Bobby snatched the book out of his hand and flipped the cover over to look at it. The boy heard a page tear and his hands jerked toward the book involuntarily. It was a library book. He’d get in trouble if he ripped it. Bobby read the title aloud. “Bats, Bats, How Do You Know About That? Sounds like a baby book. Are you a baby?” The boy shook his head. “We’re fishing, not reading before a bottle and naptime.” He tossed the book into the dirt out of the boy’s reach and opened a Styrofoam cup full of earth and moss. He pulled a long wriggling worm out and shoved it at the boy. “Wanna help me put it on the hook?” The boy shrank away and shook his head. He didn’t want to say “no” any more than he wanted to get dirty. “Suit yourself, puss.”
Bobby speared the thing’s pink flesh on the hook and wrapped it over, piercing it again, and then a third time. He pursed his lips, and nodded with satisfaction as he watched the worm struggle against the steel upon which it was impaled. He let go of the hook and let it drop in the sand and dirt.
“Can I . . . can . . . can . . .”
“What!”
“Grampa lets me . . . he lets me cast it.”
Bobby frowned and shook his head. “You’ll throw the worm off the hook,” he said.
“I won’t . . . I never . . . I don’t do it when . . . Grampa—”
“I’m not George. I said, no!” He picked up his pole and stood. He tried to cast, but he forgot to open the bail and the line didn’t feed from the reel. The line snapped and the sinker, hook, and worm flew into the lake. “LITTLE FUCKER!” Bobby hollered. He swung back to throw the pole in after, but didn’t. “See what you made me do, goddamn it!” Scowling, he sat down heavily and replaced the hook and sinker on the line. He speared another worm, nicking a finger on the tip of the barbed hook and cursed again. While he didn’t blame the boy for that, the child winced anyway, waiting for the dark words to batter him. Bobby stood and tried again. This time he did it right, sending the line unfurling in a lazy spiral out over the water. The hook and sinker made a hollow sounding plonk as it penetrated the surface. Bobby stood holding the pole, staring quietly out at the rippling surface.
The boy looked over at his book. He didn’t want to sit and just stare at the line, waiting. He didn’t know anything about this pond, but he knew what fishing was like. And he always brought a book. On the cover was a picture of a bat with its wings outspread and large ears sticking up to hear. Its mouth was closed and the little animal almost looked like it was smiling, happy to be in the air. In the first chapter of the book it discussed how bats were the only mammals that could truly fly. It explained that flying squirrels and the like only glided. It didn’t mention people, but the boy knew that airplanes and helicopters didn’t count. Bats were the only mammals that could fly without something to help them. He so badly wanted to fly. His bedroom window at home looked out at the barn, catty-corner across the road. Every night he’d sit up in his bed and watch as the bats that lived in Clement Tilden’s hayloft streamed out at dusk. Hundreds and hundreds of them twisting and swooping around each other in perfectly agile chaos. Old Clem had no animals to live in the barn, and the boy had overheard him saying once that bat guano was excellent fertilizer. “And damned ’spensive too. I get that fa’ free, y’know. S’why m’pumpkins get so big in the autumn.” The boy didn’t care about fertilizer or pumpkins, but he was glad that was Old Clem’s attitude, because that meant he didn’t call the exterminator out to get rid of the bats. And that meant every night in the summer he got to see them fly away. And then he’d go to sleep and dream he was one of them, flying free, lissome and beautiful, with a mother who would always come home and hold him in a warm wing against her body and love him.
He got up on his hands and knees and stretched over to take back his book. His fingers brushed the cover and the next thing he knew the waistband of his jeans was tight and cutting into his belly, and he lost his sense of up and down, disoriented and breathless.
And then he hit the water.
He sank. The coldness of it made him gasp for a breath, and take in a short lungful of water. He kicked like they’d tried to teach him in swim class and he bobbed to the surface, sputtering and choking, getting a half-breath before slipping back under. The brightness of the day was lost. He sank deep into the suffocating depth of the pond. He kicked and thrashed in the water, trying to climb up again, but his vision darkened and he didn’t know which way was up. He might be swimming toward the bottom for all he knew. Or he might be doing nothing at all, and treading water below the surface, inches away from life. He tried opening his eyes and the water got in them and he panicked. His heart raced and he wanted to take a breath so badly. Just one breath of air. A last taste of it before dying.
The boy knew he was dying.
Water filled his ears and pressed against his eardrums with a horrible, deep burbling sound all around him that was constant and terrifying. It was in his ears and invaded his head and he couldn’t shut it out no matter how hard he tried not to hear it. He wanted to clamp his hands over his ears, but he couldn’t stop struggling to move. His body was doing what it wanted, not what he wanted. And still the sound. The overwhelming sound of the pulse of the pond.
A fish materialized out of the dark and swam past him. Its blurry presence confused the boy, and he stopped trying to swim while his mind processed the surreal image of the thing hovering before his eyes before it startled and disappeared. It was upright. He was upright. Not head down like Bobby had teased him. The surface was above. He looked up and saw the sparkle of the sun glinting through the surface. The daylight didn’t reach him, though. He was too deep, and slipping farther away.
He wished he could hug his mother one more time. Just a hug, not the feeling of water all around him, making it hard to move, impossible to breathe. Arms around his shoulders and the feeling of her soft belly against his chest and his head on her breast. Her body warm and comforting. But she wasn’t there with him, and even if she had been, she couldn’t swim any better than he could. They’d die together. So, it was better that he was alone in the deepening dark and getting deeper.
He let go and stopped struggling. A slight feeling of weightlessness came over him and he imagined that it might be what it felt like to be a bat and fly. He felt contented to die flying.
The surface of the water rushed closer and he became aware of an arm around him as he broke through into the air and bright light and his eyes snapped shut at the blinding brilliance of it. He shivered at a refreshed sensation of freezing and choked on the water in his mouth and lungs keeping him from drawing a deep breath. An unfamiliar voice behind him said, “You can relax, boy. You’re gonna be all right!” It was deep and full of soft, long New England “ahs” that made everything sound as comforting as a favorite pillow. Yah gahnna be ah’right. The owner of the voice dragged him along the surface and he felt that flying sensation along with the embrace he craved. He was safe in this man’s arms, whoever he was.
The man pulled the boy out of the water and laid him on the beach, pressing a hand against the boy’s chest. A second later the child coughed and sputtered and water came rushing out of his mouth. It was cold and tasted like dirt and it spilled out through his nostrils and over gaping lips. He panicked again, feeling like he was being killed—drowning on dry land. And then he got a deep breath. And another. Cold and fresh like autumn. All under the reassuring touch of the man who’d saved him. When he finally let go, the boy cried.
“Oh my god!” Bobby shouted. The boy could hear his footsteps as he ran toward them. Please don’t come over here, he thought. Please, just leave us alone.
“How did he end up in the water?” the man said. His voice changed. What had been soft and calming became hard and sharp. He was demanding, no longer comforting. It seemed to rustle in the trees like a strong wind. The boy tried to sit up. The man pressed his hand in the middle of his chest again, not pushing—encouraging him to rest a moment longer. When the man touched him, he felt less like crying. He was
happy to lie there. He blinked at the blue sky above. A small dark bird flew overhead, followed by another trailing close, black against the blue sky. He pretended they were bats and imagined himself flying with them.
“He just fell in. I was fishing and . . . he was playing on a log and the next thing I know, in he went. I told him not to get up there.”
The man leaned over the boy. He had a reddish beard specked with gray and a long, straight nose. His face was wrinkly around his blue eyes like he was smiling, though he wasn’t. The boy blinked and tried to make sense of him; he seemed both there and not there, like a dream outside his head. He blinked again and the man resolved into sharper reality as if he’d become more present at the insistence of the boy’s need. The man said, “Izzat true, son? Were ya balancin’ on a log?”
The boy wanted to tell the truth, though he knew better. He looked over at Bobby, standing dry on the beach ten feet away, still holding his fishing pole. He stared into the boy’s eyes, widening them for a second before letting his face relax. The boy got the message and said, “Yessir. I was . . . I was playing . . . ninja. The . . . stick was my tightrope.”
“I told him there was moss on that log,” Bobby began, “and to be careful, but he’s a daredevil, you know. Always pretending to be something stupid.” The boy heard his jaws click shut after the word “stupid” as if he was trying to bite off that last word before the man could hear it.
The man turned the boy’s face back toward his with a gentle finger. His hand was rough, but warm despite dripping with cold water. He looked the boy in the eyes and asked, “Y’sure about that? Did you slip on the moss?”
He nodded and lied, “Yessir.” He wanted to signal him. Make some sign that he wasn’t telling the truth, that Bobby had thrown him in the water. That he’d brought him here just to do that. He wanted to tell the man that Bobby hated fishing and every time his Grandpa invited him along he’d say, “No, go on without me.” He wanted to tell all the other things too, but he didn’t say anything. He knew better. He remembered what Bobby had told him.
“You love your mom, right?” he’d ask those nights she worked late. The boy would nod and say “Uh-huh,” and Bobby would reply, “Remember Tyler Durrant from school? Remember how God took his mother in that car accident last summer? He must’ve told. But you won’t tell, will you? You don’t want God to kill your mommy, do you?” He did not. It didn’t make sense that God would punish him for telling the truth, but he didn’t question. And because he didn’t want anything to happen to his mom, he never told. Not his grandfather or his teacher or even his best friend up the street, Heidi. He would never tell, and that meant he couldn’t say anything to this man either. But how he wanted him to see it in his eyes. Please please know. Just know and don’t let him take me back.
“I fell in,” he said.
The man smoothed his wet hair away from his forehead. He helped the boy stand and together they turned to face Bobby, still waiting a few yards away. The bobber and hook dangled from his fishing pole near the end ring at the tip-top. He’d reeled the line in.
The boy saw their car on the opposite side of the pond. “How’d I get all the way over here?” The man kept his hands on the boy’s shoulders. They felt so heavy, but right, like gravity.
“You were swimming away from me like a fish,” Bobby said. “You got halfway across before I could jump in, and then . . . this guy—”
“You and I both know this boy can’t swim a stroke. He didn’t get all the way t’the middle of the pond from his own tryin’.” The boy looked up at the man. He was staring hard at Bobby, the look on his face darker than anything he’d ever seen. He seemed to waver again. Like he was something else wearing a man mask, and it was slipping. The boy blinked and he was solid again. Just a man. Right?
The boy turned to look up at his rescuer. He said, “I been taking swim lessons. I guess I must’ve tried to doggy paddle before I got too tired to swim anymore.” The man looked down, his mouth pursed the way his teacher did when he told her one of his stories about how he got this bruise, or why he was limping. “I did; I really really did. Like this.” He pantomimed a dog’s paws in the water.
The man shook his head, giving him a sad smile. He wanted the man to take his hand and lead him away to wherever he’d come from. But the boy knew he couldn’t go. He wasn’t his to take. Bobby’s hand fell on his shoulder, tight and painful. He squirmed a little under his grip. He had missed his chance. He’d lied and missed it. And now it was getting ready to walk away. “You need to keep a better eye on this one,” the man said. “Little boys can slip right away before you even know they’re gone. You need to do better.”
Bobby yanked him back, as if he wanted to be far from the man’s reach as quickly as he could get away. He nodded so hard the boy could feel it. “I sure do. Especially with this one.” He squeezed again and the boy tried not to wince. Bobby tussled his hair too hard and his fingers got caught in a snarl and pulled. “Is there anything I can give you? A little money, maybe?” He wasn’t waiting for the man to politely decline as he dragged the boy away with him.
“No reward. Just keep that boy safe.” The man stood there with sad eyes and turned to head off in whatever direction he’d originally come. A house, nearby, perhaps. A place close to his favorite fishing hole, just past that bramble right there, the boy imagined him telling his friends. A real quiet spot nobody knows about but me an’ the tasty little fishies.
Bobby yanked hard on his arm, propelling him toward the car. He opened the driver’s side door and the boy clambered inside across the bench seat. He sat, holding his breath, waiting for Bobby to yell at him for getting the seat wet. But he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t say a thing. Not a single word of worry, or relief, or anything at all. He tossed his fishing pole into the back and climbed in after him, forgetting about the tackle box on the shore. He sat for a moment staring through the windshield at the far shore. The man was gone. The boy assumed he’d disappeared into the trees—he wasn’t standing there anymore—but there wasn’t anywhere along the entire far shore that looked like the end of a path. The trees were thick as a fairy-tale bramble. Then, his eyes alighted on a flash of movement. A red and gray streak with a fat tail that looked like a fox, maybe, darted into the trees, and was gone.
Bobby put the car in reverse and backed up the dirt path. The boy stared straight ahead at the receding pond. Bobbing up and down on the sparkling wavelets, the bat book floated on the surface of the water, cover open and pages down. It looked like it was flying in nighttime stars. He despaired. The librarian was going to be angry and tell him he had to pay for it. And that was going to make his mom upset. She’d be disappointed and shout at him about how they weren’t made of money, even though she worked all day and night. “What do you mean you don’t know what happened to it? It didn’t just fly away!” He didn’t need to be reminded either that he couldn’t tell her that Bobby had taken him fishing and he dropped it in the pond miles and miles away. Saying Bobby had driven all the way out there to try to drown him would hurt her worst of all because God would kill her to punish him for saying it. Even though he was starting to think there wasn’t any God at all. How could there be? Still, he wasn’t sure, so to be safe, he wouldn’t tell. He’d just stop going to the library so they couldn’t ever make him pay. He wouldn’t tell about the book, or the fishing trip, or about anything else Bobby did. No. He was going to go home and get into dry pajamas, and put his clothes in the wash, and wait for dusk to come. And when the sun started to set and Old Clem’s bats started to fly out of the hayloft, he’d open his window, crawl from his bed out onto the eaves, and join them. And when he did, he wouldn’t ever have to worry about keeping any more secrets ever, because when he flew, the only ones who would ever be able to hear him cry aloud would be the bats.
And maybe, just maybe, if he wished hard enough, the man would be waiting to down below to catch him. He’d catch him, and take him into the woods to be foxes and bats togeth
er. He was afraid of what would happen if the man wasn’t there. But if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t ever know.
Not as long as he went down head first.
BLOOD MAKES THE GRASS GROW
Sam watched the old man lean over to inspect the deep wound. Despite the severity of the gash in her haunch, the dog was reasonably calm under the veterinarian’s hands. She didn’t try to scramble off the examination table or even nip or bark. Instead, she sat whining softly as he tended to her. Gina had been a perfect patient ever since Sam and Callie Cooper, her owners, had started bringing her to the clinic as a puppy. By contrast, to say Sam and Callie were agitated was putting it mildly.
“She’ll be fine,” Pickett reassured them, reaching for a bottle of saline. “This’ll be the hardest part ’cause the cut’s so deep. Gonna have to get in there. As soon as I’m satisfied we got ’er properly cleaned out, then we’ll staple it right up. Before you go, I’ll write you a scrip for antibiotics you can have filled over at the Walgreens. Even call it in for you if you want.”
Pickett spoke slowly and articulately, enunciating every syllable as carefully as one would expect from a man who’d managed his own rehab after a stroke. Aside from a slightly lazy eye on the right side, he showed no sign. He deliberately chose his words, but he was also showing his age. Sam’s father had introduced him to Dr. Pickett maybe twenty-five years ago and he was old back then.
Standing in the low-ceilinged doublewide that served as his veterinary clinic, Pickett looked diminished. Stooped and tired, as though his advancing age was costing him size. He was a tough guy from a family of tough guys. His thick, scarred hands showed it. But every year robbed him of another inch, another five pounds, until eventually, Sam imagined, the man would become so old there would be nothing left of him but a whisper.
13 Views of the Suicide Woods Page 6