by Ronald Malfi
“Poindexter,” Michael called. “You okay, man?”
Adrian turned. With his sweatshirt hood over his head and the shadows of the overhead tree branches crisscrossing his face, I couldn’t make out his expression—couldn’t tell if he even had one.
“Sure,” Adrian said after a moment. He went over to a carved-out niche in a nearby tree and hoisted himself into it, pulling his knees up to his chest. He wore imitation Converse sneakers, the kind with the cheap soles that looked overly white and were made of uncomfortable plastic instead of rubber. When he held his legs straight out before him, I could see that someone—his mother, I supposed—had printed in permanent marker an R on the sole of his right sneaker and an L on the sole of his left.
Scott distributed the canteens. There were five so we each got our own. “It’s just filled with water. In case, you know, we get thirsty or whatever. But I also brought something to keep us awake, too.” He returned to his backpack and produced two six-packs of Jolt Cola. “Extra caffeine to keep us going.”
“I love this man,” Michael said. He was seated on his army helmet like a soldier on break, drumming his hands against his thighs. “Toss me one of those, Scotty boy.”
“Just what he needs,” Peter commented. “More caffeine.”
Scott pulled some cans of Jolt free from the pack and tossed them around. Adrian was the only one who didn’t take one.
A moment later when Scott took out a pack of Camels and offered a cigarette to Adrian, the smaller boy recoiled into the niche in the tree and said, “Those things give you cancer.”
Scott cocked his head and didn’t seem like he cared all that much. He stuck one of the smokes between his lips, then chased it with his lighter for several seconds before catching and lighting the tip.
Silence overtook us. Even Michael was uncharacteristically quiet. We all sat in our rough circle about the clearing as a cool wintry wind shook the skeletal tree branches and rattled the remaining leaves like maracas. In the far distance, I heard children shouting somewhere across December Park. Beyond the park and the woods, Harting Farms ended abruptly at the edge of a cliff that overlooked the Chesapeake Bay.
Again, I recalled that day so many years ago when Charles and I had gone out on the boat and he had pointed up to the cliff and at the giant holes bored into the face of it. Some had looked large enough to drive a car through. With terrible clarity, I saw my brother’s tanned chest and the flecks of bay salt that crystalized in his dark eyelashes. I shivered.
After a moment, Scott cranked the transistor, and soon we had an AM oldies station to keep us company. The reception was horrible, and Scott kept the volume low, but at least it was something.
“I wonder if it’s anyone we know,” Scott said. He used the blade of his butterfly knife to scrape the dirt out from beneath his fingernails.
“Who?” Peter said.
“The killer. The guy who got Courtney Cole. And the others.”
“Possibly the others,” Michael added. He was laying on his back now, his hands laced behind his head and his army helmet on his stomach, rising and falling with his respiration. “We don’t know that for sure.”
“You sound just like the goddamn news,” Scott scolded. “Is it so impossible to believe?” He turned to me. “What does your dad think?”
“He thinks it’s the same person,” I said, “but the cops don’t have any real proof.”
“What else did your dad say?”
“That’s about it. He didn’t seem like he really wanted to talk about it.”
“Man, you gotta ask him for some details,” Scott said.
“I went snooping through his work papers. Isn’t that enough?”
“You gotta ask him if he has any suspects,” Scott continued. “Find out if he has any idea who it might be.”
“Leave Angie alone,” Peter said. “His dad ain’t gonna tell him anything important. That shit’s all confidential, anyway.”
Scott feigned a jab at Peter with his butterfly knife.
“You’re pretty tough sitting all the way—” Peter quickly shut his mouth as Scott flung the knife at him. It pinwheeled through the air before planting itself, blade down, in the dirt between Peter’s sneakers. “Holy shit! You could have killed me!”
Scott laughed. “Yeah, right.”
“You could have cut my fucking balls off.”
Scott laughed harder. “What balls?”
Michael sat up and grinned. He had his mirrored sunglasses back on, and he looked like someone enjoying a day at the beach.
“Dickhead,” Peter said, plucking the knife from the ground. He examined the blade, then attempted to flip it shut. He managed to do it on the third try, but it wasn’t nearly as graceful as when Scott did it.
“What if it isn’t a man?” Scott spoke up.
“What do you mean?” Peter said. “Like, it could be a woman?”
Michael shook his head. “That’s horseshit. Chicks don’t have the balls to pull off this kinda madness.”
“Literally,” commented Peter.
“I’m serious. Only men can be that sadistic. You ever hear of a female serial killer?”
“Aileen Wuornos,” Scott said without missing a beat.
“Shut up,” Michael said. “You made that up.”
“Did not. She killed a bunch of guys and was arrested a few years ago.”
Michael waved a hand at him. “Well, it sounds like bullshit to me. And, anyway, I’d bet anything that the Cole girl was . . . I don’t know . . . raped or . . . like, molested or something . . .”
“She wasn’t,” I said.
“Yeah? How the hell would you know?”
“Because I read the coroner’s report, dummy.”
“Anyway, I didn’t mean that the killer’s a woman,” Scott said. “But what if the killer is something that’s . . . maybe not human . . .”
“What’s that mean?” Peter said.
“Maybe there’s something else here in town taking everyone.”
“This isn’t one of your horror movies,” Peter told him.
Michael piped up: “I once read a story about a rogue lion in Africa that went around killing villagers. The thing would wait for someone to go wandering off from the rest of the tribe and then attack. It was almost human in how it hunted. You know, like it waited for the right time and everything. Creepy as hell.”
“Or like an alligator or something,” Peter suggested.
Across the clearing, Adrian nodded almost imperceptibly. “I’ve heard about alligators in some areas getting really big and eating children. It happens down south a lot. They put up big fences around the yards in Louisiana to keep the alligators out.”
“Or the sewers,” Scott said. “Like that movie we saw at the Juniper. The one where someone flushed a baby alligator down the toilet, and it lived in the sewers eating all kinds of stuff—”
“Like turds,” Michael interjected, chuckling.
“—until it got so big that it broke through the street and started eating all those people.”
“Whoa,” said Adrian. “Cool.”
“It was awesome,” Scott assured him.
“Don’t forget about the Chesapeake Bay,” Michael said. “Man, there could be anything living down there.”
“Like that story Angie wrote about Chessie,” Peter said.
“What’s Chessie?” Adrian asked.
“It’s the Chesapeake Bay version of the Loch Ness Monster,” I said. “It’s a myth, like Bigfoot.”
“That shit’s real,” Michael contested, jabbing a finger at me, then sliding his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose. “Chessie’s no myth. Uncle of mine saw it a few years ago at the Cape locks, right here in town—two big humps rising out of the water. Swear to God.”
“You’re a big hump,” Scott said.
“Hey, I’m dead serious,” Michael said.
Beside me, Peter began carving his initials into the stone statue with Scott’s knife. “Remember when
they caught that huge shark by the Naval Academy? It was a great white, wasn’t it? Like in Jaws.”
“I think it was a sand shark,” Scott said. “Some fishermen caught it on a line from the academy bridge.”
“Well,” Michael said, “unless the thing’s got legs, it ain’t crawling on land and snatching up kids, jackass.”
“I didn’t say it was, jerk face,” Peter said.
“Douche nozzle!”
“Ass muncher!”
“Gorbachev’s wife!” This had been Michael’s favorite insult for as long as I could remember. When he first started using it, none of us even knew who Gorbachev was, let alone his wife.
Peter ignored him. “Ed the Jew used to tell us stories about a thing called the White Worm, something that his old man used to scare him with. He never described it in much detail, just that it was a worm about the size of a sofa, really fat and bulbous.”
“Bulbous,” Michael echoed, snickering.
“It lives in the bay and attacks watermen who fall asleep on their boats overnight. It climbs into the boats and eats them. Oh, and it has a big mouth on one end filled with a ring of teeth, all jagged and pointy like a shark’s.”
“Awesome,” Scott intoned.
“Whenever you see an old johnboat or Sunfish floating across the bay or down the river with no one on it, that means the White Worm got ’em.”
Michael’s eyes widened. “I’ve seen those boats.”
“That’s a fuckin’ cool story,” Scott admitted.
“He used to tell it to me when I was just a kid and acting up,” Peter said. His eyes grew distant and he smiled. “He liked to mess with my head.”
“How did it climb onto the boats if it was just a worm?” Michael asked.
Peter shrugged. “Well, it was a giant worm.”
“Worms don’t have hands. Not even giant ones.”
“This one did. It had skinny little arms like you, and it would drag its fat body up onto the boats.”
“Aw, you just made that up,” Michael said, waving him off. “I’m being serious. How can a giant worm climb onto a boat?”
“Dude.” Peter shook his head. “It’s just a story. The whole thing’s made up.”
Adrian got up from his perch and went over to his backpack. He unzipped it and withdrew the Girls’ Holy Cross yearbook and a slimmer volume I recognized as his drawing tablet. Then he returned to his tree and crawled back into the niche. He moved with the litheness and delicateness of a girl. His entire body looked fragile, as if he might break apart into pieces at even the slightest nudge. He opened the yearbook and slowly turned the pages.
“Here,” Peter said, handing me the knife.
I started to engrave my initials beneath his.
“The question I’d like answered is what happened to their bodies,” Scott said. The radio at his feet changed songs, the soft lilt of “In the Still of the Night” crackling from the speaker. “There’s only been one body found, but there are still four kids missing. Where are their bodies? Down here somewhere, too?”
We looked around at the looming, sun-silvered trees and the serenity of the woods that surrounded us. All of a sudden, it seemed like a false quiet, a façade designed to lull us into false security. This place could be a graveyard, a land for the dead and buried. Were any of them beneath our feet—just mere inches under the soil—at this very moment?
But then I remembered what my dad had told me, and I said, “The cops took cadaver dogs down here. They would have found bodies if there were any.”
“Even if they’re buried real deep?” asked Scott.
“I guess.”
“Gah!” Michael shouted, grabbing his throat and struggling on the ground. The army helmet bounded off his stomach and rolled away. “They got me! They got me!”
“Cut it out, fuck face,” Scott scolded him.
Finished with my carving, I closed the knife and tossed it to Scott. He got up, came over to the statue, and began inscribing his initials into the concrete below mine.
I slid off the statue and onto the ground, the coldness of the earth radiating through my jeans and numbing my buttocks—coolie, I thought, smiling to myself—and popped the tab on my can of Jolt. The soda was warm and too sugary. Perfect.
“Why do you guys make so much fun of each other if you’re friends?” Adrian said.
“We’re just screwing around,” I said. “We don’t mean it.”
“Although Michael is a fuck face,” Scott said from over his shoulder. “That’s just a fact.”
“We’ve all been friends for years,” Peter said. “It’s just joking, Adrian. No one means anything by it.”
Adrian pursed his lips and nodded slowly, watching us.
We must look like alien creatures to him, I thought, a kid who’s never had any close friends in his life . . .
“Get over here, Sugarland,” Scott called, rising off the ground and holding out the knife. “Your turn.”
Michael snatched the knife from him, feigned slicing open one of his wrists, then dropped to his knees in the muck, gurgling and frothing from the mouth. A glob of spittle hung from his lower lip, slowly lengthening to a fine white thread that eventually touched his sweatshirt.
“Gross,” Scott remarked casually. He’d seen enough of Michael’s stunts to remain unimpressed.
His tongue poking from his mouth, Michael crawled toward the statue.
Adrian continued to turn the pages of the yearbook. On occasion he would lift his eyes and gaze off into the darkness of the woods. Once, he caught me staring at him and turned hurriedly away.
I stood and, brushing debris off my backside, went over to him. “Whatcha doing?”
“Just looking,” he said.
“Is something wrong?”
He shook his head but didn’t look at me. He had his writing tablet balanced on his other knee. I deciphered what appeared to be hasty sketches of Courtney Cole. Even as a sketch, the likeness was unmistakable.
Then he looked at me—a lost babe in the woods of some horrific fairy tale. His big fishy eyes appeared sloppy and unfocused, perhaps muddled by too many thoughts. I noticed a thin piece of shoestring around his neck and saw that Courtney Cole’s heart-shaped locket hung from it. This struck me. Scott had fixed the clasp for him, but it never occurred to me that Adrian would actually wear it.
From the corner of his mouth, Adrian said, “I’m okay, Angie. I’m just doing some thinking. We should probably designate areas and spread out, start searching.”
I chewed my lower lip, then looked over at Michael, Peter, and Scott. Michael was still carving his initials into the statue while Peter watched over his shoulder. Scott was fiddling with the dynamo radio and balancing a can of Jolt on one knee. They all looked young but also strangely old, too. It occurred to me that there wouldn’t be many more days like these, hanging out in the woods without a care in the world.
“Yeah, okay, but you gotta do something first,” I told him.
“Do what?”
“You gotta carve your initials,” I said.
In the end, they ran down the trunk of the statue like this:
PG
AM
SS
MS
AG
Once we finished, the five of us stared at our work in silent appreciation. Seeing our names on that statue seemed to solidify the notion that these woods, these Dead Woods, were now ours and ours alone. We held stewardship over them.
“Scott’s got Nazi initials,” Michael said.
Scott slugged him on the arm.
Adrian nodded at the statue, a satisfied little smile on his thin lips. Then he pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at Michael. “Did you bring the map?”
Michael took out of one his maps from the rear pocket of his jeans and handed it to Adrian. Adrian unfolded it and splayed it out over the statue. The rest of us gathered around and dropped down on our haunches in the cold earth.
The legend said this map had been cre
ated by the Harting Farms Parks and Recreations Department in conjunction with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. It was a map of the surrounding woodland as well as the coastal waterways that filtered straight out into the bay.
“The Dead Woods are here,” Michael explained, tracing a dark green horseshoe on the map. Next, he addressed a pale green rectangle surrounded on three of its four sides by the Dead Woods. “And this is December Park, smack in the middle. That means we’re probably . . . right about . . . here.” He pointed to a spot in the dark green horseshoe that was bordered by two intersecting roadways toward the northwest—Point and Counterpoint Lanes—and by December Park to the south.
“This is great.” Adrian retrieved a black felt-tipped marker that he’d clipped to the cover of his sketch pad and returned to the map. As he uncapped the marker, he glanced at Michael. “Do you mind?”
“Shoot, I’ve got a dozen of these,” Michael said.
Drawing a series of vertical lines in one corner of the map, Adrian divided the woods into sections. When he finished, he admired his work for a moment before retrieving some more items from his backpack. He handed us flashlights, some plastic bags with the Generous Superstore logo on them, small notepads, and rubber gloves.
Michael snapped one of the gloves on his hand. “These for the proctology exam?”
“This is how they do it on TV,” Adrian explained. “You wear gloves in case you find evidence and don’t want to ruin the fingerprints that might be on it.”
Examining his own pair of rubber gloves, Peter nodded. “Makes sense. Good thinking.”
Adrian tapped the marker against the grid he’d drawn across the Dead Woods. “See how I broke it up into squares? We each search a different square, then check them off on the map when we finish. But then we rotate, so that we can search someone else’s section after they’re done in case that person missed anything.”
“That’s gonna take a long time,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s important.” He held up one of the small notepads. “We use these to mark down anything we find. Like, the location of it. And then we can mark it down on the map, too. One of us should stay here, too, at home base. It’s like when you call 911 and you get that operator on the phone . . .”