Trick of the light or not, I quickened my pace.
At Barry’s car we loaded ourselves in, and on the dark roads in the heavy night, only the headlights shining through the bleakness about us, it seemed the world had vanished, abandoning us.
We drove into town and arrived at the hospital and its comforting world of white.
* * *
A trip to the police station was unnecessary, as they came to us at the hospital. As did our parents. With a little protesting, Jim, Bobby and I got to stay in the same room. Jim was stitched up at the shoulder where the Collector’s knife had stuck him; Bobby’s face was cleaned and patched up; and various things were stuck in my ear as the doctor snapped his fingers a couple times to make sure I could hear.
Like a small band or tribe, our parents stood outside the room and came in after the doctor was done. They were all in robes and flannels and slippers like maybe that was the traditional garb of their culture. Mr. Connolly tall and thin and dark; Tara’s dad, wiry and gawky and with the hawkish face, her mom moving around Tara like a guard setting a perimeter; Mom and Dad, staring at me and Sarah, sending us those private telepathies that said there was a lot to answer for, and we would, oh, by God, those looks told us, we would.
I couldn’t help but notice that Bobby, save for us his friends, had no family and was alone, and I wondered what that felt like. Even if you hated your dad, as I was pretty sure he did, there must be something inside that was different when he was no longer around. Something gone and maybe a hole where it had been.
Sheriff Glover showed up but Mom and Dad refused to allow him to be the one to interview us, and so things were on hold until other officers arrived. The police questioned us with our parents present and it was Fat Bobby who spoke first and we listened and got the gist of what he was saying and so formulated our story around that. He told the police how we had a club and we met at this abandoned car on one of the forest access roads and just talked about stuff and played games and such. We had agreed to get together at night sometime, thinking it would be cool and spooky, and so we had set it up. But then his dad found out and wouldn’t let him go and started to beat him. Sarah and I picked it up from there and we were as honest as could be and told how Sarah had asked her boyfriend to sneak me and her out at night to take us out to the woods where we’d meet the others. Jim and Tara told how they’d arrived together and met us and how the four of us had waited a couple minutes for Bobby, but when he didn’t show up we went on by ourselves.
At the old Buick we found someone else there. Someone in a wide-brimmed hat and a long coat, and it was here that our story necessarily spiraled into lies again. This strange man asked us to take off our clothes, I told the deputies. We said no and he took out a large knife. We ran, and he ran after us.
We ran to the mountain and climbed up it, the strange man in the coat and hat still chasing us. Here Bobby picked up the story again, saying how he tried sneaking out of the trailer so that he could still meet us, and how his dad caught him and started to hit him again. So Bobby had started to run and his dad, drunk and slow, followed him. Bobby went to the old Buick on the access road first, and when he didn’t find us there he headed on to the mountain. There he saw us and climbed up to us and his dad followed.
Barry started to speak for the first time and that was when his parents arrived at the hospital. Seeing them in their silk pajamas I realized again that he wasn’t anything like Sarah’s greaseball in California, but Barry and his family weren’t like us either. And I think maybe that’s why Sarah liked him so much. He was from a different world than ours, and had money and was polite and well mannered, and maybe those things were appealing to a girl.
Then I wondered why Tara liked me because I didn’t have any of that. I wasn’t too well mannered; I’d almost gotten us killed a few times; and what money I may have had was blood money. But Barry’s story interrupted this train of thought, and I listened as he told the police how he’d heard some gunshots and left the car to come find us. His disheveled yet still dignified parents coddled him and engulfed him in hugs at this revelation.
Gunshots? one of the deputies said, and so looking down, avoiding his father’s gaze, Jim told how he’d snuck out one of his father’s guns and brought it with him. He thought maybe it’d be cool to show us all and maybe shoot a few cans or bottles off some stumps or something. Mr. Connolly’s face filled with a fire then, and I knew Jim’s lies for our sake was costing him dearly, that the downcast of his eyes and shame in his face was genuine and he wasn’t at that moment lying about anything. His father had had a deep trust in him and Jim had broken it. Intentionally and for good purpose to protect us against the Collector, but that neither the police nor our parents could know about.
There’d been a struggle between Mr. Templeton and the strange man in the coat and hat. During this melee the man in the coat had thrown his knife. Hitting Jim, the gun had discharged and Jim had dropped it. In the course of their brawl, Mr. Templeton and the other man went over the side of the mountain. Tara had picked up the gun and walked to the edge. Both men were right there, she said, just a few feet down on a small ledge of rock, fighting, and then they’d both seen her and reached for her and she’d pulled the trigger.
She wasn’t sure if she’d hit either or both of them, Tara said through the sobs that shook her as she took up the narrative. But both men stumbled backwards, fell again, and tumbled all the way down.
The story told, or at least a version of it, we stood or sat there in the hospital room and waited for what would befall us. By the faces of the police and our parents, a great shit storm was a-blowing.
5.
The story was in the local paper for weeks.
Jim’s father was fined heavily for his gun finding its way into the hands of minors and all his firearms were confiscated from his home. Bobby was put into a group home for a few days until my mom and dad did some heavy and persistent legwork, after which he was placed in our home until his case could be further reviewed by Child Protective Services and the state. For having shot a man, Tara’s parents were required to provide her with counseling, and I didn’t see her for over a week. Sarah and I were restricted to the house, and so I really didn’t see much of anything.
Then another week passed and finally I saw the light of day again.
I met my friends at Lookout Mountain after calling them all, and we stood there not looking at each other but looking at the upright stone and the top of it. Finally Jim walked over and boosted himself up. He peered down inside and then looked back at us.
“It’s still there,” he said, and we exchanged glances.
My sister was with us, indelibly part of the club now, having seen what she’d seen, been through what she had, what we all had. I looked at her, she looked at me, and though the day was warm and bright it somehow seemed as dark as the night it had all happened. Jim reached inside the fissure between the stones and started pulling the sacks out one by one and tossing them down among us. When he was done he jumped back down and we made a circle around the sacks of money.
“Are we sure we want to do this?” he said. “After all we’ve been through?”
Tara held up the box of matches and we all leaned forward and took a couple out.
“I guess that answers that,” Jim said, rolling his own matches between his fingers.
With scratches and hisses we all struck the heads of our matches in turn and knelt and applied the small flames to the bundles of money. We watched the flames grow and lick the air, and we wondered how long before someone noticed the smoke. The smoke wasn’t thick, but it was gray and black and conspicuous against the blue sky. With my feet I kicked stray bundles closer to the center of the blaze. Seeing what I was doing everyone else followed suit. Soon, the whole mound was ablaze, and the heat wafting off of it was palpable and uncomfortable.
“Millions of dollars,” Jim said, “up in smoke.”
But his heart wasn’t in the words, and I knew he was
n’t terribly disappointed. Neither was I, and I don’t think any of us were. Mr. Templeton looking up at me from the bottom of Lookout Mountain, crooked and broken like a toy was what I was thinking about, and other thoughts like it. The bound and rotted skeleton in the trunk of the Buick with the hole in its skull; the Collector’s knife at my throat, then at Bobby’s; Tara at the precipice, gun in hand, the flashes of it firing.
The Collector …
When the police had gone to search the access road and then the mountain, they’d found everything as we’d said, except for one thing. There were spent bullet casings, and a knife, and at the bottom of the hill, crumpled and broken, Mr. Templeton.
But no man in a coat and hat, though they’d found a crushed bush where he’d landed, and footprints leading off into the woods. Blood presumably from bullet wounds made another trail along with the prints. Lots of blood. The police assured us he couldn’t have gotten far after losing so much blood.
But we knew differently.
He’d obviously made it far enough. They didn’t find him.
I tried to pretend it was over, as I and the rest of the Outsiders’ Club stood atop Lookout Mountain and watched the money burn and the ashes carried away, some in the breeze, some down the slopes and mixed into the grass and trees. I told myself that maybe wild animals, like coyotes or bobcats, had collected the Collector when he’d finally collapsed from exhaustion and blood loss.
I tried to tell myself many things, but none of them brought the slightest comfort.
Because I think I understood him now. I remembered his poetry and it echoed in my mind whenever the silence allowed the memories to stir.
This is the night. These are the times.
Life itself is on loan, a price that must ultimately be collected.
PART THREE
This is the Night
CHAPTER NINE
1.
Try as I might, I couldn’t be family to Fat Bobby. He had been alone at his father’s funeral—my parents, Sarah and I having driven him to the cemetery, but at his insistence not accompanying him to the coffin—and he’d been alone ever since. I tried to understand his sadness, depression, or whatever it was, for a wicked and evil man, but I couldn’t. He’d been freed from his prison, the monster had been slain, and yet he moped around as if still bound by what was gone, and that irritated me.
This irritation on my end worried me. I remembered what I’d felt like initially befriending this kid, and how it had made me feel good being there for him. Whether showing him the wonders of comics or listening to him on a hilltop talk about wanting to get away from it all; being there for another human being had stirred something in me that I now had trouble retrieving.
I think I understood on some level what was happening. It wasn’t just Fat Bobby and his despair over a dead father who didn’t deserve a single tear shed for him. So much had changed about the people, and the world, around me. It was as if I were seeing the world through a prism and the image of things was broken up. I was seeing behind it all, catching a glimpse of the true nature of things.
Since the night on Lookout Mountain and the death of Bobby’s father and the disappearance of the Collector, Tara and I hadn’t spent a single moment alone. We didn’t touch or hold hands, and a second kiss like the first at the fair seemed impossible and distant, like an astronomical body.
This is the night. These are the times.
The Collector’s words lived on in my mind, haunting me even though the man himself was gone. The fedora and the coat and the shadows they cast were thrown far and wide and seemed to eclipse the rest of my life. In the aftermath of death, something I’d never truly seen until the broken neck and crooked face of Mr. Templeton at the bottom of the hill, nothing seemed the same. They couldn’t be the same.
Fat Bobby was tainted by his father’s death, in a way, as strongly as he’d been tainted by the man in life. The rest of us were tainted also, by the desire for money that was blood bought and never ours, and our momentary claim over it was paid in death. Maybe that’s why Tara and I couldn’t touch each other. Stained by the pain and suffering our actions had inadvertently caused, such a warmth and comfort as human contact maybe wasn’t ours to have.
We didn’t deserve it.
Not merely an eight-hour stretch when the earth had turned and the sun had left our hemisphere, this was the night: pain and death and the memory of it playing endlessly in a loop in your mind. The darkness that pervaded the mind, heart, and spirit, born of the grim things in life that were always there. Catch a glimpse of the devil and maybe he never went away but camped out in the corners of consciousness, ready to hold up the pictures of sins and remind us all of how far we’d fallen.
These are the times.
I couldn’t read the things I’d so enjoyed reading since as far back as I could remember. I’d open a book, lying on my bed or sitting on the porch, and five minutes later I’d close it again. The words wouldn’t come together, they didn’t make sense. The story they built page after page fell absently through my mind like sand through a sieve.
I walked the house aimlessly, and Bobby did the same. We passed each other like lost drivers on a directionless highway, feeding off the invisible hurt and silent suffering of each other.
I think he disgusted me a little.
And I disgusted myself.
My sister and I didn’t so much avoid each other, as we did wordlessly agree with tentative nods and furtive glances that maybe a little distance was necessary. Although we were brother and sister and annoyed each other, I think we both knew that the kind of barrier that was between me and Bobby couldn’t be allowed to divide family.
But we could give each other a respectful buffer. A measure of time to permit the healing that only time could effect.
There seemed no cure to it, no end. Just day after day of the muck and mire, the heavy shadow over us and nightmares that overflowed from sleep to wakefulness. My parents felt it as well. After Dad reluctantly went back to work it was just Mom in the house, and she’d try to talk to me at times, ask how I was doing, if I was sleeping well, if there was anything I wanted to talk about. She said that Bobby and I should go out and play; she offered me money to go walk the shops in town; and yet none of it seemed right or proper.
To return to life as if nothing had happened would be a lie, one more atop the mountain of lies we’d already told. I couldn’t do it.
Then came the Fourth of July. The flyers posted about town and inserted in the morning paper promised fireworks and hotdogs and drinks in Town Square. Dad wanted us to go, thought it would be good for the family, and we went, along with most of the rest of the town. Under the evening sky with the expectation for the coming light blooming like flowers above, a work was done. For a time it seemed like things might return to a semblance of the way they were, and I felt a thing in my young heart like hope.
2.
My parents picked out a spot for our family, Fat Bobby and Bandit included, atop a small rise not quite a hill but a mild roll like a small wave passing through the earth. Mom unfolded a blanket and set out the basket of food and the cooler with frosted drinks like cold ambrosia on that hot summer evening. People were everywhere along the green expanse of Town Square, like ants milling about, and the courthouse provided a backdrop that brought to mind again that Wild West image of hanging criminals and dust-trailed wagons and saloons.
Set apart from the gathering families and lovers holding hands was a roped-off area with several devices like miniature space shuttle launch pads pointing up at the sky. Here people with bright yellow shirts with “VOLUNTEER” stenciled in black pulled fireworks like little rockets from boxes and wrappers and organized them on folding tables and on the grass. It seemed like an arsenal being laid out and I grimly wondered about the mayhem that could ensue if all those little rockets exploded accidentally here on the ground, instead of high up in the sky.
I leaned over to my sister and told her about this, and how mayb
e if one landed on her head it would improve her face. She pushed me as I tried to take a bite of a sandwich, and my food landed on the ground. I picked it up, saw the dirt and grass stuck to the bread, and wiped it on her arm.
“You retard!” she said and wiped her stained arm on my shirt. I saw Fat Bobby sitting across from me flash the slightest hint of a grin, and that small miracle made me smile too.
“Leave your sister alone,” Mom said.
But it was a forceless command, and I looked at her, saw the hint of a smile on her face also. I thought that maybe she wasn’t so mad that things were getting back to a semblance of normalcy, even if that normalcy meant us driving each other, and her, insane.
At eight o’clock the fireworks began and the explosions of them in the black night sky was like watching the universe becoming. Stars and planets colliding in bursts of color and fire and light. Flashing and then dimming in the dark to be replaced anew by further cascades of brilliant light. Reds and blues and yellows opening like hands and fingers of sparks darting out in every direction. Blooms of light and us below in the illumination of it all.
I looked about for Jim and Tara among the throngs in the dark. Trying to find a familiar face in a sea of strangers staring up at the lightshow in the sky was nearly impossible. Not wanting to miss the fireworks myself, I gave up, likewise turning my gaze skyward.
Cheers, clapping, and oohs and ahhs made a discordant yet cheerful chorus for the better part of an hour, until, finally, the lightshow slowed, then ended.
With the spectacle over, people started to trickle away. Slowly at first, so that it was like a small stream breaking away from the larger body. I turned and asked my parents if I could look around a bit, and they said for a couple minutes.
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 18
