Woods

by Finkelstein, Steven

  “Get up, you little dingleberry,” said Casey Surrey. His a crude, mean voice, flat and atonal, one that demanded attention and was used to getting it, the voice of a schoolyard tough. He turned and spat into the grass, then he prodded his younger brother with the toe of one of his Converse. Tad rolled onto his back and looked up at the frowning face, framed against a sky of twinkling stars such as are only visible out in the country, away from the smoggy hydrocarbon residue that can be found hanging over any major city. They were the spitting image of each other, but put the two of them side by side and you’d think you were looking at the before and after pictures from some ultra-protein shake or miracle He-Man kit. At six foot one, Casey was four inches taller than his younger brother and nearly fifty pounds heavier, already a physical presence at his age. He had the same auburn hair, the same gold infused hazel eyes. But Casey was broader in the chest, the shoulders. His wrists were as big around as Tad’s forearms, and just beneath the skin of his biceps and triceps an intricate maze of dark blue veins, criss-crossing, separating and meeting again. Now Casey knelt down, inserted his pinkie in his mouth, then jammed it into Tad’s left ear.

  “Fucker!” Tad slapped his brother’s arm away and leapt to his feet. Casey smirked, eying the filth encrusted jeans and sneakers.

  “What have we been doing? Taking a little swim in the creek?” Tad didn’t respond, instead turning away and moving in the direction of the driveway. Undaunted, Casey loped along beside him, jabbing an accusatory finger into his arm. Tad pushed it away and Casey grinned. “You know how pissed off the old lady is? You know chow time’s at five sharp, little buddy. You’re gonna start summer vacation grounded for a week.”

  “Who cares?”

  “You say that about it now. You’re gonna be singing a different tune when Ma’s got you out cutting the grass bright and early tomorrow. It’s supposed to get up to ninety and the riding mower’s still in the shop. You’ll have to use the walk behind.” They turned left onto the unpaved drive and entered the woods again, Tad hurrying now to keep up with Casey’s longer stride.

  “She send you out after me?”

  “Of course. What, you think I’d bother to go look for you myself?”

  “Hey Case. Let me ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know who lives over there?”

  “Over where?”

  “There.” Tad pointed to the left, off into the trees.

  “What, the McKentons?”

  “No, the property between ours and theirs. Who owns it? Like, if you’re going up the Willow Road away from town, and you pass our place, you know where it makes that big loop around to the right? The McKentons house is there, and their fields, and then there’s that section of woods between our property and theirs.”

  “No one lives there. Roy McKenton owns all that property, from the fence that borders our land on that side all the way up the road to the Tate’s place. Those are his woods.”

  “So you don’t think there could be somebody living there, do you think?”

  “What, you mean just out in the woods?” The driveway was gradually making a wide, sweeping curve to the right. The branches formed a dark canopy overhead. Tad couldn’t see Casey’s face, but his brother sounded impatient. “You mean like squatters, or something?”

  “Sure. Like that.”

  “No.” Casey shook his head disgustedly. “Hell no. If there was somebody living in Roy McKenton’s woods, it wouldn’t take more than a day before his hounds sniffed them out. Those are purebred Georgia bloodhounds. If somebody was squatting, those dogs would root them out in about half a tick and old Roy would put two barrels of buckshot in their ass. Hey.” They moved through a patch of moonlight, and when Tad looked over he could see Casey regarding him suspiciously. “You weren’t fucking around over there on the McKenton’s property, were you?”

  “No!”

  “You better not have. You know Pa would strap your ass for that shit. You know better than that.”

  “I wasn’t over there. It’s just something that somebody at school said. I was curious.”

  “Curious. Yeah, you got that right. You sure are one curious little sack o’ rat turds. I’m curious about whether we’re really related, that’s what I’m curious about.” As they rounded a corner the drive straightened out. Some distance away the lights of the Surrey house burned steadily from out of the deepening night. Despite the trouble he was surely in, Tad felt a sense of relief to see those lights, so achingly strong for a moment that he shivered. They walked on toward the house in silence, Casey with his jaw set and his fists clenched, as they so often were, ready to challenge the world or the night itself, Tad with his head lowered and his mind full, unconsciously doing double time to keep up. The drive ended at the Surrey’s garage, an old wooden building with a peaked roof badly in need of thatching, and flaked, peeling white paint. Ivy clung to its sides, some of it rising ten or twelve feet up, as if it was in the gradual process of pulling the entire building underground. Walt Surrey’s battered green pickup truck stood in front of it, the West Virginia license plate so rusted the numbers could hardly be read. The garage did not open electronically, but rather by the old fashioned way, getting out of the truck and pulling up by the handle at its base. Not that it mattered much, as the garage was stuffed so full that the truck hadn’t been able to fit in it for the past several years anyhow. Walt Surrey, the consummate packrat, never threw anything away. Marta had been asking her husband for months to clear out the garage, but in vain. If Tad and his sister had wanted to start a pool for their mother’s comments in the same vein as they used for their father, they very well might have made a list of the more common chores that Marta was always telling Walt to do, and then drawn those from the hat. It was with the most extreme reluctance that Walt would ever comply with his wife’s requests, and when he did, it was usually through being coaxed into it by the promise of one of his favorite deserts, particularly peach pie. Were it not for the invention of peach pie, it’s likely nothing around the Surrey household would ever have been accomplished.

  The house stood to the right of the garage, two stories, build of the same tough, unyielding wood. They had, in fact, been built at the same time, in the early nineteen fifties by Walt Surrey’s father, Percival Surrey, a somewhat legendary figure in the annals of family lore, an inveterate gambler who was rumored to have bought the Surrey property and built the house on poker winnings. It had two stories, plus the attic, where Daisy lived. There was a broad porch running the length of the front of the house, with an overturned swing lying at one end of it. Fixing the swing had been on Walt Surrey’s to do list for somewhat longer than four years. They reached the house in silence and Casey strode up the steps and across the porch, opening the screen door as Tad lagged slightly behind. “Come on.” Casey jerked his head at him and Tad stepped up and walked past his brother, Casey giving him a shove in the small of the back to help him across the threshold. Walt Surrey was sitting in the living room, his eyes on the television. Walt’s body type was similar to that of his elder son, though Casey was already an inch taller than his father. Walt had acquired a thirty pound beer gut since his high school days, but he still had the Surrey trademark hair, shaggy at the base of the neck, thinning just slightly. The same eyes, also, but while Casey’s flashed a constant dissatisfaction and a challenge to the world around him, and Tad’s revealed an internal life and depth that was off limits to all but himself, Walt’s eyes conveyed at all times an acceptance of who and where he was. A man who knew the scope of his world and was content with the simple pleasures it yielded. A green bottle of Rolling Rock sat on the card table in front of him, half full, beading with moisture. There were no lights on besides the relentless flickering from the box, but there was a light on in the dining room and it spilled a long beam across the floor.

  “Tad,” his father said, not taking his eyes from the screen. “You go in there and talk to your momma, y’hear me?” Then he gla
nced over for the first time and noticed the condition of his son’s pants and sneakers. He straightened up in the chair and squinted across the room. “Cripes!” he said. He reached up and pulled the cord on a lamp standing next to him, and a garish light flooded the room. Tad blinked. Casey walked past him and threw himself down on a dark blue couch cattycorner to his father. “Boy, what in the hell have you been getting yourself into?”

  “He’s been messing around over on the McKenton’s land,” Casey said.

  Walt’s expression became stern. “That right?”

  “No sir. I just went for a walk and I lost track of time.”

  “Tad, is that you? Come in here this minute, you hear me?” A female voice calling from somewhere in the house. Tad took a step forward.

  “Wait up, there.” Walt held up a restraining hand. “Take off your shoes and those pants and leave them on the porch. Don’t you go tracking no mud in here.” Tad stepped through the screen door again and stood on the porch and tugged his shoes off one by one, looking off down the driveway. Then his socks, and then the pants, caked with dried mud, heavy and immobile. He fought his way out of them and left them sitting by his sneakers. He opened the door again and walked through the living room, clad now only in his gym shirt and a pair of white Hanes boxer briefs. He made his way through the living room and turned to his left, meaning to go up the stairs to the second floor. His mother’s voice stopped him, calling from the kitchen. “Where are you going? Come in here.”

  “I need to get a new pair of jeans.”

  “What you need to do is get in here now.” He walked into the kitchen, stepping onto the linoleum in his bare feet. His mother was standing with her back turned to him, stirring something in a pot on the stove. Her lank, dark hair tied back in a ponytail. She turned and glanced at him, legs gangly, two shades whiter than the farmer’s tan on his face and arms. He felt a ridiculous figure, standing there with no pants, about to get a dressing down. Like one of those dreams, being in public with no clothes on. “What time was dinner?”

  “Five o’ clock.”

  “And what time is it now?”

  He realized he had no idea, and said so. She stepped out of the way and gestured with the ladle she was holding at the digital readout on the clock below the stove. It was a quarter to nine. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I don’t know. I lost track of time. I’m sorry.”

  She adjusted the burner, placed the ladle on the counter beside the stove, and turned to face him. Marta Surrey was in her early forties, but she looked older, careworn; a kindly face, perhaps, at times. Not so, now. He looked down at the tile. Some of them featured pictures of smiling ducks in raingear. He began to rub the palms of his hands together. “Here’s the thing of it. You’re getting older now, and getting older means more responsibility. It means more freedom too, but the responsibility has to come first. It means more flexibility on the part of me and your father. You’ll be able to stay out later, and you’ll be able to make more decisions for yourself. But it’s not automatic. You don’t just get it handed to you, kiddo, you have to earn it. Like your brother. If you were going to be late, why didn’t you just call the house and let me know? What were you doing?” He didn’t answer. There was a cold draft chilling his exposed legs from the open door to the cellar. “You weren’t over there on the McKenton’s land, were you?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Well? Where then?”

  “On our property. Just…uh…”

  “You were playing around down there in The Bottoms, weren’t you?” She put her hands on her hips, shaking her head. “Have I or have I not expressly forbade you kids to go horsing around down there? Apart from being nothing but thorns and sinking mud, there’s leaches and ticks and I don’t know what all. There are copperheads down there too. I don’t want you getting bit.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What you are is grounded for a week.” He looked up at her then, opening his mouth to speak. She arched an eyebrow, and he pressed his lips together tightly, returning his gaze to the floor. She nodded. “Good start to your summer, isn’t it? And you’re not just going to be sitting around watching T.V. either. I already spoke to your father, and he’s got plenty of work for you to help him with. Just to let you know, he was all in favor of tanning your behind. That’s sure enough what his father would have done, let me tell you. Let’s call this a heads up, kiddo. Stay out of The Bottoms, and be where you say you’re going to be when you say you’re going to be there. That’s not so unreasonable, is it? Well? Can I get an answer?”

  “No ma’am. Not so unreasonable.” From the dining room the phone gave a long clattering ring, and his mother paused, looking in that direction. He heard his father pick up the receiver and say something muffled, then a loud clack coupled with a curse as he replaced it again.

  “Who was it, Pa?” Casey’s voice.

  “Heck if I know. Somebody fooling around. That’s the third time they’ve called here tonight.”

  His mother’s eyes focused in on him again and she continued. “You’re growing up, kiddo, but you’re not grown yet. You’ve a ways to go.” She turned back to the stove. “Now for gosh sakes go put some pants on, then you can get yourself some dinner. There’s chicken in the fridge.”

  “Hey Ma.”

  “What?”

  “Where’s Daisy?”

  “Where do you think?” He nodded, turning away, swinging around the corner and up the stairs toward the second floor. As he climbed he avoided certain steps, and others he treaded on lightly, avoiding putting his full weight down. This was done subconsciously. He had crept upstairs trying to avoid waking his parents so many times that he knew the steps that creaked and had memorized their pattern years ago. He paused on the landing for a moment and looked out the window to the rear of the house. A gentle hillside rising up and away, with a couple of shade trees not far off, painted deep blue by the moonlight. The closest tree an ancient oak, under which Tad had played so often throughout his childhood, and whose branches he’d climbed through more times than he could count. The edge of the woods to the left, barely visible from this angle. All serene. He turned the corner and bounded up the last ten stairs. He passed the bathroom door on the right, Casey’s door on the left (closed, with a padlock on it) and the second door on the right was his. It was partially open and he pushed it the rest of the way with the toes of his right foot. He turned and flipped the light switch for the overhead and closed the door behind him. Tad’s was the smaller room; naturally Casey had the larger of the two, while his parent’s room was downstairs off of the dining room, necessitating the ingrained stealth while climbing the stairs. The attic, of course, was Daisy’s domain. As Tad pulled a fresh pair of jeans out of the dresser, twenty-eight waist, twenty-eight length, he could hear her padding around up there, prowling her little cave. Like a small animal roaming about in the walls at night. He zipped up his fly and left the room with a rolled up pair of socks in his hand. In the ceiling of the hall between his room and Casey’s was a length of hanging cord leading up to a metal loop in a trapdoor, which was painted the same white as the walls. Here it was even more old and faded than the porch and the exterior of the house, dulled to a weak yellow at the baseboard around Tad’s ankles. He picked up a wooden pole that had been leaning against the wall and knocked it three times against the trapdoor. There was movement above, then a voice.

  “Who is it?”

  “The middle child.”