a fashionable concern, you could stand on your front porch and see a peculiarly beautiful orange haze on the sky every dusk. The Highlands had bars where men lost ears, eyes, and fingers in just garden-variety fights, and streets where nobody sane ever walked after dark, not even cops unless they were in pairs. But it wasn't the physical violence you remembered so much as the emotional violence of poverty. You get tired of hearing your mother scream because there isn't enough money for food and hearing your father scream back because there's nothing he can do about it. Nothing.
Karen Lane and I had come from the Highlands, but we were smarter and, in her case, better looking than most of the people from the area, so when we went to Wilson High School—one of those nightmare conglomerates that shoves the poorest kids in a city in with the richest—we didn't do badly for ourselves. By senior year we found ourselves hanging out with the sons and daughters of bankers and doctors and city officials and lawyers and riding around in new Impala convertibles and attending an occasional party where you saw an actual maid. But wherever we went, we'd manage for at least a few minutes to get away from our dates and talk to each other. What we were doing, of course, was trying to comfort ourselves. We shared terrible and confusing feelings—pride that we were acceptable to those we saw as glamorous, shame that we felt disgrace for being from the Highlands and having fathers who worked in factories and mothers who went to Mass as often as nuns and brothers and sisters who were doomed to punching the clock and yelling at ragged kids in the cold factory dusk. (You never realize what a toll such shame takes till you see your father's waxen face there in the years-later casket.)
That was the big secret we shared, of course, Karen and I, that we were going to get out, leave the place once and for all. And her brown eyes never sparkled more Christmas-morning bright than at those moments when it all was ahead of us, money, sex, endless thrills, immortality. She had the kind of clean
good looks brought out best by a blue cardigan with a line of white button-down shirt at the top and a brown suede car coat over her slender shoulders and moderately tight jeans displaying her quietly artful ass. Nothing splashy about her. She had the sort of face that snuck up on you. You had the impression you were talking to a pretty but in no way spectacular girl, and then all of a sudden you saw how the eyes burned with sad humor and how wry the mouth got at certain times and how the freckles enhanced rather than detracted from her beauty and by then of course you were hopelessly entangled. Hopelessly.
This wasn't just my opinion, either. I mentioned four divorce settlements. True facts. Karen was one of those prizes that powerful and rich men like to collect with the understanding that it's only something you hold in trust, like a yachting cup. So, in her time, she'd been an ornament for a professional football player (her college beau), an orthodontist ("I think he used to have sexual fantasies about Barry Goldwater"), the owner of a large commuter airline ("I slept with half his pilots; it was kind of a company benefit"), and a sixty-nine-year-old millionaire who was dying of heart disease ("He used to have me sit next to his bedside and just hold his hand—the weird thing was that of all of them, I loved him, I really did—and his eyes would be closed and then every once in a while tears would start streaming down his cheeks as if he was remembering something that really filled him with remorse; he was really a sweetie, but then cancer got him before the heart disease and I never did find out what he regretted so much, I mean if it was about his son or his wife or what"), and now she was comfortably fixed for the rest of her life and if the crow's feet were a little more pronounced around eyes and mouth and if the slenderness was just a trifle too slender (she weighed, at five-three, maybe ninety pounds and kept a variety of diet books in her big sunny kitchen), she was a damn good-looking woman nonetheless, the world's absurdity catalogued and evaluated in a gaze that managed to be both weary and impish, with a laugh that was knowing without being cynical.
So now she wanted to play detective.
I had some more bourbon from the pint—it burned beautifully—and said, "If I had your money, you know what I'd do?"