Into that Good Night

by Levis Keltner

  The risk paid off. When Tiffany passed him the gloves, Doug wiped his palms on his pants to dry them before he slipped his hands inside, and he enjoyed the cool shock of her sweat on his skin. The pleasure was simple and perverse. To be able to say he’d sat a reach away from Tiffany Dennys, shooting the shit in Bachelor’s Grove, restored a bit of his pride. Sharing her sweat, something so intimate, allowed Doug to try on a new fantasy: being one day worthy enough to hold such a girl’s hand.

  Tiffany didn’t mind the genius. He was safe. And he’d pointed out a spot furthest from “the pit.” That’s what Rocky called the circle of stumps where he and his crew threw weird parties with the campfires that stunk up her clothes for days. They weren’t the only people she’d partied with here, some older kids, too. But most guys, even the biggest on the football team, were scared of Bachelor’s Grove. Maybe it was not knowing what was behind the trees and being almost lost in the middle of nowhere. Tiffany actually kinda liked it. In the middle of nowhere … The last night she’d spent in the woods, she’d repeated the saying, chanted it to feel more lost. People say it all the time, In the middle of nowhere … but lying outside the pit, a girl in the grass, searching for the stars past the treetops … She wanted to see them twinkle. Her dad had once told her that’s how you tell the difference between a regular planet and a star. “And you’re one of the stars,” he’d said, dropping his clammy hand on the small of her back and raising a wave of goose bumps that burned up over her shoulders. To be out there—where?—far from Palos Hills and everyone she knew. Better to be gone a long time, maybe forever, and in some new place, outside of time, even, to be whatever she was and—“Wakey, wakey.” Erika had pulled her by the ankle and stuck a beer in her hand as she sat up. “Be with us,” Erika had said, pushing the can to her lips, and then—here she was, digging with the dork and his merry band of rejects, sweating her tits off. She’d owed Erika that much, to say yes to the still somewhat cute-ish Dead Man and to be here now. At least she still could sweat and run and try.

  The day’s heat had peaked, and Tiffany put her hair up, which exposed more of her face. Doug noticed her cheeks were uncommonly wide, almost muscular in a way that made her face mannish. Not that Tiffany wasn’t still hot. She was debatably hotter with the added streak of athleticism, which Doug read as an aptitude for sexual prowess years beyond the average junior high kid. Barely average in every way imaginable himself, the revelation was paralyzing.

  “What’s up, genius?” Tiffany said as she maneuvered her bound hair into place above her head. She could feel the weak light of his gaze. That alone was enough for her to push the ignore button, but Tiffany was trying on a different life and continued to talk to him, the opposite of what she would normally do. It wasn’t easy out here. Compared to the guys she was used to, though, he was harmless.

  Doug lifted his eyes to the Big Tree like he wasn’t gawking at her necessarily, but into general space and was maybe in the middle of a deep thought. This then luckily triggered an actually deep thought—just as Tiffany could only admire his mental features, Doug could only admire her physical features. He was enthralled by her, but not by who she was, only who she was insofar as she was this person more physically perfect than other people, which lent the girl an otherworldly presence, grounded in the body, her form so exquisite that the only explanation of her as a phenomenon seemed to be that he’d dreamed her into existence. How else could all her parts possess the splendor of a magical being, like a sexy elf or something, not like that creeping, mist-bodied specter, the Dead Man. Tiffany’s fey beauty was a rare and precious thing. Doug allowed himself to accept that fact, which was difficult, because the times she’d been at E.’s house, hanging with Erika, he’d completely avoided Tiffany for this exact reason, never looking at her directly, always quick to duck and exit a room that she dominated, sensing what she was, but never allowing himself to behold it for fear, he now realized, of succumbing to her like so many fools and becoming another in a long line of fools suffering from fantasies that would never be fulfilled. Doug had no illusions about his place in the junior high social world, where, because of his manner and dress, he was nothing and Tiffany was everything that others wanted and wanted to be. She was no less striking in the woods, maybe more so, in a whole other dimension Doug would never have access to unless as some warty green troll at her beck and call, a hopeless position he’d resisted by making comments to E. about how superficial Tiffany and Erika were and then laughing when E. would go off on how totally meaningless those girls’ lives were and that it would be no great loss if they died. What would E. think of him now? If looks alone were enough to make Doug want to be intimate with Tiffany, then E. would certainly deem him shallow, shallower than she already did because he didn’t enjoy reading (how many yards of pages had he skimmed for a chance to sit inches beside E. in the good light, shoulder to shoulder, just once?). Doug didn’t want to think about what she would think, but he had and couldn’t unthink it now. This made him angry and precipitated into his best attempt to get to know Tiffany Dennys better.

  “What would you be doing? If you weren’t … here?” he asked.

  “Listening to music in my room,” she answered. “Why?”

  “You could do anything,” Doug blurted.

  “You’re thinking way too fast for me, genius. What?”

  “That’s—I mean, what would you do … if you could do anything? Right now.”

  “I’d rather be dancing, I guess.”

  “Dance here!” he said with such a force that his glasses half jolted off.

  “OK … You got a little beer for me in that book bag?” she said, amused by the dork, but skeptical of his ability to keep up. He said no, but he did have a soda saved from lunch, and gave it to her without checking if she really wanted it or not. If he was trying to hit on her, he wasn’t doing great. But if he was trying to get to know her, he was doing a lot better than most.

  After a sip, Tiffany thanked him, though it wasn’t diet, and talked about her dance experience. She did ballet as a girl, then cheer. She gave it up after Erika died. Doug didn’t ask why. Tiffany appreciated that. She stretched one of her legs as she spoke, down the length of the tree and tried to point her toes against the restriction of her rubber boots. A mosquito landed just above her kneecap. She watched it stick her and suck all it wanted. She thought about tensing her thigh to make his head explode.

  “What kind of dance would be good?… to you … to do out here.”

  “I don’t know. Something nymph-y, maybe.”

  “What’s a nymph? Like a dryad?”

  “Nymph—nympho.” He didn’t laugh. “Never heard of it?”

  Doug hadn’t. She’d never heard of a dryad before. Both were surprised that the other’s life experience had excluded them from such information.

  “It’s a mythological creature.…” He described the woodland spirit from one of his role-playing games. Instead of backing out of the topic, he explained the game, too, and risked sounding dorkier than he apparently looked to her.

  “A nymph is mythological, too, I think,” she said, stumbling over the big word and repressing commentary on the game. It sounded important to him and kinda interesting: shooting a bow, defending the forest from outsiders, living in the shadows of great trees. Tiffany had forgotten about the mosquito while he talked, and it was gone except for a red bump.

  “What do they look like?” the genius asked. He seemed actually interested and no longer stole peeping glances. He blinked up at her straight on. He’d lost that sheepish, already-defeated self-consciousness guys got around her that was sweet but mostly annoying.

  “Nymphs? Oh, I imagine they have long arms and legs and long hair.”

  “Like you! Obviously.”

  “And they like sex a lot.”

  “Like—”

  Tiffany covered her mouth demurely as she laughed. “Boys are too much trouble.”

  “Some are,” he said. Doug looked over to the Big
Tree at Dead Man Walker. Greg and Alex were shoveling near the guy, but his back was turned on everyone. He looked up into the boughs, as if listening to someone high up. E. resumed digging when Doug glanced in her direction—she’d stopped to watch him and Tiffany. He hoped that she was a little jealous. He immediately took back that mean-spirited hope and hoped instead that she was content with her Dead Man and left him alone.

  “Girls can be, too,” Tiffany said after a moment.

  “Let’s stay away from them,” Doug said, “the troublemakers.”

  “I like that idea,” she said.

  E. watched her friend shake hands with the blonde witch in a polite and gentlemanly manner that made the thing’s orange face light up with mocking glee. A girl that vapid couldn’t appreciate Doug’s sincerity. E. had never cared for her sister’s best friend. Her name alone made E. cringe. Doug must’ve made a joke, and Tiffany raised one of her razored talons to coyly cover her many rows of shark’s teeth as she hee-hawed. Did she have a problem with teeth falling out? She couldn’t possibly be self-conscious. She was a young boy’s wet dream on two, very radiant—possibly radioactive after so much tanning—dream legs. Even Dougy, a boy who knew better, was staring at the side of her face as if he’d never seen a girl before. It hurt a little. Not that E. wasn’t familiar with the absurdity of attraction. But it did seem as if he were making a show of it to try and wound her. Just days ago, the kid was literally tripping over himself to change their friendship into something more. Now he was coming to the woods alone and avoiding her—the only boy who’d ever treated her like a person and not a contagious disease. Weren’t they still friends? Even if E. did resemble two or three other girls at school, at least she didn’t resemble two or three dozen. At least she attempted authenticity. Individuality. Personality. Dougy is still my friend. He has his own life, and I have to let him make mistakes. The thought didn’t return any comfort. Dougy needed someone to connect with on a deeper level, and at that range this girl would leave teeth marks on his heart. She was sincerely worried for him. And for herself? There’s John, she thought. Though she didn’t have him yet, did she.

  E. worked with Josué Ortiz, a stocky ESL seventh grader who didn’t say anything. He didn’t yesterday and hadn’t today. Neither had she, brooding over Doug and Tiffany or eyeballing John, so the two were a fine match. E. was all smiles when John checked in. She couldn’t restrain it. She tried, which, she imagined, lent her otherwise dour and reddened face a jack-o-lantern fright. John smiled back and assured that their hard work wouldn’t be for nothing. E. could only mutely nod, thankfully unable to gush her thoughts and feelings. It’d been easier to communicate when she didn’t care what he thought about her. She got a lot of digging done.

  The kids by now had internalized their leader’s very particular instructions (the ideal depth and diameter of holes, what soil types they were and weren’t supposed to break into, how all rocks and roots and unearthed items were to be returned at precisely the depth they were found, etc.) and no longer paid close attention to his encouragements or heard much of anything but the occasional spade smack against stone and the incessant sawing of the insects.

  “Quiet! Stop everything!” John called out in a hushed voice. He beckoned and had the group crouch around the trunk of the Big Tree. He pointed up at a clump of trees that appeared ready to topple over the western edge of the valley. “An outsider …” he said. They watched for cops or hikers or kids who might’ve seen them. There was no one, or no one who dared descend into Bachelor’s Grove. After ten minutes, the group set back to work, overly sensitive to scuttling in the underbrush and the branches stirring above. Their paranoia subsided after a few hours, and the kids went back to disbelieving anything would come of their labor, until Tiffany Dennys shrieked.

  “Gah! I found something!”

  E. wiped the sweat from her brow and rested against her shovel, skeptical, as the others ran over. E. had many reasons for not liking Tiffany. The girl had been her sister’s closest friend, which meant them gabbing too loud in the house about X boy and Y girl who gave her Z look during study hall. Tiffany represented the kind of woman E. worked hard not to be—a person without a complex and mature inner life who cared solely about her looks and the attention of boys. Also, Tiffany and Erika had a falling out the week before it happened, so the police had heavily interrogated her. Still technically a suspect, she’d quit cheer and, according to rumors, hid in her bedroom after school, haunted by her guilt for killing Erika over some mystery boy. E. didn’t believe Tiffany was the murderer. She was too dumb to get away with it this long. What bothered E. most was that the girl might have useful information lost in the black hole of her brain. Which, E. realized, was the mistake she’d made with Erika’s dirty fingernails—if it meant anything. Ugh, just look at Tiffany. Hugging her shovel, she and the rubber ducky faces, printed on her yellow boots, peered fearfully into the hole. The girl was maybe half real. Why did she get to live and not Erika?

  When the chatter surrounding Tiffany didn’t clear and it seemed that the girl had found something of worth, E. came over using her upturned shovel like a walking stick and stopped beside John. Doug was hunkered beside the hole. At arm’s length, he held up to the light what he’d picked out: a dull chrome slug—a bullet shell.

  The kids deliberated over the find:

  “Wait—she was stabbed, right?” Greg said.

  “The dipshits still haven’t found the murder weapon,” Tiffany said.

  “Erika didn’t die like that,” E. said.

  The mention was enough to replay the gruesome scene that’d run through their minds after hearing the reports and rumors of reports and plain rumors and then rumors of rumors—the discovery of the body. One freakishly pale leg stretched casually, seen through the trees. A young girl in the grass … Smears of dried blood start past her muddied knees, thicken higher up, the more thigh that’s revealed. Her bent elbow touches her hips, the other arm tangled in her soiled blonde hair. Her torso is at an extreme right angle to her hips, a wrong angle, like a snapped pencil and just as cleanly. How straight her back, how flat the shoulders lie. The wound gapes. Animals have picked her guts into a slop. Her voided eyes—

  “Could be from a hunter’s rifle,” Alex said.

  “Nobody hunts here,” Tiffany said.

  “Hunting isn’t allowed in the woods?” E. said.

  “Not in these woods, I don’t think.”

  “That doesn’t mean people don’t do it.”

  “No rifle,” Josué said, overtaken by excitement of his insight. He shook his head, raised and snugged his arms around the stock of an imaginary rifle. Then he dropped his shoulders and drew a six-shooter from his side. Bang, bang—he fanned gunfire into the woods around them. The guy blew the smoke from the barrel and twirled the gun around his index finger before holstering.

  “You’re on my team if we play charades,” Alex said, having comprehended his gestures in context.

  Josué ducked his head and smiled, embarrassed that he didn’t catch the girl’s whole meaning, but knowing the comment to be friendly from her tone. He understood a lot of what he heard in English, and read American comic books, and mostly lacked the confidence to express his ideas in words. He wished that he could explain to the kids at school how it was that he lived in the US and could not yet speak the language with great fluency. This had caused bullies to fight him. It was many bloody noses many times. Sometimes Josué won, but never against a group. Though he was getting more confident at punching and taking the punches. Some white kids and pochos watched these fights and did nothing. Doug was one of those who did nothing. He’d watched during one of the fistfights after school in the parking lot behind the library, the full glare of sunlight across those glasses and the pendejo’s mouth open as if he would say stop if he were not so afraid of his world. The world. Josué understood this well. To stand alone. Now in the woods, it seemed Doug feared him, the way he stood out of reach. Or perhaps the pendejo was asha
med of his own cowardice. He perhaps deserved a smack for this, but Josué had been taught that this work was best left in the hands of God. John was different. The sick kid stopped the fight at Erika’s funeral against the angry boys in the parking lot that said he didn’t belong, helped him up from the ground. Josué took his hand, though distrustful of what John would believe him indebted to. “We’re all of us here because we loved Erika in some way,” he’d said to the bullies, and they’d turned their backs. The words were much truer here. It would be wrong not to help, though would he be only a laborer or part of something?

  “There weren’t any cowboys in Illinois,” Tiffany said, pronouncing the s. “Wait—”

  “Read a book,” E. said. “He’s saying the bullet comes from a handgun.”

  “Oh. Well, you don’t have to be a stuck-up bitch about it.”

  “Anytime—really.”

  Greg spurted laughter. “Shots definitely fired here,” he said.

  Everyone stepped back from the two girls except John. He lowered his head, eyes closed as if listening to a faint cry on the wind.

  “I’m sorry about your sister, OK?” Tiffany said.

  “Don’t be. Unless you did it.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? Obviously, I didn’t do it.”

  “Oh, obviously.”

  Tiffany looked to Doug. Jaw clenched, he glared at E. Behind his thick lenses, his eyes appeared wet, and he trembled with concentrated anger. The freak must’ve broke the dork’s heart and was now coming back for more blood. By fourteen, this was a tired story for Tiffany. She’d broken boys’ hearts and at least one girl’s and had her own broken almost as many times. So she understood E.’s lashing out, not wanting a guy because you knew it wouldn’t work, but not wanting anyone else to have him either. She and the freak were both, in Doug’s words, “troublemakers.” Tiffany didn’t want to be one anymore. That was why she’d dropped out of her old friend circle and from cheer. She wanted a second shot at being good. Not good looking, or good at dancing, or good at giving BJs. She wanted actual goodness in her life. Great restraint was not in her nature, however, especially when some ugly bitch in a shlumpy outfit came around clawing and pissing like she was God’s gift. Strangely, John’s presence helped. Something about the Dead Man, across from her with his eyes shut as if he’d fallen asleep standing up, and the stiffness of his body, tamped her rage. Instead of slapping the girl upside the head, Tiffany said: