Armed with a gardening fork and a can of bee repellent, Ashley headed into the woods behind her house. Her weapons were meager, but she didn’t actually want to encounter the monster, just find evidence that he’d been there. And she needed to check on the raccoons.
After walking for five minutes, she spotted a person through the trees.
Ashley ducked behind the fat beech tree she and Sid called The Walrus.
Shane Savage was sitting on Carl Lee’s rock, his legs dangling over the side, his eyes gazing into a space of trampled grass. For several minutes he didn’t move, barely blinked, and Ashley grew antsy behind the tree.
Finally, she stepped out and planted her hands on her hips. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“This your rock?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow.
A sheaf of blond hair fell over one half of his forehead. If it got much longer, it would obscure his left eye.
“No, it’s Carl Lee’s rock. So why are you sitting on it?”
Shane laughed. “Carl Lee’s dead.”
The blunt way he said the words knocked Ashley off kilter. She searched for a witty comeback. “Exactly,” she said at last. “You don’t live over here.”
“So?”
“So, maybe you should go back to your own woods.”
Shane lived several miles away in a stretch of barren fields called Sycamore Mobile Home Park. Warren lived there too.
“My cousin lives over here. I was looking for her.”
Ashley frowned. “Who?” she demanded.
“Ask me nice and I’ll tell ya.”
Ashley huffed and started to turn away. “Why don’t you like me?” he retorted. “I’ve never done anything to you.”
“Your friends have done plenty,” she barked, turning back around to face him. She would not run away from her own woods. If anyone should leave, it was Shane Savage.
“The Thrashers aren’t my friends,” he told her. “I skate with them sometimes. That’s it. They’re a bunch of shit eaters.”
Ashley spurted laughter, and Shane’s own face broke into a smile.
“Total shit eaters,” she agreed.
Shane stood on the rock, stretching his arms overhead with a loud yawn. He hopped down and turned back to gaze at it.
“Weird isn’t it? Someone died right there on that rock.”
Ashley nodded.
It was weird. Sometimes she sat on the rock and had those exact thoughts. She wondered if animals crept up to Carl Lee’s body and sniffed it, and if police found the tracks of birds in the blood that coated the surface of the rock.
“My dad knew him,” Shane continued. “Carl Lee. He was a Vietnam Vet. On Independence Day every year, he flew a black flag from his porch.”
“My mom knew him too,” Ashley admitted. She’d bugged her mom into telling her details about Carl Lee on more than one occasion, but Rebecca Shepherd rarely complied. “They went to high school together. I think she might have dated him when they were kids.”
Shane whistled. “That’s far out. He wasn’t like your dad or anything?”
Ashley glared at him, and his eyes shot wide.
“Shit, what? Not cool? I just know you don’t have a dad, so…”
Ashley stuffed her hands in her pockets.
“I do have a dad, dickweed,” she spat. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m not exactly white. My dad lives in Mexico.”
Shane nodded as if that were cool, though she wasn’t sure what part he found cool, her absentee dad or her non-whiteness.
“My dad’s a dick,” Shane admitted. “My mom’s cool, though. Why’s your dad in Mexico?”
Ashley shrugged.
“My mom met him there on vacation and got pregnant when she was nineteen. The rest is history.”
“So, he’s never been around?”
Ashley sighed, kicking at a clump of leaves.
“Why do you care?”
“Why not?” he asked. “Have somewhere better to be?”
Ashley considered the possibilities. She could go home, eat a bowl of cocoa puffs and flip through the channels. Or she could continue down her original path, searching the woods for clues of the boy or the monster or whatever he was.
“No, he’s never been around. I’ve never met him. I talked to him on the phone a few times when I was little. He and my mom talked about making a go of things, but…” she trailed off. There wasn’t much more to tell.
“That must suck for your mom. I mean doing it all on her own.”
Ashley nodded.
“Yeah, probably. I had my Grandma Patty until a year and a half ago. She lived with us.”
“Your mom’s mom.”
“Yeah.”
Grandma Patty’s small bedroom remained in the back of the house. Ashley’s mom had tucked her coral print comforter into the creases of the bed and stacked her pile of pillows, crocheted with little sayings like ‘This house is a home,’ near the headboard. Ashley went in sometimes and curled up on the bed.
The room no longer smelled like her grandmother. The residual odors of the medicine and the lotion that had consumed her final days remained. It stank of the disinfectant cleaner her mother used to wipe down the rocking chair and the dresser after Grandma Patty went into the ground.
“No grandpa?” Shane asked.
Ashley shook her head. “He died when I was like five. I have a few memories with him. He drove a big truck for a living. Had a massive heart attack on the road one day, and his truck just drifted into a guardrail.”
Shane grimaced. “Damn, at least he didn’t take out like a school bus of little kids or anything.”
“Yeah.”
Grandma Patty said Grandpa died doing what he loved, chugging down the road, watching the trees whip by as the sun rose over a new horizon.
“So, why do you come out here?” Shane asked, leaning back against the rock. He wore a black t-shirt displaying the band AC/DC over jean shorts. A chain ran from his wallet to one of his belt loops.
Despite going to the same school, Ashley had rarely spoken to Shane Savage. They’d shared only a few classes, and he tended toward the punk-rock cool kids while Ashley’s group included Sid and a handful of other kids from her neighborhood who liked to watch horror movies and build forts in the woods.
“I like the woods,” she said. “And…” The story of the boy in the forest pushed to the tip of her tongue and there she stopped it, clamping her teeth together.
Shane hung out with the Thrashers. Maybe he didn’t call them friends, but how much would he love to take Ashley’s crazy tale of a boy in the woods back to those jerks. The Thrashers would have new material to torture her and Sid with for the summer.
“And that’s it. I like the woods,” she finished.
Shane frowned, and Ashley wondered if he’d push for more. Instead, he shrugged.
“Me too. Though this spot gives me the creeps.” He leaned a hand on Carl Lee’s rock and then pulled it away as if burned. He barked an embarrassed laugh. “Do you think he haunts this place?”
Ashley glanced at the rock and then the dense forest beyond Shane.
“I’ve never seen him out here,” she said.
* * *
When Sid had arrived at her house the following day, grumbling about spending the day before at his Aunt Gretchen’s house, Ashley filled him in on the monster boy in her backyard.
Sid sat at the kitchen table, finishing a bowl of cocoa puffs, an off-limits food in his house. He pushed his bowl away and glanced at the kitchen door.
“Do you think it’s like a zombie or something?” Sid asked, tilting his bowl and drinking the brown milk.
“Could be,” Ashley said. “It wanted to kill me. I can tell you that much.”
Sid nodded.
“Me too. Whatever it is. It’s bad.”
“I tried to find it yesterday,” Ashley said, not mentioning her encounter in the woods with Shane. “But I didn’t see anything.”
Sid grima
ced.
“You tried to find it? That’s crazy.”
“I didn’t want to find the monster, just proof it had been there.”
Sid fidgeted in his chair and picked at a scab on his arm.
“Because you thought I was making it up too?” he asked.
Ashley glowered at him.
“No. I didn’t say that, did I?”
Sid shrugged.
“Did you check on the raccoons?”
“Yeah, I fed them later in the day. They’re okay.”
“Should we tell someone?” Sid asked, imagining his parents' faces if he and Ashley sat them down and revealed their near-deaths by zombie-forest boy.
Before she answered, he shook his head. “I’ll never be allowed to watch another scary movie as long as I live. My mom already took away all my horror comics after I had those nightmares about The Howling.”
“No adults would believe us,” Ashley agreed. “If we could get proof, but even then…”
“Like what? A photograph?” Sid stood and put his bowl in the sink.
Ashley leaned against the counter and chewed the side of her thumbnail.
“We’d almost have to trap it.”
“No way,” Sid shook his head from side to side so hard it made him dizzy.
“I need to think about it more,” she said.
Sid swallowed the lump in his throat, hopeful she’d abandon the idea all-together.
“Want to go to the pit?” Ashley asked. “It’s going to be like ninety degrees today.”
“Do you think it’s safe?”
“Well, we’ve only seen it at night, right? It probably isn’t out during the day. Maybe it sleeps in the day like a vampire.”
“Yeah,” Sid agreed, rinsing his bowl. “I bet sunlight hurts it or something.”
Sid rushed home and put on his swimsuit, meeting Ashley back at her garage.
“Damn my tire’s flat again,” Ashley roared, kicking her bike.
Her bike was old, a hand-me-down that a neighbor had given her mother years before. The tires went flat at least twice a month.
Sid squatted down and touched it.
“It’s the rim.”
“I know it’s the rim,” she grumbled.
“Just ride on my hubs,” Sid suggested, delighted at the prospect. He loved when Ash rode on the back of his bike, hands on his shoulders laughing in his ear if he hit a bump.
“All the way to the pit?” she asked, squinting toward the midday sun, a fiery ball that seemed to swallow the cool blue sky in a single gulp.
It was gonna be a hot one and the pit would be their only respite.
Other kids in town had pools. Some of them swam at Higgins Lake, but most of those kids had boats. Ash and Sid would be stuck on the packed beach patrolled by Deputy Dingleberry. Technically, he wasn’t a deputy, just a park ranger who made it his sole duty to ruin everyone’s summer by yelling at kids who swam past the buoys or played chicken in the water.
Sid rarely went to the beach, and when he did go, his family accompanied him. His mother forced him beneath a giant umbrella and insisted he slather white zinc from forehead to toes. He looked like the Pillsbury doughboy.
The pit, a rock quarry abandoned decades before, was a kid only kind of place.
Sid’s dad had told him that fifty years before, a section of the forest had been cleared so trucks could travel in and out of the quarry carrying away huge chunks of gravel and limestone, but eventually the town had closed the quarry down. Nature had taken back the forest except for where the kids had borne footpaths through the weeds and created their own rugged oasis deep in the woods.
One side of the pit was rock and sandstone rising fifty feet high. The rock sloped down to a weedy ledge.
The water looked black year-round, though Sid knew it was only because the water ran deep, deeper than any of them could ever swim. It was a game he’d watched other kids play. They plugged their noses or held their breath and ducked beneath the dark surface. Down and down they’d swim, only to pop up twenty seconds later, gasping for breath and shrieking that it felt colder than a freezer down there.
Sid had never tried himself.
He preferred to stay in the deceptively warm layer at the top, floating on his back and gazing at the never-ending sky. When he imagined the same infinite space beneath him, his heart would beat faster, and he’d paddle to the shore to warm up. Really, he just needed to get out of the abyss, the space where monsters might hide, where something ancient might slumber in the icy quarry bed.
“Earth to Sid,” Ashly said. “Are we going to go or what?”
Sid nodded and hopped on his bike, waiting for Ash to climb onto the metal knobs jutting from the back tire. When her hands clasped his shoulders, he pushed away from the curb, standing as he peddled until he gained his balance.
There was no designated trail to the quarry, and Sid and Ashley had created their own. Sid stashed his bike beneath high ferns and followed Ashley into the trees.
They each picked up a stick. Ashley carried one in case the Thrashers showed up and for walking. Sid liked to pretend his was a sword, and he periodically sliced it against dead trees, which he and Ashley then pushed over.
Beneath the trees, the temperature was cooler, but the bugs descended like a flock of end-of-the-world locusts. They buzzed in their ears, landed on their bare arms and legs, and feasted on their young blood. The part of the woods they walked through had a swampy area, which inevitably gave rise to a horde of insects.
“Damn blood-suckers,” Ashley hissed, slapping a large one on her bicep and leaving a bloody smear in its place.
Sid swatted his ear where another had been trying to burrow into his skull. They ran the last few yards, breaking from trees into the hot noon sun.
8
The quarry stood empty. Not surprising, as most of the kids opted for the lake or pools, and it was early enough in the summer that the icy water held little appeal. Sid lacked bravery in most instances, but he prided himself on being one of the first kids in the water every year.
No road went to the quarry. You had to walk in. In summer, teenagers frequented the pit at night, building bonfires on the high cliff and smoking grass or drinking beer they’d scammed from their parents’ garage refrigerator.
Ash and Sid still had a few years before they’d be into such activities, but they often saw the charred remains left from the previous night’s gatherings: beer cans smashed and burned, a snack bag or two, cigarette butts.
Ash would swear and kick at the dirt, gathering up the garbage and putting it in a neat little pile. She hated litter bugs.
Sid hated them too, because Ashley did.
Ashley took off her tank top and tennis shoes, then her shorts, not hesitating as she ran down the high embankment of the quarry. Halfway down she cannon-balled off the cliff.
The jumping spot was only ten feet above the water, but Sid still cringed when her bare feet left the hard sand and pull in close to her body. She sailed, a little ball of dark skin and hair and hit the water with a black splash. She disappeared, and Sid paused at the rock ledge, breath held until she broke back through the surface.
He took a shaky breath and smiled when she waved.
“You gonna jump today?” she asked, waving him in.
She asked him every time they swam at the quarry. And like every other time, he shook his head no.
She didn’t respond, just flipped over and started a long breaststroke deeper into the quarry.
She never pressured him to jump, not like other kids did. Their other friends would goad and dare him. They’d try to drag him to the edge and threaten to throw him off until Ash ripped them in two with some insult that left them defending themselves and Sid forgotten on the sidelines.
He walked until the water was flush with the rock, then he sat down and removed his high-top Reebok tennis shoes followed by his mid-calf white socks with the blue piping. He’d worn his swim shorts, so they stayed put, and he glanc
ed toward Ashley, ensuring she didn’t notice as he pulled his Batman shirt over his head and dropped it on the ground, hurrying into the water before she saw his pale fleshy belly.
Despite his mother’s insistence he was perfect just the way he was, Sid understood that he was fat. Not fat like the guys who had to sit in wheelchairs because their feet didn’t fit into shoes fat, but fat enough that people noticed his weight before they commented on his sparkling personality.
His father had tried to get him into running. Sid’s dad ran three miles every day first thing in the morning, after one cup of coffee, but before his oatmeal. Sid had tried it a handful of times, but he’d barely made it three blocks before dropping to his knees and vomiting on the sidewalk.
It was a strange physical reaction because he ran with Ashley all the time. They ran through the woods playing tag, and they ran in dodge ball. He got winded then too, but nothing like he did with his dad. When he ran with his dad, his heart had started thumping before he’d even finished tying his shoes.
The icy water took his breath away, and he dunked under, knowing if he hesitated, he’d be tempted to crawl back out and bake in the sun like a lizard.
He doggy paddled out to Ashley as she dove and popped her head above the water again and again, like a mermaid he thought. And he an awkward little crab struggling to keep up with her.
“Want to swim a story?” she asked.
Their favorite game at the quarry was to swim a story. They took turns weaving a tale as they swam through the dark waters, briefly transporting them both to another realm as they paddled in the midst of the northern Michigan woods.
“Yeah,” he said, flipping onto his back. “You start.”
“Once upon a time, there were two explorers, Sapphire and Stone.”
“I better be Stone,” he told her.
She splashed him. “Sapphire and Stone had traveled the world searching for the Lost Kingdom of the Dark Prince. The Prince could only live in total darkness. The sunlight caused him excruciating pain.”
Ashley stopped and waited for Sid to pick up the story.
Sid scissored his legs beneath him.
“In daylight, the Dark Prince was hideous,” he said. “Big and pale with white amphibian eyes. But in total darkness, he transformed. He became the most handsome man in the world. Stories were told of his beauty, but only the cat people had ever seen him. You see, the cat people had eyes that could penetrate complete darkness.”
Rag Doll Bones: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 5
