by Lee Klein
Moss admitted to spending a lot of time stoned in that strip of woods, sensing its possibilities, its perishable beauty. There was always a sense, like childhood, that all this must end. Now that he was more than twice the age he had been when I first met him, Moss associated any sort of wooded area with his youth. A walk in the woods let him remember when his imagination and perception were wide open to the world. A semblance of childhood returned in such places. It was not as sentimental as it was essential, knowing which vehicles carried one back through time.
For Moss, there was the moment when that paradise of youth was lost, and it was then, perhaps the lowest point in his life, that I met him: I had been walking through those woods, exploring the territory, not many years after I had relocated to the area. When not at the supermarket where I bagged groceries, I liked to walk, especially since I had spent so much time in flight, hovering, soaring, always at a remove from the dense particularity of the ground. Walking was a revelation, the streaming detail of feet over earth. There was so much territory to explore. All the sidewalks led into one another, ball fields, parks with paths through woods, and areas where it was easy to stray from those paths and cross streams and skirt the extensive backyards of estates on the outskirts of town. I sometimes found myself lost and by nightfall considered undressing to cover the remaining ground before midnight. Especially for the first few years, I tried to live a sane, socialized, domestic life as a young man. At times I was tempted to return to my bestial past and tour the areas I’d walked at high velocity, feasting here and there whenever able, but mostly I restrained myself. I changed my thinking so walking seemed more real, more natural, than flight.
On one of these walks, I came to a clearing in a strip of woods. Something unusual jutted from the earth. Some sort of hairy plant? A strange melon-shaped bonsai tree?
I approached from behind what could only be a human head. The dirt was loosely packed. It seemed that if a body were attached, all it needed was a quick shake of the limbs to free itself. Maybe the head had no body attached except a bit of neck and, for sport, buried itself as deeply as it could and waited for animals to approach before shouting them away when they came too close. Bones of deer and birds were not uncommonly found, broken egg shells, all mixed in with the illicit detritus of teenage hangouts. Deer and delinquents, both needed a place to go.
I stood in front of the head. The eyes opened. A voice played it cool.
“Wassup?”
“How’s it going?”
“Just hanging,” said the head.
A dun-haired boy, with clear pale skin and a long nose slanting to the left at the end, looked up at me. The angle made his eyes seem excessively white.
Late October. The scent and crunch of fallen leaves at early-evening dusk always made me want to attend a harvest ritual come the new moon. Addled by unprecedented amounts of high fructose corn syrup and progressively effective marijuana at the time, the approach of Halloween maybe was to blame for what had happened to the head.
“So what’s the plan?” I said.
“Haven’t thought much about it.”
Something was obviously not quite right with this head. Its eyes were no more than rosy red slits accentuated by an underlying puffiness and an expressive arch to the eyebrows, as though those woolly carets across his forehead were responsible for all his charms. Whoever had buried him surely possessed damning evidence against the head, numerous infractions of unofficial high school law. Or maybe this was an honor, an autumnal sacrifice among high-schoolers, a dedication to their gods who, if appeased, feted them with every imaginable intoxicant.
“Does this happen often?” I asked.
“Once a year. This year’s me.”
“A ritual?”
“A bitch when it’s you.”
I asked if he’d ever helped bury anyone. He said no but he’d heard of these burials.
I went to work on the poor boy’s self-esteem. “It’s an honor when they pick you,” I said. “Means you’re special.”
“Some honor,” he said. “A badge of dorkdom.”
“You want out?”
“Maybe in a minute.”
Moss wasn’t too difficult to get talking. I sat cross-legged and interviewed him. His responses were delivered in staccato phrases, as though he could only manage five words before losing his breath. Maybe the earth constricted his chest.
He told me about Marshall, the ringleader responsible for his current state. Years later when Moss suggested a Jersey Devil hunt in the Pine Barrens, his description of the area’s chief delinquent came to mind. Maybe our hunt for the Jersey Devil was a severely late attempt at revenge.
According to Moss, his teenage antagonist was evil incarnate, a puffy white face atop a wraith-like frame, equal parts pirate, warrior, and rock star. Some said Marshall’s cousin was the singer for a glam rock band on MTV. The association lent him more than his share of notoriety. He always wore slack black jeans and rock shirts emblazoned with Black Sabbath record covers. The rumor was that Marshall once ate a downed bat in imitation of Ozzy Osborne. He was suspected of igniting the map of the world on fire in a high school history classroom. It was widely suggested that he would never earn his driver’s license, either because he would never pass the test or the community would band together to deny him the privilege. As Moss excavated stray images in staccato phases, Marshall rose as the reincarnation of Branley Jukes, a late-1980s update of the cursed lineage. Branley, as far as I knew, had never been captured, but this Marshall fit the description of a Jukes, that same wide-open disrespect for everything.
The shovels used to bury him were nearby, so it was easy enough to dig him out. Moss seemed incapable of humiliation. Maybe it was that nonplussed expression Marshall and associates had targeted to change. He seemed too often to breathe through his mouth, which accounted for over-taut cheeks. For Moss, the simple intake of air may have made it difficult for him to smile or frown or let someone’s words affect the composure of his face.
He brushed himself off and thanked me as though it were a formality of rescue. Might as well get it over with, he seemed to think. Not that he was ungrateful, just that he knew Marshall’s subordinates would return to exhume the body after nightfall. I understood why he was a target. As he brushed himself off, I considered smacking him with the shovel and crumpling him into a shape a little easier to bury completely.
Why do some people incite such reactions without ever doing anything really offensive? It’s a type of negative charisma. Maybe there’s a sense that if smacked hard enough something black and white inside him would reveal itself in color?
He didn’t seem to recognize me when we met again ten or twelve years later. I rented a studio efficiency above a stand-alone garage, and he rented the third floor of the main house. I had a large room with breeze and light to spare. It was a comfortable, modest tree house of a place, ideal for what I needed. A bed, a bathroom, a desk, walls lined with built-in bookshelves. Each book was an emblem of everything I had achieved. Just spending hours in my humble apartment with a book spread beneath electric light, not mouthing the words as when Larner first taught me to read, I’d never anticipated such a simple, restful, civilized, meditative, sustainable, and uniquely human activity when I passed nights on beaches or in caves. Each book was an inhabitable world. Each page absorbed me deeper. I read as though my life depended on it. The words I read were as essential as air.
Not everyone needed to read to survive, however. Moss, for example, required no deepened perception, no instruction, no experience of wonder via the ocular intake of text. He was skeptical of artifice. His heart did not seem in conflict with itself or with anyone else. His essential conflict was, I think, his lack of conflict. He didn’t even seem all that interested in his own self interest. His greatest hardship each day involved motivating himself not to hit the snooze button more than once, to feed himself, to make the five-minute walk to work, where he assisted a master architect. He had earned a graduat
e degree in landscape design, the two years in Providence endured with the urgency of a rainy weekend in bed.
Time had transformed my neighbor. The first time he invited me to his place to watch a Yankees playoff game, he engaged the event as though the television had challenged him to a duel. He’d needed a second and so he asked me over.
“My father and grandfather were Yanks fans,” he said. “People hate the Yankees, but it’s a family tradition. My mom loved them, too.”
This suggestion of something beyond baseball came by the fourth inning, three Pilsners into the national broadcast. I half-understood the intricacies of the game, its rules and history, having read up on it once I determined that a grocery clerk in this part of New Jersey needs to know who’s pitching for the Yankees, Mets, and Phils. Otherwise, when someone initiated an affable exchange about the national pastime, I would be useless, and my uselessness would suggest a failure in terms of becoming a cog in the machine. If this required studying the game’s history and box scores, it was a duty I needed to fulfill for myself and society.
Did the aardvark ever make a similar decision? The antelope? The otter?
Moss’s fourth-inning confession of being a grandfathered Yankee fan suggested there was more to his story. I waited to hear what happened to his mother, to hear anything at all during commercial breaks more than invitations to help myself to chips and beer. I was a welcome guest, mirroring my host’s sensitivities to the game, as his heart recalibrated itself per out, per inning, per run.
He did not ask for, and I did not offer, information about my life. I suggested a long-lapsed allegiance to the Orioles, but offered nothing else. I was wary that at any minute he might say he recognized me from the woods.
Years later, when Moss introduced the idea of hunting the Jersey Devil, enthusiastic approval from our friend Riv indicated he needed something to take himself out of himself. He was just about where one began recovering from absolute bottom. He had turned to vodka stored in his freezer more than ever before, but drink was only a symptom of the underlying emotional stressor. He was like a gymnast who sent himself into a series of aerial convolutions only to wind up splayed, calling on every force within to scrape his crumpled humanity off the floor. Francesca, Francesca, it wasn’t just a matter of forgiving her. Her crime against the state of their union was unforgivable, largely because she was neither repentant nor interested in forgiveness. She was overjoyed, by all accounts, despite Riv’s obliteration.
Riv seemed like someone always in need of nicknames, especially shortened ones that matched his stature. He was sturdy, with such extraordinary calf muscles they seemed like separate entities, removable lobes of leg strength. Small round glasses, an undersized face, the features drawn in around an unobtrusive nose, curly hair placed on his skull like a helmet strapped down by overlong sideburns. If he didn’t shave twice a day, a goatee appeared by evening. Otherwise so stable, he had toppled and now thought a weekend night awake, walking through the Pine Barrens, would help him endure a stage of life he entered with reluctance.
The Jersey Devil, to Riv, meant betrayal. But it also rose in his imagination as the Soviet Union. His birthplace informed everything about him, even what seemed American on the surface. As a child, he was always teased about how he was a spy, relaying sensitive information to Moscow about the elementary school lunchroom.
His positive energy synched with equal yet opposite emanations from Moss. They brought the best out in each other, a rivalry built on arguments as small as the correct pronunciation of the surname of the drummer for Rush all the way up to how the United States should allocate its forces, if at all, in the Middle East.
Slowly, slowly, these strangers transformed into friends, and I learned to enjoy beer, finding it pleasurable in moderation and also necessary, as though the effect after the third downed pint, the looseness of talk, the immediate camaraderie and elevated urgency of everything, were an epoxy, a mortar, albeit liquid and always likely to end in dehydration, anxiety, headache, regret. None of which mattered much to our friend Kirsch, whose nationwide tour of college towns could just as well have been doctoral thesis research on the anthropologic variance/significance of taverns, dives, breweries, meat markets, sports bars, and beer gardens, with special emphasis on appreciation of subtleties distinguishing beverages available therein. At worst, it could be said that Kirsch was a beer bloke, which is sort of like a wine snob in the guise of an unshowered outdoorsman too lazy to hike. He had an air of the explorer to him, what with his not always well-kept beard and excess subcutaneous insulation secured by well more than the recommended daily intake of carbohydrates in the form of wheat, barley, and hops.
The Jersey Devil, to Kirsch, was a hoot, a story that nicely complemented his third Smuttynose Porter. If forced to excavate something more significant than an anecdote, Kirsch might say that the beast’s composite parts accounted for each of his many stops on his college tour. Or, deeper, the beast was a manifestation of the superficiality that comes from thinking that a compendium of difference is any more interesting than the same thing in the same spot with the same people in the same setting. Or, further, the beast represented something he did not want to confront in himself, and he was happy to pursue it exactly because he knew it did not exist. He had read enough to admire such a quest. A hunt for anything other than a nonexistent beast, in fact, would have been out of the question.
That I could call these men friends seemed a fundamental victory. They invited me along without hesitation, although I was neither architect, chemist, nor educator. They often treated me as though I were a child prone to outbursts at the slightest change in routine. Maybe they noticed I was aging faster than they were. Maybe they suspected something about me, or wondered about my history. But they never let on.
The summer before we set off to hunt the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens, Moss had suggested a trip to Fenway Park to see the Yankees in enemy territory. I went along with Riv and Kirsch but it meant less to us than it did to Moss. The 37-foot-tall Green Monster, the left-field wall, was the best thing about it. Otherwise, seeing the game in its natural habitat, despite all its geometric beauty, the grace and power and slow-rising drama of a pitcher’s duel, seemed overwhelmed by life in the stands, a communal instinct taken to a radical and mostly benign extent. I felt like the crowd might seethe and be used for a purpose other than saluting a blast off the Citgo sign or a ground-rule double around the Pesky Pole in right. In the Bronx, I vicariously fed off Moss’s association with everyone else, and so in Boston, despite wearing neutral colors, I associated myself with the enemy. I exaggerated the row-diness, the heathen indulgence in light beer and peanuts and tube steaks, the whooping for a strikeout of the famous Yankee shortstop, a roar simulating hatred, or maybe this was as real as it got. The stadium was a theater unaware of itself as such, the crowd on stage more than it realized, especially considering the television coverage. All of it was easy enough to spill out from the stands and into the streets, intoxicated, an unruly militia dressed as one.
Maybe such a crowd, with all its individual identities subsumed by the whole, was my Jersey Devil. But that was last year. This year I figured that Moss, Riv, and Kirsch were finally on to me when they asked, having first discussed it among themselves, if I would like to hunt the Jersey Devil on the longest night of the year.
We were at the Atlas in our favorite booth. Riv, Moss, and I shared a cheap pitcher of lager, while Kirsch savored whatever concoction of hops and licorice he’d ordered. It was early June and the Phillies and Yankees played in the new stadium in the Bronx, a simulation of the classic venue where the legends played, a billiondollar mausoleum to the past century of the sport. The interleague matchup was of special interest in New Jersey. The high-def television screen offered clearer-than-reality broadcast. Moss seemed as animated as I had ever seen him.
“Sometime this winter,” he said, pausing as though each pitch required a deeper breath, “I was watching the Devils against the Flye
rs. Hockey, not my favorite. But it got me thinking. We all heard about the Jersey Devil growing up. Something out in the woods, down in the Pine Barrens. It’d get ya if you got too restless when stuck in traffic on 539 going down to the shore. But I never really knew too much about it. I always pictured a red leprechaun sort of thing, probably because of the hockey mascot.”
He lost track of himself as his attention drifted toward the television. Riv patted the table and said, “So then what?” His back was to the screen. The Atlas wasn’t a sports bar. Only a single television was visible from where we sat.
“So I did some searching, educated myself about it, I’ll send you the links, but the thing I learned is you can hunt it down.”
“How can you hunt down something that doesn’t exist?” I said.
“That’s the beauty of it, right?” Kirsch chimed in. “Like Moby Dick.”
“I’m pretty sure the white whale existed,” said Riv. “But I really only remember chapters about rope and ambergris and that little black boy Pip bobbing in the ocean.”
“Whatever it’s like,” Moss said, “it has a website, hunt the jersey devil dot com: an all-night tour of the pines, a sleepless night walking around, hunting it down.”
“With guns?” I asked.
“Cameras,” Moss said. “You in?”
“How much?”
“A hundred each. From dusk to dawn on the summer solstice. A Saturday. We’ll drink so much coffee we’ll start seeing things in the woods.”
“We need this,” Riv said, and the way he said it, so clear and earnest, I almost offered to pay his way. He needed it, definitely, to distance himself from recent events with Francesca.
I held my pint in the air. “We need this,” I said, and the others said “here, here.” From that moment on there was more to this trip than driving up to Boston last year. This trip would be like a tunnel we entered and afterwards emerged transformed, hearts turned in favor of our more courageous selves.