“Where’s Jake?”
PJ jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “I think he’s under the bridge.”
I walk back to the edge of the bank, and sure enough, I see the glowing red tip of Jake’s cigarette and hear the echo of him tossing rocks around in the shallow water under the bridge.
“Jake!” I whisper-shout. “Jake!”
He doesn’t answer me, but after a couple of minutes of cursing, he splashes over and accepts my hand as he struggles up the bank.
“Did you find it?” I ask.
Jake scrapes the mud off his shoes on the edge of a rock. “No,” he replies angrily. “I could’ve sworn I had something stashed under there.” He squints at me suspiciously. “You didn’t take it, did you?”
“No, Jake, I did not drink your troll booze. Jesus.” I turn and stomp back through the woods. Jake can be so infuriating sometimes. He hides bottles of booze all over the countryside—bottles that his dad won’t notice are missing, either because they’re three-quarters empty or are rarely used alcohols like Campari or mint schnapps—and every time he can’t find one he thinks somebody stole it. I imagine the farmers’ confusion each spring when they till their fields, the dark fertile soil parting under their plow to reveal airline bottles of Jim Beam and Rumple Minze.
After a couple of minutes of walking in silence we step over a low wall of stacked fieldstones and into—big surprise—a cornfield. No matter where you are in Shuckburgh, you’re always near a cornfield, and like the one across from my house, this one is just dirt now, the corn harvested before the weather turned cold. We walk on top of the rows, the dirt hard as rock in the cold, stepping over the ruts and kicking through piles of dead cornstalks. I’m glad there’s no corn; pushing your way through cornstalks slows you down. Also, if I’m being honest, it spooks me. The slightest breeze makes the stalks rub against one another and creates this creepy whispering sound. Walking through the narrow rows, you can’t see what’s on either side of you, and I always imagine murderers and monsters hiding just on the other side of the swaying rows. God, I wish something would swoop out of the darkness and take me now. It would save me the horror of having to face my parents in the morning.
“Are you okay, dude?” PJ trots up next to me.
I am very not okay, but I tell PJ, “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t said anything since we left your house.”
I wish I could tell PJ what’s wrong, but not only do he and Jake not know about my notebook, they don’t even know about Melanie. They don’t know I have—had, whatever—a sister. When we first met I didn’t mention it because dead siblings is sort of a heavy subject, but then after that there never seemed to be a good time. And now that I’ve waited this long, I almost feel like I’m intentionally lying to them. The reluctance I initially felt has turned into fear that they’ll find out some other way.
We hit another low fieldstone wall, the other edge of the cornfield, and PJ and I clamber over it. Jake is trailing behind us, as usual, probably searching for buried treasure.
“I’m fine,” I lie to PJ again. “Honestly, I’m just thinking about what you could possibly have in that bag.”
Anytime someone begins a sentence with “honestly,” you know they’re lying, but PJ trusts everyone. “Ah!” He brightens. “Well, don’t waste your time thinking. You’ll never guess.”
We climb up a massive hill covered in knee-high grass, and I guess the moon must come out from the clouds on the other side of the hill, because all of a sudden its crest glows silver with moonlight.
“We’re going to pass the housing complex next to Delps Road, right?” PJ asks me.
“Well, I think that based on our current route we’re going to walk past it on our left—but before you say anything, the answer is no.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” PJ says, immediately starting to drift left.
“Dude, you do this every time, and I’ve told you before: That’s cheating! A straight line is a straight line! You’re not allowed to change course like that, especially not for something this stupid.”
“Who’s changing course?” PJ asks innocently, slowly leaning farther left. Then he drops his book bag, and it rolls downhill a few feet to our left. “Oh shoot. I dropped my bag!” He runs over to pick it up and then continues walking, ten feet left of where he was before.
Jake lags behind us. “What are you girls fighting about?” he calls.
“PJ wants to walk past Vern’s house again.”
“No, I don’t,” PJ says. “Oops. I dropped my bag again!”
Vern is a cheerleader in our grade who PJ has a crush on. She’s the most unbelievably hot girl I’ve ever seen in real life. Watching her do normal things like take her books out of her locker makes me feel like I’m watching a movie. I expect a Transformer to break down a wall at any moment. Realistically, PJ has absolutely no chance with Vern, but of course PJ has never let reality stop him before.
“PJ!” I whisper-yell. “You are desecrating the sanctity of our night rituals!”
“What? I can’t hear you!” he straight-up yells from so far to the left that I can barely see him.
At the top of the hill we hit the aforementioned Delps Road, a smooth paved road that runs along the edge of a small housing complex, a little slice of the suburbs plopped incongruously in the middle of the farmland. They actually have streetlights here, for God’s sake! A dozen crummy lampposts and a couple of porch lights, but still, it’s Las Vegas compared to the rest of Sucksburgh.
PJ is down the road fifty feet to my left, at the edge of the housing complex. He waves from a circle of yellow under one of the streetlights before disappearing into a row of neatly trimmed hedges running behind the houses.
I smell something awful and look down at my feet to find a dead possum squished on the side of the road. Oh man. Poor little guy. His head is flattened, blood and brains spread over the road like a dark flower. Roadkill is common in Shuckburgh, not because there’s a lot of cars, but because there are a lot of varmints.
Jake stops next to me and nudges the possum with his toe. “Do you think he’s all right?”
This is a classic Jake joke: both mean and not funny. I make a mental note to file it away in the Big Book of Jake Jokes that I’m editing. Here’s a sample joke:
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Because fuck you, that’s why.
I point at the housing complex. “PJ’s spying on Vern again.”
Jake shakes his head. “That kid is weird.”
“Says the kid who buries booze like he’s a pirate.”
Jake cocks back a fist to punch me in the nuts, but I turn sideways and raise one knee to block him. Instead he pushes me so I stumble back and step into the possum’s guts.
“Ah! Crap! Dude, c’mon!”
Jake walks ahead of me, and I hurry to catch up, shuffle-stepping as I try to wipe the fresh possum off my shoe.
We enter the hedges where I saw PJ go in and tiptoe across a couple of backyards until we find him peeking around the side of the shed behind Vern’s house, a nondescript split-level with tan vinyl siding.
Even though PJ is obsessed with Vern and talks about her nonstop to me and Jake, lurking behind her shed is the closest he’s gotten to talking to her. It’s weird. He goes to these insane lengths to be near her, but he won’t actually speak to her. He even joined the football team, as their mascot, just so he could be closer to Vern while she’s cheerleading.
All of PJ’s scheming is building up to asking her to the Fall Fling dance, which is next week. He’s been planning all these different crazy ways to ask her out, like hiring a skywriting plane or hijacking the school’s PA system during the Pledge of Allegiance. Although I don’t think it matters how PJ asks her. Since they’ve never talked to each other even once, the answer’s gonna be no, followed by who are you? and probably also why are you dressed like a ninja?
Jake and I both think this backyard lurkin
g is creepy, but PJ thinks of it as research and always pulls out his little notepad to write down observations. He has the notepad out now, scribbling intently.
I take a knee beside him and crane my neck around the corner of the shed. “How’s the case going, Detective?” I ask.
“Good,” PJ says. “I noticed they have geraniums planted behind the house, so I’m going to get a bouquet of geraniums when I ask Vern out.”
Jake and I look at each other.
I grab PJ’s arm. “C’mon, Sherlock, let’s get moving. We’re almost there.”
Jake and I walk out from behind the shed and cross through the middle of Vern’s backyard. PJ lingers a few feet behind us, looking at the house, when suddenly the back porch light flicks on, flooding the backyard with blinding light. At first I assume the light is set on a motion detector, like many of the backyard lights in the neighborhood, but then I hear a sliding-glass door open and my heart jumps into my throat.
Someone steps out of the back door, onto the porch maybe ten feet away from us.
Jake and I duck behind a lone rosebush, which is barely big enough to shield us from view, but PJ is a few steps behind us and has absolutely nothing to hide behind. He’s in full view of the house, a spotlight trained on him.
PJ drops to his knees, curls up into a little ball, and kneels there motionless.
I hold my breath and peer between the branches of the rosebush. I can’t see the person on the porch well because they’re backlit by the spotlight, but it looks like a girl. I guess it must be Vern. She walks to the edge of the porch and leans on the banister, her face turned up to the stars.
She seems to search the night sky for a minute, then looks down and surveys the backyard. Her gaze passes right over PJ curled up in a ball. Finally, after what feels like forever, she goes back inside and closes the sliding-glass door. The light flicks off, and PJ uncurls like some strange nocturnal animal. He squat-runs toward us, does a little ninja roll, and joins Jake and me behind the shrub.
“I was pretending to be a rock!” PJ whispers excitedly. “I was pretending to be a rock and it totally worked!”
“That’s fantastic,” I say. “Maybe you can pretend to be a rock when we get arrested for trespassing.”
“I probably could,” PJ says earnestly. “You know what? I bet I could.”
We resume our straight-line navigation, which leads us through the backyards of the few remaining houses on this side of the complex. When we pass a large rock in one of the yards, Jake points at it and says to PJ, “Look, another ninja.”
Jake joke!
Parting the shrubs at the edge of the housing complex, we step into farmland so suddenly that the housing complex feels like it was a mirage. I enjoy this fantasy and intentionally preserve it by not looking back over my shoulder.
I don’t know why, but it reminds me of a station wagon my parents used to have when Melanie and I were kids. It had a seat which was turned backward, facing out the rear window. Melanie loved sitting back there, but I didn’t like it. It made me carsick to ride backward. When I asked her why she liked it so much, she looked at me like I was the dumbest little brother in the whole world. “Because,” she said, “it’s exciting.” She pointed out the back window in front of us. “You can see where you’ve been.” Then she turned around and pointed out the front window, up where Mom and Dad were sitting. “But you don’t know where you’re going. At least not until you get there.”
I love Melanie, but I gotta disagree with her on this one. I’m not interested in looking at where I’ve already been. Forward ho, I say, and preferably in a straight line.
I run the rest of the way down the muddy hill and stop at a field full of tall corn. Jake and PJ are already waiting for me at its edge.
“What the fuck is this?” Jake asks.
“Corn,” PJ says.
Jake tries to smack PJ, but PJ dodges him with a quick ninja head bob.
“Why isn’t it harvested?” I wonder. Even in the dark we can see that the corn is dead, the orderly rows slumped and bent like an army of zombies standing at ragged attention. A breeze picks up, and a murmur of dry whispers rises from the field.
A shiver crawls up my spine. “Ugh. Creepy corn.”
I reluctantly take the lead as we enter the field single file. The corn is over our heads. The stalks are weighed down by the cobs, and because the rows are all cockeyed and falling down, I have to push the crackling stalks out of our way.
Decaying corn shucks brush against my face like mummy hands. “Ugh. This sucks. Who’s the lazy-ass farmer that owns this field?”
“Yeah, it’s weird,” PJ says. He’s lost in the corn somewhere behind me, but I hear a rattle as he pulls an ear off one of the stalks. “The cobs are still on. The farmer just never harvested them, I guess.”
“Fascinating,” Jake says, disgusted. He pushes past me, slashing at the stalks like he’s breaking trail in the jungle.
We stumble out of the field of dead corn to find a small road that disappears around the bend of the big hill we just came down. We pause on the shoulder to catch our breath and pull dead cornstalks out of our shirt collars. I’m going be itching for days. I hope no corn bugs crawled down my shirt.
I consult my phone and see that the farm is just on the other side of the road, down a dirt driveway whose mouth leads down through a break in the skeletal trees.
The wind shifts, and I can smell it now, the rich, disgusting scent of cow manure. It’s an eager odor that crawls up your nose and then slides down your throat, seeking your core. I’ve heard that, of all the evil man-made chemicals destroying the environment, nothing has done more to dissolve the Earth’s ozone layer than cow farts, and I believe it. They have physical weight. If you filled a bag with cow farts and threw it in a pond, it would sink like a stone.
PJ inhales deeply. “I love the smell of cow manure in the moonlight.”
Jake agrees. “It smells like victory.”
I look left and right down the road, then back the way we came. For some reason, it seems familiar. Have I been here before? I look around, but it’s hard to see in the dark.
One thing that definitely seems familiar is that, ominously, there’s another dead possum squished on the side of the road here. Jake points at it and asks, “How’d he get here before us?”
Knock-knock. Who’s there? Nobody is here, and I have a gun. Go away.
I point to the break in the trees, and Jake and PJ follow me across the road.
The dirt road leads downhill, and it’s so narrow that it’s really just a driveway, albeit a long one. Old trees with knotty limbs arch over the driveway, making it feel like we’re descending underground through a tunnel. After a few twists and turns, the driveway levels out and ends at an old two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch. I keep an eye on Jake, just in case he gets the urge to stroll inside and make himself a cup of coffee. The three of us pause behind a big oak and look carefully at the windows to make sure all the lights are off before creeping past the house to the barns behind it.
It’s a small farm, just two barns and a chicken coop, and they’re all run-down in a way that makes me think whoever owns this place is the same person who owns the field of unharvested corn we just trudged through. Splintery fences surround a scrubby yard of overgrown grass. A couple of rusted cars sit on blocks like the skeletons of ancient beasts.
The larger of the two barns is in the back and is connected to a small pen bounded by a two-tier wooden fence. The mud around the pen is thick and reeking, heavily mixed with manure; it’s grosser than most cow pens I’ve seen, and most cow pens are super gross.
“Geez,” Jake mutters. “Even for a shit hole, this place is a shit hole.”
The grubby pen is empty—there are no cows in it—but a gate at the far end stands open, leading to a large, grassy pasture bounded by an electrical fence. From far out in the pasture, moos drift to us like the horns of ships passing at sea.
It’s time.
— — —
When Jake, PJ, and I met each other over the summer, we instantly felt there was a special connection between the three of us. That our trio held mysterious potential. Even Jake, who is not prone to philosophizing, noted at the time (as PJ was in the middle of demonstrating how you could achieve a mild high by holding your breath until you nearly passed out) that “the three of us should start a band or something.”
The feeling was unanimous, but since none of us played any instruments, we agreed that we’d have to focus on the “or something.”
A couple of days later, at the first sleepover at my house, PJ told Jake and me about an activity he’d heard whispers of online called cow tipping. Supposedly, some kids in the country figured out that since cows sleep standing up, if you sneak up on them at night, you can tip them right over.
We didn’t know if anyone was really doing this or not, but the idea of sneaking up on a large herbivore under cover of darkness and doing something illegal ignited our imaginations. Finally, here was an activity we had all the resources to do: cows, arms, and stupidity.
Tipping cows seemed a little mean, though—couldn’t they get hurt? Jake didn’t care, of course, but PJ and I did, so we came up with a humane variation: cow painting. We would sneak up on the cows and paint them as they slumbered. The cows around Shuckburgh are primarily white; they’re large, shoulder height—a perfect blank canvas for rural delinquency.
That very night we filled a whole spiral notebook with ideas. Our minds reeled with the possibilities. “We can paint one to look like a zebra!” PJ suggested. “We can paint them all camouflage so the farmer won’t be able to see them!” I said. We’d paint subversive slogans on them like MEAT IS MURDER and WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?
That weekend PJ and Jake spent the night at my place again, and we put our plan into action. After my parents fell asleep, we snuck out to the garage and grabbed a couple cans of house paint along with rollers and brushes. Then we crept outside, cutting across the moonlit fields as quietly as we could while lugging paint cans, toward a cow farm that PJ knew about near his house.
This Might Hurt a Bit Page 4