The sun dropped behind 111th, and the melt of orange and gold silhouetted the last hill that marked the very edge of Palos Hills, made gorgeous thanks to atmospheric pollution, and halted Alex in the crunchy rocks between the parallel tracks. Beauty seemed simple, looking over the town, a product not so much of being alone—Alex was always alone—but of being. In time, the pinks shied into purples. A cooler breeze swept by, signaling night. Looking back, one could see its purplish shade falling from the east of town. Somewhere out there lived a killer, a person capable of turning a young girl inside out and red all over and going on with life quietly. Until he or she killed again.
“I’m going to find you,” Alex whispered, eyes closed as if praying beside Yiaya, except not hollow-hearted, a show to please Grandmother, but brimming with faith in the power of deductive reasoning.
Someone coughed close by. On both sides, the tracks were empty, shadow-tipped peaks stretched against rocks that glowed neon white in the new dark. Alex listened for a clue. The stranger thrashed through the brush below. Here, past the intersection of 111th and Harlem, the concrete train bridge was a grassy wall of dirt that carried the tracks through upper and lower Palos Hills. The fear the situation induced was laughable. The probability of facing the child killer in this manner was infinitesimal. Likely a fellow kid rushed to make curfew or a fellow explorer took to the tracks to enjoy the night in solitude.
Alex did not wait to find out and ran hard.
Before sliding down to the street, Alex glanced back. A thin rectangle of a figure of indiscernible age stood in the middle of the tracks and gazed in Alex’s direction.
Turning the front door lock that night felt good. Only then did a laugh escape Alex over the stranger. And another at E. and Tiffany’s fight in the woods, and the troubles they would inevitably face tomorrow. And lastly at how irrational one human being’s actions could make a community. Such potent, perilous influence.
9
The kids came prepared to make their third day of excavating clues at Bachelor’s Grove more pleasant than before.
E. and John showed up on Doug’s bike—the Dead Man pedaling on the weakest gear and E. upright on the back pegs with her backpack jiggling, full of bottled waters. The group laughed at how the heck they’d got the bike down the ravine, then cheered as the pair crossed the valley in slo-mo, John eager and determined to reach the creek. E. looked more tired than he did. Her under-eyes were the color of ripe plums. She yawned, happily, as if having cruised all night and never having let go of his shoulders, too thrilled by the company to sleep, ready to meet whatever obstacles life brought next so long as they did it together.
That’s what love looks like, Doug thought. He felt queasy. E. had found the one boy who fascinated her enough to make her act like everybody else. And it seemed the Dead Man had found a groupie to entertain him until his final days. What more could she mean to a guy like John H. Walker, who at one time could’ve had any girl in town? Doug was left with nothing, of course. A lesson in maintaining his dignity, maybe.
It wasn’t easy to watch them murmuring to each other as they dismounted and came over the creek planks toward Doug and the rest waiting around the Big Tree. Alex had refused to share research about the chrome shell discovered here yesterday until John arrived. Another groupie, Doug had thought, envy pricking his heart, which he plunged into soothing visions of Tiffany Dennys’s face turned to him in full glow. All he could really think about at school was being near the girl again and pleasing her. Sure, Tiffany wasn’t smart or serious or deep. But she seemed a good person—good enough if more loyal than Mrs. Dead Man. Tiffany, however, hadn’t yet arrived.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” John announced to the group. He recapped yesterday’s progress and detailed the sections of the Grove yet unearthed. He clapped his hands to get them moving, not allowing Doug to get a word in about waiting for Tiffany. Doug suspected John was trying to keep anyone from commenting on how he’d recovered from yesterday, from bringing any attention to his weakness and subsequent surge of vitality. To push E. on the back of Doug’s bicycle just to be cute, either the guy had faked yesterday or was so doped up on painkillers that he didn’t know how he’d gotten here. Neither explanation comforted Doug.
“John?” Alex jumped in. “I have information on the bullet that Doug and Tiffany discovered, relevant to the dig. I would like to share this information with you now.”
“Please, share it with the group,” John said. “We’re in this together.”
Alex reported on the find: Firstly, it wasn’t a bullet, but a casing, a shell. The bullet was the part of a cartridge that flew out and killed people, in this instance, at approximately one thousand feet per second. The find was a .38 caliber Super casing from the ’70s or ’80s. The rim of the case was stamped with most of that information and Alex had just looked up the manufacturer and saw when the company was in business. Of course, the person could’ve fired an old cartridge at a later date, but either way it was a pistol round, not from a rifle. That said, Erika Summerson wasn’t shot, at least not publicly reported to be shot.
“I appreciate your hustle on this, Alex,” John said.
“Thank you, sir.”
Doug could’ve puked.
Feeling he was missing something, Greg said, “So, this tells us—”
“Nada?” Josué said.
“Not a thing,” Doug affirmed.
“There’s more here than we can imagine right now,” John said.
Everyone nodded thoughtfully, even the real genius, who was clearly Alex. E. didn’t voice a word of criticism about yesterday being a waste of time. She beamed at John with ravenous adoration, as if nothing in the world would please her more than biting the guy’s head clean off. The Dead Man seemed to have put the group under a spell of lunacy. Doug wasn’t wholly immune to its influence. Yesterday, after John had asked the group if they were hot, a cool breeze blew in, and later, a limb of the Big Tree had been squeaking for an hour and the Dead Man looked up and began muttering to it, talking with the tree until, a minute later, it ceased. These were a series of coincidences, which nevertheless made a weakness invade Doug’s guts and settle down into his balls with a cold pang of fragility. The others had glanced at one another for confirmation that these small miracles were indeed happening, yet they couldn’t look each other in the eyes. To do so would acknowledge what they’d witnessed, actual miracles. Instead of recognizing John as crazy and that no one was going to find anything but trouble, the effect was greater faith in what was possible. The police had combed the area for months, and they were just kids, not trained detectives. Their only advantage was having larger imaginations, easily a disadvantage under the wrong influence. They were honoring Erika’s memory, that’s all.
Not all. Doug had stumbled into a one-in-a-million chance to woo someone as valuable as he wished to feel. Tiffany still hadn’t come through the trees, though. The wait was torturous. He didn’t ask everyone to wait as they grabbed shovels. He wouldn’t reveal his weakness to the group, unlike John, who’d exposed his yesterday. Doug doggedly held out to prove himself the better man.
Though the kids’ blisters were still raw, with John’s encouragement, they raised their shovel blades in a shaky salute and set out in teams of two. That day, they uncovered a mess of scrap metal: an old car antenna, a dash knob, and a few chrome bits of auto body. Alex plotted these finds on a 3D grid of the area made of graph paper turned on a 45-degree angle, which of course greatly impressed everyone. They soon isolated the area of highest debris deeper in the ground and closest to the base of the Big Tree, as if at one time the stony trunk was the cause of a devastating auto wreck later buried. The advantage of this knowledge, John touted, was an increased ability to discern objects that were unusual and relevant to the crime.
More bullshit to keep us pacified, Doug thought. No one asked how a car got down here, let alone gathered enough speed to smash into a tree. Doug didn’t mention it to avoid sou
nding antagonistic.
The Dead Man supervised the kids’ work, aided by his assistants, Alex and E. The girls spent most of their time refilling and replacing water bottles, ensuring that John and their lackey diggers were properly hydrated. Doug kept himself from souring over the unequal distribution of labor by picturing the guy as a senile pharaoh perpetually dissatisfied with sites chosen for his burial chamber. After taking his orders to stop what he was doing and do it in another spot, then again told to stop and do it someplace else, Doug couldn’t restrain his frustration and muttered, “So long as we bury you, eventually.” He was relieved when John didn’t turn to confront him.
About an hour before sunset, John suggested that the group get to know one another. He directed Greg and Josué and Doug to carry over large rocks and a section of fallen trunk, which they did, panting as they dropped the crude seats in a semicircle around the hole first discovered in front of the Big Tree. For a few minutes, the kids spoke short, unconnected declaratives at one another. The silence between their attempts at conversation lengthened. The beat of Greg’s headphones became noticeable, and he turned them off to not be rude. Then it was really quiet. Each kid kept their gaze on the empty pit, as if on one’s desk to avoid being called on by a teacher.
“Is this all we have to say to one another?” John asked, more of an observation than a question.
Greg and Josué immediately began to perspire harder than while digging. To speak a single word seemed the hardest task they’d been charged with all day.
“No partying without me!” short yet sharply echoed off the rock face encircling the Grove, making the place seem isolated and far removed from the world. Whether they liked Tiffany Dennys or not, everyone looked for her in the trees and shadow fingers that crossed the valley, relieved help from outside had arrived to save them from talking.
Tiffany came over the bridge with the sunset coppery at her back. She’d gotten caught up with jerks from school that’d missed her, she said, but “voila!”—and she twirled around the hole before the group with her arms raised, then wilting dramatically, then reaching again higher. The dance exposed a slit of skin between her white shorts and top, which only John missed, who instead watched her hands flutter against the jet trails carved into the pale sky.
Josué clapped and sent the last of his Halloween candy around the circle—a hefty grocery bag—to sustain this positive spirit. He hadn’t cared for trick-or-treating or Día de Muertos back in his hometown. Particularly men dancing in skeleton costumes startled him easily as a child, and the thought of the veil between worlds becoming flimsy, useless, made him feel faint, which caused his six aunts to tease him for acting like a sissy. Was he not the man in their house? Two years in America had hardened him. He’d made trick-or-treating his quest, setting out several times during the day dressed as a cowboy defender from the old times, until he’d reaped most of Palos Hills. His goal was to amass a trove to last an entire year. As of yet, his efforts hadn’t been enough. Sometimes he had to hide from the older bullies, or rain clouds hung in the sky and brought nighttime early, and the streets lost their familiarity, and the yards sprouted heads of monsters and their limp, dismembered bodies left to rot, and going on meant facing an endless pageant of demons and the screams of innocents begging for salvation. And when his aunt who always had a limp cigarette in her mouth came in from the balcony, a marigold in one hand with the petals plucked, half her face painted as a skull, and said, “Ya estuvo, vaquero?” it felt to Josué like a betrayal. But last Halloween, he’d braved the night and walked into his home with a garbage bag of sweets slung over his shoulder. Little Santa he was called, earning the laughter but also the praise of his aunts, whom he later caught tearing into his stash like vultures; vultures he privately enjoyed pleasing with his labor. To the group’s happiness, he similarly wanted to contribute. If for no other reason, very much did he want friends in school so that they might watch each other’s backs, even strange ones like these.
Doug then opened his book bag and passed around candy bars. He’d bought two for Tiffany and him and U-turned back into the store and blew his allowance to appear generous. This quality seemed to have impressed the girl yesterday. Doug wagged a bar at her, and Tiffany said she’d just eaten, but would share one if that was OK. Doug laid his hoodie on the log for her to sit on, and she came around beside him. The tangle of sunny hopes and deeply plotted maneuvers and end-of-the-world disappointments that’d tortured him all day seemed worth that moment when she thanked him and his lungs again filled with her sweet cherry aroma, and her bare, darkly tanned knee nestled against his clammy thigh, and she asked, “Did you like my dance?”
“Very nymph-y,” Doug said.
“You guessed it, genius,” she said, and they smiled.
The kids spent the remaining hour in the woods before nightfall, snacking between excited talk about friends of friends they shared, about two notable fistfights that had gone down in the halls that day, as well as highlights of the unusual amount of teacher outbursts in the last few weeks that they’d witnessed or heard rumored. There was also Coach Atkins, who’d been killed last night. He wasn’t murdered, just plain dead, and most teachers and the groups’ parents seemed relieved by the news rather than upset when announced this morning. Mr. Atkins had been initially indicted in Erika’s murder, as it’d come out that he’d occasionally given her rides to away games and allegedly she’d come out of his car once reeking of alcohol. Under interrogation, he’d admitted to the drinking incident but denied any sexual misconduct and killing the girl. The night of her murder, he’d been carried home, blackout drunk, from the Pump Room, a local bar, where he’d made an ass of himself in front of plenty of witnesses, and so had been released from custody. But his coaching and teaching career was finished, which was just as well at that point in his life, having lost John H. Walker, then Erika, then his wife and child from the scandal. The school had been allowing him to finish the baseball season, Palos’s first without their star, but had suspended him from teaching. If he wasn’t a killer, he was a drunk and a child predator, and that made him about as bad as one. Coach Atkins died having smashed his car into a tree at the corner of 115th and Harlem.
“It’s almost safer out here,” Greg said. He looked around the circle like a kid half his size for someone to agree.
“The police said the walking trails are safe, at least,” E. added.
“As long as a killer is at large, no one is safe anywhere,” Alex corrected, recalling the silly scare up on the train tracks yesterday, and decided not to jeopardize the investigation by sharing an unsubstantiated suspicion of being followed.
“Are you kidding me? This place? It’s never been safe!” Tiffany threw back her head and cackled, shielding her smile loosely with one hand.
Greg ducked his eyes, feeling the shame Tiffany did not. But it was a very sexy cackle, he thought, how she broke the great stone silence of the moraine and finished in an ecstatic gasp.
“The only reason the cops reopened this place was to let the surveyors in,” she said.
“Surveyors?” Alex asked.
“The land people,” Tiffany said. “They’re all in cahoots now. Don’t you know anything? The police, the mayor, the developers. My dad’s one. A developer. They’ll be hacking trees within the week, he says. But here’s the thing: he’s a dumb fucking bastard, too.”
They all laughed. Their conversation swept on, each seeking common ground unconsciously, enjoying the company, and feeling a little less alone.
Josué wanted to communicate the lightness in his heart, at last welcome and safe someplace away from home, as Greg had expressed, because the people there accepted and appreciated him. These kids weren’t family. They had no responsibility to care for him. This fact heightened his joy. “Josué?” the girl named E. said handing him a fresh bottle of water. He hated the taste of water, which sat in his gut as though liquid rock, but he drank a gulp with great pleasure in front of her because she’d used
his full name instead of just “J.” and pronounced the name the right way, leaving its character sublimidad or apasionado, as his aunt had said of it after he once vented to her his frustrations with life in America. None of the kids in the group poked fun at the name after she used it, as jerks liked to do during study hall whenever the teacher, a well-meaning white lady, entertained herself by speaking to him in a robot-sounding Spanish. All he could do to thank E. was smile and give her a thumbs up, which made him feel less like a person, but some dumb cartoon, his fear of speaking poorly threatening his joy.
Attempting to speak even bad English with these kids would be a perfect opportunity to improve, he knew. But it was too late to start now because they would notice the change, and then it would be weird, and Josué could not stand the embarrassment of being singled out in that way and maybe ostracized for the difference. Instead, he withdrew from the group with his paint markers in hand, which he sometimes used for tagging desks and bathrooms, and he began to draw on the Big Tree where the bark had been dented and peeled away to expose a smoother skin. He drew Erika as he remembered her.
She used to pass him many notes during English class. These were comic drawings of the teacher, mostly, but sometimes of the author or class topic. Erika was easily the funniest girl he’d ever met. Josué still smiled when recalling the time she had rendered a likeness of the teacher’s face in the ass of a horse and how she’d made it wink, which had forced him to tap his forehead against his desktop a long time to restrain uproarious laughter at the mere thought of the image. Sometimes she would speak to him about her life in these notes, about the friends she had and confess the trouble she’d gotten into over the weekend, which wasn’t always funny, but her sharing was always appreciated. Sometimes she asked questions about his life, although Josué was too busy with family to get into much trouble. “I wish I had your life,” she’d once written. He didn’t think much of her words at the time. It was naive, a joke. Then her desk stood empty one day, and the next, too, and then he heard his mother on the phone speaking of otra pobre güera muerta and his world went black except for those six words that returned in Erika’s loopy handwriting, so wide that each at first appeared as a deranged insect until painfully clear.
Into that Good Night Page 10