The Year of the Storm

by John Mantooth

  I did want to find the shelter again, to show Cliff, but for some reason I couldn’t locate it. The woods looked so different now, devastated by the storm. I would be doing good just to find the old cabin again, much less the storm shelter where I’d seen Anna. Besides, I still wasn’t sure what to make of that whole day anyway. Like the night I’d seen Anna near the quicksand, the time in the storm shelter seemed more like a dream than reality.

  A few minutes later, we stood on top of a steep embankment, looking down at the little shack. It looked almost the same as the last time I was here, when I’d watched the police coming in and out behind yellow tape. A rutted, dirt road served as a driveway to connect the place with another similar road that wound out to the highway. You could drive back here—the man obviously had—but most people wouldn’t want to put their cars through it. I noticed his mud-splattered truck, an old F-250 parked in the shade just off the makeshift drive. The yard was littered with junk, although it was evident he’d been trying to clean it up some because it had been much worse the last time I was here. A busted generator, spare tires, and the scraps of at least three push mowers sulked among the overgrown weeds and kudzu. The shack itself seemed to have sprouted vines. The kudzu fell off the roof like shaggy hair, tangling over on itself, thickening, closing off the cabin from sight. Except for the very front, where the old man had obviously cleared enough vines away to go inside. Now, the door stood open, thumping very gently in the breeze.

  I looked at Cliff. “You up for this?”

  “Not really.”

  “Me either.”

  We stood there a moment. I don’t know about Cliff, but I was scared. You grow up in a place, taking certain things for granted. One of those things was that this cabin was a dark, brooding entity, an almost living and breathing thing that kept its secrets deep within. Watching that door thump in the breeze, almost like an invitation, didn’t help either.

  Yet . . .

  I was here. The man said he knew where my mother and sister were. I had to go in. I just had to.

  I started down the embankment, ignoring the way my insides were twisted in knots. I reached the bottom and turned back around. Cliff was still standing there. “Well?”

  He shrugged, slid down the embankment, and followed me inside.

  —

  We found him on the floor beside his bed and facedown in a pool of his own vomit. The smell hit me the moment we walked in, a kind of pungent aroma that suggested raw meat. We pushed through a darkened hallway to a single room in the back. A bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon lay on the floor beside him, its amber contents seeping out and mingling with what appeared to be yellow puke.

  I never assumed he was dead. Somehow that seemed out of the question. Maybe it was just my nature to always think people would survive. I certainly believed that Mom and Anna had. Still, it was alarming to see him like that, a man who had literally drunk himself into a stupor.

  I picked up the man’s arm gently. It was like a lead weight.

  “Is he alive?” Cliff asked, his voice cracking into a whisper.

  “I think so. He’s just passed out.” I looked around. “I wonder if this place has running water.”

  “Not likely,” Cliff said.

  I wanted to get a damp cloth and place it on his forehead. Not sure why, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Before I had a chance to move, he stirred, lifted the same arm I’d picked up, and used it to shoo me away. I stepped back and waited as he pushed himself up from his vomit. The side of his face was covered in it, the yellow semisolid stuff peppering his beard like ornaments in a bush. He reached for the blanket on his bed and used it to wipe his face before righting the bottle of Wild Turkey, preserving the very last bit. He contemplated the bottle, as if trying to decide if he should drink it, but ended up shaking his head, placing the bottle upright on a nightstand, and falling back onto his mattress.

  “What’s your name?” he said, his dirty T-shirt riding up past his belly and exposing a long scar that bisected his lower abdomen and curved downward beneath his blue jeans. I looked at his glass eye—it had to be glass, didn’t it?—and the scar that ran down his face. The two wounds were similar, as if done by the same blade. All of these thoughts were running through my head, so much so that I didn’t even give him an answer.

  His good eye cut in my direction. “You got a name, don’t you?” His voice was guttural, more like the moaning of a bear than the words of a person.

  “Yeah,” I said, and my voice sounded foreign to me, a strange instrument that had grown dull and almost useless. “Danny.”

  He lifted his hand from the mattress and pointed across the room. “Danny, go get me that tank.”

  I turned and saw the oxygen tank on wheels leaning against an antique-looking dresser. I started for it when he said, “And a pack of smokes from the top drawer, would you?”

  —

  His name was Pike. Walter Pike.

  He spoke in a deep, ancient, whiskey-stained voice. His dead eye never looked at me, and I always found myself wanting to look over my shoulder to see what it was watching. Sometimes he muttered to himself, and when he did, his eyes went distant, and he didn’t seem to be in the same place as we were. It scared me, and only when he’d refocus and light another cigarette did the fear dissipate.

  “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “You know about my mother and Anna?”

  He closed one eye. The dead one stayed open and I realized whatever injury he’d suffered there must have not only taken his eye but also severed whatever nerves were needed to control the eyelid.

  “Know about them? I believe I might, but it’s probably not as clear-cut as you think.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Pike ran a liver-spotted hand through his hair. “I don’t hardly know myself.”

  I could feel Cliff’s eyes watching me. I didn’t look at him because once I did, I knew I’d see the skepticism there and I’d be less able to push my own away.

  I shook my head, trying to make sense of it. “How can you hardly know?”

  Cliff interrupted me. “Mister, if you’re just blowing smoke up our asses, please stop. This is real serious stuff to Danny. We’re talking about his family.”

  Surprisingly Pike nodded at this and dislodged a cigarette from his half-empty soft pack. “Let’s go outside,” he said. “It stinks in here.”

  —

  Pike had us bring out wrought-iron chairs from what served as his den and set them in a half circle out in the yard. We sat in the half-light of the woods, Cliff and I shifting uneasily, while Pike alternately smoked Marlboros and took hits from his oxygen tank. Occasionally, he did that thing where he stopped and looked off in the distance. Once he even nodded as if he were hearing a voice that we couldn’t.

  “It’s a long story. I think I’ll have to tell it from the beginning for you to believe it. And even then, I’m afraid there’ll be no guarantee.”

  I wanted to tell him to just get on with it. Spit it out and let me decide for myself.

  “The hard part is deciding where the beginning begins. I think with Seth. Seth’s dead now. But I’m not sure that even matters. Maybe it does. There’s so much I don’t know.”

  It was maddening. The way he’d start to say something meaningful before detouring to begin some other thought. He was hungover, probably still groggy. I chalked it up to that.

  “The reason,” he continued, “I’ve been hanging around your house at night is that I was trying to get up the courage to talk to you, to somebody, but I think it is better you than your father. Adults, they don’t believe. I’ve been selfish for waiting this long, but I’m afraid . . .” He trailed off, looking around anxiously, maybe for a bottle of something hard. He even shifted in his chair like he wanted to rise, to go back inside, surely for the remains of the Wild Turkey by his b
edside. “I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.” He beat the palm of his hand against his forehead. “Oh, if only Seth could tell you.” He looked out into the woods. “You always understood it better than me,” he said, and I actually turned to look for who he might be talking to. There was nothing but trees swaying in the afternoon breeze.

  I looked at Cliff. Cliff gave me a look back. The guy was nuts. Still, I felt a fascination, a deep need to get at what was going on, why he was nuts, why he felt the need to inflict his madness on my family.

  I spoke slowly, calmly. “Can you please just tell us what you know about my mother and sister?”

  He nodded at me, his good eye fixing me with a look I couldn’t read. “Yes, you deserve to hear it. Your mother and sister have vanished from this world, but they’re not dead, at least I don’t think they are. They’ve simply . . .” He paused here, as if trying to come up with just the right words. “They’ve simply disappeared from this world.”

  I was about to respond, maybe even laugh, when I heard a vehicle coming down the rutted road that led to Pike’s shack.

  For an instant, I thought the truck was Dad’s, but then the red Silverado rounded the bend and I realized it belonged to Cliff’s father.

  Mr. Banks never came out here. I shot a look at Cliff. He didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Did you tell your dad we were coming out here?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly? What does that mean?”

  The truck slid to a stop on the dry gravel. “It means I just mentioned we were going to be exploring over by the old cabin today.”

  I gave him a nasty look.

  “It was the safe thing to do.” He glanced at Pike, who was taking all of this in passively. “He might be a crazy man for all we know.”

  Pike chuckled. “You got that right.”

  Mr. Banks unfolded his long frame from the driver’s seat and quickly headed toward us. I glanced at Pike. He was watching the man with his head tilted to the side, a look of perplexed agitation on his face.

  “Get in the car, boys,” he said.

  “Help you?” Pike said gruffly.

  Mr. Banks barely looked at him. Instead, he focused all his intensity on me, which was disconcerting to say the least, considering all the time I had spent at Cliff’s over the years when he’d barely acknowledged my existence.

  This obviously rubbed Pike the wrong way. He stood up and positioned himself between Cliff’s father and me. He cleared his throat. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  Cliff’s dad shot him a withering look. “You’ve got some nerve coming back here.”

  “I grew up in these woods. Nerve ain’t what I’d call it.”

  “What would you call it?”

  Pike thought for a minute. “The right thing to do.”

  “What would you know about that?”

  Pike seemed to consider this. “Plenty more than you know about good manners, it seems.”

  Cliff’s dad laughed. “Manners? This is my son. He and the other boy are coming with me, and unless you want the police out here faster than you can count to five, old man, you’ll stay the hell away from him.”

  Pike just stared at him but made no further argument.

  Mr. Banks met his glare, mumbled something under his breath, and pushed his way past until he stood over me.

  “Daniel,” he said. “They’ve arrested your father.”

  —

  Talking to one’s father in jail for the first time is not something that’s easy to forget. It was the first time I can remember feeling like our situation was spinning out of control. It seemed beyond bad luck, beyond the curves that life throws you. I felt at that moment like our family was laboring under a vicious curse and once I heard what my father had to say, the feeling grew stronger.

  I took his call at Cliff’s house, where I would be staying indefinitely. Dad’s court-appointed attorney had already been in touch with Mr. Banks.

  “Danny?” His voice was clear and loud in my ear. Somewhere in the background I heard a cell door clanging shut with an eerie finality that made me shudder.

  “Hey,” I said. My lips felt dry, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “What’s happening?”

  There was a pause. I imagined Dad’s eyes roaming over the empty cell, the cot, the plain gray walls, the floors stained with piss and blood. “Danny, I—” He faltered. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For what I did.”

  I felt cold fingers on my spine. What had he done? I had to resist the urge to hang up the phone.

  “What was it?” I said at last.

  “Mr. Banks didn’t tell you?”

  I could hardly speak now. “No, sir.”

  “Jesus. I should have never gone down there.”

  “Where? What happened?”

  “You know the place out on County Road Seven? Ghost Bells?”

  It was a bar, a honky-tonk, a place I’d been expressly forbidden to go.

  “Yeah. What about it?”

  Dad hesitated. I could almost hear him changing his mind. He’d already told me too much. He would cut me off, tell me I was too young.

  But I was wrong.

  “I beat a man. At the bar. I hurt him pretty bad, Danny.”

  “What?” There was nothing he could say that would have surprised me more.

  “It was a mistake. I let . . . I let my emotions get the best of me.”

  “Why?”

  Dad sighed. “Danny, there are some things I haven’t told you about your mother. Some things I probably shouldn’t have kept from you.”

  I waited, again resisting—this time by force of will—the urge to hang up on him.

  “Your mother—well, you know, she had some trouble with alcohol—but that’s not all, Danny. Your mother, at one time, well, she was a drug addict, and she’s cheated on me before, Danny.”

  I sucked in a deep breath. He was lying. It was easier for him to think about this sort of thing instead of her being dead. No different than Gran.

  “I know this is hard to hear, Danny, but in the weeks and months before she left, she slipped back into her old—”

  “Stop lying. Just stop it.”

  “Danny, you have to face the truth. I know she’s your mother, and I know you love her, but there comes a point—”

  I hung the phone up. It’s not something I’m proud of. My father was in jail, and I was all he had left, yet I hung up on him. These days, when I think about regrets, I don’t have many, but that’s one that still gets me. I suppose in the grand scheme of things, it was a small gesture, but I can’t shake the thought of him alone in that cell, believing that he’d been abandoned first by his wife, and then by his son.

  —

  But that’s not the only thing that nags at me about that conversation these days. He’d said she “slipped.” It was a word I hadn’t heard yet from Pike, but I would. It’s a word now that’s always on my lips, as if mouthing the syllables enough times would help me break the code of my own life and see the truth of memory. She slipped. Yes, one way or another, I suppose she did.

  Chapter Ten

  WALTER

  Her name was Rachel Scroggins, and they never found her. She was the first to disappear. Rach was what her friends and family called her. She was only ten and actually lived across the highway from me, about a mile to the west. Her family had a small piece of land with a barn. They raised chickens and owned three cows. She loved German shepherds, and her dog, Molly, had given birth to twelve puppies just a week before she disappeared.

  Back then her disappearance obsessed the town. It wasn’t on the national news or the talk shows because in the early sixties local mysteries stayed local. In the sixties, the only thing that could bring national news to Alabama was civil rights. Anyth
ing else that happened in the state was mostly just ignored. It was no different on the local level. Look back at the papers from the early sixties. You’ll find very little about Rachel, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t care. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her name was on the lips of every person within a thirty-mile radius. We all felt the loss, the hard truth that somebody had taken a ten-year-old girl. Sure, she might have gotten lost. Those things do happen. My daddy used to tell a story of how back in 1936, a girl wandered off into the woods and didn’t come back for nearly two weeks. She just got lost and confused. She panicked. She would have died in the woods if a hunter hadn’t literally stumbled over her unconscious body.

  This was different. People might have hoped she was lost in the woods, but in our hearts, we didn’t believe that. The police had combed every bit of land within thirty miles. They had dogs. They had volunteers. But in the end, they had nothing. Not a damned thing.

  My mother came into my room one night after turning off her radio programs. She sat on the edge of my bed. I was pretending to sleep, even though I couldn’t because my thoughts kept jumping between Seth and Ronnie and Jake.

  “She’s dead,” my mother said. Her voice was a whisper. I didn’t move.

  Mama touched my forehead with her hand. She leaned over me, and I could feel her tears soaking into my sheet. “Dead, dead, dead. Dead.”

  She sat there for a long time. I don’t know what made her come into my room that night. I don’t know if she had a vision or saw it in a dream or had inside knowledge of what was happening. To this day, I don’t know. What I do know—and I knew it then too—is that she was right. The girl was dead.

  —

  A few weeks later, when Tina disappeared, Seth stayed out of school. Tina and Rachel. Their names were on everybody’s lips. Tina’s story was simple. Heartbreakingly simple. She’d been walking her dog, Little Rascal, one evening and never came home. The leash was found in the park, the same park where Seth and I had sat and talked after school until dark. Other than the leash, there was nothing, not a fingerprint, not a note, nothing. Even the dog was gone.