“Yeah?”
Joey swallowed. This wouldn’t be easy for his friend to hear. “Mike, she saw the detective there. And she saw Bryce with him.”
Michael’s face pulled noticeably back.
“They were eating ice cream together and she thought they were talking.”
“She...” Michael’s head shook slightly. “She must have made a mistake.”
“She’s positive, Mike. It was Bryce.”
Bryce? With the Kiddie Catcher? “Bryce?”
Joey nodded. “Did you talk to him at all yesterday?”
“No,” Michael answered. His eyes slanted away and something thick and heavy crawled into his chest. Bryce?
“You’re his best friend, Mike.” Joey scooted backward as the line shortened. “Can you try and get a hold of him?”
Michael nodded, his words gone momentarily as thoughts erupted like billiard balls after a vicious break. He had been acting weird. Like at the cemetery. And before, when he saw Guy’s writing on the note. And Friday at lunch when he said he couldn’t help with Chris. He seemed funny then.
“Mike?” Joey tapped his friend on the shoulder. “Mike?”
“Yeah?” Mike said, looking back to Joey now.
“Can you try and talk to him?”
“Sure. I’ll, um, stop by his house after church.”
“Okay,” Joey said, then turned back toward the head of the line. The confessionals were just a few feet away.
Behind, Michael was thinking of those small rooms, closets really, and all that went on in there. About confessing one’s sins in there, and how priests couldn’t tell anyone what you said. You could tell them anything. That you killed someone, or that you knew who had killed a certain person, and the they couldn’t tell a soul. And for a brief instant Michael thought to himself how good it might feel to tell someone. Just what a relief it would be to let it out.
He wondered if Bryce was thinking the same thing in a very different way.
* * *
It was Bryce who didn’t want to talk in the house, and Bryce who suggested they take a walk through Bigfoot Woods.
A hundred silent yards into the forest, Dooley asked his young acquaintance how the place got its name.
“It’s been called that for a long time,” Bryce answered, his eyes ahead and on the dark and damp path. He remembered PJ tripping, going down hard and almost on her face, and he didn’t want the same thing to happen to him. So he had to look ahead and not at the Kidd... at Dooley. (Call me Dooley, okay? I’m not a cop right now; I’m trying to be a friend.) Had to. Even when he felt Dooley eyeing him as they walked between the trees. He had to stay focused on not tripping. That was why he couldn’t look at him.
And the night they played chess, he had to concentrate on the board. On the game. He hadn’t wanted to make any wrong moves. That was why he’d avoided Dooley’s gaze then. Simple as that.
“How long?” Dooley asked.
“As long as I can remember.” Bryce stepped long over a tangle of fallen pine boughs, one thought spawned by his reply striking him as odd. It seemed to him that everything before Guy’s death, all his memories, were disjointed and hard to grasp. They were there in his head, for sure, but the things that had happened since that cold Wednesday were drowning out the images and sounds of his past.
The realization that his memory was segmenting itself like the centuries, Before Guy/After Guy, disturbed Bryce.
‘Everything will be all right. Just like it used to be.’
How did it used to be? I’m not sure I remember. I don’t even remember if it was ‘all right’.
A sting pricked at the wet inside of his lip.
He wanted to remember. Wanted to hook something in the foggy time Before Guy and reel it in to see it, hear it, feel it. He wanted to so bad that he made himself try, trolling his murky memory for more of an answer to Dooley’s question. He thought hard and after a minute he had it, in pieces at first, but those pieces began to fit together and before he knew it he was saying, “It actually got its name before I was born.”
“Really?” Dooley said politely. The little guy’s eyes had come up from the forest floor and were now aimed ahead. He was squinting a little, as if solving some puzzle in his head.
“A long time before,” Bryce went on, snagging the details as they became whole. “There was this old man named Henry Cullison, but we all called him Old Hank. We called him that because that’s what everyone called him. Our parents, everybody.” A pause stopped the recollection only briefly as more came. “He died last year.”
“An old guy, huh?”
Bryce nodded at the path ahead. A damp spot on the earthen track sloshed beneath his feet. “Back in like nineteen seventy, I think, Old Hank was out hunting in the woods here. Most of the houses on my street hadn’t been built then. My dad says ours was built in seventy-eight. So there used to be more deer out here back then. You still see them sometimes, but not much.”
“So he was hunting and he, what, saw Bigfoot?” Dooley smiled at Bryce’s bobbing profile.
“No, Old Hank said he killed it.”
“Killed it? Killed Bigfoot?” Dooley asked obligingly. He glanced back at the path they’d followed. The Hool house and those on either side were no longer visible.
“Yeah, he told a whole bunch of people that he’d shot a deer, and he chased it as it ran off, and after a few minutes he found a blood trail and followed that for like a half an hour or something like that. But he said he started getting a weird feeling because there was a whole lot of blood. Way too much. He said there was enough on the ground that the deer should have been dead a long way back. He kept on following it and he said when he came close to Old Woman Rock—”
“What’s that?”
Bryce pointed up the slope, away from the more level path they were following. “It’s this big rock in a clearing that looks like an old woman’s face. It’s got a big, crooked nose like a witch. Big enough to stand under.”
Dooley nodded and they walked in silence for a moment.
“Old Hank said that when he got close to Old Woman Rock he could hear grunting and chewing and slobbering sounds.” Bryce chewed at the inside of his lip and hopped long over an exposed root, the condensation from the damp and heavy forest air sputtering off his jacket as he landed solidly on the opposite side. The jarring touchdown pressed his teeth into the small wound he’d opened exactly one week earlier. The mushy, tender flesh parted again and he could taste blood on his tongue. “And when he got close enough to see the rock he said he saw Bigfoot sitting on top of it with its big hairy legs hanging down around the nose. And Bigfoot was holding the deer Old Hank had shot and was eating it.”
A young, spindly pine bisected the path and briefly came between Dooley and Bryce.
“Eating the deer?”
“Yeah,” Bryce confirmed. The entire thing had come back to him now. Beginning to end. Just like one of his stories. He could see it whole, the detail pushing the recollection up. Up and out. “And Old Hank said the thing looked at him and showed its teeth.” (Smiling? Growling?) “It had these yellow teeth.” Guy’s were white. White like the big keys on a piano. “And they were stained with the deer’s blood.” Blood. Remember the blood? Bryce’s tongue swept the inside of his lips and pulled the coppery taste deep into his mouth. “Old Hank thought that Bigfoot was growling at him, like it was going to come after him, so he lifted his gun...” I can see it coming up. He’s lifting the gun. It’s like it’s real. Like I’m watching it happen now. “...and aimed it at Bigfoot...” And Bryce did see it, though the alleged incident happened before he was born. Before his real (?) mom had given him away for whatever reason. He could see Old Hank putting the rifle to his shoulder, see his hand tighten around the curve of the wood grip, see his fingers curl around it, squeezing tight, tighter, tighter...
...until the memory of the old tale was invaded by a memory Bryce knew to be real. A memory of his own. A memory where the fingers were tigh
tening around a wood something, but not the grip of a rifle stock. They were mashing hard around the thinning handle of the bat.
The bat.
Before more fingers got to it. These were the real fingers, the real hands, the hands that had raised the bat high in the air and brought it down hard on Guy’s head.
This memory interjected itself into the innocent story of Old Hank and Bigfoot Woods just like the hateful wantings had slipped quietly into The Sun Beam as he put it to paper. Just that way, right as he was thinking about one thing, one perfectly normal thing, a story just like his own stories, really. It came then, unannounced, and made itself known.
He had let it come the last time. Had given it life on the page. Now...
He saw the hands, and he didn’t want to. He knew the hands, and he wished he didn’t.
Bryce tasted the blood in his mouth, and that was when he went down.
Dooley tried to grab the young boy, but his fingers just brushed the hood of his jacket. He went face first toward the ground, his hands not pocketed and hanging casually at his side all the way down. His right shoulder caught most of the impact. It pushed a good inch into the soft earth. When it hit, it seemed to jolt Bryce back to some sense of awareness and his left hand shot quickly out, grabbing at the dirt to keep his body from tumbling over on his face. His head thunked against the muck lightly, leaving the right side of his forehead smudged with mud.
“Hey,” Dooley said, stepping over the obstacle that had tripped up his young companion and squatting down close at his side. “Are you hurt? Bryce? Are you okay?”
Bryce felt hands help him to a sit, then he shook the mild shock away and looked around. He saw the root that had caught his foot, and he saw the trees, and the path ahead. He remembered the path ahead, and he remembered this spot. It was here, right here, that PJ had gone down. The same gnarled black root had gotten him.
Dooley brushed some of the mud from Bryce and gently wiped some of the smudge from his forehead. “Did you hit hard?”
“No,” Bryce answered, shaking his head slowly. He looked up at Dooley, looked into his eyes, and felt the big hands tend the non-wound on his forehead. “I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” Bryce looked down at the root again. How had it gotten him, too? And why was he walking this way with the detective? The same way they’d traveled to the cemetery? Why? Why?
Dooley shifted his position to examine Bryce’s head a bit more closely. “So, what happened?”
“I didn’t see the root.”
Dooley shook his head. “What happened with Bigfoot?”
“Old Hank...” Here this detective was, brushing him off and cleaning him up just like they all had after PJ had tripped. Almost like he cared. Bryce glanced briefly up the path still ahead and was hit with the sudden, hot worry that going that way with his friends might not have been the right thing to do. That and other things.
“Old Hank what?”
This time, Bryce’s eyes settled upon Dooley’s easily, with more wonder than fear. He swallowed the blood skimming his tongue. “He shot Bigfoot.”
“And?” Dooley probed, checking Bryce’s head carefully and cleaning the spot above his right eyebrow with spit on a tissue.
“And he went back to town and told people.” A crimson line crawled out of Bryce’s mouth and over his lip to his narrow chin. “And they came out to Old Woman Rock and found the deer Old Hank had shot.” Dooley was mid-wipe on the last remnants of the smudge when he noticed the blood oozing thinly from Bryce’s mouth, in two places now, staining his chin as he kept talking. “It was all chewed up and laying on the big rock nose, but Bigfoot wasn’t there.” Blood trickled over in a wispy sheen now, across the length of his lower lip, and all the while Bryce just looked at Dooley and continued on. “Old Hank swore he saw it, but no one believed him.” Dooley moved the tissue gingerly to Bryce’s chin now and dabbed at the red mess gathering there and dripping onto his jacket. “Everyone thought he was crazy.”
Bryce’s tongue slipped through his lips and drew some of the blood back in. His eyes never left Dooley’s.
Dooley reached up with his thumb and pulled the Bryce’s bottom lip down. The long open welt where his teeth had sliced into the flesh was pooling blood that thinned as it mixed with the boy’s spit. “You’ve got a good cut here.”
Bryce stared at him.
Dooley drew his own bottom lip in over his teeth, sucking it into his mouth in demonstration. “Do like this.”
Bryce did, putting immediate pressure on the wound. The flow slowed against his tongue.
“We should get you back and cleaned up,” Dooley said. He took Bryce by the arms and helped him up. “We’ll just tell your mom that you said something bad about the Mariners and I popped you one in the jaw, okay?”
An actual smile forced its way onto Bryce’s contorted lips. A real smile.
It had taken a thousand rotten jokes and four weeks to get a smile out of Jimmy Vincent. A real smile, but one that Dooley knew was tainted with the reality of what the boy had done.
This one, the one twisting Bryce’s bloodied mouth, was not tainted that way. In its brief appearance Dooley saw flashes of a child. A child with hope.
He counted it a victory and started back with Bryce toward his house on the edge of Bigfoot Woods.
* * *
She stood in the half-open doorway and aimed a polite smile at her son’s so-called best friend. “Bryce is not here, Michael.”
“Oh,” Michael reacted. His eyes stole glances past Mrs. Hool, trying to see down the hall toward Bryce’s bedroom.
Caroline Hool closed the door a bit and wedged herself full into the open space. “I don’t know when he’ll be back, Michael, so you should probably just go.”
‘...just go’? Mrs. Hool had never, not once, told him to ‘just go.’ In fact her usual reaction when Michael came by and Bryce wasn’t there, maybe at the store with his dad or on some similar and finite excursion, was to invite him in and pour him a glass of juice while he waited. She’d let him watch TV or play on the computer, or just hang out in Bryce’s room reading a comic book or whatever. Nothing like this had ever happened, and that made the skin on the back of Michael’s neck crawl.
“Do you know where he went?” Michael asked, and was as surprised as a minute before when Mrs. Hool let out a slow, impatient breath that stole the faint smile from her face.
“You need to go,” Caroline Hool said, then stepped back from the door and closed it with Michael gaping at her.
He stared at the brass knocker for a few seconds, then backed away from the door, his heels coming to the edge of the stoop. He looked left off the porch, and then right toward the driveway, past the minivan parked there. His eyes narrowed at the sight.
The minivan was outside. On a Sunday. Heck, it was never outside anytime. Or hardly ever. Mrs. Hool always parked it in the garage, right next to Mr. Hool’s Subaru. In fact, Michael could only remember it being parked in the driveway once or twice before, and that was only when Bryce had his train set, the one mounted on a big piece of plywood, out and resting on two sawhorses. It wouldn’t fit in the house. Michael knew that because he and Bryce had struggled to angle the big thing through the door and into the kitchen on the way to Bryce’s bedroom one time, with no luck. So it stayed in the garage, the track and the buildings fastened to the board that simply leaned against the back wall of the garage.
Michael’s eyes snapped toward the flat garage door. Except when Bryce has it out.
He glanced cautiously back at the front door. He could hear Mrs. Hool’s voice inside, saying something to Connie and Bonnie about keeping their roller skates out of the hall. One foot stepped slowly down the front steps, then the other, and when both of his feet were solidly on the cement walkway Michael did a quick turn to the right and sprinted behind Mrs. Hool’s minivan and ran in a crouch up the side of the garage. He stopped at the side window and slowly peeked in.
Mr. Hoo
l’s Subaru wasn’t there, which was expected. On Sundays he liked to go to the driving range in Shelton and practice his swing. Bryce and he had gone with him once. So his being gone was no surprise. And even not seeing the board-mounted train landscape inside, the engine pulling a half dozen box cars and that one stupid circus car Bryce liked so much, that wasn’t beyond expectation. Bryce could have been with his dad at the driving range. Both those things made sense.
What didn’t fit, or did fit, considering what PJ had seen at Gorton’s the day before, was the blue sedan parked in the garage where the minivan usually sat. Blue and shiny and new looking. Michael stood straight up and rose to his tip-toes so he could see down into the car. It was clean inside. No clutter. The only thing he could make out inside was something lying on the passenger seat. It was flat and brown, one of those soft briefcases. Maybe a leather one like Mrs. Gray carried out to her car sometimes. It had a flap that closed over the top, and two buckles that held the flap shut. And on the flap there was something. Some letters. Michael pressed close to the window, but his breath fogged the glass. He wiped the foggy smudge with the sleeve of his jacket and held his breath as he pressed his face close again.
This time the letters were clear. Two letters. A D and an A done in gold. That was all, but it was enough.
Michael stepped back from the window, the breath he’d held slipping free as a lost, dejected sigh as he wondered how his friend could be doing it. Wondered if he was. Wondered just what the heck was happening to everything.
He shook his head at the ground and turned toward the street. He jogged out to the sidewalk and off toward home, feeling as alone as he could ever remember feeling.
Thirty Two
As the last echoes of Monday’s three o’clock bell died, the students of Room 18 filed out of Windhaven’s auditorium with music and song at their backs.
They’d spent the last hour in the old, cavernous building, the recesses of its high ceiling lost in darkness above the rafter-mounted stage lights, practicing the numbers they would perform at the autumn pageant on Wednesday night, just two days off now. Practicing the songs the group would sing as one, and songs a few would offer, all with Miss Austin in accompaniment on the piano that was pushed to the side of the stage. There was even going to be a solo, they had learned just that day, and it was the sweet, small voice of that surprising soloist that followed the class out.
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