“To hell with it,” Bobby said, throwing extra air behind the words to hide any potential cracks. “I want me one of those smokes.”
He flung the rock—away from the cave, lest he wake any more of those skeletal men inside—and hurried down the slope, nearly slipping as he hustled while feigning nonchalance. One more whisper might have wended from the inky depths, but Bobby’s feet scuffed leaves and Dex laughed and Vernon Ray hacked from a too-deep draw and the music of the forest swarmed in: whistling birds, creaking branches, tinkling creek water, and the brittle cawing of a lonely crow.
Bobby joined his friends and sat on a flat slab of granite beside the stump. From there, the Hole looked less menacing, a gouge in the dirt. Gray boulders, pocked with lichen and worn smooth by the centuries, framed the opening, and stunted, deformed jack pines clung to the dark soil above the cave.
A couple of dented beer cans lay half-buried in a patch of purple monkshood, and a rubber dangled like a stubby rattlesnake skin from a nearby laurel branch. Mulatto Mountain rose another hundred feet in altitude above the cave, where it topped off with sycamore and buckeye trees that had been sheared trim by the winter winds.
He took a cancer stick from Dex and fired it up, inhaling hard enough to send an inch of glowing orange along its tip. The smoke bit his lungs but he choked it down and then wheezed it out in small tufts.
The first buzz of nicotine numbed his fingers and floated him from his body. Relishing the punishment, he went back to mouth-smoking the way he usually did, rolling the smoke with his tongue instead of huffing it down. His head reeled but he grinned toward the sky in case Dex or Vernon Ray was looking.
“We ought to camp here sometime,” Dex said, smoking with the ease of the addicted. He played dress-up as much as the Civil War re-enactors did, though his uniform of choice was upscale hoodlum—white T-shirt and a windbreaker that had “McCallister Alley” stitched over the left breast pocket. Three leaning bowling pins, punctured by a yellow starburst indicating a clean strike, were sewn beneath the label. Dex’s old man owned the only alley within 80 miles of Titusville, and about once a month Mac McCallister was lubed enough from Scotch to let the boys roll a few free games.
“It’ll be too cold to camp soon,” Vernon Ray said, constantly flicking ash from his cigarette like a sissy. Bobby was almost embarrassed for him, but at the moment he had other concerns besides his best friend maybe being queer.
Concerns like the Jangling Hole, and whoever—or whatever—had spoken to him. The wind, nothing but the wind.
“Best time of year for camping,” Dex said. “I can get my old man’s tent, swipe a couple six-packs, bring some fishing poles. Maybe tote my .410 and bag us a couple squirrels for dinner.”
“There’s a level place down by the creek,” Bobby said.
“Right here’s fine,” Dex said, sweeping one arm out in the expansive gesture of someone giving away something that wasn’t his. “Put the tent between the roots of that oak yonder. Already got a fireplace.” He booted one of the rocks that ringed a hump of charred wood.
“I don’t know if my folks will let me,” Vernon Ray said.
“Your dad’s doing Stoneman’s, ain’t he?” Dex dangled his cigarette from his lower lip. “Since he’s the big captain and all.”
Stoneman’s Raid was an annual Civil War re-enactment that commemorated the Yankee incursion suffered by Titusville in 1864. The modern weekend warriors marked it by sleeping on the ground, drinking whiskey from dented canteens, and logging time in the saddle on rumps grown soft from too many hours in the armchair.
If they were like Bobby’s dad, they spent their free time thumbing the remote between “Dancing With The Stars” and “The History Channel,” unless it was football season when the Carolina Panthers jerseys came out of the bottom drawer.
“Sure,” Vernon Ray said, voice hoarse from the cigarette. He flicked his smoke twice, but no ash fell. “Mom will probably go to Myrtle Beach like usual.”
“The beach,” Dex said. “Wouldn’t mind eyeing some bikini babes myself.”
There was a test in Dex’s tone, maybe a taunt. Perhaps Dex, like Bobby, had been wondering about Vernon Ray. “What ya think, Bobby? A little sand in the honey sounds a lot better than watching a bunch of old farts in uniform, don’t it?”
Bobby’s gaze had wandered to the Hole again and he scanned the crisp line where the dappled sunlight met the black wall of hidden space that burrowed deep into Mulatto Mountain. As Dex called his name, Bobby blinked and took a deep, stinging puff. He spoke around the exhaled smoke, borrowing a line from his dad’s secret stash of magazines in the tool shed. “Yeah, wouldn’t mind some sweet tang myself.”
Dex reached out and gave Vernon Ray a chummy slap on the back that was loud enough to echo off the rocks. “Beats pounding the old pud, huh?”
Vernon Ray nodded and took a quick hit. He even held his cigarette like a sissy, his pinky lifted in the air as if communicating in some sort of delicate sign language. Vernon Ray, unlike most of the kids at Titusville Middle School, already had a hair style, a soft, wavy curl flopping over his forehead.
Bobby wished he could protect his best friend, change him, rip that precious blonde curl out by the roots and turn him into a regular guy before Dex launched into asshole mode. When Dex got rolling, things went mean quick, and Vernon Ray’s eyes already welled with water, either from the smoke or the teasing.
“I heard something at the Hole,” Bobby said, not realizing he was speaking until the sentence escaped.
“Do what?” Dex leaned forward, flicking his butt into the cold, dead embers of the campfire.
“Somebody’s in there.”
Dex twisted off a laugh that sounded like the wheeze of an emphysema sufferer. “Something jangly, maybe? Bobby, you’re so full of shit it’s leaking out your ears.”
Vernon Ray looked at him with gratitude. Bambi eyes, Bobby thought. Pathetic.
Bobby put a little drama in the sales pitch to grab Dex’s full attention. “It went ‘Urrrrr.’”
Dex snorted again. “Maybe somebody’s barfing.”
“Could have been a bum,” Bobby said. “Ever since they shut down the homeless shelter, I’ve seen them sleeping under the bridge and behind the Dumpster at KFC. They’ve got to go somewhere. They don’t just disappear.”
“Maybe they do,” Dex said. “I reckon those wino bastards better stay out of sight or they’ll run ‘em plumb out of the county.”
The shelter had been shut down through the insidious self-righteousness of civic pride. Merchants had complained about panhandling outside their stores and the Titusville Town Council had drafted an ordinance against loitering. However, the town attorney, a misplaced Massachusetts native who had married into the fifth-generation law firm that had ruled the town behind the scenes since Reconstruction, dug up some court rulings suggesting that such an ordinance would interfere with the panhandlers’ First Amendment rights.
Since the town leaders couldn’t use the law as a whip and chair, they instead cut off local-government funding and drove the shelter into bankruptcy. Vernon Ray had explained all this to Bobby, but Bobby didn’t think it was that complicated. People who didn’t take the safe bet lost the game, simple as that.
“Even a bum’s not stupid enough to sleep in the Hole,” Vernon Ray said. “Cold as a witch’s diddy in there.”
Dex grinned with approval. “That why you didn’t th’ow the rock, Bobby Boy? Afraid a creepy old crackhead might th’ow it back?”
“Probably just the wind,” Bobby said. “Probably there’s a bunch of other caves and the air went through just right.”
“Sure it wasn’t the Boys in Blue and Gray?” Dex said, thumbing another smoke from the pack. “Kirk’s See-Through Raiders?”
“Like you said, you can believe the stories if you want.” Contradicting his bravado, Bobby’s gaze kept traveling to the dank orifice in the black Appalachian soil.
They should have stuck to the creek trail a
nd not followed the animal path into the woods. The trail was the shortest distance from the trailer park where he lived and the Kangeroo Hop’n’Shop, a convenience store run by a family that Dex called “The Dot Heads.” Bobby wasn’t sure whether the family was Indian, Pakistani, or Arabian, though one of the daughters was in his English class and had a lot of vowels in her name. Dot Heads or not, it was the closest place to buy candy bars and football cards, not to mention sneak a peek at the oily, swollen breasts flashing from the magazine covers.
Half an hour before, the boys had made their ritual Saturday visit, flush with pocket change collected over the course of the week. While tobacco had become a controlled substance on the order of liquor and Sudafed, even in the tobacco-raising state of North Carolina, not all packs were kept on shelves behind the cash register.
A promotional two-pack of Camels, shrink-wrapped with a lighter, was perched on the edge of the counter by the ice cream freezer, and as Bobby had paid for a Dr. Pepper, Dex swept the package into the pocket of his windbreaker. Bobby caught the crime out of the corner of his eye, but the middle-aged woman at the register, who had a slight mustache riding her dark, pursed lips, was focused on counting pennies.
“Let’s smoke ‘em at the Hole,” Dex had said, once they were out of sight of the store. Neither Bobby nor Vernon Ray had the guts to protest.
The Jangling Hole was half a mile’s hike up rocky and wooded Blue Ridge terrain. Bobby had been there before with his two pals—after all, who could resist the most notorious haunted spot in the county, especially during Halloween season?—but they usually just eased around it and went to the headwaters of the creek where you could hook rainbow trout all year round, because no wildlife officers ever hoofed it that far back into the hills. That was back before Budget Bill Willard, the famous local photographer, had bought the property and posted “No Trespassing” signs all over it.
Dex had knocked down the first such sign he’d seen, unzipped his trousers, and urinated on it. Then he’d cajoled his reluctant merry band of pranksters to the Hole. After Dex had dared him to “th’ow” the rock, Bobby had no choice but to march up to the crevice, which was as wide as a pick-up truck. Nobody in his right mind would go near the cave that harbored the spirits of—
“Bobby?”
At first he thought the voice had come from the cave, in that same reverberating whisper that reached into his ears and tickled the bottom of his nasal cavity. But it was Dex, arms folded, chin out, squatting on the deadfall like a gargoyle clinging to the edge of some old French cathedral.
“You going to pretend it was them Civil War ghosts?” Dex said, letting one eyelid go lazy as if suggesting they could play a good one on Vernon Ray.
“I’m bored.” Bobby’s mouth was an ashtray, tongue dry as a spider web, nicotine ramping up his pulse. He’d wished he’d saved some of the Dr. Pepper, but Dex had knocked it from his hands as they’d crossed the creek.
“What you guys doing tonight?” Vernon Ray said.
“Your momma,” Dex snapped back.
“I claim sloppy seconds,” Bobby said, though his heart wasn’t in it.
“For real,” Vernon Ray said. “Think you can get out for a movie?”
“What’s playing?” Dex said, faking a yawn and showing his missing molar.
“Tarentino’s got a new one.”
“We can’t sneak into that, dumbass,” Dex said. “It’s rated ‘R’ for racks and red blood.”
Bobby was about to suggest a round of X-Box, anything to get away from the cave, when Vernon Ray held up his hand.
“Shhh,” the curly-haired boy said. “I hear something.”
Bobby couldn’t help sneaking a glance at the Hole, wondering if Vernon Ray had heard the whisper. Dex groaned. “Jesus, not you, too, V-Boy.”
“Serious.”
“That’s the roaring of your own fat skull.” Dex stood and looked down the slope into the woods, where the animal path widened. He blinked and flung his cigarette away as he turned and bolted.
“Over here!” came a shout. The rhododendrons shook along the edge of the clearing and a man in a brown uniform burst out, breaking into a run. Bobby caught the gleam of metal on the man’s belt.
Cop. Crap.
His heart jumped against his ribs and fluttered like a bird in a cat’s mouth. His dad would bust his ass good if he got in trouble with the law again. Dex headed for the back side of the mountain, where the steep slope bristled with brambles and scraggly locust trees, cover fit for a rabbit but little else.
The overweight cop was after him, wheezing, shouting at him to stop. Vernon Ray, who had fled down the path toward the creek trail, froze in his tracks at the command. While Bobby was still deciding which way to run, a second cop emerged, the brown-skinned store owner beside him.
“Is them,” the store owner said. The cop, a young guy whose cheeks were blued with stubble, put his hand on his holster, no doubt weighing the wisdom of drawing on a couple of kids.
As the second cop hesitated, Vernon Ray cut to the right, through a shaded thicket of hardwoods and jack pine. He was soon out of sight, though his route was discernable by snapping branches and rattling leaves. The cop took three steps in pursuit, and then apparently realized Bobby would be easier prey.
Bobby took a backwards step. As a Little League All-Star, he could dash ninety feet between bases with no problem, and the safety of the woods was only half that distance. Dex would get away clean, he was as slick as a snake in a car wash, but the swarthy cop would probably net Vernon Ray if Bobby fled. And Vernon Ray was Honor Roll, the pride of the trailer park and Bobby’s best friend.
“Hold it right there, son,” the cop said, though he was barely a decade older than Bobby. The stem of his sunglasses was tucked in one pocket, the lenses like a second pair of accusing eyes. Sweat splotched the cop’s underarms, and the badge caught a stray bit of sunlight as if God had signaled a secret moral message.
Bobby wanted to tell the cop he was innocent, to sell Dex down the river and take a plea, to beg the hairy-eared store owner’s forgiveness. But no words came, his feet had grown roots like the trees around him, and his senses were as heightened as they’d been during the first rush of nicotine. Had there been so many birds before?
The cop smiled in condescension and triumph, and Bobby blushed with anger. Titusville was full of meth addicts, lock bumpers, and check kiters, and Bobby was pretty sure Louise Templeton was running a trailer-park whorehouse three doors down from his home, yet the local peace officers had nothing better to do than hassle kids.
Of course, his jacket already had three lines in it, and though as a juvenile he’d had it all written off because the courts called him an “at-risk youth,” bad habits had a way of coming back to bite you on the ass.
“Don’t worry,” the cop said, reading the anxiety in Bobby’s eyes. “We just want to talk.”
“I make charges,” the store owner said in his high-pitched, thickly accented voice. “I run fair trade.”
The cop waved him back. “I’ll handle this. It’s only a misdemeanor, not a hanging offense.”
It was the same smug crap the probation officer, the school counselor, and the principal all dished out. They’d poke around for some reason to explain the delinquent behavior, and though Bobby had only a passing knowledge of Freud, he’d picked up enough to feed the crap right back. Unhappy home, poverty, what they liked to call “an adjustment disorder,” and the likelihood of substance abuse became not reasons to whip his ass into shape, but excuses for screwing up. Not only was his troubled streak explainable, it was practically expected. And who was he to disappoint so many others who had such a deep interest in his future?
The cop was close enough that Bobby could smell his aftershave, Old Spice or some other five-dollar-a-pint pisswater they sold at Walmart. The store owner’s pudgy fists were clenched, his dark face flushed with the anger of small-change violation. Hell, Dex could have paid for the smokes, that was no prob, Dex not
only had a generous allowance but he was the biggest weed dealer at Titusville Middle School. He always had some spare jack in his pocket. But what the Dot Heads and the cops and the do-gooders didn’t understand was that stealing was just more fun.
And Bobby had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than sit through a booking and a lecture and then Dad’s trip to bail his ass out of trouble again. Beat the hell out of X-box any day. And, he had to admit, an arrest would get him away from The Jangling Hole and the cold whispers and—
”Aieeeeeee.”
A scream ripped from the other side of the ridge, where the cop had chased Dex. It was followed almost immediately by a gunshot, the sharp report silencing the birds and riding up above the wind.
The young cop’s face erupted in what might have been shock, but Bobby saw just a little pleasure in it. The cop was as bored as Bobby, and “Shots fired” was almost as good as “Officer down” when it came to law-enforcement hard-ons.
The cop grappled with his holster and had his mean-looking piece in his hand by the time he brushed past Bobby and headed around the Hole. Bobby and the store owner were left looking at each other, neither knowing what to do.
Bobby shrugged. “It was just some smokes, man.”
The store owner stamped his foot and started jabbering a mile a minute in some exotic language, but he shut up quick when the second shot rang out.
CHAPTER TWO
Vernon Ray was nearly to the creek, wondering if it was safe to pop out onto the trail, when he heard the shot. Surely they wouldn’t shoot anybody for shoplifting, would they?
Unless Dex had been packing. Dex McCallister had a bad rep to maintain, but his record was pretty clean. That had more to do with the bully’s instinct for self-preservation, as well as his dad’s lawyer, than it did criminal cunning. Vernon Ray was Dex’s pet target, but Bobby’s defense was worth all the “Batman and Supergirl” comments Dex dished out. Vernon Ray had to admit, nobody else at school picked on him these days, and though Dex still got in a little jab now and then, it was a better deal than have a hundred other goons riding his case. All because he was different.
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