by Alan Deniro
“Come on, Tristana,” Evan said, putting his arm around her. “I . . . I need to refocus.”
“Patrick,” Tristana said with a smile. “Make sure that he doesn’t escape.” Then she and Evan went up the stairs. Patrick could hear them both laughing. He imagined that she would tell him, while she straddled him on the cot in the living room, that Patrick was being a jealous prick and maybe they shouldn’t have trusted him at all, and Evan would have shrugged, unlistening, tracing his hands on the phoenix tattoo on her chest, a tender gesture that he would conjure at times. The professor coughed and Patrick blinked and turned to him. But the professor’s head sank down again.
Patrick walked to the professor and stood in front of him. “Look at me,” he said. “Look at me.”
The professor looked up at him. Patrick tried to say something like Evan would have said, something cutting, but nothing came to him.
“Do you know they were talking about you when you were upstairs?” the professor said, teeth chattering. The professor smelled like an untended fish tank.
Patrick shook his head. “Tell me what they said.”
The professor shrugged. Then he said, “Tyrannia . . .”
“I don’t have time for this,” Patrick said. He scooped up another beer and went up the stairs, but quietly, so that Evan and Tristana wouldn’t hear him. But he could hear them laughing softly. They weren’t paying any attention to Patrick. He went outside. It was raining. The fog rolled over the fields of buckwheat and thistle, and the dying apple trees. He stood on the porch and drank his beer. The plan was not going as he had thought it would.
“Fuck it,” he said. He tossed the half-full beer can toward the barn, where it spun in a shower of watery gold. Then he walked to the van, thinking that at any moment Evan would come out with his pants half on and say Where the fuck do you think you’re going, but he didn’t. Patrick got in, put the van in neutral and coasted backward down the hill. At the bottom he started it up and did a three-point turn. He looked at the farmhouse and the barn and the mist rising up the hill toward the barn and then gunned the minivan down the narrow road.
He took a couple of wrong turns, sat in the parking lot in an abandoned gas station, trying to retrace his steps, wondering how to get home. Driving again, Patrick thought about Evan’s story about his uncle, and whether anyone had a similar influence in his own life. No one came to mind. No teacher, no relative, no mentor, no crossing guard. Maybe Tristana. That was the only person he could possibly think of. But that was long past over. He felt saddened by this for about a second or two—the time for his heart to beat a couple of times—and then he was filled with an overwhelming sense of relief.
When he finally made it back, it was getting dark. There wasn’t any fog in town. The lights were on; his mom must have taken a taxi back. He stripped the back windows of the newspaper and peeled off the duct tape. He checked the minivan’s carpet for blood—miraculously, there was none. His mom was in the living room watching Deal or No Deal.
“Hey hon,” she said. Patrick kissed her on the forehead.
“Hey mom,” he said. “How was the trip?”
“Oh, fine. Work left a message, they want to know if you can work a double on your first day back.”
“Okay. I’m going to lie down now.”
“What have you been up to?”
Patrick shrugged. “Thanks for letting me borrow the van.”
“No problem, sweetie.”
“Okay, I’ll see you later mom.”
“Love you sweetie.”
“Love you too.”
In his room, all he could think about was the professor’s face, and his nonchalant shrug. He checked his email and went through all of Tristana’s old messages, and Evan’s old messages, and deleted them. He expected the FBI, or ATF, or whomever, to burst down his door, and wake his mother on the couch, and force her to the floor at gunpoint, and charge up the stairs. He was ready for the plan to end like that. But there was no commotion as he had imagined it. He fell asleep with the lights on.
He had no dreams, only the darkness of sleep, when his cell phone woke him up, vibrating and chirping on his nightstand. It was four in the morning. His lamp was still on and the house was quiet. He picked up the phone; Tristana was calling him. He let it ring three times, staring at her name, and then flipped his phone open.
“Hello?” he said.
The connection wasn’t good, but he could tell she was breathing heavily.
“Hello? Tristana?”
After a few seconds she finally talked. “Patrick,” she whispered. “You have to come back. Oh . . .” Her mouth moved away from the phone; he could hear her voice, panicked, and another more distant voice, as well as a rumbling sound. “Oh God . . . please come back. You have to help us. I can’t . . .”
“Do you know what time it is?” Patrick said.
“Time?” she said. “Are you talking about time?”
Another voice in the distance, a high wail.
“Is the FBI there?” he said. “Is this a trap?”
“I forgive you,” she said. “Of course, of course I forgive you. And I’m sorry too. I made a lot of mistakes, Patrick. But it’s almost too late . . . please come. The tunnel—”
Then he lost the signal. He tried calling her back, but he couldn’t even get her voicemail, only a recorded message that a connection was not possible at that time. He sat up in bed, arms crossed, biting his lip, wondering what possibilities were really before him. The whole day was beginning to sink into him. Then the phone rang again. It was an unlisted number.
“Hello?” Patrick said.
There was nothing at first, then a low-pitched hum. It might or might not have been one of the sounds he heard when Tristana called him. The sound increased in pitch and intensity and then the connection died. He stared at the phone and flipped it off.
“Shit,” he said. He felt like he should have been scared or something. But he knew he wouldn’t have padded down the stairs and out of the house to the van if he was scared.
More than anything, he wanted to see Tristana’s face.
A few more wrong turns on country roads of mist, white darkness in his headlights and branches scraping against the side of the van. He felt drunk still. The mountain rain Febreze lingered in the van like a hospital’s spoor. When lost, he spun the van out on muddy parking lots connected to no buildings, in order to turn around and retrace his path. Outside of town, he only passed one other car, which weaved in the road so much that Patrick waited on the berm for the car to pass, its honks receding in the distance.
After a few false starts, he finally found his way and his memory reasserted itself. At the foot of the farmhouse hill, he tried to keep his hands from shaking. There were no lights in the house and no other vehicles parked outside. There weren’t crickets. He climbed the hill and parked right in front of the house. He left the headlights on, took a flashlight in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, and got out of the van. No sounds. As he stepped into the house, the headlights did more harm than good. In the living room, the mattress was still there, with a twin depression in the middle.
“Hello?” he called out. “Tristana?”
He stood at the top of the stairs. There was a dim light coming from down there. He slowly went down the stairs, darting his flashlight around and finding nothing to see.
On the basement floor, the battery-powered lamp was almost dead, giving off a reddish glow. The cooler was overturned and crushed beer cans were scattered everywhere. In the center of the room, the chair was still there—though its legs looked burnt and scorched—and was empty except for the professor’s shoes on the seat, polished black. The leather captured the glow from the lamp like the clouds of a dark Jupiter. Feathery strands of rope, like pillow down, were scattered around the chair.
The rest of the basement was empty, but he did hear a trickling from the archway opening in the far corner. He took a deep breath and walked to the opening.
A blast of cold air. He crossed his arms. He took a few steps into the tunnel, which began to slope downward. The footing was slick. He looked at his own sneakers and wondered if he was going to slide down the rest of the way. As he tried to grip the rough stone wall, his flashlight slipped out of his hands and skittered down the slope for a few seconds until it stopped.
“Shit,” he said. The sound didn’t echo; it died.
He heard sloshing down below. He stopped himself from sliding any farther and held his breath.
Someone picked up the flashlight, and flicked it around, revealing a cavern about as large as the basement above, filled with a couple inches of reddish water. The person was all shadows until putting the flashlight under the chin. It was Tristana. She had a black eye, lacerations on the cheeks, torn clothes, gray skin. She was also barefoot.
“Tristana,” Patrick whispered. “Come on up. Come on. I found you.” He kept himself from rushing down to her. It was not a hard decision and that surprised him.
She looked up at Patrick but didn’t seem to recognize him. She wiggled the flashlight around the cavern walls, as if she hadn’t ever used one before. Patrick could catch glimpses of human skeletons and bear skulls embedded on the rough walls below him.
“Tristana!” he said.
More footsteps, and someone took the flashlight away from Tristana. It was Evan. He was hunched over. He was carrying the professor on his back, who looked unconscious or dead. Evan looked as mottled and wounded as Tristana did. He was barefoot also, and didn’t have any fingernails. He looked up at Patrick too, and then past him. Then Evan dropped the flashlight and they both turned away from the light and kept moving until Patrick couldn’t hear their footsteps anymore.
Patrick stumbled back the way he came. The light was turning gray in the east. His headlights were dimming, and they would have died if he had stayed down there any longer.
No one ever asked him any questions about the disappearances. He wanted someone to. He wanted to be put through the ringer, to be placed in a small cell and asked penetrating questions about his role in the disappearance of three people. He wanted to be roughed up a little bit.
The university held memorial services. The Attorney General spoke at the funeral of the professor. Patrick avoided everything, and then went back to work waxing floors and making windows upon the quad sparkle. He tried to forget about the farmhouse, and the tunnels. Evan, Tristana, and the professor were a little harder to forget, but he was working on it. His dreams were dark spaces, and he liked it that way.
About two weeks after the funerals, he was watching TV alone on a Sunday night. His mother was out at a bar, and he tried not to think of the fact that she had more of a social life than he did. He was drifting off. The doorbell rang. Startled, it took him a few seconds to register the sound. It rung again, and he muttered to himself as he opened the door.
Tristana pushed open the door the rest of the way and came into the house, with Evan close behind her. The professor was still draped onto his back.
“Whew,” Tristana said. “Glad we found you.”
Their skin was grayer than before, with red scars and welts all over their bodies. Their clothes were tatters, and Tristana was almost naked. The professor’s scalp was almost gone and Patrick could see a nest of black ovals at the base of his neck—beetles.
“Been looking everywhere for you, my man,” Evan said. Tristana took Patrick’s hand and squeezed it. Her hand felt like a cantelope that had been left in the icebox for months.
Evan hobbled over to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair, spilling a stack of bills and newspapers that were on the seat. Tristana sank down to the couch, still holding onto Patrick’s hand. “Sit with me,” she said, and Patrick sat next to her. She smelled like the monkey cages in the psychology building that Patrick had to sometimes clean. Evan deposited the professor onto the chair and flexed his shoulder blades. A few beetles dropped from his back onto the floor and scurried away. The professor moaned a little bit, though it might have been Evan throwing his voice. Tristana stroked Patrick’s cheek.
“We, all of us, are together at last, my little bear,” she said, and then she kissed him. He didn’t want his heart to open up, or his mouth, but they did, and he kissed her back, crushing her tongue against his and licking the salty pulp, feeling her breathe like she was choking, and her neck quiver as if she was in danger. He was getting feverish, and at the same time his skin prickled all over with chills, but he didn’t care. He kissed the giant scar on Tristana’s forehead and then they settled into the couch to watch Evan work.
Evan slapped the professor’s cheek, which gouged open. Then he took hold of Patrick’s baseball bat, which was propped up against the kitchen table. Evan coughed a few times, and spat magnolias of blood onto the floor.
“Now,” Evan said to the professor, “for the last time, tell me everything you know!”
Cudgel Springs
Things aren’t working out too well here, are they? Or is it aren’t they. You’ll find out soon enough. Looks like there’s a train here. Let go of my hand, now. Now! My train of thought leads upstate, to your camp. It’s good you’re going. It’s a good camp. I’ll try to impart some advice in these few minutes we have left together.
For starters, it helps to dress like everyone else and speak like your friends. Or don’t speak at all if that floats your boat. Which is easier if you don’t have friends. It’s not advised where you are going. Finding friends, that is. I know this, I lurked there in my salad days. Don’t self-edit, but avoid embarrassment. Don’t assume everyone is staring at you because you’re crazy. You might be crazy, but that’s probably not why they’re staring at you. There are beasts in the old growth forest where you are going, and not all of them are quadrupeds. I’ve packed Deep Woods Off. It could help. What we’re talking about is honesty. An honesty in assessing situations you don’t understand.
I’m trying to wipe that frown off your face. Maybe you should take my pulse. But be sure to return it as soon as you’re done with it. That’s funny. I like staring at depressed people. I wonder if they think of me ever. But then I go to work. Oh, work works me into a frenzy. There’s this game I play. I print out hundreds of pages when the printer is low on toner. How long can I go before anyone says anything? I guestimate displeasure. You must be thinking: so kill an octopus and be done with it, already! But then it’s 5. The money grows on the money tree and I pluck some off every two weeks. Which allows for your room and board and your gratitude. Your father might think differently about this. I’ve also packed peanuts, grapes, and a mallet. If you really want “PB&J,” as the supermarket calls it, you can do with these tools what you will. That type of food doesn’t exist at the camp. You will doubtless be sleeping inside a cabin that used to be a concession stand.
Don’t assume I’m taking you down a peg for the sake of it. For pity’s sake. The gap between loving you and wanting you to be happy—there is a difference, do not doubt me—is one I travel through every day. It’s more of a gulch. Sometimes I think it would be much easier if I were in a cult. A good countryside cult, where I could wear robes and raise legumes. It would help my complexion. Don’t you think? Is my skin cold? Take my hand again. Nobody’s watching. Ignore them!
When I was a girl—your look reminded me of something—I wanted a sawed off shotgun. I liked the way holding one sounded. Ideally, I would have received it as a gift. They say the same thing about tarot cards—better to be given a deck or steal one rather than buy one. The first was out of the question. The shotgun I stole was your grandfather’s, no problem, he had plenty of shotguns and it wasn’t as if he’d miss just one. I think you’d remember him from the sanatorium. There was a woodshed in our acreage.
I commenced sawing there. But I wasn’t sure where on the barrel to saw. This happened on a Sunday. I was without skill, being your age, and my hand slipped. The left pinky finger gashed on the saw tooth. As it turned out, the gun was also loaded, which was unfortunate. When I fell, the trigger kicked back and that finger blew right off like dandelion seeds. This was bigger than a mere scratch. I know this is a surprise to you, because of the verisimilitude of this finger I’m holding in front of you. Plastics make it probable. When Dad came in the woodshed for his nightly libations, he found me under his workbench and after the surgery I was on a train to Camp Cudgel Springs.
This is a lot to digest. Okay, you can let go again. You’ve warmed me up nicely. Look at the Snoopy backpack I got for you. Be sure to try it on before you need to run, such as from a serial killer who approaches your cabin. Not that I think that will happen. Or maybe he will only want a glass of water. You don’t really have a “kill me, eat me” face. Camp changed my life as it will change yours. I was the youngest there, as you will be. This is healthy. See the parallels? Our lives are two rails, side by side, holding a locomotive in place. On the first day at camp I tried to run away. I had a clever plan. I made a map with a stick on the ground, choosing a certain black ant that seemed to be of independent spirit to represent me. The ant didn’t follow my escape route, however, so I liberated it and took a nap, eschewing dinner. When everyone was asleep, I stole away from my noxious bunkmates into the woods. The trees were hundreds of years older than me. I didn’t know their names and still don’t. You’ll have to choose, once you’re there, whether to name them, although there’s always the risk you’ll run out of names. My clothes smelled like chicken strips. From the mess hall. Pay attention. I was afraid of predators picking up my chicken strip scent, naturally, so I decided to wash my clothes in the eponymous spring before making my way to the closest state highway. It would also help with the whole bloodhound issue.