In the Woods

by Carrie Jones

  “You just watch,” I hear Kelsey tell Katie. “He always gets the same one.”

  “I want to play Sorry!,” Katie calls to me.

  “Sorry, Katie,” I say as I pull Risk out of the closet. Ha! I made a pun.

  “Not Risk again!” she wails. “Why do we always have to play that war game? I hate Risk!”

  “Katie,” Mom calls from the kitchen where she’s frosting cupcakes. “I told you, it’s Logan’s turn to pick. You picked Sorry! last week.”

  “I picked Life the time before,” she pouts. “I don’t always pick the same game every time, like he does.”

  “If you don’t want to play, you can go on to bed,” Mom answers.

  For a minute I think Katie might go. Ultimately, I think it’s the popcorn and the promise of chocolate cupcakes that keep her at the table.

  “We can team up against him,” Kelsey whispers. Big surprise there. They always do that anyway, and I still win.

  I spread out the board and distribute the plastic cases of colored numbers that represent armies. Within fifteen minutes I’ve captured all of Australia. A couple turns later I’ve amassed a big enough force to launch my invasion of Asia.

  “Here he comes again,” Dad says as he passes me the red attack dice. He winks. I wink back.

  “Ew! Logan tooted!” Katie crinkles up her nose. “That’s nasty.”

  “I did not, Katie,” I protest. I’m not above claiming it when it’s my crime, but the noxious odor did not come from me.

  “Dad?” Kelsey eyes him.

  “Not me!” He holds up his hands in mock surrender while Kelsey makes sort-of-fake and sort-of-real gagging noises.

  I shake the three cubes in my hand, ready to announce my attack on India. It’s right when I’m rolling the dice that the noise happens. We freeze. The dice land by the board. The sound gets louder. It’s a roaring—something primal and horrifying and coming from south of our house, in the direction of the 720 Road. My mom’s face loses all its color. Katie immediately starts crying. Dad stands up and grabs the rifle by the front door, but he doesn’t go outside. Kelsey whispers, “It’s in our driveway.”

  Dad yanks the door open. I’m right at his heels, but nothing’s out there—nothing but darkness and smells.

  * * *

  About four years ago a tornado ripped through our town. Dad and Mom yanked us all out of bed once the warning siren sounded, and hauled us into the basement. It was dark. It sounded like a train was roaring down the road outside our house. Not just any train—but something nuclear. David had been sleeping over, so he was there too, and when it was all over and our house was still standing, I noticed he had wet his pajama bottoms. His face was a horrified mix of embarrassment and fear. I threw a pillow at him. I’d been clutching that pillow because I was so scared. Anyway, I threw that pillow at him and he grabbed it and held it in front of the stain on his pajama pants. My dad left the house to go help with the cleanup and my mom and the girls went to bed. I snuck downstairs and washed David’s pj’s. We never said a word about it to anyone, and not to each other, either, except when we put the washer on and David whispered, “That was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  I wish I could say the same. I wish that would be the worst thing that happens to any of us, but I somehow doubt it, you know? That howling makes me doubt everything.

  * * *

  “Sure, it’s a great idea, Ronnie, but you’re not the first one to come up with it,” Sam Davis, owner of the feedstore in Forest Road, says to my dad. Forest Road is a few miles south of Tahlequah, the county seat and it’s the closest town to our farm, and it’s barely a town. Basically, there’s a post office, the feedstore, the Baptist church almost everyone around here goes to, Gus’s Grocery—which is really a convenience store with one gas pump beside it—and a little beauty salon run by Mr. Davis’s daughter. The feedstore is the closest thing we have to a hardware store.

  Dad sighs deeply. I can feel his disappointment.

  “Nothing?” He leans against the counter, then seems to think better of it. He straightens up and rubs a hand over his eyes.

  “I have two lights left. Shop lights you clip to a workbench,” Mr. Davis answers, rubbing the gray stubble on his dark face. “They take a regular bulb. Everything I had that was bigger, and it wasn’t much, was snapped up within twenty minutes of opening the store this morning. And posts to mount them on? Shoot, I could have retired if I’d had enough of them.”

  “I guess we could go to Tahlequah,” Dad says. I stand away from them a bit, looking out the window of the front door, not really watching anything.

  “That’s what lots of people are doing,” Mr. Davis says. “If it was me, I’d head for Wagoner. Maybe Fort Gibson. One of those mega stores, Lowe’s or Home Depot.”

  “That’ll take hours of daylight,” Dad argues.

  “I’m sorry, Ronnie. Really, I am,” Mr. Davis says. He’s an older guy, probably in his sixties, bald but with gray stubble on his cheeks no matter the time of day. The patriarch of one of the area’s only black families, he always wears pin-striped bib overalls with a chewed pencil in the bib and a tape measure clipped to his right hip pocket. Mr. Davis is the only person I know who calls my dad Ronnie. To most people, Dad is RJ Jennings, but Mr. Davis has been calling him Ronnie since Dad was a little boy.

  “Well, give me what you’ve got,” Dad says. “It’s a start.”

  Mr. Davis ambles toward the back of his small store. Outside, a red Ford F-250 crunches over the gravel drive and stops beside Dad’s black F-350 diesel. David and his dad get out and come in. Mr. Thompson, wearing a battered straw cowboy hat, nods at me then goes to shake hands with Dad.

  “Hey,” David says. “You hear that thing last night?”

  “Yeah,” I say. Dad and Mr. Thompson are having the same conversation. “I guess everyone around here heard it this time.”

  “Nobody’s gonna think you’re a weirdo anymore. That’s for sure,” David says.

  “You thought that?”

  “Nah. You don’t make stuff up. Not like that, anyway. You just make it up for your poetry.” He grins at me. “Hey, you know that one you wrote? The one about how a tree smells wet after it rains?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought of that the other night when we had that little bit of rain. Me and Yesenia were in her yard and I was pushing her on the tire swing. I said the lines I could remember and she really liked it.”

  “She did?” I ask. Somebody liked my poem? “Does she want to read the rest of it?”

  “Well, man, I didn’t tell her you wrote it. She just thought I made it up, so I let her think that. Is that cool? You okay with that?” His face is earnest, hopeful.

  “I’m your Cyrano?” I say, joking, but not really feeling it.

  “What’s that?” he asks.

  “Oh, he was an ugly guy who wrote poems to help his friend get a girl.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess. You’re not mad, are you?”

  “No,” I tell him. I guess I’m really not. At least he remembered a little of what I wrote, and when he recited it, the audience liked it. “So, how much did she like it?”

  David glances over at our fathers, then says real low, “Third base.”

  I laugh, but don’t say any more. Mr. Davis returns from the back of his store with the lights in cardboard boxes. He calls out, “Hello there, Billy!” to Mr. Thompson. “I hope you’re not here for lights, posts, extension cords, or .30-.30 shells.”

  “Well, I was,” Mr. Thompson drawls. “RJ here done told me you’re cleaned out.”

  “Yep. Whatever you folks up north heard musta scared the bejesus outta everybody,” Mr. Davis says, then looks at me and David by the door. “Excuse me,” he says. “Anyway, everybody up your way is wanting to put lights around their houses today.”

  “What was it?” Mr. Thompson asks. “Anybody see anything?”

  “Nope,” Mr. Davis answers. “That young feller over there’s the only one
to have seen it.” He points at me. “We all read the papers. Whatever it was killed Ray Cheever’s bull calf last night. The bull was pretty near nine months old. It wasn’t a little thing anymore. Bo Sanders and Jed Fields both have stock missing. Bo’s been missing a couple goats for close to two weeks now.”

  The thing is: animals have been going missing for a long time, way before this. Nobody thought anything of it. Coyotes can run stock way out into the hills, wear out a cow, a goat, sometimes even a horse, and then, when their prey goes down, they’ll kill it. Bears get a few, and some get shot for wandering into remote areas where people are growing pot. Nobody’d thought much of a missing calf here and there. But maybe …

  “What’d it sound like to you, RJ?” Mr. Thompson asks Dad.

  “I don’t know,” Dad answers. “Sounded … I don’t even know. Almost like a man trying to sound like a bear but not doing a real good job of it.”

  “Yeah.” Mr. Thompson nods. “That’s about it.”

  “What kind of setup are you planning to do around your place?” Dad asks.

  “Gonna put up some lights around the house and barn. The chicken house is already pretty well lit because of the coyotes and varmints,” Mr. Thompson answers. “I just got the four head of cattle I can run into the little pasture by the road. I figured a half dozen of those halogen lights, just mounted on the sides of the barn, and some of those motion-sensing lights on the house. How about you?”

  “I’d like to set posts around my west pasture, light up the whole thing, but it seems like that’s not going to happen,” Dad says. “I’ve got a hundred and fifty head of cattle. I guess I’ll still run them in there after the evening milking, put up all the lights I can find, and me and Logan’ll have to watch over them at night.”

  Mr. Thompson emits a low whistle. “Stay outside with that thing loose? No, thank you.”

  “Has it got any of your chickens yet?” Dad asks.

  “Thank God, no.”

  “When it does, you’ll probably think different,” Dad promises.

  David bumps my arm and motions for me to follow him outside. I’d rather stay and see how the men decide to handle the situation, but I follow my friend out to the gravel parking lot. “You and your dad are going to stay out all night waiting on that thing?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “You scared?”

  “Yeah.” No use lying about that.

  “What did it look like, man?”

  “I told you,” I say, but I describe it again anyway.

  “Do you think it was Bigfoot, like the papers say?”

  “I don’t know.” I’ve seen shows on TV where people went hunting Bigfoot. I think again about what they said about the creature. “This thing seemed, I don’t know, smarter than Bigfoot. But that means it wasn’t a bear. I want it to be a bear.”

  “It’s messed up,” David says, then reaches into his back pocket and brings out his Skoal can. He offers it to me and I shake my head.

  “I thought Yesenia made you stop dipping,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, I just don’t do it around her.”

  “Oh.” I’d never really thought of David as someone who’d lie, but I guess love makes people do strange things.

  Dad and Mr. Thompson come out of the store, Dad carrying his boxed lights that he puts in the backseat of our truck.

  Mr. Thompson calls out to David. “I’m going back for the trailer, then going to Wagoner to see if I can get the stuff we need and the posts and lights RJ wants. I want you to go with Logan and his dad and help them dig holes for the posts.”

  “Sure, Dad,” David says. I can tell he’s not thrilled with the idea. He’s never minded hard work, but I bet he had plans with Yesenia today.

  “How’d you feel about staying the night, helping watch their place? I thought maybe you could help tonight, then your brothers can take turns.”

  “Yeah, sure,” David agrees, and now he really sounds disappointed.

  * * *

  Digging the post holes isn’t so bad. Dad has a drill for the tractor because we’re always fixing fences. We have about fifty holes drilled by the time Mr. Thompson shows up with a trailer loaded down with ten-foot posts, high-pressure sodium lamps, and bright-orange extension cords. Me, Dad, and David break for lunch while Mr. Thompson finishes drilling post holes around the pasture. We don’t usually put the cattle in this pasture because it’s where we grow alfalfa that we bail as hay to feed them in the winter, but this is an emergency. After lunch, we break into two teams, with me and David mounting the light fixtures to the posts so Dad and Mr. Thompson can plant them in the ground. We begin on the side of the pasture facing the woods, but by dinnertime we haven’t even finished that side of the rectangle. Still, it’s a pretty impressive line of fresh posts linked together by shiny new extension cords.

  “This’ll have to do for now,” Dad says. He sends me to bring the gas-powered generator out, and I come back on our Kawasaki four-wheeler, pulling the generator on its trailer. Within a few minutes the lights are glowing amber.

  “Mom and the girls did the milking this evening,” Dad tells me. “They’re holding the cattle in the pen behind the milk barn. Let’s get them in here, then get some supper.”

  Mr. Thompson stays to help, so with the four of us, we get the cattle moved fairly quickly from the very cramped yard where they go at milking time and into the alfalfa pasture.

  Supper is a buffet of leftovers and apprehension. Mom insists I check my cell phone twice to make sure it’s charged up. There’s an air horn and a pair of flashlights as the table centerpiece. My shotgun, loaded with slugs, leans against a nearby wall with David’s lever-action .30-.30 rifle and Dad’s .30-.06 deer rifle.

  “You and David take the first watch,” Dad instructs. “I’ll relieve you at about one. If you hear anything out of the ordinary, you blow that air horn long and loud. Okay?”

  “All right, Dad,” I promise.

  “You’ll need to get up at sunrise and help with the milking, like always,” he tells me.

  I nod.

  Before we go, Mom wraps her arms around me and hugs me so tight it almost cuts off my wind. Then she steps back, still holding on to me. I notice, maybe for the first time, the wrinkles around her bright-green eyes and the silvery strands of gray that shine among the brown of her hair. “You be careful,” she insists. “I’d rather lose every cow out there than you, so you get to the house if you get scared.”

  “Yeah, Mom, okay.”

  She turns from me to David and grabs him in a shorter version of the hug I got. “That goes for you, too, David Thompson.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Jennings,” he says, obviously surprised.

  We take our guns and get out to the pasture. Most of the cattle are munching grass, the white patches of their hair shining in the new lights, reminding me of the screaming calf. Some seem to be asleep standing up, and a few are nosing around the strange new posts.

  Thunder is loping along beside us, sniffing the ground here and there, probably thinking we’re going hunting for coons or rabbits. They’d make a racket, and I know Mom won’t sleep at all anyway.

  At first we feel all important, patrolling around and around the fence without talking much. That gets pretty old and tiring pretty quick, so we decide to hang around the middle of the field, closer to the lights illuminating the edge of the forest.

  “You had plans with Yesenia tonight, didn’t you?” I ask after a long silence.

  “Yeah. We were gonna go bowling in Tahlequah. Eat some pizza. Hang out.”

  “Sorry, man.”

  “Not your fault.” He pulls out his cell phone and answers a text message. From Yesenia, I’m sure.

  “Well, I was pretty surprised when your dad volunteered you to stay. And your brothers,” I offer.

  “Why? We’re neighbors. You and your dad would do the same.”

  “Yeah,” I agree. “You really like Yesenia.” I don’t know if it’s a question or a statement. Davi
d takes it as a question.

  “Yeah. She’s cool. Remember how I set her hair on fire in fifth grade?”

  I laugh a little. “I remember. I think you were lucky Mrs. Hartley got to you before Yesenia put out the fire. I think she would have killed you.” I remember how her big dark eyes were filled with angry tears.

  “Probably,” David agrees. “I never would have told her, but I thought she was cute then, too.”

  “That’s how we flirted back then. Well, we didn’t usually set them on fire, but we were mean to the girls we liked,” I say. Despite the dark, it’s still pretty hot outside, and humid. The air’s so thick, we could almost swim in it. “We should go fly-fishing.”

  “Yeah. You should get a girlfriend, Logan. Maybe Christina. We could double-date.” David stretches, bored.

  Christina Moses is Yesenia’s best friend. She’s not ugly, and she’s usually pretty nice, but I’ve never had much to say to her. I can’t imagine her fishing with me, or hunting, and I have no desire to kiss her. I shrug off David’s suggestion. “I don’t know. Girls don’t seem to like me.”

  “That’s because you don’t put yourself out there, man,” he argues.

  “I do,” I counter, but I know he’s right.

  “I’ll check around, see who’s interested. Yesenia’ll know.”

  “Whatever,” I say.

  Hours creep by. Cows sleep all around us. Once, off in the woods, a screech owl snatches up a meal, probably a rabbit, and flaps away with it. That’s the only remarkable sound we hear before Dad shows up at twelve thirty. David and I go back to the house, go to different bathrooms for showers, then crash in my bedroom until my alarm sounds at four thirty. There are no monsters in my dreams, no poems, just aimless fish in a creek, swimming beneath the surface, waiting for me to catch them. I smack off the alarm with my palm and leave David sleeping on the floor to stumble out in the predawn and meet Dad in the milking barn. The cows are already gathering outside the back door, their udders full.

  Later, over breakfast, Dad gets a call on his cell. “Proctor?” he says. “Yeah, I remember him.” Pause. “Two of them, huh?” Pause. “All right, Sam. Thanks for letting me know.” Pause. “Yeah, we got them. We’ll finish planting the posts today, I guess.” Pause. “All right. Let me know what you hear. Bye.”