Jonathan and Gene took turns dragging the carcass back a couple of miles to the cabin.
Conner and Michael were already there, the doe strung up in the barn, the meat settling and cooling in the cold air, their clothes spattered with blood.
“Red in tooth and claw?” Jonathan said.
“We’ll cut her up,” Michael said. “Eat good tonight.”
That was what the first two days were. Hunting during the day, eating and drinking at night, trying to reclaim a heritage lost on American men. They were living at the edge of civilization, raging against the darkness and the loss of existing in the modern world.
Those couple of days were the last good memories Jonathan – or any of them – had from that trip. Perhaps even from life itself in the ten years since.
It was the fourth and final day of the trip when the world came to a sudden halt. The week had gone spectacularly – Jonathan, Conner and Michael had all bagged deer. The fishing had been solid, and the nights around the fire were full and true, with the fire keeping their collective fears at bay. Gene remained at a loss for a trophy. After a morning in which they all came up empty-handed, they decided to put down the rifles and go on a day-long bender.
But as night grew heavy, they fell into that state of mind in which one drunken idea builds off another and another until they were challenging each other to do something dumb. They teased Gene for coming up short, and by night he was growing angry, saying that he would go out into the night with one of the hand-held spotlights and bag a night kill. The deer see the light and stand up straight and tall, eyes shining yellow in the dark, the same way they do in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. Despite spending the entire week hiding from the overwhelming darkness of Coombs’ Gulch at night, they suddenly thought it was a fantastic idea. They already had a freezer full of meat and fish. If they took another deer, they’d have to strap it to the roof of the SUV. But then they could drive it victoriously back into Pasternak and drop it off to Bill Flood as a thank-you for letting them rent the cabin.
Gene grabbed his bolt-action rifle and Jonathan took the mini-spotlight from the SUV. But as they donned their gear, their spirits changed; it wasn’t about getting Gene a deer or showing off for the locals. It was something deeper, something more challenging. They had spent the entire week staring out at that darkness in the forest with a brooding, nibbling fear in their guts. It wasn’t about hunting now; it was about proving themselves, about venturing out into that darkness to show they were unafraid of that ancient terror. The joviality became more somber. They all sensed it; like ancient man, they all knew there was something other out there, and now, in their drunkenness, they prepared to face it.
Michael took a bottle of whiskey to keep their blood and courage flowing, and, together, the four of them stepped away from the light of the cabin and the drone of the gas-powered generator and into the dark silence. They found the nearest deer path and made their way to a small ridge, using only their flashlights. They knew that just a hundred yards away the creek that bifurcated Coombs’ Gulch lazily rolled over rocks and between grassy tuffets. The four of them settled down behind a hillock rimmed with shrubs, and Gene put the butt of the rifle into his shoulder, sighting down the scope but seeing nothing in the night.
Jonathan switched on the spotlight, and the world was suddenly cast in shadow and light, the long grass around the creek bed seemingly inter-dimensional, waving slightly as if in a breeze, an entire universe hiding just behind each individual stalk. The light reached out and showed the immense cold and darkness beyond its reach. They were all stunned for a moment, staring out at that strange, inverted world, until Gene spotted two glowing animal eyes at the edge of the darkness. They were high off the ground, too high for a deer. Gene sighted in; the others saw the eyes shine for a brief second – so quickly that ten years on they would each wonder to themselves if they saw anything at all. Jonathan didn’t recall seeing the body of what could only be a moose, or the largest stag in history, but he remembered the eyes lighting up and glaring at them for that brief second. Jonathan tried to say something – he couldn’t remember now what he meant to say – when Gene fired and the deafening crack echoed over all of Coombs’ Gulch. Gene was always a sporadic, impulsive man. He fired and the eyes blinked out of existence.
Gene was up and over the hillock before the rest of them, whooping it up. “I know I got him! I know it! A perfect shot, center mass! I know it! Did you see the size?”
Gene was running, stumbling through the underbrush toward the creek, the image of his big, burly body charging out through the corona of the spotlight toward his kill forever etched in their memories.
Then suddenly he stopped his joyous yelling and there was nothing but silence. Jonathan, Conner and Michael saw the cone of his flashlight stop beside a massive wild raisin bush. Then came the most god-awful wail any of them had ever heard from a human. It didn’t sound like Gene’s voice but like an animal. It wasn’t loud; it wasn’t born of pain, but rather it was a slow, mournful cry – a fading terror, as if he were falling off a cliff – a cry against life itself and all the coincidences, machinations and riddles.
When they reached Gene he was on his knees sobbing, grabbing at the ground as if he were trying to dig into the cold dirt with his clawed hands. Before him was the body of a boy. Scrubby jeans, dark jacket now sprayed with blood and brain matter. His hands and neck were pale white, his hair black and slicked down. His face was broken like a porcelain doll. The bullet moving at 3,000 feet per second entered his skull, fragmented and released all its energy. Where his left eye had been was a star-shaped hole the size of an orange that reached arms and cracks across the rest of his face.
He couldn’t have been more than ten years old.
Steam rose from the red-and-black opening in his head, twirling in the light of their electric torches, and all around them the Gulch came alive with the sound of movement as if a stampede had suddenly been loosed. Dead leaves crunched under hooves, saplings bent and snapped, the ground itself seemed to shake, the air electric as seemingly every living thing in Coombs’ Gulch stirred to life and ran.
Their attention shifted from the boy to the swirling maelstrom throughout the surrounding forest. The force was overwhelming. They clutched their rifles.
Jonathan turned the spotlight out toward the tree line, but there was only darkness.
Chapter Four
Two weeks later, Gene pronounced Jonathan and Mary husband and wife as Conner and Michael, dressed in tuxedos, watched on, standing beside him like sentries. Mary’s eyes lit up when Jonathan said, “I do.” His heart was consumed with guilt when she slid the ring on his finger.
They panicked the night Gene shot that boy. They were drunk. It was pitch black – not even a moon – and they were in the middle of nowhere, living out every hunter’s worst nightmare. The whole Gulch was filled with movement and they were terrified. Looking back, Jonathan wasn’t sure what he’d been more terrified of – the fact they’d just killed a child or that someone might be there in the woods who’d witnessed it. But the sound was too great to be any one person – it was like a fast-moving river and the four of them a small rock in the middle.
Gene was still crying, pulling at the boy, trying to revive him, trying to check him for a pulse until Michael decided to end the lunacy and dragged him away from the body like a man handling a small dog.
“Where did he even come from? What the hell is he doing out here?” Michael was screaming, raising his voice over the din of Gene’s breakdown.
Conner was talking about calling 911 and what to tell them. “It was an accident! We saw the eyes!”
“Those eyes were eight feet off the ground! A kid’s eyes don’t light up! It was a moose or something, it had to be!” Gene sat on bloody grass, rocking back and forth, his voice trembling “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. It’s not right. It can’t be…”
&nbs
p; Jonathan stood staring down at the boy with a star-shaped crater where his eye should be. Michael searched the tree line and the creek bed with the spotlight, trying to find where the boy had come from and what he was doing there. Conner weighed the possibilities, how this might all turn out.
The boy was dead. There was no one else in Coombs’ Gulch. Michael searched high and low that night, but there were no other people, campers, hunters – nothing.
And there was nothing that would bring the boy back from the dead. Involving the authorities, at this point, would be futile. Decisions had to be made. There was no life to save other than their own. It would be irrational and unreasonable to ruin their lives and futures by going public with the accident. No good could come of it.
“We would be on the hook for murder, manslaughter, whatever it might be, but it would certainly mean careers ending, relationships ending, public shame and prison.” Conner was exasperated, his voice growing louder with each breath. “And why should we have to face that? Where are this kid’s parents? What the fuck is he doing out here in the freezing night miles and miles from the nearest town? We saw the eyes in the spotlight! It was a clean shot! Where the fuck is the goddamned deer?”
The world would have no sympathy for them. It isn’t just hunters who shoot to kill; courts and newspapers can sometimes do worse than a gun. Gene was still too distraught to think, but Jonathan, Conner and Michael stood in the night staring at each other and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this accident would ruin their lives. There was no one else for miles around. It was the middle of the night and they were alone. It seemed the best thing for everybody.
“This is the only way we’ll still get to live our lives,” Conner said.
“It’s not our fault,” Michael said.
“What would Mary say?” Jonathan said.
“Mary isn’t going to know. Two weeks from now, you’ll get married and go on to live your life the way you’re supposed to. This is a fucking fluke. It’s not our fault. What is he even doing out here?”
“Don’t they always say the cover-up is worse than the crime?”
“Not this time,” Michael said. “And only if you get caught.”
Michael and Conner hiked back to the cabin while Jonathan waited with Gene, who had now gone silent, sitting in the tall grass, wet with the boy’s blood and cold condensation. They returned with a thick, airtight plastic trunk from Conner’s truck, a military-grade storage container meant to keep gear outdoors for long periods of time, immune to water, rot or rust. They brought shovels and a pickaxe from Bill Flood’s barn. It was two in the morning and freezing, but they were sweating, digging, chopping through the stony soil, digging deep enough that it wouldn’t be found. The sealed trunk ensured bears couldn’t smell the body or that a wayward hunting dog wouldn’t bring a boy’s desiccated hand back to his owner instead of a turkey. They laid the boy in the trunk, bending him into a fetal position so he fit. Conner locked and sealed it, and together they dropped the trunk into the ground beside the massive wild raisin bush where they found him.
The work took all night and by the end they were dead tired, dazed and no less guilty.
It was all for nothing, Jonathan thought. Here he was now, sitting before Conner and Michael in the East Side Tavern, his childhood friend dead, his own life in shambles under the burden of that one night, and now he was being told he had to go back and relive it – to dig it all back up.
A tree falling in the forest may or may not make a sound, but the death of a child reverberates the world over with or without a witness.
Jonathan felt the world drop out from beneath him. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s too much. I don’t think I can do this.”
“They’re going to be clearing out the forest and digging up the ground,” Michael said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“I can’t, it won’t matter.”
“It will matter,” Conner said. “Everything we have now, our families, our lives, will be gone. It’s still out there, and they will find it, and it will be all too easy for the cops to figure out who it was.”
For years afterward, Jonathan had scanned missing person reports, news sites, online databases, anything he could find for a sign of the boy they buried in a box in the woods. He was sure the others had as well, trying to see if and when the axe would fall. He combed through the seemingly inexhaustible lists of the missing, the vanished, the ones who had been given up on by all but their parents, and even the parents – grown so weary of the search and not knowing – were relegated out of news reports to poor webpages where their child was nothing more than a needle in a haystack of other special and forgotten children. He looked through them for years. He pictured each boy with a giant star-shaped cavity in his face, and each time that horror anchored his guilt. There were plenty of boys who resembled the boy in the woods, but the details were all wrong; a kid who goes missing in Colorado probably has little chance of showing up in the middle of Coombs’ Gulch near the Canadian border. Not impossible, but not likely.
But even more convincing than the lack of any picture, and without any bit of rationality, was that none of them felt right; there was not that blazing moment of recognition where the ancient, evolutionary part of the brain that puts faces together cries out and says, “That’s him.” Even though Jonathan couldn’t quite be sure of his features, there was something inside him that screamed he would know the boy when he saw him. It was the same something that made him shake his head when he gazed upon some other black-haired boy who wandered away from home never to be seen again.
Despite years of searching, there was no record of a similar-looking boy missing in that area. No reports of pleading and terrified parents. No news stories of a body being uncovered in a remote part of the Adirondacks. It was as if he’d never existed, and in one way it was a relief, but in another, more tragic way, it was worse. Had no one cared enough to look for him? Was he a tortured creature totally alone in the wilderness? Jonathan eventually gave up the search. After this long, if there was no sign of him in the world, there probably never would be.
It made him question his sanity, whether the incident that night had even occurred, whether they had somehow all just imagined it together – one drunken, shared hallucination.
But no. That was impossible. The gunshot was deafening. The eyes in the night were bright yellow. The steam rose from the bloodied hole in his eye socket and curled in the night air. He could remember the goddamned smell of it. Jonathan’s life was a spent shell of what it should have been, and Gene was dead by his own hand – a rifle shot under the chin. It was all too real to have been imagined.
“There’s never been any report,” Jonathan said.
“You think we don’t know that?” Conner said.
“It won’t matter once they find it,” Michael said. “We don’t know for sure there hasn’t been a report, and it won’t matter. Once they find it they’ll have to investigate. They’ll figure out cause and approximate time of death, and the first goddamned person they’re going to ask is Bill Flood. It will probably take them a week before they’re knocking on our doors.”
“I just don’t think I can go back there,” Jonathan said.
Michael turned his head away, sighing with frustration, perhaps disgust.
“This is not about us,” Conner said. “It’s about Mary and Jacob. It’s about Madison and Aria.” Conner looked at Michael. “It’s about Annie and the family you’re trying to have. This blows open and our lives are over. Maybe we were wrong with what we did, but admitting to it now would just be worse. We owe it to the people we love to make sure this is gone forever.”
Conner was speaking in platitudes, Jonathan thought. Ripping lines he’d heard countless times in made-for-television movies or paperback thrillers. It made the whole notion of it more unreal, as if it were all scripted and they were just reading their lines. He had no
choice but to continue. The show must go on.
Michael’s eyes were dead serious with a glaze of ice over them. “You don’t have to convince me.”
Jonathan said nothing but stood and went to the bar for another pitcher of beer. He slugged down a rocks glassful of Canadian Club while he was there.
The bartender eyed him. “You okay?”
“No.” He took the beer and sat back down at the table. He looked at Conner and Michael. “So what are you suggesting?”
Conner, realizing that he was finally reeling Jonathan toward this terrible shore of reality, held his hands up in a calm, stabilizing manner – likely taught to him by Human Resources. “We just have to go up and move the trunk,” he said. “I’ve already arranged to rent the cabin again from Bill Flood.”
“Jesus. He’s still alive?” Jonathan said.
“Yes. And that’s part of the problem. Any records he has will have us on them at the same time that kid went missing. Plus, he’s got a mind like a steel trap. Remembered everything about us when I called. One of those old guys who can’t find his way home, but remembers everything about you. He’s selling his land to the developers. This is the last shot we have at this before they break ground and start digging in the spring. We just go up there like we’re going hunting again, dig up the box and move it somewhere no one will ever find it.”
Boy in the Box Page 4