At one point, a section of sandstone had collapsed, taking along with it a huge juniper that now jutted out horizontally, the fibrous branches of its root system clawing the air like dead fingers grasping for purchase.
Behind the tree, I spied a pair of small cairns tucked inside a cranny in the sandstone. Getting down on my hands and knees, I crawled under the roots until I reached the shrine. Buttressed with bramble-like tumbleweed and roofed with braided branches of sage, the small structure formed a primitive shelter for a photo of Paulie. In the picture, which Mick had encased in a plastic sleeve, the boy hugged the furry haunch of an enormous stuffed bear, while grinning out at the camera.
I felt a hitch in my throat as I gazed into the face of the little boy who’d once played with my daughter. I wondered if Mick really had a hope in hell of getting him back or if this was the quest of a heartsick, delusional father.
Close behind me, a voice said, “I see you found Paulie.”
Startled, I tried to stand up and was immediately entangled in dead, dangling roots that scraped my face and snagged in my hair and my clothes.
Cursing, feeling ridiculous, I freed myself the only way I could, by dropping to the ground again and squirming out butt first, until I was able to see the man who was the cause of my embarrassment.
He was fit and deeply tanned with a thin, solemn face, a salt and pepper goatee, and pale, intense eyes set in a face corrugated with crinkles. Impractically dressed for a hike, he wore creased jeans, a blue silk shirt and studded boots so well-shined they might never have touched the soil. On his fingers and wrists, heavy rings and thick silver cuffs, trapped the light and seemed to bathe him in radiance.
“Chusco Jones,” he said, extending a hand. I shook it, even though a handshake between strangers in the middle of the woods seemed mildly ludicrous, as though we were about to walk in opposite directions, turn and fire pistols at each other.
Nodding toward the shrine, he said, “I remember when that young boy went missing. His parents crying, all those good people who came to look for him.”
“Yeah, my wife and I searched. You?”
He looked mildly amused. “I was elsewhere.”
There was a lilt to his voice that suggested southern roots or even Caribbean origins, the vowels elongated, sweet and stretchy as taffy. I wondered if he was an actor or entertainer of some sort. Or a snatcher of children.
“A sweet soul, that little boy,” he said.
“I guess all kids are sweet souls at that age.”
It was a random remark, but he latched onto it. “You’re wrong there. It’s a myth that all children are pure and innocent. Something adults believe in order to feel better about themselves.”
His voice was musical, lulling. Easy to get lost in the cadence and not hear the words.
He flashed a glittering smile and continued. “Let me tell you about children, my friend. Most of them, when they enter this world, the midwife cuts the cord and off they go to make mischief and grief. But a few, the ones born with bright, shiny souls, they’re the keepers, the true treasures. For them, the cord’s never really severed. An attachment remains between them and the world of light and laughter they left behind. If a door opens, they’re keen to come back.” His long face grew grave. “Especially if there are difficulties at home. If all is not what it should be.”
My scalp was prickling. “You’re the guy who’s got Mick convinced you can find his boy.”
His response was a rich expulsion of laughter. “Oh, I can find him. It’s a question of getting him back again. Tricky business, that. Not always easy, no.”
“You always talk in riddles? What the hell does that even mean?”
His face remained impassive, but his squinty eyes mocked me.
“Watch yourself on your way out, my friend.” He looked up at the arroyo’s steep walls as though seeing them for the first time. “Easy to get lost here. Every path looks the same.”
I watched him scale the bank effortlessly. Even as he disappeared out of sight, I could still see comets of sunlight flashing off his silver jewelry.
I wanted to follow him, tackle him, maybe even call the police, but I did none of those things. Instead I lingered at the shrine, as though believing some harm might come to it if I were to leave too soon.
***
Mick called the next morning, rousing me from an unsound sleep to remind me this was the day. As if being the getaway driver for a missing boy and his father might have somehow slipped my mind.
I quelled my mounting apprehension by telling myself Mick knew what he was doing. Besides, he’d be the one dealing with Jones.
Mick checked in for the last time around one. By this time, I was already seated at a booth at Lou’s, forking tine dents in the crust of a slab of blackberry pie I hadn’t touched while downing cup after cup of black coffee. “Just sit tight,” Mick said, “I’ll call you as soon as we’re on the way. Won’t be long now.”
His voice cracked like a geezer of ninety. I’d heard three pack a day smokers sound better.
“Hang in there,” I said, but he’d already cut off the call.
After that, no word.
My own cell was on mute, but I glanced at it and saw Molly had called, not just once, but every ten or fifteen minutes for the past hour. Before I could listen to the messages, a text scrolled across the top of the screen: Wtf Gary? Where are you? And PS thanks for not inviting me to the party. Asshole.
Party?
When I called her back, she picked up right away and started in on me. “Could you just once be responsible? You were supposed to have Angie back here at three. Now it’s a quarter to five. Where are you?”
“What are you talking about? Angie’s with you! Answer me, Molly! Isn’t she?”
The silence that followed was the most clamorous I’ve ever endured. For the first time in months, maybe ever, I knew Molly and I were in perfect sync in the most appalling way possible, that our hearts, like two panicked horses, had begun racing as one.
“Mick said you were having a birthday party for her at some restaurant in Albuquerque, and after you and I argued, you didn’t want to see me, so you asked him to pick her up.” A sob shook her. “And I yelled at him for doing your dirty work, but he was so kind, so understanding. I let him take her . . . God, what have I done?”
A ball of barbed wire that had lodged in my gut since this morning began to unspool.
“How did Mick know you and I argued? And why the hell would you let him take Angie?”
Except, of course, I already knew. “How long have you been fucking him?”
I didn’t wait for an answer and didn’t want one. I threw bills on the table and ran out of the restaurant, not knowing if Molly was still on the line, but yelling out anyway. “I’ll find her. I’ll get her. I know where she is.”
***
I drove like a madman, mind racing. In my panic, I couldn’t find the right trailhead, and wasted precious time before I spotted Mick’s Escalade partially hidden in a grove of trees, motor running. After blocking him as best I could with my truck, I sprinted into the woods.
My best bet, I thought, was to go back to where I’d encountered Jones.
Loose rock slid away under my feet and dust churned around me as I skidded down into the wash, yelling for Angie. I was about to climb the far wall, when I saw the thick tangle of exposed roots I’d crawled under before and realized something was different. The root system protruded farther and behind it, an entire section of the sandstone had folded in on itself, collapsed. I could see the shrine Mick had built more clearly now. Paulie’s picture was gone. In its place was the photo of Angie that Molly kept on a table in the hallway.
I didn’t know what kind of evil magic the picture might have been designed to invoke, but I grabbed it and tore it to pieces, seeing my daughter’s face reduced to smaller and smaller bits of paper. Then I knocked down the cairns and scattered the stones, tried to make it as though the vile thing had never existe
d.
When I looked up, I saw Mick gazing down at me like he was God, and I knew it was too late. And maybe right then, Mick really was God, because hadn’t he pulled off a miracle? In his arms he held Paulie, who made small mewling noises and was shivering in spite of the heat. His head was nestled on his father’s chest and his red hair, once so electric and vibrant, now looked like a faded photocopy. I wondered if Mick saw the change. Wondered if it mattered to him.
“I had no choice, Gary.” He hugged Paulie fiercely, kissed the boy’s cheek and buried his face in that once-bright red hair. “You’d’ve done the same.” His voice broke and his eyes were those of someone I’d never met before in my life, a man delirious with feverish joy and utter self-loathing.
“Where’s my daughter? What have you done with her?”
He turned to run, and I lunged up the embankment, the unstable sandstone crumbling away under my feet. I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d caught him, but I never got the chance to find out. Chusco Jones saw to that.
His arms clamped around me from behind, pinning my arms in an iron grip while he crooned in my ear like a pedophile priest, “Leave him be, and I’ll let you see your daughter.”
He nudged me toward the downed juniper, whose hollow trunk had begun to emit a pale, pulsing light, by turns concave and convex. At its widest, the light formed a dome a few feet across, before inverting and shrinking to the size of a small bowl. I found myself speeding up my breathing to match its hypnotic pulse.
When I forced myself to breathe deeply and slowly, the light adjusted its rhythm accordingly, and I was able to see inside the tree. At the farthest point of illumination, sepia shadows swarmed and dispersed, curling in and then unfurling like some obscene bloom. In the center, Angie was silhouetted, not much more than a shadow herself, backlit by a lurid brilliance that was absorbing her little by little, like liquid sipped through a straw.
I screamed her name, which caused the light to pulse wildly, as though my outcry had disturbed some natural flow. Angie’s outline grew vaguer, the highlights in her hair dimming and dulling. So little was left of her then, but she did not seem afraid or even aware of what was happening. Maybe she was in a kind of sleepwalking state or maybe what Jones called a place of laughter and light was really just that. Maybe whatever was inside that bright, gaping void had a way of sedating its victims, calming them. At least that’s what I’d like to believe.
“A sweet soul, a keeper,” I heard Jones say, and I snapped my head back, breaking his grip on me along with his nose. I slammed my fist through those absurdly perfect and star-spangled teeth, punched his jaw so far out of alignment it jutted at an angle from his face, while blood gushed from his mangled tongue. He took all that and more without fighting back, which made me angrier, so when he finally fell, I went to work with my boots; ribs, liver, kidneys, balls. Rinse and repeat. Then I finished re-landscaping his face, screaming, “Bring her back! God fuck you to hell, bring her back!”
Even after everything I threw at him, when my arms ached from beating him, he didn’t die or even lose consciousness. He rolled over and threw up a bucket of blood, then lisped through the red mess I’d made of his mouth, “You can get her back.”
I was panting and sobbing, trying to dig an incisor out of one of my knuckles. I knew what he meant, but didn’t want to admit it. As though knowing would make it all true.
“The umbilicus connects to us all, but it feeds off the pure ones, the special ones who give it their light. Be patient. Someone will find you.”
He choked and threw up a ropey mass of black blood and lung tissue. Then he lay still. He wanted me to think he was dying, but I didn’t believe it.
I think it was all a farce to distract me while Mick got away with his son. Jones may have looked human, but the man whose face and body I pulverized was no more of this world than whatever it was that took my daughter.
And all I had giving me hope were his final words, “Do what you have to do, Gary. Get her back,” right before I kicked in his head.
***
In the end, I had to get out of the country of course. Not because I killed Jones, because I don’t think I did, but because Molly stood up for her ex-lover, claiming I engineered Angie’s disappearance as a way to get back at her for fucking Mick who, in another of her outlandish theories, I’d also managed to murder. If I’d stuck around, I’d have ended up in prison, so one night I crossed the border at Las Cruces, hopped a bus and just kept going south.
All that time, I’ve been looking for someone.
A beach town in Guatemala’s not a bad place to disappear, once you’ve learned some Spanish and have adapted, more or less, to your basic beach bum, Gallo-and-frijoles lifestyle. I make a few quetzals renting snorkeling gear and surfboards to the tourists and have become an avid imbiber of local rums of dubious merit. In other words, I get by. It’s a dangerous place, though, especially for kids. They get caught up in street gangs and drug running, trafficked for sex, befriended by the wrong kind of people for the worst kind of reasons.
The other day, I even imagined I spied Chusco Jones, one version of that monster anyway, although this time the form he took was a heavyset Mayan hottie who came waddling up the beach decked out like the Queen Mary at Christmas. The giveaway was the fire of her bangles, elbow to wrist, and the liquid silver chains streaming into her Grand Canyon of cleavage. As she bounced up the beach, the sunlight owned her. She left people blind in her wake.
“Hear tell you lost your little girl,” she chimed in a voice that gave evil the sweet solace of damp sheets and the scent of a lover. She suggested we meet in the evening, then showed up not wearing her human disguise, but as the abomination she actually was. With the tip of one prehensile digit, she found a seam in the fabric of sky and peeled it open. A dome of gleaming, honey-colored light flowed from the rent, and the squeal and chitter of children perforated the ink of the night. But when I grabbed at the rim of that pulsing orb, it dimpled and shrank to a single bright point that vanished back into the darkness.
***
Now, beside me skips Ernesto, age eight or nine, a street kid who sells chewing gum and woven bracelets to tourists. I feed him tortillas and ruffle his black hair and tell myself no, I can’t do this.
Some days I vow on all that is holy I’ll open an artery first. Other days, all I think of is Angie, and I’d sacrifice a hundred kids, a thousand, if it meant I could have her back with me for one day. And if that’s evil, then so fucking be it.
So I stroll up the beach with Ernesto while he chatters in Spanish about soccer and school and pop songs, and I wonder what kind of man I really am. I’m terrified I already know.
There’s something else I know, too and probably, if I’m honest, it’s the biggest thing holding me back. I know whatever took Paulie and Angie doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the souls of these kids, untarnished or otherwise. Pristine’s not its angle, and that line about bright shiny souls that Jones fed me is honey-dipped shit. What it wants is to defile and destroy and gut-fuck the parents who decide to play the game, who’re willing to consign another kid to who knows what kind of limbo to get back their own daughter or son. Understanding this means I almost don’t even hate Mick anymore. Because I can’t imagine life’s ever worth living after committing so monstrous a deed.
And yet . . . an image comes, both temptation and promise: Angie’s hand in mine as we wade through warm emerald waves, eating salty chocolate and laughing about the crazy dream she was dreaming before she woke up in a foreign land—and after all, aren’t all lands foreign?—and found herself safe with her daddy.
But for now it’s just Ernesto and me on this brown, sun-scoured beach, him hawking his trinkets, and me, with every step, a little closer to selling my soul.
Meantime, the sun shatters the waves into glittering shards and the heat blasts down like vengeance for every sin ever committed.
THE WEEDS AND THE WILDNESS YET
ROBERT STAHL
; The irony is that his wife loves the dirt. How many times over the past forty-two years has Charlie watched her out in the garden, massaging the earth with her fingers? Mildred’s tomatoes and peppers are blue ribbon winners come fair time; her lilies and caladiums, the envy of every woman in the neighborhood. She knows every gardening trick in the book: how to control aphids with sticky tape, how to squat on an upturned bucket to avoid back pains, how to scrape her nails over a bar of soap to prevent dirt from caking underneath.
But Charlie, he’s always found dirt . . . well, dirty. He hates the musty smell of the stuff, that suffocating feeling on his skin.
Of course, his dislike intensifies the morning he finds her lying face down in the garden. As long as he lives, he’ll never forget how the dirt behaves when he turns her over. The way it clings to the whites of her eyes. The bloody clump of mud that burps out of her nostril. The grit even manages to creep into his mouth when he’s trying to breathe life back into her, calling out to God to please, bring her back, for one more moment.
But God doesn’t work that way.
Not in real life.
At the burial, he watches family and loved ones drop handfuls of dirt onto her casket. A lump forms in his throat while he tries to imagine her in there, quiet and tranquil with her arms folded against her chest, the way she often slept at night.
How long, Charlie wonders, until the body of the woman he loves disintegrates? How many years until the rains and erosion soften the casket walls, until the wet earth surges in to claim her again? Dust to dust, like the preacher says.
The thoughts gain momentum, quickly becoming too much to bear. “Stop!” he shouts, surging forward, wrestling the bucket away from the attendant.
It’s his brother Sidney who pulls him away, loads him into the back of his car, and holds him until he stops shaking.
***
Sidney stays with him the next several days, insists on keeping watch. Charlie doesn’t make it difficult. He spends most of his waking hours on the sofa, watching TV.
Tales from The Lake 5 Page 2
