by Brian Hodge
Like I said, not a word of this to Aaron or Dad. Another secret for us. This was just something I had to tell you. I’ve resolved to try my very hardest to make Aaron feel closer to me than he must feel now. It isn’t that I love him any less. Just differently.
I’ll let you go now. Study hard. Do me a favor and at least look a green vegetable in the face once in a while. And we can’t wait to have you back over Labor Day!
Love,
Mom
Wednesday. Only a scant two days left before I’d be heading home again. Mom’s letter and phone calls had helped boost my spirits from the deflated state they’d been in when I’d returned to Andrews. They were a much-needed boost, helping to ease the shapeless, shadowed fears of what might still be growing back at home, and how maybe, just maybe, it might involve more than me.
That Wednesday evening, I ate and grabbed a book and went for a walk, ending up near the quad. The evening shadows strained for new ground as the sun dipped into the horizon. I cut between two buildings and walked out into the center of the quad. During the day it was always packed with students in transit or hanging around between classes, and the occasional speaker with a cause and a crate to stand on. Now, though, I saw fewer than a dozen people, and as the evening wore on, it would only thin out more.
I plunked down next to a tree in the middle of the quad and began to read about corporate structure. Nope, no Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch hiding within my skin, awaiting release.
A half hour ticked by, then another, and gradually the book’s pages grew more difficult to read. Eyestrain…
I shut my eyes to rest them, just a few moments, that’s all…
…and I snapped my head up. Almost dropped off for good.
I should’ve gotten up and moved around to clear my head, but I didn’t. And when I don’t, it’s as sure as the kiss of death and twice as subtle.
The book slid off my lap into the grass and I slumped against the tree, my chin playing a game of tag with my chest. Soon I began to dream, returning to a place I’d been before. A place I knew. A place that knew me, as well.
It was the Tri-Lakes of that July day I’d gone up alone, the day I’d watched it shift and shimmer like a dream sequence from a movie, until it was no longer the same old Tri-Lakes. Until it had mutated into a Tri-Lakes surrounded by craggy dark hills, and an inlet of water I’d wanted to call a fjord.
And just as before, I looked to my left, this time fully aware that I would again see the rider atop the hill. The large man whose horse reared in bestial defiance before plunging recklessly down the hillside. He drew his weapon, brandishing it in the air. The horse’s hooves swelled into thunder as rabid foam lathered its muzzle.
I saw the man’s furry clothing again, his flying tangle of hair, his matted beard. I could smell the overwhelming stench of his foul bulk. And I could see all the fury of hell in his eyes.
The horse’s hooves reached a savage crescendo, and the man raised the axe high above his head as he roared triumph once more. There would be no stopping him, not now, not ever.
He brought the axe down so swiftly I didn’t even see the arc.
The pain—
I awoke with a dull sound ringing in my ears, the sound a big log makes the first time you try to split it. Left over from the dream, I figured in that first instant upon awakening. That’s all.
But then I straightened up against the tree…
And smacked my head into something that hadn’t been there before.
With a startled cry and a close call with pissing my pants, I rolled away on the ground, then looked back to see the dream-axe imbedded in the tree, scarcely an inch from where my head had been.
I glanced around in a desperate search. It was night by now, but the quad remained brightly lit. It was deserted, as well. Even if someone had been quiet enough to creep up on me, they couldn’t have gotten far enough away to hide themselves in so short a time. Not from the middle of the quad.
I began to shake, as you so often will after some danger is past, and crawled back to the tree. The axe was a single-bladed weapon, dully gleaming steel that had bitten deeply into the tree. A thick wooden handle hung askew to the ground. The head flanged out from where it joined the handle to where it had been honed to a razor’s edge, and was inscribed with small figures … crude sticklike shapes, simple geometric forms.
Runes. Viking runes. I couldn’t read them, but I could at least recognize them for what they were.
And this old, old battleaxe was without so much as a single flake of rust or stain of corrosion. As if it had just been forged.
Bracing one foot on the tree trunk and wrapping my hands around the handle, I tugged it free with a grunt. I slid down the tree to collapse at its base once more, and could do nothing more than sit there helplessly.
Vikings, I thought. It’s coming up Vikings again.
Okay. Maybe Tri-Lakes wasn’t just showing me a form it knew I would understand. Now I had tangible evidence, even if it made as little sense as ever. But Vikings were European. Scandinavian. Myself? Scandinavian. The cops and PI’s on TV would see a definite link there. But I would defy any of them to establish a link between myself or my past and the place we called Tri-Lakes, and wrap it all up with a Nordic bow.
Something was missing here. A big something. Maybe lots of big somethings. I felt as if I were staring at two opposite ends of a calculus equation with the middle left out.
Europeans? Well, they were big on exploration. The Vikings did manage to beat Columbus to the New World by centuries. But they never got farther inland than the upper East Coast.
I clenched the handle until my knuckles went white.
“I DON’T FUCKING UNDERSTAND!” I screamed to the sky, to the axe, to the tree, to the entire world.
All I knew for sure now was the obvious: that whatever was wrong with Tri-Lakes wasn’t confined there. Yet I’d known all along, really. All the evidence I needed was there. The night I’d struck Dennis Lawton with my car. The night I’d tried to sodomize Valerie. Hadn’t I conveniently pushed all that aside, hoping I could outrun it?
It could move anywhere it pleased. And I knew it. It was only giving me a friendly reminder.
I stood, textbook in one hand, battleaxe in the other. Ready to take on the corporate world, hacking my way up the ladder of success.
What to do with the unwieldy thing was a momentary matter of concern. I could hide it in my room, but on the chance that Greg would find it, he’d wonder about me more than ever. So. That left one place. Offhand, I couldn’t think of any place more private than the trunk of my car.
There it would stay safe, and dry, and out of sight. And perhaps I could hang on to it until it would serve me, for a change.
Chapter 26
Labor Day weekend.
Shelly Potter’s apartment was one of four in a large old house on the north side of town. The neighborhoods there had originally been among the finest in Mt. Vernon, with huge houses and iron gates and, in one instance, stone lions that graced the walk in front of a house. But the north side’s heyday had ended long ago, and now many of the houses had faded into a mismatched collection of relics, outmoded and somehow quaint. Balanced between days of glory and approaching years of decay, the houses grieved, weeping flakes of paint instead of tears.
I’d almost backed out of coming, turning the decision over and over in my mind back at home, first one way and then the other. I forced myself to consider what it was I was afraid of. Shelly’s proposal was no bad joke, I believed this wholeheartedly. And knowledge itself, understanding, couldn’t harm me.
But I guess I was afraid of standing there and looking the truth in the face, if it could even be known. Because now, after finding Rick as I had, after nearly being scalped by some vague phantom, I knew that the rules my world had always worked by had been tossed out the window.
Finally, working up my nerve in that dim hallway, I took one last deep breath and rapped my knuckles against the door.
“Hi,” she said, standing aside so I could enter. “I have to be honest. Until you called, I’d been spending the past couple weeks wondering if you’d ignore me.”
“I thought about it,” I said. “But I figured you’d just come hunting for me if I did.”
She poked her glasses up from the end of her nose. “No, I don’t think so. I would’ve given up.” She hunched her shoulders. “I’m not that pushy.” She motioned me farther in. “The living room’s this way.”
I followed her through a short entrance hall, past the kitchen and into the living room. I liked the way she’d decorated the place. The inside outclassed the building’s exterior by leaps and bounds. It looked bright and airy, the colors mostly greens and whites and rich earth tones. A network of shelves covered most of one living room wall, home to a small TV and her stereo and lots of books. Several plants sat around in pots or were suspended from the ceiling in baskets. A hanging wicker chair swayed gently in one corner, caressed by September breezes.
She asked me how college was, and I told her fine, and this quickly exhausted our common ground for opening small talk.
“Do we flip for who starts?” I then said.
She lowered herself until she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I asked you first.”
We could verbally dance around like this all afternoon, neither of us wanting to take the risk of being first. The risk of what, though? Sounding like a fool? I found my gaze wandering nervously around her living room.
“No notebooks, no hidden tape recorders,” Shelly said quietly. “Like I told you before, this is for me. It won’t leave this room.”
I joined her on the floor, several feet away, easing back against a recliner. “I don’t guess I’ve really had anyone to talk to about how I felt that night with Rick,” I said. “Sure, I had to repeat the story a bunch of times, but that’s only part of it. I felt a lot more going on than what actually happened. I mean, how much could we explain? Rick walks into that grove and screams and never comes out again. That’s it. But it felt like so much more was going on.”
“Like you knew what was going to happen?” Her eyes seemed calm, neutral. At least they weren’t brimming with skepticism.
“No, that wasn’t it. I didn’t get a premonition of anything specific. I just knew something bad was going to happen. A generic feeling, I guess you’d call it. I didn’t even have time to figure it out before he was gone.” My eyes were starting to burn. “I guess it just capped off everything else that seemed to be going wrong this summer.”
“What else happened up there?” Within her, I could feel a rising sense of urgency, which she was keeping in check. But not completely.
I shrugged. “None of it seems important when you look at it by itself. There was a pretty bloody fight I got into up there. Just little stuff.” Yeah, would Valerie consider what I’d done to her little stuff? “But everything seemed to go wrong with us, my friends and me, only after we found that place.”
Shelly drew her knees up under her chin, toes curling into the rug. “And you say the night Rick disappeared capped it off?”
Capped it off? I repeated to myself. Poor choice of words on my part. It sounded like that finished it, which certainly wasn’t the case. But Rick’s last night seemed to be the main focus of conversation, so I just drove right in and recounted the whole story: about Rick and his passions, his obsession with the guitar, how he ended up with the splints. How depressed he was that final night. How, all along, I’d felt something else out at Tri-Lakes. And I decided to go ahead, what the hell, and not caring how weird it must’ve sounded, I told her what it felt like when Rick hurled his beer into the grove.
…as if something else was with us, growing as the summer went on … something that had reached a new level in its evolution…
And when I’d finished, she sat across from me, fingers tapping the side of her bare knee, lips pursed in concentration.
“Do you believe me?” I asked.
She tilted her head to one side for a moment. “I’m willing to keep an open mind.”
She stood then, leg muscles flexing like a gymnast’s, and walked over to her wall of shelves. She pulled down a blue folder, sat down again, nearer to me this time.
“You said last month that you’d already heard about the problems the workers had up there?”
I nodded.
She flipped the folder open. It contained photocopied news articles, the paper crisp and fresh.
“That week before I first came to see you, I went through the microfiche copies at the newspaper. I sort of remembered the problems the work crews had. So I went back and looked it all up again, night by night, year by year. Slow going. But go ahead and read through them anyway. Something was popping up every few months with the place, it seemed.” Shelly dropped the folder in my lap, and I stared down at the worn cover as if turning it back would set me on a road from which there would be no return. “You’ll find them interesting.”
She fixed herself some herbal tea in the kitchen while I read, and yes, I did find them interesting. Except for its first few months of proposed development, I didn’t read much that hadn’t already been covered to some degree by White Trash Joe during our walk down memory lane, but this time all the information was laid out documentary-style. And it was gratifying to have found, or been found by, someone else who seemed bugged by the place. I’d heard it said that a sympathetic stranger could be the easiest person to confide your troubles to, and this time it made sense.
I scarcely noticed when Shelly came back in and sat on the floor again. Tendrils of steam rose from a mug that bore the slogan I want chocolate and I want it NOW! She took a sip of tea. “So what do you think?”
I arranged the article photocopies into a neat stack, slipped them back into their folder, closed it. “It seems like Tri-Lakes was … protecting itself. Fighting back against its development.”
“I’d thought of that.”
I reached out and laid the folder atop her coffee table, looked at her straight on. “Your turn.”
She nodded as if living up to a hasty bargain she wasn’t any too eager to keep. And as I watched her sit there with her knees drawn up under her chin, hands wrapped around her mug, eyes wide and staring into the floor. It looked as if she were folding in on herself. Seeing her like this made me fear the next few years more than I ever had before. I wasn’t sure how old she was, but I was guessing twenty-five or so. Give her a seven-year jump on me. I’d always thought that by the time you got to that age, the answers to life’s big questions came a lot easier. That the sailing got smoother.
Shelly had seemed so in control and on top of things during what little time I’d been around her. But one look at her now and I knew that life’s seas didn’t calm for you out of deference for your experience.
She set her mug on the folder and returned to the shelves, pulling out an eight-by-ten photo, no frame. She handed it to me and I peered at it. It showed her with some guy probably a few years older than she, both of them laughing. Her left leg was strapped to his right, with their arms looped around each other’s shoulders. The guy was clutching a beer can and they looked to be in mid-stride. A bunch of other people were crowded into the background. I guessed the picture had been shot during some silly race at a picnic.
“Recognize him?” she said quietly.
I kept staring. He was probably a six-footer, dark blond hair and a bushy moustache. He had the makings of a solid beer belly tucked behind a gray T-shirt. I couldn’t recall having met him, but something in that face grew familiar.
What Shelly said next had all the impact of a hickory stick across the back of the head: “That’s Dennis Lawton.”
All at once I pictured that face looming up in my windshield, gray and slack and unknowing. Unthinking. Dead. I remembered, all right.
“You knew all along I was the one who hit him,” I whispered. I gave the picture back as she returned to her spot on the floor. No way did I want to look into that face again. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t taken his life. I’d still violated the dead.
“Your name didn’t mean anything to me when it first happened,” she said. “But I remembered it when this came up about Rick.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t keep my eyes from turning traitor and glancing back at the picture. Their two happy faces.
“Guess I should back up a little.” Shelly took a big gulp of tea as if to fortify herself. “I got out of school four years ago, and got a job here not too long after graduation. I never expected to be here this long, but … I don’t know. I just got kind of settled. But that’s another story. And a part of it was Dennis. I met him almost three years ago and things had been off and on between us ever since. He drank too much, and I didn’t like that. It made him argue, and I was usually willing to go fifteen rounds with him, which really was stupid, if you’ve ever tried to argue with a drunk.”
Throughout this I’d been sitting quietly, nodding every so often, and for the first time I got the idea that maybe I was every bit the sympathetic stranger for her as she’d been for me. She stopped then, looking up from the spot on the floor she’d been staring at, and hit me with a wry, uncertain smile. She rubbed her forehead and shook her head gently.
“You must be a decent person,” she said. “I’m telling you all this personal stuff.”
I shrugged, returning the smile.
More tea. “But it wasn’t all bad, don’t get that idea. Well. Finally, we got to talking about getting married. I think we started talking about that in May. It would’ve been my first. His second, and that’s why he was more reluctant. Afraid history would repeat itself, or something. We had our problems, but we had our strong points too, and I figured, oh, let’s just go ahead and jump into it and hope like hell it works out.
“It got to be June, and one night we were at his house. He lived a few miles north of town. We got into it again, because he couldn’t make up his mind, and so he took off for a while. He had this Honda three-wheeler. Helped him blow off steam, and that night there was about an hour of daylight left.”