The Year of the Storm

by John Mantooth

  Jake stuck his finger in Seth’s chest. Obviously, Jake couldn’t read the same signs I could, or maybe he just didn’t care.

  “Where do you live, queer?”

  Seth knocked Jake’s hand away.

  Ronnie stepped forward. Jake held his hand up. Wait, the hand said. Just wait until I need you. Ronnie nodded and glared hard at Seth.

  “Touch me again, queer, and I’ll kill you.” The thing about Jake was that he probably meant it. I’d once seen him hold a puppy over a fire by the scruff of its neck because it wouldn’t stop barking. When the poor thing’s backside began to smoke, the puppy squealed and shook and tried to bite him, but Jake held on, at least until the fire started to burn his hand. Then he took the puppy over to the pond and shoved him under. I thought he would keep him there until he was drowned, but that wasn’t good enough for Jake. Jake wanted more. Jake always wanted more. He pulled the pup out and took him over to the fire to light him up again. This went on until the poor thing passed out. After that Jake tossed it aside, bored because he couldn’t watch it suffer anymore.

  It’s hard for me to say nowadays just why I stuck with Jake as long as I did. My father liked to talk about family and the importance of sticking with your blood, but Jake was no kin of mine. Still, we’d spent enough time together that we might as well have been brothers, or at least cousins. I suppose it was loyalty as much as anything. At least that’s what I liked to tell myself back then. The real reason—I know this now—is that there was part of me in Jake. A sick, twisted part that could stand by and watch a dog being tortured. Violence was a part of our lives back then. We didn’t think twice about killing a rabbit or fox or any animal, really. There was some measure of comfort in watching something else suffer and knowing you didn’t have to. This was in me as much as it was Jake. And when a thing like that gets inside you, it don’t come out easily. Even when you want it to real bad.

  So when Jake threatened to kill Seth, I had no reason to doubt he wouldn’t try.

  “Put your hand on my chest again and I’ll knock it off again,” Seth said.

  Jake pointed his finger at Seth’s chest a second time, but there was a key difference. This time he didn’t touch him. “What are you running from?” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Prove you ain’t a faggot.”

  “Don’t have to.”

  It was like some kind of Mexican standoff. Seth was so cool under our pressure that I think it set Jake on edge. The fact that he didn’t touch Seth again said something. I’d never seen Jake back down from anybody before.

  “Look around you, faggot. These woods belong to me, Ronnie, and Walter. If we catch you here again, you’re going home to Mommy with your nuts in a sling. Comprende?”

  I thought it was over then. Jake was giving him an out. He didn’t really want to fight this strange boy, not now. He’d wait until the odds were stacked far enough in his favor that he could humiliate Seth. It was never about just winning with Jake. He had to destroy the other person, kill their spirit. I’d seen him do it to some of the other boys at school before. But this was the summer. There wasn’t a teacher here to break things up when they got tight. These were the woods, where a wildness hung in the air, strong as the scent of pine. Jake must have felt the difference. I know I did. Seth seemed too unpredictable, too intense, and out here anything could happen.

  I thought it was over.

  If it had been, things might have been different. Maybe I’d never have known about the slip. Maybe I wouldn’t have survived ’Nam. Probably wouldn’t have. The slip and Seth kept me alive over there.

  It wasn’t over, though. Seth said something that set Jake off. Something that I’d later wonder how he knew.

  “You talk a lot about queers, don’t you? I’ll bet your daddy is taking it up the ass every day and night in prison. Maybe you just want to be like him.”

  I’d seen Jake angry before, but usually he kept it at a slow boil, just under the skin, always hot, but never full tilt. I had no idea how fast he could move. His fist had been at his waist, just hanging loose one second, and the next it was slammed up against Seth’s right cheek. He hit Seth four times before anybody could react. Seth crumpled to the ground.

  “You don’t know nothing ’bout my daddy,” he said, kicking Seth again.

  I realized Jake didn’t plan on stopping, so I reacted. That’s something situations like this teach you. What you’re made of. What you really believe. It’s one thing to stand by and watch a puppy being tortured; it’s not right, but it’s a different thing than watching one person trying to kill another. I was proud to find out that particular bit of darkness wasn’t in me.

  I grabbed Jake in a bear hug, squeezing down on his chest as hard as I could. “Go easy, Jake. You’ve made your point.”

  “That bastard. Wants to talk. About my daddy. I’ll kill him!” Each phrase was punctuated with another kick to Seth’s midsection. I finally succeeded in pulling him away. He cursed me and struggled to break free of my grip.

  “Get him off me!” he shouted to Ronnie.

  Ronnie looked stunned. He didn’t move.

  “Just stay put, Ronnie,” I said. “Jake needs to calm down before he kills somebody.”

  Jake twisted violently under my arms, but I didn’t let go. “Get. Him. Off. Me,” he said.

  Ronnie shook his head.

  “Remember three summers ago, Ronnie? Remember what those queers did to your—”

  “Okay,” Ronnie said. “Enough. Let him go.”

  I knew Ronnie could hurt me, but I also knew letting Jake go would get Seth hurt probably as bad or worse. I held on. Ronnie shook his head. “Your decision, Walter.”

  He tried to come around behind me. I turned Jake, always keeping him in front, a barrier between Ronnie and me. Seth stirred, getting up to his knees, coughing, maybe even spitting up blood.

  I couldn’t keep this dance up forever, but maybe I could last long enough for Seth to get away. “Get out of here,” I said.

  Seth made it to his feet but didn’t go anywhere. Stubborn fool.

  Ronnie lunged at me. I tried to move out of the way, but Jake wouldn’t move with me and I was stuck. He slid through my arms and to the ground. Ronnie spun me around and I lost my balance, falling back into Seth. Seth caught me and shoved me aside before going for Jake. I hit my head on the base of an oak tree and watched from the ground as Seth managed one good lick in on Jake—a wicked shot to his nose—before Ronnie grabbed hold of him and lifted him high into the air. At first, I thought he was going to take him to the creek, maybe toss him in, but no, he walked upstream a little to where the bank turned muddy and soft. Then I knew where he was heading. For as long as I could remember there was a certain area along the creek that was like quicksand. Hell, there wasn’t any like to it; it was quicksand. As a younger boy I’d thrown in rock after rock and watched, fascinated, as each disappeared from sight.

  Now I watched again as Ronnie slammed Seth into the soft sand. Just like all the rocks I’d thrown, Seth began to sink.

  By now, Jake was on his feet, wiping the blood from his nose. “Your ass is next,” he said to me, and walked over to the quicksand. Ronnie glanced at him because he wanted Jake to tell him what to do. Seth was sinking fast, and all his flailing didn’t seem to be helping much.

  Jake knelt and reached one hand back, motioning for Ronnie to hold on to him. Ronnie took his arm, and Jake leaned out over the quicksand. He shoved Seth’s chest hard, pushing him all the way under. Ronnie pulled Jake back and helped him regain his feet.

  I watched all this through blurred vision. I knew what I was seeing wasn’t right—that you couldn’t make somebody sink so easy, that quicksand didn’t work like that—but the knock on my head had been a doozy. I guess later, I chalked it up to that. Either way, at that moment, only one thing was clear:

 
Seth was gone.

  Ronnie shifted, and I could tell he was nervous. He kept looking at Jake.

  Jake shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “Jake,” I said. “He’s going to die.”

  “Shut up, Walter. Shut up or you’ll be next.”

  “Ronnie,” I tried. “Come on.” Ronnie turned and looked at me. He was torn between doing the right thing and his loyalty to Jake.

  The sand gurgled and Seth’s right arm flailed up, waving wildly. I tried to reach for it, but Jake held me back. It didn’t matter, though. The only hope I had of helping him would be if I were willing to fall in myself. Jake must have understood this because he let me go.

  I turned back to Ronnie. “If you don’t let him up now, he’s going to die,” I said. “You don’t want that. None of us do.”

  He just looked at me. Jesus Christ.

  “Take my hand,” I said. If I could get one of them to cooperate, I’d be able to lean over and grab Seth. Then together, we could pull him out.

  Jake shot Ronnie a look. Ronnie dropped his head.

  The sand gurgled again and his arm was gone. How long had he been down there? At least two minutes, probably more. How long could a person go without breathing?

  An idea hit me. It was my only chance.

  I picked up a rock. It was the perfect size. Fit my hand like a baseball. Jake saw what I was planning and lunged at me. I knocked him upside the head with the rock, hit him right in the temple. The blood came fast and covered his face like a veil. His knees wobbled, and I smelled the stench of urine as he pissed himself.

  Ronnie winced and slid away from me. I dropped the rock to show him I meant no harm. “You need to hold me, Ronnie. Don’t let me go in.”

  He looked from me back to Jake and back to me again.

  “He’s going to die,” I said. My voice cracked. I was about to cry, something I usually would have tried to hide, but not this time. This was too real, too in my face to pretend I didn’t care.

  I think Ronnie must have seen this and decided it was time to act, maybe past time. He nodded. “Okay.”

  I laid out on the ground, my elbows sinking into the sand. “Take my feet,” I said, and instantly felt Ronnie’s big hands around my ankles. The pull of the sand was strong, and for a minute I thought I’d plunge in headfirst, and no matter how strong Ronnie was, he wouldn’t be able to pull me out. But the moment passed, and I realized if I was still, the sinking wasn’t as fast.

  “I need to go farther out,” I said. “Do you have any good ground left?”

  Ronnie moved me closer. I dug in with all my strength. I was moving my arms through the sand. It felt like moving them through wet cement. I finally touched something, a pant leg. I grabbed it just as my own chin hit the sand. I tasted the salty muck and tried to yell. I’m not sure I made much sense with the sand in my mouth, but Ronnie got the message. He pulled me back just as I got a decent grip on Seth’s leg.

  A few minutes later, the three of us lay on solid ground, panting. Well, not Seth. Seth was coughing up a storm. Each breath he tried to take seemed riddled with sand and grit. His lungs rattled like they were full of broken glass, but he was alive, by God.

  I stumbled to my feet and stood there looking at what was left of my life. Seth—breathing, but barely. Jake—he might be dead—there was so much blood and it kept on coming. Ronnie—shaking hard, like somebody with a fever, doubled over, plumb exhausted from pulling both of us out.

  At the time, I had no idea that what I’d done had set into motion the events that would shape the rest of my life.

  —

  That night after I ate my supper and kissed Mama on the cheek while she listened to her radio programs, I went to the hall bathroom and locked the door. I heard my daddy outside the window with one of his buddies, popping the tops off their jugs of moonshine and muttering curses about the heat. Nobody had to tell me how that was going to end.

  Thanks to a botched land deal several years ago, we were one of the few houses in this region that had running water. The lines had already been run, and we’d been ready to move—to escape what Daddy called the “city folk”—when the deal fell through, and we were left with the best of both worlds: indoor plumbing and very few neighbors. Thanks to this, I didn’t have to go out to the pond to try my little experiment. That’s all it was—an experiment. That’s what I told myself.

  But like most of the things we tell ourselves, it was a damned lie.

  I stopped the sink up and let the water run until it was almost to the top. I thought about how Seth had been in the quicksand for all that time, and when he came out, he wasn’t drowned or anything. Not even passed out. He was alive, maybe coughing like crazy, but he was alive.

  I closed my eyes and lowered my head. The water came up around my ears and the world took on that echoing, faraway feel. My pulse throbbed in my temples, and I kept imagining hands on my back, pushing me down. I began to count.

  I made it to seventy before I knew my lungs were going to explode. My pulse hammered. Ten more seconds. Twenty. Thirty. I stopped counting and opened my eyes. The white of the porcelain sink was bright. I wanted to breathe so bad, but I kept my head under anyway. I’d read somewhere that you passed out before you died when you were holding your breath.

  The world shook. It was like the water was moving in the sink and not just the water; the sink moved too. I was fading, slipping away, or maybe it was the world that was slipping. The last thing I saw before sucking in a lungful of water was the sky over tall trees at dusk. Then my lungs filled up, and I began to choke. I pulled out of the sink and fell back against the window. Outside, I heard my father. “What the—?”

  Coughing didn’t seem to help. I couldn’t remember what I had been trying to prove. I just knew I wanted to live.

  Daddy lifted me off the floor, hugging me from behind. His big hands balled themselves under my rib cage, and he squeezed hard, sending the water out of my lungs and all over the bathroom mirror. He dropped me.

  “Next time,” he said, “try a gun.”

  After he left, I stayed on the floor. There was a part of me that wanted to go get his gun—I knew right where it was—and hold it under his chin and make him squirm before I pulled the trigger. But there was another part of me that was too glad to be alive to do anything as stupid as that.

  Chapter Five

  It was October when I heard about it. I was sitting in English class. Mrs. Harris had forgotten to pull the shades down, and outside it was one of those special fall days Alabama has: bright blue sky and red leaves, every tree blazing like a fire. I was watching a baby rabbit hop across the grass when I heard a girl speak.

  “She’s been gone since Saturday night. My uncle said she was just going out to check on the puppies in their barn. That was just about dark, Saturday night.”

  I turned around and saw Meredith Garrigan across the aisle from me. She was talking to Tina Bray, a girl I’d liked since the sixth grade.

  “How old is she?” Tina asked.

  Meredith shook her head. “Ten.”

  Tina made a face, wrinkling her nose like she was disgusted.

  “I know. It’s terrible.”

  Seth sat in the desk right in front of me. He had his head down, his usual position. Since the stuff that happened with Jake and Ronnie back in the summer, Seth and me had become casual friends, and I got used to seeing him like this in class. School was so easy for him, he barely paid attention. Once the teachers realized how smart he was, they pretty much left him alone.

  Seth seemed like he wasn’t listening until Meredith said, “It’s terrible.” Then he sat up.

  “What’s terrible?” he asked.

  She looked a little put off. “We were talking about my cousin.”

  “What about your cousin?”

  Just then, Mrs. Harris looked up from the essays she�
��d been grading. Her gaze fell on our group. I’m sure we must have looked like we were having quite the conversation, leaned over across the aisle like we were.

  “Something you’d like to share with the class, Miss Bray?” Mrs. Harris always went for Tina first. I believed it was because Tina represented a lot of things in a girl that Mrs. Harris didn’t like. Things like brains. Not get-the-right-answer kind of brains, but the think-for-yourself kind. To make things worse, Tina was something of a looker. First girl I can ever remember fantasizing about that wasn’t in the pages of that ’59 Playboy.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tina shot back.

  Mrs. Harris smiled and got up from her desk. She walked to the front of the room and addressed the rest of the class, the ones who had at least been pretending to quietly work on the sentences they were supposed to be diagramming. “Please listen, class. Miss Bray has something that she deems more important than learning the correct functions of our language.” She turned to Tina. “You have the floor, Miss Bray.”

  Tina stood up. “Thanks. Well, a lot of things are more important than diagramming stupid sentences, but this one is especially important. Meredith was just trying to spread the word that her ten-year-old cousin is missing. Has been missing since Saturday night, as a matter of fact. Considering today is Tuesday, this is a heck of a lot more important than your brainless sentences.”

  A lot of things might have happened after that. I’m sure they probably did. I heard later that Mrs. Harris almost had a come-apart. She gritted her teeth and broke her ink pen. She gave Tina a look so evil that a month later when Tina herself went missing, people actually muttered about Mrs. Harris being a suspect. Truth was, I didn’t notice anything at that moment except Seth. Seth broke. Right in front of us all, though I’m sure nobody else was watching, being too preoccupied with Tina and Mrs. Harris.

  He started by shaking his head, slowly, side to side. It was like he refused to believe what he’d heard. His mouth dropped open and just hung there, slack. He groaned and closed his eyes. He was gone, his eyes vacant, as he dropped his head to his desk. He didn’t move until the bell rang.