Into that Good Night

by Levis Keltner

  After the kids had spread out over the area, Greg wandered over to the original crime scene and stepped over the police tape. Greg was taller than most kids and wore mesh shorts and his favorite gray basketball jersey that declared: STRONGER THAN FAILURE. He was in seventh grade and had wanted to ask Erika out since the first school assembly of the year. She’d been nearby chomping gum—which she wasn’t supposed to have—and blowing big bubbles, and she gabbed to a friend like she could care less about the rules or school spirit, which Greg found sexy. He felt the same irreverence about dumb school. It was school. Erika did cheer, though. Greg knew she cheered because sometimes he’d go to a basketball game to measure up the players to later challenge them to a real street game, and he began to notice her warming up beside the bleachers, stretching her tanned legs, always a shade darker than the other girls’. Then a whistle would blow, and she’d spring in front of the first row, kicking her white shoes up past her head and doing shakes and twists and leaps and things Greg wouldn’t have been able to dream up with those gold pompoms zigging and her blonde hair zagging. That shit had put him into a trance. He typically never stayed for a whole game, but he stayed to the very end of every one starring Erika Summerson front and center. Then he’d pretended to be busy talking with friends on his phone—though only rereading an earlier text from his mom that she’d be home later than usual—while the kids and parents and next the players filed out of the gym doors. One night Greg watched Erika exit the locker room, a gym bag over her shoulder and still sexy as hell in the sweats she’d thrown on. And off she went with some guys on the other team, which sucked, but it was also an amazingly tough thing for a girl to do. “Erika … Erika …” he’d later repeated in the dark on the way back to lower Palos under the too-quiet, leafless boughs of fall trees hanging over the sidewalk, not bouncing his ball, but clutching it to his chest. They were the same, he thought—two outlaws among so many ass-kissers. She was the girl for him. Greg didn’t do well at tests and homework and so couldn’t play on the team, not that he’d want to put up with that teamwork trash. He didn’t hang out with the jock crowd, either, and never had the guts to stop the girl after a game and ask her out. And now … a few muddy footprints from those spoiled, school-athlete motherfuckers and a burnt-out fire pit collecting dirty rainwater. He hefted the shovel blade closer to his hands. Greg was sure that, if he and Erika had been dating, he’d be raging and might not just want to kill some fools, but actually do it—kill and bury the bitches with the shovel right here.

  “There’s nothing over there,” E. said to the tall basketball kid, despite the threatening manner with which he held his shovel, as if against all the ghosts of Bachelor’s Grove. The boy was listening to music, and his ear buds blared, “On to the next one. On to the next one.…” E. didn’t like that a stranger was in the circle where her sister had been killed. Nor did she like that she didn’t like it. E. didn’t believe in anything, so how could she sympathize with trapped souls not appreciating the breathers that violated their place of death? She tried to picture the good times that must’ve been had here late into the night. Erika’s shrieking laughter returned.… Ordinary woods lay beneath the trash of the scene—dirt, plants, trees, bugs—and all this would be woods again one day, E. reassured herself and grounded yet another irritating emotional flare-up.

  Greg lowered the shovel. The kid took heaving breaths, and E. saw that he’d been thinking and feeling too much. Though tough acting, Greg’s concern for her sister made him seem vulnerable in a way that E. bitterly understood. If he’d loved her, it must’ve been the kind of love familiar to her—the kind some fought brutally to keep, like her parents, who shouted and shoved and woke the neighbors and called the police on one another in the name of preserving senseless, but unmistakable love. It was easily more senseless how she was jealous of it. Not of their love necessarily, but of the fight for something bigger than oneself.

  “You searched this area?” Greg said. “You sure?”

  “John says he did.”

  “John says, huh.”

  “He also said, ‘Our fate hangs in the Big Tree’s branches,’ or something, so—yeah.”

  “Kooky. But OK. Whatever the man says.”

  Greg had first heard about John H. Walker after Greg’s mom remarried and they’d moved to an apartment in the burbs way back in the fourth grade. If he’d talked sports with any Palos Hills kids, they’d inevitably mention the guy and shamelessly compare his talent to Hall of Fame baseballers. Greg had thought the whole town pretty damn stupid until he saw Walker play. He was the real thing. The guy sprung like a snake and made flashy catches like the pros while the crowd oohed and aahed. So Walker was legit despite that he cared too much about his image and grades and all that. And their favorite sports were different. Still, it was kind of cool to see him turn up alone on Greg’s court at Penny Park one November night, before Erika had died. The halogen floodlight mounted to the telephone pole behind the backboard had already whited-out the world beyond the court, right before Greg was about to head home, when the swings creaked. Greg saw nothing, then jumped—startled by the Dead Man on the sideline. Buried in a scarf and the hood of his parka, his face looked bloodless, zombiefied. The kid had cancer or something. Still, meeting Walker was worth skipping dinner for. They played HORSE. Greg won, but the game wasn’t a sweep. Walker might’ve had a chance if he’d stopped gabbing and focused when he had the ball. Greg remembered the kid asking after the winning shot if there was anything he loved more than basketball. Greg had said no. Greg then mentioned Erika, like some big stalker. He kept shooting, stripped down to his jersey and shorts, his body heat worked up, trying hard not to listen too hard to the bundled kid on the sidelines pushing with the personal questions, as though somehow he knew how sick Greg’s heart was for her, the guy saying, “Erika … Erika …” with these floats of white breath that Greg dodged on his way to the hoop, as if she would materialize out of one if the kid wasn’t dying and had a few ounces better lung capacity. Greg couldn’t shoot worth a shit, then, too afraid it could happen, which was dumb because of how badly he wished it would—until an hour later, when they were drinking hot Gatorade teas together—he and John H. Walker drinking Greg’s own winter game elixir, no shit—outside of 7-Eleven, like buddies, and Greg admitted wanting to love someone as much as he loved the game. “Something bigger,” Walker said and admitted he knew the feeling. Greg walked home that night with true respect for the kid, though feeling kinda that he’d gabbed and hardly let Walker speak, which wasn’t his style. Sharing feelings wasn’t his style. Still. So when the guy came up to him yesterday to say there might be a way to help Erika, he must’ve already known Greg would say yes.

  The kids dug until daylight fled the crowns of the trees. All that time, they plodded with their long-handled shovels in the well-rooted earth while John went around saying, “Deeper. No—close. A little deeper.” Each thanked him for his feedback to be kind. They figured his condition made physical labor risky—everyone except E.

  Between her warring compulsions to stare all evening at the site of her sister’s murder or at the Dead Man, E. chose what she hoped to be the lesser emotional risk. John had ambled all afternoon from digger to digger, hands in his pockets, a boy playing a much older man, burdened, almost crippled by his self-imposed responsibility. His kindness toward everyone was grating, made him seem daft, she thought, like he might be only a boy scout, doing the right thing for no reason other than an obligation to goodness. Then she witnessed him vulnerable. During a moment when he believed no one was watching—her attention went to him after every sling of dirt—John had closed his eyes in the shade of the Big Tree. His brows clenched as he wrestled with something inside himself, and he summoned the strength to win. For lack of a more dignified word, his struggle was “sexy.” E.’s body had urged her to him then—Did he need water? A hand to keep him steady? Flaky stuff like that. E. knew she was overextending her empathy and needed another way to distract hersel
f before she did something she would later regret. All weekend, she’d run through Fromm’s The Art of Loving, articles that debunked love into oxytocin and codependency, self-help books on common relationship pitfalls, and by Sunday she was annotating one of her mother’s well-thumbed romance novels. Meanwhile, her desire grew hourly, a wildfire clearing the weightier aspects of her personality. Or was her attitude to it the problem? “The foundation of love is vulnerability,” she’d read. E. couldn’t risk more loss. Her sister … John had liked Erika so much. The same guy couldn’t like her, too. Could he? John could hold himself upright just fine, she told herself. He cared. It was sweet. That was all there was to him. One week was all she would lend in return. After that, she wanted her life back.

  Eventually, John caught her gaze. He came over with his head lowered, grinning, she thought, about having acquired yet another fan. E. cursed herself for acting adolescent. If she couldn’t control her eyeballs, E. feared what else she’d fail to control if the boy got too close.

  “How’re you feeling about The Work?” he said. “It’s going well, I think,” he answered after a block of silence.

  E. kept her eyes on the blade of her shovel. “Tired. Fine. Just—watch out.” Her digging intensified, and a forceful pitch of dirt swept over John’s shoes.

  “I’ll go. Don’t want to disturb your flow.”

  “My flow is heavy as usual.”

  “That’s great, E.,” John said, nonplussed with a nod of encouragement. He didn’t get the period joke, meaning it either wasn’t funny or the boy was immune to humor. It frustrated her that she even cared which.

  “It must be hard to be in this place,” he said. “Thank you for trusting me this far.”

  “Hey, John—?” she said, unable to restrain from talking to the boy a moment longer— “I loved Erika. I wish that what’d happened to my sister never did. I do want to know what happened. And I’m grateful for your concern. But she was a crazy bitch, too. You know?”

  “She had a wild soul.”

  “Sure. But you loved her. That’s what this is about—right?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Because that’s what it is? Was?”

  “Lately, love has been feeling bigger than the word,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  His tired eyes rounded into hopeful circles. “You know what I mean?”

  “Oh, no way. I mean, you tell me about it—please.” And quit looking at me so damn sweetly while you talk about my sister. You make me want to die trying to be a monster like her.

  “I guess we shared something. She was real in that moment at the hospital. She let me in and asked for nothing in return. That’s the stuff worth fighting for, I think. But anybody could share that, if they were brave enough.”

  Over John’s shoulder, Dougy spied from behind his upright shovel. He resembled a child that still believed covering one eye made him half invisible. In the way he clung to the top of the handle, wiltingly, E. saw how her talking to the boy injured him. Yesterday’s awkward moment—Dougy’s attempt to hold her hand—that was him trying to be “real,” and she’d rejected him. Because she wanted someone else. Maybe she already was as careless as her little sister.

  “Erika was a good person, too,” John continued. Too? As in, like you, E.? “Something out here corrupted her.”

  “Boys with beer, maybe.”

  “Not someone, something. Erika didn’t like whatever it was, and they—” John noticed E. had checked out—in too deep, really, watching his lips make passionate and determined words of gorgeous insight—and he stopped short. “I’m rambling, sorry. My mind has been—”

  “No, I like hearing …” anything that comes out of your mouth, really. “Your perspective is unique. Really. Talk to me, anytime.” So I can spew even more embarrassingly earnest sentiments like this.

  “I will,” he said. And, by the simple pleasure in his smile, she knew that his weren’t empty words.

  After several hours of digging on that first day, the most remarkable thing the kids found in the dirt was an old chrome car door handle.

  “Does this mean anything?” Greg asked.

  “It’s still too early.” John looked up at the dying light.

  He immediately asked the group to “gather ’round,” which they did in a loose half-circle. “I mean, huddle,” he said. They shuffled tighter. He led the group in a moment of silence devoted to remembering “the good in Erika.” Mostly, the kids shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other for an entire minute, slightly repulsed by the sweaty shoulders and BO and radiant body heat, and self-conscious of others listening to them breathe. John thanked everyone for his or her “strength” and wished all a safe journey home.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  On the walk home with Dougy that evening, E. put aside her private joy, shining through the mire of reminiscences she’d managed to suppress that day, and didn’t mention John or The Work. She asked Dougy, What videogames was he enjoying? Was he keeping up with his reading? He said he wasn’t and described a game he’d started in which one constructed a house and trees and tools and, in time, an entire world out of tiny blocks, anything that you wanted living or dead, and it wasn’t easy, as the sun and stars spun on forever and the undead rose at night. “So, there really is no point,” she said. “The point is to make stuff,” he said defensively, which did sound tedious—to what end? Still E. continued to ask about it, forgetting the details of the impressive objects he said that he’d built as soon as he’d mentioned them. Doug didn’t seem moved by her efforts to be a better friend, nor did he walk her home. E. then recognized that he’d accompanied her home on that first, much scarier night and that he had every evening since what’d happened to Erika, to put her mother at ease about walking home and make her dreadfully early 6 p.m. curfew. Before E. could think to tell Dougy that he was appreciated, he’d said, “Goodnight, E.,” and disappeared inside his small, poorly lit house. There was finality in his tone, like a goodbye from someone you wouldn’t see all summer break and who might not be the same when they returned.

  The sun had dropped behind the houses, and an insistent breeze blew against her back and urged E. down the empty sidewalk. Her life was changing at a manic speed, as if whizzing through space with no control over the destination.

  E. stopped along some house’s newly paved driveway. The asphalt warmed through her thin shoes. She didn’t want to go home on time like usual. She pictured how her mother would freak when she got in just five minutes late. She ignored her nagging conscience. E. thought to go to the library, but it would close soon after she reached it. She remembered how questions seemed to have answers there, and ending one’s ignorance seemed as easy as reading a well-written book (but only seemed, she thought). If she wanted, she could turn back to Dougy’s, throw rocks at his window until he let her into his bedroom, maybe to watch a movie like they did on his birthdays. No, that would be cruel.

  E. lifted one leg and enjoyed the feel of the cool wind that nudged her calf forward. She took a step and smiled. Perhaps she could learn some lesson by listening to her feelings. She took another step, off the curb this time, then another back onto the sidewalk. Then she drifted into the street until treading the yellow dashes there were no end of, with the sleepy road aimed into the night. This is how John must see the world, she thought and her whole body shivered.

  E. stopped between lanes. Her destination lit up ahead as bright as oncoming headlights along the timeline in her mind. She saw what she wanted most: to date the Dead Man.

  8

  Only their second day in the woods and the kids’ hands—puckered with tender, quarter-sized blisters—smarted against the unyielding handles of their shovels. They labored for several hours, digging and filling, in pairs.

  When John had suggested they work in teams, Doug had elbowed through Greg and Josué and walked right up to Tiffany Dennys. He understood why she looked down
on him initially—well, she was three inches taller. But he didn’t let her hair flip and a less-than-pleased sigh daunt him. He reseated his glasses out of habit and pointed to, in his estimation, the best digging spot this side of the creek—in the shade, so they wouldn’t become sunburned or dehydrated, and along a fallen tree, upon which they might rest at intervals. Through some miracle, she heard him and followed.

  Her windbreaker came off at the spot, revealing her toned arms, tanned as incredibly evenly as her legs and ready to dig. He caught her scent, like stewed cherries over vanilla ice cream, and what little courage the boy had evaporated. Doug focused on the simple task of shoveling dirt.

  An hour went by in silence until they rested a moment on the fallen tree, as if he’d ingeniously planned it that way. Tiffany gestured at the four other diggers, who were sweat-spotted in the sun. “Thank god you’re a genius,” she said. Years beside E. had made Doug painfully aware of his average intelligence, at best, but, yes, he wore glasses and had the runty, underdog look of a math or science geek. Still, he took the remark as a compliment. He certainly possessed assumptions about her intelligence that he’d resolved earlier to put aside.

  He and Tiffany shared the pair of oversized yard gloves he’d brought—another genius move. His dad had two pairs, but he’d only stuffed the one into his backpack this morning after telling himself to stop caring about E. and to focus on himself until she began to miss him and returned. By lunch, he’d decided to give E. the gloves all week to prove how selflessly he cared for her. Surely that would stir her affection after their years together in a nonsexual friendship. But when he’d arrived at the Grove and E. was asking questions and proposing ideas that the Dead Man praised, which caused her to fall into orbit around him like a fertile planet to his sun, Doug’s naivete came into tight focus, spiked his anger, and he wasn’t his meek self again until he’d whisked away the hottest girl who’d ever graced the Grove to a shady corner of the valley.