by Hunt, S. A.
As we got in his car and headed out of town, he explained. “A dryad is at its most basic a soul trapped inside of a tree. Or, well, technically it’s the name for the tree-prison itself, but it also refers to the tree-and-soul combined. Anyway, dryads don’t occur naturally, so you have to make one—provided your ass knows how, of course.
“Now, if you make a dryad out of a normal person…take Joe Schmoe off the street, kill him, siphon his spirit into a tree, all you have is a self-aware tree. Pretty shitty existence for poor Joe, livin out the rest of eternity with squirrels shovin acorns up his ass, but there ain’t nothin special about it.
“But if you make a dryad out of a supernaturally-endowed person, for example, another witch, you end up with what’s called a nag shi. Like the person it was created from, this kind of dryad is an energy-absorber. And with a little coaxing and a bucket of human blood twice a week, it will become a sort of black hole. The tree’s roots draw up life for miles around, and if it’s in a town like Blackfield, it will tap that town for nourishment.
“Where does all that give-a-shit go, you ask?” We were sitting at a crossroads between two cotton fields, listening to the wind shake a stop sign. “It goes into the dryad’s fruit. Flora de vida—the fruit of life.”
Heinrich pulled across the intersection, swinging onto the road that would eventually bring us to his house in distant Texas.
“The soul-tree pulls the will-to-live out of the town and converts it to fruit. Peaches, apples, lemons, whatever the dryad happens to flower. The fruit depends on the soul that was used to make the tree.
“I’m sure you can guess why witches cultivate them and eat the fruit.” He lit a cigar and rolled the window down a hair to suck the pungent smoke out. “I’ll give you a hint: Marilyn Cutty’s grandson Leonard Bascombe fought in the American Civil War.”
❂
“And that’s when I started training with Heinrich,” said Robin. By the time she’d finished the tale, they had migrated to the kitchen. She sat on a stool at the island while Kenway cooked burgers on a griddle set in the island next to the stove. Her camera stood on a bendy-legged tripod at the end of the counter, next to a splat of postal envelopes.
“Was it like in the movies?” he asked, flipping a burger. Kssssss. “You know, like a montage with a music backing, and you’re beating up a kick-bag and throwing wooden stakes at a dummy?”
“That’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Robin gave him a dark eye. Noticing a glass vase full of coffee beans, she slid it over and took a sniff. “And …well, there were things like that I guess. It was mainly poring over esoteric texts. Library books, microfiche, photocopied newspapers, stolen documents….”
“Stolen?”
“Heinrich was the type, he didn’t let a little thing like the law stop him from doing what he needed to do.”
“I see.” He flipped another patty. Kssssss. “I assume you haven’t had to do anything like that, since you don’t seem to be hiding from the law.” Unwrapping a piece of cheese, he added, “You aren’t running from the law, are you? That living-in-the-van would make a lot more sense if you were.”
“Heinrich had already gotten all the stuff he’d needed by the time I met him,” said Robin. “Of course there’s probably a couple dozen unsolved cases of arson out there.” She put a finger to her lips. “But I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Kenway sighed thoughtfully and put the cheese on the meat as it sizzled. “You’re really something, lady. I don’t know what to do with you.”
You could kiss me, she thought, but didn’t say. “Thank you for giving me a place to hang out for the evening that isn’t my van or the pizzeria. And the internet.”
He smirked up at her. “And the burger.”
“And the burger. I love pizza, but I think I’m overdosing.”
“So how did the YouTube thing start?” Kenway asked, putting some buns on plates and scooping up the burgers onto them.
“You know how in football, the team keeps the game recordings and goes over them later? Heinrich used to do that so we could watch them and fine-tune our techniques. I was the one that suggested we could put the tapes on the internet and make money on them.” Her stomach growled at the smell rising off the griddle. “At first, he was dead set against it, but after I showed him how much like some of the other YouTube series it was, and how much money we could make on it, he warmed up to the idea.”
A noise came from Robin’s jeans, startling both of them. She dug in her pocket and took out her phone.
It was an alarm set to go off at six. She put it back in her pocket and slid down off the stool, opening a cabinet. “Where’s your glasses?”
“I don’t wear glasses.”
She grinned awkwardly. “Drinking glasses.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Kenway opened one of the other doors. Robin took down a glass and filled it at the sink, then went to her laptop on the coffee table and dug a prescription bottle out of her messenger bag. She tipped out a tablet and swallowed it with a gulp of water.
He watched her with curiosity, but didn’t say anything.
Putting the bottle away, Robin went back to the island to sit down and drink the rest of the glass. Kenway gave her a curious eye.
“The pills are for, uhh…well, the shrinks say I have schizophrenia, or something like that. I have hallucinations. Nightmares.” She picked at a fleck of color in the marble counter. “The medication helps. I did have Zoloft too, but I stopped taking it when I ran out of the bottle they gave me at the psych ward. I don’t like it. It makes me a zombie.”
Kenway seemed to be uncomfortable. He actually rolled his shoulders and tugged on his shirt as if it didn’t fit right.
“I guess that probably put you off me, didn’t it?” Robin murmured, folding her arms. “It usually does. The guys. I’ve…tried to date before, but as soon as I break out the pill bottle, they’re out the door.”
Pursing his lips, Kenway looked at her—really looked at her, a burning, assessing, ant-under-a-magnifying-glass stare—and then he put down the spatula and rolled up one of his pants legs, revealing the prosthetic foot.
He unbuckled it, a laborious process with grunting and pulling and ripping of Velcro, then pulled the foot off, leaving a nub wrapped in a bandage. As big as Kenway was, the false leg looked as if it were three feet tall, with an articulated ankle and silicone cup. It had a shoe on it, of course, the match to his other Doc Marten.
“If you don’t run away from this—” He stood the leg on the counter in front of her. “—I won’t run away from you.”
9
“HERE’S THE HIGH SCHOOL, where we are,” said Pete, his pudgy finger pressed against the paper. Pete, Wayne, Johnny Juan, and Amanda Hugginkiss-neé-Johnson stood in front of the huge map of Blackfield hanging in Mr. Villarubia’s fourth-grade classroom. A clock ticked quietly on the wall over their heads: ten minutes after three in the afternoon. They were alone.
The map was as tall as the teacher himself, five feet across, and represented several square miles of the territory of the town, reaching clear out into the surrounding counties. This included Slade, the area north of town where the kids lived.
According to Mr. Villarubia’s Social Studies class, Slade was either referred to as a ‘unincorporated township’, a ‘district’ or a ’suburb’, depending on who you asked. As far as he was concerned, it was basically the northeastern arm of Blackfield, a civilized wilderness reaching up to the interstate freeway that ran between Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama. Unlike the urban grid of avenues and streets in town, Slade was thick forest and cow pastures, chewed up into a hundred wandering feeder roads. They all branched off of Highway Nine, a two-lane ribbon that dropped like a rock, from the freeway into the heart of Blackfield.
Wayne felt like Lewis and Clark looking at this thing, plotting out tracks and trails. A feeling of adventure swelled in his chest, safe adventure, welcoming, inviting adventure, nothing like the streets back home.
They’
d find no gibbering crackheads demanding money, or trying to sell them stolen watches, coins, car stereos. There’d be no haggard, barefoot women offering to “make a man” out of him, no Bloods looking to recruit a new pusher. No cops stopping him on the sidewalk to ask him what he was doing, where he was going, what he had in his pocket, no sir, it’s just an action figure, no sir, it’s just a piece of candy, see?
There was only him, a warm sun on a cool fall day, and a bunch of trees. He found a reassurance and confidence in that the other children would never know. They literally can’t see the forest for the trees, he thought rather suddenly, a realization dawning on him. They grew up here. They’ll never know what this place really is because they’ve always known it.
“And here’s Chevrolet Trailer Park,” Pete said, pointing to a non-descript part of the woods. His fingertip stood an inch to the right of the Nine, and a few inches north of the river that ran across that end of Blackfield.
“That’s Chevalier Village,” corrected Amanda.
“Whatever,” Pete said, grimacing.
He pointed to the school again and traced their route. “Okay, what we’re gonna do is cross Gardiner, cross the baseball field, then take Wilmer up to Broad, and then we’re gonna follow Broad up to here.” He looked over his shoulder. “That’s where Fish’s Comic Shop is. Have you been there yet, Batman?”
“No,” said Wayne.
“It’s fuckin awesome. We’ll have to stop there on the way. They got a life-size Alien and a Freddy Krueger claw. The guy that owns it does movie nights on Thursdays.”
“I love that place,” Johnny Juan said to no one in particular.
Amanda rolled her eyes and sighed through her nose. “I wish you would stop swearing so much. It’s not right.”
Pete winced at her. “You ain’t right.” He went back to his explanation. “Okay, whatever, when we’re done there, we’ll go up Broad Street for about a block and then there’s a bridge that you can go under, into the canal that runs next to the street. It’s about eight foot deep. It runs under Highway Nine.”
“What about the water?” asked Johnny.
“There ain’t no water. Well, not really. There’s a little bit. There’s not a lot in there unless it rains. Nothin to worry about.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Anyway, we follow the canal this way.” He traced the dotted line east to where it hooked up at a shallow angle, and then he followed it northeast. “Up to the river, and there’s a bridge there we’ll have to cross. Or we can walk across the big blue pipe that crosses the river next to it. We’ll come to the pipe first. The bridge is a little farther down.”
“I’ll take the bridge,” said Amanda. “You guys can fall in and drown without me.”
Pete ignored her jibe, tracing a path from the river bridge into what Wayne assumed by the blotchy outline were trees. The blotch was a massive crescent of forest that lined the north side of Blackfield and accompanied another highway going north. “Then we’ll cut through these woods here and take this trail going…north.” His finger drew an invisible line up into the forest and on up to a trembly, jagged path labeled UNDERWOOD RD. “From there it’s a straight shot to Chevrolet.”
“Chevalier.”
“That’s what I said, Chevrolet. Anyway I’ve got a surprise for you back in those trees.”
“A surprise?” Amanda asked, her eyes narrowing. “What kind of surprise?”
“Something I found last summer.”
“It’s not like those old porno magazines you found on top of the ceiling tiles in the boys’ bathroom, is it?” asked Johnny. He wiped his hands on his shirt as if the memory alone was enough to soil him. “Those were so gross. So much hair.”
Amanda held her stomach and feigned a dry-heave.
The band of explorers headed out the front door, threading a path through the kids outside waiting for the buses and car pickups. When they got to the edge of the parking lot, a police officer in the middle of the road stopped traffic to let them across.
“Y’all be careful goin home,” said the cop, a slender man with a weaselly face and Men in Black Ray-Bans. His jet-black uniform was impeccable, ironed smooth, and he wore a patrol cap with a badge over the brim that glinted in the sun.
“Yes sir,” grinned Wayne.
“I ain’t no sir,” the officer called to him as he stepped up onto the curb. “Sir’s my old man, I’m just Owen.”
“Thank you, Owen!”
The officer waved them off and went back to directing pick-up traffic.
King Hill Elementary was three blocks west of the main drag through town, a sprawling complex on a hill at the edge of a wooded suburb. The kids marched resolutely across the school’s front lawn toward the baseball field. The only other sound was birdsong and the tidal wheeze of poor Pete’s horsey panting.
As Wayne walked alongside the gaggle, the feeling of adventure only grew. It was a real halleluah moment. The redneck-ness, the remoteness of Blackfield was already starting to grow on him.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sky was a thousand miles wide and twice as high, and if he stared hard enough at the airliner carving a whispering contrail across that blue dome, he thought he could almost make out the faces in the windows. It was as if God had reached down and smoothed the world out like a blanket, leaving only him, his new friends, and the tall blue.
He made a mental note to thank his dad for dragging them out here to ‘the middle of nowhere’, as he’d been thinking of it all day. With the warm sun on his bare head and healthy green grass under his feet, he found it hard to keep talking trash and playing the pouty transplanted kid.
Children were hanging out in the baseball diamond, chatting in the bleachers and dugouts, and throwing balls to each other out on the dirt. Pete led them around the back of the risers, passing a blue Porta-Potty.
“I heard one of the high-school kids got trapped in this potty by a mountain lion last year,” said Johnny Juan.
Amanda watched her feet eat up the grass, her thumbs tucked behind the straps of her My Little Pony backpack as if they were suspenders. “There’s no mountain lions out here, dummy.”
“There’s bobcats.”
“There’s Bigfoots too,” said Pete.
Amanda’s ponytail flounced back and forth like an actual horse’s tail. Wayne found it as hypnotic as a metronome. “No such thing as Bigfoot.”
“Sure there is.” Pete looked over his shoulder at Wayne. “What do you think? Do you believe in Bigfoot?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’d like to.”
“See? Wayne believes in Bigfoot.”
“I think I’d crap my pants if I ever saw Bigfoot,” said Johnny Juan. “Have you ever seen him, Pete?”
“No. But I know about a website that tracks sightings. Bigfoot Research Organization or something like that. They had like forty reports right here in Georgia.”
Wilmer Street was on the other side of the baseball diamond. They jumped a deep culvert and followed the road’s shoulder to where the sidewalk materialized under their feet, assembling itself out of broken slabs where the weeds and mud had started to reclaim it.
That took them up a long valley of nameless brick buildings with wooden house-doors and metal doors without knobs, roll-up garage doors and glass doors with sun-faded signs taped to their insides that said OUT OF BUSINESS and CUSTOMERS ENTER AROUND SIDE and MOVED TO VAUGHAN BLVD. Wayne quit paying attention to where they were going and let his feet carry him along behind the plodding Pete in a sort of auto-pilot.
At one point they passed an open cafe where two men were perched in a large window cut in the side of a twenty-foot shipping container. A hand-painted sign over the dining-area awning said DEVIL-MOON BEER & BURGERS and had a picture of two disembodied red hands cupping a crystal ball.
Despite Johnny Juan’s good-natured beggaring, the men wouldn’t let them have a beer, but they had cans of something called Firewater, a locally-made cinnamon sarsaparilla, for a doll
ar. They each bought one and continued up Wilmer drinking them. Amanda bought some fried dill pickles and let Wayne have one. He thought they were the best things he’d ever eaten in his life, and made another mental note to talk Leon into bringing him back to the Devil-Moon.
That means he’ll have to go to a bar, though, he thought.
Johnny Juan pulled some berries off of a holly bush in front of a lawyer’s office and chucked them one by one at the back of Pete’s head.
You keep on and they gon fire your ass, lil brother, Aunt Marcelina had said to Leon.
This conversation had taken place back in Chicago, but Wayne could remember it as if it had taken place that morning. She and Leon stood behind the car, almost nose-to-nose, while Wayne sat in the front passenger seat reading the latest Spider-Man comic book.
I know life been tough since you lost your old lady, Aunt Marcelina told Leon, her hands on her ample hips. Her tone was soft but reproachful. But you can’t carry on like this. You keep showin up to work tore up and they gon let you go. And you know what’s gonna happen then?
Leon had said nothing, but his arms were folded. Normally a Leon Parkin with folded arms meant you were about to get an earful about something or other, but this time he was hunched over as though the wind were chilling him, even though it was August and the armpits of his shirt were dark. He looked more like a kicked puppy, sweaty and diminished.
This time he was the one getting an earful. They ain’t nobody else gon hire you. Marcelina pointed at the school with an open hand. Ain’t nobody gon hire a drunk-ass teacher.
What you want me to do? Leon had asked.
His neck-tie was loose, his collar open. His hand drifted up to his mouth and he pulled his face in exasperation, wiping his hand on his slacks.
You need to get right with God, Marcelina told him.