“No,” Edgar said innocently. “I don’t know you.”
“Guess I’ll have to give you a test then.”
“What kind of test?”
“What’s my dog’s name?”
“I know. Jack.”
“Right. And was I ever married?”
“Yes.”
“To whom?”
“To a nurse.”
“And what’s in here?” the man said, patting the glove box.
“First-aid kit.”
“Correct. And let’s see, final question … what’s my nickname for you?”
Edgar paused. How was it that he knew all the answers? A faint pride pulsed inside a knot of apprehension. “Kevin.”
“Bingo.” The man reached beside him and pulled some clothes from a bag. “And you know what? I don’t think Kevin would wear a red jacket.”
“Why not?”
The man shrugged. “How do you feel about costumes?”
“Like for Halloween?”
“For Halloween, sure. Or just for fun.”
“I was a vampire last year,” Edgar said shyly.
The man smiled. “I bet you were perfect.”
“Not perfect, but my grandmother made me a cape and I … I put a drip of blood here,” the boy said, touching the right side of his lips.
* * *
After the boy had been sitting in the truck for a while, warm and sleepy from the heat, the man asked him if he’d like to go for a drive. When the boy said that maybe he should go home, the man asked if it was safe there, and then watched, inspired, as the boy’s lips condensed into a marvelous pout of uncertainty. His confusion seemed all the more precious with his little head poking out of the larger boy’s denim shirt and down jacket.
“Have you ever been on a camping trip?” the man asked.
Edgar shook his head.
“Did you know there’s a place where the trees don’t grow any bigger than you are?”
“Like in a story?” Edgar said, and the man said, “No, for real. I have a house there.”
The boy’s pale face absorbed this information with a series of nervous blinks. “But I have to go home.”
“Of course.” When the man shifted into gear, the boy flinched. The truck sounded like a helicopter. “You okay, soldier?”
Edgar didn’t like loud things. He touched his pocket to make sure the diamond was still there. He’d made sure to transfer it from his jacket to Kevin’s when he’d made the switch.
As the man drove, he glanced at the backpack on the boy’s lap. “I see you brought a bag.” He’d purposely not commented on it before, but time was running out now; they were almost at the boy’s house.
Edgar looked down at his schoolbag with no recollection of what he’d put inside—let alone why he’d brought it with him in the first place. When the truck turned onto Cressida Drive, he felt afraid. The lamppost in front of his house was dark. The only light came from his mother’s room, a dim red haze, which meant she’d placed her fringed Indian shawl over the lamp—something she did when she had a headache or wished to be left alone. But she wasn’t alone now. The white van was still parked in front of the house. Let us MEAT your needs!
His grandmother had been gone less than two weeks and his mother was already letting a suitor stay over. Edgar shook his head like a clockwork miniature of the old woman.
“Last stop, soldier.”
“Why do you call me that?” said Edgar.
It was something Florence sometimes called him after she’d combed his hair or cleaned a cut or wiped a smudge from his cheek. All done, soldier.
“I won’t say it anymore,” the man said.
Edgar closed his eyes, too tired to say that he liked it.
And the word made sense. A soldier was someone who fought in a war—and there had always been a war at 21 Cressida Drive. Edgar could feel the red haze from his mother’s bedroom seeping into every room of the house. Slowly, he began to rock, letting the air rush from his nose with each thrust forward.
“What kind of trees are they?” he asked.
“Where?” the man said.
“The little ones. Where you live.”
“Pines.” The man spoke quietly. “Pygmy pines.”
Tears dripped from behind Edgar’s closed eyes.
As the man pulled away from the house, and Edgar realized that he was still in the truck, he understood that he must quickly get a message to the two women he was leaving behind. But it was an impossible feat. He was too angry to say goodbye to one, and too sad to say goodbye to the other.
He turned his eyes to the house next door.
Goodbye, Toni-Ann, he thought, offering his farewell to someone he didn’t love at all.
But it was a trap. Because, as soon as he’d thought it, he realized that he loved her, too.
* * *
“Pit stop,” the man said. “I’ll be right back.”
They’d been driving for barely twenty minutes when the truck pulled into a dark driveway. Edgar watched sleepily as the man approached an expensive-looking brick house with a weedy, overgrown lawn. From inside, a dog was barking.
A few minutes later, the man emerged with a duffel bag and a long silver case with a black handle—both of which he put into the bed of the truck. He whistled, and the dog bolted from the shadow of a bush.
When Edgar turned, he could see the dog looking at him through the narrow window behind the seats. The animal wagged its tail and barked.
“Don’t let him scare you,” the man said, back at the wheel. “He’s a pussycat.”
Edgar’s eyes fluttered. He knew what was coming. Soon, the finger-pill would drag him down like water into a drain. “How far to the…?”
“A ways,” the man said. “But you rest, okay? Lie down if you want. There’s plenty of room.”
* * *
On Percocet, Edgar had troubled dreams with the forced perspective and feverish light of medieval paintings. He moved through rooms in which every fold of fabric, every floor tile, winked with rumors of some dreadful ecstasy; landscapes in which the uniform leaves on miniaturized trees seemed like insignia torn from the lapels of a thousand perished soldiers.
The man watched the boy sleep and reached out to touch his face. A car horn recalled him to the road, where he’d begun to stray into an adjacent lane. Though there was little traffic on the Parkway at this hour, each car he passed—or that passed him—seemed a kind of invasion, or accusation. He gripped the wheel to steady his shaking hands.
He knew that what he was doing was unforgivable, but this thought had little effect. He didn’t wish for forgiveness; no longer believed such a thing was possible. His main desire was to be destroyed, but first—if only for a little while—to exchange something, some sweetness, with the child he’d stolen. The whole transaction, he hoped, could be finished in a few days. He didn’t want the boy to suffer.
The man wasn’t a sociopath; did not possess a mind unfettered by the pain of others. In fact, every step he’d taken toward the child, each bid for the child’s trust, was matched by a stabbing awareness of his own selfishness.
Still, he’d done it; had not stopped himself. Perhaps he was even worse than a sociopath—with a mind that tended toward the poetic. He felt too much, swerved dangerously and often into metaphor. Such a state of mind was not unreasonable, considering the scope of his tragedy—a tragedy that he’d both suffered and inflicted. Plus, as a writer—albeit a failed one—he understood how one could bend the contours of reality to suit one’s desires, as well as to fulfill one’s pain.
If the man was ill, he had no sense of this. He only knew that he wished things to be different. He wanted dead things to live again, and living things to perish. The current state of reality was horrible.
Kevin was gone.
What choice was there now but to enact some story by which he might redeem himself. Yes, he was using the child, but it was obvious the child needed something, too. That’s why they had foun
d each other. Why it had been so effortless.
We belong here, the man thought as he drove into the Pinelands National Reserve. He felt a hot sickness in his chest—to be here again, in the place his son had died.
But the story made sense now. He saw exactly what would happen—imagining, like every poor writer, that he alone was in control; that all outcomes would be a factor of his own design.
32
The Pine Barrens
The man and the boy walked along a narrow road of sugar sand, flanked on both sides by far-reaching plains of dwarf pine. It was the first time Edgar had been more than a few yards from the cabin. The sky, massed with slender lenticular clouds frozen in place, seemed like a parking lot for spaceships. The improbable terrain, and the fact that they’d been walking for half an hour without seeing another house, caused the boy to suffer another fit of breathlessness. He considered running into the trees, but a deep tiredness made any real effort at flight impossible.
Besides, these woods were nothing like the woods behind his house. This landscape was enormous. One could feel, even without having walked very far, the oceanic distances. The shrieks of birds rang out from a silence that seemed an echo of infinity. Plus, the man had warned of feral dogs that roamed the forests of pygmy pine. Which was the reason, he said, he liked to keep Jack in the house or tied to a post in the yard. The man said the wild dogs were normal people-dogs that had run away, centuries ago, from the old bog-iron towns of the Pine Barrens. But they were no longer normal people-dogs; they’d become something else.
Edgar had been in this strange place for a week now (he kept track with his pills). It might have seemed much longer were he to judge by other means, such as the flickering inconsistency of his mother’s face, or how quickly the hair she’d shorn from his head was growing back. At night, in the glass globe of the old-fashioned lamp beside his bed, he pretended he saw her—like in a magician’s crystal ball—standing on the lawn of 21 Cressida Drive, calling his name. He knew, of course, that this was nothing more than an image borrowed from a movie. In reality, his mother was probably in bed with the butcher, a red shawl draped over the crystal ball of her own lamp.
“Wait.” The man stopped on the sandy road and slowly pointed. In the distance, among the tiny trees, a deer lifted its head.
“But I don’t want to learn yet,” Edgar whispered anxiously. The man was carrying his gun. Just this morning, he’d talked again about teaching Edgar some new skills, things a person had to learn if he was going to live in the woods. In the cabin, two mounted deer heads, with blind glass eyes the color of tar, searched for each other futilely from opposite sides of the living room.
Gun control is hitting your target.
The man’s bumper sticker made sense now. He was a hunter. And though that didn’t seem so different from a butcher, the bearded man was somehow nicer; he didn’t kill animals and put them in a glass case to sell to strangers. “Only for my family,” he’d explained this morning—after which he’d abruptly stopped speaking and excused himself to his bedroom.
“Season doesn’t begin for a few weeks,” he said now, still pointing at the deer. “I just wanted to make sure you saw her.”
“How come it doesn’t run?” asked Edgar.
“She won’t move until we do. If we don’t make any sudden moves…”
The man slowly lifted the gun into position. “I’m not going to do anything,” he said. “I’m just showing you.”
Edgar’s hands began to shake. When a sound erupted from his mouth, it was less a scream than a bark. The deer bolted.
“I’m sorry,” said Edgar, his cheeks flushing red.
“No worries. But it’s probably better if we don’t make too much noise.”
The boy nodded. “I just make sounds sometimes. When I’m nervous.”
The man smiled and resisted the urge to touch the boy’s face. He was a peculiar child. Twice, the man had heard him talking to himself in his bedroom—little murmurs that reminded him of the sounds Kevin used to make when he struggled over his math homework: the grunted half-utterances of thought overflowing into speech. But the boy’s sounds were odder—squeaks and coos, small animals escaping from the underworld of the boy’s anxious dreaminess. That Edgar had arrived confused, even damaged (the finger, the death-white pallor), provided an opportunity, the man felt, to offer comfort, and clarity. The man recognized, though, that the manageable tensions of the last week might become something far worse when the boy’s medication ran out. He might start barking in earnest.
“Come on,” the man said, moving from the road into the dense scrub of trees. “I want to show you something.”
Among the tiny pines, the man looked, to Edgar, like a giant. The boy followed at a distance, his shoulders rubbing against the shoulders of his arboreal brethren. Being his size, they seemed even more alive than normal trees, and more plaintive. They were not Christmas tree pines, but more like bonsais, twisty and tortured, with blackish branches that gestured with the panic of fleers from Vesuvius. Edgar had a feeling that Florence was nearby.
“Do you know what’s underneath us?” the man said. He turned back to look at Edgar, who offered an obedient schoolboy shake of his head.
“A gigantic lake,” the man said. “We’re basically floating on top of a melted glacier.”
Edgar stopped walking and looked at the dusty, desert-like earth.
“Purest water in the world,” the man said. “Right under our feet.”
Edgar knew from Mr. Levinson that what the man was saying could be true. Mr. Levinson had once spent a whole science class talking about how the world was shaped—the mountains and caverns and lakes—a great cataclysm that had made so much of what we now consider beautiful.
“From the Ice Age?” asked Edgar, and the man said, “Very good.”
After another ten minutes of walking, the ground began to slope downward. The plain of pygmy pine slowly descended into a cooler, darker terrain—the trees growing progressively larger. No longer even pines now, but maples and gums and magnolia, and in the distance tall stands of oak and cedar. Edgar stopped again—a sudden gut resistance to going any farther. He longed for the confraternity of the pygmies, and the open sky, which was gradually closing now under the latticework of lengthening branches. When he looked back, he could still see the edge of the plain lit by the sun.
“Are they really that small?”
“What are you looking at?” asked the man.
“The trees up there. The ones we just walked through.”
“Do you think your eyes are lying?”
“No, but I mean…” Edgar paused. He wasn’t sure what he meant. “I mean, will they get any bigger?”
“They will not,” the man said. “They’re a very special case.”
“But are they babies?”
“No. Most of them are fully grown.”
As the boy continued to stare at the pygmies, the man felt a hot flash of impatience. He grabbed the boy’s arm to wake him. “Kevin.”
At the touch, Edgar doubled over and vomited onto the ground—and then, as he’d been doing for days, he apologized. So much of the mess he was in seemed his own fault.
“You don’t need to keep saying you’re sorry. You haven’t done anything wrong.” The man knelt down to fix things. “I didn’t mean to yell. I’m the one who should apologize.”
Edgar shut his eyes to the stranger’s closeness. “I’m supposed to eat something when I take my pill.”
“Come on, if we walk just a little more, there’s a nice spot for you to rest.”
With each step, the ground became softer; Edgar could feel his feet sink into the soil. The smell, he noticed, was different, too. The dried paintbrush tang of the pines was replaced by the must of a just-watered flowerpot.
As the man continued talking, the understory grew thick with shrubs and bushes. He named each variety as he passed it. It calmed him down to repeat the lessons he’d learned from his father—who’d loved
this place, and whose own father had built the cabin. But as the names of each species of flora came out of the man’s mouth, he realized how worthless it was to parse things into categories, to separate each thing by its name. A bush was a bush; a child, a child.
Edgar wasn’t sure what the man was saying. Some sort of poem, an assemblage of gibberish like the one by Lewis Carroll they’d read in English class. Staggerbush and dangleberry; swamp azalea, leatherleaf; bracken fern, fever bush.
As the pair pushed through, branches snapped, releasing the scent of coffee and chocolate and black pepper. Edgar’s uncannily sensitive nose twitched like a rabbit’s. He wished the man would stop speaking, because his words were somehow making the forest darker. Now they were standing before a large pond. As Edgar stared at the reflection of a leafless tree reaching for him from the other side, the man’s stream of words continued. Plants had become animals. Pickerel, mudminnow, swamp darter, pirate perch.
“We used to fish here,” the man said.
Edgar wondered if the water before him was the melted glacier seeping through. Water was the Earth’s vitality, Mr. Levinson had said. It was healing. Edgar looked at his freshly bandaged finger (the man changed it every morning with a military precision). Inside the wrapping he could almost hear his body ticking. He knew the mechanics of this had something to do with his heart.
* * *
The man stopped speaking and turned to Edgar, who was standing on a carpet of crimson leaves—which seemed not to have come from a tree but to have fallen from the boy. Why else would he be so pale? The red leaves were like blood. The color had drained from the other child’s face in the same way.
This was the spot where it had happened. The man sat on the ground, unnerved by the sound of his own whistling.
Edgar nervously fingered the dried flowers of an orchid growing near the water.
“Lady slippers,” the man said.
The boy considered them more closely, noticing how the dead flowers did, in fact, mimic the shape of puffy shoes. He thought of his grandmother’s dried and cracked feet. When a frog jumped from a rock into the water, Edgar felt the splash inside his chest.
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