“Why do you want to help so bad?”
“Why do you think?” she said, and answered before I could get out even a syllable. “That creepo Collector guy said he was coming for both of us. We won’t be safe until he’s out of the picture.”
Those words held a finality to them and I thought about our initial meeting on Lookout Mountain. I thought of Tara saying we’d need more than rocks, and I thought again about what me and my friends were planning on doing. My stomach briefly fluttered with nausea.
I thought also of what Jim and Tara and Bobby had been up to at the car yard yesterday, and the preparations they had presumably made. The things we were planning on doing were not things kids should be thinking about. They were things that maybe no one at all should be contemplating.
But I remembered the Collector, his long knife, and the finger flung through the air like a coin tossed. I thought of him telling us that he collected things that were owed, and sometimes he collected things for himself.
I had no doubt what category my sister and I fell into.
Of course there was the money to consider as well. I’m ashamed to say it now, but there’s no reason in lying. The money occupied a sizable space in my mind. The imaginations of youth are fertile ground, and what the money could do, the things of this world that it could accomplish, weren’t lost on me.
I have no doubt my sister and friends felt the same things, thought the same thoughts. I do not attempt to diminish my responsibility with that statement. Saying my friends felt the way I did about the money isn’t some attempt at what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. The stain on my soul will never diminish, never diffuse.
Not in this lifetime.
That money had been at the expense of some unknown’s life, dead and rotted and now but a tangle of bones. Tied and bound and shut in a trunk, now gone as if scrubbed from existence. We wanted that money for our childish dreams, and how innocent can children be if we wanted what the dead had paid for?
2.
My bedside clock seemed to blink the minutes away at a torturously slow pace, like it was mocking me. I tried reading, with little success, then tried to nap, with even less success, and so finally settled on just turning out the lights and staring at the dark ceiling. The plaster contours above were fuzzy and vague in shadow.
I waited and hoped for my parents to climb the stairs and go to bed, but of course they didn’t. Instead, they waited for their daughter to come home so they could quiz her on her evening out.
Did he open doors for you? Did he compliment you? What did you do? What movie did you see? I’d heard and seen the routine before in California with Mr. Greaseball, and knew my parents wouldn’t settle down for the night until Sarah came home safe and sound.
The faint grinding of rubber on dirt and gravel announced her arrival. The crunches and grinding grew louder, the hum of an engine accompanying it. My chest pounded with anticipation, and I clutched my blankets in my fists.
Headlights through the window cast moving shadows like creeping things across the walls and floor of my room. The shadows passed over me in a brief eclipse, and the car pulled to a stop outside the house.
I sat up in bed, swung my legs over the edge of the mattress, and slipped on my shoes. Bandit awoke in the process, his eyes glowing in the dark like twin stars, and I shushed him softly. Creaks and stirs sounded from below as Mom and Dad got up to meet Sarah at the door.
I crept to my window and worked at it slowly so it pushed up silently. The curtains stirred in a soft and gentle evening breeze. Outside my window the apple tree swayed its branches in a leisurely dance.
Below my window and to the right, the enclosed porch was alight and the yellow cast by the bulbs seeped through the mesh screen like the ghost lights Fat Bobby had been so intent on seeing what seemed like ages ago. Sarah climbed the steps and hugged Mom and Dad both. Turning briefly to wave back at the car, she then walked inside and closed the door.
The porch lights winked off.
I swung one leg out the window and then the other, toeing the branches below me until I found a thick and sturdy one. My hands still on the windowsill for leverage and balance, the rattle of Bandit’s chain collar made me look up, back into the dim interior of my room. The dog trotted to the window and peered out at me quizzically. I gave him another shhhh for good measure, then with one hand worked the window back down.
I knew if Sarah were to make it seem natural, I’d have only seconds before she reappeared on the porch, Mom and Dad most likely looking out the windows after her. Barry’s car idling too long in the driveway, when he should have pulled away, would attract our parents’ attention.
My hands left the windowsill and I turned and found the trunk of the tree. I lowered myself to awkward rungs on the scattered growth of branches. When these footholds terminated about halfway down the length of the trunk, I turned and leapt the last few feet to the lawn. I rolled with the fall to keep it as quiet as possible.
I moved fast in a crouch towards Barry’s car.
I saw the lock buttons pop up as I scuttled towards the rear passenger door.
Gently, I opened it, climbed in, and shut it behind me as softly as possible. There was hardly more than a click, but in the otherwise quiet of the evening I felt as if I’d slammed the door. Waiting for Mom and Dad to come bursting out of the house, find me, and drag me back inside, I curled into a ball on the passenger seat, held my breath.
“Hey, kid,” said the almost too handsome blond guy from the front seat. His pompadour bounced with the motions of his face and skull muscles.
“Hey, Fairy,” I said.
“What’d you say?” he asked, turning in his seat to look back at me.
“Hey, Barry.”
He looked at me like he was about to say something else, but then the light from the porch came on again and the slaps of sandaled feet flopping down the steps, coming our way across the lawn, silenced us both. Barry reached across the seat to pull the handle and swing the door open for my sister. Sarah climbed in the seat and when she turned to look at Barry I saw her eyes roll to look at me in her peripheral.
“Let’s go, Barry,” she said.
“Let’s go, Fairy,” I mocked in a high voice.
“Hey, kid,” Barry said and started to turn around, until Sarah stopped him with a nudge of an elbow. I took that as Mom and Dad still being at the door or the windows and watching. So Barry, instead, looked at me through the rearview mirror. “I’m doing you a favor, kid. I don’t know if you’re worried about me taking your sister away or something …”
“Please, take her away,” I said.
“Shut up, Joey,” Sarah said. Then to Barry: “Just go.”
I felt the car start to back out and then turn and shift into gear. We started down the road and when I thought we were a safe distance away I sat up and put on my seatbelt. Barry was looking at me in the rearview again and I gave him a winning smile, showing my pearly whites.
“Look kid, there’s no reason for us to be rude to each other.”
I stuck one hand beneath my shirt, under my arm. Cupping it there, I pumped my arm up and down a few times so that the mock farts squeaked loud and good.
“Was that rude enough?” I said. When he opened his mouth to respond, I gave him a few more.
“What the hell’s wrong with your brother?” he said to Sarah, and I timed my armpit farts so that they coincided with his words. What FART! the FART! hell’s FART! wrong FART! with FART! your FART! brother?
“Mom dropped him on his head,” she said, crossing her arms and looking out the window. I knew I’d embarrassed her and was rightly proud.
“At least I have a head and not two asses,” I said.
“I think this is going to be a long night,” Barry said, and I made sure to accompany his words with another armpit fart orchestra.
* * *
We reached the end of the dirt road that led to the woods, the same road I had used to come to the stream w
here I’d first met Fat Bobby. The same road from which Sheriff Glover had given chase, swinging his nightstick like a kid after a piñata. Barry put the car in park and turned to my sister.
“You sure you don’t want me to come with you guys?”
“No,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “Joey’s just meeting some friends of his for something.”
“Out here?” Barry prodded. “In the woods? At this hour?”
“Best time and place for Satanic worship,” I said. Both of them turned and gave me exasperated and angry looks, and I realized I wasn’t helping any, but it was fun and I couldn’t help myself. “We cover ourselves in goat’s blood and masturbate.”
They did their best to ignore me.
“How’re you going to get back?” Barry asked.
“We’ll walk,” Sarah said. “It isn’t far.”
Barry’s expression said he didn’t like that idea at all, and he took a moment to look around, peering at the wall of trees and the night sky outside the car. I knew what he was thinking. The silence save the breeze and the bobbing and swaying of the trees, the dark and shadows: anything could be out there. Though your mind on the verge of adulthood or something close to it insisted there was nothing more dangerous out here at night than there was in the day, another part of your mind, perhaps some primitive genetic remainders of distant and long dead ancestors, told you otherwise. This voice warned you to remain near the fire, stay in the light.
“I don’t know about this,” Barry said. “I think maybe I should wait for you. I can give you guys a ride back after … you do whatever it is you’re doing out here.”
I looked at the time on the digital clock set into the dashboard, saw it was almost ten thirty. We had to find Jim and the others and get set up before midnight. I opened the door and stepped out, started walking towards the woods.
“Joey!” my sister called after me. “Wait!”
“We don’t have much time,” I said, turning to look back at her.
She got out, then leaned back in the open door and said: “Fine, wait, but I can’t say how long this will be.”
Sarah closed the door and jogged awkwardly in her skirt and sandals to catch up, her purse slapping against her side like a riding crop. The headlights of Barry’s car spotlighted us as we stepped through the trees and into the forest. This gave us some light to see by for the first several yards before dwindling out and leaving us in near pitch-dark.
The zip of Sarah opening her purse sounded serpentine in the night. When the beam of the flashlight she’d stowed in there blinked on, I was relieved.
“Let’s go,” she said, and we followed the small light into the greater darkness.
* * *
We met Jim and Tara at the bend in the stream where not so long ago a fat kid had been pelted by rocks and sticks by three older guys who’d later held us at knife point in a mockup haunted house. Jim was wearing a heavy dark sweater that billowed out and made him look heavier than he was, with a backpack slung across one shoulder. Tara was wearing jeans and a sweater too, though her top didn’t make her look fat at all, but clung to her in places that I would’ve liked to investigate closer if we’d been alone.
“Where’s Bobby?” I asked, fearing the worst, knowing that the worst in my head was probably fairly accurate.
“He didn’t show up,” Jim said, his eyes set in his dark face like little bright stars dangling in the night.
I recapped for them what had happened at our place the day before, the fight between my dad and Mr. Templeton. We looked about ourselves and at each other for a few anxious moments, wondering how this affected things, thinking about our friend. I knew we were all wondering if he was curled in a ball right now, somewhere in that little trailer of his, being whipped or pummeled and whimpering for his dad to stop. Or worse, maybe not whimpering or begging at all, because maybe his dad had gone too far this time, seeing my dad, seeing Bandit, seeing me as he brought the belt or fists down on his son.
I resolved then and there that I had to find out about my friend, even if I had to go to the trailer by myself. But first was this business tonight.
“Okay,” I said, “so we make do without him.”
The words out of my mouth made me feel like the most callous asshole ever, but there was nothing to be done about it. Not tonight anyway. Though I’d met him only once, I knew the Collector wasn’t going away until he got what he wanted. You got that message loud and clear when he was holding a big bowie knife to your throat and tossing severed fingers around like jacks or marbles.
“You guys got everything?” I asked Jim and Tara, and Jim stepped closer to me, shrugging the backpack off his shoulder and kneeling to unzip it. Sarah, Tara, and I knelt too, looking into the depths of the pack as he opened it, seeing what was there, staring at it, then staring at each other.
The look that passed among us spoke of things beyond our years, things we weren’t ready for. Things that once done could never be undone and would stay with us for the rest of our days.
“Good,” I said, giving the contents of the backpack one last lingering look, then standing. Tara and Sarah stood as well, and Jim zipped up the pack again and hefted it back over his shoulder. I looked at my sister and my friends again. I was suddenly afraid. I wished Bandit were with me. “We all know what to do?”
They nodded.
“Then let’s get started,” I said.
I wondered with a stark realization if this would be the night that I saw some or all of them for the last time. That realization—that things could go wrong, that we were ill-equipped players in a game far greater than us—made me want to run and hide.
And I almost did. Then and there, I almost turned and ran.
The moving waters of the stream whispered secrets in the night; tantalizing, urgent, frightening. But also alluring, seductive, and mysterious. I didn’t run.
Instead, we, the members of the Outsiders’ Club, looked at each other one last time. Some of us nodded slightly. Some of us offered weak, half smiles.
Then we parted, my sister and I going west, Tara and Jim east, and Bobby out there somewhere, directionless, lost to us for the time, lost to us perhaps forever. Or maybe all of us were lost, and we just didn’t know it yet.
3.
The rutted and pitted access road, overgrown with weeds and detritus, looked like the abandoned road of some old pagan city long gone to ruin. With every pop and snap of a twig, there was the expectation that something would dart from the shadows; something with a wide-brimmed fedora and long flowing trench coat. Something wielding a large, gleaming knife. It would grab and snatch at us, pull one or perhaps both of us into the shadows and feast upon us with its lone long, sharp tooth.
I knew he was out there, the Collector. I could feel him, waiting, watching. Watching from within the shadows of his upturned collar and fedora.
In front of us, the car came into view, catching the moonlight in its windows and headlights and patches of body yet untouched by the skin of rust spreading upon it like a cancer. The doors were open as before, like wings. The old bent grill and bumper grinned at us.
And from the shadows, as if stepping out from another dimension, a portal from darkness to darkness, the Collector arrived. He stopped in front of the old dead car, his collar upturned and the hat pulled low. Like last time, nothing of his face could be seen but a pale blur and the whites of eyes looking at us.
It was time.
I remembered his words, his dark poetry.
This is the night. These are the times.
No words had ever seemed truer to me for some reason. They rang in my head like the grim tolling of a despondent church tower bell.
“The money,” he said, his voice like the voice of a poet too. Casual, fluidic, underscored with restrained passions. Passions of pain and violence. Blood passions.
I couldn’t speak. I knew I had to, but it seemed as if my voice had left me for greener, and safer, pastures. Somehow Sarah found hers, though, and
again I was filled with an appreciation and love for my sister that I’d rarely consciously felt.
“We have it,” she said, and turned to point behind us. “It’s up on a small hill down the road, past the stream.”
The Collector’s hands moved to his pockets. They shuffled in there, and I remembered with stark clarity what had been in those recesses last time. What I had no doubt was in there this time as well. Just a casual motion, as if he were turning about a set of keys or a pile of change.
His shadowed visage moved the slightest of degrees, looking at Sarah, looking at the road beyond her.
“No tricks,” he said, not a question, not a request.
Sarah shook her head, the beam of the flashlight playing on the ground between us and him. Still he didn’t move. I think he could see through us, see our thoughts and our deceits. In the shadows of his upturned collar and wide-brimmed hat, that small cave of lightlessness, was something altogether inhuman. Something that could see things we couldn’t, that processed ideas and thoughts and feelings we’d never understand. A way of perceiving that was impossible for us.
He doubted us.
He sensed our intentions.
The knife came out: a flick of the wrist, a dance of fingers. The twirl of the blade like a pirouette. A flash of metal.
He didn’t believe us, and now came the cutting. Unless we could regain his trust in our fear. I remembered what had made him believe me two nights ago when he held the knife to my throat. The thing that had probably saved my life.
I did what I had to.
For the second time that summer, I pissed my pants.
The warmth of it spreading across the front of my jeans was startling in the cool night. Trickles of it ran down my legs. The smell of it; tart, astringent.
The Collector saw it. The vaguest sense of motion in that cave of shadows: a smile. He knew the fear. We all did. Its bitter smell filled the distance between us.
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 16
