Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  “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.”

  10

  “Here’s the school, where we are,” said Pete, his finger pressed against the paper. Pete, Wayne, Johnny Juan, and Amanda Hugginkiss-née-Johnson stood in front of the huge map of Blackfield hanging in Mr. Villarubia’s 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, representing 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 9, a two-lane ribbon dropping 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?

  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 nondescript part of the woods. His fingertip stood an inch to the right of the 9, and a few inches north of the river running across that end of Blackfield.

  “Chevalier Village,” corrected Amanda. Sha-vall-yay.

  “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. 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 you can go under, into the canal next to the street. It’s about eight foot deep. 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 lining 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 swelled. It was a real hallelujah moment. The remoteness of Blackfield was already starting to grow on him.

  The cloudless 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 hung 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.

  “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. Mayb
e. 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. 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: 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 autopilot.

  At one point they passed an open café 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 dollar. They each bought one and continued up Wilmer drinking them. Amanda had 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.

  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’re gonna 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’s been tough since you lost your old lady, Aunt Marcelina told Leon, her hands on her hips. Her tone was soft but reproachful. But you can’t carry on like this. You keep showing up to work tore up and they’re gonna 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. Nobody else is gonna hire you. Marcelina pointed at the school with an open hand. Ain’t nobody gonna hire a drunk-ass teacher.

  What do you want me to do? Leon had asked.

  His necktie 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.

  God? scoffed Leon. God needs to get right with me.

  Don’t you start, Leonhard Louis Parkin. Marcelina’s broad shoulders hulked over him when she handled her hips like that, like she was using them as leverage to make herself even bigger, and she was already built like a bear. Her lips pursed under flaring nostrils. I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do.

  What we gonna do?

  I’m gonna give you a little money, and you can get out of town. Get outta your head, get outta that apartment, get away from here and go somewhere you can get clear. Somewhere quiet you can dry up.

  Leon stood a little straighter in his surprise. Get outta town? What is this, Tombstone? You runnin’ me outta town now?

  If that’s what it takes to fix you.

  Marcy, Leon had said, I can’t take your money.

  Yes, you can, she told him, and you will. Look, you can pay me back whenever. She pointed at Wayne sitting in the car. The nail on the end of her finger was bright sports-car red. I want you to think of that little boy sitting in there. Do you love him?

  Leon recoiled. Of course I do.

  Then get outta here, get away from these memories, away from this city, and get right with God. Baby brother, don’t make me have to raise my own nephew. I got three boys of my own. Marcelina hitched up her purse where it’d slipped down her shoulder and took out a wadded-up tissue. You know she would want you happy, dammit.

  Leon peered through the back window at Wayne, biting his lip in apprehension. His eyes were pink, and his face was twisted like something hurt deep inside. The boy could see the pain sticking out of him like a knife-handle.

  I’ve been talking to Principal Hayes, said Marcelina. There’s a job down south he wants to recommend you for. It’s close to Atlanta. Trisha lives in Atlanta. Your cousin, Aunt Nell’s granddaughter, you remember her? She’s all right, you know? You two used to play together before her mama moved them down there to go to school. She craned her head forward to look up into Leon’s face. Will you think about it?

  Sunshine glinted on something lying in the cupholder.

  Wayne reached in and pulled out a gold ring. An inscription on the inside said, Together We’ll Always Find a Way.

  Instinctively he thought about leaning out the window to ask his father whose ring it was, but he and Aunt Marcy were still talking. Wait, he thought, holding it up to the light. Isn’t this a wedding ring? Grown folks wear rings like this when they get married. And Dad never takes his off, even when he goes to bed.

  So it must be Mom’s.

  He held the ring up to his eye and gazed through it. The back of the school loomed over the windshield, a shadowy brick wall some two stories high.

  There were no windows on this side; Wayne wasn’t sure why, but he vaguely remembered the cafeteria was on the other side of the wall, and the windows in there were high and wide, like the casement windows in the cellar of Aunt Marcy’s house. There were huge fans, too, and before they moved out of Chicago he would learn the fans and high windows were meant for sucking heat out of the often sweltering-hot lunchroom.

  Leaning forward, he craned his neck to peer up at the wall. To his surprise, there was a door halfway up, some twelve or thirteen feet off the ground.

  What the heck? he’d thought.

  Freestanding, with no stairs leading up to it, no platform underneath it. If someone opened it from the other side and walked through it, they’d fall out and face-plant on the asphalt right next to Leon Parkin’s car. It stood in a shallow rectangular alcove, embedded into the bricks a few inches. Painted matte brown, the color of well-creamed coffee, with a brushed-steel handle instead of a knob, and there was a gold number affixed in the middle of the door. 306, like an apartment, or a hotel room.

  The weirdest thing. The two of them moved soon after, and it never occurred to him to bring the strange door up to his father—he didn’t talk to his father about a lot of things after Mom died—but he never forgot about it.

  11

  Marilyn found Roy out back in the garden beating up the board fence with the Weed Eater, his eyes shielded by his cheesy wrap-around redneck sunglasses. WHEEEER, WHEEEER, the trimmer-line cut through crabgrass and wild onions, tinting the air with a bitter green scent.

  The secluded garden was massive, cutting deep into the encroaching forest. Impeccable landscaping occupied most of the space, a field of five one-hundred-yard wire fences, each one tangled in grapevines. Flanking the vineyard were shallow hillocks of purple dahlia and lavender, watched over by trees drooping with Texas mountain laurel. The girls didn’t make their own wine anymore, too much of a hassle; these days with the Internet they could very easily purchase much better wine, older stock, and to be honest Roy was a bit of an idiot and
couldn’t be trusted with the delicate processes of producing a fine red.

  The aforementioned idiot was at the very back near the dryad, the bright late-afternoon sun shining on his copper-and-salt hair. He cut the Weed Eater off as she approached, pulling plugs out of his ears. “You look like you’ve had a hard week, dear,” she told him, her long hands clasped together over her belly like a gentleman vicar. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Get started on the weekend a little early.”

  “Must admit I am a mite run-down today.” Roy pushed his iridescent NASCAR sunglasses up, revealing his pale, ocean-bleached eyes. Putting down the trimmer, he beat the grass off his jeans with his gloves.

  As always, his eyes cut over at the tree. The tree, the tallest one on the property.

  Marilyn relished the hint of old fear in that anxious glance. She smiled ingratiatingly. “I would like to ask you one favor before you go, though.”

  “What?”

  “Mother tells me there is … well, it seems our new neighbors have … disturbed something in Annie’s house. I’d like to go investigate with my own eyes while they are gone for the day, but I would like a chaperone. Karen and Theresa have gone to the forest to look for wild mushrooms, and I would appreciate the company.”

  Even if it’s you, she thought.

  Roy rolled his shoulders uncomfortably, his head bobbing as if he could duck the request. He tugged his sweaty T-shirt to air out his chest and Marilyn caught a whiff of him. Pickled asshole.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “When you’ve put away your tools, I’ll be in the kitchen, making you something to drink—it’s surprisingly warm for October, isn’t it?”

  “Warmest year on record so far.” Roy hefted the Weed Eater and headed for the garage. “How about that global warming, huh?” Marilyn watched him track across the back lawn, slipping between two grapevine fences, disappearing.

  Standing in the absolute rear of the property, a stone’s throw from the back fence, was the apple tree that made Roy so nervous.

  Underneath the lush, brilliant green foliage was a sinuous violin trunk, with its suggestion of an hourglass shape, as if it had grown tall constricted by a ring around the middle. Two main branches thrust up from the top of the trunk in a great Y, bristling with smaller boughs and twigs. Apples studded the tree’s endmost fingers, gleaming red under the indigo sky. As if the branches and leaves were an unbearable burden, the trunk seemed almost to kneel like Atlas carrying the globe, as twisted and bent as a bonsai.