Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  For the first time the boy moved mentally out of panic, long enough for some semblance of passing time to come to him. But he didn’t wear a watch. He tried counting sixty twice in slow, metronomic fashion, then gave up – what did it matter how many minutes had passed? But it only seemed like for ever until he heard the faint thud of footsteps on the packed earth of the forest floor. Surprisingly it came again from the pond side of the tree house – the man in the yellow shirt must have doubled back to the place where he had entered the wood.

  Then he heard the man say something, low and unintelligible; there was a pause, and then a whistle, like an appreciative wolf whistle without a short skirt at the other end. Wheet-whoo. ‘Well, here we are,’ the voice declared, sounding self-consciously cheerful, like an MC warming up an audience before the main act. ‘And there I was, looking at my feet through all these trees when I get the big idea of looking up. And lo and behold, what do I see? I see me a hiding place.’

  The voice was so close that the boy knew the man had found the tree house. He resisted the temptation to try and curl up even smaller in his little eyrie, knowing that anything he gained in terms of invisibility would be of no importance if he made even the smallest noise. He held his breath until he thought he would burst, then exhaled far more noisily than he intended, just – thank God – as he heard the man kick aside a stick as he came to stand below the tree house. The boy heard something bang against the tree trunk and thought, It’s the gun, the funny cut-down gun, then heard the sliding clambering sound of the man’s feet on the low step. There was a click, and the boy thought, Trigger? No, safety, and bit his bottom lip so as not to cry out with his sudden terror.

  He felt the tree house shudder slightly and realised the man was standing just below it – his feet must have been balanced on the rough steps while his hands reached up to grip the tree house floorboards. ‘Don’t you dare fucking move,’ the voice hissed from below, still high, but sibilant now and menacing. The boy froze and did exactly as he was told and waited for the next instructions. Maybe he will let me go, he told himself. Hadn’t he said he would? After all, the boy hadn’t done anything. Maybe he should believe the man.

  Then he heard, curiously, ‘Shit!’, the expletive sharp, all mellowness gone, and the boy understood at once that the man had only discovered the empty tree house. He hasn’t seen me at all, the boy thought, and tried to keep his breathing shallow. He could almost feel the man’s disappointment as he stood below him, not ten feet away, doubtless staring at the inside of the tree house – nothing but its rough floor of planks really, he and his uncle had never put so much as a chair inside – staring with disbelief, so confident had he sounded that the boy was there.

  It was some time – ten seconds? A minute? – before the man clambered down again. Then he shouted, this time indiscriminately into the air around him, ‘I know you’re hiding somewhere. I’ll find you, don’t worry. Goddamn it!’ This last said with a surprised kind of rage, so that the boy wondered for a minute if the man had hurt himself, pricking himself badly on stickerbush perhaps; or seen a snake, or thought he had. But no, it must have been just plain frustration, for the man continued, venting his rage. ‘Come out,’ he commanded.

  He heard the man moving around the wood now, noisily, not even bothering to disguise his progress – here and there, back and forth through the trees and the packed earth and soft beds of pine needles on the forest floor. The noises were of boots scuffing through the undergrowth, the occasional sharp crack of a stick being kicked, or moved, or stepped on, and the odd swish as the man walked through stands of ferns.

  The noise would recede then return, and each time the boy found his steady, anxious fear flare into panic. He realised the light was starting to fade – at first it simply seemed as if the sunlight, filtered through the trees, was fainter, but then he realised there was no direct sunlight at all. What time must it be? Seven or eight o’clock, time for supper on any normal day. He wondered where Maris was, and pictured her in the kitchen, making supper. His uncle would return from the Valley Orchard, parking the tractor in the barn, ambling into the house, fetching the boy with a friendly shout for supper (no, that wasn’t right; the boy would have already been inside, doing his homework at the long table in the big room) and whistling for Ellie, whom his uncle would feed in an aluminium bowl on the deck outside the kitchen door.

  And then the scene blew apart, at the same time as the boy remembered that Maris was staying in town that night. The boy shivered again. He tried to shut out the image of his uncle blown up with blood, and struggled to block out the memory of the physical sensation as his knife had moved into the firm flesh of the other man, his astonished eyes, the resistance of muscle to the blade. Yet the image he could not suppress was an imagined one, of something he had not seen or felt: the shooting of Ellie. It came to him now again and again – her barking, the discharge of the gun, then nothing.

  And maybe his uncle had survived, he tried to tell himself, floating the thought out in his mind like a balloon allowed provisional drift in the breeze. Until snap, and the owner yanked hard on the string – so now he found his wishful thinking aborted by the reality of what he had seen: the sheer impact of the blast which had knocked his uncle back against the wall of the greenhouse as he exploded with blood.

  This time when the footsteps drew closer, the man spoke again, still in his whistling voice, but with an almost plaintive and appealing note to it now, more haunting than the barked version with its emphatic fruitless commands. ‘Hey, it’s getting dark now and you must be getting cold. There’s no point going on like this. We’re all square now; I’ve got nothing else to prove. So what do you say you come out now?’

  The man was moving further away in the dusk but he continued to speak. The birds were still absent and there was no wind; the effect was of becalming silence in which the weirdly calm voice of the man in the yellow shirt rang clear. The boy’s anxiety, intermittently joined by a jolting, draining panic, was fortified by the spooky timbre of the voice, and the way it was imploring him: ‘Nothing is going to happen to you if you come out now. You’ve got to come out some time. Why not now?’ The man must have realised how lame this sounded, for he changed tack. ‘Listen, my beef was with Will. Now Will, well, he got hurt – yeah, fair enough, no denying that. But my friend Walt’s not looking too hot either.’

  The man was still talking as he walked slowly out of earshot. It was truly dark now with the moonless night shifting from grey to the colour of rich soil, the kind in which remaining light was scarce – the boy could not tell which of the shapes and shades he discerned in the distance were imagined, which real. Once he thought he saw a figure crouching on a high branch of a nearby spruce. He closed his eyes and when he opened them was alarmed to see the figure had moved. Had it? He peered into the dark, and decided it was the outline of two branches.

  As he wondered what the man would do now to hunt for him, he heard a car start up in the distance – the whinnying of the ignition and the bass vroom as the engine caught and roared. He decided it must be the man’s car – it was too thick and reverberating a noise to come from as far away as the road. Should he climb down? But what if he were wrong about the car? What if the man was still on foot, looking for him? He could head for the orchard end but if he was heard he’d be spotted making his way across the long slope of trees – even in the dark, it wouldn’t be hard to see him in his light T-shirt. And the other way was daunting in the dark: he could not be sure of finding the path which led around the pond towards the house, and that is where the man would probably be watching out for him. The alternative to that, to go by the greenhouse, would require him to clamber among rocks, making noise, and then there were the sleeping rattlesnakes.

  So he stayed put, and was soon relieved he had, since suddenly out of nowhere – there had been no warning sound – a wide and golden beam of light began moving through the wood. High at first, near the tops of some younger trees, then lower down. It w
as like an erratic light show, but there was method in its circling, and, peeking carefully, the boy could tell that the man in the yellow shirt was working his way with a high-powered flashlight systematically through the stand of trees. He would hold the beam for seconds at a time when he spied something of interest, and the beam held firm when it focused on the tree house. At last it moved away, but the boy’s relief was short-lived: the beam returned and illuminated the thickest of the trunks which shielded him. He must have seen me, he thought, and cramp suddenly attacked his left leg in an agonising intermittent spasm. He forced himself not to touch it until the light moved away, and then the pain temporarily overrode his fear. As soon as he heard the man move through the brush on the orchard side of him he slowly bent his leg and kneaded his calf urgently but silently with his hand.

  After this he knew he could not come down, but he found a new fear that he might fall asleep and fall from his perch, for despite his anxiety – or perhaps because of it – he was near complete exhaustion. He managed to wedge himself firmly enough in place but still did not trust himself to sleep, since he was scared of waking with a start that would alert the man in the yellow shirt to his position high in the branches.

  At first he had welcomed the darkness, thinking the night might protect him, but now it worried him, since he feared the man’s flashlight would somehow pierce the enveloping blackness and reveal him. Right then he could not see the flashlight’s beam or hear the man, but he was certain he would be back. Without a watch he could only make rough stabs at time-keeping, counting again, then giving up in frustration at how small a dent his mental recital of numbers – three hundred and two, three hundred and three – made in the fabric of this endless night.

  And yet he felt ambivalent about the passage of time, since daylight would bring fresh dangers – he felt, perhaps irrationally, that a new day would serve to expose him in his eyrie, that his ability to hide there would dissolve in a fresh kind of daylight. As his back began to ache from leaning against the tree trunk, he thought briefly of descending to the tree house, where he could lie down on solid floorboards without fear of falling off. But that would be the natural place for the man to double-check – if not now then in the middle of the night, and at first light, looking to see if the boy had taken shelter after all.

  He heard a sudden rush through the brush, a scuffle that seemed to take place low on the ground, and a squeal followed by a crunch. Fox, he told himself, fox finding rabbit. He remembered the night when, in a show of ten-year-old independence, he had insisted on sleeping out here alone – until the unknown noises of the night had scared him so much that he had climbed down and started to run back to the house, encountering his uncle on the edge of the wood, who had come out to make sure he was all right. But it would not be his uncle whom he met now, and Maris was spending the night in town.

  He tried hard not think about what he had seen, and for a while played a game in which he took inventory of the interior of his uncle’s house, locating in his mind’s eye as many items as he could remember. In this game, his uncle was somewhere in the background, in his office probably, and Maris was in the house as well, sitting in the recliner in the big room, reading one of her novels. But he paid no attention to either of them – in his mind’s eye, that is – and focused on the safe objects of the house, recalling his uncle’s very own mantra, minimise, minimise. The wooden standing lamp in the corner, and the central lamp suspended from the high ceiling all the way down until it hovered over the long table, and the soapstone carvings of a whale and a seal his uncle had bought on their day trip to the coast, propped up on the stone ledge of the fireplace’s mantelpiece, and a brass figurine – was that the word? – of a small bell which Maris liked, and then the gun cupboard, which he deftly avoided in this imaginary survey, heading for the kitchen instead, but no, there were knives there, so he turned around in his mind and on the long table he found the guide to wildflowers, thumbed and dog-eared, which his uncle and Maris took with them on their walks back behind the greenhouse or down to the bottom meadowland of the Valley Orchard, and there were the upright chairs on the kitchen side of the table, with high back posts you could hook a jacket on, and what was the colour of the cane matting of the seat? Dark brown, almost the colour of dried blood. And with the thought of blood he saw again the scarlet burst from his uncle’s chest like rain.

  He must have fallen asleep, for when his dream spoke the word ‘blood’ he jerked and hit his head against the pine’s trunk. And it was then that the game collapsed, or at least its purpose did, which was to drive away his fear. And he felt such a sudden wave of panic, like a kind of manic flu racing through his bones, that for a split second he thought he might literally be so shaken by it that he would fall out of the tree.

  And it simply wouldn’t go away, not even as tears loosened in his eyes for the first time since he had seen his uncle murdered – what? five or six hours before? – and then seemed to flow in rivers down his cheeks, and then his chest seized up as he was racked with sobbing, which simply made the fear worse, since he was terrified the man would hear him crying. And yet from his sobbing he took a kernel of comfort, for it was an emotion he could embrace somehow and live through, whereas with the shocked fear he felt destabilised and there was nothing to embrace, for it was in control of him. He resisted the urge to cry out, and he held his breath expectantly instead, but there was nothing moving in the dark, nothing at all, not even an animal, and soon he started his inventory again, only this time he moved to the orchard and the Gravensteins, which he began to count, skipping the windfall dead, zeroing in and out only on the biggest fruit, filling them now in lugs he could miraculously lift all by himself and move back to the flatbed attached to the tractor. The lugs filled up like kitchen canisters when you poured in coffee beans or flour, and the flatbed sagged as if pregnant with the apples’ weight, and the sun sparkled on the red stripes of the fruit, while the yellow patches of the skin matched the buttery richness of the sun. And in his dream – or was it a waking dream? – he was somehow awash in a hillside of apples, which rolled without bruising, and when he woke this time light was dispelling the black syrup of the night and he could make out the ground in the distance and then a neighbouring Douglas fir next to the pepperwood which leaned against the third of the Monterey pines. And the birds were beginning to sing, or twitter really, tentatively talking as if tuning their throats like an orchestra’s instruments before the real playing begins, and he thought at once how pretty the blackbird’s song was – Maris had taught him to recognise the call – and then its significance hit him with full force. He’s gone. The birds are making noise so he’s not here.

  He lifted his head, and found his neck sore from the position he had fallen asleep in. Slowly he let his eyes cover the immediately adjacent area of woods, then as far as he could see, almost to the back edge of the trees. There was no sign of anyone, the bird calls had begun with intensity. His fear, lulled by falling asleep, now returned in full force. What should he do? The orchard was still as exposed as ever, but to go back towards the house seemed suicidal. The man in the yellow shirt could be hidden anywhere along the track, or in the rhododendrons of the pond’s edge, or even in the house itself, waiting patiently with that strange short gun.

  And what if the man had help now? The boy couldn’t stay where he was; with more than one searcher, he would be found. There was only one way to go: he would have to work his way the long way around to the road. He sat up on the bough, then lowered himself until he was suspended just above the pitched roof of the tree house, his arms wrapped around the pine branch. He let go, landing awkwardly on one side of the gable, and as he slid down he reached up and grabbed the roof line to stop himself. Then he crouched on his heels on the incline and listened. There was no birdsong now, but suddenly he heard a shout from near the pond. Moving carefully down the side of the roof, he dropped as lightly as he could onto the tree house floor and listened. Still nothing nearby, and he now quick
ly climbed down to the base of the big pine and without pause moved through the woods towards the back end of the pond. He played the Indian game Maris had played with him, alternately walking on his toes and his heels to deaden the noise, avoiding sticks as best he could.

  It was only a few hundred yards, but it seemed like miles – he had to keep from speeding up and making noise. There was poison oak here, which he would usually go to any lengths to avoid, but now it barely registered, and he concentrated only on taking a path which would be quietest. Short of the beginning of the Back Orchard he came to the edge of the wood, about a hundred yards past the end of the pond and the greenhouse. He crouched in the shelter of a large eucalyptus and waited. This was the one place where he would be totally exposed, crossing from these woods and climbing the rocky hill behind the greenhouse, from where he could run through the brush and woods out to the road.

  He tried to still his breathing, hoped it would slow as he stood up ready to run. One, two, three and he was off, one sneaker slipping slightly on the early morning dewy grass. Finding his grip again, he charged head down, waiting for a warning shout – or worse. He moved with legs pumping and arms going up and down, just as they had taught him on the track at school, and when he reached the bottom of the hill behind the greenhouse he didn’t stop but kept moving as fast as he could – it was the hill’s slant which was slowing him down, as he fought his way up the sandy, rocky soil, using his hands to push off the larger rocks, something he would normally never do since his uncle had warned him from the beginning that the rattlesnakes liked this sun-soaked place. He thought he heard a shout again in the distance, a loud startled cry, and as he reached the top of the hill he didn’t slow down at all, but merely straightened up and plunged into the woods, widening his eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness since the low morning sun was largely obscured here by the high growth of ferns – some as high as the boy – and the many trees, black and live oaks mixed with Douglas fir and the odd Madrone, gnarled in a desperate search for sun.