The Year of the Storm

by John Mantooth

  “No idea. Bird watching?”

  “Close.” He held the binoculars up to his eyes. “Chick watching.”

  “Okay. Sounds better than bird watching, at least.”

  “I talked to Sarah Moss last night. She and her sister are coming to the lake today to swim.”

  “You talked to Sarah Moss?”

  Cliff tried to play it cool. “Yeah. She called. We talked. No big deal.”

  I knew better. Girls did in fact call Cliff sometimes, but it was always for help with homework. It was summer, so that couldn’t have been it. “Okay, come clean,” I said. “Why did she call?”

  Cliff gave me a sheepish grin. “All right. She called to ask me if I’d be willing to type her up some notes on our summer reading books, okay? But I talked to her. That’s what counts, right?”

  “Sure. If you say so.”

  “I do say so. And furthermore, I say that we climb this tree and get in position because Sarah and Rebecca are going to be here in bikinis. And Rebecca’s like twenty. Let that sink in for a second.”

  I shook my head. I’d been a part of Cliff’s schemes before.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just shake your head and roll your eyes,” Cliff said. “Two words: Golden. Opportunity.”

  I shrugged. I felt tired and completely uninvolved even if there might be an opportunity to see female flesh.

  “You ever stop and think that me and you are just losers, Cliff?”

  “Of course we’re losers, but we’re losers with binoculars. Is there a problem?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe instead of hiding in a tree, we should actually stay out here in the open and talk to them.”

  Cliff laughed, but I could hear genuine hurt behind it. “Easy for you to say. Your name isn’t Cliff. You don’t have a face full of pimples and a brain that scares girls.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Cliff.”

  “There’s nothing right with it either.”

  Sometimes Cliff did this. He got down on himself. Maybe I would have done the same with his particular roadblocks, but today I found it irritating. He had a mother and father, a giant-sized house. I didn’t, and after last night, I found myself wallowing in my own self-pity.

  Cliff must have sensed this because he smiled suddenly and patted my back. “Come on. I’ll let you use the binoculars first.”

  I shrugged and began to climb the tree.

  —

  We climbed this tree a lot, mostly when we pretended to be cops on a stakeout. Sometimes we pretended we were astronauts hanging on to a satellite in deep space after narrowly escaping our starship before it was sucked through a black hole. Sometimes, especially in the last few months or so when I began to feel the absence of Mom and Anna like two bullet-sized holes in my heart, I climbed up by myself and looked for them. I know that sounds crazy even for a kid, but that’s exactly what I did.

  When I reached the high, solid limb where I liked to sit, I scanned the area for anything to see. Deserted. No fisherman, no deer tentatively slipping from the dark world of the woods to the open sunlight for a drink in the pond, certainly no Sarah or Rebecca in bikinis. I repositioned myself on the limb so I could see out to the road and the cotton fields beyond. The clouds had moved on and the sun shone hot and bright on the rows of cotton, making them appear like silver liquid in the breeze. Turning back, I looked at the massive woods that lay behind the pond and my house. They stretched for a couple of miles before giving way to sloping fields and hills, and past that, County Road Seven, where Mom and Dad had forbidden me to go. It was filled with honky-tonk bars, loose women, and hard-drinking men. Dad would only shrug when I asked him about it and mumble that it was “no place for a boy.” Of course, his silence on the issue only increased my desire to see it. Yet that desire paled in comparison to the fascination I felt for the woods. I’d studied them so many times, wondering if they’d swallowed Mom and Anna whole, or perhaps they’d simply slipped away through some hidden crease in the trees. The little cabin was back there somewhere. When they first disappeared, the cabin had attracted quite a bit of attention. I can still remember the police tape and the constant flow of uniformed and plainclothes cops streaming in and out. Dad and I stood, tense with anticipation, watching for several hours before the sheriff finally sauntered over, winking at me, shaking my father’s hand. “Nothing,” he said. Dad—this was still very early on—had taken this as good news. Nothing meant they were still alive. Somewhere along the way, this definition had changed. At least for Dad. Nothing had become synonymous with a kind of lingering and bitter regret, the weight of unending frustration—in short, no news began to equal bad news.

  Some days, I liked to climb this tree and sit very still, dragging my gaze over the treetops, searching for the slight change, the little bump in the landscape where the cabin was. Then I’d be able to pick out the little smokestack on the top. According to Dad, the cabin hadn’t been occupied for years, and in fact, he wasn’t sure if it ever had been. This was about all I’d been able to drag out of him on the subject. Anything else I knew—or thought I knew—about the place was cobbled together from whispers, rumors, and innuendo. The gist of it was that the girls—those mysterious shadowy girls who seemed to haunt not only the woods, but the whole town—had something to do with the place. Whatever that might be, nobody said.

  Something bumped my leg. I looked down. Cliff was balanced precariously on the limb below me, holding the binoculars up. “Take them before I fall,” he said.

  I took the binoculars and put them to my eyes.

  “See anything interesting?” Cliff said.

  I scanned the pond. “Well, the girls obviously haven’t shown yet.” I moved the binoculars up so I could see the woods. Slowly, I tracked them over the trees until I came to the place where the cabin was. I saw the patched shingles, the solitary, rusty smokestack. Panning down some, I saw kudzu climbing over the walls and onto the roof, covering everything in a mess of green.

  “What are you looking at?” Cliff said.

  “That old cabin.” I pulled the binoculars from my face and handed them back to him. “You ever seen a ghost?”

  “Uh, did somebody say non sequitur?”

  “Huh?” I hated when Cliff used big words.

  “Non sequitur. Means moving from one idea to the next without any connection between them. The old cabin. Then the question: Have I ever seen a ghost? Which, by the way, I haven’t. Have you? And before you answer, please explain what this has got to do with the cabin.”

  “Nothing, really. It’s just that the cabin is kind of spooky. The two girls and all.”

  “The two girls? You mean the missing girls? That’s just a legend, Danny. Folklore. If two girls really did go missing in these woods, I’m positive their bodies would have been found by now. Besides, even if the girls had gone missing and had died, ghosts don’t exist.”

  I shrugged, not wanting to argue the point. Anyway, that wasn’t really what had been bothering me, and to Cliff’s credit, he could tell.

  “There’s something else, right?” he said. Cliff had many faults, but he was a great listener, and more importantly, he knew me. My moods, my brooding silences. The hesitation in my conversations. He could read me like he could read his science book, which is to say irritatingly well. Still, I hesitated, not sure if I should tell him about the white-haired man I thought Dad had shot at, or about Anna. I decided on the man. The encounter with Anna seemed too personal for some reason. Besides, telling him about that would be like admitting she was a ghost, which would be like admitting she was dead. Despite the vague, almost dreamlike nature of my trip through the woods the night before, I didn’t believe I’d seen a ghost. In fact, it felt strangely reassuring, like evidence that she was still alive.

  “The other night there was a man at our front door. He had long, white hair. He was old
. I don’t know. Maybe not old old, but haggard, you know. Worn the hell out. He was dragging this oxygen tank thing around with him. Like—”

  “Like Mr. Yates.”

  “Yeah, like Mr. Yates.” Mr. Yates was an old man who used to be the custodian at the school before my dad took over for him when his emphysema became too much to deal with.

  “Weird,” Cliff said, lifting the binoculars to his eyes. “But what makes you think he’s a ghost and not just some loon?”

  “I don’t know. Lots of things, I guess.” In reality, it was one thing: Anna. The visit from Anna had seemed connected somehow, had made my thoughts turn to the supernatural. And then there was Dad shooting at what had to be the same visitor I had seen the night before. Dad was a crack shot and he rarely missed. Yet I’d seen the light from the man’s cigarette from my upstairs window after the gunfire.

  “Anyway,” Cliff said. “What did he want?”

  “He just stood there. Like he wanted to knock on the door but couldn’t decide if he should or not. The wind was blowing and it was raining and his hair kept flying everywhere. He was smoking too. Switching out hits from the oxygen with drags on his cigarette. He just stood there. It seriously creeped me out.”

  “So you think this guy is a ghost?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just weird. It’s all too weird, like something out of a movie.”

  “Did this apparition have a scar on his right cheek?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Why?”

  “Long white hair, right? Messy. Greasy. Scruffy beard?”

  “Yeah.” I looked down and saw Cliff looking through the binoculars.

  “I think I see your ghost,” Cliff said.

  —

  I zoomed the binoculars in on the man’s face. If anything, he looked more frightening by daylight than he had a few nights ago. His scar was long; it ran from his right eye down his cheek until it disappeared beneath his shirt collar. He muttered to himself as he paced around outside the cabin.

  “What’s he doing?” Cliff said.

  “Looks like he’s moving in.” I panned out and saw that he was indeed moving in. He was carrying a large framed painting into the cabin. His pickup was filled with boxes and furniture.

  “You’ve got to be pretty hard up to move into that place.” Cliff whistled. “No running water, lights. Jeez. I hope he brought plenty of books.”

  I panned back to the truck. “I see a bed frame, so yeah, it looks like he’s taking up residence.”

  “Why do you think he came to your house the other night?”

  I shook my head and lowered the binoculars. “I don’t know.” What I didn’t say was that I felt damned determined to find out.

  Chapter Four

  WALTER

  I remember fourteen. Best and worst year of my life. Best because I learned how to be a man. Worst because I forgot how to be a boy.

  The year was 1960. The year I met Seth Sykes.

  Before Seth, I had friends, but they were the roughneck kind, the type of boys more interested in knocking out windows and kicking around seventh graders than doing anything worthwhile. I knew right away that Seth was different.

  We liked to hang out at the pond. Me, Jake Rogan, and Ronnie Watts. The summer before, we’d built a little hut out of two-by-fours hauled over from Ronnie’s place. We kept a good supply of cigarettes, moonshine, and one Playboy. May 1959. Had a sketch of three bathing beauties on the front. That magazine might have been the most looked-at periodical in the history of the world. I still compare every woman I see to the women in those pages. I suspect that’s a sad thing in the end, but it’s true, so there’s no use in hiding it.

  You might say it was sort of like our hangout, a place where we felt like men. It never occurred to us then that we didn’t have the first clue about what it took to be real men. Ronnie, he had a saying he liked to always recite when he was sitting in the little fort, a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Eugene Porter’s moonshine in the other. “A man in his castle is a beautiful thing. All I need is some cootch and I’d have the world by its balls.”

  That’s where we were the day Seth stumbled across us. We’d been doing nothing out of the ordinary—smoking, drinking, talking about girls, doing the things we thought made us men. Seth had been running fast and ran plumb into our little fort we’d worked so hard to build. We didn’t see him so much as feel the fort shake when he hit it.

  Jake put out his cigarette and went to look.

  Ronnie shrugged. “Some animal, I guess.”

  Jake came back inside, lit another cigarette. “Men,” he said, “anybody up for kicking some queerboy ass?”

  —

  I didn’t believe Seth was gay. I’m not sure Jake even believed it at first. Yeah, he was different from us, but there were a lot of kids we went to school with that were different. Being from the woods like we were, we tended to see everyone as an outsider, and if you were an outsider, you were queer. It’s just how we saw the world back then.

  It’s hard to find the right words to describe Seth. Fragile—that was the word that came to mind, though time would teach me this wasn’t really the truth of it. No, truth was, he was as tough as thick rope. We called guys like that hard asses in ’Nam. He didn’t look it, but Seth was a hard ass, through and through. Just took us a little while to figure that out, is all.

  Jake wanted to make him pay for being in our woods and said we should track him down.

  I told him it wasn’t worth it, but that was like trying to convince an alcoholic that he didn’t need another drink. Once Jake set his mind to something, he was going to do it.

  “I saw this faggot,” he said. “He’s as queer as a three-dollar bill and he’s on our turf.”

  That was enough for Ronnie, and I guess it was enough for me too. We went after him, running deep into the woods. We caught up with him ten minutes later at a little creek. The three of us stood on a hill, looking down on him. Seth sat at the edge of the water, his hands buried in his face. He was crying.

  I don’t think most people can pinpoint one certain moment when they change from a child to an adult. For me, though, it was easy. Not too long before, I would have joined Jake and Ronnie without a second thought. But for some reason, I didn’t see any joy in ridiculing somebody else anymore. Especially somebody as hard up as this kid was. Maybe it was because my own family was changing—my old man was drinking more and had been out of work going on a year. Maybe it was just that I understood how sometimes a kid needed to find a place alone where he could cry his eyes out and not worry about being called a baby. Hell, maybe it was the way he cried. There was nobody here to impress—at least as far as he knew. Those tears weren’t for gaining anybody’s damned sympathy; they were real.

  Years later, as a POW in Vietnam, I suffered moments like this when bawling my eyes out seemed like the only answer. But that was Vietnam. Even at fourteen, I knew Seth must have been up against some pretty heavy stuff.

  There was something else too. Something in his face that I recognized. Something in his eyes, maybe. I couldn’t place it, but for a second, I saw it clear enough to make me dizzy. Then it was gone, and I heard Jake’s voice:

  “A faggot and a baby. Does the little baby queer want his mommy?”

  Seth looked up, his eyes going from hurt to defiant in a hot second.

  Ronnie laughed. “Look at that hair. He’s a homo all right. Hey, pussy juice? You ever heard of scissors? Or maybe you’re trying to grow it out so you can put it in a ponytail?”

  Jake snickered. My stomach turned because I knew that every joke they made and every threat they hurled at this kid would make my own life that much harder. Pretty soon I’d have to make a choice. I couldn’t just stand here with them. Silence was the same as approval. I knew that, even at fourteen. Hell, I knew it more then than I ever would.

  Still, I wait
ed. They were just throwing out some insults. We’d done that to kids hundreds of times.

  “I’ll bet he’s got tits and a pussy,” Jake said.

  Seth stood up. “You won’t say it to my face.”

  Jake slapped me on the back and laughed. “Hell, I was hoping you’d say that.”

  —

  A little later, we stood in a semicircle around Seth, me on the right, Ronnie on the left, and Jake in the middle, facing Seth directly. From this closer view, I saw that Seth had a dark complexion and even darker eyes. He’d stopped crying now, and despite his long, wild hair, he didn’t look like a queer at all, not now. He looked like a kid, not too different from us save one thing. His eyes. I saw in those eyes something that frightened me a little. Later, I would see similar expressions in ’Nam. Guys who had seen too much. Guys who had stepped past some invisible line that the rest of us didn’t even know was there, and once they crossed that line, they changed. A silence went with them wherever they walked, and they stopped caring about their own well-being. When Jake spoke to him, he didn’t even flinch; those eyes stayed right on Jake’s, not moving, full of something reckless, full of something I didn’t have a word for yet.

  Still don’t, to tell the truth, though some days it feels like it’s on the tip of my tongue.

  Seth was thin and at least three full inches taller than Ronnie, who was tallest in our little gang. But Ronnie wasn’t just tall, he was muscular—broad shoulders with arms like small tree trunks. He’d been doing Jake’s dirty work for years. Just looking at Seth, I couldn’t imagine him being able to take any of us, much less Ronnie. Then I looked at his eyes again. You ever seen a cat go all bug-eyed before it pounces? That was Seth, except his eyes weren’t big or anything; no, truth was, they weren’t much more than slits. Didn’t matter, though; the intensity, the wild-assed focus was there. And I knew. No way one of us would take him down alone.