Into that Good Night

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Into that Good Night Page 28

by Levis Keltner


  John returned to the audience, gleaming with inspiration. He described how they’d met—“around town,” both “basically friendless.”

  Maybe the Dead Man had conned him one last time. Maybe he’d stood up only to be slayed before the entire world—the audience wanting blood without knowing why, John’s command that masterful—to allow him to finish what his disciple had failed on the train bridge.

  “Doug took pity on me,” John said. “Not over my health. For what I was deeper than that.”

  He dropped his arm around the boy’s shoulder. The room audibly gasped.

  He told them to look out—for one another, as a team does, and other things Doug could no longer hear, stunned by the lights and the micro mushroom-cloud field of blooming confusion trembling under reach of John’s resounding voice, which touched all, assuredly and godlike, vaulting from the waxy floor to crash against the bleachers, bathing bodies and all in foam-soft words that penetrated their beings with the crude penetrability of lava.

  Through all of that, Doug was unable to name a single vaguely familiar face in the room. He tried. Couldn’t recall his own name. Or the speaker’s. At the same time, each kid looked more real than ever, more close-up—leaning in to understand, their necks craned, chewing lips, fingers knotted or forgotten in their hair—more themselves. Adrift until the finale, until he was certain the guy wasn’t talking about baseball. As Doug almost had in class, John edged on exposing their work in the woods:

  “Chasing wins, I lost touch with how I was winning. I forgot what matters. You matter. If you don’t, I don’t. We’re leaves of the same tree. That goes for everyone outside those doors, in Palos and past that, during our toughest games, when we’re lost in the woods.

  “It was Doug who showed me that,” he said. John put out his hand to shake. “So, thank you.”

  It hit Doug like a hot and stiff wind—he’d been wrong about John Walker. The guy wasn’t the undead leader of a bloodthirsty cult in the woods. E. was, spurned by loss, emptiness, and rage. John wanted peace. Maybe he hadn’t always. The score didn’t matter now.

  Doug shook John’s hand.

  He braced for heckling and boos. The gym burst into cheers. The force of the blast reflected that something monumental had transpired. It didn’t involve the audience, yet couldn’t have happened without them. The aftereffect? Students felt inspired to take on high school and more: their deficient personal lives, the future, all their hopes and dreams. None might’ve been able to explain why a dying legend shaking hands with a nobody meant so much. All felt the reconciliation—the living and the dead, the center of the universe and dust, all and nothing—forces that couldn’t have collided without rapture.

  John smiled, half surprised by their acceptance, half satisfied. Doug smiled with him, not in the Dead Man’s chilly shadow—at his side. Maybe not as his friend, but that hadn’t ever been possible with John. The guy had wanted friendship, maybe more than anything. His speech told of great isolation. He’d had it all, and everyone, except for feeling a part, equal. Fame and his egocentrism had brought him followers instead of friends. Even among the group, the boy was a symbol, a spectacle, a prophet. Doug had never worshipped him, though his unease was a type of reverence. Their conflicts aside, John wore a bubble of self-importance that would’ve prevented their intimacy. Its root was also fear. If he was regular like everyone else, he would have nothing, he would be nothing. Nothing special, at least. Doug could understand that. If fear had made John recoil from the town and disgust had made him retreat to the woods, love made him return. Because he wasn’t a tyrant. Or because, on his deathbed, he wanted to be remembered as more, a person, a boy who wanted to do good and be loved.

  In humanizing himself, Doug ascended, maybe not his equal, but nonetheless integral to the success of an exalting moment.

  Until John whispered in his ear: “You hear the trees?”

  Doug barely heard the guy. He basked in the joy of a different life: celebrated by his peers, wishing the applause to drown on after he descended and onward, the soundtrack to a new Doug, to a new sense of himself, his specialness never more positive, firmer, affixed in time, how the group had described feeling after the ritual in the Big Tree. No, opposite. He felt purged of the woods and the drama of the group. Why think of it? That’s what John’s question did, of course. It recalled the tormentor, whom Doug had allowed to be beaten and left tied up overnight. His having treated another boy cruelly, no matter what Rocky might’ve done or was capable of doing, metastasized through Doug and ate at his fulfillment. He tried to wish the ignorance to return. He wanted to be as large and as worthy of love as he felt right now, before the entire world, eternally. If he helped to kill Rocky, his shame would never again allow him to accept it. His break with E. would be total and complete either way. He’d be no better than Rocky. That wasn’t entirely true. He’d be no better than John—the old John, the monster of undying ego, the Dead Man Walker. A familiar pit of emptiness opened beneath Doug’s heart, his very being, and threatened to wholly consume him. He would be the guy he’d most hated.

  Maybe his posture straightened. Maybe his eyes brightened behind his glasses like short charred wicks that at last took flame. E. must’ve recognized a change in Doug across the gymnasium. She raced down the bleachers, through the crowd for the side doors as the principal excused everyone and then blurted the necessary instructions for the graduation ceremony tomorrow, only to give up over the tumult of mass exodus and teachers who rushed the stage to tell John his speech was wonderful or else to say goodbye. For E., the speech hadn’t been a restoration, but a declaration of war. The doors popped. She was the first out of the building, headed to the woods to keep anyone from altering the captive’s fate.

  Alex was nowhere to be seen. A head taller than the rest, Greg pushed through the kids who bottlenecked into the building. Tiffany’s blonde head pinged through the crowd in front of him. Doug watched Greg measure the effort to get to the stage, not to embrace Doug and John in celebration of a new life together, in a mutual desire to do good, but rather to see if it was easier to run against the current and stop the dork here and now or to race him to the Grove. Doug’s heart skipped. Tiffany pulled Greg’s hand. They followed the red flag of E.’s hair out of the building.

  Mobbed before he could vanish, John stood on the stage stairs ringed with admirers who talked loudly, mostly about themselves and all at once. He spoke kindly, patiently, to each by name. He looked up at once, fully attentive, however, when Doug called his name and said that E. and the others had left to—

  “We should stop them.”

  “Is that what you want?” John asked.

  “Yeah,” Doug said. “Yes.”

  “Then you should.”

  The gym doors had shut behind the others. The effort of going that far and opening them seemed herculean.

  “You can,” John said.

  Doug Horolez burst through the rear doors. The impact hurt his shoulder. He fumbled his bike lock combo several times. Then he pumped at the pedals with all the oomph his meager body possessed and crossed town to beat the group to the Grove. He sped Oketo downhill, avoiding the less public side streets they would favor to gain a few minutes. His bravery dried up as he pictured the confrontation: Greg and his long legs overtaking him on a dead sprint down the train tracks, E. clubbing him unconscious to be tied up, Tiffany pounding at his face if he whimpered or squirmed as the group hauled him to camp, another log for the fire. Doug was racing to his death.

  His pedaling wound down. The momentum of the hill pulled him yet faster down the street past rows of houses framed identically as to be indistinguishable at his speed. Their windows reflected a furious young man streaking across the black-silver surface, otherwise disrupting no one and nothing—the placid lawns of sprinkler chirp and dog yip queries, the mismatched siding and peeled awnings and saggy porch steps, a ball left in a yard under a tree riddled with dry rot, the cracked and variegated sidewalk alongside him—a
ll whipping by on an overcast afternoon that stunk of impending rain, the day not dark, just a diffuse gray over everything except for a single cloud peak, high and far above the rest, with an expansive base that swelled into a battered purple bulge soon to wreak lightning. Where were the stay-at-home parents, the retirees, the babysitters, the out-of-workers, the peace officers, the help for kids lost between worlds?

  Doug was that help.

  On 115th, the trees had already been cleared thirty or more feet back from the street. Construction workers in neon orange vests mobbed the entrance of the main walking trail, imposing in their wraparound sunglasses. Doug saw his one chance and double-backed down the only path that would allow him to stop E. and the others.

  He swerved hell-bent through the worksite, around barricades and trucks. Hardhats turned, swears flew. If Doug stopped to explain, it would be too late. One wiry guy with copper sunglasses gave chase down the main trail. Doug biked far beyond that.

  He soon couldn’t feel his legs. He spun gears regardless. If the group took the train tracks, at most he’d have ten minutes to work out the rescue. The Grove’s archway came in view. He hit a stump and flipped over the handlebars.

  Doug landed hard. He sat up mute for a while. His glasses were split down the center. They came off into his cupped hands as if his eyeballs had fallen out of his head. This was the least pain he would experience if caught as a traitor.

  He stumbled on, half blind through the archway. He strapped his backpack to his front-side and let his body be drawn by its weight down the steep, rooted trailway. His shoulder clunked a young trunk and set his body spinning counterclockwise. Doug nearly tumbled the rest backward, and scraped his forehead on a low branch. He told himself to ignore these distractions, so close to the valley floor, and kept on through the woodland blur, watching for low-lying branches, as if that were more important than his footing, when his leg disappeared through the doors of a punji bear trap.

  Doug pulled his gnarled limb out by the knee. His foot hadn’t thrust down far enough to be punctured by the rusty nails sticking up from the bottom, and the gum of his shoe sole had prevented his foot from being iron-maidened. But his ankle had been shredded on the way down by nails along the sides of the trap. He refused to examine the mess. He tried to stand. Something was excruciatingly wrong. Doug peeled back his bloody sock. One of the longer, stubborn nails had come off inside him.

  “Crazy … Sick …” he cursed through gritted teeth.

  As if stabbing himself in reverse, Doug pulled the nail from the thick of his trembling calf.

  Anger drowned his pain. Though slowed, his will intensified. He limped through the passage of sheer stone and into the Grove.

  Through the trees, the creek cheerily babbled. The captive was still bound to the Big Tree. Doug saw no one else at camp. He kept low and hobbled over, remembering to watch his step.

  Rocky lay on his side. He was trying to slip under the ropes. At Doug’s approach, he inched upright and joyfully called, “Dhhhhk!”

  Faint strings of smoke rose from the campfire. There were no flames, but somebody had tended the bright coals. Josué was supposed to be on guard, Doug recalled. He was relieved the kid had gone home.

  Rocky “Mmhmm”ed at Doug’s bloodied leg like a steak dinner had been set in front of him. Doug said to hold still and undid his gag. He fished the gnawed gym sock from between the kid’s wide teeth.

  “Bravo!” Rocky cried amid a coughing fit. “I knew you were the dark horse. The Master would’ve come … but only as they were flaying the skin from my bones! He never misses a good show.”

  “I’m not here because I like you,” Doug said.

  Rocky gave one last, pleased huff and cleared his lungs. He spit a gob in a high arc that landed sizzling in the fire.

  “Let me go, and I’ll tell you who killed the girl.”

  “There’s no … deal. I’m just—” Doug unzipped his backpack and with the hammer’s claws began to hack tape and rope “—I’m saving you.”

  Rocky grinned as a draught of power reentered him.

  “There’s always a deal.”

  The restraints were no joke. Doug paused several times as he wrangled the series of elaborate knots. Were they loosening or tightening? The minutes ran fast. His nerves didn’t help. If only Rocky’s knife were nearby.

  Doug saw the boy’s grin go out. A runner’s footsteps crunched around the fire pit.

  He wheeled around. Josué charged with the knife.

  “Sorry, buddy,” he said and tackled the dork.

  Josué pinned him and Doug lost his breath. His head had smacked something shockingly hard on the way down, and he rolled onto one side.

  When he could think, Doug clutched his guts. A terrible pain coursed through him. He craned his head.

  Josué stood up, horrified. He wiped his nose, and tears pooled his eyes.

  “I didn’t mean …”

  The handle of the knife protruded from Doug’s backpack—the blade lodged deep in his guts. He would die exactly as he’d feared from the start.

  “I want the ritual,” Josué said shakily.

  He reached to yank out the knife. Doug raised his arms to stop him from making the pain worse. They both noticed Doug’s hands weren’t smeared with blood. Josué drew out the long knife, and it too was dry. They looked at Doug’s belly. A gaping hole was punched through the backpack. Doug put a hand inside and it withdrew miraculously clean but for some notebook shreds and uneaten lunch muck. A ruined textbook slid out like an afterbirth. He’d been granted the grace Erika hadn’t.

  With astonishment frozen on his face, Josué sank to his knees.

  Rocky stood over them in his ragged cloak. He’d struggled free and had cracked Josué in the head with one of the fire circle stones.

  “Pathetic,” Rocky said of his unconscious jailer. He tossed the weapon to undo the ropes still lashed to his arms. “He was going to kill you over that do-nothing ritual. Do you know how hard it was not to laugh at their little drama last night? The ‘Watchers of the Grove’!”

  Doug wasn’t listening. He was still recovering from not being dead, gutted as Erika had been. Then the suspected killer was looming over him, hands on his hips, fully freed. Doug was alive, but not safe.

  Rocky eyed the knife where it’d fallen. His humor went out.

  He lunged. Doug scrambled on his hands and knees and reached it first. He pointed the knife, and the high schooler reversed as Doug found his feet.

  The two boys turned in a slow circle, until Rocky’s back was to the Big Tree and Doug’s was to the valley clearing and the trail to the regular world.

  “I have in my possession a book of arcane secrets.” Rocky tapped the dirt-strewn velvet over his heart. “There’s so much to learn, Dougydearest. You could be my newest apprentice. Together we could pick through the entrails of our enemies. Or are you tempted, as I would be—as Erika had been—to strike me down and claim that power for yourself?”

  Rocky’s gaze, all lit up again, fiercely amused, challenged Doug to say otherwise.

  Doug threw aside the knife. It clanged into the fire pit.

  “I want everybody to stop,” he said. “I won’t kill you, or anybody.”

  Rocky heckled Doug’s frustration with an abrasive ha. “You could under the right master.”

  Without Doug’s prescription glasses, Rocky was a dark smudge. The smudge grew taller, widened. Rocky spewed riddles as he stalked closer. Doug was defenseless and too wounded to run.

  “A firm and dominant hand is required to implement the mysteries revealed in the woods,” Rocky continued, “and your Dead Man can’t lead you to the peak of the mountain. You need me.”

  Rocky was close enough that Doug could see him clearly now. The disarray of his robes was no longer comic. It befitted his unrestrained wickedness. His hands rose, either to embrace Doug as a brother or to strangle him.

  “You’re crazy—” Doug staggered back “—just like them.”


  Shouts sounded from the valley’s rim. The group was coming fast. If the boys were going to escape, they had to leave now.

  “Save yourself and come with me,” Rocky said, “or you too will die a calf for the coming slaughter.”

  “I’m going to the police. I’ll tell them everything. We’ll all go down. I’m OK with that.”

  Rocky didn’t laugh this time. He gave Doug a dire look, the closest thing to pity he seemed capable of. “You’re crazy if you think that world can protect you.”

  More shouting from above. The boys had been spotted. Rocky slinked up-creek to follow it deeper into the woods, and Doug went up the main trail.

  “Wait!” Doug called back. He paused at the bridge. “Who killed Erika?”

  Far off Rocky halted in the trees.

  “Have time for a long story?”

  The answer wasn’t worth their lives, Doug decided.

  All along the stone passageway and up the steep path out of the moraine, Doug heard Rocky’s laughter. It echoed up from Bachelor’s Grove, in the breeze, but otherwise directionless, bathing the trunks, drowning the leaves, overtaking the insects and birds, all animals, until the Grove, the entire valley was a sloshing basin of mad laughter, and Doug wondered if he’d done the right thing.

  •

  Doug limped down a longer, unfamiliar walking trail and soon was lost without his glasses, the pieces of which he’d pocketed near his downed bicycle. Part of him worried what his parents would say about smashing them, wanting to believe it would be the worst of the news he would deliver. He pushed his bike through paths untrampled for months, then blazed his own. His handlebars caught overgrowth every few feet. His calf cramped in pain. With his remaining strength, Doug pulled the bike through a mire thickened with biting swarms of insects. Then a clearing of dead and cracked saplings obstructed him further. His leg was failing, and he expected Greg or even Rocky to hear his cries for the damn road to just be there, please, and to impale him atop one of the jagged trees, gasping at the sky.

  He heard the whine of old brake pads. Doug was looking out at 115th, the sky overcast. Not a drop of rain had fallen.

 

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