SOMETHING WAITS

by Bruce Jones

  Mary Ellen brightened suddenly. “I know! What are you both afraid of the most?” Kenny looked surprised. Then sneered, spit. “Nothing.”

  To which John was obliged to quickly agree, “Me either!”

  Mary Ellen turned indifferently to look behind them. “Even the hollow?”

  John felt a wave of dread clutch his heart. He gazed beyond her to the sinister forest of foreboding swampland past the bright meadow, whose tangled depths and high canopy of trees allowed no sun to penetrate, revealing its terrible secrets.

  The hollow was taboo to all the school children, had been as long as John could remember. Parents and faculty alike had made strict rules about entering its treacherous reaches, its snakes and poisonous plants, bogs and unforgiving quicksand. “A kid could get lost in there for days wandering in that maze of brambles and sink holes,” his father had told him on more than one occasion. But such parental warnings were unnecessary; the hollow’s legend was a far more potent deterrent for most kids. It was long rumored that something far more odious than snakes and gators lurked there…a wild man inhabited the hollow, a crazy old hermit, beady eyed and gibbering, who lived on berries and rats, and seized any child foolish enough to wander into the hollow’s dark recesses.

  “No,” John said. “It’s dangerous in there, Mary Ellen.”

  Mary Ellen smirked a shrug. “So you are afraid, John.”

  Kenny turned toward the tangled darkness arrogantly. “How far do I have to go in?” he demanded.

  Mary Ellen tilted her head bird-like again, considered carefully. “Until we can’t see you anymore.”

  The tall boy stood quietly for a moment, chewing his lower lip. “All right,” he finally nodded. “All right.”

  John felt his heart quicken as the other boy approached the hollow. “You’d better not!” he warned. “There’s copperheads and cottonmouths in there!”

  Kenny waved him off, not breaking stride. “How would you know, chicken-shit?”

  “Your aren’t from around here!” John called. “There’s a crazy man in there! He waits in the thicket at the edge of the woods to grab kids who come too close!”

  Kenny slowed, hesitated.

  “And he eats ‘em! Raw!”

  Kenny stopped. Considered. He turned. “How do you know, Richardson?”

  “I saw him!”

  Kenny made a wry face. “Yeah? Where?”

  “In…in a dream!”

  Both the other children laughed.

  “Go on,” Mary Ellen called to Kenny, “John’s just a scaredy-cat.”

  She was right about that. John watched with tightening insides as Kenny entered the hollow. Nothing would ever give him the courage to go in there. He looked askance at Mary Ellen watching the other boy with excited anticipation. Was she crazy? Worse: would he lose her now?

  Kenny stepped gingerly over the first gnarled root and proceeded cautiously into the lattice of shadows. The marsh seemed to swallow him. His silhouette dimmed; soon the sound of his crunching sneakers across the undergrowth was all that identified him.

  Then there was silence.

  Mary Ellen looked at John.

  He’s dead! John prayed silently. A snake got him, or maybe even the wild man! Oh, please let him be dead!

  A voice from deep shadows. “Can you see me?”

  Mary Ellen yelled back gleefully. “No!”

  There came a sound of loud crashing and Kenny Watkins charged from the hollow, breathing hard. His right arm was scrapped, his jeans trailing foxtails. “I win,” he gasped. “I win!”

  “Why were you running so fast?” Mary Ellen wondered admiringly.

  Kenny looked back over his shoulder, frowned vague concern. “Thought I heard something in there.”

  “You were scared!” John exclaimed.

  Kenny turned on him. “Was not!”

  “We’re so!”

  Kenny returned a smug look. “Maybe, but I went in. I get the kiss.”

  He turned to the girl.

  “Not here,” she giggled and nodded in John’s direction. “Somewhere we can be alone.”

  John watched them walk off across the bright meadow, his heart breaking.

  * * *

  The doorbell rang the next morning at John Richardson’s house. His wife shut off the vacuum with irritation and answered it.

  Her husband stood in the doorway staring vacantly at her.

  “What? Forget your keys?”

  “I couldn’t find it,” he told her.

  She leaned on one hip with slow weariness. “What?”

  “The office. My job. I forgot where it is.”

  He just stood there at the lintel staring stupidly at her. She finally pulled him in by the front of his shirt and slammed the door.

  “I looked all over,” he confided, “but I couldn’t find the building. Do you think they might have moved it?”

  She took his coat, avoiding his eyes, not wanting him to see the desperation in her own. “Sit down, John.”

  He sank into the sofa. “I couldn’t remember the name of the place…all I could see was that red building…”

  Jean watched him, expressionless. “Red building?”

  “The red brick schoolhouse. In Louisiana. And…the little girl…”

  Jean put a hand to her head, closed her eyes a moment. “I’m going to call a doctor, John.”

  He looked up. “A doctor? What for?”

  “I want you to lie down there on the sofa, honey.” She pushed him back gently. “You’ve been at it too hard. I should have seen this coming.” She shoved a throw under his head. “Now you just relax and rest. The doctor will be here in a minute, give you a nice sedative.”

  He grabbed her arm before she could leave. “I want to go back, Jean. I want to see the school again.”

  She nodded a smile, patted his hand maternally. “All right, all right. We’ll see what the doctor says.”

  She moved to the hallway, picked up the landline phone. She punched in numbers. Ran a shaky hand through her hair as the number began to ring. Before anyone answered, she heard the car start out in the garage. “John?” She dropped the receiver and ran through the living room. “John?”

  The sofa was empty.

  * * *

  He drove all night, stopping only for gas. It was six hundred miles to Louisiana, another seventy-five to his hometown. He stopped once in the morning for a sandwich, then drove on all day without stopping again.

  It was mid-afternoon when he reached the town of his childhood. Except for the road signs announcing its name he never would have recognized it. He hadn’t been back since he was twelve. A deep emptiness found his stomach as he passed unfamiliar tracks of houses in what once were wide fields of chickweed and saw grass. Strange buildings and businesses rose up around him, new bridges and flat, monotonous strip malls with familiar corporate logos. Maybe he was in the wrong town, could that be it? He became lost, panicked. He had to ask at a filling station where the center of town was. If he could find that, he reasoned, he could locate the road to the old school.

  Only a handful of buildings looked familiar when he finally reached Main Street. It took nearly half an hour to find the street that led past his school; it had been widened, festooned with yet more strip malls, used car lots, McDonald’s. Acrid factory smoke assailed him on the road he once raced his Schwinn. Once scattered-apart homes were now butted together in a continuous line of bland conformity. In desperation he realized the old school might no longer be there. What if it had been razed like so much else of the town, replaced by the hideous lines and angles of progress? He began to feel sick inside. His hand trembled on the wheel and beginning tears brimmed sleep-starved eyes; please, God, let it be there…I won’t ask you for another thing…

  The Lexus climbed a step grade, leveled off and suddenly the maddening rows of houses thinned. He recognized an old gas station on his left, the same green pumps, movement behind sun-glared windows. His heart quickened.

  He bre
asted the next hill and stopped. He looked down in wonder. In awe.

  It was there below him. All of it. More beautiful even than he remembered. The school.

  And the playground, the bike rack and best of all the meadow of yellow flowers, shifting and nodding like a restless sea in the afternoon breeze. “They left it,” he whispered as if in a cathedral. “They left it just as it was, didn’t change a thing, an inch of ground…”

  The ground. And suddenly he had the answer. Of course! The ground! The whole school, this whole section of town was built on the edge of a marsh! No contractor in his right mind would touch this property, or any property for acres around it! It was like a preservation!

  He put the car in gear jubilantly and shot down the hill, throwing gravel as he entered the school parking lot. He braked near the old bike rack and climbed out.

  He froze.

  The bike rack was empty. Where were the kids? Was the school closed? Awaiting the wrecking ball?

  He looked at his calendar watch. Chuckled. Idiot! It’s summer! The kids will be back next fall! Everything’s okay!

  He crossed quickly to the playground and found the monkey bars exactly where he’d left them, rising from the dark asphalt like an old friend, waiting for him. He reached out and touched the cool metal of one of the nearest rung, polished smooth by thousands of grasping young hands, his own included. He took off his jacket and hung it over the rung, rolled up the sleeves of his Arrow shirt and began to climb.

  King of the mountain, a voice cried triumphantly within, and he couldn’t suppress a victorious smile. I’m back! I did it! I’m back and nothing can ever make me leave again! This is my home, my real home! This is where I belong, who I am!

  At the top of the bars he sat elated, gripping the rung beneath him, letting his legs dangle over the side, eyes closed in contentment, lungs reveling in the rich, familiar smell of the meadow. He gazed outward across the rolling hills of yellow dandelions to the edge of the dark tangle of hollow beyond. It still stood there grimly, ringing the entire expanse of meadow, taunting him with its dark secrets.

  He loved it now, he realized. He loved the hollow as he loved the meadow, the school. Maybe he’d always loved it, even in his fear of it, even though it had almost taken Mary Ellen from him. He loved its mystery and its shadows and its silent implacability. That last afternoon in Louisiana years ago, when he’d come alone to the school to sit like this on the monkey bars and say goodbye, it was the hollow he’d been saying goodbye to. It was the hollow he knew he’d miss the most. He never realized it until now. And the marvel of it was that after all these years, sitting here a grown man, he still feared it. The thought of entering those dark woodland chambers still sent a chill through him. And that was as it should be, he thought. That was the way he wanted it.

  He jerked his head suddenly. Something was moving out on the meadow.

  He squinted into the warm glare and felt his breath catch. A little girl in a bright summer dress was wandering in the golden fields gathering a bouquet of dandelions.

  John Richardson felt his heart swell tremulously beneath his ribs. No. Not just any little girl. Even from here, the yellow hair and delicate walk were unmistakable. Only one little girl in the world looked like that…

  He climbed down the monkey bars in a kind of dream, the years melting away rung by magical rung. His shoes scraped the asphalt with practiced familiarity, reached the soft, yielding grass of the meadow of their own accord. He moved toward the little girl in a kind of trance…moved toward her on the legs of a twelve-year-old boy…

  It’s her! She’s still here!

  I’m losing my mind he though absently, dreamily, not really caring at all…how could this be?

  The little girl looked up as he approached, hurling twenty years of memories at him from wide, iridescent blue eyes. He stopped before her and looked down. Impossible. But there she was. “Mary Ellen…”

  She smiled and blinked up at him in the warm sun, shading her brow with a pink hand. “How did you know my name?” she asked in that innocent voice he’d never forgotten.

  He dropped to his knees before her, head swirling. “Don’t you remember me? It’s John. John Richardson. We played together, don’t you know?” He looked down at himself. “Only…I’m all grown up now…”

  The girl frowned sweetly, trying to remember, cocking her little head like a robin.

  “Mary Ellen!”

  The little girl turned at the sound of her name. John followed her gaze to the figure of the woman coming over the hill behind them. He stood up.

  “Mother, this is Mr. Richardson. He knows my name!”

  The woman nodded politely. “How do you do?” She smiled confusion. “Do you really know my daughter?”

  Her face is the same, John thought: sweet, pretty, trustful. The blue eyes bright and friendly, with just that small gleam of naughty adventure. But something else was there now too. Or was it something missing?

  “You’re Mary Ellen,” he said to the woman.

  She nodded, still puzzled, slightly cautious now. “Do we know each other?”

  “We did.”

  She shook her head, took her daughter’s hand. “I don’t—“ Then her face lit. “John! Little John Richardson! Of course! It can’t be!”

  He smiled wanly. He felt vaguely tired all of a sudden, as if he’d come to the end of a very long journey.

  “After all these years!” she exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  He shrugged a weak smile. “I was looking for you, actually.”

  Her brows knit for just an instant, then she laughed. “Oh, John! This is wonderful! Are you married? Did you bring your wife?”

  “No. She’s…home.” He’d almost said, “dead.”

  “Oh, what a shame. I’d love to have met her. Are you staying long?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, come!” She took his hand. “We have a picnic blanket close by! And food! We can sit and talk, catch up!”

  She led him over the crest of the hill to a large tree, lawn blanket and wicker basket of fried chicken an island in the sea of yellow. She pointed for him to sit while she opened a thermos of coffee. “I bring Mary Ellen here every so often for a little picnic between girls. Would like a drumstick or breast?”

  “No thanks.” It’s the innocence, he thought. That’s what’s missing from her face. But of course it would be.

  She handed him a cup of coffee and turned to her daughter. “Honey, you go play now. Mr. Richardson and I want to talk.”

  John watched the girl move off among the dandelions, stooping, picking. “She’s you all over again,” he said.

  “Yes, there’s not much of her daddy in her.”

  “Daddy working today?”

  “Daddy’s dead. Iraq.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She smiled, then shrugged pragmatically. “He was always over there. Mary Ellen never knew him. Neither did I really, for that matter.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “you never did tell me what brought you here.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “To find me?” She laughed the old laugh. “You’re still sweet little John Richardson, aren’t you?”

  “That’s the trouble, I really am. I never learned to grow up very gracefully.”

  She sighed, looked out at the meadow. “Well, neither do most of us.”

  “Yes, but it’s worse with me. I hate everything about my life today. It’s as though I stopped living the day my parents moved from Louisiana. Would you believe me if I told you I’m happier right now sitting here with you than I have been since I was twelve? Seeing you, seeing the old school. It’s the only real peace I’ve known in years.”

  “John, what a lovely thing to say.”

  He looked into her little girl eyes and heart: two children talking. Pretty isn’t so much. Lots of girls are pretty. If you really liked me you’d think I was beautiful
.

  “I do.”

  “Do what?” asked the woman sipping coffee.

  John blinked. “I do think you’re beautiful, Mary Ellen…”

  She studied him without speaking. The breeze died suddenly. “Sweet John…” she murmured, and leaned closer.

  I love you, Mary Ellen, a child cried within him.

  “You want to kiss me, John,” the woman said softly. “I know you do. And it’s all right, John. I want you to…”