Boy in the Box

by Marc E. Fitch

  Chapter Three

  Jonathan’s bachelor party ten years ago was a small affair – just the four of them heading deep into the Adirondack Mountains. They were searching for someplace ‘real’, a place where they weren’t bagging juvenile whitetail with only two nubs protruding from the top of their heads, like they had in the small, heavily hunted forests around Harwinton. They couldn’t afford a trip out west to Montana or Wyoming, but the upstate mountains offered thousands of square miles of pure, untouched forested mountains. A place where they could truly be men, communing with nature, hunting, killing together like a pack of wolves. A place where a hunter could lose himself. The long, toothy mountain range was like a rip in time, a place where the past could be glimpsed, where it would seem wholly reasonable for a T. rex to wander out from the tree cover. It was perfect to them – big deer, moose, bear and mountain lions; no need for passports; no trying to pack rifles on a plane. They rented a cabin far outside the small village of Pasternak, a town built in shadow, at the edge of a massive swath of state forest and valley known as Coombs’ Gulch.

  Jonathan didn’t know the trip was coming. He and Mary had rented a hall for their wedding, which was scheduled for the fifteenth of November. It was one of those places that provide a classy-looking venue to churn out two weddings a day, but was really just a money-making machine. It didn’t matter to Jonathan. These were things that had to be done. Mary was happy with it, and once all the requisite hoops were jumped through they could finally settle into their life together and let the rest of the world slowly fall away. They were the first of the group to get married, and it became an affair of friends, a celebration of that first leap into true adulthood. Seemingly everyone was involved on some level. Madison and Annie were bridesmaids, Michael and Conner groomsmen. Gene, in all his bumbling around town hall, had managed to become a justice of the peace and would perform the ceremony. It was all funny and joyous at the time, but now seemed quaint and sad.

  Conner, Michael and Gene surprised Jonathan on a Wednesday morning as he was leaving for work and dumped him into the back of an SUV and set out for the mountains. They had arranged everything ahead of time with Jonathan’s editor and, naturally, with Mary. Mary had let them into their shared apartment at the time and helped them pack up all his gear. They were popping beers in the back seat before they even hit the interstate.

  They didn’t make it to Pasternak that first night. Too eager to get on with the drinking and partying, they stopped in the small city of Allentown, three hours south of Pasternak. The town’s entire economy relied on a strip club owned and operated by the Hell’s Angels and attached to a seedy motel in a hidden enclave just outside the town proper. The club was a two-story industrial-looking monstrosity set below hills with a wide parking lot bathed in the neon glow of a nude woman with horns and a tail. It was a Wednesday night, but the lot was half-full of cars and trucks. Gene, Jonathan and Michael were already drunk. Conner took a long pull from a bottle of whiskey in the parking lot.

  The doors opened to a purple haze of colored lights. Women danced on stage like snakes rising out of the grass, hypnotizing and deadly. Mirrors lined the walls; dark rooms were set off from the main stage. Big, hard men lurched over the bar, beers in one hand, cash in the other. The four of them joked with the bartenders, bought drinks for the locals, waved cash at the girls, who then came over and sat on their laps and draped thin, strong arms over their necks. Their asses soft and warm; their skin smelled of perfume and sweat and sparkled with glitter. The girls all laughed with them, sold them lies, pretended to enjoy this life and their company. For all their willingness to expose their naked bodies to the world, the girls dancing on stage were the biggest mystery and the boys – each and every one of them – perfectly played their role of the willing and eternal sucker.

  Then it was as if something shifted. Jonathan was unsure how long they were there, but suddenly he noticed a strange, new intensity, as if everyone were suddenly plunged into a thrashing, living version of hell. The music grew louder. The whole world seemed lost in an LSD haze. The women danced with renewed vigor; they began doing things to themselves and each other – touching, kissing, fingers reaching into flesh. The club itself seemed to undulate with the hips and legs of living ghosts. Men laughed and fought, cash spilled onto glossy stages, lights shifted. A tight quadricep brushed just beneath Jonathan’s nose, and suddenly he thought of splitting a deer open from stern to stern, spilling out the guts, stripping the meat from the bone.

  A sweet-smelling, doe-eyed girl took Jonathan’s hand and led him from his barstool through a mirrored corridor of violet light. The club suddenly seemed as large as all the world – a maze in which he was now lost and she his only guide. Everywhere he looked there was a distorted image of himself reflected back, superficial and flat and glass. Even now, Jonathan remembered that moment with shame and regret, realizing how he’d never truly known himself. He saw in those mirrors a dopey kid, ugly with flesh and drunkenness, lost in some kind of vague illusion. The entire world was nothing more than a strip club filled with lies of coming pleasures meant to rob you of your very essence. When he saw himself in that moment, hand in hand with this dark-haired, beautiful girl, stumbling along like a diseased cur, it was the second worst moment of his life. He stared into the mirror and something awful stared back.

  She took him into a small room behind a curtain. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He stared into those dark eyes. He felt pure rot. He buried his face into her chest. He plunged into her and she raked her fingernails across his back, leaving bloodied streaks across his spine. He knew that he was infecting her with some spreading, moral disease, a genetic mutation that had infected all men since the dawn of time and left the world a horrid place. In the strange light, as Jonathan plunged in and out of her, he looked into her eyes and she seemed utterly different – inhuman, an animal. For a moment in his drunken, debauched haze, he saw her as a buck, a crown of antlers reaching out from her dark, luminous hair. He was terrified. He fucked harder and harder until he finally came and her body stiffened under his melted weight, and he lay on top of her – near dead – while she stroked his hair like a long-lost mother.

  Jonathan woke in terror the following day. He was in a bare, cheap motel room and had no recollection of how he’d got there. Gene was on the other bed. Jonathan was in nothing but his boxers. His head lost in a fog; missing memories from the night before came to him but seemed nothing more than flashes of forgotten dreams. Gray light glowed behind the curtains of the lone window of their motel room. Jonathan walked over and peeked out. The strip club was next door, quiet and dark, the hills beyond trapped in a dull shadow. The neon was gone, the multicolored light. Now there was only the pale grayness and cold. In that moment he remembered the girl, the nails raking across his back, her body under his, and he wished he could go back in time and erase it all. That was the worst part of guilt, he thought – the inability to make it right no matter how hard you try. He had done exactly what was expected of him, behaved like an absolute boor, cheated on the woman he loved with a girl who was undoubtedly worse off for having spent time with him. He felt less human for having done exactly what every movie and television show about a bachelor party said he should do, what every woman feared her fiancé would do, for having left an indelible mark on the life of a beautiful dark-haired girl.

  He remembered that girl for a moment, and a strange, terrifying image crept into his mind, the flash of a nightmare.

  “Jesus, she did a number on you or what?” Gene was awake, lying on his bed with his belly spilling out onto the mattress, staring at his back.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Take a look at your back in the mirror.”

  Jonathan walked to the mirror and twisted his body so he could view his back. Five bloodied streaks went across his spine.

  Gene walked over to examine the scratches more closely. “Those will heal up in a week. Just
keep Mary away.” Then Gene shoved him. “Last piece of strange you’re ever gonna taste, huh?”

  They met Conner and Michael in the parking lot, both bleary-eyed and largely silent. “How ’bout we never do that again?” Conner said, attempting to break the silence.

  “That’s what we always say after a night out,” Gene said. He cracked a beer. “Hair of the dog, boys!” He handed a Budweiser to Jonathan. His head was starting to hurt with the onset of a hangover.

  “Fuck it,” Jonathan said and took a drink.

  They pulled into Pasternak that afternoon. There was a dull, blue gloom hanging over the town as if snow was about to fall. Pasternak was a brief Main Street of brick facades, each a couple of stories high with window shops that advertised power equipment and handmade dresses. The main strip was surrounded by cheap bungalows, originally built to house factory workers during the 1940s war manufacturing boom. Now, it was one of those dying places where children moved out, eager to escape the boredom and the impending sense of doom, and the remaining residents were willing to embrace their oncoming death, easing the disquiet with booze and cheap television. The nearest supermarket was a town away and accessible only by interstate. There was a Sam’s Club that doubled as a liquor store, grocery and pharmacy. They stopped and loaded up on beer and liquor, food for sandwiches and snacks with the idea they’d be eating strips of meat from their kills and fish caught in the creek that flowed through the center of Coombs’ Gulch. Bill Flood owned the cabin at the edge of the Gulch and had an apartment above a small diner on Main Street.

  Bill Flood was one of those guys who aged but never died. His skin sagged heavy off his face, and his eyes seemed to look past whoever he was talking to, out into the oncoming future. He didn’t even say hello when they arrived at his front door, but just nodded and said, “I’ll get my things.” His big frame stooped at the neck, his arms flapped back and forth with his stride, his hands were like the tips of wings. He drove his pickup truck, and Jonathan and the brothers followed him as they dipped into the mountains, the way a boat might drop below the surface of the sea during a storm. They drove north for forty-five minutes on broken back roads that wound snakelike through the mountains. Finally, they turned down a dirt road at a small opening between the silent rock bluffs. They bounced and jostled in Conner’s SUV, beer bottles crashing together. It was another twenty minutes down the dirt path.

  “Are we sure there’s even a cabin out here or has the old guy just lost it?” Gene said.

  “Middle of nowhere, boys,” Conner said. “You can forget about civilization out here. No grocery stores, phones, nothing but trees and hills.” And that was the point: true hunters living off what they caught, away from all the bullshit of modern life. Conner gloried in it.

  The cabin was larger than they had expected, a welcome surprise. It was more of a house with two floors, dormer windows looking out into the trees like a pair of eyes, three bedrooms, a front porch with wicker furniture and a barn in the back with a massive firepit.

  Bill got out of his truck and flapped his arms to the front door on pure autopilot, his mind a million miles away.

  Jonathan looked at the forest surrounding them. The trees were truly dense here, black-and-white slash marks that built up layer on layer until fifty feet out was just a solid wall of wood. The air was cold and thin, making Jonathan feel as if he were trying to breathe in space.

  “This is a big place,” Conner said to Bill. “You don’t live here instead of in town?”

  Bill didn’t even stop walking to and fro, doing whatever he felt was necessary for their stay. “Too far from town for my age,” he said. “I can’t be hauling food and everything out here.” He stopped for a moment and looked at the four of them. “You boys be careful out here. One of you gets hurt and there ain’t no one else can help you. Nearest hospital is about a two-hour drive from here. Your nearest neighbor is over that ridge of mountains.” He pointed to some peaks that marked the eastern ridgeline of Coombs’ Gulch. “Had a couple guys up here once; one of ’em fell out of his tree stand, broke his leg. Damn near had gangrene by the time they got him to the hospital.”

  The inside of the cabin glowed dull with wood. Dust swirled in sunlight that streaked through old, drafty windows. The furniture was circa 1970s, old couches that itched your skin, a table and chairs probably picked up at a garage sale and single beds that looked built for children rather than full-grown men. Bill waved them over to a map encased in glass and hanging on the wall. The Gulch was a five-mile valley running north to south between two ridges of mountains, a deep scar through the Adirondack range. “You can hunt or fish or do whatever you want in the Gulch,” he said. The cabin was at the southernmost edge. “The creek is good for trout. A couple years back I had a guy bag a moose up here. Be careful around them, though. They’re angry animals, not like your whitetail that’ll just turn and run.”

  “Any other hunters up here?” Michael asked.

  “No. No other hunters. Nobody hunts these parts. Most people usually go south of Pasternak. Good hunting down there and not so far away.”

  “The hunting is good up here, though, right?,” Gene asked with a nervous laugh, hoping their money hadn’t been wasted.

  “Better hunting up here,” Bill said. “But I’m the only one that has any property, and I keep ’em off. The first thousand acres going north is mine; the rest is state land.”

  “Moose, huh?” Gene said.

  Bill looked them up and down, clearly eyeing them as a group of weekend warriors who had little business in such a place. “If you didn’t bring enough firepower, just let them walk on by. Otherwise you’re gonna get hurt.”

  “Would a .30-06 do the trick?”

  Bill turned toward Michael for a moment and then back as if he’d heard a familiar sound. He looked out into the trees through a window. “Yeah. That’ll do it.”

  There was a two-way radio in the house with two channels – one to Bill’s apartment and one to the nearest state police barracks.

  “They probably couldn’t get out here if they had to,” he said.

  Bill finally left, his old pickup rumbling down the road and suddenly buried by the trees. The silence was overwhelming.

  “Don’t even hear any birds up here,” Michael said.

  “That’s ’cause they’re terrified of the big, bad hunters!” Gene said, slapping him on the back.

  The first night, they drank beer and liquor and lit a bonfire in the back. Together, they sat at the edge of Coombs’ Gulch, getting drunk and laughing, the flicker of orange fire dancing in the darkness.

  The fears of ancient man crept into the back of their minds, and, looking out at the immense darkness of Coombs’ Gulch, they all felt a little uncomfortable. That first night, while the others kept their eyes on the fire to avoid staring out at the forest, Jonathan snuck glimpses into the blackness. He felt it cloister around him, reaching dangerous tendrils of cold over his shoulders. He felt that ancient presence in the primordial world that forced men into caves with fires just like the one dancing before him. In those endless trees of Coombs’ Gulch were the sounds of rustling dead leaves and footfalls in the night, slight affairs, barely audible above the sound of the crackling fire. For a moment, Jonathan thought he saw something look back at him. He straightened his spine and nerves sparked needles throughout his body. It may have been a trick of light, but he was sure he saw something inhuman exhale a puff of hot breath that rose out of the darkness into the cold night air.

  Jonathan told himself it was just his imagination. But he remembered that moment for years to come. He was sure they all felt it. He was sure they drank and joked and laughed to keep that frightening darkness at bay. That first night, he wondered if they were in over their heads – they were not great hunters but still-frightened children wandering and lost in a cold world.

  The first morning out they traveled up the west s
ide of the valley. It was early and cold, and their breath formed clouds that dissipated into the miasma of trees. The black spruce was thick, the lower branches like sharpened spikes of some medieval torture device. They could barely get through it without impaling themselves and began to wonder aloud if they’d been had, if old Bill Flood had rented out his cabin with tales of deer and moose when it was just a dead, forgotten wood. But because of the density of the trees they couldn’t help but find the deer trails – they were practically the only way to get through the area. They followed the pellet droppings and spruce trees with the bark scraped off where the bucks sharpened their antlers, down to the vein of water at the base of the Gulch that flowed through an open field of tall brown grass bordered by the thick forest. Jonathan was the man of the hour, so when they finally spotted a large herd at the river’s edge, he lined up the shot first while Conner zeroed in on a second. Jonathan had a good-sized buck in his sights – the biggest he’d ever taken – but for some reason, when he squeezed the trigger, he could only think of that girl from the strip club, Mary, and his suddenly tainted future. Somehow, it all felt like a giant kill shot.

  The impact of the bullet rippled the buck’s thick skin, and he took off bounding toward tree cover, disappearing in the brush. Conner put down a doe. It was a vital, precision shot. She dropped like a sack of rocks. Gene accompanied Jonathan into the woods, following the flow of blood that grew heavier and heavier and puddled on the dead leaves until they found the buck panting and moaning beside a massive uprooted tree, whose root system resembled a cave festooned with dirt and moss. The buck panted heavy and hard with its small tongue protruding slightly from its nimble mouth. He was the biggest whitetail Jonathan had ever bagged. Easily two hundred and fifty pounds with twelve points on him. Gene clapped him on the back and said, “Now we gotta drag this son of a bitch all the way back.” Jonathan put a nine-millimeter handgun round in the buck’s head to finish him off. They gutted him right then and there beneath the cavernous root system, the dark blood and intestines spilling out onto the dead leaves and cold ground, steam rising up from the buck’s body cavity. The smell was always the same, raw and sickly sweet. Jonathan stared into the guts of the beast and thought he saw something. Like an ancient shaman who saw the future in the innards of a tribal kill, Jonathan saw a face staring back at him – a moment that left him with a feeling of dread, of being watched by the dead.