“Don’t stop!” he shouted in Sarah’s ear.
My sister hit the gas pedal and the car surged forward.
The Cadillac swerved and picked up speed also. It drew up alongside our car with ease, so close that if Sarah rolled down her window she could reach out and touch it.
It swerved towards us, striking the driver’s side and sending sparks showering about like radioactive rain. Sarah screamed; we all screamed. The impact rocked us, sending me hard into the passenger window. For a moment the steering wheel spun out of my sister’s hand and the car jerked to the right. The tires left the road and crunched gravel. Grains of it struck the undercarriage with a Morse Code-like tap tap tap tap.
Sarah caught the wheel. Pulled the car back onto the road.
Where the Cadillac again swerved and broadsided us.
More glowing sparks like hot rain; more screams; the crunch and crinkle of tortured metal. The tires left the road again. More gravel tap tap tapping underneath the car.
My sister tried to get us on the highway again, hit the gas pedal harder and tried to bring us forward, ahead, and around the Cadillac. But it was there blocking our path, black and malignant. Dark metal like a thing of shadows, a sliver of the night come alive.
The Cadillac swerved again, striking the side of our mother’s car, and insanely I thought: Well, I don’t think either of us will ever be allowed to drive again.
With this collision, the driver’s side tires were forced off the road too, and the car dipped as we hit the shoulder. Dirt plumes rose about us like we were at the base of a tornado. Sarah hit the brakes, and the car squealed to a stop.
Bandit barked from the backseat.
Jim was chanting something that sounded druidic, but I don’t think druids ever gathered around Easter Island chanting: “shitshitshitshitshit.”
Tara or Sarah was crying. Maybe both of them. Or maybe it was me.
Through the dirt clouds I saw the vague form of the Cadillac speed ahead of us, and then the shape of it lost in dusty vapors. I realized I was gripping the armrest beside me as if to secure myself against another impact.
I let go.
Opening the door, I stepped out.
Breathing in deeply, I inhaled dirt as well as air, and coughed violently like a black-lunged smoker. I waved the billows of dirt away with little effect, waited for them to settle.
Other doors opened and everyone else got out.
“Was that them?” my sister asked. No one answered. No one had to. “They’re trying to fucking kill us!”
Again, there was no need to answer.
Bandit trotted beside me, his tail hung low.
Then he was barking and, at first, I tried to shush him, until I heard what he heard and I turned to stare down the highway. Saw what he saw. I called out to everyone else, pointing.
There was a scrabble of footfalls as everyone lined up to look down the highway at what I needlessly pointed at.
I thought maybe we should have been getting back in the car, then wondered how much protection that would give us.
The shiny grill like a metal sneer preceding it, the Cadillac roared our way. It ate up the highway between us like a starving animal licking up a length of intestines. We stood where we were as if anchored to the ground, watching the car draw nearer, moving fast and yet seeming to approach us in slow motion at the same time.
The Cadillac slowed as it neared.
The rear door opened as it rolled past.
Mr. Perrelli was in the backseat. So was Bobby. Mr. Perrelli held Bobby around the throat with one arm. With the other he fished underneath his black suit jacket and pulled out a pistol.
He put it to the back of Fat Bobby’s skull.
Feeling the chill and solidity of it, Bobby’s eyes widened in shock. He reached out for us, fingers splayed.
Vincent Perrelli pulled the trigger.
Bobby’s head exploded.
Mr. Perrelli kicked out with a foot to Bobby’s back. Bobby slumped forward, did a half somersault, landed on the pavement in front of us. The top of his head was missing and some of him poured out like the contents of a capsized soup bowl.
The Cadillac continued to roll past.
I stared down at my friend. His fingers and one leg jittered and twitched as the remaining electricity in him misfired, trying to fuel life where there was none.
I realized someone was screaming again, but it was muted and distant as if I’d somehow turned off the world. I saw only my friend there, his insides on the outside, on the pavement, under the sun, dead.
Something in me loosened, fell, was lost.
I turned in the direction towards town, where the Cadillac was still rolling slowly away, taunting us with its leisurely pace. I took a step or two towards it. A wet squish as one shoe landed in something underfoot that I didn’t want to think about.
“We have the money!” I shouted, and now the world returned to life, and I heard my words above all other sounds. It was loud, angry, seemed to shake all of creation like the voice of God.
The Cadillac braked. The rear door was still open.
“My house! Midnight!”
A black-sleeved arm reached out and pulled the Cadillac door shut. The black car picked up speed and I watched it for a distance until it crested a rise, went down it and was gone, creature of ebony in the bleached desert white.
4.
We loaded Bobby into the backseat. The others wanted to put him in the trunk, but I refused to let that happen and sat in the back with him, cradling his ruined head and looking into a face that was no longer all there, trying to remember that face. Bandit sniffed at the mess, and I let him. Maybe my dog had a way of seeing what I no longer could.
Jim was on the other end of the rear seat, pressed as far against the door as possible, not looking at what lay between us.
Tara had taken my place in the front passenger seat.
Sarah still drove.
I told her where to go, speaking softly, as if not to disturb the boy in my lap. As if he were just napping. I expected some resistance to my directions, was ready to scream it to submission, but nobody offered any.
Looking down on my dead friend, his clothes specked with his own blood, the juices of him staining my lap, I cried, I think, but it wasn’t hysterical. They were tears of shame, tears of loss. I cried at what I had done; at what I had failed to do; at the things that I could never do again.
If I cried, I like to think that my tears fell and mingled with his blood. That way a part of me is with him always. My tears, his blood, the various waters of life.
Jim had once told me about other access roads into the woods. I tried to think of the nearest one and told Sarah how to get there. We found it and turned onto it, the trees sprouted up around us out of the desert, and again I was struck by this strange land. How there was nothingness and desert, and then the green and majesty of forestry just around the bend. Life and death; color and the void; those polarities that seemed so intent on finding me, revealing themselves in all their apathetic glory.
This access road eventually met with the familiar fork that was ours. I knew if I leaned over and looked out the window I’d see the old rusted sign, fallen in the grass in the rutted road. Here we turned and kept driving, and sometime later we came to the old Buick, sitting there unmoving, immovable perhaps, waiting for us as if it belonged to us, and us to it. That it hadn’t been moved by the police, even after the incident on Lookout Mountain, didn’t seem strange at all to me then, nor does it now. Some things are monolithic in their existence, transcending all the orders of the world.
That old Buick was just such a thing. A permanent fixture upon the earth, testament to life and death and all things between.
I told my friends what I wanted to do and looks were exchanged, but no one argued which I thought was a good idea. I wouldn’t have argued with me at that moment either. Plus, I think they understood.
We were Bobby’s family. He belonged to us, and we to h
im. It was for us to decide what to do with him.
The Outsiders’ Club: we always watched out for each other, no matter what.
The four of us grabbed and lifted Fat Bobby, Jim and I at his arms, Tara and Sarah each at a leg, Bandit plodding along beside us like an honor guard. We carried him from our car to the Buick. The trunk was still open as it had been since that night we’d met the Collector and led him to Lookout Mountain. The old body, bound hand and foot and with a hole in its skull, gone, I thought: Out with the old, in with the new, and I had the brief and incredible urge to laugh. Then it was replaced with the urge to cry again, and we lifted Fat Bobby and hefted him into the trunk of the Buick.
For a time we all stood there and stared down at him.
His head was in shadow and you could barely make out the ruin of it and for a moment he looked almost normal. I could almost pretend as if he were just lying there, sleeping. Then reality crept in and I knew I was looking at a corpse. He was asleep alright. A sleep from which he would never awaken.
I reached up and closed the trunk lid.
“There’s a pond not too much farther down the road,” Jim said. “The stream feeds into it.”
I nodded.
“Will the car move without a key?” Tara whispered, as if she were afraid to speak.
A thought came to me then as if out of the ether. Something, in all our time with the Buick, we’d never thought of doing. Leaning in across the driver’s seat, I reached for the glove compartment, gripped the latch, and pulled it open with a brief, harsh tug.
Inside were some old yellowed papers like ancient documents, an owner’s manual, and … a set of keys. Grabbing the keys by the fob, I settled in the driver’s seat. The third key I tried fit into the ignition. Turning it, the steering wheel unlocked, and I looked out at my friends as if for affirmation.
“Put it in neutral,” Jim said, “and we’ll push it.”
I got out, and Sarah settled behind the wheel of the Buick, put it in neutral, and released the emergency brake. Jim and I got behind the car. Tara stood at the passenger side behind the open door, using the doorframe for leverage. Sarah steering, we pushed the car, turning it around slowly, the ancient tires flaking away in black drifts. I groaned and huffed with the effort, heard Jim and Tara doing the same. Then we had it facing the other direction, and going straight, the going was a bit easier.
We rolled it along beneath the intermittent shade of the overreaching forest trees—for how long I don’t know. Occasionally, deeper ruts in the road gave us problems, so that we had to heave-ho and rock the Buick rhythmically until we built momentum and could roll it out of the rut and get it moving again. Soon, I was sweating as if I’d run a mile. I could smell myself, the sour sweat and pine of the forest and the heat of the day mixing into a noxious odor.
Finally we came to it, glimpsed through a break in the trees, glimmering with the green of fallen leaves and reflected leaves and the moss beneath its surface coating the rocks like fine earthen pelts: an emerald pond, almost magical in its strange color and still, fluid face. Only just larger than the Buick itself, I wondered if it had been waiting here for the car, as the car had been waiting on the road for us.
Through the break in the trees we steered off of the road, branches snapping under the nearly tireless rims. As it rolled nearer, Sarah climbed carefully out from behind the wheel and stood and walked alongside the car, positioning herself like Tara opposite her, pushing the car ever closer to the placid green water. Then the front of the Buick dipped down and we all pushed harder, groaning and gritting our teeth, and Sarah and Tara left their positions and came around to the rear to join Jim and I. There the four of us pushed together, digging our heels into the ground with the effort.
The car rolled into the pond.
It sunk to the door handles, seemed to bob there for a moment like a child’s bathtub float toy. It rolled forward a bit more. Water cascaded into the open doors, filling the space inside, weighing it down, pulling it down.
The water of the pond bubbled as the car sank lower, and then there was just the roof of it, almost even with the surface of the pond, so that if you were to wade out and climb atop it you could probably do a good imitation of Jesus walking on water. In time that too was gone, and a gurgle of water like a faint burp seemed to announce this. Bubbles rose to the surface and popped.
A ripple followed and then that too faded, and we stood there gathered at the tiny shore of the watery grave. In our silence we felt the passing of the dead in the quiet of the woods. The light of the sun seemed muted in the tall imposing stillness of the woods and the cold, wider world beyond.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1.
It was afternoon when our little funeral was done and we were back on the highway heading home. No one spoke and there was nothing to say.
We pulled in the driveway and filed out. I thought briefly of what Mom would say when she saw her car, then decided it didn’t matter because she and Dad would soon know everything. Dad’s car was still in the driveway, although his lunch hour had long passed, but this was just fine by me. Mr. Perrelli had obviously been busy with us, which meant my parents were safe and sound. Whatever the reason he was still home, we could now tell him everything without having to wait. The sooner everything was on the table, the sooner we could prepare for what was coming.
Trudging up the porch, I opened the screen door, left behind a rusty smear. A smear of Bobby.
Sarah opened the front door and we all stepped inside.
The curtains were all pulled shut, and the lamps and overhead bulbs were off, putting the house in an artificial and premature dimness. Mom and Dad were at the dining table as they had been earlier in the day. For a moment there was a sense of déjà vu, and I thought briefly of science fiction stories of temporal loops where people lived the same day over and over again. I wondered why my parents would sit or eat in darkness, and was about to ask them when I noticed something.
They weren’t sitting across from each other as they had been during Dad’s lunch earlier. Instead, they were side by side, facing us from across the table. Underneath the table, I could see their legs were tied to the legs of the chairs. The way their arms were hooked out of sight around the backs of the chairs, I assumed they were likewise bound.
Blood streaked their faces.
The deep purple-green of ripe bruises complemented the blood.
Taking a hesitant step or two forward, I saw Mom’s makeup was running down her face and I knew she’d been crying. She made noises when she saw us enter, but the wadded cloth stuffed in her mouth made her gag on the sounds. Dad rolled his head and tried to open his swollen eyes when he heard her, and his squinty stare made him look vaguely Asian. He saw us and tried to talk as well, but the gag in his mouth allowed him only weak moans and incomprehensible utterances.
Sarah and I ran towards our parents, fell to our knees beside them, working frantically and ineffectually at the tight fishing line knots that bound them. The fishing wire bit deeply into their wrists, and seeing the rawness and redness of their flesh made me wince.
I heard Bandit growl, his claws clacking on the hardwood foyer floor, then the light clacking of him bounding upstairs.
Behind us I heard Tara’s gasps as she took in our parents. I heard Jim utter something with “fuck” and “shit” in it.
From upstairs came a pained yelp and the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.
I stood when I heard Bandit’s cry of pain, trapped in indecision. The knots around my mom’s wrists and ankles may as well have been iron chains. Did I find something to cut her free or charge upstairs to find my dog?
“We don’t have the money yet!” I screamed upstairs in frustration and anger. There were supposed to be rules, I thought. In school and at home, everywhere in life there were rules. I’d said midnight. That was the rule I’d established and they were supposed to follow it, and yet here they were. “I said midnight!”
But something
didn’t make sense. I hadn’t seen the black Cadillac anywhere outside. Also, Perrelli and Brock had driven in the opposite direction after dumping Bobby, back towards town.
How had they gotten here ahead of us? Had they turned around while we were busy with Bobby? Headed back here? Even without knowing where the money was?
From above me a rustling issued at the top of the stairs.
Turning, I saw the figure flowing down like moving shadows, fluid darkness, billowing coat and wide fedora, face in darkness, face of shadows. Here he came, drifting down as if smoke given form, and the knife, the knife in his hands, sprung from nowhere, from the void, that long and sharp knife, that cruel tooth. The Collector descended, shot and supposedly dead, but not dead, definitely not; instead, here in my house, floating down like a living storm cloud. His coat flapped like large black wings as he descended on us, enveloping us, eclipsing all else.
Jim tried to turn and open the door. But the Collector was there, across the distance between them as if teleported, and grabbed my friend by the arm and twirled and threw him. Jim danced across the room and collided with the stairway banister, crashing to the floor in a heap.
Tara tried for the door next, and the Collector glided towards her, intercepting her, grabbing her and likewise tossing her as he had Jim. Tara met the door of the foyer closet face first with a thud, rebounded off of it, and crumpled to the floor also.
“Get Dad loose!” I yelled at my sister, and then I was running across the room at the dark form of the Collector. His face was pale and vague in the midst of the shadows, a blur, a ghost of color, watching me coming at him.
His knife rose as I ran at him.
Skidding to a stop feet from him, I twirled, did a little pirouette, and shot out one leg. I didn’t really expect much against this man, the thing of shadows, but my foot met his knife hand and then the knife was arcing through the air and fell to the floor with a clatter.
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 25
