He had a look on his face that I only now understand, a look of wanting to do something without regard to consequences. He had a face like a raccoon, dark-encircled eyes, and a need to get into things he wasn’t supposed to. I remember that face with fondness, not for his smile or his wildness, but for what came after.
It was 1969, and a man had landed on the moon the day before which is why we’d been staying at my uncle’s. My uncle had a color television set and my father didn’t believe in them until the day a man walked on the moon.
It had been an unpleasant family outing, and my brother was giving my father some lip. We drove past the sign that said Vidal Junction, and my father turned to my older brother, Ray, and told him to just keep it shut tight or he’d be walking from there back to Prewitt. As if to show he meant it, my father slowed the car to ten miles an hour, and pulled off on the shoulder. My mother was quiet. She kept facing forward, as she always did, and I pretended I wasn’t even there. Vidal Junction was just a sliver of a gas station and maybe an old diner off the railroad tracks, but it had been abandoned back in the thirties. When I was much younger my mother and I had stopped there to collect some of the junk she took to her junkshop dealers, like old telephone pole insulators and bits from the gas pumps. It had looked the same since I was four, that junction, a ghost place, and that sign just sitting up there: Vidal Junction, as if it would continue, lifeless, into infinity.
“It’s damn hot,” my father said, parking the car so we could all look at the old gas station, and my brother Ray could get good and mad about my father’s threats to make him walk.
“Look at that big heap behind the pumps.”
My mother was trying to remain silent, I could tell. But she wanted to say something; she ground her teeth together so as not to let anything out.
“What do you boys think it is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It looked like a piece of a car, but I didn’t know cars too well, and it could just as easily have been a piece of a rocket. I smelled something from my cracked window, something sweet like candy.
“Maybe you can sell it to one of your junk shops,” my father said to my mother.
“Antique stores,” she said.
“This place is strange,” my father said, “you’d think somebody would plough it over and put up some stores or maybe grow something. Maybe that thing’s from outer space. Or Russia. Or maybe it’s like space trash. Everything’s space-something these days. Right, Ray? That’s right, Ray? You think it’s from Mars?”
I heard a click, and there was my brother Ray opening the door on his side of the car.
“Maybe I will walk from here,” Ray said. “Just maybe.”
“Just maybe my ass,” my father said. “It’s a sure thing.”
Ray got full out of the car and left the door hanging open.
“Coop,” my mother said. She reached over and touched my father gently on his shoulder. He shrugged. “Coop,” she repeated, “it’s twenty miles home.”
“Only fifteen, by my estimate,” my father said. “He’s old enough. Or is sixteen still a baby?”
My mother was silent.
Ray walked across the steamy asphalt on the highway, over to Vidal Junction and I wondered if he was going to burn to a crisp. As if he sensed this, he took his shirt off and rolled it up and stuck it under his right armpit. He was so bony that kids at school called him Scarecrow, and I swear you could read the bones of his back, line by line, and they all said Up Yours.
My father started up the station wagon.
“Coop,” my mother said. Coop wasn’t my father’s name, but it’s what Ray used to call him before I was born and my father was a Corporal and wanted to be called Corporal but Ray could only say Coop. My mother had called him Coop since then. To my father it must have been the kind of endearment that reminded him that he was a father after all and no longer a Corporal. My mother probably figured it would soften him, and it probably did.
“He wants to walk, let the boy walk,” my father said. “I didn’t make him walk. I didn’t. His choice.”
That was the end of that, and my father started up the car, and as we drove off toward Prewitt, I looked out the back window and saw Ray just sitting down by one of the old gas pumps and lighting up a cigarette because he knew he could get away with it.
We crossed the railroad track, and the road became bumpy again because nobody in the county much bothered to keep up this end of the highway, and it would stay bumpy until we got out of this side of the valley.
“Fifteen miles,” my mother said. We sat on the front porch, just sweating and wondering when Ray would be home.
“Daddy said he used to run fifteen miles every Saturday.”
My mother looked at me, and then back to the road.
“Used to,” she said under her breath.
“Ray walked ten miles in the rain last March.”
My mother stood up and said, “oh.” I thought at first it was because she saw Ray coming up the road, but there was nothing there. We had four neighbors, back then, before the development came through, and the nearest house was a half-mile down the road. Across the road was a pond and some woods, and beyond that the mountains and the Appalachian Trail. It was pretty in the summer, if the temperature dropped, to sit on the porch and watch the light fade by slow degrees until the sun was all but gone by nine-thirty and it was past my bed time.
My father looked out through the screen door.
“They still teach math?” My father said. “At a slow pace, given the sun and other factors, you can figure on maybe three miles an hour, and that’s only if he keeps a moderate pace. So he won’t be home ‘til eleven. Maybe midnight. Ray’s stubborn, too. Got to factor that in. He may just sleep out back of Huron’s, or by the river.”
“Mosquitoes’ll eat him alive if he does,” I said.
“He’s done this before,” my mother said, more to herself than to anyone.
“He can go to hell for all I care,” my father said.
A brief silence followed this. I thought about my parents and my brother who seemed to ruin any peace we had as a family; I thought of the pain my mother felt; I was already tired of the fights between Ray and my dad.
“Huron said he might carry some of your junk,” my father said, softly.
“Oh,” my mother said. She walked out into the yard and called for the collie to come in for the night.
I wondered what Ray was thinking right now, or if he was sneaking a beer at Huron’s, or if he was just out of sight but almost home.
Seven days later, I was fairly sure we would never see Ray again, and we eventually moved, when I was twelve, to Richmond, where my father got a job that actually paid, and where I was sure we had arrived because it was so different from Prewitt. I thought of Ray often, and what our family would’ve been like if he had ever returned from his walk that day when I was ten and a half.
I have to admit that our family was the better for his loss. My father became a tolerable man, and the violence that I had known from early childhood transformed into a benevolent moodiness, an anger that took itself out on, not his family, but his employer, or the monthly bills, or the television set. No longer did he throw furniture against the wall when he and my mother argued, and never again did he raise his voice to me. I missed my brother somewhat, but he had never been kind to me, nor had he been my protector. Ray had always dominated things for me, and had even gone so far, once, to piss on my leg when I was five (and he was just about eleven) to prove that he was the brother with the power. Although my mother suffered greatly for a few years after Ray disappeared, I think even she finally blossomed, for Ray was a difficult child, who, according to her, since birth had been demanding and unreasonable and quick of temper. I think that Ray did a great service by walking the other way from Vidal Junction, or wherever I assumed he had marched off to, for my mother had the tragedy of loss, but over the years she drew strength from the thought that Ray was, perhaps, living in some ru
ral Virginia town, and functioning better without the burden of his family. Perhaps he was even happy. Never once did it cross anyone’s minds that Ray was dead. He was a cuss, and cusses don’t die in the South. They become the spice of the land, and are revered in the smaller towns the way unusually beautiful women are, or three-legged dogs.
2
When I grew up, I moved around a bit, raised a family, and then got divorced.
When my son was five, I decided we’d take a trip to his grandma’s for a belated visit. I had custody of Tommy for six whole days, which was generous of my ex-wife
I took the surface roads through all the small towns in the mountain valley. It would be nice to drive to Prewitt and show my kid the failed horse farm.
But my memory of the area was bad, and I was too proud to stop at gas stations for directions.
We got a little lost.
Tommy wanted lunch, and I pulled off at a coffee shop that looked like it was made of tin and was shaped like an old-fashioned percolator.
The waitress was cute and told Tommy that he was the red-headiest boy she had ever seen. The place smelled like rotting vegetables, but the ham biscuits were good, and I taught my son the lost art of see-food with the biscuits and some peanuts thrown in. His mother would hate it when he returned to Baltimore and kept opening his mouth when it was full of food.
“You know which way to Prewitt?” I asked the waitress.
She went and got a road map for me, and I moved over so she could scootch in next to me and show me the route down past Grand Island, and off to the south of Natural Bridge.
“All these new highways,” I said, “got me confused.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “They just keep tearing the hills up. Pretty soon it’s gonna look like New York.”
Because I wanted to keep flirting with her, I began the story of my missing brother, which never ceased to interest Tommy whenever I told him. While I spoke, I watched the girl’s face, and she betrayed nothing other than interest. She was years younger than me, maybe only twenty, but it was nice that she enjoyed my attentions at least as much as I enjoyed hers. I ended, “…and to this day, we don’t know where he went.”
She looked thoughtful, and reached over, combing her fingers through Tommy’s hair to keep it out of his eyes. “Well, I’ve heard about that place.”
Tommy asked for more milk, and the girl got up to get him some. When she returned I asked her what she’d meant.
“Well,” she said, her eyes squinting a bit as if trying to remember something clearly from the back of her mind, “they don’t call it that, anymore, Vidal Junction, and the railroad tracks got all torn up or covered over. But it’s still there, and people have disappeared there before.”
“You talk like it’s a news story,” I said.
She laughed. “Well, it was one of those boogeyman kind of stories. When I was a kid.”
You’re still a kid, I thought. It struck me then, that she reminded me in some way of Anne, my ex. Not her looks, but the girl in her.
“What’s a boogeyman?” Tommy asked.
“Someone who picks his nose too much,” I told him.
The waitress looked very serious, and she spoke in a whisper. “There was a girl in Covington who ran away from home. My cousin knew her. She got to that place and she didn’t get further. My aunt said she was taken by her stepfather, but my cousin said that was just to keep us all from getting scared.”
“It’s one of those stories,” I said, but then I started to feel uneasy, as if the child in me were threatening to come out. “You know, like you hear from a friend of a good friend about a dead dog in a shopping bag that these punks steal, or the hook in the back of the car.”
“What’s a hook in the back of the car?” Tommy asked.
“Fishing hook,” I said by way of calming him. His mother had been telling me that he had severe nightmares and I didn’t want to feed them.
But the girl went ahead and scared him anyway, by saying, “well, folks around here I grew up with think it’s something like the asshole of the universe.”
I paid our bill, and I raced Tommy to the Mustang, because the girl had finally given me the creeps and convinced me that Tommy would have more nightmares—for which I would be rewarded with fewer and fewer weekends with him.
But, instead, Tommy said, “I want to go there.”
“Where?”
“The asshole.”
“Never say that word again as long as you live.”
“Okay.”
“She was weird, huh.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She was trying to scare you.”
“I think she was trying to scare you.”
He shrugged. “I don’t scare.”
I didn’t hunt Vidal Junction down intentionally, but we happened to come upon it because of my superb driving which, at the rate we were going, would set us down at my mother’s in Richmond at midnight. It was only five-thirty. I didn’t recognize the Junction at once. It had changed. The sign was gone, and the old gas pumps, while they were still there, were surrounded and almost engulfed by abandoned couches, refrigerators, and old rusted-out clunkers along the roadside.
I would’ve just driven by the place if it were not for the fact that Tommy told me that he had to pee. He could not wait, and what I had learned in my five years of fatherhood was that my son meant he had to go when he said it. So I pulled over and got out of the car with my son, and told him to pee behind one of the couches. I didn’t stand near him just because I was afraid of the waitress’ apocryphal warning, but because I worried about copperheads and perverts. I glanced around the junction, and noticed that the girl in the coffee shop had lied: the railroad tracks were very much in evidence.
“Lookit,” Tommy said, after he had zipped up. He grabbed my hand and pointed to the bottom of the torn up old couch.
“It’s asphalt,” I said. Or oil, I thought.
Or something.
“Don’t touch it,” I told him, but I was too late. Tommy stooped over and put his fingers right into it. “I hope it’s not doggie doo.”
I pulled him up and away, but as I did he let out a squeal, and then I saw why.
The skin of his fingers, right where the pads were, appeared ragged and bleeding. The top layer of skin had been torn off.
“Owee,” he said, immediately thrusting his fingers in his mouth.
The asshole of the universe is right, I thought.
“Hurts bad?” I asked.
He shook his head, withdrawing his fingers from between his lips. “Tastes funny.”
“Don’t eat it, Tom, for God’s sakes.”
He began crying as if I had slapped him — which I never did — and he went running across the drying field of junk.
I called to him.
I heard a door slam.
I went toward the sound, behind the old gas station, and there stood a man of about forty, with long hippie-style hair, and a white cotton T-shirt on and jeans, covered head to toe with dirt. “Tried to stop him,” the man said. “He went in, and I tried to stop him.”
“Tommy!” I called, and heard something that sounded like him from inside the gas station. The man blocked my way to the doorway, which had, in its last life, been the gas station restroom. It was odd that it had a screen door, and it seemed odder that this man standing there didn’t move as I came rather threateningly towards him.
He wore a puzzled look, briefly. Then, he nodded to me as if he’d sized me up in a matter of seconds. “It’s a kind of attraction they smell. I don’t smell it much now, but at first I did. The younger you are, the more you catch it.”
From the restroom, I heard my son cry out.
“You don’t want to go in there,” the man said. He remained in front of me, and I felt adrenaline rush through my blood as I prepared for a fight. “I tried to stop the boy, but it’s got that smell, and kids seem to respond to it best. I studied it for three years, and look,” he said, pointing to
his feet.
And then I understood why he stood so still.
The man had not feet, but where his legs stopped, his shins were splinted against blocks of wood. He squatted down, balancing himself against the wall of the building, and picked up a small kitchen knife and a flashlight, and then slid up again.
“Be prepared,” he said, handing me the knife, “I was smart, buddy. I cut them off when it started to get me. Cauterized them later. It hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, but it was a small sacrifice.”
Then he moved out of the way, and I opened the screen door to the restroom, and was about to set foot inside when he shined a flashlight over my shoulder into the dark room. I saw the forms, and the beam of light hit the strawberry-blonde hair of my son, only it was not my son but something I can’t even give a name to, unless it can be called skin, skin like silk and mud, moving slowly beneath the red-blonde hair, and from it the sound of my boy as if he were retreating somewhere, not hurting, and not crying, but just like he was going somewhere beyond imagining, and was making noises that were incomprehensible. Skin like an undulating river of shiny eels, turning inward, inward.
Knife in my hand, I stood on the threshold, and the man behind me said, “they go in all the time. I can’t stop them.”
“What in god’s name is it?”
“It’s a rip in the skin of the world,” he said. “Hell, I don’t know. It’s something living. Maybe anything.”
I felt something against the toe of my shoe, and instinctively drew back, but not before the tip of my Nike was torn off by the skin. The toes of my left foot were bleeding.
“Living organism,” he said, “I don’t know how long it’s been here, but it’s been three years since I found it. Could’ve been here for at least a decade.”
“Maybe more,” I said, remembering my brother Ray and his cigarette in front of the gas station, and his words, “I gotta go, anyway.” He would’ve gone around back to take a leak, maybe smelled whatever you were supposed to smell, and then just went in.
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