The Bone Tree

by Christopher Fulbright

  Bobby stood on the back of the couch and jumped over me as the first verse of the song broke in, and he sang at the top of his lungs, “I’m tough, rough, ready and able, to pick myself up from under this table!”

  I beat on the pillows like mad, incorporating the lampshade as a cymbal, and Bobby air guitared like a wild man.

  “Don’t stick no sign on me, I got no label,” he screamed. “I’m a little sick, unsure, unsound and unstable...but I’m fightin’ my way back!”

  About two minutes of this insanity was all it took to summon Mom. I don’t know how long she stood there, but I guess she might have been there all along, and I went beet-red at the thought. Bobby froze, and just like that the concert was over.

  With a grin she encouraged us to find something quieter to do. She made us more of her cookies, and when we got tired of playing Atari we went out back to throw rocks into the forest behind my house.

  One day that week Dad came home early, saw us throwing rocks out there, and pulled out his BB gun for us. He gave us some target shooting lessons, and from then on we spent the rest of the week out back, shooting holes in tin cans, setting up some of my G.I. Joe and Star Wars figures in various hiding places in the brush, and trying to pick them off like Marine snipers.

  The story of the Plecker murders was in the newspaper that next week. Back then we just got the weekly newspaper out of Waxahachie, so anything that was worth mentioning was old news by the time any stories came out. We didn’t learn any more details about the deaths of the Pleckers. All it said was they were found dead after Joe Plecker’s boss at the auto shop called the house, didn’t get an answer, and “got a bad feelin’ about it, so I drove on out to see if everythin’ was okay.” Of course, everything wasn’t okay. The front door was open, and that wouldn’t have been so bad if there hadn’t been bloody footprints leading out the foyer and down the front steps. The newspaper story didn’t give any details beyond that. But for us, they didn’t need to. We’d already heard Eddie’s version according to Javier, and his dad had seen everything, so that’s all we needed to know. They’d been slaughtered.

  “Do you think it had anything to do with...” the shadow man, I wanted to say, but then Bobby still hadn’t admitted that he’d seen anything more than something, and that was all.

  He was quiet as he squinted down the barrel of the BB rifle, aiming deep into the brush about twenty feet away. The heads of Obi-Wan, Mike Power, a Stormtrooper, the big-headed Han Solo, and Commander Adama poked out above small rocks and in bushes where they’d been propped. A breeze stirred the oven-like heat of the day. Patchy shade shifted with the light wind. Birds chirped, and some cicadas made their sounds from deeper in the woods.

  I held my breath at the look of concentration on Bobby’s face and watched the targets.

  He squeezed off a shot.

  —pumph!

  The Stormtrooper flew out of the bush and flipped in a pinwheel backwards.

  We both shouted in victory, and Bobby grinned, handing me the rifle.

  “Nice one,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I pulled back the bolt of the rifle and reloaded, using the pump action on the forestock. I took a seat and propped the butt of the gun on my knee before shooting.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well, I think it’s clear that I’m going to be a top secret CIA marksman.”

  “Heh, yeah, well, so much for your secret.”

  He gave a half-smile and gazed out at his targets.

  “Seriously, what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Do you think all that stuff at the Plecker house had anything to do with...him getting chased?”

  Bobby shrugged. His eyes searched the trees, and for a minute he looked older than he had a right to be. A few days ago it seemed like maybe something happened at home and he’d been a little distant again, only this time he hadn’t really been able to totally shake it off. I mean, we still spent as much time together as always, but his head was definitely somewhere else, and I didn’t know what to say. I figured if he needed to talk or whatever, he’d spill it.

  Bobby looked hard at his shoes. They were old, white leather shoes. I remembered when his mom got them for him last summer, and he’d been proud as ever. Now they were cracked, the white leather worn off, the shoelaces dirty and tied together in spots where they’d broken.

  I was about to remind him about the red eyes on that shadow man when Bobby spoke up again.

  “Three nights ago, I heard my dad talking to me outside my window.”

  My mouth opened just a little. My heart thudded in my chest once or twice before it went on about its regular routine. We were sitting in the shade of the overhang on my back patio, and it was hot as red blazes, but the wind kicked up and I felt a chill.

  “I was up late. Momma said her prayers and went to bed, and I’d turned on the flashlight to read. It was dead quiet and dark outside, except a sliver of moon. Then I heard the voice. You know how you hear people outside talking through a wall? Well, that’s the way it sounded. It was a man’s voice and...” He looked up at me, eyes dilated and deep with fear. “It said my name.”

  “Shit,” I said. No doubt, both of us were thinking back to that day Tom told us about his midnight vision. And if that had been a portent of things to come, then...well, this was bad news. “What did you do?”

  “I turned off the flashlight. Just held my breath and listened. About the time I started to figure it was just the wind, I heard it again.”

  “Your name?”

  “Yeah. And it was definitely my dad’s voice. I was too scared to look out the window.” He swallowed hard, and I could see tears shimmering around his eyes. “I backed into the corner of my room, and I-I hid there like a...I just couldn’t...look.” He cut himself short and his head sagged, and he looked down so I couldn’t see his eyes. When he spoke again his voice was quieter, ashamed of himself. “I folded my arms over my knees and buried my face. I heard footsteps crunching through the dead leaves outside. The steps stopped just on the other side of the window, and then I heard his voice, Kevin. I heard it clear as day, just on the other side of that glass. He said my name. And then he tapped on the glass.”

  At mention of the tapping a downright cold wave rose inside me and sent goose bumps over my skin.

  “God, Bobby. And you didn’t look?”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. His voice was even now, but he sniffled, and I saw a tear drop to the concrete. He wiped it away brusquely. “I was too scared.”

  When he looked up at me, there was anger in his face. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like he was mad at himself. I didn’t know why at the time, but thinking back on it now, I guess maybe he was angry at himself because he was supposed to be the man of the house. That now, when push came to shove, if his mother or their home was endangered, he was the one who had to step up to the plate and defend them. It was a helluva weight he carried, and he felt like he failed that night. That instead of standing up and being a man, he’d cried and hunkered down in the corner of his bedroom like a coward.

  “How long was he there?”

  He shook his head and shrugged.

  Just then my mom opened the back door and hung her head out.

  “Boys! Do you want some lemonade?”

  I glanced at Bobby and he nodded.

  “Yeah Mom!”

  Mom’s appearance out back a few minutes later with ice clinking in a frosty pitcher of lemonade lightened the mood enough for us to come back to Earth. She came out in short white shorts and a loose red blouse, and I tried to pretend like I didn’t see Bobby admiring my mother’s long tanned legs. She gave us each a glass and asked us to be careful, casting a scornful look at the BB gun.

  “Why don’t you guys come in and play some Atari or something?” She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear and put her hands on her hips, that look of motherly concern doing its work on us. She seemed to have spider-sense telling her some
thing was going on out here she wasn’t supposed to hear.

  “We’re all right, Mom. Dad showed us how to use the safety and everything.”

  Of course the safety didn’t have anything to do with actually shooting the gun, but I figured invoking the word “safety” and assuring her we knew how to use it might help.

  “Okay guys. Well, Ms. Nolan will probably be here in about thirty minutes, so be sure you’ve got your stuff together.”

  “Okay Mom.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Burkett.”

  She went in, and we took a few more turns shooting. We didn’t say anything else about the apparition speaking Bobby’s name and tapping on his window. The tall trees behind my house rustled and filtered the sunlight. The birds sang and the weather was nice. We checked out the damage to the figures—Commander Adama had a big divot in his chest, Obi-Wan had a peeled chunk of plastic carved out of his face, and Mike Powers’s head had a BB lodged in it above the left eye. Neither one of us managed to hit Han Solo. The Stormtrooper seemed toughest of them all—who knows what they made those things out of, but they were bullet proof.

  Later, Ms. Nolan came and picked up Bobby and headed home. We had our family supper and I talked to Dad about the BB gun, and Mom said she was concerned again, and he consoled her. I helped do some of the dishes as Dad went into the living room, lit his pipe and sank into his chair with the newspaper and the remote control. I joined him about the time Man from Atlantis came on, and before I knew it, it was time for a bath and bedtime.

  Lying there in the safety of my own bed that night, I kept staring out the window, hoping-God-hoping that nothing would come for me through the woods. And knowing, too, that we had to do something now. That the tapping was a portent of evil to come.

  Echoes of Eddie Milken claiming that they’d found Tom’s mother skinned alive, a pile of her skin lying in the hallway, and that his dad was torn open with his guts hanging out, haunted me as I drifted toward dreamland, and I yanked the covers up over my nose, leaving just enough room for my eyes to watch the window.

  It occurred to me they never said what happened to Tom.

  Maybe it was best that we didn’t know.

  It was a long night. I studied the skies through my sheer curtains, counting the same stars over and over, hoping that I’d drift off, praying that Bobby and Ms. Nolan were okay down the hill, wondering what might be waiting for him tonight in the woods.

  As sleep finally crept up to the edge of consciousness, the moon gleamed like the silver blade of a scythe, poised to harvest my dreams.

  CHAPTER 7

  “We have to do it,” Bobby said.

  I nodded grimly. We’d spent our morning on the bus ride quiet and thoughtful, even as chaos ensued around us. The bus driver screamed and yelled, and the Yager twins beat each other silly two seats away. I’d been afraid to ask Bobby how things had gone the night before, but he hadn’t needed to say anything at all because I could see it in his eyes. They were bloodshot and sunken, with bruised pools of sleeplessness beneath them. Almost like Tom Plecker’s that day we’d found him hiding in the tree house.

  We knew we had to do something. We just weren’t sure what it was.

  That day at lunch, Bobby was short cash for a drink, so I gave him fifteen cents for chocolate milk. The cafeteria was too loud to hear each other talk, so we went out into the courtyard and sat down in the sun with our bagged lunches.

  Really, we rarely sat in the cafeteria at all. It was always a stupid game you had to play. None of the white kids wanted any of the black kids to sit at their table, so there was always one table full of black kids, and none of them really accepted Bobby because he hung out with me and not many of them. Anyway, we agreed to go outside and skip the whole scene: the looks and the glares and the maneuvering for spots where we could sit unmolested.

  The weather had stayed pretty nice, so the sloping lawn that covered the open courtyard of the school was scattered with students. The grass was plush green and soft. We spread out our lunches and pooled our food and split everything. Bobby was morose. No use beating around the bush today. I got right to the heart of it.

  “I think it’s the Bone Tree.”

  Bobby chewed a mouthful of bologna sandwich and chased it with the chocolate milk. He swallowed and looked down at the pile of goods between us, then nodded.

  “That day Tom was chased off into the woods,” I said. “Remember when we were over by that tree, it was like there wasn’t any air, and nothin’ grew there. The air was dead, and so was the ground, and soon as we got close...” I couldn’t finish because I didn’t know how to articulate it, but I remembered how the temperature dropped and shadows gathered as if drawn there by some unseen force. “And then Tom. Remember when he was telling us about his dream? He mentioned that when he saw the shape, or ghost or whatever outside his window, he could see that tree glowing through the forest.”

  Bobby nodded. “That tree’s evil.”

  He said it and I went cold. A real chill deep in my bones. Putting the word “evil” to the tree marked it as a malevolent force to be reckoned with. It made sense of everything somehow. That rather than dark shapes shambling aimlessly through the night, they actually came from somewhere, and returned again when their malign deeds were done. And that old tree, white as bone, its lightning-twisted branches like the talons of some clawed beast, was a likelier place than any.

  We didn’t need to have any discussion about if that was the target or not. Maybe Bobby latched onto it because he desperately needed to think there might be a way to stop what had happened to the Pleckers from happening to him and his mom. Because if the truth was that a creeping phantom was bent on mutilating them in the night, he wouldn’t have any earthly control over that. He’d already said enough prayers to make Jesus sleep on the couch. Bobby had faith, but he also knew what he’d seen, and truth be told, these days God never showed up for anything in person anymore. Not like that shape outside his window, calling his name. Short of the Lord sending an angel dressed for battle with bells on to the front door, wasn’t anything going to satisfy him that he and his mom were safe until something tangible had been done.

  For that matter, I didn’t know if I could take many nights like the one I had last night.

  Terrible as I felt about it, the real nagging question in the back of my mind was, How long before the shape came for me?

  “We could cut it down,” I said.

  “We should burn it.”

  “You kidding? How we gonna manage that?”

  “We’ll go camping. Your dad’s got that gas can in the garage that he keeps for his riding mower.”

  “This weekend?”

  “Tonight.”

  “My mom won’t let me camp tonight. Especially since everyone’s all freaked out about the murders. You know how she’s been.”

  When Bobby looked up at me his jaw was set. “I can’t make it another night like that, Kevin. Not with that thing out there. I’m serious. I can’t.” He swallowed hard and his dark eyes filled with tears and he looked away, trying to swallow more bologna sandwich and insert a chip after, but I could tell it wouldn’t hold if I objected one more time.

  “Okay,” I said. Instantly my gut filled with dread and the flutter of moths. “We’ll camp tonight.”

  And it felt like I’d just signed my own admission slip to the county morgue.

  “Camping tonight?”

  The female voice wafted down into our private conversation and changed the tone like birdsong on a spring day. I shaded my eyes and looked up into the sunny sky to see Wendy Hawkins standing over us, beautiful as Brooke Shields from the floating spread of her shimmering auburn hair down to her pluming white and blue dress, with scrunched white socks and low-heeled flats. It took me a minute to realize this was as close as I’d ever been to her bare legs, and I tried not to let that preoccupy me too much, even though I knew that a wry wind could come along and make this my special day any second.

  I leaned bac
k on the grass and tried to look cool, but of course I knew for sure that my hair looked stupid, I had a spot of something on my shirt, or I had a booger hanging out of my nose. I fidgeted a little bit, to nonchalantly check these things out.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re gonna go out and camp by the old cemetery tonight.”

  Bobby rolled his eyes and finished lunch, eating my share while I was otherwise occupied. My heart was beating too fast, the blood rushing too quickly to my cheeks and loins to really know anything other than Wendy Hawkins was standing over us. She was a pretty girl all right. If I prayed for anything earnestly in those days, it was that my first French kiss would be with Wendy Hawkins.

  “Ew.” She scrunched her cute little nose, then gave one of those feminine smirks that I’d learn in later years was reserved for moments when women find something a man has said ridiculous. “Why the cemetery?”

  “Oh, we’ve got a tree house down by Sutter’s Creek. It’s not too far from Greathouse Cemetery. We hang out there all the time. It’s not scary.”

  Bobby cleared his throat and batted his eyelashes at me. I blushed and hoped Wendy didn’t see. Bobby just grinned.

  “Oh, well, sounds weird.”

  I shrugged and felt suddenly stupid.

  “So, are you going to the dance next week?”

  “Uh, well, I don’t know, yet...really. Are you?”

  “Yeah, my mom’s going to chaperone.”

  “Oh.”

  She smiled down at me.

  I smiled back.

  Bobby tried to be invisible. I noticed how she didn’t really acknowledge that he was even there, and thinking about it sort of cooled my fire for her. But just a bit. The thought of seeing her at the dance had my pulse up and my palms sweating enough that the grass stuck to them. I guess I had it pretty bad for her.