“I was thinking about your dog, after that stunt you pulled in the woods.” I watched him flick his wrist, a quick and simple motion like a magician would do, and a long and silver blade sprung like magic from his fist. “And I think I came up with a viable solution.”
That blade, four inches and gleaming with moonlight, held my eyes as effectively as Tara had, though for different reasons. The thought of that knife punching into my dog, ripping into Bandit’s guts, tearing the life from him, made my stomach do a little queasy flip. I felt like a small boy, and I wanted my dad.
Hell, I wouldn’t have turned away my mom either, had she at that moment come running down the highway to save the day.
I pushed the images away, the momentary horror of what could be, of what I no doubt knew this guy in the leather jacket, driving the deep black Mustang, would do if given the chance. Instead, I tried to snatch the anger that hid behind the fear.
“You ever touch my dog and I’ll use that knife to cut off your limp dick,” I said. Then, speaking before the thought was even fully formed, as if it were almost a revelation, something inferred from the mists of a crystal ball, I continued. I think it was something like how I’d known the kind of man Fat Bobby’s dad had to be, even as I said he couldn’t be that bad. “And I’ll mail your tiny noodle limp dick to your dad, so he’ll know what a fucking pansy ass his son really is.”
The tires squealed with the braking of the black car. The Mustang lurched with the sudden friction, and stopped. The pungent smell of burnt rubber wafted up in the darkness.
“I’ll fucking kill you,” Dillon said, and I looked at him square in the eyes, and his smirk, that lopsided grin like he didn’t give a shit about anything, like he was separate from it all, was gone.
His hand held the switchblade with white-knuckle intensity, making his hands even whiter than they already were, contrasted with all the black.
The blade quivered, and the moonlight twinkled upon it.
The driver’s door opened, and he stepped out.
I snatched at Bandit’s collar again, to let him know he was to follow, and I turned and ran, forgetting all my talk about not taking shit, not being scared.
I ran for the turnoff like I’d never run before, faster than for any track meet or scrimmage ball game I’d ever been a part of. I ran and didn’t stop running until I was home, through the door, throwing the lock behind me.
Not wanting to, but needing to know, I peeked through the curtains of the adjacent window. The black Mustang rolled by as if on cue, the windows up so that I could imagine it driven not by a teenage thug, but maybe driving itself, fueled by otherworldly forces. Then it was out of sight down the road, once more part of the night that had birthed it.
Breathing fast and loud and harsh, bent over clutching my legs, I turned away from the window and looked up to see Mom there wringing a dish towel in her hands, looking at me, looking at the door, waiting to see what hordes of hell and damnation had to be on my heels.
CHAPTER THREE
1.
With a whole week before the fair was to open to the public, Fat Bobby and I needed something to do to occupy our minds. We’d spent a couple hours reading comics, and I’d let him go through my boxes and pick and choose what he wanted to read. But I stayed close by as he read them, never leaving him alone for even a second.
I’d instructed him on how to hold and care for the comics properly so as not to crease the covers or bend the binding. Nervously, I pretended to read as well, but watched my friend’s elbows and legs shuffling as he sat on my bedroom floor and flipped through the books. He came frighteningly close to trampling the comics at times, like a large circus elephant dancing dangerously close to the gleeful, pointing children, but disaster was always averted.
Finally, filled to the brim with mutants and krytponians, radioactive spiders and dark knights, even Fat Bobby had had enough superheroism for one morning and looked up and asked what we should do next.
I wanted to get out of the house as well, but was afraid to, and so didn’t immediately respond.
Sleep the past couple nights had been fitful and restless. I tossed and turned beneath the sheets, disturbing Bandit at the foot of the bed. Outside my window the branches of the apple trees tapped and clicked constantly, as if imploring my attention. Little nubs on the branches looked like switchblades, and every time headlights passed I was sure it was a sleek black Mustang out there cruising through the night.
I hadn’t told Mom or Dad about the guys in the car trailing me, or the driver with his gleaming knife. I knew I should; I knew Mr. Smirk—Dillon—was a dangerous kind of guy, not someone who’d be satisfied with just a fistfight. But I thought of the fuss and drama that would follow if I told them. How I’d probably be under house arrest until Dad got a hold of the police and the police got a hold of Dillon, his two friends, and their parents. The thought of missing even a single day of the summer was intolerable.
That was a foolish train of thought. What we as adults call irrational. I knew that even then. But kids aren’t the most rational of beings, as I’m sure you know. And boys the least of all.
Gathering up the comics we’d been reading, Bobby and I started slipping them back into their plastic sleeves as we silently considered his question. Light from the dresser lamp shone off the clear plastic sleeves in streaks and whorls of color. Thus bagged, we filed the books into their respective boxes, pushed the boxes back into the closet.
The light off the comics made me think of the light I’d seen from atop the hill on the dirt road overlooking the woods. I told Fat Bobby about it—he seemed vaguely interested—and we got up, went to the kitchen, grabbed a couple sodas and, with Bandit between us, we headed out.
As we walked, Fat Bobby’s interest seemed to grow, almost reaching a minimum level to qualify as excitement, and so mine did also, by proxy. He asked questions, and I found myself answering eagerly.
“Was it like a ghost light?” he asked. “I’ve heard that sometimes people see strange lights floating about in swamps. Was it like that? Ghost lights?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t like that at all. Besides, there aren’t any swamps here. It wasn’t no ghost lights.”
He looked vaguely disappointed, a scowl scrunching his face and making it look like a pile of unbaked dough grimacing. Then he smiled as some other idea struck him, something better, and the disappointment was a memory.
“Was it UFO lights?” he said, the eagerness in his tone raising his voice an octave and making me remember uncomfortably those high, whiny pleas that had first led me to the crying, nearly naked kid in the stream. “You know, all flashes of blue and green and white as the ship lands and the aliens get out and laser some holes into some cows and stuff.”
“No, no.” Shaking my head briskly, irritation gaining a foothold, I tried not to let it show. “No, it wasn’t no spaceship landing.” I wondered if maybe I should put Bobby on some sort of comic book restriction, give his brain a few days to come down from the clouds. “It was like a twinkle or something, you know, when the sun flashes off of something glass or metal.”
“Oh,” Fat Bobby said, “I think I know what that is.”
The disappointment returned to his face, and he started walking ahead of me up the dirt hill. I had to trot to catch up to him. Up at the top, the woods ahead of us a carpet of green, Fat Bobby pointed into the distance.
Away from the woods.
My eyes followed the line of his finger and arm and, sure enough, there it was: the light I’d seen—the fallen star—the sun reflecting off some surface in fiery flashes that made me squint. I swiveled my head like a periscope, looking back towards the woods where I’d originally seen the reflective light.
I saw nothing there among the trees as I had the first time.
But turning my head the other way, in the direction Bobby was pointing, and there it was, that bright light like some sort of signal, twinkling, sparkling.
<
br /> How had it moved? What was it?
I scanned the landscape this way and that, and with each turn of my head I saw something surprising. There wasn’t just one flashing light out there among the hills where Fat Bobby had directed me to look. There were several. It was a veritable village of flashing lights, like bits of shattered glass or grains of sand on a beachfront catching the sunrays and throwing them back.
“What is it?” I asked, mystified.
“Come on,” Fat Bobby said, “I’ll show you.”
* * *
The junkyard held mostly dead and dilapidated cars, parked side by side and fender to fender on dirt so barren that I felt sad for the sparse and dry weeds growing out from the cracks, like fingers of penitents from hell reaching through the grating of the earth. We walked the perimeter of the chain-link fence that surrounded the yard, heading towards where Fat Bobby said the entrance was located. As we walked we heard short and harsh sounds like firecrackers exploding, and I again thought Guns! Guns! Run! Duck! as the sounds cracked the silence like small thunders.
Bobby saw me flinch, and I looked to him seeing that he hadn’t, and he gave me a wry smile that seemed to say Not always so tough, are we, dumbshit? and I thought: good for you, maybe there’s hope yet.
“That’s Jim and his dad,” he said. “They run the place.”
We reached the sliding gate that served as the entrance to the yard, and there a sign read “NO TRESPASSING.” As I gazed into the yard I realized that it wasn’t as haphazard and slapdash as I’d first thought. There was a large garage in the center of the automotive graveyard, three bay doors rolled up, and inside were various cars and trucks elevated or with hoods propped open. Parts and pieces littered the floor of the garage among shelves and tables full of tools. This wasn’t just some scrap or auto yard. This was a mechanic’s shop.
“Come on,” Fat Bobby said, grabbing the fence. He started to push, and the large entrance gate wheeled open with a screech in its rusty tract.
“Wait!” Looking at the sign and hearing the loud firecracker sounds coming from somewhere in the yard, I hung back. “It says no trespassing!”
“Don’t worry.” He looked back at me as he slipped inside. “I know them.”
Hesitantly, I followed.
As we crossed the yard towards the garage, walking around the cars in various states of disrepair and stages of rust, stepping over flaking tires and old engine blocks like the remnants of machines after Armageddon, I took in the fading chrome and metal, the shattered windshields and sun-cracked bumpers, and thought to myself: So these are my fallen stars, my great treasure in the woods. That realization carried with it a light sadness, and a soft sigh, barely perceptible, escaped me as the loss of possibilities played out in my mind. Maybe Bobby’s talk of ghost lights and UFO landings had sparked an excitement in me despite my pretenses otherwise. At certain angles, the sunlight glared off of the dead vehicles as intense as it had from far off on the hill, yet this close up the magnificence had left the display and it was just daylight bouncing off scrap metal.
Fat Bobby led me around the garage. The building in the middle of the refuse was like the last fortress on a battlefield, itself pockmarked by age or mortar fire. Then we turned a corner and there, a few feet away, were black people with guns, and with California memories like wartime flashbacks I once more thought Guns! Guns! Run! Gang war!
Bobby called out over the gunfire to the duo. Bottles and cans set up on a segment of wooden post some distance away jumped into the air, shattered, or ripped into aluminum shreds as I looked on, and I thought of the anxiety-filled freeway trips through Compton or Long Beach of years past.
The larger of the two, a tall and wiry black man with close-cropped curls of gray peppered hair, turned, saw us, flashed a bright white smile, and holstered his weapon. The second black person, a kid really, no more than a year older than me, if that, saw this, turned to look at us too, and lowered his gun also.
“Hey, my man!” the man said, in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, grease and oil-stained, looking very much the mechanic. He stepped over to Fat Bobby, held out his hand palm up, and Bobby gave him a mighty slap, a smile brightening his fat face as I hadn’t seen it do since my dad had given him the comic book money.
Bobby gestured to the older man, then the boy, and looked at me as he said: “Joey, this is Mr. Connolly—”
“Ernest,” Mr. Connolly interjected, and shook my hand with one of his, large and long-fingered and hairy so that I thought of a tarantula as I shook it. I put him at around sixty or so, and yet he carried himself with a mild swagger and confidence of a man thirty years younger.
“—and his son, Jim,” Bobby finished, and my hand was released and taken up by the smaller hand of the black kid, wiry like his dad, but his head bald as a baby’s. Jim smiled that same flashy ivory smile his dad had, genuine and friendly, and I thought to myself for a fat kid with no friends Bobby sure had a lot of friends.
Tara bloomed in my mind briefly like a puff of smoke, and I smothered the thought and what accompanied it (the fair the fair a beautiful girl and the fair) and brought my thoughts back to the here and now.
“Joey saw the light shining off all your cars and wondered what it was,” Fat Bobby explained, “so I brought him here. Hope it’s not a problem.”
Mr. Connolly dismissed this with a combination snort and bark of a laugh, and waved the very idea away.
“No problem at all,” he said. “You know you can come around here anytime, Bobby.” With that Mr. Connolly gave Bobby a massive slap on the back, which he probably meant to be friendly but rocked Fat Bobby on his heels. Turning to his son he gathered up the pistol his kid had been using and started to walk away. “You kids have fun,” he said to all of us. And this just to Jim: “Be in for lunch.”
Then it was the three of us: Fat Bobby, myself, and the first black kid I wasn’t afraid of being shot or stabbed by in a long, long time. And Bandit, of course, off somewhere nearby, sniffing the cars and parts of cars, and the dirt and the thin, dying weeds, scents invisible in the air, there but unseen.
I felt it again, that sense of things moving and me being carried along for the ride. Another link in the chain of events, the moving of the gears, and I felt I was on a trail myself, following it like Bandit to wherever it inevitably led.
2.
“It actually wasn’t one of the cars here I saw,” I told Jim as the three of us strolled casually through the yard, like three buddies on a fishing trip. I’d answered all the initial questions boys always had when meeting each other, like where I was from, where I lived, what I liked to do, things like that. Of course he took to Bandit real quick, which was a point in my favor: a good dog like a sign that said, Hey, I ain’t so bad. I’m pretty damn okay, actually. See, I have a dog!
“Oh?” he said, twirling a metal pipe he had scooped up off the ground. I noticed his motions weren’t clumsy, that the pipe whizzed in circles and semicircles in his hand with deftness and ease, and as sure as Bandit was a sign about me, this was a sign about Jim. It said I know how to take care of myself and like a telepathy of some sort I knew Mr. Connolly had bestowed a similar philosophy upon his son as Dad had done with me.
Don’t let fear control you.
Don’t take shit from anyone.
With just the right twist of his wrist, I knew Jim Connolly could whack something good with that small pipe. Probably without the pipe too, and I knew this was one kid I didn’t want to get in any pissing contest with. I was glad we’d hit it off so well.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was a lot like the sun shining off these cars here, but it wasn’t here. I saw it off in the woods.”
“You probably just forgot exactly where you saw it coming from,” Fat Bobby said, picking up a stick, trying to twirl and spin it like Jim. The stick went flying out of his sausage-like fingers, sailed dangerously close past my face.
I slugged him on the arm. I checked the punch at the last moment, not hitting hi
m too hard, but Bobby still gave me an injured What’d you do that for? look.
“There’s at least half a mile between the woods and here,” I said. “I’m not fucking blind.”
“Geez,” Fat Bobby said, rubbing his shoulder where I’d hit him. “Sorry.”
“Actually,” Jim said, “there’s service roads that run all through the woods.”
“Service roads?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know, for forest rangers and firefighters and shit like that.” He had given me a look when I’d hit Bobby that said: Don’t hit the fat kid. To his credit he didn’t make a big deal about it, and so I made a mental note to myself not to hit Fat Bobby like that anymore, even in play. That Jim would come to Fat Bobby’s defense, even with just a look, was kind of cool in my book, and my respect for the kid rose a notch or two. “So it’s possible you saw something where you said you saw it.”
“I did see something where I said I saw it.” The note of challenge in my voice made Jim look up at me, and he flashed his bright smile again. I knew that he was liking me more as well, what with me not backing down from him, even about something as dumb as where some ghost lights or UFO beams had come from.
“Only one problem,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
We came to the far rear fence of the yard at that moment, and Jim pointed off to where the woods started a hundred yards off or so. A dirt road led off that way into the trees, and there was a barricade across it, large metal crossbeams in the shape of an X. As if for added determent, thick coils of chain looped around the crossbeams, then around two trees on either side of the barricade, and a thick padlock hung at the center where the ends of the chain met up.
“Those roads have been closed for some time,” he said.
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 5
