The Sadness of Spirits

by Aimee Pogson

  It is almost sunset when he stops beside the creek, suddenly aware of the mistake he’s made. All day he has been following the water, stopping occasionally to pick up a new pebble and suck all the moisture out of it before swallowing it down, but now he realizes that if he can follow the water, then anyone else can, too. He thinks back to his dad holstering a gun to his hip before their forest walks, how he asked, “Is that for bears?”

  “Maybe, but there are more dangerous things in the woods.”

  “Like what?”

  “People. You never know who you’re going to find.”

  The situation becomes clear to him: not only does the creek make it easier for his mom and Uncle Rob to find him, but it also means he might run into a stranger, a dangerous stranger who has escaped into the woods. The boy hesitates on the edge of the water, weighing the likelihood of meeting someone at this time of day against the shadowy trees beyond, then he fills his pockets with three more stones and hurries as far away from the water as he can possibly get.

  His stomach is a strange configuration of hunger and pain and nausea. Shooting pains roll all the way down his abdomen, and it’s hard to say what is on the inside and what is on the outside, what is caused by hunger and what isn’t. The night presses in, cold and dark, and he finds himself yearning for dinner and for his bed, but instead he huddles beneath a tree, his shorts and shirt nowhere near thick enough to protect him from the dew.

  He feels safe for now, but only because he believes nothing will be able to see him in the darkness. He’s such a small boy, and no one has ever noticed him before.

  He distracts himself with escapes. The scenario is the following: he is walking through the woods and there, directly in front of him, is a frenzied man with a hatchet. The man isn’t obviously frenzied since he believes himself to be alone in the forest, but the boy knows his madness is hidden just below the surface. The boy will see the man before the man sees him. This is simply a fact since the boy is small and quiet and lower to the ground. The boy will then proceed to lower himself farther into the brush, again soundlessly, while also backing away. Then, when he has reached a reasonable distance, he will run as fast as he can, and the man with the hatchet will never catch him.

  If the man gets close, the boy can make a swift turn and throw him off his tracks.

  The boy can throw rocks at him.

  The boy can climb a tree.

  He shivers and the cold comes from deep within him, even though his face feels warm, hot even. He lifts one pebble out of his pocket, runs his finger across its smooth surface, and then puts it back again. His dad is out there somewhere, perhaps even in these woods, clearing a path, calling the boy’s name. Maybe the boy won’t have a cottage ready and won’t be able to offer his rescuers any fish, but he’ll still be happy to see his dad and he’ll have quite the story to tell when school starts in the fall. “I lived in the forest for many days,” he’ll tell his astounded schoolmates, “and I ate only rocks.”

  Of course, Uncle Rob will be gone by then. His mom will have seen the error of her ways.

  He draws his knees up to his chest, but even this isn’t enough to stop his shaking. He closes his eyes and listens to the night birds. Sleep doesn’t come.

  The following morning, his limbs ache so much he has trouble standing. He takes one wobbly step and then another, steadying himself against trees. His head spins and his abdomen is a crisscrossed map of shooting pains that take his breath away. Water would be perfect, but he is far, far away from the creek and has no idea how to get back. He walks a ways and then rests, walks farther and then rests again. He wishes the search and rescue team would hurry up and find him.

  The man sees him long before he sees the man. Gaunt and gray-haired with a flannel shirt, worn-out jeans, and a straw hat, the man stands in a slight clearing and asks, “What are you doing out here? This isn’t a place for kids to be alone.”

  The boy freezes. He needs to sink down, run away, throw stones, but his head is hot pain and he can think only about the raspy edge of the man’s voice, how it feels like it could cut right through him.

  “What’s wrong with you, boy?” the man asks. “Can’t you talk?”

  He wobbles on his legs, turns to go, but black spots are floating before his eyes. He’s never seen anything like them before, and as much as he blinks they won’t go away. Instead, they gather faster and faster until everything is going black and the man’s hand is on his arm, steadying him before he falls.

  There are two dogs. One, with a head like soft velvet, wakes the boy, nudging him gently with its nose and staring at him with yearning brown eyes. The other dog sits in the corner and watches the boy warily. When the boy moves too much, the dog lowers its head and growls.

  This catches the man’s attention, and he comes over to the makeshift bed where the boy is lying. “You’re awake,” he says. “How are you feeling?”

  The boy looks around slowly. He’s in a house, but it’s not much of a house. The floors are dirt and the walls are made out of wood with bits of bright Pink Panther insulation showing through here and there. A single fireplace stands at the end of the room along with an old wooden table. He’s on some sort of hard cot, but it feels good to rest his body.

  “I’m okay,” he says. “Feeling better.”

  The man nods. “You’re not out of the woods yet.”

  The boy stares at him, trying to understand what this means. The man reminds him of his grandpa because of his gray beard and the tobacco smell that follows him everywhere, but he is not the boy’s grandpa. His eyes are serious and distant. He doesn’t smile when he talks.

  “I don’t know what you did to yourself,” he continues, “but your stitches are infected. I tried to clean it out, but I don’t have much here. Some aspirin and soap is about all. Where did you come from?”

  “My house,” he begins, but then he stops. His head is still spinning, and he’s suddenly not sure if he should reveal where his mom lives. “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember where you live?” The man stands up and walks over to the fireplace. “That’s not exactly helpful.”

  The boy is silent. The velvet-haired dog has moved to the far side of the room, and he wishes it would come back.

  “What about your parents?” the man asks. “What are their names?”

  The boy hesitates. “I don’t know.”

  The man turns around. “What do you mean you don’t know your parents’ names? Don’t lie to me.”

  The boy says nothing. His parents’ names aren’t his to share.

  “You’re only making it harder for yourself.” The man stirs something in a pot over the fire. “My brother will be coming tomorrow, and he’ll take you into town.”

  Into town. The boy tries to imagine what this will consist of: life in the brother’s basement, slavery, torture, and death. He tries to sit up, but his head is still fuzzy, and those black dots return to the edge of his vision. “Can I call my parents?” he asks.

  “So you remember your phone number.” The man shakes his head. “No, you can’t call your parents. I don’t have a phone.”

  The boy sinks back down onto the cot. What kind of person doesn’t have a phone? What kind of person lives out in the woods with just two dogs? He makes eyes contact with the velvet-haired dog across the room and tries to will it back, but the dog remains seated.

  “Here,” the man says, slopping some thick white liquid from the pot into a bowl. “Eat this.”

  He places the bowl in front of the boy, along with a spoon, and the boy again forces himself to sit up. The soup is like nothing he’s ever seen before—thick and white with floating potatoes and something dark and rubbery. There could be danger in the soup, poison or drugs, but it does smell good and his stomach is rumbling, even though it still aches, too.

  “Go on and eat it,” the man says. “Haven’t you ever seen clam chowder before?”

  He hasn’t. His mom usually makes either chicken noodle
soup or beef vegetable. He picks up a spoonful and blows carefully. Meanwhile, the man sits down at the table and takes out his pipe. He packs it expertly and lights it, sending a sweet tobacco scent into the air. The smell makes the boy think of his grandfather, and he relaxes slightly and takes a bite of soup. Thick and milky and salty all at once. His rumbling stomach yearns for another bite and then another.

  “What kind of boy doesn’t know his own address?” the man muses in between puffs of his pipe. “How old are you?”

  “Eight.”

  “At least you know that. Didn’t you have to learn your address in kindergarten? In case you got lost?”

  The boy remains silent.

  “My grandson had to learn his address in kindergarten,” the man continues. “They gave him a red ribbon for it. It said: Hooray! Gregory Knows His Address. Can you believe that? A special ribbon for knowing your own damn address?”

  “You have a grandson?”

  “Yeah, he’s a little older than you, and probably smarter, too. He doesn’t get lost in the woods. And he knows what clam chowder is.”

  “What are your dogs’ names?”

  The man moves his pipe to the edge of his mouth and talks around it. “The black one is Jake. He’s a guard dog. And the other one’s Molly. Come here, Molly.” He bends down and the velvet-haired dog comes running to him. “Go and visit the boy.” He glances up at the boy. “You wouldn’t happen to know your name, would you?”

  “Chet.”

  “Good. Go and visit Chet.”

  The dog trots over, and the boy rubs her ears. “She’s a very nice dog.”

  “Of course she is. One of the best.”

  They sit quietly, the man smoking and the boy alternating between petting the dog and eating his soup. He knows his mom would object to touching an animal while he’s eating, but she’s far away and her opinion is a distant law that doesn’t apply here. When the boy finishes, he places the spoon in the bowl and tries to stand, but the man rises quickly. “I’ll get that for you. You have an ugly set of stitches there.”

  The boy nods and hands him the bowl.

  “Do you mind telling me what happened?”

  If the boy were older he would tell the man it’s none of his business, but he is eight years old and the weight of adult requests is forever upon him, even if the adult also happens to be a murderer or kidnapper living in the woods. “I had surgery,” the boy replies. “To remove a nail.”

  The man sits back down at the table. “How did you get a nail in your stomach?”

  The boy swallows hard. It sounds so silly to say it out loud. “I ate it.”

  “You ate it?” The man leans forward slightly, eyebrows arched. “Why would you do that?”

  The boy shakes his head. He can feel tears forming in his eyes, but he blinks them back. Boys don’t cry, especially if they want to be firefighters like his dad, but where is his dad?

  “Come on now,” says the man. “Don’t sit there and cry.” But this only makes it worse, and the boy can feel the tears running down his face, one of the least masculine sights of all.

  “Well, I’m sure you learned your lesson,” the man says. “There’s not much to be gained from swallowing a nail.”

  There is much to be gained, and the boy can see it all laid out in his mind: the strength of each item, the weight that makes him a bit more present if only to himself. He wants to tell the man about vampires and how they gain strength from people and people gain strength from cows and pigs and chickens, but the man wouldn’t believe him because no one really believes what the boy has to say. They think he’s making up stories or “telling lies,” as Uncle Rob might say.

  The man stands up and stretches. “I can’t say I didn’t do stupid things in my day. What do you say about getting some sleep?”

  The boy is afraid to sleep in this place with the man right across the room, but he nods. The man rolls a sleeping bag across the dirt and stomps out the fire, leaving a few coals to dimly light the room. “Good night,” the man says, and his voice is disembodied in the darkness.

  “Good night,” the boy repeats and settles onto the cot, his mind awake and running in circles, his abdomen a strange and foreign landscape of pain.

  The man is up before sunrise, making coffee, waking the boy with his movements. He encourages the boy to eat breakfast, and the boy tries to hobble off the cot and sit at the table, but the pain seems to bend him in half, and as much as he tries he can’t hide it. “What’s wrong with you?” the man asks, staring at him from above a steaming cup of coffee. “Stitches don’t hurt that much.”

  “Just stiff, I guess.” The boy can’t bring himself to mention the buttons, the bark, the pebbles.

  Once the sun rises, the boy makes his way to the makeshift front porch, which is nothing more than an aluminum overhang with a rickety rocking chair. It hurts to sit and it hurts to rock, but the boy forces himself to do it anyway so that he doesn’t draw any more attention to himself. The mean dog watches him closely, and the boy wonders what would happen if he tried to run. Would the dog chase him down and tear him to bits?

  He decides not to experiment.

  Eventually, the man drags a chair out and joins him outside. He talks about his hunting trips, about how he’s gone to Colorado and Montana and seen mountains and deer bigger than anything you would ever see in these parts. The boy pictures these places as the man talks and wonders if he will ever get to experience anything as fantastical as the man describes.

  He wonders how Tennessee fits into this landscape, if it’s near or far, closer to Ohio or Montana.

  The man doesn’t ask the boy many questions, but still the boy finds himself talking more than he imagined, telling a little about his friends, about his dad, who is the strongest man he has ever met and a firefighter, too.

  “I imagine your dad is looking for you right now.”

  “I hope so,” the boy says, “but he may have moved away.”

  The man says nothing to this, and the afternoon wears on. Pain distracts the boy more and more. Sharp aches stretch across his abdomen, and he feels weak and unfocused. Occasionally, he catches the man looking at him carefully, and it makes him uncomfortable, as if he’s being assessed, as if he’s being judged.

  He’s the boy without a dad close by.

  He’s the boy nobody will look for.

  He’s already said too much.

  And it’s then he realizes the brother in the pickup truck never came. There is still light, but it’s fading rapidly, and the old man is inside cooking dinner, maybe another can of soup.

  Then what will happen?

  His dad wasn’t really specific about what crazy people in the woods would do, but the boy knows enough from watching movies to know that people could be hung by their feet, stabbed with knives, chased with chain saws, or poisoned through food.

  His mind is a blur of scattered thoughts and shooting pain and dizziness, and he considers potential sources of poisoning—maybe the soup, maybe the water. And there is low ground and bushes and brush, and most brush is below a man’s vision. Boys are short and fast and invisible, and he has a plan. He has always had a plan even if it failed the first time. One dog. Two dogs. The mean dog might bite him, but the brother hasn’t come, isn’t going to come. Maybe there is no brother and no town, and the boy is staggering to his feet and moving to the edge of the clearing even though the mean dog is growling. Then he is in the brush, the brush surrounding him, and he pulls himself together despite the splitting pain in his side, and he is running, running through the brush as fast as his legs will take him.

  The dogs are barking in the distance. Two dog voices rage in the air, but they are growing distant. They aren’t following him.

  The boy collapses beneath a tree, breathing heavily, his abdomen a long rip where his stitches had been, and he is bleeding. He closes his eyes because there is nothing to see anyway: darkness, the moon, one of many summer nights to come in a young boy’s life.

&
nbsp; He tries to think about where he is, but there is only a dream of a search party in shades of black and yellow stretching across the woods, looking for him, but not seeing that he’s right there. And he’s searching for his dad, but his dad is watching TV. His dad packed a suitcase, two suitcases, and left and didn’t say goodbye.

  It’s not the boy’s fault. None of this is his fault.

  Dogs are barking and they are part of the search party, but they scare him and he begins to crawl deeper into the trees. He imagines himself as a snake, only he is dripping blood and he has lost his dad’s Swiss Army knife. The old man may have taken it, and he begins to cry at yet another thing he has lost.

  The boy closes his eyes: he is a battery.

  He forces his eyes open: he is a battery being drained.

  How did he become a battery? What is he supposed to do?

  His mind burns and forces him to think through these questions again and again, a repetition he needs to stop, but can’t. When he turns on his side, he feels liquid ooze from his abdomen and he imagines blood, battery acid. He doesn’t have the strength to look down.

  Overhead, birds soar and the sun rises, stark and solid. Save them, he thinks, and his thoughts are with the birds.

  Save me, he thinks, and his thoughts are with himself.

  He is falling deeper and deeper into himself. The boy closes his eyes against the sun and does not move. His heart is hammering in his chest, and it is his. He owns it. His lungs rise and fall with air, and they are his. He owns them. He’s never thought about it before, but his arms are his and his legs are his, and there is something inside his shell of a body that looks through his eyes and what it experiences is entirely its own even if it is invisible.

  Sometimes this invisible self shifts away and the black threatens to return, but he fights it off. He likes this new version of himself, weighted down and present even if no one else can see it. He imagines the bark and buttons and pebbles, and he can’t see clearly. Maybe he never could. The dogs are barking, though. The dogs are moving closer and closer, their voices rising high into the sky, and there is another voice calling his name, Chet, Chet, Chet, and it is a single word, poised and ready to be found.