Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  But she owed me now, and knew it, and maybe that Saturday afternoon she’d gotten a little glimpse of what I could be, the seeds of what lay within me needing only a few more years and a good example.

  Whatever had happened that afternoon, whatever had been at work, be it accident or fate, it had given me back my sister, and the worst thing I could possibly imagine was losing her all over again.

  Discharge. And autumn, what remained of it before the unrelenting clawed grip of our next northern winter.

  I’d hardly been home from the hospital anytime at all before discovering that I had a mother who was more protective than she’d been before. The woods, which had for as long as I could remember furnished countless options for the ways I stretched my muscles and spent my childhood, now harbored dangers. She didn’t want me going into them, and hearing her tell me this was as bad as hearing her announce that she was going to saw off both my legs. Meanwhile, she still had no objections to Terri climbing into Willard’s car every morning and afternoon, five days a week minimum, yet from my standpoint there was no question which was more dangerous.

  My father, of course, retained a saner outlook, and I went to him to mediate.

  “Give her a few days,” he told me with a tone of diplomacy. This was private council, just between the two of us, not for women’s ears. “She’ll come around, just let her have a little time to get used to the idea of you heading back in there first.”

  “And you’ll talk to her?” I pleaded.

  He promised me he would. “But whatever you do,” he warned, “if you cut yourself on something out there, don’t let your mom see you bleeding. Either come get me, or take care of it yourself if it’s not too bad.”

  Or Terri, I appended, but did not say. Terri would now come through for me in a pinch. Of this I felt sure. But I didn’t want her to have to, not if I could help it. I got a huge thrill of self-reliance from realizing that my father trusted me to patch up my own wounds. How many times had I seen him finish a meal, pour a mug of coffee, and then yank his own stitches at the dining room table, healed up from one mishap or another and loath to pay some doctor to do what he could take care of himself? I would marvel at these displays of autonomy and courage, the discarded black threads piling up at the edge of his emptied dinner plate like the legs of little dead spiders. My only wish now was that I be allowed the same gutsy privilege once it was clear that my forehead wouldn’t split back open, or that Dad at least handle the task himself, but when I casually mentioned this to him, he stopped and looked at me and said, “Not a chance. She’d skin us both alive.”

  My forest, then: so near, yet so far away. I tried to make it through those next several days of abstinence and the inhuman patience they required by ignoring the woods completely, doing my best to pretend they didn’t exist. Nothing out there a boy would like. The only thing on the other side of the windows were the houses of our neighbors. Brick walls, the in-your-face closeness of Detroit ghettos.

  But I quickly learned that I could lie to my mom a lot easier than to myself, and longing got the better of me before my hangdog sorrow could get the better of her. I began to watch the woods from my bedroom window the way other kids watched TV. The way cats perch on a sill and stare through the glass, missing nothing and their paws aching for what they cannot reach.

  Twilight became an especially dismal time, shadows thickening between the trees until night drew in like the closing of a closet door, a few minutes earlier for each square of the calendar that became one more twenty-four hour chunk of history. It was a cruel taunt: Here’s another whole day you’ve just missed.

  And this was when I began to see him.

  At first I didn’t think much of it, just that going by what I could see in the gloom he was one odd-looking fellow. Definitely not a hunter, because he carried no gun, and rather than orange vests and thermal gear or a camouflage jumpsuit he was draped in a ragged dark cloak that billowed around him like a kind of bulb. No hat on his smooth, bony head. The first time I saw him I thought he was a transient, but since he was still coming around the next couple of evenings I wondered if he might not live deep in the forest, a secret kept until now by thousands of acres of trees. I tried to picture him grumbling around inside a tiny cabin whose chimney curled smoke that got lost in the nearby branches — tried but failed, because I couldn’t picture him living anywhere at all. He seemed beyond the need of shelter, that he could roam at will and no matter how cold the deepening October dusks, he refused to be bothered by their chill.

  I first noticed him around nightfall, then some mornings, too, and I began to wonder if he wasn’t staying out there all night as well. All those hours I could no longer see him, just drifting among the trees and periodically staring at the house. At times our eyes would meet, or seemed to, but he would never hold the gaze for long, as if I were only of minimal interest to him.

  Sometimes I’d blink and he’d be gone.

  And sometimes he’d linger no matter what I tried.

  “Mom?” I called loudly late one afternoon. She was in the kitchen, which faced the same direction as my bedroom windows. “Do you see that guy out there?”

  “What guy, hon?” she called back.

  “That guy out back, in the trees. He’s just looking at the house.”

  She didn’t answer me right away, and a moment later I heard her footsteps in the hall. She stood in my doorway, smiling gently at me, but with concern.

  “Toby, remember what we talked about — how you don’t have to worry about that hunter coming around anymore? He can’t hurt you or your sister again. He moved away because he was so ashamed of what he did.”

  While still in the hospital I’d had one bad dream about the man who’d clubbed me. One. That’s all. But I guess it’s always tough, when you’re eleven, to convince adults you really do know what you’re not afraid of, and what you are.

  My mom stepped into my room then to give me a hug because she thought that was what I needed, and brushed her fingertips over my healing wound, still puffy and bruised, and she gave me a kiss on the top of my head. But what I really needed was for her to turn around and try looking out the window once more and this time say she saw the guy too.

  “That hunter’ll never be out there ever again,” she whispered to my hair. “I promise you that. Because he’s gone away forever and he won’t be back. I promise.” She pulled back a step, grinning at me. “Cross my heart and hope to diet,” she said, because when I was five years old I’d thought that was just about the funniest joke in the world.

  But she didn’t need to promise me anything right then. Because I already knew that the hunter would never be coming back, and I knew why, the real why. I suppose Mom thought she was protecting me from the ugliness of the world, and you have to applaud instincts like that, but it wasn’t as though I was living in a jar. I had since returned to school, and kids talk. Sometimes they don’t get their facts straight, but there’s nearly always some kernel of truth at the core of the whispers, the legends, the lore told in cafeterias and playgrounds and on gymnasium benches.

  The hunter hadn’t moved away in shame. He was dead.

  He’d lived a couple of towns south, so the news wasn’t quite firsthand, more likely overheard from parents with ties there, or shared by cousins who knew the guy’s neighbors … passed along like that, and maybe embellished along the way.

  Our attacker might never even have been identified since, to Terri and me, one unshaven guy in a bright orange vest carrying a shotgun looks pretty much the same as another. He’d turned tail and run away after thinking he’d killed me a second time, leaving my sister and me with no way of knowing who he was. But he’d been turned in by his own wife, who had been on the verge of leaving him anyway. Murdering schoolkids must have been the last straw.

  That much, at least, was true. The rest of the story had it that, after he’d been arrested by the sheriff and posted his bail, he went out drinking with some friends who took as sour a view
of what he’d done to us as his wife had. Some of them had kids of their own, took it almost personally. A fight broke out, and the others ended up beating him to death in a gravel parking lot.

  Part of the rumor, at least among the middle school and younger crowd, held that they’d skinned him and made jerky out of him. But I never believed that.

  As punishments went, the hunter’s death sentence seemed excessive to me even then. He’d killed no one. He had thought my sister was a deer — a stupid mistake, but at least an honest one. He hadn’t even been trying to kill me, just swat me down like a pesky mosquito.

  Yet, just the same, he was dead. Almost as if he’d been forced to pay with his life for murders he hadn’t carried out, as if this were his inescapable destiny, and the last thing that mattered was who else had died, or hadn’t.

  In early November, a couple of days after Halloween, I made my first foray back into the woods, and it was a clandestine mission. For as long as I could recall, I had refused to subject my jack-o-lanterns to the indignity of the trash can. Children are natural animists; everything around them is alive and aware and possessed of deep feelings and exceptional memories. My pumpkins had never minded submitting to the knife, but by all that was holy and most of what wasn’t, they’d earned more consideration than funereal consignment to a Hefty bag. It was our bargain.

  After the school bus dropped me off that day I discovered that my mom was away and, knowing what had to be done — my annual trek to the Jack-o-Lantern Burial Ground — I tucked a softening pumpkin, going moldy inside, under each arm and boldly strutted toward the treeline. One big orange face grinned, the other scowled. I was the Headless Horseman times two, and minus one horse.

  Hundreds of yards of crunchy leaves and deadfall, familiar landmarks and subtle alterations. I’d been away a long time, if felt like, and the trees spread wide their branches in welcome. Things died here all the time, but I could never imagine myself to be one of them. These woods knew me too well, would never allow such a thing to happen. I was their ambassador, their protector. I had grown here, sunk roots here, as surely as any tree.

  There had never been any burials at the Jack-o-Lantern Burial Ground, no more than the elephant graveyards of Africa contain actual graves. All you need to do is show up, and nature takes care of the rest. Each year I would place the aging pumpkins on the crown of a small mound, the same place where their predecessors had finished their own days, and there I would leave them to slump and cave in on themselves, their faces, once so firm and robust, turning to wizened mush. As they gave up the ghost, the ground reclaimed everything else they had left to give.

  Closure was not a word I knew then. But I knew the feeling by instinct.

  I gave them their moments of respect, their due honor, and when I turned around to let nature begin taking its course I found that he was waiting for me. Watching from no more than a dozen strides away. Perhaps even more perplexing to me than who he was, what he was, was how he could have sneaked up on me as he had. All these fallen leaves, I should have heard him the same as I often heard whitetail deer crashing through the underbrush before I saw them.

  I pressed a couple of fingers to the last remnants of the gash on my forehead, then blinked. Blinked hard. He wouldn’t cooperate. I noticed then that he didn’t touch the ground, either … no legs, no feet protruding from beneath the tattered billows of his cloak. He simply hovered inches above the leaves, as big around as a church bell it seemed to me, while the ragged ends of his cloak, and the spiny-looking mantle that draped around his shoulders and down his sides like strips of dead moss, appeared to waver in some breeze that wasn’t reaching me. I knew that if I got close enough to him the air would drop by twenty degrees, and he would smell like the spongy wet bark of a tree fallen two autumns before.

  He looked at me with eyes set deep in his narrow, bony head, beneath stern brows, and lifted one hand, held close to his body. An impatient twitching of his finger: Come. He spun on some kind of axis, a move that looked effortless, and began to glide away over the leaves as if he fully expected me to follow him. The bald knob of his skull never once turned back so that he could check on me, make sure I was there. No, he had ears, and my feet were very much earthbound.

  His cloak — I was seeing it far better now than I ever could from the house, and while it may have moved like cloth, from close up it didn’t look like cloth. It looked brittle and very thinly lined, almost fibrous, and I could hear a whispery rustling as he moved, as if beneath this outer cloak there might’ve been layers upon layers. Because its color was grayish-black, rather than pale and washed-out, it took me several moments to realize what the texture of his vast cloak really resembled: the dried-out shucks from ears of corn.

  The Husk Man, I thought.

  He was the Husk Man, and while he led, I followed. The sound my sneakers made on the fallen leaves was the same sound that I imagined he would make if I punched him, or swung a branch into his middle. But I really didn’t want to find out.

  Only when he stopped did I realize where this path of his had been leading. I found myself standing beside the hole where I’d gone digging for arrowheads.

  With a finger that looked as long and thin as a pencil, the Husk Man pointed toward a spot on the ground.

  “She was to have died there,” he said. His words hung in the chilled air as unquestionably as he did.

  The last time I’d been out here, my sister had stood on that very spot and complained about having to find me.

  He pointed again, now to the scattered fragments of a chunk of blasted wood.

  “And there,” said the Husk Man, “is where one second’s interference from you got in the way and changed what was meant to be.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” I said. “It’s just what happened.”

  He fixed his gaze on me with those stern eyes, unblinking, as if to say that this was no excuse.

  “She lives on stolen time now,” he said.

  “So?”

  “Stolen time,” he repeated, more forcefully. “Not borrowed. Stolen. This cannot remain.”

  “You take that back,” I told him. “Terri doesn’t steal.”

  “She may steal without knowing but this is thievery just the same. It does not demand punishment. Just an end. Before it is too late.”

  “What are you telling me for?”

  “Because it falls to you, and only you, to undo what you’ve done.”

  And I didn’t like the sound of this. He’d spoken plainly enough, very matter-of-fact, but it sounded as though there was a threat somewhere inside this. I let my head hang and tried to make him go away, and for a moment I thought he had, but then I realized, no, he’d just moved. He hung between two tree trunks like a big smudge of smoke.

  “Or else … else what?” I said.

  “Else her life, such as it is now, begins to take what it needs to sustain itself by eating whatever it finds most available.”

  I told him I wasn’t sure what that meant, and so the Husk Man looked at me without accusation, without pity, then dug his hands into the folds down the front of his cloak, and pulled them open with a crackle, open wide, and he showed me the future.

  At supper that evening I had to force myself to eat those first few bites, and they weren’t down any time at all before I brought them back up again. My parents tucked me into bed and popped the thermometer in my mouth but found no fever. I soon overheard Dad on the phone with my pediatrician, and it might have been the most fear I had ever heard in his voice. Greatly distressing, because as far as I’d known he was fearless. I overheard words like “lesion” and “frontal lobe” and “seizure” and “quacks.”

  And when they took me back to the hospital, again turned me over to white coats and machines, I had to let them, because I couldn’t tell them the truth.

  “I’m fine,” I kept telling everyone. My mom especially. “I’m not sick and I’m not hurt and I feel fine.”

  She would nod and bite her lip and
hold me.

  And I was fine. I really was. It’s just that nothing else was.

  Terri was the one that they should’ve been paying attention to. Because early November became the middle of November, and since I was watching her closely now apparently it was only me who noticed how she was no longer the same. I’d never wanted to believe that she had stolen time, but now it was looking as though this was exactly what she’d done — had stolen all she could hold but now it was running out. Which made me think of a bicycle when you stop pedaling. Just because you hold your legs still doesn’t mean the bike stops right away. You coast awhile, slowing down a little at a time. The bike might even think it’s still being ridden, but really, it’s just being steered.

  Terri wasn’t laughing like she used to, or smiling, or even going out of her way to tell me what an annoyance I was to her. And she wasn’t doing any better with food than I had that evening after I’d met the Husk Man face to face, except with Terri it was ongoing. After meals, I would secretly follow her inside the house, to whichever bathroom was farthest away from everyone else at the moment, or so she thought, and I would hear her lock herself inside, and a few moments later the gagging sounds would begin.

  After a few nights in a row of this, what was happening became clear to me: Her body was rejecting food because food had ceased to have any meaning to her, and it had no meaning because she was supposed to be dead and deep down some part of her knew it. This had to be why she was losing weight. Had to be why Terri’s clothes had begun to hang from her and her cheeks began to sink and her bones looked sharper. This had to be why she would stand in front of the mirror on her bedroom closet door, staring at herself from every angle with such a look of misery on her face that you couldn’t help but wonder how someone could live with that much sorrow inside.