Evie of the Deepthorn

by André Babyn

  Huddy’s face was turning red.

  “You think he doesn’t like it?” asked Walid. “What’s the matter, big guy?”

  Walid was giving me ironic looks, as if he could push the joke far enough that I’d eventually be okay with it. I didn’t know what to do.

  “You should leave him alone, man.”

  “I think Huddy just needs to relax,” said Walid, pinching harder into Huddy’s flesh.

  Huddy slapped away Walid’s hand and turned toward him, snorting loudly, his chest heaving up and down.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said, firmly and slowly.

  People were starting to notice.

  “That’s probably a good idea, Walid.”

  Walid ignored me and held his hand up in front of Huddy’s face. Finger pointing, threatening. Like he was talking to a dog.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” he said to Huddy.

  Huddy kept trying to grab Walid’s hand, but Walid used his other hand to bat him away.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Walid said, again.

  “Jesus,” I said. “What the fuck, man?”

  Huddy finally caught Walid’s hand and started squeezing it. Huddy looks strong, and he’s much bigger than Walid, but his grip was so frantic that it didn’t seem like he could be causing Walid any pain. And summers spent hauling bricks for his uncle’s construction company meant that Walid was stronger, despite the considerable size difference.

  I think Huddy mostly sits around and talks to himself.

  Walid grabbed Huddy’s arms and pulled them behind him, pinning him to the table. It must have hurt, because Huddy was shouting now.

  “Get off me! Get off! Cocksucker! Get off!”

  I stood up from the table. I could see the nearest teacher on lunchroom duty, Mrs. Baker, with her back turned, talking to someone, not far away. It was loud in the cafeteria, but not that loud. It was only a matter of time before she noticed what was going on. I tried to get Walid to stop, but it didn’t seem like he could hear me, and Huddy just kept yelling for him to get off.

  “Hey!”

  That was Mrs. Baker. I froze. Walid jumped away from Huddy, who slowly picked himself off the table.

  “What’s going on here?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said Walid.

  “He was hurting me,” said Huddy, rubbing his arms.

  “Is that true?”

  “No,” said Walid.

  “No? That’s not what it looked like to me.”

  “Okay, maybe?”

  “Maybe?” asked Baker.

  “I didn’t realize I was hurting him,” said Walid.

  “You didn’t realize?”

  “No,” he said, suppressing a smile.

  “That’s smart. What about you?” she said, turning to me.

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” I said. It seemed impossible to explain.

  “You don’t know?”

  “He hurt me, too,” said Huddy.

  “What the fuck?” said Walid. “He didn’t do anything.”

  “Excuse me? ”

  “He didn’t do anything,” said Walid, cowed.

  Mrs. Baker asked us all our names.

  “I want all three of you to come with me.”

  “Are you serious?” asked Walid, knowing already that she was.

  * * *

  “Kent,” said Vice-Principal Johnson, as I sat down across from him. “How quickly we’ve become acquainted. This is the second time I’ve had to deal with an altercation between you and Mr. Hudson. I’m beginning to see a pattern.” Walid and Huddy were waiting in the office reception. They’d both already spoken to him.

  “There wasn’t an altercation between us,” I said.

  Johnson’s eyebrow rose — he could do the Spock thing, just one.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was just trying to talk to him. Then Walid came up, and …”

  “And what?”

  “They had a disagreement.”

  “About what?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing, really.”

  “That sounds about right to me,” said Johnson. “But would you say it would be more accurate to suggest that your friend Walid started the disagreement?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to throw Walid under the bus, but he had also made that pretty fucking hard to not do.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Johnson.

  I guess it was pretty clear.

  He gestured to my bag. “Is your camera in there?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Is there anything you need to show me?”

  I felt heavy. Obviously I couldn’t let Johnson see the footage or hear anything that Walid had said while I was filming. I felt like an idiot for shooting it in the first place. Lauren was so, so right.

  “No,” I said. “I just don’t like keeping it in my locker.”

  Johnson looked at me for a long time. He was calm and his calm was giving me a migraine. Adults. Time moves faster for them. I tried to look as innocent as possible.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “I believe you, but only because I’ve already heard Walid and Patrick’s versions of events. I will accept that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in case you weren’t aware, and I don’t understand how you couldn’t not be, Patrick is not having a good time right now. It is our duty, as decent human beings, to be as understanding of that as possible. If I catch you bothering him again I won’t go so easy on you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “This is a warning. You are not completely exonerated. The slate has not been wiped clean. Remember that. I won’t forget.” He stared at me, hard.

  I nodded.

  “Okay. You’re free to go.”

  Astounded, I blinked for a few moments, then mumbled my thanks and left. Johnson called both Huddy and Walid in after me. Walid gave me a confused look, as if it was my fault that he was going back in. Huddy looked like he’d been crying. I completely understood. I felt like I’d been crying, too. I hated being talked to like that.

  Especially when I deserved it.

  I had to get a note from the secretary excusing my absence because the second bell had rung long ago and I was late.

  I learned afterward that Huddy had burst into tears when he and Walid were called in together, and that Johnson had threatened Walid with suspension. Instead, somehow, Walid argued him down to a couple weeks’ detention, with much more serious consequences to come if he ever bothered Huddy again. I thought Walid was smart enough to know not to ever fuck with Huddy in the future. The only reason he escaped suspension, as far as I understand it, was his grades. And his eloquence, I guess.

  His parents would have completely flipped if he’d been sent home.

  “Fucking Huddy,” said Walid, after he’d finished telling me the story. “It didn’t have to be such a big deal.”

  I didn’t say anything, because something had dawned on me after I’d left Johnson’s office, during my long walk back to English: Huddy hadn’t told Johnson anything about the camera or the two days I’d spent filming him.

  When I got home that night I tried to call Lauren at her house, but no one picked up. I sent her an MSN message later, but there was no response. I was going to have a lot of explaining to do the next day in bio, if she’d even talk to me. I felt like the worst person in the world. Or at least a pretty bad one.

  6

  What does it mean when someone dies?

  I was thinking about that a lot.

  Sometimes I thought about Mom and me, about how we were all that we had left. And how I felt guilty about that without really knowing why. And also that I was afraid, somehow, that whatever it was that Jeff had felt, I would feel it, too. Like it was contagious. And then I thought back to the beginning of Evie, Evie entering the Deepthorn, lost, alone. Only it wasn’t Evie disappearing into the trees, it was Jeff. And that gave me a glimmer of hope. Like he could come
back.

  I wanted him to come back.

  But I was worried that if I went after him, I’d get lost, too.

  Sometimes I’d go down to the creek and imagine that it wasn’t a creek, but a river or a lake. And that off in the distance I could see tiny lights blinking. And I imagined that there was something else out there, an apartment building or a neighbourhood or a whole city, where everyone is different, just slightly. Like, it’s not easier or better there, it’s just different. And in that world Jeff is like me, confused and maybe struggling, but still alive. And then I think, maybe I’ll write a novel and it will be the life that I want Jeff to live. And it won’t be a perfect life. Just a life. But as if I could change it. As if representation was more than fantasy. And then I think, is that why it’s so difficult to figure out what I’m doing with this documentary? Is that why it means so much to me?

  * * *

  On Saturdays or on Mom’s days off during the summer, when we were kids, she used to take us to this park on the edge of town. Just a swing set and a jungle gym and some benches, but it felt special because the park was near a creek and little forest. The forest has recently been cleared, now it’s just sand and piles of dirt, ready to accept the housing development that they’re building next year, which, I’m told, will surround the park in concentric rings of crescents and cul-de-sacs and detours and long, leaning lanes cutting across from Fourth to the highway.

  Behind the park there was a path that led over a stream and into the forest, where it meandered and criss-crossed over itself before coming out of another exit about a hundred metres away. But you could also follow the creek deeper and deeper into the bush on a separate trajectory. If you followed it that way, the creek walls got higher and higher, like a sort of trench, and you’d have to make the decision to walk along the top, which was sometimes difficult, depending on how thick the forest was, or right alongside the creek itself, which was the more dramatic route, but didn’t always offer a dry place for you to set down your feet, although if you were really careful you could pick your way across some of the less shallow areas, or, since the creek was pretty narrow at times, wedge yourself across the banks.

  By the time Jeff was thirteen, he would usually just wander off to the creek as soon as we got there, leaving me to play by myself. I would have rather gone off with him, but I felt like with him gone someone had to entertain Mom, so I usually played on the swings while she watched. Maybe that’s weird. But the way Mom always announced that we were going to the “good jungle gym,” even though it wasn’t much different than any of the others in town, made me feel that it meant something to her, like she was doing something special for us. Even though we’d probably dubbed the park “good” arbitrarily one morning when we were feeling bratty and she was dragging us somewhere else.

  The last day I can remember all of us going there together, I had been feeling so generous that I had even allowed Mom to push me on the swings. I was ten by then, and old enough to find that a little bit humiliating, but Jeff had been a dick in the car and I wanted to make up for it. I don’t remember what he’d said exactly, but he was pretty snipey then. Often the smallest comment would set him off. Even just asking questions about what he’d done at school could cause a mega fight, because Mom would keep pressing and pressing even though it was clear that he didn’t want to talk about it at all. And instead of giving in and telling her about his day he snapped and turned it back on her. I always felt like it was my responsibility to smooth things over, like my being good would somehow reassure Mom that Jeff was okay and that she could leave him alone. Or that Jeff would see that there was a way to get along with Mom without causing things to escalate so quickly. But I know that Mom didn’t feel like Jeff was okay, that he had surprised her or astonished her somehow, so that now she was always ready for him to explode, even when he was just minding his own business, like he was a psychopath or a killer that had snuck into our home.

  After a while, Mom went to sit down on a park bench somewhere and I kept swinging. I was finally able to go as high as I wanted. But I started thinking about Jeff and wondering what he was up to.

  The forest was usually abandoned, and even the park itself was pretty quiet on that particular June afternoon. I don’t think it even occurred to Mom to be worried. Durham is sleepy, and even if it’s hard not to notice that there are plenty of sketch people around, when you really start to look for them, it’s also easy enough to pretend that they don’t exist if that’s what you’d prefer.

  Maybe she should have been more worried, though.

  It wasn’t much of a forest, or at least that’s what I’d always thought, but I’d always gone in with Jeff, and when I was with Jeff I felt brave, like nothing could hurt me. Which was maybe stupid since he was only three years older than me and he was just a kid, too. And if I went in with him there was at least one thing that could hurt me, and that was him, and he often did, turning and whaling on me out of nowhere or running off and pretending like he had abandoned me. I always knew when he’d run off that it was just a game, but that didn’t stop me from playing my part and crying like it wasn’t.

  Once I got farther up from the park, and I could no longer hear the cars passing on the road, or see the field or the swings, once I realized that Jeff was going to be harder to find than I’d thought, I started to get scared. I called his name and hoped that would dispel my fear, but when he didn’t appear and there was no answer, not from him or from the forest itself, it just made things worse. It felt like the birds and the plants and the insects were holding their breath, as stupid as that sounds, like they were waiting for something to descend on me, waiting for me to screw up so that they could catch me when my guard was down and tear me to shreds. It also wasn’t out of the question that it was Jeff waiting, that he was just behind a bush and he was going to jump out at any moment and make me shit my pants, which was comforting, in a way. But not really comforting. Only more comforting than the alternative.

  I tried to keep cool as I kept looking for him, fighting the panic that threatened to overtake me at any moment, as I imagined all kinds of dangers, from the relatively benign — but much more probable — lurking animals, to crazed child-killers, to supernatural horrors that were completely undefined in my imagination, but which somehow terrified me the most, filling up all of the negative space with a kind of profound and focused malevolence that I had somehow deeply offended or betrayed. I imagined for a minute that I wasn’t looking for Jeff, but for myself, like it was my own body that was lying somewhere among the ferns. And not to say that I was looking for a body, although the thought had crossed my mind that whatever was waiting for me in the forest had gotten Jeff, too. In any case I was ready to panic and run screaming at any moment, and it took everything I had to stop that from happening.

  Jeff would have seen that I was falling apart. He could smell my weakness. He knew when I was ready to cave, usually, well before I did. He had it down to a science: my psychic pressure points were ingrained in his DNA. You get that when you’re an older brother, I think. So even if he hadn’t planned on surprising me, it would have been impossible for Jeff to resist if he was spying. The fact that he hadn’t jumped out yet was disconcerting, either because I was walking into a really exceptional trap or because something was actually wrong.

  I don’t know what I was imagining, but I also didn’t want to clarify that too much for myself either, because to think about the horrors waiting for me was, to a certain extent, to bring them into being.

  There was a place in the forest he liked to go, along the creek bed, where the banks were steep, and the vines — raspberry bushes, I think — thick overhead. The creek was narrower there and there was a little room to move around. Not far away enough that he wouldn’t have been able to hear me calling for him, but I headed there, anyway.

  Where Jeff liked to go. I didn’t, not especially. But I could see the appeal. The place seemed enclosed, like a fort or a home, but it also seemed menacing
to me, like it belonged to someone else and they could come home at any moment. It was hard to get there, at least without getting wet or falling on your ass. At times the creek went right to either bank and the only way to cross was to inch across slippery tree trunks or to nimbly skip across the tops of the least-submerged rocks.

  The first time we’d gone that way had been weird, too. It was midsummer, and we’d spent all of this time navigating the creek bed, which seemed private and secret and almost magical because we were discovering it for the first time, and then we heard voices, hushed voices, speaking intimately, like we were waiting outside someone’s kitchen or bedroom, and we stopped. I must have been seven or eight, and the idea of meeting anyone in the forest terrified me, but Jeff wanted to keep going. After watching him push forward for a while I reluctantly followed him, because the alternative — missing out or being alone in the forest or being called gay or a pussy, later — was much worse.

  There were three teenagers where the creek narrowed, two men and one woman. A couple and another man. Maybe I should say two boys and a girl, but they seemed like men and women to me then, although more dangerous because men and women didn’t seem capable of the same kinds of things that I knew teenagers were. One boy was leaning against the creek wall and the other two were sitting on a log pushed up against the bank. All of them were smoking, the couple sharing a single cigarette and the boy with his own and sparking a lighter in his hands.

  “Look, Paul,” said the boy standing by himself, when we rounded the final bend.

  “How did you guys get here?” asked Paul.

  We just stared at them quietly. Jeff gestured behind us.

  The girl laughed. “They look so confused.”

  I wanted to leave immediately, but I could see that Jeff was in awe, either of the little space and how it expanded out and felt secret, or of the teenagers themselves and what they stood for: death, sex, secret knowledge.

  The first boy barked and Jeff flinched.

  “We own this forest,” said Paul.

  “No you don’t,” said Jeff, quietly, as if he couldn’t be sure.