by Brian Hodge
Greg found wisdom in that, too.
*
The camp was split that evening when dusk claimed the forest. Two fires blazed in rings of stone—the boys had wanted one for themselves, and their fathers agreed it was a fine idea. These were men in the making, were they not?
Kyle watched his father and the others, some thirty feet away. Boisterous and frequently roaring with hilarity, all of them hoisting beers and indulging in backslapping intimacy. Talking of the closing baseball season, the coming football season. Women on TV and in the movies. Prostate glands.
Kyle turned back to their own fire, smaller…yet somehow a more thoughtful fire. Chad Deitz tended and fed it with unwavering devotion. They gazed into its depths, muted orange light reflecting from solemn faces. The hard glint of eyes, the dried maroon rite of passage still streaking every cheek, lifeblood of an animal that had forfeited itself to feed their bodies for a night, their spirits forever.
"What do you think Hell's like?" Kyle asked.
The other ten looked at him. Some quizzical, some surprised. A couple of the youngest with hesitant awe: He had said a word they were not allowed to speak at home.
"In Hell I bet you have to stay after school every day," said Chris Draper.
"The weather's always your least favorite season," this from Bobby Reinhart.
"They make you eat seconds on vegetables," Chad Deitz said, then his brother Matt shoved his shoulder and said, "No, all they serve is broccoli!" And one and all were repulsed.
Adam Golding made his bangs cockeyed with his fingers. "If you get a stupid haircut, it never grows out again."
"Then you're in Hell already," his older brother Coy said.
"And they never let you see the end of your favorite TV shows," came another voice from the outer circle, and this thought seemed to wound them as none other. Then they all laughed, at first skittishly, then with more assurance. Self-awareness.
A shift in wind sent woodsmoke drifting toward Kyle's face, and he shut his eyes. Breathed it, did not cough. As though his lungs were made for it, drawing from it something that older lungs could never strain.
How warm would it be tomorrow? Just once he would like to strip away his clothes, cover himself head to toe with mud, crouch still and silent beside quiet waters and see what his reflection looked like. The woods did that to you, he figured. Made you think of things you'd never even consider at home. Like a song you could never hear as long as a roof hung over your head.
Being out here forced you to listen…which was okay, because you wanted to. Not like school, where you had no choice and some days that made you want to throw some teacher down the stairs for it, just for underestimating you. Treating you like a child.
The darker it got, the louder that song played. And these wussies got shook up by the thought of missing the end of their favorite shows?
"I think in Hell," said Kyle, very slowly, and even the two eleven-year-olds in their circle quieted and paid attention, as if the right to speak had always been his, "you have to grow up and listen to a million people telling you what you should be like, no matter how stupid it sounds. And you can tell just by looking at them they don't know what they're talking about."
Silence. Just the feeding fire and the loud wet laughter from thirty feet away.
Kyle hitched a thumb over his shoulder and the others looked at their fathers, who they were. Illuminated by the fresh light of old wisdom and young eyes.
"They're all full of shit, you know."
And the other boys shrugged, then gave sheepish nods, one at a time, even the littlest ones, as if, yes, they had known that since they were born.
*
When I was in college, in my fraternity, we used to have very concrete ideas on what separated men from boys. Most of them involved alcohol, and the number of pubic scalps you claimed to dangle from your belt, belonging to members of our sister sorority or women we met at parties or the Greek bars.
We were wrong. I recognized that in time. But I miss those days, if not for their ideals, at least for their simplicity. We had an outlook and we stuck with it. It was only when I was in the real world that it all got so confusing.
Trying to find out what it meant to be a man, what answer would satisfy everybody. Going through life, then, attempting to become the epitome of the sensitive male, and wondering why so many women still seemed attracted to the abusers and reprobates. Becoming one of those for a while, and wondering why I felt so lousy about myself. Starting a family, finally, and wondering why I woke up one day and realized that I never truly knew what I was.
But realizing I wasn't alone. A lot of others out there were as confused as I was. For so long we'd been told who and what we were, what the women in our lives wanted us to be…was it any wonder we eventually turned to one another? We all sought that elemental male, that primal hairy man, buried inside each of us and who had been stilled for so long that we'd come to find his silence deafening.
How sure we were of ourselves, that we knew how to recapture the elusive bastard. Through shared memories and celebrations of our fathers and grandfathers, through ceremony and ritual.
Ho. Ho. Ho.
We were as lost as we ever were. Worse, I think. Because we didn't know it. The idiot with the wrong map is worse off than the idiot with none.
How clear that must have been to our sons.
Who saw, instead of patriarchs, pretenders.
And how clear that must have been to the primal man, buried so deep, beyond the reach of neurosis. The primal hairy man who looked into us all and recognized only those hearts in which he would find the warmest caves.
*
Dawn brought perplexity, confusion, and finally panic. Fathers awakening to discover that their sons were missing, all of them, from the oldest to the youngest. The emptied sleeping bags still conformed to the shape of their bodies, but no longer held their warmth.
Amid the mounting babble of fathers' voices—some charged with grave annoyance, others with worry—Greg tried his best to remain calm. There was a reason for this. All they need do was look for hints as to what the boys might have done.
Maybe they'd gone hunting on their own, someone suggested. Unlikely. None of the guns were missing. Gone off somewhere for a more private breakfast, a continuance of their solitary little powwow from last night? Again, unlikely. The food supply was unpilfered.
Someone suggested wolves, and although it was a ludicrous explanation, it nevertheless gave them a moment's taste of terror. Minnesota's woods were home to over a thousand, and they could be heard at night this far north, their cries from the heart of desolation. Only after that initial grip of fear passed did a few of the fathers heap ridicule on the man who'd brought it up, but the moment was enough. Their nerves were jangling.
"Hey. Look. What's with the drums?" Charlie Draper was over by one of the SUVs, fists on hips, looking down in confusion.
Their tribal drums lay in an unceremonious jumble. Hollows open top and bottom, the stiff hides beside them like a pile of discarded tissues.
"The lacings," someone said. "They took the rawhide lacings."
Zack Deitz swore. Boys would be boys—they all knew that, all cherished that. But desecrating the drums, now that was just too much to excuse.
Fathers' voices took to the air, calling for their sons, then waiting, calling again. Never a reply. The boys were either out of earshot or were refusing to answer, and Greg passed the next hour with mounting distress as they fixed their breakfast eggs and sausages and coffee while waiting for their sons to return. Maybe the scent of food would lure them back.
An hour, though, was enough, by unanimous vote. This had ceased to be cute. Or funny. Or dismissed as the serendipity of youth. This was rude and disrespectful, and any kid thinking it would be tolerated had another thing coming.
They would go out and find their sons, bring them back like men, fugitives to face their crimes. They needed someone to linger back at the camp, though, in case th
e boys slipped past the searchers to return unseen. Someone would have to keep them here. Brent Piercy got the nod, since he had bunions, and blisters from yesterday's hunt. He seemed relieved.
The other seven laced their boots and began a northerly trek, back into the deeper woodland they'd walked the day before. There was a lot of talk of what to do once the boys turned up. Cutting the weekend short with most of Sunday before them would suit the crime, if they were here primarily for the boys' sake…but what a shame to penalize themselves that way.
Make the boys sit out the rest of the day in the vehicles, then. Time out, like a penalty box. Without their damn Gameboys.
On they walked, north, driven by instinct and impulse, some deep-rooted knowledge that this was the direction their sons had gone. As if they could smell the passage lingering in the air, a scent trail left by bodies they had seen grow from babies tiny enough to be seated in a cupped pair of father's hands.
So much forest. Greg found it easy to liken it to the imponderability of deep space. Trying to grasp the idea of space going on forever, without containment. No boundary ahead to mark its end, the beginning of something else. Just more of the same, eternally—just like these accursed trees, nurtured over decades and centuries, and the forest floor, rich with the rot of forever.
Greg felt the pendulum swing, the slow hours marked by the shortening of the trees' shadows, until they were dark puddles beneath a noonday sun. Then they began to lengthen again, in the opposite direction. Shadows reaching for the cusp of night, and the longer they got, the more it seemed that everyone out here was a babe in the woods.
The fathers began to find the clothes in late afternoon—a shoe here, a shirt there—and the growing catalogue of punishments began giving way to a hunger to simply clutch their sons again. Hold them close, smell them, rub in the reassurance of their existence.
"This is Chad's," said Zack Deitz. He held a small blue sweatshirt in both hands. Looking up, then, at the others, with so much unsaid, but then, where was the need? They were all feeling the same things. "Getting late, we better split up…"
Greg went wherever Deitz pointed him. Deitz was the hunter, Deitz should know. In this moment, the wisdom of fatherhood seemed to Greg an inflated concept. His son was missing and he could not take charge, wishing only for someone more skilled than he to tell him where to look, what to do. Wanting a stronger back than his to bear this terrible apprehension.
Walking. Walking. Feet crunching leaves, twigs, the shadows straining before him as he watched. Daylight didn't just die in woods this deep—it was murdered, and bled black. He could hear, from near and far, the voices of fathers calling for their sons. But they were supplanted by the distant howls of a wolfpack, a shrill and mournful chorus that could chill the spine of any two-foot.
He was going in circles, snagging himself on thorns and underbrush, staring at trees whose pattern of branches looked familiar. Had he passed them just five minutes ago, ten? The same trees made different by waning light, by new shadows flooding in to fill the void? The voices of his brethren seemed to dwindle with the sun.
He turned his head. Off to his right, a sound, faint—the whimper of a child, frightened by evening and slouching in guilt? Greg quickened his hesitant stride, tore past trees and ferns and rotting logs, and the sound grew louder, he was homing in with unerring accuracy—
And found him. Charlie Draper, the optometrist nearly blind without his glasses. Tied against a tree, back first, so tightly he might as well have been moss. Blinking madly, and words were beyond him, Greg could see that now. Someone had lashed a rawhide strip across the corners of his mouth so tightly that his lips were skinned back over his teeth in a grotesque rictus.
Impulses were many and conflicting: to help, to run, to summon the others. But in the wild, Greg dimly understood, a moment of hesitation could be the line between victor and vanquished.
And just before they blindsided him, to make swift work of his skull and knees with their crude bludgeons, he caught glimpses: flashes of their young bodies, quick and lithe, caked with mud. And their eyes, crazed by a hunger that went deeper than their bellies.
When he awoke, Greg realized that he was in the same predicament Charlie Draper had been. Made a part of some tree, tied around the torso and legs with vines; arms stretched around back, wrists lashed together on the far side of the trunk. The rawhide lacing around his wrists and face and neck had been tied while wet, very tight, and Greg sobbed. As it dried, it would begin to shrink, and tighten even more. Painful? Excruciating would be no exaggeration before long. Where had the boys learned this trick? Had it just come to them? Had they tilted their heads to the night and trees, and listened?
Then he remembered: When they were first making their drums, someone had said the finished instruments would sound far more resonant if the heads and lashings were soaking wet when tied over the frames. The suggestion had been voted down. They would have to wait too long for the skins to dry before they would be able to start pounding them.
Greg surmised that he and the rest had been tied far from one another, for better isolation. He remembered seeing the boys passing through the trees before he'd come fully conscious again. Retaining this image of them, thin and spindly-legged, somehow more powerful in their nudity, total or near, than they had ever appeared in Little League uniforms. Smeared with mud, they looked to be from another time entirely. A few carried torches made from branches and leaves, and rags that might once have been their clothes.
And, of course, they gave deference to a chieftain.
*
My Kyle.
What we, as fathers, had hoped to find out here, maybe it came effortlessly to our sons. As much as it hurts to admit it, maybe we were too far gone.
Or maybe what we'd hoped to find has more sentience than I ever credited it with, and by stealth it took our sons, took them mind and heart and soul. Whispering to them in the night, in their dreams.
Or maybe we just drove them crazy all on our own, with our sad games.
Whatever happened to them, should I hate our sons because they fulfilled our purpose the only way that made sense to them? Isn't mythology full of elders usurped by their sons?
Maybe it's best this way, that they start by making a clean break, claiming their heritage by force. And leaving us, their sacrificed fathers, to rot on our trees, our bones turned into totems to remind them where they'd come from.
And so I wait. Strangulation and dehydration will claim us long before any searchers will find us.
And so. I wait. Still unable to hate my son.
Hoping only that, before I die, I can at least manage to find that long-lost boy inside myself. Turn him loose, set him free.
Because my final failing should not be being too old to learn.
GUARDIAN
The first time it’s pills, the wimp’s way out, nothing bloody or messy, and that appeals because you’ve never been big on pain—obviously not, since you’ve finally reached this ultimate tipping point.
Think of it as an afternoon snack: a large helping of Seconal washed down with milk to coat the stomach. You’ve researched your plans enough to know that alcohol sometimes makes people retch everything up. An hour earlier you took a dose of Dramamine to alleviate nausea and increase your odds of keeping it all down. Finally, to make doubly sure you won’t be getting up from the sofa, you stretch out with a plastic bag slipped over your head, cinched around your neck with a rubber band.
While waiting for the barbiturates to kick in, you use a couple of fingers to stretch the rubber band away from your neck and let in enough air in so you can still breathe, so you won’t panic. You know your hand will fall away soon enough.
And it does.
The next thing you know, if through a muddled haze, another pair of hands is ripping the bag open over your face as though revealing the real you from behind a birth caul, and he forces a tube as far back as your tonsils, squeezing some fluid in that you have no choice but to swallow
, and he’s barely gotten the tube back out before your stomach starts to rumble and heave, and so much for not making a mess.
Except now you’re still going to be alive to clean up this one.
“Better out than in,” he says, and scrutinizes what has just come out of you in a series of geysers. “You’re lucky. They’re hardly digested. You know, you mess up a thing like this, you can wake up with a lifetime of liver damage to look forward to.”
“Lucky,” you murmur, and it feels like shouting.
He nods at one of the splashes. “You shouldn’t wait too long to clean that up. Nice summer day like this, that milk’ll stink a fright pretty soon.”
There’s a mop in the utility closet waiting to erase your failure. Better luck next time, maybe.
“I turned the phone back on,” he says. “Would you like me to call anyone?”
You tell him no, that there isn’t anyone. Which is part of the problem, isn’t it, and you’re pretty sure he knows that already.
“Well, then. I’ll let myself out,” he says.
But you can’t recall ever hearing the door.
*
The second time you think to hell with it: Go ahead, leave a mess. It will be fast, as fast as a speeding bullet, so there can be no time for pain. As long as you’re halfway competent, there won’t be any living through this. All you have to do is get the angle right, avoid doing something stupid like aiming through your cheek at the last instant. At least it makes you laugh a little, the thought of life after such a blunder, people in restaurants staring at the food falling out the hole in the side of your face.
You found it surprising, how much easier the gun was to get than the pills. For all the Seconal you wanted, you had to lie to three doctors, a story about how you were job hunting, and extreme anxiety was keeping you awake nights before interviews that you ended up blowing, and milder tranqs weren’t working. The used .38 revolver? That was only a quick matter of paperwork, and you didn’t even have to lie.
