Seeing his house, something he and Mary had worked and saved for, brought all of it back. He should have been proud of this place, despite the desperation they both shared in trying to pay for it. But it was built after that night in the Adirondacks; it was built during this fever dream of remorse, and, because of all that, it seemed to sag in under the weight of the past, sinking slowly into the wet soil. Every time he set foot inside, he felt it sink deeper.
He pulled into the driveway, and something in the trees behind the house drew his attention. He looked but saw nothing in particular, as if his animal brain had registered something important but his civilized, human mind could not put the pieces together. He stared into the trees that led to that marshland farther back. The leaves hadn’t changed yet. It was a warm autumn, everything hanging on, living out their last days to the fullest and brightest. No. He didn’t see anything. It was nerves, imagination, ghosts of the past. Jonathan wandered into those trees occasionally with Jacob, helping the boy explore the woods the way Jonathan had done when he was young. It was always muddy, even when there were weeks without rain. Jacob liked it, but he wasn’t the only one. About an acre back, at the edge of the marsh, they found a clearing in the trees with a small circle of rocks for a fire and benches made of carved-out deadwood. Liquor bottles and old beer cans littered the forest floor here. Jonathan hoped it was teenagers and not some wayward vagrants. He didn’t like the thought of strange men loitering in the woods so near the home where his boy played and his wife stayed home alone much of the day. Teenagers being stupid was one thing, but bums using the clearing as some sort of camp downright disturbed him. Since making that discovery, Jacob couldn’t go into the woods alone. He always had to be within sight of the back porch and either Jonathan or Mary would be there watching him. It wasn’t enough having to worry about the bears and coyotes that frequented the area during the summer; now he had to be concerned about whatever weirdos could be hanging around in the woods near his home.
He stepped inside, shut the front door, and felt the house sink a bit more. It seemed strangely quiet. Images flashed into Jonathan’s brain from old, forgotten television programs and commercials that showed a father arriving home and his family running to greet him happily at the door. But that was not the case. He found Mary at the kitchen table, poring over her computer, her thick brown hair resting on her shoulders, glasses perched on a small nose.
She looked up and smiled with quiet, wet eyes and said, “Are you okay?” He wasn’t sure if she asked because of Gene’s wake or if it was a more generalized question. Either way the answer was no. How many times had she begged him to come clean? To fess up to whatever was lingering inside him, but he couldn’t – he wouldn’t. It would destroy everything in one fell swoop. Although, maybe this slow destruction was worse. He couldn’t tell and he hadn’t the courage to test it.
“Where’s Jacob?” he said.
“In his room, playing. How was the wake?”
“About as you’d expect it to be. Lot of people, though. So that’s good, I suppose. I’m meeting Conner and Michael tonight. Talk about things.”
“That’s good,” she said. “You all should get together and talk this through. It’s been too long, and I’m sure this is hard on each of you.”
“Right,” he said and nodded appreciatively. He tried to look her in the eyes, but she turned away and that hurt most of all. She hadn’t touched him in a couple of weeks now. They hadn’t made love for two months. They were less husband and wife now than roommates with a shared responsibility.
“You need to get out more,” she said. “You know I worry about you. You need to reconnect with your friends or make new ones or something. Do something you love again. You always just work. It’s not a way to live your life.”
When they were first together, every weekend, every day, seemed a celebration. Jonathan did things he loved with the people he loved – hunting, fishing, camping with thirty packs and fires and the sweet smell of marijuana lifting into the darkness. They began their relationship under those circumstances – laughter and joy and good times with good friends. But that dissolved away. Friends fall away, children and responsibilities take up time and drive wedges into relationships. The good times give way to those long, gray days of blandness. He supposed it was just life, the way things were meant to be, and accepted it as best he could. Mary felt differently. She tried to jog him out of his despair and laziness. She was probably the only wife in the world who was actively trying to push her husband out of the house to go mingle with his old buddies and hopefully rejuvenate that old spark of life in him. She had married a young, dynamic man who dreamed of being a writer someday, a Hemingway-like creature, who took the world as his hallowed hunting ground. What she had now was a thirty-eight-year-old man who seemed broken, and, unlike her patients at the hospital, there was no way to tell what was wrong or how to fix him. Instead, she could only watch as he descended further into whatever dark depression grew from within.
Jonathan knew all this. He knew what he had been and he knew what he’d become. None of this was what he’d intended when they first wed, but he was so far down this hole he didn’t know where to start, how to get back on track. He couldn’t give up on this life, this family – it was all he had. He knew it had all started that one night ten years ago, but the past remains unchangeable and so too, it seemed, did his future.
Something had to break eventually. Something would have to give.
Jonathan heard a pair of feet hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and Jacob appeared around the corner. The boy smiled, happily yelled, “Daddy!”, then ran and jumped into Jonathan’s arms. He caught the boy with a whoompf of exhalation and twisted his body in such a way to keep the boy’s knees from landing squarely in his crotch. Jonathan held his son for a moment, then patted him on the bottom and asked him how his day had been. Jacob was the spitting image of Jonathan as a seven-year-old boy – light brown hair, blue eyes, baby fat melting away, his face radiating innocence that tragically would be lost in time. Jacob was a quiet boy. An only child at this point, and, as far as Jonathan could tell, he would remain an only child for the foreseeable future.
When Mary first announced she was pregnant, he had feigned excitement as much as possible, but inside, he was afraid. Afraid that somehow the sins of his past would be transferred to his unborn son.
Jonathan ran his fingers through Jacob’s thick hair, feeling the contours of his scalp, thinking of how easily everything can be broken and praying to whatever god he could find that his one and only son be spared. There was still love inside him; his love raged at times, made him feel strong and even insane with it. But those surges of emotion did not last for long – they couldn’t. He looked in Jacob’s eyes for a moment before he placed the boy back on his feet and made for the television room.
“Try not to drink too much while you’re out,” Mary said.
He looked at her. She was still sitting at the table, her face resting in her hand as if she were bored, but looking up at him. “I still love you, you know,” she said. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. Jacob and I need you here.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking back down at her. “I know.”
Chapter Two
Jonathan hadn’t been to the East Side Tavern in years. It was their old hangout, but he, Conner and Michael had put it behind them. Gene never had. He remained their regular, their best customer, even when he became increasingly pathetic. Jonathan stopped and bought a pack of cigarettes at a gas station. He didn’t normally smoke but wanted an excuse to step outside the bar, take in the night air and escape the Braddick brothers, if necessary. He wasn’t sure what they wanted or what they had in store for him, but he remained concerned. The more history people share, the more likely they are to do horrible things to each other.
The East Side Tavern was a single, stand-alone brick building beside a busy road that served dra
ught beer to lonely men and women working through multiple divorces, and underage kids who could fake a decent enough ID to get a shrug from the bartender. Most people drove by and didn’t realize it was there. There were a couple of cars out front and more in the back when Jonathan arrived. He recognized Conner’s and Michael’s cars in the rear parking lot. It was dark now, and the only neon in the bar windows was the open sign, which occasionally shut off early on dull weekday nights like tonight. Inside was a dark hovel with old wooden tables and shadowy booths. The walls sparkled with liquor bottles. The televisions played endless loops of ESPN – old Red Sox games that seemed broadcast from the other side of time. Jonathan saw the bartender – a middle-aged woman with large, dyed blonde hair and a shirt revealing her flabby midriff – serving pitchers of cheap beer with red plastic cups, part of Gene’s sad memorial special for the evening. Behind the bar was a large picture of Gene, trimmed with smaller pictures of him in various stages of drunken exploits and a small sign that read, ‘We Will Miss You’. He was well known here, and, Jonathan imagined, so were his former friends who had left him to wither in his last years. The bartender eyed him as he walked inside. Five or six bleary-eyed mourners seated at the bar turned, stared hard at him for a moment and then went back to watching colors and figures move across television screens, whispering into their drinks, leaning left and right to converse in muted tones. Everyone seemed strangely familiar, as if they were people he actually knew wearing skin masks, staring at him with an eerie intimacy.
He feared for a moment that Gene had told them stories of his old friends who weren’t there for him anymore, who had run off, started families and left Gene behind with his dark and terrible secret. Perhaps those men at the bar were plotting his demise.
He saw Conner and Michael seated beside each other in a booth. A yellow pitcher of beer and several cups sat on the table. They were playing some kind of game like drunken frat boys, trying to flip one cup placed upside down at the edge of the table and have it land inside a second empty cup placed right-side up. It was one of those small competitions that drive brothers, and Jonathan watched as they kept trying over and over in rapid succession. Even after landing one inside the other, they kept going. Conner trying to gently and accurately hit his target with soft and subtle flips of his fingers, only forcing the cup into the air enough to clear the white lip and slide into position. Michael, much more forceful, flipping the plastic container higher into the air, causing it to spin end over end several times before either bouncing off the Formica-topped table or rumbling into its intended position like a nesting doll. They kept going and going at it like obsessives.
As kids, the Braddick brothers were better than nearly everyone else at small feats of accuracy and skill. Not athletes in the usual sense of the word, but rather savants at things most other people thought unworthy of practice. It made them great fun at parties. Conner would perform a card trick and Michael would dominate a drinking game. They were masters – not of games but of parlor tricks. Their funny little skills helped them slide into social circles, made them popular and well liked. Jonathan had tagged along for most of his life, ridden their coattails into adulthood. Personally, he never saw the point of these ridiculous little games.
But watching their cup-flipping at the booth reminded him of when they began to hunt together with Conner’s and Michael’s uncle when they were all in high school. Conner would fell a buck from two hundred yards with a light and fast bullet; Michael would put a shotgun slug in its heart from fifty feet away because he had baited the deer in with female scent and whistled so it perked its head, exposing its flank. They were good hunters. Jonathan was lucky if he got a doe the entire season, and Gene was largely along for the beer and camaraderie. But Conner and Michael took it seriously, as if it were the ultimate parlor trick – touch the trigger and poof! the deer has disappeared.
Even after all this time and all they had been through, Michael still hunted. He was the only one. For what reason he continued, Jonathan couldn’t understand. Maybe it was Michael’s ability to rationalize and compartmentalize life into little boxes and equations. For him it always seemed so simple, so mechanical. Fix the problem; no need to let the defective part affect the rest of the machine. With Conner, he was less sure. Conner had the ability to put something out of his mind enough to pretend it never happened in the first place. His ability to adjust and adapt meant that he was equally talented at covering things up that would impact his life and ambitions. Indeed, the whole cover-up was his idea. He had pushed it harder than anyone, supposedly in order to save their lives.
The Braddick brothers looked up as Jonathan sidled into the booth like a third wheel imposing on an exquisite date. They shook hands and nodded to each other like old business partners. The waitress brought another pitcher and Jonathan poured a cup. He glanced back at the bar and caught some latent stares. The owner of East Side was now behind the bar with arms crossed, watching them. No longer in their suits from the wake earlier in the evening, Jonathan and the Braddick brothers were dressed like every other man in the bar – heavy fabrics, denim and flannel, and old jackets that seemed stitched from burlap, worn when raking leaves on weekends or working on the car. They blended in perfectly, but still the others stared as if an aura of guilt hung over their heads – or maybe targets on their backs.
They quietly toasted their beers. The brothers were a bit drunker than they let on – Michael had a wet glaze over his eyes and Conner was slightly flushed. Jonathan sensed the opportunity to tie one on without judgmental eyes. He drank his beer fast and poured another. He looked at the brothers from across the table. “So. Is this some kind of tribute? A commiseration?”
“Something like that,” Michael said. Conner was busy tapping on his phone.
“How’s Annie doing?”
“She’s fine. Same old thing. New job, heading up HR. We stay busy.” Michael and Annie had married three years ago and had been trying to have children ever since. It was a small town and people talked. Although the men rarely spoke, all their respective wives stayed in touch, unaware and unaffected by the wedge that drove their husbands apart. They had all been friends years ago, and despite the busy lives of children and jobs, the women remained friends enough to know what was happening in each other’s lives. Mary occasionally told him of Annie’s troubles. Jonathan couldn’t help but see some kind of cosmic connection.
Jonathan looked to Conner. “It’s been a while. How’s Madison and the kids?” Conner had a son one year younger than Jacob, a daughter and another on the way.
“I coached T-ball this past spring,” he said. “Fourteen little kids trying to run around the bases. It was a bit of a nightmare. Aria is starting school next year.”
“Madison make up your mind for you to do that?” Jonathan caught himself being an asshole for no reason.
Conner smiled slyly and drank his beer. He was the most successful of them all, which made sense. He lived in a large house atop a hill in town with isolated and sweeping views. Madison was the archetypal suburban mother and wife, a woman from a moneyed family, who left her nursing job to raise the children, creating a life that was by the book, directly out of a magazine or a made-for-television movie. She determined life should be as proscribed by Redbook and planned accordingly. She stayed attractive enough to put on a black dress and wow businessmen at company dinners and fierce enough to run the Parent Teacher Association. Even when they were dating the world could see where Conner’s life was leading.
“When’s the last time you went out?” Michael said.
Jonathan stared long and hard at Michael. “I haven’t hunted in ten years, Mike.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Conner said.
“I didn’t stop,” Michael said. “It wouldn’t make a difference either way.” He shifted in his seat, rocking back and forth slightly like a child grown excited. “Got an eight-pointer last year up at the Gunderson property.”
Jonathan said, “So what the fuck are we doing here, anyway?” He looked from brother to brother. “This can’t just be to catch up. ’Cause, honestly, it’s been a long day and we could do this anytime – if we actually wanted to.”
Conner and Michael went silent and solemn. They touched their beers with light, pensive fingers, eyes cast downward.
“We need to make a trip,” Conner said. “To the Adirondacks. Coombs’ Gulch. Opening day of this year.”
Jonathan looked from one to the other and then back to Conner, incredulous and growing angry.
“No, and get the fuck out of here.” Jonathan moved to get up out of the booth, but Michael reached out and grabbed his arm. It was a hard grip, filled with desperate energy and perhaps rage. Jonathan stared down at Michael for a moment, hoping the larger man wouldn’t stand up and make it official. He looked up to the bar. The dying, pale eyes were staring again, watching this little drama unfold. The owner crossed his arms, waiting to see what happened.
Jonathan looked back at Conner, whose eyes were now pleading. “Just hear me out,” he said. “It’s important. I wouldn’t have asked you here if it wasn’t.”
Jonathan waited and then slowly eased back into the booth. Michael’s grip on his arm loosened.
Jonathan poured another beer and Conner looked like he’d just come from the grave.
“There’s a road being built,” he said, and Jonathan knew what was coming next.
“The state is building a new route off the interstate, trying to connect the towns. They’ve sold off ten thousand acres of state forest to private developers for motels, gas stations, stores – all that shit. My company is underwriting the insurance plans. That’s how I found out. The project starts this spring and it’s going right through Coombs’ Gulch.”
Boy in the Box Page 2
