Dead Echo

by C.G. Banks

  Chapter 7: The Walk

  By Thursday of the following week she’d put most of her things to rights. The weather had been good with only one afternoon of scattered showers and the persistent sunshine had gone far in alleviating her initial uneasiness. The house had shed its weirdness as she finished first one room and then another, and she tried to write off these early misgivings as being in a strange place, alone. She still missed her family dearly, every day for hours at a time, but it was getting easier. For the last four days she hadn’t thought about the gun underneath the seat of the Impala at all, and that was a new record. It was still there though, like a weak magnet, but its power over her had indeed diminished. It didn’t call out to her during all hours of the day, nor torment her in the darkest shadows of nightmares. In fact, she’d had no nightmares at all since she’d taken to sleeping in her own bed. She’d thought that’s when they’d come, lying in bed soaking in the emptiness streaming in from the other side where John used to lay. She’d half-expected to start awake in the dead time of night, alert for Terri’s cries from her bedroom, but so far (and here she kept her fingers crossed) these fears had not materialized. There were only tender remembrances in dreams, simple rewinds and poignant moments. She could handle that.

  She wanted that.

  When she’d had time to consider her trouble at the hardware store it proved no cataclysm either. Let’s face it, she told herself, she was a pretty good-looking woman with an athletic build, though she’d never really done anything up to now to have or maintain it. Seems these were the years when the stick-thin angles of her youth had come to pay off. So men were gonna look. Sometimes women too. When she tried to recapture the episode with the Hispanic guy it was not surprisingly horrific. After all, what had really happened? She’d caught some stranger looking at her a couple of times and when he knew she knew he’d left. In a nutshell that was it. She’d already been a little off her mark with moving and the ridiculous scene in the attic (because after all, what else could that have been?) and maybe even the first looks she’d gotten from the plumbers had unnerved her more than she’d realized. Okay, good, the voice said quietly, reasonably. But what about the box? What about the papers, the newspaper articles? That was a difference, she had to admit, regardless if the sun was bright and high in the sky or not, but it really didn’t mean that much either. Hell, it was kind of like the Bermuda Triangle, she guessed. John had been a History Channel nut and she remembered watching a program with him late one night in their bed, right after having had great sex. Although she didn’t remember much of what had been said (she’d been tired and satisfied, dozing as the lights flickered on the screen), she did remember one thing. The narrator said that if one took the area of the Triangle and placed it in just about any random same-sized place of any ocean or sea the world over, the number of disappearances would be roughly equal. Well, she didn’t know about any of that but it sounded good; it sounded right. Patsy knew a lot about reputations and knew for certain (she didn’t need any narrator to tell her so) that many times reputations were overblown and stuck for no good reason at all. The guy who’d lived here before, the one who’d left the goddamn locked box in the attic, had obviously been one of the many weirdos in the world who happened to fixate on a particular thing, his being proximity to deaths and accidents. She tried to convince herself that wherever he was now he was probably stuffing clippings and handwritten notes into another lock box in his new attic.

  However, that particular unease persisted.

  She stood up from the couch and glanced around at the walls. The pictures still had to be hung in here and the armoire for the TV suddenly didn’t seem right. In the early morning light, like now, the sun streamed in through the sheer curtain she’d placed over the large living room window and made watching TV difficult from the center of the room. And the couch was not moving. She would turn it a little, one way or the other, but she wanted it to be the center, the point from which everything else radiated. And the damn armoire was heavy, even empty. She looked down at her hands and saw all the nicks and scratches and bruises. They hurt to clinch even, much less to go pushing heavy furniture around. She pursed her lips and thought for a moment, then shook her head as if negating some unspoken question before moving around the couch and through the square breezeway to the kitchen. She pulled the house key from the hook on the cabinet by the carport door and unlocked the deadbolt. Then she dropped the key in her pocket and opened it, pushing the creaking storm door back and turned left, away from the Impala. Between the wall of the house and carport storage room the concrete stretched about ten feet to a door that had obviously not been there when the house was built. It used to open out to a patio crammed into the back L of the house, facing the backyard but somebody (Lockbox Guy?) had added a room back here. The new roof meshed with the old, and the windows and doors were of sound quality but that was about as far as finishing it as he’d come. The walls were absent of sheet rock and the floor was the same dirty outside patio moved inside. But, she thought opening the door, there was potential here.

  She stepped through the doorway and into the room, reaching for the light switch because the sun was on the other side of the house. A long, florescent bulb began to flicker and dance not far above her head and she considered it with a frown. That would be the first to go. She hated florescent light. Her grandmother had had it in almost every room of her house and it’d always made the place seem like a police station, or maybe a hospital. Anyway, no place you wanted to hang around. A place where questions were always waiting to barrage you. Uh, uh. Even though she knew absolutely nothing about electrical work other than screwing in light bulbs, that damn thing was coming down. If she had to hire an electrician, so be it. She wouldn’t let that damn woman haunt her here. She waved her hand, brushing off the thought. It was a little warm in here which meant by noon it would be untenable. Below the window on the right was a plug where the air conditioner would go. That would have to be soon too. It was amazing, really, how much you didn’t consider when buying a house. All the little things that just kept on piling up no matter how much you did

  She walked across the room to the opposite door, pausing to look out the window before opening it. It was a pretty back yard with six-foot wood fences on either side, only open at the back of the property by a four-foot hurricane fence that connected the wooden fences. At the far back left corner was a little gate, no padlock. She’d noticed it on her first visit and thought nothing of it really, but of course that was before she found the box in the attic. Strange habits from a strange man. There was nothing behind the house, just an empty field that ran across a pot-holed street into another, larger field and then a tree line beyond. She grabbed the doorknob and turned it, pulling the door back into the room. Then she stepped out into the sunshine, enjoying the play of light across her face. For a moment she just stood there quietly, soaking it in. She walked to the extent of the patio. There was a lot she’d have to do back here too, though the previous owner had helped out as far as trees went. In the quarter acre lot he’d planted five hard woods: two pecans, two red maples, a pin oak and some kind of spindly vinegar tree that had blown its yellow blossoms all over the yard. She could already envision a picnic table over there, underneath the pecan and red maple; it would be nice when the real heat of summer set in.

  Patsy walked across the patio, cut left around the large rectangle of four-by-fours that described a separate area in the yard, filled with loose gravel, each rock no bigger than the pebbles one found if looking through a parking lot. She skirted its edges and headed deeper into the yard, toward the gate. On her initial drive-through she’d noticed construction starting up behind her on Achin Street, but it was obvious now things wouldn’t be finished for the better part of a couple of years, not that she knew anything about construction. Just a gut instinct. As of now there were no more than four houses on both sides of the street, total, and as she raised the swing-latch, and looked around, the emptiness gave the n
eighborhood an unsettling, unfinished look back here.

  She walked through the gate and latched it solid again. She’d yet to take a walking tour through the neighborhood, and gazing up at the sun, she couldn’t imagine another time proving better than now. She passed through the empty lot and reached the street, looked both right and left deciding on a direction. To the left the pot-holed street led down to a STOP sign and intersection at the extremity of the neighborhood and a solid line of old-growth woods started up directly thereafter. However, to the right, the canvass opened up in starts and spurts to Highway 27. On the way in she’d passed a lake on the right and figured that would be the most reasonable direction, especially on the first run. She turned right and began walking down Achin Street, looking off left and right as she went.

  The grass had not been cut here in a while and was almost knee-high. Cat tails and dandelions grew in profusion, halted only by the several infrequent manicured yards she passed on her way down the street. After a block she again came to a STOP sign, this one at the corner of Achin and Stickler. It was obvious the developer had not taxed himself coming up with names for the neighborhood. To the right Tangerine led out to Samane (her street) but to the right it went no more than seventy feet back to a gravel intersection just past the house on the corner. The gravel ran out behind the corner house’s fence on the left and right clear out of sight among the high grass and spindly border trees toward the highway.

  She turned left and walked the short distance to the gravel. There were dirt bike and four-wheeler tracks everywhere, some skirting the edge of the pock-marked road and others trailing off into the woods in every direction. She squinted right into the distance and saw the long gravel trail leading out of sight and around a corner a quarter mile away. It would skirt the lake down there, the distance seemed about right, and if she walked it she’d eventually end up at the highway. To the left of the gravel road numerous trails led back into the woods, but she wasn’t up to that right now. She looked deeper. The scale was smaller and because of its proximity, more inviting. Good enough. She turned away from the longer leg of the trail and started left, walking alongside the corner lot’s back fence as she made her way along. A dog, a big one from the sound of it, started up a frantic volley of barks but the fence look solid enough and was at least six feet tall. Nonetheless, she moved to the other side of the road and went quick, swinging a thin stick she’d grabbed by the side of the road near the ditch moments before.

  The gravel road made a sharp dog-leg right just ahead and she found herself disappointed at the amount of trash back here. Some people. Everything from household trash to kitchen appliances and it really sucked. Their own neighborhood and they thought little enough to trash it. It recalled the many trailer parks she known before John, the propensity of people to let things pile up with no intention of ever really doing anything about them. Once again, for the second time since leaving the kitchen, she found herself reminded of the life she’d thought she’d left. But it was reality; stone-cold, stark reality. Run though you tried, you could never really, truly escape your past, the things that made you who you were.

  Patsy swung the switch at a bank of creeper vines to little effect. Right, right, right, she thought, but who the hell are you? That was a harder question to answer, a seemingly fateful question. A master of charades? She hated to think so but that’s where it went. Let’s face it, the voice spoke again, this time with the confidence of a well-versed college professor venting his angst on a slacker student. You’re no more than a couple of steps from the trailer park right now. No education, no job prospects, you think about that goddamn gun underneath the seat more than you think about getting a job, and what are you gonna do when the house is done, when all the neat little boxes have been emptied and put away? What then? You’ve never even had a real job in your life. Most people in this neighborhood have either been working or out of school with degrees by your age, and here you are railroading in like you know what the hell’s up. What happens when the money gets short? What happens when the novelty of this idea dries up?

  She stopped in the road and flung the stick as far as she could into the underbrush that made a solid line back to the trees. No, goddammit, she wouldn’t let this come down again, not like it did for the weeks after the accident. Those had been the nights where the gun had begged her, just to follow her loved ones and forget about the trials she was left here to face. It wasn’t fair and she’d been looking to square the score. Only she’d gone the other way, into the light instead of the darkness.

  Only to find the light was not so goddamn bright, that not much separated it from the black hole of oblivion she felt crouched around her like a dog itching to bite. She stuck her hands into her jeans’ pockets and continued along the road toward the dog-leg. She kept her head down and kicked at the random rocks that sat dislodged from their places, skittering them into the ditches and mud holes that ran the length of the trail back here. Somewhere in the distance she heard the whine of either a dirt bike or four-wheeler, but it didn’t get any closer. It gave her a weird feeling. No more than five minutes earlier she’d been walking paved roads in her new neighborhood, and now it was as if she’d stepped off some unforeseen shelf into the unknown, surrounded on all sides by vast areas of nameless and unknown space.

  She came to the dog-leg and followed it around right. It looked like a tractor of some sort had been back her recently because much of the grass and undergrowth had been cut back. What remained had been beaten into submission by the dirt bikes and four-wheelers. There were tracks and trails everywhere. Piles of trash. Some asshole (or group of assholes, it seemed) had obviously pulled their trucks back here and dumped bagfuls of household trash. Shit the normal trash detail would have picked up easy enough. Just impatience, the unwillingness to wait for anything. It was a fucking shame.

  She walked on, trying not to notice the garbage, bending her neck to catch the trees and pretty bushes. She paused, glancing into the underbrush and, yes, there was no denying. Blueberries. Not ready yet, but from the looks of it there’d be plenty soon. Because now that she’d spotted them, she couldn’t help but notice the rest. My God, blueberry heaven. It brightened her mood and she continued along the trail, disavowing the garbage, refusing it the right to spoil her day. She came to a spot in the trail that was a boy’s dream, banks of hard-packed dirt spread amid huge craters and mud holes. She threaded her away around the biggest, as close as she could get between that and the underbrush, holding off some of it with a bigger stick she’d found because poison ivy had a hold back here. She squeezed around the last little bit and a large, unfamiliar bush that appeared to be vicariously hanging from a muddy bank, and looked around.

  She drew her breath in surprise.

  An area as big as a football field lay before her, trampled clean of vegetation. Everywhere she saw the tell-tale signs of knobby wheels; the bikes and four-wheelers had really leveled things out back here. What looked like a miniature crater lake formed the centerpiece of the vista and shone in the high sunlight malevolently. The area surrounding this was nothing but mud and hard-pan. She thought of her little tomboy, Terri, of the other children John and she had talked about having. They would have loved it back here, but of course, those were things never meant to be. At the cost of poor tires and wet pavement; that was all it took to break things into pieces, to smash your life into a million, irretrievable, little parts. She bent to her knee and looked at the small pile of rocks close by her feet, all flat, skipping stones someone had obviously gathered and then, for some reason, not thrown. Maybe this mysterious person had been no good at it and given up. Patsy, for her part, had been taught this skill not long into junior high by some boy (she could remember his face but not his name) at the reservoir they used to swim in after school. But, here she could not lie either, many of those times had been during school, with hell usually following her later at her grandmother’s desolate house. As she looked down at the pile of rocks those afternoons
rolled through her mind; hadn’t she let that boy, whatever his name was, “touch her monkey” as they’d used to say. She couldn’t say for sure but thought the answer was probably yes. What else would “a little Jezabel” (according to her grandmother) have done? Well, she hoped she had because life was short and you needed to get your thrills where and when you could.

  Like this pile of rocks.

  She reached over and picked out the largest, flattest one and hefted it up and down in her right palm. Terri had gotten her tomboy nature from her mother because Patsy had never been one to sit on the sidelines when things were heating up. All the girls had told her she “threw like a boy” but even as they’d said it she could see the jealousy close behind their eyes. Because it gave her special access to the secret lives of the boys they had craved. Of course, touch football had possessed an added dimension when she’d played, but attention was attention. Or at least so she’d thought. Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it would have been better to hermit away; it would have spared her the agony of the last year, that was a sure bet.

  “Fuck it,” she said, squeezing her fingers together. She curled her forefinger around the edge of stone and drew back her arm in a high arc, letting go with a sidearm throw that would have shamed many boys half her age. The stone left her hand like pure sweetness (the feel when the basketball leaves your fingertips and you don’t even have to wonder if it’s going in) and dropped down to the pond-sized mud hole like it had wings. It hit the surface a quarter of the way across, dimpling the water in an undulating ripple, and roared on across the pond, marking the water at nine different places as straight as any ruler could have drawn. She saw the stone tumble briefly across the mud flat on the other side before coming to an abrupt halt. “Still got it, sister,” she told herself. Then she looked around, almost self-consciously, as if someone had heard her mumbling to herself. No one was there.

  She kicked the rest of the rocks in a wide scatter and made her way steady right, skirting the edge of the gigantic mud hole up where the ground was dry and furrowed and curled with tracks. It made walking difficult but it beat hell out of ruining her new running shoes. But something else had her eyes now.

  She held up a hand to shield them from the sun and stumbled once, almost going down. Just ahead, no more than forty or fifty yards away, hunched a large bank with an old bridge running across it. Sitting out in the middle of nowhere it seemed such an anomaly, and therefore drew her like a bug to a light. No road led up to it, if one disavowed the remnants of gravel trail she felt through the soles of her shoes, but, closer now and with the sun behind a cloud, she could tell the surface was concrete, and looked to be upwards of two feet thick. Strange. Someone had obviously paid big bucks in the past to have it put here and now it stood like a lonely, lost relic of time.

  She grunted up the bank to the top for a better look. The bridge spanned a creek, now just a dribble of water wandering in and out between rocks, broken trees and branches, and muddy cut-backs. It was anchored by telephone poles and stood almost twenty feet above the wet bottom. Patsy looked both ways down the creek, trying to imagine what it must be like when things really got rolling back here. It didn’t take much of a stretch to picture torrents of water licking the bottom of the concrete because as she scanned the banks she saw a clear high-water mark, at a point just below the tops of the telephone poles. “Jesus,” she whispered, eyeing the broken bicycle tied up among the weeds and split branches in a little cleft beneath the bridge. If you were ever caught down there during a flood it would be curtains. Why, the many years of such violence had broken the bridge from the land. Or at least on her side, though she felt sure the other would echo the same; there was a good two feet between the edge of the bank and the beginning of the bridge, and the fall would not be kind with all the broken bottles and bridge stanchions you’d meet on the way to the water.

  Patsy looked down, summoning courage, and stretched her right foot across to the concrete. She stood there, scissored, not daring to look down as she pumped weight to her foot, testing the bridge. It seemed solid enough, not that she knew a damn thing about engineering, but what the hell. For a second she pictured herself crumpled down there either in the water or close to it, deep in the gully. No one would hear her cries, no one would see her unless they happened to come to the bridge as she had. It could, theoretically, take days. Regardless…she swung her weight across with her left leg, fully on the bridge now. She stood hands out as if catching her balance or checking for ominous tremors, and scanned the surface for cracks and holes. It appeared solid enough. When she rocked back and forth on her heels she didn’t notice any mirrored behavior from the structure. And now, standing here in the sunlight, she saw the bridge for what it actually was, after its separation and neglect. It was a stage, a platform. She walked carefully to the center, testing each step. On the far side of the creek ran a long length of hurricane fence completely engulfed by foliage and young trees. A deep field played out behind it, and around to the right she could just make out the rooftops of another neighborhood. Over there, somewhere, she could dimly hear the sound of children hollering, probably over a ballgame. It did little to change her view on the solitude, the sense of being far away from others, of being left to your own devices. She nodded and felt good, powerful. Defiant. From far over to her right she heard the bee-like drone of a two-stroke engine until it abruptly disappeared. This raised a moment of trepidation, but, she told herself, how could she help what she couldn’t see? It was an apt metaphor for her life.

  She sat down and folded her knees to her chest, wrapping them solidly with her arms. Then she stared down the creek bed into the distance.