Jeremy laughed and took off after him. "Come on!"
There's something about being left behind, even when you never wanted to go along in the first place. Somewhere behind me, I heard the rumble of the freight train again, like a nudge back to reality. But I watched Jeremy running after the kid, and all I remember was that I didn't want to get left behind. I didn't want to be left standing alone on the tracks.
Jeremy laughed again, and tossed a rock that skipped off a tie, struck the tracks, and dug into the dirt. He was running a good thirty yards in front of me now.
I thought if I cut across the tracks I might be able to catch them before they entered the woods. But that was only assuming the kid remained headed in that direction. He might just as easily cut off toward the station, and try to lose us in the confusion of people and buildings.
From behind me, I heard the rumble of the train again. The sound had grown into a near roar by now, and only distantly at first, I realized it was right on my heels. I glanced back, startled to find myself in the growing shadow of the huge black mass.
A whistle blew.
Jeremy screamed something at the kid, something I couldn't hear, and then tossed another rock.
Andy Bale looked over his shoulder, his eyes red and shining back a terror like I'd never seen before, and in that instant, like some sort of clairvoyance, I knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to cut across the tracks in front of the train. I suppose I would have done the same thing if our roles had been reversed and I had been the one in front, running for his life. It was a decent bet, by the looks of it. The train didn't stop here. It went right on through to Kingston Mills, hauling seventy or eighty cars behind it. If he made it, Andy Bale would have himself a good five minute head start before we ever even got a glimpse of the caboose.
Jeremy screamed again: "What's the rush, Bale!"
To this day, I'm not sure if he knew the train was coming or not.
Andy knew it, though. He glanced back at Jeremy, and then made a break across the tracks.
I heard the train's whistle blow, and the screech of brakes, and though I couldn't be certain, I thought I also heard the sound of impact. There was the commotion of black shadows beneath the belly of the engine, and the long, almost endless slide of the train down the tracks, its wheels locked and screaming. My mind, I suppose, filled in most of the rest.
After the train came to a stop, I looked to Jeremy, who was standing motionless not far from where he had let go of that last rock. His face was pale, his lips trembling. He stared, dark-eyed, at the place in the tracks where Andy Bale had tried to out run the train. Then Jeremy fell to his knees, his hands curled into a fist, his eyes closed tightly, his mouth open wide with one, long, defiant sound: "Noooooooo!"
For a moment, I felt caught between hating him and feeling sorry for him. Then he raised his head, and I could see the darkness behind his eyes, and all I could feel was a cold shiver rattle through me.
It might have been an accident.
Or it might have been on purpose.
I guess I'll never know for sure.
But I know this: even though Andy Bale died that day, they didn't find his body for another week. And when they did find it, it wasn't packed under the belly of a freight train. It was lying at the bottom of the cliff at Dead Man's Lookout.
No one ever knew the difference, I suppose. No one except me and Jeremy. The engineer got out and hunted around for nearly half-an-hour before deciding he hadn't hit the kid after all.
But I knew.
Jeremy Taft had sent Andy Bale on a little excursion through space and time. And by the time Andy had arrived at his final destination it was some six or seven days later and a good twelve miles up the line.
I knew.
And so did Jeremy Taft.
I put away my thoughts of Andy as I turned into the gravel driveway of the old Victorian. Jeremy Taft, now an adult, was sitting on the steps of the front porch, his back against the handrail. He had changed over the years, as I guess we all had. But I would have recognized him anywhere. It was the eyes that gave him away. Those dark, impassive eyes. His hair had thinned a bit, though not much, and he was wearing glasses now – thick wire rims. He looked as if he had grown into his perfect weight, just under six feet tall and maybe a hundred-and-seventy pounds. He waved, without a smile.
"Hope I'm not late," I said as I climbed out of the car. It was hot out, close to ninety-five by the feel of it, though it was blessedly dry and not too humid.
Jeremy checked his watch. "Nope. Looks like you're on the early side."
"Good. I hate waiting for people, and I hate making people wait for me."
"Me, too," he said. "Sometimes, though, we don't have much choice, do we? Whether we like it or not."
We shook hands, the grip firm, like two young kids, each trying to hold his own in a test of nerves. In a way, I guess that's exactly what we were doing. Each trying to hold his own.
"It's been a while," he said, with a smile that was empty.
"Yeah, I guess it has."
"You're looking good."
"A little weight here, a little balding there, but I feel good." I looked up at the house, wanting to escape his gaze as much as anything. "You wanna have a look at her?"
Jeremy checked his watch again. "Sure. Why not?"
Even with the succession of renters, the house had been well kept. I had only been inside once, shortly after the most recent couple had vacated. The original furnishings had stayed with the house after Jeremy and his mother had moved away. Though the realty company had had to replace the curtains upstairs, as well as the mattress in the guest room. Everything else had held up rather well, I thought.
Jeremy stood in the entryway and glanced toward the living room, an unreadable expression cut into his face. "It looks ... smaller," he said, rather quietly.
"Does it?"
"Yes." He ran his fingers across the top of a pine chest that stood against the foyer wall, leaving a thin line in the dust that he hardly seemed to notice. "I always loved the feel of this house. It was the only place that ever really felt like home."
I followed him across a patterned throw rug, past the fireplace, and around a corner that led into the kitchen. The house was furnished modestly in a style that you might call country or farmhouse. The kitchen, which opened to a family dining area, looked cluttered and chaotic at first glance. But if you looked closer, gradually you realized that everything had a place and it was all fairly-well organized. There was an open-faced china cabinet in one corner, empty now, though the family living here most recently had lined it with a set of Danish stoneware, as well as a beautiful collection of ceramic goblets.
Jeremy paused next to the tile-lined sink, and stared out the window into the back yard. "You never came by to visit when we were kids, did you?" he asked absently.
"No, I don't think I ever did."
"You remember Melissa Jenkins?"
“Sure."
"She came by once," he said. He seemed melancholy all of a sudden, and that seemed completely out of character with the Jeremy Taft I remembered from my childhood. "Is she still around?"
I tried to recall the last time I had seen her. It had been years ago now, not long after I had graduated from high school. She had been coming out of Morgan's Five & Dime with her mother, and I had nearly knocked her over in my hurry to get to my summer job at the Rexall soda fountain. I apologized. She looked away, a hint of fear crossing her face. And I remember thinking what an odd duck she had become. She had never fully recovered from that summer, I imagined, when she had disappeared for those four days.
"I think she moved upstate somewhere," I said to Jeremy. "Sometime around ‘85.”
"Oh." He sounded disappointed.
We followed the layout of the house, through the kitchen and a small utility area where there was a washing machine and a dryer. There was a small family room on the other side, and beyond that the entryway at the bottom of the stair
case where we had started the tour.
Jeremy stopped and glanced at his watch again. It was about twenty minutes after two now. He sat down on the bottom step, buried his head in his hands a moment, then sighed and looked up at me. It was the first time we had made direct eye contact, and I turned away almost immediately.
“Still scared of me?" he asked.
Maybe not scared, I thought. Maybe just uneasy. Fear has a way of inflating itself if you don't keep a check on it, and I suppose I had spent the last twenty-odd years trying to pretend it didn't really exist. But a trace of it was back now, like Jeremy Taft himself, and I felt like a little boy again. I hated myself for it, but I felt like a frightened little boy.
"I'm not the same person," he said. "I know what I was like back then, but things change. We all grow up, Dave. We all have regrets."
"Is that why you're back? Regrets?"
He checked his watch again. "In a way, I suppose. Partly that, and partly to fix things that should have been fixed a long time ago."
"Things like what?" For the first time, I began to feel the stuffiness inside the house. It had been closed up all summer, and the air was thick and hot. I wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead, hating the idea of being middle-aged, especially when it showed itself so easily.
"Just ... things," he said with a thoughtful pause. Then he looked up at me, his eyes not quite as dark, but still serious, still very serious. "You ever think about that kid ... Andy? The one at the rail yards that summer?"
"Yeah. Sometimes."
"Me, too. I don't think I've ever been as scared in my life as I was that day," he said. "I never meant to hurt him. Not really."
"Yes, you did."
Jeremy looked up at me, as surprised as I was by what I had said. "Not seriously. Not like that. I just wanted to scare him, that's all."
"Well, you did that."
"Yeah, I guess I did," he said regretfully.
"Is that why you came back? To make peace with Andy Bale?"
He shook his head. "No, not with Andy. With Melissa."
"Melissa?"
"I told you she came by once, didn't I?"
"Yeah, but..." But it had seemed like a casual, almost unimportant comment at the time. Now, though, I realized there had been nothing casual about it. It had been a comment designed to solicit information.
Jeremy looked away again, staring out the big picture window in the living room, staring out beyond the front yard somewhere. "Christ," he said, fighting somewhere inside himself. "I don't know where to start, Dave. I've been looking for an explanation all my life. Why it was me. Why not you or that Andy kid or the kid down the block? What was it that made me so different from everyone else? For a long time I wanted to blame it on my mother. She was all caught up in the drug scene in the sixties, and I guess I thought, well, maybe..."
He caught himself and fell silent, and I had the feeling he had gone round and round with it a thousand times before. Then he checked his watch again. "Getting close to two-thirty," he said.
"What's supposed to happen at two-thirty, Jeremy?"
"A trip down memory lane, I'm afraid." He stood up, brushed some dust away from his jeans, and started up the stairs. "Coming?"
I had come this far, hadn't I? It wasn't because I had wanted to, at least not initially. But now that I was here, I found myself wondering about the past again. What was it about the past that had always kept me looking back? And wasn't it getting time to start looking forward again? I had come this far. I had stared into the great black gullet of my memories of Jeremy Taft, and what I had found was a man not that much different from myself, a man uneasy with who he was, uncertain with who he is.
I followed.
"The first time it happened," he said at the top of the stairs, "it scared the holy hell out of me. I had just turned thirteen, and I was playing in the backyard with our neighbor's cat. Roughhousing, I guess you would have called it. Anyway, I got a little rough, and I was holding the cat tight with both hands around its neck when it panicked and scratched me across the face. I didn't drop it, like you might expect. Instead, I closed my eyes and I thought the cat away. I wanted it somewhere else, in some other time, and I couldn't stop my hands from squeezing down against its throat."
"You wanted to kill it?"
"I suppose, in that moment, that's exactly what I wanted."
"Because it had scratched you and now you were angry?"
Jeremy stopped and looked at me, a trace of shame in his expression. "I was always angry back then. Always. It felt like I was standing on one side of the fence and everyone else was on the other side. Me against the world."
"Did you kill it?"
"I think so. I think I did to that cat what I did to Andy Bale. Because when I opened my eyes again, the cat was gone. For a couple of days, I thought my rage must have been so intense that I had somehow made the cat disappear. All I could remember was the instant anger that had exploded out of me, and the image of the cat lying in the bottom of the garbage can with its neck broken." Jeremy looked away again, the memory apparently as fresh as ever in his mind. "Then my Mom asked me to empty the trash one night ..."
He didn't need to finish the sentence, because we both knew where it was going. He had found the neighbor's cat, dead, in the bottom of the trash can, its neck twisted and badly misshapen.
"You'd think I would have felt like the most powerful person in the world, and I guess I'd be lying if I told you any different. But that wasn't the all of it, because it had scared me something awful. Not only scared me, but made me realize that I wasn't like everyone else. I was like that guy who killed all those nurses that one night."
"Richard Speck?"
Jeremy nodded. "Like him and like Manson and the Zodiac."
There was an open landing at the top of the stairs. Across the opening, the bedroom door was slightly ajar and I could see the leaves and branches of a dogwood tree through the window at the far end of the room.
"I don't think I'll ever know for sure if I killed Andy Bale or if the train killed him," Jeremy said quietly. He followed my glance toward the master bedroom, then turned his attention down the short hallway to our right. "This way."
I followed him down the hallway to the far end, where there was a foldaway stepladder built into the ceiling. A rope dangled freely from an eye hook screwed into the base of the facing material. Above us was the attic.
"Melissa Jenkins came by one afternoon when my Mom was away at work," Jeremy said. He gave the rope a pull, the ceiling opened up and the stepladder descended. He checked his watch again, and then started up.
I hesitated at the bottom, looking up into the attic where it seemed the afternoon sun had rarely come to visit. I had come this far, and somehow the journey had become our journey, a little of Jeremy's, a little of mine. I still didn't fully understand what it was all about. But I thought it had something to do with putting the past to rest, and that was something we both needed to do. "What are you looking for, Jeremy?"
"The same thing we're all looking for," he said. "A little peace of mind, that's all."
The attic was three or four inches short of headroom. It had been used mostly for storage over the years, and though it was empty now, I could see faint outlines in the dust where old boxes full of clothing and used toys had once sat. Off to one side, there was a stack of two-by-fours, some R-19 fiberglass insulation, and half a panel of sheetrock.
Jeremy, resting at the top of the ladder on bent knees, took a long look around the room. "It looks smaller than I remember."
"Things from childhood usually do," I said.
"No, not like that. It looks..." He paused, appearing mildly confused.
"They added a wall," I said.
"What?"
"The last renters. They built an insulating wall across the north side. To save on the heating bills."
"Oh, Christ." Jeremy glanced at his watch, and then took a quick look around the room, this time nearly in a panic. "We've got to
break through that wall," he said.
"I don't understand."
"She's going to end up behind the wall."
"Who?"
"Melissa."
He made his way across the dust-covered floor, to the stack of two-by-fours, and found one near the top that was maybe three feet in length. "Grab yourself something you can use to knock out a hole," he said.
I didn't move for a moment. "Jesus, Jeremy, what's going on?"
And then I heard it.
We both heard it.
A scream from the other side of the north wall.
"Oh, my God."
“It's Melissa," Jeremy said. He was at the wall now, his ear pressed up against the sheetrock. The scream had suddenly cut off, and now you could hear the faint sound of someone crying on the other side. "Shhh, we'll get you out of there. Just hold on."
"Hurry," she said. "Please hurry."
Jeremy's face was still pale as he raised the stick of lumber and brought it down against the panel of sheetrock. I had never seen panic on his face before. Even at the moment that Andy Bale had darted across the tracks in front of the train. Jeremy had appeared upset then, the way a little boy who's caught doing something wrong might get upset. But this was different. This was genuine anguish, I thought.
Another scream exploded from behind the wall.
Jeremy had made a small indentation in the sheetrock, offset to one side. He raised the two-by-four again, brought it down again, and the indentation grew into a small hole.
I had watched this, captivated, unable to move, not completely understanding what was going on. And then suddenly I was next to him, in concert, beating a stick of pine against the wall like an old lineman pounding a spike into the dry, brittle earth. Whatever it was that was happening would have to be sorted out later.
Through Shattered Glass Page 7
